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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23334 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Eighteen—Smooth as Scales

            “Why did the Unspeakables send out this owl?”

            Draco leaned back in his chair at the dining room table and smiled as he watched Harry stare at the letter. They were out of the shower now, freshly washed and dressed, with the white serpent coiled around Harry’s arm. This time, Draco could make out every detail except for a slight fuzz of air and light down near the tail. It satisfied him in ways that he had never expected to be satisfied, and he shifted his weight and crossed his legs to remind himself that he couldn’t get hard again right now even if he wanted to.

            “Because they always do things like that as a first tactic,” Draco answered. “I got one a few years ago when Blaise successfully stole something from them. They hope that they can intimidate someone who might have done it for the thrill or on a bet to surrender it when they see how serious the Unspeakables are about it.”

            Harry looked up and blinked. “But they must have seen that this was a—professional job, for lack of a better word.”

            Draco smiled at him and put a bit of toast in his mouth. It had been browned to perfection by the elves, as always. “Do you know how difficult it can be to figure out the activities of Dark wizards without any knowledge of the Dark paths?” he murmured.

            Harry sat all the way up, nearly banging the white snake against his chair. The snake hissed at him and writhed up to Harry’s shoulder. Harry ignored him, too absorbed in his stare at Draco. “But you said they were Dark wizards!”

            “In the shallow definition,” Draco said.

            “Shallow as in the public thinks this about us but it’s not true?” Harry ruffled his hair, thinking. “Or shallow as in, I don’t know, shallow water?”

            “Very good,” Draco said, and if he used the languorous voice he’d also used immediately after the sex, making Harry flush bright and pretty pink was an advantage, not the other way around. “Yes. The Dark paths are the depths of the Dark Arts, when one commits to working them and taking the risks for the joy of it. But there are many people who only want to use the spells, and never delve enough into the theory to realize what lies behind it. They wade in the shallow water of the spells, and they’re more likely to go insane than the deep ones.”

            “You mean, the deep ones who don’t lose their balance on the paths,” Harry corrected him.

            Draco nodded. “Well, of course. I thought that went without saying, by this point in your studies.”

            Harry shuddered. “The way you so casually refer to it. I risked my life that way in Hogwarts, maybe, but that was because I was young and didn’t know any better. You’re an adult and you chose this way of life, after being a coward. Why?”

            Draco accepted the insult easily. He knew he had been a coward at one point, and he couldn’t even regret it, not when it had provided him with the motive to change himself, the burning shame that he wanted to grow away from in order to become his real self. “Because this is the road that led to where I wanted to be,” he said. “Braving the consequences, bracing myself, standing up to the siege of the magic and worse elements than a little light disapproval from the society around me.”

            “And I’m here because of the Parseltongue.” Harry’s hands moved up to stroke the white snake, down to stroke the black viper that had appeared wrapped around his waist.

            Draco arched his eyebrows. “Don’t you think it’s time to go further than that? See what else appeals to you, what else you might want to do with the Dark Arts, and specialize in, beyond shapeshifting and commanding snakes?”

            Harry frowned. “I thought that was what I would find out, the more Dark paths I went down.”

            “The artifact that you stole from the Unspeakables’ offices can help you with that,” Draco said smugly. “It’s only one of a number of its uses, and I haven’t plumbed all its secrets yet. But it would be a better use than what they intended to make of it, I know that.”

            “All right,” Harry said, leaning over the table to rap Draco sharply on the back of the hand. “But how do you know about it? You can’t have studied it for longer than they had it, unless they just got it.”

            “I was looking at it last night, after Pansy went home and you went to bed, of course,” Draco said, wondering that Harry couldn’t have anticipated his answer.

            “And then you came and had sex with me this morning.” Harry shook his head, a complicated expression on his face. “You don’t stop, do you? Where in the world do you get all this energy?”

            “When you’re as much in love with life as I am right now, it’s not hard.” Draco shoved his chair back from the table and popped to his feet, as much to startle Harry as to hear the outraged gasps from the portraits behind him. Draco shook his head. There were so few of his ancestors who really understood him. But he had accomplished more in his short life so far than some of them had in their entire hundreds of years of lying and maneuvering to get close to a small gain. “Anyway. Do you want to come to my lab and see the artifact? We have a little time before we should invite Skeeter over and have her photograph us with the object and write about it for the loyal masses who still think of the Ministry as the opponent of Dark Arts.”

            Harry rose and held out his hand. Draco took it, wondering if he was cold or needed help getting out of his chair, only to have Harry bring Draco’s hand to his lips and scrape the forks of his tongue in the webbing between Draco’s fingers.

            “I’m glad that you came and got me out of hospital,” Harry said, softly, intensely, his eyes lingering on Draco’s face. “Thank you.”

