lomonaaeren | Chapter Fourteen of 'Forgive Those Who Trespass'- Harry's Test

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Chapter Fourteen—Harry’s Test

Harry had no idea how long he knelt there, holding Ron’s head, before it spoke.

With Draco’s voice.

“A pathetic display, really, Potter. Have you learned so little about life and death, and what they are both like here, that you assume your friend is gone without looking further?”

Draco slumped against him from behind; Harry thought him close to passing out with the suddenness and the shock of the words, or perhaps just because it was his voice. Harry looked up. He had not wept. His eyes were dry and burning. His throat felt the same, and it took him several attempts at clearing it before he was able to respond.

“I will look further,” he said. “I suspect you’ve never experienced grief, if you don’t understand the practice of pausing for some time to mourn.”

The voice laughed, and yes, it was Draco’s arrogant, sneering schoolboy laugh. Harry wasn’t sure which struck him as more obscene, the familiar tones or the fact that he could see Ron’s lips moving around the words, even as the blue eyes continued to stare past him at the far wall of the maze. “Then come ahead. This maze was never designed for you, but since it has gone wrong and your friends were your reason for coming here—because why would you come for Draco Malfoy, of all people?—you will be one of our best subjects for an experiment done to test responses to the maze.”

Harry nodded. He rose to his feet with Ron’s head in his arms and his gaze focused down the tunnel that led to the right. He knew it wasn’t the route that would take them to the Pensieve room.

He didn’t care. He could no more have walked away from this than he could have walked away from the sight of his friends tortured and dying in front of him.

A pair of arms winding around his waist jerked him back hard enough to make him catch his breath in pain. He glanced over his shoulder to see Draco digging his heels into the stone floor, shaking his head frantically.

“I mean this in the politest possible way, Draco,” Harry said. He didn’t recognize his own voice. Well, at least one of us doesn’t sound uncomfortably familiar. “Fuck off.”

He twisted to the side, kicking one leg to make Draco release him. He made sure to fling him off gently enough that his collision with the wall shouldn’t harm him. But he didn’t intend to stay put like a good little boy, even if that was the best plan. And he couldn’t—

He knew this wasn’t really Draco speaking. But at the same time it was Draco’s laughter echoing in his ears, coming from his best friend’s lips, and he was beginning to accept that he would find Ron and Hermione dead at the end of the corridor.

He ran. Behind him he could hear Draco’s pounding footsteps, gradually catching him up. Harry didn’t care. Draco was physically weak and unable to use magic. He would have no choice but to stay out of this battle, and take his chances with whoever, or whatever, won it.

For one moment, his conscience tried to restrain him in turn, asking what would happen to Draco if he were stuck down here without someone to take care of him. He would suffer. He would die—

Then Harry shrugged off that hold, too, much more easily than he’d got rid of Draco’s arms. He’d come down here for his friends, not Malfoy. Yes, he wished Draco all the best and would be sorry to see him die, but he owed his life to Ron and Hermione. If they were dead and he could have saved them instead of proceeding slowly through the maze in the midst of self-doubt and self-loathing, then the least he could do was perish trying to avenge them.

The world, which had gained such complexity that Harry felt as if he were continually walking across shaky mud, had suddenly flattened and clarified itself again. Harry hated the reason for it, but he rejoiced in the feeling of clean air flooding his lungs, of his feet hitting solid ground again.

And still Draco followed him. Harry cursed under his breath and sped up; the tunnel was a large one, but had no side-turnings. He couldn’t lose Draco, but maybe he could leave him behind.

He was vaguely aware that he was carrying Ron’s head under his arm like a Quaffle, and that it was still laughing at him. This was bizarre and would probably make him vomit later, but at the moment it had no power to slow him down. Nothing did.

He vaulted over a small rise of stone steps and into the middle of a chamber so enormous he was forcibly reminded of the portrait room. But this one wasn’t crowded with pictures. On the walls hung what looked like webs, instead.

Webs starred with people, instead of flies.

Harry’s eyes locked on Hermione’s head, in the middle of the nearest and largest web. And to one side, hanging in swathes of browned silk that must have been older, he recognized her arm, and one of her legs. Harry stooped to place Ron’s head carefully on the smooth flagstone floor, and drew his wand. He could do nothing about the past desecration of her body, but he would not leave her here to hang like this.

