Part One of 'Currents of Silver'
Title: Currents of Silver
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Snape, then Harry/Snape/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, violence, gore, minor character deaths, AU in that Snape lived, non-linear timeline (flashbacks interwoven with the present)
Summary: Harry and Severus are dwelling comfortably in both the Muggle and wizarding worlds. When Draco Malfoy comes to them for help in finding a killer who can slip back and forth between the two worlds, complexities from the past flare to life and change the course of their lives as well as Draco’s case.
Author’s Note: Another Wednesday one-shot written for fight_wit_pocky’s request: Harry/Snape/Draco
Harry and Snape are in an established relationship. They live comfortably in both the Wizard and Muggle worlds. Harry works in a office where he is a psychologist to his Muggle clients and a Mind Healer to the Wizard ones. Severus owns a shop that sells both medicines and potions, depending on the customer. Draco, an Auror, comes to them for help with a special case.
This is a long one-shot-much longer than I initially thought-that will need to be divided into chapters of varying lengths. It should probably be five or six of them long.
Currents of Silver
“I-I can hardly believe that would be all it was.”
Harry settled thoughtfully back into his chair and looked at his patient, Alton Carter, sitting huddled in the other one. Alton studied him as though he expected the words that came out of Harry’s mouth to turn into dragons.
That only happened once, Harry scolded himself, and focused again on Alton. “All? A tour in a war zone doesn’t sound like ‘all’ to me.”
Alton shifted uneasily and then sighed and rubbed one hand over his tattered jeans. “But-I don’t have PTSD. Not like all my mates do. I don’t have nightmares or flashbacks or anything like that.”
“You had fears severe enough to drive you here,” Harry pointed out. Fears, in fact, severe enough to qualify him for treatment by the “eerie” kind of psychologist.
“Crazy fears.” Alton turned brick-red, easy for him to do; he looked as if his skin was made of porcelain.
“I told you that you weren’t crazy,” said Harry severely. It had been the first thing he’d had to reassure Alton of. “Believe me, I know crazy. And just being afraid of the darkness isn’t it.”
“But the darkness under my bed. Like some little kid.”
Harry shook his head. He had got frustrated at first with the way that Alton needed to recite all Harry’s words over and over again, but by now, it was sort of soothing to him as well as Alton. “You said you don’t have nightmares. Dreaming about being drowned because the darkness is rising from under your bed sounds like one to me.”
“I don’t wake up screaming.”
You do wake up fighting for your life. It was that which had finally persuaded Alton to go in for evaluation in the first place, he’d told Harry. He’d almost strangled his wife one night in bed.
“Screaming’s a matter of opinion,” said Harry firmly, and then switched the subject of conversation. He had to alternate with Alton, from talking about his problems to talking about ordinary things. “How is Mercy?”
Alton’s face always brightened and warmed when he talked about his daughter, as if he was standing in a shaft of sunlight. Harry sat back in his chair, smiling, and listened to Mercy’s adventures in primary school, with her friends, and on the roof.
“On the roof of your flat?” Harry broke in, laughing. Alton had never said that Mercy had a particular fascination with heights before.
“Yes.” Alton rolled his eyes, but any attempt at sternness got ruined by the way he was utterly beaming. Harry hoped he was more successful when he had to punish Mercy. “She told me that she didn’t climb the stairs, even. Some wild story about how she was running and tripped and wished to be safe, and suddenly she was up there.”
Harry froze for a second. He didn’t think Alton, who was still chuckling to himself, had noticed. Then he asked, softly, “And does she lie often?”
“Oh, just the childish lies any kid tells.” Alton shrugged. “She didn’t eat the last biscuit. Someone else must have left the soap on the floor. She didn’t change her shoes from blue to red by getting hold of dye, she just wished they would change color and it happened.” He smiled. “She’s five. The world is still a magical place.”
Harry smiled, and didn’t think it looked strained. “You know, I’d like to meet Mercy sometime. Not during one of our regular sessions,” he added hastily, as Alton sat up and looked perceptive. “But outside of it.”
“You don’t think there’s something wrong with her, too? Just because she lies sometimes-”
“No,” said Harry calmly. “I just think that talking to her and getting her perspective on things would be valuable. It’s amazing how much kids notice.”
Alton thought about it, then nodded. “All right. You have a point, Potter. I’ll bring her along next time, and you can talk without me in the room.” He winked at Harry, although his face had gone back to that expression of anxiety that seemed fixed on it every time he first came in. “Talk to her about the darkness under the bed, too, right?”
“Yes.”
And about the letter she’s probably going to be getting when she’s eleven, Harry thought, as he waved good-bye to Alton. He would have to work more delicately with this than with the few other Muggleborns he’d accidentally noticed or discovered. Her father would need a lot of calming and explanation once he found out magic was real.
Alton had been his last appointment of the day. Harry let himself sit back and be soothed by his own pretty pale blue walls and pictures of flowers before he shook his head, stood up, and went to make sure the doors were secured with both locks and the spells that did most of the actual protection. Walking between the Muggle and wizarding worlds was always interesting, but sometimes twice as much work.
Harry was glad he could throw his cloak back over his shoulders after a day like this and Floo home to Severus. The flames engulfed him as he called out, “Green and Gold Hollow!”, and spat him out on a hearth made of stone in exactly those colors. Harry had got a bit more graceful in the years since Hogwarts, and he managed to step off the hearth without stumbling.
The next second, though, he caught his foot on a potions vial lying on the floor. Severus would remind him that it was only a bit.
Harry snorted, picked up the vial, and hung his cloak on one of the hooks next to the fireplace. Then he followed the trail of vials, crumpled pieces of parchment, pens, pencils, and dust and soot to the door of Severus’s lab. Severus was prone to mix the Muggle and wizarding worlds in his rubbish when he was planning, too, but he never allowed any of it to dirty the lab.
“Severus?” Harry pitched his voice low, capable of being ignored if Severus wanted to. He didn’t need any explanations of what it could mean-sometimes-to disturb someone brewing. The scars in the door above his head were enough. And the scars on the back of one hand, too.
A second after his call, the door of the lab swung inwards, an invitation in itself. Harry stepped in, already half-smiling.
But he stopped short when he saw two figures turn away from the battered pewter cauldron on the nearest table. In a second, Harry fell back into the calm, cool persona he tended to adopt with visitors from the wizarding world who weren’t his patients.
Of course, he couldn’t remember the last time Severus had invited a customer of his own back into their home from his apothecary. But it wouldn’t do to start showing anything too openly.
“Welcome,” Harry said, and extended a hand a little as he swept a bow. It would have looked better with his cloak still on him, but then, he hadn’t known there was anyone else here. “My name is Harry Potter. If you’re here for a private consultation, then I can leave you alone with Severus and let you-”
“Shove it, Potter.” The figure turned further towards him, and Harry nearly swallowed his teeth at the sight of the pale, desperate face, and the grey eyes glittering frenetically, like broken gems.
“Welcome,” Harry said after a minute, “Malfoy.”
He hoped his voice was polite, but couldn’t be sure, since the falcon-like glance Severus shot him could have meant anything. In the meantime, he couldn’t stop staring, because memories had turned and begun to wing their way through his mind in ghostly processions.
*
Harry leaned back against the wall of the hospital wing, so tired that it felt as if his eyelids were going to fall off his face. But he could sleep now. He was sure he had done it this time, and Snape was going to live.
