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Ashborn	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 36151 -:- 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 Twenty—Fighting and Falling

            “I don’t think it’s enough, mate. It’s still a leash.”

            Harry sighed and took a bite of the fruit that the Ashborn had provided him and Ron when they wanted to meet. Hermione had been too busy to come, still futilely trying to place articles with Potions journals. At least the apple in his mouth was sweet and tart at the same time and made up for some of the frustration that Harry got from staring into Ron’s strong, stubborn, freckled face.

            “Right, but at least it’s not the same kind of leash that Snape had on me before.” Harry swallowed the bite of apple, because Ron was giving him the kind of stare at his speaking with his mouth full that he’d probably learned from Hermione. “Something has to stay between us, I agree with that much. I don’t think the Ashborn would attack unless Snape told them to—I didn’t understand the kind of control he had over them before—”

            “A perverted control.” Ron hadn’t touched the food so far, as though he was afraid it would poison him. He folded his arms and glared at Harry.

            “I totally agree,” Harry said grimly, and tried not to look back at the door into the fortress, where Bellatrix was waiting for him. He knew he would meet empty eyes and a wand that hung down at her side because Snape had assigned her to be his guard but not on her guard all the time. “So far, though, I haven’t managed to convince him to release them. But if he’ll agree to this, to me spending long periods of time away from the Ashborn, that might be the first step.”

            “What do you owe him?” Ron drummed a closed fist on the table. “What do you owe them? So many of them were your enemies before you won the war, Harry. Why should you care about what happens to them now?”

            Harry blinked at him. “But a minute ago you were saying that the way Snape controlled them is perverted,” he said, feeling as though he’d fallen off a horse.

            “Right. It is.” Ron picked up a slice of orange from the bowl in the center of the table and looked at it as if it would grow teeth. Harry smiled in spite of himself. One of the things he missed the most about his friends was that he felt as if he understood them. He was never sure what Snape and Malfoy were feeling, and of course the Ashborn had few to no emotions of their own, so it wasn’t important what they felt.

            He licked his lips a moment later, swallowing the taste of bile rather than apples this time. And if I really care enough about them to want Snape to relinquish his control, why am I thinking things like that?

            Corners, in his cup on the corner of the table, curled his head around to watch Ron from the rim. Ron had blinked at the introduction to Corners, but taken it in good part. Harry thought Corners liked Ron more than he had liked either Malfoy or Snape, but it was hard to be sure. He hadn’t said much, only hissed a polite greeting for Harry to translate and then taken up that watching.

            “Then why talk like that?” Harry asked. “It’s not a case of owing, any more than I owed some of Voldemort’s prisoners I rescued. It’s a case of seeing something that has to be done and doing it.”

            Ron practically slammed the slice of orange back into the bowl. “Right, mate,” he said, speaking with exaggerated care. “But you don’t understand. It’s not—about things like that. You’ve done enough things that other people didn’t want to do. You should be allowed to rest, not dragged back into the struggle just when you thought you were going to be free from it.”

            “Maybe so,” Harry muttered, and ate another piece of apple just because he could. “But it doesn’t work out that way. Here I am, and I can’t help being concerned about the Ashborn. I don’t think I could force Snape to let them go, but I could persuade him. Hermione seems to be persuading him to let me go. Amazingly.”

            “More than she should have to pay,” Ron said, and his face was shadowed in a way that Harry wondered if he was only noticing for the first time. Perhaps it had always been there. “More than you should have to pay. The investment of time and attention and money, on Hermione’s part, and life, on yours. So Snape and Malfoy can be content? Is that what it’s all about?”

            “Snape,” Harry said. “Until I got here, Snape was the only important one. I don’t think he’d paid attention to what Draco wanted for a very long time.”

            “And that’s another thing,” Ron muttered, leaning forwards and staring into Harry’s eyes with a piercing regard that made Harry shift uneasily from side to side, raising one hand as if he could keep Ron’s gaze from his neck. “You didn’t used to call Malfoy Draco, either.”

