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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-Eight—Patience and a Nundu
            “He cannot have meant what he said.”
            Harry kept his eyes focused straight ahead as they made their way to the far edge of the wards that surrounded Malfoy Manor. Snape had been jumpy since he got here, little ripples traveling through the bond as well as through his body. Harry could understand that. If the Lestranges had got through the wards once to take Malfoy, there was no reason to think they couldn’t come back.
            But Harry didn’t really think they would. They had got what they wanted when they took Malfoy, and that was bait to lure Harry and Snape into their trap. Whether they knew about the bond or just assumed that Harry and Snape were going to inevitably show up, they didn’t have to take anyone else.
            “No one can hold a Nundu captive like that.”
            That irritated Harry enough to look over his shoulder. “Really? Not even Death Eaters who have the benefit of more Dark Arts training than any ordinary wizard would get?”
            Snape paused as if he had to think about that. Harry didn’t. Malfoy had risked a lot to shout that warning about the Nundu at him. Harry was going to repay his possible sacrifice, and do everything he could to get them there safely.
            Snape’s hand closed on his wrist. Harry stood still, patiently, and ignored the sharp twitch of his own shoulders. Yes, he didn’t want to be touched by Snape. He could acknowledge that now. But acknowledgment didn’t mean exploding in rage; he wanted to save all his rage for the Lestranges and their kind.
            “Are you sure that you did not misunderstand what he said?” Snape murmured. “Or that they might not have a creature they have enchanted to look like a Nundu, enough that they could fool Draco?”
            “Maybe they did,” said Harry. He couldn’t discount that possibility, and he knew from the smug shimmer in the back of his mind that Snape was glad he couldn’t. “But if it’s enough like a Nundu to fool Malfoy right now, that’s enough to concern me.” He took his hand back. “Because spells that could do that, even when Malfoy’s upset, would be pretty rare, wouldn’t they?”
            Snape paused to think about that. Harry snorted inelegantly and snatched up some of the grass from the edge of the Manor’s grounds, tearing hard enough to make sure that his hand was full of both dirt and roots.
            “What are you doing?”
            “Dark Arts.” Harry slipped the clot of earth into his pocket. “The kind that can only help once we’ve got to the place where they’re holding Malfoy captive.” He turned and tilted his head at Snape. “Are you coming or not?”
*
            “Don’t hurt him too badly, Rabastan. They’re not here yet.”
            Draco tried to breathe. It came out as a sound more like a sob. He promptly stiffened, flinched, and tried to bury his face in the floor of the room.
            It was too late. Rodolphus prowled towards him and lifted his head again. “Is the little Malfoy beginning to break?” he whispered into Draco’s ear. “How delightful.”
            Draco said nothing. There was nothing to say. Breaking wouldn’t help. Screaming wouldn’t help. He knew now that Rabastan and Rodolphus had brought him here to kill him, and nothing was going to help.
            Rodolphus dropped his head with a disgusted sound. “I did think that he had more fight in him than this,” he turned around to report to his brother. “More fight than to collapse like a bitch at the first threat.” He kicked sideways again, and Draco rolled limply, all he could do. He still took a bruising blow to the side, and coughed, but at least that meant he didn’t have a broken rib. He was still hoping—in the distant part of himself that hoped, despite everything, that Severus and Potter would show up to rescue him—that he could escape without too much trouble.
            A low growl came from the side, and Draco limply turned his head. The chained Nundu was watching him with such hunger that he found some fear left after all, and managed to scramble away from it, dragging his knuckles across the floor.
            “We could always do what we discussed the other day,” said Rabastan, and he sounded a bit hopeful.
            “I told you, too quick,” said Rodolphus, and knelt down next to Draco. Draco desperately worked some spit into his throat. He wasn’t insane enough to spit into either of their faces, but he did think that they might hurt him less if he answered right away when they asked him a question.
