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lomonaaerenThird part of a really, really long chapter, Don't start reading here.
Harry darted under the wildly moving branches of the willow and stabbed something high on the trunk. A knot, Draco thought. The branches froze with a shudder, and Harry turned and nodded to Draco.
Draco took a deep breath and moved in slowly. It had been harder than he’d thought it would be to watch Harry go in by himself, although Draco had agreed to it because he didn’t know where the mechanism for stopping the tree was and he didn’t move as fast as Harry. He had wanted to spring on the branches and force them to stop moving, or cast a Stunning Charm, or drag Harry back by main force, anything that would keep him safe.
Draco couldn’t remember fits of protectiveness like that with his other lovers. He wondered if it had something to do with the fact that he and Harry planned to make this relationship permanent, or the peculiar nature of the relationship.
Watching Harry trotting back to him with his green eyes bright and his head cocked, listening to invisible music, Draco decided that it didn’t really matter. The difference was there, and he would live with it and respect it.
He did lean in and kiss Harry when he slowed to a stop, before he could speak. Harry blushed and stammered beautifully, of course, as he always did, and then cleared his throat and turned to the tree as if he thought it would make a better audience for his embarrassment than Draco would.
“I didn’t see any sign that it’s been disturbed recently,” he said. “I’d thought the Ministry might have placed a charm on it to render it safer, but they didn’t.”
Draco narrowed his eyes in thought. “Perhaps they suspected that something important was here.”
Harry rolled his eyes at him. “I don’t think so. True, Professor Snape died in the Shrieking Shack, but I doubt that anyone would be curious enough to go up the tunnel, the way I did, just to learn how they found the body. They could have come in through the door, if they wanted.”
Draco jerked his head up in a tight nod. He had forgotten, somehow, that Severus had died so short a distance from this place.
That’s the thing that portraits and lovers have in common, he thought, irrationally. They make you forget about the dead.
“I’ll go to the left,” he said. “You to the right. Shout if you run into a danger that’s too hard for you to handle.” He wondered if he should have made the instructions more specific a moment later, because Harry was apt to think that he could handle any danger, but Harry had nodded and turned away. Draco sighed and took his own route.
Harry was right; no one appeared to have been near enough the tree to disturb it. Draco found animal tracks, years of fallen leaves, dirt in abundance, and a few holes among the roots of the tree itself. He conjured a magical eye each time that let him peer into the depths of the burrow, but found only more animal tracks and a few old bones inside.
The tree wasn’t as large as it looked to the eyes of a child. He and Harry met up again in a few minutes. Harry was frowning.
“I keep thinking this has to be the best candidate,” he muttered. “A significant tree. What other one is there on the grounds? Maybe, if Hermione is right and some of those sites in the Forbidden Forest are important, they could be the right candidates. But what are the chances that a tree in the forest is important to both Dumbledore and Snape?”
“Not good,” Draco had to admit. He was wishing now that he had asked the portrait of Severus this morning before they left. True, the portrait couldn’t remember the riddles, but he might be able to tell them if there was any event that they didn’t know about, something known only to Dumbledore and Severus themselves.
Then again, the riddles weren’t meant to be impossible to solve, and this one could be if one didn’t speak to the portraits. Draco frowned more fiercely.
“That line, ‘bright in eternity,’ has to mean something,” Harry said, as if talking to himself. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Draco said. He looked over his shoulder at the tree again. The roots and the trunk kept their secrets well. He tapped his fingers on the wand and thought again. “Perhaps we should investigate the Shrieking Shack. The lines of the riddle might refer to different places. The first two lines to the Whomping Willow, perhaps, and the last two to the Shack.”
Harry turned a frown on him in turn. “And you think that the Shack would fit the line about eternity better than the tree does?”
Draco shook his head. “I know that there were dark memories associated with the Shack for Severus before he died there. He wouldn’t tell me what they were in detail, but he tensed up whenever I mentioned it.”
Harry, uncharacteristically, hesitated. “Oh,” he said a moment later, in a lame fashion. “Did he? That’s strange.”
“You know something,” Draco said. He hardly avoided making it a question, he was so startled. How could Harry have learned something about Severus that Draco didn’t know? Severus would hardly have chosen him as a confessor.
But from the guilty flush in Harry’s cheeks and the sudden memory of the time that Harry had spent with Dumbledore when he was younger, Draco could imagine how it might have happened. He gestured for Harry to go in front of him.
The tunnel that led into the Shrieking Shack was long enough and low enough and dirty enough that Draco could feel his temper fraying by the time that he finally came up into the building. It was no wonder that so many students had looked for the secret and never found it. How many of them would have thought this entrance was important in the first place, and how many of them could have crawled as long as Draco had?
“This had better be right, Potter,” he growled as he stood up and swatted the dust from the knees of his trousers. “Or you’re paying for my clothes to be cleaned.”
“What, you don’t want me to lick them clean?”
Draco looked up and had to catch his breath. Harry’s eyes were bright with insolence, his head lowered as if he was going to get right in Draco’s face and challenge his authority. It probably wouldn’t help either of them if Draco drowned in his own drool, though, so he turned away with a sneer and began to eye the walls.
Harry chucked behind him. Draco carefully didn’t turn around until he thought his voice was under control. Then he said, “I don’t see anything here that looks like a trap or a fight to the death, do you?”
“No,” Harry said. “But we didn’t see the water-snakes before we stumbled into that trap, either. Let’s quarter the room the way we halved the tree. You take that side first, and I’ll take the other.”
Draco resigned himself to a long period of tapping the walls with his wand and casting every revealing spell he could think of. No matter how long it took, though, he was starting to think that there was nothing here. The place looked as if only the dust and a few rats had lived here since Severus died.
What had it been like, to feel death creeping over him? Draco could imagine it, since he had analyzed Nagini’s poison from a fang he’d “borrowed” from the Aurors, and knew what magical properties it had and what potions it was similar to. But he could never be sure, not when Severus’s portrait didn’t remember his death.
That’s what all the dead are like for us, Draco thought with a faint sigh. Gone beyond reach and recall.
They met up in the middle of the room the way they had met up near the tree, and Draco shook his head. “No,” Harry said in response, bending down to look under a dusty piece of wood that stood near the wall. Draco thought it was the remains of a bed, left behind now as worthless. There were ashes on the floor near the foot of the wood that might have been part of the bed at one point. Like everything else here, they were worth nothing.
Draco shuddered. God, this is a depressing place. And I’ll depress myself the longer I stay here.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, only to hear another voice echoing him. When he looked up, he realized that he was looking into Harry’s eyes, which were wide with what Draco thought was a kind of superstitious dread. Despite everything, he managed to smirk in Harry’s direction.
“Oh, shut up,” Harry muttered, and headed for the tunnel. “Licking dirt off your clothes looks positively fun next to this.”
Those words were enough to keep Draco dreaming all the way back to the castle.
*
“Mr. Potter.”
Harry sighed. He had gone back to his room in Hogsmeade to retrieve his belongings and pay the money he still owed for the lodgings and meals. He hadn’t meant to run into Covington on the way back.
Maybe this is why Draco was so insistent about me not leaving, Harry thought, but realistically, he knew he had to blame his own behavior for that, not Draco’s fear of Covington. He turned around and nodded to her. “Good day, ma’am.”
Covington had caught him on the path that wound from Hogsmeade towards the school. She had a flask in her hand, and waved it at him with a little smile. “They make delicious tea at the Hog’s Head, if you know how to ask for it,” she said. “I got some to take with me.”
Harry made a polite noise. He thought the sloshing brown liquid in the flask, the color of ditch-water, wasn’t a kind of tea he would have chosen, but he was determined to give Covington nothing that she could use to impugn or quarrel with him.
She fell into step beside him as they headed up the path. Harry looked at her enough to fulfill the rules of courtesy, but was glad that the walls of Hogwarts came nearer and nearer every minute and he would soon be back inside them.
