[Broken Glass Life]: Chapter Seventeen of 'Glassfall'- Honoring the Dead

[lomonaaeren]

“I know you said you didn’t really want to try it, but…please.”

Draco watches as his lord sits down heavily, eyes fixed on the Mark on Draco’s left arm. The air around them is also heavy, with the scent of smoke and softly burning incense. They’re back in the ritual room where Harry marked Pansy and Neville.

It took Draco most of the week to talk Harry down here.

“I understand why you want me to do it,” his lord says quietly, sweeping back the shaggy hair always hanging in his eyes. Draco has to bite his lip to avoid giving him hair-care tips. “But not whether you can withstand the disappointment.”

“What disappointment?”

“If we try it and don’t learn anything about what happened to your father. You know as well as I do that we might not.”

Draco closes his eyes and fights back his crushing sadness, his anger, his panic. He never thought he would lose one of his parents like this. To old age, of course, and he didn’t even like imagining that. But to one of the Dark Lord’s orders?

No, not like this.

“I can live with it if we don’t find out what happened to him,” he says. It might be a lie, but Harry sits quietly and doesn’t say it is. “But I can’t live with the notion that we might have the means to do it and we’re not…even trying. Please, Harry.”

His lord seems to respond better to his first name than to the title, which is only one of the many things that Draco finds odd about him. And now Harry is letting out a soft, exasperated sigh and reaching for Draco’s arm.

“All right. But you’ll have to brace yourself for the pain of the seeking spell.”

Draco doesn’t care about that. He just cares that he convinced his lord to try it.

Harry’s hand comes to rest on Draco’s Mark, and it flares to soft, pulsing life. Draco knows that the Dark Mark hurt his father even when the Dark Lord was gone, or supposedly gone. Harry’s Mark has never hurt Draco, though. It sometimes feels sharp, like a blade resting against his skin, if Harry is feeling fear or anger. But all it does is urge Draco to go to his lord’s aid, which he’d do anyway.

The Dark Lord finding out Harry is his son is the best thing that could have happened for Draco, personally.

Harry draws in his breath and then lets it out. When he speaks again, it’s in the incantation of the seeking spell Draco taught him—the one that should be able to reach through Harry to Draco’s Mark, the connection between them, and through Draco to his father, down the blood connection.

Draco closes his eyes and lets his mind drift, reaching out, seeking. This is the best chance they have to find Father, he repeats to himself. He has to treat the chance with the care and consideration it deserves.

Then he lets his mind dissolve into the seeking trance that Mother said was the best thing he could do while Harry performed the spell.

Father. Lucius Malfoy. Dark Lord’s servant. Husband of Narcissa Black. Son of Abraxas. Grey-eyed and stern. Hair like platinum. Man who taught me to fly a broom…

Draco thinks, and thinks, and braids the thoughts together, and feeds them back into the connection that Harry is trying to establish with their Marks and the Malfoy blood. The more he can concentrate on things that bring Father to mind, the easier this should be for them.

Man who was said to be under Imperius in the first war. Part of the Dark Lord’s court. Sent on a mission by the Dark Lord. Master of Malfoy Manor. Enemy of my lord until we found out whose son he is…

Draco feels a jerk and then a connection that feels as though someone has run a rope through his chest at the exact moment that Harry says, “I have him.”

“Yes,” Draco gasps. “I can feel it. Can you see anything?” The seeking spell is supposed to create what’s essentially a mental map to where Father is, or at least where he was before he vanished behind powerful magical protections.

He must be behind them. Mother’s attempts to find him would have located him otherwise.

“I can…I think I can…”

And then the rope snaps and jerks Draco off his feet. He’s flying through space, and the only thing he can think to do is wrap his arms and legs around his body, so that if he slams into the far wall of the ritual room, he won’t be hurt.

As it turns out, he doesn’t slam into anything at all, at least not until his flight drops and lands on the floor. He rolls on slick stone, his arms wrapped around his head, a sharp whimper breaking out of the corner of his mouth.

Then he hears the soft lapping of water, and scrambles to his feet, staring around. They’re definitely not in the ritual room anymore.

They’re in a huge cavern with a dark lake lapping not far away, a lake that makes Draco sick to look at. In the center of what appears to be an island is a plinth with a huge basin on it. A Pensieve? Draco doesn’t know, and it also makes him sick to look at.

“Draco, are you okay?”

Harry is standing up with his wand in his hand and a comical frown on his face. Draco swallows. He thought that Harry might have brought them here on purpose and know where this place is, but he looks as puzzled as Draco does.

That’s not good.

