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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.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fifteen—Malfoy Manor
            Draco thought the way Potter flinched and tensed up when they stepped through the Manor’s gates was unusual, but then, Potter flinched and tensed up around everything to do with Draco and Severus. It wasn’t until they reached the doors and he saw how Potter had to labor to put his feet on the gravel that Draco remembered.
            He was here, during the war. And he wasn’t tortured, but Granger was.
            Draco winced. He was sorry for suggesting that Potter come here, now. Maybe he could have gone home and firecalled them when they were ready to interrogate the prisoners, and suggested questions and heard the information they gained by Floo.
            But it seemed there was nothing about the bond or them or the suggestions they made that wasn’t flinchable, Draco decided. And Potter had come this far, was stepping through the door of the Manor with carefully squared shoulders that made Draco ache with pity and pride.
            He stepped through the door after Potter, careful not to touch him, and then turned to help Severus guide in the line of bound and sleeping Aurors. They had already placed the dead in the deserted safehouse that they had been living in when Rabastan and Rodolphus found them. It was unlikely that anyone connected with the Ministry would look there, or be able to explain what they found if they did.
            And there were several dead people, five or six, from Potter’s pendulum spell alone. Draco found his gaze going back to Potter as he stalked around the entrance hall, through the door that led to the immense dining room where Nagini had once eaten people.
            I won’t tell him if he doesn’t want to listen. But he is more than an Auror. Either the ritual and the rape or something else changed him.
            Maybe I can offer some support for that.
*
            Harry found it hard to remember whether this was really the room where Bellatrix Lestrange had tortured Hermione or not. He thought it was, and that made shivers so strong crawl up his spine that he could feel the prickle of their claws.
            But it would be a waste of time to ask, and Harry thought they had wasted enough time. He turned around and watched Snape and Malfoy stack Aurors against the wall like cordwood. Snape slipped out of the room and came back with a potion that he carried from mouth to mouth, massaging their throats sometimes to make them swallow.
            The Draught of Living Death, Harry thought, recognizing the oily black sheen of the potion as he saw it pass from flask to lips. He approved. That potion would keep the Aurors sleeping and harmless until they were ready for them. And in the meantime, it kept them from aggravating their wounds.
            Malfoy had been the one to heal most of the wounds. Harry thought that was strange. He would never have thought of Malfoy as a Healer.
            Maybe he learned after the war. And I wasn’t going to heal them, was I?
            Harry turned away, rubbing his hand absently over his mouth. He had the taste of vomit on his tongue, although he hadn’t vomited. Maybe he would have felt better if he had. Wasn’t that what most Aurors would do, if it turned out that they were responsible for the slaughter of several of their colleagues?
            Well, no. Ice wouldn’t do it, he thought, and neither would whoever in the Aurors had betrayed him to the Lestranges. They had given him and Snape and Malfoy up without a qualm, knowing that what happened to them would be worse than simple death.
            And he was still no closer to the reason why.
            “We should begin with her, I believe.”
            Harry turned around to see who they were talking about, though he thought he probably knew. Snape was standing over Ice, staring down at her as though he could see the secrets of her dueling skill by looking at her muscles. He caught Harry’s eye and jerked his head at Ice. “You know her?”
            Harry shook his head. “She was obviously the leader, though. She told me that they had to conduct the ritual because the Lestranges hadn’t done what they were supposed to do. She called herself Ice.”
            “You—” Snape began, and then half-shut his eyes and turned away. “You should have told us at once that she’d made a reference to what happened with the Lestranges,” he whispered. “That is something we needed to know.”
            “What would you have used it for?” Harry asked incredulously. “For taunting her while you dueled? You didn’t need to know before now.”
            Snape glared at him. Harry sneered back. He could feel the hatred brewing between them like one of Snape’s precious potions, and he almost hoped that it would explode. He could use something that would ease the tension in his arms and shoulders and spine, which he thought was at least partially from the unreal, unnatural solution of getting along with Snape.