The door of the hospital wing opening still brought him to his feet with his wand in hand, though. While the Hogwarts hospital wing now had protections humming around it in waves of blue and silver, the colors of Harry’s Healing magic, the Aurors hadn’t yet caught the people who’d almost eviscerated Snape. And Harry was no stranger to the technique of sending someone in under the Imperius Curse so protections attuned to frequent visitors would let them through.
It was Malfoy, though. Harry lowered his wand, while he still studied Malfoy in silence. He hadn’t been among the swarm of Aurors who had found Snape or brought him here or questioned him. Harry had thought he hadn’t been assigned to this case.
“Where is he?” Malfoy had hair standing out from his head that looked burned, and a face nearly as pale as Harry’s with lack of sleep, so Harry just nodded to the bed right in front of him instead of mocking Malfoy for not having eyes in his head.
Malfoy closed his eyes and then opened them again, trembling. He moved in, seeming ignorant of Harry’s careful gaze, and rested his hand on the edge of the bed. Snape didn’t move, but slept on.
“Who did this to him?”
Again Harry held back the snap, and the impulse to tell Malfoy that was more his department than Harry’s. “The rest of your lot don’t know yet,” he said. “They thought they might have an answer by tomorrow morning.”
“When I heard the news, I thought-” Malfoy stopped and seemed about to indulge in a slow-motion collapse. Harry Summoned a chair and skidded it over behind Malfoy. Of course, once he realized someone was trying to care for him, Malfoy straightened his back and glared at Harry.
“Yes, he did almost die,” Harry said. “That’s one reason he’s here instead of St. Mungo’s. Waiting to transport him there would have cost him too much time and blood.” He pinched his lips shut in the next instant. The Aurors had found Snape on the edge of the Forbidden Forest as they searched it for both him and some students who had apparently gone missing two days before. It was sheer luck that Harry had been with them trying to use spells to track one of the students, who he’d recently Healed.
Malfoy turned back to Snape. He put out a hand, retracted it, and sat down in the chair at last. Harry grunted and turned to wash his hands. He would have gone to sleep with them bloody, but now that he had other awakened people in the hospital wing, he wouldn’t.
And Malfoy would judge him for it in a way that most of those other people wouldn’t. Harry ignored the prickle down his spine that whispered maybe it wouldn’t happen now with Snape nearby for Malfoy to care for.
Malfoy had never cared enough for Snape to officially announce it. That was the problem.
Harry cast a few spells that would refresh him on himself. Then he strode over to the Floo to speak to a house-elf. He would have to eat, particularly if he needed to Heal other people. The Aurors were still searching for the missing students.
“Why don’t you tell him?”
It took Harry a long second to realize that Malfoy had said those words to him, instead of the other way around. Then Harry turned slowly, and tried to look casual instead of exhausted as he leaned an elbow on the mantel.
“Excuse me? Tell him what?”
“That you care for him.” Malfoy’s face looked like a skull. As Harry watched, he held his hand out again, then pulled it back again, a little dance he had been conducting with Snape ever since Harry had got to know them both since the war. “I have no idea if he knows, but it’s pathetic, how much you hold back from him.”
Harry felt his lips trembling, and tried to halt what was coming next, because he thought he would look even more pathetic than Malfoy considered him right now. But in the end, he couldn’t make them be still, and he burst out laughing. Not even Snape stirring a little on the bed and rolling over could make him stop.
Malfoy stared at him, and Harry thought he saw the skull beneath coming more and more to the surface every moment. He made no attempt to say anything else, though. He held still, and his rage grew thicker and thicker, filling the room with an invisible cloud.
“All of those words,” Harry finally said, choking a little as he tried to swallow the merriment, “are ones I could have spoken to you.”
“I don’t care for Severus,” Malfoy said, even as his wand fell to the floor and he started back from the bed and the chair as if Harry had sent lightning spinning through him.
Harry sighed. “I almost wish that was true, because it would leave the way open for me.” He continued without allowing Malfoy a chance to respond. “But I can’t compete with the intensity of the relationship you shared during the war, anyway. I don’t really know why you hold back. You might as well go and take what you want, and what he wants, too, from the way he spoke of you.”
There. Harry had sometimes writhed inside with how ungenerous he was, how much he had wished for Malfoy to fall in love with someone else or just conveniently get sick so that Harry could heroically save his life and then Malfoy, in gratitude, would give up his claim to Snape. Something that would remove the weight from Harry’s mind whenever he thought about Malfoy and Snape.
But he couldn’t get more generous than letting Malfoy know the truth and then standing out of the way. Harry turned and cast powder into the Floo, calling “Hogwarts kitchens!” as he saw Snape starting to stir.
Do what you can with the time I’ve given you, Malfoy. It’s not my fault if you don’t use it well.
*
Harry thought it might be his fault, though, when he came back after a full meal and a long talk with Winky to find Snape sitting up in bed, silent, and Malfoy gone.
“None of the other Aurors have come back or brought the missing students in yet?” Harry shook his head as he brushed the soot off his robes.
“They did bring them back.” Snape looked up. “They determined that none of them needed treatment in the hospital wing, though, and so they didn’t call you. It turned out to be-a stupid prank. They dared each other to go into the Forbidden Forest and cast certain spells, and then they found themselves lost. I might as well not have gone after them.” His face wrinkled for a long moment. “Or got myself caught by one of their waiting trap spells they had had another idiotic friend cast to make sure they couldn’t simply run out of the Forest.”
“Oh.” Harry sighed a little as a part of his brain that never relaxed when there were people in trouble seemed to unravel. “That’s good. Much better than I feared.” He nodded at Snape. “And you, Professor?”
“Bloodied, but not broken.” Snape turned and faced him. “And capable of returning to consciousness earlier than you imagined I could. Your Peaceful Sleep Draught was not properly brewed. I heard the whole of your fascinating conversation with Mr. Malfoy.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Sorry?”
“Are you apologizing for the potion or the conversation?” Snape demanded.
“The potion.” Harry held his eyes. “Everything I said to Malfoy was true, and you know it.”
Snape made an irritated motion with his arm. “About his motivations, it may be. Since the war, I have never fathomed his heart.” Harry was still blinking over Severus Snape using the word “heart” seriously when Snape leaned forwards and added, “But you need not presume about my motivations.”
“Oh,” Harry breathed. He strangled his newborn hope. Things never went the way he wanted immediately. “So you’re not pursuing a relationship with him for your own reasons? Or it’s complicated for some other reason besides the war?”
“Fool,” said Snape. “I will not pursue that which flees me. I had enough of that when I had to pretend to care for the goals of others before my own.” He paused, a flicker in his eyes like a dying fire, and added, “I thought you drew back because of disgust or uncertainty. Now that I find it was to give someone else precedence, permit me to enlighten you. My bond with Draco during the war was not so deep that I cannot form another with someone else, especially seven years later.”
Harry drew his shoulders up and blinked for a second.
“I also do not care for those who pretend to be stupider than they are,” Snape said. “I receive enough of that in my classes.”
And Harry laughed, and stepped forwards, and began to explain when he had started admiring the way Snape had returned to life and how he had behaved since the war, and Snape listened as though he had never heard anything like it in his life before.
*
“Draco is here for help on a case.”
Harry thought of himself as mysterious, Severus knew. He had been encouraged in the notion by people who surrounded him and gaped at him and analyzed his smallest movement as though it was profound, never understanding the simple principles that drove most of Harry’s actions. Even after plenty of proof that Severus could read him like a Muggle sign, Harry still tried to draw himself back, behind impassive walls.
