Chapter Ten of 'Love, Free as Air'- In Flux

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Nine.

Title: Love, Free As Air (10/21)
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 Ten—In Flux

Severus stood in front of his cauldron and stared in silence at the ruined Calming Draught. This was one of the simplest potions one could brew; a competent second-year could have managed it. And now he had ruined it because he had not added the basil leaves at the correct moment—he who always added them at the correct moment, who had never failed in such a thing from the moment that he first had Potions ingredients in his hands.

I was thinking about Draco.

Severus turned away from the cauldron with a snarl, and then forced himself to not reach out and grasp the delicate equipment around him as he wanted. He had already smashed everything that wasn’t irreplaceable in the grips of his rage. He could repair vials, but he would never again trust a silver cauldron that had once had a crack in the side. And while he could order another one—he had Galleons enough for that—he did not want Draco to force him to spend money.

Draco. And Potter.

That was the source of the difference. If Draco had left because he was bored and fed-up, Severus honestly believed that he would not have missed him. But that he had left with Potter meant he would have another lover soon, one who would make him smile and probably give him the degree of spoiling that he had always wanted and which Severus had denied him for his own good, and would not feel the urge to come back to Severus.

Severus shut his eyes. Lately, when he had thoughts like that, he could feel his mind leaping and surging in odd ways, as though other thoughts were trying to force their way to the surface. Of course, he had never been one of the weaklings who held the theory that one could not control his mind or body. There was no one in his skull but him to think the thoughts, and no one but him who could master them.

In this case, he did not want to think about Draco’s accusations and the idea that his fear of Potter was a cover for his own shame.

Having faced the thought, Severus flinched and turned aside, and then wondered why he was. How could he be so weak as that? It was ridiculous. He would consider anything that he wanted to consider, and his biases and fears would not rule that process for him.

He left the lab, because he could not do good work there while he was in this state, and went to the drawing room. He had thought a moment of going into the gardens to walk, but the gardens reminded him too much of Draco. He sat down on the couch in the drawing room instead and stared bitterly at the shattered remnants of the cage that Draco had kept Potter in.

How could Draco have written like that to him? Severus had been honest in his initial letter. He had warned Draco of his faults and told him how he could correct them. He had shown his distress that Draco had left. Severus had thought that was what Draco wanted, the demonstration that he was important to Severus.

And Draco had responded as though he was sick of the way that Severus felt about him, sick of the way he felt about Draco’s faults.

Severus paused, breathing faster. Somewhere out in the garden, a bird chirped. Severus had nearly fired a curse through the window before it occurred to him that Potter could not be back in the garden—Severus would have felt him come through the wards—and that parrots didn’t sound like that. He opened his shaking hand and let the wand drop to the floor.

What if—what if?

This time, the thought did in truth come slowly, forcing its way up through layers of sluggish mud. Even when he became impatient and tried to think it faster, Severus could do nothing to hasten it until it burst on his perceptions in all its angry glory.

What if Draco was responding the way Severus would, if someone told him he was childish, had never grown up, and was only looking for a lover? Severus knew more than that about himself. He knew his depths, his skills, his prides, his passions, and it did not matter to him if no one else ever did.

Draco was different, but he could have—he could have thoughts like that. He could think he was more than Severus saw, and respond scornfully out of that self-sufficiency.

And of course, then, he would react angrily to a letter that commanded him to return. Because Severus would.

Severus’s fingers crumpled at the air, but he had nothing to hold now, including Draco’s letter. He leaped to his feet and paced back and forth, afraid for a moment of what someone else looking at him would see, but then remembering that he was alone, had been alone for three days before the letter came and alone for what felt like decades since the letter had arrived, and that no one would hear him if he chose to scream.

He did not, of course. There were limits to the melodrama that he would play out in his own home, limits to the way that he would shift himself into Draco’s perspective. But he paced and his head whirled and the thoughts were coming thick and fast now, thicker and faster than he would have preferred them to if he had full control.

Draco did not like to be commanded. Draco was able to muster the confidence to leave even after six years of a love that he had clung to long after Severus believed it to be dead. Draco had chosen to stay away and to regard him with scorn, and that stabbed as deep into Severus as though someone had hit him with a brush full of needles, deeper than his pride went.

That could only mean…

Severus halted, breath quickening, and his fingers clenching into his palm so deeply that he winced and unbent them a moment later. They had left red marks.

That could only mean that Draco was a little like Severus. And so Severus was a little like him, with similar feelings and an otherwise inexplicable regret that Draco had left him. And Severus believed that nothing was inexplicable.

That could only mean that Severus felt some type of affection for Draco, if not Draco’s lingering love, and that the regret would not cease until he had Draco back with him.

