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lomonaaerenThis chapter has been divided into two parts for length reasons. Start reading with the first part, not here.
Harry stood on the bank of the lake, concentrating fiercely on the water. It was late in the afternoon now, and the stars would be coming out soon. Perhaps the reflection of Venus in the water, if it shone at all, would tell them something.
Malfoy stood beside him. He didn’t move the way Harry did, when he had to ease the weight on his feet or an ache in his side that had formed with standing for too long. He could give his attention to a single object and then cease to exist in the contemplation of that object. Harry remembered him being like that in Potions at Hogwarts, too, where he would earn better marks than almost anyone in the class because he could fixate—
Harry yanked his gaze away, flushing, and then turned to kick a small pebble into the lake. The ripples that broke the surface passed in front of Malfoy’s eyes, but he gave no sign that he noticed.
Harry clenched his fists. He couldn’t have said why Malfoy bothered him so much, except that Harry had assumed they had an understanding about the incident yesterday and wouldn’t mention it again. He had been happy not thinking of it or reverting to it until Malfoy brought us up.
And why did he do that? Harry sneaked another glance. Malfoy had remained in the same posture for twenty minutes now, but he didn’t look stiff or bored. He must know that us being together in any way is impossible.
Of course, Harry hastily reminded himself, Malfoy had given no indication that he wanted that. He simply wanted to fuck Harry again, to assert his authority. It wasn’t surprising. That way, he could have control of the partnership, too.
He probably assumed that he would get sole credit for discovering the secret of the riddles in the press, if he played his cards right.
Harry grimaced. He can have it, as far as I’m concerned. Not that I care enough to tell him that. He gave another sideways look at Malfoy, who had started frowning as though he assumed the answer would rise from the lake if he just scowled hard enough. He ought to know I like my privacy by now.
The thought would probably have led him into another gloomy round of speculations and castigations to himself for being stupid enough to trust Malfoy in the first place, but suddenly Malfoy took a step back and laughed.
Harry tensed instinctively at the laughter. Deep, ringing, loud, joyous—it wasn’t the sort of sound he associated with Malfoy at all, let alone at a time when they were both baffled and had had a frustrating row earlier. Well, more frustrating for Malfoy than for Harry, at any rate. That was something to take comfort in.
Maybe he’s finally gone off his nut, Harry decided, wondering if that would be good for Harry himself or not. Well, if it coordinated with a tendency to forget intense sexual experiences, it would be. “Malfoy?” he asked cautiously.
“I was ignoring certain parts of the riddle,” Malfoy said, and turned to him with a wide grin that made Harry shudder. Ron had grinned like that when he thought he had a brilliant solution to the conflict between Harry and the Ministry over Hogwarts: that Harry should become a teacher there. “The last line is the most important. Why would it be isolated from the rest and in a different case if it wasn’t?”
“All right,” Harry said. “But what does it mean?”
Malfoy seized the riddle parchment from his pocket and twisted it around to show to Harry. “The last,” he said triumphantly. “We have to look at the last. The last word, Potter, don’t you see? And the last word is beauty.”
Harry could see that, even from the insane angle Malfoy was holding the riddle at, as if he expected Harry to read it with his head on one side like a bird. “I can see. So what?”
Malfoy laughed again and then reached out, grabbed a quill and an inkwell from what seemed thin air but must have been the depths of his sleeves, and began to scribble on the back of the parchment. Harry stepped around him to see and tried to ignore the sensation of warmth that blazed up at him through Malfoy’s robes. It wasn’t as though he had to touch him.
Unless he wanted to.
Harry held his breath for a moment until Malfoy was finished, so that his chest wouldn’t accidentally touch Malfoy’s back. They brushed shoulders anyway when Malfoy turned and held out the parchment to him. Harry flushed and tried to focus on the letters.
It simply looked as though Malfoy had rewritten the word BEAUTY, though with the first three vowels more widely spaced apart from the consonants surrounding them. E A U said the paper, and still Harry didn’t see what was supposed to be so special about that. He gave Malfoy a look that he knew was full of baffled incomprehension.
Malfoy sighed, rolled his eyes, and turned the parchment over. “We mistook the meaning of the word legend in the second line,” he said, stabbing the riddle with one finger. “A legend can be a story, sure.” He paused triumphantly. “It can also mean a piece of writing.”
Harry blinked. “And that, combined with the letters in the word ‘beauty,’ tells you what?”
Malfoy laughed. “There’s only one creature that walks on four legs in the world around us and on eight legs—the eight legs of letters—and two tails—the tails of curved letters—in our writing, as well as having those three vowels in the same order as the word beauty.” He turned the parchment over and copied out another word, in capital letters this time, then once again held it out to Harry.
CENTAUR.
Harry did want to smack himself in the forehead with one hand when he saw that Malfoy had explained it that way. “So the clue to the riddle is going to be in the Forbidden Forest,” he said. “All right. But where? Are we supposed to go and ask the centaurs to please give up whatever it was that Dumbledore and Snape asked them to hide?”
Malfoy flipped the parchment again and tapped the third line. “We should have paid more attention to everything about this riddle, and that includes the third line. ‘Cross the sky.’ Wherever Venus appears to set, or rise, in the Forbidden Forest is the place we want.”
“But doesn’t that change with the seasons, or something?” Long-ago memories of Astronomy were struggling to surface in Harry’s mind. He rubbed his head and wished that thinking didn’t have to be so painful.
There’s a joke in that that Malfoy or Hermione would find, he decided, and then decided that he also wasn’t going to think about that anymore. He had enough to deal with, given the condescending look that Malfoy had just tossed him.
“I can still make the necessary calculations,” Malfoy said, waving a hand. “And the centaurs are doubtless included in the riddle because we’ll have to fight one to get the clue free. Like I said, we should have paid attention to the whole riddle. It’s one integrated unit, no matter how strange it might seem.”
Harry nodded. Then he paused, his mind flickering back to something that he might have put more importance on at the time if he had been thinking about the riddles then.
“I think I might know where we need to go,” he said slowly.