            Rodolphus looked down at him with a smile that had nothing but scorn and hatred in it. Draco cringed automatically. This was like being back during the war, when any Death Eater who liked could take him away and kick him, and no one would raise any objections. Well, who could? His parents were busy saving their own skins, and his when they could protest once in a while. Saving him from death was important. Saving him from a beating didn’t matter.
            “Yes, he’s breaking,” Rodolphus said, and bent down to whisper. “Do you know what’s going to happen to your bondmates when they arrive? Do you have the least idea of what’s in store for them?”
            Draco couldn’t help himself. His eyes flickered sideways to the Nundu, and Rodolphus chuckled and patted his cheek like a proud parent. “That’s right,” he said. “We went to considerable expense to find and capture and hold one of those beasts, but nothing could be too good for the enemies we most want dead.”
            Draco closed his eyes in exhaustion. He had been about to ask why they were so intent on seeing him and Severus and Potter dead, but the longer he thought about that, the stupider the question appeared. Of course they would want the man who had killed the Dark Lord and two Death Eaters who had escaped condemnation and had better lives than they did dead. In the Lestranges’ eyes, Severus and Draco probably had the lives that Rabastan and Rodolphus wanted, and Potter was responsible for destroying what they could have had, their imagined dream lives.
            “You’re going to have a front row seat,” Rodolphus said, and then began to cast some complicated spells on Draco. Draco felt his wrists bind together behind his back, but when he tried to move his hands, to test the give in whatever rope or chain they had used, they simply stuck together. Pure magical binding, he decided then, and nothing to do with ropes or chains.
            Rodolphus bent over him and touched the corner of his mouth. “Poor confused Malfoy,” he whispered. “Yes, Malfoy, you can’t move your hands. You can watch, but you can’t speak.” He waved his wand, and a similar binding settled over Draco’s mouth. For an instant, Draco thrashed, thinking he couldn’t breathe, but then a desperate sucking-in of air through his nostrils reassured him. Rodolphus clucked at him again and shook his head. “We don’t want to kill you yet. But suffocation might be the path in the end.”
            “Or giving you to the Nundu when it’s done with the others,” said Rabastan, and came up and smiled over his brother’s shoulder at Draco.
            “If the pain of his bondmates dying doesn’t simply kill him,” said Rodolphus thoughtfully. “It might. Right, Malfoy?”
            Draco didn’t bother moving. He suspected that Rodolphus was right, but then, the most intense pain they had suffered so far was from each other. He had no idea what a Nundu tearing apart Potter and Severus might do to him.
            “I think we’ll find out,” Rodolphus said. “And if it doesn’t work, we’ll still have one toy to play with.” He stood there chuckling, while Rabastan walked over to the chained Nundu. It snarled at him, and Draco heard the sound of huge claws hitting the floor, but Rodolphus didn’t seem particularly concerned. That only confirmed Draco’s opinion that they’d had to find some piece of incredibly complicated magic to keep the Nundu confined and not dangerous to them.
            That magic wouldn’t be available for Severus and Potter.
            Draco closed his eyes and reached out cautiously along the bond—only to slam into a barrier in his mind at the same moment as Rodolphus’s hand slammed into his jaw. Draco cried out, was stopped by the binding, and winced. It seemed that his jaw wasn’t broken if he could still move it, but it hurt, a slicing pain that seemed to travel along towards the back of his throat.
            “Be quiet, or I’ll do worse than that,” said Rodolphus casually, and then went back to hauling Draco along.
            Behind them, there was a raised chant, and then the sound of something rising to its feet. Something else beat a hasty retreat. Rabastan would be running from the Nundu, Draco thought, getting under shelter. They didn’t trust the magic that was supposed to guard them from it completely, then.
            Unfortunately, he saw nothing in that fact to help Severus and Potter.
            Eyes shut as hard as he could, he tried to plan.
