Chapter Eleven of 'Love, Free as Air'- Transition

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Ten.

Title: Love, Free As Air (11/21)
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 Eleven—Transition

“Master Harry Potter, sir!”

Harry jerked himself out of bed an instant, and found his wand in his hand as though he had Summoned it there. Perhaps he had. He sometimes did wandless magic in his sleep, he’d found, and the instinct was to find his wand and keep it close when he’d been without it for weeks in his bird body.

He blinked in a circle, only then realizing that it was Kreacher’s voice he’d heard and not Ron’s, Hermione’s, or Draco’s, and found Kreacher standing at the bottom of the bed. He held a large pot and a larger wooden spoon, and looked sufficiently outraged that Harry decided that he was yearning to attack, not frightened.

“What is it, Kreacher?” Harry kept his voice low, while he cast his senses out in a circle with a quick spell. He could feel the wards holding strong around the house—except in one place, where the front door faced the street. Someone was trying to tunnel through the wards there, and doing a clumsy job. Harry thought he probably would have felt it in a few seconds, even if Kreacher hadn’t summoned him.

“Someone is getting into Master Harry Potter’s house, Master Harry Potter sir!” Kreacher whispered, his eyes flashing. He waved his makeshift weapons. “Master Harry Potter must wake up and defend his property!”

Harry grinned at that. “Yes, you’re right,” he said, and began to ease down the stairs. “Come on.”

As he went, he reached out to test the wards again. The magical signature pressing against them didn’t feel familiar, which cut out a lot of the Aurors and Snape. (Although Harry honestly didn’t think Snape would cross a shallow puddle to get Draco back, he might have decided to harm Harry’s home out of revenge). That left thugs from the Wizengamot as the most likely culprits.

At the bottom of the stairs, just as he started to raise his wand, he heard someone behind him. Harry turned, and released a hard breath when he saw it was only Draco. Of course, Kreacher probably would have had time to warn him if someone had actually managed to get through the wards and behind him, but Harry had lived through the past six years by never underestimating his enemies.

“Go back to bed,” Harry whispered crossly. “I can handle this.”

Draco stood behind him with his hair shaggy and his eyes enormous and his chest pale in the moonlight; it was covered with scars, Harry noticed. And he noticed that because Draco didn’t have a shirt on. Harry rolled his eyes. “It’s all right,” he said. “I promise. Go put on some robes, at least?”

“No,” Draco said. “Why should I? I don’t have to have robes to fight.” He lifted his wand, lit it so brightly that Harry’s eyes flinched away, and then leaned across Harry’s shoulder to stare at the door. “What is it? Who is it?”

“The Wizengamot, I suspect,” Harry said. “The magical signature isn’t familiar, and that means it can’t be any of the others who would have reason to break in here and get you back, like the Aurors.” He shifted to the side, staring at the front door and hoping that no one had seen the light of Draco’s wand through the windows. He doubted it, though. The window wards were some of the inner ones, and would be the last and hardest to break, immediately before they stormed in. “Mostly, we have to make sure that we don’t hurt them.”

“We have to make sure of that?” Draco’s voice rose.

Harry cast him an exasperated glance. “Think. If they thought they had right on their side and could get away with a raid like this, why would they make it in the middle of the night? It would be much better to have it in the middle of the day, with a reporter or two present. Lots of publicity, lots of chances for solemn speeches to the wizarding world about how they tried, they did, but you were just too dangerous to let run around free. An attack in the middle of the night means something different. I think they want some injuries so that they have a chance to arrest you for fresh crimes. Or me,” he had to add, because he thought there were some Wizengamot members who wouldn’t mind seeing Harry gone from the trial as well.

Draco stood where he was, brilliant wand in hand, staring at Harry with his jaw dropped.

“What?” Harry checked over his shoulder to make sure that no one had come in while he was lecturing. Or maybe Draco had lost his composure at the sight of Kreacher, standing beside them and banging his spoon into his pot with a rhythmic measure that Harry knew was meant to intimidate. Well, with all luck the Wizengamot’s raid team would include a few pure-bloods who would find it intimidating that a house-elf was fighting back.