“Hold very still, Draco.”

Draco holds very still, and not because it’s his lord commanding him. He’s pretty sure he can hear what caused Harry to give that order. There’s a soft sound mingled with the lapping of the water, a sigh that sounds like it comes from throats.

Not human throats. Just throats.

Harry raised his wand. A shimmering point of light seems to gather halfway along the shaft and speed to the tip. Draco manages to cover his eyes with one hand just before the light spreads out into a blast of wordless magic he hasn’t seen before.

Unless it’s an overpowered Lumos. Which isn’t out of the possibility with Harry, who doesn’t know his own strength.

The light hovers for a moment, but doesn’t fade when Draco assumes it will. He peeks through his fingers and watches the light flying up to hover against the ceiling of the cavern. He swallows. Okay. Not an overpowered Lumos, then.

“Stay back, Draco.”

Draco stands up, but stays where he is. His bond with Harry has narrowed to a single point of steel-hard determination. Whatever Harry’s doing, Draco would probably only get in the way if he tried to help.

He reassures himself that that’s really the reason he’s standing there and not because he’s a coward. Harry doesn’t send impulses of disapproval or anything down the bond, so he must be okay with it.

Harry prowls slowly forwards, then around a black standing stone Draco didn’t see the first time and out of his sight. Draco cranes his neck, but he can’t see where Harry’s gone. He bites his lip and stands still, keeping a wary eye on the water. He knows a threat will come from there if one’s hiding under the surface.

But what kind of guards could both breathe underwater and be effective above the surface?

Draco thinks about that. Then he decides he would rather stop thinking about that, and just stands still instead.

Harry gives an explosive noise that sounds like half a sigh, and Draco’s bond with him thrums. Draco gets ready to move despite the earlier command and his own fear. But then Harry says softly, sadly, “You can come ahead.”

Draco rounds the standing stone, and then drops to his knees as all his strength goes out of him.

Father is lying dead on the stone in front of him.

No, not just dead, half-eaten.

Draco’s eyes go to the lake, and he whispers, “Do you—do you think that there are fish in there that eat people?”

“No,” Harry says softly, sadly, and raises his wand.

The light hovering near the ceiling of the cavern darts down, and part of it seems to become brighter, or more transparent, or something, although Draco is looking at it directly and doesn’t really notice a change. Now, though, he can see under the surface of the lake.

Stirring bodies, whispering voices.

Inferi.

Draco claps a hand over his mouth, but he knows it isn’t going to be enough. He whirls and sprints past the standing stone, falling to his knees again on the other side of it. He vomits and vomits and vomits.

His bond with Harry grows soft and warm, and then Harry comes and rests his hand on Draco’s shoulder. He says nothing as Draco retches everything in his stomach out.

Harry just continues to be there, physically and in the bond, and Draco finally sits back on his heels and takes a deep breath.

“Fuck,” he whispers.

“Yeah.”

Draco makes himself stand up and turn around, walking back over to stare down at his father’s—corpse. Lucius lies as if he were scrambling away from the lake when he was attacked. His hair is draped around him, and honestly, that’s the only tell there is to let Draco know for sure this is his father. The rest is too—worried.

“Mother will want his body back,” he whispers.

“Of course.”

Harry conjures a bubble around Father. Draco stands watching with a face and a soul that feel numb as Harry casts some more spells that he recognizes distantly. They’ll keep Father stable and protected from the elements, and prevent any more harm occurring to the body in transport.

The body.

Harry comes up without being asked and stands there, his hand resting on Draco’s Mark. It’s not enough. Draco makes a little sound that he knows without asking is hysterical and throws himself into Harry’s arms.

Harry immediately stiffens and acts as though he’ll withdraw. But then the bond in Draco’s mind softens again, and he holds Draco as he sobs. There’s no word of censure, Draco thinks dimly in the part of himself that never stops thinking, the part that Father trained, as he cries. No scoffing about his weakness or attempt to put him aside.

I’m so much luckier in my lord than Father was.

Draco finally stands up and turns his face away, casting a spell that will make his eyes feel less heavy and swollen. Harry quietly pulls back. He stands waiting, though, without hovering, until Draco takes a deep breath and glances back at him.

Harry waits.

“I must go to Mother with this,” Draco whispers.

“You mean we have to.”

“I…”

“Unless you think that she won’t want to see the son of her husband’s murderer right now,” Harry says, and there’s a horrible thick sludge, purple and red, like a wound, pouring through his bond with Draco before he cuts it off.

“No, she—she’ll welcome you for the sake of bringing my father’s body back,” Draco says. “I probably can’t manage the Apparition and transportation spells right now.”

