[one-shots]: With Your Green Mantle, R, 1/3
Title: With Your Green Mantle
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/OFC and Draco/others
Rating: R
Warnings: Sex, profanity, some violence and flangst. Crackish humor. Ignores the epilogue.
Wordcount: ~21,700
Summary: Draco would like visions of Harry Potter to stop appearing in his rose garden, please. Especially since Harry Potter has been gone for seven years.
Author’s Notes: This fic is based on the story of Tam Lin, and the title is a quote from one version of the ballad.
With Your Green Mantle
The first time Draco saw the vision of Harry Potter, it was early morning and he was stumbling through the rose garden after a party that had lasted all night and been-well, it had been some party, that was all Draco could really say. He was never sure if the ones that left a musty taste of vomit in his mouth and the overwhelming urge to produce more of it were fun or not.
Draco couldn’t remember how he’d got into the rose garden, either. He had been chasing Pansy, who wore a green dress-or no, wait, that was that friend of hers. Nicola. Or something. His memory really wasn’t clear.
But Pansy, or Nicola, or maybe it was Astoria, hadn’t actually run into the rose garden. Draco remembered that much. He had stumbled into it somehow later, then. Perhaps that was when he was wrapped around Blaise and kissing him for all he was worth. Or maybe not. Draco had the hazy impression that he’d left Blaise behind, entangled on a bench with Daphne, and then stumbled about with Theo for a while.
Automatically, Draco checked his penis. He smiled in satisfaction when he saw it was still attached and looked normal. Being with Theo could shrivel one’s cock something fierce.
He looked up from his penis, and that was when he saw the vision of Harry Potter.
It was an unpleasant combination of sights, as he told the house-elves later.
For the moment, Draco just stood there with his pants pulled down, the urge to piss and the one to vomit both gone, and stared with his mouth open as Harry Potter stood gazing at his rosebushes. He had a wistful smile on his face; he was turned to Draco in profile, but Draco could see that much. He reached out a hand that hovered over the nearest rose, and he sighed. Someone could break their heart over that sigh, Draco thought. If someone was a fool, of course, and hadn’t known handsomer people.
Somehow, he forgot right then that no one had seen Harry Potter for seven years. So he stupidly shouted, “Oi! What do you think you’re doing?”
Potter whirled around and stared at him, his green eyes so wide that they looked unnatural. For a moment, his gaze flickered down to Draco’s penis and stayed there, and Draco felt absurdly gratified even though this had to be a ghost or a vision, which meant Draco couldn’t have sex with it, which meant that the compliment was wasted.
Then Potter stared into Draco’s face and shook his head. His long black hair, shoulder-length, a wild mass of curls, flew around his features.
That was the point when Draco noticed that Potter was dressed, as Draco eloquently put it to the house-elves later, “in a really fucking poncey way.”
His shirt had some sort of ruffled lace collar, and it was made of a silky green fabric that Draco had imagined no Gryffindor would be caught dead wearing, because of its similarity to Slytherin colors. His trousers, honest-to-Merlin, were ruffled, too, and made of the same silky cloth, although this was dark blue. The trousers led straight to big pointy shoes, with curled golden tips. Draco had to wonder exactly what he’d allowed Astoria to put in his wine last night.
“This is a dream,” Draco said loudly, because Potter just stood there staring at him with his lips parted-intense red lips, Draco had to note, as though he had smeared makeup over them-and didn’t seem to understand that it was his duty to vanish so Draco didn’t have to doubt his sanity any longer. “You’re not real. You would be naked if you were.”
Then he shut his mouth, and shut his eyes in horror, too. He couldn’t believe that he’d admitted that aloud, that he sometimes had fantasies about Harry Potter.
Then he remembered this was just a dream-or a hallucination; Draco wasn’t picky and they were both welcome-and he didn’t have to worry. It wouldn’t be reporting anything about his predilections to anyone. (Predilections, that was a nice big word for ten-o’clock in the morning). Besides, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to fantasize about sleeping with someone else. The stable of Slytherins who regularly associated with him was large, but it couldn’t provide an infinite variety. There was no one with green eyes, for one.
“It’s not a dream,” the ghost of Potter said, and his voice was echoingly deep and seemed to bounce off the rosebushes and the benches. Stupid benches; Draco didn’t know why Great-Grandfather Octavius had installed them. All they did was bang Draco’s shins or injure his head when he was stumbling through the gardens at night, trying to find a quiet place to sleep. “You’re the first one to see me since I vanished.” Some kind of weird smile was on Potter’s lips when Draco looked again. “And probably the last,” he added cryptically.
“I hate riddles in the morning,” Draco said pitifully.
The vision didn’t respond. Draco looked up again and found that it had vanished.
He finished pissing as soon as he could, vomited into the pot of a sickly-looking fern that he had never liked anyway, and then staggered into the house. He needed a bath and a Hangover Potion. Then he needed some food, and some wine. And then he needed the house-elves to comb his hair and tidy him up so that he could go over to Blaise’s house. Blaise had said he had something important and special that he wanted to show Draco today.
Normally, Draco would have discounted anything like that that Blaise said at one of these parties, but he’d said it before they started drinking, so he thought it was worth taking a look at.
*
“Not Potter,” Blaise said, shaking his head and managing to look sober despite the fact that Draco personally knew he had swallowed at least six pints this evening. “You couldn’t have seen Potter.”
“Why not?” Draco took another sip of the sweet, pale wine that he’d been drinking most of the evening. Blaise had told him the name, but he’d forgotten. But since the wine was the important, special thing he had wanted to show Draco and it was good enough, Draco figured he could forgive that. “Do you mean that the combination of drinks I had couldn’t possibly have caused hallucinations?” He would do a lot to be able to ignore the implication that he was getting too old to hold his drink at the age of twenty-five.
“Because.” Blaise leaned close to him and held out one finger as if he meant to jab Draco in the nose. Draco watched its flight in fascination, but it settled to the table instead of poking him in the face. Draco was a bit disappointed. If Blaise had touched him, Draco could have grabbed the finger and sucked on it. “Because,” Blaise finished in a triumphant tone, “Potter’s vanished.”
“Oh.” Losing interest, Draco took another gulp of wine, then put the glass down and snatched at the plate of biscuits in the middle of the table. Blaise’s mother made them. They were covered with a delicious, flaking white icing and filled with some sort of cream, and Draco had only checked them for poison once or twice. “I knew that. But why did I see him, then?”
Theo leaned in from the side. They were all seated around the large table in the middle of the dining room at Blaise’s house, which meant it was polished enough by house-elves that Draco could see Theo’s reflection in the smooth dark wood. “Because you were drunk,” Theo said. “Of course.” And then he frowned and rubbed a hand across his forehead as if to check for fever. “Or were you busy fucking Pansy instead of drinking? I can’t remember.”
“Nicola, not Pansy,” Draco said, and slid back in his seat with pleasure as he bit into the biscuit. His mouth filled with a melting ecstasy that had him decide it was almost worthwhile to die from eating food that Belladonna Zabini had prepared if this was the result. “I was trying to fuck Nicola.”
“Who?” Pansy leaned against the table in return, but she almost lost her balance and had to prop herself up with a hand on the pot of flowers between them. It wobbled and probably would have fallen, except that a well-trained house-elf appeared under the table, captured the large pot in loving arms, and Apparated away. Draco didn’t think Pansy noticed. She kept her vacant gaze on his face. “What? Who’s that?”
Draco frowned at her. “Your friend from Paris,” he said. “You should know. You were the one who brought her.”
“I don’t know anyone named Nicola, darling,” Pansy said, with a shrug that made her breasts bounce, and fell back in her chair again. Then she giggled. “Imagine if we had someone we didn’t know at one of our parties? Wouldn’t that be exciting?”
They all considered this in silence for a while. Theo was the one who said what Draco, at least, was thinking. “No,” he said decisively. “It’s better when it’s just the six of us.” He gave Draco a bright, hopeful smile that said where he wanted the evening to lead and reached out to squeeze his hand under the table. “Who else could understand us like one of us? Who could drink like one of us, or fuck like one of us?”
“Millicent?” Pansy asked, but not in the sense of someone offering up a serious alternative. The discussion of the rest of their group seemed to have reminded her that Daphne and Astoria weren’t here tonight, and she was the only woman. She sat up taller and gave all of them a secretive smile. Draco removed his hand from Theo’s. When Pansy looked like that, she was inevitably exciting, and Draco was in the mood for exciting.
“She’s gone all…” Blaise searched for a sufficiently horrifying adjective, and in the end came back to the only one that any of them had been able to use to describe Millicent since the war. “Gryffindor.”
Draco shuddered and took another biscuit. “How did she ever get Sorted into Slytherin anyway?” he demanded. “Did she somehow fool the Hat?”
