Chapter Text
There it was again. Like dense, moving smoke, only gone the minute Harry turned his head.
Magic knows when something is amiss. Psychic muggles call it energy, but they don't always know how to separate it from their superstitions. For Harry, it kept appearing as a dark haze out of the corner of his eye. Settled on the train, passing heather and bracken, had finally lulled him to a calmer place. But each attempt to trust it, to go with it, had him noticing movement behind the panel across from his cabin. There, a window revealed the opposite cabin to be empty. It took realizing he was looking for something in there, three times, before he took it seriously enough to take out his wand and perform a scan. He had to do it from the corridor, the cabin door was locked and he didn't want to set off any alarms. The scan revealed nothing more than the train's active security system. There were heat spots and cold spots, but nothing strong enough to warrant a threat. He put away his wand and went to the toilet.
When he returned, he had the damndest time getting the door to close properly. While he wrestled with it, the temperature seemed to drop and the tips of his fingers went numb. He let the sliding door go, and watched as it glided to a close on its own. He blamed the oddity on drowsiness and stress, pulled his jacket around him, and wedged himself back into the furthest corner away from the door. The air vent blew against his face, blasting him with microbial debris from the train's aging ductwork. He didn't mind. It gave him a chance to charm his coat twice its size and cover up with his head pressed against the seat.
Plastic absorbs smells. Harry thinks he can smell the train's entire history, in its plastic upholstery. The material looks like real plaid, fabric cloth. But few things are real these days. Only the wood and steel frame of the car is real. The upholstery has absorbed thousands of layers of cologne, sweat, cold and heat in its service. Unventilated, those scents got trapped in the floor corners where ventilation never really reached. In winter, they refrigerated there. And in summer, they thawed and cooked. Freon-forced air, covered it all up in a chemical chill that Harry tasted in the back of his mouth.
It reminded him of an old-fashioned ice-box the Dursley's kept in their basement, and how he got his arse busted when he talked Dudley into scraping the ice out to make snow cones. He hadn't meant to make Dudley sick, they were honestly having fun for a change before Dudley went green and keeled over. Harry, however, had not gotten sick, and had found the ice shavings to be delicious. Cold air blowing from the window vents smelled and tasted exactly like that.
He saw no more movement from the other cabin. An hour into the train ride, he looked at his watch for the seventh time. Outside the window, desolate moors and a faded sky could not compete with the watch. It wasn't really a watch, it was a code charm. But it looked and functioned exactly like a muggle timepiece so that its real function was camouflaged in their presence.
It was no secret that he and Draco chose to live in non-magical neighborhoods. They had to look the part without arousing suspicion. And he had to remain in contact with Draco at all times. All he had to do was lift the face of the watch and see hexagonal-shaped cells behind it. The cells were part of a thin disc of luminescence. So far, the colors were programmed magically, to show six colors with different meanings: Green = We're safe. Yellow = Stay away. Red = Help/We're in trouble. Orange = Hide/ You're in trouble. Black = Unavailable/Sleep. Blue = We need to talk. White = All is well.
He had ways of talking to Draco, if he needed to. But when it wasn't safe to talk, the watch provided shorthand for them both.
He owed this bit of technology to one of the books Snape had left for him and Draco in the cottage. How to Survive in a Muggle World. It was just one, out of a list of books, that Snape had left written orders to read before leaving the cottage. In fact, He and Draco found themselves redirected back onto the property with each attempt to leave while ignoring their required reading. It turns out, they couldn't apparate or floo the baby at all, until they'd found the spell that removed the safety feature which allowed them to do so, in one of the books. They hadn't known they needed charms to protect her. Not until they found them in the books. Even from the grave, it seemed, Snape was making sure they didn't skimp on their homework.
While magic could always be traced, muggle accommodations provided refuge from fame, suspicion, and a world saturated by the aftermath of war. The muggle world was an extension of the wizard wars. It was certainly affected by them. But the way muggles blamed their problems on everyday politics, lack, or just plain bad luck, made Harry look upon them affectionately, as complete innocents. Woe to those who would wake up and learn the truth. Their governments would never admit to knowing the existence of a parallel world full of witches and wizards who knew how to manipulate energy, and so could not be forced into paycheck slavery just to keep warm in the winter, or to travel from one place to another. Such a government would have to admit that dragons, elves, and unicorns were real. And god only knew what else. Aliens? Why not, bring on the motherfucking aliens.
Poor muggles. It must be rough, needing to believe that there were no other creatures higher up on the food chain. If that's what it took to make them feel safe, then Harry could let them have it. They were so fragile. Hell, even magical people could be hurt beyond repair, and they had magic! No, let people have their security blankets. Better they get to enjoy some sun, before it all goes dark.
On the watch, a white hexagon outglowed the others. Harry told himself to believe it and flipped the lid closed.
He'd gotten a private car for a reason. He didn't want to think of himself as a pervert, but Dr. Rankar's instructions had so far gone unfollowed. Every time the thought occurred to him, do it quick, do it now, he dismissed it as being ridiculous. But he knew it wasn't ridiculous. The desire to punch something, or to lash out, could start as small as the temptation to tell the Minister what his two-toned mustache really looked like to his constituents. It made him look like an elderly gigolo, well past his prime. He'd been edging towards blunt honesty lately. Usually, there were no degrees between that and running for the closet so that he didn't have to hold back. But he'd learned to read the signs, the twitches he ignored and the comments he held back. His body was giving him warnings that enough emotion was built up. It needed out. He could cooperate nicely or have it taken out of his hands completely.
