lomonaaeren

Part One.

Title: Fading in the Sunlight (2/4)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, mentions of other canon background pairings
Content Notes: Horror, torture, gore, violence, angst, drama, dubious consent
Wordcount: This part 3400
Rating: R
Summary: The day that Draco Malfoy sees Harry Potter fade into the sunlight ahead of him as they’re both leaving the Ministry, his life changes. And the hunt is on to find out what really happened to Harry Potter.
Author’s Notes: This is another one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year, and should have four parts, to be updated over the next few days.

Thank you for all the reviews!

Part Two

Draco waited, covered in the cloak of a charm he’d modified from the standard Disillusionment Charm. He had publicly and visibly left the Ministry that day, and moaned to a few people on the way out about his father requesting his presence at home. Lucius had his own memories prepared, of himself talking for hours with an illusion of Draco.

Draco had then returned to the Ministry and cast his charm. It turned him into nothing more than a whisper of air, and he stubbornly appeared that way to both sound and sight until he ended the charm. He hadn’t been able to do anything about scent, but given the Ministry’s resistance to hiring werewolves, it was unlikely to be a problem.

He had learned, through the hard experience of having a Dark Lord in his home, to sit motionlessly. And now his caution was paying off.

A small procession came down the corridor that Potter had warned him away from yesterday. Gawain Robards was with them, the first time Draco had seen him since he’d retired, and the current Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Jared Skeeter, a tall man with tired brown eyes and thinning white hair. Behind them were two women Draco thought worked as Hit Wizards, both of them with their wands out.

No Potter. Hmmm. Perhaps he had accomplished everything he needed to behind the door earlier in the day.

Draco fell into step behind them as they aimed for the closed office. This was the most dangerous moment, even though the motion of opening the door would also contribute to the sensation of the breeze his disguise caused. Someone might brush against him, there might be defenses he didn’t know about that would reveal him, or the door might be outfitted with a device the Department of Mysteries had supposedly invented months ago that ended all magic.

Draco’s fingers and toes tingled. He realized he was a moment away from laughter.

He had trained as an Auror. They wouldn’t use him in the field, but damn, he had missed the sensation of balancing on the edge of danger.

Not like a Gryffindor, he thought, as he hovered off to the side and watched the complicated protocols that the Hit Wizards had to engage in to release the spells on the door, but like a clever, cunning Slytherin with the world at his feet.

The door creaked open at last. Draco noticed that there was absolute darkness beyond it, unusual for the Ministry, which would usually have an enchanted window pouring light into every office.

And more to the point, it opened on a stone staircase.

Draco smiled as he slipped past Skeeter, who frowned, a little curiously, and made a remark about draughts. But no one else seemed interested, and Draco was at their back as they went down the staircase.

It spiraled and twisted around itself, and at times became so narrow that Draco had to balance on one foot and wedge himself against the walls to avoid touching someone else. Those were the places that it passed between rooms that supposedly backed onto each other, Draco thought. The rest of the time, they had more room, and the stone steps were large and looked as if they had been hacked into being by spells, rather than carved, the way the rest of the Ministry appeared.

Draco trailed behind as they finally came to the end of the steps and walked along a smooth, flat corridor that was almost the twin of the one above, only without the closed doors. Where was this place? And why was it so important that it had to be approached this way, instead of by Flooing or even Apparating?

He got that last answer as they stepped through a doorway that sparkled as if it was hung with a shimmering metallic curtain. Draco shuddered as he moved through it. He’d never felt such strong magic dedicated to separating what was outside from what was inside. No magical transportation would have worked to get past it, even if there was a fireplace inside the room.

Luckily, it didn’t disrupt Draco’s enchantments, probably because the visitors didn’t want to deal with recasting all their own spells, either. It was simply determined to separate, to—

To prevent escape.

Draco understood that the minute he stepped fully into the room and saw the bars, and the barred doors, covering the walls of the room. He stiffened despite himself. He’d spent time in a place like this when he was awaiting trial after the war.

