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A Harp, A Shadow, The Wind	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2949 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-A Harp, A Shadow, The Wind
- 1
Title: A Harp, A Shadow, The Wind

Disclaimer: These characters are the property of J. K. Rowling and associates. I make no claim to them.

Pairing(s): Harry/Draco

Summary: Draco was kidnapped, his shadow stolen away, his ability to lie also taken. Harry and Draco adventure through poetry, through time, and through darkness to win both of them back

Rating: R

Warnings: Non-graphic sex, angst, foul language. This story takes place after DH, but doesn't take notice of the epilogue. Also, this is non-linear like hell and plays games with points of view. And has rhyming couplets in some parts.

Word Count: ~10,000

Author's Notes: This was written for elfflame for the bottom_draco fairytale prompt fest, inspired by Thomas the Rhymer. Thank you very much to my friend Linda for the beta.

A Harp, A Shadow, The Wind

            What do you use to hunt a shadow?

            Harry hesitated, but in the end he decided to start with rope, because rope was good for a lot of things. Beside it, he put a mirror. Shadows were like reflections, or at least the philosophy books he'd been reading in the last few months used them as synonyms, so maybe a mirror could help capture his prey.

            The absurdity of the situation--reading philosophy books to prepare for an adventure--made Harry shake his head.

            Then again, this whole thing was ridiculous, he thought, turning and looking across the room in the Leaky Cauldron to where Draco Malfoy leaned his elbows on the sill and stared out the window.

            A faint breeze was blowing. Since Harry had found Malfoy stumbling through the Ministry, his eyes wide and staring as though he'd spent too much time looking into the heart of the sun, his body thin and pale, the image of a harp traced in ash on either palm, it seemed that wind always followed Malfoy around. At the moment, it was tossing his pale hair about like dandelion fluff. Malfoy closed his eyes slowly, as if he felt tormented.

            Harry shook his head. He would have felt lucky in Malfoy's place. Surviving Dark magic of the kind that had been used on him, or at least that Harry thought had been used on him because he'd never heard of anything like it, without scars, was incredible. So what if he couldn't lie any more, if he didn't have a shadow? Those were small prices to pay.

            Malfoy took them hard, of course. Malfoy took everything hard.

            "Tell me again about what happened," Harry said. "It could be important to have all the details when we face the shadow, and maybe there's a clue in the story as to how to keep one from slipping away."

            Malfoy froze, and then glanced over his shoulder at Harry, turning his head as slowly as he had shut his eyes. There was a clockwork precision about his movements that made Harry sigh. Really, must Malfoy treat everything that had happened to him like an episode of some unending melodrama? It only made Harry impatient, and Harry was his best chance for getting his shadow back. No one else in the world had much time or sympathy for him anymore, not since his father had died in prison and his mother had thrown herself from the roof of the Manor. The loss of his parents ought to hurt him more than what he'd suffered.

            "To you, Potter, it's just a story," Malfoy said, and his face twisted as though he'd bitten into a mushy tomato. "To me, it's the loss of my honor and glory."

            Harry rolled his eyes. "Did you try to lie again?" he asked, although he already knew the answer. Malfoy only spoke in couplets like that when he had made up his mind to deceive somebody. "I already know most of the details. What's your big objection to telling it again?"

            Malfoy's mouth twitched violently, and more poetry tumbled out, confirmation that he hadn't wanted to say what he did. "Your callousness makes no room for me as a being. You have no idea what you're hearing or seeing."

            Harry slammed down the silver knife he'd just pulled out of his bag on the table in irritation. "Get some fucking perspective, Malfoy," he snapped. "Worse things happen to people every day than what happened to you."

            "I know--" Malfoy managed to say before his curse choked him off and he had to say, "It's even clearer now that you don't see the truth. I feel as though someone has ripped away my youth."

            "Why?" Harry said. "You can get along without a shadow, and as long as you carefully shade the truth, then it isn't like living under Veritaserum." Malfoy had told him that was what it was like not being able to lie when they first met, and Harry had to admit that that would be ruddy awful. But he no longer thought the curse mimicked Veritaserum. That was something Malfoy ought to have been able to figure out for himself.

            "What's the point of telling you again?" Malfoy wrapped his arms around himself, as if the magical wind he had following him chilled him. "You'll only refuse to listen."

            That wasn't a couplet, which meant Malfoy saw his words as the truth. Harry fought not to turn away in disgust. "Just tell me," he said.

            Malfoy looked at him once, then lowered his eyes and began to repeat the well-worn words. Harry turned back to the tools in front of him and sorted through them again, this time picking up a stone carved with runes. He didn't know enough about runes to tell how useful it was likely to be; Hermione had prepared it for him. Harry only knew that he'd read a lot of books in the past month that suggested using runes to capture immaterial things, such as spirits, shadows, and truth.

            He didn't need to listen to the words being spoken with dull emphasis behind him. He could see the story in his head, the image of the way it must have gone.

*

            Malfoy insisted that he didn't know the identities of the people who captured him. What did that matter? Harry could figure out easily enough who they must have been. All the Death Eaters were in custody, which left one half of society to resent Malfoy. There were plenty of people who thought he should have received a harsher sentence when he appeared before the Wizengamot, instead of the two-month house arrest he'd been given.

            They'd taken him to a dark, underground place and conducted a long ritual where they used candles and conjured winds. Malfoy also insisted that he didn't know how they'd managed to attach a permanent wind to him, but Harry knew that he hadn't been paying sufficient attention. In a situation like that, Harry was sure, he would have paid attention, no matter how disoriented he was. It was all a matter of keeping your head calm and cool.

            At the climax of the ritual, they brought a harp of silver and obsidian towards Malfoy and forced his hands onto it.

