[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Fading in the Sunlight, Harry/Draco, R, 4/4
Part Three.
Part One.
Title: Fading in the Sunlight (4/4)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, mentions of other canon background pairings
Content Notes: Horror, torture, gore, violence, angst, drama, dubious consent
Wordcount: This part 7200
Rating: R
Summary: The day that Draco Malfoy sees Harry Potter fade into the sunlight ahead of him as they’re both leaving the Ministry, his life changes. And the hunt is on to find out what really happened to Harry Potter.
Author’s Notes: This is another one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year, and should have four parts, to be updated over the next few days.
Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the story.
Part Four
“Can we trust your friends?”
“I don’t know.”
Harry was pacing slowly back and forth across the length of the Malfoy library. Draco watched him in silence. It was nearly morning now; in fact, Draco thought he could see the first vestiges of dawn’s pearly light peeking in through the windows. But neither of them had wanted to go to sleep, or probably would have been able to, given the way the ritual had energized them.
Besides, they only had a limited amount of time before the Ministry would probably announce Harry Potter’s kidnapping or disappearance. Draco was betting on kidnapping, so they could stir up the maximum amount of drama and have the most people looking for Harry. Harry thought it would be disappearance, or even that they would announce he was sick and would be out of sight for a little while, given that they wouldn’t want to make it seem they had lost control of the situation.
“Why not?”
Harry paused and looked at him. His eyes gleamed with a ripple of the power that had loomed over the circle of standing stones. Draco thought he did a very bad job of hiding his shiver, but luckily, Harry only smiled once and returned to pacing back and forth.
“Because they didn’t raise a fuss,” Harry said. “You told me they didn’t, and it wasn’t something that Robards or the rest ever discussed in front of me, either, even when they wanted to taunt me. That means that either they didn’t know the difference between me and the doppelganger, or…”
“They preferred the spiritless version of you.”
Harry gave a harsh, croaking laugh that made Draco remember the way he had looked when Draco first took him out of the cell. “Oh, he has plenty of spirit. His own opinions, even. That’s why they could make him so convincing. They took so much from me.”
Lightning arced away from him as he spoke. Draco jumped, and then cast a quick spell to prevent it from incinerating the books on the nearest shelf. Harry stared at the dwindling flames in silence for a moment.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Draco quelled the last of the flames and turned to face him. “Well, your doppelganger opposed a bill on house-elf rights that Granger wanted to bring in front of the Wizengamot. It’s possible that she would have wondered what was going on with you, and we should go to her first.”
He hesitated, aware of another problem, and Harry glanced at him. “What?”
“I don’t know how to get your wand back from the doppelganger. I don’t know where he would put it. I suppose it would drop wherever he is when the magic runs out, or maybe it would be down in the cells, and-”
“I will never go back there again. I’ll burn the Ministry down first.”
The lightning was arcing around Harry again, and Draco extended his arm to calm him. “I can understand that. Don’t worry about it. We’ll find a way to make this work. Perhaps you could borrow one of the Malfoy wands that my ancestors used. My father never throws anything away, and a wand with a dead owner isn’t the same as trying to use a wand you haven’t mastered. One of them might respond to you.”
Harry shut his eyes and breathed for a long moment. Then he said, “I actually have a solution to that problem. Not that it could help me in that cell where all my magic was blocked.” He held out his hand.
There was a humming, whooshing noise, as if something was traveling at speed through the house, and a wand slammed into Harry’s palm. Draco stared at it with widening eyes. The wand looked as if it was made of-
“Elder.” Harry spun it once, and the wand sparked and spat dark fire that burned out harmlessly in the air long before it would have encountered the library books, to Draco’s immense relief. “The Elder Wand.”
“It answers to you,” Draco whispered. “I’m amazed that it let you be imprisoned.”
“They took me in Robards’s house,” Harry answered flatly. “I still trusted him, and when they bound me with the process the Department of Mysteries invented, which established the connection between me and the doppelganger…”
His body crackled with a grey aura that frankly scared Draco more than the dark fire. He held his breath, and only spoke again when Harry had the aura under control. “Do you think we’ll have to fight the Unspeakables?”
Harry shook his head roughly, shaggy hair flying around him. “I doubt it. None of them ever showed up to talk to me or study the process, and they would have. I think they invented the damn thing, but the Department of Magical Law Enforcement was the one that decided to use it.”
