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This Enchanted Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3669 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Seven--Varieties of Loyalty

            Draco choked on the tentacle, and kicked out with his feet, trying frantically to put distance between himself and the beast. It didn't seem to matter; the beast still followed him, and the tentacles still whirled in circles and came down, crossed in front of the creature, in a pattern that would make it extremely difficult to get a spell between them. Draco could see boils erupting from the creature's skin that would probably form defensive shields, as well.

            And meanwhile, he was choking on a tentacle.

            He could see Alexander's face, the man following his nightmares, his hand resting on a globe. He had no expression; his eyes were calm and merciless, the way Draco sometimes saw his in a mirror on a good day. He watched Draco and no one else, as though gauging how long he could hold his breath.

            That explained why he didn't see Harry coming until it was too late.

            Suddenly magic was there, surrounding Draco, lapping against his legs, so thick and persistent that he felt it as a countercurrent to the terrible pull in his throat. And it rose, and grabbed the beast in front of him, and hurled it against the far wall. Then an invisible foot crushed it the way a giant might crush an ant. Draco watched the grey blood and skin fly apart with fascination.

            Alexander turned to face Harry. He tossed another globe at him, but Harry dodged, rolled, and slammed into Alexander's legs.

            They fell. The twisted never changed expression, and Draco knew why. He had a variety of weapons at his command, and he didn't seem to care about his own life. If Leah was right and he had become a twisted because of an infection of blood and not because he had studied the Dark Arts until he went mad, then he might even be "altruistic" enough to die in pursuit of his goal.

            Whatever the bloody thing is, Draco thought, and cast a binding spell as Alexander's leg flew past. The spell manifested as a long whip of leather coiled around Draco's wrist and leading to Alexander's leg, and when Draco took a step sideways and snapped his arm in the same direction, Alexander flew out of the writhing pile and landed on his back with a solid thump, as if he was made of mahogany.

            Draco moved closer to him. Alexander looked up at him and tossed a globe into his face.

            Draco, remembering the way the last one had gone through his shields, whirled to the side with his arm tucked securely around his face. The globe soared above his shoulder and smashed against the far wall with a tinkling noise. Draco had the mad vision, for a moment, of the wall growing a shield that would protect it against the influence of twisted for the rest of its existence. Because surely that was what Alexander was trying to do, or a version of it. If Leah was right and the Aurors in the Socrates Corps resembled twisted, then Alexander didn't seem to want to form any sort of common cause with them.

            Something cold grabbed Draco's ankle and numbed his feet at once, causing him to wobble. When he looked down, all he saw was a mass of shadows, flowing and flowering around him and rising continually higher. For a moment, his vision swam with remembrance. The Dementors, and the way they had looked like this, fountains of shadow, of cold...

            "Expecto Patronum!"

            A silver stag, the most glorious sight Draco had ever seen in his life, swept past him and dipped its head, catching the shadowy creature on its antlers. When it reared, the shadow creature squalled, and when the stag shook its antlers, the creature tore apart. Draco blinked once, twice. Well, if the thing had had some resemblance to Dementors, it made sense that it might be able to be fought the same way. It was faster thinking than he was used to expecting of Harry, that was all.

            He turned back in time to see Alexander throw another globe at him. Harry stepped in between them and raised a Shield Charm.

            Back in the street attack, Harry's shields had been enough to keep the globe away. This time, the globe soared straight through them and struck Harry in the chest. Harry blinked and staggered back a step.

            Then the globe exploded, and Draco's eyes were full of flying blood and flesh. He thought he saw Alexander disappear out the shop's broken door, he knew he heard Leah's frightened gasping, but everything else disappeared until he was at Harry's side and resting his hand over his heart.

            It still beat. Draco closed his eyes. Not even the revelation that the Dark Lord was dead and he had a rest of his life to look forward to had ever been so important.

            Then he forced himself to look at the bloody wound in the center of Harry's chest. It was shallower than he had thought, but a literal groove digging downwards, and Draco at once cast the spells that would prevent it from bleeding further out and hopefully protect Harry's organs through the jouncing that would follow. Then he turned around to offer reassurances, if Harry wanted them.

            Harry's eyes were closed, his face pale and covered with a sheen of sweat. Just as had happened after the first globe, he was unconscious again.

            Draco took one of his hands and squeezed hard enough to make the bones in Harry's fingers creak. I don't know where you are, what world you're walking with Vane. Come back to me.

*

            "You've had enough adventures for five lifetimes."