He was doing it now, hunching his shoulders slightly and giving Draco a smile as stiff as the side of the cauldron. When Severus spoke those words about the case, Harry turned and gaped at him. Draco smoothed a hand down his robes and pretended he was elsewhere.
More open than you will ever realize, Severus thought at both of them, and continued, “It seems that the Aurors are tracking a killer who knows both the Muggle and the wizarding worlds better than most do. He’s come to us for help in setting up a trap and bait for the killer.”
“Based on a potion?” Harry turned as though he was prepared to acknowledge the existence of the half of the room where Draco stood. “Because I’m not using one of my patients as bait.”
“No one would expect you to,” Severus said, and found that he was turning his head just in time to catch the exasperated eyeroll from Draco. There were times in which he was more similar to Draco, even now.
And there were some ways in which Harry was still a Gryffindor. “Then why does he need the help of both of us, instead of just you?” he asked Severus, and faced Draco fully. “Why not just ask for the potion and be done with it?”
Draco drew himself up. The seven years since Severus had seen him last had done him good, Severus thought. He was a wizard in his mid-thirties now, and had outgrown the lingering traces of his childhood. He stood and moved more confidently, and if Harry hadn’t wound himself so tightly in his shell, he would have felt the soft thrum of magic around Draco. Contained, settled, adult.
Then again, neither Harry nor Draco had ever been rational where the other was concerned, and Draco proceeded to prove it.
“Because it’s not about a potion. It’s about observation. And luring the killer to me with help that only you can provide.” Draco performed the trick of looking down his nose that made Severus sigh under his breath. “We know he targets Mind-Healers. Don’t worry, Potter, we won’t ask you to put any of your precious sheep at risk.”
“I’ll take being a sheepdog over someone who still believes that Muggles are inferior,” Harry said instantly.
Draco turned a deeply unattractive red. Severus moved a hand over and flicked his fingers against the caldron so it rang. Both the others started slightly and looked at him.
“From the case as Draco has described it to me,” Severus told Harry, and let his accents fall in all the right places that only seven years of living with and loving with someone could teach him, “it is serious. Store up the petty insults and fling them at each other after the case. Perhaps they’ll be soaked in special virulence from your spite then.”
Draco turned redder. Harry only nodded, and then turned and said in an arctic tone, “Won’t you come in and have some dinner? I was just about to start it.”
Draco nodded back. Harry seemed able to feel it, since he certainly didn’t turn to look at it. He departed through the door into the rest of the house instead, his head so high that it made Severus’s neck ache watching.
Once the door swung a little shut, Draco turned immediately to Severus. His voice was low but passionate. “Do we need him to set up this trap? Tell him the minimum amount possible and then arrange the trap. We could always use an illusion of him and leave him out of it. He’s just the same, Severus. He won’t understand!”
Severus waited. Eventually, the passage of seconds like grains of sand wore away the outer coating of Draco’s self-absorption, and he turned redder. Severus nodded.
“You are talking about something that will endanger his life, at least in potentia. And you speak of leaving him out of it? Lying to him?” Severus shook his head once. “He is not the one who doesn’t understand.”
He preceded Draco into the house, and left the echoes of his last statement behind to ring in Draco’s ears. There was more than one reason for Draco to think about them.
*
“But I was the one you sacrificed everything for. And I never even got the chance to say that I was sorry!”
Severus pushed the cauldron back from him. It wobbled on the edge of the table for a moment, then tipped. Severus watched with a savage satisfaction as the potion poured onto the stone floor and began to eat through it as the liquid combined with some of the scattered belladonna leaves Severus had dropped there earlier.
Draco raised his head with a startled gasp, and then slumped back in his chair. “And now I’ve ruined your potion! Severus, I’m sorry.”
Severus turned and limped sharply towards the back of his quarters. The scars along his neck ached, the way they always did in moments of high emotion.
Ironically, he had entertained Draco’s visit in the first place because he had thought that a twenty-one-year-old, and one skilled enough to be accepted into the Auror program, would be able to explain and explore the complexities of their situation after the war, instead of whining about it. He had been wrong. And he did not think that he should be disappointed in all of his former students who had attained that particular age.
This was Draco’s fault.
Severus drew his wand and gestured. The cupboards flew open, and tea marched out and began preparing itself as the kettle filled with water from his jetted Aguamenti spell. Severus took the cups himself and slammed them on the counter, delighting in their clang.
“Severus?”
Draco had not been able to help much of what had happened to him in the war, including the Unbreakable Vows his mother and Dumbledore had made Severus swear, and his father’s idiocy, and the punishment that the Dark Lord had laid on him to make up for Lucius’s idiocy. Severus had hoped that, with those weights gone, he would develop into the person that Severus knew he could be.
It had not happened. Instead, Draco had grown more apologetic, but also more absorbed by his self-pity. Convinced no one could ever forgive him, he wearied Severus and others by appearing at their doors, whining about how sorry he was, and then glorying in the feeling he received when they got bored and kicked him out.
Severus was determined to stop that today, at least. He could never force Draco to grow into his full potential, but he might remove one excuse for it.
Draco repeated his name, standing at the entrance to the kitchen. Severus turned and nodded reassuringly at him, which made Draco beam so much he never noticed the small vial Severus withdrew from another drawer or how he added it to the tea.
It was a potion Severus used most of the time only when a reporter or someone who wanted to write an “essay” on his activities during the war pushed their way into Hogwarts. None of them had ever come back.
“Most people don’t even know I can apologize,” Draco was saying, as he stood by the table and rocked softly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “They won’t let me prove myself to them.” He bowed his head and touched his hair as if he was checking to make sure it was still present. “No one wants to listen.”
Then why did you get accepted into the Auror program? Severus thought, but he knew he would get no answer there, either. Besides, it was hard to speak since the wound to his throat. He could do so, but only haltingly and softly, and Draco was in no mood to listen to either kind of speech.
“No one just understands what it’s like, wanting to apologize and having no one accept your apology.” Draco picked up the doctored cup of tea and tilted his head back to throw the hot liquid down his throat. “No one-”
The potion took effect at once, because Severus had never been one to wait on idiocy when he need not. A second later, Draco clutched at his throat and wheezed. Then he dropped to his knees on the floor, choking.
The sounds were soft, and Severus judged it a good time to speak. “I have long forgiven you, Draco.”
Draco looked up at him, and then touched his throat. Severus nodded.
“The sensation like a boulder in your throat will fade in half an hour. You cannot dispel it by means of magic, so don’t try,” Severus added, seeing Draco reach for the hawthorn wand up his sleeve. “And now, I will speak to you of the real waste of your life.”
Draco seemed to have discovered that he couldn’t cough anything up, but that didn’t prevent him from trying. Severus moved forwards until he was almost standing on the boy’s hand before Draco bothered to pay attention to him.
“The real waste,” Severus whispered, “is that you have made no attempt to live and grow past the war. You do not even know what is important. You are an Auror trainee, but I never hear you talk about that. Your father is in prison, but that forms no part of your list of tragedies. You have few or no friends, but you are not smart enough to attribute their non-existence to your own actions.” Severus paused to take a wheezing breath. He would have trouble breathing if he spoke too long.
Draco stared up at him. He had forgotten about wheezing himself, Severus was glad to see. He simply had his hands laid on the hollow of his throat and his shoulders. As Severus watched, his shoulders shook a little.
