The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

by neomaxizoomdweebie

After tragedy at Malfoy Manor, Draco is left on his own to face the world - and his own darkness. But can Harry pull him out on time? Set two years after Hogwarts. SLASH.

9. The Puzzle of Flesh

The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
by Miss T

Title: The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
Author: Miss T
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Genre: Romance/Future-fic/Horror
Notes: This story is based on one of my favourite adult-books of all time - Drawing Blood by Poppy Z Brite. The story is not exactly the same, just based around it, although some of it is very similar. I thought it was a good Harry/Draco plot, and I hope you all like it! Please please please take my recommendation of reading Drawing Blood... it really is good.

Chapter Eight

The Puzzle Of Flesh

Remember, you promised me
I'm dying, I'm dying please
I want to, I need to be
Under your skin...
- hole - dying

Harry felt a freezing stimulating flash of energy surge through his body, and suddenly became aware of his weight and the mattress underneath him. He could feel his heart slamming against his ribcage, and he could taste his own blood in his mouth as it ran from his nose and down past his throat. His head felt twenty times too big for him and his hands stung as if he had a million paper cuts. Either everything that had just happened was real, or this was one intense motherfucker of a trip.

Harry pried his eyes open and saw Draco sitting at the end of the bed, staring into space. The scars on his arms were closed but his hands and bare legs were still marred with dried blood, his long pale hair lying in sweaty clumps down his back.

Harry also noticed that he held a rusted bottle in his right fist, that same rusted bottle that he had seen Draco with the first night. Harry sat up slowly and blinked owlishly, his glasses lost somewhere on the bed. "Draco?" He whispered hoarsely. "Are you alright?"

Draco didn't answer.

"Draco?" Harry managed to slither his way down to the end of the mattress and closer to Draco. "Draco, listen, you didn't hurt me. I'm fine." Harry winced as his vision began to get blurry and his head began to buzz painfully. "Are you okay? What's the matter?"

Draco turned around slowly, his eyes no longer shining in the darkness. They absorbed the darkness around them and looked blank, his features expressionless and drained. "He saw me." Draco whispered. "He saw me in there."

"Who saw you, Draco?"

"My father." Draco's eyes were cold and depthless. "He saw me come in here that night. He talked to me."

"Where were you?" Harry asked warily.

"Noxland."

Of course, where else? "No, I mean... I mean when were you?"

"This house. That night. I saw Mother - she was dead. I didn't check the servants quarters but I knew that they would have been, too. Then I came in here, and Lucius was alive. He was sitting on this bed deciding whether to kill me. He saw me, spoke to me, and decided he couldn't do it. It was my own fault."

"I'm not really sure if I understand. You mean you woke up and talked him out of it?"

"NO! He saw me the way I am NOW! He talked to ME NOW, and then he went and HUNG HIMSELF! LOOK AT THIS! DON'T YOU SEE?" Draco shook the bottle in his hand. Harry shrank away from Draco to the head of the bed and pressed his back against the wall.

"He talked to you at age nineteen?"

"Yes."

"He was haunted by your ghost."

"Yes."

"Wow." It was beginning to make more sense to Harry now. He winced as a drop of blood from his nose landed on his bare chest, running down slowly onto his navel. Draco turned and faced Harry, and gently placed the side of the glass bottle to Harry's face. He ran it smoothly across Harry's cheek, his face illustrious, nearly elated.

"Draco?" Harry asked, his voice trembling. "What are you doing?"

"I'm getting ready, Harry."

"What for?"

"The puzzle of flesh."

/Whatever in the name of Merlin that is supposed to mean./

"Okay, I'll help you with that if you want. But you have to put the bottle down first."

Draco glared at Harry with his cold, depthless eyes.

"Please?" Harry whispered croakily.

Draco shook his head slowly. "I can't." he said, and raised the bottle in the air. His eyes drilled holes into Harry's, full of yearning, beseeching horror - Harry realised that Draco did not want to be doing this. Draco had the bottle raised above Harry's head, ready to land between Harry's temples. Harry panicked and scuttled underneath Draco, falling off the bed and clambering for the door. But Draco had got up in three easy strides and blocked the doorway, crashing the bottle to the wall beside Harry's face.

"What are you doing?!!" Harry screamed.

"I'm finding out what it feels like, Harry."

"WHY?!"

"Because I'm an artist." Draco snarled. "I have to know. I need to know." He pinned Harry hard against the wall with his other hand, gripping onto Harry's left forearm. He raised the bottle again.

"Draco - please... I love you..."

"I love you too, Harry." Draco replied honestly, though his voice was distant and persistent - utterly mad. He flung the bottle over Harry's head, but Harry twisted away so that it landed with an audible crunch on his shoulder.

Harry yelped in pain as Draco pulled the bottle back up again, and he whipped his hand up just in time to grab Draco's wrist. He glared deeply into Draco's eyes.
"Listen to me, Draco." Harry gasped. "Why do you need to know? You have an imagination, don't you?"

Draco blinked for a second, and slammed his body against Harry's. Harry winced and tried again. "Your imagination is better than Lucius'! He might have had to do it to find out how it felt, but you don't!"

