Chapter Nine of 'Incadescence'- Illusion
Title: Incandescence (9/12 or 13)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Angst, profanity, manipulation. Takes place fairly far in the future after DH, but ignores the epilogue.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Luna/Neville, Lucius/Narcissa.
Summary: Draco has become a successful writer by novelizing the lives of heroes from the war with Voldemort. He’s managed to charm the most difficult and reticent into talking to him. Now he thinks he’s ready for the ultimate challenge: persuading Harry Potter, who’s notoriously close-mouthed, to give him both the material and the permission for a novel based on him.
Author’s Notes: This is intended to be a fairly short novel, probably around 50,000 words (12 or 13 chapters), but I won’t rule out going longer.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nine-Illusion
Draco eyed the Hog’s Head with resignation. Not even the prosperity that the end of the war had brought to the pub-it seemed that quite a few people wanted to drink in a place where the barman was someone who had saved Harry Potter’s life-could change things in it. The smell of goats, which always reminded Draco of rotting grain and feces mixed, drifted from the planked walls. The signboard still carried a hog’s head bleeding onto a field of white, but someone had painted several long and dripping strands of blood on the bottom, so realistic that Draco felt a little faint as he looked at them.
Needs must, he told himself, subtly casting a spell on his face that should repel the worst of the scent before he reached out to open the door. Think of it as atmosphere. Surely you could set the beginning of a novel here?
Of course, the moment he started thinking about that, he was at a loss for a hero, with Potter unavailable to him. Draco sighed. Wading through his life was indeed wading through a sea of troubles, a phrase he had seen in one of Yolanda’s stories last night and liked.
The inside of the pub was so dingy that Draco had to feel gingerly in front of himself with his foot, to ensure that he didn’t stumble over something. As it was, he fell over the small step coming down into the main room and straightened himself with a flush and a clearing of his throat. Hostile glances darted at him, then wandered away.
It’s not fair that Potter has such an advantage in disguising himself, Draco thought in disgust, turning his head in several directions as he walked across the floor of the main room. The patrons all wore their cloaks over their faces, as usual. They all hunched over their drinks, as usual, and communicated in grunts when Aberforth Dumbledore brought them more drinks, as usual. Potter could walk in here wearing his own face and probably no one would notice.
Draco restrained his own exaggeration as he scanned the room for Yolanda. Yes, they would notice, and a nervous ripple would no doubt run through the ones who were here in defiance of the exile laws or to trade dragons’ eggs or other illegal goods. He would have to rely on the ripple to warn him if someone came in who was dangerous to him personally, instead of faces.
Atmosphere, remember, he told himself, and did his best to look confident as he strutted over to Yolanda’s table and gave her a curt nod.
Yolanda nodded back. She had secured a table in the corner, where she could watch the doors and the few smudged windows simultaneously. A long cloak draped over her shoulders and fell in graceful folds about her hands, but left her face bare, so that Draco didn’t see much point to her disguise. Her drink sat in front of her, a mug full of evil-smelling red liquid that Draco contemplated with dismay. He didn’t relish sitting across from her for an hour or however long this conversation would take and breathing in those fumes.
Draco tossed his own cloak around the back of his chair and sat down with an ostentatiously direct stare into Yolanda’s eyes. She would need to believe that he was guileless, or at least it would be best if she did, for his and Potter’s tricks to work. And it would also help if she could believe that he was a bit stupid, the way that someone trying to blackmail a powerful and dangerous person would be.
If she’s that powerful and dangerous person. It bothered Draco that he and Potter had as yet discovered no method by which Yolanda could have found out Potter’s secrets, though Potter had admitted to meeting her two or three times at Ministry functions.
Yolanda stared back at him. Draco went on looking until he felt his eyes water, and then jumped as the gruff voice of Aberforth sounded in his ear.
“What yer havin’?”
Good God, his diction has declined. Draco restrained a shudder and nodded at him. “Firewhisky.”
“Puling boy’s drink,” Aberforth declared, and wandered off in the direction of the bar. Draco sighed. He had chosen Firewhisky because it was strong enough to drown out the taste of the phantom goats and dirt that haunted the bar, but not strong enough to strip his throat clean of its lining. Of course, no matter what he chose, Aberforth would probably declare it was inferior to his own choice, so Draco shouldn’t worry about it.
One of the lessons you should have taken from your confrontation with Potter is that you can’t impress everyone with the Malfoy charm.
Yolanda leaned forwards across the table and lowered her voice. Draco had thought she might do that. His hands were conveniently beneath the level of the table, so he squeezed the small crystal in his pocket. Potter had given it to him and explained that it was a device the Aurors used to overhear private conversations, as long as it could be carried by or planted on one of the participants in the conversation. Squeezing it would allow their words to flow directly to a similar device in Potter’s ears.
