lomonaaeren | Chapter Eighteen of "A Determined Frame of Mind"- Different Kinds of Strength

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Chapter Eighteen—Different Kinds of Strength

“This will be your last home.”

Harry blinked around the room Scrimgeour had shown him to. It was a bit larger than a closet, and it was a corridor away from Scrimgeour’s office—a corridor that Harry had never suspected was there. Since the Ministry was underground, it was easier than it should have been to keep rooms tucked out of sight and confused among the walls and doors.

The room itself had no features. The walls and ceiling were bare stone. The floor had a few rugs on it, less to provide color than to provide the minimum amount of protection necessary from the cold, Harry thought. When the door shut, there would be space beneath it for air to flow, but otherwise nothing could pass in or out.

“This is the place you will die,” Scrimgeour said, with a confidence in his voice that Harry could have wished to echo. “Very sad and very sorry about it, of course—“

Harry concealed a snort. He could not imagine someone less likely to be sorry about his passing than the Minister.

“—but that is the way things have to work out.” For a moment, Scrimgeour hesitated, as if he imagined that Harry would walk into the room on his own. Harry couldn’t imagine something he wanted less. He stood where he was, and wasn’t surprised when Scrimgeour shoved him, on whatever place in his back the Blasting Curse had hit.

Harry went down in silence, luckily catching his head on a rug instead of the stone. He stretched out a hand to hold his balance, and it slid on an imperfection in the floor and opened a shallow cut across his palm. He cradled it to his chest as he sat up, folded his legs beneath him, and turned around to face Scrimgeour.

The Minister held such hatred in his eyes that Harry wondered he could contain it all without screaming. He hadn’t harbored half that level of hatred when he was still trying to figure out who had cast the Cassandra Curse on him, before he had made plans to flee to the Muggle world on his own and met Draco.

Draco.

Harry told himself, brutally, that the pain welling up in the middle of his chest meant nothing, rather like the chance that he’d had at another life and a different kind of love meant nothing. He hadn’t fought hard enough to retain them, becoming confident and complacent—or he’d dragged Draco into his life where he had no right, because he had known how dangerous it would be. Either way, he didn’t have the right to complain now.

He had been here before. He recognized every breath he drew, every moment of the black smoke creeping through his head. This was the same apathy that had confined him in the moment when he conjured the iron jaws and ordered them to bite through his wrists. He didn’t care if he lived or died.

He cared that Draco was out of danger. He cared that he would never get to reconcile with his friends. But those were pale and fluttering imitations of emotions. What did they matter? Even if he cared about them more, his survival wouldn’t make any difference. Draco had no reason to seek him out. He might encounter people who would tell him that he had associated with Harry Potter for the last few weeks, but without the love they had shared, without the memories of what he’d seen in Harry’s soul, what should inspire him to go searching for the truth? He would probably shudder at his own madness and decide that he was well-rid of Harry Potter.

Draco wouldn’t want me to think like that.

But the Draco I knew is dead.

Something spun and clattered to a stop next to him. Harry opened his eyes, wondering what it was; he couldn’t believe that Scrimgeour would have thrown him his wand.

He understood when he made out the gleam of a serrated knife next to him, easily sharp enough for him to cut his wrists open.

“I think you know what this means,” Scrimgeour said softly, holding his eyes, “without my having to explain it to you.”

Harry gave a tiny nod. There were spells that, with a bit of work and patience, could tell how someone else had died if there was a question. They could not read the minds of the dead or reveal the motives of a killer, but they were sufficient to distinguish between murder and suicide. Scrimgeour wanted him to kill himself so that there would be no chance of his being linked to Harry’s death.

He’s not stupid enough to let his political career, which he did all this for, be threatened just because he’d like to slit my throat with his own hands, Harry thought, staring steadily into the yellow eyes that he had looked into for years and never suspected anything from.

Scrimgeour crouched down in front of him and spoke with quiet intensity. Had he only watched the scene from a distance, Harry thought, then he might have believed the Minister to be offering advice or encouragement to a new Auror recruit.

But no recruit had ever heard such words hiss past their ears, words that were meant to kill their souls.

