[one-shots]: This Worship of an Extinct Fire, H/D, R, 2/3

[lomonaaeren]

"I trust you slept well, Mr. Dane?"

Draco kept his eyes down and picked at his food, allowing only a soft grunt to escape his throat. He counted internally, using heartbeats to time. When he pushed his plate away and stared at the table, it only took twenty-five before Linwood stood up and sighed at him. Draco looked up. Linwood hadn't done it out of real concern for his guest, of course, but because he couldn't stand to have that guest's attention anywhere than on him.

"Tell me," Linwood said, and smiled at Draco with the winning manner of a Mind-Healer. Draco thought, with a real but mental sigh, that he would have made a good Unspeakable liaison to the public, able to present the results of dangerous experiments as though the public had approved them.

"I did," Draco admitted. "But I found myself dreaming of what I could do with that magic, and especially with the one who--" He shut his mouth, and blushed (he had spent a month learning to blush on command) and hastily pushed back from the table and turned towards his room. "Good morning," he added over his shoulder.

Linwood came and stood in front of him. "Harry Potter?" he whispered. "The trouble in your heart concerns Harry Potter?"

Lowering his eyes so Linwood wouldn't see what Draco thought of him saying "heart" that way, Draco hesitated, then nodded. "I knew him," he whispered. "Well, I mean. I say knew him. I saw him. And I learned all about him when he first defeated You-Know-Who, of course. And I always felt that we shared a special connection, you know? If that makes sense?"

He glanced up bashfully, and found Linwood smiling at him, one hand held out as though he wanted to take Draco's and shake it.

"I know exactly what you mean, Mr. Dane," he said warmly. "I share the same connection with Mr. Potter, and it's so rare to find someone else who understands that. Won't you come with me and have your formal introduction to him? A rather more intimate one than you received the other day," he added, when Draco hesitated.

"Could I? Really?" Draco swallowed and took Linwood's hand.

Meanwhile, his mind raced, trying to decide if this offer was genuine. If Linwood was really that obsessed with Potter and wanted to keep the pleasure of conquering such a powerful wizard to himself, then Draco thought it was strange he would offer to share.

But he saw the way Linwood turned his head to the side, as though trying to conceal the smile that kept threatening to break free, and the way he ran ahead of Draco down the stairs at one point, and Draco understood. He was tired of being alone in his conquest, not allowing his students near enough Potter to understand what he had done. He wanted to brag, to show off, and be sure that he had a sympathetic audience.

Draco kept a small smile fixed on his face, and followed. Although he could dream of grinding Thomas Linwood's bones to dust, he wasn't in the position to effect that--yet.

*

Potter's face was even more pathetic to Draco now than it had looked yesterday, when he hadn't yet seen it alive with remembered fire. He wondered if that fire was gone out now, if he would never see it again, since Potter had effectively locked him out of his mind.

No. I won't accept that.

It was too late now, he had already decided, for him to retain a distant position from Potter. He would have to use his anger as his weapon, and as they came near now, he gulped and took his wand from his pocket.

"I heard once that Potter has a special connection to wands," he whispered to Linwood. "Because of the Elder Wand he used to defeat You-Know-Who." He had thought of mentioning Draco Malfoy's hawthorn wand, but there was no reason to get Linwood thinking in the right direction. "Would you mind--if I just touched my wand to his cheek, a little bit, just for a minute? Since that might--bless it."

He knew he was blushing, and Linwood did stare. But his smile broadened a moment later, and he nodded.

"I never thought of that before, the connection Potter has with wands," he said, watching with interest as Draco drew his wand and dropped to his knees beside Potter. "Perhaps I'll try it later."

Draco smiled vaguely over his shoulder in Linwood's direction, the way Dane would. He could guarantee that Linwood's wand wouldn't have the same effect on Potter that Draco's would, unless Linwood had also cast a spell that stored the ambient magic in his wand's core and planned on transferring that back to Potter.

Draco brushed his wand up and down Potter's cheek, hesitated, then pressed in closer as if his courage was growing. He murmured nonsense words into Potter's ear, not taking the chance that Linwood had wards that could make out anything he said. He had only managed as well as he did last night because the encounter was completely immaterial. If Linwood knew part of Potter still lingered, sane, he would have long since forced it to worship him.

The core of Draco's wand was swollen with the magic, and Draco only needed to concentrate a little to release it. It rushed back into Potter's skin, and Draco thought for a second he could make it out, sinking into Potter's body, straight down to the depleted magical core.

Of course, when it went there, it would become vulnerable to being drained by the chain and put into the pillar again. But Draco hoped the gesture was enough to make Potter begin to trust him, to realize that he had Potter's best interests at heart.

In the meantime, he had to make Linwood trust him, and he did it by closing his eyes, clutching at the wand, and then gasping aloud and starting back, his hand over his mouth as he looked down at Potter.

"What is it?" Linwood demanded, crowding up to him. "What is it?" Draco thought he might have tried to grab Draco's wand himself, but he contented himself with a single, burning look back and forth from Draco to the wand.

"The blessing," Draco whispered, and let his voice shake as much as it wanted, although Linwood wouldn't know the cause of that trembling was being so close to the man he had been sure was dead. "I felt it. It went up my arm. Like lightning. Like roses." He turned and gaped at Linwood. "Like magic."

It was nonsense, but it was the sort of nonsense that Linwood would expect from a man like Dane, and his nostrils tightened and flared, his head lifting as though someone was pushing on his neck. "You felt it?"

Draco nodded. He was walking such a thin line, because there was the chance that Linwood would want to destroy a successful rival for Potter's magic, but it was the plan he had come up with, and the one he would play through to the end.

Linwood knelt down in front of Potter, his hands trembling. For a moment, Draco thought he would shake him or slap him, anything to get him awake. But he glanced at the chain and the glowing golden pillar, and seemed to decide that it would be useless.

"I want you to tell me everything you remember," he whispered. "Everything, from the moment he knelt down beside you."