            Harry blinked and opened his eyes. He had expected to find himself on the grass under the trees again, but this time, he was in the middle of a cool room in the cottage he had seen before, with the windows open and sunlight and the breeze and birdsong swooping in. He sat up on the bed, and discovered that the sheets were like gathered clouds around him, the way he had always dreamed they might be when he read fairy tales as a child.

            And Lionel sat opposite him, sipping a cup of tea and smiling.

            "Is Draco all right?" Harry croaked out, and Lionel paused in reaching for another cup of tea, presumably to hand to him.

            "I don't know," he said quietly. "I only know what happened to me since I...left, and what passes through your memories. And neither includes any information about that." He gave Harry the tea, and Harry closed his hand around it, feeling the smoothness of the cup and the warmth against his fingers. "Does it really matter so much?"

            "Of course," Harry said, and sipped, and let the tastes burst apart in his mouth and reassemble as what felt like a starburst of sparks. "He's my partner."

            "That used to be my title." Lionel didn't move and didn't raise his eyes from his teacup, but he didn't have to, not when his lowered voice spoke for him.

            Harry winced, and wondered how he could say what he needed to without being condescending. He hadn't moved on, not really. That would be as stupid to say as it was false. He still thought of Lionel. He still looked at him and wondered why it couldn't have worked out between them, why he had been fucked over before he ever opened his mouth to confess his love.

            But it no longer seemed as urgent as it would have a few hours or days ago. Why?

            Because you think that you're falling in love with Draco bloody Malfoy, that's why.

            Cold shame took away all the pleasure of the tea. Harry set it down carefully on the table beside him and sat up. "I don't think that I can be what you want me to be," he said. "Not anymore, not when I'm alive and you're dead." The words appeared to hit Lionel like arrows, from the way he hunched his shoulders, but Harry went on speaking, ignoring the way his heartbeat buzzed and leaped in his ears. He would have to, for the moment. "And Draco can't be what I want him to be, either. I'm starting to think that I haven't really ever been in love with anyone, not when my feelings are shallow and I can transfer them from person to person."

            Lionel stared at him with those wonderful dark eyes shining as if he might weep. "That's not true," he said. "You were loyal to me. I know you were. What I was then wouldn't allow me to accept how loyal you really were, how much courage it took for you to tell me the truth, but I see it now."

            "What you were," Harry echoed quietly. "Not who you were. Lionel...this is wonderful, this life that you seem to promise me." He gestured around the house decorated just the way he always would have liked it to be, and then at Lionel, who was focused on him as though he was the only person in the universe. Harry could remember the time he would have happily killed to see that. "But it's not real."

            "It's real if you want it to be," Lionel said. "If you find the gate. The key." His hands trembled, and he stared down at them until they stopped.

            "I accept that," Harry said. "But the only gate I want to find is the one to the world where I stop becoming infatuated with my partners. It's not fair to them. To you, or to Draco. We need to be partners first, and not--I don't know. I don't think that I was even thinking in terms of lovers, or boyfriends. Just something, grand and passionate and silly. I feel too much. I want too much, for what you can give me."

            I really should have thought of that before. It was what everyone had been trying to tell him, Draco and Lionel and even Ginny, who had finally told Harry that she had to break up with him because his concentration on her alone was just too stifling.

            Harry wondered for a moment if he could ask for a few weeks of holiday time when they were finished with the Alexander case. Go somewhere by himself, or travel, or take up some of the magical hobbies that Ron and Hermione had told him he would enjoy. Do something that would make him be alone and not forever pining after someone to complete him.

            But you have to survive the Alexander case first. And that means coming back from this world where the globes put you.

            He climbed slowly up from the bed and looked around the room. Lionel's chair was between him and the door, but Harry didn't worry much about that. If this illusion was still acting like the real Lionel, then he wouldn't try to prevent Harry from leaving. If he did oppose Harry, that would make it all the easier to shake free of him.

            "Harry." Lionel stood and reached out an appealing hand. "I wanted to be here in the first place because I thought it would mean I had a second chance with you. Are you telling me that's not true, that it's never going to happen?"

            "It's never going to happen," Harry said, and he breathed through the sadness that seemed to be clogging his throat, "because you are dead, Lionel. That's the entire point of this. That's the point of Alexander flinging the globe at me in the first place, I think, to make me think that I have no reason to remain alive, and I should just stay here with you in the dream-world and not come back."

            "This part isn't real," Lionel said, dropping his hand and looking at Harry with eyes that now were too dry. "It could be, if you searched. If you looked hard enough for the light past the darkness in you."

            Harry paused. Those could be random words, spoken as the magic in Alexander's globe felt it was losing control, but he didn't think so. Not when everything else in this dream-world had been so carefully tailored to him.

