First of all, very merry Christmas to all of you. Here it comes a new chapter as very special gift for you all. I hope you like it ;)
And now…
Welcome to:
SPIDERWEB
Chapter 15 - We Are Not Alone
(Harry)
In the corner where he had been locked, the outside was but a window like mirror, through which he could look, but not be seen, nor felt, nor heard.
At first he only howled like an animal and fought like a madman; Without mind, without direction, to regain control. The fear of being perpetually relegated to this space without space, a living thing that fed on his newly awakened memories, grew and grew with every passing minute, until it was unbearable.
Hatred, anger, the intolerable suffering of loss, betrayal ... began to suffocate him in layers and layers of feelings he did not wish to recall. They pounced on him and crushed him with their weight, Harry drowned, drowned ...
"RAKSA!" Where his threats had not been heard, this primary sound of pure anguish instantly attracted the attention of the guardian, his quieter, safer side, the protector of the triad. He did not need to say what was happening, Raksa had already been here when Harry's sanity began to deteriorate, so many years ago.
"Calm down." The voice of his other self, who was from the forest, had the timbre of a much older man, grave and rugged, deeply kind. The vibration he knew so well brought back some metaphoric oxygen, relieving the anguish.
With hands covered with calluses and scars, Raksa penetrated the psyche that belonged to Harry, and collected the memories that had been awakened by the psychic wound that Malfoy's words had opened.
Like oozing entrails, or decaying fruits, their touch was slippery and greasy. In their wake they left traces of a viscous slime, and the sweet, asphyxiating, smell, of food long decayed.
Harry shuddered at Raksa's movement, until those things were again behind the barriers of resentment and hatred, the guardian had erected to protect him, so long ago.
To keep his sanity intact.
Harry Potter was a withered body that had to remain in his niche, and Malfoy should not have lifted the lid of a coffin that was best left closed. The breaking of his wrists was a small price to pay for having disturbed the dead.
With the corpse again silent, and his belongings returned to the coffin, the human began to regain his composure.
The remnants of the experience were purged from his system in traces of black mud, to slide back to the well. Leaving him exhausted.
Then, and only then, in the silence and the relaxed murmur of the spider laying at his side, Harry began to grasp what he could see through the eyes of the guardian.
Malfoy was in his lap with his wrists bandaged in bloodstained cloth, his white hands of elegant fingers, cradled between Raksa's bigger and dark ones.
White against black was a beautiful contrast.
From the spider he felt a warm sense of belonging and the ever-present possessiveness, emanate in brief traces of color and sensation. Harry allowed the impressions to pass beside him in vibrant, delicate shapes, like bubbles, without bothering to grasp them or understand them.
The spider was simple, familiar, and looked satisfied. His presence helped to calm the last remains of the memories, with the frankness and the animal clarity that defined him.
The black widow never lied. He was a safe companion.
Harry let himself relax in his aura, as he watched, and now, too, listened to what was happening outside.
Raksa was talking, and when Harry recognized what about, he felt the anger relight in his psyche, like embers that are blown, sparking, and also, something like betrayal, that gnawed at his blood.
Because Raksa had no right to tell Malfoy that. He was aware that the guardian was not giving details, or narrating the most painful facts of that time, but however sketchy the story was, it was still something deeply his horribly his, he had no right to share. Even less so with Malfoy! That lying, manipulative, cruel man, who in their childhood had tortured Harry with such fury.
He had hated him. They had hated each other!
He prepared for the sarcastic laugh, and the cold curve of thin lips that he was already waiting for. For the words again hurtful, for the satisfaction on the gray pupils at knowing how he had been rejected by his friends and loved ones, for his malicious delight.
But all those things failed to materialize.
The lips curved, but down, worried, or perhaps sad, the pupils grew and grew large and black until they almost swallowed the gray ring that rocked them, the brows of a blond on the edge of silver were wrung in a sore arc. And words.
There were words tied together that formed phrases. Questions instead of teasing. How? Why? And finally. Everybody? And with each answer, his face became darker and sadder. Harry looked with increasing disbelief and surprise, which became as big as a mountain, when that delicate hand gripped his softly. Comforting.
Though he had broken his wrists, and had raped him, even though he had stolen him from his people, and put in his womb a child he did not want, the blond man, in spite of all that, was listening.
Trying to understand.
Empathizing with his loss and his pain. Stretching an offering of sympathy, that Harry would never have expected of him. Never from him, the aristocratic boy, cocky and evil he remembered.
