Chapter Thirty-Two of 'An Image of Lethe'- Three Tremendous Days
Chapter Thirty-One.
Title: An Image of Lethe (32/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Bill/Fleur
Warnings: Angst, violence, minor character death
Rating: R
Summary: The Ministry finally has a way to test people for Dark magic and separate the Dark wizards definitively from the rest. Harry Potter undergoes the test, produces an utterly unexpected result, and finds himself swept up in a political conflict that materialized out of nowhere yesterday, it seems: the fight over whether Dark wizards have a right to continue mingling with "normal" society. Updated every Sunday.
Author's Notes: This story idea has been brewing in my head for several months. This will probably be a long one, and very political. The title is from a poem, "The Coming of War: Actaeon," by Ezra Pound.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Two-A Tremendous Three Days
“What can I do to help?” Draco asked quietly, when they had shut Pansy out and it was only the two of them in Harry’s little lab. Well, the two of them and his father, who was still unconscious and breathing deeply.
For a moment, Harry stood looking into the fire. Draco watched the way his eyes glittered and his hands flexed, and he felt a fierce love working through him. He blinked and glanced off to the side.
“You can calm your mother down,” Harry said at last. “It would be a huge imposition if I had to stop work because she decided to interfere.”
Draco felt the need to defend his mother. “As long as someone tells her what’s going on, then she won’t.”
“Then I need you to tell her what’s going on.” Harry caught Draco’s hand and turned to stare at him, and Draco felt as though his lungs had no more need of air. “Please. I wouldn’t know the right words to say.”
Draco grimaced. It was something that had to be done, of course, and he might even understand why better than Harry did, but he had wanted to do something more active. “And that’s all?”
Harry shut his eyes and turned towards the reverse Lightfinder. “There’s something else,” he said after a moment. “Come over here.”
Draco stepped forwards curiously. The Lightfinder had a hum of power around it that soared as he approached it. He reached out with one hand, and kept an eye on Harry. Harry nodded, so Draco let his hand brush over the wood of the doorway. Nothing happened, and he continued on to the metal bar, and then, in a rush of daring, up to the dark glass globe.
There was a surge of power for an instant that clenched Draco’s teeth like the Cruciatus Curse had when it was channeled through his body-but there was no pain in this. It simply felt as though someone had sealed him to a blast of energy. It let him go a minute later, and he staggered back and shook his head. Power was sparking behind his teeth.
“What was that?” he asked, and looked at Harry.
Harry, whose own eyes were wide as though he hadn’t intended this to happen, but Draco thought it was with happiness, even joy. He reached out and brushed a hand down the globe. No current of power seemed to bind him there. Well, maybe he was used to it.
“That confirms something,” he said, and looked at Draco again in turn. The power that surrounded the machine seemed to rise up around him, although maybe that was only Draco’s own dazed senses, demanding an explanation for what had happened. “When I used the Lightfinder on a conjured snake earlier, it turned it into this rainbow winged snake. I let it fly out the window. And then-then I couldn’t touch Lucius to the Lightfinder at all, even when he was unconscious, until Ignis appeared and gave me permission. Your magic just blends with it. I think-I think I made it so that the reverse Lightfinder’s magic reacts to how friendly the creature feels towards me.”
“But I don’t actually share your magic,” Draco said, his mind leaping. He had heard of theories of shared magic; it was one reason that identical twins could so often use each other’s wands, and sometimes wands could be inherited by family members. And something like the snake, made from Harry’s spell in the first place, would get spectacular results from the Lightfinder. “I mean-I’m close to you, but that’s not the same thing.”
“I know.” Harry smiled at him and stepped closer. “But what if it’s not just sharing magic? What if it’s how friendly the one with the magic feels towards me? Lucius is my enemy, and that’s why he resisted the power so well. The snake was mine and would do whatever I wanted. Although I have to figure out what made it change into the rainbow snake instead of the unicorn foal I was trying for.” He shrugged. “And you’re my lover.”
Draco basked in that word for as long as he thought he could permit himself to, and then nodded sternly. “Right. And that means I should be able to help you more with the Lightfinder, if you want me to.”
From the way Harry went still and looked at him. Draco thought he had said something wrong. But instead, Harry made a flourishing gesture with one hand and whispered, “Even if it means manhandling your father around sometimes?”
Draco lifted his head. “Even then.”
Harry blinked once, closed his eyes fast, opened them, and then murmured, “Why don’t you go to your mother, first, and make sure that she knows the truth and won’t intervene. Then you can come back, and help me.”
Draco smiled at him, brushed his fingertips along Harry’s arm like a kiss, and then left the room. He knew he would have to explain certain things to his mother that he didn’t look forward to explaining, and not only because she had wanted them to leave already. He knew he would have to explain them to Pansy and Astoria sometime, too.