*
Draco had been proud of his brilliance earlier that afternoon. He had stood by the lake, and the answers had seemed to rise from the bottom of his mind like fish rising from the water, conveying the obvious question: why couldn’t “the last” refer to the last word on the parchment? It was as likely as anything else, and the different forms of the letters—capital in most of the riddle, lower-case in that last line—was a clue that it would have something to do with writing.
Now that he was trudging through the Forbidden Forest behind Potter, who swatted branches out of the way as if he did this for a living, he was more dissatisfied with himself, and he couldn’t stop thinking about why.
Potter had still been the one to come up with the place that they would need to visit. When he had explained about the white centaur and the blackened clearing, Draco had to agree that it was worth taking a look at.
But why should the solution depend, yet again, on those sudden skips of Potter’s unaided and inexplicable intuition, rather than on Draco’s subtle and brilliant calculations with the Astronomical instruments, as he thought it should?
Of course, he could have refused to visit the clearing and insisted that Potter let him make the calculations. But he knew Potter would have set out on his own, and he did think that Potter’s conclusion was right, much as he didn’t want to think that.
And had Potter praised him for his brilliance, asked him how he achieved the answer to the second riddle, or looked at him with the adoration that Draco had seen in his vision in the lake?
He had not.
He kicked a stone in front of him, and it went rolling away and rebounded from the trunk of a tree with a ringing sound that shouldn’t have traveled so far through the Forest, Draco thought, wincing. Then again, there was no reason for the laws of nature in the Forbidden Forest to be the same as those elsewhere.
Potter whirled around and stared at him. “Is something the matter?” he asked, his eyes searching past Draco’s shoulder for Merlin knew what danger.
Draco shook his head and gestured Potter curtly to go on. Potter raised an eyebrow and did so.
The raised eyebrow stayed with Draco, and so did the doubtful expression on Potter’s face. It looked as though he thought Draco was irrational or stupid, but he was too polite to say so. Draco was the one who should be feeling that, after the way that Potter had repudiated his offer this morning.
Potter halted and lifted one cautious hand. Draco peered in front of him, but could see no lessening of the trunks. “What’s the matter?” he whispered irritably. “We obviously aren’t in the clearing yet.”
“Obviously,” Potter snapped back. “But I thought I heard hoofbeats.”
Draco drew his wand in silence, keeping his eyes on the trees around him while straining his own ears. Nothing happened, and the silence seemed to grow thicker and stronger the longer he listened. He let his gaze come back to Potter and raised an eyebrow of his own.
“I did hear them,” Potter said. He didn’t look inclined to doubt himself because Draco did. That irritated Draco, primarily because he had been looking forwards to watching Potter flounder around in circles. “And we’re close enough to the clearing now that there could be centaurs about, if not the one we want.” He gestured to the burned footsteps on the forest floor, the trail of marks he’d caused with his magical flames a few days ago, and which had led them this far. “These are more frequent now. I know that I was shedding more and more magic—”
“And destroying more and more of the Forest,” Draco felt compelled to add.
Potter scowled at him again. “The closer I got to the clearing,” he finished determinedly. “It has to be close. That white centaur acted like he was guarding something. I know he was.”
Draco decided not to say that, in his opinion, Potter hadn’t thought that at the time and had simply added the detail to his memory later based on his new hope. It cost him nothing to remain calm and still and listen.
And yes, there was the soft sound of a foot disturbing the leaf mold not far from them. It might have been a human foot, but this far out in the Forest, Draco thought it significantly more likely to be a magical creature. He turned to face it and raised his voice. “If you guard the secret that Professors Snape and Dumbledore wanted you to hide, we’ve come to claim it from you.”
Potter grabbed his arm roughly, which wasn’t exactly the kind of skin-to-skin contact Draco had been craving, but at least was contact. “Malfoy, what you are doing?” he whispered harshly into Draco’s ear.
“Using my time wisely,” Draco said, and walked a few steps closer to the rustling noise. “Are you coming out?”
There was a pause, which Draco thought their opponent was trying and failing to make dramatic, and then a white centaur emerged through the gap in the nearest line of trees, stopping there so that he was framed by the branches. He was taller than most centaurs Draco had seen, with flowing hair and a beard that could have rivaled Dumbledore’s. He scraped his left forehoof on the ground, producing the rustling sound they had heard before, and then inclined his head.
“You are brave to venture this far into the Forest when the sun is falling,” he said. “Come and fight me.”
Draco hesitated, trying to figure out the trap in this. The water-snakes had been a surprise, attacking without warning, and he had assumed that all their other challenges would be the same way. A straightforward invitation to fight wasn’t something he had expected.
“Not as brave as that,” the centaur remarked. “It seems that your courage needs more reinforcement from your common sense. You should have come earlier.” He took a bow and quiver of arrows from nowhere, or so it seemed, so neatly did his hands move, and was stringing an arrow before Draco thought about it.
Potter raised a Shield Charm in front of them and then stepped towards the centaur. His eyes were wild, a slight smile tugging at his lips, and Draco thought he glimpsed the man who had been both hero and Auror in his time, and had become someone who needed bonds to control him. “I’ll fight with you,” he said. “No reason to involve Malfoy in it.”
“You should,” the centaur said. “He understands more of darkness than you do.” And he shot.
The arrow passed through Potter’s Shield Charm as if it were mist and straight into his shoulder. Potter, the expressions of surprise and agony warring on his face, grabbed the arrow shaft and hissed in pain. Then he sank to the forest floor, while keeping an eye on the centaur and holding up his wand in a shaking hand.
Draco watched blood well up from the wound in dark droplets before he truly absorbed what had happened.
He whirled around and lifted his wand in turn, only to find that the centaur had disappeared. A soft rustling sound behind him made him duck frantically, and the second arrow swished overhead. Draco turned his head automatically to track it, but it had vanished instead of lodging in a tree the way he expected.
