Chapter Ten of 'Incandescence'- Inspiration
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Title: Incandescence (10/12 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.
Chapter Ten-Inspiration
Potter, where are you? Draco thought, as Yolanda secured the chains around him and then stepped back to admire her work.
Sarcastically, he answered himself. Somewhere far away, acting like a good little Auror and probably trying to get help to rescue me instead of going after someone on his own. Potter’s become a bit too rule-bound for his own good.
“There,” Yolanda breathed. “I think that will do.”
Draco glanced up and down. The chains bound him to a metal frame, which he thought was shaped like an X but wasn’t sure of; he hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at it before Yolanda had turned him so that he was facing away from it, out into the room. All he knew for certain was that it was hard and knobby and his arms were already complaining. “I think you could stand to loosen the chains a bit,” he said.
Yolanda shook her head, smiling. “You keep your sense of humor even under intense pressure, Draco. I do admire that. The character I plan to base on you will do the same thing.” She turned to reach behind her and drew out a large basin that looked like a Pensieve. Draco blinked and took a moment to study the differences-it was white, not silver, and had figures carved along the rim that looked like tortured dancers-before he decided it was his duty as a fellow artist to let her know something.
“You can’t effectively torture me with a Pensieve,” he said. “It has a distinct lack of spikes.”
Yolanda’s smile only widened as she tapped her wand on the rim of the basin and spoke an incantation. A silver whirlwind rose from the basin and floated ominously towards Draco. Draco darted his head forwards and snapped at it, trying to make it keep its distance, but it paid no attention. It settled on top of his skull instead, and Draco hissed as a squeezing sensation flooded his head.
He had never so much cursed his writer’s vivid imagination before as when he was able to see, all too well, his brains leaping out of his ears and falling all over the floor.
The silver mist drifted away from him after only a moment, and returned to the basin. Yolanda spoke two incantations, and it dissolved into separate spiral clouds, which slid down into the basin and filled it with shining silvery water that looked like liquid memories after all. Yolanda leaned over and plunged her head into them.
Draco watched her in confused silence. Was she trying to learn enough about him so that she could torture him effectively?
And a more pressing and better question: Where is Potter, and who gave him permission to dally like this?
“Ah!” Yolanda pulled her head free and shook it so that flying drops of sliver liquid landed in the corners of the room. Draco just managed to bite his lip on a protest. Those were his memories she was scattering like common rubbish. He kept silent mostly because he suspected she wouldn’t care. Yolanda turned towards him and nodded.
“This is an invention of my own,” she said. “It doesn’t work exactly like an ordinary Pensieve, the way that you may have noticed from its color and the effort required to fill it. It contains many of your worst memories.”
Draco sniffed. “So what? I’ve faced those memories down before, and managed to go on and live my life.”
“But have you faced them all at once?” Yolanda cocked her head. “Have you faced them in their rawness, exactly as they happened, and dropping onto your mind like a weight of boulders?” She moved towards him at a swinging pace that inevitably reminded Draco of a stalking wildcat. “Individually, no, I doubt that these memories are much trouble to you. But all together, they have the power to crack your mind open and send you falling through the cracks into the depths. I’ll keep sending them through your head, like endless nightmares, until they do.”
Draco had to respect the idea behind the plan. He wanted to say that it wouldn’t work, but he couldn’t make that statement for certain. He shook his head. “And you’re doing this because it will give you something new to write about?”
“Yes, that.” Yolanda stepped towards him and examined him in the leisurely fashion Draco himself used when he was thinking up a new character based on someone who already existed, as though she wanted to get the proportions of the limbs and the angles of the head exactly right. “And because you stole the person I was going to write about. I think Potter will ignore my letters now, and they cannot torment him into madness. It is only fair that you replace my victim.”
“You were wrong about the similarities between us,” Draco said. “I don’t think of my characters as victims. I think of them as people I’m going to transfigure, purge the raw material out of, and turn into heroes.”
“You are right,” Yolanda said. “We are very different. I might have been able to write about Potter. You, he never would have let near him.” She waved her wand, and the frame Draco was bound to Levitated into the air and flew over to the white basin.
Draco concentrated, counted to three under his breath, and lashed out with all his limbs at once, hoping that would get up enough strength to break the metal frame. The frame, however, continued serenely flying with him, and finally came to a stop less than a foot above his memories. Yolanda spent a few moments guiding it into the right place, then whispered an incantation Draco couldn’t make out.
An invisible force gripped his neck and plunged his face beneath the surface of the memories.
