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A Black Stone in a Glass Box	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10351 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Eight—The Red Flight

            Draco’s world for long moments was pure flight, pure aim. He rose, and he rose, and he rose, and he rose, and his vision filled with blooming black and red roses, and his chest heaved like a bellows, like that bellows pumping iron and smoke that he’d helped to shut down in Austria, and he knew it was time to go back down.

            He assumed Potter had followed him. He might not know all the tricks for making the Hermes Charm go faster that Draco and his friends had discovered, but he had conjured wings on his wrists as well as his ankles, and that would make up for a lot.

            So he dived again, without bothering to pause or look behind him. He heard a startled roar, but it might have been the wind in his ears as easily as a shout. He was spinning and falling, diving, the ground beneath him coming up again in a flash of gold. He knew that he would have to stop in a minute, half a minute, less than fifteen seconds, because otherwise he would smash into it at top speed and Potter would win. Which was simply unacceptable.

            He pulled up before he touched it, and turned to the side, so far that he was practically lying down in the air. He felt something grab his ankle, but the wings had already reacted to the change in position and begun to spin him so fast that Draco knew he would probably lose his breakfast soon. He usually had, when he did challenges like this with his friends.

            The point, though, the point was that the fierce spin tore Potter’s fingers from their hold on his foot, and Draco bobbed back up like an apple in water, shaking his head and gasping as he touched the pouch that held the silver hair. Yes, it was still with him.

            “Malfoy!”

            The shout shook the air around him. Draco looked down—well, to the side, anyway, he had to admit his sense of basic directions was skewed right now, with the way he was hanging in the air—and saw Potter struggling furiously against the wings on his wrists and ankles, rowing in circles. Draco blinked, wondering what had happened.

            Then he knew. It seemed Potter had tried to follow him, and had ended up with the wings beating in different directions, trying to fly him north and south and east and west at once. So he was scooting around like a beetle on its back, and getting more and more frustrated, especially when he kicked out and didn’t start moving because he didn’t have anything to push off from.

            Draco began to laugh, and it hurt his stomach and made him spin in lazy circles, too, and Potter was probably going to kill him when he caught up with Draco, and he should stop, but he couldn’t, Potter was still rowing and he was too funny.

            “You’d better enjoy what life you have left, Malfoy,” Potter said calmly. He had already started to discover a way out of his predicament, Draco saw, putting his ankles side-by-side and forcing the wings to beat together, the pinions stroking and fluttering against each other and learning how to fly from one another. “When I catch up with you, it won’t last long.”

            “I never reckoned that I would live to an old age, anyway,” Draco said delicately. “What with the Dark Lord, and the mountain-skimming, and all the rest of it…” He stretched out his own legs, not touching them the way Potter did, but holding them parallel to each other. Time to see if he could pull off a trick he’d never been able to use. On the other hand, he hadn’t had this impetus to perfect it, either.

            “Mountain-skimming?” Potter squinted at him. “Why would someone as stupid and incompetent as you are, as cowardly as you are, decide to do something like that?’

            Draco widened his eyes at Potter, while his stomach danced and jumped for another reason, a new one. Potter had showed him anger before, but Draco had forgotten how addictive his curiosity could be. Of course, the main time he had provoked it before had been during their sixth year, when he had been too busy to enjoy it.

            “Why, Potter,” Draco said, and clasped his hand to his chest. “Why would someone as upright and uptight as you are know about a sport that the Ministry’s banned?”

            It would have been easy for Potter to say that he knew about it because he had arrested people who practiced it, and Draco actually waited for that comeback. But instead, Potter’s face turned the color of a Gryffindor curtain, and his eyes darted away from Draco’s, for just a second.

            Draco laughed again. “You’ve done it, haven’t you?” he asked. “And you shut those parts of yourself away with that chain ritual, too.” He shook his head. “I’m amazed at you, Harry. Amazed that you could stand for anyone to think that you’re just a dutiful little Ministry drone. And amazed that anyone bought the act the chain ritual put you through for so long.”

            Really, how blind were Potter’s friends, that he’d been able to get away without questions for a fortnight?

            “Don’t call me Harry,” Potter said through gritted teeth. He had almost got himself back in order now, with his hands clasped the way his feet had been. In another moment, he would rock to the side, and then he would be in the right position to fly after Draco.

            “It seems that not enough people do,” Draco said, and stretched his arms out, too. Hands not touching, not coming close enough for the wings to brush; that was the first and the most common way that someone messed up the trick that Draco was currently trying. He ducked his head and heaved out a breath, gathering the air in his lungs that the flight would take away. “Or they would have rescued you before this.”

            “Stop talking about my friends.”

