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A Determined Frame of Mind	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16811 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Nineteen—Wise Use of Magic

            Draco watched as the colors around him darkened, the Slytherin green turning the shade of poison, the purple and black he was used to accepting as his flaws altering until they shone like a starling’s feathers. He knew he was nearing the part of himself guarded by the veil of the Memory Charm, magic powerful enough to reach down and bind his consciousness along with his memories if he were not careful.

            There was a reason that Obliviate was a spell widely used on one’s enemies and on Muggles. Even if the person noticed the missing time, the chances were small that they would consider the memories important enough to search for when breaking the charm could drive them insane

            Draco swam on.

            He halted at last in front of the Memory Charm and the obscurity it had cast on his soul, and took several deep breaths. The beautiful blue-green arch he had noticed before reached overhead and then down into the darkness, like a rainbow losing itself in the advance of night. Draco peered ahead, but could see nothing within that darkness, not even the normal colors of his soul. It purely and simply refused his eyes.

            The Memory Charm was linked to the event that had changed his soul, whatever it was.

            To know what it was, he had to go into that darkness.

            It was no good pretending otherwise, or that he really wanted to hesitate.

            He called up memories of the time he had broken Severus’s Obliviate. This ought to be easier, since then he had been only a terrified adolescent and now he was an experienced Psyche-Diver with years of maneuvering around mental obstacles behind him.

            That did not lessen his terror, and since no one else was here, he could admit to the feeling.

            He stretched his arms in front of him, an analogue for the determination he summoned up now. He could not stop once he began to tear the veil. To do so would be to drive himself mad with the glimpses of half-understood events and an uncertainty about what they meant. But the Obliviate itself would drag at him like tar. It had never been meant to part or lessen once it was cast; Memory Charms did not wear away with the passage of time, either. He would have to keep going, no matter what he saw, no matter what shocked or frightened him, no matter how slowly he might have to travel at times and how close his speed would come to stopping.

            One glance at the blue-green arch was enough to sustain any faltering resolve.

            Draco held his breath, silly thing to do though it was, and paddled in.

*

            Harry sat back on his heels, still munching. Scrimgeour had, after all, brought him food, or rather assigned an Auror to bring him a cheese sandwich, a small salad, and a butterbeer. Harry had been surprised, but decided it was more of the Minister’s paranoia. When Harry’s body was found, he wanted no inconsistencies, and Ron and Hermione certainly would have thought it strange if he hadn’t eaten for days.

            Since the food gave him more strength, Harry wasn’t inclined to object.

            He had studied the wards carefully, moving his hand towards them now and again to watch them spark and flare when he wasn’t sure of their purpose. He’d dredged up every bit of Auror training concerning wards he could remember, and while it hadn’t been enough to let him recognize every line of magic, he could make secure estimates based on analogies and reason.

            The Draco in the back of his head laughed. A Potter functioning on reason, without a friend or a lover to help him along? If you wanted to kill me with humor, you just succeeded.

            Harry smiled fondly. He hoped that Draco would have a full life after this, eventually finding someone else he could love as much as he loved Harry. Perhaps he would arrange to keep as close an eye on him as a wizard living in the Muggle world could. He recalled, hazily, that there were ways to arrange the delivery of the Daily Prophet not using an owl; Hermione had helped her parents set up a subscription that way. That at least would allow Harry to know if anything newsworthy happened to Draco.

            It will have to. Someone like Draco can’t stay out of the spotlight forever.

            Perhaps he would read someday that Draco had married, or settled down with a lover. Harry forced himself to shrug the pain away. So far, it was only imaginary. He had enough real hurt to confront that he didn’t intend to give the false ones any power over him.

