Chapter Ten of 'Ragnarok'- Rush

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Nine.

Title: Ragnarok (10/12)
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 Ten—Rush

For a few moments as they prepared to Apparate, Harry felt as if he were walking in a dream. He was doing anything, anything, rather than actually preparing to murder a Wizengamot member. He had served them for so long, and other than moments when the magic had swirled within him and he had longed to release it any way he could, he had never seriously thought about killing the ones who called themselves his masters. Why should he? They would know what had happened and hunt him down.

Of course, that should have told him something right there, he thought. If he only wanted to die to escape the magic’s torment, then why not relieve his feelings and let them kill him? Even then, his strongest desire had been to survive. The problem was that he couldn’t acknowledge it, and that made him ignore the indicators that would have told him otherwise.

But now he was going.

As long as I don’t act as though I’m in a dream, he decided, and felt them leap through darkness as Malfoy Apparated them, it’s probably going to be all right. And we can decide what we’re going to do when Gilfleur is dead.

*

Draco stood outside the building that held the Wizengamot’s quarters and studied Potter critically. His eyes were brighter and bigger than they should have been, his breathing faster, and he looked at the building as though he had never seen it before.

Of course, he noticed that Draco was observing him, though not fast enough to reassure Draco. He twisted his head and frowned at him. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“I want to know if the Wizengamot’s training of you is going to be a problem,” Draco said bluntly. “They might have conditioned you to such an extent that you can’t strike against them, if they didn’t simply put a spell on you that would make it impossible for you to rebel. That’s what I would have done.”

Potter bristled. “If they had done that, then why didn’t it force me away from the path of rebellion already? I’ve done lots of things with you that they wouldn’t have wanted me to do.”

Yes, and sex not the least transgressive, Draco thought. He would have considered it, at least, if he had been on the Wizengamot when Potter first became Ragnarok, and he could not believe that all of them were fools without any psychological insight. They had to know that it would be easier to control Potter if they isolated him and kept him from forming any bonds or attachments. That way, they could also manipulate him with ease. Draco had seen the way Potter looked and acted when he thought no one in the world valued him or would help him. He wasn’t fit to stand alone.

On the other hand, he was right that any spell meant to prevent rebellion should have acted before now. Why wait? The Wizengamot might consider that nothing except an attempt to actually rise against them was worthy of the spell acting—the first thought Draco had had—but Gilfleur and Risidell at least would have been careful enough to see otherwise, and Risidell was the one who had the most direct charge of Potter.

“Come with me, then,” he said softly, and once again called his magic as he laid his hand on Potter’s arm. Potter’s eyelids drooped deliciously for a moment, and then he unexpectedly stepped away and shook his head angrily.

“You don’t need to manipulate me, too,” he whispered. “I’ll come along. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Draco laughed in spite of himself, though quietly, so that he wouldn’t warn any eager watcher they were there. “I wasn’t trying to manipulate you,” he explained when Potter glared at him. “I was trying to seduce you.”

Potter gaped at him, and Draco rolled his eyes. “Did you really think anything else of me by now?” he asked. “Are you about to have a moral crisis because I didn’t approach you in honesty from the beginning?”

“It was enough honesty from the beginning,” Potter said, and swallowed, and then gave an awkward laugh. “I just—it didn’t occur to me that that was what you might want. It didn’t occur to me that I was seducible.”

“The next time we’re alone, then I’ll show you exactly what I think on that subject,” Draco promised.

Potter shut his eyes and swayed a little, putting out a hand as though he would catch himself on an invisible wall. When nothing appeared beneath his hand, he popped his eyes back open and gave Draco a sickly smile. “All right.”

“Good,” Draco said, and looked back at the building in front of them, large, impressive, dark, and silent. “Now, let’s kill her.”

