lomonaaeren

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Part VI. Wildest Imaginings.

Harry was so interested in the facts he was discovering about the Black family that he was not sure he would have noticed if Draco had come down and leaned against the doorway and made despairing remarks again. But he noticed when the book vanished from his hands and the house turned dark around him and he started falling.

At once Harry gripped his wand, to make sure that it would fall with him and he wouldn’t be left searching through space for it, and bent his knees, to try and absorb some of the force of the landing. Of course, when the fall had lasted what seemed like seven minutes, he began to wonder if that would make any difference. Surely a tumble this long would kill him, whether or not he was braced.

If it’s the usual type of fall. Given the lack of rushing air around him and the fact that his body never wavered to one side or another, Harry didn’t think it was.

Then he crunched down on something gritty, which sounded like sand, and rose to his feet. He had bumped down as if he had missed a step or so; the worst part was the unexpectedness of it.

Well, and the fact that I don’t know if Draco is around at all, or if he managed to teleport only me.

Harry looked around, but no light appeared. He glanced above, but there was no sun, no moon, no stars there. He frowned and pushed his glasses up his nose, then whispered, “Lumos.”

The flare of light revealed little. Beneath his feet there was, yes, black sand. In front of him appeared only darkness and more darkness. Harry tried extending a hand to either side and behind him, and the best that he could say was that he didn’t bump into anything. He frowned, baffled. At least the other places Draco had transported them were natural habitats. What was this one?

With little choice, he started walking.

*

Draco lifted his head cautiously and stared around. He was standing in a strangely lighted grove of trees. The trees were absolutely straight and had gray trunks, their limbs starting just above his head, so he could reach up and grasp them with an easy stretch of his arm. Draco did so, tentatively. Their bark was cool and dry as stone, or the black sand beneath his feet.

A moment later, he realized what was strange about the light. It shone down straight into the grove, and without flickering or changing, the way that a Muggle light bulb would look, but not a fire or a torch or a Lumos charm. And Draco blinked as a strange surge of familiarity came to him. He had been in this place before.

And yet, he was sure that he had not been in it. It was very confusing.

Still, it made as much sense as anything else had since the curse started. At least he was sure that he had not visited this place on the wild run from the creatures, and therefore there was an excellent chance that none of them were here.

Except Harry, he thought suddenly, and the surge of familiarity turned into one of loneliness. Or the creature with Harry’s voice. Please let him have come with me. I can’t—I don’t want to be without him, now. Even the idea that Harry might discover how unsure Draco was about anything, including his own identity, was better than the thought of being alone again.

He took a few cautious steps outside the grove of trees. The light moved with him, steady and unchanging, and revealed more black sand, and, ahead, two wooden chairs that sat in the middle of the sand with nothing else nearby, except a fountain of springing silvery water. Draco halted and stared hard at the carving along the edge of the basin, shining white scallops and reaching hands that echoed the hands of mermaids he had seen in paintings and books—the lovely kind who lived near Greece, not the ugly merfolk of Hogwarts’s lake.

And then he knew where he was. He didn’t know how he could have reached it, because this place had never existed, but he knew where he was.

It was a land he had once dreamed up for himself after a long fever when he was six. He’d had to spend two entire weeks in bed, and in desperation, he’d imagined a place that was strange and wonderful, a combination of his fever dreams and the intense desire to be somewhere other than his room.

He had used Muggle lighting because he had seen it in a Pensieve memory his father showed him and it seemed far more strange, and thus interesting, than any charm or fire he had ever seen. And chairs in the middles of dark deserts were strange, and so was a light that followed him, and so were fountains covered with dust and yet running forever instead of ruined.

Draco sat in one of the chairs and nodded. Yes, it felt like the chairs that had stood in his nursery when he was a child. He had modeled the chairs of his imaginary land after those, because he didn’t know what else a good seat should feel like.

He looked around in wonder. How had it come here? If his mind had constructed a complicated delusion, that was one thing, but Harry had seemed to see and hear most of the same things he had when they were in the forest and the desert, minus the creatures. So at least some of the time, his surroundings could be real to other people, too.