“I wish you would learn to work with the Ministry, Mr. Potter.”
Harry hoped that his smile didn’t look too fake. “Well, I’ve never been good at working under authority. If you’ve spoken with Professor McGonagall or any of the others who remember me, you must have heard that I was in trouble constantly when I was a student.”
Covington put a hand on his sleeve. Harry halted because he had to, but he could feel the anger stirring beneath the surface of his skin, in a way it hadn’t since he had agreed to try and make a go of this with Draco. He would never be comfortable with strangers touching him.
“We are not children now, Mr. Potter.” Covington could do an impression amount of wide-eyed, solemn speaking when she had to, Harry thought. “I had hoped we could move past this and into a cooperative bond based on what we both have to offer.”
Harry resisted the temptation to either send flame ringing up her fingers or take her words overly personally. “You mean the Ministry and me?” he asked. “No, I don’t think of the members of the Ministry as children.” Just childish. “I’m not sure what growing up has to do with anything when you’re talking about an organization.”
“You want to see a stable wizarding world, and you want to see Hogwarts open again,” Covington said, peering into his eyes as if she would see a demon hiding behind them that might account for his strange actions. “That is all the Ministry wants, as well. We are unsure why you are resisting so much.”
“I distrust the Ministry’s methods, if not its goals.” Harry glanced at Hogwarts. He would have given a lot to see Draco, or even Ron and Hermione, strolling along the paths right now.
Then he shook his head. What was he thinking? He could certainly handle Covington, and the guilt that her soft, insinuating words were trying to inspire in him. He was a more powerful wizard than the Ministry had ever known, since Harry hadn’t showed them his magic on the days when he knew he couldn’t control it.
Covington’s hand tightened on his arm, and she breathed a single word that Harry didn’t recognize, a word in Latin. His muscles froze.
Harry’s magic boiled up at once, coming from beneath his heart and liver. He knew that he would shatter the spell she had cast in a few moments and then he would make her sorry, sorry that she lived and breathed—
His magic met the barrier of the spell, and stuck there. Incredulous, Harry tried to will his magic to open his throat, to let his eyes blink, or even to curl one of his fingers. Nothing happened.
Covington stepped around in front of him. She had a faint whiteness to her face that made Harry think she hadn’t been sure that spell would work until she actually used it, but she had used it, and he was going to destroy her. He glared at her so that she would know that.
Covington didn’t seem inclined to pay attention. Instead, she held up the flask of brown liquid and turned it back and forth, as if she wanted to see how much sunlight could get through the muddy amber. Harry felt his heart begin to pick up speed in a way that was unfamiliar from the last few years. He had felt much anger, but not much fear.
“Not enough,” Covington said with what sounded like regret. “Not enough to keep you under control for days, at least. And I do wish that I had managed to freeze you when your mouth was open. This is going to be difficult.” She looked at his face and offered the kind of apologetic shrug Harry thought she might give one of her superiors at the Ministry. “Oh, well. I’ve done harder things.”
She reached up and clamped her hand on his jaw, prying it down. Harry felt the barrier of the spell that stuck against the surface of his skin shiver, broken by the movement of one part of his body. He tensed, ready to attack, if only with a bite, the moment she let his jaw go.
She didn’t give him a chance. His lips opened reluctantly, and she laid the mouth of the flask against it, pouring in the liquid. Harry choked, and went on choking as the drink poured in. He could feel it trickling down between his teeth and along the sides of his face.
Covington sighed. “It’s only too clear that no one tried this in the field,” she muttered, and then cast another spell with a wave of her wand. The muscles in Harry’s throat relaxed, and she reached up and started to massage them, trying to force him to swallow.
Harry didn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t get a better chance. Once again, she had disrupted the integrity of the immobilizing spell, weakening it, and her skin was against his skin now, rather than the harmless glass of the flask. He would wound her. He had wounded people with less magic and less anger.
The magic flung itself against the sides of his throat, against the charm that continued to hold him prisoner. It was difficult, especially because his unblinking eyes were beginning to dry out and ache, and he had to worry about what the potion that had already flowed down his throat would do to him. But the desperation was a goad to the fury, and on he worked, reaching up again and again and scraping the anger against her spell like a chisel against rock.
It gave way. Suddenly Harry could feel her fingers against his skin, instead of a distant sensation as if she touched him through gloves, and that meant the magic could feel her.
Covington shrieked as spikes grew through the sides of Harry’s neck and curled around her fingers, holding them trapped there. She yanked, and Harry worried for a moment about the spikes simply tearing his flesh aside to keep her prisoner.
But the magic protected him against any pain, or else the anger did. The magic passed through Harry like lightning, up and then down, and broke the glassy spell that gripped his limbs. He flexed his arms, reached up, grabbed the flask, and flung it away from him, while at the same time spitting out all the liquid that was still in his mouth.
The flask shattered on the ground. Harry grimaced and Summoned one shard of glass coated with the potion, the magic extending from his fingers into another, giant hand and scooping up the shard. He should probably keep that so Draco could analyze the potion and tell him what it had been meant to do.
Covington was still screaming. Harry stepped back, but the spikes pulled her with him, and she was screaming practically into his face, her own face splotched with red and white.
Harry panted. He wanted to destroy her. The magic that could do it raged up and down in him, as capable of being aimed as a Muggle gun. He could do it, and no one would find a trace of her. The Ministry could investigate, but they would never learn what happened. Harry was capable of concealing every hint.
They might suspect him. They wouldn’t know.
Harry swallowed and closed his eyes. He envisioned Draco’s face, and then the way Draco had lain on top of him when they were in bed together last night. He remembered the tight feeling of the chains around his limbs when they were in the Room of Requirement together. The Ministry might not be able to find the evidence, but he thought they would condemn him for the murder anyway when Covington disappeared, and that would—it would devastate Draco. Or at least Harry thought so. It was still strange to work through these ideas and think that someone other than him would care if he was condemned to Azkaban.
He concentrated. The spikes snapped back into his throat. Harry glared at Covington. He didn’t know if he had swallowed any of the potion, but if he had, it wasn’t enough to make him into her slave, or whatever else it had been meant to do. Covington lay on the ground and whimpered softly with big eyes, staring up at him.
“Remember that I spared your life,” Harry said. His voice was rough. He shook his head and turned away when the temptation to make her stop whimpering came to him.
He carried the shard, and he carried the memory, which he would place in a Pensieve as soon as he could. He had never actually committed murder, despite the temptations that had sometimes presented themselves when his magic was high. He would keep from it now, when he was on the verge of a better life. He wasn’t going to allow Covington to ruin that for him.
*
Draco glanced at the clock and frowned. He thought it shouldn’t have taken Harry as long as this to fetch his belongings from Hogsmeade, but perhaps he had stopped to talk to Granger or Weasel. Perhaps he had decided to have lunch instead of eating with Draco.
“Perhaps he is not coming back,” Severus murmured from the portrait frame, with exquisitely painful timing.
“Shut up,” Draco snapped at him, and then bent again over the cauldron that contained the sentient potion. It had retreated to the bottom and decided to sulk today. Draco was trying to figure out how he would coax it into performing when it had grown smart enough to suspect that doing so would be the prelude to pain.
“What reason does he have to stay with you?” Small splashes and plops came from Severus’s painting. He had been brewing something new all day, although Draco didn’t know what it was. “Tell me that. You have been very accommodating for him, very convenient. He got the ability to settle his anger and a good fuck from you. But when he left your immediate presence, he would begin to think again. He would begin to think that he has his friends back, and that they stand a good chance of helping him solve the riddle even if you don’t. Why would he return?”
“Be quiet, Severus,” Draco said.
The words still hung in the air when someone knocked at the door. Draco shot Severus a triumphant look as he went to open it, and was delighted to see that Severus was ruffled enough to betray a frown. He quickly looked the other way, of course, and dropped something new into the cauldron. The potion hissed in a discouraging way.
