Darker Magic

Chapter 1:

Legilimens

It was the end of the summer and there were once again three Malfoys in the manor.

Draco, the youngest of the triad, kept the silence the other two had imposed as if it were some preordained decree that the manor remain cold, dark, and still while the rest of the world outside rustled and chirped and gusted about.

Draco was taller than his mother this summer, which would have seemed quite the feat to the tea friends of the thin, lithe woman... except no one came for tea. No one came for anything anymore. Draco showed the deserted library shelves his new but already forgotten height, sitting straight-backed in the window seat, watching the earliest of the leaves fade from vibrant green to fiery orange. The trees looked odd, speckled like that in the middle of August. Draco watched. The skies grew darker each day, blue slipping into dull gray. Clouds billowed by, but no rain fell. And the air grew colder.

Draco knew what it was. He felt it vibrating through the polished floorboards under his toes. He didn't know when or where, only that it was approaching.

There was a woman in the house, somewhere. Mother. In the garden now. Draco could see her, bent on her knees like a willow in the midst of gently waving flower stalks, running fine manicured hands that had never gardened over the green thorns. She did not prick herself; Draco could see it from the window. Her blood would have been a bright red blossom against the pearl gray of her dress. Everyday, for hours, she would sit under the lowering sky, blond hair whipping in gusts of cool, dry wind. Just stroking the rose stems slowly, caressing the thick green.

Draco wanted to gather her hair behind her and pin it up on her head, curl it into a thick coif that said she still thought about such things. But he knew it was the same to her as Quidditch was to him: something on the sidelines, a movement in the corner of one eye. Continually glanced at, but ultimately ignored.

So he sat and watched instead, watched her fingers drift up and down the stems, and let his own fingers float just over the white skin of his left arm. Because that was what the man did.

Father.

The Ministry under Fudge, in all its stupidity and incompetence, could not even keep hold of a man they'd found in Death Eater's robes cursing children in the very bowels of the Ministry building. After the mass Dementor revolt, only wizards guarded the cells of Azkaban, the few Aurors who could be spared. Draco didn't know exactly how his father had extracted himself from that problem, but he suspected it had something to do with the wizards in the highest reaches of the government, the ones right under Fudge's snooty nose. Those were always the positions that escaped notice. Wizarding law had become a joke. They could have had Voldemort himself in their clutches and not known what to charge him with. Draco saw a smirk sneaking across his own reflected face in the double paned window, wondering how long it would have taken Voldemort to wizen his way out of the Wizengamot.

Draco had often passed his father in silence, a figure in rich, forest green robes sitting in the study, gazing out his own window. He could have been one of the living statues out in the garden whose stony hair drifted in odd drafts, whose slate-colored eyes followed ravens winging their way over the lush but somehow lifeless plants. Fingers trailing over an inner forearm once as pale as Draco's, now stained with twisting black.

He was watching his wife in the garden. Draco retired to the upstairs library and did the same, and the manor remained cloaked in silence.

* * *

The first time his father told him to get out was a week after his return. It was the middle of July. Draco woke in a fury that morning, unable to recall his dream, but assured by the gnawing tension in his gut that it had been undesirable. He had found his mother already out in the garden at noon, much earlier than was her wont, and had spoken to her, only to stop when he saw that her mind was not with his words. She stared off past the moss-covered estate wall, its greenish-gray stones jutting out in quaint unevenness. Her mouth opened once and for a long second Draco held his breath, terrified that he would miss whatever was about to issue forth if he spoke or moved. But she only closed her mouth again and dug into the flower bed with white fingers, continuously burying and unearthing her hands until they were caked with dirt. He'd shouted at her then, more out of a need to startle her from her stupor than out of any sort of anger. When she did not respond, he rose and left her there, went up to his parents' room and rifled through the closet until his fingers closed on a thick woolen shawl. The house elves stuttered their disbelief and anxiety about his actions but he waved them away and took the shawl downstairs, outside to the garden, flinging it across her shoulders.

She did not move.

