[one-shots]: This Worship of an Extinct Fire, H/D, R, 1/3
Title: This Worship of an Extinct Fire
Summary: Unspeakable Draco Malfoy has planned for nearly six months how to take down Thomas Linwood, a man who has discovered the secret of converting wizard bodies to pure magic. He was prepared for anything--except the discovery of the missing Harry Potter in Linwood's compound.
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Draco/Harry
Warnings: Sometimes graphic violence, descriptions of magical torture, angst, deaths of original characters
Word Count: 30,500
Author's Notes: Written for
awickedmemory in the 2013 Draco Tops Harry Fest.
awickedmemory, thanks so much for a great prompt! (Which involved Draco, as either an Unspeakable or a Hit Wizard, going undercover and finding Harry in the clutches of villains a year after he vanished). There is no non-con in this, but lots of other violence and vengeance. Thanks to my betas L and K, and to A, who found the title of this fic in A. E.'s poem "On Behalf of Certain Irishmen Not Followers of Tradition." The poem is quoted at the beginning of the fic.
This Worship of an Extinct Fire
And they would have us join their dirge,
This worship of an extinct fire
In which they drift beyond the verge
Where races all outworn expire.
The worship of the dead is not
A worship that our hearts allow...
Draco turned around in front of the mirror and checked the hang of his cloak. Then he nodded. It mimicked the pose in the photographs that he had sent to Linwood, and that was enough for him.
He faced the mirror. Yes, the glamour was in place, the one that darkened his pale hair to deep golden-blond and made his grey eyes look more blue than anything. Draco smiled. He had found that people were more likely to fail to recognize someone who had made slight changes to his form and features than someone who had made a total change.
He had practiced writing like Eddison Dane, the "magical theorist" who had made contact with Linwood months before. He had practiced walking like him, and speaking like him, and feeling what he would feel, and gazing at the sunset the way he would.
Now only one thing remained, the final step that would let Draco become him.
He lowered his head and closed his eyes, sinking at once into the grey mental space that all Unspeakables were taught to access. Draco had yet to figure out whether it was pure magic, or simply a trick of meditation. What mattered was that it worked, and he needed it to work now.
Behind the walls of that space, that dungeon room in his own mind, he carefully shut away his own preoccupations, his pure blood, his family history, his story of the war, his shadows of the past. It was Eddison Dane's life he needed, and Dane was a half-blood, hadn't fought in the war--due to a prudent leave of absence from Britain--and preferred to avoid discussing anything except magical theory. Of course, Draco had let a few hints of unhappy shadows slip into the letters he wrote to Linwood. That would make his target think he had the advantage, some way to conquer Draco and twist him around his finger.
Stop thinking of him as the target. He's Linwood, your correspondent and someone who can tell you everything you want to know about this original line of magical research.
Draco dipped himself into the freezing greyness, and when he opened his eyes and gazed into the mirror, it was Eddison Dane who looked back.
He nodded. It was time.
*
"Mr. Dane. Such a pleasure."
It was Thomas Linwood, the master of the project himself, who came to meet him outside the grey stone complex where the Dreamers of the Future worked, his hand extended and a soft smile on his face. Draco took his hand and bowed with the courtly manners that were important to him, murmuring a greeting while his gaze traveled over the complex.
It looked like nothing so much as a school, with low walls and gated courtyards where children could play in safety. Here and there windows opened on dark rooms that could have held classes, although they emitted no sound. And Draco could make out young wizards sprawled about on the velvety grass with books.
"When I learned you felt comfortable enough to come here, I knew that all my hard work had paid off."
Draco faced Linwood again. Of course he knew what the man looked like--the underground world they both moved in had been lavish with photographs and descriptions of both the man and his school--but it was another thing to see him in person. He looked all points, pointed chin and angled cheekbones and slender fingers that bore beautiful nails. A few inkstains on the edges of the fingers curved under the nails. Linwood's dark eyes followed Draco's gaze down to his fingers, and he laughed, shaking his head.
"I'm afraid that a scholar's duties must take precedence," he said, and bowed. "Won't you come and see what you've traveled so far to see?"
"You're very kind," Draco said, and faltered, and looked down.
"Yes, I heard about your loss," Linwood said, referring to the rumors that Draco had taken care to spread before he came here. He took Draco's elbow. "Will you allow me to say that we are all sorry? The Healers are very fine people, of course, but they don't understand magical progress, and they require too many tests. I'm sure we could have saved your mother."
Draco closed his eyes and nodded. "Thank you," he whispered. "I--I'd like to see what I came to see, yes."
He flicked his eyes open in time to see the fleeting smile cross Linwood's face. The man liked echoes, and Draco intended to make himself into one. There was a great empty spot at the center of Eddison Dane's heart simply waiting to be filled, and Linwood would want to step into that place.
For his own reasons, Draco wanted him to, too.
They passed through one of the courtyard gates, and Draco tilted his head back and breathed in the heavy scents of the roses that decorated the bushes here and there. There were colors he had never seen on the flowers, from a black as velvety as the grass to a peacock-colored blossom he would have liked to linger to examine.
"Rather unusual to have roses at this season," he remarked.
"We are capable of greater miracles than that." Linwood unlocked a door in front of them that had appeared to lead into a classroom, but now Draco saw steps going down. "I was going to take you to your room so you could relax, but--forgive me, but I'm accustomed to thinking of myself as a man who can read hearts. I think you would want your tour to begin with a sight of the magic we're harvesting here. Isn't that right?" He tilted his head at Draco.
Draco, his heart full and singing, nodded, and together they proceeded into the school, Linwood closing the door gently behind them.
Small lights that floated in the air like fireflies immediately sprang into being. Draco nodded at them and followed Linwood down the stairs, his mouth slightly open with awe.
The stairs were wide and well-used, not narrow and shallow the way Draco had half-expected them to be. He shook his head in wonder as they came down into the wide room that was the center--one of the centers--of Linwood's "process." No one else would know that the shake was also an admonition to himself. He must not allow his expectations and stereotypes of a place like this to interfere with seeing the reality. Otherwise, he was likely to end up on the other side of the "process."
And he didn't want that. The Unspeakables didn't want that. He was here for something else.
Linwood turned and gestured in front of him, though he might have saved himself the motion. Draco was already looking. "Behold, the fires that shall change the world!" His voice shook a little, and so did the hand that fell back to his side, while he stood, looking around and breathing.
He's allowed himself poetic license, but only a little.
The room in front of them glowed and flared with what might have looked like pillars of fire from a distance. In reality, they were twisted columns of crystal, springing from the floor and making their way in delicate corkscrews like unicorn horns to the ceiling, and all around them danced lashes and leashes of color.
One could almost ignore the chains at the bottoms of them, Draco noted. In reality, even those were more delicate and gentle than he had seen elsewhere.
Then again, these prisoners were not moving far. Linwood might not have needed the chains.
Draco looked at them, and noted the bowed heads and folded arms and shaking shoulders. Now and then someone would whimper. But all in all, it was a very quiet kind of torture, and their bodies shone almost like the crystal pillars, turned to faint and glowing glasses.
Now you sound like Linwood.
But the closer he could imitate Linwood's strictures and vocabulary and viewpoint, the more likely he would survive this, and not end up in the chains. Draco looked up at Linwood, and blinked a little. "Might I see the most powerful one you have?" he whispered. "The one who might have saved my mother?"
Linwood inclined his head, smiling. "Of course. I did promise you that, didn't I?" He took Draco's arm and started to escort him around the room. "Meanwhile, you know the process, but if you have any technical questions, feel free to ask me."
At the moment, Draco was too absorbed in watching the process Linwood's letters had talked about come to life to have any questions. He paused now and then to watch the dancing ribbons of red and green and blue and purple and grey--always those five colors, correlated to different levels of magical strength--twine their way up the pillars. Linwood always paused courteously beside him, to watch and smile.
Draco watched until he noted the exact points at which the ribbons emerged from the skin. They were in many different places, but always from the part of the body that was in contact with the chain.
At one point, he was lucky. While he was watching a thin, shivering woman rock back against the pillar, he saw one particular fat ribbon of blue get away from her and course up the corkscrew. At the top, it flared and turned a small stretch of crystal the brilliant color of a sapphire.
And Draco looked back down just as the woman's arm--the part she was chained to the pillar by--faded out, to a flesh-colored shadow with the bones floating in it like meat in soup. The woman moaned faintly, and one of the grey-cloaked attendants that hovered along the sides of the room hurried forwards to move the chain to a collar around her neck.
"It's just as you described, isn't it?" Draco murmured. "The conversion of their flesh and bone and blood to purest magical energy."
Linwood nodded. "Many wizards have succeeded in tapping their magical cores, of course, but few of us have found the way to open a direct conduit between our magical cores and the surface of the world where we can use the power. Our cores are buried too deep, linked to the health of the body and the alertness of the mind and, oh, all sorts of things." A flash of his hand dismissed all solidity. "With this device, we bring the core to the surface, and turn all the barriers in its way into more magic, part of it."
Draco nodded. It was what he had understood before, but clarifying what he understood was always good. He had made mistakes in the past.
He turned his head to the side as he approached a squat crystal pillar, shining like a heap of golden coins. Draco blinked. Yes. The light around it was phoenix-colored, something he hadn't seen before.
And chained to the pillar was a slumped figure with his black hair almost the only solid point of himself.
Draco raised his eyebrows. The black hair was almost familiar, but he had seen lots of people with hair that wild in the past few years. He turned a polite look on Linwood.
Linwood stood with his hands clasped together, breathing softly and steadily. That struck Draco as odd. So far, the man hadn't shown glee or any stronger emotion than academic pleasure when contemplating his victims. What was it about this one that made it different?
"Come and see." Linwood, as though Draco had voiced the question aloud, whispered those words and took Draco's hand to drag him over the floor towards the pillar.
It loomed larger and larger as Draco got closer, and he could see delicate threads of gold even in the veins that he had taken to be pure crystal. It seemed this particular wizard was almost completely transformed. Draco wondered what Linwood would do to replace him when he was gone.
"Behold," Linwood said, reaching out but stopping his hand short of the chain that bound the collared wizard to the pillar. "Our greatest prize, our greatest conquest."
Draco made a small black mark in his mind. So far, Linwood seemed to have few weaknesses; even a sense of humor was part of his psychology, a trait Draco saw in few wizards who invented magic the Unspeakables wanted for themselves. But the only other man Draco had heard talk about possessing someone in that rapturous way was the Dark Lord.
As though compelled by the presence of people near him, the prisoner tilted his head back degree by degree, and met their eyes.
And Draco's grey prison that he'd contained his personality in broke, and the personality of Draco Malfoy rose towards the surface, displacing the mask of Eddison Dane, because the wizard chained to the pillar had brilliant green eyes, and a lightning bolt scar, and was Harry Potter.
*
No.
Draco touched the rising personality, the memories, the rivalry, the fury, and crushed it back down into the prison. It was harder to concentrate and force the cold grey walls to close around that part of him than it had been, but still. He was going to control this situation. He would not reveal himself for who he was in front of someone as dangerous as Linwood.
He had become Eddison Dane. He must stay that man at least until he was in the room that Linwood had prepared for him. He could not explode now.
