lomonaaeren | [one-shots]: The New-Minted Coin of the Soul, H/D/S, R, 2/2

This is the second part of a long one-shot. Don't start reading here.

“You could have waited.”

Harry smiled at Hermione and put his cup of tea down on the table between them. They were meeting at a small shop established just inside Muggle London, which sold tea and magical and Muggle books with impunity. As long as no Muggle actually saw a book with moving pictures or titles that referenced specific wizarding historical events, the Ministry didn’t interfere.

“I know,” he said. “But there were Aurors there already, enough that they could have helped me with the support spells and the other things I needed to do. They didn’t. They wanted to stand around and wait for someone more official to arrive.”

“That’s Ministry procedure,” Hermione pointed out, folding her arms. “That’s what you really should have done, no matter how badly you wanted to rescue Snape and Malfoy.” Her voice had a wary, baffled edge to it. She couldn’t figure out why he had risked his life for them, Harry knew.

“It might insult you to know it, but you think about debts like a Slytherin,” Harry told her, and sipped at his tea again. “That was the same sort of thing Snape told me yesterday. That I must have felt I owed them from the war or something, and that was the only reason for me to charge in there.”

Hermione paused, tilting her head to the side. “Then you don’t feel that way?”

Harry snorted, and ended up getting some tea in his nose. He put the cup down and mopped his face with a napkin, shaking his head. “No. Of course not. We all did so much for each other, the debts between us are tangled. Keeping track of them is like trying to keep track of Ron’s freckles.”

“I know how many freckles Ron has,” Hermione murmured smugly.

Harry bowed to her. “Just like Snape probably knows all the complexities of the debts between us. And I bow to your specialist knowledge, and his, in this case. But that’s not the kind of knowledge I can live my life by. Besides, Deputy Head Auror Barran was there. They had all the official support and approval they needed. If Barran had approved of them going into that mess to rescue two former Death Eaters.”

Hermione bit her lip. “So you think he deliberately left them there?”

“I don’t know about that,” Harry said, shrugging. So much of what he had seen and fought against since he came into the Ministry was like that, he thought in some disgust, ambiguous and barely-there and deniable. But it didn’t mean he had to agree with them. “Thoughtless. He doesn’t care. He was going to wait until the Head Auror or the Minister showed up and ordered him to rescue them, I think. And then, well, if it was too late and they were dead, that was too bad, right?”

Hermione gave a little shiver and spent a moment staring at the table. Harry knew the feeling. There was a real temptation to concentrate on what they couldn’t do instead of what they had done so far, and then declare that no matter what they had done, it wasn’t enough.

But Harry could shake himself out of such moods fairly easily when they occurred now, because he did extra work that he wanted to handle, like making sure Snape and Malfoy were safe. He smiled at Hermione and added, “So you can understand why I ran in like that? No one else was going to, and in the meantime, Snape and Malfoy might have died.”

Hermione nodded slowly. “But what about living with them? Are you sure you’re going to be able to handle that? I mean—Harry, I know you’ve changed and grown since the war, and you’re generous and brave and loving and all the rest of it, but they might be the same.”

Harry shook his head. “They were quiet yesterday. Barely sneered at all. Maybe that’s just the shock of having their shop collapse on their heads, I don’t know. But I really don’t think they’ll be much trouble.”

Hermione gave him another disturbed glance. “If you’re sure.”

“Yes, thank you.” Harry reached out and squeezed her hand. “But never stop caring. It’s good to know you do.”

She smiled at him, and they spent the rest of their lunch talking about more cheerful things, before they parted, Harry to go back to filing paperwork on his latest case, Hermione to a political meeting of some kind where she was going to speak on house-elf rights.

*

Harry stepped into the house at Godric’s Hollow and smiled when he heard voices coming up from the cellar. They had taken that over as a potions lab, then. Good.

He glanced down at the bundle in his arms and cocked his head ruefully. The gift had seemed like such a good idea when he bought it, but they were rebuilding their lab from the ground up, and they might need simple things more than fancy ones. Trouble was, he didn’t know what simple things for Potions masters were, and the fancy one would at least look nice even if they couldn’t use it right away. He turned towards the steps that led down to the cellar.

“We can’t let him think that.” Snape’s voice was low, and charged, and something in the tone made Harry pause at the top of the stairs, out of sight and sound, listening the way he would have listened if he overheard Snape and another teacher talking at Hogwarts.

“Why not?” There was a snap that was probably Malfoy’s robe swishing behind him as he turned, and yes, that was the thump of his footsteps on the floor of the lab. “He’s obviously prepared to give us what we need, and demand nothing in return. Severus, we have nothing to give. We can’t give him—what you’re suggesting. We need our time and energy for ourselves. We have to rebuild.” His voice dropped so suddenly on the last words that Harry closed his eyes to listen better. “You can’t think that doing what you want to do will be possible, not when it will demand more patience and understanding than I have, whatever your own stores may be.”

Harry nodded in agreement, not that anyone was paying attention to him. They did need to keep their energy for themselves, he thought. If Snape was suggesting moving out or buying an expensive gift for Harry in thanks or something, then he should drop it and concentrate on what they most needed to do for now.

“I am not the man to leave such an obligation unanswered,” Snape said. “Nor are you, Draco. When we find what he needs, what he wants, we will give it to him.”

Harry sighed. Yes, Snape probably thought he had to repay all the debts after all. That was like him. Harry thought about trying to talk him out of it, but decided that it wouldn’t work. And better to let him do it, after all, if he wanted to. Harry would certainly accept whatever they came up with to give him, even if he never used it.

