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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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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Eight—Healer Tarriash
            Severus raised a hand for silence as they came towards the entrance of St. Mungo’s. Harry paused, then nodded and lowered his wand. They weren’t going to march in and arrest Tarriash as if they were Aurors, but neither would they simply burst in and kidnap her in a whirl of limbs. They had to plan.
            The problem was that Severus and Draco seemed to have some sort of plan, if the number of vials clinking in Severus’s robe was any indication, but they hadn’t bothered to explain any of it to Harry.
            “What do you think we should go for first?” Harry whispered, careful to keep his voice low. He only hoped no one would show up to go into hospital and think they were doing something strange. “Healer Tarriash’s office, or her current location?”
            “How well do you know the layout inside?” Severus jerked his head at the front entrance, his hand tightening on what could have been his wand or a potions vial.
            Harry rolled his eyes. As long as they told him the plan eventually, he was willing to play along with their secretive little games for now, and it was true that they had as much investment in seeing Tarraish punished as he did. “Fairly well. I’ve been here a lot, and visited the various wards when we had to interview witnesses or escort sick prisoners.”
            “Very well,” said Severus, and Harry couldn’t decide for a second whether that was a response to his question or a declaration of how well Severus knew the layout himself. “Then we will go to Healer Tarriash’s office.” He motioned to Draco and himself. “You will seek her out. I think she will want to see you.”
            “Yes, that’s probably true,” Harry said, as dryly as he could, and won a smile from Severus before he turned and glanced at Draco. “What are you going to do to her when she and I get there?”
            “Severus is the one who came up with the plan, and not me,” said Draco in a fake-modest voice, casting his eyes down.
            Harry snorted and turned around again. “All right, mastermind. What then?”
            “I think you can imagine what will happen then without the need for words.” Severus touched something that was definitely his wand this time and glanced at St. Mungo’s as if he was imagining all the many ways that the Healers inside might try to shield Tarriash, and the ways he wouldn’t allow her to be shielded.
            Once, Harry would have shivered and felt sorry for any person that Severus Snape was looking for in that way, because it would probably have been him. This time, it was weirdly comforting, like knowing that you had a cold north wind at your back that would strike at your enemies alone.
            Draco was comforting, too, but since Severus seemed to be in charge of this particular escapade—and maybe he needed to be, to make up for what he perceived as his failure in battling the Lestranges—Harry would defer to him.
            “Fine,” said Harry. “I’ll send a Patronus if something happens and Tarriash doesn’t want to come with me.” He strolled towards the hospital.
            Draco caught his arm and leaned in. “How dangerous do you think she’s likely to be?”
            Harry turned around, taking his arm from Draco but also catching his eye in turn, and smiled. “I thought you were willing to let me take the risk and find out. And thank you for that. It means that you won’t be hovering over me all the time.” He paused for an artistic moment. “Or did Severus come up with this part of the plan, and you just realized that I might have to take a risk? Quick, dissuade me from it!”
            Draco stared at him long enough that Harry thought his tactic might backfire, but then he snorted and stepped away. “Go on, arse.”
            “Thank you,” said Harry, with a smile that he made sure included Severus and was as sincere as possible. Because he meant it. It was a lot for them to let him walk away and into danger, at least based on the way they’d been acting when he was around the captive Aurors.
            That’s what will have to happen, if we’re going to survive as friends, he thought, as he trotted into hospital. They’ll have to trust me to take risks, and I’ll have to trust them to work with me and keep their word.
            Put like that, he thought he could do it.
*
            Severus looked around the office they had found their way to. It had gleaming bookshelves and a desk and a chair. Everything, except the chair’s cushioned seat and the books on the shelves, was made of steel. Even the files that lay on the desk reposed inside replicas of folders made of steel.
            “Compensating for something, do you think?” Draco asked, casting the round of spells that would guarantee they didn’t trip into one of Tarriash’s traps.
            Severus shook his head in silence, and continued patrolling the office, not touching anything. It was unusual, certainly, but he had learned the lesson during the war. You couldn’t always rely on someone’s personal belongings to give a true picture of who they really were. For that, you needed their expressions and body language.
            Of course, a written confession of the reasons behind Tarriash making this betrayal would also help. But there were things one could expect to find, and things one could not expect to find.
            “Severus.”
            Draco’s voice made him turn very quickly, his wand in his hand. Draco was staring at a book on the shelf nearest the door. A complicated swirl of pink light that Severus recognized had manifested around it.
            “Interesting,” Severus breathed. “Why would a Healer use that particular hex to defend a book, no matter how valuable?” He moved towards Draco, and cast a few spells of his own, mostly private ones he had developed, to make sure that the light indicated the curse he thought it did. The pink glow only deepened, which meant Draco had discovered the right answer.
