lomonaaeren

Chapter Two.

Title: Love, Free As Air (3/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Sex, angst, profanity, a bit of violence. Ignores the epilogue of DH.
Pairings: Snape/Harry/Draco.
Rating: R
Summary: Trapped in his Animagus form, Harry stumbles on Snape and Draco, who disappeared from the wizarding world years ago. His first task is to become human again. His second might be to help Snape and Draco with the same problem.
Author’s Notes: This story is being written for

heeroluva, who won a charity auction at

gulf_aid_now to raise money for the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. She gave me the plot, for which I thank her. I’m not sure how long this story will be, though I estimate somewhere between 15 and 20 chapters. The title comes from a quote by Alexander Pope.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Three—Sharp as a Claw

Draco came in from the garden in a fragile good mood. He had talked himself into ignoring Severus’s foibles as he sat under the shade of the largest fruit trees, and instead remembered the good times they’d had immediately after settling in the cottage. Severus had taught Draco to brew complex potions he could never have managed on his own, and he had taught Draco more about sex than he had ever hoped to learn, either. He had touched Draco with reverent hands. Draco had looked up more than once and found Severus’s eyes fixed on him, as if he was wondering where Draco had appeared from and when he would return to that strange, hidden land.

It had been like that once. Draco would make it like that again.

Or, if he couldn’t, he would finally separate from Severus. There were places he could go without returning to the wizarding world—not many, but a few. And he did have skills that Severus had taught him and that he had deliberately cultivated in the last six years. He didn’t like to think about making it on his own, but he could.

He stepped into the drawing room and smiled at Compensation sitting in his cage. “Have you spent the afternoon well?” he murmured. “I have, much better than I expected.”

“Oh, he didn’t tell you, then?” The bird ruffled his feathers and took a step forwards on the perch as though he wanted to study Draco’s reactions—which was ridiculous, Draco told himself a moment later. He was a bird. He knew he had a tendency to humanize Compensation, but this was too much. “Snape discovered that I really was Harry Potter trapped in a parrot’s body, and he provisionally believed me. He’s in the lab right now, working on a potion that might end this spell that traps me.”

Draco’s good mood shattered like a window with a stone thrown through it. He paused with his hand on the wall inside the door and narrowed his eyes at the cage. “I don’t know why you’re continuing with this trick, Severus,” he said quietly. “You know that I’m no longer going to believe it, and that must make it less fun for you.”

The bird actually shook his head, and Draco had to admit that he didn’t think the Televox Potion could force an animal to do that. “I am Harry Potter,” he said. “This is my Animagus form. I was tracking a bunch of kidnappers who thought it was fun and profitable to grab wizards and change them into animals that they could sell. But a fire broke out in their house, and I had to flee. One of them hurled a spell at me as I was escaping, one they developed. You can’t detect it, but it means that I can’t change back to human. Potions are probably my only hope, since their magic is too new to be fought with spells.”

Draco closed his eyes. It didn’t sound like the kind of story that Severus would come up with, but he no longer knew Severus very well.

“You’re lying,” he said. “Even if you were Harry Potter, there’s no way that you would remain like this for as long as you did. You would have told us on the first day that something was wrong, and that way, you wouldn’t have to endure the cage.”

Compensation gave him a very human condescending look. “When I had to distrust you from school? When the last thing I knew about Snape was that he’d been condemned to the Dementor’s Kiss and then disappeared? I couldn’t be sure how you would react. Perhaps you wouldn’t hurt me, but the wards around your house argued for someone paranoid. I stayed silent for a few days because I needed to heal anyway, and I thought this would be tolerable. It’s not. I want to get out of here.”

Draco sank onto the couch, staring at the cage. He was starting to believe in spite of himself. Now that he thought about it, Compensation’s voice did sound like his memory of Potter’s. And it beggared belief that the bird could have belonged to Harry Potter and had got in here on a coincidence.

Well, unless he wanted to spy on us.

