The Second Hand Unwinds [WIP]



Author: michi_thekiller

Pairings and Main Characters: Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa

Summary: Harry finds himself being held captive as a prisoner of war, seven years after the war is over. Draco Malfoy is his very not-entirely-sane Keeper. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Featuring guest appearances by: Lucius, Narcissa, a cat named Church, and a very perverted house elf. Introducing, in its debut role: Stockholm Syndrome. A Humor/Horror/Romantic Comedy.

Rating: NC-17

Word Count: ~27,000

Warnings: Dark Humor, Mild Gore, Mild Torture, Mild Violence, Stockholm Syndrome

Genre: Horror, Humor, Mystery, Romance, Smut

Canon: Post-Hogwarts, EWE

Notes: All my love and thanks to the following heavenly creatures: To Huey, (phoenixacid), who is a horrible enabler, a neverending source of support, and more understanding than any of my many therapists. Who will always say, "You can do it, don't give up!" You make me want to sneak into your room at night and impregnate you with my love-spawn. To Mel (melusinahp), bestest beta, wildly inspiring, the spark that ignites my fire, whom I can trust to say, "This? This is not good enough." You make me want to make it better. Thank you, Mistress, may I please have another!




So when you wake up one morning with no recollection of the night before, with your hands chained above your head, in a bed you don’t know, in a room you’ve never seen before, you might say that it is time to re-evaluate the direction of your life.

Such is the predicament in which Harry Potter now finds himself. Only Harry Potter isn’t that type of person, the kind who needs to make such re-evaluations. He has a great job and a steady girlfriend, both of which will soon be upgraded; he’s up for a promotion at work, and the girlfriend is about to be promoted to fiancée. Some other healthy 24-year-old males might have used the fact that they have saved the world (on at least three separate occasions, although due to Ministry cover-up, only one and a half of these occasions were known by the public) to score some ladies.

After all, he has reached celebrity status of such godlike proportions that if he were found one morning passed out on the balcony of a Monte Carlo hotel along with two hookers and a suitcase full of blow, his adoring public would simply laugh and say, “well, boys will be boys.”

But no. Harry Potter does not have a single rapscallion-flavoured bone in his body. He is a loyal friend, a doting boyfriend, and an all-around stand-up bloke, which is all the more reason not to wake up chained to a stranger's bed.

At least he’s not naked.

His memories of the previous night are not hazy, but rather nonexistent. Nor can he really recall the night before last. Immediately he takes stock of his situation; the room is lit entirely by candles, although not very well – the sort of dim lighting that passes for “romantic ambiance” and is more often than not likely to cause one to trip over things and possibly end up with a concussion. The candles are a necessity, however, for there are no doors and no windows.

No escape.

Okay. A room with no exits – it could be a kinky sex dungeon, it could be an enchanted Room of Requirement deal, but more and more this seems like a fancy prison.

The furniture is sparse, as well, but what of it there is, it is all rich and ornately decorated. For one, the canopy bed on which he lies, has thick red velvet curtains and what appears to be a mahogany frame. Or rosewood. Or whatever. It’s not like Harry can really tell the difference; Ginny’s usually the one who cares about things like that.

The wallpaper is covered with an elaborate pattern, burgundy and rose and wine, dark wood panelling running along the sides. He has the vague feeling of being inside a velvet-lined shoebox; it’s a red room, like the kind designed to make one go mad.

It’s either a tawdry boudoir or the lair of a madman, then. He tests the chains again. No luck.

There is no use trying to call for help. That’s such a rookie FNB (Fuckin’ New Bloke) mistake that he’d be roasted at every Department Holiday party from now until Judgment Day. Rule number one, after all, is Scene Safety and all scenes are considered dangerous unless proven otherwise. He’s not ruling out the crazed possibly-drugged one-night stand theory, but chances are equally likely that his captor is a sadistic serial killer instead of a sexy blonde bird in delicate black lace lingerie. It’s quite a gamble, and so far? Today is not his lucky day.

After all, who carefully redresses a sex partner in such clean, crisp clothing? He knows for a fact that the shirt and trousers are not his. He doesn’t even want to wonder whether his underwear belongs to a stranger as well.

That is not something anyone should ever have to ponder.

Fortunately, he doesn’t have to lie there and wonder about anything for too long before a long line appears in the wall; a crack where there was no crack before, followed by the outline of a door. So perhaps he wasn’t Apparated here, although it wouldn’t make too much of a difference if he were. His fingers twitch, aching to reach for his wand...his wand...does he even have it?

And then for a moment everything in his body stops, from his lungs to his heart to the blood in his veins -- as the newly-formed door opens, and someone all-too familiar steps into the room.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s finally decided to rejoin the world of the living.”

Malfoy?”

“You were expecting someone else, perhaps?”

A serial killer or a sexy blonde in heels and a corset.

“Well...” Shut up, brain. “I mean, what the hell? Why am I here? Why are you here?”

Malfoy, whom he hasn’t seen in over seven years. Whose whole family manages to stay out of the society pages and off of the front page of the Prophet -- not counting the Trials, of course, but no one could avoid those.

He looks good. Much more like himself than he has since they were back in school together, back in sixth year, much better than when he’d seen him at the Trials, pale face smudged with shadows, jaw tight and set hard, as if it were carved out of stone. The Malfoy before him now has none of the haggard, haunted look so many war survivors do, his grey eyes sharp, outfit and hair impeccable, the same way it always used to be.

“If you mean ‘why are we here’ in the broad, philosophical sense of ‘what is the purpose of our existence,’ I’m afraid I don’t have much of an answer for you. However, I’ve a feeling that’s not quite what you mean.”

“What the hell am I doing chained up here and what do you have to do with it?”

“Ah, a much simpler, baser question, much like yourself,” Malfoy responds, with a subtle quirk of his lips. He pauses for a moment, and an inscrutable expression skitters across his face, so quick it’s almost as if it were just a trick of the flickering candlelight. “You really don’t remember anything?”

“No, I just enjoy asking questions and endlessly repeating myself. Now for the last time—“

“You’ve been critically injured. Don’t try to move too much. You’ll hurt yourself, and as much as I am an advocate of Potter-in -pain, if you burst your stitches open you’ll make a mess all over the bed.“

Harry tries to look down at his body and he can’t. His body, his injuries, it's all there, under the sheets, lurking like some sort of deep sea monster. “Stitches?”

“Yes, stitches, you know, that barbaric Muggle medical practice that uses little bits of thread attached to a needle to hold the edges of a wound together—“

“I have stitches?”

Malfoy looks at him, almost pityingly, and then speaks slowly, as if talking to a child. “What part of critically injured did you not understand? I tried to use small words.”

So after all these years the irritating presence hasn’t changed, at least. “Look, Malfoy. Could you stop being you for just a second? Just long enough to tell me what the hell’s going on? First of all, I know firsthand stitches don’t do shit for magical wounds; secondly, no mediwizard in their right mind is going to attempt Muggle stitches on a wound—“

Malfoy smiles back at him, serene and enigmatic. A smile like a Buddhist statue.

“Oh God,” Harry says, as his stomach lurches violently. “You stitched me up, didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t worry overmuch. I assure you, I did a beautiful job. I was forced to take up embroidery as a child, after all.”

“Oh no, you didn’t.”

“I know, I wouldn’t believe it, either, but I’ll have you know, it’s considered a very masculine pursuit. Surprisingly, it was Father’s idea; Mother was always worried about something about small children and sharp needles—“

“You know what I mean! What, is this some sick experiment for you? You better believe I’m going to be making a mess when the wound rejects them--“

“Calm yourself, Scarhead. These are modified magical stitches. You’d be amazed at what some unicorn sinew can do for you. I ought to write a book, really. 1001 Uses for a Dead Unicorn. Granted, I’m only up to 238, but I’m creative.”

Hearing creative uses for an ex-unicorn is not exactly Harry’s idea of a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Or evening. Or whatever. Neither is imagining Malfoy doing creative things with the deceased magical equine. Harry has been an Auror for seven years by now. He’s seen things. Horrible things. Things that change a man.

Basically, people are really, really sick.

“And you suddenly know how to magically modify stitches because....?”

“Obviously,” Malfoy says, completely matter-of-fact. “...I’m a genius.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “All right, Professor Brilliant. How was I injured?”

“It’s always me, me, me with you, isn’t it, Potter? Well, you were injured, of course, being idiotically suicidal, as always. You threw yourself headfirst into an altercation with some nasty D.Ea.R.” A thoughtful pause. “Or D.Ea.R.s if one prefers, grammatically speaking.”

“Deer?” Harry echoes. “You mean to tell me I need stitches because I fought a herd of deer? Were they at least evil deer? Or were they the normal kind?”

The idea of getting into a nearly-fatal fight with Bambi’s parents is obviously upsetting. There was the fact of his own father, after all. And then there was his mother. He supposes that this makes him Bambi and... “You know, I always thought that deer and I would get along.”

And Malfoy has to have drugged him, if he’s saying ridiculous things like this.

“Not deer, you idiot, D.Ea.R. Death Eaters Reborn.”

“Oh, der.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“No, that’s what we call them at the Auror office. D.E.R. It’s a lot more fitting.” The thing that does not escape him, of course, is that he had a run-in with some rather competently evil D.E.R. and Malfoy is the one who saved him. It doesn’t compute. “So that’s the company you’ve been keeping these days? I see you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd again, Malfoy. Or maybe you’ve never left.”

Malfoy snorted. “Hardly. These Neo-Death types, they fancy themselves traditionalists. They idolise what they call The High Twelve. The originals. Never mind that most of us are dead, nearly dead, wish we were dead, or Kissed – which is the equivalent of dead. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not much for idolising old, dried up corpses, especially for the sake of resurrecting an even older, more desiccated, dry husk of a corpse. So, no. I’m not into rebirthing friendly Mr. Snakeface, and I don’t much care for a gang of sycophants that would sacrifice both testicles for a sniff of my perfect, perfect hair.”

Harry refrains from asking which hair they were dying for a whiff of. Powerful drugs that Malfoy has him on. “Poseur whippersnappers,” he added, helpfully.

“Exactly. I was following the Dark Lord before it was the thing to do. I assure you, it’s highly overrated.”

“Somehow I don’t doubt that.”

“Right. Nevertheless, they’re not completely useless. After all, some of them can make a decent cup of tea. And, of course, they’ve got some powerful fanatics amongst them – as evidenced by your current condition.

“You’re bruised and broken all over. Five to six hundred stitches in total. Like I said, don’t try to move, you’ll only hurt yourself.”

“That’s funny, I don’t feel anything.”

“Painkillers are a marvellous, addictive invention. You’ve enough in you to set up shop in the East End.”

Harry has to fight the urge to shout a-ha! as one usually has the urge to, when one’s informed suspicions have been proven completely correct. Fortunately, he’s been an Auror for a while, and he can be a professional about this.

“That,” Malfoy continues, “and the fact that you’re paralysed from the waist down.”

And he can be professional about that revelation, too.

What the fuck?!”

“Your back was broken in 3 places. Skele-Gro has helped immensely, but it can’t heal the spinal cord. I wouldn’t worry overmuch, however, it isn’t permanent. I’ve been working on it. Think of it as more of a spinal cord bruise.”

Paralysed.
He always thought you’d notice it if you couldn’t feel your legs – that is what people always scream, after all - until he tries to shift them and he realises, with horror rising in his throat, that he can’t feel his legs.

The urge to scream is quickly stifled. This should be nothing compared to being dead. Panic has never helped him in any situation in his life, and panic now would do nothing except show weakness. Besides, Malfoy just said that it isn’t permanent. If one could trust Malfoy, of all people.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Take control of first yourself, then take control of the situation. He can do this.

He distracts himself. “Unicorn stitches, Skele-Go, Healing magics...since when did you get your M.W.?”

Malfoy smiles now, but the expression, so very Malfoy, is like a great big spoonful of pure vanilla extract - more nasty than nice. “Never. I dabble. Haven’t got anything better to do, and I figure if I lose this particular patient, well...it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Your bedside manner is astounding,” Harry comments drily. Don’t try to move, don’t do it...

“Thank you.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to think you naturally bring that out in me.”

“No, I mean why? I didn’t think you were the life-saving type.”

“I don’t believe in owing people anything, particularly not when those people happen to have the stupid name of ‘Potter.’”

“And the chains? Is this how you treat all your patients? A tasteful and amusing way to remind me not to move and hurt myself?”

“No,” Malfoy says, and the smile spreads slowly across his face, vengeful and self-satisfied. Harry’s seen this look before. Just once, looking up, lying on the floor of the Hogwarts Express, completely paralysed, with the taste of his own blood pooling in the back of his throat.

“They’re to remind you that you’re my prisoner.”

* * *


Malfoy really knows how to make an exit. A few ominous, dramatic lines, a disappearing act. The door seals up behind him when he leaves, leaving no cracks, just solid wood, as if it had never existed in the first place. His evil laugh, however, could really use some work. Harry would know, having done battle with a megalomaniacal villain or two in his day. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being Rictor the Horrible and 1 being Vichter the AH-mazing, Malfoy probably sits around a 4.3 on the Rictor Scale.

The imprisonment plan is where one must award points where points are due. Inescapable lair? Check; the physical paralysis is enough, if not for the next item on the list... Room with no viable exits? Check. No doors and no windows, accessible only by the captor. Prisoner who literally, physically, cannot leave? Check. And then throw in some chains for good measure. 50 points to Slytherin, then.

Harry tries not to struggle. It appears that Malfoy is right, and he’s lost usage of his legs. Struggling is useless; it saps his energy quickly and accomplishes nothing - best to store it up and try to rest instead.

The most important thing about a hostage situation is to stay calm and keep one’s wits about oneself. That’s basic stuff, really, Hostage Situation 101. Prisoner of War, if one prefers. Temporarily Incapacitated Agent, TIA, being the newest official term, as of 2002 – much less disheartening, more optimistic. They’ve had training for this sort of thing; hours of mind-numbing training, actually, directed by Hermione, one of their Intelligence Command Officers. Harry had hated her at the time - she had a nasty habit of launching projectile erasers at one’s head when she suspected one of sleeping. Now he is nothing but grateful; Hermione is going to get a giant Honeydukes heart full of candy delivered straight to her office once he escapes.

The nagging little word if goes purposefully ignored.

When the door appears again, it feels like hours have passed. The time has dragged by since he’s spent most of it not-struggling, racking his brain for the memory of the fight that got him here and finding himself empty. Post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, as they say. No way to know the time for sure, without any natural light and no clocks around. Now and then there is a twinging sensation lingering on the edge of his consciousness, but then it disappears again, like the tide lapping at the sandbank of his brain.

Malfoy enters carrying a tray, and Harry is embarrassingly glad to see him – or at least the gifts that he has come bearing. Upon the tray is a large bowl of something hot, the aroma wafting on the gently curling steam. It smells delicious, like treacle tart, no, something meaty, like filet mignon, or something spicy...

His stomach cramps and his mouth waters. He wasn’t even aware that he was hungry, but come to think of it, how long has he been unconscious? How long since his last meal?

His stomach complains. Whiny little bitch.

Next to the bowl is a glass of water, and a phial of something dark and red.

The tray is set down on the table next to the bed.

A fine silver spoon, dipping into the bowl of mysterious stew. The spoon is raised to his lips, and it, too, is coated with dark red. Thick and viscous, with a sheen like brown satin.

“Eat.”

He wants to refuse it. Training tells him that it’s probably poisoned, to never accept food from an enemy, that he should clamp his lips and twist his head away. But he’s so hungry, so very hungry, and he can feel his stomach gnawing on itself and it smells so good.

In goes the choo-choo train, and it tastes of meat, cinnamon, and spice. Divine. It’s his first Christmas dinner at Hogwarts, it’s the first time they sat down together in the Burrow after the war, it’s that stupid expensive meal at that stupid five-star restaurant where Ginny asked to go on their first real date.

It almost makes him come in his pants. No joke.

For a few moments the room fills with the sounds of ravenous, unrestrained eating: slurping, chewing, licking – sloppy, rude, beautiful, a symphony of gluttony. The meat is tender and juicy, the stew bursts with flavours that titillate the tongue, there’s gobs of wonderful soft fat that melt in the mouth. It’s warm sliding down his throat and the lovely warmth curls up in his stomach and settles there comfortably, like a contented cat going to sleep.

Malfoy, for once, doesn’t ruin it by opening his mouth and saying something.

