lomonaaeren

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Chapter Twenty-Two—Memory Is a Grave

Harry, at least, felt too tired and drained to move after Draco had finally stopped grasping him and stepped away a bit. He arranged blankets for Draco and walled the doors of the Pensieve room with every ward and small, clever trap spell he could think of, including several that would blare like klaxons if anything moved near them. He would have liked to stay awake and guard the other man’s sleep, but he knew he didn’t have much chance of keeping his eyes open.

Especially not when Draco lay back on the blankets and then insisted that Harry lie beside him.

Harry did so without hesitation. Show hesitation now, he knew, and he would be cutting Draco apart in a way he hardly pretended to understand. He could witness the memories, but he still felt only his emotions, not Draco’s. He had never wished more fiercely that he was actually good at Legilimency. That would let him know just what Draco needed, not to mention getting around the communication barrier.

Maybe some things are meant to be hard.

But Harry rejected the thought. This wasn’t a case of another prophecy messing up and changing lives to defeat a greater evil. The Unspeakables had created this situation themselves, and Harry could not imagine any circumstances under which Draco would have deserved it.

He found himself staring into Draco’s face; they lay side by side and chest to chest, so it was somewhat hard not to. Draco was pale, and the circles under his eyes looked more like bruises. But already his mask of pain was cracking, and Harry could make out the lines of strength underneath, like a steel support beneath a fragile wooden frame.

I wish I had strength like that. I wish I could contribute to strength like that.

You can, his conscience said, if you keep your promise.

Harry stirred uneasily. Whether he would be able to keep his promise or not didn’t depend on him.

Draco’s right hand rose and reached out to him, tracing the edges of his eye sockets—so close his fingers bumped on Harry’s glasses—and then his cheekbones and jawline. The soft, shining look in his eyes told Harry what he was trying to convey.

Stop worrying. Go to sleep.

With a sigh of both reluctance and acceptance, Harry tightened his arms around Draco’s body and sought refuge in slumber from both the painful emotions he’d just experienced and the painful uncertainties awaiting him.

*

He awoke to whispers. For a moment, before he opened his eyes, he thought the magic that had filled the throne room with voices had got loose and slipped up on him and Draco. Or perhaps the maze had moved them backwards. This time, he would watch out for a flicker from his shadow, and not dismiss it as a trick of his eyes. He took his guardianship over Draco’s life too seriously to do that now.

But when he looked around, he found them still alone, the wards over the doorways shimmering in unbroken lines. Harry had no illusions that he was the best creator of wards in the entire Auror Department, but he’d laid so many that one of them would have had to break if a spy crept up and peered through. Harry rolled his neck to ease the stiffness; he wouldn’t move more than that now, since Draco was still asleep.

He could hear the whispers, though.

Harry darted his eyes restlessly from side to side. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing. By dint of shuffling carefully and making sure that he braced Draco’s weight again the moment he lifted one part of his body away, he managed to roll over and study the far corners of the Pensieve room, and to look just past the base of the pillar. Nothing. He touched his wand and twitched it back and forth, concentrating hard on the nonverbal incantation, but no human presence appeared.

There are things in this maze that aren’t human.

But Harry didn’t know all of them, so he could hardly go through a list of spells guaranteed to hit them all. Besides, Draco was starting to stir and murmur unhappily, and Harry didn’t want to recall him to wakefulness—and memory—before it was time.

So he forced himself to lie there, or twist slowly through motions designed to relieve his cramped arms and legs, and listen to the voices instead. Perhaps he could analyze them if he listened long enough; perhaps he would hear something familiar.

This time, that didn’t happen. The whispers never rose or came closer, as the ones in the room of voices had, and Harry didn’t think one of them was Ron, one Hermione, or anyone else familiar, such as other members of the Weasley family. At the same time, they did remind him of something. The something tickled irritatingly at the corner of his memory, never coming closer, never revealing itself properly in the light. Harry huffed under his breath and then froze as he realized the motion had stirred Draco’s hair.

A moment later, there could be no doubt that Draco was really returning to consciousness. His head rolled back against Harry’s arm, and his mouth opened in a yawn that Harry found the more endearing for its silence.

Remember, Harry’s internal monitor reminded him, you can’t be too attached, in case you have to leave him. And you can’t get attached to a man too much at all, if you want to have a chance of remaining straight.

Harry admitted the truth of both those propositions, but that couldn’t change the fact that he did find the yawn endearing. When Draco’s eyes popped open a moment later, he could only smile helplessly.

“Sleep well?” he whispered.

Draco, eyes wide as though he were hypnotized by Harry’s proximity, nodded slightly. Then he turned his head to the side. Harry started to open his arms, thinking this was a signal to let him go, but instead, Draco sighed out and laid his cheek against Harry’s.

