Chapter Five of 'Ragnarok'- Backblow

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Four.

Title: Ragnarok (5/12)
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.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Backblow

Draco was leaning against the back of his bathtub, his eyes closed in luxury, when the house-elf appeared. Draco did nothing except open one eye. He was generally unembarrassed around house-elves, especially since they had seen him in circumstances far more naked than the current layer of bubbles and thick, foamy water that lay over his loins. He could always order this one to punish itself later if he thought it needed the discipline.

The elf that stood beside the tub was not one of his, however, and Draco regarded it with a bit more interest. It was bobbing its head, blinking so fast that it squeezed tears from its eyes, and gripping the scrap of cloth that it wore around its waist in lieu of clothes. Draco was glad that whoever owned it had at least managed that much decency. It was one thing for house-elves to see him naked and quite another for it to happen the other way around.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I has a message from Master Harry Potter, Master Draco Malfoy, sir,” moaned the elf in an ecstasy of agony.

Draco lowered his head, afraid that the pleased look in his eyes would be too visible to the house-elf. He knew at once what Potter had done, and that meant he knew the elf could possibly still report what happened around it to other members of the Wizengamot. There was no saying that Potter had managed to secure its loyalty before it left him, no matter how he had convinced it to deliver the message in the first place.

“What is the message?” he asked. Best to let a house-elf that upset get done with its task as soon as possible.

“I is supposed to tell you that M-Mistress Madam Gilfleur came to M-Master Harry Potter and said that you are getting t-too independent and might need to be k-killed. By M-Master Harry Potter,” the elf added.

Draco threw back his head and laughed. The elf cowered from the echoes off the walls of the bathroom. Draco didn’t let that bother him, but had his laugh, and then smiled at the elf. “You’ve done well,” he said. “Go back to your master and tell him that I’ve received his message and thank him for the warning. He will hear somewhat from me tomorrow concerning the task we’ve been working on.”

The elf, looking reassured at someone who knew how to treat it, bowed and disappeared. Draco leaned back and closed his eyes, chuckling. The water around him seemed warmer, though he knew that came from his own satisfaction rather than any renewed magic.

Well, well, well.

This was an excellent sign for several reasons. First, Draco now knew that Madam Gilfleur’s friendliness was indeed a ruse, though he wasn’t yet sure of her ultimate target. Second, Potter cared enough about Draco—or, be honest, the promise of freedom and power that Draco offered—to defy the masters he’d sold his soul to. Third, Potter must have done something to leave the elf that cowed and unable to report to other members of the Wizengamot, and Draco thought he knew what it was.

Use that power, Potter, yes. Become used to it. It is your right.

*

Harry sat down when he received the house-elf’s message and stared almost blankly into the fireplace. He didn’t know what else he was supposed to do now that he was launched on a course of rebellion against the Wizengamot.

Wait, though. Was it rebellion to warn one Wizengamot member against another? The situation had never come up before, since the Wizengamot had a tendency to simply deprive one of their own who failed them of prestige and power until they resigned in a huff. Harry had no idea why Gilfleur thought Malfoy was different, dangerous enough to be destroyed by an edict to Ragnarok, but it was strange.

Face up to the truth, Harry, he thought then, rubbing his face with one hand, feeling the shapes of his cheekbones, lips, and nose as though he had never felt them before. If it’s not rebellion now, it will become so in the future.

The door opened. Harry looked up and saw Risidell standing there. He nodded and tossed a packet of letters at Harry, which Harry caught. By the time he looked up again, the door was shut and Risidell was gone. He never stayed long, and Harry had no idea whether that had to do with some distaste for the place and the weapon, or because he was uncomfortable being close to Harry’s power.

Harry paused suddenly. That second possibility would not have occurred to him before a few days ago. He had accepted it for a fact that all the Wizengamot despised him and wouldn’t want to be around him any longer than necessary.

He swallowed. Was it right that Malfoy was changing his life so powerfully, so fast?

But it has to be fast, he thought then, shuddering as the magic nipped at his wrist joint. The magic is killing me as quickly.

He flipped through the letters. One each from Ron and Hermione. One from George, asking Harry’s advice for a new set of jokes for the Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes line. One from Molly, asking him how he was and advising him to prepare warmly for the Australian winter. One from Ginny, asking a few simple questions and bidding him farewell, as she always did, “with affection and regret.”

