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Intoxicate the Sun	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18051 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Three—Dross and Slag

            The moment came at last, when they were all on the dragons’ backs and Harry could attend to the impulses that had begun to blossom and blow in him from shortly after his people went into Azkaban to rescue the prisoners.

            They were here. They had saved the prisoners who had been held here, rightly or wrongly. They had abrogated the role of judgment to themselves, and if they wrong about that, then Harry would do his best to ensure that the price was a minimal one to everyone in the revolution as well as to the prisoners who were truly innocent. The guards, still bound in ropes of fire, had been floated by Ron and George and some of the other people Harry trusted most to the small outer islands around Azkaban, humps of spray-soaked stone in the water, and surrounded with protective wards.

            Harry would have let Draco help with that task, too, if he wanted, but from the moment he came up onto the dragon, he had had eyes for nothing but his shaky mother and his staring, silent, hatred-laden father.

            Harry was surprised to have to admit to himself that that hurt.

            But it wasn’t as important as other things were right now, so Harry shoved the notion out of his head and told it to take a flying leap. He lifted his head and turned his mind back to happier things. “Hang tight,” he told those behind him, and lifted his voice to shout the same warning to those riding on the other Hebridean Black.

            Catchers muttered something uncomplimentary. Harry ignored him. When they were back at the manor, then Catchers could choose to desert, if he wanted, but he was hardly going to do it when they were all stranded together on a dragon’s back high in the air.

            “Now,” he told the wheel in a whirl of Parseltongue, and watched the whirl spin and spread through the dragons, altering the pattern of their wings, changing the pattern of fire that he had burned before their eyes.

            They responded. Heads turned towards Harry. Eyes like massive jewels and like fireballs and like openings into darkness shone at him. Harry nodded, and then laughed aloud. He knew that some of the people behind him, even Ron, were staring at him, but he had no care for that. He had no words for the weird, wild, nameless joy that leaped in him.

            Perhaps it was because the dragons were creatures of fire and, at some base level, deeper down than even the Parseltongue affinity that bound Harry to them as reptiles, Harry understood them. His wild magic made him a creature of fire, too.

            And the dragons began to turn.

            The lances stabbed downwards from their mouths again, and this time, Harry made utterly no attempt to arrest them, to spin them into ropes or ladders or anything else. So the flames fell almost gently, and touched the prison.

            Azkaban lit like a torch. Harry sucked in his breath in awe, and then coughed as it stung his chest. However much of a creature of fire he was, it still wasn’t easy for him to breathe superheated air.

            The walls began to melt. Stone crept across the island in undulating waves of lava. For a moment, Harry thought there was no difference between land and water except the colors. He was breathing harshly again, but this time, not because of the air. He could have swallowed smoke then and done so gladly, for the joy of the char.

            One fountain of sparks leaped into the air from near the back of the island, where the Opal-eye had moved. Harry laughed again, and imagined the magma, the molten stone, creeping into the innards of the prison, into the cells where some of these prisoners had spent so long gradually dying. His gladness bounded inside him, and expanded. He wished that he had wings of his own, that he had fiery breath, that he could join the dragons in the destruction they wrought.

            No.

            Someone seemed to sigh the word directly into his head, but when Harry looked around, there was no one there. He shook his head. Perhaps some affinity from the dragons was speaking to him, reminding him that, no matter how much he might wish it, he wasn’t a dragon and shouldn’t want to be one, because who would control this group then and ensure that they backed off at the right time?

            So, reluctantly, he pulled back from the fantasy that had nearly consumed him, of blasting his own magic into the mess of fire and volcanoes beneath him, and instead watched as the prison was torn apart, the wards fracturing, the shapes of the walls melting and warping and flowing until they looked as though they had been natural sculptures of magma for as long as the island stood. He realized that he was breathing more deeply than he needed to, and shook his head with a faint smile. Maybe that was another reason he could respond so well to the dragons; he had something of the same streak of destruction in him.

            “Mate? Are you all right?”

            Harry glanced over his shoulder when Ron touched him in the middle of his back. Ron’s eyes were huge, and Harry realized that nearly everyone on the dragon was sitting bolt upright and staring at him with the same expression, as though they thought he would change into a dragon himself any minute.

            Except Draco, who was still occupied with his parents.

            Seven years of imprisonment, Harry reminded himself, lowering his eyes in shame over the vague jealousy that stirred in him. Remember that he never got to see them. Ever. He nodded. “Yes. I’m going to let the dragons who aren’t carrying us go now. Hold me.”

            “What do you mean?” Ron asked, with a weak little laugh. “If they decided to turn on you, I don’t think I could stop them.”

            Harry reached back and squeezed Ron’s hand in his until he could hear the pop and creak of tendons. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “I just want you to act as an anchor, someone who can touch me and remind me of which way ‘up’ is when I need it.”

