Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

A Reckless Frame of Mind	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 15025 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- 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.

Chapter List
- 2
- 3
- 4
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Three—The First Session

            Draco had arranged to meet Potter in his own office, of course. This was home ground for him, an advantage that Potter might try to fake but could never match. He settled back in his chair, his eyes on the file, but his attention fastened on the door that led into the room. Potter would be coming under armed escort from his cell several corridors away, and Draco intended to snap his head up and fix him with a disconcerting gaze the moment he saw a trace of his shadow.

            It didn’t quite work out that way. The first person into the room was a mediwizard wearing an expression that made it look as if termites had crawled up his trousers leg. He glanced back once, then nodded in resignation, and two more mediwizards, walking closely behind Potter as if he were a prisoner and not a patient, brought him into the room.

            Potter walked with his wrists clasped tamely in front of him. His spine was straight, as though he headed into an interrogation—

            Smart man, Draco thought, feeling the first vestiges of a sneer begin to lift his lips.

            --and didn’t want to betray any nervousness. His eyes were likewise cool and guarded, far more so than Draco had ever seen them at school. He seemed to think he was some sort of hero—

            Not that that isn’t a common delusion of his.

            --who could resist anything a Psyche-Diver might throw at him. Draco’s hand ached for his wand, so that he might show him that wasn’t true.

            “Good luck with him,” the leading mediwizard muttered to Draco, which surprised him. Even relatively low-ranking Healers like this went out of their way to pretend that he didn’t exist, or at least they sneered at him where their superiors could see it.

            But evidently his disgust for Potter was great enough to result in some sympathy for Draco. His two companions seated the patient on a combination of divan and chair that was deliberately lower than Draco’s seat, while he stood back, arms crossed and a heavy frown on his face. He made sure to shake his head at Potter on his way out.

            Interesting.It seems that Potter’s determined lying affects even people who’ve known him for a relatively short time.

            Draco waited in silence, wondering how long it would take Potter to break it and demand an explanation, or start saying he wasn’t crazy and hadn’t meant to chew his wrists open with magic. But Potter didn’t move, didn’t respond, other than to examine the bandages on his hands as if they contained the secrets of the universe.

            “You do realize that you can’t leave St. Mungo’s until I say that you’re sane?” Draco asked at last, softly, spinning his wand between his fingers. “And I’m unlikely to do that if you stare into nothingness?”

            Potter looked up. For just a moment, the glass over his eyes starred with amusement, but it was gone in instants.

            “Say whatever you want, Malfoy,” he replied in a bored tone. “Even though I am sane, and if you just listened to me I could prove that to you, you wouldn’t let me go. This is your big chance, isn’t it? To repay me for everything I did to you in Hogwarts.” He shrugged and returned his gaze to his fingertips again.

            Draco understood the mediwizards’ reaction to Potter in instants. His dislike grew sharp enough that his fingers tightened on his wand.

            “Do you understand what Psyche-Diving is?” He made his voice cool and distant. “At all?”

            “Enlighten me.” Potter’s lips skinned back from his teeth.

            Smug bastard.He does know, I know he does. But since he had moved the conversation in this direction, and one of his biggest tenets when faced with a patient was the unalterable principle that a Diver did not retreat, Draco continued. “It involves entry into the patient’s mind—no, more than that. Movement into the patient’s mind. I’ll essentially set up camp within your thoughts. I can evaluate your sanity best that way. And it’s called Psyche-Diving because I’ll dive into your soul, Potter. Every single one of your secrets will be mine.”

            He might have expected defiance, bravado, or nervousness. Potter’s full-throated laughter was a new reaction.

*

            Harry shook his head as his laughter subsided. He felt happier than he had since the moment he’d awakened in St. Mungo’s and realized that the first part of his plan had really worked. Malfoy was so funny.

            No one knew all his secrets now. No one ever would again. And if the wildest chance came to pass and Malfoy somehow got past the Cassandra Curse—

            Harry caught the hope and strangled it before it could grow.

