lomonaaeren | Chapter Twenty-Three of 'Forgive Those Who Trespass'- The Seventh Pensieve

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Chapter Twenty-Three—The Seventh Pensieve

By the time the white light of the seventh Pensieve room appeared, it was all Harry could do to keep himself from crying out in welcome and running forwards. He knew they would see images of horror in the Pensieve. But at least they were known images of horror. Harry would prefer that to another veil, a sudden surprise he was not prepared for.

He noticed that Draco followed him very carefully into the room, however, staring in several directions and jumping when Harry cast one of the spells that would identify any lurking magical creatures. Harry frowned at him. “Are you remembering something we need to be careful of here?” he asked, tilting his head back and looking at the ceiling. Nothing up there, but just because the Pensieve rooms so far had all been clear…

He felt a sharp tug on his sleeve, and looked back to see Draco frowning at him over the top of the communication sphere. Of course, he’d probably tried to sign an answer, but without Harry looking at him, he was shouting into a void.

Harry flushed, remembering, all over again, his feeling when he had realized the Unspeakables had rendered Draco easy to ignore by taking his voice. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

Draco gave him a curt nod, then rapped his fingers on the facets that meant, The center of the maze.

Harry closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recall the pattern of the maze he’d seen inscribed on the table in that first set of memories. There’d been nine balls, yes: one for Draco himself, and eight for the Pensieves. They probably were close to the center of the maze.

“You’re worried about what we’ll find there,” he said, opening his eyes.

Draco nodded, and tapped his throat. Then he shrugged, traced the letter R in the air with two of his fingers bunched together, and shrugged again.

Maybe my voice. Maybe Richard. Who can tell?

The haunted look to his eyes did more to remind Harry of what was at stake here than any irritation in the tone of a voice could have. He nodded. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep a sharper look out. But my spells have already said that no one is waiting to trap us here.”

Draco let his lips flutter open on a soundless sigh, as if to show just how much he trusted Harry’s magic, but he joined Harry at the side of the Pensieve and stared solemnly into the silvery liquid for a long moment. Harry could almost feel his muscles tightening as he prepared himself for the horror he would undoubtedly be committing inside this Pensieve—at least, if it followed the patterns of all the others.

Harry put an arm around Draco’s shoulders. The other man started, but didn’t draw away from him. “Ready?” Harry whispered, as he cast a pair of nonverbal Sticking Charms and then lowered his wand to his side.

Draco gave him a look compounded of amusement and despair all at once. Harry understood better than he would have if Draco had tried to use the sphere. Even if I am, that won’t make much difference, will it?

Harry tightened his arm as they lowered their heads. No matter what Draco had done in the past, he wanted him to know that Harry would never turn away from him or abandon him now.

Unless it’s necessary to free him from the maze, of course.

*

The light that enveloped them in this memory was unlike the brilliant white glare and the firelight that so far had seemed the Unspeakables’ preference. Harry blinked, and blinked again. He knew the glow was blue, the color of sheet lightning, but that didn’t make it any easier to get used to.

At last, he managed to make out that it illuminated the bars of a narrow, hexagonal steel cage, constructed in such a way that the prisoner inside couldn’t lie down or stand up comfortably. The prisoner sat silent and stoic towards one side of the cage, the part furthest from where Harry and Draco stood. He was a young man in dress robes, as though the Unspeakables had caught him on his way to a party. His hair was red, and Harry’s heart lurched, but no matter how long he stared, the boy’s face refused to take on any resemblance to Ron’s. He couldn’t be a Weasley cousin, either, not having freckles.

Harry’s unease only increased when the past Draco came into the light. He must have appeared from a door on the other side of the room, but the contrast between the blue glow and the darkness was so intense Harry couldn’t see it.

The Draco at his side had gone as still as a mouse that feared the shadow of a hawk. Harry hugged him with his arm again, and turned back to the scene as the past Draco started to speak.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

The boy hadn’t seen or heard him appear, either. He jumped, but then turned weary eyes towards Draco. “You’ve asked me questions like that before,” he said. “No matter what answer I give, you aren’t going to let me go. Won’t you be satisfied with my silence and leave it?”

“No.” The past Draco raised his wand. His face was taut. Harry was sure it only seemed cruel to his victim, but to him, who had so much experience in reading that particular set of features, it said that Draco was struggling to control his emotions and look cruel. “I need certain answers from you, and if you won’t give them…”

“I don’t know anything.” For the first time, the boy’s voice cracked, and Harry revised his estimate of his age downwards. Fifteen, perhaps, or a small sixteen.

“You were overheard talking about the Department of Mysteries,” Draco said. “That means you know something.”

“It was a joke. That’s all.”

