lomonaaeren | Chapter Sixteen of 'Forgive Those Who Trespass'- The Water Room

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Chapter Sixteen—The Water Room

Harry wasn’t surprised when Draco almost collapsed as they left the room with the fourth Pensieve. He was close to the edge himself, having run and fought in the Collecting Room, suffered several minor injuries when the blades broke through his skin, and then gone through the emotional torment of the Pensieves. He put a hand on Draco’s shoulder and another under his arm, and together they limped through the far doorway into the next part of the maze.

Harry halted when they came fully into it, and tilted his head back, blinking. This was the most normal room he’d seen so far, barring the room with the books where the Malfoys had taken them. The walls were circular, with no portraits, and the floor made of smooth and expertly jointed flagstones. Along the walls were slender shelves that might double as cots. Harry could even see the faint outlines of what might have been filled-in windows, and lines of white dust on the floor that seemed to indicate places where the legs of furniture had rested or been dragged.

Not that I want to sleep on those cots. With our luck, they’ll fold up and trap us next to the walls.

He glanced at Draco as he began casting the necessary spells. “What do you think? Do you remember this place being dangerous?”

Draco slowly lifted his head. His eyes were glazed over, and Harry winced, wondering if he was remembering the pain as his ribs were cut away. But he still managed to inspect the room with a gleam of intelligence in his gaze. At last, he shook his head, and then sank to the floor, bracing himself on his hands and knees.

Harry wasted no time in unpacking the satchel, spreading blankets down for Draco, and drawing out a few pieces of dried meat, as well as breaking the preservation spells on an orange whose skin he sliced through. Draco seized them and started eating without seeming to care that he was getting juice all over his face and dropping parts of the food onto the floor. Harry could feel his own hunger rising at the sight of the food, and turned away slightly. He had to make sure they were safe before he could start his meal.

And he needed to put a little distance between himself and Draco for right now, so that he could wrestle his hormones and his ideas back into compliance with reality.

So what if he’s bent? Harry told himself as he cast spells that would enable him to peer through the walls and floor. The spell revealed only twisting tunnels, or solid stone, depending on where he looked—no more giant snakes, no Unspeakables, no crouching bone-spiders. It means less than nothing to you. Or it should. There’s a time for sexual attraction and images of what could happen between the two of you, and this isn’t it.

He had already determined that he wouldn’t make a move on Draco and would do his best not to think of him that way, either. His main worry was about what would happen if he had a sexual dream. He knew he was susceptible to them; Ginny had first suspected something was wrong when he moaned the name of an attractive male Auror trainee. Draco would probably be at the forefront of his mind, and so that could happen again.

Silence myself, Harry decided. I’ll have to do that. It shouldn’t matter whilst I’m asleep. If something wakes me and I need to speak aloud, I can always remove the spell first. It’s not as though I’ll be muffling sounds around us.

More relaxed now, he finished warding the far doorway and then turned towards Draco—only to find him asleep, his fingers sprawled open and his head drooping on his chest.

Harry smiled, and felt a rush of desperate protectiveness. At least he knew that, with him around, Draco was less likely to suffer and become the prey of the creatures of the maze. He could do something right.

But will he ever be able to recover fully from things like what we witnessed in the Pensieve?

Harry gave an impatient little shrug as he moved to rearrange Draco’s limbs comfortably on the blankets and clean up the food he hadn’t eaten. He was neither a Mind-Healer nor a Muggle psychologist, and he was very far from being Draco’s best friend, even if he was Draco’s best hope for survival at the moment. He would just have to offer what comfort he could, and hope it was enough.

Besides, unless we both die, we’ll come to St. Mungo’s eventually. They’ll be the ones to offer him real healing.

*

Harry had wedged himself into another uncomfortable position between Draco and the door, one that should ensure he saw any threat the moment it appeared and didn’t fall asleep easily. He’d eaten the rest of the orange Draco had left, a few pieces of bread spread with peanut butter, and some of the meat. He had his wand in his hand, ready to cast a Silencing Charm the moment his Tempus Charm told him that Draco had slept for seven hours. He had done everything he could.

Except defeated his own sleepiness.

It yanked and tugged at him like an undertow, and the thought of just closing his eyes for a moment was nearly irresistible. Harry pinched his arm and thought about using Cognosco. It would enable him to stay awake now, and when Draco woke up, they could make excellent progress until it wore off. But then what would happen when it failed and both he and Draco needed to sleep at the same time?