Draco opened his mouth, then closed it again. From the pronouns, Linwood wasn't talking to him. He was still talking to Potter, softly pouring words into his ears, and Draco moved back a step. He would have liked to listen, but he had to yield to Dane's discomfort with the moment.

Besides, thinking back on it, he wasn't sure that he did want to hear. Linwood seemed to know part of Potter remained alive and sane enough to listen to him, even if it was buried, but he wanted to coax it back to the surface simply so it would respond to him.

Does he even think of what he's doing to Potter is torture?

There might be a good chance he didn't. And Draco laid the fact down in his mind, along with so many others, so many marks next to Linwood's name, and memories of the way he had seen Potter last night, so that he could use it to help him make a decision about what to do in the future.

Linwood stood up finally, and frowned down at Potter. Draco coughed diffidently and ventured, "You look as though you were upset with him. I'm sorry, did I do something wrong?"

"Not you," Linwood said. "I thought--I thought he understood his place here, that it's his duty to put all his strength and magic into the pillar. That he has enough left to respond to someone else, a new student..." He whirled away from the pillar and strode rapidly towards the stairs that had brought them down.

Draco stared after him for a long time before he followed, understandable for a man of Dane's cautious temperament. Was Linwood insane? Did he think that Potter would really thank him for Linwood's treatment of him if he woke up and had to confront it?

No, Draco decided at last. Linwood had simply thought Potter broken, not able to respond to anything at all, and that had made it acceptable for Potter not to react. If he could, then Linwood wanted the response all to himself.

If he realizes that Potter isn't completely broken...

Then he could become dangerous. Or, at least, more dangerous than he already was, as a man who had thought up the process that converted wizards into pure magic and could use the ambient magic that was drifting around in the background of the "school."

Draco walked after him anyway. He had a part to play, suspicions to encourage and discourage, and he could do nothing better for Potter than to keep playing the role he had chosen for himself.

*

It didn't take as much time to release himself from his body that night. Draco suspected that the ambient magic in the air was helping, just like it had helped Linwood Transfigure his body into different shapes. He floated between the wards and dodged and dipped down to the cavern and the golden pillar.

Something seemed different about it from last night, and Draco paused to study it. He could make out the ripples of light that it cast on the floor, and the intense glow, like phoenix fire, all the same as it had been...

No. A moment later, Draco knew his eyes would have narrowed if he was in his physical body. The shine of the pillar, the color, had reminded him of piled golden coins the first time he had seen it. There hadn't been a trace of the blue and orange and white that made it resemble phoenix fire before. No other colors dancing up and down in the crystal.

Draco swallowed, and forced himself to reach back into his memories of that afternoon, the way the pillar had looked when he came down here with Linwood. If Linwood was to notice something different about it, that was probably the end of Potter's life. Or Draco's, if he connected the way the pillar looked to the "blessing" that Draco had taken from Potter. Draco could accept the second risk, but not the first.

No, he remembered at last. The pillar had still seemed golden that afternoon, without a ripple or a wisp of any other color. He nodded shortly. It must appear that way only in this special kind of sight, seen more through the eyes of magic than physically.

He landed on the stone in front of Potter, or so it seemed, shaking so badly that he nearly lost control of the delicate state needed to hold himself here. Then he reached out towards Potter.

This time, he slid beneath the surface of that misty face. He was in a different landscape, one with more green grass and a lake--a lot like Hogwarts if you took away the castle and the forest. He folded his arms and waited.

"How did you do that?"

Draco started and turned. It seemed he wasn't going to sense Potter coming, here in the landscape of his mind, if Potter didn't want him to. He was watching Draco with brilliant eyes, and smiled a little when he realized he had his attention.

"Give me the magic," Potter clarified. "I feel a lot better than I did, but I don't know how you did it." His eyes shifted to the color of the grass under their feet. It was like watching pieces of glass float into place. "And you did it without kissing me, either. You told me that you had to do that, but you found a way around it."

Draco rolled his eyes. "I told you that was the most effective way to do it, and that's still the truth. I was able to store some magic in my wand core and bring it to you that way. It helped. It's not as much as I could have brought you if I could have stored it in my body. That's all."

Maybe this was a good thing, he thought, that Potter was back to his irritating self. That meant Draco might be able to pull back from his obsession with him, as well as rescue him sooner.

Potter stared at him in silence, then said, "But you saw what Linwood likes to do to me. How can you ask--" He broke off, with a faint sound that Draco didn't recognize at first. A moment later, he realized it was Potter's teeth grinding.

That meant he had recovered enough strength to add sounds and extraneous physical details to his mindscape. He wasn't imagining just the country around him, but more detail to his body, things he didn't need.

Draco smiled. He couldn't help himself. Potter seemed to shrink in size, but a moment later he shook his head and walked towards Draco, casting a bigger shadow on the green grass as he came.

Draco remained passive, and watched him approach, finding more and more signs. Potter's remembered Auror robes were neater, more polished, more done-up. He had neat hair, too, smoothed back and tangled only around his ears. Draco smiled more widely. That had to be a wish instead of a desire. Potter's hair had never looked that neat.

Potter grabbed his hands. "You're touching me now," he hissed. "Why can't you transfer magic to me like this?"

"A touch of my hands to yours would work," Draco said. "Not as well as a touch some other places, because your hands are almost completely transparent now. But that would work. It doesn't have to be a kiss."

Potter blinked, but repeated, "What's wrong with now? Why can't you transfer magic to me now, right here, if you're so determined to do it?"

"Because," Draco told him quietly, "this isn't my real body, only a compound of magic. If I tried to give any to you, it would be my power and not yours that you absorbed, and alien magic doesn't stay easily in the body. That's why Linwood has to store it in the pillars or keep it floating in the air most of the time, instead of just taking it into himself. And that's why I would have to bring it to you as soon as possible after I started taking it in. Otherwise, it'll become just as useless for me as it would be for him."

Potter blinked. Then he turned away and dropped Draco's hands. Draco licked his lips and told himself he was battling to win a real touch here, that he could be disappointed later about how much Potter walked away from him.

