[From Litha to Lammas]: The Art of the Impossible, R, 4/7, Harr/Draco/Blaise/Theo

[lomonaaeren]

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Part Four

“What is this?”

Harry opened his eyes and looked around. “Well, fuck me,” he muttered, staring. He had left these bland walls and insipid photographs behind, but not so long ago that he wouldn’t recognize the inside of Number Four Privet Drive.

“Perhaps that can be arranged.”

Harry glanced over his shoulder at Theo, snorting. “You wouldn’t want to do it right in the middle of the Muggle world,” he said, and nudged his bondmate with one hand. “Don’t waggle your eyebrows at me.”

“I would never do something so childish,” Theo said, giving Harry that open smile Harry had once thought he would never see. “Perhaps we can fuck in your old bedroom.”

“No room,” Harry muttered, and when Theo frowned at him, stepped forwards and opened the door of the cupboard under the stairs. It was a bright and sunny morning, although admittedly the sun seemed to come from nowhere in particular. Perhaps Theo had created an enchanted window in the wall and Harry just hadn’t noticed it.

“What do you mean?” Theo stepped forwards and peered into the cupboard as if looking for a missing sock.

“This was my room until I went to Hogwarts. They stuffed me in here and forgot about me, a lot of times. Unless they wanted me to do chores, and then they would haul me out and make me do them.”

Theo spun around and stared at him. Harry raised his eyebrows. He knew that Theo had suffered just as bad or worse as a child.

“Are you going to say it’s worse because they’re Muggles?” he asked, a little gentle, a little impatient. “You ought to know better than that, Theo.”

“It is worse,” Theo said, and his hand shook as he reached out towards the cupboard. He stopped short of it, though, and backed away as if it was casting Stinging Hexes at him. “Because at least I grew up around other magical people and knew about my heritage. And I knew I would get to escape to Hogwarts someday. And I had people who valued me, friends who told me that it wasn’t right. Did you have any of that?”

Harry glanced away. Theo promptly stepped in and slipped his hand around the back of Harry’s neck in that comforting way he had. Harry exhaled shakily and leaned against him.

“I want to know if you had any of that,” Theo’s mouth said close to his ear. Harry shivered, thinking about other things that mouth had done, but it was time to answer the question. “Tell me.”

Sometimes Harry regretted, truly regretted, that the bond made him unable to lie. But he had been the one to come up with the idea of bringing Theo to his relatives’ house and insisting that the abuse hadn’t been that bad, so he could bear the consequences.

“No,” Harry whispered. “I didn’t have any friends because of my cousin. And I knew nothing about magic or Hogwarts even though they did. They kept that from me.”

“Then it was worse,” Theo said. His hand sank into Harry’s hair and twisted, and Harry arched his neck and shivered again. He had never known how much he liked having his hair played with, until Theo. “And we should do something to them.”

“We don’t need to.”

“I want to.”

And, well, who was Harry to deny Theo anything? He stepped back and looked up the stairs to the bedrooms where he thought at least Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were probably still sleeping. Dudley had most likely moved out. “Let’s begin, then.”

*

Harry opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling, and said, “What the bloody hell.”

He sat up, shaking. The dream had been so vivid. He had stood in Privet Drive and heard his own voice and felt as though the floor was solid beneath his feet (a marker of the most “real” dreams he’d ever had). If Petunia had been cooking in the kitchen, he thought he would have smelled her roast.

But the twisted relationship he had with Theodore Nott in that dream made no sense. Why in the world would Harry ever tell him secrets? Why would he take him to Privet Drive in the first place? And worst of all, why would he ever consent to let Nott torture his relatives?

The nasty voice in the back of his head murmured, Shouldn’t it be, worst of all, why would you have sex with him?

Harry swallowed and pushed the thought away. But truthfully, that mattered less to him than the rest of it. He’d known chances were excellent he would die a virgin.

He paused as he was about to get up from the bed, because now there was another voice in his head, and it wasn’t the nasty one that sounded like Nott.

He heard Zabini saying the bond would change him.

You are here now. You are part of us. You cannot reject that. You cannot flee.

The dream was probably part of that, Harry thought, and nodded slowly. All right, that was—disturbing, a huge interference with his mind and magic, but at least he could recognize it. Even if he couldn’t in the dream itself, when he woke up, he knew it for a load of bollocks.

