Title: The Higher Geometry

Pairings: Harry/Draco

Summary: The Unspeakables have invented a device that slows down time-sort of. During its testing in the Department of Mysteries, Harry and Draco accidentally set it off.

Rating: R

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and her associates own everything Harry Potter. I make no claim to them and am not doing this for money.

Warnings: Sex, angst. EWE.

Wordcount: 17,600

Author's Notes: This is a pinch-hit for prompt 124, which gave me most of the story. Hopefully it's plotty enough! Thanks to my betas, Linda. and Christine.

The Higher Geometry

Before the Pendant

"This is stupid."

No one appeared inclined to listen to him, so Harry just had to keep his mutters to himself as they walked down the corridor that led through the convoluted maze of the Department of Mysteries. The department had changed a lot since the last time Harry had been here as a student, Harry had to grudgingly admit. That didn't mean he was happy to be here, and so he glared in every direction he could.

The walls were flat and black, set with large stones, as though to say that the Unspeakables were as firm as the Ministry itself. The floor, on the other hand, shone with a long curlicue of blue light that was apparently meant to lead them to the display they'd come to watch. Harry prodded it once with his wand; it spat a disapproving spark at him and then continued primly running into the distance. Harry reckoned that could represent the Unspeakables' determination to remain independent of the rest of the Ministry. They refused an investigation by the Aurors into their affairs every year, Harry did know that.

And then he started thinking about what the torches, in golden sconces behind glass globes, could represent, and had to give up. It was early and he had a headache, and he had never been good at games of symbolic logic anyway. Kingsley had only given him a stern look when he attempted to pass that class.

They came out into a large room that was circular for the most part, although Harry kept getting glimpses of unexplained angles and corners out of the side of his eye just when he'd started to relax. All the walls shone with the blue lights, and the central roof bent down like an inverted dome over a pentagon of golden pillars. Someone stood next to them, an Unspeakable from the robe, studying the device that lay on a crystal table between the pillars.

Harry was relatively calm, despite the fact that he was only here because Kingsley thought someone who had done a historic deed should witness a historic device, until the Unspeakable turned and Harry caught a glimpse of his hair.

"Malfoy," he hissed, body tightening.

The other two Aurors walking in front of him, both ancient sticks who had probably been chosen to represent the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at this ceremony because they could remember Merlin himself, turned around and frowned severely at him. Harry frowned back and waved a hand at Malfoy. "Doesn't it bother you that the Ministry hires former Death Eaters to staff its most mysterious department?" he demanded.

"Thank you so much for the commendation, Potter," Malfoy said from right behind him, making Harry jump, and then hate himself for jumping. "It's reassuring to know that Aurors at least have a grasp of some basic ideas, such as the Department of Mysteries being mysterious."

Harry scowled, transferring the hate for his nerves onto Malfoy. Malfoy looked perfectly calm and bored, damn him. His hood was pulled back now, and Harry could see not only his hair but also his face, bone-pale, with thin, red lips that looked as if he used some special kind of makeup on them. A small, thin scar ran from the top of his fringe to the top of his nose, between his eyes, and then stopped. Harry wouldn't have seen it at all, given the pallor of his skin, except that it was a bit silvery, like the color of the scars Harry remembered forming on Malfoy's chest after he'd used Sectumsempra on him.

Harry realized suddenly that he was staring and turned away with another scowl. He might have said something, but he didn't remember it, and Malfoy was speaking with the two other Aurors as though he hadn't heard, anyway.

"You understand that I can only provide you with a summary?" Malfoy's eyes darted back and forth between the two ancients.

They nodded like the fools they were, and the one on the left, who had a beard that Dumbledore would have been ashamed of, said, "We don't need the understanding of the magical theory behind your device, Unspeakable Malfoy. We only need a demonstration so that we can know whether it's safe to put in Auror hands. Feel free to keep your secrets like the respected craftsman you are."

"The respected craftsman you are," Harry mimicked under his breath. Honestly, who talked like that?

Then he abruptly realized something, and stood up. "Wait a minute. Malfoy invented this device? Why are we in the same room with it and not a hundred miles away?"

Everyone else ignored him. Malfoy walked over to the nearest of the golden pillars, which bent inwards to the crystal table like teeth, and touched it. It began to hum. Blue lightning extended from it like grasping hands, wavered back and forth for a moment, hesitated, and then touched the next pillar. The lightning was more confident in going from that pillar to the next.