“You can’t do that,” Pansy said, with the disagreeable habit she had of being reasonable in drunken discussions. Draco changed his mind about whether he wanted to sleep with her tonight. “It sees straight into your head, darling.”
“I don’t remember that,” Draco muttered. And he didn’t. The Hat had seen that he was meant for Slytherin right away, so it hadn’t had to do anything like peer into his head and read his every thought. Blaise said it had happened to him, and Pansy to her, but Draco wasn’t sure about that. They could be misremembering.
“Yes, well, you don’t recall much on the best of nights,” Theo said. Draco scowled at him and decided that he didn’t want to sleep with him tonight, either.
“I was younger then,” Draco said haughtily, and then clapped a hand over his mouth. Why in the world had he wanted to remind them of his age? He wasn’t the oldest of the group-that was Theo-but he didn’t want them comparing him to the way he had acted years or months ago. The present was the most important.
“Anyway,” said Blaise, leaning over and pouring out more of the wine, “Millicent has a shop in Diagon Alley and sells robes like it’s something she trained to do. She doesn’t seem to have sex at all. I don’t think she drinks much, either.”
“It’s worse than that,” Pansy whispered. “She pays her taxes.”
All of them shuddered, and Draco felt pity congeal in his stomach. He had half-thought sometimes of calling on Millicent and asking why she was so different now, but it was obvious that would never happen.
“How the mighty do fall,” said Blaise, with a sigh and a world-weary shake of his head that Draco knew would have done credit to his mother. “Who would have thought she would end up that way?” He grinned suddenly. “Who would have thought that Weasley would end up the way he did?”
Draco didn’t have to ask which Weasley he meant; the only one of interest to his little circle of friends was the one who had been in their year, after all. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “I know that he stopped his Auror training when Potter disappeared, but what’s happened since then?”
Theo and Pansy looked as bewildered, which meant Blaise took his time about telling them. He leaned back in his chair and sipped his wine, then ate a biscuit delicately piece by piece, flicking the icing from his fingers. Draco tried not to roll his eyes. He knew he would have done the same if he had the rare good fortune to be in sole possession of such a delicious piece of news.
“He’s in prison,” Blaise said. “Not Azkaban, not yet, but it might end up that way when they finish sentencing him.”
Pansy squealed and clutched at Blaise’s arm. “For what, Blaise, darling? You can’t leave it at that! You have to tell us!”
Theo nodded. Draco picked up a biscuit of his own and bit off the top to avoid looking too excited. He did have to maintain a certain standard, especially after his inadvertent reminder of his age and the fact that he had admitted seeing a hallucination of Potter last night.
“It seems that he started to distrust the Ministry after Potter’s disappearance,” Blaise said, and finished the last of his biscuit. “Thought they had something to do with it. He demanded an investigation, which they refused to perform. They had evidence that Potter had fled the wizarding world, and it was probably bloody convincing evidence. After all, with everyone claiming to see Potter around every corner, they would only accept a solid story.”
Draco nodded. He remembered Weasley’s demands, if vaguely, before he had grown disgusted with the ill-trained way the post-owls landed on their perches and canceled his subscription to the Daily Prophet.
“So he got caught breaking into the offices of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement last night,” Blaise said, and his voice sparkled with delighted malice. “He wanted the records of the time that Potter vanished, and the reports of the Aurors they sent to the scene, if one can believe his claims. Of course he was arrested. He admitted that he’d done it, and practically dared them to condemn him.”
“I wonder what it would be like to fuck a war hero,” Pansy said dreamily.
Draco nearly dropped his biscuit. “Pansy!” he said. “The thought of you and the Weasel in an intimate embrace is going to turn my stomach and make me vomit in your lap.”
Pansy drew her chair away from him. “Don’t you dare, Draco!” she said, sternly if unsteadily. “This dress is new.”
“And so is the image that you just introduced into my head,” Draco retorted. “That doesn’t make it valuable.”
Blaise snickered, and Theo clapped Draco on the back. Pansy chose to win by ignoring them all and sighing again. “I wondered what it would be like to fuck Potter when we were still at school,” she admitted. “And even Weasley, sometimes. But those dreadful freckles were too much for me. Potter, though, had a certain je ne sais quoi about him even before he defeated the Dark Lord.”
“You were the one who suggested sacrificing him to the Dark Lord,” Draco pointed out. He had spent a few months envious that he didn’t think of that suggestion first. It might have meant that he had some distinction in the heated discussion that followed the war, instead of being dismissed in the papers as “Lucius Malfoy’s son.”
Now they presumably said something different about him, with his father in prison and his mother traveling, but Draco didn’t know what, since he didn’t read the papers. He frowned and considered renewing his subscription.
Pansy still had the wistful smile on her face. “Yes, but I would have made sure his last moments were happy ones,” she said. “That’s more than you could say, Draco.”
“I don’t know,” Draco said slowly, forced to consider it by the amount of wine he’d drunk. “I reckon I could fancy Potter, under the right circumstances. The vision I had of him last night was intense.”
“Well, if you find him in the solid form, maybe you can ask him to put his cock in you before you turn him over to the Ministry and claim the ten thousand Galleon reward,” Blaise said cheerfully, pouring himself another glass.
“Ten thousand Galleons?” Draco asked, snapping to attention. That was something he was sure he hadn’t heard about in the papers. “The Ministry’s offering that?”
“Something called The Organization for Finding Harry Potter is,” Pansy said. “With contributions from the Ministry and Potter’s friends and ‘the good people of Britain.’” She rolled her eyes and played with the stem of her glass. “These were the same good people who thought he was insane when alive. I doubt they would actually raise the money if someone brought him back.”
“Ten thousand Galleons,” Draco murmured. He had a fortune, of course, but there were certain things that he couldn’t do with it, including purchase the tame dragons he’d always wanted. The asking prices on the black market for domesticated Chinese Fireballs ran at least twenty thousand Galleons, and Draco had never wanted to spend that much money on an uncertain prospect. “I wonder…”
“Oh, don’t go and tell them about your hallucinations,” Theo said impatiently. “Otherwise it’ll be like that time at St. Mungo’s with your supposed Ghostly Spattergroit all over again.”
Draco turned on him, wounded. “You said that you were never going to mention that again!”
“Yes, but I made that vow when I was sober,” Theo said, and drank some more wine.
Draco closed his eyes, doing his best to ignore the treachery of his friends, and sank back into thought. Yes, he could use the ten thousand Galleons towards the purchase of the dragon. Or he could throw the kind of party that would make him famous among his friends for weeks. Or he could plant more roses in the Manor gardens so that they would become the kind of living, growing, changing place his mother had always wanted.
Draco carefully steered his mind away from thoughts of his parents and opened one eye to look around the table. Everyone else was flirting or staring into their wine or thinking with dreams in their expression.
None of them, like Draco, was actually making the kind of plans that would make those dreams come true.
It was time to lay a little trap for his hallucination.
*
The second time Draco saw the vision of Harry Potter, it was again in the rose garden, this time in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a problem for Draco to sit up and drink by the light of his wand, but it had meant that he had to refuse an invitation to Astoria and Daphne’s latest party, and he was a bit irritated at that.
Also bored. He wouldn’t have thought confronting an image of his childhood best enemy would involve so much waiting.
But there was Potter, standing among the roses again and bowing his head as if to sniff them. Draco studied him carefully. Potter didn’t look transparent, actually. And he wore different clothes than he last time: a rose-colored tunic, a long green cloak, and trousers of a slightly different shade of blue. His feet were bare, and he carried a golden ring on one hand with a ruby that made Draco contemplate the finer points of trying to steal from someone who wasn’t really there.
He wasn’t sure what the different clothes meant. Perhaps that his brain had grown weary of the simpler tricks it could play on him.
(Draco had no difficulty in believing that this was a hallucination and so not really there and that he had a chance to find the lost Potter and bring him home at the same time. His brain was special like that).
He cleared his throat. Potter whirled around, and he had a rose in one hand. He dropped it when he saw Draco staring at him and shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said, voice faint and far off. Draco cocked his head. Was it his imagination, or was Potter’s voice more musical than it used to be? Certainly his imagination, since he didn’t really remember what Potter’s voice sounded like. “You can see me?”
“I’m drunk, but yes, I can,” Draco said, and set down his glass of brandy carefully. “What I want to know is why you’re coming here, and where you’ve been, and why you’re wearing those poncey clothes.” Maybe, he thought, astonished at the freshness and brilliancy of his theory, Potter has been kidnapped by people obsessed with costume balls. Has The Organization for Finding Harry Potter looked into that, I wonder?
