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The Wages of Going On	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 43959 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 7
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Chapter Twenty-One—The Swirling Waters
            Draco laid his book aside, and bowed his head, rubbing gently at his temples. Something was wrong, he thought. Something that was more than just general tiredness or impatience with the way that the words on the page seemed to swim as he tried to focus on them.
            He wondered for a second if Severus or Potter had somehow been hurt, but then dismissed the idea. He would have felt that through the bond, he was sure. Potter’s pain had summoned him so far. Severus’s pain couldn’t be far behind.
            And if nothing else, there were the emotions in the back of his head. Severus’s had darkened to the point that Draco felt like he was gasping in acidic wine a while ago, but they had lightened again, and Draco occasionally thought that it felt as if the steel mountain was standing in the middle of a pool of water. That was far better than looming all by itself and projecting haughtily into the air.
            Maybe I am just tired. It seemed incredible to remember that the day had started ages ago with him and Severus preparing to go to Potter’s side because it felt as if he might be in danger.
            Then the bond screamed in his head like one of those alarm spells that the Dark Lord had cast to alert him when someone without a Dark Mark tried to cross into certain parts of the Manor, and Draco jerked his head up, spinning around to the windows.
            Of course he was on the far side of the house from the gates, where Potter and Severus had gone, and couldn’t see a bloody thing. Draco flicked his wand down hard, though, and cast one of the spells that let the master of Malfoy Manor interact with the windows and the wards. The panes of glass promptly spun on the wall, rotating to the side and letting the window that looked out over the gates appear without changing its view.
            Potter and Severus were standing in the middle of what looked like a flickering, shifting illusion. Draco squinted at them for several seconds until he was certain he understood it. A small house, at the end of a raised stone causeway, with waters swirling around the stones?
            He didn’t know what they were trying to do, but whatever it was, it seemed to be going wrong. Draco rushed out of the library and towards the far side of the house, casting a few spells that would ensure he could leap over the banisters or balconies on the way and land safely on a mound of soft carpeting. His bondmates needed him right now.
*
            It was the strangest thing Harry had ever experienced, even worse than trying to bargain with the bond and keep his brain from pouring out his ears in the middle of losing his virginity.
            He could feel stone under his feet, and on either side of him, rough wood. If he put out his hands, he could feel the sides of the house looming there, brushing his fingertips. And there was the noise of rushing waters.
            But those impressions danced around his head, hallucinatory, there and not there. Because at the same time there was grass under his feet, and open air on either side of him—he could feel the slight breeze on his skin—and silence except for Snape’s rasping breath.
            The bond rang in his head as though it had been shaken by an enemy, but no matter how hard Harry tried to calm down and get a grip on it, it would just swing again, and shock him. And the impressions doubled around it, going faster but not changing with any regularity, certainly faster than the bond vibrated. It was impossible to decide what was really happening or if all of his impressions were illusions. He didn’t know what he could do except bow his head and endure.
            “Potter!”
            That was Malfoy. Harry turned to see him. He was the one constant in the change, standing there like a rock with the waters swirling around him. Harry reached out one hand, not because he wanted to but because that was the instinctive thing to do, and Malfoy hurried forwards and grasped it.
            In seconds, the changes stopped. Harry realized that he was standing on slick stone after all, and water was sliding away from the sides of it the way he and Snape had envisioned. There was a fortress-like hut of earth and stone behind them, not encompassing them. Harry swallowed. He wondered if the hut had formed like that because they were already standing on the stone road, or if it had only formed in a way that wouldn’t cut them off from their bondmate.
            “What happened?” Malfoy surveyed them warily for a second, then continued mentally. Harry bristled a little. Malfoy seemed to assume they were too fragile right now to concentrate on spoken words. I was feeling tired and distracted, and I felt Severus grow bitter, but there was this alarm from the bond that I’ve never felt.
            Snape answered before Harry could come up with something to say. It seems that the bond needs all three of us together to form the roads. He straightened up, shaking his head and leaning away from Harry as if there were only so much air around him and he didn’t want to share any of it with Harry’s lungs. The book said something about that, but I did not realize that it meant the physical presence.
            I wish I had known that, Harry snapped. That was not fun to go through.
            Malfoy gave him a flat look, and the bond tingled in the back of Harry’s mind, in a way that suggested Malfoy thought he was understating things. But aloud, Malfoy only said, “All right. So we have the beginning of a road. But where does it lead?”
            Harry stared down at the stone beneath his feet. It was strange to look at, and know that some of his own ideas and magic, and even emotions, were bound up in the thing. The road grew misty with distance, rising into the air, and while he thought it might go to the Burrow, he couldn’t see if it actually aimed in that direction.
