Chapter Twenty-One of "Forgive Those Who Trespass'- The Sixth Pensieve

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Twenty-One—The Sixth Pensieve

The next Pensieve sat alone atop the same pillar of rib bone. Again the brilliant white light spread all around it, and again Harry’s spells revealed no traps or magical creatures hiding in the corners. He gave the pillar a look of loathing. Why had the Unspeakables done this?

And it didn’t matter that he knew something of the magical and theoretical reasons they had for taking Draco’s ribs. He wanted to know what their moral justification was, why in the world they thought they could get away with something like this and not be punished somehow.

Well, if their own consciences didn’t scar them, they probably didn’t think anyone else would. Did they expect one of their captives to be freed and make it this far? Harry smiled grimly, even as he stooped to look at the base of the pillar and make out the letter there. I, it said this time. Harry was beginning to have a theory about those letters. I don‘t think they did. They seem to have decided that once helpless, always helpless.

He glanced back proudly at Draco, who had his arms wrapped around himself and was staring at the pillar with an expression of extreme dislike. And he can chide himself for weakness if he wants to, but he’s stronger than their hatred and their desire for immortality, to have made it this far.

“Do you want to go in with me?” he asked Draco.

There was a shadow in the other man’s eyes, and Harry thought he was longing to hold back, to just sit against the wall and let Harry tell him what was in the memories rather than seeing them for himself. But as Harry watched, he straightened his shoulders and stepped forwards like a soldier.

Harry caught his arm as Draco came level with him. “You don’t have to do this just to prove something to me,” he said quietly. “So far as I’m concerned, you have nothing to prove.”

Draco gave him a startled glance, and then his expression melted into a smile so sweet Harry caught his breath. He traced the line of Harry’s chin for a moment with his foreshortened fingers, and then shook his head and faced the Pensieve again.

“You have to do this for yourself?” Harry asked. He felt less sure about his reading of this gesture than he was about many others, but he’d risk it.

Draco gave him a full-fledged grin this time, and Harry smiled back, feeling more confident and happier than he’d ever been before he entered one of the Pensieves. He embraced Draco firmly, and cast the Sticking Charm on their feet with a single wave of his wand before they leaned down together and plunged their heads into the silvery liquid.

*

Harry caught his breath when they landed. They were standing on bright green grass, beneath a wide, almost brassy sky, with the sun blazing on them so strongly Harry could convince himself he felt the heat on his skin. His heart leapt up at once. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the simple comforts of a spring day until he had them back again.

But then he realized Draco had stiffened next to him, and looked sideways. Draco was watching with that fixed expression, that almost ceramic expression, which meant he had connected this memory to fleeting, broken images he’d had before, and didn’t like what the whole resembled.

“We’re not really outside, are we?” Harry whispered. He felt compelled to keep his voice down, though the only sounds were distant, and they’d have to walk towards them to make them out.

Draco gave his head a tiny twitch, one Harry wouldn’t have seen at all if he wasn’t looking closely, and strode forwards. Harry scrambled after him, and together they mounted a tiny hillock. Draco scanned the expanse of green country below them, whilst Harry tried to convince himself, without success, that this was all fake. The air even tasted sweeter.

Well, it’s a memory, isn’t it? And it wouldn’t take much improvement to get sweeter air than you have in the maze.

Draco tugged on his sleeve. Harry followed his pointing finger, and saw a human figure darting over the grass far below.

Following it came a number of shapes on four legs, and they uttered sounds that made Harry want to scream, even from this distance. Sounds like the gibbering of a madhouse, like babies crying in distress, like—

He shut off the comparisons and nodded to Draco, who was watching his past self with that ceramic expression again. Together, they linked arms and hurried down the hill, Harry watching out sharply; if Draco fell, the blow to his chest would hurt him far more than it would hurt Harry.

Closer at hand, they could see the past Draco turning at bay next to a spindly tree, which had appeared as a shrub from the height of the hill. He seemed to have been running for a long time; his face was blotched with red, and his hair clung to his skull. Sweat-dark patches peered from under his ragged shirt, and he pressed his hand to his side in a way far too familiar to Harry from Auror training.

But what made Harry want to spit were his missing fingers and ribs. The Unspeakables had forced him to run like this after they had already tortured him.

Harry savored the blank, black hatred welling up in him. If he could have reached Richard right then, he would have forgotten about Expelliarmus and all his guilt over using the Unforgivable Curses. Richard simply didn’t deserve anything else.

