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Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2821 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 1-Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams
- 1
Title: Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams

Pairing(s): Harry/Draco

Summary: Draco is in Azkaban. The new Azkaban, where solitary confinement means confinement with one's self.

Rating: R

Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.

Warning(s): D/s, prisoner!fic, heavy angst, collars, cages, dub-con, bondage, psychological trauma and torture, no happy ending.

Word Count: 17,500

Author's Notes: This was written for the 2011 hd_holidays round, for scarletlady, for her prompts of prisoner fic, dub-con, collars, cages, and D/s. I started out with a tiny scrap of an idea, but it was her prompts that nurtured it into life. Thanks to my betas, L. and K, and to groolover for Brit-picking. The title comes from a Hamlet quote: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space--were it not that I have bad dreams."

Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams

            Draco remembered coming to the island.

            He remembered the hard buzzing that seemed to surround him when he was Apparated onto the low, foam-washed grey stone extending out into the sea, and he looked around, expecting the appearance of Dementors. He saw nothing. Nothing but grey. The fog, and the birds, and the sea, and the sky, all washed-out and half-glowing in the distance.

            "Felt that, did you?" The guard behind him was a bulky Auror, not evil and not kind. He pushed Draco ahead with a hand in the middle of his back. "That's the ward. Responsible for your punishment."

            Draco nearly stumbled. He hadn't eaten in two days, anticipating the completion of his trial and sentencing.

            Three months, he told himself. It's only three months. I can make it through three months. Potter managed to persuade them down to that much. I can handle three months. I can--

            He cut his thoughts off. Going mad was no part of the plan, and his family had tendencies in that direction he did not want to encourage. Azkaban didn't use Dementors; they used something else to guard their most dangerous prisoners now, something that involved wards and being locked inside one's own head. Draco could imagine worse punishments. He wouldn't find anyone here worthy of conversing with, anyway.

            He looked around as they moved through the front door of the enormous granite block that housed the prison and down--and down, and down--corridors and stairs and weakly glimmering ramps. There was nothing to see that was any different from what he had seen so far. Granite, steel, wood, iron, stone. And darkness. As they moved down, black replaced the grey.

            Down and down and down.

*

            His cell lay under sea level, so that the smell and the damp and the roar seeped in. Draco didn't mind. None of his jailers were Slytherins, or they would have known about the dungeons' proximity to the lake.

            One weakly glimmering torch shone outside the cell, providing guidance for the guards who came to bring him stale bread and dusty porridge and, now and then, a musty scrap of fruit to keep him from getting sick. There was water, always, dripping into a bucket with a steady song that they probably intended to bother him. Draco slept through it. There was a latrine, and a few lumpy blankets that cradled him against the stone. Now and then the guards blasted him with Cleaning Charms and Repairing Charms, to ensure they didn't have to let him take a shower or change his clothes.

            And there was the buzzing.

            Draco listened to it. Now and then, it was a distant, hard sound that cut through the noises of the sea. Other times, it seemed close but soft, as though a purring cat had crept into bed with him. On the third morning he was there--or perhaps it was not, but it was the third time he had bread--Draco asked the guard who brought him the food about it.

            A woman with waxy skin and grey eyes and stony hair, she looked at him without interest and answered, "The ward. It needs time to get used to you before it goes to work, or you would have already felt it." She laid the tray down in front of him and stepped back, her wand pointed at his throat.

            "The ward," Draco said, and licked a crumb off the back of his finger, closing his eyes for a moment at the taste of bread and skin. Then he opened his eyes and paid attention to the woman again. "I've heard about that before. When will it get used to me?"

            The woman smiled for the first time. It didn't show any amusement that Draco could see, as though someone had made an impression on the skin of her face alone. "Questions of when are irrelevant," she answered, and waited until he was done, picked up the tray, and departed.

            Draco lay back with his arms folded behind his head, and listened to the buzzing. The crash of the waves. The distant noises of people pacing back and forth, and now and then screaming or rustling or dying.

            He had been at least some days here, he thought, and he hadn't gone mad or been hurt yet. He would see what the ward did when it affected him, but he didn't think it could be much worse than what he had endured so far.

            Malfoy?

            Draco bolted to his knees before he thought about it, turning his head in several directions. He knew that voice. Most recently, he'd listened to it plead at his trial for leniency, like the drops of water dripping into the bucket.

            "Potter," he said, and then stopped. Why would Potter have come to Azkaban? The Ministry had forbidden Draco visitors. And Potter had better things to do, like getting on with being a hero.

He made himself lie back down. This could be the faint vestiges of madness creeping in, though he didn't know why, considering the prison hadn't hurt him as yet. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing until he thought he could reproduce the pattern on a piano.

            Malfoy, Potter's voice whispered again, and fell silent.

*

            Warmth. The sound of a fire as relentless and regular as the sound of the sea. Carpet beneath his feet, his bare feet. The elegant feeling of clean skin, scraped and washed fresh from a bath with a servant who knew what they were doing. Something light and flexible in his hands, travelling around them but not binding them, instead offering itself.

            He opened his eyes.

            He stood in a room with walls that extended so far to the sides he knew at once it could not be anywhere in the Manor; his father had thought large rooms like this vulgar and diminished them or shut them up. He turned in a slow circle, and found the fire behind him, spread along a hearth that two people could have lain head-to-foot in. It ate slick and gleaming logs of wood in the same way that the dawn ate stars, and golden light spilled out of it and along the carpet. The carpet had subdued shades in it, red and brown and gold, and they changed under Draco's eyes as he completed his circle.

            He knew this must be a delusion, of course, because he remembered Azkaban and the prison cell. What he could not figure out was why the ward the guards spoke of with such anticipation would give him pleasure and warmth and satisfaction. Any softening of the Death Eaters' punishment wouldn't have met with the approval of the moving statues that surrounded him to keep him in his place.

            Draco paused when he finished his slow turn, because he had realised for the first time that there was someone else in the room. The person knelt in front of him, facing away from Draco, head bowed and hands linked together behind his back. Draco took a step forwards and then paused as the flexible thing in his hands slithered out and fell to the floor with a semitoned thump.

            A length of rope, and nothing else. No, Draco decided when he reached down to finger it, silken cord. He shook his head and stepped over it, approaching the figure with its back to him. He doubted he would need the rope to deal with someone who knelt there so submissively.

            His steps halted for a moment, and his eyes closed. It was flashes of other memories that bled into his head now, nothing to do with the Manor except that the Manor had been where some of them happened.

            Vague ideas of what would happen if he walked into a room and snapped a command and people leaped to obey because of who he was, not who his father was, or his blood. The idea of hair gripped between his hands, held there as someone swallowed around his cock, and the person not fighting him, not struggling, leaning into the hold because they needed it. Estimating the strength of someone like Blaise and the ways that he might be able to pin him down.

            And the words Draco would say once he was pinned down, to make him want to stay there.

            He shook his head, wiped his hands free of sweat on the palms of his knees, and stepped around the kneeling figure so he could make out the face.

            The head drooped so much, shaggy black hair falling around the features, that he couldn't at first. Then Draco reached out and swept the fringe back, and the hair cleared enough to reveal a lightning bolt scar.

            Draco leaped a step back before he thought about it, and then forced himself to stillness, feeling the urge to run still in him, loud and insistent as a startled rabbit's heart.

            No. He had not dreamed of Potter like this. The ward was supposed to torment him with pictures of things he could never have, perhaps? But he had never thought of this, because he had always known Potter would never be attainable for anything more than a quick fist-fight. If the Death Eaters had captured Potter and decided to torture him, others with seniority to Draco would have had the task of breaking him.

            But he's not broken, is he?

            No, Draco thought, and reached out with one hand, though it halted well short of that bowed head and the scar that seemed to have eyes of its own, the way it stared at him. The word was breakable. The word was submitting, rather than submissive.

            Draco clenched his hand into a fist and drew it back. He looked again at the silken rope lying on the floor, and then at the way Potter had clasped his hands behind him, with no one to make him do so. He would try the chain and the weight of his voice first, and see if that could make Potter stir in response to him.

            "Potter."

            The jolt he had felt himself when he saw the scar was nothing compared to the one that spasmed through Potter. He controlled it immediately, dipping his chin towards the carpet and, Draco thought, opening his eyes, although he could only tell that by the motion of the eyelashes as seen from above.

            "Sir."

            Draco shook his head. This time, it didn't come from the title Potter was using, simple and unstrained, so unlike the grudging respect Draco had heard him offer to Professor Snape when he absolutely had to. This time, it came from that title hanging in the air between them, between them, and the way that his throat was thick and his heart sang in his ears again. The urge to run was there, but Draco, having spent so many months in the Dark Lord's immediate presence, had learned the difference between the urge to run away from something and the urge to run towards it. This was the latter.

            "What is going on?" he asked. He needed to address the press of the questions before the insistent press of his desire. He had to, or he thought he would go mad.

            "Sir?" Potter's neck muscles tensed, but he didn't lift his head.

            "How did we come to be here? Why are you kneeling? Why did I have a rope?" Once the questions began, they flowed like babble, but Draco felt no urge to bite his lip. After all, Potter showed no inclination to rise to his feet. He had accepted his position. He had admitted that Draco had the right to rule here.



            "Sir," Potter said, and his muscles melted back into position, his head bowing, his hands working themselves into another loose knot. "More than likely it comes from the intensity of your last orgasm."

            Draco laughed. Potter leaned towards the sound. Draco licked his lips before he could go on. "No. I know where I was. I was in Azkaban before I opened my eyes here. This is a dream, a fantasy induced by the ward."

            "Yes, sir," Potter said. "If you say so."

