![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Part IV. Bleak and Barren and Burning
Harry tripped and fell into the water when Draco began strangling him, and for a long moment, the surprise was so great that he just lay there gaping and gasping and letting Draco do it.
Then he decided that, friend or not, no one was killing him that easily.
A quick spell sent a jolt of harmless electricity up Draco’s arms and made him flinch back, his hands momentarily losing their grip. Harry pushed hard at his chest, and Draco fell away from him into the water. Then Harry, deciding that he wasn’t about to take any chances, cast a Body-Bind that tied Draco’s arms to his sides.
Draco thrashed madly, his mouth open, his eyes bulging. Harry climbed slowly to his feet, never taking his eyes off Draco even when he stumbled on the stones in the river. He raised a hand to touch his throat, and swallowed again and again. Had Draco really gone mad? Had he killed the Aurors who came after him? It was seeming much more likely than it had just a few minutes ago.
Harry took a deep breath, then, and forced himself to calm down, the way he’d often had to after seeing Ron wounded on a joint mission. He wouldn’t get any answers by standing around and worrying until he went out of his mind. He would just have to ask Draco questions and hope that they got somewhere against Draco’s obvious madness.
“Draco?” he said, quietly, because speaking loudly right now would agitate Draco further. “Are you all right?”
Draco glared at him, his eyes more furious than Harry had ever seen them, even after Harry had accidentally insulted a bloke he didn’t know Draco fancied. Harry stared back for a moment, then remembered that the Body-Bind would have frozen Draco’s jaw as well. He winced and undid the spell enough to let Draco talk.
Draco licked his lips twice, then said, “I don’t know how you stole my friend’s voice, but I’ll never believe you’re him, no matter what you sound like.”
He’s worse than I thought. Harry had to take another breath to keep the concern and sympathy from eating him alive. “I really am Harry,” he said, when he thought he could speak steadily. “I came to find you, Draco.” He thought about telling him that Kingsley had commanded this, but discarded the notion. Draco might not even realize he’d killed the Aurors, and any reference to being hunted by the Ministry would bring up memories of the war. Harry didn’t think he needed to deal with those on top of the curse afflicting him. “Can you tell me what happened? Was it someone in France who cast this curse on you?”
“Curse?” Draco laughed harshly. “Being chased all over the world is a curse instead of torture?” Then he shook his head and dragged himself as much upright as he could whilst he was still in the Body-Bind. “Not that you need to know anything about that,” he hissed, “considering you were one of those who cast the curse yourself.”
“Assume I don’t know.” Harry waved his wand and raised one stone above the surface of the water so he could sit down in relative comfort. True, he could have moved to the bank, but that would have involved getting further away from Draco than he felt ready to do at the moment. “Assume I’m some new enemy that the rest hired to torment you.”
Draco’s eyes squeezed shut, and his head tilted forwards, as if hearing the request had taken the last of his strength. Harry winced again and held himself still by main force of will. You can’t do anything until you know what his perception of this is. Don’t rush. You make mistakes when you rush. You want to hug him right now, but maybe he’d just think you were some giant spider trying to build a web around him.
“You’ve been chasing me for months,” Draco whispered. “I was stolen from my bed, from my home, in the middle of the night. I’ve run through forests to get away from them, through swamps and icefields, but they’re always right behind me. Sometimes they let me get food and rest, but that’s just because they want to continue chasing me for longer, to kill me right when I’m on the edge of hope. I know that’s the reason.” He shivered and made a motion as if he would wrap his arms around himself, but the Body-Bind still held them tight. “The worst…the worst was a time when I had to run across the desert, freezing in the night and then burning when the sun came up. I was delirious for three weeks from that, and they didn’t wait until I was recovered to pursue me.”
An enormous surge of wild magic rippled out from Draco just as Harry was opening his mouth to respond. Harry grabbed his rock as the trees wavered like curtains around them and the stream spluttered to a halt. And then the rock was gone, and the landscape bowed and waved up and down, and Harry nearly broke his neck thrashing frantically towards Draco to take him in his arms and shield him from whatever was happening. He’d never felt magic like this; his own accidental bursts that had blown up Aunt Marge and transported him to the roof of his school were nothing in comparison. He understood now how not only the Aurors but multiple people around Draco could have died.
