Chapter the Twelfth: In Which Severus Sees More Than He Would Have Preferred

Disclaimer: Herein please find even MORE characters that are not mine (including unnamed ones whose identity should nonetheless be apparent) and for use of whose likeness I receive no compensation.

Warning: I considered incorporating 'morally bankrupt' somewhere in the title but (a) after reordering it is no longer Chapter 11 and (b) I have beaten that nag to death elsewhere. Also, nudity.

It took Severus time to get his bearings after leaving the Headmaster's office. In part, this was because he'd forgotten the quickest way to the Quidditch Pitch, where Minerva assured him that Prince Harry could be found. In larger part, it was because Lady Minerva had not been content merely to relate this intelligence, but had winked at him and...in case he'd mistaken the gesture for a spot of lint in her eye...petted his broom handle a little too familiarly. In largest part, he was disoriented because he was actually contemplating taking up the implied offer from a woman old enough to be...hell, she HAD been...one of his teachers. It wasn't like he had anything else going and she had just handed him a coronet.

Still in a somewhat defensive mood from the argument with himself, he may have been a bit brusque with the youths who were dutifully flying drills at the Quidditch pitch. A gangly ginger whose gear proclaimed him the Keeper and whose arm span looked more than equal to blocking all three hoops at once, informed him that Prince Harry had left practice early, claiming a scheduled a tutoring session in the library. As Severus stalked away, he was sure he overheard a mumbled 'tetchy git' from behind him.

At the library he had a rather pedantic encounter with a young woman of barely-noble stock with a chip on her shoulder the size of her under-appreciated ability. (He knew the type, having to confront it in the mirror when shaving.) On that account and because she seemed authoritative in her assertion that the prince was 'loafing about his quarters, almost certainly neglecting his studies and by extension his duties to the kingdom,' etc., he refrained from hexing her.

After a series of wrong turns, Severus finally located the room the girl had described. Completely out of patience, he gave one perfunctory knock before bursting through the locked door with a spell.

He really ought to have recalled that one usually locks doors for a reason, and one possible reason a young man might lock a door is that he is not alone in the room.

"Merlin's hairy balls! What the merry hell?" Severus had a moment's difficulty registering the situation. His brain was rather stuck on the youth and nudity of the young female (who otherwise bore an uncanny resemblance to his recalcitrant charge) and the fact that the young male hadn't the decency (or patience) to close the curtains on either the bed or the window. In the middle of the day, no less!

"Not Merlin's, just Harry's," the girl said placidly.

"Who the hell are you?" The young man took a rather more alarmed view of things. He had a pillow over his bits and a wand in his hand before he was done speaking, and managed to at least partially position himself in front of his bedmate. Chivalry wasn't entirely dead.

"Lord Thanestrife, if that matters," Severus said boredly, as if it should have been common knowledge. The accompanying bizarre happy dance was completely internal. "Lady Minerva told me to find Your Highness if a princess needed rescuing, but under the circumstances I wonder," he glanced down and quickly looked up at the bed's canopy again...he really needed to get out more, if his response to that underfed girl-child meant anything... "if that's a good idea." In lieu of relating the whole sorry tale, Severus opted to promote Draco to 'princess.' If the rescue was quick, the prince might not notice the difference.

"Oh, that's what Harry was doing...rescuing me," the girl said.

"I'd love to know how you convinced her of that," Severus said. Slightly to his chagrin, he really did want to know.

The barely-covered prince sputtered an attempted rebuttal, but the girl interrupted. "I need to be 'damaged goods' so I'll be off the marriage market and free to pursue my cryptozoological studies. Harry needs an heir so he can tell Dumbledore to push off if he tries to arrange a political marriage. We're friends, so we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement," the blonde said, making no effort to re-arrange the sheets.

"Child, put some clothes on! At least the Prince-who-lived-to-hump had the decency to cover his bits," Severus said, trying to look somewhere other than at the blonde's modest...if immodestly exposed...endowments, or at the prince who was fumbling into clothes and... spectacles? "I would expect that conniving old queen to be having me on, claiming that he was the best of the lot, but I hoped that Lady Minerva had the decency not to hand me a load of Abraxan shit."

The Prince sighed in frustration. "I know that Lord Dumbledore considers me a malleable little pawn, but I'm well aware I'm meant to unite the whole bloody mess. Luna's a Princess from one of the most prominent families in Ravenclaw, so... Well, the child's not a bastard if I acknowledge him. One of the perks of being the future king of everything between the coasts, if I live that long."

