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The Marriage of True Minds	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 55082 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty—Spinning in the Same Darkness

            It was happening again, what had happened when he escaped from the darkened house where the beast had fed on him, what had happened when he could no longer stand it and knew it was escape or die.

            Harry screamed and tried to hold it in, the force of his own magic, but it was impossible. It twisted out of him, borne by the screams, taunted by the smell of decay. If he didn’t strike out at something, he was going to die, going to drown, going to choke. His pulse hammered in his throat, and his mind warped and bent, gently, and he could hear his breath through ears that seemed to bleed.

            He had no idea if they were actually bleeding. He had no idea if his wounds had opened again. He had no idea if anyone else was in the building with him and might be harmed by the ropes that he knew he was creating. He was whimpering, and he was screaming, and it was high and mindless. He knew that when he knew anything at all.

            The darkness.

            It was there, sliding around him like heavy oil, like muffled velvet, stretching and hitting him and taunting him and it hurt and he no longer cared about the damage that he was doing because it was there, it was there, there was no holding back, it was coming out of him, he was shredding and spinning apart and—

            There was pain.

            Of course, there was pain wherever the darkness was, but this felt like something new, something new. Harry shuddered and opened his eyes, although he didn’t know why he thought he would be able to see anything with the pit around him.

            The pit, the house with its walls that never moved and the beast that returned and the food and drink that spared him when he wanted to die and the feces he sat in because the beast’s suckers held him still, he had sat in the same place for three months, the Healers said he wouldn’t have relearned how to walk again so fast except that his magic was surrounding him and driving him on to erase any reminders of that place he could, the pit—

            There was pain.

            It came from his finger. Strange to remember that he had fingers when so much of him was dissolving and pouring out of him, but Harry opened his eyes and looked down, and now he could make out the ring of light that shone there, painful and pure and hurtful. He reached down, and it stung his other fingers. The light spread, from the platinum and the steel and the silver and the gold and the copper, filling the darkness with a radiance as multicolored as they were.

            Harry shivered, and he remembered the forced marriage bond and the way that Draco had touched him that morning—was it only that morning?—and the way he had fallen asleep beside him, and it reminded him that other things existed in a world as battered and grieving as this one was. He could breathe again, and the wild beat of his heart slowed. He turned his head and was able to see a far wall in the light.

            And he could see what he had tried so hard to forget, what he had taken into him, made a part of him, and then used to escape.

            Waving red-black tendrils extended across the room. They extended from the wounds on his back, writhing and slipping back and forth. They were looking for something to feed on.

            The truth struck across his mind, no longer held at bay by the barriers he could raise against it:

            At the end, his magic had risen from the scars that the beast had carved into his back and eaten it, consumed the darkness, swallowed its strength. He had been afraid, ever since, that he would lose control of his magic during a flashback and eat anyone else he was near.

            And from the sound of the screams, he was near someone.

            Harry wrapped his arms around his head and closed his eyes. The burning pain of the ring sent more and more swords of light into his mind, and his magic and his memories alike wavered, as the pain of that eating and the horror of what he had probably already done whirled down on him.

            He didn’t think he could stop. The light from the ring was dying, and soon he would be in darkness again, and the madness pressed closer, rubbing against him like a cat waiting to be petted.

            He tried again to think about it, to think about what he had done there and what he had probably done here and what he would do. His mind stood in front of it, then shivered, and then shattered.

            I’m sorry, he thought, to whoever might have come along to hear it, as more and more memories soared up to join him. I’m so sorry, but this time, it’s too much. I’m going to collapse this time, and no one can stop me or save me. No one can heal me. Maybe no one ever could. I’m too far gone—

            Once again, the pain of the ring hit him, but this time it felt like something trying to gnaw his finger off. Harry flinched, hissing, and some sanity climbed back to the forefront of his mind and shook him.

            It wouldn’t hurt like that if it was only the marriage bond being upset that I was going to die. It hasn’t hurt like that when I was close to the cases or when I drove myself to exhaustion. It would only act like that—

            If I was about to hurt someone else from the family with my magic. If Draco is here.

            Harry groaned. He wanted to weep. He wanted to say that he was too tired, that living with the memories and the scars had been hard enough, that last time he had only cut himself off from hurting Draco with a Shield Charm and that the pain and panic that drove his magic, the desire, the need to be rid of whatever was hurting him this time, the people who had dumped him in the darkness, was stronger than the marriage bond.

