[One-shots] A Better Bargain Driven, H/D, R, 3/3
Third part of a long one-shot. Don't start reading here.
Part V: Hath My Heart
It was not going to happen.
Because I will it not to, Draco thought, lying with his arms stiff on either side of his body, staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom, invisible in the darkness. He panted like he’d been running, and he knew it didn’t sound healthy.
It also wasn’t healthy to have sweat standing out on his forehead, and his fingers working frantically in the blankets beside him, and his body feeling as though it would be simpler to stop existing. At least that way, he wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of what Potter had said.
They have a battle plan that requires him to die.
If things had been different, the Dark Lord the man Draco’s father had once described, then there would have been no difficulty about what Draco had to do. He would have betrayed Potter’s plans to the Dark Lord in an instant, and asked for Potter’s life as his reward. Then Potter would have been upset with him, but he would have been alive. Which had to come before everything else.
But then Draco wouldn’t have started spying for the Order of the Phoenix anyway, because he would have stayed loyal to the Dark Lord, and there would be no bargain for Potter to fulfill.
Draco shifted around, trying to get more comfortable. There seemed to be a hump of spring under his back, which was silly, when the mattresses his family was afforded were still more comfortable than anything else in the Manor.
Or as if it was a piece of pine needle stuck there.
Yes. That’s what it’s like. A piece of needle stuck and irritating me, like that one bed I lay with Potter on.
He could taste Potter even when he was alone now, see the way his stubborn expression melted into pleasure, and feel the urgency coursing through him like a drumbeat when Potter’s unexpected Blood Letter had arrived, summoning Draco to-Draco knew it now-give him something he could forget the bad news in.
Well. Potter would learn that he couldn’t just jerk Draco around.
He’s not the only one who can make plans and do something unexpected. And neither is the Order of the Phoenix.
*
“You seem strangely intent on that potion, young Draco.”
Draco hadn’t started when the Dark Lord spoke, because, as silently as he could move, he still needed to open doors. And Professor Snape, traitor though he was, had taught Draco to hold his own in Potions by maintaining a state of clear, lucid concentration that would let him focus absolutely on the potion while coming to the surface in the case of outside sensations. The noise of the door opening was one of those things he’d trained Draco to respond to. It might mean the difference between success and disaster for a potion.
“I hope that you’ll let me use it in the next raid, my Lord,” Draco responded, kneeling even as he strained some of the yellow, murky mixture the potion had become through a net of silver threads that had been in the Malfoy family for generations. The potion ran gold through them as it dripped back into the cauldron, but left a sharp-edged glop clinging to the net’s threads. Draco laid the net aside on the table. He would need to mix the glop back in later.
“Or should I say,” he went on, turning around and bowing so that his forehead touched the floor, “the aftermath of the next raid, when we bring some Muggles back here.”
The Dark Lord chuckled and reached down, pressing on the back of Draco’s neck. Draco looked up obediently, and filled his mind with images of potion-making as he felt the usual probe against his shields.
“The Lover’s Haze,” said the Dark Lord. “What interesting ideas you have, Draco. We might let you put on a show before the court. Or we might not,” he added, in that usual way he had of changing the ground beneath his Death Eaters’ feet so nothing would be certain.
Draco had expected it, and let his eyes fall again as he nodded. “Yes, my lord.”
“Continue,” said the Dark Lord, and swept out. Draco got back to his feet and reached for an obsidian knife to chop up some of the sharper edges in the glop.
The Lover’s Haze Potion, when he had it done, would be a potion he could smear on his lips, and transfer with a kiss. It never affected the one who had made it. But it would drug the one he kissed, loosen their tongue and make them confess their innermost thoughts.
Usually, it was used simply in bedroom games, to learn the desires of one’s partner-or the things that would most humiliate them, in the game Draco was letting the Dark Lord think he would play.
But there was another property of the potion that Draco was counting on. The confessions would always be the absolute truth.
*
“I don’t think this is such a huge thing to ask for, given what I’ve done for you in the last little while.”
They were back in the clearing in the Forbidden Forest where they had seen the dying unicorn. Even those memories dimmed before Draco’s irritation as he watched how slowly Potter undressed.
Potter turned towards him, face shadowed. Then he shook his head and said, “Oh. No. It wasn’t begrudging you, Malfoy. Just thinking about something else.” He kicked the Muggle trainers he’d once again worn off and bent down to yank on his trousers.
Draco had the Lover’s Haze potion safe in a vial in his already discarded robes. He had intended to put it on his lips immediately and kiss Potter the instant he arrived, so that there would be no chance Potter could get away without telling Draco what was going on.
But now, it was as if a fire had leaped to life in his chest, and he didn’t want Potter drugged or distracted at all while they were having sex. He seized the bottom of Potter’s rough clothes and dragged them off while he was still struggling with his belt. Potter gasped and fell, up in a second with his wand in hand.
“What are you playing at, Malfoy?” he snarled, aiming the wand straight at Draco. “If you think for a second I’m going-”
Draco grabbed him around the waist and dragged Potter against him, his fingers finding flinching warm skin, warmer from the fire Potter had been standing with his back to. Draco had drugged a guard-snake to come here, and while he was confident in his own Potions skills, he knew he would have to get back soon.
And yet all that went out of his head when he saw Potter so determined to focus on something beyond Draco.
“You think you can ignore me?” Draco hissed, digging his hand into the soft skin over Potter’s ribs, making him wriggle and yelp. “Well, you can’t.” And he slammed his mouth into Potter’s, so hard that he knew Potter’s teeth were probably cutting his lips, and dragged him down and over. Potter rolled with him on the ground.
Draco was already naked. And he had charms he could cast to make Potter relaxed and slick, so he did, and he cast the same lube charm on his cock, and raised Potter and jammed him down on his cock.
Potter yelped, but intimately familiar as he was with Potter’s sounds of pain from Quidditch games, Draco knew it wasn’t because he hurt from where Draco had entered him; more likely it was just the unexpectedness of it. And that made Draco reckless with anger, too. Potter ought to have come here expecting this. He was the one who had begged Draco to fuck him last time. Had he thought it would never happen again?
Draco rolled himself over, every movement burning with grace, radiant as light from an exploding star leaking down his limbs. He put Potter on his back, staring up at him with wide eyes. Then Draco flexed his hips, and Potter’s face went scarlet as his back strained in response, his legs locking around Draco’s.
“What was that?” he hissed.
Draco grinned. He thought he knew what it was, but it was also clear that he must not have hit it last time they fucked, or Potter wouldn’t have sounded so startled. He angled himself a little, switching angles when Potter wriggled, and then he hit it again. Potter moaned in a ragged voice and turned his head a little to the side, apparently not wanting to look at the person who brought him such pleasure.
Draco wrenched his head back around. “I could stop, you know,” he said, and began to slide out, using all the willpower he’d mustered during endless months of braving the Dark Lord’s wrath and walking the edge of uncertainty to stay alive. “I could stand up and walk away, and then you could try to use your hand or your wand to bring you relief-”
“Fuck you, Malfoy!”
“That’s one thing you’ll never do, no matter what happens,” Draco said with certainty, and mopped little bits of spittle off his face. “Your choice, Potter. In-” he let himself sink a little deeper, and knew from their twin gasps something about how it felt for Potter “-or out?” And he began to draw back again, focusing his attention ferociously on Potter’s knee to keep from looking at his face and yielding.
Potter thrust upwards himself, and pulled Draco back in. “Come on, then,” he said, and arched and wriggled.
Draco laughed breathlessly-Potter had managed to avoid giving Draco what he asked for even when there should have been no way he could-and began to thrust the way Potter had probably wanted him to last time, thick and rapid. His gaze remained on Potter’s face as he did, the fading blush in his cheeks, the sweat, the different crinkles around his eyelids as he squeezed his eyes shut.