" 'You take back your control and your privacy,' " Avi had said. " ' Deliberately, consciously, create a positive, intimate experience to interrupt the cycle. The more of them you have, the more you give your brain a way around the pain.' "
That all sounded great in theory. But when Harry tried it, all those warm, good feelings that used to flood his body, vanished. Something dark and cold, that made him feel like he was forcing a frozen wheel, took their place. If he pushed the effort, that dark cold began to take form and began to feel like a person. He could practically see the shape of their shoulders, that silhouette of long blond hair, and hear that nasty, nasal inflection. Exactly the person he didn't want to see. Not only could his body not enjoy that, it made him sick. His mind added pressure and mass against his will. It breathed Lucius' breath and let it into him, where it froze Harry's insides.
Beneath the jacket, Harry's hand worked to find the old, effortless comfort of his teenage exploits. He remembered when it was so easy, his penis was practically a magnet for his hand and he was halfway there before he'd even touched it. He was only twenty. It wasn't supposed to be this difficult.
As he urged himself, he told himself to take it easy. The train wasn't exactly the sexiest place on earth. There was too much of a sense of wrongness about being in a semi-public place, even if the cabin was private. It wasn't private enough. It just felt wrong. But he had to beat that feeling. If he could just get this over with, and he knew he could, in minutes, if he could just lock onto something that feels good.
The image that finally eclipsed that dense mass, was the vividness of Draco pushing himself back onto the bed, shoulders to mattress, and spreading his arms in mock submission. That led to an amalgamation of Draco's mouth and hands and Harry's knowledge of what they could do. Harry knew he was hurting himself. He knew his angry grip was making bruises and scratches, but the rise of pleasure was worth that little bit of pain. He'd pay for it later, but right then he was beginning to feel. And there were things that never happened between him and Draco, impossible things, but they fed him more of what he wanted. He had never tied Draco up, never shoved him face-first into the carpet and reached beneath him for a fist full of bulge to bring him off. Never. But that didn't seem to matter to the surge on the move inside of him. He had never witnessed Draco in a forest, caught by Death Eaters, who held him against a massive redwood. They tore his shirt and held his jean-tight thighs apart so that as many hands could wedge inside as possible.
This does the trick. It's more work than pleasure, and Harry suspects he's bleeding from a scratch, but he finishes it. When he opens his eyes, he has a second to catch his breath and to shake off a heated chill. Under the jacket, he uses basic sanitizing spells and arranges himself back into his pants.
He's hardly caught his breath when he sees the orange glow. Out the window, a number of cars down, beautiful red-amber light obliterated all visibility. In its flash, tracks sprung into the air like broken pieces of noodles. Whole cars lifted and went their separate ways.
The sight was so fantastic, so off in Harry's dislodged brain, still recovering from its own seismic activity, that it wasn't completely in the same time-zone as the train. Even though it was daylight outside, Harry's brain would always see that moment as dark as night, because that's how much black smoke blotted out the day. Red sparks, molten metal, and no time to act. He couldn't even get his brain to realize it needed his wand, let alone apparate before the series of explosions got to his car. Disbelief, wonder, what to make of those explosions that shook his soul inside his skin, all went into the one second that froze his awareness in that moment.
Frozen in that second, he didn't have time to be horrified. The energy and clouds of black-red flames racing towards him, told him there was only acceptance of his fate. There was only now, and no more.
A wall of molten hell descended on him. In that suspended moment, the car went airborne and engulfed. Harry could not know the state of the toxic materials around him, that he was breathing poisons, that he was losing consciousness, or the fact that he had fourth-degree burns before the fire ever reached him. Lack of gravity and balance shredded his body against collapsing walls.
The next image his brain recorded, was a man-shaped wall of black rising between him and the flames. The sight alone, provided an insulation of cold and created a barrier between his blistered skin and the mouth of hell still ravaging everything around him.
The last thing his brain recorded, was waking up, face down in a gully of water. He couldn't move and he felt tremendous cold. His face, partially sunk, submerged to the point that his eyelashes disturbed the water when he blinked, but his nose and mouth were just above the water level, which streamed an unusual color of crimson. In that dark pool, he squinted to comprehend the reflection looking back at him. It was a figure looking down on him, with sunlight spiking through leaves behind the person's head.
Where he could not ask for help, Harry's focus narrowed to make out the watery reflection. In that rippling darkness, the features that put themselves together, mocked every hope left in his being. He saw a pale grimace, etched by ravines of worry lines, all blended in a curvature of bone too graceful for its masculine precision. Bold black outlines of hair, brow, and shoulders held rigid familiarity. But that mouth. That beautifully compressed, disapproving, line of a mouth, told Harry who the man was. Only one man looked like that. And he was dead. Snape was dead.
So Harry understood that he was either dead or dying too. In the water, he saw Snape's reflection draw closer as it bent down to him.
A/N: Please review!
There will be alternating points of view.
