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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23334 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
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Chapter Three—Slither

            “I need you to do better than this, Harry.”

            Healer Lyons’s voice was chiding. Harry tried to respond to it, breathing deeply and descending into his soul—clearing his mind—the way that Lyons had shown him. He had a much gentler way of doing it than Snape had ever shown in Occlumency, and he had put so much faith in Harry, spent so much time with him. It would be horrible to disappoint him.

            But when he opened his eyes, they were still there. Cobras hung from the ceiling and crawled slowly up the walls, in ways that said there were masses of other cobras beneath them. Vipers coated every inch of his arms and leaned their heads against his neck. An adder had taken up a permanent position near Healer Lyons, mouth opened and fangs poised. Harry tried to tell himself that no real snake could do that, but that just made it all the more disgusting and depressing.

            And a giant snake with human eyes had taken Healer Lyons’s place. It leaned towards him and stared with a flat gaze, and Harry had no way of knowing if the words that reached him were Parseltongue or English. “You still see them?”

            “Yes,” Harry whispered, closing his eyes. “I’m sorry.” His pulse beat dully in his temples, and he raised his hand to rub at his face, ignoring the slight sensation of weight on his arm. He hated this, he hated it, and he was beginning to think that it didn’t matter if Malfoy was right. Get rid of his magic—it was a horrible idea, but at least he would be able to see again, and be sane again.

            “It’s not your fault,” Healer Lyons said gently. “Perhaps I need to read my notes on the ways that we have healed Parselmouths in the past again. There is no reason to think that it’s your fault when I might have missed something.”

            Harry took a hard, fast breath, and then decided that he might as well ask before he lost his nerve. “Has anyone—has anyone actually managed to concentrate the snakes away? Or is the only thing I can do become a Squib?” He had considered asking Lyons about them cursing him mute and blind, but that would reveal more detailed knowledge than he was comfortable with, knowledge that he should have had no way of getting.

            And knowledge that you have no business getting. For God’s sake, are you really going to lie like Malfoy with people who are trying to help you?

            The nice thing about feeling that he was turning evil was that he at least got to keep his eyes closed. He wouldn’t see anyone human if he opened them, anyway.

            There was a long pause that Harry tried to tell himself was compassionate, not startled, and then Lyons murmured, “It is true that some of our Parselmouths treated here became Squibs, more out of a desire not to be a danger to anyone else than because they had to. But of course, no one would wish that to happen to you, Harry.”

            Except me, maybe, if there’s no other way to stop it. Harry shivered and tried to ignore the half-kiss of forked tongues against his mouth. “But is there anyone who’s managed to concentrate the snakes away? I just want to know that.”

            “Of course there are,” Lyons said, and now he sounded as though he was tapping his fingers against the arm of his chair. Harry didn’t dare listen too closely in case it metamorphosed into the rattling of a hollow tail. “I wouldn’t have suggested the treatment if I knew that it wouldn’t work.”

            Harry swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just don’t know how to deal with this—”

            “In English, Harry, please.”

            Harry ground his teeth and wanted to shout. But what good would that do in the end? He would probably only prove himself a horrible person like the one Malfoy wanted him to turn into, like the Healers thought he was turning into.

            He thought again of human lips forming words, and then said, “How common is it that people manage to concentrate the snakes away? Do you have to be good at Occlumency first before you can do it?”



            There was shocked silence from Healer Lyons’s direction, and shocked silence inside Harry’s own head, which might or might not be an improvement over the hisses. I didn’t mean to say that. I really didn’t.

            “It is not very common,” Healer Lyons said at last. “But Occlumency skill has nothing to do with it. Not desiring the Parseltongue does. I would say that five percent of all Parselmouths have managed to recover this way.”

            Five percent. And how do I know that my luck is going to hold this time? Harry ran a hand through his hair, making his fringe stand out from the scar. He heard Healer Lyons catch his breath sharply, perhaps at the sight of it, but at the moment, he couldn’t be bothered to care about whether the scar reminded someone else of Voldemort, even though he was usually careful of things like that.