“I am going to bring your friends to visit you in a short time, Potter. We’ll tell them, of course, that we caught you roaming about and are sheltering you until we can persuade St. Mungo’s to accept a dangerous, runaway patient back. They’re still under the influence of the curse. In fact, the only people who aren’t have no reason to care about you. Can you imagine the way Weasley and Granger will react? What they will say, how they will mourn the death of their friend? I should think their mourning when you commit suicide will be tinged with relief. Who wouldn’t rather see you dead than deal with the monster you have become?”

Harry closed his eyes and opened them again. His hand rose to touch the mark on the back of his neck, the one he had understood demonstrated Draco’s love and possessiveness; that was the only reason he had allowed Draco to bite him at all.

His fingers brushed over it. It was still there.

His hand then lowered into his lap and clenched into a fist. Scrimgeour had been watching it, perhaps because he thought Harry had a second wand hidden in his hair, but he relaxed and smiled when Harry took it out again. Harry thought, clinically, that it was quite the most hateful smile he had ever seen.

“Rest,” the Minister murmured. “Your friends will come to see you soon. Of course, if you want to solve our mutual problem before then, I would not object, and I believe it would be the best thing for you, as well.” He nodded slightly, then rose to his feet and turned towards the door.

Harry lay back on the rugs and shut his eyes, not listening to the door slam. He could feel the immediate tingle of wards surrounding the room. He didn’t think they were less powerful than the wards that covered Scrimgeour’s office, which Draco had described to him and which he’d seen for himself every time he went to receive an assignment from the Minister.

He knew a struggle was coming—the most severe struggle since his first days under the Cassandra Curse, when he had believed there might still be a way out. Then, he had trained himself to accept that nothing conventional would work and he needed a plan his remorseless magical enemy could not counter.

Now, he had to convince himself, against the deep, attractive pull of the apathy that he wanted to give into, to survive, and find a plan that Scrimgeour could not take apart before it began.

He locked his hands behind his head, and let his fingers brush Draco’s bite mark once again.

*

Draco scowled. The problem had long since passed his definition of “strange” and gone straight into “highly inconvenient.”

“Batty!” he shouted.

Still she did not appear, and neither did any other house-elf who could tell him that she was sick with one of the strange illnesses that sometimes required house-elves not to use magic. Draco narrowed his eyes and rose from the dining room table, stalking towards the kitchens. He had still eaten an excellent breakfast, but Batty was the only elf he owned who could get his toast a perfect light brown and who really knew how to poach eggs. He would have her attending at the table again, or he would have a good excuse. At this point, she had better be dead.

He opened the door to the kitchens, and paused. His house-elves were cowering in the corners of the large room holding their ears, the way they did when they knew they would be ordered to punish themselves in a moment. But his swift glance revealed no Batty holding her ears, no Batty on a pallet of rags, and no corpse. The house-elves usually held off on attending to the corpses of their own kind until ordered, or they might be accused of helping the dead ones escape their masters’ control.

“Where is Batty?” Draco snapped. He focused on another house-elf who usually spent most of his time cleaning the abandoned wings of the Manor. “Perry. Where is she?”

“Begging Master Malfoy’s pardon,” the elf whispered, and then knocked his head several times against the wall. Draco narrowed his eyes further. That gesture wasn’t usual unless an elf had to give a master bad news it knew he would dislike. Perhaps Batty was sick after all, or had died in a place other than the kitchen. “But Master Draco gave her c-clothes and ordered her off the property.”

Draco stared. He had encountered other signs that something was not right: the fact that he had quit his employment at St. Mungo’s to become a private Psyche-Diver (though the Healer he had corresponded with had hinted they would be glad to have him back); the open and clean wing of the Manor with a bedroom filled with resized clothes; and the lost weeks, not merely days or hours, of time. Something drastic had happened, that was certain. Draco half-wondered now if he had Obliviated himself to avoid the memory of a disastrous love affair, after discovering that he found it hard to sleep because he missed the warmth and weight of another body beside him.

But he could not imagine any combination of those circumstances, or any others, really, which would have led up to his freeing Batty.

“Why did I do that?” he demanded. Perry hesitated, and he added, “Pretend that I don’t know anything.”

Perry swallowed nervously. “M-Master Malfoy s-said that she should go for th-threatening Harry Potter.”

Draco reeled backwards and barely caught himself on the wall. No memories had returned to him, but he understood suddenly why he might have wanted a Memory Charm performed on himself. The Daily Prophet articles from the last year claimed that Potter had turned into an impossible bastard, an all-around git and pathological liar whom Draco might find fascinating to watch from a distance but would never wish to associate with.