But then not even that thought was enough. Severus had really and truly roused his mind now, and, as if grateful for the chance to think about something other than potions, it was in full and roaring flood.

What would keep it from happening again, if you had him back? You would ignore him the moment you were assured of his love, and he would be lonely and pine for the outside world. No chance that he could establish a business like yours; he’s not good enough at any one thing, and inferior products coming out under the same assumed name would diminish your reputation and your money. And you couldn’t provide him with the contacts and the freedom and the renewed respectability that he craves.

Something would have to change. There would have to be some other factor if he came back.

And there the chattering of Severus’s mind fell into silence, because he did not know what that other factor would have to be, and the silence crept back in around him, dragging a large black web with it.

*

“Members of the Wizengamot. I think you will find that my client, Draco Malfoy, does not deserve to be put in Azkaban for several reasons.”

Draco shut his eyes. He had never thought that Granger’s voice would speak those words. He had never realized that he could be in this courtroom sitting in an ordinary chair, rather than the one with chains that stood in the center of the floor.

Then a small smile tugged at his lips. Of course, the reason he wasn’t in the chair with chains was simple. The Aurors who had come for him and Potter had tried to guide them there, and Potter had followed them without stopping and conjured a second chair with chains right beside the first. As everyone stared at him in astonishment, he’d sat down in the conjured one and reached out to wrap the manacles around his wrists.

“Mr. Potter!” The scandalized voice came from among the Wizengamot, but Draco wasn’t sure which one of them it was. “Do you mind telling us what you are doing?”

“Oh, I thought that was obvious,” Potter said, blinking up at them with a look on his face that only an idiot would have thought was confused or myopic. Then again, Draco thought, watching Potter in glee and fascination, the Wizengamot was probably ninety percent idiots, with ten percent intelligent people whose conceptions of the world were outdated. “But then again, I can understand how you wouldn’t recognize fairness when you see it.”

Draco had gaped at him, particularly when Granger shot Potter a disapproving frown, but he had understood a moment later, when Potter said, “Of course, if you were willing to release Mr. Malfoy from his degrading position…”

Granger and Potter were working as a team. Granger would speak the legal language that the Wizengamot needed to hear, and Potter would threaten them with outrageousness when they went too far.

Draco had had to shut his eyes against distinctly unmanly tears, and he’d leaned a little heavily on Potter when the Aurors reluctantly stepped back and let him up from the chair. Potter had stood there, letting him lean, and whispered, “Are you all right?”

“I am. Now.” Draco opened his eyes and looked up, not bothering to hide what he felt. Potter had blinked and shuffled and then led him over to where Granger was sitting, carefully not touching him on the way.

Draco had sat down in the chair next to her and watched her rise to combat the Wizengamot with a little smile on her mouth. She looked perfectly polite and more carefully groomed than he would have thought possible. Her hair clung around her head as smooth curls; she held a sheaf of parchments that she barely looked at, instead meeting the eyes in the gallery above her and pronouncing her words clearly.

“…as Draco Malfoy was a student of Hogwarts at the time, and yet no one was able to resume a professor’s care for him, which is the way that any young wizard ‘of age’ at Hogwarts can still be disciplined by their Heads of House and other professors rather than obliged to strike out on their own as a legal adult…”

And so on flowed the talk, and Draco could see some of the Wizengamot members blinking their eyes in what looked like horrified fascination. Draco wondered if part of her tactics involved simply wearing the enemy into exhaustion.

“She’ll win you free,” Potter murmured to him, as if he knew where Draco’s thoughts were tending. “She’s too good not to. And she’s never lost a case.” There was a lilt of pride in his voice, and his eyes fixed on Granger’s back as though he was lost in admiration.

Draco astonished himself with a stab of jealousy. He had never seen Potter look at him that way, although he had seen him look that way at Granger, at Weasley, and at several of the other Aurors they’d been with since they left Severus’s house. So he handed it out freely to everyone around him, it seemed, except Draco.

What have you done to win his admiration, exactly?

But Draco didn’t have to think about that if he didn’t want to, and he had long since accepted that his feelings weren’t exactly reasonable. He asked in a low voice, trying not to disturb Granger’s magnificent litany, “Why was she so eager to help me? Why were you?”

Potter blinked and looked away from Granger as though he had to physically pull his eyes free. “For the same reason,” he said. “What happened to you was unjust. What was happening to you when I found you—there—was unjust. You deserve a chance to prove that you can have the sort of adult life you wanted and were denied. If you fuck that up this time, well, that’s your look-out. But it wasn’t fair last time, and all the circumstances were against you in a way that no one could have overcome.”