"You've become so clever, so Unspeakable," Potter said over his shoulder. "You're not like you used to be."

"Neither are you," Draco pointed out. "And I think that both of us have changed in a way that would allow us to escape--if you would cooperate with me instead of continually looking for a way out of this."

Potter folded his arms. "I'm not supposed to look for a way out?"

Draco shook his head. "One way I haven't changed is that I still have trouble saying what I mean, at least when it comes to you," he muttered. "I meant that you need my help, and I want to help you, and there's no way for you to escape this without me, but you're still balking and resisting and acting as though you should have your own personal rescuer sent from fate, someone you like better."

Potter closed his eyes. "You have no idea what I want, or what I went through in the three months before Linwood bought me, let alone after that."

"I might know if you told me," Draco suggested quietly.

Potter opened his eyes and stared at him. "Really? You think--you think you would be the perfect confessor for me? The perfect friend, along with rescuer?" He was sneering at Draco now. "You think I could trust you that much?"

"Maybe not," Draco said. "But if you want to talk to someone, then the offer is there." He leaned back against one of the trees that had started springing up in the mindscape and admired the color of Potter's eyes again.

Potter stared at him, then shut his eyes. "You have no idea what it's like," he whispered. "Giving up hope was peaceful. When I knew there was no way I could survive, I at least knew that I wouldn't have to exhaust myself fighting anymore. And now you show up and tell me that it's not over, that I'll always have to fight and I'll never have the kind of peace I was dreaming of..."

"I can't promise you peace one way or the other," Draco said. "I can promise you a chance at freedom. A chance to take a risk, the way you always did at Hogwarts."

Potter smiled. It was the most desperate smile Draco had ever seen. And still he didn't open his eyes. "I might die."

"Then you'll die fighting, and not drained of your magic the way Linwood wants to make you," Draco said. "Imagine. No one really understands all the implications of Linwood's process. What if you pass into magic that can feel itself being used? What if you know that you're giving power to Linwood as he does--whatever his ultimate goal is with it?" At the moment, it seemed to him that Linwood had few goals beyond storing more magic. "Would you want that?"

"Wow," Potter said, opening his eyes so wide that Draco thought he could see himself reflected in the backs of them. "Somehow you managed to make a horrible fate sound even worse. Well done!"

Draco reminded himself that he probably shouldn't bite Potter's head off, since he didn't know everything he had undergone, and simply inclined his head. "It's a talent of mine," he said.

Potter choked, then chuckled, then folded his arms and scowled--probably at himself, for doing either. "I don't want that to happen," he admitted slowly, finally seeming to take Draco's question seriously. "But I don't really know how to stop it, either. I mean, say that you do bring me magic. The pillar will drain it again. I don't see any way that you can undo the chain or stop that from happening."

Draco tilted his head. "I need more time to study the theory that Linwood's working with. He explained a lot to me in the letters, but not the way the chains and pillars work, or whether someone can turn into sentient magic, for that matter. I'm not even sure what's happened when he's come to the end of any of his--resources."

"Had someone just fade into mist, you mean?" Potter's face was the green thing now.

Draco nodded. "I know he has. He's been doing this for more than a year, and he was bragging to me about--how long you've lasted." He lowered his voice as he finished the sentence, only now thinking how that might sound to Potter. "Nine months, he said. If that's a long time, there are plenty of others he's drained completely by now."

"And if I leave here," Potter whispered, "what happens to the other people whose magic is draining out of them?"

Draco grimaced. He should have known better than to wake up those bloody hero instincts. "Come up with a way to rescue them all, and I'll be happy to go along with it," he said. "For now, I think we need to concentrate on rescuing you. If nothing else, your magic is the one thing giving Linwood most of his strength."

Potter slowly nodded. "How long do you estimate that it would take you to free me by bringing me magic in your wand core?"

"Days. Maybe months." Draco thought again about softening that, but Potter had survived hearing himself referred to as a resource for Linwood's mad plan. Draco thought he could survive this.

Potter took a slow, deep breath, eyes locked on the lake. It stirred and bubbled, and a silver fish came up and flopped around. Draco watched it. Who knew why it was there? Since this was Potter's mindscape, it might be an emblem of anything from the helplessness he felt to the food that he was missing.

"That's not acceptable," Potter said at last.

Draco held himself back from what he wanted to say. Potter had changed less than he'd reckoned, but Draco could be mature and rational. The Unspeakables had taught him to be, if in savage ways. "That's all I can manage. I'm one of the most sophisticated users of this technique in the wizarding world, one of the few who's studied it, but it's still difficult."

Potter braced himself as though Draco had tried to hit him. Draco surreptitiously checked his hands to make sure they hadn't moved from his sides. "I meant," Potter said, "that I can't accept the slowness. You should start bringing me magic in your lips and hands."

Draco felt as though a shimmer of lightning had come up through the ground and rooted him to the spot. He hoped he wasn't actively trembling. "I don't want to make this something that you can't bear," he said, and he didn't think there was anything in his Unspeakable training that made it unacceptable for his voice to be that gentle.

"I can bear it," Potter said, and jerked his head at something that Draco couldn't see, and apparently Potter couldn't, either, because the next instant he frowned. "Sorry. What I meant is--I have to get out of here. I have to do it before I convince myself this was all a dream and die of sheer despair. Or before Linwood finds out and does something to stop you. And I want to have the power to rescue the others, too."

Draco nodded. "Once you have your magic back, I don't think there's much you can't do."

The smile in Potter's eyes was a desert smile. "I don't know. The strength will take a while to return to my body, too, especially since most of it's fog right now."

"I'll study the pillars," Draco said. "And the chains, to find out how they transform your body like that. And I'll make sure that Linwood doesn't find out what's happening."

"That puts so much of the burden on you," Potter muttered, shaking his head. "How can I thank you enough for doing this? For taking all these risks for me?"

