[One-shots]: No Gracious Influence Shed, 3/3, Snape/Harry/Draco, NC-17, Beltane fic
Third part of a long one-shot. Don't start reading here.
Draco waited until nearly midnight to knock on the door of Potter’s hovel. Severus had already gone to bed, the silence between them smoldering. Draco had started the day happy because Severus was recovering, and now he’d had it all spoiled by Potter’s reluctance and idiocy.
“Potter!” He raised his voice when he got no answer. “I know you’re in there. And awake.” The shine of the light of that stupid Muggle machine through the windows would have told him that even if he couldn’t hear Potter moving around in there. Really, Potter must think they were imbeciles.
Potter opened the door so little a space that Draco couldn’t see him through it. Draco had expected that, too. Severus had told him about being pushed out of the house by an invisible wind earlier.
“Listen to me,” Draco told the tiny crack, with as much dignity as he could when he felt ridiculous. “You’re going to bond to us. That means spending a lot more time with us than this, and putting up with us.”
Potter laughed. The sound was so unexpected that Draco thought he had mistaken it for a second. “Are you mad, Malfoy? Or just hoping to trick me so you can laugh about it later? I read the ritual as well as you did. It said that we wouldn’t need to spend any time together after the initial bonding. My presence ought to sustain Snape whether I’m here or miles away. And it isn’t the sort of bond where we need to have sex once a month or something like that.”
Draco closed his eyes. “Potter, you prick. Did you read onto the next page?”
“No. Because you also described it as working like that.” Potter’s voice was as empty as the night around them.
“We won’t have a telepathic or empathic bond like the ones that would become traditional with this type of ritual, no.” Draco slumped against the side of the house. Suddenly a lot of the way that Potter had been behaving made sense. Draco had thought Potter was distancing himself because of resentment at what he’d have to undergo, but no, he just thought this was the way it was going to be. “I don’t think any of us could stand that.”
“And it’s not sexual?” Potter sounded bored, damn him.
“No.”
“Then what?”
Draco sighed again. “We do have to spend some time together. Not much, not nearly as much as you’re doing now. But it’s a sort of-it has to be a bond of togetherness. We have to eat some meals together, at certain phases of the moon. You have to spend time with us, and we some time with you. In your home, I mean. And it means that we need to cast certain spells in concert. Severus would probably need to teach you to brew, because there are potions that need to be done in common, as well. And you would come and spend some time with me in my business.”
Silence came back. Except for the crack of darkness through the door, which Draco kept his eyes on, he would have thought Potter had gone to bed.
Then Potter whispered, “When did you plan on telling me this?”
“I thought you’d read it.” Draco took refuge in rage, the only refuge there was now, striking out as hard as he could. “And didn’t object to it, because nothing we did seemed to have any impact on you-”
The door flew open, and Potter yanked him into the room. Draco went with a stumble, and came up and around with his wand in his hand. He might have to restrict the damage he did to Potter so it didn’t affect Severus, but he wasn’t going to lie down and wait for Potter to crush him with a spell, either.
He didn’t have to, he realized when he saw the raging inferno of Potter’s eyes. Potter didn’t need a spell to crush him. His magic ranged free around the room, and bits and pieces of the plank walls froze, and then melted again, and burned with a strange, soundless blue fire that left only afterimages behind. There was tar on one of the planks for a moment, and then shadows, and then sand. Draco swallowed and yanked his gaze away from them. The real danger was right in front of him.
“You haven’t been acting like someone who’d need to spend time with me after this,” Potter whispered, and took a step towards Draco that cracked the floor beneath him. “You’ve been doing everything you can to show me how much you distrust me, and to antagonize me. This dinner idea in Diagon Alley was only the latest in a long chain of petty insults.”
“You needed to go with us to keep Severus safe,” Draco said stiffly. “We had to come home right after you left. We barely enjoyed it.”
“You made sure I didn’t, either.” Potter lifted his lip as if he was showing off his teeth like a dog. “What’s the matter? Don’t think that I’ll ever change from the boy you had the prejudiced view of at Hogwarts? Then this bond is pointless. You’re telling me about the things I’ll have to change and learn and become, but you didn’t intend to change at all, did you?”
Draco swallowed and massaged his forehead for a second. Potter’s accusations made sense when he thought about them in that light, little as he liked them. He supposed that neither he nor Severus had gone out of their way to make a friend of Potter.
“All right,” he said. “You’re-correct about that, at least. I’m sorry.” The words were so foreign in his mouth that it made Draco realize how long it was since he had said them and meant them. He said them often to Severus, but they were mocking more often than not. “But you’re strange, Potter. I think it would actually be easier if you were more like how I remembered you at Hogwarts. At least I thought I understood you then. Now I don’t, and you’re just weird.”
Potter went still for some reason. Then he laughed. “A freak, right?”
The word had resonances that Draco didn’t understand, but he could hardly miss them-not when the air around him had begun to whirl and congeal with wind fast enough to make his eyes sting.
“No,” said Draco carefully. No matter how much he might have used the word in his own thoughts, which wasn’t often because it wasn’t a word that he used often, period, he wasn’t going to say it aloud now. “I just-fuck, Potter, you’re a wizard.” The word exploded out of him, into the outlet that the rest of his rage was denied. “Why would you want to give up your magic and live in the Muggle world? Why, in the name of Merlin?”
“Because of the staring.”
“You could go out under a glamour,” Draco replied. His breathing was easing, he realized, and he no longer thought Potter might murder him or throw him out the door for being impudent. Yes, this was what he had wanted to discuss. “Come on, Potter. Tell me the truth. Why did you flee the world that you saved?”
Potter paused for a long moment, studying Draco as if he wanted to see how serious he was and whether he would treat Potter’s answer likewise seriously. Draco tried to maintain a calm face, and nodded when Potter’s eyes grew sharp and scrutinizing. Yes, he could at least make sure that he didn’t mock Potter for the answer, whatever he felt about it.
Finally, Potter said, “Because I wanted to live a normal life. An ordinary one. I shouldn’t have to use a glamour to do that. Besides, how long would I have to live under it? How long until people got used to it? They still haven’t stopped gaping at the mere sight of me, as you saw tonight.”
“I think they were gaping at you because they hadn’t seen you in so long,” said Draco. “Come back, and be normal, and go around in the wizarding world, and they would probably get used to you and stop staring soon.”
Potter shook his head. “I told you that I didn’t like being looked at. That’s not true. I hate it. And I can lead a normal life in the Muggle world. A normal life for a human.”
“Not for a wizard,” Draco countered, feeling the words burning on his tongue, breaking against his teeth like iron bolts. He leaned forwards. “Which you are. Come on, Potter. Come back and at least use this bond to reestablish yourself in the wizarding world and claim what their staring has denied you.”
“And you think that once people learn I’m bonded to two men who were on the opposite side of the war, they’re really going to be enthusiastic about that?” Potter shook his head and closed his eyes. “I can’t do this, Malfoy. I already decided.”
“You’re going to have to, because of the bond,” Draco said bluntly. “And you haven’t seen how scathing Severus and I can be in defense of our privacy. We can get them to leave you alone.”
Potter’s hand trembled for a moment. He wasn’t looking at Draco, but he seemed to tell Draco could see it anyway, and stuffed it into a pocket.
“There are times I miss magic,” Potter whispered. “But I was only getting along with this in the first place by convincing myself I can have my normal life back when it’s done. What happens when I start-realizing what’s going to happen?”
“You come to us, and let us help you,” said Draco at once. “Beltane is always intense. Did you ever participate in a ritual on it before?”
Potter’s magic sparked in a way that Draco took for a negative answer, and he moved a step closer. “Come on, Potter. It’s going to be hard for all of us. You already agreed to do this to save Severus’s life, and that means-that means we do owe you some basic consideration. I can’t promise Severus will go along with it any time soon, but I’ll try.”
Potter gave him a tired smile. “Malfoy, you’re talking about a man who was willing to die because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not willing to go along with it at all is what I’d expect.”
Draco snorted. “Well, he’ll be part of the bond along with you and me. Despite what you might think, Severus doesn’t engage in useless displays of temper. He wouldn’t want to make the rest of his own life miserable, even if he thought it might be fun to do it to you. I promise,” he added, when Potter started to open his mouth as if he wasn’t convinced. “He’ll come around. Maybe not until after the ritual, but it’s hard to share an experience like that and remain unconnected.” He hesitated. “What made you think you’d be able to?”
“I’m not really a wizard anymore,” Potter said simply. “I don’t have much to do with you, while you already have a bond. All that.”
Draco pointed at the wall. Potter looked over, and started when he saw the patch of luminous, glowing red-orange light there. Draco reckoned that he found it hard to feel what his magic was doing when it was distant from him.
“You’re not a Muggle,” Draco told him. “No Muggle could make a wall glow like that without raising a finger. Hell, not many wizards could do it, either. Come back to magic, Potter. You can think of that as what this ritual is going to give you, if you like. Just like Severus is getting his life back.”
“And you?” Potter’s voice was soft, the way it had been the night he came in response to Draco’s summons. “What about you? Do you just get to see Snape alive and happy? Is that enough?”
“I love him, so yes,” said Draco. It was hard to speak of his love for Severus in front of Severus, but Potter made it easy, created an atmosphere where it would have been harder to hold back. “But I think I might gain something else as well.”
He held Potter’s gaze, making it obvious that he wasn’t thinking just of the sex, and finished in a murmur, “This is the most honestly I’ve spoken to someone else in a long time. It’s hard, with Severus.”
Potter slowly nodded. There was a look in his eyes that might become wonder if Draco didn’t crush it. He was resolved not to crush it.
“Good,” said Draco. “Now, I’m going to bed. I hope you sleep well, Potter.” He inclined his head to him, then turned and walked back out the door.
It didn’t close behind him until he had almost reached the door of his own home. Draco let his lips quirk a little, a satisfied movement. Yes, he knew Potter had stood there and watched him.
Watch me, Potter. I might teach you things you never dreamed of learning.
Only fair to return the favor.
*
Severus steeled himself for a harder task than brewing a Draught of Peace blindfolded, and waited until sunset, and then went out to the boulder where Potter liked to sit and watch that sunset with a civil tongue in his head.
He could have used a Draught of Peace, in fact. The last week had not been pleasant. Draco had told him the truth roundly, which he often did, but then added that having Potter miserable was a bad thing for its own sake, as well as because it could affect the bond that was going to form between Potter and them.
Severus had pointed out that Potter was bringing his own misery on himself by doing things like staying out of the wizarding world and then letting the stares get to him. It was a good argument. An unanswerable one, he had thought.
Until Draco had smiled at him and produced chains of logic of the sort that Severus thought he must have learned from Lucius. Not that he was about to bring up Draco’s parents. Some things, he did know better about.
“Does it matter whose fault it is, if it’s going to be affecting all of us? And what kind of fools would we be if we didn’t try and alleviate it? No, Severus, we have to do something about this.” He’d paused and eyed Severus, and went on doing it until Severus had nodded, because he had seen where this was going already. “Good. Then go and speak to him, and try to act like you’re at least marginally interested.”
