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lomonaaerenTitle: The New-Minted Coin of the Soul
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Snape/Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, sex, flangst, a complete disregarding of the epilogue.
Wordcount: 18.600
Summary: Harry rescues Snape and Malfoy from a cave-in that seems like a deliberate assassination attempt. He saves people all the time. But Malfoy and Snape don’t get saved all the time…and debts, to a Slytherin, always need repayment.
Author’s Note: I’m writing this fic foreelegantlyeevil, who made a very generous donation for helpsomalia and asked for a threesome fic. Despite what the summary may look like, this is actually a pretty light and humorous story in the end. EE, I hope you enjoy.
The New-Minted Coin of the Soul
Harry rounded the corner at a speed that made the buildings around him flash in front of his eyes, chanting under his breath, “Adminiculor, adminiculor, adminiculor,” until the sound of the incantation blurred in his ears to join the blurring buildings in his sight. He leaped over a broken block of rubble, dodged around what had been the wall of a small shop at the far end of Diagon Alley until a moment ago, and bumped—
Straight into an unyielding row of Auror backs, as it turned out. Infuriatingly, most of them were taller than he was. Harry reached up and rapped on the nearest, and when the man stirred to look at him, snapped, “I’m trying to get through here. If you’re not going to help, move aside.”
The man stared at him, and then a few other Aurors turned to look at him. Harry smiled when he recognized the one on the left, Auror Stacey Inchbeck. “If you can lend your strength to mine, Auror Inchbeck,” he began, “then I think we can keep the building from falling inwards, and that will mean we’re all the more likely to spare the Potions masters’ lives—”
“Do you know how unstable that building is?” Inchbeck asked, not bothering to smile back or do anything to show that she was glad to see him.
“I have some idea, yes,” Harry said, and elbowed her in the ribs where he happened to know that she’d taken a particularly bad injury in a training session the other day. As she groaned and slumped faintly to the side, he shook his head and rushed past. “Considering that I’ve been chanting spells halfway up the street so that it would stay in place,” he added over his shoulder, and whirled to study the collapsed building again so he could find the best way in.
This time, it was Deputy Head Auror Barran who moved forwards to confront him. Harry rolled his eyes. Barran was the one who kept seeing assassination plots to get rid of the Chosen One (and why did they still use that name? Didn’t they realize who had made it up in the first place?) in every shadow. And Harry knew they weren’t. Not in every shadow. There had only been two in the last month, not five as Barran had insisted. And Harry had escaped one and foiled the other before the Aurors assigned to the case could even start their investigation. When it came to taking care of himself, Harry was an expert.
“You can’t go in there, sir,” Barran said.
Harry ground his teeth. You’re the one who merits a “sir,” he wanted to say. I don’t have any rank compared to you. I’m one of the younger Aurors, the crazy risk-taker, the one who’s such a liability to a partner’s safety in the field that you have me behind a desk most of the time.
“Why not?” he asked, and then saw a piece of what might have been the first floor shifting to fall on the rest. “Adminiculor,” he whispered again, flicking his wand out, and the sliding piece froze in place as the magic conjured an invisible support beneath it. Harry relaxed a fraction. Something had struck the base of the building, which meant it had first collapsed and then started sliding, and he thought his spells had preserved pockets of air and safety beneath. But he wouldn’t know for sure until he got in there. He started to pick his way forwards, avoiding powdery white grit that had been stones until a few minutes ago.
Barran seized his shoulder. Harry swung around and kicked him in the groin, then blinked as he realized the man was now lying on the ground. He shrugged.
“Don’t grab someone you helped train defensive instincts into,” he told Barran, and then picked his way further forwards. Someone shouted behind him, and someone else cast a Stunner, followed by a Body-Bind, but they slammed against the Shield Charm that Harry’d had the foresight to wrap around himself. He wondered why everyone in the Aurors didn’t learn to cast Protego nonverbally. It would save tremendous amounts of time, and save him feeling quite so much like a freak every time he had to use it.
He knew why they wanted to keep him out of it, of course. It wouldn’t look good if Harry Potter died in there.
And neither would it be good if Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy died because someone blew up their Potions shop. But Harry was the only one in the immediate vicinity who held that opinion. Most people thought Snape had already cheated death once, carrying that bezoar around in his pocket the way he did, and that both of them had cheated Azkaban. Their lives weren’t a priority.
That’s too fucking bad, Harry thought, and bent down so that he could slide determinedly forwards through the clutching bits of stone on the edges of what had been the door. Because they are to me.
Beyond the door, there was a huge mass of rubble that Harry had to pause and study. His support spells were propping some of it, but other pieces lay where they had fallen.
Yes, it had been a curse that hit the ground floor. It came in through the door—no, a window, Harry thought, a vulnerable place that had been completely destroyed. Too much of the door still stood for it to have been the point of entry. And then the curse had reverberated up as well as down, which was one reason that Snape and Malfoy might still be alive. The curse had burned and shook as it rose, which meant there was less shop and flats above it, less to fall on the two men.
Harry gritted his teeth. They might be dead. You should at least find out before you try to go further.
He nodded as he leaned down and traced his wand across the floor in front of him, creating a looping pattern like half a Celtic knot. He was smart about things like this, unlike what his superiors believed, and he wouldn’t risk his own life unnecessarily. The problem was that they thought no one should risk their lives at all, as if Snape and Malfoy had chosen to be in danger and despised by more than half the wizarding world after their trials, and Harry disagreed with them.
He had the power to make his disagreement a problem for the Ministry. Not a whole lot of people did, but that wouldn’t stop Harry from doing what he could.
The pattern glowered where he traced it, and when Harry quietly spoke the incantation, it glowed blue for a moment. Then two traces shot away from it. They returned quietly, and made the knot glow again before it faded.
Harry closed his eyes. Those tracers meant that there were people in the building still alive. Thank God, he thought, and his eyes and throat burned for a moment with emotions he would have found it difficult to acknowledge out loud.
He stood and made his way with quick smoothness around the edge of that massive mound of rubble, using another support spell when it creaked above him. The tracers had darted straight into the mound, which meant Snape and Malfoy were probably under it. Too bad that Harry wasn’t made of pure light and power like the spell, to be able to get to where they would need him.
Then he paused, and smiled. Or it would be too bad, if I didn’t have something that made me able to pass through it.
He clasped a fist to his heart and began to whisper the spell, ignoring it when the building behind him shuddered a little. That would be the Aurors gradually coming in, but their own safety procedures would force them to wait for a time, to tread carefully, and their reluctance to save the lives of two accused Death Eaters would hold them back for long enough that he could do the spell without being disturbed.
It wasn’t that the spell was illegal, exactly, and it wasn’t Dark Arts. But it was risky, and experimental, and the spellcrafters who had come up with it had told Harry not to use it unless he absolutely had to.
Well, now he had to.
The world around him seemed to shudder as though it was a giant bell and someone had struck it, and then Harry’s body was melting, dissipating, shuddering and spreading out. He found that he had eyes everywhere, and he could see up and down and to the side, behind him where the Aurors were, in front of him in small cracks between the rubble. He saw Snape leaning against what looked like the remnants of a stable wall, the rock sagging and shifting above him, while Malfoy crouched near him, one hand on his shoulder. Both their mouths and eyes were shut. They might have given up already, Harry thought in mild indignation, as if rescue was never coming.
Then he thought of the Aurors, and sighed. They couldn’t know rescue was coming, which meant he couldn’t blame them for their reaction.
Too bad. Blaming them for their reactions used to be so much fun.
He melted and flashed and flowed forwards, becoming the air, becoming the light, and estimated the space in the little pocket where Snape and Malfoy crouched. He didn’t know if he could manifest right next to them. But there was another little pocket on the other side of the wall from them, where his support spells had kept the debris from raining down, and where a man like him could form if he was crouched down.
He blew into it, formed back into himself, took a moment to recover his breath, cast another spell that would keep the air circulating through the tiny cracks in the mound and mean that Snape and Malfoy would have enough to breathe, and then cast a Sonorus Charm on his voice. “Hello?” he called.
He could hear the sudden hiss, and then the equally sudden calm, that came from the little pocket next door. Malfoy had probably recognized his voice, and then tried to conserve the precious air. Harry smiled. He opened his mouth to tell them that they were fine as far as that went, but Malfoy spoke before he could, his voice trembling.
“Potter? You—you’re here?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “The rubble created another air pocket next to you, and I got into it. I’ve used a few spells to support the rubble above you, and you’re going to have all the air you can use thanks to another one. You’re going to be alive and fine. I’ll cast some more support spells, and then I’ll use another that’ll tell people where we are. They ought to bring some powerful Unspeakable artifact that can lift this off us.”
“Why did you,” Malfoy said, and swallowed.
Harry understood the question. “They might not have come in after you until the building finally collapsed,” he said, and let his anger color his voice. It probably wouldn’t matter to Snape and Malfoy what he thought of them, but if it did, let them know that there was one Auror who thought this was unjust. “But they’ll have no choice about rescuing Harry Potter.”
Silence, except for a brief shifting noise that might have been Malfoy playing with a bit of wood. “Thank you,” he said at last. His voice was stiff and strained and unfamiliar.
Harry laughed. “No need to say it, if it bothers you that much,” he said, and began to chant the support spell again, visualizing the pile as he had seen it in the moments when he was air and spread all through it. Shift a window there, adjust a group of stones into an unconventional pillar here, add a column of solidified air on this side…
“Is Snape all right?” he added when he was done with that portion of the work. “I haven’t heard him say anything yet.”
“He’s—going to be fine,” Malfoy said, and his voice seemed to tilt downwards, all the emphasis on the “going.” “But ever since he was in the cells, he doesn’t like closed-in spaces.” Another shifting noise.
And I’d bet you don’t, either, but you can’t admit it, Harry thought. Well, that was fine. He wasn’t all that fond of small spaces himself, after spending half his childhood in a cupboard.
“Did I ever tell you about the time that I turned around and punched my Dramatic Dueling instructor in the nose?” he asked conversationally.
There was a noise, this time, that might have been someone choking on air. “Of course not,” Malfoy said, in an attempt to be on his dignity. “We didn’t have contact by the time that you went into Auror training.”