He knew better than to ask any of the Death Eaters to try and block the bond, either. They’d made it clear they wouldn’t. In a way, this was just another battlefield of the kind he’d been anticipating when they took him hostage, and a cleaner and more straightforward one. At least he knew the bond was trying to trick him and shove him closer to the other three, instead of anticipating a blow that didn’t fall and possibly being fooled by fake kindness.

Harry straightened his shoulders. He would set himself to endure, the way he’d thought he would have to endure torture. He would do what he could to prove that he was such a terrible prospect, Malfoy and Zabini and Nott would end up rejecting him in disgust. Harry couldn’t get free of them, but he could make them send him away.

Or kill him.

Does it really matter which, in the end, as long as it benefits Neville’s side?

*

“Good morning.”

Nott’s voice was low and gentle. Harry paused in the doorway of the dining room, wondering for a moment why Nott was sitting alone at the table, and then whether he had seen or shared Harry’s dream somehow.

Well. It didn’t matter. Asking questions like that would only draw him further into the bond and make him feel as though he owed something to these Death Eaters. There was no way he should do it.

“Good morning,” Harry said back, and sat down in his usual seat. He blinked when he saw that there were only a few plates in front of Nott, one of scrambled eggs and one of sausages, and a glass of pumpkin juice that Nott shoved towards him. “You realize that if house-elves made this—”

“They didn’t. I made it.”

Harry gaped at him. “No bloody way,” he said, when he recovered his voice. “You’re a pureblood, why would you cook?”

Nott rolled his eyes. “Did you really think that all purebloods had house-elves who would do things for them?”

“I mean, yeah, most do. And most treat them like shit.”

“Like you were?”

Nott’s voice was light, but Harry knew better than to trust it. He rolled his eyes. “Yes, I told you all about my sad childhood, can we move on?”

“I was just wondering if that’s why you empathize so much with house-elves.” Nott dished some eggs and sausage onto an empty plate sitting off to the side and pushed it over to Harry. Harry had to admit, reluctantly, that he thought better of the bloke for not using his wand. “Interested in knowing more about the new bondmate I’m going to live with for the rest of our lives.”

“You can have heart-to-hearts with two others, why don’t you do it with them instead?”

“Do you believe it’s such a foreign impulse, to want other people to understand you?” Nott had steepled his fingers beneath his chin, probably trying to look like some wise old professor, and Harry remembered Dumbledore with a pang. He hadn’t been close to the Headmaster, but he had seen a few memories in Neville’s Pensieve. “As many as possible?”

“I believe it’s something I can’t afford to indulge,” Harry told him, and started eating. He had to hide his unbelievable gratitude for the food, but he thought he could do that as long as Nott didn’t talk about it.

“Can’t afford to indulge a natural longing for kindness and compassion,” Nott said, and his eyebrows appeared about to fly off his face. “That’s incredibly sad.”

“Not the kind of kindness and compassion you claim to practice,” Harry muttered, and shoved eggs into his face. Nott would probably be one of those prissy purebloods who wouldn’t want to see someone’s mouth full of food more than he wanted to continue the conversation.

Nott watched him, eyes glinting, in silence long enough that Harry thought he’d been right. But then Nott shook his head and murmured, “You will be here for the rest of your life, Harry. You should be able to accept what’s natural, an instinct to love and trust the people you’re around.”

Unfortunately, Harry was swallowing a bit of egg when Nott said that, which meant he began to cough and choke. Nott clucked his tongue and waved his wand. An invisible force jerked the food out of Harry’s throat and soothed his coughing.

“Sorry,” Harry said, after a final snort, and sat back in his chair. “You think it’s a natural instinct to love and trust the people you’re around? Did you forget where I grew up? Where you grew up?”

Nott’s eyes widened for a second. “I meant—”

“I don’t really care what you meant.” Harry shoved back from the table. “This conversation is over.”

“I never meant to drive you away from your food.” Nott stood up. “Please, accept my sincerest apologies, Harry. I will remove myself from your vicinity instead, and allow you to go on eating.”

Harry hesitated. He really was hungry and wanted to finish—

Nott was standing still, his head bowed as though in repentance. “I hope that you will find yourself inclined to wander down to the pitch later this morning,” he added over his shoulder. “I remember you as competent on a broom, and neither Blaise nor I can really give Draco much of a challenge.”

He left before Harry could say anything. Slowly, Harry sank back into his chair, and as slowly, began to eat.

He wondered if Nott had simply meant the conversation and the leaving as ploys to gain Harry’s trust. Probably.

