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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23334 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
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Chapter Sixteen—Writhe in the Dance

            Draco gasped against the scales muffling his mouth. He reached up to strike away the heads that were striking at him. The only advantage they had right now, he thought, backing frantically away, was that the cobras distracted each other. There were too many of them to start up a clear or coherent charge.

            Small mercies.

            But those mercies had kept him from dying of venom so far, and had even saved Pansy from being overwhelmed, so he had to be grateful for them.

            He tucked in his hands close to his sides and rolled towards the back of the room, towards the darkened mirror. It should be quiescent now. If anything else came out of it, it would be friendly towards the one who had caused that darkness.

            Draco thought.

            He turned his head back and saw that Pansy had leaped up and attached herself to a wall with Sticking Charms on her hands, the sort of clever thing she would tend to think of. But Harry still stood in the way of the snakes, and his head was almost hidden under the silver bodies. The white serpent whipped back and forth, a soft, steady hiss coming to Draco’s ears, but he knew that it couldn’t hold all of them back.

            He’s relying on his Parseltongue to command them, and it’s not working, Draco thought a moment later, and shook his head. This was why every Dark wizard should have a specialization outside the magic he felt most comfortable with. That magic wouldn’t work in all circumstances.

            Draco closed his eyes and reached out to the memory of a Dark path that he had had to conquer by himself, in silence and in freezing fear. His wand rose without his willing it, pulled by that memory, pulled by the magic that surged through his veins at once. Dark Arts were no more sentient than any other branch of magic, but they gave the wizard power, and affected his will. Be strong enough in the first place to master them, and it could feel as if the spells were crushing each other up your wand, seem as if there was something beyond you that wanted you to cast them.

            “Timor,” Draco whispered.

            The air in front of him turned a dull, silvery black. A moment later, the magic blasted out of him and enveloped the cobras, parting on either side of Harry, the way Draco had wanted it to. That was the thing about Dark Arts spells, too, Draco thought, panting as he leaned his head back on the wall; they responded more to the caster’s will, as long as he was strong enough to control them. He would have had no choice but to inflict everyone in front of him with the consequences of the spell if he was a Light wizard. This way, only the snakes should be affected.

            Unless Harry is enough like a snake to feel the pulses of spells directed at them…

            Draco shook away the suspicion. He didn’t think so. He had very clearly thought about affecting only the cobras, and his will wouldn’t fail under such a challenge. He waited and watched, though, wand twitching in his hand with the eagerness to cast again if necessary.

*

            You should flee, brother.

            Harry thought he smiled, but it was hard to tell. So many scales were rubbing around him, so many fangs were looking for a purchase somewhere in his hair, which Harry had hardened into streams of hanging scales, or on his skin, which Harry had toughened to thin rock with scales beneath it. Not even the tiniest of muscles could move freely anymore.

            That would have been good advice some time ago, Harry said, and tried to see the white serpent. No, he couldn’t; a cobra was pressing his eyelids shut, striking again and again at his hands. Sooner or later, Harry thought, the fangs would puncture the scales that he didn’t know how to control very well, after all. I can’t now.

            I am sorry, brother.



            Harry wished he had a hand free to reach up and strike the white serpent. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known what was behind that door, and I would have come even if you did. I thought I could control them.

            He never knew what the white serpent would have replied. Both of them were too distracted by the violent shiver that ran through the piled cobras at that moment, and the low, insistent whining that began to surge up their throats. Harry blinked. It was like standing inside a vibrating gong.

            Magic. The cold one. The white serpent slid down the side of Harry’s neck; he could tell it apart from the cobras because it still felt warmer, and familiar to his skin in a way that none of the others did. He cast a spell.

            What does it do?

            I cannot tell. Be silent and let me—

            Then the cobras slid away from them in a mad rush, piling back towards the door they’d come out of. Harry and the white serpent stood alone in the middle of the floor, with Harry able to raise his hands and open his eyes again. He turned his head and saw Malfoy reclining against the dark mirror, his eyes so brilliant with fire that they could have outshone the silver machine in the next room.