Potter was the most alive person Draco had ever met. It would never have been like this with anyone else, because they wouldn’t have responded to Draco’s demands with such insults, such fire, such shudders.
And Draco was going to make sure that Potter stayed alive.
He grabbed Potter’s wrist and grabbed his fingers at the same time, roughly entwining them, holding on. Potter didn’t seem to notice what he was doing. He was lost in his own little world of grunts and harsh breaths, catching his chest and his nose against Draco’s skin.
But Draco knew. Draco was the one in control. He drove down, he angled, and he held on and made Potter come.
This time, Potter gave a muted sound of ecstasy only, but it was enough. Draco felt the spreading wetness between them and let go, following Potter in a thunderous spiral down, to the exhaustion that awaited them both at the bottom.
And the vindication.
*
By the time Draco stirred and opened his eyes again, Potter was starting to recover, but he was still limp. His eyes remained half-open, and so did his mouth, as Draco crawled slowly over to his robes and drew out the flask of the Lover’s Haze.
Perfect. This was the very situation Draco had hoped to land them in, where Potter would think the way he rambled about the plans to kill him some sort of sweet exhaustion brought on by the sex. And it would be a dream instead of a memory, later.
Draco carefully coated his lips with the potion. It tasted faintly sweet, with a sticky gloss on his lips. Draco shrugged at the slightly unpleasant feeling and crawled back to Potter, carefully pulling him around so that his head rested on Draco’s knees instead of lolling off to the side.
Potter stared up at him with glazed trust.
Out of everything-the risk of being caught by the Dark Lord, of having Potter be suspicious, of not having the potion work the way it was supposed to-that was what nearly undid Draco. And when Potter stirred and murmured his first name, instead of his last, Draco came the closest he ever would to regret about something other than his decision to be a Death Eater.
No. I can’t. If I don’t do this, then Potter’s going to die, and not even struggle against it, because they had to convince him to be a martyr until the last.
Draco bent down and kissed Potter, slow and long and languid. Potter gasped and let himself be kissed, his tongue not even moving until Draco pointedly licked it a few times. Then Potter guided his own heavy arms around Draco’s neck and kissed back, mouth sprawled open and heart beating a little faster as the potion began to take effect.
“You know,” Draco whispered at last, when he could pry their lips apart, “I don’t perfectly understand this battle tactic that means you have to die. Can you explain it to me?”
Potter hesitated, and one last spasm of doubt wrung Draco, this time about whether he’d brewed the potion right. But then he began to murmur, and all Draco had to do was bend low enough to let his ears catch every word.
And calm his growing anger.
*
Draco didn’t send a Blood Letter this time. He had no way to send one to the person he needed this owl to reach.
He wrote it steadily during a time when he had Stunned the snake-guardian. And he didn’t care if the Dark Lord chose that moment to look out of the snake’s eyes. Or rather, he cared only because it would mean that he might be defeated on the verge of doing something important.
But he couldn’t worry about that right now. He couldn’t be worried about anything except the words unfolding on the paper, and then the silent fashion in which he made his way, under a Disillusionment Charm, to the top of the Manor that still served as an Owlery. The owl that hooted at him was silenced in a moment by another charm. Draco watched it wing away with the letter and the vial of his blood, indignantly.
Then he went back to his bedroom and woke the guardian-snake beneath his bed with an Rennervate, before he applied himself grimly to the business of being an ordinary Death Eater for now.
It was as if his anger had given him luck. Soon enough, a day later, a Blood Letter materialized, a vial attached to it.
The letter was different this time. For one thing, the blood was not Potter’s.
Draco,
You are right on your assessment of the means that Dumbledore intends to get rid of the Horcrux in Potter. And I find your proposed adjustments…interesting.
Severus Snape.
Part VI: A Better Bargain
Hermione had been crying for fifteen minutes.
Harry closed his eyes and simply leaned against her, keeping his arms around her. There were no words other than the blunt ones he’d used to explain what Dumbledore wanted them to understand. He had told them about the Horcruxes, and the way that Dumbledore had found the Hufflepuff Cup-getting inside Gringotts and taking it from the Lestrange vaults in exchange for promising the goblins they could have the Sword of Gryffindor when they were done with it. All of them were destroyed now.
Except him, and except Nagini.
“There has to be some other way,” whispered Hermione, as she had now whispered for the fifteenth time.
“I don’t see what it could be.” Ron, his eyes dull and stricken, leaned against the wall in the dim sitting room of Grimmauld Place. He looked a lot older than eighteen, with scars from battle on his hands and a half-missing ear. Then again, Harry thought he might seem the same if someone looked into his eyes. “Dumbledore wouldn’t just let Harry die, Hermione, you know that. He would have looked to make sure that there wasn’t another solution.”
“And at least Dumbledore will be able to defeat Voldemort once he has my Invisibility Cloak,” Harry said, determined to make them look on the bright side. “Because he’ll be the Master of the Deathly Hallows, and Voldemort will be mortal.”
“How’s Nagini going to die, then?”
“I think he’s planning to kill her right after I-die.” Harry’s breath caught, but he coughed and went on. “He’s planning to have Snape pretend that he’s going back to the Death Eaters, and bring him and me along. Then we’ll goad Voldemort into killing me, and after that, Dumbledore will become master of the Deathly Hallows. The Cloak will be there. Snape’s going to pretend that he’s brought it as an extra enticement for Voldemort to forgive him.”
“Pretend,” Ron said, with skepticism deep enough to make his voice bitter. “Are we sure about that?”
Harry shrugged a little. He still didn’t like Snape much. He trusted him because he had to, and because Dumbledore did. “Then either Snape or Dumbledore kills Nagini, and Dumbledore will duel Voldemort.”
“I don’t like this.”
“I know. Neither do I.”
Hermione sniffled again. Harry grabbed hold of her and tried to give her something to remember, in the way his arms folded against her ribs and her shoulders and his hair overlapped with hers where it hung on her collarbone.
It wasn’t enough. He didn’t think it would ever be enough.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t enough, then nothing would be. Harry could only explain and touch so much. He would say good-bye to them with every word he spoke from now on, with every breath he drew.
It would have to be enough.
*
“You’re ready, Potter.”
It was Snape who spoke. Dumbledore had become silent a little while before, eyes closed as if he was meditating. The shackles around his wrists-which were made with some spell that would dissolve when he started fighting-sparkled silver in the firelight of the kitchen.
Harry looked away from them and at Snape, who was studying him with the quietest expression he had worn around Harry in years. He held up a hand as Harry watched and a scroll unfolded from it.
The will. Harry had had to make a magical will leaving the Potter Invisibility Cloak to Dumbledore. Apparently, you could only really own that one of the Deathly Hallows if you inherited it. You had to fight someone for the Elder Wand, and apparently anyone could pick up the Stone, but the Cloak was special.
“You are ready to sign it?” Snape inquired.
Harry nodded. He didn’t really understand why they’d left his signature, the binding part of the document, until last, only that Snape had suggested it and Dumbledore had gone along with it.
Probably didn’t want me to panic and change my mind, Harry thought, as he reached for the quill that Snape held out to him, glinting with dark red ink. Or he was just giving me a chance to go on thinking like I was going to be alive after this and the Cloak was going to be mine-
Harry choked. His hand wavered. Snape, his eyes still quiet in that way that had nothing to do with mockery, steadied the will on the table, and Harry reached down and signed quickly, before he changed his mind. The part where he’d written Dumbledore’s name gleamed with fresh ink, he thought. But he knew it had been written at the same time as everything else, so his imagination was fevered and playing tricks on him.