But that had been, if not public, at least known. From the force of the magic around him now, and the shimmering curtains that covered the barred doors the way they’d covered the arched entrance of the room, Draco was sure that this wasn’t.

He swallowed, and heard Skeeter say, “Someone really must take care of those draughts.” For the moment, however, he couldn’t even think about what would happen if he was discovered. His gaze darted around the room, but the cells seemed to be empty.

Thank Merlin.

Shaking with memories and with a terror that bit at his bones, Draco followed the others. They’d walked towards what appeared to be the only blank wall in the room while he was standing there and trembling like a first-year Hufflepuff. Draco scolded himself silently. Probably this was an old place, disused now, and what they were really after was the potion or charm that made Potter behave the way he did.

Then Skeeter and Robards reached forwards and put their right hands on the blank wall at the same time, and it dissolved into tatters of mist in front of them. It was the most extensive illusion Draco had ever seen.

A scream seared the air.

Draco reeled back, his hands over his ears. He stared at the space the illusion had been covering. It was a wide black space, without bars, so it didn’t seem to be a cell. But then he saw yet another of those shimmering curtains covering it, and he reckoned that it didn’t have bars only because it didn’t need them.

The space was so dark that Draco didn’t understand what exactly he was seeing. His eyes caught the edge of what looked like a stone bench, barely touched by the light from the Lumos Charms on the Hit Wizards’ wands. There had been no light in the room when they’d entered. A circle of torches on the walls had sprung to life when Skeeter crossed the threshold, but it was too faint and sickly to reach this far.

Something came flying forwards from the back of the cell and clutched at the air blocked by the anti-magic spell. Hands scraped and clawed as if the barrier was solid, and the scream issued forth again.

“This gets more impossible each time,” Skeeter said, in the intervals between one of the screams.

“You were the one who insisted that we had to do this,” Robards snapped, as he took a large blue pebble out of his pocket and set it on the floor in front of the shimmering curtain. Draco actually only noticed that later when he revised the memory in a Pensieve. At the moment, he was too caught up in staring at the figure in the cell, starving-thin, with dark tangled hair that hung past his shoulders and bleeding hands with long, twisted fingernails and a red mouth filled with broken teeth. “I would have let him go.”

“You were the one who came up with the idea, so don’t tell me—”

“We’re wasting time,” one of the Hit Wizards interrupted, with a cool swish of her wand. “We need to do this in time for that vital Ministry gala this evening, the one that the French Minister is going to attend.”

“You’re right, Sasha,” said Skeeter, and he reached down and rapped his wand sharply against the top of the pebble.

There was a long silence that Draco appreciated after the shrieks of the person in the cell. The creature in the cell? His gaze went back to its face again, and found the gaping mouth opening still wider, but this time the scream seemed cut off.

The pebble vibrated in place, and a long banner of mist began to unfold from it. At the same time, the person in the cell slumped over, his hands rising as if to shield his face, and then sliding down the shimmering barrier that divided him from the people outside. Draco saw him shuddering all over, though, as if invisible knives were stabbing him.

And magic bled out from his pores.

Draco swallowed. He had never seen it before, but he knew at once what it was. Wild magic. Nothing else could sting against his senses that way, as if someone was raising the power for a spell but not directing it anywhere. And this was a deep green-black like the colors in a jungle roaring with full power.

The green magic spiraled out and met the mist that was hovering in midair from the pebble. There was a long hissing, splashing noise that meant Draco wouldn’t have been surprised to see a waterfall forming in front of him.

Then the prisoner moaned, and the sound was worse than the screams, because it was a hopeless noise. As if this had happened again, and again, and would keep on happening for hundreds of years, and every day.

Draco blinked sharply as his eyes burned, and was just in time to see a shadowy figure take shape in the cell and walk away from the crumpled form.

It merged with the white mist and the spiraling green of the magic, and this time, the noise was a grinding one like a huge rock moving aside. The rock that should have guarded this prison, Draco thought, numb, as he stared at the slumped figure, and the one that had turned away from the cell, shaking his head a little.