“I didn’t think of any of that,” Draco said in a daze. “I could have, with more time, but I didn’t.”

Harry smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, it’s the middle of the night, and you’re tired and just got up. Come on. Follow my lead, and cast the brightest hexes you can, and other than that, only defensive spells.” He started to move forwards.

Draco held him back, one hand pressing into the middle of Harry’s spine as if he wanted to memorize the contour. “No,” he murmured. “I owe you an apology. I didn’t expect you to think of it, either.”

“I’ve changed a lot since you knew me,” Harry said, and stepped away. “Now, come on. Like I said, bright hexes only, We want to blind and dazzle, not injure them or convince them that we’re dangerous.” He thought a moment, then smiled. “Want to lead with the Conjurer’s Rainbow?”

*

He and Potter made a good team, Draco had to think., and they fell so naturally into place next to each other that his back teeth ached. It was the kind of partnership that he had wished to have with Severus, but he had never felt it except during a few moments of brewing and the night they had fled the wizarding world.

Together, after Potter tore down the wards, they raised the Conjurer’s Rainbow, a bright arc of light that changed color six times a second and blazed into the night, ripping it apart and incidentally revealing the Wizengamot enforcers crouched in the shadows on either side of the path that led up to the front door. Then Potter let loose a stream of fireworks, or hexes like them—Draco had to admit that he was too busy planning his next spell to be sure of that—and half the enforcers shrieked and leaped about like rabbits.

Draco had chosen his hex by then. He lifted his wand high and cried out, “Flamma incomprehensibilis!”

What was left of the night turned pale and dowdy in the wake of the fire Draco conjured. It was brilliant, pure white, and looked as though it ought to be hot enough to consume flesh at a touch, though it was only illusion. It rose up from behind Draco, a giant swan-colored flame, and surged forwards, a dancing taper, to coil around the edges of the enforcers’ cloaks and throw them to the ground. So many more of them were shrieking now, but with fear and shock, not pain. Draco laughed aloud. The challenge to keep from injuring anyone, and thus to keep his hands and mind away from the Darker spells he knew, was stimulating.

Into the middle of everything rushed Potter’s house-elf, laying about him with spoon and pot and screams of, “Bad wizards, bad wizards, to threaten Master Harry Potter sir’s property!” which Draco didn’t think were all that intimidating but certainly added to the distractions.

Draco turned to the side, knowing without asking that Potter was there, and sure enough, Potter was, grinning at him. He held out his hand, and Draco clasped it, also knowing without asking what spell Potter wanted to perform next.

“Nox candelabrorum!” they shouted together.

Candles in golden holders immediately appeared in a circle around the wizards, and then another rank behind them, and then another rank behind that, producing illumination as bright as a Muggle spotlight Draco had once seen from a distance. The fighting stopped at once, as if that had been a signal. Later, Draco thought that the enforcers had probably been relying on darkness to cover their retreat, and had realized that this meant anyone could see their faces and commit them to a Pensieve memory.

Kreacher started to line himself up for a charge at the enemy until Potter reached out and made a chopping, commanding gesture. Then he stepped back, sulking, and Potter took a step in front of him—shielding both Draco and Kreacher at once, as Draco was quick to realize—and swept the small crowd with an unsmiling glance.

“I want to know what you’re doing here,” Potter said. His voice was low and commanding, and Draco felt the urge to stretch himself against the rippling touch of the air that the words passed through, as if they were a great, solid cloak he could feel draping over his shoulders. “I know you work with the Wizengamot; that’s not the question. Why are you here? Why did you try to get through the wards?”

The enforcers exchanged glances. Most of them were younger wizards, Draco saw, in their thirties and late twenties, though he saw no one knew.

And none of them, it seemed, had been provided with instructions about what they should say if they failed. They probably weren’t supposed to fail. They shuffled back and forth, and cleared their throats, and examined their wands.

