Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

An Image of Lethe	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21751 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
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Chapter Thirty-Six—Demands
            Harry woke abruptly, with all his senses prickling in a way that made him sure someone had finally broken down the protections on the rooms where he slept. He reached for his wand and got ready to conjure snakes, snap orders in Parseltongue, wake the dragon that was dozing heavy and warm near his hand, send a Patronus to find Draco—
            But then the presence moved closer, glowing silvery itself, and Harry realized it was Hermione’s Patronus, not any Death Eater.
            “Harry,” said the Patronus, looking directly at him, “we have to talk. Meet me near where the Lightfinder was.”
            The bright otter winked out a moment later. Harry sat up and spent a moment sighing, touching his hair, while the dragon lifted its head beside him and yawned, tongue spiraling around its teeth.
            But only a moment, because he knew that tone in Hermione’s voice. Either something had happened, or his friends were losing faith in him, which was an equally urgent “something.” Harry had to go now.
            He stood up and made sure that he’d laced on his boots correctly—most of the time, now, he slept in them—and then layered some more spells around the reverse Lightfinder. He couldn’t chance either taking it with him or losing it to someone who was curious enough to try and break open his rooms.
            The dragon watched him in silence. Harry turned towards it and raised one eyebrow. “Do you want to come with me?”
            The dragon stood up and moved slowly and deliberately. When it fully occupied the space on his bed where Harry had lain, and so all the warmth, it sprawled out and yawned again, then closed its eyes.
            “Yeah, didn’t think so,” Harry muttered, and cast some Silencing Charms on himself before he opened his door.
            He still disturbed someone, and almost swallowed his tongue when he saw who it was. Fenrir Greyback was sprawled on the floor in front of the door-crack, curled up like a big dog. He stirred the instant the door opened, and sat up and stared at Harry with an intent, silent, pleading expression.
            Harry shook his head, and resumed the cold mask he had hoped he would be able to put aside for a few hours. “What are you doing here, Greyback?”
            Greyback whined and crept towards him, but Harry took a step back from the reaching hand that tried to caress his boots, his skin crawling. Greyback immediately rolled over and showed Harry his belly, while still arching his neck to meet his eyes. His whine resolved into words. “I’m guarding your doors. Where are you going, my Lord? You shouldn’t go without someone to watch your back.” He sat up and immediately looked at Harry as if he assumed he would be invited along.
            Shit. Harry made an impatient motion with one hand. “Your Lord has private business, Fenrir, part of fooling the Light wizards who will cooperate with us to herd more of their kind together. I cannot bring a Death Eater with me, lest they be suspicious.”
            “But you can’t go unprotected, either.” Greyback pranced to his feet, his eyes so bright that they reminded Harry of the dragon’s. “Take me with you, my Lord. I promise to hide out of sight, and attack these Light wizards the moment they make a threatening move towards you!”
            Harry kept down the groan he wanted to give by sheer dint of effort. Then he said, “And if they make no threatening move towards me? Would you attack, without my permission, those who could be precious false allies?”
            Greyback immediately pressed his belly to the floor. “My Lord, no, of course not, my Lord!” He looked up with big eyes. “What signal will you use to show me when they overstep their boundaries and you want me to attack?”
            This is going to happen, apparently, Harry thought in resignation. It meant he would have to take care when he was with Hermione, so he would say only things that could sound ambiguous and as if he could betray them.
            He held up his right hand and folded down the last three fingers. “This signal,” he said. “Do not attack, Fenrir, do not even reveal yourself, unless you see me make it. Do you understand?”
            He thought his last words were impressive even for a werewolf, and apparently Greyback thought so, too. In seconds he was pressing his face against the floor, kissing Harry’s boots, and whining under his breath, “My Lord is wise, my Lord is kind, my Lord is good! Three fingers folded down on the right hand, the last three, yes, yes, I understand, my Lord, I understand…”
            Harry checked his disgust. As much as he would like some of his creatures, like the dragon, to work better with him, intense submission of the kind that Greyback practiced made him uncomfortable. For that matter, so had some of his fans’ displays in the days when they had thought Harry Potter was a Light wizard.
            “Come with me, then,” he said. “And be quiet,” he added, as Greyback started to open his mouth in what looked like an eager whine.
            “Yes, my Lord, of course,” said Greyback, and his eyes shone. “Quiet as stalking wolves!”
            Harry checked what he could have said about that, too, and led the way to the edge of the manor house, wrapping himself and Greyback in spells that concealed them easily from the few Death Eaters wandering about at this hour, and from the guards on the edges of the manor’s grounds. When they were at a place they could Apparate, shielded by a large tree from any sight of the house, Harry turned around and held out his arm to Greyback.
