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Ashborn	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 36149 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 12
- 13
- 14
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Chapter Thirteen—Changing the Game

            Harry went to visit the vampires that night.

            He didn’t know what he ought to visualize, and Malfoy seemed less help than normal, just shaking his head when Harry asked him. Very well, then, Harry thought, determined to keep calm even when Malfoy was being an idiot. He would reach out to the first image that came to him, and see how closely it corresponded to the dreams of any vampire out there.

            If vampires dreamed. Harry wondered what would happen if he touched the mind of one who was simply awake. Would it feel him? Would it try to seduce him? Would it be able to control him or possess him that way, as both Malfoy and the centaurs seemed to fear?

            Harry had to smile as he thought about that. The vampire might be sorry it had tried, given his fucked-up memories that rose the moment someone tried to touch his mind with Legilimency or anything like it.

            He lay in his bed and gave himself long moments to let his eyes flutter open and shut, looking at his painted walls and then losing the images again as his eyelids came down. He let his mind drift. He had discovered that he was no good at meditation or Occlumency the hard way. He had to think of different things, creeping up carefully on the blankness that he wanted. Trying to force himself into an immediate blank, calm state was just asking for disaster.

            “Potter.”

            The voice sighed through him from a distance, carrying notions of blood and iron. Harry’s breath drifted out in response. Had he made contact with a vampire already, or was that Snape or Malfoy calling him?

            His eyes fluttered open lazily, and he found himself lying in a crypt.

            His first thought was, Typical. His second was that it probably didn’t count as a crypt if the bodies in it were still moving around. He sat up and carefully considered the scene in front of him.

            The walls were black stone, lit only by torches. Harry noticed that the torches burned with dim blue flame, and wondered if that meant they were using a fire that couldn’t harm vampires. A salty stink seemed to confirm it. He’d never smelled that scent from any ordinary flame, no matter what it looked like.

            The walls were carved with hollows and images of skulls and gravestones, but Harry couldn’t see one actual skeleton. Instead, there was a black bench in front of him, made of ebony so polished that he could see his dim reflection moving in it. On the bench sat a single vampire, its legs folded, staring at Harry.

            Harry nodded back. The vampire might have passed muster as human in the right light, but this close, Harry could make out the wax-tone to the skin and the way that its mouth was rearranged to accommodate the fangs. Its clothes were all black, too, and around its neck hung something on a thin silver chain. Harry thought it might have been a pendant, but the shiny back was turned towards him, and he wasn’t sure.

            “Hullo,” Harry said.

            The vampire blinked. At least he’d succeeded in surprising it. Him, Harry reckoned, once he heard the wheezy, deep voice the vampire summoned up to speak. “Why have you come here?”

            “Because we’re putting together an alliance, and they thought a half-blood would appeal more to you than a pure-blood,” Harry said. Lying would only make the vampires feel slighted when they found out the truth, and they probably would. Harry didn’t want to rely on the discretion of everyone in the alliance.

            Hell, I don’t want to rely on the alliance at all.

            The vampire rose to its feet and came slowly across the floor towards him. Harry took note of where he was—back to the black stone wall, seated on the floor as though someone had dumped him there—and got ready to move. He had no idea why he had landed that way, but then, this method of communicating with magical creatures through dreams still seemed suspect to him. He would be happier if he never had to do it again.

            I would be happier if I could simply go back to my normal life and not do something like this ever again.

            Harry put on a harsh smile as the vampire rocked to a stop next to him. It didn’t move quite like a human, Harry thought. The movements were heavier and less graceful than a human’s most of the time, but faster and more liquid in the turns of the joints. When the vampire spoke this time, he could see the fangs, and they were more slender than he had been led to believe. He thought he could reach up and break one off with a push of his finger.

            “They thought that I would favor a half-blood’s taste over a pure-blood’s?” The vampire laughed, and the sound came up from inside the chest with a hollow clang, as though it were a heartbeat. “How kind. But there is no link between taste and the ridiculous blood prejudice that your kind entertains.”

            Harry cocked his head. “I’m sure I would agree with you. But no, this isn’t a gift for you on that score. What I am is an ambassador. And since the last alliance started crumbling when pure-bloods threw you out of it, maybe a half-blood would be more acceptable.”