I am here for Draco, and not Potter, Severus told himself stiffly as he moved through the gardens and towards the taut back of the man sitting on the boulder. He will sense that. He won’t be accepting of me in the way Draco thinks he will.
In the end, however, Potter didn’t fly at him the way that Severus had thought he would. He’d turned around and studied Severus as though checking how his robes hung, then nodded and moved aside. Astonished, Severus watched as Potter waved at the boulder and understood he was being invited to sit down.
“You’ll welcome me this close to you?” Severus muttered as he sat.
Potter shot him a glance. “There’s a difference between welcoming and accepting.”
There was indeed, Severus thought. Albus had made use of the difference often enough to tame some of Severus’s reactions when he still worked at Hogwarts. It merely wasn’t the sort of thing he had thought Potter would know.
Potter was still gazing ahead at the sunset as if nothing could trouble him, but Severus caught sight of one tight hand gripping the edge of the boulder. At least that showed this was affecting him somehow, Severus thought.
“Draco told me that you don’t think of yourself as a wizard anymore.” Severus might be willing to do a lot of things, but not approach the subject subtly. Besides, if Potter was smart enough to make distinctions like the one had just made to Severus, then he was smart enough to see through honeyed words.
“I don’t,” said Potter simply. He turned slightly towards Severus, and Severus could see his profile better now-in case he had been longing to do that, which he hadn’t. “But I reckon I’ll have to get used to it again now, since I’ll be spending time with you a lot once the bond takes. Why did you get together with Malfoy in the first place?”
Mouth open to retort, Severus found himself stranded in the unexpected position of having to answer a question. “That need not concern you,” he said finally.
“Then my acceptance of being a wizard or not doesn’t need to concern you,” Potter said. Once again, he filled his eyes with the vanishing orange rim of the sun beyond the edge of the mountains. He seemed to soak in the silence that filled the little valley, and Severus knew he wouldn’t get much more out of him.
Left now with his own unwillingness to lose a game like this to Harry Potter, Severus thought furiously. He had asked a question. Potter had answered it, and offered a question of his own.
Is the game to be that simple?
It seemed it was. Severus faced Potter, and murmured, “We were isolated together in the wake of Albus’s death, in the wake of the war, and I seemed to have taken the position of more than a mentor to him, although I didn’t know that for a long time. Not to take him would have been cruel.” He hesitated, but Potter didn’t demand more information, and didn’t get up and storm away, either. “What makes you think of yourself as not a wizard?”
“It’s easier for me than most people, because I was raised by Muggles and I don’t have the family ties here,” Potter said. Before Severus could open his mouth to retort, he added, “Why become his lover, though? Why not just his mentor?”
Severus curbed his impatience. He could do this with tricky potions; he could do it with Potter. Potter would not be able to say he had won this contest. “Because that was what he needed. And then shortly, it was what I needed, as well. You have friends. Why not come back for them?”
“Because they’re willing to come see me in the Muggle world, and they understand my dislike of publicity. Why did you need it?”
Severus paused, weighing his words. He need only answer the actual pronoun, he decided swiftly, not say why Draco had needed it. “Because I needed one relationship that would provide a haven for me in a world that had gone Dark to the very core. It was dangerous, but not as dangerous as the waltz I danced between two masters, and without it, I would have gone insane.”
Potter turned and considered him, a calm, grave look that said nothing about judging him. Severus eased down a little, and added, “Why do you dislike publicity so much?”
“I got told enough that I was different when I was a child, and not in a positive way. And this isn’t always positive, either.” Potter’s mouth curled, but he went on without pausing. “Are you willing to enter this bond?”
Severus blinked. “You know I have no choice if I wish to live.”
“Not what I asked,” Potter murmured, and his eyes this time were unblinking, in a way that reminded Severus of a particularly stubborn cat he’d used to own.
Severus struggled in silence for a time. He would have got up and stormed away at the slightest sign from Potter. But all Potter did was sit there and watch him, and Severus finally hissed a little, nodded, and said, “It will make Draco happy. And while I thought otherwise, when I also thought that I had no chance of surviving the illness in any case, I wish to make him happy.”
Potter relaxed. “Good. Then I can go ahead without worrying that I’m doing something that makes you so unhappy you can’t stand being bonded to me.”
He stood, but Severus threw out an arm to bar him, and asked the last question he was owed. “Why do you care about my unhappiness?”
Potter could have fobbed him off with any one of a number of easy responses, but he stood there, eyes trained on Severus, and Severus knew he was being considered in the last low light of the sun, and answered honesty.
“Because this is something for life. I know I can bear it, and I’m pretty sure that it’ll relieve Malfoy’s mind, but I didn’t know what you thought.”
Severus inclined his head. Potter walked away and shut the door of his little house behind him, and a second later, his Muggle telly started to life.
Severus settled back slowly against the rock. It was little enough, but something between them had changed.
And sometimes an avalanche starts with a pebble.
*
It was hard not to admire them, Harry thought, once you saw them working together.
It was something he might not have noticed if he didn’t have the example of Ron and Hermione to compare them to. Hermione would sometimes go into a wild flight of rhetoric when she visited Harry, waving her arms and telling the story of the latest idiot who wanted the right to beat his house-elves, and Ron was the one who silently rescued her teacup from falling over. Then he would go and get more tea, and she would reach out and pick it up and have the slightest, loveliest smile on her face before she sipped.
And there were the times that Ron was distressed about something in his family-like his mum pushing them to have kids now, when they just weren’t ready, or George brooding on Fred’s death more than usual-and Hermione would lean her shoulder against his and tell Harry something light and amusing while Ron withdrew from the conversation a little. Then Ron would tap her hand, and Hermione would segue neatly into whatever he wanted to talk about.
It wasn’t mind-reading, unless both his best friends had taken up Legilimency without telling Harry. It was being bonded.
And Malfoy and Snape moved around each other in that same way, that dancing way, that waltzing way. Malfoy reached for an ingredient, and Snape had it ready to provide. Snape broke the stirring rod against the side of the cauldron, and Malfoy reached out and swept the broken glass up with a spell that created an invisible net before it could hit the surface of the potion. Their hands brushed each other’s because of a longing to be where the other one was.
Harry wondered for a moment if that was the kind of thing they would all have, after they were bonded.
But he rejected the thought at once. He knew the bond was of a different kind. It would blend their magic, but only enough to stabilize Snape’s.
And the bond between you and Malfoy?
Harry shrugged to himself and went back to crushing the tulip bulbs that Snape had assigned him. He had said that Harry wouldn’t be able to mess that up, much. This potion was the one that would decorate their bodies in the actual ritual, and the bulbs needed to be completely mashed before being added.
He wouldn’t have an experience like theirs. Well. It was beautiful to watch, anyway.
*
Draco sat up and put his book aside. There was a nagging sensation in the corner of his mouth, as though he had a sudden toothache. He hissed under his breath as he stood up and moved to the mirror. Illness would delay the ritual, now scarcely a week away.
But it wasn’t his tooth. The window was in the same direction as the mirror, and now he knew what was going on.
He looked out into the back garden, where Potter and Severus were, near the boulder that had become their unofficial post by which to gather when doing ritual activities. He was in time to hear the raised voices, and he leaned his arms on the windowsill and watched, blinking. He reckoned it was his bond with Severus that had drawn him, but he didn’t know why. Severus was capable of handling their rows by himself.
“You are a powerful wizard!” Severus sounded pissed-off in that very particular way he had when someone was denying a basic fact to him.
“But I didn’t win the war because of that!” Potter was waving one hand, and his eyes were raging like a forest fire. “I won the war because of my mother’s love and Voldemort’s arrogance and-”
“You will use magic to prepare the ritual circle, because it must be used that way!”
“One of you could do it!”
Severus’s voice came out low and ugly. “Then you are not powerful enough?”
Potter spun around, snarling, and lifted his wand. Something that looked like a green rope, jungle-colored light, sprayed out of the end of it, and leaped into the air, and settled like a lasso around a circle of earth. Draco saw the disturbed soil leap into the air, and the raw color of the dirt, and then Potter lashed again and laid another rope on top of that one, and the circle was made of softly glowing light the way it was supposed to be.
“There,” Potter said, and glared. “Fuck you.” And he stomped off to his house and slammed the door.
Severus had no expression on his face, but he watched the door as if he expected Potter to come back out. Draco took a step back, amazed to discover how stunned he had become simply watching a display of magic.
And how hard.
*
Severus wondered if he was the only one who could see the wary way that Draco and Potter circled around each other.
Or maybe he meant the wary way that Draco circled around Potter. Potter seemed oblivious to most things outside of himself, including how much magic he would have to use once the ritual began.
But Draco’s eyes would lock on Potter and then flit away again, and he frowned down at the rite book when Potter found out another thing he apparently hadn’t been aware of, that he would need to spend the hour before the rite naked and meditating, and he flinched when Potter drew his wand.
Draco had to remember a bathroom where he had suffered from the effects of Potter’s wand. Severus himself had touched the scars more than once.
On the other hand, Draco didn’t seem inclined to back away from the ritual. He didn’t balk at preparing the extensive potions necessary to make sure that they would have enough to decorate themselves with; each potion boiled away at the end to reveal a small scrim of liquid in the bottom of the cauldron, so they had brewed that particular potion until Severus went to sleep with the measurements in his head.
The day that Potter made an offhand reference to something he’d seen on his Muggle devices and Draco blew up, Severus realized he might have misjudged the situation.
“You’re a bloody wizard,” Draco said in a muffled voice, slamming down the book he was reading for the five hundredth time and pivoting around to stare at Potter. “Why aren’t you referring to magical theory, or Diagon Alley, or-or those bloody songs Celestina Warbeck sings, if you need to talk about something trivial?”
Potter stared at him. “Because I don’t like Celestina Warbeck?” he offered.
Severus leaned back against the door of his lab. He had been researching another potion they might be able to use in the ritual that would not take as long as this one did to brew, and he had come out only to ask Draco a question about the location of a particular book whose title he could not remember. He thought things would change between the two of them if they noticed he was there.
Draco leaned forwards with his hands braced on the table, clenched fists, as if he was going to transform them suddenly into horse-hooves and prance away. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he whispered. “You act like you despise magic, when you’re getting ready to perform one of the most powerful and dangerous magical rituals in our library, on one of the most magical days in the year. What are you doing here, Potter? Really? If you want to go be a Muggle, why you don’t just go be a Muggle?”
“Because, amazingly,” Potter said, and leaned forwards as if he was going to transform himself as suddenly into a snake and lunge, “I’m capable of thinking about and being more than one thing at once. Wizard and Muggle. Magic-user and someone who watches the telly. Why are you running an apothecary instead of murdering and torturing people on the path to Dark Lord-dom?”
Draco reeled. Severus lifted his eyebrows. Perhaps he was wrong about a better understanding, or at least a deeper one, growing between Potter and Draco. No one who knew Draco would have asked that question.
“I don’t-I hate torture,” Draco whispered. “I never wanted to do that. No one asked me if I wanted to do that.”
“Exactly. And no one asked me if I was willing to save the world, either.” Potter fell back a measured step. “I just had to do it because Voldemort would have killed me if I didn’t. Now I want to live in a world that doesn’t remind me of that, at least sometimes. I’ll have a better connection to the magical world if I do this ritual. Fine. At least, though, you could show me that it’s a connection with people who are going to respect me.”