Harry closed his eyes. Ten years. He hadn’t seen his friends in ten years. The Wizengamot members helped him come up with a combination of shifting excuses that meant they had to stay away. The latest one, which had lasted three years or more, was that Harry had a combination of crippling social anxiety, from his years in the spotlight as a child, and of guilt. Ron and Hermione knew that a large number of Aurors had died in the disastrous raid on the Death Eaters that ended up raising his power.

They didn’t know that Harry had been the one to kill them.

A wave of yearning broke across Harry and left him shaking and dazed.

I want that life back, the life I was going to have. I want my friends. I want to be an Auror and have nothing more to worry about than whether a Dark wizard is going to be quicker than I am someday. I want to have a family and a place to go for dinner on Sunday nights and people to drink with. I want myself back.

If he cooperated with Malfoy’s plans, even if he could somehow emerge from seclusion and see his friends again, it wouldn’t be on the same terms. They would never understand his allying with Malfoy and becoming—

What? A Dark wizard? A ruler of the wizarding world?

Harry pushed the post away, feeling ill and indecisive again. He could rebel against the Wizengamot. He was not sure he could rebel against the image of the person he still felt himself to be, under all the changes and the encrustations of the years.

*

This time, the moment his Patronus landed in front of Potter, Draco knew something had changed. Potter was sitting with his head buried in his arms and didn’t look up at the appearance of the silvery cormorant, though Draco knew he couldn’t get that many visitors.

“Well?’ Draco asked, when he had waited a short time.

Potter brought his arms down as though they were weighted with stones and stared at him with dull eyes. “Did you find out why Madam Gilfleur wanted to kill you?” he asked in a rasping voice.

“Not yet,” Draco said, accepting the change of subject for what it was. “I had a few theories, but most of them were proven wrong today.” Gilfleur had used his suggestions when she spoke in the Wizengamot, meaning that she wasn’t afraid of his intelligence, and when Draco performed a subtle spell on her that would have revealed any blood connection to Kellerston and thus a reason for her to feel protective of him, nothing appeared. But Draco was not upset. Wizengamot members could indeed have subtle reasons. “I’ll find out eventually. What’s wrong with you, in the meantime?”

Potter swallowed noisily. “I don’t think—Malfoy, what in the world are my friends going to think of me if I really do become something worse than I already am?”

“I fail to see how your situation could be worse,” Draco said dryly. It was impossible not to glance around the large, dim prison chamber where Potter was kept, though Potter was so sunk in misery that he might not have noticed the cormorant turning its head. “Kept locked away from the world, serving as the Wizengamot’s executioner, no one to help or speak to you as anything but a kind of servant.”

“A weapon,” Potter said. “Not a servant. That’s what I am to them.”

Draco raised his eyebrows and leaned forwards to make sure that he was seeing Potter to his best advantage at the end of that silvery tunnel the Patronus created. “And you don’t resent that?”

Potter moved his hands restlessly back and forth. Draco relaxed with a little sigh. He might have got to Potter just in time. Whatever surge of confidence had animated him yesterday was wearing off, and he seemed to be reconsidering whether or not he could follow through on the promises he had made. Or that Draco had made to him, perhaps.

“I was thinking,” Potter whispered. “My friends don’t know where I’ve been the past ten years. They don’t know that, when I stumbled into that ritual, I killed a bunch of people—not just Death Eaters, but Aurors. I would have to reveal myself as a murderer if I came out. I would have to see them again, which is what I’ve been wanting, but it wouldn’t be in the best circumstances. It just—what am I going to do, Malfoy?” He looked up with haunted eyes.

Draco sighed, in relief this time, and leaned his chin on his fist. Yes, he was the best Mind-Healer for this that Potter could have found, and he was glad that he had contacted the idiot when he had. “Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening to me?” Potter’s eyes had wandered away to the side, and with the limited field of vision that the Patronus gave him, Draco wasn’t sure that he was still paying attention.

Potter nodded, blinked, and jerked his wide eyes back to Draco.

“Listen,” Draco said again, and made sure that he kept his voice as calm as ever, along with his face. “There’s no way that you can have a normal homecoming among your friends. Too much has changed. Too much has passed. They haven’t seen you in ten years, you said?”

Potter nodded, and his eyes started to wonder again. But Draco had already had enough of his brooding, and didn’t intend to allow him to get back to it.

“Then they won’t be expecting to see you again, anyway,” Draco said. “They certainly won’t expect you to be the same. I knew Granger, Potter. She was smart.” He decided to say nothing about the Weasel just yet, because he wasn’t sure how close Potter was to the family and there was no point in starting a row over a name. “She must have decided by now that something very strange is happening. You might still give her an unpleasant surprise, but I really doubt she accepts the deceptions that the Wizengamot has been trying to foist on her.”