And then his smile froze on his face as other memories returned to him. The next moment, he had leaped to his feet and started running away from the chairs, in the direction that his mind marked “north.” Yes, yes, there was a road, white and straight, streaming out into the distance across the sand. Draco pounded along it, his footsteps ringing as if he ran on Muggle cement.

There were other parts of the land that he had created, too. Things pulled from the fever dreams that had danced around him. Draco had imagined that he’d walked into the land and his parents wanted to follow him, but he didn’t feel like seeing them, because every time he did they had another nasty potion or another bit of bad news to feed him. So he had invented guardians of the land, and of him, that would keep his parents out.

Things that made the creatures chasing him look like kittens.

If Harry was here, and he ran into them alone, Draco knew he would die. They had been designed to be deadly to anyone but Draco, after all.

Gasping with the urgency of his quest, and dimly grateful that he had designed the air of the place to be vaguely sweet-smelling and utterly breathable to his lungs no matter how fast they labored, Draco ran on.

*

Harry lifted his head and quickened his pace. He had walked through the darkness with no change for so long that he had begun to wonder if he was dreaming. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep over one of the books of Black family history and imagined tumbling into sleep, which his mind had turned into a fall into this place.

But the book hadn’t been that boring, and Harry had learned a good rule in the Aurors: when weird things began to happen around you, assume they were going to continue until you received a definite stopping point. Preferably the point where you managed to lock the Dark wizard up in his or her cell.

And now, finally, his patience had paid off, and something had appeared ahead. It looked like a wall, or perhaps the corner of an enormous stone block. Harry didn’t care if it was the local equivalent of Azkaban. A building meant people…somewhere.

Perhaps somewhere far away, he had to admit, as he got closer, his steps making a regular crunching noise on the sand, and still no one came around the corner or called out. And now he could see that the wall resembled the corner of an enormous stone block much more than it resembled the wall of a building. He slowed and studied it, and could make out no decorations, no place to scramble over the wall, no door. He halted and tapped his wand against his leg, making the light from the Lumos charm bounce oddly.

You have to make a concerted effort to be as boring as this, he thought, and decided on a slow navigation around the building, first right and then left. He’d return to the corner after five minutes of walking each time. With his luck, it was the local equivalent of Azkaban, and they assumed everyone walking around outside was an escaped prisoner.

Counting heartbeats under his breath, he struck to the right, what might be the northeast, around the corner. He hadn’t reached one hundred twenty when he saw the end of the wall, and began to hurry towards it, smiling to himself. He shouldn’t have panicked before thinking things out. Of course walls had to have an end sometime. He had fallen into an unnatural place, but it still had air and gravity, and that meant a limit to its strangeness.

And then the nightmare came around the wall, and he had to change his mind.

It was a whirling mess of forms, sliding into and out of each other: grasping spider legs, rattling human skulls, fringed antennae that looked as if they belonged to monstrous beetles, furred and feathered wings that flapped out of tune with one another, lurching elephant legs. And in the center of it all was a single, gaping, toothed mouth that screamed and screamed.

At the first scream, Harry could feel some of his thoughts die. Suddenly there were holes in his memory, and it was as if he were tumbling through space again, the way he had when he first appeared here, but inside his skull. He stumbled to his knees, his hands over his ears. It didn’t matter, as he found when the creature screeched again; it tore more holes in his brain. He began to cry in pain and terror. Blood slicked his fingers, creeping from his eardrums. He knew there was something he was supposed to be doing at the moment, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

A different voice yelled something. Harry cringed. With his luck, it would be another one of the creatures.

Much worse than Azkaban, he thought, but he couldn’t remember what Azkaban was, and as the creature screamed again, it seemed unlikely he would have to.

*

Draco heard the scream and shouted at the creature. It turned one sliding collection of heads towards him and called back, mouths dropping open. Harry, caught in the sand before it, writhed.

Draco swore under his breath. He had designed the creatures—imagined them—so that if his mother and father heard them, they would forget all about medicinal potions and run away as fast as they could. Which was fine, but he hadn’t thought about them destroying his best friend’s brain at the time. He himself suffered no damage from the cries.

God knows what they’re doing to Harry, he thought. Maybe he’s already forgotten me. He sped up further, grateful that at least the creature was watching him now and not moving forwards to eat Harry. And it had only screamed three times that he heard. Maybe that was enough to leave some tattered shreds of Harry’s brain that could recover.

