Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Currents of Silver	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 7453 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 5
- 6
- 7
Thank you again for all the reviews!
            “That is disturbing.”
            Harry wanted to snort when he heard Severus say that. Malfoy had explained it all—how there must be some magic or spell that had gathered up all the negative emotions from anyone who had ever wished harm on Harry and amplified them until they reached the point where they could reach out to harm Harry himself—in clearer terms than he had at first. He had poured out names of magical theorists Harry had never heard of, his face alight with passion, and at one point slammed his fist into the dining room table hard enough to make Harry jump.
            “It is,” Harry settled for saying. “What I want to know is, do we need to find the person who cast the original spell to stop the killings? Or not?”
            Severus and Malfoy turned and cast him oddly identical glances of pity. Harry locked his elbows into the tabletop. Years ago he would have retreated defensively, but you couldn’t do that and remain in a successful relationship with Severus Snape. He might be ignorant. Still, he’d asked a question that mattered.
            “There is most likely no original spellcaster,” Malfoy said. “You’re a person who arouses strong emotions, Potter, and you always have been. Those emotions need some place to go, and it’s not unknown for them to collect and gather like this.”
            Harry heaved a quick breath. He wasn’t stupid. He had formed a wrong conclusion through listening to Malfoy’s words, and that was something that they could just tolerate. “But the way you spoke, about it—them—needing practice before they lashed out—”
            “These kinds of magical ripples don’t need practice,” Severus interrupted. Harry turned away from Malfoy to listen to Severus. It might well be that Malfoy wasn’t rolling his eyes at how stupid Harry was, but Harry could barely stand to look at his face right now to find out. “They’re ripples from intense emotional events. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one began with your destruction of the Dark Lord.”
            Harry nodded slowly. “So they build like waves?”
            “Exactly.” That was Malfoy, leaning in from the side, his smile warm.
            Harry eyed him carefully and managed to nod and murmur his understanding. Wow. Malfoy is like—like someone lit a fire underneath him, ever since the moment when he found out I was jealous of him.
            Harry thought it was a weird way to decide you had a bond with someone, but hey. Whatever worked for Malfoy, he supposed.
            “Like waves, like water. That’s a useful way to think about them.” Malfoy leaned back, and his hands sketched back and forth through the air, attracting Harry’s gaze. “Think of all the ambient background magic of the wizarding world as a pool, lying there, waiting. Someone tosses a stone, and it hits the pool and sets up waves. Usually, by the time the ripples spread far away from the source, they’re weak and don’t affect anything. That’s why you don’t usually hear about magic like this attacking other people. Something might happen near the source, and that’s it.”
            Harry thought he could understand now. A bad taste coated his tongue. “So what you’re saying,” he murmured, “is that because so many people thought about my victory and—what, resented it?” He stared at Malfoy, wondering if it was true that part of him had resented Harry for surviving.
            Malfoy inclined his head. “We were all young once.”
            But some of us weren’t as dumb. Harry would have said it, too, except that Severus glided in then. “Yes. They relived your victory and celebrated it in the papers and discussed it and focused their emotion on it in a way that would have happened rarely, if at all, with any other event. So the ripples built and built.”
            “But their choice of targets? And the silver band?” Those were the parts that Harry found it hardest to understand.
            “Ah.” Severus turned towards Malfoy. “Here, the Auror who has been handling the case will have to help.”
            “Well, we can’t find connections between all the victims,” Malfoy said briskly. “But your suggestion of looking to see how many had been treated by Mind-Healers was a good one. And even—what do you practice as, Potter? A psychologist?”
            Harry shrugged. “More or less. I’m uncomfortable with labels.”
            He got a single, searingly sardonic glance from Malfoy at that, but Malfoy shielded his eyes with a blink in the next second and said, “Yes. Well, the magic could trace connections like that. It was the profession you trained in and the profession you practiced. Certain people would have heard about it. Like me, for example. The magic would focus the emotions along certain lines, looking for someone to hurt. It found them.”
            “The silver bands?” Harry had to admit that this sounded reasonable to him so far, although he still didn’t know how much of the theory he would understand if Malfoy tried to explain it.
            “I don’t know about those yet,” said Malfoy, shaking his head. “We might not understand them until we examine the source of the ripple.”
            Harry paused. “What do you mean?” Malfoy hadn’t mentioned traveling anywhere. “Are we going to look at the site of the first murder?” That was the only thing he could think of.
