Chapter Two of 'Ragnarok'- Strike

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter One.

Title: Ragnarok (2/12)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Heavy violence, gore, sex, angst, manipulation, discussion of suicide, arguably Dark versions of both characters. Ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Draco Malfoy, at thirty, is the youngest member of the Wizengamot. He thinks he has achieved the highest political power of which he’s capable—until he learns the secret of Ragnarok, the elite corps of wizards who deal with “unsolvable” problems for the Wizengamot.
Author’s Notes: This will be, I think, a fairly short story, somewhere between 12 and 15 chapters, and perhaps even shorter than that. It involves fairly cynical versions of the characters. The title is the name of the event that, in Norse mythology, was supposed to kill the gods.

Thank you for all the reviews!

Chapter Two—Strike

“You look stricken, still.”

Draco lowered his eyes to his plate and managed to pull himself together. He and Risidell were finishing the day of his initiation into the Wizengamot with a private meal so that they could discuss those matters the rest of the Wizengamot didn’t need to know about, and Draco had thought he was sufficiently over his shock at seeing Potter as power source and slave to the wizarding government.

“It is a shock,” he said truthfully. “I believed the rumors that Potter had emigrated to Australia like all the rest of them, and I’m cursing my gullibility.” He felt free to look back at Risidell, now that he thought he had mastered the expression on his face. “And then again, his power. All he did was walk into the middle of a ritual?”

Risidell seemed to mistake the eagerness in his voice for envy, rather than simple desire to know more about Potter. He leaned forwards with a frown. “Yes, but it’s a miracle he survived. I wouldn’t seek to try it for yourself. As it is, the magic is probably going to kill him in a year or two.”

Draco cocked his head to the side and took a sip of the very fine drink, somewhere between fruit juice and wine, that Risidell’s house-elves had provided. This room was nearly as large and dim as the cavern where they kept Potter, though the walls were wood instead of stone and there were several fires to throw light and shadow on the floor. Draco watched their dance for a long moment before he answered. That helped conceal the shock of Risidell’s words. “I wouldn’t think anything could kill someone as strong as he seemed.”

“It’s the magic itself that’s doing it,” Risidell said, shaking his head. “We’ve had a few Healers in to see him—under strictest secrecy, of course—and they agree that he’s aging faster than normal. He has to use strength that would normally be used to maintain his bones and heart and so on simply to resist the onslaught of the magic.”

And just like that, on a platter, was handed Draco’s excuse to contact Potter and get him to listen to him. He hid another smile in his glass and leaned back in his chair, stretching with unfeigned pleasure. Risidell didn’t live in ostentatious luxury, but he knew how to use his money. The chairs were comfortable, the table polished, the food excellent. Draco was going to have a life like this now—well, in truth, he had it already, if he wanted to husband his money and buy better furniture.

But he was interested in other things instead. Such as how to get Potter closer, to feed off his power if he could, or draw on it. Draco had no interest in dying because of a misguided ritual. But he didn’t think it had to be that way. After all, he was not so much weaker than Potter, and he had his power perfectly under control.

“How do you decide when a problem needs Ragnarok’s touch?” he asked. “I can see where using Potter to handle a criminal who was reluctant to consent to arrest would be overkill, but what about when you don’t know how dangerous someone is yet?”

Risidell narrowed his eyes. “It’s less difficult than you perhaps imagine,” he said. “Which does not mean that I urge you to do it.”

Draco leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily. So Risidell had noticed some of Draco’s attraction to power, though he couldn’t have seen the extremity of it or he probably wouldn’t be so calm. “I don’t have any enemies who are rising Dark Lords yet, and all the Malfoy heirlooms I own have remained safely in my family’s control for centuries. But my enemies will be the Wizengamot’s enemies now. How do you decide?”

Risidell hesitated, spinning his glass between his fingers. Draco put on his most benign expression, silently encouraging the man to do something that he probably would end up having to do anyway.

Or Draco would learn the truth from Potter himself when he contacted him, but he knew he shouldn’t trouble Risidell with the confession of that.

