Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Ashborn	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 36149 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 32
- 33
- 34
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Thirty-Three--To the Table

            "You're all right, then." Hermione leaned forwards as if she was going to count Harry's fingers through the fireplace.

            Harry nodded, and then reached up to adjust the weight of Shield, clinging to his shoulder. The dragon hadn't left him since he came home from the Ministry and took the spell off him that made Shield look like Nagini. And Harry could understand why, really; Shield had hated being separated from him for a few hours, which hadn't happened since Draco made him. But his claws kept catching in Harry's shirt, and his tail half-burning Harry's neck, because it was wound so tightly around it. "Yes. And I think the spells on the Ministry will hold. No one who was there could escape them."

            "That's why you told Arthur to stay home, then." Hermione still flushed a bit when she called her future father-in-law Arthur, but Harry reckoned she would get used to it.

            "Yeah. I didn't want him caught in it." Harry shrugged. "And I suppose he might be in a little bit of danger from going to work in the Ministry every day, but I don't think so. When he comes home and listens to Ron and the rest of them talk, then he'll figure out that any bollocks they talk about me is just that, bollocks."

            Hermione nodded. Harry could see the reserve in her eyes, and he smiled. Hermione had trouble approving of any plan that she hadn't been involved in from the beginning and had a strong hand in forming.

            As if she knew what he was thinking, Hermione cleared her throat and changed the subject. "What about Percy?"

            "I didn't bother warning him," Harry said, shrugging again. "So I suppose that he might believe what they're saying about me. He might anyway, given that he hasn't said anything about the attack at the Ministry party to anyone."

            "No," Hermione said, although Harry was sure she had meant that. "I meant, what are you going to do about him? Is Snape going to insist that you question him? Or torture him?" There was a visible hesitation in front of those last words.

            "I wouldn't let that happen," Harry said, and leaned forwards so far that Shield nearly slid off his shoulder and over his head. "You know--you ought to know that I wouldn't let that happen, Hermione. You know it."

            "Of course," Hermione said, and then seemed to steel herself to say what was lurking in her head. "I just wonder--you don't want Snape to control the Ashborn, either, but you let him use the spell that would bind those emotional impressions to the Aurors' minds. I wondered if you would let him torture someone if he begged you hard enough."

            Harry forced himself not to get angry, and just to consider the question. Hermione, and maybe Ron, must still be uncertain about Severus and Draco if she would ask that, and there were times that Harry looked into their eyes and saw something alien moving there.

            "No," he said at last. "If--if someone who had information that would save your lives or their lives was here, maybe, and not talking. But even then, torture doesn't often get the truth out of someone. You know that."

            Hermione shuddered lightly and looked away. She had tortured Bellatrix once when she got in their way and wounded Ron, and even now, it was the one part of the war that they most rarely referred to.

            "Fine," Hermione whispered. "But what are you going to do now? If you've settled the problems with the Ministry and have Shield to protect you, then you should be able to come back to the Burrow for a visit."

            Harry nodded slightly. "But I don't know if Severus and Draco would want me to."

            Hermione looked happy to have something she could legitimately glare at him about. "They don't control you!"

            "No," Harry said. "And the reason that they don't is that they know I wouldn't stand for it. But I do find it worthwhile to get along with them, or there wouldn't have been any reason to go with them to the Ministry and try to avoid getting them upset, or to make Unbreakable Vows in the first place." He sighed at the blank look Hermione was giving him. "Hermione, please. I know that it's not easy for you and Ron, but I want to get along with them. That means asking them before I do something they might think is dangerous."

            Hermione frowned and drummed her fingers on something Harry couldn't see. "The way you would ask Ron and me during the war?"

            Harry nodded. "Exactly like that." He did think that it might be a little different, because if everything went well, Draco and Severus would be his lovers instead of his friends, but he wasn't about to shove that in Hermione's face.

