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Ashborn	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 36151 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Twelve—Visits Paid

            “Harry.”

            Hermione just whispered the word as she took him in her arms and held him, but Harry heard it. Then Ron hugged him from behind, and Harry closed his eyes and let himself rest on his friends.

            Just for a little while. Just for that moment. Most of the time, he wasn’t even aware of how much he missed them, because he couldn’t be. He couldn’t spend his time yearning after his old life, or he would go mad. Or he would start looking around for new friends who could give him the same support, and there would be none. The day that he started thinking he could rely on Malfoy or Snape the same way he relied on Ron and Hermione, then he would know that he had crossed the line into delusion.

            That’s the way my life is. And if I thought that I couldn’t bear up without them, then I shouldn’t have chosen this kind of life.

            Hermione finally stepped back, wiping tears away from her eyes. Ron clapped him on the shoulder and moved around in front of him, to sit down at the table Snape had given them, the same one as before. “We think we might have a way that could free you, mate,” he said.

            Harry stared at them. Hermione was sitting very upright, hands clasped in front of her and eyes glowing. Harry shook his head. “He’s listening in, remember? Nothing you say can possibly surprise Snape.”

            “That doesn’t matter,” Ron said. “Look, he made this deal in the first place because he wanted you as a hostage, right? Well, all we had to do was come up with something he wanted more.”

            “And what would that be?” Harry sat down carefully at the table, stifling the urge to look around for spying eyes. He knew where those eyes were, in any case, in the windows that overlooked the courtyard and behind the doors that opened onto it. Staring at them would only make it more obvious that they were there.

            But he had no idea what his friends could possibly have come up with, clever though they were. The Ashborn were good servants. Snape obviously had no trouble acquiring Potions ingredients or the other things that he needed to brew them. Malfoy was his lover, and the Unbreakable Vows meant that people wouldn’t constantly attack him or his Ashborn. There was nothing Harry could think of, short of using Time-Turners, and he doubted there were any of those left. Voldemort would probably have found them and used them to hide his Horcruxes, if that was so.

            Hermione leaned forwards, smiling. “He still has to publish under a pseudonym,” she murmured. “Some people know that he controls the Ashborn, some people know that he killed Dumbledore, some people think he’s dead and hate him, but whatever the reason, he can’t use his own name when he publishes. Don’t you think that kills him? He’s a proud man. He would want to be acknowledged for all the clever things he’s done in his field, and no one will as long as they think of him as a traitor.”

            Harry frowned and scratched the back of his head. “Well, okay, I could see that. But how can we redeem his name? Is that what you’re thinking of? I don’t think we could make it work, no matter how much we might want to.”

            Hermione sniffed. “Not all right away, no. What I’m thinking of is a long and complicated process. But it would take a few steps, and then we could ask for more freedom for you. Maybe you and—and Malfoy could come visit the Weasleys.” She grimaced as if she was biting into a sour apple. “And then we could ask for a few more visits, and then we could ask for you to spend more time away.”

            Harry had to close his eyes. He knew that he would show some emotion he probably shouldn’t, or even cry, if he didn’t. “I—that sounds wonderful,” he whispered. “Hermione. Can you possibly manage it?”

            “Not only that, I’m going to,” Hermione said. “I never would have said it if I didn’t think I could, Harry.”

            Harry nodded and opened his eyes. “Fine. How?”

            “She’s going to mention that she learned a lot from the notes that Snape left behind at Hogwarts,” Ron said, his voice bubbling over with excitement. “Hermione’s publishing in the Potions journals, too. She’s not very respected right now, but there’s some interest. She’ll keep mentioning the notes, and then she’ll mention some of the experimental potions, and she’ll keep introducing his name wherever and whenever she can.”

            Harry had to smile. “I never thought that I would see you so enthusiastic about anything concerning Snape, Ron,” he murmured.

            Ron waved his hand. “Hey, as long as Hermione isn’t fantasizing about him in any other way than just talking about his potions notes and wishing that she had access to the full things—ouch!”