Severus met his eyes, and held them. He made his voice sharp, short, passionate. “I once wanted to save your life partially because I wanted to see the kind of man you could grow into. It doesn’t seem as though you have chosen to grow.”
Draco stood up and began to back away. Severus watched him. Draco reached the door and fumbled backwards for the knob, never taking his eyes off Severus.
In the end, he bolted out of the school and was gone, leaving Severus to clean up the tea, the spilled potion, and the remains of his patience.
Draco was much younger than he was. Perhaps getting angry at him was as childish as Draco’s refusal to see that the world had changed around him.
But Severus had begun to think that, angry or not, he would never change anything about Draco, so he might as well do what would make him most comfortable.
*
“Meat?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“Potatoes?”
“Thank you.”
Severus didn’t put his hand over his eyes, but only because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Draco and Harry seemed to think they were being subtle, making constant table-talk to each other. Or that someone who watched them would be fooled.
Someone might be if they were running a fever, dazed from a blow on the head, and currently suffering from a Confundus Charm. And even then, Severus thought, leaning back to survey the man who was his lover and the one who might have been, that hypothetical person would have to be blind in one eye.
Harry served with exquisite politeness, still drawn back into that cold cocoon he tended to take up around anyone from the wizarding world who didn’t come as a patient. Severus and his friends were exceptions, but Harry had discovered that too many apparently casual visitors and well-wishers only wanted a glimpse of him or Severus, or had some grudge, or wanted to persuade them to donate to a charity. The coldness chased them off.
Not Draco, of course. The little he’d told Severus about the case before Harry came home had been enough to make Severus understand why Draco would pursue it so tenaciously-though not necessarily why he was the lead Auror on a case that so involved the Muggle world. Draco had started when Harry flicked the light switch in the wall. He hadn’t adapted at all in the last seven years.
And he still looked at Severus now and then with a mute pleading, before looking away, that made Severus’s throat tighten. Severus touched the old scars for a moment, however, and shook his head.
He valued what he had built with Harry. He could have had something of exciting richness and strength with Draco, too, but Draco had finally lacked the courage to come to Severus and join him in that journey. Harry had made the choice.
From the gleam of contempt in Harry’s eyes when they cut across Draco’s face, it was for the past insult to Severus that Harry most blamed him. Severus wished there was a way to discreetly tell Harry that he need not be angry on Severus’s behalf.
The courteous meal finally finished, and Harry leaned back in his chair as obediently bobbing bowls of ice cream came out of the kitchen. “What’s this case that you wanted us to look at, Malfoy?”
It was an excuse to speak, and Draco seemed to seize it gratefully. He grabbed up a thick sheaf of parchment from inside his cloak and laid it on the table, then moved it a second before the bowl of ice cream thumped down where he had started to put it.
Harry, Severus said, with his glance and the turn of his head. Harry nodded and leaned back a little, and watched with pretended calm as Draco removed the constricting spell from the sheaf.
“We’re calling this the Argent Case, right now.” Draco’s voice was low and exhausted as he spoke the words. “The only reason we started realizing the murders were linked was the band of silver around the upper left forearm of each victim.”
“The upper left forearm?” Harry asked.
People are dying, Severus said, with the way he curled his fingers into Harry’s leg under the table. Leave the ancient grudge alone for now.
Harry subsided just as Draco glanced at him with his own slow fire kindling in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “And we did check any possible Death Eater connections, and got nothing. All of the victims are half-bloods with strong Muggle ties or Muggleborns, anyway. Not the sort the Dark Lord would have taken under his charge.” He ignored, graciously enough, the mutter from Harry about the Dark Lord’s real name. “Or Muggles.”
Severus sat up. “That’s the reason you came to us?”
“Yes.” Draco made the sensible decision to focus only on Severus for right now, leaning as close and speaking as softly as he had when they were alone in the lab. “We don’t understand it. It took us ages to start learning about the Muggles who had died, in remote places all over the country, with those same silver bands. And it made us realize that this killer is hunting more places than we ever thought.”
“He goes after Mind-Healers, you say?”
Severus started. Harry’s voice had shattered the fragile atmosphere he and Draco had built up between themselves without Severus’s even realizing it.
Draco sat back, and wrapped himself in a calm, frigid cloak that he actually seemed to clasp at his throat with a small motion of his hand. “Yes,” he said. “Not all, but a significant portion, of the victims with ties to the wizarding world have been Mind-Healers.”
Severus glanced at Harry sidelong. He had magic fluttering around him in the way Draco had once had. But while Draco’s had come from the almost constant stress he’d lived under during the war, Harry’s usually only stirred in moments of extreme agitation.
“And the Muggles?” Harry pushed ahead tensely. “Is it possible that any of them had seen Mind-Healers?”
“They were Muggles, Potter,” Draco said. “Of the absolute worst-I mean, blameless kind. They had no magical relatives. They weren’t connected to any of the wizards killed. We wouldn’t have thought the cases were related at all if not for the silver bands.”
“But did they go to psychologists who might have been Mind-Healers?” Harry asked softly. “Or had Mind-Healer training?”
Draco’s mouth fell open a little. Severus held back a smug chuckle. He wasn’t sure who he would have been laughing at, anyway.
“Shit,” Draco breathed. “That’s a connection we never thought to check.”
“It would be difficult to check if the people they visited were wizards who had cut ties,” Harry said, standing and picking up his bowl of ice cream. He hadn’t eaten any of it, Severus saw. “Muggleborns who vanished back into the Muggle world the minute they were done with Hogwarts, for example. But I suggest you look into it.” He glided back into the kitchen.
Draco wrote a few excited notes down, then sat back and shook his head at Severus. “He could have come up with that earlier.”
“Without information?” Severus let his voice climb the notch from “surprised curiosity” to “exasperated rhetorical question.”
Draco flinched for old time’s sake, and then said, “He was the best, you know. That’s what they said in Auror training, before he quit to become a Healer. He could have done a lot more than he did.”
“Harry is content with the path he’s chosen,” Severus said temperately, while he felt as if he’d swallowed a whole glass of lemonade unexpectedly. That was a cause for bitterness he had never known lay between Harry and Draco. “And he gave up on being an Auror almost ten years ago. You can’t hold out hope he would choose to go back now?”
“If he’d chosen to stay, those people might not have died.”
Severus rose. “I trust you are wiser than to say that to him,” he snapped, and made to follow Harry.
“Severus.”
There were tones and shadings in Draco’s voice that Severus had never thought to hear there, and that was the only reason he paused, reluctantly, and looked back. Draco held out an appealing hand to him. Severus grimaced, and waited.
“This case is horrible,” Draco whispered. “These cases are horrible. Do you know how this killer murders them? He uses the Entrail-Expelling Curse and then stuffs their mouths full of their own intestines and wraps them around the bodies and bathes them in blood. It’s sickening. And I’ve had to look at almost twenty of these bodies.”
Severus closed his eyes for a second. “You have another link between the killings besides the silver bands, then,” he said.
“Yes.”
Draco’s voice was dragging, reluctant. But Severus could not give him the absolution or the connection he was looking for. He’d had the chance to claim that, and had chosen to give it up.
“We will give you what help we can,” Severus said. Then he opened his eyes and pinned Draco with the kind of gaze Draco had once known better than to mistake. “But I would suggest that you do not try to guilt Harry into offering you help you think he should have given you months ago.”