He would explode later.
He was uncomfortably aware that that promise to himself was the only thing that allowed him to resume his mask, but for the moment, he had resumed it. He could deal with the emotions that had prompted him to shatter it in the same later that contained the explosion.
*
He opened his eyes, and focused on Potter again, the emptiness in those green eyes, the way they seemed to float slightly above his face, as though the substance-draining had begun in them first.
"Harry Potter?" He let his voice squeak. Eddison Dane would, and that was who he was. "I thought he was dead!"
Linwood laughed, and the sound was rich and irritating at the same time, scraping against the prison walls that Draco had raised again. Since Draco still didn't understand why the fury was there or where it had come from, he didn't react to the irritation, either.
But he did keep his eyes on Linwood. He wasn't sure what would happen if he looked at Potter again.
"That's what everyone seems to believe about Harry Potter at some point or another," Linwood said, shaking his head. "The Dark Lord, and the people who thought he'd died when he was living in the Muggle world, and the people who saw him vanish after the Third Task at the Tri-wizard Tournament, and the people who saw him carried into the Great Hall at Hogwarts." He reached over and touched Potter's head, giving a small shudder as he did so. Draco, concentrating strongly on his analysis of Linwood's reactions so he could forget his own, doubted it was a shudder of disgust. "You'd think everyone would have learned to stop assuming it by now, until they saw the body staked through the heart and then buried. And even then, I wouldn't put it past him."
"Of course," Draco said, and squeaked a little more as he looked at Potter, or rather at the pillar behind him. Linwood was distracted enough not to notice the real direction of Draco's eyes. "I just--I know he vanished a year again. Every time, he came back much sooner than that."
Potter showed no sign of recognizing him, Draco realized distantly. Good. He hadn't counted on the possibility of finding someone he knew among Linwood's prisoners, and he should have. But as long as Potter was this out of it, Draco's mistake wouldn't cost him his own life.
Not your own.
Draco accepted the revelation of who else's life might be important to him, and put it behind grey prison walls once again. Azkaban had nothing on his mind.
"That's true," Linwood said. "And I don't know all his adventures from the time he vanished a year ago. He would have to tell you, assuming he wanted to. But I've never been able to drag that out of him." He shook his head and sighed. Once again, Draco doubted that he was putting on those mannerisms. "But whatever he became involved in, he ended up as a slave ready to be sold. Of course I took him at once. We all know how strong he is. I couldn't pass up a chance to have him as part of the process."
"Strong?" Draco repeated, as if blankly. "Well, yes, of course. Although I have read a few arguments that say the Dark Lord was the mightiest wizard of the last ten generations, and another one would not have been born so soon afterwards."
"How ridiculous," Linwood said, with the first flash of passion Draco had seen from him beyond the way he approached Potter. "Magic has a sense of balance and proportion, or at least we can discover laws that make it seem that way, but it isn't our sense of balance or proportion. It wouldn't confine itself to one great wizard in a certain number of human generations. It's just as likely to obey the movements of the stars, or the moon. Besides, the figure of the ‘last ten generations' ignores wizards such as Dumbledore and Grindelwald." He tugged on Potter's hair. Potter closed his eyes.
The rage threatened to burst out again. Draco built an extra wall and concealed the moments of his mental uncertainty by bending down to examine the chain that bound Potter's collar to the crystal. It was made of crystal itself, or so it seemed, although this had veins in it that the pillars didn't. Draco wished he could ask about it, but Linwood had no reason to trust Eddison Dane that much yet.
"Of course," he said at last, and sighed a little. "You make it all sound so reasonable. I don't know why I can't think of these reasons on my own."
Linwood touched his arm again, the way he had when they were strolling through the pillared chamber. Draco would have felt better about that if he had once let go of Potter's hair since he touched it. "Don't put yourself down that way, Eddison," he said. "Our movement needs people like you, too, people willing to put in the time and patient study to understand what we're doing here."
Draco swallowed and glanced up from beneath fluttering eyelashes. "Then my application to join your school and spend some time studying the process is--accepted?"
Linwood laughed. "I did make you wait for a formal answer, didn't I? I'm afraid that's procedure, just an instinct that I have." He clutched Draco's hand for an instant, then let it fall away and twined the fingers of both hands in Potter's hair. Potter's swaying head might have belonged to a doll for all the reaction that produced. "But yes, you're invited, Mr. Dane. I'll have someone show you to your room."
Draco bit his lip. "You won't come yourself? I mean, it's just--I would feel so much more welcome if you did."
"It's time you met other people here, your fellow students." Linwood nodded as the young witch who had moved the chain on the fading witch came forwards. "And I'm afraid that Potter requires my special attentions, sometimes."
None of the notes Linwood had shown him or the correspondence they'd exchanged said anything about the need for human interference in the "process," other than having to move the chains to a more solid part of the body when the magical core thinned one to shadow. But Draco understood the real reason at the level of his viscera, and another black mark went down on his mental slate next to Linwood's name.
"I understand," he said, and turned to the witch, and tried to make himself smile. "What's your name?"
"Teresa Brooke," she murmured, and turned away with lowered eyes. "Come with me, Mr. Dane. And be accepted."
Draco glanced back only once. Linwood stood with his hands clenched in Potter's hair, his hips rocking back and forth. For a shocked moment, Draco thought he was forcing Potter to suck his cock.
But no. Potter didn't have a mouth solid enough for that. He was simply lost in the enjoyment of his triumph, a passion that must be rarer and sweeter for him than carnal lust.
Draco turned his back and left the chamber.
*
The room that Linwood had allotted to him was small, but not as bare as Draco had expected. A huge fire burned in a hearth, beneath a mantle that looked as if it had been made of carved ivory. There was a shimmering tapestry on the wall, thick blankets on the bed done in a variety of colors--sky-blues and peacock-greens and cinnamon-browns--and a pillow that Draco let his hand sink into. It descended a long way before it finally stopped.
Draco went through the motions of someone like Eddison Dane making himself at home: gawking at the room, bouncing on the bed, splaying out on his back to test its softness, and then bouncing up with a little shake of his head to hang up his cloak and take off his boots and unpack his trunks. But all the while, his mind churned.
The way someone like Eddison Dane would make himself at home.
Because Draco couldn't lie to himself. He wasn't the perfect shell, the automaton with a mask for a face, who had walked out his door on his way to Apparate to Linwood's place. He was no longer a means of recording detail, of evaluations on Linwood's process and the best way to possess that secret for the Unspeakables, or judge whether it was too dangerous and Dark to allow it to continue existing.
He hadn't been since he saw Potter.
Why Potter?
The answer to that question had roots perhaps as deep as fairy tales, and the stories that his mother told him with her face averted--the stories that were connected with the short stay his father had had in prison after the first war--and the boy like a bird who had alighted on the stool next to him at Madam Malkin's.
And they had roots in the cellar where the Unspeakables had questioned him after his initiation, questioned him and listened to him as he poured out rubbish about himself that he had forgotten he knew but which, for some reason, they couldn't live without knowing.
Potter. It's always been Potter.
That had been what he said when, after hours and hours of wearing down, of relentless questioning, of water dripping on his face, someone--he never saw the faces of his questioners--had asked him what his greatest weakness was.
"Potter," he whispered, and someone shook him, while the voice of the first one--not the same as the person shaking him, he had been sure--asked him to repeat what he had just said.
"It's always been Potter," Draco said, staring at the floor, his shoulders heaving in their bonds, his desire to be an Unspeakable fluctuating and fluttering and dying at random intervals like a poorly-nourished fire. "I never wanted to admit that before. But I wanted him to pay attention to me, and he wouldn't. I wanted to beat him at Quidditch, and I couldn't. I wanted to be on the winning side, and I wasn't. When I tried to deliver him to the Dark Lord, on the last day I was a Death Eater, he had to rescue me instead. I can't get over what I owe him, and I can't get over that he doesn't need me. I can't repay those debts."
There had been silence, and then the bonds released his shoulders, and in dim light they let Draco stand on his own and gave him a cloth to wipe the dripping water away from his face. Draco had done so, a little stunned.
Through one of those leaks that weren't supposed to happen, Draco learned, later on, that he had been one of the few Unspeakables ever to admit his fears openly and quickly and quietly. Most of the rest resisted on that question longer than any other. The people who had tested him had taken that to mean he knew what he was doing; he knew himself, and he wouldn't make mistakes in stressful situations by misunderstanding his own reactions.
So Draco had been an Unspeakable from that day forwards, and he had never failed to anticipate what he would think.
Except for now.
Yet even that wasn't impossible to foresee, if I had remembered what was important.
Draco nodded. All right. He was still here to find out Linwood's secret and take it back to the Department of Mysteries. He still had to be sure that no one suspected him.
But in the meantime, he would have to find a way to rescue Potter as well. His own outrage and life-debts and emotional tangle and stupidity would have it no other way.
Draco sat down on the bed and flopped back again as though exhausted, shutting his eyes. He had to plan.
*
"Was it everything you expected?"
Draco dared a quick glance up into Linwood's eyes, before he blushed and looked back at the table. Linwood was watching him with a self-satisfied little smile, using his finger to trace runes in water on his plate. As Draco watched, the runes lit up and flared into blue fire.
Not possible anywhere else. But Draco had been in the school long enough to feel how saturated the air was with power, leaking away from the crystal pillars, waiting for someone to do something with it, waiting for an outlet. Linwood had admitted, when Draco mentioned it, that the process of transferring magic into the pillars wasn't perfect. They needed better chains, or a more automatic process to tie the chains to another part of their victims' bodies when the first part began to thin.
"My room?" Draco smiled and nodded. "Very kind. But of course you mean the main chamber," he corrected himself hastily when Linwood's eyebrows began to rise. "Dear me, yes. It was..." He paused and thought about it, trying to find words. "Intense," he said at last.
Linwood did smile at that, and half-bowed his head. "It is," he agreed. "Especially for someone who's not used to it."
Draco let his hand fly to his mouth, something he had described doing in his letters as Eddison Dane. "Did I look that obvious?" he whispered.
Linwood smiled more widely and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. This room was larger than most of them, and with its roaring fires and long tables where Linwood's students ate, reminded Draco of nothing so much as the Great Hall at Hogwarts. But candles without holders floated above their table, and here and there on the walls were shelves with golden vases and tiny ivory harps and small scarlet dragons. All creations of the ambient magic, Linwood had said, and as likely to vanish at any time. They hadn't yet figured out how to make them stay. The impression was one of fleeting, glittering, enchanting luxury.
"Someone who's not used to it always reacts that way," Linwood said, shaking his head. "It's the one thing I can be generous with you about."
The one thing. Draco could read a warning there, and as unsubtle as he was, so could Dane. He nodded and dropped his eyes. "Yes, sir," he whispered. "In the meantime--I wanted to ask you something." He hesitated as if gathering his courage.
Linwood only waited. "Yes?"
He knows. He knows already. He might not have understood the source of Draco's reaction to Potter--no, he must not have, or Draco would be chained to a pillar already--but he had seen it. Draco ducked his head, shrugging a little. Since he couldn't hide it, he would work that reaction into his plan.
