lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2010-07-12 04:53 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2010-07-12 04:53 pm
Chapter Three of 'Chosen Chains'- Where Light and Shadow End (2/2)
This chapter has been split in two for length reasons. Don't start reading here.
“This? You call this a likely candidate?”
Potter nodded and didn’t turn around, which somewhat disappointed Draco. He would have thought his question deserving of at least some of the anger Potter had shown in front of Weasley and Granger.
But Potter seemed more self-contained today in general. He had met Draco in front of the school at nine, listened to his tale of the meeting with Covington without a flicker of his eyebrows, nodded, and then led the way to the cave he had said might be the place where sun and shadow ended.
“I don’t call it a likely candidate.” Potter’s voice was muffled as he drove further into the small cave—if you could call it a cave. Draco would have called it a scratch in the side of a hill. “I call it a place we have to investigate, just in case. After all, both sun and shadow end here when the sunlight runs out.”
“But the riddle spoke as though sun and shadow were separate,” Draco said, lounging against the entrance of the cave with his arms folded. He was more than willing to let Potter be the dirty one. “Not both ending because one ends.”
“How do we know that?’ Potter looked over his shoulder, tossing dust out of his hair. For some reason, Draco’s mouth went dry, and he would have frowned in confusion had he been by himself. He usually preferred scrupulously clean partners. He had to put this eccentricity aside in his brain for his own contemplation, later. “Remember, these are portraits, and we didn’t know the originals so well that we can say what they intended with such a simple riddle.”
“I knew Severus that well,” Draco said simply, concealing his irritation that Potter had been the one to remind him about the limitations of portraits instead of the other way around. “I’m sure that’s what it means.”
“How did you come to know him?” Potter sat back against the wall of the cave and cast a spell that created a ball of glowing pink light which ventured further in. Draco opened his mouth to ask what that was for, and then closed it again. Of course. Potter wanted to see if he could trigger the traps that Dumbledore and Severus had spoken of.
“When we were running from the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters,” Draco said. “He spoke of many different things, and while he never mentioned the riddles or the wards, I got a good glimpse of how his mind worked.”
Potter’s mouth curved to the side in an ugly sneer. “What, Malfoy, you’re still afraid of saying Voldemort?”
Draco let the words sail past his ear, and then responded calmly, “I respect the power of his name, yes.”
“Why?” Potter scrambled to his feet, hands planted against the cave wall as if he would hurl himself off it in Draco’s direction. Draco wondered whether there was something special behind this, or whether Potter had simply gone without his daily dose of anger and needed it now. “He isn’t someone you need to respect.”
“It’s not about him,” Draco said. “It’s about what that name meant to me for two years, the absolute dread it stirred up in me, the fear that he would kill my parents. I won’t name him for the same reason that you don’t usually talk about the subjects of your nightmares.”
Potter’s jaw went slack while he stared at Draco. Draco couldn’t help thinking it was more attractive clenched.
Then Potter said, “Yeah. I understand that,” and turned away, throwing a few more balls of light into the cave’s interior.
Draco eyed his back in silence, let him waste his time a little more, and then said, “So. Why did you refuse to be Sorted into Slytherin?”
Potter went still and tilted his head as if listening to a far-off call. Then he said, “I should have known one of them would betray me further.”
Draco paused, then pressed on. “I asked you a question.”
“You hardly need to ask, do you?” Potter said, and then waved his wand. A flare of yellow light illuminated the cave to the furthest corner, and another incantation should have made any wards present glow. Nothing happened. Draco nodded. He had argued from the beginning that this cave couldn’t be the place. “You were there. You’d taunted the first person who’d ever been friendly to me, and you’d acted as though you were better, superior. And Hagrid told me about Voldemort. Of course I wasn’t going to go into your House, and his.”
Draco tapped his fingers against his arm. He had expected some more complex motivation than a childish grudge, or a childish fear.
Then he wanted to laugh. Severus would say that you’ve been influenced too much by knowledge of his House affiliation. It doesn’t matter that he could have Sorted Slytherin. He didn’t actually become one.
“Ah,” Draco said. “And what did you argue with your friends about?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Potter said in a friendly voice. “It’s not here. Why don’t we try the Room of Requirement?”
*
Harry couldn’t understand the way Malfoy was leaning on him.
Well, not literally on him. That would have been stupid. Harry would have shrugged, or made his skin hot with his magic, and Malfoy would have fallen to the ground or howled the way Ron had when Harry burned his hand the other day, and that would have been the end of it.
But he was asking him questions and then studying him as if Harry was one of the experimental potions he had talked about brewing. Whether he got an answer or not, he had a habit of nodding solemnly. Harry had the impression that he was absorbing information Harry gave him through his silences, his eyes, the movement of his hands. He didn’t actually need to speak for Malfoy to know him.
And he hadn’t stopped when they left the cave—where Harry had imagined that his questions were the result of boredom—and moved to the Room of Requirement. Harry was currently prowling up and down before the door, trying to imagine the kind of place that Snape and Dumbledore might have hidden the damn key. Malfoy leaned against the wall behind him and asked his infuriating questions.
“Do you ever regret asking the Hat not to put you in Slytherin?”
“How can I, when it would have meant more contact with you?” Harry closed his eyes and tried as hard as he could to remember all the random remarks Dumbledore had made to him over the years, especially during his sixth year. On the other hand, he also had to keep in mind that the riddle demanded a place where sun and shadow ended.
“That’s not a compelling reason,” Malfoy said, as if he were a philosopher instead of a Potions master. “You couldn’t know at the time what more contact with me might have meant. You might have ended up a brilliant researcher. You could have defeated the Dark Lord more easily by being involved with the children of his inner circle.”