Draco wavered for a second, his grip only loosening slightly on Harry.

/Fight back, Harry!/ He thought to himself frantically. /Do something now, because if you don't, you're a goner! JUST DO IT!!/

Harry yelled as he drove his knee straight into Draco's crotch, pushing Draco's arm back as hard as he could. Draco gasped and stumbled backwards, and Harry twisted Draco's wrist around, so that the pale boy lost grip of the bottle. It landed to the floor with a clunk and rolled to the other side of the room.

"Fine!" Draco growled. "I'll do it with my bare hands!"

Draco wormed his way out of Harry's weak grip and lunged on the other boy, but Harry had managed to slide out of his grip and into the hallway. Harry landed with a painful thud on his backside, and Draco leaned down and gripped a hold of his messy, sweat slicked hair. He pulled him upwards, causing Harry's neck to bend painfully backwards, and he stumbled against Draco, who instantly wrapped his other arm around Harry's waist so that he couldn't fight back.

"I just want to know how you're made." Draco said breathily. "I love you so much, Harry. I want to tear you apart and study each separate piece of you... I want to crawl inside that curious brain of yours, I want to feel what you're heart feels like beating in my hands..."

"It can only beat in your hands for a few seconds, Draco. Then I'll be dead and you won't have me anymore." Harry spluttered.

"Oh, yes I will, Harry! You'll be right here with me forever."

Harry cried in pain as Draco sank his teeth into the back of his neck, sucking and tearing at the flesh until blood began to trickle down Harry's shoulder. Harry sobbed wildly and weakly tried to fight his way out of Draco's clutch, but nothing gave. Draco continued to bite into Harry's flesh as he dragged him through into the bathroom across the hall.

/He's taking me to his hell,/ Harry thought, feeling hot tears curse down his face, /and he's going to rip and tear at me to try and find my magic, until there's nothing left but a useless corpse.../

Draco kicked the door shut. The bathroom was dark but the shards of mirror in the tub sparkled in the moonlight from the window. Harry began to feel woozy, detached - Draco's hold on him was making it difficult to breath. He suddenly realised he was going to die right now. Draco slammed Harry into the tiled wall face first, and Harry blacked out completely.

As Harry slumped to the ground, Draco kneeled before him and licked his lips, already tainted with the raven haired boy's blood. He began to scratch and claw at Harry's chest, watching the blood spray and splatter onto his fingers and the stark white complexion of Harry's flesh. Taking his fingers away he eagerly leaned in and ran his tongue along the trails of blood, occasionally ripping at Harry's flesh with his teeth. It was so easy... so right... so beautiful!

Harry's hands came up and try to bat Draco away weakly, but it was no use. "Draco...?" said Harry faintly. "I won't fight you. But if you are going to kill me, please tell me why."

Draco moved up to Harry's neck and began to bite at the tender flesh he had feasted on in the hall. "Why what?"

"Why pain is better than love. Why you'd rather kill me for the sheer kick of it than try to have a life with me. I thought you were brave. This is some pretty cowardly shit." Harry's eyes were overflowing with tears, and Draco ran his tongue over them, flicking it over the soft eyelids and wondering what it would be like to burst one of Harry's eyeballs.

"To see everything, you have to be alive. If you do this to me, you're going to die, too. Tell me you're not." Harry whispered.

Draco stopped and remembered something. Lucius had said to him that Noxland was a system oiled with the blood of artists.

Draco looked down at Harry. He was covered in blood - from his temple, from his nose and mouth, deep crimson bite marks on his neck and shoulder, his chest furiously marred with claw marks. His eyes held Draco's, and his expression hovered somewhere between petrified and serene.

"Whatever you want." Harry whispered. "It's your decision."

The words tore Draco completely from his trance, from his desires to reach inside of Harry and tear him apart. Because it wasn't just a body, he realised. It wasn't a puzzle or an anatomy lesson or a source of magical knowledge, it was /Harry./

The beautiful boy he had teased all throughout school, the young man he had lost his virginity to, and had heard moan and whimper his name under his touch, his best friend. His soul. Not a box of toys to destroy.

Harry was right - whatever Draco did next would be his own choice, and he would have to live with it until he died, even if it were for only a couple of minutes. And if he died, would he go to Noxland? He thought of Lucius, alone with his broken victims forever. What if Draco ended up back here with his own dead? Yet Lucius had given him the bottle and told him to find out what it feels like. Was Noxland thirsty for blood to grease its cogs?

Pushing himself off Harry, Draco stared at his blood covered hands.

'If I have any talent, any gift left at all, he heard his father saying, it's in you now.'

/Fuck that./ Draco thought. /I'm not finishing off your dirty work./

Draco turned away from Harry and stepped into the bath tub, not daring to wince as the broken glass embedded into his feet. Draco glared into the gleaming shards of mirror. "I won't do it." he murmured. "I don't need to know what it feels like. I don't need to play it. I can live it." Draco lifted his fist in the air and drove it straight into the tiled wall. The gleaming wall splattered with blood as his fist burst open, although it hadn't hurt at all. He wanted it to hurt - he wanted the pain. Falling to his knees, Draco began slamming his fists again and again into the hard porcelain bathtub, into the glass.