But Harry, once the stomach is nearly full and the bowl is almost empty, simply can’t resist. “You’re a nurse, you embroider, and now you can cook, too? Wow, Malfoy. Do something about your hair and you’re going to make someone a lovely wife one day.”

The spoon is shoved so hard into his mouth he can feel it stab the back of his throat, ramming past his teeth and scraping the soft tissue. He gags and chokes.

“Embroidery is a perfectly respectable, masculine leisure activity,” Malfoy insists, dropping the spoon into the bowl with a clatter. “At least now we know your gag reflex is working.”

Malfoy reaches for the phial and uncorks it, placing the glass stopper on the tray. And then, just like the spoon, the cool glass is pressed against his mouth, already slightly tilted.

“Drink.”

But Harry has a little bit more control this time, and he jerks back. “Right. I’ll just drink that unknown potion of yours. What is it?”

“It’s your medicine. A Healing potion. You’ve suffered severe spell-damage from the combination of delightful curses that have been used on you. A very meticulous, thorough job, if I do say so myself. Your body can’t heal without magic. Now drink.”

This is more than basic training, it’s just plain common sense. Never ever ever drink a mysterious potion. This isn’t Wonderland and he sure as hell is no Alice – just because things say Eat me and Drink Me doesn’t mean you ought to stick them in your mouth. In fact, that should be a general rule to live by: don't go sticking strange things in your mouth.



Harry makes a face. “I’m not drinking that. For all I know, you’re lying. How do I know it’s not poison?”

Malfoy, of course, looks mildly amused. “Ah, the true beauty of it. You don’t. For all you know, I’ve also poisoned your food. Drink. It’ll make you feel better.”

“I feel fi—“

But before he’s even finished the sound of i, it begins. A strange sort of pain that seems to work backwards; instead of bursting from within and spreading out, it starts on his skin and sinks its way in, like hot knives cleaving through his flesh, as if his flesh were made of butter. He’s aware of a coldness, bitter and sharp as a winter wind; he shivers, uncontrollably. Every wound, every bruise, quiet until now, wakes up, screaming their presence out into an uncaring void, as if his body, his skin, his flesh, is filled with holes, every one of them an open mouth, all of them screaming. He can feel each and every stitch as it was made, the needle piercing through, the thread following behind, the wormlike thread as it tunnelled its way through skin and flesh and forced it all together.

He’s panting, gasping. Can’t breathe. Cruciatus was never this mean.

“It could very well be poison,” Malfoy is saying. “I could be slowly and painfully killing you. Or, unlikely as it seems, it could make that nasty pain go away and heal your cursed body. If you take it, you might die. If you don’t, you’ll rot and die slowly. Bit of a win-win situation for me, here.”

Harry shudders, uncontrollably, and cannot speak. It occurs to him, vaguely, Malfoy has poisoned his food. It also occurs to him that possibly, very slightly possibly, he could be telling the truth.

The command, when it comes, is almost silky in its authority. “Now, drink.”

When the phial returns to his lips there is no resistance. He drinks it down greedily, gratefully, and it goes down smooth; the texture is thick but it glides down his throat, coating it, soothing it. It’s terribly bitter but there’s a fragrance to it, too, as if the base liquid were a mixture of perfume and a burnt cherry cordial.

The relief is almost immediate. The potion warms him the same way the food did, from the inside out. Only it starts in his chest, like an injection of epinephrine to the heart - less a blossoming and more a sudden explosion. His pupils dilate and the potion bubbles through his veins, shooting warmth through all the rivers and tributaries in his body, re-warming the flesh.

The pain stops so suddenly, then, that he’s left gasping in the wake of it, the relief so strong it’s something like pleasure.

He can feel a sheen of sweat on his skin, and the hairs on his arms prickle.

“Why...?” he manages, looking over to a smug Malfoy, who appears to be carefully taking notes on parchment with a long white quill.

“Why?” Malfoy echoes, not looking up. “Words, Potter. That is the preferred method of human communication.”

“Why save me?”

“Reason number one being that you’re of no use to anyone dead, mainly me. Reason number two being that you’re completely useless to me dead.”

“And so you’ve saved my life and now you’re nursing me back to health, yet keeping me imprisoned? And what are you going to do once I’ve fully recovered?”

Malfoy sets the quill and scroll down. “I really don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “Perhaps I’ll break your legs and nurse you back to health all over again,” he suggests cheerily. “Trust me when I say that I’ve really got nothing better to do.”

A horrible, sinking feeling, settling like a stone in his stomach.

“You’re mad,” Harry says, with sudden realisation. Perhaps Malfoy isn’t so far off from a typical war survivor, after all.

“Not particularly,” Malfoy responds. “Mostly just bored. Maybe a little listless. You’d be surprised at how similar these things are.”

He makes a disgusted noise and takes out his handkerchief – with the silver monogrammed letters D.L.M., of course, entwined like snakes, of course – and rubs, none-too-gently, at Harry’s face. “You’re appalling.”

“Says the man who is keeping a critically wounded man chained to a bed in an underground prison. Nice.”

“Details, details. Shut up and go to sleep. You’re exhausted.”

“I’m not ti-“

The rest of the word is swallowed up in a yawn. Same as before, the feeling seems to occur only when it’s suggested to him, and for moment he has to wonder if that potion has just a hint of Imperius .Or some sort of sleeping draught, at least.

He doesn’t wonder long, however, because in the next moment he’s asleep. Soft and quick, just like that, like pulling a dark thick blanket over his eyes, like blowing out the candles, so quickly that he doesn’t even feel the hand passing over his face, or hear the voice that says, simply, “Sleep.”

* * *


He is sleeping in the ground. In the cool, dark earth, where the worms crawl in and the worms crawl out, where the roots grow in opposite direction of the trees, branching out like dreams in a tangled web. Where the seeds sleep. It smells moist and all around him things are dying, dead things are rotting, and from the rotting things are being born and living. He is suffocating; there is no air. Every breath is damp with dirt, earth filling his lungs, and the cool and the damp are seeping into his bones.

He can hear the bugs crawling, the silent skitter of a millipede as it burrows gently through the dirt. He can hear the tiny deep breaths of rodents curled up in their dens, sleeping, dreaming little rat and mouse and mole dreams of eating and breeding, living and dying. Rainwater trickles in and is absorbed and the earth swells around him. Here is a world, upside-down, underground, that doesn’t know the sky, where the only stars are the glistening glowworms, where nothing truly dies because as it decays it new life is born…

* * *


He jolts awake to candlelight, with no sense of day or night or how long he’s been asleep.

Goddamn Evil Room/Lair/Villainous Hidey-Hole.

For the moment there is no pain, but there is no feeling at all, actually, except for the sense that...

in the darkness there are eyes...and the sound of a heartbeat...

Another sudden jolt as he realises he’s not alone. “Merlin!” he says. “How long have you been there?”

“Not long,” says Malfoy. Here time has no meaning. Just as he has no idea how long he has been unconscious, how long his warden has been sitting opposite the bed, with his quill and his scroll, watching over him...

Today(?) Malfoy is wearing white Healer’s robes, which also suspiciously resemble a Muggle mad scientist lab coat. Sterile, white and pristine. He has a bleached, pale air about him, everything from the smooth pallor of his skin to the gleam of his hair to the washed-out grey of his eyes.

Except for his hands. They are covered with stark black, skin-tight gloves, as if he had dipped his hands into a bucket of ink.

The touch of his eyes, his oddly warm presence, the fact that he had been there for who knows how long... It all makes Harry shudder. “Watching me sleep, that’s not creepy or anything.”

Malfoy snorts. “Making sure you wake up again, that’s not benevolent or anything.”

“But you’re not benevolent,” Harry points out.

“I know. But I am mad, according to you, and/or bored, according to myself, and so I am prone to humour any ridiculous, arbitrary whim that strikes my fancy at any given moment.”

“So I’m supposed to accept that this whole setup is just a whim of yours?”

“Of course.”

“And not that you care about my well-being or anything.”

“Good Dark Lord, Heavens, no.”

Harry sighs, and looks at the red velvet canopy above his bed. For a moment it seems as endless as the night sky. He stretches his arms, as much as he can, shackled as they are, to relieve the numbness. There is a vague protest and twinges of pain, skin pulling against skin, stitches holding him together, and the image of pulling too hard so that the stitches burst and the insides spill out –

He stops.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“About a day or so. You’ll need feeding again soon.” Feeding, like an animal. A pet. Something not human. He has always suspected that Malfoy was sick, but that was in a different way, the way that you have to be sick in order to follow a creepy snake-faced megalomaniac until everything good in your life is destroyed. The way you have to be sick to hurt all those people, to torture, to maim, to kill; that kind of sick’s the normal kind. The kind that Harry’s used to. That kind of sick is not beyond his comprehension, neither is the kind of sick that makes you want to hurt a person...

The way that Malfoy’s treating him, however? That’s bloody sick.

“Royal Treatment, I see,” he murmurs.

“Of course. Nothing but the best for our guests at Chez Malfoy, after all.”

For one bizarre moment Harry wonders if Malfoy’s lost it enough to break into song and dance with enchanted silverware, and then he wonders if the potion didn’t fog up his brain. It may very well have.

But he can’t let that happen. He needs to keep his wits about him if there’s going to be any hope at all of escape. Malfoy controls the door, and he controls the chains. As of right now, he can’t use the lower half of his body, but if Malfoy keeps his word about the healing part, then one day they will be fixed.

“Especially for such a celebrity guest,” Malfoy says. “That’s what you’re used to, isn’t it? The charmed life. The Royal Treatment.”

“Shut up,” Harry says, with a sort of vehemence he hasn’t felt in a long time. For anyone else he has a weary sigh, a begrudging, sheepish smile, even, let them think what they want. But Malfoy has that annoying quality about him that makes it impossible to not argue with him. It’s like asking someone to hold still and not swat the mosquito on his thigh. “You know, if you’d ever done anything good with your life, maybe people would treat you better, too.”

It garners a laugh. An empty little sound, like an echo in an oil drum. “People used to treat me so well, but that was out of fear, not because I ever did anything good. They’re simply not afraid anymore. But we’re not talking common niceties here, in regards to you – we’re talking worship. St. Potter on a pedestal. They lay down bushels of flowers before you step anywhere so that you won’t dirty your precious holy feet on common earth.”

“What kind of flowers?” Harry has to ask. “Not roses I hope. Or else the holy feet might be bleeding holy blood everywhere. They might even be holey holy feet.”

George’s little joke. He would have appreciated it being used in a possibly life-threatening hostage situation.

“Tell me you don’t like it.”

“Pricked feet? No, not really...”

“The thousands of flashing, popping bulbs every time you grace the world with your presence, the endless outpourings of gifts and offerings and gratitude, the legions of screaming, adoring, drooling fans, waiting to strip for you out in the streets at the slightest wave of your hand...”

“That’s horrific. It’s horrific. Does the idea of it all really appeal to you?”

“Well, naturally. Fame, fortune, an adoring public. What kind of poor, maladjusted sad sack wouldn’t...? Oh. Right.”

“It’s not like that. It’s not all glamorous the way you and everyone think it is, I never asked for any of it, I never wanted it, and—“ and he’s trying to justify himself to Malfoy, of all people, while the same person has him chained up. He has to laugh, because it’s funny in the way that hopelessness is funny. “I’m wasting my breath. You don’t understand. Of course you don’t even care.”

“The people,” says Malfoy abruptly.

“What?”

“You don’t like the people. Their expectations. Their attentions. Their hopes and dreams. The way that they think they know you, really know you – the way that they all want a piece of you. The way they make you feel as if you have to fit into this preconceived notion of you, how they’ve already judged you before they’ve ever met you and they all want something from you that you cannot give. You don’t like how Harry Potter is an idea; the Boy-Who-Lived is a fiction, a fantasy, one that wipes out the existence of the person.”

“How...how did you know that?” Harry says, throat dry. Ginny’s voice echoes in his head, her lilting laugh, gently teasing, “Of course you’re Harry Potter, silly, who else would you be?”

“Because I alone know everything about you,” Malfoy says, ominously, darkly, and his voice rolls down Harry’s spine, making even the supposedly paralysed parts of him tingle.

“...Or because you are so obviously, boringly pathetic that of course you’d choose something like fame and fortune to make your raison d’angst. Come now, Potter, could you be any more of a loser? ‘Oh, woe is me, everybody loves me and worships the ground I walk upon! Poor, pitiful me, I just don’t know how I’m going to deal with being so adored and famous!’ There are worse problems to be afflicted with, you know. ”

“Like your problems, for example?” Harry huffs.

“Me? I have no problems. I meant more along the lines of hangnails. Or bedsores. Or mites. Those are all horrible, disgusting problems.”

“How very practical of you.”

“Or necrosis, or infection, or parasites. These should be your real worries. After all, they’re very real problems that could be afflicting you.”

“Right ...wait, what? Did you just say parasites?”

Yes. Which brings us to the next portion of our regularly-scheduled programme. “

He reaches for the edges of Harry’s shirt, and begins to undo the buttons, one by one.

“Wait, what are you—“

“Your wounds, if not cleaned and re-checked regularly, can become infected,” Malfoy replies. The shirt is pushed open carelessly, as easily as if he were undressing himself and not someone else. Or as if he’s done this before, a whole other disturbing thought entirely. “Approximately 1 to 3 out of every 100 surgical sites become infected. If the flesh is not healing properly, if it is not getting enough blood, the tissues die. Then it becomes necrotic. The flesh dies and rots. This means parts of you turn black and fall off. Serious, real problems, Potter.”

He grabs the edges of the layers of sheets and blankets, and pulls them off with a flourish, like a sculptor revealing his masterpiece on opening night of his exhibition at the Louvre.

At first Harry can’t look. And then he can’t look away.

His whole body is a mess, bruised and swollen all over, raised in places, a hideous rainbow of purples and reds and greens and blues and yellows. He looks like he’s been to Hell and back; Dante-style, enduring the torture of all nine circles and then re-doing them in reverse.

There are gashes, and stitches, like Malfoy had said. And some of them are oozing, a dark, thick red liquid, like the burnt cherry cordial potion he had taken, as if his body simply couldn’t hold it in...

He wants to scream. He feels it bubble up in his throat, a big bursting sound that wants to crawl out, open up his mouth as wide as it will go. He clamps his lips shut, tightly, stubbornly, teeth digging into his lip. He will not scream. He will not scream. He will not give his tormentor that satisfaction.

The scream suffocates, without air, and dies a slow, painful death in his throat, leaving a nasty taste behind. The way that dead things always have that awful air about them, or that morning breath will when one has had too much garlic the night before.

He lets out a sigh and suddenly feels self-conscious about his breath, of all things. How long has it been since he’s brushed his teeth? How long has it been since he’s shaved? Or bathed, for that matter? Does he smell? Not to his own senses, but then again, one can never smell oneself – that was proven by the two weeks one unseasonably warm September that Crabbe had decided, inexplicably, to boycott showers – he suspected, at Malfoy’s suggestion, not even to punish Crabbe himself, but rather to punish everyone who had to sit around him in Potions.

But wouldn’t he be able to smell it? The sick smell; when Malfoy talks about infection and necrosis he knows what that smells like, that sense of sickness, of disease; remembers that case, with the Goodward girl, trapped in that basement for two months in the middle of summer and that smell had washed over them and Ron had lost it, puked right there on the steps...

Personal hygiene seems very important at the moment, when his whole body is about to be given a head to toe examination.

It’s also difficult not to be self-conscious when someone’s eyes sweep over you, particularly Malfoy’s eyes, cold and clear and clinical. A chill breaks out over his skin, not just from the sudden exposure to air, and his skin probably prickles out all over in goosebumps. He doesn’t think he can tell for sure, underneath all the bruising and swelling.

But when Malfoy’s hand actually makes contact with his skin, he’s ashamed that he actually yelps in surprise.

There’s no reason for it. It’s on an area of little interest- just below his collarbone – just some neutral, blank body space. The gloved thumb carelessly strokes across a bruise; he feels the pressure, that sort of radiating soreness from the tissue injury, and then the thumb presses down and he winces, immediately.

The hand moves on. Hovering, now, over a bandaged area on the side of his chest, inches above white gauze, and suddenly it hurts to breathe. He wonders if his ribs are bruised. The hand disappears and when it returns it has a friend – the sharp point of scissors prick his skin, delicately, before they open with that slick sound of metal rubbing against metal, and the cold steel slides smooth and easy against his skin.

