Chapter Fourteen of 'Love, Free as Air'- Quite the Conversation

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirteen.

Title: Love, Free As Air (14/21)
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 Fourteen—Quite the Conversation

Potter, Severus noted, sat on the edge of his seat looking stunned after Draco had stormed out, which at least proved this was no part of a plan they had concocted together. Severus raised an eyebrow and extended the kettle silently. Potter hesitated, then nodded, and Severus poured tea into his cup until it lapped at the brim.

“I didn’t expect that,” Potter said blankly. He picked up his cup and sipped, then sipped again, and turned to look out into the gardens. Severus knew from experience that Draco would have already gone deep enough not to be visible, however. He always did when he was wrestling with a problem that was mostly his fault. “I thought he’d make a decision when he realized anything he did required a decision.”

“That is the part of Draco’s character that remains unfathomable to me,” Severus murmured. “He wishes to avoid mistakes that would expose his vulnerabilities to others, but he believes that hovering in midair, leaving the choice in suspense, will not expose him. I have never understood why. Enemies are the most likely to attack when your uncertainty is apparent, rather than a wrong certainty.”

Potter looked at him politely, as if such thoughts had never passed through his head, and Severus supposed they had not. What would Potter have to fear, he thought with a slight sneer, from seeming unprepared? He had plenty of people around to guard him and sacrifice their lives for him if someone dared to attack.

Then Severus remembered the way Potter had stepped forwards and gazed into his eyes when Severus thought he was dying, and the way that Potter had—he must have—walked to what he thought would be his death at the Dark Lord’s wand, for the sake of saving the world.

I must learn to remember that my former perceptions of him were not all correct, he thought with a slight frown, and sipped at his tea.

“Maybe that’s what he’s afraid of,” Potter said. “But he’s also afraid of having too many choices, I think. He got used to a confined life, a cage, and when he’s offered room to spread his wings, the cage feels safer.”

“Confess what you are thinking,” Severus said. His voice sharpened, and he was glad, because that meant he could deal with Potter’s words and not feel as ashamed or awkward as he did when he thought of the seventeen-year-old boy walking to his death. “I am the one who made him that way. I am the one who built the cage.”

Potter looked at him evenly. “I was trying to avoid bringing that up, but yes, you are. Your changes sound like they could be a good start, but no, I don’t entirely trust you not to confine him again. So there.”

Severus bit back a response. He would not be a child in these contests no matter how much Potter and Draco seemed to wish he were. When he had waited long enough for the flush to fade from Potter’s face, he said, “You seem to have forgotten the other part of my letter.”

Potter’s eyes narrowed. “Which was?”

“Your presence,” Severus said. “I wished to speak to both you and Draco. If you fear that I might build the cage again, here is your chance to bend the bars.”

Potter blinked only once, thank Merlin, before he subjected Severus to a serious stare. “Yeah, that was the part of the letter that puzzled me. You have to please Draco. He’s the one who has to believe you. I think it’s a mistake if he just comes back and everything’s the same, but I couldn’t actually force him to stay away. You must have known, though, what I’d say if I was here. So why invite me?”

Severus half-shut his eyes and waited until his fingers, hidden behind the teacup, had ceased their trembling. This was the part of the interaction he had dreaded most. It was one thing to place the emotions in a letter, where the spiky black letters could bury any emotion in straight ink lines. It was another to acknowledge the same truth with eyes, skin, hands, and voice all ready to betray one.

“Because your memories of me in the Pensieve were genuine,” he said at last. “It has been too long since someone approached me that way, thought of me that way. I want to know why you managed to cling to those memories after I fled from justice. The memories I gave you might have been enough to clear me of Albus’s murder, perhaps, but not from any—unfair treatment that you might have received from me in school. And then, for me to become to a fugitive instead of staying for a trial would have been enough to make many of your kind decide that I was guilty after all.”

It was like drawing his heart out and placing it in Potter’s fist to crush. But the words were said now, their echo hanging in the air, and Severus could not take them back.

*

Harry sat there and blinked. It felt like all he could do for at least several minutes.

Then he came back to himself, and a sharp spark of pity burned into his heart.

How much must it mean to Snape, if he got this emotional over a few memories? It said how few people he had in his life who would give him the notion that he mattered. Draco had told him and told him, Harry thought, but for some reason he was deaf to that. For some reason, it was Harry’s memories that got through.

But meanwhile, Snape had implied a question, and Harry didn’t think he would want the pity. He replied carefully. There were a limited number of things he could say and be honest, and some of those were harsh.

“I never thought you’d fled because you had something else to hide. I knew enough about what you did and why you did it to be sure of that. I thought you fled because the Wizengamot was biased and you’d heard about their other condemnations. How could they have judged you fairly when they put the woman who saved my life by lying to Voldemort in prison?”

