Harry Potter & The Hand God

“I told you, Snape, I’m not--” Harry blinks at the figure creeping into the office. He is a little too short to be Snape. And too pretty. “Oh. Blaise. Fancy seeing you here.”

Blaise closes the door behind him with a quiet click. “I never expected your holding place to be Snape’s office,” he confesses.

Harry snorts, snuggling himself further into the blankets. “That’s the point, I think. They have it all fitted out for me, though, so it’s not too bad. Still wish they could remove that rancid smell, though. And they took my wand -- and… wait, this place is warded as fuck. How did you get in here?”

Blaise smiles, shrugging, sitting down at the end of Harry’s bed. “You’re not the only one with cool powers, Harry.”

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

“When’s your trial?”

“Pending, as I’m told.” Harry grins. “Some people are calling me a danger to society -- a danger to society, can you believe it? I’m a secret weapon to those silly little revolutionists.”

“You very well might be.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Oh, har-har.”

“Can I ask something of you?”

“Is it gonna be bad? It’s gonna be bad, I can tell. No one asks ‘can I ask something of you’ without the answer probably being ‘no.’”

“Will you just hear me out?”

“Are you mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

“I don’t know,” says Harry, wrapping his arms around himself. “Why is anyone mad, ever? And I know… I know that what I did, in the courtyard -- say what you will about it, but…”

“But what, Harry?”

“But I did it to protect my friends,” snaps Harry, throwing his hands into the air. “Snape said Ron’s in critical condition as is, can you imagine what would’ve happened if I did nothing? I did what I had to do.”

“Yes. You did what you had to do. And then some.”

“What are you accusing me of, Blaise?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” says Blaise. “And I am not mad that you did it. But I want to ask something of you.”

“Ask what?”

“To not do it again.”

“Don’t be a bi--”

“I’m not trying to be,” stresses Blaise. “But you didn’t consider anything regarding the consequences of your actions before you made them. They are discussing expulsion. You will have your wand snapped.”

“I don’t need my wand,” says Harry. “Not anymore.”

“Didn’t pansy say ‘without that trump card, you are nothing’? Do you have it in your head to prove her right?”

“Now can I tell you not to be a bitch?”

Blaise sighs, then laughs a bit. “Yes. Can I also tell you to stop being so self righteous? You could have taken their magic until your friends were safe. You could have returned it. So, no, Harry. I don’t think you did what you did was entirely with the goal to save Hermione and Ron. I don’t think you think so, either. And I’m not saying I have a problem with that. You have never prided yourself on moral purity. Why start now?”

Harry stares at him, hands balled up in the blankets before he grins, an unhinged look in his eyes. “Oh, Blaise! I should have known better than to try to hide anything from you. I hurt my enemies out of a sense of protection but malice, too. I hate them, Blaise. I hate them!” He laughs. “I hate them, Blaise, do you hear me? Fuck those guys! Did you hear some of the spells they were casting? Ron’s lucky he isn’t dead -- do you get that? Ron could’ve died and, really, Blaise, I don't think anyone willing to kill him is a good person. Pansy fucking Parkison and her friends? Fuck them! They’re bigoted assholes who are lucky they got off with what they did.” He smiles. “But that won’t very well hold up in court, will it?”

Blaise stares at him.  “No,” he says at last. “It won’t.”

Harry leans back against the bed frame. “So that’s why. I’m not interested in going to prison. If I get expelled, if my suspension is extended, that’s fine. But I can’t afford to be out of service so soon. I will lie. I will push the narrative that I didn’t know what would happen if I dropped the ball. I will push the narrative that it was in self defense -- and, considering the circumstances, I think it’ll be one that’s hard to dispute. And then I’ll win.”

“This time,” says Blaise.

“What?”

“You’ll win this time. And the next. Maybe even the one after that. But eventually, Harry,” says Blaise. “Eventually you won’t. I need you. Be careful. And don’t do this again. I want to spend all of my Hogwarts years with you -- and I can’t do that if you’re expelled. You might be fine with that, but I’m not. Okay? I’m not.”

Harry chuckles nervously. “Then this probably isn’t the best time to tell you--”

“Don’t.” Don’t say it. Please do not say it. 

