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The Serenity of His Rage	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16981 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
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Chapter Thirty-Seven—Abide
Harry winced as he came awake, and felt all the soreness in his muscles that he hadn’t while he was asleep. He did glance over and see Draco asleep beside him, though, one hand resting on his chest, so Harry couldn’t resent the pain too much.
And then the memory came up and hit him like a bounding, over-friendly dog.
We did it! We defeated Voldemort! We took away my Horcrux! We really bloody did it!
Harry whipped a hand to his forehead. The first thing he felt was his fringe, and then his hand crashed into his glasses, which he apparently hadn’t taken off to sleep. He groaned in annoyance and pushed his glasses out of the way, while he felt for some sign of the familiar scar.
Gone. No ridge or shape of a lightning bolt. Harry traced his fingers over the blank skin again and again, until Draco made a sleepy snuffling noise and sat up, looking at him with far too much quickness of eye for Harry’s taste. How could someone be awake that bloody quickly?
“I know it’s gone,” Draco said. “But I’m glad the scar is gone, too. I suppose the scar was really the visible sign of the Horcrux, instead of the backfired curse. That was what I thought.” He yawned. “But you look handsomer without it.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “And of course what I look like is your main concern.”
Draco abruptly ducked his head and brought their faces so close that Harry blinked and stared at him. “No, it’s not,” Draco whispered, and then bit Harry’s ear before he rolled away from him and stood up. “And don’t you forget it. Now, are we going to go find breakfast, or what?”
“It is here.”
Harry jumped as he turned around, which probably only amused Snape, who was coming in with a huge tray of porridge and eggs and sliced fruit that made Harry’s stomach start aching. But Snape didn’t show any sign of amusement as he set the tray down in front of them. “You will want to eat all you can. Magical exhaustion is not easily remedied without food.”
“I didn’t know that we’d magically exhausted ourselves,” Harry remarked, reaching out and picking up a piece of sliced orange. He held it out to Draco, who grinned and opened his mouth. The bond thrummed with swimming silver and blue emotions. Harry shrugged and fed him, although he did have to ignore the way Draco licked his fingers if he wanted to keep his mind on what they were doing. “It feels like physical exhaustion to me.”
“It would.” Snape stood by with his arms folded and his gaze fixed gloomily on them, as if to say that he shouldn’t be surprised Harry was stupid, and he already knew he would have to live with it. “That does not mean it is. You will have to get used to understanding as much. If you do not, then—”
“Either way, the war isn’t going to last that much longer, is it?” Harry interrupted. “We know that the only one left outside our control is Nagini.”
Snape paused, his face inscrutable again. Then he said, “I was referring to your life after the war, when you might want to perform feats like this more than once.”
“Oh.” Harry blinked and hid his blush behind as much of an omelet as he could. Draco pushed up to him, mouth open for a slice of pear that Harry had intended to eat himself. But it wasn’t much trouble to feed Draco and then stab himself another one. “I knew that.”
Snape didn’t make the obvious retort, just sitting down on the floor and watching them eat. Draco was the one who finally stopped snapping and gulping half Harry’s portion to ask, “How long have we been here? It can’t be that long, I suppose, or Dumbledore would be banging the door down.”
“It is the middle of the next day,” said Snape without as much as a twitch of expression in his eyes. “Weasley and Granger were guarding you most of the evening. Then I relieved them. Weasley and Granger have successfully thrown Albus into one of his crises of conscience, so you don’t have to worry about him noticing you missing right away.”
“Huh. What kind of crisis of conscience?” Harry had a hard time picturing Dumbledore as not believing he was right.
This time, Snape did smirk, although it was still small. “They told him they were beginning to lose faith in him. Which has the advantage of being true.”
Harry snickered into his food at the same time as Draco did. Then Draco laid an arm along his shoulders and sent a wave of contentment down the bond at the same moment as he spoke.
“Then you think Dumbledore is—what? Off brooding so that he won’t come down here and look for us?”
