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Keep This Wolf	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20229 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Fifteen—Thread the Maze
            “I need complete peace and quiet. Can I find it in your pack?”
            Harry started. He had nearly dozed off in front of his house, with the fire flickering in front of him and his head drooping between his hands. He leaped to his feet now and stirred the fire up with a single flick of his wand. Its smell competed with the scent of the person who had startled him, but he thought that was a small price to pay when he could use the fire as a weapon and to see better.
            And then the potential enemy stepped from the shadows, and turned out to be Malfoy. Harry sighed and sat back down on the bench in front of his cottage.
            “I can’t promise that some of my wolves won’t come to see what you’re doing,” he said. “They don’t trust you the way I do.”
            Malfoy’s eyes shone strangely at those words, but he nodded. “Are you capable of tightly warding the guest quarters?”
            Harry shrugged. “I am, but those kinds of wards would increase the pack’s distrust of you, not decrease it. Why don’t you put up the wards instead?”
            Malfoy stared at him in a way that would have signaled a challenge, coming from the pack. Harry managed to restrain himself from reacting, and only watched Malfoy mildly back instead. Malfoy finally said, “And those kinds of wards wouldn’t increase the pack’s distrust?”
            “They already think I’m a bit mad to have tolerated you when you intended to betray us to the Unspeakables at first,” said Harry. “I’m the pack leader they have to live under. You’ll either be an ally who’s sometimes here and sometimes not, or someone who leaves and doesn’t come back, in the end.”
            Malfoy considered that for long enough that Harry wondered if the Ministry would descend on their heads before he finished thinking it through. In the end, however, he nodded, and turned to the guest quarters. “Don’t let anyone touch or disturb the wards,” he said over his shoulder. “They’ll shock them at the very least.”
            “What are you going to work on?” Harry asked. “One of the artifacts they gave you that you’re going to turn against them now?”
            He wondered why Malfoy leaped and spun in place to stare at him, and considered drawing his own wand. But a second later, Malfoy relaxed and chuckled grimly.
            “You could say that,” he said. “An artifact.” He nodded and vanished into the guest quarters, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t let anyone disturb those wards, Potter.”
            The enchantments shivered into sight a moment later, so complex and complete that Harry suspected he had some kind of artifact with him that powered them. A shield that looked like it was made of sewn silver cloth draped the house from top to bottom, without any seams to allow entrance. Another shield curved from underneath it, and Harry knew from the way it rose from and then dipped into the dirt that it would prevent tunneling creatures from getting inside as well.
            Harry grinned. Whatever Malfoy wanted to do, he thought it was going to be impressive.
*
            Draco sat down on the bed in the cabin. It was the most comfortable place, minus his own desk and chair, and he needed to leave his body behind while he devoted his mind and magic to the complicated task of subduing the Malfoy artifact.
            It pulsed and shimmered softly in his hand. Draco knew it would stop doing that, the way it would lose the map to every secret of the Manor, once he had begun to alter it.
            But he had memorized those secrets long ago, and he knew that his ancestors would approve. Whichever way the head of the Malfoy line chose to use this artifact was the correct one. And avenging an insult to his honor was more correct than most.
            Draco breathed softly, until he was sure that his breathing came in time with the gentle pulsing of the crystal. He used tools in the Department of Mysteries—hooks that pulled apart tiny moving cogs, probes that dipped into the hidden heart of an artifact and came out dripping with magic, wheels that could forcibly move apart spells whose protection existed in different layers—but he didn’t need them.
            The most secret training of the Unspeakables, what Draco thought Invisible Heldeson had been referring to when she talked about the trained mind, consisted of the skills that let them take apart an artifact and reshape it to their purpose with nothing more than their conscious will. It was dangerous, and not many Unspeakables excelled in the art. Most of them only used the artifacts, went on raids to acquire more of them, or learned their secrets and then passed them along to the re-makers without attempting any other experiments on them.
            Draco had learned the art.
            He let that pride flood his mind, like a crystal torrent of water that gave the power to turn a millwheel but obscured nothing hiding beneath it. Here, the pride would help him instead of distract him as his teachers had feared.
            Breath, and breath, and breath. His mind was sinking, wavering into the crystal torrent like the tendrils of some tender plant. He was tumbling down, in a kind of slow, controlled fall that he had dreamed about more than once. This was what flight should be like, part of him had said before he had ridden a broom.
            He reached out, and saw fingers that were longer than the ones on his hand curl around the other sides of the cube. Silver light flared to meet and match them, from inside the crystal. Draco breathed, and his fingers of will and imagination grew longer, more curved. They covered the cube completely.
            Draco felt its defenses of cold. He smiled. He was a Malfoy, and the chill could not harm him.
            The first layer of those defenses withered. Next came the blazing heat.
            Draco faced the heat unafraid. He had gone through worse things, and come out of them. The Fiendfyre. The heat of shame after the war, when he first realized how violently the reputation of his family had changed, and what he would have to do to reclaim it. He had given up on that reclamation process at the time, that was true, but not forever. No Malfoy could abandon his heritage forever.
