Part Twenty-Six of 'Their Phoenix'
Aug. 4th, 2009 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: Their Phoenix (26/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Threesome, Snape/Harry/Draco. (Harry and Draco do develop their own sexual relationship within the threesome). Some Harry/Ginny and Snape/Draco near the beginning of the story.
Rating: NC-17.
Warnings: Magical bonding, slash sex, violence, profanity, massive denial. Springing-from-DH AU; it starts deviating from the moment Voldemort confronts Snape in the Shrieking Shack.
Summary: AU. Voldemort has learned who the true master of the Elder Wand is, and he plans to kill Draco along with Snape. Harry is desperate to save them, because Dumbledore would have wanted him to. But with wild magic, Horcruxes, and Dark Marks all involved, Harry may have condemned all three of them to something worse than death.
Author’s Notes: This is One of Those Bonding Fics. It’s also One of Those Threesome Fics, and also One of Those Fics With Harry-in-Denial. If that sounds like what you’re looking for, then come right in. I’m sorry to say that I have absolutely no idea how long this will be, and it will also be irregularly updated, whenever I finish a major “part.”
Part One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
“But the Ministry here doesn’t have any record of her parents’ marriage,” Hermione said, for the second time, leaning forwards as if she thought that she could drub the words she wanted to hear out of Harry with her fists. Harry stopped a sigh, but it was difficult. He wished she would let him talk, since that was the only way she would ever hear the news he was trying so hard to tell her.
“No, because Colben’s parents were married in France,” he said patiently. “The record of the wedding is in the French Ministry.”
Hermione blinked as though someone had shot her. Harry leaned back and ran a hand enviously over the top of the Burrow’s kitchen table. It was smooth and silken with long years of use. It would be decades, probably, before any of the furniture in their house felt like that, even assuming they kept the same furniture that long. Draco had ideas about that that sometimes invaded even the more…interesting…of the blended dreams.
Harry flushed, though he wasn’t sure if it came from the thought of the dreams or the fact that he’d just seriously thought about spending decades with Severus and Draco, and took a long swallow of his butterbeer. Even though Ginny had finished her last year of Hogwarts and passed her seventeenth birthday, Mrs. Weasley still didn’t like anyone drinking anything stronger in her house.
“Oh,” Hermione said at last. Then she rallied and said, “But someone might still try to say that her father didn’t really marry a Muggleborn and use that against us.”
Harry shrugged. “Then we’ll ask for a copy of her parents’ marriage records. Though it could possibly be insulting, so I think I’ll let you be the one to ask that, thanks all the same.” He tilted the bottle of butterbeer back and squirted the liquid down his throat.
“Insulting, maybe, but we have to have it,” Hermione said, which Harry knew meant the proof was as good as asked for.
“Yes, all right,” he said, and then turned the conversation around. “Ron said something about you buying your own house.”
Hermione flushed. “I told him not to tell anyone,” she muttered. “We wanted it to be a surprise. And we knew that Molly would be hurt that we were moving out of the Burrow.” Then she relented and gave Harry a smile that made her look more relaxed than he’d seen her since she started helping him with politics. “But yes, we are.”
Harry smiled back. “What made you decide on this now?”
“Because we’re finally ready to stay with each other,” Hermione said. She was looking at the table, and her cheeks were so red that she could have passed as an honorary Weasley. “I know that doesn’t sound like something big, but—”
“No, it is,” Harry said, reaching out and squeezing her arm. “Where are you going to buy the house?” He both hoped and feared that she would say Hogsmeade. He would like having his best friends near him, but he wasn’t entirely certain that Severus and Draco would like it.
“Some people are trying to establish wizarding villages again,” Hermione said. “They think part of the problem during the war was that the Death Eaters knew exactly where to go to target people, and Hogsmeade was so close to Hogwarts that taking over one was easy when they had the other. There’s a village called Iolanthe they’re trying to set up in the South, in Wiltshire.” She hesitated, then added, “Of course, with Apparition, Ron and I can reach the Ministry easily and you can visit us anytime.”
“It’s good to hear that I’m welcome,” Harry said, and thought again of telling her about Draco and Severus. And again, the knowledge that his bondmates might not want their private life to be exposed stopped him.
“Snape and Malfoy can come, too, if you need to be with them,” Hermione said.
Startled, Harry looked up at her. She stared straight at him, then leaned back and picked up her own butterbeer. “If you need to,” she said, now looking out the window as though the sight of the Weasleys’ garden fascinated her.
Slowly, Harry smiled. Maybe Hermione wasn’t aware of all the details, but she had probably noticed the change in his behavior that the open bonds had made, and she was telling him that it was all right, that he was still her friend and welcome in her house.
And if she accepted it, Harry was sure that Ron eventually would as well. Ron was starting to consider Hermione’s opinion as more important than his own, most of the time. Given her guidance, Ron would probably come around to seeing that the feud between the Weasleys and the Malfoys was less important than Harry’s bonds.
“Thanks, Hermione,” he said.
“You’re welcome.” Hermione gave him a solemn look.
