Chapter Five of 'A Reckless Frame of Mind'- The Core of the Soul
Chapter Four.
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Chapter Five-The Core of the Soul
Draco swam on across blue expanses and green ones, the colors varying only slightly, as though, once Harry had decided on these hues for his soul, he didn’t ever want to choose others.
Draco shook his head slightly. He was being nonsensical; he knew that no one really chose the colors of his soul. But he had expected to find signs of irrationality before now. Why else would someone lie to his friends for a year and then try to kill himself, but because he was insane? No other explanation made sense.
He halted for a moment, thinking. Of course, Harry could resemble a witch he’d treated a few months ago, who had not only become convinced that she was persecuted by invisible enemies, but also that they’d planted monitoring devices in her very soul. She’d turned her irrationality inside out, making it nearly invisible, along with attempting to think different thoughts than what really occupied her head so as to fool anyone who might be reading her mind. It had been a tangled and difficult case, but once Draco figured out what she had done, he’d spotted the turtle-shaped dome in the core of her soul and worked his way in through a chink.
He looked around now for a sign of a similar dome in Harry, but couldn’t spot it. Of course, he was not yet near the core. Perhaps he should head in that direction.
He closed his eyes, to shut out the beauty that was distracting him, and cocked his head. Yes, a faint vibration came from the direction that, for the sake of convenience, he was choosing to call left. He paddled towards it, only opening his eyes now and then, to make sure he wasn’t passing a jagged flaw that could be the source of Harry’s insanity.
*
Harry shifted uneasily on the bed. He had tried to make his plans and ignore Malfoy’s motionless body as much as possible, but it was getting hard. For one thing, he had no idea if the curse had managed to stop Malfoy or not. Would he open his eyes and exclaim in disgust over the state of Harry’s soul if it had? Maybe, but maybe he would also keep swimming, battling against the current of foulness. He was stubborn that way.
But there was something else than the passage of time which irritated his mind until it felt as if soap had been rubbed against his thoughts. He didn’t like Malfoy being-well, in him like that. He wouldn’t see anything real, not with the curse coiling around Harry’s secrets like a guardian snake, but he might see other things. Even if they were foul and distorted beyond recognition, they were his. Harry hadn’t invited Ron or Hermione into his soul. He hardly saw why the first intruder should be someone he’d hated for sixteen years.
He-
Harry blinked and frowned at the ceiling, playing for anyone who happened to peer through the window and watch him.
He had never thought about it before, but at some point his determination to depend on himself had changed. He now sincerely hoped that someone else didn’t discover the truth in time to stop him before he fled the wizarding world.
His frown deepened as he wondered whether this could be the Cassandra Curse influencing him, in turn. He didn’t think so, but then, would he really know? None of the books he’d managed to read said that it could change the victim’s own perceptions about himself, but then, most of the books agreed that it was a legend.
Think about this too much and you really will go mad, he told himself. You’ve been so alone, the only one in the world who believes your version of events. Start thinking that other people have a point or are right about you, and you’ll start disbelieving in the existence of the curse next.
Harry wiped a hand across his mouth. No, he would accept this new thought as real and coming from himself.
What did it mean, that he didn’t want anyone else to find out?
Harry gave an impatient shrug. Just that I’m tired of living like this, and the one concrete step I can take to better affairs is to flee. No one managed to help me in all the months before; no one should try to “help” me now, and only end up hindering my recovery. I don’t need Malfoy or anyone else who thinks this is a good idea. I don’t want help.
Really, he thought, as his heartbeat slowed down, he was only living with reality. There was no way to break the curse without identifying the caster, and the books he’d consulted said that the caster could have used the spell anywhere up to twelve hours before Harry felt the first effects. He’d been in the Ministry then, surrounded by nearly a thousand witches and wizards. He would never know.
Far better to concentrate on rescuing himself, instead of brooding about what would follow if the impossible should happen.
He didn’t want to be helped.
He held up a map of St. Mungo’s in front of his mind’s eye instead, and forced himself to concentrate on it.
*
Draco shivered as he flowed over one blue arc. He was nearly to the core, now, and he should be able to see in moments if Harry had indeed protected his insanity with a clear cover of sanity and reason.
Except-
He couldn’t see the core.
Draco halted, staring. He’d never faced anything like what confronted him now. A brooding darkness, shaped like a hurricane, it whipped searching arms out along the blue-green jeweled windows and then drew them back again. It breathed. Draco had no idea what part of Harry’s mental defenses could have produced it.
