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Ashborn	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 36176 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
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Chapter Fourteen—Before the Screaming Hordes

            Severus plunged in, and in, and down.

            The images that streamed past him were, for the most part, the ones he had expected. Images of Potter running through Hogwarts at night, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone had noticed him under that infernal Invisibility Cloak. Potter and his friends crouching over books and arguing about them. Potter and his girlfriend, the red-haired Weasley sister, holding hands and swearing eternal love. Potter standing in front of the Dark Lord with an expression that mingled defiance and despair.

            That was all common enough.

            But then Severus turned and plunged further under the surface, and met the other, streaming memories that arose like whales from the deep and swam towards him, and he saw why Potter’s mind might have changed so as to make normal Legilimency impossible.

            There were images of blood and torture there. Potter holding the Lestranges under the Cruciatus Curse, his face bearing no expression at all. Weasley retching out his stomach and bowels due to some poisonous potion, while Potter stayed beside him to embrace him and clean up his mess and in general display literally disgusting Gryffindor nobility.

            Potter tied down while the Dark Lord bent over him and whispered filthy things in his ear, things that Severus was astonished Potter had remembered instead of taking the time and trouble to repress.

            A labyrinth, dozens and dozens of stony passages cut through an underground cave, through which Potter and Granger ran with a shimmering locket in their hands and a screaming, howling beast on their trail. Potter’s mind had not preserved an image of their beast, which was fine, as far as Severus was concerned. He knew the various candidates for something that might make that noise, and that Potter had challenged one of them and survived was the surprise here, not that he didn’t remember it.

            Potter ducking under a waterfall of blood and kneeling down in a pile of bones, sorting through them so that he could find the right skull and hold it on his knees. Severus would not have been surprised to see the skull’s eyes glow as Potter asked something trapped inside it questions, but instead Potter picked up a stone and used it to smash the skull to small pieces, which he then picked up and began to eat.

            There was Granger, her hair filthy and matted with blood and sweat, Potter beside her, crawling through something it took Severus some time to recognize. They were in the belly of a dragon; it had swallowed them without digesting them. Of course, that meant Potter and Granger—and Weasley, because there he was, behind them—had to dodge the acid that poured down around them and drag themselves through the fetid swamp of the food fragments that the dragon had digested. Flicking after that memory, as though pulled along with it, in its train, came the sensation of a shower that Potter had stood in for hours, long after the water had become cold, and scrubbed at the dried blood on his skin.

            Severus shrugged. So far, he had seen no trace of the vampire’s presence, and no reason for Potter to feel so awfully about what had happened to him during the war. Memories like these could not have raised the barriers that would keep a Legilimens of Severus’s caliber out of a boy’s mind. So he pushed, harder, trying to get under the surface and see what was there that was so molten with evil.

            For a moment, Potter resisted. Severus could feel him rising up against the Calming Draught in a way that should have been impossible, stretching and struggling and straining. Of course, Severus did not know when the last time had been that the usual rules applied to Potter. He kept a mental sneer locked in place and pushed again.

            He thought he might have met the vampire’s power after all when the currents of Potter’s mind bore him against something incredibly hard, enough to make the shock of pain shudder back into his own body, and not simply the mental projection of himself that he had placed in Potter’s mind. Then he looked up and saw the visual of stone gates in front of him, hinged with silver. Around the hinges leaked mist that probably formed the memories and thus the barriers. But the real memories lay hidden behind them. Severus reached out and put a hand on the gates, though he had no reason to think they would open for him, specifically.

            Perhaps Potter was trying to be cooperative in the way that Severus had accused him of deliberately not being. Perhaps he had realized that Severus was trying to help him. Perhaps he was simply too tired to fight anymore.

            The gates quivered. Then they opened. Severus stepped through them and into the land of blood and ash.

            The landscape around him was grey and red, and nothing else. Severus reached out to plunge his hand into a memory, and found himself drawn in more quickly than he would have been even by ordinary Legilimency.

            He was in a dark place. He tried to move, and found that he couldn’t. When he lay still and tried to listen to the input of his body, of Potter’s body, he found the cause. Stones pinned him down from above, and his legs were broken, besides. That sharp pain could mean nothing else.