            He once again moved his head slowly back and forth along the lines of the wards, and smiled. Yes. The colored spells all tied together in the center of the door, where they formed a tangled knot. His instructors during Auror training had drilled Harry in recognizing that most wards had a common purpose, and that that purpose could be found at the center. Someone who wanted to keep thieves out of her house, for example, would have alarms to alert her of unexpected intruders, wards sensitive to sound and certain charms, and separate individual protections on every entrance. The place where they came together in a common anchor would often appear as a lock or a sign saying Keep Out in ferocious runes.

            As ferocious as runes can get, anyway.

            These wards formed a knot, and the whole thing was pulsing in and out like a beating heart. That was because, if Harry had done his reading correctly, Scrimgeour was rather intent on not only keeping him prisoner but knowing when he died. Another plausible excuse, of course; no one would expect him to confine a man who had showed himself capable of suicide without some kind of alarm that measured and kept track of his health. The wards watched over motion and wand magic and defended the door, but they also kept track of his breathing and his heartbeat. If any one of them lowered too far or stopped, then a silent alarm would tremble through the knot and alert Scrimgeour.

            Harry had been surprised that the wards were set up to measure slower breathing as well as a cessation of breath, but then he’d remembered whom he was dealing with. Scrimgeour probably planned to rush in and watch Harry’s last moments if he had the chance, so that he could be sure his enemy was dead. It was an understandable weakness from a man whom Harry thought was probably ruled by his fear above all else.

            And now it would cost him.

            Harry knew already that he could not cut through the wards—the same magic that defended the door would lash out at him if he tried—and it would have been a difficult task to work around them even if he had his wand. But he didn’t need to work around them. His wandless magic was powerful, newly energized by the food and the long rest he’d had, and it could be used for small and subtle things as well as large.

            In his head, Draco laughed again.

            Harry rolled his eyes. Ever considered that I might have learned the art of subtlety from you?

            The Draco in his head allowed that this might make matters more plausible.

            Harry lay carefully back on the floor, his head cushioned on a rug and the others arranged so that they cradled his elbows, his tailbone, and the curve of his spine. He wanted no distractions from what he was about to attempt by minor physical pains.

            He closed his eyes and began to concentrate on his breathing.

*

            Draco had not anticipated how hard the veil would drag at him. The darkness had turned complete almost immediately, not even the glimpse of the blue-green arch overhead lighting his way anymore, and the tar yanked at his elbows and his knees and clogged the normal pathways of his thoughts. He was panting already, and he knew that if he glanced over his shoulder, he would still see light.

            Or maybe he wouldn’t see light. Maybe the Memory Charm had already sucked him away from the rest of his conscious awareness, and he would spend the rest of his life, until one of his house-elves gave up and mercifully killed his motionless body, drooling and staring at nothing…

            Draco gritted his teeth. He had faced such perils before, when he was developing Psyche-Diving, and they had never been enough to stop him. He would not let them stop him now, when he could be uncovering the most important buried secret of his life. His patients’ secrets were left at St. Mungo’s when he came home. But he would heave to live with these.

            Will surged up in him, and acted as a knife to cut the veil—for a few paces. Then he was crawling again, and the bulk of the task weighed on his mind once more. Draco made sure to keep swimming, but he couldn’t keep from thinking about all he had to do, and whether dread would crush him flat.

            It will not. I will not let it.

            Determination and will were all very well, but there were other weapons that could be used to fight mental battles, and which Draco had used to keep his balance before in the midst of patients’ minds that were trying to kill him in the way they tried desperately to kill their own delusions. He shrank his motions to the barest minimum now, and closed his eyes. Having them open or shut really didn’t make any difference in the midst of the Obliviate, but the mental analogues of physical motions comforted him, and Draco was wise enough to use any advantage he could get in this situation.

            Rising through him were his pride, his arrogance, and his unwillingness to admit defeat. Draco rode them like a whirlwind, and directed them straight at the slough in front of him, where the power of his enemy’s magic was thickest and thus the going hardest.