*
            Severus kept behind Potter as, following the bond, they appeared in what looked to be the outer anteroom of yet another half-buried manor. Severus wondered idly how many were left from the Death Eater days, how many people had donated properties to the Dark Lord and then died. It was perhaps more remarkable that the Dark Lord should have shared the location of those houses with the Lestranges than that he should have received them. Of course, perhaps there had been a list and Rabastan and Rodolphus had discovered the Apparition coordinates after the war. It would certainly explain how they had managed to stay ahead of the Aurors.
            Will you think about something more relevant?
            Severus curled his lip at Potter’s back. His idle thoughts were not going to doom them here. The Nundu was going to doom them, if Draco really was right and the Lestranges had managed the magic to tame one. Severus kept thinking he could not be right, because he had never heard of someone taming a Nundu before, and barely heard of someone keeping one confined.
            But Potter seemed to believe.
            Perhaps because he trusts Draco more than he trusts me.
            Potter pivoted and looked at him so intensely for a moment that it was all Severus could do not to turn aside. But his words rather than his gaze were the true tools that Potter wielded as weapons to shame Severus. You’re worried about that right now? If I had said that I trusted you, you would have despised me for it. You certainly despised me for being worried enough about your safety to send you back into the Manor.
            You coupled that “concern” with enough insults that—
            Potter spun back around and dropped to his knees, casting a spell that dropped Severus at the same time. With his ear pressed to the floor, Severus could not avoid hearing the noises that had made Potter wary. Or rather, not noises, but vibrations, the weight of an enormous beast padding along towards them.
            A Nundu would move silently.
            Severus swore under his breath and shook his head at Potter. You know that a hundred wizards would have to work together to subdue a Nundu.
            Yet somehow the Lestranges, who were never the most competent of the Death Eaters, managed it. Potter’s face was bright, his eyes obscenely bright as he cocked his head, in the direction of the vibrations. Besides, it doesn’t matter if we don’t want to subdue it. I want to kill it, instead.
            Who is to say that is any more possible?
            Potter said nothing, so Severus turned his head to look at him. The smile he saw on Potter’s face was dangerous enough to make him recoil.
            Potter saw that and winked at him. “Come on, Snape,” he breathed aloud, as he removed the clod of dirt he had taken from Malfoy Manor’s grounds out of his pocket. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
            Severus snapped at him, mentally, not about to speak aloud when there was a Nundu near, but there was a sound like an indrawn breath, and he remembered the toxic, pestilent breath that the beasts had. Frantically, Severus began raising shields around himself, although he had never had to face a Nundu before and had no idea whether the shields were going to be strong enough.
            Potter laughed, as soundlessly as the footsteps, and cast the clod of dirt down in front of him. Then he pulled out something else. Severus squinted. It was a thin blond hair—it looked like one of Draco’s. With a queasy stomach, Severus remembered that Potter had vanished briefly into Draco’s wing before they left. He had thought it was to retrieve some potion that would be vital to their mission, or maybe to look for Draco’s wand, although the Lestranges would surely have taken it with them.
            Potter ought to have known that, of course. He did know that, from the scorn that throbbed like an open wound in the back of Severus’s head.
            And you ought to have known that I would know that, and all the rest of this pointless charade, said Potter impatiently. Can we stop talking in this convoluted manner now and go back to doing something about it?
            What are you going to do? Severus whispered. He knew it must be Dark—no spell that used parts of the human body such as hair or blood was exactly Light—but in combination with the clod of dirt, he didn’t recognize it.
            Intense surprise through the link for a moment, surprise as intense as hatred, and then Potter picked up the clod of dirt and began to weave the hair into it. Small bits of soil dropped off the divot and onto the floor of the anteroom, but he didn’t seem bothered by that, watching Severus instead. I thought you would know. You have more experience of pure-blood manors than I do, after all.
            Severus opened his mouth to say indignantly that Malfoy Manor was the only one he had spent much time in, and then realized how stupid it was to let Potter bait him like this. He shook his head and shut up instead, watching as Potter guided the hair through the roots of the grass, caught some of the falling dirt in his hand, and smashed it back into his own skin, coating the lines of his palm with soil.