            “Right,” Ron said, exhaling on a soft sigh, and his fingers dug into Harry’s waist. Harry looked down at the wheel and touched the eye in the middle, closing his own eyes as he imagined the patterns of fire falling apart from the few dragons—the Fireball and one of the Hebrideans—who hadn’t been needed to carry the prisoners.

            Go on now, he told them. I take the knowledge of my soul back from you. Go, be free, hunt and burn elsewhere.

            They roared back at him as his mind touched them, and then turned and fled. Harry suspected that his ability to reach out to them, once he had removed the artificial pull the wheel created, probably reminded them too much of the way that Dragon-Keepers would try to captivate them. The dragons carrying passengers stirred restlessly, and the wind stirred by their wings acquired a wail at the edge of it.

            You cannot go yet, Harry thought, and then said aloud in Parseltongue. The wheel spun faithfully, and the dragons settled back. Harry stitched the fire of his soul between his fingers one more time, in case he needed it yet, and then, finally, touched the dragon he rode on the neck and turned it back around.

            Clouds were moving in. Lightning danced among them, and Harry saw the shape of slender legs, lifted antlers, the narrow eyes focused in disapproval.

            He ignored them. Whatever the lightning stag was—if not simply a manifestation of his wild magic or a hallucination—he had responsibilities to his people that precluded him dealing with it.

*

            It was there. You saw it!

            George took a long drink of Firewhisky and shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw, Fred. It was late and I’m tired.”

            You know what I saw. I was looking, and if you were too tired to use your eyes, then you should just give them to me.

            “I can’t give them to you, you can’t use them from inside there,” George said reasonably, and drank the Firewhisky again. Then he leaned back so he could see out the window of their bedroom, which wasn’t enchanted like most of the windows in the manor, but actually stared at the trees and wards that surrounded the house and let them know what the time really was. George was more insistent than Fred about knowing the proper time. He’d been responsible for most of the Wheezes that relied on timed effects to work.

            Almost dawn, at least if the grey line growing along the horizon was any indication. George shook his head in wonder and thought about going to bed. Among other advantages, his twin rarely spoke to him in dreams, so going to sleep meant that he wouldn’t have to listen to Fred’s ridiculous theories.

            But…

            It was the end of a long day—and night—since they’d got back and settled the prisoners from Azkaban in the cleared and empty rooms of the manor not even an hour ago. But George didn’t think it had gone on long enough. He was too tired to sleep, too excited to breathe. Too weary to do anything but sit here and drink, really.

            That’ll leave you with a hangover, Fred complained. And it’s my skull, too.

            “Shut up, you can’t feel physical pain the same way,” George muttered, knowing he was being childish, and took another drink. But that left him at a disadvantage, since Fred didn’t need their physical mouth to complain.

            You saw it as well as I did. That’s what’s been driving and shifting around all the times that our Harry’s used his magic. The lightning, the force, the something out there. His wild magic is connected to it.

            “Is not,” George retorted, the moment he’d swallowed. “And anyway, lightning doesn’t necessarily mean anything. What are you going to say, that Harry randomly has the power to call storms now? He’d have had one to cover us on the approach to Azkaban, if that was the case.”

            We don’t know what it means—yet. Fred’s voice sank, hushed, which was a pretty good trick for someone who only spoke inside George’s head. You know that something else is out there, something that wants our Harry. It’ll hold him, seize him if it can. He’s connected to—

            And then Fred ran out of words, which left room for George to snort rudely. “Exactly. What in the world do you think he’d be connected to? He got rid of Voldemort, he’s freed himself from the Ministry, and his wild magic is his wild magic, not given to him by something else. He hasn’t even made any deals with demons or magical creatures lately. We’d know, because it would have affected the way we built the wheel. There you go again, Fred, thinking that just because you were more impatient to get out of Mum you have more ideas about the way the world actually works.”

            I know it’s something, Fred said, but his voice had sunk even more, to a murmur that George could ignore if he wanted to. He never would, of course. He’d had enough of the ignoring in the few days between the time that Fred died and the time that he found his twin again. I just don’t know the right name for it yet.

            “Let me know when you do,” George suggested, and then proceeded to drown both raging fear and roaring excitement by getting absolutely pissed.

*

            Draco’s parents had rooms not far from his. Draco had wanted to bring them into his quarters at first, had assumed without thought that he would do that and everything would be fine, but Potter had looked at him once and shaken his head.

            “The locks aren’t strong enough,” he’d said.

            Lucius had looked at Draco and mouthed, See? He’s trying to separate us already.

            Draco had turned away and not answered, because he wasn’t sure who he wanted to unleash the rage gathering in him at, his father or Potter.

