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The Wages of Going On	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 43959 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 7
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Chapter Eleven--A Road Like Sunset
            Harry twitched his head irritably. He could feel Snape's and Malfoy's emotions more than ever now, as if they were flows of water moving inside his ears. The bond seemed to have decided that their--well, one of them--pulling him out of his coma was an excuse to strengthen the sensations he got from them.
            "Auror Potter? Are you quite all right?"
            Harry immediately focused back on the man in front of him. He didn't think Erasmus Johnson was likely to have been the Auror who betrayed him; he was a supervisor who manifestly preferred working behind a desk to working in the field. But he had many vital contacts with other Aurors who were Harry's suspects. "Yes," he said. "You should know that I got a head injury during the raid. Concussion, you know. That leaves me still feeling as though I have phantom pains in my skull sometimes."
            Johnson made a sympathetic face and shifted in his chair as he reached out for a piece of parchment on the edge of the desk. He was related to Angelina, some sort of great-uncle or something, but Harry could see the flicker in his eyes. He loved gossip. He would spread that tale about the head injury around, and that meant Harry could count on a fairly regular diet of pitying glances and excuses made for him.
            Good. In this hunt, Harry would need something that could cover strange behavior.
            "Oh, dear," Johnson breathed as he fastened his eyes on the piece of parchment, which was apparently a memo. He swallowed and looked up at Harry, then back at the memo. Johnson wasn't that good an actor, and Harry's attention sharpened. "I--I'm afraid that I have a meeting with the Minister I didn't know about, Auror Potter," Johnson said, standing up and wincing a little as the edge of the desk caught his thigh. "But I'll be happy to talk to you about your efforts to strengthen wards some more later."
            Harry gave him a polite smile. That was his excuse for talking to Johnson: that he wanted to know how to strengthen the wards around safehouses in case something like this ever happened again. "Thank you, Auror Johnson. I'll see you tomorrow, perhaps?"
            He waited until Johnson had nodded and limped out of the room, rubbing a little at his thigh. Then Harry Disillusioned himself and went after him.
            Disillusionment was hard in the Auror Department, as it was in most parts of the Ministry, with so many people walking through and not inclined to dodge someone they couldn't see. What made it uniquely hard here was the tendency of sharp, trained Auror eyes to focus on the little ripples of movement and color against the walls and decide that someone was indeed Disillusioning themselves, and they need to Stun first and ask questions later.
            But Harry, along with most of the trainees in his class, had mastered the big, loose-limbed stride that would speed him along after his target without making the spell over him shimmer all that much, or in eye-catching motions that looked like a human body moving. He managed to get to the Minister's door just as Johnson stepped inside and shut the door behind him. Anti-eavesdropping wards engaged with a small crackle.
            Harry dropped to one knee beside the wards and lifted his wand until it hovered just an inch or so from them. This was the other good part about spending so much time in the Black library. He knew some of those charms for dispelling wards that had been banned as part of Dark Arts, but then been entirely forgotten by most Aurors because they weren't the big and harmful kinds of Dark Arts that they ran into on the job.
            Should you be eavesdropping on the Minister? his Hermione-conscience asked him.
            It's necessary, Harry's own conscience answered to shut it up, and he whispered the charm.
            The charm opened a tiny channel in the wards, allowing passage for Harry's wand, and then his body, and his ears. It was too small for the wards to notice, the same way they wouldn't react if a fly and not a human being was to land on the door. Harry cast the other charm, and the wards opened the other way, permitting sound to come to him.
            He could hear the conversation clearly now. The Minister trusted in the strength of his wards, and he and Johnson weren't making any attempt to keep their voices down.
            "You don't think that anyone will take us to task for this, then?" That was Johnson's voice, and he sounded low and relieved. From the creaking noise Harry heard next, he was leaning back in his chair.
            "They have no reason to do so." Minister Leaping's voice was low and precise. Harry thought he was a good Minister in the sense that he kept a finger on the pulse of politics, but then again, someone that intimately involved with politics had to have his dark sides, too. "There is no sign that Auror Potter is courting the press with respect to his injuries."
            Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing hysterically. Of course he wasn't. He had no idea how much the Minister knew about those "injuries," but shit, even if Harry had been willing to report on them, why would he have been willing to tell someone he had been raped?
            "Good," Johnson said. "I have to admit, I was--well, worried that someone would accuse us of not taking the right precautions with Auror Potter's safety."
            Harry shifted just a little closer to the door, checking the tingling state of the wards around him and down the corridor with one eye. The wards still hummed with no sign of noticing him, and no one was coming.
            "Auror Potter was undertaking the duty of any other Auror," Leaping said. "A risky duty that he knew might end up with him locked in combat. The Lestranges are dab hands at torture, as well. He fully knew the risks, was fully informed of them."