Malfoy gave a sound that could be called a sigh if you really wanted to stretch the word. “All right. But, Severus…it’s so hard. I wish there was some way—some way we could repay the debts without getting ourselves more entangled with him.”

Harry raised his eyebrows, trying to make out the meaning of that, and then nodded in enlightenment. Of course. Malfoy probably thought that, because they would use Harry’s money to buy the gift, whatever it was, they would still be in debt to him. Harry might not be able to stop them paying back what they thought they owed him in the first place, but he was going to argue if Malfoy said that it had cost them their freedom. They were free to go the instant they saved up enough money to buy another shop.

Harry wished they wouldn’t. But his wishes were beside the point. He wanted them to do what they wanted.

“It need not be immediately,” Snape said, and his voice had softened. “We may take our time to recover our strength.”

I’m glad they both have some sense, Harry thought, and then cleared his throat loudly and started down the steps. He heard a startled stillness that burst into motion a moment later. Malfoy came to the entrance of the cellar with his wand drawn, and took the first step up before he saw Harry and froze, blinking.

“Potter,” he said, and fell back a step, as though he assumed he needed to apologize for his presence in Harry’s cellar to Harry. “We—had forgotten you would be home soon.” He touched his hair and then his robe collar, and exchanged something fleeting and burning in the glance with Snape.

I’d like to understand someone as well as they understand each other, Harry thought wistfully as he stepped into the makeshift lab. Ron and Hermione don’t really count, not when they have their own exclusive bond.

“Wow, you’ve made a lot of progress with this,” he said, turning in a slow circle so that he could see the work they’d put into the lab. There were already tables in the center, and the walls, an uninspiring ash-grey the last time Harry had been down here, had been painted or charmed white. The floor was made of clean, scrubbed tile. Harry wondered if it was a glamour or not, and almost bent down to see, but Snape interrupted him.

“What is that?”

Harry grinned and looked up. Snape’s gaze was fixed on the cauldron in his arms. Harry turned it back and forth, as if to admire the glitter of it himself. “Isn’t it pretty? A golden cauldron. And it’s for you.” He set it down in the middle of one of the tables.

They stared at him. Well, Snape stared at the cauldron and Malfoy stared at him. Harry wondered if Malfoy had seen more golden cauldrons than Snape had, or whether Snape had a greater devotion to Potions paraphernalia than Malfoy did. Or maybe Snape just trusted him more. Malfoy had a weird, twisted expression on his face, as if he thought this gift would mean Harry would try to kill them in their beds.

“You are trying to buy us,” he said at last.

“Draco.” Snape’s voice cut like a lash, and he had finally looked away from the cauldron. Harry saw Malfoy flinch back, but the next moment he shook his head and firmed his jaw, taking a step forwards so that he could stand in front of the table.

“No, Severus. You know this gift is too extravagant.” He reached out, but kept himself from touching the cauldron, as if he feared the rim would contaminate or poison him. Harry felt the impulse to assure him it hadn’t been washed in the blood of a hundred Muggleborns, but managed to keep the words to himself. “What motive could Potter have for giving it to us, other than to buy us?”

“The dastardly cretin trying to buy you is standing right there,” Harry said mildly. “You could try asking me the truth before assuming things about my motives.”

Malfoy tilted him a single glance that smoldered like banked lightning. “You’d lie.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Make up your minds. Why would I lie about a golden cauldron but not about giving you a Potions lab and a place to live? That seems to be the bigger gift to me, but you accepted it and trusted it.”

Malfoy whirled to face him. “Accepted it, but didn’t trust it,” he said, and his voice cut away the years that lay between them, making Harry feel as if he stood in a corridor at Hogwarts again. He felt his fists clench despite himself. Malfoy noticed and smiled at him, a dreadful pursing of his lips Harry could have lived without seeing again. “Yes, Potter, that’s right. You’ve gone out of your way in the past to mock and humiliate us. And now this? You expect us to think that you gave this to us out of the goodness of your heart?”

Snape was watching, Harry noticed, seeing the way Snape stood with his arms folded and his gaze fixed on Harry. He wouldn’t try to stop the confrontation unless it got violent, most likely.

Which meant he wanted to know the answer, too.

Harry sighed. “You’ll probably disbelieve me no matter what I say, which means I might as well tell the truth. I like giving people things. I like making people happy, for the same reason I like rescuing them. After the war—I want joy in the world, Draco.” Malfoy visibly strove to keep himself from blinking. “I can’t do everything about every piece of mindless and needless suffering, but I can fight it when it’s in my power.”

“Giving joy to people like us cannot be fulfilling for you,” Malfoy whispered harshly.

Harry cocked his head. “Why not? If you attribute bad motives to me, wouldn’t making you happy, against your will, be understandable?”

Snape hid a smile. Harry didn’t know when he’d learned to read the man as doing that, rather than just sitting there with a straight face, but he saw it, and he knew it, and he smiled back. Snape blinked, once again tile-faced.

“I—it doesn’t work that way,” Malfoy said, and wiped his hand over his face. “Potter, someday you’re going to demand an accounting of this, I know. I just want to know what you want. Name your price, and I can pay it now, or as soon as possible. That way, I won’t be surprised by it later.”

“You won’t be surprised,” Harry said. “I don’t think you ever forget a debt.”

Malfoy just stared. Harry sighed, and leaned forwards. “You really want to know what I want?” he whispered. “You want to know what I’ve done all this for, what I’d appreciate in return, what you can give me?”

