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A Vicious Tangle (Complete)	By : Tommy-Lane Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13085 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any charactors from the books and I am not making any money off of this.

Chapter List
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Two Years Later

The hotel room wasn't anything new, he had spent many a night over the last two years behind its door and staring awake at its ceiling.

It had long ago started to feel very much like repeating a hazy dream, the long journey filled with catching Portkeys and Apparating and walking, always alone, always the same steps, always in the same order - his movement’s clockwork precision. This morning was no different - blinking his dry eyes, slipping his feet into his boots, straightening the black oxford in the mirror, and looping the gray tie around his neck.

His fingers always lingered over the neat knot, his eyes first straying to the platinum ring on his finger and then, hesitantly, to the mark just barely visible that was etched on the inside of his wrist.

A round swirling pattern he could still see behind his closed eyes.

It had appeared slowly, taking shape almost tentatively in his flesh just days after the encounter in the tunnel. When it had finally settled - icy blue and slightly indented - it was an exact replica of the disks, the exact same marking as the one on Astoria's wrist, inches below where the scar from his Dark Mark trickled into once unmarred skin. It was all converged on his left arm in a startling order and display - the jagged scar of his sordid youth, an impossible tattoo of the one case that still pricked his heart, and the ring Harry had slipped onto his finger despite the markings above it four months ago beneath a starry sky and before a silent muggle in black and white who had no clue who Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy even were.

He could remember waking on the foggy morning the faint marking had first appeared, how he had just stared at it with an unsettling blankness inside until Harry stirred beside him and asked in his sleepy way what was wrong. The darker man had immediately drug him back to the hospital and had proceeded to pace around agitatedly until all the tests had been run and they had proclaimed that nothing negative had changed inside him.

Two years and he had learned to live with it, had learned to stop letting his eyes trace over it again and again. Two years of Harry strong arming him into visiting the hospital to make sure it wasn't seeping anything nefarious into him. Two years later and he was still well, still stable, still with the two little words - Inconclusive Damage - decorating the bottom of his chart each and every time like a mockery.

He was resigned to never knowing the damage Astoria had wrecked inside him. It was a nameless thing that festered silently most days, something that seemed to echo hollowly if he stared too long at the mark connecting him to her, but otherwise it lay dormant. A visual reminder for him to carry with him all his days, making sure he would never forget his erased memories and the outcome that had come from those invisible steps.

Two years and it hadn't changed one little bit.

Brushing his hand down his tie, Draco stepped from his room and strode down the hall. His feet knew the route by heart, they maneuvered the crowded street of Brussels as his mind wandered elsewhere, leading him to the same unassuming building with gray concrete walls and steel doors as they did this same time every month. With a quick glance over his shoulder, Draco twisted his fingers in a gentle hook and curve - the wards shifting uneasily over him as he stepped through the door without pushing it open.

He smiled at the witch who knew him by sight behind the single desk in the empty receiving room and signed his name to the appropriate documents, nodding at her as she handed him a key and lowered the wards on the door beside her. It clicked heavily as he pulled it open and disappeared inside, a familiar unease settling in the pit of his stomach and making his hand twitch as he fingered his ring. He had walked down this hall yesterday, just like he had so many times before that, only to reach the sixth door on the right and be denied entrance. Which left him to spend an hour speaking with the head Healer before wasting the day away in his hotel room - flipping through channels on the muggle telly, his eyes a glassy daze as he watched without really seeing and wishing that he hadn't so adamantly refused Harry's idea of getting a pair of those muggle mobile telephones so he could speak with him.

He never knew what these trips would yield and on several occasions he had returned home sullen and depressed - Harry finding him at their kitchen table nursing a glass of gin that the Auror typically had to coax from his grasp. Then Draco would blink and fall into the arms that always seemed to be there and spend the rest of the night erasing the emptiness with him. If it bothered Harry that Draco needed to go every single month, if it weighed on him that it only seemed to feed the sorrow in his heart, he didn't express it. Nor did he ever mention that those were the nights Draco often found himself begging for Harry to take him, to fill him - Harry always tenderer than he demanded he be yet always, somehow, just what he needed to feel righted again.

With a bated breath, he knocked, his hand pressing flat against the wood as he waited.

"Come in."

The voice was small but clear and Draco felt relief flood him as he fitted the key into the lock and turned it - magic once more washing over him as the wards shifted and dropped, allowing him to push the door open.

