Title: The Wages of Going On

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

Pairing: Snape/Harry/Draco

Rating: R

Warnings: Issues of consent (fuck or die scenario), angst, violence, torture, original character deaths. AU in that Snape is alive after the Battle of Hogwarts.

Summary: Harry thought he was guarding Snape and Malfoy from the last of the escaped Death Eaters. It wasn't supposed to end up with them all getting kidnapped and being cursed with Dark magic instead.

Author's Notes: Written for a prompt by kitty_fic that asked for this threesome with a fuck-or-die scenario. The title comes from a Tennyson poem called "Wages," and specifically the line "Give her the wages of going on, and not to die."

The Wages of Going On

Chapter One—No Safer Place

"There's no safer place in Britain," Kingsley had assured Harry after giving over the key to the wards on the safehouse.

Harry spat blood, felt with his tongue for broken teeth, and wondered what Kingsley would say if he could see them now.

Not that anyone else was ever likely to see them again, Harry had already decided. There was just too much against it. Rodolphus and Rabastan had reasons to hate all three of them: Snape for being a traitor, Malfoy for daring to survive and be free when just about all other Death Eaters were in prison, and Harry for defeating Voldemort.

The knowledge that he was going to die lay like an alien hand against the back of Harry's neck. Sometimes he could feel his mind racing frantically, thoughts tumbling over each other, but it all seemed to be happening from a distance. There was a center, cold core of him that watched things and noted the glances he got in public functions that weren't adoring, the way that George flinched when Angelina spoke to him sometimes, the way Ginny stared at the table when her mother asked her about dating other people. Harry didn't think he'd had it when he was younger. Maybe it had been born of the war.

Good place for it was here and now, then, in this rough stone cell, hollowed out of a cave, where the Lestranges had cast him.

You're going to die.

Quite possible, a slightly less cold part of Harry replied to the cold one, and he turned as the door opened. Rabastan had only thrown Harry back in here after the latest torture session a minute or so ago. Harry had assumed that one of the others was up next.

He made no attempt to resist as Rodolphus dragged him to his feet and spat into his face. Let them think he was down and beaten; it was sensible advice from Auror training as well as what the cold part of him whispered. They thought he was overinflated anyway, overhyped, the "Great Chosen One" who was really fragile and weak underneath. If Harry could convince them of that, then he could possibly fool them for long enough to get near and steal a wand.

Maybe. The hatred in Rodolphus's eyes at the moment told Harry nothing about how weak they thought he was.

"Rabastan wanted to just kill you," Rodolphus whispered into Harry's ear. "I was all for that, at first. Why not? You're alive, and my Bellatrix is dead. Why not?"

Harry breathed around the tight grip on his throat, as best he could, and said nothing. Useless to remind Rodolphus that Bellatrix had walked into her own battle, and it hadn't been with Harry. Harry didn't want to give one of the crazy Lestranges the idea to hurt Molly.

Besides, if either Lestrange brother had been sane enough to realize things like that, Harry wouldn't be here right now.

"Filth." Rodolphus tossed him away, and Harry rolled on the ground, only using his arms to prevent himself from slamming his head into the door. Trying to protect his body against minor wounds wasn't the point right now. "How a lowly half-blood like you defeated our Lord, I will never know."

Harry said nothing, again, but spat some more blood. The younger him would have pointed out that Voldemort had Muggle heritage, too.

The older him was a little less suicidal. And remembered that he had two people he was supposed to protect, not die and fail.

"But I came up with a better idea than killing you," Rodolphus said, and seized Harry's hair. Harry couldn't resist a yelp as Rodolphus hauled him to his feet; it hurt the exact same way it always had when Aunt Petunia seized his hair to try and cut it. Rodolphus's mouth split open in what Harry had to call a grin because there was no better name for it. "Do you want to hear it?"

Harry spat more blood. Really, having a cut on his upper lip and his gums was more annoying than he'd thought.

"You only defeated our Lord because of the Elder Wand, and the connection that you had to it because of the Malfoy brat," Rodolphus whispered to him. Harry tried to move his head a little, hoping you couldn't catch diseases from someone's spit on your ear. "And you only had that connection because Severus let everything go to hell with Dumbledore instead of just killing him from the first. Well. You like to be bound together so much, we'll just let you have that."

He dropped Harry back on his feet and transferred his grip to his ear. Harry followed, bending just enough to be sure that the pain didn't cloud his concentration. His eyes darted around as Rodolphus took him through the corridors. It was the first time they hadn't troubled to put a blindfold on him as they led him between room and room. Harry was hoping to find some clue as to where this place was, a clue to get out.