            Well, that’s the point of all this, isn’t it? A Dark wizard doesn’t have to care about other people’s emotions, and that’s what I’m becoming.

            Unless he wanted to become blind and mute, or a Squib. And although he had told himself that would be preferable to becoming Dark, he remembered the way that Malfoy had spoken, so cool and confident, and wondered.

            But there isn’t any sharp dividing line, is there? I could tell myself I was only embracing the snakes and the Parseltongue to save my own life, and then I would wake up one day and find that I’d become like Voldemort without meaning to. Once I start down that road, I can’t turn back.

            “If you would turn your attention,” Healer Lyons began, but he fell silent when Harry pushed a hand towards him.

            “I don’t want to do this right now,” Harry whispered. “I want to sleep. Can you leave me alone and—I don’t know, just let me relax for a while? You can lock the door. I won’t try to break out, and I won’t speak to the snakes willingly.” Brother, they sang in his head, and they sounded sad and disapproving. He ignored that. There was no reason to think that these imaginary snakes were so different from real ones that they could understand English. Maybe they only understood his emotions.

            “The longer you put off learning this, the harder it will be to learn later,” Lyons told him, voice cool and inflexible now. The same tone that Malfoy had had in his voice, Harry thought, but so different.

            “I know that,” Harry whispered. “But I’m getting frustrated right now, and that won’t help me to master it, either. Leave me alone.” He turned away and ducked his head into the pillow, still without opening his eyes. He would see the snakes if he did that, and he simply couldn’t deal with them. Not at this moment, maybe not ever.

            Lyons hesitated, then said, “Very well,” and went out. Harry found himself listening again, and yes, there was the click of the locking ward.

            They don’t have the right to imprison me like this. I could destroy them if I wanted to, and no one would blame me.

            But Ron would. Hermione would. And Harry would blame himself. He was an Auror. It was his duty to lock away people who were a danger to others, even if that danger came from their own madness or uncontrollable magic and wasn’t their fault.

            The adder who’d been watching Healer Lyons curled up under his chin. Hating the fact that he could tell the difference between them simply from the feeling of their scales, Harry drifted off to sleep.

*

            “That doesn’t sound very promising for a first venture.”

            Draco snorted and leaned across the table to clink his glass with Pansy’s. “Potter’s still under the delusion that the Healers care about getting him back to normal, when in reality they want him to go away and stop bothering them, the same way they’ve wanted that for all the Parselmouths they’ve treated down the centuries. Once he overcomes that, I think he’ll come around to my way of thinking very quickly.”

            Pansy sighed and trained a curl around one finger. “And then what, Draco? What are you going to do with Harry Potter next to you?”

            Draco smiled at her. “What couldn’t I do? And I thought you’d agreed, anyway.”

            “I agreed that we shouldn’t let them strip him of his Parseltongue and lessen Dark magic in the world that way.” Pansy leaned forwards. “But I think it would be best if you let him go after this, Draco. When they come hunting him, that means they’ll be following him, not you.”

            Draco snorted. “You and I both had mentors in the Dark Arts, Pansy. It’s necessary, to learn the paths and prevent anyone from succumbing to the strangeness of the power at first. Potter wouldn’t have anyone if I simply let him go, and he’d probably end up insane or dead after all, neither of which fits with what I want. I’ll be his mentor.”

            “And then what?” Pansy’s fingers rapped the table and the chair, her glass and the edge of her plate. Draco hadn’t seen her do that in a long time, and kept his eyebrows raised and his gaze on her while he poured himself a new glass of wine. “You can’t keep him with you forever, Draco. Someone will notice.”

            Draco blinked, then smiled, and held his glass up to her again, although she didn’t move hers to toast him. “Don’t you understand, Pansy? That’s the point.”

            She froze, staring at him. Then she leaned back and shook her head. “Do you want to explain that one to me again? Because you’re right, I don’t understand how that can be the point when we’ve always gone out of our way to make sure that the Dark Arts don’t involve us getting noticed for them.”

