ethrosdemon ||| Harry Potter

War: Vates, Primus
by ethrosdemon
slytherinpride@obsessedmmuch.net

Draco thinks he's pinpointed where it all started to fall apart, where the world took the first lurch towards unredeemablity: Tom Riddle's birth.

**

Draco can remember the exact second when he knew that nothing he did, thought, or felt was more concrete than the fading bliss of an orgasm. That he was just another person striving to control rather than be controlled.

One afternoon as he was crossing the Great Hall, Draco watched as Blaise backhanded his Ravenclaw boyfriend across the face. The wound bloomed red then purple then black. All of this occurred in less than a minute, and Draco was arrested in his movements just like everyone else.

His first unguarded thought as the crowd began to disperse was 'how embarassing'. But he didn't mean for Blaise, who had exposed himself to shame and denunciation from all those in the school not Slytherins. He meant for the unknown boy. He recognised it as sympathy, and his world felt somewhat askew.

Many hours over the following weeks Draco spent many hours watching closely those who shared his days. He attempted to recreate that resonance with another. To be honest, he did not need to attempt it, connections sprung from every corner of every room he entered. Draco had been pulled to earth, made common, normal.

The people he had spent his entire life manipulating suddenly clamoured to be treated like people. Like human beings. Draco preferred to see them as sheep to be sheared and corralled, and he did his best to reconstruct that worldview.

Instead, his thoughts slipped around the concept of control. Of what it means to be truly in control, to be unseen and unknown, directing the lives of others who might not even be aware you exist. Like his father, like he hoped some day to do.

In his sixth year, Draco started to believe in fate and predestination. He worked miracles of rhetoric on himself regarding who controlled *him *. If someone else was pulling his strings, he'd be damned if it were just Voldemort and his lackeys; it was going to be God or gods, he wasn't too narrow in his focus there. Draco was always amazingly adept at convincing himself of whatever took his fancy, and he became a fragmented religious zealot with the same fervor he'd once reserved for insulting Gryffindors.

**

His mother clucked and fussed over him for bringing That Book into the house. That book being the Bible, but he felt like he should know his enemy. When he wouldn't see the impropriety of *owning * such a piece of literature, she tried to cajole him into seeing reason.

"Draco, dear, you know those things are made up, don't you? None of it is real." Narcissa scrutinized her son with the same off-kilter expression she always wore after six in the evening.

"Mother, what does 'real' mean?" She had no answer for that, neither did Draco, so they did not debate the point.

**

Just because he'd acknowledged other humans as having their own internal impetus didn't mean he gave up *trying * to constrict others into his mold of them. Far from it. He tried all the harder, became stealthy, smouldered rather than burnt brightly. The cocky stomping gave way to a silent stalking. He kept his voice low so people had to strain to hear him, lean off balance into his space to catch his words.

He became expert at ticks and twitches, could read everyone he knew from the back by the set of their shoulders. This way he built up a baseline, and from that he could judge a person's level of intoxication or anxiety, illness or exhaustion. Along the way he decided Veriserum was for the lazy.

He also decided to fight. If God gave freewill to choose Him over others, Draco decided he at least stood a chance of deciding his own path. What it took him longer to realize was that he had already chosen his path when he looked past his own limitations and assumptions, when he moved from seeing other people as automatons and accepted them as complex systems worthy of his scrutiny. When he heard the word 'fate' and believed it applied to him.

Voldemort became not a hulking bogeyman that dogged his nightmares but a study in miscalculations and hubris. Once a man, and half one still. Full of base human emotions: pride and fear. The power was the difference. That always was the most important of the differences.

By then he'd also realized that for most people, their lives held no meaning, their mark on the world less than a wave on the shore. However, there are *other * people, too. The ones who are far from ephemeral, who shaped and called for reordering of Creation.

Draco would will himself into being one of the people who marked. He would set his sights on bringing down Heaven to him rather than striving to be worthy of ascending to it.

**

"You've changed," his father eyed him from behind his desk. The rumors were loud then, more a warning being sounded than whispers. It was the Eve, of what no one was sure, but there was a looming sense abounding in their world.

"It was my destiny." Lucius expected such remarks from his son and was too caught up in his offshore accounts to mark that statement for the bone-bare truth it was.

**

//Three men and a woman sit in a half-lit room. All of them are known to him, well, and the youngest is himself.

"Obviously, the key is the Burrow," he said.

"Obviously," said the Dark Lord.