            The curse was one that would turn all the body’s defenses against itself. The healthier a person was, the faster they would sicken; their blood would burst out of their veins, their brains’ acuity would curl into paranoia that stung like a scorpion, their immune system would tear itself apart. Severus had never heard of a Healer using it.
            They might know it, because they had treated it or seen its effects, but using it was a different matter.
            And to protect a book, the kind of thing that someone might have brushed a hand against innocently as they came in the door? It was mad.
            “We have to break through,” said Draco, coming to the same conclusion Severus had, although the gleam in his eyes made Severus suspect that Draco was more eager to tackle the curse than he was.
            “Or we have to wait until she is here, and capture her, and interrogate her about what the book contains,” said Severus, but his voice was faint. He was measuring the distance between himself and that pink light.
            “You know what it contains.” Draco looked at him sideways with that look that said he knew Severus was being deliberately difficult.
            Severus said nothing. Yes, he suspected that the book might contain a description of a bond such as the one they had survived, or the twisted ritual that would produce one. But they could not be sure, and it was a silly risk to take for less than complete certainty.
            “How could she know that the outcome of the ritual would be this bond, before we knew it ourselves, and when it was unprecedented?” he asked again. “The Lestranges did not know. They meant us to die, not to survive with a strange bond.”
            “She could have looked it up afterwards.” Draco had walked around so he was looking at the book from another angle, through the pink light instead of straight at it. “This isn’t a book I recognize. Severus…”
            “The bond is over now. We don’t have to worry about finding every possible book on it.”

            Draco glanced at him, and Severus flushed. Yes, very well, he still would like to know if such a bond would have lingering emotional effects, and if everything they felt was natural. He was not sure that he would do much about it if he did know, but he wanted the option.
            “There is still no saying that the book will contain that. Or that it will contain information we want to know.”
            “You were the one who used to tell me that I should want to know more than I should want to hide,” Draco said. “Do you think I can get rid of this curse, or will you tackle it?”
            “I will tackle it,” said Severus at once. He didn’t want Draco getting hurt because of the curse on the book, and he wouldn’t know how to handle it in the way that Severus did. “Stand back, and make sure you have something to shelter behind if this goes wrong.”
            “Is that supposed to be reassuring?” Draco muttered, but he willingly took shelter behind the desk.
            Severus moved to the side, and spent a moment examining the book. Yes, the curse extended all the way around it, instead of only resting on the cover, as would usually be the case. Unusual, but pointed. Tarriash really wanted to make sure that no one touched the book, and she was willing to risk the death of an innocent to get away with it.
            But also a point of weakness. The curse was made to cover a flat surface. Extending it all around a three-dimensional object like this…
            Severus raised his wand. He thought for a moment of checking for spells on the office that would detect the use of Dark Arts, but dismissed it. His own created spells did not fit within the parameters of the Dark Arts unless someone who didn’t know them wanted to assign them the label. They were spells no one else knew.
            He brought his wand down and to the side, so that the tip brushed the pink light. He heard Draco gasp. He ignored it. He knew what he was doing.
            As the light began to surge out, disregarding the wood of the wand and trying to make contact with his flesh, he murmured, “Rumpere.”
            The unusual form of the word and the light that danced from the wand and the curse as they met made Severus have to move backwards for a second. He thought that it might not be enough to counteract the curse.
            The next spell was already rising up his throat when Draco made a surprised little noise and said, “I think it worked.”
            Severus took a step back and considered the book in front of him. Yes, the pink glow had stopped, and it did seem as though the book was calmer than it had been. The sense of lingering Dark magic had dissipated.
            “Well, then,” he said, and reached out and laid his hand on the book’s cover, reveling, just a little, in Draco’s choked cry of warning and the way he stumbled to his feet.
            But nothing happened. The book sat still, and nothing stung his palm or flicked against his magical core. And blood didn’t start running out of his ears and nose, and he didn’t start sneezing hard enough to break his ribs.
            Severus nodded in satisfaction, and opened the book.
            He scanned the index and found the listing for bonds. The book as a whole appeared to be about unexpected magical effects when it came to common spells and rituals, but the section on bonds was reassuringly thick.
            He found a few places with bent pages, and began to read. But then Draco, who had been standing near the door, raised a hand warningly, and Severus began to pay attention to more than the words in front of him.
            “So good of you to take time out of your day…”
            Severus didn’t stay to hear the answering words. That was Harry’s voice, and that one recognition was enough. He put the book back on the shelf and slipped over to the side of the door, with Draco. His hand was on his wand. Draco took the opposite side from him and smiled at him, lifting his own wand.