"You just did," Draco said, unthinking, then reminded himself of his past as an enemy of Potter's and his current job as Unspeakable when Potter's eyes widened. "I mean, I came here intending to possess the secret of how Linwood was doing this and deprive him of it, one way or another. This is the best way. This way, you get your power back, and you take it away from Linwood as well. If you cooperate with me, if you're sure you can, we can get this done a lot faster and I can accomplish my goal a lot faster."

"You're here undercover, right?" Potter seemed oblivious to the black cloak that had appeared draped over his shoulders, probably because of what his mind had associated with the word "undercover," and utterly oblivious to what the sight of him in that cloak did to Draco. "You would have to be, of course. It's not like Linwood would allow anyone he knew was an Unspeakable inside."

"If only for fear that we might steal his secret," Draco agreed. "Yes, I'm undercover. The way you were when you--vanished." It was taking another risk, but Potter had been able to talk about some of what was happening to him, and Draco violently wished to know more, how this had happened.

Potter set his jaw. "Yes. I was careless."

Draco blinked, as impressed that Potter could admit that as he was surprised by the admission. "What happened?"

Potter sighed and stared at the ground. "What happened once before when I was on a mission to infiltrate a group and not let anyone know what I was there for. They started torturing someone who couldn't fight back. The Head Auror had warned me that I might have to observe torture and not do anything to stop it, because that would endanger our chances of rescuing more people later. But I couldn't do that. I had to interfere." He looked up with a small smile. "But I rescued her, and sent her safely home before they took me."

"Safely home--you idiot, that was why some little girl showed up clutching your emergency Portkey and sobbing, and no one knew where you were," Draco said, and had to clench his teeth on his tongue, so he wouldn't continue at length with how horribly and stupidly Potter had behaved.

"You heard about that?" Potter shrugged before Draco could say anything. "Oh, right. Harry Potter. The news must have been all over the Ministry inside an hour."

Draco nodded. He was glad that Potter knew little enough about the Unspeakables' work to ask why all the details had lingered in Draco's memory instead of being immediately replaced by those of experiments that he was supposed to be thinking about. "But no one could figure out why you hadn't come with her. It would have been simple enough for both of you to use the Portkey."

Potter gave him that desert smile again. "They had hold of me by then. I threw the Portkey to her and activated it just before she touched it. She went free. I used her memory to keep myself whole during the next three months."

"What did they--"

"Everything," Potter said. "They did everything."

Draco had to glance away and swallow. "Oh," he said. "Except the magical torture that Linwood put you through, I reckon."

Potter nodded. "By the time they sold me to him, I thought there was nothing left that I couldn't endure. I thought he'd kill me." He waved another hand at the lake and the trees, that was probably meant more to indicate the cavern beyond his head. "Not this."

"What does it feel like?" Draco asked, less because he needed to know for his research than because the question was always there, waiting under the surface, and escaped before he could reconsider it.

Potter leaned forwards, his arms folding. He looked at the grass for a long time before he answered, his voice as flat as it was, as unnaturally flat as his hair.

"It feels like someone's hooked something to your soul. The way a Dementor's Kiss would, except it goes on and on. The chain's always there, even though most of me has gone so transparent and filmy that I can't feel anything anymore. So I can't feel pleasure or heat or cold or hunger, just pain. On and on."

Draco nodded. "We'll free you."

"And the others," said Potter, looking inflexibly at him now. Draco wondered what kind of person could so easily dismiss his own pain to focus on the pain of others. "I want them freed, too. Or I won't take the magic you bring me."

Draco grimaced. "Of course you won't. For right now, I don't know how I would do it, or whether the chains are all similar or operate on different principles. I do know your pillar is different from the others. It glows gold, not the colors that the others' do. That means that the method I come up with to free you might not work on them." In truth, all he wanted to do was take the chain off Potter's magical core, give him back the power Linwood had sucked out of him, and vanish as soon as possible with him. Fuck the others, fuck what he might be able to learn about Linwood and his methods if he stayed longer, fuck what the Unspeakables would think.

Potter only looked at him.

Yes, the flaw in his soul, what he can't surpass, is that desire to be a hero, Draco decided, with a shake of his head. And mine is him. "Fine. But like I said, I don't know whether I'll be able to or not."

"Try."

"I'll try."

For no reason, given that Draco had lied to him in the past and his experiences in the last year certainly wouldn't have let him trust anyone, Potter relaxed and smiled at him. "Thank you. You don't know--what it means to hear someone say that."

Draco cleared his throat. He had to, or he would reveal what it did to him to have Potter smiling at him that way. "I need you to tell me everything you can about the sensation of the chain, what you might have heard Linwood say about it before you started to lose your awareness of the world around you, what his students do, and anything else that you think might be important."

Potter nodded, and closed his eyes. His face was deep and serious, although Draco could see the lines of laughter around the corners of his eyes, too. He wondered how long it had been since Potter laughed.

And when would he have had the reason? If I'm going to insist that he should laugh, I have to at least prove to him that he has reason.

"Linwood welcomed me in with this excited little speech about how much I could help them learn about magic," Potter murmured. Draco thought he was hearing the relaxed, calm voice of an Auror who might have to testify to exact dates and times and words in a criminal case. "He told me that he might have made me one of the students, that it would be exciting to work with me that way, too, but my magic was so strong that there was no choice but to use me as a resource."

A shudder in his shoulders. Something clamped and clenched tight in Draco's stomach relaxed at that. It was possible--barely--that Potter might recover, if Linwood hadn't convinced him that his new reality was normal, if part of him still disliked and hated it.

"How did they know you were that strong?" Draco asked. "Reputation, or did the people who had you before tell him about it?"

Potter opened his eyes. "I didn't think to question that," he muttered. "Didn't they have a conversation--no, wait! He had some kind of crystal rod in the room where he talked to me. It glowed and vibrated whenever I thought about reaching for my wand. I couldn't do it, of course, with my hands tied behind my back, but I wanted to. And that rod kept changing colors. Sometimes yellow, sometimes red. I remember blue once. But mostly yellow."

The color that Potter's pillar turns, Draco thought. He had to find out what gold meant, besides powerful magic, in Linwood's private perception of the world. "What did the rod look like? A smaller version of the pillars?"

