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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 Seven—Not Useless
            “Are you giving up, then?”
            Hermione’s voice was a little shrill. Harry ignored her as he dragged the books off the shelves in the Black library—books that he’d ignored before, because both he and Hermione had assumed they would hold no useful information. But that was a hard judgment to make if the bond was unprecedented, Harry thought. There were a lot of things that might be useful which he hadn’t thought of before.
            “No,” he said, and laid the books out on the table that Hermione had been using. It was long enough to accommodate both of them. “I have an idea about the bond, and I’m going to see if I can find it.”
            Hermione leaned over his shoulder. Harry tensed a little, but permitted it. It wasn’t Hermione’s fault that he didn’t like anyone behind him right now.
            “But…those are books about magical creatures,” Hermione said, her voice blank. “How can the bond have anything to do with those?”
            Harry resisted the temptation to say that the bond sure as hell hadn’t been in anything they had found so far, either, and silently flipped through the pages until he reached the illustration that he remembered, from the summer he’d spent mostly in Grimmauld Place reading anything he could get his hands on. Hermione studied it, her eyes narrowed. A circle, with three triangles inside it. Each triangle sprouted lines that connected them together, but the lines became more slender and faded out near the top of the circle.
            “That has something to do with Veela,” Hermione said. “I know I’ve seen it before. I can’t remember where.”
            Harry grunted and nodded. “Sometimes a Veela gets bonded to people they don’t want, don’t like, can’t live with. It’s not always instinctual the way that people think it is.” He laid the book down on the table and turned a few more pages until he found what he wanted. “In those cases, the bonding can be reversed, by enacting a certain kind of breaking ritual that pulls a third person into the orbit and confuses the bond. The bond is stretched back and forth until it snaps, basically. It can’t accommodate a third person—”
            “Like the one that holds you,” Hermione said, and then sat down beside him with a thump. “But is it really the same thing? I mean, this is already a bond with three people in it, not one with just two.”
            Harry smiled at her, and saw her flinch. He didn’t know why. He had been honest when he said that he thought this bond was possible to get rid of this way.
            He didn’t care what kind it was. That had been his sudden revelation when he was talking with Snape in Lenten. And he didn’t think they had to know what kind it was. They just had to get rid of it.
            “I think we might be able to modify the bond-breaking ritual,” he said, his hand and eyes tracing over the pages. “It would take a while to make it fit three people instead of two. And Veela bonds don’t usually have the mental components that mine does, so that would take some adjustment, too. This is an unnatural bond, though. Getting rid of it would probably be something my mind and magic could help me with. It’s a disease, a cancer.”
            “You keep talking about your mind and magic,” Hermione began.
            Harry stared at her. The last thing he had expected was an objection now. He had made more progress in three minutes than they had so far in five days. “What? What do you mean? Do you know something else that could get me free from the bond?”
            “You have bondmates,” Hermione said, and squirmed a little under his gaze. “You need to contact them and let them know that you’re considering something like this. It could put them in danger if you don’t.”
            Harry put the book down. He did that carefully, and lined up the edge of the book with the edge of the table. Then he turned around and pinned Hermione with his gaze. She flinched hard enough to knock one of the other tomes that she’d been reading off the far edge of the table.
            “I met Snape in a café yesterday,” Harry began. “He brought up the past and accused me of being arrogant and childish. He sees everything as my fault.” He could feel the acid building up in his throat as he spoke, until he thought he could have spat and burned holes in Hermione’s notes. “Malfoy hasn’t bothered writing to me or anything, so I don’t know what he thinks and feels.”
            “I thought…the bond…”
            Harry snorted. “Yes, I can feel that he’s drowning in guilt and hiding in his house. As well as what he wants with the bond or whether he’s close to finding a solution, I have no idea.” He shook his head and closed his eyes, but that was no use; that just brought the image of Snape to mind.
            Snape and Malfoy were useless? Harry was useless, to think that anything would ever change. Snape would see him as his father’s son no matter what happened. Malfoy would run and hide from his problems. Maybe he hadn’t during the war because he hadn’t had a choice. But now he did, and he would go the rest of his life ducking around the corner to avoid Harry if he had to.
            “I’m not going to get any help from them,” he said, opening his eyes. “They’ve decided to blame me for everything. Snape was more interested in the fact that I thought he kept a journal when he made experimental potions than anything else. Apparently I’m not allowed to grow, or change, or acquire knowledge of Potions.” He glared Hermione into silence when she tried to say something. “He wouldn’t tell me anything about the research he’d done, that’s how bad it was.”