“Look at the way he said something useful within the first five minutes, though. If he’d been there-”
Severus turned around and left. It seemed there were some things that Draco Malfoy, still, would never understand.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/780097.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Snape, then Harry/Snape/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, violence, gore, minor character deaths, AU in that Snape lived, non-linear timeline (flashbacks interwoven with the present)
Summary: Harry and Severus are dwelling comfortably in both the Muggle and wizarding worlds. When Draco Malfoy comes to them for help in finding a killer who can slip back and forth between the two worlds, complexities from the past flare to life and change the course of their lives as well as Draco’s case.
Author’s Note: Another Wednesday one-shot written for fight_wit_pocky’s request: Harry/Snape/Draco
Harry and Snape are in an established relationship. They live comfortably in both the Wizard and Muggle worlds. Harry works in a office where he is a psychologist to his Muggle clients and a Mind Healer to the Wizard ones. Severus owns a shop that sells both medicines and potions, depending on the customer. Draco, an Auror, comes to them for help with a special case.
This is a long one-shot-much longer than I initially thought-that will need to be divided into chapters of varying lengths. It should probably be five or six of them long.
Currents of Silver
“I-I can hardly believe that would be all it was.”
Harry settled thoughtfully back into his chair and looked at his patient, Alton Carter, sitting huddled in the other one. Alton studied him as though he expected the words that came out of Harry’s mouth to turn into dragons.
That only happened once, Harry scolded himself, and focused again on Alton. “All? A tour in a war zone doesn’t sound like ‘all’ to me.”
Alton shifted uneasily and then sighed and rubbed one hand over his tattered jeans. “But-I don’t have PTSD. Not like all my mates do. I don’t have nightmares or flashbacks or anything like that.”
“You had fears severe enough to drive you here,” Harry pointed out. Fears, in fact, severe enough to qualify him for treatment by the “eerie” kind of psychologist.
“Crazy fears.” Alton turned brick-red, easy for him to do; he looked as if his skin was made of porcelain.
“I told you that you weren’t crazy,” said Harry severely. It had been the first thing he’d had to reassure Alton of. “Believe me, I know crazy. And just being afraid of the darkness isn’t it.”
“But the darkness under my bed. Like some little kid.”
Harry shook his head. He had got frustrated at first with the way that Alton needed to recite all Harry’s words over and over again, but by now, it was sort of soothing to him as well as Alton. “You said you don’t have nightmares. Dreaming about being drowned because the darkness is rising from under your bed sounds like one to me.”
“I don’t wake up screaming.”
You do wake up fighting for your life. It was that which had finally persuaded Alton to go in for evaluation in the first place, he’d told Harry. He’d almost strangled his wife one night in bed.
“Screaming’s a matter of opinion,” said Harry firmly, and then switched the subject of conversation. He had to alternate with Alton, from talking about his problems to talking about ordinary things. “How is Mercy?”
Alton’s face always brightened and warmed when he talked about his daughter, as if he was standing in a shaft of sunlight. Harry sat back in his chair, smiling, and listened to Mercy’s adventures in primary school, with her friends, and on the roof.
“On the roof of your flat?” Harry broke in, laughing. Alton had never said that Mercy had a particular fascination with heights before.
“Yes.” Alton rolled his eyes, but any attempt at sternness got ruined by the way he was utterly beaming. Harry hoped he was more successful when he had to punish Mercy. “She told me that she didn’t climb the stairs, even. Some wild story about how she was running and tripped and wished to be safe, and suddenly she was up there.”
Harry froze for a second. He didn’t think Alton, who was still chuckling to himself, had noticed. Then he asked, softly, “And does she lie often?”
“Oh, just the childish lies any kid tells.” Alton shrugged. “She didn’t eat the last biscuit. Someone else must have left the soap on the floor. She didn’t change her shoes from blue to red by getting hold of dye, she just wished they would change color and it happened.” He smiled. “She’s five. The world is still a magical place.”
Harry smiled, and didn’t think it looked strained. “You know, I’d like to meet Mercy sometime. Not during one of our regular sessions,” he added hastily, as Alton sat up and looked perceptive. “But outside of it.”
“You don’t think there’s something wrong with her, too? Just because she lies sometimes-”
“No,” said Harry calmly. “I just think that talking to her and getting her perspective on things would be valuable. It’s amazing how much kids notice.”
Alton thought about it, then nodded. “All right. You have a point, Potter. I’ll bring her along next time, and you can talk without me in the room.” He winked at Harry, although his face had gone back to that expression of anxiety that seemed fixed on it every time he first came in. “Talk to her about the darkness under the bed, too, right?”
“Yes.”
And about the letter she’s probably going to be getting when she’s eleven, Harry thought, as he waved good-bye to Alton. He would have to work more delicately with this than with the few other Muggleborns he’d accidentally noticed or discovered. Her father would need a lot of calming and explanation once he found out magic was real.
Alton had been his last appointment of the day. Harry let himself sit back and be soothed by his own pretty pale blue walls and pictures of flowers before he shook his head, stood up, and went to make sure the doors were secured with both locks and the spells that did most of the actual protection. Walking between the Muggle and wizarding worlds was always interesting, but sometimes twice as much work.
Harry was glad he could throw his cloak back over his shoulders after a day like this and Floo home to Severus. The flames engulfed him as he called out, “Green and Gold Hollow!”, and spat him out on a hearth made of stone in exactly those colors. Harry had got a bit more graceful in the years since Hogwarts, and he managed to step off the hearth without stumbling.
The next second, though, he caught his foot on a potions vial lying on the floor. Severus would remind him that it was only a bit.
Harry snorted, picked up the vial, and hung his cloak on one of the hooks next to the fireplace. Then he followed the trail of vials, crumpled pieces of parchment, pens, pencils, and dust and soot to the door of Severus’s lab. Severus was prone to mix the Muggle and wizarding worlds in his rubbish when he was planning, too, but he never allowed any of it to dirty the lab.
“Severus?” Harry pitched his voice low, capable of being ignored if Severus wanted to. He didn’t need any explanations of what it could mean-sometimes-to disturb someone brewing. The scars in the door above his head were enough. And the scars on the back of one hand, too.
A second after his call, the door of the lab swung inwards, an invitation in itself. Harry stepped in, already half-smiling.
But he stopped short when he saw two figures turn away from the battered pewter cauldron on the nearest table. In a second, Harry fell back into the calm, cool persona he tended to adopt with visitors from the wizarding world who weren’t his patients.
Of course, he couldn’t remember the last time Severus had invited a customer of his own back into their home from his apothecary. But it wouldn’t do to start showing anything too openly.
“Welcome,” Harry said, and extended a hand a little as he swept a bow. It would have looked better with his cloak still on him, but then, he hadn’t known there was anyone else here. “My name is Harry Potter. If you’re here for a private consultation, then I can leave you alone with Severus and let you-”
“Shove it, Potter.” The figure turned further towards him, and Harry nearly swallowed his teeth at the sight of the pale, desperate face, and the grey eyes glittering frenetically, like broken gems.
“Welcome,” Harry said after a minute, “Malfoy.”
He hoped his voice was polite, but couldn’t be sure, since the falcon-like glance Severus shot him could have meant anything. In the meantime, he couldn’t stop staring, because memories had turned and begun to wing their way through his mind in ghostly processions.
*
Harry leaned back against the wall of the hospital wing, so tired that it felt as if his eyelids were going to fall off his face. But he could sleep now. He was sure he had done it this time, and Snape was going to live.