            But he had the ring on his finger. And the ring had brought back light, and that had brought back a bit of sanity, and that meant that he couldn’t simply lie down and ignore, or pretend that he was ignoring, the consequences of his actions.

            He hadn’t died in the darkness before. He hadn’t died this time. And it was possible that if he didn’t react, if he didn’t reach out and try to pull back in the reaching tendrils from his back that were the remnants of the beast’s suckers, its power added to his own, then Draco would die.

            Still groaning, still weeping, he reached out and began the impossibly long climb from darkness and madness back to sanity and light.

*

            Draco hadn’t died in the first astonished moments of the tendrils’ attack because he had realized what they were, or at least that they were causing his captors to melt, and so he had rolled away from them, back down and under the stone benches that lined the aisle. The stupid wizards in front of him had tried to fight them.

            They couldn’t. The suckers pulled, and their faces warped and floated into reaching lines of color, eyes and cheeks and teeth and lips. They raised their wands, and the tendrils snatched them and whipped them away. The suckers settled into place on their necks when their faces had finished melting, and continued to draw, to drink. Draco thought he saw cracks open down their backs like the grey scars that littered Harry’s in the minute before they turned too liquid to have surfaces that would crack.

            Two of the tendrils curled towards him. From behind, Draco thought he saw them lit by light that wasn’t that of the torches on the walls, glowing metallic light, and he wondered what it was.

            But he had no time to find out. He did the only thing that made sense at the moment, and thrust his left hand with the marriage ring on it towards them.

            The metallic light that shone behind the suckers blazed as bright as a fallen star. The tendrils coiled back on themselves and floated there. Draco stared. What he had assumed were simple suckers on the end of the tendrils now revealed themselves as faces, with opening and closing mouths and slowly blinking eyes. Draco felt his stomach heave and managed to clamp his teeth shut just in time. He was not going to embarrass himself by vomiting all over the floor, and besides, the momentary distraction that that would cause him would probably also cause his death.

            The light behind the suckers went out, briefly. Draco saw one of the tendrils lash towards him, and he pulled his arms and legs in and rolled again. The stone bench struck the back of his head, and he gritted his teeth, sucking hard at the space between them. When he bit down on his tongue, the pain jolted him back to reality.

            The radiance was there again when he opened his eyes, brighter than before. This time, there could be no doubt of it: the tendrils were slowly falling to the floor and turning away from him. Draco thought he could hear faint cries of pain from the faces on the ends of them. He closed his eyes until he could banish the thought, because it was the sort of thing that he might go mad if he spent too much time contemplating.

            Then he remembered the other thing he had almost forgotten in the rush of trying to get out of the tentacles’ reach. Harry.

            Draco stood up, banged his head on the bench above him again, swore, and then crawled out and resumed his feet. When he looked at the floor where his captors stood, he saw no trace of them save a few anonymous brownish-red stains. He shuddered and faced the dark, open doorway. A shadow showed him the last of the tendrils retreating around the corner of it. He would have to go after them.

            Into the darkness.

            The darkness lit by softly-glowing light, the darkness where Harry was.

            Draco rubbed the softly buzzing ring on his finger, summoned his wand, and followed the tendrils.

*

            It had been the hardest thing Harry had ever done in his life. But he had pulled the tendrils back, and the ring on his finger had stopped sending little radiating shocks of pain up his arm, so he reckoned that he hadn’t harmed Draco.

            Now he concentrated on wrapping deep layers of a Shield Charm around himself, again and again. His magic had no trouble doing such a thing; it hummed and bounced through his veins with eager strength. He knew why. If he had not devoured Draco, there had still been other people there, perhaps the wizards who had used the decay magic, and he had eaten them.

            The level of disgust with himself in his stomach made him wish that he could simply close his eyes and not wake up.

            But he couldn’t do that. Draco was still here somewhere, and Harry didn’t know how long his control over himself would last, particularly because the memories of what he had done before and what he had just done were pressing in on him, telling him that he was a monster, that—

            His magic would come out again, because the memories would seem like reality and he had to have it to defend himself against threats, or because he was doing the best he could to reject the swallowed power and destroy himself. Hence the Shield Charm. A layer of it above his body would at least make it so that he was no threat to anyone else, and that should give Draco time to go for help.

            “Harry.”

            Harry flinched in shock at the voice, and the Shield Charm collapsed into nothingness. The one thing he had not anticipated was that Draco would be mad enough to come into the room after him.