That froze Harry. It felt—very close. Very warm. Animal, almost, the kind of gesture an affectionate kitten might make. He had to hold still and just wait, slowness sliding through his limbs, happiness making his heart race.

Draco pulled back at last and rose slowly to his knees, then to his feet. Once there, he put his hands on his hips and raised an eyebrow at Harry. Are you going to lie on those blankets all day?

Harry scrambled up, his face burning. The sliding warmth hadn’t left him yet, and he didn’t know why he should be so affected by such a simple thing, but he was. Reality had an eerie habit of getting past his defenses that morning.

“Do you hear the whispers?” he asked.

Draco’s eyes narrowed at once in worry, and he turned around. Harry put a hand on his shoulder, sorry to have alarmed him. “No, I don’t think they have anything to do with that throne room. I haven’t heard my friends’ voices—or your father’s, either.” When the shoulder under his palm fell a little, he knew he’d hit Draco’s main concern. “But it does sound familiar. Maybe just because it resembles leaves in wind or the murmur of a crowd, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

Draco shrugged, as good as saying that he could deal with anything short of Lucius’s voice again, and then gave the Pensieve one more lingering glance. Harry waited. He could hardly interfere in Draco’s decision. If he wanted the memories back in his head, then Harry would fetch them for him.

But Draco shook his head and turned decisively away. Harry walked after him to the far side of the Pensieve room, where Draco waited like a cat at a shut door for Harry to take the wards down. Then he made his way into the tunnel beyond the doorway without looking back.

Harry remembered to turn around and Summon the blankets they’d lain on before he followed, but it was a near thing.

*

They went on a longer uninterrupted journey than any of the others, that day, without a single attack by magical creatures, a single odd room, or another Pensieve. The tunnels varied more than they had before, however, sometimes the plain patterned stone that Harry had grown to hate, sometimes wooden corridors of the sort that Harry had seen between the throne room and the sixth Pensieve, and once or twice stairs or ramps.

Harry kept looking back over his shoulder, wondering if he could hear Unspeakables following, wondering if the stairs would retract or the ramps grow slick and unpassable behind them. But neither happened.

The whispering voices, however, kept pace with them. And Harry’s unease and wonder that Draco couldn’t hear what was so plain to him grew.

When they reached the corridor with carpet and wooden walls where they decided to make camp at last, Harry was sufficiently unnerved to ask Draco about the voices again. But Draco peered at Harry’s ears in concern, instead of admitting that it was strange he couldn’t hear them.

“I think it’s something in the maze,” Harry said, as he, at Draco’s insistence, used a small fire spell to warm up some of the cold food he’d brought along. “Not something wrong with me.”

Draco spread his hands and tilted his head. How can you be sure? the gesture said, and I have no better idea.

“Because—well, I don’t have anything wrong with me,” said Harry. “I’m not sick. Nothing’s attacked me today. I haven’t taken any wounds since my fight with the snake, and those are all healed.” He shrugged. “If something’s wrong with me, why wouldn’t something be wrong with you, too?”

The maze, Draco said, reaching out to the communication sphere. This is my place.

“Not forever,” Harry said grimly, as a fist seemed to take hold of his stomach. “I promise I’ll free you from it.”

Draco smiled condescendingly at him and reached out to pat his knee. Harry wasn’t sure that he liked the implied lack of confidence, but on the other hand, telling Draco his plan would result in a hissy fit and Draco’s refusal to let Harry go through with it. And in his current state of helplessness, with the memories from yesterday still spreading like octopus tendrils through Harry’s mind whenever he paused to think, Draco would be able to manipulate Harry through guilt into giving up the plan.

I can’t let him do that. The more Harry thought about it, the more convinced he was that it was the only way to free Draco. The maze had gone wrong, and thus he didn’t think they had to worry about becoming immortal from walking it, but on the other hand, it was literally built on Draco’s bones and mind. How could he be removed from it?

How do you safely move the foundation from under a building? You dig under it, but I don’t think that will work here. Or you crack the building away and give up its foundation, but that would mean leaving Draco in the maze forever. Not an option.

Or you do what you have to do. And if you’re limited by a lack of materials and time, that only increases the idea of doing what you have to do, not what you might like to.

Harry took a bite of warm fish, and had to admit that tasted better than the dried meat he’d brought along. Draco was hungrily chewing, his mouth and his hand both oddly tilted so that he could eat normally despite his short fingers.

Just look at him, Harry thought, and the fist that had earlier held his stomach moved to his heart. He’s long since made up for the suffering he caused—or, at the very least, he’s alive and the people he tortured are dead, and I can’t help them. He deserves a chance to regrow his bones, to walk in the sunlight, to talk normally and confess what the Unspeakables did to him to the Healers. I’ve got to win that chance for him.

