lomonaaeren

Chapter Forty-Seven.

Title: The Only True Lords (48/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual (very eventual) Harry/Draco, canon het pairings
Warnings: Angst, violence, suicidal thoughts (on Snape's part), AU of the end of DH
Rating: R
Summary: Harry ends up accidentally bonding himself as Lord to several Slytherins after the Battle of Hogwarts, including Snape and Draco Malfoy. It’s a long journey from putting his foot in it all the time to at least trying to be a good one.
Author’s Notes: The story’s title comes from a quote by the fantasy and science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”: “The Lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth: their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness.” I became interested in writing a story that would chronicle the transformation of Harry into one of those lords. This is going to be a fairly long story, and not all that fast-paced.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Forty-Eight—Struggle

Severus lifted his head at the knock on the door. He thought he would have felt at least a slight twinge in the bond if it was Potter out there, or any of the other vassals. Though now that he thought about it, the only twinge that he might have felt was from Draco; both Parkinson and Goyle were sleeping some of the effects of the day off, although Severus suspected it was Potter’s sense and not Mr. Goyle’s alone that had ordered him to bed.

That left the elder Malfoys, Potter’s ridiculous friends, or Mr. Zabini. And that they hadn’t started shouting through the door right away meant someone was out there who had a sense of propriety and respect left for Severus, which reduced the possibilities to one.

“Come in, Mr. Zabini,” Severus replied, and thought he heard a slight gasp before the door swung open and Mr. Zabini stepped into the room. He tried to repress the surge of satisfaction that came from that. He should not take such pride in his ability to still impress his Slytherin students. If he could not do more than that, he deserved to suffer.

Mr. Zabini’s eyes moved around the bedroom as if he thought Potter might be hiding in here. Severus sneered at the thought, and the sneer drew Zabini’s eyes back to his face.

“No one can overhear us?” Blaise whispered.

That sounded like it might precede a confession of weakness, and any true Slytherin would wish to keep unfamiliar ears from overhearing one of those. Severus nodded and sat up. “No one can,” he confirmed, when Blaise continued to watch him. “What did you wish to say? Is it about your mother?”

Blaise’s shoulders jerked, and he lowered his head. “I have to go to her,” he whispered. “She’s my only hope now.”

Severus restrained his immediate response—giving those had done him little good tonight—and considered the bowed dark head before he replied. “Well. Perhaps you should consider whether she would receive you.”

Blaise lifted his head, something as bright as hope in the backs of his eyes. “She misunderstood what I was doing. She’ll welcome me back once she realizes.”

“Will she?” Severus could restrain many things, and should have better than he had so far, but not his skepticism. It was for Blaise’s own good, he told himself. If he reached his mother—a large if, if he intended to travel with no wand and the Ministry hunting for him—she would most likely only cast him back again.

“She’ll understand.” Blaise glanced for a moment at his right arm, where the shield mark had been. “The—that bloody thing is gone. Don’t you think that’s going to matter to her?”

“I know not,” Severus admitted. He hadn’t known Blaise well enough in school to predict his every movement, the way he usually could with Draco and Mr. Goyle. Blaise had been closed off in a way that Severus had understood when he watched the boy interact with his mother. Abused children often did close off in that way, although Severus and Potter had chosen other methods.

And I do not wish to occupy my mind with Potter.

“Is she the sort to stand up to pressure from the Ministry?” Severus had to ask. “Or to lie low and not attract it in the first place?” Perhaps she would be willing to accept her wayward son back with some modification of his behavior, but Severus felt free to doubt that she would if it came with the Ministry bearing down on her.

“Well,” Blaise said, and crept even closer, and lowered his voice. Severus leaned in to listen.

He knew that he should have known the trick for what it was when Blaise’s hand darted out, sealing on his wand holster and pulling hard against it. Once a Slytherin, always a Slytherin, and he had seen that Blaise’s mother had raised him in ways that made him even more the typical Slytherin than most others.

Severus quashed the impulse to pull away at once, which would have meant that his stolen wand would slide out of its sheath and into Blaise’s hand. Instead, he twisted to the side, and brought up a fist with a memory pulling it along. He had very rarely had to struggle against someone else like this since the days of the Marauders.