            "No," Draco said, reaching out and snagging his hand in Potter's hair before he thought about it. Potter came with him, letting his head be pulled, his mouth falling open in a silent gasp. Draco tried not to stagger because of what those glazed green eyes and the shining pink tongue between the bright teeth did to him; he did succeed in not letting it silence him. "I don't want to hear that. You're willing to go along with whatever I want, I get that, but I want to know why. What happened to get me here? Why does this dream seem so real, and what's its purpose? Why did they put that ward on Azkaban in the first place? Giving people what they want doesn't mean that they're always going to want to stay in their cells. I promise, no matter how much they give me of you on your knees, I'll always still want to go back to freedom."

            "I don't know anything about that, sir," Potter said, and his eyes retained the glaze even though his voice sounded calm and sensible. Draco wondered for a mad moment if he'd had clients--owners--whatever they were--who liked to hear him discuss magical theory in that voice as he rode their cocks. "I don't know what you mean about Azkaban or wards. We have wards on our home, sir, but they're all of your doing, wards that you put there. The last thing I knew, you finished up with me and told me to kneel here with my eyes shut while you went into the bedroom to sleep. That's been several hours, sir," he added, and shifted his knees.

            "I suppose you're getting tired?" Draco couldn't help the dip in his voice, or the dip in his stomach when Potter's eyelids dipped in response, fluttering helplessly over his eyes. "I suppose your knees hurt and you're be glad to stand up and find some relief for them?"

            "Sir," Potter said, and leaned nearer and nearer, his eyes shut now, his mouth distractingly open. "Only if you want me to, sir."

            "I don't want you to stand up," Draco said, and his breathing had accelerated, and when he tried to take his hand away from Potter's hair, he found that his fingers had curled deeper into it instead.

            But that made his courage and his pride rise. So far, he hadn't been able to fight the evils of Azkaban; he had nothing to do but suffer and endure. But this was something active. He would show them that he didn't care what fantasies the ward induced in him, that even Potter seduced and willing was not enough of a temptation to make him stop being a Malfoy. He would outlast these three months and every gift they thought they could give him.

            What are they going to do, make all of us eager to use Potter's arse?

            "I wasn't asking for that, sir," Potter whispered, and his mouth gaped open, further open, and Draco was naked, and his skin was scraped and shining, and he could see a faint film of green from beneath Potter's drooping eyelids.

            He did want this, and he hadn't enough of what he wanted during the war or the trials. He thrust forwards.

            Potter didn't gag, didn't choke, when he took in Draco's cock. He accepted it instead, making a soft noise around it that was more luxurious than a moan. The heat inside his throat made Draco's eyes roll back. He thought about moving so that he was braced against a wall, but he needed nothing for that. It would be too like admitting weakness to whoever was observing his mind inside a Pensieve or with Legilimency--because there had to be someone, didn't there, or how would they be sure their precious ward was working?--and he would show them that he could stand up and take this.

            As Potter was taking it, loving every second of it.

            Draco shut his eyes and arched his hips forwards, and Potter sucked and sighed, and he moved to the side, and Potter followed him and sucked and licked, and Draco took a step back and Potter followed him, perfectly in time, perfectly in tune, all the while sucking and tapping with his tongue on the sensitive head of Draco's shaft.

            Draco released all at once, taking pleasure in jamming his hips forwards and holding them there. He did force his eyes open against the weight of delight, intent on watching Potter as he swallowed.

            He still didn't gag, and his eyes were fierce as he watched Draco back, as if he were the one in charge here, swallowing, taking, accepting, surrendering.

            Draco moved closer to him after he finished, closer and closer. And Potter bowed down before him, bowed back before him, rolling onto his haunches and then his spine and shoulders without releasing Draco's cock from his mouth, glancing away and veiling his eyes as Draco stood over him.

            If he had looked like this, even once, at school, bowed and made safe, domesticated and tame, Draco would have taken him. He would have followed him to the Quidditch showers, he would have sent a note that lured him to the Forbidden Forest, he would have stalked him better during fifth year and found out where he hid with his little group of followers who wanted to ignore Umbridge, but he would have found him. He would have had him.

            The shattering experience was still with him as he reached down and dragged Potter's head up and off him. The angle of his neck had to be exquisitely uncomfortable, but Potter watched him, and his eyes were glazed again and his teeth were bright.

            "Show me you swallowed it," Draco said softly, and Potter's mouth gaped.

            Draco slid himself back in, rubbing his cock along Potter's gums and cheeks and palate, knowing Potter wouldn't dare let a tooth touch him. And Potter took it, open and worshipful and unguarded and open.

            He took it, and Draco learned something better than joy.

*

            Draco opened his eyes.

            Grey around him. Sea-sounds. The distant shriek of birds as they quarrelled over fish or crumbs.

            Draco clenched his hands into small fists and turned his head away from the walls, towards the centre of the cell. He watched the water dripping into the bucket and listened to it, until the temptation to call to Potter had faded.

            He had to grudgingly admire the wizards who had built the ward. They had done it in a way that made you aware it was a fantasy--because it made it worse that way, Draco thought, or would for those who were not as strong as Draco--but it still shook him to be snatched away from the warmth and the comfort and back into his blank cell. The spray from the sea seemed wetter than before.

            That must be the purpose, then. Not to drive prisoners mad, which Draco thought was unlikely if they were being put into new situations rather than old familiar memories that they might want to return to, but to make them so crave the comforts the fantasies could offer that they would do anything to escape from the cells.

            Draco shook his head, and felt the lines carve themselves into his cheeks. They should still have chosen otherwise with him. He had no confession to make; what he was guilty of, the Wizengamot had already decided. His father was in prison, his mother free, and they couldn't change that, not when Potter had testified that she had saved his life in the Forest. Draco had no hope to hope for. He would stay here until his three months were past.

            Back to endurance again, rather than the resistance, strong as lightning, that the fantasy had enabled him to feel.

            Draco listened to the distant buzzing and settled down. His arms rested behind his head, on the lumpy blankets; his chin was turned up to the ceiling; his ears were tuned to the tumble of the waves outside. Every line of him was set still in resistance, and if it must be frozen and not moving for the moment, still it was there.

*

            Another room this time, but one without the rich carpet and the enormous fire. It was a rather bare room, in fact. Draco studied the stone walls and the wooden door in front of him and frowned. Except for the lack of tables and cauldrons, he would have taken it for the Potions classroom at Hogwarts.

            There was one table, as he saw when he turned around. The fantasies seemed to start with him facing the opposite way from what he desired.

            Except that what he desired in this case was nothing in particular. Draco moved forwards and stared at the item lying there, shaking his head. It resembled a small whip, a strip of leather. He sighed. The fantasies the ward provided continued to be odd matches for his real mind, what the wizards who had made it assumed prisoners wanted rather than what they did. He had not needed anything more than his voice to subdue Potter in the last fantasy, after all.

            Then he picked up the strip and turned it around.

            And realised what it really was.

            It bent under his touch, flexible but not enough so that one could effectively hit someone else with it. The ends had a neat loop and latch that would fit into each other and would, as far as Draco could find with tugging on them, prove extremely hard to pull off. Here and there, along the leather, subdued jewels shone. No diamonds, no sapphires, nothing that would shine bright. Only dark emeralds, tarnished jade, ember-like rubies. All small and exquisitely set.

            Draco knew, even before the knock on the door, whose throat this collar was meant to fit. He turned around with it in his hands and said, "Come in."

            The door swung open, and Potter stepped inside. One more different from the Potter of the last vision the ward had induced was hard to imagine. He wore Hit Wizard robes, and he looked as if he had never learned the meaning of peaceful kneeling. He had his wand drawn. He paused when he saw Draco, and said nothing, but his mouth slashed sideways into a sneer.

            Draco smiled at him, and felt the same charging excitement in him. If he had ever gone into battle properly, he thought, rather than running away from the Astronomy Tower the night Dumbledore died being the closest he'd ever got to it, it would have felt like this. He knew what he was going to do, because it was useless asking the imaginary Potter questions he couldn't answer.

            He was going to win.

            "Ah, yes," Draco said, and turned the collar around in his hands, so that Potter's eyes were drawn to the flash of the jewels because he could not help himself. "So you do have the balls to walk into a room where I stand."

            "I've done it before, Malfoy," Potter said, his voice so quiet that Draco could envision the memories of their previous encounters building up between them like the layers and layers of colours in the carpet of the first fantasy. "Walked in, and spat in your face, and walked away without any badge of your ownership on me." He looked at the collar, sneered, and looked aside. But Draco was watching, and this second sneer wasn't quite so perfect as the first, was less polished, looked less practised, was less in every way. "If you would remember what's happened instead of dreaming about what you want, you would know that it's going to happen again."

            "You think the future always repeats the past?" Draco turned the collar over one more time and put it down on the table again, but kept his hand on it. "How strange. Most people I know go out of their way to prevent that from happening."

            Potter remained still. But he didn't spit in Draco's face and he didn't walk out the door, either.

            He was listening.

            Draco turned his head away and paced to the far side of the room to hide his smile. He wondered for a moment what the place really was, but it didn't matter. The ward had erred this time. The imaginary room it had tried to construct was considerably less warm and welcoming than the first had been, and Draco would find no one willing to suck his cock here. "I wonder if you know," Draco told the stone walls, "how long we have been coming here."

            "Er," Potter said, and his voice held the quality of someone who knows he's going to spoil things but doesn't know how. "Three months."

            Draco sighed and shook his head, letting the clean wash of breath from his mouth overwhelm the taint of stupidity that Potter's careless words had left on the air. "Not that," he said. "Not to this room."

