"Secrets" for sapphiretragedy.
Secrets by ravenna_c_tan
Happy Beltane, sapphiretragedy!
Title: Secrets
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/Snape, Snape/Draco,
Word Count: 4200
Summary: Harry has a secret lover, whose secrets he would love to divine for himself. But there is little time for contemplating the mysteries of live when you are trying to kill the Dark Lord.
Warnings: None.
Beta-read by: My very own Severus. You know who you are!
Request: "I want angst - it can have a happy ending, but try to put the characters through their paces. I prefer some kind of HP/SS/DM relationship. Not necessarily NC-17, but a dynamic at least. Please include a reaction to the events of HBP - How do they deal? How did they end up there? I am also more interested in character driven things, too. Plot isn't as important to me as character."
A/N: I started and threw out two previous stories for this request before this one caught fire! I love this threesome but found I kept going back to writing stories of how they ended up together rather than ones in which they are already in a threeway dynamic. I hope that's all right. In particular what struck me in the request was "a reaction to the events of HBP - How do they deal? How did they end up there?" That was what really sparked the following:





Secrets
by (anonymous)

This man comes to me with secrets. Some of the secrets belong to the so-called Dark Lord, and we use them to kill him, one piece at a time.

Some of the secrets are best left unspoken, and he teaches them to me in the dark of night, with his hands and his mouth and his body.

And that makes him my secret, too.

***

He is stroking me with my own foreskin, if barely touching me with two fingers can be called stroking. I am sweating and trembling under this touch, which has been going on for hours. Well, more like an hour, but still, that is a long time to lie perfectly still merely because one's lover is curious what will happen.

I count myself curious, too, though, which is why I agreed. No, why kid myself? Since the very first time he made me come, I've never turned down a suggestion of his. They nearly always end in a moment of pleasure, and those are rare in this war.

They offset the times when he is moody, difficult, perplexing. Or maybe those offset the times when I am fractious and confusing. I at least have the excuse of being not yet twenty. He is older than me, though I don't know by how much. Sometimes it seems only a few years, other times decades. It's so hard to tell with wizards. Then again, people who know me tell me I aged ten years in the past two--war will do that. So who the hell knows. He acts as though he's older, or at least more experienced than me, and the reality we create between us is what matters anyway. He has dark, curly hair and hazel eyes that change color with the light.

His stroke is as light as the puffs of air that come from his chuckle. I feel them against my sweat-damp temple. "Bastard...!" I accuse through teeth gritted with the intensity of my arousal.

He laughs all the more. He has never told me his name. I swear it is not for secrecy's sake. It is so I have nothing to call out when I masturbate alone at night, thinking about him. Instead I must wait until he is actually here to have anything tangible of his presence.

And even then, sometimes he disappears suddenly, like smoke. Like now.

I am left alone, hard and aching, and grab my cock desperately. I come before my hand can even close completely, crying out wordlessly, and wondering when the next time I will see him is.

***

There are those, if they knew, who would say I am the worst kind of fool. Seduced by a stranger. Thinking with my cock. But I can't explain how it was that I did not trust him, even after he had brought me irrefutable evidence, until we became intimate. I have always wanted to ask him how he knew that would do the trick, but I am afraid to learn that it was just a guess, a wild stab to see what would work. I am afraid to find out what happens after the last horcrux is destroyed--by which I mean Voldemort himself. Will my lover disappear like smoke after the final battle? Questions like these would keep me up at night were I not so exhausted than any chance to sleep my body grabs eagerly, regardless of how my mind frets.

The first time had been the summer after sixth year. A few months after that horrid night on the Tower. I had been getting nowhere in the search for the locket. As Dumbledore had instructed, I told only Ron and Hermione and kept the rest of the Order in the dark. They seemed inclined to leave me cooped up until it was time to fulfil the prophecy, since of course they didn't know that to kill him I would have to destroy one piece at a time.

It was on a night of total frustration, when Remus and Minerva came close to imprisoning me at Grimmauld Place, that we met. So that was how Sirius felt, I thought, as I went out the door without looking back. And I felt just as reckless.

I was having a drink in a Muggle bar when the stranger came up to me. He slid onto the stool next to mine, his back to the bar and his eyes on the crowd of tired and drunken Muggles. And he said something like "I understand you're in the market for a certain piece of jewelry," or some such thing.

We bantered a bit, but I did not take him seriously. I knew he had to be from the other side. It could only be a trap. We parted that night without having gained anything from each other.

***

He knows me so well. We are on the half-ruined tower of an ancient castle, looking for the way in, when he sees my face, when he reaches for me to quell the storm of anger rising in me.

His hands are somehow cool across my brow as he pulls me close. "This is not that tower," he whispers. "Save that anger, Harry, for when you face your true enemy."

