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The Same Species As Shakespeare	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16108 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- 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 Twenty-Three�Light,
Seeking Light

�� Harry sat
up and mopped a hand across his forehead, grumbling under his breath. You�d think I�ve have fulfilled my lifelong quota
of nightmares after the visions I had when Voldemort was still alive, but no,
of course not.

�� And this
nightmare had been particularly vivid and fearsome. Draco, lying under a heap
of dark, crumbling flowers that looked like dead roses,
or maybe roses carved from iron, his arm stretched out, his eyes blank and
empty. He had died trying to crawl to safety, Harry knew, reaching out for
someone who refused to save him.

�� The way that Harry had refused to.

�� Harry bit
off the end of an exclamation and leaped out of bed. He hesitated when he
remembered that he was only wearing pants, then shrugged.
No one else was here to see him�Ron had gone back to the Auror Department, in
part to keep up with the case�and the windows were all enchanted. No one close enough to be offended, Harry thought with a faint
smile.

�� He wandered
out of his bedroom and into the central chamber of the house. Warming Charms
kept the chairs comfortable enough to sit in, but Harry felt the need of a fire�s
brightness, so he lit one on the waiting logs with a wave of his wand. Then he
collapsed in front of it and tried to work out what he was feeling.

�� He wished
he could have done something other than send that letter to Draco, and as good
as the revenge had felt at the time�as necessary
as it had been to put his emotions on paper so that he didn�t show up at
the Manor and blast Draco�s brains out�still, now he more than half regretted
it.

�� But if he
had done nothing, then what would have Draco thought? That he could do anything
at all, and Harry would put up with it because he was too weak to defend his
own rights. And then Harry thought of the betrayal to the papers again, and
anger burned like acid along his veins.

�� Which didn�t lessen his worry for Draco now. Draco wasn�t a
duelist, and the imposter might well go after him when he wasn�t able to find
Harry. The imposter struck Harry as mad, but too clever not to realize that it
was useless searching for a wizard under the Fidelius
Charm when you had an easy target right in front of you.

�� Harry had
tried to talk to Ron about arranging protection for Draco. Ron had looked at
him with slitted eyes and hadn�t said anything. Harry
had begged harder, and Ron had uttered a martyred sigh and said that he reckoned
something would have to be done,
since it wouldn�t look good if the only Auror capable of protecting Malfoy was
the one who slept with him.

�� Ron would
do it, Harry knew that. But his prejudice might cause him to wait a few days,
either to punish Draco or because he had persuaded himself that the imposter
had attacked Harry last, and there was no sign he was about to go after Malfoy now.
And those few days could be the chance the imposter needed.

�� Harry tried
to distract himself with thoughts of the stocked library, or the food, or the
chance to sleep in, which never happened when he was working on a case. But it
was no good. His mind always circled back to Draco, and his muscles trembled with
the restless need to be up and doing something.

�� I wasn�t made to be locked away like some
princess in a tower, waiting to be rescued, he thought, and stood with a
wrench of motion that made his spine shudder for long moments. Then he shook
his head and turned for the library after all.

�� If he
couldn�t do anything else, maybe he could conduct research that would help somehow. Unlikely, when Hermione and
members in the Auror Department were both devoting their spare time to that
research�the Auror Department with extra energy, because the Malfoy case had
already earned them enough bad press. But they wouldn�t be able to study one
subject with concentrated attention. Hermione had her own job. The Aurors were likely
to be called out and tasked with something else before they could get in more
than a few hours of reading.

�� Maybe he
could find something. Maybe.

�� Harry hoped
so. At least, that way, he wouldn�t have to feel completely useless.

�� And it was
probably a good idea if he could keep his mind off fantasies of flying to
Malfoy Manor, making Draco understand
somehow, and then making love to him until both of them were exhausted and
aching.

*

�

�� The moment
the dream began, Lucius knew it for a dream. He had had it often enough before.
He could have shaken himself, hard, and woken from it.

