Fic: The Blue is a Clue [2/2]

[zukkokya]

Part 1


On their way to the Shack’s hidden passage on the third floor, they came across several copies of the list scattered on the floor. Hermione warned them not to look, but after the twentieth discarded copy, Harry couldn’t put up with the curiosity anymore. He scooped up a copy, ignoring Hermione’s exasperated sigh, and scanned the opening lines.

OUTBREAK!!

ATTENTION ALL STUDENTS AND FACULTY:

HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO A POTENTIALLY LETHAL OUTBREAK.

PLEASE NOTE!! THIS ILLNESS IS LIKELY CONTAGIOUS. IF YOU SEE YOUR NAME BELOW, PLEASE REPORT TO MME. POMFREY IMMEDIATELY FOR MEDICAL ATTENTION.

Beneath that were names organized by House. Thirty-five in Gryffindor, nineteen in Ravenclaw, sixteen in Hufflepuff and—

“Had to be a Slytherin,” he said. He shoved the list into Hermione’s hands. “Look. Read it.”

Ron crowded her and read with her over her shoulder. Harry could see the moment when each of them got to the ridiculous part. Under the Slytherin column, there were twenty-five slots, but every one had the word “UNKNOWN” next to it.

Hermione raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t seem surprised. “Someone must have figured out the spell yesterday and warned the rest of the Slytherins to stay out of sight until it could be removed. Then as soon as they were back to normal, they made a list of blue students that would humiliate the other Houses.”

“It was Malfoy,” Harry said, certain and furious.

“Oh, Harry!” Hermione snapped. “It’s not always Malfoy!”

“Yeah,” Ron said. “Sometimes it’s You-Know-Who.”

In spite of his annoyance, Harry couldn’t stop himself from grinning. Even Hermione seemed slightly amused, even though she tried to cover it by rolling her eyes.

Ron took the list from Hermione as they continued down the corridor and read off a name whenever one surprised him.

“They think Romy Jameson’s queer?” he scoffed. “She’s got a boyfriend!”

Or, “No way Sophie Sawbridge’s a lesbian. She’s got a crush on Dean! And she dated Derrick Jones last year!”

Finally, he cried, “Olivia Nicholson!” and Hermione spun around sharply and seized the list out of his hands.

“I do hate to spoil your perfectly two-toned world, Ronald, but the spectrum of human sexuality has been proven time and time again by numerous sources to be just a bit more complex than you imagine. Bisexuals are not mythical creatures, Ronald. They are human beings, and much more than fantasy fodder to be drawn out of one’s imagination for the purpose of one’s personal pornography. They are your friends, Ronald, and they are your classmates.”

With this said, she tore the list into six even strips and let them wilt to the floor as she turned the corner and left Harry and Ron behind.

Harry blinked at Ron, whose eyebrows had settled halfway to his hairline.

“Bloody hell,” he said, bewildered. “What’s she so worked up for? She’s not even on the thing.”

“She’s not a house elf, either,” Harry pointed out.

“Yeah,” Ron said. “Uh. Is she still coming with us to see Lupin?”

“Doesn’t seem.” Harry thumbed his eyebrow. “Um. Maybe you should…”

Ron squirmed. “I…guess.” He sighed. “Yeah, all right. You’re right. I’ll catch you up later.”

Ron quickly headed off after Hermione, while Harry crossed the hallway to duck behind the tapestry that concealed the Shack’s secret passage.


When Harry arrived at the Shack, he noticed a gleaming red shin bone on the bottom stair. He stepped over it, trying not to think about where it had come from or who’d put it there, and rushed up the steps. They shrilled under his weight, which made a perfect compliment to the moaning banister on the wall.

He checked the first two rooms with no luck, then followed the sound of quiet wheezing into a bedroom facing the forest. He spotted Lupin lying on an ancient wreck of a bed with a quilt drawn up to his chin. Padfoot, Harry was thrilled to see, had taken a spot on the floor underneath one of Lupin’s bloodied hands. He seemed to be entertaining himself by reading a book that he held flat with his paws. He didn’t look up when Harry entered the room, but the moment Harry trod on a squeaky board, Sirius made a quiet whuff at the pages that Harry somehow understood as, “Keep it down.”

So he crossed the room on his toes and felt satisfied when the floor groaned only once or twice more. When Harry sat down on the floor next to Sirius, his godfather bunted Harry’s palm with his wet nose and shifted back to human form.