Malfoy swayed towards him a little. Harry blinked, because he hadn’t thought his personal odor of sweat was that strong—he’d spent most of today behind a desk—but then realized how close they stood. And how Malfoy was looking into his eyes.

Huh. Maybe Snape and Malfoy hadn’t had time for sex lately or something.

“Yes,” Malfoy whispered. His voice cracked, but he licked his lips, and it steadied a moment later. “Yes, I need that. I—I want that.”

Harry nodded. “I want a free supply of healing potions. Whenever I need them. Saves having to run to the apothecary or haul half the supply of St. Mungo’s home with me when I’m injured and the Healers are having a collective apoplectic fit in their certainty that I won’t survive the night.”

Malfoy blinked. “You invited us into your house to be your own personal brewers, at a moment’s notice?”

“Yes,” Harry said. “That’s why.”

Malfoy stepped back from him and put his hand on the table that supported the golden cauldron. “And you bought this cauldron for us so that we could brew you the very best and most sophisticated healing potions?” he clarified.

Gravely, Harry nodded again.

Malfoy gaped at him. Then he narrowed his eyes and straightened with a snap. “You’re joking,” he snapped.

“Thank God,” Harry said dryly. “I was starting to worry for a moment there.” And again he saw Snape stifling a smile. He wondered if that was a record, to get two in the same day.

“You brought us here,” Malfoy said. “You brought us gifts. You let us have our wands.” The words were spoken with a quietude that might have made them a curse or a prayer; Harry was betting on the former. “Why would you do something like that? I want to know the real reason.”

“I’ve told it to you,” Harry repeated patiently. “And since I doubt you have any intention of leaving any time soon, because your practicality is stronger than your pride, then you might as well accept it and leave it at that.” He turned his back to climb the stairs again, ignoring Malfoy’s wordless spluttering. He had tried.

“Potter.”

Because it was Snape, and he sounded halfway willing to speak to Harry like a serious adult, Harry turned around again. “Yes, sir?”

Snape stood tall in the middle of the lab, staring at him. Harry resisted the temptation to pull back his shoulders and suck his stomach in the way he did when the Head Auror was coming for an inspection of the Department. He had done as much as he could right now; he had explained it as best he knew how. There was really nothing Snape could say to make him change his mind about that, either.

“You should know,” Snape said at last, after a long and leisurely inspection of Harry from boots to robe collar, “that I appreciate the cauldron.” Harry didn’t know if the slight emphasis on the personal pronoun he heard was real, but he thought so.

“You’re welcome, sir,” he said, and smiled, and started to turn around again.

“And you should know,” Snape went on in a low voice, “that a Slytherin always pays his debts.”

Harry shot a smile over his shoulder. Malfoy was practically buzzing in place, like a very large and very pale firework, and Harry thought he should get out of the way so the lovers could talk over their beliefs and the divisions his visit may have caused in private. “That’s fine, sir. Someday, when you have your own shop again and the Galleons to do it, then you can pay me back. Knowing you always do it means I won’t get upset if it takes years.”

Somehow, it was harder to joke when he was meeting those dark eyes. Harry shrugged the sensation off and climbed.

Strangely, he didn’t hear their voices resume immediately behind him, but, well, they may have wanted to wait until he was out of the way before that started. Or maybe they’d set up a Silencing Charm.

He made a peaceful, if silent, dinner of sliced fruit and cereal for himself, since he hadn’t had a proper breakfast this morning, and then went up to read in his study and sleep. He couldn’t deny that he kept his ears cocked for a snippet of sound from below, but, well, if they didn’t want to share it with him, they didn’t have to. Merlin knew they had been forced to share too many other things.

*

Harry’s first clue that the assassin might be a bit peeved at him for saving Snape and Malfoy came when the same kind of curse as the one that had destroyed their shop struck his office door.

Harry reacted as he’d been trained, diving behind his desk to use it as cover while he set up a Shield Charm in front of himself and watched the buckling door. This spell was obviously a lot weaker than the one the bastard had used on Snape and Malfoy’s shop, or a good portion of the Ministry would have collapsed by now. But it was making his door, and the ceiling and walls near it, fall apart in the same way.

Harry paused, and then reacted in the way that his training didn’t approve. He cast a Lightening Charm on himself, and then murmured, “Alae, alae, alae.”

A pair of large blue wings, made of light and fire sketched in with the glitter of stars, spread out from his back. Harry beat them once, and lifted from the floor, just a moment before another spell came blasting in from under the door and hit his desk, smashing it into a pile of kindling.

Harry nodded wisely and skimmed towards the door, moaning and groaning all the while as though he’d been seriously hurt. He thought he heard a maniacal cackle from the corridor, and rolled his eyes. Not even Voldemort had cackled.

He waited one beat, two, and three, and then raised a Shield Charm in front of himself and cast a Stunner under it, towards the door, at the same time.

There was an indignant gasp, and then the next curse hit the Shield Charm and nearly cracked it. But Harry was the best in the Department at defensive magic, and he threw will into the charm and held it. Then he swam towards the door on his wings of air, cast a few support spells of the kind that he’d used to hold up the pile of rubble in Snape and Malfoy’s shop, and pried some of the cracked wood apart.

A man Harry didn’t know lay senseless in the corridor, staring at the ceiling and surrounded by Aurors. Harry snorted as he landed on the floor next to them and banished the wings. He didn’t know the man, but he recognized that shape of jaw and the big, mad dark eyes.

“Another mental Lestrange cousin?” he asked the Auror beside him, Inchbeck.