            “No,” said Malfoy. “The source of your defeat of the Dark Lord. The true source of all the negative feelings about you,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth. “Or at least the most powerful.”
            “Do you think we’ll find something if we go to Hogwarts, then?” Harry asked doubtfully, turning to stare at Severus. Severus preserved a blank face, as he tended to do when he was trying to avoid influencing the discussion. “I mean, people hated me before that. And after that.”
            “Maybe. But I think this is the epicenter. We have to go to Hogwarts to determine if it really is.” Malfoy slid to his feet, eyes locked on Harry’s. “Will you come with me?”
            “I will,” said Harry, and glanced a question at Severus.
            Severus’s eyes were dark. Harry knew why. Although he had returned to Hogwarts to teach for a time after running his own Potions business for a number of years, the last time he’d left it was—under a cloud, to put it mildly.
*
            “I have to insist, Severus. I’m sorry.”
            Harry paused and turned slowly around. He’d been leaving Severus’s quarters after one of his weekend visits. Minerva had turned a blind eye as long as they were discreet, which usually meant Harry had to be out of sight by Sunday evening.
            This time, though, Harry had stumbled straight into a conversation between Minerva and Severus, one in which she sounded so tired and guilty that Harry felt his curiosity piqued. He did his best to blend in with the wall.
            He watched Severus reach out and take what, from the shadow, looked like a piece of parchment. Severus and Minerva were standing around a corner, and Harry could only see bits and pieces of their elbows and robes. The torches casting shadows told him more.
            “I see,” said Severus. Flatly.
            “I am sorry,” said Minerva, and Harry thought that he saw her bowing her head. “But the Ministry is searching desperately for an excuse to interfere in Hogwarts. I can’t let them have this one.”
            “I quite understand.” Severus cleared his throat, then again. “Well. I knew this day might soon come. There have been more complaints lately from the parents of students I teach, about someone with the Dark Mark on his arm instructing them.”
            “There shouldn’t be a difference!” Minerva said passionately, and Harry leaned back a little. He had thought that she was on the Ministry’s side for a moment, even with the sorrow in her voice. “They agreed to forgive you! They agreed that you weren’t a danger. That they could forget what you did during the war—” She gasped and continued, “It disgusts me.”
            “I know,” said Severus. Listening as hard as he could for clues in a voice that was steadily more familiar, Harry couldn’t hear as much annoyance as he had thought he would. Or maybe Severus was simply resigned to the world turning against him, since people seemed to do it all the time, and for the smallest of reasons. “But I thought, when I heard about the new law they were passing on war reparations, that it might make an impact.”
            “Then why didn’t you warn me?”
            “Because I thought the impact would fall on other former Death Eaters,” Severus whispered. “Not me.”
            Harry slipped silently back into Severus’s quarters. Yes, he could hear some anger there after all, and he would wait to see if Severus needed him. But on the other hand, he had heard enough of what should be a private conversation. If Severus and Minerva wanted to say farewell to each other, they should be able to do so.
            Harry sat down on Severus’s bed and spent a moment staring at the rumpled blankets. Then he let himself slump back so he could look at the ceiling.
            He wasn’t worried about Severus’s financial future. He had plenty of money saved, he could return to brewing full-time, and he knew that Severus didn’t have the peculiar pride that would forbid him to take money from someone else, if it came to that. At least, as long as he trusted and loved that person.
            And Harry cherished the fact that he had managed to ascend to that position of trust. He wouldn’t lose it now.
            No, he was worried more for what would happen to Severus’s state of mind, and the peace he had struggled so hard to win after the war.
            “So you heard.”
            It never ceased to amaze Harry how Severus could draw conclusions like that simply from something like seeing Harry waiting in his room. But he knew it well enough not to be surprised by it, either. He rolled over and nodded silently.
            Severus shut the bedroom door behind him and sat down in the chair by the desk. Harry had woken up several times now, on the nights he spent here, to find Severus sitting there and scribbling restlessly on one of the seemingly random scrolls of parchment coiled on the desk. He said that his best ideas came to him when he was half-dreaming about potions or detentions. Harry would leave him to it.
            “Do you want to talk about it?” Harry asked.
            Severus turned his head by slow degrees to meet Harry’s eyes. “Do I even have the ability to mourn it?”
            “I think so,” Harry said slowly. “I mean, this wasn’t what you wanted to do for the rest of your life, but it’s unfair for you to be forced out simply because the Ministry is paranoid.”