            “We’re going to deceive Harry Potter’s friends at the edge of the platform where the Ministry’s Lightfinder once stood,” he whispered. “I’ll arrive at a distance of about a hundred feet from it. I want you to conceal yourself at once, and use the magic that will keep you hidden from their sight and scent. Just in case. Do you understand me?”
            Greyback slobbered his devotion all over the back of Harry’s hand.
            I just hope this fucking works, Harry thought in resignation as they disappeared.
*
            Draco glanced up sharply as the door started to open. He had been reading up on some of the spellbooks that Astoria had located during her library research and brought to him. It couldn’t hurt to have some extra knowledge when he and Harry got trapped between Light and Dark wizards.
            His mother paused inside the doorway with her hand on her wand, which glowed with a peculiarly white Lumos that she had learned, she said, from her mother. “What are you doing awake?” she asked.
            Draco sighed a little and sat back. “You knew I would be awake,” he said. “You must have seen the light of my lamp from beneath the door.”
            A moment later, his mother inclined her head and came further into the room, shutting the door behind her. “We must speak.”
            “About Father?” Lucius had been amazingly well-behaved in the last few days, at least compared to what he’d been before. Draco hadn’t been there when he made his private apology to Narcissa, but he knew, from what his mother said, that he’d made one. And he’d been one of the people researching a way to survive, along with Pansy and Astoria and Draco himself, on the sly.
            “No.” Narcissa folded her hands in the way that always reminded Draco of the portrait of a Malfoy ancestor who was a Wizengamot judge. “About you, and the man who saved your father.”
            Draco raised his eyebrows. So his mother was going to say something about that. It simply hadn’t happened right after Lucius’s rescue, the way Draco had thought it might. Maybe Narcissa had needed some time to make up her mind.
            Draco waited, his fingers tapping out a slow rhythm on the table next to the book. Narcissa looked at the hand and frowned. Draco ignored that. He had to let his nerves out somehow, and at least a slow tapping was better than a fast one.
            “I wish to make sure that your loyalty is ultimately to your family, the way your father’s should have been from the beginning.” Narcissa walked slowly towards the fireplace and touched the mantel as if calling Draco’s attention to the dust on it. “Is it?”
            Draco nodded. “I love both of you and I would do anything to save you. I think I proved that when I begged Harry to save Father, and he did,” he added.
            Narcissa turned around, and her eyes were full of shadows. “You begged him. That means you think you owe him a debt. There was a time you would have disdained to owe anyone a debt, Draco. You had the pride that your father had trained into you, but softened, I thought, into an appropriate sense of your heritage.”
            Draco couldn’t help sniffing a little. “I’m not sure I was ever the man you want to see me as, Mother. But even if I was, the war and running as a fugitive after it would have changed me.”
            “Perhaps so.” His mother pinned him with the full weight of one of her unforgiving gazes. “I still want to know if you would choose your parents or this Potter if you had to make the choice.”
            Draco shrugged a little, easily. “I don’t intend to put myself in the position of having to make the choice.”
            His mother’s eyes hardened. “Someone else might put you in that position. With the best of intentions.”
            Draco leaned back. “I already spoke to Harry about this.” His mother started at his reference to Harry’s first name, but kept watching him, so quiet that Draco swallowed before he could continue. “He wants to return the sanity that the Lightfinder’s explosion took to the Light wizards who were affected. But there’s the possibility that they won’t forgive him for pretending the way he had to do, even if he could explain everything. In that case, he said he would leave with us.”
            “If we are forced to leave before then?” Narcissa was watching him with only her lips moving. “Which side would you choose?”
            “I am going to be with him when he confronts the Light wizards, playing the part of unwilling prisoner.” Draco spoke it and then left it lying there for his mother to respond to, the way she had kept doing with most of her words.
            “That does not answer my question.”
            “I’m trying to prevent your question from being asked, so that’s not surprising.” Draco softened his words as much as he could with a quick smile.
            His mother stepped back from him, and then turned the motion into one that let her hand slide smoothly along the stone of the fireplace. Draco looked at her in as much sympathy as he could muster. He didn’t think Narcissa was trying deliberately to separate him from someone he loved. She didn’t have any idea how deep his bond with Harry ran.
            Draco entertained the idea of trying to explain, but he doubted it would make much difference. Narcissa had been angry with Lucius because he had put himself before his family. She could be angry at Draco for putting someone else, as she saw, before them, even if she could also acknowledge that they legitimately owed him a debt.
            “You will not give me a straight answer,” said his mother at last.
            “I don’t think I can,” Draco said. He wasn’t swallowing now, wasn’t smiling. There was only the thing that was important to him, and his mother’s gaze, and the conflict between them. He turned back to the book again. “I’m trying to make sure that all the people I care about can survive. And that includes Pansy and Astoria,” he added. “I doubt you would approve of leaving them here when they’ve been so loyal to me.”
            “I would approve of our family escaping first, and then coming back and rescuing who else we can when we reach a secure place.”