            Hermione sighed as though someone was asking her to snort a dragon out her nose. "Fine. But I do hope that you come and visit us this weekend, if no other time."

            "I'll see what I can do," Harry said, and smiled at her until she disappeared from his fireplace. Then he shook his head and leaned back against his bed, stroking Shield, who had wormed his way under Harry's chin and seemed intent on providing all the warmth to Harry's neck that he could ever need.

            "How did my life get like this?" Harry asked the dragon. "I could swear that yesterday I was a hostage, and the only people I was important to for myself were Ron and Hermione and the other Weasleys."

            Shield didn't answer, but only hooked his claws into Harry's shirt. Harry rolled his eyes, stood up while trying to make sure that Shield didn't shift and scratch him again, and went to find Draco.

*

            Draco marked his place in the old book with a finger and looked up. He'd known that Harry was standing next to his table in the library for a while, but he had really wanted to finish reading the paragraph that he was in the middle of, since he thought it would make more sense if he swallowed all the ideas at once.

            "What is it?" he asked, when Harry didn't immediately say something. Instead, he stared at Draco's book as if trying to count the number of words on the page.

            Harry jumped and laughed uneasily. Then he said, "I want to know--if I wanted to be part of the pure-blood alliance again, how would I go about it?"

            Draco leaned back, studying Harry. Then he waved Harry into a chair across from him, so he could go on looking at him more conveniently. Harry sat, Shield draped across his shoulder like a silver blanket that writhed in different directions between different minutes. Harry stroked the dragon’s neck and met Draco's eye with what, Draco had to admit, was commendable boldness.

            "The hardest thing will be deciding how you should apologize to the centaurs," Draco said, deciding that Harry could do with a warning. "They were offended, and, more to the point, hurt by what you did to them. I don't know that any single apology will be enough." But he didn't know that it wouldn't be, either, Draco had to admit to himself. Persuading Thera to accompany him to the Forbidden Forest and speak with Laughter was the most work he had done with the centaurs in a long time. At the moment, they remained in their garden and he tried to decide what the hell should happen next.

            Thera might be content with that state of affairs, but Kleianthe wouldn't be, not forever. Draco expected each day to hear that she had left and gone back to the Forest, taking her daughter with her.

            Harry sighed and scratched at the back of his skull. Shield moved his head over to rest his triangular chin on the spot. "And the vampires probably won't want to become part of the alliance, not when I fucked up the meeting with their leader so badly."

            Draco shook his head, a little surprised that Harry still didn't understand this. It would have allowed him to feel better about himself--

            Oh. Of course. That's why he made no bloody attempt to think through it. He never seems to think he should feel comfortable or that there's a chance he might be in the right.

            Draco sighed and then tried to restrain the sigh as Harry stared at him. "You negotiated with the leader of one group of vampires," he said. "She may think of herself as the one who rules all of them, but I assure you, there are bound to be vampires out there who don't agree with that view. And if it turns out that we have alienated them forever, then we can ally with a group of vampires who live beyond Britain. Or simply leave them out of the pure-blood alliance. The old alliance included them, but ours and theirs may not be exactly the same. Not as massive, for one thing."

            Harry nodded, but went on stroking Shield with one hand, which Draco had come to note as a sign that he needed reassurance. Draco felt more than a little smug to have provided the creature from which he drew that reassurance. "Oh. Um...is there anything I can do to help the alliance, then? Or did my fuck-ups with the vampires and the centaurs exile me from it forever?"

            Draco didn't roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. "You can help. I just don't know how, right now. Why don't you go see Severus? I know he wanted to speak with you this morning anyway. Something about Incognita and the Ashborn."

            Harry's face looked a little grey as he stood. "Something about freeing them, I'm sure, and the toll it takes on him."

            "If it takes too much of a toll, then leave them enslaved," Draco said. "They provide useful guardians and servants, and I don't think we could have moved that potion through the water in the Ministry without Yaxley."