But Draco rejected that conclusion, too. It would have been better, if the bird was a spy, for Potter not to speak out at all and thus not to associate the bird with him in their minds.

“Why?” Draco asked at last, when his mind had whirled around so long without giving him a better answer that he was ready to believe. “Why come here?”

“I didn’t know it was your house, did I?” the bird snapped, and scratched at his face with one foot, so fast that the foot blurred in Draco’s sight. “The Aurors were waiting for my report in a camp not far from the kidnappers’ house. I made for the nearest strong source of magic. I thought it would be the camp. But it happened to be your house instead.”

Draco suddenly sat up, anxiety making his throat tight. “You can’t tell them where we are.”

“I don’t even really know where you are,” said the bird, and made his pupils widen and then shrink again rapidly. Draco thought it might be the avian equivalent of rolling your eyes. “And Snape made me already promise that, if he can get me back to human, I would swear an Unbreakable Vow not to reveal your location or harm you in any way.”

That reminded Draco of something else. “How long after I went into the garden did Severus decide that you were Potter and he was going to work on the potions?”

“It’s not like I can tell time that well in this cage,” the bird—Potter—said, “and I don’t have my wand on me to cast a Tempus Charm, do I? But I think it was less than an hour by the light.”

Which meant it had been over five hours altogether. Draco had spent at least that length of time in the garden, soothing himself back into peace with Severus.

He hadn’t known that he would be losing his pet, the only thing to come along and make his life interesting or different in—far too many months. He and Severus had been drifting apart for a long time, Draco thought, but it was only recently that he had admitted that to himself, and started looking for something that could soothe his boredom.

“I’ll be right back, Compensation,” he said, and then stood up and turned to go down the corridor to Severus’s lab again.

“Potter,” said the bird irritably, but Draco didn’t care at this point. He could only think that Severus hadn’t told him. Not to tell him that he was losing his pet, and not to ask for Draco’s help with the potions, hard as they would be to brew when he had to counter completely new magic. He obviously thought he could do it by himself.

He didn’t really need Draco anymore, did he? He could wank himself, if it came to that, and he had told Draco once or twice, in a particularly cutting mood, that he preferred his hand over Draco because the hand didn’t take as much time and didn’t demand as much.

For the second time that day, Draco broke through the wards around Severus’s lab and flung the door open.

*

Severus could sense himself drawing nearer to an answer. The first two potions he had tried had failed, and why not? There were weaknesses in the recipes that he should have seen before he began to brew. But this new one was on the right track. Rather than following a recipe, Severus was simply acting on instinct, adding ingredients to the cauldron as they came to hand and felt right. Here a handful of mosquito eggs, here a petal from a hibiscus, here a sleek black feather from the left wing of a murdered raven. The flow of strength and goodwill through him was moving him towards the answer as smoothly as the current would move a boat downstream.

He was close. He could feel it—

The door opened.

Severus’s mood broke, and the high, dignified certainty that he was going in the right direction fled. The cauldron in front of him, which a moment ago had held explicable lumps dancing in a pattern, dissolved into inexplicable lumps. He looked at it fixedly, so that he wouldn’t look up and commit murder.

“Why didn’t you tell me that the bird was Potter?”

Severus closed his eyes. Of course it would have to be Draco, no one else could break through his wards, but somehow Severus was not prepared for him, or for his inevitable, childish demand. The things Draco wanted were important only to him. When would he understand that?

“I wanted to begin my brewing, and you were in the garden,” he said distantly, turning his head with supreme slowness so that he could give Draco the full benefit of his glare. “I would have told you when I had the potion ready.”

“You still could have told me,” Draco said. He had his arms folded and as many bristles as a Kneazle dropped in a puddle of water. “That bird’s been the only interesting thing to happen to me in months. And now it’ll be taken away, and you didn’t feel compelled to tell me?” His voice was rising.

Severus shook his head. “What would a delay of a few hours matter?” Behind him, the potion made a loud goop noise. Severus knew that meant it had become, finally, unusable. He did not put his hand over his eyes, because that would let Draco have an insight into Severus’s emotions he frankly did not deserve, but his fingers trembled with the wish to.