And then the rippling stopped, and Harry felt a pulse of heat on his head. He looked up and around in disbelief.
He knelt in the middle of a desert, a hot, flat, white pan of ground with dunes arching on either side of him, their sides sculpted by enormous winds. The sun stood directly overhead, at noon, though Harry knew it had been later than that when he’d Apparated to Malfoy Manor. The heat pressed down like an overturned pot lid on his back, and Harry could feel sweat start along the curves of his shoulders and chest.
Draco stood up in front of him, Body-Bind dissipated by the wild magic as if it had never existed, and stared around with a hunted expression. Then he screamed, turned, and began to lurch over the ground in a random direction.
Harry cursed softly and cast a Cushioning Charm at the sand ahead of Draco, a Cooling Charm, and another Body-Bind in rapid succession. Draco fell over as his limbs stiffened up again, but the cooled sand caught and cradled him, so that he wouldn’t get scraped or have his skin abraded. His face was wild with fear, though. Staring at him, Harry felt almost helpless. He had no idea what was wrong with Draco or how to help, and all his instincts were urging him to help, telling him he was useless if he didn’t.
First things first. Harry had to ensure that they survived the desert for the length of time it might take them to find a way out. He cast a Cooling Charm on himself, then conjured water and poured it over his head. A second Aguamenti charm thoroughly wet Draco. He spluttered and stared at Harry in amazement.
“Sorry,” Harry muttered. He wondered for a moment what Draco’s delusions told him had happened, and then put that out of his head. First things first.
He stepped up to Draco, Levitated him into the air, took his arm so that he could lead him gently along, and then, concentrating on home with all his might, tried to Apparate there.
Nothing happened.
Harry paused for long moments. Of course, the desert had already proved itself different from the forest in that Harry could enchant parts of it. But he did wish the differences didn’t extend to keeping them captive when they tried to Apparate out.
Try again before you panic, he chided himself. Maybe your home is too far away from this place, wherever it is. Wild magic that powerful could have put you into the Sahara for all you know.
He focused on Malfoy Manor, making his mind as calm as possible. Being back in the forest would be an improvement over this.
And again nothing happened, not even the shuddering jangle in his own body that Harry had become accustomed to when he overestimated his own power and tried to Apparate too far. The desert stayed the same around them, the sun broiling down and the sand shimmering obliquely in the distance. Draco had closed his eyes and let his head fall forwards, sweat rolling from his temples.
Harry shut his own eyes.
*
By the end of the day, as the sun began to sink behind the dunes, Harry had learned a number of things about the desert.
The first was that they couldn’t Apparate anywhere within it, never mind outside it. When Harry had focused carefully on one dune to the north and then tried to bring himself and Draco there, the landscape had shuddered a bit, but they’d stayed standing on flat ground. And yet, Harry couldn’t be absolutely certain that this was an inherent property of the desert. Apparition relied on a wizard’s internal picture of the place he was trying to go. Maybe, because Harry had no training in deserts, his magic couldn’t work because he couldn’t distinguish the one dune clearly enough from the others. It was maddening.
The second was that they might be anywhere on earth. No matter how long they walked or in what direction, Harry saw no distinguishing features that matched any desert geography he had ever learned or heard vaguely about. The wild magic had been extraordinarily powerful; there was no way to gauge what it might or might not be able to do.
The third was that, whilst Harry’s wand kept them safely hydrated and cool during the day, and then warm at night, it could do nothing about giving them food. Harry had never mastered the Transfiguration spells that would let him turn something else into food, and of course conjuring it out of thin air was impossible. And without food, his magical strength would lapse eventually, and leave them exposed to all the dangers of heat and thirst.
Harry finally had located a projecting stone that had a shallow hole near the bottom, more like a scrape than a cave. He’d laid Draco within it and arranged Draco’s tattered robes around him so that they shielded him as much as possible before he cast the Warming Charm. Then he lay down next to Draco and turned to watch the desert. His wand was already stuck to his hand with another spell. Harry wasn’t about to let wind or wild beasts snatch it away in the night.
Draco had said nothing all day, even when Harry removed the Body-Bind on his jaw so he could drink. Now and then he stared at Harry as if Harry were demented or possibly a Dementor, but if he had opinions on the strange behavior of one of the “creatures chasing him,” he kept that to himself.