            Hermione had pushed him on the shoulder, almost hard enough to knock him to the ground. “You should consider what else I might fantasize about,” she told Ron darkly, and then turned back to Harry. “Anyway. We have it worked out. We’re going to work on rehabilitating Snape’s name as a Potions master. I don’t think we can make him a war hero, but on the other hand, we don’t have to. I doubt he’d care if we could. So we can decide whether he should be honored as someone who was a genius brewer, or someone who still is. He has to be the one to make the decision.”

            Harry swallowed. Yes, he thought it could work. It had to gall Snape that any notice he had gained for being more than a spy and teacher had died when Dumbledore did. If Hermione’s plan worked, then Snape had to care more about getting his name back then about keeping Harry here and making him odd gifts while he did.

            Surely.

            The more Harry thought about it, the more he thought it might be workable. There were so few people here whose opinions could make a difference to Snape. Malfoy would probably always think about him too much no matter what Harry did, and the Ashborn would notice what they were told to notice and nothing else. But the wider world was something else. Encourage that to look kindly on Snape, and he might let Harry go. He wouldn’t care whether or not the wizarding world hated him as long as they feared him.

            Harry could go home. He could leave Malfoy to build the pure-blood alliance with the magical creatures, since he had to be better at it anyway. The centaurs were well on their way to not fearing humans any longer, and Malfoy could find some way to contact the vampires that didn’t involve Harry—

            Then he paused and buried his head in his hands.

            “Harry?” Hermione reached out and put a hand on his arm. “What is it?”

            Harry grimaced. “You know how tightly Snape controls the Ashborn,” he said. He could feel them nodding. He’d mentioned it often enough in his letters. “I don’t know if I can persuade him to change that, but I have to try. I want to try. I haven’t really said much about it so far. What happens if I leave? They’re just left locked in their minds forever? And Malfoy. The same thing could happen to him.”

            “But why do you care?” Ron insisted, reaching out and pulling Harry’s hand from his face so that he could stare into Harry’s eyes. “It’s not like they’re your friends.”

            Harry shook his head. He didn’t know if he had the words.

            But he would have to find them, because Hermione was leaning forwards in interest, too, and there was a brightness about her eyes that Harry didn’t trust. She might start crying, and he knew that he really couldn’t take that if she did. He swallowed and said, “I—I can’t leave them here. Not like this. Malfoy is starting to come out from under Snape’s domination, but I don’t think that will last if I go. And some of the Ashborn are the ones who might need that mental control, like Bellatrix or Fenrir Greyback, but not all of them. They deserve to have their minds back. They deserve to make the choice between good and evil.”

            “Harry.” Hermione sounded troubled. “I think we could get Snape to agree to letting you go if we rehabilitated his name, or we could get him to agree to releasing the Ashborn. But not both.”

            Ron wasn’t as gentle. “You’re always sacrificing yourself for other people,” he told Harry angrily, leaning forwards, right into his face. “But you don’t owe these people anything. They didn’t follow you in the war. They didn’t fight beside you. They weren’t even innocent victims that got caught up in it. Malfoy tried to kill Dumbledore, and Snape actually did. How can you just forget about that?”

            Harry winced. So that was it. That was what he looked like to people outside the tight little world of the Ashborn. He had forgotten about the past already and was trying to find some way to justify his sympathy for Snape and Malfoy, just so that he could live with himself and his new life.

            But that was as impossible as just walking away was. He had to remember what they were, that he hadn’t chosen this life because he wanted it. He had to endure, not give in and not rebel. Doing either would be like letting the Dursleys matter more to him during the summer than the wizarding world did.

            “Sorry, you’re right,” he said. He tried not to think about Malfoy, and the angry words he had, and the strange sliding moods, and the way his face had looked when Harry had stepped between him and Kleianthe when she reared. Malfoy wasn’t his friend. He wasn’t his ally.

            Except that he was, if the pure-blood alliance really held true and Harry was involved more in it than just to relieve his boredom.