A sharp noise from the other side of the room, the side not lit by the globe floating beside him, caught his attention. Harry whirled towards it, his eyes wide and his arm already aiming.

What came forth was not a spider, as he had been expecting, not even an Acromantula, though it was as large as that. What came forth was an enormous snake, shimmering green-white with sickly phosphorescence, its eyes large and yellow as a basilisk’s. Harry knew what basilisks looked like, however—none better—and this was not one. He didn’t recognize the breed of snake, though he carefully noted the clanking rustle of its scales on the floor and its enormous fangs.

That solved the mystery of what hung on the walls. Not spiderwebs, after all, but swathes of the snake’s shed skin.

Draco’s voice laughed and spoke out of the mouth of Hermione’s head this time. “All the creatures you have encountered so far have been immortal, Harry Potter. What makes you think you can defeat this one?”

Harry said nothing. What was there to say? He wanted to take his friends’ bodies out of here. The snake was between him and his friends. That meant he was going to kill it or disable it, whatever else happened. He began to move carefully to the right, causing the snake to turn its blunt muzzle towards him. The forked tongue, at least a foot long, flicked out from its mouth. The eyes shone with a cruel and devastating intelligence, enough to make Harry assume it might have played some part in torturing Ron and Hermione before they were ripped apart.

His eyes fixed on the snake, he spoke in what he knew must be Parseltongue. “Someone killed my friends.” “Friends” came out more like “hatchlings of the same egg.” “Was it you?”

The snake’s head reared back as if in surprise, but it said nothing in response. Instead, it coiled the upper third of its body beneath it, swaying slightly back and forth, and Harry knew it would strike. He couldn’t tell the direction or speed of the strike, though, or what weapon it would use. The size argued for a constrictor; the fangs argued for venom. Since the Unspeakables might well have created this snake, and if not it was a magical creature, Harry saw no reason it couldn’t use both.

The snake lunged at him, coming from the left.

Harry began his spin to the side, calling a Blasting Curse to his tongue in the same moment.

And then the snake vanished in mid-motion, appearing with a solid thump behind him.

Bloody hell! It can Apparate! Harry didn’t try to correct his course; by this point, it was too late anyway, he’d built up too much momentum. He flung himself forwards, half-stumbling, half-falling. The Aurors had taught him how to control his falls. Now was the time for the training to be effective, if it ever could be, and Harry had the satisfaction of hearing the coil the snake had flung out to catch him clank on the floor at his heels. There came an inarticulate hiss that sounded for all the world like a human grumbling as he got out of bed in the morning.

Harry scrambled back to his feet, and found the snake considering him with more respect this time.

“I will kill you,” he told it.

Again, no response. Its motion forwards held a dream-like slowness, as if it had assessed the threat he represented completely in a few seconds, and was no longer concerned about what he might do.

Harry aimed his wand at the ceiling. The snake uttered a little chuckle of a hiss and slithered towards him faster.

“Frigus!”

The temperature in the room dropped at least forty degrees. The snake faltered for a moment, and Harry, though he had no doubt it would adapt to the cold in time, took the opportunity to rush it. He was able to draw near before it Apparated away—or maybe it wanted him to come to it, but he couldn’t worry about that right now—and he planted a foot on one metallic fold of the body and leaped straight up.

He had cast the Self-Lifting Charm, the one that he and Draco had used to cross the room with the bone-eating spiders, already, nonverbally, and he flew towards the snake’s head with the force of his leap. The head gracefully twisted, the mouth opened, and a spittle of dark-colored venom came flying from between the fangs.

Harry felt some of the poison strike his hands and shoulder blades, and begin eating holes through him like acid. He didn’t think he flinched. He was wondering, all the while, if this was the last sight Ron and Hermione had seen before they died, and thinking it must have been, and deciding that that made it more appropriate he should suffer the poison, too, on the way to vengeance.

