Part 8 of 'Viper'
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Harry remained kneeling on the floor of their new prison for a moment after the Collector and Lucy had dumped them there, not sure that he wanted to look up and see what awaited them. The image of Ginny dying, and dying again at his hands, resonated through his mind. Others had seen it. Others had looked at it.
The mockery he would see in Malfoy’s eyes when he looked up again was not what troubled him. Others had looked at the images he had carried in his head as private memorials of Ginny. It was as bad as vampires digging up her grave and biting into her bloodless corpse, seeking another means of making her one of them.
If she had a grave.
The grief and the guilt cut at him like knives steadily sawing through his inner organs. Harry longed for death as he rarely had. He had failed her once, but he had been proud of only doing it the once. He had ensured that she was not condemned to a life of darkness, and he had done his best to prevent others from falling to her fate.
And now he had failed again. Harry shuddered. Ginny had always been a private person, with secrets from the members of her family and from Harry. Most people knew a lot about her, but no one person knew everything. How would she feel to know she had been pawed over, if not in the flesh, by vampires?
“Potter.”
From his annoyed tone, Malfoy had already called Harry’s name several times. Harry unwound himself from his curl and took a deep breath. He had to forget about the way he had failed Ginny, at least for the moment. It was possible that the vampires, with their alien mindsets and focus on food that would have done credit to a starving dog, wouldn’t understand the humiliation they had inflicted on him, and on her. It wouldn’t do to give them clues.
“What?” Harry snapped, and struggled to his feet. He was standing on slick glass, he realized then, and when he looked up, he realized that every wall around them was glass. He put out a hand and watched his fingers obscure some of the stars. High in the air, too. They were probably in another wizardspace, or else a section of the tower that the Collector had worked a peculiar Transfiguration on.
“I want to know the purpose of this prison.” Malfoy’s voice was haughty, but his eyes intense. Harry could all too easily imagine that was the way they had looked in the pit of kraits, when Malfoy-
But no, he would not think of that, either.
Harry turned his attention back to the glass, all too glad to forget about his other failure, his other crime against Ginny’s memory. Thick glass, not completely transparent, on the floor, but the walls were translucent, and the ceiling so clear that Harry wouldn’t have thought it was there at all except for the lack of a wind blowing in on them. And, of course, the fact that the Collector wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave them in a cage without a roof. There was always the chance that Malfoy could jump out the top and climb down the sides, even if he had to leave Harry behind.
Maybe he won’t. Maybe that’s why she imprisoned us together, because she knows that the Long-Desired bond is enough to keep him with me, but too weak to force me to yield to him.
Harry didn’t want to think about that, either, so he stamped a few times, meditatively, on the glass floor, wondering if it would crack open and let them fall to their deaths. Was the purpose of this prison to keep them in a constant state of heightened alertness, wondering when they would die? That seemed rather simple for a vampire of the Collector’s intelligence, especially when she couldn’t guarantee that her prisoners would be of such a delicate temperament-
And then Harry understood, and chuckled appreciatively. He turned in the direction that he thought was east and narrowed his eyes, searching. Yes, there was a faint golden glow in the distance. When he looked above his head and let his eyes trace the angles of the room instead of simply looking at the material it was made from, he became certain. He chuckled again.
“What is it?” Malfoy demanded. He had moved closer. Harry casually stepped backwards. He would prefer to die free, on his feet, not in a vampire’s embrace.
“This whole room is made of glass, Malfoy,” Harry said, with a gesture around and above his head. “No shadows. And it’s round, with no corners to hide in. And there are enough angles that I reckon they can act as mirrors and lenses.”
“I’m aware of that.” Malfoy’s eyes had narrowed, too, but in suspicion rather than alertness. Harry experienced a fleeting annoyance that he couldn’t die in the company of a person who was more like-minded about their surroundings, and thought the work of the Collector’s brain interesting.
