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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.

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Chapter Thirty-Six—Getting Warmer

            “There is no need to ask what you have been doing.”

            Laughter’s voice was sly and knowing. It could have been only one of the two, Draco thought, and he still would have flushed. He wasn’t very good at controlling his emotional reactions. The closest he had ever come to it was during the depressive period when he lived so much in Severus’s shadow, and he didn’t particularly want to return to that time. He might have to accept that this was the best he could do for now.

            “I have two lovers,” he said instead, sitting down in the grass beside Laughter. “It takes more than a bit to keep them satisfied.”

            Laughter paused, and there was a moment when Draco thought he might lunge forwards and attack. The werewolves had a number of petty little laws and concerns that Draco didn’t understand yet, despite studying them as much as he could on these dream-visits to Laughter. They weren’t exactly the same as werewolves in the old pure-blood alliance, who could alternate between being considered humans and magical creatures depending on the circumstance and the people they were with.

            Then Laughter smiled at him and said, “That is a good answer, and I am rewarded for my snooping. If I heard something I did not wish to hear, that is no one’s fault but my own.” He leaned forwards. “I wished to hear what progress you have made on bringing the merfolk into the alliance.”

            “I have been studying them,” Draco said, and grimaced. “But it seems the centaurs have a grudge against them, and though I have someone who speaks Mermish, she admits that it’s not well.” He and Incognita had spent most of yesterday talking about it. She had gained expertise from a translating spell, but she knew few of the words by heart, and, she had warned Draco, translating charms had a tendency to fail underwater.

            “The centaurs’ grudge is ancient and tangled with the first alliance,” Laughter said. “I believe that you do not wish your alliance to be a mere copy of that one, as you have done certain things differently.”

            Draco smiled in spite of himself to hear Laughter call the alliance his. Laughter gave him a sidelong look, and Draco reminded himself that showing how pleased he was might be one of the stupidest things he could do. He tried to remain grave as he nodded. “That’s true. Provided that I give everyone an equal place in the alliance, I don’t think they can complain.”

            Laughter snorted and rolled over onto his back, extending his hands along the ground so that he could feel the blades of grass prickling between his fingers. “If your goal is to create an alliance based on that, then you’ll never make a good leader. I can tell you, you can be scrupulously fair and correct, and people only appreciate that until it’s one of their pet projects or needs that they feel slighted about.”

            Draco grimaced. “Thanks for the warning. Is there any advice you would give me on dealing with the merfolk, then?”

            “If I give it to you,” Laughter said, rolling over and studying him from his belly-crouched-low position that always made Draco nervously think about a wolf stalking prey, “will you give me something in return?”

            “You know I will,” Draco said. “I’ve tried to give you a centaur negotiator who respects your positions already.”

            Laughter gave him a brief smile. “You’ll do,” he said. “This is rather more than that. I heard that Harry Potter had come back to you. I’d like a look at him, see what the fuss is about this Dark Lord slayer. Can you get him to agree to visit?”

            Draco licked his lips, and thought about that. Then he said, “He might be reluctant. He might think it’s a trap.” He knew Harry had wanted to come, but that was Harry in the desperate stage of remorse when he would promise everything to the people he had hurt. Draco wasn’t at all sure whether his remorse would remain as strong when he realized that there could be danger, and demands.

            “I can give him safe conduct for the meeting,” Laughter said, waving one hand to dismiss the concerns. “And I am perfectly satisfied with you as a negotiator. But both you and Thera seemed to feel his presence would change the alliance, that there is something odd or special about him. I have decided that I need to meet him face-to-face, so I can judge whether there is or not for myself.”

            Draco smiled a little. He wondered if that was Laughter’s way of angling for him to talk about Harry, because he knew they had recently become lovers. Well, Draco wasn’t as reluctant to talk as he thought Harry might be to visit.