“I think the next time he faces you, he will want his inner defenses to be perfect. He was taken off-guard by what Weasley and Granger said to him. He will want time to recover and start building them back up again, the excuses for why he has done what he has done, the reasons and justifications for the greater good.”
Harry sighed into his plate. He supposed that was the ultimate sign that he wouldn’t be going back to his old relationship with Dumbledore, or even getting a new one. If Snape, who knew him this well, thought Dumbledore would try to justify himself again…
Draco poked him, and the bond shimmered grey and black. “What are you mourning about? You have me. You know how perfect I am.”
Harry wanted to flutter his eyelashes and go along with that, especially since Snape was looking more than slightly ill. But at the same time, he couldn’t help wincing and thinking of how he could explain. The bond shimmered blue again as he pushed his own emotions down it—sadness. “I just mourn the mentor I lost, that’s all. You and I were never mentor and student.”
“When I taught you Occlumency, we were!”
Harry held back his choke. Draco sounded so indignant, as though it was impossible to imagine that Dumbledore might have held a position in Harry’s life that Draco hadn’t.
“Well, fine, you can count that if you want,” Harry conceded, ignoring the way Draco’s eyes flashed and the bond lapped at him with stinging waves. “But I meant in general. Dumbledore was the one who taught me about things like how people saw me. And he was the one who explained death to me.”
Draco drew back like a snake that someone had tried to command in English instead of Parseltongue. “What?”
Harry glanced at Snape, since he thought Dumbledore would probably also have explained to Snape how death was the next great adventure, but Snape just watched him with his arms folded and his eyes so narrow that it was hard to look at him. Harry finally shrugged and turned back to Draco. “He said if you have a well-organized mind, death is just the next great adventure.”
“Ah. I see.” Draco was sitting very still and looked outwardly calm, but Harry knew him. He could see the repressed fury buzzing along under his skin, even better than he could feel it through the bond. “So he’s the one responsible for your desire to throw away your life. I suppose I should have known. Voldemort wouldn’t have that effect on you.”
“Since when do you call him Voldemort?”
“That’s what you take from what I say? I don’t know who’s responsible for your inability to listen, but I’d like to hunt them down and make them listen myself.”
Harry shook his head, disgusted. “Listen, Draco, I wasn’t trying to throw away my life on purpose, no matter what you may have thought—”
“No, just on Dumbledore’s say-so!”
“Perhaps you could calm down and listen to each other for a moment?” Snape stood up, his face so polite and blank that Harry would have laughed again if he wasn’t so angry. “While I stand outside the door.”
He left, while Draco turned to Harry and scowled at him. The waves of emotion in the bond were lashing dangerously now, so fast that Harry would have thought he’d be swamped by them if not for the Occlumency that Draco had taught him. As it was, he lifted a haughty chin and waited.
“You have no idea how much I hate him,” Draco whispered. “The way he came to you on your birthday and just told you that you had to die.”
“You’re still angry about that? I’m a lot angrier about all the other things that he’s done and subjected me to!”
“Not just that.” Draco reached out and stroked Harry’s cheek, fast, fleeting and fragile, once. “You didn’t give me the chance to finish the list.”
“Oh.” Harry sat back and sighed. “But I’m not going to try and die, Draco. I just meant—I can get used to thinking of myself as free and without the Horcrux, but it’ll take a while. And until we knew how to deal with the Horcrux, I did have to wonder if the simplest solution was to die.”
Draco paused. Then he said, “Would it have been the kind of death Dumbledore chose for you?”
“Walking up to Voldemort and letting him cast the Killing Curse at me? The one Dumbledore thought I might survive?”
“Yes. That one. Or the other kinds that he started to come up with when he realized he was losing his grip on you.”
“I never would have done it without some kind of assurance that things would really work the way he told me they would. And he couldn’t give me that assurance. I doubt he ever knew.”
“But you would have done it with an assurance.”
Harry looked him straight in the eye, listening to the bitterness of his voice and waiting for a moment before he replied. “I’m telling you the truth, Draco. I’ve changed since I got to know you and the soul-bond grew better. I’m—just telling you the truth. I would have had to consider dying.”