*

The moment remained dream-like for Harry even when they stepped back into his warded room—Draco had said the killing should take place there, because the wards would keep most of the Wizengamot from feeling the collision of powerful magic—and saw Gilfleur waiting in Harry’s chair beside the fire. Yes, he understood that this wasn’t the best state of mind to be in, but he was still struggling with the notion that Malfoy might want to seduce him rather than simply make a bargain with him or twist him to his own ends. The word seduce implied, well, all sorts of possibilities that Harry had sometimes dreamed of or hoped for and never taken seriously even when he found himself sleeping with Malfoy.

Possibilities that he had to dismiss from his mind when he saw Gilfleur rising hastily to her feet with moist eyes.

“You succeeded,” she said. “You would not have come back if you did not succeed. I wondered. Given that Malfoy is—was—formidable—”

And then she broke off and gave him a sick look when she saw the man who walked by his side. That was what undid her, Harry thought later, the sick look. She would have done much better in the ensuing battle if she hadn’t hesitated, but simply understood the situation from a glance and struck.

“You’ve betrayed me,” she whispered. “I let you have as much assistance as you liked, and you served us, and you betrayed us.”

Harry would have asked who he was supposed to be betraying, exactly, her or the whole Wizengamot, but she turned and cast a spell at Malfoy, as if she assumed that Harry would simply stand back and let that happen.

Harry held out his hand, told his magic, I want nothing of her left, and let it go.

His magic surged out in a crackling cloud of energy—and rammed into a barrier, for the first time since the ritual that had changed Harry. He reeled back, gasping. The barrier dissolved in instants, but Harry was still caught in the current of his turning power and couldn’t respond the way he probably should have.

Malfoy was already in front of him, casting spells that Harry could barely see or comprehend because of their swiftness, all of which seemed to run into the same invisible wall that his magic had. Harry swallowed as the cloud dissipated back into his body, saw Gilfleur’s intense face and faint smile, and finally understood. He hadn’t battled someone before who had enhanced their power with one of those rituals. Gilfleur might not be able to resist every strike he could throw, but she could defend herself.

And Malfoy was probably only equal to her in power, not substantially stronger, or he would have overcome her in the first moments. Harry had to figure out some other way to help in this battle.

He dropped back with a frown and began to circle, thinking. If she was defended against brute force, then what else could he do? That was the only weapon he had to offer, the only thing that made him frightening in the first place.

Then another answer came to him, one that focused on the image of a dissolving telescope in the attics at Grimmauld Place.

Harry smiled, and began to focus.

*

Draco felt a flash of intense regret as Gilfleur dismissed and dodged and outfaced his spells. If he had known of her existence before now, he could have had someone to practice with, someone who would let him test his powers more fully than he could against Potter, whose magic was—for now—so different.

But he could not have enjoyed the other pleasures with her that he had enjoyed with Potter: the seduction, the dancing, the intense cooperation for the goal of getting more power. He was sure that Gilfleur would have become uneasy as Draco grew stronger and plotted to destroy him. It had been her first reaction when she saw that he had more than the usual amount of magic, after all.

But he still mourned the opportunity missed, because she had been through different rituals than he had. The defenses against his magic, which he could not see or anticipate and could only feel by the way that his magic turned around and came back to him, were masterly. She had not learned them on her own, Draco was certain. The rituals had adapted and changed her spells, and she had adapted and changed them in turn as she learned how they functioned.

She was smarter than he had thought, and if she could not drive him back because of her offensive spells, at least Draco thirsted for the knowledge she had used to make herself a master of shields and walls.

Gilfleur spoke when they had danced in silence—well, silence except for the grunts of intense effort—around each other for several moments. “You will not win,” she said. Her lips were set in a thin smile. “I have let others know what I intended to do. Kill me and you bring the entire Wizengamot down on you.”

Draco didn’t see that this was worth responding to. He was trying to find a hole in her walls, and he wouldn’t find it if he wasted time on irrelevant speeches. Perhaps Gilfleur had joined the Wizengamot because she liked irrelevant speeches, though he had interacted with her for too short a time to see signs of it.

