Chapter Two of 'Love, Free As Air'- From Between the Bars
Chapter One.
Title: Love, Free As Air (2/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Sex, angst, profanity, a bit of violence. Ignores the epilogue of DH.
Pairings: Snape/Harry/Draco.
Rating: R
Summary: Trapped in his Animagus form, Harry stumbles on Snape and Draco, who disappeared from the wizarding world years ago. His first task is to become human again. His second might be to help Snape and Draco with the same problem.
Author’s Notes: This story is being written for
heeroluva, who won a charity auction at
gulf_aid_now to raise money for the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. She gave me the plot, for which I thank her. I’m not sure how long this story will be, though I estimate somewhere between 15 and 20 chapters. The title comes from a quote by Alexander Pope.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two-From Between the Bars
After a few days of living in a cage, placed against the far wall of the large dark room that served Snape and Malfoy as a cross between study and drawing room, Harry knew more about the two men than he had ever wanted to know.
For example, he knew that Malfoy stumbled out of bed in the morning with his hair mussed all to one side and bits of food still stuck between his teeth. He would give Harry the bowl of seeds, nuts, and slices of fruit that he seemed to have decided was a perfect diet for a parrot, yawning all the time, which gave Harry the perfect opportunity to look at his tonsils, assuming he wanted to. Then he stumbled back into the bathroom and did some arcane series of wandless Transfigurations that resulted in him emerging looking like the sleek man Harry had spotted in the garden that first day.
Malfoy would spend a portion of the morning talking to Harry, or rather, sitting in the same room and using Harry as a convenient audience for his tales of woe or his latest reading. Then he would go out in the garden and sit staring at the sky. He came back inside to eat his lunch, then would sit with a book, or sleep, or go walking in the garden once more, and so on until dinner.
He never seemed to spend much time with Snape.
Harry wasn’t stupid; he had figured out within a few hours of coming here that Snape and Malfoy were lovers. But it showed more in the way Malfoy hunched his shoulders and snapped, and Snape ignored him with a magnificence Harry couldn’t remember Snape using even on him in school, than in any tender touches or loving words.
Harry had to seriously pause when he thought of that and ask himself whether he had thought that Snape and Malfoy would use tender touches or loving words anyway. He would shake his head and preen his feathers afterwards, in the hopes that smoothing them back into place would also put his thoughts in some semblance of order.
Snape was different. He would come out a full hour before Malfoy and stand looking through the window into the garden. Then he would turn around, give Harry a single cold look, and go to fetch his own breakfast. (If Malfoy ate breakfast, Harry never saw him do it). After that, it was brewing, brewing, brewing, and sometimes reading Potions books in the drawing room-cum-study in the evening, pausing now and then for a single bite of toast or a cup of soup.
Harry thought he would have feared Snape less in school if he had known how phenomenally boring the man was.
Snape almost never spoke. He seemed to find enough to content him in his cauldrons and books. Malfoy would look at him constantly, open his mouth, and then snap it shut again, turning his head away. Harry could practically hear him thinking that interrupting Snape’s solitude would never be worth it.
A pretty sad statement when you think about it, that you can’t imagine interrupting your lover to offer him your presence, Harry thought, and then had to spend a little time biting his toenails before he could feel normal again.
Snape and Malfoy’s relationship-if Harry had to think about it in those terms, and it seemed he did-was falling apart slowly, like a building subjected to the Detonation-in-Eternity Curse. Snape never noticed. Malfoy was too wrapped up in it to notice anything else.
That ought to have made this the perfect set of conditions for Harry to escape. Malfoy barely paid attention to him except when Harry did something he hadn’t seen before, like hang upside-down from the top of the cage, or when he wanted an audience to the sad little story of his sad little life. Harry should have picked the lock that fastened the door of the cage and made his way out the window on the second day, or at least convinced Malfoy that he was who he said he was and got some help in changing back.
Except that neither of those worked.