“This is your medical lesson for today.”

Snip snip snip go the scissors, and the bandages fall away. One gloved finger runs along the line of revealed stitches like stroking across a windchime, and the wound sings out with tinkling silver notes of pain. Little tiny twinges making him aware of every thread, of the edges of his wound like a pair of lips sewn together.

“An infected wound is hot to the touch,” Malfoy says, fingers playing over the site of incision. “Other telling signs include swelling, redness, pain, or tenderness. The examining mediwizard may pal-pate—“

On pal there’s a bright burst of pain as Malfoy presses down, hard, like pushing a big shiny red button that you must never, ever press, maybe the kind that says SELF-DESTRUCT underneath it in bold black letters. The pain stutters for just a moment, but before it’s even started to fade it’s immediately followed by a second burst on pate, tripping on the heels of it, even bigger than the first.

Malfoy is still talking, but the words are lost to him. Something about hard, warm areas around the wound. It’s not the worst pain he’s ever felt, nowhere close, but there’s a little bubble of nausea growing in his stomach, threatening to pop. He remembers, all too clearly, that sort of awful mindless horror that wracked his body before, making him feel shattered into so many pieces that all the king’s horses wouldn’t even make enough glue to put him back together again.

Vaguely he’s aware that the horror is still there, lurking just underneath the surface. Like the Inferi in the waters of a dark enchanted lake, all slimy white limbs and empty black eyes; open mouths and hungry, clawing hands. Drifting, dreamless, waiting...

“...Thin red veins, spreading out from the site of the surgical incision, are another sign of infection...”

One, two, three, four fingertips tap down on his skin like raindrops. Then they spread out, spider-like, tracing the paths of non-existent red veins, branching and searching.

“The mediwizard may cut the sutures to inspect the inside of the wound,” Malfoy continues. The scissors are returned to their place, on the tray. His fingers hover thoughtfully over an array of tools, before settling on a scalpel.

“You’re going to cut it open again?”

“Of course. How else am I supposed to look for worms? I’ve put far too much work into you for you to become worm-food on me this early into the game.He fingers the scalpel lovingly. “Now, hold still. I would hate to cut you accidentally.”

Harry holds his breath and braces himself for the pain. The scalpel slices cleanly through the thin sinew and he can feel the wound trying to pull open as well as stay closed at the same time, as if his insides were lined with sticky tape.

But the pain doesn’t really begin until Malfoy’s black-gloved fingers begin to tug at the stitches he’s undone, sliding them out of his skin.

One, two, three, four, five stitches. Harry can feel each of them being tugged out of him, like tiny thin wriggling worms with the way Malfoy pulls on the thread, and when one hits a snag, Malfoy gives it a yank, and Harry winces and shudders.

Six, seven, eight, nine stitches. Tug, tug, yank.

“Of course there are spells for this sort of thing,” Malfoy continues, conversationally, fingers placing pressure on the raw edges of the wound, while the other hand slides out another bit of magical unicorn gut-thread.

“But I think sometimes Muggles have it right. Positively shocking, I know. Spells can be rather inexact for such delicate procedures, and - I think you’ll agree with me – the hands-on approach is so much more personal.”

And on that nastily intimate word, Malfoy pulls the wound open as Harry’s body sings out with protest. Breathe in. Breathe out. Deep breaths combat the pain, and his eyes remain successfully dry even as he squeezes them shut.

“At a first glance, it looks very good, Potter,” Malfoy hums a little and makes a few notes onto his parchment. “Of course, we need a bit more of a thorough inspection.” The scalpel is placed gently back on the tray with a light clink. Malfoy picks up another tool, a cotton swab, long and thin.

As Harry watches, without any preamble or foreplay, Malfoy just goes ahead and sticks it straight into the wound.

Harry hisses with the feel of something probing into his flesh. In spite of himself, he lets out a soft gasp, half-choking on the sound.

“Hmm,” says Malfoy. “About 5...no, 7 centimetres deep.” The quill scratches on the parchment. “Not bad, Potter. You should be happy.”

“Trust me,” Harry grits out through his teeth, “I’m ecstatic.”

The swab rubs around the insides of the wound, torturously gentle, making him feel every centimetre of its depth. The cotton feels like sandpaper, dry and scratchy and rubbing him raw. Malfoy slides it in and out, swabbing the walls of flesh, and when he withdraws it, the white has turned so dark with blood it’s nearly black.

For some reason, Harry’s eyes feel strangely dry, despite the swelling lump in his throat and the hot pricking sensation at the back of his eyeballs. He’s glad for it, of course.

No way in Hades would he let Malfoy see him cry, least of all over something like this.

“Perfect,” Malfoy says, examining the swab, which is covered in black-red goo. The whole thing looks like something that might come out of a troll with an ear infection; Harry, unfortunately, knows this from experience.

“Now, we’ve only the antiseptic left.”

“Antiseptic....” Harry exhales. This at least, he knows. Or he’s pretty sure of it. “You don’t need to put antiseptic into an open wound.”

Don’t question me, Potter. I’m a medical professional.”

“As in...”

“I’ve read a few books here and there. I still know more than you.”

“I don’t think ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Mediwizard’ counts as a professional text, Malfoy.”

“And I don’t think it’s quite so smart to be doubting someone you rely so completely upon, is it? Or are you that eager to prove your bone-headed ignorance? Don’t fret so much, Potty, I already think of you as a complete moron with atrocious fashion sense.”

“What does my fashion sense have to do with it?”

“It’s so bad that it ought to be illegal. To label it as fashion sense is a crime; it’s more like fashion offence, really. I had to burn your clothes for fear that they might reproduce if left in a dark closet somewhere and breed even uglier mutant offspring.”

Another phial is picked up off the tray, this one filled with some sort of white, frothy liquid. Malfoy holds the edges of the wound open with two fingers, spread in a V. “Now hold still, you recently sharply-dressed imbecile, this might sting a little,” he warns, oh-so-gently, before he uncorks the phial and then he tips the liquid in.

Shit,” Harry curses, gasping, unable to help himself.

To say it burns is an understatement. It burns, it burns so bad, Harry’s certain it’s actually acid, not antiseptic. Acid, hissing and bubbling and corroding his flesh. Eating him from the inside out, making holes and holes inside his body, holes inside his wound.

His whole body breaks out in sweat and he spasms with the pain.

“Shit, shit, shit, Merlin, fuck,” he gasps out, and chokes on the words, he’s going to be sick, he just knows it. He can’t breathe. He can’t swallow the saliva building in his mouth. He’s panting and he still feels like he’s suffocating and he’s sure that potion is burning down to the bone.

“Shh, shh,” Malfoy soothes, perversely comforting. “Stay with the pain. Embrace the pain. Pain is simply your body telling you it’s alive, that you can feel,” he continues, like some sort of bloody wise-man-guru.

And if he smiles, it’s a fucking Cheshire Cat smile, sweet and insincere.

Malfoy’s become refined these past seven years, Harry’s brain registers, numbly. The sick things Harry’s seen, Malfoy’s probably seen them too. He’s probably seen even sicker things, considering the company he must keep. No longer the petty, outwardly vengeful villain, he’s developed a certain finesse.

“Don’t tell me the Boy-Who-Lived grew up into the Man-Who-Whinged-Like-a-Little-Baby. Come now, Potter, you’re going to be all right,” Malfoy comforts. He dabs at Harry’s forehead with a wad of cotton, playing the role of the doting caregiver. The blandly pleasant expression, just a glimmer of a smirk – the kind of person who stabs you through the heart and smiles while he twists the knife. His schoolyard bully, all grown up.

“M-make it stop,” Harry manages; all he can think of is the sizzle of his flesh on a frying pan. What it must smell like, cooking like that.

“It’ll stop on its own soon,” Malfoy promises. He promises some more things, too, but his words are lost, just comforting little mumbles in a sea of fire. Consumed. Fire lapping into his flesh and when Harry is sure he’s going to be sick all over himself and all over the bed, and all over Malfoy if he’s lucky –

That’s when the burning finally fizzles out.

Oh God. Thank God.

Relief like a cool wave of water sluices over his skin. He pants and gasps for breath like a drowning man washed up on the shore.

“There, now, that wasn’t that bad, now was it?” Malfoy says. He pats the foaming liquid from the edges of the wound, and Harry cringes.

“Not...so bad...” He pants out.

“Now for the last bit. We must close up the wound again,” Malfoy says, and oh god, he’s pushing the thread through the needle and Harry knows what that needle is going to be pushing through next.

“You said the last bit was the last bit,” he accuses.

“I lied,” Malfoy says simply, and then the needle pierces his skin.

* * *


“Is that it?” Harry pants. There is a slick film of fresh sweat on his forehead. All over his body, for that matter, only he still can’t feel his legs.

“Oh, yes,” Malfoy says, snipping the thread that closes off the stitch. “At least with this particular wound.”

“We’re going to be here for a while. By all means, feel free to scream. It’ll make you feel better.”

Harry clamps his lips down tight and refuses to let the scream out. Later he will hear the screams he’s bottled up inside, echoing on and on inside his head.

* * *


The oblivion that shrouds him when he finally passes out is both sweet and merciful.

* * *


It could be moments, it could be days before he wakes up again. Such is the nature of his captivity; time - like an unenchanted Promise Ring on the finger of a hormonal Hufflepuff - means nothing at all.

Whenever it is, when Malfoy shows up again, he has to go for the age old ‘You’ll never get away with this’ speech. It’s only right that the both of them play their parts, after all.

"They're going to find me, you know,” Harry says, noble and defiant. He ignores the twinges of pain every time he even attempts to move. “You might as well give it up, Malfoy."

"The Ministry, the Auror Department, my friends," he continues. And as much as he hates to use his name as clout, he has to bring up the obvious, after all. "I'm Harry Bloody Potter - you don't think someone's going to maybe notice that I'm missing?"

“Oh, there is the matter of that.” Malfoy doesn’t appear fazed, nor disturbed in the slightest. Quite the contrary, in fact, he has the nerve to tack on an expression of near-manic glee. "Hold on, pardon me for a moment - you need to allow me to savour this, it's my favourite part."

"I've set up wards,” he begins, “so that you are in a place from which you cannot Apparate out of and no one can Apparate into. No one can find this place unless they've been here before; it simply cannot be found. Unless it already exists in their mind, it cannot exist in their reality.

“I control the entrance and the exit of this room. There is no key. You may as well be 600 yards below the earth in a subterranean lair.

“No one knows where you went. There were no witnesses when I took you. They’ll look for you, of course they will – you’re Harry Bloody Potter, after all, as you so charmingly put it. For your body, because nobody, not even you, could face that vicious onslaught of Dark Magic and survive. Rest assured, though, you won. The Prophet is having quite the field day with it. Potter, saviour of us all, shining at his best.

“They might search for you for weeks, months, years, even – but they won’t find you. But what a way to go, hm?”

“Even you can see the beauty of this, yes?

He leans in close, for the next few words, awfully, dangerously intimate. "You're trapped, and you're mine.”

He holds the phial of dark red up to Harry’s mouth, the chill of glass pressing against his lip. “Now, drink up. You do want to get better, don’t you?”

* * *


Harry remembers the Trials. The Malfoys had had an excellent defence counsel, of course, the best that their money could buy. The extravagant funds that they had had, of course, before the Ministry had seized their cut of it.

They had all robed themselves in head-to-toe sombre blacks the day of their Judgment, as always, dressed for the occasion. Narcissa wore a mourning veil, a storm cloud of lace eclipsing her face and shimmering hair.

The picture that the Defence had painted was so sympathetic. A good wife, a filial son. A family forced into the hands of the Dark Lord under the behest of the controlling, domineering patriarch.

Tearful, Narcissa had refused to testify.

Draco had not. He had gotten up on the stands, before the Council, and testified against his own father.

It was the socializing, they said, it was his upbringing; the sins of the Father that were visited upon the son. For Draco Malfoy, barely 18, was still a child although he was a legal adult. A child who was never taught anything other than to follow, an innocent who was thrown into the reptilian hands of the Dark Lord, like a lamb to the wolves. How tortured he had been, manipulated and misguided. What a good son he had been, obedient and faithful, loyal to his family first and his evil father foremost.

It was quite the touching construction. After all, no one could prove Draco had ever killed anyone.

Draco had looked right at his father, the once-regal figure now bowed and hunched, and he had pointed his pretty white finger at him, like the outstretched bony finger of Death. Then, like a good little traitor, he had denounced him, the man he idolised as a child; in front of the Council, the Prophet, and the eyes of God, he professed his innocence and laid all the blame on his father, his creator.

For this he had been spared.



This is the type of man who holds him captive now; this ruthless being who would betray the very family he had risked his life to defend, who would deny the patriarch he had spent his entire life trying to impress. A man with no loyalties, with no compassion, and most of all, a man who now has nothing left to lose.



If there’s one thing Harry was taught to recognise, it’s a situation where he’s screwed.

* * *


If Harry really thought about it – and he had nothing but time to think about it - he supposed that he kind of deserved it.

“Some people just have a calling,” he’d tried to explain, once. “The way that they say that’s not just an occupation, it’s a vocation.”

“No,” Shacklebolt had corrected him. “Auror McCormack has a calling. Auror Oujiabane has a calling. Auror Spearson has a calling. What you have is a death wish.”

Harry had heard similar things before, but at least Hermione had been nice about it. “What you have, Harry,” she’d said gently, “is what some people might call a pathology.” That, at least, sounded a sight better than “you are a danger to yourself and others, and a risk to this Department as a whole.”

“I save people,” Harry had told his commanding officer, frowning. “It’s what I do.”

“You rush into situations recklessly and risk your life needlessly. You ignore your own personal safety, which should be the first priority when approaching any scene, when addressing any case, and I’m not positive that you’ve been properly debriefed about this particular issue, but your partner does not double as a punching bag.”

Harry waited for the part of the speech that essentially said “you’re a loose cannon, but goddammit, you’re the best damn Auror we have.” He waited for the part where Shacklebolt ordered him to turn in his wand and badge but then decided to give him one more chance, and don’t you blow it this time, Potter.

They had this sort of meeting about once a week, so Harry rather knew what to expect.

Admittedly, Harry Potter, all on his lonesome, was routinely the cause of more Incident Reports than the whole Department combined, from the years 2001 to present. He had to write so many Incident Reports that he had to write Incident Reports on why his old Incident Reports weren’t submitted yet.

Aurors, of course, were naturally a special breed to begin with. There was a shared personality profile; a certain history: their generation, of course, were the children of war. Children who had gone to bed as children and awakened suddenly as adults in the breadth of one battle; children who were made orphans and widows and widowers in the same dying breaths. They worked well under pressure; they were used to managing crises; they thrived in chaos. They wanted to fix things, they wanted to heal the world, they wanted to make peace, they wanted to change the world - they wanted to save.

If it hadn’t been for the war, Harry was sure that they would have all come from abusive households with drug-addicted alcoholic parents, who practised the Dark Arts and possibly danced naked around a sacrificial altar with the lewd involvement of sheep (plural), or other equally fucked up childhood traumas like that.

(He had asked Hermione to perform an investigation once, to confirm this theory, a sort of survey or poll as an appeal to her love of statistics and findings and random facts. Shocked, she had told him that that was a gross violation of privacy, and he made the wise decision to not inform her that he was already borrowing her keys to read the unauthorised files.)

Still, despite being amongst this special breed, he was somehow the special-est of special breeds (unlike Malfoy, who proclaimed himself a specialist of special breeds; as if Harry were some sort of prize-winning horse or cat) and although he was among his peers, his people, he was still different from them.

Not different in a tragic, glamorous, be-all-end-all, oh-woe-is-me, I’m-so-special-and-different-and-unique¬ way (and he’s spent too much time locked up with Malfoy if he can hear that voice invading his head like that) – or even in a particularly angst-fuelled way. He was just different from them; it was a simple, subtle fact, so subtle, in fact, that he himself didn’t even notice it at first.

It was that extra push, that extra gumption. You could trust him to be the first one to run into the burning building. The first one armoured up, shield up, fighting back the hungry Hungarian Horntail. Front page of the Daily Prophet, balanced precariously on his broom, wind in his hair, the crying baby in his arms; having caught it after the Dark Wizard had tossed it out of the fourth floor window – there he’d be.

He wouldn’t say he felt useless after the war. He wouldn’t say that he felt purposeless.

