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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 Eighteen—Planning Revenge
            “It seems to me that we can make good use of those Aurors you killed.”
            Draco could feel the startled surge in the back of his mind, the emotion that immediately dried up and sealed itself away in the sides of the steel mountain. At least not every emotion was doing that, Draco thought. Only the ones that Potter thought could make him weak, or cause Severus and Draco to taunt him. He could express rage and curiosity, and he turned towards Draco now and raised his eyebrows.
            “What do you mean?”
            Draco put his hands on the table and regarded Potter directly. The bond hummed between them, and Draco felt as though he could put his hand out and touch the cord in the air that connected them, where it bent and how it flowed. “Can’t you read the answer out of my head? I didn’t think the bond was that limited.”
            “I’m choosing not to do that right now.” Potter’s voice was so low that it was hard to register, and only the leap of light off the steel mountain in the back of his thoughts told Draco what was going on.
            Draco paused, then shrugged. So Potter wanted to talk aloud right now. Why not?
            Severus, across the table from him, gave him a look. Draco ignored it. It wasn’t as though Severus had come up with a way to communicate that Potter wouldn’t overhear. Private conversations would just have to wait until Potter was asleep or something.
            Or they would have to include Potter. If he thought about that long enough, Draco was almost certain he would get used to it.
            “I mean,” Draco said, deciding that returning to the original question would be more productive right now than picking through motive with those green eyes staring at him, “that we have a pile of bodies at our disposal, and no one will know who killed them. Unless that pendulum curse is a signature spell or something.”
            Potter made a soft noise. “Ron knows it, too.”
            “Is it something you developed on your own?” Severus’s voice was distant, and he looked over Potter’s head at the far wall. Draco rolled his eyes. He didn’t care if Severus “overheard” him doing it. He would overhear things far more destructive to his peace, in the end.
            “No,” Potter said. “But he would recognize it, if you’re thinking about putting bodies around the Ministry with limbs chopped off.” He cocked his head at Draco. “Why are you thinking of doing that?”
            Really, he’s surprisingly intelligent when he doesn’t suppress his intelligence and pretend that his determination is the only part of him worth paying attention to, Draco thought, and he didn’t care who heard that thought, either. “Because we need to stampede your other enemies out of hiding,” he said.
            “I thought Stockwell gave us a long list of names.”
            “A long list, but most of them are not particularly powerful people in the Ministry,” said Severus. He seemed to have decided that the table was at least as interesting as the far wall. “The ones who are, we have little excuse for approaching. So we see what their reaction is to the bodies, who bolts and runs, who makes accusations, who suddenly acquires new protection on their offices.”
            Potter’s frown grew hard enough to compete with the durability of the steel mountain. “How are we going to see that for certain? I can’t go back to the Ministry right now. I’ve come up with the lie that I’m on holiday because I was wounded when the Lestranges tortured me. It was supposed to give me some time and cover while I searched for the traitor in the Aurors, but now…”
            “This is where your friends come in,” Severus said. “Your partner Weasley is still working as an Auror, is he not? He can pass information on to us.”
            “Absolutely not.”
It was Draco’s turn to stare at something, but he chose the ceiling. “Why not?” he asked in a toneless voice.
“Because they’re my friends.” Potter slammed his hand down on the table as though making it bounce was worth something, and glared at them. “I don’t want to drag them further into this than I already have.”
“You’ve already told them the truth,” Draco said. He didn’t know, honestly, if he had received that information through the bond or if it was simply the sensible thing to suspect, but he knew that it was right. “You told them about the rape and ritual and everything else. Granger was the one who suggested that you use the bond the way we’re doing right now. I don’t see how letting them know still more places them in danger. It might keep them out of it. What if Weasley trusts the wrong people, otherwise?”
Potter’s hands flexed. “I trust you to protect yourselves, the way you did when you came after me when Stockwell and her people had me. Ron and Hermione—don’t have those kinds of skills.”
Severus was staring. Draco bit back a smile. He knew why. Severus wasn’t used to being complimented. In a second, he would press his hand to his heart and fire off some sarcastic comment, to ruin the moment.
On purpose. Because that was how he dealt with such things. It was the way he had dealt with Draco buying him a new cauldron for his birthday, and reassuring him that he deserved the life he was making for himself in wizarding society since the war and the revelation of his true loyalties, and almost everything else.
Stop it, Draco threw at Severus, and turned to Potter. “I think that information would help protect them, would help give them those skills. And if Weasley knows the pendulum curse, that’s a good start. Get him to teach those kinds of spells to Granger.”