When Draco opened the door, Harry staggered in, carrying something covered with a foul-looking potion and blood in his hand. He nodded to Draco and leaned against the wall for a minute. “I got hurt more than I thought I did,” he gasped.
Draco stared at him for a moment, so shocked that it was difficult to move. Harry blinked at him and pushed a hank of hair hanging in his eyes aside. His expression was inquiring, but it suddenly closed and he moved to the side, looking away. “Well,” he said, voice distant, “it doesn’t matter. I’ll put this over here and tell you what happened, and you can analyze the potion when you have time for it. I see that you’re working right now.”
The words were enough to loosen Draco’s paralysis. He knew when someone was drawing away from him, when he was losing contact that he desired, and he would not allow Harry to go right back into the holding pattern from which Draco had labored so hard to rescue him. He grabbed Harry’s shoulders and propelled him backwards into the wall. Harry winced, but not with the exaggerated movements Draco knew would mark back injuries. He lifted his head, too, a moment later, and glared at Draco.
“Malfoy, what the hell—”
Draco fastened his mouth into place, kissing and biting. Perhaps he could have spoken reassuring words instead, but he wanted to apologize for the moment of shock and tell Harry that he was still welcome here without words.
Harry stiffened, then melted against him with a small whimper that he was flushed red about when Draco pulled away to look at him. His hand had wandered into Draco’s hair and locked on, and his eyes were closed, his head tilted back. Draco nodded and kissed his forehead in turn, then lifted the bleeding hand.
“It looks like that you cut your hand on the glass,” he said. He was amazed to hear his voice come out critical and calm, balanced, rather than the scolding tone he had thought he would adopt. “Why did that happen? Why couldn’t you use your magic to pick it up?”
“I did at first,” Harry said. He was still leaning against the wall, hand in Draco’s hair, though it was starting to lose its grip and wander down to his shoulder. “But I had to pick it up when the magic faded. That must have happened somewhere along the path to your rooms. I really don’t remember it,” he added, in what sounded like a voice of astonishment. “I wonder why?”
Draco shook his head. He didn’t know enough about Harry’s relationship with his magic to say what was and wasn’t normal. He wouldn’t think about that for right now, and concentrate on keeping Harry’s trust and learning the truth instead. “What happened?” he asked, levitating the shard from Harry’s fingers with a flick of his wand. The shard landed on the table and sat there, sopping. Draco wrinkled his nose. The potion’s original smell was no treat, but it smelled worse when mixed with the blood that Harry had left on the glass.
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I mean, Covington stopped me, and then she used some sort of spell, sent through her hand on my arm, to freeze me in place. She had to unfreeze my jaw and throat muscles to get the potion down me, though. That was when I shot spikes through my neck and ripped her hand up.”
Draco at once crossed the room and pushed Harry back against the wall just as he was starting to step away. Harry went, wrinkling his forehead at Draco as if to ask what the problem was.
“Where did the spikes come out?” Draco demanded, staring at Harry’s throat. It looked uninjured to him, but he had to admit that he didn’t know much about this kind of thing, and didn’t know if magical defenses like that would necessarily leave any remnant behind.
“Out of my neck, in the front,” Harry said. “I’m afraid that I can’t name the muscles. I rather had other things on my mind at the time,” he added, and now there was a sneer in the back of his voice that spoke of his rising anger.
Draco wrapped his hand around the base of Harry’s throat and hung on. Harry’s eyes widened, then closed again. Draco smiled. The restraint appealed to Harry, and exercising it took away some of Draco’s murderous fury that urged him to dash outside, find Covington, and then kill her.
“You did right, hurting her,” he whispered. “But you didn’t kill her, and that’s good.” He was sure Harry would have confessed at once if they had a death to cover up. “What did the potion taste like?”
“Frogs’ legs and other unmentionables, what I could taste of it through the binding spell that she cast on me,” Harry said, making a face. He didn’t turn away from the clutch that Draco had on his throat, though, and Draco made no attempt to release him. “She pretended it was tea she had bought in Hogsmeade at first.”
“She needed to get close to you to use it,” Draco said quietly, and turned his head so that he could look at the glass on the table. He wanted to go and analyze the mixture that he could see shimmering sickly all over it, but it would have meant releasing Harry. He wasn’t sure if that was the best idea. “That limits the number of potions it could have been.”
“What?” Harry asked. His voice was slurring a bit. Shock, Draco thought, eyeing him. He had probably got through the moments of immediate danger all right, but now he was beginning to shake with reaction. “Of course she would have to get close to me to use it. It’s a potion. She didn’t have any choice, if she wanted me to swallow it.”
Draco tapped the back of Harry’s skull with one finger, making his eyes flutter open again when they’d been on the verge of closing. “Keep up,” he said mildly. “There are some potions that you can use from a distance. If it could be absorbed through your skin or smelled, then she wouldn’t have had to freeze you like that. Inviting you to smell the ‘delicious tea’ she had would have been enough. And she also made an effort to catch you alone. That suggests the changes the potion brings about would have happened immediately, or at least quickly, and in a way that would have been unmistakably different from your normal behavior to anyone who knew you.”
“Do you know me?” Harry gave him a crooked smile as his eyes fluttered shut again. “I didn’t notice.”
“Lie down,” Draco murmured into his ear. “I’m going to work on analyzing this potion, and I would rather that you were spending your time in a place where I know you were. If some of the potion did go down your throat—”
“It couldn’t have been a lot,” Harry argued, struggling to keep his eyes open. “I would have felt it, I think.”
“We don’t always know what’s our own behavior and what’s not, when we’re under the influence of a new potion,” Draco said, with perfect sympathy. He had experimented with some of his own concoctions, to make sure that they were sufficiently undetectable, and he still remembered the strange impulses that had dashed through him, as though he was host to another person’s spirit. “For now, I want you to lie down and see if you can sleep this off.”
Harry grunted. Draco thought for a minute they would get into another row, but Harry sighed, murmured, “Yes, Draco,” and staggered through the door into the bedroom. Draco peered after him just to make sure that he really was collapsing on the bed instead of the floor, and then returned to the shard of glass.
“Bring that here.”
Draco started. He had forgotten that they had a witness. But this was potentially something that Severus would help with, rather than simply mock from a distance, and so Draco scooped up the shard and took it over to the portrait. He had already cast a spell that would keep his skin from being pierced. He would no more feed an unknown potion into his veins than he would send Harry back out to face Covington right now.
Covington.
An anger that was alien in its intensity moved through Draco when he thought of her attacking Harry. He would destroy her for that. He would destroy her for a great deal, in truth, but that would come first.
Harry was his.
And that meant no one got to take him away, either in the way that Draco suspected this potion was meant to do or in others. He could feel his lips sliding back from his teeth as he thought about it, and had to shake his head sharply to bring his mind back to a focus on what Severus was saying about the potion.
The portrait looked at him from the corner of one eye as he spoke, perhaps wondering whether Draco would storm out of the room and try to confront Covington immediately. “That brown color says that it shares some ingredients with the Willow Spine potion.”
Draco nodded, not seeing the need to look less ferocious. The Willow Spine potion would weaken the victim’s willpower, leading him to do more or less as the creator of the potion commanded. With great effort, a command could be resisted, but then it took longer for the will to recover, and in the meantime, the Potions master involved could wring more actions out of his defeated slave.
It was an especially insidious weapon to use against someone like Harry, since Draco suspected he would fight back at once instead of waiting for a more advantageous time and place the way that some people would, and that meant Covington could wait out the initial struggle and dangle him from her fingers like a puppet thereafter.
“Is it a variation?” he asked. “I can’t believe Covington would carry pure Willow Spine about with her, not when the consequences for being caught with it are too great for even the Ministry to tolerate.”
“Smell it,” Severus said. “Carefully,” he added, as if he suspected Draco would try to plunge his nose into the middle of the potion. “The Willow Spine works by ingestion, but this could be an olfactory cousin.”