            "What do you mean?" he asked quietly. "The light past the darkness? What do you mean?"

            "The darkness that's the flaw," Lionel said, and his eyes had changed. They still had the same shine that Harry remembered from the times he'd been alive, but his hands were clasped in front of him as though he was going to swing them like a club and hit Harry on the side of the head. "I know what your gift of visions is. Didn't you always wonder why you had them, when you were never a Seer and sucked at Divination all your life?"

            "I thought it was because of the Dark magic I took during the war, or because of Voldemort," Harry said. "I had visions of him, too." He wondered for a moment if he should be saying that, if Alexander could get the knowledge and use it somehow, but it was clear Alexander, if he knew the content of these visions, didn't know everything. Otherwise, he could have convinced Harry already. "What's important is the way I use them, not that they exist."

            "But a flaw makes you a twisted," Lionel said, leaning towards him. "And twisted need to be hunted and put down for the good of society. Or is it different when they're Aurors?" And his mouth curled.

            That's it, Harry told himself, memorizing the expression for the instant it lasted. That's Alexander speaking, not Lionel. Lionel would never despise Aurors like that. Our Corps, yeah, maybe, but not the job itself.

            "Maybe we do," Harry said quietly. "But if Alexander thinks that, if that's what he's trying to accomplish with his globes, then why hasn't he already committed suicide? Or at least handed himself to the people he could trust to kill him? That's a question I would want to ask. You know, if I could have a chance to talk to him."

            For the first time, Lionel's gaze flickered, and he turned his head in the opposite direction. "How would I know what Alexander thinks?" he asked. "We're two separate people."

            "I don't think so, no," Harry said. He edged closer, and wondered if anything would happen if he tried to grab Lionel. Or he could just dash around him and try to get out the door now. In the end, he settled for talking. "You know what I do, you said. That would explain how you know what Leah told us about our wandless abilities being flaws, and the flaws marking the twisted. But I don't necessarily believe that. It sounds like you do."

            "It makes sense," Lionel said, running a hand through his hair. "But I can't argue with it if you'd rather kill people, of course."

            "I'd rather protect people," Harry corrected him. "If that means thinking about the definition of twisted and changing it some of the time, then that's what I'll do. But I have to stop Alexander first. He's not a twisted who's interested in doing anything but killing people right now, I think."

            "You don't want to stay here with me?" And still Lionel's eyes had something of the man Harry had known in them, even if they were larger and darker than normal.

            "No," Harry said. "I thought--I thought that was what I wanted. But I really am shallow and fickle, the same way Draco thought I was. I loved the man I wanted you to be, not the man you were. And I don't want you to change yourself after death just to fit me. If you're real. If you're not some projection from Alexander's globe that's fucking with my head, anyway."

            Lionel caught his breath and closed his eyes. "You'll never know what you're missing," he said.

            "I think I do," Harry said. "Here? In this little world that's designed to be perfect for me? I do. Every day would be the same. But no, I don't know what my life would have been like if my love for you had been real and you loved me back." He swallowed, and wondered who he had to thank for this new courage, to say things like that and think it wouldn't be the end of the world. Draco? Healer Estillo? Even Alexander?

            "You can find out, if you stay here," Lionel said, and opened his eyes. "I think you're more capable of love than you think you are."

            Harry shrugged, and then in one smooth motion sped past Lionel and out the door of the bedroom, through the main room of the cottage, and out the door that led to the lake.

            The world beyond, on the shore of the lake, resembled a washed-out picture, and Harry grimaced at the lack of color in it. But he kept going, his head bowed as though fighting a strong wind. One was beginning to pick up, in fact, whipping the flat surface of the lake into small waves.

            Lionel didn't chase after him, didn't call after him. Harry looked back over his shoulder once and saw him standing in the doorway of the cottage, his arms folded as though he was cold, his head bowed and his shoulders braced.

            Harry half-wanted to go back, to say that he was sorry, to tell Lionel that it would be all right and he would make things all right if they weren't. But he had come this far, and he thought the pathetic posture was probably one more trick of Alexander's globes. He kept on plodding along.

            And then the world faded around him. Grey became more grey, the surface of the lake opened like a popping balloon, and Harry found himself practically diving into the void that opened at his feet. Harry held his breath, and then let it out. He was certain nothing would happen to him.

            Alexander could enchant his mind, make him believe what wasn't true, try to kill him. But there was no reason to try to persuade Harry to stay in this unreal world if he could kill him easily in his mind.