            The vampire’s hands had started towards his shoulders. They halted, in a way that Harry knew a human could never have mimicked. No matter how long he watched them, they never shook or trembled. The vampire either had perfect control over its body or less need for the kind of small movements that a human would always make.

            “You do not know what you are saying,” the vampire whispered.

            “I know the history only a little,” Harry admitted, drawing up his legs beneath him and clasping his arms around them. “So it could be that I’m mistaken. But I don’t think so. What I just said meant something to you. What?”

            The vampire turned its head from side to side, as if Harry’s words would make more sense when his face was viewed from a different angle. Hell, it could. Harry didn’t know much about vampires at all, only the common-sense things that everyone learned in Defense Against the Dark Arts, like the sensitivity to sunlight and so on. What if they could see words on the air, or hear their echoes longer than other people?

            “You are an odd choice for an ally,” the vampire said abruptly. “We know that you do no favor the Dark Arts or the Dark Lord.”

            “Was I mistaken, then?” Harry raised his eyebrows and rose to his feet. The vampire moved back so that he could. Harry hoped that was a good sign. On the other hand, he remained uncertain whether the vampire could break his neck in this dream-realm or not. “I thought that most of your kind didn’t work for Voldemort, that it was just one or two loners. Were you his servants? Are you going to kill me for killing him?”

            “We are servants to no one.” The vampire bent towards him, and Harry could smell the breath it was using to speak. It had a dusty, airless quality, as if it had been shut up in a tomb for a long time. Only appropriate, really, Harry thought, struggling to hold his breath. “You will have to learn that if we are to be allies.”

            “Are we?” Harry cocked his head at the vampire. “Seems to me that we haven’t agreed on that yet.”

            The vampire made another abrupt motion, as though it was going to pluck something out of his chest. Harry watched and felt his heartbeat speed up, his mouth fill with saliva, his eyes widen. He was alive in a way that he hadn’t been in the past several months, it seemed. He had felt like this when he was challenging someone on a battlefield, or creeping through one of the traps and labyrinths that Voldemort seemed to favor to guard his Horcruxes. Never any other time.

            Will I feel this way if I get to go back to Ron and Hermione?

            It was a thought that he had to put aside for later, because the vampire’s motion had stopped before it injured him, and now it moved back, saying in a polite tone, “We will need to speak with Lady Zembaz.”

            “Will we?” Harry took the chance to stand up, and shake his wand into a comfortable position for gripping. He could do a little with wandless magic, yes, but he wouldn’t trust it to save his life if a more powerful vampire came on the scene. “Who is she?”

            “Here.”

            Harry turned, starting to open his mouth and protest that he had asked who she was, not where. But then he saw the other vampire, and he had to swallow.

            She had hooked claws on her hands, and pointed ears that nestled under curling horns atop her head, and glimmering black scales along her flanks and face. Harry wondered for a moment if he had found a nest of vampires ruled by something that wasn’t one of them at all, but she turned to the side, and he could make out her fangs, still slender and needle-like, like the fangs of the first one. He nodded to her, and tried to see the humanity in her red eyes and thin, pinched face. It wasn’t easy. The thick braids of snow-white hair bound around her horns made it a little better, though.

            “Lady Zembaz,” Harry said, and inclined his head. “My name is Harry Potter. I haven’t heard of you before, though.”

            “Interesting, that you assume I would have heard of you.” Zembaz moved closer. Gloves covered her hands, except the claws at the ends of her fingers, but Harry thought he could see nobbled and twisted shapes under them that indicated she didn’t have normal fingers, either. “I had not heard you were that arrogant.”

            Harry shrugged. “You can be a little more arrogant when you’ve survived a war and you’re negotiating for a pure-blood alliance. Oh, and you killed a Dark Lord, too. I think that’s the part most people find impressive.” He met her eyes. They weren’t as bad as Voldemort’s, but maybe that was because Voldemort had been his personal nightmare for so long. Or maybe she just wasn’t using the mind-controlling magic that Malfoy had warned him about. Be careful, Harry. “Are you going to be the vampires’ negotiator? Can you, when you don’t look like the rest of them?”