*
What could have been hours or seconds later, Draco fought his way slowly back to a consciousness of himself. He hung still, blinking his eyes and staring straight ahead, telling himself that he was here in this body, present, right now, watching stone walls-Yolanda appeared to believe that a room where she was going to torture someone should look like a proper dungeon-and feeling bits of memory drip off his eyelashes. His body was sore with flinching and the bonds. His head-
His head felt empty and too full, at once. The horror and sorrow of seeing the boy he had been, trapped in hopeless situations while Voldemort made him torture people, flowed through it in a sluggish wave, giving him a heavy feeling. But at the same time, he couldn’t get a good hold on any one individual memory. They whirled and drifted and twisted together, like the spiral clouds they had formed going into the basin.
He had wept. He knew that. But he also felt numb, as though being subjected to so much suffering at once had left him unable to react.
A hand gripped his hair and pulled his face up so that he was looking into Yolanda’s eyes. Draco felt her Legilimency probing and poking at his mind this time, sliding among his thoughts and rummaging through them. Draco shuddered and tried to shut his eyes, only to find that he didn’t have control of them anymore.
“Ah,” Yolanda said, with a disappointed tone this time. “It appears that your mind is more resilient than I thought it was. A pity, when the hue and cry about your being missing will go up tomorrow. Perhaps I simply need to increase the amount of memories?” She paused, as if taking counsel with someone invisible, and then shook her head. “No, I think I’ll need to increase the pain of them as well.” The silver cloud rose from the basin at her command and encircled Draco’s head and neck again.
“No,” Draco whispered. “Please.” He felt so strange that the witty words he wanted to speak scattered when he reached after them.
“Pleading does not truly affect me,” Yolanda said. “One of my victims found out what my story was about on the verge of publication and came to ask me, to beg me, not to publish it.” She shook her head in what looked like wonder. “How was I to respond to that? What I do is what I do. It is art. Art cannot be changed or criticized before it is even born, or it will die stillborn. Art cannot be made responsible to the world. If someone reads one of my stories and then goes out and commits a murder, have I caused it? If someone changes their life because of my stories and becomes a bit more bitter and cynical, have I caused it? I am an artist, and I create free of all restrictions and all restraint. It must be that, or my art would be less than pure. And I cannot have that.”
Draco had tried to use the moments when she was speaking to breathe quickly but calmly and settle his mind for another bout with the memories. But the heavy, empty, numb feeling was still with him, and he realized that he would need days or months before he was ready to face something like that again. And he did not have days or months.
He barely thought about what he was going to do before he did it. If he had, Yolanda would only have read it out of his thoughts anyway. He lunged forwards and closed his teeth hard on her nose.
Yolanda yelped and danced backwards, or tried. Draco clenched his teeth down hard, harder than he’d ever bitten into anything, and then began swaying in the frame that held him. He heard skin and flesh tear, and had a private moment of exultation before something-Yolanda’s wand or fist-struck him in the temple hard enough to daze him and make his teeth release.
He hung there, panting, licking at the blood and bits of skin on his lips, and listened to Yolanda steadily swear. It bought him a few more moments. Draco tried his best to think of his novels, where the best part of him lived, and his parents, and Potter, and anything else that was not the memories that rolled through his head and were trying to force him to dwell on them.
“This time,” Yolanda said at last, thrusting her face into his and showing him that her nose was a bloody ruin, “I will leave you down until your mind breaks.” She spat out some of the blood that had fallen into her mouth and then waved her wand so that the frame jerked Draco lower all at once.
His face hadn’t quite touched the memories when he heard a sound like crumbling stone, and Yolanda cried out. Whether the sound was one of pain or fear or surprise, Draco didn’t know. What he mostly cared about was that the frame stopped with his face still far enough above the memories that he could turn his head and look towards the intruder. His curiosity would probably kill him, he had to acknowledge.
Potter was standing in the middle of a hole in the air, which behind him was grey and black and other. Draco found himself jerking his eyes away as soon as he looked, feeling fainter and sicker than when he had first come up from the memories. He had no doubt that he’d just had a glimpse into the world of the dead.
The important thing was the Potter had come through it, and now he was here, and now that he was here, he was going to save Draco. Draco barely minded being cast into the role of victim instead of author, which showed how horrible Yolanda was.
You tried to change my place in the story, he thought at her, with more indignation than he had felt when he thought she was going to kill him. Bitch.
“Potter,” Yolanda said. Her voice was shaking, though she maintained the pleasant tone that Draco had heard her use in the Hog’s Head when she confessed to sending the letters to Potter. “How strange of you to intrude on me like this. I don’t see why you need to concern yourself with what two consenting adults get up to at night.”