            But Snape turned away and gestured with the flask of Living Death towards a chair. Malfoy promptly floated Ice’s body in that direction, and Snape said, “I am going to fetch the Veritaserum,” and left the room with a long stride. Harry stared after him, but that wasn’t enough to make Snape come back and continue the duel, either the verbal one or a magical one.
            What the hell was going on in Snape’s head?
*
            If you irritate Potter, then you’ll never get any information that you need again. He’ll start to keep it from you out of spite. And now that he’s finally cooperating, the bond might decide to punish you, too.
            To Severus’s intense irritation, the voice of his late-wakening conscience resembled Draco’s. He busied himself with performing every test he could think of on his vials of Veritaserum to make sure the potion was perfect, testing for age, sourness, contamination by a dozen different brews and ingredients, and felt all the while the painful pounding of his heart.
            His own rage was starting to wear on him. It had been so easy to tell Draco, to feel, that being able to brew potions was all-important to him. But the moment he was in Potter’s presence, he reverted to acting childishly again.
            He had once been able to hold his feelings back, with a few notable exceptions, such as his explosion at Black’s escape from Hogwarts. He had been able to content himself with rational objections to Dumbledore’s mad plans. He had worked with people he despised, including that fool Trelawney, who knew less about real life than Potter.
            Had all those skills deserted him? Was he growing less rusty, less keen and intelligent, as he grew older?
            Severus shut his eyes and blocked out the sight of his gaping, staring reflection in the highly-polished side of the cauldron he faced. He felt stupid enough without seeing an image that seemed to confirm it.
            No. He had been settled, able to brew, able to fence verbally through letters with another Potions master in Austria who wanted to claim credit for a discovery of his, only days before they went into the safehouse and hiding. Even when he and Potter and Draco were all in close proximity behind the wards, he had been curt but civil with Potter. He would never care for him, but he could endure being near him and not explode.
            What had really changed? He was not the one who had bargained with the bond, nor had the Lestranges done anything with their torture before they placed him and Draco in the ritual circle that he had not suffered before.
            Severus shifted. He was beginning to believe that the change wore the name of guilt—not something he wished to suffer from, not something he often suffered from, but he thought that was what it was, now.
            The only thing that had made this time so much different from the others when he had done something, been through an ordeal, gasped in pain and groaned under the domination of a tyrant, was that he had raped Potter. He could imagine what Lily would say if she knew that about her son. About him.
            She knew how low I could sink. But there were some depths she could not have imagined I would descend to.
            Severus drove his fist into the wall, and then picked up the vials of Veritaserum he would need, and one other potion, and started a stern pace back towards the dining room. He clenched his jaw at the same time and made his face strong and calm. He did not want Potter to guess what was going on somehow and use it torment him.
            I was under a spell and compelled by a ritual that would have destroyed us otherwise. Potter was the one who was sane enough to create a small space in the middle of the spell, which spared us. Does that not matter?
            Not enough, it seemed, to the deep and stinging sense inside him that was coming out as all this irrational rage.
            Severus closed his eyes. Well, then, he would handle it like any other debt, like the life-debt he had owed James or the one that had driven him hotfoot to Dumbledore after he knew what his revelation of the prophecy to the Dark Lord meant. He had paid those debts. He would do the same with Potter. He did not have to be gracious about it, but he owed Potter. He hated owing.
            But he would hate the debt, and not the person involved. That would only drive Potter further away.
*
            Harry crowded close as Snape tipped the vial down Ice’s throat. Then he cast the spell that would release her from the Stunner.
            Ice blinked and opened her eyes. For a second before the Veritaserum took effect, Harry saw her gaze dart around the enormous room, and he knew she was grasping the scope of the situation and what had happened to disable her people—well, understanding they had lost, at least. It would be dangerous to underestimate her. Harry gripped his wand.
