Chapter Twenty-One of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- Action Is Eloquence

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Chapter Twenty-One—Action Is Eloquence

Draco probed his teeth gingerly with his tongue. He thought Potter must have loosened some of them when he popped Draco back into his house, through the wards.

He had power. More than Draco had estimated, enough that it had probably left Potter panting on the floor when he exercised it, since lifting another Auror into the air with it had exhausted him.

But that was small comfort when Draco knew he had been the target of that magic, dismissed from Potter’s presence like a naughty child.

He took a deep breath and sat down on his bed, rubbing his fingers absently over his jaw. What he would have liked to do was clench them into a fist and punch the wall, but that wasn’t permissible. Potter had won two victories over him so far: he had forced Draco to doubt his own emotions and face how much he didn’t really want to enact his revenge, and he had made him accept that convenient and easy lies wouldn’t be enough anymore. He would not force Draco into childish expressions of anger.

So. He couldn’t lie. It had seemed so easy when he stood in front of Potter and saw the shock mixed with simmering adoration—even now, even after—in those green eyes. He could win Potter back if he played on his affection and told him that Draco had simply acted to secure their future together. Potter would have to believe it. He was too enthralled to the love he had constructed mostly in his own mind. He had rejected Draco because the betrayal to the Prophet had been too great a disruption of the perfect confidence he thought lovers should share, but when Draco came back, humble and penitent, he would have to change his mind.

And Harry had shown him it wouldn’t be that easy.

Draco swallowed. Somehow, he would have to manage a confrontation with no one around, so that he could speak freely. Confessing his weakness and his mistakes would be hard enough in front of the one person who deserved to hear the apology. In front of someone like Weasley or Granger, impossible.

“I never knew someone could hurt me this much,” he whispered into the echoing silence of his bedroom, staring at the conjured bed that Harry hadn’t slept in for two nights now and which looked emptier than Draco’s own bed after a month elsewhere. “When did that become possible? The moment I started my obsession? Or the moment I brought him here? Or some other time?” He paused, distracted from his own thoughts by the remembrance of the flinty shine in Lucius’s eyes that morning. “And if my father felt something like this for my mother, how did he ever stand it, in life or in death?”

For the first time in years, Draco felt a flash of pity for his father.

But it didn’t last long. He was busy planning ways to win Potter back, and he needed all his attention, all his cunning and cleverness, for himself.

*

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

Harry smiled as he looked around the cottage. It was actually bigger than his flat, but then, that only made sense; he spent barely any time in the flat, what with working on cases and entertaining friends and lovers and allies, and he would be living here. The walls were long, the ceilings low, and it sprawled off into the distance like a labyrinth. Harry could hear water flowing and the loud calls of exotic birds. He hoped absently that magic had only replicated the sound of the birds, and not actually Summoned them. He had swallowed enough feathers trying to recapture that hippogriff that the imposter had let loose.

“Come on,” said Ron, who was hovering in the doorway whilst Harry and Hermione entrained themselves by looking at the cottage. “Come in and see the rest of it.”

Harry ducked through the door, and blinked in surprise when he straightened in the small entrance hall and found out the ceiling had lifted to accommodate his head. Ron grinned at him. “It adjusts itself to the most comfortable size for its inhabitants.” He gestured, and for the first time, Harry noticed that the ceiling above his head was higher than the rest of it. “Mum would have killed for something like this when she had seven children at home in the Burrow.”

Harry nodded fervently, thinking of what his childhood would have been like if he could expand his cupboard at will, and turned in a circle. The hall was covered with blue paneling, trimmed with pale wood painted with even paler decorations, a subtle bending pattern of flowers that turned to one of vines and interlocked sheaves of grain, then to stylized birds, then to leaping animals that Harry thought might be gazelles or unicorns, which melted back into the flowers as they renewed the circle. The ceiling rippled softly, also blue, either the magic or the velvet that covered it making it look like a bubble ready to pop at any moment. Harry wandered into the next room, the drawing room, and the ceiling promptly drew up and the walls pulled back. He found himself staring into yet another shade of blue, this one as pale as sun-shadows on a morning expanse of snow. Windows gazed out at cliffs, some of them gray, some black, some dazzlingly white. Harry wondered for a moment, absently, which was the true view that actually surrounded the cottage. He’d had time to see that the area was mountainous when he and Hermione Apparated in, but not much else.

“The library’s full of books,” said Hermione behind him. Harry could hear the faint, rapid rap of her nails on her satchel, which she used when she wanted to keep from bouncing with excitement. “There’s a private indoor Quidditch Pitch for entertainment, too, if you get bored. And plenty of—“

Ron made a shushing noise, and Hermione obligingly shut her mouth. Harry felt a smile tug at his lips. He made sure to give Ron a small nod before he made his way further into the house, looking up at the ceilings, trailing his hands along the walls.