The creatures chasing Draco crashed to a halt in front of him, and formed a rough semicircle, panting and staring at him. They were dogs, Harry thought, but only in the way that dragons were snakes. They seemed to be carved of heavy black stone, and their legs were hooked to their torsos, and their heads to their necks, with gleaming mechanical joints. Their eyes flared wide and red, worse than Voldemort’s eyes. When they moved forwards, their blunt, toeless feet cracked the ground, and the sounds that emerged from their throats—

Well, Harry found it no surprise when the past Draco clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!”

If he’s been hearing that sound for days and hours, it’s a wonder he’s not mad already, Harry thought, and felt another surge of admiration for Draco. It was wonder enough that he had survived physically; that he had done it with his mind more or less intact was close to a miracle. Of course, having some of his worst memories removed and put in the Pensieves might have helped with that, but Harry was not the less inclined to marvel.

He put an arm around his Draco. Draco leaned against him, but absently, as if Harry were a convenient rock. All his attention was, unsurprisingly, fixed on the drama before him.

The nearest dog edged forwards, parting its jaws to reveal teeth that made Harry ache. They were jagged, made of silver or steel, but they also gleamed like diamonds, with a disturbing inner fire. If those teeth met flesh, they would do worse than tear, he was certain.

The past Draco darted abruptly around the tree, like a deer. But the pack didn’t seem to have been fooled, and the dog with the parted jaws and two others sprang on him. Harry flinched, bracing instinctively for the crack of bone and the impact of stone against flesh.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, those glittering teeth locked on Draco’s flesh, and snagged, and then pulled. And Draco’s skin bulged away from his body, unraveling like rope from a central spool, traveling in ribbons that tangled with each other as the dogs began to leap, cavorting around one another and sometimes dropping their own threads so they could take up another.

In the middle of it, Draco fell to his knees, screaming, a low sound like the cry of a cow being slaughtered, full of dull despair. His skin tore and slid away, and behind it, slick, shining, naked flesh was left, seamed with veins and arteries. The dogs wrestled and rolled in the skin, and still it came off.

Harry was watching when they peeled Draco’s face away, and it flew like a kite before it landed on the ground and the nearest dog picked it up. Then it dangled from the heavy jaws like a mask, until the dog swallowed.

His Draco, when Harry dared to glance at him, had his arms folded around his chest, but still shook as though nothing would ever warm him again. His eyes had brewing storms in them as he stared at his fleshless past self, and then he turned his back and, without ceremony, threw up.

Harry was beside him in a moment, trying desperately to hold and brace Draco so his vomiting wouldn’t hurt him, wincing whenever he crushed the empty skin where the ribs should have been inwards. Draco didn’t fight him off, though, and made no movement of pain (though that might have been lost in the violent twitches he gave as he emptied his stomach). Harry decided he could do worse than hang on, and wait for the moment when Draco would be ready to face the memory again.

He wasn’t sure that moment really arrived. Draco certainly stopped vomiting, and turned around to observe his past self, though his body still quivered with dry heaves. Harry kept an anxious eye on him, not at all believing in his recovery, until Draco hit him with an elbow and frowned at him.

Looking at the horrible scene again, Harry realized the dogs had stopped playing and now sat patiently in their semicircle, Draco’s skin looped and piled around them like a ripped tapestry. The skinless Draco still huddled on the grass, motionless with pain. And walking towards the dogs and Draco was Richard, his wand swinging casually in his hand.

Harry bit his tongue to control his hatred, reminding himself this was only a memory, only the past, and he couldn’t affect Richard even if he cast the most violent spells he knew. He had to bite until he drew blood.

Richard stepped through the dogs, now and then patting a stony head, until he reached the lumps of skin. He picked one up, let it trail through his fingers, and sighed. When he glanced at the man he had hunted and had skinned, he wore the stern expression Harry remembered from McGonagall’s classroom when everyone (except Hermione) inexplicably failed to get a simple Transfiguration right.

“Remember,” Richard whispered, “you are the one who controls this torture, Draco. We must have your invitation into your soul so that we can take your voice. All you need to do is give us that invitation. Then we will take it, and you can have food. You can have rest. You can have escape from this pain.”

The huddled Draco shook like a rabbit, but made no reply. Richard sighed again. “One would think you voiceless already,” he said. “I don’t want to do this, but you give me no choice. The spell is most insistent on willing consent.”

He flicked his wand.

New skin began to grow back across Draco’s shoulders and arms. From the way the past Draco arched his back and opened his mouth, the process was intensely painful. Sheets of pale, mucous-like covering slid across him, so thick and slow and viscous that watching its advance could qualify as torture in itself, Harry thought. He turned away, sickened, long before it was complete. When he glanced back, Draco was wholly clad in skin again, and Richard nodded in satisfaction.

“No,” the past Draco whispered, but not in a tone that suggested he thought the words would make any difference. “Please.”