Harry reached across the table and tapped his bottle of butterbeer against hers.
*
Draco knew Harry and Severus were talking about something when he wasn’t there, but it was frustrating to try and catch them at it.
He would spend hours in his lab, working on a potion that needed absolute concentration, and then he would come out and find Severus and Harry sitting in the library or the kitchen, staring intently at each other. Then they would glance away the moment he showed up and start talking in loud false voices. Draco had tried asking them bluntly what was wrong, but Harry simply shook his head furiously and Severus had adopted an inscrutable stare that seemed to suggest nothing could possibly be less wrong than his life at the moment.
Sometimes he could feel thoughts darting between them like owls, carrying messages that he couldn’t hear. When he demanded to know whether they were criticizing him, Harry shook his head less furiously, and Severus gave him a cool look and said, “Studying you. No one can complain of the accumulation of knowledge.”
“When it’s about me and you’re gathering it without my realization, I can,” Draco said in a low snarl, imagining that Severus was probably telling Harry some of the secrets that had come up between them when they were in bed together.
Severus caught the edges of the thought and sent him back a fanged denial before he stood and departed the room in a whirlwind of dignity. Draco was left to brood and decide that the secrets Severus was telling Harry were probably even more damaging than what he’d thought they were, so damaging that Severus didn’t dare allude to them.
On the other hand, it seemed that Harry was perfectly capable of gathering his own information. He sat on the other side of the table during meals and in the library on a couch watching Draco. Once or twice Draco turned around panting during one of Ledbetter’s lessons or from a wrestling match with a difficult potion and found Harry standing there with his arms folded and head cocked, eyes fixed intently on him.
“What do you want?” Draco asked him one of the times that he intruded into the lab. Harry’s eyes had become sharper and sharper over the last few days, as though some kind of deadline was approaching that meant he had to focus his concentration.
“To make your life pleasant,” Harry said, and the bond between them was bright with crystal flames, which indicated Harry was being honest.
Draco shook his head. “You’re making it paranoid right now.”
Harry smiled at him, and some of the ice that Draco thought he had seen in his eyes the last few days melted away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m studying to make your life more pleasant, then. And sometimes my nervousness gets the better of me, and I start thinking that you won’t like my gift, and—” He shrugged. “It comes out like that.”
Draco narrowed his eyes. His birthday was in two days, and he was sure that Harry hadn’t meant to let that tidbit about a gift slip. He thought he could live with this for two more days if it meant a spectacular present.
“I’d think that you could learn everything you need to know about me by now,” he contented himself with saying. “After all, you have the bond, and we live in the same house. What about me can be a mystery to you?”
“What you really care about,” Harry said instantly. “Why your fits of courage and maturity never last longer than a few moments. Why you sometimes spend hours of patience on potions and other times act as though you want to smash a vial the minute it balks you. Why you take luxury for granted and want more of it but can live here with us and not have it.” He gave Draco a single intense look that seemed to sear into the middle of his soul. “You, Draco.”
Flustered, frustrated, and more flattered than he wanted to let on, Draco looked away. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Do,” said Harry, and clapped his shoulder, and strode away from the lab with a crest of blue flames playing through the bond.
Draco blinked at his back and then turned to his potion, determined to spend the next two days thinking about something other than Harry. And maybe Severus. He had no idea if Severus would be involved in the gift or not.
I should have asked him, he thought, thinking back over the conversation and realizing that Harry had neatly deflected all the words away from that possibility. He’s more subtle than I thought he was.
There came the inevitable follow-up idea that that would not be difficult, given the opinion he’d entertained of Harry Potter’s subtlety in school, but the words no longer had a bite.
*
Harry was stupidly nervous, to Severus’s mind.
He had a mouth. He had hands. He had an arse. He was bonded to Draco and genuinely cared for him, though with blazing undertones of anger that made Severus expect fights between them daily. He had opened the bonds, so any pleasure he induced in Draco would echo back to him and should make him more eager for his task. He was young and presumably knew something about what a young man would like, thanks to his experiments with Caesarion.
Thinking about those experiments made Severus curl the page he was holding. He carefully flattened it and returned to his reading—or rather to his thinking, as the words gushing through his mind would not let him interpret the ones written before him.
Nevertheless, Harry was nervous.
And, the last few days, and especially after Harry’s conversation with Draco in the potions lab, there was a shut-up place in Harry’s mind that neither of his bondmates could access. Harry pretended it wasn’t there and spent a lot of time looking at Severus with speculative eyes.
Severus knew what he hoped that signified, but not what it truly did.
At the moment, the bond between him and Harry dashed back and forth with sharp waves of panic, as though the moon were causing many separate tides in Harry’s soul. Draco’s bond was more settled and precise, but every now and then it, too, whirled with puffs like dust. Severus sometimes wondered if he would ever have privacy in his own head again.
But he was good at muffling those feelings and concentrating when he wished to. So, at the moment, he must not truly wish to.
Severus shut the book, folded his hands on top of it, and stared into the fire.
