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The Dust of Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20632 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eighteen—The Straighter Path
            Harry drifted in and out of a doze, waking only when he heard the name, “Potter.”
            As he sat up, he glanced around once to see if there was a house-elf within calling distance. But there wasn’t. He had managed to drag Malfoy up the stairs to the study they had met in the first time Harry came to the Manor. Then, although he knew there would be no bedrooms on the ground floor, Harry had decided to stay there. There was no way he could manage another flight when he was this exhausted.
            Harry turned to Malfoy. He lay on the couch, blinking at Harry out of a mask of dust. Harry had used all the magic he was capable of to protect Malfoy from the roughness of the steps. There had been nothing for Cleaning Charms.
            Now there was, after some rest. Harry drew his wand and murmured, “Scourgify.”
            It made Malfoy flinch, but he didn’t say anything. He only went on staring while Harry put his wand away. It made Harry feel creepier than anything else.
            “What’s one of your house-elves’ names?” Harry cleared his throat and repeated the words when Malfoy only looked at him blankly. His voice was so hoarse, it was no wonder.
            “Ius,” said Malfoy. “Call Ius. He’s the one who escorted you to see me the first time you visited.”
            Harry hesitated, then shrugged. It wasn’t his business what Malfoy named his house-elves. “Ius!” he shouted.
            “I is here, Master Potter. You need not be shouting,” said a slightly reproachful voice from behind him, and the grey-eyed house-elf moved into view. He already held a steaming mug. “Master Malfoy is needing this for his throat?”
            Malfoy took the mug away from Ius and swallowed a huge gulp. Harry suspected it had to be a potion, because his pale face recovered color like it was being boiled. “Yes,” he said. He sat up and turned to Harry. “What do you need, Potter?”
            “The truth.”
            For an instant, Malfoy’s gaze swung away from him, and then he sighed. “Bring some food for us, Ius,” he said. “A light meal. Then make sure that we’re not going to be disturbed no matter what happens.”
            “Master Malfoy.” Ius bowed and disappeared. Harry heard a sound that might have been a lock clicking on a door, although he didn’t bother looking around to figure out if it was one of the study doors. He wanted to look at Malfoy and make sure he wouldn’t come up with some way of writhing out of this.
            Malfoy finished his potion and stared into the mug. Then he said, “There’s something to be praised in Gryffindor courage,” put the mug down on the table next to the couch, and faced Harry. Harry leaned forwards encouragingly.
            “That potion was supposed to give me the experience of being you.”
            “Right,” said Harry, and gestured. “Well? I know you felt the pain. Is that what made you scream?”
            Malfoy swallowed. He looked ill. “I didn’t know—the Cruciatus Curse. I had no idea you were under that.”
            Harry blinked. “Sometimes. But you were sometimes yourself. Was that what made you scream?”
            “No.” Malfoy huddled on the couch for a second, then turned wounded eyes on Harry. Harry didn’t move to comfort him, although part of him wanted to. Malfoy had brought this entirely on himself, wanting to drink that potion like that. Harry had only agreed to spare the portrait from suffering. It wasn’t his fault.
            “I had no idea how much pain there was,” Malfoy whispered. “I was prepared for mental pain and the—some of the physical suffering I knew you had, like the time that that Bludger broke your arm in second year.” He closed his eyes. “But this was all those sensations, all at once, condensed into a moment.”
            Harry nodded, relieved that the explanation was so simple he could follow it without Malfoy needing to name several Potions ingredients. “That makes sense.”
            “Not—as much as I thought it would.” Malfoy locked his hands on his knees and said, “I need to stop dodging.”
            Since Ius brought in a tray with bread and cheese and some fruit then, though, Malfoy was able to dodge for a little longer. Harry watched him order Ius to arrange the tray on the table with the mug and then put the food in just such an order so they could reach it. Harry waited. There was a small ball of dread in his stomach.
            Maybe he would have been happier if Malfoy went on dodging.