            Draco bowed back in silence, and then turned and led Harry into the bowels of the Manor, his head high and his shoulders thrown back. It seemed that, even after all these years, attention from Harry bloody Potter could affect him as nothing else could. Not even Harry’s snake-like features.

            And wasn’t that a revelation?

*

            The venom sacs in Harry’s cheeks grew as soon as they stepped into Malfoy’s lab. This wasn’t the room he had seen before, with the intricate web of interconnected lines that showed Malfoy how many wizards in Britain had done Dark Arts, and where they all were. This was a smaller lab, with only two counters and two cauldrons set up opposite each other. At least, Harry thought they were cauldrons. They both had flaring, bell-like mouths, as if they were designed to be able to clap over small fleeing creatures.

            And a rainbow of glittering, actinic light stretched between them, in which hung, suspended, the object he had stolen from the Unspeakable’s desk.

            Harry stared at it. It was easier to look at now. The sharp sparks coursing down and dripping off it seemed to have melted a layer of its disguise. He could make out that it was a purple ring, or half a purple ring, bright as the inner core of a geode, embedded into a darker stone. Malfoy held up his wand and flicked it, and the object rotated, showing Harry that it was reflective on the bottom.

            “How do I use it?” Harry asked. He felt the same sharp shiver coursing down his spine that he had sometimes felt when approaching a particularly intriguing Auror case, and had to smile. At least he knew that this new career could offer some of the same excitements and dangers as the old one.

            “Stand where I’m standing,” Malfoy said, and moved aside from a particular patch of lab floor almost directly beneath the thing. Harry stepped onto it, and tried to ignore the fact that it was painted with an X, and that the X was red. The white snake had risen and was staring at the object, flicking out his tongue, but not hissing.

            “Now,” Malfoy said, “you need to hold the image of one of the Dark paths you’ve conquered in your mind, and imagine it opening in front of you and guiding you down the purple ring, overlapping it, into the heart of the stone.”

            “How in the world did you discover that?” Harry muttered, even as he began to focus.

            “It’s a common technique to unlock Dark artifacts.” Malfoy lounged back against the wall, his voice soft, his eyes sharp. “I already saw what I expected to see, my own affinity. I want to see what comes of yours.”

            Harry nodded and called up the image of the Hanging Tree, still the most vivid of those he had seen on the Dark paths, and the curve of solid black dirt that led to it. He flung both at the artifact, imagining it opening like a scroll down his fingers and into the air and up to the artifact. The white serpent extended his head as though he was interested in supporting the bridge on his neck.

            Harry “saw” the moment when his imagined path made contact with the artifact as a shower of black sparks. He felt it, too, a jerk in his belly that made him stumble as if he were bracing against the pull of a Portkey. And then his mind sped forwards, and back, and down, leaving his body behind.

            Still speeding, still curving, he landed in the middle of a vast, wild, bleak landscape. Black desert, cracked earth, the corpses of trees in several directions. Harry turned in a slow circle and tried to tell himself that this was not the way his soul would look to someone else; in fact, that was a stupid delusion to have leaped to.

            And no matter what his soul looked like, at least he had one person who would always think he was beautiful.

            As his breathing eased and clarified, he saw the path leading away in front of him, darker than the black earth, and stepped onto it. It sparked and spat at him, then calmed, and there were no distractions of laughter and song off to the sides, either. Harry began to walk slowly forwards, his arms spread for balance.

            The path ended soon enough, in front of what looked like another stump of a charred tree. Harry knelt down in front of it and smoothed his hands up and down the trunk, searching for a way in, through the cracks in the bark.

            The tree shuddered twice, and the roots that spiraled out of it to grip the earth abruptly rose and reared, shaking back and forth, wrapping around Harry’s arms and legs. He fought for a moment, but then saw, just before the tree sucked him in, that the path continued on into the trunk, in specks of curving black like coal dust.

            He closed his eyes and tried to relax, tried not to breathe, as the tree drew him in and down.

            For long moments, he simply lay in the stomach of the earth, and felt earth moving over him. Then he opened his eyes and nearly jumped. He was in front of the Hanging Tree. Had he somehow managed to reach the Dark paths, the ordinary ones, from here?

            No, he saw as he struggled up onto his knees. This was a vision, and a vision only. Because from the foot of the Hanging Tree other paths ran away, new ones springing up even as Harry watched, and footprints appeared on every one of them. He stared, trying to commit the number and the shape of the footprints to mind, but there were too many of them, and more multiplied every moment.

            Was the magic telling him that he would have a genius for walking the Dark paths, then? Harry couldn’t help but cock his head with the disappointment. Every Dark wizard could do that, but not everyone could do what Parkinson managed with keys or Draco with information. Harry had hoped to have a separate specialty of his own. Commanding snakes was wonderful, but inborn and not something he had learned.