            Then the story became weird, and Harry had to discard most of what he'd heard Malfoy said. Malfoy said he had been translated through the harp, that his soul had passed through it and into a vast darkness. Harry had laughed the first time he heard that, and Malfoy had bristled like an offended cat and sat staring at him.

            "Well, tell a more believable story if you want me to believe you," Harry had told him. That ought to be obvious to a prat like Malfoy.

            "I can't lie," Malfoy had said, his voice brittle. "Don't you understand that yet? I'm telling you the story of how I got that way so you can help make me normal again. Do you understand that?"

            Which…Harry didn't have words for. That had been the first time he heard the story, and he hadn't obtained evidence of Malfoy's inability to lie yet. Malfoy could have been less hostile when he was explaining something that went straight to the boundaries of ridiculous.

            When Malfoy came back to himself, he was in a perfectly ordinary room in the Ministry, his hands marked and his shadow gone. He hadn't learned until later, when Harry questioned him and he tried to lie because he thought he would be arrested if he didn't, that they had also taken his ability to deceive someone.

            Harry thought that a benefit to society in general, actually.

            But he was supposed to be an Auror, and that meant he had to help everyone afflicted by Dark magic, even a Dark wizard. The five years since the war, during which Malfoy had vanished and supposedly "wandered" looking for his shadow before his memory came back to him, had made Harry more tolerant and more ethical than he'd been in Hogwarts.

            There were other reasons that he wanted to help Malfoy, too, a matter of some dreams and some intellectual curiosity about the boy whose wand he'd used and whose life he'd saved. But Malfoy hadn't asked about that part, so Harry saw no reason to volunteer it.

            An ordinary spell--it had to be an ordinary spell, because Harry had researched rituals and there were none that did anything like what Malfoy described. He thought his captors had used the ritual to disguise their incantations and probably the mind-altering potions that they'd fed Malfoy.

            But the longer Harry sheltered Malfoy and researched ways to help him, the more fixated on the loss of his shadow Malfoy became. He seemed to believe that he would be fine as long as they could capture it. So Harry humored him. And it was rather fascinating, the way that the Dark wizards had somehow detached Malfoy's shadow.

            Malfoy could go on all he liked about "stealing" and "violation," but Harry knew the story. He could tell it over in his sleep by now. There was the way things had been, and were, and would be. That was the way it was.

*

            So easy for you to decide that you'll not listen to me.

            You're unviolated, privileged, laughing, free.

            But I lay in the darkness and watched them coming,

            Heard their chanting and my heart's swift doomed drumming.

            I saw the way they handled, with reverence, that harp.

            On that point, my memory's unviolated, sharp.

            My hands were marked and my brain scarred.

            They passed me through it, and I was a shard,

            Drifting,set free from my natural element,

            Like seed scattered by the wind and sent

            Drifting so far it cannot come back to earth.

            And all around me were the sounds of their mirth.

            Having given up so much to a cause mistaken,

            Do you wonder that I ask that the rest of me not be taken?

*

            Harry bowed his head over the compass and shook his head in amazement. Hermione had promised him that the proper compass with the proper Arithmancy equations on it could actually track something as swift as a shadow, but he hadn't believed her.

            Of course, he reminded himself hastily, he had no guarantee that it was actually tracking Malfoy's shadow. The needle pointed steadily north for the most part, and sometimes switched to the east or the south. Malfoy had acted as though he had believed that the compass had value, and sometimes he had told Harry that he could "feel" his shadow in the direction they were heading. Harry didn't accept that for a moment. If he could "feel" it, then why would he need the compass's help? Why hadn't he tracked it himself from the beginning?

            But the fact remained that they were tramping together down a path covered with sunlight and dust and the striped shade of tree branches, in a forest that Harry thought belonged to Muggles, or maybe the Muggle government. They'd Apparated several times, as Hermione had said they might need to in order to keep the compass useful, and about all Harry was sure of was that they hadn't Apparated over the ocean yet.

            It was a fine day. Harry took a deep breath to fill his lungs with warmth, then turned and looked at Malfoy.

            Malfoy might have been marching to Azkaban. He kept his eyes on the path or the compass, and the few times Harry saying something had forced Malfoy to look up, he'd worn an impatient scowl. Apparently, having to deal with a plebian like Harry was not what he wanted to spend his afternoon doing.

            Harry scowled, but turned his face away first so that Malfoy couldn't see it. He'd given Malfoy shelter in his home for the last few months, and listened to his story, and tried to help him, out of the goodness of his heart. He had anticipated from the first that Malfoy would reject that charity, or not notice it because he thought the world owed him something.

            But the revelation of his ingratitude was proving harder to deal with than Harry had expected, maybe because Malfoy did sometimes seem as if he was someone Harry could have become friends with under different circumstances.

            "You know," he muttered at last, when the thought had festered in his head for mind-hours and he could no longer keep silent, "you could show some fucking thankfulness for what I'm doing for you."

            Malfoy stopped walking. Harry marched on to show that he wasn't going to be discouraged by that, then turned around and put his hands on his hips.

            Malfoy simply scowled and didn't hurry ahead, chastened by the ridiculousness of the situation, the way Harry had hoped he would. Harry blew hard through his mouth and shook his head. "I'm not asking for much," he said. "Just some politeness now and then in return for everything I've tried to give you since you came back--shelter, food, help in this quest of yours--"

            "I wanted to do everything myself."

            Harry frowned. Malfoy's voice had a high and reedy sound to it. His hands were clenched as if he had to squeeze down hard to keep from lashing out. That wasn't the kind of response Harry had wanted to provoke from him. He might start ranting and vanishing into the memories at any moment, the way he'd already done several times since he came to Harry's house.

