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Chapter nine: Sheep and Wolves

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; 7th of August, 1944, Buchenwald

It was a cool Monday morning and after the usual morning roll call I sent a few guards to fetch Draco for me. I would have done it myself but I had paper work to do before I could allow him to come in. I sat by the window, typing away on the typing machine as I heard voices coming from outside. One of them unmistakably belonged to Draco.

"No! No, please don't! I'm begging you, let go of me!"

"Shut your face! I said we're taking you to Mr. and Mrs. Potter's residence. Quit whining and follow me or else you'll leave me no other choice but to punish you for your disobedience!"

"You're lying! I wasn't born yesterday, why on earth would the Potters want me there?"

They entered my line of vision as they rounded the corner and walked closer and closer to the main door. The taller of the guards took hold of Draco from the back of his neck.

"Did you not hear me? If you don't shut your trap I will shoot you here and now, you got it?"

I got up, as I did not have any faith in the blond man's abilities to keep quiet. I was proven right in my assumptions in only a few seconds.

"Ouch! Something snapped in my neck, let me go!"

"That's it, you asked for this!"

I went to open the door, not even waiting for them to knock on it. "You're here, good," I said. Tom's hand stopped in mid-air, obviously about to hit Draco. "Thank you, I'll take this from here." The two men nodded and left, talking to each other as they walked away.

I took hold of Draco's stained sleeve and pulled him inside the house. "I can't let you just stand there in front of the house forever for all people to ogle at. Do you know why you're here?"

Eyes quite wide, Draco stammered, "I - Yes, I think so, but... I didn't believe the guards were telling me the truth. I thought they were going to take me somewhere to be killed."

"You're to help Barbara with whatever she needs help with. You will not disobey her or hurt anyone in this house or I'll be sure to wring your skinny neck myself. Do you understand me?"

The other man averted his eyes to the ground. "Yes, Mr. Potter."

"You are up at 4 in the morning every day to ask Barbara for instructions. She'll be here in a minute to tell you what to do today," I explained. "You are in a privileged position, Draco. Don't abuse it. I don't wish to see you getting carted away on top of a pile of corpses, but it's your call."

"Thank you, sir," he said, sounding sincere but looking very confused. "I will not disappoint you."

-

; August 21st, 1944, Buchenwald

Strangely enough I was both pleased with my situation and growing worried over it at the same time. All was well in Buchenwald; we got food deliveries regularly again, the trains arrived and departed mostly on time and the summer nights weren't unbearably hot. The war was escalating fast, however; Avranches, Dragoon, the Soviet attack on Romania, the uprisings in Paris and the Allied forces' siege in Falaise Pocket... I didn't like the way things were going at all. Naturally, not all of the setbacks were broadcasted on the radio, as such information never affected the nation's morale in a productive way.e

My father had been back very shortly but had to leave for Hamburg the very next day. I had no idea what it was that he was actually going to do there, and to be honest, I wasn't really interested. The letters he had sent us while he was away had been polite, though awfully short and hurriedly written. The night he came back I spoke with him briefly but stayed on safe and insignificant topics: what the weather had been like down here in Buchenwald, how my father had found Berlin and the food there, where he had bought that lovely necklace he had given my mother and so forth. Then I'd made the mistake of asking who he had met and my father had looked at me in the eye in a way that told me it was time to stop asking any more questions. Barbara asked us if we wanted some more tea or coffee.

My mother was recovering slowly but surely under Barbara's care. I did not have a lot of spare time outside my duties so I could not go to the main building and see her as often as I would have wanted to. According to the maids, my mother had started moving around the house again, occasionally going to sit outside to observe the life in the camp from afar. Every now and then I got to see Draco working outside the house, chopping or carrying firewood and fixing the spouts or the steps of the wooden veranda.

One day, on a particularly hot day, I saw him in the back garden of the house as I was bringing some files over for my father to look at the next time he came back again. Draco was there, chopping wood by the wood shed, and his naked back was glistering with perspiration under the hot sun. He had not noticed me yet, and was wiping sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.

He was pleasant to look at. Sure, he was filthy and definitely malnourished, despite my attempts to slip him some extra food after the people at the main building had dined, but he was a fine specimen of a man. His muscles, not as defined as a professional athlete's, of course, were visible but natural. His profile was like that of a Roman sculpture's, I thought, though his nose and chin where slightly too pointy. Somehow I found that those sharp angles made him even more fascinating to look at. Narrow hips, strong and lean legs, reasonably masculine shoulders and a flat, hairless chest... Or maybe he did have chest hair, but I just couldn't see it then as it was probably blond. All of his bodily hair was probably blond.