And now to find out that he might have taken Potter as a lover, and then lost him instead of telling him to vanish…

It was too much. The signs of what he had wanted to Obliviate were clear enough: his own errors of judgment, his own infatuation—it could be nothing else—which would have him freeing Batty and valuing Harry Potter’s life, and the final argument that must have resulted in tearful pleadings from him, because he knew that an obsession strong enough to make him send Batty away would not have been his own choice to end.

“Thank you, Perry,” he said quietly, still stunned, and then turned and walked out of the kitchen. He didn’t return to his breakfast. He needed to go to his own room and think about things in silence for a while.

*

“And here they are,” Scrimgeour’s voice said lightly. “Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. And here he is.” His tone altered to one of gentle concern. Harry, still sitting with his fingers touching the mark on the back of his neck, absently marveled at the way the bastard could act. He was a far more dangerous man than Harry had thought him—or would have been if he were less afraid of someone else stealing his power. He had already cast a light glamour that concealed the presence of the knife from Ron and Hermione. “I’m afraid St. Mungo’s still hasn’t agreed to accept him into their care again, even though we would of course arrange to put him in a locked ward. We have to keep him in this room because it’s the only one strongly warded enough to be impervious to his magic. I’m sorry for—“

“It’s all right, Minister,” Hermione said, and her voice was full of tears. She sounded worse than she had the last time Harry had seen her, in front of the iron gates of the Manor.

A life that is over now, a life that is done.

“We know that you’ve done all you could, and this isn’t your fault.” She crouched down in front of Harry. Her face looked weary beyond Harry’s ability to bear it. He turned his head away. Hermione made a little choking noise, and then Ron knelt next to her and put his arm around her shoulders.

I’ve lost all that, Harry thought, and made himself think it, acknowledge it, and accept it. He could never survive the onslaught of his own apathy if he didn’t. The impulse to commit suicide might rise up in him at a later date. He needed to conquer this, not shove it down as he had done when living with Draco. I will never have that again—not the comfort of a lover, not the comfort of these friends.

“I’m sure that you want to converse with him alone,” said Scrimgeour, in that same voice he’d used to apologize for the size and kind of room he was keeping Harry in, and then he stepped out and shut the door behind him. Once again, Harry felt the compulsive hiss of the wards. He grimaced. Scrimgeour had almost certainly visited St. Mungo’s to see the destruction that Harry had wrought to their suppressive wards with his wandless magic, and he would have strengthened the spells in response. Harry couldn’t blast his way out of here.

Who said anything about blasting?

But Harry tucked the sudden kernel of a plan away, because Hermione was talking now, her words muffled, half-buried in Ron’s shoulder, and this was his test. Besides, this might be the last time he ever saw her, and he wanted to hear what she said, even if it hurt him.

“I just—I don’t understand this, Harry. What made you run? What made you go to Malfoy Manor, of all places? Were you just resentful that Malfoy couldn’t cure you? Did you want to taunt him, since you escaped on his watch? I have no friendly feelings for him, but what you did to him was cruel, if only because it humiliated his professional pride.”

You know nothing about cruelty, or about humiliation. But Harry bit his tongue and kept his words behind his teeth. He understood too much about how the Cassandra Curse worked now to find relief in speaking. And there was no Draco this time to remove the memory of any words he might speak for the easing of his heart.

There will never be any Draco again.

Harry breathed slowly, catching and absorbing that pain. It was right in the most important aspects, but wrong in one. The Draco Harry had known and loved would survive in his memories, even if he never saw the sunlight in any other place. For his sake, Harry was fighting to live. He had enjoined the company of the dead for thirteen months, when he couldn’t get anyone else. There was no shame in the fact that he would need to rely on a memory now.

“I want to understand, too,” Ron added, his voice full of confusion and frustration. “Don’t you think you’ve played the superior act long enough? You’re a good Auror. You’re better than I am. You didn’t even need a partner on most of the cases that you worked for the Ministry in the last year. If I admit that, will whatever pride made you decide to lie to us be appeased? Can you just—can you just stop being the prat that you turned into and start being our friend again?”

Alas, no, Harry thought, forcing himself to absorb those blows, too. The curse doesn’t work that way, and neither does our friendship. Even if I returned completely to normal, Ron, we wouldn’t return completely to normal. There are too many memories, too many wounds.

