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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 Thirty-One—Banishing the Dark
            “There will be someone who will make you pay for this.”
            Harry tightened his lips to keep from laughing as he entered into the separate room, a sitting room cleared of all its furniture, where they had stored the Lestranges until Draco woke up. Both of the brothers were bound with chains to the floor—chains that, thanks to house-elf magic, disappeared into the floor, so there was no way for the Lestranges to get free of them. Rabastan was slightly closer to the door than Rodolphus. He was the one who sneered at Harry. Rodolphus was the one who had spoken.
            “Now you sound like one of your own victims,” Harry said softly as he moved out of the way of Snape. He was the one who had wanted to carry the ritual bowl of salt. It wasn’t like Harry minded, or that the bowl was very heavy, but Snape had to scatter the salt into every corner of the room, and make sure that no carpet showed beneath the grains. He went to work now, and left Harry, who as controller of the mental part of the bond could have no part in the ritual preparation, to talk to the Lestranges. “How many times did one of them promise you vengeance? Did you always know that it would be as useless as this is going to be?”
            Rabastan watched him with narrowed eyes. Rodolphus spoke, quickly, as though he wanted to keep from thinking about what Harry had said. “Do you hope that you can purify us of Dark Arts? There is no salt in the world that can purify us.”
            “Oh, I know,” said Harry with absolute calmness, and stepped aside so Draco could come in next. He carried a torch, and he had to wave it to make sure that smoke curled into the same corners where Snape had put the salt. There was no making the smoke stay there, of course, but the important part was to have the walls impregnated by the scent. “I hope you don’t think Dark magic disgusts me. Only the uses that you put it to.” He glanced over his shoulder.
            On cue, the house-elves came in carrying Nelson. He was still unconscious, his head dangling limply on his neck. Harry smiled to see the ripple of reaction that ran through Rodolphus before he could control it.
            Rabastan was the one who spoke this time. “I did not know that you could appreciate the finer points of human sacrifice. Perhaps we should have tried to recruit you and not duel with you, Potter.”
            “Only a certain kind of sacrifice,” Harry said, and bent over until his face was right about Rabastan’s. “Listen. If you spit on me it isn’t going to make a bit of difference.”
            That made Rabastan’s throat stop working—not the threat, Harry was certain, but Harry’s utterly calm and indifferent tone. That made the threat real.
            “I don’t think you understand what you’re about,” Rodolphus whispered, narrowing his eyes. He was probably watching as the house-elves attached Nelson to the wall with more unbreakable chains, against the far panel of the wall behind Harry. He had to be in the center between two of the corners that were stained with smoke and salt. When it came time, Harry would be in the middle of the opposite wall, facing him. “There is only one kind of ritual that functions like this, and you cannot mean to make us stronger.”
            “There’s only one kind of ritual that functions like this if you use a human sacrifice, and one person to perform the ritual,” Harry agreed. “There’s only one kind that functions like this if you use the human as a magical sacrifice, and three people to perform it.” He waited, watching.
            Enlightenment made Rabastan uglier than ever. He did spit, but Harry had expected it and moved out of the way. The spittle fell back on Rabastan’s arm, which he was trying, futilely, to thrash under the chain.
            “You cannot do this,” said Rodolphus.
            “That’s another saying that I suspect you’re more familiar with from your victims’ pleas than you’re used to making it,” Harry murmured, and smiled at him.
            Rodolphus half-shook his head, his eyes entirely too bright and focused completely on Harry. “You would need three people who trusted each other and their magic to conduct the ritual you are talking about. You would have to move in absolute concert. That is what I mean. It is beyond your reach, physically and magically.”
            Harry winked at him. “It would be, except that we have this mental and magical bond that can substitute for perfect trust. That was your gift. I suppose I should thank you. Though in a short while you’ll lose every vestige of your triumph over us. So maybe I’ll save the thanks.”
            He turned his back, ignoring the way that Rodolphus tried to speak to him, and strolled over to Draco. He had finished waving the torch in the fourth corner of the room, the one on the opposite side of the door from which he had entered, and he turned around with a flushed and breathless look. His eyes went from the Lestranges to Harry.
            “What have they been saying to you?” he whispered.
            Harry cocked his head. “Nothing that matters. Why? Did try to speak to you, too?” He didn’t think Draco had been down to see the Lestranges at all since his capture—and Harry hadn’t thought he would dare—but maybe he had come to this room earlier in the name of overcoming his fear.
            “No,” Draco said. “You feel vicious, though.”
            Harry shared the memory of the conversation in a few short bursts, and watched in interest as Draco’s eyes narrowed and his mouth firmed. He turned and studied the Lestranges for a second.
