Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Wages of Going On	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 43959 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 7
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fourteen—Stalking and Striking
            It was no wonder that Ice had been talking about squares, Harry thought. That was what the Aurors in front of him were cutting into the stone. Not a circle, like so many rituals were conducted in, including the corrupted one that had bound him to Snape and Malfoy. A perfect square, marred only by little bits of stone dust and flakes of rock that the Aurors cutting it scraped away without pausing.
            Harry couldn’t think of many rituals that used a square in the first place, let alone ones so urgent that the Aurors would continue ignoring him and Malfoy instead of fighting. Well. He would give them something else to think about.
            “Veritas,” he murmured, and swept his wand in a cross-shape in front of him, ignoring the way Malfoy stared at him. There was no way Harry would believe that Malfoy wasn’t familiar with that spell, so he didn’t have any cause to start talking righteously about the way Harry knew Dark Arts.
            The spell slammed into the kneeling, working Aurors as a kind of haze, like droplets of dew. One of them leaned back on her heels and giggled, but the rest kept working. Harry nodded. The Veritas Curse didn’t always disrupt concentration, and the people it did that for weren’t necessarily the best targets for questioning. He asked aloud, “What kind of ritual are you designing?”
            They began to answer in a babbling chorus, their answers overrunning each other and making it hard to determine who was saying what. Harry cast a Fine-Tuning Charm on his ears, and began to listen to just one voice in the middle of the mess, from the Auror there who looked oldest and was thus probably senior, and more trusted by Ice.
            “…said that we needed a ritual to understand. Everyone knows about your scar but no one understands it. We needed to think about that. Needed to know if there was a possibility of You-Know-Who coming back. What happened when you faced him? Why did you manage to survive the Killing Curse twice and no one else ever did? Why hasn’t it happened again? What is going on?” She bowed her head over the design in the stone and went on cutting, mumbling questions to herself. “Could the Ministry have understood from the beginning if you were properly placed in a wizarding family instead of in the Muggle world? What about if we had studied you right after the war? This isn’t the best, but it will have to do.”
            Harry hissed and let the Fine-Tuning Charm go. A knowledge ritual. What they would have done if they had got him in the center of the square wasn’t all that different from what his curse had just done to them.
            “You know the Veritas Curse, Potter.” Malfoy’s voice was so low that Harry had trouble hearing him over the babble of the cursed Aurors, even though Malfoy was hovering right by his shoulder. “I’m impressed.”
            Harry shrugged dismissively. “Lots of people know it.” It would have been used more often, but while it did make the people it was cast on speak the truth, it did it by ruining any inhibitions they had. People would speak without direction, saying whatever was on their minds. Veritaserum was much easier to use, and the people under it would respond to direct questions. Not to mention that fine little point about Veritaserum only being legal to use if someone willingly drank it.
            Then again, nothing about this situation was legal, and Harry had no prejudice against using Dark tactics on his enemies when they were other Aurors and hadn’t followed the rules, either.
            “They wanted to investigate your scar?”
            “They wanted to do more than that.” Harry kept his back turned to Malfoy, although he did dart his eyes around to make sure that no Aurors were closing in on their backs. What he saw made him relax. Even Snape’s duel with Ice seemed to be over. The men and women in front of him went on feverishly working, but it would mean less than nothing if someone else didn’t force Harry into the square and cast the necessary spells. “I think I would have been in the Department of Mysteries if they just wanted questions answered. In a knowledge ritual, you can gain objective knowledge about whatever the topic you’re researching is. I would answer things I didn’t know myself. Or a voice would answer through me.”
            “I’ve heard of knowledge rituals, of course,” Malfoy said. “I never knew they functioned like that.”
            “They need a lot of help and they need a lot of magic,” Harry said. “Most people who could perform them like to work alone and think they can find their answers in an easier way.” He turned around. “Where’s—”
            “Here, Potter.”
            Snape’s voice was as cold as Ice had made Harry feel. Of course it was. Harry shrugged at him and turned back, gesturing to the square on the floor. “Do you recognize what particular ritual that belongs to? I only recognize the class of ritual.”
            “You don’t mind asking me for help?” From the corner of his eye, Harry saw Snape pressing his hand to his chest. “The Great Harry Potter deigns to admit that he doesn’t know everything himself?”
            “Sometimes even a rapist can be helpful,” Harry drawled, and shot him a sweet smile.
            From the way he swallowed, Snape was forcing down his rage. Harry didn’t care. He had been the one to get captured, but Snape had been the one to turn this whole confrontation into one where he was a right git. He could pay the price in anger for once, and Harry would be the one who stood around and seemed polite and civil and committed to getting everything done the right way. And he was. He had accepted Malfoy’s help. He had even accepted Malfoy’s information and submission when he had to. Snape was the one who kept standing outside and sneering at him. Let Malfoy see that, too.