            He was here, and he reached out with all the powers that were in him, powers of blood and skill and training, to say that he had the right to this heritage, and he was going to take it and use it as he saw fit.
            The flames sparked and fell. What was left was the maze.
            Draco could see the silver lines coiling in front of him, bending back on each other and tangling in impossible shapes in his mind and warping until they could draw his mind into an unending spiral. If he wandered into that spiral, he would be lost. There would be nothing left in his body because there would be nothing for him to come back to. His body and his mind alike would dissolve into the swirl and the flow—
            And even thinking about it this poetically, instead of as the peril it was, made him in danger of losing his mind to it. He pulled back sharply and rose on steadily beating wings to the center of the cube, where he hovered.
            A true Malfoy would not be afraid.
            That sounded like the taunting voice of one of his ancestors, but Draco knew it for a trick of his thoughts. The Unspeakables had taught him all about the tricks of his mind, how it was the best deceiver of itself, and that was one of the reasons they didn’t usually ask an artifact’s owners what it did. The owners were the least likely to understand the mysterious and powerful magic they used.
            Not commanded. Only those who understood artifacts from the inside out could command them, and few owners grasped the full potential of the prizes they held.
            Draco hovered, and cut through the shimmering haze inside the artifact with the power of his trained mind, the power that Invisible Heldeson had told him the Unspeakables so valued. He had seen paths like this before. He had walked them before. He had escaped traps that even the other Unspeakables had fallen into.
They betrayed you—
It was another distraction, here, and Draco banished it. Yes, revenge was his motive, but it mattered only if it could ultimately help him to understand the artifact. He would not die here. It was not his way.
No Malfoy would die here. No trained Unspeakable would die here. And Draco was finally coming to understand that he was both, that no amount of mourning and being blamed by other people and being manipulated by other people could change that.
Down and down he bore, when he saw the opening in the silver mist that signaled the opening of the maze. Down and down he dived, and he saw the thread unwinding ahead of him, not already formed, the way it had always appeared before when the artifact was dancing deviously with him, but still moving.
            Draco hit that with his imagined talons, and rode the rebounding, dizzying, shattering thrill of visions that immediately tore through him. He could see a maze that looked like the center of Malfoy Manor, and he could see a maze like the walls, and he could see faces, and he could see trees, and he could see a whirl of seasons that threatened to destroy his sense of the passage of time forever.
            Amid autumn leaves and summer sunlight, amid silver mist and white terror, he halted the whirling, and cracked the secret heart of the artifact open, descending into its magic and forcing that magic to reveal its mysteries, with nothing but will alone.
            The artifact trembled and leaned back, split halves hanging. Draco passed delicately into the heart of it, in no danger as he sorted through the silver threads that had made it up.
            Those silver threads coiled on a heart so complicated that it took Draco a long moment to work out the simple principles underlying it, principles he knew he had seen before. When he fully understood it, he felt like laughing. Of course, of course. The heart was really a shimmering silvery fire of the kind that many wizards lit ritually at the heart of their domains when they first built them, a fire that would consume rubbish and contribute power to the building of the house at the same time. No wonder the cube had been linked so intimately with the defenses and the map of the Manor.
            Now that Draco knew what the fire did, it was simple enough to gather it up and breathe it along new pathways. And he knew the Department of Mysteries as only an Unspeakable knew it. He started to breathe it out to form a map of the Department.
            Then he paused.
            If he engaged the Unspeakables in the Department of Mysteries, he would also engage them in the heart of their strength. Draco didn’t think Invisible Heldeson was smarter than he was, but he knew she knew the Department better. They would have traps in their offices, traps that could easily be turned and aimed against him. They would engage out of sight, and if he lost, they could say anything had happened to him that they liked, without fear of contradiction. Potter might stand up for him if his reputation was tarnished, but he wouldn’t know, any more than any outsider, what exactly had taken place in the darkened corridors and twisting pathways of the Department of Mysteries.
            That wasn’t the way Draco wanted to die. Or triumph, for that matter.
            All the while he had thought, the silver fire had hovered around him, waiting, obedient to his desires. And so Draco turned now and changed the direction of his breathing, and the silver fire around him whirled up into the images of trees.
            He laid paths through the trees, and images of houses, senses and memories he had barely used since he came here giving him the representation of the pack’s territory in the Forbidden Forest to thread through the cube.
            The territory blossomed around him, shining, wavering spurts of flame that Draco picked out as delicately as the original threads of silver had run through the cube. Draco stepped back and studied it from the outside at last, and gradually relaxed. Yes, the image was as perfect as he could make it. If necessary, he could study those paths and houses again and make sure that both the way they looked and the maze he would make out of them were realistic.
            Draco surfaced at last, and found himself still sitting on the bed, the cube cupped in his hands before him. His arms were trembling violently, and he dropped them back into his lap, his head bowed as he panted.
            He knew that only the discipline of the Unspeakables had made him able to both hold up the cube so long and reshape it to his purpose, but that only made him more viciously delighted now. Yes, he would turn their weapons against them, all their weapons, both his trained mind and skills and the weapon they had hoped to make of him.
            Now, all he needed to do was tell Potter that he had made his pack’s territory the inevitable battleground.