            "We had Corners," Harry said, and the grey tinge faded. Now his face looked like it was made of diamond. "And I can't allow them to stay bound like that. Severus was wrong to do it in the first place."

            Draco rolled his eyes openly this time. "You weren't there in the glory days of the Dark Lord, or you would have understood immediately why Severus wanted the Death Eaters under control, and why we had no chance of peace until it happened."

            Harry winced. "No, I wasn't there--"

            "And if you have a guilt attack over that, I'm never speaking to you again," Draco finished, letting his voice bite, crisp as frost. "You were a bit busy at that exact moment kneeling over the smoking remains of the Dark Lord. As long as you remember that, we should get along fine." He leaned back and kicked a foot into the air, then winced when it hit the underside of the table instead of flying up in the fine gesture he'd envisioned. "Suffice it to say that I understand why Severus did it, to feel safe. Yes, the Ashborn guard and protect him against the people who might have tried to harm him, but they also protect him from what they used to be, and the reminder of his own crimes and failures. Let the past lie, if it hurts him."

            "There could still be good in them," Harry countered, and Draco recognized this wasn't an argument he could win. Laughter had called him a good negotiator, but that presumed there was good faith on the other side and something they wanted enough to listen. Harry just wanted the Ashborn free. Draco had neither the power to do that nor the will to oppose him, if he wanted to force it badly enough.

            Draco rolled his eyes. "Then I think he'll agree if you also agree to help him bear the consequences. Give him potions for the headaches, keep an eye on the Ashborn, and be ready to do something about them if they attack."

            "Incognita didn't."

            Draco snorted. "She also stayed in the fortress when we went to the Ministry, did you notice? Severus did ask her to join the attack, but she's still a bit hesitant when it comes to performing complex magic. You can't expect someone to recover immediately from that kind of complicated Legilimency and binding."

            "All the more reason for Severus not to have done it in the first place." Harry braced his hands on the table, and Shield raised his head and glanced at Draco, flicking his tongue out past shark-edged teeth.

            "But he didn't care," Draco said, deciding that he probably couldn't emphasize that enough. "He didn't care what they might eventually suffer, because he never intended to release them in the first place, and he would have dealt with them if any of them showed mental degradation from it. Can you understand now, Harry? It's great if you want them free, but you're going to have to do the majority of the lifting yourself, because Severus and I don't care."

            Harry blinked for a bit. Then he closed his mouth and said thoughtfully, "Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I'll go and help him."

            And away he went, with Draco raising an eyebrow at his back. I really doubt that he does understand everything I'm asking him to do, or that he's asking of Severus.

            But this wasn't Draco's concern. He went back to his book, and to the careful layers of diplomacy and compliment and insult and aggravation that the old pure-blood alliance seemed to tolerate. Draco wanted something at least as flexible for his new one.

*

            Severus raised his head and then one eyebrow at the knock on the door. It did not sound like Draco's, but he had expected that Harry would wait longer before approaching him. What he was asking Severus to do, and what he would have to do in return, did seem rather more work than he must have thought it was. "Come in."

            Harry walked into the lab and gave the cauldrons a look that made Severus's lips twitch. It seemed he had managed to instill a lifelong loathing of Potions in Harry--which, considering his lack of talent in the subject, might be all to the good.

            Harry then took a chair across from him and said, "Draco said you wanted to talk to me. Had you chosen someone to free?"

            No doubt about it. Harry's eyes shone, and he tapped one foot against the floor for a moment before he remembered and restrained himself. But his hands clenched in his lap, and even the way that Shield nudged his head against his neck didn't seem able to restrain Harry or call his attention back. He touched the dragon's head in a stroke that ended too soon as he leaned forwards and dragged his hands away.

            "Yes," Severus said, trying not to calculate how soon the fire in Harry's eyes might be turned on him for something other than repairing what Harry saw as a mistake. He reached out and touched Yaxley's mind, bidding him come to the lab. "Since he was so useful in the expedition to the Ministry, I thought you would agree that Yaxley was a wise choice."

