Part Twenty-Four of 'Their Phoenix'
Title: Their Phoenix (24/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Threesome, Snape/Harry/Draco. (Harry and Draco do develop their own sexual relationship within the threesome). Some Harry/Ginny and Snape/Draco near the beginning of the story.
Rating: NC-17.
Warnings: Magical bonding, slash sex, violence, profanity, massive denial. Springing-from-DH AU; it starts deviating from the moment Voldemort confronts Snape in the Shrieking Shack.
Summary: AU. Voldemort has learned who the true master of the Elder Wand is, and he plans to kill Draco along with Snape. Harry is desperate to save them, because Dumbledore would have wanted him to. But with wild magic, Horcruxes, and Dark Marks all involved, Harry may have condemned all three of them to something worse than death.
Author’s Notes: This is One of Those Bonding Fics. It’s also One of Those Threesome Fics, and also One of Those Fics With Harry-in-Denial. If that sounds like what you’re looking for, then come right in. I’m sorry to say that I have absolutely no idea how long this will be, and it will also be irregularly updated, whenever I finish a major “part.”
Part One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
“Harry?” Hermione’s voice was impatient. “We’ve tried to explain this several times now, but you keep not paying attention.”
Harry brought his attention back to Hermione and gave her a wan smile. “Sorry,” he said. They were sitting in his bedroom, with Harry on the bed, Hermione on a chair, and Ron on a stool that he had conjured up himself and kept saying was comfortable, despite all the available evidence. “But do you think something is wrong? With the weather.” He frowned out the window. The clouds were grey and thick, but that wasn’t unusual for Scotland. The wrong thing seemed connected with the wind, which was too quick and hot, or the colored haze hanging around the sun, or something else. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly what bothered him; every time he thought he could, it would seem to change back to normal, and the unsettling thing would sneak around to another place in his vision. “Maybe we’re going to get a storm,” he added, though he couldn’t remember feeling like this before a storm any time in the past.
“Nothing is wrong with the weather,” Hermione said, and rapped her wand on the parchment in front of her. “We’re trying to investigate Colben’s background, remember? Ron thought there was something strange about it, and he was right.”
Harry took a deep breath and forced himself to fix his attention on Hermione’s words. Colben was the candidate they had committed so much to at this point that it would be hard to change their minds. If Ron and Hermione said there was something wrong with her, then he ought to be concerned. “What is it?”
“There’s no record of anyone from the Colben family ever marrying a Muggleborn.” Ron’s forehead was wrinkled, his cheeks red, his voice low with excitement. “I thought I remembered something about their name, and when I looked it up, I found out that they were involved in the last big round of Muggle-hunting, right before it was declared illegal. The head of the family then, Redworth Colben, declared that no descendent of his should ever marry a Muggleborn, or they’d be exiled from the family.”
Harry shrugged. “So what?” The irritating thing had now become the wall of his bedroom, which he scowled at before he turned back to Ron. “It could be like Sirius. His parents disowned him and blasted his name off the tapestry, but he still called himself a Black.”
“Yeah, but the marriage records don’t show anything, either.” Ron was almost bouncing up and down on the stool at this point. It fell over, and he picked himself up, shaking his head as though he’d meant to do that. “Hermione and I checked. No Colben marriage in the last fifty years except with a Rosier woman who died the next year.”
Harry exhaled hard and tried to ignore the sensation that the bedroom wall was rippling and steaming at him. “It’s suspicious,” he admitted. “Have you asked anyone who might support the story or know the truth? Like Swanfair?”
Ron gave him a superior look, which Harry thought was bloody unfair of him, considering how new to politics they both were. “Swanfair would have every reason to lie about it, Harry. She wants us to accept Colben, probably because she thinks that she can manipulate her the way she can’t manipulate you.”
“And lying about her heritage would give Swanfair something to blackmail Colben about,” Hermione added quietly. “At the very least, we need to investigate this further, Harry. It would be worse to support the wrong candidate for Minister than to support no one at all.”
Harry thought about saying he didn’t believe that, but in the end he had to nod. Kingsley had done some stupid things while in office, and it had meant more pure-blood families leaving the country and more people muttering about how they had always known they couldn’t trust Dumbledore’s old servants. If Colben would widen the gap between pure-bloods and Muggleborns, or other parts of the wizarding world, then they couldn’t risk having her in office. “All right. How do you think we should go about this?”