            He was Draco Malfoy. He had invented Psyche-Diving. A Memory Charm would not defeat him. He had lasted out stints in the minds of people that even their closest relatives had given up for lost. He had seen eyes widen in sudden awareness of his power, in awe and respect. He would not allow an enemy who, at this point, did not even have the dignity of a name and a face to hold a victory over his head.

            Forwards! Forwards!

            Around him, the veil began to boil. Draco concentrated on imagining the stuff of his mind as water, which his magic was heating. And a whirlpool was spreading out from him, tearing at the blackness, shearing great gobs of pitch from the curtain, sucking it down and drowning it.

            The Obliviate trembled. It was hard to hold the imagining of his own power against the gloomy reality of it, but Draco had often been told that his arrogance was made of diamond. Every time he wanted to sag back in weariness, he pressed that diamond like a knife against the tip of his spine and dug it in. The pain—not physical, but rather the shame of thinking that he’d let this single Memory Charm rule over him—drove him into new efforts.

            A large patch tore in the veil. Draco laughed as light glittered down across the blue-green arch. It still continued. Its root was still somewhere ahead. But he could make out the general outlines now. He reached a hand up, out of the spluttering might of his whirlpool, and touched it.

            That was nearly the end of all his efforts. The shock was so great that the magic around him dropped. Draco shook his head and called up the power again, turning the shock to wonder and thus to more fuel for the water.

            The blue-green arch contained love—an overwhelming emotion, thick with blended passion and impatience, as though Draco had once understood the need for slowness but had wanted more from his partner all the same.

            And that love was for Harry Potter.

            Draco was not stupid. If he had fallen in love with Harry Potter, it was for a damn good reason. And the Memory Charm was still burying that reason, along with exactly how this had happened.

            Draco roared, and raised his arms. The ocean around him whirled up into a waterspout. Draco reared it higher and higher, into a wave, and brought it crashing down on the remnants of the Obliviate with the immeasurable force of a ton of angry water.

*

            Harry had always been pants at the parts of Occlumency which involved clearing the mind. On the other hand, this wasn’t exactly the same. And he had never tried to use his wandless magic to help with Occlumency. He knew how to use it on his body. Letting it into his mind was asking for trouble.

            This, though, was a physical response. The main trouble he would have was with the finesse involved.

            Help if you can, he thought to the Draco living in the back of his mind, and began to wrap his magic around his breath.

            He had thought of actually using his magic to lower the rate of his breathing and his heartbeat, to go into a state of torpor, but then he might not react fast enough when Scrimgeour came through the door. It was far better to create a glamour over himself that would fool the wards. He only had to concentrate on it.

            And hope that I have enough wandless magic to create this in the first place.

            He envisioned his magic surrounding him in a light, shimmering cocoon, telling the wards that his breathing was slowing down. His heart didn’t beat so hard, either. He was dropping past the states of relaxed and asleep, both of which the wards would recognize and not consider dangerous, and into something beyond that. His chest barely heaved. They couldn’t detect his heartbeat. Each contraction forced more blood from his body. His veins swelled sluggishly. His breathing continued to drop. His mind was drifting away. In a few more minutes, an hour at most, life would leave his body. He was dying. He was dying.

            The glamour grew deeper. Harry could feel it tingling around him like a beam of sunlight. He gritted his teeth on a wistful whimper, as he wondered if he would ever see the sunlight again. Escaping from this room was only the first step. He must find a way to neutralize Scrimgeour before he fled, or Draco wouldn’t be safe.

            His heartbeat surged with fear and adrenaline, and Harry realized he was disrupting the glamour; a hole was growing over his chest. He reached out again and coaxed the magic to lie still and respond. Slowly, it settled back into place. That was the way of things, his body dutifully and deceitfully reported to the wards. He had, for a moment, changed his mind and wanted to live, but that only shortened his life and made his heart labor all the more now, since it had briefly bounded.

            Deeper and deeper into the deception he went, coaxing more wandless magic out of his body and into the cocoon. But he never quite lost track of two things: how ready he really was under the glamour, and the solid hilt of the knife that Scrimgeour had given him, lying beneath his right elbow.