“Mind passing me those?” Sirius asked, gesturing at the clothes Harry was sitting on. Harry handed them over and read the book’s back cover while Sirius dressed. Sherlock Holmes.

“Harry, I’ve always hated to point out the obvious, but—”

“Yeah, I know. I’m blue.”

“Right. Any particular reason?”

Harry shrugged, uncomfortable. “Not really,” he hedged.

Sirius accepted that easily enough and pulled on a pair of scuffed trainers.

“Can you really read while you’re a dog?” Harry asked.

Sirius made a face. “Sort of. I tried to teach myself when I was younger, but I seem to have lost the knack for it. Dogs aren’t wired for it, but I remember I’d almost figured it out before I graduated.”

“That’s a lie,” Lupin said from underneath a pillow. “You had no way of proving it then and you’ve none now. Dogs can’t read, and they never shall.”

Sirius ignored that and said instead, “Welcome back to the species, Moony.”

“Thank you, you willful abomination.”

Harry arched his eyebrows, but Sirius just grinned. “Oh, yes, Harry,” he said, eyes bright with familiar mischief. “Your kindly professor isn’t so nice all the time. One learns to take it in stride.”

“Bugger off,” Lupin groaned. “Stop talking nonsense to my student.”

“And my godson,” Sirius said cheerfully. “I have to guide him, you know. Warn him of all the foul creatures in the world, which includes werewolves with poorly developed social skills, I’m sorry to say.”

Lupin flung the pillow at Sirius. “I can’t imagine why I was so happy to have you reintroduced into my life,” he muttered.

Sirius dodged the pillow and casually shrugged off the slight. “Your poor taste, I’m afraid, is the cause of that.” Still grinning, Sirius clapped Harry on the shoulder. “Now, what can we help you with, Harry?”

Harry couldn’t remember ever seeing them this…childish was the only word he could think of. Still, he supposed it was to be expected from the creators of the Marauders’ Map, no matter their age. The more time Sirius spent away from Azkaban, the more his personality seemed to come alive.

“There’s been a…mishap at school,” Harry said.

Sirius’s face darkened immediately, and Harry rushed to say, “No, no, nothing bad. Well. Nothing Voldemort-related.”

Lupin was sitting up, now, his expression equally grim. This was more familiar to Harry, but he found he liked it much less. “What’s happened, Harry?” Lupin asked.

“It’s really not that bad,” Harry said, embarrassed that he’d alarmed them at all. “Just that…some of the students have turned blue. And Malfoy’s saying it’s because of a spell that turns uh—turns the queer students blue.” When they didn’t react, Harry added, “And bisexual.”

Harry started to wonder if it was that bad, because Sirius and Lupin still looked as grave as the night Peter Pettigrew broke off his career as Ron’s pet. Then Lupin burst out laughing, and Harry suffered a long moment of total confusion.

Sirius, on the other hand, though he didn’t seem worried anymore, now appeared to be growing increasingly agitated.

“This is your fault,” Lupin told Sirius, his tired face suddenly bright with pure amusement.

“It’s not my fault,” Sirius said, offended. “How did you arrive there? Maybe it’s yours.”

“You wrote it,” Lupin pointed out.

“And then you took it from me! I remember this! You hid that parchment between the stones in the dormitory wall, of all the obvious secret hiding places! It’s like hiding the spare house key under a petrified garden gnome.”

Harry frowned, trying to catch up with what they were saying. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What did you write?”

Sirius looked like he wanted to turn back into a dog.

“It shouldn’t be a problem, Harry,” Lupin said. “Sirius knows how to remove it.”

The full scope of the joke suddenly came into focus for Harry. “You know this spell? You….” He turned and gave Sirius a disbelieving stare. “You wrote it?”

Sirius made a strange noise in his throat, a cross between affirmation and a neutral grunt.

“Why would you write a spell like that?” Harry asked.

Sirius looked at Lupin.

“It’s just.” Harry shrugged. “It seems…malicious.” Not just petty or cruel like some of their pranks, but personal. Hateful.

If Sirius had been hoping Lupin would answer for him, Lupin disappointed him. After a moment, Sirius sighed, “Yes, but it wasn’t meant to be a…a marker for homosexuals or anything.”

“What was it meant to be, then?”

Sirius turned a more beseeching expression on Lupin, but again received no assistance. In fact, Lupin seemed to be vastly enjoying Sirius’s discomfort.

“It was…a means of…of divesting…ah…” Sirius turned one hand in a slow, mystifying circle.