            Potter’s panting was loud in the confined space. Severus did not see why, unless the boy had claustrophobia. He himself had the presence of mind to look about and see what he could, but then again, unless what he wanted to see was darkness, there was nothing to find purchase or hold on. Nor was there anything to hear except the breaths, and perhaps the wild beating of his heart when Severus truly concentrated.

            Then he heard a scrape in front of him.

            The darkness seemed to lighten. At first, Severus thought the boy had found the strength to cast Lumos. But no, his wand hand was pinned, as Severus found when he tried instinctively to move it. The light came from the creatures in front of him.

            They resembled worms with a multitude of small legs all the way around the edges of their bodies, fringed and feathered. Severus did not recognize them, but he would have liked to try them as substitutes for centipedes in a few of his potions.

            For a moment, Severus thought they would try to eat the boy. But instead, they crawled down around Potter’s hands and arms and crouched there. Some were moving over his legs, if the feeling Severus had from that direction was any indication. He blinked, and again thought that this memory was a poor one to inspire all that savage terror and anger in Potter.

            The creatures continued to flow in. More and more of them, and they did not bite or scratch. They simply settled around Potter, rings around his arms, burdens on his shoulders. The boy was so trapped by the stones that he could not move in any case, and this was not a great addition to the pain.

            Then the insects began to crawl into the small space between Potter’s head and the stone in front of him. Their bodies brushed against Severus’s face, against Potter’s face, pushing into his nostrils and against his lips. Blocking his eyes.

            Stifling his breath.

            Potter began to scream, whimpering, wailing sobs of the kind that Severus imagined might come from a child who knew that it was abandoned and its parents would never come for it again. The noises cut at his nerves as the realization about the creatures themselves could not have done. He tried to tug himself out of the memory, but he had come in too deeply, and this was a powerful set of sensations. He was caught.

            Potter’s sounds became muffled as the creatures piled up, one atop another, feelers waving. He closed his eyes, but there were smaller versions of the worms that began to press under the edges of his eyelids, under the lashes, against the ball. Severus heard a distant sound of grinding stones that he suspected was a rescuer coming to Potter’s aid—how had he survived this, otherwise?—but the feelings around him were too overwhelming to focus on it.

            Potter’s panic lashed him, and his own determination not to remain here and suffer it any longer. He finally, finally managed to pull himself free, and floated in the black space behind the gates again, staring at the floating pools of reminiscence.

            Perhaps, after all, he did not disdain Potter for wanting to lock these particular denizens of his mind and nightmares up.

            He drifted further, to the side, and found another pulsing light that he ventured to touch. This time, he deliberately kept part of his consciousness back, in the land of red and grey, so that he could escape again more easily.

            He wondered if he should have when he found himself in a small, neat corridor in a Muggle house. Clearly this was a memory of Potter’s childhood, and he had confined it here because he could not bear to remember the time when he had first realized that his uncle and aunt were not his parents.

            Severus drifted across the corridor like a shadow and into a small place under the stairs. Potter was curled up in it, his breath rasping. Severus nodded. Ah. Undoubtedly where his claustrophobia came from. Potter had probably locked himself in here playing some childish game, and of course the fear would be the worst thing in the world for a boy who fancied himself brave.

            Then he got closer, his consciousness more nearly blending with Potter’s, and paused. The smells were strong now, the waste and the vomit. Had Potter been locked here when he was sick? That might explain the intensity of the memory, and of course Severus know all too well how being six or seven could exaggerate every sensation until it burned with a clear flame that adulthood could never match.

            His friendship with Lily was an example of that. No doubt, if he had met her at Hogwarts, he never would have conceived of such a friendship, and could have remained above that.

            He came closer, and found Potter lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his head, his body wracked with shudders and sobs. Close beside him was a bucket, and a small bed. Severus peered at the bucket and recoiled. It was full of feces, and their stink permeated the hot and stale air in the cupboard space.

            Potter rolled his head to the side, his glazed eyes staring at Severus. His mouth opened, and he began to vomit, spreading a puddle of it that covered the floor. Severus was not sure whether he was sick or was responding to the smell of the feces, which he could not escape.

