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Intoxicate the Sun	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18051 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fourteen—Extending the Evil

            George leaned back and squinted at the wheel in front of him. He thought it was almost finished, but he had thought that twice before now, and each time he had turned out to be wrong.

            I would have told you if you were right, Fred’s voice murmured in his ear. Honestly, George, your biggest fault is that you keep—

            “Questioning you and doubting you,” George muttered, rolling his eyes. “I knew that. But remember who actually has the hands around here.”

            Remember who has the genius, Fred retorted.

            George started to respond, but someone knocked on the door. George tugged the small gold chain that lay beside his left hand, and it, in turn, pulled on a button embedded in the table that made a ward outside the door come to life. The ward would deposit an image of who stood outside the door in front of his eyes, and George could decide how he should act when that person came into the room—or if he should worry about letting them inside at all.

            This time, it was Harry, and he was staring off into the distance with an abstracted expression on his face that George recognized. The device he’d finished wasn’t the one that would keep Harry sane, but he silently resolved to speed up their production of the next one. Fred murmured in wordless agreement in the back of his head; this was one of those issues where they didn’t need to speak aloud to understand each other’s thoughts.

            “Come in, Harry,” George called, disarming the traps on the door with another tap of his fingers. Harry took him at his word and came in almost before the protections were gone, glancing around the lab casually.

            “I hadn’t seen this before,” he murmured. George blinked at him, and then realized that he was looking at the maps that George had covered the walls with, in pursuit of their latest project. He shrugged modestly.

            “They’re only copies of the maps that everyone else has,” he reassured Harry. “We haven’t been keeping anything from the rest of the revolution.”

            One thing George liked about Harry was that he didn’t stop and stand there visibly debating whether he should acknowledge the “we” that George used. He just nodded and went straight into what he’d come here for. “Have you finished the last device we discussed yet?”

            George smiled. He was proud of both what they’d accomplished and its form. “Yes,” he said, and flourished a hand at the wheel in the center of the table.

            Harry sucked in his breath, and approached it as if he were afraid that the vibrations of his steps through the floor would shake the wheel to pieces. George laughed. “It isn’t that fragile,” he reassured Harry. “It can’t be, or we wouldn’t be able to use it in the field.”

            Harry nodded again, apparently accepting that, but still reached out cautiously. “I assume I can touch it?” he added, looking over his shoulder at George.

            “Yes,” George said, approving his caution. It really was too bad that it hadn’t worked out so that Harry could marry Ginny. George and Fred would both have enjoyed having a brother like Harry, who asked about touching rather than assuming it was safe the way Ron did. The last time Ron had come into the design room, he’d got a concussion, and after George told him not to touch anything.

            Harry picked up the wheel and turned it over. George leaned back in his chair and unfocused his eyes for a moment, trying to see the wheel the way that someone else, a stranger like Harry, would. Fred murmured instructions that George could use; he’d always been better at that, and had usually made the introductions of the stranger-looking devices in the shop.

            The wheel was made of brass polished to look like gold, and hollow in the center, around the shining spokes. The axles and the double rim of the wheel itself were covered with long slivers of silver and diamond. Harry had winced when George first told him what he needed to build the wheel, but as George had suspected, it hadn’t been a problem once they raided the back supplies of the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes shop and sold some of the stranger and less useful gifts that the rebels had brought with them

            In the center of the wheel, serving as the main attractor for an observer as well as the device itself, was a second wheel, this one made of brass except for the staring eye in the exact center of that. Harry reached out with one finger, and George reached up and caught his finger. Fred, who’d shrieked, settled down with a huff.

            You always did freak out about nothing, George taunted his brother, and winked at Harry. “Sorry, mate. That’s the one point that it’s not quite safe to touch, unless you want to call them here and now.”

            Harry’s throat worked as he swallowed. “I’ll remember that,” he said hoarsely. “Can you—does it—did you make it of emerald on purpose?”

            George smiled at him. “Yes. You’re going to be the one who uses it, and the sympathetic resonances between you and the wheel should be as strong as possible. We had trouble finding an emerald the exact color of your eyes, though.” He shuddered. He hated some of the finer points of detail work, and combing through hundreds of stones over a few evenings, the glass held close to his eye so that Fred could see it better, would rank among some of his least favorite memories ever.

            Harry couldn’t perhaps appreciate the full extent of the sacrifice, but he did let his hand rest on George’s shoulder for a second, giving him a hard squeeze. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that.” He put the wheel back on the table and studied it again. “No tests with this one, I reckon?”

            George shook his head. “It’d give away too much right now. But as soon as you want to, you can use it.”