            “I didn’t know him then,” Harry said, conscious of the way he was turning his head aside, and promptly turning it back. He didn’t want to look as though he was weak in front of Ron—

            Weak in front of your best friends? Are you listening to your own thoughts?

            Oddly enough, the voice he used to address himself in his thoughts was starting to sound more and more like Malfoy. Harry took a deep breath and forced himself to speak. “I think—Ron, I’m not being forced to do this. Snape never asked me to think about the Ashborn. He never asked me to think about Draco. He wanted to forget about everything but what was outside his walls. In fact, the reason he agreed to swear Vows to me is because he thought it would help him do that. Get rid of enough other things demanding his attention and he can just stay in his lab for the rest of his life.”

            Ron snorted and folded his arms. “You make it sound like some kind of miracle of altruism that he ever ventured out.”

            “He would think of it that way, I’m sure.” Harry rubbed his forehead when Ron glared at him. Everyone seemed displeased with him lately, except Corners, and sometimes Corners watched him with what Harry thought would have displeasure, except one of the Water People was too polite to show it to the first Parselmouth they’d ever met. “Ron…I can care about Snape and Malfoy and the Ashborn, or at least care that certain things change that probably won’t if Snape never wakes up, and I won’t care about you or Hermione any less.”

            “Who’s worried about that?” Ron asked loudly, glaring around as if he expected the table to grow a mouth and answer the accusation. “Not me!”

            “Glad to hear it,” Harry answered dryly. He leaned forwards and squeezed Ron’s hand when Ron looked at him worriedly and made no move to answer him. “Listen. What I want is to be back with you and Hermione. That was never in doubt. But I can still worry about the Ashborn, and Snape, and Malfoy.”

            “You just said that,” Ron pointed out.

            Harry nodded. “But I think you need to hear it again. I want to be concerned about everyone and able to work to free them if needed.”

            Ron stared at him as though he had grown a second head. “But that was what you did during the war,” he whispered. “Do you really want to go on doing what you did during the war all your life?”

            Harry opened his mouth to give some light answer, something about how he had wanted to be an Auror before, and Aurors spent all their lives chasing and fighting Dark wizards, and after Voldemort, how could anyone assume he would want that? But no one had questioned him when he stated that desire.

            And then…

            And then, worlds moved in his mind, and thoughts collided, and he almost laughed when he realized that there might be an answer to Draco’s and Ron’s frustrated questions about what he wanted, or how he could want certain things, and a reason why it was hard to answer them, as well.

            “What I want,” he said slowly, and felt the words moving in his mouth, as sweet in their own way as those pieces of apple he had eaten, “is to help people, yes. I was busy during the war, and frightened, and angry, and I could give those things up and never have to feel them again to think I was doing a good job. But I was also happy when we freed prisoners. Or when I spent those three days with George because there was no one else I could spend them with and we talked about how it wasn’t his fault that some of the Death Eaters stole his jokes and used them against us. Or when I dragged Hermione back to that mudfield where you almost died and we cast spells together to find you.”

            Ron shuddered. “Don’t remind me. Spending a day almost buried to your eyelids in mud is not fun.”

            “And you think crawling through half-digested dragon food is?” Harry softened when he saw the way Ron stared at him. “Sorry. Anyway. What I’m saying is that that’s what I’d like to do. Help people. Comfort people. Soothe them back to health. Find what they need when they need it, and give them their freedom when it’s that. Those were the times I was happy. I want to be happy, and that’s what I need.”

            “You’re making up excuses to sacrifice yourself again,” Ron whispered, and reached tentatively out to him as though he thought Harry would snap at him if Ron touched him too quickly. “What you should want is—”

            “What I want is for other people to stop telling me what I should want,” Harry snarled at him, and tore his hand free.

            Ron rocked back in his chair again, wincing. Harry stared back, blinking, and then shrugged a little. Well. Ron had been right about the way that Harry was going to snap at him, then.