“I did,” Harry said, disregarding that last. He cast the spell that would tell everyone where they were, a steady yellow glow that encompassed both their “rooms” and then crept out of the pile. Standard Ministry distress spell, and with any luck, they would have a few Aurors among the idiots out there who weren’t too stupid to know what it meant. “He had crept up behind me, after he’d Disarmed my partner. That was Dramatic Dueling, you know, we were meant to ‘act’ in pairs. Someone who came up that name overestimated their sense of humor. They thought they had one.”
A deeper noise this time, one that might be someone with a hooked nose clearing his throat. Harry grinned and sat back against the sturdiest wall of his pocket, one that was made of what looked like mostly collapsed flooring, with here and there a fleck of what was probably shattered glass in the middle of it.
“I didn’t know exactly what had happened to my partner. This was all taking place in the middle of a dark room, where they train the Aurors with illusions to make us think we’re in the middle of a battlefield at the time. I reckon real battlefields cost too much.” This time, what was probably a snort from Malfoy. “He thought he’d put his wand to my back and I would surrender, the way I was supposed to when I felt something there.
“But it was dark, and I was already keyed-up.” And old memories of being bullied by Dudley and his gang on Privet Drive after nightfall had come crowding to the forefront of his mind, but he knew there was a limit to how much about his personal life Snape and Malfoy would be interested in. “When I felt the wand touch the middle of my back, no way was I going to put up with that shit. I whirled around and lashed out, and got him square in the middle of his nose. He yelled, and I recognized his voice, and knew who it was. I Disarmed him and won the game. He was too busy cradling his broken nose to object, really.”
Some more rustles, and then Snape said, voice like a rusty hinge, “A most amusing story, Potter. But I can hear the creaking of the building settling. How do you intend to keep the ceiling from falling on top of us?”
“Oh, that,” Harry said, with a glance upwards. He knew that the ceiling wouldn’t care about his annoyance, but he showed it anyway, because it was hard to avoid it. “I’d thought my support spells would have taken care of that—”
“Obviously not.” Snape’s voice had a breathiness to it that worried Harry. He could hear Malfoy shifting around, probably to quietly touch Snape and hopefully keep him sane, but he couldn’t count on that.
“Well, give me a moment,” Harry said, and then concentrated hard enough that he could feel his heartbeat slow with the force of the attention his body was giving to other things. “Cellae fortes!”
The world around him seemed to tremble, and Harry slumped over, glad he was already sitting down, as the magic ran out of him. This many spells in one day took a lot out of him, though not as much as it would have for one of his many competitors among the Aurors. There were times that it was good to be this powerful.
The walls around him softened and bulged inwards, and he heard Malfoy give a half-scream. Harry smiled, and reminded himself not to tease the git about that later. He had assumed they would recognize the spell, but it was a rather specialized one, and if they spent all their time with potions, probably not.
“It’s all right,” he said, as the floor beneath him turned to smooth wood, as the crumbling walls became sturdy stone ones, as the air above him vanished into a neat plasterwork ceiling. “I’m creating a pair of rooms that will hold up against the weight. But people can break into them from the outside, so they’ll see us when they dig into the pile. And there are windows,” he added, as flashes of green and blue and pink from a sunset bloomed in the walls. “I hope that might help with the claustrophobia.”
Silence this time. Harry got comfortable on the wooden floor, and wished for a moment that he had thought to conjure chairs. But he couldn’t afford the expenditure of magical energy right now, and he would not waste any on a Cushioning Charm, either. He leaned his forehead on his knees and closed his eyes.
“Potter.”
Harry popped an eye open again. Snape. Of course it was. He would interrupt just when Harry was trying to nap. “Yeah.”
Snape’s disdain for his diction coated the words he spoke next even if he didn’t say anything directly about it. “You will have to know—this is not enough. Even with the windows,” he added, in what he probably imagined was a humorous, joking tone. Harry had never heard anything more out of place, even with the former Death Eaters that the Ministry sometimes invited to their functions to celebrate the defeat of Voldemort.
“All right,” Harry said, and chose the first funny story that he could feel bobbing at the surface of his mind. “You ought to appreciate this. Did you know Ron and Hermione are married and having kids now?”
Malfoy gagged. Harry grinned. He thought it interesting he could tell their voices apart even when they weren’t speaking words, and when he hadn’t heard them in years.
“Yes, imagine it all you like,” he said. “But the kids are a lot cuter than you would imagine. Red hair and freckles and clever little hands, into everything. Well, George sometimes dates these really unsuitable girls, you know, because he’s always looking for someone with a sense of humor, after—well, after Fred. But sometimes the sense of humor is nasty, and he doesn’t see that as long as they’re nice to him. Well, he brought one over to Ron and Hermione’s house one time just after Rose had turned two.
“Let’s call this girl—Peony. That’s not in any way her real name,” Harry added, thickening his voice, and heard Snape snort this time. It sounded like a snort of amusement, even. Harry smiled, leaned against a wall, and closed his eyes, the better to envision the scene in his story. “And her real surname isn’t Parkinson. Not in any way, or shape, or form. Not even close to it in the Floo directory.”
Silence, except for breathing. Harry reckoned that was as good as he would get for right now, and plunged on. “Peony—not her real name, remember— kept saying over and over again how much she loved children, so George thought the visit would be a good idea. He didn’t count on her only having been around properly-brought-up, as she would say, pure-blood children. So they stepped into Ron and Hermione’s house, and found screaming chaos, because Hugo had a cold and Rose was running around and getting into everything, and Hermione was at work, and Ron had been injured recently and couldn’t help with the kids as much as he usually did.”
“It seems,” Malfoy said, sounding exactly like one of the “helpful” witnesses Harry sometimes got who wanted to correct what they saw as inconsistencies in other people’s testimony, “that Weasel—Weasley would have called on his mother for help.”
“Ron’s proud that way,” Harry said, rolling his eyes even though they were closed and no one was there to see it. If you didn’t roll your eyes like that, sometimes, he had discovered, you were letting your standards slip, and soon you would be polite and discerning in public and everything. “He doesn’t want to let on that he can’t handle a problem. But he really can’t handle Rose and Hugo sometimes, and it would have been smarter for him to admit that instead of insist it isn’t a problem. I think Mrs. Weasley likes it, though,” he added. “Revenge for all those days she was trying to cope with seven kids.”
Not seven, now. Only six. But the grief for Fred was an old grief, and Harry shook himself out of it when Snape said, “The story, Potter.”
“Oh, right,” Harry said. “So George and Peony came in the door, and Ron promptly recruited them to catch Rose while he tried to make Hugo feel better. Peony walked over to Rose with her hand out, saying all these simpering sugary things—well, George didn’t describe them that way when he told me the story, but I know what they must have been. ‘Put the toy down and come back here, sweetheart. Don’t you want to be a little lady?’ That would have been about the best of it.”
His words fell into what at least seemed like a listening silence, so Harry went ahead and continued with the story. “Well, Rose told Peony she didn’t want to be a little lady and hit Peony on the hand with her doll. That broke one of Peony’s nails. She pulled back with a sob and left George to catch Rose.
“George was scolding Rose all the time, you know, asking how she felt about hitting her future aunt, and what she would do if one of her cousins hit her mum. Rose said she’d hit them back, and I think you could feel the arctic wind that swept in and made Peony’s face freeze. She wasn’t thinking seriously about marrying George, I don’t think, but that assumption he made that of course they would have children—children who played with Rose—knocked her away from any thought of it.
“So George tried to get Rose settled with some biscuits, and Peony cast a spell that made the biscuits vanish from her hand the moment she opened her mouth.”
“Pansy’s cousin always was a little bitch,” Malfoy muttered.
Harry hummed in agreement. He had only met Peony once, and she had been charming enough to him, since he was the beloved and all-powerful Harry Potter, but he had felt the falseness in her and never particularly wanted to see her again. “Well. George didn’t see anything wrong; he just thought Rose was eating all the biscuits too fast and wanting more. He refused to give her any, no matter how much she cried. But Rose knew what Peony had really done—I think Peony was stupid enough to tell her, too—and she was plotting revenge.
“I don’t know if she used accidental magic or just her hands, but the next time George changed Hugo’s nappy, Rose got hold of the used one and draped it across Peony’s face.”
There was silence, and Harry frowned. He thought that story was hilarious, himself, or at least he had the first time he had heard it. And he still had to conceal snickers when he was around Ron or Hermione and one of them decided to be humiliated that Rose had done such a thing. What—
Then he heard the quiet, rasping laughter from the other room, as though someone had taught a raven the meaning of humor, and relaxed.
“And the child was not punished for this?” Snape asked, when the laughter had died and Harry thought he could feel their tension rising again like a bubble, pressing against the walls and floors around them.
Harry snorted. “Not when everyone was more concerned with Peony and the shit dripping down her face.” Malfoy gave a little gasp, as though he had never imagined that Harry would actually say the word “shit,” and Harry rolled his eyes. There’s a lot more where that came from, Malfoy. “Then they figured out what had happened, and while Peony didn’t admit she’d been taking the biscuits away from Rose, it was easy enough to cast Priori Incantatem on her wand and find the spell. George decided he didn’t want to marry her after that, and we were saved from such an embarrassment as a sister-in-law who would take sweets away from children to make her point.”
“Too bad that they could not save themselves from the embarrassment of a son-in-law such as you,” Malfoy muttered.
“Oh, I quite agree,” Harry said cheerfully. “Ginny ended up marrying Michael Corner, and he has the same sense of humor I do and he’s an Auror, too. So she really didn’t trade up when she left me.”
There was some more silence, and Snape said, “Another story, perhaps.”
Harry nodded. His voice would get hoarse, but he thought he could risk a small charm that would moisten it, at least for long enough to keep speaking. “All right, then I’ll tell you about the time the Head Auror left me alone in his office for five minutes and I managed to trash the place…”
*
Five minutes into Harry’s eleventh or twelfth story, the roof above him creaked. He could feel Snape’s flinch through the wall, and said calmly, looking up, “No ordinary magic could make the walls creak that way, and they’re stable against the rubble, I told you. I think our rescue party has arrived.”
The ceiling of his artificial room creaked again, then split open in the next instant. Harry stood up and waved. He heard someone curse, and grinned, recognizing Ron’s voice. “Down here!” he called. “Snape and Malfoy are in the next room over. You’ll need more seats than that,” he added, spotting a single chair being lowered down on the end of a rope of spidersilk.
“What?” Ron asked, his voice breathless. Harry didn’t think all that came from the amount of magic it was taking to lower the chair and keep the rope from tangling around stones and shattered pieces of wood. “They’re alive?”