Potter slowly shut his eyes and nodded again. “You may be right.”

“Of course I am.” With Potter as with house-elves, Draco thought at that moment. Take a high-handed tone from the beginning and they would follow you. “When you come forwards again, it may surprise them, frighten them, disgust them. But that is not enough reason to hold back. The life the Wizengamot has forced on you for the past ten years is disgraceful and ridiculous. Of course you can’t simply go back to what you were before, but for you never to see them, even under controlled conditions…” Draco shook his head in wonder. He once would have wagered that nothing could part Potter from his friends. Then again, at the time he hadn’t understood the full force of Potter’s shame and guilt, his martyr complex, or the way that the Wizengamot would play on both. He was probably ashamed of his magic, too, considering the way that he had behaved. “It’s wrong. You owe it to yourself to appear in the world again, to have what you want, and to accept that your relationship with your friends has altered so much that it wouldn’t be worth recovering. You’ll have to make a new friendship with them, that’s all.”

“What if they won’t?” Potter had that look again as of an animal at bay, a look that Draco hated as unnatural for him. Let someone who didn’t have all his power feel that way. “Accept me, that is, or become my friends again?”

“Then you move on and leave them behind,” Draco said ruthlessly, but held up his hand when Potter opened his mouth to object. “Haven’t you already done that? Why wasn’t part of your price for serving the Wizengamot an occasional visit to them?”

Potter swallowed, and his eyelashes brushed his cheeks.

Draco nodded. “I know,” he said with a false croon in his voice, one that Potter would realize was false, but it was better to have him fight with Draco than simply sit there like a dejected simpleton. “You wanted to keep your secrets. You were so horrified by what had happened, by the end of your dreams, that you thought it was the end of your life, too. You were willing to do anything, as long as the Wizengamot would keep you secret, keep others safe from you, and give you some purpose in life.”

Potter stared up at him with his lips slowly parting. “How did you know that?” he whispered.

“Because I know you, and people like you,” Draco shot back. He was shaking with excitement rather than anger, but these words still had to be spoken. They were the right way to handle Potter, to fill him with pride and master him and bring him back to some semblance of a working life. If he would have considered that he had a right to a working life in the first place, this would be easier. But it wasn’t like that, and that simply meant Draco had to change things until it was. “Always afraid of yourselves. Always knowing what you want, dreaming of it in your deepest hidden minds, but afraid to reach out and grasp it even when it’s close. You would rather be miserable than suffer the torments of your conscience. Or at least, you think that,” he added, and dropped his voice to a murmur while staring as directly into Potter’s face as he could across the miles that separated them. “I think ten years of misery should have been enough to teach you that conscience’s price isn’t so high.”

“How would you know?” Potter spat, his hands working over each other to the point that Draco thought he would bruise his knuckles. “I don’t think that you’ve ever had a conscience to quiet.”

“Not in the ultra-refined sense that you apparently have, no.” Draco examined Potter down his nose. “But I had to choose to break with my family’s political tradition, which had never had someone on the Wizengamot except in the times it was a lesser power, because we prefer to be in the shadows rather than in the forefront. I had to admit that my father was not going to recover from the madness that consumed him, and that a political career was more important than remaining at his side. I had to learn to work with others, which I don’t like, and compromise, and wait. I would have been in the Wizengamot five years ago, seven years ago, if I could have. But that was a younger man’s dream. I changed myself, Potter, because I came to recognize that my more basic desires—the longing for power—mattered more than the sacrifices I would have to make.”

“I can’t say that my magic matters more to me than my friends,” Potter protested.

Draco sneered mildly at him. “And yet, you didn’t commit suicide the moment you became a murderer. You didn’t fight to remain close to your friends before all else. I think, Potter, that your basic desire is to survive.” He paused for effect, then added, “And now that I’ve come along and offered you a richer way of doing that, you shrink back. You’re going to have to choose life along with survival.”

He dismissed his Patronus before Potter could respond. Yes, he was the kind of partner who would have to listen to the echoes of Draco’s words in his head for a time before he could stand to speak his acceptance of them aloud.

Draco leaned back in his luxurious chair and shook his head. What must it be like to have a conscience like Potter’s? Like having giant wings that you could never use to fly, he reckoned. They were huge and decorative, but inconvenient far more than beautiful, grotesque in their size, and liable to trip one every time one turned around. Draco had had his own disabilities to conquer, but he was glad that had never been one of them.