“I’ll still be on time for the gala, right?” asked Harry Potter.

Robards smiled at him. “Of course, Mr. Potter. And Miss Weasley is waiting for you. I must say, we were a little worried when sunset came and we realized you hadn’t made the journey down here today.”

Potter shrugged. “I got delayed. But I’m looking forward to the evening, and my date with Ginny.”

“Yes, let’s think of the future, not the past,” said Skeeter happily, and they turned and walked out of the room, leaving the huddled figure behind them. Draco lingered long enough behind them to watch the illusion-wall reform, and listen to Potter’s footsteps on the stairs. They sounded solid, in the way that he knew no illusion could have created.

But the figure on the floor of the cell rolled over and stared up at him, and Draco could see them, in the middle of the tangled mass of hair.

The green eyes of Harry Potter.

And they were utterly mad.

*

“Please, Draco, let the house-elves bring you another glass of wine.”

Draco managed to nod, because his mother sounded genuinely distressed. He knew nothing was going to soothe his particular mood, or the mad itching of the life-debt magic in his spine, but he could ensure she felt better. He leaned back, cleared his throat, and accepted the glass when the house-elves brought it.

“I’ve watched the memory three times,” Lucius said, gesturing with his cane at the brimming Pensieve sitting on the dining room table. The new dining room table, as Draco still thought of it, because none of them had been able to bear having the old one where the Dark Lord’s snake had eaten her victims in the house. “And I still don’t understand what I saw.”

“Neither do I,” Draco whispered. “That’s Potter in the cell, but it’s also Potter walking around in the sunlight and saving people and being an Auror and dating Weasley. If he was mad, how could he be doing that? But if he’s the man I knew, how could he tolerate having someone locked up in the cell like that?”

Narcissa cleared her throat. “I have a theory.”

Draco motioned to her. He couldn’t say anything. The wine had moistened his throat and calmed him down more than he’d expected…

Ah. When he licked his lips, there was a trace of a Calming Draught. Well, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t need it. The sight of the maddened green eyes had affected him far more than even the mad itching of the life-debt.

“I think that they have created a doppelganger,” Narcissa said. “They take the essence of what they want. An obedient Potter, someone who upholds the laws of the Ministry and acts like the perfect hero in public. You told me that he became abrupt with you when he thought you weren’t taking Dawlish’s warning seriously, Draco.”

Draco blinked and nodded. “Yes. But Dawlish was warning me about the Department of Mysteries, and this appears to be the doing of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.”

“The Department of Mysteries could have created this—process.” Narcissa clasped her elbows with her hands. Lucius got up and shifted into the chair next to hers, gently resting his arm around her shoulders. Narcissa sighed and leaned against him. “But it’s Robards and Skeeter who are using it.”

It would make sense of a number of things, Draco had to acknowledge. Like why “Potter” had opposed Granger’s bill to help house-elves. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement contained a great number of purebloods who would have seen the bill as an infringement on their rights to treat their servants as they saw fit.

But still…

“How could they do this?” he whispered. “How could they have decided to reduce Potter to that crawling thing in the cell, and use his magic to create a version of him?” That was what his mother was saying, he thought. No wonder no one had really noticed a difference, or any charm or potion. This was Potter walking around among them daily. Sort of.

“Greed,” Lucius said, his voice calm and not demanding. Draco still glanced at him incredulously, and his father cleared his throat and sat a little back in his chair. “It would be simple enough, Draco. They wanted someone who would go on being a hero for them, and Potter obviously didn’t want to do that. He had flashes of temper before that holiday five years ago, and he was regularly refusing public appearances. And do you remember when he announced that he wasn’t dating Weasley?”

Draco blinked. “Vaguely.” He had been involved in one of the few cases the Aurors had let him handle at that point, a matter of internal corruption in the Ministry. “He was dating…I can’t remember.”