            And, as usual, the Ministry isn’t going to punish the former Death Eaters who have the money to pay them off. Harry had been a little sickened to see how easily some of the former Death Eaters who hadn’t committed any murders had been accepted back among the Ministry elite.
            Now that he thought about it, it was probably one of the reasons he hadn’t wanted to stay an Auror, although he hadn’t known himself well enough to say that when he left the training. He would have had to deal with those people all the time.
            “That is not—precisely what I meant to say. I used the wrong word.” Severus dragged his hand through his hair. “I meant, do I have the right to mourn? Should I not have known that this would end someday?’
            “You can think something’s going to end without expecting it to end in an unjust way.”
            Severus’s gaze came back from whatever distance it was focused on and landed on Harry, softening. “Yes. I like your perspective.”
            “It’s not one you would have thought of?”
            “You sound surprised.” Severus stood and made his way over to the bed, already undoing his robes. Harry, although he felt himself blush, leaned back and spread his legs in invitation. “But you seem convinced that Slytherins spend most of their time alive mourning how unfair things are, anyway.” Severus kissed his shoulder.
            “Not all of them. Some of them.” Harry’s mind flickered back to Malfoy and the last time he’d seen him, unable to comprehend even then that he and Harry were different and Harry wasn’t going to fall over in admiration of Malfoy’s skill. “You, sometimes.”

            Severus gave a breathless snort and stretched out beside him. Obedient to the implied command, Harry began to take off his robes.
            “I began to think somewhere along the seventh year of teaching that this was the price I deserved to pay,” Severus said, stretching his arms above his head and shrugging out of the robe only when Harry tapped his shoulder blade and made him raise up. “For letting Lily die, for becoming a Death Eater for even a short time, and all the rest of it. This suffering was my redemption.”
            “The seventh year you were teaching? You mean, even before Hermione and Ron and I got to Hogwarts?”
            “You always see things in term of your friends,” Severus murmured, but not as if he minded. “Yes. That was the way I felt.”
            “But you were still unpleasant and unfair to people.”
            “Redemption gives one rather a sense of superiority. You begin to think that you can do anything to anyone you like, because you are already suffering for crimes they know nothing about.”
            Harry laughed softly and said nothing more as he dragged the robes free and then rolled over to claim a kiss from Severus. What he said was true enough, and he and Harry had argued and agreed about those days, both. Harry hadn’t been content until Severus had apologized to Neville, particularly. He had been the one Severus picked on most.
            But for Harry, the real test had been seeing what Severus would do when it came to the students he’d taught at Hogwarts the second time around. And he had changed. He still permitted no one to use wands in his classroom and took away points from students who purposely did dangerous or stupid things around the potions, but this time, he did it from all Houses. And he didn’t sabotage people by attacking their character or making comments about them to their faces.
            Maybe his words on their essays were still savage. Harry wouldn’t know.
            For now, though, he did know that he enjoyed relaxing with Severus, his arms draped around Severus’s shoulders, his eyelids drooping as he sighed and the sweat on their bodies cooled. They had come a longer way than Harry could ever have imagined. That was what was important now.
*
            “Here it is.”
            Harry looked around the Great Hall and sighed a little. It was the middle of the day, which meant students were attending classes instead of gathering around to gape at Harry, which Harry had been afraid of.
            But maybe it wouldn’t have been him. Maybe it would have been Severus, who some of them still remembered as a Potions professor. Or maybe it would have been the sight of a real life Auror stalking around the Great Hall in red robes. Harry had sort of faded out of sight in the last few years, being only a Healer and living mostly in the Muggle world.
            “You’re sure this will work.”
            McGonagall’s voice was low and skeptical. Harry flashed her a quick smile. But she looked more reassured by Malfoy’s soft, “We don’t know. It’s our best guess at the moment, and the only way I can think of to stop the murders.”
            “They must be stopped, of course.” McGonagall’s shoulders straightened under what looked like the burden of a Gryffindor’s righteousness. “There’s no question of that.”
            Harry smiled at her and turned around to contemplate the spot in the Great Hall where Voldemort had died. He’d expected to have trouble pinpointing it. It had been fourteen years.
            But no, surprisingly. The instant they’d walked in, his head had turned towards it, and he’d felt a pulsing wave of magic that broke against his senses.
            Harry tried to hide his shiver, and circled slowly towards the spot. He could see a few dark marks on the floor, but he was sure the original ones from the battle had to have been cleared up long ago.