“This kind of arrow is meant to stir up the darkness in living flesh,” the centaur said, in the tone of someone giving an Astronomy lesson, and then Draco heard the singing hum of the bow bending beneath the weight of another arrow. “Perhaps you should look at your companion if you wish to learn what will happen then.”
Draco really wanted to keep his eyes on the centaur, provided he could find him again, but the words seemed to grab his face and turn it so that he was looking at Potter.
Or, rather, the writhing blot of darkness where Potter had been.
*
They are coming back again.
The cool voice seemed to speak in Harry’s head a moment before all the evil in him leaped up through the barriers he had thought were containing it.
There was a spitting, splitting noise, and Harry found himself tumbled through his hatred and resentment of Dumbledore and Snape when he had first thought in any detail about what they had done and planned to do to him, and his willingness to leave the piece of Voldemort’s soul lying right there in King’s Cross, and the killing anger he had felt after the war when the Ministry tried to condemn innocent people to death—combined with his secret wish that some of them could be condemned, that he didn’t have to fight for those who would have been willing to watch him die.
Here was the darkness that had led him to use Unforgivable Curses casually by the end of the war, and which had wanted him to use it again when he faced the Carrows across a courtroom.
Here was the vicious pleasure that had exploded inside of him when he watched Molly Weasley kill Bellatrix Lestrange—so vicious that he hadn’t even recognized the emotion until he thought about it later.
Here was the mixture of rage and despair that had drowned him when he realized the Auror program would never treat him like simply another trainee, that he was and would forever be someone’s villain or someone’s hero.
Here was the frustration that had assaulted him when he realized that he would lose the struggle against the Ministry to keep Hogwarts free—inevitably lose it, because there was no way that he could succeed.
And there, perhaps deepest of all, was the drowning pool of disgust that swallowed him whenever his sanity outweighed his need and he had to confront being bound to the bed and fucked by a stranger just to keep from burning down the buildings around him.
He was coated with contempt, filled with his crimes, diminished by his constant attempts to rise above them, because the attempts always failed. The anger rose that might consume him if he let it.
With the anger came the magic.
Harry opened his eyes and found his vision consumed by filth whichever direction he looked in. His body was running, dripping with it, bleeding bloody tar. His hands were stained with it; they would never be clean. Fire ran with the slime and scarred the forest floor, digging down, bruising and battering and burning the earth.
A voice was calling, or might be calling, or could be calling, to him outside the magic and the whirl of fire. Harry refused to see why he should listen. There was nothing he could do but try to hold back the fire as long as he still had the power to do so. He tried to wrap the familiar barriers around himself, thinking of what he could do when he found someone who would gratify him—
And the disgust met him head-on. Who was he that he should need that? Ron and Hermione were right. It was abnormal, he had no reason for such a thing except the darkest possible hang-ups resulting from his abuse and Dumbledore’s manipulation, and he hadn’t even suffered that much or lost that many people in the war, compared to some people. Why did he react so strongly to mental wounds that chains were the only things that could compensate?
His chest was heaving. Murder and war and revolt ran wild in his veins.
He fell back into the darkness, the barriers breaking apart as they tried to emerge, and he was lost to the voice.
*
Draco, still dodging the arrows, spoke Potter’s first name and then his last name over and over again, in a steady and calm voice, and never looked away from him. Despite what the centaur had said, he thought that Potter might have the chance to catch hold of Draco’s words and rise from the fountain of dirt that seemed to be devouring him. They had shared an intimate encounter in which Draco’s voice could command him, after all.
But the darkness remained, and Draco decided that he could do nothing for Potter at the moment. He would have to stop the centaur and his arrows first.
He already knew Shield Charms wouldn’t work. He wondered, though, if something more unorthodox, more daring, would. He began to smile as he considered it, and the centaur noticed.
“You cannot fight me,” he said, gently, mournfully. “They hid the secret with me, in light, and I am the light that searches out the depths of your soul. I bring the secrets to the surface, the buried things, and you cannot face them.”
Draco tossed his head back and dropped the shields he had been beginning to brew. He faced the centaur, naked of anything except his wand, which swept back and forth in front of him, low and parallel to the ground. The centaur paused, scraping a hoof on the earth and studying him carefully.
“Strike at me,” Draco said quietly. “You might find more than you expected.”
The centaur moved with flowing speed, stringing and shooting the arrow so quickly that Draco began to think his earlier escapes had been luck. The arrow whistled across the distance between them and struck him in the shoulder. The darkness sank into him and began to rise from within him at the same time.
Draco shut his eyes and confronted the darkness with his utter lack of barriers.
The arrow sent poison into him, seeking to free the hidden poisons he had filled himself with. And it could find nothing that Draco had not already confronted and alchemized as part of himself, no place where he had not already been.
Draco had struggled with other things than becoming a Potions master in the years after the war. He had struggled with his shame and frustration over not doing something glorious when it seemed every other student at Hogwarts was a war hero. He had struggled with the fact that he hadn’t actually saved his parents, and that he’d been stupid enough to believe Voldemort in the first place when he said Draco could. He had struggled with the memory of Severus, the jealousy he felt when other people did better than he did, the heart-gnawing rage he still experienced when he saw Potter’s picture in the paper. He struggled with the fact that his name was tarnished and would be for generations.
All that he’d been raised to believe he would have and would serve had been destroyed. The Dark Lord was a shadow and a lie. His parents had played no more glorious part than saving Harry Potter’s life when the Dark Lord believed he was dead—something that changed the course of the war, yes, but not the kind of blazing deed performed before dozens of witnesses, and not something that anyone outside a small, select group of people would even believe had happened. Draco wasn’t a Malfoy, heir to an astonishing legacy. He was an eighteen-year-old in a world that didn’t want him.
All of that he had faced. All of that he had conquered or subdued or learned to live with. He had made vows that embraced the future rather than the past, such as the one about never sleeping with someone who didn’t want him.
He was not without flaw, but he was without self-deception. He faced those things Severus and his parents and the world had taught them and made the wounds his sign of strength. And the thoughts that would have terrified other people, of becoming too powerful or hurting his enemies or performing the Dark Arts, were his secret dreams at night.