"If that was more articulate and less apologetic, it might be worthy of Slytherin," Severus granted him begrudgingly. He figured having got the initial 'Your Highness' out of the way, he could skip a few. "Do you plan to get a Princess of Hufflepuff up on the duff as well?"

"No need; I'm godfather to the orphaned Duke of Hufflepuff, and his dowager grandmother claims my protection. The Hufflepuff-Gryffindor alliance is secure." Prince Harry sighed tragically. Princess Luna (at last holding a sheet to her bosom, to Severus's relief) put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

Severus was curious now. "You know what Dumbledore intends, yet you still go through with it?"

Prince Harry shrugged, which had the added benefit of seating his Gryffindor-red cloak on his shoulders. "He's better than the self-styled Lord Voldemort. And he doesn't need to know until after I'm king that I'll only heed his advice if I like it."

Severus felt begrudgingly hopeful. "Well, shift your arse, then, Highness, you've a rescue to attend to."

"Is it urgent?" The prince picked up a late model broom and an old-fashioned sword from the chest and the foot of the bed and fumbled into the sword belt, a task made needlessly difficult by holding the broom.

"Urgent? Look, you dunderhead, the Sinister yet Dashing genius who owns the tower will only be away for..." Severus consulted his watch "...four hours before he must return to feed his favorite pitcher plant. There are a Devil's Snare, two mature Whomping Willows, and small yet irritable flock of Thestrals to pacify before you can reach the tower...and you'll still need to climb the princess' hair to get in the topmost window since the curse nullifies the spells on brooms. So you'll bloody well get on it NOW."

"All right, all right, don't get your knickers in a twist," Harry groused. He glanced at Luna wistfully. "You sure you're going to be all right?"

"Quite certain," Luna assured him. "No need to get married or anything, unless we're both kind of bored."

"Right." Prince Harry sounded disappointed. "Well... Take care. Let me know if you need anything, yeah? I've got loads of room in Grimhold Keep if your dad puts you out," he yelled over his shoulder as Severus hustled him out of the room.

"Sure, Harry. Have fun!"

"'Have fun,' she says," Severus groused. "This is serious business. To get past the Thestrals alone..."

"It's a small herd, you said? I'll swing by the kitchens on my way and pick up a couple of legs of mutton to keep them busy. I can see Thestrals, so they won't get the drop on me."

"You can't distract the Whomping Willows with meat."

"No, but there's an angry, ancient Whomping Willow on the Hogwarts grounds, and my former Quidditch captain was a bit... obsessive. I've been flying around and under it for years as part of practice drills."

Severus blinked. "That's not obsessive, that's sadistic," he murmured. More loudly, "Well enough, but there's still the matter of the Devil's Snare."

Prince Harry drew his wand and sent a plume of fire into the air with a nonverbal spell. "It ought to shrink away from flame." He threw his leg over the broom handle.

"When you get there," Severus said through gritted teeth, "you need to speak the correct words, else the princess won't let down her hair. There is no other way to avoid the spells on the tower except to climb the braid."

Prince Harry finally paused. "What are the words, then?"

"Draceana Draco, let down your hair," Severus said. "Repeat them."

Prince Harry did so dutifully, having had to say stranger things in the name of magic over his brief lifetime.

Severus huffed. "All right. I suppose you might do, at that."

"I usually manage," Harry said. With no further ado, he kicked off and flew towards the kitchens.

"That'll put old Lucius right out of countenance when he sees a short-arse ragmuffin on a broom instead of a prince in purple on a white hippogriff rescuing his 'princess,'" Severus murmured in a show of schadenfraude.

"Oh, Harry has one of those...a white Hippogriff, that is," Luna said. She toddled up beside Severus, apparently unmindful of the fact that she was in the corridor wearing only a bedsheet. "He just knows better than to take it near a Thestral herd. Frankly, he's quite the superior flyer...just don't tell the hippogriffs. And I think Dumbledore overdid the whole early privation thing. Challenges are one thing, but stunting someone's growth is quite another." Severus wouldn't have thought the apparently ditzy princess could sound so disapproving. His opinion of her nudged slightly upward.

"Well, make sure you tell that rich little tosser to keep you at least as well as..." Severus turned to offer his opinion, and immediately looked away. "Young lady," he asked in a strained voice, "have you no modesty? Never mind, I think I know the answer; more to the point, have you no robes?"

"They're around here somewhere." The sheet rustled as she meandered. "Unless they went out the window, of course. There's one thing about Harry; he gives everything his all."

"And with that nauseatingly gratuitous bit of information, I'm off," Severus said. He only had four hours to hit the major distilleries and stock up for a private party...to celebrate the eviction of his resident brat, and to bemoan the execution of his impending teaching sentence.