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A Dream of Running Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7808 -:- 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 Five—A Dark Lord
            Draco wasn’t stupid. He immediately scrambled out of bed and onto the floor, where he bowed his forehead down until it rested between his hands. Maybe that wasn’t exactly what the Dark Lord wanted, but he would tell Draco better in a moment if he didn’t, and probably let Draco feel his displeasure, too.
            The Dark Lord stood motionless. Well, Draco thought he might hear the creak of dry and ancient tendons in his neck as he tilted his head to look down at Draco, but he didn’t think so—and he tried to banish the thought of “dry and ancient” the minute he had it, even though his eyes were pressed against the floorboards and the Dark Lord couldn’t read his mind.
            Snape had risked his life to save Draco’s. His mother could still be hurt. Draco had to remember that.
            “Elwood tells me that you have performed unexpectedly well in your new task.”
            Draco trembled at the papery sound of that voice. Perhaps he hadn’t been meant to do well. Perhaps he should have done badly because the Dark Lord had assigned him to Elwood as a punishment and that meant he was supposed to simply fall down and die.
            Not being able to read the Dark Lord’s mind in return or guess his intentions didn’t matter. You still had to obey his will.
            And banish traitorous thoughts. Like the one that asked why he had ever thought he wanted to serve this madman.
            “You are to answer,” said the Dark Lord, and one of his hands came down and settled like a prong on the back of Draco’s neck. Draco spoke in a gabbling rush, anything to concentrate on something besides the hand.
            “Yes, my lord. I enjoy the work, my lord. It’s fascinating, my Lord. Elwood has taught me that I can kill, my lord. I see now—”
            “Enough,” said the Dark Lord, and for a moment, Draco had the sensation of hanging above a pit crawling with vipers. Then the sensation ended, spell-induced, and Draco shuddered and was silent.
            The silence continued long past the time he expected more punishment, making him want to sneak a look up. He would have done that if this was his father testing him, because the test would have been to assert his independence after a reasonable interval. Nothing was supposed to be able to tame the heir to the Malfoy line and properties, even the head of the family.
            But the man in front of him was the reason that there would be no more tests like that, no more head of the family unless Draco got out of here and survived. Draco held down his impatience, like he had the fear and the despair and so many other emotions about being here, and waited.
            “There is other work for you,” the Dark Lord said abruptly, and Draco followed the departure of the hand and stood up. He kept his head bowed, but it seemed this time, he’d gauged the Dark Lord’s intentions correctly, and he merely received the order, “Go and seek out Rodolphus. He awaits you in the small dining room.”
            Bellatrix’s husband. He’s putting me with the husband of the woman I killed.
            But Draco knew he could hardly say that. Of course the Dark Lord was going to do things like that, because he could, and because he probably still blamed Draco for the loss of a servant he’d valued more than he valued Draco.
            “My Lord,” said Draco, and bowed even lower, his hair scraping the floor, before he stood up and hurried out of his room. He was just in time. His stomach had rumbled, and the reminder that this despised Death Eater was mortal and needed some nourishment probably would have infuriated the Dark Lord even more.
*
            “We’re going to invent a new torture spell.”
            Rodolphus had announced that the minute Draco walked through the door to the dining room, and then he’d said nothing else. Instead, he’d had Draco lay out all sorts of things that didn’t seem to have much to do with the work of inventing a new spell: pallets on the floor, ropes hung from hooks on the wall that Draco hadn’t seen the last time he’d been in this room, pendulums of steel that hung from the ceiling, and shards of glass that Draco had placed on the floor. He had tried to be clever and careful with his fingers, but of course he’d been cut and his blood dripped out.
            He kept his head bowed, though, and stayed silent. He was determined to give Rodolphus no cause for offense. He might find one anyway, but neither Snape nor his mum would be able to say that Draco was stupid and had provoked him.
            “Now came into the middle of the room and turn to face me,” said Rodolphus. He had been lounging in one of the dining room chairs—what had been one of the dining room chairs, once upon a time—watching Draco with his fist propped up under his chin. Now he flicked his wand, and half the glass shards on the floor sprang up and hovered near Draco.
            Draco didn’t think he suppressed a nervous flicker of his eyes towards the glass shards, but he managed to keep himself from dwelling on them. He looked at Rodolphus, at the eyes that burned with hatred towards him, and nothing else.
