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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
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Chapter Eighteen—Serpensortia

            “Harry, they accepted it!”

            For a second, as he stepped back from the hug Ron had given him, Harry was still too busy with the sight and sound of his friends to know what Hermione was talking about. Then he swore in wonder and stared at her. “They did? They really did?”

            Hermione nodded, her cheeks so flushed and her eyes so bright that Harry was at last sure she was telling the truth and not making up good news to soothe him. “Yes. They said they’d be happy to publish my article and that they thought Severus Snape a neglected Potions master, one whose notes need to be studied more carefully.” Harry hid a smile. He didn’t think she’d realized that her voice had taken on more than a hint of snooty stuffiness, as if she wanted to imitate the way she imagined the Potions masters speaking. “And they said that they thought my article did him justice.”

            Harry bounced to his feet. They were using a table in a garden today, so at least they were outside, but he couldn’t bring himself to sit still. He strode back and forth instead, running his hands through his hair and swearing softly.

            “Harry? Aren’t you pleased?”

            Harry whirled around and grabbed Hermione by the waist, kissing her mouth so hard Ron made a protesting little sound. Then he let her go but danced around the garden, shaking his head.

            “Of course I am,” he told the skies and the air and the roses that grew nearby and his friends, although they really ought to know the truth, which meant they were a less important audience than anyone else. “Why wouldn’t I be? They’ve tried, Snape and Malfoy, but they can’t offer me enough. Snape thinks he’s—he thinks he’s talking me around.” That was the closest he would get to telling them about the memories and the stupid “talks” with Snape where he seemed to think he had to play concerned father, or at least father confessor. “And Malfoy says he wants to be my friend, but he’s told me about his parents and his friends abandoning him and how hard his life is with Snape and hasn’t seemed interested in listening to anything I say. I don’t want to stay here. I want to go.”

            Hermione reached out and took his hand, holding it fiercely. “And so you shall. Everyone’s waiting for you, Harry. Us. The life you should have had.” She hesitated, then lowered her voice. “Ginny.”

            Harry winced a little, automatically, and then sighed. He and Ginny had had plenty of choices to get married since the end of the war, and it hadn’t happened. On the other hand, maybe being back with her would rekindle some sort of interest.

            Maybe being with his friends would mean he could discuss his memories, too. There was no limit to the extraordinary things that would happen, the instant he was free. He would have his life back, and life contained everything else.

*

            That’s what friendship looks like.

            Draco had told himself that he wouldn’t spy on Potter’s meeting with his friends. First, because it would just irritate him to see Granger and Weasley again, and he was trying to be less irritable these days. And second, because it wasn’t the kind of thing a good friend would do, and he was trying to be a good friend.

            But he…

            He had followed Potter out when he saw him leaving the fortress with a determined stride, and no guard. It was always possible Severus might have dismissed Bellatrix from attending Potter, of course, but also possible Potter had shed her somewhere, and that he was about to do something stupid.

            Instead, though, he had watched Potter go into this garden and meet his friends. He had heard him laugh. He had watched him dance, and heard his words.

            I didn’t think I was doing that. I didn’t think Severus was doing that.

            His quick anger died when he remembered something Severus had once said to him, when they were still new to their prison cell and to being out of the Dark Lord’s favor. Draco had paced up and down, ranting about the task the Dark Lord had assigned him and how impossible it was, and asking Severus why the Dark Lord had wanted him to fail. Surely punishing Draco’s father couldn’t matter that much? Surely the inside of an Azkaban cell, for months on end, had been punishment enough?

            Severus had looked up at him, clever and cynical even in the middle of his exhaustion, and replied simply, “What matters is what the Dark Lord thinks, Draco. Not what is right or fair.” He had hesitated as though he didn’t want to destroy the last remnants of Draco’s faith, then plunged ahead. “Not even what is real.”

            It was the same way now, Draco understood after hearing the way Potter spoke. It didn’t matter how carefully Draco and Severus went about things if Potter still misinterpreted what they were doing, if they came across as odious to him. They would have to adjust, because Potter was the one they were trying to convince.

