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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23338 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
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Chapter Twenty-Two—The Snake Devours

            The Runespoor-basilisk stopped moving and raised all three heads high in the air. Harry thought he was the only one who felt the little darting, pricking jabs at his control, like tongues from all its mouths. This is where the path ends. You will get off me and not return?

            Harry heard the white serpent hiss indignantly, but he stroked his back, and the snake calmed. Harry shook his head as he leaped off the larger snake and tore open the darkness with a slash from the golden-green serpent. I don’t know. We might have to flee this way.

            The Runespoor turned sulkily away. Harry called softly to the others, making sure to look at his own hands so it would come out in English. Yes, his hands weren’t the most human part of him, but they were different enough from anything snakes carried around to do the trick. “Hurry up. This is the part where we can get into the office I found last time.”

            Draco was the first to join him, of course. Harry didn’t have time to touch him—he was busy both tearing the gate and trying to sense if anyone was waiting for them beyond it—but he enjoyed having him near, the solid energy that seemed to burn like the light of diamonds beneath his skin.

            Bulstrode joined them next, tossing the little black thing in her hand up and down. “Just let me know where you want the distraction,” she murmured to Draco, barely moving her lips.

            “I’ll let you know,” Draco said, and watched Harry.

            Parkinson came last, cringing and creeping, and obviously keeping her eyes averted from Harry as if there was something indecent about the sight of him. Harry kept his head bowed and didn’t glance back at her. It would only distract him right now, and he thought he could smell someone in the office.

            Then the gate was fully open, and Harry heard the indrawn breath and the sound of wizards scrambling to their feet. He leaned a hand on the white snake and closed his eyes, and felt, through the vibrating bones of his head, more than one pair of footsteps coming towards them. He nodded and opened his eyes. “People there.”

            “Now, Millicent,” Draco said.

            Bulstrode swept through the hole and tossed the black thing high in the air. Then she did something else, something that seemed to wrap her in a writhing silver web. Harry blinked and stared, the snake sniffed, and found her scent vanishing. When the web collapsed, she was gone.

            It isn’t Apparition, but it is as good as, said the white serpent approvingly. She was serious when she said that she didn’t want to come with us on the attack.

            You like that?

            I like it that we have someone besides the cold one who tells the truth, the white serpent said, and Harry could tell without looking that he would be glancing towards Parkinson.

            Harry started to respond, and then a horrible, ringing shriek filled the room ahead of them. The shrieks quickly shrank smaller, and smaller. Harry could feel that someone was still in the room because of the way the white serpent cocked his head and hissed, but their feet had grown considerably lighter.

            “Draco?” Harry whispered, and saw the light gleaming in Draco’s eyes as he reached out and caught Harry’s wrist to draw him in.

            “Come see,” he whispered, and Harry jumped through the gate beside him as though Draco had been the one who opened it.

            But he hadn’t been, and Harry was going to remember that, was going to remember that, after all, he was capable of doing some important things.

            The room was full of scurrying mice, rearing up and trying to grab their wands with helpless paws. Harry laughed, and then glanced at the door of the office. The smoke had spread out there, and from the sounds of squeaking, more than the Unspeakables in this one small room had become rodents.

            And the white snake was stirring on his shoulder, and Harry could feel the spirits of other snakes coming to life around his feet, with their darting bodies and their wide mouths perfect for the eating of mice.

            Draco laughed, quietly. “I see now what Millicent meant when she said that I would like the distraction.” Harry glanced at him and found Draco standing with his arms extended in front of him, magic twitching and crawling and curling up his palms, and gaze fixed on the mice. “You can eat them if you want to, Harry.”

            “Must you?” Parkinson, who stopped behind Draco and stood there with her arms folded as if she was at a boring meeting. Harry had to look closely to see the way her locked arms trembled, and the way she closed and opened her eyes with little swallows, as if she were fighting nausea. “Such a feast with human jaws would be more than a little disgusting.”

            “His snakes can eat them,” Draco said, eyes fixed on Harry as if he never wanted to look anywhere else. “And I don’t care if it’s technically murder. They did worse than that to us, or could have, if they took us on the Dark path.”

            Harry thought about it. He could feel the white snake’s hunger as a yearning in the middle of his own stomach, an abyss going down to Merlin knew what depths, and it was something to know that the Unspeakables wouldn’t trouble them anymore after this—

            But no, it would do too much damage to the cause of Dark Arts that Malfoy wanted to forward. And if one of these Unspeakables had information about Ron and Hermione, or if someone who did heard what had happened to them, then it could damage their ability to get his friends back, too. Why confess where Ron and Hermione were when they thought Harry and Draco would kill them?