“I do respect you.” Draco’s voice was very low.
“Then trust the answer I gave you.” Potter’s voice was gentle, and he reached out and clasped Draco’s arm for a minute. “Whether or not you like it. I respect the path you took after the war.”
Respect mine. The words were ringing in the room, unheard.
Draco gave an uncertain nod, and then turned back to reminding Potter yet again of the ritual responses he needed to give. Severus quietly shut the door.
Perhaps he didn’t need to research different potions after all. What they had at the moment might work.
*
The night before the ritual, the night before Beltane, Harry stood at the window of his little house and watched the stars rise. This far away from any Muggle city, the points of light were wild and majestic, scattering radiance into the air that Harry realized he had missed when he was in London.
He had missed a lot of things about the wizarding world, honestly. Not just his friends and Diagon Alley.
His friends. Harry hadn’t told Ron and Hermione about what he intended to do. He just-he didn’t want to. At first, he had justified it by telling himself that Ron would be horrified by Harry having that kind of connection with Snape and Malfoy, and he didn’t want to listen to the arguments when he had to make the connection anyway to save Snape’s life.
But lately, he had realized he didn’t want to. He loved his friends. They would always be the main draw to the wizarding world for him.
But-they had their bond, too. Harry loved watching it, but he was outside it. He simply couldn’t be close to them that way, no matter how close they were in other ways.
This time, he had a chance to be part of something like it, but different. It was his. It was private. He wanted it.
And that was the real reason he would go through this, despite all the doubts that he sometimes had about Snape and Malfoy and whether a bond that had first formed between two people could ever expand to include a third.
He drew the curtains over the window.
*
Draco stepped into the back garden. He was clad in the thin, white robe that the ritual demanded, and he could feel the drift and swirl of incredibly heavy magic around him. Magic that seemed to steam from the grass, to rise from the turning of the earth about the sun. Once, this would have been the first day of summer.
Now, it was a day of magic that connected Draco to the man behind him-Severus, also clad in a thin robe, but this one dark green. Draco had to keep himself from turning to admire how well Severus looked in it. Silver serpents marched up and down the edge of the robe, but that wasn’t required. It was just a touch Severus had said he might as well add after he had seen how much of the rest of the ritual featured Slytherin symbols.
And the magic also came off the bonfire that burned ahead of them, streaming with more colors than any natural fire should have, red and gold and orange, deep, luxuriant shades that Draco had never seen in flames before. Phoenix-colored, he thought, before he could stop himself, and perhaps that was appropriate considering the man who sat upright in the circle in front of the fire, facing it with his arms crossed on top of his knees.
He was naked, and he shook sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes and looked up. His face had taken on a sheen of calm as well as sweat from his meditation, Draco thought, or else it looked more vulnerable with his eyes and scar bared. He had no glasses, not now. He didn’t need them to see. He would know every step of this ritual by heart.
He should, after the amount of time that we spent studying.
Draco shed the thought the way he shed the robe a moment later, though, dropping the white garment straight down to the ground. He heard Severus walk out of his own robe behind him. Green, it would touch the grass, the color of the grass. And Draco’s robe would lie there like the snow that was beginning to melt on the mountains around them.
Draco stepped out of the space he had occupied for so long in relation to Potter, the space of being exasperated with him and disliking him and hating him and thinking he would have done something different with all those gifts than Potter had, and straight into ritual space. The air around him sharpened, grew like pleated paintings full of color and depthless light. Draco held out a hand, and realized he had crossed the distance between him and the edge of the ritual circle in what seemed like a single step.
His hand lingered on Potter’s forehead, fingers tracing the scar. Potter looked up at him and smiled.
Draco’s senses flew away from him for a second, everything but sight and touch. He could feel the worn skin. He could see the green eyes. He could see the light playing on Potter’s face, and feel the heat from the fire. All else was gone.
He asked the first question he had to ask, while Severus moved over to the other side of the circle and stopped. Potter watched Draco with the calm, absolute trust he had needed. “Do you consent to be painted by my hand?”
“I do,” said Potter, and lay back on the ground, open and stretching himself, limbs projecting out into the bounded space of the circle.
Draco swallowed and picked up the cauldron beside him, which held the mixed remains of all the many potions that he and Severus and Potter had prepared during the past month. They slipped back and forth, and Draco drew out the tiny, smooth brush made of hummingbird feathers that had been more of a pain to make than the potions themselves. The feathers shone like rubies, like peacocks, like paradise.
“You consent to accept the first symbol?” he asked, and positioned the brush with the green potion dripping from it above Potter’s chest. His heart.
“I do,” Potter said, and his chest rose and fell with his breathing.
Draco stared as his painted. The first symbol was simple enough, a circle, echoing the ritual circle, but Draco had to place it partially on top of a round, ugly scar that he didn’t understand. It looked awfully similar to a place of jewelry, as if Potter had been wearing a locket around his neck and it had burned through his clothes and into his skin.
But the question faded as Draco worked, as he asked the questions and painted the symbols, and Potter’s response rose and fell in a quickening chant.
“Do you accept the second symbol?”
“I do.”
A flying dragon on his left leg.
“Do you accept the third symbol?”
“I do.”
A swirling serpent on his right leg.
“Do you accept the fourth symbol?”
“I do.”
A lightning bolt on his forehead, covering the one already there.
“Do you accept the fifth symbol?”
“I do.”
A pair of circles on his eyelids, conjoined by a thick line between them, the only part visible as he blinked.
“Do you accept the sixth symbol?”
“I do.”
A dragon rampant on his left arm. Draco carefully etched the edges of the wings in the thickest and greenest part of the potion.
“Do you accept the seventh symbol?”
“I do.”
The serpent coiled on his right arm. Draco’s arm tingled as a warning jolt of magic shot up it.
“Do you accept the eighth symbol?”
“I do.”
And a lightning bolt, turned sideways, on the triangle of skin right above Potter’s groin.
The instant Draco finished painting, the fire blew up. Suddenly there was a wall of flame surrounding them, lancing and lashing from side to side of a bigger circle than the ritual one, closing them in, binding them, not yet bonding them. Draco swallowed. They could not leave now, not until the ritual was complete or they were dead.
And they would die if they didn’t complete it in the right way. That was simple fact.
But at the same time, Draco’s swallow was only his body’s fear. He was not afraid. He stood up and bowed, then looked across the circle at Severus.
“He is yours,” he said, and Severus crossed the barrier of the ritual circle that he’d been avoiding so far. The fire moved with him, leaped with him, and now it burned exactly on that side of the circle.
Draco stood, and watched.
*
The moment he crossed into the circle, Severus knew this would not be gentle. It could not.
The ritual reached into the deepest parts of him and hauled all of him up-the man who had hated Harry Potter for being the son of his rival, the man who had been willing to die for Harry Potter but not be saved by him, the man who had loved Lily Potter and hated her for rescuing him.
The man who had been a Death Eater.
Severus shivered, unsteady, as the memories roared through him and bound him, as chains of silvery magic and blue magic and white magic and green magic leaped out of the ground and converged on him. For a moment, he was those people again, dying in the Shrieking Shack, watching Lily walk away from him, torturing a victim with his father’s face, glaring at a defiant Harry Potter in the brat’s first Potions class-
The memories clapped together and were gone. But now Severus had Harry on the ground in front of him, and as surely as he knew that this man’s name was Harry and not Potter now, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold back.
The green symbols were painted all over his own body, though shifted by one position, so that the circle was on his left leg, and the dragon on his right leg, and so on, down to the circle above his groin. He knew it. He knew the potion had leaped from the cauldron and hit him, powered and shaped and painted by the magic of the spell.
He knew it, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the painted symbols didn’t count as clothing Harry, and all Severus wanted at the moment was to take.
He lunged.
Harry was there to welcome him, arms opening, lips parting to allow his tongue to grasp Severus’s, but it wasn’t enough. Severus was on his knees beside him, hand grasping and pulling on everything from Harry’s skin itself to the hair between his nipples, and Harry lifted his head and gave a small sound of pain.
Severus laughed, rough, unending. He threw his leg over Harry’s hips and reached for his own cock. Harry was rolling, to the side, to lift his legs and expose the arse Severus had spent so much time standing on the other side of the circle and staring at. Severus was still laughing as he reached out with his fingers. The ritual was supposed to make this happen, make Harry ready to be taken, as much as it was supposed to incite Severus’s desire.
But, in truth, Severus did not care if Harry wasn’t ready. He was going to have him regardless.
He slid in. It was a long, sliding plunge, rather like diving into a pool of blood. Strange, odd, perhaps disgusting at first if Severus thought about it, but then he was at the bottom, and opening his eyes, and this was exactly where he wanted to be.
He opened his eyes. Harry lay beneath him, panting up, the dark green circles visible on his eyelids when he shut them. That shimmer of green potion on his skin separated him from both his parents for Severus, because James would never have agreed to this and Lily wouldn’t have needed that paint.
There was very little gentleness in Severus at the moment, but there was a sense of rightness. The hole in his magic, rather like a hole in wards, had faded. Harry’s magic poured in, and Severus tossed his head back and made a sound that was not a laugh, because laughter didn’t sound like that.
Harry made the same sound beneath him.
Severus placed his hands on either side of Harry’s head and began to thrust. No, it wasn’t gentle. Despite the magic that had eased his way, he knew full well that Harry would bleed from it. But it didn’t matter. Not when Harry was opening his mouth and grasping eagerly with it at anything that he could reach, including Severus’s fingers when they brushed for a moment past his mouth.
Images glinted and slid in and out of Severus’s mind. A cupboard beneath the stairs. A lunging snake that had left a pool of blood spilled on the floor, blood from his own throat. A basilisk fang through his arm. A green-eyed girl turning her back on him.
And more images. Hurtling after the Golden Snitch, the sudden thunder of applause as he caught it. The excitement of brewing, the softness and certainty waiting for him at the bottom of a cauldron that even a wand in his hand didn’t equal. Turning the Elder Wand on Voldemort. Waking that first morning with Draco in his arms.
The images blended and shot through him, and Severus saw the green, painted images on Harry’s body taking fire. They were burning without harming him, constant shimmering fire, closest to Severus where their legs entwined and their groins pressed together. Severus heard the flames murmuring in soft voices to themselves. Only the sound of his balls slapping into Harry’s arse was louder.
The flames were wild, dancing around the circle, dancing on Harry’s body, dancing on Severus’s shoulders and in his hair as his own symbols began finally and fully to burn. Severus tried harder to rock. There was something he was supposed to say, something he was supposed to remember…
“I bind you,” he gasped to Harry, as the thunder-inside him this time, applause under his skin-stirred and echoed and slid towards his cock. “I offer you the-bonded-state of my own soul, and this is the-bonded nature of mine.”
“And I accept,” Harry said, voice stronger than Severus’s, “with my own unbonded soul, opening to yours, clutching and holding on.”
Why is his voice stronger than mine when he’s the one getting fucked?
On that indignant note in his mind, Severus came, the pull of pleasure through his body stronger than he’d ever imagined anything could be. He tossed his head back and his body stiffened at the same moment as Harry cried out beneath him.
