lomonaaeren

Thank you for all the reviews!

Part Two

“Potter.”

Harry woke up, yawning. He had fallen asleep late last night because his hunger had kept him up, and so had the thirst burning in his throat. But he’d endured worse, and for longer, and if they could put a potion in the food, then the drink would be even easier. He rolled over and blinked at Nott, who was standing beside the bed.

“Yeah? Whazzat?”

Nott’s lip curled. Harry grinned, and yawned so widely that Nott could probably see down his throat, and dragged his hand over his face, and sighed, and hiccoughed, and messed up his hair even more with a sleepy hand. When he peered at Nott again, the man looked as if he had swallowed a wasp.

But he jerked his head at the door and said, “Come on, Potter. We’re going to eat.”

“No, thanks,” Harry said, and flopped back into the bed, rooting around with his shoulders. He was fully dressed, more was the pity, because he could probably have disgusted Nott even more with the sight of naked skin on someone who had been raised by Muggles and was the son of a Muggleborn. “Not interested in eating.”

Nott stared at him in silence so long that Harry was a little surprised he wasn’t giving up and going away. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and draped his right arm over his knee. Harry glanced down and saw the edge of a silver snake marking peeking from under his sleeve.

“I know what it’s like,” Nott said softly.

“Not eating? What, did you want to keep your scrawny figure?”

Nott stiffened for a long moment, and his eyebrows drew in as if he was about to start scolding Harry like Hermione would have. Harry tensed as much as he could while he was lying down and didn’t want to give his enemy a warning. If Nott attacked him, then Harry would defend himself, even though that might mean the breaking of the treaty.

One provision of the bloody thing that Harry did remember was that the Death Eaters had to provide proof that he was alive every week. He didn’t know exactly how that would happen, but obviously it had been some means that had satisfied the clever minds, like Hermione’s, that had put the treaty together. At least Neville would know soon enough that he was dead and speed up his efforts to go on the offensive.

“No,” Nott whispered, barely moving his lips. “I mean that I know what it’s like to be starved by those who are supposed to care for you.”

A hot wash of shame poured through Harry, and he swallowed. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you. I just—you’re enemies. I don’t care if you get your feelings hurt. About most things. But this…this is different.”

“Yes, it is.” Nott sat back, staring at Harry with his eyebrows rising this time. “I’m going to share this with you. I’d like you to share what you suffered with me.”

Harry felt the heat surge up in his cheeks. It wasn’t shame this time, or at least it wasn’t purely shame. “You don’t want to hear more stories about Muggles,” he whispered. “I know that the lot of you hate them, and—”

“Personally, I’m indifferent. I don’t think I’ll ever encounter one unless I have to venture into the Muggle world for some reason, and then I’ll have mentally prepared myself. I love magic. I’ll spend my life around people who have it. But I want to know you. Understand you. Please tell me.”

“Is this because of the snake marking on your arm?”

“In part. And in part because we’ll be bound together, you and I and Draco and Blaise. Don’t you think that we should try to come to some sort of understanding?”

“No,” Harry said, on firmer ground now.

“Why not?”

Nott’s voice was unexpectedly coaxing, and Harry unexpectedly wanted to tell him things. But he stuck to what was verifiable fact and what they should know already. “Because you took me prisoner. And you’ll either hand me back to Neville at the end of the year or end up killing me. Personally, I know which one I think is more likely.” He gave Nott a cocky grin, and waited for the exasperation or the anger.

Nott just stared at him with those deep, quiet eyes. Harry shifted. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“It explains a lot about how you see us.”

“What, as torturing, murdering Death Eaters? Amazing that—”

“No,” Nott said quietly, his hands folded in his lap. “As people who would hurt someone who is in their care.”

Harry just shook his head. How could he explain to Nott? Nott might have been abused and Harry treated badly, but that didn’t make them nice people. Harry had done plenty of things that weren’t “nice.” If he thought that striking back against the Death Eaters holding him prisoner might not have bad consequences for Neville, he might have done plenty of them here.

