Chapter Text

Chapter Nine

First Meeting

For the first week of term, Harry saw Lukas Merlin only the way the whole school saw him: in glimpses, at a distance, the subject of more talk than any new student in living memory.

He saw him across the Great Hall at meals, a still pale point at the Slytherin table, eating little, flanked by the fascinated, wary attention of his new housemates. He saw him in the corridors between classes, moving through the press of students with that uncanny unhurried calm, a small clear space always seeming to open around him as though the crowd felt what Harry felt and gave it room. He saw him once from a high window, alone in a courtyard, standing perfectly motionless with his face turned up to a grey sky, and a single crow had come down out of the cold air and landed on the stone an arm's length from him and simply stayed there, the two of them keeping each other company, until a knot of students rounded the corner and the bird startled up and was gone. Harry had watched that for longer than he meant to and had not been able to say why it unsettled him.

The school talked of nothing else. The gossip ran through the corridors like water finding its level, and Harry, who had spent a year being gossiped about himself, listened to it with a connoisseur's ear and found most of it wrong. They said the boy was a prince of some foreign land. They said he was Dumbledore's secret ward, or a Ministry plant, or the result of some old scandal. They said the Hat had refused him because he was too dark for any house, or too powerful, or cursed. They said Merlin was a stage name, an affectation, a joke; and they said, the cleverer ones, the ones from the old families who had gone quiet and thoughtful since the feast, that Merlin was not a joke at all, that there were things it might mean that did not bear saying aloud in a crowded corridor. Mostly they said: why Slytherin? Why, when the Hat had handed him the whole castle, when he could have been anything, had the strange unsortable boy chosen the snakes?

Harry wondered that too. He wondered a great many things, that first week, watching the pale still figure at the edges of his days. He did not seek the boy out. Something in him was wary of the pull, the vast flat settling he had felt in the Hall, the sense of an answer he had not asked for; and a boy who had spent thirteen years learning that wanting things was dangerous did not go chasing a feeling that large simply because it tugged at him. So, he watched, and he wondered, and he waited, and the pull hummed under the ordinary days like a held note, and he told himself he was in no hurry.

The boy came to him anyway.

♦

It was Theo who brought him, in the end, though Harry was never entirely sure, afterward, whether brought was the right word, or whether Theo had been the thing Lukas attached himself to on the way to where he was always going.

They were in the base, the disused fourth-floor classroom that had been theirs since the dark middle of last year, lockable and defensible and where the found family gathered now not to decode a sealed will but simply because it was theirs. It was a loose afternoon, the kind they had not had many of yet this term: Hermione with a book, Daphne and Susan with their heads together over something that was probably the Wizengamot's autumn order of business, Neville coaxing along a plant on the windowsill, Ginny and Ron arguing amiably about Quidditch, Luna threading something onto a string. Harry was half in the conversation and half at the window, and he felt the change in the room before he heard the door, felt the held note behind his breastbone go suddenly taut, and turned.

Theo stood in the doorway. And a half-step behind him, framed in the dark of the corridor, still and pale and watching, stood Lukas Merlin.

"I'm aware," Theo said, into the silence that dropped over the room, in his driest voice, the voice he used when he had decided to do a thing he expected to be questioned about, "that this is irregular. He's been following me about for three days like a particularly unnerving cat, and I've concluded it's because this is where he actually wants to be, so." He stepped aside. "Lukas. This is everyone. Everyone, this is the boy you've all been failing not to stare at for a week. He doesn't bite. I don't think. I'm honestly not sure."

For a moment no one said anything, and Harry, watching, understood several things at once. He understood that Theo was unsettled, under the dryness, Theo, who was never unsettled, who had walked through a year of impossible strangeness with one eyebrow raised; that whatever Theo had spent three days observing in his new housemate had gotten under his guard in a way little did. He understood that Ron had gone stiff beside Ginny, his easy Quidditch-argument warmth shutting down into something watchful and closed. And he understood that the still pale boy in the doorway was looking at exactly one person in the crowded room, past Theo, past all of them, directly and unwaveringly at Harry, with the deep navy eyes, the same look from across the Great Hall, the look of a thing that had found what it came for.