*

            The veil broke loose into slimy pieces that clung to Draco’s face and shoulders. He spat them out, disgusted, knowing that they weren’t really touching his body but sliding along the surface of his thoughts. One thing he had taught himself to remember when he was Psyche-Diving was that the mind would translate what it felt and saw into physical terms because it didn’t have the language or the concepts for what was really happening.

            That didn’t make it any less disgusting, though.

            The blue-green arch appeared and vanished again, fracturing into pieces behind the flying tar. Draco called up still more pride when he thought of drowning under a failed Memory Charm so close to his goal. He only needed to last a little longer, and bring down a little more water—

            And then the last of the veil broke with a roaring, churning sound, and fell on top of him.

            Draco couldn’t breathe. He reminded himself brutally that he didn’t need to, not here, and that the most important thing was not to cease his motions. He turned in circles, since that was the only thing he could do, now using his will like a knife. Saw and slice and cut, the slowest and most exhausting way of getting through any obstacle, but the thought that he had been in love with Harry Potter drove him now as effectively as his pride ever had.

            Scratch and batter and tear and paddle, for what felt like hour after tiresome hour. Draco didn’t know when the tar would end. He had to chew at one point, as the sensation of thick gore filling his mouth became too much for him. It was only an analogue, but a damn convincing one.

            Blood dripped down his throat. Liquid sealed his eyelids shut. Strands of webbing yanked at his limbs like tentacles. Draco chewed and swallowed when he had no choice, spat it out when he could, and continued to move his hands and his legs.

            And then he was through.

            Draco shook his head, staring at the light, and turning to look beneath him, where the strands of the Obliviate were falling away, disintegrating like mist in the sun. Then he turned and reached for the panes of glittering stained glass in front of him, which represented the memories the charm had buried.

            Light swarmed him.

*

            Harry knew the moment when his deception had worked. A sharp tingling that did not come from his glamour ran over his body. He could feel the small hairs on his arms stand upright. Gooseflesh followed a moment later.

            He nearly lost control of the glamour in his excitement, but he managed to tame the wandless magic instead. He had to lie there, looking like a corpse, at least until the moment that Scrimgeour bent over him to examine him for a cause of death.

            It still took some moments; perhaps Scrimgeour was busy and had to make excuses to the people he was standing with. Harry was never under much doubt that he’d come, though. After all the effort he had gone to to make sure that his hands were not actually stained with Harry’s blood, he would want to see the fulfillment of his plans.

            Distantly, his hearing muted by the glamour, Harry heard the door open. Keeping himself still, and not letting his fingers clench into fists or his muscles tighten or any other betrayal run through his body, was the hardest thing he had ever done.

            Scrimgeour came nearer slowly. Since he was so distrustful, Harry wasn’t surprised that he would think of deception. Of course, he would also know that Harry fooling the wards wasn’t likely.

            Hell, your thinking of a clever plan, when he believes you to be unbalanced and suicidal, isn’t likely, Draco announced in the back of his head.

            Harry permitted himself to give an inner grin. He was doing this as much for Draco’s sake as his own.

            Breath raked through the glamour. Scrimgeour was bending over him, studying Harry’s face intently.

            Harry doubted he would get a better chance.

He moved.

*

Draco opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling of his study for a moment, his breath racing so that his vision wavered, his head moving slowly on the cushion he had chosen to cradle it. The memories had returned to him so fast that he needed to spend some time fastening them in place and remembering what had happened in what order.

And then he was consumed from the inside by incandescent rage.

            He rose from the couch and Summoned a vase that stood on a table on the other side of the room, shattering it with his next spell. Bits of alabaster flew everywhere. Draco didn’t care. He turned and Summoned one of the porcelain elephants his mother had spent a year collecting next, this time disintegrating it.