“As I said, it’s relatively simple,” Risidell murmured with a shake of his head. “Potter’s magic is extremely powerful, yes, but limited in what it can do. We think that’s a consequence of the ritual going wrong. He can only destroy. Not cast household cleaning charms, or glamours, or defensive spells. We send him in when we want something annihilated. Or someone,” he said, and cast Draco a grave look. “You can see how serious a decision that must be.”

Draco cast his eyes down and leaned back further towards the nearest fire, hoping that Risidell would think his immediate flush a consequence of being too close to the flames. He had barely stifled the moan in time.

It didn’t matter that Potter’s power was limited to one specific area. It was still so strong that Draco would have liked to be touching himself when he thought about it.

“Who makes the decision to use Ragnarok?” he asked. “The whole of the Wizengamot, or you, or some other person, or is there a smaller committee in the middle of the Wizengamot that handles chores like that?”

He could see Risidell relaxing. It sounded as though his questions were leading towards more general topics, he knew, and that would content Risidell. The man doubtless thought him obsessed with Potter.

And Draco was, in a way. The other secrets he had been so proud to learn were so much dust blowing in the wind compared with this. He had been happy and excited to become part of the Wizengamot because that would mean he had a position of the highest power and influence in the British wizarding world as he understood it.

But there was another part of the British wizarding world he knew about now. He wouldn’t scold himself for failing to aspire to it when he hadn’t known it existed. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t aspire to control over or alliance with it now.

“The whole Wizengamot has to make the decision, though of course anyone can bring up the information that might lead to him being used,” Risidell explained, leaning back in his chair in return. He was drinking ordinary wine, and he closed his eyes in pleasure after he finished one sip. That gave Draco a chance to discreetly adjust himself. He hoped that his reaction to Potter would gradually grow less intense, or it could prove a distraction. “If you learn about a wizard who calls himself a Dark Lord, or that a legendary artifact has reappeared and defied the control of the Department of Mysteries, feel free to propose his use.”

Draco drank thoughtfully, noting the terms that Risidell had used to talk about Potter. His “use,” and he often called Ragnarok an “it.” Draco licked his lips. It seemed as though Risidell regarded Potter as no more than a weapon. Draco had no idea how widespread his attitude might be throughout the Wizengamot, but it must be fairly common. Someone would have treated Potter like a person and forged an alliance with him for personal gain in return.

That no one had yet simply meant Draco was the lucky person who could step into that gap.

“Interesting,” Draco said, and then turned the conversation to other matters. He could learn from Potter himself whether Risidell was the only one who could open the door that led to Potter’s domain, or what the means of entrance were. Draco was sure that Potter would be receptive to what he was proposing. Who wouldn’t want to find a way to avoid death?

And on a less professional level, Draco had other—skills—that might persuade Potter to agree.

*

He could hear voices behind him shouting for him to stop running, that they would catch up in a minute and he had no right to outdistance them, but Harry ignored them. They were so far behind him. He was going to beat them all to the poor victim being tortured and stop the Death Eaters from inducting someone new into their ranks. Everyone knew a new Death Eater had to torture someone to death before he was allowed in.

The closer he got to the cavern, the more magic Harry could feel. That made him just set his jaw harder and run faster. Magical torture was far less endurable than the ordinary kind. It was a wonder that the victim wasn’t dead yet.

A dazzle of light, that of fire and star and torch, blasted his eyes as he burst into the cavern. Because of it, Harry stumbled forwards, drawing his wand and casting random curses at the dark shapes he could see. Two of them fell, and he nodded. If the watching Death Eaters had to deal with someone coming unexpectedly among them, then it wasn’t a true initiation, which needed all the witnesses to watch it all the way through.

He wasn’t sure if he had got the torturer, though, and surged further forwards, stumbling and blinking frantically as he tried to let his eyes adjust.

His foot crossed the edge of what felt like a summoning ring.

All the power in the universe surged up and hit him at once.

