Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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
- 18
- 19
- 20
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Nineteen—Power Shifts

            “I did not know you had allied with one of the Water People.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. He’d carried Corners’s cup with him into the garden where the centaurs were staying because Corners wanted to see all of the fortress Harry was familiar with, and it didn’t seem polite to leave him behind. He should have reckoned that the centaurs would immediately see him as a new ally, though, or else not see any value in him at all.

            “I haven’t allied with him,” he said, keeping his voice clipped but not unfriendly. He didn’t want to annoy Kleianthe and make Malfoy’s task harder after he had left. For all that he couldn’t care much about the alliance, Malfoy did, and Harry wasn’t such an arsehole as to try and damage it for him. “He woke me with his song and then decided to stay. That’s different, and you know it.”

            “Is it?” Kleianthe gave him a small smile and turned away to eat the apple Harry had brought her as a peace offering that morning. She didn’t like anyone to see the way the juice ran from the corners of her mouth, or something, Harry thought.

            “Yes,” Harry said to her back, and then turned to Thera. Sometimes she had been more sympathetic than Kleianthe, although she was the one who had insisted he had to stay in the alliance for the sake of hypothetical future people who might never show up at all. “Don’t you think I can make friends who aren’t allies?”

            “It depends on the way you define allies,” Thera said. She swished her tail and looked thoughtfully at Corners, who was currently the size of a cobra and swaying above the cup while he stared into the corners of the garden. The sight of so many trees and flowers, so much solid earth, seemed to stun him. “Someone who is friendly with you, who aids you, or would aid you, if you asked? That’s my definition.”

            “Yeah,” Harry said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “But there’s no place in a definition like that for someone who doesn’t want to relate to people like that.”

            “You wish not to be friendly with them?” Thera took a step towards him, then stopped when Corners glanced at her. “I did not understand your personality that way, based on the things you have said and done.”

            “Argh,” Harry said, the first time in his life he’d made the noise as a word, and clutched one hand to his hair. The other still held the cup, so he couldn’t move it much. Corners touched the edge of his long blue tongue to Harry’s hair anyway and glared at Thera, as if he assumed she was the one who caused the most distress to Harry. Well, in a way she had been. “My friends give me support, too. We enjoy ourselves. We have arguments. We don’t consider ourselves as irrevocably bound to everyone else, either. There are a few people Hermione likes that I can’t stand. But apparently I would have to help raise your children, and give aid to the werewolves, and agree with the vampires’ friends—if we ever bring them into the alliance—and somehow negotiate between you and the merfolk when you’re both jealous of your honor, and leave the Ashborn under Snape’s control, because if he’s my ally I can hardly challenge his possession of them, can I? There’s nothing for me in all this.”

            “If you are trapped, it leaves no time to sing or slip down to the water,” Corners murmured in a voice that had the pattern of the song he had sung to Malfoy in it. Harry wasn’t sure how he could tell the difference between that music and the original melody that had woken him from sleep, but sometimes he thought he had acquired a new kind of ear since listening to Corners. “No freedom.”

            Harry nodded to him, then wished he hadn’t when the cup sloshed. No drops fell to the ground, though. Corners could control the water he was made of, Harry reminded himself; what he held really wasn’t a tiny portion of the river, but Corners’s body. “Exactly.”

            Thera stamped a hoof in thought for a moment, staring past Harry with an expression that was not quite a scowl. Then she inclined her head and murmured, “I wish I had known you felt that way.”

            “You should have,” Harry couldn’t help muttering. Then he sighed. Don’t ruin it for Draco, right. “But why should you have to think about that? I want to leave, and I know you don’t feel obligations to people who don’t feel obligations to you.”

            Thera shook her head. “Of course other people in the alliance will aid you,” she said. “If I did not make that clear, I am sorry.”

            “That’s the problem,” Harry said. Corners flicked a wet tongue against his ear, and he tried not to jump. It would undercut the impression of calm adulthood he was trying to present to Thera more than a little. “I don’t want anything they can offer me. The best thing they could give me would be going away and leaving me alone.”

            Thera reached out and placed a slender hand on his shoulder. Harry stared. He never remembered her touching him before. Corners hissed, a trace of a new warble in the back of his voice.