“Yes, thank you for that elementary precaution,” Draco murmured. He let his nostrils open delicately to their widest extent. He could smell something crushed and green at the base of the potion, with salt and murk piled on top of that. That wasn’t the usual scent of the Willow Spine, and he frowned. “It really does smell like the ditchwater that it resembles,” he admitted.
Severus laughed. Draco looked up at him with an eyebrow raised, wondering if Covington had paid a great deal of money for a potion that wouldn’t work. Draco would punish her severely no matter what, of course, but it might lessen the charges that he could bring against her, if he chose that route.
Severus, though, wore the delighted expression he usually got when contemplating a master’s work, not the scorn that he showed those fools trapped by their own stupidity. “It was experimental when I was alive,” he said. “The Danish had begun to modify the Willow Spine so that it would have a more subtle but lasting influence. The one who used the potion would still be in control, but wouldn’t be able to count on instant obedience. On the other hand, that has its advantages, since it means that the orders could take place over longer periods of time, and the one fed the potion could be trusted out of sight. My guess is that Covington intended to feed Potter that potion and then Obliviate him so that he would obey her without realizing what had happened.”
Draco nodded. One reason the Willow Spine potion wasn’t more used was the sort of bond it created between the victim and his master, which ensured that he would remember what had happened—and be able to testify against his master, if he escaped—even if a Memory Charm was used. “And undetectable, of course?”
“But of course,” Severus murmured. Then a shadow of uncertainty passed over his face. “At least, the Danish version was supposed to be. They never perfected it, that I had heard. I strongly suspect that we would not be able to tell if this version was supposed to be unless we tested it.”
“Which I am not in a hurry to do,” Draco said acidly, thinking of the way that Harry had looked when he came back into their rooms.
Severus inclined his head in agreement. “But perhaps you should do something about Covington, given that she has, at the moment, nothing but a torn hand and a chance to have cleaned up the flask the potion came in.”
Draco cursed and spun to face the door. In his overwhelming concern for Harry, it hadn’t even occurred to him that Covington would be spinning her own story as hard as she could in the time left to her.
“You are in love,” Severus said in a tolerant voice. “And love makes us fools of us all.”
“Between the two of us,” Draco snapped back, as he reached out and plucked one of the vials from the central table in the room, “we have more power than Covington can command or comprehend, which was precisely why she wanted to ride on our backs.”
Severus’s reply was cut off by the slam of the door. Draco took a moment, standing in the dungeon corridor, to master his breathing and his heartrate. He had no intention of letting Covington escape, but on the other hand, he couldn’t charge around like a madman looking for her.
He pressed forwards.
*
Harry woke up when he heard the door to Snape’s rooms shut. He listened with a frown, and decided that Draco must be out of the rooms when he didn’t hear him moving around.
That’s probably a bad thing, Harry thought, flinging the blankets back and sitting up. He knew Draco had been killingly angry when he sent Harry to bed. Harry hadn’t been worried because he thought Draco could keep his temper under control with that same icy lightness he had shown Harry when they were fucking.
“Draco?” he called, stepping into the central room.
“Do let him do as he wishes,” a drawl said from behind him. “He has taken a potion and will act better without you there at his side. Trying to hold him back will simply make him impatient of restraint, and your presence will inflame him to demonstrate that he can protect you. Let him go, and he will extract a powerful but not overwhelming revenge.”
Harry turned to Snape’s portrait. He wondered if it would lie, and then decided it probably wouldn’t. If Draco was really in danger, the portrait probably would have already flickered away, in fact, to watch out of another frame.
“You’re sure?” he asked dubiously.
Snape leaned on his cauldron and sneered at Harry. The cauldron wasn’t bubbling, which Harry thought was a first since he had come back to Hogwarts.
“Not entirely sure, Potter, as no one can predict the future,” Snape said. “And do not bring Trelawney up to me.” From his shudder, Harry thought Dumbledore’s portrait must often have done that. “But it is my belief that Draco needs to do this himself, to confirm, if only in his own mind, the—unusual—relation to you he has taken up.”
Harry turned away, flushing and pulling on his hair. He had forgotten that Snape, along with all the other portraits, knew about his sex with Draco in the Room of Requirement.
“How unusual,” Snape said to his back, with the light, almost bored tone that meant he was preparing some masterpiece of malice. “How wonderful¸ that a Potter would prefer to be dominated rather than dominating others.”
Harry shook his head quickly. “It’s not that,” he said. “I know what you’re talking about, and I’m different from those people.”
“But not so marvelous that a Potter would claim uniqueness,” Snape said, from the sound of it telling the walls.
“I’m not—” Harry fell silent and moved to the other side of the room. Draco had laid the glass shard in the middle of the table. Harry stared down at it and wished he had written notes about what the potion was. At least that would convince Harry that Draco was justified in getting as angry about what Covington had done as he’d sounded.
Why should I argue with Snape? He would only find some way to twist my words around anyway, and I’d rather save my efforts for someone who actually deserves them.
“You are unusual,” Snape said flatly to his back. “Do not accept that, and it would make Draco miserable. I would rather not see him miserable.”
Harry turned back and glared at Snape, good resolutions already forgotten. Draco might have to live with a portrait frame cracked down the middle or a canvas that had caught fire. “D’you think I want to make him miserable? But I won’t be the slave or the pet that you’re thinking of, either.”
“How do you know that is what I am thinking of?” Snape moved so that he was standing beside the bookshelf, but made no pretense of reaching for a book. He studied Harry without blinking, in fact. Harry concealed a shudder over that fact and decided there were some advantages to being paint.
“Because you mentioned domination first,” Harry said, and had to keep his fingers from curling around the shard. He might destroy important evidence that Draco needed to analyze later. Or he might cut his fingers. It was strange to think that Draco might be more upset about that than about the destruction of evidence. “And then that you don’t want him to be unhappy. Apparently he needs a slave to be happy.” His voice curdled in his throat. He didn’t believe that, but then again, Snape had known Draco longer.
“You have become sensitive to the nuances of words at last,” Snape said. “Is it any surprise that you still interpret them wrongly?”
Harry refused to look up, and tapped his fingers on the table to ease his impatience and anger. Draco couldn’t be far ahead. If Harry left now and went with him, he would at least know what he planned to do. And, really, wasn’t his place at Draco’s side? Their sexual relationship didn’t mean that Harry had to keep away from him because Draco had chosen to “defend his honor.”
He had started to reach out for the door-handle when Snape spoke again, in the neutral tone Harry had once heard him use to tell Hermione that her potion was correct. “Draco needs a focus for his intensity. He has found a suitable one in you. I would prefer that you not destroy yourself when that would deprive him of his focus.”
Harry blinked. Snape looked as if he was trying to keep from chewing on his tongue, but he had actually spoken the words, and they seemed to be true. That they weren’t about Harry’s welfare but Draco’s wasn’t the point. Of course they would be about Draco’s welfare, because Draco was the one Snape cared about.
The one Harry cared about, too, come to that.
“Isn’t his brewing focus enough?” Harry asked. “He’s told me about some of the things he’s doing with experimental potions—”
“No doubt, in truth, things he did two or three years ago,” Snape interrupted. He had an air of relief, as though he was launching vitriol to relieve an itch that had built up when he admitted Harry might be good for something. “It would take him that long to simplify the concepts so that you could understand them.”
Harry ignored this, and had the satisfaction of seeing Snape look exquisitely frustrated. “Well, isn’t it focus enough? Why would he need someone like me, if he has such an all-consuming passion?”
Snape sighed hard enough to make the portrait frame swing on the wall, or at least it looked like it. “Because potions are not people,” he said. “And because they cannot give him someone to fuck.” He paused and tilted his head. “Unless he has delved into areas of research that I cannot see him having an interest in,” he murmured, attention caught. “Perhaps I should encourage his interest, however.”
“If they would be dangerous to him, then you can’t,” Harry said.
Snape gave him a faint, distantly amused look. “How do you imagine that you could stop me?”