            No, he wouldn’t. But even if he did, let’s talk impossible universes, Harry, he wouldn’t tell anyone else. He would just hug the truth to himself for the delight of tormenting someone he’d always hated.

            Malfoy was Malfoy. He’d done well enough for himself, and he had something of a reputation as a Mind-Healer, but that was with people he didn’t have childhood grudges against. Harry was just a victim. He couldn’t expect any help from him.

            No help from anyone, ever, he reminded himself, and raised his eyebrows and settled back into his seat as Malfoy stared at him with a thundercloud expression. Did the idiot really think he could intimidate Harry by seating him on a lower chair? Harry had endured too much of the same thing from Snape when he was a student to be affected by it.

            “I’m sure you’ll find all sorts of interesting things in my mind,” he said.

            And of course he told only the truth, and of course the curse only ensured that Malfoy took it as a lie. Harry had become somewhat of an expert in the Cassandra Curse over the past half-year since he’d recognized it, and now he could notice the smallest signs of its conquering a new victim. A slight glaze slid over Malfoy’s eyes, and a shadow flickered about his temples as the curse attacked his mind.

            That was the reason that he wouldn’t ever find the caster, from what Harry had understood. The curse altered immediate, present-time perceptions, but also memories—or Ron and Hermione would have been able to compare his “lies” with his past behavior and understand that he would never have wanted to do something like this. The caster’s memory had been altered along with everything else, and now he either didn’t remember that he’d cast the spell, or probably thought he’d done it for some good reason.

            “I’ve never before met a patient who thought his own mind wasn’t interesting,” Malfoy said softly, and lifted his wand. “This shall be a—unique—experience, indeed. Legilimens!”

            The magic, familiar from Snape’s old Occlumency lessons and from the Unspeakable more recently than that, entered Harry’s eye like a needle. He flinched and hissed under his breath, but held himself still, staring boldly at Malfoy. Even if he saw things Harry would prefer that he not know about, he wouldn’t understand any of them. The curse hung in front of them like a dark veil, distorting their shapes and reality.

            Harry had never thought he would be grateful for the damn spell, but he was now.

*

            Draco braced himself as his own perceptions arrowed forwards, twisting and cutting around any barriers that might have been in the way. If Potter was an Occlumens, he was such a poor one that Draco didn’t even feel broken shields scraping against his belly.

            In moments he floated in darkness. Draco waited. This was usual. The spell only took him so far on a first journey such as this; then it reached ahead of him, and fetched back what he wanted to see. In this case, Draco was concentrating on the reason for Potter’s suicide.

            The memory bounced back to him, surrounding him with a sudden wash of nearly white walls and plain gray carpeting. Potter stood in front of him, and yet at the same time Draco was seeing through his eyes, hearing his rasping breath as his own.

            The split perception was caused by the memory itself battling with what Draco expected to see, since he was not Potter and knew it. He knew how to combat the confusion, since he’d been doing this for five years. Coolly, he divided them completely, assigning the real memory to his right eye and the view from the outside to his left. Then he closed his left eye tightly and shared Potter’s body for those moments before he had decided to conjure the iron jaws.

            Contradictory emotions rushed through him, such an explosion that they rocked Draco slightly in his seat. Worry, fear, hope, fury. He wanted this to work, so badly, but he didn’t know if it would, and what if someone found him in time to stop him from cutting his wrists at all, or, worse, didn’t find him in time after he did it—

            Draco sniffed. It really was just a plea for attention, wasn’t it? He never meant to die. I knew it, although I didn’t think even this arrogant wanker would stoop that low. Cutting his wrists so people would fuss over him? Pathetic.

            When it came to the final moments before the suicide, Potter moved quickly. He conjured the jaws. He animated them. He let them have his wrists. And he flung away his wand when the blood began to flow. Draco caught the quick dart of his thought: can’t be tempted to heal myself.