�� And where
would he be then? An empty bedroom, with an empty portrait
frame on the wall. At least in this dream he had a chance of seeing the
woman who had become his ruling passion when she was dead as she had never been
when she was alive.

�� He chose to
stay.

�� The doors
of Malfoy Manor stood open before him, rocking slightly in the midst of a
cracked frame. Lucius approached slowly. Charms protected his feet from the
intense heat of the ground; he had to stop several times to renew them. All
around him, jagged spirals of smoke traced the place of the most violent burnings.
Lucius could smell cooking meat; he caught a glimpse of more than one pile of
limbs, more than one head taken apart with loving care down to the eyes and the
bones of the ear. Each time, he averted his gaze and walked on.

�� The magic in
the air drove him to the floor the moment he crossed the threshold of the
Manor. He knelt, shaking, his hands pressing against his head and then his stomach.
He was not sure whether the pressure was more severe in his temples or his
belly.

�� At last,
though it felt as if he were pushing against the stone of his own tomb with his
forehead, Lucius managed to look up and about.

�� Sketches of
black lightning and green seemed to dart about, appearing in the corners of his
eyes, vanishing when he looked at them. He learned later that those were the
remnants of the magical power that the Dark Lord and Potter had lashed at each
other. Broken parts of their wills still wheeled through the Manor. That was
what took longest to clean out, when Lucius was rebuilding the house.

�� The ceiling
was gone, at least on the entrance hall. A few of the walls in the distance
still bore wobbly pieces. And there was a silence, and the smell of blood, that told Lucius what had happened.

�� Of course
he couldn�t have known it at the time. Of course he thought he did, anyway, in
this dream when he was looking into the past. He rose to his feet with an
enormous effort, pausing a long time on one knee, and then staggered on.

�� Silence. That silence stretched along Lucius�s skin until he
felt it would have been less painful if wild cats were clawing him apart. His
hand tightened on his wand, and his breath came harsh and short. And that also
should not have happened; he should have faced the events, whatever they were,
calmly. He had to set an example for his son, and he had to prove to the Death
Eaters and the Dark Lord that he was still cool, untroubled even by the
atrocities that occurred within his own home.

�� But he
could not do it, and then he stepped into a room that was awash with blood, and
he saw the dancing figure.

�� Even within
the dream, he could not see it whole and clear. Here a glimpse of a pool of
blood that was so thick it lay on the carpet like a puddle of rain that
saturated grass hadn�t managed to absorb; here a broken limb, ending in a hand
from which the fingernails had been cut out. And in the middle, the dancing
figure, whirling and laughing.

�� Did he see
it? Was it only told to him later? Lucius did not remember. He didn�t really
think it mattered. If someone had described it to him, they had done a good
enough job that he knew exactly what it looked like.

�� Bellatrix,
dancing and dancing, limbs flopping like a scarecrow�s. Blood covering her face
in a mask that Lucius knew would pull away in one even coating. So much of it. Her hands, red. Her
feet, crimson. Even her eyes, aglow with the reflection of flames really, but
seeming as if she had gazed into her own reflection in blood until the blood
had moved into her eyes instead, that she might never have to look as far as a
puddle to see the color.

�� She wore,
on her back, attached to her, Narcissa�s skin, peeled from Narcissa�s body.

�� She will
never usurp my place with my lord again!� Bellatrix cackled, her voice gory, as
transcendent in its awfulness as her new clothing.

�� And the
dream ended, and Lucius opened his eyes and lay still for long moments.
Strange, he thought distantly, how he had thought he had grown used to horror.
He had tortured Muggles and seen them tortured, and not flinched. He had condemned
former allies on the Dark Lord�s say-so and stood by as the most terrible
punishments happened to them�as they were deprived of their wits, turned into
creatures half-animal and half-human, raped by werewolves in beastial form. And though he had saved several prisoners
when he had begun to doubt the surety of the Dark Lord�s victory, he could have
stood by and seen the same thing happen to them without flinching.