This was where I woke up from my day dreams and shook my head clear of those thoughts.

"How's it going there?" I yelled, and the other man turned to look at me, setting his axe aside and regarding me with an appropriate, humble stance.

"Sir, I am done with fourteen cartfuls of firewood. I still have about six more to go."

I walked closer to him, keeping my eye on the axe by his right leg. "You're doing well. Keep it up."

"Yes, sir."

Up close I could actually see the individual beads of sweat on his abs. That stomach was like a magnet, making my fingers itch as they wanted to reach out and touch that skin. I felt disgusted with myself once again. He must have caught me looking and gave me that familiar smirk I'd certainly seen before, in that spinney during that fateful night not long ago.

I lifted my eyes to look at him in the face. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheekbone. "I'd better be off now."

-

In the house Barbara was teaching one of the maids how to embroider handkerchiefs. "Good afternoon, Barbara."

"Hello, Harry," she smiled up at me as I closed the door behind me. She said to the maid, "I'll be back in a minute."

Barbara and I walked to the kitchen where she offered me some freshly-made lemonade. I asked for another glassful that I left untouched on the table. I noticed that the elderly woman looked somewhat uncomfortable. "Is everything alright?"

"Well, yes, but... It's about that inmate working here..."

"He hasn't behaved out of order, has he? He's been here for two weeks and so far he has -"

"No, no, he's done excellent work; it was right of you to bring him over. He has been nothing but very co-operative and polite."

I was puzzled. "Then what's the matter?"

"I'm running out of tasks to give him, Harry," she admitted. "The wood shed is full of firewood already; it'll easily last over the winter and well into the spring. The house is in fine condition now that he has fixed the tiles on the roof, the spouts, and the veranda. For a few days now, I've found it difficult to think of anything to tell him to do. I don't think we need him here right now."

Something constricted in my throat. Over the past two weeks I had felt at ease, knowing that Draco was not working with the other inmates under the surveillance of the other guards. I knew he was away from all of that, somewhere where I had put him and where Barbara and I were his superiors. I had told Barbara to share the remains of the meals with Draco as well and not only with the other maids.

"Barbara," I began. "You have my utmost trust and I want you to not question what I'm about to say."

Barbara nodded.

"He is going to stay here. I don't care if the tasks you give him are the kind that you or the Helen or anyone else could do. Make him useful around here, even if it means that you get a fair few more hours off each day."

The blond man had started to get some healthy colour back on his cheeks, and when he was working he did not look like he was about to faint from over-exertion. He was getting decent food every now and then, and got to sleep with the other maids in an additional house like the ones down in other parts of the camp, only safer.

'Why are you protecting an inmate? And is it really 'safer' here, what with you and your pervy eyes?'

I refused to contemplate on those matters any further.

-

; 27th of August, 1944, Buchenwald

Paris had been lost. General Chollitz suddenly gained a very unflattering reputation amongst both the public and the leaders.

Such an important turn in the war broke the silence in our dorm and the whole SS seemed to have only one thing in mind: what was going to happen next? They had walked German soldiers down the streets of the city, hands raised behind their heads, and crowds had gathered at avenue des Champs-Élysées. As if that wasn't enough, Romania had also declared war on Germany, there had been some hassle by the Metauro River in Italy that I didn't know much about, and in the Eastern Front the Soviets had captured Tartu of Estonia.

That day the lives of many prisoners of war came to an end as the number of executions was suddenly raised and we, the guards, became more generous than ever in giving out punishments. Series of gunshots echoed across the meadows from the nearby woods, scaring flocks of birds out of the tall grass, bushes and the trees, and the long lines of prisoners who had slowly been led into the depths of the forest by the SS never came back.

Ron and I were sitting in the cafeteria of the camp, having lunch when Blaise and Jerry flopped down to sit in our table.

"Hey, how's it going?" Blaise asked, not sounding quite as carefree as he usually did when asking that question. He seemed tense, as many men in the camp did those days.

"Not bad," I replied as Ron continued devouring his soup. "It's just been a very exhausting morning. I need to go get more bullets before my shift starts again. How about you?"

Blaise took a piece of bread and dipped it into his soup. "Same. Some French inmates were trying to create a bit of trouble in the woods a bit earlier but they didn't make it very far. We chased down the escapees and their break-out was cut pretty short; but damn, they were fast! I never thought that anyone in that condition would be able to run half as hard as they did."