“And now you see how we treat jokes.” Draco began to move in a slow circle, around the cage, forcing the boy to turn each time to look at him. “You might as well know that pretending stupidity won’t save you, here. We’ll take the truth from you one way or the other.”

“You—you can’t do that.” The boy clenched his hands in his lap. “I know that giving you Veritaserum against your will is illegal.” He sounded proud of himself for knowing, but the fear in the back of his voice kept growing and growing. Harry winced, remembering himself when he’d faced Umbridge.

“You think you’re in a place where laws matter?” Draco tilted his head. “You need a convincing demonstration, I see.” He flicked his wand at the cage and spoke a single quiet word. Harry didn’t think it was an incantation; it sounded more like a name.

The cage abruptly tightened, the oddly distended sides shooting inwards, the bars sticking to the boy’s skin and robes. The boy sucked in a panicked gasp of air. Harry was sure that he wouldn’t have done much better in his circumstances. He’d had his share of nightmares about being trapped in small, dark spaces where the walls suddenly started to squeeze in on him.

Then the bars began to burn.

The boy screamed as the smells of singing flesh and hair rose from his body. The past Draco stood watching with his hands behind his back, his face the picture of cool calculation. Only someone at Harry’s or Draco’s vantage could see the way his hands twisted around each other, as distorted as the way the boy’s body lurched off the ground.

The burning smell increased. Harry held his nose with one hand, then remembered it wouldn’t do any good and let it drop. He hauled his own Draco closer to his side; the other man was so pale Harry thought he might faint, and he wanted the support for himself, too. Then he forced himself to look more closely at the boy, who was continuing to scream in a high, thin voice.

The bars of the cage were cutting into his skin. And his skin was rippling, bubbling, transforming. Harry wasn’t entirely sure what it was becoming, but whatever it was shone with the same blue glow as the cage bars.

Then the burning smell stopped. The boy’s whimpers continued for some time, before lapsing into silence and little snuffling noises. The past Draco walked once more around the cage. Harry thought he was trying to control his jumping stomach, but he faced away most of the time and Harry couldn’t be certain.

“Now,” Draco said. “You have one more chance to tell me the truth before we decide that you’re more useful in another form, and change you.”

“I don’t know anything!” A childish wail, and Harry was certain he saw tears sliding down the boy’s face.

“I believe you,” said Draco. “But that makes you only more of a candidate for transformation, so that you can’t go back among other people and tell them what you know now. And frequent Obliviation is so messy.” He flicked his wand again, and this time Harry was sure he was speaking to the cage.

The bars tightened once more. Where they touched, the boy’s skin turned stiff and gleaming—metallic. Harry could see the ripple of magic traveling up inside his body, altering his bones, making them angled like the hinges that had held together the stone dogs pursuing Draco in the last Pensieve. The boy screamed—at least until the transformation reached his face, and it became a compound of stone and metal. Then his eyes screamed his horror, until they became gems. Harry watched life leave them and wondered if they were as dead as they seemed, or if human feeling still quivered behind them.

For the boy’s sake, he hoped he was completely dead, incapable of remembering what had happened to him.

Finally the past Draco flicked his wand again, and the cage vanished entirely. The thing that had been the boy lurched to its feet. To Harry, it looked like a rather clumsy construct of stone and metal, shunted together with random strips of tough, leathery flesh. The eyes and the fingernails and a few other parts of the body had become gems. It might be immortal, but it wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests.

Draco made it walk up and down the room a few times. He had a complicated expression on his face—as if he wanted to be pleased but could not; and as if he wanted to express disgust but was afraid of what would happen should he do so.

The door on the far side of the room opened. This time, Harry could see it clearly; light was creeping into the chamber from sconces on the walls that had lit themselves. Richard stepped in, shut the door behind him, and folded his arms across his chest, nodding in approval as he watched Draco’s golem.

“You’ve done well,” he said. “And I think we can apply this research to the next prisoner we use. After all, Sir Galen’s spell only says that someone must forever suffer as the foundation of the maze. It doesn’t say that that person has to be human.”

From the quiver that traveled up the past Draco’s cheek as he bit the inside of it, Harry thought he disagreed with that opinion, but he was smart enough not to say so. Instead, he said, “And you haven’t harmed her?”

Richard only went on admiring the construct, and said nothing.

Draco took a quick, sliding step forwards, the way Harry had sometimes done in Auror training when he let his instincts carry him ahead of the proposed patterns of strike, hex, and counterattack. “You haven’t harmed her,” he said, his tone a demand for reassurance.

