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The Serpent's Gaze, Book Four: Betting On Blood	By : DictionaryWrites Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male Views: 3021 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter and the characters therein belong to JK Rowling; I'm playing in the sandbox, as it were, whilst claiming no ownership and making no money.

Chapter List
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Harry feels his throat move, feels the vibration in it as he screams, but he barely hears the sound; it echoes around the inside of his head distantly, like it's happening in a far off cave. He doesn't know how far he falls for, but he feels his stomach almost leaping out of him as he drops too-fast, too-soon, too far: when he hits the ground, it's surprisingly softly. The leaves underneath him make quiet crinkling sounds, and although they're dusted with snow, Harry doesn't feel the cold.
He's on his feet now, moving forwards with his bare feet (where are his shoes?) making crunching sounds as they crush the mulch and twigs and dropped leaves underneath him. The forest canopy is black and high above his head, and in the distance he hears bird calls and the whistle of arrows through the air, and fires crackling: centaurs. Although he looks one way and then the other, he doesn't see them, so he simply keeps on walking, walking until he cannot hear them anymore.
There's a sickly scent on the air, too supernaturally saccharine to belong to something that isn't magical, and as he inhales, he feels the scent take him over. There's an edge to the scent, a heavy edge, and he realizes what it is when he steps in it.
Staring down at the grey pooling around his bare feet, he smells the unicorn blood on the air, almost tastes it on his tongue. He feels himself gag, and he drops to his knees in the silver surrounding him, letting it soak into his robes as it did all those years ago, and he puts his hands on the unicorn's shoulder. It isn't breathing beneath him, and it's so cold under the pads of his fingers, and he realizes that one of its eyes is entirely gone from its head, pecked away by something or other. He'd been blinded by the reflection of the moonlight (where is the moon coming from? hadn't the canopy been so black?) on the unicorn's blood, but now he sees he's looking only at its top half. Its haunches aren't in sight, and the unicorn's rib cage has been ripped open by something with great, mighty jaws.
Green tinges some of the unicorn's soft, white hair, and when Harry drags his fingers over the stain, his skin hisses with steam, and he feels the pain of acid.
He cries out, again, but he barely hears it: he hears only the smooth sound of scales on crunching leaves and twigs, and when his head whips to the side, he sees a blind monster staring back at him. Its head is huge, and where its eyes ought have been are red-black scabbed-over wounds. When it opens its mouth, Harry screams.
---
"Harry!" Draco says sharply, and Harry feels the other boy's thin, piano-player's hands on his shoulders (does Draco play piano? Harry knows Lucius does), shaking him awake. Draco's hands are cold, and his face is concerned. "You were- you were screaming. Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Harry tries to say, but it comes out as a croak. His voice is hoarse, and he has to cough into his hand, reaching for the glass of water on his bedside and taking greedy gulps. The dormitory door flies open, and Francis stands there, dressed hurriedly in a dressing gown over mermaid-decorated pyjamas and looking panicked.
"Potter? You alright? I could hear you all the way-" Francis takes in a small breath, and he seems to relax. "Nightmare, Potter?"
"Yeah, Francis. Draco wasn't murdering me or anything." Francis' lip twitches, and he seems to almost laugh, but not quite. He still looks a bit pale, but he nods his head.
"Well," he says awkwardly, quietly in his more usual voice. "Can't be too careful. Night, lads." Francis Drummond pulls the door shut behind him, heading back down the corridor to his own room. Draco sits on the edge of Harry's bed, sat on one of his own feet, and Harry feels the heavy weight of the other boy's grey gaze on him.
After a long, drawn-out silence, Draco says, "Was it a nightmare? About- about the tournament?" Harry shakes his head.
"No, no, it was just about- Hagrid's had his roosters die, down by his hut. I guess it just made me think of the Basilisk." Draco squints at him. "Rooster cries kill Basilisks, Draco," Harry adds.
"I knew that," Draco says sharply. Harry raises his eyebrows at him, and Draco huffs a short sound. "Well, the Basilisk-" He hesitates. "Is it still out there? Isn't it dead? I thought-" Draco stops short again. "It's not dead. It's just out there, in the Forbidden Forest? It's been out there all this time? My father-"
"Oh, shut up," Harry interrupts him. "Go back to bed." Draco's white cheeks are tinged red with an angry flush, but he stomps back to his own bed all the same, and Harry blows out the candle Draco had lit beside him. In the darkness, Harry lies still for a long, long time, his eyes closed as he does his best to get back to sleep.