“I don’t understand,” Potter muttered, his brow furrowing. “The reason I haven’t been able to find someone to rescue me before this is that no one could see me.” He looked around as though he assumed he would find some huge magnifying lens crouching in the corner of the gardens. “Why should you be able to do it?” His gaze as he turned it on Draco was hostile and hopeful both at once.
Draco wagged his finger. “I know how this works,” he said. “And I’m the one asking the questions. You’re not going to refuse to answer in case you should run away the next moment and leave me here with a hat full of sorrow.”
Potter’s mouth drooped open. “What? Are you in league with them?”
“Um-” Draco pulled himself together. Truth to tell, he wasn’t sure what had made him say those words. They had made sense in his head, but they sure didn’t when they emerged from his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said loftily. “Because I don’t know who captured you.” There. That was a subtle psychological maneuver that asked Potter the question without actually asking it. Surely he wouldn’t be able to resist.
Potter licked his lips. “I’m not sure how to say this without making you laugh,” he said. “But I’ve been taken by fairies.”
Draco laughed.
Potter backed up and looked as if he would depart in offended pride. Draco hastily waved a hand. Either this was a very interesting hallucination or he was about to find out that Potter also hallucinated-or else his costume-obsessed captors had been very successful in never letting him see their faces. “It just sounds ridiculous,” he said. “The little fairies we hang up in our lights when we need them? Those fairies?”
“These are much taller,” Potter said with some dignity. “They can change shape. They’re immortal. They-” He closed his eyes and shuddered.
“Did they try to prick you to death with pins?” Draco asked, knowing he probably shouldn’t, but unable to stop.
Potter’s eyes popped open, and he glared. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’ve seen them kill someone with a glance because that person couldn’t stand their beauty. Well, only she can do that, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s the one who took me, after all. Chose me. Because I was like a diamond lying in the grass, she said, and she couldn’t stand to see me lose my luster.” He closed his eyes again. “I was a fool ever to believe that. She took me because I was payment.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Draco cautioned him. He always appreciated it when people said things like that to him.
“The fairies make some sort of payment to Hell every seven years,” Potter said. “I don’t know why. But, naturally, they don’t want to sell a soul that belongs to them.” He took a deep breath. “This year, my soul’s the payment.”
Draco shook his head slowly, once and then again. He was trying, he really was, but he simply couldn’t imagine why in the world Potter expected him to believe this.
Then he remembered the way Potter had vanished the first time, instead of trying to tell Draco this mad story then, and frowned thoughtfully. Maybe Potter believed it, and the problem was that his craziness would set up a barrier when Draco tried to rescue him. Maybe that was the real problem.
“What, like Muggle Hell?” he asked, deciding to play along for the moment. He’d got vague notions of what Muggles thought this place called Hell was like from books that Pansy had stolen for him. Draco hadn’t been able to make much sense of it. It was a hot place, and they believed they lived forever in pain and torment there, but they also talked about how their God was full of peace and love. Draco thought one could be true or the other, but not both at once.
Potter shuddered. “I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the legends of Muggle Hell to be certain of that.” He licked his lips. “But there’s something there, something that frightens them. I’ve felt it myself.”
“What did it feel like?” Draco thought there probably was some sort of threat, something sufficient to keep Potter caged, or he would have come back on his own. If he could get Potter to talk through this, then he might find the truth behind his delusions, and with it the way to coax him back.
“Like a rain of fire against my skin,” Potter said. “But an invisible one. My skin didn’t char.” He wrapped his arms around himself as if he was feeling it right now.
“Ah,” Draco said, contented because he understood what was happening now. “That’s a common type of Dark Arts. They’re probably using it, and you don’t notice because you’re bewildered by glamours.”
Potter stared at him. “Fairies can use glamours,” he said slowly. “That’s how she got me to go with her in the first place. But that doesn’t apply here, Malfoy. I know what I felt, and it wasn’t the fault of any bloody glamour.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Draco said soothingly, while he thought about it. His brain stirred dimly with memories of Dark Arts that could cause invisible rains of fire, but he would have to look up the spells again to be sure. He made a face. He hated research.
“You’ve got to rescue me before the sacrifice,” Potter said, which interrupted Draco’s thoughts, and which he hated.
“Why can’t you leave on your own?” Draco demanded. He was proud of himself for thinking of the question when he was distracted with all this thinking and when Potter wasn’t making any sense because he was mad. “Glamours shouldn’t be enough to keep you in place.”
Potter closed his eyes and laid his hand over his heart, which was so ridiculous that Draco wanted to snicker. He didn’t think that was allowed when he was trying to come up with a way to bring a hero home, though. At least, not if he wanted the hero’s cooperation.
“It’s her beauty,” Potter whispered. “I told you. No one could walk away from her willingly. I told you.” Draco thought of pointing out that he had repeated himself, but Potter was going on, and his words rushed and hissed in an oddly compelling fashion, like the first tumble of new wine into a glass. “She has a hook in my heart, and the hook is her beauty. As long as she wants me, she can have me.”
“Well, then you can’t be that worried about this trip to Hell,” Draco pointed out.
Potter glared at him. “Why did I ever think that you would be able to help me?” He turned away and took a step forwards into the rosebushes, and Draco had the distinct impression that he was about to vanish behind a door.
“Wait!” Draco yelped, scrambling to his feet. If Potter left, then so would Draco’s chances for a tame dragon. “I’m sorry,” he added soothingly, when Potter turned and scowled over his shoulder at him. “I just really don’t understand. What-how could just beauty keep you captive? How could you know that glamours were holding you and not be able to break free?”
Potter gave him a small, bitter smile. “That’s the worst of it, Malfoy,” he said. “Knowing what she’s going to do to me, knowing that the glamours are false and that some small and petty reality lies beneath, and yet not being able to break free.”
Draco nodded. “That would be pretty awful. Like knowing that you’re drinking awful wine but having to keep going because it’s polite.”
Potter peered at him with a puzzled expression on his face, but kept silent. Draco took that as encouragement to go on.
“If you have to be rescued, you have to be rescued,” Draco said. “Though I’m not really a hero.”
He’d meant it as modest self-deprecation. There was no reason for Potter to flicker a glance over him and mutter in an insulting tone, “No, you’re not.”
Draco glared. “Maybe I should leave you there with these glamours and this fairy woman that you obviously love so much,” he said. “And you can say hello to the devil for me.” He remembered that devils lived in the Muggle Hell, though like lots of other things about the books that Pansy had showed him, it didn’t make sense. The devils all looked unhappy. They could just leave if it was so bad. Draco wondered that no one had ever suggested it to them.
Potter laughed without humor. “It looks like I’ll going to anyway,” he muttered, and then he turned and flickered as if someone had passed a thick pane of not-quite-transparent glass over him. A moment later, he had disappeared.
Draco tapped suspiciously on the sides of his skull. It wasn’t like him to think of similes and metaphors like that. He really would have to see about stocking his cellars with different kinds of wine, if this was what resulted.
*
“This is The Organization for Finding Harry Potter, right?”
The tired-looking woman sitting behind the desk glanced up at him and blinked. Draco could see why she did. She must never have seen anyone who looked as clean and well-dressed as Draco did in her office before. She herself wore a brown jumper with a large red H on it that had seen better days-probably when it was thread-and her hair straggled over her shoulders. Draco eyed it sternly, to convey the silent message that it needed a comb, and started to say that he knew where she could find one, but she spoke first.
“Malfoy?”
“Why, yes,” Draco said, and smiled at her, glad for her sake that she had at least the rudiments of taste. “I’m sure that you recognized me from my appearances in the society pages, yes?”
“I recognize you from the arse you were at school.” The woman rose to her feet and reached beneath the desk she sat at. Draco had the uncomfortable impression she was pointing a wand at him. “Is this a joke of yours? You have to have seen the organization name over the door. Decided to have a bit of fun, have you?” Her voice thickened with bitterness and exhaustion.
It was the bitterness that made Draco peer more closely, subtract seven years-or fourteen-from her face and decide that he knew her after all. “Granger?”
“Who else would be at the desk, now that Ron’s been arrested?” Granger took a large, deep breath and straightened up. The wand in her hand was no longer a hidden threat. “I don’t care why you’re here, actually, Malfoy. You can just go away again. It’s not like you would be anxious to see Harry returned.”
“I came to check on the amount of the reward,” Draco said, graciously willing to overlook the insults she’d offered him because he knew that she was mourning her lost friend. “Ten thousand Galleons, I believe? And is that for information leading to the recovery of Potter, or for Potter himself?” He hoped it was the former. Then he could just tell the story of Potter’s delusion that he’d been taken by fairies, claim the money, and free himself of the whole absurd business.
“You would,” Granger said softly. “You would be the sort of person who’d come here and act as if you could make fun of our grief by pretending you have information.” She gestured towards the door with her wand. “Get out!”