            “He’s remarkable,” he said simply, gratified when Laughter sat up and focused on him. “I can tell you that and have it be true in all the senses of the word. Yes, he defeated the Dark Lord, but he only did it after a few years of hard and dedicated struggle. His two best friends helped him, but he was the one who had to use the spell that killed the Dark Lord, and then found himself leader of what was left of wizarding society in the aftermath.”

            Laughter showed a single canine tooth as his lips flicked up. “From rumors I have heard, that part he supposedly led was only too eager to sacrifice him to secure their victory.”

            Draco snorted. “That’s true, but I think he’s impressed the Ministry into leaving him alone for now.” Although part of him burned to tell the truth, he thought it was more important to preserve the secret of how they had acted together, just in case Laughter balked at the illegal nature of it. “He only had a few enemies in the Ministry itself. Many more of them were simply afraid of him.”

            “Are you?”

            Draco blinked. If there was one question he hadn’t expected Laughter to ask, it was that one, when Draco had admitted that he was Harry’s ally and lover.

            But it was a fair one, and from Laughter’s intent, still stare, Draco thought he probably wanted him to answer it. Draco gave it some consideration, his mind filled with flickers of scars, of his hand moving on Harry’s skin, of the way that Harry’s eyes had burned when he looked Draco in the face and then away. Of the way his hands had clenched and tightened beneath Draco’s, as Draco laid his fingers on them.

            “No,” he said at last. “But I think I’m unusual in that I’ve known him for a long time now and I was his enemy at first, then changed my mind.”

            “Would you say that that’s a gift he has? Making his enemies into friends?”

            Draco shook his head. “No, or he would never have had enemies in the Ministry in the first place, or he would have taught them all to fear him or at least keep quiet before this. He’s more—impressive, as I said. People who let themselves think falsely about that impressiveness, who expect him to be some grand and thunderous hero, are the ones who create the mistake and the mystique. If you approach him as you would anyone else powerful and dangerous who’s done something impressive, then I think you’ll rate him exactly as he should be rated.”

            One of Laughter’s ears twitched backwards; one twitched forwards. It was the most wolf-like move Draco had seen him make while still in human form, despite all the twitches and snarls of his mouth.

            Then he nodded and said, “Fair enough. You’ve given me a picture that sounds accurate.” Draco smiled in spite of himself. “Bring Potter to meet me tomorrow.

            “In the meantime, the merfolk.” Laughter sat upright and adopted a voice that reminded Draco of McGonagall’s when she was teaching a particularly stubborn class. “The first thing you must remember about them is that they are proud, intolerably proud, and they will never forgive you if they think you have infringed on that pride…”

*

            “What did they do to you?”

            Harry blinked and pulled his left foot cautiously from the fireplace, where his right one had gone through into the Burrow’s drawing room confidently. He eyed Hermione, who stood with her arms folded next to the chair that sat opposite the fireplace and glared at him.

            “What do you mean?” he asked, and had to stifle a yawn. They had slept in this morning, really, but there had been plenty of vigorous exercise last night.

            “You look different.” Hermione snapped her head up and down, as though nodding emphatically at someone Harry couldn’t see. “Just—different. The way you move, the expression on your face.” She paused and leaned nearer, then gaped at him.

            Harry felt his face flame red. Of course, he tried to stop it, because that would be all Hermione needed to reach the right conclusion, but it was a little late for that, and Hermione pointed one finger at him and then dropped her arm and shook her head and all but stamped her foot.

            “Harry James Potter!” she exclaimed. “What are you—you slept with them, didn’t you?”

            “Slept with who?” Ron was walking in from the kitchen, balancing an enormous sandwich on a plate in front of him. Harry saw crisps and marmalade between the slices of bread, and who knew what else. He blinked. Sometimes it still hurt to be reminded that his friends were ordinary teenagers, or would have been that way if he hadn’t involved them in the Horcrux hunt. “Is there a shortage of beds at the fortress or something?”

            Then he looked up at Harry’s face, and almost dropped his sandwich.