Sometimes he felt out of place with them, these two young men who had already lived through many and varied things and looked forwards to a future just as varied. They had suffered; they refused to let the suffering define them. They had loved many people between them; they had not been scarred by a single great love. They had nightmares; they did not have twenty years of them, centering on a few central images. Severus had his bonds to them, but those were slender rope bridges flung out across a great abyss—
“You’re getting maudlin.”
So grave had his mood become that Severus actually imagined for a moment that Albus’s voice had spoken those words; these were the kind of thoughts that he would have when he was at Albus’s tomb. Then he rose and turned around and realized that Harry was standing in the doorway of the library, his arms folded and his glare disapproving. While Severus still tried to come up with an answer, Harry stepped forwards and launched words at him that were the perfect verbal counterparts of the bright blue lightning bolts twisting through the bond.
“You’re sitting here thinking about my mother, as though she was the only one who ever cared for you. You’re sitting here thinking about nightmares, as though you were the only one who ever suffered them. You’re sitting here thinking about distance in the bonds, as though you were the only one who wondered if we would be able to live with this. And that’s not true. You’re shutting yourself away from us with imagined barriers this time, not even the real ones.”
Astonished, Severus stared at Harry for a moment longer before he recovered his voice. He certainly had not meant to share those last thoughts and those particular images. He wondered if he had been less guarded than he imagined or if Harry was more sensitive. Either seemed hard to grant. “You cannot deny that there is a vast difference in our ages and our experience. I would not blame you for trying to have an easier sexual relationship with Draco than with me. I did love your mother, and—”
“Bollocks,” Harry said rudely. “We’ve all been marked by the Dark Lord. And yes, you carried the Dark Mark, and so did Draco, but I had the scar. So don’t dispute with me about the literalness of that word,” he added, rushing ahead before Severus could come up with the words to argue him down. “And yes, my mother loved me, but she’s dead, almost twenty years dead. You have to let go and move on from her sometime.”
“I do not think,” Severus said coldly, stung to the quick in a way that astonished him almost more than it hurt, “that you have ceased to mourn your mother or want her back—”
“At least I didn’t make the mistake,” Harry said, hissing like Nagini, “of thinking that no one else ever loved me just because she maybe loved me most. You had Dumbledore, and you have two people right here in this house who could care for you if you let them. You are a horse’s arse if you go on brooding this way, Severus. We can’t comfort you if you go around being proud of how hard you are to comfort.”
And he strode across the room, seized Severus’s hair in his hands, and kissed him so fiercely that Severus choked on his tongue.
Severus leaned his head back and lifted his hands, determined to regain control of the kiss. But Harry didn’t let him. He pinned one of Severus’s hands to the chair and the other to the side of his head, and meanwhile he went on kissing him, thrusting his tongue as if he were imagining some other action, the action Severus had believed they would have to wait months for before Harry felt ready to undertake it. Severus’s cock hardened more quickly than he thought it had ever done since he was at Hogwarts, and he heard himself making a protesting, gasping murmur.
Harry pulled back finally, licking one last time at Severus’s lips as he went. Then he stood there, arms folded as he gazed at him. His breath sounded hoarse and harsh, as if he’d just come out of a dank and dusty cave and needed the air. Severus started at him, not breathing much better himself.
“There,” Harry said. “You’re right. You’ve had a worse past than either of us. I don’t want to forget that, and I don’t think you should, either. But the only person who can ultimately let your past take over your future is you. Voldemort and Dumbledore are dead and can’t demand your allegiance anymore. You’ve made up any debt that you owed to my mother by keeping me safe. You’ve already said that you won’t let society call you a Death Eater and surrender to their perceptions of you. Why do you think that we would let you surrender, either?”
He turned and stomped out of the room before Severus could come up with a reply. He had to touch his tingling lips and his bruised fingers to convince himself, after a moment, that Harry’s rage had been real.
Severus tried to go back to his book, but the right fibers wouldn’t stir in his mind yet. In the end, he had to lean back in his chair and spend some time becoming reacquainted with his body and his mind in the wake of Harry’s unexpected possession of it.
It was a sensation he would not mind having more of.
*
Harry paced back and forth across the kitchen. Draco was currently at Malfoy Manor for a private dinner with Narcissa. Harry and Severus would give him their presents when he came back.
And then it would be Harry’s turn to give the less traditional gift that he’d spent so many days studying Draco for, trying to decide on the best way to give him pleasure. Harry didn’t want to make it just fun for Draco. He wanted to make it fantastic.
Harry tapped a fist against his mouth and frowned, glancing at the gift that waited on the edge of the table. It was obviously a book, wrapped in glittering silver paper; Harry wasn’t skilled the way Ginny seemed to be, at wrapping presents so that it became a guessing game to tell what they were until they were unwrapped. That book had been easy enough to choose. Draco had been moaning lately over his attempts to combine Defense and Potions, worrying that someone else had done everything before he could get there, so Harry had bought him a history of attempts to combine different magical fields. At least he should get to know how original he was that way.
Severus had bought Draco a new cloak, soft and shadow-grey, almost exactly the color of his eyes.