Harry stared out into the desert, squinting and then widening his eyes, sniffing as much as he could, and listening intently. There were ways to pierce an illusion by exercising the senses well enough, and he’d learned some in Auror training. On the off chance that the wild magic had created a glamour of a desert around them instead of actually transporting them to one, Harry wanted to dissipate it.
Draco finally spoke when a very real-looking moon had soared above the stone and was casting frosty light down on the sand. “You’re taking care of me.”
“Trying to, yes,” Harry said absently. Was the shadow of the dune in front of them different than it had been a moment ago? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t stop hoping. “I’m sorry I can’t get you any food.”
“But the creatures never try to take care of me,” Draco whispered. Harry heard him stirring within the confines of the Body-Bind. Without looking away from the desert and anything that might try to sneak up on him, Harry picked up his wand and cast a spell that would loosen the Body-Bind enough that Draco could be a little more comfortable. “They’re never nice to me. They never say sorry.”
“I’m not a creature.”
Draco scoffed. “Of course you are.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
They repeated the words a few times each, an exercise that Harry found almost soothing, though he knew that they were probably wasting water as they talked. At least it was an improvement over Draco screaming that Harry wanted to hurt him or running as though a nundu was after him.
“Maybe you’re not a creature,” Draco said suddenly. “They always hunt in packs or at least pairs, and I haven’t seen anything but you since we got here.”
“Where are we, anyway?” Harry rolled over and looked at Draco with interest. He hadn’t asked before because he thought it was just as likely that Draco wasn’t seeing a desert, or not the same desert, with the delusions that seemed to hover behind his eyes. But the answer to the question was at least worth checking out, as Hermione and Kingsley would no doubt have reminded him before now.
“The same desert we always are in when you chase me here,” said Draco, his voice dull and weary in a way that made Harry frown. “Dry, barren, and almost featureless except for those damn dune and a few rocks like these.” He reached out and brushed his hand against the rock arch above him, which made Harry frown further. If Draco can see the same landscape I do, why can’t he see me as a person? “This is the part of the journey I hate most, because you never let me stop to drink or rest.”
“The journey?” Harry eased himself closer, then paused when he saw the way Draco stiffened.
“From place to place,” Draco whispered. “You’re always hunting me. You’re always hurting me. It never matters to you, that I might have a life to get back to like anyone else.” He turned eyes full of fury and hatred on Harry suddenly. It took an effort for Harry to remain curled up in the sand as close as he was. “I hate you.”
Harry rubbed his shoulder absently; it felt as though some poisoned dart had stung him, though he knew that was ridiculous. Draco couldn’t help what he was saying. If anything, Harry should feel bad that he hadn’t gone after Draco before, or hadn’t asked more questions when the letters stopped coming. “I care,” he said, and decided that he might as well do some investigating, if neither of them was going to sleep. “Tell me about the life that you want to get back to. What were you doing just before the chase began?”
Draco lowered his head to the ground, closing his eyes in an obviously fake parody of someone going to sleep. “As if I would tell you that, and let you give the creatures more ways to torment me.”
“But maybe the creatures are getting bored,” Harry said. “And aren’t you tired, anyway, of this endless chase? Wouldn’t a different kind of torment at least make your life a bit more livable?”
Draco tensed, but didn’t say anything for long moments. Harry waited with some confidence. Draco had been vulnerable to absurd arguments like this in the past; he couldn’t resist the temptation to make Harry look foolish by practicing his own “Slytherin” cunning.
“You know all about it anyway,” Draco said at last. “You were the ones who chased me out of the house. You were the ones who came to me after I’d been doing something completely innocuous and started this as revenge for God knows what crime.”
Harry controlled his breathing. Maybe he was getting close to an answer, yes, but it could as easily be another of Draco’s delusions. He didn’t exactly count as a trustworthy witness after the way he’d tried to strangle Harry. “But what were you doing? I don’t know. And I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You stole his voice,” Draco whispered. “You sound like Harry, but you aren’t him. I think I should distrust you most of all.”