�� The
flinching was done inside, and no one save perhaps his wife and son, if they petitioned
for it, was invited into his soul.

�� But he had
looked on what had been done to his wife, or heard it described to him, and
nearly gone mad.

�� He was
still not used to it. He still dreamed about it, and Narcissa was still gone.
Perhaps someone could have helped her if someone had reached her in time�and that
was a new horror to linger and torment the mind. For his part, Lucius preferred
to believe Severus�s testimony that there was nothing that could have been done
for her.

�� He stood
and made his way rapidly to the library. He would read one of his wife�s
diaries, in order to be closer to a time when she had lived.

*

�� Poison-green,
emerald-green�

��

�� (Lily-green, but he would not think of that).

�� --and the surface
of the potion shifted once more before it settled into the almost solid,
gem-like form, slick and gleaming, that it would hold until Severus added the
final ingredient. He drew back his head, aware his eyes were narrowed.

�� (Lily once said he looked like a rat when he
was in this stage of brewing. He supposed she would know).

�� Rats. His
mind glided, and he turned to the cabinet that sat in one corner of the room.
The final ingredient of the potion could vary. It only needed to be something
powerful, imbued with Dark magic, and obtained under Dark circumstances. An
enchanted flower obtained by the dark of the moon would do.

�� But Severus
drew out a single silver hair from the cabinet and held it to the light,
turning it back and forth in order to admire the way a shimmer of blackness followed
the reflection of the fire. The fire seemed to be aware of it, and to hurry
away from it.

�� Pettigrew
had been so self-important, when the Dark Lord assigned him to live in Severus�s
house and spy on him. And then Severus had caught him slipping away from the
battle, intent on supposedly betraying the Dark Lord to Potter and then, in
reality, betraying Potter to him.

�� Pettigrew
stood trial.

�� But what
they tried was not exactly Pettigrew, any more.

�� Severus
wondered, with a faint smile as he dropped the hair and watched it drift into
the potion, if Pettigrew would feel this, wherever he was. Of course, what held
his attention at the moment was probably far more�interesting. Severus had
never had occasion to visit the realm where he had sent part of Pettigrew�s
soul himself, but he thought interesting was at the very least a justifiable
description.

�� The hair
settled into the potion, and it leaped upwards in a fountain that Severus had already
dodged because he had read the book. Slowly, he worked his way back to the
cauldron again, sniffing lightly. Yes, it smelled like new-mown hay and the hot
sparks flung up from two pieces of flint rubbed together.

�� (Lily had rubbed two pieces of flint together
one day when they were children, when she wanted to show Severus that one could
start a fire without magic. She had done that, but she had started more than
one fire, and she would not have approved the tinder of the other, or known how
to put it out).

�� The potion
settled. Severus counted to fifty under his breath, and then stepped back as a
cloud of noxious black gas rose from the surface and hung there like the imaginary
rainclouds Muggles were pleased to think hung over the heads of some of their
iconic persons. More Potions masters had been destroyed by this gas than by the
initial explosion of the potion. Severus tried to imagine what it would have done
to Neville Longbottom, and then put the thought out of his mind. He did enjoy his unbroken rest at night.

�� The potion
was a deep, rich red when the gas dissipated, as if it were made of liquid
rubies. Pleased, Severus drew a ladle of it out of the cauldron and held it up until
the first few, corrosive drops�at least to human skin�had dripped
back into the mass of the potion. Then he empted it onto a golden plate that he�d
taken out of the cabinet in which Pettigrew�s hair had been stored,
and breathed gently across the surface.

�� The red
liquid stirred, and a shape rose from it, a drifting, cobra-shaped shadow, its hood flaring around it. It examined Severus from
nonexistent eyes for long moments. Then it bowed its head and hissed. The exhalation
became a long stream of mist, which formed into white letters in front of the
snake�s head. What is your question?

