Heroic Perversions

Chapter 3

Draco's Dilemma

"Kill the spare!"

A flashing of green and the rushed whisper of death...

A dashing young boy's life withers in one breath.

He jerked in his bed, sweat swimming all over his skin.

His traitor's second strike: a cauldron pulled and a fire made under obedience.

A liquid of diamond brilliance and restless sparks welcomed their last ingredients.

A bone of his ignorant ancestor, a hand of his deferent follower, and the blood of his constant defeater.

His ignorance renewed, his loyalty revived, and his contempt resurrected him.

It was over when he saw it rise out of light and steam.

"No..." He scrunched his eyes harder and sobbed into the cool night, his gleaming arms and legs trembling.

Pain beyond pain, all-consuming, writhing in his muscles, tearing apart his nerves...

Fear and more fear, of the face in his dreams, beyond the set of sun, his only universe.

He rolled around his bed, twisting his sheets all around him.

Twice thwarted, twice he toyed with him.

The Cruciatus, ah, pain beyond pain. The Imperius, oh, bliss beyond bliss.

Fire assaulted his hands, burning his hold, and vibrations vaulted his virtue and his vice, and only white fear in one face was told.

Hope, there was none, but hold on, he had done.

Then they came to him, spoke to him, told him to let go and flee as quick as he can.

He listened and nodded and though scary it was, broke the connection and quickly he ran.

He ran and ran and ran, a push and a shove, a duck and then he dove, Summoned the Cup and stared into the depthless grey eyes of his fellow handsome champion, Cedric Diggory.

"Let's just take it together."

He took him to the graveyard with a Cup that was wayward, and minutes after that blunder, he sentenced him under.

"No...!" He writhed on the bed, twisting his sweat-soaked sheets around him. His pulse was fast and fierce while his heart pumped madly.

"Cedric," Harry moaned in the night, unheard by his dorm mate after placing a Silencing Charm around his bed, knowing the sounds he tend to make at night. He kicked his legs and threw his head side to side, his brow shining and furrowed like ripples on troubled waters. He screamed into the night as he jerked wide awake, breathing hard through his lips, his chest heaving. He looked around frantically, found himself bound by four corners. His eyes landed on the next bed in which lay his friend Ron.

Harry's face screwed up as he pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and rubbed them. He had thought perhaps his nightmares would be assuaged by the comfort borne of his return to Hogwarts. He had thought once he escaped the oppressive grip of the Dursleys, the nightmares would somehow vanish. How wrong he had been. He was bound at the centre of a ghastly zoetrope spinning harrowing images coming every direction.

It was the first weekend of term. Harry knew sleep would not return to him for several hours to come and knew where he would probably be in a few minutes' time. He heaved a deep sigh through his fingers as his hands slipped over his face, wiping away his sweat. Groping around for his glasses he pushed his bed curtains aside, spilling a square slab of moonlight from the window onto his bed, and swung his legs over the covers.

He grabbed his wand from his bedside drawer. This had been a habit of his after waking up from his disturbing dreams. He padded over to his trunk, carefully lifted its lid and rifled blindly inside it. Without needing to light his wand he found the familiar edges of two books and lifted the top one to slip out a folded piece of parchment between. After pulling out his arm he closed the lid and returned to his bed.

By wand-light and fully awake Harry ran his eyes idly across the yellow-brown surface of the Marauder's Map while he sat on his bed with his legs folded and his back resting against the headboard. Hundreds upon hundreds of names dotted the map in clumps, with only a handful of them set apart from the rest: those of the professors who slept in their own quarters, and the headmaster, presumably snoozing in the higher levels of his office. Although these names stood out more easily than any other by virtue of their solitude, Harry's attention was immediately stolen by something else: a most peculiar sight at - Harry found his watch atop his drawer and read the green figures - 02:47 in the morning.

Without preamble or hesitation his mind rushed with a legion of suspicions he was happy to justify by the simple supply of the name at which he was staring. And as he did so his eyes burned and they glared, marking the swell of his loathing of the name, of which the owner's forbear he had heard whisper his renewed allegiance to the man that has haunted his dreams ever since he discovered magic. The pool of wand-light rippled and the map quivered under his hands as his eyes burned a hole through the dot labelled Draco Malfoy. And he wondered why the dot was in the corridor all on its own.