“Hmmm?” Richard faced Draco again. Harry would have hated him less if he could have thought Richard was acting for dramatic effect, but it really did seem as if he’d forgotten all about Draco’s frantic question. As it was, he shook his head and blinked a few times before he could bring himself back to the subject. “Oh, of course not. You’ve done what we commanded of you, Draco—made your own advances in immortality magic and selected your own victim.” His eyes went back to the construct again. “And done a better job with it than we have. Perhaps innocence is a major factor in this process, and using Azkaban prisoners is not the best idea. Hmmm.”

Draco stepped back as if someone had driven a Muggle car at him. His face was so revolted that Harry felt a surge of fear for him, before he remembered that all of this was gone, and whatever Draco had suffered as a consequence of showing his real feelings had been suffered already.

Suffered, indeed. Harry tried to smile reassuringly at the Draco at his side, but his eyes were closed and he was breathing shallowly. Harry wondered what had affected him most: the knowledge that he had designed the cage himself, his choice of a child as victim, or his selection of an innocent. He rubbed a soothing hand over Draco’s back, and Draco let his head drop on Harry’s shoulder like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

The past Draco had controlled his face by the time Richard really looked at him, at least. “Tell me,” said Richard, and Harry stiffened. That was the same tone Richard had used when speaking of the sapphire spiders he’d dropped into Draco’s stomach. “How did it feel, when you were pretending to be one of us?”

Draco’s eyes narrowed as he felt through the question for traps. At last he said, “I am one of you.”

Richard threw his head back and laughed. Harry wished he could hear some hint of insanity in that laughter, but alas, it only sounded normal. Richard’s wasn’t the gibbering kind of madness that might have convinced some of his underlings to mistrust and turn against him. “Not in heart, Draco,” he said, when his chuckles had calmed. “I know better than that. You came here for yourself, because you wanted the Dark Mark removed. You don’t give a fig for the research we do, or the lofty goal we serve, improving humanity, unless it somehow benefits you.”

Draco said nothing, but his eyes were narrowing further and further, until Harry thought it was a wonder he could see out of them at all.

“But,” Richard said, and his voice dipped and slowed, “there are times when acting goes too far.”

“I did what you wanted,” Draco said. “Now will you punish me for that as you would for rebellion?”

“You don’t understand me,” Richard said calmly. “Not that that’s new. You have misunderstood my purposes almost since we made our first serious try at building Sir Galen’s maze.” He paused, and then began to walk in a circle around the construct. The past Draco watched him with head cocked like a dog puzzled at the actions of its master. When Harry glanced down, his Draco was watching his past self with a mask of disgust.

“You came here convinced of nothing but your own right to be free from pain,” Richard went on, smoothly. “You have clung to that goal through months when our plans deepened and solidified. Sometimes we had to use persuasion to make you agree with our more extreme actions, but you have remained. Doubtless you could tell yourself that you were forced to do this, since we had surveillance on the people you love.” He threw a keen glance at Draco. “Though, I wonder. Can someone who would see suffering and disease continue in the world—someone who does not want others to live forever—know what love is? An interesting dilemma.”

“Get on with it,” Draco said, though without much voice behind the words.

“You made your justifications,” said Richard, as though obedient to the command. Harry thought it simply amused him to seem to obey. “And they were pitiful. I have listened to them and shaken my head and still allowed you to participate in the project, because you did good work and showed skill and intelligence that few of the others have. Do you see, Draco? I have no problem admitting the good qualities of people who do not appreciate mine.”

Harry very much feared that that was true, and it would make Richard an infinitely harder opponent to deal with.

“But now,” said Richard, “now and at other times, when we asked you to do something—you went further and did something else. No one asked that you select a child, or even a young wizard, for your task. That is something you did. No one asked that you build this cage and force someone else into a golem’s shape. That is something you chose on your own. No doubt it was not as grotesque as it could have been; you threw up after you skinned your last prisoner, I understand. But the skinning was not something I told you to do.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.” Draco turned as if he would walk out the door. “I have work to do, and I have to compile the results of this experiment in a simple, easy code if others are to understand them.”

“I wager Pearl would understand it, no matter how long you waited to write it,” Richard said softly to his back.

Draco went still. Then he repeated, without looking around, “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“You made certain decisions when you had no choice, or told yourself that you had no choice,” Richard said. “It was a defensive maneuver to allow you to retain your contempt of us whilst telling yourself that you would never do something like this of your own free will. It was a truce with your conscience.

“And now you have done something horrible of your own free will. You have made it harder for the prisoner who would transform that I would have.” Richard’s voice held a hint of laughter. “You see the perils of spending too much time with one kind of person, now? You are becoming like us, whether you want to be or not.”

“No.”

Harry was not the only one who heard the snarl of despair under Draco’s denial. Once again, his shoulder received the heavy weight of his Draco’s head.

“Yes, you are,” said Richard. “Why did you choose a child?”