            “No one is ever alone in this world,” Thera said quietly. “One cannot avoid making connections.”

            “But the connections I have now are enough for me,” Harry said, when he had breathed once through his nose and once through his mouth in an effort not to shout. “I want to be with my friends, not make new ones.” He repeated that to Corners, whom he saw gazing at him for a translation.

            “You made me,” Corners said, and swayed back from him.

            “That’s different,” Harry said, turning to face him and reaching out so his fingers hovered near the long, snaky stream of water rising from the cup. So far, he hadn’t touched Corners, either, except accidentally, when Corners moved in a way that splashed him. “I made you a friend the same way I made my other friends: we met accidentally and decided we want to spend time together. It wasn’t a planned thing.” And now Thera was glaring at him for a translation in turn, which meant he had to provide it.

            “You would have preferred if we had simply shown up one day at the fortress and obliged you to take care of us?” Thera lifted a hoof and held it in the air, turning her leg back and forth. “Perhaps that would have appealed to your sense of the dramatic, but it doesn’t sound much like a workable plan to me.”

            Harry groaned a bit. “This doesn’t work,” he said. “It’s something else that defines my friendships, with Ron and Hermione and the other Weasleys and Corners here.” He tapped the cup firmly this time, persuaded that Corners wouldn’t flow anywhere unless he wanted to. “I can’t put it in words. But I can tell you I don’t want anything from anyone else in the alliance. There’s no reason for them to appeal to me, when I can’t exchange gifts with them.”

            Thera lowered the hoof to the grass and stared at him again. “I find it arrogant,” she said, “to decide that you want nothing of anyone before you have met them all.”

            Harry cursed the flush rising along his cheeks. He was still too vulnerable to scolds, perhaps because it had been one of the prime methods the Dursleys had of punishing him.

            And that’s another sign of how different it is here. How stupid. How often did I think of the Dursleys before I came here?

            “There’s nothing I want,” he said. “There’s nothing I really have to offer, except things that other people can offer equally well. And since I’ll leave and live among people who aren’t part of the pure-blood alliance, it can’t affect me.”

            “Even if the alliances turn out to be the best way of building your wizarding world up again?” Thera cocked her head. “I understood that the Ministry barely survives, thanks to the war, but what is left is run by bitter old men.”

            Harry closed his eyes and shook his head. He hated the way people could turn his words around on him, and come up with circumstances that sounded plausible, and imagine ways he could keep sacrificing himself.

            It wasn’t enough that he hated politics and wanted to be done with them. No, everyone insisted he be more involved.

            Except Ron. He was the one who told me I played them too often, and that I should come back home and stop doing that. I wish I’d listened to him and committed myself to the thought of getting out of here instead of winding myself in.

            “They should not taunt you so,” Corners said suddenly. “At the moment, you are the only human one of the Water People wishes to speak with. They have no hope of bringing us to the alliance if they cannot keep you.”

            Thera turned her head and looked at Corners with steady interest, but didn’t respond to his words, which surprised Harry. Then he smiled a little. The centaurs spoke English, and even if they used some other language among themselves, it was clear that that didn’t involve Parseltongue. And Thera was too cautious to respond to a tone in the voice she might not be sure she understood.

            “He says that the Water People won’t want to become part of the alliances unless you can retain me somehow,” he told Thera. “And at the moment, I don’t think you have a hope of doing it.”

            Thera nodded. “Perhaps not. Yet I find it hard to think that, among all the gifts the centaurs and the werewolves and your own kind can offer you, there is nothing you want.”

            Harry shrugged. “Perhaps not. But I can’t think of it.” Draco had asked him that, too, what he wanted besides to go back to his friends. But Harry thought going back to his friends was a laudable goal in and of itself. At least he would have the freedom and the quiet he desired and couldn’t get here.

            Thera nodded again. “Then perhaps it is for the best that you go.”

            Harry closed his eyes. He hadn’t realized the chains hanging on him, or the way they would fall off, until she said those words. “Thank you,” he whispered. “You can make my excuses to Kleianthe, and the children?”

            “I can,” Thera said. “Though I would prefer you did it yourself, since you are here and so are they.”