“Why? No one else would have!”
“Yes, they would,” Harry said quietly. “Put it down to a difference in our Houses if you want, or a lack of sense, but I know Ron and Hermione would have. And Dumbledore already made a sacrifice of that kind. Look at his hand.”
“That doesn’t mean he had the right to call on you to make it!”
“That’s a different kind of argument, though.” Harry took Draco’s hands, ignoring the petulant way he tugged to get Harry to release them. “I’m just saying there were other people who would have volunteered to die with a Horcrux in them. But I was the one who had the Horcrux, and the one who had to make the decision.”
“Now you know we’re going to destroy the cup, and Nagini. And the Horcrux in you is gone. So we don’t have to make that decision at all.” Draco stared at him with fierce, feral eyes. “Promise me you won’t consider it again.”
“Why would I, now that I don’t have to?” Harry asked, and leaned forwards to kiss him. “And now that I can spend my days with you?”
As Harry had thought that might, it changed his mind. Draco leaned back onto the pallet beneath him but didn’t end the kiss, dragging Harry with him, and they began to hump each other quietly on the floor, ignoring it when the tray Snape had left tipped over.
They had all the time for food in the world. But for each other, they had to have now.
*
In the end, their qualms about destroying the cup were for naught.
The cup began to rattle and hiss when Severus drew near it with the basilisk fang. But there wasn’t any black smoke leaking from it, or the same malevolent presence Severus had sensed when he accidentally summoned it. Perhaps the cup sensed danger. It spun and twisted, then stopped, huddling as if it thought it could pass itself off as a harmless inanimate object.
When Severus plunged the fang into the golden metal, there was a horrible shrieking noise like someone rasping claws up a stone wall, and Severus heard Draco and Harry both suck in pained breaths. But Granger, who was standing near it, only folded her arms and gave the cup a glad little smile. Weasley was nodding beside her, as if someone had asked him a question.
Severus kept the fang, which he had fashioned a hilt for, embedded in the cup until he was sure that every trace of the Horcrux was done. Then he backed slowly away. He had chosen to do this in a version of the Room of Requirement with utterly blank walls, leaving no magical objects for the Horcrux to latch onto or hide in should it try to flee its container.
Of course, without the battle he had been sure was coming, he didn’t know if it was actually dead. He glanced at Harry. “Can you tell—”
Harry rubbed a pointed finger over his unscarred forehead. “I can’t sense them anymore,” he said. “I mean, more than you lot can. There was that noise it made, and I felt some greasy Dark magic when we came in here, but that was it.”
Severus sighed and stared intently at the cup. It wasn’t a ruined mess like the locket, but it was tarnished now, and the slight aura of importance that had clung to it, the way it had drawn Severus’s eye all the time he had kept it imprisoned in his quarters, was gone. Severus still didn’t touch it with bare hands, but Levitated it into the firepit in the center of the room, where he burned it.
It burned in ordinary, hot fire, melting down into what looked like slag. It didn’t need Fiendfyre. Severus shook his head, conscious of a slight but burning sensation of disappointment.
“Now that things are going well, now he’s disappointed?” he heard Weasley mutter, but he chose to ignore the brat. He had to concentrate on the cup, make sure there wasn’t the slightest wisp of evil steam escaping it.
There wasn’t. When he cast a spell at the melted remains of the cup that would detect any trace of magic, not just Dark Arts, nothing responded to the spell. The object was as neutral as a Muggle plate.
“I told you it wouldn’t be as hard as you thought it would be.” That was Draco, more comforting than Weasley, stepping up beside Severus and catching his eye as if he was the student in need of reassurance. “We only have Nagini to go now. And then we can kill Voldemort.”
“The Dark Lord,” said Severus automatically, but he knew his voice was hollow. He kept frowning at the remains of the cup. He was wondering now if the cup he had thought he was destroying was the real one, or even if this vision of its destruction was just that, a vision, a dream conjured by the cup to hold him still and make him think it was real.
“Sir? I think I might know what the problem is.”