Now the floor seemed to vibrate. When Harry put a hand on it, though, it was perfectly solid. He sighed and ignored the odd looks he got from Ron and Hermione as he tried his very hardest to pay attention to their notions about research-which Ron kept interrupting Hermione to explain with all the enthusiasm of a convert.
*
Draco tossed his head back and shook it. Then he put it down again and concentrated on the vial in front of him. Half a mashed gooseberry tart, mixed with the carapace of a scarab. The gooseberry tart had been large. Draco was worrying that it had been too large for the recipe to work. The book he was working out of was so old that the Potions master who wrote it hadn’t bothered to include measurements on most of the ingredients, seeming to assume that anyone who read from the book would have learned personally from him and wouldn’t need numbers on the pages.
A snake’s slithering across the ceiling.
The impression was so strong that Draco had to dig his elbows into the table and grit his teeth to keep himself from looking up. He’d been looking up all morning. There was no reason for it. It was time to get to work and think about this potion. If he was right, then he could combine it with a spell in the way he had the potion for seeing through the wards and create one that would come in useful in battle.
If he was right. But that would never happen, he would never get to see if he was right or not, if he couldn’t concentrate.
Draco sat back with a scowl. He didn’t understand why this had happened to him. He had concentrated in the middle of Severus’s Potions class when he hadn’t had any sleep the night before, and Vince was poking him in the side and whining at him to explain the instructions. He’d tried to impress Slughorn during his sixth year despite having the fates of his parents and the Dark Lord’s threats weighing on his mind. Scattered impressions that had haunted him all morning shouldn’t compare to that.
Yet the small things proved more effective in distracting him than any of the larger ones. Draco sighed and scratched his forehead .There was probably some intense philosophical lesson in there, of the kind that Ledbetter would tell him to study and learn from, but he didn’t care to investigate it right now.
The potion. Yes.
He sighed again and picked up the vial. A scratching, prickling sensation on the side of his hand, as though someone with claws had just reached out and closed those claws around his wrist, made him start. The vial slipped through his fingers. Draco made a desperate grab with his other hand and barely managed to catch it.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
He didn’t know, but he was starting to hate it.
Severus would say that he couldn’t work on the potion in this state, and it was worse than folly to try and force work he couldn’t do out of himself; it was poison to any good effort that he might actually put forth. Draco stood and walked out of the lab. So far, the cauldron had nothing but water in it, and the fire burning gently beneath it would go out on its own if it began to cause destruction. The ingredients waiting in their vials were all static and harmless.
Draco took a deep and grateful breath as he emerged into the sitting room. Maybe he would go to the kitchen and get something to eat. That would at least provide him with a distraction from the distractions.
At least, he thought it would until he stepped into the kitchen and saw a fleeting glitter of green on the counter, like a snake hiding in nonexistent grass.
Draco had better control of his accidental magic than he used to have, or he might have blown out every window in the kitchen.
*
When the twitches and flinches in his concentration began, Severus ignored them. He buried himself in his book and tightened his Occlumency shields. He suspected that someone from Hogsmeade had decided to try a new assault on their wards. It didn’t matter. Should they get far enough under or through them, they would find the quietly sleeping surprises that Severus had set up without telling Harry, because he knew it would involve thrashing through tiresome moral scruples. The spells weren’t Dark or illegal, and they were far less violent than the Gut Chewing Curse that had caused so much trouble when Huxley used it on Harry. That would have to be enough.
Then a soft burn distracted him. He turned his head and saw the phoenix on his left arm glowing with blue flame.
Severus narrowed his eyes and laid the book down quietly on a table beside him, where he cast a protective spell that should keep it sheltered from any violence invading the house. It was a rare Potions manual that he had gone to some trouble to acquire in the days when he still served the Dark Lord. Then he rose to his feet and felt out cautiously through the bonds. His sense of Harry and Draco’s emotions had dimmed when he raised his Occlumency shields.
Harry was uneasy and restless, but those emotions melted and flowed into each other so quickly that Severus deduced it was only some low-level distress that affected him. He was not in pain.
Draco’s bond flickered with images of snakes, and the milk-white irritation that never seemed to be far from the surface. Fewer conclusions to be drawn from that, Severus thought, but at least he was not afraid.
If my bondmates are not in danger, why should the phoenix burn? And why should it be blue flame, instead of the red and gold it has always been?