            Of course he couldn’t, or it would have seemed that he wasn’t serious—which he wasn’t—to anyone who happened by. Draco snorted in displeasure. He had somehow expected better from Potter, though he wasn’t certain why any more. The man was twenty-seven now—

            But still a boy inside, and you always knew that, didn’t you? The public perception of him is different, but then, everyone thought differently of him than you did during Hogwarts, too, and the plain and simple fact even then was that they didn’t see him like you did.

            Potter crumpled as blood loss overcame him, and the memory ceased to be interesting for Draco. He closed his right eye and opened the left, expecting to see the same thing from the outside now, though without the distraction of Potter’s idiotic emotions.

            And paused.

            Potter was breathing fast, his eyes closed. Then those eyes flared open, and the sheer expression of determination and fatigue there caught Draco. He looked as if he’d been suffering for years and had finally decided to end it all. If that look had still been on his face when Weasley found him, Draco could understand why his best friend hadn’t immediately realized that Potter had sliced his wrists open just for the attention.

            But you know that’s not real. You were just inside his head.

            Yes, but the emotions didn’t match the expressions on his face. Or, at least, not perfectly. Draco thought he could make them match with just a little work, but—

            He pulled himself sharply back from that temptation. He would not prejudice his own conclusions. This was the whole reason that he used the outer perspective along with the inner one. It could sometimes reveal things that not even the patient had noticed, the way that a Pensieve could show more than someone wanted to remember.

            As objectively as possible, he watched Potter call the jaws and fling his wand away, again. And now there was another expression on his face as he closed his eyes and slumped to his knees. Triumph.

            Well, of course. He must have realized that this would take him to St. Mungo’s and away from a workload that was becoming too much for him, poor hero, even though it was only what the wizarding world had a right to ask of their “savior.”

            And he forced himself to watch the whole thing, before he at last leaped backwards and opened his eyes to look at Potter over the edge of his own desk again.

            “You wanted to kill yourself solely for the attention?” he asked, trying to make sure that his voice expressed all of his incredulity, and not sure he succeeded.

*

            Harry shivered in relief the moment he felt Malfoy depart his mind. He couldn’t have blocked the entrance, and it had to happen as part of the healing process, but he still disliked having someone else spying on him like that. No one who had entered his thoughts had ever been kind to him.

            “No,” he said. “I did it to get myself out of the Auror Department.”

            And that was the truth, but Malfoy heard it as a lie, of course, and slapped his hand against the edge of the desk. “Your duties there were light enough, I should think,” he said, with a curl of his lip. “They wouldn’t have worked their hero that hard.”

            Whoever had invented the Cassandra Curse had been very, very clever, Harry had to admit. It could make someone else ignore his own memories, in the rare cases where those directly contradicted something he had learned about Harry.

            “Think of what you’ve read in the Prophet,” he said, in a self-mocking tone that he knew Malfoy would take a different interpretation from. “How many different cases did I solve? How many different times was I alone? How many times did I almost die?” He shook his head. “I was the hardest-working Auror in the Department, because I was always handling not only fieldwork but paperwork meant for two.”

            The faintest frown marred Malfoy’s forehead, as if he were struggling to recall reading about those cases and couldn’t. And then he straightened and gave Harry a smirk, and Harry felt an odd twinge of relief. It would have been too much, after all his planning and careful resignation of hope, to meet someone, now, on the edge of his escape, who could resist the curse’s influence. Not to mention the horror of having to depend on his enemy.

            “Not true at all, Potter,” he said. “There were only a few articles about you—“

            Harry resisted the temptation to roll his eyes.

            “And most of them covered you in fawning detail.” Malfoy leaned forwards and made his voice a soft croon. “Were they not flattering enough for you? Did the mean reporters hurt Baby Potter’s feelings? Is that it?”

            Harry shuddered. “You sound too much like your aunt when you do that,” he told Malfoy, who had raised his eyebrows. “Stop it.”