*

You didn’t fight to remain close to your friends before all else.

That one sentence Malfoy had spoken, of all of them, stayed with Harry the longest. He found himself on his feet pacing back and forth, swearing furiously under his breath, trying to understand his rage.

Ron and Hermione were important to him. He had assumed without thinking about it that of course they were the most important.

But Malfoy was right. What kind of person, who had his magic to bargain with, would have tamely accepted the Wizengamot’s edict that he had to vanish from the sight of everyone, rather than meeting them under tightly controlled circumstances? Harry knew that Ron and Hermione would have kept secrets for his sake, at least, even if he couldn’t trust all the Weasleys.

But he hadn’t tried that.

Harry bowed his head and gritted his teeth, telling himself to be as calm as he could. He couldn’t simply lash out with his magic and level the building, or even do target practice, the way he could have in the Aurors, to exhaust himself and the shame and other emotions swimming through his mind. The wards would scream. He would lose control. It was wrong.

But he had to get away. He could do it, the way he had when he went to meet with Malfoy the other day. And although he had never done this before, still, if he was careful, and if he went to a place that was previously warded, then no one should be able to sense his magic from a distance. The wards would tingle, not scream. The Wizengamot considered that of course some traces of his power would be left behind, and they had stories ready in place for those. Only a complete execution or annihilation would be a problem.

Harry didn’t plan on that. But he had to use some of the magic that danced like lightning through his muscles and made them jerk and form into new patterns.

He turned and searched briefly among the things standing on the mantle above his fireplace, which included ornaments that the Wizengamot had used to try and buy his favor, a saltcellar, the cutlery he kept to eat his food, a brush, a comb, and a number of miscellaneous cups, glasses, and bowls that he rolled his eyes at. He was used to thinking of his life here as simple and deprived, but it still seemed that he would accumulate a lot of useless objects where he had no idea where they came from.

Ah, there it is, he thought, as his finger finally scraped across the covered china bowl of modified Floo powder that Risidell had given him.

Harry couldn’t use ordinary Floo powder any more than he could use ordinary cleaning charms or conjuring charms, but the Wizengamot had managed to work out a solution so that their executioner could come and go unseen—one reason he had a fireplace in his rooms in the first place. Harry cast the handful of powder he’d chosen into the flames, took a deep breath, and plucked a name out of the air.

“Number Twelve Grimmauld Place!”

The fire sang and turned an odd, deep, violent shade of green. Harry leaped forwards, drawing his cloak around his face. He couldn’t use his magic to lift protective spells around himself, and he would always get a bit burned without the shield of the reinforced cloth.

The fire grabbed him, flames lunging out to curl around his legs, and dragged him forwards. Harry maintained his balance with an effort, and then began to do the odd dance that was usually necessary, leaping over the embers that grew many-branched, tangling himself among the flames while trying to keep a layer of fabric between his skin and the heat, and flinging himself backwards when it seemed as though the top of the fireplace would collide with his shoulder.

The modified Floo powder made the fire into a force of destruction, one sufficient to allow his magic to work with it. Harry turned his head sideways, drew in a quick breath of fresh air, and then curled into a ball and let his magic rise.

You could have done something like this long since, he thought, as he felt his magic and the magic of the fire join like great hands and fling him into the distance. If there’s a workaround for the Floo, could have found a workaround for other things that trouble you and keep you from living a full life. Malfoy is right.

Of course, for every one of those solutions he would have to find someone else who could help him. And that was the problem. The Wizengamot wouldn’t be amenable to unauthorized trips outside their headquarters every day, or unauthorized visits with his friends, or rituals to modify his magic without knowing exactly what he wanted to do with it, even if any of them were strong enough to help him with the rituals in the first place.

As he stumbled out into the drawing room of Number Twelve, Harry decided that he probably couldn’t trust Malfoy more than most of them, except to follow his own priorities—and those priorities were different from keeping Harry imprisoned and safe.

He looked around the drawing room with distant eyes. He’d told Ron and Hermione that he’d sold the house, but that was mainly because he had known even then that he might need to come back here someday, and it would be more than awkward to appear on his best friends’ hearth after having been gone for ten years.

You could have kept up with them more than this.