Nott sighed and stood up. “Why don’t you get dressed? We’ll have breakfast on the terrace.”

“No, thanks.”

“That wasn’t an option, Potter.”

Harry studied Nott with narrowed eyes. He seemed to have gone hard in the last few minutes, and the gaze he bent on Harry was dark and without any of the personal touch or sympathy it’d had in the past few minutes.

Harry nodded slowly. A few people had disappeared in the lead-up to the treaty, one of the reasons that Neville had been willing to negotiate it. It was possible that the Death Eaters had them as prisoners and Nott would torture them if Harry didn’t comply. “All right. Give me a few minutes.”

The door to the room shut quietly behind Nott. Harry shook his head, stood, and went to put on new robes.

*

“You really don’t intend to eat, do you?”

“You said that you understood why.”

Nott leaned back on the other side of the small table from Harry, crossing his legs. They were outside in the Manor gardens, and no one else was in sight. Harry didn’t know why Zabini and Malfoy had left him to deal with Nott alone.

Then again, they had that “bond” between them because of the snake markings, or so Zabini had claimed. Probably they would be able to arrive in a heartbeat if Harry did something to hurt Nott. Not that he had any intention of doing so.

“No. I said that I had suffered much the same thing. I am sensible enough to always accept food when it’s on offer.” Nott picked up a plate of fluffy scrambled eggs and waved it at Harry, causing the scent to waft towards him. His stomach howled, and Harry grimaced. “Are you sure that you won’t have some? It would be a shame to eat this all by myself.”

“Perfectly sure.”

Nott half-shrugged, eyes on Harry. He moved the plate back towards him and picked up a bowl of what seemed to be mixed shreds of mushrooms, some kind of meat, and maybe spices. He scattered it across the eggs, still not breaking eye contact.

Harry looked away. His stomach grumbled some more in protest, and Nott sighed and picked up a fork.

“Tell me why you’re so sure that I am going to poison you,” he said, and started eating with quick, neat bites that made Harry ache in empathy. He’d eaten as fast as that the first time he arrived at Hogwarts and realized that he really could eat as much as he liked and no one was going to take it away from him.

Although, to be fair, never that neatly.

“Because it’s what you do,” Harry murmured, studying the grounds that for some reason were filled with strutting white peacocks. He vaguely recalled Hermione saying something about being here during the war, about the peacocks, and how You-Know-Who’s snake had been eating them or something. “Make people disappear, cooperate with the torturers and the other Death Eaters, swear to serve a Dark Lord. Hurt people you hold captive. I know Hermione got tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange when she and Ron and Neville were here on their quest.”

“If I hadn’t cooperated with the Carrows in Hogwarts, I would have been tortured, too. Do you really blame me for that?”

Harry turned around and looked at him. Nott was still eating, and still staring. It was weird. Harry turned away again. “I do and I don’t.”

“Explain that to me.”

Harry half-shrugged. “I can’t really blame you for doing what you were told and hoping they would ignore you. Merlin knows they didn’t ignore me, and it hurt.” He shivered with the memory of the time they had tortured him for thirty minutes and he had thought he could feel his mind slipping away. There were people in St. Mungo’s who had been tortured with the Cruciatus too long during the first war and had become like that. “But I feel worse for the kids you were torturing. They were still trying to resist and do what they could to help, or they were just innocent victims who weren’t even doing anything but didn’t have the level of protection you did because they were half-bloods or had politically suspect parents. So I don’t blame you as much as the Carrows, but I can’t give you as much sympathy as your victims, either. It’s different levels.”

There was silence. Harry kept on looking across the grass. It was light enough to make out fountains, he thought, or at least that’s what the splashing water in the distance probably was. And hedgerows. And neat flowerbeds.

How much of this is kept in order with house-elves?

Harry sneered to himself, anger stirring in him all over again at the way Neville had told him about the Malfoys treating Dobby, and so he missed the next thing Nott said. “What?” he asked, turning back.