He signed his name with the kind of scribble that would have made Snape scold him in Defense class. Or Potion class. Or anything before this year. Then he laid the quill on the table and nodded a little to Snape.
“I’m ready.”
Snape conjured the shackles for him that he had for Dumbledore, and cast a spell over the will that shielded it from sight where it lay. Harry blinked, confused for a moment by why he wasn’t rolling it up, and then wanted to snort at himself.
Of course. The ink is still wet. That’s the last thing he wants to do.
And with his head hanging and his footsteps dragging, Harry followed Snape out the door of Number Twelve. At least he would present a convincing picture when they arrived at Voldemort’s lair, he thought glumly.
*
“There is no reason for me to forgive you, Severus. No reason.”
Harry, keeping his head pressed to the floor, shuddered. He had heard that tone in Voldemort’s voice before, and he knew that Voldemort was intrigued despite what he’d said. He wanted to at least kill Dumbledore and Harry while they were here, helpless, in front of him, even if he just killed Snape right after it.
“He revealed something I could not tolerate,” said Snape, his voice filled with his sneer. Also a bit of a shake, from the aftermath of the Cruciatus. Harry wondered for a moment whether he would ever be able to shake off torture like that and keep talking. “He revealed that he had never intended that I should survive the war free.”
“He intended to send you to Azkaban?” Voldemort laughed. Harry’s scar leaped to life, changing from a heavy weight on his forehead to one so burning that he cried out in spite of himself. He heard someone catch their breath.
Probably at someone daring to interrupt Voldemort, Harry thought, and then he heard Voldemort’s footsteps pacing slowly towards him.
“Harry Potter,” Voldemort said, his voice dripping hisses in a way that might mean he was speaking Parseltongue. Harry never had been good at telling. “At last.” He reached out and hooked his fingers around Harry’s cheekbones and ears, lifting his head. Harry screamed in misery, screwing his eyes shut.
This is good. It means Voldemort can’t read my mind. He has to have eye-contact to do that, right?
But the thought was a lost, drifting thing, somewhere near the back of his mind where all the other thoughts huddled. There were only two important ones as Voldemort turned his face back and forth like someone examining fine merchandise.
It hurt.
And he was going to die.
“I wonder,” Voldemort said softly, as if speaking to himself, “whether I should keep you alive for a while. See how long you could endure the Cruciatus. I dreamed of that, you know. While you were away from me. Give you to Bellatrix. She hasn’t shut up yet about how she killed your godfather and wants the godson.”
Bellatrix cackled from somewhere across the circle. Harry decided that she must not mind being talked about like she was an annoying pet.
Of course, she never has, he thought, and forced his eyes open. This was a dangerous moment. Dumbledore had been afraid that Voldemort would decide in favor of keeping Harry alive, if only because he might feel the subconscious pull of the Horcrux and want to preserve that part of himself.
So Harry’s task was to make Voldemort so angry that he would kill him right away. And Harry only knew one way to do that, for sure.
“Yeah,” Harry whispered. Voldemort focused on him the minute he started speaking. This time, the thoughts helped each other; Harry was in a lot of pain from his scar, but the thought that he was going to die, and with a purpose, pushed him into speaking. “But would she follow you so closely if she knew that you were really Tom Marvolo Riddle, Jr., named for your Muggle father?”
There was a lot of stirring and rustling among the Death Eaters. But Harry couldn’t see them. Voldemort’s face filled his whole world.
Voldemort’s horrified face.
“Yeah.” Harry chuckled, and then coughed. The pain felt like it was tearing into his lungs. “And there were a whole bunch of terrible secrets connected with your history, but not the kind you’d like them to think there are. Right? Like your mother’s family being inbred to the point where they were all brainless, degenerate freaks.”
Oh, that’s a good one. Harry knew just how to twist that word. And Voldemort’s face.
“And your mother being so in love with a Muggle she used a love potion on him,” Harry breathed. “And so heartbroken when your dad abandoned her that she didn’t even think you were worth sticking around for. And you grew up in a Muggle orphanage, stealing little toys from Muggle kids that you abused because they were more powerless than you-”
Voldemort stepped back with a wordless roar, and aimed his wand. Harry stared straight at him, eyes widening. This was it. He could tell. The pain in his head had become pure anger.
“Avada Kedavra!”
It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all.
*
Harry opened his eyes.
It was strange. He hadn’t expected to open them again. He turned his head and looked around in interest, staring at the floor beneath him.
His body lay there, so motionless that Harry had no trouble accepting he was dead. Well, he had come intending to do that. He was more interested in other people right now, rather than the shell he had left behind.
Malfoy was moving. Even though Harry had no idea why he would come forwards-since no one except two other people knew he’d been fucking Harry and it would be dangerous-he was charging. An “Expelliarmus!”, and Dumbledore’s wand, carefully concealed inside a fold of his robe, ripped abruptly away from him. The Elder Wand went flying to Draco Malfoy’s hand.
Harry stared. He knew he should feel something, but the emotions were distant things, circling his head like birds in flight, seemingly nothing to do with him.
At the same moment, Snape lunged like a rabid dog, and cast a spell that made Bellatrix fall. Only then did Harry notice that Voldemort was also on the floor. Maybe he’d been brought down by the destruction of his Horcrux. Chaos was starting to erupt among the Death Eaters.
Snape pulled two other things from his pocket and tossed them to Malfoy. One of them was the Invisibility Cloak. One was a small stone that Harry had to squint to identify. The Resurrection Stone?
But he can’t use them. I left the Cloak to Dumbledore. I mean, maybe he could use the Stone. I think it only has to be given, not inherited…
Which didn’t make any more sense of the fact that Malfoy was acting as though he was now Master of the Deathly Hallows.
But Malfoy knelt down next to Harry’s shell exactly as if it made sense, and held out the wand. He was whispering something, but Harry couldn’t hear what it was from this height. Curious, he drifted closer.
“I know you can come back. I know. I want you back, and I’m going to pull as hard as I can, tell Death that’s the only thing I want.” Malfoy put the Stone on his chest and wrapped the Cloak around one arm. He shivered as the arm lifted and fell back heavily, although Harry didn’t know why. Of course it would fall back heavily. He was dead. “If the Stone can bring the dead back…”
It did, but only in distorted form. Harry wondered why Malfoy, who had grown up in the wizarding world and must have read the Tale of the Three Brothers when he was still a kid, wouldn’t know that.
It was such a strange thing to watch, that little huddle of silence in the middle of a battle. Snape and even Dumbledore-who had snatched up another wand from someone he’d fought-were taking down the Death Eaters, a lot of whom were running now that they thought Voldemort was dead. Or maybe it was because Voldemort was dead and they knew that he wasn’t the pure-blood he’d always claimed to be. Harry would have liked to think he’d helped in some way before he died.
There was a strange, tickling sensation around him now. Harry found himself going lower and lower without meaning to, until he hovered right above Malfoy.
There were tears on Malfoy’s cheeks. Harry stared without comprehension. Then he heard the low, murmured words.
“I know you can come back, I know, I know the theory, Snape talked about it, that there’s a chance the Killing Curse would only kill the Horcrux and you can come back, he thought it was Dumbledore’s plan all along…”
But there wasn’t much chance, and you should have known that. We didn’t dare depend on it.
Harry thought that, and shook his head, and opened his mouth to tell Malfoy-he might be able to hear Harry, now that he was Master of the Deathly Hallows-that he ought to get over it and move on.
But suddenly he found himself sucked and pulled down a tunnel that didn’t hurt, back into a world of light and pain that did.
*
“You can’t do this!”
Harry was sure he was shouting at Malfoy. He heard the words inside his head, of course, but he also heard them in his ears, and that meant he had to be shouting them.