            Harry ground his teeth. The way Malfoy had described the old alliances sounded like a swamp to him; once you were in it, you could never get out. And it would happen with the new one, too, unless he remembered who his real friends were and what his real goals were. He was here to keep the peace, and he would never leave unless he had some means of assuring that would happen. But on the other hand, he wasn’t here to make friends, and he couldn’t let that happen either.

            “We’ll try,” he repeated, more firmly. “If Snape accepts it, great. If not, we’ll try something else.”

            Hermione squealed and hugged him. Ron reached out to clasp his hands, warmth rising in his eyes.

            Harry hugged Hermione back, and took Ron’s hand, and tried not to feel like a traitor. A traitor to what, exactly?

*

            Severus leaned back on his chair and closed his eyes. There were visions in his head, visions of the flickering pages of Potions journals and the neat handwriting that Granger had always used on her essays when she was a student at Hogwarts.

            If he could have that, his reputation restored, his potions used under the full knowledge that he was the one who had created them, his brilliance as an experimenter and an innovator acknowledged…

            It seemed to him that he would have little else to wish for.

            But then he shook his head. Everything came with a price. Granger wasn’t offering the gift out of the goodness of her heart. She would gain some fame from it too, some reputation for brilliance, as though she had interpreted his notes without any outside guidance. And there was the little fact that she wanted a reversal of the Vows that had cost Severus so much, that she wanted Potter free to trouble him again.

            Severus grimaced and opened his eyes. If he accepted this bargain, there would have to be more to it, it would have to be secured by more than the naïve trust that Granger was displaying in thinking he would agree at once and believe in her to do everything correctly.

            And that security would almost certainly have to come from Potter. There was something to be said, after all, for his inflexible rejection of the gifts that Draco and Severus had offered him. If he agreed to something, then Severus could trust him to hold to it, because he had no reason to give in for greater privileges or because he pitied them.

            Severus stood. He had spent too long already today thinking about Potter, and he had promised himself that he would not. He went to his lab for a much-needed brewing session, his mind cleared and settled.

*

            “Did you contact the vampires yet?”

            “Um.”

            Draco stared at Potter. Potter was the one who had wanted to know whether he had contacted the werewolves the morning after it had happened, who had insisted that he discuss the unusual werewolf he had met with the centaurs, who had negotiated the tricky relationship between Kleianthe and Thera over their argument. And now he stared out the window of the library, his fingers rasping along the edge of the desk.

            “Well?” Draco asked at last. “Did you?”

            Potter blinked and turned back. “No,” he said. “My friends visited yesterday, and I wasn’t in the right mindset for it. I doubt the vampires would appreciate someone who’s visibly distracted and interested in something other than talking to them.”

            Draco had to nod, but that didn’t mean he had to sympathize. “Does little Potter miss his friends that much?” he cooed.

            Something strong and dark moved through Potter’s eyes, like a leviathan beneath the surface of the water. Draco licked his lips, enchanted by that glimpse of blackness in the green in a way he had never been before. This was the kind of response he had craved from Potter, helpless, infuriated, the way that Draco had been able to provoke him in school.

            The next moment, it was locked away again, and Potter’s fingers stopped trying to make new holes in the table. He leaned back in his chair, stared out the window, and said evenly, “No. Hermione thinks she might have come up with a way to free me from the Unbreakable Vows, and then I can finally leave here.”

            Draco stared again. Then he said, “And leave the alliance behind? Leave the centaurs behind, when Cadmaea and Starborn spoke to us this morning for the first time?”

            Potter gave him a flat look. “As you’ve reminded me again and again, it’s pure-bloods these alliances matter to. I’m not that. And you don’t care about me being here one way or the other. In fact, sometimes I think you want me gone, because that means that you would have to think less about the way you act around Snape.”

            Draco shook his head. “The vampire situation should tell you that half-bloods are important, too.”

            Potter laughed. “You’re licking your lips, did you know that? That visibly left a bad taste in your mouth.” The flat look was back again a moment later, amusement banished as if it had never existed. “No. Ron said something yesterday which made a lot of sense. I’m always giving up what I want so that someone else can have it. I thought about staying for you and the Ashborn, trying to make Snape give up his control of you, but who the fuck am I kidding? He never will, not for any price. That’s his security shield. Having me as a hostage isn’t that important to him, though, so he’ll trade for it.”