Draco nodded. It was good to know that the most powerful department in the Ministry probably wasn’t on their list of enemies, at least. “Do you want to approach Granger?”
Harry closed his eyes. “It has less to do with not trusting her.”
“Yes?”
“And more to do with thinking that she won’t approve of what I mean to do.”
Draco hadn’t thought of that. He had assumed that Granger’s unshakeable loyalty would hold her to Harry’s side no matter what. After all, it had kept her there while she and Harry went on an insane quest to defeat the Dark Lord, and they had used Unforgivables together, from what Draco had heard. But murder might be something different.
“And it would take too long,” Harry said, his voice descending into a growl.
Draco nodded slowly. “You think they’ll come up with a way to defend against what you’ll do if we don’t move now.”
“Yes.”
Harry glanced at him, and his eyes were flaring, brilliant green holes into something dark and depthless. Draco found his breath coming faster. Harry smiled smugly at him, his lips curling up a little.
“You won’t hesitate. I trust Hermione and Ron, but-they’ll want explanations, they’ll want to discuss things, they’ll distrust you, they’ll want to come up with some solution other than hurting and murdering the people who hurt me. I don’t want that.”
As far as Draco was concerned, Harry deserved to get whatever he wanted, given all the years he’d spent in that foul prison. He nodded. “What’s your first plan? Or did you want me to come up with that, as the cunning Slytherin?”
Harry started to answer, but then glanced over his shoulder. “I think someone is outside the door of the library.”
Draco nodded and stood, walking over to it while Harry drifted behind a bookshelf. Draco would prefer to keep either of his parents from realizing that Harry was here, as impossible as that might ultimately be. He didn’t want to deal with their objections any more than Harry wanted to deal with his friends’.
Narcissa was outside the door, a paper folded over her arm. Draco couldn’t see the full story, but there was a picture of Harry, or rather of his doppelganger, and the half-visible headline had the letters ICK in it. Draco nodded. Harry had been right. They’d gone for the illness story to give themselves a few days to frantically hunt for Harry.
“Draco, what did you do?” Narcissa hissed.
Draco met his mother’s eyes. “What I could.”
“Just because you want to pay back a life-debt-”
Draco shook his head. “This is more than that, Mother, and I think you know it. I couldn’t have left Potter in that situation.” It already sounded unnatural to call the man he’d helped, who’d fucked him to completion last night, Potter, but Draco was able to keep a calm countenance as he did. “Not and ever lived with myself.”
Narcissa stared at him hard, but Draco was a master of these kinds of games. He looked back at her calmly, and Narcissa finally closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Don’t get caught,” she whispered. “And avoid your father for a little while. He’s upset and already planning to leave Britain if necessary, and there’s not much I can do to soothe him.” Then she turned and walked down the corridor.
Draco blinked and shut the door, turning in time to see Harry emerge from behind the shelf. “Is she going to insist on searching the library later?” Harry asked in a hoarse whisper, turning his head as if tracking the progress of an invisible mouse along the walls.
“No,” Draco said, with a long sigh. “The reason my parents didn’t want me to help you is that they think you’re mad and there’s nothing that could heal you. They didn’t want me to get hurt. It had nothing to do with thinking the Ministry was in the right.”
Harry gave a dark snort. “I assume that neither of my friends thought that way, either, but the end result is the same.”
Draco nodded. He wasn’t going to ask Harry for sympathy for his parents, or for his friends who had accepted and believed the doppelganger enough to never search for any trace of him. “Who’s the first target?’
“Robards is the one who adapted the process from the Department of Mysteries. And set them on that course of research in the first place. I have to assume that even then, he was thinking about using it on me.”
Draco smiled at him. “Then he’s first.”
*
Gawain Robards had retired to a small house on the outskirts of magical London which stood separate from the Muggle homes around it. The wards made it eye-watering to look for, but Harry had tracked Robards effortlessly from the feeling of his own magic that Robards had swallowed.
Bet you never thought that consuming that magic would betray you like this, Draco thought darkly as they crouched on the outside edge of the wards, which surrounded the small, weed-laden garden with sparkling walls.
“Plan?” he asked Harry.
“Harm him.”
Harry wasn’t covered with shadows or half-melting the way he had been when Draco pulled him from the cell, but his eyes were wide and sparking as they had then, and Draco doubted that he was any more sane. Draco nodded and stood back. Harry brought the Elder Wand up.