“Or I could have been corrupted by you, and by now we’d all be serving him,” Harry said, and fixed an image in his mind. It was based on the first thing Dumbledore had ever said to him about the Room, so he hoped that it might have more usefulness than some of the other random projections. He started stalking up and down the corridor. One.
“Which could have its usefulness,” Malfoy said in the same smooth, unruffled tone.
“Yes,” Harry agreed. “For one thing, you might have been exiled to the other side of the world to marry a pure-blood bride in India or something. And we wouldn’t have to be here solving stupid riddles.” Two.
Malfoy didn’t speak again, though Harry could feel that burning stare on the back of his head. He ignored it. Three.
The door appeared, a tiny, low thing with an arched frame and a brass handle. Harry shook his head—he couldn’t guess what the room would look like from the outside only based on the door—and grabbed the handle. A tingling bolt of energy zipped up his arm, which made him hope that there was considerable magic behind the wood.
He opened it.
The room inside was dim, with sunlight and shadow both filtering through the windows and then halting precisely short of the center of the chamber. Harry heard a menacing click and rustle there, and licked his lips. Maybe this was the fight to the death that Dumbledore and Snape had been talking about. He drew his wand and started to move forwards.
Malfoy grabbed his arm, squeezing down. Harry gasped and stood still, his eyes half-shutting despite himself. The power behind his hand said that Malfoy didn’t care how much he hurt Harry, or thought he could take it.
It had been so long since Harry experienced those things at the hands of someone he didn’t pay. In fact, right now he couldn’t remember if he’d ever experienced them just like that. His knees weakened and a dark purple cloak seemed to cross over his vision. He swayed and tried to fall.
“Hold still, Potter,” Malfoy snarled in his ear, and Harry was more than happy to obey. “What are those things? Where did you bring us?”
Harry dragged in a shivering breath and managed, from a great distance, to remind himself that he couldn’t do this, couldn’t give in and treat Malfoy like someone who had agreed to help him. Malfoy might have done this accidentally, but he wasn’t even as knowledgeable as Bradley, who had never understood why Harry required this. Harry had to be normal, had to snatch the moment of relief and not expect any more of it.
He’d had a lot of practice at that, fortunately. So his voice was calm when he said, “Dumbledore mentioned the Room of Requirement once, when he first talked about it, as a place where he’d found a lot of chamber pots when he really needed them.”
Malfoy was silent. Harry knew it was the silence of disbelief, and that helped him to move a bit further away from the private meaning of the hand on his arm and the snarled orders in his ear. He broke free and listened. There was a menacing gurgle of water from the center of the room, and a noise like a jug slowly tipping over.
“So…” Malfoy said.
“So I brought us to a room that combined that memory and the answer to the riddle.” Harry took a step forwards and turned his head. “It’s as likely a hiding place as any other. Are you coming?”
“No,” Malfoy said flatly. “It can’t be here. There’s no way that anyone could be expected to hit on the right combination of needs, and the riddles are supposed to be difficult to solve, not impossible.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Do you have any better idea right now? One that doesn’t involve walking through the Forbidden Forest for months and hoping to bump into the key? I don’t know about you, but I do have a life to get back to.” He moved another step forwards. The gurgling noise repeated.
Malfoy clamped his hand down so hard that Harry knew there would be bruises left. That triggered his other set of reflexes, to fight, and he twisted his arm, forcing Malfoy to let go. “What are those things?”
Harry started to answer, but one of the “things” flailed into the light and showed well enough what it was.
It had a squat, brass body and a mouth in the middle of it accented with long pointed teeth and an equally long and equally pointed tongue. It stuck the tongue out at them, wriggled it, and then launched itself into the air.
Harry swung his wand and cast a curse that sliced through the body of the thing. It fell at his feet, squirming, dying, tongue cut by the teeth. Both faded away when it “died” and left an ordinary object lying there.
“Predatory chamber pots,” Malfoy said. “Bloody predatory chamber pots.”
Two more of them flew through the air, and Harry swirled his wand and created a rope of fire that tugged them into each other and boiled them both into a sticky mass of metal. As it crashed to the floor, Malfoy propelled Harry backwards and slammed the door. They heard several angry thumps against the door before it vanished.
“That might have been our chance, you fucker,” Harry said when he could get his breath. It was a while since he had fought for his life, though dealing with his magic and retaining his Auror training had helped. He moved further away from Malfoy, conscious of what might happen if he stayed close, and flicked sweat from his forehead.
“It wasn’t,” Malfoy said flatly. “Dumbledore was strange, yes, and might expect people to guess what he meant based on nothing, but Severus was logical and would have tempered his oddities. The ‘where sun and shadow end’ has to mean something else.”
“Fine.” Harry turned away and started pacing the corridor so that he wouldn’t have to look at Malfoy. “What would you suggest? What can block both sunlight and shadow? Walls, stone, something that eats both?”
“Or a place where they naturally run out.” Malfoy had retreated to his cool tone again. “I told you, I think the use of the phrase ‘end’ rather than ‘stop’ significant.”
“If it was a place where they naturally ran out, then I’d think the riddle would have used ‘stop,’” Harry pointed out, and had the rare pleasure of seeing Malfoy look flustered.
“What suggestions do you have, then?” Malfoy folded his arms and tilted his head forwards as though granting Harry the nod that began a duel.
Harry smiled back. He had reason to know that his smiles were unnerving, but to his disappointment, Malfoy did nothing more than shake his head as if slightly irritated. “I suggest that we think about what can end light,” Harry said. “Darkness, obviously. Night. But what about a place?”
“A spell that imitates the effects of darkness or night,” Malfoy said, a bit of the ice melting from his features as he became interested in the conversation. Harry wondered for a moment if that was all it would have taken when they were boys to become friends with him, and then snorted. Malfoy had been interested in distinctly different things at that point. “Or a potion. Or a curse.”