He also had no idea how to get through it.
He aimed his wand at the thing, and the black tendrils promptly aimed at him. He lowered his wand and moved away, and they went back to ignoring him, though Draco trusted the sensation about as much as he would have trusted the dozing of a crocodile. No, it knew who and where he was. The only thing he might be certain of was that it would hold off on attacking him if he held off on attacking it.
He swam in a slow circle around the edge, then tried to dive beneath it. It didn’t work. The core of Harry’s soul, as with every other soul Draco had visited, sat like a jeweled egg in a place where the planes of glassy colors bent together. Eventually, the arcs across which one could travel thinned, and any nearer would bring him within reach of the dark thing’s outer edges. Draco hovered, and thought some more.
Possibly the madness had sunken so deep into Harry’s mind that he was denying it, not to outside observers, as the paranoid witch had done, but to himself. He would rather think himself evil than insane.
But Draco did not like the theory. It did not fit with the way Harry had acted since he came to St. Mungo’s. Sarcastic, yes; cynical, yes. And there was something about him that effortlessly irritated Draco, as there always had been. But he had not been violent, and Draco still could not picture him committing an evil act simply to revel in it.
No, something else had happened here, something new in his entire experience as a Psyche-Diver.
And he did not yet know what it was.
Perhaps he should return to the surface and ask Harry. He would get only lies in return, but he could still watch his face and his gestures for clues. He could not conceal himself in everything, not from one so skilled in interpretation, and especially Potter-interpretation, as Draco was.
He cast Finite Incantantem, and rose.
*
Harry felt a spasm of pure relief when the motionless Malfoy across from him twitched and then resumed its life. He watched with narrowed eyes for a moment as the other man jerked and put a hand to his forehead, but there was no comprehension in the pale eyes that peered at him a moment later. If anything, Harry thought, the dislike had increased.
I’m safe. He can’t hold anything over me.
“Rather an interesting expedition, Potter,” Malfoy said coolly. “There is less wrong with your soul than I would have suspected, given the condition of your behavior.” For long moments, he twirled his wand through his fingers, and Harry wondered what emotions that signified. Then he told himself it didn’t matter. Malfoy was being paid-quite a hefty sum from Hermione, if he had understood the paperwork correctly-to understand him, not the other way around.
Harry just sat on the bed and stared at him. He didn’t feel like talking. Malfoy would interpret the expression of relief on his face viciously, anyway. The curse had already flickered darkly around his temples.
“Do you know what a soul looks like?” Malfoy asked a moment later, his tone gone warmer, almost conversational.
A Slytherin trick. Harry shook his head.
A faint frown marred Malfoy’s forehead at that; he was probably trying to determine how Harry could possibly know anything about the area of his own expertise. It smoothed out a moment later, though. If Harry knew the operations of the curse, Malfoy had managed to interpret the headshake as not a deceptive denial of knowledge but a simple refusal to care about what he said.
“Listen to me, then, Potter,” Malfoy said, and his voice had acquired more of the warmth. Does he really think I’ll be charmed into listening to him, when I know him so well? Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing. “They’re gorgeous.”
Harry bit his lip again, this time to keep from laughing at Malfoy’s choice of adjective. He really was a ponce.
The git didn’t seem to notice, or else decided to ignore it. He leaned back in his chair and directed his own gaze at the ceiling. The wand had stopped spinning through his fingers and now simply rested on one knee, since he had crossed his legs as if that would conceal his impatience. Harry waited, rasping his fingers through the bed linens in a rhythm he knew would become sharply annoying in a few moments.
“They’re beautiful,” Malfoy whispered, and Harry might have interrupted to complain that he was repeating himself, but Malfoy’s voice had already surged on, crushing any possible interjection like an ocean wave washing over a rock. “They resemble stained glass windows more than anything else. The colors are radiant, as if lit from behind by full sunlight. They’re everywhere around you, except the very small space in the middle, where you create a void that preserves your own sanity. And yet…the temptation is there to give in and join with the other person’s soul, even though you would cease to exist in any recognizable form. So beautiful, Potter. It seems wrong to be apart from it, the way it seems wrong to be indoors on a morning when the sun is just rising.”
Malfoy goes for sunrise walks? Harry had always pictured him as the type who stayed indoors as much as possible, shuddering when someone else mentioned insects, and calling for house-elves the moment a visitor departed, so that they might get rid of the stray dust and lint the other wizard’s robes had collected.