“And Potter will die,” she whispered. “There are ways to kill even an abomination like him, and we have found them.”

Draco wondered why she would say such things when Potter was still in the room, but then decided that it probably had to do with the common Wizengamot attitude that Potter was incapable of rebellion because he didn’t have a mind of his own. Well, if she wanted to forget, he wasn’t about to remind her. He chose another spell that he thought might make her jump, and touched her heart the same way he had touched Kellerston’s.

Her shield turned it aside again, but this time, Draco knew he had felt the spell sink further into her flesh. Her internal shields were not as good as her external ones. It was a weakness, and she saw that he knew it as one, because her eyes grew wary and she backed away from him, still circling, still watching intently for some way to trip him up.

Potter attacked from the side.

Draco caught a glimpse of his squinting eyes and set jaw, and a collection of flames—with no color that Draco had ever seen before, and which he couldn’t remember no matter how much he tried to think of it later—were suddenly dancing in front of Gilfleur. She stepped adeptly backwards, but the flames extended long fingers and curled them around her ankles, tugging her forwards. She pitched to the floor, screaming loudly enough that Draco flinched before he remembered that she had wanted to kill him and therefore deserved no compromise and no sympathy.

He stepped closer, craning his neck so that he could at least have a good view of how Potter appeared to be killing her. He would remember this technique in case he wanted to use it on someone in the future.

The flames were doing no damage that he could see, oddly, other than sticking into Gilfleur’s skin like splinters or thorns. But her eyes were wide with desperation, and every time she started to raise her power, which Draco could feel as a trembling, quivering flood of silvery pressure, it collapsed again.

Draco suddenly understood, and didn’t bother concealing his laughter. He didn’t think it would distract Potter, and Gilfleur could hear it as she died and do nothing to interfere. Potter had somehow figured out a way to use his magic to destroy her own. The flames were simply the form that it took, probably because Potter had used fire and other traditional sources of destruction for so long that he couldn’t envision the magic simply being consumed. And it made it more terrifying for Gilfleur, perhaps, to see the flames and know that she should have been able to resist them.

Draco turned to Potter. His jaw was still set, but his eyes were distant now, with an expression in them as if he was listening to calming music. When he focused on Draco and Gilfleur again, it was to cock his head and give a disarming smile. Perhaps he feared that Draco would scold him for some reason.

Draco smiled back instead, and let the smile widen into the lascivious one he had been suppressing since the moment he first understood what Potter had done. Potter jerked a little, as though it had never occurred to him that someone could find his magic exciting, but he recovered in good time and smiled back.

Gilfleur cried out. It was a sound of panic and pain, but of loss more profound than either. Draco understood. If he had suddenly realized that he was losing all the magic he had worked so hard to retain, then he would have cried out, too. He turned around and leaned in interest against the nearby wall, watching as Gilfleur began to die.

The flames were fading out, flickering now and then with pulses of green and rose along their strange color, snapping back into view for a moment, and then flickering again. Draco could see through them. He looked at Gilfleur and realized with a shock that he could see through her, too.

Potter was turning her into magic, Draco thought a moment later. That was the only possible explanation. The flames were eating Gilfleur as well as the magic that poured out of her, and destroying it.

Draco opened his mouth to ask if Potter could possibly compel his magic to transfer some of her power to Draco, and then shut it again. No, Potter had already said that his power could only destroy, and Draco would look stupid if he asked the question again. He would simply relax, accept matters, and continue to watch the fascinating way in which Gilfleur would likely die.

Gilfleur’s wail began to grow softer, not because she had stopped screaming but because she was losing substance to her mouth, as Draco saw when he looked. The color of her lips was gone, and she might have been one of Hogwarts’s ghosts on a particularly bad day. Her hair was ashen, not because it had suddenly turned grey but because that was the way it had to be. She closed her eyes at the last moment, as if the sight of herself dissolving was worse than anything else. Draco could see why it might be.