This was the place that might be his home for the next several weeks or months, for all he knew. There was no telling how long it would be until the Aurors caught the imposter—particularly without Harry there to help them—and even then, Harry could see himself wanting to remain here until he had proof Draco had lost interest in him and moved on to some other innocent to swindle and trick.

Malfoy. His name is Malfoy.

Harry snarled to no one as he investigated the library, which was exactly as stocked as Hermione had promised, so filled with bookshelves that Harry had a difficult time finding a place for his own feet. He would eventually learn to call Draco by his last name again, but until he did, he thought, he would have to accept that he was more stubborn and backwards than his friends wanted him to be.

“Look at this one.” Hermione darted past him and reached for one of the books on the lowest of the shelves. From the shining glance she cast him, Harry decided that she was physically unable to keep silent any longer. He smiled, reluctantly and in spite of himself drawn in as Hermione showed him the drawing of a golden wheel on the leather cover and explained that it was an exploration of wizarding history and the points where it touched and bled into Muggle history.

You’ll need longer than a few days to get over Draco, yes, because you’re the only one who knows how much he could have been worth. But you also need a commitment to getting over him, instead of brooding on him. And there are worse pursuits, as Hermione would say, than reading history whilst you wait for your heart to change.

*

Draco hesitated, turning his wand in his fingers. He didn’t particularly want to enter this place again. But he had seen the ease and courtesy with which the proprietor welcomed Potter, and he had to believe that if someone could tell him some valuable information about him, it would be this woman.

Weasley and Granger would be even more valuable sources, of course, but Draco had a desire to survive the initial encounter with the person who would tell him about Potter.

He stepped into the Imperatrix and waited for the dizzying flash of the wards to crawl over him and then slow down. He released a slight breath when he found himself standing in the brilliant entrance he had seen once before. Though Potter had said that people could find the restaurant who had been invited or entered with someone who was, Draco hadn’t been sure the permission would extend to embrace him if he came unescorted.

From the cold strength on Faustine’s face as she walked out to confront him, it should not have.

“I have heard what you have done,” she said, a trace of a sharp accent coming out in her voice that Draco hadn’t noticed before. “You will not get away with it here. I will give you no information to the disadvantage of a dear friend, and therefore you might as well go away again.” She folded her hands in front of her. Draco saw the rings that shone on her fingers, and winced as the edge of light poking out from one like a sword cut into his eyes. They bore powerful enchantments, ones that he would be reluctant to confront even with the weapons that he carried hidden about him—if only because using those weapons would advertise their existence to his enemies.

“You don’t understand,” Draco began.

“I understand more than Harry does, more than you do.” Shadows moved and flickered on Faustine’s face like the light of the moon moving over a stormy sea. “I understand that you find yourself weak in his shadow, and you sought to destroy him because you thought your life would improve if he weren’t looming over you. You have a small soul, of course, that cannot change its size.”

Draco seized the anger twisting him and held himself fiercely still. It would avail him nothing now if he made a mess of things again, this time by destroying the one tentative contact he might still have with Potter.

“And if I wanted to change its size?” he asked.

Faustine lifted her head. A gold tracery along the side of one eye flashed and caught Draco’s attention, and he felt a reluctant admiration stir; the woman had inlaid one of her scars with magic. Draco had heard of such things, but he was not quite desperate enough to sacrifice his beauty to power. “Such things may be done,” she said. “But with difficulty. Dangerously. Expensively.”

“You know I can afford it,” Draco said, glad to hear a reference to money. It moved the conversation back onto ground he was more familiar with than he was with this talk of souls and the rest.

“Not in that way.” Faustine looked distantly amused, which Draco wanted to rage at. This time he had to bite his tongue hard in order to draw a little blood and make himself listen politely. “It costs the person making the change. Are you prepared to overthrow your assumptions, to humble your pride, to bow your head and admit you were wrong?”

Of all the things she could have chosen, she had to put her finger on the one that was the most painful to him, the reason he had lied to Harry the last time he saw him. Draco exhaled hard, his eyes falling to the ground. “My lady—“ he began, and saw her shake her head warningly. She didn’t want empty courtesy. She wanted an answer now.

“Yes,” he said, anger giving him the strength to stare at her and lean forwards so that she could see the sharp lines that bent his eyes at the corners. “Yes. Is that what you want to hear? Yes.”

Faustine gave him a maddening smile and turned away. “Then you won’t mind coming with me and passing a small test so we can be assured it is so,” she murmured.