            “But think about what you could be losing,” Ron said. “If you spend all your time devoting yourself to other people’s happiness, then you’ll lose your chance to live your own life, with your own privacy and your ability to choose what you want to do. Is that worth it?”

            Harry stared at him, then snorted. “What would I lose, Ron? Why do you assume I’d spend all my time devoting myself to that? I’ll have to stop and rest sometimes, and I know that you and Hermione won’t let me use myself up, and in the meantime, I can be working on things I want to do. That’s the point of it being things I want to do, rather than just any old random set of things. I’ll have pleasure in doing them for their own sake.”

            Ron hesitated. Then he said, “I’m just afraid it’s the mentality that drove you during the war. You thought you had to be useful. You weren’t happy if you weren’t being useful. You started fighting Voldemort in the first place because Dumbledore convinced you you had to.”

            Harry laughed, but also shook his head. He hadn’t realized how little Ron understood about the way Harry had approached the war. Not much, if he could still say things like that.

            “Dumbledore set me up to find the Horcruxes,” he said. “Not fight the war. He couldn’t have known how much fighting I’d have to go through, or he’d have tried to prepare me better. He was overprotective, Ron, if anything. He didn’t tell me about the prophecy and train me as he should have because he wanted me to have a normal childhood. I fought Voldemort because he killed my parents, and because he would have killed me and you and Hermione and your family, and because he wouldn’t leave me alone. And then, later, his people killed Sirius and Dumbledore. Or that was what I thought at the time,” he added in some confusion, reminding himself that Bellatrix was standing behind him, and he hadn’t really brought up that she’d killed Sirius yet. “I didn’t fight because I was some grand hero, Ron. Not only that. I promise.”

            Ron ran his hands through his hair and blew his breath out through slick lips. “I want to say something, mate,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll get angry. I don’t want you to,” he added hastily, as if he thought that Harry might think he lived to piss him off. “But I think you will.”

            Harry leaned back and picked up another slice of apple, mainly so he would have something to do with his hands. “All right. Say it, then.”

            “You won’t get angry?” Ron’s eyes skittered across his face and then off to the side like nervous horses.

“I can’t promise that,” Harry pointed out, keeping his voice as mild as he could. “Because I have no idea what you want to say.”

Ron took a deep breath and stared at his clasped hands. “What if you don’t want to help people, mate, you only think you do because that’s what other people have decided you should want? Do you have any chance—have you ever had a chance—to think about what you want and separate it from other people’s theories?”

Harry did feel a slight, hot shimmer in the back of his nostrils and throat, but he managed to laugh. “That took you a lot of courage to say, didn’t it?” he asked, and then bit into the slice of apple.

Ron narrowed his eyes as though squinting into sunlight. “And you aren’t angry?”

            “I am, a bit,” Harry admitted, and then rolled one shoulder. “But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that you admitted it to me, and it’s something I should think about it, if only so you and Hermione aren’t thinking it silently and afraid to say anything.”

            “But have you considered it?” The words leaped from Ron’s lips like falling water now. He leaned forwards, and took Harry’s hand in his. “Have you considered that what you want most could be influenced by other people’s expectations? Sometimes I think you don’t think about that enough.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and reached for another piece of fruit, not incidentally taking his hand out of Ron’s. “Make up your mind,” he said sharply. “Either I’m very influenced by people all around me, or I don’t think enough about what they want. Both of them can’t be true at once.”

            Ron leaned back and watched him with a careful set to his mouth. “You are angry about this,” he said accusingly after a moment.

            Harry looked off to the side, and took a deep breath, and let the scents fill his lungs, felt the light and the stone of the fortress collide in his mind and create a balance of opposites. He spent a few minutes thinking about that, and only about that, before he trusted himself to answer Ron.