            “No, it’s all right,” he said, and pulled the other snakes back into no more than a dream of mist, and stroked the white serpent until he calmed down and curled around Harry’s throat like a sulky necklace. “But why don’t you gather up their wands? It’ll give you something else to study, and restrict what they can do even if they start to change back before we’re out of here.”

            Draco smiled at him. “You’re so good to me, Harry,” he murmured, and began moving his wand through the Summoning Charm. Unspeakable wands sprang up off the floor like grasshoppers and flew towards him.

            Harry grinned back and started to turn away, only to catch Parkinson’s expression. She stood so still that the white serpent’s hunting instincts picked up again, and stared at Harry with glazed eyes.

            “What?” Harry demanded. God, she reacted badly when he acted like a snake and when he didn’t act like one. Harry was starting to lose his worry about her opinion, because it was all too plain that he could do nothing right, in her view.

            Parkinson’s eyes snapped back into human focus again, and she straightened, shaking her head. “Nothing. I’m only surprised that you would take the chance to show mercy to our enemies when they could strike at our backs.”

            “I don’t know how long Bulstrode’s spell will last, but I don’t think we need to worry about that,” Harry said, flat as a snake’s nose, and turned away.

            So that was it. She had expected him to leap at the chance to eat and murder his enemies, and he had caught her off-guard when he didn’t take it.

            She was so concerned about me not being Slytherin enough, and then she’s surprised when I act like a Gryffindor, Harry thought, and stomped to the door of the office. He almost hoped that Bulstrode’s spell had missed a few Unspeakables and there were still some human ones down the corridor who wanted to fight.

            But it didn’t look as though there were. The corridor was alive with small, hurrying dark bodies that made the white serpent stir again, and something smaller and dark red down at the end of it, which glowed like an eye—

            “Down!” Harry shouted, so loudly that he could only hope it was in English and not in Parseltongue, because he felt like he had to make them obey right then.

            The white serpent was already clinging to his shoulder. Harry turned and leaped over Draco’s head, landing in a crouch on the wall as serpent heads shot out of his neck and shoulders and locked their fangs in place through the stone. He couldn’t see any sign of Parkinson, who presumably knew enough to duck and shield herself, but Draco was still standing in front of the door, staring at the red light as if he wanted to know what it was.

            Harry snarled, and his legs twisted and flowed. A single huge coil descended, picked Draco up, and snagged him close to Harry’s side, trussed, before Harry could even decide if he was changing shape or summoning a real snake. Summoning a real one, it seemed, since the shape was now split off from him and wrapped around Draco, a gleaming python with scales like shields.

            “What—” Draco began.

            “Your obsession with knowledge is going to kill you,” Harry hissed back, and whether Draco could understand what he was saying or not, he shut up. “Now. Keep your eyes closed.” He reached out and smoothed his hand down Draco’s face, over his eyelids. When he pulled them back, they were shut.

            He closed his own eyes and felt the white serpent hide his lidless ones against Harry’s neck. The snake cradling Draco had its head tucked under one curve of the immense body. They were as safe as Harry knew how to be from the thing that was coming.

            The thing that he had learned about in the Aurors, although the Unspeakables had removed the artifact the moment the case was done. That they would let it loose to protect them, although they didn’t have much idea of how to control it, surprised Harry not at all. Bloody Unspeakables.

            There was the sound of soft footsteps, marked here and there by the clink of a nail against stone floor. Harry felt Draco stir, and silently cursed him to hell and back. Being curious about this creature wasn’t enough reason to look at it.

            He wondered if Draco would note the difference in calling it a creature sometimes and an artifact at others, and ask him to be more specific. Then he rolled his eyes behind his closed lids.

            Great, now I’m thinking like him, he thought, and heard the sniffing.

            He shut his eyes more tightly and reached out to make sure that he could feel Draco’s smooth shoulder as well as smooth scales beside him. He was worried about Parkinson, in a distant way, but she could probably take care of herself.

*

            Draco was breathing hoarsely, and not just because the python had nearly driven all the air out of his lungs when it grabbed him.

            He knew what was below them, snuffling its way along the floor, or thought he did. They had once been called sighthounds, a calm, innocent name that gave no clue to their real powers unless you were a breeder or knew someone who was. They had keen noses that allowed them to track prey and magic-enhanced metal legs that let them run for hours, a blend of artifact and animal so perfect Draco had tried to get one before he understood how hideously expensive they were.

            And if they met your eyes…

            Draco shivered. Their eyes were the real way they hunted, and that was why you could be relatively safe as long as you stayed out of their reach and didn’t look at them. They would track your scent, know you were there, but they couldn’t kill without a gaze.