With the feeling that he was walking on glassy air, he didn’t give a damn.
*
Harry hesitated, looking at the reverse Lightfinder. He didn’t want to conduct any tests with Lucius until Draco got back, but at the same time, he didn’t want to waste a moment of those three days that Ignis had granted him. Perhaps he could use some of the time to figure out why he had ended up with a rainbow serpent.
Hermione would tell him to start with basic questions and work his way out from there, instead of trying to answer the most complicated one first. Harry sat down.
Why did I want a unicorn foal? What did the reverse Lightfinder actually do?
Well, the second one might still be too complex. Harry shook his head, uneasy, and turned back to the first one.
He had wanted a unicorn foal because it was a symbol of the Light. Because it was impressive. Because he had already showed the cobra “transforming” into one in front of the Death Eaters, and he had wanted to prepare for the moment when illusions wouldn’t be enough and he would have to show off the reality.
But did it have to be a unicorn foal? Although how a nonexistent creature could represent the Light, he didn’t know.
Then Harry snorted. He was fooling himself. He would have thought, when he was still unbothered by the Ministry’s political definitions of Light and Dark, that something that shone all the colors of the rainbow was pretty Light. And the snake had grown in intelligence at the same time, but it hadn’t attacked him, or tried to destroy anything in the room in the pursuit of getting out. It had simply wanted to leave.
What if…
Harry cocked his head, almost afraid of scaring the thought off.
What if the Lightfinder created something I desired, something that would be a symbol of the Light and something impressive, but just didn’t touch on a unicorn foal? It was answering some of my desires. Not all of them.
Harry sat up slowly. Yes, maybe that was the answer. Maybe he couldn’t expect the reverse Lightfinder to do exactly what he wanted, but he could expect it to do something like he wanted.
This time, he conjured the ball python with even more enthusiasm, and sent it writhing over to the reverse Lightfinder and commanded it to look into the globe with bated breath. The same sense of light in reverse came welling out of the dark globe and enveloped the snake, but this time, Harry didn’t intend to look away.
And this time, the light moved more languorously, and lengthened the snake’s neck and tail and gave it legs in a delicious shimmer. Harry reached out and stroked the magic around the edge of the machine as it worked, and nodded. It felt different than it had even before. It felt more like him, as if he was shaking his own hand or looking at his reflection in the Mirror of Erised. The reverse Lightfinder did do what he desired. It just didn’t interpret the word “desire” in the same way Harry had.
By the time the light faded in another starburst, there was a small dragon standing in the reverse Lightfinder. It spread its wings slowly and calmly, and let Harry admire the tiny, overlapping purple scales along its neck and spine, combined with shimmering silver ones on its leg and face so polished that Harry could almost see himself in them, like a mirror. The wings and the paws glowed green, but not the poisonous green of the Avada Kedavra. It was a glad, forest green that reminded Harry of what the Hogwarts grounds looked like after rain.
“You’re a pretty thing,” said Harry quietly. “If gaudy.”
He had assumed the dragon would want to leave, too, and nodded to the open window, but instead, the dragon stepped off the Lightfinder and trotted over to him. Harry picked it up and held it. It was heavier than it looked, as if it was really made of those amethysts and silver and emeralds instead of muscles and scales. It leaned against him and sighed, glowing warm through its bones.
“What am I going to do to you?” Harry asked.
The dragon, which was about the size of a large dog, didn’t seem to think that was an important question. It struggled after a second, and Harry cleared off the top of a table and put it down. It went to sleep, its muzzle resting on its tail.
Draco came in a second later, not bothering to knock. Harry looked at him and tried to control the smile that wanted to spread across his face. Really, he should scold Draco for such a dangerous habit.
But the look of amazement on Draco’s face as he came to a stop and stared at the dragon was worth it. He cleared his throat and spoke a second later, but without managing to look away from the dragon. “Mother says that she’ll support us. Although she still wants to take me away from here if Father wakes up and starts trying to hurt me.”
“He won’t.” Harry reached out and floated Lucius into the air, bringing him near the Lightfinder again. This time, although the whine from his own clashing magic and Lucius’s still set his teeth on edge, it didn’t prevent him from laying Lucius on the metal bar. “I need you to work with me now.”
“All right,” said Draco. “How?”
“Lay your hand on my right arm, and then your other hand on his hair.” Harry nodded to the floating hair that hung down under Lucius’s head. “I’m going to see if the touch of someone connected to both of us will make it less painful for him, or more.”
Draco’s eyes flashed over to him for a second, but then he seemed to remember that Harry had to keep up a certain pretense of being willing to hurt Lucius if they were going to fool Ignis. He nodded, and did as Harry had suggested. Harry narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t sure, but he thought there had been a reduction in the loud, buzzing magic hovering around Lucius’s body.