Those words are still in my ears later, when we are making love. The search of the ruin proved fruitless, and we are making up for the loss the only way we know how.

He is my secret, and my mystery, as well. I am standing, pressed against his back, naked, my erection riding his crevice hungrily. He slips his hand down, pushing my cock until it is squeezed between his thighs. It feels good, but not as good as what I crave. "I want to be inside you," I say, into his ear.

He is the only person I've ever fucked. The only one I will, until this is all over. Doesn't he understand that?

"Not this time," he says, body shaking with lust as my hands circle him, plucking at his nipples.

"Why? You practically begged for my cock last time." I am perplexed and maybe a little hurt, as I always am when he seems different from one time to the next. As if I will never truly know him, the way he seems to know me.

"I don't want to fall into a habit," he says then, voice low and sinuous. "Of needing you. And I wouldn't want you to grow too high and mighty with me."

My hands slide lower, until I am massaging his cock in both palms. "I suppose that means you think it's my turn to take it," I say into his ear. His hair is dark and curly and I nose through it.

"I wouldn't object," comes a voice dry with amusement, but rough with desire. "Where's that Gryffindor sense of fairness?"

He doesn't just fuck me when I acquiesce. He lays me down on my stomach and spreads my legs, fingering me with deliberate touches, like a chef preparing a meal just so, then bids me up on all fours, spreading the cheeks of my arse and fucking me with his tongue until I am wild with longing for him. He teases at my hole with the slippery blunt head of him, but does not deign to fuck me until I express my desire for him to get on with it. I think he considers my use of the word 'please' to be begging. As he presses into me slowly, I am thinking that in his school days he was a Slytherin for sure.

***

He had pursued me for some months, appearing when I would least expect it, until I began to go into Muggle bars and other places I could be alone and out of the eye of the Order and the Wizarding world just to see if he would appear. More often than not, he did. Perhaps it is a measure of how desperately I needed someone to talk to. We were still getting nowhere on the locket. Hermione was judgemental and opinionated about many of my ideas, while Ron was alternately uselessly morose and irritatingly cheerful when trying to be "supportive." They had each other. I had no one.

We'd had too much to drink, or at least I had, that first time. I cannot recall the details of the conversation, only that they were laced with innuendo, the strands drawing tighter and tighter as the evening wore on, until I was tied up tight by desire and a reckless urge to find out what would happen if I pushed things that far with him. His mouth looked edible as he licked foam from his upper lip. I reached for his chin right there at the table, and pulled his mouth to mine.

It was moments later we were in a room upstairs, his, that he'd rented for the night he said, though my foggy brain had not quite wondered how he'd known that would be the public house I would wander into... Maybe it was magic. I was much more concerned with pressing my body against his. I was too inexperienced to know what to do, what to ask for, just kissing him and rutting helplessly against him.

He put me against a wall and set his mouth to work, tearing open my trousers and proving to me that that mouth was indeed worth watching and fantasizing about. Watching my cock disappear into his reddened lips was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. He coughed a little when I came, but swallowed, and licked the come from his lips like a satisfied cat licking cream.

But I knew he was far from satisfied. I pushed him down onto the bed and tore at his clothes, wanting to do the same to him, to expose him before my eyes and make him come... but I did not get so far as his trousers. I was distracted by the fact that when I tore open his shirt, buttons flying everywhere, a sight was revealed to me that took all of my attention. He wore a silver locket on a chain around his neck, and he looked up at me with a smirk as I started at it. "I told you so," he said.

***

We are raiding a safehouse of Death Eaters one night, the poor saps unaware that there is nothing safe about having a bit of that madman's soul lying about, when I get a bit too carried away. I slash the throats of two of them with that old hex of Snape's, inordinately pleased at myself that I am using one of their own weapons against them.

I find the cup shortly thereafter, and we repair back to a room that I keep, that not even the Order, not even Ron and Hermione know about. I am expecting to fuck him this time, in triumph and exultation. Instead, I am shocked to find as I unbutton his collar that, though he tries to play along, he is shrinking from me.

"What is it?" I demand, urgent.

"N-nothing," he insists, but he does not move closer, nor move to disrobe himself.

I'm hurt by this. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised," I say. "Those were probably your buddies I killed tonight, weren't they? Don't look so surprised. I know you must be a Death Eater too, to know all that you do."

He looks at me, angry and surprisingly sad. "I'm not a Death Eater."

"Show me your arm, then," I insist, though I've seen it a hundred times before. I've undressed him and kissed every inch of his skin--you'd think I'd have noticed something like the Dark Mark.