            Potter closed his eyes and tilted his head back. Then he began to chant, but he whispered the words. Severus reckoned that he did not dare to keep it completely nonverbal, in case the power of the spell was such that he must cast it aloud. Or perhaps he was not very familiar with the spell.
            Wonderful.
            Potter said, without a faltering in his chant, You should remember that we have a Nundu coming up on us. Keep an eye on the shields.
            With a start, Severus realized that he had indeed forgotten the Nundu in the pleasure of arguing with Potter. He turned around on shaky legs, and not entirely from fear of the beast. What must his feelings towards Potter be, if they were strong enough to distract him when he should be in terror for his life?
            He did not want to think about it, so he considered the Nundu instead.
            He could see lazy swirls of red and yellow breaking against their shields—the pestilence carried on the Nundu’s breath, made visible by contact with their defensive magic. Severus gripped his wand more firmly. His breath had gone shallow, and he tried instinctively to deepen it, to stretch it out.
            Done, Potter said behind him, and Severus caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye of Potter spreading his hands, smashing the dirt-covered one into the stone and smearing the dirt around, and slowly sifting the mingled dust and hair from the other around in a circle.
            What are you—
            The Nundu charged.
            Severus caught the merest glimpse of the immense head, the beating paws, the flaring eye, and then the Nundu hit their shields and bounced back. Bounced back. The air was dry in Severus’s mouth, curling like ice around his limbs.
            That had to be Potter’s shields, he numbly acknowledged. He knew none of sufficient strength.
            Potter said something casual, and Severus was so shaken that he wasn’t paying attention, and it could have been a curse or an incantation. He was off, Severus acknowledged, if only to himself, his attention so scattered and shattered that it was remarkable he had the presence of mind to raise his wand as the Nundu charged again.
            This time, it was aiming between them, at what Severus more than suspected was a weak spot in their shields. He expected Potter to change his stance to strengthen them, but he only stood there, his wand dangling down at his side and a bored expression on his face as he surveyed the Nundu.
            Bored. Severus reached out to the bond, and no, that was really what Potter felt, incomprehensibly. Severus laughed, half-hysterically, and began to weave another shield into place, although he knew it wouldn’t be enough.
            “Will you be quiet?” Potter murmured, and then he raised his wand and cast a long spell in rippling Latin that Severus could only half follow.
            He reached along the bond between them again, this time searching for confirmation as to what the spell was, and encountered an image of the Nundu reeling back.
            The shield already did that, Severus said, snappish in what felt like the moments before death as the Nundu sped towards them. Are you going to tell me what in the world this spell is going to do that the shield didn’t?
            Potter only smiled at him, and in the same moment, a flash of soundless light erupted from behind the shields. Severus flung a hand over his eyes, but the shields must have protected them from the blinding effect, or maybe that was another spell that Potter had cast at the same time to do that.
            The Nundu had no such protection. And Severus knew from reading about them how sensitive a Nundu’s eyes were, as delicate as the eyes of any cat.
            The Nundu reeled, flung its head back and shrieked. Severus nearly covered his ears, but he knew that shriek could have pierced the fragile barrier of his hands. So he concentrated on watching as the cat writhed on the floor, paws striking in all directions, and planned what they should do next.
            We don’t need to do anything, said Potter down the bond before Severus could come up with the brilliant plan that he hadn’t managed so far. It’s up to Draco to do something now.
            Severus didn’t send a question, just a bare flicker of outrage as to how Potter expected Draco to rescue himself when he hadn’t so far. He would have asked the question if he’d had time, Severus was certain. He wasn’t such a fool as to leave this hanging.
            But instead, he felt a rumble far beneath the stones of the floor, one that shot up his legs and through his limbs in a tingling rush, and he abruptly remembered where he had seen Potter’s first spell, the one with the clot of dirt and hair, before.
*
            “They’re not doing well, are they?”
