Disclaimer: Not my characters.
Rating: R for language.
Summary: H/D warfic in which Harry is using too much dark magic, Pansy is a pyromaniac, and Draco wants his memory back. Also D/P and, briefly, H/P.
A/N: Chimera: 1. Greek Mythology; fire-breathing she-monster represented as a composite of a lion and a serpent (and a goat). 2. Fanciful mental illusion or fabrication. 3. Grotesque product of the imagination.
Chimera
During the five days he is in custody, Draco Malfoy nearly escapes three times. The burly Auror who retrieves him after the third attempt---which subjected two guards to severe head trauma and left a floor mop charmed into an approximation of a Quidditch broom as a getaway vehicle---throws him back into his cell like a ragdoll and then kicks him hard in the gut.
When Harry Potter appears outside the bars, Draco is still on all fours, mouth slick with blood, one arm wrapped around his bruised or broken ribs. He looks up at Harry out of cold, cold eyes and staggers to his feet.
Harry is reminded of the way he'd stood, unaided and furiously angry, after Crouch transfigured him into a ferret and beat him half to death against the stone flags of Hogwarts.
Draco narrows his eyes and spits a glob of blood onto the floor of the cell. There is absolutely nothing in his face to suggest that he feels anything other than the raging loathing he has always felt.
Still, the portrait's teasing voice is fresh in Harry's mind and the new dark magic is sluicing off of him in waves and Harry knows what he wants to think. The small, cautious part of him watches the large, reckless part decide to believe that his willing a thing is enough to make it true.
*
Ron goggles at Harry.
Harry says, "Yeah. I know."
Ron's familiarity with Muggle weapons is now such that he automatically continues loading the guns without looking at them. Even the news that Draco Malfoy, evil ferret-faced git and public enemy number two, may be in love with his best friend and leader of the light, the Boy Who Lived, Harry Potter, is not enough to interrupt his rhythm.
Harry finds it soothing, standing there, watching Ron's shocked, enormous eyes and listening to the bolts slamming home.
*
When one of Lupin's Auror-assassins Apparated into headquarters covered in blistering fire wounds and gasped out that the Death Eaters had a power source stashed on the grounds of Malfoy Manor, the seven Order members present stood, grim and red-eyed, and watched her die.
Then Harry grinned. It was the grin of a sadist who has just had an epiphany. In a room poisonous with the smell of burnt flesh, Ron thought that that grin was the most obscene thing he'd ever seen. It was Lupin who pinned Ron's arms to his sides before he could slug Harry and whispered, "Wait."
Ron had thought that war would be like chess: a game of cut-glass tactics governed by absolute rules. He knew by then that if he had led those armies, they would have been slaughtered. Instead, Harry, who was mediocre at chess, but ferocious and cagey and ruthless in real life, led them to victory after victory after victory.
Harry said, "I should have thought of this months ago. I'll bet there's still some of Malfoy's hair on the black market."
Ron, still restrained by Lupin, snarled, uncomprehending, "Malfoy's hair?"
"There used to be quite a demand. For people who wanted, er… Malfoyesque… partners. I doubt he was selling it himself, but I don't know that he ever did anything to stop it. Maybe he didn't give a damn."
"Harry!" Ron sputtered. "Ugh. What the hell are you talking about?"
"Polyjuice. Snape? I want two days plus. Excellent. One smirking blond bastard coming up."
Out of the corner of his eye, Ron registered Snape's nod to the question and wince at the insult.
Lupin released Ron with a quelling glance and stepped away to say, "There is some risk that you'll bump into the actual Malfoy."
Harry favored his team with an unholy smile. "I plan to convince them that he's the imposter. Remus, once I'm in, your people will create a diversion in the forest to the west of the Manor. There's just parkland between there and the house. It's a good battle surface. I'll cue you by mirror. There are anti-Apparition charms on the grounds, so, Ron, you'll hold the outer walls with Muggle troops. Dean, you take over for Remus on the south front. Everyone else holds their position. Forty-eight hours from now, I'll have shut down the power source and brought in Draco Malfoy."