            "When they took me and started torturing me," Malfoy whispered, "with words at first, and then with magic, I wanted someone to come and rescue me. I couldn't think of any way out of there on my own. But surely my parents would come. Surely my friends would come. Surely Professor Snape would come back to life and realize that I didn't deserve to suffer like that. Surely there would be someone."

            He closed his eyes and shook his head. Harry would have spoken, but he was seeing the lines of pain around Malfoy's eyes as if for the first time, and they paralyzed him.

            "I lay there with hope pouring out of me. They could have lit torches from it if it was fire. The taunting grew worse when they saw me studying the distance to the door and rattling my chains. They told me that I would never escape from this, and I didn't believe them. That disbelief was what kept me alive, at first.

            "But no one ever came."

            Malfoy's eyes flared open again, and Harry took an uneasy step back from him. He looked mad. Harry had to wonder what would happen if Malfoy decided that everyone around him was an enemy and started trying to hurt them randomly.

            Malfoy laughed at him, and Harry realized his mistake. That wasn't madness in Malfoy's eyes. It was extreme anger, the same kind of anger that Harry thought he would have had a right to feel after hoping and trusting in something that never happened. He thought of how he'd reacted when he first began to figure out that Dumbledore wasn't perfect.

            "I should have thought of what I could do to get out of there on my own," Malfoy said harshly. "It was too late by then, of course. They'd begun the ritual that tore my shadow away from me and sent me into--nothingness." He shuddered, but didn't take his gaze from Harry, despite the obvious temptation to close his eyes. "But I swore to myself that I would at least act on my own if I managed to escape.

            "And then I couldn't even do that. I'd been gone so long, and the world moved on without me. No one wanted to leave me free to act. They just wanted me and my problems to go away."

            "Except me," Harry whispered.

            "Do you understand why you were worse than nothing, when I had promised myself I was going to act on my own?" Malfoy replied. "And why I accepted it anyway, because letting those bastards win would have been worst of all?"

            Harry shivered and grasped at his elbows. Yes, as much as he might try to argue, he thought he was beginning to understand now. At least it explained the bitterness Malfoy's eyes flashed at him, and the way he would turn his head away when Harry tried to get him to behave like a normal human being. He wasn't a normal human being anymore. Part of him had remained behind in the darkness, shrieking and hoping and taking it as a betrayal when no one came to rescue him.

            Or some part of him went with his shadow.

            Harry shook that temptation to believe Malfoy off. That couldn't be right, because it would suggest that the spell had gone deeply into Malfoy and ripped through him the way he described. But Harry thought the spell they had used on Malfoy was ordinary, if unusual, and designed to drive Malfoy mad with dread more than anything else.

            It had to be, because otherwise Harry would think too much about the way he'd been treating Malfoy since his escape, and wonder if that combination of help and condescension was really helpful after all.

            "Come on," he said abruptly. "Let's go."

            He started following the compass again. Malfoy came behind him, as silent as the shadow he was missing.

*

            Through the harp.

            Once through the harp, he was a struggling shade, a scrap, the waves of desire and intention curling over one another and breaking and dissolving into one another without leaving a mark between them, because he couldn't affect the world any more than a ghost.

            Less than a ghost, because there was only darkness, and the sense of being translated elsewhere, into a place that had never been solid and never would be, and he could not see, and he could not hear, and he could not ride with the headless hunt, because he was in a place where people had never had heads to lose.

            He wandered, his hands pushing at the darkness until he forgot he had hands, and words running pell-mell through his head until he forgot that he had once known language. What remained to him most was the sensation of loss. He no longer remembered what had been torn away from him and sent whirling into the darkness, but he knew there had been things. And each moment he became smaller and smaller, until he lost the sensation of time passing and no longer knew how much time there was between one loss and another.

            There was hunger, too. He wanted those things he had lost back. But if he picked them up and reattached them to himself, would he even know what they were? He had a sense of himself as a ridiculous creature of mismatched longings and hungers and satisfaction of hungers, spangled and spinning like a--like a--

            Like a what? He retained the concepts of motion and light; they were older than many other things, and harder to banish, though he no longer remembered why he thought that older things were that way. But he could not remember what kinds of things might have spun and been spangled. Or spangled? Did things spangle? The notions drifted through his head, golden and faint, and he chased them, and they crumbled to scraps when he brushed them.

            (This was later, this thinking and reclaiming of thought. While it was happening, of course he experienced things differently, because he was without words and the knowledge of words).

            He blundered into something sticky, and hung there for so long that he felt like a fly in a spiderweb--or a small hanging thing wrapped in white, more precisely, because that was the point where only images remained, and those too were going. The darkness was eating him. He might have felt misery or panic, except that he thought he needed flesh to feel both things. He knew that he didn't want the darkness to eat him, but so many of his other wants were ignored as unimportant that he could not feel upset when this one was not fulfilled. If he could feel upset.

            He faded more and more into the darkness.

            And then there was light again, and with the light words, and with the words feelings, and with the feelings despair.

            When Draco opened his eyes in the world beyond the harp, he knew at once that his shadow and the capacity to lie were gone from him. It took him more time to learn that he had vanished for years, and that the majority of those years had been spent drifting in the darkness through the harp, becoming more and more piecemeal.

            Time to learn, but not enough time to stop resenting.

*

            Harry was wrestling with Malfoy's shadow.

            It was like fighting a wraith made of water. It slipped through him. It turned back against him with the strong, persistent force of a flood beating down the door of a house. It shoved, and Harry staggered and fell. He managed to keep enough of a grasp to snare a trailing fiber of the shadow, and it turned on him, hands crooked into claws.

