Chapter Four of 'Hephaestus'- Hephaestus's Revenge
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Chapter Four-Hephaestus’s Revenge
“Scorpius, I never want you to do anything like that again.” Draco paced up and down in front of the bed where his son sat, the same bed he had looked at Scorpius sitting in earlier that afternoon and pictured as the perfect setting for the perfect jewel of his son. Since then, Scorpius had shown so much will, and contradicted him so many times, that Draco looked back on his own earlier impressions in bewilderment. “You shouldn’t visit someone like Potter without my permission. You shouldn’t tell strangers secrets without knowing if it’s safe for them to know those secrets. And you especially shouldn’t beg so persistently for sweets in front of a guest.” He swung towards Scorpius and delivered his verdict with an especially deadly stare. “It isn’t polite.”
Scorpius usually cowered when he was informed that he’d been rude, and he asked penitently for some way that he could make it better. But now, he only lifted his head and gave his father a strong stare that Draco thought impudent.
“I wasn’t rude,” said Scorpius, his tones edged with the polite disdain Draco thought he must have picked up from his mother. Certainly it couldn’t come from the Malfoy side, given how careful his education had been. “I only asked for sweets. And you’re in love with Mr. Potter. He’s not a stranger.”
“Scorpius.” Draco gave an unblinking scowl at his son. “Your mother told you about him. I’ve never mentioned him. Why wouldn’t I mention him?”
“Don’t you know?”
Draco ground his teeth. Then he thought of what sort of lessons his clever and imitative son would pick up from that, and made himself stop. It was not in his plans for Scorpius to have less than perfect teeth.
“I didn’t mention him because we argued, and I was angry at him,” he said. “The way I shall be angry at you if you don’t start behaving better.”
Scorpius stared up at him with wonder and something like pity in his shining eyes. Draco bristled to see it.
For the first time, he wondered if he should have refused his anxious parents when they told him they wanted to perform certain spells on Scorpius that would enable his intelligence to develop faster than a normal child’s, and let him understand and retain learning that was usually forgotten by children twice his age. It had seemed a good idea at the time, because of course his son was to be superior in everything, including cleverness, and when he got into Hogwarts, he could astonish and dazzle his teachers if he had knowledge that belonged to the upper years. A prodigy was one means of rescuing the Malfoy family from disgrace, and no one could say that they’d done anything illegal in obtaining their fame. Draco had let his parents cast the spells-which he knew they had researched to make sure they wouldn’t hurt Scorpius; Narcissa and Lucius would not damage their grandson-and train Scorpius hard in reading, music, and other subjects a Malfoy heir should know.
But he hadn’t had the keen edge of that intelligence turned on him before. It was that which made all the difference.
“But,” said Scorpius calmly, “that’s a stupid reason.”
Draco slammed his hand down on the edge of the bed. He didn’t know he was going to do it until it happened. He had never been violent around Scorpius, or at least he had always explained the cause of his bad temper and made sure Scorpius understood it wasn’t directed at him. Scorpius pushed himself back across the bed until he was leaning on the pillows and glared at Draco as if he were some strange creature who had come crawling into Morningswood in order to interrupt Scorpius’s good time.
He looked at Draco, in fact, much as Draco knew he had looked at Harry when he first saw him in the dwarves’ shed.
Draco found he had lost his stomach for the argument. He turned away, shaking his head, and said peremptorily, “You aren’t to go near Harry again. I’ll know if you do, and you’ll be punished.” And he stepped out of the room, just barely remembering not to slam the door behind him.
For some moments he stood where he was, shaking, his eyes shut, and then he popped them open as a thought occurred to him.
He was still fascinated with Harry, more interested in him than he should be. But now he knew why that was. He had never allowed himself to think enough about those scars in the years that separated him from the person he had been, Harry’s lover. He needed to confront them, and then they would lose their hold over him.
He had thought he was doing that at dinner, but then he hadn’t been close enough. And then Harry had cast the glamour over his face-
Draco chopped that thought off at the knees. He was good at thinking about what he wanted to think about, and right now he wanted to think about those scars, not the glamour. He needed to be close. He needed to touch them, perhaps, assuming Harry had cast some spell on his face that would ensure Draco’s flesh wasn’t sliced to ribbons immediately.
