lomonaaeren

Chapter Five.

Title: Love, Free As Air (6/?)
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 Six—Words of a Wise Bird

“Malfoy, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Draco looked up in surprise. He had just come into the house from tending to the garden, and his mind was still full of roses and vines, morning glories and the way to train them around the trellis, which made it hard to concentrate on what Potter was talking about. He might even have thought he was back in Hogwarts for a moment, except Potter’s voice was too polite.

Potter stood on the perch that they’d installed in the drawing room, staring at him intently. Draco nodded and dropped onto the couch, stretching his arms along the back. With Severus, he would have cast a Cleaning Charm to remove the sweat and grime first, but it wasn’t as though Potter could possibly care about that. “Yes. What is it? Did Severus threaten to pluck you bald again?” That had happened three days ago, apparently, the first time that Draco had left them alone in the lab together.

“Not this time.” Potter shook his head in that gesture that looked so unnatural on a parrot. “I wanted to talk about you.”

Draco snorted. “If this is another plea for me to leave Severus, you’re forgetting I have to change slowly.” He thought spending time by himself in the garden, meditating and tending the flowers, and beginning to study the esoteric magic he’d been interested in years ago was a pretty good start. At least it saved him from trailing after Severus and whining for his attention all the time.

“No,” Potter said, though he sounded uncertain. “I just—” He sprang into the air and fluttered his way over to land on the couch beside Draco. Draco flinched a bit in spite of himself. He still wasn’t used to having a bird of Potter’s size flying at him. “Snape was talking to me about other Slytherin students who’ve been arrested after the war.”

Draco frowned in confusion. “You do get on the strangest topics,” he said.

“Snape intended to torment me with guilt,” Potter said, stretching out a leg and then turning it into a whole-body stretch with both wings extended one at a time. Draco watched in fascination. He wasn’t used to anything about Potter the bird yet, including all his movements. “I’m more bothered that I never knew.”

Draco shrugged. “The sentences were short, for the most part. I’m sure they’re all out by now. No reason for you to have known or interfered.”

“I should have,” Potter said, but he went on before Draco could ask what that meant. Everyone knew he hadn’t been sympathetic to Slytherins in school. Did he imagine that Pansy and the rest had sat in their Azkaban cells dreaming of his interference? “Snape seemed more affected by their imprisonment than I realized.”

Draco smiled wryly. “Potions master is by far the biggest part of him, but there was no reason that he needed to accept being the Head of Slytherin House if he didn’t want to. There have been Heads in the past who weren’t part of their House as students.”

“But I bet Snape thought no one else in the school would do a good job at the time he accepted the post,” Potter said, bobbing his head up and down.

That startled a laugh out of Draco. “See how well you already know him,” he said. “That’s exactly what he told me about his reasons for accepting.”

“Hmmm.” Potter walked in a small circle. “Would you say that he only brought up the imprisonment of those students to affect me and get me to shut up? Or would you say that he feels there’s an actual injustice there that should be remedied?” He slid his neck to the side. “Would Snape have helped them if he could have stayed in the wizarding world, if the Wizengamot had acquitted him?”

“Only doesn’t apply to Severus very often,” Draco said dryly, “whether it’s in discussions of his motives or anything else. I’m sure he brought it up for both reasons. But yes, I do think that he would have tried to help Pansy and the rest if he was free to do so at the time, especially since they were arrested after he was and he didn’t know anything about it until we’d fled. Fuck, I would have.”

Potter stared at him with his beak parted and long grey tongue showing. Then he shut it and bobbed his head again. “That’s bloody decent of you, Malfoy.”

Draco raised his eyebrows. “Why the interrogation? Were you that bothered by not paying attention to every detail of the arrests? We heard about your sickness, you know. I didn’t expect you to make my mother’s trial to testify, and you looked awful when you did. It’s hardly surprising that you missed some of the news.”

Potter froze in the act of shaking his tail.

*

Harry hated thinking about the three months immediately after the war, when he had drifted in and out of a strange sickness that the Healers couldn’t name or cure. Sometimes he would be almost fine, if weak; other times he was lost in feverish dreams and thought waking was another dream. He knew people, and then he didn’t. He could walk by himself, and then only with someone’s support or leaning against a wall. He heard Dumbledore’s voice explaining the circumstances of his death to him and Voldemort’s voice whispering and shrieking and cackling, and then he didn’t.

Hermione had looked through book after book and finally told Harry, teary-eyed, that she thought it came from being dead. “There’s only one case that’s similar to it, and that’s a witch who was briefly brought back to life after her heart stopped beating,” she said, sitting on Harry’s bed in Grimmauld Place and clutching both his hands. “She had the fever and the weakness and the dreams, too. It doesn’t say she heard the voices, but I don’t think she told her Healers everything. Oh, Harry!” And she’d flung her arms around him and clutched him tight.