“If you really knew me, you would know the answer to that.” Draco clenched one fist. Severus stared at him. He had not thought Draco so crude as to resort to physical violence. Draco had been cleverer than that even in his last year at Hogwarts, when he had cast spells strictly at the command of the Carrows or as needed in class, and had avoided fisticuffs altogether.

“Knowledge of you to that depth and extent is not one of my priorities,” Severus said, and watched Draco’s eyes grow wide and liquid with pain. He rolled his own eyes, and didn’t care if Draco saw him doing it. Why in the world would he expect anything different of Severus? Draco hadn’t made his attachment to the bird clear, and he could have adopted another pet if he wanted one. It was not as though Severus had kept the knowledge from him for a few hours to hurt him. He simply had not thought about it.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Draco said. His voice cracked, but he cleared his throat and continued. “I don’t think I’m interested in knowing you that well anymore, either.”

He paused, as if to give Severus a chance to change his mind. Severus looked at him stolidly, patiently, and waited for Draco to realize that a lessened knowledge of each other was fine with him. They had come together in this place, but that did not mean they must always be bound as closely as they were when they arrived. It would have been easier if Draco had grown up to meet Severus, instead of staying a child.

Draco’s eyes hardened to little grey pebbles that reminded Severus of the way that Lucius could look when thwarted in something he wanted by the Dark Lord.

“I didn’t think so,” Draco said, and then turned and stormed out of the lab, slamming the door behind him.

Severus waited until the distracting vibrations from the door had trembled throughout the room and ceased before he turned back to his potion. He could not recover exactly what he had been doing, but he could try. And there were new ideas in the back of his mind. What had prompted him to choose the mosquito eggs? If he could think of that, bring the incalculable impulses of the subconscious mind under the control of his conscious one, then he thought that he might reconstruct the potion.

It would not be the same as the one he would have brewed in those first moments of instinctive, ecstatic delight, of course. But that was the price he paid for his kindness to a boy who had still not realized how different his life in an isolated cottage with only one lover for company must be from the continual, changing parade and wealth he had envisioned.

*

Harry was watching for the moment when Malfoy came out of Snape’s lab. He had expected him to be angry, and he hoped that Malfoy would have a few more choice insults to describe Snape’s behavior. Since Harry couldn’t speak them himself without possibly causing the man to stop brewing his potion, he would just have to rely on Malfoy for a little while.

But Malfoy came out of the lab silently, and stood in the middle of the drawing room, his face burning with a cold flame. Harry cocked his head so that he could get one eye firmly on the man. His cheeks were bright pink, but his eyes glittered in a way that said he didn’t care about his own embarrassment. He was sorting through anger instead.

Harry had seen Hermione look like that when people in the Ministry called her a Mudblood. He had seen Ron look like that when someone had almost killed Percy. In neither case had the outcome been good for the person who caused the anger.

“Are you all right?” Harry found himself asking, without even considering beforehand whether he would ask it.

Malfoy didn’t answer. Instead, he shut his eyes once and then opened them, staring straight ahead in a determined fashion. Then he turned and started back down the corridor once more. Craning his neck, Harry could just make out that he was disappearing into the room Harry thought was a bedroom, rather than Snape’s lab.

It was frustrating as fuck at the moment to be caged and not able to see much outside the room. Harry climbed to the top and hung upside-down, hoping that would help him with the angle, but it didn’t, much. All he could make out was that Malfoy’s bedroom door was open and there was a series of regular thumps, as though he was shifting furniture around.

Or packing.

Harry cocked his neck and flapped his wings hard enough to detach small feathers and send them swirling around the room. Let Snape find them in the morning and stare at him in outrage.

He didn’t know why he should feel so happy that Malfoy was getting out of this situation, especially since Snape would be worse company and probably forget to feed him, but he was.

“Do you need help?” he called down the corridor. “I know a few good shrinking spells the Aurors use that aren’t standard knowledge among people outside the Ministry.”