The door of the hospital wing opening still brought him to his feet with his wand in hand, though. While the Hogwarts hospital wing now had protections humming around it in waves of blue and silver, the colors of Harry’s Healing magic, the Aurors hadn’t yet caught the people who’d almost eviscerated Snape. And Harry was no stranger to the technique of sending someone in under the Imperius Curse so protections attuned to frequent visitors would let them through.
It was Malfoy, though. Harry lowered his wand, while he still studied Malfoy in silence. He hadn’t been among the swarm of Aurors who had found Snape or brought him here or questioned him. Harry had thought he hadn’t been assigned to this case.
“Where is he?” Malfoy had hair standing out from his head that looked burned, and a face nearly as pale as Harry’s with lack of sleep, so Harry just nodded to the bed right in front of him instead of mocking Malfoy for not having eyes in his head.
Malfoy closed his eyes and then opened them again, trembling. He moved in, seeming ignorant of Harry’s careful gaze, and rested his hand on the edge of the bed. Snape didn’t move, but slept on.
“Who did this to him?”
Again Harry held back the snap, and the impulse to tell Malfoy that was more his department than Harry’s. “The rest of your lot don’t know yet,” he said. “They thought they might have an answer by tomorrow morning.”
“When I heard the news, I thought-” Malfoy stopped and seemed about to indulge in a slow-motion collapse. Harry Summoned a chair and skidded it over behind Malfoy. Of course, once he realized someone was trying to care for him, Malfoy straightened his back and glared at Harry.
“Yes, he did almost die,” Harry said. “That’s one reason he’s here instead of St. Mungo’s. Waiting to transport him there would have cost him too much time and blood.” He pinched his lips shut in the next instant. The Aurors had found Snape on the edge of the Forbidden Forest as they searched it for both him and some students who had apparently gone missing two days before. It was sheer luck that Harry had been with them trying to use spells to track one of the students, who he’d recently Healed.
Malfoy turned back to Snape. He put out a hand, retracted it, and sat down in the chair at last. Harry grunted and turned to wash his hands. He would have gone to sleep with them bloody, but now that he had other awakened people in the hospital wing, he wouldn’t.
And Malfoy would judge him for it in a way that most of those other people wouldn’t. Harry ignored the prickle down his spine that whispered maybe it wouldn’t happen now with Snape nearby for Malfoy to care for.
Malfoy had never cared enough for Snape to officially announce it. That was the problem.
Harry cast a few spells that would refresh him on himself. Then he strode over to the Floo to speak to a house-elf. He would have to eat, particularly if he needed to Heal other people. The Aurors were still searching for the missing students.
“Why don’t you tell him?”
It took Harry a long second to realize that Malfoy had said those words to him, instead of the other way around. Then Harry turned slowly, and tried to look casual instead of exhausted as he leaned an elbow on the mantel.
“Excuse me? Tell him what?”
“That you care for him.” Malfoy’s face looked like a skull. As Harry watched, he held his hand out again, then pulled it back again, a little dance he had been conducting with Snape ever since Harry had got to know them both since the war. “I have no idea if he knows, but it’s pathetic, how much you hold back from him.”
Harry felt his lips trembling, and tried to halt what was coming next, because he thought he would look even more pathetic than Malfoy considered him right now. But in the end, he couldn’t make them be still, and he burst out laughing. Not even Snape stirring a little on the bed and rolling over could make him stop.
Malfoy stared at him, and Harry thought he saw the skull beneath coming more and more to the surface every moment. He made no attempt to say anything else, though. He held still, and his rage grew thicker and thicker, filling the room with an invisible cloud.
“All of those words,” Harry finally said, choking a little as he tried to swallow the merriment, “are ones I could have spoken to you.”
“I don’t care for Severus,” Malfoy said, even as his wand fell to the floor and he started back from the bed and the chair as if Harry had sent lightning spinning through him.
Harry sighed. “I almost wish that was true, because it would leave the way open for me.” He continued without allowing Malfoy a chance to respond. “But I can’t compete with the intensity of the relationship you shared during the war, anyway. I don’t really know why you hold back. You might as well go and take what you want, and what he wants, too, from the way he spoke of you.”
There. Harry had sometimes writhed inside with how ungenerous he was, how much he had wished for Malfoy to fall in love with someone else or just conveniently get sick so that Harry could heroically save his life and then Malfoy, in gratitude, would give up his claim to Snape. Something that would remove the weight from Harry’s mind whenever he thought about Malfoy and Snape.
But he couldn’t get more generous than letting Malfoy know the truth and then standing out of the way. Harry turned and cast powder into the Floo, calling “Hogwarts kitchens!” as he saw Snape starting to stir.
Do what you can with the time I’ve given you, Malfoy. It’s not my fault if you don’t use it well.
*
Harry thought it might be his fault, though, when he came back after a full meal and a long talk with Winky to find Snape sitting up in bed, silent, and Malfoy gone.
“None of the other Aurors have come back or brought the missing students in yet?” Harry shook his head as he brushed the soot off his robes.
“They did bring them back.” Snape looked up. “They determined that none of them needed treatment in the hospital wing, though, and so they didn’t call you. It turned out to be-a stupid prank. They dared each other to go into the Forbidden Forest and cast certain spells, and then they found themselves lost. I might as well not have gone after them.” His face wrinkled for a long moment. “Or got myself caught by one of their waiting trap spells they had had another idiotic friend cast to make sure they couldn’t simply run out of the Forest.”
“Oh.” Harry sighed a little as a part of his brain that never relaxed when there were people in trouble seemed to unravel. “That’s good. Much better than I feared.” He nodded at Snape. “And you, Professor?”
“Bloodied, but not broken.” Snape turned and faced him. “And capable of returning to consciousness earlier than you imagined I could. Your Peaceful Sleep Draught was not properly brewed. I heard the whole of your fascinating conversation with Mr. Malfoy.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Sorry?”
“Are you apologizing for the potion or the conversation?” Snape demanded.
“The potion.” Harry held his eyes. “Everything I said to Malfoy was true, and you know it.”
Snape made an irritated motion with his arm. “About his motivations, it may be. Since the war, I have never fathomed his heart.” Harry was still blinking over Severus Snape using the word “heart” seriously when Snape leaned forwards and added, “But you need not presume about my motivations.”
“Oh,” Harry breathed. He strangled his newborn hope. Things never went the way he wanted immediately. “So you’re not pursuing a relationship with him for your own reasons? Or it’s complicated for some other reason besides the war?”
“Fool,” said Snape. “I will not pursue that which flees me. I had enough of that when I had to pretend to care for the goals of others before my own.” He paused, a flicker in his eyes like a dying fire, and added, “I thought you drew back because of disgust or uncertainty. Now that I find it was to give someone else precedence, permit me to enlighten you. My bond with Draco during the war was not so deep that I cannot form another with someone else, especially seven years later.”
Harry drew his shoulders up and blinked for a second.
“I also do not care for those who pretend to be stupider than they are,” Snape said. “I receive enough of that in my classes.”
And Harry laughed, and stepped forwards, and began to explain when he had started admiring the way Snape had returned to life and how he had behaved since the war, and Snape listened as though he had never heard anything like it in his life before.
*
“Draco is here for help on a case.”
Harry thought of himself as mysterious, Severus knew. He had been encouraged in the notion by people who surrounded him and gaped at him and analyzed his smallest movement as though it was profound, never understanding the simple principles that drove most of Harry’s actions. Even after plenty of proof that Severus could read him like a Muggle sign, Harry still tried to draw himself back, behind impassive walls.