"Why Harry Potter?" Draco whispered. "I would have thought he'd fight. Or was all the spirit gone out of him by the time you got him?"
That was what it had looked like: Potter pale and trembling, eyes glassy, unable to react, unable to do anything but sit still as his magic flowed into the chain, and then into the pillar.
"Whoever captured him had made him slow to react," Linwood said. "Taught him a lesson. We did have a few problems with him, but taking his magic relieved us of those. If we had been a more traditional group of Dark wizards, with more traditional methods of breaking prisoners, we might have had more problems."
Breaking--the word made Draco's prison walls want to break again in response. But he had promised himself that wouldn't happen, so he only nodded and murmured, "I understand. Does the draining of magic affect people's spirits that way, usually?"
Linwood lifted the goblet of wine in his hand and revolved it. Draco watched the flashing, changing nature of it, now made of paneled gold with rubies glowing in it, now rough wood with veins of silver here and there. "You are seeking some way to pull back," Linwood said. "Or else to tell yourself that this isn't Dark."
Draco could stare down at his hands without fear. He had made Eddison Dane a timid, fluttering personality, who had waited six months to come this far because of his own fear as much as because of the need to make Linwood trust him. "Yes," he whispered. "I thought--it was the look in some of their eyes. I thought I would see some despair. I saw nothingness."
"You saw transformation," Linwood corrected, and for the first time, his voice was noticeably sharp. "You saw the passing into magic that they were destined for, to serve the strong."
You are consuming them. You are consuming him.
The first thought didn't burn; the second did. Draco had had them both on purpose, to test himself. Understanding even more about the limits of his own weakness, he whispered, "All right. But--do they feel any pain?"
Linwood smiled then. "Most don't. They're in the stage where they don't know what's happening to them anymore, and feel no desire for food or water or any of the other commodities that purely physical bodies need. We use the chains and some drugs during the first stage," he added, correctly anticipating Draco's next question. "When they stop fighting, we let them wake and be quiescent, caught in the becoming of their own majesty."
Overly pleased with his own eloquence, Draco noted down next to Linwood's name in his mind. He bobbed his head a little. "Potter's pillar looked different from the others. Is there a reason behind that?"
Linwood's smile broke out again, and his eyes shone the same way they had when he was near Potter. Draco wanted to crush the table. He contented himself with dropping a fork and having to bend down after it, although the ambient magic floated it back into his hand before he actually had to touch the floor.
"Of course there is," Linwood said. "Such a grand reason, besides. No harm in letting you know it." He leaned forwards, and Draco held Dane's breath and leaned in to match him, so close to the candles he nearly singed his face.
"Potter is so powerful," Linwood whispered, "that he has lasted in our possession for nine months. Most wizards last two."
More than four times as powerful. Draco chanted the simple maths to himself so he wouldn't stand and reach for Linwood's throat. That gesture held no future and no meaning for himself or Potter.
"And so the pillar glows," he whispered, channeling his rage into making his voice low. Linwood could mistake that sound for fascination. "Do you know what will happen when you come to the end of his magic?"
For a moment, Linwood's eyelashes fluttered, and his fingers curled on the table as if he had his fantasies of crushing it himself. Then he put down his goblet, and gave Draco a charming, reckless smile. Draco had last seen its like on Potter's face during Quidditch matches.
"You've come this far," Linwood said. "You've dined at my table. And you know so many of our secrets, and you've contributed so much money to our cause." Draco saw no need to tell Linwood that those Galleons came from Unspeakable vaults, rather than Dane ones. Linwood pushed his chair back, and stood up. "Watch. This is what we hope to achieve, what we can achieve if only we can take another four months from Potter. And there is every sign that we can."
He stood in front of his chair with his arms extended and his eyes closed. Ambient magic gathered around him and made his hair glitter as if it was threaded with gold even though it was so dark. Draco waited and watched in breathing silence, though he felt the air tighten around him. He wondered if Linwood was calling in the magic to create some spectacular spell.
A second later, Linwood opened his eyes and winked.
And then he vanished.
Draco started to his feet, his own natural reaction as well as Dane's, and swung around, staring. He didn't reach for his wand up his sleeve only because Dane should trust his host a little more than that. "Linwood?" he called softly.
"Here."
The voice was soft and feminine. Draco turned, assuming the young witch who had escorted him to his room had returned.
But instead, he saw a glorious woman in front of the fireplace, naked, her golden hair tumbling down her back and her arms folded across her chest as though to emphasize her breasts. Draco blinked, and saw her dark eyes.
"Linwood?" he asked. "You've gained the power to Transfigure yourself?"
The woman--Linwood--tossed back his head and laughed. "Not Transfigure," he said, and great wings grew out of his back, and he became a snowy winged cat of the kind Draco had once faced in battle, and of whose existence the Unspeakables would prefer British wizards were kept secret. "Reshape. When we are done with Potter and have enough power, we can do this permanently. Our own bodies will become magic, flowing and changing with our whims, with pure strength." The snowy cat wavered and collapsed like a glamour, revealing Linwood on his knees, rubbing his shins with a tenderness that made Draco really believe they had been hind legs a moment ago, not merely enspelled to look like them. He smiled up at Draco, as rapturous as he had been with Potter. "Imagine. Wings when you want them, to fly. Becoming older or younger , a different sex, a different person, in an instant." His smile deepened to a promise of wildness and immortality. "Never having to die."
Draco half-closed his eyes and shivered, purely because it was the sort of thing Eddison Dane would do. "Never having to die," he whispered, while his own memories contained the Dark Lord and the things that could happen when someone decided that he should not have to die.
And the rest of him, the flawed part that put far too much importance on Potter and the ways that he behaved and what he thought, throbbed with longing to grab the ambient magic and stuff as much of it back in Potter's core as would fit.
He had to stop this. Not because the secret was too valuable to be left in Linwood's hands, or because the Unspeakables would want to study it and duplicate it in a way that didn't use living victims (too messy), although those things were true and what he would use to his superiors, if he ever had to justify what he was doing here.
But because Potter would fade away into magic otherwise, magic that Linwood and his students would absorb and use to their liking, and he would never look at Draco again, or rage at him, or defy him, or apologize, in the way that Draco still cherished a fantasy of happening.
It was a motivation that would have made many of the Unspeakables Draco knew shake their heads. But it was the one he had.
He opened his eyes fully and smiled at Linwood. "Tell me more."
*
Draco leaned back on his bed and began to breathe, slow, deep, compelling exercises that he had learned to do at the same time as he had learned how to seal away part of his personality in the depths of his own mind. The breaths reached into his own magical core, and soon power flooded him, shimmering gently just under his skin, until his fingers ached for his wand, to release it.
Draco didn't let that happen. He simply breathed. The magic stirred. The wand lay motionless on the table, where he had left it, to attract the attention of the wards and the spells Linwood no doubt had watching his room.
Draco breathed, and his fingers moved back and forth now and then, as if twitching in his sleep. He had made sure to write to Linwood that Eddison Dane had lots of dreams, including nervous nightmares that startled him awake, to prepare for the use of this tactic. Of course, he hadn't thought at the time that he would be using the tactic for quite this purpose.
He had to rein in his mind when it almost rambled off on another track of accusing himself for being stupid. All right, he was here, and he was going to do this. It was useless to waste time worrying about it.
And he would waste Potter's time if he waited, which was more precious.
Finally, he could feel the magic gathering in what felt like golden bubbles under his skin, under his chest and his fingernails and his neck, the bubbles hovering like hummingbirds. He had reached the point when he might be able to help Potter, and waiting longer wouldn't aid anyone.
He stretched his hands out in front of him and flicked his fingers. The magic ebbed for a second, as if it would drip out the ends of his fingernails, and then washed back down inside him, towards the core it had come from.
Yes. He had reached the tipping point. Draco stretched out in a different way, imagining that tendrils extended from his ears, eyes, fingertips, nostrils, and tongue. He opened his mouth slightly to help that particular tactic. It had to be all those things, or he wouldn't have the senses he needed to investigate the room. He had tried to do this one time last month, and had ended up deaf when he forgot to imagine the tendrils extending from his ears.
This time, it worked the way it was meant to. There was a soft sound, like bubbles popping, or meat ripping.
And Draco popped free of his body in response.
He opened his eyes, or rather moved the magic that had come from his eyes, and looked around the room. In this form, which was as close to pure mental travel as any wizard would ever come, he could see the magic in the room, the wards and the spells that Linwood had woven about him.
There were fewer of them than he would have reckoned--two large blue wards on the door, one on a patch of the wall behind which Draco could sense a hidden passage, and crystalline loops dancing around the trunks and cupboards. Spells that would carry any noise made in the room to a hidden observer, of course. Spells to amplify sound, too, so that any whisper Draco might try to make would sound as clear as a tolling bell to someone who listened for it.
But no more than that. Either Linwood trusted Eddison Dane more than he had shown he did so far, or he considered him a wizard of no account.
Draco would have smiled if his lips weren't on his face two yards away, from his current perspective. Instead, he turned and passed quietly out through the gap in the wards. In this form, he was as large or as small as he wanted to be, and even the tightest wards needed a space between them to keep them from canceling each other out. He made it easily.
Through the walls of the compound he moved, through the thickness of ambient magic that hung there. That was visible in this form, too, looking like snowflakes that had been arrested in the air instead of completing their tumble to the ground. Draco studied the edges of the flakes, and when he had lingered long enough, he saw the shimmer of gold from them, the same color he had seen in the crystalline pillar Potter's magic filled.
Perhaps half of the magic in the room had come from Potter.
Draco moved effortlessly in the direction of the chamber where Linwood kept Potter and the other prisoners, and he concentrated all the way on the little flashes of gold like suspended coins. If he didn't, then his rage might break free, and he would find himself back in his body, with most of his night's effort wasted.
*
Draco spent long moments studying the chain that bound Potter and the configuration of the pillar, in case he had to have the information at a later date. Then he floated around in front of Potter.
He couldn't tell whether the complete careless bastard--
The world flickered, almost becoming the room Linwood had given him, and Draco reminded himself of the breaths that reached down into his core, the magic that surrounded and cradled him, and the ambient magic that Linwood shouldn't get the chance to use. The chamber of pillars stabilized around him again.
He couldn't tell whether Potter was asleep or awake. His eyes floated in a filmy face, his body gone as thin as a vessel of crystal itself. Perhaps he was lost in some state in between, neither dreaming nor not dreaming.
In the end, it was enough to make Draco take the risk. He reached out with the spiky tendrils that represented his fingers right now, and passed through the image of Potter's eyes.
The world shuddered around him. Draco braced himself to resist, and felt something far beneath him, some great and somnolent power, shuddering to life, staring upwards and flexing what felt like wings.
Potter's magic, Draco knew at once. Somehow, Linwood had managed to bind it with the chains and the pillar in such a way that it didn't take them as a threat. But it would take someone pushing in from the outside that way.
So Draco sent an image of himself as he had seen it only in dreams, not in life. In the dream, he sat with his arm around Potter's shoulders, and they leaned on a tangled bank of vines and flowers, somewhere in the middle of blazing green summer. Potter breathed slowly and evenly, and his eyes were alight with joy because he was with Draco. Draco couldn't even name the expression on his own face. It wasn't one he had ever worn in waking life, though.
