Chapter Thirteen of 'Nova Cupiditas'- Baker's Dozen

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twelve.

Title: Nova Cupiditas (13/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Attempted rape, issues of consent, violence, gore, sex, heavy angst, profanity. Ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Nova cupiditas—the curse that makes the victim desire someone they hate. There is no cure, and the consequences grow increasingly violent the more the desire is denied. And now someone has cursed Draco Malfoy to desire Harry Potter.
Author’s Notes: This is a very dark story. It will probably be between twelve and twenty chapters.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Thirteen—Baker’s Dozen

Draco woke to heat, and hatred.

He didn’t know what had happened to make him feel that hatred, which seemed something outside of himself, hovering on his shoulder like a bird and able to fly away again as easily. But it was there, and it was enough that, when he turned his head and tried to focus his eyes on the bubble, Harry wasn’t sitting beside him. In fact, when Draco carefully listened, he didn’t think Harry was in the room.

That made him snarl. He tried to sit up and reach out with the sense in his chest that made him aware of where Harry was at all times, and ran into an invisible barrier. There was something in the house that kept him from probing after Harry, and Draco briefly wondered if Granger had cast some spell.

Then he realized that the simplest explanation was the likeliest, too: that he couldn’t feel Harry because Harry wasn’t there.

His full-throated howl of rage made Granger come pounding into the room, her wand held out in front of her and her eyes bewildered. Draco ignored her. He had his attention on the bubble surrounding him, the first of the walls that he would have to pass if he wanted to find and catch up with Harry again.

The jealousy had swept in and cleared his mind, the way Draco vaguely remembered it doing once before. The lust blinded him. The jealousy made him think rationally, because he had to find a way to take Harry away from whoever might be touching or holding him at the moment.

Harry had said last night that the Weasel had left the house. What if Harry was at his house with him? Or with his sister? Draco had seen the way they touched, Harry and the Weasel, casually intimate. That could mean that Harry romped pretty often in the sister’s bed, or the brother’s, or—

He had thought about that deliberately, not because he couldn’t help thinking it, and it worked as it had worked when he was in the warded circle in Harry’s lab. The rage and hatred built in him, sinking deep claws and flexing, and unleashing the restraints that usually kept his magic imprisoned, like the magic of any adult wizard who had got used to using a wand and climbed past the accidental outbursts of childhood.

Draco screamed his fury, and the bubble fell in ringing shards around him. He stood up, shook himself, and looked around, but he didn’t spot his wand right away. He turned to Granger, barely noticing the wand in her hand. It seemed like an annoyance now, more than anything. If she had information about where Harry was, if she’d hidden him away deliberately so that Harry could cavort with the Weasels, he would torture that out of her, but for now, he needed his wand more than anything else.

“My wand,” he said.

“Malfoy,” Granger said. “What are you doing?” She had walked backwards so that she was against the doorway, and stood there as if she intended to bar his passage beyond it with her life. The sight made Draco want to smile, but he snarled instead. Granger was too likely to get in the way and prove a distraction from his important task of finding Harry.

“Searching for what’s mine,” Draco said. He could barely speak the question. The lust hadn’t come back, but the jealousy was close to choking him, because his sense of Harry had not only confirmed that Harry wasn’t in the house, it was reaching out and not finding a trace of him anywhere. Not in the streets nearby, not in the buildings that stood within reach.

“Where is he?” he demanded of Granger, even as his desperately reaching magic found his wand and brought it skimming into the room between Granger’s legs.

She leaped and stared at him, more cautious than ever around him because he was armed now. “He—he went to the Manor to see if your mother had any information on the curse in her books,” she said, testing each word as if she thought it would make Draco attack her. “He should be back soon.”

Draco snarled again. There was Lucius at the Manor, who wanted to hurt his Harry, and who looked enough like Draco that Harry might be forgiven for straying thoughts—if Draco was the kind of person to forgive.

But a moment later, as his thoughts fixed on the house, he received a clear impression of it standing open and empty. His mother wasn’t there, and his father was hiding somewhere on the grounds, and unless they had killed Harry and buried his body in the gardens, Harry wasn’t there, either.

“I need more than that, Granger,” he said, stalking towards her. Had Harry told her to conceal his whereabouts? He would regret that. He would regret anything but staying by Draco’s side and putting him first. If Draco was going to commit himself to someone like this, heart and soul, he deserved to have that commitment back. “What plans did he mention other than that? Why did he leave the house in the first place? Anywhere he went, we were to go together. He specifically promised me that.” He realized that he was spitting and raving, but he didn’t care. Not if it frightened her enough to make her tell him the truth.

Granger backed away from him. Then she shook her head. “If he isn’t at the Manor, then I don’t know where he is.”