            “I don’t want you to leave,” Draco said.

            Potter stared at him. Draco would have liked to step back and join him in staring at himself. Had he really said that? Had he really just sounded like a pleading little kid, when he once would have done anything to avoid that?

            And in front of Potter?

            “Well, uh.” Potter’s shock had cut beneath that glassy surface of annoyance and amusement, just like the anger of a moment ago had. Draco felt his stomach stir with a hunger that wouldn’t manifest as anything like a growl. That was what he wanted, what he craved. Making someone else react to him, see him as a source of emotion, not just a convenience. Severus’s jealousy had been wonderful, warming him more than the chocolate had, but he wanted Potter’s anger, too.

            The shock vanished, though. Potter settled himself neatly back into place and gave Draco a scornful glance. “That’s too bad. I’ll owl you, if you want, and you can tell me about the progress of the alliance and whether Snape ever lets you out to play on your own. But I’m not staying here.”

            He turned away, but not in time. Again Draco saw real emotion from him, shattered glass that flew and cut. Yearning for distant skies, longing to fly, longing to be with people who were not Draco.

            That hurt, and it shouldn’t, and it was stupid, Draco knew. But at least he knew Severus preferred the company of potions and automatons to Draco’s because they gave him things Draco couldn’t give him. He wasn’t being set aside for other people, the way that Potter wanted to set him aside for his friends.

            “It’s more than that,” he said. “We have your word of honor on the alliance, and the centaurs trust you. It can’t succeed without you.”

            Potter gave an irritated twitch, as though Draco had reached over and flicked his ear. “That’s another example of something I would make sacrifices for if I stayed,” he said. “I was only doing this to stave off boredom. It isn’t real for me.”

            Draco laughed before he knew he was going to do so. Again the dark shape was in Potter’s eyes, and Draco felt a thrill as though someone had stroked his arm up and down with a warm cloth.

            “I don’t think you can lie very well,” Draco told him. “Except by omission, maybe, and except to yourself. This was real. You just preferred to pretend it wasn’t, because you don’t want to think of yourself as less than a hero for abandoning us.”

            “I told you from the beginning it was about boredom.” Potter had gone icy, and perhaps he thought he was magnificent, but Draco knew better. He was magnificent with rage or compassion burning from him. He was fire, not a glacier, and he should never try to be that way. “What else do you expect from me?”

            “For you to acknowledge that anything you put effort into becomes real for you,” Draco said. “The alliance. Freeing the Ashborn from the toils of mind control. Trying to rescue me from Severus, little as I needed the rescue.”

            “Now who’s denying that something is real?” Potter leaned forwards, intent on driving the conversation, Draco knew, back on Draco himself. “You were a slave and half-alive, and you didn’t realize it. You thought Snape had a right to treat you like that. You barely thought of yourself as a human being, did you?”

            Draco started to snap back, and then paused. That wasn’t an effective tactic, not with someone like this.

            He bowed his head and stared at the table. “If you’re right,” he whispered, “how long do you think it will take after you leave before I tumble right back into the old habits?”

            He could hear Potter’s teeth grinding from across the table, and smirked at his hands. If the idiot thought that walking away and out of the alliance he had supposedly tried so hard to build should be easy, then he was a bloody hypocrite and deserved everything that Draco might want to hand him.

            “You don’t understand,” Potter said at last.

            Draco looked up and nodded. “I’m used to hearing that. It’s the sort of line that Severus used to feed me all the time.” He sighed and pushed back from the table. “Well. If you’ve made your decision, then I can’t stop you, of course. I hope the centaurs continue to speak to me and don’t lose faith because you walk away.” He started to stand.

            Potter circled around the table quickly enough to impress Draco; he decided to remember how rapidly the man could move. Draco found himself leaning against the wall with Potter’s hands on his shoulders, although one looked as if it might move up to his throat. Draco breathed out and stared at him.

