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Deconversion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 23338 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 9
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Five—First Bite

            Draco stepped out of the fireplace in Chance’s office and paused to listen to the distant shouts. Yes, Millicent had given him his distraction. A patient throwing up random fireballs every time she vomited would give the Healers an appropriately exciting time. And because it came from a potion rather than a spell, they were going to have difficulty stopping it. Even Vanishing the potion from her stomach wouldn’t work; they would have to know what particular mixture had produced the fireballs before they could do that.

            Before he opened the door of Chance’s office and stepped out into the corridor, Draco carefully Disillusioned himself. He ought to pass unnoticed as long as he was silent and swift.

            He did have to wait while a few apprentice Healers plunged past him in the direction of the excitement, but Millicent had only promised him mostly empty corridors, not completely empty ones. Draco was more than willing to take what he could get.

            He ended up in front of Potter’s door faster than he had thought he would, and spent a few minutes listening and looking for signs of spies before he slid the key into the wards. The wards spat at him, then listened to the key and faded from existence with a resigned little sigh. Draco smiled slightly and laid his hand on the door.

            Immediately, without the muffling presence of the wards, he could sense the difference in the magic in the room. He cursed and tore the door open.

            Potter, enveloped in a misty cloud that Draco could almost arrange into serpentine shapes with his eyes, lay on the bed. His head was turned to the side, his mouth distended, his face waxy. Draco bent down, and cursed again when he realized that long, slender viper fangs had replaced Potter’s front teeth. He was far gone enough that he was probably walking the Dark paths without anyone to guide him.



            Draco knew how to join Potter and offer his help. The spell was risky, but what Dark Arts spell wasn’t?

            He swiftly cast the spell that relocked the door and then reached down and plunged his hands into the colored clouds of power shifting around Potter. He felt the slight prickle of teeth against his skin, the cool brush of scales, but the next moment, the magic had relaxed and accepted him. Draco smiled grimly. That might mean he had a chance of catching up with Potter before he did himself irreparable damage.

            Even as he closed his eyes and began chanting the spell that would connect his magic with Potter’s, he felt distant wonder fill him. Most Dark wizards had to meditate until the image of the paths presented itself to them. Very few had the strength, or the nature, to simply be pulled there, like calling to like.

            And the wonder changed and became cooler and stronger, sustaining him like water as he dropped under the surface and into Potter’s mind.

            If Potter was that strong, he and Draco would have so much fun together.

*

            Harry had been walking the dark path for something that felt like an hour. The hill and the flexible trees on it had long since vanished behind him. He could barely see if he looked straight ahead; faint starlight was the strongest guide here. He was growing bored, although the snakes inching along beside him kept their heads aimed implacably straight ahead.

            Of course, Harry wouldn’t be bored if he looked at what awaited him to the sides of the path. But the memory of Malfoy’s caution kept his gaze fixed, and what he saw was only out of the corners of his eyes.

            He made out a woman who was a snake from the waist down, but rounded and curved in intriguing ways from the waist up. She beckoned to him with one red nail, and then smiled lazily, as if she was listening to the thought in his head: How would you even have sex with someone like that? Her smile invited him to come and find out.

            He saw an up-and-down motion that looked like swings, and laughing winged children flitting around them, pushing others too young to fly back and forth. Their laughter pierced Harry the way nothing had since the days when Dudley’s friends were joking about him in primary school. He wanted to stop and slow down, to ask what game they were playing, to step off the path and see if he could grow wings, too.

            Stay on the path.

            Malfoy’s voice, not in Parseltongue. But Harry was beginning to wonder exactly what would happen if he stepped off the path. Would something eat him? Would he go insane, the way that Malfoy said some Dark wizards like Voldemort had?

            But you don’t want to go mad. You want to live, the way that Chance said so few Parselmouths did.

            So he kept his eyes forwards even when he thought he saw something harmless from the corner of them, like a field of swaying wildflowers, and moved further and further into the starlit darkness.

            The path finally finished sloping downwards, and Harry found himself walking on level ground, a cool breeze in his lungs, the edges of the path breaking away into small but solid clumps of dirt. He hesitated and finally stood still, tilting his head back to watch the motionless stars. No moon. The breeze drifted across his forehead and dried the sweat forming on it.

            If the path was breaking up into these clumps, then how was he going to know when he strayed off it?

            “You shouldn’t have come here alone.”

            Harry jerked, and felt the snakes by his feet rise up in hissing clumps of defense. But the next moment, he relaxed when he saw Malfoy’s shape standing on the path, or at least in a portion of it that still looked stamped-down. None of the other things he had seen so far could come onto the path. If Malfoy was here, he was probably legitimate.

            “Why not?” Harry asked. “It’s not like I wanted to. I opened my eyes, and I was standing on a hill with trees on it and thirteen paths leading away. I only chose this one because the snakes thought I should.” The white one by his feet who had guided him hissed languidly at the acknowledgment, and twined around his ankle.