            Malfoy stood next to him with his arms folded and his eyes wide with longing. Harry wondered for a moment why he didn't help.

            If he thinks that I must not want help because he's enough of an idiot not to--

            The shadow tangled itself around his legs and tripped him. Harry swore and snatched a handful of it, but once again it rippled and got loose. This time, it rose and darted over the trees in the direction of the sunset. Harry got slowly back to his feet, wiping off dirt and leaves. The shadow had appeared and attacked so suddenly that he hadn't been able to choose where he fought it.

            He knew his gaze was bitter as he followed the shadow, but really. He darted another look at Malfoy.

            "Why didn't you help?"

            A bitter smile slid like poisoned honey across Malfoy's mouth. "Going through the harp made me less than I am," he answered. "The opposite of the shadow. I wouldn't have been able to get even as much of a grasp on it as you could."

            "Fine, don't answer, then." Harry stomped over to the place where he'd dropped the satchel with their magical equipment in it and sat down, shaking his head. A fine useless lot that had been.

            "This is why I need help," Malfoy whispered. "Because I can track the shadow, but I can't touch it. This is why I stayed around when you offered me a shelter. Because you can do things I can't."

            Harry blinked at him. "I think that's the first time you've ever made an admission like that."

            "And I can do some things that you can't," Malfoy continued, as if he hadn't heard Harry. "Such as not gloating over the failures of others."

            He whirled sharply on his heel and went behind a tree. Harry slumped down until his head was resting on the satchel and frowned at the sky.

            He knew that, sometimes, he had had a grip. His hand had closed hard enough to wrench and pull at the shadow. Why couldn't he have held on more firmly still, and tugged it back to earth?

*

            There was no way that the man who had wrestled it would manage to hold and catch it—not as long as the tie between him and the man it had been stripped from stayed dark and poisoned. The man who had wrestled it did not even see that the poison was all of his own making. He had taken up the bitterness that the man it had been stripped from projected and wrapped it around himself, then wondered when his shadow withered those it fell upon.

            The shadow knew shadows, and it knew it was not easily deceived.

            It vibrated into the trees in amusement, already waiting for the next time that the man who had wrestled it and the man it had been stripped from would catch up with it.

*

            Potter was making camp.

            He couldn't do that with any degree of grace, Draco noted. All he had to do was set up the tent, which was large enough inside, given the wizardspace, that both of them could be in the same room and not know it. He didn't have to make a fire in the open, because the tent had fireplaces in it. He didn't have to spread out rolls of blankets, because the tent had blankets and cushions and full beds.

            But after one attempt to set up the tent, which ended in the tent rolling itself up and wrapping around him, Potter had given up. Draco had moved forwards to help, and Potter had stopped him with a noise which sounded remarkably like a seal's bark.

            "You can't do that," he said, and then mustered up a grin and used his wand to dig a hole in the ground. "We'll just camp out in the open air. It's fresh." He took a large sniff and appeared satisfied that nothing actively disgusting had urinated or been killed in the vicinity. "And we'll have a fire. It'll be a treat for you, anyway. I can't imagine that you like enclosed spaces, after what you've been through."

            You can't do that.

            The casual assumption of his inability set Draco seething, but he knew that answering back would only win him more condescension, and he had swallowed that from Potter until he thought he might vomit. Not to mention the fake sympathy that his remark about enclosed spaces implied. If he had listened at all to Draco's story, then he would have known that Draco had spent a large part of his time as a bodiless spirit drifting through a place that didn't exist. But trust Potter to listen to everything except that which most mattered.

            As Potter struggled with the fire, his eyebrows narrowing in frustration when Incendio burned all the sticks he'd Summoned to ashes instead of starting a proper blaze, Draco quietly walked across the clearing to the tent. It took him only a moment to undo the stakes and arrange them in the proper position. Then he murmured the incantation that should work on it, giving a tiny flourish of the practice wand that Potter had found for him. It was no substitute for the wand that his captors had taken from him, most of the time, but it was excellent at small practical charms like this one.

            He had to jump out of the way as the tent swiftly expanded, shooting up turrets topped with colored flags and wide green-grey walls that resembled mossy stone, but he succeeded, and watched in some pride as the tent blossomed. He shook his head when he saw the whole thing. Trust Potter to have selected a temporary accommodation that looked like fucking Hogwarts.

            "Malfoy."

            That was not the tone Draco would have expected from Potter, given what he had just done. He glanced sharply at him, and found Potter crouched over the firepit, thrusting sticks into the sand and shaking his head.

            "Do you think we'll ever catch up with the shadow again?" Potter asked in a dreary voice.

            He hadn't even noticed what Draco had done.

            Draco struggled between the impulse to offer a comforting, sarcastic lie to Potter, so that he would turn around, insulted, and notice the tent, and the fact that he had to speak the truth. In the end, what burst out of his mouth was another bloody rhyming couplet, as always happened when he tried to lie. "That's something I really can't say. Maybe we'll find it and you'll let it get away."

            Then he spun and stalked into the woods. There were times that Potter's presence was a continual irritation like bubotuber pus against raw skin and Draco needed nothing more than to get away.

*

            He was drifting in darkness.

            Harry turned around, trying to remember how he'd got here. One moment he'd been arguing with Hermione over the proper way to flay a cat, and though he'd had a faint suspicion that it was a dream, he was enjoying the argument and saw no need to wake up. Then the darkness had poured in on him and he had no idea where Ron and Hermione's kitchen or the table between them, covered with tea where Hermione had set her cup down hard in making a point, had gone.

            He took a step forwards, expecting to bump into something, and hit nothing. There was more nothingness beyond that, he thought, and no matter how long he walked, he would only encounter more and more of it.