            He is our second-day Dark Lord, Draco thought, shaking his head, and turned and left the garden before Potter could see him spying and become incensed at him. Draco had something he wanted to do, and his bedroom was the perfect place to do it in.

*

            Harry lifted his head. He was having a terrible time sleeping that night, though of course he knew why. The excitement of hearing that Hermione’s plan might work still thrummed through his veins. Lying down and going to sleep was so much less exciting than being up and about, talking with his friends, making plans for the moment he would be free.

            Well. It wasn’t only that. He had bobbed around in his bed, in different positions, for half-an-hour before admitting it, but it wasn’t only that.

            He was hearing something, something that flickered along the edges of his senses, shone and dived away again, and then returned just when he was about to give up on it and drift to sleep. He knotted his fingers in the sheets and listened. The sound was faint, without words. For a moment, he wondered if he was hearing a basilisk crawling about in the walls again.

            But no, nothing that simple (or wonderful; perhaps he could have spoken to the basilisk and asked it to help him find some way out of his Vows). It was only a song, and it coiled like mist and scattered like it when he tried to focus his thoughts on it, as if his mind was a kind of sun to burn it away. He wondered for a second if it could be a siren, but he knew they weren’t near enough the right kind of water for those.

            It was becoming clear that he would never get to sleep, though, so Harry stood, shoved his feet into the soft shoes he kept for walking through the fortress, and started towards the door of his rooms.

            When he opened it, Bellatrix was sitting in a chair outside it, asleep. Harry cast a Muffliato on her and crept past her. He had noticed the Ashborn were less alert during the night, because Snape slept then and so they did, too.

            One of the faults of having your soldiers under your direct control and giving them no free will, Harry thought smugly as he crept down the corridor.

            He rounded several corners, following the song. It grew louder as he approached, but not loud enough to convince him it was coming from inside the fortress. Sure enough, when he opened a door that led towards a long fall of grass down towards a small river, the song was so clear that he felt tears start to his eyes for a moment.

            I’m not escaping, I’m not escaping, he thought, over and over, to soothe the Unbreakable Vow as he plunged out and down the slope of grass. I just want to see what this is, that’s all.

            The water rippled in front of him, a river so small Harry was surprised Snape and Malfoy could draw on it to feed the water needs of all the Ashborn. On the other hand, maybe they got the majority of their water somewhere else. He felt a faint breeze travel past him, and the stars overhead seemed to dance as if they were lights attached to the end of a high, dark branch. It was an amazing night, Harry thought, still staring at the water.

            The song twisted around him.

            It resembled a net, too, and Harry shook his head as the comparison came to him. He didn’t think this was something that wanted to harm him, but it wouldn’t hurt to be cautious. He made sure he had one hand on his wand and a defensive spell smoldering under his tongue as he came towards the edge of the river.

            A small ripple ran towards him, and then drew back as if it had sensed him and he wasn’t a visitor it had expected. Harry gave a harsh smile at nothing and kept his fingers relaxed and open, so that he could grip the wand and move it in any direction in an instant.

            Something quivered in the middle of the water, and rose towards him. Harry nearly barked the spell, but kept it back just in time. Something about the movement of the long, slender thing suggested it was as hesitant as he was, but didn’t know what his reaction would be if it touched him.

            It looked like a neck, and a moment after he thought that, Harry made out on the head on the end reaching towards him. It was blunt, and the eyes that blinked above the place where the jaws divided it were transparent and dark blue, with slashes of shadow above them that looked suspiciously like eyelashes.

            But other than those unusual things, he knew what he was looking at. This was a snake. A water snake, in the most literal interpretation of those words possible.

            Harry felt a savage joy stir to life in his heart. He thought he knew now why no one else had heard the song. He nodded to the snake and hissed softly in Parseltongue, sure he would speak that rather than English since he was looking directly at the serpent. “What is your name?”

            The snake flinched back from him. Maybe it had expected someone to be here, Harry thought, since it had come right up the minute the ripple retreated from him, but it hadn’t expected someone who could speak its language.