“There’s no need to be like that,” Draco said, wounded and irritated both at once. “It’s for the information, then? That’s all I want to know. I think Potter is being held-”
“It’s for him, or for his body, and honestly,” Granger said, with a sneer that shocked Draco. She had to have picked it up from a Slytherin, which made him wonder who had been slumming. Probably Millicent, with her disgusting tax-paying ways. “As if you would ever know anything like that. Leave now.”
Draco did, somewhat disconcerted both by the pity he felt for Granger and the fact that he was going to have work harder than he’d expected to get the reward. He asked himself seriously, as he Apparated back to the Manor, whether a tame dragon and the trouble of having to drag Potter out of this fairy realm, or wherever he really was, was worth all this.
He decided, reluctantly, that it was, if only so that he could have his rose garden to himself again, free of visions.
*
The third time Draco saw Potter, he was unfortunately sober, even though it was dawn. Pansy had come over last night, before Draco had even started drinking, to sob on his shoulder and say that she wanted to marry Blaise but was afraid it would break up the friendship of their little group. Or maybe it was Theo she’d wanted to marry. It wasn’t as though Draco had bothered to listen, once he had worked out that she didn’t expect him to settle down.
So he was grouchy, and in no mood to entertain a half-imaginary madman. When he saw Potter wandering soulfully about among the bushes, once again wearing the green cloak, and with his back to Draco so that he couldn’t make out the shocking colors of his clothes, he called out a question he’d been wondering about.
“Why my rose gardens?”
Potter started and turned around, as though he had the right to be surprised about someone else being in the house. He stared at Draco so hard and so long that Draco glared and waved a hand to shoo him away. Ten thousand Galleons weren’t worth this aggravation after all, he’d decided.
“I still don’t know why you can see me,” Potter whispered. “So few people can. As for roses, they’re one of the few mortal flowers that still smells sweet to me after the bowers of Fairyland.” His eyes were bright with yearning and doom, but then, Draco considered, they had always been like that.
“Well, then,” Draco said, giving in to the inevitable, “tell me how to rescue you so that you can come back to the mortal world.”
Potter stared up at him with big, hopeful eyes. They made him a little more attractive, Draco thought. In fact, Potter did himself no favors in general with his brooding hero shtick. He would be much more handsome if his eyes occasionally looked as though he wasn’t about to start crying.
“Really?” he whispered. “You would do that?” Suddenly he stopped and bit his lip. “But in the other versions of the legend that I’ve heard, the one who rescued the sacrifice had to be a pregnant woman.”
“I’m not taking a Gender-Reversal Potion for your sake,” Draco said crossly. “They’re notoriously hard to brew, and then half the time they don’t work right and you’re stuck as the wrong sex for the rest of your life. Hearing Pansy bitch about her menstrual cycle is quite enough without experiencing it myself.”
Potter buried his head in his arms and kept it there. Draco frowned and leaned closer. He hoped that Potter wasn’t about to expire in visionary form in his rose garden. It would make a bother to try and take that body to Granger.
Then he realized Potter was laughing, great whoops of laughter that surged through him and looked as if they ought to make his lungs burn. Draco raised his nose and did his best to look calm and unconcerned, while his heart leaped with curiosity. Potter went on laughing for a long time, and Draco didn’t think his words had been that funny.
Then he reconsidered. If he could amuse Potter like this, then perhaps he would consent to make sure that the ten thousand Galleons was given to Draco when he came back to the world.
“Well,” Potter said, lifting his head and shaking it. He looked much better when he had laughed, Draco thought with grudging admiration. His cheeks were bright now, and his eyes had a spark in them that Draco remembered from school. “I don’t think that will be necessary. When they told the legends to me, never dreaming that I would want to make use of them, they emphasized that desire was enough. If you feel a deep desire to rescue me, then it should work.” He looked dubiously at Draco, as if was reconsidering whether Draco could feel such desire.
“I can do that,” Draco reassured him, and fixed his mind on the heap of Galleons. “But why would they tell you the legends? Didn’t they think you would try to use them to escape?” He didn’t really believe it was fairies that had taken Potter, but whoever it was had to be capable of keeping a powerful wizard imprisoned against his will. Draco thought it was only right to feel a bit of wariness about that.
Potter gave him an odd, bitter smile. “I didn’t tell you why they grabbed me in the first place, did I?”
Draco shook his head and leaned against the balcony’s railings. He thought Potter would probably take a lot of time to recite his sob story. Draco might as well be comfortable while he did so.
“Because I was tired of life,” Potter said simply. His eyes were enormous, and he looked as if he could start crying at any moment out of sheer self-pity. Draco considered him critically and retracted his opinion about laughter improving Potter’s appearance. It did that less than self-pity destroyed it. “Because I thought that I could go away and no one would miss me-or, well, that the people who missed me would only be served right. I’d quarreled with my friends, no one seemed to love me for me instead of for the fame or the money, and I wanted to punish them a little.”
“Ah,” Draco said, recognizing the motivation from when he was sixteen. “Your own funeral delusion.”
Potter raised his eyebrows. They were exquisitely shaped, Draco had to admit, if too bushy and dark in places. “The what?”
“The idea that if you could die, everyone would see how wonderful you were and then they would feel sorry for you,” Draco said. “Most people forget that they can’t actually attend their own funeral and see everyone mourning and sobbing.” He thought a moment, then added, “But I did see Granger today. She heads up an organization to find you, and is offering quite a large reward. She looks miserable. Perhaps you’ve succeeded in punishing her, at least.”
Potter bowed his head. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. “It was just the impulse of an afternoon. It wouldn’t have lasted even a day. But she found me, and offered what seemed to be beauty and peace and-and revenge. I took it, and by the time I realized what she was, it was too late.” Then he blinked and looked up. “A reward?”
“Yes,” Draco said.
“That’s why you’re doing this?” Potter asked, leaning forwards and studying him so intently that Draco would have been abashed about it if he could have been abashed about anything.
“Yes,” Draco said, and matched Potter stare for stare. What did Potter want, one of his friends to rescue him and do it for unselfish and heroic reasons? He should have chosen to appear in one of their rose gardens.
Potter looked bemused. “And you think that desire is going to be enough to make you hold on to me against all the illusions that they can inflict on your senses?”
“You have no idea how much I care about money,” Draco said haughtily. “But tell me what I’ll have to do. You talk about illusions. I can take a potion that will keep me safe from the effects of glamours.”
“That won’t do anything,” Potter said, with a negligent wave of his hand. He appeared to be thinking deeply now, and Draco was relieved, since deep thinking was incompatible with a moral lecture about the evils of money. “The fairy illusions are stronger than anything mortal potions are meant to contend with. The legends say that the Queen’s lover who tried to escape was changed into many different shapes in the arms of the woman who rescued him, but I’ve never seen a real change here.” His eyes were deep and bitter, and Draco thought his words had some profound significance that Draco was missing utterly. Not that he cared. “I’m sure it’ll only be illusions. But some of them could be very convincing. You might think you were holding a burning brand.”
Draco shuddered fastidiously, but said, “I could put up with that as long as it didn’t actually burn my hair or skin.”
“It couldn’t,” Potter said. “Though the effects are stronger the more belief you give to the glamour.”
“What a charming troop of creatures you chose to let yourself be captured by,” Draco said dryly, and then saw Potter flicker. “It looks as though you’re going. Will you be able to return here?”
Potter stared down at himself, and then suddenly said, “Yes. I’ll come back. I’ll grow stronger, too, as the sacrifice approaches. It’ll be on the first day of autumn. Stronger, and more solid, and able to stay in the real world for longer periods-” He abruptly tore the green cloak from his shoulders and tossed it at Draco. Draco reached out automatically and found his arms full of warmth and finery. “I-”
Then he was gone.
Blinking, Draco shook the cloak out and stared at it. The material was the brilliant, true green of leaves in sunlight, the kind of green that Draco had seen many times almost achieved in robes but never naturally; there was always some glamour that the robe-maker had to add. Whoever Potter was staying with, Draco admitted grudgingly, they knew something about materials and dyes.
The lacy edging along the hem and collar of the cloak was a brilliant silver, though the material was so silky that Draco nearly dropped the garment when he tried to pick it up by one end. He wondered if Potter ever found it annoying, rubbing against his skin.
He hesitated for long moments, waiting for any hint that Potter was coming back. Then he shrugged and draped the cloak around himself.
The cloak settled with a heavy swing, and then Draco smelled a strong scent rising from it, the odor of chestnuts and wild spring. He gasped, and the odor swirled into his lungs, making him want to dance until his feet bled, to run through the woods until he could catch deer with his bare hands, to spend the rest of his life learning to play the harp and sing-
Draco tore the cloak off his shoulders and stared at it suspiciously.