Draco thought she was telling him all she knew. And in any case, his sense of Harry had expanded again, spiraling further and further away from the Manor and Harry’s house, but still locking and orienting on details that felt familiar. Draco turned his head, sniffing the air, trying to understand the impressions that were pouring in on him.

And then he did understand. He felt his mouth relax into a pleasant smile. Granger gasped, as if the change in his face was too great for her to stand. But Draco could ignore her easily. He knew where Harry was, and what he was doing there, and who he was with, and how he, himself, was going to respond.

Harry had been taken by the same people who had taken Draco, and brought to the same place.

Draco strode out of Harry’s house and went to Apparate, deaf to Granger’s cries behind him.

*

Well, this isn’t good, Harry thought.

He was still in the sack, but he could hear the low, excited mutters around him, and feel the casual way that they handled him: tossing him on the grass, turning him over with a kick, crowding around him and laughing into their sleeves with excitement. Harry pretended to be unconscious still, but he didn’t think they were fooled. Someone had already come over, prodded him in the chest once with a finger, and then retreated.

Harry had had a bit of Auror training, not much, before he left the program. But he remembered how to read criminals from their body language—one of the most valuable things he had learned, he thought, because there were plenty of people who would want to hurt him even after he became a research wizard—and this body language said that they felt confident about their place and their plans and weren’t anticipating any sudden betrayal, the way that Harry thought they would have been wise to. Surely someone among them would think that the way they had cursed Draco was wrong, or get nervous about snatching the great Harry Potter and run tattling to the Ministry.

But it didn’t seem so. Instead, they clustered around him and laughed, and then they yanked the sack from his head with a suddenness that left Harry gasping.

A figure wearing a black cloak bent over him. Harry couldn’t see her face, hard as he stared, and she had fastened something on either side of his head so that he couldn’t turn it. The sounds and the smells, though, were the same as those of the meadow he had visited with Draco the other day. He thought that might be their first mistake, bringing him back to the same place they had cursed Draco.

Then again, no one knew where he was. They had snatched him before he could Apparate from his own street, which meant they must have been watching his house for some time, and he hadn’t managed to go to the Manor. Ron and Hermione wouldn’t panic until hours went by without his return, and maybe not even then, if they thought he was engaged in a long talk with Mrs. Malfoy. Why should he think rescue was coming?

He drew in a sharp breath and fought away the despair. Something would happen. They had made one careless mistake. They could make others.

“Mr. Potter,” the figure said. Harry wanted to say that it was a woman, but really, given the thick hood and the auditory glamour he had no doubt she was using on her voice, it was impossible to tell. “You should have left well enough alone. I don’t think I recall another case in the literature where someone helped the victim who was cursed to lust after them. It’s procedure in these cases to feel sorry and to ignore them. After all, there’s no cure for Nova Cupiditas.”

“You don’t believe that,” Harry said. “Not completely. Or you wouldn’t be upset that I was researching it.”

The woman paused. Only a slight hesitation, before she laughed, but Harry would remember it. Yes, they weren’t completely perfect, no matter how marvelous their snatch-and-grab techniques were. If nothing else, continued success might have made them overconfident. They could have protected themselves better if they had simply stayed far away from him altogether.

“You’re the Savior,” she said. “I suspect we should have thought of the possibility that you would try to help him first, the boy who had always tormented you.” She paused, and Harry glared at her. He didn’t see any possibility of trying to placate her. If they already knew that he wanted to help Draco, they wouldn’t be fooled by him widening his eyes and saying in an innocent tone that he didn’t want to.

“But you should understand one thing,” she went on, and her voice was low and ugly. “Draco Malfoy and people like him insulted and ruined the chances of many more people than they ever touched in the war.”

Harry pretended to listen to her. In reality, he was only listening insofar as any clues would come through her words or the references she made. He wanted to find some way out of this situation, and the longer she talked, the longer he would stay alive.

He thought she wanted to persuade him his actions were wrong, rather than simply kill him, or, worse, cast Nova Cupiditas on him in turn. He could nod and make encouraging noises sometimes, like someone who could be persuaded, and then he would take her information and twist it against her like a weapon.

If he could.

“They barred the acceptance and entrance of Muggleborns into the Ministry and the wizarding world for a long time after,” the woman went on. “Now the children who come into the wizarding world for the first time are frightened by rumors of the war and the truth about what happened to people like them, and many of them go back to their parents and give up magic. The people who have the courage to stay, like your friend Hermione Granger, are rare, and they shouldn’t have to have that courage. No one is asking the pure-bloods to face death and destruction. But someone should.”

Harry shook his head. “That’s what I don’t understand about your methods, though,” he said, trying to focus his eyes over her head while not making it obvious that that’s what he was doing. “I mean, why not go after the worst pure-bloods? Lucius Malfoy is bad, true, but Draco didn’t really do anything.”