Lupin finally took mercy on him and said, “In our seventh year, Sirius claimed he’d written a spell that repelled people’s trousers, but he misused several Latin components and the spell turned out to be a ‘marker for homosexuals’ instead. Fortunately, it happened in our last week of school and wore off within a month, so few even realized or cared why it had happened at all.”

Sirius did not look happy with Lupin.

Harry frowned. “You mean…it was a mistake?”

“Yes,” Lupin said with a grin. “A very, very big mistake. A mistake of linguistics, actually. You see, there is no Latin word for ‘homosexual,’ but there are certain words that, when assembled in a certain order, describe homosexual actions. The spell simply points out those who have performed or desire to perform such actions. Ah, even subconsciously,” he added, perhaps noticing Harry’s increasing skepticism.

Harry lifted his eyebrows at Sirius, whose scowl got infinitesimally deeper.

“I’m brilliant,” Sirius reminded Lupin. “I never got anything but full marks on all my assignments, co-wrote a comprehensive map of Hogwarts and became an Animagus by the age of sixteen. So if you’ll pardon the expression, Moony, blow me.”

“I will not,” Lupin said cheerfully. “I take a reasonable amount joy from your mistakes, you arrogant sod, and that was certainly one of your worst.”

Harry had to admit that after hearing so much about the incredible achievements that Sirius and his dad had made in school, it was a little difficult to imagine Sirius making such an enormous mistake. “What went wrong?” he asked.

Sirius opened his mouth, but Lupin cleared his throat, and Sirius changed whatever his intended answer might have been to, “I may not have been in full possession of my faculties.”

“He was drunk,” Lupin translated.

Sirius continued to look utterly martyred while Harry put their explanation together. “But if you made it…how did Slytherin figure it out?” he asked.

Lupin shrugged. “I’m sure Severus recognized it. Where Sirius’s talent lies in creating mischief, Severus’s lies in—”

“Spoiling everything,” Sirius finished.

“—Solving riddles,” Remus corrected.

“Ah,” Sirius said, snapping. “I was close!”

Harry looked at him, frowning. “But why did you leave the spell at Hogwarts?”

“That was Remus’s fault,” Sirius said quickly. “He had this space in the wall of our dormitory where he used to hide things.”

Lupin frowned thoughtfully. “I think our old dormitory is the current sixth-year boys’ dormitory. Ah. That would make it Fred and George Weasley’s dormitory. That explains a great deal of the situation—they must have found it and thought they’d be performing a trouser-repelling spell. How disappointing for them.”

Still reminiscing, Sirius said, almost to himself, “He put my whole scroll of spells in there and forgot to give it to me again before we graduated.”

Lupin made an impatient noise. “You forgot to ask,” he said.

“You forgot about my bad memory,” Sirius countered.

“I’m not queer,” Harry blurted.

Lupin and Sirius seemed to have been expecting such an outburst, judging by their downcast eyes and sudden silence.

Finally, Sirius said, “What if you are?”

“That’s stupid,” Harry said, his face heating. He stared out the window, terrified of looking at Sirius’s expression and seeing anything like disgust. He wasn’t, and he knew that, but they clearly thought he was. “I’d know if I were,” he said firmly.

“Would you?” Lupin asked. He sounded maddeningly patient and completely without emotion. “Have you ever thought about it?”

Harry shuddered. “No, because I’m not queer!”

The next silence Harry could feel. They wouldn’t believe him. Of course they wouldn’t believe him—he was bloody blue, which was the new rainbow, apparently.

“Maybe Fred and George did it wrong,” Harry muttered. His neck itched again, this time tickled by sweat.

The floorboards creaked, and a shadow fell over the windowsill. Sirius didn’t touch him, but Harry could see the silhouette of his hand over Harry’s shoulder. Harry tensed, horrified by what his godfather must think of him now. Eventually the hand went away, and Sirius crouched next to him. He smelled like mothballs and dirt and grass.

“I hid,” Sirius said quietly.

Harry looked up at him, frowning.

“The spell turned me blue,” he explained steadily, “so I hid. Missed the last week of school. Nearly got myself taken out of graduation, but James went to McGonagall behind my back and told her about the spell and what it did. Said we’d both done it.” The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. “He saved my neck a lot, your dad.”

But.

But.

Harry’s mind went back to the first time he’d met Sirius, and then skimmed over all the other memories of him. Harry couldn’t remember a single moment when he’d thought Sirius might be…sexual. Not homosexual, just sexual. In any way. So if Harry had never thought of Sirius with anyone, of course he wouldn’t have thought of him with another man, now would he?

