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Nova Cupiditas	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 37321 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Eighteen�Eighteen
Times

�� The pain
had grown so bad that Draco found it hard to remember how he had come to be
lying on the floor. He was more than happy
to be lying on the floor, though. He suspected he would have a much harder time
of it if he tried to stand up. He shut his eyes and groaned instead.

�� His head
ached with a throbbing, burning pain that made stars of white and yellow light
flicker and flash behind his eyelids. His hands were burning off. He had extra bones everywhere, and
they cut into his lungs and his ribs and his chest and his intestines. He could
feel every muscle of his body separately, and they were all shredding slowly
and delicately, as though under the touch of a master torturer.

�� He hurt.
And Harry, who was supposed to save him, hadn�t appeared to make it stop.

�� Draco
couldn�t even feel bitter about that, though, because his emotions towards
Harry altered so much and so suddenly from moment to moment that they sometimes
distracted him from the pain. There was hatred and contempt as he thought about
the way Harry had promised to be a hero and obviously couldn�t fulfill that
role. There was lust as he thought about the warmth that would surround him
when he pushed into Harry�s body, more than enough to make up for the agony he
suffered now. There was jealousy, which brought with it a furious despair,
because he had to burst through the incoherence that cocooned him and make sure
that no one had taken Harry away, but he was incapable of doing it.

�� And there
was the love.

�� Harry had
been wrong to think that he could wave his wand and make an end of it. It was
everywhere, and it filled Draco�s world with a clear and shining light, and the
pain that touched him was mingled with that light, so that he knew he would
never be able to remember one without the other.

�� Assuming
that there was anything left of him to remember, after this.

�� I love you. I�ll go to my death loving you,
Harry. Draco fixed his mind firmly on that, because yes, going to his death
mattered to him even if no one else
in the whole world thought it did, and waited for death or the end of the pain.

�� They might
be the same thing, now that he thought about it.

*

�� Harry lost
track of the charms and the curses that he yelled, trying to put his plan into
action. Nothing seemed to work. Most of the spells he cast simply vanished into
that sea of magic that surrounded Draco and so very effectively muted his effectiveness. Draco writhed on the
floor, blood spilling from his mouth where he had bitten his tongue, his
screams so high and thin and voiceless and frantic that they no longer sounded
human. Harry wanted to tear at his own skin with his fingernails, wanted to
fall on the floor and weep, but he knew that wouldn�t be productive.

�� No, he had
promised Draco that he would save him from Nova
Cupiditas, and Harry still planned on doing that.
It was just going to take him a bit longer than he had thought, that was all.

�� He fell
back on one heel, took a deep breath, and turned around to fetch another of his
notebooks down from the shelves. Horrible as it was, he would just have to
ignore the shrieks issuing from Draco�s throat for the moment.

�� He met
Hermione, with tears streaming down her cheeks and her wand pointed at the
warded circle. Harry barked out a wordless warning, which did its job, because
Hermione�s hand jerked and her wand fell to the floor.

�� Mate,� Ron
said. He both looked and sounded breathless, his eyes starting practically out
of his head. �You have to see that
this can�t go on. He has to die, and it would be better to give him a clean
death than��

�� I wasn�t
trying to do that!� Hermione snapped, spinning on Ron.

�� Harry shook
his head. Sometimes he thought his best friends would bicker if the world ended
because they would disagree about how it
was ending.

�� He snatched
the notebook and opened it to the very back pages, to the project that he had
been starting when Draco had come along and taken precedence. The words stabbed
and sparkled up at him. Harry blinked, and then realized that they were doing
that because of the tears in his eyes as he listened to Draco scream. He dashed
them away and bent down closer to the page, reading what he had written so long
ago.

�� Yes. And
yes again.

�� I don�t think it�s possible to shatter some
of the large, ancient curses, the ones that were designed to endure or be the
last spell that was ever cast on a victim. But it might be possible to break
them and leave something behind that wouldn�t threaten the victim.

