Chapter Twenty-Three of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- Light, Seeking Light
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Three-Light, Seeking Light
Harry sat up and mopped a hand across his forehead, grumbling under his breath. You’d think I’ve have fulfilled my lifelong quota of nightmares after the visions I had when Voldemort was still alive, but no, of course not.
And this nightmare had been particularly vivid and fearsome. Draco, lying under a heap of dark, crumbling flowers that looked like dead roses, or maybe roses carved from iron, his arm stretched out, his eyes blank and empty. He had died trying to crawl to safety, Harry knew, reaching out for someone who refused to save him.
The way that Harry had refused to.
Harry bit off the end of an exclamation and leaped out of bed. He hesitated when he remembered that he was only wearing pants, then shrugged. No one else was here to see him-Ron had gone back to the Auror Department, in part to keep up with the case-and the windows were all enchanted. No one close enough to be offended, Harry thought with a faint smile.
He wandered out of his bedroom and into the central chamber of the house. Warming Charms kept the chairs comfortable enough to sit in, but Harry felt the need of a fire’s brightness, so he lit one on the waiting logs with a wave of his wand. Then he collapsed in front of it and tried to work out what he was feeling.
He wished he could have done something other than send that letter to Draco, and as good as the revenge had felt at the time-as necessary as it had been to put his emotions on paper so that he didn’t show up at the Manor and blast Draco’s brains out-still, now he more than half regretted it.
But if he had done nothing, then what would have Draco thought? That he could do anything at all, and Harry would put up with it because he was too weak to defend his own rights. And then Harry thought of the betrayal to the papers again, and anger burned like acid along his veins.
Which didn’t lessen his worry for Draco now. Draco wasn’t a duelist, and the imposter might well go after him when he wasn’t able to find Harry. The imposter struck Harry as mad, but too clever not to realize that it was useless searching for a wizard under the Fidelius Charm when you had an easy target right in front of you.
Harry had tried to talk to Ron about arranging protection for Draco. Ron had looked at him with slitted eyes and hadn’t said anything. Harry had begged harder, and Ron had uttered a martyred sigh and said that he reckoned something would have to be done, since it wouldn’t look good if the only Auror capable of protecting Malfoy was the one who slept with him.
Ron would do it, Harry knew that. But his prejudice might cause him to wait a few days, either to punish Draco or because he had persuaded himself that the imposter had attacked Harry last, and there was no sign he was about to go after Malfoy now. And those few days could be the chance the imposter needed.
Harry tried to distract himself with thoughts of the stocked library, or the food, or the chance to sleep in, which never happened when he was working on a case. But it was no good. His mind always circled back to Draco, and his muscles trembled with the restless need to be up and doing something.
I wasn’t made to be locked away like some princess in a tower, waiting to be rescued, he thought, and stood with a wrench of motion that made his spine shudder for long moments. Then he shook his head and turned for the library after all.
If he couldn’t do anything else, maybe he could conduct research that would help somehow. Unlikely, when Hermione and members in the Auror Department were both devoting their spare time to that research-the Auror Department with extra energy, because the Malfoy case had already earned them enough bad press. But they wouldn’t be able to study one subject with concentrated attention. Hermione had her own job. The Aurors were likely to be called out and tasked with something else before they could get in more than a few hours of reading.
Maybe he could find something. Maybe.
Harry hoped so. At least, that way, he wouldn’t have to feel completely useless.
And it was probably a good idea if he could keep his mind off fantasies of flying to Malfoy Manor, making Draco understand somehow, and then making love to him until both of them were exhausted and aching.
*
The moment the dream began, Lucius knew it for a dream. He had had it often enough before. He could have shaken himself, hard, and woken from it.
And where would he be then? An empty bedroom, with an empty portrait frame on the wall. At least in this dream he had a chance of seeing the woman who had become his ruling passion when she was dead as she had never been when she was alive.
He chose to stay.
The doors of Malfoy Manor stood open before him, rocking slightly in the midst of a cracked frame. Lucius approached slowly. Charms protected his feet from the intense heat of the ground; he had to stop several times to renew them. All around him, jagged spirals of smoke traced the place of the most violent burnings. Lucius could smell cooking meat; he caught a glimpse of more than one pile of limbs, more than one head taken apart with loving care down to the eyes and the bones of the ear. Each time, he averted his gaze and walked on.
The magic in the air drove him to the floor the moment he crossed the threshold of the Manor. He knelt, shaking, his hands pressing against his head and then his stomach. He was not sure whether the pressure was more severe in his temples or his belly.