Still, thinking about it now was making Harry extremely uncomfortable. He felt rather glad now that Sirius had decided against touching him while Harry frantically fended off images of his godfather snogging another man.

“Uh,” said Harry finally. “So…you….”

“Queer as a belt in a hat,” Sirius said, grinning.

Harry heard a thump and saw over Sirius’s shoulder that Lupin had let himself fall back into bed with a groan.

“So’s Moony,” Sirius confided.

“Fuck off!” Lupin shouted, bolting upright. “Sirius!”

Sirius glanced back at him and shrugged. “You are,” he said. “Save your fit.”

“I have to teach him!” Lupin yelled. “I keep my private life private for a reason, Padfoot!”

Sirius waved him off with a snort. “You had no private life until I got here,” he said dismissively.

Lupin went very still, and even Sirius seemed to think over what he’d just said with a bit of discomfort.

Harry wisely chose not to comment. He shifted, wondering if it’d be too jarring to the awkward atmosphere if he stood and ran, and said to Sirius, “Can you think of a way to remove it? The Slytherins managed to take it off before breakfast this morning, and one of them put up this list yesterday—”

“Indeed, of course. It’s done,” Sirius said quickly. “Ah, let me just—” He jumped to his feet with surprising agility for someone who’d spent thirteen years in confinement and practically ran from the room.

Lupin had one hand over his face, which Harry appreciated as it meant they could each pretend the other didn’t exist.

Outside, the sun had climbed to a place in the sky that sent shards of light through the grimy windows and onto the backs of Harry’s blue hands. He studied his knuckles and tried to imagine Ron’s reaction when Harry returned to the castle back to his normal pigment.

Then he thought of the days to come. Even after the spell got removed from everyone—it was out now. Everyone would know he was queer. Or…bisexual. He still didn’t feel queer, though.

“It doesn’t have to be half and half, does it?” he asked Lupin cautiously. “Being bisexual.”

Lupin took his hand away with a sigh. “No,” he said, looking tired. He didn’t seem upset with Harry, though. He even smiled a little, if a bit ruefully. “You’re actually about the same shade I was. Sexuality is…complex.”

“That’s what Hermione said.”

Lupin chuckled, “Clever witch. Stick with her, Harry.”

As Lupin reached for his crumpled robes on the end of the bed, Sirius came back into the room with a scrap of parchment and a wand. He coughed at the door and tossed the wand to Lupin without making eye contact.

Lupin rolled his eyes. “Allergic, are we?” he asked sarcastically.

Sirius turned pink and said, “Sod off,” in an unusually gruff voice. He sat down next to Harry and took out a quill from his pocket. As Sirius sketched out several Latin words and then crossed them out, Harry looked at his hands and face and tried to imagine him blue.

At some point, Sirius must have noticed, because his face became even redder.

“Serves you right,” Lupin said, watching them from the bed with great smugness.

“Sorry,” Harry said, and looked everywhere else in the room but at his godfather and his professor. He imagined his trunk wistfully and the Invisibility Cloak that rested in secret at the bottom.

At last, Sirius said, “This should do it. Thought I couldn’t remember it for a minute.” He’d penned an illegible Latin phrase at the bottom of the ink-smeared page that Harry couldn’t read. Clearing his throat, Sirius extended the parchment, shook it, and said, “Ah, Moony. If you would?”

Lupin raised his eyebrows, unimpressed. “Is it going to fly, Padfoot?” he asked casually.

Harry took the parchment from Sirius and brought it over to Lupin. He imagined his bed, and how much he’d enjoy spending the rest of the day underneath it.

“Thank you, Harry.” Lupin lifted his wand to Harry’s forehead just beneath the scar and said, “Typicus aufero.”

A shimmer of cold went through him, and then he watched as the blue receded from his fingers up to his wrists up to his elbows and finally underneath his sleeves. It only took seconds, and then Harry felt muscles relax everywhere in his body, muscles that he hadn’t even realized were tense.

“Thank you, Sirius,” Harry said.

Sirius had stood up and gone to lean on the wall beside the window. He cast his eyes to the side and said, “I’m sorry it happened at all, Harry.” He sounded sincere, and Harry wondered how it must have been when Sirius was seventeen and queer and blue and slowly realizing what he’d done.

Lupin folded the spell and said, “Make sure you deliver this straight to McGonagall. Do you need the parchment?”