He rolls up his sleeve and thrusts his arm at me. I seize his wrist then, passing my wand over the flesh with a spell that will remove any glamour. But in the firelight all I see is the fine hairs there flickering gold in the flames.

He pulls away then, hugging himself slightly, something I've never seen him do before.

"Are you afraid of me?" I ask, incredulous.

"No," he insists. "I'll be fine." He turns to me then, resolve steeling his face and I know he will now give me some half-truth. "I know you did what you had to. But I have a bad history with that curse."

I laugh. "Did you forget you used that line with me once already? And you used Sectumsempra yourself..."

"I know," he says, suddenly vehement. "Don't remind me, please."

He distracts me from my thoughts with his hand on my cock. It isn't long before he's enticed me to bury myself in him. Yet when I do, he cries out as if I've split him open.

***

The very first time he fucked me it felt almost accidental, a few months after I'd discovered the locket on him. We'd been intimate a few times by then, as if he rewarded me for opening myself up to him with information about the horcruxes. But a few orgasms here and there, accompanied with kisses, is not the same thing as sex. Not the same level of intimacy. Neither of us was quite ready to go there for a while.

But one day he was teasing me with an edge of anger, running his cock over my skin like a stiletto. "I can read you like a book," he said, as if put out by this fact. My suspicion about who he was at the time was obvious, he had to be R. A. B., right? He had the locket, so that seemed the obvious guess.

"You're smarter than you look, Potter," he said then, rubbing his erection in the hollow of my hip. "But until you learn to close your mind, anyone seducing you can look right in."

"But no one seduces me but you," I countered.

"I am not asking you for fidelity," he replied, slipping his cock between my legs then and teasing over my hole.

"Well, there's no one else," I said crossly. "I may as well make a pledge."

"No! Potter, that's no the point. The point is you should learn to close your mind."

I laughed, "I did. It was a bitch, and I had the worst Occlusion teacher ever, but I eventually managed it. I'm just not Occluding right now."

"And why the hell not?"

Good question. Maybe because lying naked with him didn't feel wanton and dangerous enough for me? "All right, look. I'm closing my mind now. See if you can pull out what I'm thinking."

He circled my cock with his hand then, which I thought was cheating, and then when I still didn't crack, he ended up fucking me. First with his finger, eventually with his cock. And he was right. I cracked.

"You think I'm R.A.B.?" he said, even as we both neared completion. So near, actually that I did not answer. But I knew from the way he'd said it, he probably was not. Perhaps it was a ruse to keep me guessing. But from that moment on, I thought he must be someone else.

***

A very confused someone else, who seems to swing between extremes from one time to the next. I never know which one of him I am going to get these days. He can always be surly, often aggressive, definitely always manipulative. But there seems to be a vulnerable side of him that I only see some of the time. The other times, he is hard as the ebony wand he carries. Am I any different, I wonder? I suppose there are the days when I want to cry in his arms, and there are the days when I want to see how many more Death Eaters I can use Sectumsempra on. With me, though, they are sometimes the same day.

We are making plans for the final confrontation with Voldemort. The Ministry is destroyed, Hogwarts itself is under siege--the Order is planning to make their final stand there.

"Listen," I say, "It's time the Order knew about you. They won't be able to claim you didn't help me destroy every horcrux, what more proof would they need?"

"No, Harry," he answers, even as he's removing his clothes solemnly, as if preparing for a ritual and not just to lie down with me. "We've got this far without them knowing, I think we ought to keep up our modus operandi."

"Don't fix what's not broken?" I ask, stripping down to nothing and laying my wand on the side table.

He nods and I pretend to cede the point as I kiss him and fondle him and tease his hole until he gasps. He's vulnerable today, moreso than usual as I look into his eyes as I penetrate him and realize his usual Occlusion has slipped. I blink in startlement, and his walls spring up again, but not before I've gathered one important fact:

He loves me.

I find I'm forcing my own eyes shut, squeezing them tight as his arse clenches at me, pulling me in. Two years. We've been through danger together, and I've confided in him so many times when I needed to talk. And there is the sex. But how can he love me, when I don't know who he is, and can't love him in return?

But of course I do. I've fallen for him long since. Even without knowing his name. The sudden recognition of the fact takes my breath away. I pull out and find myself halfway across the room.

He sits up, alarmed. "Harry?"

He is not the only one who can change the subject to suit him. "So you really think it should be just the two of us, taking out Voldemort."

He sighs, knowing that I won't be coaxed back to bed until we discuss this. "We shall have the help of one accomplice. It should be more than enough." Ha pauses, as he always does when he is weighing whether to tell me something or not. "Someone very close to him is on our side."

"You're sure?"

"I'm as sure of him as you are of me," he says. "Harry..."

But I'm suddenly not sure of anything. "I might die doing this."