            Then he shook himself sharply. He created things all the time with charms, conjurations, and Transfigurations, and it would be silly to get too caught up in the “newness” of the experience when it was only really like learning a new spell. Besides, there was some of Snape in this road, too, and maybe Malfoy, since it had only stabilized when he was here. To start thinking of it as his own creation was even sillier than being excited about it.
            All your own, yes, that would be silly, Malfoy said. But it’s partially your own.
            Harry scowled at him, and said, “We chose a place that we knew. The Burrow.”
            Malfoy tilted his head to the side, and his thoughts worked too fast for Harry to follow. Well, he didn’t really want to follow them anyway. He knew what Malfoy thought of the Weasleys already. Nothing new or strange there.
            “I think we should follow it,” Malfoy said abruptly.
            “Truly, Draco?” Snape was standing on his own, but Harry had to admit, it seemed like an effort. He fixed a weary eye on Malfoy and shook his head. “When we know where it leads, and we have gone through what we have gone through today? I long to rest. The creation of the road was enough effort.”
            Harry started to nod, then snatched his head back to stillness. What had he been doing, about to agree with Snape? That was ridiculous, far more ridiculous than doing one more thing on a day that seemed to require endless effort from all of them.
            “I’m ready to do it if Malfoy is,” he said.
            Malfoy blinked at him, then said into his mind, You know that you shouldn’t make fun of Severus.
            Who’s making fun of him? I just don’t want to be like him. Harry ignored the hiss in the back of his mind. That could be Snape being annoyed. It could be Malfoy being annoyed. Harry didn’t care, and wouldn’t permit himself to. We should go ahead and explore the bloody road so that we can know where it leads, if nothing else.
            There was a brief struggle inside Malfoy’s head; Harry felt it as though someone was hitting him with pillows. Then Malfoy said, “Do you agree, Severus?”
            Snape didn’t say anything, but nodded. Harry held back his sigh, and took the lead as they walked down the road. He was the only trained Auror among the three of them, and he would have the best ability to survive any challenges the road threw at them, if it did.
            That matters a lot to you, doesn’t it? Being an Auror?
            Harry half-tensed, but Snape seemed to have decided that Harry didn’t exist except as a body to walk beside, so he knew it was Malfoy. Yes, he said. Of course it does. If Malfoy had spent this much time in his head, or in contact with his emotions, before the telepathic part of the bond came to life, and didn’t know that about him, Harry couldn’t help him.
            I know that it was what brought you back to life and kept you sane when you were negotiating with the bond, Malfoy said. I just wondered why. When you were in school, you seemed to define yourself by being a Gryffindor and the friend of Weasleys. Now you don’t.
            Harry wanted to laugh, but that would be giving Malfoy too credit, when none of the things he had said were actually funny. He fastened his eyes on the road instead, and murmured, It would be stupid to call myself a Gryffindor when we aren’t in school anymore, Malfoy. Though to be honest, I’m not sure that you noticed.
            Malfoy stiffened, but Harry continued to plod along the road, not looking at him. Malfoy finally sighed and said, But why not a friend? Why an Auror? Why did you choose that label?
            Harry sensed a thought behind those words that he didn’t like. He dived after it, and it flashed and thrashed in his grasp a few seconds later. Don’t you mean, why didn’t I choose to call myself a hero? Do you really think that I ever wanted that label?
            For a while, I did.
            Harry shut his eyes and rubbed the middle of his forehead. There was no reaction from Malfoy to him touching his scar, at least. That was good. Harry had gone through one period where every touch to the scar had resulted in a scalded-cat reaction from Ron and Hermione, who were sure that Voldemort was coming back.
            He might be coming back. But it won’t have anything to do with your scar.
            Harry winced. He had agreed to the bond in the first place because Voldemort might be coming back. It was incredible how he could have missed that, how he could have just got stuck on thinking the bond and his supposed “intimacy” with Malfoy and Snape were important things. They weren’t.
            We were speaking of why it’s so important to you to be an Auror, Malfoy prompted, with an edge to his mental voice.
            Harry wondered why Malfoy wanted to know this, but he supposed Malfoy might have some curiosity about his bondmates, and he already knew everything incriminating about Snape. And there wasn’t anything to do except talk as they walked along the road. They had reached the part where it had gone thin and misty and vanished into the air, but to Harry’s disappointment, it didn’t do that now. It just appeared to move along the ground, as level as ever, while the point of it disappearing had moved ahead of them. It was like the horizon, he supposed. However far you walked, there was still one that you would never catch up with.
            Harry?