At last, though it felt as if he were pushing against the stone of his own tomb with his forehead, Lucius managed to look up and about.
Sketches of black lightning and green seemed to dart about, appearing in the corners of his eyes, vanishing when he looked at them. He learned later that those were the remnants of the magical power that the Dark Lord and Potter had lashed at each other. Broken parts of their wills still wheeled through the Manor. That was what took longest to clean out, when Lucius was rebuilding the house.
The ceiling was gone, at least on the entrance hall. A few of the walls in the distance still bore wobbly pieces. And there was a silence, and the smell of blood, that told Lucius what had happened.
Of course he couldn’t have known it at the time. Of course he thought he did, anyway, in this dream when he was looking into the past. He rose to his feet with an enormous effort, pausing a long time on one knee, and then staggered on.
Silence. That silence stretched along Lucius’s skin until he felt it would have been less painful if wild cats were clawing him apart. His hand tightened on his wand, and his breath came harsh and short. And that also should not have happened; he should have faced the events, whatever they were, calmly. He had to set an example for his son, and he had to prove to the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord that he was still cool, untroubled even by the atrocities that occurred within his own home.
But he could not do it, and then he stepped into a room that was awash with blood, and he saw the dancing figure.
Even within the dream, he could not see it whole and clear. Here a glimpse of a pool of blood that was so thick it lay on the carpet like a puddle of rain that saturated grass hadn’t managed to absorb; here a broken limb, ending in a hand from which the fingernails had been cut out. And in the middle, the dancing figure, whirling and laughing.
Did he see it? Was it only told to him later? Lucius did not remember. He didn’t really think it mattered. If someone had described it to him, they had done a good enough job that he knew exactly what it looked like.
Bellatrix, dancing and dancing, limbs flopping like a scarecrow’s. Blood covering her face in a mask that Lucius knew would pull away in one even coating. So much of it. Her hands, red. Her feet, crimson. Even her eyes, aglow with the reflection of flames really, but seeming as if she had gazed into her own reflection in blood until the blood had moved into her eyes instead, that she might never have to look as far as a puddle to see the color.
She wore, on her back, attached to her, Narcissa’s skin, peeled from Narcissa’s body.
“She will never usurp my place with my lord again!” Bellatrix cackled, her voice gory, as transcendent in its awfulness as her new clothing.
And the dream ended, and Lucius opened his eyes and lay still for long moments. Strange, he thought distantly, how he had thought he had grown used to horror. He had tortured Muggles and seen them tortured, and not flinched. He had condemned former allies on the Dark Lord’s say-so and stood by as the most terrible punishments happened to them-as they were deprived of their wits, turned into creatures half-animal and half-human, raped by werewolves in beastial form. And though he had saved several prisoners when he had begun to doubt the surety of the Dark Lord’s victory, he could have stood by and seen the same thing happen to them without flinching.
The flinching was done inside, and no one save perhaps his wife and son, if they petitioned for it, was invited into his soul.
But he had looked on what had been done to his wife, or heard it described to him, and nearly gone mad.
He was still not used to it. He still dreamed about it, and Narcissa was still gone. Perhaps someone could have helped her if someone had reached her in time-and that was a new horror to linger and torment the mind. For his part, Lucius preferred to believe Severus’s testimony that there was nothing that could have been done for her.
He stood and made his way rapidly to the library. He would read one of his wife’s diaries, in order to be closer to a time when she had lived.
*
Poison-green, emerald-green-
(Lily-green, but he would not think of that).
--and the surface of the potion shifted once more before it settled into the almost solid, gem-like form, slick and gleaming, that it would hold until Severus added the final ingredient. He drew back his head, aware his eyes were narrowed.
(Lily once said he looked like a rat when he was in this stage of brewing. He supposed she would know).
Rats. His mind glided, and he turned to the cabinet that sat in one corner of the room. The final ingredient of the potion could vary. It only needed to be something powerful, imbued with Dark magic, and obtained under Dark circumstances. An enchanted flower obtained by the dark of the moon would do.
But Severus drew out a single silver hair from the cabinet and held it to the light, turning it back and forth in order to admire the way a shimmer of blackness followed the reflection of the fire. The fire seemed to be aware of it, and to hurry away from it.
Pettigrew had been so self-important, when the Dark Lord assigned him to live in Severus’s house and spy on him. And then Severus had caught him slipping away from the battle, intent on supposedly betraying the Dark Lord to Potter and then, in reality, betraying Potter to him.
