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Kinder, Kindler, Kindlier	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 24795 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Kinder, Kindler, Kindlier
- 2-Chapter 2
- 3-Part 3
- 4-Part 4
- 5-Part 5
- 6-Part 6
- 7-Part 7
- 8-Part 8
- 9-Part 9
- 10-Part 10
- 11-Part 10
- 12-Part 12
- 1
- 2
Title: Kinder,
Kindler, Kindlier

Disclaimer: J. K.
Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun
and not profit.

Pairings: Snape/Harry/Draco

Rating: R

Warnings: Threesome. Slightly AU from DH in that
Snape survives. Profanity, sex, angst.

Summary: The
third law of motion does not apply to relationships.

Author�s Notes: This
started life as a tiny one-shot, but didn�t stay there. It will probably end up
being posted in seven or eight parts, perhaps a bit more or a bit less.

Kinder, Kindler,
Kindlier

�� I don�t
know why I come here.�

�� Severus could
hear the mutter well enough, even from across the shop. Potter often seemed to
believe that it was his ears and not his throat that Nagini�s bite had injured.

�� Severus
pressed his teeth together and continued sorting through the ingredients that
needed to be arranged on the shelves. He had believed, before the war ended and
his life changed, that it would be a simple thing to keep an apothecary�s shop.
He could organize the ingredients, the vials, and the cauldrons better than
half the poor fools he had seen in the apothecary�s shops of Diagon Alley and
Hogsmeade.

�� And then he
had opened his own, and realized that his perfect vision had assumed one thing:
that all customers were as neat as he was. Instead of tidy perfection, Severus
found that wizards and witches entered his shop who seemed to have no concept
of the words �privacy,� �cleanliness,� and �don�t touch that.� They picked up
and fingered rare weeds and flowers, half-crushing them and rubbing off the
texture or pollen that the potions which used them depended on. They dropped
vials. (Severus would have thought that sharp glass shards, or the possibility
of encountering same, was a deterrent to careless handling, but it seemed
rather to be a challenge). They tried to bargain down the prices for rare
scales, feathers, and eggs, or sneak out with them under their robes, and some
of them assumed that his status as a former Death Eater should somehow entitle
them to free use of his products.

�� Severus had
learned to deal with them. He had his freedom and the ability to make a living,
and that was more than he had dreamed of when he opened his eyes in St. Mungo�s
for the first time after the war. Compared to customers who knew what they were
doing and did it anyway, with a spark of contempt in their eyes that dared him
to stop them, Harry Potter was not even an annoyance.

�� Potter
chanted several rapid words under his breath, and Severus felt the air of the
shop flicker and change as the wards strengthened. �There,� Potter said aloud.
�You should be safe from attacks of any kind for the next month, including
flung stones, Muggle bombs, fire spells, werewolf bites�� His voice was bored
as he listed all the things his specially crafted defensive magic would hold up
against. Severus had the impression that he had done this many times before.

�� He turned
around so that he could see Potter more clearly. Potter stood beside the window
in the front of the shop, scanning the street with an alertness that Severus
knew was more habit than real belief that danger would come along. Three years
of Auror training had created a mark on him, after all.

�� He didn�t
wear the scarlet robes of the Aurors. At the end of those three years, Potter
had astonished most of the wizarding world by declaring that he didn�t want to
serve the Ministry after all and going his own way to set up a business that
specialized in dense and efficient wards for hard-to-protect buildings. Rumor
was that even the Ministry had turned to Potter�s Protection Agency, though
they denied the rumor hotly.

�� Potter wore
Muggle jeans and a large, battered green jumper that Severus didn�t wish to
inquire into the origins of. He held his wand in one hand, his tongue in more
situations than not, and boredom in the corners of his eyes.

�� Severus
cleared his throat. Potter turned to face him. Despite the mutter Severus had
heard from him earlier, his expression was smooth and neutral. �Yes?� he asked.