"You do realize that Malfoy tried to kill me more than once?" Harry asked loudly. "Now I know why I'm here. Because someone in the Ministry wants to get rid of me, and thought this would be the most efficient way!"

"Do shut up, Auror Potter," said the second Auror, the one with a brow so thick that Harry was surprised he could see from beneath it. He was watching Malfoy's humming little device with fascination.

Harry huffed and crossed his arms. He almost hoped that something would go horribly wrong, because that would be all Malfoy deserved.

Draco hadn't realized how hard it would be, to see him again.

Oh, he had known Potter still existed; he had known Potter was an Auror. It was impossible to get away from that, with Potter's face always plastered on the Prophet and his eyes staring at the camera in feigned innocence. He had to know that the photographers were there, Draco thought, at least most of the time. He seemed to fool most of his public, but he wouldn't fool Draco.

So he had been prepared, in some measure, by the papers.

But it was easy, too, to forget Potter: to sink into his routine as an Unspeakable, dancing the rings of time, weaving the spirals together, debating the circles. To dive so deep into an underwater world that the intrusion of daylight was shocking.

Potter was all daylight, bright and hard and unforgiving. Draco could feel Potter's gaze tracking him as he walked around the device, checking the strength of the lightning bonds. It bothered him more than it should have. He had given up the light and the dark for the shadows, willingly, and they ought to have sheltered him more.

Potter leaned against the wall and stared at him. Or he was behind Draco, on his heels, and staring at him. Draco didn't know his exact position, and he was glad for that. It showed that one of his senses had escaped Potter's domination. He addressed Aurors Greyson and Trevors, who seemed interested in what he was doing.

"This device slows down time for the criminal caught in it." He indicated the edge of the device, a crystal, tear-shaped pendant with a small golden clock embedded in it. Greyson and Trevors leaned forwards and made admiring sounds. "He can only stagger along in an endless, stretched second, while around him everything moves at a normal speed. You can see how useful this would be for the Aurors." He gave a confidential smile to Greyson and Trevors and tried to ignore the feeling of diamond-pointed observation from Potter. "They would be able to transport the criminal to Azkaban, a holding cell, or the courtroom, anywhere they liked, while to him his transport would seem instantaneous."

"I understand that you are also thinking about applications for prison," Trevors said. "That a criminal caught in such a device could be made to feel that he was living through a sentence of years, while he was actually only in prison for a few seconds or days?"

Draco nodded. In truth, he wasn't quite sure about the ratio of time inside the teardrop of the device to time outside the teardrop, but there was no way he would tell them that. They would probably take his funding away. Always best to remain calm and confident and never give them a reason to doubt you. "Yes. There is some concern that criminals who spend years in Azkaban—physical years—come out broken in health and thus unable to contribute to our society, as well as bitter against the ones who imprisoned them and thus less likely to achieve a full rehabilitation. My device can give them the experience of punishment for their crimes while releasing them soon enough that they would be able to rejoin society and find almost no time gone at all."

Trevors frowned. "Is that wise, Unspeakable Malfoy?" Potter gave a childish snicker, probably at hearing Draco's title conjoined with his name. Draco ignored him with studied magnificence. "Yes, it would seem like eternity to the prisoner, but everyone else would see him as having endured no punishment."

"The prisoner's perception is more important than the public's," Draco said. "The Ministry can manage the perceptions of the public with ease and skill; it is the minds of hardened criminals that we have more difficulty in cracking."

Through the bright surface of the pendant, he could see Potter's eyes roll. Draco's shoulders stiffened, but then he took a deep breath and made himself relax. What did anything Potter did or said matter? Draco took Potter more seriously than Potter took him, and that wasn't a good idea, when Potter was simply an overgrown child playing hero.

"True," Trevors murmured.

Greyson took up the litany. "How do they survive inside the pendant? If they experience a subjective year, wouldn't they starve to death?"

Draco shook his head with a small, smug smile. "No. I made a distinction between physical and mental years a moment ago." Both the older Aurors nodded and tried to look as if they had noticed said distinction; Potter just looked confused. Draco sneered at him sideways. That honesty will get him into trouble someday. "The body lives the physical year, in normal time, during, say, a sojourn in Azkaban, and so must be fed and bathed and rested. It does not live the same time inside my pendant, only the second or minutes the prisoner is held. The mind is what experiences the passing of that year. The prisoner will go through boredom, guilt, and endless brooding, but he will never starve or suffer, although he might feel as if he should be hungry, and I think it likely that most people will attempt to spend the time sleeping, so as to make it pass faster."

"It's cruel," Potter said suddenly.

