Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54573 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 46
- 47
- 48
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Forty-Seven—Interlude
            “I’ll do what I can to free you.”
            Pansy didn’t respond for long seconds. She was looking into the platter that Kreacher had brought her as if it contained all the mysteries of life. Harry couldn’t help looking with her, but it still remained a platter, loaded with sandwiches and bacon and slices of pork and treacle tart, which Harry thought was probably Pansy’s favorite food, but not much else.
            Pansy finally swallowed dryly and looked up. “Thank you,” she said. Her emotions made the bond sing with weariness.
            Harry gripped her shoulder. “You don’t have the Mark, and I managed to free Severus despite him messing it up so badly.” In front of the others, he would call Snape by his first name. He didn’t want them to think that he had exiled Severus from his consideration, although that was pretty close to what had happened.
            Pansy bit her lip and shook her head, wordless. “I don’t—I’m not as worried about something like that. I don’t intend to sabotage my trial the way he did.” For a moment, the emotions coming through the bond altered, and she and Harry exchanged a look that Harry thought came as close to perfect understanding as they would ever achieve. They both thought that what Snape had done was utterly idiotic.
            “But I do wonder who they’re going to have testify against me.” Pansy’s emotions had already sunk again, and her eyes looked much the same, so weary that Harry wondered if she hadn’t been sleeping well and he somehow hadn’t picked up on that through the bond. “It’s—not going to be easy to remember who might have a grudge against me. I insulted so many people, and laughed at them, and hurt them, because the Carrows and the other Death Eaters ordered me to. And sometimes without any orders. Because I was afraid, and that seemed like a good strategy to survive.”
            “I know that you didn’t always do right,” Harry told her quietly. He wondered for a second if he would be feeling this sorry for Pansy if she wasn’t one of his vassals, but ended up discarding the thought. The problem was that he couldn’t know one way or the other. She was one of his vassals, and dealing with reality was better than hiding from it, the way Snape had done. “But we’ll go into the trial and hope that we can win it, anyway.”
            Pansy nodded. “I wonder why Ollondors said that I should be next, instead of Draco, though,” she said. “Or Mr. Malfoy, if they didn’t care about keeping the vassals’ trials all close together. That would bring more publicity.”
            Harry had to smile a little. “Because Ollondors is on our side, as much as she can be, and she’s trying to give us a bit of a holiday and some rest. She thought your trial would do that.”
            Pansy half-snorted. “Oh, yes. For you.”
            “Well, yeah,” Harry said, and held her gaze until Pansy rolled her eyes at him. So she did understand about political expediency. It was probably just harder to apply it to yourself than to think about it in the abstract.
            “Fine,” Pansy said. “I don’t—if you and Changes need me to say anything, then tell me, but otherwise, I’m going to bed. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to rest, and let it wash over me.” She stood up, and pushed back the plate that Kreacher had prepared for her. Of course, that made Kreacher appear, squeaking in distress.
            “Take the plate with you,” Harry said, when she stared at him in a silent demand that he do something. “It’ll make him happy, and that keeps more people from getting upset.”
            Pansy sighed and shook her head. “Fine.” She scooped up the plate, and accepted the floating glass of pumpkin juice that Kreacher offered her as well, eyes immobile on Harry’s face. It annoyed Harry enough that he finally looked at her and stretched out his hand in a silent demand for an explanation.
            “Remember to let yourself rest, too,” Pansy said abruptly, and strode away.
            Harry sat there for a little while after she’d gone, sipping at his own pumpkin juice and thinking about it. Then he nodded and stood up. They had a day before Pansy’s trial began. He could speak to Changes tomorrow. For now, he thought going to bed was an excellent idea. Greg had already gone, on Harry’s insistence. He’d stood guard outside Harry’s door all night last night, and was near to dropping. Harry had demanded that he go so that Greg could protect him later, and Greg wasn’t foolish enough to ignore a direct order from his Lord.
            “Potter.”
            Think of the bloody devil, Harry thought, and turned around to face Snape, who—of course—he hadn’t felt coming through their diminished bond.
*
            Severus didn’t feel Potter’s emotions anymore, not with the Occlumency shields he had erected against the possibility, but he could taste all the bitterness and rage that he needed on the back of his tongue.
            From the way Potter turned around, slow and deliberate, and the way he looked Severus up and down as if Severus was the one responsible for this farce, Severus was going to get the battle he wanted, if he persisted. He took a slow sliding step nearer. Potter had seemed weary before, but he didn’t now. Or maybe he just wasn’t weary enough to run away.