Part Four.
Harry darted under the wildly moving branches of the willow and stabbed something high on the trunk. A knot, Draco thought. The branches froze with a shudder, and Harry turned and nodded to Draco.
Draco took a deep breath and moved in slowly. It had been harder than he’d thought it would be to watch Harry go in by himself, although Draco had agreed to it because he didn’t know where the mechanism for stopping the tree was and he didn’t move as fast as Harry. He had wanted to spring on the branches and force them to stop moving, or cast a Stunning Charm, or drag Harry back by main force, anything that would keep him safe.
Draco couldn’t remember fits of protectiveness like that with his other lovers. He wondered if it had something to do with the fact that he and Harry planned to make this relationship permanent, or the peculiar nature of the relationship.
Watching Harry trotting back to him with his green eyes bright and his head cocked, listening to invisible music, Draco decided that it didn’t really matter. The difference was there, and he would live with it and respect it.
He did lean in and kiss Harry when he slowed to a stop, before he could speak. Harry blushed and stammered beautifully, of course, as he always did, and then cleared his throat and turned to the tree as if he thought it would make a better audience for his embarrassment than Draco would.
“I didn’t see any sign that it’s been disturbed recently,” he said. “I’d thought the Ministry might have placed a charm on it to render it safer, but they didn’t.”
Draco narrowed his eyes in thought. “Perhaps they suspected that something important was here.”
Harry rolled his eyes at him. “I don’t think so. True, Professor Snape died in the Shrieking Shack, but I doubt that anyone would be curious enough to go up the tunnel, the way I did, just to learn how they found the body. They could have come in through the door, if they wanted.”
Draco jerked his head up in a tight nod. He had forgotten, somehow, that Severus had died so short a distance from this place.
That’s the thing that portraits and lovers have in common, he thought, irrationally. They make you forget about the dead.
“I’ll go to the left,” he said. “You to the right. Shout if you run into a danger that’s too hard for you to handle.” He wondered if he should have made the instructions more specific a moment later, because Harry was apt to think that he could handle any danger, but Harry had nodded and turned away. Draco sighed and took his own route.
Harry was right; no one appeared to have been near enough the tree to disturb it. Draco found animal tracks, years of fallen leaves, dirt in abundance, and a few holes among the roots of the tree itself. He conjured a magical eye each time that let him peer into the depths of the burrow, but found only more animal tracks and a few old bones inside.
The tree wasn’t as large as it looked to the eyes of a child. He and Harry met up again in a few minutes. Harry was frowning.
“I keep thinking this has to be the best candidate,” he muttered. “A significant tree. What other one is there on the grounds? Maybe, if Hermione is right and some of those sites in the Forbidden Forest are important, they could be the right candidates. But what are the chances that a tree in the forest is important to both Dumbledore and Snape?”
“Not good,” Draco had to admit. He was wishing now that he had asked the portrait of Severus this morning before they left. True, the portrait couldn’t remember the riddles, but he might be able to tell them if there was any event that they didn’t know about, something known only to Dumbledore and Severus themselves.
Then again, the riddles weren’t meant to be impossible to solve, and this one could be if one didn’t speak to the portraits. Draco frowned more fiercely.
“That line, ‘bright in eternity,’ has to mean something,” Harry said, as if talking to himself. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Draco said. He looked over his shoulder at the tree again. The roots and the trunk kept their secrets well. He tapped his fingers on the wand and thought again. “Perhaps we should investigate the Shrieking Shack. The lines of the riddle might refer to different places. The first two lines to the Whomping Willow, perhaps, and the last two to the Shack.”
Harry turned a frown on him in turn. “And you think that the Shack would fit the line about eternity better than the tree does?”
Draco shook his head. “I know that there were dark memories associated with the Shack for Severus before he died there. He wouldn’t tell me what they were in detail, but he tensed up whenever I mentioned it.”
Harry, uncharacteristically, hesitated. “Oh,” he said a moment later, in a lame fashion. “Did he? That’s strange.”
“You know something,” Draco said. He hardly avoided making it a question, he was so startled. How could Harry have learned something about Severus that Draco didn’t know? Severus would hardly have chosen him as a confessor.
But from the guilty flush in Harry’s cheeks and the sudden memory of the time that Harry had spent with Dumbledore when he was younger, Draco could imagine how it might have happened. He gestured for Harry to go in front of him.
The tunnel that led into the Shrieking Shack was long enough and low enough and dirty enough that Draco could feel his temper fraying by the time that he finally came up into the building. It was no wonder that so many students had looked for the secret and never found it. How many of them would have thought this entrance was important in the first place, and how many of them could have crawled as long as Draco had?
“This had better be right, Potter,” he growled as he stood up and swatted the dust from the knees of his trousers. “Or you’re paying for my clothes to be cleaned.”
“What, you don’t want me to lick them clean?”
Draco looked up and had to catch his breath. Harry’s eyes were bright with insolence, his head lowered as if he was going to get right in Draco’s face and challenge his authority. It probably wouldn’t help either of them if Draco drowned in his own drool, though, so he turned away with a sneer and began to eye the walls.
Harry chucked behind him. Draco carefully didn’t turn around until he thought his voice was under control. Then he said, “I don’t see anything here that looks like a trap or a fight to the death, do you?”
“No,” Harry said. “But we didn’t see the water-snakes before we stumbled into that trap, either. Let’s quarter the room the way we halved the tree. You take that side first, and I’ll take the other.”
Draco resigned himself to a long period of tapping the walls with his wand and casting every revealing spell he could think of. No matter how long it took, though, he was starting to think that there was nothing here. The place looked as if only the dust and a few rats had lived here since Severus died.
What had it been like, to feel death creeping over him? Draco could imagine it, since he had analyzed Nagini’s poison from a fang he’d “borrowed” from the Aurors, and knew what magical properties it had and what potions it was similar to. But he could never be sure, not when Severus’s portrait didn’t remember his death.
That’s what all the dead are like for us, Draco thought with a faint sigh. Gone beyond reach and recall.
They met up in the middle of the room the way they had met up near the tree, and Draco shook his head. “No,” Harry said in response, bending down to look under a dusty piece of wood that stood near the wall. Draco thought it was the remains of a bed, left behind now as worthless. There were ashes on the floor near the foot of the wood that might have been part of the bed at one point. Like everything else here, they were worth nothing.
Draco shuddered. God, this is a depressing place. And I’ll depress myself the longer I stay here.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, only to hear another voice echoing him. When he looked up, he realized that he was looking into Harry’s eyes, which were wide with what Draco thought was a kind of superstitious dread. Despite everything, he managed to smirk in Harry’s direction.
“Oh, shut up,” Harry muttered, and headed for the tunnel. “Licking dirt off your clothes looks positively fun next to this.”
Those words were enough to keep Draco dreaming all the way back to the castle.
*
“Mr. Potter.”
Harry sighed. He had gone back to his room in Hogsmeade to retrieve his belongings and pay the money he still owed for the lodgings and meals. He hadn’t meant to run into Covington on the way back.
Maybe this is why Draco was so insistent about me not leaving, Harry thought, but realistically, he knew he had to blame his own behavior for that, not Draco’s fear of Covington. He turned around and nodded to her. “Good day, ma’am.”
Covington had caught him on the path that wound from Hogsmeade towards the school. She had a flask in her hand, and waved it at him with a little smile. “They make delicious tea at the Hog’s Head, if you know how to ask for it,” she said. “I got some to take with me.”
Harry made a polite noise. He thought the sloshing brown liquid in the flask, the color of ditch-water, wasn’t a kind of tea he would have chosen, but he was determined to give Covington nothing that she could use to impugn or quarrel with him.
She fell into step beside him as they headed up the path. Harry looked at her enough to fulfill the rules of courtesy, but was glad that the walls of Hogwarts came nearer and nearer every minute and he would soon be back inside them.
“I wish you would learn to work with the Ministry, Mr. Potter.”