“No, it’s fine.”

Lupin looked concerned. “Are you all right to go back, Harry?” he asked. “I’d walk with you, of course, but I’m not certain I’m up to it just yet. If you’d like to wait—”

“I’m all right,” Harry said.

Lupin and Sirius exchanged a look, and Sirius walked over to sit on the bed next to Lupin. Not close. He left more than half a foot between them, but Lupin seemed to appreciate it all the same.

Harry squirmed, dreaming of the space under his bed where he could be sure he wasn’t about to watch his godfather and his professor accidentally start snogging each other.

Ngh.

“You have some awful flaws, Harry,” Sirius said slowly, “just like everyone does. But this isn’t one of them. I know you’ve never really thought about this, and I’m sure that if you can avoid it even now, you will. What you should know, though—and I promise this is the one time you’ll hear me bring it up and never again—is that this doesn’t matter. Not to me, not to anyone who matters.”

Lupin was staring at Sirius with an unreadable expression.

Sirius just smiled. "Your dad told me that."

Harry shrugged, embarrassed. “Thanks,” he said, feeling his face heat up. “I’ll go—ah. I’ll go help, um.”

Chuckling, Sirius gave him a small push and said, “I understand. Off you go.”

Harry nodded, relieved, and left the room at not quite a jog, but close to it.


(After Harry left, Remus frowned at Sirius.

“James never said that to you.”

“He did.”

“He was never that eloquent.”

“Not as such, no. Good taste in books, though.”

“He plagiarized a book to give you advice?”

“You plagiarize some anonymous dead person every time you cast a spell, my dear Moony.”

“You never tire of yourself, do you, Padfoot?”

“Sod off, you. I’m marvelous company.”)


4.
At 2:06AM on Monday, Harry closed the door of the Diviniation classroom behind him and removed his Invisibility Cloak.

“Hi, Harry.”

He spun around, heart in his throat, and slowly exhaled when he saw Seamus sitting in his usual seat.

“Seamus. How did…?”

Seamus shrugged listlessly. “Filch sneaks off to the kitchen ‘round this time on Mondays. Not always, but usually.” His eyes followed the shimmering line of the Cloak. “Mum told me about those. Said they’re rare.”

“S’pose so,” Harry said, frowning. He put it down on Trelawney’s favorite overstuffed pillow and sat down next to it. Left about six feet between him and Seamus. “What’re you doing up here?”

Seamus lifted a walkman. Harry found himself struck to see something so entirely Muggle in Trelawney’s utterly magical classroom. He had to think far back to remember that Seamus’s father was a Muggle. “Mum sent this to me by owl,” Seamus said. “Didn’t want to wake anyone listening to it.”

Harry didn’t ask why he felt he had to listen to it now in the North Tower. “I didn’t notice you were missing,” he said instead.

Seamus snorted. “You don’t notice me at all, Harry.”

Which wasn’t really true, Harry thought, or fair. Seamus lived with him. Slept in the bed next to his. Harry knew his name, his class schedule, his parentage. Harry thought he noticed plenty about Seamus.

“Where were you all day?” Seamus asked. He had headphones around his neck, and the wire roped around his wrist. He kept absently coiling it around his arm with his index finger, and Harry imagined that that was a nervous tic of Seamus’s that few in the Wizarding world had ever seen, since walkmen were rare in Hogwarts. There. Now he’d noticed something personal, and he almost felt like saying so, just to make a point.

But no. Too queer to notice another boy’s nervous tics. “Nowhere special,” Harry said, then winced. He really should learn how to lie better than that.

Luckily, Seamus didn’t call him on it. “What’re you doing up here, then?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, and didn’t feel too proud of his confident tone since he was, after all, telling the truth.

Seamus nodded, then turned his head to look out the window. Harry gratefully recognized the clean break in conversation. He may know things about Seamus, sure, but Harry didn’t know him personally at all. They probably had a few shared interests like Quidditch and a Muggle upbringing and girls—only not that, not anymore.

Harry felt a hot shiver go down his arms. Malfoy had been obnoxious enough before; what could Harry look forward to from him now?

The moon had waned a bit since last night. It rested now just above the lake, surrounded by a peppering of stars and a twist of cloud. The quiet here felt almost tangible.

Something about the privacy made Harry feel safe enough to ask, “Does everyone believe it?”

Without looking at him, Seamus nodded. “Everyone,” he said quietly.

Harry nodded and studied the bit of robe he’d been unconsciously worrying in his hands. “Oh,” he said.