“Not saying it won’t make it not true,” Harry says and the softness in his voice is cutting.

“Why? Why must you leave me? Hogwarts is your home. It is our home.” 

“When I pass my OWLS--”

“Stop.”

And he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t: “--I’ll be free to use magic outside of Hogwarts. NEWTS are nice and all, but I have bigger plans.”

“Why is it always bigger with you? If your movement needs a leader, why must it be you? I don’t understand, Harry. I don’t understand.”

“It’s not all about being the head,” says Harry. “I mean, that’s not why I’m leaving early.”

Blaise furrows his eyebrows at him. “What? Then…”

Harry huffs, setting up and grabbing his bag. Shifting through it, he says, “Do you know why I was originally a follower of Merlin?”

Blaise blanks. It is a time of his life Harry rarely, if ever, talks about. It is a source of shame and discomfort and when he talks about it, he shrinks in on himself. And Blaise hates to see that, so he is content to bury his questions.

But now it is Harry who starts the conversation. “No,” says Blaise. “You’ve never said.”

“That’s because,” Harry says, pulling his journal out of his bookbag, “I didn’t know why myself. Over the summer, Pomfrey had mentioned that my parents had been members of the Church.”

Ah. Putting two and two together. “So you got it them from?” 

“Yeah,” says Harry. He opens the book and starts flipping. “I checked my entries to confirm, of course. I found something really interesting.”

“Interesting enough to leave Hogwarts early?”

“Oh,” says Harry, holding the book out to Blaise. “You have no idea.”

James mentions the exercitus of Seers. He tells me not to tell the future if I know it? What a weirdo.

Blaise frowns. “The ‘exercitus’?”

“Latin for army,” explains Harry, taking the book back. “Not to tell the future if I know it. Where do I know that from, Blaise?”

His mouth goes dry. “The Church of Merlin.”

“Right. Here’s my theory: The Church of Merlin has a growing collection of Seers. They reap their prophecies and use them to control the social and political tide -- which person to elect, which people are spies. An army -- the backbone, I believe, of the Church itself.”

“You,” Blaise says, understanding what Harry means to do, “are a fool.”

“How rude,” says Harry. It is not a disagreement.

“You cannot find nor dismantle the underground trafficking of Seers on your own.”

“Why not?” asks Harry. “My father did it.”

“What do you--?”

“I asked around. Rubbed elbows with some of my rivals, listened in, bribed, stole, blackmailed. Do you know what I found? About the kidnapping and capture of Seers?” He does not wait for an answer. “Nothing. Not a thing. You’d think I was crazy, the way they were looking at me.

“Why does my father know something about the Church that no one else does? That’s a mystery for my expeditions, too.” Harry sighs, ruffling his hair. He all of the sudden looks tired. “I can never outrun him, can I?”

Blaise absorbs the information, trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out which words mean which feelings, how to voice his concern, to coerce. There is a problem with this fundamentally. “You’re lying,” says Blaise slowly, like the words do not make sense on his tongue. Harry does not lie a lot. 

And Harry seems defensive, doesn’t he? Disturbed. He answers a little too quick, a little too loud. “I don’t lie,” he snaps. And he doesn’t. But there it is again, that guilty flicker of his eye.

“Something doesn't fit,” Blaise continues. “Why would you need to leave Hogwarts two years early if finding this ring was the goal?”

“I literally do not know what you mean,” argues Harry, trying to play bewildered but failing. The loose soil beneath him makes his footing uneasy and he knows it. “If I can destroy this ring, I can not only liberate hundreds, if not thousands of Seers, but can also destroy the foundation in which the Church of Merlin stands! Something doesn’t fit? Something’s off? No, Blaise. This is me. I am hateful. I am spiteful. I am ugly. I am selfish.”

Ugly? With a soul like yours? The idea is disgraceful. But that’s not worth arguing, is it? You don’t believe that.

What is this?

…

I get it.

I get it, Harry.

This is a diversion.

The words are spoken quietly, barely audible: “You’re doing this for me.”

Harry tries, one last time, to play dumb. “You have nothing to do with this, right? I mean, you do know that, don’t you?”

