Chapter Text
In the end, the work of unraveling the ruse is just as careful as piecing it together had been.
Things are different, of course. Once upon a time, it had been Archie who was free to essentially be himself, while Harry juggled the thousand delicate details required to play her role. Now, it's the other way around.
Not that the script Harry has to play out isn't painful enough—it is, it will rip her heart out—but in a way it's freeing, too. In a way, it's taking off the mask. For Archie, it will be his first time really putting on a show. Harry worries for him. She knows he can handle it—knows he has to, but she also knows how hard it is.
They're lucky that Hogwarts and AIM'S Easter and Spring breaks line up this year. They both have a chance to come home together, one last time, as the versions of themselves they have pretended to be for the past six-and-something years.
And then they push down the dominoes.
***
This is the story of Rigel Arcturus Black:
Once upon a time, a little boy was raised by Sirius Black and Remus Lupin and James Potter, along with a fiery, outspoken muggleborn named Lily Evans, and then he went to Slytherin, and he shut his mouth.
The children around him see a closed off box that they can open up. They think they can teach him to love, and to care, and to trust. They succeed at two out of three, because they don't really understand him.
Rigel Black's school friends only see one side of the box. They see the side that is safe to show inside Slytherin house, cold and paranoid and potions-obsessed as it is. Ever so carefully, they pry him open, expose his insides to the sun and light, and they see that part of him flourish, sprouts reaching up for the sun, and they think that's all. They never see the part of him that's already on fire, that already has its own light, and it burns in the dark for a long time.
(Here's the thing about fires:
They don't like to be buried)
There are two things that could happen to Rigel Black:
The new part of him can keep growing. Eventually, the roots will grow deep enough to choke out the flames. More and more dirt will season them until nothing is left but ashes. He can push his past down, down, deep within him, until that part of him is lost enough it's almost as if it were never there at all. Rigel gets good at growing delicate, beautiful flowers. Rigel gets good at compromise. Rigel gets good at quiet. Rigel learns how to bend, and slither through the holes in the traps Slytherin leaves for him, until the holes in the net draw tighter… and tighter. For a long time, Rigel thinks this has already happened.
His father looks at him in green, and takes him to Malfoy manor to socialize with people who want his family dead. It's ugly. It's beautiful.
Rigel wears chains, but they're pretty ones, and it's okay, because these are the people who taught him how to love.
Or:
The roots burn.
The roots burn, and Rigel remembers his mothers both; the one who raised him, and the one who didn't get to, rage and justice lighting up his veins. Some things can't be restrained forever. Some things shouldn't be. This is one of them.
(Sometimes, love isn't enough)
Rigel Black stops holding his tongue.
Rigel Black stops making compromises.
In Slytherin house, unfortunately, friendship and compromise are synonymous.
***
("I'm sorry Pansy. Draco. But I'm done with being 'neutral'."
She raises her hands up into finger quotes. She has litres and litres of bitterness saved up for this moment. Years of it.
She doesn't want to use a single ounce.
"...What do you mean by that, Rye?"
"It means I'm done holding my tongue. No more pureblood parties. No more galas."
There's a drop. In the air. In her heart.
"No more cavorting around with Parkinsons and Malfoys."
She leaves off the 'in public' she wants to add. There can be no quarter. No room for evasion.
"I'll be cutting contact when we leave school. I know this isn't really either of your faults—not yet anyway—but we all know where you're going. And I'm not coming with.")
***
Their story for Harriet Potter is this:
It starts with going off to school. It starts off with becoming someone else. (That part, at least, is true.)
Harry is sick of her life back home, where she can't sleep, can't breathe, can't choose what to do with her life, and so when she hops on a plane ride she doesn't want to take and flies away from everything she knows, it's easy to leave her girlishness behind with everything else; another set of strict expectations she doesn't want to keep. (Another set of ugly stereotypes and she doesn't want to wear.)
I'm Harry, she says to another little girl on a plane, and the other little girl just—assumes.
Harry likes the freedom of it so much she never corrects her.
Eventually, the other girl finds out. This is about the same time that Harry falls in love with her.
Who are you, Hermione asks and Harry has no answer, because she knows that this is just a game I play is not the answer Hermione wants to hear. She knows that is not a permissible answer. That if she said it, Hermione would make her stop.