            “Listen, Ron,” he said quietly. “Yeah, it sucks. I wish I could have had a different life. I wish I wasn’t the one who had to kill Voldemort. I wish my parents were still alive. I wish someone else had signed their life away as hostage to Snape and Malfoy, and that they would have accepted someone else.

            “But I’m the person I am. And I can either spend the rest of my life second-guessing myself and being sure that what I want is really just the product of what other people demanded of me, or I can try my best and actually achieve what I want. Sooner or later, I have to stop exploring into motives and deciding that I can never trust what anyone else says or where my desires come from. Sooner or later, I have to accept it.”

            He saw Ron’s head shake from the corner of his eye, and shut his eyes in response. His best friends were his lifeline in a situation like that, although Corners could be that, too, if Harry let him. He didn’t want to argue with them, but he thought Ron was rather forcing him into an argument.

            “But what if,” Ron whispered, “what if you can’t trust anything you think? What if your thoughts have roots deeper than the ones you know about? What if you have to be sure of your motives, because what you do is so important, but you can’t be sure because you don’t know all the roots of your motives?”

            Harry looked into his eyes and said, “I don’t think this has much to do with me at all, does it?”

            Ron started and half-turned away from him. Now he was the one staring at the garden wall and the twining vines that covered it, and clenching his hands as though he expected someone to try and take his fingers from him. Harry waited, sipping now and then at the juice that covered the small slice of orange he had taken from the bowl of fruit.

            “I want to marry Hermione,” Ron said abruptly. “I know that. I’ve known that since two years ago, since that awful day when I thought she was dead and we barely got her back.”

            Harry nodded. He remembered that day. Hermione had fallen into a Death Eater trap that forcibly Apparated the victim into their hands, behind him and Ron one moment as they crept through the undergrowth towards the house they thought guarded the diadem Horcrux and not behind them the next. Ron had frozen, and Harry had been the one who took over, who guided them in the search, who found Hermione and devised the plan that rescued her. But how could he resent that, when he saw the look in Ron’s eyes as he held Hermione in his arms?

            “But it’s still,” Ron said, and swallowed. “I keep putting it off when she asks me. We’re engaged, but I can’t bring myself to get married yet.” He stared at Harry. “Why not?”

            Harry snorted. “Do you really think that you’ll never get married if you don’t do it right after the war? Do you think Hermione is that impatient?”

            “I don’t know,” Ron said. “Because I don’t know why I don’t want to marry her, see? Why I want to wait.” His voice was beginning to rise, steadily, and Harry felt more than heard Bellatrix stir behind him. He made a sharp gesture with one hand that he hoped Bellatrix would understand, and obey. He didn’t dare turn away from Ron, not when Ron needed him. Ron rose to his feet and began to pace around the table, his head bowed. “What if I never find out? What if it turns out that I’m really too childish for her, or I just don’t love her enough? I have to know, because if it’s something like that, then I owe it to her to tell her right away.”

            “I think,” Harry said gently, “that Hermione understands you better than anyone could. If you tell her you want to wait, even if you don’t know why yet, I think she’ll agree. And if she asks all the time, or if she’s unhappy about waiting, then at least this way she gets to make a decision. It’s better than lying to her and making her think you’re the eager one.”

            Ron shook his head. “But she’ll want to know why. And I don’t know why.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “You went through a bloody war, Ron. So did she. You’re just starting to reestablish your lives. What reason do you need that’s not covered by that? Or do you think she wants to get married to help heal her scars from those days, or something?”

            “That’s not it.” Ron clenched his teeth and looked as though he would like to reach out and scoop a piece of fruit off the table, but left it alone in the end. “That’s not it. You don’t get it. I have to think about it. I have to figure it out, because she’ll ask questions, and I can’t answer them.”

            “I trust that you love each other,” Harry said firmly. “And that will be true whether you get married or not. Talk to her. Explain what’s happening, and why you think it might be a problem. See if you can’t figure it out together.”

            “But on the other hand, what if it’s nothing?” Ron ran his hands through his hair. “Some kind of lingering trauma from the war or something? I could wake up in a few weeks and be fine. Then I would feel stupid for telling her.”