“It’s like that, is it?” Potter nodded, and Draco might have thought his voice was gentle, if he hadn’t seen his face. “None of you wanted to be here, but you had no choice, and you expected me to come charging out, acting like a crazed murderer, so you would have an excuse to arrest me. And you probably thought Mr. Malfoy was a crazed murderer, so you had no objections to that part of the assignment, either.” His voice deepened, but he never moved, simply standing there with his arms folded and his face still. Draco licked his lips and felt a thrumming sense of power travel through him. This was the way he had imagined someone defending him when he was a child, with undeniable words and the power to force other people to look away. Granger had given him a taste of it for the first time two days ago, but this was more exciting. “None of you considered that Mr. Malfoy has had enough mud thrown at him to stick if it was going to. None of you considered that I am a power in my own right and can defend who I can choose to defend. None of you considered that your employers are going to be willing to sacrifice you when they find out what happened, rather than admit that they’ve done anything wrong.”

He paused, his eyes raking across faces as if he thought someone in front of him would be ashamed enough to throw himself on his knees and confess. But no one did, and Potter snorted in disgust and turned his back. “Go away,” he said.

And they did. The Wizengamot enforcers melted away between the candles as though they had no choice. Few of them glanced at him or Kreacher, Draco saw; most of their attention was for Potter. And those few wore a mixture of confusion and resentment, but they went away like all the others.

Potter halted in front of Draco, studying him with kind, weary eyes. “Are you all right? I didn’t ask you that, but I didn’t want to in front of them.”

“Of course I’m all right,” Draco said. His breath was coming very short. “None of them got the chance to injure me.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Potter said. “Are you all right that I spoke for you? I would have let you do it, but I was afraid that they wouldn’t listen. They still respect me for what I did during the war.”

Draco couldn’t respond except in one way. He reached out and clasped Potter’s shoulders, staring into his eyes. Potter knew what this meant, from the sudden stillness, but he didn’t move away, though his breathing accelerated to match Draco’s.

Draco leaned up and placed his lips gently against Potter’s, trying to convey his gratitude and his glee and his longing.

Potter shuddered and didn’t move one way or the other, forwards or back. He stood there and let Draco kiss him, and when Draco was done, he bowed his head and nodded. “Thank you,” he said, voice harsh. “I know that must have cost you a lot to give.”

“Nothing at all,” Draco said, running his fingers lightly along Potter’s arm, feeling the skin there. “Not nearly as much as it must have cost you to stand there and let me give it.”

Potter blinked down at him, startled, as Draco had intended him to be, into discussing this rather than pretending that it had never happened. “I—oh, fuck.” He smiled suddenly, but it was an awkward smile. “Look, Malfoy, I know that you need a lover again, that you’re not used to being without one since you left Snape, but I don’t think I can be that lover. I thought you were kissing me because it was the only way you knew how to express how you felt, but I want you to learn to be independent, and—”

“It was the only way I could express what I felt,” Draco said calmly. So calm. He hadn’t known it would be that way. He ran his fingers the other way, down Potter’s arm this time, and closed them lightly around his wrist. “But not because I’ve become so twisted by my years with Severus that sexual kisses are the only means of intimacy I can think of. Because you did something brave here tonight, and I wanted to thank you for it.” He let his hand linger one moment more on Potter’s wrist, and then let it go. “Harry.”

He could feel the silence of Harry’s bewilderment behind him as he walked back into the house. It was pleasant.

*

Severus had to cross out so many different starts to the letter that he began to wonder if it was worth sending at all. But then he would think of the way that Draco had written to him, and his own thoughts, and the fact that he had ruined a Calming Draught, of all potions, and he would return to the stubborn facts of ink and parchment.