            Then he thought he understood, and opened his mouth in a shout of joy at the same moment as the vision shattered and he dropped back into his body, all his bones ringing like struck harps.

            He could discover new Dark paths. That was what the vision had been doing.

            Harry had to smile, and he felt his tongue dart out. Malfoy would be so jealous. He wanted the knowledge that it seemed would come more easily to Harry, perhaps even flowing over him like a waterfall.

            But he sobered up in the next instant. He might have a talent for this, but it wouldn’t be easy. Malfoy had needed to scold that into Harry at the beginning. After meeting the cobras that he couldn’t control with Parseltongue, though, Harry wouldn’t need another reminder.

            The vision continued to hang in front of him for an instant, and then exploded. Harry lifted his head and gasped in air. The white serpent looped him closer and said, You look weary, brother. How far did you go on that path?

            Far enough to know that I can learn new paths, paths that no one has ever found before, Harry said, and turned around.

            Malfoy stood behind him, his face hanging over Harry’s like a small moon. Harry jumped, but straightened up when Malfoy snickered at him. “It’s not that funny,” Harry snapped. “I didn’t know that you had a talent for creeping up on people.”

            “You might as well just decide that I have a talent for annoying you and let it go at that,” Malfoy said, and then waited, one hand raised as if he was conducting an orchestra.

            “I can find new Dark paths,” Harry said. “Ones that were always there, but which no one else has ever seen. It showed me an image of the Hanging Tree and the paths sprouting away from the base.”

            For a moment, Malfoy quivered like a horse on the end of a tight rein. And then he bowed his head and shook it a little, sighing.

            “I envy you,” he said. “And I shouldn’t, because I command my talents better than you do, and I’ve walked more paths than you know exist yet, and you might die in the first exercise of that gift. You have so much to learn about being a Dark wizard.”

            Harry held onto his temper, even managing to smile. “Thanks to you, I might survive to learn it.”

            Malfoy clapped him on the shoulder. “Right. Look forward to the challenges, and thank me for my most gracious help, instead of getting upset about the comments that I can’t keep from slipping out.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Have you ever looked into self-control for your mouth as well as your magic? You might benefit.”

            “But I enjoy the way you look when you’re angry,” Malfoy murmured, nodding down, and Harry looked to see the bands of scales swelling and sweeping over his hands, down to his fingers, further than they usually went. His fingers hadn’t started to shorten yet, but Harry still concentrated to drive the scales back. “Beautiful,” Malfoy added.

            Harry nodded back to show that he appreciated the comment and said, “What do you propose to do now?”

            Malfoy waved his wand, and the arcs of light that supported the artifact vanished back into nothingness. The artifact began to tumble, but Malfoy caught it in a sack that he whipped out of his belt and held ready. Harry thought he heard a single hiss from the exposed purple part as it fell, but the white serpent swept his tongue out before Harry could ask him and said, Nothing but random cursing.

            “We show it to Skeeter and unleash a public relations disaster for the Ministry,” said Malfoy.

            Harry had to admit that he found nothing wrong with either the boldness or the phrasing of that plan.

*

            Skeeter sat bolt upright on her chair as Draco explained their raid into the Department of Mysteries as “an expedition of concerned citizens.” She all but wriggled, faster than her quill could write, when Draco said that they had found an artifact and discovered that it was tuned to Dark wizards, and therefore that they “wanted to rescue their brothers and sisters in magic from hypocrisy.” Draco opened the sack and posed in front of the room with the artifact, and Skeeter took picture after picture, hitting the side of her camera when it didn’t operate fast enough for her liking.

            Draco smiled serenely, aware of the way that Pansy, watching off to the side, shook her head. She thought they were moving too fast, that they should hold back and continue building a campaign of gentle hints to many wizards that Dark Arts were something interwound with their lives, spells that people used all the time, instead of something sharply different.

            And Draco did intend to pursue that tactic with the people it might reach. But with Unspeakables looking through Pansy’s wards and the Ministry freezing Harry’s accounts, he also intended to give them something else to think about.

            The interview finished with Skeeter standing up and shaking both their hands. If she felt anything different about the dry and slightly scaly skin on the palm of Harry’s, she didn’t say so. “Thank you, Mr. Malfoy,” she said huskily. “To be involved in an exposé of this sort…to have the leading role in breaking the biggest story of the century…” She took out a handkerchief to mop at her eyes. “You have no idea what this means to me.”

            Draco smiled into her eyes, certain they understood each other, more than content that it be so. “I think I can guess, Madam Skeeter,” he said. “Your eyes are always eloquent.”

            Skeeter simpered and whimpered at him, and then left. Draco remained standing upright as he swept the room with his wand, looking for listening charms and scraps of beetle carapace that Skeeter might have left behind. When he couldn’t find anything on the fourth sweep, he relaxed, and leaned back until he tipped into the chair that stood waiting for him. “What was wrong with it?” he asked Pansy.