�� Severus
looked at him again. Potter had spoken up for him at the Wizengamot trials. He
had been behind�Severus believed, though he could never prove it�a donation of
Galleons to Severus�s Gringotts vault that allowed him to start up his shop. He
regularly came in to renew the wards on the shop and charged much less than
Severus knew his work was worth. Throughout everything, he never showed
anything but passionless competence, as if he knew that Severus would despise a
display of personal emotion. What he felt about Severus�s return from death
thanks to the antivenin floating in his veins, he had never disclosed.

�� Despite his
past, Severus did not like to think himself an ungrateful man. And he had never
thanked Potter.

�� He took a
deep breath and said, �I�appreciate it.�

�� Potter
blinked at him. �Appreciate what?� There wasn�t even a quickening of interest
in his eyes. He seemed to assume that he had misunderstood.

�� Severus
growled, disliking the fact that Potter would force him to speak the words
straight out. But he managed to wrestle his tongue under control. If he spoke
sharply now, then Potter would turn around and leave the shop, and probably
never believe any attempt that Severus made in future to clear the debt between
them.

�� Thank
you,� he said. �For�standing up for me. For working
for me at a price that I know is discounted.� He pondered thanking Potter for
the donation, but reminded himself again that he had no absolute proof of that,
and Potter would probably resent being thanked since he�d chosen anonymity on
his own. �For helping me,� he finished, �though you have no reason to do so.�

�� Potter�s
eyes widened, and continued widening, until Severus thought he was going to
faint. He did put out one hand on the wall as though to catch himself, and
lightly shook his head. �Why would you do that?� he asked,
his voice distant. �You hate me.�

�� I do not
hate you,� Severus corrected carefully. It was something he had thought of
before, when he wondered why he let Potter return to the shop the next month to
renew the wards, instead of refusing or at least insisting on paying full
price. (He would be stupid to give up Potter�s services completely when he was
the best in the business). �I have disliked you, yes. But you have fought for
me and benefited me since the war. And you know some of the secrets I would not
willingly have shared if I were not close to death, and yet you do not mock me
for them.� Severus felt his face burn. He had panicked when he thought that his
memories of Lily might die with him; it would be like her suffering a second
death. So he had called them forth from within his head and given them to
Potter.

It had been a mistake, but he had
not suffered for it. That was a kindness he had not expected.

Potter spent some time considering
Severus�s face with a methodical gaze, as if he assumed that this would turn
out to be a trick or a trap any moment. Then he nodded. �All right,� he said,
and he was almost as blank as he had been before. �Thanks for letting me know.
I�ll see you next month.�

He slipped out the door, leaving
Severus to stare after him. He wondered why he should be so disappointed.
Surely that was the best reaction Potter could have to the statements Severus
had just made. An emotional one would have embarrassed them both; one of scorn
or hatred would have made Severus regret speaking at all.

Then why did he feel as if he held
out a hand to a wild bird and watched it fly away?

*

�� It�s stupid to focus on something so small.
Go to sleep.

�� And Harry
should have. He should have shut his eyes and slipped immediately, blankly,
into dreamland. It wasn�t hard. He had a lot of practice at being blank during
the day when he was casting the same wards over and over again, or listening to
the high-flown dreams of people who wanted something they could never afford,
before he knocked them back down to what was practical again.

�� But
instead, he lay there with his eyes shut but his mind racing and dancing and,
God help him, practically sparkling over
Snape�s words.

�� Harry
hadn�t done what he�d done for Snape because he expected thanks. He�d done it
because he�d been wrong, horribly wrong, and this was the only way he knew to
make up for it. Snape wouldn�t want gifts, or apologies, or deep heart-to-heart
talks about his mum, which Harry might have tried if he�d thought there was any
chance of it working; he still wanted to know so much. But instead, he�d handed
over what he thought Snape would take, and he�d been right. Going to his shop
every month was just a duty like so many others, like going to the Burrow for
dinner once a week and checking all the post he got for poisons or Dark spells.

�� But now,
Snape had spoken.

