lomonaaeren

Chapter Sixteen.

Title: Love, Free As Air (17/21)
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.

Thanks again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seventeen—Like Three Legs of a Table

Severus and Potter—Draco rolled the name Harry around in his mind occasionally, but didn’t yet have the courage to speak it aloud—weren’t perfect.

He got ample proof of that in the next few days. Potter started to make some significant remark about the future several times, with his eye on Draco, and had to choke it back each time. He looked sorry when he did it, of course, but that wasn’t the point. Draco had said that he didn’t want to be pressured, and Potter had done it anyway. Draco satisfied himself, each time, by turning away with immense dignity and occasionally getting up to leave the table.

Once, Potter followed him into the drawing room. Draco turned around to face him, and he knew that his expression was wild and his eyes too bright, but he couldn’t help it.

“You said that you wouldn’t press me,” he hissed. “You said that you would hold back and let me do what I wanted when I wanted to.”

And Potter had winced, and nodded, and murmured that he was sorry, and then gone out of the room—either back into the kitchen if he wasn’t finished eating, or up to his bed or out into the gardens. Once or twice that week he accompanied Severus into the lab, an activity that Draco watched suspiciously, but could think of no reason for interfering with.

Sometimes he thought they were leaving him out. And even Severus, who understood him better, sometimes looked at him as if he thought that Draco had no right to object to that. He was the one who heard Draco’s breath catch when he and Potter did anything together.

But that was only sometimes. The rest of the time, Draco was grateful to escape into the gardens and stand there breathing, knowing that one of them wouldn’t summon him in the next minute and a half. And then he would go back in and pick up the books that Harry had brought with him from Grimmauld Place. Sometimes they were books on law; other times he studied curses or potions. There was no pattern to his studies yet, and Draco didn’t think there needed to be. He had to push ahead, that was all, and experiment, and find out what he liked.

He had to learn how to be himself again.

Severus was more help in that than Draco had expected he would be, even if he wasn’t perfect. He came out and sat in the drawing room while Draco read, most of the time. He always had a thick book with him, and paid strict attention to that, so Draco couldn’t accuse him of intruding. But if Draco did look up with the frown that meant he needed help understanding a text, rather than the frown that meant he needed to think through it on his own, Severus was always available.

“That has to do with the first goblin rebellion,” he said one night, running his finger along a thick paragraph that Draco had somehow skipped the middle of, and then everything was all right again.

Or “Perhaps you meant to consider this set of ingredients and not the set that you were telling me about?” Severus identified a list on the next page, and Draco nodded and kept on with his reading, while Severus subsided into his.

It was like having a second chance to live, again, those first dizzy months when he had been a boy and he and Severus had come here. Severus had been careful around him then, too, Draco remembered. It was strange, but he had forgotten. He remembered Severus being passionate and sympathetic the way he hadn’t been later, but he was the one who had got impatient with the slow sexual dance they were performing around each other and accelerated it. When he was interested in a person, Severus would move slowly.

Perhaps he’s afraid of frightening them away, Draco thought, staring at the back of his lover’s head as Severus bent over a thick-written page in front of him. It wasn’t something he’d ever considered before.

He and Severus worked in the lab, too, and if Draco had been worried that Severus was seeking to replace him with Potter, he worried less after that. Severus spoke the directions or gave him warnings with precise clarity, and Draco whirled through the steps of the brewing as if through a dance. When he finished and sagged suddenly to a stop against the table, he was breathing fast and found himself touching his forehead as if he expected to find sweat there.

“You did well.”

Draco looked up and found Severus looming close to him, closer than Draco thought he had come in the fortnight they’d been living together. He started to straighten, not liking the idea of looking weak in front of Severus, but Severus bent close to him and kissed him.

Draco opened his mouth without thought. This had once been so familiar, and not in the dry and dusty way that it had become in the later years. This was known. He let his tongue stroke the roof of Severus’s mouth and then leaned close enough that Severus could touch his face if he wanted to.

Severus chose not to. Instead, he stepped away a moment later, and the sheer intensity of his eyes made Draco swallow.

“I will not push you into anything that you might regret,” Severus murmured. “If you wish to join me for the brewing session that I will conduct tomorrow, for the sake of the experience, then you may.”

Draco couldn’t do anything but nod. Severus turned and swept out of the lab and left Draco standing alone in a place that seemed much less enchanted when he was no longer there. Draco picked up a vial and held it to the light, watching the sun shake and shine from it.

He could wish that he got along with Potter one half as well as he was beginning to with Severus.