            Harry shrugged. "I only know the really unwise ones, Bellatrix and Greyback. I didn't know the other Death Eaters all that well."

            "And yet you want them free anyway, even not knowing their crimes," Severus murmured, remembering the evening that Yaxley had hung Draco by his wrists for hours while Severus sat by, not interfering because something worse would happen. He had taken a particular pleasure in snaring Yaxley's mind while Draco watched, after that. "You are sure?"

            "It's a greater crime to keep them captive."

            Severus found that he could admire the sight of Harry as a determined fanatic as long as the thing Harry was fanatic about was not killing him or Draco. He smiled slightly. "I wonder, will you forgive me even when they are free?"

            Harry blinked and stared at him. Shield stood up on his shoulder, wings spread and trembling as though he was going to fly at Severus. But Severus did not regard that. He watched Harry instead, and after a few moments, Harry swallowed and slid slowly down against the back of his chair, his hands in his lap.

            "I don't hate you for it now," he whispered. "I can forgive you. I think--I think if you and Draco had argued against this enough, I would have let the Ashborn stay enslaved." He shook his head. "I don't understand that. Surely I ought to consider you an enemy and never forgive you if you wanted to keep them?"

            "I do want to keep them," Severus said. "But I also want to please you, and you have shown me evidence that it's a good idea."

            "What evidence?" Harry eyed him, called back from his half-fugue state, Severus thought, by the compliment. "What do you mean? So far I've been demanding or guilt-ridden. If you're talking about our duel--"

            "You showed me just now that you care more about me and Draco than about abstract moral principles," Severus said. "I had hesitated before in part because I wondered if you would insist on sacrificing us to them, should we do something that you did not like. But you are more human than I thought you were, more fallible, closer to us. This is the kind of person I could take as a lover."

            Harry flushed, but nodded. "I know what you mean. Even if I think I should be different at the same time."

            Severus shrugged broadly. "That is up to you. I have made my choice, and he is here now." Yaxley knocked on the door of the lab. "Shall I call him in and make the first motions towards his freedom?"

            Harry bit his lip for a moment. Then he nodded again. "And I'm sorry about what I'm putting you through," he added, as though Severus was someone he had forced into this against his will.

            Severus thought it best to nod, stand, and call to Yaxley to come in, aloud as well as through the Mark. Lingering too long on the magnitude of the change would only convince Harry that he had to martyr himself further, or else he would martyr Severus. Once, Severus would not have believed he could tire of contests of guilt and assigning blame to others, but now he did, and easily. He wished for mental quietude to concentrate on his work.

            Yaxley came in and stood in front of him. Severus directed him to the chair instead. He had decided to stand this time, in case that would help to ease the headache. He was partially convinced that his last one had come from venturing too far into Incognita's mind, and losing himself in the disentangling. If he had to stand, he would spare some of his focus to keeping his balance, and might keep himself back and keep from expending too much effort.

            "Someone must watch him in case he is about to break free and lash out," he told Harry. "I entrust that task to you."

            Harry blinked and opened his mouth, perhaps to ask what signs he should watch for, but then stopped and left the question silent. Severus nodded. He had no doubt remembered what Severus himself thought, that he was alert enough to all signs of danger to know when someone became a threat.

            And he had Shield, who was now watching Yaxley with his teeth bared. In the last extreme, with Severus moving slowly, Shield would defend them both.

            Severus commanded Yaxley to meet his eyes, and whispered the initial spell that would immerse himself in the man's mind the way he had not been since he first claimed his will and changed his Dark Mark. Wide swathes of dark, silvery-grey territory opened under him as if he had wings, and he stooped down on the first target.

*

            As Severus had entrusted him to, Harry watched.