*
            Severus did not want to admit that Potter might have a point, because that would mean admitting that Potter had enough of a sense of wit to get at him. He knelt down next to the square carved in the stone, instead, and squinted at it, willing it silently to make sense.
            It remained unfamiliar and puzzling for moments longer than it should have, although that was partially because it was not complete and some of the kneeling carvers cut off his line of sight. Then it suddenly resolved, so that Severus could see the way that the ragged lines at the top would bend and touch each other.
            “It is not a square,” he said, not looking at Potter’s face when he said it, because although he would love to see its expression, he did not want Potter to know that. “It is a pentagon.”
            “And what’s the significance of that shape?”
            It was Draco who spoke, which meant Potter did not lose in that particular contest. Severus privately snarled and reset the score in his mind. “It means that they intended to confine you and ask you questions, as in a knowledge ritual. But they intended to reshape you afterwards, as this square is being reshaped through the way they cut it.” He turned to Potter then, because this was more important than their little contest, loathe though Severus was to admit that. “They would have dug into your mind, after the answers, and then remade what was left of your thoughts after that, into the person they wanted you to be.”
            “So that I couldn’t tell anything about what they had done?” Potter’s eyes were wide, but calm. One would think that he faced threats like this all the time, Severus thought. “It seems to me that a Memory Charm would be simpler.”
            “Memory Charms can be detected, and sometimes undone, to reveal what is beneath them,” Severus said. “Besides, they cannot be used to influence behavior afterwards, beyond the simple forgetting. And even Ministry Aurors should know that you are impervious to the Imperius Curse.”
            He hoped that his sneering about the Aurors would anger Potter, but perhaps the ability of that taunt to anger him had been done away with, considering who his captors were. Potter turned and looked thoughtfully at the woman Severus had dueled with, then back at the babbling Aurors still cutting the pentagon in the stone. “Yes,” he said. “I can see that. I think I annoyed someone with the way I was searching around the Ministry, and it would be good for them to make sure I wouldn’t do that anymore, along with the knowledge that they hoped to gain from me.” He rolled his shoulder in what could either have been an easy shrug or an attempt to lessen some pain there. “Well. Thanks for your help. I’ll gather then up and take them back to the Ministry, and let the Ministry decide what to do with them.”
            Severus stared at him, but Potter didn’t seem to find anything incredible in what he had just said. He looked back blandly, and then turned to Stun the Aurors working on the pentagon.
            “Are you listening to yourself?” Draco demanded, stalking up to Potter. Severus rose slowly to his feet and brushed the stone dust off his knees. Perhaps he should let Draco pull his weight in handling Potter. “How can you take them back to the Ministry when people from the Ministry were the ones who betrayed and hunted you?”
            “Because not everyone in the Ministry is my enemy.” Potter was talking loudly and slowly, as though Draco was a foreigner. “There will be some people who can support me and help me figure out who among these Aurors really hates me and how far the corruption has spread. I didn’t have many leads before this, but now I have a lot of people who can be questioned.” He turned away, then added over his shoulder, “And that’s what a proper Auror would do. That’s procedure. I’m a proper Auror, so I should do that.”
            “Oh, bollocks,” Draco said, his voice so disgusted that Severus blinked. “You just used the Veritas Curse on them, a curse that I’m sure no Auror is supposed to actually know. And you used that pendulum spell that no one could counter, either. You haven’t even really moved over to those people you injured to make sure that they’re still alive. Stop telling me that you’re exactly like all the other Aurors and that’s all you’ll ever be. I know a lie when I hear one.”
            Potter stopped walking. He stood there with his arms folded, and then turned around. Severus was glad that he had left this particular contest up to Draco, then.
            “You don’t get to define what I am,” Potter whispered. “You keep trying to define me as someone who should be happy to be in this bond with you, and as a helpless rape victim, and I’m neither. Will you condemn me for the tactics that I had to use to save my life, and yours, since you were fool enough to come after me?”
            “I’m not trying to define you,” Draco said, glaring harder than Severus would have thought he could. Where had the coward Draco who would have run from someone looking at him like Potter did gone? “I’m trying to stop you from limiting yourself. You think that you’ll just go in and act like a normal Auror and no one will question that? What happens when you have to bring in the bodies? And when the ones making the ritual square—pentagon—talk about how you used the Veritas Curse on them? Will you just go quietly along with whatever penance they make you serve? What if they kick you out of the Aurors?”