"Hello," Lukas said. His voice was dry and even and younger than the rest of him, exactly as it had been when he claimed his house in front of the school. He did not come into the room. He stood on the threshold as though he understood it was not his to enter uninvited, which was, Harry thought, a more careful courtesy than he'd expected. "I won't stay if I'm not wanted. I'm not very good at this. I haven't done much of it." A faint pause. "Being somewhere because I chose to. I'm practising."

It disarmed the room, a little, that plain strange honesty. Hermione, who could not help herself, said, "You can come in," before anyone could decide otherwise, and shot Harry a look that asked whether she'd overstepped. Harry found himself nodding, because the held note in his chest had not loosened and would not, he understood, until he had looked this boy in the face up close and learned what the pull was about.

Lukas came in. He moved to the edge of the room rather than its centre, the way Harry himself always did, the way someone does who has spent his life learning to take up no space, and he stood near the wall and let himself be looked at with a stillness that gave nothing away.

♦

It was Daphne who broke it, because of course it was Daphne.

"All right," she said, setting down the parchment, fixing Lukas with the frank political curiosity Harry remembered from her own introduction a year ago, entirely free of malice and entirely without mercy. "Let's have it properly, since we're all pretending we're not desperate to know. The Hat said Merlin. The Hat said it like the word meant something. You chose Salazar's house in front of the whole school as though you had a right to it." She tilted her head. "Tell us what you are, and let's see how much of the corridor gossip we have to throw out."

And Lukas, who could have deflected, who could have been coy, looked at her with something that might have been the faintest flicker of respect for the directness, and answered.

"I'm the heir of Merlin," he said, plainly, into the quiet room. "And of Salazar Slytherin. The two lines are one line, joined a long way back. Gringotts read my blood three weeks ago and confirmed it. I have the rings." He said it the way you might report the weather, no pride in it, no wonder, a flat statement of an enormous fact, and the very flatness of it was more convincing than any flourish could have been. "That's what the Hat meant with the 25% of it. That's why I chose Slytherin. It's Salazar's house, and I'm Salazar's, so. It seemed honest." A pause. "Mostly I chose it because no one's ever let me choose anything, and I wanted the choosing to be mine. The house was almost incidental."

The room had gone very quiet. Harry watched it land on them one by one, and watched, with the part of him that had learned this year to read a room politically, how differently it landed.

He saw Daphne and Susan exchange a single swift glance, and knew that between them, wordlessly, an entire analysis had just occurred. It was Susan who voiced it, carefully, in her steady Bones-bred way. "You understand what that does," she said. It was not a question. "A Merlin heir. And Slytherin's. Choosing the snake house, publicly, when the whole world's watching." She frowned, working it. "The old families won't know what to do with you. Half of them will want to claim you, the greatest name there is, surfaced in their house set to reclaim its inheritance; that's a prize beyond price to people who measure everything in blood. And the other half will be terrified of you, because a power that big that they didn't make, don’t have an alliance with and can't control is exactly the thing that frightens them most." She glanced at Daphne. "You've put a piece on the board that none of them know how to play."

"Which," Daphne added, with relish, "is going to make this year extremely interesting. The Malfoy set will be in uproar. They spent the World Cup feeling rather pleased with themselves, and now a Merlin is sitting at their own table whose loyalties no one can read." Her eyes glittered. "I do hope you understand you've made yourself the most fought-over object in Britain, Merlin,” and with a quick flick towards Harry “No offence, Potter.”

Looking back directly at Lukas, Daphne stated plainly, “People are going to be very kind to you for entirely terrible reasons."

"People are usually kind to me for terrible reasons," Lukas said. "It's familiar." And there was something so flat and so self-pitying in it, a thing stated rather than complained, that the room went briefly, awkwardly silent, because every one of them had just heard the size of the thing under it and not known what to do with it.