            Harry thought of the shower of thoughts in the back of his head, and refrained from snorting. He certainly hadn't been informed of the risk of ending up bonded to the two idiots he was guarding.
            But no one else had known about that, either. That was the problem, Harry thought. Unless he could find the traitor in the Aurors who had actually betrayed the wards to Rabastan and Rodolphus, he had no one to blame. No one had known that what was going to happen with the ritual circle could happen.
            "As you say, sir," said Johnson, a little unsteadily. "But what about these rumors that he can't return to work for a month, yet?"
            "Kingsley says that's as much for his protection as for that of other people." Harry could almost hear the way Leaping waved his hand. "Because he is too close to the case at the moment, and inclined to poke around the Ministry."
            "He can't!"
            Harry narrowed his eyes and snuggled closer to the door. That's an interesting note of panic in your voice there, Johnson.
            "I know that," said Leaping. "There is too much corruption here that he would feel himself bound to take note of. I know that we have a great asset in Auror Potter, but we need him out in the field, catching criminals and Death Eaters the way that he's shown he knows how to do best, not snooping around for who knows what."
            Harry felt his muscles relax a little. All right. It seems that the Minister is just worried about ordinary corruption and bribery--business as usual in the Ministry. That doesn't excuse him from some guilty knowledge, but maybe not the same kind that Johnson has.
            "Right, sir." Yes, Johnson didn't sound much reassured by that.
            "If Potter was going to make himself into a martyr over this, he would have by now," Leaping continued, his voice quiet and slower even than usual. "If he isn't doing it right now, he won't. That means that I would appreciate you not contacting me about this again."
            For a wild moment, Harry felt tempted to tell everyone about the bond. If that was what it would take to unsettle the Minister, the Ministry, Johnson, everyone else who was worried for some reason that he would investigate internally...
            And then he shook his head and slid away from the door, murmuring the charms that would close the wards behind him with no sign that they had ever been broken. No. That was the kind of temptation that the bond itself offered, the whisper in the back of his head that things would be easier if he gave in to Snape and Malfoy and worked with them to find research.
            He had the ability to resist. He had the ability to do only what he wanted, and he would take it. He would be a good Auror, and he would track down the man or woman who had betrayed him, and turn them in. Then he would go back to being a regular Auror, Ron's partner. It was the sum total of his ambitions.
            Let there be corruption in the Ministry. There probably always would be. Harry was more interested in investigating Johnson's panic at the mention of his name than in investigating Leaping's dismissal of his torture.
            And since Johnson hadn't come out of the Minister's office and would probably be in the meeting a good while longer, this was the perfect time to go back and learn what he could from the papers on Johnson's desk.
*
            "Out with it."
            Severus started slightly and looked up from his end of the table. Draco had ignored him through most of the two courses the house-elves had thought it appropriate to serve so far, and Severus had presumed the ignoring would go on until the end of dinner. That was fine with him. He would brood some more about what he had discovered, and then retreat into the library or the lab again and brood some more. Probably the lab, since Draco seemed to have established himself in the library.
            "What do you mean?" Severus asked, when he saw the way Draco leaned forwards and supported his jaw on his fist, as though the clenched weight of it was too much to bear on his own.
            "I know that you found something earlier," Draco said, and shook his head. "The flood of bitterness in my head...it was like being drowned in tea that hadn't been prepared properly. What was it?"
            "I found nothing." Severus was an accomplished liar, and he thought he could bring this one off, too, despite the short notice. "I was reflecting on what could be done to snap the bond easily, and realized it was nothing." He shoved his plate back from him and stood up from the table with what he thought a convincing show of frustration. "Unless you find something, I am afraid that we will be subject to Potter's--"
            "Bollocks."
            Severus jerked around. "Excuse me?" he asked, his voice deepening. Even now, with their relationship as teacher and student long behind them, Draco did not say such words to him casually.
            "I said, bollocks." Draco's face was mottled with a flush, and he rose to his feet and leaned forwards, his fists braced on the table. Perhaps he didn't say it casually, Severus decided, with his heart going so fast that it seemed to be its own separate entity. "I know that it was more than that. I've felt your bitterness about this before, right before you told me you were feeling it. This was different. Deeper. Why?"
            The thread of Severus's patience snapped. Perhaps, after all, Draco should share and understand his hopelessness.
            "Accio Paths Through the Mind," he snapped, and his hand shot out as the book winged its way from the lab into his fingers. He spent a moment flipping his way through the pages, then nodded and turned it around, tapping the passage he had found earlier.
            Draco bent over the table to read it. Severus had to turn away. He didn't want to watch the neutral expression on Draco's face right now, the intent effort to understand that he was all too familiar with. He wanted to hear the moment when Draco exploded with rage.