He caught hold of one huge fang and swung around it as he might around the Keeper’s pole on the Quidditch pitch, aiming himself directly into the gullet. The snake rumbled, a sound of pleasure, and started to close its jaws on him. If he was so polite as to come to it, it was saying to itself, then it would quite happily swallow him.

Harry closed his eyes. Auror Donaldson’s voice, in his head, chanted an incantation, and then said, If I ever catch you using this spell, I will beat the shit out of you, because Azkaban will be a better fate than you deserve. So I better not catch you using it.

Cutis falcis, Harry thought, and moved his wand in a star-shaped pattern. Right, and left, and left, and right. Had Ron and Hermione tried to cast that spell before they died? Where were their wands? Had the serpent torn them apart, or was this only a collecting room for the victims of other beasts in the maze?

Blades sprouted from Harry’s skin, serrated knives tearing up through his arms, swords unfolding like wings of steel from his shoulders, his teeth lengthening and curving. One reason Auror Donaldson had forbidden this spell was the danger of killing oneself with it, along with one’s opponent.

Harry rather thought, though, that the pinpricks he felt as the blades grew were nothing compared to the pain the snake endured as its mouth closed firmly, definitely, on him—and the blades impaled it through the cheeks and jaws.

Black blood drenched Harry at once, boiling, trying to flush him out of the mouth. Harry crouched under the worst of it, and then began pushing his way deeper, dragging and digging furrows in skin and flesh with his blades. The serpent tossed its head and folded and unfolded its fangs; that only made the going a little harder. Harry grabbed hold of a lesser tooth, one that didn’t bear a venom sac he could see, and hung on when the climb briefly became vertical.

Then he was over the rolled carpet of the tongue, and into the gullet itself. Harry slipped down a few feet and braced himself hard, slamming the sword that grew from his right shoulder into the throat wall to hold his place. He thought of Ron and Hermione for a moment more, envisioning their faces clearly, hoping they would be the first two people he saw on the other side if he killed himself with this, as he fully expected to.

Then he aimed his wand down the throat. Strange, that he could hear his own voice over the sound of the serpent’s strangled cries, but fitting.

He spoke the spell aloud this time. No taking the chance that speaking nonverbally would deprive it of some of its force. “Cutis falcis!”

His faithful globe of light had followed him. Harry could see the blades rippling along the serpent’s neck, stretching to meet one another like ingrown fangs. Harry cast the spell again, and again, and the magic traveled further and further down the throat, turning the serpent into a mass of weapons—from the inside.

Slicing it apart.

Harry closed his eyes as another tide of blood drenched him. He could remain here and allow himself to be cut apart by the blades or crushed by the constricting muscles. In some ways, it was no more than he deserved, for having failed Ron and Hermione.

He wanted to. The intensity of his grief numbed all other emotions. He had never surrendered in his life, but that was because they had been beside him or ahead of him or behind him, urging him not to surrender. With them gone, what good was he? What did he have to live for? He didn’t know for certain who had done this to them, so even the ideal of vengeance was useless, now that he had killed the snake keeping their bodies from him.

Their bodies.

He still had to take those out of the maze, and show the people who knew nothing about what had happened down here, who only knew that Ron and Hermione had vanished utterly, that he had kept what faith he could.

He cast a Feather-Light Charm on himself, and let the blood and the poison wash him out. He floated back to the floor, and spent some moments wiping liquids and chunks of flesh off his face, so he could watch the serpent’s demise. As an afterthought, he retracted the blades back into his body.

The blades he had seeded kept growing, cutting straight through the snake’s slim body, passing one another and stabbing out the opposite side they had started from. The snake was, in essence, turned into an endless string of shish kebab. Its struggles did no good, considering that the enemy was coming from inside it. When it turned and began biting itself, Harry thought he was smiling, a smile that hurt his mouth from smallness and coldness.

At last each piece of the serpent was separate, and left twitching. Harry knew it was probably still alive. That didn’t matter. By the time it could get itself back together again, he and Ron and Hermione’s bodies would be long gone, back to the surface.

Harry had no desire, anymore, to learn what lay in the center of the maze.

