Indifference Towards Difference || Harry Potter

16 | When Love Bargains With Deceitful Pleading

"You can learn things from a heart so bleeding, when love bargains with deceitful pleading."
Munia Khan

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⚠️ TORTURE ⚠️

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"How did you know...he was angry?" Harry looked up from shaping his baked salmon mush into a frowny face, his headache having retreated behind a bolted cupboard door. Malfoy was looking at him steadily.

"You mean Voldemort?" He raised an eyebrow at the Slytherin's flinch— his forehead felt a little sticky and icky— but Malfoy looked no less sure of himself than he did before.

Harry blew out a breath, thinking through how much was safe to give away. And how much he wanted to give away. "I get... sort of visions, I suppose. I can feel what he feels when it's particularly strong."

"You and the Dark— him share a mind?" Harry was finding it rather odd that Malfoy wasn't addressing Voldemort with his fancy-pants 'Dark Lord' title.

"It's... complicated. But that's simplifying it pretty well."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not much," Harry lied. He'd learnt to adjust to the pain by now. But sometimes what he saw gripped his heart with a cold claw until he bled icicles that scraped away at him from the inside.

There wasn't much of him left anyway. Not since Sirius had died.

"So..." the blond hair shone gently under the candlelight as Malfoy fidgeted with his ring. "You could... watch the meeting?"

Harry wasn't quite sure what Malfoy was getting at. He looked... nervous? No— cautious, that was it. As though he was afraid of over-stepping some sort of boundary.

"I could," Harry said slowly.

"You could... check on Severus?"

Oh.

Harry watched as Malfoy took a deep breath. "Look... we're not friends, Potter, I know that. And I have no right to be asking you favours. But... your assistance would be... appreciated. Severus is... someone I value."

For Malfoy, that was practically a marriage proposal, Harry perceived. He knew Slytherins had a thing about always being calm, cool and collected, whereas Gryffindors were known for wearing their hearts on their sleeves and emotions tattooed on their foreheads. So for Malfoy to... confide in him as much... it must've been a big deal.

But of course Snape would be someone Malfoy valued. They were godfather and godson— what Sirius and Harry had once been. And even though they held different morals and belonged to different Houses, that didn't mean Snape and Malfoy's relationship was any less meaningful or fortifying as Harry and Sirius' had been.

Harry had done his own thinking about why Malfoy was here; the Slytherin had always liked to rub his extravagant vacations to wherever in everyone's face, with luxurious, foreign robes and expensive French chocolates. So for Malfoy to be here, in Devon, with its weather changes as big as Voldemort's mood swings, it must've been due to something extreme. Harry bet it had something to do with Lucius Malfoy's imprisonment, and the flashes of resentment and cruel vindiction he'd recieved from Voldemort early in the summer.