Draco stared at his hands. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had said that they were going to treat him like everyone else and then actually done so. Maybe with McGonagall, who was scrupulously even-handed with all the Houses. But other than that, he was always being favored or denigrated, and made to feel like a fraud most of the time, because he was praised or blamed for qualities he didn’t possess.

“Draco? Are you all right?”

Potter sometimes called him by his first name now, since the letter came. Draco remembered that. He turned to face Potter and studied him, not bothering to hide the intent searching look in his eyes.

Potter blinked and looked back, bewildered and helpful and half-smiling. Draco leaned in until his lips almost brushed Potter’s ear—and let the greedily staring members of the Wizengamot take that as they would—and whispered, “You’re going further than you need to for me. I’ve never met someone who does this much for a relative stranger, a former enemy, just because his sense of justice has been outraged.”

Potter’s eyes flashed and he muttered back, “Well, now you’re met three.”

And then he turned to the side and refused to speak to Draco for the rest of that particular trial session.

*

“I think it went well.”

Harry laughed and slid another glass of pumpkin juice across the table to Hermione; it was the only thing she was thirsty for after a trial like this. Hermione picked it up, drained half of it, and then started wandering around his kitchen in a state of high excitement, though after every circuit she came back to rub her hand across the top of the parchments. Harry wondered if that was one of the ways she absorbed all the knowledge she needed to fight her legal battles, through the words running straight from parchment into her brain. Malfoy had already gone upstairs. Harry suspected he was overwhelmed, and who wouldn’t be, with all those eyes staring at him?

“That’s an understatement,” Harry said.

Hermione whirled towards him, eyes bright. “Then you followed the progress of the arguments?”

Harry shook his head regretfully, and watched her face fall. Hermione was always looking for someone she could share her genius with; though she still liked to explain to an ignorant audience, Harry thought most of that impulse went into the trials themselves now. “No, but I can always tell when it’s gone well just by the expression on your face,” he said.

Hermione cocked her head wisely. “And what about Malfoy’s face?”

“What about it?” Harry asked, surprised. “I don’t think he understood it fully either, if that’s what you’re asking, but he was impressed.”

Hermione said nothing, but gave him a smirk. As the silence stretched, Harry suddenly knew what she was talking about. He turned away and fiddled with his own glass of pumpkin juice, sliding it back and forth across the table until it left a wet ring behind it. Hermione finally reached out and clamped her hand over the top of the glass.

“Kreacher will have to clean up that mark later, and I prefer not to make extra work for him,” she said firmly. By now, she had given up on trying to coax Kreacher out of Harry’s service, which Harry was profoundly grateful for. It was the reason he wasn’t afraid to leave the house on cases that could stretch for weeks; he knew Kreacher would look after everything and have a hot meal waiting when he got back. “Now, Harry, why you can’t just face up to what this means?”

“’What this means,’” Harry mocked viciously, shoving his chair back from the table and pacing in a circle of his own. Hermione didn’t try to stop him, just watched him. Harry glared at her, loathing the knowing look on her face. “What this means, Hermione, is that I have someone I need to help. Like Neville, that time Hannah had kicked him out and he needed a place to stay. Or Dean, when we thought that he might kill himself and he needed help. I help people. You know that. It’s what’s right.”

“I know that,” Hermione said. Her face was sober, probably from the reminder of Dean’s situation. At least he was still alive, and attending regular sessions at St. Mungo’s now. “But this is different. The others were friends. Before, when you had to help a man and he was a stranger, you didn’t bring him to the house with you.”

“I don’t do that with women, either,” Harry snapped. “I like my privacy.”

Hermione gave a windy sigh that seemed to travel through at least eight other throats before it got to her. The eight other throats were all Weasley ones, and they thought the same thing Hermione did, Harry knew. He braced himself for the usual lecture.

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand his friends’ concerns. They wanted him to be happy, and didn’t think he could be when he went from woman to woman the way he did. On the other hand, not everyone had the kind of blissful marriage that Ron and Hermione, Molly and Arthur, and Bill and Fleur did. Maybe Harry was different. Maybe he just didn’t fit the pattern. As long as he didn’t hurt anyone, he didn’t see why it mattered.

“You’ve never settled down,” Hermione said softly, “though I see the envy in your eyes when you watch us. It’s not always one-night stands, no, but it is extremely short relationships.” She hesitated, then added, “And usually with Quidditch players, Muggleborn athletes, and other women who aren’t—the common stereotype of women.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t want a family,” Harry said. “I just don’t know if it would be with a woman.”

He’d left himself open with that one, he realized a moment later, as Hermione grinned and leaned forwards. “Yes, exactly. So why couldn’t it be with a man?”