            “You slept with them!” he said, started to point a finger at Harry, then looked around for a safe place to put his sandwich and set it down on the seat of a chair before he pointed. “Mate, I didn’t think—I mean, I know you were talking about them like that, but we thought it would be ages before anything happened—”

            The dull burn in Harry’s face was becoming actively painful, and although he had come to the Burrow partially so that he could see the rest of the Weasleys, he wanted to hiss at his friends to stop talking. He cleared his throat and cast a Listening Charm, one they’d often used when on the Horcrux hunt, that would bring all the noise in the house directly to his ears. He relaxed a little when he realized that he wasn’t hearing anyone else. Just Ron and Hermione here to notice his shame and be loud about it.

            “It’s not what you think,” he began, feebly.

            Hermione sniffed and folded her arms. “Then what is it?” she demanded. “I think it’s exactly what we think it is. You slept with our old Potions professor and that git Malfoy, and now you’re come to—what? Apologize? Excuse it?”

            “I didn’t think you trusted them enough to do that yet,” Ron said. He had a weird expression on his face. After peering at him, Harry decided it was a combination of wanting to sick up and struggling to keep the nausea down so that he could have this conversation in the first place.

            “I didn’t know I did,” Harry had to admit. “But—”

            He paused, and thought back to last night. It was true there had been no sudden change in how much he trusted Draco and Severus, although working together to stop the Ministry from persecuting them and Severus agreeing to free as many of the Ashborn as he could had a lot to do with it. But there also hadn’t been a reason to wait years and months to dance around each other. He admired Draco for the way he had grown and the independence he had achieved; he admired the way Severus had done things Harry hadn’t thought he would dream of doing.

            And he had wanted to. He had done very few things in his life simply because he wanted to, and probably none as important.

            Wasn’t everyone always telling him that he should do more things just because he wanted to? He lifted his head and smiled at Ron and Hermione. Hermione frowned at him, but Ron got a faint smile on his face in return. Harry thought he had probably looked like this that day in the garden when he had told Ron that he really liked helping people and wanted to continue on with it.

            “I wanted to see what it was like,” Harry said. “And I was tired of missing out on something that everyone always insisted was enjoyable. I hadn’t done it before, so I wanted to try it.”

            Hermione stared at him, her eyes widening, her cheeks flushing. “But surely you and Ginny—”

            “If they did, I don’t want to know,” Ron said, loudly enough to make Harry wonder if the neighbors would hear.

            “We didn’t,” Harry said, and this time his smile was really meant to reassure Ron more than anything else. “But I thought when I went to be a hostage of the Ashborn that I would never get to do anything like that. I didn’t think Snape would let me visit Ginny, and there was no one else I wanted, and at the time, I couldn’t conceive of finding someone there I could want. The Ashborn, certainly not. And Snape and Malfoy, holding me captive? No.”

            “Then how have you changed your mind?” Hermione sat up and folded her hands primly in her lap, as though there was some law about how far they should be allowed to stray from her body. “I can’t—Harry, I can’t conceive of how you could have got to this point. Snape and Malfoy were your captors.”

            “Are they now?” Harry asked quietly. “I don’t think I would have wanted to have anything to do with them if they had stayed the same, but they haven’t.”

            Hermione hesitated. Then she said, as if exploring a new idea, “They did make Unbreakable Vows to you when you left, and had you make them to them.”

            “Or to Severus,” Harry said, trying out the name aloud in front of other people as much to see how they would react as anything else. Both Ron and Hermione stared, and then their faces seemed to shut down. Harry gave a mental shrug. He had to admit he would have done the same thing if either of his friends had got involved with people they’d hated during school. “But yes, that changed things. And I was able to leave freely this time, and I’ll go back to them freely when I want to.”

            “Things have changed, fine,” Hermione said, and her hands squeezed tighter. “But—oh, Harry, I’m afraid that you won’t be happy with them, that you’ll get your heart broken.”