“Your lack of faith in me is flattering,” Harry drawled. “Yes, of course. I performed the stabilization spells before I entered the building.” He reached up and yanked on the rope, then nodded. “And you ought to send this over to their room first, not mine,” he added, turning the rope so that the chair aimed at the wall of debris between their two pockets. “Add more rope onto the top. I’ll direct it in. Potions master Snape—” it was hard to remember, sometimes, that that was the proper address, rather than Professor “—needs to get out of here before the rest of us. Unless you’re wounded, Potions master Malfoy?” he added, raising his voice. Of course they hadn’t said anything, but they were unlikely to when they were speaking to a Gryffindor Auror, were they?
Silence, and then Malfoy said, “No. Both of us have only bruises and minor cuts. And, Potter.”
He said nothing, and Harry waited a second, then asked, “What?”
“Thank you.” It was a whisper, but Harry heard it because he was listening for it. He shook his head. Don’t want to admit their wounds and don’t want to say thanks. Such Slytherins. At least I got over the first problem a while ago and never had the second. Maybe that’s how I convinced the Hat.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Now, stand back. I’m going to have to shift the wall the separates us, and I don’t want it to fall down on you.”
“You cannot do such a thing,” Snape said. His voice sounded more normal than it had so far, but it still had that sneer Harry knew so well and had to grin at hearing again. “The mound will fall down when you move it.”
“No, it won’t,” Harry said patiently. “Because I’m going to do something that I couldn’t do beforehand without prepared Aurors around, and which I can do now. All you have to do is stand back.”
A muffled breath of a snort, but they moved. Harry stepped back in turn and called up the rope to Ron, “Do you have more chairs ready? Have you added more spidersilk to the top of this rope?”
“Yes and yes,” Ron called. His voice had acquired a slight tremor. “Harry, you better not—”
“How many Aurors do you have with you?” Harry interrupted. “Any trainees?”
“Twenty.” Harry snorted into his hand. Of course, twenty for the famous Harry Potter. Then again, he had counted on that when he jumped in here. “And no trainees. Harry, we discussed this when that Muggle bank collapsed, you can’t—”
“Ron?” Harry asked, grinning madly into the darkness.
“Yes?” Ron sounded like he had the faintest shadow of a hint of a hope that he might persuade Harry not to do anything reckless.
“Catch!” Harry yelled, and then swung around to face the wall and held his wand up. “Wingardium Leviosa!”
The illusion he had created of the two rooms shuddered, but held—all except the wall that faced him, the illusory wooden wall that in reality concealed a partition of stone, glass, and worse things. It heaved, and then began to rise. Harry channeled more magic through his wand, remembering, as his lungs shuddered and his vision began to black out, the instructions that Professor Flitwick had squeaked at them in class.
Swish and flick. Swish and flick. He did it, again and again.
The illusion faded completely—although enough of it would remain in the small pocket where Snape and Malfoy were trapped that they could still feel they were looking through windows into the open air—and Harry saw the rubble began to flow towards him. He stepped back, waving his wand, and heard his own breathing as if from a distance, desperate, exhausted, panicked breaths. He shrugged a little. That couldn’t be helped, could it? He was accomplishing this, and he would do it if it killed him.
He didn’t think it would kill him. But it was hard for anyone to be completely sure, of course.
The rubble shuddered and flowed, and then flowed backwards. Harry nodded. Good. That was the way he had meant it to go in the first place. The rubble was now pressing against the pile that lay over the top of the pocket where Snape and Malfoy were trapped, wanting to rise, but held down by the collapsed floors above it.
Not for long.
Then it happened, just as Harry had to grab the chair on the end of the rope for fear of passing out. The enormous part of the pile that had been above Snape and Malfoy’s air pocket lifted completely, rotating in the air like a floating island. Harry blew out his breath, but didn’t dare relax his control for a moment, blinking as he was in the sudden flow of light through the hole he’d created in the wall between them. He waited, and spun it, and wavered an inch from collapse, until he felt the Aurors’ support spells move in and catch the mound of rubble, fifteen or sixteen Aurors taking the burden from him. More rubble flowed away and down, and he could see the street.
Then he ran forwards and out through the new rent in the whole pile, out from under the debris that remained behind him, and past the startled faces of Snape and Malfoy, pulling at their arms when they wouldn’t move fast enough. He sprawled in the street outside, swearing and feeling his magic ready to drain out of him like blood from a wound.
“Harry,” Ron wailed from some distant place. “You implied that they’d be taking the chair up!”
“Yeah, well, I came up with a better plan,” Harry yelled back, and then rolled over, stood up, and steadied himself against the side of one of the still-standing shops, while the Aurors levitating the huge mass of rubble floated it back to the rest of the pile and set about Vanishing things now that they knew no one living was left inside. Harry nodded to Snape and Malfoy. “I’m sorry about your shop.”
They both looked at him without responding. Malfoy was still the shorter of the two, Harry noted, but not by much; it looked as though all the energy he’d had to tamp down during the two years when he was living under Voldemort’s rule had gone into growth. Both of them wore Potions masters’ robes, dark green or blue—Harry found it hard to tell which when he was still blinking from the sunlight—with black borders. Their hands were immaculately neat. Harry knew it was because they didn’t want dirt to come into contact with the potions.
Snape never seemed to care about that when he was at Hogwarts. But then, he’d probably used Cleaning Charms on his hands when he had to and not cared the rest of the time. He hadn’t cared about a lot, Harry thought, surrounded by students he hated and doing a job he despised just to stay alive.
Snape turned his head now and stared back at the ruined shop. Malfoy leaned a hand on his shoulder and then leaned against him. Harry had the feeling he was witnessing something he shouldn’t have. He looked away slightly as he said, “Do you have a place you can go that will take you in? Do you need help finding a place to stay?”
“This was—our home,” Malfoy said, his voice limp, on the edge of the moment Harry had decided they weren’t going to answer. “I assume the Ministry will permit us to leave when they finish questioning us?”
Harry nodded. It was no use pretending the interrogations wouldn’t happen, although Snape and Malfoy would have less than no reason to destroy their own shop and home. But he wasn’t interested in that right now. “I meant, can I help you find a place to stay?”
“Of course not, Potter,” Snape said, and his voice was still that harsh blast Harry had heard when they were trapped. “How can you help? How can you possibly know what we require?”
“I know that you required me to speak to you when you were trapped,” Harry replied, and met his eyes this time. They were still venomous, still dark, but Harry had looked into plenty of pairs of eyes that were harder to meet, now. “I know you require sunlight and open spaces. It’s not much, but you might be able to find what you need in one of my houses.”
Malfoy took a single step forwards, one hand fluttering up. Harry wondered if he intended to touch Snape’s arm. If he did, he pulled his hand back before it connected, and looked at Harry with mute, pleading eyes.
Harry nodded against his will. “Follow me,” he said, taking the decision away from Snape because he knew what Malfoy feared, that Snape would never make it, and turned his back, walking up the street towards the Ministry’s nearest entrance as if he never doubted they would obey.
He heard the rustling sounds of argument for a moment, and then a single pair of boots scuttling along. It seemed to take half a small eternity before the next pair followed them.
Harry huffed out a breath and shook his head. Snape and Malfoy had lost their shop, their home, their livelihood. They needed more than he could give, in terms of recovering their pride, but what little Harry could offer was theirs, because they needed it and because he had the ability to offer it. Maybe there was something else he could give them too, though. Solitude, once they were settled in the small house at Godric’s Hollow. The Ministry would insist he stay with them, keep them under custody, but Harry saw no problem with moving his case files and a few clothes into one of the bedrooms and letting them have the rest of the house. Space. Room. Quiet. Neatness. There was a cellar Harry would never use, filled with dust and air, that they could take over and turn into a potions lab.
The visions shone in front of his eyes the way his visions through the windows of the illusory rooms had. Harry smiled, and managed to keep the smile when he met Barran, who had questions, and demands, and orders, and other things that Harry normally had no time for. But Barran would make trouble for Snape and Malfoy if Harry didn’t go along with him, so he did.
Then there was Ron, but Harry kept his monologue short by reciting it along with him, down to the folded arms and the yelling about how Harry was an adult and not a schoolboy now, with real responsibilities, a phrase Ron had picked up from Hermione. Ron quit while he still had some normal color left in his face, and Harry and Malfoy and Snape and all the rest of them went to the Ministry.
*
Harry sighed as he stepped into the small house and spent a moment rolling his shoulders back and down, ignoring the way Snape and Malfoy paused behind him as if they thought he would spread wings that would take up the remaining space in the entrance hall. Three interrogations, one request for interviews, and seven rows later, he had permission to give two innocent men shelter in one of his own homes. The Ministry, in the person of Deputy Head Auror Barran, had delivered that permission looking down its nose, in an austere tone, but Harry knew it was sincere. He’d fought hard enough for it.
“Where do we sleep?” Malfoy was standing between Harry and Snape when Harry glanced back at him, one hand outstretched as if he thought he would have to keep Snape from charging. Harry nodded in recognition. Malfoy was in exactly the same position Harry had sometimes found himself when Ron and Hermione argued, ambassador between two hostile countries. Harry considered conjuring a white flag to wave, but he knew that would irritate Snape, because nothing existed that didn’t irritate Snape.
“There are bedrooms upstairs,” Harry said. “Do you want one, or two?”
Malfoy stared at him. Behind him, Snape did the same thing, except Harry wasn’t accustomed to applying a mundane word like “stare” to the drawing, quartering, flaying, and dissecting that Snape was trying to do with his gaze.
Harry rolled his eyes. “Not being able to count to two must be a handicap when you’re brewing any potion more complicated than a Boil Cure,” he said.
Snape surged forwards one step, and Malfoy stepped along in front of him, so that Harry had to retreat into the drawing room. Snape coughed, and the cough was the kind that told Harry he could indeed count, in this case every one of the half-moldy cobwebs that draped along the walls and door and clung to the wainscoting.
Harry cast a Cleaning Charm that banished most of the dust, and then a small beam of sunlight that fried the cobwebs. “Choose which rooms you like,” he said, and then turned and ducked into the kitchen. His owl, Spartacus, emphatically black and young and male and not like Hedwig in any other way, either, hopped up and down on his perch and hooted. Harry sat down and started writing out a long owl-order.
“What size clothes do you wear?” he yelled back at Snape and Malfoy, once he had written down orders for bread, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, scones, and several Muggle meals that could keep without a fridge.
