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Chapter Seven—The Second PensieveHarry raised his foot and brought it down again. As before, it made a faint clunk. He grimaced. So much for traveling in absolute silence.
But having a wooden foot was better than having a leaking bag of blood and flesh that would slow him down. Harry had to content himself with that, since his healing spells were limited and he had no Skele-Gro. When they returned to the surface, then the Healers at St. Mungo's should be able to regrow the bones in his foot, just as they should be able to regrow Draco's ribs.
Malfoy's ribs, you mean.
Harry shook his head at himself. He had already slipped up twice in so simple a matter as the name of a potential enemy. What would happen when he ventured deeper into the Department of Mysteries with Malfoy and his entire survival relied on keeping a careful emotional distance?
This is why you need Ron and Hermione back, besides just needing their friendship. You're half-helpless on your own.
He rose and turned to face Malfoy, who had waited for him in the first proper room they'd found since the room of the bone-eating creatures. Harry had insisted on remaining in the tunnel to test his foot. He'd told Malfoy it was so that any spells he had to cast wouldn't accidentally hit the other man, but he had mostly wanted the chance to think without meeting piercing gray eyes every second.
He was more balanced and settled, now. It would have to be enough.
"All right," he said quietly to Malfoy. "Are you tired? Do you need to gather more strength, or should we go on?" Beyond this room, which was another small stone circle without windows rather like the one where they'd slept, Harry had already seen that a second maze of tunnels opened. He'd rather cover what ground they could before they had to take another extended rest.
Malfoy folded his arms and looked stubborn. Harry frowned and waited, but Malfoy didn't motion for the communication sphere, or try to mouth any words. He just kept his gaze steady and his face blank.
"I give up," Harry said at last. "I told you, I'm no good at Legilimency." He stopped after the words and took a deep breath. His tone sounded as if he were about to whinge any second. No whinging. I'm not a child, and I'm not a spoiled brat, either. "Just tell me what's wrong," he went on encouragingly.
Malfoy stepped forwards, eyes on his face. Harry stood and waited for him to come, though his muscles tensed involuntarily. Over and over, he reminded himself that Malfoy was severely wounded and had no wand. If it came to a physical struggle, Harry would still win.
He expected anything from a punch to a silent lecture on what an idiot he was. What he got were hands pressing on his shoulders, pushing him down. Harry fought back on instinct, which caused Malfoy to roll his eyes and push again. Slowly, Harry sank to his floor, his eyes never wavering from Malfoy's face, his tongue curling around a spell and his fingers around the wand. His wooden foot clanked awkwardly beneath him, making him an even better target.
Malfoy did nothing except sit him down, though, and then seat himself opposite Harry. He promptly folded his legs beneath himself and piled his hands on top of each other in the middle of his lap. His gaze was steady. Harry waited, hearing his heart beat oddly loud in his ears.
The communication sphere bobbed not far away. Malfoy picked it up and started rapping the heel of his palm and his finger nubs against the facets. Slowly, Harry made out the message: You save my life. I trust you.
"That's nice to know," said Harry, and then stopped, because Malfoy had already started rapping out the same message, only in reverse.
You trust me.
Harry folded his arms in turn. "I can't," he said. "I just—you were here when they started torturing people, Malfoy!" His voice soared despite himself, and he didn't care that he'd just used the "wrong" name. "How do you expect me to just accept that and go on, when you probably had something to do with my friends disappearing and the whole Department becoming like—like this?"
Malfoy gazed at him evenly. Then he pointed into the maze beyond this room.
"I don't know what that means," Harry reminded him.
Malfoy made an expressive gesture with one hand, managing to mime, even with his fingers mostly missing, the motion of a wand pulling memories from his temple and dropping them into a Pensieve. Then he pointed into the maze again.
"There's another Pensieve ahead," Harry muttered, feeling like a right berk for not getting it the first time. See? he added to whatever fate had taken Ron and Hermione away. I can't do anything right.
Malfoy nodded fiercely.
"How do youknow that?"
Malfoy sighed, then folded one finger stump on either hand into his palm and extended all the others. Harry frowned. "Eight? Eight what?"
But his memory had already returned to the glimpse of the wooden table that Malfoy had constructed and shown to the Unspeakable called Richard. There had been nine balls that had arranged themselves along the grooves of the maze instead of dropping into the center with the rest. If the nine balls had been nine Pensieves, or maybe one ball representing Malfoy and eight balls representing Pensieves…
"Eight Pensieves altogether?" Harry asked quickly. "Or eight remaining?"
That question won him a beaming smile, and then a quick nod and headshake. Eight Pensieves altogether, Harry translated.
"But you don't remember what's in each one."
Heashake.
"But you want me to trust you anyway."
Nod.