It wasn't until he was back in the library that he saw she had shrugged it off. He looked at the sky-blue wool lying puddled against the soles of her shoes and gritted his teeth. The skin of his arm was red and raw already from the constant tracks of his fingers.

Draco found himself just inside the door of the study moments later, staring at his father's silent figure. It seemed enough for him to simply be there, to weight the room with his presence until his father looked at him. Lucius Malfoy turned his head and gazed at his son, and there was none of the cloudiness that Draco had come to imagine there. He looked Draco up and down once, from his toes to his blond hair.

Draco's voice was harsh when it made itself known. "Fucking do something!"

Lucius blinked once. Sneered. "Get out."

Draco smirked back, meeting cold eyes with his own. But it was no longer enough to stand there. He backed out of the room, and his father continued to stare at the space he had vacated until Draco turned and walked away down the hall.

He went back to the library and looked at the chafed skin of his arm. Once before, he had rubbed it until it bruised, but then...

But then Harry. He'd grabbed his wrists in his hands and pulled his arms apart. Draco had shouted at him, had tried to get up and leave. But Harry only looked at him mutely and tightened his grip until the force of his fingers became a dull ache on already tender skin. And then Harry raised the sore arm, kissed the skin lightly, and let him go.

And Draco had not left after all.

* * *

One day his father turned to him as he passed by the study. "Draco."

The sound was a jangle in Draco's ears. It took him a long moment to remember what his name sounded like coming from his father's lips. Lucius Malfoy sat stone-faced in front of the window. Draco walked up and sat down across from him, scraping the chair across the floor, but his father did not relinquish his gaze from the glass.

"Dementors, Draco."

He looked at his father. "What?"

Lucius turned his eyes on his son. They were clear, alight with some sort of hidden mirth. "Perfect creatures. They reduce you to the most primal piece of yourself. You almost feel you can suck what you need from the nearest person, just to fill the void."

There were no more Dementors in Azkaban. There had not been since summer's end after fifth year. The few that the Ministry had spelled forcefully into remaining at the prison had long since shed their magical shackles and vanished. Draco had a sense they had stayed at first because suddenly the ratio of prisoners to prison wardens had gone up significantly. But even that surplus could not keep them there forever.

"What was there to suck from you?" Draco did not think he'd meant it to be spiteful. But he couldn't be sure.

His father's eyes flickered strangely. His mask fell back into place. He looked Draco over again and then frowned. "Get out, Draco."

Draco stood slowly, towering over his father where he sat. Lucius looked up at him, cold emptiness in his eyes, and Draco shivered. He left the room.

* * *

That night Draco dreamt of deep green grass and rustling trees, of being warm in spite of the wind. He was not alone in the grass; he didn't need to look up to know it. He dreamt of warm arms around his chest, of fingers looping through his hair.

When he awoke, there was no green, only white cotton sheets turned ice-blue under the veil of darkness. There was no sound of shifting pine needles. He jerked his blanket up and burrowed into his pillow, the warmth of the spot where his head had lain already leeching away. He could still feel the imprint of those arms on his chest, but the heat had vanished.

Draco could not get warm.

* * *

There were weeks of silence; at least, that was Draco's impression. In reality, there was no way to know for sure, just the rise of the sun and the gleam of the stars as day gave way to night. Sometimes he sat up for hours watching the huge wheel of stars turn in the sky, the moon skimming up and floating down like a will-o-the-wisp. The garden was unearthly in the white light, full of pocks and hollows of darkness. He walked there during the twilight after his mother had at last journeyed back indoors because he could not walk the paths with her eyes staring. If they had been turned his way, perhaps it would have felt cleaner, less haunting, but she looked at nothing that he could see. The last day he tried to walk with her still sitting there, her eyes had swiveled toward him like echoes following a sound and he had caught himself in the spark of recognition there, the deep sadness in her face. She continued to turn her head with barely a pause, and her eyes went sightless again. Draco had retreated into the manor, going to the study before thinking about it, where his father's cold gaze had first met then turned him out. Always the same two words.

Get out.