"You brought the sun with you." Astoria murmured as he stepped into the room, her back to him as she stared out the lone window that was currently showing a break in the thick clouds to let thick streams of yellow light filter down.

He took a moment to look her over before answering, his gaze drifting down her still slim body that had been slowly filling out to a healthier figure during her stay in the psychiatric hospital. She wore a green dress today that stopped at her knees, flowing off one shoulder like her frame was still slightly too unsteady to keep the fabric up, her feet bare just as they always were. Her blonde hair had been chopped short, ragged around her ears, making her look even younger and smaller than she was. But she was standing, she was talking, she sounded...present and really that was enough to go home and smile at Harry when he asks how it went.

"You look well." He stated calmly, still very careful with his movement and speech. She was extremely skittish and had become even more so as her therapy worked through her deep and earth shattering wounds - bringing to light things she didn't want to think on or remember.

"Thank you." She turned towards him, her green eyes looking lighter than the last time he had seen her. "So do you." She tilted her head, studying him silently for a moment. "Dr. Emma said you've been asking questions."

Draco nodded, threading his fingers together behind his back. "I have."

"What sort?" She walked towards him with gliding feet, stopping at the look on his face. "You've been asking me too?" She asked quietly, pointing to herself.

He nodded again, wishing to Merlin that her memory wasn't so splintered, that she wouldn't slip so easily into dream worlds and nightmares and forget where she was, who she was, and what she was doing. Her therapist had said she was getting better, that every month their seeing improvement but it was times like these that it was hard to remember that she used to be so much worse. "It's alright Astoria, I've been gone for a while." He reassured her as he saw the familiar stirrings of panic flit across her face.

"You should come more." She stated, like she always did whenever she let him through and remembered where she was.

"I can't, remember?"

Her nod was slow and thoughtful. "Right because...because you don't live here...I miss you."

He smiled and sat slowly in the stiff chair by her bed. "Did you get the chocolate I sent you?"

"Yes." She beamed, making her lips look pale and thin and cheeks shallow but her eyes lit up like a child at the holidays.

"I'm glad you enjoyed it." He flexed his fingers as he debated his next words, weighing them heavily on his tongue. "How have you been doing?" He finally settled on, deciding it best to start as simply as he could and see how she would take it.

She frowned and sank down onto the bed, her bare feet kicking at the floor. "Dr. Emma says I'm doing better." She folded her dainty hands in her lap as her frown grow in distress. "But I think she's lying."

"Why?"

"I...I think I tried to hurt someone the other day but I don't know why...I don't want to talk about it."

"Alright we don't have to." Draco smiled softly as she hugged herself, drawing into herself on the bed in a defensive position. "What would you like to talk about?"

"We have the same mark." She whispered, her thumb rubbing over the swirling pattern on her wrist.

"Yes." He answered, this wasn't the first time she had pointed it out, wasn't the first time she had started opening up about what had happened before clamping shut and turning despondent. But there was always something about the way she brought it up, almost like she was as desperate to know its meaning as Draco was. Except this felt different, she was looking at the mark on his wrist with a strange glint in her eyes, almost like she could...remember. The idea made his pulse jump and his throat dry up, his heart picking up at the smallest hope that he would come away with some actually answers this visit. "It's a replica of the disks. Do you remember them?"

She nodded, turning her head into her knees as she drew her legs up onto the bed. "Yes, I hear them screaming sometimes."

"Who?" He asked though he feared he knew the answer already.

"I killed people. Dr. Emma says I killed them during blackouts where I didn't know what I was doing but I can hear them at night sometimes, like their clawing at me, waiting for me to join them. Sometimes their even louder than him."

A muscle twitched under his eye like it usually did when she brought up Jenner Thornbee, her captor, the man who tormented her for years. Dr. Emma - Astoria's therapist - had disclosed to him that the man had forced her into an Aeternum Bond shortly after her capture. That he inserted cruel and unusual twists into the bonding that in affect made her lose all sense of herself for months on end, living in perpetual horror and fear as the man who called himself her husband bent her to his will. On odd and unpredictable occasions she would speak a little about the disks, vague words that seemed to hint on the fact that the man had used them on her for some purpose that Astoria couldn't articulate but desperately wanted to.

But the scar tissue on the inside of her mouth was extensive, almost like he had stuck them to her flesh, ripped them out, and repeated the process over a dozen times.