Malfoy had been clever when he conjured the lock, clever enough that Harry thought he ought to be punished by being locked up with it after death (if he shouldn’t be punished by being made to sit in a room with Snape and continually trying to get some of his attention). The lock had a steel cover over the wards that made it move, and the cover was impossible to lift from any angle that Harry could attain inside the cage. Even when he clung to the bars of the door beneath it, stretched his beak through the bars, and lifted, the cover wouldn’t cling to anything; it fell back down with a rattling noise just when Harry was starting to insert the curved tip of his beak between the flutings of the lock.
It was maddening.
The other course, Harry tried in desperation the fourth day he was there, because he thought that perhaps his suspicions about Malfoy being paranoid and willing to kill him if Harry mentioned his name were exaggerated. He waited until Snape was deeply involved in something in his lab and Malfoy was sitting on the couch, supposedly reading but really staring at the wall with a faraway look in his eyes. He was about to begin complaining, and Harry would just as soon head that off if he could.
“Listen,” he said.
Malfoy glanced at him with a faint smile. “Your voice is so clear, Compensation,” he said. (Harry also hated the name Malfoy had chosen for him. It made Malfoy sound so soppy and Harry sound like some faithful lapdog come to relieve his loneliness). “I reckon that you’ll start talking like us eventually, won’t you? Or like me,” he added, plunged straight back into gloom. “I don’t think Severus ever talks to you.”
Harry had an unfortunately clear, if brief, vision of Malfoy twisting in Snape’s arms in bed, calling out, “Severus!” He shuddered as best as he could without big shoulders and tried again.
“I really did know you at Hogwarts, Malfoy,” he said. “You scared me on the Quidditch pitch by dressing up like a Dementor. I found you in the bathroom crying during our sixth year. It’s me, Harry Potter.”
Malfoy went quite still. His hand slid to his wand. Harry held his breath, ready to spread his wings and flap furiously from side to side if he needed to. Luckily, Malfoy had made the cage big enough for that.
Then Malfoy shook his head and cast a spell. He was distant enough on the couch that Harry couldn’t make out the words his lips were forming, but the movements of his wand looked familiar. It was a charm that would let him sense any magic clinging to an animal, or at least Harry thought it was. He arched his neck helpfully on his perch and hoped for the best.
Malfoy sat still when the spell was finished and turned pink. Then he rose and stalked across the room to Harry.
He bent down so that his face was level with Harry. Harry looked at him hopefully. He didn’t like the look in Malfoy’s eyes, though, and his words were even less likeable.
“Severus?” Malfoy whispered. “Can you hear me? This isn’t funny, you bastard. It wasn’t funny when you enchanted the morning glory and it’s not funny this time either.”
Harry stared. What?
“You can’t fool me into thinking it’s the bloody bird,” Malfoy said, voice scathing. “I just checked and there’s no magic of any kind on him-no charms that would give him memories belonging to someone else, no magic that would conceal the fact that he’s an Animagus, nothing. That means it’s you and your bloody undetectable potions again. Give me one reason, just one, why I shouldn’t storm into your lab and interrupt your brewing.”
“It’s really me,” Harry said, and tried to think of something Malfoy had done to him that Snape wouldn’t know about, the way he would about the bathroom incident and probably the confrontation on the Quidditch pitch. It was hard, though, when his mind was reeling with the other knowledge Malfoy had discovered.
Not only had the criminals he’d been spying on put a spell on him that would trap him in his Animagus form, they’d used another charm-or that charm itself had a component-that made anyone else unable to find the magic.
Bastards. Harry hoped they’d all burned in the fire that a quarrel over money between them had started.
“You wanted to fight a duel with me first year,” Harry said, and pressed closer to the side of the cage, cocking his head so that he could see Malfoy better with one eye. Damn beak. “You didn’t show up. That was a trap. You didn’t tell Snape about that, did you? You couldn’t have.”
“Yes, very funny, Severus,” Malfoy said, but his voice had changed. It sounded more like frozen glass breaking and less like anger. “To use words against me that I spoke in privacy. I find your joke unamusing, and since you won’t admit to it…”
He stalked away down the corridor.