“Ginny has someone else, did you know that?” Ron said, evidently deciding coaxing wouldn’t work and he should strike with pain. “She had to find someone she wanted to love and marry when you abandoned her in the way you did.”

Harry just gazed back at him. The shallow cut on his palm tingled. The mark on the back of his neck was still sensitive when he touched his fingers to it, though he thought from his hunger that at least a day had passed since Scrimgeour had thrown him into the room.

Abruptly, Ron launched a punch at him.

Harry ducked his head so that he took it on his shoulder, instead of his face. He couldn’t afford to be blinded by blood, or have a broken nose, when he finally escaped. The pain in the middle of his back from Scrimgeour’s curse would be bad enough.

“Ron!” Hermione exclaimed shrilly.

“He’s just sitting there staring at us, Hermione.” Ron’s voice was flat and full of disgust. “I can’t—how can you stand that?”

“If he thinks he’s too good even to talk to us, then we ought to just leave,” said Hermione, and turned around to call to Scrimgeour.

Harry watched them go. Hermione glanced back, trying to catch his eye. He caught her glance but gave her nothing, and acknowledged that it affected him when she dissolved into tears again.

The problem was that he could not let it affect him to the point of stopping him.

When they were gone, he lay back, and closed his eyes, and reached down to the place where his demons lurked.

*

Draco had given strict instructions to his house-elves. They were to leave him alone in his study for at least an entire day. No matter what they heard, what amount of screaming or profanity, they were not to intrude before then. If they smelled the scent of blood, then they might enter, do as much as was necessary to save his life or stanch a wound, and then leave again.

He had thought he could ignore the mystery of what had happened during these weeks he apparently spent with Harry Potter, because the truth would only humiliate him. But two letters had come today that made that impossible.

One was from St. Mungo’s. Healer Mugwort, whom Draco had worked under in the past, wanted him to know he would be welcome, and no one held his failure to cure Harry Potter’s madness against him. From the reports that had come in across the country as Potter randomly appeared, caused havoc, and vanished again, most of the hospital staff had concluded that this was not the kind of madness that was curable.

The second came from an Auror calling herself Lila Ambernight. She wanted to know what Draco intended to do about Potter and the Cassandra Curse. She had uncovered some information that distressed her, but which she believed was too sensitive to be trusted to letter, so she had requested an invitation to visit the Manor. Meeting in the room where he had convinced her of the truth, she said, would be fine.

Something more had happened than a few disastrous dates with Potter. And Draco was no longer entirely certain that he had Obliviated himself. At the very least, he would have left notes so that he could be reminded of what date it was and that he had left St. Mungo’s, to spare himself further shock and embarrassment.

He would have to Dive into himself, and do what he could to unlock the hold of the Memory Charm on his soul.

It was a risky procedure, and Draco had never cared enough in the past to work it on himself, except to recover the memory of the last night he had spent in Snape’s company. Severus had Charmed him so that Draco could honestly deny certain details of his escape to the Dark Lord or the Ministry, should he need to. But Draco, who detested decisions being made for him, had Dived under the veil of the magic so that he could learn what Severus wanted to hide.

He had thought, given the time and pain that cost him, that nothing behind a Memory Charm would ever be worth knowing again.

He doubted that now.

He closed his eyes, regulated his breathing, and then cast the incantation on himself, the way he used to do when he was developing Psyche-Diving. The room wavered around him, then separated, and he plunged through the darkness of his mind to emerge floating above the familiar landscape of his soul.

No. Not familiar.

In one corner of the looming mountains, fading in strength and brilliance but still present enough to make an impact, was a lovely blue-green arch, a color that Draco had never before seen in himself. It was rare even among his patients, because madness tended to destroy loveliness like that. The hunger it raised in him was new—

And not new. Draco knew absolutely he had felt it before, the same way he had become used to a body in bed with him during the last few weeks.

He simply could not place the context.

Draco gritted his teeth and began to swim. Something severe would have been required to change his soul. And someone else had reached into his mind and taken that experience away.

Draco knew he would never have agreed willingly to that. He would have that experience, whatever it had been, back.

*

Down and down and down.

Harry presented himself with all the things that had happened to him in the last few days as a series of simple propositions. All the while, he kept one hand on Draco’s mark and one hand on the knife Scrimgeour had left him.

