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The Wages of Going On	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 43959 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 7
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Six—Purification
            “Where did you go, mate?”
            Harry raised one hand to keep Ron and Hermione’s questions at bay while he finished climbing into the Burrow. Then he collapsed at the kitchen table and rubbed his arms. It seemed odd to him that Molly and Arthur weren’t showing up already, and he raised his head and looked around. “Where are your mum and dad, Ron?” he asked.
            Ron snorted. “Some cousin of mine owled my mum about a ‘family problem’ and my mum decided she had to go and solve it right away.” He sat down on the other side of the table, while Hermione hovered behind his chair. Despite that, Harry knew that his eyes were anxiously scanning Harry’s face. “What’s the matter, mate?”
            Harry sat there with his hands clenched in his hair and wondered what he was supposed to say. He felt so tired not because he had done anything other than separate the piles of gold dust and now and then fetch a vial for Snape when Snape asked for it, but with the effort of keeping his rage in.
            He hadn’t known it would be so exhausting. He hadn’t known that his emotions were so strong that restraining them would be like clinging to the lid of a boiling barrel and keeping it on only by sheer force.
            “Is it something we can help with?”
            Harry looked up. Hermione had come a step forwards and was watching him with kind eyes. One hand had reached out and then been retracted, as though she realized that touching him right now might not be the best idea.
            Harry swallowed deeply and sat up. Hermione had asked the right question, even if her wording had been a coincidence. “Not really,” he said honestly. “I’m doing what I can to make things better, but it’s hard.”
            “With Snape and Malfoy?” Ron looked around, evidently expecting them to materialize out of the walls.
            Harry nodded and rubbed his forehead. He wished he knew how to soothe a headache like this without using a Headache Potion. That would get rid of the pain, but not the cause of the pain.
            And it was the cause of the pain he had to deal with. He had thought everything was done with after his explosion in the Manor gardens, but maybe not.
            “Come on, Ron,” Hermione said gently, and Harry looked up to see her helping Ron to his feet as if Ron and not Harry was the invalid. Harry sat there, expecting to feel some flush of anger, the way he had for days whenever Snape or Malfoy did something considerate for each other instead of him, but there was only a sort of dim compassion instead.
            Hermione paused and looked back at him. “Harry has to this work through this by himself,” she said.
            And that was the real problem, the crux of the problem. Harry swallowed and nodded, and watched his friends go. Ron gave him one last brave smile, and a pat on the shoulder that cheered Harry up more than it should have.
            Then they went out the front door, and Harry was alone.
            He lowered his head into his hands. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt fury intense enough that it physically hurt to restrain it. And he had seen a lot of people tortured and hurt in his work as an Auror. It wasn’t just dealing with the aftermath of Death Eaters, either. He had also seen Death Eaters other than the Lestranges up close since the war, and if they weren’t as insane as Voldemort, they were sometimes worse in what they did to other people.
            But he had never reacted like this. What made it different? Was it just because it had happened to him?
            Harry swallowed again. He knew the answer to that, the answer he thought he had even acknowledged to Snape and Malfoy once or twice, but it was waiting for him at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
            No, the worst thing that happened was that I was in control during the ritual, and I haven’t been in control since.
            He’d been the one who’d made the bargain. He’d been the one who had something to bargain with, his virginity. Even if his first lie had been true and it had been Parseltongue that had allowed him to survive the ritual, then he would have had something that no one else in the ritual circle had.
            He’d been the only one to keep his head, a little, during the ritual, because he had to concentrate so hard on the bond and appease it when it wanted to change into something that would destroy them. He had maintained his control during the interviews with Kingsley and the Healer, and with his friends. He’d told them about what had happened. He’d faced up to the faint guilt he felt for letting the Lestranges break through the wards on the safehouse. He’d come up with a plan to hunt the traitor in the Aurors, and he had deduced that there was a traitor in the Aurors, and he had been right.
            So when had it gone wrong?
            Harry grimaced. There was no one there to see him, he might as well do it. And he had walls raised in his mind against the bond, and against Snape and Malfoy feeling his emotions. At least that part of the bond was his.
            It started going wrong when I realized that they were in control of some things, too. The other parts of the bond, and they insulted me and they apologized to me when I didn’t want them to and they kept showing up. If they’d moved somewhere out of Britain right away, then it would have been better.