And he needed to hear the full story of the torture. Harry had never told him, preferring to selfishly keep it to himself with claims that he wasn’t ready to talk, and the papers had never managed to penetrate the confidential talks Harry had with the Minister on the subject.
Draco lifted a chin that only trembled a little and strode firmly to his room, to collect a Quick-Quotes Quill and sheaf of parchment.
He was going to win himself free of this injurious fascination. He was going to show Harry that he could not win the long contest between them.
And woe to Harry if he tried.
*
“You are not concentrating.”
Harry closed his eyes and nodded. He was crouched in the middle of a series of cinders and circular burns on the dirt floor of the shed, all that remained of the latest pattern he had tried to forge. It had exploded in the middle, drops of molten metal leaping in several directions. Harry had furiously controlled the most dangerous section, the middle, which was afire, until Grishnazk could clean up the drops and come to help him support the burning coils of steel. Then he had dropped straight to the ground, spent, and remained there since. Grishnazk had allowed him to have five minutes of silence, which Harry knew was generous of the dwarf.
I lost my focus. That was all that mattered to him at the moment, rather than the person whom he had lost his focus over. Merlin, he had escaped into metal-dancing because he wanted to leave Draco behind him. And then he came here, to a place he had known would be hard to visit before he accepted the commission, and his concentration was fracturing as if someone had taken a hammer to it. It was unacceptable. Harry opened his eyes, mopped some sweat from his brow-as much as he could; some would collect in puddles on the half-hidden pieces of flat skin and need a towel to reach them-and nodded to Grishnazk, who stood hammering some platinum flat without even looking at the steady motion of his arm.
That’s what I need to be like, Harry thought. The worker, effortless about his work. Metal-dancing is something I’m good at, something where my looks don’t matter. I can’t allow Draco’s perceptions to control me. He surged to his feet. So what if I’ll probably never have another lover? I haven’t spent the past three years brooding about that, even after I broke up with Ginny. I’ll finish the patterns they need me for and then leave this damn estate, and leave the past behind me, too.
“I know,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
Grishnazk studied his face doubtfully, one eyebrow arched, as if he were certain of Harry’s good intentions but not of his ability to keep his promise. Harry nodded again and tried to look as hard and competent as he could.
“Very well,” said Grishnazk, and then hammered once more at the platinum and held it up-a simple circlet, because they couldn’t afford as much platinum as they could copper and silver, even with the bargains on Galleons that the goblins were giving them as a business owned partially by non-humans. “You’ll forge this?”
Harry nodded, and Grishnazk tossed the circlet at him, a deliberate test. If Harry used his hands to catch it and keep it from falling to the ground, he knew Grishnazk’s opinion of him would suffer.
He was too wise to try. Instead, he opened his mouth and sang a single, pure note, and the circlet jerked to a stop, wobbling from side to side.
Harry backed up a step, his hands flipping through several swift circular patterns, his attention never wavering from the metal. Platinum was not like silver, an excellent conductor of magic, or copper, flexible and with a long history of use. It was harder to work with, more stubborn, more temperamental-more cautious, as the dwarves would say, who were fond of attributing personalities of their own to the various kinds of metal and gems they worked with.
Harry whistled, now, coaxing the platinum to relax and soften around the edges, so that the circlet became a ring at the top of two long drooping streams of metal like tears. The ring vibrated, and a low chiming note worked its way out of it, which Harry wove into the substance of his song; it was easier to work with platinum if one used its song as a way to charm it. Twice up, twice down, a run of notes that blended into the metal and came back with a hard clang. Harry frowned. He had forgotten that, once past the outer surface of the platinum, it took more effort as well as more noise to find a workable compromise.
He didn’t give up hope. He adjusted his voice instead, intoning a variation on a lullaby that he sometimes sang to Ron and Hermione’s children, but so loud that it rocked the walls of the shed and made Grishnazk take a step backwards. Irritated at himself for still noticing things happening outside his dance with the metal, Harry refocused his eyes and made himself become lost in the gold-white-silver sheen that broke from the platinum.