            The snake coiled back on itself, its body twisting through the air and through its own neck. The water flowed and melded without protest, Harry thought, like a series of miniature cataracts that could fall in any direction. He wondered how hard it would be to damage a snake like this. Probably pretty hard, when it had no body that you could cut or slice or blast apart.

            “Who are you?” The snake had the same sort of melodic, drifting voice that had propelled the song through Harry’s mind, and he resisted the urge to reach out and stroke it. Just because it was beautiful didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.

            “My name is Harry Potter,” Harry said, and knew from the way the snake’s eyelashes—or whatever they were—shifted back and forth that his name must have come out in some strange way. He had asked several snakes what they heard when he said his name in Parseltongue, but it wasn’t something any of them could talk about, or perhaps wanted to. “I heard your song, and awoke. It was a lovely song,” he added encouragingly, when the snake floated back to the middle of the river and looked as if might mingle with the surface again.

            “Perhaps it was,” the snake said, and this time it had a burble in the back of its voice that it hadn’t had before. Was it embarrassed? None of the other snakes Harry had spoken with before had shown a conception of that emotion, but then, this wasn’t precisely a snake, was it? “But I do not—I did not mean to wake anyone up.”

            “I wasn’t asleep,” Harry said. “Who are you?”

            The snake’s neck went on coiling back and forth a few times, as though it assumed Harry would leave it alone when it did that. But Harry only waited and watched, more fascinated every time he saw the thin bands of liquid and light pass in and out of each other.

            “My kind is the Water People,” the snake said at last. Harry suspected his mind was translating the words into an acceptable kind of English just as the snakes heard his name as a kind of Parseltongue, but that didn’t matter. He smiled and nodded, and the snake, flicking out a transparent blue tongue as if to smell his emotions, seemed reassured and continued. “I am called Inhabitant-of-the-Stream-that-Bends-around-Several-Corners.”

            Harry blinked a little. “Wow,” he said at last. Even in Parseltongue, that was a long name, though he could only judge by how long it had taken the snake to say it. “Can I call you Bends?”



            The snake cocked its head again, this time completely upside-down, and flowed through its own neck again. “I would prefer Corners,” it said at last.

            Harry grinned. “Why not?” He sat down on the bank, and Corners promptly floated down to his level, shortening its body by shedding several feet of dripping water. Harry studied its bright eyes and shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of or seen your people before.”

            “The Water People love the water,” said Corners. “We find the places that few others come. We cannot share with the merfolk or the ones who drink so much water that they swell and swim away with it.”

            “What about sea serpents?” Harry asked.

            Corners flicked his tongue out again, and this time the burble in the back of his voice was louder, like water flowing around a hard stone. “They only swim in the sea,” he said. “They are not of it. Not the way we are.”

            Harry nodded. “What brought you here, today? If you live in the sea, then I don’t think that you’d come up a stream.”

            Corners gave him a slow look that made Harry flush. He knew it conveyed contempt better than the hard burble in the back of his voice. “I am this stream,” he said. “I wanted to come here tonight and sing. I already apologized for waking you up. I can go.” He pulled back towards the middle of the stream.

            “No, wait!” Harry said hastily. Corners was new, and Harry wanted to go on speaking to him because he was different than Malfoy or Snape, or even than his friends. Corners had nothing to do with Ashborn or hostages or the complexities of friendship that Snape and Malfoy claimed to have with him.

            Corners paused and glanced at him. Harry nodded again. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Have you lived in the sea before, then?”

            “Yes.” Corners laid his chin on the edge of the stream, so Harry had to look down past his own feet to find his eyes. “It is wonderful, and wide. But there are no humans who speak to us there. Perhaps they are everywhere on land?”

            Harry smiled in spite of himself. “No, I think I’m the only one.” Then he hesitated, and shrugged. “There might be other people in other places,” he said. “Other lands. But I killed the only other one I knew of who could do it, so they’re rare.”

            Corners once again coiled himself around in a slow way and looked at Harry with a directness that told him he had said something stupid. “Why would you do that?” Corners demanded. “If you are rare, you should remain with and support each other.”