Potter had explained all that in fascinating detail, then forbidden Draco to ever explicitly mention the device in a novel. Not all Draco’s sulking had changed that.
“You have to understand, Mr. Malfoy, that there is a reason to get out of the public eye with such talk as you gave me.”
Draco nodded with a wide-eyed expression. “Of course. Because though you are the best audience for it, you are not the only audience if we speak in the middle of the street.”
“Exactly.” Yolanda leaned back in her seat enough to look at him appraisingly. “But I have wards around this table that will prevent anyone from eavesdropping now. You may speak freely to me of what you have learned.”
Draco dropped his eyelids coyly. “I don’t think I could…without some hope of material reward from it.”
He felt more than he saw Yolanda’s shudder. Aberforth came back with his drink, and Draco used the excuse of looking up and nodding at him to glance around the room. Still he saw no one who looked like Potter, or indeed like anything but a hunched and shrouded shape. Some of them resembled furniture more than human beings.
“I dislike all talk of material things,” Yolanda said softly. “We are both writers, Mr. Malfoy, which means that we deal with the spiritual matter of personalities, motivations, pasts, souls. I would rather pay you in coinage of the soul. Assuming, of course, that you know anything I would find valuable.”
“I think I do.” Draco chose a shrewd expression this time, as if he were considering her words, while he sipped at his Firewhisky. “For example, I have a letter here. While it is a material thing and thus not to your taste intrinsically, I think the shape of the writing and the thickness of the paper and the color of the ink all together add up to a sufficiently metaphysical whole.” He dug out the letter he had had Justice intercept and handed it solemnly across the table.
Yolanda took it and gazed at it. Draco watched her face, but she had absolutely perfect control of her muscles. He shook his head. He had thought it might be so. He had spent last night, after Potter left, rereading a few of her stories, and she described expressions too well not to know how betraying they could be. Sometimes the major revelations of her writing depended on the look on a character’s face.
“Interesting,” said Yolanda, running one finger down the crease in the middle of the letter. “Cryptic. Almost prophetic. However, I fail to see how, from this letter, you have deduced that I could have any connection to it.”
“The letter hints of madness, does it not?” Draco lowered his voice to the soft tone of hers, fully confident that Potter would be able to overhear them despite everything. “Almost savors of it. And I know that you write about madness.”
Yolanda touched the edge of the paper, seeming to admire the shape of the letters, and then smiled at Draco. “And you have brought this to me to serve as a source of inspiration for my stories? It is very kind of you, but ideas concerned with madness and the other vices of our society which require satirizing drop freely from the air. I need not pay you for this.” She pushed the letter back to him.
Draco put a hand on the edge of the table and prevented the parchment from falling off it. “Look again,” he urged gently. “Does any of this seem familiar?”
“No.” Yolanda shook her head, and she could do innocence very well, couldn’t she? Her eyes were not ridiculously knowing, and she let her shoulders rise in a helpless shrug when Draco looked at her. “I don’t know what else you want me to say. I would tell you if I had seen it before, but I am afraid that any hunt you mount in this direction is futile.”
Draco would have exploded in frustration if he hadn’t expected this. Yolanda must know the consequences that could fall upon her head if she was suspected of tormenting Potter, or even driving him to madness or suicide. So he simply nodded and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” he mused. “That both you and I make our living writing about prominent members of our society, and yet it shouldn’t have occurred to us before now?”
Yolanda said, “I beg your pardon?”
“I can’t believe that I never thought of Potter before.” Draco brought his gaze down and smiled at her, keeping his face gentle. “It seems like he would be the natural start to any series called Heroic Lives, and yet, here I am, finding him almost at the end. And you probably would have targeted him much earlier, except that he moved in a sphere that you considered beyond your reach.”
“Do you still persist in your delusion that I had anything to do with this?” Yolanda nodded to the letter. “Though I must thank you for giving me a name.”
Draco suffered a brief moment of panic. What if he had judged wrongly and given up Potter’s secrets for nothing? Yolanda’s regret and incomprehension was so perfect that it seemed hard to believe it was a mask.
But he did not distrust his own artistic judgment that much. This had become an argument about art, now, or at least he was trying to turn it into one. He linked his fingers together and gave her a wise, scolding look.
“I know that you’re hunting him,” he said. It was a more open statement than he had planned to make, but Yolanda made a careless motion with her left hand, and that at least showed he had caught her attention. “I don’t blame you. Such tempting prey.” He hoped fervently that Potter wouldn’t take the wrong impression from this, but then, he had probably heard his partner or his confederates sound as if they were betraying him before during his Auror work. Draco could not believe that no one who tried to kill Aurors had ever targeted Potter. “And if you discovered that he had a secret that brought him close to the edge of madness, how could you resist?”