She nodded, and rolled her eyes. “You’d think at some point, we would find that bloody family tapestry and become able to locate all of them,” she murmured, bending down and using several conjured ropes to bind Lestrange’s hands behind his back. “Or else that they would realize Rodolphus and his brother were no loss to the family.”

Harry shook his head. “That day will never come,” he said. “Pure-blood family loyalty, what can I say.”

Inchbeck cleared her throat and looked at him pointedly.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “Crazy, Voldemort-following, not-at-all-like-other-pure-bloods pure-blood family loyalty, what can I say.”

Inchbeck nodded majestically to him and started escorting Lestrange away, just as Ron came around the corner with two cups of tea in his hands. He pivoted in place to watch Lestrange being hauled off, then pivoted back and handed one cuppa to Harry in silence. Harry swallowed half of it, then coughed and choked. He always did that with alcohol, too. Those quick gestures that looked neat in Muggle movies Hermione made them watch weren’t so easy in reality.

“You have the weirdest life, mate,” Ron said, and gave him a look of intense sympathy. The reporters would descend in a few minutes, and then would come Hermione, and the Head Auror, and Barran, and the small group of fans that went mad every time Harry was in danger, as though that was something that should be prevented by national legislation.

“I do,” Harry said placidly. “But at least that’s likely the same person who decided to take a shot at Snape and Malfoy—and we even have a motive, if it turns out that he feels cheated that they’re free instead of in prison.”

He went back to his office and wrote out a quick owl to Snape and Malfoy, telling them he would stay late tonight and they’d probably caught the man who had damaged their shop. Then he settled in for the beginning of the circus, which involved a simultaneous firecall from the Prophet and the profuse apologies of two other Aurors in the Department who had seen Lestrange walk past and hadn’t stopped him.

Yes, the weird life I lead. Harry sipped from his cup again. At least there’s tea.

*

“How much danger were you in?”

Harry blinked and let the door fall shut behind him. That certainly wasn’t the first question he had expected to be ambushed with when he was coming home to his own house. He had thought Snape and Malfoy would greet him with questions about Lestrange himself and whether anything usable had been recovered from their shop, or complaints about dinner being cold and late.

“Not much,” he said cautiously, and looked from one to the other. Snape stood behind Malfoy with his arms folded, but he was always doing that, so it didn’t provide a great clue to his mood. Malfoy was the one who leaned forwards, balanced on the edge of his heels as though he was going to strike out and Harry had better be out of the way when the blow landed. In the interests of being out of the way, Harry edged sideways and hung his cloak up on the peg next to the door. “I recognized the attack right away, and it only took a minute or so to defeat him.”

“Why did he come after you?” Malfoy asked, spacing out each word so that there was room for half a dozen invisible accusations between them.

“Because he was a Lestrange,” Harry said. “And he blamed me for getting you out of the rubble, I reckon.”

Malfoy fell back a step, and looked up at Snape. Telepathy passed between them like wind, unseen but felt. Harry shook his head to get the envy out of the back corners of his mind. He shouldn’t envy what they had been through. Yes, they had a close bond, but Harry wouldn’t have wanted to endure what he was sure they’d had to to build it.

“We should have thought of that,” Snape said, voice deep and—cultured? Harry hadn’t thought that about his voice before, but he could hear it now. If there was such a thing as thick elegance, it was there in Snape’s tone. “I do not know why we did not.”

Harry shrugged. “You had wards on your shop that would hold up against almost any attack, and we keep thinking we’ve caught all the Lestrange cousins. Someday, we’ll be right.” He started to walk past them towards the kitchen. It was almost nine, and he was looking forwards to a quick Muggle pizza and then bed.

Snape put a hand on one of his shoulders, Malfoy a hand on the other. Harry glanced back and forth between them, feeling oddly as though he was about to be kidnapped.

Or kissed.

Snape certainly bent down close enough to do it, his eyes aflame. “That is another debt we owe you,” he said. “For our lives, for the place to live, for our wands, for the cauldron, for this. Do you see why it concerns us, that we may not be able to pay you back?”

“Look,” Harry said, after a long, patient moment in which he thought longingly of slapping their hands off his shoulders and screaming at them, “I’ve told you what I think of that. I don’t count them all as separate debts. I don’t count most of them as debts at all. If you want to, you can pay me back later.”

“But at this rate, we won’t be able to pay you back,” Malfoy said, and his voice was low, as though he anticipated some objection from Harry that Harry didn’t intend to make. It was hard to make an objection when Malfoy was this close, close enough for Harry to make out flecks of slate-grey and bright blue in the corners of his eyes, and see his eyelashes shining like separate flakes of snow. “That’s our objection. That’s the trouble.”

Harry blinked and tore his glance from Malfoy’s eyes to look up at Snape’s—not that they were much less deep, or intense. “Well, I’m not going to lower the wards on the house and let anyone who wants to have a chance kill you,” he snapped. “You’ll just have to put up with me saving your lives.”

Snape stepped back. Perhaps the vehemence was too much for him, Harry thought. He struck Harry as a more controlled person most of the time, who would like his partners to have cool expressions on their faces and close their eyes when they came.

Yes, and you’re speculating on things you have no business speculating on.

He turned back to Malfoy, who had stepped back as well, but had a more thoughtful expression on his face than the one Snape wore at the moment. “Well,” he said slowly. “I wouldn’t expect you to do that, Potter.”

Harry nodded. That was good to know, at least, that there were limits to how far they were willing to go to pay the debt. He faced Snape. “And you, sir?”