Draco turned, eyebrows lifted. He had little choice but to take notice of a direct question, irritating as Potter was. He cast an aura of heat around him, Draco thought, that could well disrupt the lightning bonds and melt the pendant. "I beg your pardon?"

"It's cruel, to make someone suffer that," Potter said. "All alone? Suffering for a year with no companionship?" He shook his head, face stubborn. "Besides, I don't see how this pendant will be useful if you have to set up these stupid pillars in every place where you want to use it." He swatted casually at the nearest crackle of lightning.

"Don't!" Draco cried, beyond shocked. He hadn't thought to warn them because he had thought no one would be that stupid, but—

A silent explosion of light opened around them, and Draco felt the hard sleeting past him that he associated with an opening shape of time. He lunged to the right, the only direction he could think of that might let him escape—

And then light abounded.

Within the Teardrop

Harry opened his eyes slowly. His hand stung, and he brought it to his mouth and sucked on his finger without thought. Then he winced. Ron would have told him not to do that, that the stinging insect or scorpion that had struck him might still have been there, and really, what kind of Auror was he, to think of danger last and pain first?

He looked around at the room he lay in. He knew that some sort of explosion had happened in the Department of Mysteries, the explosion he had been certain would happen, because Malfoy was trying to kill him no matter what anybody said.

But instead of on a hospital bed, he lay in an ovular, white room shaped like an egg. Harry rose to his feet in some alarm. The room seemed to rock around him for a moment, but Harry realized that must have been his head spinning, because when he reached out and tapped the crystalline wall a few feet away, it was solid and didn't sway.

He turned in a circle. There was no bed in the enclosure, and no bathroom. He frowned and fought down panic. This wasn't St. Mungo's. He had probably got trapped in some experimental part of the Department. Well, they would find him and let him out in a few minutes. He started to sit down again in the same place where he'd been.

Then someone groaned.

Harry turned around, ready to say, "That was fast." The last time he'd been involved in a DoM accident, they'd left him trapped inside a small square enclosure that supposedly contained the souls of dead philosophers for more than a day.

But lying next to him was Malfoy. Harry stared, then frowned. "What the fuck are you doing here, Malfoy?" he demanded.

Malfoy lifted his head and gave Harry a sharp stare. Then he buried his head in his hands. Harry nodded. He could hope that Malfoy was beginning to realize how stupid he had been, to try and kill Harry Potter in front of other Aurors, but he still wanted to know what had happened and how Malfoy's murder attempt had gone wrong.

"My device," Malfoy whispered. "You set it off, you idiot. We're trapped inside it now. God knows how long we'll be here." Then he laughed hollowly. "What am I talking about? It will only be a second."

Harry counted a second under his breath, and nothing happened. "Well?" he said.

"A second to the people outside the pendant." Malfoy sucked in a breath. "We're here for—thirteen months. Thirteen subjective months. That was how much time I had set the device to imitate."

Harry stared. "Like the prisoners that you wanted to punish?" he asked. "We—we can't be, Malfoy. We'd kill each other."

"It doesn't matter," Malfoy said dully, shutting his eyes. "That's what happened. I recognize this from the description of one of the men I tested it on. The crystalline walls and the shape of the room were just the same."

"You trapped us in the pendant?" Harry turned around again, thinking that he should be able to see faces peering in or at least the golden clock embedded in the device stretched above or to the sides. Wasn't the pendant made of crystal? Crystal was transparent, and it would act for them as a window on the world.

But he discovered that not all crystals were created equal. This crystal was clouded transparent, with patches here and there where it looked as if Harry was staring into mist. He reached out and tapped one of them. It rang with a true, high note, but showed no indication of breaking when Harry threw his shoulder against it.

"You crossed the barrier with your hand," Malfoy whispered. "That means that the trapped time no longer was contained within a certain amount of space. It expanded instead, and to redress the balance, it grabbed the first people it could find. We must have been standing within an equal distance of the pendant when the explosion happened."

"How do we get out?" Harry asked. Much as he hated it, it seemed this had actually occurred, and Malfoy was the expert, so he was the one Harry needed to listen to.

"I designed the pendant to be impossible to open from the inside." Malfoy lifted his head and gave Harry an opaque look. "They'll have to open it for us. Don't worry," he added, in the apparent absurd belief that he could reassure Harry for the devastation in his expression. "No matter how long we're trapped in here, how much time seems to pass for us, it will only be a second outside."