Harry shook his head. That was the kind of gift he would never dare to purchase until he knew Draco better. Nothing ornamental, nothing that said Harry had noticed the way he looked. Because he didn’t think he had noticed enough, while Severus had known Draco much better than Harry for years and been his lover for months.
What if I’m wrong about what he would like? What if I can’t please him because I’m not a sophisticated enough lover?
A sharp snake of repudiation curled around his mind. Harry started. He had chosen to brood now because he was certain that Severus was asleep, but the emotions melting and shifting through the bond said that he had come awake and, worse, that he could feel what Harry was thinking.
I do dislike a hypocrite who will ask others not to despise themselves while doing the exact same thing, Severus’s voice said in his head. Lately, it had sounded different, with a sharp chime to it that Harry disliked. It would not surprise him to know that Severus had found a way to render his voice different primarily to be exasperating.
It’s not that I despise myself. Harry held the collar of his robe away from his neck. It felt tight and hot, as if it were choking him. It’s that I’m worried Draco might despise me. You can’t say that they’re the same thing.
But ultimately, they do spring from the same root, Severus said disagreeably, his irritation sliding across Harry’s skin like rasping scales. You fear yourself inadequate. You do not want to become our lover because of fear, primarily, not because of lack of desire or incompatibility. And that is not an adequate reason.
Harry managed to smile, though he thought it felt more like baring his teeth. You great charmer, you.
There was silence for a moment, and Harry thought he had managed to persuade Severus to leave him alone. He still didn’t know how sensitive he was to the bonds where Severus was concerned. Sometimes he could miss an emotion from Severus that would make Draco vibrate in sympathy like a hound on the end of a leash, and sometimes he could catch the edges of thoughts that Severus had obviously intended to remain private. It seemed to depend on the time of day and his mood and level of alertness as much as anything else.
Listen to me, Harry.
Harry fidgeted a bit. The hardest tone of all to resist was the one where Severus sounded heavy and gentle, like a man speaking to an abused animal. Harry half-longed for and half-dreaded the soothing stroke down his spine that followed.
You will do fine. Draco is not impossible to know. He is not some grand riddle that you must solve before you dare to climb into bed with him. I promise you, he will be as nervous and as full of anticipation about this as you are. Or else the anticipation will override the nervousness and he will not even notice any mistakes you make.
At least you’re not claiming that I won’t make any mistakes, Harry snapped back. That was the sort of lie he had no patience for. He knew that Draco and Severus had often found fault with him in school, and it would be unnatural if they stopped completely.
You would not listen to me even if I did.
Then Severus’s snake of mingled irony and ridicule, contempt and comfort, glinted greenly in his mind and slipped away as Harry heard the sound of Draco stepping through the wards. This is your chance, Severus said. I will not be far away, should you wish to reach out to me for reassurance or comfort.
Harry nodded shortly and took a step forwards, keeping the safe place in his mind carefully shielded with his astonishment that he should ever be exchanging such words with Severus Snape.
What he hadn’t told Severus was that he would be a participant in tonight’s activities, too. Severus thought that Harry wanted to get to know Draco alone at first, because so far they had kissed and touched less often than Harry and Severus had. And that was partially right.
But they were a bonded triad. Harry had no intention of leaving Severus out.
*
Draco came in through the front door of their house smiling. The evening with his mother had been more than pleasant. She had given him a small thing, an ornamental porcelain vase with etchings of horses on it that flew without wings, their long legs and their bending, swan-like necks curving around the grooves. But Draco had treasured it because it was a sign that his mother still trusted him not to have fallen away from all Malfoy breeding during the time he’d spent with Severus and Harry. She trusted his bondmates, too, not to break the vase during some careless gesture.
And it was also an item from the Black inheritance, which Narcissa had brought with her when she married Lucius, not from the Malfoy inheritance. That involved all sorts of secret and silent meanings that Draco didn’t think he could have put into words even if he tried.
He was mildly curious about the gifts that Severus and Harry had got for him, he thought as he shrugged off his cloak. He was sure that he wouldn’t get another gift as refined as the vase tonight, but—
Then his brain stuttered to a halt, because he could feel the nervousness and the determination from Harry like a crashing crystal wave now that he was through the wards and nearer to his bondmates.
The wave was mingled with darker undertones of lust, which Draco had gradually come to think of as something that Harry would never let himself feel.
And Harry stood in the center of the entrance hall, staring at him.
Draco licked suddenly dry lips and laid down his cloak on the small table near the door. It wasn’t the right place for it, but at the moment he was too frazzled to carry it into the sitting room, where the hooks were.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
Harry smiled, and his bond softened and spread out like a pool of water, as if the sight of Draco’s nervousness had increased his confidence. “Something perfectly understandable, and which you’ll thank me for later,” he answered, as he stepped past Draco and picked up the cloak. “You know that it would drive you mad to have this lying here, at least once you recovered.” He closed one eye in a slow wink and turned towards the sitting room.
Draco shivered. His nerves were stretched taut, and he felt as though he were humming with fire. He felt along his bond with Severus, but encountered only dark, patient waiting that didn’t help him figure out what Harry was doing.