Potter didn’t bother answering her, which Draco thought was a sign of how intelligent he could be-sometimes. He stepped out of the hole, which made it possible for Draco to look at him from a corner of his eye, and said quietly, “Are you all right?”
“My mind will recover,” Draco said. “Though not if she forces me to take more baths in my memories and pummels my thoughts with them all at once.”
He wasn’t sure how clear that was as a description of what had happened to him, but it seemed to be enough for Potter, who compressed his lips and turned to confront Yolanda. Yolanda lifted her head and looked almost bored, toying with a locket that hung around her neck on a silver chain. Draco tensed. “That’s probably a weapon,” he told Potter. “She tends to be good at having unusual ones. I wouldn’t let her touch it for much longer.”
Potter aimed his wand at Yolanda in response. “I heard everything through the crystal,” he said. “I would have arrived to stop you from taking him if I hadn’t seen a murder that needed preventing before the conversation ever began.”
“Ha!” Draco exclaimed, happy despite himself. “Then you weren’t in the Hog’s Head at all, under a disguise or any other way! That means that I win the bet, because I wouldn’t have had a chance of seeing you.”
Potter’s mouth twitched, though he never looked away from Yolanda. Draco was glad to see some sign of human emotion in him, stern as he was at the moment. “I think it means the bet is canceled. But we shall have to see what the spell thinks.”
“There are many things that could explain this,” Yolanda said, in a low, curiously happy voice. “That Draco and I were acting parts, for example. You must have heard the part of the conversation where Draco speaks about turning you into a character in his stories. Why punish me, since I have found a substitute, and not him, for having the gall to speak of doing that?”
Draco held his breath. It was possible that Potter might believe her, or at least believe that Draco had turned traitor to his promise not to write books about Potter, especially since Potter didn’t have all that much reason to trust him yet.
But, maybe because he was used to dealing with criminals who would tell desperate lies to save themselves, Potter didn’t react to what she said except to take a few steps forwards and say, “I know what I heard. I know that you’ve been tormenting me long before the idea occurred to Malfoy to write about me.” He paused and stared hard at Yolanda. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, as though he thought that gentleness could persuade her not to act like a fool. “It’s not too late. Surrender now, and I can arrest you and take you to the Ministry for them to deal with.”
Yolanda smiled and didn’t stop toying with the ornament about her neck. “How does it feel, to know that you can see the world of the dead and it is no illusion? Perhaps you are not mad, but you are different from the rest of the wizarding world and always will be. I can hardly think they would forgive it, did they know.”
“It’s over,” Potter said. “You can’t alter me from my course, and I won’t let you hurt Draco any longer.” Draco would have danced in place on hearing his first name from Potter’s lips if not for the bonds. “Surrender, and let it be the end for you, as well. Don’t court your fate.”
Yolanda stepped closer to him, eyes bright. By now, silver lights were coruscating around her fingers, and her hand moved faster and faster across the surface of the ornament. “I am an artist, Potter,” she said. “You should have heard and understood that if you understood any of our conversation at all. You cannot cause me to fear you in the same way that you cause criminals to fear you, because I am not consumed by guilt.”
Potter watched her with a cool, remote gaze for a minute, then lowered his head. Draco could see that his coolness was gone, replaced by a terrible sadness.
Do something! Draco wanted to scream at him. Do you want Yolanda blinding us or making us forget what’s happened or doing something else equally heinous because you couldn’t be bothered to fight her?
But another realization made him bite his lip and keep silent. Even though he couldn’t have a clue what Yolanda’s weapon did, Potter wasn’t afraid. That must mean he had another plan in waiting. Draco knew that Potter was often reckless, but he wasn’t reckless with the lives of others. While Draco was in the room, he wouldn’t give Yolanda more chances than she deserved.
As Yolanda started spouting off some other nonsense about art that Draco didn’t bother to listen to, he saw that Potter’s eyes were fastened on her hands. Draco approved. He should be looking at the part of her that was closest to the dangerous weapon.
But then Potter looked at the floor, and he winced and shut his eyes. Incredulous that he would give Yolanda an opening like that, Draco looked at the floor, too, but saw nothing there save Yolanda’s shadow.
Potter’s words when they had sat in his tower and Potter confessed the secret behind the letters rushed back to him.
I see grey outlines flickering around people’s hands when they’ve committed a murder. I see a grey aura replace their shadows when they’re on the verge of death themselves.
No wonder he isn’t frightened, Draco thought, dazed, and then Yolanda’s voice rose in a shout and a great curling blue-white storm of magic rushed out of her ornament.