But his one major thought, at the moment, was a determination to make Harry sound more fucked next time.
*
Everything hurt.
Harry ached with simmering heat, on his skin where the fire burned, in his eyes were sweat had run, in his arse. In his cock, even, where the pleasure had taken place so violently that he felt seared. He tumbled limply away from Severus as he climbed off Harry and sat down on the grass beside him, head bowed, panting harshly into his knees.
Harry would have enjoyed lying there for a while, recovering himself and waiting for the flames to subside.
But footsteps approached, and Harry remembered. To complete the bond, the third one, he had to let Draco fuck him.
And he had to come. Again.
Honestly, Harry didn’t know if he could do it.
He reached out, groping, with one hand, and Draco caught it and drew it up to his lips, where he bit it. Harry moaned in surprise. He knew that Draco biting him wouldn’t disrupt the paint that was burning, since it was on his arm and not his hand, but he hadn’t known…
He hadn’t known that that would be the thing to bring the desire roaring back through him, leaping from point to point in his body, arching up and filling him up like the starlight he had seen from the window last night, like the stars.
“Yes,” said Draco, in a voice that was nearly a drone compared to the rough one Severus had used to talk while he fucked him. “I thought so.”
He turned Harry to the side and drew his hands over his head. Harry grunted a little. He knew the fire had closed in on the other side of the circle the minute Draco had stepped into it, and he was a little displeased with having his fingers that close to the flames.
Instead of letting his hands go, though, Draco did a spell with a murmur. Harry stared. He hadn’t thought Draco had brought his wand with him, or-
And he hadn’t. This was wandless magic, the same power that had made Harry ready for Severus, pouring over and through and between them. And then it was between Harry’s fingers in turn, and Harry flexed his hands hard as he realized that his fingers were looped through links of chain that in turn were attached to stakes in the ground.
“Why?” he whispered, a response that wasn’t part of the ritual and might displease Draco because of that, because it wasn’t planned.
But Draco only looked at him, smiling, surrounded already by a glint of green fire from the symbols that had appeared on his body, as they had appeared on Severus’s, when he crossed the boundary of the circle.
“Because I wanted to,” he said. “Just like I wanted to bite you.” He shrugged a little. “I don’t understand all my desires. But you’re going to.” And he slid into Harry’s body in a slam, instead of the long slide that Severus had used.
Harry shouted. He knew that it was silly to expect gentleness given how intense this was, but-
“You thought I’d be gentler than Severus,” Draco whispered above him, and rocked into his body in long, deep, punishing, fucking strokes.
“Yeah,” Harry gasped, and gulped as much air as he could. Another thing he hadn’t expected to burn: the inside of his throat. It felt as though he had run ten miles at a stretch, and he still wasn’t done.
“I’m not,” said Draco. “I just have different ways of showing it.” He paused, and when he blinked his eyes open, Harry saw Draco’s own eyes darken. “And I’m still annoyed at you about forsaking your own magic.”
“I told you the reasons for that,” Harry snarled back at him. “And they’re true-”
“I know, but I still don’t like them,” said Draco, and sped up his rocking.
It was getting painful. Harry twisted his head to the side and panted, trying to take in as much air as possible despite the way it made his throat burn. He wanted to-he wanted to shout, he wanted to cry out-
And then the pleasure raced through him as Draco’s cock found his prostate, and Harry shouted for a different reason. And his throat and his arse were both burning, and he honestly wasn’t sure which one hurt more, and which one pleased him more.
“Yes,” Draco said, and then began to whisper. “I bind you. I offer you the bonded nature of my own soul, and my magic, that does not need you, but wants you, accepts you.”
“And I accept,” Harry gasped back, “with the once-bonded nature of my own soul, and with my magic, which opens and welcomes yours.”
“Just like your body is opening and welcoming me now,” Draco murmured back, sounding delirious, and thrust home and held, hard and still.
Harry knew Draco had come, that he must have, because the fire closed in around them. But what mattered most of all was that he came, that he did it somehow, that his body cried out along with him and he managed it, the way he had known he would have to.
Then the fire came in and took them away.
*
Draco raised his head slowly. He was sprawled in the middle of luxuriant warmth, and he thought he should be able to go on enjoying it for as long as he wanted.
But something pressed gently against his side, and when he rolled over, Draco saw what it was. Wonder stole his breath.
Severus rested on one side of him, and his face was healthier than it had looked in months. The illness and the hole in his magic must have been taking a toll on him even before I realized it, Draco thought, and gently reached out to touch his lover’s hair. Severus stirred and rolled closer to him. His breathing was so smooth and gentle that it seemed as if he would never be sick again.
Of course he will. But for now, I can pretend.
When Draco looked the other way, he found Harry resting there. The green potion symbols were gone from his body, as they were gone, too, from Draco’s and Severus’s. He was stretched flat, but still with a slight glimmer from his skin.
Draco reached towards him, but Harry opened his eyes before his hand could get there, and arched his neck a little. When he raised his hands, a flickering trail of magic followed them.
Draco stared. Then he smiled. “The ritual healed Severus,” he murmured. “It gave me a new bond-companion. And it seems to have put you back in touch with your magic.” He lay back and waited, in interest, for what Harry’s reaction would be.
“It seems like you got the worst deal,” Harry muttered, and fluttered his fingers. Magic once again followed their movements. He shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. But-I probably can’t go back into the Muggle world right away looking like this.”
“That’s part of the point,” Draco said quietly, and when Harry rolled towards him, snarling, he caught his neck and held him still for a moment. “You can go back eventually. But you are normal, because you’re alive, and you get to define what that is. And I can promise that no one is going to look at you in ways that you don’t like, not now. Severus and I are going to prevent that.”
Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Severus’s voice murmured from Draco’s other side, “And does Severus get a choice in this?”
Draco rolled over, heart thumping, and lifted his mouth for a kiss. Severus’s lips were there, ready to descend on his, proving that he wasn’t truly angry.
From the way Harry cuddled closer and kissed the back of Draco’s neck a second later, he wasn’t, either.
Not that I won’t welcome their anger when it comes. It’s going to be as magnificent as everything else about them.
*
Severus felt as though he was still in the middle of the ritual, seeing the world through shining planes of stained glass.
He could feel Draco beside him, his heat on Severus’s skin and his heart beating calmly. And he could feel the magic through their bond, the one that had existed before the ritual, as a caress on his skin, as fire hovering above it.
He could feel Harry, too. It was a small loss to know that he would never be able to think of him as Potter again, but then, he could think of other things. Like the way that his own magic surged and stirred in response to him, and how clear his mind was, and how he could probably brew potions now that he’d remembered giving up on in the last year. At the time, he’d used the excuse to himself that he was simply getting older, and couldn’t respond with the same clarity and vividness that he’d once used.
Now, he knew it was the draining of his magic. Thanks to Harry, he had that back.
And he could remember the tightness in Harry’s arse, and how much he would like to experience that again.
“This is an interesting result,” Severus murmured, and reached out with one hand over Draco’s back to touch Harry’s hand. Harry touched back, then withdrew. So he wanted to give Severus and Draco a moment of space.
It is needed.
Draco stared up at him with those drowning, strong, vulnerable eyes for a moment. The eyes of the boy Severus had known, who had realized, finally, what he had got himself into by becoming a Death Eater-and had determined to endure to the end, because there was nothing else he could do. And the eyes of the man who had determined that he would have Severus as his lover, despite all his family had to say on the subject.
And the eyes of the man who had determined that he would save Severus’s life, even when Severus himself told him to desist.
“Can you understand why I did it?” Draco whispered.
“Is it forgiveness that you’re asking for?” Severus snapped back.
“No,” Draco said. “Understanding.” He lifted his chin. “Because you’re alive, and that means I’ve already won.”
Severus nodded, once. He suspected part of the reason he had struggled so hard against Draco bringing Harry into the mix was the notion of owing a debt to Harry again, and not of dying with dignity. And he was never that rational with pain clouding his mind.
Not that he would admit that, any more than Draco would ask for forgiveness. But they were back to the way they had worked-or better-and there were certain words Severus did not disdain to speak.
“Good,” said Draco, and leaned up to kiss Severus. Severus leaned down to press his lips even more firmly against Draco’s.
They kissed for long moments, until Severus did what else needed to be done and broke the hold of their mouths. Then he knelt up and looked at Harry across Draco’s back. Draco rolled down and lay sprawled between them, turning his head back and forth.
Things will never be easy between us.
But there were some things that needed to be clear.
*
Harry nodded when he saw Severus looking at him. So this was a sort of confrontation, and it needed to happen with them still naked and lying inside the burned grass of the ritual circle. All right.
“I’m not sorry about saving your life the first time,” he said. “I am sorry it went wrong.”
“I was not looking for an apology,” said Severus, and gazed at him in silence for long seconds before stretching an arm out. “Come here.”
Harry clambered awkwardly to the side on hands and knees, while Draco shifted to make room for him. Harry had a sudden flash of how much that would be happening in the future, and blinked. He had thought-
Well, no, he thought, as Severus grabbed his arm and reeled him in, perhaps he had been stupid to think that this was the last time all three of them would be lovers, with only Draco and Severus maintaining that relationship from now on. Their bond didn’t have to include it.
But from the way Severus was staring at him, it would.
“Ah,” said Severus. “You are beginning to understand now?” His arm constricted Harry to his side, and he stared at him again. Draco pressed up from behind him.
Harry nodded. He understood things they couldn’t put into words, and perhaps it would be stupid to try. But, if he could have…
He trusted them to protect him from stares, because they were both capable of being frightening when they wanted.
He trusted them to keep up the terms of the bond and not to be horrible, the kind of horror he had thought they were heading for before his longer conversations with Draco and Severus in the weeks before the ritual began.
He trusted them to connect him more to the wizarding world, and that was, perhaps, something he wanted, now that he was remembering he was a wizard.
He trusted them to fuck him right.
He wasn’t sure how much he trusted them for other things. How much what he trusted them for was, well, something you shouldn’t trust people for. But he knew. And he doubted they would lie to him about any of it. Doubted they were capable anymore.
Severus nodded. Perhaps he had skimmed some of Harry’s thoughts off the surface of his mind. He could do it, as a Legilimens. Harry knew it from his time as a student, and how much he had loathed Snape doing it, as a professor.
Now, it would benefit him.
Severus kissed him, hard, enough to make Harry feel the press of teeth behind his lips, and to leave him gasping to get his breath. It wasn’t something he would ever have thought to find arousing before this; none of his previous lovers had done it. But he wanted it now, and he started when Draco’s hand curled around his hip and found his cock.
“Yeah,” Draco breathed against his neck.
“Perhaps we shall try…newly-bonded sex,” said Severus, and eased Harry up onto his hands and knees. “If Harry’s arse is not too sore?”
“I’m sure you can make it better,” Harry muttered into his hands, and heard Severus laugh, followed by Draco.
“Yes, we can,” Draco said, and his voice was warm and confident.
So was Severus’s silence.
And as fingers probed gently into him, covered with conjured lube instead of ritual power this time, Harry shut his eyes and sighed, gently. This wasn’t something he had ever anticipated when Draco had contacted him and he’d offered to heal Severus, but it was something he could get used to, feel warm about, welcome.