            "What other definition of ‘here' is there, then?" Potter asked, and Draco could hear him shifting his weight.

            Draco smiled, and held his silence until the shifting settled down again. "What I meant," he said, "is the road we've been on. Since the war. Since Hogwarts. Perhaps since the first time my father told me about you and I realised that someone like you existed in the world." He laid a hand on the wall in front of him and traced the places where the blocks joined, for something to touch. "How long has that road been aiming here, bringing us here, where we could do nothing about it?"

            He heard Potter's stuttered, uneven breaths, filling up the whole of the room for a moment and then fading away. Draco nodded as if that was the answer to a question, though he knew Potter would have denied giving one.

            "Forever, or as near to it as makes no matter," Draco said, and turned around so he could face Potter, because not looking at him no longer seemed like a good idea. "Because we are what we are, Potter, and that means we need this." He gestured between them, and then let his hand fall. "You could walk away from this if you really believed it was wrong."

            "I do believe it's wrong." Potter had the sound of teeth in his voice.

            Draco needed an eyebrow, a single one, no words.

            "Not," Potter said, and rubbed a hand over his face, slowly, up and down, as though the slower he went, the more likely he would be to erase the things he was talking about. "But." He slowed and thought about it, his chest heaving in and out, his head bowing as though he had a weight on the crown of it. Draco waited, and thought for a moment about how tame Potter looked, in a different way than he had already kneeling and conquered in Draco's first fantasy.

            "I don't think that it's wrong for someone else," Potter said at last, and his voice was charged enough to make Draco's groin ache with words that would have been ordinary and simple coming from someone else. "But it is for me. I'm a Hit Wizard. They depend on me to be loyal to the Ministry and the law above all. I can't owe allegiance to someone who could well be a criminal." His eyes came up, and they blazed away at Draco. They said, I hate you. They said, I believe what I'm saying.

            They said, Convince me.

            Draco took a single step away from the wall and shrugged with one shoulder. "Well, perhaps you're right," he said. "I need someone who can yield to me, and you can't. I never thought about it like that. I thought that you didn't want to surrender to a Slytherin, that you didn't want to show me that you could obey someone you used to hate, in case I got other…ideas." He slipped a finger under the collar and lifted it.

            Potter was looking at the collar. Draco was sure he didn't even see Draco's own hand, though his stare in that direction seemed so intense.

            "But it does seem a shame," Draco said, and he, too, looked at the collar. The way the jewels glimmered as he turned it back and forth. The way the buckle and ring shone with the faint glow of a charm that meant the one wearing the collar could never take it off. Draco looked up at Potter and smiled. "I had this made especially for you. Did you know that you can't remove it without help? I put it on, and it stays on. For the rest of your life, if that's the way I want to leave it. You would have to wear it to your precious job and to hospital and to prison if they arrested you for consorting with me."

            Potter shut his eyes. He wasn't trembling, but Draco recognised the superfine control of his muscles that it took to keep him from doing that.

            "A shame," Draco repeated, and took one step closer, and then another. Potter didn't open his eyes, and didn't run. Draco trailed the edge of the collar over Potter's throat. Potter's head jerked as if to follow it, then went still again. Draco unrolled the collar and held it out as though estimating the length. "To have to destroy something so beautiful, so finely made."

            "Destroy." Potter's eyes flickered open, looking past him. They looked drugged. Draco reckoned that looking past him was all the effort they could make right now.

            "Yes." Draco moved back a step and tapped the collar against the heel of his palm, and the eyes moved to him because they had to. "Because it was made for one person, and he won't be needing it. There's no reason to keep it. I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone else wearing it." He spoke a quiet spell, letting go of the collar with one hand to take up his wand, and then reached back. The spell was one Potter would know, he was certain. It made his grip strong enough to tear through a table; it would certainly more than destroy the stiff but small object in his grip.

            Potter's spell slapped his hand aside, and a moment later, he said, "Finite," ending the charm Draco had given himself for strength.

            Once again, it would have been a bad idea for Draco to say anything. He waited, staring at Potter, and Potter's tongue appeared, touching the middle of his lower lip and staying there as if he had forgotten the ability to go on. He stared at the collar.

            Draco moved forwards. Potter took a step back. Draco kept following, because he knew the backing wouldn't go on forever. He pursued, and Potter yielded. Soon his back was against the door, and he lowered his head. His body shook, his teeth and eyes showing the pain of a wounded animal.

            Draco took the last step forwards, and rested the buckle and loop of the collar against Potter's pulse.

            And Potter tilted his head back at last, making his throat small, making it ready to receive the collar that Draco drew around it and then, gently, pulled tight. Gentle. There was no need for violence.

            It was violence that glimmered in Potter's eyes and showed through the shaking in his hands as he reached up to touch the collar and the small jewels scattered along it, but it was tamed violence.

            Leashed, Draco thought, and reached out to grip Potter's hair, to touch something more yielding still. Potter's eyes were green and wild as he stared at Draco, as Draco brought his head closer and his mouth up.

*

            And he opened his eyes to grey.

            Not green. It took Draco a moment to understand that. He lay on the blankets with the humming of the ward around him. And around him was grey, the sullen colour of the stone, with patches of dun and black where the prison was less finely-made.

            Nothing as finely-made as the collar or Potter around, of course. Of course not.

            Draco rolled slowly to his knees and spent a moment bowing his head and flexing his shoulders and arms. He recalled his mother telling him once that he should stretch before any hard activity, which might include studying for an exam. He couldn't remember which way she had said he should stretch, but that was all right. No Dementors in the new prison, so no one to steal his happy memories.

            Only the ward.

            Draco imagined the woman who had brought him the food, and others, watching from the shadows, and knew what they would think of him if he broke and whimpered because the ward had given him a few moments of comfort and then taken it away. He would not do something like that. He stretched his arms above his head, clasped his hands together, and then brought them down so they touched his stomach. Fifteen times he did that, his eyes half-closed and his count the only words echoing through his head.

            Then he rolled his shoulders and continued to roll them until the tension from the vision had passed away. When he lay back again, he was breathing slowly and his heartbeat no longer filled his ears.

            That it had was shameful.

            I was right about the purpose of the ward, Draco decided. It is meant to give the prisoners comfort they'll break for. But not merely physical comfort. Dominating Potter was its own kind.

            For a moment, he wondered why. He truly never had dreamed of doing that, that he remembered. Had he? Perhaps he had sometimes had dreams he couldn't remember--there was a period when he was fourteen that he could never remember what he dreamed of each night--but he had seen Potter the next morning with all the same hatred, which rather argued that images like that didn't lurk just under the surface of his thoughts.

            If they were new…

            Draco shrugged. Perhaps the ward had sensed that he would like to strike back at his enemies, but whoever had constructed it didn't want the prisoners thinking that way about Wizengamot members and the guards. So they would give him an acceptable substitute instead, or make him take one.

            He rolled over and faced the bucket, rejecting the press against his mind and his ears. The ward would not win. He was still himself, and what he was endured. He would not let it diminish. He was not tame.

*

            "So you had to do this to me before you could convince me that you'd won. Clever."

            Draco lifted his head and glanced slowly around the room in front of him, surveying it. He had done that each time he came into a fantasy so far, and he didn't see why Potter should change the way he did things just because he was visible and speaking to Draco now. Not that Draco had looked at him yet, but the closeness of his voice said he must be visible.

            Draco felt his stomach muscles clench, the way they sometimes did when he was anticipating the house-elves serving honeyed bread for dinner. He ignored it, and studied the room around him.

            Not as luxurious as the first room, not as bare as the second. Draco smiled. He knew why. The ward was fucking with him, trying to make him think of these places as real, or find the middle ground that would enable it to destroy the true balance of Draco's mind. It would only be happy when he was crawling and whimpering and broken, never wanting to leave the prison where he had first come against his will.

            Because that was another purpose to the ward that he could think of. Make someone unable to escape, and then the Wizengamot could claim with all sincerity when his term was up that they had tried to offer him freedom, but he had hugged his pillows and refused the door of his cell.

            This time, Draco would remember. He had allowed himself to forget with the last vision; he had thought of Potter and the collar as real. This time, he would remember, and it would be an imprisonment on his terms, a vision without importance. He would move through it like a dream, able to break free at any time but indulging his own wishes for now.

            "Malfoy?"

            Draco nodded at the walls, panelled wood like the kind that he remembered seeing in some of the professors' offices at Hogwarts. There was a desk in the middle of the room, too, on thick green carpeting. He wondered for a moment if he was a professor in this fantasy, and then banished it. They didn't give him enough context, and he would not ask for it. This was the here, this was the now, and rendering certain things unknowable should help him to keep in mind that it was unreal.

            He turned, to face Potter for the first time since he had arrived here.

            And lost his breath.

            Potter was sitting in a chair with cushions that looked thicker than the carpet, raised on a dais above the floor. He sat with his legs crossed over one another, and his arms folded, and his eyebrows raised. He must have spent minutes practising the sardonic expression on his face.

            And around him, over him, above him, connecting to the top of the dais and so beneath him as well, was a cage.

            Draco moved a step forwards. Then he stopped. He would lose control of his tongue soon, and no matter how he did it, whether via babbling or through simple hanging of it loose, he would provide material for Potter to laugh at. He shook his head lightly, twice, and then studied the bars again.

            They were light, strong, and numerous. Draco thought he might be able to stand near the room's door and squint, and it would seem as though they weren't there at all. Potter couldn't pass a wand between them, much less a hand or arm. Perhaps a finger, but Draco recognised the material, the same material that--

            Well, it was there. He had seen it before. Silver-reinforced steel. The bars wouldn't bend to a casual touch, and they were resistant to most accidental and wandless magic that someone could muster.