"Wild animals are unpredictable, especially if they are cornered or hurt. They can draw some sort of primitive strength out of their own misery, it seems," Jerry said, buttering up a piece of white bread. "That's why you have to be ready for anything, always. In spite of their simple minds they can sometimes take you by surprise and then you're done for. The Jews need to be eliminated; they can't be trusted."

'He's right,' I thought to myself. 'The Jews can't be trusted, ever. They're not like us. We must protect our own kind and make sure the next generation won't be subjected to them.' I frowned. 'Then why am I putting not only myself in danger but my mother as well? Draco is a Jew, and a homosexual one at that! I am acting irrationall;, it's impossible that any good would ever come out of this.'

What did I expect to happen in the end? Why did I bother helping Draco out even though I knew what was to come?

Draco was going to die, eventually. And there was nothing I could do – should have done - about it, I thought.

"Sorry, guys, I need to go now. See you later," I stood up and stomped out of the cafeteria, silently fuming but trying not to show it. I had developed a mild headache and almost forgot to fetch more bullets before my shift.

-

Later that evening I started reading a book that Blaise had lent to me. He himself wasn't a great friend of literature and I was probably the first person to even open the book. Judging by the stiffness of the covers and the crunching sounds that the folding paper made, I was right.

The Pestilential Miasma of the World, by Dr. Robert Ley.

"This war is a battle between worldviews, and the side that has the strongest faith will be victorious. Only he who is convinced of the justice of his cause, and who in fact has justice on his side, who acts reasonably and correctly, who recognizes and follows the laws of nature, can have the strongest faith. ---"

Faith. I knew it was a key term in the equation of making the world a better place. We all had strong faith in the cause, in our leader, and we knew that historical and scientific facts supported us. Our worldview, our faith, was justified.

"--- Everything in nature obeys ancient and unchangeable laws. Nothing happens apart from these natural laws. The laws strive toward harmony and construction. Every natural creature must obey some of these countless laws. It has a mission, thereby obeying its drives, its instincts, and its understanding, if nature has given it that. The opposite of harmony is chaos and disharmony. If racial community displays harmony in blood and nature, the Jew is the chaotic, disharmonic factor in such human harmony. National Socialism wants to release energy by promoting communities of race and blood so that humanity can develop its abilities and virtues to the highest level. National Socialism thus strives for the highest level of culture. ---"

My life used to be so harmonious. I didn't doubt myself and I wasn't weak enough to feel anything other than hatred towards Jews. Life was easy and my path in life seemed smooth and straight, containing no unsettling bumps or surprising turns.

Then a blond man came into the picture and the harmony started to crack slowly until it shattered completely, like all those windows in Berlin years and years ago. One man had made me do things I never imagined I'd do, and he didn't even need to ask for help. I offered it anyways.

I continued reading further.

"--- The Jew developed like any other parasite. Parasites develop through unnatural inbreeding and by the inheritance of the worst traits. Parasites develop under some sort of natural pressure, through unnatural, perverse inheritance, through forced atrophy — in other words, as the result of disease, bad environment, and inheritance."

The Jews were parasites, I knew that already. They were the enemies amongst us, as Herr Hitler once said. They were consuming our nation from within and making it rot away, piece by piece.

Nevertheless, I found it confusing how such beauty, Draco's beauty, could possibly be that of a parasite's. If he was like a disease, inbred and corrupt, how could I have felt such intense desire to touch him? To protect him, to make sure no one did those things to him that I did to others of his own kind on a daily basis. Shouldn't I have been disgusted at him, seeing as I was aware of all the characteristics and the general nature of the Jewry? Deep down I knew I was a hypocrite and overlooking the possibility that Draco might have somehow managed to get past all my defences. Jewish men and women were known to have lured respectful Aryan citizens into their traps, polluting pure German blood with their genes. Such was unacceptable.

But was I really doing anything that endangered the Aryan heritage? Draco was a queer and therefore wasn't likely to ever procreate. Whatever he did, his blood was never going to mix with our blood. He was of no use to the Jews and no threat to us in that sense. Homosexuals were useless, their acts were immoral and they were generally thought of as a good riddance, but surely saving just one wouldn't hurt.

I set down the book on my bed and put my head in my hands. Bewitched or not, I had a problem that I couldn't solve on my own.