            Severus began to release his hold on the memory again, enough that he left the cupboard and could look at its door. Locked shut. A Muggle boy passed by as he watched and kicked the door beneath the lock, so casually as to make it clear that he did it every day. “Mummy, the freak’s throwing up again!” he shouted over his shoulder.

            There was a long-suffering sigh that could only be Petunia’s, and she stepped out of what looked like the doorway of a kitchen and banged on the door. “Be quiet in there,” she snapped. “You know that we don’t have the time to take care of you, and you shouldn’t have been sick if you wanted attention.” She turned away and went back to her work with an expression on her face as though someone had asked some enormous favor of her that she had at last fulfilled.

            Severus shut his eyes again. He opened them. But the cupboard with the locked door was still there, and the retching sounds of the boy from behind it, lying sick and weak in his own filth.

            He released his hold on that memory and darted silently back towards the surface, away from the gates. He spun tendrils around him as he went, fine filaments of power that would seek out the tenor of an alien mind imprinted on Potter’s. Now that he had experienced some of the boy’s most powerful memories, his secret shames, he thought he could identify that mind fairly easily.

            Nothing answered him. Potter’s mind was clear of any trace of vampires.

            Severus went on rising, and opened his eyes, and leaned away from Potter. He kept his hand in place on Potter’s chin, holding his face turned up to the ceiling, and did not look away even when Potter’s eyes fluttered and opened.

            He had received some answers, but, in the manner of all more complicated answers, they simply created even more questions.

*

            Harry felt as though someone had taken a scalpel to his mind and scraped away any trace of dignity. He knew what Snape had seen, he knew that Snape knew about the Dursleys, and he wanted to vomit. Snape knowing about the war was one thing, because Harry had survived all those tortures and still killed Voldemort. But the Dursleys were his past, not part of the suffering that had made him motivated enough to take down Voldemort, and Snape would say things that…

            Harry shuddered, and then coiled his anger and fear into a whip and tucked it away in some obscure corner of himself, where no one could find it. Yes, Snape might say something like that. It didn’t matter. Harry was being an idiot to think it did. He had survived snakes spitting poison into his eyes and Bellatrix whispering and chuckling into his ear about Sirius as she tortured him and a Death Eater whose name he didn’t know walking down his spine and breaking it into separate chunks, only to put it back together and start all over again. Compared to that, what were a few stinging insults? He could do this.

            He was no longer afraid of death. That meant not being afraid of the things that seemed worse than death, either. Because he knew they really weren’t.

            He opened his eyes.

            Snape still sat on the bed, and he kept hold of Harry’s face as though he assumed that he needed the hold to control him or keep him down or something. His eyes were huge, and Harry couldn’t read the emotions in them. Then again, he never had, at least not in such a way that Snape’s reasons made sense to him. Harry knocked Snape’s hand away roughly and sat up, turning to Malfoy, who leaned close in the chair.

            “I didn’t feel any trace of vampires,” Harry said calmly. “And I think Snape probably would have told you if he found any. Right?”

            Malfoy nodded, although his eyes were wide in much the same way as Snape’s. Harry frowned, wondering if it was possible to ride along on Legilimency and pick up images from someone’s mind even if it wasn’t you reading that mind. Perhaps Malfoy had cast some spell that Harry didn’t hear, because he was too busy drowning in the Calming Draught and trying to think calming thoughts to lower the barriers…

            No. He wouldn’t think that. He would take the words they gave him, and nothing else. And at the moment, that probably meant crushing insults. He turned back to Snape. “Well?” he asked, lifting his chin.

            “Well, what?” Snape sat back and looked at Harry as if he was of no more interest than one of the fringed-with-feet insects that had nearly killed Harry. Harry shuddered and banished that memory to the back of his mind. He swallowed. He wondered if he had imagined some of the more extreme consequences, and if this meant that Snape was going to let everything go, in the interests of not connecting himself any more intimately to Harry than he had to.

            But then he realized something else. Snape was still sitting on his bed. He hadn’t backed away and gone to wash his mind free of the taint of stupidity he must have found in Harry’s, the way Harry had imagined he would.

