Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Sparing Theo

"Harry's off to meet with his mysterious girlfriend again."

Harry feels himself flush so hard that he's surprised his hair doesn't catch fire. He spins around to face Ron, who's sitting near the fireplace in the common room and watching Harry with a slight, sardonic smile. "What? I am not!"

"Oh?" Ron's eyebrows rise a little, and he leans forwards the way he does when he's challenging Harry over a chessboard. "Then why do you keep sneaking out of the Tower and hoping no one notices?"

"I…"

It feels like half the common room is staring in Harry's direction, and he clears his throat and carefully doesn't look in Ginny's direction, even though he can feel her stare. They kissed after the battle, they talked, but they didn't get back together. It was a mutual, silent agreement not to talk any further about things. Harry thought at first they would sort it out when they got back to Hogwarts, and then they both got caught up in NEWT studying and trying to live normally again.

And he got caught up in Theo.

Maybe it's wrong to think of him that way, when Theo hasn't offered him his first name, but things being wrong have never stopped Harry before.

"Well, mate? Where are you going?"

"None of your business."

Ron blinks a little and looks at Harry as if evaluating him in a new light. "You really mean that," he says after a second.

"Well, yeah. If you were going off somewhere, and I asked you, and you didn't want to tell me, wouldn't you be justified in saying that it was none of my business?"

Ron pauses, but Hermione jumps in. "It's just that your secrets have been dangerous so much of the time, Harry," she says soothingly. "That's all. We just wanted to make sure you were all right."

"I'm fine. And Voldemort is dead, so you know that I can't be hiding anything related to him—oh, come on, will you stop it?" Harry adds, as half the common room flinches and gasps. "You know he's dead. He's not hiding behind the couch and about to jump out at you. None of you were even Death Eaters!"

He can't help contrasting their reaction, in his mind, with Theo's. Theo was affected more by Voldemort than most of them, and has a Death Eater father, but he doesn't look as if he wants to run upstairs and pull the covers over his head when Harry says the name.

"That's not fair, mate," Neville says quietly.

"You're right, sorry," Harry says, nodding to him. "For you. But a lot of people here weren't even in Hogwarts last year, and you're taking it better than them."

"It's still not necessary to say it," Parvati Patil whispers, her eyes focused on her lap.

Harry sighs. He knows that Lavender, Parvati's best friend, died in the battle, and it can't be easy for her to back at Hogwarts and seeing all the sights that Lavender would have seen, walking down the staircases she would have walked down and sitting where Lavender sat before she died.

"Fine. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Harry says, and bows three times. "I'll call him Old Snakeface from now on. But none of this has anything to do with whether I can keep my own secrets, which I can."

He turns and walks out of the common room, rolling his eyes as the whispers break out behind him. They really have nothing better to do than gossip about him, do they?

Theo has better things to do.

Harry smiles, and lengthens his stride. That's true, and he can't wait to see Theo again, talk to him, watch the way that his nose wrinkles when Harry does something uncouth by his standards, or how he seems to struggle with the basic fact of Harry's whole existence and the fact that he can't owe Harry any debts.

Theo doesn't stare at Harry as if he's done something wrong by surviving the war, the way that some of the Gryffindors do. And he's going to work on teaching Harry how to control his volatile magic.

Harry, frankly, can't wait.

"Sorry if I'm late."

Theo turns around. Potter has skidded around the corner, but he stops the instant he sees Theo, and leans against the wall, coming no closer. Theo doesn't understand why Potter knows that's the right thing to do, but he does, and they're here to talk about other things.

"We didn't specify a time, only after dinner, and it is."

"True enough." Potter smiles. "Did you want to hold our lessons in the kitchens, or find somewhere else?"

"The house-elves would have fits. We'll find somewhere else. Come with me."

Potter doesn't hesitate to trail after him into the dungeons, another thing that baffles Theo. This one he does decide to ask about.

"Why do you trust me enough to follow me into the dungeons? You don't fear some kind of Slytherin treachery?"

"Slytherins don't scare me anymore."

Theo understands the subtext of that—Potter has faced far worse—and he nods. But he does have to say, if only for the sake of his own pride, "You know that I could torture you if I wanted. Curse you with the kind of curse that would be difficult to recover from."

"I know."

Theo spins around to stare at Potter. "And yet you're following me this blithely?"

"You said that you could, not that you would. I already knew that. And I'm not afraid of you. I trust you."

Theo has to close his eyes and turn away. There are too many things to think about in Potter's words, and he doesn't—he'll lose his composure if he thinks about them too much. They aren't for him, not really. They're simply reflections of Potter's warped sense of reality.