Hermione wants a boy she can be in love with, or a girl she can fall out of love with. She wants Harry to stop pretending.
She doesn't understand that Harry can't. Harry needs this like it's air, even if it's not her, because being Harriet Potter is suffocating even if it's the truth.
Eventually, Hermione learns to be okay with that. She finds a space she can live with, in her confusion, somewhere on the side of love, and they are both happy, or at least something close to it.
***
Here's the thing about pretending: it's temporary.
***
The first version of this story doesn't come with an impetus. In fact, it doesn't come with much of an ending at all, aside from "graduate" and "go back to potions." The first version of this story was written before Hermione.
It was also written before Harry became a vampire.
(For Archie, that version of the story would have been much, much easier.)
***
The second version goes like this:
Harriet Potter goes home for spring break the April of her seventh year, perfectly alive and happy, and when she comes back, she's dead. The only people that know are her friends in the lower alleys, and her cousin, who brought her back after they patched her up and helped her hide her condition from her parents.
Hermione doesn't know.
Harry doesn't tell her.
(If Archie were really Harry, he would. He would trust her with anything. He does trust her with anything—but she can't afford to know the truth, not when she's muggleborn, not when there's Azkaban on the line if they ever get caught. She can't afford to trust him back.
And that means something has to break.)
Harry Potter has fallen in love with pretending—this is how she falls out of it: with hidden vials of blood and too-pale skin hidden under layers of makeup and illusions; with constant warming charms on her hands and feet, and the ever-present paranoia that she'll slip up and touch someone with corpse-cool hands. She stops eating in front of people. She stops going outside. When she has to, she does it in a ball of blankets, face hidden, makes herself look numb and sick and exhausted enough that no one will question the bad manners of it.
Unlike the crossdressing, this pretending isn't a game. It isn't something she can stop. There is nothing freeing about playing human, not when every second reminds her what she has to lose, and slowly, the other masquerade, the one she chose for herself, starts to chip away at her too, with every he or him or boyfriend off the tongues of those around her, with every look from Hermione she knows she wouldn't be getting if Hermione understood the truth, until finally—
("You told me—" Archie wets his lips. "—To come to you when I figured myself out."
Hermione looks up at him, soft eyes meeting his, and gently takes both of his hands in hers. "And have you?"
A sharp intake of breath. "Yeah."
He hadn't been ready for this lie, as a little kid who didn't yet understand the stakes. He wishes he had been.
He's even less ready now.
"I'm not a boy, Hermione." he says. And then, with another, less steady breath:
"I think I'm done acting like I am.")
Harriet ends the game. And Hermione stands by her, even if it can't be with the same kind of love, even if it's obvious Harry is falling to pieces.
And then they go home.
***
Those last few weeks at AIM are some of the worst Archie can remember living. He's not sure how Harry did this for so long. Every time he looks in the mirror or hears himself speak, he wants to claw off his own skin. He misses Hermione like a lost limb, even as she's right there.
Part of his fake vampire-pretending-to-be-a-human cover is acting like he has depression, to excuse the sunshield blankets and the fact that he never leaves the house. It feels so, so stupid. He's not a vampire. If he was, he could just wear the sunscreen Harry developed for herself three years ago when she got bitten.
It's a show. A show with an audience of one, because Archie only has one friend and she's the only one who needs to see this. She's the one who has to be persuaded to leave him alone, and it is so, so hard, because Hermione is so loyal and so curious.
She isn't going to leave for anything less than a betrayal. Archie is glad, at least, that he doesn't have to be the one to twist the knife.
They fly home on the plane together. Hermione looks at him with doe eyes and tries to get him to eat something, anything, but he just keeps shaking his head no. When he finally caves to the desperate look in her eyes, he goes to the bathroom right after.
He doesn't purge the food, but Hermione will think he did. There can't be any inconsistencies, he tells himself, as he stands hunched over in the tiny airplane bathroom with his arms wrapped around himself. Not a single one.
His face is wet when he comes back with tears and smudged mascara, but Hermione doesn't say anything, just hands him a tissue and leans past the armrest to press her shoulder warmly against his.
At least when Harry comes out about the bite, she'll know he hasn't really been hurting himself. Just lying to her.