Darker Magic

Chapter 2:

Petrificus Totalus

Draco was not sure when the thought actually appeared. It had snuck into his brain gradually, a slow flow of cool water, and now it swirled and shifted and he could not rid himself of it. What are you going back to? To which the answer was, of course, Harry.

Are you sure?

No.

He made his own way to King's Cross, Apparating into the appointed chamber. It took a great amount of patience and negotiation to get himself a proper appointment time, and the fact that he was a Malfoy had a good deal to do with it, he was certain. Or perhaps it was that his father was a Death Eater now out of Azkaban. Perhaps it was that his father was a Death Eater. Perhaps it was his father. Perhaps it was.

The house-elves bid him a warmer farewell than he would have expected, bowing low and toting his trunk and owl cage into the front atrium of the manor. Other than their shuffling, knobbly feet, it was so silent Draco actually heard the dull pulse of his heartbeat against his eardrums. It was heavy, an oppressive thud-thud, like oily ocean waves washing against a rotting dock. His head felt larger than normal, filled with thick fog that threatened to press itself from his skull. He wondered what would happen to his head if it succeeded.

His father did not appear, nor did his mother. He could only guess at their whereabouts but really, the truth did not matter. His father might as well be in the study, his mother in the garden; it had always been so. Draco had come to see them as part of the surroundings, pieces of furniture or tapestry in a fading building. Soon all the color would leech from them both and be absorbed into the gray of the stones and statues.

When all was prepared and the house-elves had backed away to a respectful distance, hands clasped in front of them and heads bowed, Draco placed one hand lightly atop his trunk and one hand against the bars of his owl's cage, and then willed himself into nothingness. He liked Apparating. Disapparating. It held a sharp chill and he thought that must be what it felt like to not exist, if only for a split second. He wondered if Splinching occurred when the body could not remember how to reform itself from the nothingness, or maybe when the body did not desire to reform. And who was to say the resulting tangle of arms and legs and eyes and teeth was a mistake? Perhaps that form was more comfortable even if it could not exist for long in the dimension it sailed into.

Draco had been uncomfortable for months; he knew the value of even a moment's calm.

He waited, suspended in non-existence, to see if his body would twist itself into some grotesque and soothing shape. When he appeared on the Apparition platform at King's Cross, he was whole, with limbs where they had always been and mind in good enough working order to be infuriated by the bumbling old wizard who tottered into him trying to get off the platform. But the anger was short-lived. Obviously his body was not yet tired of its shape. Draco wondered if that meant he still had things to do in life, if that meant he had begun a countdown to the moment when he would appear malformed, if this whole line of thought meant he had gone completely off his rocker.

He gripped his trunk handle and owl cage with his two still perfectly Malfoyish hands and moved through the train station. He barely realized he was at the barrier before he was through it, and then there was more noise, shocking him into wide-eyed silence. Voices. Talking. Having conversations with each other. He'd forgotten what that sounded like. The smooth rise and lilt of the girls' voices, the full laughter and depth of the boys'... Draco listened, his features assuming their familiar frown. It made him angry, these noises. They were irritating, raucous, and he could not stand them after so much silence. He'd come to understand the silence; it had its own language and he had been fully immersed in it until he could hear the unspoken just as loudly as what was actually spoken. These girls and boys, these well-wishing parents and brothers and sisters, they said too much. They left nothing for the silence to say.

Draco's body felt tired. He wanted nothing more than to sleep, to find the rest that had eluded him the previous night. But the prospect of those dreams again drove him into wakefulness. He couldn't deal with those images anymore, he could not handle the scents that tormented him, the skin he could almost touch. He wanted to touch it, oh gods he did, he wanted it to touch him-- Draco shook his head clear, scowling disgustedly at himself.

There would be no single compartment on the train for him if he were not careful. The classes got bigger every year until there were first and second years pouring out of windows, laughing their inane giggly laughs down the train corridors, taking all the best pastries and candies from the snack trolley. Children half his height skittered around him looking fearful, excited, stunned, who the hell cared, he was going to find an empty compartment and spell the door shut. Everything was gray here, as it was at the mansion, except there was that cacophonous noise and it was the last straw.

Draco felt a tingle along the ridge of his spine and looked up. There was Harry.

A flash of black, gleaming lenses, and a rich red sweater too big for his frame. It was as if color and life had bled right out of the ashy stones into the boy's form. Draco caught his breath, stumbling at the sight. He could feel Harry's warmth from there, across the platform, and he longed to be near it again. His throat closed tightly until he shut his eyes.