Abruptly, he turned his head and fixed his eyes on the large book about accidental bonds that stood on the edge of the shelf above his chair. If he closed his eyes, he could picture the pages that he had studied, and almost see the words written there. His memory was not perfect, so he could not recall entire books when he had read them only once, but it was a good trick for finding the precise place in a text where the information he wanted was.
He reached up, snatched the book down, and flicked at once to page 180.
…one of the strangest conditions of accidental magic is a degree of prescience. When the bondmates have become accustomed to each other and accept that their individual survival is interlinked, they may be able to sense danger that would threaten that survival. Unfortunately, such signs are never consistent between one bond and another. One can only hope to recognize the sign when it comes.
The distraction he had felt all morning, and which it seemed that Draco and Harry were also feeling, the little twinges of distress-
Severus turned his head and threw two thoughts, one to Harry, one to Draco. I think we may be under-
The house quaked and wailed like a beast in pain.
*
Harry was thrown from his chair when the house shuddered. He grasped and grabbed onto the floor for a moment; he hated the feeling that everything was sliding away from him. But he stood up in the next minute, because both Ron and Hermione looked terrified and his first instinct was still to protect.
“What’s going on?” Ron’s face was so pale his freckles seemed to stand out like his eyes. He drew his wand and started towards Hermione. Another buckle and jolt threw him, and he ended up near Hermione, who flung her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder.
“I don’t know.” Harry aimed his wand at the far wall and tried to turn it transparent, a trick that Ledbetter had taught him. It wouldn’t turn.
At the same moment, he finally noticed the blue glow coming from the phoenixes on his arms, and heard Severus’s thought cutting off in the middle, which sent more wild thoughts spiraling through his head.
What if his bondmates were hurt, and he wouldn’t know, because the phoenixes couldn’t pull him anywhere when they were already in the same house? What if the blue flame was the sign that one of them was already suffering from a wound that would kill them?
Without another pause for thought, he opened the bonds fully.
*
Draco barely managed to roll out of the way as the kitchen table pitched forwards at him. The first shock threw him to the floor and cracked his head against it; the second made him realize he hadn’t just lost his footing and infuriated him. He’d already started to turn around so that he could get to his feet when he saw a moving shadow and reacted to it instinctively. That was the only reason he missed the table.
Someone’s attacking the house, he thought as he drew his wand. His mind was strangely clear, the way Ledbetter had said it might become in an attack. His thoughts had forever to move, and he could almost watch them doing it. His phoenix shimmered with blue flame. I’ll have to find Harry and Severus in the middle-the training room would be safest, there’s no heavy furniture in there to fall over-
He started to reach for his bondmates, so that he could figure out where they were. The bonds were so alike in harsh and leaping excitement that he didn’t know which one was which at the moment.
The bonds opened.
Draco shuddered, larger than himself, larger than the earthquakes that grabbed the house and shook it like a pair of dice. He ascended to a height of clarity and rapidity of thought that astonished him, until he realized that it should have been like this all along and accepted it as the natural order of things.
Without much hesitation, he grasped the reins of the bonds and knotted them together under his claws, under his wings. Harry barely struggled against him before he agreed, because as quickly as Draco had the thought, Harry had it, too. Severus took a bit longer to submit, but he trusted in the strength of Draco’s intentions if not in his half-formed plans, and contributed his experience and strength without murmuring, much.
Now, Draco said, as Severus’s knowledge of the wards and Harry’s knowledge that he couldn’t turn the wall transparent flooded him. That means that they’re using Blinding Glamours on us. That argues for a spell that would be fairly visible if they weren’t using the glamours. Another shock annoyed him briefly, but he was large and hovering and the shocks couldn’t reach him. Besides, the magic of the bond, spread about them in a shimmering tent, protected their physical bodies, so there was nothing to worry about on that score. And the feeling of those shocks argues for an Earthquake Tunnel.
Earthquake-Harry started to ask, but Severus fed him the knowledge like a nursemaid spooning food into a child’s mouth. Draco laughed to feel Harry’s scowl at the comparison, and then Harry understood and nodded. The spell involved digging under a building with magic, locating every weak point in it, and then launching the magic up through the earth, directed specifically at those weak points. Sooner or later, the sturdiest building would shake itself apart.