Snape surveyed him for a few minutes in the way that made him feel like his soul was being studied instead of his body. Then he said, “It is nearly a decade since I taught you, Potter, and you have attained status that surpasses my own in this corrupt world. I would appreciate you addressing me without a title.”

Harry blinked. Then he said, “Even if I want to show respect?”

“You aren’t calling me that,” Malfoy pointed out. “Does that mean you don’t respect me?”

“No,” Harry said, flicking him a glance, and a smile at the same time, to show the teasing. “But you’re less likely to rip me apart and stick my dissected organs in bottles somewhere, where no one will ever find me again.”

“I’m a Potions master, as well,” Malfoy said, and lowered his voice yet again, as if they stood in the middle of a busy street that he needed to shut out. “You have no idea what I could do to you, Potter.”

Harry felt his eyes widen and a pulse beating up from his throat like a golden Snitch. He caught it in time, he thought, to keep himself from blushing, and smiled at Malfoy. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he murmured.

“To address the problem,” Snape said suddenly. Harry thought he probably didn’t appreciate seeing Harry flirt with his lover. “We wish to pay back the debts, and you don’t want us to.”

“I want you to when you’re financially stable and you can manage something,” Harry countered, wondering how it was that he stood in the middle of his own house arguing philosophy with two Slytherins, after a long day, and yet felt completely confident and alive. “Not right now.”

“Other than the cauldron, what you have done for us cannot be repaid with money,” Snape said. “You said that you wish to make others happy, that you saved our lives because you wished to. If we repay the debt the same way—”

“Sure, I’ll be happy to let you do that,” Harry interrupted. “If you save my life, that repays a life-debt, right?” He reckoned Snape had to know that, because of the life-debt that Harry’s dad saving him had stuck him with.

“I meant,” Snape said, with a familiar brittleness that promised a stack of dirty cauldrons for the next person who interrupted him, “making you happy.”

Harry blinked. “But you already are. I’m happy you’re alive. And as long as you do some of the cooking and don’t mess up the house, I’m happy to have you here. I like being able to talk with someone when I come home.”

“We want a more active role,” Malfoy said, and crowded forwards on Harry’s other side. “We’ve been passive long enough. It’s time to remind people of what we can do.”

Harry turned to ask him what he meant, and met Malfoy’s mouth closing on his own.

Harry felt a moment of crystalline shock—with him?—and then the acceptance came back, just as sharp and just as welcome. Of course, why not? Especially when it feels so bloody good.

And don’t pretend that you haven’t thought of this since he got here. You were thinking of it just now.

He kissed back, not bringing his hands into play although Malfoy was clutching at him with greedy intensity, using his tongue to turn over Malfoy’s tongue, to touch his cheeks and then stroke them backwards, to urge his head down and forwards until Malfoy was sighing urgently and crushing Harry to him with one hand on his spine. Then Harry reached out a hand for Snape, thinking he wouldn’t want to be left out, unless he just intended to watch Malfoy with Harry and nothing else.

No, Snape was there, stepping up behind Harry and using his greater height to his advantage: stroking the back of his neck, lifting Harry’s hair to find the hidden spots underneath it, following the path of his hands with his tongue a moment later. Harry gasped, and of course that left more room for Malfoy’s tongue to play, and his hands were low on Harry’s waist and his knee was riding high between Harry’s legs, and Harry was glad that someone was holding him or he would sag backwards on the floor.

Snape slipped his hands beneath Harry’s robes and murmured a question Harry couldn’t make out over the rolling boulders of blood in his ears. But he could guess what it was, and he nodded. A moment longer, his robes were gone, and Snape’s hands settled on his shirt.

He wondered for a moment why Snape just hadn’t Vanished everything, but when he felt those long clever fingers begin to unbutton him, he understood why. Snape wanted to take his time. He turned his head and let his tongue flicker out and around one of Snape’s nails. Snape caught his breath, and his undressing quickened.

Malfoy ducked into Harry’s view as he dropped to one knee in front of him. He gave Harry a bright, daring smile, and turned his head to the side in turn, letting his cheek rest against Harry’s groin. Harry panted at him, and Malfoy’s laughter blazed across his face like a shooting star as he pulled first one and then another boot off.

Slowly. Right.

Harry lifted his feet as best as he could to assist Malfoy getting the boots off, though he was still struggling with balance. Then Snape murmured another spell, and Harry felt himself leave the ground, floating in the air.

Snape stepped around in front of him, and the way he looked at Harry made Harry’s hands, reaching for him, fall back to his side. Harry gaped back, at the same moment as he felt Malfoy pull off one of his socks and place a kiss on his ankle.

“You are glorious,” Snape said in a low voice, just this side of hearing, like the voice of the earth speaking before a quake. “Do you realize how your magic shimmers around you, how it saturates the air, how it goes before you like a wave?”

“I realize that I never expected you to use a word like ‘shimmers’,” Harry muttered idiotically, but even that only won him a smile, although a shark-edged one.

“Having you will be a pleasure,” Snape said, and Harry grinned, because he didn’t think that Snape had had much pleasure in his life lately, except perhaps with Malfoy. Who he probably should start thinking of as Draco, and Snape as Severus, if he was going to do this.

He wondered for a moment if they realized that, by taking pleasure from this, they could be said to be creating another debt that they owed him. But he kept quiet. Perhaps this exchange would teach them that debts were not the only way to look at life.

Severus bent and breathed over his mouth. Harry stuck his tongue out, trying vainly to catch Severus’s, but Severus kept his distance, breathing around and over and on Harry’s lips until he struggled in the grip of the spell that held him, mad with desire. Only then did Severus close in on him and kiss him as Draco had done.