*
Ron, hands slick from the oiled guns, asks, "Going to do anything about it?"
Harry shrugs, lifts a semi-automatic, hefts it experimentally, and then sniffs it. "Doesn't make much difference, really. God, I love the smell of Muggle oil."
"I guess you could use it against him."
"I doubt I'll need to. What?" He stops moving and looks at Ron.
"It's just… kind of weird."
"Why is it weird?"
Ron, who is used to the idea that Harry is always right, struggles to rationalize Harry's theory. "I guess all that nastiness could have been desperation for attention. Like, at least he could make you hate him."
Harry sets down the gun and says dismissively, "I never hated him. He wasn't worth it."
Ron looks skeptical and remains silent.
"What are you worried about? You know I'm not sentimental about that shit." Harry smiles winningly and claps Ron on the shoulder.
Ron rubs a rag hard against a gun barrel and mutters, "Yeah. I know." And that, at least, is true. He remembers Cho Chang, the way Harry walked away from her crumpled body without a second look, without a pause, without a breath.
*
The wards at Malfoy Manor were keyed to magical signatures, not visual appearances, so the polyjuice was no help there. In the treeless, hard-scrabble moorland outside the eastern wall, Harry, shrouded in his invisibility cloak, found a pair of guards and slit their throats. He took the wand of the one who more closely resembled him physically and slathered himself in the man's blood.
Fifty yards away, the sweet tang of magic betrayed a hidden gate. Harry stood in front of it and deftly slashed his right palm with a pocket knife, mingling his blood with the dead man's and gripping both their wands in one hand.
He had never used a blood meld to simulate an identity and wasn't entirely sure it would work. Had it been less dark, he might have asked Remus or Hermione, but letting them know how much dark magic he knew---and was using---was not part of the plan. Nor did he owe them. After all, no one complained when he won.
Standing with his bloody wand hand poised inches from the stone of the secret door, Harry could feel the magic roiling up inside him, sparking off his skin and making the air waver like gas fumes. He decided he wasn't worried.
It was a sung spell rather than a spoken one---a lot of dark magic was like that; back in school, he used to think Malfoy looked like a depraved choir boy, singing his dark spells---and he gathered his voice low in his throat and chanted the words.
The gate shimmered and hummed, swinging open on an elm-framed vista of heady gardens, like a door out of hell into paradise. Harry found it extremely gratifying that he was only able to break into Malfoy's stronghold because he'd spent so much goddamned time spying on him, draped in this same invisibility cloak, once upon a time.
When a third guard arrived to investigate, Harry-as-Draco smiled at her, registering the way the surprise in her eyes sharpened into suspicion just before she lunged at him. He killed her and swore softly, standing over her body, but minutes passed and no alarm tripped and no one came.
After a bit, he smirked at their carelessness, amazed that in such an inner sanctum, the Death Eaters would fail to track their inhabitants with life marks, and headed toward the house.
*
Hermione, who is in charge of incarceration, wants to know if Harry plans to interrogate the prisoner. "I don't think you should, Harry," she says, very seriously. "He's never brought out your most rational side. And he's very clever. I don't want him to mess with your head."
Ron says, "Mione's right, Harry. He'll give any of us a hard time, but with you it's practically an art form. I don't see a lot of useful intell coming out of it. Also, I would have thought that after, well… that now you'd really want to stay away from him."
Remus says, "There is a certain amount of standing tension between you two that may interfere with your ability to procure information."
Dean says, "Parvati's by far the best interrogator. Although, if you'd rather, Par, I'm perfectly happy to do it… ?" He looks over at her.
Parvati says, "It's Harry's call, of course, but, Harry, I'm kind of surprised that you want to."
"Yeah," says Ron, giving him a loaded look. "What's up with that, Harry?"