            “Merlin, what happened to you?” Draco knelt down next to him. His wand shone with a Lumos charm, and his ring blazed in answer to Harry’s. The glow faded as he started to reach out, and Harry flinched again, imagining that they would be left in darkness. He knew what would happen after that.

            No, he told himself firmly. Draco still has the light on his wand, and he would never let it fade from sight completely so that you would be hurt. He would never do that to you. Do you remember the way he let you rest beside him and didn’t try to touch your scars? Maybe he doesn’t understand how serious everything is in your life, but he understands most of it. Let him do this.

            It took all of Harry’s strength to stay still so that Draco’s hand could rest on his arm, no matter how often he told himself that he wasn’t in danger of losing control right now, with the light. He knew that he had nearly consumed Draco, and the moment that thought came into his mind, he turned his face away in disgust.

            “Did you notice the rings?” Draco’s voice was hushed. His fingers ran lightly up and down Harry’s arm, as though he thought the touches would help Harry to focus his mind on something that wasn’t the darkness. Potentially true, Harry thought, huddling and shivering into himself, if only Draco had any idea of how much else he was dealing with.

            So tell him.

            But the only thing Harry feared more right now than losing Draco’s regard was the darkness. And Draco’s regard for him would fade, be changed and distorted, if he learned that Harry was the only monster here.

            Draco had asked a question, Harry realized abruptly. He was waiting for an answer. He cleared his throat. “I—yeah,” he said, clearing his throat again, because the first word had sounded so horrible it would reveal his monstrous nature to Draco all on its own. “That was what told me that you could be in danger, when they started glowing.”

            “I didn’t mean that.”

            Harry blinked. Draco’s voice sounded the same as it always had, except softer. He looked around, almost expecting to find them back in his bedroom at Malfoy Manor—or Draco’s bedroom, really, since that was the one they had spent the most time in. “What do you mean?” he asked, when only solid walls and pressing darkness met his glance.

            The darkness—A scream kicked the back of his throat, and Harry shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself. No. He wasn’t going to give in.

            “You moved away,” Draco said, and this time he slung an arm around Harry’s shoulders. Harry ducked his head and got free before he could stop himself. It was an instinctive, unthinking reaction, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, stay like that under Draco’s touch, not when his arm was resting so close to the scars. Draco sighed at him and held out his hands, as if begging Harry to observe that he didn’t have anything in them. “I want us to face this together,” he said, slowly and clearly. “And I want you to look at the rings.”

            Harry turned his head. The glow from the rings had settled down to a steady, dim shine like that which came out of oil lamps. At least it reassured him that he wouldn’t be left alone with the darkness. That was a good thing. That was a thing he needed.

            And—

            Harry stared. He was used to the three metals that had formed the ring when he got it shoved onto his finger by the magic of the marriage bond, gold and silver and copper. And he had accepted that the platinum and steel were there to stay, that he wouldn’t remove them by ignoring Draco or focusing his thoughts on other things. But the band of shimmering bronze among them was new.

            “Do you know what the bronze means?” Draco’s voice was low and intimate, but he didn’t try to touch the scars on Harry’s back again. He leaned forwards and rested on his heels next to Harry, instead, holding out his hand so that they could study the rings and the bronze in them side-by-side. “It’s one of those metals that doesn’t appear often. I have no idea how it acquired the meaning it has, but I know what pure-bloods say about it now. Sanity is a candle, easily snuffed out. Bronze has the most colors of fire, especially when you twist it.” He turned his hand around, and the light followed and flowed into the bronze. “So. You’ve saved my sanity, Harry.” He looked up, and his eyes had their own, slight glow, something Harry almost thought he could have followed out of the room if magic had ceased to exist in that moment. “And you’re mad if you think that I’m going to let you shut yourself away, or commit suicide out of guilt, or whatever it was that you were imagining doing.”

            Harry took one deep breath, and then another. There was something wrong with what Draco was saying, something he had to combat, but for a moment, the comfort of Draco’s words wrapping around him acted like a Memory Charm on everything else. He was—it was nice, to think that Draco cared for him enough to speak like that.

            And then he remembered.

            “I was the one who endangered your sanity in the first place,” he whispered miserably, ducking his head so that he could escape Draco’s lambent gaze. He had to keep his eyes open, because at the moment even the minor darkness caused by closing them was beyond his ability to face, but he didn’t deserve to meet the shine Draco was showing him. “You shouldn’t even come near me. You should want to stay as far away as you possibly can—”

            “You might be right,” Draco said.