He certainly didn’t miss it.

Sometimes in the dead of night, he remembered that feeling, the knowledge that he was walking towards his death; that very real feeling I am going to die and the serenity that had swept over him once the fear had passed, the knowledge that he was not alone, the righteousness in every single doomed step he took.

That feeling, that utterly beautiful perfect tranquillity from within, of being at peace with himself, with his life, his friends, his loved ones past and present, his family. The universe and he as one, and he saw Destiny, waiting for him with welcoming, open arms, and he rose to meet it, and they embraced.

It had felt like coming home.

He hadn’t felt anything like that since.

Out there, every day in the city, there were a million purposes, a million people who needed him. Everyone of them, crying out “save me!” “Help me in my time of need!”

Harry did not choose his causes; his causes called out his name until he answered.

The media loved Harry Potter’s heroics. He made so many front pages that you could line the cage of every Ironbelly dragon from here to Ukraine using only front pages. The first place he’d tried to move into, reporters set up camp on his front lawn, and he’d have to toss out a firecracker every now and then so that the noise would make them scatter. That had prompted his move back into Grimmauld Place.

The stacks of paperwork, of course, made the front pages look like kindling.

“This is how much you’re costing the Department,” Shacklebolt said, “the sick time, the disability leave, the overall increase to the healthcare costs—“

“I never take long-term disability!” Harry had protested. “Or short-term, for that matter. I never even take a sickie.”

Of course Harry Potter never took a single day off. He downed shots of Skele-Gro as if it were Firewhiskey. In fact, a shot or two of Firewhiskey made the Skele-Gro go down right smooth.

“I am referring, of course, to that of your partners. If we are to blame you specifically, Mr. Potter, we should look at the overextension of resources, the massive high-impact property damage...”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that,” said Shacklebolt, and gave him a pointed look. He unrolled the parchment then, and the scroll unfurled out the door, down the hall, until it finally stopped at Lorna’s desk in Accounting.

“Perhaps you may be unaware of this, but your fellow Aurors have taken to drawing straws to see who’ll have to be the unfortunate soul who has to take shifts with Auror Potter that particular month.”

“Well, some of them are fame-seekers, you know that, sir –“

“It is not a compliment, Mr. Potter. Auror Wheatley has been in traction at St. Mungo’s for a month –“

“That was only a flesh wound.”

“Auror Lee was out on light duty around the office for two months, due to being hit with a nasty curse during your time in Elsinore; a situation in which the two of you were vastly outnumbered-

“All things considered, we handled it rather admirably.”

“And Auror Alexander has been in the treatment facility at an undisclosed location for perhaps the past year and may be there for an indefinite period of time—“

“One of my longest lasting partners.”

“Your co-workers have started referring to it as the Curse of Potter.”

“You’d think they’d be a bit more clever.”

“Mr. Potter, what you have is a problem. This is concerning, not only as your superior officer, but as a friend and comrade in arms. It is of my opinion that perhaps you should seek professional help.”

Harry had no idea that being bloody good at one’s job was such a goddamned dire medical condition, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from not-so-politely telling his superior so.

“One of these days you’re going to get somebody – most likely yourself – maimed or killed. As much as your early retirement would lighten the burden on the Department’s budget, I’d rather not have it come to that.”

“Here,” Shacklebolt said, and handed him a card. “Please, just give our Disaster Debrief Department a call.” He lowered his voice and added, “They’re very discrete,” which was so shady that it sounded rather like he was recommending Harry to a brothel. An exotic brothel at that, the type with centaurs and goblins and Pixies. The kind of creatures that certain half-giants might appreciate. And from the unholy glint in Shacklebolt’s eye, perhaps the type with half-giants too.

Harry was certainly not going to see anyone in any sort of Discrete, Depraved Disasters Department.

He resented the implication that he had gotten his partners hurt; he would have taken a wand blast for any of them, including that annoying Wheatley. But in every single case, they hesitated instead of following through, they paused where difficult decisions needed to be made, they held off in the face of danger – that one split-second moment that was the difference between life and death, wellbeing and injury, wholeness and many little pieces.

He did not blame them. They were still afraid, and that was a human instinct, it was natural to be afraid sometimes.

Harry had already known death and he knew that there was nothing left to fear.

He wouldn’t call it confidence. Perhaps it was more a matter of conviction.

The Department called it recklessness.

So he crumpled up the card and continued to do what he did best, which was saving people – regardless of the risk of life and limb.

And now that he finds himself here, held as prisoner, tortured daily, without escape, in a most dangerous situation – well, he supposes he’s had it coming for a while.

* * *


Out of everyone who could have possibly kidnapped him, admittedly, Malfoy wouldn’t have even made it to the Top Ten shortlist.

There was Arabella Schmidt, who had threatened suicide every week or so unless Harry agreed to meet her for drinks at the Saucy Sorceress. There was Guy Holliday, who offered him extravagant amounts of money for clippings of his hair and nails. And then there was the one who had sent Harry anonymous, vaguely sexual and intensely uncomfortable owls nonstop for three weeks. Male or female he couldn’t tell; all he knew was that one day the letters stopped and he did not have any desire to investigate, for fear of what he might find.

In a long list of obsessed nobodies Malfoy is a Somebody, somebody he knows; that shared bond of having grown up together, like it or not. Potter versus Malfoy; schoolboy rivals, opposite sides of war, each of them bred and raised for the battlefield.

There’s a quaint sort of nostalgia to it that Harry actually appreciates.

“DON’T. PANIC!!!!!”

So reads the first page of the manual that they passed out during that one Continuing Education course on Hostage Situations. Harry had rather thought that there were some punctuation issues with that particular header, but what else could you expect from a booklet titled, “So, You’re a Hostage Now” by hostage negotiator Ian Chainz?

“This is actually the 3rd Edition,” Hermione had said when he pointed out the grammatical error to her. “You should have seen the first one. The copy editor had somehow misheard Auror Chainz and originally titled it, ‘So, You’re a Sausage Now’ thinking it was an instructional manual on cured meats. And, more specifically, the Transfiguration into.”

At his bewildered look, she had continued, “Look up the Grisly Luncheon Conference Tragedy of 1952. Or rather, don’t.”

Regardless of its imperfect grammar, apparently it was the Ministry-approved text for the subject matter, written by the authority in the field. Auror Chainz, after all, between the years of 1981-1990, had successfully negotiated over five hostage situations; a previously unheard-of record.

“DON’T,” Harry mutters to himself now, followed by a fervent, enthusiastic, “PANIC!!!!!!”

The most important thing to remember, in a hostage situation, is to stay calm. Don’t lose your head. Once you lose your head then everything else goes.

If he’s going to survive this, then he must keep his wits about him.

Never mind that no one knows where he is, never mind that the world probably believes he’s already dead. Never mind that he’s drastically injured, he’s chained to a bed, his legs don’t work, and the person his life depends on has made it no secret that he believes Prisoner Torture ought to be Britain’s new national pastime.

Never mind all that. Never mind the fact that it’s hopeless.

Never mind the fact that he’s going to very likely be here a long, long time.

Never! GIVE UP! Hope!!!!

Or so said Chapter 2 of the manual, a strange little exercise in contradicting, bipolar commands.

* * *


This is the part that they never discuss in the instruction manuals, nor in the seminars, nor in the extensive interviews with heroic Aurors who’ve survived being held captive.

What the hell do tied-up captives do when they have to...erm, use the facilities.

Harry tries to hold it as long as possible. He thinks of deserts, miles and miles of sun-bleached sand; of droughts, of scorched earth, baked and cracked dirt.

He tries, resolutely, not to think of water. Running water. Streams. Rivers. Oceans with great big waves, crashing upon the shore.

He will not call for Malfoy. He does not need Malfoy.

Tidal waves of water. Rushing streams. Thunderstorms. Flood.

He will not sacrifice that last little shred of dignity.

Babbling brooks. Fountains. Waterfalls.

Well, fuck.

Damn you, brain.

Perhaps it would be a tad more dignified to call for Malfoy rather than to wet himself.

Malfoy!” He cries out into the cold, unanswering room. The walls echo his own voice back to him. “MALFOY!!”

He will handle this. He will not get desperate. He is a trained Auror, he is England’s finest, he is a professional. He is Saviour of the Wizarding World, for Merlin’s sake.

“MALFOY WHERE THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU?!”

The door appears and opens – his summons have worked. Sometimes a little desperation does pay off.

Although, unless Draco Malfoy has shrunk, lost all his hair, developed two overly large ears and decided that this year’s newest fashion is a deconstructed tea cosy, all since Harry last saw him, he is actually looking at a house elf.

“Master Potter!” the elf exclaims. “Bimsy here to save you!”

For a second Harry’s heart leaps; although he has never seen this particular house elf before in his life, it would not be the first time that his life was saved by an elf. It would not be unheard of, for this to be a Ministry elf – Hermione has been doing all that work with her Free Elf Free Agent (F.E.F.A.) programme after all, and it is well known that house elves have magical abilities and access that are barred from wizardkind and –

This train of thought is abruptly interrupted as Bimsy makes a direct move for Harry’s trousers and two things happen: first Harry shrieks (manfully, of course, as you would) and secondly he realises that Bimsy means to save him from incontinence. And the possibility of urinary tract infection.

“Oh, Master Harry Potter,” murmurs Bimsy. “Very nice. Bimsy like.”

And for one moment that he’d pay good money to have completely Obliviated from his memory forever, he is actually glad that he is currently paralysed from the waist down.

* * *


Fact One: a house elf, or perhaps, this particular house elf, is capable of leaving and entering the room at will.

Fact the Second: this particular house elf has a certain particular inclination...an admiration, even, for the captive in question, one Master Harry Potter.

Therefore, Fact One + Fact Two = ....

..something that makes Harry shudder hard enough that every single one of his five to six hundred stitches cry out with pain.

In comparison to that line of logic, Malfoy and his hours of practised sadism look like a jolly day spent in Hogsmeade.

He hasn’t hit rock bottom yet.



* * *


The darkness. And in the darkness, like a bright light bursting behind his eyelids: the pain, the hunger.

* * *


He thinks of Ginny. He feels a little guilty that it’s the first time that he’s thought of Ginny in...days? Since he’s come here. But it’s okay, because he thinks of her now - of her smiling face, the sound of her laugh, the way the sun makes her hair glint like a freshly minted copper knut in the light.

She would have taken exception to the comparison, of course. “How can you even call my hair a knut, Harry?” she’d say. “What, are you calling me a knuthead?”

Harry doesn’t see the issue, really. He likes her hair, loves the feel of it, slipping between his fingers, the weight of it in his hands, the way it bounces about her when she gets excited.

Some days they took Teddy to the zoo. The little boy’s hair declared his favourite animal of the moment: the last time they went he was going through a tiger phase, the previous animal being a polar bear. Both were better than when he had chosen elephants, and had horrified all the other families with his awful disfigurement, as parents had to teach children that it wasn’t polite to stare at the poor boy born with a trunk instead of a nose.

The trunk wasn’t even the impressive part, really, as Teddy was already quite the little Metamorphagus – it was the fact that he could eat peanuts with it that was quite a fancy trick.

Ginny would buy the Fairy Floss (now guaranteed 100% Fairy-free) provided that Harry bought the ice cream, and Teddy would walk between them, a little hand holding onto each of theirs.

People would look at them, laughing and smiling, and they would think what a sweet family; Harry would look at Ginny, buttoning up Teddy’s coat, and feel the sunshine burst warm in his chest. Her delicate white hands carefully smoothing down the front of the boy’s coat, nimble fingers pushing each button into its proper hole; the perfunctory way she would check to make sure Teddy hadn’t lost his mittens again.

That’s the image he holds in his mind when the door opens again, and there stands Malfoy, with a tray full of gleaming surgical tools and a blinding, dazzlingly white smile on his face.

* * *


“Today, class, we’re going to talk about torture. Now, why does a captor torture? Anyone? Show of hands, here. Anyone? No?”

Malfoy looks impeccable as always – the way he used to do, before war, before what happened immediately after the war. White robes again, buttoned up to his throat, black-covered hands; black and white and shades of grey. All the elegance and the coldness of a marbled Greek statue. He fingers his tools with the touch of an artist, with the touch of a lover.

“Potter? Anyone? Potter?”

Harry will not give him the satisfaction of answering, even though his body – treacherous, useless body, feels the phantom pain already. “Disappointing. I thought we’d had a better education in the finer aspects of interrogation than that. Were we not paying attention in class, Potty?” Malfoy clicks his tongue, the same time as he picks up a metal instrument that looks something like a corkscrew, something like a drill, and holds it up to the light. “Well, a captor tortures for a variety of reasons; it is actually more complex than one might think. “One common reason for torture, especially that of your enemy, is to obtain information. There is much debate on this matter, of course, since we have no way of knowing whether torture was actually beneficial to the cause. People may say anything under duress.

“The Official Ministry stance on this matter is fascinating, as I’m sure you know from experience. They never mention torture, nor the usage of torture, in obtaining information from prisoners nor criminals, but rumour has it that all Aurors are trained in some very interesting methods of persuasion; that even a scan of one’s wand will not detect. Correct me if I’m wrong, there are the cleansing spells that are meant to tidy up an interrogation afterwards, leaving no trace of what has transpired there. Spells like that would have been very useful around here during wartime; the mess gave Mother the most horrid headaches.”



The light glints off the needle-sharp point of the corkscrew, and then the cold metal is held against the skin of Harry’s arm, rolled back and forth; the point of it pricks him, proving just how sharp it is.



“It just goes to show you, torture isn’t just a villain’s hobby. It can be fun for everyone. It can even be fun for the whole family!”

He takes the corkscrew tool and holds it straight up to Harry’s face, twisting it about so he can see the sharpness of it, the deadly simplicity.

“Take this little instrument, for example. Normally it would take a lot of pressure, and a lot of mess to extract an eyeball, yes? Well, with this funny little trinket all one needs to do is to centre it, like so,” he says, demonstrating by holding it in front of Harry’s eye, the point of it staring him in the face, “give it a little push, a little twist, a pull, and then, viola! Out with a pop and looking much like a martini olive. So simple that even a child could do it.”

“Standard issue for all Death Eater children, I presume,” Harry mutters, holding his breath as the business end of the tool is uncomfortably close, poised to strike.

Death, as Malfoy said, was not on the menu. He had not discounted the prospect of mutilation, however.

“Oh, no, Dark Objects and torture instruments were for special, grown-up occasions,” Malfoy says. The eyeball-baller is placed with a clink back on the tray. Harry hisses out a sigh of relief he hadn’t been aware was bubbling up in his chest. “Coming of age soirees and debutante balls and the like. For example, my sixteenth birthday.”

“An absolutely charming occasion, I’m sure. Was taking the Mark part of the party?”

“Obviously. Sandwiched right between the games of musical chairs and before cutting the cake.”

“Positively festive.” He pauses, because the manual specifically states not to antagonise one’s captor, especially not when one’s captor has a tray full of near-deadly weapons, but he honestly cannot help it. “Did you ever regret it?”

“I made my choices,” Malfoy says, curtly.

“That’s not what you said before the Council.”

For the first time since he’s been trapped here, a flush of colour rises to Malfoy’s face. Nevertheless, his voice is stony as he answers, “Like I said, I made my choices – that, too, was a choice.”

“Betrayal is a choice?” Potter needles on, clearly spitting in the face of danger.

“There is always a choice,” says Malfoy grimly. “Why, Potter, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were disappointed in me for doing the right thing, and condemning a guilty man to the sentence he deserved.”

“He was your father.”

“He was a murderer, and one of the Dark Lord’s most devoted and devout. Isn’t that true? That was enough to damn him.”

“I just expected a little more integrity from you, that’s all.”

Ha! Me? Integrity? I was nothing but a coward. Isn’t that what you always said?”

“Did you love him?”

“Suddenly so sympathetic to my plight now? Potter, you shouldn’t be.” He takes up the scalpel and cuts open a line of stitches, ripping all the threads out. Harry winces as the pain slices through him.

“He was an evil man,” Malfoy says calmly, as he yanks the wound open with a vicious tug, drawing a sharp, involuntary cry from Harry. “...who deserved everything he got and more. I don’t know if you read, but there was a lovely editorial piece in the Prophet all about it. There were parties all over London the night he and a few other big name Death Eaters were Kissed. Don’t think I don’t know. The Ministry one, I hear, was the event to be at; black-tie, invitation-only, exclusive, joyous affair. Anybody who was anybody was there. You would have been the Guest of Honour, of course.”