            “There’s always the chance of that,” Harry agreed, and tried to sound calm and mature and knowing so he wouldn’t reveal just how strongly that fear told on him, too, and how much it dried his throat out. “But I think there would be the chance of that with anyone. We’re all marked by the war, and I don’t want someone entirely innocent of it. There’s too much about me that they couldn’t understand.”

            “Well, if you want someone Marked, you’ve found them,” Ron muttered.

            Hermione hit Ron on the shoulder, probably more for how awful his pun was than any other reason, and then faced Harry again. “All right, fine. But aren’t you afraid that Malfoy could start taunting you about your parents again, or that Snape is—I don’t want to say it, Harry, but Snape could see your father in you, and decide to hate and punish you for that.”

            “I think,” Harry said delicately, feeling out the words as he said them, because he had thought them only that morning, “that that’s not going to happen. Too much has changed. The war changed both Draco and Severus from the people they were, and taught them that what happened to them at Hogwarts wasn’t the worst thing that could ever happen. They lapsed into these unchanging states for a while, before I was there, where Severus did nothing but brew and take new Ashborn, and Draco was—I’m not sure there’s even a word for how cramped he was, in his mind and his body. But now they’re better than that. And if it ends because of something like that, then, well, I’ll recover and go on. I’m still here despite my parents dying and Sirius dying and Dumbledore dying and having to kill Voldemort and the Ministry betraying me. I don’t think I’m that fragile.”

            “Fragility has nothing to do with getting your heart broken,” Hermione started.

            “Leave him alone, dear,” Ron said, in exactly the tone that Harry had heard Mr. Weasley use to Mrs. Weasley. “Can’t you see that he’s determined to do it no matter what?’

            Hermione looked up at Ron with her lips parted, and then laughed. “I’m not your mum,” she said.

            “But sometimes it’s worth trying,” Ron said, and grinned at her. Harry watched them for a moment, and nodded. Yes. That was the kind of love he wanted, where they depended on each other so much that they shared laughter and arguments as well as past events and sex. And if his relationship with Draco and Severus didn’t eventually turn into that, if it soured, then he would go and find it elsewhere. “Really, Hermione, I think Harry deserves the right to make his own mistakes as much as we did.”

            “You think it’s a mistake, then?” Harry asked him quietly. “Really?”

            Ron shrugged, his eyes huge and steady, with a slight shine in them that Harry thought was pride instead of anger. “For me? It would be. I couldn’t get over the stupid shit that Malfoy did to me in school no matter what. And I think it’s kind of fucked-up to be sleeping with a man who could be your father.”

            Harry winced a little.

            “I’m sorry,” Ron added quickly. “But you’re the one who has to make the decision, just like you were the one who had to make the decision about going to the Ashborn. You know that we would have fought for you if you didn’t want to be a hostage, braved a second war for you. We’ll support you in this, because you have to make the decision that satisfies you, in the end.”

            Harry nodded slowly. It wasn’t the expression of whole-hearted support he had dreamed of, but then, whole-hearted support on this from Ron and Hermione might have meant they were brainwashed. “Thanks,” he mumbled.

            Ron grinned and punched him on the shoulder. “You’re welcome. Now, are you going to come have a proper lunch, or what?”

            Harry blinked at Ron’s huge sandwich.

            “That’s morning tea,” Ron said, unabashed, and bit into the sandwich, making crisp bits fly everywhere. Hermione gave him a single scathing look.

            Harry tried to imagine Ron sitting at a table with Draco and Severus, and grinned. Hermione and Severus might bond over deprecation of how awful his manners were, actually.

            I’ll keep that in mind as an emergency plan.

            He followed his best friends into the kitchen, glad that the first breaking of the news was over with, and grateful to think about lunch.

*

            Severus leaned back and slowly circled the glass globe sitting on the table in which his new potion to read the thoughts of the bound Ashborn bubbled and glowed. This time, the potion had turned gold, and Severus was not sure whether that was a regression or not. It should have turned white, if his theoretical predictions were correct, but at least it was not red or blue.