He had never seen this person - whose dot zigzagged down the hallway, sometimes pausing, sometimes retreating and then lurching forward once more as though it were drowsy - ever moonlighting across the castle since he started studying the map alone at night. Two weeks into the new academic year and he had not known anyone but him to listlessly prowl the corridors under a dark sky. What was Malfoy doing at three o'clock in the morning? And seeming to behave so bizarrely? As far as Harry knew Malfoy was not a prefect, and even if he were, Harry was quite confident patrol duty was not supposed to be performed this late.

His night-time terrors rapidly creeping away, ousted by his deep-seated hatred with which his eyes bored through the map, remembering the words the Slytherin spoke through his disgusting lips on the Hogwarts Express about Lord Voldemort's imminent rise to power and Cedric's murder, Harry had a sudden stroke of mind: he wanted to hex Malfoy to Uranus.

His lips pursed against this pointless search for revenge or vent through which to release the stress of his recent dream upon Malfoy. Or for no reason at all perhaps. Harry nevertheless rose from his bed, throwing reason out to the wind. In any case he wished to the feel the refreshing air of the cold night on his face once more as he did every night following the waves of his horrible nightmares.

"Who's there?" called the Fat Lady tremulously as her portrait swung open by an invisible force. And feeling no desire to pacify the fear so obvious in her quivering voice, Harry set off down the corridor, the Marauder's Map in one hand, the Invisibility Cloak in the other. He heard the Fat Lady shuffle out of her portrait with a squeak undoubtedly to go seek refuge by her friend Violet's portrait and jabber about what she had just seen - or had not seen.

The corridors were dark and striped by narrow bands of moonlight. Harry knew there would be a slight chill. Hence he wore his maroon, oversized Weasley sweater. But the statues and the gargoyles and the portraits never stirred, remaining as still, dispassionate and guarded as usual, unaware that an unseen boy trotted down the hallway with which they were charged.

Harry checked the map of Hogwarts from time to time as he moved along the corridor. It was true he had ventured outside in the first instance to clear his mind and admittedly wallow in his depression. But tonight he was taken, at will, with this distraction by the name of Draco Malfoy. Yet he did not know what he could achieve in finding his enemy (perhaps finding out why he was so suddenly popular this year); he did not know what he would do when he approached him. But tonight's nightmare had been particularly vicious, and perhaps this called for a different, more proactive kind of relief than that which he would achieve merely traipsing about the castle with his thoughts pulled in every direction. Having an objective kept his mind clear.

Not too long now. Malfoy was not too far now and not before long he would find a reason to act. Turning into a new corridor Harry flung off his Cloak, stuffed it into his school robes together with the map, having memorized the path leading to the floor on which travelled Malfoy, and took out his wand. He folded his arms and tried to slow his pace but found now that his curiosity was ignited he could not wait to see what Malfoy was up to alone well into the night.

Harry caught his reflection in a window of classroom as he passed it... He thought he had seen someone very much like him around Hogwarts... A boy, about his age, about his build. Maybe that Wheelock boy, though he was in the same year Ginny was as she had shared with him and the others. As if he cared. His nightmares were slowly corrupting his vision; he was seeing double now.

"Had there been any sign from you, any whisper of your whereabouts, I would have been at your side immediately, nothing could have prevented me..."

No, no, no, no. Until he ran into Malfoy he was unoccupied and he did not want that. He hastened towards the fourth floor. He distantly heard the voice of the Fat Lady but her voice did not quaver anymore; Harry recognized the tone of gossip, and her voice was strengthened by it.

"You'd think it was just another midnight prowler under these never-ending Invisimubilty Cloaks everyone has and keeps throwing down to their children, Merlin forbid. But then I remembered that whole Sirius Black episode, V! I ran for it! Still gives me nightmares, that does! And that savannah I had to hide in was blasting hot, mind you! I had twigs in my hair and ruined my lovely Bonfils piece! Not going through that again, mind. Came straight here, V. It's happening almost every night since those wretched tykes came back from their holidays. And I think it's the same person every night..."

Her voice faded away.