The packing sounds died into silence. Harry turned himself around on the bars and pressed his eye between the nearest two. He could make it out when Malfoy’s head popped into the corridor, from the flicker of the lamps on that pale hair if nothing else.

“Why would you care?” Malfoy asked. He paused, as if those weren’t the words he wanted, and then revised it to, “Why would you help me?”

“Because if I can’t do anything about being in a cage myself, then at least I can make sure that someone else gets to open his,” Harry said. The words felt right, shaped and smooth in his mouth, in a way that most of the words he spoke as a parrot hadn’t. And they were the reason that he was so happy Malfoy was getting out, he thought. Of course. He had a constitutional dislike of cages. After the sessions with the kidnappers where they kept him in a cage most of the time and only brought him out occasionally, that was even stronger.

Malfoy came back down the corridor into the drawing room and stood staring at him. Harry shifted so that he was clinging to the side of the cage, and stared back.

“You’re really him,” Malfoy said softly.

Harry bobbed his head in an exaggerated nod. It wasn’t a comfortable motion for a parrot, but then, comfort was low on his list of priorities at the moment. Seeing Malfoy escape Snape was highest.

“God,” Malfoy said, and shut his eyes again. At least he no longer looked embarrassed. He ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve thought about leaving Severus for a long time,” he said. “But we were bound together by shared history and by practicality. Where was I going to go? I left everyone behind when I fled. My parents are both in Azkaban. Or dead,” he added quietly. “I haven’t received a letter from them in years.”

“They’re both still alive, as far as I know,” Harry said. “But they instituted a policy years ago that inmates of Azkaban can’t send or receive letters, because relatives of inmates were sending spells attached to parchment that helped several people escape. Face-to-face visits only are the policy now.”

Malfoy’s shoulders sagged. “That would make sense,” he said, almost to himself. Then he looked up with an iron face. “And now I’ve decided. It’s better to go somewhere, anywhere, else, even if I don’t know exactly how I’ll be received there.”

Harry bobbed his head again. He had felt something similar when he quit the Auror program.

“I could take you with me, I reckon,” Malfoy said, giving him a critical look. “As long as you would make the same promise not to betray us, and as long as you think that someone outside of Severus’s lab might be able to change you back. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to stay here until he was finished brewing the potion.”

“I have no reason to want to owe him anything,” Harry said.

Malfoy smiled and reached over to unlock the cage.

A voice spoke from the corridor, cool and smooth enough that Harry wouldn’t have been surprised to see it coat the walls with ice. “You were thinking of leaving me, Draco? And you did not consider what would happen to me in your absence?”

Malfoy’s fingers hesitated on the lock. Harry grabbed one of them in his beak, intending to hasten it on, but he must have pinched too hard, because Malfoy snatched his hand back and looked offended. Harry tried to look as apologetic as he could while muttering, “Sorry.” He didn’t think his face was the best for looking sorry, though. He could more often look falsely innocent when he had just played a joke.

“I didn’t think you would care,” Malfoy said, staring at the wall without turning around. The not turning around was a hopeful sign, Harry thought, but his voice had begun to shake, and that wasn’t. “You’ve made it clear for the past few days that you care far more about your brewing than about me. Why shouldn’t I leave and find someone who will give me the attention and respect I deserve?”

Snape moved into sight. Though he must have been able to feel the pressure of Harry’s watching eyes, he never glanced at him; all his attention was for Malfoy.

“I have spoken in haste and in temper,” he said. Smooth, so smooth, smooth as snake oil, Harry thought in anger, twisting his head around and snapping his beak. He wanted to make Malfoy look at him, but Malfoy had closed his eyes. “I have been neglectful of you lately, and not in a position to glance up from my cauldron and realize what you needed.”

“It’s been more than ‘lately,’” Malfoy said, his voice muffled. Harry glanced at him and saw that he had one hand in front of his mouth and seemed to be biting down on the skin of his knuckles. “You haven’t paid proper attention to me in months. Can you name the date that we last slept together? You haven’t missed it.”

