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A Vicious Tangle (Complete)	By : Tommy-Lane Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13085 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any charactors from the books and I am not making any money off of this.

Chapter List
- 6
- 7
- 8
"You'll enter behind me."
"So you've said already."
"Malfoy, this is serious."
"I'm taking it seriously."
"No, you're not, your being...you."
"Elaborate if you want me to catch on, because I find nothing wrong with me."
"You know what I mean."
"I can't read your traumatized brain Potter."
"Enter behind me and stay there till I give the go ahead or I'm taking you right back to the office."
"To fix me with that collar you mentioned so I can't go anywhere without you?"
"Try me and I will. And it will be pink and sparkly."
"That's just sick."
"With a leash to boot."
"Now you're just trying to provoke me, you twisted tosser."
"Are you two finished sniping at each other yet?" Weasley poked his head out of the hospital room door and Potter's lips - that embarrassingly enough seemed redder and puffier than usual - snapped closed around whatever thickheaded thing he was about to come back at him with. "Because if not let me know yeah, so I can go get a sandwich."
"We're coming." Draco announced, taking a step forward and purposely keeping his gaze from drifting back to Potter whose hair even after excessive finger combing and a few well directed spells still looked like he had been...well what they had been doing. Draco just hoped Weasley wouldn't notice considering Potter's hair always looked like it was on the wrong side of a hurricane.
"Seriously, not two seconds later." Potter gripped the back of his robes and sent him stumbling back a step, his lean form slipping in front of Draco's like a vigilant body guard. Pansy would be oh so pleased, not that he was going to tell her anything, the nagging bint. "Behind me, remember?"
Grumbling under his breath Draco let Potter follow Weasley through the door before he joined them inside the large room. The muggle woman was lying on a hard bed in the middle, surrounded by tables filled with potion bottles and a bubbling cauldron, a floating piece of parchment with an enchanted quill scratching out her vitals just off to her right. "Think she'd assume she was dead if she randomly awoke?" He asked no one in particular as he studied her from over Potter's shoulder.
She was still as white as when he first saw her, her hair still wet but the pillowcase supporting her lovely flaxen head was as dry as a summer's day. Her fingernails had gone completely blue, the veins running through her body the same ice color and visible through her near translucent skin. Everything about her was white and blue - winter down to her sodden hair and wrinkly toes. He guessed that her lips would be a violent shade of blue as well if he could see them but there was strip of something covering her mouth, blocking it completely from sight.
"What's over her mouth?" He asked quietly, stepping involuntarily closer and knocking into Potter's back when he didn't budge an inch.
"It's soaked with a rejuvenation and healing potion and laced with a few anti-curse charms." A soft, whimsical voice said from behind them, a Healer in flowing white robes brushing past them as she came to stand beside the bed - her large brown eyes scanning the parchment in the air. "Might I inquire whom you might be?" She asked, looking straight past both Weasley and Potter and directly at him, her gaze uncomfortably reminiscent of McGonagall - cat like and penetrating.
"Specialist Malfoy." He answered, more than a little annoyed when Potter still refused to move from in front of him like some unmovable fortress.
"Of?" She quipped an eyebrow and marked something off on the chart in her hands.
"Dark Artifacts."
"Ah. Welcome, I'm Healer Keller, I assume you're familiar with the patient then?" She set the chart down and folded her hands together behind her.
"He was the one who discovered her...predicament." Potter answered.
"Good good, smart to bring him along gentlemen." She smiled and Draco took the moment her back was turned to elbow Potter sharply in the side in a ‘ha, told you so’ gesture.
"We got a note that something’s changed?" Potter asked, nudging him back sharply with his own.
She beckoned them closer with a nod of her head and they did so like a forward moving boat on a track - as one unit with Draco forced to remain firmly behind the pair of them. He scowled at their shoulders. How was he supposed to get anything done from behind them? "It was in between the rounds this morning, a mediwitch was changing her bedclothes when she noticed this." Kellen flicked her wand and the girl’s thin, limp arm lifted into the air, turning until the palm was facing upwards.
Narrowing his eyes and pressing closer to Potter's back, Draco squinted at her pallid skin, the faintest marking in the same blue of her veins twisting over the inside of her wrist - it was about the same size as the disk. He knew it without a shadow of doubt, he had spent far too much time holed up in his office studying it not to notice the marking for what it was when his vision adjusted and he was able to take it all in.
"What is it?" Weasley asked, his head tipped in curiosity.