He did trust that Nott had told the truth when he’d said he cooked the breakfast himself, though. And maybe it was all right as long as Harry trusted what they said about harmless things like that. It wasn’t the same as yielding to them. In fact, it was turning the truth-telling properties of the bond back on them.

Harry smiled a little. They’re going to be sorry that they took me by the time all this is said and done.

*

“Finally, Harry!”

It was beyond strange to hear Draco Malfoy call him Harry. After all, Malfoy had been Slytherin’s Seeker since second year, Harry Gryffindor’s since their third. They’d yelled lots of things at each other on the pitch, but never their first names.

Harry, holding the Firebolt that had shown up in his room in one hand, couldn’t deny a sting of excitement as he watched Malfoy spiral down to the center of the pitch on his Nimbus, though. He’d spent the morning so bored. This would at least be something different, but familiar enough to remind himself to hold his distance from his “bondmates.”

“Do you want to just chase the Snitch, or do you want the full experience?” Malfoy’s cheeks were pink with the wind of the early spring afternoon. He nodded to a locked box nearby that was shaking the way Harry associated with Bludgers.

Harry smiled at him. “Why not have the full experience?” he said, and then arched his eyebrow a little. “Unless you’re scared.”

“It takes more than that to scare me, Potter,” Malfoy said, and stepped over to the locked box, spinning out of the way as he sent the Bludgers and the Snitch both into flight. The Quaffle rose and bobbed a bit, then sank to the ground. But the Bludgers were already spinning to orient on them.

Malfoy climbed aboard his broom. “Are you coming, Potter?”

“Yeah, just a second,” Harry said, and slung his leg over the Firebolt, his eyes on the Bludgers. Malfoy nodded and sped off. Harry bowed his head and waited, feeling the good kind of adrenaline stream through him for the first time since he’d come here.

The Bludgers were coming at him with the streak of whistling wind that Harry had loved on the Hogwarts pitch.

“Harry!”

Harry waved a hand at Malfoy, despite seeing him turn his broom around in midair. It came to Harry like a distant, unimportant piece of information that Malfoy was calling him by his first name. Probably something to do with the damn bond.

“Harry!”

The Bludgers were almost to him. Harry waited until he was sure they wouldn’t turn aside or pull any sudden maneuvers the way they sometimes did in a live game, and then he rose straight up from between them.

Behind him came the enormous crack of the Bludgers slamming together. Harry spun in place, laughing, and saw Malfoy pull out of a dive with difficulty, drifting sideways as he scowled at Harry. His hair was all messed up.

“You prat!”

“Proud of it,” Harry agreed, and nudged the Firebolt to the left. He’d never been on one of these, but that didn’t matter. The broom turned like a dream under him, and Harry instantly felt as though he understood everything it could do, because he’d spent hours imagining this. “Come on, let’s play.”

He spun away from Malfoy and arched for the sky. Malfoy spluttered and then began to follow. The Bludgers had recovered from their collision and were moving like bolos around each other, focusing on both Harry and Malfoy.

It made it all the more exciting.

A gleam of gold off to the left side of the pitch. Harry flattened himself along the broom and sped towards it, ignoring the way that Malfoy shouted behind him. Maybe he thought Harry was trying to distract him.

But Harry really had seen the Snitch, and as it wove an intricate, embroidery-like pattern across the air, Harry continued following it, dodging and weaving with it.

Malfoy caught up with him as the Snitch slowed down, but Harry pulled another spinning maneuver and nearly led his opponent right into the path of a Bludger. Malfoy recovered with an impressive duck and some even more impressive swearing.

Harry laughed aloud. He felt the sunlight on his skin, and it felt as if he could play forever, as if he could spend his life on a broom, as if he were made for this.

He ducked down, ducked up, grabbed the Snitch, and turned around to wave his hand at Malfoy.

Malfoy was watching him with an expression Harry had never seen before, a warm, quirked half-smile that Harry could only imagine was the way he must smile at Nott and Zabini. That was, if they were mates as well as bondmates.

Of course they are. They have sex, too, you know that, right? And that’s what they want to invite you into the middle of.

Harry felt as if his face had caught on fire. Malfoy’s smile disappeared, and he urged his Nimbus a little closer. “What’s wrong, Harry?”

“Don’t call me Harry,” Harry muttered half-heartedly, and dived towards the ground. Malfoy followed him, and reached out a hand to put it on the haft of the Firebolt as Harry hopped off, keeping his gaze on the ground.