“The worst ones are in prison, dead, or fled,” someone else murmured from beyond the restraints that kept Harry from turning. “We couldn’t hurt only them unless we wanted to confine our revenge unacceptably.”

“Be still, Worthy,” said the woman in front of Harry, not unkindly. Harry vowed to remember the name, though he doubted that it was a real one. “All pure-bloods are part of this culture that keeps Muggleborns estranged from their rightful heritage, Potter, not just the worst ones. To let some go unpunished would be tantamount to admitting that there was no point in hunting any of them.”

Harry didn’t understand the logic, but he would argue only as much as he needed to to keep the conversation flowing. He thought he had an idea, and so he flexed his fingers next to his hip and began to concentrate on his anger.

“Why use that curse, though?” he asked. “There must have been worse things you could do to them. More painful.”

“That death is painful,” the woman said. “But what matters more is humiliating them. Making them see that people of different ‘blood’ can still be desirable, even if it is magic that makes them feel the desire. We make them pollute themselves, and then they can’t talk about their precious purity.”

Of course that’s what matters, Harry thought, and struggled not to roll his eyes. He watched her face instead, or the blankness in the hood where her face should be, and moved his hand a little more at his hip. He had used wandless magic once, when he was young and stupid, and blown up Aunt Marge. He ought to be able to use it again now, when he understood what was at stake, and when the same people who had persecuted Draco had taken him.

“But is pollution enough?” he asked. “Do you care about the suffering you cause people, like me, who might feel compassion for them—and for you, if your methods were different, or kinder?”

The woman drew breath to answer. Harry tensed, thinking he would wait until she had spoken a few sentences and was obviously engrossed in what she was saying, and then attack.

He never got the chance.

The air ripped open behind her, and Draco came through it, storming silver with madness and death.

*

The first thing Draco saw when he Apparated in was someone bending over his Harry, close enough that her chest could have touched his. She had boards fastened around his head so that he couldn’t turn away, and she was practically feeding him her breasts.

Draco raised his wand and destroyed her.

He could never remember what spell he had used afterwards. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that her head ripped from her shoulders and her body slumped over Harry, limp and dead and no longer a rival for his lover. Draco turned away for the moment and focused on the dozen other people who stood around the meadow.

They started scattering and yelling. Draco smiled. It didn’t matter. They had been here, and he thought he could track them to the ends of the earth if necessary. The jealousy rode him, shining and powerful, and kept the lust at bay. Like this, he was rational.

And like this, he was the doom of those who had tried to doom him.

His wand flickered, and bodies leaped apart in front of him. It flickered again, and chopped off the hand of someone who had crept up behind him, reaching for his wand. Draco pointed it at the ground, and the earth opened and then clamped shut like a set of traps around the legs of his enemies.

He wanted to save a few for later, so that he could torture them for information and then kill them slowly.

In high good humor that almost eclipsed the anger, he bounded after the people who stumbled over each other, too terrified to Apparate, or too slow. Or maybe they hated him too much to try. Draco didn’t mind. He was moving. He was protecting Harry. He felt better than he had since these bastards had cursed him. He was taking an active part in his own preservation again, where, before, he’d simply had to sit around and wait for Harry to come up with something, or sleep behind the wards because he would fatally distract Harry otherwise.

He licked his lips, tasted something salty and stinging, and realized there was blood there. Draco shrugged and strode with a spring in his step back to Harry. It didn’t matter. He would share a kiss with Harry, and teach him to love the taste of blood if he didn’t already. Harry had been a soldier; Draco thought he would understand.

“Love,” he said, and the word buzzed in his mouth, making it holy. Harry would have to believe him after this, he thought. He no longer thought the curse was gone, but he believed it could be a source of strength. He reached down and unfastened the binders from either side of Harry’s head, then dragged the limp body of the woman he had killed off Harry. Once again, he held Harry safe in his embrace, and he closed his eyes as the curse filled him with an indescribable feeling. He could cut off his hand sooner than he could go back to not loving Harry, not holding him, not having rights to him that no one else had.

“I—” Harry pushed at Draco’s chest, and his eyes were wide and panicked. Draco didn’t understand that. Hadn’t he shown that there was nothing to be afraid of? He had taken care of all the attackers, and no matter how he looked around the meadow, no more appeared. Perhaps some had fled, but Draco didn’t think so. The blurs of light pushing and passing through his memory included no Apparitions. Eight people were dead, five trapped moaning in the ground. He thought he had seen thirteen when he came into the meadow.