            Then Ice’s head dropped back and her gaze turned vacant. Snape stepped towards her and spoke in a controlled tone that Harry hadn’t heard from him in years. “What is your full name?”
            “Beatrix Maria Stockwell,” said Ice, and half-shut her eyes, and seemed as if she was struggling to regain control. Harry doubted it would help. This was Veritaserum that Snape had brewed, or at least he thought so, and Harry trusted Snape’s brewing skills as he trusted few other things about the man.
            “How long have you been an Auror?” It was Malfoy who contributed that one, leaning against the wall behind Harry. Harry shifted so that Malfoy wasn’t as much at his back.
            “Twenty-five years.” Stockwell seemed as if she would like to catch the words in her hands and stop them, but after an ineffective fluttering motion, her hands fell back to her sides. She was trying to catch her breath and pounce on that one moment of resistance, Harry thought. She failed at that, too.
            “Why did you kidnap me?” Harry demanded. It was the question he most wanted to know the answer to, although Snape darted a reprimanding look at him. Standard procedure with Veritaserum demanded three questions that the interrogators knew the answer to.
            Harry returned Snape’s look with a hard stare. It wasn’t as though they knew for sure that the answers to their other questions were true, either.
            Stockwell seemed to have given up the struggle against the Veritaserum. Her breath was heaving just a little, in and out, as she looked at Harry and said, with a dead voice and dead eyes, “We need to know about your scar. There have been disturbing signs lately that You-Know-Who may not be as dead as we thought him.”
            Harry froze, while a nightmare worse than being bonded to Snape and Malfoy threatened to paralyze him. Then he shook his head. “What evidence do you have?”
            “Signs of the darkening of the Dark Mark on the skin of those who bear it,” said Stockwell, and sat there expectantly waiting for the next question.
            Harry saw Malfoy and Snape pull up their sleeves almost simultaneously. Breathing hard, he kept his back turned to them and faced Stockwell. He hadn’t looked at their Marks lately and wouldn’t know if they had changed or not. “Who did you see the Dark Mark darkening on?”
            “I did not see it,” Stockwell corrected him.
            Bloody literal Veritaserum. “I mean,” Harry said grimly, “who was it that had the Dark Mark that was supposedly darkening?”
            “His name is Aloysius Nott.”
            I thought so, Harry thought, and his skin was slick and his heart nearly shaking him with the force of its beat. I knew that Nott had something to do with this.
            “Aloysius Nott is in prison,” Malfoy said, apparently speaking aloud. “The Aurors would have access to him, but I don’t know how they would have noticed…do they make regular visits to Azkaban to look at the Death Eater prisoners?”
            Harry thought Malfoy was asking him, but it was Stockwell who replied, compelled by the Veritaserum to respond to any question voiced around her that she knew the answer to. “When any Death Eater asks to speak to us, we go.”
            “And Nott would be concerned about the Mark changing,” Harry muttered, as his mind completed that sentence. “Or maybe he would just want to rub it in the Aurors’ faces.” He didn’t know enough about the elder Nott for certain either way.
            Malfoy nodded. He had pulled his sleeve back down, but his hand was busy on the Mark, Harry noticed. “Ours haven’t changed,” he said. “But Nott remained faithful to the Dark Lord’s cause until the end. I don’t know how much that affects things.”
            “I know all about the Unbreakable Vows and the way that Snape spied for our cause,” Harry sniped at him. “But I was unaware of anything you did that would have made you less than perfectly loyal to Voldemort.”
            Malfoy pivoted towards him. “I didn’t identify you when you came here,” he snapped. “I think that’s enough.”
            “You were afraid,” Harry said. “It wasn’t exactly an act of rebellion.”
            “Fuck you, yes it was!” Malfoy looked as if he would jump on Harry and tear his throat out. Harry rested his hand on his wand and breathed easily. He was sure that he was a better fighter than Malfoy, if it actually came down to fighting, which it probably wouldn’t. “Don’t you understand? For me to stand up against my fear like that and face down Greyback and Bellatrix was the bravest thing I ever did!”
