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Chapter 14 - Reasons ...
"It's going to hurt, but I have to reset your bones."
The sharp twist of Raksa's fingers send a trail of agony that fluttered through his articulation. And although Draco had dealt with broken bones before, and already expected it, the hypersensitivity caused by the poison, made him need to bite his tongue, just not to scream.
With expert movements, the guardian manipulated the shards of bone, guided by what he could feel beneath the skin, and his own experience. Pretending not to hear the sounds of pain that he tried to swallow, and doing everything possible to make the experience more bearable.
"I'm done with the right," he finally muttered, tearing the rim of Draco's bloody robe to bandage the fracture.
He worked with the serenity of one who knows well what he does. The touch of his fingers on Draco's skin, as he finished tying the improvised bandage, was almost delicate, careful every time he was forced to touch him. Almost nonexistent contacts, like the antennae of a butterfly. So different from the angular and ferocious movements of the man he had known so far, that it was disturbing.
Nobody could change their body language so quickly and in such a natural looking way. Not without serious mental problems, or a training similar to his.
And could Potter have acquired the necessary skill? He didn't think so. Potter's mind wasn't Hale...
However ... what Draco had felt on himself, and what the so called Raksa had explained ...
He blinked, wiping away tears that he had not come to pour, watching the arachnid.
Oddly enough, the atmosphere between the two had become quiet.
Draco watched his serene, completely calm face as he worked, delicately releasing his right hand, to take the left.
"... Raksa " He called
"Yes?" The guardian did not look up from his inspection of the second joint, as he began to replace the bones.
Draco gritted his teeth, speaking in an attempt to distract himself from the pain, and at the same time, to confirm his suspicions.
"When you said you were three. You, the human and the spider ... You did not mean it as a metaphor. Did you?"
Raksa finally lifted his gaze to Draco's tired, stained with blood and dry tears, face. And he straightened, releasing the hand already placed in the cradle of his lap, to prepare a new bandage.
"Yes, there are three of us."
Draco inclined his head, looking at this information, and the man who had given it to him, whose gaze was again on the careful work of bandaging him.
"How did I not see you before?" If Raksa had made an appearance at any time, he would know. That tender way of holding him, the way he moved, the serenity of his eyes, were things he would have remembered.
"I had not need to dispute the control of the human. He usually knows how to handle things without me having to intervene."
"... But not this time." It was not a question, and Malfoy looked at him with perfect calm. Raksa knew that motionless calm, Malfoy was contemplating something.
He let the air in his lungs escape with a sigh.
"No, not this time. Malfoy, I know he does not look it now, but Harry is not what you've seen so far." - he said, because the blond man had to understand, needed to know and accept Harry, as Harry also needed to understand and accept him. Nothing would work with this division as a void between them.
Draco's calm facade cracked with the gesture of scorn that twisted his lips.
"Is he not?" Sarcasm, but at least not the visceral hatred Raksa had learned to recognize in the gray pupils.
"His reasons are ... broad, but it is true that you do not deserve to be the target of his anger."
"And what are his reasons, Raksa?" He hissed unpleasantly. "Because what I've seen so far has only taught me what he can do!" He stretched out his arms, showing the bloody bandages in a gesture of resentment.
Malfoy was starting to get angry.
Raksa knew it was not a good attitude to listen with, but asking for something better was impossible now.
He gently took the thin pale hands between his much larger and black ones, not allowing the other to reject him.
"All the people he loved turned his back on him. Do you know what his best friend said to him, when he knew what he was? He called him a monster, a demon. And Dumbledore? The man he trusted more than anyone? Do you know what he said? That there was something dark inside Harry, something that was dangerous to others, but that he did not need to fear, because he wasn't mean to survive the battle anyway."
Draco had joined the order a year later, when Potter had been dead for months, and no one had told him the story in detail. The hero of the light had fallen in battle, and the people who had been there to see it; his loved ones, Dumbledore, Hermione ... didn't talk about it.
... elusive glances, silences, omissions ... Which suddenly became stained in dry blood.
He had thought that the reluctance to speak was due to the pain of loss, now he saw a much more macabre pattern.
Raksa was not lying, he could see it in his stance, in his eyes. It takes a liar to recognize one, and this man was not.
"Did they turn their back on him because he was a widow?" A whisper.
"On a creature that eats human flesh? That is not a wizard? That is so dangerous? Yes, Malfoy, they turned their back on him. You who have lived as a pure blood, should already know what the wizards have done with the magical beings. Their racism, their aversion, their cruel treatment; Deaths, exterminations, experiments…"
Draco swallowed.
"All of them?"
His eyes hardened, the marshy waters turned into a corrosive green.
"No one raised a finger when Dumbledore said that Harry must die. No one, Malfoy, no one." The words suppurated.
Draco squeezed Raksa's hand in his, as a way to comfort someone. He did not know whether Raksa or himself.
If they had abandoned Potter, had that known that Draco was also a spider, what would they had done?
He was a potions master, he had seen creatures cut down, beings as sentient and intelligent as him, chopped to pieces. Had worked with their organs and bones. But he had never cared because they were not human, they were not like him...
Potter's hatred, his visceral resentment, the violence ... suddenly he could easily see where they had come from.
Come to understand how a young man whom he remembered imbued with a sense of unshakable justice, brave, and almost mad in his heroics, had been able to metamorphose into someone capable of the things he had done to him.
"But he did not die," he muttered pensively.
"No, he did not. He decided that if he was going to fight in a war, he would do so for those who really needed him... the magical creatures that were being massacred."
The sudden clarity that flooded his thoughts made Draco close his eyes.
Now he understood at least a bit, even if he could not, would not, forgive Potter for what he had done to him, but ... they needed to talk, because he felt that all this, this viscous, icy relationship between the two, was like an infected wound. It needed to be opened and cleaned so it could start to heal. Or they would end up killing each other.
And perhaps, the decision also had something to do, with the presence of his own spider in the back of his mind.
He slipped from Raksa's lap, to sit on the floor in front of him.
"Call Potter, we need to talk."
To be continue.
Note: A new chapter, this time un-betaed. I want to give my thanks to this fantastic beta I had and that took so much work, even when he wasn't feeling so well.
I will miss you my companion.
I hope you get better soon.