"The disk." Draco answered before the Healer had even parted her lips.
"What?" Potter peered at him from over his shoulder.
"The markings. See the pattern its making? It's following the same path the green did on all the disks and it's the exact same size." He answered as he met Potter's eye, noticing with a funny little jolt that he was smiling a little, even though there was nothing to be smiling about in the least.
"You're certain?" Healer Keller asked to which Draco nodded. "We had wondered but it's impossible to get a good look inside her mouth, the water there has taken on a nearly pitch black hue."
Draco's gaze darted quickly away from his smiling lips and over to the woman lying on the bed in horror. "The water is still in her mouth?" He asked, his voice coming out a tad choked. "Why hasn't it been removed?"
"We've tried but the moment we began draining it, her vitals slipped even further and there's barely anything left of her as it is." She explained. "And due to the strange and complex nature of her case we have started to concentrate our efforts on that particular area. We've placed the cloth over it in hopes that the potion will seep into the water and produce some kind of effect."
"Has it?" Potter asked.
"Unfortunately not yet. The only change there's been is the marking that's shown up on her wrist. We don't have any idea what it could be, no one has ever seen anything like it, especially on a muggle of all people whose bodies cannot usually tolerate the presence of magic like this for so long."
"Could you remove it?" Draco asked, to which Potter said his name very quietly, Weasley shot him a nervous look, and the Healer hesitated as she glanced between the three of them. "Only for a moment?" He pressed on, ignoring the two Auror's and the tension that rippled suddenly across Potter's shoulders.
"I don't see why not." She answered after a moment’s deliberation.
"Wait." Potter ordered before turning sharply to Draco. "Are you sure? What if...?" He left the rest unsaid because it didn't need to be and when all Draco did was stare resiliently back at him, he sighed and rolled his shoulders back. "Fine. But the first sign of something being off and we're leaving."
With a swift nod, he stepped around Potter and up to the bedside, waiting and listening with all that was in him. It was odd, when he concentrated on it, on the girl completely, he could tap back into the feeling of suspension but it was different then at the house. Now it was just her being held still, almost like he could see time rushing around her in air currents but not touching a single hair on her head. It flowed and rippled over her, pressing in places like it was trying, trying to connect, like she was some sort of reverse black hole - pushing out instead of sucking in.
When he touched her, his fingers lightly tracing over the mark on her wrist, it felt just like when he had been electrocuted when he had accidentally touched that damn wire around a muggle's field once. It jolted up his arm and singed his nerves raw. But unlike with the wire fence, the pain kept going and going, like his fist was clamped tight around it. Potter was at his side, saying his name softly again, but he ignored him, trialing his fingers away even though it still hurt and hurt in an unending kind of way. Then he was touching the potion soaked cloth and with a deep breath he pulled it away and immediately felt like he had been plunged under an icy lake.
The screaming started in his bones, his face screwed up, his lips gasped, and he could see the disk glowing in the murky water - disjointed, fuzzy images like he was wearing Potter's glasses playing behind his eyes for all but a second before the pain seared in his head and he felt himself squeezing away. With a cry his knees crumbled under him, strong arms around his waist as he was pressed back until he felt the edge of a desk digging under his arse.
"Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth." Potter's voice was in his ear and with a wave that felt like acid washing over him, it all faded away and he was left feeling horribly numb with Potter's chest smashed against his as he held Draco up between him and the desk.
In their cubicle. Potter had Apparated them away and he had barely even noticed.
"Just...breathe okay?"
"I'm not in fucking labor." Draco snapped, but his tone was shaky and hoarse like he had been screaming and his body was throbbing from head to toe again.
"No you're just a sadistic idiot." Potter grumbled back with what sounded like a relieved little laugh. "Feeling better?"
"How about I wrap you in some muggle electric wire then throw you in the ocean and see how you feel? Oh and add a few dementors so all your happiness can get sucked out while you listen to a woman screaming in your soul." He grumbled, sounding more tired than he intended and even though he knew he should be pushing away from Potter he couldn't bring himself to - not when he was feeling like a human icicle and Potter felt like a furnace on a winters day.
"That's...that's how it feels?" Potter asked quietly and Draco nodded against his shoulder. "Merlin you are barmy."
"Say's the man who voluntarily hunted for horcruxes around the country for a year." He murmured, his weight sinking back into the desk behind him as feeling slowly started seeping back into his toes.
