Chapter Seven of 'Secondhand Heroes'- Determination


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Chapter Seven—Determination

Harry lay on his bed and looked up at the ceiling, trying to ignore the feeling of wrongness about it. This wasn’t his own bedroom at his flat; this was a room he had spent perhaps two months of his life in. It wasn’t the sort of place where he wanted to make a decision as life-changing as the one that awaited him.

But it was the place he had.

That was the thought that drowned his self-pity and kept his mind fastened to the path it needed to take. This was the place he had. This was the choice he had: to give up his friends and the people who had surrounded him and loved him for the last eight years, or to watch the world sink further into darkness.

He’d felt this way once before, Harry told himself. He had looked into Snape’s Pensieve memories, seen that he’d have to die, and begun to tremble and shake. He’d screamed in his head that there must be a different way, that he couldn’t be asked to sacrifice this much, and that surely someone else could take up the burden.

But no one else had been there. No one else would be there now.

And at least he could go on living, which wasn’t an assurance he’d had when he walked into the Forbidden Forest to confront Voldemort. He could carry his own memories into the future, and hope to live within them. People in the magical world abroad should still be able to remember him, because only Britain was under the influence of the Troublestone. He ought to make a life for himself in France, or Germany, or Italy, or—where was a place that actually spoke English? Canada, maybe, or Australia.

This isn’t the end of the world, and I ought not to mourn like it is. Harry braced his hands on the bed and pushed himself upright against his pillows. I do still have choices, and options. Think of the dead, like Narcissa Malfoy. They’ll never have what I do. And I owe them, and all the others who have died and been tortured—like Malfoy himself—a debt I can’t repay unless I get rid of the Troublestone forever.

Harry’s shoulders relaxed as he remembered what Malfoy had promised him. The sacrifice of his own memory in the minds of the Troublestone’s victims would shatter the damn sapphire forever, and not allow it to teleport anywhere else. That would lift his guilt. No one could ask any more of him than that, since even killing himself would only cause the Troublestone to teleport.

I’m going to do this.

Harry closed his eyes and spent a moment thinking about Hermione, Ron, Kingsley—whom he hoped he hadn’t killed—Neville, Ginny, Mrs. Weasley, Bill, all the other people he knew who had laughed and mourned with him in the past eight years. Tears threatened his eyes for a moment, but he shook his head and they subsided. They would remain alive, and that had to be worth it.

“Made your decision, Harry?”

Even Malfoy’s voice was clinging, Harry thought as he opened his eyes, draping itself along his throat and shoulders like a cobweb. Malfoy stood in the door of the bedroom, his arms folded and his eyebrow lifted. He might have managed to carry off the cool impression of someone who didn’t care very much, except Harry could see the trembling in his hand before he managed to close it around his elbow.

“I have,” he said, deciding to ignore Malfoy’s use of his first name for now. “I have to do this, or I’ll suffer and they’ll suffer.”

Malfoy closed his eyes and hummed. “I’m glad to see that you’re reasonable about that part,” he said. He went on before Harry could ask what other part existed to be reasonable about. “How did you want to die?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“They’ll think you died no matter what,” Malfoy said patiently. “But you can choose the manner of your false death. Do you want to go in a heroic sacrifice? Do you want to pretend a Death Eater killed you?” His voice hardened minutely. “I would ask that you not choose that one, since it might lead to increased persecution in the wake of the Troublestone’s disappearance. Not even shame over their former behavior could keep them from getting angry at us if they thought we killed the Savior.”

Harry nodded. “I want it to be a heroic sacrifice,” he said. “Let them think I destroyed myself destroying the Troublestone.”

“Which is only true, of course.” Malfoy nodded. “You will wake a different person. Ever the honest Gryffindor.” He stepped towards Harry, moving briskly, but that clinging warm gaze was back, and Harry shifted uneasily under it. “I’ll gather the materials that we need for the ritual, then. Most of them should be here, since this is a pure-blood house once home to people who practiced Dark magic.” He sat down on the end of the bed, which made Harry pull his legs closer to his chest. Malfoy didn’t seem to notice. “And are you reasonable about the other part? About our fates being intertwined?”

