fic: weirdways ch.1 (hp)

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Weirdways
Posted 25 November 2007; WIP

Pairing: Harry/Draco, though it's rather slow-going
Summary: "Harry and Draco have both wished their lives were different.  Now Malfoy gets to learn that knowledge, not fear, is power, and Harry figures out that he isn't the only one to have had his fate decided without his permission."
Note: Crossover with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Last Dragon, Septimus Heap, Artemis Fowl, and perhaps others as they occur to me.  However, since Harry and Draco are the focus of this fic, knowledge of the others isn't (shouldn't be) necessary.

I know I said I'd never do HP again, but it appears that I overestimated my fortitude.  Usual warnings for the high likelihood of my losing interest.  Unbetaed. 

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“’The door, get to the door, the door!’ screamed Malfoy in Harry’s ear, and Harry sped up, following Ron, Hermione, and Goyle through the billowing black smoke, hardly able to breathe and all around them the last few objects unburned by the devouring flames were flung into the air, as the creatures of the cursed fire cast them high in celebration: cups and shields, a sparkling necklace, and an old, discolored tiara—

 

‘What are you doing, what are you doing, the door’s that way!’ screamed Malfoy, but Harry made a hairpin swerve and dived.  The diadem seemed to fall in slow motion, turning and glittering as it dropped toward the maw of a yawning serpent, and then he had it, caught it around his wrist—

 

Harry swerved again as the serpent lunged at him; he soared upward and straight toward the place where, he prayed, the door stood open: Ron, Hermione, and Goyle had vanished; Malfoy was screaming and holding Harry so tightly it hurt.  Then, through the smoke, Harry saw a rectangular patch on the wall and steered the broom at it…”

 

(Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, p. 633-634)

 

1.

 

It was the Room of Requirement’s door, it had to be, when everything else was flame and ash and acrid smoke—it was the only clear, dark spot in a hazy labyrinth of fire and dangerous magic, and Harry refused to believe that after everything he’d gone through he’d end up dying because Crabbe was so fucking stupid as to cast a powerful Dark curse he didn’t know the counter to, with Malfoy of all people clinging to him for dear life—

 

Let us out!  Harry mentally screamed at the door, and then the broom was through, and they struck the opposite wall only to crumple into a heap on the uneven floor.  For a moment all Harry could hear was the sound of his harsh gasping for breath, and after the pure adrenaline rush and roar of the flames it was almost deafening.

 

Once Harry got used to the idea that he wasn’t on fire, flying for his life, or dead, and was in fact lying flat on his back, he blearily opened his eyes.  Off to the side he could hear Malfoy coughing and retching violently.

 

He blinked a few times, but the information that his eyes were providing for his brain didn’t change in the slightest.  Instead of the arched ceiling of the corridor, he was staring up a slate-grey sky.  It wasn’t cloudy or misty, but simply a flat grey as though someone had forgotten that even skies had texture, and the surface he’d taken to be the rough stone floor of Hogwarts was really a poorly cobbled road.  A slight tilt of his head to one side showed that the ‘wall’ he’d collided into with the broom was a tall tree, turned into a black, skeletal silhouette by the empty sky.

 

Harry pulled himself to a sitting position with a short groan, feeling like he’d just suffered through one of Wood’s fanatical Quidditch practices, and nearly shouted with surprise when the diadem looped around his wrist suddenly cracked sharply.  Immediately he shook it off and leapt to his feet, taking a few steps back when something twisted and poisonous seeped out of the metal that withered as touched the air, and Harry could swear he heard an agonized scream echo in his thoughts.

 

“C-Crabbe…” Malfoy gasped into the stone, braced on his hands and knees, “Merlin, Crabbe…”

 

“He’s dead,” Harry said faintly, as Malfoy made the sound of a wounded animal, and suddenly the strange spell this place had cast over him seemed to break.  That, or the shock was finally passing, allowing panic to have its turn.

 

“Where are we?” he asked sharply, turning in place.  The road stretched away from left to right, but an unnatural sort of fog obscured everything more than a few hundred meters away, so he couldn’t see anything except the road, a tree, Malfoy, and the dreary moor in front and behind.

 

Not Hermione, or Ron, or Ginny, who should’ve been waiting outside the Room by now.  Or Hogwarts.  And he didn’t think this was a joke by the Room, either, because this was not what Harry needed right now, which meant they were somewhere else entirely.  Perhaps by the Forest, since the atmosphere of this place felt pretty damn Forbidden, all greys and blacks and faded mossy greens.

 

“Where are we?” he demanded more forcefully, but when Malfoy didn’t seem inclined to do anything more than sob at the ground, Harry seized him by the robes and hauled him upright with a glare.  “Where.  The Fuck.  Are we?”

 

He was beyond caring by now that his voice had come out in a very serpentine hiss as he shook Malfoy by the front of his robes.  Even though they were of similar height, the Slytherin didn’t have much weight to his frame and so was jerked violently back and forth.

