Fragile

Chapter 9

When Harry woke up again, he carefully probed Severus' mind with his. His bond mate responded to the mental touch by opening up his mind and letting Harry in. No words were needed between them as Harry showed him his intention of severing his connection to Voldemort. Severus would have preferred to wait a little longer in order to strengthen their bond but that would also have increased the likelihood of the Dark Lord identifying their plan.

Physically entwined in Severus' bed, the two men merged their minds as completely as possible. After a bit of probing, Harry guided Severus to his connection to Voldemort. For the first time, he was able to visualise the link; it felt like large confusing bunch of threads reaching from his own mind to the Dark Lord's. He tried to move along one of those threads towards the evil wizard's mind when his bond mate firmly pulled him back.

"At least I know the anchoring bit works," he thought sarcastically. Suddenly he realised something.

"How am I actually going to break this link?" he asked Severus.

"Try to cut each of these threads as if you use a knife," the older man instructed. Harry did as he was told. At first, nothing happened. Then, after what seemed like hours, one small thread slowly disentangled itself from the chaos. It thinned at one place until it almost snapped, then simply faded into nothingness. Encouraged by this little success, Harry set to work on another thread. And another. And yet another.

When he had severed about half of the links, a searing pain shot through his scar. At the same time, his hold on the threads became weaker. Voldemort had realised what he was about to do and was desperately trying to prevent it. For a short moment, Harry felt Severus recoil from the sharp pain. Then the man's presence returned to full strength and immediately, his pain was reduced to a dull throb.

"Hurry!" he heard Severus call through the mind link. "I'm trying to keep him at bay but you need to be quick." Even mentally, he sounded strained.

Harry quickly returned his concentration to the connection. Voldemort was still fighting his progress violently so he turned to a new strategy. Instead of concentrating on one thread at a time, he randomly kept changing threads, weakening each as much as he could in as little time as possible. As he had expected, the Dark Lord found it much harder to follow him in this erratic pattern. Slowly but steadily, an increasing number of threads showed signs of weakness until some disappeared.

The pain in Harry's scar soon increased again as Voldemort multiplied his efforts to salvage the connection. If it hadn't been for Severus, the young man would have been unable to continue his task.

Eventually, only one thick thread was all that was left of the connection between Harry and the Dark Lord. The Gryffindor's headache was now so excruciating that he barely managed to remain conscious. Voldemort was focussing all his energy on the final bit of the connection, pushing Harry back with shockwaves of raw magical energy.

Harry fought back as hard as he could but he felt himself inexorably lose ground. He was ready to give up when another force joined his own: Severus. The man had been fighting off Voldemort with Occlumency techniques so far but now he changed his strategy. It felt to Harry as if his mind was being enveloped in a protective hug. The shield of Severus' mind blocked Voldemort's attacks enough to bring the pain back to a bearable level and give Harry the necessary strength to launch himself onto the final thread.

The battle moved back and forth, with both parties constantly losing and winning ground. After what seemed like forever, the final thread was as thin as a split hair. Focussing his powers one last time, Harry jabbed with all the strength he could muster at the connection. The link snapped like an overstretched rubber band.

The force of the back thrust was so great that it felt to Harry like a punch in the face. As if it had a physical form, his mind flew "backwards", out of Severus' protective embrace and further away from the man.

Harry distantly thought that there should be something he should worry about but he couldn't get himself to focus on anything. He felt as light as a feather, floating through ethereal nothingness. There were no worries, no pain. Shreds of memories drifted in and out of his awareness but he only gazed at them with detached indifference.

Suddenly a hard jerk pulled him from this dream-like state and back into his body. A hundred sensations rushed over him at once. The slowly fading headache, the feeling of the cotton bed sheets against his naked skin, the body pressed against his, Severus' arms wrapped around him, the faint smell of a fire burning in the hearth and the crackling of the flames.

Harry gasped for breath like someone who had been under water for too long. His heart was beating furiously against his ribcage and when he tried to open his eyes, the world was spinning. With a moan, he closed them again.