Snape rested a hand on his left arm at Voldemort’s name, and only then opened his eyes. His expression looked somewhere between bewildered and trapped. “You destroyed my lab when you were here. That is not the action of someone who thinks I am an innocent man.”

“I can think that you deserved better than you got, and still think you were a right bastard to Draco,” Harry pointed out.

Snape stared at him as if this were a foreign concept. Harry smiled grimly, feeling a bit pleased for once that he was the one making confusing statements, and finished his tea.

“Do you approve of Draco coming back to join me, or do you not?” Snape asked at last, a snarl in the back of his voice.

“Of course not,” Harry said easily. “I told you, I don’t think he’s making the decision from the right motives. The desire to bury your head in the sand is almost never the right motive. And I think he needs more of a spine, and he’s not going to get it living here with you, when you tread so heavily on his spine because he’s lying on the floor.”

Snape seemed to swell up like a bullfrog. Harry picked up his cup, remembered the tea was gone, and got himself more, grinning. He wanted to see how Snape would respond. If it was with some blast of vitriol based on Harry’s dad, well, then at least Harry would know Snape hadn’t really changed.

But Snape’s commitment to having Draco back must have gone deeper than Harry realized, because he shut his eyes, turned his head as though feeling sunlight on his face would help him to calm down, and murmured, “You realize that you have implied the impulse to conquest is what I desire in my relationship with Draco, and nothing else.” A faint pause, so faint that Harry probably wouldn’t have noticed it except that conversations with Snape always put all his senses on hyper-alert, and then he said, “And in my relationship with you.”

Harry would have fallen, except that he was already sitting down and didn’t really want to spill his tea, so that wasn’t an option. He settled for swallowing and saying, “Well, yes. I think you demonstrated that you wanted him to stay so you could have control over him when you slept with him just to stop him leaving.”

Snape’s robes rippled as if he had tensed under them and then relaxed again. “And my relationship with you?”

“What relationship would that be?” Harry asked. “Patient and counselor, which seems to be what you’re asking me for, or professor and student, which we seem to be returning to every half-minute?”

*

Potter was more irritating and confusing than Severus had thought he would be.

Of course, he had pictured a more sympathetic version of the boy he knew, and clearly that wasn’t true, either. Potter had learned to bear insults with some grace, and to insult back, in the years since Severus had last seen him. And he seemed to have the ability to keep his temper. So much of what Severus had known of him had come from his response to baiting that this left him floundering and vulnerable, and unexpectedly sure that he knew what Draco was feeling, faced with this new, calm Harry Potter.

He wants the comfort of familiarity. Potter doesn’t give it to him. All the grasping and clinging you can do, all the barbs you can throw, just slide off that wall.

Severus slowly opened his eyes and decided that the most effective tool at the moment would be something Potter could not have conceived of. “I was thinking of the relationship of friend and friend.”

He took deep pleasure in the way Potter’s eyes widened and flashed as if his words had been in an incomprehensible language. Then he sat back, cradling the cup of tea in both hands despite its smallness, and said carefully, “I don’t know that that’s possible.”

“Why not?” Severus was on surer ground here. Some of the most painful and inconceivable moments had passed, and he was free to consider what the consequences of his words might be. “If your memories show that you can think well of me, if you must remain with us long enough to prove that my changes are real to Draco and see that Draco is deciding to return of his own free will, what would we be but friends?”

“I don’t know that there’s a word for it,” Potter said, looking highly disturbed now, “but I’m bloody well sure it’s not friends.”

Severus laughed. In a strange fashion, he was beginning to enjoy this. “Why not? Do you fear so much to admit me into your mind, to admit Draco into your life? Or perhaps not the last, since you willingly adopted him when he wanted to follow you home.”

“Shut up!” Potter snapped, with an edgy intensity that fit the boy Severus had known. “You have no idea what it’s been like, having him there.”

“He gets on your nerves that much?” Severus raised his eyebrows. “I am amazed that you do not wish to hand him back to me, in that case.”

Potter bowed his head. The tips of his ears were flushed, and he made continual nervous reaches into thin air to stroke the tops of nonexistent tables or fold back the pages of imaginary books. Watching him, watching the flush spread down the sides of his face to his throat, Severus had a sudden suspicion.

“Or is it he touches other things than your nerves, when he is there?” he asked softly, and was rewarded by Potter jerking his head up and glaring at him with a hunted expression.

“Look, I didn’t plan it this way,” Potter said, and tapped an agitated foot on the floor. “But he kissed me and that made me think of things I was determined not to think of, and then I was thinking about him all the time in different ways, and—” He shook his head. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” he said, with what sounded like a deliberate effort to return to that unbreakable calm. “He let me know that he doesn’t really think about me in that way, and it was just adding to the stress of the decisions that he had to make, so I backed off. He can come back and you can resume your relationship without any interference from me.”