They don’t want the rest of Hogsmeade to see what they’re doing, sang the blended thought in Draco’s mind, mingling the tones of Harry’s and Severus’s voices until he couldn’t tell which words had begun with which person. And that was natural and the way it should be, so Draco didn’t feel the panic that he knew was hovering in the back of Harry’s mind. It’s not someone from Hogsmeade itself. It can’t be the whole town. That cuts down one round of suspects.
We must-
Open our eyes, said both of them, completing Draco’s thought, Severus’s voice flavored with impatience, Harry’s with excitement. Draco turned towards the outer wards, lifted his head higher and higher into the air, and then opened a pair of enormous eyes that tilted from three directions, thanks to the three perspectives involved.
Draco found himself/themselves looking down from the top of the house at the garden. A circle of robed and masked figures surrounded it, chanting loudly. A Blinding Glamour shone behind them like a heat shimmer, protecting them from being seen should someone pass in the street. The Earthquake Tunnel opened at their feet, a yawning purple pit, and connected with the white strings that extended from their wands. As Draco watched, the house shook and quivered again.
Who are the enemies? Harry was the one who spoke the question, but it ended up in Draco’s mind with a twist of Severus’s curiosity.
Aurors, it seems. Harry laughed disgustedly, Severus growled in harmony, and Draco spread his wings and flexed his claws. He could feel the dangerous simmer of heat that rose from the phoenix marks on all their arms, the army of birds that waited, head bowed and beaks shut, inside him. I could annihilate them. I could burn them to death.
In his mind, the flames rose. Harry sighed with longing. Severus offered grudging admiration and his own longing, darker and brighter at once, because he had spent more time becoming familiar with his worse emotions than Harry had. Harry noticed and beat back the desire with flapping cloths of horror. Severus laughed at him. Draco shook his head and subdued the fires. No, Harry would try to pull himself out of the bond if they did that.
Not fire, Harry whispered. There must be some other way to handle them.
What would you suggest? Draco craned his head back on his long neck. The house shuddered, and he heard a loud clang that suggested something metal had fallen over-and therefore it was probably damage to the lab. I don’t think they’ll stand around politely while we think of something non-harmful.
Let us impress them, Severus said, his words leaping about like wild cats taking to the branches to hunt reluctant prey. They cannot see us yet. Let us manifest and give them something to think about.
Of course. And Draco reached out and gathered the images from Harry’s and Severus’s minds without hesitating, combining them with his own thoughts. He knew what Harry and Severus would think impressive, and of course he knew what he would think impressive, and it was no problem at all to sort and recombine them.
Then he shook the images out in front of the casting wizards, Aurors or otherwise, like a great flaming banner.
He heard their shrieks, stabbing into his ears like diamond-tipped drills. He saw their shrieks, streaking upwards like light from a body struck with the Flaming Boils Curse. He smelled their shrieks, pure red-black temptation to the predator inside them, which made his claws open and their beak part in hungry anticipation.
Now.
The voice was all of theirs, and Draco spread his wings and stooped on them.
They ran before the great phoenix, screaming still. Draco didn’t kill them, though he could have, so easily it was laughable. Of course, that very ease diminished the accomplishment he would have felt if had killed them. It was better to flit above their heads, lowering his beak casually now and then, stabbing right next to one of them and cutting open the ground with a chomp or a stamp. They would scream and run faster. They seemed to have forgotten how to Apparate, so terrified were they.
No, said Severus, laughing like a lion. Our magic creeps into their brains and prevents them from Apparating unless we want to.
The notion of a power that great swept through all of them and steered their wings back upwards, where Draco hurled a shriek of his own into the sky, mighty and ecstatic. They were so powerful. Was there nothing they could not do?
Heal the house, Harry said.
Draco turned, floating back towards the house and letting most of the attackers Apparate away; he kept the cap of prevention fastened tight across a few of them so that he and his bondmates could ask questions. When he examined the shattered joints and sagging windows of the house, he had to reluctantly agree. They were powerful, but they could only use magic inherent in the bond or knowledge inherent in their own minds. None of them were architects, and therefore none of them had the proper knowledge in how to fix the house.
We’ll make them do it, Severus said and Draco echoed, the echoes chasing each other until Draco was once more unaware of which mind they originated in. It didn’t matter. Joined like this, the resources of all their three minds were open to each other.