"This way," he says, and leads Potter around a corner and down towards the darkest parts of the dungeons, a place even his fellow Slytherins won't bother them. Theo was heading there when he was overwhelmed with Amortentia, and it's only his own weakness that made it impossible for him to reach it.

His weakness that made him meet Potter.

Theo shuts the door on the thoughts the way he has learned to do with thoughts about his father, the war, and almost everything else except vengeance.

And Potter. It's annoying, the way he sneaks through.

"Wow."

Harry can't keep silent as he stares around the huge room in the dungeons where Theo has led him. It resembles Harry's dim memories of the Slytherin common room more than anything else he's seen in the castle. The ceiling arches overhead with an iron spike in the middle that looks as if a chandelier is meant to hang from it, and the only windows show the dark green of the lake and swift-moving shapes that remind Harry of diving to the merpeople's village in the Second Task.

"Nothing like you've ever seen before, is it, Potter/"

"Outside of the time that I sneaked into the Slytherin common room under Polyjuice, no."

There's silence behind him. Harry glances over his shoulder with a frown. "Oh, come on, I told you that story when I was telling you about fighting the basilisk in second year. I must have."

"I don't remember it." Theo's voice is so dry that Harry can practically feel any sweat on his skin vanishing. "Why did you do that?"

"Ron and I were pretty convinced that Malfoy was the Heir of Slytherin and he knew something about the Petrifications. We thought he would tell us if we were disguised as Crabbe and Goyle. Hermione tried to turn into Bulstrode, but she mistook a cat hair for a human hair, and, well."

"That's why she was in the hospital wing for so long."

"Yes."

Theo shakes his head. "If you knew how many ways there are for Polyjuice Potion to go wrong…you might be luckier to have survived that than the basilisk."

"Well, nothing will ever compare to my luck in surviving the Killing Curse," Harry says lightly. "But I think that's part of the reason that my magic is acting the way it is now. I know that my mum left her protective magic on me when she died. If his Killing Curse ended it, then maybe it affected my magic, too."

"It sounds like a half-baked theory to me."

"Do you have a better one?"

"No. But maybe I would if you would tell me the truth."

Harry winces a little. Theo looks at him, his mouth curving in a hard smile. "I suppose there are limits to how much you trust me."

Harry takes a deep breath. That's true, but he doesn't want there to be limits. He's trusted Theo so far, so he supposes that he'll have to keep doing it. "All right. I think the Horcrux of Voldemort's I was carrying in my head somehow kept part of my magic subdued. Or I just got used to casting spells when it was there and I don't know how to master the differences now that it's gone. Or maybe it being torn out the way it was made my magic more volatile. Something related to the Horcrux, anyway."

Theo has gone utterly still. Harry thinks that his eyes were more alive when he was under Amortentia. He stands and he stares, and Harry suddenly realizes that because he wanted to show he trusted Theo is no reason for Theo to trust him after this revelation.

"Theo?"

A Horcrux. He was a Horcrux. He really did go into the Forest and face the Dark Lord's Killing Curse, and it really did affect him more than just making him play dead the way Draco thought.

Wonder, oddly enough, is Theo's dominant emotion. He never thought much about the way that Potter played dead on the day of the battle. The Dark Lord was careless, or Potter was a convincing actor, or somehow he does have protection against the Killing Curse. What affected Theo's life was the Dark Lord's fall, not whatever method Potter chose to fool the monster.

But now…

Potter was a Horcrux. He died. He walked into the Forest probably not knowing he was coming back to life, or that a Killing Curse was a good enough method to rid a living being of a Horcrux. From what little Theo knows of that branch of Dark Arts, living Horcruxes and ways to get rid of a shard of soul in one are all unknowns.

The world is slowly spinning around him. Theo reaches out to put one hand on the wall. Potter takes a step forwards and then stops, biting his lip. His eyes are wide. Theo looks away from them and stares at the far wall.

"I don't know how to help you."

It galls Theo to admit it, when this is the only way that anyone has come up with to enable him to pay Potter back, but that's the way it is. He knows so little of Horcruxes that he doesn't even know for sure if his lessons would help Potter get control of his magic instead of hurting that control.

"But you're already helping me."

"Please don't tell me that this is going to be some kind of horrifically soppy metaphor, Potter."

"No, I mean it. I mean—after the war, so many people have wanted to get back to their normal lives, you know? They don't want to talk about the war, or they took it as a challenge so they could become themselves again. But I don't have a normal life to get back to. My whole life was defined by him. I didn't know what to do, especially when my magic started acting the way it did. I was a Horcrux. How many people could I tell that to?"