*

Harry soared in circles near the top of the wards, feeling the sun on his wings and sighing in gratitude when he finally landed on a thick branch halfway down one of the gardens’ oaks. When he put his head under his wing, the warmth still lingered, and he made a soft clucking noise of contentment.

He needed to transform into a bird and escape sometimes, although when he came back in from a venture outside, both Draco and Severus looked at him oddly, as though they had assumed he would take the chance to leave. Harry had thought about it, but the tugging of the bonds tied to his heart and soul had brought him back each time.

And they’ll bring me back again, Harry thought, as he lifted his head, spent a few moments preening the feathers on the edges of his wings, and then flew for the ground.

He still didn’t know, no matter how many days passed, if this would work out. Sometimes there seemed to be a thick understanding between Draco and Snape that he would never share. He had walked into the drawing room the other day and seen their heads bent together over one book, and had stopped. Neither of them had looked up or appeared to notice him, though Harry thought Snape might have known he was there anyway, and Harry had retreated silently.

He wanted to leave them alone so that they could have the time together they needed. He didn’t think their relationship would recover until they had it.

At the same time…

I want something for myself, too.

He watched Draco with an ache in the back of his throat, as if he was getting a cold. Draco would laugh and say something to Snape, and Snape’s face would adopt an odd glow, like a banked fire. He must have learned when he was young not to show too much emotion over anything, Harry thought, or someone would snap at him. And he would respond, and Draco’s voice would rise in communion, and it was as if they walked through a world of their own, shutting him out.

Which was ridiculous.

You have to enter that world if you want them to pay attention to you, or value you.

But he couldn’t be as good at potions as Draco was. Harry already knew that he would have to prove his value to Snape in a different way, and he would have to prove to Draco that he was valuable at all.

He landed and concentrated on the necessary magic that would turn him back into a human. His body blurred, rippled, and shook like someone wringing out a cloth. Harry gasped in discomfort and sagged down, catching himself on his fists with an effort. Then he was human again, and no one had watched him change, which might put them off their dinners.

He picked up his wand, which he had concealed in a notch at the foot of the tree, and strolled inside. He couldn’t see Draco, but then again, late afternoons seemed to be his turn to nap or examine the nearest parts of the garden for God knew what ingredients. Harry turned towards the stairs.

“Potter.”

Harry started badly. With the leftover dazzle of the sun in his eyes as he came through the door, he hadn’t realized Snape was sitting on the couch in the drawing room. Just in time, Harry remembered to call him by his first name and nodded cautiously back. “Severus. Hullo.”

“Come here.”

Cautiously, Harry went nearer. It wasn’t that he was frightened of Snape, not exactly. Desire did well through him when he saw him with Draco, after all, and Harry was coming to realize that he watched Snape’s fingers when they picked up food the way he watched the curve of Draco’s shoulder or the line of his throat. The main problem was that he never knew what would happen next. This was too new for that.

“I think you are not comfortable around me.” Snape was sitting with his hands held in front of his lips like he was modeling for the statue of a classic evil Dark Lord. He couldn’t be basing it on Voldemort, he has too much nose, Harry thought, and then swallowed a hysterical laugh and sat down on the couch before he said something stupid.

“No,” he did say, when he realized that Snape was really waiting for an answer. “I’m not.”

“I see.” Snape studied him with those dark eyes that seemed to reflect light back rather than take it in. Harry stared, then remembered he was staring and looked away. He heard a rustle from Snape, but the only thing the man said was, “Why?”

Harry licked his lips and told himself that he had to give an honest answer. He’d had his chance to brood about this, the way that Draco had spent time brooding and clucking over the effort of making his own decisions, and he also could have left if he’d decided the experiment wouldn’t work out. It was about time that he faced up to the task of making things function.

“Because I think that you and Draco have a deeper bond than we ever can,” he said, meeting Snape’s stare without flinching for the first time in days. “Where we is you and I, or me and him. You base it on similar interests. I can’t—I’d be willing to learn more about potions, but I can’t make them my life.”

“You think we will send you away if you can’t,” Snape said.

Harry flushed. He hadn’t meant to be that obvious about the source of the problem, but there it was, laid out in plain words. He nodded. “Yeah.”

“I told Draco that I was Slytherin enough to want all I could get,” Snape said, “all that anyone was willing to give me. I have taken from unwilling patrons before,” he added, as if he could hear the question Harry wanted to ask. “I no longer enjoy it or see any reason to do so.”

Harry nodded again.

“Why would I want a second Draco?” Snape asked, his voice so soft it might have sounded threatening if Harry hadn’t been looking at his face. “I have one who can share my interests, yes, and converse with me on a level you cannot reach. But I do not want two.”