*
            “Potter.”
            Harry started and looked up. He had been gardening, trying to bury his doubts and his fears about what he would do once Paracelsus came back and asked for his price in grueling labor. But it meant that, for the third time in two days, Malfoy had managed to startle him.
            Malfoy stepped out of the woods in front of him and crouched down in front of Harry, staring into his eyes as though that would tell him something essential about Harry. He clutched a crystal cube in one hand. Harry wrinkled his nose. The cube smelled of magic to him, but twisted and stinking magic, rotten enough to make him wonder what in the world it was and what Malfoy was doing with it.
            “I want you to know that the fight will be on your territory,” said Malfoy calmly.
            Harry took a step to the side, both to get out of the garden and away from the cube. He didn’t want to crush fragile plants in the actions he might be forced to take. “Excuse me?” he asked quietly, dangerously.
            Malfoy looked at him without much inflection in his voice or movement in his face. “This is a cube that once contained a map to the interior of Malfoy Manor, but would become an impenetrable maze to trap the mind of anyone who looked into it and wasn’t the head of the line,” he said, then paused. “There are ancestors stirring in their beds of earth who would be disgusted that I was telling even this much to you, I’m sure.”
            Harry had the impulse to smile, but didn’t. Malfoy might be charming or amusing sometimes, but he was the one who had told Harry that his whole pack was now in danger. “Fine. I don’t know why you need to hold a battle on our territory because of that.”
            “I made the cube into a trap that will hold the minds of any Unspeakables who try to enter the maze.” Malfoy considered him like a lizard, with still eyes. “But I couldn’t set the trap in the Department of Mysteries. I don’t know it well enough. I did create a maze and a trap based on your territory, however.”
            Harry looked around, wondering if he would smell twisted magic drifting through the trees any second.
            “Inside the cube,” Malfoy said, voice strained as if any idiot should be expected to know this. “Not literally in your territory.”
            “Then I don’t understand how that’s supposed to work,” Harry said. He didn’t really care if Malfoy thought him stupid, he told himself, to stop the prickle of embarrassment creeping up his face. What mattered was protecting his pack, and not betraying his implicit vow to them that Malfoy wasn’t dangerous. “They aren’t going to step inside the cube when they come here.”
            “No,” Malfoy agreed. “But I’ll entwine their minds with the map in the cube.”
            “How can you be sure that you aren’t going to pull any werewolf minds into the same trap?”
            “I’ll make sure of it,” said Malfoy.
            “That’s not something I can just tell my pack and expect them to accept it.”
            “You said that you would stand at my side.”
            Harry curled his lip so he could show off his teeth. It wasn’t a threat he would have used on Malfoy before, fearing to frighten him, but here, he thought Malfoy could stand it. “Me. Not my entire pack. And they won’t be sacrifices for your vengeance.”
            Malfoy studied him long enough that Harry really thought he would turn away and simply walk down a path into the forest. Harry was prepared for that to happen. It would be a pity, but Malfoy’s vengeance was less important to him than his pack, even if Malfoy himself was disturbingly important.
            “Very well,” said Malfoy, suddenly and ungraciously. He leaned back and gestured to the cube. “I’ll show you how this works. If you’ll permit me to entrap and then release your mind. It’ll take about an hour.”
            “Yes,” said Harry, laying down his gloves and the small trowel he’d been using to dig in the garden. He stepped towards Malfoy. “Do what you need to.” He noticed that Malfoy was staring at him with his mouth open, and added irritably, “What? Did you think I was going to refuse because I was afraid?”
            “Because you were cautious, perhaps,” Malfoy said, eyes shielded under his lids again. “Because you know that your pack needs you.”
            “I know that there are people here who would hunt you down if you did anything to me,” said Harry simply, and brushed some more dirt off his hands. “And not here. My friends would be willing to believe that you’d done something to me even more than most of the pack would.”
            Malfoy closed his fingers around the cube. “But you seemed so concerned about your pack a moment ago.”
            “My pack. Not myself. Not as much about myself,” he corrected, when Malfoy gave him an unimpressed look. “But I also have some magic that allows me to resist artifacts, as you’ve seen.” He gestured on into the woods when Malfoy stood there and continued to look at him. “Are we going to do this or not?”
            Malfoy turned his back sharply. “I think I liked you better when you were softer and more sympathetic to me,” Harry heard him mutter. He probably wasn’t supposed to hear it. It was the kind of thing that would have escaped most human ears.
            But Malfoy should have remembered he was dealing with a werewolf. “That was the weaker version of you,” he said cheerfully. “Draco Malfoy, the way he was, can take me.”
            Malfoy twitched, but kept walking. Harry grinned at his back. This had an odd tinge of fun to it.
            Now, if I can just keep Paracelsus from stopping all the fun.
*
Tommy-Lane: Well, the vengeance is on its way! And thanks.
CareLessLover: Harry would regret it, but he intends to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Jester: Harry doesn’t trust Paracelsus not to drain him.
SP777: Thanks! I decided that I really needed to give a better description of surroundings than I usually do, for something that strange.
And Draco? Not wanting revenge? He wanted it all the time on Harry when they were kids.
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