Harry hoped that his smile didn’t look too fake. “Well, I’ve never been good at working under authority. If you’ve spoken with Professor McGonagall or any of the others who remember me, you must have heard that I was in trouble constantly when I was a student.”
Covington put a hand on his sleeve. Harry halted because he had to, but he could feel the anger stirring beneath the surface of his skin, in a way it hadn’t since he had agreed to try and make a go of this with Draco. He would never be comfortable with strangers touching him.
“We are not children now, Mr. Potter.” Covington could do an impression amount of wide-eyed, solemn speaking when she had to, Harry thought. “I had hoped we could move past this and into a cooperative bond based on what we both have to offer.”
Harry resisted the temptation to either send flame ringing up her fingers or take her words overly personally. “You mean the Ministry and me?” he asked. “No, I don’t think of the members of the Ministry as children.” Just childish. “I’m not sure what growing up has to do with anything when you’re talking about an organization.”
“You want to see a stable wizarding world, and you want to see Hogwarts open again,” Covington said, peering into his eyes as if she would see a demon hiding behind them that might account for his strange actions. “That is all the Ministry wants, as well. We are unsure why you are resisting so much.”
“I distrust the Ministry’s methods, if not its goals.” Harry glanced at Hogwarts. He would have given a lot to see Draco, or even Ron and Hermione, strolling along the paths right now.
Then he shook his head. What was he thinking? He could certainly handle Covington, and the guilt that her soft, insinuating words were trying to inspire in him. He was a more powerful wizard than the Ministry had ever known, since Harry hadn’t showed them his magic on the days when he knew he couldn’t control it.
Covington’s hand tightened on his arm, and she breathed a single word that Harry didn’t recognize, a word in Latin. His muscles froze.
Harry’s magic boiled up at once, coming from beneath his heart and liver. He knew that he would shatter the spell she had cast in a few moments and then he would make her sorry, sorry that she lived and breathed—
His magic met the barrier of the spell, and stuck there. Incredulous, Harry tried to will his magic to open his throat, to let his eyes blink, or even to curl one of his fingers. Nothing happened.
Covington stepped around in front of him. She had a faint whiteness to her face that made Harry think she hadn’t been sure that spell would work until she actually used it, but she had used it, and he was going to destroy her. He glared at her so that she would know that.
Covington didn’t seem inclined to pay attention. Instead, she held up the flask of brown liquid and turned it back and forth, as if she wanted to see how much sunlight could get through the muddy amber. Harry felt his heart begin to pick up speed in a way that was unfamiliar from the last few years. He had felt much anger, but not much fear.
“Not enough,” Covington said with what sounded like regret. “Not enough to keep you under control for days, at least. And I do wish that I had managed to freeze you when your mouth was open. This is going to be difficult.” She looked at his face and offered the kind of apologetic shrug Harry thought she might give one of her superiors at the Ministry. “Oh, well. I’ve done harder things.”
She reached up and clamped her hand on his jaw, prying it down. Harry felt the barrier of the spell that stuck against the surface of his skin shiver, broken by the movement of one part of his body. He tensed, ready to attack, if only with a bite, the moment she let his jaw go.
She didn’t give him a chance. His lips opened reluctantly, and she laid the mouth of the flask against it, pouring in the liquid. Harry choked, and went on choking as the drink poured in. He could feel it trickling down between his teeth and along the sides of his face.
Covington sighed. “It’s only too clear that no one tried this in the field,” she muttered, and then cast another spell with a wave of her wand. The muscles in Harry’s throat relaxed, and she reached up and started to massage them, trying to force him to swallow.
Harry didn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t get a better chance. Once again, she had disrupted the integrity of the immobilizing spell, weakening it, and her skin was against his skin now, rather than the harmless glass of the flask. He would wound her. He had wounded people with less magic and less anger.
The magic flung itself against the sides of his throat, against the charm that continued to hold him prisoner. It was difficult, especially because his unblinking eyes were beginning to dry out and ache, and he had to worry about what the potion that had already flowed down his throat would do to him. But the desperation was a goad to the fury, and on he worked, reaching up again and again and scraping the anger against her spell like a chisel against rock.
It gave way. Suddenly Harry could feel her fingers against his skin, instead of a distant sensation as if she touched him through gloves, and that meant the magic could feel her.
Covington shrieked as spikes grew through the sides of Harry’s neck and curled around her fingers, holding them trapped there. She yanked, and Harry worried for a moment about the spikes simply tearing his flesh aside to keep her prisoner.
But the magic protected him against any pain, or else the anger did. The magic passed through Harry like lightning, up and then down, and broke the glassy spell that gripped his limbs. He flexed his arms, reached up, grabbed the flask, and flung it away from him, while at the same time spitting out all the liquid that was still in his mouth.
The flask shattered on the ground. Harry grimaced and Summoned one shard of glass coated with the potion, the magic extending from his fingers into another, giant hand and scooping up the shard. He should probably keep that so Draco could analyze the potion and tell him what it had been meant to do.
Covington was still screaming. Harry stepped back, but the spikes pulled her with him, and she was screaming practically into his face, her own face splotched with red and white.
Harry panted. He wanted to destroy her. The magic that could do it raged up and down in him, as capable of being aimed as a Muggle gun. He could do it, and no one would find a trace of her. The Ministry could investigate, but they would never learn what happened. Harry was capable of concealing every hint.
They might suspect him. They wouldn’t know.
Harry swallowed and closed his eyes. He envisioned Draco’s face, and then the way Draco had lain on top of him when they were in bed together last night. He remembered the tight feeling of the chains around his limbs when they were in the Room of Requirement together. The Ministry might not be able to find the evidence, but he thought they would condemn him for the murder anyway when Covington disappeared, and that would—it would devastate Draco. Or at least Harry thought so. It was still strange to work through these ideas and think that someone other than him would care if he was condemned to Azkaban.
He concentrated. The spikes snapped back into his throat. Harry glared at Covington. He didn’t know if he had swallowed any of the potion, but if he had, it wasn’t enough to make him into her slave, or whatever else it had been meant to do. Covington lay on the ground and whimpered softly with big eyes, staring up at him.
“Remember that I spared your life,” Harry said. His voice was rough. He shook his head and turned away when the temptation to make her stop whimpering came to him.
He carried the shard, and he carried the memory, which he would place in a Pensieve as soon as he could. He had never actually committed murder, despite the temptations that had sometimes presented themselves when his magic was high. He would keep from it now, when he was on the verge of a better life. He wasn’t going to allow Covington to ruin that for him.
*
Draco glanced at the clock and frowned. He thought it shouldn’t have taken Harry as long as this to fetch his belongings from Hogsmeade, but perhaps he had stopped to talk to Granger or Weasel. Perhaps he had decided to have lunch instead of eating with Draco.
“Perhaps he is not coming back,” Severus murmured from the portrait frame, with exquisitely painful timing.
“Shut up,” Draco snapped at him, and then bent again over the cauldron that contained the sentient potion. It had retreated to the bottom and decided to sulk today. Draco was trying to figure out how he would coax it into performing when it had grown smart enough to suspect that doing so would be the prelude to pain.
“What reason does he have to stay with you?” Small splashes and plops came from Severus’s painting. He had been brewing something new all day, although Draco didn’t know what it was. “Tell me that. You have been very accommodating for him, very convenient. He got the ability to settle his anger and a good fuck from you. But when he left your immediate presence, he would begin to think again. He would begin to think that he has his friends back, and that they stand a good chance of helping him solve the riddle even if you don’t. Why would he return?”
“Be quiet, Severus,” Draco said.
The words still hung in the air when someone knocked at the door. Draco shot Severus a triumphant look as he went to open it, and was delighted to see that Severus was ruffled enough to betray a frown. He quickly looked the other way, of course, and dropped something new into the cauldron. The potion hissed in a discouraging way.