            “We couldn’t,” Harry said shortly. “He decided I was his enemy when I was a baby—” that probably came out “hatchling” in Parseltongue, though Harry couldn’t be sure “—and tried to kill me. My parents died to save me. After that, I knew he wouldn’t let me live in peace. I had to kill him.”

            Corners waited, head bobbing up and down in time with the little ripples of the river, as though demanding more of the story. Then he said, “Why did you not find more snakes and surround yourself with them, then? If you are lonely, then you should find those not of your own kind who can talk to you.”

            “I can talk to other humans,” Harry corrected. As always, it seemed to him that snakes were relentlessly literal. In this case, Corners had obviously decided that he couldn’t speak to anyone but other Parselmouths. “And I don’t think the people I live with would like it if I brought in snakes.”

            “Then they shall not like me.”

            Harry blinked at him. “You’re thinking about staying longer than you have, then?”

            “I want someone to speak with,” Corners said, “and the other snakes I have met are too limited in their understanding. Merfolk only wish to sing. They taught my kind long ago, it is said, but the Water People have gone beyond them.” He didn’t sound as if he was bragging, only as if it was an utterly inconsequential thing to have happen. “I have spoken so long with other Water People that I bear their personalities in my mind as the sunset water bears the light. I want someone to speak to,” he repeated, and turned his head to the side so that he could fix both one bright blue eye and that flickering tongue on Harry. “And you are the one I have chosen.”

            “Er,” Harry said. “Thanks. But I don’t know how often I can come and speak with you. I only came out tonight because I heard the song and everyone else was asleep. And you can’t leave the water to come with me, can you?”

            “You have water?”

            Harry entertained, for a moment, a bizarre picture of Corners trying to climb into his body through his eye fluids or something similar. Then he caught on to what he meant and nodded. “Yeah, we have water in the fortress—um, the big building near here,” he added, because Corners’s tongue had stopped flicking out and he looked blank. “But we don’t have a running stream of it.”

            “There are containers that can hold water,” Corners said thoughtfully. “I leaped into one once on a human water snake, and the man who raised it to his lips saw me and shouted and dashed me back.”

            “And you still want to speak with humans?” Harry asked, impressed despite himself. “That’s pretty tolerant.”

            Corners gave him yet another patient look. “I want to speak with you,” he said. “With someone who can speak back to me, and has shown themselves willing to do that with me. That is the difference between you and the rest of them.”

            “Er—right,” Harry said. He had the impression Corners was going to be more trouble than he’d thought. “But you can really fit in a cup?”

            “The small round thing? Yes.” Corners lowered his head so that the end of his neck dissolved into the water and only his head floated on the top, like some strange Muggle pool toy. “Bring one to me.”

            “Right,” Harry said again, and stood up and took a step away from the bank of the stream, looking over his shoulder. Corners waited for him, those giant blue eyes patient under the shadows that edged them, and Harry shook his head and raced for the fortress, determined to find a cup and come back before Corners changed his mind.

            He had a cup left from his dinner tray. Harry spared a moment to wonder why in the world Snape still didn’t let him eat with the other Ashborn in the dining hall, and then shrugged. He probably wouldn’t want to eat with them. All those blank and staring faces would put him off his appetite, which never needed encouragement to be small, anyway.

            When he got back to the bank of the stream, Corners was still waiting. He lifted his head when he saw Harry, and those eyes this time had a glint of what looked like satisfaction. Harry wondered if he should be attributing human emotions to one of the Water People, but he thought it was harmless. So far, Corners had acted and reacted as if he had them. It was probably no worse than shortening his name or the strange things that Harry knew must sometimes result when he tried to translate human concepts into Parseltongue.

            He stood there and let Corners sniff the inside of the cup first, to make sure it didn’t contain anything that would offend him. Harry found himself wondering, as he watched the tongue dart and shoot past him like a blue shadow, what would happen if one of the Water People passed across a drop of tea or some other liquid. Did they absorb it? Did it become a part of their bodies, or could they just coil themselves up into pure water and shed anything else they didn’t like? Harry thought it was probably that last one, because Corners hadn’t had trouble so far changing the length of his neck or the look of his face when he wanted to. Even his eyes seemed to brighten and darken in accordance with laws Harry didn’t understand, like the course of the ripples that passed across the stream.