“I...I went home early.”

“I wouldn’t have. I heard they had champagne floats and ice swans and the whole Veela cheering squad of the Bulgarian National Team as entertainment. I bet they even had a Veela hidden in a giant cake with ‘Our Saviour, Harry Potter’ written in red icing all over it. You really missed out.”

“I just don’t see the point of celebrating death, even that of an enemy. ” A quivering breath. “It’s not something to rejoice over.”

“How every noble of you. You didn’t celebrate, after you finally killed that old snake bastard?”

“That was different.”

“Of course it was,” Malfoy says, peering into the wound like an explorer looking down a cavern. “I like death parties myself. Everybody’s so full of life at them. Either that, or dead drunk. Ultimately, it always amounts to the same thing: they’re all desperate to get laid.”

“Wonderful,” Harry chokes out, a shaky inhale as Malfoy pours the potion in and he can hear his flesh sizzle. It takes him a moment to actually be able to speak. “I s-suppose you’ve been to qu..qui—shit. Quite a few of them.”

“Of course. To be perfectly honest, I became a Death Eater for the drunken Death party orgies.” With gloved fingers, he pinches the edges of a wound together and Harry sees fire behind his eyelid.

For a while he can’t speak, and Malfoy’s voice fades into the background, front stage taken up by this strange thing, pain, that takes over his body with its clawing fingers, its gnashing teeth, its little horrific song-and-dance routine.

“Another reason people torture,” Malfoy is saying, “is that you may be the unfortunate captive of an extreme sadist. Now hold still,” he commands, and Harry curses as the needle pushes through the previously-made hole.

“You know, contrary to popular belief, I was never particularly sadistic. I have no desire to hurt and kill small animals, and I was never very good with blood and gore. I just don’t have much of a stomach for it. But here’s the thing I find fascinating. Have you ever heard of such a thing as a Brazen Bull?”

“N-no,” Harry gasps, involuntary tears leaking out the corners of his eyes. The thread inches, like a long, thin worm, through his skin.

“A medieval torture device, invented by the Greeks. Very ingenious, those Greeks. Supposedly the inventor was the first one to try it out. At any rate, the Brazen Bull is a hollow brass statue in the shape of...you guessed it – a bull. You cut the victim’s tongue out and then close the door, trapping them inside. Fires are lit around them, and as they slowly roast to death, they thrash about in agony, making the whole thing come alive. Their muffled screams sound just like a real bull. Very amusing for the audience, apparently.

“People would watch these executions. Men, women, and children. Innocent people – some of them the most angelic souls you’ve ever had the fortune to meet. And they would laugh, all of them, as the victim died. They would laugh as they listened to a tongueless person screaming, choking on their own blood and dying of the heat. The same way we celebrate our war victories and our deaths with elegant black tie affairs and raucous parties. Crowds dancing in the streets after the sentences were announced on those lovely, entertaining Trial days. Very interesting, no?”

He finishes off the stitch at last, after an eternity, carefully, methodically, tying off the thread. Harry sighs with relief as the whole area sings with the hurt, just that moment of respite from the active pain.

“Here’s the thing,” Malfoy says, inspecting his handiwork, “I just think that, under certain circumstances, there’s a bit of that bloodthirsty sadist in us all.”

Then he picks up the scalpel again.

* * *


Harry picked up his wand again.

He pointed it, with deadly intent, directly at the soft hollow of the man’s throat.

“Secure the door,” he told his partner, Neville at the time. Ron was out on light duty while he taught his leg how to bend right again. Manticora bites tended to be nasty; particularly if they clamped and held on.

Neville, without a word, without a pause, obeyed.

The year was 2002. They had been working for two months, three weeks, five days on the Carrington case.

One hot and muggy summer night in July, the two Carrington children, little Juno and Julius, ages 5 and 6, had gone missing from their beds, stolen away in the dead of night. Missing children and kidnappings were Auror cases through and through; maybe with adults they’d give it a day or two, let the local Magical Law Enforcement handle it before they called in the big boys. Harry was glad that with children they didn’t hesitate, but he had that sick feeling in his stomach, too - cases with children were always the worst, no matter the outcome.

He’d lost track of how many sleepless nights he spent working on the Carrington case. Ginny was a joker like her brothers; sent Owls to the office every night the first few weeks, each one filing a missing persons report for one Harry James Potter. Sadly her sense of humour had an expiration date. After the sixth week it curdled, and he’d come home to fights about priorities and what this relationship meant to him, anyway.

The difficulties at home just meant longer nights at the office. His chair Transfigured easily enough into a cot, but some nights he didn’t even get that incantation out of his mouth. Fell asleep on his desk, woke up with drool spots on his scrolls and paperwork and coffee rings on books that Hermione would yell over later.

“Don’t overwork yourself,” his co-workers said. “Leave work at work.” And “Go home, Potter. For Merlin’s sake, just go home.”

Neville didn’t spout such inanities, because Neville had read the case files, same as he did. He had held the same pictures that Harry had, saw the same sweet little boy and girl giggling at him through the frame. Julius had that light sun-bleached blonde hair that would turn brown when he grew up; Juno wore pink ribbons in soft brown curls, one of them already coming loose.

I will find you. I will bring you home.

In Harry’s line of work there were never any definites. They taught you to say, “We’re doing the best we can, Sir/Ma’am.” Or “We have all our best men working on the case.” Never promise that which you can’t achieve.

Harry had never told anybody he was just doing the best he could, when they had all expected him to vanquish the Dark Lord. There had never been a question about it.

“I may have to start charging you rent,” Shacklebolt told him before he locked up one night, somewhere between Harry’s fifth and sixth cup of coffee.

October, almost three months later. Autumn and the whole dingy place was grey, the yard barren. Bitter cold rain splashed against the pane of broken windows. The place was dirty and had a sick, sour smell to it, all mildew and rot, as if the building itself were sick. The floor was littered with ragged old toys; the little girl in a cage, her hair filthy with things that Harry dared not think about.

Of the little boy, there was no trace.

He Crucio’d the man until he would talk, and then when he finally burbled forth vomitus and information he Crucio’d the man until he couldn’t. Harry forced himself to look into the incinerator. There, in the ashes, was the dirty, half-burned body of a teddy bear, and some things small and white, like perfect little pebbles.

Teeth. Tiny baby teeth.

In truth he’d wanted to cry, but the tears would not come. He wanted to be sick all over himself, but the vomit would not come.

“Oh my God,” Neville said, “Oh my God, oh Merlin, my God, oh my God.”

Dimly, Harry thought that God was not here. Not God, not Merlin, not any benevolent force in the universe. Not in this dark, damp place that smelled of mildew and rot, urine and death.

The clothes, the stained underwear – it was all so small. So very small.

A few wispy strands of golden sun-bleached hair that would never turn brown.

Then with a surprisingly steady hand, Harry picked up his wand again. Neville secured the door.

Initially Harry had wanted to send Neville outside, but Neville insisted; he had to guard the door. He wanted to. Longbottom was a good partner.

Of what happened next Harry remembers little. He did not feel himself doing it, did not feel the reverberations up his wand arm from the kickback of the spells – like watching himself through a Pensieve. It happened as if through a haze, through a veil.

The man – if he could even be called a man- cried like an infant; he messed himself. He was dripping wet with his own bodily fluids: saliva, mucous, tears. Piss, vomit, shit. Blood. The stench draped around him like a wool cloak soaked in the mess, heavy and foul.

The smell was god-awful, they would later say, and Harry would be glad that he did not remember.

The man opened his mouth and coughed up blood through his confession, blood and gunk and bile.

And then they read the suspect his rights, and performed the arrest. The little girl was the highest priority, of course, but this was crucial to note: every perpetrator had the right to a fair trial.

The official reports later, corroborated by multiple sources, would say that the suspect struggled and resisted arrest. He was a threat to himself and others. Aurors Potter and Longbottom had simply taken difficult- but necessary- action to subdue him and manage the scene.

In other Aurors’ care, there may have been an accidental death involved, but Auror Potter was famous for bringing all his suspects in for fair trial – in one piece, more or less. Potter the Merciful.

Even if it meant that some of them, with a good enough defence counsel, walked the streets afterwards.

The Defence Counsel made their case for this man as well: a horror story of sexual and physical abuse suffered as a child, exacted upon by his own father, which had driven him to madness and depravity. The story of a little boy who had grown up utterly alone and lonely in a world that was uncaring and unkind. A monster created, not born, a little boy who had not even known to cry out for a saviour because he’d already accepted that something so pathetic and worthless did not deserve saving.

The man was convicted for his crimes, and sentenced swiftly.

Harry had nightmares months after the case was closed, even after Ron had returned to active duty. He thought of that little Carrington boy and how he must have felt. He had failed him. He had only brought home his bones.

He thought of that other little boy as well, the one that had grown up into a cruel and desperate man. He thought of a time when he’d accepted his fate and had never thought to even dare ask for salvation, even as it came, in the form of a half-giant on motorbike.

When he saw the photos from the investigation afterwards, he had felt sick. The man did not so much look like a man, after Harry had been done with him. Parts of him looked like strips of raw meat. Even in black and white the inky stain of blood was obvious, and it was everywhere. In the toilet he heaved up pure coffee, the only thing he’d been able to keep down all day.

He lost both sleep and weight, and sometimes he woke up to find his cheeks and pillow wet without any reason as to why – only, deep down, he knew all too well why.

In the Academy they had all been the same; bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with throats parched for the sweet nectar of truth and justice.

Harry remembered when Ron had seen his first rotting body and vomited on the spot.

After the war, they knew they had so much confidence – they had vanquished the heart of evil; after Voldemort was gone true evil simply did not exist anymore. Happily ever after, roll credits and nineteen years later: the sappy epilogue.

Then they had seen the things that would make stomachs turn just to think of them.

Someone’s grandfather, found in his bed, savaged for nothing more than the few Galleons in his pocket. Someone’s wife, 8 months pregnant, who had crawled out from behind the house on scraped hands and knees because she had been cursed so many times by her own husband that she could no longer walk. Someone’s daughter, just a child, a little girl, pretty, so very young, her eyes blank canvases with the blood still dripping down her thighs.

Then they had learned: Voldemort was not the heart of evil, but rather the heart of evil lay in the hearts of men.

There were people who existed out there more terrifying than the Dark Lord himself. They did not seek power or eternal life. There were no political motivations involved. They did not want to establish a New World Order, it was not about racial lines or society, Pureblood versus Half-Blood versus Muggleborn.

Sometimes, there was no reason at all.

“I don’t think you were out of line, or unnecessarily cruel,” Neville told him, when Harry confronted him about it later. “I think we both acted in the way most necessary and appropriate for the situation.

“Stop thinking on those you didn’t save. Don’t torture yourself with what-ifs; think on the good that we did do. We brought her home safe. That’s what matters.”

There was no comfort to be found in the words. It was the same thing everyone else had been telling him, had been telling the both of them, echoed and trite. But what Harry found in Neville, his partner on the case, was a shared weary understanding, the same burdensome guilt.

They had both held the photos in their hands, they had both failed, but they had done it together.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Neville had said, with his familiar, unassuming smile. “I think you need it even more than me.”

To think, they had mocked Neville in the Academy. In particular there had been one prick who had snickered the loudest and smirked the widest, and Harry was reminded of Malfoy, only Resigno wasn’t nearly as good. He wasn’t even in the same league. Hell, he wasn’t even in Zacharias Smith’s league. He was so below-grade that he was like a piss-poor made-in-Asian-sweatshop poor man’s knockoff imitation of Malfoy, brand name completely misspelled and all.

(He hadn’t even been blond, which Harry suspected had a little something to do with it.)

Neville was a damn good Auror, and Harry trusted him with his life.

A year later, Neville tendered his resignation.

He wanted to go back to school, he said. He’d been thinking on it for a while. He tried to explain to Harry, “It’s about plants, you see.”

Harry didn’t see.

“Plants are easy. They give everything and ask for only sun and water. Nurture them a little bit and they flourish. Think about how a man plants a tree not for himself, but for future generations. Think about how you look at a flower blooming in spring and that right there is proof that there’s a benevolent force in the universe.”

“Bugs infested our roses when Ginny tried to garden,” Harry said. “They rotted and were all full of holes and worms.”

“That’s just the thing, Harry,” Neville said. “We’re both so young. I want to see the flowers, not just the bugs.”

He wasn’t making any sense and Harry wondered if he had been smoking some of the magical plants he was talking about. He wanted to call him a pansy. Or even a dendrophile.

“What about the children?” Harry asked, sounding to even himself like some hysterical church lady.

“I’m thinking about the children. After all, I want to teach.”

Harry remembered the old adage that said those who can’t do, teach. He would never say anything so purposefully snide to Neville.

He believed he scoffed instead. He may have snorted.

It did not go over well.

Later he told Ginny to take Neville off their Christmas card list.

“Hey,” Ginny said, her voice soft against his ear, her hand soft on his shoulder. “Not everyone’s born to be a hero.”

And I am? Harry wanted to ask, but he did not know if he wanted the reply.

* * *


“Do you ever think that if you had different parents, you might have turned out differently?”

“But of course. Do you think that if you
had parents, you might have turned out differently?”

* * *


A child, in the darkness. Four little limbs curled up, cramped, hugging only himself, every breath smells of must and damp, of old mothballs when the moths are either all fled or dead. He’s lost and forgotten somewhere in the dust and cobwebs; the walls on all sides of him; a wooden box.

The walls are closing in and Harry can’t move.

Where is the air coming from? There isn’t even a plant in here, for Merlin’s sake.

A room with no windows and no doors, and he’s in here all the time. How can there be enough air to breathe? He’s going to suffocate and die in here, leaving only a desiccated corpse behind.

He’s going to dry out, like a mummy; perfectly preserved. They would put him on display in a museum, if Malfoy ever decided to donate his body, and he’d even have a nice plaque: Harry Potter, Saviour of Wizarding World, c.1980-2005; of the Malfoy collection.

Or it would be just like Malfoy to stuff him and keep him around just to gloat at his body every day. The spoils of his conquest. He might even dress him up in horrible outfits; housedresses and tea hats – that’s just the sort of thing a deranged maniac like Malfoy would do.

This lack of oxygen is clearly getting to Harry’s brain.

Every breath he takes feels spun full of cobwebs, thick and sticky. He can practically feel the spiders crawling up and down the inside of his throat. Out of nowhere, the memory of the way a house creaks at night, creaking around him, as if threatening to collapse. The sound of footsteps pounding on the steps, loud as cannon shots: boom boom boom – and the dust and plaster would shower down in a fine powder, turning his hair and skin white.



There was a story on the news once, years and years ago – a Muggle who fancied himself a magician and escape artist, chained himself up in a plastic and glass coffin so that he could be buried alive. The coffin collapsed when tonnes of dirt and wet cement were poured upon it, crushing the man inside.

Aunt Petunia had sniffed, and said that was just what happened to freaks who tried to do freaky things. Dudley had tormented him with it; had said that this was what was going to happen to a freak like him, and, just in case Harry hadn’t absorbed the horror of the story quite enough, his cousin had attempted, on multiple occasions, to bury Harry in the sandbox in the playground.

For a whole year Harry had had nightmares about it, chained up and locked up in a glass coffin, unable to scream for help as it fell in and crushed him, eyes and nose and mouth filling up with dirt and wet cement.

This was before he turned 11, and a whole new world had introduced him to a whole new fear.

In this room, however, it seems like his childhood fears brought to life. He is in a glass coffin, dirt pushing in on all sides, and sooner or later the walls are going to collapse all around him.

He has to try and breathe. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, faster and faster and there’s not enough air, he’s running out of air -

Don’t!

He looks up and almost swears the ceiling appears to be bulging, cracking underneath the weight of tonnes and tonnes of wet dirt, threatening to cave in.

The room, once a decent size, feels smaller than the cupboard he grew up in. In his cupboard at least he could open the door, he could leave anytime he wanted to.

It’s like the time Dudley had pushed a chair in front of the door, he pushed and pushed against it but he could not move it; he screamed and screamed and no one came.

Finally, when they needed him to clean up after dinnertime, they set him free.

Here they would not set him free. Heavy chains of iron dragged him down onto the bed. He thinks of quicksand, the soft, sucking sound of wet dirt. His legs can’t move, they might as well not be there – he might as well be an amputee, just a torso with dummy weights attached to him.