            But Harry remembered the bond, and massaged his forehead. No, it wouldn’t have been better. There was no way it could be, when he had to be bonded to the people who had raped him.
            It had been all right when he was the one in control of the ritual, the one in control of everything, and he’d been able to predict Snape and Malfoy’s next movements. But he hadn’t predicted that Malfoy would feel guilty enough to apologize to him. He hadn’t predicted they would come to his side when the bond was trying to kill him, and that Malfoy would submit enough to help him. He hadn’t thought that they would help him escape the Aurors who had kidnapped him, either, or that Snape would show him his memories, or that Snape would come up with the idea of a potion that might end the bond. Even though some of that should have been predictable, like the potion idea. Snape was a Potions master, of course he would decide that this was the best thing to do.
            And he liked to be in control, too. It wasn’t just Harry. Snape had thought he could be in charge of brewing the potion without fighting anyone for it, and he could direct the others in what to do.
            And what of Malfoy?
            Maybe he didn’t need it as badly as they did. Malfoy hadn’t pressed his claim to control the combination of their magic. Instead, he had told Harry that they couldn’t do it because they needed to trust each other completely if they did, and he had been the one to say that they should probably end the bond instead.
            And that had bothered Harry, even infuriated him, and made him fly over to Malfoy Manor in a rage, because—
            Because why?
            That answer was there when Harry reached for it, too, as dark and sharp as a chunk of obsidian. Because he was saying that, and I didn’t want him to come up with the solution. I wanted to be the one to tell them to stay away from me and what to do. It was important. Because I controlled myself during the ritual, and them, too, and I couldn’t predict what happened afterwards.
            Harry swallowed. He should have been able to control his emotions after the ritual, about the ritual. He had thought he would be able to. If Snape and Malfoy were fucking him as part of a ritual he had set up, then he was in control, wasn’t he? He was the one who had done this, and he ought to have felt smug, instead of this bubbling fury.
            But no, the anger had been there, and the anguish, and not from the physical pain. Being raped had hurt more than he had foreseen.
            And afterwards, he couldn’t tell anyone about it, not Ron and Hermione. They had offered to stay with him, but it had been more important to Harry not to be seen as weak than anything else. He had dismissed them with smiles, telling them that he would be fine, and they had believed it and gone away. And Snape and Malfoy weren’t people who he could be friends with. Their emotions in the back of his mind had just driven him more mental.
            What will happen when the bond is gone? Will I be saner?
            Harry swallowed again. It felt as though the huge sticky lump of his thoughts was sitting in his throat now, and no matter how many times he pressed on his throat as he felt for it, it would never go completely away.
            But it has to go away. It has to stop being a problem, because the bond will stop being a problem soon.
            Harry stood up and paced around the kitchen. A sound behind him made him spin around, afraid that someone might be coming inside or at least trying to open the Floo connection, but it was only a teacup his hand had brushed and knocked to the floor. Harry shook his head and cast the Reparo on it, concentrating hard. It was at least something to think about beyond what he was going through right now.
            The thoughts about the bond haunted him, inflicting enough pain on him that he had to sit down again. He wanted the bond gone. Of course he did. That wasn’t in doubt. Even though he had the power to cage Snape and Malfoy’s emotions away from him, he could still sense them with a touch, and that was intolerable.
            But when the bond was gone, what control would he have over his emotions? What distraction from the pain the rape had caused him?
            What control over Snape and Malfoy themselves?
            Harry’s hands clenched. If they decided to come after him, then he wouldn’t sense them coming, with the bond gone. He couldn’t inflict pain on them the way he could with it open. He couldn’t know if Malfoy’s apologies were sincere or whether Snape was brewing another kind of potion that—
            There. That’s it. That’s the kind of thing I didn’t want to happen, that I ought to be able to control. I didn’t used to suffer from paranoia all the time. Why am I now?
            Harry huffed and lifted his head. He had a faint speck of blood on the back of his left hand. He brushed it, and then stared at his thumb. The skin by the side of the nail was bleeding freely. He didn’t even remember biting at it.
            This is getting out of hand.
            He couldn’t control what Snape and Malfoy did. That had been true from the moment they stepped out of the ritual circle, maybe even before that, if he thought about it in detail.
            And maybe he shouldn’t want to try. What need would he have of them, after they had become free from the bond? What favors would he have to ask? They might all pursue revenge on the Lestranges, and it would be separately. Harry, with his investigative training, might find them first.