            “It is well,” Corners said, and then reared high. Harry fell back a step as he looked at that enormous neck stretching up to the sky, the head just a minute blob on the end of it, and winced as he imagined it crashing into him. He knew that people could die falling into water from a great enough height. If the water decided to dive on you and hit you instead—

            The neck came down, the head narrowed to a pinpoint. Harry stood firm and held the cup up. Malfoy wouldn’t have had the courage to do this, he thought. Nor Snape. This was another thing that made him different from them, like the Parseltongue, that reminded him he had other options.

            The force of Corners’s dive, when it touched the cup, was much softer than Harry had expected. He draped and flowed into the cup, and it only rocked gently as though Harry had set it in a strong breeze. He braced both hands, and soon the cup was full of rippling, slightly mucky river water. Harry lowered the cup and stared into it.

            A much smaller version of the blue eyes reappeared, and only the eyes, gleaming near the surface like slightly thickened bubbles. “Take me with you,” Corners said. “And bring me back to the river sometimes, that I might join with the water and renew myself.”

            Still struggling against his own astonishment, Harry nodded and carried the cup carefully inside, already planning the ways he would conceal it. He didn’t want to spill it, of course, and introducing Malfoy and Snape to Corners was out of the question.

            Or, at least, he thought it was, until a wand-light blazed suddenly from ahead of him and Malfoy’s voice said, “And where did you go?”

*

            It wasn’t until he caught Potter in the glare of his wand that Draco thought about what he would do if Potter managed to sneak off, somehow not disturbing the Unbreakable Vows.

            And his first thought was panic.

            Not because Potter might die. Not because it might end the agreement between the Ashborn and Potter’s people, and begin a new war. But because he would lose the one person he felt was trying hardest at the moment to understand him, even harder than Severus.

            And—that meant he needed to change some things, if he really felt that strongly.

            Of course, he greeted Potter with a sneer, because showing that panic would have meant that Potter despised him. Draco knew how this went. Potter ignored Draco, and Draco fought for notice, and he showed too much honesty, and Potter struck him down and turned his back on him again. Draco saw no need to expose as much of himself as Potter wanted him to, because Potter laughed when he did.

            But Potter barely glanced up from the glass of water he was holding to blink at Draco, and panic surged in the center of Draco’s chest again. That was the kind of glance he might have given Draco at Hogwarts, when they were still enemies and Draco could only really get his attention by insulting his friends or his parents. He had found something else, something that enchanted him and would draw his opinion.

            Draco stepped forwards. He meant nothing more than to pull Potter’s attention back to himself, and perhaps ask a few necessary questions. That was it. That was all.

            But the water in the glass bubbled as if Potter was using it for tea first, and a head poked out of it. The head was long and slender, graceful, shaped here and there like a horse’s. It reared up against the ceiling, and then went on growing, until just a thin tendril of water remained in the cup Potter was holding to support it. The great snake, balanced impossibly on that tiny column, looked down at Draco and hissed.

            It had expressive, human eyes, Draco saw, and he flinched from the cutting contempt in them, whether or not Potter had inspired it.

            Potter listened to the snake with an odd smile, then said to Draco, “This is one of the Water People, who’s agreed to let me call him Corners. He wants to stay with me for a while, since he’d never met a Parselmouth before. And I don’t think he’s impressed that you want to bar my way.”

            Draco tightened his fingers around his wand. His mouth babbled away before he could convince his mind to work with it. “One of the Water People? The sea serpents? They’re dangerous, and you can’t keep one indoors, they won’t get enough connection with the sea, and that can be dangerous for them—”

            Potter hissed at the snake, who hissed back briefly and glared at Draco again. Potter rolled his eyes. “The Water People aren’t sea serpents,” he said. “They’re different from them. They’re made of water, and they can take any form they want.” He shrugged. “He was the one who said he could fit into a cup—although he didn’t know the name—and live indoors with me for a while. I’m sure he would know if it was dangerous for him to be cut off from the river. It doesn’t seem like it.”