Harry leaned his forehead against the bars and kept it there for a minute, not caring how odd the gesture would make him look to anyone who thought he was a bird. By this point, someone thinking he was odd could only work out well for him.
Fuck. I forgot that they’ve probably been lovers, or at least friends, for years, and that Malfoy has probably told Snape everything about his Hogwarts career in a desperate attempt to seem important enough for him.
And if Snape has played jokes like this before…
If he had to pick a side in the endless arguments that haunted this house, Harry thought, this would have been enough to make him choose Malfoy’s.
*
Draco could feel the anger and the bile collecting together in his throat, creating a hot mixture that he would have to spit out rather than swallow. Luckily, he had someone he could unload that mixture onto.
Severus had cast spells like this before, though only the first one had ever fooled Draco. He had made his voice seem to emerge from the morning glory vines shortly after they’d begun to grow, and because of his use of a potion, Draco had found no magic when he used the charm that should have detected it. Draco had half-believed, for a few minutes, that the vine was really as strange and sentient as it seemed to be, a transformed wizard or unknown magical variety, and had confessed several different things to it before he remembered the Televox Potion that Severus was working on. He had destroyed the vine in a fit of rage and suffered from Severus’s calm assessment that night that he was childish and required help in controlling his anger.
Severus had tried it since, with furniture and other flowers and insects, but not for years. Draco had thought he had given it up at last.
Now he understood. Severus had only waited until he had a target that Draco might actually have believed, a bird with a human voice.
Draco struck out with one arm when he reached the wards around Severus’s lab. Though Severus had undoubtedly forgotten it, he had built weaknesses and flaws into the wards years ago, when they were on better terms, that would respond to Draco’s touch and fall apart if Draco ever desperately needed to reach him. They allowed Draco, now, to walk straight into the lab and not fear the fire that might have come to life in his guts if he was an intruder.
He slammed the door behind him.
Severus jumped, dropping a bit of metal he held into the cauldron he was currently poised above. Draco smiled. He thought it was probably a mean and spiteful smile, and he wasn’t displeased with the notion that Severus would turn around and see that on the face of the person who had dared to interrupt him.
Not that Severus turned at once. He stared into the ruined potion as if he wanted to memorize the exact terms under which it had failed, and then turned so that his robes snapped and clapped behind him. But Draco, if not immune to hurt from his lover, had at least grown immune to this tactic years ago, and only waited, arms folded, until Severus faced him.
“I don’t know why you assumed I would believe your voice emerging from a bird’s beak any more than I believed it coming from the table two years ago,” he said.
Severus narrowed his eyes. “Do tell me whatever impossible story you have dreamed up now, Draco,” he drawled, “and strip it of unnecessary details, so that I may return to what gives meaning to my life.”
Draco sucked in his breath. He would have liked to close his eyes and take a moment to assimilate the hurt Severus’s words caused him. He had never said before, so openly, that his brewing mattered more to him than Draco did.
But closing his eyes was a sign of weakness that Severus would pounce on in a moment, so instead he told the truth that Severus must already know.
“You used the Televox Potion to make my bird speak about secrets only you could have known,” he said. “It wasn’t your voice, but it doesn’t need to be when that parrot has one of its own. I’ve checked and double-checked, and there’s no magic on the bird at all, let alone any charm that could have concealed Animagus ability. It was you. It must have been. Why? Are you annoyed that I’ve passed all your little exams for the last year or so?” That was Severus’s justification for the pranks he tried to pull, that they were exams meant to test Draco’s emotional resilience and mental stability. He had to be stable, both mentally and emotionally, if he was to last out years in a confined and controlled environment like this house where they had only each other, Severus had explained.
That was another explanation that Draco would have received with wide eyes and beating heart years ago, longing to be found worthy.
Now he knew that Severus would never find him worthy no matter what he did.
Severus regarded him with his mouth and nostrils pinched tight. Then he shook his head. “I did not use the potion,” he said. “I have better things to do than grant you a chance to pass exams you have already failed.”
“When did I fail it?” Draco demanded, drawn despite himself into a row that he hadn’t wanted to have. “Tell me that. I was fooled for three minutes that first time, and since then, I’ve never believed you.”