            “Do you know what my Bella was to me?” whispered Rodolphus, idly toying with his wand as if caressing it. “Do you understand how special she was to me? How the thought of how much she needed me kept me sane in Azkaban?”
            There was nothing to be said to that, and Draco didn’t try. He stood there, and Rodolphus rose and prowled slowly back and forth in front of him, his wand tapping against the edge of his palm. Draco kept his eyes fastened firmly on the wall behind Rodolphus.
            “You don’t understand how special she was to me,” said Rodolphus, and he was breathing fast and the pupils of his eyes stood out in a way that Draco didn’t think any pupils should, “because no one can. No one can grasp how special she was to me who wasn’t there in Azkaban with us.”
            He strode up to Draco and stopped right in front of him, rocking back and forth a little. “I was there,” he breathed. “We sat there and clung to our faith in our Lord, and we knew he would come and rescue us, and so he did. And Bella never doubted. She was the fire of my faith, the kindler of my fire.”
            Draco had to look into Rodolphus’s eyes. They were there, and they were creepily fascinating, and at the moment, Draco was thinking that they might be the last thing he saw before he died. Of course he had to look.
            Rodolphus reached up and touched Draco’s chin almost gently, as if he was imploring him to look. But whether or not he was, Draco had already plunged past his surface thoughts into the depths of his mind, without meaning to. Involuntary Legilimency happened like that sometimes, and Draco had been taught by the woman Rodolphus was chanting the praises of. It would have been more surprising if it hadn’t happened.
            Images swam past Draco, and then straightened out. He was standing in the middle of a small, cramped stone room with Rodolphus rocking back and forth on the floor in front of him, and from the other side of the nearest wall came endless shrieks.
            Draco backed away, until his back hit the wall the shrieks were coming from. He shut his eyes, and opened them again. But he was still in the midst of a memory that took place in Azkaban, and he could still only recognize Rodolphus because it was what Rodolphus had been talking about. This withered man with the scraggly beard and the burning black eyes wouldn’t have been familiar to him if he hadn’t just heard about it.
            The sobbing shrieks sounded like pure Bellatrix, however. And as Draco listened, they became words, words that bounced and echoed in Draco’s mind the way they had once echoed in Rodolphus’s.
            “My lord trusts me! My lord trusts me! My lord loves me! My lord will come for me! He will be here soon! He will—”
            And then the memory mercifully ended as Rodolphus thrust Draco from his mind. Draco struggled, staggered, and ended up with his back against a different wall, one that he at least knew was real. He placed his hand flat there and stood in the midst of the thunder of his heart.
            Oddly enough, he thought of how strange it was to hear the voice of a woman he had killed. And then he wondered if Rodolphus had minded hearing his wife call out for the Dark Lord when he was right next door and unable to touch her or help her.
            Rodolphus lifted his head slowly. Draco braced himself. If Rodolphus figured out that Draco had been in his mind, he might well kill him. On the other hand, for people not trained in Legilimency, it was possible for it to just feel like recalling a particularly vivid memory.
            He hoped Rodolphus was untrained in Legilimency. He prayed for it.
            “My Lord hasn’t granted me license to kill you,” Rodolphus whispered gently. “It seems that he thinks you might still be of some use with Elwood’s project. But he told me I could do whatever else I wanted to you.” He turned his wand slowly around, looking down at it as though it was a beloved pet.
            Then he looked up and gave Draco a version of the same smile. “And so, you’re going to help me develop the torture spell. Stand still.”
*
            This time, when he came into the grey dreamscape and his memories returned, bobbing up and down in his head like rubbish in the river, Draco made his way to the water and flung himself into it.
            The cold swept all over his body and made him gasp and shiver, but it also did the thing he had been hoping for: it cleansed him. He had thought it might, after the way the taste of it made his mouth feel. Draco gulped and clawed his way back to the surface before he could drown—he didn’t even want to imagine what would happen if he drowned in a dream—and then stood there with his head bowed and his clothes streaming.
            “You look even worse than I do.”
            Draco tipped his head in dull acknowledgement of Potter’s arrival. The horrors he had endured under Rodolphus’s hands were fading away, but he didn’t think that the pain echoing along his nerves would be much touched. How could this place keep him sane when he forgot about it every time he woke up?