“Because it would impress you! Because it would keep you from hurting her!”

“And yet, you could have refused. If you were as tender-hearted as you believe you are, you would not have chosen a child as a victim no matter what provocation we offered you.” Richard raised his eyebrow. “You care more about the people around you than you should, Draco Malfoy. This compassion for them will undermine you. If you were more committed to abstract principles, you would refuse to harm someone who had never done you harm.”

Draco made no response, but his breathing sounded like the blowing of wind through a metal machine, or the series of whirs and clicks his construct was making.

“You could have knocked the child unconscious before you Transfigured him,” Richard continued, relentless. “You could have caused the transformation to happen without pain. You could have ensured that he thought he had a friend in you, so he spent his last moments in pleasure and not fear. And yet, you did none of those things, though no one was here to recommend that you use straight pain.”

No response.

“You think we are monsters,” Richard said. “I could understand resistance. I could understand joining this project with such selfishness that you simply refuse to see the suffering of others. I could understand believing as we do and accepting that the short-term pain will make for long-term gain for others—people like Pearl’s Muggleborn relatives, for example, dying of cancer.” Again the past Draco flinched. “But I cannot understand your allowing yourself to become what you think of as a monster, no matter what the cause. Unless you carried the seeds of evil within yourself already. Unless pain appeals to you at the deepest level, and you really have no compunction about hurting an innocent, though you pretend you do because it’s more socially acceptable to have that kind of conscience.” Richard paused delicately. “You liked it, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“But you only looked as if you would be sick when you started torturing him,” Richard said. “It didn’t actually happen. You only looked as if you would stop. It didn’t actually happen. You were reluctant, but you did not stop the transformation halfway through, though it was slow enough, and your magic powerful enough, that you could have.

“Actions matter more than intentions, Draco. What has happened to you, no matter the qualms of your conscience, makes you nothing better than we are.”

The past Draco sank to the floor, his hands over his eyes. “I’m not like that,” Harry could hear him whispering, his voice hollow.

Richard stepped up beside him and patted his shoulder with extreme condescension. “Of course you are not,” he said. “You simply associate with us when you think we’re wrong, and you do what we do even though you loathe it. If one cannot see the soul, Draco—and no one can, save when you cast certain very specific spells—do your victims really have any reason to think that you’re different from us?”

And he whirled and strode out of the room at high speed, only pausing to add over his shoulder, “Your performance impressed me. I have not hurt her.”

Draco was left to shudder, his fingers curling as if he would start tearing skin off his face in a moment. And then the darkness fell, and Harry and Draco were back in the Pensieve room again.

Harry cleared his throat. His face was wet, but he managed to scrub away the tears and fix his attention on his Draco, who needed him more right now.

Do you think so? Draco was already tapping out on the communication sphere.

Harry frowned. “Do I think what?”

Draco jerked his head at the Pensieve, his hair flying around him. His eyes were wide and desperate, but his face was so still that it looked like the transformed boy’s as the stone and metal replaced skin.

“A monster?” Harry let his breath out and shook his head. “No. Richard’s a very convincing speaker, that’s all.”

What I did—

“Is in the past,” Harry said firmly. “I don’t want to blame you. I don’t blame you. What happened was horrible, but what Richard did is more horrible still. I’m—somewhat familiar with the ways a mind can twist when constant pressure is put on it.” Once again, his mind returned to his fifth year at Hogwarts.

You like me.

Harry blinked. Then he said, “Yes, I do. But I’m—look, if we have to use Richard’s way of looking at things, I’m like you. I can forgive people doing things like that, when I see how it happened. I wouldn’t forgive you if I thought it was unjustifiable, no matter how much I liked you.” He thought for a minute, and added, “Besides, I don’t want to be gay, so remember, I won’t be looking for excuses to exonerate you just because you’re attractive.”

Draco stepped forwards and carefully clasped his cheeks. Harry watched him curiously, and the more so when Draco indicated he should bend down.

A moment later, a pair of cold, chapped lips touched his forehead.

Harry shivered, and not from the cold.

This just ties us tighter and tighter together. I—I can almost believe that I could change my life for him.

But I won’t be permitted to.

Sadness, slow and sweet, coiled like a snake around Harry’s heart. He cleared his throat gruffly. “We should go on,” he said, and unstuck their feet from the floor.

Draco watched him with that piercing gaze as they left the Pensieve room, but Harry was sure he didn’t know what he was thinking. If he knew, he would already be lying on top of Harry as he had in front of the veil and demanding that Harry not sacrifice himself as was the only option.

I have to do this, Harry thought again, swallowing the sadness. It’s what he needs. What kind of life would he have, dwelling forever here in the maze, even with me by his side?

Chapter 24.