But he saw nothing except more stone tunnels leading away, and the doors of more cells, and more torches. It could have been a buried Death Eater stronghold, or Lestrange Manor, if there was such a thing. Dark and hopeless, and the reek from the tunnels was of ancient dried blood and even more ancient salt.

Salt?

Harry stored that information in the back of his mind as Rodolphus let go of his ear, planted his hands in the middle of Harry's spine, and shoved him into a room he hadn't seen before. He still wasn't much good at Occlumency, but his Auror teachers had told him that thinking about other things could often substitute for it.

And he had plenty to think about, right now.

This room was much more brightly lit than the corridors, with not only ordinary torches but ones that burned with blue flames on the walls. Harry stared at them, blinking hard, and then understood. The blue flames came from driftwood. The scent of salt did seem to indicate that they were near the ocean.

And then he buried that thought completely as he glanced at the center of the room, and made out the blazing circle of inlaid copper in which his charges lay.

Harry swallowed, but that didn't moisten his throat or give him breath enough to be going on with. Snape was splayed out, his limbs spread-eagled as though the Lestranges had been about to bind him to something but had given up. His black hair intermingled with Malfoy's pale locks, and Malfoy was in the same position stretching away on the other side.

But the circle surrounded both of them, and the circle had that same bright blue glitter that accompanied the driftwood torches.

A shape moved on the far side, and Rabastan stepped out of a tunnel that led in a different direction. He said something that broke off into a long cough, but Rodolphus seemed to understand him perfectly.

"Yes, I think it would work best that way," Rodolphus said, and grinned, a grin with broken teeth of his own when Harry turned to look at him over his shoulder. "He wanted to be the one to protect them, didn't he? He always wanted to protect everyone. Little baby Potter." He slapped Harry hard enough in the face to make his ears ring. "So now he's going to hurt them, and he won't have a choice."

Harry spun towards Rodolphus, kicking him hard in the leg and reaching for his wand. It didn't matter that his head still ached from the slap and blurring visions chased themselves back and forth in front of his eyes, it didn't matter that his breath came sharp and hard, he had the strong suspicion that he had to attack now or what happened to him and Snape and Malfoy as a consequence would be death.

Rodolphus stumbled and yelped, but Harry didn't have a chance to snatch his wand. A spell hit him in the back, one that kicked like a Stunner but didn't leave unconsciousness in its wake, only a spreading numbness. Harry sprawled on the floor and saw Rodolphus recover his balance, moving towards him with his leg raised.

"Oh, don't," Rabastan rasped. "I think we should leave his mouth alone, or otherwise they can't make such good use of it."

Rodolphus paused, and smiled, and said, "You make sense, brother mine." He kicked Harry in the ribs instead, and then in the stomach, hard enough to drive the breath out of him. Harry was still gasping when Rodolphus paused again, said something in Latin, and kicked Harry across the copper ring.

The blue light glimmering there grabbed at Harry and scorched him. Harry could feel the lightning going into his lungs, the crackling tension probing at his muscles, the way that his arms seized up and began to flail around. But then he was lying in the middle of the circle next to Snape and Malfoy, and it seemed more likely that he was going to suffer from consequences in a little while rather than right away. Even his breathing evened out, and his arms fell back to his sides.

Harry lifted his head and stared at Rodolphus and Rabastan. Rodolphus laughed at him, but Rabastan was the one who came near and began to explain, his words slurred and broken but understandable.

"You interfered in our plans to properly punish the traitors behind you, Potter. So we set up a ritual that would have tied them to each other, mind to mind, and forced them to go slowly mad from hearing each other's thoughts."

Harry hoped he kept his face smooth. He thought that was unlikely to work with Snape, and maybe Malfoy, skilled in Occlumency, but he didn't know for sure, and he didn't want to give the Lestrange brothers a chance to rethink their strategy.

"We would have tortured you to death," Rabastan continued genially. "But my brother didn't think that was punishment enough, and of course he's right. So we rolled you through the ritual circle, and now the connection that was forming between Snape and Malfoy has been disrupted. It isn't really big enough to accommodate a third, you know?"

Rodolphus interrupted, eager as a crow. "So the connection will try to bind them together and find a place for you at the same time, and there's really only one way that it can do that."

Rabastan bobbed his head. "I'm sure a bright boy like you can figure it out."

Harry's hands tightened, scraping into the stone beneath him despite his resolve to show nothing to these idiots. Yes, he knew. He had heard of similar rituals during Auror training, though mostly used as means of torture by Dark wizards, not anything that anyone would want to practice.

"A lovers' connection is really the only way." Rabastan chuckled like gravel bouncing beneath Muggle wheels. "Well, when I say lovers, I mean that they'll try to fuck you apart because they just know that things will be better if the obstacle is removed, and the ritual will be trying to find a place for you at the same time. You won't want it, they won't really want it, either, but that's the way it'll have to be. Otherwise your brains will just turn liquid and drip out of your ears." He leered at Harry. "Exciting, isn't it?"

