Chapter Nineteen of 'Love, Free as Air'- Decision Time
Chapter Eighteen.
Title: Love, Free As Air (19/21)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Sex, angst, profanity, a bit of violence. Ignores the epilogue of DH.
Pairings: Snape/Harry/Draco.
Rating: R
Summary: Trapped in his Animagus form, Harry stumbles on Snape and Draco, who disappeared from the wizarding world years ago. His first task is to become human again. His second might be to help Snape and Draco with the same problem.
Author’s Notes: This story is being written for
heeroluva, who won a charity auction at
gulf_aid_now to raise money for the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. She gave me the plot, for which I thank her. I’m not sure how long this story will be, though I estimate somewhere between 15 and 20 chapters. The title comes from a quote by Alexander Pope.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nineteen-Decision Time
Harry sometimes thought that he’d never known less about what he was doing than he did right now.
Severus and Draco were both walking softly around him, talking of neutral topics when they had to and devoting the rest of their attention to their food or books or potions. Harry wondered if they would be happiest if he simply flew through the wards and never came back. Draco apparently hadn’t expected Harry to stick up for himself, and Severus seemed to have thought that the advice about Harry losing his temper would only apply to Draco.
Doubts came and danced up and down in Harry’s mind when he was lying in bed the evening after his confrontation with Severus.
I should have been kinder. I should have said things more politely. I should have backed off and started talking about something else when I saw that he was uncomfortable.
He went to sleep in keen regret and woke up expecting severe words at breakfast that morning. If he could see that he was in the wrong, then surely Severus and Draco had to be able to see it as well.
But that was the first of the meals where Severus and Draco didn’t talk about anything unnecessary, and when Harry glanced up because he’d felt Severus’s eyes on him, it was to see Severus looking hastily away.
He waited, but no one told him that he was wrong the next day, or the day after that. So the conclusion slowly formed in Harry’s mind, coming together like water solidifying into ice, that perhaps he hadn’t been wrong.
Careful, he told himself. You could be getting drunk with power just because no one will contradict you. And that might mean that you hurt them, or demand sacrifices from them that they aren’t ready to make.
Yes, perhaps it meant that, but Harry also remembered what Severus had said about his martyr complex and need for guilt. He would have to trust Draco and Severus to stand up for themselves-something Severus had experience in and Harry thought Draco was learning again-and let him know when he had gone too far.
That was, frankly, terrifying. Harry wanted to help people. He didn’t want to hurt them. Those two principles had been the guiding tenets of his life ever since he had quit the Auror program. He itched to help Draco and Severus make their decisions.
So that’s your trial, the thing that you need to learn how to live with no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. Hold back and let them take a few steps on their own, without you hovering at their sides to help.
Harry ached with anticipated guilt and longing and remorse, but he bit his tongue and held his peace.
*
Draco could no longer pretend, even to himself, that he was reading all the books that Potter had brought from his house with the same enjoyment and lack of discrimination. He was, in fact, reading more and more in potions. He might pick up a book on law and history, but he found himself thinking of equations and recipes in the middle of dry passages. Two minutes later, the law or history book was back on the pile or the shelf and he had a potions book in his hand.
He was cutting down the field. He was narrowing his interests and choosing what he should focus on. He was admitting that not everything interested him and that he would be the kind of Potions master that Severus had always professed to see in him.
He was making a decision.
The first time that he realized that, Draco banged the book he held down on his knees and glared at the wall for half an hour. It was less resentment against himself-the process had happened so naturally that he couldn’t accuse himself of listening to other people-than resentment against the fact that Potter had been right.
Potter walked through the room just then. Draco turned his head and narrowed his eyes at him, to see if he would smirk.
Potter glanced at him and looked hastily away. He muttered something and sped up. When he went into the gardens, Draco counted three heartbeats under his breath, then stood up and strolled to the window. He knew how long it usually took for Potter to get beyond the confining bushes immediately around the door into the gardens and then change shape. He should see him rising-
Yes. There. Potter’s wings beat lazily once, and then he was aloft and hurtling into the branches of the oak with an air of injured dignity. Perhaps he assumed Draco was plotting against him.
Draco shook his head, lips tight. The uneasy truce between him and Potter sometimes smoldered with what Draco thought was an edge of passion, and sometimes burned in cold anger, and sometimes seemed not to exist, as if they could live in the same house and ignore each other. It had to change.
And that was another decision.
Draco turned and slapped the wall open-palmed. The book did bang to the floor this time, and Draco hastily stooped and retrieved it. No matter how much Potter annoyed him, he couldn’t justify taking out the anger on helpless books.
“Is something the matter, Draco?” Severus asked from behind him, voice as poised and calm as if he came into the drawing room to find Draco doing this every day.