            Malfoy paused, and the inquiring expression Harry had seen there the first day he visited came back. “Well. I hadn’t thought of that. Most Dark wizards need guides, they can’t do it by themselves, but perhaps a Parselmouth’s snakes could lead him.” He hummed beneath his breath, looking remarkably like Hermione when she was starting a new project. “I haven’t had a Parselmouth to speak to and ask about it before.”

            “Why are you here?” Harry asked. “How did you get here?” The world around them was quieter than before, the breeze dying. Harry could still hear laughter from off the path, but fainter than it had been.

            “I cast a spell that connected our minds,” Malfoy said simply. “And our magic. Whatever you were suffering at the moment, I would have shared it. Gone into your dream if you were dreaming, for example.” He looked around at the still, dark world. “And this isn’t really so far from a dream.”

            “That was risky,” Harry said, wincing as he thought of some of his nightmares that Malfoy could have appeared in.

            Malfoy gave him a shining smile with black light behind the teeth. “Of course it was.”

            Harry remembered what he had said about Dark wizards, and the consequences of their spells, and smiled in spite of himself. “Well, at least no one can say that you don’t live by what you say.”

            Malfoy inclined his head, his dark smile gone. “And what about you, Harry Potter?” he asked softly, his words quiet enough that Harry shifted a step towards him to hear better. “What are your convictions, now that you’re walking this path? You remembered my advice. You took it. Can you say that you still want to be a Light wizard, enough to reject the Dark Arts?”

            Harry let out a long breath, and decided that looking away from Malfoy right now would be a bad idea, and not just because he might catch a glimpse of what was waiting for him off the paths. “I think,” he said, “that I can’t, not if I want to live. Healer Chance told me that all the Light wizards who suddenly had Parseltongue show up in their lives died or went insane. They didn’t manage to concentrate it away, and even making them Squibs didn’t help.”

            “Ah,” Malfoy said, such a soft breath of sound that Harry found himself wincing a little. He could wish Malfoy sounded less covetous. Malfoy met his gaze and smiled a little, but if he heard Harry’s thought, it seemed like he had no intention of obeying it. “You’ve come this far on your own, Potter, and never strayed from the path despite temptations. That’s really rather impressive. I can guide you on the next few steps. Will you?” He held out his hand.

            Harry still hesitated. He half-thought that what Malfoy wanted from him had to be more than mere commitment to the Dark Arts, and perhaps he should continue to explore the paths by himself with his snakes. That would keep him from owing a debt to Malfoy, at least.

            But it wouldn’t get him out of hospital. He suspected Malfoy had a plan as far as that went, since he had managed to show up for unsupervised visits to Harry’s hospital room several times now.

            “I want to know what you want,” he said.

            “To see the Dark Arts revived,” Malfoy said, his eyes shining. Harry considered him warily, but he didn’t think it was the same kind of fanatical passion that he’d seen in the Death Eaters arrested since the end of the war. “To have someone by my side who is powerful enough to make that happen. The chance to study Parseltongue, which I’ll expect you to grant me in return for rescuing you.”

            “You get me free from here,” Harry said. “And I go—where? You have to realize that Ron can track you down.”

            “There are ways of vanishing that I wouldn’t use myself unless I had a greater prize to conceal than my mere presence in St. Mungo’s,” Malfoy whispered. “As it happens, Weasley is already aware of, and unhappy about, my visits to you. But we can disappear in other ways. Would you like to come with me and learn what they are?” His hand stayed extended and steady, despite the length of time he’d held it out.

            Harry swallowed. He still felt wary just because Malfoy was Malfoy, and he didn’t know if even a bargain that would enable him to survive and Malfoy to study him would be enough to overcome their hatred.

            But who else was here? And the white snake eddying around him, and the less distinct others, hadn’t reacted to Malfoy with the same level of hostility that they used to the Healers, and even to Ron. Harry had already seen that the snakes gave him some level of perception that he didn’t ordinarily have; they’d told him Chance was lying, for example.

            Perhaps it was all right to trust Malfoy, so far if no farther.

            “Yes,” he whispered, trying not to think about what he was doing in too much detail lest it throw him back into madness, and took Malfoy’s hand.

*

            Draco might have cheered in other circumstances, but the touch of Potter’s hand filled him with a satisfaction too deep and shining for that; it would have been like cheering at the Midsummer sunrise. He bowed to him instead, and then looked down at the clouds of power around Potter’s feet. This time, he thought he could make out the slender shape of a white snake for more than a few seconds before his eyes watered and he had to look away.

            “You’ve done well so far,” he said. “But these paths don’t end, and you can’t learn from them if you simply walk them and do nothing else. I’m going to show you what lies at the end of this one, and then you can decide whether you want to walk more of it right now or return to your hospital room.”

