"Just go settle in," Snape advised. "Feel free to move anything that's in your way. Make yourselves at home. Actually, Harry, you are at home."
Right of abode, Harry remembered, nodding. The whole concept still seemed strange to him; he was too used to thinking of himself as without a home. It was nice to have a room in Snape's quarters, but sometimes, he still felt like a guest there, though he knew he really shouldn't. This place... Harry glanced around, again. He liked the dungeons well enough, he supposed, but there was something about this place that he really liked. A lot.
Maybe it was the lack of clutter, or the comfortable, worn feeling all around. It seemed the opposite of the house he'd grown up in, the house that had never been a home. Harry smiled. He didn't feel like a guest, here. It was like things were just right.
When Harry entered the room, Draco was lying idly on the bed, flicking his wand to and from to make his clothes levitate themselves over to an armoire that had seen better days. The clothes proceeded wrap themselves around wooden hangers, which Harry though a pretty neat, if relatively useless trick. He for one didn't think that wizard had to mean lazy. "What's that?" he asked, prodding a slightly dusty box beside Draco on the bed.
Draco barely spared it a glance. "Found it stuffed in the armoire," he answered, shoving it over toward Harry. "Must belong to Severus."
"I'll go ask him what to do with it, then," Harry answered, since there wasn't really anywhere else to put it except on the floor. That hardly seemed polite. He was just turning away with it when Draco came up on his knees on the bed, and leaning forward, neatly snatched it from Harry's hands. He lifted the largish box to the side of his head and shook it to and fro.
"What are you doing?"
"Maybe it's a Christmas present," Draco trilled, a wicked grin lighting up his features. "I wonder if it's for you or for me." He began to lift the top off the box.
"If it were a present it would be wrapped," Harry objected. "Put it down; it's Snape's personal stuff, whatever it is."
"He said to make ourselves at home," Draco reminded Harry, whipping the box top off before the other boy could protest further. "Hmm. Just some old clothes," he commented, pulling something black out of the box and shaking it out.
Something fell to the stone floor. As Harry went to pick it up, his breath hitched, his hand freezing in midair.
Draco realized at the same moment just what he was holding. "Shite!" he exclaimed, shoving the garments away with both hands and jumping back from the ominous black fabric that settled gracefully to the floor, splaying itself out in a long line suggestive of the human form. Beside it, almost at the level the head, lay the item that had fallen from its folds.
Side by side on the gray floor they lay.
Robe and mask.
Hooded robe, Death Eater mask.
Harry stiffened, his whole body feeling like it had gone into some sort of paralysis. It wasn't clothing lying there before him, it was the last person he'd seen wearing the evil garments Voldemort demanded of his followers.
Lucius Malfoy, in full Death Eater regalia.
Harry's eyes felt on fire as fury boiled up inside him, as a longing to hurt as he'd been hurt seemed to consume his every cell. He could feel it again, everything he'd suffered at this man's hands. The thirst, the needles, the burning.
Draco was yelling something, his hands gesturing wildly, but Harry couldn't hear anything past the roaring in his ears, an avalanche of sound made up of nothing but his own screams on Samhain. Layer past layer of agonized wailing, sensations rushing through him, fear and pain and horror... and then something else, coming in the wake of all that. A hatred too intense for words. Vengeance beyond Azkaban, beyond the petty niceties of trial and accusation and sentence. Vengeance that wouldn't wait, that didn't care that Unforgivables were called that for a reason.
His hands jerked upwards, palms facing out, fingers widely spread as power ricocheted through him like a Bludger gone berserk. Heat rose through his skin and spilled over into the air. Wild magic, unfurling itself like a banner, unleashing itself to blast the house and occupants and meadow all around.
Except, it didn't.
Harry could feel the magic lashing forth from him, could feel the hatred and rage eager to immolate the countryside itself, but he felt something else, too.
Power. Control.
With a scream of absolute pure fury, he yanked his hands together and stretched his arms forward to point at the horrid clothing on the floor. A flaming emerald jet of magic shot from his fingertips to immolate the offending garments. It went on and on, a blaze of anger, of raw magical energy, the air filling with acrid smoke as the clothes caught on fire and the mask began to melt. Harry kept screaming, his throat rasping with hoarseness, his lungs deprived of oxygen because he couldn't stop long enough to take a breath.
The mask's mouth and eye holes contorted as though in pain as the clothing twisted in the fire, and Harry could see Lucius lying there, Lucius burning...
Time seemed to slow, and almost stop. Draco was moving sluggishly, but Harry saw that only from the corner of his eye. His whole field of vision was taken up with the fire. A pyre, now, reaching up almost to the thatch roof overhead, the flames a brilliant Avada Kedavra green.
It might have gone on forever, but Harry felt himself abruptly yanked from behind, his hands pulled to his sides and forcibly held there, a palm clapped over his eyes to blind him like on Samhain. He struggled, his screams changing calibre from full-throated adult rage to frightened adolescent horror. Time snapped in on itself, the room seeming to jerk as though the whole world had been yanked elsewhere by a Portkey.
The roaring in his ears stopped, his senses filling with present instead of past. Draco, white-faced, water spraying from his wand as he fought the fire back from the ceiling. Hand hands holding him, the grip fierce. Bitter smoke clogging his nostrils and lungs.
Harry coughed, sputtering, and heard Snape murmur, "Thank Merlin, you're out of it, now. Breathe, Harry... yes, good. Come on now, sit down on the bed with me."
For a long moment there was no sound except the swish of water splashing against stone, and then Snape spoke again. "Are you going to be all right, now?"
Harry leaned weakly on Snape, feeling light-headed and ill. He tried not to glance at the floor, but his gaze seemed pulled there. The robe and mask, ruined beyond recognition, lay in a puddle of water blackened with ash.
"I'm sorry," he heard himself say, the words coming from some deep core of certainty inside him. It frightened him, this certainty. This wasn't like a seer dream, to be questioned and analyzed and doubted from start to finish. This was true prophecy, or perhaps more aptly, it was simply truth.
"Oh, the house isn't damaged," Snape replied, his hand rubbing circles against Harry's back. "For wild magic, that was remarkably well-controlled. In fact, I don't believe I would term it wild at all. Your powers did what you most wished."
Harry shook his head, hair flying wildly as he tried to make them understand. "No. Wasn't talking to you. Him. Draco," he gasped, the words slipping out of his grasp the minute he tried to say them. Taking a moment, he consciously tried to calm himself, dragging in breath after cleansing breath.
Draco's silver eyes clouded over with puzzlement and fear in equal measure. He glanced at Snape. Harry felt the man shrug. "Pardon?" Draco asked.
Another breath. Then Harry looked again at the charred remains of robe and mask, a testament to all the evil that had filled his life since he was one year old. "I'm going to do that again someday," he said through gritted teeth. "To another set of clothes. One with your father inside them. And when I do, it'll hurt you. And so..." he almost couldn't say it, since he hated Lucius Malfoy so very much. But he didn't hate Draco, and no matter how evil Lucius was, he was still Draco's father. Draco might wish him in Azkaban, but he didn't wish him dead.