            He spent a moment evaluating the globe. Then he reached back for the last ingredient, a holly leaf so fresh that he had had to break several Preservation Charms to bring it out of the cupboard where he kept it. He held the dark green, gleaming thing above the globe, and then let it fall, lazily tumbling end over end.

            It landed in the golden potion and floated on the top for a moment, like a fly landing on the surface of amber. Then there was a brittle snapping sound and the potion turned the color of ice.

            Severus smiled with his mouth only. And there was the whiteness, only slightly off from where he had predicted it would be.

            He waited for the moment the potion would bristle out with branches again, shadows that he would have to interpret to read what moved in Harry’s memory. With Harry’s permission, he had used a memory of his for this potion, though Severus had told him to choose which one so as to make the process of interpretation harder.

            But the potion remained still, although darkness gathered under the surface near the top of the globe. After another moment, Severus allowed himself another smile.

            He fell back a step and aimed his wand at the globe. The step was only cautious, and only good sense. He had no idea what would happen, though he might have chosen some possibilities as more likely than others. Sharp, sparking energy ran up and down his spine, and lingered like fire behind his teeth.

            “Legilimens,” he breathed.

            The air around him seemed to freeze and then shatter the same way that the ice in the globe might have. Whirling power grasped Severus and flung him ahead, a more dangerous and explosive experience than traveling by Portkey. He felt as if he were tumbling down a waterfall. He opened his mouth to gasp in—

            And then he was floating in the middle of a memory, serenely. Except that his feet weren’t in contact with the ground, it was as clear as being in the middle of a Pensieve.

            The memory was of a small, dark place, so crowded that Severus felt the urge to stretch out despite knowing that none of it was real. The air around him felt hot and musty. He heard a slight bang in front of him and lit his wand with a murmured Lumos. The light promptly sprang to life, revealing a cupboard. Someone banged down above the roof of it, which let Severus deduce it was underneath stairs.

            The smaller sound had come from Harry, who sat with his arms looped around knees drawn almost up to his chin, and stared straight ahead of him. He looked as he had during his fifth year, perhaps. He sat on what had once, clearly, been his bed, a mattress leaking stuffing and covered with stains, but which was now too small for him. As it was, his kneecaps nearly brushed the roof of the cupboard.

            Severus narrowed his eyes as he examined him. Harry’s expression was blank, and his eyes glassy. Now and then his fingers tightened around his legs as though he would scratch the skin, but they always flexed back before that happened and before Severus would have felt compelled to intervene.

            He shook his head and reminded himself that he could not intervene, in any case. This was a memory, and that meant it had already happened. He simply took a step back and leaned against the wall in the moment before someone flung the door open and stuck her head inside.

            Severus had to hold back a shocked snicker when he saw the way Petunia had turned out. Yes, he had glimpsed her in a few of Harry’s memories before now, but this was the most direct look he had taken, and the unfortunately long neck and nose dominated the portrait. She had teased him about his own homeliness when they were children; Severus would have given much then to grasp a picture of this future and show it to her.

            But not if it means that they had once again taken to sealing Harry under the stairs.

            “What are you doing under there?” Petunia hissed in a whisper, looking up and down outside the cupboard as if she expected members of the Order of the Phoenix to spy on her. Severus again wished this memory was real, simply so that he could see her expression when she saw him. “Get out right now.”

            She shot out one hand as if to grasp Harry’s arm and drag him free, but he leaned forwards, and she missed. He turned on her a gaze so alien that Severus’s hand went to his wand before he thought about it. This did look like a boy who might attack.

            “Nothing,” Harry whispered, his voice almost sepulchral. “I’m doing nothing. Just the way that you always wished I would,” he added, and the twist at the corner of his mouth and the flare in his eyes made Severus suddenly certain that this had happened when he was mourning Black’s death.

            Petunia stared at him, then shook her head. “You can’t stay under there,” she said. “Go up in your room if you want to think, but you can’t stay under there.” And she turned and paraded off, leaving the door of the cupboard open.