He doesn't manage it.
---
Harry and Cedric sit in silence in the empty classroom. Cross-legged on one of the desks, Harry sits with a small stack of books in his lap - histories of the Triwizard Tournament and books that go into detail as to the tasks. They're not being given any clues, this time, except that when Harry had looked out of the window that morning, the colosseum had been returned to its place on the Quidditch pitch, and was no longer hovering in pieces around the lake. Now replaced, its centre is utterly empty, except that all of the lawn has been stripped away: in the middle of the oval stadium is just a brown dirt floor.
"You want to look at precedents, then?" Cedric asks, slightly stiffly. He's sat with one leg up on the desk he's sitting on, leaning with his forearm on his knee, and the other leg dangling down. He looks like one of the dashing figures posed on the front of Pansy Parkinson's racy comics - it's not a pose Harry has ever thought someone would actually take on.
"Yeah," Harry says. Another long silence spans the short distance between them. "So, Slytherins are doublecrossers, then."
"And Hufflepuffs are stupid," Cedric returns archly. It's the closest to a sharp word Harry's ever actually heard out of him, given that Cedric Diggory is Hufflepuff's golden, shining example of manhood and Hufflepuffhood. Harry presses his lips together, leaning back slightly and crossing his arms over his chest, scowling at the other boy.
"You really think being thought of as dim is as bad as being thought of as evil?" Harry asks, and Cedric scoffs.
"Well, you guys aren't exactly shining examples of friendship, are you?"
"Yes, we are," Harry says. "We're just loyal to people who deserve it rather than anyone who smiles at us in the street. We don't blindly follow anyone who looks good to us."
"And what about You-Know-Who?" Cedric demands. "Did he look good to you?"
"I don't know," Harry says, "Why don't we call my parents and ask them?" Cedric stops short, paling slightly. His neck and the tips of his ears are slightly red, but the flush doesn't show in his cheeks, and Harry can see the way he stiffens, sitting forwards properly and clenching his fists in his lap.
Cedric's nostrils flare, and he says in a sharp, acidic tone, "Do you not think it's a bit disrespectful to your mum and dad's memory to use them as a trump card in every argument you have?"
"No idea," Harry says, shrugging his shoulders. "I guess if I could, Cedric, I'd ask them." The silence, this time, is not silent at all: Harry can distinctly hear the sound of his own heartbeat ringing in his ears, and he can hear both of their heavy breathing, and the creaking of the desk Cedric's sat on: he can't stay still on it. "I don't think Hufflepuffs are stupid, Cedric. It's just the only jokes I hear are Hufflepuff jokes, and I couldn't think of any others under pressure."
"And Slytherins aren't necessarily doublecrossers, but-"
"What the fuck do you mean, necessarily?"
"Your animal is a snake!"
"Your animal's a bloody badger! What are they good for, except for giving cows TB and getting hit by cars?" Momentarily, Cedric's face goes slightly blank, and Harry adds, "Or for killing dogs, I guess." Cedric throws himself to his feet, the desk giving a relieved whine behind him.
"Badgers are noble animals, Harry. They're fiercely loyal, intelligent, and they bury their dead. They're hard workers, and-"
"They're basically blind," Harry interrupts. "A bit like your lot, really. Kind of like badgers, in that you dig yourselves into a little hole and try to ignore the world while you eat worms."
"Really?" Cedric demands. He's angrier than Harry's ever seen him, his eyes glinting with furious passion. "Because badgers stay in their groups and protect each other. Slytherins only want to protect long dead ancestors, and I can tell you there were more Slytherin Death Eaters than from any other house."
"Yeah," Harry says, standing up himself and immediately regretting it as he's forced to look up into Cedric's face. Why does the other boy have to be so tall? "Because being excluded and hated by your entire student body from the age of eleven totally isn't going to have a negative effect on your choices, is it? Don't you realize that's exactly what Voldemort wanted?" Harry ignores the way Cedric winces. "Don't you realize that's why he pushed the pureblood rhetoric so much? He doesn't care if anyone's pureblood, Cedric, not really. He just cares about power."