Harry nods. His eyes are so bright and soft. “Well, I don’t know exactly where we are, and I can’t Apparate from here, either. So we’ll have to take another option.” He closes his eyes and stands there for a second as if debating. Then he calls, “Kreacher!”

Draco blinks. Then he blinks harder when the ugliest house-elf he’s ever seen appears next to Harry.

“Kreacher will not be coming to—”

The elf freezes, staring around. Then he throws himself on the floor and begins to wail.

Draco flinches. The sound is incredibly thin and high-pitched and resembles the sound he thinks his soul would make right now if it could.

“Kreacher, stop that.”

Harry’s voice is firm and low, and the elf’s wailing shuts up at once. He climbs to his feet, wiping tears as thick as his nose out of his eyes, and demands, “Why does Filthy Master Half-Blood call Kreacher to this horrible place where Master Regulus died?’

Is Harry a still a half-blood, now that he’s not the son of a pureblood and a Muggleborn? Draco thinks.

Then his mind slams to a halt as he absorbs the rest of what the elf said.

“What?” he whispers hoarsely.

“What?” Harry echoes him, not as hoarse, but sounding surprised and pained.

“Master Regulus be dying here,” the elf whispers, his voice bouncing from the walls and the shore. He’s wringing his hands together. Draco has the feeling he’s overwhelmed and wouldn’t be saying anything if not for that. “He be—he be telling Kreacher to return home and have the locket, and he be—”


The elf breaks down weeping. Harry exchanges a few quiet hisses with the invisible snake around his neck and then kneels down next to Kreacher. The elf swats his hand away when Harry tries to touch him, though.

Draco growls before he can stop himself. His Mark and his bond are thrumming with the desire to defend his lord.

“Draco.”

Harry only says that as he rises back to his feet, and he speaks without looking in Draco’s direction, but Draco knows what it means. He won’t be allowed to hurt the elf who was disrespectful to his lord.

Draco closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He normally wouldn’t want to do something like that, anyway. Father’s death is affecting him more than he thought it would.

Father’s death.

Part of him wants to wail and howl like the elf is doing. Draco contents himself with folding his hands under his arms and waiting, with Harry, until Kreacher stops crying and stands up again.

“I need you to take us out of here,” Harry says, and gestures to the bubble containing Father’s floating body, which Draco has been carefully avoiding looking at. “All three of us, Lucius Malfoy included. To the gates of Hogwarts.”

“Kreacher be hating filthy Master Sirius’s godson.”

“I’m not asking you to love me.” Harry’s voice is still low, his eyes fixed on the elf as if no one else exists in the world. Draco feels the oddest mix of pity and jealousy for Kreacher. “I’m asking you to do as you’re told.”

The elf gulps and stares at him. Then he reaches out and takes Harry’s hand. At the same moment, his hand seizes Draco’s. Draco has to force himself to stand still and not cast a spell or rip away. The dirt on this thing…

The world around them blurs and wavers. Draco stumbles a little, and then finds himself standing at the gates of Hogwarts.

Kreacher is standing behind them, staring at Harry as if Harry’s his purpose for existing. Harry looks at him without expression, and then says, “If you would rather that I killed you or freed you, let me know now.”

“Filthy master.”

Harry turns around and walks through the gates without another word. His bond with Draco is still wound-colored. Draco swallows and hurries to catch up with his lord, ignoring the way that the elf disappears with a pop behind them. He also ignores the way that his father’s body bobs beside them.

“You can’t bring him into the school. What are you going to do with him?”

“Bring him to the Chamber of Secrets.”

Draco closes his eyes. He knows what his father tried to do in their second year. There’s a sort of justice in this, he supposes.

And at the same time, it feels like a sort of honor for his father. That’s how he would have thought of it, to be brought to the ancient chamber Salazar Slytherin buried beneath the school. An honor.

“Draco.”

Draco looks up. Harry has moved in front of him. His face is pale, and their bond has turned clear and rushing, like a river recently cleansed of a curse.

“I promise that I’ll do my best to get justice for your father.”

“That would—my lord, it would involve going against your own father.”

“If that’s what I need to do, then I’ll do it. He shouldn’t have attacked a member of his court.”

“I don’t think he—attacked him directly.”

“Sent him off an impossible quest, then.” Harry studies Draco for a long moment. “Unless you would prefer that I hold back and not speak to my father about it. I can see why it might bother you, or why it might draw the Dark Lord’s attention to you in an unfavorable way.”

Draco closes his eyes. There are tears burning behind their lids, and there’s grief in him, and there’s the absurd urge to laugh.