            Harry shut his eyes, but Severus could see even without hearing his thoughts that his concentration had shattered when his aunt interrupted. Severus found himself grateful for that, on second thought. It would not have been useful at all for Harry to have completed whatever he was focusing on so intently, not when his grief for Black was overpowering him.

            Harry clenched his jaw and inched out of the cupboard, shutting the door behind him. Petunia was in the kitchen and kept her back stubbornly turned as Harry climbed the stairs. Severus followed him in silence, and made sure he was inside as Harry shut the door of his bedroom.

            The space seemed mostly occupied with broken Muggle toys, not of the kind that Severus assumed Harry would have chosen for himself. He sat down with his hands on his knees and his stare fixed straight ahead, on the perch and cage in the corner. His white owl flailed over to him and hooted, then landed on Harry’s knee and stared up at him worriedly when he didn’t notice. Harry petted her feathers, but there was something mechanical about the motion.

            Severus watched in silence. He still did not know why Harry had chosen to show him this memory, as it seemed nothing dramatic would happen—and indeed, the corners of the memory were already darkening, in a way that meant it would soon end.

            But that is almost certainly the point, he thought a moment later, with a faint snort. He wanted me to see an ordinary day, something that doesn’t relate to the moments in his life when he killed the Dark Lord or violated school rules. He mourns like anyone else, and he is trusting me not to throw that back in his face.

            A relationship with a Gryffindor was rather like a bullfight, it seemed. Dance in and then dance back, and dare the other to do his worst. If Severus did something Harry interpreted as a gesture of trust, then he had to do the same thing back.

            Even as Severus thought that, the memory darkened, and left him standing outside the globe, staring in at the ice-colored potion.

            The potion that would need a few more adjustments, but was otherwise nearly ready.

            Severus smiled and let the door of his own memory fall closed on what he had seen, for the moment, while he concentrated on adjusting the proportions of the ingredients in the list he kept neatly at hand.

*

            “I’m asking you to come with me when I visit Laughter tonight.”

            Harry frowned at him through the fire, and for a moment, Draco feared that he would disregard what Draco had asked him to do entirely. But then he nodded. “A dream-visit, like the one I made to the vampires?” Then he grimaced and shook his head. “Not that that one worked out too well.”

            “This time, I’ll be with you,” Draco said steadily. “And I hope that you don’t do something that angers Laughter too badly.”

            Harry snorted and said, “This is me. I’m not the negotiator that you are, and I want to be involved in the alliance, but not in a way that’ll make me make sacrifices for no return. Just keep that in mind when you’re introducing me to your allies.”

            “Our allies,” Draco corrected him. “You made the oath to the centaurs, who in turn are vowed to the werewolves, and so am I. That makes you as much a werewolf ally as swearing to them directly.”

            “Then why does Laughter want to see me?” Harry looked over his shoulder as though he heard someone calling him from inside the Burrow, but returned his attention to Draco soon enough. “He ought to feel as comfortable with me as with any of his other allies, if he believes in the tenets of the old alliance.”

            “An excellent question,” Draco said, and Harry smiled so warmly at the praise that Draco reminded himself to say things like that more often. “But I think it’s because there was no one like you in the old alliance. No one with such prestige and so much personal power. Most of the time, wizards fought together to kill Dark Lords, instead of depending on one prophesied savior.”

            “The prophecy making the difference,” Harry murmured, with a nod. “All right. How are you going to give me the coordinates of the dream clearing?”

            “This way,” Draco said, and touched his wand to his own temple, closing his eyes as the memory of the last time he had passed with Laughter rose to the forefront. When he was sure he had the length of the trees and the sheen of the leaves right, he opened his eyes and brought out the swirling strand of memory. “I’ll put this in a sealed Pensieve and send it to you with Corners, if you like.”