            Harry smiled at him. Malfoy was reflected in the mirrors that still shone clear, too, and he looked as good there, as proud and perfect and poised on the edge. Not unruffled, but Harry was coming to accept that that wasn’t an ideal for this new Malfoy, anyway, the way it seemed to have been for the old one.

            Harry opened his mouth to say thank you, then shut it as he caught sight of himself in the mirrors that curved closest to the door into the other room.

            He was covered, head to foot, in an armor of gold-brown scales. His hair really had turned into spun strands of scales, the way that he had commanded it to. His fingers danced, long and worm-like, with small eyes and snapping fangs at the ends of them. Harry hadn’t felt that change, hadn’t known it was happening. His legs had become a sort of squat pillar, halfway between haunches and the thick coil that a great constrictor would use when lifting its head to swallow prey.

            Harry turned his head away. He could bear a lot of things after being saved from death, he thought, and maybe this should have been one of them. But—

            There is a difference between accepting something, the white serpent said, draping himself through Harry’s hair-strands and setting them rattling, and accepting every consequence of it the first time you see them.

            Harry willed breath back into his lungs, and then started to withdraw the scales on skin and hair, the eyes and fangs on his fingers, the leglessness that had begun to consume his body. If he accepted it, then it was his, to use or reject or use for a time and then place back into a mental cupboard. That was what he had to remember.

            “Potter.” Parkinson’s voice, low and neutral from the side. “You survived the cobras?”

            “Yes,” Harry said, then had to pause and refashion his jawline a bit so he could speak in English. “Yes. My skin was too tough for them to bite through, and then there were too many of them searching for an opening, and they only struck at each other.” He looked up at her, and found her clinging to the wall.

            Her eyes darted to his, then away, avoiding looking at him. “I’m glad that you weren’t bitten,” she said.

            Harry knew the thickness in her voice from hearing it from Ron and Hermione, even before they saw his fingers shorten and retreat. Disgust.

            It doesn’t matter, he reminded himself. She’s still your ally, and she’s saved you, too. He made himself turn away from her and face Malfoy.

            Malfoy, who still watched him with half-lidded, burning eyes, and who had dropped down from the mirror to walk towards Harry, as though he was drawn despite himself by the glow of the scales under his skin.

            Harry concentrated on that, on the desire in Malfoy’s eyes, and said, “Thank you. What was the spell that you used on them?”

*

            Would he wind those coils around me? Would he use those fingers to tease me in ways that I couldn’t take?

            Draco had to remind himself of where they were, and that Pansy was still watching them with wide eyes, even if those eyes were halfway hidden under her hair. He bowed a little to Harry and said, “The spell was one I learned on the Dark paths, a spell of fear. It made them feel the same terror that I did walking that particular path.”

            Harry smiled. “I see.” His face was becoming more human, losing the angles, the bluntness, the scales under the skin. Draco reached out and brushed his fingers down Harry’s cheek, and knew it was the best thing he could have done. Harry relaxed, and looked more human than ever. “It was effective, thanks. You’re a better Dark wizard than I am.”

            Draco smiled back. “Only for the moment,” he murmured, and he and Harry stared at each other until Pansy cleared her throat loudly.

            “We can’t use that room,” Pansy said. “And you already have a cobra that belonged to the Unspeakables, so I’m not sure that we need one of them to make convincing evidence. So where do we go now?”

            Draco tilted his head towards his friend, gratifying her, at the same time as he gratified Harry by not taking his eyes off him. Of such delicate compromises were leaders made. Draco couldn’t believe the Dark Lord had never learned that. “We find one of the offices of a high Unspeakable agent, and retrieve paperwork from it, and an artifact, that proves that they specialize in the study of the Dark Arts.”

            Pansy choked. “Oh, yes, that’s a simple plan,” she said, when she could speak. Draco finally looked away from Harry to see her climbing down from the wall, shaking her head at him. She carefully kept her gaze away from Harry, which was something that Draco intended to tackle her about in a few days’ time. “One that I applaud for how straightforward and easy it is.”