Heavy footsteps made Harry turn around, prepared this time to encounter Snape without the buffer state of Malfoy in between. But it was Malfoy, who leaned on the doorframe and stared at Harry. Harry stared back, then crossed his eyes.
It had the effect he wanted, of making Malfoy curl his lip and then speak. “Why are you doing this, Potter? You’ve given us enough already. Our lives, a place to stay—”
“Both of them more trouble than clothes,” Harry pointed out. “And whatever perverted habits you may have got up to in that flat of yours, I don’t want you prancing around the house naked. Some of my neighbors have children.”
Malfoy stared at him again, as if the burning quality of silence in the kitchen could stifle Harry. Harry had had really impressive stiflers try to do that to him in the past, though, and he didn’t make it easy. He waited Malfoy out, and Malfoy finally looked away from him and mumbled sizes and colors and fabrics.
“Thank you,” Harry said, and started writing them down. “The rooms are furnished already, so you don’t have to worry about that. As for potions ingredients, I don’t trust myself to get you half of what you need. I’ll leave you parchment tomorrow, and those Galleons I took out of your Gringotts account, and you can decide what you need.”
“What Gringotts account?” Malfoy’s voice lashed out like a whip. “You think we have one? As if the goblins would open an account for a former Death Eater.”
“Goblins don’t care much about human politics unless it concerns the Sword of Gryffindor,” Harry said, and added a final flourish to the letter, before sealing it and holding it out to Spartacus. He bobbed his head three times before soaring out the window. Harry shook his head. He found Spartacus tiring enough to get along with. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he had Pig. “And they’ll open an account there if I ask them to. Which I did. Which I then put Galleons into, and took Galleons out of. Which Galleons are sitting in a back room in a cloth sack.”
“You did that in the midst of the interrogations.” Snape didn’t deign to move into the kitchen, but that didn’t keep his voice from reaching Harry.
“They didn’t prevent me from writing,” Harry said, leaning back and grinning at Malfoy and the space that held an invisible Snape. “Not my fault if they thought I was taking notes.”
Malfoy was still for a moment, and Harry wondered if Snape had prodded him in the back. Then Malfoy said, “Will your inattention cause problems for us?”
“I hope not,” Harry said, blinking. That it could have had not occurred to him. “After all, if I forget to order something for you or give you something that you want, then you only have to tell me. And my superiors never pay attention to the notes I take or the little things I do unless it interferes with me giving them results.”
Snape made a single, harshly suppressed noise. Harry thought of offering to buy him a crow so he could practice what was obviously his native language, but refrained.
“I still wish to know,” Malfoy said, “why you arranged a Gringotts account for us, if it is all your own money in the first place.”
“And I bet Snape does, too,” Harry said, raising his voice and leaning sideways. That didn’t let him catch a glimpse of Snape, but he hadn’t hoped for one so much as the expression on Malfoy’s face, which said he had no notion why Harry was doing something so stupid. Harry leaned back in his chair and grinned at Malfoy. “I want you to have money that you can consider your own, which won’t draw from my main account. Spend it as you need to. You should only need to talk to me about it if it’s not enough.”
Malfoy shook his head. “We do not want your charity.”
“But you need it,” Harry said quietly. “And I don’t want to humiliate you. This way, if you have your own money and you can do what you want with it instead of having to apply to me for it, then you can preserve at least some of your independence. I know it’s a pretense, but if you can obtain the ingredients you need and start brewing potions again, it won’t be a pretense for very long.”
Malfoy closed his eyes and bowed his head. “We do not deserve this,” he whispered. “What did we do that you would want to accomplish something like this for us?”
“What didn’t you do?” Harry asked, shaking his head. “Both of you saved my life during the war, and made my victory possible. And I happen to have liked defeating You-Know-Who and living after that, thank you.” He grinned at Malfoy. “Allow me to return a tiny portion of the joy that informs my every day in this world, please.”
“You did not speak his name,” said the hidden Snape.
“I don’t want to watch you flinch,” Harry said.
Malfoy, incredibly, flinched anyway, bowing his head further so that his hair shielded his face completely. Harry held back a sigh. Malfoy was more sensitive than he had thought, and God knew what a sigh would do to him.
“All right,” he said, when a few minutes had passed and neither Malfoy nor his imaginary friend seemed compelled to say anything. “The owl-orders should come in soon. In the meantime, do you mind if I make us some toast and eggs? Do you want tea? The food I have here is rather basic.” He turned around and began to remove the Preservation Charms from the cabinets along the walls of the kitchen.
“Potter.”
Harry nearly tripped over the chair turning back around. Snape had moved into sight and stood watching him with eyes that, yes, were as patient as a crow’s. Harry felt the high catch of his breath in his throat, and told himself not to be stupid. It was Snape, yes, but it was the Snape who had saved his life, and who had survived after all, and who hadn’t gone to Azkaban, and—
It was Snape.
For a few moments, he thought an invisible string stretched across the room, taut and vibrating hard enough that it could snap and sting someone. Then Snape sighed and brought his head up, and his mouth had an expression that was not quite a smile, but some distant ancestor of one that might have left fossils behind in Snape’s skin.
“Thank you,” Snape said.
*
The owls started coming in before their simple meal was finished, along with owls from the Ministry. Harry rolled his eyes and took the three Howlers—one from Barran, one from the Head Auror, one from Hermione—upstairs so that they wouldn’t disturb Snape and Malfoy as they ate.
Barran’s was the shortest, just telling him that he was very disappointed with Harry for placing himself in danger. Harry rolled his eyes, put his fingers in his ears, and chanted, “Blah, blah, blah,” back at it until it blew up.
The Head Auror went on solemnly about consequences and how he couldn’t promise that Harry would always have a job in the Auror Department. Harry started reciting the long list of rescues, fundraising events, cases, interviews, sessions for the new trainees, and Ministry functions he’d been key to for the past year at it, and he thought the Howler ended early in the sheer rush to be away from him.
Hermione’s Howler was the worst, but also predictable. Harry sighed as he listened to her lecture him about what good would it do if he got himself buried in the building and killed along with Malfoy and Snape, did he realize that someone had to fight for the rights of Slytherins in the Ministry?, he couldn’t have known they were still alive, using the spell that turned him into air had been stupid and dangerous, and don’t bother denying it, she knew that was what he had done, based on Ron’s description.
When the Howler wound down, Harry shook his head and reached for ink and parchment. His bedroom here was spare, but functional, with a desk, a chair, a fully-made bed, and a wardrobe with a few sets of Auror uniforms. He had to write back, but he paused to think about the right words.
“They are likely to make political trouble for you?”
Harry started and turned towards the door. Snape stood there, watching him. Malfoy was nowhere to be seen, but Harry thought he might be hovering on the stairs, out of sight. He refrained from rolling his eyes. Someday, he would get to see and talk to both of them at once, but he knew better than to press it right now.
“Not Hermione,” he said. “And the others know how valuable I am. They just have to scold me to make themselves feel better, really.”
Snape shifted his weight and then let it fall against the doorway again as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “There remains the matter of whoever cast the curse against our shop in the first place.”
Harry nodded. “Had you had any recent quarrels? I know they asked you that in the interrogations, but you had every reason to conceal the truth there,” he added, when Snape’s stare sharpened. “They were acting like berks.”
Snape paused, then tilted his head. “No. We told the truth, because the political consequences for us would be graver if we lied.” Harry nodded acknowledgment of the point, and Snape continued. “Vengeance from the war, perhaps. That is always the motive, is it not, when someone destroys someone else’s life years later?”
His voice was a worn-down, bitter thing. Harry wished he could hear him laugh again the way he had in the rubble pile. He stood up and moved forwards. “Are the beds going to work?” he asked. “I know they’re dusty, but the Cleaning Charms ought to remedy that.”
“You interceded for us to have our wands,” Snape said, showing no interest in moving and letting him out of the bedroom.
“Well, of course I did,” Harry said, a little irritated that he could see the corridor over Snape’s shoulder but couldn’t get there. He stared towards it, wondering if he could see Malfoy there and make him into an ally by secret signals with his eyebrows, but it didn’t seem likely. “You think I want to do everything around the house for you? I’ll have to be gone a large part of the day anyway, and it would be tiresome if you couldn’t clean up or fetch things down from shelves or move heavy cauldrons around without firecalling me.”
Snape blinked. Perhaps he had expected to hear that Harry had done it out of the pure goodness of his heart and had no ulterior motive, Harry thought. People usually did, when they looked at Harry that way.
“You would trust us not to cast a curse at your back,” Snape said, when some moments had passed and apparently his astonishment hadn’t. Harry tried edging a step forwards under the hope that sheer, pure revulsion on Snape’s part would allow Harry to get by, but this was his day to decide to imitate a pillar. “There are few Aurors who can say that.”
“There are few Aurors who got saved by you again and again when they were kids, and saved by Malfoy during the war,” Harry answered.
Something in the back of Snape’s expression eased one way, tightened another. Harry was starting to think he would never understand him. “So,” Snape said, when a beat of silence had passed and Harry was about to resort to waving his hand up and down in front of his eyes. “This is about life-debts? You trust us because we owe you?” He paused again, then added, “But you also saved Draco’s life during the war, canceling that debt. And one could argue that you have already repaid me tenfold in testifying during my trial and winning my freedom.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m all for praise,” he said. “Natural praise, good praise, everyone likes to be told how well they’ve done. But I don’t like being praised for something I didn’t do. You know it was Dumbledore’s memories that really convinced the Wizengamot to give you a chance, not me.”
Snape gave him another long look that Harry didn’t understand, so calculating that he wondered he didn’t see actual numbers dancing in his eyes, and then moved backwards a step. “So there is no debt between us as you understand it,” he murmured as Harry brushed past him.
“No,” Harry said, smiling at him, relieved to find that he grasped it. “Exactly. There’s no reason to have a debt when you’ve done so many things for me and I’ve done so many things for you.”
“Then why rescue us?” Snape asked softly. “Why invite us to live here? Why give us our wands?”
“I understand that this might be a little foreign to you,” Harry said, putting his hand on the railing at the top of the stairs, “but some people do things just because they want to.”
Snape’s expression closed. Harry felt a twinge. Snape might be thinking of all the things he’d wanted to do and never got to, thanks to his lack of choices.
But if he was, he probably wouldn’t thank Harry for noticing that, either. Harry turned and went down the stairs, Snape’s eyes on his back as heavy as a yoke.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Snape/Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, sex, flangst, a complete disregarding of the epilogue.