"But it will seem like more than that to us," Harry whispered, and sank to the floor. He didn't want Malfoy to see the way his hands were trembling. The easiest way to keep him from seeing that was to turn away.

Draco watched Potter. He wanted to say a few more things, to explain how the device worked, by constructing a separate circle of time within the wider circles and spirals, and turning it sideways so that it came into alignment with the mind, but he didn't think Potter would understand.

And then spite reared its head, and Draco turned away with a sneer that he knew was as precious as gold and therefore not to be wasted on Potter. Why should his be the duty of reassurance? Potter was the one who had fucked with the device and ensured that they came here in the first place.

Draco shrank from the thought of spending a year in Potter's presence, and then reminded himself that at least he would never need to eat or relieve himself in front of Potter. But he would probably sleep, to pass the time, and that would give Potter the chance to slit his throat.

He heard the sound of Potter casting spells against the crystalline walls. Nothing happened. Draco had known it wouldn't. When he said that he had designed the pendant not to be opened from the inside, he was speaking no less than the truth.

Potter grew more and more frustrated, from the sounds, swearing and kicking at the walls. Draco only grunted and closed his eyes. He might as well try to sleep. It was the only activity that he could see giving him a chance to pass some of the endless non-time before the spell faded and the pendant opened.

If it did.

The fear he had not confessed to Potter whispered through his heart. If Potter had crossed the bounds of the lightning, then Draco truly was not sure what would happen. It was possible that they would remain bound inside the pendant forever, hopelessly trapped, unable to escape even when the moment passed—

And because every second inside the pendant passed like a year, and their bodies would not feel the touch of time here, they might have condemned themselves to an eternity.

Panic stilled Draco's breath. He could practically feel Potter staring at him, though, and with an effort, he resumed breathing. He would not think of that.

The Spiral and the Circle

"How can we be trapped in here? And how can our minds feel the passage of time when our bodies can't? Just tell me that."

Harry was tired and frustrated. He didn't know how much time had passed, but it felt like a lot. Malfoy slept and glanced at him and slept again, and although Harry never felt tired or hungry, he'd done much the same thing, when he wasn't prowling in circles around the crystalline walls, kicking them, and casting spells against them. But even that was boring. The walls swallowed the spells instead of reflecting them back, so Harry didn't have to dodge them or deal with boils and wounds of his own making. He had been grateful for that the first few (what would one call them? Didn't days have to have a sun and a moon to make sense?) times it happened, but now, even a broken rib would have made a welcome change.

Even Malfoy's conversation would.

Malfoy only glared at him out of perfect silver eyes and refused to answer. When Harry stared back, though, Malfoy began to speak in a flat voice. Harry suspected he was as bored and longing for entertainment as Harry, but just didn't want to admit it.

"You idiot, Potter. You have no idea, any more than most people do, of the mysteries whirling around your head. You live in a world where you think of time as a river, waves sliding past you in only one direction."

"I don't think of it that way," Harry muttered. "I've traveled by a Time-Turner before. I know it's confusing."

"But in practice," Malfoy repeated stubbornly, "you do. Everything goes in one direction. People get older and eventually die, rather than younger. You'd probably laugh if someone came up to you and told you that he had lived years in an alternate universe, only to come back and find that no time had passed here."

"Maybe not," Harry said, thinking now of fairy tales that he'd heard Aunt Petunia telling Dudley, where people got taken away by fairies and came back years later, after what had seemed only a night in some hidden palace. They usually discovered that all their friends were dead or old and that their children were grown up. Or maybe a hundred years had passed and they recognized no one at all.

"In reality?" Malfoy arched his eyebrows and sneered a bit. "In a context like this, where you've seen that the power of time is real and one can halt it, yes, I imagine that you'd be more inclined to believe them. But without that? If you were in the pub having a pint with your mates, or whatever it is that you do, would you believe?"

He says pub and mates like they're words in a different language, Harry thought in amusement. Then again, Malfoy had probably never had friends, much less ones who invited him out for a drink rather than to plot the domination of the world. "All right," he conceded. "It'd be less likely, anyway."

Malfoy produced a brittle smile in response. Flawed glass was nothing to it for readiness to crack, Harry thought, staring in fascination. He had assumed without thinking about it that he would be the first to go mental from being trapped in here, since he needed movement and freedom and Malfoy was content to stay in the underground confines of the DoM, but perhaps he'd been wrong.

"Time isn't a river at all," Malfoy said. "It moves in different shapes—we who study time call it the higher geometry—"

Of course you do, Harry thought, stifling a snort. Ordinary names aren't good enough for you, in any language. But he felt that he was making progress in being diplomatic with Malfoy, since he didn't actually say those words aloud.