            “I’m glad you approve,” Draco said, and held out his arm to Harry while Pansy was still spluttering. “Shall we?”

            He led Harry towards the mirror opposite the one that Pansy had opened into the cobra room, while Pansy trailed behind them. Harry was holding himself rigid with what was probably a multitude of emotions, but Draco knew that one of them must be delight at the easy way that Draco touched him.

            Well, it should be. Or else Draco was a lesser diplomatist than he thought himself.

            “I already felt around for a door there,” Pansy said sharply when Draco reached out and skimmed his fingers down the glass. “There’s nothing, and you know that you can trust my senses for what is and isn’t there.”

            “I know,” Draco said. “But just as the Unspeakables think that there’s no door into the room with the hydra where we appeared, you think there’s none here.” He turned and smiled at Harry. “There a Dark path that leads into the smaller parts of the Department. It’s one that I never mastered, and which Pansy hasn’t, either. This is your first test beyond the path with the Hanging Tree, Harry. Are you ready?”

*

            Harry stared at Malfoy. How could he ask him that when some parts of his body were still melting back into shape?

            Because you sing with power, the white serpent told Harry, tickling his ear with his tongue. And the cold one has more faith in you than do in yourself.

            That was true, but Harry didn’t think it a good thing, at the moment. He tried to think past his memory of the disgust in Parkinson’s eyes, and the way that his skin still smarted from the withdrawal of the scales beneath it, and met Malfoy’s eyes. “No one’s mastered it. Why do you think I should, when I’m such an amateur, instead of you doing it?”

            “Because you should see the path’s guardians,” Malfoy said, which was no kind of an answer, and he reached out and tore the air open.

            Harry stiffened when the scent flooding through that small gap reached his nostrils. Rich, and salty, and so loaded with—with rocks that it made his head ache. The white serpent twisted his neck down in its direction and bobbed it slowly, flickers of light chasing the golden traceries in his scales. There are snakes there, brothers. Great ones. It is no wonder that none of them wanted to walk this path.

            Harry panted, his throat thick with excitement. He could feel the split in his tongue that always seemed to be there now widening, splitting it further. He tried to hold that back, tried to hold back the eagerness to charge in, and turned to glance at Malfoy. Malfoy had no expression on his face, the way he sometimes did, but Harry thought it was one of his more genuine neutral facades this time, that there was really nothing to be excited about.

            “How sure are you that this path leads into the offices of one of the people we want?” Harry demanded.

            “Oh.” Malfoy’s tongue could have done credit to a Parselmouth himself, the way he flicked it out and then pulled it back in. “Quite sure.”

            Harry nodded. Malfoy, he knew, wouldn’t make that kind of reassurance without some proof that at least satisfied him, because if he ran Harry into the mouth of danger, he stood losing both an ally and an ally’s trust. And Malfoy, for all his risk-taking, couldn’t value proof of the Unspeakables using Dark Arts more than he valued the chance to study a Parselmouth.

            Harry stepped forwards and braced his hands on either side of the doorway. The slit in the air began to beckon, to pull at him, less like wind tugging on his clothes than the smooth gradient of a throat swallowing him down.

            Harry swallowed in response, darted out his tongue so that the edge of it touched the edge of the white serpent’s tongue, and leaped forwards.

            The path beneath his feet writhed up and down, coiling around and back, and Harry remembered Malfoy’s warnings about what would happen if he strayed off it. He fixed his eyes forwards, and had the white serpent watch sideways, for the twistings, and when the path snapped back towards him, he leaped onto it and stamped down with his feet, with his magic, with the serpents wrapped about his legs, forcing it straight.

            That earned him a hiss, a wash of Parseltongue that was far Darker and more complex than anything he’d tried to understand so far, and the slow, wrathful turning of a great neck in front of him.

            Harry stared. Then he understood, while his heart sang furious cadences in his ears.

            The path he walked was the back of one giant snake, not a simple dirt road the way the others had been.

