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A Dream of Running Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7806 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Two—A Grey River
            Draco opened his eyes to mist.
For a long moment, he stood still, turning his head in all directions without moving his feet. He was used to tricks and deceptions from the Dark Lord now, and he wouldn’t expose himself to unnecessary danger just because he was a little impatient with being quiet.
The mist gradually cleared, and Draco realized that the ground beneath his feet was odd, too. It trembled as if he was standing in the middle of a bed, which made Draco all the more certain this was an illusion, and the Death Eaters would roar with laughter when he fell off his bed. He folded his arms and scowled at the distant horizon. There was no way that he would let someone have that kind of triumph over him.
But the mist continued clearing, and if the ground wasn’t stable, neither was it threatening. This seemed an odd kind of illusion for the Death Eaters to tease him with, anyway. Draco saw the grey country stretching out in all directions, a flat, shadowless sort of land. There was only a muffled light here, twilight, and no matter how long Draco looked, he couldn’t see the sun.
The sky wasn’t even cloudy, he thought when he looked up. Just grey. The trees in sight were all the same, but they were alive. Draco reached out a hand to the one he could touch without leaning, and felt a soft thrum, like running water, beneath the bark. The soft lacy leaves were alive when he touched them, and they were a color like the inside of a pearl.
Maybe this was the dreamland that Snape had promised him, after all. Draco thought it was strange, but he would put up with it. If it would help him get revenge on the Dark Lord and deliver his message to someone on Potter’s side of the war, it was worth it.
The noise of real running water drew his attention, and Draco moved slowly in the direction of it. The ground still trembled beneath his feet, but only momentarily; it would stabilize when he actually stepped on it.
Draco came around one of the grey trees, and caught his breath.
The water in front of him was the same color as everything else, but it was beautiful as nothing else in this country was. Draco stood there and admired the different shades in the water—charcoal, pearl, near-black, darkened blue—before he shook his head and walked down to it. One of the trees grew with its huge roots in the water, and Draco sat on the largest one, a hunched one that would keep him from getting his feet wet.
He had lost his thought that the water might be dangerous, and he dipped his hand down. It chilled his skin, but when he sipped from it, he sighed. It was deep and pure and clean, and so different from the deliberately dirty water that the Death Eaters sent him.
Draco tucked up his feet beneath him, and sat there with his gaze fixed on the distance. The sound of the stream almost lulled him into sleeping, and only the thought that someone might show up kept him awake.
“Malfoy?”
Draco’s shoulders tensed, all his peace fleeing in an instant. Suddenly he could remember his father being slaughtered, and it seemed obscene to him that he should have ever forgotten that. He twisted his head around and reached for his wand.
It wasn’t there.
Draco clenched his hand into a fist instead, hoped that Potter wouldn’t notice he was defenseless, and snapped, “What are you doing here?”
“I came here to get a message from—someone who could help me.” Potter was standing on the bank behind Draco, looking belligerent and out of place. Draco almost winced back from the colors of his clothing and eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“I have the message.” The words tasted like ashes in Draco’s mouth, but not as much as words of surrender to the Dark Lord would have.
Potter tilted his head back and sighed to an invisible heaven. Then he faced Draco and nodded with such an air of resignation that Draco bristled. “Fine. Let’s have it, then.”
“You could be nicer,” said Draco. “I’m taking a big risk, you know. If the Dark Lord comes up and finds me with this—thing under my pillow…” It would have sounded like a more dramatic declaration if he knew the object’s name, obviously, but he thought it was plenty dramatic as it was.
Potter laughed, a cracked, exhausted sound that made Draco wince for different reasons. “Yeah? Try being on the run while you try to find the secret to killing him off once and for all.” Draco was grateful that Potter hadn’t used the Dark Lord’s name, but the next second, Potter’s laughter was gone, and his eyes were narrowed. “What you’re going through is nothing next to what I’m going through, Malfoy. You were the one who chose to get that pretty little snake on your arm, and you were the one who almost killed my best friend, and—”
“He killed my fucking father!” Draco yelled.
He hadn’t planned to say it—he didn’t really want Potter to know anything about his personal life—but he thought later that was probably what made it effective when it came to opposing Potter. Potter’s mouth hung open a little, and he peered at Draco hard enough that Draco felt insulted. Then he slowly nodded.