Harry had held her back and shut his eyes. He’d known without asking that Hermione was afraid because the witch had died.

But the illness began to wane after the third month, and Harry was finally able to get back to what he had wanted to do from the beginning: testify at the Death Eater trials and enter the Auror program. Neither of those had worked out the way he wanted them to, but Harry had been working on becoming an Animagus at the same time, and that had made his life richer and compensated for some of the disappointments.

Now, Malfoy had reminded him…

Harry knew, though, that Malfoy had no idea what the illness had really been or why thinking about it was hard for Harry. Only Ron and Hermione knew what had actually happened when Harry walked into the forest to meet Voldemort, and Harry intended to keep it that way.

He came back to himself and craned his neck up to see Malfoy. “I should still have tried to find out,” he said quietly. “If I was the hero I liked to think of myself as, then I should have tried.”

Malfoy laughed aloud. Harry flinched automatically from the loudness of the laughter, but then relaxed and sat beside Malfoy. He was sure that he made Malfoy and Snape flinch more often than that from his screeches.

“Are you looking for reassurance?” Malfoy asked, chuckling. “That you are some kind of hero after all, even if your own conscience says you aren’t? You won’t find it here.”

“No, of course not,” Harry said, and sat on one leg to look more relaxed than he actually was. It was harder to lie as a bird; his body often reacted before he thought about what was happening. “So. You think Snape cared for his students, if not as much as he cared for his brewing.”

“Yes.” Malfoy looked wistful for a moment, started to open his mouth, and then pinched his lips into a thin line.

“Pretend I’m an ordinary bird,” Harry suggested softly, “if that would make it easier for you to talk with me.” He had tricked dozens of confessions out of criminals by looking cute and sweet and harmless, and got plenty of information by being the only audience that someone could talk to most of the time. He wasn’t going to use this information against Malfoy in the same way, but he did think Malfoy needed a listener.

Malfoy licked his lips and leaned back against the couch, taking his face further away, which was the opposite of the way it usually worked. But then he spoke, voice choked, and Harry knew he had taken the invitation after all. “I used to think Severus cared for me like that. I don’t think it anymore.”

“Why do you think he changed his mind?” Harry scratched the back of his head and tried to look as if he was less interested in Malfoy’s words than he really was. It would probably encourage him to talk more. “There could be lots of reasons, of course, but which do you think is the most likely one?”

Malfoy sighed. “I don’t think he changed his mind. I think I fooled myself, and he only pretended to what he thought would get him out of prison and into the open.”

Harry pressed briefly against his elbow, hoping that the brush of his feathers might reassure Malfoy. “But he must have cared for you a little, to put up with you for years and become your lover, right?”

Malfoy shook his head. “Even that might have been convenience. I was with him, and if he’d sent me back to the wizarding world, I could have betrayed his location. And as for becoming my lover—he’s told me his right hand is a better lover.”

Harry choked, and then ducked his head to attend to his breast feathers. The more he learned about Snape, the stranger it seemed that the man hadn’t self-destructed as the result of all the bitterness and spite in his body coming to a boil at once.

Maybe someone should arrange that he should.

But the wistfulness in Malfoy’s face argued against it. Strange as it seemed, someone, somewhere, had managed to come up with genuine love for Snape. Harry wasn’t going to try and take away that love unless Malfoy managed to overcome it enough to leave Snape.

I want to help them both. But if I can only help one, my priority’s going to be Malfoy.

“I’m sure that’s wrong,” he said, when he felt safe to talk again instead of simply flapping off down the corridor to the lab and trying to bite off Snape’s fingers one by one. “I’m sure you’re a good lover.”

Malfoy turned his face and raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you would know about that, would you? Had a lot of boyfriends?”

Harry felt the temptation to freeze again. But this was only teasing, it wasn’t a reference to something that he felt was a personal weakness, and so he felt free to spread his wings. “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that you actually think about other people, unlike Snape. That must make you a good lover, unless you do things like stab them in the eye with your penis all the time.”

Malfoy laughed again. Harry was ready for it this time, and half-hoped that Snape was hearing it in his lab. When was the last time you made him laugh like that? Think about what it means that someone who’s trapped in a bird’s body and who last argued like a child with Malfoy when he saw him, can make him laugh, and you can’t, you dried-up stick of evil.

“Compassion and care for others has less to do with being a good lover than you think,” Malfoy said. “If you do manage to draw Severus’s attention, then…” He sighed in longing. “You don’t know what he can do when he brings his focus to you. Imagine being the center of all the fixation he has on potions.”

Harry didn’t want to imagine it, partially because this was Snape, but also partially because he’d had enough of attention during his life, thank you. “Anyway. I think you must still be a better lover than he is.”

