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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23338 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Twenty-Five—New as Shed Scales

            Draco summoned the hound back to him by the simple expedient of tossing the mirror back into his sleeve. They couldn’t use his pet’s wall-climbing abilities right now, and there were no more wards to be broken.

            But there were other things he could do, things that particular research on the web of information he’d shown Harry had taught him.

            He whipped his hand sideways, and murmured the incantation he’d invented for identifying wizards on that web under his breath. A pale grey glow surrounded three of the Unspeakables in front of them. Draco fell one step back as someone most impolitely tried to hex him, and cast the second spell, the one that would make the specific information pour in, and tell him who they were, and what kind of Dark Arts spells they had cast before, and which kinds they tended to favor.

            He raised his eyebrows as two of the pieces of information sparked to life. Wasn’t that interesting, looking at it in that light?

            He smiled and reached for the distraction that lurked in his back pocket, all the time keeping an eye on Weasley to make sure he wouldn’t turn traitor at the sight of his fellow “Light” wizards. Harry might not think that was likely to happen, but Harry’s judgment was compromised at times.

*

            Harry ducked and put his head between his arms, trusting the white serpent to watch out for him and give him reports on what was going on. He had immediately seen that two of the Unspeakables had brilliant wands in their hands, and one sight of them made his eyes tear up. He wouldn’t have put it past them to be using artifacts that were specially invented to shine light like that into the eyes of Parselmouths and blind them.

            The white serpent, his own eyes magical and unaffected, danced back and forth and hissed, They are getting in each other’s ways. They did not plan well, this tunnel is too narrow—down!

            Harry followed the direction without question. He slammed into the floor hard enough that the stone bruised his chest, in fact, and knocked most of the air out of him. He lay there wheezing and trying to get it back, while the white serpent crawled back and forth and kept up the steady stream of information that he had decided Harry needed to know.

            There are three Unspeakables standing back and directing them. The ceiling was a distraction, nothing important came down, and it all folded off to the side. Your friend makes a good accounting of himself—

            He fell silent in what sounded like astonishment, and Harry hitched one shoulder up as a kind of nudge into the snake’s belly. Can you tell me what’s going on? I can’t see a thing right now, and I don’t want to look up!

            The cold one’s friend has done something, the white snake said. Something with keys. I don’t know the theory. He sounded regretful about that. Harry hoped that if they survived this fight, he would get a chance to sit down with the snake and figure out how much magical theory he knew, and why exactly he knew so much of it and Harry not any. It seems to have opened some kind of pathway to some of the Unspeakables. They’re standing there and trying not to scream.

            Harry smiled, and opened his eyes, peering out between his spread fingers for a moment. It seemed that at least one of the Unspeakables Parkinson had assaulted held a light-shedding artifact, and it had gone dim in his hands. Harry would be able to move in a moment, and make a difference that way.

            The expressions on their faces were indeed ones of fear. When Harry turned around to try and see what Parkinson was doing, however, someone else shone a light in his eyes and blinded him.

            Harry hissed. The white snake looped a coil around his throat. It is indeed annoying, brother, not to be able to do anything in a fight like this.

            The sarcasm of his voice told Harry what he thought. He rolled his eyes and stretched his hand forth, concentrating. Imagination and memory and magic intertwined, and formed into a great grey snake that would not need its eyes to see.

            Yes. The white serpent’s hiss was deep and languorous. Remember that you are a snake-speaker. And you should see what the cold one is doing.

            Harry took a chance, and scrambled up, feeling his way out through the vibrations that the grey snake on the tunnel floor felt, at the same moment as he sent the snake forwards with a lash of his thought to scatter the Unspeakables.

*

            Draco held up the square of metal in front of him. He had attracted the attention of a few Unspeakables, but not many as yet. They wouldn’t fixate on something so unlikely and harmless until many of them started thinking of it as “artifact.”

            He closed his eyes and blew on it, then cast some more spells on the metal, so fast that they flowed straight into one another without any gaps between one incantation and the next. Someone trying to learn the spells from watching him would have no luck, and Draco counted on that to protect many of his secrets.

            He threw the metal out in front of him when he was done, and it spun, flashing like a pinwheel of gold caught in the sun despite the lack of immediate light in the air. That caused many Unspeakables to fix on it, and some of them to leave off aiming at Harry’s great grey snake who was aiming for them. Draco smiled. Harry would be happy if all the snakes he created survived this fight, whether or not he had just created them.

            The square of metal stopped spinning long before it reached the Shield Charms that the Unspeakables were trying to set up, and hung there. Some of them stared. Some of them leaned out from behind their shields and tried to focus their wands on it.