He embraced the darkness, and the light of the centaur’s arrow found no fear of it in him.
He opened his eyes and saw that the centaur had backed away from him. His white coat was luminescent, and his hoof continued to stamp and scrape, but it sent sparks up now. He had no bow or arrows any longer.
“I had not thought a Dark wizard would come here,” he whispered. He grew brighter and brighter, until Draco had to squint and blink to see him. “I surrender.”
He tossed something that Draco caught without thinking about it, only remembering later that the centaur was an enemy and this could have been anything from a weapon to poison. But it turned out to be a large globe made of some material like flexible glass, though not quite as transparent. Looking into it, Draco could make out two twists of parchment.
When he looked up, the centaur was fading into the last of the sunlight.
“How do I heal Potter?” Draco shouted after him.
“The infection of my arrow cannot be healed, only contained,” came the voice of a whispering ghost, “unless the one touched by it faces and accepts his demons.”
Draco cursed and raced across the clearing to kneel beside Potter as the centaur faded completely into the flood of sunlight. Of course the one thing that could stop this infection would be the one thing that Potter was unlikely to do.
He clamped his hands into place on Potter’s neck and shoulders, hoping that pain and restraint might do what words alone could not do, and then spent a few moments composing himself, trying to ignore the dark flood of fire and filth that poured over his hands. When he spoke, his voice had the light, cool tone he had used when giving orders to Potter in the Room of Requirement. “Come back.”
*
He was drowning. Ron and Hermione had been right. Dumbledore had been manipulative. He had not lost much in the war against Voldemort, some people had lost their families or their lives, Teddy had lost his parents, why was he so angry? He should be sane, and he wasn’t. He should be happy, and he wasn’t. He should have a family, and he didn’t.
There was no end to the accusations, and no method by which he could cope with or handle them. He was going to drown, and he thought that he might as well let it happen.
Then a voice called out above him, giving him an order, a directive, to obey. “Come back.”
Harry paused, gasping. The dirt stopped flowing out of him and allowed him to hang motionless in the middle of it, spinning in place and staring up at the surface, from which the glittering thread of hope had descended.
The thread was there, was real, and the voice that said, “Come back,” giving him no option to escape from it, was Malfoy’s.
Harry closed his eyes. How could he sleep with Malfoy again, knowing what he knew about himself?
But the voice didn’t say that he had to do that, or even be bound. It said simply that he had to come back. And to do that, Harry had to build barriers that would put the secrets back into their places and protect them the way they had been protected beforehand.
“Come back,” the voice said. It didn’t say how. That was up to him to figure out.
Harry extended his hands to either side and seized two squirming handfuls of the blackness. He stuffed them back down and into himself, preventing them from escaping as they wanted. He then grabbed the whirling thoughts and stuffed them down. Yes, he was selfish and horrible and twisted and sick and a waste of human life, but he would have to think about that after he had reached the point where he could open his eyes and see Malfoy’s face.
Again and again the order thrummed in his ears, and again and again it gave him strength, as nothing else could have, to struggle against the darkness and tell it to learn its place, that it was not the whole of him and could not consume the whole of his will.
That was wrong. He was sick and twisted, and he should have learned some other way to cope with his problems. His friends’ voices chattered in his ears, and Hermione’s face glowed with tears, and there was no solution.
But there could be a solution later, after Harry had escaped from the immediate problem that no solution would fix. He flung himself into that, and the void groaned around him and responded. It became not a void, but stuffed with flesh, choked with bitterness, filled with evil. Yes, it was still there, yes, it was horrible, and yes, Harry thought that anyone who looked at him had to be disgusted. But the point was that it stayed there and allowed him to come closer and closer to what else he needed to do.
He opened his eyes, and saw Malfoy’s face above him.
*
Draco would not have admitted how relieved he was when the darkness stopped flowing across his hands and the last of the stain became intangible and fell away. But Potter’s eyes still showed no sense, so he kept repeating his words until they snapped open and were staring at him, lit with a darkness that was only human, that of pupil and iris.
“Malfoy.” Potter’s voice was hoarse and harsh. He sounded as if he’d been screaming for hours. Draco reckoned that it was possible he had, somewhere deep inside and far away where Draco couldn’t have heard him. Potter cleared his throat and sat up, shaking his head as if he assumed that he still had slime to clear from his hair. He glanced at the bubble in Draco’s hand. “That’s the riddle?”
“And the keyword that will unlock the wards,” Draco said, watching him carefully. He would take his cue from Potter, he thought, and react as he reacted.
“We should get out of here,” Potter said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
Draco frowned. Taking his cue from Potter had not meant being confronted by a senseless mask of flesh that refused to acknowledge anything of what had happened between them.
He stayed silent, however, until they reached the eaves of the Forest and Potter leaned against the nearest trunk with a gasp, closing his eyes. Then Draco stepped up beside him and murmured, “The centaur said that his infection couldn’t be healed, only contained, until you faced your demons.”
Potter spoke without looking at him. “And I contained it.” He hesitated, then added, “I might not come by tomorrow. I’ll have to seek someone out who can help me contain this more than I have so far.”
Draco drove his nails into Potter’s shoulder. Potter sagged towards him, then seemed to realize what he was doing and straightened up.
“Why do so?” Draco whispered against his ear. “When I’m willing and ready to help you with that?”
“Because this has nothing to do with anger,” Potter said. “And some of the things I learned when the arrow hit me have changed my mind about what we did yesterday. The chains, though, can be conjured or made by a skilled locksmith. I’ll find someone.” He stepped away from Draco.
Draco pinched harder with his nails. “You’re being ridiculous,” he said. “And endangering more than just your own life, by giving me a partner who might go into battle still suffering from a magical infection.”
“I promise you that won’t happen,” Potter said, and broke away, striding rapidly down the road towards Hogsmeade.
Draco closed his eyes and stood there in anger of his own as profound, he thought, as anything Potter suffered from, although it didn’t produce flames racing up and down his body.