Thornbee broke her so thoroughly that even now, years after his death, she could still hear him in her head - still felt his will pulling on her. Draco had wept in his empty hotel room the day he learned of it, his thumb pressing over the mark on his wrist. It made sense to him then, more than it ever had before, why Astoria had sought to use that particular bond with him - she must had figured that the only way to erase the one with Thornbee was to enact a knew one with someone else.

Someone kind. Someone who could save her. Someone she had loved since she was a little girl.

"Astoria -"

"I can feel you sometimes too." She said quietly, looking up and meeting his gaze full on for the first time in months. "On bad days, I'm not allowed to leave my room so I duck under the covers and think of you and then...the emptiness floats away...like your right beside me..."

Draco swallowed and shifted forward a little, feeling something tug at the back of his naval at her description, watching as she played her fingers over her marking. There was something familiar about the way she spoke of feeling him and he couldn't help but think of all the times he had found himself suddenly drifting, his thoughts seeping, his happiness and contentment floating away to be replaced by numbness...emptiness...desolation. He had chalked it up to what he had gone through, had decided it was connected to his forgotten actions and the reality of what happened to her - but perhaps it was more, perhaps she really could feel him.

She seemed to be connected to the disks in a very primal way. She had confessed that they were a part of Thornbee's dark artifacts collection but perhaps over the years they had morphed from their original purpose - becoming an extension of the small part of her soul that was still her own, that wasn't tainted by him. It wouldn't have been the first time he had seen something like that happen, especially in cases where emotions ran high and someone’s magic was wild and uncontrolled. It was perfectly plausible in an abstract sort of way, it gave an explanation to why the disks were found on the dead bodies when she still couldn't remember doing it or even why. If they were connected to her then it made sense why they had housed her memories - why the one left at the hospital had brought him to her despite the fact that she couldn't fathom how she had managed to do that.

And it wasn't just her - no one had been able to figure out how she had manipulated it, not him or Luckwood or the team of Unspeakables... it was a mystery now labeled neatly and forgotten by all except a handful.

It was like the ancient things were doing what she wanted to but could not do - even slowing her heart until near death to keep her from killing anymore on the morning she woke as Olivia and realized what she had been doing.

Perhaps the disks had become her savior through it all, perhaps she had cried for him enough that they had forged a way to connect them even now - the botched bonding opening him up enough for the unknown magic inside them to do as it willed. He had a feeling Harry would crackle with rage when he found out and he would no doubt be forced into another trip to see the Healer, the information whipping off the man's tongue.

He touched his mark and smiled faintly, his other hand reaching out to press lightly over hers. "Next time don't wait till it gets bad alright?" Having a name for the seemingly random depression and hollowness made all the difference and Draco figured he could live with it if he knew each time that it hit him it was because Astoria needed his strength - needed to feel him near to drown out the madman in her head. It was the least he could do for her and Harry would just have to bloody accept it.

"Thank you." She smiled and weaved her fingers through his - the touch startling considering she typically shied violently away from firm contact. "Your questions...what are they?" She asked after taking a deep, shaking breath like she didn't want to actually get the words out.

"Are you sure?"

She nodded and stared at their hands.

Knowing he most likely had only one shot at this, one question to ask, before she huddled back into herself and went despondent, he shifted through the mountain of questions in his head for the most pressing. It wasn't hard to find, it was the one that plagued him every single day. "The night you were taken...I was coming back from somewhere but I don't...I can't remember anything." He paused and slipped his eyes shut, seeing himself striding down the Slytherin dormitories so very long ago. "Was I...did I...?"

"You're not meant to remember." She sounded uncharacteristically strong and certain, her tone forcing his eye back open and up to hers.

"Why? Do you know who oblivated me?"

She looked away before nodding. "Your mother."

Draco had spent no small amount of time over the past two years trying to drudge up his memory, thinking up theories, and trying to find any possible explanation. But never did he once image his memories had been taken from him by his mother, his father maybe, but never his mother. The confession rattled inside his brain, turning the possibilities of why from evil and nefarious to stomach churning dread. "Why?" He whispered, raising a hand to rub against his brow.

"He was upset about Theodore...how you killed him instead of her. You and Pansy were ordered to carry something out in recompense...I was collateral."

He felt stuck to his chair, his veins pumping lead and his head splitting, his worst fear in all of this coming to pass. He should have known that it was all connected to that one night he took his friends life. It was a debilitating blow to realize he hadn't ended up saving anything by doing it - Pansy was still damaged and Astoria had apparently paid the price for his decision. "What was the assignment?" He didn't want to know, didn't want to find out if his hands were even more bloodied then he ever knew. How would he come back from such a revelation? How could he ever face Astoria or Pansy or Harry or himself ever again with such knowledge?

