Chapter Four of 'A Dream of Running Water'- A Dark Purpose
Chapter Three.
Title: A Dream of Running Water (4/10 or 12)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Harry/Draco
Warnings: Minor character death, violence, angst, AU after HBP
Rating: R
Summary: Driven nearly mad by his bitterness against the Dark Lord, Draco becomes a spy for the Order of the Phoenix. The device they sneak him to aid in his reports has unpredictable side-effects-like allowing Draco to dream of a landscape with a river running through it. That would be soothing, if Potter wasn’t there.
Author’s Notes: This will probably be a fairly short fic, maybe ten or twelve chapters. It will be updated every Tuesday.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-A Dark Purpose
“I want you to try the spell that will bind them to the machine yourself, now that we’re past the first stage,” said Elwood, and pushed Draco forwards, into the path of the next staggering captive, with his wand in the middle of Draco’s back. “These are going to be used just to power the machine, not to mark Potter’s name.”
Draco choked on saliva. But he knew he couldn’t stand there and do nothing. Snape had risked his life and done what he could to save Draco. Draco couldn’t give up on his sacrifice and dishonor it like that.
And, of course, he would also like to survive himself, and maybe stand a chance to rescue his mother from here at some point.
He had to put aside thoughts of how he didn’t want to torture anyone, he didn’t want to kill anyone. He had thought that about Dumbledore, but he had managed it just fine with Bellatrix. His own aunt. Someone who could do that should have no trouble torturing someone who wasn’t even related to him by blood.
His wand rose, and it seemed to Draco that he sat like a puppet in the back of his own head, as though affected by the Imperius Curse. He didn’t know what spell he had chosen until he felt his arm twitching through the wand movements, and his own voice blazed into the spell without any forethought. “Distraho.”
The spell was right there, it was speeding away from his wand, and it was striking the wizard. He fell on the floor and began screaming. Draco watched as the magic grew out of him and connected him to the machine, which pulsed and throbbed and grew. Elwood laughed behind him, a soft sound that scared Draco more than Bellatrix’s wild cackle would have, and he patted Draco on the shoulder.
“I knew you had the heart for this work,” he said. “It isn’t burning people, but it’s making something worthy out of their magic and pain.” He turned Draco around and bent down to look into his eyes. “And you will report to the Dark Lord that I am doing well?”
Draco opened his mouth to ask how he could do that, why he would be chosen to do that, when Elwood was an older Death Eater in better standing than he was.
And then he shut his mouth. Of course. He understood. This was the sort of politics that his father had taught him even before the Dark Lord returned. Set your underlings to spy on each other, and the underlings would be too busy trying to control each other and manipulate others’ perceptions to turn on you.
“I will report to him that you are doing well,” Draco said, feeling the safest words to be the exact ones Elwood had uttered, and he bowed.
For an instant, Elwood stood motionless, as though he was going to insist on a stronger pledge, and then he gave Draco a faint smile.
“Good. And I will report the same of you.” He turned to reach out to one of the Muggles. “Let me show you what happens when you use the magic on one of these.”
Draco felt himself retreat to the back of his mind again. It was almost like the effect when Snape reached into his mind and used Legilimency to make it hard to concentrate on…things. He could do this if he didn’t think about it.
“Distraho,” he said, and Elwood nodded and walked around to the side to watch as the spell made crawling dark tendrils reach out of the Muggle, then jerk and pull. The Muggle screamed. Draco looked away from brown eyes and blue-streaked hair and other things that would have made the Muggle into a distinct teenage boy, and at Elwood.
“There’s no magic in their core to power the machine or the spell,” Elwood explained. “So they simply suffer from the pain without being able to feel an end to it.” He smiled as the Muggle began to grasp and scratch at the floor with his hands, and then turned and studied Draco. “I need you to demonstrate something else for me.”
“What?” Draco asked through numb lips. He could feel bits of his mind rumbling, some of the walls he had raised breaking. He didn’t want to feel that. He pushed back against the walls, and they wobbled but then shored up again.
He was not going to die here. His mother was not going to die in the Manor. That would be much too big a disgrace for the role that Draco was trying to play here, a role that he had to keep going no matter how much he hated it.
And it would be much too big a disgrace for the other role he was trying to play and keep going, the role he mustn’t think about.
“I need you to show me that you know how to use the Killing Curse,” Elwood said, and fastened his hand on Draco’s shoulder and turned him towards the jerking Muggle. “In the end, all the glory of building this machine is to reach a quick point. This is how we’re going to destroy Harry Potter, and he’s pretty bloody quick. So you’ll cast the Killing Curse to power the machine.”