The phoenix turned and fluttered back to the three attackers they’d kept from Apparating. At least, that was how they would see it, a giant flaming bird coming after them. What Draco saw and felt was more the glimmering, shifting matrix of energies, the play back and forth of magic that did exactly as it was told to. Not only had he never wielded this much magic, he had never felt it so obedient. Usually, it seemed his magic or the potions he worked with was watching for the break in the spell or the recipe that would allow it to explode.
Two murmurs marched alongside his, and he realized that he was hearing Severus and Harry thinking about the same thing. He smiled-though Merlin alone knew what the attackers would see in the way of a smile from the giant bird that confronted them-and settled down on the street in front of their collection, tilting his head back and forth.
One of the men squeaked and fainted. That left one man and one woman. Draco cocked his head, then reached out with one claw-so they would see it-commanding a spell to blow away the dark cloaks that encircled them. The cloaks whipped off at once, though the wizards tried to cling to them, and revealed the brilliant robes of Aurors.
Draco hiss-shrieked, combining three separate tones of displeasure. The woman stood up to it, but the man fell to his knees, hands over his ears. Draco and his bondmates therefore chose to question the woman first.
“Who sent you here?” Draco asked. Or the bird asked. Or all three of them asked together. Their perspectives were shifting at the moment, combining and then falling apart, and Draco knew how to ride the shifts instinctively, but that didn’t mean he automatically understood what the shifts meant. He thought that Harry might want to break away from the blending of their minds and come out to talk to the Aurors separately, but the next moment that desire had faded and Severus was contemplating what Dark spells could force their persecutors to tell the truth in the absence of Veritaserum.
“I-I don’t-” The woman swallowed. Then she stood up and stared into the bird’s eyes. She was courageous, whatever else she was, Harry’s admiration for courage said, thrumming through Draco. Draco snapped that he would have preferred bravery from someone who wasn’t trying to kill them, and Severus agreed and channeled their attention back to the woman’s words. “I don’t owe you the truth,” the woman said. “But, on the other hand, they didn’t tell us everything, either. They didn’t tell us that you could do this.” She folded her arms. “That counts as a betrayal in my book.”
“The name,” Draco said, with a concentrated weight of deadliness in the voice that he knew originated with Severus.
The woman nodded once. “Frederic Dominus.”
Harry knew him, and grieved. He was one of Shacklebolt’s closest advisers, probably the third most important person in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Draco had never heard of him, but Severus snapped that that was only more proof of his effectiveness. The dangerous ones were the ones who never displayed themselves openly, as they had been forced to do.
“And why?” Draco asked. He thought that was a more important question than the one Harry had, which was if Shacklebolt knew about this.
“Because he thinks you a disruptive influence,” the woman said, and shrugged a little. “Disruptive to the Minister’s peace of mind, if nothing else. Also, people in the Ministry keep finding themselves restricted in certain decisions they want to make. They have to worry about what the Boy-Who-Lived would think of it, and then they remember that you aren’t under the control of the Ministry anymore and that you’re probably being influenced by Death Eaters.” Draco and Severus drifted on a distant ripple of amusement for a moment that the woman thought she was talking to Harry alone. Perhaps she assumed that the big, bad, evil Death Eaters would have killed her instead of talking to her. “There are certain laws they want to pass, certain actions they want to take, that just aren’t possible in this kind of world. They hoped that those actions would become possible if you died.”
“What kinds of actions?” Now the hiss traveled around the woman’s head, making her hair blow back. Her face grew a touch paler, but she answered steadily.
“Ones that will restrict the pure-bloods’ power and shift some positions of importance over to the Ministry’s allies.” She lifted her hand when Draco opened his beak again. “That’s all I know. I’m a very new Auror, and they wouldn’t tell me any more than that.” She looked around at her comrades for a moment, and then added, “And they’ll probably sack me for telling you as much as I have.”
“How much did Shacklebolt have to do with this?” The question welled out of Draco’s beak before he could stop it.
“Not much, I don’t think.” The woman shrugged again, a bitter smile on her face. “But as I told you, I’m new, and I don’t know a lot. Maybe he’s the secret mastermind behind all of this. But I don’t think so.” She paused seriously for a moment, then hurried on when Draco hissed again. “I think that his allies want him free to act, so they’re trying to do certain things that he won’t find out about and doesn’t have to be associated with in order to destroy the greatest obstacle.”
“Do you know what Griselda Huxley has on him that prevents him from acting?” That was Harry’s question, too. Draco and Severus snapped at him with sharp beaks. Harry ignored them, because he thought this was perhaps their one chance to find out.