Trapped in his own body.

The air feels like cotton around him, choking up his throat, his lungs, sticky and stubborn. The dirt and cement will pour in any moment now, burying him forever.

PANIC!!!!

He has to breathe. An easy enough process – the lowering of the diaphragm, the expansion of the chest cavity, the rush of incoming air.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale. Exhale.

InhaleExhaleInhaleExhaleInhaleExhale and oh God don’t breathe so fast you wanker you’re running out of air as it is, there’s no way you’re getting any air at all in here and Oh God—

He has to scream. He screams and the walls echo his scream back to him, as if he were locked in here with a screaming multitude, like the screams of people he knows and once knew, has saved and has seen die—

Only every one of them, every single one of them, has his voice, has his face.

* * *


Dear Merlin he needs to calm the fuck down.

Seriously.

* * *


The hand closest to the wooden frame of the bedpost reaches out and with a blunt nail like a dirty crescent moon, it scratches and scratches one little indent. Scritching, scratching, the sound a mouse might make, sharpening its little white teeth.

One.

Although, one what, he doesn’t exactly know.

* * *


After the initial breakdown and the screaming, after the scratches to try and make like he’s made some indication of the passage of time, after some forced breaths to regain control, Harry feels a lot more like himself again.

The thing is that there’s a whole world out there that needs him. This sense of duty, more than even thoughts of his Wonderful Life, is what keeps him held so tightly together, like a fist gripped onto life.

He grips his hands into fists – the worst thing about being tied up, incapacitated like this, physically, is the way it deteriorates the body. The muscles atrophy; the cells weaken and die. One day the chains come off and you’re left with limp overcooked St.-Mungo’s- cafeteria stroganoff arms.

He flexes his muscles in place, straining against the chains. Sets of 15 reps each. He counts, because there’s really nothing else to do.

And makes another scratch mark on the bedpost, although he still doesn’t know the units.

* * *


Desperation is a mean companion, nipping at Harry’s currently useless heels and poking him in the most painful places.

It’s not rock bottom but it’s close, thinking on the people that need him and his only chance of escape so far, and for all those people out there, his sexual modesty is a small sacrifice indeed.

Not that it feels that way when a libidinous house elf is regarding one speculatively.

“Hey, er, Bimsy?” Harry says, when the creature has appeared to help him with his daily toiletries and the like. “Come here a second, would you?”

“Yes, Master Potter?” Bimsy simpers, all too close to his side in the flash of a second, batting nonexistant eyelashes in such a way that – if house elves had lashes to bat – it would have been downright scandalous. “How can Bimsy service you?”

Harry’s fairly certain that the word he means to use is serve, and it’s only a tangential grasp of English that causes the uncomfortable imagery. Fairly almost completely certain. Almost.

“Um,” Harry says, clearing his throat. All house elves ever want is a little respect, after all, as he’d learned from his dealings with them, someone sympathetic to their plight that didn’t simply treat them as bug-eyed creature-servants. “Bimsy, let’s be friends.”

“Oh, yes, Master Potter,” Bimsy coos, “Bimsy would like to be friendly with Master Potter very much. Bimsy like.”

“Good,” says Harry, and gives what he hopes is most winning front-page smile (which also happened to be the same as the I feel awkward with so many cameras pointed at me smile). “Now, as friends, I think, maybe you could help loosen the chains a bit? Or maybe just the cuffs, a little. They’re very, very uncomfortable. Friends ought to help each other out, don’t you think?”

“Oh no, Master Potter,” Bimsy says, suddenly withdrawing. “Master Malfoy would not like at all. Master Malfoy no like.”

“But what if Master Malfoy didn’t have to know?” Harry continues on, wheedling. “What if I could get Master Malfoy to grant you your freedom?” The next thing he says is possibly one of the most disgusting things that’s ever left his mouth, but he coaxes, “And I would be ever so grateful.”

Bimsy gasps. “Freedom?” he echoes.

“Oh yes,” Harry continues, in his soft, cajoling tone. “Freedom to be your own elf. Freedom to decide where you want to work, who you want to work for. You need no longer be a slave! You can cast off your shackles and taste sweet liberty for your very own! You can seize it!”

Hermione would be proud of him, really.

“No more slaving?” Bimsy whispers. “No more beatings?”

“No more of any of that,” Harry promises him. “No more violence, no more random cruelties. No more whippings, no more beating with a hot iron, no more being slammed and smushed in the door. No more punches, no more kicks, no more abuse. You don’t have to take any of that any longer, if you just help me.”

And then, all of a sudden, the large eyes, watery all along, flood with tears as Bimsy bursts into sobs.

“Master Malfoy so beautiful! Master Malfoy so benevolent and wonderful and kind! Please, please don’t make Bimsy leave Master Draco!”

“Bimsy like,” Harry says dully, with sudden horrific realisation.

“Master Draco best at beatings,” Bimsy sighs dreamily. “Master Draco so good at punching and kicking, so good at whipping and ironing, so good at punishing. Almost good as Master Lucius. Bimsy like.

“Master Potter good,” Bimsy tells him, almost in apology, “but Master Draco is perfect.”

“And Bimsy like,” Harry finishes for him, slumping back in the pillows in disgusted defeat. Of course. Of course. How could he have forgotten? Here he lives as a resident of Malfoyland, the torturiest place on earth, where Malfoy reigns supreme as King.

To add insult to injury, Malfoy has now made him feel unattractive by proxy via rejection from a perverted house elf, and Malfoy isn’t even here.

Harry resents him with a fiery passion, he decides.

“Now,” Bimsy chirps, sniffling away the rest of his tears, “perhaps Master Potter like spongebath?”

“N-no, Master Harry no like!”



Later, as Harry shivers and feels violated, he thinks that he hasn’t really known rock bottom until now.

* * *


“Do you like fairytales, Potter?”

“What?”

“You know, fairytales. Bedtime stories. Things that begin Once Upon a Time, there was a very, very exceedingly handsome blond boy...”

“I know. I...I suppose they’re all right.”

“I always liked them. Mother was a wonderful storyteller. You ought to hear her Voldemort impression. She also does a great Pettigrew.”

“I’m sure,” Harry murmurs, disturbed. And then, “Is that where you get it from?”

“I certainly hope I’ve never gotten anything from Pettigrew. Yuck.”

“The impressions, you sod. And things.”

“Oh.” For a moment he almost looks pleased. “You remembered.”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, I should say that the talent ‘and things’ come from Mother’s side. I inherited different ‘things’ from Father. But yes. By the age of five I had all of Beadle the Bard memorised. I like the little lessons they teach, but I especially like the stories that work out, you know, with happily ever after.”

“Wow, Malfoy. That’s really...unexpected of you.”

“I suppose that’s what gave me the delusion that you’d be wonderful to meet. Children can be so stupid.”

“You were such a little snot to me when we first met!”

“I was trying to make friends!”

“Wow, Malfoy, if that was your idea of making friends, you must not have had many friends as a child.”

“...”

“Well, I mean, you had Crabbe and Goyle...”

“No, you’re right. I didn’t have very many friends as a child. I had Vincent and Gregory and I knew Pansy. I was nervous about going to school. And there you were, someone whose life was the stuff of legend, and I wanted to meet you so badly. Before, of course, I found out what a prat you were.”

“You were the horrid brat—“

“I was adorable. Honestly, I can’t look at pictures of myself without cooing over how adorable I was. But that’s beside the point, as wonderful as it is. Out of all the fairytales, I liked yours best.”


“You...what? You did?”

“I always liked your story. Little orphan boy raised by Muggles –which is probably something akin to being raised by ravenous wolves - trapped in a cupboard finds out one day he’s a wizard. And then, almost immediately after, he finds out he’s famous, and he’s meant to be the Saviour that the whole wizarding world has been waiting for. His house wins the House Cup every year – unfairly, might I add – he’s a Quidditch star, and when he grows up, he really does win the war and save the world. The villain dies, he gets the girl and goes on to live happily ever after. Does it get any better than that?”

“Well, considering that I’m spending my happily ever after chained up in a prison that nobody in the world can find, getting tortured daily, I would say yes, it could probably get better than this.”

“Always so angsty, Potty, so like you. And they said I was the drama queen. Chin up, at least the food’s not awful. And who knows? The story’s not over yet. Your prince on white steed may yet come galloping in here to defeat the Big Bad wizard, slay the dragon, kiss you back to life, and so on, and so forth.”

“You’re demented, Malfoy.”

“I’m not demented. I’m dedicated to my causes.”

“So does this mean you’ll free me?”

A sardonic smile. “It doesn’t work that way, Potty.”

* * *


He really only needs his hands free. If Muggle escape artists can do it so can he, and after what he’s been through, honestly? A little scraped skin wouldn’t bother him in the least.

Just one hand free, just one, he doesn’t care if it rips all the skin off his hand. It’s the key to survival.

“You hate me right now,” Malfoy says, running the dull edge of a scalpel underneath one of the hundreds of cuts it’s made. “You’re thinking how much you’d like to get your hands free so you can slice my throat.

“That’s not true,” Harry says, eying the scalpel. The carotid artery is obviously the easy target, a quick slash and then they bleed out. An arterial bleed spurts blood – left untreated, the victim goes unconscious in 30 seconds, and will die within three to four minutes.

In one minute, the heart pumps the entire volume of blood within the human body.

He wouldn’t do it of course, he would only threaten to, just hold the blade to Malfoy’s throat and force him to set him free.

He’d hold the blade to this throat, not quite touching, just hovering, drawing out the terrible anticipation of death and pain the same way Malfoy hovers the scalpel over his wound now.

He’d demand his wand. You can do anything with a wand – something Malfoy demonstrates on days he is feeling creative, the way a flower can bloom out of a wound, or say, what a mouse might look like if it were burrowing around underneath his skin, trying to gnaw its way out from where it had been sewn in.

That’s one thing you just have to give Malfoy – points for creativity. Some people just have a natural talent for this sort of thing.

If Harry had the wand, if he had the scalpel, he’d have all the power here. He’s not the vengeful type, never was, but there is something appealing about chaining Malfoy up and teaching him a thing or two.

“It’s for your own good, you know,” says Malfoy, almost sympathetically, and Harry imagines a spray of bright red blood; his mouth fills with saliva.

* * *


And then comes the day when Malfoy does not come at all.

At first he is glad for it, but then the boredom seeps in. There is nothing worse than the ennui; a Potter is a thing in motion. Harry Potter is a verb, an action word - always doing something, always moving, achieving, acting. When he’s trapped and tortured at least he’s being entertained. It’s the way that sometimes back at Auror Headquarters, they find him sitting at his desk, tapping his foot and making a general mess of his reports. The way that Shacklebolt says that it is literally paining him to look at Harry, and sends him to a sparring room. Or finds him and sends him on one of their low-priority investigations.

The vandalised mailbox, the baby Kneazle in the tree; and in both cases, the caller swore that Dark Arts were involved. (Per Department policy, any claim of possible Dark Arts usage had to be taken seriously, no matter if it had to do with purloined Dark Items or the cursed evil bubble bath.)

So when Malfoy doesn’t come, and the air is deathly still, and the candles keep quietly burning, and Bimsy has proven a complete disaster even in his desperation, and he has to think about all the people out there who he’s letting down, well, that’s enough to make one’s stitches itch.

The itching on its own is torture enough. Infections...parasites...

DON’T!

Then the itching turns over, a worm wriggling onto its side, and it’s something much like pain.

It blooms like a flower then, struggling towards the light; a great big crimson flower, red as red can be, red as the eyes he still sometimes sees in nightmares, with silken petals lined with black veins; bursting into life, exploding forth from its dark centre.

Brightness; redness; black veins, black eyes – that is his pain.

On and on it runs, bleeding into itself.

He knows of pain. It comes and goes like the tide, and then it’s the tide coming in. Every time a little bit more, covering up all the dry painless sand.

Waves of black water, washing onto shore. Crashing, breaking over the broken, jagged rocks of his body. The water is lapping at his feet. It covers his shins, his knees, his thighs. His hips, his stomach, his chest. It is up to his neck with no sign of dry land. And then he’s submerged in the choking black waters of pain, held under, unable to breathe. Sucked into the dark whirlpools that lead to eternity and worse, where the Inferi grasp and tug, clinging, slimy hands trying to pull you apart...

The Cuthbert case. Betty-Anne drowned and no one could say whether it was suicide or murder, there was reason enough for either to be plausible. Thinks of her limp, bloated body when they pulled her from the swirling eddies of water, long thin strands of algae and seaweed tangled in her hair...

This is the worst part of pain; even worse than just the physical, that his own pain reminds him of the pain of others.

When the door finally opens Harry’s long since been dragged underwater, dripping wet with sweat and too exhausted to flail anymore, all the muscles in his limbs twitching like pouring salt on a fresh corpse.

As if the skies had broken open and somewhere, the Hogwarts choir is singing Hallelujah, mellifluous children's voices echoing off the walls of his velvet prison, heralding the entrance of his own personal saviour, dressed all in white. He bends over Harry, who is a twitching, writhing mess of pain on the bed , as if all his limbs had been excised and replaced with pure nerve endings. Malfoy's face comes into his mottled, pain-blurred vision like a swathe of sunlight in a rainy-day watercolour.


The candlelight caresses his pale hair; the two together meld in a golden liquid mating, forming a halo that lovingly surrounds his face. His expression is a mix of pity and amusement, yet there's a sort of benevolence to it; the glimpse of a smile just touching barely-pink lips; a Michelangelo angel; a nephilim - the dark heavenly creature that mates with man.



And most importantly of all, he dangles from his fingers the gleaming phial of red, the comfort, the relief, the drug, the blood – the blood is the life.



Giver of life.



And for the first time in his life Harry thinks, unashamedly, that Malfoy is actually quite beautiful.



"Drink," says Malfoy, and Harry, without protest, obeys.

* * *


“If I’m going to be staying here a while , you might as well make the place a bit more cosy,” Harry comments sullenly, damning himself for being found so weak and wanting.



When he wakes up, there is something new in his room. A frame on the wall, just next to his bed. Inside the elaborate gilded frame, there is a cross-stitch sample, the border detailed with roses and vines and tiny blue star flowers.

And there, in lovingly, painstakingly hand-embroidered calligraphy, the letters read: Home Sweet Home.

* * *


A life, a wife, and children three. Maybe a pet dog to complete the picture.

Everybody asked him, so when are you going to ask her?

He never wanted to answer, but I haven’t even got a ring.

* * *




“Look, I’m not leaving you,” Ron said.

“No, you’re just transferring to another Department and partner-breaking up with me,” Harry shot back. “I’ll just never see you ever and I’ll have to find a new, pisstastic partner. That sound accurate enough for you, Ron?”

Ron threw his hands up uselessly. “You’re impossible when you get like this, Harry.” He ran a hand threw his hair and sighed. “Hermione’s pregnant.”

Those two words alone were enough to throw Harry off his fuming. “What?” He searched Ron’s face for the truth and found it in the look of surprised elation. “You’re serious. Oh, wow...congratulations, mate, that’s fantastic!”

And then, obviously, the twinge of upset that he couldn’t help. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I promise, you’re the first person I’ve told,” Ron said quickly.

“I can’t believe it. That’s amazing.”

“I can’t believe it either,” said Ron, and for a moment there was a look of genuine terror in his eyes. “I’m gonna be a dad,” he said, quietly, as if the softer he said it, it might not come true. He then laughed a little wildly. “I’m gonna be a dad!”

“You’ll make a great one,” said Harry, and wondered what this had to do with Ron quitting.

“...I’m gonna be a dad, you know? I have a lot to think about,” Ron’s face was pained, pleading with him to understand. “Our job is extremely high-risk, particularly our missions, not that I’m regretting them or anything; it’s just that...it’s just that it’s not just about me anymore, I’m going to have to support my family...”

“So you’re saying I’m dangerous to work with.”

“Well, no, but...I did spend 8 months of last year out on light duty...”

“Not all because of one mission!”

“Right...Because of three separate cases...”

“I would never let any harm befall you,” Harry said, stepping menacingly closer. “Did Hermione put you up to this?”

He’d always thought that Ron was rather whipped.

Hermione had always been the one to say that Ron was the best partner for him, after all, not even because Ron was the most competent or they were the most well-matched, but because he was the only one, she said, stupid enough for the job.