Just like magic.
The End.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/764752.html. Comment wherever you like.
Draco waited until nearly midnight to knock on the door of Potter’s hovel. Severus had already gone to bed, the silence between them smoldering. Draco had started the day happy because Severus was recovering, and now he’d had it all spoiled by Potter’s reluctance and idiocy.
“Potter!” He raised his voice when he got no answer. “I know you’re in there. And awake.” The shine of the light of that stupid Muggle machine through the windows would have told him that even if he couldn’t hear Potter moving around in there. Really, Potter must think they were imbeciles.
Potter opened the door so little a space that Draco couldn’t see him through it. Draco had expected that, too. Severus had told him about being pushed out of the house by an invisible wind earlier.
“Listen to me,” Draco told the tiny crack, with as much dignity as he could when he felt ridiculous. “You’re going to bond to us. That means spending a lot more time with us than this, and putting up with us.”
Potter laughed. The sound was so unexpected that Draco thought he had mistaken it for a second. “Are you mad, Malfoy? Or just hoping to trick me so you can laugh about it later? I read the ritual as well as you did. It said that we wouldn’t need to spend any time together after the initial bonding. My presence ought to sustain Snape whether I’m here or miles away. And it isn’t the sort of bond where we need to have sex once a month or something like that.”
Draco closed his eyes. “Potter, you prick. Did you read onto the next page?”
“No. Because you also described it as working like that.” Potter’s voice was as empty as the night around them.
“We won’t have a telepathic or empathic bond like the ones that would become traditional with this type of ritual, no.” Draco slumped against the side of the house. Suddenly a lot of the way that Potter had been behaving made sense. Draco had thought Potter was distancing himself because of resentment at what he’d have to undergo, but no, he just thought this was the way it was going to be. “I don’t think any of us could stand that.”
“And it’s not sexual?” Potter sounded bored, damn him.
“No.”
“Then what?”
Draco sighed again. “We do have to spend some time together. Not much, not nearly as much as you’re doing now. But it’s a sort of-it has to be a bond of togetherness. We have to eat some meals together, at certain phases of the moon. You have to spend time with us, and we some time with you. In your home, I mean. And it means that we need to cast certain spells in concert. Severus would probably need to teach you to brew, because there are potions that need to be done in common, as well. And you would come and spend some time with me in my business.”
Silence came back. Except for the crack of darkness through the door, which Draco kept his eyes on, he would have thought Potter had gone to bed.
Then Potter whispered, “When did you plan on telling me this?”
“I thought you’d read it.” Draco took refuge in rage, the only refuge there was now, striking out as hard as he could. “And didn’t object to it, because nothing we did seemed to have any impact on you-”
The door flew open, and Potter yanked him into the room. Draco went with a stumble, and came up and around with his wand in his hand. He might have to restrict the damage he did to Potter so it didn’t affect Severus, but he wasn’t going to lie down and wait for Potter to crush him with a spell, either.
He didn’t have to, he realized when he saw the raging inferno of Potter’s eyes. Potter didn’t need a spell to crush him. His magic ranged free around the room, and bits and pieces of the plank walls froze, and then melted again, and burned with a strange, soundless blue fire that left only afterimages behind. There was tar on one of the planks for a moment, and then shadows, and then sand. Draco swallowed and yanked his gaze away from them. The real danger was right in front of him.
“You haven’t been acting like someone who’d need to spend time with me after this,” Potter whispered, and took a step towards Draco that cracked the floor beneath him. “You’ve been doing everything you can to show me how much you distrust me, and to antagonize me. This dinner idea in Diagon Alley was only the latest in a long chain of petty insults.”
“You needed to go with us to keep Severus safe,” Draco said stiffly. “We had to come home right after you left. We barely enjoyed it.”
“You made sure I didn’t, either.” Potter lifted his lip as if he was showing off his teeth like a dog. “What’s the matter? Don’t think that I’ll ever change from the boy you had the prejudiced view of at Hogwarts? Then this bond is pointless. You’re telling me about the things I’ll have to change and learn and become, but you didn’t intend to change at all, did you?”
Draco swallowed and massaged his forehead for a second. Potter’s accusations made sense when he thought about them in that light, little as he liked them. He supposed that neither he nor Severus had gone out of their way to make a friend of Potter.
“All right,” he said. “You’re-correct about that, at least. I’m sorry.” The words were so foreign in his mouth that it made Draco realize how long it was since he had said them and meant them. He said them often to Severus, but they were mocking more often than not. “But you’re strange, Potter. I think it would actually be easier if you were more like how I remembered you at Hogwarts. At least I thought I understood you then. Now I don’t, and you’re just weird.”
Potter went still for some reason. Then he laughed. “A freak, right?”
The word had resonances that Draco didn’t understand, but he could hardly miss them-not when the air around him had begun to whirl and congeal with wind fast enough to make his eyes sting.
“No,” said Draco carefully. No matter how much he might have used the word in his own thoughts, which wasn’t often because it wasn’t a word that he used often, period, he wasn’t going to say it aloud now. “I just-fuck, Potter, you’re a wizard.” The word exploded out of him, into the outlet that the rest of his rage was denied. “Why would you want to give up your magic and live in the Muggle world? Why, in the name of Merlin?”
“Because of the staring.”
“You could go out under a glamour,” Draco replied. His breathing was easing, he realized, and he no longer thought Potter might murder him or throw him out the door for being impudent. Yes, this was what he had wanted to discuss. “Come on, Potter. Tell me the truth. Why did you flee the world that you saved?”
Potter paused for a long moment, studying Draco as if he wanted to see how serious he was and whether he would treat Potter’s answer likewise seriously. Draco tried to maintain a calm face, and nodded when Potter’s eyes grew sharp and scrutinizing. Yes, he could at least make sure that he didn’t mock Potter for the answer, whatever he felt about it.
Finally, Potter said, “Because I wanted to live a normal life. An ordinary one. I shouldn’t have to use a glamour to do that. Besides, how long would I have to live under it? How long until people got used to it? They still haven’t stopped gaping at the mere sight of me, as you saw tonight.”
“I think they were gaping at you because they hadn’t seen you in so long,” said Draco. “Come back, and be normal, and go around in the wizarding world, and they would probably get used to you and stop staring soon.”
Potter shook his head. “I told you that I didn’t like being looked at. That’s not true. I hate it. And I can lead a normal life in the Muggle world. A normal life for a human.”
“Not for a wizard,” Draco countered, feeling the words burning on his tongue, breaking against his teeth like iron bolts. He leaned forwards. “Which you are. Come on, Potter. Come back and at least use this bond to reestablish yourself in the wizarding world and claim what their staring has denied you.”
“And you think that once people learn I’m bonded to two men who were on the opposite side of the war, they’re really going to be enthusiastic about that?” Potter shook his head and closed his eyes. “I can’t do this, Malfoy. I already decided.”
“You’re going to have to, because of the bond,” Draco said bluntly. “And you haven’t seen how scathing Severus and I can be in defense of our privacy. We can get them to leave you alone.”
Potter’s hand trembled for a moment. He wasn’t looking at Draco, but he seemed to tell Draco could see it anyway, and stuffed it into a pocket.
“There are times I miss magic,” Potter whispered. “But I was only getting along with this in the first place by convincing myself I can have my normal life back when it’s done. What happens when I start-realizing what’s going to happen?”
“You come to us, and let us help you,” said Draco at once. “Beltane is always intense. Did you ever participate in a ritual on it before?”
Potter’s magic sparked in a way that Draco took for a negative answer, and he moved a step closer. “Come on, Potter. It’s going to be hard for all of us. You already agreed to do this to save Severus’s life, and that means-that means we do owe you some basic consideration. I can’t promise Severus will go along with it any time soon, but I’ll try.”
Potter gave him a tired smile. “Malfoy, you’re talking about a man who was willing to die because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not willing to go along with it at all is what I’d expect.”
Draco snorted. “Well, he’ll be part of the bond along with you and me. Despite what you might think, Severus doesn’t engage in useless displays of temper. He wouldn’t want to make the rest of his own life miserable, even if he thought it might be fun to do it to you. I promise,” he added, when Potter started to open his mouth as if he wasn’t convinced. “He’ll come around. Maybe not until after the ritual, but it’s hard to share an experience like that and remain unconnected.” He hesitated. “What made you think you’d be able to?”
“I’m not really a wizard anymore,” Potter said simply. “I don’t have much to do with you, while you already have a bond. All that.”
Draco pointed at the wall. Potter looked over, and started when he saw the patch of luminous, glowing red-orange light there. Draco reckoned that he found it hard to feel what his magic was doing when it was distant from him.
“You’re not a Muggle,” Draco told him. “No Muggle could make a wall glow like that without raising a finger. Hell, not many wizards could do it, either. Come back to magic, Potter. You can think of that as what this ritual is going to give you, if you like. Just like Severus is getting his life back.”
“And you?” Potter’s voice was soft, the way it had been the night he came in response to Draco’s summons. “What about you? Do you just get to see Snape alive and happy? Is that enough?”
“I love him, so yes,” said Draco. It was hard to speak of his love for Severus in front of Severus, but Potter made it easy, created an atmosphere where it would have been harder to hold back. “But I think I might gain something else as well.”
He held Potter’s gaze, making it obvious that he wasn’t thinking just of the sex, and finished in a murmur, “This is the most honestly I’ve spoken to someone else in a long time. It’s hard, with Severus.”
Potter slowly nodded. There was a look in his eyes that might become wonder if Draco didn’t crush it. He was resolved not to crush it.
“Good,” said Draco. “Now, I’m going to bed. I hope you sleep well, Potter.” He inclined his head to him, then turned and walked back out the door.
It didn’t close behind him until he had almost reached the door of his own home. Draco let his lips quirk a little, a satisfied movement. Yes, he knew Potter had stood there and watched him.
Watch me, Potter. I might teach you things you never dreamed of learning.
Only fair to return the favor.
*
Severus steeled himself for a harder task than brewing a Draught of Peace blindfolded, and waited until sunset, and then went out to the boulder where Potter liked to sit and watch that sunset with a civil tongue in his head.
He could have used a Draught of Peace, in fact. The last week had not been pleasant. Draco had told him the truth roundly, which he often did, but then added that having Potter miserable was a bad thing for its own sake, as well as because it could affect the bond that was going to form between Potter and them.
Severus had pointed out that Potter was bringing his own misery on himself by doing things like staying out of the wizarding world and then letting the stares get to him. It was a good argument. An unanswerable one, he had thought.
Until Draco had smiled at him and produced chains of logic of the sort that Severus thought he must have learned from Lucius. Not that he was about to bring up Draco’s parents. Some things, he did know better about.
“Does it matter whose fault it is, if it’s going to be affecting all of us? And what kind of fools would we be if we didn’t try and alleviate it? No, Severus, we have to do something about this.” He’d paused and eyed Severus, and went on doing it until Severus had nodded, because he had seen where this was going already. “Good. Then go and speak to him, and try to act like you’re at least marginally interested.”
I am here for Draco, and not Potter, Severus told himself stiffly as he moved through the gardens and towards the taut back of the man sitting on the boulder. He will sense that. He won’t be accepting of me in the way Draco thinks he will.