"How do you feel, Harry?" Severus gently asked in his head once his breathing had become more normal.

"Brilliant!" Harry answered. "Except for that army of Hippogriffs trying to crack open my skull."

The comforting presence in his mind whispered "Rest, Harry, rest!" He let himself enjoy the feeling of contentment as the edges of his mind remained merged with Severus'. His body relaxed into the other man's embrace. Without looking for anything, Harry lazily probed his bond mate's mind with a few tendrils of thought, letting them drift here and there. The Slytherin didn't try to actively block him out anywhere, but Harry could tell when he touched areas that the man wanted to keep to himself and respected his privacy.

Harry was about to drift off to sleep when he mentally stumbled over some kind of outgrowth of Severus' mind. It looked like thick black roots growing rampant in a beautiful orderly flower garden. One end of the growth was rooted deep into the Potions master's mind, like a tumour into the body. The other end stretched away from the man, connecting him to someone else.

Before Severus could prevent it, Harry probed the connection. It was characterised by a strange familiarity. Voldemort! The Gryffindor realised that this must be the Dark Mark that linked the Dark Lord to his Death Eaters. If Severus was mentally linked to Voldemort, the evil wizard must have noticed whom the power helping Harry was. Severus was therefore in great danger as long as the connection persisted.

He ignored the other man's "Harry, don't!" and started to work on severing the link. It was different from his own connection, rather one thick tendril than a tangle of threads. Harry fleetingly thought that this might be to make it easier for the Dark Lord to distinguish and recognize his followers. The different nature of the Dark Mark made the earlier technique of weakening the strand until it snapped difficult. It was like attempting to cut a thick root with a small pocket knife.

An exasperated groan from Severus and the man's mental pull stopped him.

"It won't work this way," the Slytherin explained. "Our only chance to break the connection is a stab of concentrated power onto one single spot of the link. If Voldemort notices what we are doing, I'm dead. He has the power to kill me through the Mark. I'm actually surprised that I'm not dead yet but I guess the severing of your link has left him weakened." He showed the younger man how he wanted to proceed.

Physically taking hold of Severus' hands and griping them tightly, Harry merged his mind as completely to his bond mate's as possible. He was worried, knowing they only had one single try before Voldemort would notice them and retaliate. He hoped their joined powers would be sufficient, as they were already drained from their first attack. Waiting until they had recovered was however not an option as this would also have given the Dark Lord time to recuperate. He probably was not expecting them to launch another attack right now.

Following Severus' lead, Harry focussed his powers as tightly as he could. His magic flowed forward into one single spot, comparable to the point of a knife, concentrating until Harry thought it might explode at any moment.

At the older man's signal, he thrust his "dagger" of magic as deep into one side of the tendril as he could while Severus did the same on the other side. Their powers met inside the connection, melted together and exploded in a multitude of colours. A torrent of sensations crashed down on the two men, all their senses almost overloaded with the assaults. Pleasurable pain and horrible bliss, blazing black and darkest white, whispers of thunder and deafening murmurs. The Slytherin and the Gryffindor held on to each other for dear life. When the storm finally passed, they collapsed into blissful blackness.

When Harry came round, he found Severus examining his arm. A look of sheer awe spread on the man's face.

"It's gone," he whispered in amazement. "The Dark Mark, it's been on my arm for half of my life and now it's gone." His eyes met Harry's and the younger man was struck by the swirl of emotions he saw in them. He smiled and brushed his fingers gently over the forearm that had previously been disfigured by the Dark Lord's hideous mark.

"You are finally free, Severus," he said softly.

"So are you," the Slytherin replied. Harry snorted weakly.

"I wish you were right but I still have to kill the bastard. Provided that I survive in the first place of course." He frowned. "What is actually going to happen now?" he asked.

Severus just shrugged. "I would say we wait for You-know... Voldemort to make his next move and meanwhile form a plan for you to kill him." Harry didn't look convinced.