Helpless to do anything else for the moment, he followed Harry into the sitting room and watched him hang the cloak up. Harry patted out a few drops of the light rain that had been falling and then turned and faced Draco with a slight smile.
“What are you doing now?” Draco whispered. He wanted the suspense to end, but at the same time the sweetness of it sped his beating heart.
Harry smiled and answered without words. He stepped forwards and placed his hands on Draco’s shoulders, kissing him squarely, once, on the mouth. He moved his face away before Draco could respond and kissed him on the cheeks, the forehead, and the ears. Draco’s breath stuttered as Harry’s tongue flicked gently along the lobes of his ears and then his teeth closed on one lobe.
Draco moaned. “I love that,” he said, arching backwards until Harry had to shift his arms so that Draco wouldn’t drop to the floor. “Did Severus tell you?”
Harry laughed and withdrew his teeth from Draco’s ear to respond, licking around the lobe again. “He didn’t need to tell me,” Harry whispered. “I watched you over the past few days and saw how you shivered whenever something brushed your ear. Your own hair, your cloak, Severus enchanting a quill to travel across the room to you and slightly missing his mark—it didn’t matter what it was. So that was when I decided I would like to do this.” He bent his head and returned to what he’d been doing.
Draco reached out, fluttering his fingers along Harry’s shoulders, wanting to grip and not daring to. Harry bit again, then moved on to his other ear and bit that one. Meanwhile, one of his hands smoothed up and down Draco’s chest in a movement that might have been enough on its own to reduce Draco to babbling incoherence.
Combined with the bites on his ears, it made his back arch and helpless moans and grumbles fall from his lips.
Harry kissed him on the mouth again, and walked him backwards. Draco tried to keep track of where they were going, but had to give it up when Harry twisted one of his nipples and turned the pain to pleasure in the same stroke with another bite on his left ear.
Draco’s knees hit something, and he hazily identified it as the couch. Harry sat him down and stood looking at him for a moment, his face dropping its teasing, playful smile. Draco blinked at him. Has he lost his nerve after all?
Harry’s eyes narrowed, showing he’d felt the thought, and then he dropped to his knees in a rush and pulled off Draco’s trousers and pants in a smooth, swift motion that he must have practiced.
Jealous images of Caesarion melted out of Draco’s mind as Harry did something else swiftly and smoothly and fastened his mouth around the head of Draco’s cock, sucking so that his cheeks puffed out.
Draco cried out and tried to muffle it with a hand over his mouth. Harry swirled his tongue around and glanced up at Draco through laughing, challenging eyes.
“I can still hear the sounds that you’re trying not to make in your mind, you know,” he told Draco, and ducked his head again. Once again, his tongue pressed forwards and swirled, and Draco whined and fell back against the couch. His hands fluttered down and onto Harry’s hair; then he moved them fretfully away. There was no escape from the pleasure and no means of bracing himself against it, no matter where he put his hands.
And then the pleasure redoubled.
It took Draco a moment to understand what was happening. His pleasure was falling down the bond to Harry, and what Draco felt was Harry’s reaction to Draco’s sensations. He managed to force his eyes open and saw Harry sliding one hand into his pants even as he remained on his knees, sucking frantically.
Draco cried out and bucked, entirely accidentally. He felt his cock slide against smooth palate and slick tongue and carefully covered teeth. Harry groaned, and his hand in his pants sped up.
“Don’t come,” Draco said, though Merlin knew how he forced the words out in between hot surges of wonderfulness that seemed to enter his cock from outside. “I want to see you when you come.”
Harry groaned at him, but pulled his hand out of his pants and wrapped it around Draco’s erection instead, then focused furiously on giving Draco the best blowjob of his life.
His tongue was everywhere, in a way that would have made Draco jealous if he hadn’t been sure a lot of it was natural talent, because there was no way that Caesarion had been this good. His tongue, which Draco had seen a time or two, was too narrow. Harry probed at Draco’s slit, stroked the underside of his head as if he thought that it needed special attention, and then eased his mouth down the shaft and sucked with a nameless hunger.
Draco reached out and stroked Harry’s cheek, letting one finger rest on the soft skin so that he could feel his own cock poking at his fingertip from inside. Harry’s eyes opened wide when Draco did that, then shut on another breathy moan. His tongue darted and whipped back and forth, and Draco had to shut his eyes so that the sparks could burst behind his eyelids.
Another lash, the final one, and Draco came so hard that he knew he strained a muscle. The fiery force and recoil of his orgasm—the recoil coming through the bond—lifted and dropped him boneless on the couch, shaking.
Harry stood up, his mouth moving as he struggled to swallow. Draco felt a moment’s smugness that his spunk was so copious that Harry had to struggle like that.
Then he leaned down with blazing eyes and gave Draco a salty kiss.
Draco tilted his head and gave himself up to it enthusiastically, his fingernails driving into and piercing the skin on the back of Harry’s neck. Harry gasped, but didn’t object, and that heavy panting into his mouth drove Draco all the more mad. He pressed on Harry’s shoulders, trying to urge him down so that he could return the favor.