            But then Harry shook his head. No. He wanted this to be done and over with. He wanted to understand Malfoy, and anything else Malfoy could help him understand. Then he wanted to walk out the Manor door and be done with it.
            When Malfoy had had a few bites of cheese and bread, he leaned back and began to talk. Harry listened without interrupting.
            “I thought I was prepared for the pain, so the potion would give me access to your thoughts. But instead, I got this whole tumult of pain. I knew what it was like to starve, and sleep in a cupboard, and be chased in fear for my life when I was eight years old.” Malfoy looked at Harry, then away as if the sight hurt him. “And I knew what it was like to think you were dying of basilisk poison, and be in front of the Dark Lord, and watch someone you loved die. And there was—so much in the last few years that I didn’t know you experienced. So much torment and doubt over whether you were a Dark wizard.”
            “Okay,” said Harry slowly. Of all the things the potion could have revealed to Malfoy, Harry hadn’t thought his childhood would be one of them. Or he hadn’t thought it would matter to Malfoy so much.
            “I know you now,” Malfoy whispered. He kept his head turned away. “I can’t—go on using you the way you did. I need to tell you what I know and what exactly I was keeping the portrait and the scraps of skin and blood for.”
            Harry leaned forwards again.
            “The Harry Potter I knew after the war made no sense to me. Conspiring with me and talking about torture, but then also talking like he despised himself for it. Why would he do those things if he hated them? At first I thought someone else was blackmailing him, but I didn’t see any signs of it. And I know the signs.”
            Harry bit his lip. Asking irrelevant questions wasn’t the point of what he was doing here, although he would have liked to know why Malfoy was so accustomed to the signs.
            “Then I thought that perhaps he’d always been a Dark wizard and didn’t want anyone to know about it. So I started watching him for signs of addiction to the Dark Arts.” Malfoy’s forehead wrinkled. “Sometimes he acted like he wanted to curse everyone in sight. Other times, he didn’t. And I know the signs of addiction, too.
            “Then I thought that perhaps he was under the effects of a curse, one that made him do Dark things even though he didn’t want to.” Malfoy turned slowly towards him. “I had to give up on that theory, too.”
            “I understand him a little better, now,” Harry whispered. “I think he tried to justify it to himself at first because he was making the wizarding world a better place, but then he realized that what he had done was horrible.” He hesitated and looked at Malfoy. “But I don’t know why he didn’t go to the Aurors then and there.”
            Malfoy laughed with soft bitterness. “You think he’d want to? It would have meant the loss of his heroic reputation and his freedom. Plus all the good that he thought he was doing. Maybe it’s a simple decision for you to give up everything you’ve dreamed of for the sake of the right thing, but it wasn’t for him.”
            New puzzle pieces slid into place in Harry’s head then. “So he kept trying Dark and Light things in combination to make up for what he’d done. And he tried to find the ‘good’ in the Dark things because he couldn’t stand to face up to what he’d done being wrong.”
            “Yes.” Malfoy exhaled the word. “Like someone taking new potions when they’ve overdosed on one, instead of stopping and letting the potions wear off.”
            Harry shook his head a little. He tried to imagine what it would have been like, to continually think that you were doing the wrong things and try to make up for them, and keep doing the wrong things anyway.
            Well, it might have been a problem for him. But it’s not going to be for me.
            Harry sighed as he thought about that. He wished he didn’t have to clean up Old Harry’s mistakes. He wished Old Harry hadn’t made those mistakes in the first place. He wished that he didn’t have to go to Azkaban, or whatever else the punishment would be, to make up for them.
            But he wasn’t going to fall into the same trap that Old Harry had, thinking he was shining and pure and every mistake he made could be atoned for by just blackmailing or capturing someone else. He was wiser than that.
            “Potter?”
            Malfoy’s voice was so small that Harry wondered if there was some other side-effect of the potion that Malfoy wasn’t telling him about. He glanced up. “Yes?”