He manages to open his eyes and murmur, “I trust you to do what’s necessary, my lord. Including protecting me if the Dark Lord’s attention does turn in this direction. I would—can you Mark my mother as soon as possible?”

“Of course. If she still wishes it.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“My father got her husband killed.”

They’re silent after that, because Harry doesn’t seem to want to speak, and Draco doesn’t think he can explain the way his mother would think of this situation. He wishes that neither of them need ever think of it at all. Father wasn’t perfect, but he loved them, and Draco knows how rare that is among children of his kind.

Even. Harry’s father seems to be fascinated with him and plan things for Harry to do, rather than love him.

They travel through secret passages and up and down staircases Draco’s never seen before, only to arrive at last outside the girls’ bathroom on the second floor that always floods the corridor. Draco blinks and glances at Harry, wondering if there’s another secret passage here that he’s using to throw off any possible pursuit.

Harry just strides into the bathroom and over to the wall where the sinks are. Then he hisses.

Draco watches open-mouthed as the nearest sink turns into the wall and the entrance to a pipe appears. Harry stares at it, then sighs and uses his wand to cast some stone from the entrance to widen it. He pauses, then mutters several words under his breath in a spell that Draco doesn’t know. Stones appear and hover over the pipe, forming what appears to be a broken bridge of sorts.

“Who taught you that one, my lord?”

“It was one of the spells that Corban insisted on teaching me during a private session. He says that it’s one of the most useful ones he knows to cross running water and the like. I might have tried it in the cavern, but I don’t know if it would have kept us out of the reach of the Inferi.”

Draco closes his eyes, and tries to keep himself from remembering that his father was partially eaten by Inferi. He feels Harry reach out to him, their bond a golden-white swell of concern, and he keeps his eyes shut so he can breathe through it.

“Here.”

They make their way down the floating stones, some of them positioned far enough apart that Draco sort of wishes they’d brought a broom. But Father’s body faithfully follows, and they reach the bottom without incident.

Then, of course, Draco has to ask for reassurance that the basilisk is really dead after seeing the discarded skin, and they have to make their way over crunchy small animal bones, and they have to walk into a Chamber that seems half-drowned with water traveling through the stones and cracks. Draco stares at the dead basilisk and decides that he’ll never, ever think Harry had unfair treatment before being found out as the Dark Lord’s son again.

“I thought we’d leave him here with candles around him until we can bring him to your mum. Is that okay?”

Draco swallows. It’s odd to hear Harry being all deferential to him. But then, that’s only one of the many ways that Draco’s lord differs from his father’s.

The man who was his father’s lord. Who sent his father to his death.

“Yes. That would be—fine.”

Harry nods and conjures a dark stone dais that rises out of the floor. He places Father’s body on it, dismisses the bubble that kept him safe while they were traveling, and then reaches into his own robe pockets and starts taking out candles.

“You had them with you?” Draco can’t keep the surprise out of his voice.

“I thought it was possible that we would find out where he died, but not actually his body,” Harry says softly. “And I thought we’d set up a vigil. Theo told me about that. Some people do it when their relatives die.”

It’s never been a Malfoy custom, but Draco isn’t going to complain about that right now. He stands back and watches in silence as Harry places the candles in a row around the dais. The altar, if Draco wants to think of it that way. He can think that Father died in an attempt to save him and is being honored before being burned, if he wants to.

It’s been a long time since the Malfoy family burned their dead. But watching the way that light and shadows flicker and dance on Father’s face, Draco finds himself thinking that maybe they ought to resurrect the custom.

Harry stands quietly beside him. Draco waits, and says as much of a farewell as he can to Father in his head. It isn’t much, honestly. His emotions churn, and he thinks he’s sad and furious and resigned all at once.

Father, why did you swear to someone who destroyed you? What made you think he’d respect you as part of his court?

Draco closes his eyes. He wants to remember the good things about Father, not the flawed ones. He wants to remember the man who put him on his first broom and brought narcissi to Mother every spring and…

And made sure that Draco didn’t need to serve the Dark Lord.

Draco knows that both Father and Mother had doubts about Draco becoming Harry’s courtier instead of the Dark Lord’s. Of course they could see the advantages, especially in Draco having the chance to mold Harry’s behavior in a way that they could never have done with the Dark Lord, but they had worried about the loss of prestige and how he’d be treated.

But they did it anyway.

Father, I love you. I lost you too soon, and I have to do something to avenge you, and I don’t know what that can be when my lord has to obey his father and I don’t have a chance of taking down the Dark Lord on my own. I hope that you won’t take it amiss if I put aside the ambition for vengeance until I can survive taking it.