There was a moment of complicated light between Harry’s magic and the Wand that Draco didn’t understand. It even caused some sparking in himself, which startled him, but he assumed it had to do with the magic that he’d lent Harry through the sex ritual.
Harry tossed his head back and screamed.
The scream soared into a howl like that of a werewolf, and a swirling, dark grey shape formed in front of Harry. It slunk low enough to the ground that it didn’t look much like a wolf, but Draco had no doubt of what it was meant to be anyway. The wolf flowed towards the edge of the wards, and sniffed them for a moment.
Then it opened an enormous pair of serrated jaws, which swelled until they were larger than the ward-encircled house. Draco found himself gasping and fighting not to step back as the jaws came down.
The teeth sawed through the wards, and squeezed, and someone inside the house screamed in utter agony. Then the wards were gone, and the wolf turned back into dark grey magic which retreated to Harry and spun around him.
Draco found himself grinning. The scream still wasn’t as loud as Harry’s when he’d been in the cell, and he couldn’t regret whatever damage the destruction of the wards had done to Robards.
“Ready?” Harry asked, and held out a hand.
Draco grasped it, and the grey magic spread out its circle to encompass him, too. They stepped forwards-
And seemed to blur through the space between them and the house, rather than Apparating or simply walking. Draco gasped as they came out of it and found themselves standing in the doorway of the house.
“What was that?”
“A way for my magic to expend itself,” Harry murmured as touched the Elder Wand to the door and it simply disintegrated into a pile of wood shavings. “It’s still unstable, despite what you did to shore it up. The more I can use it, the better.”
Draco nodded, and took only a quick glance around Robards’s entrance hall, just long enough to realize how awful the man’s taste was. The paintings on the walls resembled Muggle landscapes without the charm, and there was overdone gold and crystal on everything.
Harry glided through it, headed straight for a room upstairs. Draco followed.
On the floor of what seemed to be a large sitting room, Robards sprawled, one arm extended as if he had been trying to crawl towards the fireplace when the wards went down. Bloody shards of bone were all that remained of the hand.
“Hello, Gawain.”
Robards turned his head and saw both Harry and Draco. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“Oh, silent?” Harry’s hands flexed. “Don’t worry, that won’t last long.”
He raised the Elder Wand. For a moment, a flicker of black power formed on it, and then it merged with the grey protective magic that still encircled both of them and grew and swelled. Draco blinked as he saw the shape that the combined power was taking. It looked like-four horses with fiery eyes?
“There’s an old Muggle punishment,” Harry said in a conversational tone as the horses trotted across air to stand next to Robards’s hands and legs, “that uses four horses. Of course, we’re magical, so I decided to be a little more poetic than that.”
He snapped his fingers. The grey magic formed into a set of chains, one linking Robards’s shattered hand to the horse nearest it, and the others clasping around his free wrist and his ankles and reaching out to the horses nearest them.
“What are you going to do?” Draco said.
“Pull his body apart to retrieve my magic.” Harry smiled, his eyes so bright that Draco thought he could see a faint green glow from them. “And at the same time, incidentally, kill him.”
Incidentally, Draco thought, but then he remembered, again, the way Harry had looked in the prison cell. He swallowed and took a step to the side where he thought it likely that he wouldn’t get splattered with blood.
Robards found his voice. “Don’t!” he shouted. “You have no idea what’s been happening in the last five years outside your cell! Without me, there’s no way that you can take up your old life again!”
“You thought I could ever have it back?” Harry’s voice was low enough that Draco wasn’t sure what he was feeling. He looked at the horses and nodded to them.
The horses reared, the chains of magic behind them shaking, and then galloped forwards.
Draco found himself turning his eyes away in the end. He couldn’t watch. The thick sound, like meat being pulled apart for a sandwich, told him well enough what was happening in any case.
“Ahhh.”
Draco looked back at Harry, carefully avoiding the glimpse of black and red and white that he could see from the corner of his eye, and then stared. Ribbons of dark green and blue were flowing into Harry, rising from the thing Draco wasn’t looking at. The horses and chains had dissipated, but Harry stood absorbing this magic with his hands held out and his mouth slightly creased in a blissful smile.