Wordcount: 18.600
Summary: Harry rescues Snape and Malfoy from a cave-in that seems like a deliberate assassination attempt. He saves people all the time. But Malfoy and Snape don’t get saved all the time…and debts, to a Slytherin, always need repayment.
Author’s Note: I’m writing this fic for
eelegantlyeevil, who made a very generous donation for helpsomalia and asked for a threesome fic. Despite what the summary may look like, this is actually a pretty light and humorous story in the end. EE, I hope you enjoy.The New-Minted Coin of the Soul
Harry rounded the corner at a speed that made the buildings around him flash in front of his eyes, chanting under his breath, “Adminiculor, adminiculor, adminiculor,” until the sound of the incantation blurred in his ears to join the blurring buildings in his sight. He leaped over a broken block of rubble, dodged around what had been the wall of a small shop at the far end of Diagon Alley until a moment ago, and bumped—
Straight into an unyielding row of Auror backs, as it turned out. Infuriatingly, most of them were taller than he was. Harry reached up and rapped on the nearest, and when the man stirred to look at him, snapped, “I’m trying to get through here. If you’re not going to help, move aside.”
The man stared at him, and then a few other Aurors turned to look at him. Harry smiled when he recognized the one on the left, Auror Stacey Inchbeck. “If you can lend your strength to mine, Auror Inchbeck,” he began, “then I think we can keep the building from falling inwards, and that will mean we’re all the more likely to spare the Potions masters’ lives—”
“Do you know how unstable that building is?” Inchbeck asked, not bothering to smile back or do anything to show that she was glad to see him.
“I have some idea, yes,” Harry said, and elbowed her in the ribs where he happened to know that she’d taken a particularly bad injury in a training session the other day. As she groaned and slumped faintly to the side, he shook his head and rushed past. “Considering that I’ve been chanting spells halfway up the street so that it would stay in place,” he added over his shoulder, and whirled to study the collapsed building again so he could find the best way in.
This time, it was Deputy Head Auror Barran who moved forwards to confront him. Harry rolled his eyes. Barran was the one who kept seeing assassination plots to get rid of the Chosen One (and why did they still use that name? Didn’t they realize who had made it up in the first place?) in every shadow. And Harry knew they weren’t. Not in every shadow. There had only been two in the last month, not five as Barran had insisted. And Harry had escaped one and foiled the other before the Aurors assigned to the case could even start their investigation. When it came to taking care of himself, Harry was an expert.
“You can’t go in there, sir,” Barran said.
Harry ground his teeth. You’re the one who merits a “sir,” he wanted to say. I don’t have any rank compared to you. I’m one of the younger Aurors, the crazy risk-taker, the one who’s such a liability to a partner’s safety in the field that you have me behind a desk most of the time.
“Why not?” he asked, and then saw a piece of what might have been the first floor shifting to fall on the rest. “Adminiculor,” he whispered again, flicking his wand out, and the sliding piece froze in place as the magic conjured an invisible support beneath it. Harry relaxed a fraction. Something had struck the base of the building, which meant it had first collapsed and then started sliding, and he thought his spells had preserved pockets of air and safety beneath. But he wouldn’t know for sure until he got in there. He started to pick his way forwards, avoiding powdery white grit that had been stones until a few minutes ago.
Barran seized his shoulder. Harry swung around and kicked him in the groin, then blinked as he realized the man was now lying on the ground. He shrugged.
“Don’t grab someone you helped train defensive instincts into,” he told Barran, and then picked his way further forwards. Someone shouted behind him, and someone else cast a Stunner, followed by a Body-Bind, but they slammed against the Shield Charm that Harry’d had the foresight to wrap around himself. He wondered why everyone in the Aurors didn’t learn to cast Protego nonverbally. It would save tremendous amounts of time, and save him feeling quite so much like a freak every time he had to use it.
He knew why they wanted to keep him out of it, of course. It wouldn’t look good if Harry Potter died in there.
And neither would it be good if Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy died because someone blew up their Potions shop. But Harry was the only one in the immediate vicinity who held that opinion. Most people thought Snape had already cheated death once, carrying that bezoar around in his pocket the way he did, and that both of them had cheated Azkaban. Their lives weren’t a priority.
That’s too fucking bad, Harry thought, and bent down so that he could slide determinedly forwards through the clutching bits of stone on the edges of what had been the door. Because they are to me.
Beyond the door, there was a huge mass of rubble that Harry had to pause and study. His support spells were propping some of it, but other pieces lay where they had fallen.
Yes, it had been a curse that hit the ground floor. It came in through the door—no, a window, Harry thought, a vulnerable place that had been completely destroyed. Too much of the door still stood for it to have been the point of entry. And then the curse had reverberated up as well as down, which was one reason that Snape and Malfoy might still be alive. The curse had burned and shook as it rose, which meant there was less shop and flats above it, less to fall on the two men.
Harry gritted his teeth. They might be dead. You should at least find out before you try to go further.
He nodded as he leaned down and traced his wand across the floor in front of him, creating a looping pattern like half a Celtic knot. He was smart about things like this, unlike what his superiors believed, and he wouldn’t risk his own life unnecessarily. The problem was that they thought no one should risk their lives at all, as if Snape and Malfoy had chosen to be in danger and despised by more than half the wizarding world after their trials, and Harry disagreed with them.
He had the power to make his disagreement a problem for the Ministry. Not a whole lot of people did, but that wouldn’t stop Harry from doing what he could.
The pattern glowered where he traced it, and when Harry quietly spoke the incantation, it glowed blue for a moment. Then two traces shot away from it. They returned quietly, and made the knot glow again before it faded.
Harry closed his eyes. Those tracers meant that there were people in the building still alive. Thank God, he thought, and his eyes and throat burned for a moment with emotions he would have found it difficult to acknowledge out loud.
He stood and made his way with quick smoothness around the edge of that massive mound of rubble, using another support spell when it creaked above him. The tracers had darted straight into the mound, which meant Snape and Malfoy were probably under it. Too bad that Harry wasn’t made of pure light and power like the spell, to be able to get to where they would need him.
Then he paused, and smiled. Or it would be too bad, if I didn’t have something that made me able to pass through it.
He clasped a fist to his heart and began to whisper the spell, ignoring it when the building behind him shuddered a little. That would be the Aurors gradually coming in, but their own safety procedures would force them to wait for a time, to tread carefully, and their reluctance to save the lives of two accused Death Eaters would hold them back for long enough that he could do the spell without being disturbed.
It wasn’t that the spell was illegal, exactly, and it wasn’t Dark Arts. But it was risky, and experimental, and the spellcrafters who had come up with it had told Harry not to use it unless he absolutely had to.
Well, now he had to.
The world around him seemed to shudder as though it was a giant bell and someone had struck it, and then Harry’s body was melting, dissipating, shuddering and spreading out. He found that he had eyes everywhere, and he could see up and down and to the side, behind him where the Aurors were, in front of him in small cracks between the rubble. He saw Snape leaning against what looked like the remnants of a stable wall, the rock sagging and shifting above him, while Malfoy crouched near him, one hand on his shoulder. Both their mouths and eyes were shut. They might have given up already, Harry thought in mild indignation, as if rescue was never coming.
Then he thought of the Aurors, and sighed. They couldn’t know rescue was coming, which meant he couldn’t blame them for their reaction.
Too bad. Blaming them for their reactions used to be so much fun.
He melted and flashed and flowed forwards, becoming the air, becoming the light, and estimated the space in the little pocket where Snape and Malfoy crouched. He didn’t know if he could manifest right next to them. But there was another little pocket on the other side of the wall from them, where his support spells had kept the debris from raining down, and where a man like him could form if he was crouched down.
He blew into it, formed back into himself, took a moment to recover his breath, cast another spell that would keep the air circulating through the tiny cracks in the mound and mean that Snape and Malfoy would have enough to breathe, and then cast a Sonorus Charm on his voice. “Hello?” he called.
He could hear the sudden hiss, and then the equally sudden calm, that came from the little pocket next door. Malfoy had probably recognized his voice, and then tried to conserve the precious air. Harry smiled. He opened his mouth to tell them that they were fine as far as that went, but Malfoy spoke before he could, his voice trembling.
“Potter? You—you’re here?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “The rubble created another air pocket next to you, and I got into it. I’ve used a few spells to support the rubble above you, and you’re going to have all the air you can use thanks to another one. You’re going to be alive and fine. I’ll cast some more support spells, and then I’ll use another that’ll tell people where we are. They ought to bring some powerful Unspeakable artifact that can lift this off us.”
“Why did you,” Malfoy said, and swallowed.
Harry understood the question. “They might not have come in after you until the building finally collapsed,” he said, and let his anger color his voice. It probably wouldn’t matter to Snape and Malfoy what he thought of them, but if it did, let them know that there was one Auror who thought this was unjust. “But they’ll have no choice about rescuing Harry Potter.”
Silence, except for a brief shifting noise that might have been Malfoy playing with a bit of wood. “Thank you,” he said at last. His voice was stiff and strained and unfamiliar.
Harry laughed. “No need to say it, if it bothers you that much,” he said, and began to chant the support spell again, visualizing the pile as he had seen it in the moments when he was air and spread all through it. Shift a window there, adjust a group of stones into an unconventional pillar here, add a column of solidified air on this side…
“Is Snape all right?” he added when he was done with that portion of the work. “I haven’t heard him say anything yet.”
“He’s—going to be fine,” Malfoy said, and his voice seemed to tilt downwards, all the emphasis on the “going.” “But ever since he was in the cells, he doesn’t like closed-in spaces.” Another shifting noise.
And I’d bet you don’t, either, but you can’t admit it, Harry thought. Well, that was fine. He wasn’t all that fond of small spaces himself, after spending half his childhood in a cupboard.
“Did I ever tell you about the time that I turned around and punched my Dramatic Dueling instructor in the nose?” he asked conversationally.
There was a noise, this time, that might have been someone choking on air. “Of course not,” Malfoy said, in an attempt to be on his dignity. “We didn’t have contact by the time that you went into Auror training.”
“I did,” Harry said, disregarding that last. He cast the spell that would tell everyone where they were, a steady yellow glow that encompassed both their “rooms” and then crept out of the pile. Standard Ministry distress spell, and with any luck, they would have a few Aurors among the idiots out there who weren’t too stupid to know what it meant. “He had crept up behind me, after he’d Disarmed my partner. That was Dramatic Dueling, you know, we were meant to ‘act’ in pairs. Someone who came up that name overestimated their sense of humor. They thought they had one.”