“Yes, of course,” Severus said, and he did not recognize his tone of voice or know what he would say next, as if a strange had temporarily possessed his larynx. “You would not stand in my way even to acquire someone you want, would you? You would give up the last dose of a life-saving potion to a stranger. Your own needs do not count.”

“What?” Potter glared at him. “You’re not making any sense. I’m not thinking about acquiring anyone. I’m saying—and thinking—that I’m attracted to Draco, and it’s strange since I haven’t been attracted to any man before, but it’s not going to change things between you because he rejected me. That’s the way it is. I wouldn’t have admitted that much if you hadn’t decided to be so bloody insightful.”

“You will not even challenge me for him,” Severus continued, and the stranger was still there. “Even though you believe I mistreat him.”

“Are you always like this?” Potter asked crossly. “All this talk about challenging and acquiring—Draco’s a human being, not a bloody dog. Of course I want to date him or sleep with him, but he’s decided he doesn’t want to date or sleep with me. He’s the one who has to make that decision. If you still don’t understand that, then yes, I’m going to fight to make sure he doesn’t come back to you, because he’ll only end up in the same situation he was in before.”

The stranger seemed to have left. Severus cautiously opened his mouth and found no impulse to say odd things. He shook his head and murmured, “If I wanted someone as a lover, I would make my case. I would engage in determined pursuit. I cannot imagine backing off, throwing my hands in the air, and simply saying that it doesn’t matter, that their older and abusive lover could have them because getting in a row was too much trouble.”

“It’s not your choice, it’s his,” said Potter, who by this point sounded as if he would like to beat both their heads against the wall. “When you understand that, then maybe we can have a real conversation.” He started to stand.

Severus waited another moment, but no, there was no stranger in his body. The combination of unfamiliar emotions and the desire to take action could, perhaps, make him feel like a stranger, but he was still, always and purely, the one in control.

He rose to his feet and crossed the small space that separated him from Potter. Potter turned at once, wand in his hand, crouched as though he would transform into his Animagus shape and rise with wings fluttering.

Severus caught his hand and held it still so that he could both keep that deadly holly wand away from him and feel the pulse pounding through Potter’s veins. He murmured, “And have you thought that it is my decision, as well, if I do not want to resume the exact relationship I had with Draco? If I want something else added to it, something new?’ He paused, and, when Potter just looked at him with angry perplexity, clarified, “Someone new?”

Potter’s amazement was a fascinating thing to observe. It seemed to creep over his face as though someone was spraying it on with a Muggle device. He widened his eyes, blinked rapidly while Severus watched, and then stepped away as much as he could while Severus was still holding his wrist. Severus kept one eye on the wand. He would not be surprised if Potter lifted it and began casting random curses to get Severus to let go of him.

“What?” Potter whispered.

Severus rolled his eyes. Draco occasionally pulled this trick, pretending that he couldn’t understand something Severus knew he had no trouble understanding. “You know what I mean,” he said. “I have considered and reconsidered. You are right that Draco and I cannot simply return to the status quo. I would become emotionally unavailable once more. He would ponder and brood on what he can do to change things without gathering the courage to do so. This is the best solution that I have been able to find.”

Potter swallowed. “You don’t know that Draco wants me like that,” he said. “In fact, I gave him a chance when he could have said that he did, and he rejected it.”

“He is afraid at the moment,” Severus said. “Can you blame him for reacting that way?”

Potter looked dazed. “I don’t—I don’t really understand,” he said. “Why would you want me? Based on those memories alone?” He was starting to pull himself together now, Severus hoped, and they might have a coherent conversation sometime in the next hour.

“Those memories are more than I would get from any other,” Severus said. “And you are here, and drawn to Draco.” He tightened his hold subtly on Potter’s wrist and waited to see if he noticed.

Apparently he hadn’t, but that was probably because he looked as if he were on the verge of a brain hemorrhage. “That doesn’t mean I want you.”

Severus winced. But he had known that was coming, and still managed to nod with something like the majestic calm he wished to have. “I know that. But you might find it within your abilities to stay with me. And we could see what would happen between us.” He debated wrapping one arm around Potter’s shoulders and then decided that such a move was too bold for what he had in mind. “Draco would be more amenable to you if you stayed close,” he added, playing what he thought was his strongest card.

Now he need only watch Potter’s face to see his reaction.

*

Snape has no idea what he’s proposing, does he?