            It helped that his mother was there, too. She had said nothing, but stepped between the arguing men and leaned against Draco. Draco put his arm around her, and both Potter’s and Lucius’s faces softened as they looked at her. Not the same kind of softness, thank Merlin, or Draco might have worried about having to duel Potter for his mother’s honor.

            “All right,” Potter said, scraping one hand through his hair as though he was trying to scalp himself. “All right. You can have rooms not far down the corridor, and that’ll have to do.” But he turned and met Draco’s eyes with a trace of the softness that Narcissa had inspired still in them, and Draco thought he might have yielded if Draco had pushed.

            He didn’t try, not now. He was still dealing with Azkaban and the knowledge that his father hated him for not pushing as far as Lucius surely would have if he’d been free in the last seven years and the moments he’d shared with Weasley on the island and the sight of the prison walls melting and—and everything. He lowered his head and nodded, and Potter went away to tend to the other prisoners.

            These rooms held what seemed to be the standard furniture abandoned by the manor’s previous owners, Draco thought: a heavy four-poster bed, a window, a few cabinets—all empty of any precious objects—a few chairs and an empty cupboard. A door on the far wall led to a bathroom, but it had been sealed up, and Potter had said that his parents would have to use the one down the corridor. On an intellectual level, Draco understood. Potter and Weasley and whoever else commanded here—or might after tonight, if the schism that Draco thought was coming between Potter’s minions grew to the full—didn’t want prisoners able to barricade themselves in an inner room.

            On an emotional level, it made Draco’s rage burn hotter than before, and turned it against Potter.

            “I can’t believe we’re here.”

            That was Narcissa’s soft whisper, and Draco took a deep breath and reminded himself that he couldn’t do anything about securing his parents better quarters for tonight. That would have to wait until Potter distrusted him less, or his parents less, or something between the two. He leaned forwards and placed a soft kiss on his mother’s cheek. “I know,” he said softly. “Do you need—do you need me to shrink the bed? Bind the curtains in tighter, so it’s more like a cell?” Of course he was the only one who could do that in the room right now, since his parents had been stripped of their wands when they first went to Azkaban and not granted new ones.

            In fact, Draco realized, the notion striking him like a blow, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen with that, even assuming that Potter decided some of the prisoners were well enough to fight for the revolution. They couldn’t share wands without becoming disorganized and ineffective in battle. Did he intend to bribe Ollivander to sell or make wands for the people who fought under him?

            Draco grimaced. If that was the case, he didn’t think much of his parents’ chances of getting wands, since it was their house Ollivander had been held prisoner in during the war.

            “No.” His mother shook her head, and drew his attention back to her. It was a strange thing, Draco thought. He had assumed that, once he got his parents back, his every thought would be of them, his every desire to tend to their wounds. But instead, he kept darting off into his own head, and they had to strive to secure his care.

            That was horrible of him, even if his reception by his father wasn’t everything he had dreamed of. Draco smiled at Narcissa and knelt down beside her, kissing her hands. “What can I do for you?”

            “Be with me,” Narcissa told him soundlessly, and pulled her hands free from his so that she could touch his cheeks. Her fingers felt cool, Draco thought, and he wondered if she carried the chill of the prison or if it was his face that burned. “Stay with me. Talk with me. Tell me what you’ve done in the past seven years.”

            Her voice rose as a question on the last words, and Draco nodded back to her. “Yes, it is seven,” he said quietly. “A long time to be without you.” His tears were stinging his eyes now, and he would have let them fall if he was alone with his mother; she seemed to be staring at him in wonder, not hatred. But his father was in the same room, and he would despise them for weakness, Draco knew.

            “Draco, we must make a plan to escape from here.”

            Lucius. Draco sighed, and admitted, to himself, that he had not missed his father’s imperious manner. He turned around and shook his head. “How are you going to do that, Father?” he asked, keeping to sheer practicalities of the situation. If Lucius only wanted to admit that those existed, then that was what Draco would do. It was a small enough sacrifice, after all, given all that his father had suffered and endured. “You’re surrounded by Potter’s people, many of whom hate you. You have no wand. We have nowhere the go. The Ministry would return you to prison, and they’ve taken over the Manor’s wards. What would you have me do, other than what we’ve done?”

            There was a charged silence when he finished. Draco hadn’t realized his loud his voice was going to be until he heard it. Narcissa rose to her feet, looking back and forth between them. Her lips were pale.

            “Lucius,” she murmured, and Draco didn’t know if she was going to chide or comfort him.

            “No, Narcissa.” Lucius’s eyes burned, and he took a step forwards. Draco kept himself from reaching for his wand, but it was an effort. “I want to know what our son has made of himself. It’s been seven years, he said. But in all that time, he accomplished nothing except to sell the Manor to our enemies? He never came to rescue us? He never found any source of power except the one that Potter represents?”