Harry blinked. That was one thing he had never thought about. Snape—Severus—and Draco seemed to be bonding so well that he had assumed it was the only way Snape could bond with someone.

That was a stupid thing to think.

Most of the things that Harry assumed were, he had to admit. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. But what are we going to talk about, if we don’t talk about potions?”

Severus was silent for so long that Harry assumed the question had stumped him as well, though he was studying his fingers with rapid motions of his eyes that suggested it hadn’t. Then he looked up and said, “Tell me why you became what you are instead of an Auror.” His voice was uncertain, perhaps because of the subject, perhaps simply because he didn’t know what name to give Harry’s job.

Harry nodded slowly. He could talk about personal things, though he wondered how long it would be before those ran out and they were left with the minefield of either the war or their years at Hogwarts, and nothing else.

“I wasn’t good at being an Auror,” he said. “It wasn’t what I wanted. Too distant from helping people. I knew that Ron wanted to be one, and Hermione has always wanted to be a lawyer—well, for at least a year before she started the training, anyway. They had this faith in their actions that I lacked. A certainty that they were doing the right thing. I never felt it, and wondered if that was wrong.”

“You wonder if many things are wrong,” Severus murmured. His hand twitched as if he would reach out and touch Harry, but it didn’t happen. “Why?”

“Because I’m afraid of what would happen if I didn’t, I suppose,” Harry said, and passed on. He didn’t think his conscience was interesting, especially not to someone like Severus, who had to be tired of Gryffindor qualms after having Dumbledore for a friend. “I had a fight with my friends when I quit Auror training, but more because I locked myself up in my house to think about it and they couldn’t reach me than because I quit. They didn’t pretend to understand my decisions. They just supported them.”

He felt a warm glow as he thought about his friends, and then shook his head. They were wonderful people. He wondered if he should feel worse than he did about leaving them behind, although he had visited twice already, once to have dinner with the Weasleys and once to go over legal documents that might pertain to Narcissa Malfoy’s case with Hermione. It was going to be harder to get her free than it had been to get Draco retried, since she’d been in Azkaban for six years already.

And he wondered if he would ever get the level of support from Snape and Draco that he did from the Weasleys.

“Why an Animagus?” Severus insisted. His fingers again twitched as if he would touch Harry, but this time he actually completed the movement, to Harry’s astonishment, reaching out and laying a hand on his. Harry felt the touch go through him like a sudden storm and took a careful moment to answer.

“I’d discovered that I could become an Animagus. It seemed stupid not to use that talent to help people. I could still investigate and discover the solution to mysteries the way I would have been able to if I’d stayed an Auror.”

“Knowing things is important to you,” Severus said in a murmur.

Harry nodded, and then grinned. “But not knowing potions. It’s too orderly for me.” He had never known that before, but the words waltzed off his tongue with the ease of long insight, and Severus nodded back as though he’d expected them. “I need something that’s more chaotic. I work with the Aurors sometimes, which gives me the need to follow rules, but I’m happiest on my own, investigating situations that don’t have the potential to turn as sour.”

“You ought to be happy in this situation,” Snape said. “It could turn chaotic at any moment.”

“It’s been pretty ordered so far,” Harry said. “I think we were afraid of hurting each other’s feelings. But now I want to try something new.” When Severus raised a sardonic eyebrow, Harry leaned nearer and kissed him.

Severus’s lips were as dry as he remembered last time, but this time they parted, and Harry found himself headlong in the middle of a snog before he was ready. Panic bolted through him, and he was tempted to withdraw.

No. No, I don’t want to.

Harry had to curl his fingers into the material of the couch to keep on kissing Severus, but he managed it, and then Severus clamped a hand on the back of his neck with a little snarl and began to kiss back.

Harry found himself borne backwards, heavily, with Snape’s weight coming down on top of him. Harry gasped a little. Severus was heavier than he looked, and he liked to drive his elbow home in Harry’s gut. But they became more comfortably arranged when Severus discovered what the problem was, and then Severus discovered places in Harry’s mouth that made him shiver and shy and scratch, which he’d never known about before.

Long, drugged minutes passed before Severus lifted his head, eyes half-shut. Harry smiled. He might have been about to purr.

“We cannot simply kiss whenever a conversation becomes awkward,” Severus murmured.

“I know,” Harry said. “But it gives us something else to talk about, doesn’t it?” When Severus stared at him as if longing to know whether that statement was real, Harry added, “And I feel more comfortable now.”