A deeper noise this time, one that might be someone with a hooked nose clearing his throat. Harry grinned and sat back against the sturdiest wall of his pocket, one that was made of what looked like mostly collapsed flooring, with here and there a fleck of what was probably shattered glass in the middle of it.
“I didn’t know exactly what had happened to my partner. This was all taking place in the middle of a dark room, where they train the Aurors with illusions to make us think we’re in the middle of a battlefield at the time. I reckon real battlefields cost too much.” This time, what was probably a snort from Malfoy. “He thought he’d put his wand to my back and I would surrender, the way I was supposed to when I felt something there.
“But it was dark, and I was already keyed-up.” And old memories of being bullied by Dudley and his gang on Privet Drive after nightfall had come crowding to the forefront of his mind, but he knew there was a limit to how much about his personal life Snape and Malfoy would be interested in. “When I felt the wand touch the middle of my back, no way was I going to put up with that shit. I whirled around and lashed out, and got him square in the middle of his nose. He yelled, and I recognized his voice, and knew who it was. I Disarmed him and won the game. He was too busy cradling his broken nose to object, really.”
Some more rustles, and then Snape said, voice like a rusty hinge, “A most amusing story, Potter. But I can hear the creaking of the building settling. How do you intend to keep the ceiling from falling on top of us?”
“Oh, that,” Harry said, with a glance upwards. He knew that the ceiling wouldn’t care about his annoyance, but he showed it anyway, because it was hard to avoid it. “I’d thought my support spells would have taken care of that—”
“Obviously not.” Snape’s voice had a breathiness to it that worried Harry. He could hear Malfoy shifting around, probably to quietly touch Snape and hopefully keep him sane, but he couldn’t count on that.
“Well, give me a moment,” Harry said, and then concentrated hard enough that he could feel his heartbeat slow with the force of the attention his body was giving to other things. “Cellae fortes!”
The world around him seemed to tremble, and Harry slumped over, glad he was already sitting down, as the magic ran out of him. This many spells in one day took a lot out of him, though not as much as it would have for one of his many competitors among the Aurors. There were times that it was good to be this powerful.
The walls around him softened and bulged inwards, and he heard Malfoy give a half-scream. Harry smiled, and reminded himself not to tease the git about that later. He had assumed they would recognize the spell, but it was a rather specialized one, and if they spent all their time with potions, probably not.
“It’s all right,” he said, as the floor beneath him turned to smooth wood, as the crumbling walls became sturdy stone ones, as the air above him vanished into a neat plasterwork ceiling. “I’m creating a pair of rooms that will hold up against the weight. But people can break into them from the outside, so they’ll see us when they dig into the pile. And there are windows,” he added, as flashes of green and blue and pink from a sunset bloomed in the walls. “I hope that might help with the claustrophobia.”
Silence this time. Harry got comfortable on the wooden floor, and wished for a moment that he had thought to conjure chairs. But he couldn’t afford the expenditure of magical energy right now, and he would not waste any on a Cushioning Charm, either. He leaned his forehead on his knees and closed his eyes.
“Potter.”
Harry popped an eye open again. Snape. Of course it was. He would interrupt just when Harry was trying to nap. “Yeah.”
Snape’s disdain for his diction coated the words he spoke next even if he didn’t say anything directly about it. “You will have to know—this is not enough. Even with the windows,” he added, in what he probably imagined was a humorous, joking tone. Harry had never heard anything more out of place, even with the former Death Eaters that the Ministry sometimes invited to their functions to celebrate the defeat of Voldemort.
“All right,” Harry said, and chose the first funny story that he could feel bobbing at the surface of his mind. “You ought to appreciate this. Did you know Ron and Hermione are married and having kids now?”
Malfoy gagged. Harry grinned. He thought it interesting he could tell their voices apart even when they weren’t speaking words, and when he hadn’t heard them in years.
“Yes, imagine it all you like,” he said. “But the kids are a lot cuter than you would imagine. Red hair and freckles and clever little hands, into everything. Well, George sometimes dates these really unsuitable girls, you know, because he’s always looking for someone with a sense of humor, after—well, after Fred. But sometimes the sense of humor is nasty, and he doesn’t see that as long as they’re nice to him. Well, he brought one over to Ron and Hermione’s house one time just after Rose had turned two.
“Let’s call this girl—Peony. That’s not in any way her real name,” Harry added, thickening his voice, and heard Snape snort this time. It sounded like a snort of amusement, even. Harry smiled, leaned against a wall, and closed his eyes, the better to envision the scene in his story. “And her real surname isn’t Parkinson. Not in any way, or shape, or form. Not even close to it in the Floo directory.”
Silence, except for breathing. Harry reckoned that was as good as he would get for right now, and plunged on. “Peony—not her real name, remember— kept saying over and over again how much she loved children, so George thought the visit would be a good idea. He didn’t count on her only having been around properly-brought-up, as she would say, pure-blood children. So they stepped into Ron and Hermione’s house, and found screaming chaos, because Hugo had a cold and Rose was running around and getting into everything, and Hermione was at work, and Ron had been injured recently and couldn’t help with the kids as much as he usually did.”
“It seems,” Malfoy said, sounding exactly like one of the “helpful” witnesses Harry sometimes got who wanted to correct what they saw as inconsistencies in other people’s testimony, “that Weasel—Weasley would have called on his mother for help.”
“Ron’s proud that way,” Harry said, rolling his eyes even though they were closed and no one was there to see it. If you didn’t roll your eyes like that, sometimes, he had discovered, you were letting your standards slip, and soon you would be polite and discerning in public and everything. “He doesn’t want to let on that he can’t handle a problem. But he really can’t handle Rose and Hugo sometimes, and it would have been smarter for him to admit that instead of insist it isn’t a problem. I think Mrs. Weasley likes it, though,” he added. “Revenge for all those days she was trying to cope with seven kids.”
Not seven, now. Only six. But the grief for Fred was an old grief, and Harry shook himself out of it when Snape said, “The story, Potter.”
“Oh, right,” Harry said. “So George and Peony came in the door, and Ron promptly recruited them to catch Rose while he tried to make Hugo feel better. Peony walked over to Rose with her hand out, saying all these simpering sugary things—well, George didn’t describe them that way when he told me the story, but I know what they must have been. ‘Put the toy down and come back here, sweetheart. Don’t you want to be a little lady?’ That would have been about the best of it.”
His words fell into what at least seemed like a listening silence, so Harry went ahead and continued with the story. “Well, Rose told Peony she didn’t want to be a little lady and hit Peony on the hand with her doll. That broke one of Peony’s nails. She pulled back with a sob and left George to catch Rose.
“George was scolding Rose all the time, you know, asking how she felt about hitting her future aunt, and what she would do if one of her cousins hit her mum. Rose said she’d hit them back, and I think you could feel the arctic wind that swept in and made Peony’s face freeze. She wasn’t thinking seriously about marrying George, I don’t think, but that assumption he made that of course they would have children—children who played with Rose—knocked her away from any thought of it.
“So George tried to get Rose settled with some biscuits, and Peony cast a spell that made the biscuits vanish from her hand the moment she opened her mouth.”
“Pansy’s cousin always was a little bitch,” Malfoy muttered.
Harry hummed in agreement. He had only met Peony once, and she had been charming enough to him, since he was the beloved and all-powerful Harry Potter, but he had felt the falseness in her and never particularly wanted to see her again. “Well. George didn’t see anything wrong; he just thought Rose was eating all the biscuits too fast and wanting more. He refused to give her any, no matter how much she cried. But Rose knew what Peony had really done—I think Peony was stupid enough to tell her, too—and she was plotting revenge.
“I don’t know if she used accidental magic or just her hands, but the next time George changed Hugo’s nappy, Rose got hold of the used one and draped it across Peony’s face.”
There was silence, and Harry frowned. He thought that story was hilarious, himself, or at least he had the first time he had heard it. And he still had to conceal snickers when he was around Ron or Hermione and one of them decided to be humiliated that Rose had done such a thing. What—
Then he heard the quiet, rasping laughter from the other room, as though someone had taught a raven the meaning of humor, and relaxed.
“And the child was not punished for this?” Snape asked, when the laughter had died and Harry thought he could feel their tension rising again like a bubble, pressing against the walls and floors around them.
Harry snorted. “Not when everyone was more concerned with Peony and the shit dripping down her face.” Malfoy gave a little gasp, as though he had never imagined that Harry would actually say the word “shit,” and Harry rolled his eyes. There’s a lot more where that came from, Malfoy. “Then they figured out what had happened, and while Peony didn’t admit she’d been taking the biscuits away from Rose, it was easy enough to cast Priori Incantatem on her wand and find the spell. George decided he didn’t want to marry her after that, and we were saved from such an embarrassment as a sister-in-law who would take sweets away from children to make her point.”
“Too bad that they could not save themselves from the embarrassment of a son-in-law such as you,” Malfoy muttered.
“Oh, I quite agree,” Harry said cheerfully. “Ginny ended up marrying Michael Corner, and he has the same sense of humor I do and he’s an Auror, too. So she really didn’t trade up when she left me.”
There was some more silence, and Snape said, “Another story, perhaps.”
Harry nodded. His voice would get hoarse, but he thought he could risk a small charm that would moisten it, at least for long enough to keep speaking. “All right, then I’ll tell you about the time the Head Auror left me alone in his office for five minutes and I managed to trash the place…”
*
Five minutes into Harry’s eleventh or twelfth story, the roof above him creaked. He could feel Snape’s flinch through the wall, and said calmly, looking up, “No ordinary magic could make the walls creak that way, and they’re stable against the rubble, I told you. I think our rescue party has arrived.”
The ceiling of his artificial room creaked again, then split open in the next instant. Harry stood up and waved. He heard someone curse, and grinned, recognizing Ron’s voice. “Down here!” he called. “Snape and Malfoy are in the next room over. You’ll need more seats than that,” he added, spotting a single chair being lowered down on the end of a rope of spidersilk.
“What?” Ron asked, his voice breathless. Harry didn’t think all that came from the amount of magic it was taking to lower the chair and keep the rope from tangling around stones and shattered pieces of wood. “They’re alive?”