            Potter’s face twisted a bit. “Shouldn’t we go back anyway? Since someone is probably going to be checking on me soon, and they’ll find you there if we don’t hurry?”

            “Time doesn’t pass exactly here as it does elsewhere,” Draco said, softening his voice and soothing Potter all the more. He had to ensure that Potter was calm, or it was quite possible that they would both end up stuck somewhere on the path, and Draco didn’t look forward to the tangles that they would have to negotiate then. “You have to make the decision, though. Dark Arts is all about making your own decisions, taking your own risks.”

            Potter’s eyes half-shut. Then he nodded and said, “Show me.”

            Draco closed his eyes. The paths burned into his own mind shone bright for a moment, and he reached out and touched the memories that walked them: memories of challenges met, opponents defeated, risky spells mattered. The most frightening thing that any practitioner of the Dark Arts would face was himself.

            The dark world around them seemed to whir and turn as if he and Potter could feel the motion of the planet through space. Then it settled down. Draco turned his head and opened his eyes.

            They were standing in the middle of a wide clearing of light grey dust, the end of the path that Potter had been walking. Other paths ran out from the clearing, but the tree in the center of it occupied Potter’s attention, and Draco couldn’t blame him. Even though he had seen this sight before, it was hard to look away.

            The tree was high enough to make people looking at it feel dizzy, and its bark was the kind of velvety black that usually seemed to loom overhead between stars. The branches humped and crooked like reaching arms, or so Draco had thought until he realized that reaching arms would probably have more of a goal and sanity to them. Here and there from one of them dangled a shining silvery rope, the color of the dirt scattered in the clearing at the tree’s feet. The ropes almost shone, reflecting back the starlight better than most other things did here. But Draco knew—and from his tensing, perhaps Potter did as well—that the brightest things in the world of the Dark Arts were often the most dangerous.

            At the end of each rope hung a broken body. Tongues dangled from between their lips, longer than normal, as long as the corpse in some cases, and swollen black-blue, like the faces. Legs still kicked weakly. When a breeze passed and the bodies swayed in it, Draco could hear the crisp sound of snapping necks.

            “What is this tree?” Potter whispered.

            “It’s one of the places that people end up when they try to take a risk and then draw back at the last moment,” Draco said gently. “I know that you said you were committed to learning the Dark Arts, but it’s not a safe thing to do if you don’t mean it. Give your whole heart, or give nothing at all.”

            “Literally,” Potter said, and Draco knew he was staring at the single long branch near the back of the tree that spitted a giant heart. Draco had never known whose it was, only that it beat sluggishly now and then and sent gouts of blood down the bark. When it started to dry out, it would vanish and a new one would replace it. Or perhaps the old one, swollen and plumped for the sin of cowardice all over again, would reappear.

            “Yes,” Draco said, and drew near him, so that he could feel the way Potter breathed, the way he shifted and swallowed. He reached out and glanced one hand down Potter’s; it felt colder than it had when Draco brought them here. “This is the kind of price that can be paid.”

            Potter stared down the grey dirt beneath their feet, and muttered something. Draco bent courteously closer. After a moment, Potter raised his voice and repeated it. “It’s never going to be completely normal, is it? My life. I can get rid of seeing only snakes all the time, but that means I’ll have to listen to them and walk in places like this.”

            Draco chuckled in spite of himself, and Potter glared at him. Draco met his eyes. “Do you think you would be content with a normal life?” he asked. “You decided to go after Dark wizards, a high-profile career and one that you can’t say everyone chooses. I’ve heard about wild chases and spells invented in the heat of the moment.”

            “I chose that one,” Potter said, splotches of ugly color coming into his cheeks. “I didn’t choose to have the Parseltongue wake up and take over my life.”

            Draco nodded. “I know. But what you have now is only two options: either the Parseltongue drags you along by the nose for the rest of your life, or you make the commitment that you’ve already said you did and live with it, live through it.”

*

            Harry closed his eyes. Put like that, the choice was no choice at all.

            And he hated that, but he had been raging about it since Ron brought him to hospital. And Malfoy, as far as he could tell, had been absolutely honest and absolutely accurate, which was more than any Healer had done.

            He just wants me to join him.

            But even that was something. He wanted Harry for his strength, and to play on those strengths, instead of treating him as small and harmless in the way that the Healers wanted to.

            “All right,” Harry said, and opened his eyes. “I want to go back to hospital right now.” He forced himself to look at the giant, spitted heart, the hanging bodies, and told himself that objectively, they were no worse than some of the ways that victims’ bodies had ended up looking when he chased Dark wizards as an Auror. “I’ll think more about walking the paths later.”