Harry was still battling the issue in his mind when he heard a sharp sound from the direction of the western doorway, the one that led back into the Pensieve room. He’d heard that particular kind of hiss before. Not a snake at all, but the sound of someone without Auror training trying to speak quietly in a whisper.

Decision made, Harry waved his wand and cast Cognosco nonverbally. His spine straightened at once, but he kept his eyelids lowered and his breathing even, as if he were drifting off to sleep. His gaze remained fixed on the western doorway as if nailed there.

A few shadows agitated back and forth—human-shaped—and Harry heard the hiss of the whisper again. He frowned to himself. Any other travelers in this maze, particularly the recruits like Ron and Hermione who had been lured down here and then trapped, would surely have been madly glad to see him and Draco.

Unless they were Unspeakables.

Harry’s grip tightened fractionally on his wand, and a spell he had used to battle the bone-spiders sprang into his mouth. He would have to cast it before they moved into the room, though. He waited some more, and hoped they’d used no magic that would enable them to hear his swift heartbeat and quickened breathing.

More whispering. And then one of the shadows edged into the room, making less than no noise, and Harry saw the outline of a gray hood and cloak.

He whipped his wand up and reacted without thinking further. A stone wall promptly appeared across the doorway back into the Pensieve room, and he heard an unmistakable human cry of shock. Then another wizard cast a spell designed to melt stone or at least crack it. Harry created another stone wall behind the first, and a third after that, and then a fourth. By now, Draco was stirring fretfully against him, near to waking up.

Harry bent down and hissed in his ear, “We need to go.”

Draco started to his feet, then sagged down again as he found no support waiting for him; his hand had shot out as if to grasp a wall. Harry grabbed him under the arm and hustled him across the room towards the far doorway, dismissing the wards he’d laid there as he went. He could hear vicious cursing by now, and chanting in more than one voice. There were at least two Unspeakables, then, Harry thought grimly, and wondered for a moment how long it would take them to get through the walls.

It doesn’t matter. The point is to make them stop chasing us, not hold them at bay for a few minutes.

Harry leaned Draco against the wall in the next tunnel and gave him the communication sphere and the globe of light for company, then faced the Unspeakables across the length of the room. Already his fourth stone wall was crumbling, weakened by a series of spells that looked like lines of fire and frost combined, and then it broke and three Unspeakables in heavy gray cloaks strode through the remains.

Harry paused just a moment, in case he had mistaken their intentions and they were trapped innocents wearing the most convenient clothing available. But they made him the target of their wands instead of their voices, and he dived to the side out of cursing range even as he cast for the first time.

Red hexes slammed against the stone behind him and sparked. At the same moment, one of the Unspeakables gave a cry that abruptly faded. Harry smirked as he scrambled back to his feet. In keeping with the theme of the maze, he’d Transfigured that Unspeakable into a rat, which was struggling frantically in the heap of cloth collapsed on top of it. That should be a shape small enough to enable it to find food of some kind, and fast enough to survive the predators that crowded the corridors.

The two other Unspeakables separated, trying to flank Harry and give him a field too wide to cover with a single spell. Harry began edging slowly to the side instead, as if he were concentrating only on the wizard on his right, and they did what he wanted, gave up the flanking maneuver, and tried to catch him in a crossfire of spells.

Harry recognized the red light of a Stunner, and though it in reality went just past his shoulder, he decided to pretend it had hit him. He dropped to the ground with a high-pitched whine and lay still. Staring at the ceiling with motionless eyes and fighting the temptation to blink was the most irritating thing he had ever done, but he wouldn’t have to end the deception unless they were clever and actually bound him or Stunned him again before they approached. And the Unspeakables had given him the impression so far of being clever only when they had time to plan exquisite tortures.

Sure enough, he heard the regular rise and fall of footsteps approaching him. He took a deep breath and concentrated all his power and his Cognosco-augmented will into the spell he would cast next.

Expelliarmus! he thought, while his wand performed the necessary movements at floor level.

The Unspeakables shouted in surprise as their wands suddenly tore themselves from their hands and sped towards Harry. He sat up, caught them like a pair of Snitches, and lifted his own wand warningly. The Unspeakables halted, and one of them said, in the delicate voice of a small woman, “If you would give us a chance to explain, you would see—“

“I have no wish to, thanks,” Harry said. “I already know all I wish to about you from viewing the Pensieves.” And he flipped his wand and Transfigured them into rats as well. There was no way he could have done that without the Awareness Charm, so he would have to bless the necessity of casting it after all.

He did pull some food from the satchel and Transfigure it into cheese for them, which he left on the floor near the doorway. He could take lessons in expediency from the Unspeakables, but he wouldn’t be cruel.