Draco knew there were things in there he wasn’t hearing, things that didn’t make sense, but he had already descended into a swarm of strength. He looked at the Muggle, and he remembered what Elwood had said, that he would die over a long period of time from Draco’s curse.
This was mercy, in a way. It was mercy.
Draco raised his wand. For a moment, the air around him seemed to be heavy, as though he was bracing his back against a boulder. And Draco reached into himself, and stopped seeing the Muggle, and instead saw his mother, her eyes glazed and her body still. That was what she would look like if the Dark Lord used the Killing Curse on her.
Her face became Bellatrix’s in Draco’s head.
“Avada Kedavra.”
The Killing Curse left his wand and struck the teenage Muggle. The black tendrils that had flared out from the Muggle’s body crumpled to the floor at once, and Draco lowered his wand and looked at the body in casual interest. He wondered whether this would really be practice for cursing Harry Potter.
He wondered when he had become the one who apparently had to kill Harry Potter, instead of a weakling the Dark Lord was using for a basic purpose.
“Good,” said Elwood, and he chuckled, a sound like the rustling of scales, behind Draco. “You’ll have to practice some more before you would be ready to take the field against a determined opponent, but like all things, that comes in time.” He had an odd, mentor-like tone to his voice. He touched Draco’s shoulder again. “Step back and let me bring another one forth. I need to practice my spells as well.”
*
“Draco.”
He turned around. He knew he needed to go to bed and go to sleep as soon as possible. He didn’t know how he knew that, or why he knew that. He felt fatigue dragging at his muscles, but it was the kind he had felt ever since he had seen his father die. Why was this different?
But he couldn’t ignore his mother’s voice, and after a quick glance up and down the corridor to make sure no one was observing them, Draco crossed to the door of the storage room she was peering out of. The room remained disused, now that the Dark Lord had pulled out all the Malfoy artifacts and was either using them or had played with them until he grew bored. The only notable thing about the storage room was the way that it connected to a few other rooms by means of a secret panel.
“You cannot keep doing this,” his mother blurted, and seized his arm. Draco stared down at her hand, the small white circles that her nails were drilling into his flesh, and wondered why it felt as if she was gripping a piece of glass instead of his arm. “You have to stop.”
Draco shook his head and looked up at her. His regal mother had her hair disordered around her face, and she might not have slept since Lucius’s death. Draco reached up and touched her chin. At least that felt normal. “I have to go,” he whispered. “You know the Dark Lord is going to kill me otherwise.”
Narcissa closed her eyes tightly and swallowed. “There has to be some other means of saving your soul,” she said. “And your life at the same time.”
Draco said nothing. He didn’t know what she was talking about, and unlike the mysterious things that Snape said, Draco didn’t think she was talking about something that could save his life.
“I must find the way,” Narcissa said, and released his arm. “Tell Severus to watch out for a message from me.”
She turned and swished back into the room before Draco could answer, and then Draco heard the grinding sound of the sliding panel. He wondered how he could tell her that “Severus” probably didn’t want to hear that from him, and how he was to find the man without permission from the Dark Lord to do so anyway.
Exhausted, he went back to his room and rested his head on the pillow, and shut his eyes. It seemed to him that everyone wanted him to do something different, and then wouldn’t accept it when Draco tried to tell them that he simply couldn’t do what they wanted. Once again, it was a relief to drift, not even thinking about pain or torture or the food he would receive later, and fade into darkness.
*
It was never not going to be disconcerting, either the way that he faded into the darkness, or the sharp taste of the water in his mouth, or the surge of relief when he looked up and saw Potter coming towards him.
“I spent the day torturing people,” Draco said harshly. “I killed one. What about you?”
Potter paused and looked at him. His eyes were dark, and Draco wondered for a second if he looked the same way. There was something about Potter that suggested, yes, he knew what Draco was talking about.
But then Potter took a seat on the bank and shook his head. “Moody is dead,” he announced abruptly.
Draco opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t know what to say. He knew the “Moody” who had tortured him during their fourth year had really been a Death Eater, but that gave him no more fondness for the real one.
“It should have been simple,” Potter whispered, and slumped forwards, resting his head on his knees. Draco watched him and wondered whether he should mention that Potter would feel better for a taste of the water. He might as well not have been there, though. Potter hadn’t even asked him for information. “We worked out where it was hidden, finally, and we still have friends within the school. Everything would have gone easier in the first place if I knew about Ravenclaw legends, but…never mind. We found it. That should have been it. Who knew the destruction would be the hardest part?” Potter abruptly picked up a closed fist and hammered it into the grass beside him. Draco started despite the calm that the twilight realm usually inspired in him. “Who knew that the bastard Voldemort would have spells like that guarding it?”