He came to a stop behind Harry and put his hands on Harry’s shoulders. “He’s with me,” he said to the creature. Screamers, he’d called them, needing no other name for them, like the child he was. The words sounded stupid, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. The scream couldn’t harm him, but it had still rattled him. He’d imagined that the sound would be worse than anything he’d ever heard, but there was a difference between deciding that and hearing it.

The creature stared at him, the nearest skull hanging on a wire and shaking slowly back and forth. For the first time, Draco felt his gut tighten in fear for himself as well as Harry. What if it didn’t accept his authority? Yes, so far this place had resembled the one he had dreamed up, but the curse would probably choose now to introduce a new exception.

However, the creature lowered the skull and scooped up sand in its empty jaws, then dribbled it out in a steady stream. Then it turned and flowed, stepped, danced, and lumbered back behind the stone wall. Draco closed his eyes in relief. He’d imagined the creatures capable of understanding, even though they only made screams and couldn’t talk, and that gesture of scooping sand was one they used to show agreement.

Shaking his head over what a bloodthirsty child he’d been, Draco crouched next to Harry and ran a tender hand over his face. Harry, shivering and sweating, opened his eyes suddenly. Draco tensed when he saw the pain in them and touched Harry’s ears. Yes, there was blood coming from them, but the real damage would be to his mind, he knew.

“Harry?” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Can you remember me?” He hesitated, then added, “Do you remember what you were studying before I snatched you away?” He thought he remembered that the creature’s screams would destroy more recent memories first.

*

Harry leaned against Draco and closed his eyes for a moment. God, his head hurt so much, and tattered fragments of memories were whirling past him. For a few minutes, he’d been unable to remember who Ron and Hermione were, and though he knew Hogwarts’s name, he couldn’t place it.

But those wounds were already healing themselves, he thought. At least, Draco’s words made sense to him, and after some moments of concentration that made his head pound, he could see the words on the page of Black family history.

“Yes, I think so,” he whispered. His throat was dry.

Draco immediately stroked his hair and smiled at him. Harry damned himself for noticing when Draco was still so hurt and needed help, but it felt bloody fantastic. “That’s a good sign,” Draco said. Harry didn’t think there was a reason for him to keep his voice that soft, but he did anyway, and Harry’s ears were grateful for it. “What were you studying?”

“Something about—Black talents changing,” Harry said, struggling to recall the words. He had been excited about them, confident they pertained to Draco’s problem in some way, but he was no longer perfectly sure how. “About how the Black family talent is change, and that manifests through various members of the family in various ways.”

Draco blinked and shook his head slowly. Harry thought he was thinking hard, but a moment later, he said, “That doesn’t make much sense. Surely I would be able to change my perception of you as a creature if—”

And his voice dried up.

“What?” Harry asked him.

“I’m seeing you as a person,” Draco said. “Here. I didn’t even realize until now—I was so concerned that I couldn’t really notice you.” He laughed a little and ran his fingers through Harry’s hair again. “But when we go back to the Manor, I’ll probably see you the same as ever.” His fingers clenched down.

Harry lifted his hands and curled his fingers around Draco’s, shaking his head slightly. His mind had begun to stop hurting; he felt as if he had a brain and not soup inside his skull again. And now the brain was functioning, and he had put several pieces together with that rapidity he had used to figure out the Ice-Cold Butcher’s plan to kill all the Muggles in Britain.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

Draco opened his mouth, blinked, then smiled wryly. “That’s right. If I wish too hard, then I might move us to another place again, right?”

“That’s right,” Harry said, though it wasn’t the main reason. He spent a moment working out the connections and making sure the pieces fit.

And they did. They did. Harry chuckled with pleasure. He suspected this was as close as he would ever come to feeling the happiness that Hermione did in research.

“What?” Draco demanded.

Harry grasped Draco’s hands more strongly and let the grasp draw him to his feet. “I understand now,” he said. “I looked at your family history, and your great-great-grandmother first, just on the chance that your first memory was clear after all. And I couldn’t understand, because the book was very clear that she was a Metamorphmagus, and even if she meant to give you that as a gift, it didn’t fit with what was happening to you.” He leaned forwards and stared into Draco’s eyes. “But then I thought about your new memory, about what she said to you.”