Gold-white-silver. He had worked with gold, and he had worked with silver. Could it be possible to adapt the songs he used with them to speak to the platinum? This was an unusually stubborn piece; it had melted no more than a few drips, and now the drips were solidifying again.
Harry whistled as though to call up the wind, the note he always used to start his silver songs, and then darted sideways and left into the lullaby again, approaching from the back in a slow spiral. The glow from the platinum altered, growing brighter; the center boss was melting at last, metal rising like ropes to twine about itself. Harry felt the sweat start under his hair and flow down the back of his neck. This was going to be a new pattern, then, unlike the others, which usually started with figure-eights and built up variations on that. Well. He was ready.
He began to move backwards and to the side, allowing his wounded leg to drag the way it needed to. All the time, he never ceased whistling, coaxing, circling in, dashing sideways when the platinum’s dance showed signs of slowing in order to herd it back towards melting like a sheepdog herding sheep. Sharp notes, intermingled with small pauses and leaping sounds like whipcracks, seemed to be what the platinum responded to best.
The original circlet had dissipated entirely by now, and what Harry had was a spiral, in response to his voice, ornamented with small whorls which dizzied the eye when he tried to follow them. He felt a tremor low in his chest, near his lungs, and responded to it with delight. He at last had a pattern he’d been trying to create for some time: one that would cause an entirely illusory experience inside a Muggle’s mind, and send them away with pleasant but bewildered ideas about where they had spent the day. They might spend the rest of their lives searching for a way to recapture the feeling, but Harry thought that no bad thing. It would force some of them to be more industrious, and others to realize that happiness lay in ordinary things far more than it did in material possessions.
He dropped his voice, low and pleading now, and the platinum responded to the loss of volume by hardening in its new shape. Three more notes, fluted between Harry’s parted lips whilst his throat burned, and the thing was done.
And Harry collapsed, lying full-length on the floor of the shed, his chest heaving and his mind pleasantly blank.
At least until Draco’s voice said from behind him, cracking the mood like a stone thrown at a large mirror, “I’ve come to hear the story you were too cowardly to tell me when we broke up.”
*
Draco had to admire, in part of his mind, how swiftly Harry uncoiled from the floor. Draco never saw his knees touch it. He only knew that one moment Harry was sprawled there like some common drunkard, panting, and the next moment he was on his feet, sagging to the side because of his bad leg, and had cornered Draco against the wall. Draco had no time to draw out the parchment and quill.
Suddenly, and without the amount of preparation and effort he had envisioned, Draco found himself close to the mask of Harry’s face. It reminded him of a blasted volcanic landscape. He stared at the gray pits in the midst of the black ridges with a sick fascination, and winced when his eyes lingered on the horn-like projections and sharp points those ridges formed.
He couldn’t get used to it or appreciate the crawling skin all over his body the way he wanted, though, because Harry was storming at him, in a way that caused flecks of spit to leap out of his mouth and stain Draco’s own perfect skin. It did seem that Harry always had to be contaminating him in some way, Draco thought, drawing a hand over his mouth.
“You’ve made it clear that you don’t want me anymore! I was trying to respect that, if you can believe that, and do the job you hired me for whilst I stayed out of sight! I know you think I’m ugly. I know that you only care for the way I used to look, and not for the way I look now. What do you want, Draco? Why the fuck would you still come here? And your accusing me of cowardice, when you could barely look at me last night-that’s rich, that’s fucking rich! Why should I tell you the story of what happened to me or anything else?”
Draco stared at Harry and managed to force his voice out past his lips, as much as he wanted to recoil from the scarred thing being shoved at him. “Because I still have the right to know.”
“The right to-“ Harry shut his eyes for a moment and shook his head, with an expression so weary that Draco hoped he had seen common sense and was about to give in, if only to get rid of Draco the sooner. But when he opened his eyes again, there was still a tiresome flame in them.