 

“How should I know, Potter?” he gasped out.

 

“You just got done telling us how you’d practically ‘lived in this room,’ Malfoy, and now you’re saying you don’t know what happened?” Harry roared in his voice.

 

“You were the one flying the broom!”  Malfoy’s voice was high and fearful without any of the familiar malice, eyes wide and slightly unfocused; with a snort of disgust, Harry dropped him carelessly back onto the ground.  Immediately the other boy scooted away, remaining hunched and shivering on the dirty road.

 

Harry ignored him.  He started pacing, reached for the broom before realizing that the impact with the tree had snapped the handle and rendered it useless, and resumed pacing with growing anxiety.  Neither he nor Malfoy had any idea of where they were or how to get back, and while the Horcrux had apparently destroyed itself—Harry had no idea why the diadem had broken like that, and where was Hermione when you needed her?—they were wasting time here while the battle for Hogwarts raged without him…

 

“Fuck!” he suddenly yelled at the ugly sky, shaking with anger and helplessness and no small amount of disgust for the cowardly prick of a Slytherin.

 

“Such common language!” said an unfamiliar voice that had Harry whirling around, Malfoy’s former wand in his hand and pointed unerringly at a patch of fog that gradually darkened into the form of a man.  “And on the King’s Roads, no less.”

 

The man was tall and thin with a long nose and dark reddish hair, dressed as a gentleman from what must have been the early nineteenth century.  He had a relatively handsome face currently wearing a disapproving frown, but then it quickly changed into an expression of interest.  “Who are you?  I must say, this is quite an unprecedented circumstance.  Rarely do I come upon others in these between-places, save for those of the fairy ilk, but you do not bear the countenance of their madness and cruelty, nor one as that of a ghost.”

 

Harry stared at him blankly and wondered if he’d finally lost it.  The gentleman in his black frock coat and white cravat stopped a few paces away and regarded the boys with an inscrutable half-smile.  When the silence stretched, Harry finally muttered, “Harry.  Harry Potter.  And that’s Draco Malfoy.”

 

While Harry’s name hadn’t seemed to mean a thing to him, at Malfoy’s the gentleman’s gaze intensified.  As though some long-forgotten scrap of pride had been appealed to, Malfoy got to his feet and sullenly stared back.

 

“To be named so…I cannot help but wonder how the pride of Lucifer might respond to know that it should be borne by a mortal soul,” he murmured.  Harry wildly wondered what the hell the Devil had to do with anything.  The Dursleys had only ever gone to church on major holidays, more to maintain an image than for more esoteric reasons, and of course they wouldn’t have inflicted their criminal nephew on such good people.  “Ah, but I am remiss in my manners! and for that I sincerely apologize, but one tends to forget such mundane idleness in the face of new knowledge.  I am Jonathan Strange.”

 

How fitting.  But Harry was more concerned with other things and said quickly, “Where are we?  How did we get here?  How do we get back?”

 

Strange tilted his head slightly with surprise and intrigue, as though examining a new specimen for science.  “You do not know yourself?  Yet it must have been you that brought you here, for I see no sign of another but ourselves.”

 

“Obviously,” Harry ground out through his teeth, but then forcibly took a calm breath with the idea that it probably wouldn’t be a good move to piss off the only person who might have an idea of what was going on.  No matter how nutty he might be.  “There was a—a fire, and we tried to get through the doorway, only we ended up here.  I don’t know what happened.”

 

The gentleman frowned again, though in concern and not suspicion.  “A fire?  Are you two all right?  I daresay that I have developed a profound efficiency in basic healing magic, and advanced as well, while on the battlefield in my own time.”

 

Harry was singed and aching and had the sneaking suspicion that if he stopped moving, he’d end up sleeping for the next hundred years, but no, he wasn’t injured.  “I’m fine.”

 

As if on cue, Malfoy started coughing again, nearly ending up bent double over his knees.  Strange made an unfamiliar gesture and said a word in a language Harry had never heard, and the blond’s fit eased.

 

But Harry never saw a wand.

 

“How did you do that?” he breathed.  He’d thought wandless magic could only be done on accident unless one was as powerful as Dumbledore, but here he’d seen an outdated English gentleman use it practically without thought.

 

“It is a version of a spell from page seventy-two of Dr Pale’s Discourses that I have slightly modified for our purposes,” Strange told him in a voice scarily like Hermione’s, entirely missing the point of Harry’s question.  “If one supposes that the Spell to Conjure Death might be altered so as to conjure a disease, or the smoke in Mr Malfoy’s lungs, of course, outside of an afflicted body as if it were a demon—“

 

“’Spell to Conjure Death?’” Malfoy repeated shrilly.  Strange looked at him in puzzlement.