In my teenage years there had been signs of my deviation. I had, in fact, enjoyed kissing Emerson, and Draco was more than a common inmate to me. I didn't know what he was, but he was something that shook my very foundations. Fight the weakness, my mind told me, but it was becoming harder and harder to resist, deny, and ignore the way I felt about other men and one man in particular.

There was no way around it; I felt attracted toward Draco. I didn't consciously decide to make it so, it just happened. I'd heard that it was possible to get rid of these perverted urges, however, that one could learn how to live appropriately again. Only I didn't know how to go about doing that.

It was agonising, knowing how I felt. Nevertheless there was nothing I could do about it because someone else, an outsider, had told me it was wrong and forbidden to have such relations with another man, a Jewish one at that. I didn't know how to beat these aforementioned feelings.

I went to find Draco.

-

I found him asleep in the servants' building, lying there on the wooden planks of his bunk and looking absolutely exhausted. He had tucked a bunch of dark cloth under his cheek, pretending it was a pillow. His lips were partly open, his breathing was deep, and every now and then his brow twitched. Draco's arm was hanging outside the bunk, almost touching the floor and his fingers were slightly curled, like a sleeping person's fingers tended to be. I noted that those hands looked like they had done a lot of heavy, physical work recently, and one of his fingernails was clearly going to fall off sometime soon; he must have dropped something heavy on top of it.

I just watched him sleep. I wondered where his unconscious mind travelled, where his temporary refuge was and who he was with. Quite possibly those were the best moments of Draco's day. He got to go somewhere else, forget about Buchenwald and everything having to do with the camp. Including me.

I decided to wake him up and shook his arm.

Draco's eyes snapped open and he scrambled to sit up. "Wha-What? I'm late for work, aren't I? Forgive me, sir -"

"Shhh," I shushed. "It's not morning yet; keep quiet. There's no need to wake up the others."

"Sir –"

"For God's sake, don't wear that word out! It's starting to annoy me."

"Yes, si- Mr. Potter." He paused. "What are you doing here?"

"How do I make it stop?" I blurted out. The question had been bothering me for so long that it slipped easily off the tip of my tongue.

Draco stared at me back, confused. "What do you mean? Make what stop?"

I gritted my teeth. I'd wished I wouldn't need to go into details. "This…abnormality. How is it cured?"

"I'm not quite sure I completely understand what –"

I kicked the leg of the bunk in anger, and in case the others woke up I pulled the stumbling Draco outside, shutting the door behind us. The whole conversation was making me very uncomfortable and I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.

"I have a problem. One that is very similar to yours. It has to do with what transpired between us, in the spinney. Ring any bells yet?"

The other man pursed his lips. It looked like he was trying to hold his breath as his eyes stated watering a bit and his cheeks got a faint pink tint. I would have interpreted this reaction as horror or embarrassment had Draco not burst out laughing a few seconds later.

I flushed red both in humiliation and anger. "What exactly do you find so funny?"

He continued snickering. "This!" He exclaimed, "This is so absurd, so paradoxical! You – an SS man – asking an inmate how to deal with being gay! Oh, God, this is so preposterous I don't know whether I should laugh or cry!

"Look around you. Where are we? It's August, 1944, in Germany and currently we happen to be in the concentration camp of Buchenwald, which is located close to the hill of Ettersberg. So, how are problematic and different people dealt with, keeping in mind where we are?" He asked incredulously.

"It would seem that you have to join our ranks. The Nazis surely know what to do with us, how to solve the problem! What do you say? Shouldn't you give up your position as a highly-regarded Shutzstaffel officer and instead join the wrong-minded scum?"

"Shut up!" I spat, slamming Draco against the wall with such force that it knocked the breath out of him, leaving him gasping for air. "You did this, didn't you? It's all your fault!"

"Oh, tell me something new, please. I've heard this all bef-"

I kicked him in the shin and he fell to the ground, mewling in pain. "TELL ME! TELL ME HOW TO GET RID OF IT!"

Clutching his leg, Draco looked up at me from the ground with narrowed eyes. "I don't know! I doubt you even CAN get rid of it! It's just something that is part of you, whether you like it or not!"

This made me freeze. I hadn't expected to get a confirmation of my fears.

Shouldn't he have just told me that it's a matter of choice, or that these thoughts were contagious but curable? "Are you…sure of this?" I stammered out, not quite believing what I was hearing.

There was a moment of silence. Then Draco spoke up. "Quite sure."