            It was the kind of experience he might expect to have if he was a ghost or a shade--

            Or a shadow.

            Harry swallowed and thought of the way that Malfoy's shadow had clutched at him, curling around his fingers. He had assumed there would be no results from that. Why should there be? He had hunted dangerous and Dark magical creatures before, and merely touching them did nothing. Besides, this was a shadow detached from a human being, not a Dark creature.

            It couldn't have affected me.

            He stumbled forwards. This was another dream, one that, like the dream with Hermione, he knew was a dream and he could wake up from. He stretched his hands in front of him and visualized the kitchen table he had been sitting at across from Hermione.

            He couldn't visualize it.

            Harry hesitated and stopped walking, or floating, or whatever you could call it when there was no floor beneath you. The words "kitchen table" sounded solidly in his head, but there was no image in his head to connect them to. He caught a fleeting thought of wood, and then of chairs--he could still see the chairs--but there was no kitchen table.

            He tried to surround the words with images that would call them up. He tried to speak the words aloud, although they simply collapsed into the dead air around him, and use that as an incantation. He was a wizard, and a powerful one. He ought to be able to call up anything that he set his mind on.

            But the words floated in his head, like dead weight.

            And then he couldn't remember Hermione's face anymore.

            Frantically, Harry shut his eyes and clung to her laughter, to her name, chanting it over and over so that at least that aspect of her couldn't leave him. He could imagine her dancing with Ron, as long as he didn't mind thinking of Ron dancing with a blankness. He could see Hugo and Rose if he thought about them. He knew that Hermione was their mother, but where she had been was dust and ashes and coldness.

            He had begun to shiver uncontrollably and couldn't stop. And he knew that, because he could no longer feel it. In fact, he couldn't remember smell or taste of any kind at this moment.

            The darkness is eating me, he thought, and with that his eyes flared open and he found himself lying on his side in his bed in the tent, staring at the roaring fire. He licked his lips and sat up, feeling carefully at his mouth. It wasn't swollen and distended with his terror, but he felt as if it should have been.

            "Malfoy?" he whispered without thought. A moment later, he decided that Malfoy would be asleep and wouldn't like Harry waking him up, but Harry didn't care. He had to talk to someone, and Malfoy was the best choice. At least he might have some idea of why that had happened to Harry when Harry touched his shadow.

            "I was dreaming, Potter," Malfoy said.

            "They were probably the kind of dreams that you should be glad to be woken up from," Harry snapped. "Mine were."

            Something in his voice, and probably nothing else, made Malfoy roll over and look at him. He was sleeping in a bed that had thick green hangings and coverlet. When he went to bed, Harry had thought scornfully that that was just another example of how Malfoy hadn't grown up, because he still preferred Slytherin colors. Now he wondered what he would like and prefer if he'd experienced that nothingness, and shuddered.

            I don't know that he experienced that nothingness, he thought in the next second. Maybe the shadow was giving me a vision of what it suffered when it was detached from him, or something.

            "Does the poor little hero have bad dreams?" Malfoy's voice was sardonic, and if he hadn't been paying close attention to him, Harry knew that was all he would have noticed. But now he could make out the bright intensity in Malfoy's eyes, swiftly hidden as he lowered them and traced a finger over the blankets.

            "Of course I do," Harry said. "But nothing like this. I was in a place where the darkness was eating me alive. I forgot Hermione's face, Malfoy. I never went through anything like that, and I think--" He hesitated, because he might sound stupid, swallowed, and went on. "I think I would rather die than experience it again."

            Malfoy's eyes snapped back to his face. There it was, before he could hide it, the deep insight that Harry had thought he might have. Harry shifted as near as he could without actually getting out of bed. He needed something more than the fire to warm him just now, something tangible, like the blankets, to weigh him down.

            There are other things I could lie on, of course, he thought, his eyes lingering on Malfoy's tense body.

            "That was what I felt," Malfoy whispered. "They sent my spirit through the harp. It tore me apart. I was part of that void for years, and I could feel myself becoming more and more part of it." He sneered at Harry, but his eyes were bright with the kind of shine that came from unshed tears. "I was missing for years, you told me that first thing, but that was because I was wandering in that void, not because my captors kept me for that long."

            Harry groped after words, feeling as lost as he had when he couldn't remember Hermione's face. "I didn't know that you'd gone through that," he said. "I'm sorry."

            Malfoy inclined his head sharply, gaze searching Harry's face in a way that said he didn't quite believe the apology, but would accept it for now.

            "But why would it work that way?" Harry had to add, after another minute's thinking. "I've never heard that a harp had the power to banish anyone or anything, and the books I read didn't mention that, either."

            "They hated me so much." Malfoy's voice was simple and empty. "If someone wants something badly enough, sometimes their magic acts to give it to them. They wanted something horrible to happen to me. This was the most horrible thing they could think of."

            Harry sat up and wrapped his arms around himself, staring at his knees. That had been one of the most horrible things he'd ever experienced, and drifting through it for years…yeah, that would be pretty bad.

            But he still didn't see how the people who had kidnapped Malfoy could have caused that. Something similar, maybe, or an illusion. Malfoy's theory about magic working because of desire seemed too simple.

            Though isn't that exactly what happened when you blew up Aunt Marge in third year? You wanted something bad to happen to her. You didn't choose to inflate her and make her bob up and down like a balloon.

            Harry scowled and shook his head. That was understandable, too, because he'd been a child and children still had accidental magic. But the people who captured Malfoy had to have been adults.

            "Every time I think there's an explanation, there turns out to be a deficiency in it," he muttered.