            Malfoy had been sitting there with his forehead resting on his knees, which told Harry that he was feeling sick. But now he looked up, and his eyes were clearer than Harry thought he’d seen them since he started talking to Malfoy.
            “I’m sorry,” Malfoy whispered.
            That must be a side-effect of the potion, too, Harry decided rapidly. “You don’t need to say that, Malfoy. Really, Old Harry did a lot worse. And he’s mostly dead.”
            “No, I am sorry.” Malfoy shook his head so hard when Harry started to open his mouth that a second later he winced and ducked it. Harry was left staring at the nape of his neck and the expanse of his shoulders. “Let me just talk about it, Potter, and you’ll see what you mean.”
            Harry had to admit he probably wouldn’t be able to stop him, so he nodded. Malfoy wasn’t looking up, but he started talking anyway.
            “I think I still thought you were some kind of delusion, and the version of you I knew was the real one. I thought I would find out who you were with that potion. I would remember the sensations you couldn’t. I would—become you, somehow. That would be the end of my fascination, because I would know you through and through by then, and that was what I wanted.”
            “Was I that big a puzzle?” Harry had to ask. “I mean, you brew potions regularly. That has to mean you know some pretty intricate things. Mysteries I can’t even figure out.”
            “No potions are a mystery once you understand basic ingredient interactions. But you remained a mystery to me no matter what I did.”
            Harry would have said something else, but Malfoy was actually wringing his hands now. It seemed best to shut up and leave him to it, in case Harry upset him further.
            “I treated you not like a person,” Malfoy said. His hands had stopped wringing. They lay on his knees like dead things. “I treated you like an experiment, and I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean much now, I know. If I was really sorry, I would never have trapped your essence in a portrait like that. But I’m sorry anyway.”
            He turned and peeked at Harry from beneath his fringe. Harry just reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder, unable to think of anything else. Malfoy had done strange and torturous things to him, yes, but Harry mostly couldn’t remember them. And Malfoy was the only one who had apologized to him, rather than to some shadow of Old Harry.
            The rest of them all said how sorry they were that I didn’t have my memories. Not that I was left here to cope with his mess.
            To be utterly fair, they hadn’t known about the mess that Old Harry had left behind until recently. But Harry wasn’t in the mood to be utterly fair right now. He didn’t want to diminish the force of Malfoy’s apology.
            “Thanks,” Harry finally said. “Since you don’t need to understand me anymore, you won’t make another collection of blood and skin and so on, will you?”
            Malfoy grimaced and shook his head. “Maybe I should have brewed this potion years ago. Maybe it would have cured my obsession.” He turned towards Harry and crossed his arms. “But there’s something I still have to do. That you still have to help me do.”
            “Yes?”
            Malfoy smiled a little. “You sound so cautious. I suppose I can’t blame you.” He sighed and looked off to the side. Harry took another handful of food, wondering if Malfoy would forget about this new thing if enough time passed.
            No such luck. Malfoy said, “Because I was you, in a way that I’ve never been anyone but myself before—” He grimaced and turned to meet Harry’s eyes. “I want to help you make up for these crimes that he left behind.”
            Harry choked on his cheese. Malfoy participated eagerly in whacking him on the back. Then he leaned back against the cushions on the couch and watched Harry.
            “I think it’s going to be hard enough to convince my friends that I’m sincere about wanting to make up for this,” Harry said, when the cheese had been dislodged. “I don’t know how they’ll put up with you trailing behind.”
            “Did I say I would trail behind?” Malfoy’s face looked pinched, so high were his eyebrows angled up. “No. I’m going to be right by your side when you’re doing this.”
            “Malfoy, you can’t.”
            Malfoy abruptly lunged forwards and grabbed his hands. Harry tried to get them free, but Malfoy was strong when he was being a crazy bugger. And then Malfoy’s voice poured over Harry, and he had no choice but to listen, as unwilling as he was.