“That’s your power that he took?” Draco whispered. “I know you said you were going to get it back, but…”
“Yes.” Harry smiled at him without humor, but then the pleasure came back, probably because the magic flowing back into him felt so good. “You would have thought it would be dissipated or absorbed into Robards’s magic by now. No, the method they took ensured that wouldn’t happen. They explained it to me once, about how it was different. And how I could have avoided that if I had done what they wanted.”
There was a sharp, vicious snap on the last words, and something heavy flew into the air. Draco breathed through the scent of blood, and Harry gazed at the remains of his enemy for a long time before he nodded to Draco.
“Skeeter should be next.”
*
“There’s someone else in the house with him.”
Skeeter’s house was a small building, like Robards’s, this time on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. It didn’t have wards around it. Skeeter might have dismantled them himself, Draco thought, pulling in the strength in preparation for what he knew was coming.
“Is it someone else who took your magic?” Draco asked quietly. He looked up as a gate closed somewhere near. He wasn’t worried about them being sensed, though. Harry’s Invisibility Cloak had come to them as well when he called for it, and had willingly stretched to cover the both of them. If this was Death’s Cloak, no one else in the vicinity would be able to pierce its protections.
“No. I can only sense that the magic he did steal from me is splashing against someone else’s aura.”
Draco tried to work out how that could even be possible, and then gave up. He didn’t need to know how it worked. He only had to appreciate the benefits that it provided.
Harry glanced at him, expression dark in a way that had nothing to do with magic or insanity. “You’re still with me?”
Probably he’s thinking about the way that I couldn’t face Robards’s death, Draco thought, and lifted his chin. “Yes. I’m sorry that I couldn’t look directly at the way you killed Robards, but-”
“Don’t worry. I was only wondering about the fact that we’ll have a witness. I don’t care that much about what happens to my reputation in Britain, but your career as an Auror is over.”
Draco shook his head. “I didn’t have much of a career as an Auror in any case. They wouldn’t use me in fieldwork, most of the time. They’re not going to use me again. Dawlish talked to me, which only meant they suspected I was too interested in the secrets of your doppelganger.”
Harry simply nodded. “And your parents?”
“I’ll make sure they’re safe somehow. They have money and a safehouse in France in case anything ever happened to them, anyway, and my father was talking about leaving, according to my mother.”
Harry inclined his head once, and then walked towards the house. Draco went with him. Harry drew off the Cloak when he drew the Elder Wand, and Skeeter’s door turned to wind and drifted away.
They made it through an entrance hall with black-and-white tile and into a small room that looked like it might be a dining room before Harry stopped dead.
Draco peered past Harry’s shoulder. Skeeter stood in the room ahead of them, sure enough, looking nervous and defiant, his hands clasped in front of him as if he was going to beg for mercy.
Standing next to him was Ginny Weasley.
“Harry?” Weasley whispered, her eyes traveling slowly back and forth between Harry and Skeeter, with only a brief detour to Draco. “What’s going on? They said you were sick, but-you seemed fine last night-and-what happened to your teeth?”
Harry bared said teeth and gave a low snarl. “I don’t want you involved in this, Ginny. I’ll explain later, but what you need to know is that Skeeter has been preying on me, and I’m going to get revenge.”
Weasley glanced at Skeeter. “I see what you mean,” she said in a low, disturbed voice. “That doesn’t sound like Harry to me.”
Oh, very clever, Draco thought, with acid in his stomach. Bring Weasley here, and make Harry unlikely or unwilling to kill in front of her, all the while she thought she was actually addressing the doppelganger.
“Harry.” Weasley’s voice was low and soothing as she stepped away from Skeeter and stood in front of him with her arms spread, her eyes fixed on Harry. This time, she did spare more of a glance for Draco, though, a weak frown. “I don’t know what Malfoy has told you, or the people he’s working with, but I promise you, it’s not real. This is part of a plot against the Ministry, and Minister Shacklebolt. You need to listen to me and come with me. They have some Mind-Healers on standby who will be able to help you regain your sense of what’s real. Trust me.” She held out her hand.
Harry trembled in place for a moment. Behind the shelter of the man’s body, Draco drew his wand.
He would cast the spells himself to subdue Skeeter and Weasley if necessary, although he didn’t think he could pull out Harry’s magic from Skeeter the way Harry would demand. But he wasn’t letting Skeeter get away with this.
“Please. Trust me. Come back to us.”
Harry reared back and screamed again, and both Skeeter and Weasley jumped. Harry whipped out his hand and reached around Weasley, and Skeeter screamed in turn as sudden spirals of bone pierced his sides, his legs, and his arms, his skeleton altering and growing so that he was caged in it.