I don’t want you to know

I want you to know

I want to say

Draco informed me that

So many starts, and all of them lacked something. Severus could not speak to Potter openly of the memories alone, because that might make him sound too needy, and he couldn’t leave out all the new thoughts that had come up in the past few days, because that would cause Potter to think he was the same and throw away the letter without reading it. And he could not write to Draco because—

Because he did not have the courage yet. Because he was too ashamed.

Severus gritted his teeth. Perhaps this pain will prove useful in time, but I do not yet believe that it is. He had used pain as a goad on himself in the past, a whip that would keep him to his assigned tasks, but he had never confronted a pain this sharp and searching and personal.

It had helped, he was gradually coming to realize, that he had thought any attempts to resume his relationship with Lily hopeless. It had given him the ability to persist and yet be half-angry, half-satisfied, when she refused to listen. He had to atone, he had to grieve, but he could also give up and do the atonement, which was easier than the making up would have been.

Severus leaned back in his chair and touched his forehead with long fingers when he thought that. How Albus would laugh, that at the age of forty-four I am facing my demons at last.

So now he had to do the making up, but he didn’t think that Draco would listen to him after the last letter. Potter was his chance. And Potter had a spark of sympathy for him, as evidenced in those memories, but the spark had to be blown to life in the right way, and immediately, rather than after long waiting, as Severus would have preferred to do.

He bent over the parchment again and let the chaotic words flow from his fingers this time, trying to express his mind rather than impress someone. He would worry about how they would be received after he had written them. At least that would give him solid matter to choose from rather than the current intangible thoughts shifting in his head.

Potter:

I want you to know that I have thought about the memories that you gave me in the Pensieve. You value something in me. You were glad I survived. You were shocked to find out that I was the Half-Blood Prince, and if that means you value my brains, it is time that I proved I have them.

I was not ready to lose Draco, although I thought I was. I require him back, and that means that I must reconcile with him. Will you speak to him for me? Don’t give him this letter, or do, if you want to. I want to reconcile. Say that I have thought about it, and I am ashamed and I am sorry.

That last word was the hardest one Severus had ever written.

I have thought, and thought, and thought. I was more childish than Draco. I need him back. I need you back perhaps as well, because trying to resume our relationship from where we were simply will not work for me and him, and we need you as mediator. Try. Read this if you can, share it or not, and make your mind up.

Severus Snape.

Severus laid down the letter and closed his eyes. His head ached, still, and he didn’t know if that came from stress, memories, or the fact that those words were on the parchment now, where anyone could look at them. He pushed the letter away from him and stood.

He would spend the rest of his day in the lab and the gardens, confident that he had done his duty where he should. Tomorrow was soon enough to send the letter out.

*

“They’re crumbling.”

Harry raised his cup of water in a toast to Hermione and then took a deep gulp. It helped that Draco was here, as well, sitting on the other side of the table and seeming as viciously pleased as Hermione. It meant that there was someone else who could talk to Draco, so that Harry didn’t feel obligated to keep looking at him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to look at him, or that Draco didn’t deserve to be looked at, Harry thought defensively. He was just confused. He hadn’t expected Draco to kiss him two nights ago and then not even press the issue.

“You’re certain of that?” Draco’s voice had a sliding eagerness in it that made Harry smile. He could hardly blame Draco for wanting to get back at the Wizengamot, and this was a neater revenge than Harry thought he would have been able to get on his own. Not to mention that he probably would have been arrested if he’d tried some of the plans that had to be dancing in his head.

“Oh, yes.” Hermione set down her pumpkin juice with a bang and paced back and forth across the kitchen the way she had the other day. This time, though, she was more excited, and Harry could see curls escaping from the tight hold at her neck. She whirled around, caught him looking, and glanced haughtily away at Draco again, to show that she didn’t care. “They didn’t argue as much this time. Their voices were fainter. They had a few people there to oppose me, but their testimonies were weak and there weren’t as many witnesses as they should have been. Whether or not the Wizengamot is having trouble finding people who want to witness for them, I don’t know,” she added thoughtfully. “I did expect more in the early stages of the trial, and I would say this is still early stages. But possibly it was long enough ago that no one cares as much as the Wizengamot thought they would.”