            Harry shook his head. “I have faith in the both of you. It’s better if you tell her and then get embarrassed than to lie to her—”

            “I wouldn’t lie to her.” Ron glared at him.

            “Lying by omission, yes, you would,” Harry said, and leaned forwards. “You already have, haven’t you? Because you’re raising these concerns with me, but only after I basically forced them out of you, and you haven’t raised them with her.”

            Ron’s redness now extended from his hair all the way down his neck. “That’s not the same as lying,” he muttered, but his voice trailed off.

            “Only if you’re going to agree that I’m not lying to myself to want to help people,” Harry said. He leaned back and ate the orange slice in his hand. “Otherwise you’re saying that you’re somehow the exception, the special person who can’t lie and who doesn’t have to worry about things like that, but I’m the rule.”

            Ron leaned forwards and frowned at him. “That’s right. We were talking about you, and the way that you somehow keep helping people who need your help—”

            Harry opened his hand in the air between them, in eloquent silence.

            Ron blinked, and then the red started to fade from his face as he laughed. Harry grinned at him, sure everything was going to be all right between them, the way it always was when they argued.

            I can make up with him. I can try to make up with anyone I want. It might not work with Snape and Malfoy, but deciding ahead of time that it won’t and it’s not worth attempting is something they would do.

            Yes, I’m different from them. I’m me. I’ll do things the way Harry Potter would do them, not the way the friends of Harry Potter think he should do it or the way the enemies of Harry Potter would like him to do it.

            “I fell into that one,” Ron said, shaking his head. “But you don’t mind, mate? People ask you for help, and you don’t mind giving it?”

            Harry snorted and took yet another slice of apple. He would have to ask Snape for more of these to be served at dinner. They tasted delicious. “It depends on the way they ask. Snape or Malfoy demanding my help wouldn’t please me at all. But Malfoy is getting over that, I think, given the last things he said to me, and Snape can’t—well, to help the Ashborn, if that’s what I want to do, I have to stop thinking that Snape should be more sympathetic to me and do all these things for me. He already thinks he is, and that decision rules his action. I can either sulk and refuse, or I can choose to think that he’s giving as much as he can. The apology he gave me is a huge thing, for him. Little by my standards, but they aren’t the only ones that matter.”

            Ron wasn’t laughing anymore. “I hate to see you spending more time on them than you have so far.”

            “If I want to?” Harry asked softly, cleaning away the juice that had run down his chin.

            “How much will you pay?” Ron looked at him with hard eyes that could have been sapphires. “Will you let him trap you and keep you here and deny you food and healing because he’s giving you all he can?”

            Harry grinned at him, curling his lip back so Ron, and anyone watching, could see his teeth. He reckoned Bellatrix might carry a memory of this conversation back to Snape, but that was partially what he wanted, after all, for someone to do that so Snape would learn he was serious. “I won’t give in to him. But I can negotiate with him for the freedom of the Ashborn, and for access to Malfoy’s friendship, if I decide it’s worth having.” He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. The burdens that they had imposed on him were not burdens if he decided they weren’t. “Maybe even Snape’s friendship, although he says that we won’t be friends. I can choose to investigate what that means.”

            “Mate,” Ron said, as though tapping a loose tooth with his tongue, “things don’t change their nature because of the way you think about them.”

            “Depends,” Harry said, opening one eye to look at him. “A falling rock? No. You can’t reason with that, and if you stand there and try to disbelieve in it instead of moving out of the way, then it’ll crush your head just the same. But there were plenty of Death Eaters who decided that Voldemort was worth following and serving, not because they thought he wasn’t killing people, but because they thought killing those people was right. I don’t want to be a slave, and I don’t want to be a helpless hostage. I want to seize some control of my life. The way I think of Snape and Malfoy and the claims they pretend they have on me is a start in the right direction.”