            Hermione just shook her head. “But it affects him as much as you,” she said.
            Harry had his doubts about that, since he was the one who had made the sacrifice and the only one who had recognized the bond for what it could do before it began doing it, but he snorted. “Right,” he said. “But he doesn’t care, Hermione. He can’t work with me. And maybe that’s his pride and maybe it’s his stupid bloody arrogance that decided a bully’s son is the same as the bully, I don’t know. But the fact is, he won’t work with me no matter what happens. And Malfoy’s going to hide in the Manor until he dies and rots. If the bond attacks me, they’ll probably feel it, and maybe then they’ll stop chewing the cud of their idiocies and masturbating over their—”
            “Harry.”
            Hermione’s face was really shocked. Harry hissed and wrenched his temper back on topic. “Anyway. I’m not discussing this with them. I’ve done my share of reaching out and meeting and sacrificing for them. They want something? They can actually tell me what it is and what they’re doing, not whinge about what persecuted victims they are.” He turned back to the threefold design. “Care to help me work on this?”
            Hermione nodded and picked up her quill, although she still studied him with shadowed eyes. Harry ignored that, and plunged into the preparations and modifications they would have to make to the bond-breaking ritual. As he understood it, the third person who helped stretch the bond acted like the Binder in an Unbreakable Vow, there to witness and help cast the spell, but not stand between the partners. Since that wasn’t the way he and Snape and Malfoy were tied together, they would have to choose one of them and essentially make them into the person whose role was to observe.
            That would be him, of course. Even if Snape and Malfoy were here, Harry thought, they’d probably refuse, Malfoy because it was dangerous and Snape because it revolted his precious image of himself to be useful to a Gryffindor.
            His hand tightened on the quill. He wanted to snap it. He wanted to fling it aside and storm out the door, and go after Snape and Malfoy and curse and curse and curse them until it made a difference to the—
            Harry paused, and slowly pulled himself back into place. Yes, sometimes he had thoughts like that. It didn’t mean that he had to act on them.
            He lost himself in the recreation of the bond-breaking and the discussion with Hermione about the ways that he could position himself, and then the argument with Hermione about whether they needed his bondmates in the room to do this. That went on until the moment when Harry’s chest tightened as if his ribs were growing smaller from the inside. He gasped, doubling up, and the quill did snap this time.
            “Harry!” Hermione was kneeling beside him, her eyes frantic.
            Harry jerked his head up, and gasped, and forced himself to accept what was happening. It wasn’t a heart attack. He’d never had one, but he’d heard the pain described and he thought he would have known if he was having one. He could feel a steady tug in the middle of him instead. As though his lungs and his heart and his liver were all rising and pointing one direction.
            The direction that Snape and Malfoy were in right now, he had no doubt. He couldn’t get a sense of location from the thoughts and feelings that oozed down the bond, but he knew what this was.
            The bond acting up. He smiled without humor, wondering if this would make it easier to identify.
            And then he placed that thought aside and set it on fire. It didn’t matter. They were going to break the bond, and it didn’t matter what kind it was, if they did that. Meanwhile, Harry was going to breathe through this agonizing pain.
            He jerked his head down and did it, focusing on the relief and joy he would feel when he survived this bond, when he could walk away and concentrate fully on the search for the traitor among the Aurors. His chest heaved as if he would vomit. But he didn’t, because he willed himself not to do it. He had survived a bond that would have made him either the victim of a violent rape or drool his brains out at the ears. He was going to survive this.
            Relief came so suddenly that it hurt, itself. Harry crashed to the ground, and winced, a little, one hand rising to rub at his ribs. They were all intact, or felt so, but when he cast a Diagnostic Charm he’d had good reason to learn a minute later, he saw all the tiny fractures in them. Harry rolled his eyes and set about healing those.
            “You have to tell them, Harry.”
            He turned to Hermione. “If—they—felt something like that, I’m sure they’ll tell me,” he snapped, and searched his mind. No, there was no revelation there about Snape and Malfoy noticing anything. “And in the meantime, the bond is objecting to me and trying to pull me to them, the way I predicted. As long as it’s only affecting me, I don’t have to mention anything.”
            “Harry.” There were actual tears glistening in Hermione’s eyes now, brighter ones than there had been when Harry told her about the ritual.
            “No.” Harry stood up and shook his head, extending a hand for Hermione. She stood up on her own, staring at him so sadly that Harry sighed and rephrased it. “If it starts causing them pain as well as me, then I’ll tell them. Not before.” He turned back to the books. They had even more reason to try and modify the bond-breaking ritual now, and soon.