            "We're chasing a shadow and my ability to lie across a hundred miles and you expect things to be realistic?" Malfoy snapped. He flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. "There are some things that you can't understand rationally, Potter, and what happened to me is one of them. Get used to it."

            "I just think we need to understand our enemies to fight them." Harry scowled at Malfoy, feeling as though he had gained back some of the certainty he had been missing a minute before.

            "But we're not fighting them now," Malfoy said, and let his eyes drift shut as if he was tired of the conversation. "We're fighting the consequences and the results of their magic. So we should concentrate on what those are, and accept them, and make plans around them. Not insist that they must not be what they seem like because they don't fit any of the magical theories we know." He slit one eye open and glanced sideways at Harry. "You ought to be used to this by now, Potter. Did the way you defeated the Dark Lord make any kind of sense? Who asks you to walk into a forest and sacrifice your life to the man who's done his best to kill you since you were born?"

            About to defend Dumbledore, Harry hesitated. He could explain why he'd had to face Voldemort if Malfoy gave him long enough, but he had to admit that the words would probably be something other than rational.

            Again he watched Malfoy in place of an answer, and Malfoy turned his head away. Harry could still see his face in profile, though, the line of his chin and one shut eye that cast the faint lines of his eyelashes across his cheek. Harry swallowed. Malfoy didn't look untroubled, but he had come through that darkness and he could still sleep without nightmares.

            I don't know if I could do that.

            It was a weird moment for him, because he didn't think he'd ever thought of Malfoy as strong before.

            He spent a moment worrying his lip with his teeth, then said slowly, "I think I might understand what you went through a little better now."

            "I'm happy for you." Malfoy spoke with a force that could have chiseled the words into marble, and then rolled over further, burying his face in the pillow completely. Harry shifted uneasily. He didn't like not being able to see Malfoy's expression.

            "I could--I could do something to make us the same," he offered. He didn't really want to do this, but he wanted to be fair.

            Malfoy muttered something that was muffled by the pillow, but finally Harry made out the words, "I have no idea what you mean." By then Harry had an idea, so he could sit up and speak calmly.

            "I have some Veritaserum with me. Hermione thought we might need it in case we encountered one of your captors and questioned them. I could take it, and that would mean that, for the rest of the journey, we could both only speak the truth."

            Malfoy rolled over and stared at him again. Harry looked back at him, throat bobbing and sweat creeping across his palms as he clasped his hands together. He had no idea what the shock in Malfoy's eyes would change into.

            Contempt, it turned out.

            "You can't make up for disturbing me or belittling my experiences by crippling yourself," he snapped, and once again rolled over. This time, the tense line of his shoulder said that he wasn't looking at Harry again without a bloody good reason.

            Harry lay down, shutting his mouth on an angry retort. And then he thought again about the darkness, and his anger sluiced away like blood under an onslaught of cold water.

            What would I be like if I went through that? What would happen if I came back to the real world and no one could believe me or wanted to help me?

            The thought stayed with Harry for the rest of the night, and if he got more sleep after that, it wasn't on purpose.

*

            They took him as he was coming out of Borgin and Burkes'. It was evening, and the few people who hurried through Knockturn Alley kept their heads down and their hoods drawn up around their faces for fear of being recognized. That made it easy for the people stalking Draco. He didn't even realize they were all together--the dark cloaks made them anonymous--until they surrounded him.

            He raised his wand. Someone sent a stinging curse that took it out of his hand, and someone else caught it. Draco could feel the shock and shudder in his body when they snapped it. He lunged forwards, trying to Apparate without his wand, desperate to get away. The bag of Rainbow Bat wings he'd come to purchase fell from his hand. He didn't care about that, but he cared about what they might do to him.

            Draco did scream, but they cast a Silencing Charm and that took care of that. And the people who might have helped him simply looked away and walked a little faster. As his captors bound the rope around his wrists and muttered words that included his name and "trial" and "injustice," Draco felt the wind wash around him and thought he heard voices in that, too.

            Voices that taunted him with the loss of his freedom, along with everything else. He had been so proud, after he faced the Wizengamot, of retaining that. With his freedom, he could rebuild the Malfoy fortunes and name. He could try again. He was out of his father's shadow, since Lucius was in prison, and his mother, as much as he missed her after her suicide, wasn't around to interfere and tell him that he should only do such and such to be a "proper" Malfoy. He had had so many second chances, so many dreams.

            The capture was the end of that. They Apparated with him out of Knockturn Alley, and Draco never got a look at the outside of the place they landed in. They put a hood over his head, only one of many blinding devices, and whispered rumors of what torture they would perform in his ears as they dragged him through many large and echoing rooms.

            They took him down, into the darkness.

*

            At the corner of the border, between the fields of night and day…

            That was a line Malfoy had recited. Or Harry thought he had. Since the moment they had found the shadow--on a strip of land where the woods gave way to a meadow, as the sun was going down and making long shadows fall across the place that gave Malfoy's shadow perfect camouflage--he hadn't been conscious of anything except the way it held him and crushed him and tried to press him, bit by bit and painfully, out of existence.

            The shadow seemed more solid this time. Harry had no idea if that was to do with the time of day, or the fact that this was the second confrontation, or something else. It grasped his throat in cold fingers. It squirmed over his robes, and left what felt like a trail of slime behind. The sun flashed burning through its edges, but the center of it was more solid than ever and weighed on his chest until he thought that he would vomit.

            But he was winning.

            Harry knew he was winning, this time. He could feel the shadow giving ground, thrashing and hissing as it did so. It hated him, more than anything had ever hated him. Voldemort's hatred was personal, passionate, and fiery. The shadow was like a wild animal who knew about death and so knew that Harry had come to kill it. On it pressed, and cold breath passed across Harry's face, and the fingers dug into his eyes now, and he could almost see Malfoy's face, strained and desperate, losing the battle and hating himself for it.