Draco hissed and checked to make sure that neither the cover nor the front pages of the book were bent before he answered. “No,” he said. “Not-as such. I just realized that I have to do something about Potter.” He turned around and lifted his eyes to Severus’s face, not sure what he would encounter there. “I made a choice. As he said I would.”
Severus granted him a quick smile, so swift a shadow that Draco knew many people who would say it had not been there at all. Potter, Weasley, Weasley’s idiotic twin brothers, Granger-
Well, no, Draco had to concede, thinking of the way Granger had worked back and forth in front of the Wizengamot, hands weaving the skein that her voice took up. I reckon she would see it and understand it.
“Think of it as a victory for yourself, something that may settle the course of your studies and your days,” Severus advised him. “It is what I most often do when Harry annoys me. What changes he causes are for me, not for him, even if they are because of him. Change the nature of the relationship between effect and cause, and you may accept the benefit while ignoring the cost-at least in humiliation.”
Draco nodded. “I have to speak to him. This can’t go on. I need him to be-” He floundered a bit at that. You couldn’t really ask someone to be less right than he was. “Less righteous,” he said at last.
“Mention your decisions,” Severus said. “Delight may overwhelm him and lessen the annoyance of his manner.”
“If he wasn’t annoying, he wouldn’t be Harry,” Draco said. He touched the back of his mouth with his tongue after he spoke the name, to see if it had carved a bloody channel along his palate as it flew. Not yet.
“Then accept the deficiencies of his manner,” Severus said, in a tone that suggested he was growing bored with the conversation, and started to turn away.
Draco took a deep breath and said something that felt incredibly daring to him, though, now that he thought of it, there was no reason it should have. “I want you with me when I speak to him.”
Severus turned around, the shadow of a frown in his eyes.
Draco explained hastily, glancing out the window into the gardens to make sure that Harry hadn’t come back yet. It would be awkward if he walked into a conversation discussing how to deal with him, rather than a conversation about him, which might only be a coincidence. “Whenever I speak to him, these barriers come up. All I can remember is that he was pushing me. Now that I’ve come to a few decisions, that shouldn’t matter as much, but I’m afraid it will. With you there, we can speak about other things.”
Severus compressed his lips. “I may not be as good an ally as you think me. I have my own reasons to fear that my tongue will stop around Harry.” Draco nodded encouragingly, and Severus went on a few moments later, though with continual glances into the garden. “He offered to help me gain my freedom back. He did not seem to understand my objections, or rather he overrode them and challenged me to override them.”
“That’s what he did to me!” Draco exclaimed. “At least, we share the same experience. Maybe this time, we can prevent him from doing the same thing.”
“Admitting that he was right, that you must make decisions eventually, is not the same thing as admitting that he was right about my releasing him from the Unbreakable Vow so that my case might go to trial,” Severus said in a low, agitated voice, and eased backwards, in the direction of the lab.
“I know,” Draco said. He tried not to sound too much like he was soothing Severus. He had responded badly to that in the past. “But I didn’t want to make decisions, and he acted as if I should. He acted the same way about a possible trial for you, didn’t he?”
Severus nodded slowly, still looking as if he would prefer to escape. But Draco had learned that he couldn’t hide, and he had begun to think it might do Severus good to come out into the open, too.
As much in the open as this cottage and a conversation with sympathetic people is, anyway.
“I want him to know that I apologize for some of what I said,” Draco said. “Not the whole thing. But that’s the difficulty with him. You start talking, and he interrupts with this reasonable little peroration, and you get distracted and start arguing about side issues. I need someone who can help me keep focused on the main topic, so that he doesn’t win.”
As he had thought would happen, that last word caught Severus’s attention. He raised his eyebrows and leaned forwards. “Do you see your conversations with him as a battle?”
“They have been so far,” Draco admitted. He caught a glimpse of grey in the gardens and watched Harry swooping in his parrot form around trunks and through gracefully hanging branches. “And to think I thought I would have nice, pleasant little meditations in his presence that a dumb animal couldn’t respond to,” he muttered.
Severus’s laughter broke on him like a mountain waterfall. Draco smiled and turned to him. “Will you help me confront him?” He made sure to keep his voice lighter this time, so Severus would read it more as a question than a demand.
Severus’s face went unreadable again. After a few moments when he might also have been watching Harry in his parrot form, he nodded. “Yes. I am eager to hear what he has to say, in the presence of both of us at once.”
*
Harry knew something was wrong the moment he stepped into the house. Or different, at least. Both Severus and Draco were in the drawing room, nothing unusual, but neither had a book spread open on his lap or the aloof expressions that they wore when he interrupted a private discussion about potions. They stared at him, instead, and seemed intent on counting the number of grass blades he’d got in his hair. Self-consciously, Harry reached up to pick them free.