Blaise was not experienced in this kind of fighting; Severus would be surprised if he was. His mother had the typical pure-blood valuation of magic over one’s hands, and she would have passed that particular disgraceful prejudice on to her son. His chin hit Severus’s doubled knuckles, and he collapsed.

Severus stood up, breathing faster than such short exercise warranted. But in this case, it was the speed of his mind and not his body that made it so. He stared at Blaise, and understood the situation as well as though he had Legilimized the boy.

Blaise wanted to go back to his mother. It would be nearly impossible on foot, and he would have little chance to steal a broom or a Portkey. With a wand, he could Apparate, and arrive there all the sooner for his groveling. And there was only one wand in the house.

He had never come here intending to ask for comfort, or listen to advice. He had only wanted to go back to what he knew.

He had not interfered in the trial intending to take revenge for what Potter had done to him, as Severus had thought was his major motive. Instead, he had wanted to do something that would make him look worthy and impressive in his mother’s eyes, when it was reported in the newspapers. Nothing had changed, despite the way Potter had released him from the bond at his own request. He was mired in the abuse he had suffered, and it would not change.

Severus thought that the second most pitiful thing he had ever heard.

But only the second, for the first was his own behavior—or what his own behavior might have been, if he had followed the boy’s example.

What was he doing, but behaving as he had always done? Nothing Potter did would satisfy him, not even the thing he had thought most would, the end of the bond and his connection to Potter. Potter had promised it, and Severus had thought the sensation of joy would flood him, joy and fierce pride, that he was his own man again.

But that had not happened, and it should have. Instead, Severus had felt nothing except the same bitter resentment against Potter that he always had when he had to give the Boy-Who-Lived nothing worse than a detention, and watch over him, and guard his life, and sacrifice his standing in the wizarding world and his own mentor in order to ensure Potter’s victory at the end of the war. As if the situation had never changed. But this bond was different than the one he had endured with the Dark Lord or Albus. This bond could be ended without causing someone’s death. Since Blaise had been freed, Severus knew that.

It was no pleasant thing to Severus, to find he had been laboring under self-delusion, and that the past could so constrain and channel his thoughts.

Of course, in some respects, Severus tried to persuade himself, while he had the feeling of standing at the back of a speeding ray of light that was opening up new prospects he did not wish to see, Potter was the same as his other masters. He did not hold back when it came to expressing his opinion of Severus. He had the power to command or condemn him. He hadn’t let him go at first, even though he had known through the bond, more intimately than the Dark Lord through his Mark, that Severus was in despair at the thought of being bound.

But once the first moments of suicidal despair were past, Severus thought he should have been acting rationally. He had convinced himself that he was, or at least that he was once he had established his emotional distance from the bond. His shields had to protect him against influence from the bond leaking through and controlling his thoughts.

He should have realized that things other than the bond might influence him.

Blaise stirred, and Severus drew his wand and crouched down with the tip against the hollow of Blaise’s throat. Blaise stared at him with large eyes that had gone larger with his own despair, and started to raise his hand.

This is what I am. What I was. As irrational, as determined to take all sorts of chances for the possibility that I might be released from the bond.

“I would not,” said Severus, in the sort of warning tone that his Slytherins had learned to respect.

And still Blaise made a grab at the wand, because apparently his irrationality had become actual stupidity. Severus Stunned him, and sat back on his heels, still contemplating the boy’s motionless body.

Severus had never needed many lessons. He had learned how to act around his father very early in life, so as to minimize the possibility of getting hurt. It didn’t always work, but it made many torments easier to bear than they might have been, and Severus could see how bad it could have been with his mother. And he had seen the same thing when he came to Hogwarts: what professors might be challenged, who would be less lenient, what House divisions meant and did not mean, how he could be friends with Lily and how he could not. Others pushed too far, and Severus learned from their mistakes. The only situation in which he had not been able to profit from the experience of other students was that with the Marauders, because they tortured no one else as they did him.

When the universe itself handed him a free example of what he could have become if he intended to pursue this new direction with the bond too far, Severus was not one to disdain it.

*

Harry opened his eyes to a shaft of late morning light working its way in through the dusty curtains, and frowned. He was amazed that Severus had let him sleep so long. He would have wanted to be freed from the bond early in the morning, surely.