            Malfoy.

            Harry couldn't help it. He remembered that vulnerable face last night, those bitter words when Malfoy told him not to take the Veritaserum and cripple himself. He placed one hand in the center of the shadow's chest and pushed it backwards as he twisted to look for Malfoy. Had he got out of the way of the battle? Was he safe?

            Relief flooded him when he saw Malfoy standing next to one of the trees, arms dangling in front of him, eyes huge with hunger as he watched them.

            Then his eyes widened for a different reason, and his mouth opened.

            Harry never got to hear his words, because the shadow cried out at the same moment, its soundless voice suddenly gathering words.

            And the words were, "Because you could not trust him, all this has happened."

            It swallowed Harry.

*

            Well, now he's gone, my hero, into that gaping black maw.

            I might try to deceive myself, but I know what I saw.

            I might as well never have come, with the way the shadow

            Is hovering now, taunting me, between the wood and meadow.

            I might as well never have struggled, clawed, and fought

            To maintain my voice in the void, or my least little thought.

            I might as well never have gone to Potter's side.

            I might as well have yielded, might as well have died.

            But the shadow does not flee, and Potter now is gone,

            And it comes to me now that, just because I lived on,

            And because I am the one who is outside the shadow--

            Because there's no one else in this bloody meadow--

            Maybe I have to do my own work and be the hero for once.

            There's no other answer, and while my mind hunts

            For one, the shadow is slowly drifting away from me.

            Because I washelpless does not mean I must always be.

            And I won't think about magical theory, or Potter's books.

            What happened to me happened, no matter how strange it looks.

            So I'll follow my memories, and I'll follow common sense.

            I don't know where Potter is now, but I saw where he went.

            So into the void I'll venture, and this time we'll see

            How I fare when I have no shadow they can strip from me.

*

            There was no light.

            It was the most obvious thing about the void, but it was the also the one that most struck Harry. He stared, and there was no relief, no matter how hard he blinked or rubbed at his eyes. He had forgotten light first this time, as he had forgotten Hermione's face first last time. He put out a shaking hand, and once again nothing solid was there.

            He tried to think of a sunrise, and the word floated in his mind, as detached as a corpse in deep water.

            Harry shivered uncontrollably and wondered if things would change if he stood still. And something did seem to change. Suddenly he could hear a sound that he hadn't heard before, and he turned gladly towards it. If someone could come and rescue him here, then he would welcome even Malfoy, if--

            No, he would especially welcome Malfoy, Harry thought. Being in the void alive, without the comfort of knowing it was only a dream to cushion him, increased his respect for Malfoy for having survived this place.

            But the sound, as he found when the sensation of it brushed him, was only a wind. The same kind of magical wind that circled around Malfoy, that had perhaps followed him out of the void. It was not a companion, nothing that Harry could communicate or plead with. And its touch on his skin was a kind of stripping cold that he could imagine devastating him if it went on blowing and he found no shelter.

            He broke into a stumbling run, and then stopped. If there was no shelter of any kind, why should he hurry away? Why not stand still and let the wind batter him down? At least that would probably be a kinder death than the one where he gradually lost pieces of himself, bits of his memories and language and everything that made him who he was.

            A deep, discomforting thought came to him. He remembered Hermione saying she had read once that humans were such social creatures that most of what they were came from other people. Someone who was alone would gradually go crazy, would become more like an animal than a person.

            Harry imagined that happening, and rescue coming only when he was too far gone to recognize it, the pity and the horror in the eyes of his friends, what they would be forced to witness and endure--

            He forced the vision away, but the thoughts couldn't be forced like that. They drove into him like a wedge, and Harry found himself running again without considering where he was running to.

            He knew now why he was here. The shadow must be a piece of the void, or have the void inside it. Maybe it had pulled away from Malfoy because it could survive in that kind of environment--if it was an environment--and he couldn't. But Harry didn't know how he had come back to the daylight, and he didn't want to wander in the darkness for years.

            And he didn't want to lose his shadow as the price of survival, not when his shadow would become a creature that was capable of doing this to other people.

            He stopped and bowed his head, wishing that he knew the words to any prayer. The Dursleys had never considered it worthwhile to take Dudley to church, since he fussed about getting up so early. And Harry hadn't encountered many incentives to pray in the last few years. Mostly, once he finished his Auror training, he figured out what had to be done and he did it.

            But now he had no clue, so he did his best and came up with a single, solitary sentence.

            Send me help. Send me help, please.

*

            I walked into the darkness because someone had to do it,

            And, having been here before, I found I could see through it.

            This is the nothingness that reposes before all human birth,

            And at the end of it, in the womb and in the earth.

            This is the nothingness that forms the spirit and the soul,

            The darkness without which we could not be knit whole.

            But I was not whole. When I left that meadow,

            I went into that darkness bereft of my shadow.

            I went into that shadow like a half-soul or one unborn,

            And to my eyes it appeared as fields of ashy corn,

            As pools of clotted water, as a cinder star's spark,

            As many things grand and ugly, but not as something dark.

            I walked with the wind blowing through and around me,

            The moving, unliving companion that had found me

            When I wandered there the first time, and chose to stay.

            How that wind came to be there, who knows or can say?

            But it came with me this time, and I saw Potter floating there,

            With beside him my shadow, like a patch of rotted air.

            The shadow laughed at me, and stretched out a hand,

            And said, "You can take only one of us back to your own land,

            "And why should it be Potter, who has never done much

            For you but to torment you?Why not give me your touch?"