It was Theo who filled the silence, from his corner, and what he said was the thing Harry had been waiting for without knowing it.

"That's not the interesting part, though," Theo said. He was watching Lukas with the narrow attention of a man working at a puzzle that bothered him. "The heir business, the politics, that's just blood and money; Greengrass can have it. No." He leaned forward. "The interesting part is that there's something off with you, and I've spent three days trying to work out what, and I can't." He said it without cruelty, almost clinically, the way you'd remark on an odd noise in a familiar house. "You're too still. Animals do things around you they shouldn't, I've watched them. And there are moments, I've seen this twice, where you go somewhere behind your own eyes, just for a second, like a clock skipping, like time forgot to bring you along with it." He sat back. "I don't know what you are, Merlin. The heir of Merlin, fine, I believe you. But that's not the thing that's odd about you, and I think you know it isn't, and I think that's the thing you actually came in here carrying."

The room had gone cold and quiet. And Harry, watching Lukas's still face, saw something happen in it that the political talk had not caused: a flicker, fast, suppressed, the smallest crack in the contained surface, the look of a boy who has been seen a degree more deeply than he meant to allow. Lukas did not answer Theo. He looked at him for a long moment, and something passed between them, wariness, recognition, the meeting of a hidden thing and the eye that had found it, and then Lukas looked deliberately away, closing the door Theo had pried at, and said, lightly, "You're very observant. Slytherin suits you," in a tone that ended the subject.

But Harry had seen the crack. And he filed it, with everything else, in the fast-filling drawer: Theo's right. There's something different with him, something he carries more than heirship, something even he flinches from. And the wrongness did not make Harry warier. That was the strange thing, the thing he turned over later. It made the pull stronger. Because Harry knew, none better, what it was to find a thread and start pulling it.

♦

Ron had not said a word.

Harry became aware of it the way you become aware of a cold draught, gradually, and then all at once. Through the whole of it, the introduction, the heritage, the politics, Theo's strange diagnosis, Ron had sat by the window with his arms folded and his face shut, and the easy warmth that was Ron's whole nature had gone somewhere Harry could not follow. And when Lukas, in the loosening after Theo's subject closed, turned his attention at last fully to Harry, Ron's jaw tightened, and Harry felt the draught become a wind.

"You're Harry Potter," Lukas said.

"Yeah," Harry said.

"I know." And there it was again, that flat certainty, the same note that had been in I'm the heir of Merlin, a thing stated rather than guessed. Lukas looked at him with the deep navy eyes, and the room seemed to recede a little, the others becoming a held breath at the edges, and the held note in Harry's chest drew tight as a bowstring. "I've known for a while. Longer than I should, probably." A pause, and Harry watched the boy approach something carefully, the way you approach a step you know is loose. "I should tell you. Before we carry on down this path, or before it's strange. "

And Harry's mind, which had been worrying at a snag for a week, a bell ringing too far back to hear, the name Lukas, the archaic voice the Hat had answered, the parchment-feeling, the single letter at the bottom of a page in a hand too old for any boy, chose that exact moment to make the connection that had been sliding away from him since the feast; and it arrived all at once, complete, the way the worst and best understandings always did, and Harry heard himself say, before Lukas could finish, in a voice gone strange:

"It was you."

Lukas went still.

"The letter." Harry was on his feet without deciding to be. "Last summer. The end of last year. A letter, no name, just, just L, at the bottom, in this old, careful hand, carried by a bird that wasn't, that nobody could name. About how we were… " his voice caught, because the words of it were burned into him, but he didn’t feel like sharing with the rest of his group just yet. He stared at the pale boy, and the whole room had gone silent around them, forgotten, the two of them alone in it. "That was you. You wrote to me. Before any of this, you sat down and wrote to me a letter and signed it L, and you didn't even- you didn't know me; how did you, why did you? "

And here was the thing Harry would remember, the thing that told him more about Lukas Merlin than all the heritage and the politics and even Theo's diagnosis: that Lukas did not look triumphant, or pleased to be known, or even relieved. He looked cornered. He looked like someone standing at the edge of one of his own locked doors with the handle turning, and for a moment the contained stillness wavered and something young and lost showed through it, and when he answered his voice had lost its flat certainty entirely.