Harry bit his tongue on the temptation to say that a spell and a curse were basically the same thing in this scenario. Malfoy was trying to help, although he was largely incompetent at cooperating with anyone. “Or something within the place itself, some quality that acts like a spell or a potion. Maybe somewhere tilted, with a line of earth or trees that naturally interrupts it, like the horizon interrupting sunset?” Then Harry paused and frowned. “But a place like that would cast a long shadow.”
“Yes,” Malfoy said, with a shallow nod, and began to pace back and forth, every line of his body bent in ferocious thought. “But the thought of a place that stops light by its nature is a good one.”
Harry closed his eyes. It felt as though the answer ought to be obvious, especially if they could restrict themselves to looking inside Hogwarts’s grounds, but—
Then he opened his eyes and smiled.
Malfoy noticed the smile, somehow, though as far as Harry could tell, his head had been turned away at the time. He whipped around and went still, eyes blazing as though he could will Harry to tell him what he’d just thought of.
Harry felt a sharp tingle streak through his legs, as though someone had hit him in the back of his knees. Malfoy couldn’t compel him with a gaze, no, but with words—
Then Harry put aside that thought as too ludicrous to consider, and said softly, “The lake.”
*
Draco swallowed the last of the potion that he’d brewed that morning and held the next vial out to Potter. Potter, standing on the shore and staring at the water as if hypnotized, didn’t notice. Draco had to nudge him sharply in the ribs to get him to turn around.
Potter leaped and whirled as he did so, coming down on his feet like a startled cat. His eyes shone with a dim reflection of the coruscating green flame that surrounded his body as it had on the first day they were here. Draco eyed it in appreciation and held out the vial, wondering if he would feel heat as his hand approached the fire.
To his disappointment, the fire vanished before he could touch it. Potter inclined his head, took the potion, and examined it for a moment, murmuring a charm, before he drank. Testing for the presence of poison, Draco assumed.
“This will help us breathe under the water?” Potter asked when he finished. He acted as if he would toss the glass vial aside, but Draco rescued it with a quick motion of his arm. Potter returned his glare with interest. It was as if the brief moment of calm and joining thoughts yesterday when they had worked out the solution to the riddle had never happened.
Oddly, Draco found himself wanting to hold both that brief space of time and Potter’s gaze. The air between them felt charged the way it did when lightning was about to strike. Potter’s breathing quickened, and the flames appeared on his shoulders again. Draco took a step forwards, not sure what would happen, but willing to take the risk. He took a greater chance every time he approached his sentient potion, after all.
Then Potter abruptly snapped his head to the side, breaking the connection, and said, “Well?”
Draco sighed. The circumstances would have been easier without the dancing, leaping connection he and Potter shared, as they would have been easier without the slippery Covington. She had invited him to dinner again last night and offered him all sorts of vague promises and threats that it would be child’s play for the Ministry to deny later.
“Yes, it will,” he said. “It’s more reliable than gillyweed, and will leave us able to talk and fight.”
Potter nodded, then leaped into the water as though the surface had taunted him. Draco frowned and followed, after casting one more spell on himself that would keep his robes dry. It was Potter’s fault if he got his clothing wet.
When Draco was beneath the surface, he had to concentrate and press down on his chest to force his lungs to release their trapped air. Then water rushed in his mouth instead, an unpleasant sensation he had never cared for. He grew used to it after a few breaths and looked around for Potter.
Potter had a flushed face, as if he had fought his own battle over the sensation of water-breathing and barely conquered. He had also shed his robes and was folding them into a tight packet that he tossed back onto the shore. Beneath, he wore only a light pair of trousers that presumably wouldn’t interfere with his swimming.
Draco eyed him in appreciation, at least when Potter had his head turned away and couldn’t notice. Potter’s chest was covered with a snaking tracery of scars that mostly seemed to spiral down from his shoulders and collect in the center of his chest. They intrigued Draco. He would have recognized the marks of most cutting spells and whips, and these resembled none of them. If he had to hazard a guess, he would have said they were most similar to the marks of acid on a test piece of parchment.
“Let’s go,” Potter said gruffly, facing Draco again. He caught his eye only briefly, frowned at whatever he saw there, and then dived. Draco swam close behind him, casting Lumos on his wand as they left both light and shadow behind.
The water closed in, constant pressure, the feeling of blankets entangled about one’s limbs. Draco drew his breath in slowly and let it out as slowly. He could swim well, at his father’s insistence, but he had never before gone this deep.
Potter, the git, seemed utterly at home, and it took Draco long moments to remember that he had been here before, when he had to rescue Weasley from the lake in their fourth year.
Determined to show that he could swim as well as Potter could, Draco drew up beside him. The only thing he received for his trouble was a single impatient glance. Potter started to open his mouth. Draco assumed it was to scold, and braced himself for insults.
The trap struck then.
The water around them glittered, and Draco turned his head to pursue the glittering. The whole point of the riddle was supposed to be that there was no light down this far, after all. But it continued to move and gleam, and then he saw the lake itself form into enormous, heaving creatures, with coil after liquid coil.
Draco swore and reached for his wand, but one loop of body had already reached out and bound his arms to his sides. He flexed his fingers once, then clenched his right hand down so that he wouldn’t drop his wand into the depths of the lake. With one weapon rendered useless, he would simply have to try others. His left hand was close to a pocket. He scrabbled at it with his fingers, managing to pry it open.
Movement again caught his eye, and Draco looked up.
Potter was dancing in the water, moving as if in a play, opposite an enormous silvery-blue serpent made of water. The serpent swayed its head back and forth, eyes focused only on Potter. Draco stared. He knew Potter was creating a distraction, but he wasn’t sure how he was doing it.
Then Draco’s ears caught up with his brain. The potion he had chosen was one that would allow him and Potter to speak beneath the water so that their spells and warnings wouldn’t turn into meaningless bubbles, but apparently it was also good for other things.