“No,” Harry said irritably. He had mentally surrendered his hold on his friendships and the people he loved, everything that made his life worthwhile. He didn’t see why he should have to surrender his freedom. “I don’t care how much you dreamed about me. That doesn’t mean we’ll still be living together twenty years from now. Our—connection—is temporary. You might need me, but I won’t necessarily need you after I’ve had some time to get emotional distance from this.”

“This will affect for the rest of your life,” Malfoy said, barely breathing the words. “You’ll never get pure emotional distance.”

Harry nodded quickly. “I know. But that doesn’t mean I need to be your friend or your l-lover.”

“So nervous,” said Malfoy, his voice a croon. He cocked his head. “Have you not slept with another man before?”

“No,” said Harry, and told himself that he wouldn’t seem impressed or nervous, no matter what Malfoy wanted to think. “I slept with Ginny, and that was enough for me.” He eyed Malfoy for a moment. “Excuse me for not seeking you out earlier and indulging in all the delights of the flesh you think you have planned for me.”

“I do wish you’d sought me out earlier,” Malfoy said, and bowed his head for a moment. “If only so I needn’t have spent as long as I did in the dungeons.”

Harry winced and pulled his legs up to his chest again, resting his forehead on his knee. No matter what he said, it was the wrong thing.

“But even when I recover from the delusions that admittedly crept up on me when I was in pain and starving,” Malfoy said, his voice as brisk as his movements of a moment ago, “I’ll want you. And I can provide you with a safer place than most of the other people who might remember you.”

Harry lifted his head and blinked at him. “Why? Malfoy Manor was seized, too, and I’m sure the Ministry has found any family properties that you tried to keep secret.”

“Hmmm.” Malfoy sighed and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Well, I still know more about the underground of the wizarding world than you’ve learned in the last year, I think you’ll agree. If nothing else, I had more opportunity.” He dropped the hand with a shocking suddenness and leaned forwards, bringing his face within an inch of Harry’s before he could back away. Malfoy’s voice was low and intense. “What’s been forged between us won’t end when the Troublestone is shattered. I need you. You need me. It’s necessary.”

Harry took a deep breath and tried to think, to find the words that would pierce through the walls of what Malfoy had admitted was a delusion. “It would be convenient to accompany you for a time,” he began. “But that doesn’t mean we need to stay with each other permanently, or—or have sex again.”

“Really?” Malfoy’s face had an obscene look of tender understanding on it, obscene because Harry couldn’t think of an emotion that belonged there less. He slung one leg onto the bed and crawled forwards until Harry was shrinking and flinching to avoid him. “You couldn’t use the comfort? You aren’t dying to feel something beyond heroic determination and hopeless despair? You don’t want me to make you feel pleasure in more than a single desperate moment after the battle?” He tilted his head to the side, and there was a whimsical smile on his mouth. “You don’t want to know what my hands can do to your naked skin? It was through cloth last time, after all.”

Harry hated how weak he was, that the words Malfoy was speaking sounded good to him.

“You don’t want—“ Malfoy began, and reached out to stroke the top of Harry’s knee.

“You know what the fuck I want?” Harry spat, yanking his leg away. “I want some bloody sympathy for giving up my life yet again! I want a break from being the sacrifice for once! I want the universe to choose someone else to right all the wrongs of the world and spare the evil and the good and the horrible and the righteous! I want to live out the rest of my days in comfort with Ron and Hermione and the Weasleys, and forget this awful year ever happened.” To his shame, his voice cracked, and he pushed his face into his hands, breathing deeply and evenly to rid himself of the temptation to cry.

“You can’t have most of those things,” said Malfoy, his voice utterly reasonable. “But sympathy? Yes, I think I can do that.”