            Of course, most people weren't Harry Potter, and Draco turned to study the door, which had already buzzed with a weight of magic that he knew wasn't normal.

            Yes. Spells draped the door, visible as twirling, trailing silver and purple vines of energy. Draco recognised ones that would dampen the senses, loosen the muscles, cloud violent thoughts, and do half a dozen other things.

            Potter was a prisoner here. Stopped. Stuck. Owned.

            Tamed.

            Draco looked back at him. Potter stared at him in silence. He didn't appear to have altered his posture since Draco had first looked at him, but the muscles in his thighs clenched and twisted for a moment, perhaps with the way that Draco was looking at him.

            "Have you looked your fill yet?" Potter asked. "You ought to know what I look like. You were the one who put me in here." His voice descended to a hiss. "You're the only one who would dare."

            "But not the only one who wants to," Draco said, plunging into the stream that moved around him, not needing reminders or hints or cues now any more than he had needed the cord in the first fantasy to bind and control Potter. "I'm the one who achieved it. The one who has something everyone else wants."

            Potter looked as if he might actually try to attack the bars with his teeth. "I am not a thing."

            "I never said you were," Draco said, and his voice lowered, and he was at the cage without remembering how he got there. Well, considering how light-headed he felt, how gently he was breathing, how much he wanted to touch the bars and the way that sparks seemed to leap when he did, that wouldn't be unusual. "The thing I have is the captivity. The privilege of seeing you like this."

            Potter stared at him, mouth open, then shut it and blew air out through his nostrils hard enough to sound like a camel. "Yeah. You've never seen me sitting on a chair before, or on a chair on a platform. Because the Ministry doesn't have me do that every other week. You've had your bloody mad fun, Malfoy, let me go."

            "You have no idea," Draco said quietly. Potter was trying to destroy the mood, he knew, but the mood wasn't his to destroy. "You have no idea how many of them see you soaring around, free, above them, yes, flying above them in a world that they can't conceive of. What wouldn't they give, they think, for your fame and your popularity and your ability to have anything you want by looking at it."

            Potter's mouth curled up. "I can't have privacy by asking for it, can I?"

            "And then they wonder what you would look like like this," Draco said. His voice was pulling him with it, and it seemed to pull a flush up Potter's cheeks, too, coiling around his throat and his jaw and ending up somewhere under his ears. "Before them, stripped of that power, vulnerable, unable to do anything except listen to them. Because they have the key to the cage, to the chain. Because they want to know what happens when you surrender."

            "I don't," Potter said, his voice quieter after Draco's. Draco’s wasn't loud, but it filled the space. He knew it did. And from the way Potter ducked his head down, he knew it, too; he simply didn't want to admit it.

            "You must, sometimes," Draco said. "When you sleep. When you put your wand down. When you're in the bath, the shower. When you're somewhere with people you trust. They want to see you then, without the power. Or they want to see what lies beneath the power. You could put it that way, too."

            "I'm not weak."

            Draco waited with a smile until Potter flushed again and listened to the way those words rang and died. "Of course not," Draco said. "Never, except here and now, when someone is making you relax and do something you don't want to do."

            "You think this is relaxed? Malfoy, you narcissistic fucker--"

            "You're not striding around," Draco said. "You're sitting in one place. You're not issuing commands, you're taking them."

            He would have said more, but some of the words had got through at last, or so he saw from the way Potter's eyelids jerked up and his hands tightened in his lap. His breathing was thick, laborious, suddenly. He tried to look Draco in the eye, but he had to clench his jaw to do so.

            "You don't really think that way," Potter said, and something was still caught in the back of his throat, try to clear it as he would. He ended up looking down at his hands, and then when he tried again, his eyes wouldn't rise higher than Draco's chest. Draco watched him and knew him, knew and understood his reactions, as much as if he had used Legilimency the way he had wanted to during sixth year.

            "You're trying to make up something that you can use to excuse this childish revenge when the Ministry finds out what you've done," Potter continued, and his words were warming and charging ahead now, although he looked as if he had to struggle to find them. "You--you caged me here for a prank, and now you want me to fall for you, or--or something, and then you'll laugh at me and say it was all a prank, and I'm an idiot for doing it."

            "If I wanted to make you fall for me," Draco said with simple truth, "I would have done something else, something that was less likely to piss you off from the beginning. This, I did for me. For myself, so I could know I was the only one watching you caged and captive and still for me."

            Potter's eyes closed. His lashes swept along his cheeks, draping them in shadow. Draco clenched his teeth down to keep from a roar that would spoil the moment.

            Potter's the one who's caged, but I'm the one who wants to roar. Funny, that.

            He felt an emotion sliding through him, thick and languid and unfamiliar. The last time he had felt like that was before--

            Well. Before the war. He couldn't remember exactly when, but he didn't matter. He stood there, enjoying the contrast of being the wild beast outside the cage while Potter sat there being calm and pretty and tame within it.

            Potter swallowed and looked up. "How did you know?" he asked.

            "How did I know that I wanted you tamed like this?" Draco gave him a leisurely smile and moved closer. "It wasn't hard to figure out, not once I started thinking about the way that I needed to--"

            "No," Potter said. "How did you--" His hands were shaking. He paid them strict attention until he got them under control, not looking up even when Draco came a step nearer. "How did you know that I would like it, too?"

            Draco didn't know that he could have held himself back then if his father had been in the room watching his every move. He stepped forwards, and the lock on the cage broke when he pushed it.

            Potter didn't rise to his feet when Draco came into the cage. He sat with his hands clasped in front of him, eyes wide and frozen, and came alive when Draco gripped his neck and jerked him to his feet. But it was the kind of life that came from swirling his tongue around the inside of Draco's mouth as Draco thrust his in to kiss and conquer, and Draco could live with that.

            He dragged Potter with him as he fumbled at his trousers, and then Potter's were open, too, and his cock was out, dangling and pale but not limp, and Draco gripped it and pulled and wrung a noise out of him that made Draco think Potter's wildness might be waking up, too.

            Potter tried to reach back, to touch him, but Draco gripped his wrist until he pressed tendon to bone when Potter tried. This was to be his touching, and his alone.

            The bars of the cage blurred around him as he bent Potter back for a kiss.

*

            "Malfoy? They still want to make sure that we're not starving you."

            Nauseated, Draco lifted his head and stared at the waxy woman who had just slammed a tray down outside the door to his cell. Bits of white string seemed to cling to his eyes. He reached up and rubbed his eyes roughly, and then lowered his hands and stared at them. Those hands had been on Potter's shoulders and cheeks and arse, a few moments ago. He would have sworn it.

            "So the ward's getting to you, too." It would have been much too much to say that the waxy woman's voice had laughter in it, but there was a harder tone to it, like a bell struck off metal. "I see."

            "You don't," Draco said, and then he bit his lip and wished he could reach up far enough with his teeth to bite his nose, to stop the harsh breaths that came in and out of it. He sat down and reached for the musty orange on the tray. The woman watched him peel it and eat it. Draco thought the sections of fruit he tore loose might have had some sweetness to them, once, long ago, before they came into this grey place, but he couldn't find it now, no matter how long he sucked at them.

            "I see," she repeated, but her voice was all hard tone this time, and harder still when he glared at her. "I'm glad. How could we keep you for three months, or three years, or whatever the length of time the Wizengamot assigned you was, and know that you might do the same things when you left prison? The ward makes sure that you won't. You'll get out of here and you'll be model citizens."

            Draco stared at her, but said nothing. This was free information, poured into his ears. Perhaps the ward didn't work the way the woman thought it did, but it was still valuable to know what might be passing through his enemies' minds.

            Did they think that he would give everything up for a chance to fuck Potter, to have him under his power? Did they believe he would walk out of here and swear loyalty to Potter and the Ministry he no doubt worked for, all in hopes of one kiss, one brush of glancing fingers, one blowjob?

            Draco sat rigid and still when the woman was gone. So far, he had not resisted the ward, just as he hadn't resisted the--

            The memories scattered for a moment, then steadied themselves. The Dark Lord, when he had ordered Draco to torture people during the war. Yes, he hadn't done that. He had closed his mouth and cowered and gone along with things like the good little toy he was.

            This time, he had as little choice as he had had there. It was a case of shut his mouth or die when he was under the Dark Lord's sway; in Azkaban, it was a case of yield to the ward or spend the rest of his life in prison. But at least he understood what it was meant to do now, and the fantasies it induced to do that.

            Draco did have to smile, as he lay back down on the blankets. Had anyone told Potter that they were using him as a temptation to make the Death Eaters dream away their time? Perhaps Draco would find him when he left the prison, simply to tell him so.

*

            Draco stepped into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

            The room was done in a theme of soft gold, to satisfy--partially--Harry's craving for a room that looked Gryffindor without yielding completely to the mad colours that he would have chosen if allowed to have his own way. The sunlight came through windows and touched, here and there, half-shrouded mirrors and crystalline lamps and picture frames with cloudy yellow stained glass in them. The effect was to tame and mute even the harshest glare, to make it the gentle, lingering light of a late summer afternoon.

            The bed stood opposite the door. Draco walked over to it and twitched back one curtain that surrounded it, the heavy, pale velvet moving easily in his hand.

            Potter lay on his side, his legs curled up almost to his chest, his hands folded in front of him as if he had fallen asleep praying. He wore a pair of pants and nothing else. Draco had allowed him to have a shirt at first, and then taken it away. It was time for Potter to learn that the whole world didn't do what he wanted it to do. Draco reached out and ran a light hand down Potter's bare shoulder.