            Kleianthe turned around, her smile fixed on her face in a way that Harry had not seen since the first day she came. “Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Potter,” she said. “I shall not forget that you were the first one to welcome us.” She reached up to the bracelet that had formed for her arm when she first came, as the result of his oath, and snapped the links. Harry gasped. The sound and the ease with which she did it went straight through him.

            He turned, and saw the chain he had received in return crumbling apart into dust and ash.

            “You can break your oaths,” Kleianthe said quietly. “Since this alliance does nothing for you, and there is nothing here for you, you should. You will not keep the promises you made to us when we first came.”

            Harry shook his head. Corners was swaying back and forth, but Harry didn’t think he would actually attack, so he said nothing to hold him back. “I—I didn’t mean I wanted to do it,” he said, “or that I enjoyed it. But I can’t keep the promises because I took this up out of boredom, and Malfoy will do better, and I don’t want to keep giving of my life to people who don’t appreciate it.”

            Kleianthe nodded. “I wish it had worked out differently,” she said, with a simplicity that made Harry wince the same way the breaking of her chain had. “You seem like a natural and trustworthy ally, more so than most of the other humans I have met. But I can think of nothing to offer you, either.”

            There seemed nothing more to say after that. Draco had asked him to prepare the centaurs for his leaving, and it seemed Harry had done that. He bowed awkwardly to them, and then turned to the centaur fillies in the corner of the garden.

            Cadmaea and Starborn exchanged timid looks, and then Cadmaea moved towards him with a tap of one hoof. “You’re going,” she said.

            “I won’t be here anymore, no matter where I am,” Harry said. He tried to remind himself that it would probably take days, if not weeks or months, before Hermione’s plan would succeed well enough for Snape to agree to renegotiating the Unbreakable Vows. “I hope you don’t—that is, I hope you don’t mind my leaving.”

            “We were just getting to know you,” Starborn said.

            There seemed nothing he could say to that, so Harry mumbled a few commonplaces and then turned back towards the fortress with a sense of relief. He would almost rather stay here than go through that again, but he could hear Ron scoffing in the back of his head at the notion, and he knew he was being stupid. He simply didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to remain here, and there was no other parting that would be so painful. Corners could come with him. The Ashborn wouldn’t care where he was going. The parting with Draco had been last night, and even if they saw each other again before Harry left, he couldn’t imagine it would be with the same depth or cordiality.

            And then there was Snape, who appeared around a corner before Harry could get back to his rooms and regarded him silently. Corners still swayed above his cup. He examined Snape with some interest; Harry had told him about Snape, as much as he knew.

            “What?” Harry snapped, and fought the urge to fold his arms. It was hard to do that with a cup in one hand, and not have it look awkward. He almost wished for a moment that Corners had not called him, or at least that Harry had not heard the call.

            “Will you come back to my lab?” Snape turned his hand so Harry could see the parchment dangling from his hand. “Miss Granger sent me a most interesting letter.”

            Mouth filled with water that tasted like hope, Harry nodded, since he couldn’t say anything and be sure his voice would work for him, and followed Snape.

*

            Draco had not exaggerated. He had found Severus this morning and told him about Potter and the water snake. Severus had controlled his fury and nodded his thanks. Of course Potter should have asked his permission to bring the snake into the fortress before he did so, but Potter didn’t obey the ordinary rules, and Severus should have given up on any expectation that he would.

            “Thank you, Draco,” he’d said, when Draco hesitated. “You may go back to bed now. Be assured I shall try to treat Potter and the snake with the respect at least one of them deserves.”

            Draco shook his head and brought his hand as though he was going to comb it through his blond hair. “It’s more than that,” he said. “The snake’s changed Potter somehow. He’s—more confident than I saw him be before. It’s like having someone to fight for changes him, someone who depends on his protection.”

            “If the snake is one of the Water People, I doubt it truly needs his protection,” Severus said dryly. The books he possessed which mentioned the Water People were not very numerous, but the mentions made him sure they were comfortably powerful. And also hard to kill, given that they could dissolve their bodies into water at a moment’s notice.

            “Not what I mean,” Draco mumbled. “Potter—he’s right. He needs friends around.”

            “But he thinks neither you nor I can become one,” Severus finished. He did not find the information surprising, not when he thought of the expression Potter wore when talking about to or to his friends and the expressions he usually wore when confronting Severus, even about something so intimate as his past.

            “That’s not surprising, is it?” Draco had tilted his head back so he was looking at the ceiling and sighed. “We’re very different from his friends. Slytherins, instead of Gryffindors. Clever, instead of stupid.”

            “Miss Granger is not stupid,” Severus said. He let his voice carry the edge of a warning tone, not because Potter was there to hear and be upset, but because he did not wish to encourage Draco in lazy perceptions. For too long lately, he had not cared that Draco said stupid things and believed ones that were worse. But he would keep him away from careless habits now.

            “Yes, but she’s intelligent,” Draco said. “Not clever.”

            Severus had leaned nearer to him and poured him a fresh glass of wine. It was nearly four in the morning when Draco came, woke him up, and told him about Potter and the water snake, but Severus had released any anger once he heard the reason. Yes, it was important to know this. “I was unaware that you made that much of a distinction between those two adjectives.”

            Draco seized the glass and gulped some more wine. Severus hid his wince with an effort. That was an expensive year. “I mean she can solve problems and mysteries and write essays and do Arithmancy equations. But she’s shit at using that intelligence to her own advantage with other people.”

            Severus did not give the chuckle he wanted to, but it was with an effort. It sounded dangerously like Draco was saying Slytherins were interested in people, while Gryffindors—or at least smart ones like Granger—were interested in useless things like facts and potions and ingredients.

            Perhaps Draco caught the edge of a chuckle anyway—not impossible, not when they were closer than they had been in some time and he was more perceptive than Severus had given him credit for. He sat up straighter and glared at Severus. “Potter doesn’t like people who are clever. He calls them manipulative. He thinks we should all react the way he does, charging blindly at everything and being the prey of our emotions.”

            Severus turned his own glass in his fingers, avoiding Draco’s eyes for the moment. He was wondering—and ashamed to find himself wondering—whether Potter would have liked him better when he was the prey of his emotions, back when Potter had first arrived, and prone to tantrums simply because the man did not fit the boy he remembered.

            Man. He is not a boy, no matter how childishly he sometimes acts when we speak of the past. He has changed too much, and I reminded myself of that thought once, the evening I first tried to use Legilimency on him, and then forgot it again.

            Severus sighed and set the glass down. There were still the Vows to bind Potter here, but he did not know how much longer they would hold. “Go back to bed, Draco. The Water People do change things, but I will talk to Potter about them in the morning. You look as though you could use the rest.”

            Draco did sway when he rose to his feet, and Severus thought it was probably with weariness, not the wine. But he stood there anyway, holding onto the back of his chair, and met Severus’s eyes with a gaze so stark that Severus looked away before he could think about the impression he would present.

            And why was he so worried about impressions in front of Draco, anyway? Draco had seen him broken and bleeding after torture sessions in front of the Dark Lord; he was the one who had taught Seveurs some of the simpler charms for fixing wounds and stopping the flow of blood that Severus had never bothered to learn. Silly to believe that he would not know more about pain and wounds than Severus did.

            “We both want him,” Draco told him quietly. “I want him as a friend. And I don’t really care if the only reason I do is because he refused me when I was a child. I still want him.”

            “Perhaps you may have him,” Severus said as soothingly as he could. “I do not think Potter the kind to deliberately choose to hurt someone, if he can also gratify his own wishes. He may write to you after he leaves.”

            “And you want him, too,” Draco said, with that brutal clarity Severus remembered best from his own father. None of the Death Eaters was in the habit of getting drunk, and he had found when he tamed the minds of the mad ones, such as Bellatrix, that their freedom from conventional rules of behavior did not necessarily give them insight into the people around them. “Not as a friend. I don’t think you care about that.”

            “No, I certainly do not,” Severus said, relieved that Draco understood something in proportion, given the way he was speaking. “I would be satisfied if—he—would understand that I am trying to calm him down and help him face his past so he would refrain from destroying the Ashborn or blowing the fortress up around us.”

            “But he’s already calmer,” Draco said. “And you told me about the Sorting Hat wanting to put him in Slytherin.”

            Severus frowned. “So?” He had thought sharing the news with Draco would help him overcome some of his own incredulity at it. Draco was the only one around him who would react with the right amount of incredulity, come to that. The Ashborn would nod and widen their eyes only if he told them to.

            “You think he should have been yours,” Draco said. “Because you think all the Slytherins should have been yours. I’ve seen the way you looked at the Death Eaters who were Slytherins, trying to figure out what made the Hat put them there, or how you would have treated them if they were students there when you were Head. It frustrates you that Potter didn’t go where he was told, and you didn’t get the chance to work around him and come to some kind of compromise with him while he was still eleven.”

            Severus sat still, and kept his fingers carefully wrapped around the edge of his glass. He did not know how Draco had come to that conclusion, and he would be some minutes finding the words to refute it.

            And wondering how Draco had seen so clearly.

            “It’s obvious to someone who watches you and cares what you think,” Draco said, as if he had heard the words and decided to answer the thoughts behind them. “Of course, not many people have ever done that, have they?” His hand opened for a moment, and then closed again. He looked sad, angry. Disgusted. Severus did not know if the last emotion applied to him, or—perhaps, new thought—was for the people who had never cared enough to pay attention to what Severus wanted.

            “You think of yourself as Head of Slytherin, a Slytherin, first and foremost,” Draco continued.

            Severus found his voice then. “I think of myself as a Potions master first and foremost,” he said. “You would be interested to know that I do not often change my mind on such matters as my self-definition.”

            Draco shook his head impatiently. “No. Maybe if you’d got away from Hogwarts and had a life beyond that, beyond teaching, before the last few years, then you would have done that. Or you would have thought of yourself as a Death Eater first if you’d remained loyal to the Dark Lords. But because circumstances forced you back to Hogwarts, you were thrown together with people of your House. That’s your identity. So now you’re staring at Potter, hoping for clues in his expressions, hoping someone can tell you how in the world you missed seeing the seeds of a Slytherin in him. He’s not a good actor. How could he have kept them hidden so long?”

            Severus returned an answer that had something to do with even Gryffindors possessing more power of lying than they assumed they did, and sent Draco away satisfied.

            But he was not satisfied himself, and so he started towards the next meeting with Potter with trepidation growing in the back of his mind.

            “What do you want in return for letting me go, Snape?”

            And that led him back to this moment, the moment where he was sitting in his lab with Potter, and not his bedroom with Draco. The letter in his hand was from Granger, but it was only the excuse to bring Potter here. In it, Granger gave disappointing news: that she had failed to place a second Potions article, and it therefore might be some time before she managed to get anyone else interested. The list of Potions journals where she could submit—where she had a reasonable chance of placing the work, at least, or thought she did—was not extensive.

            Severus handed the letter over and let Potter read. The snake of the Water People danced in his cup, meanwhile, and watched Severus. Severus never released his gaze in return, though he had to blink and the serpent did not. He wondered if Potter knew how dangerous the Water People were, how disastrous they could be to anyone who carried water as part of their bodies. They could flow down a throat, or into an ear, and wreak havoc on the human body from inside.

            And Potter befriended one as though none of that mattered.

            It does not. Not to him.

            The realization stuck in Severus’s throat, but he forced himself to work it through, because it was important.

            Potter does not think about how dangerous other people are. It is something, perhaps, that he would find hard to do, after how the Dark Lord pursued him nearly all his life. He does not make friends because of power, or because he is thinking of what they could do for him in the future, or even out of fascination because he has never seen the Water People and wants to know more about what they do.

            He chooses his friends because he likes them and wants to be around them, and perhaps because they are nice to him.

            Those were truths that Severus had always known about Gryffindors, of course. But after seeing Potter’s memories, and after having Potter agree to become a hostage so that the Ashborn and his followers would not have to fight another war, Severus had thought Potter was different.

            You thought he was different from the beginning, when you compared him to his father. James would have seen the best way to torment someone in a different House, and half the decisions he made were based on that.

            Severus half-shook his head and said, “Unbreakable Vows can be replaced with other Unbreakable Vows, if both parties agree.”

            Potter frowned at him and said, “But I thought you liked the bargain we had now. That letter says it might be a long time until Hermione can give you something you want as much as you want an undisturbed life.”