            Potter flushed. “We—we never told Hermione that we were studying those kinds of spells.”
            “Why not?” Severus had found his voice, and perhaps because he was ashamed of Draco’s scolding—although the brown bitterness in the back of Draco’s mind had turned dun, so it was sort of hard to tell—he kept it cool and neutral. “Did you think that she would object on the grounds of morality?”
            Potter turned to face him. “We knew she would.”
            Draco shook his head. And Potter wanted to think of himself as an ordinary Auror, ordinary Gryffindor, no different from anyone else who had the traits he saw as essential to his being, when he was willing to make exceptions and bend rules and keep secrets even from his closest friends. Who did he think he was?
            Someone who doesn’t appreciate the way you’re thinking now, Potter said, flowing into and out of Draco’s mind in the space of a breath.
            Draco turned one hand upwards and shrugged a little. He would have withdrawn before the purging of Potter’s emotions in the garden—purged more by the crying Potter had done, he would say, then the spells he had cast to destroy the Transfigured flowers. But this Potter was not as dangerous as that one had been.
            You think so? Another surge of breath-like, wind-like communication.
            Draco raised his head and let his eyes meet Potter’s. He half-nodded. Yes. But you remain dangerous now. Just not as mad. And I like this kind of dangerous better.
            Potter stared at him with his mouth half-open, then turned back to Severus. He seemed to find it easier to deal with a man he thought hated him than a man who gave him compliments, Draco decided. Well, that was one thing Potter and Severus had in common at least, their hatred of being praised. “I don’t think going to Hermione and telling her that we were keeping the spell secret from her on purpose would be a good move now. Or telling her about the Aurors I killed.”
            “Then come up with some other way to protect her,” Severus murmured. “Use some of the spells in the books here to defend her, or bind her to secrecy if you must.”
            Potter snarled; the mountain shot up higher. “No one is going to bind Hermione, or either one of my friends.”
            “It was only one strategy suggested,” Draco said. He thought he would get tired of playing peacemaker soon, but at least for now, it was necessary. “No need to get so defensive, Potter.”
            “You think,” Potter said, staring at him with eyes like stars, “that I want either one of my friends subjected to the same sorts of indignities that come to me down this fucking bond? I hardly think so.”
            Draco stared back at him, a little at a loss for words. “So you don’t really take to the bond, no matter how useful it is,” he finally discovered, somewhere near the back of his mind.
            “It’s a fucking nightmare,” Potter said. “But it’s a nightmare that we can’t wake up from until we find the time to concentrate on it and modify one of the Veela bonding rituals I was talking about, the one that might allow us to sever it altogether. And that will only be after we take down our enemies.”
            “I thought it might—I thought it might be more useful to you now because it would allow you to take revenge on the Lestranges,” Draco said, still at a loss. It shouldn’t be possible to misunderstand someone you were telepathically bonded to this much.
            Then again, it was Potter.
            “Of course it could be useful to take revenge,” Potter said, staring at him as if Draco was the one who had ended up doing something odd. “But what happens after the revenge? What are we going to do when that particular concept isn’t occupying the whole of our time and attention? What good does the bond do then?”
            “It could give you power that would protect you against further attacks,” Draco said. He thought the revenge against the Lestranges might be over quickly, but the repercussions for Potter’s Auror career from him attacking other Aurors would go on for a long time. “Allies who could be summoned to your side in a moment’s notice, the way we already have been.”
            Potter shook his head. “It’s not worth the horror and the expense to me of having people in my head.”
            “The horror of having people in your head,” Draco muttered, and looked sideways at Severus.
            Severus slowly folded his hands. Draco winced a little. He had seen Severus do that before, and it never turned out better than Severus trying to scorn a compliment did.
            Severus caught his eye and briefly sneered at him. Then he faced Potter, and Draco sighed and leaned back. He’d been wishing that someone else would take over his role of talking to Potter. Well, there was only one other person that could.
            Not his role of peacemaker, of course. Severus was incapable of that. But perhaps Draco should retreat, for right now, and come back and pick up the pieces later. He was getting nowhere new with Potter.
*
            Severus restrained himself from snapping, reminding himself again and again about the guilt he had discovered in the back of his mind, the guilt over the rape. It did not matter that the constraints of the ritual and the bargain Potter had made with the bond would allow him and Draco to do little else. It mattered no more than the fact that Severus had not known, at the time he reported the prophecy to the Dark Lord, that it would end up killing Lily.
            Guilt was guilt, and done was done.
            “I know that you don’t want us here,” Severus said. “But I propose a temporary alliance, lasting no longer than the time that it takes us to find and destroy the Lestranges. After that, we can take the time to look up the rituals that would destroy the bond.”