�� It was a
tiny bit of kindness, but Harry didn�t care. His life had faded into mindless,
meaningless routine, with the only blessing the fact that at least no Dark Lord
was trying to kill him. He had tried to date, and only ended up making idle
conversation and perfunctory love with the women he took out. He had tried to
get up some new adventure with his friends, but they were settled down into
marriage and work, and didn�t have time. So Harry had resigned himself to the
state of the world and had expected things to continue like that until he was
found dead of boredom someday.

�� If this had
changed, though, what else might not change?

�� Harry saw
his life as if through clear glass for the first time since he�d broken free of
the Ministry, and despised himself. What the fuck was he doing? He could have reached out and swept away all the cobwebs and
obstacles at any time, but he hadn�t wanted to. It had seemed like too much
effort. He wasn�t depressed; he wasn�t undergoing any trauma. He was just continuing.

�� Well, tomorrow, I�m going to stop.

*

�� You ought
to eat something.�

�� Draco
winced, but kept his face calm and still as he stared out the window. �I�m not
hungry,� he said.

�� The ending
of one love affair isn�t the ending of the world, you know,� his mother said in
a slightly superior voice, as if she thought that Draco might not know that.
Draco heard her shoving cups and plates around on the table behind him, where
she was setting down another large tray of food he wouldn�t eat. �Especially the ending of a love affair with someone who would be
an utterly unsuitable candidate for marriage.�

�� Draco set
his teeth and said nothing. Yes, of course he couldn�t have married Pansy, who
was already married and who had just moved to France with her husband. But his
parents� intense focus on marriage and grandchildren made Draco want to run
away to France and show up on Pansy�s doorstep just to spite them all.

�� You ought
to eat something,� Narcissa said. �Then you ought to go out and fly on your
broom. That would get some blood running through your veins again.� And get me out from under your feet, Draco
thought, silently supplying the words she would never say. �But remember to
stay away from the front of the house.�

�� What�s
happening at the front of the house?� Draco asked listlessly. There was a small
blue flower extending climbing tendrils around the edge of the window he looked
out. He thought about clipping its vine so it would fall backwards and learn
something about the hopelessness of hope, but it seemed like too much effort.

�� Oh,
Potter�s there, putting up wards,� his mother said, and pushed something aside
on the table, probably a dish cover. Draco smelled a tantalizing scent of fruit
and meat, but he kept his back stubbornly turned. �I know you don�t like each
other,� his mother lightly chattered on, �so I thought I should lessen the
chance that you�d meet.�

�� Potter.

�� The name
called up old hatreds for Draco, but it had been so long since they had seen
each other that they were dusty, faded things, like some of the tapestries in
the back rooms of the Manor no longer used for guests. Draco tried to remember
some of the things that Potter had done him to him in Hogwarts, and discovered
that those had faded, too. He shook his head.

�� Definitely too long since he�s been around to add some
kind of variety to my life. I need to visit him and renew those memories.

�� Draco
turned around and reached for the plate of food. No sense in falling over in
the middle of a confrontation with Potter, who would be quick to pounce on such
weakness.

�� There you
are,� his mother said, and gave him a restrained smile before she headed out of
the room. �I knew this couldn�t last forever,� Draco heard her murmur.

�� Draco smiled
nastily to himself as he ate the delicately baked chicken and followed it with
a fresh bowl of strawberries and whipped cream. Don�t count on that, Mother. As soon as I�ve heard a few new insults from
Potter�s lips, I plan to return to feeling sorry for myself all I like. And you
won�t even be able to complain, because I�ll have done a few things you wanted
me to do.

*

�� You�re
lucky that we don�t require a better standard of dress in our servants,
Potter.�

�� Harry
blinked and looked down. He was standing on a ladder to reach the higher
windows that had to be warded; he had offered to come
up the stairs, but the Malfoys had utterly refused to let him in the Manor.
Harry once would have accepted that calmly. Since the change Snape had made in
his life, he rolled his eyes and whispered sarcastic comments to himself.

�� And he
wasn�t about to tamely bear the insults from Draco Malfoy, who stood below the
ladder, eying his tattered grey jumper with disdain.

