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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23338 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Twelve—Always a Serpent

            Harry stood there with his hands clenched, and his mind riding his fingers, digging into his skin at the same moment as Malfoy’s mouth dug into his. He didn’t know how to break away, whether Malfoy was claiming this as part of his price for extracting Harry from hospital—

            And then Harry flinched, and danced backwards.

            I don’t care if it is part of the bloody price, I don’t have to stand here and put up with it!

            Malfoy didn’t look discouraged. He smiled at Harry instead, and held out a hand. “That was going wonderfully,” he said, voice as breathy as a drifting spiderweb. “Would you care to resume?”

            “No,” Harry said, more upset at the taste lingering in his mouth than at Malfoy’s words. “How could you do something like that? How could you think that I wanted it?” He touched the side of his lips, and found that his venom sacs hadn’t swelled, and the fangs hadn’t extended any further than they usually did.

            That gave him pause.

            “I could do it because I’m hard, and because there’s the chance that you might want it, too,” Malfoy said, and then waited, his eyes on Harry and all the brighter, or all the darker, Harry thought, because of what he had just voiced.

            Harry’s hand dropped away from his fangs as he stared at Malfoy. “So you didn’t know I did?” he asked. If pressed before this, he would have guessed that Malfoy would kiss him only because he thought Harry wanted him back. He was proud. Surely Malfoy and pure-blood pride couldn’t tolerate kissing someone unless he was sure that the kiss would be welcome?

            But Malfoy smiled at him, and an invisible fire seemed to surge and dance around him, and Harry remembered that this Malfoy had changed, not least by becoming a Dark wizard.

            “The Dark takes risks,” Malfoy whispered. “Does it please you, to know that Gryffindor House was right about that all along? You can’t stay safe. That was the hardest lesson to learn once I decided that I wanted to pursue the Dark Arts instead of sitting at home behind wards for the rest of my life. You can gain great power, but you never know beforehand what you might stumble into, or what might hurt you.”

            Harry shook his head, bewildered beyond endurance. “So kissing me was the kind of risk that you took, even though you knew it might anger me?”

            Malfoy smiled at him, and didn’t bother to nod.

            “Even though you knew that it might anger me enough to poison you?” That was the part Harry really didn’t understand. There was no way that Malfoy could miss the way he shook after meeting Ron and Hermione, and there was no way that he could miss the defensive snake-parts Harry had called into being just now.

            The old Malfoy would have thought that was the best time to take advantage of Harry, when he was shaky. But this new one had other motives. Harry wondered now if he was only faltering before the rich, bizarre incomprehensibility of them.

            “I wanted to taste the poison,” Malfoy whispered, and extended his hand further, as if yearning forwards from the lip of a cliff. “I think you can control it, the way that you can control the other ways you shapeshift. You could keep from hurting me if you wanted to, if you were careful.”



“You don’t know that,” Harry said. He stood on the cliff, too, and the high air, or something else, was hurting his lungs. “You don’t even know what effect my poison has yet.”

Malfoy smiled.

Crazy. Mental. Are all Dark wizards that mental?

            It was a life that made Harry wince as he thought about it. Continually plunging into darkness, never sure if there was going to be something at the bottom to catch them, trusting to luck or fate or whatever the Dark wizards would say was guiding them on the paths—

            Power. Malfoy would say that it was power.

            But he also said that you could never be entirely safe.

            So that discussion was settled, and it still left what had been between them before, Harry abruptly realized. Malfoy still stood there and smiled at him, and Harry knew that he wouldn’t back off and consent to pretend this had never happened, which was the way that Harry had handled some awkward kisses before.

            Facing the truth. That was probably another of the Dark wizards’ tricks. And Malfoy had said at some point that the Dark wizard’s greatest enemy was himself, hadn’t he? That meant that flinching or backing away from the truth was foolish. Because the truth was what would enable you to know yourself?

            Harry took in a deep breath. The white serpent touched his cheek again, and reminded Harry that there was some support he could never lose, whether or not he ever became friends with Ron and Hermione in the exact same way again, whether he and Malfoy were allies or lovers or even friends.

            “I…you didn’t ask me,” he said.

            Malfoy swept him a courtly bow, and came up grinning like a wolf. “Then may I have the honor of this kiss, Your Highness?”

            Harry flushed, and glared at him. “I didn’t mean like that, either,” he snapped.

            “Didn’t you?” Malfoy’s eyes were lidded, his smile deep as a flush, and he came a step nearer in a way that made Harry want to match him instead of back away. “Well. I find that I want to take it that way. If your only objection is that I didn’t ask you, now you know I want to kiss you.” He bobbed to a stop again and watched Harry with those lidded eyes that made Harry mad. He wanted to shake Malfoy and spill all the secrets out of his clutching mouth, his grasping hands.