Draco doesn’t remember what happened.

He has no reason to, since to him you’re only a despised enemy he hasn’t crossed paths with in years. He could notice inconsistencies out of place, but what are the chances that he would care enough to pursue them? He’ll probably write this off as an embarrassing experiment gone awry and beg anyone who knows something about it to never mention it again.

His grip tightened on the knife.

Ron and Hermione don’t believe you, and don’t believe in you. Ron was willing to strike you. Neither one of them protested to Scrimgeour about these accommodations. The grip of the curse on them is stronger than ever. Even if it was gone, imagine all the work you’d have to do to rebuild that friendship from the ground up!

Ginny has someone else. That anchor into your old life is gone.

The scars on his wrists seemed to tremble, calling out for the knife.

What happened, happened.

But that does not mean I need to die.

His breath quickened, straining against the bonds of his own desire for an ending. If he were dead, he wouldn’t have to worry about anything else ever again. And Scrimgeour was right: in one stroke, he would end the danger he presented to anyone else. If Draco did remember, the Minister would turn on him in hatred again, and this time he might kill Draco and face the possibility that his disappearance would raise more questions than Harry’s suicide.

He would cause Draco pain by dying, but not as much as he would by staying alive.

But if I were gone…

If I were vanished into the Muggle world, then Scrimgeour would immediately have fewer resources to hunt me with, and less reason to try, since I would have cut myself off from the means to climb to political power. Ron and Hermione are likely to give up on me, the way they would have last time. And Draco—

Would he still be in danger?

Harry sighed in exasperation. His fingers curled into the marks of Draco’s teeth once again.

The problem is that that’s a question I can’t answer. Even if I killed myself the way Scrimgeour wanted me to, he might still be in danger; that’s how paranoid Scrimgeour is. If I let myself be locked up in St. Mungo’s, the same thing would happen. I can’t protect him from the Muggle world, but I can’t protect him if I somehow get out of this and become a fugitive in the wizarding world, either. His standing, his skills, his wards, his house-elves—I’ll have to trust to his own strength to guard him, the way he said he would trust to my strength to keep me alive in a hopeless situation until he could come for me.

But he won’t come for me now, will he?

Once again, his fingers strayed out to play with the serrated edge of the knife. So simple. So quick. One cut, and he would place himself beyond considerations like this. So easy.

And then the impulse to laugh surged up in him.

Since when have I ever accepted the easy road?

And Harry felt himself turn the corner. For the first time, strength began to shine in him, a golden glowing kind of warmth that he knew he had never felt before his time with Draco, a warmth that Draco had given him. Harry began to breathe more steadily, and his head slowly lifted from the floor.

Scrimgeour can’t destroy what happened for me. The memory is gone now from the only other mind that ever shared it, but—his fingers brushed over Draco’s mark again—I know it was there. Scrimgeour can kill it, but he can’t change the past so that it never existed.

And for me, this is still real. The Draco who marked me is still here. The promise I made to him, not to hurt myself in a hopeless situation, still holds. Scrimgeour can’t make me kill my memory.

And there’s a solution you still haven’t considered. Escape, neutralize Scrimgeour so you know he can’t hurt Draco, and then vanish into the Muggle world as needed. You still won’t be happy, but you’ll put distance between yourself and those who could be hurt, and you have the memory of happiness, arriving later than you had any right to expect it would come.

Harry opened his eyes slowly. Dim as the light in the room was, about the same amount of illumination as a Lumos charm, it seemed as bright as the sun to him.

He knew he would live.

He placed the knife beside him, so that he could fool Scrimgeour into thinking he was still considering suicide if he needed to, but it was no longer a temptation.

Now he had to put that part of his plan that constituted escape into motion, so that he could neutralize Scrimgeour and vanish.

And a thought he’d had when Ron and Hermione were visiting returned to him.

Who said anything about blasting?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

hpstrangelove.livejournal.com

I've been doing nothing but hitting refresh since your reply that you were working on this! Off to read now....

From:

amberwitch.livejournal.com

Great chapter!
Harry is so self sacrificing, and Draco so determined and logical. The end of last chapter was so horrible for Harry and Draco, this chapter is more hopeful in a realistic way.

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Chapter Eighteen of "A Determined Frame of Mind"- Different Kinds of Strength

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