“Tell me what’s distressing you, Harry,” he coaxed, and stroked the backs of his fingers across Harry’s cheek. He wanted to kiss him, but he would wait until Harry had spoken the words that obviously troubled him. It was a bit difficult to speak with one’s mouth full of tongue, after all.

But when that was done…

I have to take him.

*

Harry couldn’t breathe.

In a few seconds, Draco had appeared, and had done all this, and then—

It had ended.

Harry stared around him, at the people with their bodies cut in half and their heads lying fifteen feet away from them and holes through the center of their chests. He didn’t recognize most of the spells Draco had used, despite his Auror training and the research he had done into obscure spells since he started becoming a research wizard. Draco had tossed Dark magic around as though it was a handful of straws, and then he had come over and tugged Harry up with his face covered with blood, his hair plastered with it, his eyes shining like galaxies. Harry doubted that he noticed anything but the feel of Harry’s own skin, given the restless way he was running his hands across it.

“I need to know why this happened,” Harry said. “I need to know how you found me,” he added, because he had only just then realized that Ron and Hermione hadn’t come with Draco, or Mrs. Malfoy. It would have made sense if someone else could have directed Draco, or tracked Harry, but it stunned Harry’s imagination to think that Draco had come here by himself.

Draco gave him a gentle, affectionate smile, and leaned in to kiss Harry’s cheek. Harry tried not to flinch when he felt the still-sticky blood that his lips imprinted there.

“I woke up, and you were gone,” Draco said. “I’ve had a sense of you that pulled me to you before, when I was missing your body. The day we had the argument and you went down into your lab, remember? Well, it happened again, and this time, it reached out until it found you.” He gazed around the meadow contemplatively. “I think it probably helped that they were stupid enough to come back here. I wouldn’t have found you as fast as if they took you someplace unfamiliar, or further away.”

Harry blinked and shook his head. The prisoners were moaning. He knew Draco had left them alive deliberately, but it made him start to think that Draco could have left them all alive, and nothing productive would come of allowing his thoughts to wander that way. He had to get back to something more productive, before he collapsed of exhaustion or shock.

Or before Draco started trying to kiss him.

“How could you act like that?” he asked quietly. “Why wouldn’t you kill the person who was on top of me and then snatch me up and leave? The lust—it shouldn’t give you another choice.”

He held his breath, in case referring to the lust would change Draco’s behavior, but Draco simply gave him an adoring glance and smoothed down the hair on the back of his neck, murmuring something about his scent that Harry couldn’t understand fully. “I would have done that if the lust commanded me,” he admitted. “But it’s the jealousy that gives me the ability to act like this, that made me able to break the bubble, and that lets me think about something other than fucking you.” He moved his hips forwards, and Harry felt his erection. He had to wonder how long Draco had been like that, and how long since it had started to hurt. “Not that fucking wouldn’t be nice.”

His eyes had started to cloud over again. Harry spoke quickly, reaching up so that he could clasp Draco’s neck in his hand. Draco arched towards him with the low, moaning, rumbling noise that Harry had heard him make a few times before. “The jealousy is stronger than the lust, you think?”

“I think so.” Draco smiled at him, his need plain in his face. Combined with the blood and the casual way he had destroyed or captured thirteen people, it was terrifying. “Harry, I’m ready to stop talking about this and start with you now.” His hand slid down Harry’s body and squeezed at his arse.

Harry caught his breath, gulped, and then shook his head. “I can’t let you do this, Draco,” he said. “The jealousy makes you rational, and we have to question these men and women while we have them.” He wouldn’t put it past whoever really controlled this group to either rescue them or make them commit suicide.

Then he took a good look at the prisoners and thought again. They all looked utterly stunned. Their heads lolled, and they kept their eyes, which shone with tears, away from the dead as if they had never seen death before. Harry remembered that he’d thought them self-confident. Maybe too self-confident, to the point that retribution had never caught up with them before.

“Harry,” Draco whined. “Please.”

Harry winced and took a risk. If he was right, then he could use the jealousy against the lust to make Draco pay attention to him. But if he was wrong, he might be condemning himself to pain and the prisoners to death. “Draco, I want you to be calm,” he said. “I might want someone else if you can’t be calm.”

Draco straightened and glared at him. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be cool as a glass of ice water. But you’re going to owe me for this.” His hand closed down, crushing Harry’s wrist.

Harry gave him a fragile smile and tried to step away so that he could find his wand. Draco let him get to the end of his arm and then restricted his movement with a faint smirk on his face, as if asking Harry why Harry had thought that he would manage to escape.

Harry bowed his head tamely, and let Draco lead him.

All the while, his brain raced, drawing conclusions and discarding them, trying to understand the new evidence of the curse this series of events provided them with, and trying to decide what he should do with it.

And trying not to think about the murders Draco had just committed.

Because of him.