“Some sympathy is more than I expected to get out of you,” Nott said softly. He had finished the scrambled eggs when Harry wasn’t looking, and had leaned an elbow on the table, hand curled underneath his chin, stare resumed. “And your analysis of what happened at Hogwarts is more incisive than I expected.”

“Don’t expect any sympathy now. You-Know-Who is dead. There isn’t anyone running around forcing you to kidnap people or torture them. You have no real reason for taking me in the first place—”

“I thought Blaise explained to you about the bond we have through our markings.”

“A bond that I have no place in,” Harry snapped, and he couldn’t keep the bitterness from dragging his voice down. “A bond that’s yours. No place for me.” Like I had no place in Ron and Hermione and Neville’s bond. Even though I wanted one. If I had—

He couldn’t stop the thought from screaming and swooping down into his mind, even knowing how unfair it was.

If they really valued me as a friend, they wouldn’t have so easily surrendered me.

“We do have a place for you,” Nott said, and his voice had gone softer. He slid a hand across the table. Harry just watched it come to rest on his own, not resisting and not embracing it. “By my magic, Potter, I swear to you. There’s no other. We’ve searched for those others and discarded all the potential matches. We started with looking at the other people who had cast spells at the snake, but that didn’t work. We know it’s you.”

Harry sighed a little. “I don’t want a bond with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Harry said, slowly stretching and enunciating the words until there was no way that Nott could possibly miss what he was saying, “you’re Death Eaters.”

Nott closed his eyes, tightly, for a long moment. His hand didn’t move. Harry was the one who pulled away and watched the horizon, ignoring the way that his head and stomach pounded together, while Nott finished his breakfast.

*

“Okay, this is fucking ridiculous.”

Harry blinked open his eyes and turned his head. It was an effort. The skin of his forehead felt like it was on fire and his blood pulsed angrily in his temples. His stomach felt like it had gained a life of its own and was shouting in his ears about being fed.

But it was still something, to hear Draco Malfoy swear.

“You’re going to eat, you stubborn idiot,” Malfoy snapped, and set down a large tray covered with tomato soup and buttered toast and treacle tart on the small table beside Harry’s bed. Harry felt his lips twitch a little. So they’d been watching and seen what he liked to eat at Hogwarts. It was true his favorite foods hadn’t changed much since then. The icy glass of pumpkin juice made him lick his lips involuntarily.

“I don’t know why you think this would work any better than the last times,” Harry croaked. He was a little disgusted by how much the hunger was affecting him. He could have gone a lot longer than this without food when he was a kid. Water, too. But he supposed having a few years when he was relatively well-fed had made him soft.

“Because of this,” Malfoy said, and brandished his wand over the tray in a quick motion, from left to right, muttering an incantation that Harry didn’t know.

The food disappeared. Harry blinked. At the same time, he gasped as he felt weight settle into his stomach. He touched it. “What the hell, Malfoy?”

“I spelled it into your stomach,” Malfoy said, and put away his wand with a nod. “You are being ridiculous, acting as though you can starve yourself to death. You won’t be allowed to on our watch. So stop it.” He turned and walked towards the door of the bedroom.

“Nott and Zabini decided to appeal to me about this supposedly mystical bond that I ought to share with you because I’m a Parselmouth,” Harry said to his back. “None of that for you, huh? You just want to force food into me?”

He felt a bright-burning anger, but there were ashes in Malfoy’s eyes when he turned around.

“If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t offered to send a house-elf to you since you told me that you didn’t want to be served by mine,” Malfoy said in a level voice. “I haven’t pressured you, because you seemed to dislike me more than Theo or Blaise. I’m trying to make you comfortable, Potter. I just won’t let you starve yourself. That’s all.”

“You don’t want me here,” Harry said, deciding that that was the only thing that made sense. “You’re doubtful about this plan, even if Nott and Zabini are in favor of it. Look, let me go. I’m not going to join you, and I’m not going to fight Neville and the people whose side I was on during the war. I’m sure you can persuade the others. They were willing to take the Dark Mark for you. They would be willing to let their useless hostage go for you.”