“I am a Seer.” He pauses. “Or like one. And you do know that, don’t you? That’s why you want them gone as soon as possible. You want them gone before I graduate.” You are not entirely hateful. You are not entirely spiteful. You are not entirely selfish.

And you are not ugly.

Harry gnaws on his lips and when blood runs down his chin, Blaise reaches out a hand and wipes it off. “I can’t,” Harry says, the words catching in his throat. “I almost lost him. I almost lost Ron because he ran, unprotected, on my flimsy orders. I can’t lose you guys. I can’t lose you.”

Blaise kisses him on the forehead, and looks at him. (I can't lose you.) He says after a pause, “It is not only jail time they’re talking about. Nor expulsion. Nor an extended suspension.”

Harry says, breathless, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. They find you a danger to wizarding society. They fear you -- and when people are afraid, they are not rational.” Blaise looks him in the eyes. “They want to cut you open, Harry. They want to see what makes you tick, what makes you special. And then they want to use that for themselves.  They will poke and prod and dead, you will be unable to protect us.

“You can not afford to lose us. But I can not afford to lose you.”

Harry flinches back. “You can’t come with me.”

“I know. I have no plans to. But I will do everything in my power to protect you from a distance. A Seer is a worthy ally. They know that but we? We do too.”

Blaise kisses him and Harry runs his fingers through his hair. I will protect you, thinks Harry. I will kill for you.

And he will, if he has to. Merlin knows Balise will still hold his hand if it is stained red.

“Be careful,” says Blaise, pulling back. “Do not act so reckless again. Allow yourself to consult reason and allow yourself to consult me.”

“Okay,” says Harry, softly, meaning it. “Did you come here… for this? Because if that’s over then I have more pleasurable activities in min--”

Blaise laughs. “No, Harry. I am sorry. There is one last thing.”

Harry flops back onto the bed. “Lame.”

“Tom asked me to find you.”

“Look, if he’s man I fucked up his friends for harassing us, then maybe he’s mad at the wrong person--”

“Actually,” says Blaise, “Tom’s said little about the incident as a whole.”

Harry raises an eyebrow. “Really? Well, I’ll be damned.”

Of course, not all communication is verbal. Little actually is. With Tom, more is said by what isn’t. Blaise can tell one thing:

Tom is impressed. He is smitten. (He reeks of it.) And it is a big feat to impress Tom Riddle. An almost impossible one.

Along the disgusting infatuation and awe, Blaise senses something else. 

Fear.

I would wonder what exactly there is to be afraid of if I did not already know. You act like you are oh so different than Pansy Parkinson, than your friends, but you’re not. Harry does not know you’re not.

Imagine if he did.

“He wants to know about your parents’ murder,” says Blaise. 

Harry puffs out his cheeks. “...I told him about that?”

“Yeah,” Blaise says lightly, patiently. “You did. He’d asked the others -- Ron, Mione, Neville -- about it.”

“Oh. Really?” asks Harry, still looking lost. “What’d they say?”

“‘If Harry wants you knowing something, then it is Harry who will tell you.’”

Harry smiles. “I love them.”

“What response would you like to give Tom?’ I hope it is a no. I hope it is a fuck you. I hope you never speak with him again. Why am I the only one able to tell that’d you’d be better off if you did? Only I can tell. Only I ever can.

“Ehh -- well, when the trial stuff clears over, we can talk about it. But for now, it’s a no.” And if Blaise just tells Tom no, then what is the harm? “I wish people would shut the fuck up about James.”

“People? Whomever else brought him up?”

“Snape,” Harry says, exasperated. “He keeps muttering to himself -- such an awful habit. James this, Potter that, it’s fucking tiring. You know he called me James once? What a bitter old man.”

Blaise furrows his brows.

He called you James?

But…

You are not your father. You are your mother.

“Yes,” says Blaise, thinking still, ever thinking. “He really is.”

“At least his office can be made cozy,” Harry remarks. “Oh, of all the perks of getting suspended from Hogwarts while living at it.”

“Where else could they have sent you?”

“I don’t know,” hums Harry. “Petunia’s?”

Blaise makes a face. “Of all the perks indeed.”