“Those three minutes were the failure.”
Severus’s mouth was twisted, his eyes bright with contempt and disgust. Draco clenched his hands into fists. He could not believe that he had once loved this man, or convinced himself he did. Wasn’t it more likely that he had brewed his hero-worship and his frantic wish to remain free into a concoction as poisonous as any of Severus’s draughts and then called it love?
Well. He would have liked to think that, but he wasn’t sure he could, when his head and chest still pounded with pain whenever Severus did something like this.
“You’re lying,” Draco whispered. “The bird isn’t an Animagus. You’ve done things like this before. What other explanation could there be?”
“If you must think that to live with yourself, then so be it,” Severus said, and turned away. “I will need an hour’s extra work to put this right. Consider that hour stolen from time I might have spent with you this evening.”
The audacity made Draco want to scream. Severus never spent time with him in the evenings anymore. It had been months since they’d slept in the same bed, even. But to say that, to imply that he might have, and that it was Draco’s fault that he had changed his plans…
It was the kind of emotional blackmail that Severus had been pulling for years, Draco thought dully. It had either been less blatant before, or Draco had refused to see it for what it was. Perhaps a combination of both. In some ways, though not in all, Severus Snape was not a subtle man.
“Fine,” he said, and walked out of the room.
At least he managed to keep his head from dangling uselessly until he got out of the corridor that led to the lab. And then he gathered up lunch-if only a cheese sandwich-and ate it before he went out into the garden. And he chose a section of the garden that he knew Severus couldn’t see from either the lab or the kitchen, the rooms he was likely to spend time in for the rest of the afternoon.
He had little left except his pride. Best to nourish that, if only with the scraps of dignity and restraint he could snatch from Severus.
*
When and why had he taken such a childish lover?
The thought intruded itself between Severus and his refinement of the Blood-Replenisher, which had never happened before. Draco’s entrance had disturbed him more than he had thought. He stepped back from the cauldron and began to pace out the neatly calculated set of steps around his lab that would give him the maximum of exercise while keeping him a comfortable distance from the cauldrons and more delicate ingredients.
An odd lie for Draco to speak, that accusation that Severus had used the Televox Potion on the ragged parrot he had rescued the other day-a bird whose feathers were not even good material for the potions he had tried them in. He must be lying, of course, because Severus had done no such thing and he had cast charms himself that showed the parrot was ordinary.
However, perhaps there were other explanations. It was more charity than Draco deserved, but he might have heard the words that he thought he had. Severus picked up his wand, listened a moment to ensure that Draco was not in the house, and then went into the drawing room, where the parrot’s cage sat.
The enlarged rat cage was now nearly as tall as Severus and as wide as the smaller couch. The bird inside twisted its head around and eyed Severus sideways as he approached. Draco had trimmed and smoothed a branch that he had stuck through the middle of the bars to serve as a perch. The bird seemed to spend its time on that, staring at them and occasionally screaming when Severus was trying to read.
No doubt he can sense delicate mental operations taking place and does not wish them to, as they might challenge his intelligence for supremacy, Severus thought. Then he discarded the thought. Its rhetoric and formulation suggested that he was falling into the same trap as Draco by attributing unusual force of willpower and brainpower to the bird.
He lifted his wand when he was near the bars. The bird went frantic, immediately screaming, puffing his feathers out, and flinging himself off the perch to flutter around the back of the cage.
Draco might indulge such hysterics, but Severus had no time for them. He cast a spell that chained the bird’s legs to the bars and then reached in with a confident hand to hold the neck still.
The bird bit his finger, beak closing down as if it meant to unscrew the top of his skin like a seedcase.
Severus swore, jerked his hand backwards, and cast Numbing and Blood-Clotting Charms in quick succession. His fault, of course; he should have muzzled the bird before he did anything else. He waited until he thought he would not incinerate the bird’s feathers in a sheer display of bad temper-they could still be valuable, and he didn’t wish to listen to Draco’s sulks-and then raised his wand once more.