“Lean more on me,” he suggested. “And think about how much you don’t want him to be hurt.” He didn’t know yet if anyone’s desires besides his own could affect the reverse Lightfinder’s, but it was worth a try.
Draco obliged, and for a second, Harry looked in admiration at his screwed-shut mouth and eyes, and felt the pressure on his arm with wonder. Then he looked away, and watched instead the small lightning bolts surging around Lucius’s body.
Body, he told himself a second later. Not corpse.
The magic died down a second later, and Harry nodded. “That’s the first test over with, then,” he muttered. “Good. Now we only have about three hundred to conduct.”
He looked at Draco, only to find Draco looking calmly back at him, so steady that Harry wanted to hug him.
“We’d better get started then,” said Draco, and rolled his neck a little. “Hadn’t we.”
*
Draco knew Harry had told the other Death Eaters something, some reason to justify their staying in his private rooms so long. He knew Greyback had been sent out to spread the word, and Pansy. Pansy went only reluctantly, and only after Draco’s mother came up and spoke to her.
Draco might have been insulted by Pansy’s lack of trust if he’d had time to be insulted.
But instead, he only had the time to suggest experiments, and keep notes, and come up with new ideas when the old ones didn’t work, and snatch moments of sleep and food out of the chaos of constant theorizing. He felt as if someone had crept inside his brain and pummeled it. This was harder than any-than anything, really. Harder than coming up with ways to try and keep his family safe during the war. Harder than coming up with answers to the impossible extra homework that Professor Snape had sometimes assigned him, to test his “real talent in Potions.”
But what he stood to lose if he didn’t do the work would be harder. So he did it.
Harry had Draco cast spells on Lucius, on the dark globe of the Lightfinder and all the other parts of it, and on himself. Then he had Draco put his hands on the globe and stand there while the lightning played around him and snapped and snarled in concert with the magic that accepted Draco because he was so close to Harry.
Draco had to admit he wouldn’t like to go through the reverse Lightfinder, and it was only partially because he had to watch his father’s body being manipulated to go through it. He didn’t know if Harry realized how much power he had poured into the thing.
Harry cast some spells himself, and put more conjured snakes than Draco could count through the bloody doorway. All of them changed into some kind of Light creature, although all of them except the dragon Draco had seen when he first came into the room after convincing his mother left. The dragon simply stayed sleeping in the midst of it all, now and then waking to stalk around the room or eat a bit of Harry and Draco’s sandwiches. Then it would start slumbering again, often right on top of the book or parchment Draco needed. He got used to moving it, though.
Harry broke off pieces of the Lightfinder and rebuilt them. He turned Lucius so he was floating upright, upside-down, and backwards. He scribbled new notes and then immediately tried them out without even telling Draco what his notes meant.
Draco could put up with it, but he did hope that his mother didn’t come in now, for more reasons than one.
Through it all, Lucius stayed serenely asleep, his head bobbing to the side now and then when he had to be moved. He never seemed hurt, though. Draco asked for nutrient potions, and if it caused some confusion among the Death Eaters, Greyback seemed happy to make them, or steal them, and bring them to the door to hand them over.
Individual memories stood out like stars in the endless flow of moments, cracks in a pane of glass.
Draco remembered being bent over under his father’s full weight, because Harry had ended the Levitation Charm just in case that magic was interfering with the Lightfinder. Harry himself was pacing in a circle around Draco, waving his wand and chanting the same syllable over and over. Maybe it was an incantation, but if so, it wasn’t one that Draco had ever heard of.
The most irritating thing about that memory, honestly, was the trickle of sweat into his eyes that he couldn’t wipe away.
And he remembered the moment when Harry stepped back, flicked his wand down, and muttered, “If this doesn’t work, then I’ll know something’s wrong.”
Draco opened his mouth to ask what he was going to do differently that he hadn’t done the other seven times before, but a silent explosion of blue light filled the room, and Draco passed out.
He opened his eyes-another memory-to Harry cradling his head and muttering nonsense. Draco waited a long moment before clearing his throat, enjoying being cared for too much to want it to stop.
“What were you trying to do?” he asked.
“Change Lucius’s magic,” said Harry, and his eyes flickered in a way that Draco knew he meant, specifically, the link his father had with Ignis through the promise sigil, not something in his magical core. “I thought I could try the power of blue.”
It wasn’t until long afterwards that Draco figured that one out. Blue was the color of water and frost, either one of which might have seemed like Ignis’s opposite to a desperate Harry.
The memories marched past. Harry, stooping over Lucius with his wand in his hand and a look of crazed determination on his face. Harry, scribbling on a parchment with his wand aimed at the reverse Lightfinder, almost jabbing at it in irritation.
And Harry swearing and stepping back to kick a table when something didn’t work. Actually, Draco thought that memory repeated more than once. A lot of the things Harry had tried were failing.