But Harry pulled back instead and hovered over him for a moment, with his eyes bright and his face bright and his smile bright and the bond so bright that Draco kept his eyes carefully open, because he would see it burning in the darkness of his mind if he closed them and it would blind him. Draco stared back up at him, wondering for a moment if he had done something wrong, not reacted the way Harry expected.
“I did enjoy my birthday gift,” he said. “I promise.”
But Harry’s response didn’t come aloud. He stepped back from the couch—though he kept a hand on Draco’s shoulder—and called in his mind, offering the thought freely to Draco as well, Severus, aren’t you going to come down the stairs and share this with us?
*
Severus dug his fingers into his palms. Though part of him had hoped for this summons without daring to expect it, it was almost painful to hear the words now.
This should be between the two of you, he told Harry, carefully surrounding the thought with iron walls so that Draco couldn’t hear it. Draco was of the sort of sensitivity that would work Severus’s words into a rejection of him personally.
It was, Harry said cheerfully. And now it should be between the three of us. We’re bondmates. And—
He dropped the barriers over that private part of his mind, and revealed lust that dazed and dazzled Severus, roaring and shining like a fire made of rubies.
I want you, Harry said. His voice was raw, and a trembling in the bond let Severus know that he wasn’t the only one feeling this particular nervous tension. Come on, Severus. Let me pleasure you.
The words acted like iron chains to tug Severus to his feet and guide him down the stairs. He was practically stumbling in his eagerness, at least until he realized how pathetic that would make him look. He clenched his teeth and managed to walk smoothly in his eagerness, despite the fact that it looked as if his cock was leading the way.
He understood now, perfectly, why Harry had shielded that part of his mind. Harry hadn’t wanted him to know that he’d been studying Severus as well, adding small impressions to the store of them that he already had, trying to decide what would please him.
He could simply have asked, Severus thought, but he knew it couldn’t be that simple, for any of them, with their history and the tender pride that still made Harry think that he was being mocked when he wasn’t. Even ordinary lovers with every reason to trust each other did not always talk openly about their desires.
This time, Harry poured treasures of wordless admiration over Severus like a jeweled waterfall, showing that he had studied his movements, his small grains of envy, his loneliness. Harry had noticed the darkness of his hair, the elegance of his hands, the unexpected softness of his skin along his ribs and on the back of his neck, the way he could concentrate to read a book through a storm, his darting intelligence. There was so much there, and Harry kept pouring his observations down, as if he were determined to make up for all the dry years of Severus’s life.
Severus was dazed and stumbling by the time he reached the ground floor, but he still remembered the way to the sitting room.
Draco lay back on the couch, his arms splayed wide, his eyes shut and his shirt hanging over his shoulders. Traces of a flush still haunted his cheeks and chest, making the pale flesh look more real. He opened his eyes when he heard Severus’s footsteps and gave him a soft, smoldering glance that caused Severus’s lips to dry out again. He had thought it was bad enough feeling Draco’s orgasm secondhand, and Harry’s pleasure in giving him that orgasm.
And Harry stood over the couch, one hand on Draco’s shoulder, his eyes so open and inviting that Severus shuddered. It was like being touched with gentle fingers on that sensitive skin Harry had noticed, a touch that could turn into either shuddering ecstasy or a devastating pinch depending on what the toucher’s intentions were.
Welcome, Harry said, and repeated it aloud a moment later. He extended his other hand to Severus, and waited.
Severus had found many unexpected things to adore in Harry that evening, but perhaps greatest of all was this, the fact that Harry left the ultimate choice up to him. He would have been hurt, but he would have understood, if Severus had decided to walk away.
Severus stepped up to him instead, and took his hand, and held it loosely for long enough to make Harry stare. Then he tugged Harry close to him, and into a kiss that made Harry gasp and almost struggle to escape.
He had learned many things about kissing since the first months of his relationship with Draco, when Draco had seemed startled and delighted and yet not quite mindless under his lips in the way that Severus wanted him to be. He had learned to wield his tongue like a weapon in a new way.
He did it now, sliding under the corners of Harry’s tongue and stroking there, tapping Harry’s palate and then his tongue in quick succession, guiding him into all sorts of unexpected movements that nevertheless felt good and made Harry shudder and slide down into his arms, still fighting to give as good as he got but unable to do so.
Severus rejoiced a moment in his smugness, letting it flood his mind and the bonds like water burning blue.
And then he realized that he shouldn’t have done that, as Harry opened his eyes, turned his head, and pierced him with a scalpel stare.
The next moment, he had somehow pulled back and used one of the moves that Ledbetter had taught him to lay Severus on the couch next to Draco. Draco rolled out of the way, his muscles still languid, his eyes wide open, his breath torn between gasping and laughter.
Severus tried to glare at him to let him know what would happen to him if he did start laughing, and Draco shut his mouth. But his mind was still alive with mischievous snakes of lightning, which darted down and bit when Severus was occupied with the way Harry tugged his robes impatiently off. Did you really think that you were going to stand up to his determination?