�� I wasn�t
aware that you gave your servants clothes at all,� he called back. �So I�m
almost certainly exhibiting better taste than they are.�

�� Malfoy
blinked, as though he hadn�t thought it likely Harry would talk back and so had
no retorts in place to deal with that. Harry turned back to the work he was
doing and drew the line of a ward from one side of
the window to another. Light followed the line. Harry focused on it and cast
the spell that would endow the light with defensive properties.

�� The ward
flashed as its purpose entered its �brain,� and then grew as bright as a
meteorite before fading into nothingness. Harry smiled. He enjoyed the way that
wards seemed to learn what he required of them in a set of stages, rather than
being cast all at once and finished. That was another thing he hadn�t allowed
himself to think about in a long time, he realized. He would think about the
idea and then dismiss it, telling himself that the wards weren�t alive and so
couldn�t learn.

�� Did you
knit that jumper yourself,� Malfoy said, apparently deciding that now was as
good a time as any to add more of his irrelevant words, �or did you steal it
from a homeless Muggle?�

�� That�s a
third-class insult, Malfoy.� Harry squinted, and decided that the wards he�d
already cast sheltered this window sufficiently. He waved his wand, and the
ladder rose and shifted sideways, while Harry clung to it to ensure he didn�t
fall off. The next window had older glass than the first one, and Harry studied
it with an expert eye. It would be a bit harder to protect. Wards set up certain
vibrations in the objects that they were attached to, and were likely to
shatter anything exceptionally fragile. Harry adjusted the mental list of
spells he would have to use and began to cast.

�� My insults
are always first-class, Potter.�
Malfoy�s voice had frozen. �And my spells, too.�

�� A moment
later, Harry felt the ladder tremble beneath him. He held onto it firmly with
his left hand and looked down.

�� Malfoy was
hurling hexes at the base of the ladder. Harry watched with a smile and waited
for him to notice the truth.

�� Finally,
Malfoy stopped casting, stared for a minute, and then cast a detection spell.
When it finished and showed him its results�invisible to other eyes�his jaw
dropped, and he looked up at Harry with a betrayed expression. �This ladder is
warded,� he said.

�� Of
course,� Harry said. �I always do that, since the time I had an encounter with
a Crup who wasn�t fairly trained to accept strangers and thought the fastest
way to bring me down was biting through a piece of wood.� He shrugged and
turned back to his work.

�� Malfoy
didn�t leave, to Harry�s surprise. The Malfoy he remembered from school, or
thought he remembered, would have sulked away. But he didn�t speak for long
moments, either. When he did, it was about something entirely different.

�� Why did
you come here and help us?�

�� Harry
glanced down again. Malfoy stood a sufficient distance from the foot of the
ladder that Harry thought he wasn�t going to try tampering with it again. But
he had his arms folded, and a bored expression on his face. Harry wondered if
perhaps the question wasn�t a distraction from some new tactic of getting to
him, as he had thought, but a genuine one.

�� Because you pay me was the answer on his lips,
but he stopped and thought. No, his real reasons were closer to the reasons he
had for helping Snape. And he thought Malfoy deserved to know that.

�� Because I
didn�t think many other people would,� he answered, drawing the first line of
the new ward around the window he was standing next to. �I know how badly the
defenses were damaged here during the war. I thought you probably needed new
ones.� He could have said something about how they�d held out against
contacting him much longer than he�d thought they would, but decided that was
also something likely to cause an argument.

�� And, wonder
of wonders, he wanted to talk to Malfoy more than he wanted to argue with him.
Snape�s kindness was a new thing. Harry would try extending that kindness to
Malfoy and seeing what happened. It would at least be new.

�� Won�t your
friends hate it that you helped us?� Malfoy sounded a bit hopeful now, perhaps
because he was thinking of the Weasleys� reaction and assuming it would be
painful for Harry.