“I have to be grateful that you do,” Draco said, and Harry knew him well enough by now to hear the real gratitude mixed in with the stiffness.

“No, you don’t,” Hermione said, and turned around and grinned at him. “I’m doing it for sheer bloody-mindedness as much as anything else. How dare they give people biased trials in the first place!” Her teeth flashed as she bared them. “If they’d followed their own ideals of justice when they should have, instead of bowing to popular pressure, then they wouldn’t have me on their trail now.”

Draco and Hermione spoke a bit more about the trial as well as their hopes of rescuing at least his mother from prison, but Harry didn’t spend much time listening. He toyed with his glass instead and watched Draco from under his lids.

All right. So Draco needed someone. That was obvious. Harry could be a friend, but he didn’t think he could be more than that.

Draco had meant the kiss as a gesture of thanks. He’d said so. There was no reason to brood further on it. It might never go further than that.

Harry licked his lips and lowered his head. Maybe it was just because he was spending so much time in Draco’s company, or because Draco was making motions of his own to show that he wasn’t going to be as uptight as he could have been about Harry and Hermione’s help, or because Draco did need him in fairly specific and concrete ways and gave him a battle to fight, but Harry felt, for the first time, as if a man existed he could be close to in the way that Ron was close to Hermione.

But the problem was, he couldn’t do anything about his lack of physical attraction, and he didn’t want to encourage false hopes in Draco—or any hopes at all, really, when any could be disastrous. Harry shook his head and took another gulp of water.

An owl surged through the window and down to the table, offering Harry a letter. Harry took it and opened it, half-expecting it to be from the Wizengamot and about the late-night raid. They’d said nothing so far, probably because admitting it would mean that they’d also have to admit the embarrassment of its failure.

He felt his cheeks heat in automatic reaction when he saw the writing and, instead of thinking Snape, thought Half-Blood Prince.

“What’s the matter, Harry?”

Hermione had noticed the way his face changed, of course. Harry glanced up and shook his head. “I don’t know if anything is,” he said. “The letter’s just from a very unexpected person, that’s all, and I have to decide how to handle it.” He let his eyes dart over to Draco, hoping to tell him the truth he couldn’t say in front of Hermione. He was not going to keep the letter secret from Draco, no matter what Snape might have said.

He was less sure that he needed to, since the first sentence his eyes had fallen on said Say that I have thought about it, and that I am ashamed and I am sorry.

Draco was staring when Harry looked back at him again, and Hermione looked at both of them and announced that she had plenty to do with getting the final stages of the trial ready. She gathered up her parchment and was out of the kitchen so fast that Harry hardly had time to wave goodbye. Then he stared at the letter in his hand again, read through it one more time, and shook his head.

“Here,” he said, holding it out to Draco. “You make sense of it.”

Draco read it with a steadily setting jaw and a paling face, and Harry felt himself relax. He thought he could trust Draco to make the right decision. Draco was more likely to know, among other things, whether Snape was lying to them or not.

But then Draco stood up and flung the letter into the middle of the table, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said, voice breaking. “I would give almost everything for this to be real—especially since you said you can’t be mine.”

Harry flinched; Draco’s eyes were bright and accusing. He took a deep breath. “I’m willing to be your friend and your helper,” he said. “I’m willing to let you borrow money from me and live with me. But I don’t think I can be what you need. I’m not sure that you need someone in the way that you needed—him.”

“Then I don’t know,” Draco repeated, more loudly, more fiercely. “I wish he hadn’t written again. Now I have to think about him. You answer this in any way you think best.” He turned and left the room.

Slowly, reluctantly, Harry gathered up the letter and considered it again. He wanted to say that the headlong words on the page were honest, but it was true that he couldn’t know that, not for certain.

And he didn’t want to experiment with Draco’s peace or his pride.

In the end, he took the letter upstairs to sleep on it, and hoped that his mind would calm down enough to let him sleep in the first place.