            It reminded Severus of the ritualized movements they had done together to be rid of the Lestranges, and he had to blink and shake his head, hard, to clear the haze of memories and focus on the present. He had the impression that they would be able to do little against Tarriash unless they focused.
            The door opened.
*
            It hadn’t taken Harry long to find Healer Tarriash. From the look that came into the eyes of the people he questioned, most Healers knew who she was and regarded her with a trembling, amazing amount of fear and awe.
            She was working on the Spell Damage Ward, studying a teenage girl whose hair appeared to have turned into orange tentacles. Harry eyed the hair for a second, wondering what curse could have done that. Then he snorted. He thought he recognized the aftereffects of the Hair-Clipping Hex cast by someone drunk.
            Tarriash looked up at the sound. Her mask really was perfect, Harry thought. She showed nothing but a thin-lipped smile of pleasure on seeing him, and she nodded.
            “You probably came to talk to me for a good reason, Auror Potter,” she murmured. “Just give me a few more minutes to figure out what happened here and how to reverse it.”
            “The Hair-Clipping Hex?” Harry offered. He reckoned it wouldn’t be too suspicious if he offered help. Tarriash probably thought he had come to her for the “help” she had promised him after she had investigated his damage from the rape.
            And the eagerness with which she had listened to the details of what happened with the torture and the ritual circle…
            Harry’s stomach tightened with disgust, but he kept his face bland and his hands empty and loose. Yes, it was disgusting, but he had come this far, and he wasn’t going to ruin the best chance that he and Draco and Severus had.
            “Cast by someone with some impairment?” Tarriash took a step back and studied the girl again. Harry didn’t miss the way the girl’s shoulders tensed up at the guess, and neither did Tarriash. “Keeping quiet because you want to hide the name is one thing,” Tarriash told her. “Or because you want to hide that you were out drinking Firewhisky. But keeping quiet on the cause just means you’re here longer.”
            She was really good at this, Harry thought. At being a Healer. At encouraging people to confide in her.
            It made him wonder whether they had the right traitor after all. But Tarriash was at least someone with a motive. And if she knew a lot about bonds and ritual circles, then she might be able to help them in a different way, if she hadn’t betrayed them.
            The girl confessed what had happened after that, and even came close to detailing the true circumstances, by Harry’s estimate, rather than exaggerated lies for effect. Tarriash nodded, and clucked, and gave her a potion that would begin the process of reversing the hex, and took her to a room to sleep off the dizzy side-effects of the potion. Then she turned and came back to Harry.
            “You’d like to talk to me?” she asked, and lowered his voice self-consciously. “About what we discussed last time?”
            Harry nodded. “Can we do it in your office, though? I don’t want everyone in hospital to hear about it.”
            “Of course,” said Tarriash, and her smile was thin and triumphant and broke her mask for a second. Her eyes were so eager. Harry’s doubts quieted. It was her, and she wants to hear about me suffering.
            They made their way down the corridor and towards Tarriash’s office. Harry made sympathetic and soothing noises about dragging her away from her work, and Tarriash made soft little sounds about how it was nothing when she might help the Great Harry Potter. Harry thought his own smile was getting progressively tighter, but if Tarriash noticed, she wasn’t going to ask questions.
            They stepped into her office, and Harry couldn’t keep himself from jumping when Severus’s voice spoke a Stunner from the right side of the door. He had thought that Severus and Draco would set up a more complex ambush for some reason.
            Tarriash turned fluidly towards the Stunner and raised a Shield Charm against it. Then she tried to shriek. But Draco had already cast the Privacy Charm that would keep any sound from escaping the office. Harry smiled at him and moved around near the bookshelves, silently assessing the properties of the office. No obvious escape route other than the door, although he supposed it was possible that one of the shelves could swing round and uncover a hidden passage.
            “Auror Potter! Help me!” Tarriash blocked another spell from Severus and turned towards Harry, her eyes wide.
            “The way that you wanted to help me bear the consequences of the trap you set up?”
            Tarriash’s eyes hardened, and she didn’t waste any time pretending she was innocent. She simply sprang straight for Harry, her wand lashing out. Harry set his feet and raised a Shield Charm of his own.
            One of her spells went through it, but only one, and Harry leaned his head back so that it just clipped his earlobe and made a bit of blood flow. The way Draco hissed about it was really unreasonable, but at least the punch Draco then planted in Tarriash’s midsection got her attention.
            Severus finally cast his Stunner and landed it in Tarriash’s wheezing face as Harry Disarmed her. Then Draco marched up to him and examined his earlobe with a frown that caused Harry to roll his eyes.