            “What if he won’t let you come away with us and live with us?” Ron asked desperately. “Because you know he might decide against it, if he finds out you’re looking forwards to it and you still want him to stop controlling the Ashborn.”

            Harry shook his head. “He was the one who proposed the relaxation of the Unbreakable Vows that were keeping me here in the first place.”

            “But he might change his mind when he realizes what you’re thinking,” Ron said, even more desperately. “That you’re thinking of changing the chains he put on you into bridges you can walk.”

            Harry smiled at his friend despite himself. “There’s a poetic metaphor, Ron. Were you the one who came up with it?”

            “Yeah, me. Not Hermione this time.” Ron still didn’t smile. He leaned forwards so far that Harry really thought he might fall out of his chair instead of staying in it. “Mate. Listen to me. You can’t do this.”

            “Why not?” Harry asked curiously. “If it’s what I want, and I’m pretty damn sure that it is, then—”

            “It’s not what you want in the way you think it is,” Ron said, speaking quickly, and Harry was glad he did, because he might have cast a spell at anyone else who said something like that and didn’t explain it. “I mean, you think you can change Snape and Malfoy’s minds, and I don’t think you can.”

            Harry smiled at him. “Then I can’t help them, and I’ll retreat. Remember, what I want is to help people. Give advice to them. Save their lives. Maybe I’m warped and maybe that’s what the war made me into, but it’s still what I want. Snape and Malfoy deciding that I couldn’t help them would mean that what I want is impossible, and there’s no use in continuing to ask them. I’ll find something else to do.”

            “That’s,” Ron said, and then he blinked and touched his temples with shaking fingers, as though he was trying to soothe away a headache. “That makes sense. At least, I think I understand.”

            “And I live to make you understand,” Harry said dryly, but undercut the hurt he knew Ron might have felt by leaning across the table and shaking his shoulder. “Thanks, mate. I doubt what I want would have come as clear without you. Or at least not as soon,” he felt compelled to add, because he had to admit that sooner or later, he thought he would have got it. How many times had he felt happy or peaceful in the last few years, and what was the common link between all those times? It couldn’t have hidden itself from him forever.

            “If you decide that you can’t help them,” Ron said, his eyes huge and yearning, “will you come home?”

            “I’ll come home no matter what,” Harry promised. “The only thing that’s going to change is the length of time I’ll stay there, and how much tolerance I’ll have for the times that Snape and Malfoy might call me back to the fortress during it.”

            He turned away and looked straight at Bellatrix. “And right now, there’s something else I want,” he said, raising his voice slightly, although he was sure Snape had heard all the necessary words through her ears if he was looking through her at all. “Something that you don’t want to give me, but too bad. I want a look inside your mind, Snape. You already had one with me. And this is the only way I can sort out the whole twisted mess of intentions, to understand what’s happening with you and what you really want from me, not just what you think you do.”

*

            Severus sat quite still as Bellatrix heard those ringing words and they passed down the link that ran from her mind to his, through the Mark and the other bonds he had wound into her thoughts to control her insanity.

            It could not be true. Potter had refused all the gifts that Severus had tried to offer him so far: new clothes, peace through talking about his problems, freedom from the Unbreakable Vows. Well, perhaps not that last, Severus had to admit, if what Bellatrix had heard him saying to Weasley was true.

            But then, this would not be a gift, would it? Severus asked himself, leaning back against the chair in the lab and closing his eyes to shut out the sights he was receiving from Bellatrix’s, the sunlight and the garden and the glow in the green eyes of the man who had turned to face him. This was a taking. Potter was demanding something Severus had not offered, and in fact would never have thought to offer, because he had not imagined that Potter would want to look inside his mind.

            I did not imagine he would dare.

            Of course, that brought up the immediate question of how. Potter was pants at Legilimency, and Severus was not sure he would trust the battering efforts of someone like him even so. He could put the memory in a Pensieve—

            No. Not a Pensieve. The thoughts froze him until Severus shook himself loose and continued on.