            Among other things, it might enable Severus to once again understand the flitting pool of emotions at the back of his mind, which had been guilt and still had not settled into any configuration of color or feeling that he recognized.
            "Wait, I don't understand," Draco said slowly at last, in a voice still thicker and calmer than Severus wanted to hear. "What is bad about this?"
            Severus turned around, his hands locked behind his back and his face locked into its mask. He would explode if he tried to express emotion except through his voice, he thought. Draco had taken the exact wrong view on the information involved, as Severus might have known he would. "You do not understand?" he hissed. "You do not understand why I would not welcome a bond that could do this?"
            "No." Draco laid his fingers on the page as if the information would run away and looked up. "Because this says that a bond that traps someone in a mental place like the one Harry described means that we can use it. For more than just raping someone or knowing what they're feeling." Draco's face shone. "We can use it to travel through ourselves, to gain self-knowledge, to analyze our actions objectively! That's what the book says." He thumped the tome like a proud parent, as if Severus had not read it. "How long have I wanted something like that? You know what I've felt about too many of my actions since the war. Sometimes I get so paralyzed with indecision that I don't do a bloody thing. If there was a way of knowing that something was right because I could look at it from the outside--"
            "I would welcome a bond like that ordinarily," Severus interrupted, his throat aching. It had gone wrong. He did not understand how it could have, when Draco ought to have agreed with him and been on his side, but it had. "But how can you say that you will want it? Now?"
            Draco stared at him blankly. "Obviously the bond isn't that way yet, but the book says that it will be. And you were clever to think of looking up the effects instead of concentrating on the origin. Obviously, none of the books that we have here would tell us about it, since the origin of it is so unusual, but it might as well be identical to the bonds that this book describes because of what it can do--"
            "You imbecile," Severus whispered, leaning so close that Draco blinked and shut up. "To get any of the good effects of the bond, to travel the roads through our minds and analyze our actions, to link together telepathically, to even form a place in our minds to which we can bring others and torment them as we wish, we will have to work with Potter."
            Draco's face momentarily hardened. Then, so quickly that Severus could not have stopped him even if he had known what was coming, he backhanded Severus.
            Severus staggered, hissing with pain, and raised one hand to his cheek. It felt as though Draco had scored it with acid, rather than the simple backs of his fingers. Severus could tell the skin would be turning a stinging red color from the slap, and could feel his blood still jumping in shock.
            "Here." Draco conjured a mirror and tossed it at him. Severus hardly fumbled it out of the air before it would have broken and crashed.
            He could see his own face, cheeks red, eyes wide and surprised.
            "Who's the imbecile here?" Draco asked, his voice as flat as the mirror. "The one who works to gain the nearly unlimited power of a bond like this and swallows an old distaste for a school rival? Or the one who rejects it, and the bond altogether, and sulks as though there's some way out of it because he hates that school rival?"
            "Potter is the son of my school rival," Severus corrected him, the acid now feeling as if it had sunk down his throat. Potter had turned even Draco against him? Was there no limit to the power that idiot had and should not possess? "I have held a justified grudge against him for more years than you can imagine."
            "And James Potter has been dead almost as long as I've been alive!" Draco yelled. His face was finally turning blotchy and pink, but not for any reason that Severus wanted to see. He picked up Paths of the Mind and glared at Severus in near-hatred. "If you don't want to give up that fucking bloody grudge of yours, fine, but it's a bloody stupid grudge, if you'll let it stand in your way of living with the bond and making it a path to power. And I never thought you preferred revenge to power, before this."
            Draco stalked off with the book. Severus stared into the mirror, and saw no answers there. At least, no answers that didn't come down to Potter's luck in making people loyal to him when they should have been loyal to Severus.
            Make that all the Potters. Severus could still see the moment when Lily had turned away from him and walked into James Potter's arms...
            He cast the mirror into the corner, where it shattered.
*
            Harry paced slowly around his library. He had his hands clasped together behind his back, and his face locked in a permanent scowl. He supposed Hermione wouldn't like to see that, but it was better than the near-frantic pacing he'd been doing earlier.
            Every now and again, he cast a glare at the memo he'd found on Johnson's desk, now lying in copied form on his own library table.
            At last, he gave up on the notion of calming down, and came over to sit at the table and regard the memo.
            It was nothing much, but neither was it the reminder of the meeting for the Minister that Harry had assumed it would be, because of what Johnson had said immediately after reading it. It was, instead, his name, Johnson's full name, and the words beneath that, Shut him down for good.
            If Johnson knew nothing, Harry reasoned to himself as he'd reasoned at least five times since he found the memo and copied it, then the memo meant nothing. So he had to know something.