“He was dating a Muggle man,” Narcissa supplied quietly. “You weren’t paying attention to the society pages for good reason, at the time, but I remember. There were horrified letters to the paper every day about how their Chosen One couldn’t be homosexual, how he couldn’t pursue a relationship that put the Statute of Secrecy at risk, about when they were going to get their picture-perfect family and children. Potter told them to fuck off. At least, that was clearly the intent, although the Prophet wouldn’t print it, of course.”

Draco closed his eyes, shuddering. He felt sick. “He tried to have his own life, and they denied him that.”

“Yes. That motivation might have been all they needed to create this version of him,” Lucius said simply. “They used the excuse of the month’s holiday to perfect the process, I’m sure, and then portrayed the new Potter as at peace with himself and the Ministry and the world. Of course he broke off the relationship with the Muggle man because it was ‘unsuitable’ and ‘people were counting on him.’ I didn’t think it unreasonable at the time. But with everything else, it makes sense.”

“In a horrifying way,” Draco whispered, and the itching in his spine grew worse.

“Draco? What is it, darling?” Narcissa leaned over and put a hand on his wrist. “You had nothing to do with this. If even his best friends didn’t realize that something was wrong, you had no ability to do so.”

Draco swallowed and focused on her. “I know, but I have to help him somehow.”

Narcissa shook her head slowly. “You cannot, just as he cannot pay his debt to me. There is nothing left of him, Draco. The shadow that walks around isn’t solid enough. That’s the real reason that the artifacts he gave me didn’t pay the debt, of course. There was no person behind them, no will or consent from the one who truly owed me the debt.”

“I have to. He needs me.”

Even if he put it in a Pensieve, Draco knew, he could never make his parents feel the horror he had felt at the sight of Potter screaming in the cell, or convey the itching of his spine now, the harsh tug that wanted him to go back to the Ministry and down the stairs and into that space again.

“You can’t help him, though,” Lucius said, his voice soft, but he tapped his cane on the carpet to accentuate the words. “He is mad. He would tear you apart if he tried. I saw—Draco, I don’t know if you saw, but that wild magic they’re harvesting from him? It’s truly feral. It filled the whole back of the cell. That’s why it’s so dark in there, why the torches on the walls lit so reluctantly and their light charms didn’t penetrate the shadows. He is only a few months away, at most, from becoming a creature of blood and shadow, not human at all. They’ll probably have to announce he’s died at that point.”

“I don’t care,” Draco whispered. “The life-debt is tugging at me. Would it do that if there was really nothing of him left, someone I could still save?”

“It might, because it would be based on your perception,” Narcissa said. Her voice was sweet and sad, her face the softest Draco had ever seen it. “Draco, I understand. The thought of what happened to Potter horrifies me, too. I would never have saved his life if I thought he would end up like this. It would have been more merciful for him to have died at the end of the Dark Lord’s wand. But what can you do?”

Draco stared at his hands. “I don’t know.” He was glad that he had finally got better at controlling the parade of his thoughts and emotions across his face since the war, because his mother would have been more horrified by what he was thinking now.

“Then go to bed, dear. Sleep on it. You might even take a holiday tomorrow. You know that Dawlish at least suspects you’re a little too interested in the mystery of Potter. If you can show that you’re distancing yourself…”

“You’re right,” Draco said, standing up. “I think I’ll tell them I’m sick tomorrow. Just a headache and an upset stomach, but that’s enough.”

“It is, son.” Lucius smiled sadly at him. “You’re a better man than I am, to have sympathy for someone who opposed us so fiercely.”

Draco nodded to him, and then turned towards his bedroom. He wanted to scream and ask Lucius who had testified for them at the trials and saved them. That had been the real Potter, glaring green-eyed at Draco when Draco asked him why he’d testified. That, at least, had nothing to do with the life-debts. Magical court procedures outlawed that kind of repayment.

“Because I know what you’re like, and your father is the only one of the three of you who deserves to go to Azkaban, even if you’re a git.”

Yes. The real Potter, not the flawless hero the Ministry’s “process” with that blue pebble had produced.

And Draco had to try to save him. At least try.