“Imagine what will happen when the sun rises,” Harry said quietly. “No place for you to hide. No shadows to protect you. You’ll be burned to death almost at once. And then, in a few hours, probably at noon, the angles of the roof will concentrate enough sunlight to fry me like an ant under a magnifying glass.” He smiled a little at Malfoy’s horrified expression. He hadn’t known Malfoy was capable of looking at him with genuine horror. “Clever, isn’t it?” he added, and sat down against a wall. “I’m glad that, if I’m going to die, it’s at the hands of a vampire who’s more intelligent than most of them, instead of just luckier.”
*
Draco could imagine the death all too well, having felt a foretaste of it in the cage of sunlight fire Harry had used on him. And he could imagine what would happen a few hours later, with Harry closing his eyes as the burning beam consumed him.
The imagination of the latter hurt more.
But there is a way to avoid this.
If I can only convince him, stubborn human that he is!
Draco crouched down. That would bring him to Harry’s level and perhaps make him a little less threatening. He tried to make his voice sound as sympathetic as possible. “Death isn’t inevitable, you know. Do you really want to die like this, with other victims out there going unavenged? The Collector might not stop at vampire hunters. What if she decides that she wants a collection of Aurors, or your friends? What if you’re interesting enough for her to follow up your life story? You’re recognizable, with that scar.”
Harry opened an eye and gave him an uninterested stare. “I know what you’re trying to do, Malfoy. It won’t work. I’m not allowing you to die with a full stomach just because you’re a little hungry right now.”
In actual fact, Draco was ravenous, his fangs burning against the roof of his mouth and aching to unfold. He had managed to prevent them from doing it so far only because he thought they would prejudice Harry against him.
He took a deep breath now, and filled his nostrils with Harry’s scent. And that once again reminded him that he had other powers, other advantages, and he should use them. Being young as a vampire and new to his powers as a free one was no excuse.
“You’re still frightened,” he whispered. “You’re still regretful. You wish that you could live and continue your work of killing my kind. And there is a way of doing that. You know that. I am astounded that you would refuse it.” He hesitated, then played his card. What do I have to lose if he grows angry? I’ll be dead in a few hours, anyway. And he’s weaker than I am at the moment. “What would your Ginny say, if she knew that you gave up the chance to help more people like her?”
“You’re not fit to mention her name,” Harry breathed. He hadn’t moved, but his scent burned with rage like bitterness set on fire. “So-you can’t. And I can’t help people like her except by staking them and giving them peace. If you think about it, every vampire I’ve killed was one more person like her who was turned and allowed to murder for a while before I ended it.” He closed his eyes and relaxed against the wall as if pretending to fall asleep, as if he really thought that would fool Draco. “I’ve done enough. I should be able to rest now.”
“It all comes back to her,” Draco said. What he was doing was dangerous, but he still didn’t care. His own anger had risen to match Harry’s. All this survival, and I am to die at last? No. “And what kind of person was she? Bright, from the memories I saw of her. Happy. Someone committed to life.”
“Malfoy.” Harry meant it for a warning, but his voice was fragile.
“Would she be happy that you gave up your life for her?” Draco cocked his head to the side, a deliberately snake-like and inhuman movement that he knew Harry would find strange. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t let Harry ignore many things any longer, and his vampiric nature was one of them. “Not only just now, when you’ve said that you’re content to commit suicide, but all along? You stopped living when she died. You dedicated yourself to vengeance. You’ve pushed away your friends. You don’t care about anything but murder, and the infliction of pain. I saw that in the last memory. Would she be happy that you’re a sadist now? Is that what she would have wanted to achieve with her death?”
Harry drew back his lips, once again baring his teeth as if they were fangs, and scrambled to his feet. Draco rose to match him, his eyes never wavering from Harry’s face .This was the last fight. It had to be, because of time constraints if nothing else. He was going to have his Long-Desired or perish.
“No one else,” Harry whispered, his voice shaking, “has ever dared to say anything like that to me-”
“They fucking should have,” Draco snarled, his anger swinging for a moment against all the people who had allowed Harry to go along as he had been doing. They probably lied to themselves about “respecting” his grief. But Harry’s grief had twisted and grown inwards like a disgusting toenail, and it had to be removed. “And I think I’ll dare some more. If Ginny Weasley came back to earth today, could you face her with a smile and tell her that you’d been happy in the years since her death?”