            “It’s not worth it,” Harry said mildly, reacting more to the flicker of intention and will he had picked up in Draco’s mind than anything else. He didn’t think Draco had a formed and definite plan, just something that involved going over and yelling at the Lestranges. “I let them know what we’re going to do. That’s why Rodolphus was trying to bargain with me and Rabastan was trying to spit at me. Let them suffer the knowledge of what’s coming.” He leaned in and put a hand on Draco’s shoulder, the first time he had touched him since after the torture, except to heal his ribs. “To know there’s nothing they can do to stop it.”
            There was something I could have done to prevent what I suffered, Draco murmured back. You said it. Not wander at night near the wards.
            Harry shrugged and waved that aside, in the same movement, and honestly wasn’t sure which gestures he performed mentally and which were physical. It doesn’t matter. You were captured, but you might not have been. I was taken by Aurors investigating alone in the Department, when I shouldn’t have been. We all have things to be sorry for. But let’s not forget who should be sorriest. He led Draco’s gaze back to the Lestranges.
            He liked the way that Draco’s mouth went firm, and Draco nodded to him. “I need to pass the torch over Nelson’s head, and I’m done,” he said, pulling away from Harry and trotting off to do that.
            “Good,” Harry said, feeling a strong thrum of anticipation pass through him. He turned to check on Snape’s progress.
            Snape had straightened from scattering salt in the last corner, sealing the room as a ritual space. He was looking at the Lestranges, too. His face was hard to read, but when he noticed Harry watching him and met his gaze in turn, Harry could sense what he felt through the bond. Satisfaction, amoral and complete. He had been shocked when Harry suggested this spell, but Harry thought that he might have come up with it himself, in the end.
            I would not have suggested it in the same way or for the same reasons that you did, Snape told him, his lip curling as though Harry had insulted him by thinking he might have come up with the same plan.
            Maybe it was insulting for Snape to be compared to Harry in any way. Harry only shrugged. We have to be in tune through the bond for the ritual to work. Let’s concentrate on that right now.
            After a second, Snape nodded, curtly, and examined the corner he stood in once more. When he seemed sure that the carpet was covered entirely with salt, he walked towards Harry and Draco. Draco had finished covering the semi-conscious Nelson’s hair with smoke, and was standing back, admiring his work.
            Do we know the ritual is complete, though? he asked suddenly, turning around. Maybe he had felt the slight contest between Harry and Snape.
            Harry walked over to the wall opposite Nelson, and stood there, relaxed, ignoring the way that Rabastan and Rodolphus continued to fight their chains. When he let his arms droop to his sides, in the posture that Nelson had been tied to the wall, he felt it: a great release of tension that sped through him and almost dripped off his hands, accompanied by what felt like a rope drawing together behind his head and the nape of his neck.
            Harry looked up and smiled. Draco flinched from his smile, he noted. Well, that couldn’t be helped. “That was the closing of the ritual circle,” he whispered. “Or square, in this case. We’ve sealed the power in. All that remains is to use it.” He looked at Draco, then at Snape, silently making sure that they remembered their roles in this part of the ritual.
            Snape had already picked up a wooden box that had been resting inconspicuously at the base of the hearth, ready for his use. When he opened it, there was a sticky black substance inside that he had said came from the crushed and powdered lungs of toads. Harry had no idea. Snape had had the required ritual implements among the ingredients for his potions, and that was all that Harry needed to know.
            Draco moved over to the door, opposite the fireplace and so opposite Snape, reaching for the box he had left in the corridor. Like the one Snape held, it was small and of inlaid wood with a band of color around the front. Snape’s box shone yellow; Draco’s box had the deep blue glow of cobalt. When he opened it and dipped a finger inside, it came out yellow with the pollen of deadly nightshade. He nodded to Harry.
            Harry glanced around once more, although the tight cord of thrumming power behind his head told him the ritual circle was still closed. Snape, Draco, Harry, Nelson. Nelson’s participation in the ritual was hardly willing, but, well, they only needed him as a power source, not an active celebrant.
            Harry nodded once, and then faced the Lestranges. Rodolphus was scanning the walls as though looking for a way out; if he had felt the magic closing in on them, he didn’t choose to acknowledge it. Rabastan was watching Harry, his face a study in hatred. “What’s your ritual implement?” he whispered.
            Harry gave him a smile, and Rabastan flinched from it. Good. “The hatred and the desire for vengeance are the only things I need,” he said, and then faced Nelson and held up one empty, cupped hand and his wand. At the same time, Snape took some of the powdered toads’ lungs onto his left palm, and Draco cupped the pollen warily.
            “This is our desire,” Harry said, steadily, clearly, and felt Draco’s and Snape’s minds opening up to him, the same ideas and longings speeding down the stretched-tight bonds between them. But not as tight as the magic of the ritual square, and that was the idea. “To have the Lestrange brothers, and all traces of them, banished from the world. Remove their magic from the world. Remove their souls from the world. Remove their bodies from the world. Remove the contribution of their blood that flows in others’ veins. Remove the passion from the memories others have of them.”