            Potter stared at him. “I already proposed that.”
            He looked half-wild, green eyes staring and steel mountain behind them. “I know that,” Severus said. “But you are still focusing more on the horrors of the bond, when we need to focus on the advantages if we are going to use it.”
            Potter curled his lip around words that he probably didn’t want to pronounce, and then did no more than nod and sit down heavily in his chair. “Should we work on strengthening the telepathic portion of the bond?” he asked, staring into the distance. “Or the part that would allow us to combine magical power?”
            “The part that combines power, of course,” Draco said, sounding as though he was the only one who had been asked, and the only one whose opinion mattered. “It’s not as though we have any other choice.”
            “When we fight them, you mean?” Severus asked, and Draco started, remembering he was in the room. “I would have thought the part that allows us to walk paths in our minds that take us to physical places is the more useful, given that the Lestranges are hiding, and we do not know where.”
            Potter tensed as if at a blow each time one of them spoke of different aspects of the bond, but did not retreat. Severus supposed that was preferable to the way he had snapped and snarled at them before.
            Grace we cannot expect from him.
            No, no kind of grace except the sort that matters in dueling, Potter agreed in the back of his thoughts, and Severus was the one to wince this time. Remembering how easily Potter could overhear his thoughts, and therefore the insults that Severus would normally deal out with impunity, was terrifying.
            Let it be humbling, too, Potter said, and flowed on before Severus could respond. “What sorts of techniques do the books recommend for strengthening the ability to walk on mental roads? I’ve combined magic with people before and I’m speaking mentally to you lot, but I’ve never even heard of that kind of thing before.”
            “My parents’ library will have the right tomes,” Draco said smoothly, and stood up to lead the way. Severus half-relaxed. Draco was still the buffer between him and Potter, the one who could ask questions that Potter had no idea about and Severus was too impatient to answer.
            I would appreciate some more help from you than that.
            Scolded in his head by two men half his age, Severus thought as he followed Draco, or very nearly. If he had known during the war that he would live to come to this, he would have…
            He would have rejoiced that he was going to live. He would have rolled his eyes in disgust shortly afterwards, perhaps, but that would not have been his first reaction.
            He did not catch Potter’s eye, because he would sneer if he did. He simply followed Draco, and watched the way that Draco and Potter fell into step beside each other as if it was the natural thing to do. It would have to become equally natural to all of them, if they were to make the bond work.
            That was the part that Severus looked forward to the least.
*
            Harry looked around the Malfoy library with approval. Since the war and surviving Auror training, he had grown more appreciative than he used to be of large collections of books. This one was bigger than the Black library’s, or nearly, and looked like it had more varied subjects than the Dark Arts that the majority of the Black books were about.
            “Accio books on bonds,” Malfoy said, making a smart little move of his wand, and big blocky shapes began to leap off the shelves and head towards them. Harry tensed, but only until he saw the nearest books forming neat piles on the table beside them. As long as they didn’t slam into his head and shoulders, then he was fine.
            Malfoy did turn and stare at him, and Harry caught his eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “What?” he asked, plucking a large book off the top of the pile. It was bound in crumbling dark leather, and had a white title on the spine, which was one reason it had attracted Harry. Most of the books in a similar condition in the Black library had their titles all but worn away. Bonds and Their Consequences. “I didn’t know that they wouldn’t hit me at first. It’s pretty normal to flinch from flying books.”
            “But not normal to think that your bondmate would let them hit you,” Malfoy said. “Not when both of us would have to suffer the pain from the strikes.”
            Harry thought he hid his smile, but apparently not quickly enough. Snape slid forwards from the other side. “Do tell us the source of your amusement,” he said.

            Harry flung the thought at him. You and Malfoy still talk about yourselves as part of a unit. When you say “us,” that’s what you mean. So much for the efforts to build the bond into something that encompasses all of us.
            He found himself hoping Snape would snap back, because he could use a good fight, but instead, Snape simply exchanged glances with Malfoy and then turned back to Harry and bowed a little. “I did not realize that we were doing that,” he said. “We shall endeavor to make sure that we do not do it in the future.”
            Harry stared at him. “But you will.”
            “That is why I said that we shall endeavor not to do it,” Snape said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “Not that we never will again. We shall fail. But we will try.”
            Harry turned away, unaccountably annoyed himself, not by Snape’s reaction, but by the missed chance to argue with him. “All right,” he said, abruptly. “What kind of book in this mess talks about the roads through the mind and how to build them?” He put down the book he had picked up and took up the next one. This one had a cover that was hanging on by a thread. Harry wondered idly if no Malfoy ancestors had ever had to cast a Preservation Charm.