            “You don’t believe that,” Potter said, and gave Draco a shake hard enough that it seemed as if it might jolt a tooth loose. “You don’t believe this. You’re playacting again, the way that you’ve always playacted for Snape. Why?”

            “Because you’re an idiot,” Draco said, first making sure that he could breathe before he said the words. “You know that you’re setting up the alliance for failure if you walk away. It’s still tiny. We still barely have anyone in it. If you want to abandon it and go do something else, it’ll fall apart. And that might not bother me, except that you’re still arranging things so that you’re the noble martyr, the one who would like to stay but has no choice.” He reached up and put one hand on Potter’s arm. “That’s not how you teach me and Severus better, if you really want to,” he breathed, staring into Potter’s eyes.

*

            Damn it. I should never have started this conversation. I should have nodded and laughed along with him and left the possibility that I might walk away until I actually had proof that I might.

            Harry wanted to hurt Draco, but that wouldn’t solve any of the problems. He let Draco go and turned his back, running his hands through his hair.

            “I know that I can’t teach you better if you don’t want to learn,” he said, flinging the words like a handful of nails in Malfoy’s direction. If they landed and pierced the vulnerable places on his body, so much the better. “It’s just—that was arrogant of me, to think I could come in and change things. I shouldn’t have. Is that what you want to hear? That I was wrong?”

            “So close, and yet so far,” Malfoy said, with a melodramatic sigh. “You did come in and change things. So put up with the consequences. Stand up and accept that you’re abandoning something if you walk away. Did you notice that? That I leave the option open to you to leave? I just want you to acknowledge that it’s abandonment.”

            Harry shook his head. He had to hold onto what Ron had told him yesterday. That he had always been too eager to give himself up for someone who wanted rescue, because he liked to see himself as doing good. Of course he had only entered the alliance and encouraged Malfoy to leave Snape to relieve his boredom, but he could have done other things, like plunging into the long-delayed study of wizarding history that Hermione kept encouraging him to make. It said something about him that he had decided Malfoy and the Ashborn had to be helped instead.

            Nothing complimentary about me at all, might I add.

            “Fine,” he said. “I’m abandoning you and the alliance is going to fail.” His voice cracked in the middle. He swallowed. “You’re probably going to become Snape’s doll again in no time, without someone to stand up for you. Are you satisfied?”

            “Hardly.” Malfoy stepped around him and came to a halt in front of him. “But I reckon that it’ll have to do for now.”

            Harry stared at him. Then understanding flashed in him, and he reached out and shoved Malfoy in the chest, hard enough to rock him back a few paces. “You fucker,” he said. His voice was quieter than he had thought it would be, but Malfoy paled, so that was worth a few pains taken. “You were playing with me all the time. There was no—there was no reason to do that. You just wanted to see what I would do.”

            “How could that be, when I didn’t know that you were thinking about leaving until just now?” Malfoy demanded, reaching out and catching his hand, then squeezing hard enough Harry winced. “No. What I meant is that I finally got a reaction from you. You sounded upset by having to leave me behind. I’ve wanted and struggled for something like that for ages now, and now I have it.” He had an odd tone to his voice, smug and not, and his eyes darted down to Harry’s and then away.

            Harry turned and started knocking his head gently against the wall of the library. Malfoy seized him by the back of his neck. “Don’t do that!” he said.

            Of course. If I splattered my brains all over the books, then he would be the one who had to explain things to Snape, and God forbid that that happens. Harry turned around with a sigh. “Really, Malfoy? A reaction from me is worth that much?”

            “Yes.” Malfoy folded his arms. “You can talk about rescuing me from Snape and treating me like a real person all you like, but you weren’t doing that, not really. What you did was different. You saw me as someone to rescue, and you did your duty. But you weren’t focusing on me. You were focusing on the duty. Why are you angry about the Ashborn being enslaved?”

