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A Dream of Running Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7806 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Three—An Experienced Actor
            “Do exactly as I bid you, and don’t say anything.”
            That had been Snape’s sole instruction after he stepped into Draco’s room and found the blackened body of his aunt on the floor. He had cast a few spells that did nothing as far as Draco could see, except clean up some of the ash. Snape’s mouth was taut, and once his hand shook on the wand.
            He had laid it down then and spent a moment contemplating or meditating or something, his head in his hands. Draco, staring at him in silent dread that he would have broken except for Snape’s instructions not to talk, felt his heart tremble. If Snape didn’t know how to save him, there was no way that Draco could learn.
            But then Snape opened his eyes, and they were as fathomless as ever. He gave a single nod at Draco and turned away, then whirled back and seized Draco’s shoulder. Draco slumped to the ground, crying out. Snape was holding him in a way that hurt more than Draco had ever experienced in a single part of his body.
            He thought of the Dark Lord, though, and managed to keep to the order not to talk.
            “You stupid little boy,” Snape snarled, his face down at Draco’s level. “You let your anger get the better of you, didn’t you?” He shook Draco when Draco just sat there, dazed, and turned away with an expression of disgust that Draco couldn’t have bettered. “You shall have to hope the Dark Lord will be more merciful.”
            And then he hauled Draco to his feet and out of his room, in the direction of the dining room where the Dark Lord usually held court.
            Draco opened his mouth. He had thought Snape was going to save him, help him, maybe hide the body, not take him to his doom!
            Snape turned on one heel and shook him hard enough that Draco’s head snapped back and forth and he whimpered. “You are an idiot,” Snape said, and his voice was so fierce that Draco cowered again. “I wash my hands of you. May the Dark Lord find some use for you!”
            The only thing that kept Draco from utterly panicking and trying to run was that moment of Snape touching his face. He had planned what to do. This wasn’t random. It wasn’t an outburst of frustration.
            It was meant to look like an outburst of frustration, Draco realized abruptly. He knew Professor Snape had good Occlumency shields. He had tried to breach them once, and felt as if he were skidding on solid ice before Snape had thrown him contemptuously back into his own mind.
            If the Dark Lord tried to breach Snape’s mind…
            Draco trembled, and no longer slouched as he walked beside Snape. He couldn’t say that he was eager to meet his fate, but he would rather not exasperate the one person here with a plan that might be able to save him.
*
            “He has killed Bellatrix, my Lord.”
            Snape snapped the words in a voice that trembled on the edge of patience, and thrust Draco into the middle of the dining room. Draco tripped. He hadn’t known Snape would do that, and he barely caught himself on his hands and knees before he slammed his nose into the table.
            Snape had interrupted a meeting. Draco glanced around from beneath lowered eyelids, and saw most of the Inner Circle at the table. Snape was the only prominent one who was missing. Well, and his father, of course.
            Then Draco’s memory froze again, and he bowed his head and let his eyes fix on the floor as though nothing was more interesting.
            “One of the traitors has killed one of my most faithful?” The Dark Lord’s voice was high and emotionless, something that made Draco tremble harder than he’d ever done. Draco heard the swish of robes and the slow footsteps coming towards him. He made himself stay still.
            “Yes.” Snape’s voice was a hiss. “I was there to witness it. It was the Constant Conflagration Spell, and he burned her up although he could have saved her. Where was his heart for killing when it came to Albus Dumbledore?”
            I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing, Draco thought, now on the edge of hysteria instead of panic. All of this was designed to stir up not just the Dark Lord’s ire against him, but the memory of what he had done before this to make the Dark Lord despise him. What did Snape think was going to happen?
            The slowly pacing feet reached him, and the Dark Lord’s hand rested beneath his chin. Draco had known this would happen, and he looked up and resigned himself to painful Legilimency.
            The memory of what he had done to Bellatrix was ripped from his mind. Draco screamed again, and saw Fenrir Greyback lean eagerly forwards, his nails scratching light grooves in the top of the table.
            “He screams like prey,” Fenrir murmured, and his nostrils twitched as he took a deep, appreciative sniff of air that was probably scented with Draco’s fear.
            “It is as Severus says,” said the Dark Lord, and his mind leaped out of Draco’s and towards Professor Snape. Draco became aware Snape was kneeling beside him, face uplifted and earnest, utterly defenseless.
            That’s the way it looks, anyway, Draco thought, and he was intensely glad that the Dark Lord was no longer looking at him. On the other hand, the Dark Lord was so powerful a Legilimens that he might be able to learn what they were planning from skimming it off Draco’s surface thoughts. Draco looked at the ground again, and clenched his hands next to him.
            “The boy was provoked?” Whatever the Dark Lord had seen in Snape’s thoughts apparently amused him. “Does he lose his temper so easily, then?”