He whipped around and glared at Draco. “And don’t you dare run around flinching at the name! You have no idea how hard it was, to watch Moody just-just age and crumble into dust like that. All from grabbing hold of a stupid diadem without proper protection!”
Draco had no idea what to say for a second, until the anger in Potter’s eyes struck him and called up answering anger of his own.
“Yes, I have no idea how hard it is,” he said, and made his voice cutting. “I spent my day torturing and killing, but that was easy. You probably think it’s easy for a Death Eater like me, anyway,” he added, and decided to go for the low blow. “The way it was easy for you to cut my chest open and almost kill me, right?”
“Shut up!” Potter’s face was crimson. “I had no idea what that spell would do!”
“I have no idea what these spells are doing, either!” Draco screamed back. “It has something to do with your name and killing and torture, but I have to kill and torture without even thinking about it, because I’ll go mad if I do! And then someday I’ll have to think about it, and then I either will really go mad or I’ll break down or something, and that’s if I survive! You have no idea what it’s like!”
Potter paused and looked at him in silence for a long moment. Looked, Draco thought, not just stormed and waved his hands around. And then he sat back down on the bank of the stream and stared out over the running water.
Draco did, too. It wasn’t as though he had anything better to do when he was here. Maybe the running water could soothe him. Maybe this would be the escape he needed to keep himself sane through the breaking process.
“I’m looking for these things that are very powerful and very important to defeat Voldemort,” Potter whispered abruptly, and said nothing about Draco’s flinch this time. “I don’t know what all of them are. A few. I don’t know where all of them are. One. If I can destroy them, then I can destroy him. But it’s such a desperate chance, and I thought-I thought I would make it better by letting more people help me, and-it cost Moody his life.”
Draco looked away from Potter. He was bearing his own burdens, he thought. He couldn’t bear Potter’s as well.
But Potter said nothing about asking Draco to bear his. He just went on looking out over the water, and something in his posture of hunched misery jerked Draco’s words out of him.
“I was trying not to think about it,” Draco whispered. “I was trying to think about my mother’s life, and how I would spare her. But even that wasn’t enough. I don’t know. I have the hatred in my soul, because I burned my aunt to death. But I’m still flickering in and out, and I can do it, but only if I don’t think about it. How long is that going to work?”
Potter reached out, blindly groping. For one moment, Draco thought he was going to touch the root of the tree next to him, and wondered why. Potter was sitting on the bank itself; he had a firm grip.
But instead, Potter’s hand found his, and Draco gasped. The twilight realm wasn’t very cold, but it was cool, and he didn’t know it until he felt the feverish heat of Potter’s skin. He blinked and stared down at their clasped hands.
Once, he would have given anything for that sight. Now, he had no idea what to say.
Potter had the words for him.
“What are we doing?” he whispered. “How can we defeat him? A couple of kids? Even four kids?” Draco knew he was including Weasley and Granger in that total, and it was the only time, ever, he wouldn’t object at finding himself in that company. “I don’t know how Dumbledore could have expected this of us.” He turned his head and stared at Draco in misery. “Why did he tell me about this quest when he knew how hard it was going to be? Why did he try so hard to save you if it was just going to end up with you having to kill people anyway?”
Draco shook his head. His skin and his voice and his mouth all felt as dry as paper. “It’s not like Dumbledore could have predicted all this, Potter. He didn’t even predict that Professor Snape would turn on him.”
Potter closed his eyes. “I think he planned a lot more of it than I knew at the time. He was teaching me-he was showing me-things that he wouldn’t have showed me if he thought that he was going to survive and be with me.”
He opened his eyes again, and they were bitter and blazing. “But he should have tried harder!” he shouted across the stream. “He should have thought that I would find it hard! He should have tried harder!”
He turned and stared at Draco. “For all of us,” he whispered.
Draco said nothing, but maintained the hold on Potter’s hand. It was painful, in some ways, sitting that close to someone he’d hated, or thought he hated, and he wasn’t going to get any nearer.
But they were huddled against the desperation of their circumstances, and one person to be closer to was better than no one.
And other than Draco whispering once, “Potter, the incantation that Elwood is using is Distraho,” they sat like that until they both fell asleep, this time, and the grey twilight closed in around both of them equally. Potter didn’t vanish off on his own.
Draco thought some memory of that peace remained with him when he woke up, even though it slipped through his fingers like dust immediately.
He had need of it. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the Dark Lord looming by his bed.
Chapter Five.
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