Harry looks at Hermione, ignoring the rest of them, and says, "I'll do it."
*
Harry skulked through the garden, wary on the crunching gravel paths. The Manor itself was austere and beautiful and very pale (Malfoy-pale, Harry thought) in the dark green parkland, crowned with a mansard roof and ringed with an enormous terrace. Its only ornament was the flight of elegantly flared steps that spilled from the entrance to the gravel drive.
According to Dean's report, Malfoy was freshly returned from negotiations on the continent and mildly incapacitated due to exhaustion or fever. He'd been purchasing foreign dead from non-human allies (veela and vampires, mainly) to fuel the power source. Necromantic magic, very dark. Harry could feel the drug rush of it thrumming around the house like noise.
For a base, it was strangely deserted. It was nothing like the squalid, swarming ant maze of Harry's own headquarters. He vaulted over the balustrade and slipped in through a French window someone had propped open for the breeze. The front parlor and foyer were empty, but down the hall there was a murmur of voices and a familiar female laugh. Pansy Parkinson, he was almost sure…
The grand staircase was marble and beautiful and the whole place felt like a lazy holiday for lounging aristocrats. Harry's easy, boiling rage rose in him like bile. He thought, furiously, that most of them, the ones who weren't deranged cultists, the ones like Malfoy, were fighting in the war as a lark, out of a sense of youthful adventure and noblesse oblige.
Most of them didn't give a damn about politics, and why should they? They already had everything they could possibly want. When it was over, they'd go back to their money and glamour and social whirl, their tidy marriages and torrid affairs, their hunting parties on great estates, and nothing would change.
What had Malfoy said? I am better, Potter. Lucky is better. Saying I'm just lucky is the same as saying I'm just intelligent. Or just witty. Or just good-looking. Or just rich. My. I really am very lucky. Aren't I? And then he'd smirked insufferably and Harry had had to hit him.
*
Now that he has agreed to do the interrogation, Harry is not sure why he's putting it off. He is not given to procrastination. And it's just Malfoy, for god's sake. There's a lot of bad blood there, sure, but it's all clean bad blood. Just fighting and name calling and public nastiness.
None of the secret bad blood that he maybe regrets they don't have because it once seemed to him that the impulse to create it was straining like a rabid animal beneath the skin-thin surface of their feud.
After school ended, during the first months of the war, he'd finally admitted to himself that it was all just him. Made peace with it, even, as a hallucinatory side effect of too much stress, too much trauma, too much concentration of emotion in the blood and pain of his annual clashes with Voldemort.
If he'd grown up in a normal family, as a normal boy, he would have received attention in forms other than death threats and newspaper libel, been loved without having to save the world, learned to distinguish between anger and desire.
Today though, with the memory of that portrait glowing in his brain like a sun print, it is difficult to separate what Malfoy might have thought from what Harry did think or wanted to think or realized later or is starting to hope again right now.
*
Harry found Malfoy in a large, square bedroom in the southwest corner of the second floor. He was deeply asleep, flat on his back, feverish and agitated, his skin flushed red over his cheekbones and his pale hair dark with sweat. One of his hands was curled close to his jaw and the other gripped the crumpled sheet. Harry was fairly certain that under the sheet, Malfoy was naked.
After casting locking and silencing spells, Harry bound Malfoy, wrist and ankle, to the bedposts. The jarring motion of his own limbs brought Malfoy instantly awake, unfazed by the stripe of a second version of himself visible through the parted cloak and looming over his bed. Harry remembered that; that Malfoy had no hazy interim zone between sleep and total lucidity.
"Potter." Malfoy sounded hoarse and scratchy and unimpressed. "Just like old times. You traipsing around in that fucking cloak. Stalking me. Although, doing it in my body certainly adds some new flair."
"Malfoy." Harry was alarmed by the relish in his own voice. "Not much of a defense system. I'm disappointed."
"Kept out everyone but you, Potter. And you don't count."