            Malfoy pushed past him and knelt next to the spot, one hand held out as if he was testing the steam rising from a warm pool of water. He turned his head and focused on Harry with a keenness that made Harry grateful he wasn’t a criminal himself. “This is the place?”
            “Yes. How can I feel it? How can you? What kind of magical theory explains that?”
            McGonagall made a small confused noise behind him. Harry ignored that. They could explain later.
            “I can feel it because I was one of the people who had their emotions braided into this…we might as well call it a magical net, because that’s what it is.” Malfoy rose to his feet and prowled in another circle again. His eyes were still fixed on the place that Harry remembered Voldemort standing, so well. “As for why you can, you expended powerful emotions and magic here. Even just one of those can make a difference to someone’s ability to find a place afterwards.”
            “Oh. Well, is that any help in finding clues at the murder sites?”
            “It was right after the murders had first happened. The sensation fades quickly.”
            Harry snorted. He couldn’t help it. “But you want to tell me that this one still preserves the feeling here after fourteen years?”
            Malfoy gave him a sharp smile. Severus touched Harry’s elbow, but Harry shrugged the hand off impatiently. Yes, he understood that Malfoy had been through a lot. What mattered was that he said one thing and then he said another one that contradicted it.
            “Do you understand how much what you did here mattered to everybody in the wizarding world?” Malfoy asked, coming to a stop halfway around the circle he’d been pacing from Harry. He was gazing intently at the stone, but Harry thought he could raise his head any second. “It affected all of them, one way or the other. They might have rejoiced to see the Dark Lord dead. They might have wondered what was going to happen next. Maybe they didn’t know right away because they were on the run from Death Eaters and Snatchers, and someone had to track them down to tell them. But eventually, everyone knew. You were at the center of a moment that—I don’t think there are any equivalents to it in the cases I’ve studied, except maybe huge massacres. And most of those are centuries old and don’t have as much resonance as this.”
            He turned to Harry, and Harry found it even harder to glance away from Malfoy’s eyes than he had thought he would.
            “This is bloody unique. Of course there would be people with negative emotions towards you because of it. And those emotions would have stirred up the magic of our world. And now they’ve had time to build.”
            “You still haven’t explained the silver bands on the victims’ arms.”
            Harry knew it was stupid to be concerned about that, that he was using the words like a clumsy hammer to smash the mood between him and Malfoy. But as far as he wanted it to, it worked. Malfoy blinked once and turned away with a small nod.
            “Yes. But in the meantime, I think you probably have to accept that this is the magical wave I said it was.”
            Harry nodded, wordless. Then he found his voice when McGonagall made a noise like clearing her throat behind him. “So how can we protect other people? How do we know that this magic won’t kill someone else before it comes for me?”
            “I did hope, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall muttered, “that you had learned, in the years since the war, to value your own life as well.”
            “I value it for him.”
            That was Severus, and Harry shook his head at him. He turned back in time to catch an odd expression on Malfoy’s face, but it didn’t seem as though it would interfere in the case, because he said, “There’s a spell I want to cast that would tell us more about the magical resonance here, but it’s rather disruptive.” He turned to McGonagall.
            McGonagall nodded at once. “I’ve used charms that should prevent any noise from getting out of this room. I’ve also instructed the other professors not to let any students come in early to lunch.”
            “Thank you,” said Malfoy, and drew his wand.
            Harry watched, turning a little towards Severus to use his height as a shelter. He didn’t know what kind of spell could make Malfoy look that grim, but he knew that he didn’t want to stand alone before it.
*
            Draco crouched down before the spot of magical resonance that shrieked at him and placed his hand flat on the stone in front of him. If he breathed a little more slowly, in and out, and if he dropped his head until it was hard to see the place where his hand rested, and if he exhaled even more slowly, he would get into the right mindset for performing this spell.
            And he did. The cloak fell over his thoughts first, muting them and making it impossible for them to harm him. Then Draco felt his senses contracting in the same way. He could no longer hear Severus or Potter shuffling their feet or coughing or muttering to each other. There was only the distant hum of magic.
            Old magic. Ancient magic.
            Draco drew his wand in a circle around him. He said no words, but he didn’t have to. His will rose from the silent well inside him, and that was enough. The stone around him began to blaze red.
            He didn’t draw the circle behind him. There had to be one place that was left open.
            Then Draco braced both palms on the stone and began to chant the spell under his breath. His voice would rise until he was shouting the words eventually, but it had to start off as a whisper.