            “How certain are you that it’ll work?” Harry asked.

            “Ninety-nine percent,” George said, beaming at him. “And the other one percent is all Fred’s fault.”

            Harry laughed at that, which George also liked, and considered the wheel with his head held on the side. “It can be taken along when we Apparate?” he asked. “And when we fly on brooms? I’m not sure how we’ll get there. In fact, we might not be able to Apparate, but it’s better to be prepared.”

            “It ought to survive either,” George said, and gave in to the impatience that Fred was poking at him like a rusty stick. “Are you ever going to tell me where we’ll use our little invention?”

            Harry smiled at him, and the smile promised exciting things to come, shining with the emotions that George felt himself when he heard. “Azkaban, George. I’m thinking of Azkaban.”

*

            Draco tossed his third report for the Ministry into the fire and leaned back on the bed, his hands folded behind him on the pillow. To someone entering the room, he reckoned, he would have looked relaxed, but his brain buzzed with the effort of furious thought, and he knew that he would never get to sleep until he addressed it.

            Should he have taught Potter the Strangler? All his doubts had resurfaced the moment Potter gave him such a demonstration of trust. That could mean that he thought he controlled Draco, or at least wanted to think so, and that meant that he would do something unfortunate fairly soon. Not to mention the ancient family traditions that argued only a Malfoy should ever know the spell—a true Malfoy. Someone who married a Mudblood or did something else that disgraced the family would have their memory of the spell carefully removed.

            Draco sometimes feared that he would destroy his family heritage in the attempt to preserve it.

            He had said that his father wasn’t there and didn’t have the right to make the choice, but on the other hand, he would be free soon if Potter kept his promise. And that meant Draco wouldn’t be able to ignore Lucius’s wants and desires anymore.

            If he even wanted to.

            Draco balled his left hand up into a fist and slammed it into his hip. He welcomed the resulting bruise and the slight ache in his leg. He wouldn’t even have to do this if it weren’t for confusing Potter and the way he kept changing his mind and giving voice to new ideas that disrupted Draco’s old ones.

            Potter had accepted the Strangler being cast on him, and hadn’t panicked or screamed in outrage the way Draco had imagined he would. That meant he had to be mad, didn’t it? No one who was sane could remain calm when his magic was taken, much less talk to Draco the way Potter had.

            And to trust him to reverse it…

            Draco rolled over and drove his face into the pillow. He thought that a new position might help clarify his thoughts, but instead they bumped and zoomed through his mind as frenetically as ever, like insects caught in a jar.

            There was no denying that Potter was mad, and so Draco’s statements to the Minister on that head could just as easily be truth as lies. That meant Draco had to decide, again, if Potter’s revolution was really more likely to give him what he wanted than the Ministry was. Yes, the rebellion would attack Azkaban—eventually—and it would free his parents, or Draco would know why. But if it had a mad leader, then it might fall apart before it got to that stage.

            Or Potter might decide to accuse Draco of treachery and try to kill him as easily as he’d decided to trust him today.

            Draco closed his eyes and began to count backwards from one hundred, which always took him into sleep. But his thoughts remained coherent long enough for one last, unpleasant explanation to suggest itself to him.

            Potter could be sane. But Draco found it easier to believe he was mad than to believe that someone might really extend a hand of friendship to Draco himself and see him as a person.

*

            Hermione let herself fall dizzily into her bed. She had spent a second day, all day, with the committee to investigate Harry’s background, and her throat hurt from talking and her eyes were dry from squinting. She was always watching people’s eyes and hands, trying to see what they were gesturing to on parchment so crowded with writing that they could be pointing at almost any word, trying to see if they suspected her bland words hid a much stronger and more pointed truth.

            She didn’t know that she wanted to be a spy any longer. It was certainly nothing like as exciting as books made it sound. She always suspected that she had missed something, even when she simultaneously suspected she hadn’t.

            That’s the hell of it, she thought drowsily, rolling over and casting a spell that would pull off her boots for her. That was the sort of practical, everyday charm that some people ought to learn instead of relying on house-elves all the time. If you miss something, you won’t know that you have until you do.

            The room was dim, normally enough to make her fall asleep at once. But now she lay awake, chewing her lip, and remembered the parade of witnesses they’d brought in that day, all of them swearing that they’d seen Harry come to Azkaban and torture several of the former Death Eaters.

            Guards, other prisoners, the man who ran the ferry that regularly crossed to Azkaban since no Apparition was permitted there, more Death Eaters. Hermione thought they had to be lying—she couldn’t picture Harry indulging in casual torture—but at least a few of them seemed reluctant to tell their stories.