Those are powerful glamours that these people have Potter under, yes. It’s no wonder that he thinks they’re fairies.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/311152.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/OFC and Draco/others
Rating: R
Warnings: Sex, profanity, some violence and flangst. Crackish humor. Ignores the epilogue.
Wordcount: ~21,700
Summary: Draco would like visions of Harry Potter to stop appearing in his rose garden, please. Especially since Harry Potter has been gone for seven years.
Author’s Notes: This fic is based on the story of Tam Lin, and the title is a quote from one version of the ballad.
With Your Green Mantle
The first time Draco saw the vision of Harry Potter, it was early morning and he was stumbling through the rose garden after a party that had lasted all night and been-well, it had been some party, that was all Draco could really say. He was never sure if the ones that left a musty taste of vomit in his mouth and the overwhelming urge to produce more of it were fun or not.
Draco couldn’t remember how he’d got into the rose garden, either. He had been chasing Pansy, who wore a green dress-or no, wait, that was that friend of hers. Nicola. Or something. His memory really wasn’t clear.
But Pansy, or Nicola, or maybe it was Astoria, hadn’t actually run into the rose garden. Draco remembered that much. He had stumbled into it somehow later, then. Perhaps that was when he was wrapped around Blaise and kissing him for all he was worth. Or maybe not. Draco had the hazy impression that he’d left Blaise behind, entangled on a bench with Daphne, and then stumbled about with Theo for a while.
Automatically, Draco checked his penis. He smiled in satisfaction when he saw it was still attached and looked normal. Being with Theo could shrivel one’s cock something fierce.
He looked up from his penis, and that was when he saw the vision of Harry Potter.
It was an unpleasant combination of sights, as he told the house-elves later.
For the moment, Draco just stood there with his pants pulled down, the urge to piss and the one to vomit both gone, and stared with his mouth open as Harry Potter stood gazing at his rosebushes. He had a wistful smile on his face; he was turned to Draco in profile, but Draco could see that much. He reached out a hand that hovered over the nearest rose, and he sighed. Someone could break their heart over that sigh, Draco thought. If someone was a fool, of course, and hadn’t known handsomer people.
Somehow, he forgot right then that no one had seen Harry Potter for seven years. So he stupidly shouted, “Oi! What do you think you’re doing?”
Potter whirled around and stared at him, his green eyes so wide that they looked unnatural. For a moment, his gaze flickered down to Draco’s penis and stayed there, and Draco felt absurdly gratified even though this had to be a ghost or a vision, which meant Draco couldn’t have sex with it, which meant that the compliment was wasted.
Then Potter stared into Draco’s face and shook his head. His long black hair, shoulder-length, a wild mass of curls, flew around his features.
That was the point when Draco noticed that Potter was dressed, as Draco eloquently put it to the house-elves later, “in a really fucking poncey way.”
His shirt had some sort of ruffled lace collar, and it was made of a silky green fabric that Draco had imagined no Gryffindor would be caught dead wearing, because of its similarity to Slytherin colors. His trousers, honest-to-Merlin, were ruffled, too, and made of the same silky cloth, although this was dark blue. The trousers led straight to big pointy shoes, with curled golden tips. Draco had to wonder exactly what he’d allowed Astoria to put in his wine last night.
“This is a dream,” Draco said loudly, because Potter just stood there staring at him with his lips parted-intense red lips, Draco had to note, as though he had smeared makeup over them-and didn’t seem to understand that it was his duty to vanish so Draco didn’t have to doubt his sanity any longer. “You’re not real. You would be naked if you were.”
Then he shut his mouth, and shut his eyes in horror, too. He couldn’t believe that he’d admitted that aloud, that he sometimes had fantasies about Harry Potter.
Then he remembered this was just a dream-or a hallucination; Draco wasn’t picky and they were both welcome-and he didn’t have to worry. It wouldn’t be reporting anything about his predilections to anyone. (Predilections, that was a nice big word for ten-o’clock in the morning). Besides, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to fantasize about sleeping with someone else. The stable of Slytherins who regularly associated with him was large, but it couldn’t provide an infinite variety. There was no one with green eyes, for one.
“It’s not a dream,” the ghost of Potter said, and his voice was echoingly deep and seemed to bounce off the rosebushes and the benches. Stupid benches; Draco didn’t know why Great-Grandfather Octavius had installed them. All they did was bang Draco’s shins or injure his head when he was stumbling through the gardens at night, trying to find a quiet place to sleep. “You’re the first one to see me since I vanished.” Some kind of weird smile was on Potter’s lips when Draco looked again. “And probably the last,” he added cryptically.
“I hate riddles in the morning,” Draco said pitifully.
The vision didn’t respond. Draco looked up again and found that it had vanished.
He finished pissing as soon as he could, vomited into the pot of a sickly-looking fern that he had never liked anyway, and then staggered into the house. He needed a bath and a Hangover Potion. Then he needed some food, and some wine. And then he needed the house-elves to comb his hair and tidy him up so that he could go over to Blaise’s house. Blaise had said he had something important and special that he wanted to show Draco today.
Normally, Draco would have discounted anything like that that Blaise said at one of these parties, but he’d said it before they started drinking, so he thought it was worth taking a look at.
*
“Not Potter,” Blaise said, shaking his head and managing to look sober despite the fact that Draco personally knew he had swallowed at least six pints this evening. “You couldn’t have seen Potter.”
“Why not?” Draco took another sip of the sweet, pale wine that he’d been drinking most of the evening. Blaise had told him the name, but he’d forgotten. But since the wine was the important, special thing he had wanted to show Draco and it was good enough, Draco figured he could forgive that. “Do you mean that the combination of drinks I had couldn’t possibly have caused hallucinations?” He would do a lot to be able to ignore the implication that he was getting too old to hold his drink at the age of twenty-five.
“Because.” Blaise leaned close to him and held out one finger as if he meant to jab Draco in the nose. Draco watched its flight in fascination, but it settled to the table instead of poking him in the face. Draco was a bit disappointed. If Blaise had touched him, Draco could have grabbed the finger and sucked on it. “Because,” Blaise finished in a triumphant tone, “Potter’s vanished.”
“Oh.” Losing interest, Draco took another gulp of wine, then put the glass down and snatched at the plate of biscuits in the middle of the table. Blaise’s mother made them. They were covered with a delicious, flaking white icing and filled with some sort of cream, and Draco had only checked them for poison once or twice. “I knew that. But why did I see him, then?”
Theo leaned in from the side. They were all seated around the large table in the middle of the dining room at Blaise’s house, which meant it was polished enough by house-elves that Draco could see Theo’s reflection in the smooth dark wood. “Because you were drunk,” Theo said. “Of course.” And then he frowned and rubbed a hand across his forehead as if to check for fever. “Or were you busy fucking Pansy instead of drinking? I can’t remember.”
“Nicola, not Pansy,” Draco said, and slid back in his seat with pleasure as he bit into the biscuit. His mouth filled with a melting ecstasy that had him decide it was almost worthwhile to die from eating food that Belladonna Zabini had prepared if this was the result. “I was trying to fuck Nicola.”
“Who?” Pansy leaned against the table in return, but she almost lost her balance and had to prop herself up with a hand on the pot of flowers between them. It wobbled and probably would have fallen, except that a well-trained house-elf appeared under the table, captured the large pot in loving arms, and Apparated away. Draco didn’t think Pansy noticed. She kept her vacant gaze on his face. “What? Who’s that?”
Draco frowned at her. “Your friend from Paris,” he said. “You should know. You were the one who brought her.”
“I don’t know anyone named Nicola, darling,” Pansy said, with a shrug that made her breasts bounce, and fell back in her chair again. Then she giggled. “Imagine if we had someone we didn’t know at one of our parties? Wouldn’t that be exciting?”
They all considered this in silence for a while. Theo was the one who said what Draco, at least, was thinking. “No,” he said decisively. “It’s better when it’s just the six of us.” He gave Draco a bright, hopeful smile that said where he wanted the evening to lead and reached out to squeeze his hand under the table. “Who else could understand us like one of us? Who could drink like one of us, or fuck like one of us?”
“Millicent?” Pansy asked, but not in the sense of someone offering up a serious alternative. The discussion of the rest of their group seemed to have reminded her that Daphne and Astoria weren’t here tonight, and she was the only woman. She sat up taller and gave all of them a secretive smile. Draco removed his hand from Theo’s. When Pansy looked like that, she was inevitably exciting, and Draco was in the mood for exciting.
“She’s gone all…” Blaise searched for a sufficiently horrifying adjective, and in the end came back to the only one that any of them had been able to use to describe Millicent since the war. “Gryffindor.”
Draco shuddered and took another biscuit. “How did she ever get Sorted into Slytherin anyway?” he demanded. “Did she somehow fool the Hat?”