Harry fell with a strangled cry. When he tried to recover his balance, there was a sense of walls pressing in around him, panels made of down and iron. He flailed and circled, having the humiliating sensation that he was tumbling about on his arse, in the full view and laughter of the Death Eaters. Someone could kill him at any time. He found his wand and tried to cast a light spell that he hoped would blind them much as he was blinded at that moment. He might have a chance if they were on equal footing.

That was when something came along and changed his magic.

It felt as though someone had plucked the power out of him and set it back in the wrong place, tilted sideways or in a hole that was too small for it. Harry moaned, less from pain than from the sheer wrongness of it, and bent down, trying to shield his head and his body against—he didn’t know what.

The wrong magic took a deep breath and then pulsed out to fill the newly available space in his body.

Harry screamed. He was in the middle of a flood, filled with more magic than he knew what to do with, and he knew that he was going to die. Worse, so was the victim that he had come to save, the person being tortured.

A dim realization was trying to come home to him, something that was important, but more important was saving whoever the victim had been. Harry lashed out with his hand, hoping to keep the enemies he was sure were closing in on him away.

There came a dull, hollow boom. Harry felt a brief backlash of heat and heard a crisping sound. Then came the smell of frying flesh.

And silence.

Harry blinked and blinked again, and finally the obscurity that had overridden his sight started to clear away. He was sitting in the middle of the cave that he’d known he’d been rushing towards, with the charred remnants of a circle around him. It looked as if it had been deeply scored into the stone, although now it was covered with cracks, and Harry thought it resembled a ritual circle more than anything else.

Beyond the circle were the charred remnants of bodies.

“No,” Harry said, but his voice was small in the immensity of the damage the fire had done, and in the whirlwind of power that danced through his body. He stood up and walked out of the circle, a little surprised that each of his steps didn’t make the walls and floor shake. That was how enormous with magic he felt.

The bodies were body-shaped piles of ash and cinders. When Harry touched them, he burned his fingers and disturbed their shapes. The ash flew up, swirled, and settled. Harry was walking through a tomb, filled with drifting darkness and that sickly-sweet scent of burning flesh.

So much cooked skin and muscle and bone, but not a sign of it. Harry didn’t know how hot fire must burn, to vaporize bone, but he thought he could guess. His mind recoiled from guessing, though.

There were too many bodies for the Death Eaters they had thought were here. That fact only gradually dawned on Harry, and he turned around and began, painfully, to count the body-shaped piles—one couldn’t call them corpses—although it was hard because the wind of his passage tended to shake them loose and mingle one person’s flakes with another’s.

He had burned the Aurors following him to death as well.

There was a period of madness after that, of standing still in the middle of the cavern and coming to terms with what he had done while the world reeled around him.

Harry opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling of his rooms in disgust, feeling the reassuring hum of wards around him that told him his magic was still contained. Then he rolled his head over on the pillow and fully gave in to the disgust.

Why did he still dream about this? He knew what had happened—he had interrupted a ritual that was meant to raise one of the Death Eaters to power equal to Voldemort’s, rather than a sacrifice or initiation—and he knew what crimes he had committed. It was stupid and useless for his mind to continue tormenting him ten years later. Harry had become a murderer.

And he could become nothing else, when his magic couldn’t even manage something as simple as a Lumos . He had gone to the Wizengamot and offered them his services because he knew as well as anyone else who wasn’t blind that they were the rising power, and at least this way there was the chance that he would become a murderer of murderers rather than innocents.

Harry turned and stared at the firelight, trying to think about something other than the magic thrumming through him as if in response to the wards, traveling back and forth, gnawing, biting, testing the limits of his body. He tried to estimate the number of months he had left in his head, and then snorted. He didn’t think it was months, anymore. Maybe weeks. Maybe days. He should choose where he was going to go and die, if he was.

His eyes had started to droop closed in spite of himself when he saw a silvery figure wavering near the ceiling of his room. Harry raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t had someone contact him with a Patronus in years. It was perhaps the only means of sending a message that would get past both the wards and the guard that the Wizengamot maintained over his secret. They read all his post before he got it, including messages from Harry’s friends and the Weasleys, but then again, that was necessary. Harry knew that there were people out there who might have an idea of what had happened to him, and he didn’t want to be troubled by their offers of alliance or their claims that they could cure him.