�� Harry spun
away from the notebook a moment later, after he had used that moment to
memorize some of the drawings he had put there. He strode back to the warded
circle and lifted his wand.

�� He made his
mind, as much as he could, into a hard, sparkling crystal where the only thing
that mattered was getting the spells right. Too much sympathy would cripple him
right now. He had to do his best whether or not he succeeded, whether or not he
ended up with Draco loving him or not.

�� Dimidatus!� he cried.

*

�� There was a
change in the pain. Draco suddenly hurt less than he had before. He blinked,
and came back to some sense of his body as an object rather than an infinite
microcosm of different kinds of suffering.

�� Not that it
worked completely. The pain was still there, slithering around his spine and
finding new and interesting ways to probe into his brain, and Draco doubted
that he would ever go to bed again without shivering in terror of his
nightmares about it. But the option to do something other than lie there and
scream was nice.

�� He turned
his head and saw Harry standing on the edge of the circle, his wand darting
back and forth. Silvery filaments surrounded him, stalked by dark waves. As
Draco watched, more magic flooded away from him and out of the circle, going
over the wards, blending into the sea around Harry.

�� What does he think he�s doing? Draco�s
thoughts were slow and confused as they came together, but there was nothing
wrong with his brain that a good rest wouldn�t fix. He can�t possibly be doing what I think he�s doing�

�� But it
seemed that Draco was wrong, because more and more power went to Harry,
stalking around him like a ring of leopards he had somehow taught to dance.
Harry�s face was set in an expression of fierce concentration, and Draco
suffered another spark of abstract lust. To see Harry look at him like that
when Draco was pounding steadily into his body�

�� But there
was something else going on now. Harry began to turn in a circle, never taking
his eyes from the magic (except when he completed the turn and would always
snatch a quick glance at Draco). The silver and the dark ribbons followed him,
rippling along the floor, rising to wrap around Harry�s legs and shoulders.

�� Fear
pinched Draco�s heart. If he�s trying to
take the curse away from me and into himself, I�ll kill him.

�� But the
pain remained, and sometimes, with the craziness of his anguish, Draco thought
he could even glimpse a curve of the shapes on his shoulders and head out of
the corner of his eye. No, whatever Harry was doing, it wasn�t that.

�� Harry froze
in place and snapped his wand down.

�� The silver
and the black streamers, or some of them, dived into the floor and didn�t rise
again. The rest kept stalking Harry, curling around his ears now and eddying in
front of his eyes as if they sought some way inside his head.

�� Harry
visibly gritted his teeth and turned to face Draco again. This time, Draco
could hear what he said, and clung to his voice the way that he would to a rope
that someone tossed him from a boat. �Dimidiatus!�

*

�� It had
worked. When he cast the spell that would pull the magic out of the circle
where he could and over to him, Harry had cast another spell at the same time,
one that would cause him an echo of the pain that Draco was suffering.

�� It hurt. It
hurt so much that his sight blurred and his head pounded and he wondered if
this had been a good idea after all.

�� But he had
proved his point. He had, after all, proved that his technique would work. When
he cast the Cleaving Curse again, half the spell was gone, and what remained of
the pain was bearable.

�� The
Cleaving Curse was usually used on people who were powerful in battle, reducing
their magic by half so that their enemies could destroy them. It was meant to
be temporary. Harry would have to work out a permanent variation in the next
five minutes, at the most. He estimated he had that long before Draco�s body
and brain would simply begin to shut down under the intense pressure of the
pain.

�� He could be
wrong. He might have more than that time. He might have less. But he wasn�t
going to force himself to think about it, because it would be more devastating,
in the end, to lose Draco because he had rushed through what he was doing and
fucked things up than because he had made an honest mistake.

�� He turned
his wand over and focused on Draco again. He had done one good thing, at least.
When he borrowed the magic of the curse from the warded circle to make his
experiment, he had halved Draco�s pain, and he had also halved the wards. It
would be easier to reach Draco now as well as easier to work with him.