That was Granger, taking a step away from Weasley to isolate herself in Severus’s vision. At least, she would have been alone in his vision if he could stop staring at the cup. “There is no problem, of course,” he said. “None, Miss Granger. We destroyed the Horcrux.”
“Yes, we did,” Granger said gently. “And always before, we did it in the presence of at least one other Horcrux.”
That arrested Severus. He turned around. “What do you mean?”
“Harry’s,” said Granger, and smiled at her friend, who smiled back. “Harry was there when we destroyed the locket and the diadem, and I think his Horcrux increased the sense of danger we felt. It might even have been watching, if it was that sentient, trying to figure out how it could escape being destroyed the same way—”
“I would never stick a basilisk fang into Harry,” said Draco flatly. “Or burn him with Fiendfyre.”
“No one was seriously suggesting you would,” said Granger soothingly, a beat ahead of Severus saying the same thing in a much more sarcastic voice. He supposed it would be diplomatic to let Granger keep the peace. She turned back and smiled at him. “But either way, it would have added to the atmosphere in the room. And so would the sensation of having other Horcruxes to destroy, right? To know that this wasn’t the last one, but we had two or three or four to go.”
Severus nodded slowly. “What kind of research suggested that to you, Miss Granger?”
She blushed for the first time since beginning the conversation. Then again, his voice had sounded as if he respected her, and Severus suspected she was still vulnerable to praise from teachers. “It was a book I read about artifacts that all got imbued with their owner’s magic before he died. The magic was meant to call memories of him to mind when the artifacts got distributed among his legatees. When two of the artifacts were together, the memories they produced were almost overwhelming.”
“And so it was here,” Severus whispered thoughtfully. How much more powerful would not the owner’s magic, but a shard of soul, have been, if imprinted into these objects?
“Yes, I think so.” Granger gave a triumphant grin Severus never remembered seeing on her face before. “And now there’s only one left.”
“And we’re going to destroy her at the same time we destroy her master,” said Draco in satisfaction. If he could not keep that absolutely unwarranted hope from his voice, Severus thought, at least he had avoided speaking the Dark Lord’s name again.
“There’s something we have to do first, though.”
Severus glanced at Harry, not liking his tone. He’d spoken much less about the destruction of this last Horcrux they had than Severus had anticipated. No cheer when it was dead, either. His face was a little pale. “What is it?”
“We have to tell Dumbledore that the one in me is gone.”
*
They hadn’t wanted him to go alone. He’d got a lot more argument about that than about the necessity of telling Dumbledore in the first place, which even Draco agreed with, although mostly because Draco thought Dumbledore might literally try to stab him in the back otherwise.
But in the end, Harry had won, because he was more stubborn than all of them. He halted near the top of the moving stairs, and looked back. Draco and Snape would be waiting for him near the bottom, and Hermione and Ron were waiting halfway up the stairs, which Hermione had enchanted not to move for right now. It wasn’t as if there was really anyone else in the school during the summer who would urgently want to visit Dumbledore.
Is it wrong that I feel more nervous about facing him than I ever did about facing Voldemort?
In the end, Harry shook his head. He’d never worried about disappointing Voldemort, or the shade of Tom Riddle. He opened the door now and marched in.
Dumbledore was sitting behind his desk, teasing one finger along the feathers of Fawkes’s neck. His blackened hand lay on top of a book, looking almost as if it was detached from him. Fawkes was on his shoulder, and he crooned a little, sadly, when he caught sight of Harry.
“Have you finally come to tell me that you’ve turned on me, Harry?”
“No,” said Harry, and then he sat down in the chair across from Dumbledore and lifted his fringe. He’d always been better with actions than with words, anyway.
Dumbledore’s bad hand tightened on the book, and he took his other one away from Fawkes, who made a soft croon of disapproval. He stared so hard and so long at Harry’s forehead that Harry started to worry his eyes would dry out.
Then he blinked and looked aside. “What did you do?” he whispered.