The eyes of Potter's magic, or whatever they really were, examined it. Draco felt as though he was slipping through a dangerously small gap between wards, and waited with breath that he would have held if he had lungs for access to Potter's mind.
Then it seemed to work. He slipped through the gap, and landed in what looked like a misty clearing, full of shifting piles of gold power and beams of light that brightened and blinked, became real and then vanished, so bright that Draco had to raise his hand to shield his eyes more than once.
"Malfoy?"
Draco hadn't noticed how deep the ache in him ran to hear that voice until it spoke. He had thought Potter was dead for a year--or gone, missing so deeply that Draco would never speak to him again, if only because he couldn't bear the thought of Potter as an unknown corpse in a nameless grave. Now he turned around again with his magical senses blazing with saliva and hunger, and saw Potter standing before him.
In the depths of his own mind and what was left of his core, Potter looked the way he once had. He had his arms folded, his head tilted to the side and his eyes stubbornly wide and stubbornly green. He wore Auror robes, although the version of him chained to Linwood's pillar was naked. He had a burn mark near his neck that was new, and his scar appeared dimmer on his forehead than it did now. Although, Draco had to admit, probably that was just the difference between memory and reality. Potter had hated that scar before the end.
"Come to learn how it's done?"
Draco flinched before he could stop himself. He had tracked Linwood's activities, charmed his way into his confidence, created the identity of Eddison Dane, and done everything he could to achieve his entrance into this cavern, this school, without thinking much about the sufferings of his victims. The Unspeakables would possess the secret, and study it to determine if it was of use or not. Then they would destroy Linwood.
Now, Draco had to breathe before he could answer. God knew what he was breathing with when his lungs were on the bed, but then, he was touching a Potter composed of magic and memory and imagination, anyway, the same way Draco was. "I'm an Unspeakable now. We learned what Linwood was doing and decided we needed to know more about it."
Potter nodded, his eyes full of vivid mirth. "And Unspeakables move slowly. For example, it probably took you at least six months to come this far." He shook his head slowly. "Should have asked someone on the inside, I could have told you faster. Since I've been here for nine months and all."
Draco had to close his eyes. To think he had once wanted to see despair on Harry Potter's face.
"Anyway, I can't tell you much."
Draco faced Potter and blinked again. His mind seemed to dart from one subject to another. Not surprising, in someone who had been chained up to a pillar and tortured for months on end, but Draco had understood him well so far. "What do you mean?"
"I've spent those months on a chain, with the things I understand growing smaller every day." Potter gestured crudely with one hand, and his smile twisted. "I wonder what poor dear Thomas will do when I can't respond to him anymore."
"Tell me what?" Draco repeated. "What do you mean?" He was watching Potter now and absorbing as much as he could of the eyes, brilliant with fear and rage and hatred. If this was the last memory he ever had of Potter blazing with his own light, he would take it, and no matter what kindling the light burned on.
"I can't tell you much about how it works," Potter clarified. "So if you came to interview me on what it's like to have your magical core drained, you're wasting your time. Some of the other prisoners might have more sanity left."
Draco felt himself shimmer and stretch, almost breaking apart. The desk and the trunk appeared in the corners of his eyes again; the sheets of his bed scratched under his back. And all the time, his pulse pounded and danced with fury in his ears.
He came back because he dragged himself back by will, and not by force of discipline or training. He came back to find Potter gaping at him. "What happened?" Potter demanded. "You looked like you were fading. Did--"
And abruptly he drew his wand and whirled around, scanning the misty landscape around them. "You should go," he said quietly. "It's not worth it, if Linwood figures out what you were doing and chains you up, too."
Draco moved forwards. He had no choice, the same way he'd had no choice but to confess his weakness for Potter when the Unspeakables were interrogating him. He kept his hands up and out. The words spilled from his mouth in a way he knew that his hands couldn't catch.
"I came to save you. And--you don't have to save me, you don't have to stand between me and him. Shit, Potter. Shit." He halted a few centimeters from him, realizing abruptly that his hands would have risen in the next moment to frame Potter's face. And he couldn't lower them.
Potter stared at him, his lips parted as though he assumed that he'd have to fling an insult at Draco. Then he shut his mouth, took a deep breath, and asked, without backing up and without flinching, "You know I'm dying, right?"
Draco shook his head. "I've come to get you out of here," he said, and he remembered the Unspeakables and Eddison Dane and all the preparations he'd made to be here so that he could take the secret of turning wizards into magic from Linwood, but he knew that that hadn't been his real reason from the moment he saw Potter chained to the pillar. "I didn't know it until I saw you, because I had no idea you were here. And it--" Well, he might as well say it. Either Potter would die and Draco would die and no one else would ever have any idea he'd said it, or Potter, the kind of man he'd just proved himself to be, wouldn't confess it to anyone else if they made it out alive. "It makes me furious that you're offering to stand between me and him, that you care about what happens to me."
"I don't want anyone else to suffer what I'm suffering," Potter said. He'd understood part of what had Draco upset, at least. His eyes were narrowed and he looked as though he wanted to turn into magic himself and spring and spin around the misty landscape that contained them. "I would make the same offer for everyone, anyone, who came to rescue me."
"But you made it to me," Draco said, and touched Potter's face. His fingers leaped under the contact, all his magical senses contracting into one ball and shivering. "I'm going to remember that."
Potter reached up and took his wrists, but didn't try to move Draco's hands away. "You're still mental," he said, gently, penetratingly. "There's nothing you can do. Linwood's changed so much of me that this is the only place I can be real." He swallowed, and Draco saw the hollows in the back of his eyes. He wondered how deep Potter had descended, how long he had waited to speak with someone like this.
How long it had been since he was sane.
"I can't escape," Potter continued. "The chain's taken my body along with my magic. You'd bring me up to the surface and I'd fade away like a puff of dust in the sunlight."
"Is that what you believe?" Draco asked, cocking his head to the side and throwing his words like nails. "Or what Linwood's made you believe?"
Potter's head snapped back, and he stared. Then he said, "There's still no way you can give me back what I've lost. I'd be, for the rest of my life, this thing. Not even a vegetable, because I know what I've lost. I don't want to live like that."
And Draco laughed.
Potter jerked in his hold, and grew thinner. Draco could feel his thoughts through his fingertips, Potter's impetus to flee and hide himself down in what was left of his mind rather than endure the one person he could talk to mocking him.
Draco shook his head and cradled him close, blinking rapidly. His mind was leaping along other secrets, experiments he had conducted in the Department of Mysteries, the studying he had done in preparation for coming to Linwood's school, and yes. Yes, it could work. Terrifying, mad, brilliant, but it could work.
"Tell me what's so funny." Potter still sounded like an Auror on an interrogation when he tried.
"The air around the school is full of ambient magic," Draco whispered back. "In the form I came here in, I could see how much of it was yours--the same color as the power in the pillar. What I need to do is reverse the process, a little at a time. That magic is still yours, more responsive to you than anyone else. Maybe we can't recover what's pouring from you into the pillar, but what's in the air could come back to you."
Potter blinked narrowed eyes. Then he said, "And how would we do that? Anyone can use that magic if they're free of the chains. Linwood showed me. It's not--it's not as though it would come back to me for the asking."
"We work together," Draco said. "I've done things like this before, back when I was a new Unspeakable in the Department and they gave me all the problems that famously didn't have solutions. I know it sounds hard," he added, because Potter was shaking his head. "But I know how to store magic and then send it somewhere else. It was supposed to be an attempt to enchant objects that would last forever instead of breaking after a few years. I never succeeded at that. But once Linwood shows me how to access that ambient magic, I can store it and bring it back to you instead of using it."
Potter folded his arms, although they stood so close that he jostled Draco when he did it, and Draco had no intention of moving away. "Linwood's going to notice that you aren't using the magic, you know. He isn't stupid."
Draco hummed but didn't discuss his contempt of Linwood, the way he would have liked to. "I'm good at illusions. I can fool him for a little while. And I think I know a further way to trick him, given his obsession with you."
"What?" Potter stared at him.
Draco licked his lips. He doubted he could hide how much this appealed to him from Potter, and so the best course was not to try, simply to speak and be damned for his honesty, if necessary. "I pretend that I'm just as desperately obsessed with you as he is. He'll like that. He'll let me have access to you a little at a time, for the pleasure of taking it away again. And I can store the magic most easily in my body."
Potter blinked, and blinked again. Then he said, "You're saying you could store it in your--in your mouth and kiss me?"
Draco nodded, holding his gaze. "And in my hands, and massage it into your skin when I touch you."
Potter flinched back from him, hard enough to break Draco's hold on him at last. He paced up and down with his arms folded, and then turned back and shook his head. "No," he said. "Absolutely not. I've had enough of him touching me, and I can't fight back or even really speak to myself about how much it hurts. No."
"I wouldn't hurt you," Draco said.
"Not physically," Potter said, and snapped his teeth like a shark chewing up bait.
Draco shook his head and tried to get close again, thinking it might reassure Potter to have someone touching him while they spoke. But Potter jerked back like a spooked horse, and watched him with eyes so furiously wide that Draco thought he might flee back into the depths of his mind if Draco tried again. Draco retreated with his hands high and sighed a little.
"I wouldn't want to hurt you at all," Draco said. "But if you're hurt by me touching you after all your time here, I can't blame you."
Potter's smile was a narrow slash. "How bloody fucking generous of you, not to blame me," he said, with a drawl that made Draco's teeth itch. He supposed it was a good enough revenge, since he had probably sounded the same to Potter many times in the past. "No. I'm not doing this. I don't trust you enough."
"I won't betray you to Linwood," Draco said quietly. "I want you to have your magic back, too. What Linwood could do with it isn't to be borne, and this way, I can take the secret back to the Department of Mysteries without them insisting that I leave Linwood alone to observe him for a while."
Potter's eyes were as wide and wild as forests, as the dreams that Draco had had on the nights after he'd heard Potter had disappeared. "You want to preserve what's happening here? Spread it? Fuck no. There's no way I'm trusting you, Malfoy."
Draco shook his head. "What can I say to convince you that I'm not like him?" Although he suspected that he was, if you looked at it a certain way. The most he could say was that he wanted Potter to touch him back, and that his obsession had endured years, instead of months.
"Nothing." Potter's face was a still mask. "I should have known you wouldn't come bearing good news. I'm grateful for what you did for me in the war, but good news? No."
"Potter--"
"Fucking farewell, Malfoy."
And Draco found himself exiled from Potter's mind again, drifting about in the glittering world of magic outside Potter's body. He reached towards him again, but this time, it was as though he reached into the mist that had consumed most of the landscape of Potter's mind. His hand passed through, and he could feel the soft chimes and sounds of relaxing wards from around him, the signs of a household awakening.
Draco floated away, back to his body. When he had returned, he lay there for a long while, his hands flexing as though he'd just awakened from nightmares and was clutching wildly at the bed, his breathing slow and soft.
The plan to take back Potter's ambient magic from the air around them and channel it into his body was still the best one Draco could think of, bar the fact that Potter would hate to be touched that way. But Potter would never agree.
So Draco would need to store the magic, and get close, and find some other way to transfer it to Potter's body.