Malfoy gave him a smile that quirked sideways. “It’s too bad that you aren’t in a human body, or we could test that.”

I have to stop freezing like this. Luckily, this time Harry found another retort that should make Malfoy laugh and take his mind from any dangerous implication. “And then, what, for comparison’s sake I could kiss Snape? No, thanks. The closest I ever want to come to his mouth is as a bird, when I might bite his tongue since he refuses to do it himself.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” Malfoy said, waving a hand. “And you’ll have to accept that, in this case, I have more experience than you do.” He cast a glance down the corridor that led to the lab, his emotions shifting again. “Not that it really matters, when Severus doesn’t know or care that I’m alive.”

“He stopped you from leaving, didn’t he?” Even though he shouldn’t have. Harry was just glad the subject of the conversation had changed away from kissing Snape. He had enough nightmares without that.

“Yes, he did,” Malfoy said thoughtfully. “I wish I could be sure about his motives for doing so, but it’s its own sign of hope.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “And you think I ought to leave him?”

“If he doesn’t change,” Harry said. More hopeful than ever. He would have liked to hop up on Malfoy’s shoulder and run his beak through his hair, but people who weren’t used to that tended to flinch and try to hit him. Besides, Malfoy was leaning too far against the back of the couch to make it practical. “I reckon it’s possible he might.”

“I don’t know if I should think too much about that or not,” Malfoy said, and rested his head back against the couch with a sigh. “It might persuade me to stay when I would be better off going.”

Harry nodded, and then they sat there in gloomy silence until Malfoy cleared his throat and turned further back to face him. “Well, that’s something we can’t do anything about right now. What’s something we can?”

“Do you have a Pensieve?” Harry asked. “And can I borrow your wand?”

The questions were worth asking even without positive answers, for the sheer look of befuddlement on Malfoy’s face.

*

Severus stepped around the corner into the drawing room and narrowed his eyes. Usually, by this time of the evening, Draco was in his room reading and Potter was dozing in his cage. Severus had looked forwards to having the drawing room largely to himself so that he could get on with some of the research that he needed to do on Animagi.

Instead, he could hear both of their voices from the garden, and sitting alone on the table in the middle of the drawing room was Draco’s large, silvery Pensieve.

Severus walked up to it, examining the sides. Yes, he could see the light scores that a parrot’s claws might have left in the metal. The baffling thing was why Draco would have let Potter see or use it.

The Pensieve was full of brimming silver memory. Severus cast several spells that would identify other liquids mixed with it or curses on the Pensieve itself, and encountered nothing. He decided that he was foolish to fear Draco, as cowed as he was ordinarily, striking back at him in this fashion. Potter might have, but since Potter could not have used the Pensieve by himself, Draco would easily have prevented him from leaving a trap.

Then what it is here for?

Severus walked several times around the Pensieve, looking for signs of a more subtle nature, and still there was nothing. He finally sat down on the couch in front of the Pensieve and locked the door that led from the house into the garden with a negligent wave of his wand. Draco could still pass through it with a bit of work, but the noise should warn Severus and give him time to withdraw from the memories.

In the end, the only way he could learn why this had been left here—for him; Draco would not have been careless enough to leave private memories out—was to lower his head and enter them.

The usual odd sensations came and went in the back of his head, and then Severus found himself standing in the middle of a dungeon corridor, watching as he lectured Potter and his two friends. Judging from their size, they were in fourth year or thereabouts. Severus would have been disturbed he could not remember the incident himself, but there had been too many cases like this.

Severus moved up around the group, wondering what he was supposed to find or see. There were mutinous expressions on the faces of the three children, no surprise there. And he himself looked as he always did. This did not seem to be a time when Potter had got some surprising and unnoticed revenge on Severus.

When his past self had turned and strode away, the Weasley brat said bitterly, hands clenched into fists, “What a bastard!”

Old instincts died hard; Severus had opened his mouth to take points for language before he remembered that this was a memory. Luckily, the Granger girl seemed to agree with his opinion, since she frowned at the boy and said, “Well, there’s no need to talk about him like that, Ron.”

“But he is,” Weasley said, and began marching down the corridor in the opposite direction, which Severus presumed led to Gryffindor Tower, as if he intended to meet Severus on the way and pound him to pulp. “Don’t you think so, Harry?”

Potter said nothing. He looked pale and shaky, and Severus mentally corrected his estimation of the time. This still looked like the brat’s fourth year, but something had just happened, perhaps the confrontation with Crouch, Jr., that rendered Potter less likely to speak up than usual.

“Harry?” Weasley was grabbing Potter’s arm and looking at him with truly disgusting solicitousness.

“I just think there are some things about him we don’t really understand,” Potter said shortly, and shook off Weasley’s hand, and strode ahead.