Harry was not feeling murderous at all, but he also did not know what would become of his actions then. Things remained distinctly capricious between him and Malfoy: usually tempers flared, rages unleashed, and almost certainly curse flew. Perhaps Harry sought this very unknown; perhaps he was called by this unpredictable thing as he cut through the cold air and as his footstalls punctuated its chilled silence. He twiddled his wand. Perchance Malfoy proves disagreeable towards his active desire for respite, could he just hex Malfoy for no reason at all?

His feet turned another corner. He was not carefully studying the portraits and the little alcoves that littered the hallways tonight as he had done on many strolls, and this break in repetition together with the thundering of his heart as he drew ever closer to Malfoy had already energized him and improved his spirits tremendously.

"The least I could do is find out on behalf of everyone in this school why Malfoy's suddenly all that," Harry muttered to himself.

He made out a soft, plaintive song carried by a pleasant voice a little louder than a whisper.

"Hush, my dragon. Don't cry so much. Morrow I promise a bounty o' brooms' flying..."

Frowning, Harry pasted himself against the wall and slow slunk forward until he was able to peek around the last corner. There - slouching against the wall on the floor with a bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhisky clutched lazily in both hands, the scales of dragon-hide slip-ons gleaming in the torchlight, as was a sheet of long silver-blond hair and paler-than-ever skin - was Draco Malfoy.

"We'll trip to Fortescue's and buy you a sundae. A laughing quill or frills for your broom and there goes our day."

The flourish crossed over to a wheeze of amusement. Before Harry knew it Malfoy had broken out into breathless laughter, and his chest jogged the bottle in his hands as it heaved. When he finally subsided a broad, dreamy grin stuck onto his face, which was pointed to the arched ceiling. Malfoy was drunk. And this was highly odd behaviour indeed, even for him. Harry withdrew from the corner and pulled out his Marauder's Map to check to see if anybody had been following Malfoy but discovered only two dots in the same corridor in which he and Malfoy stood. Their closet neighbours were far asleep in Ravenclaw Tower a good quarter of a castle away.

Harry replaced the map in his robes and stuck his head back out into the corridor. Malfoy's song started and ended off coarsely - no doubt the doing of the Firewhisky that he embraced safely against his chest - but then his natural tenor would soar, light and airy on the nippy night's vigil, from his lungs scattering the elegance of each word like a melody sung by the wings of humming birds.

"Frolic in the gardens and laugh we shall.

You'll gift me a narcissi and I'll match you with a kiss..."

Harry's eyebrows rose. The song had a feel of a nursery rhyme to it. Invaluable, Harry thought hungrily. Something he had over Malfoy already and he had only been watching him for a few seconds. And what was more, there was every indication Malfoy would continue to make a fool of himself. Perhaps Harry should not announce his presence too soon. He looked on, and despite how sedate the scene was, his wand was at the ready and his mind had settled on a nice hex with which to start things off. Perhaps he could just blast Malfoy out of his misery. He fantasized Malfoy's pink-tinged cheek erupting with gruesome boils after striking him with a Furnunculus Hex.

"Kisses don't save people, Mother!" Malfoy suddenly spat with raspy bitterness. And he took a careful and generous swig of his Firewhiskey, then letting it loll on his chest. "Flowers can't save me..." Malfoy let out a short, sharp sob akin to one a child would make when a bandage was ripped off his skin. And just as suddenly Harry realized Malfoy was crying: his white and blotched face was screwed up, his hands tightly wrung his bottle of Firewhiskey as though it were a comforting blanket and his lips bowed and bent and trembled.

This was quite a contrast from a Malfoy once giggling and singing alone. So caught unexpectedly by this show of emotion from his enemy, Harry stood behind the corner motionlessly, green eyes sparkling down at the pale figure crouched on the floor yards away, contemplating whether he should leave Malfoy to his pathetic episode or walk right into the scene and cause him sound mortification. And the thought of returning to his solitary wanderings about the castle or back to Gryffindor Tower felt even more daunting than ever.

However, before he could decide, almost immediately Malfoy drew himself together: he stopped his tears, drew breath, and impatiently slapped away his tears. His eyes remained red and slightly swollen and his chest continued to rattle and shake his breath. Lamenting somewhat his indecision, Harry decided there was no need for such circumspection and turned the corner. He nonchalantly strode into the hallway, whistling as he did so, a hand firmly holding onto his wand, arms crossed.