            And then rise. Draco tried not to think about how many other things would rise at the same time.
            The magic swept around him, leading even his voice in the same direction as Draco had drawn the circle at first. He heard breathing from another pair of lungs at the same time, chanting in another voice.
            When he lifted his head, Draco met the eyes of a replica of himself, crouched on the stone in front of him. There was another circle around him, and another stretch of Great Hall that technically didn’t exist but reflected the one immediately behind Draco, as if he was facing a mirror.
            Draco nodded to the image without stopping his chant, and the image nodded back. Draco spared a moment to hope that the others had moved out of the way. This was going to be messy if they hadn’t.
            “Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis…”
            The image leaned forwards until Draco was sure that he would try to kiss Draco on the lips. That wasn’t supposed to happen, wasn’t supposed to be part of the spell, but Draco tried to ignore that and keep chanting.
            In the end, the image did what it was supposed to. When Draco’s throat was hoarse with the chant, it leaned in and turned into a small, wavering blur of color. The color passed between Draco’s lips and into his lungs, and the circle around Draco blew up into a net of sparks that covered him and the air around him like pictures of an intricate set of runes.
            Draco looked wildly around, his chest heaving with the power and his eyes picking out rune after rune. Yes, he could see—there were many emotions he recognized, many glowing strands of the net he could trace back to specific people if he just had enough time—
            But he didn’t have enough time. He had only the limited amount of time that the spell would actually last. He lashed his hand out and made the last gesture, the wand-movement that completed the magic.
            He flew away from his body and into the net, bouncing from strand to strand, as the spell carefully pared down his mind to the one essential image he needed to see.
*
            Draco huddled against his parents as he watched Potter duel the Dark Lord. His father’s grasp on his shoulder was so tight that Draco worried he’d break the bone.
            But broken bones wouldn’t matter if the Dark Lord won. Draco knew that, and part of him strained towards the contest happening in front of him, trying to add strength to Potter’s defense, trying to make believe that Potter would use something other than a simple Disarming spell on the most powerful wizard of all time.
            Potter seemed too confident, just prancing around like that in front of the Dark Lord and voicing a lot of slop Draco had never heard before. Draco’s mouth stung with the pace of his breathing. He wanted to turn around and bury his head in his mother’s shoulder, the way he would have done when he was a child and had a nightmare, but he couldn’t turn away from this duel, no matter how disastrous it was.
            Potter abruptly shouted “Expelliarmus!” at the same time as the Dark Lord shouted, “Avada Kedavra!”
            There was a monstrous collision of green and gold and red and other colors of magic that Draco couldn’t see through. He tucked a protective hand around his face, moaning. The power fried his skin and made him feel like he had a sunburn. He could feel his mother surging to her feet, ready to drag him further away.
            But then the magic died away, and there was so much shouting that Draco knew Potter must have won. No one would be shouting if the Dark Lord had won, but keeping still like rabbits in the grass, in fear that he would turn around and look at them.
            Draco lowered his hand and looked. He saw the smear of greasy ashes that was all that was left of the Dark Lord. He saw Potter in the embrace of his friends, his face shining with the kind of triumph that Draco knew he would never feel.
            Because along with the rush of relief that came from knowing he and his parents would survive, that the Dark Lord wouldn’t get to kill them after all, came a deeper, darker rush that made him shudder. He also knew things would change because Potter had won. There would be much less respect for the Malfoy name. There would be prison sentences for his father and maybe for him. There would be a change so profound that Draco winced from imagining it.
            And at that moment, staring at the face of the boy whose life had defined his for so many years, in one way or another, Draco didn’t try to stop the resentment that rose from within him. It was dark and hot as the breath of a beast down his neck, but what did that matter, anyway? No one else was ever going to know about it.
            It couldn’t affect Potter, in his little charmed circle.
*
            Draco lifted back out of the memory like a dolphin leaping. And then he wasn’t leaping, he was tipping over on the stone and panting roughly as he felt the air dragging in and out of his lungs.
            “Malfoy!”
            Potter sounded as if he was lunging towards Draco. Well, Draco could only hope that Severus would hold him back. It would be disastrous for everyone involved if Potter crossed the border of Draco’s circle now.
            Draco stood up, still within the confines of the spell. It felt as if he’d hit his head when he fell, but that might have been only the power he was working with. Well, he had what he’d needed, and that meant he could end things.
            He snapped his hand out and closed his fingers into a fist. “Sum pars retis!” he repeated one more time, and the runes of colors and emotions began to dance around him again. Draco nodded once, then added, “Sum as retis!”