            Harry winced, because the loss of hope was a savage thing, but he managed to nod. He had to think of Draco’s safety before his own. His own—didn’t matter much, not when he could cause chaos and calamities like this. “I’ll move out of Malfoy Manor as soon as I can.”

            Draco laughed, and there was a catch in his voice when it should have been free and joyous. Harry didn’t understand that part. “You can’t,” he said. “The marriage bond binds us tighter than ever, with the addition of the bronze. What you can do is let me know what happened, so that if something like it happens again, I can understand it and act to protect you. And myself,” he added, when Harry kept an unyielding stare on him.

            Harry thought he could tell it in simple words. Become more complicated than that, and he knew that he would collapse, screaming, and that would be the end. He might as well give up right now and let the darkness have him.

            He turned so that Draco could see the grey scars, and the black and red lights that were probably flickering in them, moving in them. Harry had seen them sometimes himself, during the rare occasions that he dared to stand with his back bare in front of a mirror. “I ate the creature. I dissolved it with my magic and pulled it into the scars. Then I did the same thing to the wizards who attacked us. And I nearly did the same thing to you.” His hands were shaking, he saw then. Only by that did he realize how much he hated himself for letting that happen. He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

*

            Draco wanted to say something, but he checked himself, because he knew that almost any words would be the wrong ones to give Harry right now. He slowed down, half-closed his eyes, and waited in silence until some of the more hasty and worrying impulses faded.

            Harry’s shaking hands and the way he kept shying away, even the sight of the grey scars, hit and hurt Draco on a level that he hadn’t known existed in himself. He wanted to touch Harry. He didn’t want to touch Harry. His throat was dry with fear. His head was heavy with pity.

            He did know one thing, though, he thought, glancing down at the bronze in the rings. This was the sign of a bond running so deep that he wouldn’t be surprised if it could no longer be severed, whatever their wishes. He used that to orient himself, to think past the shock of the moment and to absorb Harry’s words.

            “You almost did the same thing to me,” he said. “You didn’t.”

            “The marriage bond stopped me.” Harry’s voice was soft and ugly. With hatred, Draco knew, and knew at the same time that the hatred wasn’t directed against him. That left a shortage of acceptable targets. “I didn’t manage to do it on my own.”

            Draco shook his head. “Why should it matter to me why you stopped?” He shuffled closer on his knees, reached out, and then decided that it would be better to warn Harry rather than simply clapping his hands down. “Will you let me touch your scars?”

            Harry whipped his head around to stare at him, eyes wild. “Why would you want to? They nearly ate you! I nearly ate you!”

            “Will you let me?” Draco repeated. He didn’t know if he could answer the question of why he wanted to, but Harry’s permission, and what it would mean if he gave that permission, was more important than his desire, any way he looked at it.

            Harry locked all his muscles. “I don’t know what will happen if you touch them,” he whispered. “They could eat you. No one—no one touched them this soon after the time I ate the beast to escape.”

            “Then I’ll touch near them,” Draco said. “Will you let me?”

            He would have missed Harry’s nod if he hadn’t been so focused on every slight motion of his head. As it was, he waited a moment longer to be sure that he really had the permission to make this important gesture.

            And then Harry pressed backwards, and Draco’s hands touched the unbroken skin between the scars.

            Draco was breathless with the danger of it, with the shadows that he could indeed see moving in the channels of grey flesh—but not reaching out for him, it seemed Harry’s fears were unfounded—and most of all with the trust that Harry had just showed him. He stroked up and down where he could, letting his fingers run over it, humming gently under his breath until Harry began to relax, began to believe that Draco wouldn’t abandon him.

Then Draco reached out and put his hands on Harry’s shoulders, again avoiding the highest of the scars. “Let’s go back to the Manor,” he murmured. “You need a safe and lighted place.”

Harry turned to blink at him uncertainly. “Shouldn’t we go back to wherever you were when they snatched you? Or to the Ministry? They took me from there.”

Draco tightened his lips, feeling a glacial rage slowly well up in him. He would demand why the Ministry hadn’t caught the wizards wielding the decay magic yet, and soon.

            But a tirade wasn’t what Harry needed right now. He leaned close and whispered, “I’ll send the necessary owls. I’ll take care of everything. Lean on me. Right now, what you need is more important than anything else to me.”

            Harry turned his head, eyes wide and glassy with weariness. Draco waited, the way he had for Harry to relax, for Harry to let him touch. He could wait as long as he needed to. The shrieks of pain from his heels as he rested on them were so much less important than this.

            Then Harry whispered, “Yes.”

*

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The Marriage of True Minds