He turned to the disjointed limbs and heads and torsos clinging to the swathes of the snake’s skin, and aimed his wand. A Cutting Curse made the skin droop and shred and part with a sound like tearing silk curtains. Harry continued chanting Cutting Curses, mildly surprised his voice was so strong, and slowly Hermione’s head slid to the floor, and then her hands, and then her legs. They were still clad in tatters of the robe Harry had last seen her in, that day she and Ron left the office.

Draco’s voice still called to him from the lips of Hermione’s head. “Do you think this will stop it? Do you think that defeating one guardian—not even a very important one—of the Collecting Rooms will enable you to pass the test, or walk to the center of the maze and achieve immortality?”

“Death would be very welcome right now,” Harry said, clearly, and then pointed his wand at the moving lips. He would not mutilate Hermione’s body further by destroying her mouth, but he could seal it shut.

Before he could, two things happened at once: a brilliant dot of light flew out of Hermione’s mouth, laughing all the way, and passed straight through the wall; and a pair of arms closed around him from behind.

Harry hissed, annoyed. It seemed that Draco’s voice, detached from his body, was under the absolute control of Richard or whatever other Unspeakables were left, and he had no chance of stopping or catching it. He would probably encounter it again if he went ahead into the maze, which he was not going to do.

The arms continued to cling, and now Harry could feel a cheek resting against his back. He hissed again. “Let me go, Draco. I need to clean this off me, and you probably need rest. And then we need to find our way back to the Ministry.”

Even a pair of foreshortened hands could spin him around roughly, he discovered. Draco was staring at him, shaking his head back and forth frantically. A huge splash of black liquid clung like insect guts to the front of his robe. Harry cleaned it with a Scourgify, and then did the same thing to himself, though he had to do it twice.

“We have to,” he said to the shaking head. “There’s nothing here for me anymore. Ron and Hermione are dead. I owe it to their families to get the bodies back to them. And the quest I came on is fulfilled.”

Draco glared at him and held out a lump of blackened meat. Harry blinked and frowned. “Is that a piece of the snake? You’d better put it back. I don’t fancy it chasing us because it’s missing a chunk of its belly or intestines.”

Draco tossed the lump at him, forcing Harry to catch it. Only then did Harry make out the traces of red hair clinging to the top of it, and the faint indentations that might have been lips and eyes and nostrils, once upon a time.

“Ron’s head?” he whispered, and stared at Draco.

Draco turned and plucked the communication sphere, floating behind him, from the air. Then he tapped the facets for Dark magic. Artifact. He held Harry’s eyes as he moved from that set of words to another, related set. False. Illusion.

“But—the voice—“ Harry faltered. It was true, based on the little he knew of Dark magic theory, that it would have been easier to make Draco’s voice speak from a specially enchanted model, rather than through flesh and blood. Corpses were even harder to work with. You could make Inferi out of corpses, but it took an enormous amount of power to cause them to speak and respond like the living people. Better to invest that power elsewhere, and sculpt models, or cast glamours, or use Polyjuice, to impersonate the living.

False, Draco’s hands on the globe insisted again. Illusion.

Harry swallowed, and stared across at Hermione’s head still hanging on a strip of snake-skin near the floor, right above a twitching scrap of serpent. Holding his wand towards her, he whispered, “Finite Incantatem.”

The glamour covering the head splintered apart with a pop like a Muggle light bulb burning out. Harry could see the same lump of blackened flesh that had taken the place of Ron’s head.

Harry fell to his knees, pushing his hands into his eyes. That ground his glasses into his skin. He didn’t care. He had almost committed suicide, almost ensured there was no one left to avenge his friends, because he had sprinted ahead without thinking.

This just proves how badly I need them, he thought. This just proves that I shouldn’t be trusted on my own for longer than it takes me go to the loo, and we’ll probably all die before I can get them out of here.

He felt a surge of yearning as he considered the plan he’d devised which might free Draco from the maze. Something like that, he could be good at. Something like that, he understood. It only required mindless courage and strength.

But even if he chose to implement that plan, that, too, would need to wait until the very end of the journey.

Draco’s hand was on his shoulder. It didn’t grip hard, of course, but Draco leaned all his weight on it, and Harry understood the force of his silent demand.

No more charging ahead without thinking. No more stupid risks. It’s not just our lives that depend on your actions now. Have you passed the test of your own temper, Harry?