            Potter’s eyes were wild, so dark that they competed in color with his hair. “You don’t get to define me,” he repeated, as if the words themselves were an incantation.
            “All of us could be in danger in if you don’t at least let us help you,” Severus said, deciding that the time had indeed come for him to intervene. “We will have to deal with the consequences of the spells that we saw performed. We might have to give testimony, if they bring you to trial.”
            Potter shook his head. “They wouldn’t do that. They understand that I was captured, and they’ll understand I had to do whatever was necessary to get away. There were a lot of enemies. My options were limited.”
            “The pendulum spell?” Draco asked, and only now did Severus connect the image of those broken and bleeding bodies that he had thought taken down by a wide Sectumsempra with Draco’s words. “You think they’ll accept that that was what you had to do? And the Veritas Curse? Instead of sending a Patronus for help the minute you had your wand back, and sheltering behind your supposedly impenetrable Shield Charms?”
            Potter cursed loudly. Severus watched him with a held breath and a wildly beating heart. Then he exhaled, annoyed with himself. Yes, magic was gathering around Potter, crackling like invisible lightning, but to show himself overly impressed with that kind of thing would just encourage Potter to keep doing it.
            No, what he had to do was wait for the incredibly small brain Potter had to catch up with reality. Preferably before he used the magic he was gathering to strike at them.
*
            What they’re saying can’t be right.
            But Harry could imagine how he would feel about someone, even captured by Aurors, who had slaughtered a lot of them in getting away. It was true that the pendulum spell had probably killed some of his captors, and he hadn’t cared or gone to look. Some of them might have survived with immediate Healing care, but were dead of blood loss by now. And he had laughed when he cast it.
            Those facts would tell against him. So would the claim he had made to Johnson about having trouble with his head, and the fact that he had recently been in company with several former Death Eaters. They might not dismiss him from being an Auror, but they would at least make sure that he couldn’t have anything more to do with ordinary cases for a long time.
            It didn’t mean that he needed his fucking bondmates’ help, but it did mean that he couldn’t walk right back into the Ministry and be treated like the reasonable person he had hoped they would see him as.
            And the hell of it was, Malfoy was right about one thing. Harry hadn’t been thinking about being a regular Auror when he cast that pendulum spell. He had been thinking about how angry he was and how much he wanted to hurt the people opposing him. So he had, and only now did he think…
            He turned back towards the long line of people the pendulum had marked. He could see that most were still breathing, but some of them were unconscious, and the ones missing arms? There was no way that they could have survived the loss of blood without someone who wasn’t them to patch up the wounds. Particularly when he’d cut off their wand arm.
            Harry shut his eyes. He could feel more numbing guilt creeping up on him. He didn’t want to think about this, but he was the one who had cast that spell, and that meant he had to. He swallowed and wondered what he was going to tell Kingsley. He didn’t know any of these Aurors, but that didn’t make all of them evil. Perhaps some had followed Ice’s lead because they had trusted her, and she was the epitome of the professional Auror.
            “Stop it.”
            Harry opened his eyes and stepped back just in time to avoid Snape’s touch. Snape didn’t drop his hand right away, but stood there staring intently at him, one palm raised as if he would slap Harry. Then he nodded and put his arm back at his side.
            “If you start mourning your past actions, we will not do what you know we should,” he said brusquely. “We need your help to come up with a story, and a place to put the bodies, and question the survivors.”
            “But I still have to go back to the Ministry,” Harry whispered. “I have to. I have to answer for what I did.”
            Snape raised his eyebrows. “You think that our situation will be improved by having you in Azkaban? Or a holding cell? Or someplace else where the people who work for the Ministry—which might include those who betrayed us—can approach you most easily?”
            “I said that I would find out who the traitor was that located the weak places in the wards and gave that information to the Lestranges.” Harry turned away from Snape and stared at the bodies again. He didn’t understand what had been going through his own head. He had managed to refrain from harming two people who had raped him when they were in the middle of the rape, and these Aurors had been much less threatening. What had he been thinking?
            “And, of course, that means that you agreed to be kidnapped by your own colleagues and imprisoned for what they did to you,” Malfoy muttered.
            “I did commit a crime,” Harry said softly. He supposed he could see why it would look different to them. They hadn’t been trained as Aurors, and they hadn’t been the ones to cast the spells. “I have to go and turn myself in.”
            Snape and Malfoy traded a glance. Harry smiled, because he felt competent to deal with what was behind those glances. “If you try to restrain me,” he added, setting his feet and getting ready to fight as necessary, “then you won’t like the results.”
            “I would try, but our power put together cannot equal yours, and if we fight, the bond may injure all or any of us,” Snape said, turning his gaze back on Harry. “I have no desire to feel pain like the sort that confined you to the prison in your mind, and this time it might be direct instead of secondhand.”