            And she had never thought that Harry would burn someone to death before it happened, either.

            Hermione tightened her mouth into a thin line and shook her head. No. The Ministry wouldn’t make her doubt or give up faith in Harry unless she absolutely had to, unless she heard the confession from his mouth or Ron’s—and Ron had been his partner, which meant he knew a lot more about what Harry did day-to-day than Hermione did—or saw the memories in a Pensieve.

            And even if Harry did turn out to be less than she thought him, more mad or more dangerous, that wouldn’t make the cause he was fighting for any less important.

*

            Harry woke abruptly. He knew he’d been in the middle of a long dream where he’d been arguing with people. That seemed all he did nowadays, argue with people: with Malfoy over whether he should learn the Strangler, with Ron over what they should do next with the rebellion, with the people who were learning to turn Fortuna’s Wheel about whether or not it would work. This argument was in a room he had never seen before and with people he had never seen before, but that didn’t mean much.

            Now he was staring into darkness, and hearing a sound repeat: a soft, snuffling, questing sound, as though someone was working his or her way along the edge of a potion spill and trying to tell from the smells what ingredients had been used.

            Or else, something was making its way.

            Harry sat up with his wand in hand and cast one of the charms that he had learned when he was trying to make his wild magic function for him. The light that came from his wand was a soft and private thing, shining through his fingers as he cupped them around the end of the wand, but visible to no one else. Harry remembered about the visibility a moment later and shook his head at himself while he took his hand away.

            The room in front of him looked like always. Four corners, large bed that echoed the four-posters he’d known at Hogwarts, solid walls, more windows than he knew what to do with. Harry had sometimes dreamed of a large house to live in when he was locked in his cupboard, but even then, the rooms hadn’t had lots of windows, because he didn’t want to spend his time sitting in front of them and staring out them all day, and windows weren’t good for anything else.

            The sniffling sound repeated. Harry turned towards the nearest corner and lifted his wand higher. The charm glowed and flickered and made it light up as if he’d thrust a torch towards it.

            The figure that appeared was so thin that it took Harry a moment to realize what he was seeing. Not a solid creature, despite the noises it made; its footsteps were silent as it prowled towards him.

            A shadow.

            A hound made of shadow, its nose lowered to the floor as though it was tracking a particularly hard-to-find scent. Harry could see a faint glow from the head that he thought might be its eyes. They were yellow-green and had the hard surface shininess of stones.

            As he stared in uneasy fascination, the hound abruptly jerked its head up and stared straight at him. Its jaws parted, and a warbling bark came out.

            Other shadow-hounds leaped silently into being from the other corners of the room, congregating in the middle in what looked like a mass of lavender smoke. Harry saw one of them crouch as if to leap, and he automatically fired off a Stunner.

            The curse went straight through the dog’s body without slowing down, or slowing it down. The dog elongated as it flew towards him, stretching thinner and thinner like a spear, and it was too close for another spell in less than a heartbeat. Harry raised a hand, but felt nothing more than a faint cool sensation as the hound soared through his hand and into his eye. He knew it went into his eye because he saw a faint dark speck there that had faded by the time he managed to blink.

            Harry stood there, waiting for another dog to leap at him, but the rest of the pack lolled back on their haunches and waited. Harry cast a Stunner at them to discourage them, but they only stared and panted and showed no change.

            Then he heard the bay of a hound inside his own skull, and felt his heartbeat accelerate as though he was running away from it.

            Harry sat down in the bed and put his head in his hands. He was fine, he told himself multiple times, while the bay got louder and his body reacted the way it used to react when Dudley and his friends chased him. He was sitting here. The hounds couldn’t actually touch or affect him. This was a magical sending from the Ministry, undoubtedly, but all it meant was that he was seeing and hearing some strange things. That was nothing to someone who had survived visions from Voldemort for months.

            The baying filled his thoughts, shaking the world. Harry gripped his head in his hands for a moment and wondered if the purpose of the dogs was to make him wonder if he was crazy or sane for the rest of his life. Or maybe it was just meant to prevent him from getting sleep. That could mimic madness sometimes.

            The bay surged hot and hard and triumphant, and Harry fell to the bed, paralyzed abruptly, as the feeling of teeth tore into his body.

            They were coming from nowhere, just as the sound was. Harry thrashed and kicked the moment the first pain passed, but it was no good; he could still feel the sensations of jaws digging deep, twisting and worrying him the way they would worry a rabbit. Harry pushed himself up with one hand and turned towards the door, intending to fetch George. He might know what these dogs were or at least be able to build a defense against them.