            The snake surged up, with three heads like a Runespoor but the colors of a basilisk, and began to turn those heads towards him. Harry ran straight towards its neck, hands flailing out ahead of him, and closing on scales. The edges of scales, standing out from the neck, as though dislodged by the unsuccessful strike of some other predator. Harry didn’t know that for certain, but he knew they would help him now. He swung up and then down and out with his weight, making the scales bend.

            The snake screamed. Harry could translate the pain in that hiss, but no words. Two scales came away in Harry’s hand, and he heard the viscous blood begin to run.

            So much for the plan to use the jutting scales like reins to guide the snake. And the blood would make his footing all the slipperier.

            But that didn’t mean much, couldn’t be allowed to mean much.

            Harry sprang high, and unfolded snakes from his legs and chest as he went, conjuring more with a stroke of his arm through the air and a stroke of his mind inside his head. He commanded them to swarm, and they did, around the great snake’s neck and heads, overlapping each other like bracelets.

            Or like manacles.

            Every time a new chain of snakes reached the earth beneath the guardian, which must be the path itself, and stabbed in, one of the three heads became less able to move. The serpent figured out what he was doing soon enough, and froze its heads in place while it began to twist and lunge with the rest of its body, trying to shake him off that way.

            Hold him, Harry told the snakes, and then pulled the white serpent off his head and set him gently on the place where the guardian’s necks joined his body. Command them. I have something else that I need to do.

            What is that, brother? The white serpent flicked out his tongue to touch Harry’s leg. You know that we cannot do this without you.

            I know that. Harry flicked one hand down to trace his fingers along the white snake’s head. And I know that I am going to help you. But I can’t help in the form I’m in.

            For the first time, surrounded by the cold glory and might of the Dark paths, Harry closed his eyes and slipped free of his guise in skin and human bone, heading for the form that it seemed he had wanted to merge into since he first began accepting his Parseltongue and speaking it rather than English.

            The change began with his legs, freezing them together. It had been terrifying in hospital; it was liberating now that Harry knew he was the one who had begun it, rather than the other way around. His legs became long and soft, flexible and thin as whips, and braided together. He knew that was necessary, that he needed it for the moment when he would have a massive tail, but it was still an unsettling sensation to feel.

            From there, the transformation rose straight up, his arms braiding around his body the same way, coils locking them in place, his muscles thickening out and rigidifying, his neck gaining mass from the shoulders that melted upwards, and his face sticking out, soft as warm butter for a moment. Harry flicked his tongue loose, and now it was long, matching his current size, and his shape.

            He had no idea why the scales that shone under his skin, and the temptation to change as he just had, marked him out for a constrictor rather than a venomous snake, as his fangs did. But it was for him to work with his magic, not question it, right now.

            He slid softly and easily to the side, and wrapped himself around the guardian’s lashing tail. Then he joined his head with his tail, and, for the first time, squeezed.

            The guardian went still at once, which only allowed Harry to bring more coils into play. It was like being wrapped in armor that he could then wrap around someone else, Harry found. And the softer it was, the more he could play with it, the more he wanted to play with it. He braided himself in intricate patterns, and still there seemed to be no end to his body. Squeeze and squeeze, and meanwhile his conjured serpents were doing the same thing to the three heads in the front of the body, commanded by the white snake.

            The guardian stopped moving, at last, and the three heads lay along the real Dark path as it hissed to Harry, You command.

            Harry lifted his head and turned his golden-brown body in the direction of the guardian’s heads. He knew he should turn back into a human, so that he could make sure he walked the real path and thus conquered it, but he was reluctant. It seemed far more natural to stay an anaconda than to return to two-legged form. My command is that you show us the way. He flowed back up onto the snake’s body, and the white serpent came looping and dancing to meet him.

            The others listened to me! They listened!

            Of course they did. Harry wondered for a moment exactly how independent the white snake was of him, and whether it was more than an extension of himself after all, and whether he should give it a name. Then he decided that he had more pressing things to worry about, such as how he was going to walk the Dark path in anaconda form.