            Potter started up, mouth open, and then fell back against the pillows with a gasp when he saw it was Draco. He closed his eyes and ground the heel of one hand into that bloody scar on his forehead. Draco sat on the end of the bed and waited. It was months now since he had noticed the scar, much. Potter touched it more often than Draco did, treated it as a link to the Dark Lord and the war that raged outside their walls.

            Draco saw no need to think about the war, when he had his own battle inside this room, if he wanted it.

            "What do you want today, Malfoy?" Potter faced him, a dull sheen over the famous green eyes. "There's not much I can give you that you haven't already taken, you know."

            "I want what I've always wanted," Draco said, and this time he reached out and pushed the hair back from Harry's forehead, too. Call him Harry when you were in the room, he had told himself before he entered, and although so far he hadn't obeyed, he intended to set a good example in the future, an example that Harry could learn from. "You, writhing beneath me, open and slick and ripe for the taking, while my cock plunders you and you learn how to be good to me."

            Potter--no, Harry--stared at him, and shook his head. "You're sick," he said. The way he always did. "I want you to let me go, to go back to my friends. You think that you're doing me a favour keeping me here, but you're not, Malfoy, you're really not. If Voldemort wins, then you'll be in as much trouble as anyone else. He didn't order you to find me and keep me here, did he? He doesn't know where I am, either, and he'll call you disloyal when he finds out."

            "You think I care for his opinion?" Draco eased closer, not intending to let the width of the bed separate them any longer. "You're beautiful, Harry, but you're not always intelligent. No, I didn't do this for him. I didn't do this for anyone but myself, and that means that I don't care what the Dark Lord thinks of it. Nor you."

            He kissed Harry, and Harry made a sharp noise into his mouth. But he didn't reach up and push Draco away. Draco had kept him here, and surrounded him with light and caresses and a gentle serenity, unbroken by news of what his friends were doing without him. He knew yielding would get him out of here fastest, and it seemed he might be prepared to do it.

            Draco reached up and touched Harry's forehead, easing him back into the pillows with that touch alone, this time. Harry stared at him, panting, and Draco leaned forwards to fill that mouth with his tongue. Harry accepted it, his mouth straining open, and Draco smiled. For a moment, Harry's surrender reminded him of something, something that gleamed in his memory like one of the stained-glass frames on the pictures, but then Harry raised a hesitant hand to lay it on his shoulder and Draco forgot what he had wanted to remember.

            "You're--beautiful," Harry said. "Sometimes. Horribly so." He turned his head to the side, then, and bit his lip, as though he hadn't meant to say that.

            Draco laughed and coaxed his mouth further open, coaxed his legs further open, coaxed his whole body to relax and flow and open. Harry whined and panted and made small, soft noises that sounded helpless. That was the way Draco wanted him, though of course he would have preferred it if Harry was helpless before his own overpowering desire for Draco than before the wish to get out no matter how he had to do it.

            But this was a beginning, and where he had yielded once, it would be easier to persuade him to do it again.

            Harry grunted when Draco reached down with one oily finger to his arse, and made small grumbles and grunts as Draco prepared him, too. Draco paused and braced his hand in the middle of Harry's chest when he added a second finger, wondering if he should ask Harry if he was sure.

            But no, because what would happen if Harry said he wasn't? Draco would have to draw back in the effort to convince Harry he wasn't a complete monster, and that would only begin the whole process over again. Because Draco wasn't about to let Harry go, and Harry wasn't about to love this without some pressure, without some enforcing of the pleasure on his body, so that he would come to understand what he was missing.

            Three fingers in, and Harry lay still, only tiny puffs of air escaping through his open mouth, his head thrown back and his hand lifted as though he would grasp Draco's hand and slow him down that way. Draco shook his head, confidence washing through him as he withdrew his fingers and lifted Harry's knees.

            Harry's eyes snapped open. He said nothing, but his mouth formed the little round shape of denial that Draco had grown too familiar with to ever want to see again.

            "It will be good," Draco said, and then he pushed himself inside, his eyes half-closing as the warmth opened, embraced him, and he saw Harry's head fall back, saw his lips part in a different shape, saw the tame and dreamy look that crossed his face, saw the way his legs flowed open again and this time closed around Draco's hips, felt how the heat snatched him up and carried him around in a circle and--

*

            Dumped him.

            Draco felt his throbbing groin, and for a moment stroked himself before he pulled his hand back. No. He knew the guards could watch. They might come at any moment to give him another meal, or they might have eyes in the ward, but he would not jerk himself off where someone could see him doing it.

            His breath stuttered. His head ached. He lay back in the blankets and wondered for a moment whether the ward was meant to drive them mad with lust instead of making them go after Potter when they got out of the prison. He had been so close, had tasted a few inches of heat, and then--

            There was something wrong. Draco paused and turned his head, expecting to find someone watching him from just beyond the bars. That wouldn't be the first time that his senses had warned him of someone's presence before he could actually hear or see them.

            But no one was there, so it wasn't that. Draco closed his eyes for a few moments before he remembered.

            He had been in the fantasy, part of it, understanding it, from the moment he stepped through the door in that dream. He had not thought, once, of how he had struggled to escape the ward, how he should continue to do so, because he did not like the way it controlled his mind.

            Draco's hand snapped open and shut. He lay there, and continued thinking, listening to the buzzing of the ward, tasting the musty orange still caught between his teeth. He had no idea how much time passed in the dreams. The woman who brought him the food seemed to notice nothing untoward, but then, Draco knew the guards didn't try too hard to wake prisoners who were sleeping deeply enough not to hear them. They would take the tray away, report the prisoner "not hungry", and probably feed the leftovers to their Crups or something.

            The next time, he promised himself, he would feel the ward. He would know when it was coming, and brace his mind like the mind of a traveller caught in a snowstorm. It would not take him away.

*

            "You were right."

            This time, it was no bare room they met in, but the largest and brightest chamber at Malfoy Manor. Draco lounged on a divan beneath the windows that stretched the length of the western wall, eating a peach and holding a shallow silver dish beneath his mouth so the juice ran down into it. He watched Potter walk towards him, his head high and his face unreadable against the brilliant light from behind.

            The jewels of the collar around his neck flashed like the eyes of a cat running through the darkness. Draco set the peach aside and reached out with a leisurely hand, trusting Potter to be in the right place to let him touch it in time.

            He was. Draco's hand brushed the stiff leather as Potter stumbled to a stop in front of him, and Potter closed his eyes. He didn't move, even when Draco's finger slid from the collar to his throat and traced a line around it. Draco couldn't feel him breathing. Of course, that didn't mean that much, not when he could watch the way Potter's eyelashes fluttered and the flush slid up his face, slow and almost reluctant.

            "I have been right about so many things," Draco murmured, and lay back on the divan, using the hook of one finger to pull Potter with him. Potter stumbled, but he didn't fall, because Draco didn't want him to. They ended up sprawled across the divan, Potter lying on Draco's body and panting into his ear. Draco closed his eyes and tilted his head back. Potter's body was warmer than the sunlight across him except for the coolness of the collar pressing against his hand. "Remind me which of them this was."

            "Bastard," Potter hissed, and then responded with a small huff, "That we were always coming here. It--I didn't have to change anything once I'd accepted the collar. Did you know that? It was natural to have it. It didn't feel wrong. I had all these arguments, but they dissipated once it was on."

            Of course they did, Draco thought. Lust will do that to you. He lifted one leg and used his heel to caress the back of Potter's knee. Potter trembled, but his voice remained calm and firm, as if he was giving testimony at a trial.

            "No one seemed surprised to see it on me. Ron rolled his eyes and Hermione said I should be careful, but they would say that all the time anyway." There was a pause for a gulp, probably so that Potter could gather his courage. "And I think--I think I don't mind so much that they did that."

            "If you minded, you wouldn't be friends with them." The heat of Potter's breath on his neck was sweeter than the peach. Draco turned his head, wanting to meet that mouth and shut Potter up before he could say something else, something silly that would make Draco less impressed with him, and thus with his own cleverness.

            Potter arched his head back and met his kiss with desperation that made Draco give a small gasp. But he never gave any surrender that he didn't intend to see matched, so he rolled his tongue deeper into Potter's mouth and wrung another gasp out of him, something sharp and needy and incoherent. Draco's hand came down on the back of Potter's neck and stroked and pulled, and another gasp came out.

            He held onto the collar as he pushed Potter onto his back, and then brought his other hand up to hold it, too. "Strip," he said.

            Potter made not one grumble about how difficult it would be with Draco on top of him, pinning his chest down, and making the aborted movements of his arms even more aborted. He simply did it, his grunts so breathy that Draco eased up his hold on the collar, afraid it was choking him.

            But he wasn't choking. The sounds Potter made were sounds of exhilaration, as Draco realised when he listened instead of simply thought about how they must be certain things because he had decided they had to be. Draco lay above him and moved his arms only when he had to so Potter could get the shirt off. Then he arched himself up on elbows and knees so Potter could kick off his boots and socks, and remove his trousers.

            Beneath them were pants, but when Potter reached for them, Draco shook his head and tightened his hands on the collar. "Those will keep, for now," he whispered.

            Potter went still, eyes on him, and Draco felt his stomach tighten in turn and the hair on his neck and arms stand up. Potter was staring at him as if--

            There weren't real words for that, Draco decided. Never any real words. His mouth filled with saliva, and he licked it away before he said, "I'm going to let you rise. Stand up and show me what I'm getting."

            Potter closed his eyes, but in a single, slow blink that Draco suspected he would use when he approached orgasm, and not in a way that suggested he couldn't face what was between them. Draco rolled onto the couch again, using a careful finger not to upset the saucer with the peach in it, and Potter rose and rotated in front of him, arms held out from his sides.