"No?" Harry wanted to sound amused but he just sounded eager.
"I'm not an idiot, Potter." Malfoy coughed wretchedly before continuing, "This is hardly the first time you've snuck into my bedroom. I'll bet you're only winning this godforsaken war because you're using all my dark arts tricks."
"I'm winning because I play a better game than you do, Malfoy."
"Maybe on the Quidditch pitch. I'm amazed your warriors for the light let you fight so dirty."
Harry grinned evilly and held up a generously sized vial. "I'm just getting started."
"Shit, Potter. That's a week's worth of polyjuice. Did your poor adoring disciples really believe you when you told them, very solemnly I'm sure, that your pathetic desire to try out my body is a brilliant tactical maneuver?" Malfoy paused to smirk and added, "If I'd fully understood your effect on your followers, I could have made a killing in world stupidity futures."
Malfoy, Harry reflected, always had thought he was hilarious. Harry waited him out, unmoved, and then said dryly, "Apparently, being you, or having you, is not the fantasy it once was. Given how much less of you is currently available on the black market."
Malfoy looked genuinely revolted. "Please tell me you never did that. No, you know what? I don't want to know." He shuddered and then schooled himself and asked conversationally, "So you're going to kill me, then?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Malfoy. I'm going to take you alive."
"I want to live, of course, but if you were someone I liked at all I'd have to advise against it."
"Well, fortunately I'm not. Nor do I care. You aren't giving the orders here, Malfoy."
"No, just the advice. You do realize that if you don't kill me now, I will kill you?"
"You can try." Harry let the cloak slip off his shoulders so that Malfoy could see the magic crackling around him like a frantic halo.
Malfoy said, "Ah."
There was a pause during which Harry enjoyed the sensation of Malfoy admiring his power.
Then Malfoy said, "You're hitting that stuff a little hard. There is a backlash, you know. Eventually. I'll admit you're stronger than I am but no one is invulnerable. I'm surprised Granger hasn't---" Malfoy stopped, looking shrewd and slightly worried.
Harry thought that Malfoy seemed uncharacteristically easy to read. Maybe the magic was heightening Harry's perceptivity. Or maybe Malfoy, who had obviously known all along about Harry's little visits, saw no need to dissemble in front of him. Harry felt a familiar pang, wishing for the zillionth time that he had crossed that line at least once. Just to see. Everything might have gone so differently. He noticed Malfoy was talking again.
"Granger doesn't know. Does she? You moron, Potter. The best thing about you has always been your little team of high-powered nitwits. If you cut them out, I'll be able to take you down with no trouble at all."
"Right. And I believe that because you're so terrifying when you're tied to a bed and running a fever. Look, Malfoy, this is what's going to happen. I'm going to ask you some questions and you're going to give me straight answers. Otherwise I'll have to cast a veritas on you. Then I'll obliviate you, knock you unconscious, tell your cohorts downstairs that you're the imposter, and pick their brains for strategic secrets. After that, my people show up, burn this place to the waterline, and cart you off to interrogate you. Sound good?"
"Brilliant, Potter. Never let it be said that you don't have the cunning of a Slytherin."
"Yes," said Harry, feeling pleased. "I think so."
"And the ego of a Gryffindor."
"Shut up, Malfoy."
"And the sense of humor of a Ravenclaw."
"Don't make me hex your mouth shut."
"Kinky. That adds edge. I was about to say, 'And the sex appeal of a Hufflepuff,' but perhaps I'll reconsider."
"Malfoy," said Harry, exasperated and trying very hard not to laugh. "Shut the fuck up."
*
Now, of course, Malfoy has no memory of that conversation. Harry might not have bothered to obliviate him, but once he cast a veritas, he asked some things that it is better Malfoy not remember. The answers weren't exactly what he expected, or… hoped… but then, as his team so recently reminded him, Harry has never been much of an interrogator. Simply not one of his skills. So he decides to chalk it up to having asked the wrong questions.