Malfoy’s eyes widened, and he stood perfectly still. Harry restrained himself to letting one hand twitch against the bedcovers, annoyed to realize that his hunger headache had already disappeared.

“You still don’t understand,” Malfoy said, but his voice was trembling, and Harry at least counted that as a victory. “I didn’t—I didn’t think we could persuade you, but I agree that we need you. There’s no way that we can continue to exist without someone to stabilize the magic in our bond, and you’re the only Parselmouth we know of. Now that the Dark Lord is dead.”

Harry just shook his head and flopped over on his back to stare at the ceiling. “You have to realize that I would never willingly be that for you.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Malfoy repeated, and then he turned and left the room.

Harry sighed and closed his eyes. Well, his plan to starve himself had failed. He supposed he would wait a while, and if no drugs or poison appeared to affect him, then maybe he would get up and go over to read a few of the books.

*

The Dark Arts books were the most interesting, but nothing that Harry wanted to read, and anyway, he had to keep putting them down when he got to the descriptions of gross and bloody spells. So when the buzzy grey guide light found him, he was flipping listlessly through a copy of Quidditch Through the Ages.

The light hovered in front of him and buzzed, once and then again, once and then again. Harry stared at it, then sighed and put aside the Quidditch book.

It was slowly dawning on him that he wasn’t going to be able to convince Malfoy and the others to kill him quickly, and that might mean he had to live here. Look around and take an interest the way he’d done at Hogwarts when he’d come back after each summer.

He didn’t want to. He suspected there was too much chance they could turn him against Neville and the others that way. Harry knew he wasn’t smart enough to recognize temptation when it presented itself.

But he had nothing else to do.

This time, the light led him in the opposite direction of the dining hall, down a series of staircases and to a thin crack in the wall that opened on unexpected, silent hinges when Harry hooked his fingers into it. He blinked, then stepped slowly into it. He tried not to shudder as the door sealed behind him, and he found himself going down a twisting, endless spiral staircase that was much worse than the ones he’d walked so far.

Harry reached the bottom of the staircase perhaps ten minutes later and rubbed his arms as he shivered. He’d passed through a sharp, tingling sensation that he suspected was some kind of ward, and it had made his arms feel as though they’d got ten times colder than the rest of him.

“Welcome to the Circle, Potter.”

Definitely a capital letter there, Harry thought, as he turned to face the room that was becoming full of the same fuzzy grey light as the hovering orb that had guided him down here. He watched, gaping, as the light spread throughout the huge space, revealing more and more rafters of pure black stone arching overhead, and more and more walls that looked as if they were subdivided into many tiny sections, each one containing a door or a target or a huge hook.

On the floor was a huge circle, made of the same black rock as the rafters, and projecting up above the flagstones rather than set into it, as Harry would have assumed it would be. It didn’t look much like the ritual circles that he’d seen in books, either. It was a circle, but subdivided by raised ridges inside it into quarters.

Malfoy stood in the quarter nearest Harry, facing him, with Nott across from him and Zabini behind him. Harry glanced at the empty quarter, wondering if one of the high-ranking Death Eaters was going to come down and stand there.

“That will be your place, when you’ve accepted it,” Malfoy said.

Harry shook his head, but said nothing. The heavy, solemn air around him seemed to steal his words. He folded his arms and waited.

“It’s not working,” Zabini said, in a soft, frustrated voice.

Harry wondered if they were trying to curse him. It seemed odd, that they’d have to bring him here to do it, but if they were going to put a really powerful curse on him, the kind that would affect any children he had, they’d need a space like this.

Then he discarded the thought. He wasn’t going to live long enough to have any children.

“It’s not working because he’s resisting it,” Nott said.

“Yes, thank you, I understood that,” Malfoy snapped, and stepped over the outer edge of the circle, walking over to him. “Come on, Potter, you have to have looked through enough of the books in your room to recognize this.”

Harry snorted. “You gave them to me, but I haven’t looked through them much.”

“Why not?”