“We wanted to talk to you,” Draco said. He couldn’t have hit the word we harder if he’d had a hammer. It practically vibrated in the close confines of the cottage.
Harry nodded and turned to Severus. The expression on his face was intense, but Harry had expected that. He hadn’t expected the way Severus clasped his knees or the gleam in the back of his eyes. He might have been hunting prey. Prey with black hair and green eyes, Harry surmised, and a recent infusion of feathers.
“All right,” Harry said, and tried to sound casual and as if he wasn’t betraying discomfort. What reason did he have to feel discomfort? They hadn’t attacked him, and he thought they would approach kicking him out in a different way. He took the only seat left, on the couch next to Severus-the chairs that usually stood along the walls had been cleared-and tried to look polite and attentive.
Severus’s hand settled on his knee. Harry jumped. He had grown used to the rare times that Severus touched him, but it had never happened in front of Draco, and unconsciously Harry had assumed it wouldn’t. Until the moment when they were all ready to take to the bed, at least. If that ever happened.
“I made a decision today,” Draco announced. He sounded as if he’d found the Philosopher’s Stone.
Grateful for a declaration that could get his mind off Severus’s hand on his knee, Harry faced Draco and smiled. “Wonderful! What about?” He thought he knew, from the amount of time Draco was spending with Potions books, but he wouldn’t have stolen Draco’s thunder for worlds.
“I want my career to be in potions,” Draco said. No surprise there, Harry thought, but he nodded and smiled more broadly, and Draco relaxed. “Severus will help me study for a mastery. The most exclusive exams are given on the Continent, in wizarding communities who won’t care about my past or what the Wizengamot may have said. Of course, my freedom will be an asset should I want to sell potions in England. I haven’t decided on that yet, though. I may ultimately live in France.” He had begun to stroke his knee while he spoke, brows lowered and voice soft as though he was talking to himself.
Harry nodded, and swallowed his protests. If Draco chose to leave them and make his own way in the world, neither Harry nor Severus should stand in his way. Of all of them, he probably needed the independence most.
“I made another decision,” Draco said. Harry looked up. “I’m tired of dancing around you and acting as though I’m not conscious of the differences and unvoiced arguments between us. I want it to change. We’re going to talk, and I’m not letting you out of this room until we’ve come to some comfortable arrangement.”
That was more than Harry had hoped for. He swallowed for a different reason this time and said, “Thank you, Draco. What do you want to talk about first?”
Draco and Severus exchanged a swift glance, which Harry thought he might not have noticed if he hadn’t been so attuned to both of them now. Severus started to open his mouth, but closed it at a twitch from Draco. He was the one who turned majestically back to Harry and said, “I want you to know that I still won’t like you pressuring me and offering suggestions.”
“I wouldn’t presume to, now,” Harry said, and smiled at him. “You know I don’t know anything about potions.”
He had thought Draco would laugh. He clenched his fists instead and said, “But I want you involved in my life. We have to decide how to do that without you driving me into a corner. You can make me promises, but promises can be broken. I want to know, now: What do you want from me?”
Harry flushed. He didn’t think telling them the contents of his last two wet dreams would help matters much. He looked sideways at Severus, wondering what place he had in this, but Severus remained grave and still.
Well, I’ll be honest, even if no one else can be. “I want to sleep with you,” Harry said aloud. “I want to tell you secrets and hear your secrets in return. I want to share a house with you without feeling as if I’m walking on knives. I want to talk with you and know that you respect my intelligence, even if I never learn anything about potions. I want your concern when I go off on my jobs, but not concern stifling enough to hold me back. I want to free your mother if I can, and meet any of your friends you want to become reacquainted with, and have you get along with my friends as best you can.”
“I think that sounds reasonable,” Severus said, and Harry jumped again. He had assumed, without thinking about it, that Severus’s only participation in this discussion would come from his glances with Draco.
“Reasonable,” Draco echoed in an ambiguous voice that could have meant either agreement or disagreement. “Perhaps. But how are we to achieve that without putting too much pressure on each other?”
Harry shrugged. “We’ll have to disagree some of the time and risk putting pressure on each other some of the time. I don’t have a problem forgiving you if you make a mistake.” From Draco’s narrowed eyes, he didn’t think that was the primary problem facing them. Harry smiled sweetly back at him and continued. “And if you tell me when I do something wrong, then I can apologize and correct it.”
“I would prefer it if those mistakes never happened at all,” Draco said, all stiff voice and shoulders.
“Well, so would I, for that matter,” Harry said, a bit annoyed now. He let the annoyance creep into his voice where he would ordinarily have tried to keep it out, remembering what Severus had said about showing his anger. “But it’s not possible. What we have to do is make compromises and not drive each other away because we’re so horrified about the mistakes.”