Severus, he thought when he looked at Potter’s distant shape, would have laughed.
Harry stood on the bank of the lake, concentrating fiercely on the water. It was late in the afternoon now, and the stars would be coming out soon. Perhaps the reflection of Venus in the water, if it shone at all, would tell them something.
Malfoy stood beside him. He didn’t move the way Harry did, when he had to ease the weight on his feet or an ache in his side that had formed with standing for too long. He could give his attention to a single object and then cease to exist in the contemplation of that object. Harry remembered him being like that in Potions at Hogwarts, too, where he would earn better marks than almost anyone in the class because he could fixate—
Harry yanked his gaze away, flushing, and then turned to kick a small pebble into the lake. The ripples that broke the surface passed in front of Malfoy’s eyes, but he gave no sign that he noticed.
Harry clenched his fists. He couldn’t have said why Malfoy bothered him so much, except that Harry had assumed they had an understanding about the incident yesterday and wouldn’t mention it again. He had been happy not thinking of it or reverting to it until Malfoy brought us up.
And why did he do that? Harry sneaked another glance. Malfoy had remained in the same posture for twenty minutes now, but he didn’t look stiff or bored. He must know that us being together in any way is impossible.
Of course, Harry hastily reminded himself, Malfoy had given no indication that he wanted that. He simply wanted to fuck Harry again, to assert his authority. It wasn’t surprising. That way, he could have control of the partnership, too.
He probably assumed that he would get sole credit for discovering the secret of the riddles in the press, if he played his cards right.
Harry grimaced. He can have it, as far as I’m concerned. Not that I care enough to tell him that. He gave another sideways look at Malfoy, who had started frowning as though he assumed the answer would rise from the lake if he just scowled hard enough. He ought to know I like my privacy by now.
The thought would probably have led him into another gloomy round of speculations and castigations to himself for being stupid enough to trust Malfoy in the first place, but suddenly Malfoy took a step back and laughed.
Harry tensed instinctively at the laughter. Deep, ringing, loud, joyous—it wasn’t the sort of sound he associated with Malfoy at all, let alone at a time when they were both baffled and had had a frustrating row earlier. Well, more frustrating for Malfoy than for Harry, at any rate. That was something to take comfort in.
Maybe he’s finally gone off his nut, Harry decided, wondering if that would be good for Harry himself or not. Well, if it coordinated with a tendency to forget intense sexual experiences, it would be. “Malfoy?” he asked cautiously.
“I was ignoring certain parts of the riddle,” Malfoy said, and turned to him with a wide grin that made Harry shudder. Ron had grinned like that when he thought he had a brilliant solution to the conflict between Harry and the Ministry over Hogwarts: that Harry should become a teacher there. “The last line is the most important. Why would it be isolated from the rest and in a different case if it wasn’t?”
“All right,” Harry said. “But what does it mean?”
Malfoy seized the riddle parchment from his pocket and twisted it around to show to Harry. “The last,” he said triumphantly. “We have to look at the last. The last word, Potter, don’t you see? And the last word is beauty.”
Harry could see that, even from the insane angle Malfoy was holding the riddle at, as if he expected Harry to read it with his head on one side like a bird. “I can see. So what?”
Malfoy laughed again and then reached out, grabbed a quill and an inkwell from what seemed thin air but must have been the depths of his sleeves, and began to scribble on the back of the parchment. Harry stepped around him to see and tried to ignore the sensation of warmth that blazed up at him through Malfoy’s robes. It wasn’t as though he had to touch him.
Unless he wanted to.
Harry held his breath for a moment until Malfoy was finished, so that his chest wouldn’t accidentally touch Malfoy’s back. They brushed shoulders anyway when Malfoy turned and held out the parchment to him. Harry flushed and tried to focus on the letters.
It simply looked as though Malfoy had rewritten the word BEAUTY, though with the first three vowels more widely spaced apart from the consonants surrounding them. E A U said the paper, and still Harry didn’t see what was supposed to be so special about that. He gave Malfoy a look that he knew was full of baffled incomprehension.
Malfoy sighed, rolled his eyes, and turned the parchment over. “We mistook the meaning of the word legend in the second line,” he said, stabbing the riddle with one finger. “A legend can be a story, sure.” He paused triumphantly. “It can also mean a piece of writing.”
Harry blinked. “And that, combined with the letters in the word ‘beauty,’ tells you what?”
Malfoy laughed. “There’s only one creature that walks on four legs in the world around us and on eight legs—the eight legs of letters—and two tails—the tails of curved letters—in our writing, as well as having those three vowels in the same order as the word beauty.” He turned the parchment over and copied out another word, in capital letters this time, then once again held it out to Harry.
CENTAUR.
Harry did want to smack himself in the forehead with one hand when he saw that Malfoy had explained it that way. “So the clue to the riddle is going to be in the Forbidden Forest,” he said. “All right. But where? Are we supposed to go and ask the centaurs to please give up whatever it was that Dumbledore and Snape asked them to hide?”
Malfoy flipped the parchment again and tapped the third line. “We should have paid more attention to everything about this riddle, and that includes the third line. ‘Cross the sky.’ Wherever Venus appears to set, or rise, in the Forbidden Forest is the place we want.”
“But doesn’t that change with the seasons, or something?” Long-ago memories of Astronomy were struggling to surface in Harry’s mind. He rubbed his head and wished that thinking didn’t have to be so painful.
There’s a joke in that that Malfoy or Hermione would find, he decided, and then decided that he also wasn’t going to think about that anymore. He had enough to deal with, given the condescending look that Malfoy had just tossed him.
“I can still make the necessary calculations,” Malfoy said, waving a hand. “And the centaurs are doubtless included in the riddle because we’ll have to fight one to get the clue free. Like I said, we should have paid attention to the whole riddle. It’s one integrated unit, no matter how strange it might seem.”
Harry nodded. Then he paused, his mind flickering back to something that he might have put more importance on at the time if he had been thinking about the riddles then.
“I think I might know where we need to go,” he said slowly.