“Something’s wrong,” Malfoy insisted. “You were looking at me and you seemed happy, and then suddenly you looked as though someone was trying to embarrass you to death. What is it? Did I do something wrong?” He shifted a little, and suddenly his hand was on Harry’s arm instead of the broom. “I very much want to do things right. I know that we didn’t get on in school, and you have no reason to trust me, but I want to make up for that now.”

“Do you have sex with Nott and Zabini?” Harry blurted out, instead of listing the things Malfoy had done wrong, which he probably wouldn’t listen to anyway.

Malfoy pulled his hand back slowly, a blush stealing over his features. “That’s what you want to ask?”

“I want to know.”

Malfoy considered Harry in silence for a long moment, and then gave a quick nod. “Yes. It depends on what we feel like that day and who wants to do what. Sometimes both of them, sometimes just one…sometimes I wank and they watch, or vice versa.” He leaned forwards with a small smile. “Why so interested, Potter?”

“You keep talking about this bond and the power you get from it.” Harry held Malfoy’s eyes, even though it was hard (no! no! difficult!) with how much he was blushing. “But none of you have talked much about being lovers. I didn’t know if that was part of it.”

Malfoy laughed a little. “Yes. Of course we’re lovers. We’re too closely aligned to accept the intrusion of anyone else into the bond.”

“Oh, good. So that includes me.”

“No,” Malfoy said, and he gave Harry a look that seemed to mingle pity and exasperation. “Of course not, Potter. We’ve told you. You’re part of the bond, part of us. When we didn’t know who you were or why we needed a fourth person in our bond, we missed you just the same. We’re all part of this together. You’re ours. We’re yours.”

We’re yours.

Part of Harry burned. There were times that he would have given anything to hear those words. He had wanted—

He had wanted a lover. He had wanted best friends as close as Ron and Hermione and Neville were to each other. He’d found a degree of acceptance, allies, friends on the Quidditch team and with the Boy-Who-Lived later on, but not close enough to have the silent conversations or the inside jokes or the memories they did.

Here it was being offered to him on a silver platter.

Harry found himself reaching out. Malfoy promptly extended his hand. Their fingers collided, and a shivering spark of warmth traced its way down Harry’s arm, coiling back and forth as if it was etching the pattern of a magical snake there the way the ritual had already done.

Malfoy moved closer, his face lifted, his expression soft.

Harry had never kissed a bloke, but right now, nothing seemed more appealing. He closed the distance between them and brushed his lips over Malfoy’s before he thought better of it.

There was a shattering sound that Harry seemed to hear only with his mind, and something inside him broke. Suddenly emotions were roaring through him, pleasure so intense that it cooked his brain and joy as deep as hatred. Harry grabbed Draco and pulled him closer, and Draco went, yielding with a little moan.

Harry wanted—he needed—he could feel Theo and Blaise turning towards them from distant parts of the house, and he wanted to have them come here and be all together—

But then Draco reached up to touch Harry’s face with his left hand, and his sleeve fell back from his left forearm.

Harry leaped away as though he had been stung, and stared in silence at the Dark Mark there.

“Harry,” Draco panted. His cheeks were still bright pink, and Harry could still feel his heat, in many ways. He reached out again, and cupped Harry’s face, his fingers moving gently back and forth over Harry’s skin. “I promise that I did it only to survive. Not to have power. You’re the one who completes us. You and Theo and Blaise mean more to me than all the power in the world.”

Harry closed his eyes and reached out to the shattered remains of his wall against the bond, tugging on them until they began to draft back into place.

“Harry, please, no,” Draco blurted. Harry opened his eyes, struggling to concentrate on the wall, struggling to think of Draco as Malfoy, and saw that he’d gone bone-pale. “Please. It hurts when you do that. It’s not so bad when the barrier is up, but when you pull back…please. Leave it at least a little open.”

“I can’t,” Harry panted, and shoved the wall into place. He ended up bending over with the pain. Malfoy made a harsh noise, one arm wrapping around his stomach as if he was going to be sick.

Harry staggered back. He felt the same way, but it couldn’t matter, he thought, as he stared again at the Dark Mark. He had nearly given in. He had nearly decided to sleep with the enemy. And why? Because he was lonely?

Merlin, Neville would have lasted longer than this. He would have laughed to see Harry succumbing this quickly, Or, well, probably not laughed, because Neville wasn’t cruel like that to people who were weaker than him, but he would have given Harry such a disappointed look.

Harry turned away, shame curdling his stomach. Nott, standing beneath the Keeper’s hoop, folded his arms and gave Harry his own version of a disappointed look. So did Zabini, who had a dangling arm and a broom clutched in that hand.