            Harry flinched in spite of himself from that name, and shook his head furiously at Malfoy. When he could speak again, he managed to hiss, “Don’t call me that. I can’t accept—I can’t accept that from you. Please.”
            Malfoy sighed, and went on speaking in his head. We were talking about why it was so important to you to be seen as an Auror.
            Harry wiped his hand across his scar. It wasn’t burning or even tingling, though, and he couldn’t use that as an excuse to back out of the conversation. Because it was something I trained for, not something I was born for or destined for or—or whatever other odd thing I’m supposed to have been with regards to Voldemort. He ignored Malfoy’s flinch. I never had any choice about most of the things I was, except maybe for being a Gryffindor. People just thought things about me, and I couldn’t control it. Especially when I was a kid and every move I made got reported in the papers and people judged me for it. But I chose to be an Auror, and they accepted me and trained me on my own merits.
            Malfoy’s mind hovered above his for a second, and then his words descended. I heard rumors that they accepted you into the Auror training program because you were the Boy-Who-Lived.
            Harry rolled his eyes, and checked on the bond with Snape. Snape wasn’t lagging too far behind, which pleased Harry. The last thing he wanted was to go back for the git. Maybe that was the reason they accepted me, but believe me, they don’t pass you on through the program unless they’re satisfied with your performance. There’s too much chance that you could kill people if you were untrained. And some of my instructors wanted to prove that they were unbiased, and that means they were harder on me than on most of the other students. I learned very well.
            Malfoy was silent as they walked the road, which now was bending through countryside that Harry didn’t recognize. They weren’t passing through a Muggle city or Muggle villages, though, and until they did and someone saw them, Harry wasn’t much concerned with it. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead. He was beginning to wonder what the big advantage of the roads was over Apparition, at least when reaching a place you already knew. Going after people hiding somewhere unknown like the Lestranges, that he could see, but this slow trudge—
            That doesn’t mean that an Auror is the only thing you are. Without taking account of what you are otherwise.
            Harry looked at the sky until he realized that Malfoy was still gazing earnestly at him and Harry’s eye-rolling hadn’t put him off after all. Harry sighed and looked down. Thanks, but I think that an Auror is what I want to be. My friendships with Ron and Hermione and the Weasleys are the only things that I really want to keep of the past.
            After what happened in the garden and when we were trying to establish the bond, I think you know better than that.
            Harry was saved from having to snarl by the road suddenly rolling up and down in front of them, as though it followed the course of an invisible hill. Harry drew his wand. He thought the path in front of them had been perfectly straight a second ago.
            Malfoy reached out and lightly rested his hand on Harry’s wrist. Harry allowed it for a second before he pulled his arm away, scowling. There was what he had to put up with to be polite or reassure his bondmates, and then there was what went beyond it.
            Malfoy only looked sideways at him out of the corner of his eye, then seemed to resolve to ignore it, and faced the rolling part of the path. “We’re here,” he said aloud, stepping forwards.
            Harry opened his mouth to complain that Malfoy couldn’t tell him that, that Malfoy had never been to the Burrow and wouldn’t know, while Harry had, and—
            “Harry! What are you doing here?”
            It was Hermione, starting forwards with a look in her eyes that Harry knew well. She hugged him, gave Malfoy another of those looks, and then turned and nodded at Snape. Snape stood behind them like a baleful shadow with his arms folded. Harry reckoned that Hermione knew better than to try even shaking hands.
            “You came out of nowhere, mate.” Ron was behind Hermione, reaching out to shake Harry’s hand and eyeing the two Slytherins dubiously. “We saw a bit of fog, and I came out because I thought it might be one of George’s pranks, but we never expected you to show up!” He smiled at Harry.
            Harry took a long breath. He had thought he was ready to see his friends, or at least Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, but now the only thing he could think of was that he had killed a bunch of Aurors, and he didn’t know how to tell Ron that.
            Malfoy felt or heard what he was thinking, and nudged a sharp elbow into his ribs as he stepped forwards with a charming smile. “Only testing the road-walking portion of our bond,” he said. “We wanted a path that would bring us to a place we knew, to make sure we wouldn’t walk into danger, and it led us here.”
            “That was clever,” said Ron.
            Harry silently agreed, although he was praising Malfoy for a different thing. Keeping the truth concealed under a blanket of lies was the best thing to do for right now. At least until he had decided how much Ron and Hermione could know about the dead Aurors and Stockwell kidnapping Harry and Voldemort coming back, how much would put them in danger and how much would keep them out.
            You should not be the only one making that decision. Snape’s voice was unexpected enough, after they had walked all that way in silence, to make Harry start. Tell your friends the truth, and let them decide whether they want to support you or not, but tell them.