When Draco opened the door, Harry staggered in, carrying something covered with a foul-looking potion and blood in his hand. He nodded to Draco and leaned against the wall for a minute. “I got hurt more than I thought I did,” he gasped.
Draco stared at him for a moment, so shocked that it was difficult to move. Harry blinked at him and pushed a hank of hair hanging in his eyes aside. His expression was inquiring, but it suddenly closed and he moved to the side, looking away. “Well,” he said, voice distant, “it doesn’t matter. I’ll put this over here and tell you what happened, and you can analyze the potion when you have time for it. I see that you’re working right now.”
The words were enough to loosen Draco’s paralysis. He knew when someone was drawing away from him, when he was losing contact that he desired, and he would not allow Harry to go right back into the holding pattern from which Draco had labored so hard to rescue him. He grabbed Harry’s shoulders and propelled him backwards into the wall. Harry winced, but not with the exaggerated movements Draco knew would mark back injuries. He lifted his head, too, a moment later, and glared at Draco.
“Malfoy, what the hell—”
Draco fastened his mouth into place, kissing and biting. Perhaps he could have spoken reassuring words instead, but he wanted to apologize for the moment of shock and tell Harry that he was still welcome here without words.
Harry stiffened, then melted against him with a small whimper that he was flushed red about when Draco pulled away to look at him. His hand had wandered into Draco’s hair and locked on, and his eyes were closed, his head tilted back. Draco nodded and kissed his forehead in turn, then lifted the bleeding hand.
“It looks like that you cut your hand on the glass,” he said. He was amazed to hear his voice come out critical and calm, balanced, rather than the scolding tone he had thought he would adopt. “Why did that happen? Why couldn’t you use your magic to pick it up?”
“I did at first,” Harry said. He was still leaning against the wall, hand in Draco’s hair, though it was starting to lose its grip and wander down to his shoulder. “But I had to pick it up when the magic faded. That must have happened somewhere along the path to your rooms. I really don’t remember it,” he added, in what sounded like a voice of astonishment. “I wonder why?”
Draco shook his head. He didn’t know enough about Harry’s relationship with his magic to say what was and wasn’t normal. He wouldn’t think about that for right now, and concentrate on keeping Harry’s trust and learning the truth instead. “What happened?” he asked, levitating the shard from Harry’s fingers with a flick of his wand. The shard landed on the table and sat there, sopping. Draco wrinkled his nose. The potion’s original smell was no treat, but it smelled worse when mixed with the blood that Harry had left on the glass.
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I mean, Covington stopped me, and then she used some sort of spell, sent through her hand on my arm, to freeze me in place. She had to unfreeze my jaw and throat muscles to get the potion down me, though. That was when I shot spikes through my neck and ripped her hand up.”
Draco at once crossed the room and pushed Harry back against the wall just as he was starting to step away. Harry went, wrinkling his forehead at Draco as if to ask what the problem was.
“Where did the spikes come out?” Draco demanded, staring at Harry’s throat. It looked uninjured to him, but he had to admit that he didn’t know much about this kind of thing, and didn’t know if magical defenses like that would necessarily leave any remnant behind.
“Out of my neck, in the front,” Harry said. “I’m afraid that I can’t name the muscles. I rather had other things on my mind at the time,” he added, and now there was a sneer in the back of his voice that spoke of his rising anger.
Draco wrapped his hand around the base of Harry’s throat and hung on. Harry’s eyes widened, then closed again. Draco smiled. The restraint appealed to Harry, and exercising it took away some of Draco’s murderous fury that urged him to dash outside, find Covington, and then kill her.
“You did right, hurting her,” he whispered. “But you didn’t kill her, and that’s good.” He was sure Harry would have confessed at once if they had a death to cover up. “What did the potion taste like?”
“Frogs’ legs and other unmentionables, what I could taste of it through the binding spell that she cast on me,” Harry said, making a face. He didn’t turn away from the clutch that Draco had on his throat, though, and Draco made no attempt to release him. “She pretended it was tea she had bought in Hogsmeade at first.”
“She needed to get close to you to use it,” Draco said quietly, and turned his head so that he could look at the glass on the table. He wanted to go and analyze the mixture that he could see shimmering sickly all over it, but it would have meant releasing Harry. He wasn’t sure if that was the best idea. “That limits the number of potions it could have been.”
“What?” Harry asked. His voice was slurring a bit. Shock, Draco thought, eyeing him. He had probably got through the moments of immediate danger all right, but now he was beginning to shake with reaction. “Of course she would have to get close to me to use it. It’s a potion. She didn’t have any choice, if she wanted me to swallow it.”
Draco tapped the back of Harry’s skull with one finger, making his eyes flutter open again when they’d been on the verge of closing. “Keep up,” he said mildly. “There are some potions that you can use from a distance. If it could be absorbed through your skin or smelled, then she wouldn’t have had to freeze you like that. Inviting you to smell the ‘delicious tea’ she had would have been enough. And she also made an effort to catch you alone. That suggests the changes the potion brings about would have happened immediately, or at least quickly, and in a way that would have been unmistakably different from your normal behavior to anyone who knew you.”
“Do you know me?” Harry gave him a crooked smile as his eyes fluttered shut again. “I didn’t notice.”
“Lie down,” Draco murmured into his ear. “I’m going to work on analyzing this potion, and I would rather that you were spending your time in a place where I know you were. If some of the potion did go down your throat—”
“It couldn’t have been a lot,” Harry argued, struggling to keep his eyes open. “I would have felt it, I think.”
“We don’t always know what’s our own behavior and what’s not, when we’re under the influence of a new potion,” Draco said, with perfect sympathy. He had experimented with some of his own concoctions, to make sure that they were sufficiently undetectable, and he still remembered the strange impulses that had dashed through him, as though he was host to another person’s spirit. “For now, I want you to lie down and see if you can sleep this off.”
Harry grunted. Draco thought for a minute they would get into another row, but Harry sighed, murmured, “Yes, Draco,” and staggered through the door into the bedroom. Draco peered after him just to make sure that he really was collapsing on the bed instead of the floor, and then returned to the shard of glass.
“Bring that here.”
Draco started. He had forgotten that they had a witness. But this was potentially something that Severus would help with, rather than simply mock from a distance, and so Draco scooped up the shard and took it over to the portrait. He had already cast a spell that would keep his skin from being pierced. He would no more feed an unknown potion into his veins than he would send Harry back out to face Covington right now.
Covington.
An anger that was alien in its intensity moved through Draco when he thought of her attacking Harry. He would destroy her for that. He would destroy her for a great deal, in truth, but that would come first.
Harry was his.
And that meant no one got to take him away, either in the way that Draco suspected this potion was meant to do or in others. He could feel his lips sliding back from his teeth as he thought about it, and had to shake his head sharply to bring his mind back to a focus on what Severus was saying about the potion.
The portrait looked at him from the corner of one eye as he spoke, perhaps wondering whether Draco would storm out of the room and try to confront Covington immediately. “That brown color says that it shares some ingredients with the Willow Spine potion.”
Draco nodded, not seeing the need to look less ferocious. The Willow Spine potion would weaken the victim’s willpower, leading him to do more or less as the creator of the potion commanded. With great effort, a command could be resisted, but then it took longer for the will to recover, and in the meantime, the Potions master involved could wring more actions out of his defeated slave.
It was an especially insidious weapon to use against someone like Harry, since Draco suspected he would fight back at once instead of waiting for a more advantageous time and place the way that some people would, and that meant Covington could wait out the initial struggle and dangle him from her fingers like a puppet thereafter.
“Is it a variation?” he asked. “I can’t believe Covington would carry pure Willow Spine about with her, not when the consequences for being caught with it are too great for even the Ministry to tolerate.”
“Smell it,” Severus said. “Carefully,” he added, as if he suspected Draco would try to plunge his nose into the middle of the potion. “The Willow Spine works by ingestion, but this could be an olfactory cousin.”