            I looked at Potter, and saw him shivering, a child,

            Unmanned, his skin clammy, his eyes blank and wild.

            I felt a moment's triumph. But what triumph can it be

            If the one you've won the triumph over cannot ever see

            That you have proved yourself the superior after all?

            And all the while the wind's song in my ears like a call

            Told me that there was movement here, and there was life,

            And I chose to give up passivity and jump back into strife.

            I answered the shadow, "You say I can only take one.

            But I shall make one be both, and all three, and none."

            And then I walked towards the shadow, in that dark place,

            And drew both it and Potter into a wide-armed embrace.

            How it struggled then! How bitter was the fight!

            It had grown used to hatred and freedom, the emptiness of flight.

            Potter stiffened against me, and whispered, "Malfoy?"

            And I dreaded to answer, because he would find no joy

            In being rescued by someone he will always despise.

            But I feared more the unreasoning terror in his eyes.

            "It's me, Potter," I said, and he sobbed and like sand

            The tears fell from his eyes as he clasped my hand.

            We blended into each other as we floated in that place.

            He drew my breath; I felt his tears on my face.

            And we turned to face the shadow, we knitted two,

            And the shadow struggled while around it the wind blew,



            Wild, triumphant, most like the blast through a horn

            As a villain is trampled by the hooves of a unicorn.

            The shadow could not face both of us, one unmade by half,

            The other one who looked Death in the eyes to laugh.

            Yes, I knew all Potter's secrets, as he knew all mine,

            And he said to me in the heart: I am thine.

            Only for that moment, only for a single moment's pause.

            But it was enough to blunt the shadow's reaching claws,

            To draw it to me, to make it fastened once again right.

            And both of us, and all three, and none, rose to light.

*

            He opened their eyes on the space of earth between meadow and forest, in the time when twilight had cooled and become starlight. He sat up and brushed their hands down his body, and drew a deep breath of the air they had thought he would never breathe again when they had been trapped in the darkness/walking through the darkness to battle the shadow.

            He glanced at the ground, just to be sure. Yes, there were two shadows floating there, an echo of two bodies.

            But not two minds. They shared those minds at the moment, and he wondered if this would last forever/if they wanted it to last forever.

            "Will it?" asked one voice, and the other answered, "No. But for a short time, the effects are perfect."

            Perfect.

            He turned to look at each other, and green eyes and grey eyes met, mirrors of their thoughts for the moment. His hands rose, and they cupped his faces, and they kissed with his two pairs of lips.

            Because this was unusual, and important, and strange, and who knew when they would have the chance to experience something like this again? It needn't mean anything, he explained to them urgently. But he wanted to have the chance, and they agreed.

            Blended bodies, blended minds, one thought shuddering through him when their hands grasped his two cocks, when hot and dry fingers rubbed against hot damp skin, when mouths opened and pressed against one another, when breath passed their two sets of lungs and mingled in the one space between him.

            Their black-haired body knocked the blond body to the ground with the force of his probing, and they were distantly amused, remembering other times it had happened with the black-haired body in other situations, his bodies slamming together in the flight of Quidditch.

            But this was not Quidditch, nothing like.

            A bit alike, said one half of his thought.

            Wait, said the other, and bit the blond body's neck.

            So they writhed on the dirt, so they danced on the dirt, his tongues clashing and battling, his hands working so fast that it would have dizzied them even if they weren't sharing their thoughts and impulses for the moment. Speed, speed like the magical wind that had accompanied him into the void and danced around him while he stood there, and the pleasure bounced and whirled through them like the wind.

            Catching, snatching, buoying up, and up, and up, and throbbing, and smarting, and falling, and--

            Burning.

            With a sensation like stars and sun in their chests, with a final shock of pleasure so great that it frightened Harry and hurt Draco, they fell apart into their own bodies again, and the pleasure was simultaneous, was equally great, was identical, something that Harry knew he would never feel again.

            He let his head fall forwards onto Draco's cheek--he couldn't think of him as Malfoy, not now--and closed his eyes. For some reason, though his body felt sated, his mind didn't. His mind had caught a glimpse of a bewildering immensity, and he wanted to explore it more. His mind was wondering what it would be like to fuck Draco, to talk to him about his family, to talk about his time in the void and help him heal from that, as much as he could ever be healed.

            He didn't remember every secret and every piece of knowledge that he'd gained from Draco in those moments when they were joined, but he remembered enough.

            "What do you think?" he whispered, because he had fallen into the shadow in the first place because he hadn't trusted Draco enough, had had to glance over and make sure he was all right. "Do you think we could do this again? Maybe--maybe with me inside you?" Uncertain, tentative, he tried to joke. "Since I'd like to make a habit of something that happened once."



*

            It was his choice, and he had back his voice, and he could make it as he pleased.

            And to want Harry Potter, he must be diseased.

            So he thought until he lifted his head and saw Potter's green eyes. They held a fire that reminded him of pleasure, reminded him of desire.

            He gazed back at them, and slowly, like a gem, the fire and the light in his heart began to gleam as out of a long night.

            They didn't let me have a choice about being torn apart. Potter didn't let me have a choice about helping.

            But this would be a choice of the heart. Force can have no place in it, and I think Potter knows that in a way they never did.

            The sheer luxury of making a decision washed through Draco, and it was almost as sweet as moving his arm and seeing a shadow moving along the ground beneath him.

            But sweetest of all was being able to say, "I'll think about it, Potter," and watching the fire brighten in Potter's eyes until they shone like impossible stars, and knowing that, if he wanted to, he could lie.

            If he wanted to.

            He might not.

            The End.
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A Harp, A Shadow, The Wind