His arms wrapped firmly around Harry’s torso, and then he used his chin to nudge Harry’s hands away from his face. Harry stared at him, certain his eyes were swollen and full of tears, certain Malfoy was about to mock him.

Instead, Malfoy kissed him, his lips firm and gentle, moving against Harry’s not to urge them to open but because he wanted to sigh into Harry’s mouth. Harry sat stiff, and Malfoy stroked one hand across the nape of his neck and leaned him back into the pillows. Then he crawled on top of Harry, and Harry was surrounded by a cocoon of warmth, just as he’d hoped a few moments ago that he might be. But that wish was even more impossible to voice than his wish that things could be different.

“Everyone needs comfort,” Malfoy whispered into his ear. “I can do that, whether or not you let me make you feel good.”

“This makes me feel better than sex,” Harry said, his eyes shutting involuntarily.

A startled silence, and Harry tensed, fearing Malfoy would laugh. But Malfoy shook his head, his hair rasping across Harry’s forehead and his scar, and said, “You’re a strange one, Harry Potter.” His arms tightened again. “I can’t take this burden away from you, but I’ll be at your side, helping you bear it.”

Harry shivered. Such a strange ally, not the one he would have chosen. But then, had he been able to choose, nothing about this situation would have happened at all; his friends would have remained in possession of their own minds and Malfoy would have escaped being tortured.

The universe wouldn’t listen to him, so he had to make the best of what remained.

“That’s the real reason you shouldn’t be so anxious to leave me,” Malfoy breathed into his ear. “I want to help you, and God knows you could use the help.” For just a moment, his lips touched Harry’s forehead where his hair had rested.

Harry finally gave in and hugged Malfoy back, fiercely enough he thought the other man would wince. But Malfoy never spoke a word of complaint, and Harry fell asleep that way, pinned down by the person who, in the world at the moment, most understood him.

*

“A knife,” said Malfoy, and picked up one that had lain in the corner of the attic for Merlin knew how long. He hefted it thoughtfully in his hand, and Harry edged nearer to look at it. It was made of dull steel which shone oddly at the edge, as though a strip of silver had been inlaid there, and the hilt was some slick dark stone, obsidian perhaps. Harry didn’t have to concentrate to feel the aura of Dark magic wavering about it.

“Why a knife?” Harry shook his head. “Wouldn’t it be just as likely that I’d kill myself by drowning or some painless poison?” He’d thought he remembered reading, sometime in the research they’d made him do instead of real Auror work for the past year, that those were the two most common methods of suicide.

Malfoy laughed quietly and spun on one heel to face Harry. Harry kept his expression carefully blank, but a little current of exasperation burned under that. He didn’t understand the change that had come over Malfoy since their impromptu nap. Suddenly he seemed almost maniacally cheerful, and he traveled through the attics and abandoned rooms of Grimmauld Place as though he knew where every Dark artifact they’d need was. Harry had tried to suppress uneasy suspicions of betrayal, and really, he hadn’t found it too difficult. Malfoy wanted revenge on the people who had imprisoned him and the people who were ultimately responsible for that imprisonment because they’d interdicted his wand and his blood. He wouldn’t put the effort to break the Troublestone in jeopardy.

But neither did Harry know what decision he’d come to that had so changed his mood.

“A knife is more dramatic, Harry,” Malfoy said, and took a dancing step closer to him. His eyes were so brilliant that it was like watching two windows alight in a burning building. “A knife makes it more likely that they’ll believe the false scenario and ritual we construct. Of course you would slit your throat and spill your blood in order to awaken them from the Troublestone’s grip, and of course you would do it with a knife like this.” He brandished the blade with the obsidian handle again.