But he might as well not have been, because Malfoy didn’t act as if he heard them. Instead, he seized Harry’s ankles and dragged him out of the way, towards the corner of the room. Harry tried to sit up. If he could just get Malfoy to stop this-he had to die, or Voldemort was going to come back to life…
“The Horcrux is dead,” Malfoy mumbled in his ear, as if he had figured out Harry’s worries and thought he would soothe them that way. “No matter what happens, he won’t be immortal now.”
Harry turned his head to ask how Malfoy even knew about that, and was in time to see Dumbledore take something from his pocket-it looked like a fang-and stab it down. Nagini was in the way of the stab, and even though she reared, hissing, the fang went straight through her and down the middle of her body. She fell over, dead.
Voldemort was on his feet, but Harry’s scar wasn’t burning. Maybe that was because the fear on his face was stronger than the anger, though.
Dumbledore turned around, and there was a little space of silence between them. None of the Death Eaters dared to move. Except Snape, Harry supposed, and all he did was pick himself up and watch like the rest of them.
“It’s over, Tom,” Dumbledore said gently. “As you must have known long ago it would be.”
“You have no idea what I know,” Voldemort hissed. “You never did.”
“I wish I had known more, myself.”
Voldemort only stared back at Dumbledore, face so twisted that Harry couldn’t tell what he was feeling now. He put his hand up to his scar automatically. To his surprise, Malfoy caught his hand away from his forehead and kissed it fiercely.
“I paid enough of a price to get rid of the bloody thing,” he whispered into Harry’s ear. “It had better be gone now.”
Before Harry could ask another question, Dumbledore and Voldemort both moved at the same time.
For a few minutes, it was like the duel they’d had in the Ministry Atrium. Spells whirled and clashed. Snape raised some kind of shield that spread out in a half-circle and covered Harry and Malfoy, and Harry was still too tired to get up and go anywhere. He watched in silence as purple and gold light danced back and forth, as Voldemort conjured snakes and Dumbledore Transfigured pebbles into mongooses that killed them, as other spells tore down the moldering curtains and sent whirling clouds of dust high into the air.
And then the battle began to turn. Whether because Voldemort was tired or had nearly died or was full of terror because now all his Horcruxes were destroyed, Dumbledore began to force him backwards, step by step, towards the door.
The strangest thing, Harry thought afterwards, was that Voldemort turned his head for one minute before Dumbledore cast a fire spell that consumed him and locked eyes with Harry.
Harry had no idea what he was trying to say in that silent gaze, either, before the fire landed and Voldemort’s body disappeared into the raging gold-white flames.
*
“So you substituted Malfoy’s name for Dumbledore’s in the will, so he could inherit the Invisibility Cloak?”
Harry’s head hurt. They were still in the manor house where the Death Eaters and Voldemort had had their headquarters-Malfoy Manor, Harry supposed it really was. Malfoy hadn’t exactly let him leave to go exploring. He sat there with his arm wrapped around Harry’s shoulders and looked smug.
“Yes,” said Snape. He was dropping small colored pebbles into a potions vial, and didn’t seem inclined to look at Harry. The potion turned white, and Snape nodded and handed it to Malfoy. He drank it and shuddered a little, but a wound Harry hadn’t even noticed, on his side, closed. Snape looked once more at Harry. “Draco knew that if he was the Master of the Deathly Hallows, he should be able to bring you back. That, of course, was based on the notion that it was the Horcrux part of you that would die, and your own soul wouldn’t wander far from your body.”
“But you could just have discussed it with Dumbledore,” said Harry. That was what really puzzled him. Snape had gone along with him, and Malfoy had lied. It seemed like Dumbledore would have helped them a lot more if he’d just known.
Malfoy snorted. “He would be too afraid that it wouldn’t work,” he said. “Professor Snape told me-”
For some reason, Snape looked at Malfoy. Malfoy cleared his throat a little and continued, “Severus told me that Dumbledore thought you might well survive, but he wasn’t certain, and he wasn’t willing to gamble the future of the world on an uncertainty. This way, we could take the chance, and he could preserve his own innocence.”
“Dumbledore doesn’t-he doesn’t manipulate people like chess pieces. He does what he thinks is best.”
“Yeah?” Malfoy’s face tightened. “Well, I did what I thought was best. And it worked out. So.” He pulled Harry harder against him.
“And you could have told me.”
“Too much chance the Dark Lord would read it out of your mind before the end. Severus told me that you’d never learned Occlumency well enough.”
Harry still felt as if he was groping his way back towards his real self. Certain things were still fuzzy and distant, like those moments when he had seemed to float above his body looking down at it. “How did you know about the Horcruxes and the Deathly Hallows, anyway?”
“You remember the last night we had?” Harry flushed, but nodded. “Well,” Malfoy added, “I brewed a potion called the Lover’s Haze. It’s as good as Veritaserum, but it leaves you feeling sort of drugged with pleasure, and it’s hard to tell from the effects of a really good shag. So I gave it to you when we were done.”
“You drugged me when we had sex,” Harry said, even more numb now.
“No.” Malfoy suddenly twisted around and knelt in front of Harry as Snape moved away, apparently bored with the conversation. Or the one they were about to have, Harry thought, eyeing Malfoy uncertainly.
Malfoy was holding both Harry’s hands. He looked intently into his face and said, “After. I had to be sure the sex we had was intense, so you wouldn’t notice the effect of the Lover’s Haze, but-I also wanted you willing.”
“I wasn’t willing in the beginning.”
“In the beginning, it was about humiliating you.”
“And now?”
Malfoy, infuriatingly, shrugged. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I only know what the answer’s not.”
Harry stared at him and then looked away. The numbness was receding, he thought. The emotions were coming back. But it was as a crashing wave from the distance, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to survive it. He shivered, and noticed the way Malfoy’s arm immediately tightened around him.
“I have you,” Malfoy said.
Harry cocked an eyebrow at him. It was quiet, except for the moans of wounded Death Eaters. Dumbledore had gone to tell the rest of the Order of the Phoenix what had happened, and Snape was studiously ignoring them. In fact, he wasn’t even in the room, Harry saw. He’d gone to raid the potions lab, probably.
“You do have me,” Harry muttered. “And intend to keep me, do you?”
“I couldn’t let you die.”
That was, indeed, its own kind of answer. Harry turned slowly back towards Malfoy. The eyes that watched him were so vibrant with unexpressed emotion that Harry caught his breath.
Malfoy had saved his life, and fucked him, and bargained with him to have Harry offer himself up as a sacrifice, and yelled at him, and held him, and saved Harry when he desperately needed to think about something other than the Horcrux.
There wasn’t an answer right now because there wasn’t a simple one.
Harry could identify a few of the emotions coming back to him, though. They were gratitude, and more than a slight astonishment, that Malfoy was willing to fight so hard for him if it was just sex.
Hesitantly, he held a hand out. Malfoy clasped it, and held up their hands between them.
“We might start here,” Malfoy said. “Decide to-ignore other things in the past?”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think that’s the right thing to do,” he said. “But we might discuss them. Later,” he added, and slumped back against the wall and closed his eyes.
Malfoy shifted him a little, giving him a more comfortable cushion to lie against in his shoulder. Harry half-smiled and leaned harder on Malfoy, making him suck in a complicated breath.
Complicated. Not simple. Not what I envisioned when I thought about starting a family. And who knows what it’s going to be like now that Malfoy is the one who saved my life and the Master of Death?
But Harry knew that, partially thanks to Malfoy, he didn’t have to think about any of it right now.
He leaned harder.
After a moment full of breathing as delicate and complex as the Hallows, Malfoy leaned back.