“You can’t do that,” Pansy said, with the disagreeable habit she had of being reasonable in drunken discussions. Draco changed his mind about whether he wanted to sleep with her tonight. “It sees straight into your head, darling.”
“I don’t remember that,” Draco muttered. And he didn’t. The Hat had seen that he was meant for Slytherin right away, so it hadn’t had to do anything like peer into his head and read his every thought. Blaise said it had happened to him, and Pansy to her, but Draco wasn’t sure about that. They could be misremembering.
“Yes, well, you don’t recall much on the best of nights,” Theo said. Draco scowled at him and decided that he didn’t want to sleep with him tonight, either.
“I was younger then,” Draco said haughtily, and then clapped a hand over his mouth. Why in the world had he wanted to remind them of his age? He wasn’t the oldest of the group-that was Theo-but he didn’t want them comparing him to the way he had acted years or months ago. The present was the most important.
“Anyway,” said Blaise, leaning over and pouring out more of the wine, “Millicent has a shop in Diagon Alley and sells robes like it’s something she trained to do. She doesn’t seem to have sex at all. I don’t think she drinks much, either.”
“It’s worse than that,” Pansy whispered. “She pays her taxes.”
All of them shuddered, and Draco felt pity congeal in his stomach. He had half-thought sometimes of calling on Millicent and asking why she was so different now, but it was obvious that would never happen.
“How the mighty do fall,” said Blaise, with a sigh and a world-weary shake of his head that Draco knew would have done credit to his mother. “Who would have thought she would end up that way?” He grinned suddenly. “Who would have thought that Weasley would end up the way he did?”
Draco didn’t have to ask which Weasley he meant; the only one of interest to his little circle of friends was the one who had been in their year, after all. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “I know that he stopped his Auror training when Potter disappeared, but what’s happened since then?”
Theo and Pansy looked as bewildered, which meant Blaise took his time about telling them. He leaned back in his chair and sipped his wine, then ate a biscuit delicately piece by piece, flicking the icing from his fingers. Draco tried not to roll his eyes. He knew he would have done the same if he had the rare good fortune to be in sole possession of such a delicious piece of news.
“He’s in prison,” Blaise said. “Not Azkaban, not yet, but it might end up that way when they finish sentencing him.”
Pansy squealed and clutched at Blaise’s arm. “For what, Blaise, darling? You can’t leave it at that! You have to tell us!”
Theo nodded. Draco picked up a biscuit of his own and bit off the top to avoid looking too excited. He did have to maintain a certain standard, especially after his inadvertent reminder of his age and the fact that he had admitted seeing a hallucination of Potter last night.
“It seems that he started to distrust the Ministry after Potter’s disappearance,” Blaise said, and finished the last of his biscuit. “Thought they had something to do with it. He demanded an investigation, which they refused to perform. They had evidence that Potter had fled the wizarding world, and it was probably bloody convincing evidence. After all, with everyone claiming to see Potter around every corner, they would only accept a solid story.”
Draco nodded. He remembered Weasley’s demands, if vaguely, before he had grown disgusted with the ill-trained way the post-owls landed on their perches and canceled his subscription to the Daily Prophet.
“So he got caught breaking into the offices of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement last night,” Blaise said, and his voice sparkled with delighted malice. “He wanted the records of the time that Potter vanished, and the reports of the Aurors they sent to the scene, if one can believe his claims. Of course he was arrested. He admitted that he’d done it, and practically dared them to condemn him.”
“I wonder what it would be like to fuck a war hero,” Pansy said dreamily.
Draco nearly dropped his biscuit. “Pansy!” he said. “The thought of you and the Weasel in an intimate embrace is going to turn my stomach and make me vomit in your lap.”
Pansy drew her chair away from him. “Don’t you dare, Draco!” she said, sternly if unsteadily. “This dress is new.”
“And so is the image that you just introduced into my head,” Draco retorted. “That doesn’t make it valuable.”
Blaise snickered, and Theo clapped Draco on the back. Pansy chose to win by ignoring them all and sighing again. “I wondered what it would be like to fuck Potter when we were still at school,” she admitted. “And even Weasley, sometimes. But those dreadful freckles were too much for me. Potter, though, had a certain je ne sais quoi about him even before he defeated the Dark Lord.”
“You were the one who suggested sacrificing him to the Dark Lord,” Draco pointed out. He had spent a few months envious that he didn’t think of that suggestion first. It might have meant that he had some distinction in the heated discussion that followed the war, instead of being dismissed in the papers as “Lucius Malfoy’s son.”
Now they presumably said something different about him, with his father in prison and his mother traveling, but Draco didn’t know what, since he didn’t read the papers. He frowned and considered renewing his subscription.
Pansy still had the wistful smile on her face. “Yes, but I would have made sure his last moments were happy ones,” she said. “That’s more than you could say, Draco.”
“I don’t know,” Draco said slowly, forced to consider it by the amount of wine he’d drunk. “I reckon I could fancy Potter, under the right circumstances. The vision I had of him last night was intense.”
“Well, if you find him in the solid form, maybe you can ask him to put his cock in you before you turn him over to the Ministry and claim the ten thousand Galleon reward,” Blaise said cheerfully, pouring himself another glass.
“Ten thousand Galleons?” Draco asked, snapping to attention. That was something he was sure he hadn’t heard about in the papers. “The Ministry’s offering that?”
“Something called The Organization for Finding Harry Potter is,” Pansy said. “With contributions from the Ministry and Potter’s friends and ‘the good people of Britain.’” She rolled her eyes and played with the stem of her glass. “These were the same good people who thought he was insane when alive. I doubt they would actually raise the money if someone brought him back.”
“Ten thousand Galleons,” Draco murmured. He had a fortune, of course, but there were certain things that he couldn’t do with it, including purchase the tame dragons he’d always wanted. The asking prices on the black market for domesticated Chinese Fireballs ran at least twenty thousand Galleons, and Draco had never wanted to spend that much money on an uncertain prospect. “I wonder…”
“Oh, don’t go and tell them about your hallucinations,” Theo said impatiently. “Otherwise it’ll be like that time at St. Mungo’s with your supposed Ghostly Spattergroit all over again.”
Draco turned on him, wounded. “You said that you were never going to mention that again!”
“Yes, but I made that vow when I was sober,” Theo said, and drank some more wine.
Draco closed his eyes, doing his best to ignore the treachery of his friends, and sank back into thought. Yes, he could use the ten thousand Galleons towards the purchase of the dragon. Or he could throw the kind of party that would make him famous among his friends for weeks. Or he could plant more roses in the Manor gardens so that they would become the kind of living, growing, changing place his mother had always wanted.
Draco carefully steered his mind away from thoughts of his parents and opened one eye to look around the table. Everyone else was flirting or staring into their wine or thinking with dreams in their expression.
None of them, like Draco, was actually making the kind of plans that would make those dreams come true.
It was time to lay a little trap for his hallucination.
*
The second time Draco saw the vision of Harry Potter, it was again in the rose garden, this time in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a problem for Draco to sit up and drink by the light of his wand, but it had meant that he had to refuse an invitation to Astoria and Daphne’s latest party, and he was a bit irritated at that.
Also bored. He wouldn’t have thought confronting an image of his childhood best enemy would involve so much waiting.
But there was Potter, standing among the roses again and bowing his head as if to sniff them. Draco studied him carefully. Potter didn’t look transparent, actually. And he wore different clothes than he last time: a rose-colored tunic, a long green cloak, and trousers of a slightly different shade of blue. His feet were bare, and he carried a golden ring on one hand with a ruby that made Draco contemplate the finer points of trying to steal from someone who wasn’t really there.
He wasn’t sure what the different clothes meant. Perhaps that his brain had grown weary of the simpler tricks it could play on him.
(Draco had no difficulty in believing that this was a hallucination and so not really there and that he had a chance to find the lost Potter and bring him home at the same time. His brain was special like that).
He cleared his throat. Potter whirled around, and he had a rose in one hand. He dropped it when he saw Draco staring at him and shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said, voice faint and far off. Draco cocked his head. Was it his imagination, or was Potter’s voice more musical than it used to be? Certainly his imagination, since he didn’t really remember what Potter’s voice sounded like. “You can see me?”
“I’m drunk, but yes, I can,” Draco said, and set down his glass of brandy carefully. “What I want to know is why you’re coming here, and where you’ve been, and why you’re wearing those poncey clothes.” Maybe, he thought, astonished at the freshness and brilliancy of his theory, Potter has been kidnapped by people obsessed with costume balls. Has The Organization for Finding Harry Potter looked into that, I wonder?
“I don’t understand,” Potter muttered, his brow furrowing. “The reason I haven’t been able to find someone to rescue me before this is that no one could see me.” He looked around as though he assumed he would find some huge magnifying lens crouching in the corner of the gardens. “Why should you be able to do it?” His gaze as he turned it on Draco was hostile and hopeful both at once.