            Strands of light, gleaming like tinsel this time, leaped out from the square and looped themselves around the necks of the Unspeakables Draco had identified as users of Dark magic. They screamed and struggled.

            But the point of the light strands wasn’t to linger. The forks spread and sank into their bodies, and they opened their mouths a moment later. More light came from their tongues, their teeth, spreading out into perfect memories, complete with sound, of the times when they had used Dark magic.

            Knowing that one of them had specialized in Dark magic that was meant to Obliviate his victims’ basic knowledge of life and leave them helpless infants made Draco enjoy the moment when those memories appeared all the more.

            Of course, Unspeakables being the modified Light wizards they were, unable to comprehend that their fellows might be complicated people, and still good allies even if they had lied about using Dark magic, they turned on them, listening to the memories and aiming their wands at those wizards on their side. Draco strolled over to Pansy and took her arm while everyone was distracted, leaning in to whisper in her ear.

            “Do you think you can find us a path past the wards that are holding Granger prisoner, in all this mayhem?”

            Pansy glared at him, eyebrows flying up almost to her hairline. “Do you think I wouldn’t have done it before if it was that simple?”

            “I think that you weren’t thinking in terms of doors and keys before,” Draco said patiently. “You were thinking in terms of Dark paths and watching Harry in case he turned on you. Think now.”

            Pansy paused, and then snorted and took out a bunch of keys that banged and jangled on her wrists like a dozen Gringotts sacks. “Of course. I should have thought of that before. You’re a genius, Draco.”

            “I do but try,” Draco said, and inclined his head to her in a way that she was free to take as a bow if she wanted to, and moved back.

            The confusion in the corridor had become frozen confusion, with some Unspeakables aiming wands at each other, and the ones Draco had forced into memory reliving their traumas, and the sounds and colors of those memories playing out, and Harry backed against the wall with the white snake on his shoulder and the grey one in front of him, and Weasley standing off to the side as if he didn’t know what to do but feared anything he did would make the situation worse.

            Into the middle of that stepped Pansy, whirling the bunch of keys she held until most of the eyes not occupied with immediate pressures had turned to her.

            She smiled to them, and bowed, and employed the tactic that Draco had thought of because he had seen her use it once before, though only in practice. She had told him then that she thought it would never be ready to be used in battle, because it required too much concentration for her to build up when someone was casting at her.

            Now, she’d had the time since Draco suggested it to build that up. And she used it to grim advantage, as the keys leaped away from her hands and into the air, spinning and twirling still, and gathering more light to them than Draco’s enchanted metal square had ever used.

            Draco bit the inside of his cheek as all the Unspeakables tilted their heads back to watch this newest distraction. They might think of themselves as wise research wizards, but what they were was too inevitably fascinated by any new artifact that came along. They saw Pansy’s keys, and abandoned the battle around them to understand it, instead of focusing on the immediate and getting rid of the distraction later.

            The keys flew apart from each other suddenly, and between them spread a focused, glowing line. Pansy had told Draco once that keeping the keys close together was a risk, because they would influence and react with one another the way Potions ingredients would.

            And Draco had pointed out that some reactions like that were explosive, and some were productive of new knowledge, and some were both at once.

            This was both.

            The keys arched up and then came down, spinning through locks that opened in the air in front of them, locks that appeared on robes, locks that appeared in the wards, locks that appeared on the wands of the Unspeakables. Each one that opened glimmered for only a moment, there and then gone again, and faded in a coruscation of sparks.

            But in that moment, all was undone, as though Pansy had found the means to reveal all those secrets at once.

            The wands unlocked and swung apart to reveal their cores. The wards that held Granger apart from them faded. Robes unraveled themselves and dropped to the floor in useless piles of thread. The air tore open, and shards of darkness and snowflakes and other things native to the Dark paths that ran hidden and unacknowledged all through the Department of Mysteries tumbled to the floor after the robes.

            Pansy laughed, and that was the center of all the swirling confusion for Draco, the delight and the competence. He ran up beside her, lightly touched her shoulder, and then vaulted over the Unspeakables attempting to pick up their robes and gestured back at Harry and Weasley.

            Harry, at least, had learned when to listen to him and trust. A snap of his wrist, and the grey snake was smaller and curled around his arm. Weasley was slower, gaping as he was at the naked women and trying to avert his eyes from the naked men, but he followed Harry when he began running.

            Pansy stayed behind. Draco knew she was setting the traps they had brought with them, the ones that would damage the Department, and smiled. He was hardly going to worry about someone who had already proven that she could survive far worse.