*
Draco had been proud of his brilliance earlier that afternoon. He had stood by the lake, and the answers had seemed to rise from the bottom of his mind like fish rising from the water, conveying the obvious question: why couldn’t “the last” refer to the last word on the parchment? It was as likely as anything else, and the different forms of the letters—capital in most of the riddle, lower-case in that last line—was a clue that it would have something to do with writing.
Now that he was trudging through the Forbidden Forest behind Potter, who swatted branches out of the way as if he did this for a living, he was more dissatisfied with himself, and he couldn’t stop thinking about why.
Potter had still been the one to come up with the place that they would need to visit. When he had explained about the white centaur and the blackened clearing, Draco had to agree that it was worth taking a look at.
But why should the solution depend, yet again, on those sudden skips of Potter’s unaided and inexplicable intuition, rather than on Draco’s subtle and brilliant calculations with the Astronomical instruments, as he thought it should?
Of course, he could have refused to visit the clearing and insisted that Potter let him make the calculations. But he knew Potter would have set out on his own, and he did think that Potter’s conclusion was right, much as he didn’t want to think that.
And had Potter praised him for his brilliance, asked him how he achieved the answer to the second riddle, or looked at him with the adoration that Draco had seen in his vision in the lake?
He had not.
He kicked a stone in front of him, and it went rolling away and rebounded from the trunk of a tree with a ringing sound that shouldn’t have traveled so far through the Forest, Draco thought, wincing. Then again, there was no reason for the laws of nature in the Forbidden Forest to be the same as those elsewhere.
Potter whirled around and stared at him. “Is something the matter?” he asked, his eyes searching past Draco’s shoulder for Merlin knew what danger.
Draco shook his head and gestured Potter curtly to go on. Potter raised an eyebrow and did so.
The raised eyebrow stayed with Draco, and so did the doubtful expression on Potter’s face. It looked as though he thought Draco was irrational or stupid, but he was too polite to say so. Draco was the one who should be feeling that, after the way that Potter had repudiated his offer this morning.
Potter halted and lifted one cautious hand. Draco peered in front of him, but could see no lessening of the trunks. “What’s the matter?” he whispered irritably. “We obviously aren’t in the clearing yet.”
“Obviously,” Potter snapped back. “But I thought I heard hoofbeats.”
Draco drew his wand in silence, keeping his eyes on the trees around him while straining his own ears. Nothing happened, and the silence seemed to grow thicker and stronger the longer he listened. He let his gaze come back to Potter and raised an eyebrow of his own.
“I did hear them,” Potter said. He didn’t look inclined to doubt himself because Draco did. That irritated Draco, primarily because he had been looking forwards to watching Potter flounder around in circles. “And we’re close enough to the clearing now that there could be centaurs about, if not the one we want.” He gestured to the burned footsteps on the forest floor, the trail of marks he’d caused with his magical flames a few days ago, and which had led them this far. “These are more frequent now. I know that I was shedding more and more magic—”
“And destroying more and more of the Forest,” Draco felt compelled to add.
Potter scowled at him again. “The closer I got to the clearing,” he finished determinedly. “It has to be close. That white centaur acted like he was guarding something. I know he was.”
Draco decided not to say that, in his opinion, Potter hadn’t thought that at the time and had simply added the detail to his memory later based on his new hope. It cost him nothing to remain calm and still and listen.
And yes, there was the soft sound of a foot disturbing the leaf mold not far from them. It might have been a human foot, but this far out in the Forest, Draco thought it significantly more likely to be a magical creature. He turned to face it and raised his voice. “If you guard the secret that Professors Snape and Dumbledore wanted you to hide, we’ve come to claim it from you.”
Potter grabbed his arm roughly, which wasn’t exactly the kind of skin-to-skin contact Draco had been craving, but at least was contact. “Malfoy, what you are doing?” he whispered harshly into Draco’s ear.
“Using my time wisely,” Draco said, and walked a few steps closer to the rustling noise. “Are you coming out?”
There was a pause, which Draco thought their opponent was trying and failing to make dramatic, and then a white centaur emerged through the gap in the nearest line of trees, stopping there so that he was framed by the branches. He was taller than most centaurs Draco had seen, with flowing hair and a beard that could have rivaled Dumbledore’s. He scraped his left forehoof on the ground, producing the rustling sound they had heard before, and then inclined his head.
“You are brave to venture this far into the Forest when the sun is falling,” he said. “Come and fight me.”
Draco hesitated, trying to figure out the trap in this. The water-snakes had been a surprise, attacking without warning, and he had assumed that all their other challenges would be the same way. A straightforward invitation to fight wasn’t something he had expected.
“Not as brave as that,” the centaur remarked. “It seems that your courage needs more reinforcement from your common sense. You should have come earlier.” He took a bow and quiver of arrows from nowhere, or so it seemed, so neatly did his hands move, and was stringing an arrow before Draco thought about it.
Potter raised a Shield Charm in front of them and then stepped towards the centaur. His eyes were wild, a slight smile tugging at his lips, and Draco thought he glimpsed the man who had been both hero and Auror in his time, and had become someone who needed bonds to control him. “I’ll fight with you,” he said. “No reason to involve Malfoy in it.”
“You should,” the centaur said. “He understands more of darkness than you do.” And he shot.
The arrow passed through Potter’s Shield Charm as if it were mist and straight into his shoulder. Potter, the expressions of surprise and agony warring on his face, grabbed the arrow shaft and hissed in pain. Then he sank to the forest floor, while keeping an eye on the centaur and holding up his wand in a shaking hand.
Draco watched blood well up from the wound in dark droplets before he truly absorbed what had happened.
He whirled around and lifted his wand in turn, only to find that the centaur had disappeared. A soft rustling sound behind him made him duck frantically, and the second arrow swished overhead. Draco turned his head automatically to track it, but it had vanished instead of lodging in a tree the way he expected.
“This kind of arrow is meant to stir up the darkness in living flesh,” the centaur said, in the tone of someone giving an Astronomy lesson, and then Draco heard the singing hum of the bow bending beneath the weight of another arrow. “Perhaps you should look at your companion if you wish to learn what will happen then.”