“I reckon we might thank Merlin for that, at least,” Severus said, and lay on him for a short time more, lingering, before they stood up and he led Harry in for his latest session in the lab.

*

Harry was doing his best to make himself agreeable to Draco, but his best could do no good. Or so Severus thought, as he watched them over the next several days.

Draco would only grunt and not look up from his books when Harry passed through the drawing room or came into the kitchen. Several times Harry had cooked, and while Severus thanked him for the food, Draco had hunched his shoulders as though trying to throw off an unwilling obligation. The most he would do was meet his eyes for one quick moment and then look away again.

Harry put up with it all patiently, far more patiently than Severus would have. He wondered if that wasn’t part of the problem. Draco was used to people who made their displeasure known to him. They need not be direct—Severus found it hard to envision Lucius being direct once Draco was older than two—but he would know what he had done wrong and what the consequences were to be.

Harry wouldn’t tell him. He glanced away from the insults, and he stood up and walked out of the room when it became clear that Draco would respond to none of his conversational gambits. Draco might well think that he could keep on being rude forever. Harry would either smile and nod, or give up in silence and go away.

Severus did not mean to spy on them, but he was on his way from the lab to a shelf that contained the reference book he wanted on the day that Harry finally lost his temper.

“I don’t want you here,” Draco’s sullen voice said from immediately outside the window Severus was passing. He tilted his head, listening. Since he could see neither of them, he immediately guessed that neither of them could see him, and he might as well pause and wait.

“Well, I’m going to fly in another part of the grounds,” Harry said, and Severus heard a series of slight sounds which might have been Harry walking up one of the dirt paths into the middle of the garden.

“I don’t want to see you,” Draco continued. “Go away.”

Severus rolled his eyes. That was the childish part of Draco, the one that Harry had acted as if he didn’t believe in. He hadn’t heard it yet, that was the problem. Draco could be charming much of the time, but when he encountered an obstacle that didn’t melt away as he thought it should, then he would get snappish.

“I don’t want to,” Harry answered, and his voice had deepened and sharpened. Severus longed to step nearer so that he could see them through the window, but didn’t do so, more for fear of being spotted than anything else. He didn’t want to interrupt the progress of the argument, either. “I have as much right to be here as you do, and—”

“You weren’t the one who spent six years here. You don’t belong here as much as Severus and I do.”

Severus winced and started to think that he should reveal himself after all. If Harry wouldn’t fight back against that, the chances that Draco would respect him were small.

“I want to belong,” Harry said, and his voice had lowered even more. “But your stupidity might prevent that.”

Ah. Severus stepped back into his original position with an undercurrent of amusement moving through his suspense. The stunned silence that had followed Harry’s declaration was its own reward.

“You can’t say that,” Draco said, but his voice shook.

“Why not? I’ve tried to give you time and freedom, and it just gets me sneered at. I’ve tried to understand when you and Severus spend more time with each other than with me, but you ignore me anyway. I’ve tried and tried and tried to be patient. You turn your head away when I enter the room. I think you were responding more to me when we argued than you are now.”

“I don’t—I need some time.”

“Yes, I know that,” Harry said. “I wasn’t talking about my pressuring you to make your decisions. I was talking about your treating me as though I don’t have the right to live in the house that you both agreed I could stay in.”

More silence. Severus wondered if Draco was ashamed. It was sometimes hard for him to be, as he would react to shame with anger, and so snap away from the emotion he should truly feel.

“You changed your mind about being attracted to me awfully quickly,” Draco said, his mutter making it into an accusation.

“And are people not allowed to do that?” Harry demanded. “I did it with Severus, too. It happens that way sometimes. And I’m waiting because I don’t know if the consequences are going to last, although I hope so.”

“You haven’t tried to touch me since the first day you were here,” Draco said.

Severus’s second roll of his eyes was simultaneous with Harry’s disgusted snort. “Because you’ve been so inviting. Should I have forced myself on you so that you could protest about the way that I didn’t respect your decisions? What few of them you make.”

Severus suspected Harry was probably sorry for those last words, but when he dared to lean forwards and peer out the window, it was to see Harry striding away with his back firm and straight, while Draco stood there on the path and blinked like a fool. He looked at the book in his hand, then turned towards the house.

Knowing Draco must think he hadn’t overheard the conversation, Severus jerked back from the window and hurried to fetch the book he had wanted, then returned to the lab.

Harry didn’t return until late in the evening. Draco still avoided his eyes, but he also gave him speculative glances when he thought Harry wasn’t watching. Severus noticed that those glances held more of honest longing than they had in the last fortnight.

Perhaps Harry should lose his temper more often.