            Draco’s lips twitched despite himself. “You would approve me leaving such a place if we did attain it?”
            Narcissa said nothing, and Draco had his answer. No, she wouldn’t. He turned around and nodded to her. “Leave me to my study, please, Mother. If I simply left Harry now, without so much as a word, it would be a betrayal. I’m trying to memorize some incantations that would let us have a better chance of survival. I’ll go on doing that until I know that either we’re all away and safe, or that we won’t have a chance of that.”
            “Even if your Harry has already left without speaking to you? Is that not a betrayal in and of itself?”
            Draco kept control of himself with an effort, and didn’t snap his head up and gape at Narcissa. His heart ached, though, and his cheeks where he was biting the inside of them. He managed to speak a moment later. “That would be for the scouting mission we’d discussed, I assume. Strange that it’s in the middle of the night, but I do trust the decisions Harry makes.”
            His mother’s hand landed next to his, and made Draco jump and turn rapidly towards her despite his resolve to sit there. Narcissa leaned close to him.
            “In the middle of the night, as you said,” Narcissa whispered to him. “And accompanied by Fenrir Greyback.” Her hand grew white and rigid next to him. Draco didn’t move his eyes or his body, but it was difficult. “Perhaps you should recognize that the man you hold such loyalty to does not reciprocate that loyalty.”
            What are you doing, Harry? Even if Greyback had trapped him into doing something, Harry could have overpowered him if he was high-handed enough. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done it before. He could have come and told Draco, or taken Draco with him.
            We are going to talk about this when you come back, Draco promised Harry, and said aloud, “How did you happen to see this, Mother? I wasn’t aware that you were in the habit of spying on someone most of the Death Eaters still think is the Dark Lord.”
            There was a moment’s pause before his mother answered, “I was on the way back from your father’s rooms to mine.”
            But Draco had heard that moment. He turned around and smiled patiently at her. “Perhaps the truth, Mother? Since you seem so determined to tell it to me when it comes to all other aspects of the situation.” He paused and then clucked his tongue when Narcissa remained silent. “Silence now?”
            “I was alerted by Potter’s door opening,” said his mother, voice low and hard. “I have an alarm that I’ve cast on it to wake me if I’m asleep when it happens.”
            I’ll alert Harry at once. For the moment, Draco could allow a genuine emotion to appear. “Then that means that you’re—you are spying on him, Mother. And if someone else had investigated and found that? They could have come and hurt you, if they’re genuinely loyal to Harry.”
            “The man they perceive your Harry to be.”
            Draco ignored that. “Or they might have manipulated the alarm so that it would alert them instead. Or taken it as evidence of dangerous weakness on Harry’s part, and attacked him.” Draco leaned slowly towards her, and his mother’s hand fluttered as if she wanted to make him back away but didn’t know how. “It’s one thing to want your family safe, and another to work against the man who we do owe a debt to.”
            Narcissa’s mouth opened a moment. Then she said, “You may owe it to him, and your father may. I do not. I was the one who saved his life in the Forest, and I have not yet demanded payment of that debt. If I ordered him to let my family go and stop involving us in his deceptions, he would have to do so.”
            “So you would leave two members of your family in debt, with no chance to pay it back if Harry is dead?” Draco folded his arms. “It doesn’t matter to you if our magic is affected, or my happiness is compromised, compared with sheer survival? Now you’re starting to sound like Father, only unbalanced in another direction.”
            Narcissa’s cheeks looked like bloodied paper. “Draco.”
            “I’m just waiting for an answer, that’s all.” Draco paused and studied her. “Or waiting for you to admit that you don’t have one you can make acceptable to me. Either way.”
            “Will you ask your Harry where he was going in the middle of the night accompanied by Fenrir Greyback?” Narcissa asked the question calmly, standing upright and leaning away from him in the manner that meant she had also retreated emotionally. “And relay the answer to me?”
            “I’ll ask him,” Draco said. “Not the way you want me to, searching for evidence of a betrayal, but I’ll ask him.”
            His mother tried to stare him down, but Draco had got a lot better at resisting that over the past few weeks. She finally turned her head sharply to the side, nodded, and departed.
            Draco did sit there, turning various plans over in his head for how to ask Harry, and wondering whether he should follow him right now. But in the end, he shook his head and turned back to the book of spells he was trying to memorize.
            Part of trusting Harry was not jeopardizing whatever plan he had in motion, and another part was asking him for the truth later. Draco might wish he and Harry could share a bond somewhat like his parents’, but he didn’t hope for a mirror image.
*
            “Stay here,” said Harry to Greyback, and leaned so near that he thought he could catch a reflection of his face moving in Greyback’s wide amber eyes. “Do not move. Do you understand? If you come close enough to these Light wizards, or interfere in any way no matter what you hear, you need not worry about what they will do. I will be your end.”