Of the proud man he had met.
He was staring at Malfoy for what seemed like the first time, and what he was seeing was a reflection of what he knew, with nothing of the bad to tarnish it.
It was white, gray and silver, and red lips and crystalline chitin, was kind understanding, and beautiful, incomprehensibly beautiful. All his assumptions were falling around him in a slow deluge, and all Harry could see was the white beauty of Draco Malfoy.
No one outside the forest and his creatures had offered such kind sympathy. Neither Remus, who as a werewolf and should have understood him, nor Sirius, who had spent so many years himself betrayed and abandoned. Neither his best friends, nor any other ones whom he had grown up with as a wizard.
The wizards, who were so cruel, slavish, murderous ... But Malfoy, that was a pure blood, or that had grown up believing was one, that by all logic and sense should be the most sadistic of them all, the one who most enjoyed his agony, the less inclined to offer him comfort, here he was, doing exactly what no one in a thousand years would have believed.
Offering to listen to Harry Potter. The corpse nobody wanted or needed. Not to Raksa, not to the spider, not to the human who had stood as the protector of the forest, not to any of the parts that might be more willing to listen to him than Harry.
It was enough to see the imperceptible hardness of his mouth, to know that he meant it.
Harry's heart stopped, and then it kept pumping at the triple of speed, his brain made a couple of attempts to make sense of everything he was seeing, and then he simply decided to accept it, because he did not see that he could understand anything, not knowing how Malfoy had Grown, to become this man who was giving him gooseflesh.
The desire to accept the request and talk to him became, not a possibility to be contemplated, but an imperative. And although he had no intention of touching the corpse of Harry Potter, who had just come out of his grave, the one in which that boy had grown, the ruthless, protective, savage man, wanted to talk to Malfoy with the focused intensity of a laser.
He sketched the first psychic syllable to indicate to Raksa that he was well, he was calm, and he wanted to talk to him, when the wall behind him growled and creaked menacingly, announcing the arrival of someone who could only be an enemy.
oOo
(Draco)
Pieces of stone and guts slid to the floor, and a fragment of the wall, almost as large as Raksa himself, began to collapse.
The Guardian's Reaction was immediate. And when Draco wanted to look for him, he was already standing and stood between what was coming, and him, still sitting on the floor.
Tense, armed with claws and fangs ...
His naked body was black, as chitin bloomed in his epidermis to dress him in full armor, with the polished and glistening quality of obsidian.
But it was easy to see that the chitin on his back was thinner and brittle, new, not as dark or opaque as the rest of the shell that protected his organism.
Weak.
The memory of how this being had been about to die in his arms, wanting to protect him from the collapse of Hogwarts struck Draco in the solar plexus, with the instinct of his own spider.
His muscles flexed reflexively, but he could not even try to stand up. Too weak, worn and soft, by poison, stress and fatigue.
Even so, that did not stop him from taking the abandoned wand, from no more than a meter away from where he remembered dropping it.
He clutched the wood between his fingers, alert to what was coming, remembering each of the defensive and offensive spells, which he could still execute with the little magic he had left.
Knowing that to use it had to be the last resort possible, because to spend his reserves would leave him unconscious, vulnerable to the enemy and without possibility to defend himself.
oOo
(Harry)
Malfoy was weak as a kitten, after having used all his magic to save him (remembering made everything seem warmer), wounded, (by him, briefly reminded the spider; And a painful spark of guilt became bonfire in his skull), and he could not defend himself.
At that moment, for the first time in something that did not encompass the Dark Forest and its inhabitants, his three natures coincided in the desire to protect something.
Raksa, still in control of the body, interposed himself between the threat and the wonderfully mad blond man, offered the warning roar of the spider, and the ominous look of human threat.
oOo
(Draco)
With the collapse of the castle, the attack of the Death Eaters, the desperate escape of the crowd ... could not be too many survivors in the ruins of Hogwarts.
Those who had not escaped in time, and who had not died under the shedding of tons of rock, with the hours that must have passed when he was unconscious, and the time that had then been spent in saving Potter, would have already been captured or annihilated by the Forces of the dark lord, leaving little chance for what, or who, that could be gnawing the stone to reach them, to be a friend.
Perhaps the Death Eaters had heard them speak, or were using some locator spell to search for their few remaining living enemies.