“I know you,” the bird said. “Severus Snape. Snivellus. Sirius used to call you that. Do you remember him?”
Severus went very still. There were people in the world who still knew that he had borne that insulting name-though not the most damaging, with Black, the werewolf, and Potter all dead-but not many. And the list of the survivors was small enough that he thought he might determine who was speaking through the parrot with relative ease.
His mind, though, picked rapidly among the various players and justifications and could find no reason for this exact combination of circumstances. Why would any of those players send a bird to him to speak those words? If they could find their way through Severus’s wards, they would simply have arrested him and dragged him back to suffer the Dementor’s Kiss. Potter might have played a prank like this, yes, but Severus knew how rigid and brittle his justifications were. He would not have left the bird here so long before casting the spell that would let him speak through it, and he would not have left it so long before he came crashing through the wards on his self-righteous mission to capture Severus.
“Really, Snape. I didn’t think you were this stupid. You sent Malfoy outside in tears. What, is he upset because you won’t fuck him?”
Severus added a spell that would allow someone to see through the parrot’s eyes to the list of magic that must be active here. It was extraordinary that any of the fools in the Ministry’s employ could manipulate an animal’s perceptions this way, given that they would have to push aside its instincts and desires in addition to coping with its limited presence in Severus and Draco’s home. It could not have seen as much as the spy would have wished it to from its cage.
Of course, there was one answer that would fit all the evidence so far. Severus cleared his throat. “I am astonished at your facility with magic, Miss Granger, although I should not be. May I know the reason for the insults?”
“I’m not Hermione,” the bird said. “I’m Harry Potter. I got trapped in this form by a spell that the people I was watching must have invented. And it has a component that makes it impossible to detect by other magic.”
Severus shook his head. “There is no such spell. It is theoretically impossible to develop one. I have read esoteric magical theory for years, and the many who have tried have all stumbled against the same obstacles. If a researcher had discovered the means to make such a charm, he would have been internationally famous at once.”
“Yeah,” the bird said. “Because international fame really matters to criminals.”
Severus cocked his head. Certain features of what the bird said would fit in with the evidence better than the explanation he had proposed. But he could not afford to let his guard down yet. He had lived too long for that.
“Say I accept your claim,” he said. “Why did you not say something before now? If your form has a voice, you could have alerted us at once, and then Draco would have kicked you out through the wards and we should have troubled each other no longer.”
“I couldn’t fly because of another spell they cast on me as I was escaping,” the bird said, shaking its feathers and climbing cautiously back down towards the perch before the chain stopped it from moving, “so I knew that I would have to stay here if I was going to recover. And if you did believe me, you might have hurt me. Or you might have been paranoid and tried to murder me. I can believe that you’re paranoid, with all the wards around this place,” he added under his breath. He raised his voice again with another glance at Severus. “Today, I decided that it was better to take the risk than stay a prisoner any longer. Are you going to help me or not?”
The voice sounded like Potter’s, Severus thought, but that did not eliminate the hypothesis that he was manipulating the bird from a distance (after having got someone else to actually cast the spell, of course). He could at least try a few potions to see if the spell the bird described really existed and could be reversed. Already he could feel the excitement of a new theoretical direction stirring in him like a snake in water.
“I will attempt to help you,” he said. “For a price.”
Potter-truly, Severus might have to think of him that way now, hard as it was to accept that the boy had such an intelligent Animagus form-ruffled his wings out and stared at him gloomily.
“When you are human again,” Severus said, “you will take an Unbreakable Vow not to reveal my location or Draco’s, to willingly bring harm to us, or to lead anyone else here.”
Potter bobbed his head. “Just stop me from being a fucking bird any longer.”
“We will have to see,” Severus said, and strode back down the corridor to his lab, taking exquisite pleasure in being able to leave Potter caged behind him.
It was only halfway through his first potion that he realized Draco had not been lying after all, though he had been mistaken about the source of the parrot’s words.
Severus paused, then lifted his shoulder in a shrug. The realization changed matters only within his own mind, not in the outside world.
Chapter Three.
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