            “You have deprived me,” Severus began.
            He never reached the end of the sentence, because the carefully-prepared speech flew away from him at the look of utter contempt on Potter’s face. He flicked his fingers at Severus, snapping them, stealing Severus’s breath. He shook his head, and his voice came out so thick and heavy that Severus had to concentrate to make out the words, as if Potter had suddenly acquired an accent. “How dare you talk like that to me? How dare you pretend that part of this isn’t your own fault? If you hadn’t done whatever you did to the bond, then we wouldn’t have had a problem with the trial in the first place!”
            Severus felt as though his breath had turned to fire in his lungs. “They would have come up with anything they could to discredit me, and you know—”
            “They were going along with it,” Potter said, and took a step nearer him. “No one was questioning the portrait. Jenkyns acted like he was listening! Ollondors was managing the whole thing as well as she could to make sure that she got some power for herself.”
            “You would be wise not to trust her.” Severus thought he had infused that one word with venom enough to pierce even Potter’s armor, but from the way Potter laughed breathlessly, he had miscalculated.
            Potter spoke before Severus could reach for the deeper wells of his poison. “I know that she only wants power, but for the moment, her goals and mine coincide. That means that I can trust her to go along with it for a while.”
            His gaze locked on Severus, and he shook his head. “Not that I can trust you. Not that you’ll ever trust me, or let yourself be trusted. You nearly sabotaged everything today because you need everything your own way, don’t you? You didn’t tell me that you’d done something that would weaken the bond to someone looking in at it from outside!”
            Severus wrenched his hands apart at his sides, but Potter still didn’t have the sense to back away or look intimidated. Severus spoke as softly as he could when what he wanted was to scream aloud and lunge at Potter. “I did what I had to do to protect myself from the takeover the bond was doing of my mind. You need not pretend that you can understand everything, or anything, of what I went through—”
            “You don’t need to be such a self-righteous arse,” Potter snapped. He had stopped moving nearer, but Severus could feel the force of his trembling rage anyway, and not through the bond, simply hovering in the air between them. “I know that you want to be free of a master. I know, okay? I felt it through the bond before you muted it. And now you’re stomping around and throwing a temper tantrum because you had a few minutes of thinking that you might go to Azkaban. A few minutes.” He frowned in an odd way, his lip curling down, maybe the only way he could imagine frowning when his contempt for Severus was so great and sharp. “You’re an ungrateful, oblivious, stupid bastard, Snape.”
            That insult stung more than Potter could possibly know; one of the favorite ways for his father to taunt Severus when he had been young was to imply that he wasn’t Tobias’s real son, that Eileen had got herself pregnant by some other man. Only when Severus began to reply that he would gladly have had a different father had Tobias stopped using it. But to hear it all fresh and dripping with scorn from the mouth of someone like Potter made Severus swell and find the poison he had been neglecting.
            “Do you think I wanted to put my fate in the hands of someone who had been entrusted with a far more delicate task, and nearly failed in carrying it out?” he whispered harshly. “Someone who was supposed to die to save the world, and nearly couldn’t do that properly? Someone who became Lord of us all only by accident?”
            Potter’s face flamed all up and down like summer sunshine, the way that his father’s face would sometimes flame when Severus got in a good insult, right before he would call on Black and Pettigrew, and everything would go to hell. Severus found himself bracing for that, longing for it. It would repay Potter properly for thinking that he was above being like his father and the other people who had interfered in Severus’s life, if he made a wrong move now and turned out to be nothing but an arrogant bully.
            Instead of approaching him and trying to trounce him, though, Potter pulled back his right sleeve and laid his hand on his shield mark. “Do you want to be freed?” he asked.
            Severus stared at him. Potter looked back, with the same Potter face and red cheeks and messy hair. Not the same eyes, but Severus had learned to compensate for the stunning effect of Lily’s eyes in that kind of face by now.
            He should have. He should have.
            “That sounds like a threat,” Severus said when he could find his tongue. “Do you think that Albus would approve?”
            Potter shook his head with the kind of weary move that told Severus he wasn’t interested in debate. That would ordinarily have been fine with Severus, who didn’t want debate, anyway. He told himself it should be, that of course it was. He swallowed. His throat hurt.
            “I thought I could free you, and then you could leave me behind and go do something else,” Potter explained, slowly enough that it was insulting. “You’re so unhappy in the bond that I thought I’d offer.” His hand paused above the shield mark, poised like a hawk about to descend. “Do you want to be free?”
            Severus found his tongue as soon as he could, which was long after he should have found it, but that was one reason he was glad there was no one here but Potter and himself. “The Wizengamot may interpret that the wrong way.”