He thought he might know a way.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/545762.html. Comment wherever you like.
Summary: Unspeakable Draco Malfoy has planned for nearly six months how to take down Thomas Linwood, a man who has discovered the secret of converting wizard bodies to pure magic. He was prepared for anything--except the discovery of the missing Harry Potter in Linwood's compound.
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Draco/Harry
Warnings: Sometimes graphic violence, descriptions of magical torture, angst, deaths of original characters
Word Count: 30,500
Author's Notes: Written for
awickedmemory in the 2013 Draco Tops Harry Fest.
awickedmemory, thanks so much for a great prompt! (Which involved Draco, as either an Unspeakable or a Hit Wizard, going undercover and finding Harry in the clutches of villains a year after he vanished). There is no non-con in this, but lots of other violence and vengeance. Thanks to my betas L and K, and to A, who found the title of this fic in A. E.'s poem "On Behalf of Certain Irishmen Not Followers of Tradition." The poem is quoted at the beginning of the fic.
This Worship of an Extinct Fire
And they would have us join their dirge,
This worship of an extinct fire
In which they drift beyond the verge
Where races all outworn expire.
The worship of the dead is not
A worship that our hearts allow...
Draco turned around in front of the mirror and checked the hang of his cloak. Then he nodded. It mimicked the pose in the photographs that he had sent to Linwood, and that was enough for him.
He faced the mirror. Yes, the glamour was in place, the one that darkened his pale hair to deep golden-blond and made his grey eyes look more blue than anything. Draco smiled. He had found that people were more likely to fail to recognize someone who had made slight changes to his form and features than someone who had made a total change.
He had practiced writing like Eddison Dane, the "magical theorist" who had made contact with Linwood months before. He had practiced walking like him, and speaking like him, and feeling what he would feel, and gazing at the sunset the way he would.
Now only one thing remained, the final step that would let Draco become him.
He lowered his head and closed his eyes, sinking at once into the grey mental space that all Unspeakables were taught to access. Draco had yet to figure out whether it was pure magic, or simply a trick of meditation. What mattered was that it worked, and he needed it to work now.
Behind the walls of that space, that dungeon room in his own mind, he carefully shut away his own preoccupations, his pure blood, his family history, his story of the war, his shadows of the past. It was Eddison Dane's life he needed, and Dane was a half-blood, hadn't fought in the war--due to a prudent leave of absence from Britain--and preferred to avoid discussing anything except magical theory. Of course, Draco had let a few hints of unhappy shadows slip into the letters he wrote to Linwood. That would make his target think he had the advantage, some way to conquer Draco and twist him around his finger.
Stop thinking of him as the target. He's Linwood, your correspondent and someone who can tell you everything you want to know about this original line of magical research.
Draco dipped himself into the freezing greyness, and when he opened his eyes and gazed into the mirror, it was Eddison Dane who looked back.
He nodded. It was time.
*
"Mr. Dane. Such a pleasure."
It was Thomas Linwood, the master of the project himself, who came to meet him outside the grey stone complex where the Dreamers of the Future worked, his hand extended and a soft smile on his face. Draco took his hand and bowed with the courtly manners that were important to him, murmuring a greeting while his gaze traveled over the complex.
It looked like nothing so much as a school, with low walls and gated courtyards where children could play in safety. Here and there windows opened on dark rooms that could have held classes, although they emitted no sound. And Draco could make out young wizards sprawled about on the velvety grass with books.
"When I learned you felt comfortable enough to come here, I knew that all my hard work had paid off."
Draco faced Linwood again. Of course he knew what the man looked like--the underground world they both moved in had been lavish with photographs and descriptions of both the man and his school--but it was another thing to see him in person. He looked all points, pointed chin and angled cheekbones and slender fingers that bore beautiful nails. A few inkstains on the edges of the fingers curved under the nails. Linwood's dark eyes followed Draco's gaze down to his fingers, and he laughed, shaking his head.
"I'm afraid that a scholar's duties must take precedence," he said, and bowed. "Won't you come and see what you've traveled so far to see?"
"You're very kind," Draco said, and faltered, and looked down.
"Yes, I heard about your loss," Linwood said, referring to the rumors that Draco had taken care to spread before he came here. He took Draco's elbow. "Will you allow me to say that we are all sorry? The Healers are very fine people, of course, but they don't understand magical progress, and they require too many tests. I'm sure we could have saved your mother."
Draco closed his eyes and nodded. "Thank you," he whispered. "I--I'd like to see what I came to see, yes."
He flicked his eyes open in time to see the fleeting smile cross Linwood's face. The man liked echoes, and Draco intended to make himself into one. There was a great empty spot at the center of Eddison Dane's heart simply waiting to be filled, and Linwood would want to step into that place.
For his own reasons, Draco wanted him to, too.
They passed through one of the courtyard gates, and Draco tilted his head back and breathed in the heavy scents of the roses that decorated the bushes here and there. There were colors he had never seen on the flowers, from a black as velvety as the grass to a peacock-colored blossom he would have liked to linger to examine.
"Rather unusual to have roses at this season," he remarked.
"We are capable of greater miracles than that." Linwood unlocked a door in front of them that had appeared to lead into a classroom, but now Draco saw steps going down. "I was going to take you to your room so you could relax, but--forgive me, but I'm accustomed to thinking of myself as a man who can read hearts. I think you would want your tour to begin with a sight of the magic we're harvesting here. Isn't that right?" He tilted his head at Draco.
Draco, his heart full and singing, nodded, and together they proceeded into the school, Linwood closing the door gently behind them.
Small lights that floated in the air like fireflies immediately sprang into being. Draco nodded at them and followed Linwood down the stairs, his mouth slightly open with awe.
The stairs were wide and well-used, not narrow and shallow the way Draco had half-expected them to be. He shook his head in wonder as they came down into the wide room that was the center--one of the centers--of Linwood's "process." No one else would know that the shake was also an admonition to himself. He must not allow his expectations and stereotypes of a place like this to interfere with seeing the reality. Otherwise, he was likely to end up on the other side of the "process."
And he didn't want that. The Unspeakables didn't want that. He was here for something else.
Linwood turned and gestured in front of him, though he might have saved himself the motion. Draco was already looking. "Behold, the fires that shall change the world!" His voice shook a little, and so did the hand that fell back to his side, while he stood, looking around and breathing.
He's allowed himself poetic license, but only a little.
The room in front of them glowed and flared with what might have looked like pillars of fire from a distance. In reality, they were twisted columns of crystal, springing from the floor and making their way in delicate corkscrews like unicorn horns to the ceiling, and all around them danced lashes and leashes of color.
One could almost ignore the chains at the bottoms of them, Draco noted. In reality, even those were more delicate and gentle than he had seen elsewhere.
Then again, these prisoners were not moving far. Linwood might not have needed the chains.
Draco looked at them, and noted the bowed heads and folded arms and shaking shoulders. Now and then someone would whimper. But all in all, it was a very quiet kind of torture, and their bodies shone almost like the crystal pillars, turned to faint and glowing glasses.
Now you sound like Linwood.
But the closer he could imitate Linwood's strictures and vocabulary and viewpoint, the more likely he would survive this, and not end up in the chains. Draco looked up at Linwood, and blinked a little. "Might I see the most powerful one you have?" he whispered. "The one who might have saved my mother?"
Linwood inclined his head, smiling. "Of course. I did promise you that, didn't I?" He took Draco's arm and started to escort him around the room. "Meanwhile, you know the process, but if you have any technical questions, feel free to ask me."
At the moment, Draco was too absorbed in watching the process Linwood's letters had talked about come to life to have any questions. He paused now and then to watch the dancing ribbons of red and green and blue and purple and grey--always those five colors, correlated to different levels of magical strength--twine their way up the pillars. Linwood always paused courteously beside him, to watch and smile.
Draco watched until he noted the exact points at which the ribbons emerged from the skin. They were in many different places, but always from the part of the body that was in contact with the chain.
At one point, he was lucky. While he was watching a thin, shivering woman rock back against the pillar, he saw one particular fat ribbon of blue get away from her and course up the corkscrew. At the top, it flared and turned a small stretch of crystal the brilliant color of a sapphire.
And Draco looked back down just as the woman's arm--the part she was chained to the pillar by--faded out, to a flesh-colored shadow with the bones floating in it like meat in soup. The woman moaned faintly, and one of the grey-cloaked attendants that hovered along the sides of the room hurried forwards to move the chain to a collar around her neck.
"It's just as you described, isn't it?" Draco murmured. "The conversion of their flesh and bone and blood to purest magical energy."
Linwood nodded. "Many wizards have succeeded in tapping their magical cores, of course, but few of us have found the way to open a direct conduit between our magical cores and the surface of the world where we can use the power. Our cores are buried too deep, linked to the health of the body and the alertness of the mind and, oh, all sorts of things." A flash of his hand dismissed all solidity. "With this device, we bring the core to the surface, and turn all the barriers in its way into more magic, part of it."
Draco nodded. It was what he had understood before, but clarifying what he understood was always good. He had made mistakes in the past.
He turned his head to the side as he approached a squat crystal pillar, shining like a heap of golden coins. Draco blinked. Yes. The light around it was phoenix-colored, something he hadn't seen before.
And chained to the pillar was a slumped figure with his black hair almost the only solid point of himself.
Draco raised his eyebrows. The black hair was almost familiar, but he had seen lots of people with hair that wild in the past few years. He turned a polite look on Linwood.
Linwood stood with his hands clasped together, breathing softly and steadily. That struck Draco as odd. So far, the man hadn't shown glee or any stronger emotion than academic pleasure when contemplating his victims. What was it about this one that made it different?
"Come and see." Linwood, as though Draco had voiced the question aloud, whispered those words and took Draco's hand to drag him over the floor towards the pillar.
It loomed larger and larger as Draco got closer, and he could see delicate threads of gold even in the veins that he had taken to be pure crystal. It seemed this particular wizard was almost completely transformed. Draco wondered what Linwood would do to replace him when he was gone.
"Behold," Linwood said, reaching out but stopping his hand short of the chain that bound the collared wizard to the pillar. "Our greatest prize, our greatest conquest."
Draco made a small black mark in his mind. So far, Linwood seemed to have few weaknesses; even a sense of humor was part of his psychology, a trait Draco saw in few wizards who invented magic the Unspeakables wanted for themselves. But the only other man Draco had heard talk about possessing someone in that rapturous way was the Dark Lord.
As though compelled by the presence of people near him, the prisoner tilted his head back degree by degree, and met their eyes.
And Draco's grey prison that he'd contained his personality in broke, and the personality of Draco Malfoy rose towards the surface, displacing the mask of Eddison Dane, because the wizard chained to the pillar had brilliant green eyes, and a lightning bolt scar, and was Harry Potter.
*
No.
Draco touched the rising personality, the memories, the rivalry, the fury, and crushed it back down into the prison. It was harder to concentrate and force the cold grey walls to close around that part of him than it had been, but still. He was going to control this situation. He would not reveal himself for who he was in front of someone as dangerous as Linwood.
He had become Eddison Dane. He must stay that man at least until he was in the room that Linwood had prepared for him. He could not explode now.
He would explode later.