I should have said that she’d ruined me for “usual” women by being my friend. Harry crossed his arms. “Because I’m not attracted to men.” There. That was the truth, and he didn’t understand why his friends thought that he would have the happy home and devoted monogamy that they wanted for him if he just tried a bloke. How, if he couldn’t even bring himself to sleep with a man?

Hermione smiled sympathetically at him, but said, “I don’t think you’ve really tried that. You’ve never been on a date with a man, and you’ve avoided spending too much time alone with anyone who isn’t already a friend. Malfoy is the first exception to that, and, well…” She spread her hands. “We were hoping that you would find him attractive enough to experiment.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I hope that’s not the only reason you’re helping him. I just served him a load of bollocks about how we’re both interested in seeing justice being done, if that’s true.”

Hermione laughed. “Oh, of course not! But the way he looks at you, and the way he leans on you, and the way that you don’t push him away until you start thinking you should know better, all look promising.”

“Of course he looks at me with neediness,” Harry said. “He—he spent a lot of time alone.” He had been going to say that Malfoy had just separated from someone he was practically obsessed by and who had been his only human contact for six years, but of course he couldn’t say that. Bloody Unbreakable Vow. “That doesn’t mean I want to use him as an experiment, or have him use me as one.”

Hermione regarded him with a touch of sadness. “In trying to be fair all the time, Harry, and nice to people, sometimes you analyze things too much.” Harry stared with his mouth open, trying to think of something that would really cover the monstrous injustice of Hermione accusing someone else of being overly analytical, but Hermione had continued, as unstoppable as she was when she started talking about a case. “You seem afraid to just feel. You’re always thinking about consequences. You told me once that that’s why you break up with the women you date, because you think that you might regret dating them someday, or you look years into the future and analyze all the ways your flaws would hurt each other. Why not let go and try?”

“Not with Malfoy,” Harry said firmly. “He’s been too hurt.”

Hermione’s face softened after a moment of thinking about it. “Yes, you’re probably right,” she said. “But I still think you’re going to find your match in a man someday, Harry.” She reached across the table to touch his shoulder. “We want to see you as happy in your personal life as you are in your job.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Harry said, and caught her hand. “I have you and the Weasleys.”

Hermione gave him a warm smile, and the conversation was forgotten—at least on her part, Harry thought. He was keeping his own mind as carefully as possible away from the intense protective impulse he had towards Malfoy. The protective impulse wasn’t unusual, since he had chosen his career and skills with the desire to help people, but the intensity of it was.

All the others I’ve helped have mostly had people they can depend on, Harry remind himself firmly. Friends and family, even if they had to stay at a distance for a while. Malfoy has no one else. But it’s still not a good idea to let him be too dependent on me. I want to give him what he needs, and that includes a way to stand on his own two feet.

And if Malfoy needed a lover…?

Harry shook his head in irritation. Malfoy was the one who would have to make that decision, not Harry or Hermione or anyone else. Malfoy had already had too much of someone controlling his life and making choices for him, poor bloke.

*

Oddly, it was the thought of Potter that came back to rescue Severus from the web of silence.

He had thought Potter had shown him those Pensieve memories only to taunt him. Why else would he do so? Potter existed to taunt him, and to take Draco away from him, and to pay for Severus’s hard work on developing the potion that would reverse his Animagus transformation with only a lightly-made Vow. He would never want to speak about Severus anyway, so why not make it?

But the memories had nothing to do with Draco or the potion, and the longer Severus thought about them, the odder they seemed as memories chosen specifically to annoy him. Why would Potter think that it mattered to Severus that he had been shocked and upset to discover Severus was the Half-Blood Prince? What kind of taunt was it to say that he had once defended Severus, in a way, in front of his friends?

None of the memories made sense. And Severus puzzled over them and at last, in the new frame of mind that came when he was not always in control of his thoughts, flung a plank over the swamp that consumed him to something like the firm ground of rationality—if one could call anything Potter did rational.

Potter existed to help people. He might have thought he was helping Draco by taking him away from Severus. He might have thought that he was helping Severus by showing him those memories, showing him that there was one person in the world besides Draco and Albus who had once had a kind, charitable thought about him.

If Potter, of all people, could have those, Severus was not as irredeemable or as horrible as his new thoughts about Draco seemed to suggest he was.

Severus stood in the garden all that morning, changing position only to remain in the changing shade of the trees, and thought.

The thoughts, many times, made no sense, but they pressed and passed new images in front of his eyes. It was for the sake of those images that Severus went indoors, some time later, and sat down to write another letter.

To Potter, not Draco.