            Draco only bobbed his head wearily, not even sure whether he was telling Rabastan what he wanted to hear, yes or no. His breath was coming slowly out of his lungs now. He was watching Severus and Potter from high up in a gallery that led back into the wall, one that overlooked the tunnel where they had met the Nundu. Rabastan was with him. Rodolphus had gone down into the tunnels somewhere, maybe to make sure that Draco’s bondmates didn’t escape, maybe to make sure that the Nundu didn’t turn another way and destroy something precious that the Lestranges wanted protected.
            “No, they aren’t.” Rabastan sounded as though he could make his own entertainment. He pointed down between the railings of the balcony they were on, chuckling. “They think they’re great wizards because they’ve held out the Nundu once! It learns from its mistakes. And they can’t subdue it, and they can’t hold it off forever.”
            His eyes locked onto the two distant little figures, Draco wished, fiercely, that he had learned what spells the Lestranges used to keep the Nundu under their control. That would have been worth risking their anger to send down the bond to Severus and Potter.
            As it was, he agreed with Rabastan. Severus and Potter had done well so far, but holding off a Nundu for a while was not the same as winning.
            Then there came a flash of light severe enough that Rabastan cried out, and even Draco flinched, although the binding on his mouth prevented him from making any noise. He also had to give up any hope that Severus and Potter would hear Rabastan and find Draco’s hiding place from that. The sound was easily lost in the overwhelming shriek of the Nundu.
            While Draco had his eyes closed, and was straining to recover his senses, he heard something else. Something that poured through the floor beneath him like water rushing through a tunnel. At least, he thought that was the analogy. He cocked his head, blinking furiously, wondering if Rodolphus had started some waterworks moving underground, a secret defense in case things went wrong.
            Not that things are going wrong for them just because Rabastan got blinded for a second—
            Then the power crawled the rest of the way up through the floor, and slammed into him.
            Draco gasped, and went tilting and scrambling along the floor like the Nundu. The magic was pure and merciless, as unstoppable as the ash from a volcano, soaring through him, making things change. His muscles strained trying to hold it in. He could feel his bonds burst, the ones on his hands and mouth, and he knew it must be something his bondmates had done.
            Then he realized the barriers that had held him back from speaking to him were down in his head, and Potter was shouting to him—if you could use a word like shouting for a series of measured, imperative words.
            I brought dirt and hair for you. From Malfoy Manor. I cast them with the Land’s Transformation Curse. For the next five minutes, this ground is yours, an extension of Malfoy Manor. Use them wisely.
            And Draco recognized the spell, and wanted to laugh.
            Once, Malfoy and other families with manor houses had been all-powerful on their land. It was one reason that the abandoned manor houses like this one tended to be so desolate. Their masters were dead or gone, and the family line had no power left here. But the echo of what they had once had, the extent to which ancient wizards had been one with the earth, lingered enough to make most other visitors uncomfortable.
            This house was now an extension of Draco. He only had to move it the way he would his own body, and it did as his own body would do.
            He flicked his left hand, and felt walls descend in the tunnels, blocking Rodolphus as he tried to race to his brother’s aid. He twitched his right shoulder, and Rabastan sank into the floor, his head stopping mere centimeters above the stone.
            And then there was the Nundu.
            Draco looked down and lifted a negligent hand, enjoying the sight of enormous stone bars springing and weaving around each other as if guided by invisible fingers, caging the Nundu within them. The beast could still rage and wave its paws around and even breathe out if it wanted, but the bars would contain it. That much would last even when the magic had lapsed and Draco had returned to his normal self, without the control of the house.
            The important thing was that he had managed to free himself, with the help of his bondmates.
            Smiling slightly, he crossed the balcony and knelt down next to the imprisoned Rabastan, so close that Rabastan’s eyes crossed trying to see him.
            “I do hope that you enjoy the feeling of losing,” Draco said softly, and then turned to greet his bondmates.
*
moodysavage: You are seeing it, and it’s going to help a lot in the next little bit.
ChelseaPlume: Don’t worry. This chapter is only the beginning of them getting their due.
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The Wages of Going On