            “You’ve met my mother’s blood traitor sister, then—“

            “I was speaking of Bellatrix.” Harry shook his head, and the memory of Bellatrix taunting him after Sirius had fallen behind the veil vanished. He’d had to become practiced at that, even as he spent more and more of his time dwelling with the dead who could still understand him. If he focused too much on how horrible his past had sometimes been, it was another invitation to despair and giving up.

            “You never met my aunt Lestrange,” Malfoy said, his head rearing back like a disturbed snake’s.

            “Yes, I did.”

            “Why are you lying about such easily verifiable facts?” Malfoy crossed his legs and draped them over his desk, as if he could be completely casual in Harry’s presence. Harry pitied him, a little. That was the one thing he had never managed.

            Well, all right, one of a long list of things he never managed. There was also winning the Snitch away from me, and getting me in trouble without getting in trouble himself, and figuring out I had an Invisibility Cloak, and earning better marks than Hermione—

            “I could bring other people into the room who would testify that you never met my aunt,” Malfoy continued. “That’s my next question, in fact, Potter. Why lie? What’s the pleasure in it for you, when you must know that it drives everyone away?” He paused, and lifted a hand to his cheek. “Or do you not enjoy the company of your courtiers anymore, since they don’t have the grace to laugh at your jokes?”

            “I want my friends back more than anything in the world,” said Harry, and for a moment he hated the curse all over again for the honesty it compelled him to. “But I’ve learned that I can’t have them. They’re under a curse.”

            Malfoy laughed. “The Healers did examine them for that, you know. Sometimes a suspected case of suicide is actually a case of someone else getting jealous or impatient for an inheritance and pushing too much, too early. But there was no trace of a spell on them.”

            “The spell’s on me.”

            Malfoy simply shook his head. Harry shrugged in return. Well, this way, he can’t say that I never told him.

*

            Draco was growing steadily more fascinated as he pushed onwards. There was apparently a core of malice in Potter that he’d been lucky enough never to run afoul of. Potter was lying for sheer delight in lying, just as his friends had said. He had attempted suicide for attention. He had delusions of grandeur. He would insist that simple and small facts were untrue, just for the sake of forcing his interlocutor to look them up.

            If this was part of an intentional plan to drive the Weasley family around the bend, Draco had to salute him.

            But he wouldn’t allow Potter to baffle him. He always triumphed over his patients. Always. He coaxed his suicidal ones back to sanity; he forced the mad to realize that their delusions about their friends and family were not true; he stripped the obsessive of any ground to believe that the objections of their obsessions would ever love them back. He was a Healer, but the best kind of Healer, the kind who could get away with inflicting wounds under the guise of helping someone else.

            He would enjoy injuring Potter, breaking through that smug mask to find the vulnerable and bleeding man beneath.

            “And what is this spell called?” he asked, pretending to play along for a moment.

            “The Cassandra Curse.”

            Draco laughed again. “That’s a legend, Potter,” he said. “Did you really expect me to believe you?”

            “I don’t expect anyone to believe me, Malfoy.” Potter had slumped in his seat and started picking at his bandages again. “It would be nice, but this curse makes everyone believe that everything I say is a lie. Why should you be the exception?”

            Draco’s pride reared up, but more than that, he knew Potter was not telling the truth. He wanted people to believe him, follow him around with open and panting mouths, and be available to him to taunt and tease and fuck and ignore at any time. It must have rattled his cage fiercely when his family and friends had decided to bring him to St. Mungo’s instead of indulging him any longer. They would probably have brought him much sooner, Draco thought, but for his being Harry Potter.

            “This was just an exploratory session, you do realize,” he whispered. “Tomorrow, I go deeper. And every day after that, I dive deeper still, until I’m seated in the center of your soul.”

            Potter looked up at him, and his eyes were infuriatingly fearless.

            “Look as hard as you want,” he said. “You won’t find anything.”

            And that made the fearlessness a mask of bravado, Draco knew, and glee exploded through him. He couldn’t wait for the moment when Potter would have to admit that Draco really did know him, that he had pried his secrets open in a way that no one else had before, not even his Mudblood and blood traitor friends.