            Then he remembered the Aurors under the Draught of Living Death still lying in Malfoy Manor’s cellars, and grimaced.
            All right, so he would have to ask one further favor of Malfoy, anyway: to leave them there until he decided what to do with them. He hadn’t been back to the Ministry yet. He had asked Ron to tell him what the public reaction to their disappearance was, if anything; it wasn’t like the Ministry could admit they had a bunch of people running around who had been ready to sacrifice the Chosen One. But there was nothing from the Ministry’s direction as yet.
            He had to hang on.
            Harry resisted the impulse to bow his head and cover it with his arms. This was just something he had to face.
            He couldn’t control Malfoy and Snape.
            He would need one more favor from them after the potion was done.
            On the other hand, they would probably grant it. Malfoy probably didn’t want to have a bunch of Aurors in his home for weeks. Snape would want them gone so that he could concentrate on brewing, or something other than Harry. Probably revenge. They would probably go after the Lestranges.
            Harry swallowed one more time, and this time he thought the sticky lump of feelings loosened and slid down his throat about as well as he could expect it to.
            All right. All right. So he couldn’t control everything, but not being able to control the actions of a few people he had worked warily beside today was better than not being able to control himself.
            I wanted to survive. That was why I made that bargain in the first place, and let them rape me. Because I wanted to survive, and that was the only way to do it in the situation the Lestranges had set up.
            When did I start deciding that this survival wasn’t enough? If I feel defeated, then I validate the Lestranges. That was what they wanted.
            If he collapsed and gave up, or if he fought back too hard against Snape and Malfoy and turned them into his real enemies, then he was validating the Lestranges. And the last thing he wanted to do was that.
            Where was the will that had allowed him to survive the ritual circle and the rape, that had made him the one who was in control there, no matter what other people thought? The Lestranges had rolled him across that copper circle instead of killing him because they had thought it would break him. It would hurt more. That was all they cared about, the pain he suffered, nothing else.
            Harry raised his head. He could feel his lips crooking into a snarl, his muscles tensed. He wanted, badly, to bound to his feet. He wanted to run around the house. He wanted to go straight back to the Manor and demand Snape and Malfoy’s help in finishing the potion, drinking it, and then removing the Auror prisoners from the Manor.
            But he wasn’t going to get any of that done right now. If he went back in this sort of mood, Snape and Malfoy would feel it through the bond and probably decide it was dangerous. They would decide that they had to calm him down, maybe for the sake of the bond, maybe for the sake of revenge.
            Maybe for the sake of their own survival. They hadn’t shown much power to discriminate among his finer emotions so far.
            No. What he needed to do at the moment was spend some time with his friends—time that would calm him down, instead of infuriate him because Snape and Malfoy should be that understanding, because now that he thought about it, it was insane to expect Snape and Malfoy to be more understanding—and then eat as big a meal as he could hold, and then sleep. That would help him relax as nothing else could.
            He was lighter as he stepped towards the back door into the garden. And all he had really done was work out what he could control and what he couldn’t.
            Maybe I do still need some time and help in working out what I can do. But I can’t control Snape and Malfoy, and that’s all that matters. I know that, now. The same way I couldn’t control the Lestranges putting me in that circle.
            But I managed to work out a way to survive while I was being raped, and negotiate with a bond that could have killed me. And I’ve survived its efforts to kill me since, too.

            I’m stronger than I allowed myself to know. Stronger than Snape and Malfoy thought I was.
            And stronger than the Lestranges thought, as they’re going to find out to their sorrow.
*
            Draco sighed and stepped back from the cauldron. He and Severus had brewed until it was early in the morning; Severus trusted Draco to help him as he did not trust Potter. Draco’s fingers were cramped from gripping the stirring rod, his mouth ached as though he had taken a long, deep bite into something salty and crunchy, and he licked his lips and touched them with a wince. One had split and was bleeding.
            “Thank you, Draco.”
            Draco raised an eyebrow at Severus. Severus didn’t turn around or look up. He was concentrating on the cauldron in front of him still, measuring something out with one hand—Draco was no longer sure which ingredients had gone into all the bubbling vials at the moment—and salting the surface of the liquid with his other hand. Draco had thought Severus would be annoyed that Draco couldn’t go all night like he so obviously could.