Harry drew himself up and grinned, and Draco saw this was one of his barbs that would not have the effect he wanted. “Being happy would be a betrayal of her memory.”
Draco narrowed his eyes. “And has her family been happy since her death?”
Harry clenched his fists. “That’s different,” he said, and began to shuffle to the side, head ducked to guard his throat, as if he imagined that would make Draco want him less. Draco followed, his eyes on Harry’s face rather than his neck. He would look at that in a bit, when he determined that he would make Harry yield to him.
“Different in what way?” Draco asked softly. “Tell me, Harry.”
“They didn’t cause her death!” Harry’s voice echoed off the glass walls. “They didn’t let her walk straight into a vampire’s arms!”
“You couldn’t have known.” Draco made his reply, and his next question, both so swift that Harry would have no time to think. “And I think it’s pathetic that you let her death destroy you, that you’re blaming yourself for something no one could have prevented, and especially when you already took all the vengeance anyone could reasonably demand of you.”
“Look at how many kills I’ve achieved,” Harry growled back, “and tell me again that I’m pathetic.”
Oh, perfect. Draco paused in his circling and raked him up and down with a merciless gaze. “You’re asking me to admire you for how much death you’ve caused?” he asked casually. “I thought that was something only vampires did.”
Harry’s flinch looked as if it went straight to the center of his being. Draco laughed softly at the murderous glare he got a moment later. It was no worse than some of the looks Harry had already given him.
“I’m mortal.” Harry breathed the words like they were a prayer. “I’m protecting people, innocents who can’t defend themselves.”
“And you do it by hunting in the darkness,” Draco said, “and bragging about your kills, and obsessing to the point of pushing away your friends about whether some random murders are the work of my kind.”
“I was right, and the Collector was behind them!” Harry sounded as if he were on the verge of hysteria. Draco wondered idly if he even realized it.
“Yes,” Draco said. “This time. But you dug when you weren’t supposed to, when you had no reason to. That’s obsession.” He paused. Harry’s breathing was loud and desperate, and echoed off the walls more than his earlier shout had. “Tell me what it’s like to be the human in Britain who understands vampires best,” he said, “who best gets into our skin and walks with us, because you obsess about death as my kind obsesses about blood.”
Harry sprang at him.
Draco caught and held him in an unbreakable grip. Harry thrashed, spitting obscenities at him. Draco calmly let him wear himself out. He wondered as he did why no one else had done this for Harry. True, no other vampire would have cared as much, but there were spells that could accomplish much the same thing.
“Listen to me,” he said, when Harry’s yelling had subsided to broken muttering. He twisted Harry around so that his ear rested near Draco’s mouth. The temptation was great to scrape his fangs down the shell of Harry’s ear and taste what his blood was like there, whether it would have a different flavor from the blood taken at the throat, but he resisted. And that I can resist is a sign of how much he has affected me.
“You’re broken. You allowed her death to break you. You’re a sadist, someone who relishes causing pain. You’re blinded by your obsession. You’re friendless, or you will be soon. And you’re suicidal, or you would be fighting harder to get out of this room, snatching with greedy hands at the one chance offered to you-the way you did when Caspar confronted us. Is there so much difference in merely knowing that someone else has seen your memories that you have to give up now?”
Harry gave a weak thrash, but Draco had the advantage, and most of Harry’s strength had been used up in that frankly stupid display of his earlier. “That’s not it!” he hissed. “Someone else saw her die. It violates her privacy-”
“She no longer has privacy to violate.” Draco decided to cut straight to the point. Nothing other than bluntness would get through to Harry, it seemed. “She’s dead. Not alive. Not a vampire. Not someone you need to protect like a knight in shining armor. She can’t make love to you. She can’t rescue you. She can’t be violated again. You set her beyond all violation, and that was the right thing to do, given what had happened to her.” Draco turned his head and nicked the side of Harry’s neck, so that a drop of blood welled up. He stuck out his tongue to lap at it, and Harry caught his breath. “But you can’t follow her. If you really had the desperate love of her that you’re acting like you have, you would have committed suicide when you’d disposed of her killer.”