            Harry sighed a little. “That might be the best idea. I forgot to tell Shield where I was going this morning, it seems, and he showed up at the Burrow an hour ago, screaming his head off. I had to put him in a cage until he calmed down, which he doesn’t really show any sign of doing yet.” He turned his head to look over his shoulder again, and this time, Draco thought he caught the sound of a faint, high scream—the kind that a dragon might give when it was caged behind Silencing Charms.

            “Oh, dear,” Draco said, and knew he was grinning when Harry looked back at him with one eyebrow raised. “Well, that’s life with a guardian dragon bound to your soul.”

            “One that someone smug made for me,” Harry said, but the words no longer stung Draco the way they once would have. “Anyway. I’ll look forward to your owl. And now I have to go soothe Shield and untangle Hermione’s hair from the wall.”

            Draco blinked. “What happened?”

            “Better not to ask,” Harry said darkly, and then he vanished from the fire as the Floo connection closed.

            Draco spent a pleasant few moments imagining what might have happened to the smug and prissy Granger anyway, and then went to his Pensieve and dropped the single strand of memory in. A swift charm stretched a thin layer of magic over the top so that it couldn’t spill, and then Draco looked around at the table next to his bed.

            A teacup stood there, containing Corners. From what Harry had said, he had gone wandering for a short time, perhaps to see if he wanted to return to the ocean with the rest of the Water People. But he had come back last night, and shown no inclination to seek Harry at the Burrow, curling up in the glass instead. Draco thought he was probably trying to make up his mind about the alliance as well, and spend time around other people who weren’t Harry or Parselmouths, to see how he liked them.

            Draco tapped gently on the side of the glass. Corners put his head out of the cup and looked sleepily at Draco.

            Or perhaps Draco was only imagining the sleepiness. Draco had to admit to himself that he was hardly an expert in reading the expressions of snakes made of water, after all.

            Draco held up the Pensieve and waved his wand, conjuring an image of Harry in the air. It hovered to one side of the sealed Pensieve, with its hands extended and a pleading look in its eyes. That was the best Draco could do to communicate with a serpent who only spoke Parseltongue. He lowered his wand and gave Corners the most direct look he could.

            Corners’s tongue flicked out and then back and forth as if checking the air for dangerous scents. In the end, he flexed his body out of the cup, curled around the Pensieve, and gave Draco something like a nod before he flowed towards the corner of the room. He drained away under the wall, and although Draco waited for the Pensieve to be caught, it wasn’t, any more than the potions vials Severus had given him to carry through the Ministry had been. Perhaps he dissolved the substance of the harder objects into his own.

            Draco sat down on the bed and sighed. If all went well, he should see Harry in the Forest tonight, and they could start planning the next phase of the alliance, or introduce Laughter to Harry, or whatever seemed like it should be the best method of setting up the alliance.

            Someone knocked on the door. Draco stared blankly at it before remembering that he had asked Incognita to come by, so they could discuss her knowledge of Mermish and the best way to approach the merfolk that everyone was so touchy about. He sat up and called, “Come in.”

            Incognita looked more than a little out of place in Draco’s neat, restrained rooms, though that might only be the effect of her bright green robes. Draco thought she had adopted them because they would mark her out as so different from the black and grey robes of the Ashborn. She gave Draco a sharp look as she stood there with her hand on the door.

            “You look as though you were considering something else when I came in,” she said. “Should I leave?”

            Draco would have welcomed some time alone, but he knew he would do nothing productive with it, simply lie around feeling sorry for himself and wishing that Harry was back or that Severus had come out of his lab for dinner.

            At least working on the alliance is productive, even if sometimes I don’t feel like doing it.

            “It’s nothing important,” he said. “I’ve got all the books I could find in the library on the merfolk.” He gestured at the heavy tomes spread out over the table beside his bed, and little by little Incognita came in and sat down in the heavy chair he had conjured. “Now. Where do you think we should start?”

*



            unneeded: Thank you! That’s nice to hear.

            Lauren: Thanks! There are only a few chapters left, so it won’t be quite as slow from here on out, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
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Ashborn