            Draco sighed. “Plenty of people practice the Dark Arts, know about them, and will give you credit for using them as long as you’re polite and discreet about it,” he said. “But I dream of something different. The Dark Arts given the place they deserve, and offered as another branch of magic, with the proper precautions, the way that Potions is considered. Potions can be as dangerous as the Dark Arts, but we teach it all the same. And the model they have at Durmstrang shows that wizards can practice them openly and yet not have their entire society dissolve into chaos.”

            Pansy hunched her back. “That won’t work here. The memory of the Dark Lord has poisoned too many people against them.”

            “That’s part of the reason why I want the only person whose name is as powerful as the Dark Lord’s with me,” Draco said peaceably. “Harry Potter turned Dark wouldn’t go as far as I wnt, but I think he would want to make the world safe for himself. He wouldn’t be content with hiding forever.”

            Pansy shook her head. “That makes sense, and it might work. If Potter will ever agree to help you. I think it’s more likely that he would go Dark and then keep acting on his own.”

            “He must see that simply walking away from hospital isn’t possible.” Draco finished off the last of his wine. “He’ll need my help to escape, at least. And after that…it all lies in making my offer as attractive as I can.”

            Pansy snorted. “When have you ever been good at that, where Potter’s concerned?”

            Draco laughed. “There lies the difference between the boy I was and the man I am,” he said, and cradled the stem of his wineglass in his hands. “I’ve learned a few things about persuasion, and a few things about compromise. There are many things I want from Potter, but I’m willing to put up with not having a few of them in order to have the things I want more.”

            Pansy gave him a skeptical look. Draco only smiled into the remnants of his wine.

*

            Harry woke with a faint gasp, and opened his eyes to see the snakes were gone from the room. His hands shook as he reached for his glasses and slammed them onto his face. Perhaps now, he could finally do something normal like go to the bathroom without tripping over imaginary serpents all the way.

            He eased his feet over the side of the bed and then tried to take a step.

            The world tilted and went away from him. Harry found himself on his side, staring at the open door of the bathroom less than five steps away. He shook his head and tried to remember the last time he had eaten something. He felt faint and dizzy. Probably he’d just moved too fast when he’d been asleep for a little while.

            But when he tried to get his hands beneath him, they didn’t want to move, either. They didn’t seem to exist. Harry turned his head and tried to scream, but only a hiss slid out of a mouth that didn’t seem to have lips, either.

            And that hiss called the snakes. They danced out from beneath the bed, shining sidewinders with their delicate movements, thick black water snakes who sifted through the air as if it was a lake, a golden-brown anaconda that coiled itself near Harry’s head and licked his ear.

            This is the way that you move now, brother. Sideways and around. Your body can get a grip on the floor. You only have to want to do it.

            Wanting—right, that was the same thing Healer Lyons had said to him, that he only had to want to get rid of the Parseltongue and it would happen. Harry turned his head to the side, hissed a refusal, and once again tried to get his hands beneath him. He would crawl to the bathroom if he had to, but he wouldn’t listen to them anymore.

            There were no hands, or else there was no balance. Hell, with the snakes he was seeing everywhere, it was entirely possible that he just couldn’t see his hands, or that they were bound to his back somehow. He felt a hysterical giggle building up to slip out of his mouth, but it came out only as a hiss.

            Brother. We love you. One of the sidewinders lay along his neck for a moment, and then pulled back and extended itself slowly, repeating the way it used to move so that he could see every gesture of it. Do this, and you will be able to move.

            And hadn’t Malfoy said something like that? That Harry would start slithering, or that his body would reform itself, or something?

            Humiliated tears slipped down Harry’s face as he again tried to get his arms under him. He would still rather surrender to the Healers than to the snakes and Malfoy. In the end, they would only use him to hurt people, and Harry was far more against that than he was against the Healers keeping him locked up here.