            It was less difficult than he had expected it to be, actually. He didn't know that much about Legilimency, but he saw the way Severus's face relaxed, and the way that the hand clutching his wand stiffened, pointing it at Yaxley's eyes as if he were holding an instrument that would allow him to physically enter them. Then Severus leaned forwards and a small expression flitted over his face, his eyes, his lips, vanishing while Harry stared. He wasn't sure what it had been.

            Shield rattled his wings and then wrapped them tightly around himself. Harry reached up to stroke him.

            The scales under his fingers suddenly stood up on edge, and Shield hissed like the fire he could produce. Harry turned towards Yaxley and raised his own wand.

            Yaxley took a step forwards, then halted before taking another, as though his feet had turned to stone. His hand fumbled at his side, and for a moment Harry had the hallucination that he was trying to wank. But then his fingers closed on his long wand, and Harry surged to his feet.

            "Shield Severus!" he said aloud, and luckily Shield didn't act confused at the sound of his name used as a command. He flared forwards, extending his neck so that his head and one wing covered Severus's face, but his other wing and his tail remained in front of Harry. Harry thought he was finding more length in his body than it could possibly have.

            But he couldn't worry about that right now. Harry faced Yaxley and raised a Shield Charm around Severus's legs.

            Yaxley paused, and his lips moved. He seemed caught in a conversation with someone Harry couldn't see. Severus's wand jerked towards Yaxley's eyes, then stopped. Harry waited, looking back and forth between them. He didn't think he dared cast another spell until he knew what was going on.

            Yaxley took a great, gasping breath, and then his eyes opened, and there was sanity and sense in them.

            And rage.

            Harry reinforced his Shield Charm right before Yaxley tried something Harry had never seen before, a chain of connected green lightning that rippled up and down like moving stairs and tried to crack the shield in the center. It did crack part of it, and Harry reinforced it again, and then moved off to the side, hoping that he could catch Yaxley's attention and distract him from Severus until Severus came out of the trance.

            Yaxley turned towards him, and blinked, and smiled. He had jagged yellow teeth with large black gaps between them.

            "Harry Potter," he whispered. "My Lord cannot reward me, but I will ensure that you pay for his destruction." And he repeated the stairstep spell, though this time it was yellow, and Harry had the sinking feeling that it would have a different, and probably much worse, effect.

            Shield reared up in front of Harry, his tail swishing back and forth, his neck arching. Fire left his mouth, but it was silvery, and Harry didn't feel any of the heat he had during the attack in the Ministry. For a moment, the light of the fire blinded him; then he could blink and look again, and, at least if he was seeing right past the dancing afterimages, Yaxley's spell was completely gone.

            Yaxley fell back a step, eyes narrowed. He either didn't care about Severus or knew he wasn't a threat right now.

            "Perhaps you do have a true companion, then," he breathed. "That doesn't mean that I should not kill you, but it makes things different." He lowered his voice. "Master, can you hear me?"

            Harry stared at him. He cleared his throat, and watched some sense and consciousness flutter back into Severus's face. He couldn't wait for him to recover completely, though, not if he was to question Yaxley with a completely free hand. Severus would want to direct the questions in a certain way, and that might be something that would go with Harry's desire to know more of what Yaxley was talking about, and might not.

            "You mean the part of him that lived in me?" he whispered. "You mean that part, and the way it influenced me?"

            Yaxley hesitated, as if deciding whether to answer, and then said, "Master, can you hear me?"

            This time, the emphasis on the pronoun decided Harry. Yaxley probably didn't know about the Horcrux; instead, he seemed to think that some part of Voldemort survived in Harry, and that meant he should address that part and try to wake it up. And his wand was creeping stealthily over to the side in his wavering hand, as if he wanted to curse Harry from that direction and assumed Harry wouldn't notice.

            Harry snapped up a Stunner, which hit Yaxley harder than he probably had anticipated because of how he was focusing on offense. Shield flew after him in the next moment and seized Yaxley's shoulders in his claws,             yawning the silver fire into his face. Yaxley's wand fell as he slumped back, unconscious, and Shield seized it and flew back to Harry, tail coiling triumphantly through the air.