Draco followed, because what choice did he have?

*

“What do you really feel for him?”

Harry started and looked up from the meal of soft baked fish he and Ron had started eating half an hour ago. In all that time, no sound had passed between them but the soft scrape and clink of fork and spoon on the plate. Ron had seemed perfectly content to stare at nothing and daydream whilst he ate, and Harry had welcomed the silence so that he could put his thoughts in order.

But now Ron leaned forwards, the mug of butterbeer dangling from his hand, and stared so hard that Harry knew he wouldn’t get out of this inquisition.

He swallowed and looked down at the plate again. “I despise him for what he did to me,” he said. That much was easy to say, because he knew that Ron expected to hear it, and yet it still scraped at his throat. If he despised Draco, wasn’t he contributing to that littleness of spirit that was the thing he despised? Draco would not grow better for his scorn. “It’s so—so self-serving. I know that he was softening around me by the end. He took me to a private place, a place of pure magic, that I can’t believe he would have allowed me to see if he only felt hatred towards me.”

“Malfoys have done some incredible things in the name of hatred,” Ron said thoughtfully.

“But they haven’t profaned what they considered sacred, have they?” Harry looked up at him. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“And what else do you feel for him?”

Harry grimaced. Trust Ron, at least the newly sensitive Ron of the last few years who paid strict attention when he discovered Harry was hurting, to pick up on the fact that contempt was not the end-all and be-all of his emotions towards Draco—Malfoy.

“I still want him,” he said. Ron made a horrible face, rolling his eyes, but said nothing, so Harry didn’t snap at him. “I still think he’s beautiful, and talented, and could make something more than even an impressive architect of himself, if only he would try. But since he won’t, then I don’t see why I should keep on trying for him. I wanted him to be larger than he was, and trusted he would go in that direction. And I think I saw the desire to rise, to become as generous and open-hearted as his reputation in the last few years pretended he was, in his eyes. But something we shared that night frightened him away.”

“It’s so odd to talk about this with you,” Ron muttered, swirling the butterbeer in his mug. Before Harry could retort that Ron shouldn’t have brought up the subject if he didn’t want to talk about it, Ron met his eyes again and smiled wryly. “I always thought you’d get over your obsession with Malfoy and go on to someone else.”

“You could think that?” Harry leaned back in his chair and sipped his own pumpkin juice slowly. He rarely drank it now; the wizards and witches in charge of distributing food in the Ministry seemed to feel it was the food of the enemy, and what he could find for sale in the shops never matched his own memory of the freshness of the drink at Hogwarts. But the house-elves, or automatic shopping pantry, or whatever else supplied the food here—Harry hadn’t been into the kitchens yet—fetched juice just the way he liked it. “When you had an obsession of your own?”

“It was more than lust, to be close to her.” Ron’s voice took on a hushed, religious tone for a moment, and then he added, “But yes, I did think you would balk at being that vulnerable to Malfoy, when it came right down to it.”

Harry sighed and toyed with his mug. He reckoned he could understand that. Ron had always needed to be the strong one, in control; he had dealt badly with it when some criminals captured them and tortured Harry, tying Ron up so that he could only watch helplessly. He had never learned Harry’s lessons in childhood, that just because you gave in and let other people do what they wanted to you for a time didn’t mean that you abandoned your emotional control.

“I didn’t,” said Harry. “I think he balked at being so vulnerable to me, and that was the main reason he ran away and didn’t change.” He smiled a bit when he saw Ron’s blink. Yes, he understood this explanation, whereas he had looked baffled at Harry’s previous talk of being larger and rising.

“But you were the one who was—uh.” Ron suddenly the found the bottom of his mug interesting. “The powerless one.”

“Do you think Hermione’s powerless when you’re having sex?” Harry raised his eyebrows.

“No!” Ron’s face was flaming. “But that’s different.”

“Why?” Harry hid his grin behind his juice, whilst Ron’s mouth opened and shut several times. He was baiting Ron; he knew some of the differences, both the ones that existed and the ones that people assumed did, since he’d been in relationships with both men and women himself. But every now and then, it was good to make Ron think beyond the automatic assumptions he picked up from God knew where. Hermione wasn’t telling him anything so simple, that was certain.

“Because it is,” Ron muttered finally, and returned to the attack. “But you scared him—that surprises me.”