            “I am a vampire,” said Zembaz, and a small smile lifted her lips. She didn’t have other teeth, Harry noticed, or other fangs, but she did have a mouth filled with shining silver. Her gums seemed to have turned that color, and also got plated. “This is what we begin to change into when we are old enough.” She nodded at the black bench the other vampire had been sitting on when Harry first appeared. “Won’t you join me?”

            Harry nodded and followed her, making sure that he took one end of the bench when she took the other. He would have expected the horns to overbalance her, they were so huge and curving, but she sat as if she was accustomed to the weight and spent a few minutes looking him over. Harry watched her claws and wondered if she had a wand.

            “It is true that it was the pure-bloods who broke the alliance with us long ago,” Zembaz continued, as if they’d been talking about that all the time. Maybe they had; it wouldn’t have surprised Harry to learn that she could look through the eyes of the other vampires around her and listen through their ears, the way that Snape was doing with the Ashborn. “But sending a half-blood who has so little idea of or interaction with his pure-blood heritage sounds stubborn and willful to me.”

            Harry had to smile at that. He wondered for a moment what Snape would have said if he was in his place, and then rejected the thought impatiently. He and Malfoy were doing this because Snape was a pain in the arse and couldn’t keep his boyfriend contented or support his hobbies in the first place. Thinking that he would ever be here, that he would want to do something like this, was silly. “Well, we are two teenagers and several centaurs so far, and that’s all.” He thought of mentioning that Draco had gone to the werewolves, and then decided that could wait. They didn’t even know if the werewolves were going to agree yet, since Draco had tried to dream again and made no contact with them.

            Zembaz tapped her claws together, which made a far more intimidating sound than fingernails would have. Once again, Harry knew where he should move if she did. But she hadn’t seemed very hostile. Perhaps she wanted the alliance. “I do not know if I trust someone like you,” she said. “I might prefer the pure-blood.”

            Harry nodded, not really surprised. Sending him had been worth a try, but what could his fame really mean to someone like Zembaz, who had probably seen half a hundred Dark Lords killed and their conquerors go on and die? “Okay. I can tell him that when I get back.”

            “Can you?” Zembaz leaned closer, and her eyes were so bright that Harry thought he could have seen them with his own closed. “No, I don’t think that I want that. I think I want an explanation right now as to why the pure-blood wasn’t sent.”

            “Because he thought you would take offense to him and try to drain him dry,” Harry said. “Half-bloods didn’t betray you personally, so you might like them a little better.”

            Zembaz sighed, and the sound had a cold edge to it that made Harry tense. But her words were mild. “Half-bloods are also held in contempt by pure-bloods. When you are as old as I am, you judge your honor not only by what people say and by your own standards, but by the standards of other cultures. I know what it means that they sent you.”

            Harry angrily met her eyes, his own guts churning. He was a half-blood, and that was all that mattered, wasn’t it? Draco could prattle on all he liked about how Harry was part of the alliance and shouldn’t walk away from them, but—

            Zembaz smiled, and then her eyes were sliding into his like knives, and her mind was sliding into his like the cruelest knife.

            Harry tried to fling a hand up over his eyes, tried to strengthen what weak Occlumency shields he might have, tried to ready his memories so that they would form a whirling wall between him and the vampire’s will, and she sliced it all to pieces. She spoke softly in the depths of his mind, and her voice was sympathetic, even as she gripped and sifted all his memories and understood him in a moment, like someone understanding a cake by swallowing a large gulp of it.

            You fear me. You need not. I have nothing to give you that you will not like. You will have strength from me. Confidence. Power. You can go back to your pure-blood allies secure in the knowledge that you have more than any of them, now. It is not every pure-blood who carries a centuries-old vampire in his mind.

            Harry scratched and bit and fought. Or he tried. After a few moments, he became aware that it was like the struggles of a kitten held in a giant’s hand. Zembaz stroked his mind to stillness and went on looking, now and then making murmurs and chuckles of pleasure. But never surprise, never that. After she had lived so long—and Harry felt the centuries there suddenly, laid on his mind like a stone blanket—nothing that a mere human teenager did was going to surprise her.

            Then she found one of his memories of the war, and it shredded the tendrils she had twisted through his mind in that direction. Harry felt her surprise then, wild and cold as a winter wind, and wished he hadn’t.