            “Since you refuse to confess the truth to me,” he said lightly, “I think our session is finished for this morning.”

            Potter simply nodded, and sat still as Draco rang for the mediwizards. They escorted him out of the room, and Draco turned to take notes on his session.

            Patient has major delusions of grandeur. Among other things, he believes that the Daily Prophet has written lead articles about every single one of his cases for the past few years.

            Draco tilted his head back and sucked on the end of his quill for a moment, trying to recall how many articles there had actually been. He shrugged when he couldn’t remember. It was not as though Potter was the center of Draco’s life the way he wanted to be the center of everyone’s, and he could always look it up later.

            Patient also refuses to volunteer explanations for his suicidal behavior, but in this Psyche-Diver’s opinion, it was born solely of the desire for attention. Further Dives are necessary to confirm this, however. Patient also lies solely for the delight in lying, and apparently believes that no one will catch him at it, or that everyone will forgive him for these deceptions. My next Dive shall be an attempt to get to the center of this delusion.

            Draco signed the report with a flourish, and then Summoned a Pensieve from a hidden corner of the room. He would copy the memories of Potter’s mind to it and study them again. That way, if he had missed anything, he would be more likely to see it on a second scan.

            But he didn’t think he would find anything interesting. This was his first contact with Potter in a decade, and yet he thought he could say that he understood the man better than anyone else. He always had.

*

            Harry kept his head bowed as the mediwizards escorted him reluctantly back to his room, as though he were utterly uninterested in everything around him. The mediwizards were probably used to this reaction from patients who tried to kill themselves, and didn’t do anything more than glare at him occasionally.

            Harry was studying the walls, though, and the nearly hidden—though not well enough, to the eyes of an Auror—buttons and bells and alarm wards which would inform them that a patient had escaped. Each patient’s door had a particularly intriguing knot of red and yellow lines. Harry had seen spells braided together like that before, but not in this pattern. It would take him at least a few days to work out what it meant, and how he could pick it apart, without his wand, so that he could leave his room unnoticed.

            They put him back in his cell, and Harry stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling, again, his mind whirling with the security precautions on the fourth floor and how he would get past them. He knew where his wand was held—on the first floor, where every dangerous patient’s wand was taken away; he’d escorted a few mad prisoners to St. Mungo’s in his time—and he had to concentrate on getting there before he could come up with any other brilliant plans.

            He had time, though. He doubted Malfoy was going to figure anything out, either.

*

            Draco sat back from the Pensieve with a deep frown on his face, his fingers rapping the edge of the stone bowl so hard that it almost turned over.

            Something was wrong. And it wasn’t just the continual inherent wrongness of the universe fawning over Potter when Draco and certain other people had done so much more they deserved to be honored for.

            There was a disparity in his memories, Draco felt certain—some chink when his mind had skipped important information, or refused to comprehend it, and for no apparent reason. But he could not tell what it was. Potter was certainly no Occlumens. The scrape of those barriers could not be hidden. He could have shoved particular memories to the forefront of his mind and hidden others if he had enough training, but in that case, Draco would still have felt him doing so, even if he didn’t know what the hidden memories pertained to.

            Looked at objectively, there was no way that what he had seen in Potter’s mind could be anything but real.

            And yet—

            Draco had learned not to ignore the ragged edge of his instincts. They had saved him too many times to count.

            He bent over the Pensieve again. There was no way that Harry Bloody Potter would fool him. Potter had won enough of their contests for one lifetime.

            He would find out the truth.

*

            Thrnbrooke: As you can see, even Draco is having a lot of trouble.

            Paigeey07: Thanks! I worked for a long time to come up with this curse.

            Yami Bakura: Hee, thanks! You did leave me a few reviews on ‘Building With Worn-Out Tools,’ but believe me, I understand about the blurring into one giant fanfic. It makes it hell trying to find and remember stories I liked.

            Draco_Harry_lover: Thanks for reviewing!
- 2
- 3
- 4
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

A Reckless Frame of Mind