            The magic was a tangible thing in the room now, heavy like sugar behind Harry’s teeth, dust behind his eyelids, dust in his nose. He watched the Lestranges, both of whom had their mouths open. They had meant to scream and interrupt him when he was speaking the ritual words, he thought, but such was the power of the ritual that it had kept them still.
            Rodolphus spoke now, while Rabastan screamed, a long, thin, keening wail as sharp as some of the hatred that Harry felt—but not all of it. “You cannot do this. You don’t have the power or the desire.” He glanced around, his eyes avoiding Snape but landing on Draco. “Malfoy doesn’t have the moral courage for it. Neither do you.”
            “Because I was a Gryffindor?” Harry smiled, and Rodolphus looked away from his smile the way Rabastan had.
            “Because you were never one for the hard choices,” Rodolphus whispered. “Because you didn’t kill us when you had the chance.”
            “Because this is what we decided to do instead of killing you,” Harry told him gently, and then faced Nelson again. His head was lifted now, but his eyes were blank. Harry thought it was more likely the ritual magic manipulating his limbs, rather than anything else.
            “This is our desire,” Harry said, and felt the ritual close in on again, as present on the back of his neck as the press of teeth. “To have freedom and peace in our mind from the memories of these madman. To have more than we knew we desired. To possess the memories without the desire for vengeance, because the most complete vengeance we could seek has already been accomplished.”
            He glanced at Snape. Whether Snape felt the silent command that Harry sent through the bond, he didn’t know. He only knew that Snape decided to heed it, and cast a pinch of the powdered toads’ lungs into the air. Toads were creatures associated with poison, and they were needed to destroy some of the bonds that still held the Lestrange brothers to existence, and would as long as the ritual was incomplete.
            The powder rose into the air, burning, and then snuffed and rippled out in flame as they reached the ceiling of the room. Harry turned, to find that Draco had already cast the deadly nightshade pollen. It turned into flames of its own, so delicate and clear a yellow that Harry blinked. He hadn’t known they would look like that. From the way that Draco gaped at them, he hadn’t known, either.
            “We desire for the magic of this man to be the sacrifice,” Snape said, and Harry jerked back to attention. The bond in Snape’s mind had turned to a sharpened arrowhead, and was pointing straight at Nelson. Once again, Nelson looked like he was aware of his surroundings, but Harry doubted that. “It should be enough to detach the bonds of magic and others that hold the Lestranges to the world.”
            There was a long silence. Harry didn’t think that rituals had minds as such, which meant it couldn’t actually be considering, the way it felt like, but the feeling stayed with him no matter how many times he tried to shake it off. Maybe it was more like a feeling of scales being balanced, as if the ritual weighed Nelson’s sacrifice against the magnitude of the revenge they were asking.
            Then the ritual magic moved. Suddenly Harry was watching chains of delicate, pale grey light, almost pewter in color, encircle Nelson’s neck and wrists, and the chains flowed down to the middle of the floor, to the real bonds that tied the Lestranges. Rodolphus was struggling again. But with the certainty of happiness settling into him, Harry knew it would be useless.
            The chains throbbed and began to glow, with such a gentle light that it was almost impossible to distinguish from the color they already had. But Harry knew magic was pouring out of Nelson, running into the walls of the room sealed by the ritual, running into the smoke and the salt, the purification of fire and the purification of the earth. That was the revenge they had planned for Nelson, because he wasn’t worth the effort of the Banishing Curse the way that the Lestranges were, and yet there was no way that they would simply let him go. The magic sweated down, fat drops of it forming and dripping and gleaming. In each was a tiny image, shimmering reflections of the faces of the doomed Lestrange brothers.
            “The ritual has accepted our considerations and our sacrifice,” said Harry, bowing his head. They were near the end of the ritual, although the gesture left was the greatest challenge. “Let us acknowledge its greatness and favor.”
            Draco and Snape dipped their heads at the same time, and the magic buzzed and hummed back and forth between them. Harry thought it was similar to the magic of the bond, but turned inside-out, so that all its fangs were aimed towards the Lestranges.
            Rabastan was saying something else, something that sounded like an attempt at bargaining. Harry ignored him. The ritual was too far advanced to listen to him even if they had wanted to.
            “Let us banish their magic,” said Harry, and looked across at his two bondmates, counting down in his head.
            All of their right hands rose at the same time, and all of their wands gestured in the same moment. Harry relaxed a little. That had been the part that would be impossible for them without the bond. Let one person hesitate or lag a little bit behind, and they would all be lost. The ritual wouldn’t give them what they wanted, or might actually harm them.