“They’re about Dark Arts.” Harry grinned, enjoying the frustration on Malfoy’s face. “Why would I?”

Malfoy went into a furious huddle with Nott and Zabini, sniping at them, but in low enough voices that Harry couldn’t hear, which he thought was a pity. He leaned back and lazily let his attention travel around the room. Now that he was getting used to it, he no longer thought the atmosphere was as oppressive. Still solemn, though.

The Weasley twins would have loved making noise here, Harry thought, and then had to hold back a grimace. George had died in the war, and Fred was a mere ghost of the boy who had used to make the Gryffindor common room loud and fun.

Finally, Malfoy turned around and half-bowed to Harry. “Have you ever wished that you had more power?”

“Sure,” Harry said, raising his eyebrows a little. “To make purebloods listen to me and stop behaving like arseholes to house-elves.” He grinned a little at the curdled expression on Malfoy’s face. “But somehow, I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.”

“No,” Malfoy snapped, and then managed to take a deep breath and step back. “I meant magical power.”

“It wouldn’t make that much of a difference, in the end.” Harry had thought this through himself, during the times that he’d spent lying in bed hurting after the Carrows were done with him and wishing he could make them back down. “It’s blood and money that people like you respect, not magical power. I wouldn’t accomplish my goals just because I might have the power to blast someone into a wall.”

Malfoy folded his arms. “You could do more with all the power we could give you.”

“Why would you give it to me? For free? I don’t believe you.”

“Not free,” Zabini said softly. He was leaning forwards from the quadrant of the circle he stood in, although he hadn’t actually stepped out of it. Maybe he couldn’t. “You would become part of us. Part of the bond that we already have flowing between us.”

“But you wouldn’t want me to do that.”

“I explained to you about what happened with the Parseltongue incident in our second year, Potter. I have explained why we wanted—”

“No, I mean, I understand that part,” Harry said, as much as he wished he didn’t, so that he could go on playing dumb and annoying them. “What I mean is that you wouldn’t want a non-pureblood connected to your thoughts and magic and emotions.”

“How do you know that?”

Harry laughed a little. “I’m not wrong, am I, Zabini?”

The three Death Eaters exchanged glances. Harry watched with his arms still folded. He assumed they would probably try some other tactic to get him to join them, but he was a bit interested to see how it worked out for them, if they would be able to overcome their own inherent disgust at touching a Muggleborn’s son.

“No, you’re wrong,” Nott said, because apparently it was his turn to say silly things. “We’ve searched for so long that we just want the person who will complete our bond. It doesn’t matter who it is. We would have taken Longbottom if it were him.”

“Neville’s not a Parselmouth.”

“We know that,” Nott said, and started to say something else, but Zabini reached out and put a hand on his arm. Nott glanced at him, nodded, and continued with something that Harry was sure wasn’t what he had originally meant to say. “The important thing is that you feel what could blaze through us.”

“By stepping into the circle?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Nott sighed and nodded to Malfoy. Malfoy seemed to brace himself. “We can use the Imperius Curse on you if we really have to, Potter. We would—not want to. We think it might corrupt the bond that we develop in the future. But we really want you to see what happens if you step into the quadrant of the circle.”

“You couldn’t use it on me anyway.”

“Why not? Do you doubt that we’re capable of casting it?”

“No, of course you are. Most Death Eaters are, I think. But I mean that I’m immune to it. The Carrows tried it a couple of times to get me to torture some of the other students. I just fought my way through it.”

Now they were openly staring at him. Harry raised his eyebrows at them in a mocking way, and Nott scowled.

“Then how about this,” Malfoy said, voice a little unsteady. “We’ll release one of the prisoners we took if you step into this circle.”

Harry felt as though someone had melted the amusement from him, his eyes locking on Malfoy’s face. “You bastard.”

“We took them in the first place so that Longbottom would have to negotiate a hostage exchange with us. Now that we have you, we don’t have a reason to keep them. And we haven’t treated them badly.”