            He whirled about the study, harming everything except his books. Chairs cracked down the middle. Table legs came spontaneously unattached from their tops. Shelves trembled and warped, bending into useless curlicues of wood. His walls bulged and rippled suspiciously; Draco managed to turn his attention away from them, but only because any damage to them might actually hurt the structural integrity of the Manor.

            He had nearly—

            He had nearly spent the rest of his life without the memory of Harry. Even if Scrimgeour had been stupid to erase the memories of him while leaving so many people about who could tell Draco the truth, Draco might still have decided the effort of breaking the Memory Charm was too dangerous. He could have ignored his own humiliation, and chosen to live with what he had. He might have returned to work at St. Mungo’s. He might have been unaware of Harry’s fate, unaware of the Cassandra Curse, unaware of the missing shard of his soul. Perhaps the inconsistencies would have bothered him occasionally, but he would have conjured justifications for them. The longer a Memory Charm endured, the stronger it grew—at least if it received reinforcement from its victim’s mind, which Draco knew it would have in this case. He would have wanted too much not to think about Harry Potter leaving him.

            So close.

            But he remembered Harry now, and his fury made it painful to stop moving and stand with his eyes closed, trying to think up a plan that would hurt Scrimgeour.

            That did not take long, in fact. So intense was his anger that only a few things would satisfy it, and several of them were beyond Draco’s reach. There were a few potions he might have asked Severus for, but none of them was likely to be on hand, and Draco could not afford the time the brewing would take.

            Harry could not afford the time the brewing would take.

            So. He would choose a revenge that lay within his capabilities, and, more than that, within his expertise. He only need spend a bit of time looking up the specifics in his books, and then he would create a plan to enter the Ministry. He did not know where Scrimgeour had put Harry, but it was early afternoon on a Wednesday. He would certainly be at the Ministry.

            And—

            Draco felt his lips curl slightly. It might be that he could solve two of his problems at once, if he planned this right.

            Remain where you are, Harry. Remember your promise. I’m coming.

*

            Scrimgeour was a trained Auror, and no fool. The moment Harry broke the glamour, jabbed his elbow down, and flipped the knife into his hand, he began moving himself, struggling to bring his wand to bear on Harry’s face.

            But Harry was younger than Scrimgeour, insanely determined, and did not have a bad leg. He grabbed Scrimgeour’s right hand, which held the wand, and bent two of his fingers backwards to snapping point, even as he braced the knife against his wrist and began to cut in. The pain was too much. Scrimgeour cried out and dropped the wand. Harry half-whirled, his body looping like a dancer’s, snatching the wand from the floor at the same moment as his knife continued to cut further.

            Scrimgeour scrambled away from him like a crab. And then Harry was on his feet and holding the wand out, as well as the dripping knife. It was the knife that Scrimgeour looked at first, and Harry snorted as he figured out why. There were several illegal but highly effective spells that could be performed with an enemy’s blood.

            It’s typical that he thinks I’d do that.

            Harry cast a Silencing Charm on Scrimgeour, so he couldn’t call for help, and then shut and locked the door with a small wand motion. He doubted Scrimgeour would have told any of his companions the truth about where he was going, so there should be at least a few minutes’ grace period.

            “Now,” he said, as he Body-Bound his enemy and stood above him, powerful for the first time in fourteen months, “you and I are going to have a little talk.”

*

            Mangacat: There will not be a third part. Just a few more chapters, until Chapter 24, to tie everything up.

            Darthkripple: Well, what’s your prognosis for Harry after this chapter?

            Silks: There will not be a sequel. As for a prequel, I might consider it, though of necessity it would be gen and not slash. The story will end on Chapter 24.

            I don’t want to answer the question about tops or bottoms yet.

            And thank you very much. I’m glad you’re enjoying the story.

            Thrnbrooke: Thanks for reviewing!
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A Determined Frame of Mind

Chapter Nineteen—Wise Use of Magic