“You gave up all rights to me when you walked away,” he said. “Astoria Greengrass is more your taste in lovers, isn’t she? Go back to her, or someone like her, and forget me. You don’t want to share my bed, Draco, and I know now that that was all our relationship ever was to you. So you have no rights-“
“It wasn’t!” Draco interrupted, unable to believe that Harry remembered it that way. “I stood up to everyone who wanted to separate us or who thought it would be a good idea if we separated, don’t you remember that? My parents wanted me to marry someone like Astoria from the beginning, and to stay married to her, not to just have a contract to produce a child, the way we did with Scorpius! The papers thought it would make the best story of all if we split up. My friends couldn’t understand what I was doing with you. Compared to theirs, the protests of your friends were small!” He shoved at Harry’s chest and made him stagger a few steps away, which removed that charred landscape from his immediate sight and gave him the chance to catch his breath and think-except that he was too angry to think at the moment. “Would I do that for someone who did nothing more than warm my bed?”
“You’d do it for someone who warmed your bed first,” said Harry, his voice low and ugly. He folded his arms and glared at Draco. Draco had to reluctantly admit the effectiveness of the glare, which once wouldn’t have frightened him, was increased by his scars. “Once that was gone, everything else we’d built on top of it collapsed.”
“You were still the one who walked away in the end, not me,” Draco retorted. He brushed at his shirt, in case any flakes of dead skin had fallen there.
“Because you called me a monster!”
Harry’s voice was layered with years of hurt. Draco stared at him in astonishment. He’s that hurt over one slip of the tongue?
Well, it was fortunate for Draco that he was. It provided Draco with a strategy for winning him back. He ducked his head and smiled up at Harry from beneath his eyelids, making his voice breathy. “I might not think so,” he said, “if you told me the details of what happened to make you look like this.”
Harry stared at him impassively for a few more minutes. Then a smile curved his lips. Draco frowned. It was an unpleasant smile.
“Well, why not?” Harry said, and his voice had become flat and pounded, in a way that made Draco think of the ashes that would need to litter a mountain to make it look like his face. “Why not? You’re absolutely right. You deserve to know.” He turned, rubbing hard at his head, and took a step away.
Silence followed, for so long that Draco thought Harry had forgotten the promise he just made. Then Harry turned back around again and hurled the words at Draco the way he would once have used his wand to hurl a curse.
“They cast spells that turned my entire flesh into sluggish liquid, sometimes,” he said conversationally. “Liquid glass, if you will; the Healers think that’s the best comparison for it. Then they sculptured it into what they wanted and let it harden again.” He tapped one of the ridges above his ears. “This is the result of one of those experiments. I’m just lucky they didn’t get rid of my ears altogether. They discussed it, but Greyback said that they should leave them so I could hear their plans for me.
“They smothered me with my own flesh, once, when they closed off my nostrils and my mouth. Do you want to know what it’s like to lie choking because you can’t breathe, and to know that there’s nothing you can do about it, that your enemies might be able to make you die at any moment?
“And my leg? They conjured lightning bolts and bolts of fire and passed them through my leg. They had specialized spells, Healer’s spells, that let them locate the muscles and the nerves and destroy them one by one. Once they removed several chunks of flesh entirely and left my leg dangling by a strip of skin. But they regrew the skin. Greyback made them.” Harry’s smile flashed for a moment. “He was the leader. He was also the one who decided it would be more-dramatic-to leave my eyes and mouth the way they were. He wanted me to be able to see what was done to me, and scream without restraint.”
Draco had started biting his tongue to choke back the bile some time ago. His entire body was shuddering as if to the beats of a drum he could feel more than he could hear. He wrapped his arms around himself. It didn’t help.
Harry tilted his head to the side. “My magic finally couldn’t take it anymore. That was on the day they were planning to fill Ginny’s spine, slowly, with boiling lead, and see how much she could take before she started to die. And then I was the center of a maelstrom, and when I could see again, I realized that the walls were covered with flesh that had been scrambled and cooked like eggs.”
He stepped towards Draco, his voice dropping to a croon. “That’s what they did to me. That’s what made me into the monster you see before you. Maybe you’re right to call me one, even.” His laughter emerged, a sharp bark that made Draco leap; it sounded like stones clashing together. “Isn’t it only monsters who can slaughter other monsters?”
Draco’s mouth was so dry his tongue stuck to his teeth. He worked it slowly loose, still staring at Harry.