Harry shut his eyes and shook.
“What you are,” Draco repeated remorselessly, “is broken. Not wanting to admit your wounds. Battling on until they’re exposed, and then curling up like a bug so someone else can crush you.
“By no virtue of your own, you have a chance to change that. Because of me, one of the kind you most despise.” Draco sniffed at the blood on Harry’s neck, and sighed. It didn’t smell as good as the blood he took when he had Harry’s permission. Yes, the bond goes to great lengths to make sure it happens in just the way it wants to. “And I want to know if you’re going to take that chance, or if I should kill you now and at least spare you an agonizing death by sunlight.”
Harry swallowed. “She would be so ashamed of me,” he whispered.
“For the way you’re acting now? Yes. For the way you’ve acted in the years since her death? Yes, I think so.” Draco drew his fangs down again, making a shallow parallel cut beside the one he’d already caused. “But for living? No.”
“It would be turning my back on everything I’ve achieved since she died,” Harry said next.
“So you would somehow magically stop being an Auror?” Draco snorted. “I don’t have the power to make you do that. And you won’t stop breathing and your heart won’t stop beating, either. I have a special interest in seeing that it doesn’t,” he added, as a purr directly into Harry’s ear. Harry swallowed again. “And what else, besides your Auror career and your physical survival, do you have to turn your back on? Because there isn’t much else that you have achieved.”
Harry went still in his arms. Draco tightened them, because he’d seen Harry react like that before, and it usually indicated he was about to strike out.
Instead, Harry said, his voice slow and reluctant, “Maybe you’re right. I felt-” He shook his head a little, his hair brushing against Draco’s nose and making him moan. Harry didn’t seem to notice the sound, thanks be to Merlin. “I felt as if I wanted to die when Lucy put us in here,” he finished in low tones, “and I wanted to die when you were climbing out of the kraits’ tower, too. And that is-when I was waiting for the sun to roast me to death, that is passive. I should have killed myself if I had any courage at all.”
That wasn’t a line of thinking that Draco particularly wanted to encourage, but it might lead to one he did.
“And now that you’ve concluded that you’ve lost your courage and have acted like a broken little bitch for the last few years,” he drawled, “what are you going to do about it?”
Harry went more still than before, and Draco saw the shadow of his eyelids close. It was difficult to tell what he was feeling even from his scent. Draco had no choice but to wait, and try not to look too obviously at the growing line of light in the east.
*
You have a choice to make.
Harry felt as if he were poised above needle-sharp rocks, clinging to a crumbling bridge. No matter what he decided, he would fall and die.
Unless he accepted the help of the monster above him, who would give him a hand up-in exchange for his becoming a slave.
But Malfoy was right about at least one thing. Ginny would have hated to see him like this, too frightened to live, too puling and whinging to die.
There was only one choice, and Harry made it. Accept the help for the moment, and then ensure that I can’t become a slave.
One way or the other. It’ll depend on how much power we need to defeat Lucy and the Collector.
He sucked in one last, free breath, and then nodded. “I haven’t lived, only survived,” he said, because he knew Malfoy would expect to hear that. “But I want to. Bite me, so that I can.”
Malfoy’s snarl of victory was awful, and so was the pain of the fangs sliding into his throat a moment later, but Harry had borne worse, like the self-examination Malfoy had forced him to undergo. He would bear this stoically.
Or so he thought until the burning pleasure began to work its way through him again, and his cock stiffened against the material of his pants.
Harry managed to reduce the urge to moan to a little hitch in his breath, and to let his eyes shut naturally instead of fluttering the way they wanted to. He set himself to bear the pleasure, too, although the pain remained at the same level and the pleasure was soaring past that on wings of fire, obliterating even the stick of the fangs.
But it was impossible. His body reacted as if this were food he’d been starved of for years, although he’d wanked plenty of times since Ginny died. He whimpered at last, and Malfoy licked his throat in response and crowded closer to him, hands sliding up and down his body, stroking his belly, cupping his arse.