"Not voluntarily, more like out of necessity, and how do you even remember that? You were pissed out of your mind when I told you about that." Potter pulled back slightly, his arms still tight around Draco's waist, but now he was far enough away that he could see the concern in his green eyes. It was that soft expression again that Draco had absolutely no clue what to do with.
It made him uneasy and with a forced smirk, he pushed himself back onto the desk, forcing Potter to slip even further away from him until only their legs were touching. "I have a brilliant memory even while intoxicated, best not forget, I get the most wonderful blackmail material that way."
"Still a sneaky Slytherin at heart, I see." Potter snickered, a glass appearing in his hand with a carefree flick that quickly filled with cool, clear water before he pressed it into Draco's palm.
"Of course." He sipped the water, the cool liquid soothing his sore throat.
"So it happened again? Was it just like last time?"
"It was," Draco paused, his fingers toying over the rim of the glass. His hands were still freezing and if he strained his eyes it was almost as if the water was frosting over, spidery cracks of ice forming on its surface. But he knew that wasn't really happening, he'd close his eyes, breathe deep, and when he opened them again the frost was gone until he let his vision slip again - almost like he was seeing two planes of existence at once. "Colder."
"You're starting to make as much sense as me these days." Potter sighed with a lopsided smiled that didn't quite reach his eyes.
Draco nodded and went back to sipping his water, an uneasy silence settling around them that refused to break until Weasley came popping up a few minutes later - a sandwich for each of them in a brown paper sack, which he apparently procured after assuring the Healer that everything was fine, taking a few photos of the woman's wrist, and asking a couple questions.
Which meant they had been in the cubicle for quite some time and whether those moments were lost as he was gripping Potter and disoriented or if they had slipped by unnoticed as he stared at Potter's leg and sipped his water, he had no clue. But they felt stolen, a feeling he was starting to get more and more lately.
It sent a shiver of apprehension down his spine.
He and Potter picked at their sandwiches while they each filled out their respective reports. As he plucked out a piece of lettuce and stuck it in his mouth, he pondered his wording, knowing that everything that had been happening with him and the disks couldn't ever be properly explained. And while that was frustrating beyond measure - words had never failed him before - he found that it was actually concerning him very little. Instead, as he stared at the few short sentences he had managed to scratch out, all he could picture was the muggle woman who looked so familiar, lying in a perpetual sodden state - the fuzzy images he had seen for the briefest of moments when he had removed the cloth trying desperately to come into focus.
He shivered again and hugged himself tightly.
****
"Have you ever been under the Imperius curse?"
Blaise lifted his dark eyes with a questioning tilt, the cigarette between his fingers halfway towards his already parted lips. He let his gaze that always felt too knowing run over Draco's face as he considered him and the question - the warm night air blowing a gentle summer breeze around them as they idly strolled through the park. He placed the white stick lightly to his mouth, glanced around quickly at the few muggles off in the distance and mumbled something sharp and quick - the tip sparking to light. He inhaled deeply, flicked the smoldered end, and then shrugged lightly. "Professor Moody in fourth year. Though I have a feeling that's not where you're going with this."
Draco kicked lightly at the ground, his hands deep in his cashmere peacoat, the material perhaps a little warm for the night, but he couldn't seem to shake the feeling of frosting over since his trip to the hospital that afternoon. It had settled in his bones as much as in his mind and he took the small comfort the material wrapped around his willowy frame offered. "Not quite, no."
"The war then?" Blaise asked, without looking straight at his friend, knowing Draco well enough to know that in moments like this - when his shoulders were slumped and his hair was a hairs breath away from perfect, when the pulse under his right eye started ticking - that he was extremely skittish. And prone to bursts of anger. Not meeting his eye helped, he had learned that not long after their first year together at Hogwarts. Draco needed an illusion of privacy if he was going to muster up the words he wanted to get out. Shoulder to shoulder or back to back was best when anything hinting at the past surfaced.
"Yes."
Blaise was silent and Draco tried not to tug his jacket closer to his body. It wouldn't do any good anyway. The cold wasn't going anywhere. "Not me but Mother was." He paused and chuckled a dark sound that was bitter to the core. "Suppose that was good enough for the both of us."
Draco didn't respond to that, there wasn't anything to say, he knew that just like him Blaise would do anything to protect his mother. The war had happened, it had sliced into all of them, sitting in the past did nothing but make bitterness grow until it choked the life out of you. His father had been a prime example of that. He kicked a rock and scowled at the ground.