"William Weasley," he said and his face went blank. The Dark Lord, however, grinned with his too-white teeth showing and looked almost pleased.//

That was the first dream Draco marked after odd things began. Odder than normal things. Like knowing the outcome of a Quidditch match before it was played. Like hearing a soft murmuring drift from a rock and being certain the Dark Lord would be reborn within the month. He Pensieved it off the dream. That became a habit with the vivid, specific ones. When he confessed his abilities to his father and Voldemort, he was glad for the proof, later he wasn't nearly so glad of it.

**

Draco was never sure if the catalyst was the Kabbalah or the Delphic Potion. He fancied it being the Potion, given the congruity of the long vanished Pythonesses.

Magic is rarely that clever, however. Considering the reports of his guttural, nocturnal ramblings and his sudden fondness for rocking back and forth while he studied or cast spells, he suspects the Shakinah had, however fleetingly, moved through him.

His entire seventh year he spent in old-fashioned questing. Moving from the surfaces of the religions the Muggles practiced to the hidden cores, the underlying magic fuelling them all. He studied Sufism, Zen, the Sutras, Zoroaster, the lost Gospels, and finally the Kabbalah. He'd discarded them one after the other, finding some ineffable *that * missing, until the last. The Kabbalah called him, the perfection of repetition and calling down of god. This was exactly what he'd been after without being able to say so.

He even found a tutor during the Christmas holiday, an old alchemist, to teach him to chant properly.

Draco learnt to chant the names of the desert god in their original form. This became his quieting mechanism, his stilling charm. In the back of his mind, even as he wrote essays or attending class or played Quidditch, the names of god echoed through his mind in an unending spiral.

He called them out during sex. Draco overheard Pansy telling Nettle Brainbridge that his pet name for her was Adonai. He allowed the animals to think whatever suited them.

He learnt to scrawl the complex wards and seals of the prophets. During the break before his exams, he perfected the Seal of Solomon and knew he had done so when laying his hand upon the ink caused him to look straight through the wall of his room into the Slytherin common room. Two days later, he painted it above his heart with the blood of an unblemished, white goat. That afternoon, as luck would have it, he'd stumbled across Snape's 'secret' cupboard and stole the Delphi Potion. He'd drank it down to the dregs on the spot, but could detect no immediate effects.

The Seal disappeared into his skin upon completion, fading to invisibility. Draco felt no different, couldn't hear a voice from Beyond calling him to a new plane of understanding. He was sure this round of esoteric experimenting had yielded nothing. After he pouted and then broke several pieces of furniture, he lay down to sleep. He dreamt of three men and a woman in a room. One of them was him.

**

"Do you love me, my dragon?" The Dark Lord always smelled spicy, but the scent fit no known pattern. Draco spent many hours wondering what to call it.

"No, I love life, and I fear you would rob me of it." Sharp, hungry laughter floated around Draco, and his bed dipped.

"As well I would if you betrayed me. Tell me of your dreams." He did. He usually did, when he was so preoccupied trying to categorize the smell that would linger in his hair for days.

They kept him sedated. At first, he hardly minded. His life became blunt edges and bright colors. He was distant and in love with everyone.

The dreams grew worse, more terrible, fiercer and lamentable. His nights were soaked in congealing blood and saturated with the odor of roasting flesh. Dead eyes marked Draco's dream-self floating over and through the carnage.

Then the sedating potions became a balm. They smothered his memories, which really were not memories but events yet to happen. Therefore avoidable. Draco started asking for the potions instead of waiting for them silently.

**

He'd become tolerant to the soporifics over prolonged exposure, and in his more lucid moments Draco wondered why he was the servant when he was the one with the knowledge.

He had no mark to bind him. When he explained the dreams and handed over the Pensieve, he also mentioned the Seal and how it might be annulled by another brand.

"Draco serves a *higher * Master," the Dark Lord sounded indulgent, mocking, but he didn't insist.

He sent everyone else away then, flicked his hand and his sheep fled. All but Draco, full of pride at his accomplishments, sure of himself and his place in the scheme of greatness.

"Would you walk with the angels, dragon? All I can show you is this world, but that, I believe, is enough."

Draco had not known before that there was something beyond pain and that it is secret and unnamed for a reason.

"I am," Draco whispered to himself later, after the first poppy and Elysian lily infusion. "I AM."

That night he dreamt of Severus Snape crouched over an empty grave mumbling to himself, "Albus, this will have to do, old friend…"



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