“Does it?” Harry put his cup down again. His appetite was gone. He was remembering the sharp shine in Draco’s eyes, the way that Draco had trembled above him and arched his head back, half-screaming in protest as he came. His fingers had ripped at the grass. Harry had wondered then if that was merely a substitute for the clawing at Harry’s flesh Draco would have liked to do; now, he was certain of it. “I think you’re right, and he was a coward in school. That hasn’t changed much. Draco still doesn’t like to risk himself for the sake of a reward that he doesn’t know will be worth it. And I offered him hope, change—risk. He couldn’t take the chance that he would try to change himself and still fail. So he ran away, and put the temptation beyond his reach by betraying me to the Prophet.”

“But he showed up at your flat.” Ron lifted his head and eyed Harry as if he thought Harry might be trying to change the story on him. “Hermione told me that.”

“I think most of the motives I’m telling you about were subconscious.” Harry laughed, and then stopped, because he hated how bitter it sounded. “Of course he isn’t going to admit he’s a coward, is he? He thinks that he was taking revenge on me, but it would be the best revenge to make me come crawling back to him even after he’s hurt me so badly.”

Ron snorted in disgust. “What a prick.”

“Yes, he is.” Harry finished his pumpkin juice with unnecessary violence.

*

Faustine led him into a back room that made Draco’s shoulders stiffen with both affronted professional pride and wariness. No practiced architect had designed this room, which had walls with the wrong kind of sharpness and decorative pillars in corners where they weren’t needed to support anything. And in the middle of the room, to make it worse, was an enormous table made of a dark red-black wood, as if it had been coated in spilt blood. Faustine stood on one side of this alarming table and gestured for Draco to take a seat on the other side.

“I’ll stand, thanks.” Draco was impressed with himself for keeping his voice calm and cold and soft.

“Then you’ll forsake my help,” Faustine said simply, and retracted her hands from the shelf she’d been reaching for.

Draco drew an irritated breath and sat down in the chair, which was a massively carved thicket of wood, branches sprouting out of the arms and legs to fence him. He shifted uneasily and then told himself not to be so stupid. Faustine would be sure to take advantage of any nervousness he showed. Caution was acceptable, fear was not. “Do you want me to take Veritaserum?” he asked. “I would be willing to do so.”

“Veritaserum has some disadvantages.” Faustine had lifted a box of the same black-red wood from the shelf she’d reached towards earlier. When she opened it, Draco almost cried out at the sense of magic filling the air. The wood of the box must have muffled it before.

The object Faustine lifted out was small enough to fit snugly in the curve of her palm, but it prickled and branched like the chair, and had power that reminded Draco of the repulse he’d encountered from Harry. He could see that it had an outer, round rim, and wondered if Faustine held a carved wheel. But in the center of it, a glimmering jewel flashed. Diamond? Pearl? He couldn’t see, with his eyes gone dizzy and teary with the magic.

“Veritaserum cannot detect lies that the speaker believes are truths,” said Faustine. “And given your reputation for deceiving yourself, I will not chance leading you to Harry, only to see you start back at the last moment and hurt him again. This time, we will make sure that you know what you really want.”

Draco opened his mouth to say that he hadn’t yet consented to anything other than taking Veritaserum, but Faustine had already blown across the surface of the jewel in the center of the object, and it rose from her palm and hovered in front of Draco.

Yes, it was a wheel, with spokes so sharp that Draco felt his soul recoil at the sight of them. The jewel glittered with an overlay of red, with blue and green and purple crawling behind it, and by that Draco knew it.

It was an opal. Superstition, to hear Muggles talk, and excellent logic and Dark history, to listen to wizards, connected the opal to misfortune.

Then the jewel began to flow as liquid down the spokes of the wheel, tumbling like the cascade of foam turned by a waterwheel. Draco felt himself freezing, his muscles stiffening. His tongue lay heavy and dumb in his mouth. His spine ached with the unnatural position he was forced to keep it in.

“Ah,” said Faustine, no more than a breath behind the words. “Now that you can’t chatter your way out of this, we’ll see what happens.”

Draco wanted to curse her, but the magic paralyzed the words of the wandless, nonverbal incantation that he tried to form in his head. And then the liquid jewel flowing down the turning wheel reared up, smooth and graceful as a snake, and sent forks of light brilliant with the swimming opal colors straight at him.

Pain stabbed through his eyes and his cheeks, and Draco felt a pressure mounting in his head that he knew would quickly knock him unconscious. Even as he struggled against it, the new agony burst like a thunderstorm in his head.

The moment before he fell to the floor, he heard Faustine chuckle darkly.

“That’s the least you deserve,” she said, “to have the truth torn out of you. At least that way we know you can’t lie to yourself or anyone else, with it hovering in front of your eyes.”

Chapter 22.

Comments

[cheshyre]

Whoah. Fascinating magic. I can't wait to see what happens next...

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