Harry found that he didn’t dare turn and see what the expression on Malfoy’s face was.

Burning for all sorts of reasons, Harry bolted.

*

“I never took you for a coward.”

“I know, Zabini,” Harry said. He was standing on a balcony he’d found leading off a large sitting room on the second floor of Malfoy Manor. He didn’t turn to face Zabini even when the other man’s footsteps came to a halt right behind him. “But you’re right. I’m not as perfect a Gryffindor as Neville was. I—”

“Not that,” Zabini said, and reached out, gripping Harry’s shoulder and roughly spinning him. “Merlin, you think I’m talking about that?”

Harry stared into Zabini’s eyes, which shone with frustration like stars. He was so beautiful. They all were, Harry admitted, in the part of him that couldn’t forget he had nearly kissed a Death Eater. And they were here, all bright eyes and hot flesh and persuasive tongues. It would be so easy to forget, to fall.

“I’m talking about that,” Harry whispered. “I could barely hold out a few days even knowing that you torture people. Merlin, how pathetic am I? You sure you want a pathetic bondmate?”

Zabini laughed abruptly and stepped away from Harry to stare out over the grounds of Malfoy Manor, running a hand over his face. “You have so many misconceptions that it’s honestly impressive,” he said over his shoulder.

Harry took a deep breath and resisted the urge to snap back. Getting more emotionally involved with Death Eaters was the last thing he should do right now. “Well, see, that’s another reason that you shouldn’t want me as a bondmate. I’m impulsive and stupid compared to you and I don’t—”

“The way that you’ve held out against the bond is impressive, too,” Zabini said, still looking away from him. “But impossible to do for much longer. I told you what would happen, Harry. The bond would draw you closer and closer to us, and make it impossible for you to stand at a distance.”

Harry shrugged and said nothing. It was possible that he would wake up some morning as a Death Eater. But he was still going to try his best to remain free.

“Why do you resist it so much?” Zabini asked, and his voice was low and coaxing. “Just try to make me understand.”

“You didn’t believe that I could distrust you even when I told you what you did to make me distrust you,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Why should I try again?”

“Please. I’d like to understand.”

Harry shrugged. He supposed it wasn’t a waste of his breath. What else did he have to do but try and reason with his captors? “I don’t want to be the kind of person who tortures people. Who murders people. Who lets Death Eaters into a school full of children. And that’s what I’ll become if I let this bond take me over.”

“No,” breathed Zabini. “You won’t become that, Harry, I promise.”

It was heady to have someone as handsome as Zabini staring at him and promising that. But it also wasn’t a promise he could make, Harry thought abruptly, turning his head away.

“You don’t know that. You couldn’t resist the bond, and look what it did to you.”

“You know what made us that way?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“The influence of the Dark Mark.”

Harry snorted. “And I’m sure Voldemort—” he ignored Zabini’s flinch as his Mark must have burned, and ignored his own unhappiness at the thought “—just hypnotized you and turned you into his puppets. I’m sure that hurting people and killing them never would have entered your heads otherwise, right?”

Zabini shook his head. “We would have killed to defend ourselves, tortured for a cause we believed in.” He pressed on when Harry snorted again. “And you’re saying that no one on Longbottom’s side used Unforgivables? Ever?”

“They did,” Harry said, with a little grimace. It wasn’t something he liked to acknowledge. “But they didn’t do it so often that they became known for it. Or on the orders of the Carrows.”

“Yes, Theo resented that,” Zabini murmured. “But you should know that the reason this happened was because of the Mark’s influence. Without our fourth bondmate, we were vulnerable to being taken over by its magic and prodded to express our darkest impulses. With you here now, with you completing us, we can become what we want to.”

“I wish you good luck with that.”

“You’re tangled with us now, Harry. There’s no going back. Haven’t you noticed that Theo is already more open to you than he was, more likely to smile?”

“Uh…no?”

“That’s right, you haven’t spent much time around him.” Zabini’s shoulders rose and fell. “You will. I don’t think the bond is going to be very happy that you’re sleeping in a room separate from the rest of us, very soon.”

“The bond can go get fucked,” Harry snapped.

Zabini only smiled. “When you get tired of fighting back against shelter and protection and pleasure and the best friendship you’ll ever have, then do let me know.” He started to leave, then paused. “Well, I suppose that you won’t have to. The bond will do that for you.”

He left, and the door clicked shut behind him. Harry sank onto the bed, staring at the ceiling again.

He would have felt better if the door had been locked.