            “You found no trace of the vampire,” Harry said. “Did you?”

            Snape shook his head. Harry relaxed. Until that point, he had been half-sure that Zembaz was somewhere lurking in the back of his mind after all, but if Snape said that she wasn’t, he could relax and sleep tonight.

            If Snape says that she wasn’t, you’re willing to trust him? How the fuck does that work?

            Harry bit his lip, harshly, and shook his head. He didn’t know how it worked, but the fact was that he would trust Snape on matters related to the mind, if nothing else. He just would, and give up wondering how it worked. Because to spend too much time thinking about that was to go mad, really.

            “Great,” he said. “Thanks. You can go away. I think I’d like to sleep now.” Distance from Snape and sleep should both help to erase that horrible stretched feeling from his mind.

            He started to lie down, but Snape reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, restraining him. Harry stared at him suspiciously. Snape’s face was blank, but that didn’t help. Once again, Harry was reminded forcibly that he had never really been able to read Snape.

            “Did you think of something else you need?” Harry let the sarcasm bubble to the surface of his voice. The more he could annoy Snape, the more likely the man was to leave him alone. “Perhaps your own nightmares need refreshing?”

            “I did indeed see images in your mind that were worse than what I had expected there,” Snape said, bending near. Harry thought he could feel a faint echo of the fascination he must carry for Malfoy when Snape did that. Someone who didn’t tell you outright what he thought, but just loomed and scowled, could seem more intimidating than some of the Death Eaters Harry had known, and that might be just the kind of person that you wanted to protect you from Death Eaters. “Particularly those images that came from your childhood with the Muggles.”

            Well. So here it was. Harry ignored the way that Malfoy’s jaw was dropping, ignored the way that Malfoy snapped his head back and forth between them as though he hadn’t suspected any such thing. Well, perhaps that meant that Snape hadn’t told Malfoy anything while Harry was unconscious and unable to hear his voice. That was something, Harry reckoned, though not the uninterrupted silence about the Dursleys that he would have preferred to have preserved.

            But sometimes he didn’t get what he wanted. Harry met Snape’s eyes and said blandly, “Yes, horrible, weren’t they? But they’re rubbish that I left behind. I’ll never have to see them again, and that’s good enough for me.”

            Snape was leaning in close again. Harry wondered how he could come closer without kissing. That was more in Malfoy’s department, not Harry’s, wasn’t it? Harry had to bite his lip then to stifle an inappropriate laugh, and try to sit up and look calm and manly. He had the feeling it didn’t work, if the way that Snape’s eyes cut at him was any indication. “You will admit to nothing more than that?” Snape asked.

            Harry snorted, and was glad that he could make it sound natural. Inside, part of him was ripping into shreds, the part that had sworn to defend his secrets and die before anyone else got hold of them, but as he had learned before, when it came down to it, he could bear quite a lot without dying. “Admit? Am I confessing a crime now? Or is this only part of your general idea that I should always be confessing some crime, or I’m not the Potter you know and love?”

            Snape’s hand cramped. Harry watched it. Yeah. Stay closer and pursue this, and you’d better believe that I’ll make you regret it as much as I can, Snape. Your choice. Is it really worth it?

*

            Draco didn’t know all the details of what Severus had seen in Potter’s mind, but he didn’t need to. Not when Severus had that look in his eyes Draco recognized, although he had seen it only once. The look was the sharp, half-outraged one of someone who had clashed with his own preconceptions and come out the worse.

            Draco had seen it before when the Dark Lord dropped his parents’ mangled corpses in front of him. Severus was the one who had told him they would be safe, that the Dark Lord was too short on followers to waste them. He had stared at the bodies longer than Draco had, longer than Draco could have without giving in to the impulse to turn his head away and hide his face against Severus’s robes.

            What was there in Potter to stand up to the sight of Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy lying on the floor?

            Draco half-hoped that he wouldn’t have to find out, though from the way that Potter and Severus stared at each other, he wouldn’t get that wish. For the moment, though, neither was moving, Potter secure in his defiance, Severus clearly considering which was the best way to proceed and not liking any of his options.

            He cleared his throat.