Draco glanced at Potter and saw that he avoided watching the flames, his mouth curled in disgust. Draco shrugged. Whether Potter didn’t like the effects his power was having or simply didn’t want to watch someone else killed, it was up to him whether he wanted to look or not. Draco didn’t see anything noble watching an enemy die. They were still going, either way, and the old notion that someone should “look you in the eye as they stick the sword through you” did nothing but comfort the killer.

Besides, as far as Draco was concerned, Potter had earned the right to any indulgence he wanted. Even those he might not know he wanted.

He waited until the last traces of Gilfleur had become smoke and dissipated into the air around them. Then he moved while Potter was still staring at his hands as if his fingernails were dirty.

Potter gasped when Draco pinned him to the wall and pressed his mouth fiercely home. But he gave back the challenge a moment later, his hands locking into place on Draco’s hips, his tongue thrusting as if he wanted to choke him. Draco backed away and steered him towards the bed.

“I don’t—understand—” Potter gasped as they fell. “Why now? Don’t you want to go back to the Manor and—”

Draco didn’t bother answering with anything other than his tongue. The room had wards that should contain their destructive magic as they had contained the spells that caused Gilfleur’s death, and he wanted Potter now. He also wanted to give Potter some surge of pleasure now, so that he wouldn’t look back on this evening, their first victory, with utter distaste, and he wanted to offer an apology of sorts. He had told Potter they would kill Gilfleur together, and that hadn’t happened because she and Draco were too close to equal.

Well, Draco could still bring other skills to this partnership.

He bit Potter’s throat, and when Potter stared up at him with bright and heated eyes, leaned back so that their bodies almost ceased to touch. Potter’s gaze started to turn away, as if he assumed that he should simply give up because Draco was leaving, but Draco conjured lube on his fingers with a murmured word.

The lube shone in the muffled light of the fire. Potter’s gaze locked on the glitter, and Draco heard a hopeful, choked-back breath.

Merlin, Potter was gagging for it.

Draco snarled, and then lost control and knowledge of his movements for a few brief seconds. When he could see again, he was half-naked and Potter was getting there. Potter gave a snarl of his own, and suddenly his clothes were gone, swirling briefly in the air as colored motes before even that vanished.

Draco shuddered and tore into the suddenly uncertain expression on Potter’s face with lips and tongue. If Potter didn’t understand by now that Draco was turned on by exposure to his magic, then Draco hadn’t been doing his job.

Potter’s hands grew more confident, and by the time that Draco pulled off the last of his own clothes and reached for Potter’s arse, he even had a smile that could have been mistaken for a mischievous one. He parted his legs and looked up at Draco with faux innocence, eyelids drooping as if he were about to go to sleep. “Like this?” he asked.

Draco bit down on his tongue savagely enough to draw blood as he stared at the small round hole that awaited his fingers. He reached down.

*

Harry could almost remember what it was like to be normal, now, and not be surprised that someone was looking at him with desire.

Almost. He was still sure there was nothing in his life before he had become the Wizengamot’s executioner that approached the intensity of this experience.

He spread his legs further, until his hips ached and his feet dangled off the sides of the bed. “Well, come on,” he said, because Malfoy’s hand was moving slowly, as if he himself was surprised at what Harry was doing. “Can you take this or not?”

Malfoy choked and sighed, and leaned down to kiss him. Harry permitted that, but bit Malfoy’s tongue when he tried to prolong the kiss. He wanted the fingers to get where they were going, and pushed himself backwards with a complicated movement of knees and thighs so that he would actually feel Malfoy some time this century.

Malfoy uttered a shuddering breath when his fingers entered Harry and stared with wide eyes. Harry wanted to laugh. He was the one in control, suddenly, and if he had his way, then the control wouldn’t return to Malfoy until after he was safely inside Harry. Perhaps not even then, if Harry was the one who could handle it better.