            Of course we have, Malfoy snapped, coming up to take the book from him.
            Harry nodded to him. “Well done,” he said aloud. “That time, the first person plural referred to you and your family, instead of you and Snape together. A change indeed.”
            Malfoy glared at him, then bit his lip and suddenly dropped the glare, although he went on staring. Harry tilted his head mockingly. “What?”
            “Your teasing and sniping at us is only going to make us all the more determined to survive,” Malfoy said softly, and put the book down, although not before casting a Preservation Charm on it that mended the cover and sent the dust flying off in a large puff. Harry nodded congratulations again. Malfoy ground his teeth, from the sound of it, but tried to speak normally. “Anyway. I think this is the kind of book that will help us.”
            He sorted through several and came up with a slim book that almost looked like Tom Riddle’s diary. Harry stifled the recoil he wanted to make and looked it over carefully. “Why that particular one?” he asked at last, after he had tried and failed to make out any difference between it and the rest. “I give up.”
            “Because,” Malfoy said, and turned it around. This time, Harry could make out the title stamped on the cover. Rare Effects of Bonds.
            Harry nodded grudgingly. The ability to walk from place to place in one’s mind was certainly rare. He’d never heard of any bond that could make it real, and he wasn’t sure that he believed this one could.
            Malfoy cast him one more look, and then sat down at the table with it. “Severus, you might see about brewing Clarifying and Strengthening Potions,” he said absently. “Potter, read with me.”
            “How can I do that, when there’s only one book between us?” Harry asked, but he dragged his chair up to the table and sat down beside Malfoy. He was most impressed with the way that Snape nodded distantly and left the room, presumably for his lab, as though Malfoy was his commander.
            Or maybe that’s another effect of the two of them being one unit and me being the other.
            “I’ll hold it so that we can both see it,” said Malfoy, and positioned the book that way as he talked. “I have more training in magical theory, but you’re the one who experienced the most pain from the bond and probably some other sensations that you haven’t talked about yet. So you’re the one who might realize that a description applies to the bond when we don’t.”
            Harry caught his eye. Malfoy grimaced. “Sorry,” he said. “But Severus and I have been living together since the bonding ritual, and that means that I’m more used to thinking of him as standing with me, and you as standing apart.”
            Try as he might, Harry couldn’t really find a way to disdain that apology. He nodded grudgingly instead. “Thanks,” he said. “For saying that.” He paused, then added, “Why did Snape stay with you instead of going back to his house?” He thought Snape had a home of his own, even though he seemed comfortable and had a lab here.
            Malfoy gave him a sharp look. “Because who would want to be alone, after an experience like that fucked-up ritual?”
            “I would,” said Harry.
            Malfoy opened his mouth, then closed it carefully. Harry felt the tremor in his mind, which a minute later became words, projected down the bond. I know. But I think that was part of what made your emotions so explosive, because you didn’t have someone you could talk them over with and take them out on.
            Harry would have said something about Ron and Hermione, but although they had been with him at first, Harry hadn’t let them stay the night with him since the first one, when Ron had been there. He had pushed them away, told them he was fine, that he just wanted to research ways of ending the bond, to go home.
            And now he had succumbed to the bond, and he was afraid of appearing weak in front of them.
            They’ll understand. I never liked Weasley and Granger much, but I never doubted that they understood you. They’ll do the same thing this time. I’m certain of it.
            Harry counted the seconds as he took air into his lungs and let it out again, concentrating on accepting the reassurance, instead of throwing it away from him because one of his rapists had said it. Then he nodded.
            And then they turned to the book, and it became really almost peaceful for a while, the way they read together, their words echoed from mind to mind, and Snape’s brewing was a steady hum in the back of their heads.
            Until they came across the sentence that ruined it all.

*
BAFan: Yes, it’ll take a while. But at least Harry is acting more sane now.
ChelseaPlume: I think, until this point, other things have given Harry a reason to avoid putting the emotional confrontation off. He had the pain from the bond, and the research he threw himself into, and the investigation, and getting captured. Now he’s finally slowed down a bit, and the emotions are taking their revenge.
Thank you! I’m pleased that you like it.
SP777: I think I’ve always done action scenes! I had several in my first couple of stories, at least.
It’s not so much the writing of Quidditch scenes now as whole stories that I don’t think I can do.
Severus still doesn’t particularly want to understand. But at least he’s snapping now instead of trying to fling deadly insults at Harry.
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The Wages of Going On