            The muscles gleamed along his ribs. Scars shone here and there, too, toughened skin that looked brighter than the blades and claws and curses that had made it to Draco under the afternoon sky. Potter's eyes caught the light, and so did the collar's jewels, but where the jewels glittered as hard and confident as Draco's will, Potter's eyes let the sunbeams pass into them, deep under the surface.

            Everything was as it should be. Draco finally nodded, and Potter hastily stripped off the pants, then lifted them carefully off at the last moment, as though he knew how much it would displease Draco if he stumbled.

            Draco rose and sauntered a step closer, reaching out and trailing his fingers up and down the taut scars that ran along Potter's stomach. Potter closed his eyes, and his head fell forwards. Draco touched the back of his neck, checking, but no, the collar wasn't too tight. He had done that because he wanted to.

            And that was what it was about. Free will, and the surrender of free will. Choosing to be tame, in the end.

            "Ah, yes," Draco said, and lowered his eyes so that he could see Potter's cock for the first time. It was wet, and the blood flushing it gave it more colour than Draco would have expected. He reached out, slowly, and Potter locked his legs so he wouldn't thrust into Draco's palm.

            Draco held his hand there for a few moments, letting his fingers curl and stroke the air, before he gave in and gripped Potter. Potter swayed, but apart from a gurgle that Draco didn't think he could help and which seemed to come from his stomach more than from his mouth, he stayed silent.

            "This is what I like to see," Draco told him, and began to caress Potter's skin with two fingers, keeping the others still. "You admitted that you wanted to wear the collar, in the end. You admitted that you wanted me to see you naked, said that I could, did what I said. Now, you're going to show me how obedient you are."

            Potter closed his eyes, but opened them again when Draco gave a quiet warning in the back of his throat. He stared with what Draco could have called dreadful fascination in someone else, but he knew where it came from, knew what emotions made Potter's throat bob and his eyes flicker and fall and flicker open again, because he felt them himself.

            He pressed forwards and against Potter's chest, watching the way that Potter's eyes continued to focus on his hand. Yes, that was as it should be. Draco hadn't given permission for anything else, and he knew Potter wanted to do as he was told.

            "Such a good boy," he whispered, words soft and hot, sighed out through the curled tunnel of his tongue. "You want to do as you're told, I know you do. Such a good boy, to stand here and let me do this."

            Potter gave a whimper in response, and didn't move. Draco began to stroke him with three fingers, and still they stood there, swaying a little, Draco's hand moving faster without his conscious volition that it should be so.

            Potter got to him, always had, and made him change what he had done and planned and wanted to do. But that was all right, when Draco had been the one to give the collar in the first place and accept what was happening between them in the first place.

            Potter moaned, and let his head fall forwards to rest on Draco's shoulder. Draco lifted a hand to stroke his shoulder blade in return.

            Sweat beneath his fingers, the small mound of a mole, muscle and bone and flesh, and blood beneath that, rushing alive. Blood beneath the fingers of the other hand, too, and hardness that spoke more of will than bone.

            And above it all, shining with muted reflections, the collar.

            When Potter began to come, Draco's hand was in the perfect spot to catch it, because he had planned it that way.

*

            The grey of the cell was worse this time.

            Draco kept his eyes closed as he stretched his legs out in front of him. His breath would come fast, if he let it. He didn't intend to let it. They were still trying to hurt him with the ward. They were spying on the fantasies. They must think that they could laugh at him and they would catch him unprepared. They would flense the fantasies from his mind and ask him why he had these responses, when he had thought only the other day--the other time--the time between fantasies--that he had never desired Potter and never wanted something like these fantasies showed him.

            They would say that, they would laugh, but he could endure the laughter. He had endured worse things during the months in Malfoy Manor under the Dark Lord's rule and during sixth year. Those would forever be the standards of hardship that Draco thought about from now on. Azkaban simply couldn't compare.

            So he lay, and so he thought, and so the pulse pounded in his head and shifted, and so he was when the waxy woman brought him his next meal. This time, she didn't try to say anything, only looked at him and set the tray down with a clang near the bars, watching him crawl near to eat it.

            Draco did, and ate the bread, and ignored her. He was doing well. He had--well, he hadn't done something that he meant to do in that fantasy of Potter with the collar, he knew that, but he had handled it like a recurring dream. He had often had dreams like that.

            When?

            Now, that was an odd question, Draco thought, irritated with himself. Why would he care when he had recurring dreams? They had happened sometime when he was a child, he knew that. Or when he was eleven or twelve or so. They weren't important. The point was that he had had them, and endured them, and this fantasy of the collar was neither more nor less important.

            He could endure them. Those who thought they knew how to control him, how to make the ward change his mind and twist it, would learn soon enough that no one but a Malfoy could really control a Malfoy.

            The waxy woman picked up the tray and left again. Draco lay back with his arms folded behind his head. Then they hurt that way, so he shifted to the side and listened to the buzzing of the ward.

            So many variations in the buzzing, he noted, subtle variations that trickled up and down and altered as fast as the patterns that the eye could spot in changing flames. Draco wondered if he should try and treat the ward that way. The next time he saw a real fire might be forever away.

            No. It might not. There might be a fire in his next fantasy, the way there had been in his first one, and he could concentrate on the part of his mind that the ward touched and bring forth what he wanted. Surely.

            That was his next task of resistance, then. He closed his eyes and thought about the warmth of a fire, the way that sparks would leap out and touch his skin, the glow of embers on a clear night. He thought about the fire and tried to bring it to him, tried to make it real, or as real as the humming of the ward would allow it to be.

*

            He didn't need a cage, this time. Oh, he could have had the cage, he liked it, he wanted it, and Potter had shown that he valued it, too. Or at least he liked it more than he would have had Draco think he did.

            But he didn't need it when Potter was sprawled on his bed, drugged with nothing more than lust, a leash tying his hands to the headboard, his legs spread and his voice spiralling up and down as he pleaded.

            Draco lay beside him, using one hand to play with his hair and watching the way that Potter's eyes kept opening to show off the dim darkness in the centre of them. So beautiful, Draco thought. So calm, in their own way, although I know from his body that he isn't calm at all.



            The room was dim, lit only with torches on the walls. Draco wanted it that way. Torches created a delicious play of light and shadow over Potter's body, and he turned his head fervently back and forth when the shadows crept long enough, as though they were a substitute for Draco's fingers on his skin. Draco held his hand back, however, and Potter quickly whimpered and curled his tongue out, blindly searching for his fingers in the air.

            "Draco, please--you have to--" The last vestiges of insolence had gone from Potter's voice, despite the way he tried to command. He opened his mouth wider, and Draco admired the sharpness of his teeth, the depth of his throat, so well-suited to sucking whatever Draco wanted him to suck. "Please."

            That was what Draco had wanted, waited, wished to see. The leash holding Potter's hands wasn't sturdy. He could have broken it if he tried. There was nothing holding him here but desire, no chains but the ones he wanted as badly as Draco did. And so Draco called him Harry in his mind, and bent down to give Harry what he wanted, what he wanted, what they both wanted.

            Harry sucked his fingers, tongue swirling around them, playing with the knuckles, sliding up and down the skin, finding the small places that Draco had healed cuts or bruises from his job and lingering there longest. Draco bore him down into the bed at last and drew his fingers free. When he reached for Harry's arse, Harry arched his back and spread his legs, and there was a muffled sob in his voice as his hands broke the leash. Not, Draco knew, because it hurt, but because he had done something that Draco hadn't specifically asked him to.

            "Oh, please," Harry whispered. "Oh, please. Have to. Have to. Please." He turned his head and opened his eyes, and Draco stroked his hair, knew him tamed by his immense need, knew him as domesticated as any dog.

            "I know," he said. "But not until I give you permission, Harry."

            "Didn't mean I was going to come," Harry said, and his eyes focused so hard on Draco that it was like having someone drive little bits of bone into him. "Meant--have to do what you want me to do."

            Draco took his mouth in a deep kiss, and yes, Harry's mouth was as warm and deep as he had thought it would be.

            And so was his arse, and when Draco was in him and rocking, Harry spread his legs more and arched his hips up to the ceiling and extended his arms, as though imploring some invisible audience to look on him, to see how he was surrendering, to see how Draco had tamed him.

            Once, he never would have done that. Once, he would have fought to the bitter end. The man who had defied the Dark Lord to his face, the man who had duelled with him and got away, the man who had survived the Killing Curse and fought a basilisk, was not the same as the one chained by lust to Draco's bed.

            That was because--

            Draco thrust, and his pleasure gripped him and flew up with him like a hawk ascending into the sky with its prey.

            That was because that man was dead. Draco had taken him. Gentled him. Taught him to walk as he wanted him to walk, to do as he was ordered.

            Taming is called "breaking" for a reason, Draco thought, as he came and broke apart in his own way, in all the most wonderful ways.

*

            It felt wonderful.

            For the first time since he had come to Azkaban, Draco was warm. He lay there in his bed and panted, and felt the cooling wetness of his orgasm across his groin. He reached down to stir a hand lazily over his trousers, and smiled. Yes, he would have to wait until someone came down here with a Cleaning Charm to do anything about it, to get rid of it, as he would have done in the outside world with a flick of his own wand. No wands allowed here. It was part of the taming they tried to give to people they put in the cells.

            But he didn't mind. The fantasy with Potter had been fulfilling, for once, instead of jerking him away the moment he started to come, as it had the last few times. And he had cheated the fantasy, for once. The ward had done as he ordered it to do, in the silence of his mind. He had had fire--not the large, roaring hearth of his first vision, it was true, but torches on the walls. And he had forgotten about the fire when he stepped into the fantasy, seeing it only as a recurrence of the vision of the cage. But it was still there.