�� He hoped.

�� Ron and
Hermione�s voices briefly surged into his consciousness.� They were rowing about something, as usual.
Harry ignored them and moved closer to Draco, crouching down so that he could
see him face-to-face.

�� Draco�s
eyes were focusing. Harry cast the Cleaving Curse yet again, and his gaze
sharpened still more. But Harry knew that he couldn�t just keep doing that. The
single biggest step had been taking away half of Draco�s pain at the beginning.
He could halve what was left, but it would continue to be a smaller and smaller
amount, until he was making virtually no difference at all.

�� So he had
to come up with a variation of the Cleaving Curse that would take away half of everything, and all the pain. It would leave part of the curse
clinging to Draco, but Harry thought Draco could bear that. He would be more in
control of his actions than he had been so far, and it was possible that Harry
could try again in the future for a more permanent solution.

�� Two
minutes.

�� Harry bowed
his head, closed his eyes, and reached out with all his will. He knew the Latin
words better than he had ever known them in school. He knew what the
incantation for a permanent Cleaving Curse ought
to be, and he would throw his will towards it and make the wand movements
that instinct demanded, and hope that was enough.

�� No, not a wild guess. It�s my best chance.

�� Fixing his
confidence in front of his mental eyes like the pole star, Harry threw up his
wand, swept it back and forth over Draco�s body, and shouted again, �Dimidatus! Dimidatus semper!�

*

�� The magic
blazed in Draco, and it was like standing in the center of a star: glory and
pain both shone through him to the point that it made his limbs tingle and his
mouth dry out, and he couldn�t remember anything, for the barest instant,
except what was around him.

�� Then they
were gone and he was staggering and stumbling along some kind of road of clear
light, expecting to land or brush against something at any moment, and doing
neither.

�� Harry�s
voice soared around him, chanting the same spell again and again. Draco was
counting the times it spoke before he knew what he was doing. It was the only
reality in the world besides the light and the pain.

�� Dimidatus semper! Dimidatus semper! Dimi��

�� For a
moment, Draco lost track, but he was certain that Harry hadn�t stopped
speaking. No, he would be faithful to his charge. Instead, Draco�s ears were
simply filled so much with the ringing and the roar of magic that he couldn�t
hear. He put his head down and bulled forwards through the curtains that wanted
to swing closed around him, swearing under his breath.

�� Dimidatus semper! Dimidatus semper!�

�� By Draco�s
count, that was the sixteenth and the seventeenth cry. And he did feel
different, in other ways than the burning of his eyes from the radiance that
surrounded him and the strange feeling that the pain was pulling back, like a
tsunami, leaving him alone but about to crash over him soon. He stood on a high
mountain cliff, or so his mind told him, the air thin and burning in his lungs.

�� Dimidatus semper!�

�� The eighteenth time.

�� The wave
broke.

�� Draco
screamed, or tried, but there was no air left in his lungs. It was all burning around him, burning, burning, and he didn�t know how
to make it stop and it was brilliant at the same time that it was agonizing and
he wanted to suffer from it until the second that it killed him, which couldn�t
be far away.

�� The light
flared up around him and separated into silver candleflames.
Harry was nearby; Draco could feel him, from something that he would have
called the pressure of the soul if someone had demanded a name for it. He was
there, resting a hand on Draco�s shoulder, or dancing with the flames, or
inside his mind. His voice no longer sounded, but it didn�t matter. They were
so deeply connected that Draco thought he could have sensed him from the other
side of the world.

�� Up and down
the flames spun, and then flattened towards Draco, laid out like paving stones.
The pain flew out from him, and Draco had the odd impression of watching
himself explode as chunks of spell were ripped from his head and his chest and
his heart. Red-black in color, terrifying like blood and flesh, they coiled and
turned and split and fell apart, and the flames sprang back up again and burned
their refuse.