�� Severus waited
for long moments, his eyes half-closed, breathing steadily. He hated to waste
the question on what he had already decided to ask; now that he had come to
this point, he wondered whether it would not be better to ask something else
that mattered more to him personally.

�� On the
other hand, now he had mastered the potion, which meant he was certain he could
brew it again. It would be best to use it for its original purpose. That done,
there was no way Draco could blame Severus for not having done all he could. Severus
straightened and thinned his lips before he waved his wand. A small cut appeared
in his forearm; the blood dripped out and turned to steam at once on contact
with the air, courtesy of another simple spell. Severus healed the cut as the
blood-gas drifted towards the snake�s steam and became the words, Who is the man stalking Draco Malfoy?

�� The snake
drew back its head. The hood flared twice, like flapping wings, and the answer
emerged in a cascade of white.

�� Severus stared
at it for long moments.

�� Almost himself.

�� Well,�
Severus said softly, �isn�t that interesting.�

*

�� Lucius had
found the entry he wanted, and he laid his head against the back of the chair
as he read. He was still tired, and if he tried to read sitting upright, his
head would inevitably droop on his chest and he would sleep. He might drool, as
he sometimes did now that Narcissa was gone, enough to ruin the precious pages
of the diary. He would not tolerate even the smallest chances of that
happening.

�� I visited the garden tonight, for the first
time since Draco nearly drowned in the pond. I walked with my skirts sweeping
the earth, my nostrils slightly open and drawing in the scents of the roses. I
was determined that I would absorb every scent and sight and sound and touch of
this place, to remember it as it was.

�� After all, tonight it would only exist in my
memory.

�� I wended between long rows of roses, amaryllis,
amaranth with its gorgeous red-purple blooms�strange, to think that some
magical flowers might be immortal when wizards are not�and the black gladiolus
that stood straight like spires of mourning. I heard the calls of nightbirds around me, but I did not heed them. I would have
walked the garden as straight-backed and determined during the day; the
darkness only made my purpose holier.

�� I halted at last in front of it, the pool
that nearly cost me my son�s life. It was low, and surrounded by a low stone
wall, but deep; I could not see the bottom from where I stood on its shore
without craning my neck. I was not about to crane my neck.

�� I stood there, and I remembered the way that
one of the house-elves ran to me holding Draco, his head lolling, his lungs
still half-filled with water, his face blue and his eyes staring. He chased his
reflection in the pool, the house-elf told me, sobbing. An
accident that could have happened to anyone.

�� It should not have happened to my child. The
world should know better.

�� Two long minutes I stood there, and then I
lifted my wand.

�� The earth under the pool tore itself apart,
cracking and sucking in the water like a giant drawing breath. The water
resisted me; it had lain in that pool for a long time,
and age lends its own magical force to such things. But it was nothing against
my will, and I made it flow backwards and sink, instead of welling up.

�� I opposed both nature and Lucius�s own
ancestors, who chose to make an ornamental pond out of that spring long ago. I
won.

�� The stone wall dissolved, the stones
becoming less than sand, vaporized by the localized fire-curse I hurled at
them. Lucius does not know that spell. The flowers around the pool swayed, and
wavered, and then gave up their lives, lying down and withering because I
commanded them to. I stood rejoicing in their power for some time, my hands
spread, the life-force circling around me, and then I filled the bed of the
pool with their ashes.

�� I created a shallow bowl of pure white sand
where my son can play, if he chooses, with no worse hurt than might come from
getting a few grains of sand in his eyes. And this sand is so fine that it is
unlikely to trouble him. The sides of this small pit, which slope upwards now with no trace of wetness to them, are not steep
enough to trip him. The ground is level, raked dirt for a hundred feet in any
direction. Draco will walk here without crushing greenery underfoot, and also
without tangling his feet in vines and being pricked by the thorns of the
roses.

�� The pond is gone. There is no trace that it
has ever been there, and the spring, sealed, will reemerge nowhere else.

�� Nothing that threatens my child shall
survive.