            “He seems to, my Lord.” Snape drew his robes around him and sniffed in Draco’s direction. “Uncontrolled, impulsive, childish. He has no use to you, my Lord, and will only stand in your way. Will you permit me to kill him as I have removed other…impediments for you?”
            Draco crouched there because he was too scared to do anything else. But his mind was turning in so many different directions that it was physically painful. This was Snape’s idea of “saving” him?
            “Perhaps he has a use,” the Dark Lord whispered, “if he has a taste for pain and a ready temper.”
            Snape shifted. “My Lord?” But he went still at another glance from the Dark Lord. Draco wondered what he would have done if that hadn’t happened. Dared to protest? Done something else to send the Dark Lord’s mind in a different direction?
            The Dark Lord turned back to Draco. “Child,” he said, and the hatred Draco felt for Potter or even Bellatrix was nothing compared to the hatred he felt for that voice and that word, “you may know that I recently freed a Death Eater named Julian Elwood.”
            Elwood was sitting at the table behind him. Draco nodded mutely, held that way partially by fear and partially by Snape’s instructions.
            “You will assist him in his magical research,” said the Dark Lord. “You are to do whatever he tells you, without hesitation. If you hesitate, then I will use the same spell on you that you did on Bellatrix, with an incantation to make it last three times as long. Do you understand me?”
            Draco shuddered, and went on shuddering. It felt as though his spine and arms and shoulders had escaped his control, and so had his head. He went on nodding until the Dark Lord turned abruptly away from him, looking bored.
            “Take him away and put him to his new duties, Julian,” the Dark Lord murmured, with a wave of his hand. “He will be lucky if he comes out of it with his mind intact, but he has cost me a Death Eater. One mad one may replace another.”
            Elwood stalked towards him, a bulk of a man with brown hair that fell around his broken nose. He looked down at Draco for a moment, and then drew back his boot.
            Draco knew Elwood would kick him in the side and break ribs and think nothing of it. And then it would be even harder to do the work the Dark Lord had commanded him to do, and survive.
            He thought he was the only one looking at Snape as he stood, since the Dark Lord had already turned back to his confederates, and Snape was kneeling on the floor in a submissive posture. Snape’s eyes shone.
            There was a mean satisfaction about the way they did, as though this had been what he intended all along.
            Was it?
            There was no way that Draco could know. The only things he knew for certain were that Snape had gone to a great deal of trouble to set up the memory of him getting angry at Draco over Bellatrix’s death and dragging Draco out of his room, in case the Dark Lord peered into his mind—
            And that he had better do what the Dark Lord told him and not mess up again, or he would die.
            At least that part hasn’t changed, Draco thought gloomily, and followed Elwood into what had once been the Manor’s primary Potions lab.
*
            Draco’s mind whirled as he sank into bed. He could see why the Dark Lord had thought he would be good at Elwood’s work. It was a complex, challenging, delicate task, but along the way, it involved a lot of destruction, and the torture of—
            Draco hardened his heart and mind. He hadn’t wanted to kill Dumbledore, but he had known that the poison or the necklace could do it, if they got there. They had almost killed other people. It was silly pretending that part of him wasn’t willing to do anything it could to stay alive.
            Well, for family. And revenge. But Draco had to stay alive to protect his mother or get any sort of revenge.
            Elwood was building what he had said, when Draco asked the one question he was permitted each hour, was a “pain machine.” Draco could see why it had that name. It was a great, delicate golden cage of braided wires, and the dangling wires wove around slabs of stone and turning gears of silver and vials of crystal. Draco had actually thought the whole thing was meant to deliver potions to unwilling victims, at first.
            And there were unwilling victims. Oh, they were there.
            Draco clamped his hands over his eyes and rolled onto his side. He wondered if Snape knew about this, knew exactly what he had delivered Draco into. Or maybe he didn’t care, as long as Draco was protected and his vow was fulfilled. Or maybe he would have taken anything, because he was less in control of the situation than Draco thought and had to accept what the Dark Lord demanded.
            There were Muggleborns there, and traitors to the Dark Lord’s cause, and a few Muggles. Elwood had explained that Muggles didn’t have the magical core necessary to power the machine, and they were kept only as “controls.” Whatever that meant. Draco hadn’t learned all he had to know yet.
            What he did know was that the victims were bound to the machine, wires coiling around them, and Elwood would cast spells, mostly the Imperius Curse, that forced them to say their full names in precise, clear voices. Then each of them would pronounce Harry Potter’s full name in the same way.
            And when the second name was said, the machine trembled into life, and the victims screamed and screamed, and golden, shining strands of magic spread out of their bodies. The magic solidified into wires that sprouted more crystal vials, which filled with a shimmering clear mist. And then Elwood would end the spell and move forwards to attach the gears and stones, which seemed to be the only part of the machine not grown out of their bodies.