“That would do it,” he whispered. “I wondered why you were here instead of—the other person I was waiting for, but now I know.”
“I know the other person is Snape,” said Draco tiredly. Now all the emotion was gone from him, as though the full force had been packed into his yell. “Don’t worry. He buried the memory really deep in my head so I can’t talk about it.”
Potter eyed him for long enough that Draco wondered if he was going to say anything at all, and then he gave an abrupt nod that made Draco like him better and sat down on the bank a little way away from Draco. “What do you have to report?”
He’s not my superior. He’s not my father. He’s not the Dark Lord—
No, Potter wasn’t, and the remembrance of why he was here made the spite drain out of Draco. He gave Potter a tired sigh and muttered, “There’s been several Death Eaters freed from Azkaban. My father—is dead.” Only the thought of how Lucius would frown if he started sobbing in front of Potter let Draco stumble through those words. “I think the others that you have to worry about the most are Julian Elwood and Walden Macnair. Macnair swore some kind of oath of vengeance against you and that bumbling oaf Hagrid.”
            Potter ignored this as though Macnair was nothing to worry about. Maybe he wasn’t, when compared to the Dark Lord. “I haven’t heard of Elwood.”
            “He was imprisoned when—I think when we were ten,” said Draco. It was strange to think of himself sharing an age in common with Potter, but then again, they had a lot more than that in common now. “He’d slipped past the Ministry in the first war. They didn’t know he was a Death Eater. Then he sort of went mental waiting for the Dark Lord to get back, and he threw the Unforgivables enough to force them to imprison him.”
“Should I be worried about him just because he’s crazy?”
Draco rubbed the back of his neck. He thought it was the most civil conversation he’d ever had with Potter, though, yes, probably also the strangest. “That’s not the only reason. He’s a little more sane than Bellatrix, but he’ll do anything the Dark Lord tells him to do. And he’s developing some sort of spell that focuses on your name.” It was hard to remember back to the last Death Eater meeting, because he’d been thinking too hard during the meeting about his father coming home instead of paying attention to the words around him.
“My name,” said Potter, and frowned at the river.
“That’s just what I heard,” Draco snapped. “I was a little distracted.” He would let Potter assume that he had been distracted by his father’s death if he wanted to, he told the part of him that was unhappy with the way the conversation was going.
Potter clenched a hand on the ground beside him as if he was going to tear up the grey grass, then shook his head and turned back to Draco. “Is it like a Taboo?”
“Maybe.” That made the most sense, now that Draco thought about it. He was annoyed that he hadn’t come up with the theory himself, and that made him snappish. “I’m just the messenger, Potter. I didn’t know that I was coming to you, you know. I have other things to do.”
Potter gave him a distant look and stood up. “Thanks, Malfoy. Listen.” Draco bristled again. He had the feeling that Potter was mentally reclassifying Draco as a soldier in the Army of Harry Potter, and Draco could do without that sensation. “Do you think that you can keep an ear out for any mention of valuable objects the Dark Lord has?”
Draco stared. Potter wanted to collect the Dark Lord’s treasure now? “I have no idea what you mean.”
Potter fidgeted from foot to foot a moment. “I mean, I just thought that—you know how sometimes someone has a weakness because they get obsessed with something?”
Draco gave Potter a pointed look.
Potter flushed, a color Draco could see even in that dim country, and his voice rose. “I didn’t ask you to make a comment on—”
“I know what you mean, Potter,” Draco cut him off. “And you already know about his obsession with you, so I suppose you mean obsessions with other things?”
“Yes, exactly.” Potter seemed just as relieved as Draco was to slip past the awkwardness that made the air around them even dimmer. “Any—treasures that he mentions. Objects. Things that he wants to find or take over.”
Draco closed his eyes and tried again to recall the last Death Eater meeting. The Dark Lord had talked about something he was in quest of, but Draco didn’t think he’d ever mentioned the item’s name. And he had fed someone to his snake, some captured Muggle. Draco had taken care not to watch that part.
“I think,” he said slowly, concentrating as hard as he could, “that he’s probably the most obsessed with his snake.”
There was a noise like someone gulping, and he opened his eyes to see that Potter’s face had gone pale this time. He was nodding. “Yeah, that would do it,” he muttered to himself.