Nor does Malfoy remember Lupin's team charging in and taking down his entire skeleton crew after Harry shorted out the power source and dropped the wards. Most importantly, he has no idea that Harry Potter spent twenty-six hours doped up on polyjuice being him.
Harry is highly unlikely to tell him even that much, never mind that during those hours, in addition to locating the power source, casing the Manor's protective and defensive systems, and assessing its weapons caches, he killed a bottle of very good Scotch with Blaise Zabini.
More invasively, he skimmed through Malfoy's old school journals, in which he found not a whiff of suspicion that Malfoy thought Harry was spying on him---nor, in fact, any mention of Harry at all. But after seeing him again, Harry is sure that Malfoy did think of him, that that burgeoning nervous hunger wasn't only on his side. Perhaps, Harry decides, he was just too careful to write it down.
Harry also slept with Pansy. He told himself he was doing it 'just to see.' He has no idea what he meant by that.
The experience about which Harry most wants to grill Malfoy now, however, is unrelated to the war or his friends or even his school days. Instead, it involves the portrait of an affectionate young man in the fourth-floor corridor outside Pansy's room who looks intriguingly like Harry himself.
*
It wasn't hard to convince Malfoy's team that he was the real Draco and the body in the bed was the imposter. Before he went downstairs and got them, Harry knocked Malfoy out with a spell that put him into a temporary coma.
Pansy laid a hand on his forehead, muttered a few counter curses, and then looked at Harry-as-Draco suspiciously.
"This isn't polyjuice."
"It's a curse. Obviously not very well cast. The idiot seems unlikely to live." Harry paused and then added, "Don't you kill him, though, darling. If he comes to, I'd like to interrogate him." Harry attempted one of Malfoy's appealing smirks. "I suppose after that, you can. If you like."
"Fine." Pansy looked wary but tired, like she was sick of the war and wanted to believe the person standing in front of her because it was easier. "I'm going to bed."
"Not alone, surely? Beautiful girl." Harry spun her around and snaked an arm around her waist.
"For heaven's sake, Draco." But she was smiling and when she leaned into him, Harry thought he'd never felt so deeply wanted in his life. It did occur to him that a person's style in bed is singular as a fingerprint, but he had a strange conviction that he knew what Malfoy would be like. If Pansy doubted him, nothing in her flushed face or soft murmurs gave her away.
The next morning, leaving Pansy's fourth floor room, he found the portrait. First, he passed a mullioned door glazed with mirrors that provided an abrupt, full-length vision of himself as Draco Malfoy. He stopped and looked. Malfoy looked back through the bars of the mirror moldings. Harry's own height but bony and icy-eyed and blond.
He walked on, and the warm green eyes grinning at him from the portrait beyond the mirror gave him a hot, unnerving shock. For a moment, despite the four-hundred-year-old battle robes and neatly combed black hair, he thought the polyjuice had worn off and he was looking into a second mirror.
Harry stood, riveted. The man said, in a voice that could have been his own, but in a caressing tone he'd never used, "Draco. I've missed you, you gorgeous idiot. Don't you love me any more?"
"Don't I love you?" Harry stammered, confused.
The man in the portrait frowned and squinted, pressing himself almost out of the frame. His green irises looked enormous, their outer rings as dark as gunmetal.
"What the---?" Then he drew abruptly back and gave Harry a cautious smile. "Ah, poor boy. I see what it is. Still fighting this war, are you? With the man who looks like me. I realize he's probably a relative of ours, somehow or other, but honestly, Draco, just kill him already and get it over with."
"I'm, uh, working on that."
"Well, work faster. It's lonely up here." The man's smile was slow and sexy, and Harry nodded and backed away and thought dazedly that it could mean only one thing that Malfoy had a flirtatious relationship with a portrait of a person who looked exactly like Harry himself.
*
AN: Thanks for reading and let me know if I should keep going. I love reviews!