He was uncomfortably aware that that promise to himself was the only thing that allowed him to resume his mask, but for the moment, he had resumed it. He could deal with the emotions that had prompted him to shatter it in the same later that contained the explosion.
*
He opened his eyes, and focused on Potter again, the emptiness in those green eyes, the way they seemed to float slightly above his face, as though the substance-draining had begun in them first.
"Harry Potter?" He let his voice squeak. Eddison Dane would, and that was who he was. "I thought he was dead!"
Linwood laughed, and the sound was rich and irritating at the same time, scraping against the prison walls that Draco had raised again. Since Draco still didn't understand why the fury was there or where it had come from, he didn't react to the irritation, either.
But he did keep his eyes on Linwood. He wasn't sure what would happen if he looked at Potter again.
"That's what everyone seems to believe about Harry Potter at some point or another," Linwood said, shaking his head. "The Dark Lord, and the people who thought he'd died when he was living in the Muggle world, and the people who saw him vanish after the Third Task at the Tri-wizard Tournament, and the people who saw him carried into the Great Hall at Hogwarts." He reached over and touched Potter's head, giving a small shudder as he did so. Draco, concentrating strongly on his analysis of Linwood's reactions so he could forget his own, doubted it was a shudder of disgust. "You'd think everyone would have learned to stop assuming it by now, until they saw the body staked through the heart and then buried. And even then, I wouldn't put it past him."
"Of course," Draco said, and squeaked a little more as he looked at Potter, or rather at the pillar behind him. Linwood was distracted enough not to notice the real direction of Draco's eyes. "I just--I know he vanished a year again. Every time, he came back much sooner than that."
Potter showed no sign of recognizing him, Draco realized distantly. Good. He hadn't counted on the possibility of finding someone he knew among Linwood's prisoners, and he should have. But as long as Potter was this out of it, Draco's mistake wouldn't cost him his own life.
Not your own.
Draco accepted the revelation of who else's life might be important to him, and put it behind grey prison walls once again. Azkaban had nothing on his mind.
"That's true," Linwood said. "And I don't know all his adventures from the time he vanished a year ago. He would have to tell you, assuming he wanted to. But I've never been able to drag that out of him." He shook his head and sighed. Once again, Draco doubted that he was putting on those mannerisms. "But whatever he became involved in, he ended up as a slave ready to be sold. Of course I took him at once. We all know how strong he is. I couldn't pass up a chance to have him as part of the process."
"Strong?" Draco repeated, as if blankly. "Well, yes, of course. Although I have read a few arguments that say the Dark Lord was the mightiest wizard of the last ten generations, and another one would not have been born so soon afterwards."
"How ridiculous," Linwood said, with the first flash of passion Draco had seen from him beyond the way he approached Potter. "Magic has a sense of balance and proportion, or at least we can discover laws that make it seem that way, but it isn't our sense of balance or proportion. It wouldn't confine itself to one great wizard in a certain number of human generations. It's just as likely to obey the movements of the stars, or the moon. Besides, the figure of the ‘last ten generations' ignores wizards such as Dumbledore and Grindelwald." He tugged on Potter's hair. Potter closed his eyes.
The rage threatened to burst out again. Draco built an extra wall and concealed the moments of his mental uncertainty by bending down to examine the chain that bound Potter's collar to the crystal. It was made of crystal itself, or so it seemed, although this had veins in it that the pillars didn't. Draco wished he could ask about it, but Linwood had no reason to trust Eddison Dane that much yet.
"Of course," he said at last, and sighed a little. "You make it all sound so reasonable. I don't know why I can't think of these reasons on my own."
Linwood touched his arm again, the way he had when they were strolling through the pillared chamber. Draco would have felt better about that if he had once let go of Potter's hair since he touched it. "Don't put yourself down that way, Eddison," he said. "Our movement needs people like you, too, people willing to put in the time and patient study to understand what we're doing here."
Draco swallowed and glanced up from beneath fluttering eyelashes. "Then my application to join your school and spend some time studying the process is--accepted?"
Linwood laughed. "I did make you wait for a formal answer, didn't I? I'm afraid that's procedure, just an instinct that I have." He clutched Draco's hand for an instant, then let it fall away and twined the fingers of both hands in Potter's hair. Potter's swaying head might have belonged to a doll for all the reaction that produced. "But yes, you're invited, Mr. Dane. I'll have someone show you to your room."
Draco bit his lip. "You won't come yourself? I mean, it's just--I would feel so much more welcome if you did."
"It's time you met other people here, your fellow students." Linwood nodded as the young witch who had moved the chain on the fading witch came forwards. "And I'm afraid that Potter requires my special attentions, sometimes."
None of the notes Linwood had shown him or the correspondence they'd exchanged said anything about the need for human interference in the "process," other than having to move the chains to a more solid part of the body when the magical core thinned one to shadow. But Draco understood the real reason at the level of his viscera, and another black mark went down on his mental slate next to Linwood's name.
"I understand," he said, and turned to the witch, and tried to make himself smile. "What's your name?"
"Teresa Brooke," she murmured, and turned away with lowered eyes. "Come with me, Mr. Dane. And be accepted."
Draco glanced back only once. Linwood stood with his hands clenched in Potter's hair, his hips rocking back and forth. For a shocked moment, Draco thought he was forcing Potter to suck his cock.
But no. Potter didn't have a mouth solid enough for that. He was simply lost in the enjoyment of his triumph, a passion that must be rarer and sweeter for him than carnal lust.
Draco turned his back and left the chamber.
*
The room that Linwood had allotted to him was small, but not as bare as Draco had expected. A huge fire burned in a hearth, beneath a mantle that looked as if it had been made of carved ivory. There was a shimmering tapestry on the wall, thick blankets on the bed done in a variety of colors--sky-blues and peacock-greens and cinnamon-browns--and a pillow that Draco let his hand sink into. It descended a long way before it finally stopped.
Draco went through the motions of someone like Eddison Dane making himself at home: gawking at the room, bouncing on the bed, splaying out on his back to test its softness, and then bouncing up with a little shake of his head to hang up his cloak and take off his boots and unpack his trunks. But all the while, his mind churned.
The way someone like Eddison Dane would make himself at home.
Because Draco couldn't lie to himself. He wasn't the perfect shell, the automaton with a mask for a face, who had walked out his door on his way to Apparate to Linwood's place. He was no longer a means of recording detail, of evaluations on Linwood's process and the best way to possess that secret for the Unspeakables, or judge whether it was too dangerous and Dark to allow it to continue existing.
He hadn't been since he saw Potter.
Why Potter?
The answer to that question had roots perhaps as deep as fairy tales, and the stories that his mother told him with her face averted--the stories that were connected with the short stay his father had had in prison after the first war--and the boy like a bird who had alighted on the stool next to him at Madam Malkin's.
And they had roots in the cellar where the Unspeakables had questioned him after his initiation, questioned him and listened to him as he poured out rubbish about himself that he had forgotten he knew but which, for some reason, they couldn't live without knowing.
Potter. It's always been Potter.
That had been what he said when, after hours and hours of wearing down, of relentless questioning, of water dripping on his face, someone--he never saw the faces of his questioners--had asked him what his greatest weakness was.
"Potter," he whispered, and someone shook him, while the voice of the first one--not the same as the person shaking him, he had been sure--asked him to repeat what he had just said.
"It's always been Potter," Draco said, staring at the floor, his shoulders heaving in their bonds, his desire to be an Unspeakable fluctuating and fluttering and dying at random intervals like a poorly-nourished fire. "I never wanted to admit that before. But I wanted him to pay attention to me, and he wouldn't. I wanted to beat him at Quidditch, and I couldn't. I wanted to be on the winning side, and I wasn't. When I tried to deliver him to the Dark Lord, on the last day I was a Death Eater, he had to rescue me instead. I can't get over what I owe him, and I can't get over that he doesn't need me. I can't repay those debts."
There had been silence, and then the bonds released his shoulders, and in dim light they let Draco stand on his own and gave him a cloth to wipe the dripping water away from his face. Draco had done so, a little stunned.
Through one of those leaks that weren't supposed to happen, Draco learned, later on, that he had been one of the few Unspeakables ever to admit his fears openly and quickly and quietly. Most of the rest resisted on that question longer than any other. The people who had tested him had taken that to mean he knew what he was doing; he knew himself, and he wouldn't make mistakes in stressful situations by misunderstanding his own reactions.
So Draco had been an Unspeakable from that day forwards, and he had never failed to anticipate what he would think.
Except for now.
Yet even that wasn't impossible to foresee, if I had remembered what was important.
Draco nodded. All right. He was still here to find out Linwood's secret and take it back to the Department of Mysteries. He still had to be sure that no one suspected him.
But in the meantime, he would have to find a way to rescue Potter as well. His own outrage and life-debts and emotional tangle and stupidity would have it no other way.
Draco sat down on the bed and flopped back again as though exhausted, shutting his eyes. He had to plan.
*
"Was it everything you expected?"
Draco dared a quick glance up into Linwood's eyes, before he blushed and looked back at the table. Linwood was watching him with a self-satisfied little smile, using his finger to trace runes in water on his plate. As Draco watched, the runes lit up and flared into blue fire.
Not possible anywhere else. But Draco had been in the school long enough to feel how saturated the air was with power, leaking away from the crystal pillars, waiting for someone to do something with it, waiting for an outlet. Linwood had admitted, when Draco mentioned it, that the process of transferring magic into the pillars wasn't perfect. They needed better chains, or a more automatic process to tie the chains to another part of their victims' bodies when the first part began to thin.
"My room?" Draco smiled and nodded. "Very kind. But of course you mean the main chamber," he corrected himself hastily when Linwood's eyebrows began to rise. "Dear me, yes. It was..." He paused and thought about it, trying to find words. "Intense," he said at last.
Linwood did smile at that, and half-bowed his head. "It is," he agreed. "Especially for someone who's not used to it."
Draco let his hand fly to his mouth, something he had described doing in his letters as Eddison Dane. "Did I look that obvious?" he whispered.
Linwood smiled more widely and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. This room was larger than most of them, and with its roaring fires and long tables where Linwood's students ate, reminded Draco of nothing so much as the Great Hall at Hogwarts. But candles without holders floated above their table, and here and there on the walls were shelves with golden vases and tiny ivory harps and small scarlet dragons. All creations of the ambient magic, Linwood had said, and as likely to vanish at any time. They hadn't yet figured out how to make them stay. The impression was one of fleeting, glittering, enchanting luxury.
"Someone who's not used to it always reacts that way," Linwood said, shaking his head. "It's the one thing I can be generous with you about."
The one thing. Draco could read a warning there, and as unsubtle as he was, so could Dane. He nodded and dropped his eyes. "Yes, sir," he whispered. "In the meantime--I wanted to ask you something." He hesitated as if gathering his courage.
Linwood only waited. "Yes?"
He knows. He knows already. He might not have understood the source of Draco's reaction to Potter--no, he must not have, or Draco would be chained to a pillar already--but he had seen it. Draco ducked his head, shrugging a little. Since he couldn't hide it, he would work that reaction into his plan.
"Why Harry Potter?" Draco whispered. "I would have thought he'd fight. Or was all the spirit gone out of him by the time you got him?"