Such as conveying the sibilant words of Parseltongue.
Draco floated in the motionless coils of the beast holding him, feeling as trapped and drugged as it apparently was, and watched.
*
Harry had felt a smile break across his face when he saw the trap. Yes, the snakes were formidable opponents and there was no reason to assume that he would be able to communicate with them as he could with normal snakes, or control them, but he had smiled anyway.
This was a place that he could use his magic, and thus use up some of the power racing and battering against the limits of his body.
“I am master here,” he told the serpent that had lashed towards him, and it had hesitated long enough that he could continue. “Do you doubt it? Could the ones who made you and set you here speak to you as I can? Could they make their wills known in your own tongue? Bow down to me. It is what you wish to do.”
The snake whipped its tail in a circle, then slowly edged towards him, head dipping up and down as though it was examining his hands for signs of food. Harry laughed and kept up the stream of Parseltongue, knowing that he couldn’t expect to control a magical creature right away with a command so simple.
“Has no one ever come to see you since they set you here? Have they not enchanted you, charmed you, thanked you for your service?” He backed up in the water, floating down with small waves of his hands, not daring to take his eyes off the serpent in case it suddenly changed direction. He wondered where Malfoy was, but had no time to contemplate. This was his task, ensuring the snakes didn’t attack them, and Malfoy would have to handle himself for the moment.
The serpent never responded, but continued to dance opposite him, slowly settling into a regular pattern. Harry propelled himself sideways, then down, then up again, letting the movement of the water around him join in the pattern. The words, too, resumed their own pattern, so soft and regular that Harry wondered if anyone hearing the Parseltongue from the outside could isolate the individual words.
“Yes, it’s better when you have someone to speak to you. Someone who cares for you as a creature, someone who will see you as more than a guard. Someone to be your master and cradle you in words that hiss. Yes, it’s better when you have someone to speak to you…”
Harry repeated himself until he knew his throat would be sore if he was speaking English, and twisted to the side slowly. He spotted Malfoy, caught in the coils of another serpent. Like the first one, it was bobbing its head in time to Harry’s words, watching him.
Harry licked his lips. He couldn’t keep this up forever, and so far the snakes hadn’t shown any intent to attack. He would just have to hope that his control was strong enough over them for what he needed to do next.
“Down. Leave us.”
The snakes paused, their heads slowly curving to the side and then staying poised. The one in front of Harry swam closer to him, and he saw the coils forming again, glistening like Mrs. Weasley’s ice cream.
“Leave us,” Harry said sharply. “If you wish me not to tire of your company and never to speak to you again, leave us.”
The snakes remained still for long moments more. Harry could feel them all but reconsidering what he had said to them, if magical creatures formed of water could be said to consider anything. He had no idea what would happen next, and would have held his breath if he thought it would do any good.
Then the snake unwrapped from Malfoy and passed into the depths of the lake like a wave running parallel. The snake in front of Harry followed it, with one mournful glance from large crystalline eyes as though to say that he hadn’t had to scold it like that to get it to leave. Harry shook his head and turned to Malfoy.
“The key to the riddle ought to be around here somewhere,” he said. “Where would you suggest looking?”
*
Draco stared at Potter for long, intense moments without moving. He knew he owed his life to Potter’s quick thinking—and the coincidence of Severus and Dumbledore setting snakes as guards when Potter could speak Parseltongue—but that was nothing unusual. He owed life-debts to Potter from the war, still.
No, what he wanted to contemplate was the fact that Potter had come through the battle and yet looked completely calm, as though this was an everyday occurrence for him. His magic didn’t boil the water around him. He floated in place without a sign of undue agitation. Draco wondered whether fighting for his life was an outlet for his anger, and why it would be so. Could his anger be connected to his magic alone?
“Where do you think it is, Malfoy?”
At Potter’s languidly patient question, Draco forced himself back into motion. Potter’s face was flushed now, his hands clenched as though he wanted to beat Draco for staying silent. They would lose or at least waste time if they argued now.
Draco turned to study the water where the serpents had been hovering. It made no sense that they had attacked them at this point in the lake unless the secret they guarded was close at hand, and Draco didn’t think they had to destroy the serpents to find it, no matter what Dumbledore had said about a fight to the death. Such guardians as those could only be driven away for a time, not destroyed.
Another glitter caught his eye, this time like light flashing off a diamond. Draco smiled grimly, held his wand up, and performed the Summoning Charm.
The ring that tumbled towards him through the water glowed only with magical light; being in the lake for years had tarnished it. Draco recognized it, though. Severus had worn the ring a few times when he gave private lectures to the Slytherins, mostly to fill them with curiosity and dread about what it might mean.
The dark stone on the top still twisted. Draco wrenched it to the side and shook it. A tiny bubble floated out, enclosing a piece of magically protected parchment. Draco smiled and reached inside the cavity the stone had covered, and a second bubble came to hand, cradling a smaller twist of paper.
“One of these will be a word or words to unlock the wards,” he told Potter. “The other will be the next riddle.”
Potter nodded slowly. “I never would have thought of opening the ring,” he admitted. “You’re smarter than you look, Malfoy.”
For a moment, just a moment, the look on his face was open admiration, the flush on his cheeks possible to take as symptomatic of something other than anger.
Draco experienced a flash of a vision, not dissimilar from the ones he received when he came up with a new potion. This one, though, showed not a list of ingredients, an altered recipe, or a finished potion, but Potter kneeling at his feet, staring up at him with that same expression. His hands were behind his back as if bound there, and his magic crackled and danced around him, kept within strict limits, on Draco’s orders alone.
He turned his gaze to the side and kept it there for a moment, hoping Potter had not noticed the change in his expression. “I knew this ring from the time that Severus wore it,” he said shortly. “Come.” He swam towards the surface.