            “I realize, with you here, that an undisturbed life is not what I most want,” Severus said. “I would settle for the Ashborn being safe from the attacks of your people. I thought I needed your life as a chain on your friends, more than as a chain on you.”

            Potter grimaced. “You want Ron and Hermione to make Vows to you? I think Hermione might, but Ron wouldn’t. He’s already angry because he thinks I’m sacrificing myself too much for you.”

            Severus shook his head. “I was thinking of us both swearing another Vow, or pair of Vows,” he said, and swallowed the thick sickness that welled in his throat when he thought about that. He had been bound by too many of them in this life.

            But choosing to make them is different than Albus, or political circumstances, forcing me to swear them. That must be true.

            “What, though?” Potter demanded. “There’s nothing we could swear that would make sense and still keep the agreement between us not to attack each other alive.”

            “Really?” Severus asked. He had been thinking about this ever since Draco told him Potter had one of the Water People with him, and except that he knew more now about the peculiar way Potter’s mind worked, he would have expected him to be thinking of it, too. “You could go on long visits to your friends, all but live with them, while keeping enough of a base in the fortress that it would seem as if we were keeping our original agreement of you being a hostage. I would still want some private guarantee that your friends would not attack me in revenge over my original treatment of you, but it need not be a Vow. And you could help Draco, still. I know he would value that.”

            Potter stared at him with narrowed eyes, and with a light in the back of them that nearly made Severus wince in anticipation. He knew what was coming next, but he wasn’t sure that Potter did.

            Or at least, he did not know where the conversation would end up. But Severus’s reckonings on that score might be wrong, as well.

            “No,” Potter said. “I don’t believe this. Private agreements and hostage agreements and all the rest aside, this is too much for you to give them without demanding something in return.” He laughed without joy. “And what else could I give you? You don’t want my friendship, the way Draco does.”

            “No,” Severus agreed. Draco had been right about that.

            “What, then?” Potter shook his head. “You’ve helped me, by your lights, and that means a lot to someone like you.” If not to me, his eyes and the stubborn tilt of his head said, and Severus could accept that to him, something like that meant far less than to Severus. “So what do you want in return for it?”

            Severus would have given a minute shrug if he was alone. As it was, he had no reason to, and he put the shrug into his voice instead. “I want your attention. I want the chance to understand you, to understand why I never saw the Slytherin in you before.”

            “My comment about the Sorting Hat bothered you that much?” The snake rising from the cup next to him hissed, and Potter reached up and let a hand hover next to its neck, but he never looked away from Severus. “It was just like I said. I had some traits that could have put me in Slytherin, but I begged the Hat not to do it. That’s all. A little, stupid story for you to be making a big deal of.”

            It is Slytherin to underplay something that other people have shown is important, Severus decided. At least, if you do not want to be noticed.

            And of course the boy—the boy Potter had been—had not wanted to be noticed. Severus could not claim he had hidden that particular trait. Severus’s preconceptions had made sure he ignored it and saw only the attention-seeker he knew James would have been in his son’s particular situation.

            “Draco told me I identify myself with my House,” he said. “That much is true. I have found a Housemate in you.”

            “A potential Housemate,” Potter corrected him at once. “If I had given in to the Hat’s pleading, I might have gone to Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. It didn’t say Slytherin was the ultimate choice, just that I’d do well there.”

            “And that also changes the boundaries of how I think,” Severus corrected him in turn. “Because it seems to me that House traits do not change, that you are born one way and must be that way. It was important of me to think of myself as Slytherin, and important to most of my Housemates, as well. And important to your father to think of himself as Gryffindor. Even Black. He had never expected to be put into that House, but once he was, he clung to the ways it made him different from the rest of his family.”

            “And my mother?” Potter challenged, leaning forwards like a horse about to bite.

            Severus checked the immediate response he wanted to give when a wound was pressed, and in the end, only shook his head.

            “Well, then.” Potter leaned back in his chair. “I can’t really understand it. To me, it matters a lot more whether someone is nice to me or not.” The snake hissed again, and this time, Potter glanced up and smiled at him.



            I understand that, now. And in its own way, that is Slytherin. We may choose our allies by how they can benefit us, but that is not how we choose our friends. And most of us do make a distinction, Slytherins like the Dark Lord and Lucius notwithstanding.