            Harry shook his head. His vision was growing dark along the edges, he thought, but that happened all the time in battle, and it wasn’t something to be concerned about. “I don’t think it was all that brave. You did it because you were scared and you’d decided that you didn’t want to live in a world where the Dark Lord won the war.”
            “I don’t want to live in a world where the Dark Lord wins at all, you can bet on that,” Malfoy said, From the sound of the strain in his voice, he was still trying to control the urge to rip Harry apart. “If he returns, the way that the Mark on Nott’s arm might indicate, then we should do something to stop that.”
            Harry smiled and turned back to Stockwell. His heart was singing in his ears, along with his blood. He knew that his next questions would probably draw blood, and he didn’t care. “What ritual did you think the Lestranges would perform on me instead of what they did to me?”
            Stockwell, head bobbing backwards on her neck, answered almost dreamily. “They were supposed to see how their Dark Marks reacted to your scar. They didn’t do that. They seemed to think that revenge was what they were hired for.”
            “Hired.” Harry grabbed the word, grabbed it and held it close. “Who hired them?”
            “He wore a mask when he spoke with me.” Stockwell’s eyes snapped back to Harry’s voice, but if she knew what was going on, it still wasn’t enough motive for her to gain any control over her words. “He said that his name was Alfred, but I don’t know anyone named that, and I don’t know who it was.”
            Harry hissed. Every time he thought he was going to burst through the stone wall, it turned out there was more stone behind it. “Why would he hire the Lestranges? Why would the Aurors agree to it?”
            “There are—factions.” These words dragged a little more. Harry couldn’t be sure if the Veritaserum was wearing off or if these were the secrets that Stockwell would spend herself, if she could, on protecting. “They want certain things. They thought they should approach you—part of the Aurors—and enlist you to work with them on—finding out the truth. Others said that you had done enough for the wizarding world and shouldn’t be troubled. To—circumvent them, we had to do what we did.”
            Harry shut his eyes. If the group of wizards, probably led by Kingsley, who thought he should be left alone just hadn’t been that vocal, then he wouldn’t have been raped and bonded, and he would have known for months that Voldemort was coming back.
            If he comes back, he’s the real danger. Not the Aurors who want me dead, and not the Lestranges, and not—
            The words were hard even to think. Harry didn’t dare think how hard they would have been if he was speaking them. Not Snape and Malfoy.
            The thought of working with them didn’t make Harry feel any better, but he turned halfway towards them as he spoke to Stockwell. “Why the Lestranges specifically? Why not Snape and Malfoy, former Death Eaters who weren’t crazy?”
            Snape said something, but Harry didn’t hear what it was, and didn’t care. His attention was on Stockwell now, and his pulse was loud, and he could feel the magic sparking and coiling in his wand. He was going to destroy whatever he cast a spell at. It didn’t have to be a person, but he had the strong feeling that it probably would be.
            “Because the Lestranges were capable of being bribed.” Stockwell waved her hand dreamily. “They would have done what needed to be done, with the knowledge ritual. Snape and Malfoy wouldn’t have no matter how much we paid them.”
            Harry stared over his shoulder at Snape and Malfoy. They stood there staring back. If they said something that contradicted that, Harry couldn’t hear them. Not with the blood in his ears and everything.
            He whirled back, his hands on the wand, his mind working so fast that it hurt. “But they didn’t do the knowledge ritual. They didn’t do anything that you wanted.”
            Stockwell sat there.
            Harry growled and asked, “What did you do when you realized that the knowledge ritual had failed and the Lestranges did something else instead?”
            “Swore a lot.”
            “And after that?” Harry managed to ask, when it was clear that there would be no more responses until he asked another question.