He stopped screaming when the bones of his skull grew into his eyes. Draco watched it this time, his heart a thunder in his ears, ignoring the way that Weasley shrieked and demanded that Harry stop.
The threads of magic unfolded from Skeeter the way they had from Robards, and streamed into Harry. He bowed his head and accepted them. Weasley, in the meantime, drew her wand and aimed it.
Draco had no idea what she planned to do with it, and no care. He Disarmed her and kicked her wand to the floor behind them. Weasley stared at him with hatred that might have impressed him if he hadn’t seen Harry’s.
“Malfoy,” she hissed. “You’re responsible for this. I’ll make you pay.”
“No,” Draco said evenly. “They kept him in a cell for five years, Weasley, and drained enough magic from him to make a doppelganger that could pass as him. But they also drained magic from him and fed on it for their own uses. Harry is taking it back. That’s all.”
Harry tensed. Draco glanced at him and hoped that it wasn’t about Draco using his first name, but Harry said nothing about that. His eyes were clearer than they had been, again, and one hand stroked the Elder Wand as he stared thoughtfully at Weasley.
“Ginny,” he said. “What conversation did we have right before I left for that month’s holiday five years ago?”
Weasley tensed so hard that she let out a noise of pain. Then she said, “Harry, I don’t think we should discuss this in front of Malfoy-”
“Tell me, Ginny.”
Weasley blinked once, hard. Then she looked away from Harry and said in a small voice, “You said that you wouldn’t be dating me anymore, because you’d figured out that you preferred men.”
“And so you never wondered why I came back from that month’s holiday and immediately started dating witches? Why I eventually started dating you? Why I would agree to be the Ministry’s little pet, when I didn’t even want to be an Auror half the time?”
“I thought you changed your mind.”
Harry stared in silence at Weasley. His silence was deep and disgusted. Draco said nothing. He thought this was a private matter between Harry and his ex-girlfriend, and he had to resolve it.
“And that’s probably everyone’s excuse,” Harry muttered at last. “The changes were beneficial for them, or they didn’t mind them, so they just ignored them.” He sighed and shook his head. “They held me prisoner and tortured me for five years, Ginny, while using my magic to create a version of me. That’s the truth.”
“But-you said you loved me two days ago.”
“That was him. It. The doppelganger.”
Weasley closed her eyes, but the underside of her eyelids brimmed with tears. Harry turned roughly away, and grabbed Draco’s hand. Draco followed him without another glance back at Weasley. He had no feelings in particular towards her, even though he thought he would have questioned the sudden change in personality of a man he actually loved more seriously than she had.
“How are we going to find the Hit Wizards and the others who fed on your magic?” he asked as they stopped outside the house. “I don’t know their names the way I did with Robards and Skeeter.”
“I told you, I can track their magic.” Harry lifted his head and sniffed the air for a second like a wolf scenting prey. “But I think it’ll be a better object lesson to draw them all into one central location and punish them there.”
“Can you do that?”
“If I pull hard enough on the magic that they took from me? Yes. It’ll act like a chain around their bones, drawing them there.”
Draco carefully didn’t think about Skeeter’s corpse in the house behind them, impaled by his own skeleton. “And why do you want to do that in public? Why punish them in public?”
Harry turned and stared at him with hot eyes. Draco braced himself. It was like being looked at by a hurricane, but he reminded himself of what he and Harry had been through together so far, including the sex ritual, and it only made him sway a little.
In a moment, the sensation of the hurricane-gaze passed, and Harry reached out and caught Draco’s hands, drawing him in the way he had during the ritual. Draco went with him and leaned his head on Harry’s shoulder for a moment. He still felt like a bonfire.
“The Ministry got away with what they did because no one outside the most secret department in the place and my torturers even knew making a doppelganger was possible,” Harry murmured. “I want to make sure that they don’t have the chance to do anything like that again. My vengeance is going to be public. Their punishment is going to be public.”
“You realize that you’ll never be able to stay in Great Britain again, after this.”
“Do you think I care?”
Tension surged through Harry’s muscles, and Draco raised his hand and gently massaged Harry’s shoulder. “I didn’t think so, but I wanted to be sure that you knew. Some people would think that the cost of such a thing would be-well, too horrific to undergo willingly.”