Potter shook his head. "Just a rod. I thought it was a stirring rod at first," he added, probably because Draco had glared at him and he understood that he needed to make his answers more helpful.

"Like this?" Draco asked, and concentrated, hard. He had never tried to do something like this before, because most of the time he didn't talk to someone when he was in this half-magical form, floating free of his body. But since everything here was a compound of memory and desire and imagination, including the body that Harry had carved out of his mind and the very landscape they stood in, Draco doubted this would be impossible.

The image of a stirring rod such as Draco had used a hundred thousand times snapped into being in the air between them, glowing white from the inside. Draco looked harder at it and imagined lines of delicate yellow running up and through the glass.

Potter gave him a grim smile. "Brighter on the yellow, but yeah."

Draco obediently made the yellow brighter. Now it was the golden color that the pillar behind Potter glowed, and Potter studied it critically and paced in a circle around it before he nodded. "That's it."

I have to find out what the color means. Draco marked that down as his next task, for certain, then asked quietly, "Did you notice whether the rod made any sounds when it changed colors? Humming, chiming, vibrating?"

"He was always talking," Potter muttered. "I could never hear anything else but his voice babbling on and on." When Draco looked at him in much the same way as he had looked at the image of the stirring rod, though, Potter sighed and put a hand on his forehead. "Let me think for a minute."

Potter stood with his eyes closed again. Draco watched the edges of his body. If he started flickering or disappearing, then Draco would concede that they had pushed the matter too far, and that it might be best for him to return to his body and for Harry to--

Return to his body? Draco actually wasn't sure that he was away from it. He was speaking with the sane Harry, the real one, as he thought of him, the one that Linwood would have given anything to reach and couldn't. Maybe Harry couldn't leave this part of his mind; he could only force Draco out if he became displeased with him, the way he had the other night.

Or die.

Draco examined that fact in his mind and then calmly laid it aside. It would not be permitted to happen, that was all. Other people might want it to happen, or Linwood might try to kill Harry. But Draco would save Harry.

At the moment, it was more important to get the facts Harry could remember than to worry about how.

His Unspeakable mentors would be horrified. Draco knew and accepted that. On the other hand, they had also told their trainees again and again that no one except the Unspeakable on the ground could know what was best to do when a mission turned out to be more complicated than expected. They had to make their decisions and do the best they could. Their mentors would give them the training to try and ensure those decisions would be good ones.

They couldn't hope for anything beyond that, not really.

Harry finally opened his eyes and said, "You know, I think there was a little chime. A subtle one, a sweet one. I assumed that Linwood had windchimes when he was questioning me, but we were in an enclosed room. Windchimes? Where?"

Draco stepped forwards, smiling, and took Harry's hands. He had become Harry in the last few minutes, as he had to, as Draco had been preparing himself for since last night. "Good. That means I have some idea about what spells he wove into the crystal, and that means that I have some idea about how to fight him.

"That's important," Draco added in a whisper. "That's so important. I only know a few spells that would make a noise like that, and not all of them could be used with crystal."

"But the pillars and the rod I told you about aren't made of crystal, are they?" Harry frowned at him. "I mean, they aren't literal crystal, like the kind that you might make a glass out of."

"They're close enough," Draco told him, quietly and truthfully. "There are some properties of crystal that are true all the time--magical properties, I mean. And your clue gave me a very important hint about what I should do next."

An important one, but a potentially suicidal one. Already Draco's mind was blurring through the possibilities, the facts and the cases he had researched that would have to be recalled, so he could create a weapon that would play the right tune. It would take more time than he might have, and more determination than he could usually summon, and more will than he had ever had up until this point.

But he had never been laboring to save his fatal flaw, the man who had been the cause of him almost being dismissed from the Unspeakables, the reason he had sat in an empty room staring at the wall for three days last year.

"How much time are you going to need?" Whether or not Harry knew anything about Draco's other limitations, he had picked up on that one.

"I'm going to make as much time as I need," Draco said calmly. "And in the meantime, I have something to do that may be more difficult than figuring out how to free you and the other prisoners. I have to convince Linwood to let me near you, to let me touch and kiss you."

Harry shuddered a little, then nodded. "Whatever you have to do."

"I'll be so gentle," Draco said. The words came out of him because he had no defense, not against that look in Harry's eyes. "You have no idea how gentle I can be, when I--"

"But I'm not your lover, or your friend, or your family," Harry said, and looked Draco in the eye. "If you choose to take a little revenge, I can't stop you. I will ask you to consider how much of a time limit we're under, though."

Draco winced. "I--wouldn't do that."

Harry considered him long enough that Draco feared he might have to return to his body so he could be there before the morning came and Linwood found him. Linwood might not know what he was doing now, or ever have heard of this particular method of using one's magic, but Draco didn't want him to find out, either. He was dangerous enough as it was.

"All right," Harry said, and smiled a little at him. "I reckon I can trust you that far."

Draco wanted to say that Harry should trust him further than that. He wanted to say that he would take Harry out of here in an instant if he could manage it, that he would break the chain the moment he was sure his plan would work, that Linwood would never touch Harry again because Draco would kill him before that could happen.

But how many times had Harry dreamed of rescue in the past few months? Especially here, where he lived in a place of dreams and his body became more and more inaccessible to him each day?

He wouldn't want to listen to Draco's protestations of devotion (obsession, call it what it is) or attempts to rekindle his hopes. He would want results.

Draco nodded. "Thank you," he said, and picked up Harry's hands, watching his face all the while. Harry only stood there, staring at him, so Draco continued with the gesture he hadn't dared use before and kissed Harry's hands. "I'll reward your trust in me. You won't regret it. Please don't regret it."

Harry blinked at him again, so rapidly that Draco was afraid for a moment he had strained credulity, and Harry would turn his back after all. Then he smiled, almost helplessly, and nodded. "I'll try," he whispered. "Thank you for--for trying."

Then he dropped Draco's hands and cleared his throat, as though he worried that someone else would see them and be embarrassed on their behalf.