In the end, however, Potter didn’t fly at him the way that Severus had thought he would. He’d turned around and studied Severus as though checking how his robes hung, then nodded and moved aside. Astonished, Severus watched as Potter waved at the boulder and understood he was being invited to sit down.
“You’ll welcome me this close to you?” Severus muttered as he sat.
Potter shot him a glance. “There’s a difference between welcoming and accepting.”
There was indeed, Severus thought. Albus had made use of the difference often enough to tame some of Severus’s reactions when he still worked at Hogwarts. It merely wasn’t the sort of thing he had thought Potter would know.
Potter was still gazing ahead at the sunset as if nothing could trouble him, but Severus caught sight of one tight hand gripping the edge of the boulder. At least that showed this was affecting him somehow, Severus thought.
“Draco told me that you don’t think of yourself as a wizard anymore.” Severus might be willing to do a lot of things, but not approach the subject subtly. Besides, if Potter was smart enough to make distinctions like the one had just made to Severus, then he was smart enough to see through honeyed words.
“I don’t,” said Potter simply. He turned slightly towards Severus, and Severus could see his profile better now-in case he had been longing to do that, which he hadn’t. “But I reckon I’ll have to get used to it again now, since I’ll be spending time with you a lot once the bond takes. Why did you get together with Malfoy in the first place?”
Mouth open to retort, Severus found himself stranded in the unexpected position of having to answer a question. “That need not concern you,” he said finally.
“Then my acceptance of being a wizard or not doesn’t need to concern you,” Potter said. Once again, he filled his eyes with the vanishing orange rim of the sun beyond the edge of the mountains. He seemed to soak in the silence that filled the little valley, and Severus knew he wouldn’t get much more out of him.
Left now with his own unwillingness to lose a game like this to Harry Potter, Severus thought furiously. He had asked a question. Potter had answered it, and offered a question of his own.
Is the game to be that simple?
It seemed it was. Severus faced Potter, and murmured, “We were isolated together in the wake of Albus’s death, in the wake of the war, and I seemed to have taken the position of more than a mentor to him, although I didn’t know that for a long time. Not to take him would have been cruel.” He hesitated, but Potter didn’t demand more information, and didn’t get up and storm away, either. “What makes you think of yourself as not a wizard?”
“It’s easier for me than most people, because I was raised by Muggles and I don’t have the family ties here,” Potter said. Before Severus could open his mouth to retort, he added, “Why become his lover, though? Why not just his mentor?”
Severus curbed his impatience. He could do this with tricky potions; he could do it with Potter. Potter would not be able to say he had won this contest. “Because that was what he needed. And then shortly, it was what I needed, as well. You have friends. Why not come back for them?”
“Because they’re willing to come see me in the Muggle world, and they understand my dislike of publicity. Why did you need it?”
Severus paused, weighing his words. He need only answer the actual pronoun, he decided swiftly, not say why Draco had needed it. “Because I needed one relationship that would provide a haven for me in a world that had gone Dark to the very core. It was dangerous, but not as dangerous as the waltz I danced between two masters, and without it, I would have gone insane.”
Potter turned and considered him, a calm, grave look that said nothing about judging him. Severus eased down a little, and added, “Why do you dislike publicity so much?”
“I got told enough that I was different when I was a child, and not in a positive way. And this isn’t always positive, either.” Potter’s mouth curled, but he went on without pausing. “Are you willing to enter this bond?”
Severus blinked. “You know I have no choice if I wish to live.”
“Not what I asked,” Potter murmured, and his eyes this time were unblinking, in a way that reminded Severus of a particularly stubborn cat he’d used to own.
Severus struggled in silence for a time. He would have got up and stormed away at the slightest sign from Potter. But all Potter did was sit there and watch him, and Severus finally hissed a little, nodded, and said, “It will make Draco happy. And while I thought otherwise, when I also thought that I had no chance of surviving the illness in any case, I wish to make him happy.”
Potter relaxed. “Good. Then I can go ahead without worrying that I’m doing something that makes you so unhappy you can’t stand being bonded to me.”
He stood, but Severus threw out an arm to bar him, and asked the last question he was owed. “Why do you care about my unhappiness?”
Potter could have fobbed him off with any one of a number of easy responses, but he stood there, eyes trained on Severus, and Severus knew he was being considered in the last low light of the sun, and answered honesty.
“Because this is something for life. I know I can bear it, and I’m pretty sure that it’ll relieve Malfoy’s mind, but I didn’t know what you thought.”
Severus inclined his head. Potter walked away and shut the door of his little house behind him, and a second later, his Muggle telly started to life.
Severus settled back slowly against the rock. It was little enough, but something between them had changed.
And sometimes an avalanche starts with a pebble.
*
It was hard not to admire them, Harry thought, once you saw them working together.
It was something he might not have noticed if he didn’t have the example of Ron and Hermione to compare them to. Hermione would sometimes go into a wild flight of rhetoric when she visited Harry, waving her arms and telling the story of the latest idiot who wanted the right to beat his house-elves, and Ron was the one who silently rescued her teacup from falling over. Then he would go and get more tea, and she would reach out and pick it up and have the slightest, loveliest smile on her face before she sipped.
And there were the times that Ron was distressed about something in his family-like his mum pushing them to have kids now, when they just weren’t ready, or George brooding on Fred’s death more than usual-and Hermione would lean her shoulder against his and tell Harry something light and amusing while Ron withdrew from the conversation a little. Then Ron would tap her hand, and Hermione would segue neatly into whatever he wanted to talk about.
It wasn’t mind-reading, unless both his best friends had taken up Legilimency without telling Harry. It was being bonded.
And Malfoy and Snape moved around each other in that same way, that dancing way, that waltzing way. Malfoy reached for an ingredient, and Snape had it ready to provide. Snape broke the stirring rod against the side of the cauldron, and Malfoy reached out and swept the broken glass up with a spell that created an invisible net before it could hit the surface of the potion. Their hands brushed each other’s because of a longing to be where the other one was.
Harry wondered for a moment if that was the kind of thing they would all have, after they were bonded.
But he rejected the thought at once. He knew the bond was of a different kind. It would blend their magic, but only enough to stabilize Snape’s.
And the bond between you and Malfoy?
Harry shrugged to himself and went back to crushing the tulip bulbs that Snape had assigned him. He had said that Harry wouldn’t be able to mess that up, much. This potion was the one that would decorate their bodies in the actual ritual, and the bulbs needed to be completely mashed before being added.
He wouldn’t have an experience like theirs. Well. It was beautiful to watch, anyway.
*
Draco sat up and put his book aside. There was a nagging sensation in the corner of his mouth, as though he had a sudden toothache. He hissed under his breath as he stood up and moved to the mirror. Illness would delay the ritual, now scarcely a week away.
But it wasn’t his tooth. The window was in the same direction as the mirror, and now he knew what was going on.
He looked out into the back garden, where Potter and Severus were, near the boulder that had become their unofficial post by which to gather when doing ritual activities. He was in time to hear the raised voices, and he leaned his arms on the windowsill and watched, blinking. He reckoned it was his bond with Severus that had drawn him, but he didn’t know why. Severus was capable of handling their rows by himself.
“You are a powerful wizard!” Severus sounded pissed-off in that very particular way he had when someone was denying a basic fact to him.
“But I didn’t win the war because of that!” Potter was waving one hand, and his eyes were raging like a forest fire. “I won the war because of my mother’s love and Voldemort’s arrogance and-”
“You will use magic to prepare the ritual circle, because it must be used that way!”
“One of you could do it!”
Severus’s voice came out low and ugly. “Then you are not powerful enough?”
Potter spun around, snarling, and lifted his wand. Something that looked like a green rope, jungle-colored light, sprayed out of the end of it, and leaped into the air, and settled like a lasso around a circle of earth. Draco saw the disturbed soil leap into the air, and the raw color of the dirt, and then Potter lashed again and laid another rope on top of that one, and the circle was made of softly glowing light the way it was supposed to be.
“There,” Potter said, and glared. “Fuck you.” And he stomped off to his house and slammed the door.
Severus had no expression on his face, but he watched the door as if he expected Potter to come back out. Draco took a step back, amazed to discover how stunned he had become simply watching a display of magic.
And how hard.
*
Severus wondered if he was the only one who could see the wary way that Draco and Potter circled around each other.
Or maybe he meant the wary way that Draco circled around Potter. Potter seemed oblivious to most things outside of himself, including how much magic he would have to use once the ritual began.
But Draco’s eyes would lock on Potter and then flit away again, and he frowned down at the rite book when Potter found out another thing he apparently hadn’t been aware of, that he would need to spend the hour before the rite naked and meditating, and he flinched when Potter drew his wand.
Draco had to remember a bathroom where he had suffered from the effects of Potter’s wand. Severus himself had touched the scars more than once.
On the other hand, Draco didn’t seem inclined to back away from the ritual. He didn’t balk at preparing the extensive potions necessary to make sure that they would have enough to decorate themselves with; each potion boiled away at the end to reveal a small scrim of liquid in the bottom of the cauldron, so they had brewed that particular potion until Severus went to sleep with the measurements in his head.
The day that Potter made an offhand reference to something he’d seen on his Muggle devices and Draco blew up, Severus realized he might have misjudged the situation.
“You’re a bloody wizard,” Draco said in a muffled voice, slamming down the book he was reading for the five hundredth time and pivoting around to stare at Potter. “Why aren’t you referring to magical theory, or Diagon Alley, or-or those bloody songs Celestina Warbeck sings, if you need to talk about something trivial?”
Potter stared at him. “Because I don’t like Celestina Warbeck?” he offered.
Severus leaned back against the door of his lab. He had been researching another potion they might be able to use in the ritual that would not take as long as this one did to brew, and he had come out only to ask Draco a question about the location of a particular book whose title he could not remember. He thought things would change between the two of them if they noticed he was there.
Draco leaned forwards with his hands braced on the table, clenched fists, as if he was going to transform them suddenly into horse-hooves and prance away. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he whispered. “You act like you despise magic, when you’re getting ready to perform one of the most powerful and dangerous magical rituals in our library, on one of the most magical days in the year. What are you doing here, Potter? Really? If you want to go be a Muggle, why you don’t just go be a Muggle?”
“Because, amazingly,” Potter said, and leaned forwards as if he was going to transform himself as suddenly into a snake and lunge, “I’m capable of thinking about and being more than one thing at once. Wizard and Muggle. Magic-user and someone who watches the telly. Why are you running an apothecary instead of murdering and torturing people on the path to Dark Lord-dom?”
Draco reeled. Severus lifted his eyebrows. Perhaps he was wrong about a better understanding, or at least a deeper one, growing between Potter and Draco. No one who knew Draco would have asked that question.
“I don’t-I hate torture,” Draco whispered. “I never wanted to do that. No one asked me if I wanted to do that.”
“Exactly. And no one asked me if I was willing to save the world, either.” Potter fell back a measured step. “I just had to do it because Voldemort would have killed me if I didn’t. Now I want to live in a world that doesn’t remind me of that, at least sometimes. I’ll have a better connection to the magical world if I do this ritual. Fine. At least, though, you could show me that it’s a connection with people who are going to respect me.”