“I’m here to rescue you,” Harry said. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He hesitated, wondering if he should continue playing one of Draco’s creatures to build on the arguments he’d already started, and then threw caution to the winds. It was more important for Draco to believe, if he could, that he had one friend in this nightmarish world with him. “Draco, I am Harry, and I promise, I’ll do what I can to get you out of here. But I don’t understand how we got into the desert, and I’ve never seen one of the creatures chasing you. To understand, I have to know what you were doing just before the chase started, what might have caused the creatures to notice you.”
Draco shivered as if he were cold. Harry cast another Warming Charm, and scowled at the desert sky. Any other environment, except perhaps an actual icefield, would be easier to survive in.
“I was meditating on the history of my family,” Draco said, and then added, in a haughty tone, his eyes shut, “This doesn’t mean I trust you. I am bored of being chased all the time, though. Maybe you can use my own failures against me to try and torment me now.”
Harry smiled and resisted, barely, the temptation to reach out and stroke his hand across Draco’s forehead. If Draco was seeing his hand as a paw with talons or worse, then Harry would only panic him where he meant to comfort. But Draco was—well, rather cute when he acted like this. “All right. You were meditating on the history of your family. And then what happened?”
“I had got into a deep trance state that one of the books I read said was necessary to summon the ghosts of your ancestors.” Draco was speaking normally, rather than trying to whisper and make his voice sound all spectral the way he did sometimes when talking about pure-blood traditions to Harry, but Harry still felt a shiver run over his skin. This was the center of the secret of what had happened to Draco, he was certain, and therefore what had happened to the Aurors and the other victims. “I could see them lined up in front of me like portraits, and I could walk a corridor between them. I reached out and touched the face of a woman. I think she was my grandmother’s grandmother. She opened her eyes and said something to me; I can’t remember what it was. Then the whole world went shiny and dark and silvery, and I wished I was somewhere else, and the chase started.”
Harry frowned and concentrated as hard as he could on what he’d read of wild magic, but the memories were years old. The Auror trainees had studied it briefly. Their instructors didn’t think they needed to know much about it compared to Dark magic and common jinxes. Other departments in the Ministry were more likely to deal with the results of children’s accidental magic, which were the most common form of wild magic and rarely deadly. If silver light meant anything special, then Harry couldn’t remember what it was.
So perhaps the answer might lie in Draco’s other words.
But he couldn’t remember anything about a corridor of ancestors, either, or ancestors being ghosts, and though he’d studied the Malfoy line, he didn’t remember the particular name or attributes of Draco’s great-great-grandmother—
Oh.
Abruptly, Harry felt extraordinarily stupid. He’d assumed without thinking about it that Lucius’s family was the only possible source of clues, but Draco had had two parents. Perhaps he had inherited a wild magic talent from one of his Black ancestors.
It still didn’t explain the talent manifesting so late in Draco’s life, or why a ritual that should have been safe would have produced it. (And Harry knew Draco wouldn’t have chanced a ritual that wasn’t safe, no matter how desperate he was to know something about his family. After Voldemort, Draco had a prejudice against most Dark Arts that rivaled Harry’s own). But it gave him a new direction to look in.
And then he felt more stupid still.
“You wished you were somewhere else,” he said carefully.
“Yes, I just said that,” Draco said irritably. “Along with Harry’s voice, you managed to steal his capacity for not paying much attention to anything around him.”
“The way you mentioned a desert right before we appeared here.” Harry slapped himself in the forehead, then winced, because it hurt. “I’m stupid. I should have put the clues together before now. You’re transporting yourself to other places somehow, when you think about them hard enough.”
“I’m not doing it.” Draco had folded himself up into a ball, and his voice was a soft growl. “How can I be the one doing it, when the creatures are chasing me from place to place? Why wouldn’t I imagine a comfortable place and keep myself there?”
“I don’t know that yet,” Harry said, and smiled at him, because he felt more optimistic at the moment than he had since he started the case. “And I’m not sure why you see me as a creature, either. But at least I know that we can get out of the desert. You haven’t died here yet, so I think your body and mind probably cooperate to get you out of danger when there’s a large chance you’ll be permanently hurt. As long as I stay with you, then I’ll probably go along with you when you transport yourself.”
Draco folded his arms and glared at him. Harry understood. Draco had never liked being blamed for anything, even those things he acknowledged that he fully deserved to be blamed for. He would hate the idea that maybe he’d been responsible for his own plight all along, and therefore, he could have stopped it at any time.