The woman gave them a perfectly blank stare, which Severus judged was genuine. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve heard of Huxley as a hero during the war and the woman who attacked you with the Gut Chewing Curse, but no more than that.”
Draco pushed Harry gently into a corner of their shared mind with the advice to think about something else, and then said, “And were you actually supposed to cause our deaths, or simply the destruction of our home?” Harry asked why that distinction mattered, and Draco replied haughtily that they probably weren’t going to learn it elsewhere. Harry subsided into grumbling irrelevance.
“Our instructions were to collapse the house.” The woman wrung her hair out as if she had noticed the dust among the strands and wanted to get rid of it. “It was assumed your deaths would follow that.”
And they might have, Severus said, his voice slightly separating from the rest of them again as the need for their power diminished, if we had not noticed what was happening immediately and if Harry had not opened the bonds.
“Your name,” Draco said, with a snap close to the ear of the Auror, in case she was getting overconfident and thinking that she might depend on their good will.
“Georgianna Murphy.” The woman’s chin rose stubbornly. “You can tell anyone you like that you talked to me. I’m going to find a different career than the Aurors. I want one where I’m not sent on assassinations.”
“A good idea,” Draco said with Harry’s impetus, and then turned and dived for the house again. He had thought about leaving a final warning for the woman, but Severus hardly saw the need. If she did not understand the implied threat in what they could do by now, she was less intelligent than she had seemed, and Severus had hardly ever failed when judging other people’s intelligence.
They did flick out some of their magic to build a new set of wards and repair some of the gaps in the old ones as they went by. It was not fine work; basically, they surrounded the house with a shield of pure magic instead of the densely woven net of specific spells that they had relied on before. But it would do to shield the house from attack while they decided on what to do next, and that was enough.
Something else had been enough, too. The moment they were settled back in the house, Harry shut the bonds. Draco dropped to his knees on the tilted kitchen floor, gasping, suddenly back in his body and only two-thirds of a complete being. It was tormenting and infuriating, when he no longer had access to the power and emotions that had hovered easily within his gap for the last fifteen minutes.
We must talk to him, Severus said.
Draco stood up and sent a pulse of agreement back along the bond. And decide what to do about the house, he added, as he looked at shattered countertops, the fallen table, and the door hanging out of its hinges.
*
Harry knelt on the floor of his bedroom, eyes closed and hands folded around his head. He heard Ron and Hermione rustling around him. Without opening his eyes or lifting his head-he didn’t think he could do either at the moment without feeling incomplete, and he hated feeling that way-he rasped, “Are you all right?”
“We’re fine, Harry,” Hermione said gently. “Not injured. I would be more worried about you, actually. Your arms started glowing blue, and then you closed your eyes and your body slumped sideways as though you’d gone out of it. What happened?’
“I opened the bonds and joined together with my bondmates to protect our home.” Harry approved of the terse blankness in his voice. If he could sound like that whenever he spoke of it, then maybe he stood a chance of not losing himself to the overwhelming nature of the bonds.
“But-” Ron said.
“Not now,” Hermione whispered. Harry almost smiled. She had understood the reason behind his lack of emotion in the words without his having to explain. Hermione was a good friend.
And Severus and Draco are good bondmates.
Harry shuddered a little and slowly sat back on his heels, his head still buried in his arms. He wasn’t sure what he would see if he looked at his friends, and that made him all the more reluctant to look at them. He was still involved in his colloquy with himself, and wishing he could deal with all these emotions: wonder, awe, pride that Draco had proved himself such a good leader of the three of them in the bond, hunger to taste that mixing of emotions and power again, and fear.
The point isn’t whether they’re good bondmates or not, Harry told himself. Of course they are, or we never would have survived a month together. But-will they be able to understand why I don’t want this and want this at the same time? I don’t know if they will.
Someone knocked on his bedroom door. Harry started before he understood that of course it would be Severus and Draco. Some part of him, already used to the open bonds, was sure that he should have felt them coming.
He gingerly picked his way across the room to open the door. The windows were out of their frames, and there was a jagged crack in the middle of the floor that made him wince at every creak his feet caused. He waved his wand and murmured a reinforcing spell that he had heard Ledbetter use on the training room when their flying spells were likely to damage it. That at least strengthened the beams holding the floor up and stopped the creaks.