Harry relaxed as the decision spread through him. He was here to rescue his friends, but he was also here to save Draco. And he was gaining the knowledge to do it; the only thing that had been lacking was the resolve. Now he had strengthened his will, and he would not turn aside because of petty fears.

He realized Draco was looking at him with a frown, doubtless wondering why he had been so silent so long. Harry reached out and cupped the other man’s face for a moment, laying a quick kiss on his cheek. “Considering tortures for Richard, if we meet up with him,” he said. “And thinking about how handsome you look in the firelight.”

Draco beamed, and snared more fish.

*

The whispers were still present when they awoke the next day, but not louder or more insistent, and Harry largely ignored them as he and Draco trotted through endless tunnels. He was eager for the seventh Pensieve, so that he could continue to gather the knowledge that would free Draco from the maze.

Now and then he rubbed his arms, feeling a bit cold, and once or twice he got a twinge in his temples, as if a headache had started to manifest and then stopped itself. But neither of those things were a warning.

They rounded a corner into a circular space that might have served for an amphitheater if it had had seats, and in the center of the circular space was the veil Sirius had fallen through.

Draco halted at once, his face wary. Harry stepped up beside him, but he could hardly look at Draco. His body had tightened up, and the cold and the headache he’d felt earlier had come back full force.

He recognized the whispers flowing past him now, of course. These were the voices of the beloved dead.

The damned thing looked exactly as it had the last time Harry had seen it, in the normal Department of Mysteries at the end of his fifth year. There was the arch; there was the ragged veil. Currents of cold swirled about Harry and curled like hands around his waist, tugging at him as if they could get him to move forwards that way.

Draco’s hand fell on his arm, but it felt oddly distant, as if Harry were turning to marble and Draco had remained only flesh. He was probably in shock, Harry thought, and his mind shivered and scrambled as it had when he was light and reading Draco’s thoughts as words scratched on glass. That was to be expected, considering the suddenness of his confrontation with an object that had appeared in his dreams again and again.

And then something happened that he had not expected. A figure moved under the ragged veil. Thin, shadowy, uncanny, it paused just at the edge where the billowing curtain separated the worlds of the living and the dead. Harry recognized the ragged hair and the tentative smile and the flashing gray eyes.

This was Sirius—looking not young and happy, as he had when Harry summoned the ghosts of his parents and the Marauders in the Forbidden Forest, but as he had just before he fell through the veil. Harry had been content with the vision of the dead that the Resurrection Stone granted him, but now his heart banged painfully against his chest, almost as painfully as it had when he was thinking of the horror of Draco’s torments. Sirius had never received justice. His afterlife might be happy, but on the other hand, Harry could have deluded himself, or seen only what he needed to see when he thought he was walking to his own death.

“Sirius,” he said.

The figure gave him another uncertain smile, and moved a few steps away from the veil. Its body was gray, not transparent like the body of a ghost, and its feet raised puffs of dust from the stone platform the veil sat on. It paused on the edge of the platform, and held out a hand. No, he paused and held out a hand.

“Harry,” Sirius said, in the barking voice that Harry remembered. “You’ve changed so much. So much more than I thought—“ He broke off and shook his head. “Time doesn’t pass in the land of the dead as it passes out here,” he murmured, obviously saddened.

Harry tried to step forwards, and found Draco clinging to him like a dead weight of bone-spider. Harry uttered a soft distressed sound, and Draco leaned hard against him and shoved. They both fell to the stone floor, and Harry yelped as his head bounced off it.

“Harry?” Sirius asked anxiously.

“Get off,” Harry muttered, and pushed at Draco. But Draco draped himself across Harry, shaking his head wildly so that his hair rustled against Harry’s chin, his eyes brilliant with fear and determination. He was mouthing something over and over, so that Harry had to reluctantly pause and try to make it out, instead of forcing Draco out of the way so he could reach Sirius.

You promised, said Draco’s lips.

Never leave me, he had said after the Pensieve. And Harry had agreed. And even though he had not known if he could keep the promise, Draco would not have expected him to break it so soon.

Damn.

Harry craned his neck so that he could stare past Draco’s head at the stone platform. Sirius was still waiting for him, face wistful but accepting, as though he had come to consider himself never a recipient of happiness.

“My time isn’t long, Harry,” he said. “Just enough to bid you goodbye. But if you don’t want to come, I’ll understand.” He glanced down at his own body with a self-deprecating expression. “I’m afraid the years haven’t done your poor old godfather much good.”

Harry put up another struggle. But short of hurting Draco, there was nothing he could do to move him. Harry swore at him. Draco just mouthed You promised, and then dropped his head to rest his ear against Harry’s chest. He seemed to be listening to Harry’s heart.