Draco felt best on the days he managed to coax something more from his father, though he hardly did anything to warrant the sudden outbursts of lucidity. Just entering the room was enough some days; others he sat there for over an hour before his father gave a shuddering sigh and looked at him directly. He always squared his shoulders toward Draco, which seemed odd. Draco could not remember having prompted this behavior from his father previously. But there was always something in the man's strange topics of conversation that demanded Draco's full attention; perhaps they demanded Lucius' as well.

"Can you say you've ever truly been unhappy, Draco?"

He blinked at the older man, his mind still with his mother in the garden. They'd been watching her - their favorite familial pastime, Draco thought with a grimace - and Lucius had come to life, taking a step outside the chilled statue he had become, and spoken.

"What?" was all Draco managed in response. He had gotten little sleep the night before, waking in cold sweats because of the pressing silence and something else he could never remember, but it had something to do with a warmth he could not quite touch. It was white noise just beyond his understanding. He frowned, rubbed his temples, and looked at the complicated green and gold fleur de lys carpet pattern. "Gods, what are you talking about?"

"Unhappiness, Draco. It's utterly impossible."

Draco squinted at his father and sighed. "I don't understand."

Lucius raised one eyebrow and narrowed his eyes. "Try to imagine a place where unhappiness is reality. It's all you ever think of, all you can experience. You start to realize just how unhappy you have really been in life. It all comes back and it's glorious, how wrong it is. How unhappy you were not."

"Are you talking about the Dementors?"

Lucius smiled vaguely, turning to face the window again. "They take all the unhappiness out of life. Do you see? They feed off of your joy and all you can think of are the times when you were devoid of that emotion. But those memories change. They become worse, until you can't remember what the truth of the matter really was, or even if there was a truth once. Perhaps you never had those particular unfavorable experiences at all."

Draco shook his head and looked away. He tried to gather his thoughts. "You-- But they're your memories."

"But not necessarily as you remember them." Lucius closed his eyes and tilted his head. "My real unhappiness is nothing compared to what I felt there. I could never have experienced the sort of pain they gave me in the past. Otherwise it would mean nothing to feel it now."

Draco sighed. "That doesn't mean anything. You can remember pain. It's what makes the Dementors effective."

Lucius fixed a hard gaze on him. "They are effective because we allow them to be. We let them twist us. We twist for them, Draco. They change us, change what we remember until our memories are not our own. They add pain, and draw from the void it creates, but our actual pain is minuscule compared to it."

"What did they show you?"

Lucius sneered at his reflection in silence and for a long moment Draco prepared to leave, certain he would be sent out again and quite ready to depart. He could see what his father was getting at, vaguely. But it was frustratingly unclear. Suddenly his father's smile widened into a horrid grimace and he sniffed. "That we allow people too much space in our lives. That they don't deserve more than a passing thought, if that."

Draco looked at his father intently. "What about the people we care about?"

"We can't have people like that, Draco." Lucius let a resigned half-smirk touch his face.

Draco narrowed his eyes. He'd expected something like this. It didn't mean he agreed with it. But it felt strange to him suddenly, as if it made sense, and yet did not. As if he were agreeing with Lucius. He had thought that ever since his confusing feelings for Harry had first surfaced, he and his father would be at odds over everything. He'd silently thanked the Ministry officials for the reprieve they had unwittingly given him by removing his father from his life, and prepared subconsciously to hide his disagreement if he could. He knew Lucius would be back.

Perhaps his father was the one who had changed, some lonely midnight hour in the dank blackness of the Azkaban cells. Reduced to all that is primal, all that is important. Or perhaps it was only Draco who had really changed. But it seemed, since Lucius' return to the manor, that the farther away Draco drew from his old mindset, the more he and his father were beginning to see eye to eye, at least in the most recent of these strange conversations. It bothered him a great deal when he noticed the inklings of it. Draco never admitted it, even argued it when it happened. He told himself it was not his father but rather his father's imprisonment speaking - he'd never spoken this way before - and it was convincing as he sat in the light from the study windows. Yet his father's odd words made sense at night when Draco was alone again in the darkness. Some complex truth, or an answer, drawing inexorably nearer.

Interesting. But apparently not an exclusive occurrence. Draco definitely found disagreement in this instance.