And Harry thought he had. Finally. At last.

He twisted his head enough that he leaned his cheek against the back of Draco’s hand, trapping it on his shoulder. That couldn’t have been pleasant for him, considering Harry was still covered with the stench of the serpent’s body fluids, but Draco dew nearer still, and then his arms closed about Harry’s shoulders in an embrace as fierce as the one he’d used to catch Harry in the corridor.

He understood what had happened, and why. But it had better not happen again.

They rested like that, until the stench and increasing speed of the serpent’s twitching, along with Harry’s aching knees, forced them to their feet and back in search of the right path.

Chapter 15.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

xelloss-poo.livejournal.com

AWwwww. Harry almost died for nothing. Yay for the awesomeness that is Draco though. ;D He brought Harry back. And now they must continue that Harry can hear Draco's sexy voice out of his own mouth! ^____^ And save Ron and Hermione too, of course.

From:

lunasky3.livejournal.com

ILLUSION! :D i like you again :D and yay draco saves the day :D:D:D

From:

neji-chan.livejournal.com

Thank GOD that wasn’t Ron or Harry would have carried his head with them for the rest of the journey. I couldn’t stop thinking of the picture Draco silently arguing with Ron’s severed head, with Harry caught in the middle, would made ::lol:: Not as bizarre as Ron’s severed head speaking with Malfoy’s voice (so unexpected). I don’t know who was more traumatized, Draco or Harry. Ron would be, if he knew what happened.

I don’t have words for Harry’s behavior, other than reckless and suicidal and unbelievable stupid. I understand why he did it, sure: Ron and Hermione are the most important thing for him and he tried so hard to not think of their fates that Ron’s “death” came as a shock. But all I could think of was Draco, what he must have felt as he saw Harry run to danger because he couldn’t stop for one minute to think and listen to Draco. And he should have know he can’t trust anything in the maze, and as Ron’s head said, life and death are different there. Apparently he’s learnt his lesson and that won’t happened again. Hopefully.

On the other hand, if Harry hadn’t act like that awesome fight scene wouldn’t have taken place ::lol:: I love kick-ass!Harry, and it was a taste of what he’d do for his friends. Richard should be very afraid if Ron or Hermione are hurt. That last scene was very sweet, I loved Draco’s understanding.

“Someone killed my friends.” “Friends” came out more like “hatchlings of the same egg.” “Was it you?” I Parseltongue, and that detail… it’s like it made the language more real, because it makes sense snakes don’t have the same vocabulary than humans. I don’t know, I liked that :P

Looking forward to the next Pensieve!

From:

thrnbrooke.livejournal.com

Wow! Riveting chapter! You held me on the edge of my seat!

From:

darkestnight12.livejournal.com

Tsk tsk, Harry. Always knew there was a temper to you. Not to mention rash decisions and the tendency to charge forward on the existing emotion before thinking about what was going on. *sighs* Good thin Draco is there for you.

XD Yay! It was an illusion! Ron and Hermione might just be alive! *dances*

From:

tkp.livejournal.com

Harry was total badass awesomesauce in this chapter; I don't care how stupid he is.

From:

endilwen-09.livejournal.com

I actually thought of Sirius while reading this chapter, and how Voldemort had tricked him into going to the Department of Mysteries. Relieved that it was a trick! Also, very inventive with the Cutis Falcis :o)

From:

ravenqueen55.livejournal.com

I was screaming in my head for Harry to turn around and listen to Draco! I had a feeling it was an illusion (more of a deep rooted hope, actually!). You wrote that so well, because it's exactly the kind of thing Harry would do ~ charge in there without considering all angles. And poor Draco...how I love him in this fic!

From:

jameschick.livejournal.com

Oh, thank Christ! Ron and Hermione might still be alive. Harry really needs to stop rushing in like a fool and stop to think before acting.

From:

lycias.livejournal.com

whew! That spell that makes Harry all spikey was pretty neat. I like how Harry thinks about how much he needs Ron and Hermione, not even realizing how much he has also been relying on Draco. So oblivious.

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Chapter Fourteen of 'Forgive Those Who Trespass'- Harry's Test

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