"Yes," he said. "I wrote it." A breath. "I don't, " and he stopped, and Harry watched him try to find the answer and fail, watched him reach for the why and come back empty-handed, his face doing something complicated and pained. "I don't know why I knew to write to you. That's the truth. I know how that sounds. I sat down one night with a piece of parchment, and I knew your name, and I knew, " he swallowed, "I knew we were to meet this year, and I knew I had to tell you that you weren't alone, and I could not have told you then and I cannot tell you now where any of it came from. It felt like remembering. Remembering something that hasn't happened." He looked at Harry, and the navy eyes were, for the first time, not opaque at all, were open and bewildered and a little afraid. "I came here following a feeling I can't explain, to a school without knowing why, to find a boy I wrote to without knowing how I knew him. I'm not playing at being mysterious. I genuinely don't know what I am to you. I only know that I am something, and that the not-knowing is the single most frightening thing in my life, and I have a great many frightening things to choose from." A pause. "So, that's the letter. I'm sorry I can't make it make more sense. I've tried. The trying is part of what's wrong with me."

The room was utterly silent. And Harry stood across from him, the boy from the dream, the writer of the letter, the answer to a question he had never asked, and felt the held note in his chest finally, fully resolve, not into safety, not into understanding, but into a recognition so total it frightened him: We are the same. Whatever this is. He carries a thing too big to look at and so do I, and we have been walking toward each other the whole time, and neither of us knows why.

"You don't have to make it make sense," Harry heard himself say, quietly. "I've got a drawer full of things that don't make sense. One more won't hurt." And it was not much, but it was the right thing, he saw it land, saw the cornered look ease a fraction, saw something in the still pale boy unclench by a single degree; and that, Harry would think later, was the actual beginning, not the letter, not the Hall, but that: two boys agreeing, without saying so, to carry the not-knowing together rather than apart.

♦

It was Ron who broke it, and the way he broke it told Harry the wind had not died.

"Right," Ron said, standing, his voice too loud and too bright in the charged quiet. "Well. This has all been very, " he gestured, vaguely, at the whole impossible scene, "cosmic. I'm going to dinner. Coming, Harry? Or are you, " and he stopped, and something raw showed through the brightness for just a second, and Harry understood that Ron had watched the entire thing. The dream and the letter and the recognition, had watched a strange Slytherin boy walk into their room and become, in the space of twenty minutes, something Harry was visibly bound to in a way Ron could see and could not name and was not part of; and that it had frightened him, badly, in the specific way of a person who has already felt himself being left behind. "Never mind," Ron said, the brightness slamming back down over the rawness. "You're busy. I'll see you there."

And he left, and the door shut behind him a little too hard, and Harry stood torn in the silence, half of him wanting to go after his oldest friend and half of him rooted to the spot by the pale still boy who had just cracked himself open in front of everyone; and into the silence Daphne's voice came, quiet, only for Harry, the words she had said to him once before in this very room a lifetime ago, that he had never forgotten.

"Don't lose him, Potter," she murmured. "I told you last year. The loose thread. It doesn't mend on its own, and it doesn't stay sad." Her eyes followed the closed door. "You've just acquired something extraordinary. Mind it doesn't cost you something ordinary that mattered more."

Harry looked at the door Ron had gone through, and then at Lukas, who was watching him with the navy eyes, who had nowhere else in the world to be and knew it, and he felt the first cold edge of a problem he did not know how to solve: that the held note in his chest and the oldest friendship in his life were pulling, gently, in opposite directions, and that he was going to have to find a way to keep both, and that he was not at all sure it could be done.

He went after Ron. But he was slow about it, half a beat too slow, and they all heard it, the slowness; and Lukas Merlin watched him go with a still pale face that gave nothing away, and the year, properly, began.