            Not the reunion I imagined. Draco didn’t scrub his hand across his mouth, a nervous habit he had developed since his parents went to Azkaban, because Lucius would see it, correctly, as another sign of weakness. He inclined his head to his father, never taking his eyes from Lucius’s face. “Listen, Father,” he said. “You need to understand the political realities of the situation.”

            “I understand the intimate realities first,” Lucius said, and Draco had heard words from the Dark Lord’s mouth that sounded less poisonous than the ones he heard next. “I understand that our son has given up on the Malfoy legacy, and we should have had another heir.”

            Narcissa’s fingers tightened on Lucius’s arm until it seemed as if she was holding onto him to keep from falling. Draco looked at her face, and wondered if she would speak up and contradict Lucius.

            He didn’t know. After all, she had elected to go to prison for her husband rather than try and stay out, for her son.

            “Tell me,” Draco said, and he almost didn’t recognize the chill, casual tone with which the words slid from his mouth, “how in the world would you have arranged that, from inside the cell that you’re so sure couldn’t hold you? How would you have acted differently from me, if I was the one imprisoned? Do tell me, Father. I’m dying to know.”

            “Draco,” his mother said uncertainly, and then shut her mouth and looked away. Perhaps she was calculating the same odds he was, Draco thought, although he kept his eyes on Lucius’s face, that she would actually stand up for him, when so far she had spent more time and effort choosing her husband’s part.

            “I would have managed,” Lucius said. “I would have used my contacts in the Ministry to ensure that they never imprisoned us, that we retained the Manor. I would have had my wand, and managed with judicious use of Imperius and other control spells. I would have used the money in bribes.”

            “Even if they took it all?” Draco asked. “The way they did.” His throat was burning as if he’d swallowed sand.

            “I would have found a way,” Lucius said. “I am surprised that you did not go to my contacts and beg for our freedom.” His face was filled with conflicting and dashing impulses that surfaced like ripples in his stormy eyes, and Draco wondered if he was weighing the necessity of freedom against the horrible idea that a Malfoy of any kind would beg.

            “I asked everyone I knew,” Draco said. “They all told me nothing could be done. And as for bribes and political experience and the rest of it…Father. I was eighteen years old.”

            “I would have done differently,” Lucius said, and leaned forwards as if he was going to walk over to Draco and strangle him. Draco knew that look too well, having seen it on most of the Ministry flunkies who attended at his home at one point or another. “I would have done better.”

            “Then you are welcome to,” Draco said. “Do you want me to walk away? Do you want me to cease assisting you? I can. It doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed, but it does mean that you’ll be treated like the other prisoners who were Death Eaters—given little to no privacy and probably some mistreatment on the sly. Of course, Potter tries to prevent such things, but that’s no guarantee that you’ll survive. Do you want that, Father? I can give it to you.”

            Narcissa closed her eyes and shuddered as if she was back in prison. Draco paused, felt his nostrils flare, and then managed to say carefully, “I wouldn’t abandon you, Mother, unless you want to go with Father.”

            The way you always do, he nearly said, and then didn’t say.

            Lucius stared at him as if extra toughness from Draco was not what he had expected. Then he shook his head. “The world cannot have changed so much that you would abandon family, Draco.”

            Draco smiled. He had the feeling that his mouth was full of blood, or should have been, but he didn’t want to spit. It would give his father too much credit for angering him. “I’m not abandoning you if I walk away because you want me to, am I? And that’s what I’m asking. Do you want me to leave you?”

            Narcissa huddled nearer and whispered to his father, “He is right. They would consume us, Lucius. There is nothing we can do but accept the offer that Draco has generously made us and hope—hope that it is enough.” She swallowed hard.

            His father said nothing, but stood there, and all the beasts of the desert were sleeping in his eyes. Draco glared back. No, not the reunion he had imagined, but then, he had already changed from the boy who sat in his house for seven years, dreaming of his parents and the day they would come home and everything would be perfect. Perhaps it was time to acknowledge that.

            “I want your help,” Lucius said.

            Draco nodded curtly. “Very well.” He went about strengthening the protective spells on the rooms. No one had told him that that wasn’t allowed, and if Potter found it unnecessary or wanted to get through them, Draco had no doubts about his ability to do so.

            Lucius’s eyes burned on his back. Draco ignored them without as much effort as he had thought it would take.

            I’ve changed.

            And I don’t even know if I can blame Potter for that much.

*

            SP777: Thanks! That’s an interesting observation. I think that in most of my stories, Draco’s parents are able to see him as still a child. In this one, Lucius does see it that way, but Draco is much more aware of how much they need him, and how helpless they are.

            Kit: That’s what Draco is thinking, too. On the other hand, he’s watched his mother choose his father before, over him, and even he didn’t know how much he had changed until he had the conflict with Lucius to point it out.
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Intoxicate the Sun