The Patronus came closer, and Harry saw that it was a bird with a heavy beak and a long, snake-like neck. A cormorant, he thought. It settled in front of him and spoke in Malfoy’s voice.

“Potter. I want to speak to you about a personal alliance. Now that I’m a member of the Wizengamot, there’s no reason we shouldn’t.” The Patronus paused as if it expected a response, but that didn’t fool Harry. He knew that they were meant to carry one simple message. This one was probably imitating the dramatic pauses of Malfoy’s voice.

“Speak, Potter,” the cormorant said in an irritated voice. “This bird is my way of reaching you, but it does take concentration to get through those words and to listen to you. Don’t you have anything to say?”

Harry narrowed his eyes. He started to say that no one could make a Patronus do what Malfoy was doing with it, but then he remembered his sense of Malfoy’s heightened power. If he had been through rituals similar to the ones Harry had stumbled into—rituals that worked the way they were supposed to—he could do this.

Harry always hated the return of hope. It was like air coming to his lungs when they’d been starved of oxygen, painful and frantic. He had felt it before, and each time, the hope that he could do something about his condition had turned to dust and ashes like—like the bodies of the people he’d killed.

But he swallowed, because at least no one had managed to send a Patronus through the wards before, and responded, “I’ll kill one personal enemy for you, no questions asked, if you can help me find a way to get rid of this power.”

The cormorant paused, then ducked its neck forwards in a smooth motion and spread its wings. Harry wondered if it was going to depart. Perhaps his offer hadn’t been generous enough for Malfoy.

“Two enemies?” he asked.

“You want to get rid of it?” the cormorant demanded, with all Malfoy’s arrogance and lack of understanding. At least Harry didn’t have to doubt that this was someone impersonating Malfoy to try and trick him. “When you’re so strong that you make the room shake and my body come to life? Are you mental?”

Harry rolled his eyes. At this point, he didn’t care if the cormorant saw him do it or not. Malfoy was clearly the one who was mental, and Harry was beginning to regret that he’d made an exception to his refusal to listen to offers. “Yes, of course I am. Because I can do nothing—not even light up my own wand—for myself except destroy, and have to have people take care of me like I’m a child, or a Muggle. Because I know that I’m going to die soon with my magic destroying my body in lieu of anything else to eat. Because I want to live a normal life, among normal people, and stop being a weapon.” He rolled over on his bed. “You can’t understand. Leave.”

*

Draco, sitting in his drawing room, had to concentrate to keep peering through the cormorant’s eyes. It was difficult enough at this distance, when it was only his enhanced power that forced the Patronus to behave unnaturally and act as a permanent conduit for him, but his surprise made it all the harder.

Why hadn’t he anticipated this? Of course Potter would want to stop being a weapon—he had seen that far—but it was for a different reason than the one Draco had dreamed of, where Potter would be glad for someone who respected his wishes and treated him like an equal instead of a slave. Instead, Potter’s dreams were too small. He couldn’t imagine any richer bliss than spending his life reproducing and languishing among the smallest people of the wizarding population, when he might have been among the grandest.

Draco would have withdrawn in disgust, the way that Potter looked poised to, but the memory of what he had felt this afternoon made him pause. He could find other allies, true, but someone with Potter’s level of magic didn’t come along every day.

“Listen to me, Potter,” he said, when he could speak. “Have you ever thought about the fact that you changed fundamentally when you interrupted that ritual?”

Potter jolted as though someone had stabbed him and rolled back over. Draco squinted. The vision of Potter appeared surrounded by a silvery mist the color of the Patronus, and it was hard to be absolutely sure, but it did seem as though Potter wore an expression of pure contempt.

“I went from being an Auror to being a murderer,” Potter said, his voice charged with enough menace to make Draco’s breathing quicken. “But you have the gall to suggest that I wouldn’t know that’s a change?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Draco murmured, trying to sound repentant when he was quietly delighted. Potter had some spirit left after all. “I meant…you’ve changed, Potter. The old rules no longer apply. You’re not a wizard as much as you are—”

“A weapon, I know,” Potter said. “Congratulations. You’ll soon fit into the Wizengamot, with a mindset like that.”