No matter what he did, it seems he really was only a puppet, and now he was about to find out how tangled those strings really were.

"I don't know...but I remember you two whispering about it. You weren't going to do it, you were going to figure something else out. Then they came for me and a week later I watched you get dragged into his house...bloody and twisted...you looked at me through black eyes. I knew then that you hadn't gone through with what they wanted and that I was...but I was glad." A tear slipped down her cheek as she spoke with a far off look, her voice so clear, almost like she was whole again. "My husb-Jenner, demanded an explanation and you were just about to say something when your mother stepped up, looking harder than I've ever seen her. You went blank, your father and Jenner started screaming at her...you didn't recognize me after that..."

"Astoria I'm sorry." His throat felt tight, his eyes stinging, a rushing that was loud and ringing in his ears, because it had been his fault - it didn't matter if it was his intention or not - that she had suffered as she had. She became the plaything for a twisted piece of shit all because he had decided to play at being the hero. He felt like he was shattering, breaking apart bit by bit, his back slumped as he clasped her hand in both of his. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't cry." She tipped his chin up, looking into his stormy gray eyes as her own took on a glassy sheen that always proceeded her slipping away. "You're my sunshine, always and forever."

****

Draco missed his portkey home.

A letter from Harry sat unopened on the hotel room desk, his own quickly scrawled, one line note stating that he was fine winging its way towards England between the claws of an unassuming barn owl.

He lay on his bed, eyes closed, platinum ring rolling between his thumb and pointer finger.

He figured he had about one more day before Harry came bursting his door open. One more day to figure out the mess rolling around in his head and heart. His chest ached and he clenched his teeth - who the fuck was he kidding? He didn't think he'd ever find his way through the sludge inside him. At least he now knew what the inconclusive damage was - simply put it was a gigantic hole in his heart that seeped nothing but black poison, destroying all he touched, reminding him exactly what he was. The problem was that now that he knew what it was, now that he could see it, he didn't know how to look away from it.

He was a coward. A puppet. A selfish fuck. How he had managed to deny it for so long, to fool himself into thinking he was anything but was almost laughable now.

"For fucks sake, not even locked. If I didn't know better, I would think you wanted to be robbed and murdered by muggle thugs."

"Go home Pansy." Draco grumbled, his hand moving to drop his wedding ring on the bedside table. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone showed up but he hadn't expected Pansy and in all honesty he didn't know how to make his eyes open and look over at her - afraid she would read all that he had learned on his face and that it would shatter her tentative hold on life. Merlin he could barely handle himself right now, he had no idea how to navigate her as well.

"Gladly, whenever you’re ready dear."

"I'm extending my trip."

"So I've noticed. Or actually I hadn't really noticed you were gone at all until Potter popped up yesterday all flustered asking if I'd heard from you."

Draco grunted in response.

"I, being such an amazingly good friend, covered your arse and said you'd mentioned you would be gone a few days longer this time and didn't he remember? He glared at me all suspicious like but after a minute or two the gullible man seemed to take me at my word."

"Then why are you here?" Draco focused his gaze on the gray ceiling, his hand curled over his heart that hadn't stopped thumping painfully since Astoria spilled her story.

"Because you’re late and your ignoring that intolerable husband of yours, all while you're on your trip to see that mental woman. Doesn't stack up well you see... not to mention you look positively horrid. Honestly is there no shower available? Also well...Potter did look a bit...manic...and worried. Very worried actually." She sounded worried herself as she trailed off, the emotion hidden well beneath layers of snappish attitude but Draco knew her too well to be fooled.

"I'll be home soon." He said pointedly, ignoring the little squeeze in his chest at the mention of Harry. Merlin he missed the man, missed his warmth, especially now when he felt like a pillar of ice and desperately needed him to melt it for him. But there was a pang that he couldn't ignore that kept him from going home, that kept him from firecalling, a pain that was keeping him in an unappealing hotel room instead of returning to those strong arms and soft lips.

A pain that kept him staring at the festering hole Astoria had uncovered.

"So let’s just skip this back and forth shall we?" Pansy snapped, sitting heavily on the bed next to his legs, the crappy mattress dipping towards her. "Somethings wrong, now tell me what it is so we can leave this infested little hole and get lunch."