Harry thought he heard a bone snap in Draco's hand. Trying to push himself up, Harry's head felt too heavy for his body, and he had to slide along the floor towards Draco. The porcelain tub actually shook under Draco's punches, Draco's blood splattering up onto the gleaming white surface. Harry clung onto the edge of the tub with one arm as he reached over to place his hand on Draco's back.

Draco twirled round to face Harry, his eyes bright and manic.

/This is it,/ Harry thought, flinging his last shred of hope out the window, /He's going to kill me now, and then beat himself to death. Lucius can watch. How fucking stupid. How utterly useless./ Harry wasn't afraid anymore - Harry was disappointed.

Draco stopped punching and glared at Harry, his face on tenterhooks.

/Something I said made him stop hurting me, Harry thought, Now, what do I have to say so he stops hurting himself?/

"Listen," Harry started, his voice tired. "Lucius killed the others because he couldn't take care of them anymore, and he couldn't let them go. Then he killed himself because he couldn't live without them, right?"

Draco didn't answer, he just continued to stare at Harry as if he were the most weird and interesting thing on the planet. "Is this about love?" Harry asked. "Draco, do you think you have to make all this keep happening to prove your love for me?"

Draco nodded slowly after a few silent seconds.

Harry's expression turned desperate. "But I know you love me, Draco. I believe you. I want to stay alive and show you. I don't need you to take care of me, I can take care of myself. And if you come away with me I will never leave you. Ever."

"How..." Draco's voice was dry and husky. "How can I know that?"

"You have to trust me," said Harry, "Leave your Slytherin tactics at the door and trust me, Draco. All I can tell you is the truth, you have to decide the rest for yourself."

Draco looked up from the magnetic spinning of reflective mirror shards and blood, and looked into Harry's damaged face. His knuckles felt as if they could fall apart at any given moment, and they no longer hurt, they just felt numb. He knew he had to have at least broken a couple of fingers, and the realisation made him miserable - he had nearly killed himself, and taken Harry with him.

Draco tried to climb out of the bathtub, but with a stifled yelp he landed in Harry's arms, who pulled him over and into a gentle embrace. He could feel Harry's blood smear onto him as their chests pressed together; could feel Harry's strangled breathing. "What can I do?" he heard himself ask - it wasn't exactly the question he had wanted to ask, but he couldn't exactly think of anything else to say.

"Leave with me. Now."

Draco expected some supernatural force to drag him back under the floorboards, to keep in enfolded inside the house - but it never happened. He looked over at the blooded bathtub and realised he didn't feel sad anymore - he just felt trepidation. This was where Lucius had chose to stay, and Draco could go anywhere he wanted.

Harry awkwardly stumbled to his feet, holding Draco up under his waist, and pulled them into the hall. Through the windows the first signs of dawn began to appear, illuminating Harry's bloody, exhausted face. They stumbled into Draco's bedroom and sat on the bed, where Harry found his glasses on the mattress and shakily put them on.

Draco watched Harry anxiously, tears of shame filling his grey eyes. Harry leaned against him, and ran his hand gingerly up and down Draco's undamaged arm. "We need to get out of here." he whispered.

"Where will we go?" Draco asked.

"Away." Harry let his eyes run over Draco's broken and bloody hands. "We need a hospital. Your hands... your fingers look broken... and I think I'm concussed."

"Oh... Harry..."

"You didn't do it. My father did."

"Your father?"

"We can talk about it later... right now we need help. I'll get my car... I'll drive us down to the village and we can get Martin to drive us to a muggle hospital... or at least tell us where one is."

Draco tried to straighten his fingers but all it done was sent sharp bolts of pain up his arms. He hissed and closed his eyes. "Alright, but... are you sure you'll be able to drive?" Draco didn't really know much about muggle transportation - he didn't know if it was safe for Harry to be driving in the state that he was in.

"I think so." Harry replied, standing up. They helped each other dress, and Draco took a bag full of some personal belongings from his room. As they left the house, they were graced with the cool morning air damp with frosty dew that soothed their tired, broken faces. Harry helped Draco into the passenger seat and clumsily tied on the seat belt for him. He walked round the front of the car and sat in the driver's seat, taking in a deep breath of air before starting the engine.
The engine rattled on and startled Draco for a second, before he relaxed and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the car was still rattling but there was no movement - Harry was slumped over the driver's wheel. "Harry!" Draco cried, sitting up.

"... mmm?" Harry replied, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. "Right... okay... " he mumbled sleepily and began to pull out of the drive way. As they were driving along the narrow country lane towards the village, Draco saw that Harry was starting to doze off again at the wheel.

"Harry?" Draco asked, shaking Harry's shoulder. "Stay awake, you can't fall asleep..."

"... uh huh..." Harry replied, swallowing and blinking his eyes.

Before they knew it, they had pulled up into the entrance of the village, and stumbled out of the car towards Martin's pub.

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