"I assume Weasley and Granger know."

Theo can't stand to look in the opposite direction anymore, and turns back to face Potter. Potter gives some unholy combination of a nod and a shrug. He's still watching Theo intently, leaning forwards a little as if he wants to cross the space between them and only his own inhuman will is holding him back.

He doesn't need any help with force of will.

"Oh, yeah, of course. But outside them. They know everything about me because of who they are. And here you are, doing your best to live, and your whole life was changed right after the war, too, and you're trusting me even though we had no reason to trust each other before this, and you aren't pretending everything is normal."

Theo lowers his eyes. He says nothing, and Potter stands there. He waits, and at last Theo says, "I still don't know how to help you reassert some kind of control over your magic."

"If you could practice with me, then that would be helpful. Or if you could show me how to have stronger control over the wandless magic."

"You really don't?"

"I mean, sometimes it does what I want, like when I was breaking through Slughorn's wards. But other times it's like when it explodes the cauldron in the kitchens. I don't really know when it's going to lash out or why."

Theo nods slowly. He could see why that would be something Potter wants to get under control. Potter isn't only powerful enough to be dangerous; he's also the subject of intense speculation, and all it would take is one outburst for him to wind up on the front page of the Daily Prophet.

Probably as a rising Dark Lord. Even though I can't think of anyone further away from one.

"It does involve meditation. Nothing as violent as practicing spells against each other at first. What's the matter?" Theo asks, because Potter's entire face is drooping downwards.

"I tried to learn Occlumency a few years ago." Potter sighs and runs his hand down his face. "It didn't—go well. I couldn't ever clear my mind. I don't know if I'll do any better at meditation now."

"Who was teaching you?"

"Professor Snape."

Theo stares at him in horror.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. But there were reasons that Professor Dumbledore thought he would be the best choice. He couldn't do it himself because he thought Snakeface would look through my eyes and into his."

"Because of the Horcrux," Theo says softly, and thinks for a long moment about how horrible it would be to be connected to the Dark Lord mentally before he pushes it aside. It isn't what he has to concentrate on. "It's—more horrible than just because Professor Snape hated you, Potter. If you had hated him but trusted him, it could have worked."

"But instead…"

"Yes. He tore into your mind with Legilimency?"

Potter smiles. It makes his face look like a skull. "Got it in one. He told me to clear my mind. That was the only bloody instruction he ever gave me. Well, besides 'throw me out.' And if you thought he was a horrible Potions instructor, you should have seen him trying to teach Legilimency."

"I would have killed him."

"Oh. Because he would have torn into your mind, and you would have killed him for trying? Or because your Legilimency defenses are that strong? Hey, if they are, could you teach me Occlumency? You already know I trust you—"

"I would have killed him," Theo says, making his voice as precise as he can, "because I would have seen him causing you pain of an unacceptable kind, and I would have killed him for doing so."

Potter stares at Theo with his lips slightly parted. Something strong and unwelcome strikes Theo. It would have been unwelcome even without his having suffered under Amortentia, but perhaps slightly less so then.

"Oh," Potter says softly.

Theo turns his head again and focuses on the wall. This time, it's as much to give Potter time to recover as it is him. When he turns back, he says, "My Occlumency defenses are not as strong as you were picturing, but I could indeed teach you."

"Okay. But do you trust me enough in case I accidentally push back strongly enough to see some of your memories? Because if you don't, we shouldn't do it."

"I trust you."

Potter swallows, and repeats, "Oh," his voice sounding a little off. Then he says, "Okay, but we need to practice meditation first, right? Whether I'm trying to learn control over my wandless magic or my Occlumency."

"That's right," Theo says, and conjures a cushion on the floor. "It will work best if you sit down and think about things that make you calm. Not necessarily happy," he adds, as Potter opens his mouth. He knows what Potter's first question will be, because it was the first one Theo asked when he began to learn. "But calm."

"All right," Potter says. He takes one more look at Theo, as if thinking that he might need to reassure him more strongly that he's all right, and then closes his eyes. Theo watches as his breathing softens and smooths out.

While Potter practices, Theo thinks. He has no access to the Headmistress's office, but that's all right. He pays attention to the portraits the way that anyone trained by a Death Eater father obsessed with perfectionism would, and he knows that he's seen a dark-robed figure striding through landscapes and paintings that belong to other people.

When this first practice session is over, Theo will start a hunt for that black-robed figure.

He and Professor Snape are going to have a talk.