"And the most common are circles and spirals." Malfoy moved his fingers through the shapes as he spoke. Harry fought the temptation to bury his head in his hands. Did Malfoy really think Harry was that stupid? "The circles are the simple repetition of time, time returning to itself, the snake eating its tail. The spirals are—more complex. They seem to be returning to their own beginnings at first, but they slide past those beginnings and create slightly different times nested within one another—"

"Alternate universes?" Harry guessed.

Malfoy gave him a flat look. "Yes," he added grudgingly, after waiting a bit, probably to see if he could shake Harry's confidence in his answer.

"So what happens when someone crosses over from one universe to another?" Harry settled himself more comfortably, or tried, and then snorted. As though he could. The pendant around him was featureless, the floor slick and smooth, the walls cold to the touch and so utterly sheer that reaching out to them made his fingers skate about. There was little to focus on but Malfoy, and Harry did hate that.

But since the git was there, he might as well focus on him.

"It doesn't work like that," Malfoy said. "For that to happen, one's whole spiral would have to cross another spiral, and no one has the power to control time like that."

Harry waited a moment, then glanced around at the device that imprisoned them and raised his eyebrows.

"Oh, I did something much less difficult than crossing two spirals," Malfoy said, with modesty that surprised Harry so much he would have had to sit down if he hadn't been already. "There are people working on that, but it violates a basic shape of time. I don't imagine they'll succeed. I chopped a teardrop off from time and isolated it, that's all."

"And that's less difficult," Harry said.

"Of course," Malfoy said, oblivious to why it might not be obvious to Harry.

Harry waited some more, then sighed and gave in. "All right, why is it less difficult? Why can't you cross the spirals?"

Malfoy smirked. Harry's irritation rose again. That proved the git had known he was confused all along and had wanted to wait to explain matters because—because that was just the way he was, Harry reckoned. He resisted the temptation to turn away and knock his head on the wall. It would hurt his forehead while not helping his general state of knowledge.

Potter's undivided attention was something new in Draco's experience. He discovered that he liked it. He wasn't used to encountering those who listened with such rapt attention and a clumsy, puppy-like effort to keep up. Most of his colleagues understood the theory behind what he was doing and would have considered themselves degraded if they inquired into it too closely. They should be able to figure out the theory from watching Draco's practical effects.

But Potter watched him with head cocked to the side and mind flailing away behind the bright green eyes, and Draco found himself explaining more than he would have to a more experienced person, as if he was rewarding Potter for his naïveté.

"Do two parallel lines meet, Potter?" he asked.

Potter held up a hand, as though warding an obnoxious autograph-seeker off. Draco supposed that he must encounter them sometimes, as well as those whose attention he enjoyed. All classes of people had their less attractive members. "I know this one," he said. "No?"

Draco laughed, once, but got it under control when Potter glared at him. His body might not ordinarily suffer in a bubble of time like this, but matters would change if he was hit or kicked. "No," he said. "They don't. And you can only have two spirals of time meet if they overlap. Overlapping one without doing it completely would cause destruction with the clashing forces of time, as they sought to continue along their natural track and instead burrowed through time and space occupied by another spiral."

"But what if you aligned them perfectly?" Potter asked.

Draco had to reluctantly nod his approval. Potter was smarter than he had thought, to ask a question that hadn't occurred to Draco until two minutes into his research in the nature of time. "Then one spiral would become the other, and they would blend. We suspect that this has happened many, many times, though of course we can't actually observe such a thing, from within our own limited spiral. It may account for odd phenomena like déjà vu and missing time."

"I don't understand how that can happen," Potter said.

Draco shrugged. "There's a limit to the knowledge of even Unspeakables," he said. "We do the best we can to work from knowledge and theory and reason rather than direct observation, which often is not possible."

"And yet, sometimes you do come up with a practical result," Potter said, with a long glance around the sides of the teardrop.

A thrill crept down Draco's spine. Potter had sounded—vaguely admiring. No more than vaguely, but then again, if it had been more, Draco might have thought the world was coming to an end.

"Mind," Potter added, "this time it's a practical result that endangers us and prevents us from fully engaging with the world. But it's the thought that counts."

Draco sighed and turned over to go back to sleep.

"That's all it takes?" Potter complained to his back. "You're sensitive." Then he descended into mutterings of his own that Draco didn't understand and had no intention of listening to. He closed his eyes firmly.