“I do respect you.” Draco’s voice was very low.
“Then trust the answer I gave you.” Potter’s voice was gentle, and he reached out and clasped Draco’s arm for a minute. “Whether or not you like it. I respect the path you took after the war.”
Respect mine. The words were ringing in the room, unheard.
Draco gave an uncertain nod, and then turned back to reminding Potter yet again of the ritual responses he needed to give. Severus quietly shut the door.
Perhaps he didn’t need to research different potions after all. What they had at the moment might work.
*
The night before the ritual, the night before Beltane, Harry stood at the window of his little house and watched the stars rise. This far away from any Muggle city, the points of light were wild and majestic, scattering radiance into the air that Harry realized he had missed when he was in London.
He had missed a lot of things about the wizarding world, honestly. Not just his friends and Diagon Alley.
His friends. Harry hadn’t told Ron and Hermione about what he intended to do. He just-he didn’t want to. At first, he had justified it by telling himself that Ron would be horrified by Harry having that kind of connection with Snape and Malfoy, and he didn’t want to listen to the arguments when he had to make the connection anyway to save Snape’s life.
But lately, he had realized he didn’t want to. He loved his friends. They would always be the main draw to the wizarding world for him.
But-they had their bond, too. Harry loved watching it, but he was outside it. He simply couldn’t be close to them that way, no matter how close they were in other ways.
This time, he had a chance to be part of something like it, but different. It was his. It was private. He wanted it.
And that was the real reason he would go through this, despite all the doubts that he sometimes had about Snape and Malfoy and whether a bond that had first formed between two people could ever expand to include a third.
He drew the curtains over the window.
*
Draco stepped into the back garden. He was clad in the thin, white robe that the ritual demanded, and he could feel the drift and swirl of incredibly heavy magic around him. Magic that seemed to steam from the grass, to rise from the turning of the earth about the sun. Once, this would have been the first day of summer.
Now, it was a day of magic that connected Draco to the man behind him-Severus, also clad in a thin robe, but this one dark green. Draco had to keep himself from turning to admire how well Severus looked in it. Silver serpents marched up and down the edge of the robe, but that wasn’t required. It was just a touch Severus had said he might as well add after he had seen how much of the rest of the ritual featured Slytherin symbols.
And the magic also came off the bonfire that burned ahead of them, streaming with more colors than any natural fire should have, red and gold and orange, deep, luxuriant shades that Draco had never seen in flames before. Phoenix-colored, he thought, before he could stop himself, and perhaps that was appropriate considering the man who sat upright in the circle in front of the fire, facing it with his arms crossed on top of his knees.
He was naked, and he shook sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes and looked up. His face had taken on a sheen of calm as well as sweat from his meditation, Draco thought, or else it looked more vulnerable with his eyes and scar bared. He had no glasses, not now. He didn’t need them to see. He would know every step of this ritual by heart.
He should, after the amount of time that we spent studying.
Draco shed the thought the way he shed the robe a moment later, though, dropping the white garment straight down to the ground. He heard Severus walk out of his own robe behind him. Green, it would touch the grass, the color of the grass. And Draco’s robe would lie there like the snow that was beginning to melt on the mountains around them.
Draco stepped out of the space he had occupied for so long in relation to Potter, the space of being exasperated with him and disliking him and hating him and thinking he would have done something different with all those gifts than Potter had, and straight into ritual space. The air around him sharpened, grew like pleated paintings full of color and depthless light. Draco held out a hand, and realized he had crossed the distance between him and the edge of the ritual circle in what seemed like a single step.
His hand lingered on Potter’s forehead, fingers tracing the scar. Potter looked up at him and smiled.
Draco’s senses flew away from him for a second, everything but sight and touch. He could feel the worn skin. He could see the green eyes. He could see the light playing on Potter’s face, and feel the heat from the fire. All else was gone.
He asked the first question he had to ask, while Severus moved over to the other side of the circle and stopped. Potter watched Draco with the calm, absolute trust he had needed. “Do you consent to be painted by my hand?”
“I do,” said Potter, and lay back on the ground, open and stretching himself, limbs projecting out into the bounded space of the circle.
Draco swallowed and picked up the cauldron beside him, which held the mixed remains of all the many potions that he and Severus and Potter had prepared during the past month. They slipped back and forth, and Draco drew out the tiny, smooth brush made of hummingbird feathers that had been more of a pain to make than the potions themselves. The feathers shone like rubies, like peacocks, like paradise.
“You consent to accept the first symbol?” he asked, and positioned the brush with the green potion dripping from it above Potter’s chest. His heart.
“I do,” Potter said, and his chest rose and fell with his breathing.
Draco stared as his painted. The first symbol was simple enough, a circle, echoing the ritual circle, but Draco had to place it partially on top of a round, ugly scar that he didn’t understand. It looked awfully similar to a place of jewelry, as if Potter had been wearing a locket around his neck and it had burned through his clothes and into his skin.
But the question faded as Draco worked, as he asked the questions and painted the symbols, and Potter’s response rose and fell in a quickening chant.
“Do you accept the second symbol?”
“I do.”
A flying dragon on his left leg.
“Do you accept the third symbol?”
“I do.”
A swirling serpent on his right leg.
“Do you accept the fourth symbol?”
“I do.”
A lightning bolt on his forehead, covering the one already there.
“Do you accept the fifth symbol?”
“I do.”
A pair of circles on his eyelids, conjoined by a thick line between them, the only part visible as he blinked.
“Do you accept the sixth symbol?”
“I do.”
A dragon rampant on his left arm. Draco carefully etched the edges of the wings in the thickest and greenest part of the potion.
“Do you accept the seventh symbol?”
“I do.”
The serpent coiled on his right arm. Draco’s arm tingled as a warning jolt of magic shot up it.
“Do you accept the eighth symbol?”
“I do.”
And a lightning bolt, turned sideways, on the triangle of skin right above Potter’s groin.
The instant Draco finished painting, the fire blew up. Suddenly there was a wall of flame surrounding them, lancing and lashing from side to side of a bigger circle than the ritual one, closing them in, binding them, not yet bonding them. Draco swallowed. They could not leave now, not until the ritual was complete or they were dead.
And they would die if they didn’t complete it in the right way. That was simple fact.
But at the same time, Draco’s swallow was only his body’s fear. He was not afraid. He stood up and bowed, then looked across the circle at Severus.
“He is yours,” he said, and Severus crossed the barrier of the ritual circle that he’d been avoiding so far. The fire moved with him, leaped with him, and now it burned exactly on that side of the circle.
Draco stood, and watched.
*
The moment he crossed into the circle, Severus knew this would not be gentle. It could not.
The ritual reached into the deepest parts of him and hauled all of him up-the man who had hated Harry Potter for being the son of his rival, the man who had been willing to die for Harry Potter but not be saved by him, the man who had loved Lily Potter and hated her for rescuing him.
The man who had been a Death Eater.
Severus shivered, unsteady, as the memories roared through him and bound him, as chains of silvery magic and blue magic and white magic and green magic leaped out of the ground and converged on him. For a moment, he was those people again, dying in the Shrieking Shack, watching Lily walk away from him, torturing a victim with his father’s face, glaring at a defiant Harry Potter in the brat’s first Potions class-
The memories clapped together and were gone. But now Severus had Harry on the ground in front of him, and as surely as he knew that this man’s name was Harry and not Potter now, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold back.
The green symbols were painted all over his own body, though shifted by one position, so that the circle was on his left leg, and the dragon on his right leg, and so on, down to the circle above his groin. He knew it. He knew the potion had leaped from the cauldron and hit him, powered and shaped and painted by the magic of the spell.
He knew it, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the painted symbols didn’t count as clothing Harry, and all Severus wanted at the moment was to take.
He lunged.
Harry was there to welcome him, arms opening, lips parting to allow his tongue to grasp Severus’s, but it wasn’t enough. Severus was on his knees beside him, hand grasping and pulling on everything from Harry’s skin itself to the hair between his nipples, and Harry lifted his head and gave a small sound of pain.
Severus laughed, rough, unending. He threw his leg over Harry’s hips and reached for his own cock. Harry was rolling, to the side, to lift his legs and expose the arse Severus had spent so much time standing on the other side of the circle and staring at. Severus was still laughing as he reached out with his fingers. The ritual was supposed to make this happen, make Harry ready to be taken, as much as it was supposed to incite Severus’s desire.
But, in truth, Severus did not care if Harry wasn’t ready. He was going to have him regardless.
He slid in. It was a long, sliding plunge, rather like diving into a pool of blood. Strange, odd, perhaps disgusting at first if Severus thought about it, but then he was at the bottom, and opening his eyes, and this was exactly where he wanted to be.
He opened his eyes. Harry lay beneath him, panting up, the dark green circles visible on his eyelids when he shut them. That shimmer of green potion on his skin separated him from both his parents for Severus, because James would never have agreed to this and Lily wouldn’t have needed that paint.
There was very little gentleness in Severus at the moment, but there was a sense of rightness. The hole in his magic, rather like a hole in wards, had faded. Harry’s magic poured in, and Severus tossed his head back and made a sound that was not a laugh, because laughter didn’t sound like that.
Harry made the same sound beneath him.
Severus placed his hands on either side of Harry’s head and began to thrust. No, it wasn’t gentle. Despite the magic that had eased his way, he knew full well that Harry would bleed from it. But it didn’t matter. Not when Harry was opening his mouth and grasping eagerly with it at anything that he could reach, including Severus’s fingers when they brushed for a moment past his mouth.
Images glinted and slid in and out of Severus’s mind. A cupboard beneath the stairs. A lunging snake that had left a pool of blood spilled on the floor, blood from his own throat. A basilisk fang through his arm. A green-eyed girl turning her back on him.
And more images. Hurtling after the Golden Snitch, the sudden thunder of applause as he caught it. The excitement of brewing, the softness and certainty waiting for him at the bottom of a cauldron that even a wand in his hand didn’t equal. Turning the Elder Wand on Voldemort. Waking that first morning with Draco in his arms.
The images blended and shot through him, and Severus saw the green, painted images on Harry’s body taking fire. They were burning without harming him, constant shimmering fire, closest to Severus where their legs entwined and their groins pressed together. Severus heard the flames murmuring in soft voices to themselves. Only the sound of his balls slapping into Harry’s arse was louder.
The flames were wild, dancing around the circle, dancing on Harry’s body, dancing on Severus’s shoulders and in his hair as his own symbols began finally and fully to burn. Severus tried harder to rock. There was something he was supposed to say, something he was supposed to remember…
“I bind you,” he gasped to Harry, as the thunder-inside him this time, applause under his skin-stirred and echoed and slid towards his cock. “I offer you the-bonded-state of my own soul, and this is the-bonded nature of mine.”
“And I accept,” Harry said, voice stronger than Severus’s, “with my own unbonded soul, opening to yours, clutching and holding on.”
Why is his voice stronger than mine when he’s the one getting fucked?
On that indignant note in his mind, Severus came, the pull of pleasure through his body stronger than he’d ever imagined anything could be. He tossed his head back and his body stiffened at the same moment as Harry cried out beneath him.
But his one major thought, at the moment, was a determination to make Harry sound more fucked next time.