No, not as Draco had done. Perhaps because he was sure Harry wanted it, Severus plunged deeper and kissed him until Harry saw black spots across his vision. Then he pulled back and regarded Harry as if he had caught him for lunch.

“My turn, Severus,” Draco said, rising to his feet and shaking his hair out. He had undone the tie in it, Harry saw, and his hair was longer than Harry had thought—not to the middle of his back or anything ridiculous, but sweeping his shoulders.

“You think I’m glorious?” Harry blurted out as he watched Severus step back to stand beside Draco. They looked good like that, the contrast of black and pale, Snape’s skin a shade lighter than Draco’s, even the potions stains that Draco bore yellow instead of deep gold. “You ought to look at yourselves.”

“We do,” Draco said. “Frequently. It’s the one thing we’ve found unpleasant about living in your house so far, the lack of mirrors.” He stepped forwards and bent down slightly to kiss Harry. Harry leaned boldly back and up, confident that Severus’s spell would keep him hovering on the solid currents of air.

Draco made a soft and needy noise after only a moment of Harry kissing him, which meant either Harry was a much better kisser than he’d thought he was or Draco was much less experienced. Probably the first, he decided smugly, straining his neck to reach Draco as he pulled away. If Severus kissed him all the time, then he had to be used to the best.

“We think,” Severus said, moving forwards and casting a spell that made the currents carrying Harry swirl and turn towards the stairs, “that we would be more comfortable in a bedroom.”

“Pity,” Harry said, looking around at the boring wallpaper of the entrance hall. “I was hoping that you’d fuck me against the walls here and give me a happy memory for whenever I come home in the future.”

He glanced back in time to see Draco turn pale and then flush, a fascinating process of watching him acquire color. “Severus,” Draco breathed.

“Walls for later,” Severus said, in the same kind of authoritative voice that Harry fancied he might use in the lab to calm Draco down when he wanted to brew something dangerously experimental and not deadly enough to small helpless kittens and ducklings. “Beds for now.” He paused, and studied Harry, as though he had a lot of secrets to give up now that he was naked. “Perhaps, walls for not much later,” he murmured.

Harry smiled, and led the way. Sure, Severus’s spell was the thing ensuring he could do so, but he was still in front, and he enjoyed the feeling of them looking at his arse all the way upstairs. Maybe later, they’d kiss it.

*

Not that anyone had ever asked Harry—more’s the pity, since that would have been something to liven up the usual round of dull questions about his career and about the war that he got in his Daily Prophet interviews—but if someone had, he would have said that having two lovers at once wasn’t that different from having one. You had a few more limbs and maybe another cock to keep track of, but surely not everyone would all want to play at the same time, and meanwhile, you could stop counting.

Perhaps he had been wrong. Or perhaps his fantasies had suffered from not including enough imaginary lovers like the real Draco and Severus.

His body certainly had.

Severus was at his head one moment, kissing him, sending his tongue so deep that Harry felt invaded and conquered and happily surrendering, all at once. He was sure of that. And Draco was somewhere down near his legs, stroking and parting them, and now and then moaning in a low voice that Harry didn’t think he wanted anyone to hear, but which Harry heard anyway, of course. It was wonderful.

And then Draco was kissing him and Severus was down near his feet, doing God knew what, perhaps tying them to the headboard or taking pictures of Harry’s dirty toenails to use as blackmail, and Harry didn’t care because God, it was good. He threw an arm around Draco’s neck and tried to flip him over and deepen the kiss that way, darting and thrusting his tongue, but Draco held still and went slowly, because he wanted to, and Harry grumbled into his mouth and got his revenge by skimming his fingers along just underneath Draco’s ribs. Draco broke off the kiss, hiss-laughing, then squirmed closer.

“We’ll find the spots,” he said breathlessly. “The ones that make you dance on the bed, the ones that make you cry for us.”

“Cry out for you, you mean,” Harry said, and arched up for another kiss.

“No, I think I meant what I said,” Draco said, slowly, and then Harry tilted his head back and exposed his throat for Draco to bite, which he did willingly, because Harry had just found out what Severus was doing, which was sucking his cock down a throat as hot as sunlight.

It was so good. Harry wanted to laugh aloud at how good it was, not because he wanted to make fun of Draco and Severus but just because it was so good it made him joyful, and he wanted everyone in the room to know about that.

Though, from the slow smacking noises Severus was making around his cock and the way Draco had started down his body, lingering over Harry’s ribs and nipples and scars in an apparent attempt to learn his sensitive places, they probably knew already.

With a lot of effort, Harry managed to lift his head and open his eyes. Draco smiled brilliantly at him, then closed his eyes as he outlined Harry’s hipbone with his tongue. He was crouched at Harry’s side, his hands resting on Harry’s leg as though he thought he might have to hold him down.

And Severus knelt on the bed between Harry’s legs—the bed was bigger than he remembered it being, and when had that happened?—and used his tongue to travel, and trace, and tap, and suck.

Harry reached out. He wanted to touch them, somehow. He wanted to pull on their hair, both of them, and demand that they stop acting selfish and come up to the top of the bed right now so he could make them feel as good as they were making him feel.

But they were too far away, and already it was beginning, that distant train of small explosions in his chest and groin like starbursts before a supernova, and he shuddered and arched up. Severus never choked, only moved his head to the side and kept sucking, and Harry rolled his own head to the side on his pillow in response and let his mouth gape.

Draco was there, coming out of nowhere, filling Harry’s mouth with his tongue and stroking deep, murmuring something that Harry didn’t entirely catch, but he thought he heard a word like “surprising.”