Draco wagged his finger. “I know how this works,” he said. “And I’m the one asking the questions. You’re not going to refuse to answer in case you should run away the next moment and leave me here with a hat full of sorrow.”
Potter’s mouth drooped open. “What? Are you in league with them?”
“Um-” Draco pulled himself together. Truth to tell, he wasn’t sure what had made him say those words. They had made sense in his head, but they sure didn’t when they emerged from his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said loftily. “Because I don’t know who captured you.” There. That was a subtle psychological maneuver that asked Potter the question without actually asking it. Surely he wouldn’t be able to resist.
Potter licked his lips. “I’m not sure how to say this without making you laugh,” he said. “But I’ve been taken by fairies.”
Draco laughed.
Potter backed up and looked as if he would depart in offended pride. Draco hastily waved a hand. Either this was a very interesting hallucination or he was about to find out that Potter also hallucinated-or else his costume-obsessed captors had been very successful in never letting him see their faces. “It just sounds ridiculous,” he said. “The little fairies we hang up in our lights when we need them? Those fairies?”
“These are much taller,” Potter said with some dignity. “They can change shape. They’re immortal. They-” He closed his eyes and shuddered.
“Did they try to prick you to death with pins?” Draco asked, knowing he probably shouldn’t, but unable to stop.
Potter’s eyes popped open, and he glared. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’ve seen them kill someone with a glance because that person couldn’t stand their beauty. Well, only she can do that, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s the one who took me, after all. Chose me. Because I was like a diamond lying in the grass, she said, and she couldn’t stand to see me lose my luster.” He closed his eyes again. “I was a fool ever to believe that. She took me because I was payment.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Draco cautioned him. He always appreciated it when people said things like that to him.
“The fairies make some sort of payment to Hell every seven years,” Potter said. “I don’t know why. But, naturally, they don’t want to sell a soul that belongs to them.” He took a deep breath. “This year, my soul’s the payment.”
Draco shook his head slowly, once and then again. He was trying, he really was, but he simply couldn’t imagine why in the world Potter expected him to believe this.
Then he remembered the way Potter had vanished the first time, instead of trying to tell Draco this mad story then, and frowned thoughtfully. Maybe Potter believed it, and the problem was that his craziness would set up a barrier when Draco tried to rescue him. Maybe that was the real problem.
“What, like Muggle Hell?” he asked, deciding to play along for the moment. He’d got vague notions of what Muggles thought this place called Hell was like from books that Pansy had stolen for him. Draco hadn’t been able to make much sense of it. It was a hot place, and they believed they lived forever in pain and torment there, but they also talked about how their God was full of peace and love. Draco thought one could be true or the other, but not both at once.
Potter shuddered. “I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the legends of Muggle Hell to be certain of that.” He licked his lips. “But there’s something there, something that frightens them. I’ve felt it myself.”
“What did it feel like?” Draco thought there probably was some sort of threat, something sufficient to keep Potter caged, or he would have come back on his own. If he could get Potter to talk through this, then he might find the truth behind his delusions, and with it the way to coax him back.
“Like a rain of fire against my skin,” Potter said. “But an invisible one. My skin didn’t char.” He wrapped his arms around himself as if he was feeling it right now.
“Ah,” Draco said, contented because he understood what was happening now. “That’s a common type of Dark Arts. They’re probably using it, and you don’t notice because you’re bewildered by glamours.”
Potter stared at him. “Fairies can use glamours,” he said slowly. “That’s how she got me to go with her in the first place. But that doesn’t apply here, Malfoy. I know what I felt, and it wasn’t the fault of any bloody glamour.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Draco said soothingly, while he thought about it. His brain stirred dimly with memories of Dark Arts that could cause invisible rains of fire, but he would have to look up the spells again to be sure. He made a face. He hated research.
“You’ve got to rescue me before the sacrifice,” Potter said, which interrupted Draco’s thoughts, and which he hated.
“Why can’t you leave on your own?” Draco demanded. He was proud of himself for thinking of the question when he was distracted with all this thinking and when Potter wasn’t making any sense because he was mad. “Glamours shouldn’t be enough to keep you in place.”
Potter closed his eyes and laid his hand over his heart, which was so ridiculous that Draco wanted to snicker. He didn’t think that was allowed when he was trying to come up with a way to bring a hero home, though. At least, not if he wanted the hero’s cooperation.
“It’s her beauty,” Potter whispered. “I told you. No one could walk away from her willingly. I told you.” Draco thought of pointing out that he had repeated himself, but Potter was going on, and his words rushed and hissed in an oddly compelling fashion, like the first tumble of new wine into a glass. “She has a hook in my heart, and the hook is her beauty. As long as she wants me, she can have me.”
“Well, then you can’t be that worried about this trip to Hell,” Draco pointed out.
Potter glared at him. “Why did I ever think that you would be able to help me?” He turned away and took a step forwards into the rosebushes, and Draco had the distinct impression that he was about to vanish behind a door.
“Wait!” Draco yelped, scrambling to his feet. If Potter left, then so would Draco’s chances for a tame dragon. “I’m sorry,” he added soothingly, when Potter turned and scowled over his shoulder at him. “I just really don’t understand. What-how could just beauty keep you captive? How could you know that glamours were holding you and not be able to break free?”
Potter gave him a small, bitter smile. “That’s the worst of it, Malfoy,” he said. “Knowing what she’s going to do to me, knowing that the glamours are false and that some small and petty reality lies beneath, and yet not being able to break free.”
Draco nodded. “That would be pretty awful. Like knowing that you’re drinking awful wine but having to keep going because it’s polite.”
Potter peered at him with a puzzled expression on his face, but kept silent. Draco took that as encouragement to go on.
“If you have to be rescued, you have to be rescued,” Draco said. “Though I’m not really a hero.”
He’d meant it as modest self-deprecation. There was no reason for Potter to flicker a glance over him and mutter in an insulting tone, “No, you’re not.”
Draco glared. “Maybe I should leave you there with these glamours and this fairy woman that you obviously love so much,” he said. “And you can say hello to the devil for me.” He remembered that devils lived in the Muggle Hell, though like lots of other things about the books that Pansy had showed him, it didn’t make sense. The devils all looked unhappy. They could just leave if it was so bad. Draco wondered that no one had ever suggested it to them.
Potter laughed without humor. “It looks like I’ll going to anyway,” he muttered, and then he turned and flickered as if someone had passed a thick pane of not-quite-transparent glass over him. A moment later, he had disappeared.
Draco tapped suspiciously on the sides of his skull. It wasn’t like him to think of similes and metaphors like that. He really would have to see about stocking his cellars with different kinds of wine, if this was what resulted.
*
“This is The Organization for Finding Harry Potter, right?”
The tired-looking woman sitting behind the desk glanced up at him and blinked. Draco could see why she did. She must never have seen anyone who looked as clean and well-dressed as Draco did in her office before. She herself wore a brown jumper with a large red H on it that had seen better days-probably when it was thread-and her hair straggled over her shoulders. Draco eyed it sternly, to convey the silent message that it needed a comb, and started to say that he knew where she could find one, but she spoke first.
“Malfoy?”
“Why, yes,” Draco said, and smiled at her, glad for her sake that she had at least the rudiments of taste. “I’m sure that you recognized me from my appearances in the society pages, yes?”
“I recognize you from the arse you were at school.” The woman rose to her feet and reached beneath the desk she sat at. Draco had the uncomfortable impression she was pointing a wand at him. “Is this a joke of yours? You have to have seen the organization name over the door. Decided to have a bit of fun, have you?” Her voice thickened with bitterness and exhaustion.
It was the bitterness that made Draco peer more closely, subtract seven years-or fourteen-from her face and decide that he knew her after all. “Granger?”
“Who else would be at the desk, now that Ron’s been arrested?” Granger took a large, deep breath and straightened up. The wand in her hand was no longer a hidden threat. “I don’t care why you’re here, actually, Malfoy. You can just go away again. It’s not like you would be anxious to see Harry returned.”
“I came to check on the amount of the reward,” Draco said, graciously willing to overlook the insults she’d offered him because he knew that she was mourning her lost friend. “Ten thousand Galleons, I believe? And is that for information leading to the recovery of Potter, or for Potter himself?” He hoped it was the former. Then he could just tell the story of Potter’s delusion that he’d been taken by fairies, claim the money, and free himself of the whole absurd business.
“You would,” Granger said softly. “You would be the sort of person who’d come here and act as if you could make fun of our grief by pretending you have information.” She gestured towards the door with her wand. “Get out!”