Harry sighed and rubbed his fingers across his face. "If it was anyone but you, this wouldn't be such a problem," he muttered. "Or if I hadn't seen what I did in the last Pensieve, about you ignoring that poor woman as you burned." He sensed more than saw Malfoy give a massive flinch. He dropped his hand and glared at the other man again. "How could you do that? How could you see her burn and then still let that witch, Pearl or whatever her name is, persuade you to go back to your research?"
The piercing gray eyes clouded. Then they closed, and Malfoy shook his head slowly, not in denial, but with such a lost expression on his face that Harry felt another uncomfortable twitch of pity and sympathy. He tried to banish the swirling emotions, telling himself no murderer or torturer deserved them. They refused to go.
He was faced with another of those choices he always made wrong. And he was probably going to make this one wrong, too. That was Harry Potter: face him with a precipice, and he leaped off it. He thought again of what he had done to come into the Department of Mysteries, a piece of recklessness Hermione would undoubtedly have scolded him for.
But ignoring his own instincts would make him so uncomfortable he'd probably have even worse errors later on. And his instincts were with the pity, and the sympathy, and the tendency to think that the lost expression on Malfoy's face came from the genuine lack of a memory.
"All right," Harry said, clearing his throat. "All right. I'll trust you for now, and we'll go ahead to the Pensieve." He paused. "I reckon that you'll let me look at the memories first, before you try to put them back in your head?"
Malfoy's eyes flared open. Hope was in them like light. Harry blinked and glanced away, but he couldn't escape the sudden pressure of a warm body close to his and a heavy hand on his arm so easily.
Lips moved just against his ear. Harry suspected they were only mouthing thank you, but he shivered anyway.
And then told himself not to be so stupid.
The second Pensieve, like the first, was standing in the middle of a solid ivory pillar. Harry glanced at the pillar just once and then away; looking at it steadily made him ill. Like the first, the shadowy shapes of letters gleamed near the base. Epi, said these. Harry wondered what they meant.
Cautious spells revealed no trace of enemies, even though this time Harry used a few extra ones to turn the walls and floor and ceiling transparent so that he could check for creatures lurking and awaiting their chance. The floor was solid stone. And Malfoy strolled in confidently enough, so that Harry eventually felt like a pillock for staying behind and hurried to catch up with him.
Malfoy glanced up at him once, then back at the Pensieve. His face had shut down again, but his eyes gleamed with some emotion Harry doubted he would have understood even if he'd been in contact with the git's thoughts. He directed the communication sphere to hover next to Malfoy, within easy reach if he needed it, and asked, "And you're sure you want me to look at them first?"
A firm nod. Malfoy touched Harry's chest in the next instant, his hand resting forcibly over Harry's heart. It was the same forced intimacy he'd instigated while they hovered above the bone-creatures. Harry backed up a step, but Malfoy just followed him, staring intently all the while.
"Yeah," Harry said, turning away uneasily. "I'll just get on with it, then, shall I?" Finally, he backed up enough to make Malfoy's hand drop off, and he faced the Pensieve and cast the Sticking Charm on his feet, as before.
"Hit me over the head with the sphere if you get in trouble," he said, and once again got another flat stare, the same as when he'd suggested that Malfoy enjoy the violence of their pushing against one another to get to the doorway. Harry bent down to the Pensieve, and his last thought while his mind was still his own was that the Unspeakables seemed to have taken Draco's sense of humor about their schoolboy rivalry from him along with his fingers and his ribs.
The first memory Harry landed in was an unexpectedly pleasant one. He stood in a room crowded with fine furniture, old books, and birdcages that contained softly twittering parakeets and canaries. It was dark, but only because the sole illumination came from a fire in a grand old hearth of weathered stone. In front of the fire was a high-backed pair of chairs from which voices came. Harry picked his way towards them.
Once again, Malfoy's voice hit his ears with the shock of being slapped in the face by a wave.
"—don't think that's likely to matter. Sir Galen was a fine fellow, I'm certain—a great wizard, even if you only look at this one spell. But he had some rather old-fashioned ideas about what mattered to the use of magic. The question of intent, of willingness? That sounds to me like the outdated criteria that the Ministry uses to classify some magic as Dark. There are healing spells that could be Dark, because the person casts them intending to hurt someone else. The pain ultimately leads to greater benefit, though. And our research will, as well."
By this time, Harry had rounded the chairs. Malfoy was leaning back in his, a glass of wine cupped in one whole hand, the other waving lazily back and forth, a smug smirk occupying his lips. The inhabitant of the other chair was Pearl, the woman Harry had last seen persuading Malfoy that torture was a good thing.