He had spent most of his life, at least during his school years and the trials after the war, explaining his perspective and actions to people who had already judged him and only gave him a chance to speak out of an idea that they were being fair. He had no reason, as a full-fledged Unspeakable, to spend time doing it with Potter now. Even if they were trapped together.

The Magic of Teardrops

"So, how did you get involved with the Unspeakables? What made you want to study time?"

Once, Harry would have thought that nothing on earth could persuade him to ask that question. What could be less interesting than Draco Malfoy's background? Who gave a fuck why he'd made the decisions that he had?

But the pendant was less interesting, and Harry had run through every spell he knew, twice, and had only been repelled by the crystalline walls. He'd looked for flaws over every inch and found none. If Malfoy told him something new, it would be, well, new, and wouldn't represent yet more repetition.

Malfoy, who had been sitting awake and apparently meditating from the slow way he breathed and stared at the crystal wall, turned around with an expression of annoyance. "You didn't seem to be interested in me as more than an obstruction and inconvenience, if the way that you've referred to me in the past few hours is real," he said. Harry saw his expression change after he spoke, and knew that he was wondering if they really had spent only hours in the pendant. It felt longer than that, but Harry was learning to distrust his own perception of time.

He tried to imagine spending months here and shuddered away from the thought. He would die of boredom. He would go mad.

And the key to avoiding both of those fates seemed to lie in Malfoy.

"I am interested now," Harry said. "I probably wouldn't have been if we hadn't been trapped here, but I am now." He leaned forwards and tried to convey appropriate interest with an intense stare. For some reason, Malfoy turned his head away, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips.

"Fine," he said. "I went to the Unspeakables because they were the only ones after the war who would accept me, and I wanted to work in the Ministry. I became interested in the field of time because it was the most prominent one in the Unspeakables' ranks, and I knew that I would be promoted faster and receive rewards faster. Satisfied?"

"Not hardly," Harry said.

Malfoy's body was stiff as he whipped back around to stare at Harry. Harry was glad that some of his Auror lessons in reading body language had sunk in after all. Or maybe he was simply starting to know Malfoy well after spending several—times—cooped up with him.

That was a frightening thought.

"Why not?" Malfoy snapped. "I'm nothing more than an enemy to you. Why won't you accept the truth when I tell it to you?"

"Wouldn't I be more likely to think an enemy was lying?" Harry asked, but that made Malfoy turn away with an expression on his face that Harry recognized, and he really didn't want the other man to retreat into silence and stillness again. "I'm sorry," he said. "But this is a new experience for me. The thing is, I saw you with the pendant and the lightning that enclosed it. I know that it matters more to you than just as a source of Galleons and rewards. I saw the way you looked at it. No one looks at something that way unless it's important to them. A part of their soul."

Malfoy narrowed his eyes as though Harry had spit at him. "It seems that I never knew you, Potter," he said. "Such unexpected eloquence."

Harry shrugged. "I don't usually have the words for things like this. I chose those, and they fit." He leaned forwards again. "Did you go into the Unspeakables intending to study time? Or did you start out the way you told me and then change your mind? I really want to know."

Malfoy waited as though searching for some sign in his face or posture that he would lash out. Harry smiled back and tried to look relaxed. He couldn't really be, of course, with the possibility of eternity in here lingering in the back of his mind, but Malfoy would probably fold up again like a hedgehog if he didn't try.

Finally, Malfoy made a queer grunting sound and leaned forwards. "Imagine that someone told you you could learn the secrets of the universe," he said, whispering as if he thought that spies from the enemies of the Ministry were in here with them. "Wouldn't you want to do it?"

Harry shook his head. "I've never been interested in the secrets of the universe. I'm interested when people hide things from me, and I'm interested in secrets about people I know." It was a continuing source of regret to him that he would never know if Snape had managed to come to terms with his hatred for Harry after all, or what his mother was really like, because all the people who had known her best were dead. "But I became an Auror to catch Dark wizards and protect people, not solve mysteries."

"Perhaps the glimpse of depth I thought I spied in you was misplaced," Malfoy muttered.

Harry arranged himself so that he sprawled on his belly with his legs extended behind him. "Go on."

"I wanted to know them," Malfoy said. "At one time, I thought I might become an Astronomer or a Seer." Harry bit his tongue so that he wouldn't make unfortunate references to Trelawney, but maybe Malfoy saw them in his gaze anyway, because his voice became sharp and haughty. "But I didn't have the gift of prophecy that makes a Seer, and no reputable Astronomers' school would accept me. Besides, my father wanted me to work for the Ministry. We compromised. The Unspeakables were the only department that satisfied my need to learn more and my father's desire for me to have strength in politics."