At the same time, Potter lifted his head and spread his hands and said, in a flat, uninflected voice, “Do what you must.”
Grey shapes began to step out of the hole in the air that Potter had traveled through. At least, Draco assumed they were grey; after one attempt to look at them, his eyes rebelled as they had when Yolanda hit him with her weapon in the Hog’s Head, and he had to look away with his stomach swimming. But they were vaguely human-shaped, and they walked past Potter, who stood there with his hands still extended and an absolutely miserable expression on his face, and towards Yolanda.
The blue-white magic hit them and simply vanished. Draco shivered. That was probably magic meant to hurt the living.
Yolanda backed away from the dead, her arms lifted as if she could hold them back that way. Another weapon went up, creating a flickering golden circle around her left hand. Draco had to fight and blink hard as it blinded him; when he could see again, a smoking ring had dropped from Yolanda’s finger to lie useless on the floor, and the dead were still advancing on her.
They trapped her against the far wall and surrounded her.
Draco couldn’t see exactly what happened next. The dead were too hard to look at, and Yolanda seemed to be changing in color to match them, gold and blue running out of her eyes and clothes like a sloppy dye job. But she did make a deep sucking noise, once, as if she were struggling to breathe comfortably in cold air.
Potter bowed his head further, and then dropped his hands. “You can go,” he said. “Take her home.”
The dead turned and flowed back around him to the hole in the air. Draco didn’t try to watch them go. He kept his eyes on Potter instead, who looked nearly as grey as they did, and exhausted, and sorrowful.
And with his eyes full of something that was probably self-loathing.
Potter brought his hands together, staring intently at the hole. It closed, and Potter sagged as though someone had cut off his access to a crutch that had been holding him up. Then he turned, his head drooping slightly, and staggered over to Draco. By the time he reached the white basin, he was walking more or less normally again, but he didn’t look Draco in the face as he destroyed the frame and set him down.
Draco groaned in relief as the bonds fell away from his limbs, and then nearly fell. He’d been bound in an awkward position so long he didn’t think it was surprising that he couldn’t stand on his own right away. Potter caught him and murmured soothing sounds into his ear while he tapped his wand here and there on Draco’s arms and legs, easing the blood flow and healing some of the pain that had crept into them.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be here earlier,” he whispered. “I saw a man with grey on his hands on the way to the Hog’s Head, and I had to follow him and stop the second murder that he was about to commit. I did hear the conversation, and then the only way I could get past Timpany’s wards was to travel through the world of the dead.” He stopped for a moment, as if hearing the words spoken aloud made him hate himself more than ever. Then he swallowed and continued. “I’m sorry you had to endure what you did.”
“I’ll accept that apology, since it’s more than I’ll ever get from her.” Draco kept one elbow on Potter’s shoulder as he hopped gingerly in a circle and turned around to face Potter again. Potter tried to look away; Draco jabbed at his neck so that those green eyes, startled and indignant, would look at him again. “You can do more than just seeing the world of the dead, can’t you?” Draco asked softly.
Potter winced. “Yes,” he said in a muffled voice. “That’s the part I try not to think about, so I have no idea if Timpany ever discovered it. I can travel through their world if I need to and-and ask them to claim someone who’s about to die.” He shook his head. “Of course, I have to wonder whether what caused those people to die was the fact that I sent the dead to claim them.”
“I don’t see why you have to wonder about that,” Draco said firmly. “It sounds like the kind of philosophical conundrum that would drive you mad more efficiently than Yolanda’s letters would. She also could have died because of her own magic, and she would certainly have killed us. We have no idea what that weapon of hers was meant to do. Now, I think the spell considers the bet forfeited by both parties, or one of us would have started itching by now. But I’m the one who actually showed up to the Hog’s Head. So I claim your indulgence for an evening of conversation, which ought to include those things you’ve been keeping from me.”
Potter raised a hand and trailed his fingers gently around the outline of Draco’s eye. “Yes,” he whispered. “All right.”
Draco turned his head and let himself kiss delicately at Potter’s fingers. “Can you undo the wards from inside the house so that we can Apparate out? I don’t fancy walking through the world of the dead to leave.”
Potter’s arm tightened around his waist. “Yes,” he said again. He began to sketch his wand through the motions of the spells that would remove the wards.
Maybe he should have kept silent, but Draco’s curiosity still pushed him. “What are you going to tell the Aurors about Timpany?”
Potter paused to say in a low voice, “I don’t know,” before he returned to his work.
After that, Draco was quite content to lean on him and be Apparated out. He was the author, after all, not the hero.
Chapter Eleven.