“Yes, thank you for that elementary precaution,” Draco murmured. He let his nostrils open delicately to their widest extent. He could smell something crushed and green at the base of the potion, with salt and murk piled on top of that. That wasn’t the usual scent of the Willow Spine, and he frowned. “It really does smell like the ditchwater that it resembles,” he admitted.
Severus laughed. Draco looked up at him with an eyebrow raised, wondering if Covington had paid a great deal of money for a potion that wouldn’t work. Draco would punish her severely no matter what, of course, but it might lessen the charges that he could bring against her, if he chose that route.
Severus, though, wore the delighted expression he usually got when contemplating a master’s work, not the scorn that he showed those fools trapped by their own stupidity. “It was experimental when I was alive,” he said. “The Danish had begun to modify the Willow Spine so that it would have a more subtle but lasting influence. The one who used the potion would still be in control, but wouldn’t be able to count on instant obedience. On the other hand, that has its advantages, since it means that the orders could take place over longer periods of time, and the one fed the potion could be trusted out of sight. My guess is that Covington intended to feed Potter that potion and then Obliviate him so that he would obey her without realizing what had happened.”
Draco nodded. One reason the Willow Spine potion wasn’t more used was the sort of bond it created between the victim and his master, which ensured that he would remember what had happened—and be able to testify against his master, if he escaped—even if a Memory Charm was used. “And undetectable, of course?”
“But of course,” Severus murmured. Then a shadow of uncertainty passed over his face. “At least, the Danish version was supposed to be. They never perfected it, that I had heard. I strongly suspect that we would not be able to tell if this version was supposed to be unless we tested it.”
“Which I am not in a hurry to do,” Draco said acidly, thinking of the way that Harry had looked when he came back into their rooms.
Severus inclined his head in agreement. “But perhaps you should do something about Covington, given that she has, at the moment, nothing but a torn hand and a chance to have cleaned up the flask the potion came in.”
Draco cursed and spun to face the door. In his overwhelming concern for Harry, it hadn’t even occurred to him that Covington would be spinning her own story as hard as she could in the time left to her.
“You are in love,” Severus said in a tolerant voice. “And love makes us fools of us all.”
“Between the two of us,” Draco snapped back, as he reached out and plucked one of the vials from the central table in the room, “we have more power than Covington can command or comprehend, which was precisely why she wanted to ride on our backs.”
Severus’s reply was cut off by the slam of the door. Draco took a moment, standing in the dungeon corridor, to master his breathing and his heartrate. He had no intention of letting Covington escape, but on the other hand, he couldn’t charge around like a madman looking for her.
He pressed forwards.
*
Harry woke up when he heard the door to Snape’s rooms shut. He listened with a frown, and decided that Draco must be out of the rooms when he didn’t hear him moving around.
That’s probably a bad thing, Harry thought, flinging the blankets back and sitting up. He knew Draco had been killingly angry when he sent Harry to bed. Harry hadn’t been worried because he thought Draco could keep his temper under control with that same icy lightness he had shown Harry when they were fucking.
“Draco?” he called, stepping into the central room.
“Do let him do as he wishes,” a drawl said from behind him. “He has taken a potion and will act better without you there at his side. Trying to hold him back will simply make him impatient of restraint, and your presence will inflame him to demonstrate that he can protect you. Let him go, and he will extract a powerful but not overwhelming revenge.”
Harry turned to Snape’s portrait. He wondered if it would lie, and then decided it probably wouldn’t. If Draco was really in danger, the portrait probably would have already flickered away, in fact, to watch out of another frame.
“You’re sure?” he asked dubiously.
Snape leaned on his cauldron and sneered at Harry. The cauldron wasn’t bubbling, which Harry thought was a first since he had come back to Hogwarts.
“Not entirely sure, Potter, as no one can predict the future,” Snape said. “And do not bring Trelawney up to me.” From his shudder, Harry thought Dumbledore’s portrait must often have done that. “But it is my belief that Draco needs to do this himself, to confirm, if only in his own mind, the—unusual—relation to you he has taken up.”
Harry turned away, flushing and pulling on his hair. He had forgotten that Snape, along with all the other portraits, knew about his sex with Draco in the Room of Requirement.
“How unusual,” Snape said to his back, with the light, almost bored tone that meant he was preparing some masterpiece of malice. “How wonderful¸ that a Potter would prefer to be dominated rather than dominating others.”
Harry shook his head quickly. “It’s not that,” he said. “I know what you’re talking about, and I’m different from those people.”
“But not so marvelous that a Potter would claim uniqueness,” Snape said, from the sound of it telling the walls.
“I’m not—” Harry fell silent and moved to the other side of the room. Draco had laid the glass shard in the middle of the table. Harry stared down at it and wished he had written notes about what the potion was. At least that would convince Harry that Draco was justified in getting as angry about what Covington had done as he’d sounded.
Why should I argue with Snape? He would only find some way to twist my words around anyway, and I’d rather save my efforts for someone who actually deserves them.
“You are unusual,” Snape said flatly to his back. “Do not accept that, and it would make Draco miserable. I would rather not see him miserable.”
Harry turned back and glared at Snape, good resolutions already forgotten. Draco might have to live with a portrait frame cracked down the middle or a canvas that had caught fire. “D’you think I want to make him miserable? But I won’t be the slave or the pet that you’re thinking of, either.”
“How do you know that is what I am thinking of?” Snape moved so that he was standing beside the bookshelf, but made no pretense of reaching for a book. He studied Harry without blinking, in fact. Harry concealed a shudder over that fact and decided there were some advantages to being paint.
“Because you mentioned domination first,” Harry said, and had to keep his fingers from curling around the shard. He might destroy important evidence that Draco needed to analyze later. Or he might cut his fingers. It was strange to think that Draco might be more upset about that than about the destruction of evidence. “And then that you don’t want him to be unhappy. Apparently he needs a slave to be happy.” His voice curdled in his throat. He didn’t believe that, but then again, Snape had known Draco longer.
“You have become sensitive to the nuances of words at last,” Snape said. “Is it any surprise that you still interpret them wrongly?”
Harry refused to look up, and tapped his fingers on the table to ease his impatience and anger. Draco couldn’t be far ahead. If Harry left now and went with him, he would at least know what he planned to do. And, really, wasn’t his place at Draco’s side? Their sexual relationship didn’t mean that Harry had to keep away from him because Draco had chosen to “defend his honor.”
He had started to reach out for the door-handle when Snape spoke again, in the neutral tone Harry had once heard him use to tell Hermione that her potion was correct. “Draco needs a focus for his intensity. He has found a suitable one in you. I would prefer that you not destroy yourself when that would deprive him of his focus.”
Harry blinked. Snape looked as if he was trying to keep from chewing on his tongue, but he had actually spoken the words, and they seemed to be true. That they weren’t about Harry’s welfare but Draco’s wasn’t the point. Of course they would be about Draco’s welfare, because Draco was the one Snape cared about.
The one Harry cared about, too, come to that.
“Isn’t his brewing focus enough?” Harry asked. “He’s told me about some of the things he’s doing with experimental potions—”
“No doubt, in truth, things he did two or three years ago,” Snape interrupted. He had an air of relief, as though he was launching vitriol to relieve an itch that had built up when he admitted Harry might be good for something. “It would take him that long to simplify the concepts so that you could understand them.”
Harry ignored this, and had the satisfaction of seeing Snape look exquisitely frustrated. “Well, isn’t it focus enough? Why would he need someone like me, if he has such an all-consuming passion?”
Snape sighed hard enough to make the portrait frame swing on the wall, or at least it looked like it. “Because potions are not people,” he said. “And because they cannot give him someone to fuck.” He paused and tilted his head. “Unless he has delved into areas of research that I cannot see him having an interest in,” he murmured, attention caught. “Perhaps I should encourage his interest, however.”
“If they would be dangerous to him, then you can’t,” Harry said.
Snape gave him a faint, distantly amused look. “How do you imagine that you could stop me?”
Part Four.