Harry drove his fingernails into his palms, regularly, over and over. If he could only muster another source of pain to distract himself from the one that no longer worked-
And again it didn’t work. God, he’d never experienced anything like this, this fire that subsided into a shining, warm sea all around him and made him feel as if he drifted cradled in a pair of loving arms. Then the sensation sharpened, and Harry cried out softly as the pleasure made his balls draw up against his body. He craned his head far enough to bite at his arm, hissing under his breath.
“It’s all right,” Malfoy whispered into his ear, too close, too intimate. He must have taken his fangs out of flesh to speak, and Harry was aware of a dim astonishment at that. “She wouldn’t begrudge this. It’s not a betrayal. It’s fine.”
Bastard! With every word, the pulse of the pleasure grew worse, and Harry was bucking and twisting as if he were under torture now. Malfoy wrapped his arms around him to hold him in place, and the fangs slid back into place, whilst Malfoy’s elbow brushed against Harry’s cock.
A light touch, no more than that.
It didn’t need more than that.
Harry’s eyes snapped open and his body snapped straight, and he wailed. He came hard enough that his heart was a thunder in his ears and he couldn’t even hear the smug chuckle he was sure Malfoy was uttering. He came hard enough to daze and confuse himself, and then, when he fell limp, the pleasure was still there, burning softly at his throat, not like the oversensitivity that Harry would have felt if someone were stroking his cock after orgasm.
“Oh,” Malfoy said, and his voice was too gentle for Harry to think that the vampire was mocking him, “that was very nice.”
Harry turned his head, inch by inch, to face him. He knew he would see horrid laughter behind his eyes, but he didn’t care; he needed to face up to that laughter and get beyond it.
He didn’t see amusement or hatred. He saw something worse. Malfoy was staring at him as if Harry were more than a meal to him, and the next moment he pushed Harry flat to the floor and climbed on top of him. Harry was vaguely, distantly aware that Malfoy had indeed pulled his fangs from the wounds, and that those wounds were no longer bleeding.
“Mine to protect,” Malfoy said, the words bursting out of him as if the urge to say them were a physical necessity. Harry couldn’t move, his soul as well as his body apparently captured by blazing grey eyes. “Mine to feed from. Mine to share with.” He lowered himself so that he was wrapped firmly around Harry and lapped gently at his neck.
He came in the next moment, with a groan that got into Harry’s body through his ear and rattled his bones around. Harry swallowed and held still. Maybe Malfoy would move now, back to normal, and rip his throat out because Harry had witnessed his weakness.
Instead, Malfoy lifted his head and languidly stroked Harry’s cheek with the back of his hand. On his face was deep satisfaction, with no trace of smugness at all. He looked rather astonished, in fact, as if he had dug up a golden treasure where he’d expected to find only dirt and bones.
“I would lie down on you,” Malfoy said, his voice hypnotic, “and shelter you with my body, to keep you from the sun. I would burn for you.”
Harry shivered and, because he couldn’t look away, shut his eyes.
That caressing hand returned, fingers feathering across his forehead, through his hair, down his eyelids. “Mine,” Malfoy said, his voice dark again, full of a predator’s claim mingled with a kind of reverence that Harry had last heard in Ron and Hermione’s voices when they talked about celebrating their wedding anniversary. It was an emotion that he knew was foreign to vampires.
Then what does it mean that he’s experiencing it?
And what does it mean that I only want to lie here under him and feel him experience it?
“I will bring you back to life,” Malfoy breathed, “and not by feeding you my blood.”
That was by far the most terrifying, alien thing he had said, and Harry pushed at his chest and struggled out from beneath him. “We should decide what we’re going to do to fight the Collector,” he said. Magic pulsed beneath them now, more powerful than the weak sunrise in the distance.
Malfoy lay still for a minute longer, then rose to his feet with a tiger’s slow, dangerous grace. “Yes, we should,” he said.
But his attention was fixed and his body oriented on Harry, and Harry began to understand how much of an effort it would be to get rid of him, this viper who had adopted him as its own.
He swallowed down the dread, too, and began to do what he was good at: plot murder.
He tried to ignore the way Malfoy’s eyes, never wavering from his face, shone.
Part 9.