*
Everything hurt.
Harry ached with simmering heat, on his skin where the fire burned, in his eyes were sweat had run, in his arse. In his cock, even, where the pleasure had taken place so violently that he felt seared. He tumbled limply away from Severus as he climbed off Harry and sat down on the grass beside him, head bowed, panting harshly into his knees.
Harry would have enjoyed lying there for a while, recovering himself and waiting for the flames to subside.
But footsteps approached, and Harry remembered. To complete the bond, the third one, he had to let Draco fuck him.
And he had to come. Again.
Honestly, Harry didn’t know if he could do it.
He reached out, groping, with one hand, and Draco caught it and drew it up to his lips, where he bit it. Harry moaned in surprise. He knew that Draco biting him wouldn’t disrupt the paint that was burning, since it was on his arm and not his hand, but he hadn’t known…
He hadn’t known that that would be the thing to bring the desire roaring back through him, leaping from point to point in his body, arching up and filling him up like the starlight he had seen from the window last night, like the stars.
“Yes,” said Draco, in a voice that was nearly a drone compared to the rough one Severus had used to talk while he fucked him. “I thought so.”
He turned Harry to the side and drew his hands over his head. Harry grunted a little. He knew the fire had closed in on the other side of the circle the minute Draco had stepped into it, and he was a little displeased with having his fingers that close to the flames.
Instead of letting his hands go, though, Draco did a spell with a murmur. Harry stared. He hadn’t thought Draco had brought his wand with him, or-
And he hadn’t. This was wandless magic, the same power that had made Harry ready for Severus, pouring over and through and between them. And then it was between Harry’s fingers in turn, and Harry flexed his hands hard as he realized that his fingers were looped through links of chain that in turn were attached to stakes in the ground.
“Why?” he whispered, a response that wasn’t part of the ritual and might displease Draco because of that, because it wasn’t planned.
But Draco only looked at him, smiling, surrounded already by a glint of green fire from the symbols that had appeared on his body, as they had appeared on Severus’s, when he crossed the boundary of the circle.
“Because I wanted to,” he said. “Just like I wanted to bite you.” He shrugged a little. “I don’t understand all my desires. But you’re going to.” And he slid into Harry’s body in a slam, instead of the long slide that Severus had used.
Harry shouted. He knew that it was silly to expect gentleness given how intense this was, but-
“You thought I’d be gentler than Severus,” Draco whispered above him, and rocked into his body in long, deep, punishing, fucking strokes.
“Yeah,” Harry gasped, and gulped as much air as he could. Another thing he hadn’t expected to burn: the inside of his throat. It felt as though he had run ten miles at a stretch, and he still wasn’t done.
“I’m not,” said Draco. “I just have different ways of showing it.” He paused, and when he blinked his eyes open, Harry saw Draco’s own eyes darken. “And I’m still annoyed at you about forsaking your own magic.”
“I told you the reasons for that,” Harry snarled back at him. “And they’re true-”
“I know, but I still don’t like them,” said Draco, and sped up his rocking.
It was getting painful. Harry twisted his head to the side and panted, trying to take in as much air as possible despite the way it made his throat burn. He wanted to-he wanted to shout, he wanted to cry out-
And then the pleasure raced through him as Draco’s cock found his prostate, and Harry shouted for a different reason. And his throat and his arse were both burning, and he honestly wasn’t sure which one hurt more, and which one pleased him more.
“Yes,” Draco said, and then began to whisper. “I bind you. I offer you the bonded nature of my own soul, and my magic, that does not need you, but wants you, accepts you.”
“And I accept,” Harry gasped back, “with the once-bonded nature of my own soul, and with my magic, which opens and welcomes yours.”
“Just like your body is opening and welcoming me now,” Draco murmured back, sounding delirious, and thrust home and held, hard and still.
Harry knew Draco had come, that he must have, because the fire closed in around them. But what mattered most of all was that he came, that he did it somehow, that his body cried out along with him and he managed it, the way he had known he would have to.
Then the fire came in and took them away.
*
Draco raised his head slowly. He was sprawled in the middle of luxuriant warmth, and he thought he should be able to go on enjoying it for as long as he wanted.
But something pressed gently against his side, and when he rolled over, Draco saw what it was. Wonder stole his breath.
Severus rested on one side of him, and his face was healthier than it had looked in months. The illness and the hole in his magic must have been taking a toll on him even before I realized it, Draco thought, and gently reached out to touch his lover’s hair. Severus stirred and rolled closer to him. His breathing was so smooth and gentle that it seemed as if he would never be sick again.
Of course he will. But for now, I can pretend.
When Draco looked the other way, he found Harry resting there. The green potion symbols were gone from his body, as they were gone, too, from Draco’s and Severus’s. He was stretched flat, but still with a slight glimmer from his skin.
Draco reached towards him, but Harry opened his eyes before his hand could get there, and arched his neck a little. When he raised his hands, a flickering trail of magic followed them.
Draco stared. Then he smiled. “The ritual healed Severus,” he murmured. “It gave me a new bond-companion. And it seems to have put you back in touch with your magic.” He lay back and waited, in interest, for what Harry’s reaction would be.
“It seems like you got the worst deal,” Harry muttered, and fluttered his fingers. Magic once again followed their movements. He shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. But-I probably can’t go back into the Muggle world right away looking like this.”
“That’s part of the point,” Draco said quietly, and when Harry rolled towards him, snarling, he caught his neck and held him still for a moment. “You can go back eventually. But you are normal, because you’re alive, and you get to define what that is. And I can promise that no one is going to look at you in ways that you don’t like, not now. Severus and I are going to prevent that.”
Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Severus’s voice murmured from Draco’s other side, “And does Severus get a choice in this?”
Draco rolled over, heart thumping, and lifted his mouth for a kiss. Severus’s lips were there, ready to descend on his, proving that he wasn’t truly angry.
From the way Harry cuddled closer and kissed the back of Draco’s neck a second later, he wasn’t, either.
Not that I won’t welcome their anger when it comes. It’s going to be as magnificent as everything else about them.
*
Severus felt as though he was still in the middle of the ritual, seeing the world through shining planes of stained glass.
He could feel Draco beside him, his heat on Severus’s skin and his heart beating calmly. And he could feel the magic through their bond, the one that had existed before the ritual, as a caress on his skin, as fire hovering above it.
He could feel Harry, too. It was a small loss to know that he would never be able to think of him as Potter again, but then, he could think of other things. Like the way that his own magic surged and stirred in response to him, and how clear his mind was, and how he could probably brew potions now that he’d remembered giving up on in the last year. At the time, he’d used the excuse to himself that he was simply getting older, and couldn’t respond with the same clarity and vividness that he’d once used.
Now, he knew it was the draining of his magic. Thanks to Harry, he had that back.
And he could remember the tightness in Harry’s arse, and how much he would like to experience that again.
“This is an interesting result,” Severus murmured, and reached out with one hand over Draco’s back to touch Harry’s hand. Harry touched back, then withdrew. So he wanted to give Severus and Draco a moment of space.
It is needed.
Draco stared up at him with those drowning, strong, vulnerable eyes for a moment. The eyes of the boy Severus had known, who had realized, finally, what he had got himself into by becoming a Death Eater-and had determined to endure to the end, because there was nothing else he could do. And the eyes of the man who had determined that he would have Severus as his lover, despite all his family had to say on the subject.
And the eyes of the man who had determined that he would save Severus’s life, even when Severus himself told him to desist.
“Can you understand why I did it?” Draco whispered.
“Is it forgiveness that you’re asking for?” Severus snapped back.
“No,” Draco said. “Understanding.” He lifted his chin. “Because you’re alive, and that means I’ve already won.”
Severus nodded, once. He suspected part of the reason he had struggled so hard against Draco bringing Harry into the mix was the notion of owing a debt to Harry again, and not of dying with dignity. And he was never that rational with pain clouding his mind.
Not that he would admit that, any more than Draco would ask for forgiveness. But they were back to the way they had worked-or better-and there were certain words Severus did not disdain to speak.
“Good,” said Draco, and leaned up to kiss Severus. Severus leaned down to press his lips even more firmly against Draco’s.
They kissed for long moments, until Severus did what else needed to be done and broke the hold of their mouths. Then he knelt up and looked at Harry across Draco’s back. Draco rolled down and lay sprawled between them, turning his head back and forth.
Things will never be easy between us.
But there were some things that needed to be clear.
*
Harry nodded when he saw Severus looking at him. So this was a sort of confrontation, and it needed to happen with them still naked and lying inside the burned grass of the ritual circle. All right.
“I’m not sorry about saving your life the first time,” he said. “I am sorry it went wrong.”
“I was not looking for an apology,” said Severus, and gazed at him in silence for long seconds before stretching an arm out. “Come here.”
Harry clambered awkwardly to the side on hands and knees, while Draco shifted to make room for him. Harry had a sudden flash of how much that would be happening in the future, and blinked. He had thought-
Well, no, he thought, as Severus grabbed his arm and reeled him in, perhaps he had been stupid to think that this was the last time all three of them would be lovers, with only Draco and Severus maintaining that relationship from now on. Their bond didn’t have to include it.
But from the way Severus was staring at him, it would.
“Ah,” said Severus. “You are beginning to understand now?” His arm constricted Harry to his side, and he stared at him again. Draco pressed up from behind him.
Harry nodded. He understood things they couldn’t put into words, and perhaps it would be stupid to try. But, if he could have…
He trusted them to protect him from stares, because they were both capable of being frightening when they wanted.
He trusted them to keep up the terms of the bond and not to be horrible, the kind of horror he had thought they were heading for before his longer conversations with Draco and Severus in the weeks before the ritual began.
He trusted them to connect him more to the wizarding world, and that was, perhaps, something he wanted, now that he was remembering he was a wizard.
He trusted them to fuck him right.
He wasn’t sure how much he trusted them for other things. How much what he trusted them for was, well, something you shouldn’t trust people for. But he knew. And he doubted they would lie to him about any of it. Doubted they were capable anymore.
Severus nodded. Perhaps he had skimmed some of Harry’s thoughts off the surface of his mind. He could do it, as a Legilimens. Harry knew it from his time as a student, and how much he had loathed Snape doing it, as a professor.
Now, it would benefit him.
Severus kissed him, hard, enough to make Harry feel the press of teeth behind his lips, and to leave him gasping to get his breath. It wasn’t something he would ever have thought to find arousing before this; none of his previous lovers had done it. But he wanted it now, and he started when Draco’s hand curled around his hip and found his cock.
“Yeah,” Draco breathed against his neck.
“Perhaps we shall try…newly-bonded sex,” said Severus, and eased Harry up onto his hands and knees. “If Harry’s arse is not too sore?”
“I’m sure you can make it better,” Harry muttered into his hands, and heard Severus laugh, followed by Draco.
“Yes, we can,” Draco said, and his voice was warm and confident.
So was Severus’s silence.
And as fingers probed gently into him, covered with conjured lube instead of ritual power this time, Harry shut his eyes and sighed, gently. This wasn’t something he had ever anticipated when Draco had contacted him and he’d offered to heal Severus, but it was something he could get used to, feel warm about, welcome.
Just like magic.
The End.
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