�� Draco
shouted. The echoes of his voice turned into silver, clanging rods that fell
down around him, singing sweetly when they touched the
ground the flames had hardened.

�� They hit
the thing that sat on his head like a crown, squeezing his temples�something of
which Draco was only aware then�and cracked it. Draco reeled, his hands
clutching, and this time someone did reach
out and clasp them, holding him upright, while Harry�s voice said, �It�s almost
done, Draco. Almost.�

�� His
shoulders trembled, and the pain that scraped through them was like someone
tearing out the marrow and then replacing it. Draco sank with a cry, but his
knees touched nothing but a silvery mist that continued.

�� And Harry�s
voice said, �That�s it. That�s as good as I can do.� There was an exhaustion deeper than Draco�s pain in it. Draco reached
out instinctively to comfort him, and then paused.

�� The
overriding compulsion to do that was gone.

*

�� Harry
scrambled up and stood on wavering legs. His eyes watered, and he blinked them,
making the star-like images that had been suspended in front of them shatter.
He stared at Draco, casting another revealing charm at the same time that would
let him see whether any pieces of the curse were left on him.

�� Of course I had to cast the spell eighteen
times, he thought, with the only part of his brain that didn�t feel
fatigued to death. There were eighteen
tendrils on the crown that represented the lust, and I think that was the most
deeply-rooted part of the spell. It showed up first�

�� Then his
thoughts stuttered to a halt, and he was examining the revealing spell
thoughtfully. If he was right, it should show a certain, very specific result.
If he wasn�t right, he didn�t like to think about what would happen.

�� But no, the
result was what he had thought it would be. A faint, dark shadow lingered over
Draco�s head. Slightly stronger silhouettes of the puzzle pieces glowed on his
shoulders.

�� The false
love, the transparent snake, was entirely gone.

�� Harry
closed his eyes and slumped back, exhaling in relief. But there was nothing to
lean against, so he sat down rather hard on the floor. He rubbed his arse and
winced. Then he told himself that it was nothing compared to what Draco had
suffered in the past hour, and took his hand roughly away.

�� Harry?
What did you do?�

�� It was
Hermione who asked it, and not Draco. Harry was glad for that. He hadn�t been
able to rid Draco completely of the curse, but he had reduced it so that he
thought Draco could control the residue of what was left. It was still easier
to explain that to someone else than to the person who had suffered so greatly
because of his mistake, though.

�� I halved
the spell,� he said, and swallowed. His throat was raw. He hadn�t noticed that
before. Had he really cast the spell that
many times? �There are still traces of lust and jealousy left in Draco�s
head. I couldn�t get rid of them completely, because the spell was designed to
spill its magic and kill the victim with pain if someone tried.� Harry
shivered. He couldn�t imagine what the person who had created the Nova Cupiditas curse
must have been like. What had been his purpose?

�� What does
that mean?� Hermione insisted.

�� Harry sat
up, then stood up, hanging onto the nearest table. He was outside the warded
circle, he noted with half his brain. That was interesting. He must have
crossed over the line of the wards when he left Draco after the last time.

�� He looked
at Draco before he answered.

�� Draco sat
there, staring at him, hair hanging in his face as if he had been half-drowned.
Given how much pain he�d suffered, and the sea-like nature of the spilled
magic, Harry thought that was a good comparison. And there was a look in his
eyes that made Harry wince and bow his head.

�� I�m
sorry,� he said, in a voice that he hoped would be inaudible to Ron and
Hermione, to anyone else except Draco. �I did the best I could. I know it�s not
enough, but I hope that it will be in time.�

�� Tell me
what you did.�

�� Draco�s
voice was absolutely flat. Harry wistfully contrasted it in his mind with the
way that Draco had sounded when talking about him just a short while ago, and
then shook his head. No, he had known this would happen. The only thing he
could do was keep going and face the consequences.