But even that is more than what he had before, that hope that he might get back into normal society, with his friends, who would be embarrassed for him if they saw this.

By the time they had said goodbye and he'd returned to his body, Draco was alive with joy. Plans for the right way to crack the crystal whirled through his mind as he opened his eyes.

And, best of all, he had come up with a plan that would make Linwood let him near Harry.

*

"What's wrong, Eddison? You look inattentive."

Draco started and jerked his eyes away from the walls of Linwood's study, where he had let them wander for the fifth time this morning. It was a useful way to make out the titles of the books, and see what tomes he might have studied and which ones he didn't have. "Nothing," he muttered, and lowered his head.

Something that wasn't a hand touched his cheek. Draco jerked his head up, shuddering a little, and realized that Linwood wore claws on the ends of his fingers and a smile that showed more teeth than could fit in a mouth. Well, a human mouth, anyway.

"What is it?" Linwood whispered, even as Harry's magic slid away from him again and left him human. "Tell me."

Draco took a deep breath. He had to use real emotions and lying words, braiding them together until they made a rope that Linwood couldn't break free from.

Make it good.

"I don't--I'm so miserable," he whispered. "I know that you mean it for the best in everything you do, but you're making me miserable, telling me about the magic that you get from Potter and emphasizing that you're the only one who can touch him."

Linwood turned his head a little to the side, the way Draco had anticipated he would. The quiet intensity in his eyes was more than Draco had hoped for this soon, though. "Explain what you mean," Linwood told him.

"I want to touch him," Draco said, and lowered his head into his hands. Right now, he was speaking pure truth. He wondered if there was some way Linwood could tell, if he was going to laugh in a second and tell Draco that he'd been caught out after all, and he would be destroyed now. But Draco didn't think so. "I want to stroke his face, kiss him, caress him. I want to--I want to do things that I know aren't even possible right now, because you've changed him so much that he wouldn't feel it if I tried to touch him. But that's the way it is."

"Why do you think that your ambition is hopeless?" Linwood's voice was very quiet. He sat with his arms looped around his knees, folded on top of them, in utter silence and stillness and attentiveness, when Draco looked again.

"Because you're the only one who can touch him." Draco sighed shakily and spread his hands. "Do you think I don't know that? Of course I know it. You're the one who bought him and brought him here, the one who probably hauled him out of whatever pit he was living in before. I know all that. I have to give up what I want for the greater good of learning what you have to teach me and leaving him with someone who can appreciate him the way he should be appreciated."

He paused for a second, then dropped his head back into his hands and shuddered. "But my desire still torments me, and I haven't learned the right way to discipline it yet."

There was a long silence, long enough that Draco thought he would have to begin the act over again, or later. And then Linwood leaned forwards and rested his hand on Draco's shoulder.

The contact was like Harry's in one way only: the intensity of it. Draco shivered and stared into Linwood's face through the eyes of his disguise.

"One should never suppress one's desires unless there is an excellent reason for it," Linwood said quietly. "I don't think this counts as an excellent reason."

Draco had to swallow several times, although not for the reasons Linwood thought. It's working. Then he shook his head a little and said, "But don't you have to give desires up when they come into conflict with reality? I know he's yours. There's no doubt of that."

The way Linwood's jaw tightened and he gave a little turn of his head told Draco that the bolt had gone home and his plan was working out as he had wanted it to. Linwood enjoyed the exclusive possession of Potter, yes, but he would enjoy it even more if he could show if off to an audience while having it remain exclusive. Someone who humbly acknowledged his absolute superiority of control over Potter was the best candidate.

"My desires were to be more powerful than anyone else, to have enough magic to Transfigure my body at a moment's notice," Linwood said. "I didn't give it up when certain people told me it was impossible, including people at the Ministry. You have to know how to keep going, Eddison, not collapse at the first hurdle."

Draco turned his head downwards and fluttered his eyelashes in Dane's trademark hesitation again. "Yes, but you're so ambitious," he muttered. "You're so much more determined than I'll ever be. I can't do the same thing."

By now, Linwood had risen to his feet and was standing with his hands on Draco's shoulders, beaming down into his face. "You're wrong," he said, calmly enough. "I teach people here. How to master the process of turning resources into magic, yes, but also how to be determined."

Draco trembled again. This was working. He would get there, he would achieve what he had come for, but at the moment, he was dazzled by the visions that unreeled around them, as dazzled as ever Eddison Dane could be by the chance to touch Harry Potter. "You--mean it? You won't change your mind in the middle of the experiment?"

Linwood shook his head. "None of my students see him the same way I do," he whispered, leaning his forehead against Draco's as though he could get inside his mind that way. "They see him as a great resource, but no more. When I tell them he was once a great man in the outside world, they stare at me and ask why that matters, since what is most important is what he is here." Linwood sighed. "I taught them to be that way, so I can't complain when they aim for it. But it is discouraging, and ultimately, distracting. I want to share my love of Potter before he vanishes into literal mist. I didn't think someone would come along who could share it."

Draco ducked his head before the weight of emotion in Linwood's eyes. There was suspicion among that emotion. Of course there was. Draco had managed to tap into one of Linwood's desires, and Draco had seen how he treated those people who fulfilled his desires.

But Linwood was going to allow him the chance anyway, Draco knew. Even as his paranoid mind rattled and lashed like a scorpion's tail, some more rational part of him asked how Draco could have known that he wanted someone to show Potter off to? And so he let him go ahead with it.

For that reason, and because his desire is stronger than his reason.

Draco promised himself that he would not tumble into the same trap.

*

"Even kiss him?"

"Even that."

Shaking again, a shaking that was as real as anything else he had done since he came into the school, Draco knelt before Harry again. He reached out and cupped his cheek, and felt nothing there but slightly warm mist. His lips were still visible, though, and more solid than the rest of him. The change to magic had affected ordinary skin first and most of all, Linwood explained. The eyes, the hair, and places like the mouth and the insides of the ears went later, as the magic learned to transform them.