            And it is not one memory he wants. It is a look inside the whole mind, the atmosphere and context, and the way that the memories fit together. He wants to be sure he can trust me.

            I cannot trust him. Not to do anything but cause me pain and leave the memories he would seek in small and bleeding pieces.

            Severus understood this, however: if he did not acquiesce to what Potter was asking for, he would lose him. And with him, all means of understanding him and the combination of Slytherin and Gryffindor and infuriating and sensible he was. And perhaps all chance of understanding himself as well, and why he was so determined to keep Potter close and peer into his head in the first place.

            Severus gritted his teeth.

            “Well, Snape? I’m waiting.”

            Severus opened his eyes slowly, and readjusted his mouth and Bellatrix’s so that he could speak with her tongue. “I accept, Potter. But I insist on lending you the power that you need to accomplish the Legilimency, so you do not leave my mind a tattered mess.”

            Potter smiled, and his smile was merciless and full of joy. Fear the moment that the boy learns what he wants, Albus had told Severus once, as a joke, and meaning that Potter would pursue the girl he had chosen with all his heart, once he had figured out which of the girls who swarmed around him was actually the right one.

            Now, this smile, all because Potter had decided that what he wanted was to continue being a hero, and it pierced something in Severus that struggled, and squirmed, and bled, and died.

            “It applies to Draco, too,” Potter said softly. “But not as much, since I trust him more. He was a little weaker than me. You’ve always made this fuss about being stronger than me, and now you’ll have to trust me.”

            Severus sneered. He was glad that Potter was at a distance from him now, and couldn’t see how weak the expression was, though it was possible he heard it in the shade of Bellatrix’s voice. “And you’ll have to trust me to give you the strength, and not read your mind while you’re doing it.”

            “I can do that,” Potter said at once. “Because I’m stronger than you are, despite what you like to pretend. I can get over my past mistakes more easily.” He flicked a glance at his friend, who sat still. Severus could not tell at this distance whether that was shock or a wise decision not to interfere with Potter’s actions, and then decided that there was probably no difference right now. “I can decide that I’ll act and trust myself despite not having one hundred percent pure objective certainty about the reasons for my actions. I’ll move.”

            “I await you, then,” Severus said, and broke the connection between his mind and Bellatrix’s.

            Alone in his lab, he put his hands over his face. His breathing and his body vibrated to one great, low tone of finality.

            He had not known he could agree to such a thing. He wondered if Draco would think him weak for it, and then laughed. The laughter began to spiral higher. He cut it off abruptly, shaking his head.

            Draco will not think me weak. It is the kind of thing I think he has been longing for from Potter, almost without knowing it.

            And, was I…

            He could not explain his fascination with Potter to himself. He had thought Draco’s came from Potter’s rejection of his friendship when they were children. He had accepted Draco’s explanation of how he identified himself with Slytherin and was fascinated with the possible Slytherin qualities in Potter because he had none better.

            But he had hinted at something else to Potter, and now, it was here, it was true.

            Potter was himself. He was something irresistibly fascinating, at least to someone like Severus Snape, with his particular and peculiar history.

            So. He would be assisting a man who was no good at Legilimency and who had strong reasons to hate him—a man Severus himself had such severely mixed feelings for—to venture into his mind and perhaps learn the source of those feelings.

            To learn a reason to trust him, and perhaps to distrust him completely, if he found the origin of those feelings to be what Severus was beginning to suspect.

            But he was committed, now.

*

            Tsubame: Thank you!

            AlterEquis: Thanks! As far as I know, snakes made of water are my invention, but I’m sure someone else has thought of something like them before.

            PrincessKay: Yes, I feel the same way. That’s part of the reason I decided to shake things up with this chapter. One of the reasons I kept delaying was trying to explain Snape and Draco’s motives to some people who didn’t like them, but at this point, I have to accept that not everyone is going to like this story, and I have to write it the way I want to write it.
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Ashborn