            Harry sort of hoped the threat would make Greyback cower so much he would start being frightened of Harry—well, frightened in a way that would prevent him from following Harry around and wanting to protect him. But Greyback, even though he pressed himself flat with his belly to the ground behind the abandoned stage, still gave him an adoring look.
            I hate how the wizarding world turned on me after the Lightfinder declared me Dark, but maybe it was a good thing, if the only alternative is this sniveling service, Harry thought, as he walked around the stage.
            Hermione was standing there, in the middle of a Disillusionment Charm’s shiver that Harry only saw because he was looking for it. He gave her a quick, tentative smile. “Hermione?”
            She saw him and cast a spell that sped past him, searching. Harry knew the moment when she detected Greyback’s presence, because she seemed to reel back.
            Harry met her eyes and shrugged a little. “I was lucky to come this far with so little guardianship,” he said. Then he let his real emotions come to the surface for the first time in days. “Hermione, it’s so good to see you.”
            She walked slowly towards him. She hadn’t spoken yet, and there was magic crackling around her hair and in the tip of her wand. Harry was a little surprised he could sense it, but he reckoned that working with the Lightfinder might have made him more sensitive to it.
            “Harry,” Hermione whispered finally, when she was only a few centimeters away from him, and yet she didn’t embrace him. “What are you doing?”
            “The only thing I can,” Harry said, and waited until she was actually looking at him before he continued. “Making sure that I save my life and the lives of other people depending on me, and save the wizarding world’s sanity.”
            “They have been pretty insane since the Lightfinder exploded, yes,” Hermione said, but a second later, she frowned as if she hated agreeing to anything he said. “But have you considered what this deception could cost you?”
            “I know I could die,” Harry began.
            “No. I mean, people might never believe you again. I mean—” Hermione’s hand tightened on her wand. “I could barely convince myself to come. I know—I know you, and yet it sounds so convincing, the rumors that are spreading of Voldemort coming back to life.”
            “And what do you think would happen if they weren’t convincing?” Harry shook his head. “I know what it could cost me. I know that people might never trust or believe me even after I return to the wizarding world. But what exactly is the alternative? They don’t trust or believe me now.”
            Hermione pushed sweaty hair out of her face and closed her eyes. “They don’t. But will persisting in this deception help you?”
            “The way I want it to? For me to survive and restore the Light wizards’ sanity?” Harry nodded and caught her eye. “Yes, I think so. Whether it can achieve anything more than that—I don’t know.” He reached out and caught her hand, needing to hold it for a minute no matter what she thought of him. “I can’t make people forgive me.”
            Hermione took her hand away. Harry leaned back against the stage and tried to convince himself that at least, this way, it would make a good show for Greyback.
            “Neville trusts you,” Hermione whispered. “Ron trusts you. Did you send them any messages that you didn’t send to me?”
            Harry blinked. “Not unless they didn’t tell you about some of them. Otherwise, you should know everything they know.”
            “I know, but I don’t realize,” said Hermione, and pressed her hand over her heart, and opened her eyes to consider him again. “How is this going to work, Harry?”
            Harry grimaced. He really couldn’t give her details, not when Greyback was listening to them from a short distance away. “I’m going to do what I can to get the Light wizards together,” he said, even as he traced his wand over his palm, forming green letters that spelled out Fenrir Greyback is listening to us. “And from there, well. It’s up to the Ministry to forgive me after all is said and done, I suppose.”
            Hermione glanced at him from shadowed eyes. “It’s not that I don’t think you have good intentions, you know? But I think this act could consume you. You might have darkness inside you that you’re not even aware of, and which could eat you alive, or make you enjoy torturing someone a little too much.”
            Harry tensed, but said nothing. It was nothing more than what he was afraid of himself, the same tension he struggled with every day.
            “You can’t give me any more reassurances?” If it hadn’t been from the way Hermione had glanced at his palm, Harry might have thought she hadn’t even noticed his message. Then again, maybe she was trying hard not to call attention to it.
            Harry met her eyes and said, as gently as he could, “No.”
            Hermione sagged a bit. “We have to trust you?”
            “Pretty much.”
            Hermione shivered once, then hugged him so quickly he didn’t have time to hug back, and turned away. “I hope that you are right,” she said over her shoulder, a few seconds before she Apparated.
            Greyback came lolloping up to Harry while he was still staring at the spot Hermione had occupied. “You fooled her, my Lord,” he said. “You fooled her.”
            And you, and lots of other people. Let’s just hope it’s not myself. Harry nodded and said simply, fighting for the strength to make his voice cold, “Indeed. Let us return now.”
            Fenrir ran proudly in front of him until they reached the Apparition point. Harry said nothing, but his heartbeat was loud and cold in his ears.
            I can’t make them forgive me.
            I can only give them the chance.
*
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An Image of Lethe