The thing was, Harry didn’t think he really could have stopped it. The delusion about Harry, and maybe about the creatures, if they existed at all, argued that something else ran under the simple concept of wild magic that could transport someone from place to place. The Aurors had died somehow. So had the other people blinded or crippled or maddened by their exposure to Draco’s peculiar magic.
“If what you say is true,” Draco said, “then I should be able to wish myself back into Malfoy Manor.”
*
The world shifted and melted. The creature who had Harry’s voice reached out and clutched at him, and Draco ducked, shoving his face into his arm, though he knew it wouldn’t do a bit of good against those cutting claws.
But the beast didn’t scratch him. Instead, it only gently held him, and the next moment the sand had faded and they were lying on sheets that felt like silk—the familiar, perfumed silk of Malfoy Manor—against Draco’s skin.
Draco took a few moments to gasp softly, new thoughts flooding his head. He had been home before he appeared in the forest, and naked. If the creatures were really chasing him and controlled where he went, why would they have left him go home at all? He had assumed they were doing it to hold out a promise of rest and then torment him by snatching it away, but they couldn’t be both that subtle and the mindless beasts he’d been considering them all along. And why would they have clothed him in robes?
And now he was home.
With the creature that had Harry’s voice, and that seemed to understand the helpless way Draco stared at the familiar walls of his room.
“We’ll find out the truth,” it said. “Now that we’re here, with a library, we can try and locate the source of the wild magic that’s dragging you from place to place. It’s under your control, but not completely.”
“I did this,” Draco whispered. “I still did this.” Dread began to pile in on him as he wondered if any of the creatures had been other people, if he had hurt them when they ran after him.
“Not all of it.” The creature laid a claw gently on his shoulder. The face, featureless except for the teeth, leaned towards him. Draco shuddered, and it stopped moving, but the voice was still soft and caressing. “I’ll stay with you and keep you safe, Draco.”
It took Draco quite a lot of trust to believe that voice, considering the body and face it emanated from, but it had been so long since he had hope that he was willing to lean even on the shoulder of a beast.
Part 5.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-11 10:16 pm (UTC)This is very interesting~~~
*wants more*
Aza^^
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-11 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:37 am (UTC)That kindness is going to make all the difference, in the end.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-11 11:09 pm (UTC)~Mab
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 12:17 am (UTC)MOAR! :)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:38 am (UTC)Thanks for commenting.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:38 am (UTC)Draco and Harry are both confused, but they'll be closer to figuring out what's going on after Chapter 5.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 03:22 am (UTC)It must be surreal for Draco to see some creature with Harry's voice. And then even more so when he realizes that this creature has been taking care of him. But remembering that this creatures aren't exactly cute and cuddly, it's probably more creepy than surreal.
So Draco was researching his family tree? This reminds me a great deal of that one-shot you had on the dark!magic tapestry although I doubt that the intention of the 'curse' is quite so malicious. I'm still wondering if it was a Malfoy or a Black. Personally, I'm going with Malfoy since I don't think Draco would want to summon anyone from the Black line. Although the idea of it being a Black is interesting (as painfully scary as it sounds).
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:39 am (UTC)Draco is completely confused, and not in the best of moods even when he starts thinking that Harry is really there instead of the creature- something that appears in the next chapter.
And no, this is definitely not the same kind of curse as the tapestry one-shot. As to what it is? More is explained and hinted at in the next chapter.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:40 am (UTC)Draco is not going to deal with this realization well.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 10:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:40 am (UTC)The question of whether he did or not is going to have to wait for a while.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 12:27 pm (UTC)Can't wait for more.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 08:32 pm (UTC)Very interesting.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 12:41 am (UTC)Fantastic chapter!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:43 am (UTC)Yes, he can change them- but he can't really control the changes yet. So he would have to consciously decide how he's seeing the creatures and then alter them, probably, before he could change their appearance in his head.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-15 12:43 am (UTC)This is very much a hurt/comfort story, in some ways, with Draco at its center.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-18 12:48 am (UTC)“Yes, I just said that,” Draco said irritably. “Along with Harry’s voice, you managed to steal his capacity for not paying much attention to anything around him.”
I love how in-character he is despite this frightening predicament.