            Oh, she said. You should not have, no. And she gathered him up and punished him for that, claws trailing through his mind so often and so hard that he began to sob, and didn’t care if someone heard it. He had overestimated his capacity, and he was going to die this way, with the vampire wearing him like a puppet—

            Potter! Harry!

            He thought that must be Zembaz for a moment, because he knew that he wasn’t hearing it with his ears, and he couldn’t imagine she would let anyone else in his head. But then he felt the faint sensation of hands shaking his shoulders, and remembered, with a leap of wild and glorious gladness, that this was a dream.

            And one thing you could do with dreams was wake up from them.

            So he lashed out, dragging himself up a sheer mountain and back to the surface of the dream, while Zembaz roared in his mind like a wakened dragon.

*

            Draco didn’t think he entirely knew what he was doing. On the other hand, if the alternative was to do nothing, that wasn’t acceptable, either.

            He had been shaken and jolted out of the meditative state he was using to try and reach the werewolves when someone began screaming. He had stepped out into the corridor and stared around, wondering why someone didn’t do something, before he realized that the Ashborn couldn’t act independently for a stimulus like this. An enemy would have had to swoop down with that scream on the fortress before they moved.

            He grimaced and ran for Potter’s room—because of course it was Potter who was in trouble like that, not Severus or the centaurs or one of the Ashborn—and found Bellatrix gone from the door. He couldn’t think why. What mattered was that the door was charmed so it couldn’t be locked from the inside, only the outside. It was a simple matter to kick it open and run in.

            Potter was sitting on the bed, bolt upright against the pillows, as though someone had grabbed his shoulders and was holding him there. His eyes were flipping up and down. It reminded Draco of the way that one of the house-elves had once accidentally enchanted the curtains at the Manor. He could see the whites and then the pupils of Potter’s eyes, the darkness and then the light of them, and he shuddered.

            But shuddering wasn’t helping anyone. He leaped onto the bed and shook Potter hard, thinking he could at least unbalance him and make him fall over. That way, he might snap out of the trance or spell that gripped him.

            Potter fell, but heavily, stiffly, as though his body was made of bones and wax. Draco stared into his eyes as they fell open again, and made out a swirling mass of red.

            His first thought was the Dark Lord, since those eyes haunted his dreams, but he thought of the Dark Mark on his arm and the way it would be hurting if that were true, and he knew it had to be something different. Something else powerful, with red eyes, that could control Potter’s mind and movements and make him react like this—

            Vampire. It has to be.

            Draco grabbed himself on the brink and leaped back, mentally and physically, from the plunge he had been about to take. He was good at Legilimency and Occlumency, yes, but that didn’t mean he could survive looking a vampire in the eyes. He had been wary about Potter trying it, he remembered, but, well, the centaurs had wanted to send a half-blood to negotiate for the alliance, and Draco had foolishly agreed with them.

            And perhaps the most important thing at the moment is to rescue Potter from the consequences of that foolishness, not remind yourself that you knew what would happen all along.

            Draco nodded several times, quickly, and then reached out and arranged Potter so that he was lying on the bed with his face aiming at the ceiling. Draco kept his eyes away from those red ones as he readied his wand. He had to admit that part of Potter’s boast might have been right after all, if not the half that would have done him the most good. It seemed the vampire was having a lot of time breaking into Potter’s mind, more than it should have done with someone as open as he was.

            Draco knew the incantation he wanted, but it had been years since he learned it, and that meant he struggled in silence for long moments until the right words came back to him. “Tintinnabulum corporis!” he bellowed at last, and an almost delicate crystal flower opened from his wand and flared out to touch Potter.

            Its effects weren’t delicate. It made Potter’s body ring like the bell the incantation invoked, and his head shook on his neck, and his heels flew up as though someone had snatched his legs into the air. A weak cry came from his mouth. Those red eyes flared once more into the normal green and white.

            Draco repeated the incantation again, this time shouting Potter’s name as he finished. The magic wound that into the chaos and drama occurring inside Potter’s mind, snatching him steadily back towards the normal waking state he was supposed to be in; the spell was used to awaken people from trances, comas, and sleeping charms gone awry. Draco did it again, and added Potter’s first name this time, so that both of them were sweeping and screaming through the interior of his hand like hawks on the wing.