            They cursed themselves when they decided to give me visions of Potter, he decided, stretching his arms out above his head. If I can master him, then I can master anything, including the spells they think will keep me captive.

            The food came what was probably on time, along with the Cleaning Charm, but Draco couldn't care. He lay back down and listened again to the buzzing of the ward, this time trying to identify the patterns of sound that wavered up and down in it instead of merely note that they were there.

            Changing shapes. Some of them were probably beasts and monsters, the kind Fiendfyre sometimes produced, or at least had produced in all the book illustrations Draco ever seen. Or would have seen for himself, if he had ever been around someone who was mad enough to actually cast the spell.

            Draco snorted, then shook his head and closed his eyes. He shouldn't be lying here, wasting his mental power on idle speculations like that. He wanted to challenge the ward again, to see what it would show him this time and what he could force it to show.

            He passed into darkness lying still, striving to lie more still yet, listening and wondering and feeling out. Since he had been successful in commanding fire from the ward last time, this time he would try for darkness. Quietude. An unlighted place where he was with Potter, and Potter was lost in that delightful nonresistance, being tamed, being delivered to Draco's every will and desire…

*

            "Shhh. You don't have to get up. Let me take care of you."

            Harry's voice lapped around him. It was like warm water. Draco let his head fall back, and smiled. A blanket crossed his face, and more wrapped him, and somewhere outside that cocoon was chill air and light. But he didn't need to face it if he didn't want to. And he didn't want to. Harry had promised.

            Harry's fingers started by running down his spine, hesitated near the base of it, and then pressed home, stroking him, pressing down, easing away any tension he might still have left. Draco tilted his head back and groaned. Harry's fingers whispered past his ears, down into his blankets, around his eyesockets and jaw. Draco flicked his tongue out and managed to lap one as it went past.

            Harry laughed, a slow, breathless sound. Draco thought about reaching up, cupping Harry's head and bringing him down for a kiss, but that would take too much time, and involve too much effort and disruption of his blanket cocoon. He rested his head on his forearms instead, and moaned into them as Harry found another source of tension just beneath the small of his back.

            "I never realised how much you carried," Harry whispered. "How much of this came from the way you've lived your life. The war. The battles to free them. The way that you had to think about your responsibilities and go against the Ministry." His fingers dug deeper, and Draco rolled with them, quiet, boneless, his head dropping down on the pillow and his mouth opening so that he could release a heartfelt breath.

            "There's a lot," Draco said, and his voice was softer and more solemn than he'd ever heard it. "But it eases when you're with me. It always did."

            "Really?" Harry bent over and flicked his tongue out so that he could catch Draco behind his ear. "I don't remember that being the case at Hogwarts, during the war."

            Draco raised a hand. It fell back before he could touch Harry, because it always did. It was too weak, it was too far away, he had no reason to touch Harry when he could feel Harry touching him. "Candle wax," he said. "That's what I feel like now. It eases when you're with me."

            Harry laughed softly, and then went back to rolling his hands in the small of Draco's back. "You're melting like candle wax?"

            Draco closed his eyes and nodded, although he had the impression that it wasn't a very good nod when his head was rolling all over the pillow. "Being reshaped," he said, and his voice slid and slackened. "Like metal melting in fire. Like heated glass, the way it bends. You're melting me."

            "I would never want to do that," Harry said, gliding his tongue along the shell of Draco's ear. "And always."

            Draco hummed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that he hadn't felt any part of Harry's body but his hands and mouth. He pictured a face and hands and nothing else tending to him, bodiless, without anything heavier than that. It was a nice picture. Light. He could envision melting into nothing more than a breeze like that, and appreciating the fate.



            Harry was humming under his breath, or maybe singing. Draco didn't think he had to care which it was. He closed his eyes more fully, and the thin lines of light that entered under his eyelids turned to glittering red dimness. He could have been lying in front of a fire or a setting sun, and he didn't think he could have told the difference. Both of them would leave this sort of haze of warmth spread over his face. Both of them would make him feel like he was coming to the end of a wonderful day, a noble struggle, that he could lean back and let his muscles fall limp now, and that there was no reason for him to feel that he had to get up and struggle again.

            "Potter?" he whispered.

            Harry laughed into his ear, but his fingers dug into Draco's lower back again, making him hum in turn and arch it. "It's been a long time since you called me that," Harry whispered. "My first name is your favourite for moaning."

            Draco nodded. He knew that. But in the sliding soup of his mind, other thoughts were surfacing, thoughts that he kept strangled most of the time.

            "Do you remember," he asked, doing his best to keep his voice steady and not only a steady series of moans as Harry's fingers continued to soothe the tension out of him, "the way we were rivals in school?"

            "Not well," Harry said, and his tongue smoothed a long, slow, wet line down the place his fingers had just been stroking. Then he blew across it, and Draco sighed and spread his legs. Harry seemed to drift over him, because the next time Draco felt the heat of that mouth, it was down near his balls. "I just--I never think about it any more because I don't see how it's relevant."

            "Not relevant?" Draco tried to lift eyelids that had grown so heavy he was surprised he remembered how to move them. The red dimness was still pleasant, but he felt, a little, like he wanted to see Harry's face. "But it led to everything we are! It led to us becoming…" His voice trailed off into a yawn.

            Harry huffed a laugh that made Draco's cock stir. Or had he been hard for some time and he was just now remembering it? "That's the point, though. Or sort of the point. Do you think that we're still what we were then? Rivals, competitors, the sort of schoolboys who can't let well enough alone?"

            "Well," Draco had to admit. "No." His words trailed off into another yawn, and then he sighed as Harry's mouth closed in, his tongue curling, lapping, his breath so hot on Draco's erection that Draco squirmed for a moment in what was almost more pain than pleasure. But the pain lessened, and the heat increased, and when he thrust home, Harry's throat was relaxed enough to accept him, as always.

            "That's it," Harry said, his mouth in Draco's ear, or his voice in Draco's mind, at the same time as his mouth caressed and welcomed Draco's cock. "Relax and let me take care of you."

            And with his muscles running like melted butter, and his mind following them, Draco did.

*

            This time, he carried the warmth with him back into the cell, and let a pleased chuckle spill from his lips, even though it meant he laughed as the waxy woman was laying down the food tray in front of him. She froze and blinked at him, then backed up with her wand trained on him as though he was some kind of food-despoiler. Mood-despoiler, more likely, Draco thought, as he leaned up and bit into the apple that was waiting at the edge of the tray. It wasn't as sweet as the heat of Harry's mouth around him, but nothing was.

            "You're all right?" The woman was still all wide eyes and startled breath, her hand to her chest. When Draco looked up at her, she dropped it with a scowl, but Draco had seen it, and she knew he had seen it, and he knew she knew he had seen it. The layers of knowledge could go down a long way, and still they would always lead to his victory, to his winning.

            "Yes, of course," Draco said, and bit into the apple again before he continued, purely for the pleasure of the warm juice running down his face. Everything was so warm around him. The ward had given him that, because he had mastered it. His visions were visions of mastery and control, that was obvious, and if he had done what the people who put him into Azkaban wanted him to do, then he would have been the one who surrendered. Perhaps he would have dreamed of Potter fucking him. Well, that was the lie, and this was the truth. "Do you always ask the prisoners you serve if they're okay when they're laughing?"

            "Most of them, it's mad laughter, that's true," the waxy woman said, staring at him. Then she shook her head. "Most of them can't wait to leave the prison and do what they did again," she said, a faint smile twisting her mouth. "Until the ward gets hold of them."

            Draco snorted and licked the last juices of the apple from his fingers. "The ward has got hold of me, but I fought it, and won," he said.

            The woman nodded wisely, the faint half-smile still on her lips. "And why did they toss you in here? The last I heard, you hadn't done things as bad as some of them did." She jerked her head down the corridor in a way that Draco assumed was meant to indicate the rest of the prisoners.

            "Because," Draco said, and gave her a faint, pitying smile, while his mind shone bright and blank as eyes staring at the sun, "I hadn't learned to master myself sufficiently. I did stupid things and called them intelligent. Now I know the difference." And the next time he went back to sleep and into battle with the ward, he would know even more, and subdue even more.

            "That would make sense," the woman said, and then said nothing more, standing with arms folded while he finished the food on the tray. It was slightly better quality than it had been, Draco noticed. For a moment he wondered if he was imagining things, if it only tasted better because of the triumph he'd achieved, but then he knew the truth. No, they were sending him better food because they knew now that they couldn't control him, and they wanted to acknowledge that. They could be gracious, the wizards who had invented this ward and this prison. They knew that they would have to let him go soon, and if they didn't placate him, then he would tell everyone back in the outside world how insufficient their defences against crime actually were.

            He lay back down, smiling, and drew the dusty blanket over him. He was still relaxed, gentle, warm from his orgasm and from the way that he had lain during that vision, eyes closed and body lapsed but in total control.

            What he did during the war was not important. Not memorable. Not when he could tame someone.

            He closed his eyes and rushed towards the next vision the ward would give him, the next attempt the wizards who had constructed it would make towards telling him that he wasn't really fit to let free.

*

            This time, Potter was the one who came crawling towards him across the floor, shuffling more on his knees than on his hands, which were bound together with intricate twists of what looked like glinting gold wire. He bowed his head and held out his hands, and yes, there was a lock on them, and the key hung on a chain around Potter's neck. The chain was too short to let Potter fit the key into the lock and unbind the wire, but it fit perfectly into Draco's grasp.