Harry nodded slowly. When he could step back enough to look at his suicide—or his pretended suicide—from an emotional distance, he could admit that sense of the fitness of things. “All right,” he said. He glanced back at the basket of items Malfoy had collected on the table next to them. “The knife, a horn, a sapphire bracelet—“

“Which we only really need for the sapphires,” Malfoy said, curling his lip as he tossed the knife into the basket. “Thank God. Bloody ugly thing.”

Harry nodded politely, though he really didn’t see why this was the moment to comment on the taste of the Black ancestors. “And oil,” he said. “What else?”

“A potion, but it’s dead easy to brew and I’ve already confirmed that I have the ingredients.” Malfoy leaned against the wall for a moment, his hands clasped behind his back. His chest rose and fell with deep breaths. Harry eyed him, and then decided to just ask. In the strange mood Malfoy was in, he might get lucky and receive a straight answer.

“What’s made you so cheerful?”

Malfoy’s eyes flared open, and he bolted across the room towards Harry, stopping in front of him with a precision as unnerving as it was beautiful. He reached out and framed Harry’s face with his hands, carefully stroking Harry’s cheeks with the tips of his index fingers.

“You,” he said.

Harry blinked at him and said nothing. He didn’t want to interrupt Malfoy, but even without that, he doubted he could have said anything that would make sense around the lump in his throat.

“You did it,” Malfoy said. “You agreed, where so many other people would have bargained or sought some other solution. You know the meaning of duty, and you know the meaning of love.”

Harry made a rough movement before he could stop himself, as if he would seize Malfoy’s hands and take them away from his face. Malfoy removed them before he could touch them, and laughed.

“Love for your friends, and not for me,” he said. “I’m not mad enough to think that you love me yet.”

Carefully ignoring the yet for now, Harry stared him straight in the eyes. “And you’re so thrilled just because you thought there was a chance I wouldn’t sacrifice my friends’ memories of me for the Troublestone? But what kind of person would I be if I didn’t do that?”

“An ordinary one,” said Malfoy. “And the world is full of them.” He reached out and seized Harry’s shoulders, guiding him close enough that he could kiss him passionately. Harry kept his mouth firmly closed, and after a moment Malfoy moved away from him again, grinning.

“You have to admit that was worth a try.”

“Why?” Harry faced the basket of Dark magical items Malfoy had collected, and did his best to work on removing the blush from his face.

“Because it was self-evidently worth a try, so you have to admit it.” Malfoy sounded as exasperated as a cat who’d fallen into the bath.

“No.” Harry looked back at Malfoy, though he had the feeling that he was tempting fate by doing so. “Why was it worth a try to you?”

Malfoy smiled. “You’re the hero I hoped for,” he said, “the hero the world needs right now. And I’ve always wanted to kiss a hero.”

“You could put your lips to your mirror and get a more passionate response,” Harry retorted.

Malfoy’s face changed; the smile vanished so quickly that Harry fell back a pace in spite of himself and laid his hand on his wand. He told himself he was ridiculous even as he moved. If he didn’t trust Malfoy by now, why in the world had he agreed to the git’s insane plan?

“You think I’m a hero.” Malfoy’s voice trembled. One hand rose as if he would touch his own hair or reach out to Harry, and then dropped back to his side again.

“Of course.” Harry rolled his eyes when Malfoy just went on staring at him. “What else can I do to prove it?”

“That’s enough,” said Malfoy. “I simply had no idea that you thought it, that’s all.” He moved forwards again, his hand rising so slowly that Harry didn’t take alarm until he found it resting against his cheek. And then it would have seemed stupid to jerk away from so mild a touch, so he settled for glaring instead.

“Your pleasure and your comfort matter to me,” Malfoy said, his eyes searching Harry’s expression. “I know you don’t believe me right now, but they do. And after you save the world, those things will still matter to me.” He took Harry’s hand and kissed the back of it this time, then moved over, picked up the basket, and raced towards the stairs down from the attic. Harry blinked after him until he called impatiently, “Really, Harry, the ritual won’t complete itself, you know.”