Potter followed him, but slowly. Draco almost wondered, later, if he’d had a premonition of his best friends and Covington waiting for them by the shore of the lake.
“This? You call this a likely candidate?”
Potter nodded and didn’t turn around, which somewhat disappointed Draco. He would have thought his question deserving of at least some of the anger Potter had shown in front of Weasley and Granger.
But Potter seemed more self-contained today in general. He had met Draco in front of the school at nine, listened to his tale of the meeting with Covington without a flicker of his eyebrows, nodded, and then led the way to the cave he had said might be the place where sun and shadow ended.
“I don’t call it a likely candidate.” Potter’s voice was muffled as he drove further into the small cave—if you could call it a cave. Draco would have called it a scratch in the side of a hill. “I call it a place we have to investigate, just in case. After all, both sun and shadow end here when the sunlight runs out.”
“But the riddle spoke as though sun and shadow were separate,” Draco said, lounging against the entrance of the cave with his arms folded. He was more than willing to let Potter be the dirty one. “Not both ending because one ends.”
“How do we know that?’ Potter looked over his shoulder, tossing dust out of his hair. For some reason, Draco’s mouth went dry, and he would have frowned in confusion had he been by himself. He usually preferred scrupulously clean partners. He had to put this eccentricity aside in his brain for his own contemplation, later. “Remember, these are portraits, and we didn’t know the originals so well that we can say what they intended with such a simple riddle.”
“I knew Severus that well,” Draco said simply, concealing his irritation that Potter had been the one to remind him about the limitations of portraits instead of the other way around. “I’m sure that’s what it means.”
“How did you come to know him?” Potter sat back against the wall of the cave and cast a spell that created a ball of glowing pink light which ventured further in. Draco opened his mouth to ask what that was for, and then closed it again. Of course. Potter wanted to see if he could trigger the traps that Dumbledore and Severus had spoken of.
“When we were running from the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters,” Draco said. “He spoke of many different things, and while he never mentioned the riddles or the wards, I got a good glimpse of how his mind worked.”
Potter’s mouth curved to the side in an ugly sneer. “What, Malfoy, you’re still afraid of saying Voldemort?”
Draco let the words sail past his ear, and then responded calmly, “I respect the power of his name, yes.”
“Why?” Potter scrambled to his feet, hands planted against the cave wall as if he would hurl himself off it in Draco’s direction. Draco wondered whether there was something special behind this, or whether Potter had simply gone without his daily dose of anger and needed it now. “He isn’t someone you need to respect.”
“It’s not about him,” Draco said. “It’s about what that name meant to me for two years, the absolute dread it stirred up in me, the fear that he would kill my parents. I won’t name him for the same reason that you don’t usually talk about the subjects of your nightmares.”
Potter’s jaw went slack while he stared at Draco. Draco couldn’t help thinking it was more attractive clenched.
Then Potter said, “Yeah. I understand that,” and turned away, throwing a few more balls of light into the cave’s interior.
Draco eyed his back in silence, let him waste his time a little more, and then said, “So. Why did you refuse to be Sorted into Slytherin?”
Potter went still and tilted his head as if listening to a far-off call. Then he said, “I should have known one of them would betray me further.”
Draco paused, then pressed on. “I asked you a question.”
“You hardly need to ask, do you?” Potter said, and then waved his wand. A flare of yellow light illuminated the cave to the furthest corner, and another incantation should have made any wards present glow. Nothing happened. Draco nodded. He had argued from the beginning that this cave couldn’t be the place. “You were there. You’d taunted the first person who’d ever been friendly to me, and you’d acted as though you were better, superior. And Hagrid told me about Voldemort. Of course I wasn’t going to go into your House, and his.”
Draco tapped his fingers against his arm. He had expected some more complex motivation than a childish grudge, or a childish fear.
Then he wanted to laugh. Severus would say that you’ve been influenced too much by knowledge of his House affiliation. It doesn’t matter that he could have Sorted Slytherin. He didn’t actually become one.
“Ah,” Draco said. “And what did you argue with your friends about?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Potter said in a friendly voice. “It’s not here. Why don’t we try the Room of Requirement?”
*
Harry couldn’t understand the way Malfoy was leaning on him.
Well, not literally on him. That would have been stupid. Harry would have shrugged, or made his skin hot with his magic, and Malfoy would have fallen to the ground or howled the way Ron had when Harry burned his hand the other day, and that would have been the end of it.
But he was asking him questions and then studying him as if Harry was one of the experimental potions he had talked about brewing. Whether he got an answer or not, he had a habit of nodding solemnly. Harry had the impression that he was absorbing information Harry gave him through his silences, his eyes, the movement of his hands. He didn’t actually need to speak for Malfoy to know him.
And he hadn’t stopped when they left the cave—where Harry had imagined that his questions were the result of boredom—and moved to the Room of Requirement. Harry was currently prowling up and down before the door, trying to imagine the kind of place that Snape and Dumbledore might have hidden the damn key. Malfoy leaned against the wall behind him and asked his infuriating questions.
“Do you ever regret asking the Hat not to put you in Slytherin?”
“How can I, when it would have meant more contact with you?” Harry closed his eyes and tried as hard as he could to remember all the random remarks Dumbledore had made to him over the years, especially during his sixth year. On the other hand, he also had to keep in mind that the riddle demanded a place where sun and shadow ended.
“That’s not a compelling reason,” Malfoy said, as if he were a philosopher instead of a Potions master. “You couldn’t know at the time what more contact with me might have meant. You might have ended up a brilliant researcher. You could have defeated the Dark Lord more easily by being involved with the children of his inner circle.”
“Or I could have been corrupted by you, and by now we’d all be serving him,” Harry said, and fixed an image in his mind. It was based on the first thing Dumbledore had ever said to him about the Room, so he hoped that it might have more usefulness than some of the other random projections. He started stalking up and down the corridor. One.