The prat was still speaking, and Harry reluctantly found himself drawn in. It was so long since anyone had talked to or in front of him like this, obviously unconcerned with what lies he might tell next, involved in their own rapture of experience. And this was something he understood better than he’d ever understood Hermione’s flights of fancy when she spoke about her research.
“Your soul is like an ocean. Blue and green, but it never gets darker; it’s all surface everywhere, and purest, most brilliant day.” Malfoy looked at him suddenly, and Harry blinked, taken aback. The expression on his rival’s face was-well, almost fond. “There are flaws, of course, as with everyone, but far fewer than I would have expected of someone like you. Small chips of gold and red and black and purple, that’s all.” He leaned forwards in the chair, and it had been so long since anyone had done this that Harry didn’t have a chance to react before Malfoy’s hand brushed his cheek.
Oh, God, it felt warm. The people who had touched him in the last year had done it to compel or hurt. This was gentle. Harry closed his eyes and shivered, fighting the temptation to turn and lean desperately against that palm. For just a moment, he wanted to talk, to tell Malfoy the truth openly and fully, in the desperate hope that he would understand.
And then he remembered exactly who the fingers sliding down to cup his jaw belonged to-the one person who wouldn’t have cared what he had to say even if his words could somehow make it through the curse.
He clenched his teeth and would have drawn away, but Malfoy had hold of his chin now, and was turning his face back and forth. Harry was ashamed to admit how much he needed the contact, but he did.
A second, or a few. He would wait just a few seconds more, and then he would draw away. It didn’t matter if he felt good. He had resigned himself to going down his road alone, and the curse made it necessary. He’d resume his tough mask and be the lone adventurer again.
In a few seconds.
*
Draco hadn’t expected his talking to Potter like this to work. Hardly anyone who hadn’t been in a soul was capable of understanding what a Psyche-Diver saw. More, hardly anyone cared. Some people were reluctantly fascinated by the pictures of their own souls, but they didn’t want to think about what their flaws meant, and even when they were sane enough to understand him, they arranged to “forget” what he’d told them.
But Potter had listened with his eyes opening wider, and when Draco had given in to his mingling of curiosity and appreciation for the man who contained such colors and reached out, he permitted the touch. Now he was turning his head back and forth slowly, his eyes shut, his breathing shallow, brushing as much of his skin as he could against Draco’s fingers.
Draco found his own breath quickening, though not quite to the pace of Potter’s. Potter wasn’t the most beautiful wizard he’d ever seen-that honor still belonged to Blaise Zabini-but with his eyes closed and his mouth tightened as though in pain, his neck arched in absolute surrender and his voice emerging only in small desperate whimpers, he was a temptation Draco didn’t think he could resist.
He brought his other hand into play, sliding it up and around Potter’s head into the hair at the back of his neck, just so that he could feel what the curls there were like.
For a moment, Potter froze at the sensation. Then he shivered. Then a sound that Draco would swear up and down was a moan emerged from his lips, and it seemed as if he would permit his head to loll back bonelessly and let the full weight of it rest in Draco’s hands. Draco surprised himself with how fiercely he wanted that to happen.
And then Potter seemed to remember their respective positions.
He jerked like a slug sprinkled with salt, and ripped his head out of Draco’s grasp with a speed that made Draco’s fingers sting. Moments later, he was sitting on the far edge of the bed, face closed, mouth worked up into a sneer.
But in the moments between, he’d worn the same expression of desperate loneliness Draco had spied through the window when his friends left.
Draco licked dry lips. His curiosity had increased again, to a physical ache like hunger. He wanted in. He wanted to know what Potter was feeling. He wanted to see Potter relax around him, even if it was unwillingly and simply because of the knowledge that he had nothing important left to hide from Draco.
Of course, the next words he spoke were another lie.
“I don’t want you to touch me like that again, Malfoy.”
Draco simply raised an eyebrow, and let the silence speak for him.
*
Harry’s skin still rippled with prickles of burning cold, and it clamored against his declaration. Yes, his body wanted that touch again. His body wanted any touch. He’d started dreaming about hugs and handclasps and the friendly kisses on the cheek that Hermione used to give him, and lovemaking had assumed almost sacred proportions in his mind since the last year.
But his mind made the words he spoke simple truth. He couldn’t afford to start thinking, like a complete idiot, that Malfoy had somehow done a turnaround and liked him now, just because he liked the colors of his soul. And he felt furious at the thought that he might let the prat manipulate him just for a minute or so of simple physical contact.