            “They gave you the sentence when they thought your fate was linked to mine,” Potter retorted. “We can show them that it isn’t, that you can do whatever you like and there’s no way for me to stop you.” His fingers tightened, clamping on nothing but air. “What would you like? For me to free you, or continue this pathetic bond that embarrasses you so much?”
            Severus stared at him helplessly. He should not have been helpless, he knew it, and it was another reason for the burning resentment that filled him—burning not like flame, but like bile, thick and scorching and acidic and devouring far too many things in its path. “You should have realized what you were doing and never set up this bond in the first place,” he whispered harshly.
            Potter didn’t laugh. The sound he made, or barked, was too bitter to be called that. “Really, Snape? That’s your brilliant retort? That’s the direction you’re heading? I’m sorry, I’m not smart enough to really understand it.” He brought his head down and eyed Severus again. “Because I think all the Time-Turners are destroyed, and there’s no way for me to go back in time and change things so that you’re free again and the bond was never established. Believe me, the amount of trouble you’re causing me? I would. Or at least I would have made sure the bond only covered Draco and Pansy and Greg, if I could choose. You and Blaise are the most stubborn and ungrateful shits I’ve ever met.”
            “Why should I be grateful for slavery?”
            Severus knew he could have worked up a convincing head of steam if he had been left alone to do so. He knew that he would have produced arguments that would have struck Potter like well-forged swords, that he would have produced ones strong enough to make even the ridiculous Potter slink away in shame. But he was interrupted.
            “Because you would have been subjected to Voldemort’s obedience curse otherwise?” Potter looked straight at him, and Severus flinched more than a little from the light in his eyes. “Because there’s no telling what would have happened to you if the bond hadn’t intervened? That’s the alternative. Me or him. It shouldn’t have been, but that’s the way it was. And that owes just as much to Voldemort’s desire for revenge on you as anything else.”
            “If you dare to blame me for this because of the part I played in the war,” Severus began, in a hoarse whisper that even he didn’t recognize as belonging to himself.
            Potter held up a weary hand. That shouldn’t have functioned the way it did, either, choking Severus’s voice back into his throat. It was only a gesture. How could a gesture have so much power over him?
            If the bond was commanding me, it would be easy.
            But Severus could feel no stir of the bond in his mind, and he trusted in the strength of his shields. It baffled him, and infuriated him, and still he had to stand there quietly while Potter spoke, staring at the wall.
            “I don’t blame you for the part you played in the war. I’m even ready to honor you for it, now that I understand what kind of pressure you were under from Dumbledore and the rest of them. But I showed you that I honored you for that by the part I tried to play in your trial defense.” Potter’s voice was rising. “What did you do with that but throw it back in my face? You showed that you didn’t give a shit what I thought of you. The most important thing to you has always been what you thought of me.”
            He turned around, and the softness had gone from his eyes as it had from his voice. “You’ve had the chance to rescue yourself. I think it’s ridiculous that you needed this many chances to see that if the bond compels you to be a good little vassal, it compels me to be a good Lord, too. There’s no one spared here, Snape. There’s no way that you can say you’re the only victim.”
            Before Severus could retort against that, Potter caught himself up as suddenly as if he was a horse, and had pulled against a rein. He almost hissed as he did. “What does it matter?” he whispered.
            Severus wondered if the bond was tormenting him for speaking such words to a vassal, but didn’t know how he could find out when he was distant from the bond, or even if he wanted it to be so. He waited with his heart beating in his throat, oddly distant from what felt like his own emotions.
            Potter shook his head at him. “I’m not interested in blame,” he said. “Not the way you are. We can blame Voldemort for this whole war, and Dumbledore for setting up the situation with the Unbreakable Vows where you had to kill him. But eventually, it doesn’t matter. There’s always someone else to blame. There’s always some other question you can ask them to fuss about. Well, I reckon I’ve had enough of the blame to be tired of it.”
            Severus found his voice. “If you are tired of it, what do you imagine I am? To know that I am only considered not a danger to society because you volunteered to watch over me—”
            “You’re a genius with potions,” Potter interrupted. “You were a brilliant spy. You figured out a way to distance yourself from the bond when I had barely figured out how to manipulate it.”
            Severus eyed him in silence, wondering where this was going. One thing he had proven to himself in the last few minutes was that he wasn’t good at analyzing the twists and turns of Potter’s mind.