For the first time, he was really focusing on the emotions in those green eyes, and not on the fact that they still existed, more or less perfect, in the middle of devastation. And he wondered how he could never have seen the despair and the rage there before.
Harry’s not glad this happened. He’s not reveling in it. I thought he was. I thought he was overjoyed at the chance to be a martyr for something other than his childhood. But he’s angry.
He’s angry the way I would be if this was done to me.
Draco experienced a surge of fellow-feeling that carried pity with it, and anger, and a hunger that grew as he imagined Harry looking, again, the way he would with a glamour over his face. He took a step forwards. Harry’s lips shone in that unpleasant smile again.
“Going to faint on me, Malfoy?” he asked softly, mockingly. “Or going to run away?”
Draco shook his head and took a deep breath. “Neither,” he said. “I-I’ve heard of Dark Arts like those before, Harry. I think there are ways to heal them. Maybe not known to the Healers in Britain, but the Healers in Britain aren’t the only ones in the world. There are excellent ones in Italy who’ve been known to cure wounds that everyone else insisted were untreatable. They won’t see you without a hefty amount of gold, but I can provide that.”
Harry hissed and retreated a step, stumbling over his bad leg as he went. Even that might be curable, Draco thought, the vision of Harry on a broom blazing in his mind.
“I told you, Malfoy. The Healers said-“
“Within the limits of their knowledge, they couldn’t cure the scars,” Draco acknowledged. “But there’s wider knowledge out there. We can look for it. I would do anything to have you back, the way you looked before.” He blinked as he heard the words, then shrugged and forged ahead. They were said, and trying to retract them now would just make him look weak. “Please, Harry, let’s try. I’d be willing to let you live with me whilst we did. You like Scorpius and he likes you, and I do still care for you. Let’s find closure to this in the way we should have long since, by seeking an end to the scars.”
Draco was shaking as he finished the speech, shaking with pride in himself and hope and his dazzling visions of the future. He should have listened to Harry’s story before this, he thought absently. He should have insisted that Harry tell it to him. The things his imagination had conjured were much worse than the reality. These were Dark Arts. Dark Arts could be reversed.
Not always, whispered his mind, but he refused to listen to it. Listening to it was the kind of thing Harry did.
Harry stared at him, then shook his head.
“You won’t even try?” Draco heard his voice rise in a betrayed wail.
“I have to live with reality, even if you don’t,” Harry snapped. “And I’ve-looked. Hermione’s helped me. I think that if there was a solution out there, I would have found it by now.”
“But you can’t have looked everywhere,” Draco argued. “And the Malfoy money opens doors-even the Malfoy name, sometimes. We can try. Say you’ll try.”
Harry turned and limped away instead.
“Why are you always fucking walking away from me?” Draco yelled at his back, his anger surging in him like the beat of brazen wings. “Why won’t you even try?”
Harry turned his head. Anger sparked in his eyes, cutting Draco the way his story hadn’t been able to.
“Because,” Harry said, “you’re not worth it.”
And away he went, leaving Draco to stare after him with his mouth open.
*
Tears burned in Harry’s eyes as he limped to the far side of the shed and out, into the moonlight. The clang of hammers resounded from around him, and the swirl of soot, and the flicker of flames, and he used them to try to anchor himself as he put his hands over his face and breathed deeply.
He wouldn’t listen to Draco. He had put too much effort into accepting the inevitable and coming to peace with himself. All that listening would result in would be a few glittering years where Draco would chatter and investigate the possibilities and hold out a prize, the eventual reconciliation, to Harry-
And then it would come apart when Draco found out there really was no cure, and the names he had already called Harry would seem like nothing compared to the words he would speak then.
Harry shuddered, and then came out of it with a twist of his shoulders that nearly wrenched his bad leg and sent him over backwards.
His friends had tried to warn him against accepting this commission. He should have listened.
To spare Draco’s dreams and sanity as well as his own, he would have to leave now.
Let Draco have his perfect life, he thought, staring at the manor house without resentment. His perfect son and his unmarred skin and whatever lovers he wants to take to his bed. He does deserve it, for even trying to make it work a second time.
And he spun and Apparated, wishing he could ignore the feeling in the back of his head that he was running away.
Chapter 5.