"What about you and Mother? I happen to care about what happens to you." He narrowed his eyes and added in a withering tone, "Whether you believe that or not."

Lucius smirked and glanced out the window at the lone figure still sitting in the roses. "Then you have a foolish weakness, Draco, one that will be exploited and used to destroy you."

Draco felt his knuckles clench at his father's words. His mind tried to take him to the imagined cell in Azkaban, hovered over by Dementors, but he shoved the image out. He should have known. He looked away, turning his eyes to his mother instead. The skin of her bare forearms was lily-white, blotchy in places from the wind. "How can you possibly say that?"

"Because you are my weakness."

All of Draco's arguments floated uselessly out of his head. He stared at his father. Lucius Malfoy looked impassively back from his chair. For a split second, Draco saw the hollowness the man had come home with. There, just under the eyes.

"If you did not know, then it is just as well. You have already been used numerous times to hurt me. To make me submit to certain... indignities. Your mother was the means for years. Eventually you learn to place that which you love into a space of indifference. Camaraderie. Companionship. Call it what you will. But not love."

Lucius closed his eyes and settled back in a satisfied manner. "The Dark Lord knows me, knows how to control me. But he cannot control what I can no longer care about."

"Mother," Draco said flatly.

"When a person is being influenced by the use of pawns, those pawns have a habit of being destroyed. I gave up loving your mother to keep her from becoming one of those dispensables. It has kept her alive, at the very least." Lucius pursed his lips, his gaze settling on the plush armrest of his chair. "But I can't give you up."

"Me..." Draco's voice was very soft.

His father smiled listlessly at him. "I am weary of being emotionless, Draco. In that place... you actually feel it. Like tiny pebbles in your veins."

Draco saw his father's eyes glaze momentarily. He wondered if the man was about to slip into one of his stupors again. But Lucius blinked twice and twitched his shoulders. He focused his gaze on Draco once more. There was a dim flicker in the depths, a shiver of facial muscles.

"Perhaps I am not ready to give up that spark yet, not concerning you, anyway. And for that selfish failure I am sorrier than words can express."

* * *

Draco awoke in purple darkness, chest heaving, fingers clutching at his sheets. His bed. He was in his bed. But for a moment... he had been elsewhere. With someone else. Hands sliding up his arms, over his collarbone. He touched the indentation there with shaking fingers, still able to feel heat from a phantom palm, pressed lightly over his breastbone. A body with heat streaming, moving against his. Over his. Hot breath on his chest and a soft hitching gasp.

Bare skin.

Draco wrenched himself free of the tangles of sheets and staggered from his bed. Dizziness swarmed through his brain and he nearly fell. His hands sought out something to buoy him and found the soft give of his mattress. His legs buckled. Draco sat there on his knees against the bed, face pressed into the white cloth of his sheets, and tried to breathe.

And smelled Harry.

His eyes opened wide and he pushed away from the bed so hard he hit his head on the night table. Using it to pull himself up, Draco ran from the room, down the hallway in his bare feet. He managed to make it to the bottom of the stairs without falling and found his way outside into the garden. The moonlight was bright, shaping the trees into black hulks, the stone pathway into glittering silver. Draco could see the sharp outline of the rose bushes to the left, spiky and angular, jutting upward. He turned off the pathway, dropping to his knees in the midst of the flowers. The thorns tore at his arms, scoring his sides.

All around was a tableau of stark white and inky black. He closed his eyes and his mind swam with fuzzy images of soft browns, pale cream, the glow of fire-lit skin, curving muscle. Veiled green shining warm in the lamplight. A shudder ran through his body. Draco blinked at the dirt in front of him, startled by the abrupt shift into non-color. He was certain for a breathless moment that he could tip forward and fall forever into the patches shadowed by the thicker rose bushes. Like a hole in the earth. A rose, red by day but now washed in silvery dew and night-black, waved gently in front of him, bowing toward the ground.