            “You’re more than smart enough to figure out that laying blame is the least interesting part of all of this, and to get past it,” Potter said. “If you had wanted to.” He eyed Severus again in that distant, enraging way. “Which means that I don’t think you want to, and that makes me tired.”
            He walked out of the kitchen. By the time that Severus got up to him—trying not to hurry so that it wouldn’t seem as if he was chasing Potter, of all the undignified things to do—Potter was climbing the stairs with a slow, heavy step.
            “Potter!” Severus called after him, then stopped. His voice had had a sound that could only be called a screech, and he had no intention of sounding as if he was screeching after Potter.
            “What?” Potter still didn’t look at him, and continued climbing as steadily as if he never intended to again.
            “You can’t blame me for this,” Severus said. His voice would be reasonable enough if he could calm down before he spoke. That was still harder than it should have been; he had the feeling that a smidgen less of self-control would have seen him screaming at Potter the way he had when Black escaped in Potter’s third year. “You cannot. You know that the politics of the Wizengamot are more tangled than most people can cope with. We are lucky to have had your trial go as easily as it did.”
            Potter turned around on the stairs then, but kept his hands on the railing, apparently deciding not to come back down to confront Severus. He shook his head a little. “Make up your mind, Snape. This trial went easily. It didn’t. It went easily because of no effort on my part. I don’t understand you. I should understand things.”
            Severus wanted to say that he had never put forth such contradictions, but his voice was stuck in his throat and wouldn’t come out.
            “Pansy told me that I should go to bed and make sure that I rested,” said Potter, around a yawn. “I’m realizing now how smart she was. Why don’t we save all the acknowledgments of blame and things like that for the morning?”
            “You will release me from the bond.”
            Potter’s yawn faded, along with a tension to his face that Severus hadn’t realized was there. For long seconds, Potter stood motionless and looked at him, and Severus had the humiliating feeling that he should beg Potter’s apology. But then Potter’s face went motionless, and he nodded.
            “Of course,” he said. “I’d hoped to use tomorrow to prepare for Pansy’s trial, because we didn’t have any warning it was coming before this, and the extra day is as much of a grace period as Ollondors can get for us. But of course, if you want to be free of the bond, then that must come first.” He swept a low bow. “It took a lot out of me to free Blaise, though. So I’ll need a few hours to think about how I can be comfortable and clear-headed after you attain your freedom.”
            “Do not try to make me feel as if I am at fault here,” Severus warned him, voice tight. “There is no way that I will accept the blame.”
            “And you have no interest in anything except blame again.” Potter’s hands tightened for a moment as if they would crack the wood of the banisters, and Severus thought he saw a fat spark flash up from the silver shield on his right arm. “Fine. I know what you want in the morning, and I’ll go to bed, and prepare for it in the morning, like I said. Good night.”
            Although Severus knew a dozen retorts that could have withered Potter’s pretensions, he used none of them, for some reason. He stood there and watched Potter ascend the stairs, and he did not speak. Then he went back to his own bedroom, and sat on the end of the bed, and stared at the wall.
            Not until very late in the evening did he remember Mr. Zabini, and wonder where he was.
*
            Blaise’s hands shook as he loaded the shoulder bag he had found in one of the old bedrooms with at least half a dozen of the sandwiches the house-elf had left on the shelves in the kitchen under Preservation Charms. The charms meant they wouldn’t get squashed or bruised in the bag, and that meant he would have something to eat later, when he began to get hungry. That was what he told himself, although he had never studied Preservation Charms that much, not even for that long-ago essay in Charms.
            He was going on a journey, and he meant to walk or Floo or Portkey, if he had to, until he reached the point where he could…
            When he could walk into his mother’s house, and call her Mother again, and fall in submission at her feet if he needed to. Whatever he had to do, to convince her that he hadn’t gone over to the enemy.
            He swung the bag over his shoulder, grabbed preserved bottles of tea and water, and popped them into it. Then he tied it shut and looked up towards the stairs. Part of him wanted to leave as soon as possible, to get out of here and away from Potter’s reach and influence.
            But the other part of him reminded him that he had no wand, and that it would be easier to Apparate, and he didn’t even have to take the bag of food with him if he could do that. And there was only one person in the house who had a wand.
            Blaise began, soft-footed, to creep up the stairs towards Professor Snape’s room.
*
delia cerrano: The bond keeps Harry from doing a lot of that; he knows that he’s resisted as much as he can in a lot of ways.
Polka dot: Easier than Snape’s, anyway!
SP777: Harry will let Snape go because it’s what Snape wants, but he refuses to accept the blame for everything.
- 46
- 47
- 48
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

The Only True Lords