When he looked again, Harry was not alone, but the red of his sweater stood out vibrantly against the hair of his best friend; the obsidian of Harry's own hair made the brown of Granger's bushy mop look pasty and lifeless. Draco breathed in the sight and was startled to think how glad he was that his eyes were still in the right place so he could view this extraordinary creature.

Harry turned his way as if tugged and Draco almost let himself catch those green, green eyes. He looked away from them at the last possible instant, even as he saw recognition flooding through Harry's irises. He set his owl's cage on the train, reached up, and hoisted himself and his trunk through the open doorway. It was still early and there were several empty compartments to choose from. Draco slipped into one, shut the door, and locked it with three separate charms. He pushed his trunk under the seat, propped his eagle owl onto the opposite seat cushions - the bird fluttered irritably against the bars and subsided - and sat down, settling his chin in one hand.

Harry was outside, standing between his two friends. The boy looked distracted, glancing around, craning his head in either direction. Draco watched until Harry had nowhere else to look except at his window, then pulled the hood of his cloak up over his head and leaned against the seat in his shroud of darkness. His body felt pleasantly warm again, something he had not felt the entire summer shut away in the chill stone of the manor. Draco drifted into a doze.

* * *

It had been cold the day of his last conversation with his father. Draco had felt the chill permeating the house, gnawing at his bones in a way that it never could on the Hogwarts Express, in the freezing Slytherin dorms, even outside during Care of Magical Creatures. He began to suspect that his father's voice brought the cold with it from somewhere deep inside his own body, somewhere that perhaps the Dementors had managed to touch and freeze solid.

His father stared at him shrewdly enough to make him shiver and asked one thing, his eyes as flat as panes of glass. "What is it, exactly, that you intend to do?"

Draco could put any number of endings onto that question. -when you leave here. -when the war strikes your beloved school. -when I am taken away again. He thought they all applied, but one over all the rest: --when he calls. Because he would, of course. Time did not stop for Draco; it did not go back and switch things around so that he could find a way to get along with his father, even this new version of his father. Lucius Malfoy was out and the Dark Lord would come calling. It had not occurred to Draco for some reason, and suddenly it hit him in the cold of the study that it could have happened at any time that summer: perhaps when Draco was sleeping, perhaps when his mother was out in the garden plucking at blood-colored roses. Maybe in the middle of one of his odd conversations with his father.

Now, on the train, Draco's dream turned sour. Harry was there holding him in the grass, and it was as it had been, gentle and comfortable, and without that burning, itching, needing sensation in the pit of his stomach. It was without the feeling that he had to be touching Harry, feeling him, breathing his air or he would go insane. It was just green grass and green eyes, and a silent understanding that there was no need to speak. In the dream the conversation was occurring inside their heads. The simplest touch of lips conveyed messages too great to voice, and Draco sought that warmth without seeking the other and it was right and perfect and he understood it.

And then Harry opened his mouth and said, "What is it that you intend to do?" in a croaking, cracking voice. Draco looked at him, horrified at being caught with his mouth hanging open, horrified at being found wordless, at being cornered by the very person he had known only moments before would never corner him, never. Harry's mouth swung wide as if hinged and the question came again in his voice, though his lips did not move. What is it that you intend to do what is it that you intend to do whatisitthatyouintendtodo rising higher and higher until it pierced his eardrums and Harry's head lolled back and his arms became ancient and snakelike and clenched Draco so tightly he could not breathe--

And he awoke to find his thick velvet cloak covering his head, stifling him. He pulled it off and flung it away, then shivered back into fitful sleep.

This time Harry held him and laid his lips delicately against his temple. Draco waited for the encroaching darkness, the arms he knew weren't Harry's - oh gods, he knew whose arms they were - but they did not come and he rested, finally warm without reservation.

It was the screech of the train's brakes pulling into Hogsmeade station that woke him.

* * *

It was pouring outside, rain falling in fat, false droplets from the clouded Great Hall ceiling, but Draco's mind was on the thestrals.

Dumbledore was speaking, and there was food sitting in front of him, but he was remembering black leathery wings and skin-draped skeletons shifting in the movement of muscles that were not there. Dead, white eyes. The eyes were most fascinating to him. So flat and lifeless, yet somehow alert. Like opaque discs glowing from the deep darkness, reflecting milky moonlight.