            “It doesn’t matter how small the battle is, you still contrive to get wounded.” Draco lifted his wand and healed the wound as though Harry had asked him to.
            “Contrive, as though it’s on purpose.”
            “It might as well be, given that you’re a trained Auror and could guard yourself against danger better than you do—”
            “Children,” Severus said, the same way he had when they were in Malfoy Manor and he wanted to disrupt a squabble.
            Harry winced at the noise. He hated being called a child, and that was probably why Severus did it. At least Draco had shut up at the same time, and Harry could touch his earlobe, feel that it was fixed, and nod to Draco in a thanks that didn’t require words.
            “Fine,” he said. “Now that she’s Stunned, what are we going to do? Interrogate her here, take her somewhere else and do it, or just take revenge on her?”
            “She has a book that was heavily protected against intrusion, with a curse that would kill anyone who touched it.” Severus picked up a thick book and tossed it to Harry, ignoring his struggles to catch it. “I looked at it, and it does contain information on bonds, although I did not have time to read them in detail. It is important, I think, that we ask her what she meant by it and the betrayal—what she thought would happen as a result of the betrayal—rather than simply killing her.”
            Harry blinked, and nodded. He flipped quickly through the book, finding the few worn and bent-down pages, and began to read.
            …telepathic bond can be disrupted in extraordinary ways by simply introducing one more person to it. Regrettably, this kind of research cannot be performed with most humans, and creatures such as house-elves do not have enough mental similarities to wizards to make good test subjects. What little information is available suggests that disruption of a ritual could produce a lasting bond in the following manner.
            Harry skimmed the next few pages, feeling sick. The author of the book seemed to discuss the various ways that you could torture someone into accepting a telepathic bond and the times it wouldn’t work as opposed to when it would with calmness. Even interest. If that was the sort of thing that made you “Dark,” a word the author mentioned more than once, then Harry knew he wasn’t, no matter how much he liked to use Dark Arts spells.
            He slammed it down, and Severus nodded. “I believe that we should interrogate her here. Even on the chance that she merely found the book after she learned from you about the bond, she deserves to have some questions asked of her.”
            “Fine,” said Harry, and swallowed. “Do you have some Veritaserum, or does one of you know some good interrogation spells?”
*
            Draco had to admire the way that Tarriash came back to life. The moment Severus revived her, she sat up in the chair they’d bound her to, and looked down at her arms. She seemed to know already that, although the bonds weren’t visible, they weren’t going to break if she jerked on them.
            She looked up, and smiled at Harry first, then at Severus. Draco clenched one hand, down at his side where it wouldn’t matter and wouldn’t be seen. The smile said, at least to him, that she thought she had something on them because they had suffered first, whatever they might do to her in retaliation.
            “So,” said Tarriash, and shut her big brown eyes, which Draco might have thought handsome in another situation, with a little sigh. “The Auror who arrested my brother for nothing and the Death Eaters who walked free when they committed far worse crimes than Herman’s want to talk to me?”
            “Not the way you might think,” said Severus, and glanced once at Draco. Draco nodded. Severus had asked both him and Harry if they were all right with one of the spells Severus wanted to cast, and it was like Severus to check again with Draco, given what Draco had gone through with causing pain during the war.
            Tarriash’s words were as good as a confession, though, and Draco had suffered at the hands of the Lestranges twice. He could lay even the second kidnapping at her feet, if he thought about it. The Lestranges had wanted to see what the bond was doing to Draco, and tried to use the bond as an instrument of torture against Harry and Severus.
            “Dolor veritatis,” Severus whispered.
            Tarriash’s eyes opened, probably because she didn’t recognize the incantation. The invisible bonds around her glowed for a moment, and then settled back into invisibility again. Tarriash turned her head in several different directions, and seemed to pause when she didn’t feel any further restrictions on her movements.
            “What was the point of that spell?” she asked finally.
            “Lie and see,” said Severus. “Now. How much information did you give to the Lestrange brothers, and how much of the pain that they inflicted on us did you plan for?”
            “Nothing—”
            Tarriash screamed, abruptly, and her head slewed sideways as though someone had slapped her. Draco saw the long black mark, like a burn, show up on the side of her neck. It faded a second later.
            “Yes,” said Severus. “Lie, and you will suffer. Do you want to answer the question again?”
*
ChelseaPlume: Thank you! I think that they’re cooperating nicely here, although Severus is a bit overprotective (and would probably be furious if anyone pointed that out to him).
pittwitch: Thank you!
SP777: I’m afraid you baffled me this time. What do you think Draco is trying to say to Harry?
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The Wages of Going On