            There was a medley of sounds somewhere beyond the hissing, but Harry didn’t pay attention to it, knowing it probably wasn’t real. Then cool hands descended and latched onto his sides, and that was so unusual that Harry turned his head and opened his eyes and saw them as they were, rather than as hallucinations.

            “Potter?”

            Malfoy’s face hovered above him. Harry stared at him, and forgot about whether Malfoy had bribed the Healers to get in here, or whether he had come to taunt Harry again. He already had all the taunting material he would ever need, seeing Harry cry like that. “Help me,” he said, or cried. At the moment, he needed that more than he needed anything else.

*

            Draco didn’t understand the Parseltongue slipping out of Potter’s mouth, but the meaning was obvious. He locked his hands beneath Potter’s body and slowly supported him up until he was leaning against the bed. Potter kept his legs twined around one another and his hands rigidly unmoving at his sides, though, and Draco didn’t understand that until he leaned in and looked at Potter’s eyes.

            There was a slit pupil in the middle of each one of them.

            Draco shivered, and didn’t need to name all the emotions in that gesture, even to himself. Ah. So. Potter had started to go through the changes that Draco had warned him about, much faster than Draco had thought he would. Either he had been hiding the destruction the Parseltongue was wreaking on him for longer than Draco had thought, or he was simply so powerful that his gift rebounded on him with worse consequences.

            Draco kept his voice soothing as he said, “I’m going to touch your hand, Potter. Squeeze back when you can feel it.” He reached out and captured one of the callused hands that, unsurprisingly, wore no rings. They would be a disadvantage for an Auror.

            It took so long that Draco began to wonder whether his bargain with Chance would hold, but finally Potter’s fingers cramped around Draco’s.

            He turned his drowning face towards Draco’s, and the tears had stopped, the pupil in his left eye rounding again. “Malfoy,” he whispered.

            Draco nodded. “You still have hands and legs,” he said, deliberately soothing and calm. “You can still walk. My guess is that the snakes were simply impatient for you to join them fully.”

            Potter shut his eyes. “I don’t want to,” he said, a hiss of its own while still being English. “There’s—there’s so much that I want to do, and it isn’t going to be accomplished by dying here or getting rid of my magic.”

            Draco smiled, certain that Potter wouldn’t see it at the moment. “Where were you going?” he asked, and then looked around and saw the open door. “Well, come, then. Can you walk?”

            Potter needed to hop the first few steps, but then his legs fell apart as though chopped in two, and he limped stiffly to the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, but Draco shut his eyes and leaned against the wall, letting his ears tell him what Potter was doing while he prepared his next assault.

            Potter was close to the edge, and had expressed, of his own free will, the desire to live instead of surrender. That meant Draco only had to make what he offered more attractive than the idea of Potter breaking out on his own—which Draco didn’t think he could do, anyway.

            The door opened. Draco stood up and turned around, ready to prepare more arguments if he needed to, but he didn’t think he would. Potter was on the brink of convincing himself, which was always the best thing in cases like this.

*

            Harry came out seeing normally, except for the shadows that danced in the corners of his vision and always would. Perhaps Malfoy’s reminding him that his legs and arms existed had restored his sight in some ways.

            Malfoy stood up when he saw Harry coming and looked at him with a slight smile. Harry stared at him, and saw the same smugness that he had known for years, the sharp way he inclined his head, the cheekbones that always looked as if they could cut, the way his fingers worked as if he would break something.

            “You see now?” Malfoy asked quietly. “Did the Healers warn you about these things, as I tried to?”

            Harry only shook his head, wordless. He had to wonder if Malfoy had cast a spell that allowed Harry to see him, but that only begged the question of why the Healers hadn’t cast the same spell. Malfoy reached out and laid a hand on Harry’s arm in the next second, leading him back towards the bed.

            Harry sat down and took a deep breath, staring at Malfoy. He wanted to ask several questions, and for once Malfoy didn’t seem inclined to insult him. He only hovered there, his eyes on Harry’s face as though he thought he could learn about his Parseltongue by studying the pores in his skin or something.