He'd been able to see the thestrals for a year now. Almost exactly. They had startled him the first time, harnessed there between the shafts of the carriages bound for Hogwarts. Death on a black horse, except... there was no grinning skeleton with a scythe. Draco found himself caught by the blank, white stare of the creature harnessed to his carriage of choice, and it looked at him as if it knew him. Perhaps it did. He wondered if all the thestrals suddenly recognized you when you had seen what only their lifeless eyes could see. His body might emit a scent tantalizing to the stretched hollows that served as the creatures' nostrils, or maybe he looked decayed in some way. Withered around the edges.

He'd felt decayed the day he had gained the ability to see thestrals.

"It is most important this year," Dumbledore was saying, "to remember that the school's rules have been put in place for your safety. The Forbidden Forest is, as always, off limits to everyone. I would not advise venturing too near the edge, as recent events have made its inhabitants more restless than usual."

Draco ignored his food and watched the Headmaster detachedly. The elderly wizard stood tall and commanding at the front table, his eyes heavy-lidded behind half-moon spectacles. Draco could feel the power flowing off of him, though he doubted that many of the other students could. It was either something he had not paid attention to before, or something which, like the thestrals, he had not been able to sense without the right provocation.

Draco had no illusions about why Dumbledore's power surged so strongly across the void to meet him. It was the same reason he knew Harry most likely felt it, and the reason Theodore Nott was scowling under the onslaught from where he sat several places down.

When one had seen the antithesis of such power, met it face to face and looked right into its glowing, red-slit eyes, heard Parseltongue hiss like dripping acid from its twisted, inhuman mouth, the absence of Dumbledore's outwardly seeking magic would have been a gaping void, unbalancing the world.

Draco wondered where Harry stood on the scales, where he himself stood. But he moved his mind away from Dumbledore to the more intriguing memory.

Thestrals. Did they bear the soul away after its last rattling breath? Draco remembered pressing his face to the cold bars of a cell in Azkaban, watching in a silent stupor as the prisoner in the cell next to his father's struggled to fill its lungs with the dank, poisonous air of the place. The prisoner was a ragged thing, and Draco could not even tell the person's gender through the filthy clothes and weight of despair flowing from between the bars. A Healer was in the cell watching helplessly. And then, as if shut off like a dripping tap, the whistle of air into those lungs died. It took at least a moment of staring before Draco realized what he had actually witnessed.

His father had been in high spirits that day, the summer after fifth year, still retaining a semblance of the life he had once led, sneering weakly and croaking laughter from parched lungs. He had known of the fate of his neighbor before Draco could contemplate it, and had ordered the Healer to "dispose of the detestable thing before it rotted into the stones and crawled through the wall to join him." Narcissa had reacted with nothing but a faint, vacant smile on her lips, but Draco was struck by how the lucid and warped thoughts seemed to occur simultaneously in his father's mind.

Draco had returned to school the following week, and he had seen the thestrals.

Dumbledore's steady voice pierced through his thoughts like a spike of his magic. "I must impress upon you all that though you are at school here in Hogwarts castle, you have not been pulled from the world. The danger we all face has been building steadily and should not be ignored. I would ask students from each of the four houses to begin to consider carefully how separated from the elements of this conflict you wish to be. For many of you, the decisions you make this year will affect the rest of your lives and the lives of others around you."

Dumbledore's eyes roved the room, settling for the briefest of instants on the Slytherin table. Draco met his gaze unwaveringly, feeling the seeking tendril of Dumbledore's power touch him. He narrowed his eyes, dismissing it with his mind, and Dumbledore turned away.

Draco's body tingled in the aftermath and he scowled, irritation souring inside him. His dislike for Dumbledore snapped his muscles into twitchy spasms. How dare the man presume so much? The wizard knew Draco could feel it, he had seen it in those ancient eyes. The anger rose, then ebbed. The familiar, comfortable emptiness took his body with strength born of ice. Draco straightened and swept his gaze across the room, feeling the control he had thought he'd lost over the summer flow through him again.

This was still his school, for another year at least. He was a Slytherin. A Malfoy. He could see the security of his place in the future, the path stretched out before him like a glittering carpet.

A familiar flicker caught his eye and he froze. Harry's eyes were fixed on his. Not intently. No shiver of magic or weight of thought as Draco had half-expected. Just a gaze resting on him, light flooding through it when Draco met his eyes. The Slytherin caught his breath. Harry raised one hand in a silent greeting, and the recent cold was folded gently away into the back of his mind by the rush of warmth filling his chest.