"And meanwhile," Rodolphus said, his voice almost soft in contrast with what his brother had said, "if you did manage to survive the experience, then the bond still won't have a place for you, but won't be able to stop including you, either. Will it squeeze you to death, or compel them to tear you apart? It's quite interesting."

"We'll be back in a few days to see which one it was," Rabastan said, and he laughed again, and turned away.

Harry immediately attacked the edge of the circle. This time, it simply bounced him back into the center, as indifferent as a stone wall, and apparently as strong. Harry turned and attacked it from the side, where he thought it should be weaker, but the same thing happened. Small blisters had formed on his hands, and blood was pounding in his forehead, the same as would have happened if he had started beating his head against the wall of his cell.

Calm down. Think.

Harry paced in a circle, staring at Snape and Malfoy. They hadn't started to stir yet, but Harry knew it was only a matter of time.

And the magic of the ritual, the one that the Lestranges had first set up and then broken by rolling him into the circle, was stalking in the back of his mind. He could feel it coming closer, crawling on crab claws. His body was tightening beneath the waist with longings and urges he didn't want to think about.

The longings and urges that Malfoy and Snape would feel would be considerably more violent.

Harry took a deep breath and did the hardest thing he'd ever done, harder than watching Sirius die or thinking he'd die: he sat down and turned his back on his fellow unwilling participants in the ritual, folding his arms on top of his knees instead. He banished everything from his mind except what he knew about rituals like these, and concentrated on that.

Such rituals usually formed a bond that was temporary, and telepathic. The participants could communicate back and forth, sense each other's thoughts. The Ministry had once used it to bind Aurors during confrontations with Dark wizards that were expected to be particularly tricky, but then some Aurors had got trapped and stayed away from the people who were supposed to unbind them for too long.

Left in place for more than a few hours, the bond tried to tie the minds too close together, and liquefied them. What it wanted was union, and that was exactly what you couldn't achieve while you had separate personalities. The only people Harry had ever heard surviving bonds run amok like that were twins, who had similarities that the bond would accept as substitutes for a complete sharing of minds.

And although Harry hadn't heard much more than speculation about what would happen if a third person was rolled into the ritual circle during an attempt to establish one of those bonds, he suspected the Lestranges were right. The original bond was supposed to be between two people; it couldn't just tie a third one in. But it would seek some other means of union, mindlessly attempting to meld them.

That it would encourage Snape and Malfoy to rape him was the best guess.

Someone groaned behind him. Harry's eyes shot open before he gave them permission to do so, and then he clenched his hands in front of him and calmed himself down by force of sheer willpower.

He wanted to survive. The idea burned in him, and not just because he had technically failed Snape and Malfoy by not guarding them well enough to prevent this from happening. He wanted to get out of here, and live. He hadn't been taken down by Voldemort. He didn't want Death Eaters to have the honor.

And he had just got through Auror training a year ago. Harry thought he might even make a good Auror, in time. The most grudging of his instructors had admitted it. That meant he had to live, or it really would be all for nothing.

How, genius?

There was a low curse behind him. No words that Harry could make out; he had no idea whether Snape or Malfoy yet knew what had happened. But they were smart, far smarter than Harry in a lot of ways. They would see the ritual circle and feel the urges in their own bodies and figure it out.

So. What they had to do—what he had to do, because it was doubtful that Snape and Malfoy would be coherent enough to help him in a little while—was to get through this first round of the bond attempting to destroy him. And then when Malfoy and Snape had spent themselves, Harry had to find some means to keep the bond from screwing their brains out of their ears.

Harry thought he might know how to do that. It would involve more concentration and will and magical power than he'd ever applied before.

But what did that matter? Battling Voldemort had taken more everything than he'd known he had at the time. And now he was twenty-three, not a child anymore. And he had to use every advantage that he had, whether or not it was an advantage he would admit to in polite company outside the ritual circle.

"Potter." The voice was slurred, but recognizable. Snape's.

Harry took a deep breath, and stood. He could be facing his doom behind him. He would certainly be facing a lot of blame, and pain.

But that goal still burned in him, far deeper and hotter than he'd ever felt it before. Maybe this was the sort of ambition the Sorting Hat had seen in him, the reason it had wanted to put him in Slytherin. If Harry had known this was the sort of thing you could want, that his dreams of getting away from the Dursleys and showing them he was smart could count just as much as wanting to have power and money like Malfoy did, he might have let the Hat do it.

"Potter." The other voice, sharp and buzzing and commanding. Malfoy's.

The longer I put it off, the worse it is, Harry thought, and turned around.