            Potter’s head rolled to the side, and he moaned, an ordinary, human sound of confusion and pain.

            “You’re fucking all right, do you hear me?” Draco told me, and squeezed Potter’s hand. The bones were vibrating under his skin, not an unexpected result with the Waking Bell. Draco held them until they stopped shaking and then recited the spell again.

            This time, Potter’s eyes flew open, and the tint of vampire red that had disfigured them a short time before was gone. He reached up and clasped at Draco’s shoulders as if he were drowning, moaning again. Draco curled his arms around Potter and rolled over in the bed so that Potter could lie with his head and chest cradled against Draco’s.

            “We were,” Potter said, and then forced his eyes shut as if he thought something else might look out of them. “Malfoy,” he said, and his tone was breathless. “What are you doing here?”

            “Well, there’s not many others who would come to your aid if they heard you screaming, are there?” Draco asked, and trailed his fingers down Potter’s cheek. Potter jerked his head to the side and snapped his teeth on air. Draco rolled his eyes. “Now, Potter, is that nice? I’ll have you know that I saved your life, and almost certainly your sanity, by casting that spell. It shook your mind out of the domination that the vampire must have been exercising over you.”

            “Zembaz,” Potter said, and shuddered. “Yes. She was—she was a strange vampire, she had claws and horns, and she got me to look into her eyes and took over my mind without even any effort.”

            Draco froze, staring at Potter. Then he said, “She must have been wearing a disguise of some kind. A mask.”

            Potter had recovered enough by then to move away, leaving Draco with a faint regret for the loss of the warm weight in his arms. For once, he had felt as if he were the strong one, the one who had done something special and heroic, but of course Potter couldn’t let that endure for long. He had to put distance between them, because God forbid that he rely on anyone but his friends. Draco sat on the resentment and hurt, because he wouldn’t gain anything if he showed them now, and concentrated on Potter, and Potter’s bright face, and Potter’s disgusted gestures.

            “Right, Malfoy, of course,” he was saying, his voice so thick that Draco curled his lip. He really sounded as if he was about to spit up at any moment. “A mask, when the horns were growing from her head, and she had her hair pulled back to show these pointed ears, and I would have noticed if she was using a glamour.” He didn’t sound as though he were bragging, simply making a statement, as though his unusual magical sensitivity were nothing. “And she had the claws on her fingers. Believe me.”

            Draco swallowed. “Then, Potter, you can consider yourself lucky that you got away as fast as you did.” And with your mind intact, he wanted to add, but didn’t, because he didn’t know how much of the credit belonged to Potter for having a strange mind and fast reflexes, and how much of the credit would belong to Draco himself. “Those changes indicate a vampire who’s two thousand years old. Or more.”

            Potter froze for a moment, eyes wide, but the next second he shrugged. “Well. She seems to be our best chance to negotiate an alliance of some sort with them, then. But she was insulted that we sent a half-blood.” He grimaced and rubbed a hand over his cheek. “So you should go next.”

            “Potter,” Draco said, and decided to make his voice extremely slow and careful, so that Potter could understand all the implications of what Draco was saying instead of simply dismissing his claims. “You don’t understand. She’s a vampire you should never have been able to escape from in the first place. She’s the sort of vampire that’s not supposed to exist because the Ministry has special alarms that would alert their hunters of the need to destroy them before they got to that point.”

            “Well, the Ministry’s been a bit disrupted in the past few years, hasn’t it? So—”

            “She didn’t get to be two thousand years old or more in the last eighteen months, you imbecile.”

            Potter gave him a sharp look, and for a moment, Draco could see the leviathan beneath the surface of his eyes again. Then he turned his head away and shrugged with one shoulder. “Well. Anyway. Thanks for saving me. And maybe it would be best to wait to bring the vampires into the alliance after all, if they’re going to have that kind of reaction to a half-blood ambassador.” He started to roll off the bed.

            Draco grabbed his arm and kept him still. Potter gave his arm a patient look, and then Draco an impatient one. Draco didn’t care. This matter was bigger than Potter and his pathetic need to prove how strong he was. “She knows who you are now. She might try to take you over again when you sleep.”