�� I don�t
think so,� Harry said. �They�re more mature than that. At least, I hope so,� he
added, thinking with a sigh of some of the things Ron had said about Malfoy in
the last fortnight. Ron was still an Auror, and Harry didn�t think he�d come
into contact with the Malfoys since the trials that had set Narcissa and Draco
free and put Lucius under house arrest, but he still ranted about them at
times.

�� Malfoy
laughed. �You hope. You should have
chosen a different set of friends if you wanted to fulfill that hope.�

�� Harry
rolled his eyes. �As if you were much better,� he said, and drew the second
line. The wards sealed themselves in a circle, flashing red and gold. Harry
waited until the last possible trace of light died away before he started
drawing the third line. When he didn�t, there were flaws or breaks in the wards
themselves, and that could be deadly, given a place that was already
vulnerable.

�� I told
you,� Malfoy said, sounding injured, �I always had a better class of insult.
And I never started the fights we got into.�

�� Harry
stared down at him. �Right,� he drawled, and then found that one word seemed to
have used up all his incredulity. He laughed instead. �You started at least
half of them,� he said. �Why were you so obsessed with following us around and
finding out what we did, anyway? It�s not as though we were planning to hurt
you.�

�� Most of the time,� Malfoy corrected. �I seem to remember a
time when Crabbe and Goyle suddenly turned into you.�

�� We still
weren�t trying to hurt you.� Harry set up the final ward and smiled as the
glass in the window shook lightly, then settled back into place. That was a
sign that it was well-protected. �We thought you were the Heir of Slytherin,
actually, and we were trying to find out what you knew about the Chamber of
Secrets.�

�� Malfoy said
nothing. Harry looked down to see why and found him staring up with an absurdly
flattered look.

�� You
thought I was the Heir of Slytherin,� Malfoy murmured. �Really?
The Heir?� He was obviously trying out the title to
see if it fit.

�� Harry
raised his left hand from the ladder to clamp it over his lips, trying to look
as if he was stifling a yawn. He suspected that laughing maniacally right now
would destroy whatever chance he had to make peace with Malfoy.

�� Malfoy
shook himself out of the trance at last and stared up accusingly. �Well, that time
you meant to hurt me,� he snapped.
�If I was the Heir and you�d found out, you would have reported me to the
Aurors and let them put me in Azkaban.�

�� Besides
the fact that I don�t think they put children in Azkaban,� Harry said,
clutching the ladder again as it floated across the front of the house towards
the next window, �yes, of course we would have reported you if it had been you.
You were Petrifying people and trying to kill them.�

�� It was in
the service of�� Malfoy began, and then shut up.

Harry looked down again, and saw
that Malfoy had turned the color of the kind of smelly cheese Hermione was
always trying to make Ron eat, and was staring at his hands.

�Yeah,� Harry said softly. �It�s
not so easy to speak up for Voldemort�s ideals when Voldemort tortured you,
huh?�

Malfoy lifted his eyes in what
Harry supposed he could see as an appeal if he wanted to. And he could choose
the way he wanted to answer it. He could turn back to his wards and go on with
his work, as he would have done yesterday. Before Snape had shown him a bit of
kindness and changed the world.

He cast the spell that let him
slide swiftly down the ladder instead, and landed right beside Malfoy. Malfoy
started away from him, and kept a careful eye on Harry�s wand.

�� Sensible, Harry acknowledged. More sensible than what I�m
going to do. He reached
out and put a hand on Malfoy�s shoulder. �It�s all right,� he said quietly.
�We�ve both grown up since then, but we both lived through it. I saw visions of
Voldemort when he wasn�t careful. I saw you through my scar. I know that you
didn�t want to torture them, that you only did it because it was them or you.�

�� Malfoy
stared at him with his mouth wide open, the expression he�d had when Harry came
to the Manor the summer after the war to return his wand. Then he whirled and
ran away into the house.

�� Harry
blinked after him, then shrugged. He reckoned that not
all the reaching out he might do would be as successful as Snape�s.

�� But I�ll get better with practice, he
thought as he floated back up to the ladder to his former position. Maybe it�s time to start dating again.
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Kinder, Kindler, Kindlier