            He tried to change back, to imagine human hands and legs, but his coils only settled around him in firmer armor. He sighed, which came out as a contentless hiss. Well. Whether it was magical exhaustion or something else, he couldn’t become a man again right now. But the snake that lived here as a guardian would have to have some means of safely negotiating the Darkness.

            Harry decided the simplest solution was to ride the three-headed beast for the moment, because it would know the way. He moved back and hissed the commands that let the three heads up. Show us the way. Guide us there. And let your body trail the outlines of the path. If he watched carefully enough, then he thought he should be able to negotiate the path after he had let the three-headed snake go.

            The vipers and cobras and others he had used to assist in the capture flowed back over him, but the white snake took pride of place, braided twice around Harry’s thick neck. The giant Runespoor, as Harry was going to think of it until he had a reason to think otherwise, hesitated and glanced back at him once with the middle head, while the left and right continued gazing ahead. The outlines?

            Don’t reach beyond them if you don’t want to, Harry said, tasting the fear that lingered on the air. But I need you to take us to the end of this path.

            Whatever other arguments one could make when one was a giant Runespoor-basilisk crossbreed, this snake decided to hold them in reserve. It began to crawl, instead, and Harry traveled to the edge of the vast trunk so that he could watch the tail as it whipped back and forth, the curves it traced, the way it rippled and flowed.

            On and on, and this path was longer than he had thought it was when he listened to Malfoy talking about it. He wondered again if this counted as walking the path, mastering it, and how literal the metaphors were here.

            Then the Runespoor paused and probed ahead with two of its heads, and said, This is the boundary. Beyond this, I cannot go.

            My thanks, Harry said, and flowed to the front and down the side of the left neck, ignoring the soft and startled hiss behind him. Who said that Dark wizards were lacking in courtesy? Malfoy seemed to value it, and his was the only example that Harry really had to follow, unless he wanted to go with Parkinson’s and feel disgust at himself, or Voldemort’s and try to kill himself.

            That was what the Healers wanted me to do. Thought I would do.

            Harry shook that off, and touched the boundary with his nose and his tongue, then shoved ahead. It ripped in front of him the way the air had when Malfoy gestured it aside, back behind him somewhere, and Harry tumbled into a well-lit office with a soft fire flickering on the hearth. The desk was spread with paperwork, and currently unoccupied.

            The white serpent came with him, and so did the other snakes, spreading out at once in case of an ambush. But there truly was no one there, although the door stood ajar. The white serpent touched Harry’s nose with his and guided Harry’s own much larger head gently around to point at the desk.

            Something sat there, shimmering purple and silver. It looked like a crown, and wasn’t. It looked like a stone, and wasn’t. But the sense of kinship that flowed from it, kinship with the darkness behind Harry, was unmistakable.

            We did it, the white serpent said, or Harry said, their voices mingling and chiming. We made the way through.

            And when Harry sent the vipers in, to pick up the Dark artifact and the vast majority of the paperwork on the desk’s surface, he had done it in another sense. Chosen his side. Come too far to turn back now.

            He was a Dark wizard, made and embodied, and with all the evidence he needed to prove that more of his kind lurked inside the Ministry.

            After all, he thought, when he had shut the door behind them with a twitch of his tail and once again rode the giant Runespoor through the darkness, if it’s Dark to have a magical gift you never asked for born inside you, how much Darker is it to be working with an artifact that you had a choice in picking up?

            Other people might not see it like that. Yet.

            Harry, and Malfoy and Parkinson, would make them.

*

            SP777: I think Harry would probably object to being part of a triumvirate with Pansy, right now. ;)

            And I’m glad that you liked that chapter.

            polka dot: Well, unfortunately, the cobras will have to wait for another day.

            Talltree-san: Thanks! I always think of the Department of Mysteries as one of the most untrustworthy places in the Potter universe. God knows what they’re doing down there.

            disgruntledfairy: Thank you! I hope this one doesn’t seem like a cliffhanger, since I didn’t mean it to be.
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