Draco really wanted to keep his eyes on the centaur, provided he could find him again, but the words seemed to grab his face and turn it so that he was looking at Potter.
Or, rather, the writhing blot of darkness where Potter had been.
*
They are coming back again.
The cool voice seemed to speak in Harry’s head a moment before all the evil in him leaped up through the barriers he had thought were containing it.
There was a spitting, splitting noise, and Harry found himself tumbled through his hatred and resentment of Dumbledore and Snape when he had first thought in any detail about what they had done and planned to do to him, and his willingness to leave the piece of Voldemort’s soul lying right there in King’s Cross, and the killing anger he had felt after the war when the Ministry tried to condemn innocent people to death—combined with his secret wish that some of them could be condemned, that he didn’t have to fight for those who would have been willing to watch him die.
Here was the darkness that had led him to use Unforgivable Curses casually by the end of the war, and which had wanted him to use it again when he faced the Carrows across a courtroom.
Here was the vicious pleasure that had exploded inside of him when he watched Molly Weasley kill Bellatrix Lestrange—so vicious that he hadn’t even recognized the emotion until he thought about it later.
Here was the mixture of rage and despair that had drowned him when he realized the Auror program would never treat him like simply another trainee, that he was and would forever be someone’s villain or someone’s hero.
Here was the frustration that had assaulted him when he realized that he would lose the struggle against the Ministry to keep Hogwarts free—inevitably lose it, because there was no way that he could succeed.
And there, perhaps deepest of all, was the drowning pool of disgust that swallowed him whenever his sanity outweighed his need and he had to confront being bound to the bed and fucked by a stranger just to keep from burning down the buildings around him.
He was coated with contempt, filled with his crimes, diminished by his constant attempts to rise above them, because the attempts always failed. The anger rose that might consume him if he let it.
With the anger came the magic.
Harry opened his eyes and found his vision consumed by filth whichever direction he looked in. His body was running, dripping with it, bleeding bloody tar. His hands were stained with it; they would never be clean. Fire ran with the slime and scarred the forest floor, digging down, bruising and battering and burning the earth.
A voice was calling, or might be calling, or could be calling, to him outside the magic and the whirl of fire. Harry refused to see why he should listen. There was nothing he could do but try to hold back the fire as long as he still had the power to do so. He tried to wrap the familiar barriers around himself, thinking of what he could do when he found someone who would gratify him—
And the disgust met him head-on. Who was he that he should need that? Ron and Hermione were right. It was abnormal, he had no reason for such a thing except the darkest possible hang-ups resulting from his abuse and Dumbledore’s manipulation, and he hadn’t even suffered that much or lost that many people in the war, compared to some people. Why did he react so strongly to mental wounds that chains were the only things that could compensate?
His chest was heaving. Murder and war and revolt ran wild in his veins.
He fell back into the darkness, the barriers breaking apart as they tried to emerge, and he was lost to the voice.
*
Draco, still dodging the arrows, spoke Potter’s first name and then his last name over and over again, in a steady and calm voice, and never looked away from him. Despite what the centaur had said, he thought that Potter might have the chance to catch hold of Draco’s words and rise from the fountain of dirt that seemed to be devouring him. They had shared an intimate encounter in which Draco’s voice could command him, after all.
But the darkness remained, and Draco decided that he could do nothing for Potter at the moment. He would have to stop the centaur and his arrows first.
He already knew Shield Charms wouldn’t work. He wondered, though, if something more unorthodox, more daring, would. He began to smile as he considered it, and the centaur noticed.
“You cannot fight me,” he said, gently, mournfully. “They hid the secret with me, in light, and I am the light that searches out the depths of your soul. I bring the secrets to the surface, the buried things, and you cannot face them.”
Draco tossed his head back and dropped the shields he had been beginning to brew. He faced the centaur, naked of anything except his wand, which swept back and forth in front of him, low and parallel to the ground. The centaur paused, scraping a hoof on the earth and studying him carefully.
“Strike at me,” Draco said quietly. “You might find more than you expected.”
The centaur moved with flowing speed, stringing and shooting the arrow so quickly that Draco began to think his earlier escapes had been luck. The arrow whistled across the distance between them and struck him in the shoulder. The darkness sank into him and began to rise from within him at the same time.
Draco shut his eyes and confronted the darkness with his utter lack of barriers.
The arrow sent poison into him, seeking to free the hidden poisons he had filled himself with. And it could find nothing that Draco had not already confronted and alchemized as part of himself, no place where he had not already been.
Draco had struggled with other things than becoming a Potions master in the years after the war. He had struggled with his shame and frustration over not doing something glorious when it seemed every other student at Hogwarts was a war hero. He had struggled with the fact that he hadn’t actually saved his parents, and that he’d been stupid enough to believe Voldemort in the first place when he said Draco could. He had struggled with the memory of Severus, the jealousy he felt when other people did better than he did, the heart-gnawing rage he still experienced when he saw Potter’s picture in the paper. He struggled with the fact that his name was tarnished and would be for generations.
All that he’d been raised to believe he would have and would serve had been destroyed. The Dark Lord was a shadow and a lie. His parents had played no more glorious part than saving Harry Potter’s life when the Dark Lord believed he was dead—something that changed the course of the war, yes, but not the kind of blazing deed performed before dozens of witnesses, and not something that anyone outside a small, select group of people would even believe had happened. Draco wasn’t a Malfoy, heir to an astonishing legacy. He was an eighteen-year-old in a world that didn’t want him.
All of that he had faced. All of that he had conquered or subdued or learned to live with. He had made vows that embraced the future rather than the past, such as the one about never sleeping with someone who didn’t want him.
He was not without flaw, but he was without self-deception. He faced those things Severus and his parents and the world had taught them and made the wounds his sign of strength. And the thoughts that would have terrified other people, of becoming too powerful or hurting his enemies or performing the Dark Arts, were his secret dreams at night.