“Which could have its usefulness,” Malfoy said in the same smooth, unruffled tone.
“Yes,” Harry agreed. “For one thing, you might have been exiled to the other side of the world to marry a pure-blood bride in India or something. And we wouldn’t have to be here solving stupid riddles.” Two.
Malfoy didn’t speak again, though Harry could feel that burning stare on the back of his head. He ignored it. Three.
The door appeared, a tiny, low thing with an arched frame and a brass handle. Harry shook his head—he couldn’t guess what the room would look like from the outside only based on the door—and grabbed the handle. A tingling bolt of energy zipped up his arm, which made him hope that there was considerable magic behind the wood.
He opened it.
The room inside was dim, with sunlight and shadow both filtering through the windows and then halting precisely short of the center of the chamber. Harry heard a menacing click and rustle there, and licked his lips. Maybe this was the fight to the death that Dumbledore and Snape had been talking about. He drew his wand and started to move forwards.
Malfoy grabbed his arm, squeezing down. Harry gasped and stood still, his eyes half-shutting despite himself. The power behind his hand said that Malfoy didn’t care how much he hurt Harry, or thought he could take it.
It had been so long since Harry experienced those things at the hands of someone he didn’t pay. In fact, right now he couldn’t remember if he’d ever experienced them just like that. His knees weakened and a dark purple cloak seemed to cross over his vision. He swayed and tried to fall.
“Hold still, Potter,” Malfoy snarled in his ear, and Harry was more than happy to obey. “What are those things? Where did you bring us?”
Harry dragged in a shivering breath and managed, from a great distance, to remind himself that he couldn’t do this, couldn’t give in and treat Malfoy like someone who had agreed to help him. Malfoy might have done this accidentally, but he wasn’t even as knowledgeable as Bradley, who had never understood why Harry required this. Harry had to be normal, had to snatch the moment of relief and not expect any more of it.
He’d had a lot of practice at that, fortunately. So his voice was calm when he said, “Dumbledore mentioned the Room of Requirement once, when he first talked about it, as a place where he’d found a lot of chamber pots when he really needed them.”
Malfoy was silent. Harry knew it was the silence of disbelief, and that helped him to move a bit further away from the private meaning of the hand on his arm and the snarled orders in his ear. He broke free and listened. There was a menacing gurgle of water from the center of the room, and a noise like a jug slowly tipping over.
“So…” Malfoy said.
“So I brought us to a room that combined that memory and the answer to the riddle.” Harry took a step forwards and turned his head. “It’s as likely a hiding place as any other. Are you coming?”
“No,” Malfoy said flatly. “It can’t be here. There’s no way that anyone could be expected to hit on the right combination of needs, and the riddles are supposed to be difficult to solve, not impossible.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Do you have any better idea right now? One that doesn’t involve walking through the Forbidden Forest for months and hoping to bump into the key? I don’t know about you, but I do have a life to get back to.” He moved another step forwards. The gurgling noise repeated.
Malfoy clamped his hand down so hard that Harry knew there would be bruises left. That triggered his other set of reflexes, to fight, and he twisted his arm, forcing Malfoy to let go. “What are those things?”
Harry started to answer, but one of the “things” flailed into the light and showed well enough what it was.
It had a squat, brass body and a mouth in the middle of it accented with long pointed teeth and an equally long and equally pointed tongue. It stuck the tongue out at them, wriggled it, and then launched itself into the air.
Harry swung his wand and cast a curse that sliced through the body of the thing. It fell at his feet, squirming, dying, tongue cut by the teeth. Both faded away when it “died” and left an ordinary object lying there.
“Predatory chamber pots,” Malfoy said. “Bloody predatory chamber pots.”
Two more of them flew through the air, and Harry swirled his wand and created a rope of fire that tugged them into each other and boiled them both into a sticky mass of metal. As it crashed to the floor, Malfoy propelled Harry backwards and slammed the door. They heard several angry thumps against the door before it vanished.
“That might have been our chance, you fucker,” Harry said when he could get his breath. It was a while since he had fought for his life, though dealing with his magic and retaining his Auror training had helped. He moved further away from Malfoy, conscious of what might happen if he stayed close, and flicked sweat from his forehead.
“It wasn’t,” Malfoy said flatly. “Dumbledore was strange, yes, and might expect people to guess what he meant based on nothing, but Severus was logical and would have tempered his oddities. The ‘where sun and shadow end’ has to mean something else.”
“Fine.” Harry turned away and started pacing the corridor so that he wouldn’t have to look at Malfoy. “What would you suggest? What can block both sunlight and shadow? Walls, stone, something that eats both?”
“Or a place where they naturally run out.” Malfoy had retreated to his cool tone again. “I told you, I think the use of the phrase ‘end’ rather than ‘stop’ significant.”
“If it was a place where they naturally ran out, then I’d think the riddle would have used ‘stop,’” Harry pointed out, and had the rare pleasure of seeing Malfoy look flustered.
“What suggestions do you have, then?” Malfoy folded his arms and tilted his head forwards as though granting Harry the nod that began a duel.
Harry smiled back. He had reason to know that his smiles were unnerving, but to his disappointment, Malfoy did nothing more than shake his head as if slightly irritated. “I suggest that we think about what can end light,” Harry said. “Darkness, obviously. Night. But what about a place?”
“A spell that imitates the effects of darkness or night,” Malfoy said, a bit of the ice melting from his features as he became interested in the conversation. Harry wondered for a moment if that was all it would have taken when they were boys to become friends with him, and then snorted. Malfoy had been interested in distinctly different things at that point. “Or a potion. Or a curse.”