Harry knew he should probably consider questions such as whether he found Snape attractive or whether Draco’s reaction to him would really change with more time or only deepen into outright dislike and rejection. But every time he tried to fasten his thoughts on that, they scattered like a flock of startled birds and returned to the shock of Snape’s proposing this in the first place.

But he doesn’t even like me.

That, of course, had not really mattered when he had volunteered to take Draco into his house, although he had not known at the time how much was liking for Draco and how much was pity.

Harry turned his head away and glanced once at Snape’s hand on his wrist. He had the impression that he should protest, but he doubted that he would really know what to say. This was completely beyond anything he had thought would happen when he accompanied Draco to Snape’s house. He had thought he would argue with Draco for a bit. Draco would pout and stick out his lip, Snape would make more promises, and then Harry would have to leave and go home without knowing how it would all work out. In the end, both Snape and Draco were adults, and he would have to trust them to solve their own problems.

But now he had the chance to stay here and see what happened. He could work as easily from here as from home, and as long as he went back to his house often enough to visit his friends, he doubted that it would inconvenience him.

You’ll have the chance to be closer to Draco.

Harry winced and hoped that he wasn’t really as selfish as that thought made him sound. After all, he had to consider what Draco wanted, not what he did. “Think about this, Snape,” he said, voice unsteady. “One set of three memories doesn’t mean we’ll get along.”

“We have managed to so far in this conversation, have we not?” Snape asked softly. “Much more than I would have thought we could in Hogwarts.”

“Fifteen or twenty minutes of interaction doesn’t equal living together,” Harry countered, and glanced out the window into the gardens, although he still couldn’t see Draco anywhere. “And there’s a third party to this.”

“Draco, of course, shall have his say,” Snape said, in the kind of dry tone that made Harry grin before he thought about what he was doing. “But I am asking you, at the moment, to approve this, for yourself. Can you do so? Or do you believe that you will need to walk away and leave us here alone?”

“Don’t pout, it doesn’t suit you,” Harry muttered, and had the chance to watch Snape’s face tighten in the old way.

“I was not—” Snape said, and then shook his head. “Know that I very strongly desire to have you here,” he said. “You desire to stay with Draco, and I believe that Draco would welcome the opportunity to make up his mind while having both of us around. We have a pair of unused rooms that we could give over to you. You could see, if you stayed, whether I was misusing Draco and in what ways. You could make sure that I kept my promises.”

Harry said the first words that went through his mind, because by this time he was too frightened by his own thoughts to keep silent and consider them carefully. “Having me as a live-in guest is different from having me as a lover.”

“Is it?” Snape murmured. “When you are one of only two people in the wizarding world who know where I am, that I am still alive, and in what state I live? When you have displayed unwarranted compassion and patience towards both of us? When we have demonstrated that we two cannot stand on our own? A table with three legs is stronger than two.”

Harry had a moment to wonder why Snape was comparing them to tables, of all things, and whether this was a sample of his romantic dialogue, before Snape dipped his head and fastened his lips on Harry’s.

Harry would have expected—not that he had spent a lot of time imagining what it would be like to have Snape kiss him—that Snape’s lips were dry and chapped, with an extra coating of slime to complete his resemblance to a snake. Only the dryness was true. Snape kissed like an expert, with enough force to make Harry think about what it would be like to have more, and with quick, darting flickers of his tongue that were never present enough to disgust Harry. He pulled back before Harry was ready.

And that realization made him have to lower his eyes to the floor and hope that he wasn’t blushing as furiously as he thought he was.

“Well?” Snape’s voice was soft and brimful of triumph, though, to his credit, Harry thought he was at least trying to keep that back. “What now? Would you like me to display more of my talents?” The hand he had on Harry’s wrist switched to his shoulder, and the tips of sharp nails scraped, lightly, tantalizingly, along the skin of Harry’s neck. “Or does this demonstration satisfy you?”

“It satisfies me,” Harry said in a strangled voice, and only then thought to step away instead of leaning on Snape like an idiot. Snape lifted one eyebrow and waited. Harry found himself glancing out the window into the gardens again, but Draco still hadn’t returned.

“Then,” Snape said, and waited.

Harry took a deep breath. “I don’t think we should make a decision without consulting Draco,” he said. “He might be annoyed to come back and find this a fait accompli.”

Snape murmured something that sounded like, “Where did you learn those words?” but he waved a hand negligently when Harry glared at him. “He will be annoyed no matter what we do,” he said. “But there are three relationships here, not one. Between us, leaving Draco aside for the moment, what is your answer?”

Harry stared at Snape. He still didn’t think the man’s sallow skin and sunken cheeks were attractive, and his black eyes were fierce enough to make Harry flinch. “I must be mad,” he said.

“You are agreeing, then,” Snape said, in a voice full of dark glee.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I reckon I am.”