Harry squinted at him, but he really didn't think Malfoy had just admitted that he was a plant by Lucius Malfoy to control the politics of the wizarding world. What sense would it make to admit that? "All right," he said. "But why did you start studying time? Why did they accept you when no one else would?"

Strange as it seemed to Draco, he was having a civil conversation with Potter, and one where Potter kept asking the questions, so Draco didn't simply have to pour his theories and background into an unappreciative ear. He was tempted to pinch his arm and see if he was dreaming.

No, he thought then, his training coming to his rescue. There are other possibilities. The pendant makes time rearrange itself. Perhaps it's calling forth qualities that could have been ours if time had flowed differently, if we had been born into a different spiral, if Potter had taken my hand.

Shaking his head at the strangeness of being caught up in such a ring after so long studying time itself, Draco answered, "I had had time to think about the nature of time during my year working as torturer for the Dark Lord. It wasn't every moment that I spent by his side, but I noticed the way that my mental perceptions altered when I was." He was pleased that his voice was calm, though, in truth, there was little now that could make him wince when it came to that year. He had so often mined it for memories, so that he could compare his thoughts about time's passing to the thoughts of other people and those he found recorded in books, that it had become well-disciplined and ordered in his mind, a series of intricate, braided glass rings. He touched those rings now as he spoke with Potter, and they did nothing more alarming than ring with faint music. "Time lasted forever there. In the hours away from him, it expanded and flew, and even being at Hogwarts with the Carrows seemed to go fast. As long as I was away from him, it worked."

Potter was frowning intently. "But everyone feels that way, some of the time. I don't see how it's real. I mean, when I was a child, the days seemed to last forever, but I knew they didn't last that way for anyone but me."

Draco eyed Potter sideways. It was tempting to ask why his childhood had seemed to drag, given that he was the pet of everyone who knew him, but Draco didn't. He couldn't use it as original research here in the pendant, and he had nothing to write with. "Everyone feels that way because it's a real phenomenon. It only remained to understand the laws of that phenomenon and codify it. In that way, I came up with the pendant."

Potter gave a faint smile, though Draco didn't see why. "But your body and your mind aren't separate. Your body only lives through a few seconds no matter how much time it seems like to your mind."

"They're capable of being separated, even though they aren't naturally," Draco said. "Muggles have had very strange ideas about that," he felt compelled to add. His research interests had led him in many directions, and some of the most puzzling books he had read were actually Muggle. Not that their ideas were challenging in the same way that Draco had seen esoteric magical theory be challenging, but he did wonder where some of them had come up with the notion that the body was less important than the soul or the mind. "We can separate them with magic. That's the source of the pendant."

Potter turned his head from side to side as though the secrets of Draco's construction would reveal themselves to his uninitiated eyes. "So what is this? Circle or spiral?"

"Neither," Draco said. "Those are only the most common shapes for time, not the solitary ones," he clarified, when Potter whipped his head back as if he suspected Draco of lying to him. "This is an oval shape, exactly what it looks like, and the clock face embedded in it provides an objective means of assessing the passage of time. The teardrop shape enforces one of the separations between body and mind that I was talking about. That's why it's such an effective prison, because the shape is the perfect one for pinning us and making our experience of a second seem the experience of a year."

"Does that include our words, too?" Potter cocked his head. "I would think that we couldn't actually speak all that many words in a second, and words come from our bodies."

Draco smiled. Who knew that Potter could be interesting to talk to? "We aren't actually speaking," he said. "We imagine words, and our thoughts touch. But if someone could be in here with us without being affected by the teardrop shape of the pendant—which, I have to admit, is impossible—then he wouldn't hear anything. He would only experience a second of silence, and then he would return to the world around us. Just as we'll do sometime," he added, with a sharp sense of fear in his chest that he wouldn't allow to actually manifest.

"Now you're getting a bit too metaphysical for me, Malfoy," Potter said, pressing his hand to his forehead as if that scar hurt. It was on the tip of Draco's tongue to tell him about the lightning shape and what it signified in the higher geometry—including theories on how it might have made it possible for him to survive the Killing Curse—but he refrained, because he could be compassionate when it was warranted.

"I'm amazed that you know a big word like that," he said.

Potter scowled at him, but it was half-hearted, and although they went back to imagined silence after that, Draco thought it more comfortable. He still ended up falling asleep again, but he was no longer in dread of the next time that Potter spoke to him.