Harry bit his tongue on the temptation to say that a spell and a curse were basically the same thing in this scenario. Malfoy was trying to help, although he was largely incompetent at cooperating with anyone. “Or something within the place itself, some quality that acts like a spell or a potion. Maybe somewhere tilted, with a line of earth or trees that naturally interrupts it, like the horizon interrupting sunset?” Then Harry paused and frowned. “But a place like that would cast a long shadow.”
“Yes,” Malfoy said, with a shallow nod, and began to pace back and forth, every line of his body bent in ferocious thought. “But the thought of a place that stops light by its nature is a good one.”
Harry closed his eyes. It felt as though the answer ought to be obvious, especially if they could restrict themselves to looking inside Hogwarts’s grounds, but—
Then he opened his eyes and smiled.
Malfoy noticed the smile, somehow, though as far as Harry could tell, his head had been turned away at the time. He whipped around and went still, eyes blazing as though he could will Harry to tell him what he’d just thought of.
Harry felt a sharp tingle streak through his legs, as though someone had hit him in the back of his knees. Malfoy couldn’t compel him with a gaze, no, but with words—
Then Harry put aside that thought as too ludicrous to consider, and said softly, “The lake.”
*
Draco swallowed the last of the potion that he’d brewed that morning and held the next vial out to Potter. Potter, standing on the shore and staring at the water as if hypnotized, didn’t notice. Draco had to nudge him sharply in the ribs to get him to turn around.
Potter leaped and whirled as he did so, coming down on his feet like a startled cat. His eyes shone with a dim reflection of the coruscating green flame that surrounded his body as it had on the first day they were here. Draco eyed it in appreciation and held out the vial, wondering if he would feel heat as his hand approached the fire.
To his disappointment, the fire vanished before he could touch it. Potter inclined his head, took the potion, and examined it for a moment, murmuring a charm, before he drank. Testing for the presence of poison, Draco assumed.
“This will help us breathe under the water?” Potter asked when he finished. He acted as if he would toss the glass vial aside, but Draco rescued it with a quick motion of his arm. Potter returned his glare with interest. It was as if the brief moment of calm and joining thoughts yesterday when they had worked out the solution to the riddle had never happened.
Oddly, Draco found himself wanting to hold both that brief space of time and Potter’s gaze. The air between them felt charged the way it did when lightning was about to strike. Potter’s breathing quickened, and the flames appeared on his shoulders again. Draco took a step forwards, not sure what would happen, but willing to take the risk. He took a greater chance every time he approached his sentient potion, after all.
Then Potter abruptly snapped his head to the side, breaking the connection, and said, “Well?”
Draco sighed. The circumstances would have been easier without the dancing, leaping connection he and Potter shared, as they would have been easier without the slippery Covington. She had invited him to dinner again last night and offered him all sorts of vague promises and threats that it would be child’s play for the Ministry to deny later.
“Yes, it will,” he said. “It’s more reliable than gillyweed, and will leave us able to talk and fight.”
Potter nodded, then leaped into the water as though the surface had taunted him. Draco frowned and followed, after casting one more spell on himself that would keep his robes dry. It was Potter’s fault if he got his clothing wet.
When Draco was beneath the surface, he had to concentrate and press down on his chest to force his lungs to release their trapped air. Then water rushed in his mouth instead, an unpleasant sensation he had never cared for. He grew used to it after a few breaths and looked around for Potter.
Potter had a flushed face, as if he had fought his own battle over the sensation of water-breathing and barely conquered. He had also shed his robes and was folding them into a tight packet that he tossed back onto the shore. Beneath, he wore only a light pair of trousers that presumably wouldn’t interfere with his swimming.
Draco eyed him in appreciation, at least when Potter had his head turned away and couldn’t notice. Potter’s chest was covered with a snaking tracery of scars that mostly seemed to spiral down from his shoulders and collect in the center of his chest. They intrigued Draco. He would have recognized the marks of most cutting spells and whips, and these resembled none of them. If he had to hazard a guess, he would have said they were most similar to the marks of acid on a test piece of parchment.
“Let’s go,” Potter said gruffly, facing Draco again. He caught his eye only briefly, frowned at whatever he saw there, and then dived. Draco swam close behind him, casting Lumos on his wand as they left both light and shadow behind.
The water closed in, constant pressure, the feeling of blankets entangled about one’s limbs. Draco drew his breath in slowly and let it out as slowly. He could swim well, at his father’s insistence, but he had never before gone this deep.
Potter, the git, seemed utterly at home, and it took Draco long moments to remember that he had been here before, when he had to rescue Weasley from the lake in their fourth year.
Determined to show that he could swim as well as Potter could, Draco drew up beside him. The only thing he received for his trouble was a single impatient glance. Potter started to open his mouth. Draco assumed it was to scold, and braced himself for insults.
The trap struck then.
The water around them glittered, and Draco turned his head to pursue the glittering. The whole point of the riddle was supposed to be that there was no light down this far, after all. But it continued to move and gleam, and then he saw the lake itself form into enormous, heaving creatures, with coil after liquid coil.
Draco swore and reached for his wand, but one loop of body had already reached out and bound his arms to his sides. He flexed his fingers once, then clenched his right hand down so that he wouldn’t drop his wand into the depths of the lake. With one weapon rendered useless, he would simply have to try others. His left hand was close to a pocket. He scrabbled at it with his fingers, managing to pry it open.
Movement again caught his eye, and Draco looked up.
Potter was dancing in the water, moving as if in a play, opposite an enormous silvery-blue serpent made of water. The serpent swayed its head back and forth, eyes focused only on Potter. Draco stared. He knew Potter was creating a distraction, but he wasn’t sure how he was doing it.
Then Draco’s ears caught up with his brain. The potion he had chosen was one that would allow him and Potter to speak beneath the water so that their spells and warnings wouldn’t turn into meaningless bubbles, but apparently it was also good for other things.
Such as conveying the sibilant words of Parseltongue.