Malfoy seemed to think the silence he was letting repose between them now significant, and he went on staring into Harry’s eyes, trying to compel him to-some admission. Harry wouldn’t let it happen. He reached for cruel truths, which the curse would make Malfoy think were equally cruel lies.
“I’ve never thought about you once since Hogwarts, do you know that? If I was reminded of your existence, I would probably have said, ‘Oh, yes, that nasty ferret who let the Death Eaters into the school and nearly caused the deaths of three innocent people, how is he doing these days?’ I won’t think of you as anything else, it doesn’t matter what you do. You can tell me how beautiful my soul is, but that doesn’t mean I’ll change anything about myself for you. Your efforts to establish a bond, or whatever you’re doing, are doomed to failure.”
A high flush rose up Malfoy’s cheeks, and Harry clenched one hand in the bedclothes behind him in hope. When he was irritated, Malfoy didn’t think. The Cassandra Curse must not have distorted his soul in quite the way Harry wished it would, but poke Malfoy enough and he could make him forget about that.
*
Draco took several deep breaths. This was Harry Potter, and his scorn cut deeper than the scorn of the average wizard in the street would have, as always. Draco didn’t care what his colleagues thought of him. He’d spent the last five years building a career in defiance of all those who had hated him and didn’t want to see him succeed.
But he had a right to a place in Potter’s mind. He’d thought about him perforce, what with all those Daily Prophet articles to remind him, and the constant trumpeting of his name every time the anniversary of the Dark Lord’s defeat came around. It was only fair that Potter repay his regard. And he was lying, now, about how much he’d thought about Draco. It was probably constant.
Besides, the expression on his face when Draco touched him hadn’t been anything so uncomplicated as pleasure. It had been relief, relaxation, exaltation, as though Draco had come to release him from bondage. He’d probably longed for closer contact for years, but his pride had got in the way.
Draco reached out again now, towards Potter’s knee, simply to see what he would do.
Potter flinched, and slapped his hand away. Draco gave a thin, tight smile, even though his fingers stung again, and lowered his hand back to his side. Yes. Definitely fear.
“You do realize that I’m the only one here who has a say in what happens to you, Potter?” he asked. “On my word, they can release you or lock you up in the Janus Thickey ward for the rest of your life, where all the people are they couldn’t cure. Do you want to slap at me like a child, or are you going to cooperate like an adult?”
Potter snorted. “You won’t have a say what happens to me in the end, Malfoy. I’ve made plans that don’t include you.”
He’s afraid, and that’s a mask for bravado. Draco stood, never looking away from him. “There’s a darkness in the center of your soul, Potter, covering the core,” he said. “I wasn’t able to break it open today, but I will eventually. You would save yourself a lot of pain and trouble if you gave up now and told me what I wanted to know.”
“I already have,” said Potter, and now there was a glint of amusement in his eyes, damn him. “It’s not my fault you didn’t listen.”
Draco didn’t think he could spend another moment around him. He turned and glided to the door, stepping through it without a word. Then he went back to the office and placed his memories of Potter’s soul and the darkness there into a Pensieve, so he could study the hurricane for weaknesses he might have missed.
The hunger-like curiosity hadn’t gone away.
He was going to solve this. And it didn’t matter how long it took him. Potter would be his in the end, all his secrets known, all his peculiarities explained.
*
Harry took several deep breaths when Malfoy had left, and rubbed the bandages on his wrists. His thoughts were whirling, but he had finally managed to tame them into something like a semblance of order.
Fine. Malfoy was dangerous to him, more dangerous than he had initially suspected. He could cause reactions Harry had not been prepared for, and might enlist Harry’s desperation for touch-which was simply biological, and which he couldn’t ignore in the way he could ignore his loneliness-against him. Harry didn’t intend to slow down or hesitate against him, but he might do it anyway.
Step up his plans, then. Escape from St. Mungo’s as soon as possible. He already understood the wards.
He needed his wand.
Of course, fetching it too early would cause a massive fuss and an intense search of his rooms, and once he had it, he might as well leave. Besides, if he went for it too soon, he would probably grow careless.
But there was no reason not to conduct a test.
Harry nodded grimly. He would leave his rooms tomorrow night, as a test of the wards and his own ability to move around the hospital unnoticed, scout out the traps and alarms on the floors that separated the Nereus Norby ward from the entrance, and then return to his cell. A few days after that, he should be able to leave completely.
He couldn’t wait.
I really hate Malfoy.
Chapter 6.