He couldn’t entirely grasp that—that from now on, every one of his classmates who looked at him—they’d—

“Colin Creevey made the list,” Seamus said.

Harry conjured up an image of the list in his mind. THIS ILLNESS IS LIKELY CONTAGIOUS it had said. Harry raised his eyebrows skeptically.

Seamus shrugged. “He’s the only person at Hogwarts who uses a blue Stand-Up Stand-Out Quill. He got it for his birthday last month, remember? At the…never mind. You weren’t there. Anyway, he’s also the only person I know who spells Pomfrey’s title M-m-e; I’ve seen him write it before.”

“But Dennis turned blue,” Harry pointed out, frowning. “Why would Colin do that to his brother?”

Seamus shrugged again and wrapped another length of wire around his arm. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “People don’t get less homophobic just because their family members are queer.”

Harry wasn’t convinced. “Why would he have left all the Slytherin spots blank, then?”

“Because hardly anyone from Slytherin left the dungeons on Saturday; he probably didn’t know who they were.” Seamus slumped lower against the wall and Harry thought it was strange to see Seamus so…lethargic.

There, see, he knew plenty about Seamus. Quite a bit more than he’d realized, actually.

Seamus was loud, and laughed much more than Harry did. He mainly hung out with Dean, of course, since they were best friends, but Harry had also seen him with Lavender lately. People would know that about Seamus, Harry realized; they’d remember that Seamus hung out with a pretty girl like Lavender. He’d be able to say he was bisexual. Or maybe he’d say that the stupid spell had affected him because he was best mates with Dean, and the spell must have confused their friendship for something else.

In fact, maybe that’s what had happened to Harry! Maybe the spell had mistaken his friendship with Ron for something else! And Harry hung out with a girl, too. He spent as much time with Hermione as he did with Ron, so that had to count for something, didn’t it? He didn’t have to be…he wasn’t—

The word got stuck in Harry’s throat, and he made an unusual sound that made Seamus jump.

Then Harry said, too loud, “I’ve never…liked a boy.” He winced again. He couldn’t talk to girls at all as it was, and now he couldn’t talk to boys either? His face burned, but he couldn’t think of a way to take it back now. “I think the spell was wrong.”

Seamus studied him. “What if it wasn’t?” he asked.

Harry didn’t realize he was shaking his head until his glasses slipped down his nose. Shoving them back up, Harry said, “No. I’ve never thought about a boy like that. Never.”

Seamus smirked. “Sure,” he said, and looked away.

Harry narrowed his eyes. “I haven’t,” he snapped.

Seamus’s expression twisted into both anger and humiliation. “Do you think I care?” he yelled. “Christ, Harry, no one cares! So people might make some snide jokes about you now, but when haven’t they? Some people won’t want to go anywhere near you, but that isn’t new either! For once, this isn’t your own personal tragedy, Harry, so give it a bloody rest, would you?”

Harry grimaced as Seamus’s voice echoed off the ceiling. He had a sudden, alarming thought that Peeves would burst through the floor and call Filch to them, but nothing happened. Then Seamus got up, grabbed his walkman, and headed for the door.

Harry couldn’t explain why, not to himself, not even if he tried, but he suddenly wanted Seamus to stay.

“Sorry,” Harry blurted.

Seamus looked at him wearily.

Harry flushed. “I know it’s—I know it’s not. I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t sure if that would be enough to get Seamus to stay. Harry knew he’d never really understood the way Seamus thought. He knew he didn’t know how Seamus saw himself, or what Seamus thought about being bisexual or queer or whatever sexuality he was. As if he’d read Harry’s mind, Seamus crouched down in front of him and said, “I think, in a way, it’s like finding out you’re a wizard.”

Then he left, and Harry stayed.


Harry waited until he was sure his roommates would be down at breakfast before sneaking back to the dormitory. He changed quickly into his robes and ignored the sweat on his palms and throat. On his way down the stairs, he shivered and thought about his schedule class by class.

By the time he got to the Great Hall, the back of his collar was damp.

He flinched his eyes closed when the noise of conversation simmered down to silence, and Harry prepared himself for snickering, for shouting, for nearly anything, really, except for what actually happened.

When he opened his eyes everyone seemed to be looking at him. Fourteen years old, pale, and under the scrutiny of the entire school.

Then Dumbledore said, “Good morning, Harry,” and Harry looked over his shoulder and saw the headmaster smiling at him, bright blue with a fuchsia beard.



END