When he opened the door, he saw that the corridor was filled with drifting dust and smoke and that the floor buckled and rippled towards the stairs. He shook his head, not quite meeting Draco’s or Severus’s eyes. “That Earthquake Tunnel spell did quite a bit of damage,” he murmured.
“That’s one of the things we have to talk about,” Draco announced, marching past Harry into his room. Harry turned and watched his back surreptitiously. It was hard to think that the boy who spent so much time arguing with him and the confident war-leader who had manipulated the threads of their bonds as though he’d been doing it all his life were the same person.
I heard that, Draco said, whipping around to glare at him. And if you would open the bonds fully, then maybe you would understand me better and not think that you’re just reconciling opposites when you look at me.
Harry folded his arms and lifted his chin. I don’t like the person I become when the bonds are fully open, he answered. I lose the proper sense of myself, and my boundaries open, and I’m drifting in the middle of an ocean of the three of us. What happens if I can’t find my way back to my own body and shut the bonds down again?
That would not happen. Severus’s voice was coolly slashing, incisive. Harry turned around and saw him standing in the doorway of the bedroom, his head slightly ducked to avoid a hanging piece of the frame. His eyes never moved from Harry’s face, so hungry that Harry shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He was not sure that he liked someone looking at him that way. He was not sure that he deserved to be looked at that way, when he was denying his bondmates what he knew they wanted. You will always be both yourself and the wider person you become when you are in conjunction with us. You can retreat to your body if you want. You are the one of us who has the most control over the situation, since you can open and shut the bonds at will, and Draco and I can only try to muffle them or not pay attention to what they are telling us.
Harry licked his lips and glanced over his shoulder. Ron and Hermione stood in the middle of his room still, Hermione with an expectant expression on her face, Ron with a scowl. He obviously knew something was going on, and just as obviously, he disliked being shut out of it.
“Ron, Hermione,” he said quietly. “Can I talk to you about this later? I promise that I’ll see you tomorrow. It’s just that, right now…” He shook his head and extended one empty hand to show how helpless he felt to do with this when everyone was just standing there, staring at him, and waiting for an answer.
“Yes, Harry,” Hermione said. “As long as we do talk about it, I don’t care when we do it.” She yanked on Ron’s arm. “Come on, Ron.”
Ron resisted the pull, and looked from Draco to Severus as if he couldn’t decide who he distrusted more. “You better not do anything to him,” he growled to Draco, and then tossed his head at Harry. “Or you, either.” He looked at Severus meaningfully and fingered his wand.
Harry wanted to laugh and hug Ron at the same time, because he remembered how frightened Ron had been of Professor Snape in school. “It’s all right,” he said. “Really. There are just-some things that have to be settled.” He cocked his head at the door, and this time Hermione towed Ron through it before he could protest. Ron did still look over his shoulder and sweep a long, intimidating glare over Harry’s bondmates that he had probably learned in Auror training. It was plenty intimidating, even if Harry had to bite his lip so that he wouldn’t start laughing from sheer nervousness.
Harry waited until he heard Ron and Hermione leave the house before he faced his bondmates again and set his hands on his hips. “I’m willing to open the bonds again,” he said. He hated the way his voice cracked, but he suspected that he would have to put up with that. “If you can reassure me that I won’t get destroyed by them, and that I can find my way back to my body whenever I want.”
*
Severus could feel Draco’s hunger, turning the bond between them into a brewing potion that steamed with greed and longing. He hoped that he had a more dignified expression on his face, but he was not certain of that, because he also wanted what Harry was offering.
With the bonds fully open, he had felt, for the first time in his life, as if he truly belonged.
But someone had to reassure Harry that he would not be hurt by offering that belonging again, or it would not happen. Therefore, Severus folded his arms and asked, “What is it that bothers you most about this, Harry? The sharing of emotions? The sharing of magic? We have done both through the bond so far, if to a lesser extent than the full opening of the bonds implies, The sensation of leaving your body? I assure you that the bond will take steps to guard the physical vessels of those who participate in it. It knows that we would not have a way to survive otherwise.”
Harry shook his head. “None of that.” He paced back and forth on the creaking floor, casting it a few nervous glances. Severus sent a thought reassuring him that he had already cast reinforcement spells below, and Harry gave him a small smile. “I think it frightens me to be so much larger than I used to be,” he said at last. “I don’t know what to do with all the power and all that sense of space. I feel as if I could do everything. I don’t like the feeling.”