            Severus turned and stared at him in a way that would have made Draco cower a week ago. But Potter had come in to rescue him since then, and had taught Draco a little about how weak he must have seemed, how cowardly it was to take pride in his lover’s sternness and strength but fear them at the same time. He matched Severus stare for stare, and at last Severus nodded and said, “You had something to say, Draco.”

            He could have made it a question, but perhaps it’s better he didn’t. “Yes,” Draco said, glancing at Potter. “Did you see something in his mind that means he’s a danger to us? Is he going to go mad in the night and kill us all?”

            “I found no trace of the vampire, as I said,” Severus said, and now his voice was tight and cold because someone had dared to contradict him.

            “I didn’t mean that,” Draco said. “It’s Potter. There’s no saying that he won’t go mad and murder all of us in our beds just because. Vampire in his head or not.”

            Potter bowed his head to Draco, and there was a glint in his eyes that made Draco feel as if he could fly. The git still didn’t say anything, but then, Severus had almost forgotten Potter. He was staring at Draco, and he blinked more than that before he said, “No. I saw nothing to indicate that he would do such a thing.”

            Draco nodded. “Then does it matter what you saw in his head? Why not let it go, and come back some other time? If it matters,” he added, and glanced at Potter, half-expecting the git would be insulted that Draco didn’t think much of his rubbish bin of a brain.

            But Potter smiled and nodded, and Draco realized abruptly that he was giving permission for Potter to go off and rebuild the barriers that kept his emotions locked up. Right now, he was more vulnerable than he had been since he came to the Ashborn, but he could regroup, if given enough time to recover. And he would.

            Draco chewed his lip, trying to decide whether he wanted Potter alive with fire, reacting to him, or Potter free from this embarrassing tangle that they appeared caught in. What way would be best for Potter, and what would be best for the alliance, and what would be best for Draco himself? His life had certainly become more complicated once Potter induced him to start thinking about other things than Severus.

            “It matters,” Severus said, and with a heaviness in his voice that Draco had not expected, “because it was what had kept me out of his head the times I tried to read his mind. The boy was quite right. The twisted memories of the war were the main causes of those barriers, but there is also his childhood that needs addressing. There are problems caused by the way he conducts himself among the Ashborn that we can solve if we confront those memories.”

            Potter’s eyes had darkened, Draco saw when he glanced at him. He was leaning forwards in his bed, and he had clenched one hand into a fist and driven it into the side of his knee. He looked as if he’d like to spring forwards and strangle Severus. Draco replayed Severus’s words over in his head, and winced. He knew that this was about as kind as Severus ever got, but of course he couldn’t expect Potter to know that.

            Funny that I’m taking Potter’s side with sympathy, when five days ago I would still have been thinking about Severus first, he decided in wonder.

            “So sorry that you can’t read my mind the way you went to,” Potter hissed. “So sorry that you can’t easily make a mindless slave out of me, the way you’re trying to do with everyone in the Ashborn. If you think that means I’m going to give in and be your pet, your toy, your tool like all of them, now that you’ve seen inside the confines of my skull, you can think again.” His voice deepened, and Draco felt the words hammered out on the air, as if Potter was taking a fourth Unbreakable Vow. “Before I surrender to you and let you control me, I’ll commit suicide in a way that destroys the peace and destroys the Ashborn. I promise, you try to force me to work for you and I’ll destroy all your work. All your labor. I promise.”

            In the silence that followed the words, Draco licked his lips and thought, a little dazed, Well, we got him to react, at least.

*

            Severus held Potter’s eyes, and did not look away. He was not using Legilimency to read Potter’s thoughts any longer, but then, he hardly needed to. He had never seen such magnificent fury, and since Potter came here, he had never seen him so open. His emotions were all drifting on the surface of his eyes, ripe for the taking.

            And Severus—he wanted to go on observing them. He didn’t want to lock Potter’s mind away as he had with the other Ashborn. He did not want to wield the dominion of fear over him the way he had over Draco.

            Because it had taken Potter’s coming to teach him how bored he was with that.