            Potter’s set jaw said he hadn’t thought of that, but he simply nodded as though the news was something expected, rather than distressing. “Fine. Then I’ll ask you to brew some Dreamless Sleep for me.”

            “I don’t have the expertise to do that,” Draco said, rolling over and hopping off the bed. He pulled Potter with him by main force. Potter had a scowl on his face, which seemed to indicate he thought Draco was lying just to fuck with him. Draco rolled his eyes. As though I would take the time to do that. “But Severus does.”

            Potter’s eyes widened for a moment, and he stood still. Draco wondered whether he was actually showing more emotion, or he himself was just getting better at reading Potter. Then Potter shook his head. “He doesn’t approve of us making the alliance in the first place. He won’t help me. He has no reason to.”

            Draco sighed. “He wants to win my good opinion back, at least if all the little gifts he’s giving me lately are any indication. And I want you helped.” He tugged on Potter’s arm again, but Potter had rooted his feet and was glaring at Draco.

            “Why?”

            “Why what? I don’t know why he’s changed his mind and is trying to court me with gifts now, but I think your presence might have something to do with it—”

            “Why would you want to help me?” Potter narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t want a vampire loose in the fortress, I understand that, but bringing me to Snape, drawing his attention to you when you have reason to fear that more than me because you’ve suffered more from him—”

            Draco spoke before he thought. “Don’t you owe me a life-debt, Potter? For saving you? Or at least a sanity-debt? It seems a small enough price to come with me and shut up about your fears that you’re costing me something.”

            Potter stared at him for a second. Draco thought he saw something coming to life in his face that hadn’t been there even when he was broken and helpless right after Draco cast the Waking Bell, and started to lean forwards—

            In seconds, Potter’s bloody blank mask had returned. He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Silly of me to forget it. Well. Let’s go to Snape, then.” And he turned around and marched out of the room as though this had been his own idea all along.

            Draco followed, frowning. Of course his plan had been the best idea. A vampire of that age was an opponent even Severus would have trouble destroying. They couldn’t risk themselves, or the alliance, or the Ashborn, on the chance that she would look through Potter’s eyes or link to him through his dreams. And Potter’s confidence that he could resist the vampire’s mind-control had proven as foolish as every other claim he made.

            Draco had done the right thing, the mature thing. And Potter had agreed with him, rather than fighting any longer.

            So why did he feel as if he’d lost something?

*

            Draco concluded the story he had told in an almost emotionless voice, and stepped back. That left Severus, who had seated himself halfway through the story, to look at Potter.

            Potter gave him a single, uninterested glance, and returned his eyes to the surface of the lab table. His hands rested in his lap, folded in a serene position. He had dark circles under his eyes, but as far as Severus could remember, he had possessed those even as a first-year. He wasn’t raving, wasn’t shouting objections to anything Draco said, wasn’t demanding that Severus give him poison before a potion.

            He just sat there.

            Severus was growing tired indeed of Potter the compliant hostage.

            “I cannot know whether Dreamless Sleep, by itself, will be effective,” he said, into the silence that Draco’s words had left. “A vampire of such power could exploit a link to her victim’s mind that did not come through dreams, but came simply from close familiarity with his thoughts. And a touch is all it might take to gain such familiarity. Potter, will you permit me to look into your mind? I can see if her image, for a lack of a better word, still waits there and provides her with a link.”

            Potter stirred for the first time. “You know what’s happened the last two times you tried to look into my mind, Snape,” he said. His voice was so quiet that Severus had to watch his lips to catch all the words. “The same thing will happen again. It’s nothing I do on purpose, but no one who’s human can use Legilimency on me.”

            “Well, someone managed, didn’t she?” Draco snapped from behind Potter’s chair, which at least let Severus know he was not alone in his unusual frustration with Potter. “If she did, then you should be able to lower the barriers for Severus.”

            Potter’s eyes flashed, and his cheeks shone with a fire that Severus didn’t think he’d seen since the boy came here, but his voice remained quiet, so quiet. “She did, and it hurt, you wanker. I can’t lower the barriers for him because I can’t raise them, either. They’re just there, and no one can get through.”