“Your lack of faith in me is flattering,” Harry drawled. “Yes, of course. I performed the stabilization spells before I entered the building.” He reached up and yanked on the rope, then nodded. “And you ought to send this over to their room first, not mine,” he added, turning the rope so that the chair aimed at the wall of debris between their two pockets. “Add more rope onto the top. I’ll direct it in. Potions master Snape—” it was hard to remember, sometimes, that that was the proper address, rather than Professor “—needs to get out of here before the rest of us. Unless you’re wounded, Potions master Malfoy?” he added, raising his voice. Of course they hadn’t said anything, but they were unlikely to when they were speaking to a Gryffindor Auror, were they?
Silence, and then Malfoy said, “No. Both of us have only bruises and minor cuts. And, Potter.”
He said nothing, and Harry waited a second, then asked, “What?”
“Thank you.” It was a whisper, but Harry heard it because he was listening for it. He shook his head. Don’t want to admit their wounds and don’t want to say thanks. Such Slytherins. At least I got over the first problem a while ago and never had the second. Maybe that’s how I convinced the Hat.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Now, stand back. I’m going to have to shift the wall the separates us, and I don’t want it to fall down on you.”
“You cannot do such a thing,” Snape said. His voice sounded more normal than it had so far, but it still had that sneer Harry knew so well and had to grin at hearing again. “The mound will fall down when you move it.”
“No, it won’t,” Harry said patiently. “Because I’m going to do something that I couldn’t do beforehand without prepared Aurors around, and which I can do now. All you have to do is stand back.”
A muffled breath of a snort, but they moved. Harry stepped back in turn and called up the rope to Ron, “Do you have more chairs ready? Have you added more spidersilk to the top of this rope?”
“Yes and yes,” Ron called. His voice had acquired a slight tremor. “Harry, you better not—”
“How many Aurors do you have with you?” Harry interrupted. “Any trainees?”
“Twenty.” Harry snorted into his hand. Of course, twenty for the famous Harry Potter. Then again, he had counted on that when he jumped in here. “And no trainees. Harry, we discussed this when that Muggle bank collapsed, you can’t—”
“Ron?” Harry asked, grinning madly into the darkness.
“Yes?” Ron sounded like he had the faintest shadow of a hint of a hope that he might persuade Harry not to do anything reckless.
“Catch!” Harry yelled, and then swung around to face the wall and held his wand up. “Wingardium Leviosa!”
The illusion he had created of the two rooms shuddered, but held—all except the wall that faced him, the illusory wooden wall that in reality concealed a partition of stone, glass, and worse things. It heaved, and then began to rise. Harry channeled more magic through his wand, remembering, as his lungs shuddered and his vision began to black out, the instructions that Professor Flitwick had squeaked at them in class.
Swish and flick. Swish and flick. He did it, again and again.
The illusion faded completely—although enough of it would remain in the small pocket where Snape and Malfoy were trapped that they could still feel they were looking through windows into the open air—and Harry saw the rubble began to flow towards him. He stepped back, waving his wand, and heard his own breathing as if from a distance, desperate, exhausted, panicked breaths. He shrugged a little. That couldn’t be helped, could it? He was accomplishing this, and he would do it if it killed him.
He didn’t think it would kill him. But it was hard for anyone to be completely sure, of course.
The rubble shuddered and flowed, and then flowed backwards. Harry nodded. Good. That was the way he had meant it to go in the first place. The rubble was now pressing against the pile that lay over the top of the pocket where Snape and Malfoy were trapped, wanting to rise, but held down by the collapsed floors above it.
Not for long.
Then it happened, just as Harry had to grab the chair on the end of the rope for fear of passing out. The enormous part of the pile that had been above Snape and Malfoy’s air pocket lifted completely, rotating in the air like a floating island. Harry blew out his breath, but didn’t dare relax his control for a moment, blinking as he was in the sudden flow of light through the hole he’d created in the wall between them. He waited, and spun it, and wavered an inch from collapse, until he felt the Aurors’ support spells move in and catch the mound of rubble, fifteen or sixteen Aurors taking the burden from him. More rubble flowed away and down, and he could see the street.
Then he ran forwards and out through the new rent in the whole pile, out from under the debris that remained behind him, and past the startled faces of Snape and Malfoy, pulling at their arms when they wouldn’t move fast enough. He sprawled in the street outside, swearing and feeling his magic ready to drain out of him like blood from a wound.
“Harry,” Ron wailed from some distant place. “You implied that they’d be taking the chair up!”
“Yeah, well, I came up with a better plan,” Harry yelled back, and then rolled over, stood up, and steadied himself against the side of one of the still-standing shops, while the Aurors levitating the huge mass of rubble floated it back to the rest of the pile and set about Vanishing things now that they knew no one living was left inside. Harry nodded to Snape and Malfoy. “I’m sorry about your shop.”
They both looked at him without responding. Malfoy was still the shorter of the two, Harry noted, but not by much; it looked as though all the energy he’d had to tamp down during the two years when he was living under Voldemort’s rule had gone into growth. Both of them wore Potions masters’ robes, dark green or blue—Harry found it hard to tell which when he was still blinking from the sunlight—with black borders. Their hands were immaculately neat. Harry knew it was because they didn’t want dirt to come into contact with the potions.
Snape never seemed to care about that when he was at Hogwarts. But then, he’d probably used Cleaning Charms on his hands when he had to and not cared the rest of the time. He hadn’t cared about a lot, Harry thought, surrounded by students he hated and doing a job he despised just to stay alive.
Snape turned his head now and stared back at the ruined shop. Malfoy leaned a hand on his shoulder and then leaned against him. Harry had the feeling he was witnessing something he shouldn’t have. He looked away slightly as he said, “Do you have a place you can go that will take you in? Do you need help finding a place to stay?”
“This was—our home,” Malfoy said, his voice limp, on the edge of the moment Harry had decided they weren’t going to answer. “I assume the Ministry will permit us to leave when they finish questioning us?”
Harry nodded. It was no use pretending the interrogations wouldn’t happen, although Snape and Malfoy would have less than no reason to destroy their own shop and home. But he wasn’t interested in that right now. “I meant, can I help you find a place to stay?”
“Of course not, Potter,” Snape said, and his voice was still that harsh blast Harry had heard when they were trapped. “How can you help? How can you possibly know what we require?”
“I know that you required me to speak to you when you were trapped,” Harry replied, and met his eyes this time. They were still venomous, still dark, but Harry had looked into plenty of pairs of eyes that were harder to meet, now. “I know you require sunlight and open spaces. It’s not much, but you might be able to find what you need in one of my houses.”
Malfoy took a single step forwards, one hand fluttering up. Harry wondered if he intended to touch Snape’s arm. If he did, he pulled his hand back before it connected, and looked at Harry with mute, pleading eyes.
Harry nodded against his will. “Follow me,” he said, taking the decision away from Snape because he knew what Malfoy feared, that Snape would never make it, and turned his back, walking up the street towards the Ministry’s nearest entrance as if he never doubted they would obey.
He heard the rustling sounds of argument for a moment, and then a single pair of boots scuttling along. It seemed to take half a small eternity before the next pair followed them.
Harry huffed out a breath and shook his head. Snape and Malfoy had lost their shop, their home, their livelihood. They needed more than he could give, in terms of recovering their pride, but what little Harry could offer was theirs, because they needed it and because he had the ability to offer it. Maybe there was something else he could give them too, though. Solitude, once they were settled in the small house at Godric’s Hollow. The Ministry would insist he stay with them, keep them under custody, but Harry saw no problem with moving his case files and a few clothes into one of the bedrooms and letting them have the rest of the house. Space. Room. Quiet. Neatness. There was a cellar Harry would never use, filled with dust and air, that they could take over and turn into a potions lab.
The visions shone in front of his eyes the way his visions through the windows of the illusory rooms had. Harry smiled, and managed to keep the smile when he met Barran, who had questions, and demands, and orders, and other things that Harry normally had no time for. But Barran would make trouble for Snape and Malfoy if Harry didn’t go along with him, so he did.
Then there was Ron, but Harry kept his monologue short by reciting it along with him, down to the folded arms and the yelling about how Harry was an adult and not a schoolboy now, with real responsibilities, a phrase Ron had picked up from Hermione. Ron quit while he still had some normal color left in his face, and Harry and Malfoy and Snape and all the rest of them went to the Ministry.
*
Harry sighed as he stepped into the small house and spent a moment rolling his shoulders back and down, ignoring the way Snape and Malfoy paused behind him as if they thought he would spread wings that would take up the remaining space in the entrance hall. Three interrogations, one request for interviews, and seven rows later, he had permission to give two innocent men shelter in one of his own homes. The Ministry, in the person of Deputy Head Auror Barran, had delivered that permission looking down its nose, in an austere tone, but Harry knew it was sincere. He’d fought hard enough for it.
“Where do we sleep?” Malfoy was standing between Harry and Snape when Harry glanced back at him, one hand outstretched as if he thought he would have to keep Snape from charging. Harry nodded in recognition. Malfoy was in exactly the same position Harry had sometimes found himself when Ron and Hermione argued, ambassador between two hostile countries. Harry considered conjuring a white flag to wave, but he knew that would irritate Snape, because nothing existed that didn’t irritate Snape.
“There are bedrooms upstairs,” Harry said. “Do you want one, or two?”
Malfoy stared at him. Behind him, Snape did the same thing, except Harry wasn’t accustomed to applying a mundane word like “stare” to the drawing, quartering, flaying, and dissecting that Snape was trying to do with his gaze.
Harry rolled his eyes. “Not being able to count to two must be a handicap when you’re brewing any potion more complicated than a Boil Cure,” he said.
Snape surged forwards one step, and Malfoy stepped along in front of him, so that Harry had to retreat into the drawing room. Snape coughed, and the cough was the kind that told Harry he could indeed count, in this case every one of the half-moldy cobwebs that draped along the walls and door and clung to the wainscoting.
Harry cast a Cleaning Charm that banished most of the dust, and then a small beam of sunlight that fried the cobwebs. “Choose which rooms you like,” he said, and then turned and ducked into the kitchen. His owl, Spartacus, emphatically black and young and male and not like Hedwig in any other way, either, hopped up and down on his perch and hooted. Harry sat down and started writing out a long owl-order.
“What size clothes do you wear?” he yelled back at Snape and Malfoy, once he had written down orders for bread, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, scones, and several Muggle meals that could keep without a fridge.