That was what it had looked like: Potter pale and trembling, eyes glassy, unable to react, unable to do anything but sit still as his magic flowed into the chain, and then into the pillar.
"Whoever captured him had made him slow to react," Linwood said. "Taught him a lesson. We did have a few problems with him, but taking his magic relieved us of those. If we had been a more traditional group of Dark wizards, with more traditional methods of breaking prisoners, we might have had more problems."
Breaking--the word made Draco's prison walls want to break again in response. But he had promised himself that wouldn't happen, so he only nodded and murmured, "I understand. Does the draining of magic affect people's spirits that way, usually?"
Linwood lifted the goblet of wine in his hand and revolved it. Draco watched the flashing, changing nature of it, now made of paneled gold with rubies glowing in it, now rough wood with veins of silver here and there. "You are seeking some way to pull back," Linwood said. "Or else to tell yourself that this isn't Dark."
Draco could stare down at his hands without fear. He had made Eddison Dane a timid, fluttering personality, who had waited six months to come this far because of his own fear as much as because of the need to make Linwood trust him. "Yes," he whispered. "I thought--it was the look in some of their eyes. I thought I would see some despair. I saw nothingness."
"You saw transformation," Linwood corrected, and for the first time, his voice was noticeably sharp. "You saw the passing into magic that they were destined for, to serve the strong."
You are consuming them. You are consuming him.
The first thought didn't burn; the second did. Draco had had them both on purpose, to test himself. Understanding even more about the limits of his own weakness, he whispered, "All right. But--do they feel any pain?"
Linwood smiled then. "Most don't. They're in the stage where they don't know what's happening to them anymore, and feel no desire for food or water or any of the other commodities that purely physical bodies need. We use the chains and some drugs during the first stage," he added, correctly anticipating Draco's next question. "When they stop fighting, we let them wake and be quiescent, caught in the becoming of their own majesty."
Overly pleased with his own eloquence, Draco noted down next to Linwood's name in his mind. He bobbed his head a little. "Potter's pillar looked different from the others. Is there a reason behind that?"
Linwood's smile broke out again, and his eyes shone the same way they had when he was near Potter. Draco wanted to crush the table. He contented himself with dropping a fork and having to bend down after it, although the ambient magic floated it back into his hand before he actually had to touch the floor.
"Of course there is," Linwood said. "Such a grand reason, besides. No harm in letting you know it." He leaned forwards, and Draco held Dane's breath and leaned in to match him, so close to the candles he nearly singed his face.
"Potter is so powerful," Linwood whispered, "that he has lasted in our possession for nine months. Most wizards last two."
More than four times as powerful. Draco chanted the simple maths to himself so he wouldn't stand and reach for Linwood's throat. That gesture held no future and no meaning for himself or Potter.
"And so the pillar glows," he whispered, channeling his rage into making his voice low. Linwood could mistake that sound for fascination. "Do you know what will happen when you come to the end of his magic?"
For a moment, Linwood's eyelashes fluttered, and his fingers curled on the table as if he had his fantasies of crushing it himself. Then he put down his goblet, and gave Draco a charming, reckless smile. Draco had last seen its like on Potter's face during Quidditch matches.
"You've come this far," Linwood said. "You've dined at my table. And you know so many of our secrets, and you've contributed so much money to our cause." Draco saw no need to tell Linwood that those Galleons came from Unspeakable vaults, rather than Dane ones. Linwood pushed his chair back, and stood up. "Watch. This is what we hope to achieve, what we can achieve if only we can take another four months from Potter. And there is every sign that we can."
He stood in front of his chair with his arms extended and his eyes closed. Ambient magic gathered around him and made his hair glitter as if it was threaded with gold even though it was so dark. Draco waited and watched in breathing silence, though he felt the air tighten around him. He wondered if Linwood was calling in the magic to create some spectacular spell.
A second later, Linwood opened his eyes and winked.
And then he vanished.
Draco started to his feet, his own natural reaction as well as Dane's, and swung around, staring. He didn't reach for his wand up his sleeve only because Dane should trust his host a little more than that. "Linwood?" he called softly.
"Here."
The voice was soft and feminine. Draco turned, assuming the young witch who had escorted him to his room had returned.
But instead, he saw a glorious woman in front of the fireplace, naked, her golden hair tumbling down her back and her arms folded across her chest as though to emphasize her breasts. Draco blinked, and saw her dark eyes.
"Linwood?" he asked. "You've gained the power to Transfigure yourself?"
The woman--Linwood--tossed back his head and laughed. "Not Transfigure," he said, and great wings grew out of his back, and he became a snowy winged cat of the kind Draco had once faced in battle, and of whose existence the Unspeakables would prefer British wizards were kept secret. "Reshape. When we are done with Potter and have enough power, we can do this permanently. Our own bodies will become magic, flowing and changing with our whims, with pure strength." The snowy cat wavered and collapsed like a glamour, revealing Linwood on his knees, rubbing his shins with a tenderness that made Draco really believe they had been hind legs a moment ago, not merely enspelled to look like them. He smiled up at Draco, as rapturous as he had been with Potter. "Imagine. Wings when you want them, to fly. Becoming older or younger , a different sex, a different person, in an instant." His smile deepened to a promise of wildness and immortality. "Never having to die."
Draco half-closed his eyes and shivered, purely because it was the sort of thing Eddison Dane would do. "Never having to die," he whispered, while his own memories contained the Dark Lord and the things that could happen when someone decided that he should not have to die.
And the rest of him, the flawed part that put far too much importance on Potter and the ways that he behaved and what he thought, throbbed with longing to grab the ambient magic and stuff as much of it back in Potter's core as would fit.
He had to stop this. Not because the secret was too valuable to be left in Linwood's hands, or because the Unspeakables would want to study it and duplicate it in a way that didn't use living victims (too messy), although those things were true and what he would use to his superiors, if he ever had to justify what he was doing here.
But because Potter would fade away into magic otherwise, magic that Linwood and his students would absorb and use to their liking, and he would never look at Draco again, or rage at him, or defy him, or apologize, in the way that Draco still cherished a fantasy of happening.
It was a motivation that would have made many of the Unspeakables Draco knew shake their heads. But it was the one he had.
He opened his eyes fully and smiled at Linwood. "Tell me more."
*
Draco leaned back on his bed and began to breathe, slow, deep, compelling exercises that he had learned to do at the same time as he had learned how to seal away part of his personality in the depths of his own mind. The breaths reached into his own magical core, and soon power flooded him, shimmering gently just under his skin, until his fingers ached for his wand, to release it.
Draco didn't let that happen. He simply breathed. The magic stirred. The wand lay motionless on the table, where he had left it, to attract the attention of the wards and the spells Linwood no doubt had watching his room.
Draco breathed, and his fingers moved back and forth now and then, as if twitching in his sleep. He had made sure to write to Linwood that Eddison Dane had lots of dreams, including nervous nightmares that startled him awake, to prepare for the use of this tactic. Of course, he hadn't thought at the time that he would be using the tactic for quite this purpose.
He had to rein in his mind when it almost rambled off on another track of accusing himself for being stupid. All right, he was here, and he was going to do this. It was useless to waste time worrying about it.
And he would waste Potter's time if he waited, which was more precious.
Finally, he could feel the magic gathering in what felt like golden bubbles under his skin, under his chest and his fingernails and his neck, the bubbles hovering like hummingbirds. He had reached the point when he might be able to help Potter, and waiting longer wouldn't aid anyone.
He stretched his hands out in front of him and flicked his fingers. The magic ebbed for a second, as if it would drip out the ends of his fingernails, and then washed back down inside him, towards the core it had come from.
Yes. He had reached the tipping point. Draco stretched out in a different way, imagining that tendrils extended from his ears, eyes, fingertips, nostrils, and tongue. He opened his mouth slightly to help that particular tactic. It had to be all those things, or he wouldn't have the senses he needed to investigate the room. He had tried to do this one time last month, and had ended up deaf when he forgot to imagine the tendrils extending from his ears.
This time, it worked the way it was meant to. There was a soft sound, like bubbles popping, or meat ripping.
And Draco popped free of his body in response.
He opened his eyes, or rather moved the magic that had come from his eyes, and looked around the room. In this form, which was as close to pure mental travel as any wizard would ever come, he could see the magic in the room, the wards and the spells that Linwood had woven about him.
There were fewer of them than he would have reckoned--two large blue wards on the door, one on a patch of the wall behind which Draco could sense a hidden passage, and crystalline loops dancing around the trunks and cupboards. Spells that would carry any noise made in the room to a hidden observer, of course. Spells to amplify sound, too, so that any whisper Draco might try to make would sound as clear as a tolling bell to someone who listened for it.
But no more than that. Either Linwood trusted Eddison Dane more than he had shown he did so far, or he considered him a wizard of no account.
Draco would have smiled if his lips weren't on his face two yards away, from his current perspective. Instead, he turned and passed quietly out through the gap in the wards. In this form, he was as large or as small as he wanted to be, and even the tightest wards needed a space between them to keep them from canceling each other out. He made it easily.
Through the walls of the compound he moved, through the thickness of ambient magic that hung there. That was visible in this form, too, looking like snowflakes that had been arrested in the air instead of completing their tumble to the ground. Draco studied the edges of the flakes, and when he had lingered long enough, he saw the shimmer of gold from them, the same color he had seen in the crystalline pillar Potter's magic filled.
Perhaps half of the magic in the room had come from Potter.
Draco moved effortlessly in the direction of the chamber where Linwood kept Potter and the other prisoners, and he concentrated all the way on the little flashes of gold like suspended coins. If he didn't, then his rage might break free, and he would find himself back in his body, with most of his night's effort wasted.
*
Draco spent long moments studying the chain that bound Potter and the configuration of the pillar, in case he had to have the information at a later date. Then he floated around in front of Potter.
He couldn't tell whether the complete careless bastard--
The world flickered, almost becoming the room Linwood had given him, and Draco reminded himself of the breaths that reached down into his core, the magic that surrounded and cradled him, and the ambient magic that Linwood shouldn't get the chance to use. The chamber of pillars stabilized around him again.
He couldn't tell whether Potter was asleep or awake. His eyes floated in a filmy face, his body gone as thin as a vessel of crystal itself. Perhaps he was lost in some state in between, neither dreaming nor not dreaming.
In the end, it was enough to make Draco take the risk. He reached out with the spiky tendrils that represented his fingers right now, and passed through the image of Potter's eyes.
The world shuddered around him. Draco braced himself to resist, and felt something far beneath him, some great and somnolent power, shuddering to life, staring upwards and flexing what felt like wings.
Potter's magic, Draco knew at once. Somehow, Linwood had managed to bind it with the chains and the pillar in such a way that it didn't take them as a threat. But it would take someone pushing in from the outside that way.
So Draco sent an image of himself as he had seen it only in dreams, not in life. In the dream, he sat with his arm around Potter's shoulders, and they leaned on a tangled bank of vines and flowers, somewhere in the middle of blazing green summer. Potter breathed slowly and evenly, and his eyes were alight with joy because he was with Draco. Draco couldn't even name the expression on his own face. It wasn't one he had ever worn in waking life, though.