Draco shook his head and knew the cormorant was imitating his gesture, though it cost him more sweat and effort to make it do so. “I was going to say, a ruler. You’ve been lifted out of the ranks of ordinary people by this ritual. Elevated. Instead of thinking about how to get rid of the magic, maybe you should be thinking of how to live with it. I have.”

Potter was silent, looking at him. His green eyes were wide, but other than that, Draco could tell nothing. Potter still wore his emotions openly on his face, yes, but Draco didn’t think he had as many of them as he used to.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Potter said, “because it’s not true. I told you, the merest child can perform charms that I can’t.”

“So think of ways to get around that.” Draco made his voice soft. “Think of ways to make your magic work for you although it only destroys. You can get rid of dust by making it vanish, after all. You can alter your clothes by annihilating the parts of them that you don’t like. You can change the look of your house by creating new windows through the walls.”

Potter snorted and lay back on his bed, crossing his arms behind his neck. “It doesn’t work that way, Malfoy. My magic can’t be targeted so finely. It’s not water that leaks through a dam in controlled bursts, it’s a flood, and only that.”

Draco could see the limitations now, more clearly than he had from his conversation with Risidell. What he did not see was why Potter should give in to them. He’d never given in to anything else before—though Draco could also see that ten years of service to the Wizengamot and hiding his existence from anyone else might affect his will and hopes.

“There are rituals that could help you learn,” he said quietly. “I would be willing to work with you on them.”

“There’s a ritual I found that could get rid of my magic,” Potter said just as quietly, “but it needs two people, one of them near my level in power, to perform it. I would be willing to work with you on that.”

“But then you’d become a Muggle,” Draco said, who suspected that he knew what ritual Potter was talking about. Yes, it could be done, but he doubted that Potter had thought through all the implications. “There’s no way to leave you with any level of magic after that one.”

“I don’t care,” Potter said, and his voice rumbled with a low passion that Draco thought he could have heard through much worse ears than the cormorant’s magic-generated ones. “For the chance to walk in sunlight again and live among people, love and hurt and die at a normal age instead of when I was thirty? I don’t care.”

Draco spent a moment considering. He would have to go carefully. Potter had somehow, astonishingly, managed to retain a core of Gryffindor values under everything that had happened to him. That core would be opposed to helping Draco rule the wizarding world or transferring his magic to Draco, which had been the next suggestion waiting under Draco’s tongue, because Potter would fear what someone else might do with it. That particular fear was probably too strong to overcome.

However, he might persuade Potter slowly and gently towards the first of those goals. Potter wanted to walk in sunlight? That could be arranged. And Draco thought he could also manipulate matters so that Potter would live longer than he thought he would.

And if Potter wanted someone who treated him normally, someone who could give him passion and defiance and challenge…

Draco didn’t know if he could manage love. But for someone like Potter, the closest thing to an equal he would ever find, he might try.

“How about this?” he asked. “You help me with rituals that will increase my power. There are also some I’ve found that need two people to perform them, and the stronger the better. In return, we work on your ritual. It’s going to need a lot of preparation before you’re ready, you know. Otherwise, it might simply kill you.”

Potter let his eyes fall shut. “If I don’t die before then,” he whispered, “you have my agreement, Malfoy. Anything else you want from me, I can give.”

“I don’t think you’ll die,” Draco said. It was as close as he could come to saying what he believed: that Potter’s magic was responsive to his state of mind. It was destroying him because he didn’t want to live this way, plain and simple. Give him a chance to live another way, and the magic would probably back off. Draco refused to believe that it was utterly impossible to control. Nothing was.

“Thank you,” Potter whispered. “Anything.”

And I will ask for everything, before the end, Draco thought.

Comments

[absynthedrinker]

Draco's desire to possess that which Harry is anxious to abandon provides the perfection tension, This is really a joy to read. Thanks

Peace,
Bubba