“I’ve already been through my horrible, costly thing.” Harry’s eyes flashed as he stepped back. “Let other people bear theirs.”
And may Merlin have mercy on them, Draco thought, but didn’t see the point in saying.
*
Harry chose Diagon Alley, and Draco thought he could see why. He might have had an easier time herding his targets together in the Ministry-although maybe not, since Robards and Skeeter had obviously had enough warning to go into hiding-but it wouldn’t have had enough witnesses who weren’t Ministry flunkies.
They Apparated into a side alley, and Harry stood with his eyes closed for a second. Draco kept his wand drawn and his gaze vigilant and scanning. No one tried to approach them, although a few people passed the mouth of the alley and blinked at them.
“Now,” Harry said, and snapped his eyes open.
A silver tornado of power rose out of him, and swirled into the air. Cries answered it. The tornado streaked away towards what seemed to be the four directions, one definitely towards the Ministry, and Harry gave Draco a feral grin.
“I won’t be able to do things like that when my magic is stable again and I have all of it back,” he said confidingly. “But I’m going to bloody well enjoy it while I can.”
And he strode into the alley with the silver wisps of his power tumbling around him and Draco at his back.
Draco saw people orient on them at once, even though the silver magic was still gone to fetch its victims. The aura of wildness and fury around Harry was impossible to miss, rising up into the air and clarifying it. Then Harry tossed his hood back, and more people stared at them in confusion instead of horror.
“Deputy Head Potter!” called a woman in the uniform of a Hit Wizard, taking a cautious step towards them. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”
“No, I’m not all right, Alicia.” Harry gave her a smile that made her reel back and put a hand on her wand, but when Draco glanced at him, Harry shook his head subtly. So she wasn’t someone who had reaped his magic, just someone he had once known. “I’m waiting.”
Other witches and wizards started to crowd towards them now, apparently assuming that there was no danger if Harry was standing there calmly. “What’s happening?” someone asked, and someone else echoed him, until the Alley was filled with chatter.
Harry tilted his head back, and said, “An answer is coming.”
Everyone else looked up, too, which meant they saw the bodies practically raining from the sky when Harry’s silver magic snapped them to earth. Hit Wizards, for the most part, hit the stones of the Alley, although there were a few in Auror robes. Harry lifted his hands, and the silver tornado manifested again, then split, so that an individual small one was rotating above the head of each of them.
Draco stared at them, and swallowed. There were more than thirty. Even assuming that none of them had taken as much of Harry’s magic as Robards and Skeeter had, this was an enormous amount of torture.
“Five years ago,” Harry told the staring crowd, “I went on a month’s holiday. When I came back from that, I had changed my mind about quitting the Aurors and decided to stay with them. I had also stopped dating the Muggle man named Charles Isom whom some of you might remember.”
“You’re not bent!” yelled a person who apparently wanted to defend Harry against his own accusations.
Harry laughed, and the wild, cackling nature of it made that person fall silent, and some others back away as if Harry was a hyena. Draco didn’t move. He didn’t think he would ever want to leave Harry’s side again if Harry permitted it.
“I am,” Harry said. “I always have been, but it took me a while to realize it. It didn’t take the Ministry that long. I was called into a meeting with Robards, who was still the Head Auror then, and Jared Skeeter, the Head of the DMLE. They told me that they required me to stay an Auror and start dating a suitable witch.
“I refused. In fact, I laughed in their faces. And they grabbed me, dragged me to a dungeon hidden in the Ministry, and enslaved me. They fed on my magic.” Harry clenched his hands, and the Hit Wizards and Aurors on the ground jerked and screamed all at once.
“They used part of it to construct a doppelganger who would do as they wanted,” Harry continued in a casual voice. “Their own good little pet Harry Potter, who did date women and become the perfect Auror and then the Deputy Head of the DMLE. But they also fed on my magic. They took it from me.”
His voice chilled, and the rotating silver tornadoes grew sharp tips, although Draco thought he might be the only one who noticed that. Everyone else was staring at Harry, gaping in terror and wonder.
“They took it from me. For five years. Five years I’ve spent in a dungeon.” Harry looked up, and there was a sudden scramble back from him in the front ranks, which crashed into those people still standing on their toes to see. “And now, I take it back.”
The silver tornadoes drilled abruptly down into the shoulders and arms of the Hit Wizards and Aurors lying on the ground. They screamed breathlessly, and clawed at the cobblestones with their fingers.