“Are you better about moving your cock than your hand?” he asked.

Malfoy shuddered again and began working Harry open. Harry leaned his head back and concentrated on Malfoy’s face to get him through the inevitable pain. He looked half-dazed, still, as though Harry’s magic had knocked him on the head. Harry felt extremely smug. He had done something that would cause fear in many, the way he’d destroyed Gilfleur, but all Malfoy wanted was to get in bed with him.

Well, that part of the goal is accomplished, at least, Harry thought, and rocked on Malfoy’s fingers to show willing. The pain had begun its slow transmutation into pleasure, and he rather thought he could take Malfoy now.

Malfoy still used another finger before he gave in to Harry’s vocal curses and pleas and lined his cock up with Harry’s entrance. Harry shoved himself down again, but this time he had really gone as far as he could, and Malfoy was the one who had to make the final movements, entering with many hisses and sighs through clenched teeth. Harry clamped down once or twice and each time won something close to a yelp.

Then Malfoy was all the way inside, more dazed than ever, embraced between Harry’s sprawling legs, and they stared at each other.

“Now,” Harry whispered.

Malfoy pumped his hips forwards in response to the command, and Harry felt a thrum of wonder, awe, and glee travel through him.

I can command him, sometimes.

*

The warmth inside Potter was nothing new. So Draco told himself again and again while his hips snapped with more force than necessary, more force than he had told them they could use, and his cock tingled and his head spun and his balls felt as if they were going to spill their load long before he wanted them to.

Nothing new, but more intense than anything he had experienced before. There was that. And Potter lay beneath him and watched him with self-possessed pleasure, as if he were masturbating and thus solely responsible for what he felt, now and then arching his neck and writhing. It seemed he could read Draco’s mind and know that he found those motions enticing.

It wasn’t fair. Draco was on fire, and Potter looked as calm and cool as someone ordering a house-elf to get him a cup of water.

Draco probed deeper, twisting his hips, riding back and then shoving himself forwards, all because he had to see Potter’s expression change. It finally wavered and broke when he hit something that had to be Potter’s prostate, and Potter’s fingers faltered as he reached up and clutched towards Draco. His face was pale now, and he moaned for what seemed like endless moments before he finally found words.

“Draco.” That was the word, though stuttered and dragged out over a longer space of breath than Draco was accustomed to hearing it.

Draco laughed, and hoped that Potter would hear triumph and not contempt in the sound, which was all he really felt. Then he began to fuck Potter in earnest, watching the ripples that traveled through him with every thrust.

Potter never regained the control that he’d had at the beginning of the fuck, but he didn’t lie there passively and accept Draco, either. He rolled his hips in counterpoint, tried to get more of Draco’s cock inside his arse than actually existed by pushing downwards, moaned in protest when Draco briefly drew himself out to find a better position, and left long, stinging scratches along Draco’s back. Draco bowed his head and touched Potter with his lips when he could, especially when Potter half-reared up and brought his mouth or his cheek or his nipples within biting distance.

His completion came blindingly fast, reminding him of spinning over a cliff on a waterfall. Draco sighed as he orgasmed, making sure that he leaned forwards to trigger Potter’s and share the pleasure with him. Potter came a moment later, shaking hard enough in his release to nearly throw Draco off.

Draco dropped to the bed and closed his eyes, so content that it felt more obscene than the fuck had.

Potter nuzzled into his neck, pushed his hair aside, and bit down hard. Draco didn’t even jump, it felt so natural. He made sure to leave his own mark on Potter’s shoulder, and then lay there with heart racing and thoughts doing the same thing. They weren’t about any specific subject; it was enough that he had them and that he was light and flying with wonder, desire, and delight.

He didn’t know exactly what they were going to do next, but soon he would, and then they would do it.

The most important thing was that he now had complete confidence that they would conquer the Wizengamot and win their fight to conquer the wizarding world.

Together.