“Severus and I would have something to say about you using our power,” Draco said promptly.
Harry gave Draco a brilliant smile that caused Severus to twitch a bit. Only the memory of the fight Harry and Draco had had the other day kept him in his position by the door. “I didn’t know you were such a natural leader,” he said. “Thanks for doing that.”
Draco’s nostrils flared, and his eyes widened. The next moment, he was trying to behave as if he had anticipated the compliment, but the bond between him and Severus thrummed like a plucked harpstring. “I’m not a natural leader,” he said. “I was impatient to resolve the situation so that we could act against the Aurors, and neither you nor Severus was doing anything that would resolve it.”
“If I don’t get to put my talents and accomplishments down,” Harry said, “then neither do you.”
Draco ducked his head, a bright flush coloring his cheeks.
“Working off that principle,” said Severus, glad for Draco’s sake, but determined to steer the conversation back to its origin, “you should not assume that you would immediately do something regrettable with the power you assume when the bonds open, Harry. Draco is right. We would serve as a brake on you.”
“Would you?” Harry cast him a haunted glance. “Because I felt invincible today, and I also felt us agreeing on the right thing to do more often than not.”
“You forget about the spats that appeared and were quickly settled.” Severus shrugged, watching carefully for the shades of expression on Harry’s face and the way they matched the shifts in the bond. “It is true that they did not seem to matter because we could communicate with each other so quickly and openly, and because some of the time one of us went ahead and acted while the others were arguing. But they were there. You need not be afraid of us agreeing too much, Harry.”
Something, perhaps the twist of his words, made Harry look at him, and with more earnest attention than usual. Severus tried to look as sincere as he could, and radiate sincerity through the bond in case Harry thought to open it.
Harry’s smile, when it came, was a shy thing, but brilliant. Severus felt it touch him as though it were a flame that he could warm his hands beside.
“Right,” Harry agreed, tasting the word for a long moment before he expelled it from his mouth. “I don’t think there are three people in the world less likely to agree easily.”
“Exactly,” said Draco, who seemed confident enough to rejoin the conversation. He had spent long moments glancing from Harry to Severus as though he expected the bonds to be opened immediately, and now, from the ripple that Severus was receiving from him, he had decided that that wouldn’t happen unless he made it happen. “Our differences make us stronger. You’re never going to agree with Severus and me that sometimes principles should be sacrificed. We’ll never agree with you that so much compassion and kindness should be extended to our enemies. You and Severus will never agree with me on some of the luxuries that I grew up with and you didn’t.” Severus blinked; that was a commonality between him and Harry that had not occurred to him. “And Harry and I will never agree with you,” Draco said, turning to face Severus, “on the best way of teaching other people things.”
Severus inclined his head half an inch. “I am reluctant to agree with commonplaces,” he said. “But it does seem as though the debates we are likely to have will strengthen us in the end, instead of splitting us apart.”
Harry edged closer to them, his bright gaze darting from one of their faces to the other. Severus held still and made his expression as welcoming as possible, and was proud to see that Draco had the sense to do the same.
Harry took a shivery breath and extended his hands. Severus clasped one. Draco clasped the other. Severus, with his gaze divided between Harry’s face and his body, saw a faint flare of white light from the phoenixes on his arms.
Harry leaned up to kiss first Severus, then Draco. His eyes were wide now, and the bond vibrated and shimmered with so many emotions that Severus found it hard to concentrate on them.
“I wanted to do it,” Harry whispered. “I’ve wanted to do it for a week now. But I had to have some reassurance that it really wouldn’t drown me, and I would manage to be both myself and your bondmate, without having to sacrifice one of those or the other.” He shut his eyes. “Now I have that reassurance, and I’ve seen how magnificent it can be when we maintain it for more than a few seconds. And now I think I’m ready.”
Severus squeezed the hand he held without looking away from Harry. His grasp was almost nerveless. This was the best he had ever felt, as if he were standing on a cliff about to plunge into a sea of pure joy.
Harry opened the bonds.
Severus swallowed light, and expanded past his boundaries to flow and mingle with his bondmates. This time, it was not a drowning or a blending as it had been in battle; the situation was less urgent, and no one needed to seize control as Draco had.
And now, Harry said, the words coming so easily to Severus that he did not know if they had been spoken aloud or thought-it could have been both-to decide what to do about Kingsley and the Aurors.
Part Twenty-Five.