The eyes of Potter's magic, or whatever they really were, examined it. Draco felt as though he was slipping through a dangerously small gap between wards, and waited with breath that he would have held if he had lungs for access to Potter's mind.
Then it seemed to work. He slipped through the gap, and landed in what looked like a misty clearing, full of shifting piles of gold power and beams of light that brightened and blinked, became real and then vanished, so bright that Draco had to raise his hand to shield his eyes more than once.
"Malfoy?"
Draco hadn't noticed how deep the ache in him ran to hear that voice until it spoke. He had thought Potter was dead for a year--or gone, missing so deeply that Draco would never speak to him again, if only because he couldn't bear the thought of Potter as an unknown corpse in a nameless grave. Now he turned around again with his magical senses blazing with saliva and hunger, and saw Potter standing before him.
In the depths of his own mind and what was left of his core, Potter looked the way he once had. He had his arms folded, his head tilted to the side and his eyes stubbornly wide and stubbornly green. He wore Auror robes, although the version of him chained to Linwood's pillar was naked. He had a burn mark near his neck that was new, and his scar appeared dimmer on his forehead than it did now. Although, Draco had to admit, probably that was just the difference between memory and reality. Potter had hated that scar before the end.
"Come to learn how it's done?"
Draco flinched before he could stop himself. He had tracked Linwood's activities, charmed his way into his confidence, created the identity of Eddison Dane, and done everything he could to achieve his entrance into this cavern, this school, without thinking much about the sufferings of his victims. The Unspeakables would possess the secret, and study it to determine if it was of use or not. Then they would destroy Linwood.
Now, Draco had to breathe before he could answer. God knew what he was breathing with when his lungs were on the bed, but then, he was touching a Potter composed of magic and memory and imagination, anyway, the same way Draco was. "I'm an Unspeakable now. We learned what Linwood was doing and decided we needed to know more about it."
Potter nodded, his eyes full of vivid mirth. "And Unspeakables move slowly. For example, it probably took you at least six months to come this far." He shook his head slowly. "Should have asked someone on the inside, I could have told you faster. Since I've been here for nine months and all."
Draco had to close his eyes. To think he had once wanted to see despair on Harry Potter's face.
"Anyway, I can't tell you much."
Draco faced Potter and blinked again. His mind seemed to dart from one subject to another. Not surprising, in someone who had been chained up to a pillar and tortured for months on end, but Draco had understood him well so far. "What do you mean?"
"I've spent those months on a chain, with the things I understand growing smaller every day." Potter gestured crudely with one hand, and his smile twisted. "I wonder what poor dear Thomas will do when I can't respond to him anymore."
"Tell me what?" Draco repeated. "What do you mean?" He was watching Potter now and absorbing as much as he could of the eyes, brilliant with fear and rage and hatred. If this was the last memory he ever had of Potter blazing with his own light, he would take it, and no matter what kindling the light burned on.
"I can't tell you much about how it works," Potter clarified. "So if you came to interview me on what it's like to have your magical core drained, you're wasting your time. Some of the other prisoners might have more sanity left."
Draco felt himself shimmer and stretch, almost breaking apart. The desk and the trunk appeared in the corners of his eyes again; the sheets of his bed scratched under his back. And all the time, his pulse pounded and danced with fury in his ears.
He came back because he dragged himself back by will, and not by force of discipline or training. He came back to find Potter gaping at him. "What happened?" Potter demanded. "You looked like you were fading. Did--"
And abruptly he drew his wand and whirled around, scanning the misty landscape around them. "You should go," he said quietly. "It's not worth it, if Linwood figures out what you were doing and chains you up, too."
Draco moved forwards. He had no choice, the same way he'd had no choice but to confess his weakness for Potter when the Unspeakables were interrogating him. He kept his hands up and out. The words spilled from his mouth in a way he knew that his hands couldn't catch.
"I came to save you. And--you don't have to save me, you don't have to stand between me and him. Shit, Potter. Shit." He halted a few centimeters from him, realizing abruptly that his hands would have risen in the next moment to frame Potter's face. And he couldn't lower them.
Potter stared at him, his lips parted as though he assumed that he'd have to fling an insult at Draco. Then he shut his mouth, took a deep breath, and asked, without backing up and without flinching, "You know I'm dying, right?"
Draco shook his head. "I've come to get you out of here," he said, and he remembered the Unspeakables and Eddison Dane and all the preparations he'd made to be here so that he could take the secret of turning wizards into magic from Linwood, but he knew that that hadn't been his real reason from the moment he saw Potter chained to the pillar. "I didn't know it until I saw you, because I had no idea you were here. And it--" Well, he might as well say it. Either Potter would die and Draco would die and no one else would ever have any idea he'd said it, or Potter, the kind of man he'd just proved himself to be, wouldn't confess it to anyone else if they made it out alive. "It makes me furious that you're offering to stand between me and him, that you care about what happens to me."
"I don't want anyone else to suffer what I'm suffering," Potter said. He'd understood part of what had Draco upset, at least. His eyes were narrowed and he looked as though he wanted to turn into magic himself and spring and spin around the misty landscape that contained them. "I would make the same offer for everyone, anyone, who came to rescue me."
"But you made it to me," Draco said, and touched Potter's face. His fingers leaped under the contact, all his magical senses contracting into one ball and shivering. "I'm going to remember that."
Potter reached up and took his wrists, but didn't try to move Draco's hands away. "You're still mental," he said, gently, penetratingly. "There's nothing you can do. Linwood's changed so much of me that this is the only place I can be real." He swallowed, and Draco saw the hollows in the back of his eyes. He wondered how deep Potter had descended, how long he had waited to speak with someone like this.
How long it had been since he was sane.
"I can't escape," Potter continued. "The chain's taken my body along with my magic. You'd bring me up to the surface and I'd fade away like a puff of dust in the sunlight."
"Is that what you believe?" Draco asked, cocking his head to the side and throwing his words like nails. "Or what Linwood's made you believe?"
Potter's head snapped back, and he stared. Then he said, "There's still no way you can give me back what I've lost. I'd be, for the rest of my life, this thing. Not even a vegetable, because I know what I've lost. I don't want to live like that."
And Draco laughed.
Potter jerked in his hold, and grew thinner. Draco could feel his thoughts through his fingertips, Potter's impetus to flee and hide himself down in what was left of his mind rather than endure the one person he could talk to mocking him.
Draco shook his head and cradled him close, blinking rapidly. His mind was leaping along other secrets, experiments he had conducted in the Department of Mysteries, the studying he had done in preparation for coming to Linwood's school, and yes. Yes, it could work. Terrifying, mad, brilliant, but it could work.
"Tell me what's so funny." Potter still sounded like an Auror on an interrogation when he tried.
"The air around the school is full of ambient magic," Draco whispered back. "In the form I came here in, I could see how much of it was yours--the same color as the power in the pillar. What I need to do is reverse the process, a little at a time. That magic is still yours, more responsive to you than anyone else. Maybe we can't recover what's pouring from you into the pillar, but what's in the air could come back to you."
Potter blinked narrowed eyes. Then he said, "And how would we do that? Anyone can use that magic if they're free of the chains. Linwood showed me. It's not--it's not as though it would come back to me for the asking."
"We work together," Draco said. "I've done things like this before, back when I was a new Unspeakable in the Department and they gave me all the problems that famously didn't have solutions. I know it sounds hard," he added, because Potter was shaking his head. "But I know how to store magic and then send it somewhere else. It was supposed to be an attempt to enchant objects that would last forever instead of breaking after a few years. I never succeeded at that. But once Linwood shows me how to access that ambient magic, I can store it and bring it back to you instead of using it."
Potter folded his arms, although they stood so close that he jostled Draco when he did it, and Draco had no intention of moving away. "Linwood's going to notice that you aren't using the magic, you know. He isn't stupid."
Draco hummed but didn't discuss his contempt of Linwood, the way he would have liked to. "I'm good at illusions. I can fool him for a little while. And I think I know a further way to trick him, given his obsession with you."
"What?" Potter stared at him.
Draco licked his lips. He doubted he could hide how much this appealed to him from Potter, and so the best course was not to try, simply to speak and be damned for his honesty, if necessary. "I pretend that I'm just as desperately obsessed with you as he is. He'll like that. He'll let me have access to you a little at a time, for the pleasure of taking it away again. And I can store the magic most easily in my body."
Potter blinked, and blinked again. Then he said, "You're saying you could store it in your--in your mouth and kiss me?"
Draco nodded, holding his gaze. "And in my hands, and massage it into your skin when I touch you."
Potter flinched back from him, hard enough to break Draco's hold on him at last. He paced up and down with his arms folded, and then turned back and shook his head. "No," he said. "Absolutely not. I've had enough of him touching me, and I can't fight back or even really speak to myself about how much it hurts. No."
"I wouldn't hurt you," Draco said.
"Not physically," Potter said, and snapped his teeth like a shark chewing up bait.
Draco shook his head and tried to get close again, thinking it might reassure Potter to have someone touching him while they spoke. But Potter jerked back like a spooked horse, and watched him with eyes so furiously wide that Draco thought he might flee back into the depths of his mind if Draco tried again. Draco retreated with his hands high and sighed a little.
"I wouldn't want to hurt you at all," Draco said. "But if you're hurt by me touching you after all your time here, I can't blame you."
Potter's smile was a narrow slash. "How bloody fucking generous of you, not to blame me," he said, with a drawl that made Draco's teeth itch. He supposed it was a good enough revenge, since he had probably sounded the same to Potter many times in the past. "No. I'm not doing this. I don't trust you enough."
"I won't betray you to Linwood," Draco said quietly. "I want you to have your magic back, too. What Linwood could do with it isn't to be borne, and this way, I can take the secret back to the Department of Mysteries without them insisting that I leave Linwood alone to observe him for a while."
Potter's eyes were as wide and wild as forests, as the dreams that Draco had had on the nights after he'd heard Potter had disappeared. "You want to preserve what's happening here? Spread it? Fuck no. There's no way I'm trusting you, Malfoy."
Draco shook his head. "What can I say to convince you that I'm not like him?" Although he suspected that he was, if you looked at it a certain way. The most he could say was that he wanted Potter to touch him back, and that his obsession had endured years, instead of months.
"Nothing." Potter's face was a still mask. "I should have known you wouldn't come bearing good news. I'm grateful for what you did for me in the war, but good news? No."
"Potter--"
"Fucking farewell, Malfoy."
And Draco found himself exiled from Potter's mind again, drifting about in the glittering world of magic outside Potter's body. He reached towards him again, but this time, it was as though he reached into the mist that had consumed most of the landscape of Potter's mind. His hand passed through, and he could feel the soft chimes and sounds of relaxing wards from around him, the signs of a household awakening.
Draco floated away, back to his body. When he had returned, he lay there for a long while, his hands flexing as though he'd just awakened from nightmares and was clutching wildly at the bed, his breathing slow and soft.
The plan to take back Potter's ambient magic from the air around them and channel it into his body was still the best one Draco could think of, bar the fact that Potter would hate to be touched that way. But Potter would never agree.
So Draco would need to store the magic, and get close, and find some other way to transfer it to Potter's body.
He thought he might know a way.
Part Two.
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