*

Draco was waiting for him just beyond the doorway. He peered up at Harry with watery eyes for a moment, then looked pointedly over his shoulder.

“They’re gone,” said Harry. “Or rats.”

Draco shook his head slightly, and reached for the communication sphere. Tired. Will they come again?

“There may be others hunting us,” said Harry. “I don’t know if they’re Unspeakables who weren’t trapped into things like the portraits when the maze began or ones who were outside performing other tasks.” He moved up beside Draco, peering down the tunnel as if in abstraction, giving Draco the time he needed to pull himself together. “But we’re definitely safe enough to stop and rest now.”

A heavy weight collapsed against him. Harry turned in startlement towards it, and found that Draco had simply given up and let himself go. His shoulders shook with silent sobs. Harry could feel his own robes growing damp with the other man’s tears.

And it wasn’t as though Harry could blame him. He must have had a moment of feeling that his nightmares were coming true, when he saw the Unspeakables who had tortured him coming towards him again.

It was only that Harry was rather surprised Draco would be willing to let Harry see his tears. Perhaps his barriers had been lowered more than Harry thought by his re-adoption of the memories in the Pensieve.

Harry spread blankets again, and managed to do it without letting go of Draco in the meantime. This time, Draco laid his head in Harry’s lap as he had once invited Harry to do with him, and let his tears flow without check. Even when they stopped, he lay in the same position, and it took long minutes of regular breathing for Harry to realize that he was asleep.

Harry had to keep his right hand moving as he cast the spells that were necessary to keep them safe throughout the night, but his left hand slowly slipped from Draco’s chest to his cheek, and then his forehead.

I’ll take care of you. I won’t let anything else happen to you again, no matter what. And in the end, I’ll see you freed from this maze. I don’t care what I have to do to accomplish it.

Immediately his own conscience asked him if he would sacrifice Ron and Hermione, but Harry shrugged the thought off. There had to be a way that would let him free both his friends and Draco. He refused to consider anything else.

*

“It’s certainly different,” Harry said, and wondered if he had really succeeded in overlaying the tension in his voice with humor. From the eyeroll Draco gave him a moment later, he didn’t think so.

The long, low room in front of them was the most beautifully decorated of any they had passed through so far. Patterned screens of what looked like ivory stood about in several of the corners; Harry had peered closely at them and had been relieved to decide it really was ivory and not more human bone. Someone had cared to soften the stone further with tapestries, made of ordinary cloth but depicting a skill of weaving and intricacy of pattern that Harry hadn’t seen matched anywhere else, even in the few tapestries that had hung on the walls at Hogwarts. Wooden planks made raised walkways along the floor, winding in loops and coming back together again like paths through a garden.

It was the pools the planks surrounded and the screens and tapestries fronted that made Harry uneasy.

They were large basins set flush with the floor, except for a slight raised edging of stone around each. From here, Harry thought one was filled with mud, one with water, and the last with a dark kind of paint, until he sniffed and the thick coppery scent of blood came to him. That made him more than uneasy about what was in the other two pools.

But he and Draco didn’t have to walk on the paths. There was ordinary stone around the planks, narrow aisles but still wide enough to pass to the opposite side. And Harry had Shield Charms floating at the ready, to protect them should a monster explode out of the pools.

“Ready?” he asked Draco, with a brave smile, and held out his elbow so Draco could grasp it.

Draco studied him for a few moments instead, gravely. Then he reached for the communication sphere and tapped out, Careful.

“I’m always careful,” Harry said, offended, but it only took one eyebrow raise to bring the room with the snake back to him. He flushed. “Yeah, sorry. But you said you remembered the way through the maze, and this is the way we have to go. There are no tunnels to the sides around this, anyway.”

Draco nodded reluctantly, and took his elbow. Harry made sure to move carefully, since Draco’s grasp was never sturdy at the best of times.

They chose to go to the left, for no real reason except that Harry had had the light sphere hovering there while he cast his spells to make sure the way was safe, and knew already that the stone looked solid and normal. It carried them past the pools, at exactly the same distance from them that the right-hand path did. Harry kept his eyes in constant motion, looking behind the screens and tapestries for an intruder his spells hadn’t detected, looking behind them and ahead and across the pools, but his gaze always returned to the basins. The blood was bad enough; the others looked like ordinary mud and water, but God knew what they actually were.

Then they drew close enough to the mud pool to see it swirling, and to smell the scent that rose up from it.