            “Gathered together other Aurors I could trust, Aurors who would know that you needed to be subdued and restrained,” Stockwell said. “People that I could trust to help me in a knowledge ritual. Aurors who weren’t part of the faction that thought you had already done all that the wizarding world would ever need you to do.”
            “What were you going to reshape me into?” Harry demanded. He realized as he spoke that he had accepted Snape’s theory, about how the ritual would then reshape him into something after the knowledge part of it was done.
            But all of that seemed small and absurd next to the kind of knowledge that Stockwell herself could give him.
            “That depended on what we found.” Stockwell turned to him, and once again some knowledge seemed to flicker across her eyes. Again, there, she didn’t manage to rise from the grip of the Veritaserum. “If we found that you had some knowledge of You-Know-Who’s return, then we would make you into someone who couldn’t be a danger. But if you didn’t, then we would mold you into the weapon we needed.”
            Harry closed his eyes. It always came back to bloody Voldemort, didn’t it? Voldemort had shaped his life ever since he was eighteen months old, in a way. He’d killed Harry’s parents, and left him with the bloody Dursleys, and ensured that Harry had to fight in the war, and made Snape hate him, and Marked the Lestranges in a way that meant Harry would be caught up in the bonding ritual.
            Drifting as he was in the middle of the madness that surrounded him right now, he couldn’t even say which of those was the worst.
            He opened his eyes again and fired another question. “Who are the people who worked with you?”
            Stockwell began to recite a long list of names. Harry didn’t bother trying to write them down. He knew that he could look at this Pensieve memory later, and probably would, in the context of determining who his enemies were, and he would notice the ones he knew then.
            Now, he had to listen again to the drumbeat in his ears.
            Voldemort coming back. That would be worse than anything. At least he could admit that, even consumed as he was by passions that Snape and Malfoy and other people in his life would probably think were selfish.
            He paced back and forth, barely aware that Stockwell had stopped speaking the names and that Snape and Malfoy were now questioning her, their voices a low and confidential murmur. He walked with his head bowed, his hands clasped behind his back. It was a posture that had helped him sometimes when he was pacing in his office, working out the mysterious details of a case.
            This time, the details weren’t so mysterious. They had Stockwell’s confession, and although Alfred’s identity was still in question, at least Harry knew now why he would have been betrayed. Kingsley and others relatively high up in the Aurors had to be among the people who didn’t want Harry bothered, or Stockwell and anyone else who really believed in Voldemort’s return would have simply approached Harry directly.
            Harry exhaled like an angry fire and swung around again. This was stupid. What did Stockwell and her cohort expect him to do, now that this had happened? They might not know what the Lestranges had done, exactly, but they knew it hadn’t been what they wanted. And if they were in contact with the Lestranges still, then they might know about the bond.
            A sudden silence made him look up. From the vial Snape was taking away from Stockwell’s lips, he had fed her the Draught of Living Death like all the rest. Snape and Malfoy were both staring at him.
            Harry looked back, unable to say a word. Did they expect him to leave now that the interrogation had finished and they knew the purpose of capturing him?
            “Choose some room in the house where you feel comfortable,” Malfoy said softly. “I would suggest going back to Grimmauld Place, but I don’t know if the wards there are powerful enough to keep out all eavesdroppers, the way the ones here are.” He hesitated. “And I don’t know if you want us in your territory.”
            “Choose some room—and then what?” Harry challenged.
            “I think we need to talk,” Snape said.
            He said it too softly to get angry at, and with no sneer on his face when Harry glanced at him.
            Harry braced his feet and then swallowed down the animosity as much as he could. Yes. Snape was right about that much.
            He might not agree with Snape and Malfoy, they might have raped him, but Voldemort was a worse thing.
*
SP777: I think there are ways it can work, but it’s going to be a different type of emotional intimacy than romantic.
And I like all of them, preferring some better in different moods. There are some kinds that I don’t take very seriously; for example, fluffy Snarry is hard for me to read unless it’s done really well.
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The Wages of Going On