The End.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/842899.html. Comment wherever you like.
Part V: Hath My Heart
It was not going to happen.
Because I will it not to, Draco thought, lying with his arms stiff on either side of his body, staring up at the ceiling of his bedroom, invisible in the darkness. He panted like he’d been running, and he knew it didn’t sound healthy.
It also wasn’t healthy to have sweat standing out on his forehead, and his fingers working frantically in the blankets beside him, and his body feeling as though it would be simpler to stop existing. At least that way, he wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of what Potter had said.
They have a battle plan that requires him to die.
If things had been different, the Dark Lord the man Draco’s father had once described, then there would have been no difficulty about what Draco had to do. He would have betrayed Potter’s plans to the Dark Lord in an instant, and asked for Potter’s life as his reward. Then Potter would have been upset with him, but he would have been alive. Which had to come before everything else.
But then Draco wouldn’t have started spying for the Order of the Phoenix anyway, because he would have stayed loyal to the Dark Lord, and there would be no bargain for Potter to fulfill.
Draco shifted around, trying to get more comfortable. There seemed to be a hump of spring under his back, which was silly, when the mattresses his family was afforded were still more comfortable than anything else in the Manor.
Or as if it was a piece of pine needle stuck there.
Yes. That’s what it’s like. A piece of needle stuck and irritating me, like that one bed I lay with Potter on.
He could taste Potter even when he was alone now, see the way his stubborn expression melted into pleasure, and feel the urgency coursing through him like a drumbeat when Potter’s unexpected Blood Letter had arrived, summoning Draco to-Draco knew it now-give him something he could forget the bad news in.
Well. Potter would learn that he couldn’t just jerk Draco around.
He’s not the only one who can make plans and do something unexpected. And neither is the Order of the Phoenix.
*
“You seem strangely intent on that potion, young Draco.”
Draco hadn’t started when the Dark Lord spoke, because, as silently as he could move, he still needed to open doors. And Professor Snape, traitor though he was, had taught Draco to hold his own in Potions by maintaining a state of clear, lucid concentration that would let him focus absolutely on the potion while coming to the surface in the case of outside sensations. The noise of the door opening was one of those things he’d trained Draco to respond to. It might mean the difference between success and disaster for a potion.
“I hope that you’ll let me use it in the next raid, my Lord,” Draco responded, kneeling even as he strained some of the yellow, murky mixture the potion had become through a net of silver threads that had been in the Malfoy family for generations. The potion ran gold through them as it dripped back into the cauldron, but left a sharp-edged glop clinging to the net’s threads. Draco laid the net aside on the table. He would need to mix the glop back in later.
“Or should I say,” he went on, turning around and bowing so that his forehead touched the floor, “the aftermath of the next raid, when we bring some Muggles back here.”
The Dark Lord chuckled and reached down, pressing on the back of Draco’s neck. Draco looked up obediently, and filled his mind with images of potion-making as he felt the usual probe against his shields.
“The Lover’s Haze,” said the Dark Lord. “What interesting ideas you have, Draco. We might let you put on a show before the court. Or we might not,” he added, in that usual way he had of changing the ground beneath his Death Eaters’ feet so nothing would be certain.
Draco had expected it, and let his eyes fall again as he nodded. “Yes, my lord.”
“Continue,” said the Dark Lord, and swept out. Draco got back to his feet and reached for an obsidian knife to chop up some of the sharper edges in the glop.
The Lover’s Haze Potion, when he had it done, would be a potion he could smear on his lips, and transfer with a kiss. It never affected the one who had made it. But it would drug the one he kissed, loosen their tongue and make them confess their innermost thoughts.
Usually, it was used simply in bedroom games, to learn the desires of one’s partner-or the things that would most humiliate them, in the game Draco was letting the Dark Lord think he would play.
But there was another property of the potion that Draco was counting on. The confessions would always be the absolute truth.
*
“I don’t think this is such a huge thing to ask for, given what I’ve done for you in the last little while.”
They were back in the clearing in the Forbidden Forest where they had seen the dying unicorn. Even those memories dimmed before Draco’s irritation as he watched how slowly Potter undressed.
Potter turned towards him, face shadowed. Then he shook his head and said, “Oh. No. It wasn’t begrudging you, Malfoy. Just thinking about something else.” He kicked the Muggle trainers he’d once again worn off and bent down to yank on his trousers.
Draco had the Lover’s Haze potion safe in a vial in his already discarded robes. He had intended to put it on his lips immediately and kiss Potter the instant he arrived, so that there would be no chance Potter could get away without telling Draco what was going on.
But now, it was as if a fire had leaped to life in his chest, and he didn’t want Potter drugged or distracted at all while they were having sex. He seized the bottom of Potter’s rough clothes and dragged them off while he was still struggling with his belt. Potter gasped and fell, up in a second with his wand in hand.
“What are you playing at, Malfoy?” he snarled, aiming the wand straight at Draco. “If you think for a second I’m going-”
Draco grabbed him around the waist and dragged Potter against him, his fingers finding flinching warm skin, warmer from the fire Potter had been standing with his back to. Draco had drugged a guard-snake to come here, and while he was confident in his own Potions skills, he knew he would have to get back soon.
And yet all that went out of his head when he saw Potter so determined to focus on something beyond Draco.
“You think you can ignore me?” Draco hissed, digging his hand into the soft skin over Potter’s ribs, making him wriggle and yelp. “Well, you can’t.” And he slammed his mouth into Potter’s, so hard that he knew Potter’s teeth were probably cutting his lips, and dragged him down and over. Potter rolled with him on the ground.
Draco was already naked. And he had charms he could cast to make Potter relaxed and slick, so he did, and he cast the same lube charm on his cock, and raised Potter and jammed him down on his cock.
Potter yelped, but intimately familiar as he was with Potter’s sounds of pain from Quidditch games, Draco knew it wasn’t because he hurt from where Draco had entered him; more likely it was just the unexpectedness of it. And that made Draco reckless with anger, too. Potter ought to have come here expecting this. He was the one who had begged Draco to fuck him last time. Had he thought it would never happen again?
Draco rolled himself over, every movement burning with grace, radiant as light from an exploding star leaking down his limbs. He put Potter on his back, staring up at him with wide eyes. Then Draco flexed his hips, and Potter’s face went scarlet as his back strained in response, his legs locking around Draco’s.
“What was that?” he hissed.
Draco grinned. He thought he knew what it was, but it was also clear that he must not have hit it last time they fucked, or Potter wouldn’t have sounded so startled. He angled himself a little, switching angles when Potter wriggled, and then he hit it again. Potter moaned in a ragged voice and turned his head a little to the side, apparently not wanting to look at the person who brought him such pleasure.
Draco wrenched his head back around. “I could stop, you know,” he said, and began to slide out, using all the willpower he’d mustered during endless months of braving the Dark Lord’s wrath and walking the edge of uncertainty to stay alive. “I could stand up and walk away, and then you could try to use your hand or your wand to bring you relief-”
“Fuck you, Malfoy!”
“That’s one thing you’ll never do, no matter what happens,” Draco said with certainty, and mopped little bits of spittle off his face. “Your choice, Potter. In-” he let himself sink a little deeper, and knew from their twin gasps something about how it felt for Potter “-or out?” And he began to draw back again, focusing his attention ferociously on Potter’s knee to keep from looking at his face and yielding.
Potter thrust upwards himself, and pulled Draco back in. “Come on, then,” he said, and arched and wriggled.
Draco laughed breathlessly-Potter had managed to avoid giving Draco what he asked for even when there should have been no way he could-and began to thrust the way Potter had probably wanted him to last time, thick and rapid. His gaze remained on Potter’s face as he did, the fading blush in his cheeks, the sweat, the different crinkles around his eyelids as he squeezed his eyes shut.