As quickly as the strike of a snake, the pale head shot up and Malfoy's bloodshot grey eyes gleamed with surprise at Harry.

"Malfoy?" Harry said as he came even closer to the other boy and was not completely successful in striking a tone of surprise. Nevertheless he was not aiming to appear innocent, and that somehow felt like a luxury at the moment. Malfoy had yet to move. "Sloshed, I see, eh?" Yet he could not quite hide his astonishment and repulsion at seeing a student no older than him gripping a large bottle of alcohol with pale, long-fingered, easily innocent-looking hands. Malfoy was trembling on the spot, but his stunned gaze never wavered.

Malfoy seemed inadequately perturbed by his appearance for one to be discovered singing what sounded like a lullaby and slouching on the floor against a wall while wearing expensive apparel which demanded a certain level of refinement from their wearer and which included a golden necklace with a pendant the shape of the letter 'M', a silver ring set with a small emerald and a silver watch which was too large for his wrist, dangling from it inside his sleeve. Malfoy drew into himself, hugged his Firewhiskey more tightly and slipped his head back against the wall, throwing his whole face into relief. Harry halted a fair distance from Malfoy and appraised him, concentration and a trace of pity etched on his bespectacled face.

Having seen the way Malfoy's dot had moved on the Marauder's Map, he should have expected the picture in front of him. But now that he was seeing it he almost could not believe his eyes. He and his friends had trained themselves not to pay much attention to the comings and goings of Malfoy - his facial expressions and groupies had become deeply annoying - so he could not judge whether drinking himself into oblivion and singing nursery rhymes was a regular pastime of his or it was the first time Malfoy had ever done so. Of course Harry studied the Marauder's Map before he took his strolls, but he took these a little after midnight and nowhere near three o'clock in the morning, which attested to the fact that tonight's dreams were his worst yet.

"What's wrong with you?" Harry asked, a tone of genuine curiosity slipping into voice and overpowering his urge to tell Malfoy about his pathetic state. He had seen Malfoy in Potions and Care of Magical Creatures that day, and the Slytherin had been in fine form, perhaps even fiercer than usual, betraying no symptoms of distress from what Harry could recall. Therefore, whatever seemed to trouble Malfoy now was quite recent. As recent as today perhaps.

Malfoy peered at Harry from the floor, seemed to think for a moment and then said, "Potter, Potter, Potter, Harry Potter, Potter..." And he spoke no more.

A dark eyebrow slowly rose at this. Feeling increasingly disappointed of his little adventure in finding Malfoy, Harry pressed on, "Singing songs your mother sang to you when you were younger in the middle of the night?"

Now that should get the spell-lights going. Expecting to hear Malfoy telling him not to insult his mother, as it seemed Malfoy was distinctly defensive of her, Harry was decidedly taken aback when a broad grin split Malfoy's face into two which was followed by an alarming fit of silent giggles. And though Malfoy's shoulders heaved in apparent amusement he maintained, rather hauntingly, steady eye-contact with Harry, who fought his face from frowning in bafflement.

"Harry Potter," sang Malfoy again. "Songs of freedom... hope... of happy people..."

Growing exasperated and irritated by this show of melancholy that had gripped Malfoy, Harry was prepared to do away with his vague anticipation, turn around and return to his usual routes. But what overpowered him and rooted him to the spot was the desire to see what Malfoy would do next.

His father was there... Those dark thoughts were begging to rear again and he had not taken even a single step away from the scene. They were waiting to strike, to overwhelm him. He simply had to keep his mind occupied: he had to keep talking, or make Malfoy talk.

The light in Malfoy's eyes faded slowly and the smile slowly dropped. All amusement was gone from his face when he finally spoke again, and looking the slightest bit more in command of himself, said, "Oi, scar-head, I could ask you the same thing. What are you--" He pointed at Harry with a finger but managed to keep both hands on the bottle. "--doing out here so late? You're not a prefect. Having nightmares? About... Cedric Diggory?" he whispered, widening his eyes maliciously as he spoke the name.

