Chapter Twenty of 'An Alchemical Discontent'- In the Shadow
Thank you again for all the reviews!
This is the last chapter of An Alchemical Discontent. There will be a third story in the series, A More Worldly Man, which will start being posted in about a week. Thank you to everyone who’s read along thus far.
Chapter Twenty-In the Shadow
Draco shivered as he watched Harry step through the door. He actually felt him before he saw him; the air seemed to become thick and clogged, as if he were trying to breathe smoke. He coughed once, then flinched, wondering if that would draw Daphne’s attention to him.
But Daphne was entirely focused on the door. She took a single step forwards and then moved her wand in a lazy pattern. Eye-hurting lines of yellow light snapped out from the walls, each the length and sharpness of a large knife. They didn’t go near Harry yet, but Draco shuddered at the thought of what they might do.
“So long I’ve waited for this,” Daphne said. “I’ve had some trouble in understanding what Draco saw in you, but at last, at last, it doesn’t matter. When you die, that will kill the part of him that tried to resist me.”
Harry said nothing. Draco craned his neck to the side, wishing impatiently that Daphne did not stand in the way and would actually allow him to see. Harry’s power was all very well, but nothing could match the sight of the figure he would make-surely even better than the figure in Draco’s mind.
When he finally caught a glimpse of him, Draco felt a small thrill travel through his gut. Harry was standing with his arms folded, his face hard and expressionless, except for his eyes, which were fastened on the wires encircling Draco’s limbs.
“Handsome, isn’t he?” Daphne murmured, a low tone of laughter in her voice. “And I’ve gone further than you have with him. I’ve seen him naked, which you haven’t yet. I’ve searched his mind. There is a great deal of vague yearning there, but nothing specific. Strange. If you really wanted him, do you think you could have waited?”
Harry didn’t say anything, and didn’t move, either. Draco watched the way his eyes lingered on the places where wires had cut into his flesh, raising ridges of wounds and bringing out lines of blood. Harry’s eyes half-lidded, but the look in them was not one of sexual pleasure. Draco wasn’t entirely certain what it was. It was the only visible change in Harry’s face as the power in the room grew thicker, though, so Draco knew it must be important.
“You are less reactive than Draco is,” Daphne said under her breath, moving closer and closer to Harry all the while. The jagged points of light projecting from the walls twitched and swayed. Draco imagined them all piercing Harry’s body and dragging his guts out through a dozen belly wounds, and had to force himself to stay still. “How strange. Since he is so pale and calm himself, I imagined he would want a passionate lover. But you have been taking a potion that suppresses most of your strong emotions for the last six years. So perhaps you will not be that enjoyable a kill after all. A disappointment.” She sighed on the last words.
Harry still didn’t say anything. Draco licked his lips and tried not to stare in too much anxiety. Had Daphne used some sort of spell on him, one Draco hadn’t recognized and hadn’t seen her incant? Was she making him into a victim before she killed him, just to make the blow that much crueler for Draco?
Then Draco caught sight of something that reassured him. Harry’s fingers were moving slowly in and out of a clenched position, as if he felt the need to scrape them regularly against his palms. And a faint tremor ran through his body.
What will he do? Draco didn’t know, but suddenly the magic building up in the room felt like the most delicious-and dangerous-promise.
“No response even now.” Daphne bowed her head in mock sorrow, her blonde hair sliding along her neck. Draco could make out an expanse of fair skin, but it was insipid next to Harry’s darker complexion. Why had he ever thought her beautiful enough to be attractive, let alone to go to bed with? “Very well. I suppose that I must test the first and simplest of my traps and see what happens.”
She flicked her wand. The knives of yellow light left the walls and flew straight towards Harry.
Draco screamed; he knew he did, though his throat seemed to clamp around silence instead of sound. For too long a time, a deadly time, Harry stood there, staring at Draco, and made no effort to defend himself.
Then the invisible smoke cloud of magic in the room drifted lower and gathered more thickly around Draco, until he struggled not to black out. His body felt it would be the only possible surrender to such power, and Draco had to convince it that he didn’t want to surrender to such power; he wanted to watch Harry survive.
When he could see again, the knives of yellow light had simply vanished. Harry’s magic had put them out, or swallowed them. At the least, he had no mark on his skin. Draco began to breathe again, and compose a speech in his head he would use after they got out of here. It concerned the benefits of not frightening your boyfriend to death when you were supposed to be rescuing him.
A moment went by in which Daphne stared at Harry with her lips slightly parted and Harry looked back at her-finally at her instead of Draco, which Draco thought was probably an improvement but resented nonetheless.