You said yourself that I have grown to be a better kisser, Severus protested, wishing he didn’t feel quite so much like a landed fish as he flopped his legs and arms and tried to assist Harry in the removal of his robes.
That wasn’t the question I asked. Draco’s mind was bright with smugness now, too, and it was quite as irritating as Severus had always supposed. I asked if you thought you could resist a stubborn Gryffindor’s determination.
Harry had removed enough cloth by that point to get his mouth to where he apparently wanted it, on Severus’s cock, so Severus didn’t get the chance to answer as his thoughts dissolved into garbled incoherence.
Harry sucked with his eyes closed, which made Severus wonder for a moment if Harry couldn’t bear to see what his older bondmate looked like naked. At the thought, Harry’s eyes popped indignantly open, and the clear flame burning in them drove any thought of Lily from Severus’s head. This was not Lily. Lily had been gentle and thorough. Harry was rushing, impatient; the image that came to Severus through the bonds was of a horse throwing up its head and running away with its rider because it knew where to go better than he did.
Are you ever bloody hard to reassure, Harry snarled, and then he drove his mouth forwards and sucked strongly in one place, about halfway down the shaft, instead of moving around the way that he had with Draco.
Severus arched his back, gasping. He didn’t know how Harry had realized that he would like this. Perhaps the bonds conveyed more in the way of unconscious fantasies and desires than he had thought.
Then he thought about their blended dreams, and felt like a fool.
Harry brought one hand into play, rolling Severus’s balls, teasing up around his arsehole, which clenched in pleasure. His other hand remained on Severus’s hip, and his eyes never varied their direct, strong stare, as though he was daring Severus to complain about this.
Severus couldn’t. His head fell back and his throat shut so that only small puffs of air could come through—because he refused to admit that that madly embarrassing moaning noise could be him—and the pleasure crashed down on him like falling icebergs.
He was already primed by feeling Draco come. That was the excuse he gave for why he thrust forwards in a stupidly short time and held himself there, flooding Harry’s mouth with his come. The thought of that, of the fact that the mouth that had argued with him and shouted at him and cast curses at him and smashed flat against his in a kiss was now stretched around his cock, made him come harder and give shorter, more savage thrusts.
When he finished coming, he felt as though he wouldn’t be able to move for the rest of his life. He had to work to force his eyes open, instead of curling up on the couch and going to sleep without even a cleaning charm.
His strength returned when he saw the two pairs of eyes watching him. One, Harry’s, was bright and gloating. That very triumph was a challenge to Severus.
The other pair, Draco’s, darted from him to Harry and came back full of questions, but not the questions that Severus might have expected. Draco could hardly feel left out when Harry had sucked him off first. Instead, he was asking whether Severus felt strong enough to join him in tackling Harry.
Severus nodded minutely.
“Now, I think you need to acknowledge that I’m just better than you at some things,” Harry had begun, in a tone so like a taunt that he really needed to blame what happened next on himself.
He gasped as Draco sprang forwards and grabbed his hips, turning him so that he fell on the couch on his back. Harry tried to sit up, and Draco twitched his pants down. Severus bent over at the same moment and kissed Harry, plunging his tongue deep, trying to convey his pleasure and thanks in the way that his voice and mind, at the moment, would not allow him to do and which Harry might misunderstand through the bonds.
Harry gasped and moaned when he had to open his mouth to admit Severus’s tongue. He went completely still when Draco’s mouth closed around his cock from the floor, tongue licking up and down the shaft. Severus knew what Draco was doing thanks to the bonds, as they cleared and stabilized again.
Then Harry tried to express some waffle about how this was Draco’s birthday and how he’d wanted to honor Draco and Severus, and he didn’t want them to feel obligated to do this for him just because he’d done it for them—
Harry, Severus said, deliberately making his mental voice into a bark of the kind that usually quelled resistance from his Potions students. Shut up and stop being stupid. We want to do this.
He sent a nod down the bonds to Draco, who increased the speed and pressure and tightness of his mouth until Harry’s protests shattered like glass and Severus could kiss him in peace.
If peace was the name for the wild, boiling excitement that all three of them shared at the moment.
*
Harry hadn’t envisioned something like this happening; he had thought he would come with his hand down his pants while sucking off either Draco or Severus, and he’d been fine with that. He’d left so much of this getting together up to them that it was right he take the lead for a little while. Later, when they felt more comfortable and had got over their surprise at what he was doing—
But now.
He had no barriers, given his lack of expectations. He fell apart long before he came, breathless and unanchored, drifting between the plunge of Severus’s tongue at one end and Draco’s at the other. Sometimes his flailing hands found a grip on robes or shoulders or the couch, but always another surge of sensation came along at the next moment to tear them free.
He had thought that what he felt through the bonds before this was intense. He had had no idea. Severus and Draco at the moment weren’t feeling physical pleasure so much as the pleasure of finally having him with them, and it amazed and humbled Harry to know they felt this way about him. A storm of feelings, both physical and emotional, broke over his head, and he could only cower before it in awe and gratitude.
And enjoyment.