            Pansy hauled a strand of hair out of her mouth and shook her head. “Oh, nothing, if you want to destroy everything that Dark wizards have worked to hide for a hundred years.”

            “Of course I do,” Draco said. “What we have are pieces, lying around where Grindelwald and the Dark Lord tossed them. We can’t build an effective defense out of that. I’m destroying the Ministry’s fortress so that we’ll stand on even ground.”

            “That all depends on them reacting the way you want them to.” Pansy pointed one accusing finger at him. “I don’t think that will happen.”

            “Give me clear reasons,” Draco said, and smiled at her silence. He turned away and faced Harry, who sat on a chair and stroked the white serpent. Draco could make out the faint threads of gold in its scales now even when he was on the other side of the room. “What about you, Harry?”

            “I want to talk to my friends.”

            Draco hummed his disagreement. “I think it’s better to wait until they contact you. Otherwise, they might feel like you’re pressuring them into accepting you.”

            “But I haven’t heard anything from them for several days.” Harry curled his hands down until his fingers looked like the regular, overlapping patterns of a giant scale’s snakes. “It’s hard for me to concentrate on what Skeeter’s going to do, because I keep imagining the way they’ll react, and I’d like to know what they’re thinking right now, before this bomb hits.”

            Pansy rolled her eyes from the corner. Draco smiled. That was a natural gesture from her, a right one, and he would rather see her look disgusted because Harry was too focused on the people who had rejected him than because Harry had changed into a snake.

            “If you want me to contact them, I can do that,” Draco said. “But I warn you that they might not accept a message from me under any circumstances. They’re more likely to take one from you. Are you up to sending one?”

            Harry remained silent for a moment, his scales gleaming and rippling back light as he turned his hands, the white serpent watching on his shoulder as if it could catch shadows of emotion in his face that Draco couldn’t. Then Harry looked up, and his jaw had clenched in a way that Draco knew didn’t signal a transformation.

            “Yes.”

*

            The cold one is kind to let you do this, brother.

            Harry nodded back to the white serpent, but didn’t speak. He was kneeling in front of Malfoy’s fireplace, his hands on his knees, and his body so slick and cold with sweat that he was tempted to change simply to make it stop. Snakes couldn’t sweat.

            Or speak English, or look his friends in the eye, or tell them what he felt and that he missed them. Harry fought back the change that wanted to make its way up from his legs, for the fifth time that day, and took a breath so long that it seemed to make his lungs sway and bulge, then leaned back and cast the handful of Floo powder into the fire. “Ron’s Place,” he said quietly. They hadn’t changed the Floo address even though Hermione lived there too.

            The fire flickered for a moment, making Harry wonder if his friends had closed their Floo against him. He blinked. He hadn’t even considered that particular ignominious end to this attempt to contact his friends. Perhaps he would have to wait until they sent him an owl, no matter how much he longed to know.

            Then the fire turned green and orange, and Hermione’s face appeared. She stared straight at Harry and hissed out of a corner of her mouth, as if she was a snake herself, “No time to talk. The Unspeakables are here. They’ve put a watch—”

            Harry jerked back as the fire exploded in a shower of sparks. One of them landed on his arm, but a quick swat put it out. The hearth had gone cold, but just in case the Unspeakables could try and trace him by the magic used in it, Harry used his wand to clear the last grains of Floo powder out of it.

            He settled back, feeling cold and sick. His friends were war heroes, good people, without the stigma of Parseltongue or the history with the public swinging back and forth between hating and loving them that Harry had. Harry had considered that they might abandon him, or that they might suffer public displeasure once people found out that they weren’t abandoning him, but never that the Unspeakables would go after them simply because they were his friends.

            Hermione had looked all right, he thought. Distressed, but not physically abused. It left Harry without much news, but at least sure his friends were still alive. If Ron had been hurt or dead, he knew Hermione would have used her few words to tell him that instead.

            We can fight for them, brother.

            Harry smiled wanly down at the white snake and stood. “Of course we can.” And he went to find Malfoy, already turning over, in his mind, what this knowledge might do to their strategy.

            At least, he thought with macabre humor that couldn’t make him smile much more than the snake had, this had shown Hermione and Ron that Dark wizards lurked both inside and out of the Ministry.

*

            Seiren: Thank you! Pansy can probably get used to Harry, but it will require more time spent around him.

            I do have an e-mail list for AFF, but probably the easiest way would be to subscribe to my Yahoo! Group, lomonaaerensstories.

            suicidein_angeleyes: Thank you! Glad you thought it was hot.

            pittwitch: Thanks for reviewing!

            SP777: It’s still hard for Harry to forget that a little way ago, he hated Malfoy.
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