“Not until you give us access to your soul,” Richard said. He cast another spell, and chains appeared on the dogs’ necks. Then he sent stinging sparks at the soles of Draco’s feet until he staggered up and, with a sound like a strangled hare, began to run again.

Richard waited until he was over the next hillock to release the stone hounds from their chains. “Hunt’s on, boys,” he said. Again he waited, this time watching the pack disappear, and then strolled in a leisurely manner after them.

The Pensieve went dark, signaling a transition to the next memory. Draco’s fingers curled into Harry’s shoulders, digging so hard that Harry bit blood from his tongue again. But he would not cry out, not now, not when Draco was forced to suffer in silence. He put his own hand over those clenched fingers, and squeezed.

They returned abruptly to light, this time with the past Draco leaning against a wall, bound in what seemed to be the strands of a large spider web. Richard stood in front of him, shaking his head.

“I told you what’s going to happen, Draco,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn. Is your voice really such a sacrifice? You will never speak to anyone but us again, so why you would wish to keep it—“

“Tell me again.” The quaver in the past Draco’s voice betrayed false bravado, but that he could speak those words at all made Harry’s pride and pity surge. He curled his arms around his Draco, hugging more for his comfort than anything. He needed to be able to hold someone now, since he knew he couldn’t change the course of the past.

“There are sapphire spider eggs in your flesh now,” Richard said idly, flipping his wand around in his palm, never taking his gaze from Draco. “We had the female implant them in you whilst you slept. They’re hatching now—or soon. They’ll begin eating you from the inside out. Say the word, give us permission to remove your voice, and I’ll remove them.”

“I won’t—“

Draco abruptly tilted his head back and vibrated a little. Richard arched his eyebrows and looked faintly pleased. Again he reminded Harry forcibly of McGonagall, this time when someone other than Hermione managed to get a spell right.

“They’re chewing, I should expect,” he said. “Sapphire spiders are fascinating creatures, really, given their long life-cycles, the way they transmute insects into gems, and their sharp mandibles. Very sharp; they can break open the exoskeletons of insects that no other spider in the world eats. And they’re intensely magical creatures, too. They draw every bit of nourishment out of their victims they can, using a sophisticated variant of death magic that wizards have only managed to duplicate in extremely advanced necromancy. How does it feel to know that you’re both dying and being eaten alive by inches?”

Harry had heard that gut wounds were the most painful injuries possible. From the way Draco was writhing in his bonds, his legs scissoring and jack-knifing against the web hard enough to tear some threads from their anchors, he could believe it.

“Get them out of me!”

“Now, now, Draco,” Richard said, his wand still idly flipping. “Those aren’t the right words. You know what you have to say. Don’t disappoint me. You’re a brilliant boy. I’m sure you can figure this out.”

Draco began to scream. And Harry, who thought he had grown used to all the various sounds someone in pain could make, realized that he hadn’t begun to sample those sounds. This was the voice of someone in disgust as great as his pain, someone being used as food. This was the scream in the mind of the mouse pinned down under the cat’s paw, the scream of the hare with the hawk swooping on it.

The scream of the caterpillar stung and left as food for the wasp’s eggs.

The flesh of Draco’s belly bulged and rippled obscenely. Harry thought he could see the shadow of a spider’s leg moving under it, and swayed on his feet. His Draco held him up for a moment, and then they were clinging together, as tightly as two children afraid of the dark.

“I suppose, in a sense, you’re pregnant now,” Richard observed. “Tell me, how does it feel to be carrying new life? It’s a privilege that so few men ever get to experience—unless they’re the victims of sapphire spiders, of course.”

A bright, bloody slit tore across the middle of Draco’s belly, and a thrashing blue leg poked out. Richard stepped up to it, gazed at it deliberately, and then used his wand to push it back inside.

Draco was crying out mindlessly, words interrupted constantly by new flows of pain. Harry could see the gleam of what looked like armored backs, sapphire-bright mandibles, faceted eyes, through the wound.

He turned away, and with the force of his arm around his shoulders, he made his Draco turn away, too.

There was witnessing the past, so that the other man would not have suffered in vain or alone, and then there was the point where vision became obscene.

The past Draco screamed then, “You can have—you can enter my soul—just—get them out get them out GET THEM OUT OF ME NOW! PLEASE!”

“Ah,” Richard said. “Most excellent. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” And a series of small syrupy sounds followed.

Harry shuddered all over, faint and cold and weak as he had been in nightmares where Voldemort won after all. He did his best to close his ears, to sink into a trance state where the only things he was conscious of were his Draco’s skin under his hands, the brush of his hair against Harry’s face, the soft, rushed sound of his breathing. Nothing else. Nothing else existed outside the two of them.