Potter was the most alive person Draco had ever met. It would never have been like this with anyone else, because they wouldn’t have responded to Draco’s demands with such insults, such fire, such shudders.
And Draco was going to make sure that Potter stayed alive.
He grabbed Potter’s wrist and grabbed his fingers at the same time, roughly entwining them, holding on. Potter didn’t seem to notice what he was doing. He was lost in his own little world of grunts and harsh breaths, catching his chest and his nose against Draco’s skin.
But Draco knew. Draco was the one in control. He drove down, he angled, and he held on and made Potter come.
This time, Potter gave a muted sound of ecstasy only, but it was enough. Draco felt the spreading wetness between them and let go, following Potter in a thunderous spiral down, to the exhaustion that awaited them both at the bottom.
And the vindication.
*
By the time Draco stirred and opened his eyes again, Potter was starting to recover, but he was still limp. His eyes remained half-open, and so did his mouth, as Draco crawled slowly over to his robes and drew out the flask of the Lover’s Haze.
Perfect. This was the very situation Draco had hoped to land them in, where Potter would think the way he rambled about the plans to kill him some sort of sweet exhaustion brought on by the sex. And it would be a dream instead of a memory, later.
Draco carefully coated his lips with the potion. It tasted faintly sweet, with a sticky gloss on his lips. Draco shrugged at the slightly unpleasant feeling and crawled back to Potter, carefully pulling him around so that his head rested on Draco’s knees instead of lolling off to the side.
Potter stared up at him with glazed trust.
Out of everything-the risk of being caught by the Dark Lord, of having Potter be suspicious, of not having the potion work the way it was supposed to-that was what nearly undid Draco. And when Potter stirred and murmured his first name, instead of his last, Draco came the closest he ever would to regret about something other than his decision to be a Death Eater.
No. I can’t. If I don’t do this, then Potter’s going to die, and not even struggle against it, because they had to convince him to be a martyr until the last.
Draco bent down and kissed Potter, slow and long and languid. Potter gasped and let himself be kissed, his tongue not even moving until Draco pointedly licked it a few times. Then Potter guided his own heavy arms around Draco’s neck and kissed back, mouth sprawled open and heart beating a little faster as the potion began to take effect.
“You know,” Draco whispered at last, when he could pry their lips apart, “I don’t perfectly understand this battle tactic that means you have to die. Can you explain it to me?”
Potter hesitated, and one last spasm of doubt wrung Draco, this time about whether he’d brewed the potion right. But then he began to murmur, and all Draco had to do was bend low enough to let his ears catch every word.
And calm his growing anger.
*
Draco didn’t send a Blood Letter this time. He had no way to send one to the person he needed this owl to reach.
He wrote it steadily during a time when he had Stunned the snake-guardian. And he didn’t care if the Dark Lord chose that moment to look out of the snake’s eyes. Or rather, he cared only because it would mean that he might be defeated on the verge of doing something important.
But he couldn’t worry about that right now. He couldn’t be worried about anything except the words unfolding on the paper, and then the silent fashion in which he made his way, under a Disillusionment Charm, to the top of the Manor that still served as an Owlery. The owl that hooted at him was silenced in a moment by another charm. Draco watched it wing away with the letter and the vial of his blood, indignantly.
Then he went back to his bedroom and woke the guardian-snake beneath his bed with an Rennervate, before he applied himself grimly to the business of being an ordinary Death Eater for now.
It was as if his anger had given him luck. Soon enough, a day later, a Blood Letter materialized, a vial attached to it.
The letter was different this time. For one thing, the blood was not Potter’s.
Draco,
You are right on your assessment of the means that Dumbledore intends to get rid of the Horcrux in Potter. And I find your proposed adjustments…interesting.
Severus Snape.
Part VI: A Better Bargain
Hermione had been crying for fifteen minutes.
Harry closed his eyes and simply leaned against her, keeping his arms around her. There were no words other than the blunt ones he’d used to explain what Dumbledore wanted them to understand. He had told them about the Horcruxes, and the way that Dumbledore had found the Hufflepuff Cup-getting inside Gringotts and taking it from the Lestrange vaults in exchange for promising the goblins they could have the Sword of Gryffindor when they were done with it. All of them were destroyed now.
Except him, and except Nagini.
“There has to be some other way,” whispered Hermione, as she had now whispered for the fifteenth time.
“I don’t see what it could be.” Ron, his eyes dull and stricken, leaned against the wall in the dim sitting room of Grimmauld Place. He looked a lot older than eighteen, with scars from battle on his hands and a half-missing ear. Then again, Harry thought he might seem the same if someone looked into his eyes. “Dumbledore wouldn’t just let Harry die, Hermione, you know that. He would have looked to make sure that there wasn’t another solution.”
“And at least Dumbledore will be able to defeat Voldemort once he has my Invisibility Cloak,” Harry said, determined to make them look on the bright side. “Because he’ll be the Master of the Deathly Hallows, and Voldemort will be mortal.”
“How’s Nagini going to die, then?”
“I think he’s planning to kill her right after I-die.” Harry’s breath caught, but he coughed and went on. “He’s planning to have Snape pretend that he’s going back to the Death Eaters, and bring him and me along. Then we’ll goad Voldemort into killing me, and after that, Dumbledore will become master of the Deathly Hallows. The Cloak will be there. Snape’s going to pretend that he’s brought it as an extra enticement for Voldemort to forgive him.”
“Pretend,” Ron said, with skepticism deep enough to make his voice bitter. “Are we sure about that?”
Harry shrugged a little. He still didn’t like Snape much. He trusted him because he had to, and because Dumbledore did. “Then either Snape or Dumbledore kills Nagini, and Dumbledore will duel Voldemort.”
“I don’t like this.”
“I know. Neither do I.”
Hermione sniffled again. Harry grabbed hold of her and tried to give her something to remember, in the way his arms folded against her ribs and her shoulders and his hair overlapped with hers where it hung on her collarbone.
It wasn’t enough. He didn’t think it would ever be enough.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t enough, then nothing would be. Harry could only explain and touch so much. He would say good-bye to them with every word he spoke from now on, with every breath he drew.
It would have to be enough.
*
“You’re ready, Potter.”
It was Snape who spoke. Dumbledore had become silent a little while before, eyes closed as if he was meditating. The shackles around his wrists-which were made with some spell that would dissolve when he started fighting-sparkled silver in the firelight of the kitchen.
Harry looked away from them and at Snape, who was studying him with the quietest expression he had worn around Harry in years. He held up a hand as Harry watched and a scroll unfolded from it.
The will. Harry had had to make a magical will leaving the Potter Invisibility Cloak to Dumbledore. Apparently, you could only really own that one of the Deathly Hallows if you inherited it. You had to fight someone for the Elder Wand, and apparently anyone could pick up the Stone, but the Cloak was special.
“You are ready to sign it?” Snape inquired.
Harry nodded. He didn’t really understand why they’d left his signature, the binding part of the document, until last, only that Snape had suggested it and Dumbledore had gone along with it.
Probably didn’t want me to panic and change my mind, Harry thought, as he reached for the quill that Snape held out to him, glinting with dark red ink. Or he was just giving me a chance to go on thinking like I was going to be alive after this and the Cloak was going to be mine-
Harry choked. His hand wavered. Snape, his eyes still quiet in that way that had nothing to do with mockery, steadied the will on the table, and Harry reached down and signed quickly, before he changed his mind. The part where he’d written Dumbledore’s name gleamed with fresh ink, he thought. But he knew it had been written at the same time as everything else, so his imagination was fevered and playing tricks on him.