Pettigrew stood trial.
But what they tried was not exactly Pettigrew, any more.
Severus wondered, with a faint smile as he dropped the hair and watched it drift into the potion, if Pettigrew would feel this, wherever he was. Of course, what held his attention at the moment was probably far more-interesting. Severus had never had occasion to visit the realm where he had sent part of Pettigrew’s soul himself, but he thought interesting was at the very least a justifiable description.
The hair settled into the potion, and it leaped upwards in a fountain that Severus had already dodged because he had read the book. Slowly, he worked his way back to the cauldron again, sniffing lightly. Yes, it smelled like new-mown hay and the hot sparks flung up from two pieces of flint rubbed together.
(Lily had rubbed two pieces of flint together one day when they were children, when she wanted to show Severus that one could start a fire without magic. She had done that, but she had started more than one fire, and she would not have approved the tinder of the other, or known how to put it out).
The potion settled. Severus counted to fifty under his breath, and then stepped back as a cloud of noxious black gas rose from the surface and hung there like the imaginary rainclouds Muggles were pleased to think hung over the heads of some of their iconic persons. More Potions masters had been destroyed by this gas than by the initial explosion of the potion. Severus tried to imagine what it would have done to Neville Longbottom, and then put the thought out of his mind. He did enjoy his unbroken rest at night.
The potion was a deep, rich red when the gas dissipated, as if it were made of liquid rubies. Pleased, Severus drew a ladle of it out of the cauldron and held it up until the first few, corrosive drops-at least to human skin-had dripped back into the mass of the potion. Then he empted it onto a golden plate that he’d taken out of the cabinet in which Pettigrew’s hair had been stored, and breathed gently across the surface.
The red liquid stirred, and a shape rose from it, a drifting, cobra-shaped shadow, its hood flaring around it. It examined Severus from nonexistent eyes for long moments. Then it bowed its head and hissed. The exhalation became a long stream of mist, which formed into white letters in front of the snake’s head. What is your question?
Severus waited for long moments, his eyes half-closed, breathing steadily. He hated to waste the question on what he had already decided to ask; now that he had come to this point, he wondered whether it would not be better to ask something else that mattered more to him personally.
On the other hand, now he had mastered the potion, which meant he was certain he could brew it again. It would be best to use it for its original purpose. That done, there was no way Draco could blame Severus for not having done all he could. Severus straightened and thinned his lips before he waved his wand. A small cut appeared in his forearm; the blood dripped out and turned to steam at once on contact with the air, courtesy of another simple spell. Severus healed the cut as the blood-gas drifted towards the snake’s steam and became the words, Who is the man stalking Draco Malfoy?
The snake drew back its head. The hood flared twice, like flapping wings, and the answer emerged in a cascade of white.
Severus stared at it for long moments.
Almost himself.
“Well,” Severus said softly, “isn’t that interesting.”
*
Lucius had found the entry he wanted, and he laid his head against the back of the chair as he read. He was still tired, and if he tried to read sitting upright, his head would inevitably droop on his chest and he would sleep. He might drool, as he sometimes did now that Narcissa was gone, enough to ruin the precious pages of the diary. He would not tolerate even the smallest chances of that happening.
I visited the garden tonight, for the first time since Draco nearly drowned in the pond. I walked with my skirts sweeping the earth, my nostrils slightly open and drawing in the scents of the roses. I was determined that I would absorb every scent and sight and sound and touch of this place, to remember it as it was.
After all, tonight it would only exist in my memory.
I wended between long rows of roses, amaryllis, amaranth with its gorgeous red-purple blooms-strange, to think that some magical flowers might be immortal when wizards are not-and the black gladiolus that stood straight like spires of mourning. I heard the calls of nightbirds around me, but I did not heed them. I would have walked the garden as straight-backed and determined during the day; the darkness only made my purpose holier.
I halted at last in front of it, the pool that nearly cost me my son’s life. It was low, and surrounded by a low stone wall, but deep; I could not see the bottom from where I stood on its shore without craning my neck. I was not about to crane my neck.
I stood there, and I remembered the way that one of the house-elves ran to me holding Draco, his head lolling, his lungs still half-filled with water, his face blue and his eyes staring. He chased his reflection in the pool, the house-elf told me, sobbing. An accident that could have happened to anyone.
It should not have happened to my child. The world should know better.
Two long minutes I stood there, and then I lifted my wand.