            “Because it’s wrong,” Harry said, glad that he finally had a simple question to answer. Well, some of the others should have been simple, but because Malfoy was mad and demanded stupidly complicated responses, Harry was never going to arrive at the right one. “It’s wrong for someone to set himself up as king of someone else’s thoughts. Volde—sorry, Snake-Face would have done that if he had managed to take over the physical world, I can’t imagine it wasn’t stirring in that swamp-water mind of his—”

            “And me?” Malfoy moved a step forwards. “When you began suspecting that I wasn’t enslaved at all, just following Severus for different reasons, then why did you think you had to end that?”

            “Because it’s wrong, again,” Harry said. “Even if you want to be his lover, he can respect you more than what he was doing—”

            “But you didn’t care about the particular circumstances that surrounded it,” Malfoy said, his eyes gleaming now like the heads of nails. “Not about me, not about what I specifically would need. You just thought that talking to me about it and showing you could respect me was enough. That might be, with one of your friends. But they already know that you have an investment in them beyond some vague, abstract morality. I don’t have that. If you want to rescue me, you’d bloody well better have a more important reason than because Snape is wrong or because you’re right. Do you?”

            Harry sighed and tugged at his hair. “I can understand why you want a friend,” he said. “But I think I would be a horrible one for you, at least right now. I don’t understand you, no. I don’t know what you want—”

            “Because you won’t take the time to learn,” Malfoy finished, nodding wisely. “You won’t take the time to become part of the alliance, even as you scold me and Kleianthe for disrupting it. You won’t listen to my reasons and accept that I might have the ability to trust and admire Severus and still recognize that I’m less than satisfied with him. You don’t want to do anything more complicated than make the occasional moral pronouncement.”

            Harry shook his head. “Staying with you wouldn’t change that.”

            “It might help,” Malfoy said. “It might help if you stopped reacting to everything like some bloody wise and holier-than-thou automaton, and engaged with people instead of always doing the right thing.”

            “Abandoning you isn’t the right thing,” Harry said. He knew that he sounded desperate, but it was hard to care when Malfoy’s words kept twisting his head in new directions. Directions he didn’t want it twisted. If he waited, then he might lose track of the clear simplicity that his friends had planted in his head yesterday. “So you ought to want me to do it, because that would prove that I can make mistakes and I’m flawed.”

            Malfoy moved in again, and this time his arms were holding Harry against the bookshelves, and his eyes were so close that Harry looked away uncomfortably. He didn’t think he’d been this near anyone since the day that he’d spent chained to a dead Death Eater and lying there with her face staring into his. He dreamed of that still, sometimes, and if Malfoy’s eyes held more life and light, Harry didn’t understand what was going on behind them any better.

            “I know you’re flawed,” Malfoy breathed. “And I know that you’re more than willing to admit that, because it doesn’t go very deep. What I want to hear you say is that you’ll do the hard thing and keep the Unbreakable Vows if it turns out that Severus doesn’t want to let you go in exchange for the bargain your friends propose. I want you to argue with me and yell at me and tell me when I’m being stupid. I want you to discuss Quidditch with me like things are normal and have more planning meetings about the alliance. Don’t think just about your friends and the life that you lost. Think about the present, the here and now.”

            “I don’t want to.” Harry shoved at Malfoy’s shoulders, needing him to clear off and out of his face, but Malfoy only tightened his hands and stood there, so Harry reckoned that had been useless. “The life I have now is so bloody boring, and there’ll never be any change in it and no friends and no companionship.”

            “There could be,” Malfoy said stubbornly, “if you’d listen to the things that I’m telling you.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “And what? You’ll be my friend as long as we have the pure-blood alliance in common? You’ll be my friend with all that hatred we have between us and the blood prejudice and God knows what else you still believe in? I don’t understand you, I don’t want to, and that’s all the more reason that I’m looking forward to leaving this place.” He shoved again at Malfoy’s shoulders, and this time managed to move him away enough that he could get his own shoulders off the wall. He straightened his clothing and stared out the window, being careful not to catch Malfoy’s eye again.

            “You think we’ll never be friends, then,” Malfoy said, and Harry couldn’t tell what he felt from the surface of his voice or its tone. “Just victim and hero, just rescued and savior.”