            Malfoy smiled at him, and Harry tried not to preen at the approval in his eyes and tried not to wince at his own need for approval. Malfoy was going to be his companion on these paths and in his new life for a long time, it seemed. Maybe it was only natural that Harry wanted to trust him.

            You can trust him, brother, said the white snake by Harry’s feet, which had now entwined itself around his left leg so Harry thought he would have difficulty walking. I promise that you can. I would bite him if you could not.

            What would your bite do? Harry hissed back as the darkness around them dissolved and he opened his eyes to an expanse of white. After a moment, he recognized it as his pillow and sat up, shaking his head.

            Lock his muscles down so that they crushed his inner organs, said the snake, dancing across the pillow in loops of scribbles that reminded Harry of Snape’s remarks on his Potions essays.

            Harry shuddered a little and turned. Sure enough, Malfoy sat on the bed beside him. He was just opening his eyes, a faraway look in them, as though it had been harder for him to journey back than it was for Harry. If he was familiar with those paths, maybe it was, Harry thought.

            Malfoy saw him watching and smiled, brushing his pale hair back from his face. “Tempus,” he murmured, and Harry saw the numbers 10:50 appear in front of Malfoy. Malfoy nodded. “I’ve only been here ten minutes. But now that you’ve made your decision, I think we should make our escape as soon as possible.”

            Harry shivered. He was braver about speaking words of commitment on the Dark paths, in another world, than he was about speaking them in the real world where they would separate him from his friends forever.

            But when he looked at the floor, he could see the kraits going cloudy and muddy again, and when he looked up, Malfoy’s eyes were without lashes or lids. Harry swallowed and said, “I’ve committed. I’ve decided.”

            Malfoy gave him another of those approving smiles that Harry hoped he didn’t get addicted to, and then turned his head and froze. When he reached towards Harry, his hand was cold. “Were you expecting any visitor this morning?”

            Harry frowned. “No. But someone could have arranged to visit without telling me. The Healers don’t tell me when one of them is going to show up, let alone my friends.” He thought about the extreme bitterness in his voice, and winced, but then decided that it probably wasn’t going to displease Malfoy, who hated his friends.

            “Someone is out there now,” Malfoy breathed. His fingers touched the air for a moment as though he was playing an invisible harp; then he leaped off the bed and moved towards the door in a stalking crouch. Harry didn’t see his wand in his hand, but he knew that Malfoy didn’t need a wand to be dangerous.

            Harry leaped off the bed behind him and almost tripped over one of the kraits, which hissed and climbed his leg to his hip so he didn’t do it again. “Don’t hurt them,” he told Malfoy.

            “Weasley and Granger, you mean?” Malfoy’s fingers had begun to move faster; apparently the invisible harp was vibrating in a way that meant he had to struggle to play it. “I don’t want to.”

            Harry heard the silent threat in his words: That doesn’t mean I won’t.

            Harry took a breath in, and released it as the words, “Then let me go in front of you and herd them. I could do it this morning. I would—I would rather be the one who confronted them.”

            Malfoy considered him in silence. Harry waited with his heart pounding crazily, half-expecting someone to burst through the door at any moment, and more than half hoping that they wouldn’t.

*

            Well. I am impressed.

            Potter had made more strides than Draco had thought possible for a week. He had faced the Hanging Tree, made his decision about embracing the Dark Arts, and taken Draco’s hand. And although he might only want to do it to spare his friends the kind of injury he thought Draco would do them, now he was offering to use his snakes as a weapon against people who would interfere.

            Those were more significant things than Draco had thought he would achieve, more significant than he would have asked for. He wondered idly for a moment whether Potter thought them significant, and then gave up the notion of asking. Instead, he nodded and stepped back, catching a brief glimpse of a golden mist moving in front of Potter. That was probably the vipers, or whatever other kinds of snakes attended him, that he was commanding at the moment.

            “All right. Do whatever you want to, only remove them from our line of flight,” he said, and then leaned back against the bed and prepared to watch. Just because Potter had impressed him so far didn’t mean that Draco was content to let him rest on his laurels.

            Potter glanced back at him once and smiled nervously through teeth that were no longer fangs but still thinner and sharper than normal. Then he lifted his hands, and boiling Parseltongue escaped his lips. The golden mist flowed up to the door and bent sideways, in a key-like pattern, severing the wards that had reengaged behind Draco.

            The door opened.

*

            SP777: I think this chapter is even more of a literal crossroads, but yes, by then Harry had mostly made his decision.

            moodysavage: Thank you! At the moment, it’s enough for Draco’s revenge that Harry is actually going into the Dark and using his magic.

            Talltree-san: Technically, they’ve been keeping him against his will since the beginning; he really didn’t want to go to St. Mungo’s. But yes, Chance has told them about Harry’s apparent turn of mind. Given what’s happened to so many Parselmouths, though, they thought that he wouldn’t be a problem; he would just keep going insane.

            LittleO: Thank you!
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