“Good,” Harry gasped, the sum total of his thoughts at the moment, the sum total of the world, with pleasure melting down his spine and up his legs. He tried to think of something else. “If you’re only sleeping with me to fulfill your bloody debts, then it’s good it’s surprising that you’re having fun, you wanker—”

Draco reared back, and for a moment Harry feared that he’d chased him off. Then Draco reached out and down, and found a part of his cock that Severus hadn’t swallowed, and ran his finger along it, then pinched hard.

White light, and golden from Harry clenching his eyelids shut as hard as he could, and aching in his body, and yes, there was the supernova.

And God, so good.

He let his orgasm pass, and leave him limp and dazed and sticky and happy. Then he opened his eyes and smiled at Draco and Severus, who were lying beside him, both with stares so intent that Harry felt rather like a deer with a pack of wolves surrounding it. (Yes, he was sure that someone had cast a spell to make the bed larger). He stretched his arms above his head, stretched his legs apart, and watched the way their gazes snapped down.

Harry looked down, lazily. Yes, he looked rather tempting himself, he thought, with his cock still glistening wet and his inner thighs glowing red.

“Well,” he said. “I only have one mouth, but I have one arse, too. Who’s going to be the first to let me return the favor?”

Severus and Draco glanced at each other, trading another one of those silent communications that Harry had envied. This one seemed to last longer than normal, though. He waited patiently, reaching down as if he was only cleaning to play with himself.

Severus turned smoothly and seized his hand, raising it to his mouth again. He let his tongue flicker out and run along Harry’s finger, then back, curling in the way he had done with Harry’s cock. Harry tipped his head back and moaned, then reached out and drew Severus down.

“You want my mouth, then?” he asked him in a muffled voice, before he kissed him hard enough to make Draco jump at the sound. Not far, though, Harry noted smugly. Draco was creeping towards them on hands and knees, his eyes absolutely aglow.

“Yes,” Severus said, and performed some sort of complicated rolling maneuver that Harry wondered if he had learned in Death Eater orgies or something—did they have Death Eater orgies?—so that Harry was lying further down on the bed and Severus was kneeling above him. His cock dangled in front of Harry, long and darkly flushed, and Harry let his tongue run out and up and down it the way Severus had done with his finger.

Severus’s eyes darkened, and he thrust forwards. Harry had already opened his mouth to accept it, and so Severus didn’t make him choke, which perhaps disappointed him. Harry reached up and stroked Severus’s groin, slowly, tangling his fingers in the hairs there, then went back to sucking when Severus grunted a complaint.

“That means I have your arse, then.”

Harry startled a little as Draco climbed over him, dragging his cock along Harry’s cock and hip and crack. But when he realized that Draco was just propping him on his side so he could reach, he laughed and spread his legs. “Yes, please,” he said, taking his mouth from Severus to grin at Draco over his shoulder, and then returning it before Severus could complain.

Draco said something inaudible, but Harry chose to believe it was complimentary. He could feel his chest and his head whirling with pleasure, like a long-lasting and mental orgasm. He was happy to be here, on the bed between them, with Severus slowly starting to thrust into his mouth and Draco searching for lube with a constant running commentary of words too soft for Harry to make out.

Since he couldn’t see Draco, Harry settled for watching Severus. The way the lids drooped over his dark eyes as he rocked back and forth. The way his muscles tensed and then relaxed as if he was ashamed to thrust too hard. The way he reached up with one hand and then let it drop back helplessly, as if he had intended to support his head and found it too heavy.

Harry wanted him with a fierce, fiery desire that was like shooting stars slanting through his chest, and God, he really was making lots of star comparisons in his head lately, wasn’t he?

He would just have to remember to tell Severus and Draco that they took him to heaven.

He was still smirking (and sucking, and lapping) around Severus at that when Draco’s first two fingers slid into him. Harry sucked in a breath—which made Severus jump in interesting ways—and flexed around Draco’s fingers. Draco paused to say something, but Harry’s ears were filled with the buzz of the moment, and he didn’t think he would have heard or understood what Draco was saying even if he was concentrating.

“It’s okay, go on, go on,” he said, and tilted his head back and floated on nothing, so blissed-out, so in wonderland, that it took a touch on his cheek for him to remember Severus again and start sucking.

From then on, it was a race between distraction and attention: the attention of having Severus’s cock in his mouth, the distraction of Draco starting into his arse. Harry focused as hard as he could, and still it wasn’t always enough, not when Draco could flex and curl and stretch and add more fingers, and Harry was limited to one tongue and an aching jaw that he imagined couldn’t be much fun for Severus.

But if it really was less fun for him, he was showing no sign of it. He labored with his head tilted back, breath coming from his chest in slow pants now. Harry recognized the signs of a long climb to his peak, and smiled. He was doing that. He was making Severus happy.

More debts, if they want to see it that way. More tangling together.

More, without end.

That was the thought which made him close his eyes and hum as hard as he could, so that Severus started, and his breath came faster, and faster, and Harry felt as though he was floating along on a rushing river, starting down from the mountains towards the ocean, filling the world with overlapping ripples of sensation and pleasure and laughter and joy.

Severus seemed to feel the same, or at least his spine was stiff and he was fucking Harry’s mouth like he did. He reached out, and Harry felt a finger touch his face, tilting it up, at the same moment as Draco sank into him all the way and groaned with something that ran deeper into him than satisfaction.