He signed his name with the kind of scribble that would have made Snape scold him in Defense class. Or Potion class. Or anything before this year. Then he laid the quill on the table and nodded a little to Snape.
“I’m ready.”
Snape conjured the shackles for him that he had for Dumbledore, and cast a spell over the will that shielded it from sight where it lay. Harry blinked, confused for a moment by why he wasn’t rolling it up, and then wanted to snort at himself.
Of course. The ink is still wet. That’s the last thing he wants to do.
And with his head hanging and his footsteps dragging, Harry followed Snape out the door of Number Twelve. At least he would present a convincing picture when they arrived at Voldemort’s lair, he thought glumly.
*
“There is no reason for me to forgive you, Severus. No reason.”
Harry, keeping his head pressed to the floor, shuddered. He had heard that tone in Voldemort’s voice before, and he knew that Voldemort was intrigued despite what he’d said. He wanted to at least kill Dumbledore and Harry while they were here, helpless, in front of him, even if he just killed Snape right after it.
“He revealed something I could not tolerate,” said Snape, his voice filled with his sneer. Also a bit of a shake, from the aftermath of the Cruciatus. Harry wondered for a moment whether he would ever be able to shake off torture like that and keep talking. “He revealed that he had never intended that I should survive the war free.”
“He intended to send you to Azkaban?” Voldemort laughed. Harry’s scar leaped to life, changing from a heavy weight on his forehead to one so burning that he cried out in spite of himself. He heard someone catch their breath.
Probably at someone daring to interrupt Voldemort, Harry thought, and then he heard Voldemort’s footsteps pacing slowly towards him.
“Harry Potter,” Voldemort said, his voice dripping hisses in a way that might mean he was speaking Parseltongue. Harry never had been good at telling. “At last.” He reached out and hooked his fingers around Harry’s cheekbones and ears, lifting his head. Harry screamed in misery, screwing his eyes shut.
This is good. It means Voldemort can’t read my mind. He has to have eye-contact to do that, right?
But the thought was a lost, drifting thing, somewhere near the back of his mind where all the other thoughts huddled. There were only two important ones as Voldemort turned his face back and forth like someone examining fine merchandise.
It hurt.
And he was going to die.
“I wonder,” Voldemort said softly, as if speaking to himself, “whether I should keep you alive for a while. See how long you could endure the Cruciatus. I dreamed of that, you know. While you were away from me. Give you to Bellatrix. She hasn’t shut up yet about how she killed your godfather and wants the godson.”
Bellatrix cackled from somewhere across the circle. Harry decided that she must not mind being talked about like she was an annoying pet.
Of course, she never has, he thought, and forced his eyes open. This was a dangerous moment. Dumbledore had been afraid that Voldemort would decide in favor of keeping Harry alive, if only because he might feel the subconscious pull of the Horcrux and want to preserve that part of himself.
So Harry’s task was to make Voldemort so angry that he would kill him right away. And Harry only knew one way to do that, for sure.
“Yeah,” Harry whispered. Voldemort focused on him the minute he started speaking. This time, the thoughts helped each other; Harry was in a lot of pain from his scar, but the thought that he was going to die, and with a purpose, pushed him into speaking. “But would she follow you so closely if she knew that you were really Tom Marvolo Riddle, Jr., named for your Muggle father?”
There was a lot of stirring and rustling among the Death Eaters. But Harry couldn’t see them. Voldemort’s face filled his whole world.
Voldemort’s horrified face.
“Yeah.” Harry chuckled, and then coughed. The pain felt like it was tearing into his lungs. “And there were a whole bunch of terrible secrets connected with your history, but not the kind you’d like them to think there are. Right? Like your mother’s family being inbred to the point where they were all brainless, degenerate freaks.”
Oh, that’s a good one. Harry knew just how to twist that word. And Voldemort’s face.
“And your mother being so in love with a Muggle she used a love potion on him,” Harry breathed. “And so heartbroken when your dad abandoned her that she didn’t even think you were worth sticking around for. And you grew up in a Muggle orphanage, stealing little toys from Muggle kids that you abused because they were more powerless than you-”
Voldemort stepped back with a wordless roar, and aimed his wand. Harry stared straight at him, eyes widening. This was it. He could tell. The pain in his head had become pure anger.
“Avada Kedavra!”
It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all.
*
Harry opened his eyes.
It was strange. He hadn’t expected to open them again. He turned his head and looked around in interest, staring at the floor beneath him.
His body lay there, so motionless that Harry had no trouble accepting he was dead. Well, he had come intending to do that. He was more interested in other people right now, rather than the shell he had left behind.
Malfoy was moving. Even though Harry had no idea why he would come forwards-since no one except two other people knew he’d been fucking Harry and it would be dangerous-he was charging. An “Expelliarmus!”, and Dumbledore’s wand, carefully concealed inside a fold of his robe, ripped abruptly away from him. The Elder Wand went flying to Draco Malfoy’s hand.
Harry stared. He knew he should feel something, but the emotions were distant things, circling his head like birds in flight, seemingly nothing to do with him.
At the same moment, Snape lunged like a rabid dog, and cast a spell that made Bellatrix fall. Only then did Harry notice that Voldemort was also on the floor. Maybe he’d been brought down by the destruction of his Horcrux. Chaos was starting to erupt among the Death Eaters.
Snape pulled two other things from his pocket and tossed them to Malfoy. One of them was the Invisibility Cloak. One was a small stone that Harry had to squint to identify. The Resurrection Stone?
But he can’t use them. I left the Cloak to Dumbledore. I mean, maybe he could use the Stone. I think it only has to be given, not inherited…
Which didn’t make any more sense of the fact that Malfoy was acting as though he was now Master of the Deathly Hallows.
But Malfoy knelt down next to Harry’s shell exactly as if it made sense, and held out the wand. He was whispering something, but Harry couldn’t hear what it was from this height. Curious, he drifted closer.
“I know you can come back. I know. I want you back, and I’m going to pull as hard as I can, tell Death that’s the only thing I want.” Malfoy put the Stone on his chest and wrapped the Cloak around one arm. He shivered as the arm lifted and fell back heavily, although Harry didn’t know why. Of course it would fall back heavily. He was dead. “If the Stone can bring the dead back…”
It did, but only in distorted form. Harry wondered why Malfoy, who had grown up in the wizarding world and must have read the Tale of the Three Brothers when he was still a kid, wouldn’t know that.
It was such a strange thing to watch, that little huddle of silence in the middle of a battle. Snape and even Dumbledore-who had snatched up another wand from someone he’d fought-were taking down the Death Eaters, a lot of whom were running now that they thought Voldemort was dead. Or maybe it was because Voldemort was dead and they knew that he wasn’t the pure-blood he’d always claimed to be. Harry would have liked to think he’d helped in some way before he died.
There was a strange, tickling sensation around him now. Harry found himself going lower and lower without meaning to, until he hovered right above Malfoy.
There were tears on Malfoy’s cheeks. Harry stared without comprehension. Then he heard the low, murmured words.
“I know you can come back, I know, I know the theory, Snape talked about it, that there’s a chance the Killing Curse would only kill the Horcrux and you can come back, he thought it was Dumbledore’s plan all along…”
But there wasn’t much chance, and you should have known that. We didn’t dare depend on it.
Harry thought that, and shook his head, and opened his mouth to tell Malfoy-he might be able to hear Harry, now that he was Master of the Deathly Hallows-that he ought to get over it and move on.
But suddenly he found himself sucked and pulled down a tunnel that didn’t hurt, back into a world of light and pain that did.
*
“You can’t do this!”
Harry was sure he was shouting at Malfoy. He heard the words inside his head, of course, but he also heard them in his ears, and that meant he had to be shouting them.