            Then I want—

            Harry acted before his nerve broke. Although he thought Malfoy would finally back away when the fangs cut his lips, nevertheless Harry leaned forwards, and kissed him back.

            For the experiment. For the exhilarating sensation, the knowledge that someone wanted him for the way he looked, which would have repulsed so many ordinary people. For the long fall, and what awaited at the bottom.

            For the chance of what could come of it.

*

            Draco knew his breath was panting out in sighs. He knew that he swayed like a reed as Potter manhandled him back towards the wall. He knew that Pansy had slipped discreetly out of the room, probably around the time that he first kissed Potter, and that she would tease him later.

            But he knew all that with the part of his mind that always hovered back at first, caught in the nets of caution, when he was starting a new experimental potion. That wasn’t the deepest or the best part of him, not the part that tangled with Potter now and tasted his fangs and smelled the poison on his breath.

            And Dark wizards couldn’t survive divided, with part of them holding back and insisting that it was stupid to commit themselves to something like this. Of course they had to commit, and soar.

            So Draco snapped the cords holding himself to the rational part of his brain, and fell.

            The starry abyss whirled and twinkled around him. Draco would see some new part of the Dark paths for this, he was sure, and he wondered which for a moment.

            That moment became this one, the one where Potter held him still against the wall and turned his head, scraping his left fang down Draco’s right cheek. Draco tensed and breathed and stilled, and his body surged to follow it. He’d been hard for long minutes, watching Potter. Now his body was joined, erection connected directly to face.

            “That’s what you wanted?” Potter sounded hushed, incredulous, ducking his head again as though he couldn’t believe something so simple would satisfy Draco. “You want…” He let it fade, and this time turned his head to cut Draco’s cheek open.

            Draco might have warned Potter to be careful with the venom and try to concentrate it down to harmlessness if he was thinking straight, but he wasn’t thinking straight, and it was wonderful. His head tilted back, his throat spasmed, and he came with the tingle of cold sweetness in the wound on his cheek and the arch of danger in his body, as images of what that cold could do cascaded through his brain.

            All was one: his muscles, his mind, his magic. He felt the touch of dark dirt on the paths beneath his fingers for a moment, and a flower-scented chill like the poison in his nostrils. He turned his head and kissed Harry, for causing this, causing such a magnificent fall.

            Harry swallowed, and the scent and sound of his confusion was very present in Draco’s nostrils. Then he stepped back, and stood there with his eyes raking Draco’s body. Draco looked back, and smiled to see that Harry’s pupils had gone slit again. He thought that was a sign of comfort, of Harry relaxing enough not to conceal who and what he was.

            “You wanted that,” Harry said, voice lower, the voice of someone landing on a Dark path, turning in an unexpected direction, and accustoming himself to the idea.

            “Yes,” Draco said. He reached back and tangled his fingers in his own hair, pulling it forwards around his shoulders so that it hung limp and loose. Blaise had always said that made him look fantastic. From the way Harry stared at him, it was fantastic in another way, seeing Draco make himself look messy for someone. “And now I’m going to do you the courtesy of asking you the question that I didn’t ask earlier. What do you want?”

*

            Harry’s blood thrummed. This felt so wild, so twisting, so new that he didn’t know if he could find the words for it.

            But the white serpent hissed in his ear, below the level of understanding, and Harry knew what he wanted. He couldn’t have explained it. He didn’t need to, though, not when Malfoy had come from the touch of his poison.

            He closed his eyes and left the shape of his hands flow and mold the way he had when he was showing Ron and Hermione the extent of his control. They warped and sighed and bent, and then he had hands still, but short and stubby, with scales in bands of gold and black shining through the skin.

            “Show me how much you like them,” he said, and extended them to Malfoy.

            The world felt dizzy around him as Malfoy looked at him with wide eyes, and Harry’s cheeks burned, and he started to wake from his trance. He had probably gone too far, and any minute Malfoy would kick him out the door in disgust, or Parkinson would come back—oh, God, he had forgotten they were standing in her drawing room, she might still be there staring at them—

            Then Malfoy slid forwards in a dash that ended up with him on his knees at Harry’s feet, and took Harry’s hands between his own, still staring at him with eyes that, Harry realized, sparked with the reflection of literal stars. Harry swallowed. He had no doubt that he was looking at one of the Dark paths through Malfoy.

            “Of course,” Malfoy whispered, and licked down two of Harry’s fingers at once, their slenderness more responsible for that than the length of his tongue.

            Harry groaned and tilted his head back. The scales were sensitive and new, throbbing like sunburned skin in response to the licking. He crossed his legs and sank against something that might have been a wall or a couch. All he knew was that it supported him, and Malfoy followed wherever he went, sucking almost Harry’s whole hand into his mouth now, his eyes closed as his throat worked.

            Harry stared at him and wondered what was going through his head, if he was ashamed of what he was doing, if he didn’t care, if he would look up and laugh if Harry told him what Malfoy was doing to him—

            The throbbing in his fingers grew worse. The throbbing in his groin increased in time to it, and his heartbeat did much the same thing. Harry gave a hoarse cry that he knew had a hint of a hiss in it, and the next moment he came, as intense a surrender and a conquest as any he’d had in his life.

            Underneath the usual pleasurable, satiated feeling crawled a hope, a hint, a suspicion, that the next time would be intense, and the next time after that.

            If he was with someone who could see his snake-like features and value them, as Malfoy did.

            Harry turned his head. His fingers had grown out again, the nails that had almost sunk into the skin rounding, but the scales still glowed beneath the skin. Malfoy was touching them with delicate, fluttering fingertips, and he stared at them rather than into Harry’s eyes even when Harry coughed.

            Then he raised his head by slow degrees until their gazes met again, and Harry flushed red as a sunset at the smile in the back of those glinting grey eyes.

            “Now that we’ve settled this side of our alliance,” Malfoy said casually, standing up and draping himself against the back of the couch on which Harry had settled to kiss him, “should we find Pansy and plot out what we’re going to do next?”

*

            Pansy gave Draco a look as they walked out of the drawing room, after Harry had spent an absurdly long time fussing with his hair and casting Cleaning Charms on his clothes. Draco could have assured him there was no speck of white left on the cloth, but Harry said something about feeling dirty no matter what lay there. Draco had rolled his eyes and allowed him his inhibitions. Someone on his first steps down the Dark paths would still have them.

            By the look Pansy gave him, she thought it would have been nice if Draco had had some.

            Draco shrugged at her and rolled his shoulders to feel the pressure of Harry’s grip on them, then reached up to trace the healing cuts on his cheeks. He had taken a risk, and he might gain nothing from it, or gain only far in the future, or suffer setbacks in the immediate future. But risk and chance and danger were all part of the Dark Arts.

            And in the meantime, he had enjoyed himself.

            “You have your friends back, I think,” Pansy told Harry, in the brisk tone she used whenever someone had done something that she considered unwise but which was none of her business. “They wanted to be back with you, and someone willing to be convinced always does half the work for you.”

            Harry blinked at her. Draco knew that Pansy wasn’t as fascinated with the slit pupils and deepened color of his eyes as Draco was, but he didn’t know why. For that matter, he didn’t understand why Harry didn’t spend hours every day in front of a mirror.

            “You think they were willing to be convinced?” Harry asked. “They seemed pretty resistant to me.”

            Pansy gave him a faint smile, and shot Draco another look behind Harry’s back. Draco flipped a hand at her, trying to convey the message: they could afford the time to indulge Harry as he needed to be indulged, because he would be such a powerful ally to them in the times to come. Scare him away now, and they would lose him.

            Sigh checked, Pansy told Harry, “There are people who hate the Dark Arts so much they would have immediately cursed their friends. But yours love you more than they hate Dark magic. It’s an excellent sign that they listened to you for as long as they did.”

            Harry nodded and sat up. “But that won’t apply to other people, like most of them who read the article. What do we do with them? How do we keep them from lashing out before they understand everything?”

            Draco, accustomed to the slightest changes of emotion and expression on Pansy’s face, knew that she was running through the full range with Harry. Her eyebrows elevated a nanometer, and then she nodded to herself, and then she smiled.

            “I don’t know,” she said. “This is your campaign, or more precisely the one of the man who recruited you.” She tilted her head at Draco.

            Harry turned around. Perhaps sex gave him a power boost, Draco thought. His fangs and his eyes and the new scales shimmering on his hands and arms literally glowed with inner light, and he was licking at his fangs as though to absorb the drops of poison from them before they fell. The white snake was wrapped around his throat so many times that it looked like a strand of ivy on a tree. Draco squinted, and congratulated himself when he thought he made out the sharp gold of gilding running through the snake. That might not be the way it really looked, but it was a change from a few hours ago.

            “What do you want?” Harry asked him. “People to accept you? People to accept Parseltongue? Or the Dark Arts?”

            “Why reach for any ambition so small?” Draco murmured, and smiled when Harry glared at him. “I want all of those things, of course.”

            Harry blinked at him, then snorted and shook his head. “I feel as though I’m falling off a cliff, but I keep falling into winds that buoy me up before I can hit the ground,” he said. “Is being a Slytherin like that?”

            “Being a Slytherin who studies the Dark Arts is like that,” Pansy said, and gave Harry the first genuine smile Draco had seen from her in a month. “You can’t bear us company in the first quality, of course, but the lack of the other can be made up.”

            Harry hesitated, then shook his head. “Yes, of course. So do you have a plan, Malfoy, or should I come up with one?”

            “I think you should tell us what you were about to say,” Draco said, and leaned forwards and parted his lips slightly, to see what effect the inside of his mouth might have in persuading Harry. It won him a deep crimson flush that made his eyes and fangs shine all the merrier, before the inevitable scowl descended.

            “How do you do that?” Harry demanded.

            Draco wouldn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about; that was a fun kind of teasing in its place, but they had passed through that stage of their alliance by now. He waited until some moments had stretched past, however. He could make sensible decisions and still show a bit of dramatic flair. “It’s a gift you develop,” he said. “I could see that you already have some of it, the way you read their friends and their reactions.”

            Harry nodded. “And you’ve read enough about Parselmouths to know?”

            “I know you,” Draco said softly, wondering. “Did you never think yourself important enough at Hogwarts for your enemies to watch you? And you needn’t think that you’re going to get out of saying what you were going to say.”

            Harry hesitated one more time, and even Pansy leaned forwards a little. Then he shrugged with his hands more than his shoulders. “The Sorting Hat told me I could be great if I wanted to go to Slytherin.”

            Draco stood there with a fountain of emotions showering through him; Pansy burst out laughing and stood up from her couch, walking towards Harry with her hand out.

            Harry whipped around to face her and hissed, the poison on his fangs turning green where it had been clear. The white snake unwrapped two coils that it extended towards Pansy.

            Pansy stopped, but bowed to him. “You misunderstood the reason for my laughter,” she said, keeping her hand out but dropping her voice low. Draco, could he have moved in that moment, would have applauded her. “It makes things all the better, and makes me trust you in a way that would be hard for me otherwise. Welcome, brother.” And she clasped Harry’s short-fingered, scaly hand without hesitation, pumped it once, and let go, turning him towards Draco in the same motion. “Look at the expression on his face.”

            Draco smiled at Harry with the clear joy streaming through him like the light of falling stars, and said, “This is wonderful.”

*

            When was the last time that I saw someone so enthusiastic about something?

            That was hard for Harry to really remember. There was a certain rhythm to Auror work that took over after a while, and for every moment of tension-filled chase, casting curses, or hiding behind a door and waiting for a Dark wizard—like him, now—to come out of a house, there were a hundred spent filling out paperwork and testifying before the Wizengamot and arguing over procedures and talking to people who wanted to spit in your face.

            Harry had an inkling, now, that people like Malfoy would go after the Dark Arts not only because they might grant them power, but because the challenge was more fun than a lot of other things they could be doing.

            “A Slytherin mindset isn’t necessary for the Dark Arts, but it gets you along the paths faster,” Malfoy told him, talking in a dreamy, distant way. “And you have the seeds of that in you. No wonder you found the way there on your own.”

            Harry folded his arms, and the white snake wrapped back around his neck. It was talking to him in Parseltongue, soothing words, but for once, Harry didn’t want to pay attention. “It’s still condescending.”

            “No,” Malfoy whispered, and took a sliding step towards him to grip Harry’s arm. He didn’t see or didn’t care about the way the white snake extended towards him, and Harry knew which one he thought was more likely. “You don’t understand. It’s still something you have in you, something we would be hard put to teach you. You can develop certain qualities with enough hard work. But this is a greater potential.”

            Harry scanned his face, and still saw nothing there but wonder, glee, the edges of reflected glory. Malfoy was more excited for Harry being like this than he was for some of the goals they had achieved so far.

            It made Harry wonder what it would be like to stay beside someone like this, someone who took what he wanted. Not with no thought of the consequences, but because he had judged the consequences and found them worth paying.

            It was the way that Harry had once wanted to live.

            “Thank you,” he said at last. “But that still doesn’t give us a plan.”

            Parkinson and Malfoy smiled at each other, then at him, and Harry stood up a little straighter. Perhaps he could have two sets of friends.

            And by the smiles directed at him, both of them might have brilliant plans.

*

            SP777: I’m fine, thank you!

            I don’t know, I think I have done creature fics before, with the werewolf fic if nothing else.

            FairyBean: Yes, they will recruit some other allies before long. Glad that you’re enjoying it.

            Talltree-san: I think Ron is not at his best when confronted with unexpected situations, which Harry partially turning into a snake certainly is. He’ll need some more time to become comfortable with the way that things are now.
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