The glittering path guttered just a touch, but the look in Harry's eyes held Draco. He felt too far away from Harry. He suddenly yearned to close the distance, and pushed the thought away, not daring to wonder if the Gryffindor thought the same. Harry looked away.

When dinner concluded, Draco stood slowly and stretched his neck from side to side. His housemates went past him without a word, but then, he had expected nothing from them. Nott's hollow eyes bored into him, but the thin boy looked away under Draco's cold stare and left the Great Hall, the rest of the Slytherins in their year in tow. Draco thought Millicent Bulstrode gave him a small smile as she passed but he could have been imagining it.

The front hall was slowly emptying when he finally exited the Great Hall, prefects taking the bemused first years and other students to learn their new House passwords. Draco's feet moved slowly, too slowly to excuse properly, but he ignored it, letting himself drift vaguely in the direction of Slytherin House. He did not glance around, did not look, but with each step his feet grew a little heavier.

Finally, there was no one left in the hall. Draco went through the arch leading down to the dungeons, face twisting in a betrayal he refused to acknowledge. What was he looking for anyway? He was a Malfoy. Slytherin. He needed nothing and no one, not his housemates, not even-- no one. Stone like the garden statues.

And then Draco looked up, and there he was, standing a few feet away in the half-shadows of a branching hallway. He straightened when Draco halted, hands dropping to his sides.

"Draco."

"Harry," Draco intoned, holding himself still. His body felt poised on the edge of a drop-off, ready to fall forward, uncaring about what lay at the bottom. Rather... yearning for whatever lay beyond his sight.

He leaned forward.

Then it was easy. Easy to fall, easy to lurch and grab the body in front of him. He clutched Harry's shoulders, jerking the other boy to him. The Gryffindor made a surprised sound but then Draco had him, had what he was looking for, and kissed Harry hard on the mouth. Harry's hands came up, pushing at Draco's torso, and Draco felt hollowness burst inside at being thrust away. He clung to Harry for an impossibly long moment, tasting him, unwilling to let go just yet.

Harry was pushing him back. Draco broke the kiss with a hiss and moved away, trying to still the furious wail starting up inside. A wild thought that he had just ended his last kiss with Harry Potter shot through his mind and he grimaced against the hurt that welled up.

"Potter. Should have known you wouldn't--"

Harry stepped forward shaking his head mutely, reaching for Draco. He pulled the Slytherin toward him gently and met his mouth with his. Draco stiffened as Harry invited him into a deep, probing kiss, much more languid and filling than the frenzied one Draco had initiated. He felt Harry's arms enfold his body, and he clumsily gathered the other boy to him. Harry made a contented humming sound and tilted his head. Draco felt him sweep his mouth tentatively with his tongue.

Something new erupted in his belly. Draco gasped at the burning sensation and pulled back for air, only to feel Harry snake his fingers through his hair and ease him back into the kiss. The burning increased, flooding lower. Draco was caught in a web of itching, too-hot pleasure. Tantalizing. He recognized it, wanted more. But...

He recognized it. His gut clenched and he moaned into Harry's mouth. He felt Harry's body stiffen, felt the Gryffindor's cheeks flush hot under his palms. Draco's skin was tingling furiously and he was suddenly very aware of how tightly he was holding Harry. How close their bodies were.

He pulled himself away and blinked rapidly. Harry's face was so close, cheeks reddish, mouth half open. Draco sucked in a breath.

"Harry. How was your summer?"

Harry's brow creased and he squinted at Draco in confusion. He tried to lean in again, but Draco held him back. Harry licked his swollen lips. "It was... fine."

"Fine?" Draco said, trying to clear his head. His limbs were still prickly, as if pins were stabbing him everywhere. He frowned at Harry.

The effect was exactly what he needed. Harry dropped his eyes and shrugged dejectedly. All the joy slipped from his face. "Well... no. It was bad. But that's nothing new."

Draco did not press. He wanted to; anything to draw on that distance, to push Harry back until his own body did what he wanted it to do. But... no. Not this time.

He pulled Harry back into his arms, breathing in the scent of his hair. Lemons. He concentrated on the familiar tang, the tickle of hair against his lips, and was relieved when the tingling faded away.

After a moment, Harry wrapped his arms around Draco's waist and allowed himself to be held. But Draco's stomach was churning. The air was stifling and he felt an uneasy quivering in every muscle.

Not this, Draco pleaded silently. Please.