            “Right,” Draco said. Potter was indeed upright now, and all the wings were beating in the correct pattern, and his eyes and wand were focused on Draco. “You still want that silly horse-hair back, I take it?”

            “If you don’t give it back to me right now, Malfoy—”

            “You’ll eat my dust,” Draco said, and kicked like a swimmer, and this time it was perfect, of course it was, with the threat of murder in Potter’s eyes to tighten his muscles. This time, he lived up to his heroes who had done this, the mountain-skimmers Oliphant and Green, who had defied the Paris Ministry for years to fly among the twisting valleys and sudden peaks of the Pyrenees.

            This time, he shot away sideways like a comet, and went faster than anything mortal could have dreamed, faster than the silver horse, faster than a normal person could fly with the Hermes Charm.

            Potter’s shout of frustration rose behind him, but trailed away immediately, and Draco laughed giddily. He tried once to look over his shoulder, but the motion pushed his legs dangerously close to each other, and if the wings touched, then there was a strong chance he would fall out of the sky.

            On the other hand, he didn’t want Potter to get too far behind him, did he? Any minute now, Potter might lose the emotion he had achieved so far and fall back into that limp uselessness as the reaction from the horse’s death faded, and then he might stand there for an hour, or Apparate back to the Ministry, or—do anything other than follow Draco and keep pushing for the horse-hair, the way Draco wanted.

            And Draco had to admit that he didn’t know where to go next, didn’t know what kind of creature he would be facing. That would be convenient to know, although he could use the spell that he had on the dog’s tooth to make the horse-hair take him to its intended destination.

            He also wanted to get some time alone to write the letter he had promised himself, the one that would alert someone else of what he was facing. Potter couldn’t reconstitute the lost components of the chain ritual, not without obliterating the ones that were left and starting all over, but he might fall into apathy again if he managed to kill Draco.

            And then who would free him, and avenge Draco’s death? Draco wouldn’t want Potter killed or imprisoned in a situation like that; he would want the chain ritual destroyed so that he would be free again, and have to blame Draco for that.

            Maybe he would acknowledge his own stupidity, too, although Draco had to admit that was rather a lot to hope for.

            Either way, Draco had to slow down.

            He rolled back upright, and promptly dropped to the sand. He winced at the jarring motion, and the pain in his knees. Well, he would do what was necessary, and then he could ensure that he retained Potter’s attention.

            He glanced over his shoulder—

            And Potter slammed into him, far closer than Draco had thought he would be, flinging his arms around Draco’s neck and choking him so violently that Draco dropped to his knees, gasping for air. His arms flailed, once, and settled. He could feel the magic thrumming in Potter’s hands, strengthening them.

            “You bastard,” Potter was saying somewhere, over the roaring in his ears. “As though you couldn’t—as though there weren’t other things—as though you had to do this, you just had to, and you don’t even care what anyone else feels—”

            Draco couldn’t be sure that was all of it. The roaring of his heart and blood made him feel like he was missing a lot. But he was sure enough to lift his hands and pry at Potter’s arms for a second, until Potter’s magic snapped at him and he knew that he would accomplish nothing that way.

            He tilted his head back enough to see into Potter’s eyes. They didn’t resemble the flat, dull ones Draco had looked into earlier that day at all. They were so fiercely alive that Draco might almost have been content to die if he hadn’t known that his death would deprive the world of so much talent and beauty.

            So. Potter had his emotions again. That meant he had all the strength of his magic again, his passion driving him.

            And it meant he had all the vulnerabilities that the emotions implied, too.

            Draco dropped his eyes, and let his head droop at the same time. He whimpered a little, softly, fearfully.

            The hands choking him paused.

            Draco kept his head bowed, and bit the inside of his cheek, hard, so Potter wouldn’t notice the smile that had almost escaped. Draco swallowed, and winced as the swallow exacerbated the bruises that Potter had left. But right now, he thought he could wince all he wanted and still not reach the limit of its usefulness.

            “I don’t want to kill you, Malfoy.” Potter’s voice was shaking a little, and he held a wand to Draco’s throat, pressing inwards, denting the skin, as though that was more likely to convince Draco when a chokehold wouldn’t. Draco knew how to fight wands. “I just want you to give me the silver hair back, and that’ll be the end of it. No one asked you to interfere, you know.”

            He sounded sulky from the bottom of his soul, and Draco had to bow his head further, almost draping himself over Potter’s arms. If he smiled up into his face, exultant over how deep those emotions went, Potter really would get suspicious, and Draco might as well give up on winning the contest right there.

            “All right,” Draco whispered. “That’s right. I’ll just give it back, then.” He reached for the pouch on his belt, but winced when his arm got tugged up short by the odd position Potter was holding him in. “Can you let me go so I can reach it, please?”