Snape stepped up behind Malfoy and rested his hands on his shoulders. Malfoy started, then let his head fall back in spite of himself, Harry thought. He could see the familiar tiny shudders working through Malfoy, the kind of shudders someone gave when a long-time lover touched them. It didn’t really matter if that lover had been a bad or a good one; be together for months or years, and you grew familiar to each other anyway.

Harry had last felt it with Ginny. None of his relationships since then had lasted long enough.

“I have missed it,” Snape said. “It’s true that my brewing has dominated my life. But if it were the only source of stimulation I required, I would have been able to take it up without difficulty after you interrupted me today. I could not. The first time, I came out here and talked to Potter. The second time, just now, I thought about what you had said, and I came to some sense of the justice of your words.”

“He’s lying,” Harry said.

Snape lifted his head and gave Harry a look that could have burned him. Harry gave a few short flaps with his wings and stared boldly back. He doubted, now, that Snape would take the risk of killing him. That would probably drive Malfoy away for good, and for his own incomprehensible reasons, he wanted Malfoy to stay around.

“Turn and look at his eyes,” Harry insisted. “They’re cold even as he speaks all these warm and soothing words to you.”

“They’re always cold,” Malfoy muttered, but he did turn and look up, his gaze questioning.

Snape regarded him with a deep, dark stare. Harry could see how it would have drawn in someone young and impressionable. Malfoy had only been eighteen when he helped Snape escape, after all.

Malfoy shuddered and took a long breath. “I don’t believe you,” he whispered. “Not really. Not unless you’ll take me upstairs right now and make love to me.”

Harry saw a spasm cross Snape’s face at the mention of “making love,” but he nodded and dipped his head to lick at the curve of Malfoy’s ear. “As you wish,” he said.

Malfoy’s fingers tightened on Snape’s arms. Harry couldn’t see his face well from this angle, but he knew why. Malfoy would be intoxicated by the mere fact that Snape had given in, which couldn’t happen often. Harry had had his share of lovers like that, too. He and Susan Bones had fought so often that it seemed like a heaven of peace and harmony when she would let him pick the restaurant.

“He’s lying,” Harry said. “He’s trying to make you stay. Can’t you see that?”

Malfoy started to answer, but Snape took his mouth in a kiss, and his fingers worked from Malfoy’s shoulders into his hair and onto his neck. Malfoy shuddered and clasped Snape in his arms. Snape began to draw him carefully towards the corridor again, his murmurs muffled by the kiss but clearly audible. Malfoy whimpered.

“Idiot!” Harry screamed after him, and then added in a few more normal parrot screams for good measure.

But they were gone, and except for one look of triumph that Snape gave him just before they disappeared, Harry didn’t think they were noticing him anymore.

He sat in his cage and fumed for ten solid minutes. Disappointment as sharp as a claw stabbed him several times. Malfoy had been so close to fleeing his cage. Why had he given in again? He had to know that Snape changing his mind again that quickly meant no good.

Harry twisted his head to the side, thinking he should engage in some preening to soothe his ruffled feathers and his ruffled feelings, and caught sight of the lock.

He hadn’t thought Malfoy had touched it, but then again, he had been more engaged in paying attention to Snape. Malfoy had flipped back the steel cover, though, and slid one of the complex flutings aside.

Harry promptly began to swing himself down the bars. He knew already what he would do. First, he would slide the lock open as delicately as he could; if he pushed too hard, he would make the cover tremble and fall over the lock again, which would prevent him from reaching it.

Second, he would fly down the corridor to Snape’s lab and see if he couldn’t get in there. Snape had wards up, but he might have removed them when Malfoy had stormed in on him, or he might have left the door of the lab open, or he might have wards against animals in general but not against Animagi. Harry had got into more than one private home or lab because someone had overlooked that precaution.

And once he was in the lab…

His form was limited as far as casting spells went, but nearly unlimited when it came to destroying delicate equipment.

Harry ground his beak in contentment, and went to work.