�� Halved the
curse,� he said. �I got rid of the false love completely. You shouldn�t be
feeling that anymore. It was the weakest component. But some of the lust and
jealousy will remain. They�re controllable, though. You�re going to feel like
sleeping with me or hexing someone who touches me at times, but you can ignore
it.�

�� Draco just
continued to stare at him. Harry wrapped his arms around his own chest in
comfort, because he felt dreadfully cold.

*

�� What Harry
said made no sense.

�� He could
feel�Draco could feel emotions twitching in the back of his head like snakes
suddenly deprived of their heads. Lust and jealousy came and went, pale echoes
of what had gone before.

�� But he
hadn�t expected this. He had thought that he might go on desiring Harry for the
rest of his life, if Harry couldn�t do anything about the curse, or he had
thought it possible that he would get over it completely. But to be caught
halfway between one state and another wasn�t what he had anticipated.

�� It would
take some getting used to.

�� Draco
reached out one hand. He thought he was the only one who would have noticed
that Harry hesitated before taking it, but then Harry pulled firmly and he was
on his feet, and he was feeling, at one and the same time, the uncomfortably
warm scorch of Harry�s skin against his and the strange feeling of lightness
that haunted his head and shoulders, as if he had been freed of burdens that he
didn�t know were there.

�� He stretched
out his arms, and they seemed to travel past barriers that had been there
before. He swallowed.

�� I�m sorry
I couldn�t do more,� Harry said, watching him with wistful eyes. He became
aware that he was still holding Draco�s hand and stepped back, dropping it.
Draco clenched his fingers against his palms and nodded shortly.

�� Harry
closed his eyes and seemed to fall into himself for a moment, reaching for
strength the way Draco knew he had when they confronted each other on the bed
in his private house. That had been just hours ago, and yet his skin ached with
the memory, as if they had been lovers years before.

�� Now,�
Harry said, opening his eyes, by all appearances restored to his former self,
�we need to decide what we�re going to do about the people who captured and
tortured you, and the ones we still haven�t caught. That needs to come first,
for various reasons.� He caught Draco�s eyes emphatically, and Draco knew that
he was thinking about the way Draco had murdered eight people.

�� Murdered them.

�� Draco
licked his lips. There were two sets of memories in his head. One of them was
horrible as he watched blood spraying across the air and spells he had never
thought would emerge from his wand flying to cause more of it. The other was
thick with satisfaction at the thought that he had protected Harry.

�� Harry, whom
he had to go back to calling Potter. Harry, whom he
had to resign his claim to.

�� All
right,� he said. �Give me a chance to relax and get something to eat.�

�� We can do
it tomorrow,� Harry said at once, his eyes fluttering shut, as if he found
something unbearable in Draco�s face. Probably
doesn�t like to look at me anymore because I�m not in need, Draco thought
bitterly. �I should have thought before of how long you�ve been on your feet.
Of course we can do it later.�

�� We
shouldn�t wait too long,� Draco said, and tried to ignore both his own urge to
stay here because Weasley and Granger might get their hands on Harry otherwise
and the way that he despised himself for the idea. �Otherwise, someone might
find them, or I might have to go and renew the charms again.�

�� Yeah,�
Harry said, and then nodded at Draco and turned back to his friends as if he
had ceased to exist.

�� Draco
clenched his fingers again. He understood what Harry was trying to do. Put
distance between them, let Draco have
the distance, because touching now would be counterproductive in so many ways.

�� But he was
scarred by what he had gone through. Of course he was. And he didn�t think that
ignoring the wounds was a good first step in the healing process.

�� Farewell,
Potter,� he said stiffly, and turned and made his way out of the room.

�� His being
trembled and bounded between two poles: one grateful for his freedom, the
second wanting to rush back in and embrace Harry. Draco wondered how long it
would take him to get used to that.

*

�� Harry kept
his eyes closed, because letting anyone else see what he felt right now was a
stupid idea.

*

�� Review
responses can be found at http://lomonaaerenrr.livejournal.com/7938.html
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Nova Cupiditas