And the streams unfolded from them the way they had from Skeeter and Robards, coming back to Harry. He bowed his head and sighed as it flooded in, but as more and more of it came home, he also began to tremble.
Draco stepped up behind him and laid his hands on Harry’s shoulders. He might have been singularly useless in the actual hunt, he decided, but he could do this much. He could shelter Harry and give him the strength he needed as he became whole again for the first time in five years.
The streams suddenly disappeared, and so did the silver tornadoes, at the same moment. Draco gripped his wand. He wasn’t sure if Harry had retrieved all his magic, or if someone else had interfered and damped the retrieval process.
Harry lifted his head, and laughed.
It was a free, strong sound, and Draco looked into his face and caught his breath. The motionless bodies of the Hit Wizards and Aurors-although he thought they were unconscious, not dead-and the nervous crowd ceased to exist for him. Everything he had imagined for the last five years was in front of him.
This was the impatient, temperamental, callous Harry Potter who should have had the chance to exist free of prison. This was the man who had testified for Draco and whom he had dreamed about.
He was marked, perhaps, by stronger suffering than Draco would ever have wished on him, but he had survived. Draco licked his lips. Harry was more attractive right now than he had been even in the circle of standing stones.
Harry opened his eyes, and saw him.
His laughter ended. He stared at Draco with eyes that brimmed with speechless wonder, and then he reached out and drew him close with a hand on his waist and one on the back of his neck. Draco went, not daring to think about what would happen next, only knowing that he wanted to be here and this was the moment he had longed for.
Harry’s lips touched his, and Draco shuddered with the kiss.
“Harry! What are you doing?”
The kiss ended. Draco whipped his head around and saw Weasley-the male Weasley-and Granger racing down the Alley towards them. They had to slow as they got closer, both because the remnants of the crowd were rushing past them and because the Hit Wizards and Aurors were in the way, so they were having to step over flung-out limbs.
“Hello, Ron, Hermione.” Harry’s voice was calm. “Did you hear what I said about what they did to me?”
“We were, but it’s mental, mate.” Weasley gave Draco an uneasy glance and then seemed to have decided to ignore him. His attention was on Harry, instead. “They didn’t really imprison you and make you-do that. We saw you every day for the last five years! You’re dating my sister!”
“You saw my doppelganger,” Harry said, and Draco thought only someone as close to Harry as he was would have felt the way he trembled. “Didn’t it seem strange to you that I just suddenly dropped Charles like I did and declared that I liked women? That I didn’t join you until the last week of our holiday, when I’d promised to be with you the whole time? That I didn’t act the way I used to, even though I’d talked about quitting the Ministry?”
“We-thought you’d changed.” Granger was quiet. She was staring at Harry’s broken mouth, Draco thought, but he couldn’t be sure. “Ginny told us that you had a long talk and repaired your relationship. And I thought it was strange that you opposed my work with house-elves, but I know you didn’t have the exact same attitude towards them…”
“And you never questioned it,” Harry said. He shook his head a little, and then closed his eyes. Draco felt him inhale and exhale, but he kept quiet, because he didn’t think that he could understand exactly what was going through Harry’s head, and he didn’t want to try. “You never looked for some reason why I was that way.”
“We didn’t think we had to.” Weasley swiped his hand through his hair. “We didn’t-it’s not like anyone was going around thinking of doppelgangers!”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to think of the Ministry’s exact plot,” Harry said. “But Malfoy was suspicious that something was wrong, and he found out the secret in a few days. They weren’t guarding it as well as they thought they were. They’d probably got a bit careless, but still. Someone who didn’t know me that well found me in a few days.”
His voice was low and ruthless, Draco could tell that much, even if he didn’t think that he could read the rest of the emotions in it. And Weasley and Granger flinched and looked at the ground.
“I didn’t know,” Granger whispered. “We didn’t know. I’m sorry. We just thought-you’d changed your mind.”
“Even when I didn’t behave the way I’d done just a month before? Even though I became the Ministry’s little pet?”
“Everyone’s allowed to change their minds, mate,” Weasley mumbled. Draco, studying them, did think they were sincerely sorry, and also that it might not matter. They weren’t the ones who had come and found Harry. They weren’t the ones who had seen him in that cell and decided they had to do something.