            “I’ve never felt anything like that. I don’t know how you could feel that much pain and still be standing. Or not be locked up in a Mind-Healer’s office somewhere screaming your head off when the memories come back.”
            “I just forgot a lot of it—”
            “I’m talking about what I felt during your childhood and the war. Which I know you remember.” Malfoy was staring at him with just two spots of color in his face, on his corpse-white cheeks. “Maybe you would be screaming if you had all your old memories back, but Old Harry wasn’t. You—I dropped myself in it. I want to know that it’s going to diminish. I want to know I’m helping atone for it somehow.”
            “Malfoy, that doesn’t sound like you want to help me make up for his crimes,” Harry pointed out, exasperated. “It sounds like you want to make me feel better.”
            “And that’s a crime?”
            Malfoy’s eyes were too intense, catching Harry’s even when he tried to turn away. Harry finally struck out when he was looking at him. “Of course not, but that’s not what I’m primarily trying to do here, you know.”
            “Maybe someone should be trying to do it, then.”
            Malfoy didn’t move towards him, but Harry thought he could read from the twitch in his shoulders that he would have liked to. Harry sighed a little. “Thank you. The only reason you really want to do this is because you took that potion and experienced what it was like from the inside, though, right? I mean, you wouldn’t care if it was Ron or Hermione or Ginny who had gone through something like this.”
            “None of them were the source of my fascination in the first place.”
            Which means “yes, you’re right,” Harry translated. He shook his head again, but it was hard to look away from Malfoy’s eyes. It sounded—tempting. Someone who was going to be on his side for a reason that had nothing to do with who Old Harry had been, or even because they’d been friends since they were eleven.
            And as long as Harry didn’t ask Malfoy to do anything illegal or immoral, then surely it would be okay. He didn’t think Malfoy would attack his friends, either. He leaned back and nodded. “All right.”
            Malfoy smiled at him and lay back on the couch. “Eat up,” he said. “We should probably make contact with your friends as soon as possible, so they don’t think I’ve kidnapped you. You’ve been here almost a full day.”
            Harry nodded, and then remembered something else and reached into his pocket. “I got this letter from Rob just before I left,” he explained to Malfoy’s stare. “Kreacher had been holding it, and I shoved it into my pocket and then came over here.”
            Malfoy’s stare seemed to get a bit colder at the mention of Rob. Harry shrugged. Nothing he could do about that. He had no idea what Malfoy had experienced from or about Rob while he was under the potion’s influence, and he didn’t really want to know, either. That was an aspect of his life as Old Harry that he wanted to simply leave behind.
            The letter was so wrinkled that Harry had to spread it like a fan before he could read Rob’s handwriting. And even then it was so vague Harry didn’t know if it was urgent or not.
            You need to contact me. I knew about one of your crimes I don’t think anyone will discover otherwise.
            “Do you have a quill and ink I could borrow?” Harry asked absently, turning the parchment over to write on the back.
            “I would prefer to wait.”
            “What? Why?” Harry looked up, blinking.
            “Because I don’t trust him.”
            “You don’t trust my friends, either.”
            “That’s different.” Malfoy was leaning back on the couch, his arms folded and a building fury on his face. Harry hesitated, but he didn’t think he could afford to alienate his one ally. He nodded and shoved Rob’s letter back into his pocket.
            “Fine. Then let’s think about what we’re going to do next when it comes to telling Ron and the Ministry where I was.”
            “Let’s.”
            Harry fought down the urge to smile. Malfoy was just so eager, so ready to do something with him. Harry supposed Ginny and Ron and Hermione and the kids might have been like that with his old self, but he couldn’t remember, of course.
            It is kind of nice to have someone who wants to be with me.
*
Severus1snape: Perhaps a bit less so now, although it was the result of a potion.
moon: Thanks! Well, I’ve got some darker stories coming up.
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The Dust of Water