Automatically, Harry reached through the bond to try and figure out how Severus felt about the bond, and then sighed in disgust. Right, he couldn’t. Severus was no longer bonded to him as strongly.

And Harry probably didn’t have the right to call him by his first name, anyway. Snape would probably have found it presumptuous.

Harry sat up and slid his feet into his battered trainers. At least the sleep had done well for his mind, and he would be better able to face up to the exhaustion that would follow ending the bond with Snape.

Someone knocked at the door, and Harry jerked in that direction before he thought about it, his hand flying to his right arm. The link with Snape wasn’t so weak as to forbid him knowing that he was standing right outside Harry’s door, right now.

Harry hesitated only for a second. He would want to wait to unbind Snape until he had some food in him, but there was no reason to make it worse by making Snape stand at the door. “Come in,” he called.

Snape opened the door and stepped inside, shutting it precisely behind him. Harry shifted his weight a little. Snape stood like he was about to curse Harry. When it came to a duel, Harry knew he couldn’t do much without a wand, but he hoped to give a convincing account of himself nonetheless.

Now, though, Snape simply stood there and scowled at Harry. Harry had no idea why, and he looked back in silence, until they seemed to pass Snape’s invisible tolerance limits. He turned away with a dismissive snort and sank down onto the bed, putting his head in his hands.

Harry stared at him, and reached after Snape’s emotions again. They were no clearer than ever, though. If this was a sign of Snape relenting and easing his stranglehold on the shields that cut off his part of the bond, Harry didn’t think he was going to do it soon. “What’s the matter?” he finally asked.

That made Snape lift his head and get to the answer, at least. Harry relaxed a little. Snape wouldn’t be Snape if he went around accepting Harry’s pity instead of rejecting it.

“Mr. Zabini came into my room and got close enough to me, with a sob story, that he could try to steal my wand.”

Harry gasped, and looked immediately for the wand at Snape’s side, although he thought he would have missed it when Snape came into the room if it was gone. Snape rolled his eyes and muttered something that sounded like, “I did say try,” as he drew the wand out a little and let Harry see his fingers resting firmly on the handle.

“Was he planning to use it to try and hurt someone?” Harry changed the last word at the last moment. He didn’t want to ask if Blaise was planning on hurting him. That would only make Snape think he was afraid.

“No,” said Snape. “At least, I cannot answer for what he would do if he had managed to gain possession of it, but I do not particularly think so. He wanted to go to his mother, and Apparition was probably the fastest way he could conceive of to do so.”

Harry closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “He’s never going to be out of her control, is he? At least not without some serious Mind-Healing.”

“Which I recommend that you do not attempt.” Snape’s voice was so harsh that Harry gaped at him. He would have thought Snape would use that voice to talk about him, instead of one of his Slytherin students. In fact, that voice had been employed against Harry last night. Snape seemed to understand the way Harry gaped at him, and cleared his throat, glancing away uncomfortably. “You have done enough for him, more than enough, and he continues to reject your efforts. Perhaps if he was still your vassal, you would have no choice, and perhaps someone will manage to heal him. But I beg that you do not give it another thought.”

Harry blinked and nodded slowly. He tried to remember if he’d ever heard Snape use the word “beg.” No, he didn’t think so. Probably he’d only use it about something like this, when it sounded like he was speaking out of real disgust and contempt for Blaise. “Did you Stun him? Is he still Stunned?”

“Yes, I did, and he is.” Snape faced Harry again, his eyes dark and so intense that Harry bristled. He thought Snape was about to continue their argument from yesterday, and he really wasn’t in any mood for that. He started to open his mouth and say that he would go down, have breakfast, and then free Snape from the bond. That ought to distract Snape sufficiently.

“In seeking to resist the bond, I succumbed to control of another sort.”

Harry barely managed not to shake his head. Snape was turning in too many different directions, making things too confusing. “What do you mean? Was the Dark Mark influencing you or something?”

Snape gave him a look of the sort that would have made him scream, when he was eleven. And Neville probably would have fainted. “No,” he said, with a little gesture towards his left arm that Harry didn’t think he was consciously aware of. The bond wouldn’t let him feel Snape’s emotions right now, but Harry thought he was more observant of Snape than Snape knew about. “I merely meant that I was laboring under the weight of past impressions of you, and not seeing what was actually there.”