When the darkness fell over them and then brightened into firelight again, Harry wondered whether they should turn around. Would it be worth it? Or would it only be another image of blood and pain and helplessness to carry away with them, seared into the backs of their eyes?

Then he reminded himself that this was the memory where Richard took Draco’s voice, and seeing how it was done might tell them how to get it back—or at least hint at the mystery of Draco’s voice in the Collecting Room. He animated his feet by the sheer force of will, and started to turn around again.

He paused when Draco turned with him, though. “No,” he whispered urgently. “You don’t have to do this. I can observe it alone. Just—keep your face turned away. It’s better not to know.”

Draco gave him a glance fathoms deep, the look of someone who had walked through hell and hadn’t come out of it yet. Then he touched Harry’s chest with two fingers and pointed forwards, touched his own chest, and repeated the motion.

The meaning was clear. If Harry could face this, then he could.

Harry reacted before he knew what he was doing. He took Draco’s head between his hands and kissed his brow. He wasn’t sure what he meant by the kiss. It seemed promise and humbling of himself and benediction all at once.

Draco’s gaze grew deeper. And then he looked forwards. Harry’s gaze followed his, as irresistibly as if they were joined by chains.

Richard and seven other Unspeakables surrounded Draco, who was once again bound to a stretched frame of wood and metal. They were chanting steadily, and a sapphire-blue glow surrounded their wands and radiated out to touch Draco’s limbs and chest and face. Harry felt his stomach attempt to throw itself out his mouth; he didn’t think he could look on the color of sapphires again without that happening.

After the tortures of the last two memories, the taking of Draco’s voice was almost ridiculously gentle. All that happened—and it would have been a big deal to Ron and Hermione, but not to Harry, not anymore—was that the blue glow irradiated Draco, turning his body transparent, making his bones and organs gleam like rainbow lights caught in crystal. And then Richard reached into the glowing picture and extracted one small, darker dot from among the rest. When his hand came back into view, it held a mote that looked not unlike the ones Harry had conjured to seek out the Pensieves.

Richard admired the mote, and then placed it just inside his mouth. A moment later, Draco’s voice emerged. “I reckon that our prisoner could use a bite to eat after this.”

The other Unspeakables laughed, and the sapphire-blue glow collapsed. Draco, disregarded in the middle, slowly opened his eyes. And Harry thought he knew why Draco had fought for so long to retain his voice and keep his soul inviolate from the Unspeakables, through torments that others would have surrendered to at once. He was truly helpless now, unable to communicate in any normal way, and all anyone else had to do was turn their backs to render their ignorance of his existence complete.

Harry understood now, in a way he had not before, why Draco had been so insistent that Harry look directly at him and call him the name he preferred over Malfoy. It was Draco’s way of making Harry acknowledge that he existed, as the Unspeakables had never been forced to do.

The scene faded around them, and they were back in their bodies. Harry lifted his head slowly and rolled the crick out of his neck before he looked at Draco.

“You don’t want those memories back, either,” he said, with no question in his voice.

Draco shook his head. Then he gestured for the communication sphere. Harry released the Sticking Charm on his feet so he could reach it more easily.

You can’t leave me, Draco said, barely watching the facets at all, staring fixedly at Harry instead. Never leave me.

Harry swallowed. He felt both light-headed and heavy, as if the horror had turned to gas in his mind and lead in his belly.

He knew what Draco meant. It would take him years to recover from the memories of the pain he had suffered—if he ever could—and he would need company and support throughout the healing process. As the person who had discovered the pain beside him, who had seen the memories firsthand, Harry was the companion he wanted.

But when Harry thought of all the people who would be better companions for Draco—Healers, for example—and what he might have to do to free Draco from the maze, he was not sure he should agree. This was about what was really best for Draco, not about what Harry wanted or what Draco might think was best.

Draco’s throat constricted. Harry was sure he was uttering a sob of desperation.

He reached forwards and swept Draco into his arms, communication sphere and all. Draco dropped the glass at once to hold him greedily, fingers digging into his robes and skin, clinging to reality.

There was only one answer he could give right now, because Draco needed it so.

“I promise,” Harry whispered.

And I hope like hell I can keep that promise.

Chapter 22.

Comments

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

If it helps, neither Harry nor Draco will simply collapse and give up. I'm writing this story based on the premise that people can climb up a little from the darkness- I don't think Harry or Draco will ever be normal again, nor "fixed" or "healed," but on the other hand, I can't see them being content to spend the rest of their lives as catatonic. There will be fighting, and if they go down, they'll go down struggling.