“No! I mean, yeah, she and I have talked about it, but...she’s right, you know. I just have different priorities now. It’s been thrilling and fun and a few times so terrifying I thought I would wet my pants...and one time, I’m pretty certain I did. Thanks for not spreading that one around, by the way. You know how they love to gossip.”

“Don’t mention it,” Harry said drily.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is...I’m gonna miss it like hell and there’s nothing in the world like working with you...but...”

But?

“But...” Ron sighed and ran his hand through his hair, the way he tended to do. “I can’t live this life forever, don’t you see?”

Harry tried to see. He thought of the time that they’d crawled through the entrails of the Giant Graphorn that had swallowed them, only to have to fight their way out, and how, when the both of them had emerged, slathered with things most foul and unmentionable, Ron had said, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

They both had had a good laugh, then.

He’d never thought that Ron had meant it quite so literally.

But he tried to be understanding, and he tried to be happy for Ron. Later, he’d refrain from telling Ginny that Ron was off the Christmas list. It would have made things quite awkward, anyway, considering that they were due to spend Christmas at the Burrow.

“Just...” Harry finally sighed. “Just be happy, okay?”

Ron’s ever-hopeful face had lit up immediately, and he’d grabbed Harry in a big bear hug that threatened to crack his ribs. “Thanks, mate,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “You know, even though we won’t be partners anymore, you’ll always be my best mate, you know that, right?”

“Sure,” Harry had said easily. “Now you better let go of me before the mother of your child gets jealous. You know how the Department loves to gossip.”



They say that everyone you love will eventually either leave you or die. A bit redundant, if you ask me, Malfoy says.

* * *


Harry wakes one day and his hands are brilliantly, blessedly free. His legs, too, and he’s not going to question something like this. Maybe Malfoy’s lost it - well, at least even more of it than he’s already lost – or he’s completely forgotten about him, somehow. Or maybe Bimsy plans to finally run away with him in some illegal house-elf/human interspecies forced-at-wandpoint marriage.

Whatever the reason, Harry is too grateful to question it much, even if he does half-expect the door to open at any moment to reveal a house elf in a wedding gown made of a table doily.

Immediately he pushes himself up to get out of bed.

Or at least he tries.

His muscles are sore and weak from disuse, it seems. Not only have his lower extremities betrayed him, now his upper body has taken up arms (or rather, dropped arms) and joined the revolt. He feels as if he’s drugged, as if the limbs are heavy, hollowed out and packed tight with stones, as if his limbs no longer obey him, but rather answer to someone else, a higher master.

Like a puppet with all the strings cut – completely free but imprisoned by its very nature of immobility.

Long moments of grunting and heaving get him nothing but sweat and exhaustion. The exhaustion is the worst, is not smart; as in any form of survival, the last thing one should do is exhaust oneself.

With a great heave and possibly nothing more than telepathic willpower he manages to roll off the bed and onto the floor. The resounding thud makes his bones rattle, makes all the wounds screech out in a vibrato of pain and he grits his teeth against it, has to simply lie there and concentrate on breathing for a few moments before he can even attempt to continue.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he begins to drag himself forward, arms heavy and weak, feeling a bit like a great fat slug. His nails leave scratches against the beautiful hardwood floors. Inch by inch he pulls himself, the stretch of floor as vast as the Sahara between bed and non-existent door.

The floor seems to sap his strength with every agonizing inch. He breaks a nail and the bed of it bleeds. If not for the polish on the wood, his fingers would be full of splinters.

Finally, his muscles simply collapse from exhaustion, unused to the strenuous task required of them when they had been allowed to laze about in bed for so long. Frustration hotly pricks the backs of his eyes and his body is covered in a sheen of sweat from the pain.

The door – or where the door should be - is still half a room away.

This whole exercise was simply a lesson in futility. Malfoy’s nasty little way of saying, there is power in this place and none of it is yours.

Every subsequent move is simply too painful to make, Harry’s muscles throbbing, every now and then jolting with a tearing sensation. He’s sure he’s popped a stitch or two. Or three.

He lies there in pain a great long time. He feels his body grow cold. The feelings of helplessness are far worse – he can’t even get himself back to bed.

The door opens at last - and with it, in comes the aroma of something delicious, the promise of pain relief, and of course, the Deliverer of all these elements: Malfoy. He who is the God of Small Things: able to nourish and to deprive, to heal and to hurt. All the power in this little bubble of a world contained in his elegant, condemning hand; the pale, outstretched hand of Death.

“Ah, Potter, I see that you’ve let your situation bring you down,” Malfoy quips unkindly.

He seems amused. Harry is not.


“Come now, let’s rise up in the world, then,” Malfoy continues, slipping arms around Harry’s torso and pulling him back towards the bed. “Not even house elves sleep on the floor.” With surprising ease he lifts him up then, only jolting him as much as necessary to get him back in, although the pain is still debilitating. “They sleep in dens, you know, like squirrels and other tree-rodents,” he says, rather conversationally, as he covers Harry back up with a sheet and a blanket, his motions natural, almost tender, as if tucking in a child for the night.

After all, the good Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

* * *


Soft warm fingers stroke his forehead. A soothing, gentle voice whispers into his ear, urges him, “Sleep, sleep and rise again.”

* * *


When he wakes there’s a new addition to his room.

Above where the door should be, a banner is hung. On each side it features the dismembered bloody body of an ex-unicorn. Silver and gold thread make up the little sparks around each unicorn head. In beautiful, flawless script, it cheerily declares: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here!!”

* * *


The most important thing is to keep a hold of his mind.

As long as he can tell himself that he’s still sane, he may yet have a chance.

What a funny phrase, losing your mind, as if it were a set of keys, or perhaps a pair of socks. As if you had it one moment, and the next you had simply misplaced it, perhaps even in the most obvious place, simply waiting to be found again.

There are audible footsteps outside the room; the first time he seems to have heard footsteps, actually; Malfoy always has a silent approach, like a cat.

A sweet, haunting female voice sings, “Moon River...wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday...”

“Hello?” Harry calls out. “HELLO? Is anybody out there? HELLO?”

“Oh dream maker, you heartbreaker, wherever you’re going, I’m going your way...”

“HELP!” he screams at the top of his lungs. “HELP, THERE’S SOMEONE TRAPPED IN HERE!”

Two drifters off to see the world… there's such a lot of world to see...”

“CAN YOU HEAR ME? I’M TRAPPED! I’M THE CAPTIVE OF A MADMAN! I’M BEING HELD AGAINST MY WILL!”

“We're after the same rainbow's end-- waiting 'round the bend…

“I’M HARRY POTTER! I’VE GONE MISSING! YOU HAVE TO HELP ME!”

My huckleberry friend, Moon River and me…”

“HELP!” he cries, one last ditch effort. “HELP! HELP ME!” He knows it’s no use.

The footsteps fade away, and so does the voice, still singing, drifting, notes melting away in the air. The room feels very cold in its wake.

Had it been a ghost, then? He would not be surprised. How many had been in this place before him? How many had died?

Just a ghost.

Or a hallucination of a declining mind.

Person or phantom or figment? The fact that he can argue for any of them does not bode well with the knots in his stomach and the voices in his head.

* * *


When he opens his eyes again he feels like he’s really opened up his eyes to the situation this time. Like the first time he’d used Lumos and lit the whole damn room up. Like one of those comical lightbulb over the head moments, just like in those cartoons Dudley used to watch, Harry watching the inverted reflection of the television in the window he was currently washing.

It’s hard to keep track of time when there is no way of telling it. He lives in perpetual, infernal ambient candlelight. All his scratch marks add up to nothing. It’s a common captor technique of disorientation; they say to pay attention to when meals are being served to gauge days and nights, but the periods of unconsciousness in between make it nigh impossible. More and more his scratch marks document whenever Malfoy appears, which is, in a word: useless. Malfoy is too capricious, too unreliable, to serve as any sort of temporal measure; with Malfoy, it’s always crazy o’clock.

Even worse, Harry’s being trained like a Pavlov dog, to feel that uneasy tug of anticipation in the pit of his stomach when the door forms and opens. When he hears that subtle click of the doorknob turning, he both shivers and salivates, never knowing which to expect, the food or the relief or the pain. Sometimes all three. Malfoy, bringer of all things, the good and the bad and all the in-betweens. An arbitrary god with a one-person population, one creation, to toy with. His own Adam in a little windowless, silk-cushioned, velvet-lined Eden.

And whether Harry likes it or not (emphasis on the not), slowly, he’s being conditioned. Even with the awareness of the conditioning, full knowledge of it all, he can do nothing to stop it.

Should anything happen to Malfoy...well, he’ll just starve to death, he cheerily conjectures, or die of infection, whichever comes first, die and rot away in here forever, his body never to be found.

But he’s been doing this all wrong all along. He’s been playing by the rules, following the playbook like a good little captive aiming to survive, waiting for help to arrive.

Be observant, don’t panic. The loss of a sense of time, the isolation; these are all psychological tools in the hands of your captor.

Never argue, never incite your captor.
(This one, obviously, giving him far more trouble than the others.)

Exercise! Body! AND MIND!!

While he waits for help to come. While he waits for the whole Department to come crashing through the wall to rescue one of their own, the way he’d done himself on at least two separate occasions before.

Help is not coming.

Help is not an option.

He will not be saved.

Others would have found this condemning realisation depressing, even devastating. Some may have given up in the face of such complete hopelessness.

Harry Potter, however, never did do well as a victim. Harry Potter does not wait to be saved; he is the one who does the saving – and now, he must help himself.

In the loss of hope there was freedom – wild, liberating, dangerously thrilling freedom.

This is just like one of his cases, only he is the victim and the investigator in one.

Now he only has to do what he does best: he has to think like an Auror.

KNOW THY ENEMY.

He could compose a criminal profile. That’s where one might begin, when working on such a case. And Malfoy isn’t a stranger come to steal him away in the night, Malfoy is someone he knows, someone he’s known for the great majority of his young life. This is something that he can use to his advantage. Already the files are sifting together in his mind, the dossier on one Draco Malfoy compiling itself, piece by piece.

The root of the question, he rather thought, was why? The question of all questions.

Nobody did anything without a motive. Even the truly insane had motives, it just so happened that the motives were often truly insane. I killed her to protect my prize gardenias, that sort of thing.

Yet the problem with predicting the behaviour of the insane is that they are inherently so unpredictable. You could map out their personalities and thought patterns, and yet only go so far; logic applied does not often work when the behaviour is illogical.

Malfoy is carefully nursing him back to health, that much has been established, despite whatever fun little adventures in sadism this seems to also entail. But to what end? And for what purpose?

I’m keeping him captive so that I may chop him up and make myself a Potter-pot pie, that sort of thing.

Harry has a motive to find; he has to find it before it’s too late.

Not to worry, he tells himself, I’m doing the best I can.

After all, Harry Potter is on the case.

* * *


A list of common motives: Money, Revenge, Personal Involvement, Psychosis.

It’s not money, that’s for sure. The Ministry had collected its due share from the Malfoys in fines and court payments, previous war crimes reduced to minor albeit very expensive misdemeanours. Yet Malfoy still has enough money at his disposal to lavishly furnish an opulent cage for his own private prisoners-of-war.

It’s good to be rich.

Ransom? Ha!

No, money is easy to rule out.

* * *


Revenge is the most obvious suspicion.

Malfoy had always taken a certain glee in making his life difficult. Malfoy’s life had been comparably easy for quite a while. He had had social status, wealth, and two parents who supposedly loved him. He had had plenty of friends in school and a professor who favoured him. He was doing well academically, he was even made a House Prefect of his year. He had held the world in a carefree palm, served on a silver platter, until the hand of fate had tipped the tray and it had all come crashing down on him. After the war, he had lost everything.

Harry supposed that he might want revenge, too, if he had been a person like that.

Malfoy was always a petty, spiteful creature anyway. Susan Bones had knocked over his books in class once, in first year, a genuine accident, and up until fifth year he was still knocking over her things every chance he got.

Vengeance is most certainly a factor.

In comparison Harry supposes that one might think he has it all. He is famous, he is adored. He has a very steady job and a very steady life and a very steady almost-wife. His life had been shaping up into something very stable. Comfortable.

When he delves into it deeper, he realises that life must have been difficult for Slytherin students and their families, after the war. He honestly had never thought about it before; too many Trials to occupy his time, too many orders to appear in court before the Wizengamot. And then there had been his life, and the struggle to go on with his life, there had been Ginny and the rest of the Weasleys – there had been the funerals. There had been the dealings with grief and loss, there had been mourning and an attempt at healing, there had been the endless interviews and the swarming of admirers, there had been the stalkers and the paparazzi, and then there had been the Academy.

That night, the Battle at Hogwarts – Slytherin House had been sent away, locked away, almost, banished to the Dungeons where they would be nice and separated from the rest. Still ostracised at the very end.

So much for the predictions of inter-House unity.

They had all been painted with a broad brush. Even the families without any history of Death Eater involvement were accused and brought in for questioning. They bore the stain of public shaming even after their innocence was proven, guilty by association. The mobs waiting outside the Ministry during the Trials still harassed them all the same, spitting and hissing, cursing their names.

He remembered a call he’d been on once, during his field internship in the Academy. A simple investigation of a household suspected to be in possession of Dark Arts materials and other Forbidden Objects. The Haneda family had been Slytherins for two generations, ever since their immigration to England. The Aurors arrived in the middle of the night; standard procedure for such investigations, Harry’s field training officer said, since it was important that the subjects be caught off guard. Every family member was awoken and pulled out of bed, mother, father, elderly grandmother, daughter and little son, forced to stand on the lawn in their pyjamas while their house was ransacked. The Aurors were nothing if not thorough; no private object was left untouched, no drawer left unopened. They’d had a good time, laughing all the while as they overturned the furniture and mocked the decor, pulled lingerie and personal items out for all to see and comment on. The house was like a gutted fish by the time they were through, all of its insides ripped out and strewn all over the floor, spilling out onto the lawn.

They seized some objects; the more valuable ones, paintings, for instance, works of art and precious vases. Heirlooms that had been in the family for generations. It was for evidence lockup, they said, pending further investigation.

The daughter shivered in her nightgown, cheeks glinting with tears in the darkness. She looked vaguely familiar. Later Harry would realise that he’d gone to school with her, although he never had known her name. She clutched her little brother’s hand tightly in hers, knuckles white, her skin pale. The little boy looked about ten or eleven, probably just the age to start Hogwarts soon. Harry had forgotten that he had ever been that small.

He was only a cadet, he was in training, and every move was graded and judged - yet right there, right on the lawn, he’d gone up to his Field Training Officers and had told them that this wasn’t the way to go about a search. They, completely unphased, had simply taken him aside and explained to him the proper protocols, how certain procedures must be conducted when there was reasonable suspicion. The law, of course, was on their side.

Afterwards, it was revealed that they had found nothing. No evidence of Dark Arts practise, no Dark Artifacts, not a single Forbidden Object, not even a speck of Dark Pixie Dust.

Sometimes reports of harassment from Slytherin families were called in to the Law Enforcement branch; often times they weren’t, the victims all too wary of the judging look in the officer’s eye when he saw the family crest or the serpentine paraphernalia, that air of you brought this upon yourself.

When Hogwarts re-opened, Harry had never thought to ask how many members of Slytherin House even returned.

The world was unfair and now he was bearing the brunt of the retaliation, the world’s unfairness counted out and paid for in his wounds, his scars, his pain.

He’s never thought about it before. He’s never had to think about it before, he was privileged that way.

Now, he is starting to understand.

* * *


Who do you do it for? Harry has wanted to ask, although the speech would be through gasps and winces, through the merciless kiss of cold steel to his skin.

It’s a silly question, now that he’s had time to give some thought to it. They used to play a game during training scenarios: how would you interview your suspect if you were allowed one question only?

It made you rethink your questioning, your whole line of reasoning. It forced you to narrow the case down to the most essential information. It also made you realise how much information you already knew, how many of your questions you could answer yourself.

Harry already knows so much about Malfoy; he actually has a bit o f an advantage, on that part. It’s the only advantage that he has.

As one of his training Captains used to say, nurture it, love it, cherish it, make it your own.

Whose suffering are you punishing me for?

He already knows the answer to that question. The answer is everybody’s: Malfoy’s mother, his father, his own.

“I’m sorry for your f-father,” he’d said once, the stutter pain-induced but trudging on regardless.