Oh, was there ever that, as he thrust and thrust and thrust, and still Draco’s mouth never slowed down or faltered, simply moving in different directions so that he could adjust. His lips were fastened into a tight tunnel that spurred other images in Harry’s mind and made him want to wail aloud.
Except that his mouth was kept busy by Severus, who by now was thrusting his tongue very deliberately into different places in Harry’s mouth, and causing him to imagine something else that made him want to wail aloud.
Or were they part of the same thing?
The images swirled and blended, the pleasure rose and fell apart and whirled upwards, the happiness of Draco and Severus now that he was with them showered over his head like rain, and then everything clapped together and flung him into space.
Draco tightened his mouth further, greedily sucking. Severus paused, moved his lips slightly, and then thrust his tongue into the middle of Harry’s cheek.
Harry screamed.
And came.
And then he fell from the storm to rest gently in safety, in the twining of two pairs of arms, and that was all he knew for a long while.
Part Twenty-Seven.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2009-08-04 06:41 pm (UTC)*dies*
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Date: 2009-08-04 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 08:38 pm (UTC)It wouldn't surprise me if I compared all other HP/DM/SS I read in the future to this :b ^_^
Their Phoenix 26
Date: 2009-08-04 11:17 pm (UTC)Re: Their Phoenix 26
Date: 2009-08-05 09:00 am (UTC)I don't know if they have a name, but I know that there's a fair amount of them out there ^_^
Re: Their Phoenix 26
Date: 2009-08-06 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-08-04 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 07:06 pm (UTC)Frankly, that was about the hottest thing I think I've ever read. *iz in awe of you*
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 07:08 pm (UTC)And I've not much else to say... Amazing! I'm going to go read again, now. ;)
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 07:36 pm (UTC)Wonderful chapter. I love the moment when Draco realized Harry might have something more in mind other than wolfing down a piece of cake. Well, he did wolf something down but ....
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Date: 2009-08-04 07:54 pm (UTC)So utterly True! If I has been more eloquent, I'd said that too XD My comment ended up a rambling mess, because I couldn't think straight after that chapter! ^_^
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Date: 2009-08-04 08:02 pm (UTC)But your comment brought a smile to my face and that's worth more than eloquence any day!
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Date: 2009-08-04 08:08 pm (UTC)Aw! Thank you, that so sweet! And now you brought a major smile to my face, so I guess we're even? ;D XD
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:47 am (UTC)Yes, I think that's exactly right. Severus and Draco are both very prickly, and Harry is quick to mistrust them. So they have to get used to the notion that their wants will be taken care of later, but not all at the same time (which is one reason that Harry didn't try to pleasure Severus and Draco at the same time. Well, that and his nervousness).
Ooh, bad pun!
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Date: 2009-08-04 07:51 pm (UTC)MY GOD, DID I EVER ENJOY THIS CHAPTER!!!!
Holy mother of smut! DAMN!!! ♥ ♥ ♥!!!
Incredible, outstanding, amazing, completely and UTTERLY mind blowing!!!
Holy shit!
Just YES! Yesyesyesyesyesyes!!!
I LOVE YOU SO HARD!
I can't possible describe the fantasticness of this chapter! It's divine I tell you, DEVINE!!!
Their interactions, their battles, their reassurances, their FEELINGS! OMG! Everything is just so PERFECTLY done! So them! So true!
You are a goddess! And a genius!
Thank you, thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!!!!!
Damn - and so completely HOT! *flails more*
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 09:39 pm (UTC)And, oh yeah, the sex was good, too. ^^
No, everything was wonderfully written, from Draco's fretfulness to Severus' self-loathing. I'm happy to see that Harry's fighting for him and vice versa. Though I wonder what Draco will think of Severus' dwellings on the past?
Great job. More please. *smiles winningly*
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:48 am (UTC)Draco at the moment is noticing very little outside himself. :) The next chapter does start changing that, though. And he'll probably be a little less understanding than Harry about it, just because he doesn't think that he's dwelling on his own sufferings.
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Date: 2009-08-04 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:49 am (UTC)That feedback is one of the hardest things to write, especially because all three protagonists are male and I don't want to confuse anyone with whose bond to whom I mean.
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Date: 2009-08-05 12:21 am (UTC)WOW! I agree with everyone above. You've now set the bar for all DM/HP/SS threesomes.
I expected smut, but not this AMAZING chapter!
The sex was great! But so was the emotions, and the watching, and teasing, and everything!
I particularly enjoyed the scene when Harry left Severus gobsmacked! What a kiss!
<3
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:49 am (UTC)I liked writing the scene between Harry and Severus almost more than the sex scene, just because Harry was less nervous and so was I.
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Date: 2009-08-05 01:38 am (UTC)I'm so glad that they're all working emotionally and its all so happy and yay! :DDDDD
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Date: 2009-08-05 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 07:04 am (UTC)I thought it was lovely the way Harry took to *study* both Draco and Severus and the thing with the ear with Draco *shivers* awesome
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Date: 2009-08-05 12:41 pm (UTC)loving it so far!
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