            But on the other hand, Harry was very sure that there wasn't some huge network of Aurors who knew that he was hunting the traitor responsible for tipping off the Lestranges. That meant there would also be a huge network of Aurors out there who knew about the traitor in the first place, and that might imply they knew other things--
            Harry felt as if he was growing fangs. The desire to rip into people who knew about the rape and Obliviate them was that strong.
            But then he shook his head. He didn't want people to know, but the Healer and Kingsley and his friends did, and if he could survive them knowing, he would survive if the knowledge spread to a larger group. He had to keep his mind on his goal, not be distracted by smaller things. How could he use this memo to trace back the link from Johnson to the traitor, or at least someone else who knew the traitor's identity?
            Harry came up with a few wild plans that included comparing the handwriting on the memo to the handwriting on every other memo in the Department, using Legilimency on Johnson, and asking Malfoy for help. Ugh, he was desperate if he was sinking to that level.
            In the end, he elected to use a tactic that he and Ron had used in the past when they had a criminal who was so cautious that it was hard to find clues to their lair and no particular reason to move fast: light a fire under them. Harry leaned back and studied the memo carefully, and then began to imitate the letters.
            It was hard, because he wasn't able to use one of the charms that would simply disguise his own writing to look like the hand on the memo; the sample of letters was too small. And he didn't want to give himself away by an obvious fake, either. But at last, he managed to compose a message that he thought would do it. Once again, it bore his name and Johnson's name, and then the message, Find me.
            Harry nodded. He would release it to Johnson, arrange to be nearby when Johnson found it, and then see what he would do. Even a panicked memo back in return would be valuable. Harry knew a few tricks that would let him track a memo through the Department, though he had only used them when desperate.
            Then again, he reminded himself, he had considered Malfoy's help.
            "Harry?"
            Harry turned around. Hermione's face was in the fire, and she looked so upset that Harry gestured for her to come through. He had no idea what was wrong, but he might learn more by talking to her face-to-face rather than trying to manage a Floo call.
            Hermione slammed a book down on the table beside the copied memo and Harry's new one, making them both flutter to the floor. Harry unobtrusively picked them both up and slid them out of the way. No one needed to know what he was doing, not right now. He wanted to hunt on his own, and that was what he was going to do.
            "What is it?" he asked, staring down at the book Hermione had banged on the table. Paths of the Mind. The title meant nothing to him.
            Hermione, her eyes filled with tears, opened it to a marked page and gestured. Harry bent down to read.
            A specific indicator of this bond is the presence of sunset colors in a bond member's mind when he delves into it. He will find himself in a landscape that contains a representation of himself and a sunset sky all around him. The representation is usually symbolic, and has consisted of...
            Harry skimmed past that. He knew well, from years of dealing with Hermione, that it wasn't what she had wanted him to read.
            This bond is among the most powerful of the path-bonds. It permits, among other things, the bond member to judge his actions from an objective distance and see them as though committed by someone else he has no interest in. It permits self-knowledge by allowing him to travel through his own memories as if he was a skilled Legilimens reading another's mind. In the more determined and those with stronger bonds, it has even permitted telepathic communication between bond members and physical travel, by the bond members creating roads in their minds to a desired destination and all walking mentally along them. This destination, unlike Apparition coordinates, does not need to be known before the walk begins.
            Harry recoiled a little. He had thought, instantly, of one place he would like to be able to find: the Lestranges' current lair. But then sense and thought had come back to him, and he turned to face Hermione.
            "You're afraid that they'll want to continue the bond and use it for its power," he said flatly.
            Hermione, clutching a hank of hair, nodded once.
            "I won't permit it," Harry said.
            "But they'll insist," Hermione said, her eyes still overly bright. "And they'll hurt you more. And I don't want that."
            Harry caught her hands, and then decided that wasn't enough and hugged her. "I won't permit it," he whispered, again, into her ear. "It doesn't matter how much they might want it. I'm going to break this bond. I'm going to defend myself against this. I promise you."
            Hermione shivered in his arms. "I'm just worried," she whispered.
            Harry laughed, softly, coldly. He had never heard himself laugh like that before, but then again, he had never felt like this before, either. "And you don't know what I mean when I say that I'm determined to prevent them from hurting me again."
            It will not happen. They will never have anything willing from me.
*
            Genuka: A problem for Severus, anyway.
            ChelseaPlume: They do indeed agree on revenge. The problem is that Harry doesn't want anyone helping him, Draco wants to, and Severus is currently in a snit and doesn't want to do anything.
            And now this will cause more problems.
            jujukitty: Well, Draco doesn't care about pride as much as survival, so there's that.
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The Wages of Going On