            “I don’t know,” Harry said. “I do know that I don’t understand you, and it makes more sense to me when we’re working on the goals of the alliance. I don’t think even you know what you want from me, and that just makes it impossible for me to.”

            “I’m learning,” Malfoy said, and then changed subjects the way Harry had been wishing he would. “You’re going after the vampires tonight? I hope that you’ll be fucking careful. I still don’t think that this immunity you’re supposed to have with Legilimency will work when it comes to them.”

            “Then why not insist on taking up that duty yourself?” Harry snapped, still rattled. “If you think that you have the proper respect for their powers, and I don’t, and if pure-bloods set up the alliance in the first place—”

            “This matters more to me than it does to you,” Malfoy cut in. “That means that I want this to succeed, and if the vampires had a quarrel with my ancestors that resulted in them being thrown out of the alliance, then it could be counterproductive for me to face them. I’m not trying to stop you going, am I?” He paused, then added softly, “Well, not trying to stop you from going there, at least.”

            Harry couldn’t help it, although at the bottom of the heart he knew it was probably a stupid idea. He turned around and looked.

            Malfoy looked back at him, eyes calm and steel-grey. Once again, Harry thought he could compare them to the heads of nails and not be far off.

            Harry shook his head. He didn’t know what words were going to come out of his mouth before he said them, which was disorienting, but at least that meant Malfoy looked as shaken as Harry felt when he spoke. “This is the reason we can’t get along. You change from moment to moment, sometimes you’re beaten-down and sometimes you’re stronger, sometimes you’re angry at me and threaten to kill me and sometimes you want my friendship. We could never be friends because I need to know what a person is like, and not just what mask they feel like putting on today.”

            A faint smile crooked Malfoy’s mouth. “I didn’t know who I was either, for a long time,” he said simply. “I thought, after the war, I had to be Severus’s lover and the preserver of the Malfoy legacy, since my parents were dead. Now I’m waking up, and I think it’s like waking up a muscle that’s been cramped by a long period of sitting. You don’t learn everything that you can do with that muscle all at once. It takes a while.”

            Harry thought about it, then nodded seriously. “That’s officially the weirdest comparison I’ve ever heard, Malfoy.”

            Malfoy shrugged and said, “Tell me about the precautions you’re taking against the vampires. Since, after all, that’s what we’re here to talk about.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out underneath the table.

            Harry went cautiously back to tales of his plan, while he watched Malfoy out of the corner of his eye. But he didn’t see any other changes that would have made him wary for the rest of the conversation.

            Maybe Malfoy’s analogy made more sense than he’d thought.

            And maybe it doesn’t matter how much sense it makes, because I won’t be here to see it.

*

            Severus knelt down and stared into the eyes of the automaton he had chosen to begin constructing. It stared back without intelligence, no surprise since he had not put any life behind those eyes yet. It was a cat, an elegant, small little beast patterned in silver and grey, with eyes that would be diamonds when Severus was done.

            He was making it as another gift for Draco. After he cast the spells that made it move and, to a certain extent, think, he would never give it an order again. It would be Draco’s entirely, a companion and a guard and a servant and anything else that he could think to make of it.

            Severus had thought about assigning some of the Ashborn permanently to him, but Draco would know that Severus always controlled the bindings on their minds. Besides, many were Death Eaters who had laughed at Draco or tortured him when they were still free. Severus had not started crafting the automatons until after the war, and he had never made one as a gift for someone else. This was unique.

            He hoped that Draco would value it as it deserved.

            And if he did not…

            Severus stood and reached out for the powdered diamonds that he would need for the next step. If he did not, then Severus still wanted to make it.

*

            unneeded: Eventually, they want all the magical creature species involved, though it would take some time for that to happen, of course.

            Harry just doesn’t want the clothes, at all. He doesn’t want any real or deep ties to Snape and Malfoy, though those may have already begun to grow without him realizing it.

            mrequecky: Thank you!

            AlterEquis: Harry hasn’t made contact with them quite yet. When he does, then yes, things will change.
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Ashborn