"That simple? We just sit here and wait for him to come? How are we even going to know that he will stick to his plan of attacking Hogwarts, now that his connection to me is cut?"

Only then, it hit him that Severus' role as a spy in the Dark Lord's inner circle was completely over. By cutting the connection of the Dark Mark, they had excluded the Potions master from the Death Eaters. He was about to curse that fact when he realised that Voldemort had probably recognized his bond mate while they were working on his own connection. Therefore, the removal of the Dark Mark had been the only way to save Severus' life.

"We don't know," Severus replied. "Now that he knows I'm a spy, he must assume Dumbledore is informed of his plan, which ruins his surprise effect. It really depends on how mad or desperate he truly is, whether he will still go through with the attack or not. We should prepare for it at any rate, just to make sure we're ready."

"I wish I didn't have to fight him," Harry admitted. "But as I have to, I kind of hope that he will attack Hogwarts because then things would be over once and for all. I don't want to spend the next few years fighting a long and dirty war." With a sigh, he snuggled against Severus and was promptly wrapped into a pair of strong arms.

"I think I'm going to miss this," he murmured.

"Miss what?" Severus asked.

"Sharing a bed with you, falling asleep and waking up in your arms," Harry replied.

"You could stay, at least until the holidays are over," the older man offered but Harry gave him a sad smile.

"That would only make things more difficult afterwards. I'm going to move back to the Tower tomorrow." When he saw the unhappy look on his bond mate's face, he quickly added: "That doesn't mean that I don't want to see you anymore. I would be glad if we could continue our daily schedule. It's just that while I have really come to love you as a friend, I'm not IN love with you. It wouldn't be fair on either of us to hold on to something that is not there. I don't want to lose you as a friend."

Severus was silent for a moment before he nodded.

"I guess you're right, it wouldn't improve anything if you stayed. I'm definitely going to miss you though. I trust you and I will forever cherish our friendship." He placed a gentle kiss on Harry's forehead. "Thank you for teaching me to truly trust."

Harry didn't reply. He looked deeply into his bond mate's eyes and briefly touched the man's mind with his. Then he placed the chastest of kisses on his lips and simply said: "Let's rest." In the comfort of each other's arms, the two men fell asleep.

*******

It was with a thick lump in his throat that Harry packed his things the following morning. He would deeply miss being with his bond mate day and night but he knew it was for the best. He loved the man deeply but he wasn't in love with him and he didn't want to delude himself about something that wasn't real. Apart from the fact that a relationship between a student and a teacher was as illegal in the Wizarding as in the Muggle world and it would have landed both of them in deep trouble if it was found out, he knew that sooner or later, they would be faced with obstacles that a devoted couple might master but that an illusion of love couldn't endure. Therefore, Harry preferred to take the hard decision immediately, rather than having to pick up the pieces of a failed relationship and possibly lose Severus completely.

Constantly reminding himself of the necessity of this resolution, he placed the last of his belongings into his trunk and checked the room for any forgotten items before determinedly closing the lid.

Severus was watching him from the door, his eyes following Harry's every move. When the trunk lid closed with a dull thud, he flinched slightly but his face showed a firm resolution. He moved away from the door, back into the living room as the trunk floated towards him, directed by Harry's wand.

"I will see you in the lab after you have unpacked?" It was more a confirmation than an actual question. Harry smiled and nodded.

"I won't be long. Could we put in a bit of duelling practice after we're done with the potion?"

"Of course we can and we will," Severus replied. "We have an invitation for tea with the headmaster at four though, so we might have to move the practice until after then."

"What does Professor Dumbledore want to see us for now?" Harry asked suspiciously. Severus shrugged.

"Maybe he would like to congratulate us on the successful completion of our bond or perhaps it is just a social call."

Harry snorted. "Right, and Slytherin is going to wear red and gold next year. The headmaster never just calls you for tea."

"I guess you're right. The only way to find out is to go and see what he wants," Severus pointed out. Harry nodded and levitated his trunk towards the door.

"True," he said. "I'll be back in a bit."

The End