            “Where did you get him?” Draco couldn’t help the envious tone in his voice. He never had been able to, not when it came to Potter.

            Potter relaxed and grinned at him. “I heard him singing. He seemed startled that anyone could, but I probably only heard it in the first place because it was in Parseltongue.”

            “Can he sing to me?” Draco didn’t know why he made the request, other than a desire to keep Potter standing there and talking, but perhaps it had been the right thing to do. Potter drew back a little, blinked, and then hissed at the snake.

            Corners—though it was hard to think of him like that when he was all curves and no corners that Draco could see—turned his head back and forth as though checking the height of the ceiling or the openness of the walls. Then he began to make a sloshing noise that Draco found it hard to distinguish from the sloshing of water against the sides of the cup itself. He wondered how in the world it had woken Potter up and drawn him outside. Perhaps it had been louder when Corners was in the river.

            And yet, the more he listened, the more Draco could hear the melody. It was thin and had no pattern, but that hardly seemed to matter. The more it wandered, the longer he wanted to hear it, to try and predict the twists it would take.

            He drew a step closer to the cup. Potter shifted, as if he thought he might have to guard the snake from Draco, and then stood still and let him sing. The song whispered to an end at last, and Corners swayed back and forth, the ripple of the water this time making a sound that Draco reckoned was his version of applause.

            He took a deep breath and stepped back to his original position. “Will you try to bring the Water People into the alliance?” he asked Potter.

            Potter’s scorn was instantly back on his face again, cutting into every feature and hardening it in a way Draco hated. One thing he had learned about having Potter as a friend, at least: there were certain expressions he could stand to see less of.

            “Why would I want to do that, when this alliance wasn’t my idea?” Potter asked shortly. “I’ll be gone soon, and that means you won’t even have my help with the centaurs anymore. I should wean you of it while I still can, so that you aren’t stuck trying to cope with them and their demands alone one day without any practice beforehand.”

            “This is your alliance, too,” Draco said, and made sure he was keeping his hand away from his wand. “You were the one who welcomed the centaurs, and the only one who fed them at first, and the one who—”

            “No one in the bloody alliance has any responsibility to me,” Potter said. “I told you that once before. And since you said we should be friends, you’ve done nothing but cry on my shoulder.”

            “Because you won’t bloody open up to me!” Draco snapped, Potter’s words lancing a wound he hadn’t suspected existed. “Severus is the one who gets you to talk, but you won’t confess any of the details of your life to me! Even though I was the one who helped you save that life when the vampire came back in your head!”

            Potter’s breath rattled and gasped in his throat for a moment. Then he pushed calm onto his face and shook his head. His Water Snake was swaying above him, but he didn’t seem inclined to pay attention to it, instead only staring at Draco. Draco felt his skin prickle as though someone was stroking his hair. It was negative attention, but at least it was attention.

            He’d always starved for that from Potter. Always. Even when they hated each other, every day he’d been near Potter except a few months in sixth year, he had always wanted something from him.

            That made him more than a little sick and obsessed, Draco reckoned, but he had the right to be like that anyway, after the way his parents had died and he had survived the Dark Lord’s tortures. At least he no longer followed Severus about, breathless for the same kind of attention.

            And if Potter left, he would just have to deal with the lack of it from him, too.

            That thought helped Draco steady himself, where he had felt like a rock that had lost ground in a flood. He heaved out a breath and said, “I’m sorry, Potter. There are things friends do for each other besides tell each other their life stories, and I concede I haven’t done them for you. Not in a long time.”

            “Oh, you concede, do you?” Potter’s scorn stung at him. “How big of you. How about you’ve never done it for me, and I don’t want you to start?”

            Draco clenched his teeth down, and thought of the cat automaton waiting in his rooms for him. He could go to it, and give it commands, and it would obey them. It would pay attention to him and care for him as no one else did, not Severus and not Potter.

            But—

            That wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted attention from a person who could choose to give it to him, or withhold it. He valued the gift of the cat from Severus, but he would value Potter more if he chose to be his friend, Draco couldn’t deny that.

            “I’ll leave, if you want me to,” he said. “I won’t press you to stay anymore, or to be part of the alliance, either.”