            That was the reason his own emotions were so easily stirred, so present to be kicked up instead of decently locked away. He had achieved a life without challenges, only to learn that a life without challenges was a life without ambition, a life without goals. The nature of the obstacles he had faced so far—war, spying, two masters, losing his best friend because of his own stupidity—had tried him so severely that he had thought he wanted a life of peace. But he had had nearly two years to recover from his exhaustion with challenges, and to discover that he wanted to taste more of them.

            Potter would give him that life of challenges.

            In return, of course, for a life of almost constant irritation.

            But, having seen the alternative, Severus thought he might be prepared to accept the price.

            He laid his hands on the bed again and braced himself over Potter. Potter did nothing but glare back, alive with defiance, as if it was a smoke that he exuded, the air that he breathed. Severus felt his mind spin into sharper being with it, and he nodded a little. He would gain nothing if he tried to lie now, and not least because neither Potter nor Draco would believe him. What he could do was tell the truth and persist in what he wanted to do despite any disbelief, because that honesty was his strength. Potter and Draco would try to find some way around it, but they couldn’t discover his hidden plans, because he wouldn’t have any.

            I begin to see why Albus talked so often about honesty being the shield that no arrows could pierce.

            Though that is still an intolerably medieval metaphor.

            “You will know better when I am finished with you,” Severus said calmly. “I don’t want to conquer your mind, but I do want to understand you.” He heard Draco’s hard exhale, and eyed him. Draco hastily slammed his gaping jaws back together. “And I want to make sure that the threat you present to the Ashborn is lessened.”

            Potter laughed at him, the kind of breathy, hollow sound that a laughing skull might produce. “And why should I care about that? If I want to take your rotten power away from you, then I ought to be able to do that—”

            “Potter.”

            That was Draco, of all people, intervening. Severus decided to lean back and let him do so, unless he received some proof that Draco was trying to get in the way and dissuade Potter from listening to him.

            Draco gave Severus an uneasy look, which he returned impassively. Draco proceeded to ignore him and to focus on Potter. “I don’t think he means that you’re less of a threat to the Ashborn because you could take them away from him and he doesn’t want you to do so,” he said. “I think he meant that you would be less suicidal if we understood what was driving you, and that means that you’re less likely to wake up mad some fine morning and destroy us all that way.”

            Potter snorted as though that had never occurred to him and wouldn’t have concerned him if it had. “So what? Who cares? He ought to know that how I die is my business. There’s nothing in the Unbreakable Vows about that, so long as I don’t provoke him or one of the Ashborn into doing it.”

            “I would prefer that you not tear apart my fortress,” said Severus, and marveled at the clenched-tooth half-hysteria that his light, amused tone drew from Potter. Ah, yes, that was fine. He would use such a tone in the future, and he reckoned that it would be more useful than some threats. “And, of course, I wish to keep my hostage alive.”

            Potter was all but glowing now, as that dark aura Severus could see, the one that said someone was close to death or thought so, appeared around him again. “So sorry to disappoint you,” Potter purred. “Of course you would want that. But, again, if I choose to die, then that’s my business.”

            “You don’t want to stay alive?” Draco whispered. Severus couldn’t tell from his lowered voice if Draco was horrified, fascinated, or frightened by the idea. Even when the boy had undergone torture, Severus thought, Draco had never ceased wanting to live. Heroic suicide such as Potter seemed to be contemplating was not for him.

            “I don’t want to stay alive if it would serve my enemies, or lead to slavery,” Potter said. “Like your slavery.” Draco flinched and lowered his eyes as if he hadn’t expected to be addressed so personally.

            “It would not,” Severus said, and a careful, firm tone also made Potter look at him as if crazed, foam all but falling from his mouth. Did his guardians use such a tone? “It would help. It might convince me that the Ashborn are less efficient and less entertaining than a group of free people in full possession of their faculties.”

            “I can’t take the chance,” Potter said, and now his body seemed to vibrate with what was all but a croon of hatred. “I won’t stay alive on the chance that I could help them and then see you treat them badly again, you bastard—”

            “Please,” Draco said suddenly, and then leaned in and clutched at Potter’s arm, burrowing his head into Potter’s shoulder. Potter stopped ranting and stared at him in astonishment. Severus leaned back, careful to keep his smile hidden. Sometimes, Draco aided Severus’s plans, and he did not even know it.