            Harry didn’t see why it was worthwhile to respond to that. Hermione was asking questions about the theoretical portion of the bond that Malfoy was fielding, and Harry reckoned they could do with that until she asked him a direct question, or Ron did.
            Molly had seen them and was carrying chairs out of the house. She welcomed even Malfoy with nothing more than a little staring, followed by a bland smile and a nod. Then she went back into the Burrow for more chairs.
            Harry sat down in one of them and put his hands over his eyes. He was feeling more than a little overwhelmed. Tired, overcome, upset about the thought of Voldemort coming back, rattled by the information in the book and the wild purging of emotions in the garden. It had been a long, long time since he’d had a day like this.
            You should rest.
            Harry didn’t bother looking up at Snape, who had taken a chair a few seats down from him. He would only glare, and he didn’t feel like doing that right now. I know I should. But you were the one who thought we should build the road now.
            To that, Snape made no reply. Harry did finally glance over at him, and found him staring at the spot where a misty strand of magic still drifted in the air.
            You’re the one who supposedly controls the roads portion of the bond, Harry said. Aren’t you going to close it up?
            Snape curled his lip at him, and curled his hand into a fist at the same time. There was a flipping motion in Harry’s head, like watching a pack of cards shuffled by an expert all at the same time, and the trace of mist in the air vanished.
            Harry swallowed and turned away. He was sorry, now, that he had challenged Snape to do that. It was one thing to know that Snape had to be in control of something about the bond, and another thing to see him do it.
            But Ron was looking at him, and Ron was the most likely person to notice if he was out of sorts in a situation like this, sometimes even worse than Hermione. Harry sat up and did his best to smile.
*
            Idiot child.
            Severus kept the thought to himself as much as possible, not wanting to deal with Potter even in mental conversation right now, and it seemed he’d succeeded. Or maybe the imbecilic attentions of his friends had overwhelmed him and he had to give all his focus to that. Either way, no one seemed to notice Severus leaning against the back of his chair and closing his eyes. As long as no one came by to offer him tea, there would be no need to snap.
            His bones ached, and he wanted to clench his hands down until something broke. Even his own bones. He wasn’t particular right now.
            He had known that Draco and Potter were chattering away as they walked the road, but he hadn’t heard much of it. He had heard, instead, the draining of the water away from the road, the sound of their feet on its stones, the wind in his ears, the noises of magic as it ran through the bond and moved them through the country far faster than they would have been able to cross it were they actually going on foot.
            He hadn’t realized that being the one in control of this part of the bond would be so magically exhausting.
            Severus wasn’t accustomed to working with many other wizards in close collaboration. He had learned Potions from masters who demonstrated a technique once and expected him to grasp it. Teaching his students was a matter of trying to aid the weak (and the helpless, and the imbecilic) to imitate him. He suspected that his plotting with Albus to ensure that he would have a role among the Death Eaters after Albus died was the closest he had come, and that had more of an emotional toll about it.
            This was sheer, draining loss of strength. He wondered if there was a similar price associated with being in control of the telepathic part of the bond, and if that accounted for Potter’s exhaustion.
            He sat there in silence for some moments, pondering to himself whether he wanted to give it up and have Draco assume control of the roads, while he tried to be in charge of combining their magic. The experience of making Potter in charge of the telepathic part of the bond meant there was no “natural” fitness among them for any one role, something that Severus would have laughed to scorn if someone had dared mention it. They could do anything they wanted, have anyone assume any role, and perhaps they should.
            But Severus decided that he did not want to, and not only because Potter would complain if they changed their minds and methods now.
            He wanted to keep control of this portion of the bond to show that he could do it. Yes, it had tired him. But he would not let it tire him this badly again. He would plan for the next road they opened, which might be the one that allowed them to seek the Lestranges, and he would make sure that he was rested and at the top of his powers.
            He would show both Potter and Draco that if there was to be a drag on the bond, a weak link, a weak partner, it would not be him. He would prefer strength all the way around, but if he could not have that, he would at least contribute what he could.
            Potter shot him a glance, then. Severus wondered if his thoughts had been too audible, and Potter would chide him down the bond. He looked back flatly. Committing fully to cooperation with Potter, the way Draco had been urging him to do anyway, was nothing to be ashamed of.
            But Potter only turned back to his conversation with his friend, and Severus shut his eyes in far more contentment than when he had last closed them.
            This bond was much of a piece with the rest of his life. It was nothing he could not endure.
*
SP777: It can let them travel to places they couldn’t reach through anti-Apparition wards, or even places they haven’t been before. It’s slower than the other methods of wizarding travel, but more reliable.
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The Wages of Going On