            Then came the moment of death.

            Harry screamed at the blackening in his brain, the fading blood-beat, the moment when he felt as though he was being sucked down a vast tunnel towards a dark star at the bottom. Then it was gone, and he was still alive, shaking, but with the knowledge that he had died, that that had been the instant he had somehow managed to forget when he died to save the world from Voldemort.

            He was alive.

            But another hound was preparing to leap at him, and Harry thought that, in all likelihood, it would happen again in a few minutes.

            His fingers shook as he fumbled for his wand, and this time, when the dog came at him, he cast a Shield Charm. The dog still passed through it as if it were a shadow, though, and slipped into his brain at the eye. Harry stumbled to the door, hearing the first bays, his hand on the knob.

            He wished for Hermione. She might have heard of something like this; she might be able to tell him what it was and how he could end it.

            But he did have George, and he would find him and hope that he could whip up an invention that would prevent Harry from dying too many more times.

            He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the crowd of hounds had loped into the middle of the room, following him. When he took another step out into the corridor—he couldn’t even hear the step, his brain was so filled with the commanding echoes of the hound’s cry—they flowed forwards.

            Harry shook his head. He knew the group had got bigger since he first saw them. The thought of having to suffer this hundreds of times, or thousands, made him turn around clumsily so that he could run.

            Instead of George standing there, or someone neutral, it was Malfoy he smashed into. Malfoy stumbled back and caught Harry by the elbows, keeping him from measuring his length on the floor. Harry grunted his thanks and then fought free. He already knew from the curious look that Malfoy gave behind him that he didn’t see anything, and so he would probably think the hounds were a product of Harry’s mind. Harry didn’t want to listen to any acid comments on his sanity, thank you very much. He would fight hard enough to keep that until George could come up with an invention.

            The hound’s bays were so loud that Harry really had to concentrate to make out Malfoy’s words.

            “What’s happening, Potter? I couldn’t sleep, but I know that you don’t often have that problem.”

            Harry shook his head. “Need to find George,” he said, and then wondered if all his words had come out correctly, because Malfoy was giving him a very strange look. “I can’t explain, and you don’t want to hear. Let me pass.”

            Malfoy only shifted so that Harry was leaning against his shoulder instead of fighting free. That made Harry almost want to cry; he’d spent so much time trying, and now he was being held back. But he firmed his jaw and held still as best he could. If he died in front of Malfoy, then maybe Malfoy would acknowledge something was wrong.

            “What is it?” Malfoy murmured to him, right in his ear, because he seemed to have picked up on the fact that Harry couldn’t hear well. “Tell me, and I might be able to help, or at least give you some advice.”

            Harry gritted his teeth in annoyance. He didn’t want to be here, especially when he could feel his heart going mad at the approach of the hound, and the pain surging up and down his sides was spectacular enough to make him faint all by itself. But he worked his tongue into some semblance of obedience and managed to answer.

            “There—a pack of shadows appeared in my room. Shadow hounds. Two of them have gone into my head, and no spells I cast could stop them. The first one—killed me. I felt as if I’d died. And the second one’s going to do it.”

            He forced his fluttering eyes open and stared at Malfoy, willing him to understand. Malfoy’s glance at him was startled, but a moment later, a frown crossed his face, and he nodded. “I’ve heard of that,” he said. “The hounds can only be commanded by a certain Dark artifact, one that the Ministry has been rumored to have for a long time. I think I know a counterspell, but it’s Dark. Does that bother you?”

            “Just—”

            The moment of death again, the expanding nothingness and the helpless falling. Harry came back to himself shaking, unable to reject the support of Malfoy’s arms as they wrapped around his shoulders and waist.

            “Just help me,” Harry whispered. “I don’t care what spell you use. I really think this is going to kill me for real, or drive me mad.”

            “Of course it is,” Malfoy said, with a slightly impatient snap in his voice. “That would be the purpose of sending them after you.” He laid Harry down against a wall and moved forwards, putting himself between Harry and the hounds. Harry thought that was sheer good luck, since Malfoy still didn’t act as if he could see them, but the hounds tumbled to a halt and stared up with narrowed, gleaming eyes.

            Malfoy began to chant. Harry saw a third hound crouch, and would have added his voice to the spell if he knew how.

            Strange, he thought, closing his eyes in the futile hope that it would help keep the hound away, that I would rely on Malfoy to help me so much.

            There was an important thought there, but the first exploding bay chased it from Harry’s head. He gritted his teeth and hung on as best he could to the shaped, flowing syllables of Malfoy’s words.

            And hoped.

*

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Intoxicate the Sun