Harry gagged and clapped his wand hand to his nose, half-stunning himself as the wand dug in. He didn’t care. He knew the smell from vicious training sessions that had involved fire curses. This was human flesh.

Liquefied human flesh.

Draco gagged at the same moment. Harry glanced at him, wondering if he was about to be sick and worried about how that would affect his chest, but he found Draco’s eyes fixed on the pool instead, wide with standing tears. Harry looked back and caught a glimpse of the flesh mounding, fixing and flowing together into a head. Appalled, fascinated, he jerked to a stop and stared as a woman’s head floated where there had been nothing but anonymous swirling liquid a moment before.

Though it lacked eyes, it still had the gray-streaked hair on top that Harry could identify as Pearl’s thanks to the memory of her conversation with Draco. And from the way the bloodless lips moved, he thought she might still be alive.

No wonder he didn’t want to talk about her. He may have retained a memory even then that it was this.

“I’ll remove her from the pool,” Harry told Draco quietly. “I’ll make sure that she can rest. Stay here, though. I have no idea what she’ll do, and if it’s dangerous, I want you able to run—“

Draco jerked back and stared at him in exasperation. Then he reached for the communication sphere and chose Soft-headed fool from the sarcastic phrases facet.

“I have to do something,” Harry said, and faced the pool again. The flesh was forming other heads now. He looked in dread for Ron and Hermione’s, but it seemed to be only the heads of people he didn’t know, probably other Unspeakables’ victims. “I can’t just let her remain there and suffer.”

Immortality of body, Draco said, and then gave Harry another tight-lipped look that conveyed his feelings without need of more access to the communication sphere. How are you going to kill them?

“I’ll figure out something!” Harry snapped, exasperated, and hopped from the stone onto the wooden path.

The planks curled up, strong as tree roots, and around his feet in seconds. Harry cursed and lowered his wand to burn them.

Draco shoved him hard in the middle of the back, though to Harry’s relief he was careful not to step on the planks and become a captive himself. Looking up, Harry saw the flesh forming into bodies beneath the heads, which began to climb over the edge of the basin. At the same moment, fountains rose from the pool of clear liquid and the pool of blood, and streaked towards the corpses. The “water” filled their eyes in, and the blood streamed back into their bodies through pores that opened like hungry mouths.

Harry experienced a moment’s appalled conflict. So now he had to defend himself, and to do so, he would have to risk destroying the woman who had been Draco’s friend, as well as other people who had done nothing worse than become subjects of inhuman experiments.

How did he get into these situations?

By my own carelessness, he snapped at himself, and then raised the Shield Charms already sparkling in front of him to new heights. The corpses reached them and hammered on them, mindless as Inferi. Harry relaxed; at least that gave him a few more moments to figure how to deal with the planks wound about his feet.

But pain stung him. When he glanced down, he saw that one curling, flexible piece of wood had scraped along his leg and opened a shallow wound.

Blood appeared, but instead of dribbling, it flowed away in a skein of fat red drops towards the third pool.

Harry had a sudden and, no doubt, accurate vision of the way this room would strip him into drops of fluid and scraps of skin, and sort them into the appropriate pools like some sort of mad Potions collector.

But he didn’t have the time to hyperventilate or laugh hysterically at the image. He had to figure out some way out of this. Hopefully before the hammering fists of the corpses cracked his Shield Charms.

He glanced back at Draco, to see if he had any helpful suggestion, the way he had for escaping the portraits of Josephine. Draco, who was clutching his fists together in what looked like a desperate attempt to stop himself from running away, began mouthing an incantation at him.

Harry winced and grimaced as the nearest plank scraped a bit of skin from his right leg, and called, “What?”

Draco repeated the incantation again. And again. And again. Harry, squinting, thought at least that he made out Fingere solis. He knew that had something to do with the sun, and if it would burn up his enemies and the wood at once, it was good enough for him.

He nodded and lifted his wand. Draco promptly began moving his hands back and forth in simple sweeping motions, once to the right, once to the left, and once to the right again. Harry made himself watch the whole sequence three times over to be sure he had it, despite the increasing pain in his legs and the way that he had to recast the Shield Charm in the meantime. At least none of the corpses were trying to work their way around him to attack Draco.

He cast the spell, moving his wand confidently through the sweeps Draco had shown him as he cried out, “Fingere solis!”

There was a breathless pause just before the spell went to work, and Harry had time to see Draco’s lips form a soundless No!

Fuck. I got the incantation wrong—

And then everything around him, everything he was, dissolved in light.

Chapter 17.

Chapter Sixteen of 'Forgive Those Who Trespass'- The Water Room

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