            Severus glanced at him, and Draco caught a flash of clear blackness, the least bitter bitterness he had felt from Severus since the bond began, before he sniffed a little and turned back to the cauldron in front of him.
            “You may go to bed. You would make a mistake like this, and that would be worse than useless.”
            Draco hid his smile as he dipped his head and walked out of the lab. Severus couldn’t be too nice, of course not. That would damage the reputation for nastiness that seemed so dear to him. But he could dress it up as sense, and it still made sense.
            Draco did go to bed—straight to bed. He dressed in the softest, finest pyjamas he owned, and he lay down under the softest sheets, and he shut his eyes. As exhausted as he had felt when he left Severus, he’d thought he would go right to sleep.
            But instead, he lay there, and his muscles grew more and more tense and aching, while his jaw added to the pain in his mouth. Draco reached up and felt it with a grimace. He knew he hadn’t bitten into anything real in Severus’s lab, but sometimes fumes of a sufficient intensity made him feel like that. And it was a long time since he had worked around a potion as complicated and experimental as the one that Severus was making. Severus would have more built-up tolerance.
            It became obvious that he wouldn’t accomplish anything lying here. Draco sat up and sighed. He wondered for a second if Severus would welcome him back into the lab, but dismissed the thought almost as soon as he had it. Draco might feel too alert, but Severus would point out that that was no substitute for true care around a potion, and he would be correct. Draco slid on his walking cloak instead.
            He would go for a walk around the grounds, inside the wards, the way he used to do when he was younger, and see if the sight of the grounds, dark and quiet as they were right now, could soothe him to sleep.
            It didn’t take him long to get outside; he knew all the most efficient ways to get outside from whichever room he was in in the Manor. It amused him to remember the reason that his father had drilled that knowledge into his head. Lucius had been utterly convinced that they might have to escape the approach of a mob at some point.
            It was politics that defeated us, not mobs, Draco thought, and stopped to stare up at the moon. It was brighter than he’d expected; he wouldn’t have to cast a charm on his wand after all to see.
            He started to wander around the edge of the fence, his mind on the past. His mother had taught him many things, but never explicitly. She had been the one to check him with a raised eyebrow or a faint frown when he did something rude or inappropriate for public. It was his father who had told him tales of their enemies, warned him about Mudbloods, insisted to Draco that there was a difference between pure-bloods and everyone else, and taught him most of the magic that Draco knew about before Hogwarts.
            He wondered how different he would have been if he had grown up in the Muggle world, like Potter. Would he still have felt that instinctive difference between him and most of the rest of the world, bar Slytherin House, when he went to Hogwarts? Probably not, if it was just something his father had taught him.
            But yes, if it was innate.
            As if this is something I’m going to settle tonight, Draco thought irritably to himself, and halted near the fence. There was a faint, cool breeze blowing, and he turned his face. It felt good on his heated cheeks, as did even the touch of the moonlight itself. Draco held out his hand and watched the way the moon pooled in his palm.
            He didn’t have much time to react. There was a grinding sensation that he felt deep in his bones, and which first made him whirl around and stare up at the Manor, sure that something had gone wrong with the potion and that Severus was caught in the middle of an explosion. Then his mind went to Potter. Had something happened to the Burrow? Had some other enemies who wanted the truth about his scar and whether it was connected to the Dark Lord attacked him there?
            But then he remembered that he had felt that grinding sensation before, and in circumstances which had nothing to do with the bond. It was the sound of the wards parting, falling before an assault of sheer strength rather than because someone who had the authority to do so had permitted them to fall.
            Draco drew his wand.
            Someone seized his wrist, and snatched him close to a thick body. A voice laughed in his ear. “None of that now, Malfoy. You had your chance. You didn’t take it.”
            Then Apparition seized Draco just as abruptly, but he knew who it was. He had recognized the voice from hours and hours of listening to it whisper to him, during the war and then much more recently, in a house of stone and pain.
            It was the voice of Rabatan Lestrange.
*
ChelseaPlume: Thank you! Harry himself is surprised by the force of his own rage; I think an afternoon of doing other things and yet still dealing with the rage made him realize why. Now let’s see if he can deal with this particular challenge.
BAFan: He’ll be trying to calm down, lately.
SP777: Everything was being overridden by Harry’s utter need to be in control of everything. But if he can’t be, and he’s realized that for himself instead of one of his “enemies” pointing it out for him, then things ought to be better now.
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The Wages of Going On