That had given Draco ideas about the chain and the way that he could stop the magic he fed Potter from simply being drained into the pillar.

But he couldn't think about that. Right now, all he could think about were the great, drowning, blazing green eyes in front of him, and the liquid lips that parted a little in advance of his tongue, as though Harry knew where he was.

If he has that much awareness, I would do anything I could to grant him more.

Draco lapped out with his tongue, stuck it deep, and caught a touch of warmth that wasn't his own before he released the ambient magic that he had collected on his walk down the stairs. He gasped as he did, his hands clenching tight on the airy patches where Harry's arms hung. He didn't think Linwood had noticed anything; he was standing by with his fingers folded into his palms and his own eyes very bright.

The warmth grew deeper around Draco, for a single moment. Then he had to withdraw his tongue and his hands. Desire panted and sang deep inside him, and Draco understood, for a moment that went through him like splinters of crystal, how Linwood could chain someone like Harry to keep all to himself.

I must not yield to that.

Draco had come alive through the tests that gave him admission to the Unspeakables. He had been able to back away and leave Harry to his dreamscape despite speaking to him, touching him, the way he had always imagined. He stood up now and looked at Linwood with a face that he knew he didn't need to make glowing.

"Thank you," he said. "It was--" And then his voice broke, and he looked away, which he hadn't planned, but Linwood reacted as though he had. He stepped forwards with his hands extended. A moment later they came to rest on Draco's arms. Draco controlled the impulse to snatch them away, and turned back and blushed and ducked his face and stammered something, the way Eddison Dane would.

He thought he saw one of Linwood's students watching him, the one who had moved the chain on the fading woman the other day, but when he looked up and blinked at her, she turned her head away. Draco hoped that she wasn't one of those dangerously observant people you sometimes got in places like this. All he could do was keep going with his plan, though, and come up with ways to foil her interference if he needed to.

"You don't need to thank me," Linwood whispered. "It is good to find someone, at last, who appreciates our resources the way I do."

He's convinced. Draco used that triumph to ruthlessly smooth over the surface of his soul, the rage that wanted to explode out of him and crush Linwood's eyes. He bobbed his head instead, and made himself move away with Linwood from Harry's glowing golden pillar and listen to every word he told him about the magic process.

Among those words was the secret that would free Harry from the chain and the others, as well, and restore them to themselves.

*

"You seem even more well-educated on magical research than I had assumed you were."

Draco put his cup down in front of him. He and Linwood were at dinner again, and the food this time was smoked salmon, with a wine served with it that Draco didn't recognize. He didn't dare refuse, but he didn't dare let Linwood make him the slightest bit drunk, either. He toyed with his cup and simpered.

"Well," he said. "I didn't want to tell you too much about my education--I was afraid that you might think I wasn't right for your school."

"Why not?" Linwood leaned forwards, his hands creeping across the table towards Draco. "You must know that the better-educated you are, the more I should like you."

Draco let his cheeks turn red, and ducked his head further and further, until his chin brushed the tablecloth. Then he looked up again and let Linwood take his hand. He didn't dare put this off forever; even Eddison Dane would come to seem unbelievable then. Someone with a complete lack of confidence would never buck society's rules to study the Dark Arts the way Draco claimed Dane had done.

"I was afraid that you wouldn't want someone who already had some schooling," Draco mumbled. "This is a place where you teach pupils, after all. I thought you would want someone who was on a lower level, so that you could have more fun enlightening their ignorance."

Linwood's smile widened, and he gave a single stroke to the palm of Draco's hand. Then he pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. "Let me show you something else," he said. "Something I can do, something that answers my desires in the way Potter does."

No one can answer your desires the way Harry does. But Draco's tongue was still, rather than moving to utter the words. He leaned back in his chair and studied the man, nodding a little.

Linwood spread his hands and bowed his head. For a moment, his breathing sped up. Even with all the ambient magic in the air, Draco thought, this was still something he had difficulty in doing. Well, good. Draco didn't like the thought that the bastard could use Harry's magic for everything, effortlessly.

Then Linwood began to change, to mold, to flow. Draco squinted until his eyes hurt, trying to decide how what Linwood was showing him right now was any different than what he had shown him so far, but no help was forthcoming yet. So he waited, only tapping his fingers a little on the back of the chair.

Linwood flowed and bent like candle wax, dark, lit from behind so that Draco couldn't see exactly what was going on. Then, when he finished, he kept his head bowed, and Draco still couldn't judge the extent or effectiveness of his change. He dug his fingers into the chair and waited. He had plenty of practice at that from attending endless and tedious--but he repeated himself--Unspeakable meetings.

Linwood looked at him, and smiled.

Draco cried out in wonder before he could stop himself. Well, that was all right. It was precisely the sort of silly gesture that Eddison Dane would make, in fact.

"You recognize me, then?" Linwood's voice was smooth and deep. It was a voice Draco had imagined, never heard, but it fit the face. The craggy face, the pointed chin with the long beard covering it but not enough to conceal the chin, the thick eyebrows that almost hid the eyes, and, oh, those eyes.

Dark and brooding, they had stared from multiple portraits in Slytherin bedrooms and books about the history of magic. This was Salazar Slytherin, or at least the face Slytherin wore in the most popular portraits of him.

It occurred to Draco that, supposedly, Harry had seen an image of Salazar Slytherin when he entered the Chamber of Secrets. He suppressed both the desire to ask him about it and the mad giggle that having the desire caused.

"I do," he whispered. "I don't know how you did it, but you look exactly like him. Do you think--is there any way that your voice really resembles his voice? Are the thoughts that pass through your head his thoughts?"

Linwood--Draco had to remind himself that it was Linwood and not Salazar, but they were in more than enough trouble if Draco started letting himself think that way--started and turned that craggy face back towards him. "How remarkable," he whispered. "You leap straight to something that ninety-nine percent of my students never see, an application that doesn't occur to them."

Draco shrugged a little, and fluttered his eyelashes like Dane would, but under them, he was watching Linwood more intently than ever, and awaiting his answer.