Harry turned and hurried up the stairs to the second floor, where the wards were strongest around one room where he had stored the Dark artifacts that he couldn’t disarm, disenchant, or simply hand over to the Aurors. When he stepped inside and shut the door behind him, he could hear the reassuring hum of the wards as they engaged. He was surrounded by piles of crates, boxes, books, and polished bronze instruments that might have meant something to the people who had originally owned them, but Harry didn’t know what they meant and didn’t want to.

They would make excellent targets, though.

He raised his hands.

The lightning was waiting beneath his skin, and it came.

There were no lights in the room. Harry had a prime view, assuming he wanted it, of his skin glowing blue-white from the inside, a brief flash, and then the sudden waves of smoke and dust and less-than-dust that came towards him. Another flash of lightning cauterized the burning, and then another after that removed the smell of electricity from the air. His magic could destroy most traces of itself, which had been useful many times when the Wizengamot was trying to keep someone from detecting Ragnarok’s magical signature.

But it wasn’t enough. It was too quick. Harry could feel the magic pressing against his skin and driving him mad lessen, but he had to break something apart in as much slow motion as his magic would permit.

Or he needed to stand bathed in the fire of Malfoy’s controlled power again and feel what he could be, if he dared.

Harry shivered, and then focused on one crate in front of him that held what had looked like a telescope, except that, when Harry had looked through it, he found a single purple eye staring back at him. The sight of the eye was revolting, and he had never forgotten it. He hadn’t been able to store the telescope with anything else, either, since the other objects vanished or began to decay overnight. Harry felt a small, vicious smile stretch his mouth, and he lifted his hand and held it out towards the crate. The magic inside him began to fill his nails from the inside with pouches of power.

Destroy that for me, Harry told his power. The telescope. I want it burned to less than ashes, the way that I know you can do. You’re going to do it for me, and you’re going to let me watch, rather than simply obliterate it.

He felt stupid a moment later voicing his thoughts in that way, but the magic oozed out from under his nails in crawling tendrils of blue-black and traveled forwards slowly enough for him to see, which had never happened before. Harry leaned back on his elbows and heels and waited.

The tendrils hovered about the telescope for a moment, as if gauging the size or danger of their target. Then they waved around the edges and abruptly snapped together.

Harry shuddered and arched up from the floor as a pull seemed to gather together from the center of his chest at the same time. Thick, thrilling, sexual, it touched him in the groin and the heels and everywhere in between. His legs shook with it. Harry raised his head, panting, and flicked drops of saliva from his lips with his tongue, and stared.

The blue-black vines had the telescope in a tangle of leaves. The telescope was fighting, bulging and flexing, and Harry could sometimes see glimpses of metal through the leaves, as if it might win out. But each time, the vines only shifted their stance or their angle of attack and pressed in, calm and patient as a flytrap.

Harry felt the pull again and finally realized that it coincided with more and more magic flowing into the vines. They were drawing on him to destroy the telescope, but they were feeding him at the same instant. Harry had never felt something so wonderful, and it helped that he could see the telescope crisping now, the edges of it decaying as it had caused other things to decay in its time.

A low, anguished scream rose from the edge of the telescope, and at the same moment the magic closed in with a rippling roar of completion.

Harry came.

He gasped, throat burning, neck aching as it arched back, hands searching for and finding no means of support, and the air in his lungs turned to fire. The pleasure was more acute than anything else, more painful than pleasing. Harry still had his eyes open to see the telescope becoming a glowing seed of black and then nothingness, but that was more because his orgasm had fixed them that way than because he had kept them open of his own free will.

The blue-black light died. Harry was once more in dimness, and the crate and the telescope had vanished from in front of him. His pants were soaked, and there was a wet spot on his trousers when he reached down and cautiously felt at them.

That had never happened before.

Harry rolled over, when he thought he could persuade his legs to carry him, and climbed shakily to his feet. He shook his head again and again, and vibrated with the tremors that were the residue of what had happened, rather than of what was still happening.

His body felt quiet and empty, his magic still present but sleeping. Harry found his way back downstairs and through the fireplace; he’d made sure to tuck away another pinch of the modified Floo powder in his robe pocket. And it did get him back to the room beneath the Wizengamot’s headquarters, though with a few more burns than normal, since his power wasn’t present in such an amount to take up its part in the transport. Harry called a house-elf, demanded burn paste, and settled his head against the chair.

He hadn’t decided yet how he would want to approach his friends. Malfoy hadn’t convinced him that he should think of power before all else.

But he did know that he felt better, having seized control of his magic and demanded that it do as he told it, than he had in years.

The qualms of his conscience no longer seemed all that should define him.