He was doing it now, hunching his shoulders slightly and giving Draco a smile as stiff as the side of the cauldron. When Severus spoke those words about the case, Harry turned and gaped at him. Draco smoothed a hand down his robes and pretended he was elsewhere.
More open than you will ever realize, Severus thought at both of them, and continued, “It seems that the Aurors are tracking a killer who knows both the Muggle and the wizarding worlds better than most do. He’s come to us for help in setting up a trap and bait for the killer.”
“Based on a potion?” Harry turned as though he was prepared to acknowledge the existence of the half of the room where Draco stood. “Because I’m not using one of my patients as bait.”
“No one would expect you to,” Severus said, and found that he was turning his head just in time to catch the exasperated eyeroll from Draco. There were times in which he was more similar to Draco, even now.
And there were some ways in which Harry was still a Gryffindor. “Then why does he need the help of both of us, instead of just you?” he asked Severus, and faced Draco fully. “Why not just ask for the potion and be done with it?”
Draco drew himself up. The seven years since Severus had seen him last had done him good, Severus thought. He was a wizard in his mid-thirties now, and had outgrown the lingering traces of his childhood. He stood and moved more confidently, and if Harry hadn’t wound himself so tightly in his shell, he would have felt the soft thrum of magic around Draco. Contained, settled, adult.
Then again, neither Harry nor Draco had ever been rational where the other was concerned, and Draco proceeded to prove it.
“Because it’s not about a potion. It’s about observation. And luring the killer to me with help that only you can provide.” Draco performed the trick of looking down his nose that made Severus sigh under his breath. “We know he targets Mind-Healers. Don’t worry, Potter, we won’t ask you to put any of your precious sheep at risk.”
“I’ll take being a sheepdog over someone who still believes that Muggles are inferior,” Harry said instantly.
Draco turned a deeply unattractive red. Severus moved a hand over and flicked his fingers against the caldron so it rang. Both the others started slightly and looked at him.
“From the case as Draco has described it to me,” Severus told Harry, and let his accents fall in all the right places that only seven years of living with and loving with someone could teach him, “it is serious. Store up the petty insults and fling them at each other after the case. Perhaps they’ll be soaked in special virulence from your spite then.”
Draco turned redder. Harry only nodded, and then turned and said in an arctic tone, “Won’t you come in and have some dinner? I was just about to start it.”
Draco nodded back. Harry seemed able to feel it, since he certainly didn’t turn to look at it. He departed through the door into the rest of the house instead, his head so high that it made Severus’s neck ache watching.
Once the door swung a little shut, Draco turned immediately to Severus. His voice was low but passionate. “Do we need him to set up this trap? Tell him the minimum amount possible and then arrange the trap. We could always use an illusion of him and leave him out of it. He’s just the same, Severus. He won’t understand!”
Severus waited. Eventually, the passage of seconds like grains of sand wore away the outer coating of Draco’s self-absorption, and he turned redder. Severus nodded.
“You are talking about something that will endanger his life, at least in potentia. And you speak of leaving him out of it? Lying to him?” Severus shook his head once. “He is not the one who doesn’t understand.”
He preceded Draco into the house, and left the echoes of his last statement behind to ring in Draco’s ears. There was more than one reason for Draco to think about them.
*
“But I was the one you sacrificed everything for. And I never even got the chance to say that I was sorry!”
Severus pushed the cauldron back from him. It wobbled on the edge of the table for a moment, then tipped. Severus watched with a savage satisfaction as the potion poured onto the stone floor and began to eat through it as the liquid combined with some of the scattered belladonna leaves Severus had dropped there earlier.
Draco raised his head with a startled gasp, and then slumped back in his chair. “And now I’ve ruined your potion! Severus, I’m sorry.”
Severus turned and limped sharply towards the back of his quarters. The scars along his neck ached, the way they always did in moments of high emotion.
Ironically, he had entertained Draco’s visit in the first place because he had thought that a twenty-one-year-old, and one skilled enough to be accepted into the Auror program, would be able to explain and explore the complexities of their situation after the war, instead of whining about it. He had been wrong. And he did not think that he should be disappointed in all of his former students who had attained that particular age.
This was Draco’s fault.
Severus drew his wand and gestured. The cupboards flew open, and tea marched out and began preparing itself as the kettle filled with water from his jetted Aguamenti spell. Severus took the cups himself and slammed them on the counter, delighting in their clang.
“Severus?”
Draco had not been able to help much of what had happened to him in the war, including the Unbreakable Vows his mother and Dumbledore had made Severus swear, and his father’s idiocy, and the punishment that the Dark Lord had laid on him to make up for Lucius’s idiocy. Severus had hoped that, with those weights gone, he would develop into the person that Severus knew he could be.
It had not happened. Instead, Draco had grown more apologetic, but also more absorbed by his self-pity. Convinced no one could ever forgive him, he wearied Severus and others by appearing at their doors, whining about how sorry he was, and then glorying in the feeling he received when they got bored and kicked him out.
Severus was determined to stop that today, at least. He could never force Draco to grow into his full potential, but he might remove one excuse for it.
Draco repeated his name, standing at the entrance to the kitchen. Severus turned and nodded reassuringly at him, which made Draco beam so much he never noticed the small vial Severus withdrew from another drawer or how he added it to the tea.
It was a potion Severus used most of the time only when a reporter or someone who wanted to write an “essay” on his activities during the war pushed their way into Hogwarts. None of them had ever come back.
“Most people don’t even know I can apologize,” Draco was saying, as he stood by the table and rocked softly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “They won’t let me prove myself to them.” He bowed his head and touched his hair as if he was checking to make sure it was still present. “No one wants to listen.”
Then why did you get accepted into the Auror program? Severus thought, but he knew he would get no answer there, either. Besides, it was hard to speak since the wound to his throat. He could do so, but only haltingly and softly, and Draco was in no mood to listen to either kind of speech.
“No one just understands what it’s like, wanting to apologize and having no one accept your apology.” Draco picked up the doctored cup of tea and tilted his head back to throw the hot liquid down his throat. “No one-”
The potion took effect at once, because Severus had never been one to wait on idiocy when he need not. A second later, Draco clutched at his throat and wheezed. Then he dropped to his knees on the floor, choking.
The sounds were soft, and Severus judged it a good time to speak. “I have long forgiven you, Draco.”
Draco looked up at him, and then touched his throat. Severus nodded.
“The sensation like a boulder in your throat will fade in half an hour. You cannot dispel it by means of magic, so don’t try,” Severus added, seeing Draco reach for the hawthorn wand up his sleeve. “And now, I will speak to you of the real waste of your life.”
Draco seemed to have discovered that he couldn’t cough anything up, but that didn’t prevent him from trying. Severus moved forwards until he was almost standing on the boy’s hand before Draco bothered to pay attention to him.
“The real waste,” Severus whispered, “is that you have made no attempt to live and grow past the war. You do not even know what is important. You are an Auror trainee, but I never hear you talk about that. Your father is in prison, but that forms no part of your list of tragedies. You have few or no friends, but you are not smart enough to attribute their non-existence to your own actions.” Severus paused to take a wheezing breath. He would have trouble breathing if he spoke too long.
Draco stared up at him. He had forgotten about wheezing himself, Severus was glad to see. He simply had his hands laid on the hollow of his throat and his shoulders. As Severus watched, his shoulders shook a little.