“Potter?” Draco refused to be left out of the loop if he was taking this many risks for Potter, and especially because Professor Snape seemed to have successfully protected Draco’s mind thus far. “Why do you want to know this?”
Potter snapped his eyes opened and shook his head. “There are secrets that I can’t tell anyone, Malfoy,” he said. “At least, not anyone who doesn’t already know them and is committed to helping me.” He sighed when Draco stared at him. “Maybe someday, after the war, then I can tell them to you.”
“I want to know what I’m risking my life to help,” Draco said, settling himself more firmly on the bank of the river. “And who says that I’ll be alive after the war for you to tell your precious secrets to? My father wasn’t.”
“Trust me when I say—”
“You sound like bloody Dumbledore,” Draco put in. He didn’t approve of Potter going all brooding and mysterious like this. “You’re not about to tell me that there’s some great secret and then refuse to tell me what it is?”
“I should never have implied that the secret existed in the first place,” Potter muttered, and gave Draco a look that Draco didn’t know how to define. “Thanks for what you told me, Malfoy. It could be useful.”
And then he vanished utterly from the dream landscape, leaving Draco sitting by the river in unhappy silence until the dream passed into true darkness, and images that he didn’t want but which would never leave him.
*
“Up, little baby!”
Draco scrambled out of bed, clawing for his wand, his heart hammering so hard that he was afraid for a second he’d screamed out the news of his meeting with Potter and all the rest of it. But he hadn’t, and the memories were already dimming and fading in his mind, tucking themselves up and stealing off. Draco thought he had dreamed of grey cloth, and green eyes, and running water, but he couldn’t remember why.
And then he didn’t have time to think of why, as Bellatrix shot one of the curses at him that she was fond of using to teach him to be “more alert.”
Draco rolled under the first one, and watched it hit the wall and crack the stone. Then he found his wand, and he cursed Bellatrix from under the bed, tangling her feet and making her fall to the floor and lie knotted in her own hair. Bellatrix uttered what could have been a laughing snarl or a snarling laugh.
“Little baby boy is growing up!” she crooned, and used a spell Draco had never seen before, one that hit the floor in front of Draco and grew.
It was a black spider by the time it was done growing, one with intense red eyes that reminded Draco of the Dark Lord’s and a white hourglass on its back that promised nothing good. It ran at Draco, and skittered around to keep up with him when Draco skipped to the side. Draco was gasping, his throat raw with panic, aware that Bellatrix was already preparing another spell and he had no idea what it was and no idea how to avoid this particular one or avoid dying a death like his father had died.
One spell his father had shown him once came back as though Draco was standing in the study with him and discussing it for the first time. Lucius had warned him never to use the spell in an enclosed space, but it wasn’t as though Draco had much bloody choice right now.
He conjured the fireball on the tip of his wand and swept around in a circle, surrounding himself with a ring of fire. He heard the sharp sizzle as the fire consumed the spider, and then it spread up and around the curtains, over his head, and onto the walls and his bed. It wasn’t Fiendfyre, but it was something very nearly as hard to control.
Bellatrix screamed. Draco whipped back to face the door and saw that she had the fire on her robes and was trying to stamp it out.
She didn’t know the countercurse. Draco raised his wand with the incantation already on his tongue.
And then he paused.
He thought of the way she had crouched and laughed at the Dark Lord’s side while he tortured Draco or his mother. He thought of the way she had never spoken up when the Dark Lord ranted about the weakness of the Malfoys, and how she had begged for the Cruciatus to be cast on her and the pleasure of casting it on someone else.
He thought of the steel claws that had dug into his mind when he was learning Occlumency, and how she had laughed and told him it was supposed to be like rape.
Draco didn’t call the fire back.
Bellatrix was slapping and wailing at her own clothes a minute later when the fire climbed high enough that it wreathed her hair and her face in shimmering white, and she had to stop screaming. Draco dimmed the fire then. Maybe this would be enough, if she was voiceless and couldn’t beg or curse or scream at him anymore.
It had gone further than that.
He was still staring at the blackened corpse on the floor when Snape arrived.
*
delia cerrano: Snape will be mean as he has to to protect Draco and his own secrets.
Fenrirsboy: Thanks! I think Draco is still fairly close to what he was in the books, but that’s going to change very quickly now.
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A Dream of Running Water