            Potter stared at him the way he might have looked at Draco at Hogwarts, his hands tightening until Draco coughed meaningfully. Then Potter snorted and drew his arms away, standing back with his eyes on the pouch at Draco’s belt.

            Which was what Draco had been waiting for, of course.

            They had come quite a distance in their flight, which meant the anti-Apparition wards Potter had raised no longer stretched across the desert immediately around them. Draco had noted that, but he hadn’t thought he would be able to take advantage of the fact. Now, he knew he could.

            But he wanted to prove a point to Potter first.

            “You know why I’m doing this?” he asked softly, as he took the silver strand of hair from his pouch. “Not because I hate you, not because I can’t see something you did without wanting to destroy it, although I’m sure those are the reasons that you’ve convinced yourself of.”

            Potter shook his head as though trying to banish an irritating fly from his ear. “Why should I care about your reasons, Malfoy? You wouldn’t tell me the real ones if you did just want to irritate me.”

            “Right,” Draco responded instantly. “That’s why you should take what I’m telling you now as true.”

            Potter stared at him. Draco clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Logical part of your brain coming back more slowly than your emotions?” he asked. “Yes, I’ve had some nights like that myself.”

            “The point, Malfoy,” Potter said, and held his hand out as though he assumed Draco would meekly drop the strand into it.

            Yes, the chain ritual dulled his logical faculties, too, Draco noted sagely, and extended his hand. The silver strand of hair dangled and gleamed among his fingers. Potter supposedly had eyes only for it, but he still twitched when Draco smiled.

            “I want to see you alive again,” Draco said. “There are just some things that should be true about the world. For example, the Dark Lord should always stay dead. I should always be free to travel around and do exactly as I like—not that my parents agree with that, but I’ll soon convince them of the folly of their position.” His hand was on his wand. Not that Potter noticed. He was still refusing to focus on any other part of Draco’s body than the hand with the silver strand of hair that extended infinitesimally towards him. “And you should always be passionate and free.”

            “Did your parents convince you to come home?” Potter sneered at him. “They ought to send you back again.”

            “But it’s good for you that I came home,” Draco pointed out earnestly. “No one else could have saved you.”

            “I don’t need saving.”

            “You did,” Draco said. “You would have told anyone who asked about that ritual, because the ritual itself dulled all your concern and your curiosity about other people’s motives. Concern and curiosity are emotions, remember. You’re just lucky that someone who had your best interests at heart asked first, and someone with some knowledge about chain rituals.”

            Potter’s fists were clenched tightly enough that it looked like he was going to lose a finger. “Even if what you’re saying is true, then I would have told my friends about it when they asked, and Hermione would have researched chain rituals, and they would have ‘saved’ me. But you’re wrong that I needed it. They would have respected my choice, and left me alone if I wanted to sacrifice my heart.”

            “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like them!” Draco said, and snapped his fingers together, nearly dropping the horsehair.

            Potter’s eyes rose to his face, furious, and that meant he was no longer looking at Draco’s hands.

            Draco spun and Apparated.

            He heard Potter’s roar of fury behind him, but it quickly faded, and Draco landed on the grass outside the Manor. He promptly ran through the gates and up the long gravel doorway towards the front doors, privately cursing his ancestors who had thought it a grand idea, to have the doors be so far away from the Apparition point.

            He heard the “pop” behind him right away, of course. Potter would have figured out where he was going and immediately Apparated in.

            But Draco cast a Shield Charm over his shoulder, and then he was at the front doors, and he ducked through them and slammed them shut, and tossed his cloak and the horsehair at the surprised house-elf, who squeaked and blinked, but caught them.

            “Hide those somewhere safe,” he snapped, and took off up the stairs to his room, where he could write the owl he wanted to.

            Potter might break through the wards eventually, but they would give him a challenge. And in the meantime, Draco could plan.

            And he would, in the end, be victorious. And when he left, Potter would know it, and follow him.

            Draco knew that some people, like his mother, might consider his grin as he slammed his bedroom door mental, but he had made the decision to do this. At the very least, he wasn’t bored anymore.

            And at the most, he might earn Potter’s gratitude and the gratitude of his friends. Or, wait, unwilling thankfulness, muttered apologies between their teeth, would be even better.

            My greatest reward, though, is going to be seeing the fire returning to Potter’s eyes. That’s the other thing that should always be true.



*

            delia cerrano: He has here, but Harry may not listen.

            Makoto_Sagara: Three down. At this point, Draco isn’t sure how much more he has to go.

            SP777: He can’t brood. That would be boring. ;)

            Seiren: Thanks.! And as for Draco staying ahead of Harry, well, we’ll see if that happens, especially since Harry has caught him once.
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A Black Stone in a Glass Box