            The wand movement he had to make was a snap of his wand down until it was parallel to the floor. It seemed to take forever to make the motion. His wand pressed against invisible, gelatinous barriers, and Draco swore under his breath as he saw the colors of the spell fading. He had only this one chance, more than likely, to make himself the center of the web of resentment and anger and hatred against Potter instead of only one small part. By the time he cast another enchantment to see the web again, it would have changed and flowed on. He would have to spend more time entering another memory that had contributed to this murderous magic.
            I can do this. I can. He pressed his hand down and down. The web was wavering to a stop now, and Draco felt as if he was standing up to his waist in warm water. Some of it was slowing down his wand movements. Some of it was starting up a wave that would roll towards him and soak him.
            He didn’t want to know what would happen when the wave arrived.
            But then he didn’t have to. His wand was in position, and Draco repeated, “Sum as retis!” as loudly as he could.
            There was an incredible wrench, as if the whole piece of the world where he stood had clicked sideways. Draco opened his eyes and saw red and yellow everywhere, drifting, circling, spinning colors. The only difference was that now they circled him.
            And he could end them.
            Draco folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. There was only one problem with this solution to ending a magical wave of emotion, which Draco had read about but never seen performed. He had to reach past his own hatred and other feelings that had contributed to this web and find something positive about Potter.
            And the emotions were difficult to come up with. Long seconds passed in which Draco could feel sweat start to life everywhere on his body and his heart labored and the magic swirled in towards him but also drifted outwards.
            It’ll start again. The murders. If I can’t control this.
            And then Draco thought of the way that Potter had let him into his mind the other day, how the walls of Legilimency had parted for him, and the different perspective he’d gained from watching his duel among the Aurors with Potter. At least half of Draco’s resentment had always come from the idea that Potter was laughing at him behind his back and thought he was a target for mockery.
            But the most important thing about that duel, at least for Potter, had been that he wanted to end it. And he hadn’t mocked Draco. Even when he must have been able to feel how stunned Draco was to see such a different perspective on the duel.
            Draco held onto that, that warm pearl of obsession and what might have been grudging admiration in a different universe, and breathed on it. It shone. It flickered.
            It built up into a burning fire in his palm.
            “Non sum retis!”
            The web around him ruptured abruptly, the long strands of envy and dislike and worry and rage spinning away from each other. Draco lifted his hand and sucked them into the warm pearl of his reality in his hand.
            He looked up and held Potter’s eyes. They widened, but Potter seemed to understand instinctively how important this was, and he didn’t move. He only widened his eyes and let Draco do what he needed to do, staring into the face of the living man who had done more than anyone else to save the wizarding world.
            And that’s the important thing. Not what I felt at the time. Not what I’m going to feel when this is done and over with. Not the jealousy I feel because Potter became first with Severus in the way I couldn’t.
            Draco let the warmth go on building until it felt as if it would start cooking his arm. Then he tossed the pearl into the air and drew his wand in the same moment. The enchanted sight the spell had brought him was fading. He knew he would have to cast the next spell, the one that destroyed the pearl, now, or he would lose sight of it and it would land somewhere else, to become the epicenter of a new web of hatred and murder.
            “Abest!”
            The word ripped out of him along with the needed power, and the wand seemed to pull his arm after it instead of the other way around. Draco tucked his other arm around his head and fell back before the burning wave of invisible radiance that struck him. He could feel something he hadn’t even realized was still tethered to him fading away, fractured, gone.
            And then there was silence in the Great Hall. It lasted until Draco heard footsteps coming towards him. He lifted his head and blinked.
            Potter leaned over, placed a hand on Draco’s shoulder, and smiled. Severus did the same thing from the other side.
            McGonagall cleared her throat a little. “That was—remarkable, Mr. Malfoy.”
            “Wasn’t it?” Draco muttered drowsily. At the moment, he was more than content to curl up and let someone else take care of the aftermath. There might be frightened students or flustered professors, and there were ethical questions about the nature of what he had just done—another rarely used set of spells, because it would have tugged on and changed the emotions and magic of everyone involved in the web—that he would probably have to answer before other Aurors later.
            But not now. For now, Draco passed into the half-swoon, half-trance that using so much powerful magic naturally brought him, and there were only two sensations that he cared to keep track of.
            One supporting hand on the one side, and one on the other.
- 5
- 6
- 7
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Currents of Silver