The dark lord would no doubt want anyone who could be captured alive. Be it for information, or to swell the ranks of slaves always hungry for new flesh.
Being aware of all this, made him remember...
Where Hermione and the others alive? Had they have fled in time, or had they died?
The doubt, which should have felt like a curse on his chest, which should be ripping him inside ... barely resulted in a vague twinge of interested.
Draco was aware then, for a second, of the spider that seemed to be the cause of it. His arachnid side had stretched over his feelings, and he did not seem willing to move.
It was as if he were saying; Now you do not need this, let me save it until you need it again. Draco decided not to discuss it. Not in the middle of the arrival of a possible enemy.
oOo
More pieces of the wall began to fall apart, the structure supporting the cavern shuddered like a house of cards about to collapse, but against what Draco was beginning to fear, it resisted.
He watched with a certain emptiness in the stomach, as human remains were released from the mass of the wall, and fell with a wet sound similar to that of a garbage bag, to the ground.
The only advantage of there being so much blood in the rubble was that the moisture gathered the dust that could had risen, so he did not have to worry about breathing something, perhaps, poisonous.
Clumps of flesh and splinters of gray rock had not stopped falling, when someone entered through the opening.
The creature moved with inhuman fluidity, which Draco immediately associated with Potter and the acromantulas, and when he emerged completely by their side of the wall, and he was able to see him, Draco saw that the comparison had been more accurate than he wished.
He was tall, taller than Potter, and slender, much thinner, but fibrous and compact, with disproportionately long arms, finished in fine, elongated, delicate fingers, topped with sharp, thin claws, like the stiletto used by his father to open letters. That letter opener, which Draco knew very well, could cut through muscle tissue and hard cartilage, as if they were pudding.
His skin was the color of a jar of ink, and he seemed protected by the same kind of chitin as Potter's, hard and reflective, but it was not until he turned his head that Draco understood that this new entity was looking for something, and that that something, was himself.
He realised it the moment when those huge, dark, strange eyes, like fossilized wood, settled on his skin, like a palpable weight.
"Me, he's looking for me."
oOo
(Harry)
What had been on the other side of the wall crossed with a sinuous step into the cavern, and the three who were Harry immediately recognized what he was; Another black widow, like them, and also a dominant one.
Taller, thinner, just as dangerous. Draco and he were supposed to be the only ones left, two of a specie virtually extinct, the arrival of another one should be a source of joy. A good surprise to receive with open arms. But it was not.
Not when Harry could clearly see that he was looking for Draco with a gentle intensity that could only be one thing ...
Raksa crouched with a primary grunt in his throat.
All his posture turned into an aggressive warning, that even bristled his hair. Hi bared his serrated teeth, his long, restless claws curved in the stone on the floor, his body tense like a metal dock, or a huge feline about to jump.
Jealous and protective were words that lost all their essence in the light of such an attitude. Possessive was not enough to cover what the spy could catch in the sound, guttural deep and offensive, that escaped through his fangs.
'Malfoy was his, HIS!'
Raksa dilated his nostrils to catch the smell of the other dominant, but what came to him was not the spicy aroma of bonfire, of one of his own, it was dry herbs and sulfurous vapors, insect shells, and dried fat, blood. Animal hair, alcohol, dust and soap ...
"What…?"
oOo
From his position behind Raksa, Draco felt no fear of the new creature, not because he knew the Guardian was protecting him, or because the spider was mitigating all his reactions, but because the other's eyes were familiar and reassuring.
The hair around the nightmarish face was smooth and dull, hanging like a greasy black curtain from the skull...
Without realizing it at all, his nostrils dilated, he licked his lips and swallowed some air through his mouth. Draco was not aware of it, but he was examining the air, and beginning to use sensitive organs of smell that had been inactive for the twenty-seven years he had lived.
The smell was familiar.
Draco had caught that same scent last night; Was the dark and herbal perfume of hundreds of dried plants, spices and chemical vapors. It was an aroma that had cradled his childhood, and accompanied his adult life.
"Severus?"
The word seemed to break the moment, similar to floor slabs, a crystal glass.
"Draco. Are you injured?"
To be continue
Note: Maybe this is not the explanation you were waiting for, -don't worry that will come a little later- but still, we can see how Harry finally realised the man Draco is now is not the git he remembers.
This relationship needs so much work to be anything close to healthy…
I don't even know myself if it would be possible for them to be happy, or even together at this point.
I will want to know your opinions on this. What do you think?