Yolanda gave him a fleeting smile. “You have a grave misunderstanding of my character, if you believe that I would target the hero who saved us all.”
“I have a better understanding of your art,” Draco said. “You have to destroy everything that is pure and uncomplicated. Potter is not an uncomplicated force for good in our world, but many people see him that way. You would need to bring out his flaws into a sharper light and cast him down, so that other people would see the folly of their own aspirations in trying to rise out of the muck of the world. And madness is quite a flaw.”
He leaned nearer, and Yolanda did the same thing with what looked like a struggle against herself. Draco could have laughed triumphantly. He had her. Yolanda, like all writers Draco was familiar with, wanted to be praised, but she also wanted to be understood. And if Draco had seen what she was trying to do, even if he didn’t approve of it, she had to follow the irresistible call of his charmer’s pipe.
“That was it, wasn’t it?” Draco whispered. “That was the reason you never thought of him. Maybe he wasn’t pure and uncomplicated-you knew that in your bones, you could taste that simply by running your tongue along your lips-but you hadn’t discovered any evidence of a flaw in him that others hadn’t used to try and bring him down, and failed with. You knew that most of your audience wouldn’t listen, now, to the same old lies filled with the dirt of prejudice. You ignored him because he wasn’t a victim.
“Then you looked into his eyes, and it seems that you saw the taint of incipient madness there. I commend you for spotting it. Someone who wasn’t looking, who wasn’t enthralled with his seeming divinity, wouldn’t have seen it. But you did.
“You saw through the veils of illusion and into the heart of things. You always do. That’s why your enemies hate and fear you. You aren’t a satirist so much as a prophet, predicting the fall of their idols. And if you try to hurry along the fall of one, what does that matter?” Draco shrugged a bit, watching the fascinated way her eyes widened. “He would fall in any case. Perhaps you can ensure that he doesn’t take down the delicate fabric of so many hopes and dreams when he perishes.”
He paused, then added gently, “Wasn’t that the way it was?”
Yolanda shivered all over. Then she took a deep breath and said, “You seem to know much about me.”
“I have read you, and I have thought as long on your stories as my brain would permit,” Draco said simply. “That is why I dare to claim knowledge of you, no matter how much my knowledge of your character may be lacking.”
Yolanda shivered again, and said, “Yes. I understand now. You are more of an artist than I thought you were when you began to talk of vulgar payment. You are a seer of souls, someone who can spin cobwebs and make them as strong as steel.”
Draco preened under her praise, because she would expect it of him and because it was true, and then said, “I spoke of payment only because I had my doubts, at first, that you had sought Potter out as true grist for the mill of your stories and not for some other, more unforgivable reason. Now that I know the truth, I see no reason for you to deny it to me. You wrote those letters, didn’t you?” He leaned forwards and gazed at her with his heart in his eyes.
“Yes.” No hesitation in Yolanda’s voice, no wavering.
Draco could almost hear Potter’s silent gasp from somewhere in the room. He wanted to laugh triumphantly, but he controlled himself and gave her a steady look. “And was it the way I have said? I want to be corrected if there is any wrongness in my tale.”
“It was,” Yolanda said. “I saw him, and I read the truth of the madness in his eyes. It was all as you have said.” She sat back and sipped at her foul-smelling drink, smiling at Draco.
“You must be a mighty reader of souls, to see it in his eyes,” Draco said.
“Of souls.” Yolanda’s smile grew deeper. “Or of minds.”
She’s a Legilimens. Of course. Draco felt incredibly stupid.
“You have done a remarkable job of figuring it out,” Yolanda said. “I am glad, given that you also show an understanding of my art that no one has demonstrated in years.” She sighed. “It is a lonely journey, to go through one’s life and not be understood.”
“I can bear that,” Draco said. He was giving little attention to the conversation now, instead trying to turn his head so that he could seek out Potter in his disguise. He would lose the bet if he tried to figure it out later. “But I can’t bear to see people disregard and misunderstand my books. I am lucky enough to have achieved considerable popular success, however.”
“I have envied you that at times,” Yolanda said, with a heaviness of tone that turned Draco’s eyes back to her. “I have thought that you were working with inferior material, however much you sculpted it into pleasing shapes, and that I deserved the attention lavished on you better than you did.”
Draco lifted his chin and shrugged slightly, not sure that he dared take his eyes from her now. There was a strange sharpness to her face that concerned him. “Alas, there is no accounting for the tastes of critics.”
“No, indeed.” Yolanda slid her hand carelessly along the table. “Luckily, most other matters are more easily explained.”
The world abruptly began to spin before Draco’s eyes. He coughed, feeling as if the foul smell of Yolanda’s drink had got into his throat and begun to choke him. He sagged forwards, and felt Yolanda form a pillow of her hands to catch him.