Draco folded his arms. “I was under the impression that you were the one who found mistakes unacceptable.”
“I find silence unacceptable,” Harry said. “Running away. Turning your head to the side so that you can pretend not to look when the other person enters the room. Pretending that nothing is wrong when you have everything under the sun to settle.”
Draco bristled. “I wasn’t doing that.”
“Not at first,” Harry said, and left him to figure out the obvious rejoinder to that.
Draco’s fingers clawed into his knees. Severus leaned forwards, reaching out one hand as if to soothe Draco’s distress. He kept the hand on Harry’s knee in place, and Harry had the oddest sensation that Severus was becoming the bridge between them, the only link holding them together at the moment. “Are all mistakes unforgivable?” Severus murmured.
Draco froze, and then glared. The glare had more force than before, but Harry somehow felt certain that the dangerous moment was past. “I wasn’t about to leave,” he said. “I object to the way he characterized me.”
“Then I apologize,” Harry said. “But I wish you would talk to me about it, and not only to Severus. I know that you’re closer to each other than you are to me. That’s inevitable, when you spent years here. But try not to talk across me and act as though I can’t hear you.”
Draco watched him out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t know how to talk to you,” he said.
“Open your mouth and move your tongue against your teeth,” Harry said. “It forms these things called sounds, and we people who speak English put the sounds together into things called words. From there-”
“Git,” Draco said, but he sounded less upset than Harry would have thought he’d be, given the nature of Harry’s teasing. “I mean that I don’t know what we have in common. And-” A moment of struggle. His lower lip was caught between his teeth and his neck corded with frustration, his fingers digging into his palms as though he would claw skin from them. Harry cocked his head to the side and waited. He didn’t think a word from him could hasten the outcome of the struggle, and it might damage it.
“I owe you too much!” Draco burst out. “You’re too good, and you adopted me and helped me when you didn’t have to. I owe my freedom to you and your friends, and there’s no way to make up for that. You still agreed to leave your home and try to live with me, and you’ve only been angry in the last few days. I don’t know how to answer that!”
*
Severus felt as though someone had taken the tension in him, turned it to smoke, and breathed it out. After all, his tension had been mostly a reflection of Draco’s.
Ah. Now we come to the heart of it.
He had thought that Draco was irritated by Harry’s saint-like demeanor, as Severus himself sometimes was. But it ran deeper than that. Draco thought some of the saint-like behavior was real, since he had benefited from it, and he hated owing debts. Of course that would make it difficult for him to talk to Harry, while the knowledge of the debts hung between them and Harry appeared unconscious of it.
“We haven’t even discussed the life-debts from the war,” Draco was saying in a bitter tone laced with relief. He stroked his knee, then formed his hand into a fist and drummed it on his kneecap instead. Severus flexed his stretched fingers against Draco’s wrist. Draco nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t take his eyes from Harry. “I don’t know how to pay them all back.”
Harry blinked at him, then said, “Would it help if we decided that little by little? This one action pays for that one, and this action pays for another. Would that help?”
Severus stared. Does he really believe that? Does he plan to simply sit back and accept the gifts that Draco would give him to be free of those obligations?
But he saw the way that Harry’s eyes, fastened on Draco, steadily shone, and he doubted it. Harry would go along with the notion of paying back the debts because that was what Draco needed. In reality, they would be braiding their lives together as they labored at repayment. By the time that Draco found himself free of obligations, he would probably need Harry in other ways and be unwilling to renounce him.
Harry would have what he wanted, while being gracious enough to allow Draco at least the appearance of what he wanted instead.
Severus shut his eyes. He felt as though he had turned a book in a page and found the recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone facing him.
He had not wanted to let Harry fight for him before the Wizengamot for many reasons, but not the least important was the fact that he would then owe Harry a debt. The notion made him irritable for the same reasons it did Draco. How in the world could he pay the debt back? It would give Harry power over him. More, worse, it was the kind of power that could not be given away or changed. It was the kind of power-of obligation-that Albus had wielded. Severus had always despised that.
But this offered him an out. Whether Harry thought of it the same way or not, he would not use the power the same way Albus had. Albus would have wanted Draco to face the fact that there were some debts that one could simply never pay back, because of their nature. Harry was willing to pretend otherwise, for Draco’s sake. He valued comfort and what others needed more than honesty.
Severus thought of himself the same way, though the only comfort he had been willing to pay attention to for several years was his own.
When Draco nodded grudging acceptance of Harry’s plan, he might have nodded for Severus as well. Harry’s happy smile included both of them.
I will speak to him about possibly going up before the Wizengamot tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty.
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