The earth under the pool tore itself apart, cracking and sucking in the water like a giant drawing breath. The water resisted me; it had lain in that pool for a long time, and age lends its own magical force to such things. But it was nothing against my will, and I made it flow backwards and sink, instead of welling up.
I opposed both nature and Lucius’s own ancestors, who chose to make an ornamental pond out of that spring long ago. I won.
The stone wall dissolved, the stones becoming less than sand, vaporized by the localized fire-curse I hurled at them. Lucius does not know that spell. The flowers around the pool swayed, and wavered, and then gave up their lives, lying down and withering because I commanded them to. I stood rejoicing in their power for some time, my hands spread, the life-force circling around me, and then I filled the bed of the pool with their ashes.
I created a shallow bowl of pure white sand where my son can play, if he chooses, with no worse hurt than might come from getting a few grains of sand in his eyes. And this sand is so fine that it is unlikely to trouble him. The sides of this small pit, which slope upwards now with no trace of wetness to them, are not steep enough to trip him. The ground is level, raked dirt for a hundred feet in any direction. Draco will walk here without crushing greenery underfoot, and also without tangling his feet in vines and being pricked by the thorns of the roses.
The pond is gone. There is no trace that it has ever been there, and the spring, sealed, will reemerge nowhere else.
Nothing that threatens my child shall survive.
Lucius leaned back further and closed his eyes, though not before he carefully shut the diary and put it on a nearby table. He had been utterly puzzled by the disappearance of the pond at the time, and the house-elves unable to account for it, no doubt because Narcissa told them not to. But it had been only a small addition to the gardens and not one he himself had particularly favored, so he had shrugged and forgotten the matter.
Now he wished he had known, so that he could have gone to Narcissa and shown her that her will was appreciated and did not need to be hidden.
There was nothing they could not have done together, the steel and the iron pair, fronting the sun and the moon, despising the Dark Lord.
*
Glamours, and their practice, are ancient. It is sometimes believed that the first spell of any complexity created by the oldest wizards, after such simple ones as Lumos and Wingardium Leviosa, was a glamour.
Harry yawned and turned the page. So far, the books that Hermione had promised would be interesting were the sort that was only interesting to Hermione. Harry had wanted to train himself in wizarding culture and history as well as perhaps finding out tidbits of knowledge that would help the Aurors catch the imposter, but he would fall asleep before then.
And this book, which should have been interesting because there were many sinister uses to which glamours could be put, instead retreated into academic distance. Harry turned idly past the concepts of glamours as masks, auditory glamours, glamours that were meant to cover scent and how they did not fool werewolves, the use of glamours in battle…
The book fell open at a worn page. Harry peered listlessly at it, wondering what this would tell him.
Glamours and Identity.
Harry blinked and sat up. This might be worthwhile. The Aurors were certain that Draco’s imposter, Malfoy relative or not, had used glamours to increase his original likeness to Draco. Perhaps there were glamours Harry hadn’t read about, ones not often studied, that were complex enough to permit even passage of the bloodline wards.
However, he quickly grew bored again, as the book nattered on about glamours as disguises compared to Polyjuice, and how well glamours would hold up under times of immense strain, and how glamours were often the first spells to give way and reveal a pretender’s identity when magical exhaustion occurred, and…
The only potentially interesting thing was a paragraph near the end of the section on identity. Harry read it faithfully, though he was certain Hermione and half a dozen Auror researchers must have read it before him.
Glamours, when used for a long time, are considered one of the most addictive forms of magic. They also interact oddly with the will of the caster, sometimes creating results that are called “undesired,” but which the caster desired in his or her secret heart. Thus a man intending to disguise himself as an ordinary stranger may, in truth, make himself handsome enough to receive unusual notice, because he wishes to have that attention which is granted to the beautiful. Someone wearing glamours for a long time has a higher chance than usual of adopting the part he plays into his being and consciousness.
Harry sighed and marked the paragraph to discuss with Hermione later; she and Ron were planning to visit that afternoon. Then he blew out the candles and went to bed.
*
Draco woke from a dream as faint as a snuffed candle, in which his mother stood above him, a cold hand extended to touch his shoulder. He blinked up at the ceiling in stupefaction, and turned his head to the side. He almost thought he would see Narcissa standing at the edge of his bed, regarding him with the cold, passionless expression that had been her usual mask in life. Draco had never minded the mask. They had understood each other, he and his mother.
He did not think he would see a nearly perfect copy of himself standing there, and he did not expect the pain that rolled over him with a single utterance of, “Crucio!”
Chapter 24.