“There’s no need to be like that,” Draco said, wounded and irritated both at once. “It’s for the information, then? That’s all I want to know. I think Potter is being held-”
“It’s for him, or for his body, and honestly,” Granger said, with a sneer that shocked Draco. She had to have picked it up from a Slytherin, which made him wonder who had been slumming. Probably Millicent, with her disgusting tax-paying ways. “As if you would ever know anything like that. Leave now.”
Draco did, somewhat disconcerted both by the pity he felt for Granger and the fact that he was going to have work harder than he’d expected to get the reward. He asked himself seriously, as he Apparated back to the Manor, whether a tame dragon and the trouble of having to drag Potter out of this fairy realm, or wherever he really was, was worth all this.
He decided, reluctantly, that it was, if only so that he could have his rose garden to himself again, free of visions.
*
The third time Draco saw Potter, he was unfortunately sober, even though it was dawn. Pansy had come over last night, before Draco had even started drinking, to sob on his shoulder and say that she wanted to marry Blaise but was afraid it would break up the friendship of their little group. Or maybe it was Theo she’d wanted to marry. It wasn’t as though Draco had bothered to listen, once he had worked out that she didn’t expect him to settle down.
So he was grouchy, and in no mood to entertain a half-imaginary madman. When he saw Potter wandering soulfully about among the bushes, once again wearing the green cloak, and with his back to Draco so that he couldn’t make out the shocking colors of his clothes, he called out a question he’d been wondering about.
“Why my rose gardens?”
Potter started and turned around, as though he had the right to be surprised about someone else being in the house. He stared at Draco so hard and so long that Draco glared and waved a hand to shoo him away. Ten thousand Galleons weren’t worth this aggravation after all, he’d decided.
“I still don’t know why you can see me,” Potter whispered. “So few people can. As for roses, they’re one of the few mortal flowers that still smells sweet to me after the bowers of Fairyland.” His eyes were bright with yearning and doom, but then, Draco considered, they had always been like that.
“Well, then,” Draco said, giving in to the inevitable, “tell me how to rescue you so that you can come back to the mortal world.”
Potter stared up at him with big, hopeful eyes. They made him a little more attractive, Draco thought. In fact, Potter did himself no favors in general with his brooding hero shtick. He would be much more handsome if his eyes occasionally looked as though he wasn’t about to start crying.
“Really?” he whispered. “You would do that?” Suddenly he stopped and bit his lip. “But in the other versions of the legend that I’ve heard, the one who rescued the sacrifice had to be a pregnant woman.”
“I’m not taking a Gender-Reversal Potion for your sake,” Draco said crossly. “They’re notoriously hard to brew, and then half the time they don’t work right and you’re stuck as the wrong sex for the rest of your life. Hearing Pansy bitch about her menstrual cycle is quite enough without experiencing it myself.”
Potter buried his head in his arms and kept it there. Draco frowned and leaned closer. He hoped that Potter wasn’t about to expire in visionary form in his rose garden. It would make a bother to try and take that body to Granger.
Then he realized Potter was laughing, great whoops of laughter that surged through him and looked as if they ought to make his lungs burn. Draco raised his nose and did his best to look calm and unconcerned, while his heart leaped with curiosity. Potter went on laughing for a long time, and Draco didn’t think his words had been that funny.
Then he reconsidered. If he could amuse Potter like this, then perhaps he would consent to make sure that the ten thousand Galleons was given to Draco when he came back to the world.
“Well,” Potter said, lifting his head and shaking it. He looked much better when he had laughed, Draco thought with grudging admiration. His cheeks were bright now, and his eyes had a spark in them that Draco remembered from school. “I don’t think that will be necessary. When they told the legends to me, never dreaming that I would want to make use of them, they emphasized that desire was enough. If you feel a deep desire to rescue me, then it should work.” He looked dubiously at Draco, as if was reconsidering whether Draco could feel such desire.
“I can do that,” Draco reassured him, and fixed his mind on the heap of Galleons. “But why would they tell you the legends? Didn’t they think you would try to use them to escape?” He didn’t really believe it was fairies that had taken Potter, but whoever it was had to be capable of keeping a powerful wizard imprisoned against his will. Draco thought it was only right to feel a bit of wariness about that.
Potter gave him an odd, bitter smile. “I didn’t tell you why they grabbed me in the first place, did I?”
Draco shook his head and leaned against the balcony’s railings. He thought Potter would probably take a lot of time to recite his sob story. Draco might as well be comfortable while he did so.
“Because I was tired of life,” Potter said simply. His eyes were enormous, and he looked as if he could start crying at any moment out of sheer self-pity. Draco considered him critically and retracted his opinion about laughter improving Potter’s appearance. It did that less than self-pity destroyed it. “Because I thought that I could go away and no one would miss me-or, well, that the people who missed me would only be served right. I’d quarreled with my friends, no one seemed to love me for me instead of for the fame or the money, and I wanted to punish them a little.”
“Ah,” Draco said, recognizing the motivation from when he was sixteen. “Your own funeral delusion.”
Potter raised his eyebrows. They were exquisitely shaped, Draco had to admit, if too bushy and dark in places. “The what?”
“The idea that if you could die, everyone would see how wonderful you were and then they would feel sorry for you,” Draco said. “Most people forget that they can’t actually attend their own funeral and see everyone mourning and sobbing.” He thought a moment, then added, “But I did see Granger today. She heads up an organization to find you, and is offering quite a large reward. She looks miserable. Perhaps you’ve succeeded in punishing her, at least.”
Potter bowed his head. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. “It was just the impulse of an afternoon. It wouldn’t have lasted even a day. But she found me, and offered what seemed to be beauty and peace and-and revenge. I took it, and by the time I realized what she was, it was too late.” Then he blinked and looked up. “A reward?”
“Yes,” Draco said.
“That’s why you’re doing this?” Potter asked, leaning forwards and studying him so intently that Draco would have been abashed about it if he could have been abashed about anything.
“Yes,” Draco said, and matched Potter stare for stare. What did Potter want, one of his friends to rescue him and do it for unselfish and heroic reasons? He should have chosen to appear in one of their rose gardens.
Potter looked bemused. “And you think that desire is going to be enough to make you hold on to me against all the illusions that they can inflict on your senses?”
“You have no idea how much I care about money,” Draco said haughtily. “But tell me what I’ll have to do. You talk about illusions. I can take a potion that will keep me safe from the effects of glamours.”
“That won’t do anything,” Potter said, with a negligent wave of his hand. He appeared to be thinking deeply now, and Draco was relieved, since deep thinking was incompatible with a moral lecture about the evils of money. “The fairy illusions are stronger than anything mortal potions are meant to contend with. The legends say that the Queen’s lover who tried to escape was changed into many different shapes in the arms of the woman who rescued him, but I’ve never seen a real change here.” His eyes were deep and bitter, and Draco thought his words had some profound significance that Draco was missing utterly. Not that he cared. “I’m sure it’ll only be illusions. But some of them could be very convincing. You might think you were holding a burning brand.”
Draco shuddered fastidiously, but said, “I could put up with that as long as it didn’t actually burn my hair or skin.”
“It couldn’t,” Potter said. “Though the effects are stronger the more belief you give to the glamour.”
“What a charming troop of creatures you chose to let yourself be captured by,” Draco said dryly, and then saw Potter flicker. “It looks as though you’re going. Will you be able to return here?”
Potter stared down at himself, and then suddenly said, “Yes. I’ll come back. I’ll grow stronger, too, as the sacrifice approaches. It’ll be on the first day of autumn. Stronger, and more solid, and able to stay in the real world for longer periods-” He abruptly tore the green cloak from his shoulders and tossed it at Draco. Draco reached out automatically and found his arms full of warmth and finery. “I-”
Then he was gone.
Blinking, Draco shook the cloak out and stared at it. The material was the brilliant, true green of leaves in sunlight, the kind of green that Draco had seen many times almost achieved in robes but never naturally; there was always some glamour that the robe-maker had to add. Whoever Potter was staying with, Draco admitted grudgingly, they knew something about materials and dyes.
The lacy edging along the hem and collar of the cloak was a brilliant silver, though the material was so silky that Draco nearly dropped the garment when he tried to pick it up by one end. He wondered if Potter ever found it annoying, rubbing against his skin.
He hesitated for long moments, waiting for any hint that Potter was coming back. Then he shrugged and draped the cloak around himself.
The cloak settled with a heavy swing, and then Draco smelled a strong scent rising from it, the odor of chestnuts and wild spring. He gasped, and the odor swirled into his lungs, making him want to dance until his feet bled, to run through the woods until he could catch deer with his bare hands, to spend the rest of his life learning to play the harp and sing-
Draco tore the cloak off his shoulders and stared at it suspiciously.
Those are powerful glamours that these people have Potter under, yes. It’s no wonder that he thinks they’re fairies.
Part Two.
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