Linwood thought a little more about it, and then nodded. "Yes, I suspect they are," he said. "Of course, no recordings of Slytherin's voice exist. We only have descriptions of it, often written by people hostile to him. And my mind alters, but I do not lose my own memories, my own attitudes."

Yes, you don't, or you would have done something else with this magic, Draco thought. Something more Slytherin and less likely to get you found out.

"But I think so," Linwood went on. "I know that I have found myself with the ability to understand Parseltongue when it is spoken to me in this form, although never able to speak it. That may come with practice and more complete changes into this form."

Abruptly, he shuddered, and the beard sloughed off his face. Draco held himself still. He had seen worse things in the Unspeakable labs than Linwood turning back into his own form, but not many.

Linwood collapsed into his chair at the table and reached out for his cup of wine, taking a long drink. Draco sat with his fingers clasped around his own goblet now, but let his hand shake. Linwood would expect it.

"Do you see?" Linwood asked, when he put his cup down. "This is an end to the problem of mind, if we apply it more consistently and learn to master it. We can become the great historical figures and learn what they were thinking. We can solve historical conflicts and learn the solutions to great mysteries! We can become violent murderers and learn why they did what they did in the middle of crimes to baffle us."

Not that you need any practice in thinking like a murderer.

Draco took another drink, so he would have a minute to hide his mouth. It was happening again, the shattering of his walls that had first occurred when he saw Potter chained up to the pillar. The man that lived inside him and wasn't an Unspeakable or a spoiled Slytherin or Eddison Dane, the man he was when he spoke with Harry in Harry's dreams, wanted to come out and speak.

He couldn't. He would endanger Harry and everything else if he did, and that was not acceptable. For the moment, Draco had to nod and listen.

That wasn't difficult. Linwood was in full flood.

"We can even become ordinary people, and learn what the other person thinks, what they feel, from the inside," Linwood whispered, and his eyes resembled stars more than any others Draco had ever seen, except Harry's. "Imagine being able to resolve any quarrel with your wife or your partner because you can see what they were thinking when they made a bad decision. Or with your children. You would know exactly what punishment would be fair and yet make them think twice before doing anything stupid again, now, because you have their minds open to you." He sighed delicately. "I can scarcely comprehend what it will be like when we can hold the form for more than a few minutes at a time."

He just gave you a weakness. Remember it.

And he had just given Draco a strength, too, although Draco doubted he knew that. If anyone could become someone else, then it might be possible for Draco to become Linwood. It would only last a few minutes, if he understood Linwood correctly.

But a few minutes could be enough.

"And this isn't like Legilimency, or Veritaserum, with the tiresome moral objections that people raise to those," Linwood continued. "You wouldn't be literally opening someone else's mind, or forcing them to speak their innermost thoughts. But you would know what they thought all the same, and you would be able to return to your own person and apply that knowledge to them without them knowing where you got it."

No, it only has the pesky moral objection of sacrificing other people by torturing them to death.

Draco didn't say that. It paid for him, right now, to keep his voice gentle and soft and eagerly agree with Linwood's conclusions, and so he asked some more questions, and Linwood gave him more answers.

This was the heart of the way he regarded his "methods," Draco was certain. Linwood had once trained as an Auror for a few months before he quit. He retained a certain passion for justice, and that was among his reasons for choosing this way of doing things.

Draco could use that against him. The Unspeakables had sent him to discover the reason Linwood was doing this as much as they had sent him to learn the secrets of how to do it. He could have left now.

He would have, if he didn't know Harry was here.

But now that Linwood had told him so much, Draco knew how to get them all out. How to free them from the chains--or how to learn how to free them from the chains, which was more to the point. How to ensure that Linwood didn't realize what Draco was doing in time to stop him. How to do everything.

It would take time, and skill, and luck. Draco had everything except the first already, and he planned to arrange a way to get the first.

The plan came to him as he sat there. He smiled slightly and put it into action at once, setting his cup down on the table an instant before his hands started to shake and his nostrils twitched. Then he sneezed.

Linwood sat up, frowning, his words finally cut short. Draco reckoned he counted a sneeze as a sign of lost attention, perhaps on the scale right below a yawn. "I'm sorry," he said. "Did something go down your throat and disagree with you? I've sometimes regretted we can't have house-elves here to take care of the dust."

Draco shook his head. "Just a little tired," he lied effortlessly, lowering his eyes the way Eddison Dane would if he had to admit to such a personal weakness. "Last night I couldn't sleep, I was coughing so badly."

Linwood got up and came along the table to lay his hand on Draco's forehead. Draco, his wand out of sight and his face anxiously bland, cast a Fever Charm, which made Linwood wince from the heat when he touched Draco's skin.

"I don't want you to become so sick that you hurt the students here," Linwood said, frowning at him. "I wish you had told me before now. You might already have infected someone."

Draco gave a shiver hard enough to shake Linwood's hand off his forehead, and bit his lip. "Sorry," he whispered, in Eddison Dane's voice. "I thought you would send me away if you knew, and I've already worked so hard and talked so much to come here..."

"I won't send you away," Linwood said, speaking with what sounded like iron patience. "But I would have wanted to know, to make sure that I could take precautions to protect the others." He took Draco's arm and gave it a little shake. "Do you understand?"

Draco gave a desultory bob of his head. Linwood cursed under his breath and stepped back, calling for someone else. Draco wondered for a second why he didn't just use the ambient magic to float Draco back to his bedroom. But perhaps Linwood considered that a special weapon, to be reserved for the moments when he wanted to show off to someone.

Or perhaps he didn't want his students knowing as much about the magic as he had already shown to Draco, someone who did, after all, come from the outside more recently and shared Linwood's obsession with Harry. Draco had tried to make himself into a special case. It seemed it had worked.

And his other plans would work, too, assuming that he had the time alone he needed to think about them and perfect them. It seemed he would, since Linwood's students carried him with a layer of warm air between their hands and his skin to his room, and practically threw him on the bed. Draco curled up, and began to plan.

Part Three.