Draco floated in the motionless coils of the beast holding him, feeling as trapped and drugged as it apparently was, and watched.
*
Harry had felt a smile break across his face when he saw the trap. Yes, the snakes were formidable opponents and there was no reason to assume that he would be able to communicate with them as he could with normal snakes, or control them, but he had smiled anyway.
This was a place that he could use his magic, and thus use up some of the power racing and battering against the limits of his body.
“I am master here,” he told the serpent that had lashed towards him, and it had hesitated long enough that he could continue. “Do you doubt it? Could the ones who made you and set you here speak to you as I can? Could they make their wills known in your own tongue? Bow down to me. It is what you wish to do.”
The snake whipped its tail in a circle, then slowly edged towards him, head dipping up and down as though it was examining his hands for signs of food. Harry laughed and kept up the stream of Parseltongue, knowing that he couldn’t expect to control a magical creature right away with a command so simple.
“Has no one ever come to see you since they set you here? Have they not enchanted you, charmed you, thanked you for your service?” He backed up in the water, floating down with small waves of his hands, not daring to take his eyes off the serpent in case it suddenly changed direction. He wondered where Malfoy was, but had no time to contemplate. This was his task, ensuring the snakes didn’t attack them, and Malfoy would have to handle himself for the moment.
The serpent never responded, but continued to dance opposite him, slowly settling into a regular pattern. Harry propelled himself sideways, then down, then up again, letting the movement of the water around him join in the pattern. The words, too, resumed their own pattern, so soft and regular that Harry wondered if anyone hearing the Parseltongue from the outside could isolate the individual words.
“Yes, it’s better when you have someone to speak to you. Someone who cares for you as a creature, someone who will see you as more than a guard. Someone to be your master and cradle you in words that hiss. Yes, it’s better when you have someone to speak to you…”
Harry repeated himself until he knew his throat would be sore if he was speaking English, and twisted to the side slowly. He spotted Malfoy, caught in the coils of another serpent. Like the first one, it was bobbing its head in time to Harry’s words, watching him.
Harry licked his lips. He couldn’t keep this up forever, and so far the snakes hadn’t shown any intent to attack. He would just have to hope that his control was strong enough over them for what he needed to do next.
“Down. Leave us.”
The snakes paused, their heads slowly curving to the side and then staying poised. The one in front of Harry swam closer to him, and he saw the coils forming again, glistening like Mrs. Weasley’s ice cream.
“Leave us,” Harry said sharply. “If you wish me not to tire of your company and never to speak to you again, leave us.”
The snakes remained still for long moments more. Harry could feel them all but reconsidering what he had said to them, if magical creatures formed of water could be said to consider anything. He had no idea what would happen next, and would have held his breath if he thought it would do any good.
Then the snake unwrapped from Malfoy and passed into the depths of the lake like a wave running parallel. The snake in front of Harry followed it, with one mournful glance from large crystalline eyes as though to say that he hadn’t had to scold it like that to get it to leave. Harry shook his head and turned to Malfoy.
“The key to the riddle ought to be around here somewhere,” he said. “Where would you suggest looking?”
*
Draco stared at Potter for long, intense moments without moving. He knew he owed his life to Potter’s quick thinking—and the coincidence of Severus and Dumbledore setting snakes as guards when Potter could speak Parseltongue—but that was nothing unusual. He owed life-debts to Potter from the war, still.
No, what he wanted to contemplate was the fact that Potter had come through the battle and yet looked completely calm, as though this was an everyday occurrence for him. His magic didn’t boil the water around him. He floated in place without a sign of undue agitation. Draco wondered whether fighting for his life was an outlet for his anger, and why it would be so. Could his anger be connected to his magic alone?
“Where do you think it is, Malfoy?”
At Potter’s languidly patient question, Draco forced himself back into motion. Potter’s face was flushed now, his hands clenched as though he wanted to beat Draco for staying silent. They would lose or at least waste time if they argued now.
Draco turned to study the water where the serpents had been hovering. It made no sense that they had attacked them at this point in the lake unless the secret they guarded was close at hand, and Draco didn’t think they had to destroy the serpents to find it, no matter what Dumbledore had said about a fight to the death. Such guardians as those could only be driven away for a time, not destroyed.
Another glitter caught his eye, this time like light flashing off a diamond. Draco smiled grimly, held his wand up, and performed the Summoning Charm.
The ring that tumbled towards him through the water glowed only with magical light; being in the lake for years had tarnished it. Draco recognized it, though. Severus had worn the ring a few times when he gave private lectures to the Slytherins, mostly to fill them with curiosity and dread about what it might mean.
The dark stone on the top still twisted. Draco wrenched it to the side and shook it. A tiny bubble floated out, enclosing a piece of magically protected parchment. Draco smiled and reached inside the cavity the stone had covered, and a second bubble came to hand, cradling a smaller twist of paper.
“One of these will be a word or words to unlock the wards,” he told Potter. “The other will be the next riddle.”
Potter nodded slowly. “I never would have thought of opening the ring,” he admitted. “You’re smarter than you look, Malfoy.”
For a moment, just a moment, the look on his face was open admiration, the flush on his cheeks possible to take as symptomatic of something other than anger.
Draco experienced a flash of a vision, not dissimilar from the ones he received when he came up with a new potion. This one, though, showed not a list of ingredients, an altered recipe, or a finished potion, but Potter kneeling at his feet, staring up at him with that same expression. His hands were behind his back as if bound there, and his magic crackled and danced around him, kept within strict limits, on Draco’s orders alone.
He turned his gaze to the side and kept it there for a moment, hoping Potter had not noticed the change in his expression. “I knew this ring from the time that Severus wore it,” he said shortly. “Come.” He swam towards the surface.
Potter followed him, but slowly. Draco almost wondered, later, if he’d had a premonition of his best friends and Covington waiting for them by the shore of the lake.