But he might as well not have been, because Malfoy didn’t act as if he heard them. Instead, he seized Harry’s ankles and dragged him out of the way, towards the corner of the room. Harry tried to sit up. If he could just get Malfoy to stop this-he had to die, or Voldemort was going to come back to life…
“The Horcrux is dead,” Malfoy mumbled in his ear, as if he had figured out Harry’s worries and thought he would soothe them that way. “No matter what happens, he won’t be immortal now.”
Harry turned his head to ask how Malfoy even knew about that, and was in time to see Dumbledore take something from his pocket-it looked like a fang-and stab it down. Nagini was in the way of the stab, and even though she reared, hissing, the fang went straight through her and down the middle of her body. She fell over, dead.
Voldemort was on his feet, but Harry’s scar wasn’t burning. Maybe that was because the fear on his face was stronger than the anger, though.
Dumbledore turned around, and there was a little space of silence between them. None of the Death Eaters dared to move. Except Snape, Harry supposed, and all he did was pick himself up and watch like the rest of them.
“It’s over, Tom,” Dumbledore said gently. “As you must have known long ago it would be.”
“You have no idea what I know,” Voldemort hissed. “You never did.”
“I wish I had known more, myself.”
Voldemort only stared back at Dumbledore, face so twisted that Harry couldn’t tell what he was feeling now. He put his hand up to his scar automatically. To his surprise, Malfoy caught his hand away from his forehead and kissed it fiercely.
“I paid enough of a price to get rid of the bloody thing,” he whispered into Harry’s ear. “It had better be gone now.”
Before Harry could ask another question, Dumbledore and Voldemort both moved at the same time.
For a few minutes, it was like the duel they’d had in the Ministry Atrium. Spells whirled and clashed. Snape raised some kind of shield that spread out in a half-circle and covered Harry and Malfoy, and Harry was still too tired to get up and go anywhere. He watched in silence as purple and gold light danced back and forth, as Voldemort conjured snakes and Dumbledore Transfigured pebbles into mongooses that killed them, as other spells tore down the moldering curtains and sent whirling clouds of dust high into the air.
And then the battle began to turn. Whether because Voldemort was tired or had nearly died or was full of terror because now all his Horcruxes were destroyed, Dumbledore began to force him backwards, step by step, towards the door.
The strangest thing, Harry thought afterwards, was that Voldemort turned his head for one minute before Dumbledore cast a fire spell that consumed him and locked eyes with Harry.
Harry had no idea what he was trying to say in that silent gaze, either, before the fire landed and Voldemort’s body disappeared into the raging gold-white flames.
*
“So you substituted Malfoy’s name for Dumbledore’s in the will, so he could inherit the Invisibility Cloak?”
Harry’s head hurt. They were still in the manor house where the Death Eaters and Voldemort had had their headquarters-Malfoy Manor, Harry supposed it really was. Malfoy hadn’t exactly let him leave to go exploring. He sat there with his arm wrapped around Harry’s shoulders and looked smug.
“Yes,” said Snape. He was dropping small colored pebbles into a potions vial, and didn’t seem inclined to look at Harry. The potion turned white, and Snape nodded and handed it to Malfoy. He drank it and shuddered a little, but a wound Harry hadn’t even noticed, on his side, closed. Snape looked once more at Harry. “Draco knew that if he was the Master of the Deathly Hallows, he should be able to bring you back. That, of course, was based on the notion that it was the Horcrux part of you that would die, and your own soul wouldn’t wander far from your body.”
“But you could just have discussed it with Dumbledore,” said Harry. That was what really puzzled him. Snape had gone along with him, and Malfoy had lied. It seemed like Dumbledore would have helped them a lot more if he’d just known.
Malfoy snorted. “He would be too afraid that it wouldn’t work,” he said. “Professor Snape told me-”
For some reason, Snape looked at Malfoy. Malfoy cleared his throat a little and continued, “Severus told me that Dumbledore thought you might well survive, but he wasn’t certain, and he wasn’t willing to gamble the future of the world on an uncertainty. This way, we could take the chance, and he could preserve his own innocence.”
“Dumbledore doesn’t-he doesn’t manipulate people like chess pieces. He does what he thinks is best.”
“Yeah?” Malfoy’s face tightened. “Well, I did what I thought was best. And it worked out. So.” He pulled Harry harder against him.
“And you could have told me.”
“Too much chance the Dark Lord would read it out of your mind before the end. Severus told me that you’d never learned Occlumency well enough.”
Harry still felt as if he was groping his way back towards his real self. Certain things were still fuzzy and distant, like those moments when he had seemed to float above his body looking down at it. “How did you know about the Horcruxes and the Deathly Hallows, anyway?”
“You remember the last night we had?” Harry flushed, but nodded. “Well,” Malfoy added, “I brewed a potion called the Lover’s Haze. It’s as good as Veritaserum, but it leaves you feeling sort of drugged with pleasure, and it’s hard to tell from the effects of a really good shag. So I gave it to you when we were done.”
“You drugged me when we had sex,” Harry said, even more numb now.
“No.” Malfoy suddenly twisted around and knelt in front of Harry as Snape moved away, apparently bored with the conversation. Or the one they were about to have, Harry thought, eyeing Malfoy uncertainly.
Malfoy was holding both Harry’s hands. He looked intently into his face and said, “After. I had to be sure the sex we had was intense, so you wouldn’t notice the effect of the Lover’s Haze, but-I also wanted you willing.”
“I wasn’t willing in the beginning.”
“In the beginning, it was about humiliating you.”
“And now?”
Malfoy, infuriatingly, shrugged. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I only know what the answer’s not.”
Harry stared at him and then looked away. The numbness was receding, he thought. The emotions were coming back. But it was as a crashing wave from the distance, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to survive it. He shivered, and noticed the way Malfoy’s arm immediately tightened around him.
“I have you,” Malfoy said.
Harry cocked an eyebrow at him. It was quiet, except for the moans of wounded Death Eaters. Dumbledore had gone to tell the rest of the Order of the Phoenix what had happened, and Snape was studiously ignoring them. In fact, he wasn’t even in the room, Harry saw. He’d gone to raid the potions lab, probably.
“You do have me,” Harry muttered. “And intend to keep me, do you?”
“I couldn’t let you die.”
That was, indeed, its own kind of answer. Harry turned slowly back towards Malfoy. The eyes that watched him were so vibrant with unexpressed emotion that Harry caught his breath.
Malfoy had saved his life, and fucked him, and bargained with him to have Harry offer himself up as a sacrifice, and yelled at him, and held him, and saved Harry when he desperately needed to think about something other than the Horcrux.
There wasn’t an answer right now because there wasn’t a simple one.
Harry could identify a few of the emotions coming back to him, though. They were gratitude, and more than a slight astonishment, that Malfoy was willing to fight so hard for him if it was just sex.
Hesitantly, he held a hand out. Malfoy clasped it, and held up their hands between them.
“We might start here,” Malfoy said. “Decide to-ignore other things in the past?”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think that’s the right thing to do,” he said. “But we might discuss them. Later,” he added, and slumped back against the wall and closed his eyes.
Malfoy shifted him a little, giving him a more comfortable cushion to lie against in his shoulder. Harry half-smiled and leaned harder on Malfoy, making him suck in a complicated breath.
Complicated. Not simple. Not what I envisioned when I thought about starting a family. And who knows what it’s going to be like now that Malfoy is the one who saved my life and the Master of Death?
But Harry knew that, partially thanks to Malfoy, he didn’t have to think about any of it right now.
He leaned harder.
After a moment full of breathing as delicate and complex as the Hallows, Malfoy leaned back.
The End.
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