            “Why?” Hermione did whisper. “Why isn’t your pain a good enough reason?”
            “Because I’m not going to give them a chance to throw my pain in my face and mock me for asking for help,” Harry said, not looking up.
            Hermione gave a noise that might have been a choked whimper, and then began to help him again.
*
            Something had happened.
            Draco thought he would have been able to tell that even if Severus hadn’t come stomping home yesterday and slammed the door to his lab hard enough to make vials fall over and break. And Draco hadn’t heard the sound of a Reparo afterwards. That was bad.
            He sat, shivering, the book in front of him spread out on one of the library tables and his fingers clenched on either side of it. It was the second thing that had happened, this morning, the second thing that was strange, that scared him more.
            A pulling in his chest. Draco had stood up and turned along with it, blinking, shivering. He hadn’t been sure what direction he would end up facing, but it was as if he had turned to look at the steel mountain in his mind.
            The steel mountain that was shuddering, and had a blunt top where it had had a sharp peak a moment earlier.
            Draco had sunk back into his chair and waited for Severus to stomp into the library and demand to know what was going on. Draco had swallowed and had to consider what that meant, in turn, when it didn’t happen.
            It meant that Severus either hadn’t felt the twitch in his chest, or had decided that Potter could go hang, because he was so frustrated with him.
            Draco closed his eyes. There was a quick spring of tears along the edges, tears that his father and the Death Eaters who had taunted Draco during the war would have despised. Draco dashed his head along the edges of his eyes now, cleaning off the tears, doing what he could to clear them.
            He didn’t want to die.
            He had thought that even when he woke in the copper circle and shouldn’t have had enough coherent thought to understand what was happening to him. Then Potter had explained it to him, and desire took over. But the thought of dying, and what price he would have to pay for survival, had haunted the edges of his actions and tainted both the thought of helping Potter and of sitting here without doing anything.
            Now, though, Draco thought the question had been settled for him. The bond wasn’t content. It might have affected Potter and Severus more strongly than it had Draco, or not at all, but what mattered was that Draco knew he could die and the effects might get stronger with passing time. He had to do something.
            Draco stood up and went to the table in the corner where Severus had been working with books on bonds, trying to find the clues that would let him identify the one they now shared with Potter. Draco copied the notes with a few quick flaps of his wand, after Summoning the parchment he would need for it. He wouldn’t take the notes, in case Severus noticed them missing, although he hadn’t made an attempt to resume the search since his meeting with Potter yesterday.
            And then Draco turned around and added his own notes to the bundle, although he doubted they would aid Potter much. He was a much slower reader than Severus, and didn’t have as much experience of arcane magical theory. He might have written things down as significant that even Potter could tell were rubbish.
            But because they knew so little, Draco didn’t dare throw anything away. He didn’t know what was valuable, and that was the point.
            He made the whole bundle up into a compact package, the kind an owl could carry, and then Shrank it for good measure. He took it up to the Owlery, where he hesitated before choosing a new bird, not the one that had delivered their previous letter to Potter. This was an ordinary tawny owl, but a good flyer, as were all the Malfoy birds.
            “Take this package to Harry Potter,” Draco said quietly, and looped the strings around the owl’s leg, tightening them with a simple charm. The owl stared at him as if waiting for a letter, but Draco shook his head. Their first communication had been woefully misunderstood. This time, Draco would just send the notes and let Potter make of them what he would. “No other message. Don’t wait for a response.”
            The owl fluttered back and forth on the perch for a moment, as though giving Draco time to change his mind, and then turned and hurtled silently into the afternoon. Draco watched it until the small, rising shape was out of sight.
            Then he walked back to his bedroom and sat down, yawning. He hadn’t slept well last night—of course not, with Severus so agitated and the mountain of steel weighing down the back of his mind. But although the top of that mountain was still blunt and Draco knew that wasn’t a good thing, he thought he could sleep now.
            Perhaps he had done his own part to make it sharp again, he thought drowsily as he curled up under the covers.
*
            “Are they both still useless now?”
            Harry turned over the package of notes that Malfoy had sent him and didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure what he would say.
            They were in the middle of the Black library again, books about Veela bonds spread around them. Ron was sitting next to Hermione, another tome open in his lap. He hadn’t said anything since Harry had received the package of notes from Malfoy, but his eyes were expressive.