The memory blurred, a clear indication of its ending and a passage to another memory, and Severus laughed, though he was the only one who would hear. Potter had wished him to see a moment when he had defended Severus in such a lukewarm fashion? Why? Severus would hardly come to think that he was right for that reason, or treat him in a more good-natured manner.

More likely this is a ritual to assuage his own guilt, which would have arisen in him when I told him about the imprisoned students he did not care enough to save.

The next memory showed Potter alone, sitting on a bed and staring at a book in his arms. Severus glanced around, noting that he was in the Gryffindor boys’ bedroom, and then stepped to the side so that he could read the title of the book. Potter looked older than in the prior memory; he might have been sixteen or seventeen.

The book, to Severus’s surprise, was an ordinary Potions textbook, which there was no reason for Potter to look at as if it was precious. But then Potter turned the page, and Severus saw his own handwriting slashing across the paper as though he had made his nervous, defiant proclamation aloud.

This book is the property of the Half-Blood Prince.

Severus narrowed his eyes. Yes, he remembered the Sectumsempra curse that Potter had used on Draco now. What surprised him was that the boy would be obsessively tracing his finger over the words on the page, the words that gave Severus’s ridiculous name, going back to the beginning when he was finished. If this was before the incident in the bathroom, Severus would have expected Potter to be investigating the spells; if after, flinging the book from him in horror.

But then Potter proved that it was even later in the sixth year than Severus had thought, because he whispered, “How can you possibly be Snape? How? When you seemed so smart and complex and—and someone who understood.”

Severus froze, his heart pounding. Yes, he had told Potter that he was the Half-Blood Prince when he and Draco fled Hogwarts at the end of Potter and Draco’s sixth year. He had been driven to it by offended pride that Potter would attempt to use his spells, and by a desire to destroy the value that Potter placed on the book. At least, if he couldn’t hold Potter down and yank the knowledge of Severus’s personal magic forcibly from his head, he could make sure that it was tainted.

But it hadn’t worked. Potter still gazed at the words as if he liked them, as if they offered up a secret of some kind, and his brow was furrowed with what looked like painful puzzlement. He leaned back on the pillow and whispered again, though Severus was standing close enough to the boy to hear the words clearly.

“You had enemies. I knew that. You came up with spells that would defend you against them. Well, fine. I’d do the same thing, if I could use my wand during the summers.

“But I never thought you would be—you. I just thought you were a pure-blood from the beginning. I thought you—I mean, the Prince—had to know some of the same things I did, because I had a Muggleborn mother, too. And then it turns out that you’re such a different person, or two different people, and I can’t separate one from the other.”

He fell silent, still frowning. The blurring this time came up and shoved Severus along to another memory before he could decide what in the world Potter had wanted him to see that one for. It was a moment of weakness and stupidity only, of no value to anyone save Potter’s foes.

Well, and perhaps the newspapers. But submitting such a story, even anonymously, would draw more attention to Severus than he liked.

The third memory showed Potter sitting up in his bed in the Gryffindor room again, but this time he was very much the young man Severus had seen when he thought he was dying, with Lily’s eyes and a face marked by war. He was frowning at Granger, who shook her head and said, “I’m not lying, Harry. Snape really is alive. Someone found him in time and gave him the antivenin. A few people said it was Malfoy, but I’m not sure about that.”

Potter drew up his knees in front of himself and wrapped his arms around them like a child. Severus waited eagerly for the breakdown or the temper tantrum that would follow at the news of his escape from death.

But instead Potter whispered only, “I’m glad.”

Severus could not have been more stunned if Potter had tried to apologize for peering into his Pensieve during his fifth year. Granger couldn’t seem to believe it, either. She leaned nearer and said, “What, Harry?”

Potter turned to her. “He was a hero,” he said simply. “He saved us all.”

The memory ended, and this time Severus found himself able to draw his head out of the Pensieve without being pushed to another. He sat still, frowning, trying to find commonalities between the three memories and seeing none. The last two could perhaps be vulnerable moments, taunting material, but the second much less so, and the first was something that would matter to no one but Potter.

“I was trying to make you see that you have good qualities.”

Severus started badly. Potter sat on the ledge of the window, which of course Severus had not locked, looking him calmly in the eye. That he had to turn a moment later and pick at an itch under his wing did not improve Severus’s temper.

“Do you seriously think that I did not believe in my intelligence, my bravery, my complexity until you told me?” Severus asked coolly. “Do you think that I am yet another fool who requires you to validate my existence?”

Potter lifted his head and gave Severus a look he probably imagined he was noble, though on a parrot it came closer to being cross-eyed. “I think you didn’t realize I thought that about you, that anyone other than yourself could. Because, after all, you disregard Malfoy’s opinion.”

And he flew back into the garden, leaving Severus sitting still for longer than he wished to, nearly paralyzed with anger.