            He waded back to the shore where Potter stood and flopped down, his head in his hands. Potter stirred awkwardly from foot to foot, then finally cleared his throat and sat down silently beside Draco.
            “Can I do anything?” he asked.
            Draco stared at him. “You’re the hunted enemy of the Dark Lord,” he said. “And you’re asking if you can do anything.”
            “Yes.” Potter gazed at him steadily, his arms still folded on his knees. “I told you, you look worse than I feel. I’m going on a nearly impossible quest, but I don’t think that you’re on a quest. You’re trying to survive.”
            “Then consider life my goal,” Draco snapped, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t in the mood to debate with Potter tonight, even about something as intangible as his survival. He ached. He wanted to absorb as much of the grey atmosphere and the flowing stream as he could and carry it back into the real world.
            “What happened?” Potter asked, bringing him back and anchoring him to the greyness.
            “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Draco.
            “I think you need to.”
            “What do you know about what I need?” Draco knew he had no wand here, but he reached for it anyway. Then his hand fell limp and exhausted at his side, and he dipped his head and kept on speaking, but his words were purest rubbish, he thought. “Because I’ve been used as a component in a torture spell, and I’ve had pieces of glass flung at my eyes that almost put them out, and I’ve been strung up like a side of meat, and I’ve had to lie down and watch pendulums that were going to cut through my skin and bone swinging closer and closer. And all the time, Rodolphus Lestrange watched and pretended to make notes and laughed.”
            “Because you killed his wife,” Potter murmured.
            “No, because I killed his favorite Kneazle,” Draco snapped back. “Of course because of that. Although it probably didn’t help that I slipped into his memories and heard Bellatrix ranting in Azkaban about how much she trusted the Dark Lord, and then I had to wonder how Rodolphus felt, knowing that Bellatrix wanted the Dark Lord and not him.” Draco shuddered and put his hands over his face. The grey land wasn’t doing its job this evening. “I’m not sure which one he tortured me for.”
            Potter caught his breath, and said nothing. Draco blinked and turned to him. “Your sympathy dries up quickly.”
            “Not that,” said Potter, and he was looking at the river with eyes like stars. “I should have thought of it before. He wants to hide things that are important to him. Where would he hide them? With someone he trusted. Absolutely. Someone who was more devoted to him than to her own husband.” He turned and clutched Draco’s hand. “Do you know if your aunt had any hiding places? Any place where she would have put something she didn’t want the Aurors to find?”
            Draco shook his hand a little, but not hard. He didn’t want to let go of Potter’s comforting touch, as small as it was. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I really doubt it. She would have given up all her houses when she was arrested. They would have searched any place she mentioned to anyone else—and a lot of the Death Eaters didn’t stay loyal and gave evidence, so the Aurors would have known. It’s not like they could break into her Gringotts vault, but other than that—”
            Potter whooped and bent forwards, grabbing Draco so hard that Draco’s shoulders ached from the embrace. “Thanks, Malfoy! You might have just saved a lot of lives!” He jumped up and bolted across the grass towards whatever point he went when he disappeared on ordinary nights, calling over his shoulder, “And made it possible to defeat Voldemort!”
            Potter winked out like a fading flame, and left Draco blinking at river and grey mist with a pleasantly numb sensation. He’d take it, he thought. It had been a day since he’d felt a pleasant anything.
            So he sat alone, by that grey, flowing river, and gradually some of the memory of the pain left him, and his breathing calmed down, and he found himself flexing his hands slightly and smiling a little.
            He couldn’t live without pain. He might not even survive this new purpose that the Dark Lord had told him he had to fulfill. Rodolphus might decide to kill him after all. He might go too far and kill him accidentally. The Dark Lord could change his mind the next day, decide Draco was a danger instead of a liability, and use the Killing Curse on him himself.
            But there was this place, and this place was untouchable. And without even meaning to, with nothing to report on except the pain he had suffered, Draco had somehow helped Potter with his quest.
            He wasn’t useless. If he died, he wouldn’t have lived to no purpose.
            And so he sat there, musing on that fact that he would forget when he woke up, and which would have to burn like a star somewhere in the back of his mind, making his life worthwhile in the way that service to the Dark Lord never had.
*
            BAFan: But now the story continues!
SP777: A good way to put it.
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A Dream of Running Water