            Severus held back the immediate response he wanted to make. That would only alienate Potter further, and, for the first time since Severus had raised the barrier of the Ashborn, stand a chance of exposing them to danger that he could not fight against. He waited until Potter’s gaze rested more squarely on him than on the middle distance, and said, “There is something we could try. If you take a Calming Draught before I attempt to enter your mind, then that might persuade the barriers to lower. After all, they are fueled by your own defensive needs and emotions. Artificial trust might therefore change them.”

            Potter gave him a grim, wolf-like smile. “I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “On one condition.”

            Though Draco shifted behind Potter’s chair and sucked in a breath, Severus ignored that. He held Potter’s eyes and nodded instead, and sure enough, Potter gave his surprise away with a brief stiffening of his neck and hands before he continued. “I want you to know. Use the memories against me, and I’ll find a way to make your life a misery. And never mind the Vows you had me swear.”

            Again, the words surged up Severus’s throat like boiling oil, and again he held them down. There was something more here than his anger and Potter’s response, because his anger should never have existed in the first place. If he had been, in truth, as settled and calm, and with as little to wish for, as he had thought he was before Potter entered the Ashborn, then he would have responded with weariness or amused tolerance.

            He would not have been interested in Potter, in obtaining some response but defiance from him. He would not have feared any influence that Potter might hold over Draco, knowing as he did that Draco would owe allegiance to him and him only. He would not have attempted to offer the boy gifts, or, if it had become necessary, he would not have cared when Potter refused them like the stubborn brat he was.

            To gain something, one must give something. And though Severus did not yet know why Potter had cracked his supposedly glacial calm like a boulder thrown through the surface of a frozen pond, he knew it had happened.

            “I understand,” he said. “You need not fear that I will use the memories against you. Draco is the only one here who would appreciate my attempts to do so, in any case.” He looked at Draco. “And perhaps not all of them.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows back, and then turned pointedly towards Potter, who had several small twitches near his eyes that might have been signs of uneasiness. He shook his head when he saw them looking and lifted his chin. “All right, so you have me. What are you going to do besides the Calming Draught?”

            “Put you into an atmosphere that might also tranquilize you,” Severus said, keeping his movements flowing as he stood up and considered Potter from a few different angles. “This lab must remind you of the Potions classroom at Hogwarts, which can hardly be a good memory.”

            Potter’s hands spasmed once in his lap, before he clenched them down and stilled. Severus raised an eyebrow. Is he angry that I noticed, or only surprised?

            “All right,” Potter said. “There’s got to be a place like that somewhere in this ruddy fortress, doesn’t there? All right.”

            “I am overjoyed by your permission, Potter,” Severus said dryly, and turned away to find a Calming Draught among the potions that crowded his shelves. “Do you wish Draco to remain?”

            He saw Draco straighten from the corner of his eye, and knew he would resent, vocally, any attempt to send him away. Severus cast him a quelling glance, trying to tell him without words that the danger to the Ashborn was worth more than his pride, and saw Draco open, then close, his mouth. He nodded. Severus smiled and turned about with the Calming Draught, extending the vial to Potter.

            “He can stay, I reckon,” Potter said. He didn’t take the potion yet, looking up at Severus as though calculating the best way to hit him in the throat. “What kind of place are you going to put me in?”

            “Trusting, are you not?” Severus murmured, and shook his head when Potter continued to glare at him. “That is up to you. Would you prefer your rooms?”

            Potter’s jaw clenched harder than ever, the teeth grinding together audibly. Watching him, Severus would have guessed that he was caught between a desire to be in the place in the fortress that he found most comfortable and a reluctance to let Severus and Draco invade—the place in the fortress where he felt most comfortable.

            In the end, he swallowed, loudly, and inclined his head. “That will be fine.” He stood, his hand locked on the vial as if he would much prefer to drop it.

            Severus caught Draco’s eye, and saw that he was smiling as he watched Potter. Severus nodded. He could understand the impulse, at least as long as Potter was doing what he was told.

*

            This is mad. That’s the only explanation. I went mad because they poisoned my food with something to make me do it, and that’s the reason I’m going to swallow a potion that Snape’s brewed and then let him into my head.

            But Harry could remember the way that Zembaz’s claws had felt like as they dug into his mind, and he could remember the way Malfoy’s voice had sounded, shouting his name. He grimaced as he marched along the corridor in resigned silence, Snape and Malfoy so close behind him that he could feel their breath on the back of his neck.