“You kidnapped them.” Harry moved a pace towards Malfoy, thinking of all the things he could do if only the treaty didn’t bind him…

The immense room around him rang like a gong. Harry stopped, breathing harshly. Their wards were another reason he couldn’t do anything about this with magic.

“Let them go,” he spat. “I’ll step into your stupid circle.”

He trailed off when he saw how all three of them were staring at him with dropped jaws. “What now?” Harry could feel his hand itching for his wand, but there was very little he could do about that, so he just curled it into the shape he would use to punch someone instead.

“You made the room respond with just a little bit of wandless magic,” Nott breathed. Zabini was staring at Harry as if he were a miracle. Malfoy’s face was blank, but his hands were trembling down by his sides. “Yes, you’re the one we need. The one who can complete our bond.”

“As if I care about that, next to the safety of innocent people.”

“When you feel the bond, you’ll care,” Zabini murmured. “If we’re right about you being the missing complement, then you’ll feel the magic of the rest of us the way that we can feel bodily sensations and emotions and thoughts. It will change you.”

Harry just sneered at him and faced Malfoy. “Who will you release?”

Malfoy cleared his throat. “Xenophilius Lovegood.”

Harry felt his throat tighten. He had never been as close to Luna Lovegood as Hermione and Neville and Ron were, but he had heard her confession of pain when her father had disappeared. That had been so soon after the Lovegoods had finally seen each other again when Luna had been kidnapped during the war.

“Yes, release him. And you better not have done anything to hurt him.”

“We haven’t. He only had one purpose.”

“Along with the other captives,” Nott murmured.

“What can I do to get you to release them, too?”

Zabini shook his head. “You need to step into the circle first and feel the magic of the bond. We don’t trust you until then.”

Harry wanted to say that he wasn’t a Death Eater and he would keep his word, but he just inclined his head and strode forwards. Malfoy moved out of the way, and Harry stepped into the empty quarter of the circle.

This time, it was the world around him that rang like a gong.

Harry staggered to one knee, his eyes watering. He could hear their voices saying something beyond the ringing confines of his skull, but he couldn’t pay attention. Was this the way he died? Had they brought him all this way and told him all those strange lies about needing him to be part of a magical bond just so they could sacrifice him?

The swirling, draining colors around him assumed a dream-like clarity. Harry found that he was floating in the middle of them while Malfoy and Zabini and Nott all tried to reach him from outside.

Harry glanced at Malfoy and saw him standing in the middle of a frozen translucent explosion, the edges of it covered with streams of crystal and blue and white. Malfoy’s magic thrummed, and Harry knew how he could reach out and guide it in a different direction if Malfoy wanted him to.

Or maybe if he doesn’t want?

Harry lost the thought as he turned to Zabini. His magic was the soft red-orange of a deep sunset, broken here and there by empty space as if the sunset was behind a range of mountains. The force of it made Harry breathless, and he was suddenly certain that Zabini was the most powerful of them, although he might need to spend a lot of time using rituals to pull that power to the surface.

Nott was encircled by a feathery grey mass of clouds that thinned out at the edges into brightness and darkness to touch Malfoy’s and Zabini’s. He was the most affected by the rest of them, Harry understood in a flash, the one whose emotions would take a tumble if the rest of theirs did. He could borrow Zabini’s strength or Malfoy’s high-pitched nature.

What do I look like?

Harry didn’t get the chance to think of a way to find out. (He didn’t know how he would anyway? Stand in front of a mirror?) Zabini’s hand managed to connect with his, and the world shattered back into place.

Harry staggered as he tried to rise and catapulted down to his knees. He could feel—he could feel—

He pulled back his left sleeve and stared down at the shining snake that ran from his elbow to his wrist, where it coiled, head resting on the back of his hand. The body was decorated with the white of Malfoy’s magic, the deep red-orange of Zabini’s, the grey of Nott’s.

And with black.

“Potter?”

Harry raised his head and tried to shape words with his mouth. He knew that he tried. His body and his head were still ringing, though, and part of him wasn’t surprised when he tipped over backwards into a sudden sleep.