But the memory he held of the end of the process, that one was clear and not in danger of being confused with any other.
It was the afternoon of the third day.
*
Harry was starting to go cold inside, and he refused to believe that was only because his hands hurt and his brow ran with sweat and his eyes burned with exhaustion in a way that couldn’t warm him. He knew a lot of it was also the magic he had cast, and the despair that was starting to eat its way through his stomach.
The deadline that Ignis had given them was nearly past, and they were no nearer the chance to crack the riddle.
Maybe Ignis was willing to let us try at all because it knew what would happen, Harry thought bitterly, and stopped to stretch his muscles and listen to the chorus of complaints from the middle of his back especially. He seemed to have forgotten how to sit or lie down. All he’d done was stoop and hunch and crouch and walk. Maybe there’s no way to solve this in three days.
Or at all.
But that would only mean giving up, and Harry still wasn’t ready to do that. He shook his head and focused on the reverse Lightfinder again.
So far, it had done things he wanted, but not in any order. Harry had thought he sincerely wanted Lucius cured, but it had turned out that he wanted things like the weight eased-so Lucius had started levitating at one point after Harry had taken away the Levitation Charm-and the magic to stop reacting so horribly and Draco to be able to rest more. At one point, Draco had nodded off to sleep the minute he touched the dark glass globe, even though he’d just been complaining that he couldn’t imagine sleeping until Lucius was healed.
You have to discipline your mind, Harry thought savagely at himself. Think.
Then he snorted at himself in turn. You sound like Snape. And that’s not going to get you any closer to a solution, if all you can do is think about your failures.
He turned and looked at Draco. Draco was leaning against the wall with his arms folded as if he needed his elbows against the wood to keep him awake. At the moment, with the way he was staring, it might be true.
Yearning cut like a lightning bolt through Harry, yearning that hurt with how strong it was.
I want to help him. I want to make sure that nothing can ever hurt him again.
And there it was. There was the perfect moment of desire, because Harry knew the only thing that would really help Draco was curing Lucius. Narcissa would leave and take Draco with her unless Harry could produce some kind of convincing proof.
And the only possible proof is reality.
Harry shook his head and stood up. “Draco.” His voice crackled with authority that must have surprised Draco, from the way he turned his head and fastened surprised eyes on Harry. “Come over here.”
Draco pushed himself off the wall and staggered over. Harry seized him and hauled him around ruthlessly until he stood next to the reverse Lightfinder. He hated to do this, but too much compassion would change what he wanted, and result in another failure.
“Put your arm here,” he said, and rested Draco’s elbow on the dark glass globe. Then he positioned Lucius so he was floating in front of it, his face almost pressed against the glass. Draco was blinking, hardly seeming awake now. “Get ready to cast Incendio at the glass when I tell you to. Understand?”
“You want to destroy the glass?” Draco’s glossy eyes stared at him.
“This isn’t going to destroy it,” Harry told him impatiently. “You need to cast it. Can you?”
Draco nodded slowly. Harry nodded back, then turned and manipulated the Levitation Charm a little more so Lucius’s face was touching the globe. Then, holding onto the pure burning of his purpose, he snapped at Draco, “Let it go.”
“Incendio,” Draco said, nearly as strongly as Harry thought he could have.
The crackle of energy through the glass globe was so strong that Harry was flung off his feet. But he had done what he needed to do. Lucius’s face was against the globe, and what Harry wanted, the reverse Lightfinder did. The dark globe spat its shadow-light at the same moment, and willed the fire of transformation into Lucius’s body.
Except that Lucius’s body was already being consumed from within by magical fire, and the two forces clashed and made Harry’s teeth hurt.
Harry watched in breathless silence as the fires writhed and danced around Lucius. The spell, amplified by the reverse Lightfinder and Harry’s desire and the spell being cast by someone connected to both Harry and Lucius, and the fire of Ignis, enveloped Lucius in a swirling sheath, and then moved down and concentrated around the wrist that bore that promise sigil. Harry grabbed his own shirt sleeve and sent more desire at the machine, if that would help.
This was the moment when he saw what had gone wrong before. He had been trying to want to cure Lucius. He had either been distracted by petty desires and needs, or he hadn’t been able to want it enough.
What he needed to want was…
To help Draco.
There was a horrible noise, a stink of burning flesh that made Draco lunge forwards crying, and Harry grab him. Draco was shouting about how he would never forgive Harry if Harry had murdered his father, and Harry was trying to shout that he knew that, but he thought-
And then the promise sigil began to crisp and peel away in shining dark strips from Lucius’s wrist. The paler skin went first, then the swollen silver stuff, like an invisible snake turning inside out.
There was one more flare.
Lucius dropped to the floor, pure and whole and breathing, his head resting on the flank of the small dragon, which turned, gave him a single look, and went back to sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Three.
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