"Why?"
Glancing up, Draco watched the dark curve of Blaise's head in the setting sun, why was a good question. He didn't know why his brain kept going back to that one specific curse when he thought about the muggle girl and the disks. He didn't know why it hurt his head whenever he found himself thinking on it for too long, only to come up without one single answer and a fuzzy brain. He didn't know why he felt the need to speak to Blaise about it either. He couldn't tell him about the case, it was confidential, and yet - here they were. "Something has been happening at work and I can't piece any of it together. It's all a mess. There's moments where I...I feel like I've been walking around inside others body but it doesn't fit with anything." He grimaced at his botched explanation, sighing at the foolhardy idea this had been to begin with.
"What does that have to do with the Imperius curse?" He asked, flicking his fizzled cigarette to the ground to be squished beneath his shoe.
"Hell if I know." Draco tipped the collar of his peacoat up as a shiver passed down his spine, tingling all the way up his neck. He was sick of shivering, it was starting to make his teeth rattle in his head.
"Just a feeling?" Blaise wasn't looking at him again, he was staring at a tree in the distance - a giant oak with a boy cast completely in shadows scurrying across its thick branches. He didn't answer either as he watched Blaise's profile, his silence all the confirmation the other needed. "Well Draco, I don't know what to tell you but," he paused and slid his gaze to catch Draco's gray eye's just briefly, but it was enough, it said it all. "Shortchanging your instincts never goes very well in the end."
****
Potter's super-secret crime scene that he had to sign a gag restraint to see and then proceeded to get chased away by horrible muggle children looked exactly the same as it did a little over a week ago. The river's edge was littered with pebbles and coarse grains of sand, what still stood of the house a hard silhouette behind him.
But Draco wasn't interested in the ash littering the grass, only the water before him that was sitting smooth and still in the moonlight. This was where the boy, a muggle only 17 years old, had been found with a boulder on his chest to keep him from floating to the surface. Draco hadn't seen the boy under the water, or even in the hospital after he had been drudged up and proclaimed dead. He had only heard Potter's rant, listened to Potter's harsh breathing in his ear at the club that same night, and tried not to think about what he might have looked like as he set himself to working out the disk the next morning.
It wasn't even the first murder. Wasn't the first disk to grace his office. But it was that murder, that boy that had changed it all. It made little sense why he thought that, even to himself. It wasn't something coherent or remotely simple. Nothing about this case was turning out to be simple.
He didn't even know the boy’s name. He didn't know if he had shown up on site the day they found him if perhaps...the nameless boy would be lying beside the woman in the hospital right now. Alive but dead.
His shoe, black leather and worn from years of use, was soaked in a matter of moments as he took a single step forward. He watched his foot sink further, watched the water rise up around it. He was missing something, something was slipping from him about everything that was happening. He felt like he had all but the last chapter of a book, it was all there, laid out before him and yet he couldn't piece it together.
All he could think was that he was fucking freezing, that the last two dead (well almost) bodies were too close, and his mind felt like something was splitting it open with a paring knife. Blaise told him to trust his instincts, that they tended to lead him in the right direction if he paid close enough attention but this...what were his instincts even telling him?
They told him to put the disk underwater.
They told him that the girl was alive.
They hounded him with the vague feeling of skidding along a memory that perhaps wasn't even his - or perhaps it was.
****
"Malfoy?" Potter had obviously been in bed, the shirt he had pulled on was backwards and the red sleep pants were rumpled with a pillow crease on his right cheek. He blinked and wiped at his eyes with the heel of his palm, his glasses smashed against his forehead before dropping crookedly back in place. "Are you alright?"
"Yes, fine." Draco waved away the question, momentarily guilty over the fact of haven woken the insomnia riddled man, before a violent shiver shot through him and he pushed his way inside. "Could you light a fire?" He asked as he wound his way towards Potter's study, the old house’s floorboards creaking under his footsteps.
"...Okay." Potter was blinking and rubbing at his eyes again, peering at Draco like maybe he thought he had stumbled into some sort of bizarre dream. Perhaps they both had, that at least would shed some light on things. "Are you - fuck Malfoy!" He jerked as Draco laid his hand over Potter's exposed forearm, knowing the cold would send a jolt of alertness through his system. "You're freezing! What the hell have you been doing?" He asked, his eyes wide and finally all the way awake, his gaze flashing to the window that showed the dark street beyond it.