Harry used a corner of his tongue to lick Severus’s finger, the way Severus wanted him to, and used most of it to lick Severus some more, all around in circles, back and down and under, along the vein and along the side, until the musk was in his nostrils and the taste was in his mouth and Severus had stopped rocking, frozen with the muscles in his thighs fixed and shuddering.

“Going to come,” Severus said, or Draco said. No, on second thought Harry decided it was Severus’s voice, tumbling over him and covering him with a mixture of thick snow and rocks. He rolled his head back and tried to grin at them both at once, then gasped as Draco drove into him until his body quivered.

“Yes,” Severus said, and Harry needed no other affirmation than that, really, although the thick taste coating his tongue was certainly pleasant enough on its own. Severus flopped forwards, over him, and lay on him with his head on Harry’s shoulder and his hand playing with his hair. Harry could have used it lower, but then—

Then Draco rolled him over, so he was no longer fucking Harry from the side but up on top, Harry pinned beneath him, stomach and cock held against the blankets, Draco gripping his hips as he drove into him, his head falling back too when Harry twisted to look at him, his hair flipping around his face. His lips were swollen and red, his throat swollen and pink.

It hurt Harry’s neck to keep looking that direction, and Severus was lying on him in an uncomfortable position now—at least, uncomfortable for Harry, although for all he knew Severus liked to be tangled with his lovers in this particular way—so Harry rolled his head to the side and closed his eyes, panting his own breath into the cavern between his mouth and the pillow, his hand working down towards his cock.

Severus’s hand was there first, and Harry had no trouble tracking their limbs now. Draco’s hands had short nails, neat but short, as if he cut them all the time, which was the last thing Harry would have expected, and they were strong, too, cutting where he placed them, bruising, crushing. Severus’s fingers were delicate, and could curl in multiple directions, it seemed, when he wanted them to, winding about Harry’s cock as though he was stroking a rose that would snap off from the stem. Harry had the weird vision of them working in the lab together, Draco pounding the ingredients that needed a strong hand to powder and dust while Severus worked on the more fragile ones, and stifled a hysterical giggle.

Draco came with a bellow like a wounded horse, and Harry found himself following as Severus gave a particularly quick tug and sideways jerk on his cock. It was wonderful, the way his body shuddered and then went limp, the way his muscles rolled with pleasure like a storm, even the faint moan that worked its way out of his throat before he could muffle it.

From the way that Severus draped himself over Harry’s body for a kiss, and the way Draco embraced him from behind, not pulling out yet as he licked between Harry’s shoulder blades, he didn’t think they minded.

*

He woke up in the enlarged bed with the two of them, which surprised and impressed him. Not that he thought they would really fuck him like that and then leave him alone, but you never entirely knew. Harry had known people to do some pretty strange things when it came to sex.

Besides. They still had paying their debts on their minds. Perhaps they thought those debts were done with after one night of fantastic sex and they could go elsewhere and do something else for now.

But when he opened his eyes, Draco was there with a hand on his hip, and Severus was there with his hand on Harry’s chest, and both of them were looking at him with expressions better than a smile, because they were fainter and more about the light in their eyes than the way their lips curved. Harry touched one hand, and then the other, and drew them both together in the middle of his chest, over his heart, where they could feel it if they wanted.

Two days ago, a week ago, years ago, he would have been too nervous to ask the question. Now, although he felt heat in his face, he simply asked, “Will you stay with me?”

“In the house?” Severus asked, dipping his head so that his hair swept along Harry’s cheek. Draco did the same thing with the other cheek, on the other side.

“In the house,” Harry said, and tilted his head back so that he could feel Severus’s hair on his lips, too. He caught Draco’s and pulled him down close enough to kiss, though he ended up not doing it, just mouthing the words against his lips instead, on purpose, to watch his eyes darken with longing. “In the bed. With me. Will you be with me?”

“You could change your mind tomorrow, and not want us,” Severus pointed out, without what sounded like accusation, more like meditation. “You don’t know much about us.”

“I know,” Harry said. “And you don’t know much about me. Although if you spent the night in the same bed as me, you’ll know I snore.”

Draco smiled at him, and closed his eyes, and exhaled. “We—will spend some time,” he said. “How else are we going to repay our debts?”

Severus said nothing, but smoothed his hand up and down Harry’s flank, stopping to pinch at a few of the sensitive spots Draco had licked.

Harry wanted to ask whether they were going to maintain the fiction of the debts for as long as they spent with him, or if it was a fiction. He could ask. He could accuse them of lots of things, and he could draw back in disgust or worry or shame or terror, and he could risk getting his heart broken.

But…

He had lost so much of his fear, since the war. Ron and Hermione thought it made him reckless with his life alone, but it was a lot more than that. Harry knew he could go on, because he had done it since the war. And if this was only a temporary bringing of pleasure and happiness, in the end, at least it was more than would otherwise have existed.

Harry sometimes aspired to make sure that, every day when he went to bed, there was something new in the world that hadn’t been there when he woke up. He was glad, and proud, that this time, it was something like this.

He could let them have the idea of the debts, and if it was real and they parted from him, he didn’t think hearts would be bruised. He would still have some time before they made enough money to set up their own shop, anyway.

And if the idea of the debts wasn’t real, they might have more than that.

Either way, he could let them have it without challenging them for it.

“Right,” he said, and rolled over so that he could suck Draco’s cock, which he hadn’t done yet, while Severus bit him high on the back and Draco laughed above him at the sudden change of direction, wondrous and wordless and surprised, bright as the coin of the sun purchasing a new debt, or a new day.

The End.

[one-shots]: The New-Minted Coin of the Soul, H/D/S, R, 2/2

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