            Harry accepted Shield's weight on his arm and petted his arched spine while he shook his head, confused. Did enough Death Eaters know about Voldemort's bid for immortality that they assumed he must have found some way to survive even the final death of his split soul? Or was Yaxley reaching for airy castles in his hope that Harry might contain part of that dark spirit?

            Or was it some other idea, something he wasn't familiar with?

            "I assumed that it would not go without problems when I felt him slip my mental net."

            Harry turned. Severus was standing next to him, watching the fallen Yaxley with a faint distance still in his eyes, as though he was seeing whatever Yaxley's mental landscape had looked like to him. Harry opened his mouth to say something cutting, and then shook his head and let the mood drain away. Severus had only done this in the first place because Harry had insisted he should, and he was probably coping with the headache he had had after freeing Incognita.

            "Yes," he said. "And he said something to me--he seemed to think that part of Old Snake-Face was still in me, that it had something to do with Shield."

            Severus stared at him, and his hand rose for a moment as though he would cup Harry's face. Then he said, "Tell me exactly what he said. Quickly."

            Harry froze his emotions, which wanted to involve him in panic, and simply repeated the words he'd heard Yaxley use. He'd had to do the same one time when one of Voldemort's wards had poisoned him and Hermione had to race to find the cure. What mattered were facts and what Severus could do with them, not his feelings. If Severus could use the information to save him, it would do more in the long term than screaming and flailing about.

            When he finished, Severus turned to the fallen Yaxley and laughed. Harry relaxed. The sound had the rich, rolling tone of contempt he had heard the times Snape laughed at him for daring to think that he could accomplish a fancy potion without Hermione's help. He wouldn't do that if he thought Yaxley was a serious threat; he would laugh a different way.

            How do I know the different kinds of his laughter? Enough to tell the difference without him mentioning it?

            Because I do.

            "It would be a complication if he had any basis for his theory," Severus said, and shook his head. "But he thinks that because the Dark Lord escaped death once, and because his companion was a snake and yours was a dragon, that there might be a chance that part of his Lord does live. But consider. You acquired Shield only recently. He did not appear with the slaughter of Nagini."

            "Oh." Harry picked up the idea and examined it cautiously. It made almost too much sense, he thought, and it would be just his luck for Yaxley to turn out to be right. "Is there--any way that you can examine my mind and figure out whether any trace of him is still there?"

            "It would have shown up when I used Legilimency before." Severus frowned at him. "If a master vampire could not hide herself from me, neither could he."

            "But he has experience with my mind that she doesn't," Harry felt like he had to argue. Didn't Snape remember their Occlumency lessons in fifth year and the way Voldemort had used his connection to Harry? "He could find some out of the way corner and stay there--"

            "I do not think it likely," Snape said sharply, and Harry bit his lip and told himself to calm the fuck down. For a few moments, Snape watched him, forehead wrinkled, and Harry reminded himself to call him Severus.

            "If it will ease your mind, however," Severus said, in much the same tone he had used to agree to freeing the Ashborn, "then I will examine you."

            "Thank you," Harry breathed, and looked into Severus's eyes, trying, as hard as he could, to drop the barriers that might protect his thoughts. He knew it would hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to the pain of his deeper worry. Shield shifted on his shoulder, then seemed to decide Severus meant no harm and settled back into a crouch.

            Severus muttered something under his breath and lifted his wand. Harry felt the magic strike into his mind and tried to relax.

*

            It was, in Severus's opinion, an utterly ridiculous request. If the Dark Lord was still alive, their Marks would have recorded it. That was, in a way, a bond even deeper than Harry's curse scar, since the Death Eaters could only take it willingly, and the Dark Lord had commanded them through pain and power and twisted loyalty. The Marks would not have changed at the insistence of Severus's spell if the one who had placed them there was still alive, in any part.