            Draco had no idea what this was. He only knew it was more complicated than putting a Taboo on a name, which the Dark Lord had done himself, to his own name. More complicated by far.
            He shuddered again—at least it had stopped being the uncontrollable shuddering that the Dark Lord’s touch had inflicted on him—and slipped into sleep.
*
            The moment he opened his eyes in the grey twilight, Draco remembered Potter, and the box Snape had given him, and the dream caged away from his consciousness all day.
            Snape is a master at Legilimency, Draco thought. The Dark Lord had picked up on no hint of Draco’s treachery because Snape had buried the memories and thoughts in thoroughly in Draco’s mind. What Draco didn’t think about, he couldn’t betray to the Dark Lord.
            Draco wandered towards the river again, though this time he did detour to see whether there was anything else to this country except trees and grass and the river. There didn’t seem to be. Everything was the same color, too.
            Not that Draco cared when he dipped a hand into the water and scooped up the cleanliness to his mouth for a taste. It seemed as though his body had been longing for that all day. Maybe part of him remembered his last taste. Draco relaxed as though someone had slipped a Calming Draught into his food, and then sat down and let his feet dangle in the water. If it didn’t hurt him to drink, he didn’t think that it would hurt him to touch it with bare skin.
            “Malfoy.”
            This time, Draco didn’t jump. He just turned around and nodded to Potter from his place on the bank, and then watched as Potter jogged towards him and halted uncertainly a foot away.
            “You look different,” Potter said. “As though someone’s been torturing you.”
            Draco shrugged. Here, it was easier to forget about the problems that seemed so pressing when he was awake. “Not physically. The Dark Lord and Snape have both been through my mind, and I’ve had to watch people being tortured. Oh,” he added, remembering that morning. Even that seemed to have faded from his mind, incredible as it was. “And I killed Bellatrix today. That probably has something to do with it.”
            Potter, who’d been about to take his seat on a stone that projected into the current, fell into the stream at that. Draco snickered, and didn’t help him out. It did his heart good to see Potter paddling to shore and coming out of it with his hair slicked back with water, his eyes fastened on Draco as though nothing else was important.
            It does me good in lots of ways, Draco vaguely acknowledged.
            “I wanted to kill her,” Potter whispered. “She killed Sirius.”
            That, Draco hadn’t expected. At least he was seated on the flat bank itself, not on something pointed he could fall off, or he might have imitated Potter. “What?” he asked.
            “My godfather,” said Potter. “She knocked him through a magical artifact at the Department of Mysteries. I thought at first he might have survived, or she could have cursed him with a curse that he could live through, but—no, he’s dead.” He stared off into the distance. “And now you tell me that she’s dead?” He looked back at Draco.
            “Sorry,” Draco said without sincerity, shrugging. “I would have saved her for you if I knew.” He wrapped his arms around his knees, his shock already fading. Who could say that everyone didn’t have unexpected dark things inside them? Not Draco. “By the way, I think you ought to know that the Dark Lord, as a kind of punishment and a kind of way of making use of me, put me to working with Julian Elwood.”
            “The one who’s putting the Taboo on my name.” With effort, Potter seemed to forget about his desire to kill someone Draco had already killed, and fixed his gaze on him, blinking. “What about him? What’s he doing?”
            “It’s not the Taboo,” said Draco. “Not just that. I don’t know what it is, exactly.”
            He told Potter all he could remember, and Potter’s face was grim when he was done. He shook his head when Draco stared at him, and murmured, “I’ve never heard of anything like that, either. I’ll have to ask Hermione.”
            “Do you ask her for everything?” Draco demanded. Some of his peacefulness had leaked away as he recounted the horrors that he’d lived through that afternoon. “Can’t you do any research on your own?”
            “It’s stupid to do things that someone else can do better,” said Potter, and stood up with an angry glance at him. “Besides, you’d better be grateful that I’m the only one who can come to you like this, because I was the one that Moody gave the bloody box to. Or Ron would be meeting you here instead.” He jerked his head down. “Until next time, Malfoy.”
            He was walking away when Draco called out to him, “What, no thanks? Not even a ‘Thank you for risking your life to come here, Malfoy’?”
            Potter paused in mid-step and looked back at him. “Thank you for coming, Draco,” he said softly.
            He vanished. Draco sat there, feeling unfairly breathless, until the greyness palled around him into the black depths of true sleep.
*
staar: Not that Draco really wanted to kill Bellatrix, but he’s not going to mourn her, either.
Marron: Well, other emotions than “surprised,” but also that, yes.
SP777: Thank you!
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A Dream of Running Water