"My mother would warn me to beware of men like you," the older witch said, laughing softly while she sipped her own drink—ale, Harry thought. "The ones who spend the most time arguing about the Dark Arts, and presenting the most fascinating and persuasive reasons for studying them, are the ones who turn up with a Potions lab full of corpses some fine day."
Harry considered Pearl as dispassionately as he could. She looked younger than she had in the memory of Malfoy and the burning woman, certainly under less stress. That meant this memory could have happened before the last one. Maybe.
"Not me," Malfoy said.
Harry twitched around to look at him. Malfoy's face had gone unexpectedly serious, and he was staring into his drink. Though Harry doubted it would have been obvious to anyone but an observer with Auror training, he could make out the wine shaking from a fine tremor, traveling up Malfoy's arm to his shoulder.
"Really?" Pearl sounded surprised, perhaps intrigued. "You can't tell me that you've never been tempted by the secrets one can learn only from human flesh. Even your fine old Sir Galen wrote a little about that, in the spell you've been helping Richard to enact."
"It's not an option for me," Malfoy said, and drained half the remaining wine in one gulp. Harry put that particular remembrance in the back of his mind, just in case Malfoy ever claimed to have impeccable manners. "I can't kill. I can't spill the blood of another human being. I once tried to kill people from a distance, and I wasn't good even at that. The only time in my life I ever achieved appreciable levels of violence, someone else was driving me." He turned and stared at Pearl. "Do you think Richard is capable of doing that?"
Harry whipped about. Pearl's eyes slid off center just a little. Lying, Harry thought, even as she gave her answer.
"No. Of course not."
Malfoy released a breathy sigh. "Good. I wouldn't want to think my research was contributing to something like that, even tangentially."
The memory ended and whirled Harry into darkness, towards the next one. He was left laboring for breath and staring down at his own clenched fists, since for the moment he had nothing else to look at.
This memory is earlier than the last one I saw, I'm certain of that. He could have changed his mind later.
His own memory, which had a disconcerting attentiveness to nuances of tone at the most inconvenient times, told him that Malfoy had sounded as if he had an unshakable set of principles.
Yeah, but he agreed to participate in this just for the vanity of having the Dark Mark off, Harry told himself stubbornly, and lifted his head to see where he'd landed this time.
This was a large, well-lit room, probably the most brilliant place in the Department of Mysteries other than the chamber where Harry had first discovered Draco. He found himself grateful for that; he was tired of the atmosphere of darkness and oppressiveness that cloaked the place.
And then he made out the cloaked figures standing around a kneeling Malfoy, who had his arms bound stiffly in front of him and his legs shackled to the floor, and he swallowed, suddenly uncertain whether the light was a good thing. He moved closer, though, because what was he in these memories if not a witness?
"Because," said a voice Harry didn't recognize from the Unspeakable standing directly in front of Malfoy, "you have attempted to run away from us when you willingly agreed to come here—"
"You tricked me!" Malfoy snarled, bucking like a young horse in his restraints, for all that he couldn't move his arms and his legs barely stirred. "You said that you would remove the Dark Mark, but what you meant was—"
"Because," the Unspeakable continued, taking no notice of Malfoy's interruption, "you attempted to sabotage the research as it went forwards—"
"You bastards—"
"Because you displayed unseemly compassion for subjects whom you knew were traitors, criminals, and worse," the Unspeakable finished, and flourished his wand, "you shall join them."
The flick of the wand must have been part of the movement for a nonverbal spell. Harry saw a silvery flash next to the Unspeakable who had cast the spell; then another one came from the far side of the room, behind Draco, and then another one, from the nearest side of the circle. Harry couldn't see what they were at first, though, until they converged and arrived at Draco's knees.
Snakes, made of metal. Their bodies were looping, flowing rings of silver, whipping and dissolving into each other, forming shearing patterns of scales in the moments before they winked out of existence again. Harry frowned. Had the Unspeakables filled the fangs of the serpents with some poison they were testing?
Another Unspeakable moved forwards and cast several spells, in such a low voice Harry couldn't make out what they were. The stiff bindings fell away from Draco's arms, however, and his fingers splayed wide.
Harry swallowed. Flashes of red and dizzy gray traveled across his vision. He suspected he knew what he was going to see.
The serpents climbed Draco's body, though he shook his head and swayed back and forth, trying to cast them off. Then they spiraled out along his arms to his fingers and arranged their bodies carefully to hang from the edges of his palms. They opened their mouths.
Harry could see their fangs now—not the glassy, transparent points he would have thought perfect for the delivery of venom, but sharp steel teeth made for cutting, for biting.
The snakes began to chew Draco's fingers off.
Harry wished there was a wall nearby in the memory to brace himself against. As it was, he called on the same resolve that had kept him seeking the Horcruxes when everything seemed helpless, maybe even the same resolve that had kept him walking into the Forbidden Forest when he believed he was going to his death, and kept watching. It was odd, but if he left the memory and had to tell Draco he'd looked away—well, that would be one of the worst things he could do, even though he didn't know why.