            But the little flourish of the wand was enough. The magic sweating off Nelson rose, a whirlwind of salt and smoke impregnated by power. It arched across the room and settled as a wash on the Lestrange brothers, clinging to their skin. It didn’t matter how they wriggled and thrashed and tried to throw it off; it crept under their clothes, down beneath their trouser legs, into their hair and through it, and onto the soles of their feet and beneath their fingernails. They screamed harder now than they had since Harry first bound them down.
            Harry caught Snape’s eye and smiled, responding to the half-formed question in his mind. Yes, they can feel it taking their magic, draining it up. According to the descriptions of the Banishing Curse I’ve read, it feels like part of yourself turning to soup.
            Draco, he noticed, was looking a little green. Harry shrugged. It didn’t matter. They were deep into the ritual now, and they only needed to perform a few more gestures in concert to rid the Lestranges of the rest of their being.
            “Let us banish their bloodline,” said Harry, and again all of them stretched forth their right hands at the same time and cast the spell that cut a small line in their palms and added blood to the mess on the floor of the room.
            The ritual made this into small, dark red knives of its own, which it sent flying at the Lestranges from every direction. It sank into their bodies, seeking out and severing the connections they had with other pure-blood families. Harry noticed Draco gasp and stand a little taller, and Snape jolt as if someone had pushed him. The Malfoy and the Prince families must have more recent connections with the Lestranges than the Potters did, Harry thought. He might have felt someone blowing on his ear from behind, but that was just as easily his imagination.
            “Let us banish their souls,” Harry said, and exchanged a smile with both his bondmates this time. Not even Draco liked the thought of the Lestranges returning as ghosts to haunt them, or managing to work some necromantic magic from beyond the grave, as there were very rare tales of ghosts doing.
            This time, they all had to mime flinging a hood back from their faces, the way that Dementors would before giving a victim the Kiss. Again they performed without it a hitch, in unison, and the air in front of them shimmered and writhed like an insect stabbed through the middle.
            Rabastan gave the most pitiful wail that Harry had ever heard, and curled up on himself. Rodolphus seemed to fight it a moment longer, turning his head to the side and sealing his lips as if he could keep his soul from being sucked out that way. But the choice was no longer up to them, and their bodies settled and then spasmed.
            Harry felt his lips curl up in a vicious smile. He was glad to see that, glad to see them die that way. Or fade that way. Technically, their bodies were still alive, the way the bodies of Dementors’ victims could be.
            But in the meantime, they had to go on. A curt flip of the chin from Snape reminded him of that.
            “Let us banish their bodies,” Harry said, and the three of them moved as one in reaching down and gathering up imaginary ash from the carpet, blowing it across their palms towards the Lestranges’ husks.
            The ash landed and settled the way that the grime that took away their magic had, and in seconds, the bodies themselves were ashes, crisping and blowing away, scrubbed clean by what looked like a high-speed wind. Harry gave a sober nod of approval. There was no trace that the bodies had ever lain there, not even small dents in the carpet, and that meant they were ready for the last step of the ritual.
            “Let us banish the passion from our memories.”
            The gesture this time was a motion of the wand towards the temples, as though they were all pulling out strands of memory to deposit into a Pensieve. Harry twirled his wand to wind the imaginary strand around it, and saw Snape doing the same thing, and Draco, his eyes bright and his breathing rapid. He would have the memories of his capture as well as those of the original rape to deal with.
            Then Harry felt…
            It was the strangest sensation. He had imagined he would feel a weight lifting, or some of the rage that still remained in the back of his mind leaving him. But instead, there was a sensation as though someone had opened giant cupped hands and let him out of them back into the world. Harry took a deep breath, and for the first time in a long time, it felt like clean air when he drew it into his lungs. He looked around in wonder, and saw the same kind of smile on Draco’s lips.
            There was no smile on Snape’s lips, but the bond was murmuring wordless, image-laden reports of the same thing from his direction.
            Harry stepped back and bowed in Snape’s direction, in Nelson’s, in Draco’s. “The ritual is done.”
            The snapping of the magic that had sealed them in was hard enough to make Harry stagger. That had been the description in the books that he had looked up, mostly to pacify Snape, since he knew the Banishing Curse perfectly well. But he hadn’t known it would be like that.
            He hadn’t known any of this would be like anything else, Harry thought. But now, he cast his mind back to the ritual circle, the copper circle they had been spiritually mauled in.
            And now, although those memories were there, most powerfully in the bond that still sometimes throbbed in his head like an aching tooth, they had no power, any longer, to hurt him.
*
            ChelseaPlume: Thanks! I think it will be a little less grudging now that they have seen what kinds of results are available when they work together.
            SP777: The bond just holds too many bad memories. Besides, Snape put all that work into brewing the potion, and he won't want to waste it now. ;)
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The Wages of Going On