There was another pause. Once again Draco and I were out alone quite late; it was close to midnight. I looked around me in the darkness and the surroundings suddenly seemed completely unfamiliar to me. The nocturnal colours sat on the surfaces of familiar objects like suffocating blankets.

He broke the silence finally by asking me, "Why would you think it's my fault that you're this way?"

I turned to look at him again, noting how the moon's light hit his eyes and made them glimmer. "You were the one who got it all started."

I seemed to have captured his complete attention and went on. "Ever since I first saw you entering the gates I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. Every day you've entered my thoughts in one way or another. It feels like there's poison burning through my system. I want it to stop."

Draco was speechless. He just sat on the ground, looking up at me and still holding his shin,. He was not saying a word. Two lone figures, him and me, merely looked at each other in the silence of the late hour, and I wondered what would become of all of this.

"Say something," I finally pleaded, feeling like we were not in Buchenwald at all but somewhere else completely; somewhere where rules didn't exist and it was right for me to say anything I liked.

"I don't know what I should say."

"Don't think about what you should say, just tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm not sure if I want to," he muttered quietly.

I dug something out of my pocket. "A penny for your thoughts." And I tossed a food token on the ground in front of him and it made a soft clinking sound.

Draco briefly locked his eyes to the coin but then lifted his eyes to look back up at me. "I think," he began, his tone of voice almost analytical, "I think you have a lot of self-searching to do. Inherently, you are not a bad man, but a victim of the circumstances, just like me." Earlier I'd fervently denied any similarities between a Jew and myself, but at that moment I wanted to agree with the other man on some level. We were both shackled to the standards of society, and we both wanted to find peace and be free.

"I have tried to find out what is going on with me, but it's getting me nowhere! I'm stuck, Draco! I'm stuck in between everything!"

He stood up. "Mr. Potter –"

"Harry," I said. Draco looked unsure. "If I call you by your given name, you call me Harry."

"Harry," Draco said as if testing what the name sounded like on his lips. "I'm not an expert in these things. I am – or at least I was – a medical school student and I have no knowledge of how human psychology really works. But I do know that eventually you will have to take a chance, and regardless of what anyone else says, you must do as that inner pull tells you to do, or else you might end up becoming a very bitter, sad man who dies of old age with strangers around him."

"Inner pull," I repeated, thinking things over.

"Yes."

"And I have to follow it?"

"Exactly."

"But I don't know if the pull leads me in the right direction."

"Just do it anyway."

So I stepped up to Draco, cupped his face in my hands and kissed him for the second time in my life. I then felt hands gripping my hipbones and I pushed my body against the other man who had started kissing me back equally enthusiastically. I slid my fingers through Draco's short hair, wishing it hadn't been cut quite so short, although at that moment I didn't really care. What I cared about was the feeling of having him in my arms, kissing him and him kissing me back!

'Lord help me,' I thought, but soon all logic abandoned me and left me with only my desires.

Tongue on tongue, chest against chest and breaths mixing together in the warm summer night we sunk into one another. I felt like I was falling forward and deeper into the moment and had the sensation of being right where I wanted to be; being with someone who wasn't just anyone but someone who made me feel so complete, more complete than anyone had ever made me before.

Eventually we separated, our lips making a soft wet sound, and I buried my face in Draco's shoulder. I wrapped my arms around his waist and just held him, not wanting to let go anytime soon. "The pull told me to kiss you."

"I'm glad it did."

I enjoyed the feeling of his bare skin against my cheek. "But don't you hate me?"

"Yes."

"Still you let me do it."

"True."

"Why?" I asked, genuinely curious.

"My pull told me the same thing."

"So you are not only doing this because you're afraid I'd kill you otherwise?"

"Not really. There are times when thinking is not necessary."

I pressed my lips against his again, overwhelmed by the fact that he let me do so. Draco draped his arms over my shoulders, taking hold of the back of my head as he returned the warm embrace that I could only hope wouldn't be our last.

What I didn't know at the time was that there was a pair of eyes observing us from the darkness, not at all happy with what they were seeing.

TBC

A/N: Thank you, lotrwariorgodss, for betaing this chapter. You did a wonderful job :)

Ahem... I also apologise for the delay in updating this story. Yes, I was supposed to do it before Christmas but the goblins kidnapped my laptop and took it to their headquarters in Siberia. I had to wrestle with tigers and cave bears to get it back but finally I made it.

Reviewing is strongly encouraged.