*

            Draco clenched his teeth as the breath began to pass more rapidly in and out of Harry's lungs, and his eyes fluttered open. He had taken Harry back to their office after one of the Auror Healers took care of the wound in his chest, because he was half-convinced that this unconscious state would pass as the other had, and the Healers hadn't helped much with that last time. And there was still the ban in place keeping Harry from St. Mungo's.

            There was, also, squirming and unacknowledged, the desire to be the one who had tended Harry, the one responsible for Harry's waking if he did wake.

            But he had second-guessed his decision for the last hour, and had ended by promising himself that he would go to the Auror Healers if Harry didn't wake by the time that the clock recorded ninety minutes since the attack. Here Harry was, eighty-seven minutes afterwards, sitting up and looking around the room with a faint smile. Draco took a step back and clasped his hands behind him, uncertain how Harry would react to him.

            "You brought me back here?" Harry nodded to him in a manner that made it clear it wasn't really a question. "Thank you."

            "You would rather not deal with the screaming fans and friends and photographers, I would assume," Draco said. It was to their advantage that their visit to Leah had happened in the evening, and that most of the reporters assumed that interest was gone from that street of shops after Alexander's latest attack. "Miss Anderson is now in the custody of the Unspeakables, by the way."

            "I wish them joy of her," Harry said, and rubbed the back of his neck. "I saw Lionel again."

            Draco held himself still and did nothing but raise an eyebrow, because anything he said would reveal too much. Or perhaps too little.

            "He told me that I could come to that world and be with him, but..." Harry frowned at the far wall. "I think I'm finally free of that infatuation you accused me of having with him." Then he winced and held up a hand, before Draco could open a mouth and get the words out. "Sorry. I phrased that badly. You were right about my love for him being an--obsession, not real. The thought of staying there with him for the rest of my life doesn't appeal. So I came back."

            Draco stared at Harry. Harry kept looking aside, his hand rubbing at the nape of his neck all the while, as though he had ripped through a collar someone tried to put there. Draco was pleased if it was Lionel, but he could not keep the words that he spoke next from leaving his lips.

            "So you decided on your own that your love for him was false, and you needed to come back?" He shook his head. "The man you were mourning not even a month ago, the man whose death made you change your mind about loving someone or having sex again? Forgive me for being skeptical that this is a real change."

            Harry stiffened and curled his fingers into the desk hard enough to crumple a piece of parchment on it. Draco wondered if he'd noticed yet that Draco had softened the desk with a Cushioning Charm. Probably not. It was the sort of thing that Harry didn't notice because he considered comfort unimportant.

            "As you said, that was a bit of a silly idea, that I could never fall in love again," Harry said. "Or--have sex again." A bright blush overtook his face, but at least he met Draco's eyes. "So. I've decided to take a leave of absence from the Ministry when this case is done, and see if I can determine why I have the tendency to fall in love with someone suddenly and have it turn out to be infatuation. Get some distance. That's the best idea."

            Draco bit his lips, and said nothing about who they would assign him to as a partner or whether they would allow Harry a holiday from Socrates Corps, because it would come out wrong. "It seems that Alexander's visions lose their power when he uses a second globe, then," he said instead. "I wonder why he bothered tossing a second one at you?"

            Harry shrugged. "Lionel--the imagined one--said something about the darkness in me and how evil it makes me. Maybe Alexander believes the same thing Leah does, about us being twisted, and that we should be locked up ourselves."

            "If he does, why target others?" Draco shook his head. "I could believe that he believes that about the Aurors in Socrates Corps, yes, and it makes us understandable targets. But Stuart? Syles? Why?"

            "I don't know," Harry said. He paused, as though about to say something else, and then slid off the desk. "Unless we posit that he has some means of detecting other twisted. Perhaps the forms that his companions take around us? They do seem to take different forms in each attack."

            Draco opened his mouth to answer, but the door of the office flew open then, and they both jumped as Auror Macgeorge strode in. Her partner, Auror Rudie, came behind her, once a wide-eyed youngster whom the last few months had hardened. She nodded to both of them, but left it to Macgeorge to explain their abrupt entrance.

            "Seems you're wanted in the Department of Mysteries," Macgeorge said, talking to Draco alone, as she often did. They were both pure-bloods, and they both understood, as pure-bloods who did not try to live in the world did not, what that meant in the wake of the war. "Seems a globe exploded, and now one of their Unspeakables is in a coma." She raised an eyebrow. "And he's lost his magic, too."

*

            SP777: Why should Draco become Head Auror? It's a very tiresome position with almost no fieldwork. ;)

            unneeded: Alexander doesn't necessarily believe in infecting others. His purpose is a bit different.
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This Enchanted Life