            “So what’s the difference between Dark in the way that you are and the way that Voldemort was?” he asked abruptly. “Is it even possible for a Parselmouth to be one and not the other?”

            Malfoy dipped his head and gave Harry what looked like a delighted smile, which made Harry simply stare. He had never even imagined such an expression on Malfoy’s face. He wondered if he was more befuddled by it being there at all or by it looking so normal.

            “Dark means willing to practice Dark Arts,” Malfoy said calmly. “To accede to self-control. To take risks that other wizards don’t. There isn’t much risk in a household Cleaning Charm that scrubs the dust off your clothes. There’s a lot in a spell that allows you to see inside your own mind and confront your deepest fears and fantasies.”

            Harry shivered and turned his head away from a silver-grey snake creeping up to lie alongside him in the corner of his vision. “Then—there is some risk to the Dark Arts? The Ministry has a reason for banning them?”

            “Some of them yes, some of them no,” Malfoy said, and gave him another smile of delight, this time like a teacher looking proudly on a promising pupil. “There are spells of torture and sacrifice that we would prefer not to use as well as the Ministry preferring that we not use them.” Harry thought of reminding him that he had just outed himself as a Dark wizard in front of an Auror, but he kept silent, because who would listen to Harry right now? “Those are Dark. But so is the spell to look inside your mind I mentioned, and the spell to summon your ancestral spirits and bargain with them, and the ability to create servants out of your own blood. Dark wizards are as willing to put themselves in danger’s way as others. Insane wizards like the Dark Lord don’t take risks if they can help it, but torture others and make them take the chances.”

            Harry swallowed. “That would fit in well with me,” he whispered. “With my personality, I mean. I’ve always taken risks.”

            Malfoy abruptly dropped to one knee in front of Harry and clasped one of his hands with both of his. Startled, Harry tried to pull away, but Malfoy might not even have noticed. He only stared into Harry’s eyes, and Harry found himself staring back.

            “That is the reason that I think you could make a proper Dark wizard,” Malfoy whispered back to him. “And why I think that you need to become one. You can’t control this Parseltongue gift until you do. The snakes will hurt someone else, or you, because you fight the magic. You need to master it, force it to bend to your will. Another difference between Dark wizards and mad ones. Dark wizards walk the paths and stay focused. Insane wizards stray from them and do whatever they want.”

            He stood up and bowed. “I’ll leave you to think it over, Potter. But you already have one slit pupil. I wouldn’t think about it too long.”

            He slipped out. Harry lay back on his bed, eyes shut, and listened to the hissing. With one part of himself, he thought that almost all of what Malfoy did was probably intended to manipulate him, including the dramatic gestures that he’d ended his visit with.

            But at the same time, he wanted the life Malfoy had promised him. It wasn’t the one he would have chosen, but it was the one that seemed available to him. And he did, still, want so much to live. To live as a wizard, to live as himself. It might be selfish, but there it was.

Is that good enough?

He lay there, with his hands lightly clenching, staring at the ceiling, until the next Healer’s visit.

*

angelmuziq: Thanks! I’m glad that you’re giving it a chance.

Talltree-san: I think it’s hard to think of something original to do with Parseltongue, and I don’t blame people. This is only the second story I’ve written that really focused on it.

Sp777: Draco would enjoy seeing the snakes, as long as Harry was nearby to control them.

SoundChexk: Thank you very much! I’m glad that you think the stories are in some ways continuations of the canon; I never would have gotten into fanfiction in the first place if I hadn’t loved the canon so much.

Chinese Room 23: Thank you for reviewing!

LittleO: Thank you! I can’t say how regularly I will update (I had an unplanned break because of a really bad infection), but it is one of my main three fics for the moment.

Yes, that’s one of Harry’s fears, too. That the Healers will leave him unable to think and act for himself, or that the snakes will.

dust in the wind: Thank you! Luckily, updates on it should be fairly frequent.
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