"A Slytherin through and through, then." Cedric says, and Harry's lip curls. "Maybe it's better if we just split the work now. Working together obviously isn't working out."
"Obviously," Harry says, and he picks up his books, and he leaves Cedric in the classroom behind him.
---
"Without trying to be too mean about it," Hermione says delicately, "that was really stupid of you, Harry."
"Can't help but agree with Granger," Blaise says reluctantly, as if the idea itself is distasteful. "Why in Merlin's name would you do that?"
"He thinks Slytherin is a house of evil traitors." Blaise watches him for a moment with his deep, brown eyes.
"Well, Harry, it is. We're known for our cunning, not our deep-hearted power of love." Harry throws a paperback from his bag at him, but Blaise just catches it, examining it with an artful disinterest. Harry and Hermione had been settled at the top of the Astronomy Tower, legs dangling down from between the crenellations at the edge of the tower, when Blaise had joined them, having spied them from the courtyard downstairs. Now, they're all sat on the ground, leaning back against the tower's inner wall. "You're going to get killed. One of you is, at least."
All at once, Harry remembers Ludo Bagman and the goblin betting agency, and he frowns, tapping his fingers on his leg.
"Draco said you had a nightmare," Hermione says, a little desperately, obviously trying to change the subject.
"Oh, is he Draco to you now, Granger?" Blaise asks sweetly. "He will be glad to hear that." Hermione throws a book at him - other than Harry's very light paperback copy of T.S. Eliot's Cats, this is Hermione's pilfered copy of Moste Advanced Poisons, and it hits Blaise in the chest like a Bludger, knocking the wind out of him. He pulls a face, leaning back on his hands and rubbing his chest. "The Gryffindors should make you a Beater. Merlin's beard, Granger, where did you learn to throw like that?"
"I was on the local cricket team at school," Hermione says, and Harry glances at her, amused. She puts her nose in the air, avoiding his gaze, and takes her book back from Blaise.
"You?" Harry asks. "Playing cricket? What, in your whites with all the-"
"So, Blaise, what do you think the third task is going to be?" Hermione asks, interrupting Harry cleanly. Blaise whistles quietly, sprawling against his school bag. His feet (Blaise's boots had been abandoned as soon as he'd discovered the warming charm around the tower's edge) are in Harry's lap, and Harry's hand absently thumbs over the skirt of Blaise's outer robes. Hermione pretends not to notice this, but whether it's for her comfort or Harry and Blaise's, he's not certain.
"I don't know, Granger," Blaise says, looking off into the middle distance. "But whatever it is, I think it's going to be the worst you've faced so far. You and Diggory have been doing just fine, Harry, but that stuff has been designed to kill you, if possible. You two have just been lucky."

"Yeah, well," Harry murmurs, and he stands up, pulling himself to sit on the edge of the tower again. He doesn't know why he likes it so much up here, seeing his feet dangling down, but it's calming, and it doesn't raise as much attention as a solo flight around the castle does. "Unless the third task actually involves me facing Voldemort, I think I'm fine."
"He's not the only person out there who wants you dead, Harry," Blaise points out quietly. His tone is neither sharp nor friendly: it's carefully neutral. Harry wonders how many of these little conversations he's had with his mother.
"He's right," Hermione says, sounding reluctant. "I mean, the stuff with-" she glances at Blaise, and then says, "Well, you know, the stuff with Bagman and the goblins aside... There's Lockhart and his lot. For goodness' sake, Harry, even Rita Skeeter has it out for you!" Harry glances back at Hermione and Blaise, and before he can respond, he winces, letting out a sharp sound of pain. His scar suddenly seems to split open his head, and when he sways on the wall Blaise grabs him by the shoulder, hauling him bodily down to the tower floor.
"What is it?" Blaise demands. Harry just lets out a short groan of pain, trying to blink it away: whenever his eyes flutter closed, the Astronomy Tower fades away, replaced by a dark, flickering room, a grand hall-
"Get Dumbledore," Harry says, his fists clutching tight at Blaise's robes to keep himself from falling down. He feels like a bolt of lightning has hit him in the centre of his head, and he tries to keep his eyes open, but he feels them close shut, feels his body collapse. Harry is paralysed in his own body, unable to move or shift or anything, as he sees his too-white hands raise to the air.
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The Serpent's Gaze, Book Four: Betting On Blood