He plunged his hands into the dirt, lungs heaving, feeling the damp under-soil mould around his fingertips. It was cold. Draco's eyes widened as the heat rushed from his body, the wind whipping at the threads of sweat running down his back. He pulled his hands out, then pushed them in deeper and the tense tug in his abdomen lessened. The heat in his hips drifted back out of range. Draco lifted his face skyward, closed his eyes, and tentatively sniffed the air.

Only the smell of roses and night wind off the pines met his nostrils. He breathed deeply and shivered, looking down at his chest. It was so white under the moon. He could not see the lines of his muscles there; just a curving expanse of ivory skin.

Draco's mind finally came fully awake.

When he fell into bed several moments later, having climbed the stairs again in silence and padded through the emptiness of the house, his hands were still grimy with damp soil. He curled them into fists beneath his nose to block out the haunting scent he could still taste in the air. Sweet lemons.

* * *

His father was scrutinizing him, head tilted, long elegant fingers resting on his own chin and lips. Draco was slow to comprehend and his heart jumped. He'd found his father engaged in this behavior quite often. It was usually a small test of a sort, and he had reveled in the chance to stare down his father's gaze, to remain the blank slate and earn the approving raise of one eyebrow. But it was the first time he'd seen this particular glint in his father's eye since his return from Azkaban.

Lucius Malfoy was extremely intuitive, quite deft at figuring other people out before they realized what he was up to. Many of Voldemort's own followers saw Lucius as a cowed servant, ready to drop all and betray anyone at the Dark Lord's softest bidding. A contracted bully without a mind of his own. Draco was very aware that this couldn't be more false. Lucius had simple, subtle abilities which were prized and craved by Voldemort... and possibly feared by him as well? Draco was not certain; Voldemort was better at all arts of control, violent or otherwise, than anyone he'd known. He kept Lucius Malfoy close for his own benefit. Safety could well be a part of the package.

Draco met his father's ice-grey eyes, the eyes he had inherited, and wondered if he had not often considered the very same possibility.

His father's delicate seduction of others' secrets was something Draco had long admired, an ability he both attempted to block and to emulate. He remembered enjoying the rare moments when Lucius subjected him to his strictest attentions, always with a tiny, appreciative curl of his lip for his son's strengthening efforts of resistance. Now, however, with so many unfamiliar emotions tangling his thoughts, Draco only found the invasion unnerving, something to be avoided at all costs. He did not feel remotely prepared to hide anything from his father.

Lucius watched his son for several more moments. His eyes narrowed and a smile different from the one he usually wore quirked his mouth.

"Harry Potter," he murmured.

Draco started, terrified that his father had discovered his secret. "What?"

"Your situation. It is, I imagine, much like his. I would think he walks his life very much alone. As you do."

Draco relaxed and tried to slow the thud of his heart. Every nerve felt fiery, as if it had been plucked by nervous fingers. He shook himself and looked away. "My choice."

"Precisely." Lucius Malfoy pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned back in his chair. "Whether he knows it or not, he has chosen loneliness as well."

"He knows," Draco muttered, fixating on his mother's bowed form through the window.

It was the silvery edge to Lucius' voice that turned Draco's eyes back to him. "I wonder."

Draco shrugged, forcing himself to appear nonchalant. Every word he said was drawing his father closer. The man would grasp onto the frailest of threads and pull himself slowly toward whatever he was looking for, as if he were climbing a precipice. Draco suspected that it was the chase that drove his father on, that knowing exactly what he was searching for was beside the point. He would know when he found it.

Draco could not allow that, not this time. He looked at his father mutely, and slowly turned his gaze to the window again. He felt the piercing stare for a moment longer, and then heard that soft, almost inaudible huff of breath that signaled his father had given up... and was in good spirits about it.

"It does not matter either way. Whether Potter chooses to go it alone or with others by his side, he is still a fool. He will fall because he does not have the will to do otherwise."

Draco snorted softly. "I would think his very survival up until this point is more than enough proof of how strong his will is."

Lucius' eyes narrowed. "Hardly. It is more proof of the Dark Lord's incompetence."

Draco blinked and looked at his father. Lucius stared back at him and for once - for once - Draco saw the struggle there, saw him debating with himself over what he had just said. It closed his throat to see it, the vulnerability. His father not only did not seem to know what he was saying, but also why he was saying it.