Severus met his eyes, and held them. He made his voice sharp, short, passionate. “I once wanted to save your life partially because I wanted to see the kind of man you could grow into. It doesn’t seem as though you have chosen to grow.”
Draco stood up and began to back away. Severus watched him. Draco reached the door and fumbled backwards for the knob, never taking his eyes off Severus.
In the end, he bolted out of the school and was gone, leaving Severus to clean up the tea, the spilled potion, and the remains of his patience.
Draco was much younger than he was. Perhaps getting angry at him was as childish as Draco’s refusal to see that the world had changed around him.
But Severus had begun to think that, angry or not, he would never change anything about Draco, so he might as well do what would make him most comfortable.
*
“Meat?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“Potatoes?”
“Thank you.”
Severus didn’t put his hand over his eyes, but only because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Draco and Harry seemed to think they were being subtle, making constant table-talk to each other. Or that someone who watched them would be fooled.
Someone might be if they were running a fever, dazed from a blow on the head, and currently suffering from a Confundus Charm. And even then, Severus thought, leaning back to survey the man who was his lover and the one who might have been, that hypothetical person would have to be blind in one eye.
Harry served with exquisite politeness, still drawn back into that cold cocoon he tended to take up around anyone from the wizarding world who didn’t come as a patient. Severus and his friends were exceptions, but Harry had discovered that too many apparently casual visitors and well-wishers only wanted a glimpse of him or Severus, or had some grudge, or wanted to persuade them to donate to a charity. The coldness chased them off.
Not Draco, of course. The little he’d told Severus about the case before Harry came home had been enough to make Severus understand why Draco would pursue it so tenaciously-though not necessarily why he was the lead Auror on a case that so involved the Muggle world. Draco had started when Harry flicked the light switch in the wall. He hadn’t adapted at all in the last seven years.
And he still looked at Severus now and then with a mute pleading, before looking away, that made Severus’s throat tighten. Severus touched the old scars for a moment, however, and shook his head.
He valued what he had built with Harry. He could have had something of exciting richness and strength with Draco, too, but Draco had finally lacked the courage to come to Severus and join him in that journey. Harry had made the choice.
From the gleam of contempt in Harry’s eyes when they cut across Draco’s face, it was for the past insult to Severus that Harry most blamed him. Severus wished there was a way to discreetly tell Harry that he need not be angry on Severus’s behalf.
The courteous meal finally finished, and Harry leaned back in his chair as obediently bobbing bowls of ice cream came out of the kitchen. “What’s this case that you wanted us to look at, Malfoy?”
It was an excuse to speak, and Draco seemed to seize it gratefully. He grabbed up a thick sheaf of parchment from inside his cloak and laid it on the table, then moved it a second before the bowl of ice cream thumped down where he had started to put it.
Harry, Severus said, with his glance and the turn of his head. Harry nodded and leaned back a little, and watched with pretended calm as Draco removed the constricting spell from the sheaf.
“We’re calling this the Argent Case, right now.” Draco’s voice was low and exhausted as he spoke the words. “The only reason we started realizing the murders were linked was the band of silver around the upper left forearm of each victim.”
“The upper left forearm?” Harry asked.
People are dying, Severus said, with the way he curled his fingers into Harry’s leg under the table. Leave the ancient grudge alone for now.
Harry subsided just as Draco glanced at him with his own slow fire kindling in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “And we did check any possible Death Eater connections, and got nothing. All of the victims are half-bloods with strong Muggle ties or Muggleborns, anyway. Not the sort the Dark Lord would have taken under his charge.” He ignored, graciously enough, the mutter from Harry about the Dark Lord’s real name. “Or Muggles.”
Severus sat up. “That’s the reason you came to us?”
“Yes.” Draco made the sensible decision to focus only on Severus for right now, leaning as close and speaking as softly as he had when they were alone in the lab. “We don’t understand it. It took us ages to start learning about the Muggles who had died, in remote places all over the country, with those same silver bands. And it made us realize that this killer is hunting more places than we ever thought.”
“He goes after Mind-Healers, you say?”
Severus started. Harry’s voice had shattered the fragile atmosphere he and Draco had built up between themselves without Severus’s even realizing it.
Draco sat back, and wrapped himself in a calm, frigid cloak that he actually seemed to clasp at his throat with a small motion of his hand. “Yes,” he said. “Not all, but a significant portion, of the victims with ties to the wizarding world have been Mind-Healers.”
Severus glanced at Harry sidelong. He had magic fluttering around him in the way Draco had once had. But while Draco’s had come from the almost constant stress he’d lived under during the war, Harry’s usually only stirred in moments of extreme agitation.
“And the Muggles?” Harry pushed ahead tensely. “Is it possible that any of them had seen Mind-Healers?”
“They were Muggles, Potter,” Draco said. “Of the absolute worst-I mean, blameless kind. They had no magical relatives. They weren’t connected to any of the wizards killed. We wouldn’t have thought the cases were related at all if not for the silver bands.”
“But did they go to psychologists who might have been Mind-Healers?” Harry asked softly. “Or had Mind-Healer training?”
Draco’s mouth fell open a little. Severus held back a smug chuckle. He wasn’t sure who he would have been laughing at, anyway.
“Shit,” Draco breathed. “That’s a connection we never thought to check.”
“It would be difficult to check if the people they visited were wizards who had cut ties,” Harry said, standing and picking up his bowl of ice cream. He hadn’t eaten any of it, Severus saw. “Muggleborns who vanished back into the Muggle world the minute they were done with Hogwarts, for example. But I suggest you look into it.” He glided back into the kitchen.
Draco wrote a few excited notes down, then sat back and shook his head at Severus. “He could have come up with that earlier.”
“Without information?” Severus let his voice climb the notch from “surprised curiosity” to “exasperated rhetorical question.”
Draco flinched for old time’s sake, and then said, “He was the best, you know. That’s what they said in Auror training, before he quit to become a Healer. He could have done a lot more than he did.”
“Harry is content with the path he’s chosen,” Severus said temperately, while he felt as if he’d swallowed a whole glass of lemonade unexpectedly. That was a cause for bitterness he had never known lay between Harry and Draco. “And he gave up on being an Auror almost ten years ago. You can’t hold out hope he would choose to go back now?”
“If he’d chosen to stay, those people might not have died.”
Severus rose. “I trust you are wiser than to say that to him,” he snapped, and made to follow Harry.
“Severus.”
There were tones and shadings in Draco’s voice that Severus had never thought to hear there, and that was the only reason he paused, reluctantly, and looked back. Draco held out an appealing hand to him. Severus grimaced, and waited.
“This case is horrible,” Draco whispered. “These cases are horrible. Do you know how this killer murders them? He uses the Entrail-Expelling Curse and then stuffs their mouths full of their own intestines and wraps them around the bodies and bathes them in blood. It’s sickening. And I’ve had to look at almost twenty of these bodies.”
Severus closed his eyes for a second. “You have another link between the killings besides the silver bands, then,” he said.
“Yes.”
Draco’s voice was dragging, reluctant. But Severus could not give him the absolution or the connection he was looking for. He’d had the chance to claim that, and had chosen to give it up.
“We will give you what help we can,” Severus said. Then he opened his eyes and pinned Draco with the kind of gaze Draco had once known better than to mistake. “But I would suggest that you do not try to guilt Harry into offering you help you think he should have given you months ago.”
“Look at the way he said something useful within the first five minutes, though. If he’d been there-”
Severus turned around and left. It seemed there were some things that Draco Malfoy, still, would never understand.
Part Two.
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