He embraced the darkness, and the light of the centaur’s arrow found no fear of it in him.
He opened his eyes and saw that the centaur had backed away from him. His white coat was luminescent, and his hoof continued to stamp and scrape, but it sent sparks up now. He had no bow or arrows any longer.
“I had not thought a Dark wizard would come here,” he whispered. He grew brighter and brighter, until Draco had to squint and blink to see him. “I surrender.”
He tossed something that Draco caught without thinking about it, only remembering later that the centaur was an enemy and this could have been anything from a weapon to poison. But it turned out to be a large globe made of some material like flexible glass, though not quite as transparent. Looking into it, Draco could make out two twists of parchment.
When he looked up, the centaur was fading into the last of the sunlight.
“How do I heal Potter?” Draco shouted after him.
“The infection of my arrow cannot be healed, only contained,” came the voice of a whispering ghost, “unless the one touched by it faces and accepts his demons.”
Draco cursed and raced across the clearing to kneel beside Potter as the centaur faded completely into the flood of sunlight. Of course the one thing that could stop this infection would be the one thing that Potter was unlikely to do.
He clamped his hands into place on Potter’s neck and shoulders, hoping that pain and restraint might do what words alone could not do, and then spent a few moments composing himself, trying to ignore the dark flood of fire and filth that poured over his hands. When he spoke, his voice had the light, cool tone he had used when giving orders to Potter in the Room of Requirement. “Come back.”
*
He was drowning. Ron and Hermione had been right. Dumbledore had been manipulative. He had not lost much in the war against Voldemort, some people had lost their families or their lives, Teddy had lost his parents, why was he so angry? He should be sane, and he wasn’t. He should be happy, and he wasn’t. He should have a family, and he didn’t.
There was no end to the accusations, and no method by which he could cope with or handle them. He was going to drown, and he thought that he might as well let it happen.
Then a voice called out above him, giving him an order, a directive, to obey. “Come back.”
Harry paused, gasping. The dirt stopped flowing out of him and allowed him to hang motionless in the middle of it, spinning in place and staring up at the surface, from which the glittering thread of hope had descended.
The thread was there, was real, and the voice that said, “Come back,” giving him no option to escape from it, was Malfoy’s.
Harry closed his eyes. How could he sleep with Malfoy again, knowing what he knew about himself?
But the voice didn’t say that he had to do that, or even be bound. It said simply that he had to come back. And to do that, Harry had to build barriers that would put the secrets back into their places and protect them the way they had been protected beforehand.
“Come back,” the voice said. It didn’t say how. That was up to him to figure out.
Harry extended his hands to either side and seized two squirming handfuls of the blackness. He stuffed them back down and into himself, preventing them from escaping as they wanted. He then grabbed the whirling thoughts and stuffed them down. Yes, he was selfish and horrible and twisted and sick and a waste of human life, but he would have to think about that after he had reached the point where he could open his eyes and see Malfoy’s face.
Again and again the order thrummed in his ears, and again and again it gave him strength, as nothing else could have, to struggle against the darkness and tell it to learn its place, that it was not the whole of him and could not consume the whole of his will.
That was wrong. He was sick and twisted, and he should have learned some other way to cope with his problems. His friends’ voices chattered in his ears, and Hermione’s face glowed with tears, and there was no solution.
But there could be a solution later, after Harry had escaped from the immediate problem that no solution would fix. He flung himself into that, and the void groaned around him and responded. It became not a void, but stuffed with flesh, choked with bitterness, filled with evil. Yes, it was still there, yes, it was horrible, and yes, Harry thought that anyone who looked at him had to be disgusted. But the point was that it stayed there and allowed him to come closer and closer to what else he needed to do.
He opened his eyes, and saw Malfoy’s face above him.
*
Draco would not have admitted how relieved he was when the darkness stopped flowing across his hands and the last of the stain became intangible and fell away. But Potter’s eyes still showed no sense, so he kept repeating his words until they snapped open and were staring at him, lit with a darkness that was only human, that of pupil and iris.
“Malfoy.” Potter’s voice was hoarse and harsh. He sounded as if he’d been screaming for hours. Draco reckoned that it was possible he had, somewhere deep inside and far away where Draco couldn’t have heard him. Potter cleared his throat and sat up, shaking his head as if he assumed that he still had slime to clear from his hair. He glanced at the bubble in Draco’s hand. “That’s the riddle?”
“And the keyword that will unlock the wards,” Draco said, watching him carefully. He would take his cue from Potter, he thought, and react as he reacted.
“We should get out of here,” Potter said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
Draco frowned. Taking his cue from Potter had not meant being confronted by a senseless mask of flesh that refused to acknowledge anything of what had happened between them.
He stayed silent, however, until they reached the eaves of the Forest and Potter leaned against the nearest trunk with a gasp, closing his eyes. Then Draco stepped up beside him and murmured, “The centaur said that his infection couldn’t be healed, only contained, until you faced your demons.”
Potter spoke without looking at him. “And I contained it.” He hesitated, then added, “I might not come by tomorrow. I’ll have to seek someone out who can help me contain this more than I have so far.”
Draco drove his nails into Potter’s shoulder. Potter sagged towards him, then seemed to realize what he was doing and straightened up.
“Why do so?” Draco whispered against his ear. “When I’m willing and ready to help you with that?”
“Because this has nothing to do with anger,” Potter said. “And some of the things I learned when the arrow hit me have changed my mind about what we did yesterday. The chains, though, can be conjured or made by a skilled locksmith. I’ll find someone.” He stepped away from Draco.
Draco pinched harder with his nails. “You’re being ridiculous,” he said. “And endangering more than just your own life, by giving me a partner who might go into battle still suffering from a magical infection.”
“I promise you that won’t happen,” Potter said, and broke away, striding rapidly down the road towards Hogsmeade.
Draco closed his eyes and stood there in anger of his own as profound, he thought, as anything Potter suffered from, although it didn’t produce flames racing up and down his body.
Severus, he thought when he looked at Potter’s distant shape, would have laughed.