"What are you--"

In a flash, the tried and tested Lucius Malfoy was back, eyes glittering. His face suddenly looked ugly to Draco, twisted into a mask of someone who had once been familiar. Only seconds prior to this he had seen the other man, but it felt like millennia, and the loss pulled at Draco's chest.

"There is no turning back, from any of it, Draco. The Dark Lord may fail again and again, but in the end Potter will not be a match for him simply because he lacks the strength of a blind goal. He will fight, and he will die. Whether Voldemort goes with him is hardly the point."

Draco had heard thoughts on this thread many times. It bit at him in unexpected places this time, tender areas in his chest, and he shifted against it. "Survival isn't blind enough then?"

Lucius looked at Draco incredulously and then threw back his head in a long, jarring laugh. Draco jumped and was glad his father did not see.

"His survival depends on his luck. And sooner or later it will run out, unless he finds something more important to strive for."

"Such as?"

"Power is an option."

Draco barely realized he had begun to laugh as well. Lucius sized him up, eyes burning into him as he struggled to pull himself into seriousness again. "The sort of power Potter seeks is not nearly blind enough. He'll want there to be more to it."

Lucius smiled faintly. "And that is why he will die. He could kill Voldemort if he wished. But he doesn't want it enough. So Voldemort has already beaten him in more ways than he knows."

Draco did not respond. Thankfully, his father slipped out of his odd lucidity in the next few moments and returned to staring out the window. The shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks swarmed up. Draco watched years climb onto his father's face. His own thoughts struggled for dominance and he fought them down instinctively before remembering that his father was no longer fixated on him.

But the man was right. His father could have been the one talking to Harry all those weeks instead of Draco. As soon as he heard the words, Draco's mind refitted the puzzle to accommodate, and he cursed himself for not noticing what his father had merely guessed at. Half of him still did not believe that Harry was doomed. But the other half... Draco's stomach lurched.

His father's head swiveled his way slowly and Draco could not breathe for fear that he had not been as far gone as he'd looked. Perhaps he had decoded every thought. But Lucius only stared at him in silence.

Draco went. Not to the library, but to his room. He sat on his bed, turned his wand over and over between his fingers, and searched for a memory where Harry had hinted at the goal that had to be there.

Because Draco was beginning to wonder.

* * *

His father did not return to the study after that; he moved around the house freely and Draco felt some of the pressing weight lift from the manor. His mother's face took on a more flushed, alive look, and he saw less of her in the gardens, though it may have been that he spent less time looking. The imprint of her knees was still fresh in the soil in the mornings. Draco knelt in them, feeling like he was drifting into his mother's ghost, and pushed his fingers into the dirt, then sat back and cleaned his fingernails with a white handkerchief. It was automatic. Something to do.

He had three days left.

The return to Hogwarts was imminent, and Draco found himself waking in the dull, gray light of morning, balking at the idea of going back to the noise, the hustle, the constant motion.

He wanted to go back. He wanted what was there, who was there, or rather, who would be there. Harry would be there, and that should have been enough.

But Draco's dreams were more frantic. He never ran except for that first night. He now opened his eyes dazedly and stared at the ceiling, ignoring his body until it fell back within his recognition, until the pressure in his abdomen faded, the heat in his groin vanishing as if it had never been. He knew who it was in his dreams, but he never spoke the name. He felt the whole house would know if he did; the walls would absorb the name like blood into soil, the tapestries would soak it into themselves and change their appearances.

His mother looked at him in the mornings in such a way that he wondered if he had not spoken the name in his sleep.

The final night arrived and Draco did not sleep at all. He sat in bed fully clothed and thought about green grass and whispering pine trees, about a warm grasp around his chest. Soft words. But though he sought it, he did not feel the safety these memories had once promised. The shadows lengthened and receded in his room and Draco fought with the silence. There were no answers in his return to Hogwarts, just more unanswerable questions. Harry would be there. Draco's smile struggled, then vanished. He should feel right about Harry's presence. The way he'd felt all summer.

But Draco couldn't feel it anymore.