“Why,” said Daphne, voice as soft and indignant as though someone had lied to her, “you’re unusual.”
And then Harry moved.
*
The pain inflicted on Draco had been the center of his world for so many moments that he had begun to think he would not be able to move beyond it no matter what happened. He could only stare at the welts Draco was marked with and the blood rising from the cruel manner in which he was bound, and think of the worse he had probably endured. The desires to do conflicting things-fall to his knees and scream about it and rush to Draco to reassure him-warred so strongly in his mind that he could not react.
And then Greengrass set her magic on him, and his attention shifted to her. He dismissed the spells she had used almost without realizing what he was doing. They were simply things which existed and had to die, in the same way that he would have wanted a gnat to stop stinging him.
And then he realized she had been responsible for what Draco had suffered.
And she had spoken of Draco as if-as if they had been intimate in bed like lovers, as if this had been something less than rape.
And his soul exploded.
His magic was already flowing free from him. Now his rage joined it, rapidly growing, twining around the magic like a trained vine around a trellis. His wand was in his hand, but he didn’t remember drawing it. His breath was rushing in his ears, horrible and harsh and fast.
Everything was suddenly happening very fast, at least inwardly. The steps he took across the floor seemed slow, and so did the way that Greengrass’s wand rose. He had time for everything in the world.
Even though the only thing he could actually do was drown in the maelstrom consuming him.
For a moment, the thought of Ginny flickered across his mind like a prophecy, and then it drowned, too. Harry laughed. He heard himself do it as if someone else had commanded him to under Imperius. He was thick in the midst of his own emotions, and letting them come forth and combine in the way they had only once before was as good as being drugged.
He laughed and said something about Greengrass that he could never remember afterwards, and which he would not ask about. The rage went on increasing, and racing into it was the jealousy combined with the thought of her fucking Draco, of understanding Draco better than he did, body and soul. It was not just about her taking him to bed. She had hurt Draco, she had tattered Draco’s memories, she had made part of Draco’s life in the last few weeks center on her to the extent that Harry had less of a place in Draco’s attention than he might have had. That was not to be borne.
He felt something shatter inside him, but was not sure what it was. One of the chains he had been keeping on his darker self, perhaps.
And then there was the fact that Draco was naked-or perhaps not entirely so, he could have been wearing a scrap of small cloth somewhere, but Harry had not been in the mood to notice such things and so he did not. He had been bare enough for Harry to make out every single hideous coil of wire cutting into him, at least. That brought the lust out of its long hibernation, roaring like a winter-hungry bear.
The lust, the rage, the jealousy, twined together with the magic, and Harry felt as if he were in the middle of a long, slow volcanic eruption, which would only become real to other people when it hurled flaming rock on them.
Daphne cast a curse. It tore past him and cut a shallow, stinging wound into the side of his cheek. Probably it had been intended to do something much worse, but his magic had stopped it before the spell got that far.
And the eruption arrived.
Harry knew he was screaming, but he could not tell if the sound held any words. It did not matter if it did. He was drowning again, and this time he gave himself up to it joyously.
*
Every light in the room went out.
Draco went taut in his bonds, then winced as they sliced into him. He had promised himself he wasn’t going to tense up, and not only because he didn’t want to give Daphne the satisfaction of seeing him affected.
But he really couldn’t see. The smoke of Harry’s magic seemed to have become real after all, and the blinding darkness of it was worse than he could have imagined. Draco shivered. He could feel power pressing against his neck, his cheek, his eyes. He strained his vision into it, trying to make out a glimpse of Harry, nearly ready to call out and perhaps reveal his position to Daphne in doing so.
Then a weird light began to glow along the walls. It was pale blue as the heart of a flame, but colder by far than that; Draco felt a coil of it start by his feet, and flinched from the frost of it. Then he stared harder as he noticed it was his shadow burning. A perfect dusky replica of himself lay on the floor and shivered back and forth with the heartbeats of the light; it was edged with the fire that it itself bore.
Draco had never heard of magic like this. That fact alone made his breath come shorter and his head swim with respect and fear. He had studied widely in the Dark Arts as well as in Potions, and this was surely Dark magic. He ought to have recognized what it was akin to if he didn’t know the spell that caused it.
But he didn’t. And when he lifted his eyes, he saw that Daphne did not know, either. But her expression was fascinated.
She stood by the most distant wall of the room from him, not far from the mirror. Her eyes were on the shadows of the chairs, the mirror, the bed in the corner of the chamber, herself. Wherever she looked, there was something that seemed to catch her attention, her interest. Now she was touching the mirror and making small cooing noises at it, as if cold blue fire on glass were an interesting special effect from Muggle movies and not the sign of a deadly enemy.