            But he had lifted his wand and cast the spell, and that alone told him he did not resent it as much as he had pretended. He would not have cast the spell for Harry if he was inclined to argue.

            Or if it was not Harry.

            Once again, he drifted into Harry's mind, but this time he saw it differently. Here and there were coiled fields laid out in the shapes of circles and spirals, glowing green as if in the midst of spring or gold as in autumn or white as in winter. Mountains still rose here and there, but Severus had the feeling that the black stone would slide aside if only he reached out and touched them.

            He tested it, touching the nearest hill, and the rock blinked away from in front of him, revealing a misty memory. Severus shook his head, resisted the temptation to explore for exploration's sake, and turned around, raising his hands and casting a deeper version of the Legilimency spell, doing a variation of what he had done to free Yaxley's mind. There, he had needed to see all the bindings he had enacted, to make sure he did not forget any. Here, he called every memory of the Dark Lord forwards.

            They resisted and rippled, but Severus did it anyway. Only because Harry was willing to cooperate with him could he command such a thing in a mind not his own. Willingness, and not will or discipline, held sway here.

            The memories were there, and Severus caught glimpses of them from the corner of his eye as he lined them up and started to make them dance, but he refused to commit fully to any of them. Do so, and his own curiosity and the compelling quality that Harry's smallest gesture held might make him remain here until his own body collapsed of pain and exhaustion.

            But he could lay the memories one over each other, like films of cloth, and then snap them up and down, like fabric hung on a clothesline. And he could see the darkness in each of them, a particular darkness that he stared at, looking for a solidity that would tell him the memories related to something independent in Harry's mind.

            No such solidity appeared.

            Severus gave a hard smile, waited until the memories fled his control and started back towards the deep places in Harry's mind, and then reached out and touched the nearest, gazing into it, as a reward for his own patience and diligence.

            There was an explosion of dark fire, fanning out from a central point, and there was redness threaded through it, and the high, cold laughter that still had the effect of making Severus's spine press against his skin as though attempting to break through it. There was flying debris, and Severus thought he heard Nagini hiss somewhere in the background.

            Then it was gone, and Severus felt a gentle but irresistible force propelling him out of Harry's mind. He blinked open his aching eyes and found Harry helping him into a chair with hands that held the same degree of gentleness.

            "What was that?" he whispered.

            "The memory of how I killed him," Harry said quietly. "I'm sorry, but I brought you out of it because I didn't think you wanted to get lost in it. Or that you wanted to know," he added, his voice sinking even further.

            "Know how you killed him?" Severus put a hand on Harry's arm before he could withdraw the way he had withdrawn Severus from the memory and leaned closer to him still. "What does that mean?"

            "That I killed him? That you confirmed he's dead and no longer there?" Harry smiled, but his eyes and smile were both unfocused. "Exactly what it sounds like. There's a reason that Ron didn't help Hermione and me study the spell, before the end. The spell, and the knowledge of it, does...certain things...to one's mind."

            Severus opened his mouth to say that he could bear any knowledge, as he had borne for eighteen years the knowledge that he had caused his best friend's death--

            And then looked more closely at Harry's face and shut his mouth after all.

            "Thank you," he said instead.

            Harry held his gaze, and his smile curved up. Severus reached out, to touch the back of his neck, and tilted him in. Harry only closed his eyes when their mouths met.

            There was something thrilling and new about the kiss, but before Severus could analyze what it was, Harry pulled back and turned towards Yaxley. "What are we going to do about him?"

            Severus told himself that disappointment, and trust, and exploration, could wait, and turned his mind towards the question.

*

            unneeded: Absolutely. And as he can tell Harry here, the gifts he has sometimes mean that the others need to step aside and wait until he tells them what to do.

            qwerty: Thank you!

            Shadowdog85: They really should. And it’ll be a lot easier to fight a few enemies who might not leave them alone than enemies who have the might of the Ministry behind them.
- 32
- 33
- 34
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Ashborn