            Not one of my favorite sensations, that.

            Malfoy had saved him. For that, Harry would go along with this charade—up to a point. If Snape tried the Imperius Curse on him or planting memories in his mind to make him do something, the way he had heard that a skilled Legilimens could during the war, he would fight back so hard that he thought he could probably bring the walls down before the Unbreakable Vow kicked in and killed him.

            It was weird, sometimes, he thought as he stepped into the room and took a seat on his bed while Malfoy conjured a chair and Snape sat on the one that was already there, how little he was afraid of dying. By Unbreakable Vow or choking, the way he almost had when the Death Eaters got hold of him, or because his mind was scooped out by an unspeakably powerful vampire, it was all the same to him. The people who might get hurt by his various ways of dying were the innocent victims he was concerned with.

            Well, in this case I doubt Ron and Hermione will like it if you die with Snape’s claws in your mind. So swallow the Calming Draught already.

            Harry grimaced and did so. He had always hated the taste of most potions, but he’d especially come to hate the taste of this one in the last few years, after the time Bellatrix had captured him and fed one to him mixed with something else. It had made him want to tear his skin off, and he’d almost done so before Voldemort burned the potion out of him and moved on to the next torture he wanted to inflict on Harry.

            And Snape is going to see all of that.

            Harry snorted and lay back, closing his eyes. He hated the way that his muscles went limp and some of his thoughts retreated to the back of his mind, how his anger and his desire to fight back blurred. Well. Much good that lot of memories would do Snape. He had been there for some of those tortures, or would have heard about them from his “friends,” and in other cases, Harry had already dealt with the scars and moved on. There were very few ways that Snape could hurt him.

            His breathing seemed to catch on an invisible snag, as his body remembered the spiked Calming Draught and sought to expel this one. Harry tilted his head back and breathed normally a few more times, winning free of the bloody memory.

            Then he looked at Snape and nodded. He’d caught the man’s mouth open, and he was sure that Snape had been about to make some crack about how Legilimency needed direct eye contact. “I’m here, sir,” he said. “Do your worst.”

            Snape half-shook his head, his face calmer than Harry had ever seen it. If someone had asked him, he would have said that it was the face Snape probably wore when he was brewing potions. Luckily, no one had asked Harry, and he could shudder at himself for having to think about that, in silence. “You are not yet relaxed. Concentrate on something that will relax you, so that the barriers may come down.”

            Harry wanted to say that nothing was going to help with that, but he closed his eyes and focused on the moment right after he had killed Voldemort. He knelt in the middle of black dust, with crumbled stone and burned earth falling to pieces around him, and stared at the melted, slagged remains of his greatest enemy’s body. He breathed, and from the presence of the air in his lungs and the blood flowing through his veins, he knew that he was alive.

            He had won.

            Harry held onto the image until he was sure that he could have recreated it on the walls using the spell Hermione had taught him to paint, if someone had asked him. Then he opened his eyes and nodded.

            Snape leaned closer, and closer. Harry held back a private wince. Having the man this close threatened to destroy the comfort he’d found. Snape had never been someone who promoted calmness in him.

            But he held onto the memory by sheer force of will—clinging to the locket Horcrux while he fell through the air was harder—and then Snape was taking his chin in a surprisingly gentle hand and turning his head up further, to face the light. His wand flicked along the side of Harry’s cheek, close enough that Harry could see it and its motion wouldn’t come as a surprise, down far enough that the casting wouldn’t look aggressive.

            “Legilimens,” Snape whispered.

            Harry heard Malfoy’s erratic shifting about, and Snape’s breathing, and the hesitant chirping of insects that had followed his defeat of Voldemort. He heard the sheets crinkle as Snape bent closer, and the way his pulse sped up as he looked into Harry’s eyes, and the sound of Hermione crying when the message came from the Ashborn about wanting to take him hostage. He widened his eyes, refusing to blink, trying to let Snape in as he hadn’t ever let anyone in.

            There was a pause, and then Snape slipped through the barriers and into his mind.

*

            Unneeded: Yes, Severus definitely hopes that Draco likes it as well.

            Harry is still unsure what the right thing to do is, but this chapter and the following one are going to change a lot.
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Ashborn