�� Lucius
leaned back further and closed his eyes, though not before he carefully shut
the diary and put it on a nearby table. He had been utterly puzzled by the disappearance
of the pond at the time, and the house-elves unable to account for it, no doubt
because Narcissa told them not to. But it had been only a small addition to the
gardens and not one he himself had particularly favored, so he had shrugged and
forgotten the matter.

�� Now he
wished he had known, so that he could have gone to Narcissa and shown her that
her will was appreciated and did not need to be hidden.

There was nothing they could not
have done together, the steel and the iron pair, fronting the sun and the moon,
despising the Dark Lord.

*

�� Glamours, and their practice, are ancient.
It is sometimes believed that the first spell of any complexity created by the
oldest wizards, after such simple ones as Lumos and Wingardium Leviosa,
was a glamour.

�� Harry
yawned and turned the page. So far, the books that Hermione had promised would be
interesting were the sort that was only interesting to Hermione. Harry had
wanted to train himself in wizarding culture and history as well as perhaps
finding out tidbits of knowledge that would help the Aurors catch the imposter,
but he would fall asleep before then.

�� And this
book, which should have been interesting because there were many sinister uses
to which glamours could be put, instead retreated into academic distance. Harry
turned idly past the concepts of glamours as masks, auditory glamours, glamours
that were meant to cover scent and how they did not fool werewolves, the use of
glamours in battle�

�� The book
fell open at a worn page. Harry peered listlessly at it, wondering what this would
tell him.

�� Glamours and Identity.

�� Harry
blinked and sat up. This might be worthwhile. The Aurors were certain that
Draco�s imposter, Malfoy relative or not, had used glamours to increase his
original likeness to Draco. Perhaps there were glamours Harry hadn�t read
about, ones not often studied, that were complex enough to permit even passage
of the bloodline wards.

�� However, he
quickly grew bored again, as the book nattered on about glamours as disguises
compared to Polyjuice, and how well glamours would hold up under times of
immense strain, and how glamours were often the first spells to give way and
reveal a pretender�s identity when magical exhaustion occurred, and�

�� The only
potentially interesting thing was a paragraph near the end of the section on
identity. Harry read it faithfully, though he was certain Hermione and half a
dozen Auror researchers must have read it before him.

�� Glamours, when used for a long time, are
considered one of the most addictive forms of magic. They also interact oddly
with the will of the caster, sometimes creating results that are called �undesired,�
but which the caster desired in his or her secret heart. Thus a man intending
to disguise himself as an ordinary stranger may, in truth, make himself handsome
enough to receive unusual notice, because he wishes to have that attention
which is granted to the beautiful. Someone wearing glamours for a long time has
a higher chance than usual of adopting the part he plays into his being and
consciousness.

�� Harry
sighed and marked the paragraph to discuss with Hermione later; she and Ron were
planning to visit that afternoon. Then he blew out the candles and went to bed.

*

�� Draco woke
from a dream as faint as a snuffed candle, in which his mother stood above him,
a cold hand extended to touch his shoulder. He blinked up at the ceiling in
stupefaction, and turned his head to the side. He almost thought he would see
Narcissa standing at the edge of his bed, regarding him with the cold, passionless
expression that had been her usual mask in life. Draco had never minded the
mask. They had understood each other, he and his mother.

�� He did not think he would see a nearly perfect
copy of himself standing there, and he did not expect the pain that rolled over
him with a single utterance of, �Crucio!�

*

�� linagabriev: Well, after this
chapter I wouldn�t blame you if you had new guesses about the imposter!

�� Draco
mostly gets so many chances because Harry and Faustine are nicer people than he
is. ;) And Harry does kind of regret snapping at him. Of course, if Draco tries
to lie to him again, his vengeance will be swift and merciless. Even Harry can�t
continue to give him chances when it�s obvious he�ll only misuse them.

�� And I�m
glad you liked the idea that Draco was only fighting the war to get back at
Harry. I think this Draco is crazy and obsessive enough to do that.��
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The Same Species As Shakespeare