But where was Harry?
Draco looked at once in several different directions, but couldn’t spot him. He shivered then, remembering what Harry had told him about the power that had consumed him when he scared the she-Weasel, apparently for life. Had it been too much for him? Had it consumed him?
The desolation that washed over him at the thought was stronger than any emotion he had ever felt. Draco closed his eyes so that he would at least not shed tears.
And then he heard a soft sound of surprise from Daphne, and opened his eyes, hoping against hope that it would reveal Harry’s presence.
He frowned. The air around Daphne glowed in an irregular but relatively semi-circular pattern that he had learned to recognize. It was her magical aura. In her case, it shone gold and deep green, signs of power and a developed area of magic that bordered on Dark Arts.
The pattern grew brighter and brighter. Daphne regarded it with that same fascinated look in her eyes. Draco squinted, determined to see what was going on even as the light grew too brilliant to comfortably watch through.
And then it flared, and then Daphne screamed.
The sound was like someone suddenly being impaled with a meat-hook through the guts, Draco thought, tingling with awe and fear and other emotions that moved too deeply and swiftly, like the rushing current of an icy river, for him to understand. The light of the aura was dimming now. He leaned forwards, ignoring the way that more runnels of blood worked their way down his legs and arms, needing to see.
Daphne’s magical aura was diminishing, little by little, like a waning moon. And Daphne was screaming all the while, fists pressed to her temples, body writhing, as if she were being eaten alive.
She’s not being eaten alive, Draco suddenly realized, as he watched a bite vanish from her aura. Her magic is.
Harry’s here. He is the darkness itself.
Draco became aware only a moment later that his teeth were chattering hard enough to make him bite his tongue. He squirmed and shivered, fine tremors racing through his body, as they had begun to do through Harry just before he exploded at Daphne. Excitement swept through him, and then terror, and then excitement again.
He had not been lying when he told Harry that he liked powerful, dangerous lovers. He had simply never been in contact with someone who might eat him before. Even the Dark Lord, savage though he had been, had not had that power.
And what would happen if Harry couldn’t control himself this time, the way that he had with Weasley? What would happen if he turned on Draco as the source of his jealousy? If Harry thought he deserved punishment for letting Daphne touch him?
At that moment, Draco thought he would have surrendered without fuss. The magic in the room, in the dancing blue flames and in the way Daphne writhed and screamed, her torment paying back his in full measure, was too overwhelming. He wanted to be in contact with it more than he wanted to flee.
*
It was-like nothing had been.
Harry felt a violent satisfaction as he ate Greengrass’s magic. He had always been starving. He had never known what food could settle him. He consumed, and was happy. There was nothing to life but eating.
She had made him suffer. She had made Draco suffer more. There was a debt to be repaid. That was righteous and good. Sometimes Harry had been uneasy with thoughts of vengeance, but there could be no lack of ease in this. He was punishing her, and she had more than earned the punishment.
He pushed. He licked teasingly at her magic before he bit down, and knew that she suffered nearly as much from the teasing as she did from the fierce bites. Down and down and down he pushed, closer to her magical core, trimming away the gristle and the fat that the outer layers of her aura represented, to get closer to the meat.
He was hungry.
When the hunger and the satisfaction had grown to become more than the whole of his world, he became aware of a vague nagging thought. The power that he swallowed like this would not go to sustain him. He had not increased in power after he nibbled away a bit of Ginny’s. He had simply made it vanish, and the same thing would happen now, no matter how much he wished that he could make Greengrass suffer by seeing her strength made part of him.
Harry pushed forwards, eating, with a shrug that caused the shadows in the room to stir and dance like the lights of a dipped candelabra. That did not signify. He had to make her suffer as he could, and not wish for the impossible.
But as the satisfaction deepened, as he swallowed and swallowed the magic, as he took the worst revenge he could think of-he would leave her a Squib-something else in him shifted and changed. It was as if she were swallowing his rage, his lust, his jealousy, the deadly combination that had forced him into this action in the first place. Harry frowned, but went on eating; what else could he do but that? Nothing had occurred to him yet that would make him stop.
And then his conscience awoke.
He had never thought he would keep his promise to annihilate Greengrass. That had been the hasty vow of a moment. And he was a Gryffindor. Still pure of motive when he could be. He would have-should have-still preferred prison for Greengrass, the comforting regularity and mechanical nature of a trial.
Not this. He should not have taken justice into his own hands. He didn’t know whose magic he was eating. What if he had harmed Draco? What if he had driven Greengrass mad? What if-
If he had made her a Squib-
The fate that had sounded only just and right a moment before made him want to scream now. Harry flung himself away from Greengrass, away from the maelstrom of power dragging on him. It had not consumed his own magic, but now he felt as if it were consuming his soul.