"I know about the prophecy, Harry," he says. "So does... our accomplice. We'll do anything to make sure you survive."

I look up sharply. "You're saying you might die tomorrow, even if I don't."

He nods solemnly. I've never seen him like this. I decide my fears about who loves whom are bugger-all, considering what might happen tomorrow. I take him in my arms and press my cock into his hungry, willing body, and forget all about the looming future for a while.

***

The only other major assassination I took part in was that of Lucius Malfoy. If the Order had known the risk I was taking, I'm sure they would have put a stop to it. But he came to me one night--it was always night when he came to me--and outlined a plan.

"You will not have to do the deed," he assured me. "I shall take care of that."

This perplexed me. "The plan is good, but do you have something personal against Malfoy? If I'm going to cast Avada Kedavra on Voldemort, I feel perhaps I ought to practice it at some point." I know. I could barely believe the grisly words coming from my mouth. But years of war will do that to a person.

He did not listen to my logic, insisting we go with his plan. He was at his most steely, his most stubborn, and I knew better than to argue beyond a certain point.

When it came time to do the deed, though, I was surprised, he did not use Avada Kedavra at all.

He used Sectumsempra, and Malfoy's life ran out of him in scarlet ribbons, his blond hair matted in it as it pooled around him.

Later, he refused to let me touch him, offering to jerk me off if I truly needed it, but with no stomach for sex himself. "That's alright," I told him. "If you'd rather talk..."

That brought a wry snort out of him. He never wanted to "talk." Too many secrets.

I talked anyway. "I was surprised you didn't use Avada Kedavra," I said.

His jaw clenched. "I have a bad history with that curse," he said.

***

Everything seems bright, but I realize that is because I am looking at a memory--my own memory I think--and my eyes are actually closed.

Flashes of light, the hexes are flying fast and thick, and there I am, wand pointed at Voldemort.

Then it all goes dark and I am left wondering if I succeeded or not.

A voice is in the room with me. "Is he going to recover?"

Another one answers. "Time will tell. We wait."

They wait, I wait, trying to remember where I know their voices from. They are so familiar.

One of them must be my lover, I think. I cling to the hope that he survived the battle. Perhaps one is him, the other the accomplice he spoke of? I am pleased by this thought and pray that it be true.

"Did you really think we would all live this long?" the first one asks, from close by my bed.

"Never," comes the immediate answer from the other side.

"Have you given any thought to what happens now? What we say to him?"

Silence follows. I rack my brain, trying to decide which one is my lover, which one the accomplice. They begin to talk again, this time of less consequential things, and I concentrate on the cadence of their voices. One of them sounds older--the accomplice, I think, surely... except he sounds so much like him in his cynicism, his dryness. In the younger voice, though, I hear that note of vulnerability I have tuned my ears to hear, that loose thread of neediness that I had learned to pull until he would unravel in my fingers and let me fuck him six ways from Sunday.

I wonder if my cock is stirring; awareness of my body must be cut off by spells or potions. I try again to open my eyes, but there is nothing.

The first voice again. "It is so difficult, to sit here like this. May I hold his hand, do you think? Will he sense it?"

Yes, I think, that is definitely my lover. I hear the rustle of the sheets and assume he is taking my hand in his, though I cannot feel it.

The other man chuckles low in his throat, and I recognize that laugh. But no, I've already decided the other is...

"I have never known you to be prone to such displays of sentimentality, Draco," he says.

Draco! my mind screams.

"You've never known me to be in love with anyone but you," he answers. "And it is you who won't tolerate the displays of sentimentality, Severus."

Snape? The accomplice....

"Until now," he says. I hear the rustling from the other side of me now. "I shall take the other hand. You are not the only one who developed feelings toward Potter, after all."

"As you have found fit to remind me repeatedly. If I hadn't seduced him in the first place, you never would have..."

"Please, Draco, let's not bicker. We shall have a difficult enough time convincing him of our feelings, and our sincerity."

"He said it himself, that the Order should believe the evidence. Why wouldn't he believe it himself?"

"That we were on his side is one thing. That we both feel as we do? And that we hope he feels the same?"

It is too much to contemplate. The man who was my secret, the puzzle I could never solve, was not one but two men. It makes perfect sense now. One vulnerable, one steely. One who liked to take me, one who liked to be taken. One who had a bad history with Sectumsempra, one with Avada Kedavra.

Thinking of the curses makes me realize how much these two have sacrificed for this cause. For me.

"What shall we do if he doesn't wake up?" Draco Malfoy says, his voice tremulous with imminent tears.

A resigned sigh follows. "We shall have to make do with each other, in that case," Severus Snape replies.

Like hell you will, I think, and open my eyes.


-end-