            Running, panting, through a corridor that still thrummed and hissed sometimes as though in desperation for its lost wards, they reached what looked like an ordinary door. Draco cast one of his detection spells on it, and more wards sprang to life, locked ones, hidden ones that had lain beneath the surface until now and thus wouldn’t respond to Pansy’s key magic, which only unlocked the visible and the active. He stood back and shook his head.

            “We can’t get in yet,” he explained to Harry. “I think we should wait for Pansy.”

            A hex doubled down the corridor and might have singed Draco’s hair, but Harry shoved him aside just in time and glanced warily back in the direction the Unspeakables had been standing.

            “That’s not an option,” Harry said briskly, and then he reached out with his wrist, the grey snake snapping into being like a stiff ribbon, suddenly much longer. Draco stood back and watched. This was a Parselmouth in charge of his magic, working with it, and he didn’t care about the disgusted look on Weasley’s face.

            Draco felt as though he had been waiting most of his life to see something at once so Dark and so precious, so rare.

*

            The snake complained as he fully extended, but Harry had made him for one purpose that he didn’t need, now that the Unspeakables were disorganized and scrambling. And as he focused on the ward, the snake stopped speaking, and only flickered his tongue out instead.

            It is always better when the masses do what you want them to, said the white serpent smugly, and did a little dance on Harry’s shoulder that Harry thought he preferred not to know the reason for.

            The grey snake’s teeth rasped down the ward gleaming on the door, and there was a dull snapping sound. Then that ward crumpled apart, and the snake bit the next one, and that fell into dust, as well. Harry relaxed a little. He hadn’t been sure, for the briefest of seconds, that the Dark magic behind his snake was stronger than the kind that he could feel the Unspeakables had used to power their wards.

            The Unspeakables didn’t know Parseltongue magic, though, even if they had come up with magical snakes to defend part of their domain. The wards crisped and fried, and then the door swung open and Ron ran forwards.

            “Back, Weasley.”

            Harry jerked, and even Ron, who didn’t have the reasons to listen to Draco and trust him that Harry did, stopped with one foot poised above the threshold of the room. He clicked his head around by slow degrees to frown at Draco, though. “You think that you can stop me here, when my wife wants to see me?” he whispered.

            “Let’s ask her,” Draco said, and sidled up to the door, which was still not open far enough for Harry to see inside. “Granger?” he called out. “Do you want your husband to come charging in to your rescue yet, or not?”

            “Ron, stay back!” Hermione shouted at once. Her voice was ruined. Harry imagined some of the things the Unspeakables might have done, and began to conjure a very specific kind of snake. “They told me they were trapping the floor in here, and I saw them working on it. I don’t know how you got the door open, but these aren’t the same thing. Be careful.”

            She sounded so ragged and heartbroken on the last words that Harry couldn’t help but lean in and smile at her. “Hermione?”

            She sat in chains on the floor, like Ron, but she jerked her head up at the sound of his voice. The chains on her were heavier, Harry thought, and they hadn’t bothered trapping the floor in the room where Ron had been, either. That seemed to suggest they considered Hermione more dangerous, despite Ron’s Auror training.

            “Harry?”

            Harry smiled at her more widely. “Yes, it’s me. And I think I can figure out a way to get you out of the chains, if you’ll accept my help.”

            Hermione bit her lip. “When have I ever refused help from you?”

            “When it involves my Parseltongue?” Harry raised the new snake that was coiled around his arm. It was looped with dazzling scales of gold and black, and he poured more strength into it, enough that Hermione was squinting as if she could see it. “I can rescue you, but I have to use that. Will you accept it?”

            Hermione spent a moment staring and squinting some more, and then nodded. “I don’t distrust you, Harry,” she said. “Not compared to some of the things the Unspeakables have done, and some of the things they’ve done that I know the Ministry is ignoring now.”

            Harry could practically feel the rapture flooding Draco’s body. He just kept from rolling his eyes, because Hermione would probably think it was at her, and she didn’t need that right now. Draco was in love with any knowledge, and the promise of what he didn’t know was enough, Harry thought, to make him want to interview Hermione right now.

            Luckily, he had the sense to restrain himself. Ron was talking to Hermione in a small, soft voice that was probably meant to calm her, but really served more to calm himself, Harry thought. It wouldn’t take much for Ron to snap and find some other way of dealing with the problem, now that the Unspeakables were done with.

            Harry risked one more glance back down the corridor before he turned his attention to the problem of Hermione’s floor. The hex aimed at Draco had been lucky, he reckoned, with so many Unspeakable wands opened to display their cores, and Parkinson must have dealt with the caster. It was silent and dark down there except for some random flashes of light and the sound of Parkinson muttering away to herself.