“Draco and I were passing the Horcrux back and forth between us, stripping pieces of it off that way, and Voldemort decided to attack,” Harry said simply. Yes, simple was best. “We actually got him to attack the Horcrux a few times, when we tossed it back and forth and then he turned to strike at the one of us who was holding it.” He hesitated and decided to offer Dumbledore a little sop. “We couldn’t have done it if not for the soul-bond that you decided to set up between us, sir.”
Dumbledore said nothing for long minutes. Then he murmured, “And you never thought to involve me in this?”
“What could you have done?” Harry asked as kindly as he could. This was a better reaction than he’d thought he’d get. As long as Dumbledore wasn’t raging at him… “Draco and I were the ones who had to do the work, because of our soul-bond. The only thing anyone else could do was guard the room and see that we weren’t disturbed.”
“That was Severus’s role, I suppose.” Dumbledore’s hands were clasped so tightly that his good one was going white. The color on the bad one never changed.
“And Ron and Hermione’s,” Harry added. He thought Dumbledore deserved to know the whole thing. They would be leaving the school after today, because Snape thought the warded house Lucius Malfoy was living in was the safest place to plan an attack from. Voldemort knew all about Hogwarts. He didn’t know anything about the house, yet.
And now he can’t, because he doesn’t have the Horcrux to see through my eyes.
“Did Tom figure out that you were a Horcrux, dear boy?”
Harry nodded. “But since it’s dead and gone now, what we mostly have to be worried about is the care he takes of the other Horcruxes.”
“The one in Gringotts—”
“Snape summoned it, accidentally, during that ritual that was burning off part of Draco’s Dark Mark,” Harry interrupted, unable to help himself. “We killed it yesterday with a basilisk fang.”
Dumbledore stared at him once more, and shut his eyes. He looked ancient. But he also didn’t make a threatening move towards his wand or anything else, the way even Hermione had been sure that he would at this point. Score one for my intuition, Harry thought, and waited to see what would happen next.
“How much have I missed?” Dumbledore finally whispered.
“A lot,” Harry had to say. “And we’re going to kill Voldemort and Nagini on our own. I don’t know if you want to come—but the others wouldn’t allow it, anyway.” He had to grimace, thinking of that, but it was true. Hermione and Ron would maybe allow it if Harry argued with them for long enough, but Draco and Snape would be utterly against it.
Dumbledore sat there with his head downcast for long enough that Harry started to feel a little uneasy. But then he looked up, and his smile was wildly bittersweet.
“I suppose I have no one but myself to blame, do I?”
“I suppose not,” Harry said, and Dumbledore gave him a tamer and sadder smile.
“I am glad you got rid of the Horcrux, my boy, and without dying.” He held up his black hand and gave a small, dry chuckle. “And I think I would be of little assistance even if anyone else would suffer my presence. My time is almost done. My magic is being drained combating the curse in my hand. A few more weeks, maybe, and then I shall make a potion that I can take to be done with pain.”
Harry swallowed. “So—you would die the same way you wanted me to die?”
“No. Much less courageously, my dear boy. But defeat Voldemort for me first, before I go?”
Harry stood up slowly, nodding. He didn’t know what else he could do. This last conversation with Dumbledore hadn’t gone at all the way he’d expected it to go. He’d thought Dumbledore would be upset, try to convince him again not to trust Draco, and tell him he had to do things Dumbledore’s way.
But maybe thinking through how he was going to die had left Dumbledore less arrogant than he’d been. Harry didn’t think he’d ever know, now, not for certain. He and Dumbledore were not what they had been.
“Good-bye,” Harry said, at last. There were no other words that felt like the right ones to say.
“Good-bye, Harry. And thank you for telling me. For giving me the chance to see your scar gone.”
Harry walked out of the office remembering all the times that Dumbledore had wanted him to die, or told him to do something he didn’t want to do, or gently scolded him. And it still didn’t matter, not next to the words Dumbledore had just said.
Or the gentle trill of phoenix song that broke from behind him.
*
SP777: Well, if they could find a way to represent the mind-battle!
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The Serenity of His Rage