            Thwarted, Harry frowned at him. He could have struggled against Snape—in fact, he would have enjoyed it—but the man’s arguments made too much sense.
            “I can’t just not pay for this,” he said.
            “And would they pay for it?” Malfoy shook his head. “At the very least, they were going to imprison you again when you fought against them. I recognized some of those long spells the ones in the back were chanting, too. They weren’t just going to imprison you, they were going to torture you.” He gestured to the pentagon in the floor, and the silent Aurors lying around it. “They were going to do worse than that, if Severus is right about what ritual this was.”
            Harry looked again at the woman Snape had dueled. Ice. He should have known her, known anyone who was that competent and moved so well, but he didn’t. And he still didn’t know why investigating his scar had been so urgent, or whether she was actually behind the betrayal of the secret in the wards to the Lestranges, or just working with someone who had.
            “So,” Malfoy whispered. Harry started. He actually hadn’t noticed that Malfoy had moved up to within arm’s reach of him. “We have your permission to take these people back to Malfoy Manor and interrogate them?”
            Harry sneered at him and at Snape, who had come up to Malfoy’s shoulder and stood there without moving, without folding his arms, without sneering back—in fact, so calm that Harry found him a bit unnerving, and turned around to look at Malfoy instead. “If you think that you can get the truth out of a bunch of trained Aurors, then welcome.”
            “We don’t have the Ministry’s laws about Veritaserum encoded in our souls by training,” Malfoy said. “Or we can just use the Veritas Curse, like you did.”
            Harry sighed. He didn’t feel resentful, when Malfoy said things like that, just drained—and a bit guilty that he had been the one to overpower so many of his colleagues in front of Malfoy and Snape, which probably made them think worse of Auror training than they did. “Fine. Whatever. Do what you need to. In the meantime, I need to go home and think about what I’m going to say happened.” And what to do about Johnson and Nott, who hadn’t been here but might still know where Ice had taken him.
            Before he could move off, he felt something on his arm. Harry leaped away from it and stared at Malfoy accusingly. All right, so it had been a light touch, but it was still a touch. How could Malfoy have thought Harry would want to be in contact with him? Harry scrubbed at his arm, wondering if he could pretend that a fluttering piece of soot had touched him or something.
            “I’m—sorry.” Malfoy flushed, as if he hadn’t expected to ever be speaking the words and didn’t have a script ready to go with them. “Listen. I assumed that you’d come with us to Malfoy Manor, and participate in the interrogations.”
            Harry stared at him, and only went on staring harder when Malfoy stood with his legs relaxed and braced, as if he didn’t see the insanity of what he’d just suggested. “What?” Harry had to ask. “You think that I would want to go there with you?”
            “The rape didn’t happen in Malfoy Manor,” Malfoy said. “I thought there was a small chance.”
            “And this will enable you to maintain control of the investigation.” Snape said that as smoothly as though Harry could make no real objection, stepping up beside Malfoy and watching Harry with impassive eyes. “I thought that was all-important to you. To investigate well befits a real Auror.”
            Harry shut his eyes. Too many impulses, he thought, pulling him too many different directions. Hatred, and regret, and fury, and weariness. He hated what the Ministry had done to him, he hated what the Lestranges had done to him, but he thought he might hate what Snape and Malfoy were doing to him more.
            “We will not force you to come,” Snape said. “But it is where we will take the prisoners.”
            Harry opened his eyes. He could wait for them to report answers about Ice and the pentagon ritual and the rest of it, he supposed. But he wouldn’t trust their answers, would he? It would just lead to him interrogating the prisoners on his own anyway.
            And he no longer trusted that he wouldn’t go too far when facing people who had kidnapped him. He was beginning to think that his capture and torture by the Lestranges had broken something fundamental within his head.
            “Fine,” he said. He opened his eyes. “I’ll come with you. But I’ll send a Patronus to Ron and Hermione first.”
            Neither of them said anything against that, or had a gleam of triumph in their eyes. They just nodded and turned to gather up the prisoners.
            Unsettled, Harry faced the wall and conjured his Patronus to send. He wondered if this was a good idea, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
            Snape and Malfoy just better not try to hold me there.
            Because if I can’t respond sanely when it comes to kidnappers…
            That would include them, too.
*
pittwitch: Thanks! I think Snape and Draco are a little more on the same side here, but they wouldn’t have convinced Harry if only one of them had tried.
writeaddict: Thanks for your reviews! I hope this chapter is less of the “Oh, Harry” or “Oh, Draco” variety.
- 13
- 14
- 15
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Wages of Going On