The snakes bit off strips of skin first, chewing and cutting it to pieces so minute they might as well have swallowed them. Then they reached the bone and began to snap it. Harry flinched as the echoing cracks came to him, like the pops of loud fireworks, and flinched again as Draco screamed and he saw the white, jagged edges of the fingers protruding like obscene stems from the red blossoms of flesh and blood. Then the snakes would bite again, and another splinter of bone would vanish, while the wounds grew larger.
Halfway through, or so, Harry became aware that he was hissing frantically, trying to command the snakes with Parseltongue to leave Draco alone. They didn't respond, of course.
Several times, Draco almost fainted from blood loss or pain, but the Unspeakables continued to cast spells that kept him conscious throughout it. He had screamed himself hoarse before it was done, but otherwise, Harry had no way of estimating how long the process took. The snakes simply swarmed down Draco's body at last, and back to their masters. The Unspeakable who had cast the spells that spread Draco's fingers for the sacrifice stepped in and cast again. This time, the strips of skin left bound themselves around the stumps, and the remaining bones puddled and reshaped themselves like water. In a moment, Draco was left with the same smooth nubs that Harry had seen when he first rescued him.
Finally, mercifully, Draco was allowed to faint.
The memory faded from view, and Harry was left to shut his eyes and try to make sense of his whirling brain. The pity and the sympathy had arisen again, and this time their clamoring completely drowned the rational voice that told him Draco was still to be distrusted, that he'd seen a woman suffer as much as he had and hadn't tried to save her.
I don't care what he did. Maybe he should have gone to Azkaban for a year, if there'd been anyone around to judge him after he left her there. Still. No one deserves what happened to him.
Light again. Harry opened his eyes, wondering what horror waited for him in the brilliance this time.
It was almost worse to see Draco—and Harry only became aware then, dimly, that his brain had bitten away Malfoy as thoroughly as the snakes had bitten away the other man's fingers—with his body intact, sitting at a wide table, swearing steadily at a book in front of him. He looked up when the door of the room, which looked to be a library, opened, and nodded at Pearl. She handed him a cup of steaming tea, which he sipped gratefully.
"You shouldn't be studying this late, Draco," she muttered. There was a crease between her brows, and she tucked her hands into her robe sleeves as if she were cold. Harry noticed more strain in her face than in the last memory featuring her, and wondered if she'd already begun the change of mind that would lead to her betraying her friend.
"It's this damn puzzle Richard set me," said Draco, wagging his head back and forth as he stared intently down at the book. "The account of the only other time that someone did follow the good Sir Galen's instructions and try to construct a maze that could be walked through to arrive at immortality."
Pearl frowned. "I thought that book was fairly straightforward. Is it written in another language?" She leaned over Draco's shoulder, trying to get a look at the text. Draco laughed and let the book fall shut, stretching luxuriously to make it look like an accident. Harry thought it probably wasn't.
"Not another language, no. Just the arcane philosophy of six hundred years ago." Draco waved a hand. "They performed most of the necessary steps. Took the bones they needed, did the experiments, found the spell that would anchor the Pensieves in place. And then the account trails off into gibberish about will, and foundations." He clasped his hands behind his head and bent his neck with a popping noise. "I can't make sense of it. They didn't perform the spell, I know that, but why?"
"Maybe they just weren't dedicated to the research enough," Pearl suggested, leaning one hip on the table. "That happens sometimes."
Harry didn't miss the narrow-eyed glance Draco darted her, so sudden and fleeting it would have been easy for anyone not watching every movement with breathless attention to miss. "Maybe," Draco said softly.
And then the memory let Harry go, and he was once again standing in the room of the Pensieve. He was breathing hoarsely, and there was a metallic tang in his throat.
He turned and regarded Draco, who was leaning fully against his side. Draco turned his head and stared at him, shaking his hair out of the way so their eyes could meet without obstructions.
"I am so, so sorry," Harry whispered.
Draco leaned his head on his shoulder in answer.
Harry took the other man into his arms, carefully arranging himself so he wouldn't press on the ribless flesh, and rested his chin on the top of Draco's head. He wanted to take a moment to recover, and to think how he would describe the memories to Draco, so he would be prepared when he accepted them back into his head.
His brain was in chaos. Draco had helped set up the maze and continued his research even when he began to have doubts, but he had also been a victim.
It played havoc with Harry's nice, neat sense of reality, in which there had been a helpless Draco and a guilty Draco, and he only had to find out which was real in order to give one substance and dismiss the other as shadow.
He had no idea what to do.
But then, that's hardly new, is it?