Long moments pass in the flickering of the candles and the shifting of shadows on the ancient stone walls, off the dark green basilisk skin. Then Harry reaches out and clasps Draco’s hand. “We should get back to bed.”

“Yeah,” Draco whispers. He reaches out and trails his fingers down Father’s cheek. He ignores how clammy Father’s skin is beneath his touch.

I promise, Father.

It’s a promise without teeth, maybe, because Draco doesn’t know what he’s making it about. But he makes it anyway, and stands to look at his father one moment more before turning and following his lord out of the Chamber.

He thinks of the letter he’ll have to write Mother, and closes his eyes. It’s going to hurt her so much.

He knows her, and he knows that she’ll try to bury her grief in service to Harry. Probably in hatred and rage against the Dark Lord, too.

But that doesn’t change the existence of the grief.

It doesn’t for Draco, either. But at least he has the bond with his lord, which is flowing strong and clear again, and which Harry reinforces with a gentle clasp of his shoulder before they thread their way across the floating stones, back to the Chamber’s entrance.

*

“Ron?”

Hermione whispers the word. Her brain’s fuzzy, and she feels exhausted. No, more than exhausted. As though someone’s poured fatigue into her bones and taken away the marrow inside them. Replaced it.

She rolls over, and blinks at the stone ceiling above her. It seems lower than it should be, and it’s round. Is she inside a giant stone egg? Of course that’s pretty silly, but that’s what it seems like to her.

“Hermione?”

At least Ron’s here with her. Hermione reaches out a shaking hand, and feels Ron’s touching her. She licks her lips and looks around. The impression of a giant stone egg persists, and she wonders how she’s seeing it.

Well, light seems to be coming from somewhere. Where that is, Hermione doesn’t know. And she can’t tell if she has her wand with her, for that matter.

That makes her shiver. She tries to sit up, but invisible magical bonds pull on her and keep her still. The most she can do is roll so that she’s next to Ron, who has his own set of bonds connecting him to what seems to be bare stone. Wait, no, there are some shallow cups in the stone floor that are meant to hold their bodies.

Hermione shudders. She can’t imagine how bad this must be to not even have a Cushioning Charm.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“I remember that we were fighting something that looked like a dragon,” Hermione says. “But it was made of smoke, so it can’t have been. And it opened its mouth and breathed out what might have been smoke or its version of fire…”

“And I fainted,” Ron completes the sentence. “That’s what I remember. Falling, and my wand falling from my hand.”

“Do you have it now?”

Ron pats his pockets and his boots and even the collar of his robe, before he shakes his head. “You?”

“No.”

Ron closes his eyes for a long moment. Hermione lies beside him, holding his hand, and gives him strength. This was their plan, of course, to get captured so that Harry would be forced to act. But that doesn’t make it easier to go through with it.

“Do you think he’ll come soon?” Ron whispers.

“Who? Harry or Voldemort?”

Ron flinches hard enough that he bangs his hip on the side of the depression holding him. Hermione can’t blame him for that, either. There’s a difference between speaking the name in the open air and light outside Hogwarts, and doing it in what seems to be a Death Eater dungeon. “Well, I meant Harry, but. Either.”

“I think he has to,” Hermione says. “His father won’t keep it from him. He’ll want to use us to rein Harry in.”

“What if he can do that?”

Hermione licks her lips. “If he tortures us, if he touches us, that will inspire Harry to act.”

“Do you think it will? The danger to Muggleborns and people like my family hasn’t so far.”

“It has to,” Hermione says, and hates the hollow sound of her voice echoing off the stone walls. “If it doesn’t, then…”

“Then?”

Hermione closes her eyes. She’s tired, and she doesn’t want to think. “Ginny will tell him that we’re not at Hogwarts,” she whispers. “That was the plan. Do you think Ginny will forget or something?”

“Of course not! But what happens if—You-Know-Who doesn’t tell him where we are? Or what he’s doing to us?”

Hermione tightens her hands in the invisible bonds. That’s a complication that she never dreamed of, mostly because she assumed Voldemort would want to wave them around to taunt Harry.

But—

“Then we’ll take that as it comes.”

Ron looks at her with haunted eyes, but he doesn’t blame her, instead shifting closer. They’re near enough that Hermione can rest her head on his shoulder, and she does so, closing her eyes and trying to still her breathing.

Harry will come for them. He has to.

And when he does, he’ll come for the other Muggleborns and Muggles in the world, too. And for the end of Voldemort’s life.