"Walking." He turned back towards the study, the sound of Potter scrambling after him helping to calm his jittery nerves a little.
"It's the middle of the night." Potter countered but he was waving a hand and the fire in the hearth roared to life. "Have you been home yet?"
"No." Draco dropped to this knees before the blazing warmth, holding his hands out and sighing as the first lick of heat curled over his frozen fingers. It was unsatisfying though, even as the heat rushed over him it only penetrated so far, warming just the surface of his skin but refusing to sink any lower and eradicate the cold from his blood and bones - the pillar of ice that had taken up residence sometime during his aimless wandering remaining unaffected. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of charred wood and hint of smoke - he figured he shouldn't love the smell of fire, not with his past. But he found that over the years, after the deepest pains of Crabbe’s death simmered to the back of his being, that it comforted him, it made him think of the day everything finally changed for him.
"Here." Potter spoke softly from behind him, a heavy blanket dropping carefully over his shoulders and encasing him in wool. "You look like a Popsicle."
"Thank you." He murmured, tugging the blanket closer, Potter's scent replacing that of the fire. "I need to talk to you."
"I figured as much." Potter frowned, lowering himself to the ground beside Draco to sit cross-legged, his fingers toying with the edge of the blanket. "God I can feel you from here."
"Then shift over." Draco grumbled, tugging the blanket tighter to his chest.
"No that's not...I didn't mean - want some tea?"
"What was the boy's name?" Draco asked, staring into the flames as he did so.
"The - who?"
"The boy who died at the river a few weeks back. What was his name?" He felt Potter tense, saw his hand curl into a tight grip on his knee.
"Colin Martin." Potter answered after a moment’s pause. "Why?"
Draco shrugged. "I don't know. And the girl's?"
He could feel Potter staring at him closely now, could feel the intensity of his gaze and the curiosity that it held. "Olivia Tress. Why are you asking this now?" He asked and Draco knew that he wasn't referring to his lapse in inquiring earlier - the blonde was hardly one to care about personal details of the cases he assisted on. He liked the distance his job usually afforded him, liked Potter handing off the artifacts and puzzling them out. He didn't like putting a face to the deceased and he didn't like adding a name on top of it all.
"I don't know." He repeated because it was the truth. He didn't know why he suddenly needed to know, why standing on the bank of the river had reduced him to this - to seeking out Potter in the middle of the night to...what? Ask for names to add to the graveyard in his head? Merlin he felt like a dementor was hanging over him, something outside himself that was keeping him from shaking off the gloom that he was typically capable of leaving at the office door.
That and the last moment he had felt even remotely warm was when Potter had held him in his arms.
He glanced up and caught Potter's eye only to realize belatedly that the other man had spoken and he had missed it completely. Those green orbs were gazing at him with something bordering on ferocity. A tension in Potter's neck that Draco knew meant he was leashing himself back from doing something, his magic almost lifting off him like a crackling whip in the heat heavy room around them. The dark haired man had matured into a very capable wizard, powerful and kind, but it was moments like these that reminded Draco of the boy that he had been.
Potter may have grown up but he still felt everything on the very edge of his sleeve. He held it there wide open for all too see, his emotions going from zero to sixty faster than any broom ever made when something pricked at that bleeding heart of his. Mentioning the death of the boy Draco knew would set him on edge, would bring out the nail to pound into him. But while he knew Potter's hand was clenching over the remembered dead body, the tight line of his lips were coming from an entirely different source. So when he reached out and touched Draco's cheek with his burning finger tips it shouldn't have been a surprise. Draco was cold, Potter was warm, and the man was always the martyr.
But it was and it made him ache.
"Are you still...from the hospital?" He asked with his eyes glued to his fingers on Draco's pale skin. And maybe it was the first time, maybe it was a repeated question - Draco didn't know and he wasn't planning on answering. Instead he bit his tongue and looked away, shrugging the blanket off with a quick jerk of his shoulders and consequently dislodging Potter's hand from his face as well.
It didn't belong there anyway.
"Malfoy?"
"My apologies for waking you." He muttered quickly and without glancing down to read Potter's expression, fled from his house as quickly as he could - just like the coward he tried so hard not to be. But this had been a gigantic mistake. He should have waited to seek out the names at the office, he should have never sought out Potter because now his cheek was finally warm where the man had touched him and the rest of him was still ice.
He was freezing from the inside out and he had no clue why.
- 6
- 7
- 8
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A Vicious Tangle (Complete)