            Potter stopped. His breath, his blinking, the motions of his slender hands, all of them paused. Draco tensed, and waited for the blast of spells that would probably follow the moment when he had managed to startle the Chosen One.

            Then Potter whispered, “What? Why?”

            “Because—” Draco grimaced. He’d tasted food in the Dark Lord’s dungeons that was sweeter than this admission he had to make. “Because you’re right. I pressed you to be my friend, guilted you into it, and then it turned out I had nothing to really offer you besides that. You were concerned about me being used by Severus, but that’s not the same thing as friendship, and I made believe that it was.”

            “Why, though?” Potter said, and took such a violent step he nearly spilled the water that held the snake. It hissed, but Potter, beyond twitching a little, paid no attention to the sound. “Why in the world would you care if it turned out I didn’t feel anything but pity for you? Why does it matter?”

            Draco licked his lips. Nothing for it, it seemed.

            “Because I want your regard,” he said. “You were the first one who refused me a favor.”

            Potter snorted. “But plenty of people have done it since then. Snape, Dumbledore, Vol—Old Snake-Face—”

            “You never forget your first,” Draco said, and paused to enjoy the odd feeling in his throat for a moment before he went on. Part of that odd feeling came from the way that Harry had avoided the Dark Lord’s name even though his promise to Draco to do so might be null and void by now. “And sometimes you have to stop questioning why you want what you want. I wanted Severus to pay more attention to me, and then I wanted you. But that’s not the same thing as actually giving you things that would make you want my attention in return, or care about me. So.” He discovered his hands had become tight fists, and uncoiled them again with a wrench. “I’m sorry. I’ll learn to handle the alliance on my own. The only thing I ask is that you tell me when you’re leaving, and maybe explain to the centaurs why you’re going, if they ask.”

            “This can’t be it, Malfoy.” Potter drew back on himself like the snake. “It can’t be that simple. You can’t—it’s insane that you would chase me so far and then draw back at the last minute. This is some new plan to make me chase after you in return and then fall into friendship with you, isn’t it?”

            Draco snorted in return. “It would be brilliant if I could pull that off, but I don’t think I can.” He waved a hand up and down in front of him. He felt thin and stretched and old, and his throat was full, now, of some liquid he hoped very much wasn’t tears. “I’m less smart than I thought I was, less practiced, less Slytherin, less clever. I came up with the idea of renewing the pure-blood alliance, and even of marrying a girl from one of the families that still practice those old ways, but I’ve been pants at pursuing it. I make promises and I break them. Well, I’m going to keep this one. Good-bye, Potter. Only come and talk to me if you want to, and talk to the centaurs.”

            And he forced himself to turn and walk away.

            Potter didn’t call after him. Draco unclenched his jaw a moment later and admitted that, while it would have been gratifying if that had happened, he didn’t really expect it to.

            So much for that. Now I have to learn how to run the alliance on my own and figure out how to negotiate with the werewolves on my own, too. He and Potter had never had a detailed conversation about what he should do there, because every time they spoke Draco seemed to end up complaining about his past instead.

            If he ends up as my friend, then it’ll be because he wants to, not because I tried to force him to be.

            His muscles relaxed, one by one, once he was in his rooms and had lain down on the bed. He was sure this was the right decision, much as it hurt to think of Potter leaving. Potter had helped him get back some of his sense of self-respect, and Severus’s gift had proven that Severus still valued Draco, which was a boost to his self-respect, too, but he had to take the final steps on his own.

            He closed his eyes, and, while he still felt good and had some ideas about what to do with it bubbling at the forefront of his mind, dreamed himself towards the Forbidden Forest, concentrating on the image of Laughter.

*

            unneeded: Yes, they are. And Corners is not going to make the equation any easier.

            Shadowdog85: Thank you! I’m glad that you like it.

            AlterEquis: Thanks! “Snape” only really showed up so much because Harry has a majority POV in the story. Draco and Severus himself do think of him as Severus.

            Ophelia: The major problem is that Harry doesn’t want to settle down at all. He wanted to be either completely resigned or completely free.
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Ashborn