The words seemed to lash at Harry's chest like a flail, and for a moment he could not breathe. His face must have betrayed something, for Malfoy gave him a wide grin.

"Your dead friend, Potter, he keeps you awake?" Malfoy chuckled. Then his eyes wandered to a spot on the wall behind Harry. "They say you saw him," he said in an eerie, floating voice, and his face was quite blank. "I saw him too. They say he tortured you and toyed with you--"

"And I wonder who told you that!" Harry sneered loudly. "Your father, maybe? Yeah, I saw him. He had a front-row seat."

His outburst seemed to confuse Malfoy, whose eyes had found Harry's again. He seemed unable to figure out the significance of Harry seeing his father at a Death Eater gathering when Lord Voldemort returned.

"And he killed your boyfriend right in front of you, eh?" lilted Malfoy with another cold grin as he returned to his happily inebriated state.

"He wasn't my boyfriend," said Harry, who was refuting this for the second time. "So he told his mates he was the one who killed him, then, did he?" Harry knew this to be untrue since it was Wormtail who cast the spell that killed Cedric. Yet he could see this, claiming to do evils he had not, as something Voldemort would do. Apart from this, he wanted to keep Malfoy away from Cedric.

"Could've fooled me," drawled Malfoy, his eyes rolling slightly either in an attempt to add more venom to his words or because he was struggling to keep them on Harry, given his choice of beverage. "The way you clung to his dead body when you appeared--"

"Shut up, Malfoy!" growled Harry. His wand had flashed into view and was trained at Malfoy's head.

Malfoy's eyes lit up at the wand. "Ooooh... I seem to have touched a nerve - again," he sang, smiling broadly, happily, his expression almost quite removed from his words. "You want to hex me, Potter?" He lazily raised his eyebrows, which seemed to take a tremendous effort to do, and smiled still more widely, the Firewhiskey having stained his teeth gold.

"You bet I want to!" snarled Harry as he stomped over to Malfoy. He no longer cared to excuse Malfoy for his words because he was drunk - Malfoy would have said the same thing had he been completely sober. His wand quivered underneath his hand either from the cold or from rage.

"Do you really want me to take out my wand?" Malfoy asked seriously, squinting.

"I don't bloody care, Malfoy!" Harry shouted, his voice growing shrill, so nearly uncontrollable was his fury. "I'll blast you back to King's Cross with or without your bloody twig!" Oh, please try and get smart with me...

"Fine," said Malfoy amicably with an airy rasp. He shifted onto his knees and for a second Harry thought he was going to draw out his wand. But Malfoy merely spread his arms wide in submission, the bottle of Firewhiskey firmly held in one hand. "Hit me."

"Think I won't, is that it, Malfoy?"

Malfoy shrugged, walked on his knees towards Harry and slipped his thin lips over the wand in his face, whereupon Harry pulled it out with a disgusted face and pushed it into Malfoy's forehead. Malfoy started laughing at him from when the seconds passed and Harry still had not done anything other than glare.

"Aaaaahhh, Potter, Harry, you don't surprise me..." Malfoy then sat back on his haunches with a red dot on his forehead from the pressure of Harry's wand and surveyed him as would a curious toddler a pleasant stranger. He took another careful swig of Firewhiskey before letting the bottle fall limply to his thighs.

Distantly astonished that Malfoy that said his first name, Harry sneered, "You're so pathetic, Malfoy. Do you know that?" His eyes and his voice were filled with contempt; he was genuinely appalled by the Slytherin and thought him a defeated and disgusting creature, more so than in previous years.

"For once, Potter," Malfoy slurred as he raised his bottle, "you speak sense. Touché, Harry, touché." With a pleasant lilt he splashed the rest of his Firewhiskey onto his face, deliberately missing his open mouth. The golden liquid flowed generously down his chin, its underside and disappeared beneath his shirt down his chest. Some of it seeped into his white-blond hair, staining it bronze. And his face, once starkly white, was a gleaming canvas of pale-gold mania.

Somewhat disturbed and shaking his head at the sight, Harry withdrew his wand and stomped away, trailed by the slurred whisper, "He'll kill my family..." And he savagely hoped that whoever said this committed to his threat, not forgetting to do away with Malfoy as well.