Draco blinked. “I don’t know if that memory’s clear either, Harry,” he said, with so much bitterness in his voice that Harry fought back the impulse to hug him. “My mind’s—not as good these days as it used to be.” He smiled, or tried to, but he ended up looking away quickly.

“May you bear what I have borne, but in greater power as befits your nature, and changing to suit your needs,” Harry whispered. “Changing, Draco. That’s the key, don’t you see?”

Draco stared back at him, and his face had become stubborn and hostile, the way it used to look when Harry tried to take up Ron’s argument that the Chudley Cannons were really the best team in the league, just victims of a decades-long run of bad luck. “No.”

“You’re like a Metamorphmagus,” Harry said triumphantly. “But instead of changing your appearance, you’re changing the places around you, and the appearance of other people.”

Draco’s mouth fell open. Then he shut it with a click and shot a surreptitious look over his shoulder. Harry found himself smiling, and he didn’t even care that it was probably with open adoration now. Draco was worried about someone noticing that he had acted undignified, even here. It was adorable beyond words.

“But I don’t understand,” Draco said. “Why did it manifest like that?”

“Greater power,” Harry said. “What if she sensed that you didn’t really think of yourself as a Black, and wanted to give you something that would make you feel like one? Metamorphmagery is definitely the most common talent in the Black line, so you would be more like your ancestors if you had it. But you weren’t born with it, and the book did mention that its nature tends to alter when it appears so late in life. So you haven’t really been moving from place to place after all. You’ve been changing the place around you.” He gripped Draco’s shoulders tightly and swung him around in his excitement.

“Then the creatures—” Draco stammered.

“You changed the appearance of them, too,” Harry said. “For whatever reason, you imagined that these places should be that way: wild and dangerous and full of enemies. But whilst you could bring others into the place, you couldn’t control their perceptions like your own. They didn’t think that the wild places should be full of enemies, so they didn’t see the creatures. But the other dangers were real.” He sobered as he thought about the way that the other Aurors and the people in various parts of Britain must have died. Some would have perished of hunger and thirst, wandering in the wilderness; others would have been stung by insects, bitten by venomous snakes, or caught by the magical creatures native to the jungles or deserts or forests that Draco imagined. Others would have walked over cliffs that only existed for a short time. And of course madness would be a common result of experiences like that. Harry was amazed that Draco was still sane, really.

But that’s because he’s so strong, Harry thought, and stifled the temptation to reach out and stroke Draco’s hair.

“Why did I go on imagining people that way, though?” Draco’s face was troubled. Harry wondered if he was thinking along the same lines. “Why not only in one place? I can understand seeing those creatures when I returned to that first place a second time, but not—bringing them with me.”

“Your talent changed in response to your wishes,” Harry said simply. “And, here, your wild imaginings.” He gestured at the black sand and the stone wall. “If you became convinced enough that the creatures were chasing you through one place and had the ability to travel with you, then the perceptions would have followed you. And maybe some of the time, those creatures were other people, and maybe some of the time they were imaginary.”

“I understand now,” Draco whispered. “When I first appeared in the forest where I met you, I was naked, but then I was in robes again. I must have decided I’d be safer in robes than running around prey to every thorn.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Which doesn’t tell me what I do next.”

“You imagine us back in Malfoy Manor,” Harry said, and rested his hands on Draco’s shoulders. “But the ideal Malfoy Manor, one with all the food and house-elves and water and research books we need. And you concentrate hard on imagining me as myself, and not a creature. I want you to see me.”

Draco stared at him for a moment, and then an odd smile flickered across his mouth. “Do you?” he murmured.

Harry glanced off to the side and said, “Concentrate, Draco.”

But still the black sand and darkness lingered around them, and Draco asked, “But did I kill those people? And what limit does this power have? It must have some kind of limit. Where am I, really? What’s the reality underneath all this changing and shifting?”

“We can answer that later,” Harry said. “I’ve gone as far as I can, and my head hurts.” He gave Draco his best pleading look.

Draco gripped his shoulders in return, nodded slowly, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Harry shut his eyes and leaned trustingly on Draco as the strange world around them dissolved.

Part 7.