            “Don’t stay alive for them, then,” Draco muttered. “Or him. Or yourself, even, although personally I think you’re crazy if you want to die. Stay alive for me.” His hand caressed Potter’s chest, then gripped Potter’s own. “Please.”

            “This is—silly,” Potter said, after a few moments of surprise so great that Severus thought him physically incapable of anything but holding Draco and staring at him. “We were talking about my memories, not about suicide—”

            “It is your memories that make you feel as you do,” Severus cut in, quietly. The right words at the right time would outweigh all the persuasion that he might bring to bear on Potter. “Do you not wish to cure that? If you could be rid of your tendencies to think death best, to break out in unpredictable rages and wake sweating from nightmares, would you not want to be?”

            Potter twisted his head away. “Of course I don’t want to cure them,” he said. “Not when they offer certain advantages, the way that my memories keeping you out of my mind do.”

            But Severus had seen the tremor of uncertainty at the corners of his eyelids. Yes, give him the choice and Potter would choose to recover from those memories. He was not all blades and battle and restlessness and magic. He wished to be able to lay down his burdens, to rest.

            It was his sodding nobility, his conviction that he should suffer for everybody and everyone, that prevented him from doing so. If having nightmares helped him stay independent and thus protect Draco and the Ashborn from Severus, then he would certainly consider it his duty to do so.

            Severus shook his head. There was an odd, confused gratitude welling up in him, that Potter had brought challenges back into his life and taught him this, as well as wonder that Potter could ever feel such things in the first place, and exasperation that he would rather cling to them than admit human needs.

            And curiosity, of course. Severus wanted to understand the source of the memories he had seen, because understanding complex problems was what he did.

            “You can have what you want,” Severus said. “And at a low price—”

            Potter twisted back around and snarled at him again. “My independence and my ability to think for myself, you mean? All those poor little party tricks of the mind that I wasn’t using anyway?”

            Severus felt his lips twitch. “Party tricks of the mind” was good, and he would have to remember it. But he shook his head. “Not what I meant at all,” he said calmly. “You tell me about the memories. I aid you in putting them to rest, and you’re free of the nightmares. You can oppose me more ardently, I would think, when free of such preoccupations.”

            The fire caught in the deep green eyes. What Potter would not do for himself, he would do for others.

            So like his mother in that.

            “What do you get out of it?” Potter demanded.

            “I believe I already told you,” Severus murmured, but since Potter still squinted at him, he rolled his eyes and relented. “My hostage alive. Understanding of what I saw, what I cannot quite believe. I am sure that your childhood was not as bad as all that.”

            He loaded his voice with deliberate disbelief, and Potter all but snarled as he rose to the challenge. “Fine, Snape. You want it, you have it. But not because you asked.” His hands came down to rest on Draco’s shoulders, and he rocked him a little. “You can sit up now, Draco,” he added, in a gentle voice that Severus apparently didn’t deserve, as yet.

            Severus watched in contentment as Draco stirred. As near an equal exchange as we can come, with a bit more work on my side. But what I have is another interest in life, and there is nothing more precious than that.

            Except Draco, perhaps.

*

            Draco kept his head bowed until he was sure that he would have the right expression on his face when he looked up. They would think him weak, since he had hidden his face in Harry’s chest and wailed like that.

            But he had what he had wanted, too.

            A response from Potter. A promise that he would be at Draco’s side as Draco strove to find himself again.

            And perhaps interest from Severus, too, given the way that his eyes lingered on Draco’s face—a fact he didn’t seem to recognize himself.

            A mask of weakness had served Draco well before. He saw no need to abandon it until he wished to.

*

            PrincessKay: Yeah, but at least I updated on time!

            unneeded: At least Snape does have the ability to change his mind when he needs to, although that means that he’s mainly doing it for his own benefit.

            Ophelia: Thank you! That’s always a challenge with an AU, to make it interesting but not just a shadow of the original story, so I’m glad that you took a chance on it. (And I’m really flattered that you made an account specifically to review the story!)
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Ashborn