“I thought we agreed that my father was an evil, guilty man, and deserved whatever he got,” Malfoy had responded curtly.

He’d refused to say any more on the subject. Harry realises, now, that that in itself had said plenty.

None of Malfoy’s compatriots have been heard from in years, assumed either dead or disappeared.

Disappeared.

“Look,” Harry finally says to him, as Malfoy carefully prepares the tray he’s brought in. “I’m sorry about Pansy.”

The fork drops to the tray with a clatter.

“She didn’t run away,” Malfoy says simply, calmly, as he arranges the silverware again, unnecessarily.

“I know,” says Harry.

Pansy Parkinson had gone missing about four or five years ago. Vanished without a trace, without a single hint to where she might have gone or what may have happened to her. As if dissipating into thin air. To be fair, many Wizards and Witches had gone underground after the war, even if they had not been Death Eater-affiliated. Out of fear of suspicion they had all run away, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, sneered an editorial in the Prophet. Many Slytherin families had simply up and left, emigrated to other countries where they would not be tainted by their names and House loyalties. The Department had been far too overwhelmed with other pressing issues to fully investigate what looked like a routine self-expatriation from a country that a witch may no longer want to call home.

Although her case file was left open, it is now considered cold. One of the Department’s forever unsolved mysteries.

“They harassed her, you know,” Malfoy says, carefully polishing one of his instruments of torture. “After that night at Hogwarts. People found out where she lived and painted obscenities on her door. They threw rotting vegetables at her windows. They harassed her owls so she couldn’t get her mail.”

“I know,” says Harry, even though he didn’t.

“They made it impossible for her to return to school, and impossible for her to find a job, after. People spat at her when she went shopping. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“She never once ran. She wasn’t that type. She wanted to give you up that night to save the rest of us...she wasn’t a coward. For years she took the abuse , and she faced every single day with her head held high, knowing she was better than the rest of you common scum.”

“Lovely girl,” Harry remarks. He pauses, and yet the next sentence comes out without thinking, the way he tends to speak, even though it’s like doing a jig all over a human minefield.

Not that he can do much dancing these days.

“But she took it for years, you don’t think that one day, it’s a possibility that she may have simply snapped?”

“No,” Malfoy actually laughs then, looking up at Harry, looking him straight in the eye. “Maybe, maybe someone else, but she wasn’t like the rest of us. She was stronger than that. She was more stubborn than that.

“She wouldn’t have given any of you fools the satisfaction.”

He seems proud of her, admiring; Harry never really thought they were all that close. A quick image appears in his mind, on the Hogwarts Express at the beginning of sixth year, Malfoy with his head pillowed in Pansy’s lap, her long fingers delicately stroking through his fine blond hair. Like any other young couple, without a care in the world, sweetly oblivious to what the rest of the year would hold.

He supposes that Malfoy loved her, and the idea irritates him for some reason.

“You really cared about her,” he says, no idea where the strangely unpleasant taste in his mouth has just come from.

“Yes,” Malfoy says. “I did, and her family did, and her friends did – what few of them remained. But who are we, anymore? Who are we when society has turned its back upon us, best to be imprisoned or left ignored, if not publicly shamed? We’re not much of anybody, right? Ghosts, really. The shadows of people. Nobody who matters cared about her, and so she remains an open case file. Missing.”

“I-“

“Don’t lie to me, Potter.”

“I wasn’t assigned to that case.”

“And if you were?”

“I...I would have investigated further, but...maybe I would have thought that she’d simply run away, too. I—I actually never liked her.” He takes a deep breath; watches for Malfoy’s reaction.

“That’s why I’m sorry.”

Malfoy for once looks mollified; not something Harry would have ever expected. Really, he never would have thought he’d be able to say anything that was right in Malfoy’s eyes. That expression of comfort, no matter how slight, makes him look almost human, almost touchable and real.

“Doesn’t matter now,” Malfoy says. “She’s dead. So is not.”

“What?” Harry echoed, because it didn’t make any sense. Maybe the shock of Harry Potter being sympathetic to Malfoy’s plight had shocked him into losing the ability of speech.

“Not. Not is dead.”

“Not what?” Harry asks, thoroughly confused now. “Not who is dead? Or who is or isn’t dead?”

“It’s not,” Malfoy says, and gets up in a huff. Whatever tiny connection they’ve established is severed in a moment, as if put to death by the whistling blade of the guillotine.

The door slams behind Malfoy before it disappears again, and Harry wonders if maybe he doesn’t know everything he needs to know, after all.

* * *


When he awakes again it’s clear that Malfoy has been up decorating again.

At a quick glance, his walls look as if they have been completely re-papered, covered with a small intricate pattern. Upon closer inspection, it’s text upon lines of text, the pieces of paper overlapping.

Theodore Nott, son of known Death Eater Odinn Nott, aged 22, was found dead in his estate last night, on the anniversary of his father’s execution. Suspected cause of death: strangulation by rope. As of now there is no suspicion of foul play. Theodore Nott is not survived by any family.

His wall is covered with articles and obituaries, carefully arranged so that they form patterns, a true sign of a neurotic. His hand-embroidered samplers, of course, are framed by newspaper fleur de lis, including a new addition that reads: Home is where the heart is, the flowers in intricate, delicate formation around the words, so that when seen from afar they form the shape of a noose.

“To be or Nott to be,” Malfoy quips, “that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”

“I wouldn’t think you’d enjoy Muggle literature,” Harry replies.

“Muggle? Don’t be so insulting. The Bard of Avon was obviously a wizard, you philistine.”

Harry tries not to be amused as he is.

“Do you enjoy the reading material I’ve set aside for you? I apologise for how little information there is. It was only on page 5 of the Prophet, you see. Guess who was on page 1?”

Harry groans, “I’m afraid to ask.”

“Don’t be ashamed – you ought to be proud of yourself. You looked great, rescuing those poor orphans from the fire. The photographer really caught the good side that I didn’t even know you had.”

“So. Nott,” prompts Harry.

“He watched his mother die when he was very young,” Malfoy says. “I suppose you two would have gotten along, you know, having so much in common, other than his father being a Death Eater and the hating of Muggles part.”

“Well,” says Harry, “I do love a good talk about dead mums over a hot cuppa.”

“Exactly. And you could have cried together and darned your own socks or whatever it is that mum-less people too.

“You can read also read all about the Life and Times of Theodore Nott in the articles. It’s kind of funny, in a way – when he was alive no one cared about him, but once he was dead, they wanted to know everything about him. Son of Death Eater Eats Death. Nott Tied Up in Knots. A small tabloid feature on his life entitled, ‘Nott Alive, Nott Yet Dead.’ Pretty clever, these journalists, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You really cared about him,” Harry says, more question than a statement. Admittedly he’d never paid Theodore Nott very much attention; he’d faded into the background, especially when overshadowed by a big supernova of a personality like Malfoy.

“We were close,” Malfoy says, and leaves it at that.

Honesty is needed, but here Harry must dig deep, he must pull out sympathy. Sympathy for the devil, if he wants to understand. The same way he’d had to understand Voldemort when he was to face him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, although it sounds lame and woefully insufficient to even his own ears.



Harry does not have the answers, but that is because he has not decided upon his question.

Not just yet.

* * *




There is one thing however, that remains unsolved. Revenge, Personal Interest, Psychosis: Malfoy’s motives are a mix of all three, that much has been obvious all the along. Harry is the convenient target of punishment for everything that has gone wrong in Malfoy’s life: this he understands. This is why the imprisonment, why the torture, it is all so obviously simple. The need to avenge himself the loved ones he’s lost. The need to control someone, something, the need to hold power above a person – and who better to hold power over than the Saviour of the Wizarding World himself? Malfoy had always hated him, after all, and now he had his very own personal Harry Potter pincushion, one-of-a-kind, straight from the factory line and they’d never make another one like it.



None of these things explains the treacle tart.



Why the treacle tart? Is perhaps a good question, but not the one that he wants to ask.



One day, along with the rest of his meal, Malfoy had brought in a black treacle tart. Everybody knew that treacle tart was Harry’s favourite dessert ever since that interview in Witches Weekly, complete with several pages of treacle tart recipes following it.



Everybody knew that it should be golden syrup used for treacle tart, however, so there was no explanation as to why this was black. Black treacle was bitter in comparison. This was the blackest treacle he’d ever seen, even, thick as tar and with a satin sheen of maroon red, like the colour of dried blood. Until he tasted it, of course, and it melted like heaven in his mouth, bitter enhancing the sweet, the sweet tempering the bitter, finished off with spice – the combination flavours dancing in his mouth.



“God, Malfoy,” he’d said at the time, overwhelmed with the enjoyment of the treat. “I’d marry you just for your cooking skills.”



It had actually garnered a pleased little smile, an expression that – while strange – was not unpleasant on Malfoy.



“Potter,” he’d replied, “If that’s your only criteria for selecting a partner, I fear for the house elves of Hogwarts.”



It would have been one thing if it were simple; black and white. No moral greyness. If he could paint Malfoy as a pure villain, then it would have all been easy from there.

He hadn’t thought about it in a very long time, but he remembers now, during those days of running, of hiding, that desperate search for the Horcruxes. He’d thought about it a long time, once upon a time. Why? Why had Malfoy not turned him in to Voldemort at Malfoy Manor? He had clearly recognised him; he could see it in his eyes. It had haunted him a little bit after the war, just as the Snape’s revelations had. The realisation that people were not easy, not clear cut black and white, good and evil; they were everything in between.



Some were capable of great cruelty, some were capable of immeasurable kindness, some were the same people in one.



That night he’d encountered Malfoy again, in the Room of Requirement – Crabbe had wanted to kill him. Malfoy had stopped Crabbe from harming him, and Crabbe had inadvertently died in the process.

Malfoy is petty, he is vengeful. He could be treacherous. He is not evil.



In truth, Malfoy isn’t a deranged villain, he only plays one on the telly. Well, if the telly constitutes this fancy cage.

“You’re not a bad person,” he tells him, as Malfoy carefully threads the suture needle.



“I’m not, am I?” Malfoy smiles, his eyes and the sharp, deadly instruments all glinting in the candlelight. “Well, that’s news to me.”

* * *


Something is bothering Harry, itching in the back of his mind, an idea trying to hatch. He’s close, but he’s not there yet – he still doesn’t quite understand. Why the complexity? Why the occasional civil conversations? Why the treacle tart?



We were close, Malfoy had said, of he and Theodore Nott. Harry’s had all the time in the world to stare at the hundreds of grainy newspaper photos of him, plastered all over his walls and the ceiling. He tries to remember Nott from school and it’s like trying to focus on an object that one can see only in one’s peripheral vision, and is constantly moving away. He can’t really recall much about him at all. He hadn’t played Quidditch. He hadn’t ever been one of Malfoy’s followers, he was a loner type, quiet, aloof.



And yet: We were close, Malfoy had said.



He hadn’t ever seen the two of them together, not really, Malfoy was rarely without his entourage, after all. Harry doesn’t know when this supposedly close relationship had taken place. In what Rooms of Requirement had they sneaked off to? In the Dungeons? In the Library? Up the Astronomy Tower?



An objectively good-looking fellow, Harry supposes, if you liked them tall, dark, and immensely

brooding.



We were close, said Malfoy, three simple little words, same as Harry could have said about any of his friends. Only Harry isn’t cryptic like that. He doesn’t have a mind for cryptography, not so much. He would come right out and say it: he was my best friend, she was my best friend, she was my girlfriend.



For someone that Malfoy had bought hundreds of newspapers for, enough to plaster the walls with his name and his face, the word “close” doesn’t seem adequate.



So Harry wonders: just how close were they?



Years and years ago, Harry would have never considered it as a possibility. He’s a lot more worldly now; has been exposed to a variety of things, including the different types of relationships that people can have.



To be completely honest he’s never thought of Malfoy that way, but simply because he’s never thought about it doesn’t mean that it isn’t a possibility.



But why else, then, the treacle tart? Why the moments of camaraderie, why the random acts of kindness? Why the soothing after the hurt, why would Malfoy genuinely seem to want to heal him and still keep him?



It’s a ridiculous proposition, based on nothing more than a hunch. However, if there’s anything Harry’s learned in his time as an Auror, it’s to always trust your gut instincts.



And Harry’s hunches tend to be uncanny.



Know thy enemy.



He has found his question. It is not one he needs to ask, not out loud, at least. Not in words, neither interview nor interrogation.

It is a question where he is a little bit afraid of the answer.

Do you want me?

* * *


Like any good hypothesis first one must test it, to see if there’s any truth to it. Like any good hunch first one must investigate it, to follow up on it.

Harry’s having trouble even processing the idea, however, he doesn’t know how to go about testing it.

He’s never really considered himself all that attractive. Cho Chang certainly didn’t think so, especially when she had Cedric to compare him to. There were all those covers of Witches Weekly that featured him, but that was because of the fame and the heroics. He’s certain that if he hadn’t been who he was, Boy Who Lived and Saviour and all that, most girls wouldn’t ever have been interested in him the way they were.

Sometimes he thinks that Ginny’s the only person who was really all that attracted to him as he really is - just Harry.

(The only person, to be specific, thus ruling out certain house elves whose names rhyme with Flimsy.)

It’s a silly hypothesis, but one that he needs to test it, nonetheless. The only problem being that he’s not sure how, exactly. How do you know when somebody’s attracted to you? How do you go about testing it?

When Malfoy arrives with his food again, he tries to watch him. Does Malfoy’s glance linger on him when he talks to him? Does he touch him a little longer than necessary?

Not that Harry’s noticed, really.

He has to do something obvious, especially since he doesn’t have the easy luxury of touch; considering that his hands are quite literally tied at the moment.

Malfoy puts the tray down on the table, and begins with one of his favourite little personal jokes, “So, Potter, tell me about your day.”

Harry grimaces dutifully in return.

They even share private jokes now; before he knows it, they’ll be buying monogrammed dish towels together.



The idea comes to him when a spoonful of stew slowly makes its way towards his mouth. It’s the Obvious that he’s successfully avoided for so long, these past few weeks? Months? The imagery that he’s tried not to think about, being spoon-fed, like one would feed an invalid or a child or a...

Well, like how sometimes he’d fed Ginny dessert at a candlelit dinner. Or Ginny had fed him.

His heart rate has increased a little, the way it might before performing a special operation or before interrogating a particularly dangerous suspect. He opens his mouth wide to receive the food (and what wonderful food it is, really) and closes his eyes in ecstasy, overemphasizing his pleasure.

Really, this feels ridiculous.

When he opens his eyes again he looks to see if Malfoy is watching him, and is surprised to find cool grey eyes meeting his directly, quiet, steady, unafraid. Malfoy’s face is blank, however, and reflects nothing – like a frozen lake in winter, dusted with snow.

This is a little bit of a more familiar territory: a power play.

As awkward as Harry feels, he at least knows what to do when confronted with a direct challenge. He must meet it, of course.

His tongue flickers out as Malfoy slowly withdraws the spoon – not even fully, just a centimetre or two. If he thinks about it, he’ll feel stupid and lose concentration. He’ll laugh and blush and push away. So he carefully does not think about it, and lets his tongue trace the curved silver edge of it, ever so slowly. The tip of his tongue caresses the rounded bottom of it, cradling it almost, and meticulously, he licks off every last drop.

And then proceeds to lap and lick at it some more.

He’s fairly certain that the things he’s doing with his tongue to this spoon are illegal in at least 21 countries.

Witches Weekly would pay a small prince’s ransom for photos of this.

He’s half expecting that at any moment, Malfoy is going to ask if he and the spoon need some alone time together.

This spoon will never get to wear a white doily on its wedding day. It’ll be blasphemy.

The whole time he holds Malfoy’s gaze, which meets his, unwavering.

There’s no way…

But, then again…

He watches him closely, and someone else would have missed it. Someone who is not a trained investigator, or maybe even someone who is. Someone who does not know Malfoy as well as he did. There is a subtle flicker across Malfoy’s face when his tongue ever so slowly caresses the spoon, and he hears it, subtle and quick, like the sigh of a cricket: the slightest hitch in breath.

There. There it is.

Suddenly, in this moment, he has him.

Here is his answer. Here is the motive, and with it, here is Harry’s invisible key to that damn invisible door.


TO BE CONTINUED

Part 2 Sneak Peak:

(Artworks may contain spoilers to Part 2 of The Second Hand Unwinds. Click at your own risk)