            “Okay, here it comes,” Harry told Hermione as he faced her again. “I’ll throw you the snake. It’ll crawl over your chains and bite through the locks. You need to tell me which ones it should go to first, if they were locked in a specific order—”

            “They were. The lowest left one first, then the one near my chin—”

            Harry held up his hand. He knew that Hermione liked to talk to soothe her nervousness, but he would never remember the list right now. “Rescue’s coming, okay?”

            Hermione nodded again, and then froze as if she thought that would somehow set off the trapped floor. Harry understood her caution. He was beginning to wonder exactly where the Unspeakables stopped, if this was their standard for the treatment of prisoners who were more valuable kept alive.

            He lifted his arm high, and then threw the snake.

            Ripples of light traveled up and down the golden body, briefly, making the snake look as if it were flying like the one that had died in hospital. Then it settled into place around Hermione’s shoulders, head extended to the locks and fangs gleaming as they sprang into place. Hermione sat very still, eyes shifting from side to side as if she could see the snake that way.

            “The one on the lowest left first?” Harry asked, keeping his voice as calm as he knew how, low as a drumbeat.

            “The one on the lowest left first,” Hermione echoed.

            Harry nodded again and gestured. The snake slid down Hermione’s side like a trickle of oil, until it reached the lock. It nudged it back and forth, and then hissed to Harry, There are no wards here.

            That’s right, Harry hissed back, ignoring the way that Ron stiffened and Hermione’s soft gasp of shock. They had heard him speak Parseltongue, of course, but maybe not with the same deliberation. I want you to bite through the lock.

            The snake hissed back, while its fangs gleamed, more like tempered steel than teeth. Harry could feel his hair stirring as the white serpent crawled up on top of his head for a better view. Harry smiled. He could hardly blame him.

            The snake bit once, precisely, and then swung his neck so that the lock in his mouth wouldn’t fall on the floor and perhaps trigger the trap. It ended up in Hermione’s lap, and then the snake edged towards the one under her chin.

            “That’s the next one?” Harry asked, and she nodded at him. By now, she looked more than half revolted, her fingers twitching and her shoulders hunching as though the weight of the snake had become unpleasant, but Harry kept talking, kept asking questions.

            And Hermione started responding to him, not the snake. She gathered the dropped locks in her lap and slipped a few of them into pockets in her robes. Harry smiled; he knew she would study them, and Draco would probably want to borrow them to analyze the magic that clung to them when she was done.

            The snake bit through the last lock, dropped it, and flew into the air as golden light, dissolving and entering Harry’s bloodstream once again. The white snake tapped Harry’s ear with his tongue. Much better. I thought of suggesting that you keep him as a companion for me, but in the end, it would prove too much temptation for him to bite me out of jealousy.

            I should name you, Harry told him, raising a hand to touch the snake on the back of his neck, while Ron cast several Lightening Charms on Hermione and then used Wingardium Leviosa to move her out of the room, floating her over the trapped floor. You’ve gone without a name for too long.

            Consider well. The white snake turned his head to the side and arranged his neck in an elegant curve that echoed the way some of Draco’s door handles looked. I am also too important to have an inferior name.

            Harry laughed, and then Hermione was out of the room and hugging Ron, and he came in for his share of hugging, too. She didn’t flinch from his scales or his fangs when they briefly touched her cheek before Harry hastily shrank them. She leaned against him and stared into his eyes, then nodded.

            “You did it,” she whispered. “And I don’t think you could have done it without your Parseltongue magic. Thank you.”

            “Of course he couldn’t have, Granger,” Draco said, coming over to put an arm around Harry’s shoulders, probably because he thought that kissing Hermione on the cheek was as close as Harry should get to her. “That’s what we’ve been trying to get through to you for a month now.”

            Hermione’s mouth tightened, at the stretched timeline as much as anything else, Harry thought, but Ron whispered before an argument could start, “Let’s get out of here.”

            And that, at least, even Draco seemed to agree on.

*

            kain: It’s stronger than Draco thinks it is. If he ever did try to really separate Harry from his friends, for his own gain, he would get a big surprise.

            SP777: The snake might not ever manifest enough for others than Draco to see it. Draco can see it because he put in the effort.

            And yes, it was cute on purpose. ;)

            Talltree-san: Draco would be overjoyed if Harry abandoned his friends, I’m not going to learn. But he would rather be Harry’s lover than anything else at the moment.

            Seiren: Thank you!
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