            “When I am wrong about something,” Severus said quietly, “I wish to know why. I wish to understand. Your remaining near enough to me that I can understand you is what I would willingly swear Vows for.”

            “That’s…insane.” Potter turned his head, and those green eyes cut through Severus’s as Lily’s had once done—

            No. They cut as intensely as Lily’s had once done, but for different reasons. Severus took a deep breath and felt as though he had undone chains that cut him where they crossed his chest. He did not know why, but he could breathe more freely than he had done for some time.

            Because he wanted to know more, he shook his head. “No. For someone like you, who defines yourself otherwise and has different goals, yes, it would be hard to understand. But I am my own master now. I have people to serve me. I have a lover. I have the potions lab I’ve dreamed of. If I want to spend my time perfecting my understanding of the world around me, then I can do so.”

            Potter scowled at him and flipped his fringe out of his eyes, as if he wanted to emphasize the scar that had done so much to separate them since the beginning. “Shame you didn’t try to understand Draco better from the beginning. I might never have had to intervene between you.”

            Severus let his gaze cool. While he wished to conciliate Potter, that was not the same as agreeing with his every word. “Yes, a shame,” he murmured. “But it is also you.”

            “What?” Potter sounded like his godfather when he barked like that. “You think it’s somehow my fault that you and Malfoy weren’t getting along right at first?”

            He calls Draco by his last name sometimes, sometimes by his first. Interesting. Severus shook his head. “Not what I meant. There are few in the world I would be willing to swear Unbreakable Vows for because of my interest in commanding their attention. Draco, yes. And you.”

            Potter paused, his eyes flickering and his head tilting to the side. The snake hissed again, urgently, and this time Potter responded with a long, flickering hiss that made dark purple spots dance in Severus’s sight. He could have gone all his life without hearing Parseltongue again, after hearing the Dark Lord speak it so long, and yet…

            It was Potter.

            “Because I’m my mother’s son?” Potter asked it cautiously, as if afraid of the answer.

            Severus shook his head once more. “Because you are you,” he said. “Son of the man I hated and the woman I loved. The Chosen One. The boy I sacrificed and worked for and who I thought would never acknowledge it. The one who killed the Dark Lord who tormented me, and who tormented Draco. Someone important to Draco. I am not proud that you are someone I would do this for. But I am willing to, because I have never understood you, and wish to.”

            “You’re mad,” Potter said again, but he sounded less than convinced.

            “You may think that,” Severus said, and waved him out the lab door. “You will have longer visits from your friends, more freedom, as long as you agree not to abandon us altogether. That is partially for Draco’s sake—”

            “But more for your own,” Potter finished, still staring at him.

            Severus nodded, not willing to deny it. He closed his eyes when the lab door shut behind Potter. So much honesty left him feeling hollow.

            But at least he had told the truth. And at least he stood a chance of knowing himself better, if Potter would not agree.

*

            “I don’t trust him,” Corners hissed the moment the door shut behind them.

            Harry smiled at him and reached up to stroke the side of his neck. “That makes two of us.”

            Corners paused and slid his head through his neck, so that his bright eyes faced Harry upside-down. “Truly? I had thought you agreed with him, because you listened to him so long.”

            Harry shook his head and began to carry the cup down the corridor. He could have floated it beside him using a spell, he knew, but he didn’t feel like doing so, and he thought Corners would have been a little offended and hurt if he had. “No. I don’t understand what he wants, why he wants my attention.”

“Because your attention is worth having.”

            Harry opened his mouth to argue that, to say Corners only felt that way because Harry was a Parselmouth and new to him, and it wasn’t objectively true…

            And then shut it again. Because he was thinking about the way Snape had told him he undervalued himself, and it collided, oddly, in his head with Ron saying angrily that Harry was too selfless, that he sacrificed himself too much.

            Maybe, sometimes, I can allow myself to think I’m important to people.

*

            unneeded: Yes, I think so, too. Draco has learned that he can’t really pressure or cajole Harry, or manipulate him, either. Letting Harry fall into friendship with him naturally is what will be the best course, if he really does want friendship from Harry.

            AlterEquis: Unfortunately, your review didn’t come through.
- 18
- 19
- 20
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

Ashborn