“You think?” It slipped out before Harry could prevent it. “This bond hasn’t been easy for me either, Snape! I tried—”

“I will most likely have the courage and patience to say this only once. Listen.”

And Harry restrained himself to make it happen, partially because Snape was still his vassal, and because he was curious. He’d felt Snape being suicidal, and then unhappy, and then withdrawn. There didn’t seem to be much of a reason for him to change his mind.

Snape breathed out, and said, “I saw in Mr. Zabini what I might become in my resistance to the bond. Pitiful, subjected to one overriding goal. In my case, it was freedom and not the kind of domination that Mr. Zabini would have tumbled into if he went back to his mother, but the fight for freedom is another compulsion if one pursues it too avidly.”

Harry wanted to say that he didn’t understand, but then he thought back to the Horcruxes and the overriding impulse to get rid of Voldemort. He’d never felt that he could turn aside, even after he had figured out that Dumbledore had manipulated him and he was the last Horcrux.

So he kept quiet, and watched Snape struggle in silence, with Snape’s head bowing further and further until his voice was muffled by the strands of hair that brushed his lips.

“I—did not wish to be bound,” Snape said. “But that means I do not wish to be bound by anything. Particularly impulses that I did not understand, but could have understood if I had made the effort. In avoiding the bond, I would have become a different kind of slave. And finding myself free of the bond wouldn’t have ended it.”

Harry nodded slowly. “You would have gone on hating me and not feeling free, especially since you have to be under house arrest for a year.”

Snape’s head came up. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know that? I know the bond would not have told you as much. Not right now.”

Harry struggled for an answer, not because he didn’t have it but because the words were difficult, and because part of him felt so sorry for Snape, poor Snape, who didn’t know this. He didn’t want Snape to hear the pity in his voice. “I—just do. The way that you sometimes know what someone is thinking from the expression on their face? Like that.”

Snape only looked at him in what might have been shock or wonder a little longer, and then turned away. “I knew that I would end up like Blaise,” he whispered. “At the moment, I could think of no worse fate. Now I can.”

Harry just sat there. He had no idea what Snape was thinking, and no idea how to comfort him if it was something distressing. The bond wasn’t even pulling at him to comfort Snape. It was just sitting there in the back of his head like a muted light seen from a distance, now and then throbbing a bit.

Snape finally looked around at him, and said, “I still wish to be free of the bond. But—it can wait. You have a trial to plan today, and there are no character witnesses for Miss Parkinson coming forwards, are there?”

Harry shook his head. “On the other hand, the charges against her don’t involve being a murderer and a Death Eater. So I don’t think we need as many of them.”

Snape gave a faint, a very faint, smile. Harry had been joking, a little, but he hadn’t expected to see Snape acknowledge that. “Then I will leave you to plan her trial, and perhaps those of Mr. Goyle and the Malfoys, should you feel that they need you to do so.” He stood. “Free me when the trials are over.”

“Are you sure?”

Snape halted in the middle of taking a step towards the door, and looked at him in annoyance. “Why will you question me now?”

“Because I don’t want you changing your mind later,” Harry said simply. He thought he could put up with a lot from his vassals, and even people who weren’t his vassals but wanted his help anyway, if they would just stop changing their minds and thinking they knew better than him, who had the bond telling him what to do. He could do this, he could, but only if he had some immunity from people having new desires every thirty seconds.

Snape paused, then inclined his head. “I will not change my mind. In the meantime, I think it wise to contact the Aurors and tell them that Mr. Zabini should not stay here. He is not your vassal anymore, so they only placed him here for the sake of convenience. He will be better off in a holding cell.”

Harry sighed. “You’re right.” He didn’t want to think of yet another task he had to plan, but on the other hand, he suspected the labor would seem light next to the work of getting ready to release another vassal from the bond.

“I will do that, Potter,” Snape said, in a sharp, rustling voice, and left the room before Harry could do more than look up in surprise.

Harry sat slowly back, a smile working its way across his mouth in spite of what had happened in the last few days. It seemed that Blaise’s attack on Snape to take away his wand would result in some good things after all.

Severus. His name is still Severus.