            He untwisted the wire, and then bowed his head and kissed the flecks of blood, the sweet small spots of binding, that the wire had left. Potter turned his head to the side, gasping, and opened bright pale eyes, and Draco kissed them shut again and then stood up, leading him backwards, leading him to the bed.

            It was large and made of pale wood, with iron bars around the sides that Draco lowered with a word and a wave of his wand so Potter could hop over them to the inside. He lay down in the blankets and spread his legs, his eyes so wide and greedy that Draco chuckled. There were flecks of grey in the green that he never noticed before, and Potter's hair had pale sheens, too, under the right light. Well, his mother had been red-haired.

            There was something wrong with his mother, wasn't there? But Potter bit his lip and hunched his hips up again, and Draco could forget what it was.

            "Please," Potter said, just that one word and nothing else, and then ducked his head and hid his face. His cheeks were bright, too, a delicate pink rather than the red they usually flushed when he was angry or excited, but Draco shifted his thigh to the side and touched something that left him in no doubt Potter was excited right now. He laughed again and tapped one finger against Potter's cheek; Potter immediately and obediently tilted his head to the side, dilated eyes fixed on him.

            "Now, now," Draco said. "What have I told you about asking?"

            Potter shook his head, the pink flush spreading further. His legs opened and he squirmed down the bed until his feet were resting against Draco's knees. Draco smiled down at him, and Potter arched his head back until all Draco could see was the madly fluttering pulse in his throat.

            "You don't speak this time," Draco said. "Good." He reached out and latched his fingers into Potter's red-black hair, tugging. Potter tilted his head to the side, and a clump of pale spilled out from the rest. Draco laughed. Wouldn't it be delightful if Potter was dyeing his hair all this time, because he wanted to look more like his father or because the constant encounters with the Dark Lord at a young age had turned it white? "Don't speak right now. If you want out of this, then tap me with a closed fist. I'll understand that well enough. Understand?"

            Potter shut his eyes, panting, and nodded. One hand formed into a loose fist and fell apart as Draco watched. He licked his lips, and Potter mimicked him, opening his eyes that had even more of grey in them than Draco had realised, a silvery, stony colour.

            Well. He didn't think the refusal would come. He reached down and branded his fingers into Potter's hips, and Potter moaned back, his mouth falling open and his tongue poking out for a moment. Even the inside of his mouth seemed pinker than before, though perhaps that was a contrast with the other times--

            Times that Draco found harder to remember. He shivered in delight. That was the point. Each time he was with Potter was more memorable than the last, memorable enough to sweep the others into shadow.

            He prepared Potter with shaking hands, stretching him wide. Potter rocked against him, silent except for the soft moans that Draco felt puffed out against his hand. His hair was pale, his face was pale, his eyes were pale when he opened them, his skin was pale where the flush had been. It was like being in bed with a ghost, but a more graceful one; when Draco bent to kiss, again, the small spots of blood the wire had left, the limbs were smooth and well-shaped against his. He knew Potter had been doing the exercises Draco had taught him, then, the exercises that his parents had recommended for a healthy body and being.

            They had recommended them when--

            But it did not matter when they had recommended them, and it did not matter that he could not remember the time or the place. He murmured against Potter's skin, murmuring instructions and words of endearment, and he lifted those slim legs over his shoulders, and Potter shuddered and groaned with a musical touch under him, and Draco slid in.

            The heat was the same as always. He lowered his head and panted near Potter's mouth, watched the way Potter's eyes fluttered open and shut and his hands rose to clutch at Draco's, and again noticed the pallor of his skin. That was probably because all the blood was heading to one place, Draco thought, and licked the bone of Potter's forehead in satisfaction. Potter started and opened his eyes, staring up at him. Draco placed his hand above Potter's brow and held it there, watching the faint, thin line of the lightning scar bob under his fingers as he began to thrust in and out.

            Potter might have whispered his name, but Draco didn't think he had, because he had told him not to and Potter was occasionally good at doing what he was told. Draco thrust, and Potter bobbed in front of him, and there was another wordless murmur of pleasure and approbation, and Draco thrust home.

            Home.

            There was warmth all around him, melting warmth, responsive warmth, tame warmth, undefiant warmth, compliant warmth, and Draco drew breaths in through his nose and mouth that made him feel as if he were breathing in the middle of a swamp, the fetid heat, the brewing life, the bright and quick transformation of death into some new kind of life, something hatching, something coming forth, something--

            He felt his chest swell and expand, and still the warmth poured in, still the warmth clasped and enclosed his cock, still he breathed it and dreamed it and lived it and bled it and was it--

            He was melting, into pleasure, and when he opened his eyes and gazed down on Potter beneath him, silent and bobbing exactly the way Draco would have liked him to, it was like fucking himself, with the pallor of hair and eye and the brightness of the heat all around him, the heat of fire, that sanctifies and purifies, the heat of fire, that melts and changes.

            He came, and there was a chorus of fire ringing in his ears.

*

            When he opened his eyes, this time, the warmth had come with him.

            Draco lay in the middle of his blankets and drifted, lost in contentment, in thoughts of how thoroughly he had changed and fooled and fouled the intentions of the wizards who had constructed the ward. It was supposed to break him down, was it? Make him less defiant? Tame him? It couldn't have done that, not when it had only encouraged his resolve to fight.

            To hold onto the ideals that his parents had taught him, which were--

            He paused, and the buzzing of the ward turned and changed in his ears, writhing into bright patterns, like the changing patterns in fire, changing to the ears as fire would change to the eyes.

            It was--

            It was light and quick, but it was an insubstantial magic that wouldn't change anything but itself. Fire couldn't change things, could it? It could burn them to ashes, but that would just destroy them, and the Wizengamot had said something about him learning better--

            Why did he have to learn better? What had he done?

            Draco blinked and waved a hand in front of his eyes. Up and down in front of him moved the softly changing patterns of fire, the softly changing patterns of the ward, and he wondered for a moment how he was ever supposed to see anything else. But the effects of the ward wouldn't last forever. He would leave it behind when he emerged into the world around him, and that meant--

            That meant.

            Draco closed his eyes and drifted in the middle of the fire, changing constantly like another fire he had been in once, although he did not know how or when it had been. He remembered Potter, and his shining eyes, and he remembered achieving what he wanted, and how good it felt, and he remembered standing before the Wizengamot and saying things that made no sense, because he didn't need to defy them to prove his point. He had already won. He had already conquered.

            He had fucked Potter. He had tamed him. He had taken something hidden deep inside him, a desire he had never known was there, and subdued him. They couldn't enslave him because of the ward. They couldn't enslave him because of those desires. He was master of himself.

            And he didn't need to go against the Wizengamot, did he? Because they knew the truth, and he did, and so did the wizards who had designed this ward. He need never do anything else again but master himself and walk in the consciousness of that mastery, in the consciousness that he could tame everyone around him if he wanted to, because he had tamed Potter and himself.

            Draco laughed. He thought the laughter might sound mad to someone else, but he was in the midst of the ward and the fire, and it didn't sound mad to him.

            He was the tamer, the one who brought down the wild ones to his level, and he didn't need to strike out. His father had taught him--

            A shaft of light struck down into the middle of his brain, into the middle of his memories. It was white and harsh, like sunlight. For the first time, Draco thought he understood. He had misinterpreted so many things, but that was when he had the vision of a child. He had thought his parents were teaching him to stand up to the world, to defy the people who believed that Muggleborns were equal to pure-bloods, and to seize and hold political power no matter what.

            They hadn't. Or if they had, they had been wrong. Draco's memories bent and flowed and melted, as volatile to his touch as everything else was right now, as obedient, and he understood. Of course. He didn't need to speak the kind of political insults that his father had, he didn't need to make the same kind of political enemies, because he was contained in himself and he had already done the impossible. From now on, he could smile smugly and keep silent, keep to the Manor, and marry respectably, and teach his children better than his parents had taught him.

            They had taught him to savour pride and believe that he had cause for it. At least, they thought they had. He thought they had. He had thought they had.

            They hadn't. Not in the same way. It wasn't the same way. Draco would marry. He would teach his children the truth. He would manage his family estates, the smaller ones the Wizengamot had left the Malfoys, and he would teach his children the truth, that it was better to be self-mastered than mastered by the lusts of the world, the lusts for greed and money and place.

            His mind hardened, solidified, cooled. Thoughts settled into new shapes.

            Draco looked up as the woman walked to the front of the bars and lowered a new tray for him. He smiled at her. For a moment, she paused, eyeing him, and her face was as cold as the crash of the sea and the sound of the gulls' cries. Then she nodded. "The ward did its work," she said.

            "It taught me to tame," Draco said, and reached out to pick up the bowl of porridge she had left for him.

            "To be tame," the woman muttered, but she was only someone who was not part of his family, who was not part of his mind, who did not matter, and Draco could ignore her easily. She knew only what she saw from outside, what she saw and misunderstood. Draco ate, and was grateful for the meal that settled into his belly.

            It felt solid and real, like the first piece of the rest of his life.

*

            Draco remembered leaving the island.

            He remembered the grey robe they gave him, and the hawthorn wand, and the hard buzzing of the ward falling away behind him as one of the guards grasped his arm to Apparate him away from Azkaban. He remembered the images of Potter that darted and flashed through his head like bright fish, fantasies he could keep to himself.

            He remembered the scared little boy he had been, and could smile in pity for. The wild little boy who had stood up to the Wizengamot, who had believed so many things that didn't make sense to Draco now.

            The boy who had not gone through the fire, and who would never go home, who slumped here in some corner, never having come to the end of his dreams.

            The End.
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Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams