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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23338 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
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Chapter Thirteen—A Storm of Serpents

            Draco looked up from his breakfast when one of the silent wards went off. It was like a vibration in his skull, the way that he imagined some of Harry’s snakes might hear the world. And it meant that someone had come to the front gates of the Manor and tangled himself in one of the traps there.

            Draco sighed and stood. “Do you want to come with me?” he asked Harry, who was licking apple juice from his fingers. “There’s a disturbance at the front of the house. Probably someone who wanted an interview with you and didn’t go through the proper channels.”

            “An owl, you mean?” Harry was still licking as he stood up. Draco strode around the table, grabbed his hand, and sucked expertly on his fingers for a moment until the last trace of the taste was removed.

            When he glanced at Harry, it was to find him standing still with an expression of bliss on his face. Draco laughed and slapped his back to wake him out of it. “I mean he didn’t go through me. Come on, we have to find out what he wants.”

            Harry muttered something uncomplimentary about Draco’s certainty as they left the dining room, but then, if he wanted his fingers clean and didn’t want Draco doing it, he should have had one of his snakes lick them. The white serpent was coiled on his shoulder as usual. Draco let one eye stray backwards, casually, not trying to make out anything more than what simple looking would show him, and this time he did see the blunt, sleek nose and the bright eyes before the vision blurred again.

            He was learning to see them. He could have done a little dance step right there in the corridor.

            But that would have made Harry ask what he was doing, and Draco would have let the answer distract them both. For now, they belonged at the front gate, and he did his best to assume a sober expression as they walked.

*

            Harry stared at the man tangled upside-down in an invisible net near the gates. Every time he moved, the net bulged, and then settled more comfortably back around him. Harry only knew that because of the way the man’s limbs were contorted and his face smashed flat as though pressed against a window, and because Malfoy had condescended to explain it to him on their way down the gravel path.

            It had to be agonizing, if the way he twisted his shoulders was any indication. But he still tried to spit some brave threat at Malfoy.

            “Oh, a hero,” Malfoy said, in the disappointed tones that someone would use when they pulled a tiny fish from the water, and waved his wand. The net went slack, leaving the man dangling upside-down by one foot instead. He gave a little shriek and tried to shield his head with his arms before he realized that he hadn’t actually fallen to the path. Then the arms unfolded again, cautiously.

            Harry laughed, and winced a moment later. That wasn’t something he would have done a few days ago, was it? Laugh at someone’s pain? He had changed in more ways than just the obvious.

            The white serpent coiled on top of his head like a slow-moving crown, bathing his ears in cool scales. Of course you have, brother. Your mistake is in thinking that anyone will hate you for such an occurrence.

            I think he might hate me, Harry hissed back, eyes on the bulging face now twisted in his direction.

            I meant someone who counts, the white snake responded, twisting a segment of his body upside-down so that he could look the stranger in the eyes.

            Harry might have continued the conversation, but Malfoy was talking, and he would be the one to ask the interesting questions and get answers. “What are you doing here?” Malfoy asked. “You really ought to have known better than to simply charge the wards on a self-professed Dark wizard’s house. Where are we going to get our next generation of heroes, if you insist on being so stupid?”

            The man was turning red-faced, and his eyes were blinking continually. Harry sighed, because Malfoy didn’t seem the type to take notice of it himself, and laid one scaled finger on Malfoy’s wrist.

            He went too still in response. Harry couldn’t imagine that Malfoy was frightened when Harry touched him like that, which probably meant—

            Harry flushed and tugged his hand back. “Look,” he said, “all the blood is rushing to his head. You won’t get any answers if you keep holding him upside-down like that. Turn him upright, and he might answer you.”

            “You always spoil my fun,” Malfoy whined, but he turned the man over again and lowered him to the paths. He promptly tried to run out the gates, but what Harry could only think of as leg-traps this time, steel coils rising from beneath the gravel, seized him and sent him sprawling. The man rolled over and stared at them, face and hands cut and scraped from colliding with the ground.

            Harry finally recognized him then, the way he hadn’t been able to with the strange expressions the man was making in the net and the unusual perspective of seeing him upside-down. “Ivan?” he asked in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

            Ivan Ashburg, the youngest of the current class of Auror trainees, stood up, struggled against the magic holding him prisoner for a moment, and then seemed to find his balance, because he tilted his head back haughtily and folded his arms. “Rescuing you,” he said bitterly. His eyes swept Harry up and down. “I thought you were a victim of Malfoy’s manipulations. But that’s not it? It’s all true, isn’t it?”

            Harry nodded, aware of the way Malfoy looked at him. “Yes. I’m a Dark wizard, for the reasons I said in Skeeter’s article.”

            Ashburg didn’t answer in the way that Harry would have expected him to, and Harry looked down to find that Ashburg’s eyes were locked on his hands. The expression on his face would have been appropriate for a child’s murder. Harry clenched his shortened, scale-covered fingers and started to tuck them away.

            Malfoy’s hand landed on his right wrist, and a thrown coil of the white serpent’s body on the left. Harry looked at the snake first. It looked steadily back at him, but for once said nothing. There was a soothing chorus of hisses from the snakes on the ground around him instead—and they were there, a herd of spitting cobras, snapping and striking at air in the way that Harry knew he could command them to strike at Ashburg, if he wanted to.

            Harry turned to meet Malfoy’s eyes.

            They were even less expressive than the snake’s. Malfoy must have a lot of practice at hiding his emotions in the presence of people he didn’t deem worthy to know them, Harry thought, like Ashburg. His fingers tightened, and the message was all there in the way he held onto Harry’s wrist, and then released it.

            Harry nodded, and kept his hands in plain view. “As you can see,” he said to Ashburg, striving for dignity that was still hard against the disgust in Ashburg’s eyes, “I’m happy here. So there was no reason for you to come.”

            “Maybe,” Ashburg said, as if talking to himself, “it’s like a rash. The rash is a symptom of the disease. If you cure the rash, it does nothing to halt the disease.” He looked at Harry, and his eyes were deep and searching.

            Harry blinked. He had recognized the quote from Healer Yvonne’s lectures; she was the Healer hired to give the Auror trainees a good idea of what they could do on the battlefield and what they couldn’t do, and how to recognize common diseases that might come from curses or sheer weariness. But he had no idea how Ashburg meant the quote to apply here. “What?”

            Ashburg went on staring. Harry noticed the cobras shifting back, and held them in check with a simple hiss. Malfoy stood still beside him, which Harry hoped meant he wasn’t about to attack, either.

            “Yes,” Ashburg said with a sigh, and whipped his wand up with the quickness that Harry should have remembered. Ashburg had been first in his class when it came to dueling for a reason. “Reducto!”

            Harry ducked immediately, trying to angle his body so that he could block the hex’s access to Malfoy at the same time, but realized in the next moment that the hex had been aimed above his head anyway.

            At the white serpent.

            It went flying, and Harry heard the limp body crash into the path an instant later. He heard no hissing from it, nothing but the sound of that landing. He stared over his shoulder and found it lying still, the neck twisted to the side as if broken, the golden sheen that always lurked beneath the scales dull and battered.

            Harry turned back around to look at Ashburg, who was nodding. “The snakes are the real disease,” he explained to Harry. “So it’s no good cursing the scales away from your fingers when the snakes are still there.”

            Harry raised his hand, and the cobras flowed forwards.

*

            Draco made himself stop looking for some stir of life in the white serpent. It might have survived the curse, but then, they had seen in hospital that magic was able to touch the snakes as physical blows were not. In any case, that was not his concern at the moment. His concern was that Harry might slaughter their guest.

            Hardly the best action for the image of the Chosen One gone Dark.

            Draco moved sideways, wriggling, and trying to get between their prisoner and the vague grey-black blurs that were racing away from Harry. He doubted the physical barrier of his body would mean much by itself. The cobras could simply flow around him and go on.

            But the symbolic value of the barrier might mean something.

            He stood there, and sure enough, the grey-black snakes crashed together a meter away. Draco stared and made out the edges of flared hoods, enough to be sure they were cobras. He felt almost childishly pleased at having understood that, as he always did when he secured a new piece of information.

            “Get out of the way, Malfoy.”

            Harry spoke in such a guttural hiss that it sounded as if he were tearing up his lungs to speak. Draco met his eyes and shook his head. “No. You don’t want to kill him, because then you would probably lose your friends.”

            Harry paused. Draco had known that was the best way to phrase things. At the moment, Harry couldn’t care about what the public thought. It was only a personal loss like his friends’ regard that would threaten him.

            Then Harry hissed, and his jaws rippled and parted enough that Draco could see most of the way down his throat. That was a change Draco knew Harry hadn’t undergone before. He watched, his body feeling like an hourglass around his humming heart.

            Harry’s fangs lengthened, and the inside of his throat gleamed black. The only snake that Draco knew which looked like that was the black mamba. He knew how quickly a mamba’s venom killed, and wondered if the liquid which slid along Harry’s fangs now was that.

            He would have liked to touch and find out. He wanted to touch everything about Harry, to cut himself on the fangs and the scales, to know him and understand him in a way that no one had ever known or understood any other Parselmouth.

            But there was an audience, and most of the things Draco wanted to do couldn’t have an audience. At least, not the first time. Perhaps later, if Harry wanted to explore a little…

            Draco laid that idea firmly down and smiled at Harry. “You can bite me,” he said. “But you’ll have to do it before you bite him, and that means that you’ll lose one of your allies, and the sanctuary of the Manor. Isn’t that more important than punishing him?”

            He caught a wriggle of the white snake’s body from the corner of his eye. Good. He didn’t dare break eye contact with Harry right now, but it was good to know that the creature would survive.

            “I only did what I was supposed to,” Ashburg said, in the high tones of an astonished teenager who couldn’t believe he wasn’t being hailed as a hero. “What they taught us to do in Auror training.”



            “I would shut up, if I was you,” Draco said, and continued to look at Harry. He was the one who was important here, the one whose companion had possibly been damaged.

            The one who continued to watch Ashburg, and whose fangs were lengthening to absurd dimensions as Draco watched.

            When in doubt, take a risk. Draco had learned that lesson well as he delved into the Dark Arts, even though he thought it wasn’t the one his mentors had wanted him to learn. Professor Snape in particular had been a fine one for taking risks, like spying on the Dark Lord, and then trying to inspire his students to caution instead.

            Draco reached out and trailed a finger down one of Harry’s fangs, towards the tip.

            Harry wrenched his head backwards at once. He had extra bones in his neck, or so it seemed, given how fluidly it traveled. He watched Draco with that flat stare that made his eyes seem about to sink into his head, and then he closed his eyes and turned around, kneeling down on the path beside the white serpent. It was clearer than ever as it climbed his arm, like a thread of cloud. Draco wondered if the snake’s weakness might destroy some of the magic that would mostly keep it from a non-Parselmouth’s eyes.

            “I don’t understand. Why is he upset?”

            Draco waited a moment, until he had his breathing and heartbeat under control, and then turned and faced Ashburg. At least the expression on his face was enough to make Ashburg shut his mouth as tightly as if he never intended to open it until he had grown his own fangs.

            “Harry?” Draco asked gently. He didn’t look away from Ashburg for the same reason that he hadn’t turned from Harry a moment before: because there was no telling what stupidities would happen if he did. But at least he thought the worst part of the crisis was past.

            Harry moved towards them. The white serpent was draped around his shoulders, fully visible now, and Draco rejoiced in the sight. Harry stroked the long neck, and the serpent buried its head under the collar of Harry’s shirt.

            “You tell them,” Harry said, his eyes burning, his voice quiet. “You tell them that I’m happy here, and that any attempts to rescue me are futile.” He cocked his neck at that fluid angle again, and Ashburg clutched his wand and looked sick. “Yes, I’m a Dark wizard, and all the Howlers they send aren’t going to change that. I don’t care how much it damages the reputation of the Ministry to have one of their Aurors go Dark. They did nothing to help me when this Dark gift started to overwhelm me, and they turned on me quickly enough. Go back and tell them that.”

            Draco bit his lip to keep from crowing, momentarily grateful that he didn’t have fangs, as he released the coils on Ashburg’s feet. Yes, that was a strong message to send back, and Ashburg would probably embellish the tale to show what horrors he’d survived. They’d started out giving a balanced picture of what Harry was like now, but the balance would have to tip. First they would show him as scary, then they would give the picture of him as a victim suffering from the wizarding world’s betrayal, and then they would seesaw back and forth between those two options, working always towards the day when people would accept Dark power as “normal.”

            Ashburg backed up one step, then another, then hesitated. “I was only trying to help,” he said. “You could have acknowledged that.”

            This time, the fangs seemed to unfold without Harry ever opening his mouth, as though they were made of rubber and had simply popped out to their full length, and the hiss would have paralyzed Draco if he hadn’t been prepared for it. Ashburg turned and fled, his heels churning up the path. Draco clucked his tongue and made a mental note to remind the house-elves to rake the path clean again.

            “Sorry,” Harry said.

            Draco glanced at him. Harry was shaking, his arms still full of the white serpent. Draco checked that he hadn’t shat on the lawn, and then said, “For what? You reacted as any Parselmouth will when his snakes are threatened. The Dark Lord took threats to Nagini more seriously than ones to himself.” Draco had to pause and added, “Of course, some of that was because he believed he was invincible, but still.”

*

            Harry laughed shakily and cradled the white snake closer. He felt the gentlest touch of a lipless mouth against his cheek, the flick of a tongue on his ear, the softest hiss. I am all right, brother. I was stunned, not hurt.



            “I mean that I’m sorry for losing my temper,” Harry said. “I know that wasn’t part of any plan.” He still found it hard to look Malfoy in the eye, and concentrated on the gold threads between the serpent’s scales instead.

            “Not part of any plan, but since we hadn’t made many at the moment, it will do,” Malfoy said, and stretched out a hand. Harry had crouched low to shield the white snake before he thought about it. Malfoy only paused with his hand there, not retracted. “Frightening him and letting him go will show the more thoughtful that Dark wizards have some restraint, some mercy,” Malfoy added. “Of course some of them will react as if we had dismembered the idiot, but we can’t do anything about the lunatic fringe. Work with the reasonable ones.”

            “I wonder what my friends will say,” Harry said, and fell in beside Malfoy as they made their slow way down the path towards the Manor.

            “Don’t predict it in advance,” Malfoy said, and coiled his arm around Harry’s waist, low enough not to make the snake feel threatened. “They haven’t rejected you yet, and that’s about the best we can hope for.”

            Harry nodded, and sat down at the breakfast table with a good mood that lasted until after the meal, when a ponderous-looking official owl came through the window. Harry took the letter it carried and turned it over, staring at the Gringotts seal on the back.

            “Open it,” Malfoy said. Harry looked up and found him lounging in his chair, legs crossed under the table. “Putting something you dread off always makes it worse.”

            Harry grunted in acknowledgment of that and tore the envelope open. Out tumbled the Gringotts letter that he knew he would find inside, which began Dear Mr. Potter, following your reveal as a Dark wizard…

            “The Ministry is freezing my accounts,” Harry said dully, and laid the letter on the table in front of him. The white snake extended down his arm and pulsed its tongue out, touching the parchment, then pulled back as if it smelled bad. Harry stroked its neck mechanically, and looked at Malfoy. “How can I help you when I don’t have the money to do it?”

*

            Draco rolled his eyes. “You aren’t paying me any money to stay here,” he said. “I took you as an ally not for your fortune, but for other reasons.” He met Harry’s eyes and smiled, and saw the flush that crept up Harry’s neck. Good. If he got Harry to think about their sex life, which he was still conflicted about, that meant he was worrying less about the Ministry’s stupid moves. “I have more than enough money to support us and obtain the materials, such as Potions ingredients, that you might need in your new life.”

            “But I don’t want to be dependent on you.” Harry pushed his body away from the table, and his arms bulged and rippled from the golden-brown rays of scales running down them, shoulder to wrist.

            “Not dependent means all sorts of things,” Draco said, and leaned back further in his chair. God, he wanted to touch Harry right now, to see how smooth the scales were, how far they underlay the skin, but it wouldn’t be a good idea when he looked as if he were about to fly to pieces, and worse still would be for Harry to see his erection. “For example, right now you’re dependent on my advice for how you negotiate the Dark paths. Would you like to get rid of that? Move past the ones you’ve seen already to a new one?”

            Harry swung to stare at him. Then he said, “You want—you think that’s a good thing to do right now, instead of trying to get my account access back?”

            “Cutting off your money is a tool the Ministry thinks it can use to control you,” Draco began.

            “And they’re right,” Harry snapped. A long blue racer popped into existence, coiled around his leg, and hissed at Draco silently. Draco hissed right back at it, mouth open, and the racer paused to stare at him. Harry might not have noticed. “I don’t know what they want, but I have to go talk to them.”

            “No, you don’t,” Draco said calmly. “Because what they want you to do is step back from the Dark paths, and I’ve already explained to you—and Pansy’s explained to you—that that’s impossible. So what you do instead is face and find something else to do with the Dark Arts, something that will strengthen your magic and give you the sense of triumph that you need to feel calmer.”

            Harrry folded his arms. The scales were dying down to a dull golden shimmer now, and the white serpent had come out of its hiding place beneath his shirt to wind like a thread around his neck. “Is everything like that with you?” he asked. “Calculated, choosing how to feel?”

            Draco laughed aloud. “If I could choose how I felt, I wouldn’t have made as many stupid mistakes as I did when I was younger, I assure you. But yes, that’s part of it. Your enemies want you to do something? They can’t force you. You’re free. That’s part of being Dark, being free of all the demands that other people try to make on your magic. They want you to surrender your wand, or promise that you’ll stop using Parseltongue.” He stood up and held his hand across the table, and that wasn’t only to feel the stubby bluntness of Harry’s fingers or the smoothness of his nails, though that was a bonus. “But you won’t. Go and show them that you’re still going to use your Dark magic, because it’s yours, your commitment, your birthright.”

*

            Harry swallowed. That sounded like childish behavior to him, in a way, doing something just because someone didn’t want you to.

            But it was true that the Ministry didn’t offer him a solution. He couldn’t just step out of the Dark paths or banish his snakes. And Malfoy’s solution…

            Sounded a lot more fun, actually.

            That’s what some of it’s about, he decided, as he took Malfoy’s hand. Remembering to enjoy myself, that brooding all the time about the injustices that Parseltongue causes me isn’t going to help me.

            “Sounds good,” he said, and watched as Malfoy stroked the scales on his hand.

            One person finds me beautiful.

            Two, brother, said the white serpent, and threw a coil around his throat.

*

            Talltree-san: It’s possible Harry might get a swelled head from that worship, though! That’s one of the things he’s worried about.

            RRose: That step mostly happens in Chapter 14.

            disgruntledfairy: Thank you! I appreciate the compliments.
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