“I didn’t die, you know,” Sirius murmured. “Or, at least, not completely. Part of my soul did separate and go on; that was how I was able to come to you in the Forbidden Forest, when you thought you were walking off to be a sacrifice. But my body and the rest of my soul remained here. I couldn’t come out again until someone who cared for me passed by.” He exhaled hard, and Harry thought he was trying to control tears. “I’d given up hope of that happening,” he added.

“You’re—alive?” Harry choked. Draco punched him in the ribs, which didn’t help him get his breath.

Sirius shrugged. “I’m half-alive. That might be the best way to put it, since ‘undead’ means something else.” He strained forwards eagerly, reminding Harry of the way he’d acted when he thought about coming out of Grimmauld Place in that last year of his life. “Are you sure you couldn’t come up and touch my hand, Harry? At the very least, we’ll have one final handshake before you go back to saving the world and I go back to moldering away here. Or you might—“ He exhaled again, and how he managed to keep speaking was beyond Harry. “Or it might be that you could pull me out of this half-life I’m trapped in.”

Harry suffered a moment of intense vertigo. He could have Sirius back again—a dream that seemed so childish and silly he’d given up hope of it years ago. He could have someone who would listen to him and act like an older brother—he’d known for years now that Sirius wouldn’t have made parent or guardian material, but that was all right, an older brother was fine, perfect even, he wasn’t fifteen anymore and he didn’t need a guardian—and try to understand him when he did stupid things and support him when he faltered. He would have someone other than Ron and Hermione, who had each other, or the Weasleys, who had felt a little less like family ever since Harry found out he couldn’t marry Ginny.

And this had to be the real Sirius. How else would he know about that walk in the woods, something Harry hadn’t even told Ron and Hermione?

“Let me up!” he snarled at Draco. God, he didn’t want to hurt Draco, but he was choosing just the wrong moment to be clingy. “It’s my godfather—I have to go to him—“

There’s nothing there, Draco mouthed at him.

Harry blinked and stared back at the platform and the veil. Still he could see his godfather, yearning forwards with a hope in his face that was painful to watch.

“Yes, he is,” Harry disagreed, and finally managed to wrestle his wand free. He would Levitate Draco off him, and then he could dash up to the platform and clasp Sirius’s hand and drag him back into the living world.

Draco gripped his shoulders and shook him. He was mouthing something else now, but so fast Harry couldn’t make it out. And he had always been horrible at lip-reading anyway. Why should he try?

Because of what he’s been to you in this maze.

Growling, Harry focused on the lip-motions. Draco began to mouth the words more slowly the moment he realized Harry was paying attention to him.

Unspeakables. Experiments with death. The veil. Prisoners saw their loved ones there, but they went behind the veil when they tried to touch them.

Harry blinked and shivered, cold. He was cold all over, in fact, except where Draco draped on top of him, a warm, insistent, living weight.

But he could see Sirius so clearly. And how would he know about that walk in the woods, if he wasn’t real?

If he’s coming from within you, his conscience said this time. If this is all just a trick to make you step on the platform and then go behind the veil.

“Harry,” the figure said, in Sirius’s voice and with Sirius’s eyes shining and with Sirius’s hand extended to him. “Please. There’s not much time.” He paused, and then added in a tone so near to begging that Harry’s heart broke, “Please.”

Harry swallowed and looked back at Draco. Draco was watching him steadily, solemnly. And then he lifted his hand and laid it against Harry’s cheek.

He could be wrong. Maybe he thought he saw people vanishing behind the veil, but they were really reunited with the people they loved.

But he hadn’t been wrong about the maze so far.

And Harry trusted Draco.

“Don’t let me look,” he whispered, and buried his face in Draco’s neck, wrapping his arms around the other man’s chest. Draco immediately embraced him back, so protective that Harry nestled closer to him involuntarily.

“Harry?” called Sirius. “Just a handshake, to say goodbye? I understand if you don’t want me back in your life.” This time, Harry’s breath caught on a sob. “But just one more touch—I’ve been without human touch so long—it’s my soul that’s with James and Lily and Remus, not me—please—“

He repeated the words again and again, and then his voice rose to a mournful shriek, and faded to a handful of whispers. When Harry dared to glance in the direction of the platform again, it was empty, and only the veil billowed there.

Draco held him as he wept, and when Harry swallowed back the tears and tried to apologize, he shook his head without speaking and cupped the back of Harry’s neck. The simple gesture nearly made Harry break down again.

As he helped Draco stand and they continued down the tunnel that opened on the far side of the circular stone room, Harry’s head was reeling. He would never have imagined that he would ever trust Draco Malfoy more than Sirius.

And another revelation was forcing its way forwards, cold and angular and uncomfortable, in some ways, as the veil.

No one will ever mean to me what he does.

Chapter 23.