Heavy footsteps made Harry turn around, prepared this time to encounter Snape without the buffer state of Malfoy in between. But it was Malfoy, who leaned on the doorframe and stared at Harry. Harry stared back, then crossed his eyes.
It had the effect he wanted, of making Malfoy curl his lip and then speak. “Why are you doing this, Potter? You’ve given us enough already. Our lives, a place to stay—”
“Both of them more trouble than clothes,” Harry pointed out. “And whatever perverted habits you may have got up to in that flat of yours, I don’t want you prancing around the house naked. Some of my neighbors have children.”
Malfoy stared at him again, as if the burning quality of silence in the kitchen could stifle Harry. Harry had had really impressive stiflers try to do that to him in the past, though, and he didn’t make it easy. He waited Malfoy out, and Malfoy finally looked away from him and mumbled sizes and colors and fabrics.
“Thank you,” Harry said, and started writing them down. “The rooms are furnished already, so you don’t have to worry about that. As for potions ingredients, I don’t trust myself to get you half of what you need. I’ll leave you parchment tomorrow, and those Galleons I took out of your Gringotts account, and you can decide what you need.”
“What Gringotts account?” Malfoy’s voice lashed out like a whip. “You think we have one? As if the goblins would open an account for a former Death Eater.”
“Goblins don’t care much about human politics unless it concerns the Sword of Gryffindor,” Harry said, and added a final flourish to the letter, before sealing it and holding it out to Spartacus. He bobbed his head three times before soaring out the window. Harry shook his head. He found Spartacus tiring enough to get along with. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he had Pig. “And they’ll open an account there if I ask them to. Which I did. Which I then put Galleons into, and took Galleons out of. Which Galleons are sitting in a back room in a cloth sack.”
“You did that in the midst of the interrogations.” Snape didn’t deign to move into the kitchen, but that didn’t keep his voice from reaching Harry.
“They didn’t prevent me from writing,” Harry said, leaning back and grinning at Malfoy and the space that held an invisible Snape. “Not my fault if they thought I was taking notes.”
Malfoy was still for a moment, and Harry wondered if Snape had prodded him in the back. Then Malfoy said, “Will your inattention cause problems for us?”
“I hope not,” Harry said, blinking. That it could have had not occurred to him. “After all, if I forget to order something for you or give you something that you want, then you only have to tell me. And my superiors never pay attention to the notes I take or the little things I do unless it interferes with me giving them results.”
Snape made a single, harshly suppressed noise. Harry thought of offering to buy him a crow so he could practice what was obviously his native language, but refrained.
“I still wish to know,” Malfoy said, “why you arranged a Gringotts account for us, if it is all your own money in the first place.”
“And I bet Snape does, too,” Harry said, raising his voice and leaning sideways. That didn’t let him catch a glimpse of Snape, but he hadn’t hoped for one so much as the expression on Malfoy’s face, which said he had no notion why Harry was doing something so stupid. Harry leaned back in his chair and grinned at Malfoy. “I want you to have money that you can consider your own, which won’t draw from my main account. Spend it as you need to. You should only need to talk to me about it if it’s not enough.”
Malfoy shook his head. “We do not want your charity.”
“But you need it,” Harry said quietly. “And I don’t want to humiliate you. This way, if you have your own money and you can do what you want with it instead of having to apply to me for it, then you can preserve at least some of your independence. I know it’s a pretense, but if you can obtain the ingredients you need and start brewing potions again, it won’t be a pretense for very long.”
Malfoy closed his eyes and bowed his head. “We do not deserve this,” he whispered. “What did we do that you would want to accomplish something like this for us?”
“What didn’t you do?” Harry asked, shaking his head. “Both of you saved my life during the war, and made my victory possible. And I happen to have liked defeating You-Know-Who and living after that, thank you.” He grinned at Malfoy. “Allow me to return a tiny portion of the joy that informs my every day in this world, please.”
“You did not speak his name,” said the hidden Snape.
“I don’t want to watch you flinch,” Harry said.
Malfoy, incredibly, flinched anyway, bowing his head further so that his hair shielded his face completely. Harry held back a sigh. Malfoy was more sensitive than he had thought, and God knew what a sigh would do to him.
“All right,” he said, when a few minutes had passed and neither Malfoy nor his imaginary friend seemed compelled to say anything. “The owl-orders should come in soon. In the meantime, do you mind if I make us some toast and eggs? Do you want tea? The food I have here is rather basic.” He turned around and began to remove the Preservation Charms from the cabinets along the walls of the kitchen.
“Potter.”
Harry nearly tripped over the chair turning back around. Snape had moved into sight and stood watching him with eyes that, yes, were as patient as a crow’s. Harry felt the high catch of his breath in his throat, and told himself not to be stupid. It was Snape, yes, but it was the Snape who had saved his life, and who had survived after all, and who hadn’t gone to Azkaban, and—
It was Snape.
For a few moments, he thought an invisible string stretched across the room, taut and vibrating hard enough that it could snap and sting someone. Then Snape sighed and brought his head up, and his mouth had an expression that was not quite a smile, but some distant ancestor of one that might have left fossils behind in Snape’s skin.
“Thank you,” Snape said.
*
The owls started coming in before their simple meal was finished, along with owls from the Ministry. Harry rolled his eyes and took the three Howlers—one from Barran, one from the Head Auror, one from Hermione—upstairs so that they wouldn’t disturb Snape and Malfoy as they ate.
Barran’s was the shortest, just telling him that he was very disappointed with Harry for placing himself in danger. Harry rolled his eyes, put his fingers in his ears, and chanted, “Blah, blah, blah,” back at it until it blew up.
The Head Auror went on solemnly about consequences and how he couldn’t promise that Harry would always have a job in the Auror Department. Harry started reciting the long list of rescues, fundraising events, cases, interviews, sessions for the new trainees, and Ministry functions he’d been key to for the past year at it, and he thought the Howler ended early in the sheer rush to be away from him.
Hermione’s Howler was the worst, but also predictable. Harry sighed as he listened to her lecture him about what good would it do if he got himself buried in the building and killed along with Malfoy and Snape, did he realize that someone had to fight for the rights of Slytherins in the Ministry?, he couldn’t have known they were still alive, using the spell that turned him into air had been stupid and dangerous, and don’t bother denying it, she knew that was what he had done, based on Ron’s description.
When the Howler wound down, Harry shook his head and reached for ink and parchment. His bedroom here was spare, but functional, with a desk, a chair, a fully-made bed, and a wardrobe with a few sets of Auror uniforms. He had to write back, but he paused to think about the right words.
“They are likely to make political trouble for you?”
Harry started and turned towards the door. Snape stood there, watching him. Malfoy was nowhere to be seen, but Harry thought he might be hovering on the stairs, out of sight. He refrained from rolling his eyes. Someday, he would get to see and talk to both of them at once, but he knew better than to press it right now.
“Not Hermione,” he said. “And the others know how valuable I am. They just have to scold me to make themselves feel better, really.”
Snape shifted his weight and then let it fall against the doorway again as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “There remains the matter of whoever cast the curse against our shop in the first place.”
Harry nodded. “Had you had any recent quarrels? I know they asked you that in the interrogations, but you had every reason to conceal the truth there,” he added, when Snape’s stare sharpened. “They were acting like berks.”
Snape paused, then tilted his head. “No. We told the truth, because the political consequences for us would be graver if we lied.” Harry nodded acknowledgment of the point, and Snape continued. “Vengeance from the war, perhaps. That is always the motive, is it not, when someone destroys someone else’s life years later?”
His voice was a worn-down, bitter thing. Harry wished he could hear him laugh again the way he had in the rubble pile. He stood up and moved forwards. “Are the beds going to work?” he asked. “I know they’re dusty, but the Cleaning Charms ought to remedy that.”
“You interceded for us to have our wands,” Snape said, showing no interest in moving and letting him out of the bedroom.
“Well, of course I did,” Harry said, a little irritated that he could see the corridor over Snape’s shoulder but couldn’t get there. He stared towards it, wondering if he could see Malfoy there and make him into an ally by secret signals with his eyebrows, but it didn’t seem likely. “You think I want to do everything around the house for you? I’ll have to be gone a large part of the day anyway, and it would be tiresome if you couldn’t clean up or fetch things down from shelves or move heavy cauldrons around without firecalling me.”
Snape blinked. Perhaps he had expected to hear that Harry had done it out of the pure goodness of his heart and had no ulterior motive, Harry thought. People usually did, when they looked at Harry that way.
“You would trust us not to cast a curse at your back,” Snape said, when some moments had passed and apparently his astonishment hadn’t. Harry tried edging a step forwards under the hope that sheer, pure revulsion on Snape’s part would allow Harry to get by, but this was his day to decide to imitate a pillar. “There are few Aurors who can say that.”
“There are few Aurors who got saved by you again and again when they were kids, and saved by Malfoy during the war,” Harry answered.
Something in the back of Snape’s expression eased one way, tightened another. Harry was starting to think he would never understand him. “So,” Snape said, when a beat of silence had passed and Harry was about to resort to waving his hand up and down in front of his eyes. “This is about life-debts? You trust us because we owe you?” He paused again, then added, “But you also saved Draco’s life during the war, canceling that debt. And one could argue that you have already repaid me tenfold in testifying during my trial and winning my freedom.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m all for praise,” he said. “Natural praise, good praise, everyone likes to be told how well they’ve done. But I don’t like being praised for something I didn’t do. You know it was Dumbledore’s memories that really convinced the Wizengamot to give you a chance, not me.”
Snape gave him another long look that Harry didn’t understand, so calculating that he wondered he didn’t see actual numbers dancing in his eyes, and then moved backwards a step. “So there is no debt between us as you understand it,” he murmured as Harry brushed past him.
“No,” Harry said, smiling at him, relieved to find that he grasped it. “Exactly. There’s no reason to have a debt when you’ve done so many things for me and I’ve done so many things for you.”
“Then why rescue us?” Snape asked softly. “Why invite us to live here? Why give us our wands?”
“I understand that this might be a little foreign to you,” Harry said, putting his hand on the railing at the top of the stairs, “but some people do things just because they want to.”
Snape’s expression closed. Harry felt a twinge. Snape might be thinking of all the things he’d wanted to do and never got to, thanks to his lack of choices.
But if he was, he probably wouldn’t thank Harry for noticing that, either. Harry turned and went down the stairs, Snape’s eyes on his back as heavy as a yoke.
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