Harry followed him, mind patterned with confusion.

*

And once again they stood outside the Ministry with Malfoy tucked under the Invisibility Cloak, mostly to hide his hair, and Harry with his own ordinary cloak pulled over his head. He watched the wards flicker and dance over the phonebox that would let them into the Ministry, and wondered what anti-Potter ones they had added in the past few days. Would they use wards that detected his blood? Surely they had a sample of it somewhere they could work off of. Or would they simply try and trap him, desperate as they must be to rescue him from the clutches of a man they probably thought had used Imperius on him?

Malfoy touched his elbow, and Harry started, but he understood the silent message and acknowledged it with a nod. They had to act. Simply standing here would do no good. He moved forwards, and Malfoy moved after him, softer than the shadow he resembled.

The wards on the phonebox refused to spit when they encountered him, and Harry raised his eyebrows. Well. They must have decided to take the chance of my showing up and causing havoc again. Or maybe the Troublestone has persuaded them that I’m not to be interfered with no matter what happens.

Or else there are wards further into the Ministry that are meant to trap me. Harry grinned, and knew it was a savage grin that would have frightened him if he could have seen it reflected. Maybe they just don’t think I’m bold enough to come in by the front door.

No wards spat at them as they entered the phonebox, either, and jolted down, whilst Malfoy stood close to Harry just because he could. Harry shut his eyes and composed himself. No wards, but they must have surveillance spells. He and Malfoy would step out into a greeting force of Aurors in the Atrium.

And then they stepped into the Atrium, and met no one. Harry froze, staring around. There was a large hole in the floor where the Fountain of Magical Brethren had been, now covered with the blue dome of a magical barrier. The snow-thick wards Harry had become used to seeing still draped and decorated the walls and doors and fireplaces. But no one was there to stop them, and the wards ignored Malfoy as if he didn’t exist, though he had said they couldn’t use the blood spell to protect him this time and make the magic think he was Harry.

“What is going on?” Harry whispered, mostly to himself.

Malfoy answered him from the side, making Harry start and turn. “Once there was a phoenix,” he said, as he pulled the Invisibility Cloak from his shoulders and head. His hair wasn’t ruffled, and it seemed to shine with a light of its own; the dim lamps above the fireplaces weren’t strong enough to reach that far. “And a group of people who served the phoenix, and called themselves after it, because they fought the Dark Lord. And why not? The phoenix is a powerful symbol of the light devouring the darkness.”

He shook his head and lifted a hand. Shadows moved about them. Harry stared around and saw wizards and witches stepping from the corners. Most of them had deeply scarred faces and limps, or missing limbs, or the general world-weary look Harry had got used to seeing in the mirror. More than one had a bared left forearm, and there he could make out the Dark Mark. They moved in the same absolute silence Malfoy had displayed, and from their uplifted wands trailed blue and silver sparks, which formed a dampening curtain over the wards.

“But when darkness fights darkness,” Malfoy continued, his voice high-pitched and eerie and exalted, “you need a different symbol than a phoenix.” Harry heard a swishing noise that might have been Malfoy sweeping a hand through the air, but he was enthralled by the people in front of him and couldn’t look away.

The wizards and witches turned back their sleeves, or lifted their robe collars, or pulled at chains around their necks until the medallions on them hung openly on their chests. Each symbol thus revealed was the same: a stylized, rearing serpent with wide-spread wings and a curl trailing out of its mouth that might be meant to represent a stream of flame.

Malfoy’s boot scraped on the floor. Harry turned to face him and saw his eyes shining the same way they had in the attic earlier, with mad flame.

“I couldn’t reveal them to you until I knew I could absolutely trust you,” Malfoy said softly, “until you had made a commitment equal to ours and said that you would sacrifice your life to break the Troublestone.” He bowed, but kept his eyes fastened on Harry all the time, so there was nothing of subjection in the gesture. “The Order of the Dragon, and its leader, at your service.”