            Harry knew from the bond, the knowledge trickling through whether or not he wanted to let it, that Malfoy had been the one who sent the notes. The uncoiling of tension into something that felt like sleep was too obvious. And Snape had refused to tell him anything about his research at that bloody meeting. It had to be Malfoy who had wanted Harry to know what they had discovered—or hadn’t discovered—about the bond joining them together.
            Harry shut his eyes. It was more acknowledgment than he had thought he would get. It was almost impossible acknowledgment to live up to.
            “Will you tell them about the force that broke your ribs now, please?” Hermione sounded breathless, but Harry didn’t have a bond to her and couldn’t tell what emotion she was keeping back.
            And I would never wish for a bond like this with them, Harry thought viciously, opening his eyes and turning to his best friends. His fingers shook with the intensity as he put the package of notes back on the table and nodded to Hermione.
            “Because Malfoy sent me these notes,” he said. “I’ll send the letter to him, and explain what happened. It’s up to him whether he wants to show it to Snape or not.”
            Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it again. Harry smiled grimly. At least she knew better than to urge him to share the information with Snape, after the way the git had acted.
            “All right,” Ron said unexpectedly, standing up and dropping the book he held on the table. “In the meantime, we need to see whether there’s actually anything useful in these notes.” He strode across the room and snatched up the notes Malfoy had sent, beginning to rifle through them and make disgusted little noises under his breath.
            Harry took a long, slow breath that didn’t make his ribs ache, because he had cast the healing charms well enough. Then he picked up a piece of parchment, and sharpened a quill, and dipped it in ink, and wrote.
            Thank you for the notes, Malfoy. They should prove useful as we begin research on ways to break the bond. That’s what I’ve decided to do, because I can’t find what kind of bond this is, exactly, but I know it’s similar to Veela bonds that are stretched and broken by inserting a third person into them, and that gives me a reason to look up ways that those breaking rituals have been modified in the past. If you want to look up that kind of information yourself, you could send me more notes, and I could send you what we have so far. Harry thought that kind of peace offering ought to be enough to satisfy even Hermione.
            In the meantime, I should tell you that I experienced a side-effect of the bond yesterday. It made me feel as if the bond was trying to tug me across the miles to land where you are—probably Malfoy Manor. It fractured some of my ribs. He had chosen that as the less alarming word than “cracked.” Easily healed, but it does indicate that the bond isn’t satisfied with what has happened so far. I don’t know if it affected you at all. I think I was right, and the main dissatisfaction of the bond is falling on me because I was the one who made the sacrifice.
            Harry paused and wondered what else he needed to add. If the bond wanted to demand extra politeness or something, well, so far it hadn’t shown up to actually demand that.
            In the end, he wrote, If you want to write back to me and discuss the bond’s side-effects or anything you noticed, then we might be able to tell more about it. And the sooner we know what kind of bond it is and what its limitations and weaknesses are, the sooner we can break it.
            He stood up, waited for the ink to dry, sealed the letter in its envelope, and turned around to find an owl. Hermione blocked his way.
            “You’re writing to tell him what happened?” she insisted, gazing into his face. “Everything that happened to you?”
            Harry nodded. “Including the fractured ribs, and that we’re doing research on Veela bonds to try and break this one.”
            Hermione gave him a single intense stare, then flung her arms around him and hugged him. Harry patted her back, glad that he had healed his ribs completely yesterday. Otherwise, it probably would have hurt.
            He looked across the room and caught Ron’s gaze, sharp and understanding, observant. Ron nodded to him once, in what might be approval, and then turned back to reading Malfoy’s notes again.
            I wouldn’t want the kind of bond with them that I have with Snape and Malfoy, not at this cost, Harry thought, as he stood on the roof a few minutes later, watching the owl fly away. But why couldn’t I be tied to them, if I had to be tied to someone? They’re the center and ground of my being. Snape and Malfoy are nothing, and always will be.
            There was a twinge in his ribs for a second, a flare across the middle of his chest as though someone was fastening a breastplate in place and not giving him time to adjust. Harry bowed his head and folded his arms. Nothing. They will never matter to me.
            The bond was still.
*
moodysavage: Thanks! Harry might still be feeling some guilt for failing to protect Draco and Severus in the safehouse, but Severus’s attitude has pretty much destroyed that.
ChelseaPlume: Thanks! I think that both of them also went into the conversation with the belief that of course the other one was going to be difficult, and that just added further to everyone’s blind spots.
And the bond is beginning to react, as you see here.
Genuka: Yes. Although Harry continues to think that as long as he can endure the pain—and he can—it’s fine.
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The Wages of Going On