He was crying. He knew that as he came back to himself and fell to his knees in the middle of a room that suddenly seemed much brighter. When he lifted his head, blinking, he saw Greengrass slumped against the wall next to a mirror, her hands resting in her lap and her head bowed. He concentrated, trying to make out any trace of her magical aura.
None. It was all gone.
Harry folded his arms around his head and whimpered softly. What was worse than the fact that he had done it was his lack of guilt. He knew he should not have consumed her magic, but he could not bring himself to regret it.
But there was one thing worse still.
Shivering, Harry turned and drew his wand to cut Draco’s bonds, dreading the sight of his eyes.
*
Really, Gryffindor morals show up at the most inconvenient times, Draco thought. The wires had fallen off his arms and legs, but he couldn’t watch them go, or rejoice in the fact that he was nearly naked in front of Harry for the first time. He had seen the tears in Harry’s eyes, the pallor of his face, and the twitching of his throat, as if he were about to sick up.
And Draco knew exactly what was causing it: the punishment of Daphne. The lovely punishment of Daphne, which Draco would lie awake many nights of his life thinking about, and which would make him fall asleep with a smile on his face.
But that line of argument would not convince Harry. He would be sure that Draco was afraid of him, or that Draco should be, or that he could have gone too far and hurt Draco, or that he had done something wrong and should be ashamed.
Or, more probably, all of those at once, Draco thought, and came forwards to take the hawthorn wand that Harry offered him. He spelled some clothes onto himself and eased the pain of his wounds, and then knelt down in front of Harry.
Wonderful, exasperating Harry, the man who would become his boyfriend and his lover-but only after a courtship, of course. Draco was ready to be cherished and protected, healed and wooed. It had been a long time since he’d experienced even one of those luxuries, and never with someone whom he trusted as much as he trusted Harry. It would be nice to feel he could relax for once in his life, and accept those gestures wholeheartedly.
Surely he could repay Harry in advance by giving him what he needed.
“That was almost the same thing you did to Weasley?” he asked softly. “I remember that you told me about the way your magic transformed your shadow.”
Harry nodded. “But I didn’t eat her magic,” he whispered. “Greengrass is a Squib now.”
“Thank you,” Draco said, and put his arms around Harry’s neck, and kissed him softly, a chaste press of lips.
Harry stared at him when he drew back from the kiss. He looked stupefied. Draco would have liked to think it was from his excellent seduction skills, but he knew that look. Harry could not believe Draco was not afraid of him.
“Why-“
“Her magic was the thing I feared about her,” Draco whispered. “The way she could torture me, the way she could peer into my mind. She’ll be helpless to do that now, and I know it.” He dragged air into his lungs, as if more frightened than he actually was. “That was the only way I could ever feel safe.”
And it worked. Draco watched Harry’s eyes lighten with relief and eager need to believe what Draco was saying. Draco kept his face as open and unguarded as he could, letting Harry take the truth from it.
He did not expect the crushing kiss that followed a moment later, made of colliding teeth and mashing lips and furiously licking tongues. Draco found himself falling backwards for a moment; then Harry caught and supported his head, and continued kissing him with fierce, eager abandonment.
Draco felt delight and relief move through him as powerfully as Harry’s magic had moved through the room a few moments before. He believes it. He can accept what he did, because he knows that I’m not afraid of him, and because he can see it as something he did for me.
Harry used the kiss to keep proving that simple truth over and over again for long minutes, not that Draco minded. Then he pulled back and turned to look at Greengrass, his eyes hooded.
“We’ll have to explain this,” he murmured, sounding more like the collected, planning Harry Draco had known for the past few months.
“We will,” Draco said, and tightened his hold on Harry’s shoulders. The wounds he hadn’t been able to heal were making themselves known again, but he had to say this before he went to hospital and a wall of Healers separated him from Harry. “But whatever lies we tell, or truths if that’s really necessary, we’ll do it together. Won’t we?” His voice sharpened with anxiety on the last few words, even though he told himself to keep calm.
Harry turned and stared at him. The lack of expression reminded Draco of the way he had looked when he came into the room. Draco waited, dulling his own fear, trying to trust.
And then Harry gave him a slow smile, and pulled Draco forwards enough that their foreheads rested together. If Draco concentrated, he thought he could make out the roughness of Harry’s scar pressing sweetly against his own unmarked skin.
“Yes,” Harry said, and his unwavering voice made it truth. “We will.”
The End.
First chapter of the sequel.