            But none of the books Draco had read on sighthounds included a good picture, and the temptation to look was overwhelming.

            Your obsession with knowledge is going to kill you, said Harry’s voice in his head.

            Harry’s voice that he might never hear again if he gave in and looked, either because he would be a shattered mind trapped in a broken husk or because Harry would be angry that Draco had jeopardized the entire mission and wouldn’t want to talk to him.

            Draco reached out and stroked the smooth scales on Harry’s leg, up and down, reveling in the way that invisible tongues brushed against his palm. Then he dropped his hand and waited, until he heard the snuffling became a baffled snarl, and the click of nails as the sighthound turned and left again.

            When he opened his eyes, it was Harry’s face he looked into.

            Harry shook his head back and forth, but his eyes were bright and fond, and he reached down and briefly trailed his hand through Draco’s hair. Then he faced downwards again, and the white serpent on his shoulder shot its tongue out.

            “It’s safe,” Harry said. The snake on Draco released its hold, and Draco could climb to the floor.

            “The sighthound will have warned them,” he said. “At least, when it comes back without a human personality ripped from its body, they’ll know that something went wrong and it didn’t manage to break us.”

            Harry shrugged. “I think that most of the Unspeakables who could read its messages are running around as mice right now. They might be in as much danger from it as we would be.” He looked around. “Where’s Parkinson?”

            “Here.” Pansy unfolded herself from a shadow, and shook her hair back, smoothing a knot out of it with a grimace. Draco saw the way her hands shook with the simple motion, and wanted to hiss at her. What did she want? Harry hadn’t shifted shape, had saved Draco’s life, and had saved his sanity, perhaps, by convincing him not to peer at the sighthound. Draco was starting to wonder if they should have left Pansy at home, useful though she could be.

            Then Pansy stared down the corridor, and Draco realized she had been shaken from fear of the sighthound, instead.

            Well, yes. Something that could break and crumble your bones and your skin and your mind down to the smallest particles and go away wearing your personality as a hat was perhaps something to be afraid of.

            Draco passed her, and let his hand touch her back as he did so. Then he said, “We should go, and find your friends, and plant our seeds, and leave here.”

            Harry had started to nod in response, the human gesture sitting oddly on his scaled body and the white serpent’s coils around his throat, but now he stopped. “What do you mean, plant your seeds?”

            “Our seeds,” Draco corrected, smiling at him. “Well, really, Harry, did you think we would let the Unspeakables get away with threatening Pansy in her own home and kidnapping your friends? Not to mention the grudge they probably harbor against us for breaking in once before. We should take care of them before they can try to fuck with us.”

            “Settling a grudge preemptively,” Harry said. “Just like you.” But he was smiling. “Just tell me what these seeds are.”

            Pansy was the one who opened her hand and showed Harry the three small white seeds on her palm. “Some compacted magic,” she said. “Held in place by some of the spells that you learn on the Dark paths, when you’re actually experienced.”

            Harry raised his eyebrow at her, but said nothing, and Draco wanted to cheer. If she felt well enough to talk to Harry like that, to his face, then she felt well enough that she probably wouldn’t run in mindless fear anymore.

            “All right,” Harry said. “Which doesn’t tell me what they are, you understand.”

            “The principle is simple,” Draco said. “You could think about it with Muggle drinks, Blaise tells me, although I was never so vulgar as to drink them myself. You put something under pressure, something that could potentially fountain up. In the case of the Muggle drinks, carbonation. In the case of the seeds, magic.” He grinned at Harry, who did comprehend, from the way his eyes were widening. “And then you shake it.”

            “Shit,” Harry said. “Won’t that destroy the Department of Mysteries?”

            “I doubt it,” Draco said. “Too many strong wards here, too many artifacts, too many layers of magic that will probably snap into place as soon as the explosions go deep enough. But it makes a good distraction. And it makes a very good message.” He yawned. “One that they can’t even spread around too much, because the public wouldn’t like some of what they do here. There are costs as well as benefits to calling yourselves Unspeakables.”

            “But in the meantime, you’re going to take out some of their artifacts,” Harry said.

            “You don’t think that I would do this for no payment, do you?” Pansy asked, and faced down the corridor again. She touched one of the keys glowing around her neck, a crystalline one with many swirls and loops and dragons carved on it that Draco had often wished to examine more closely. The problem was that it didn’t seem to exist away from Pansy. She looked at it, and frowned. “Potter’s friends are in this direction, it says, but it can’t tell me an exact route. I think—I think that they must be in separate rooms, or behind a ward that makes it seem so.”