"I'm fine."

"Bullshit."

"Pansy." He sighed tiredly, closing his eyes once more.

"Alright look, your reminding me too much of seventh year and let’s be honest, I can't handle that. So sit the fuck up and look at me or so help me Draco I'm going to send for Blaise and Potter and we'll forcibly drag you back home where you belong."

With a glare Draco did as he was told, swinging his legs over the edge and letting his gaze skirt just shy of landing on Pansy's chocolate orbs. Dragging a hand through his rumpled hair, he waited silently for her to continue because Merlin help him but he had no clue what to say.

"Good. Now I'm assuming something happened with Astoria?" She asked and Draco nodded, staring down at the round mark on his wrist. "Is she alright?" Again he nodded and felt her eyes searching him intently. "Did she tell you something about what happened to her?"

"Yes."

"About your missing memories?"

Draco had no idea how she caught on so fast, how her mind went right to where he was suffering, it had always been an uncanny ability of hers. Over the last few days he gone back every day to visit the young woman and though she was never as lucid as she had been that day, she was always happy to see him - her smile twisting the knife in his gut. He didn't know why she still loved him, why she clung to his memory when she knew it was him that unwillingly put her in the situation that had ruined her. He didn't know how to cope with it, didn't know what to make of his own mother taking his memories.

Because that meant it had to be something really awful, truly terrible - something that she knew he wouldn't have been able to live with. Something that may have caused his death or would perhaps have just turned him fully into a replica of his father. Astoria had said he had been beaten that day and was about to do something right before his mind was taken and molded. But what? What had he been trying to accomplish? He couldn't help but pray over and over again that it was good, that he had been trying to reverse her situation even at the cost of his own life.

But he couldn't know that and he never would. It was the unknown that was driving him to the point of insanity.

Perhaps that was another reason he couldn't return home yet. Perhaps he needed to pay some sort of penance before Harry tried to wash away a portion of his guilt. Or maybe he just needed to cling to it, holding it to his chest over the hole like a shredded bandage, trying to smother the echoing word that bounced around his head.

Coward.

"Yes, I'm -"

"I don't want to hear it." Pansy declared, her back rigid, her tongue clicking. "Because it does not matter Draco. Whatever you did or didn't do it was years ago, over a decade, and you were a child amidst a war. We all made mistakes, we all suffered, her I'll admit more than most but what good will holing your life away do? Will it make her better? Will it bring back the dead? Will it assuage your guilt? No. It will only kill you and then where will we all be? She'll be left alone because no one else ever visits her, I'll die of boredom, and I think it might actually make Potter lose his shit to the point of him winding up in the room next to hers. Is that what you want? Is your guilt really that destructive and worth it?"

"It's not that simple." He felt torn, her words wanting so desperately to make themselves home over the raw pain and guilt inside him, but it seemed wrong to let it go, not when Astoria was still so wounded.

"Like fuck it isn't. War breeds hard decisions that haunt us, you don't think I know that? You think I don't think about you and Theo every day? You don't think I feel anguish over what you lost because of me? It kills me Draco, it hurts more than I can bear some mornings but do you know what I do? I get the fuck out of bed, put on a dazzling outfit, and come annoy the shit out of you. Because that's life, moving on from our mistakes. Would you have me waste away instead? Because I could, it wouldn't be hard believe me." Her gaze was hard, her cheeks wet from silent tears, her small hand gripping his thigh harshly.

Draco stared back at her, wondering how he never noticed Pansy's strength before. He had seen her as a victim he needed to protect for so long, she had always been the fragile flower that he needed to step carefully around, she had never been like this before - blazing with a fierceness to be more. It was in that moment that he realized that by making her into the person he needed to be always ready to protect he had been tucking his own pain and needs away. He had been spending their friendship apologizing for years on end, convincing himself that he was doing it for her.

It was an almost cruel realization to find that he had been the one stunting them both and not her. She was ready to move on, to try and let go, and he was keeping them grounded.

Astoria had called him her sunshine on more than one occasion and each time Draco had mourned it for hours afterwards. Perhaps it was time to stop grieving and apologizing and forgive himself - for all their sakes. Though that was far easier said than done and Draco honestly had no clue had to go about doing that.

"Harry...?" He closed his eyes, unable to voice the rest of his fear, his chest throbbing.

"Won't leave you." She shifted closer, her head falling on his shoulder. "And neither will I."
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A Vicious Tangle (Complete)