 

“That is what I said, and naturally I would not dare to tamper with such a spell for the first time should its source be other than the text of an Aureate Magician.  As much as we might owe to those great learned men of the Argentine age, it is an established fact that upon the decline of English magic, many of the later age’s Magicians had already lost much of what was known to their Aureate predecessors.  They oft confused magical knowledge with common superstition—“

 

“I’m sorry,” Harry interrupted, knowing he was being rude and unable to bring himself to care, “but we need your help now.  Hogwarts—my school—is under attack and people are bloody dying but we don’t know how to get back!  Please,” he finished in a quiet but fierce voice, strengthened by his desperation and the knowledge that just because time felt suspended here didn’t mean that Death Eaters weren’t killing Ron or Hermione right now.  “Please.  Help us.”

 

When Strange’s attention refocused on him, his eccentric but charming demeanor suddenly became unfamiliar, almost inhuman.  It wasn’t that he grew horns or a fairy’s wings, but his smile turned slightly mocking, and his dark eyes made Harry flash back to the way the doorway in the Room had looked—as though it were pulling in the light to a world that a mere teenager could never begin to understand.

 

“I am not without sympathy to your plight,” Strange murmured, studying Harry with that piercing gaze, “but I do not understand myself how two young men came to be lost on the King’s Roads.  There are many methods in which a man may find his soul wandering in-between the different kingdoms, methods divine and infernal and all sundry therein.  But while you walk the Roads you might be comforted with the knowledge that the time you pass here is not reflected on earth.”

 

It took Harry a moment to wade through Strange’s archaic style of speaking to realize that he was saying he didn’t know how the boys had gotten here either, but that time didn’t necessarily function the same way.  Which meant that once Harry figured out how to get back to Hogwarts, it might not be too late to stop Voldemort from annihilating the only place Harry had ever loved, or the people he was supposed to be protecting.

 

He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and was slightly disturbed to hear the near-hysterical edge to it.  Perhaps the adrenaline and the shock had taken a larger toll than he’d thought, but he couldn’t stop to rest; he might have a bit of time to figure things out, but he didn’t know how much, and the sooner he found an answer the less likely he’d return to find everything gone.

 

The gentleman hadn’t lost his odd half-smile.  “It would be perfectly horrible of me to forget not only my manners but my hospitality.  My w—“  He paused briefly as something painful flickered in his expression, and then continued mildly, “Arabella chided me upon my whimsical nature often enough that I could recite her scoldings in my dreams, and I have no wish of placing dishonor upon her beloved memory.  I see that you are both exhausted in spirit as well as in body, and if you wish, I will offer you the use of my current residence.  It is quite comfortable and protected, though I fear that its dressings are rather a bit behind in the latest fashions.”

 

“What?”  Malfoy sounded like was holding on to the last tether of sanity, and if he hadn’t been such a cowardly little traitor, Harry might have been able to muster up more than a mere smidgeon of pity.  But it was one thing to be unwilling to let the bastard burn to death, and another thing entirely to feel anything more positive than extreme distaste for him.

 

Besides, Harry himself didn’t feel much better.  “You don’t mind?” he asked finally.  Constant vigilance, he reminded himself, and tightened his grip on his wand.

 

“I have no doubt that my colleague will be most displeased at the mere suggestion of houseguests, but Mr Norrell is the sort of gentleman who regards a wayward spider in the library as the most villainous of intruders.  He is not unlike a dictionary of magic charmed with the personality of a miserly old widower haunted by his avaricious relatives.  But your needs are greater than his neuroticisms, and I could no more turn away two innocents than condemn them.”

 

Harry rather thought that a ‘No, I don’t mind’ would have sufficed, but he didn’t argue.  Still keeping his wand in one hand, he went over to the gnarled tree and picked up the broken halves of Ravenclaw’s diadem, stuffing it into a robe pocket with the silvery Invisibility Cloak, and contemplated the pieces of the broom.  He didn’t know the first thing about charming a broom, much less repairing one, but he Shrank it and put it in his pocket anyway.

 

“A Spell of Minimization?”  The mysteriousness in his eyes had diminished until Strange was looking as excited as Hermione over a new book.  “From whom did you learn of it?  Dr Pale, or perhaps it was Ralph Stokesey?  No, perhaps not, I find Stokesey to be a rather tedious fellow…  And your wand—that is what it is, I suppose—I have never seen its like before.  Mr Norrell and I find that we do not have a particular need for such a tool, though I can certainly see its usefulness in the focusing of will—“

 

Jonathan Strange had chosen an apparently random direction of road to follow and started walking, trusting the boys to keep up on their own.  He spoke amiably enough, and on many subjects, but Harry found that he had no desire for conversation.  He trudged after Strange, hearing Malfoy stumbling a few steps to his left and slightly behind, and tried not to think about the kind of destruction Death Eaters could inflict on a school full of children while their savior got himself lost with a backstabber and a mad gentleman.

 

Harry couldn’t help but wonder if a child had ever felt like he did right then.
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Part 1 // Part 2