            Harry looked up, his eyes flashing. The scales on his body melted and became a nest of whipping vipers. “If they’ve hurt them,” he whispered.

            He didn’t need to say the rest of what the sentence would have contained. Draco shivered when he felt the magic dancing across his skin, biting at his hips and joints, and reached out to trace the white snake’s head with one finger. The white snake put up with it; in fact, Draco thought a tongue briefly dragged along the tip of the finger.

            “If they’ve hurt them, of course we’ll make the Unspeakables pay,” Pansy said. Draco was glad to notice that she didn’t seem to be reacting as badly to the mere proximity of Harry as she had been before, though she did keep her head turned away from his scales and his snake. “But we don’t know that yet.” She held out her hand in front of her and tossed a key up that hung in the middle of the air. Pansy closed her eyes, communing with it. Draco watched the golden sparks fall and wished he knew what they said.

            Harry caught his eye and shook his head. Draco raised his eyebrows. I restrained myself with the sighthound, didn’t I? he mouthed.

            Either Harry didn’t understand the mouthed words or he didn’t think they counted, because he turned back towards Pansy when she exclaimed. “What?” Harry demanded. A comma of black hair had fallen down in front of his eyes, with a shimmer to it that said it might be growing scales.

            “They’re in separate rooms,” Pansy whispered, nodding her head, her hair shushing gently against her skin. “And they’re in chains. Behind wards that I’ve never seen before, and don’t know how to break.” She opened her eyes. “I don’t know how to reach them.”

            “You said this was the corridor that led to them?” Harry strolled towards the door of the office again.

            “I can’t tell how directly,” Pansy snapped back. “Honestly, Potter, if you ever listened to anything I said, you would realize—”

            Harry launched into a straightforward run, his head bowed and his legs pumping. His mouth was set in so grim a line that Draco didn’t even think of trying to talk him out of it. Besides, the shadows next to Harry crawled and ran with snakes. He was more likely to be a danger to anything he encountered than the other way around.

            “He really loves his friends,” Pansy mused.

            That was the voice that meant she was reconsidering some hasty conclusions; Draco had heard it most often at Hogwarts in their final year. He nodded to her. “Remember that,” he said, and because it was just the two of them together in the room, Pansy didn’t pretend that she thought Draco was warning her against hurting Weasel and Granger.

            She only nodded, and followed Harry. Draco came behind her, his hand cocked and magic shimmering on the surface of his skin, gathering up abandoned wands as he went.

*

            Harry was sure that he would know when he came to the wards that held him back from Ron and Hermione. Things had changed between them, and he trusted and worked with people they would have been horrified to know, but this was the deepest bond in his life, the oldest. He had to feel where they were trapped.

            But he reached the end of the corridor without seeing or feeling anything, and when he stopped and stared around, the white snake rose and said, Brother, the rooms are not in the same position as they were a moment before.

            What? But Harry saw what the white serpent meant when he turned his head. He had ignored the doors that he thought led to other offices, because they didn’t have wards on them and that meant they weren’t his friends’ prisons. He knew there had been a row to the left and a row to the right, though. Now they were splayed in front of and behind him, instead, and when he backed up a step, his heel bumped a wall that hadn’t been there a moment before.

            It’s as though we stand on an island, and the corridor revolves around it, the white serpent responded, head swaying back and forth. The gold threads in his scales were brighter than Harry had ever seen them, and they were dripping sparks and thinner threads towards the floor, as if that could anchor them.

            Harry started to ask how the white snake knew that, and then gave up. The white snake was sensitive to forms of magic that Harry had never known existed and to bonds like the one Draco had wanted to establish with him that could be real before Harry noticed them. He was probably right in this case, too.

            A defense of the Department. Harry gestured, and with the simplest snap of his wrist, a blue-black cobra was coiling in front of him. Harry nodded to it. Find the true direction north, and point me to it.

            The cobra started to stretch out along the length of Harry’s arm, then paused. Its red tongue flickered out, and the white snake said, It cannot find the direction. Perhaps that direction does not exist in this place, at this moment.

            So now you’re the speaker for other snakes, too? Harry asked, to contain his discomfort. He vanished the black cobra and turned around, searching for some device that would make the corridor stand still. The Unspeakables couldn’t make it an endless revolving floor, or they would get lost and confused themselves.

            There was a click. A sniff. The glow of red ahead of him, like the tail end of a banked fire.

            That was all the warning Harry had—well, that and the white snake’s scream, come too late—before the sleek, armed shape of the sighthound came out of a door and Harry found himself staring into its eyes.

*

            Talltree-san: I think Draco is one of the few people with the courage to admit such a thing, at least!
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