It was a position that Draco had sometimes daydreamed about in the past, seeing Weasley and Granger humbled, and himself at Harry’s side. But he found that he couldn’t take much satisfaction in it now. Weasley and Granger hadn’t done something terrible the way he had once imagined they might. It was what they hadn’t done. And Draco would have given up his position in a minute if it had meant that Harry wouldn’t be suffering the torments of five years in a cell.
The thought surprised Draco, and made him blink. I’m that ready to give up so much for him in the space of a few days?
But when he thought about it, to be honest with himself, it was longer than a few days. He’d daydreamed about this. He’d scorned the doppelganger for not being exactly who Draco thought he should be. He’d had no career as an Auror, not the way he’d dreamed of it, and little enough of a life. He’d wanted Potter to be an arsehole simply because that was who he was, who he really was.
He’d slept with the man last night. He’d gone in and rescued him at great personal risk, and he’d stood by his side as Harry killed people and not abandoned or scolded him.
He’d gone and got him out.
I’m ready, Draco thought as he looked at Weasley and Granger, at their pale, lost faces. I’m ready to give up what I have to to stand at his side. But they’re not. They’re not used to the idea. They thought they had him all along, and now they can hardly cope with the idea that they didn’t.
Granger swallowed. “Did you-did you kill the others, Harry?”
“Robards and Skeeter? Yes.”
“Harry. Why? It’s murder.” Tears were forming in Granger’s eyes.
Harry gave her a look that would have seared Draco, but he wasn’t sure how much impact it had on Granger, given that she was standing there and looking at Harry with pleading eyes. “They tortured me. I wanted to get them back. I wanted to take back the magic they stole from me, and I wanted to make sure that no one would ever try that doppelganger trick on me again.”
“But you could have done something else-” That was Weasley.
Harry laughed, the wild, cracking thing that Draco remembered from the cell, and Draco leaned heavily on his shoulder. “Really? You think I could have? That people would have believed me? I doubt it.” He shook his head, making his wild hair rise and settle around him, currents of magic stirring it. “Even you don’t really believe me. I remember what doubt looks like on you.”
“We believe you,” Granger whispered. “We just need time to absorb this. We need time to think about the fact that so many people are dead.”
“The ones that are here, I just drained,” Harry said indifferently. “Most of them should be fine. And they conspired to keep me and my torture a secret. But I don’t trust the Ministry. They’ll try to arrest me for murder and the like. I don’t intend to stay and wait for them to do it.” He turned and held out a hand to Draco. “Will you come with me?”
Draco felt as if he was hurtling down a long, dark tunnel as he stared into Harry’s eyes. The moment passed, and Harry’s eyes seemed to grow dimmer. He started to let his hand fall.
Draco reached out and clasped it.
Harry blinked, before a cautious smile lit his face, and Draco wondered if it should have been like this all along, him being the one to take Harry’s hand, instead of the other way around.
“Yes,” Draco said. “I had little enough to stay here for. No lover, no fulfilling career, no friends worthy of the name.” He would send an owl to his parents once they were abroad and tell them to go to the safehouse in France. They might not even have to go for very long. Even if they were questioned under Veritaserum, they could say truthfully that they’d discouraged Draco from going to free Harry and that they didn’t know how he’d done it.
“Harry!”
Harry didn’t look towards his friends’ voices, and this part was like Draco’s daydreams. He nodded. “I don’t know where we’re going,” he said, “but it’s not going to be here. Is there anything you need to pack?”
“Nothing I can’t buy on the way,” Draco murmured. His family had vaults in other branches of Gringotts, and even accounts in a few Muggle institutions, if they needed them. His father had made that decision after the war. He would be able to get money.
“Then let’s go,” Harry said, his hand tightening around Draco’s.
“Harry, please listen to me-”
“Maybe someday, Hermione,” Harry said, and gave his friends a wistful smile, before he spun in place and took Draco with him.
Draco felt his heart leap as they traveled across the miles, towards a destination he knew nothing about, with nothing but the robes on their backs, the wands in their hands, and the faith in their hearts.
Wherever I’m going next, it’s going to be different. No more useless sitting behind a desk and wishing I could be a real Auror. No more daydreaming about a life that I don’t dare grasp.
It’s going to be blindingly real.
With Harry, it couldn’t be anything else.
As they flew, Draco became aware that the life-debt no longer itched at his spine. It had settled down into a happy humming in the back of his mind.
He thought-he believed-that was a good omen.
The End.