“Always sad when someone becomes drunk on success,” Yolanda said with a sigh, and then she shouted for Aberforth.
The barman grumbled when he learned that he was doomed to receive Galleons for Draco’s drink from someone other than Draco, but Yolanda spoke soothingly, pleasantly, and he departed a little less ruffled. Draco heard their voices as from a distance. He couldn’t raise his head. He couldn’t move his limbs. His eyes were flickering helplessly open and shut, and even when he could see, he was staring at a formless sea of shifting colors.
What the fuck did she do to me?
He told himself he should have anticipated this; after all, Yolanda had used the Hideous Hopfrog venom, and if she was a Legilimens, then she had probably read his intentions out of his mind in the moment after he sat down.
And I just had to sit there, looking her in the eye, in those first seconds, to prove that I wasn’t afraid.
“No, I can help him home,” Yolanda was telling someone else, her voice gentle and amused. “I’m afraid that we met here to celebrate the publication of his new book, and he had a few too many. He doesn’t live far from me.”
The inquisitive person turned away, and Draco engaged in a mad struggle to put his head up and yell for help. But his body continued to dangle limply, and Yolanda sighed as if she were exasperated and cast a Lightening Charm.
“You’ve gained some bulk over the last year, Draco,” she murmured to him.
Draco was torn between outrage that she would dare to say such a thing and admiration of her acting skills. No one was going to come for him as long as they thought she was just helping a friend home.
Then he remembered that Potter had been in the Hog’s Head, and his hopes rose.
Then he remembered that Yolanda had had the chance to read that part of his plan out of his head, too, and his hopes crashed again.
“Ah, this way.” Yolanda turned a corner. Draco tried to force his eyes to focus and figure out which one it was, but the houses were only smears that were losing definition even as he tried to watch them. “I thought so,” said Yolanda in a pleased voice, and then she wrapped one arm around him and Apparated.
Draco thought he must have fallen unconscious for a moment, because he seemed to go straight from darkness and silence into firelight and harp music. Yolanda said something sharp that was probably meant to dismiss the house-elf, and deposited him on a couch. Draco tried to breathe deeply, as if he were asleep, and wondered if that would be enough to fool her, and if Potter would be able to track them through her Apparition.
Yolanda reached down and plucked something from his hip, and suddenly Draco was seeing normally again, though he still couldn’t move. He gave her a haughty glare, and restrained the first clichéd words that sprang to his lips. He wasn’t a character in a story, and neither was she. Forgetting that had been part of the problem earlier.
“Another little invention of mine,” Yolanda explained. Draco had a distracted thought that that was kind of her, to take the time to soothe his curiosity. They had some things in common, after all. Yolanda sat down on a couch next to him and shook her head. “What do I do now? That is the question. I don’t fancy being charged with murder, and I don’t trust Memory Charms to hold. The stories where the villain releases the hero with amnesia and thinks that he’ll not remember a thing never work out well.” She paused a moment, as if considering her statement as one about art, and added, “For the villain, at least, which I grant you is rarely their import.”
“Simply because I discovered it doesn’t mean that I would have done anything about it,” Draco said. He tried to sound calm and bored. Maybe that would convince Yolanda that he had done this only as a game, if she hadn’t read all his thoughts. “A confession like the one you made today, without Veritaserum and just to me in a pub, isn’t of any use in identifying you if you won’t repeat it. I wanted the satisfaction of running Potter’s tormentor to earth. Now that I’ve done it, I don’t have to-”
“I don’t believe you,” Yolanda said in a gentle voice, shaking her head slowly back and forth. “Did you know that you have very expressive eyes, Draco? Not like Potter’s. He has no shields, but he looks at the world with a guarded gaze. No reason why he should not, after it has hurt him so many times. But you look with a confident, steady gaze, because not enough has thwarted you.” She stepped forwards and reached into his pocket. Draco’s heart grew heavier as she fetched out the listening crystal that Potter had given him and crushed it with an easy pressure of her fingers.
Draco closed his eyes. At the moment, it didn’t seem that he could do anything else.
Yolanda bent down towards him, and he felt her breath on the edge of his ear. “I need inspiration from reality, as you do,” she whispered. “I had hoped that the tale of Potter’s decline would serve me for a book-length work, and I hoped to give it a final artistic polish-as Potter himself is so completely lacking in artistry-by precipitating that decline. But it looks as though he is warned. Some months of wasted effort.
“But a night may make up for it. And there are many ways in which someone could serve as inspiration, especially for someone who knows madness and death as intimately as I do.” Yolanda tweaked his ear, and he couldn’t even react to that. “I will give you an honorable role in the final story you will ever tell, Draco. I promise you that.”
Chapter Ten.