Until it actually happened, of course.

The Shape of Thought

"I've been thinking, Malfoy."

Harry really didn't see why that statement made Malfoy flinch. They'd had a pleasant conversation—um, however many years or hours ago it seemed. And Harry had been doing a lot of thinking since then, so his statement was strictly true. There was no reason for Malfoy to sigh as though someone was pressing the weight of the world down on his shoulders and then stare at him with what was obviously strained politeness, just waiting for him to make a mistake.

"Have you," Malfoy said at last in a flat, discouraging tone, when he seemed to understand that Harry was waiting for an answer.

Harry nodded firmly. This was a good thought. He wouldn't lose his hold on it just because Malfoy would like it if he did.

Although maybe doing other things that Malfoy liked wouldn't be so bad.

Harry shook his head. He had spent too much time in the teardrop, and Malfoy had said that imagination ruled here. He was clearly hallucinating.

"I've been thinking about what you said," he told Malfoy, looking up at the crystal ceiling that arched overhead so he wouldn't have to look into the git's eyes. That ought to suit the git, who clearly didn't want to look at him. "About spirals and rings and teardrops and circles. It makes me wonder if we can imagine our way out of this place. If we can imagine conversations and sleeping—which our bodies don't actually need to do here—why not a way out?"

Malfoy said nothing. Harry looked at him, expecting him to be stunned by the force and brilliance of Harry's ideas, and instead found him shaking his head with an expression of weary tolerance on his face.

"Why not?" Harry asked, more than a bit incensed that Malfoy apparently wouldn't even entertain the idea. "After all, you've been telling me about all these amazing things that you can do with the study of time. It stands to reason that the study of time should help us out of this. Unless you have a better idea?"

"The teardrop shape is impenetrable," Malfoy said quietly. "That's why I chose it for the prison I was making. Yes, you can think all you want of the wall opening and letting you out, but that doesn't mean it will happen. The teardrop shape permits a limited range of interactions, rather like the spirals permit only certain interactions to happen within them and not others, and circles will only lead one back to the beginning again. It's a good try, Potter, better than I would have expected of you. But impossible."

Harry shook his head back. He thought something was indeed wrong with him. Instead of despairing over Malfoy's words, he felt a little glow of pride that Malfoy had thought his plan a good try.

To keep his mind off that, as well as off the despair that probably would overcome him if he gave too much credit to Malfoy's words, Harry stood up and began to prowl around the teardrop again. Malfoy watched him. Harry reckoned he didn't have much else to do.

When he glanced at Malfoy, seeking some way to disprove his ideas, Harry saw that his hair was still perfectly clean, shining, and soft, and that his face didn't show any traces of weariness. He hadn't heard either of their bellies rumble, Harry thought. It felt like they'd been here forever, but that was only the effect of the teardrop, like Malfoy had said. It didn't mean that they would suffer from bodily pains while they were here.

At this point, Harry would have liked to. He thought that was the only thing that would give him an accurate idea of how much time was passing.

"D'you think we'll get out?" he asked abruptly. He wanted to see what Malfoy would say if he attacked him suddenly like that.

Draco hesitated. He hadn't bothered telling Potter the truth he suspected, partially because he only suspected it, not knew it, and partially because he didn't want to put up with Potter's dramatics.

But Potter had acted surprisingly mature so far, and even now, there was an expression of deep concern and thoughtfulness on his face. Draco wondered if perhaps he could be trusted with the suspicions after all.

"I set the time on the teardrop for thirteen months," he said. "To feel like thirteen months to those inside, that is."

Potter shuddered, but stopped pacing—which Draco was grateful for, as he found it maddening to watch—and focused his attention on Draco. "But? There's a tone in your voice that says 'but.'"

"No doubt you hear that a lot," Draco snapped, again frustrated at being read by someone he hadn't been accustomed to think of as perceptive.

Potter cocked his head wisely and waited.

Draco sighed windily and started to run his fingers through his hair, before he remembered that he had neither water nor mirror to readjust it. He let his hand fall limply to his side instead. "When you touched the lightning, you may have reordered the bonds between space and time that the pendant was designed to suspend. We might be locked in here for longer than the thirteen months. We might be locked in here for an endless second, living forever, no matter how long actually passes in the outside world."

"And if we stay in here for long enough that time actually passes in the outside world. . ." Potter's face was ill. He sat down hard. "No wonder you didn't want to say that, Malfoy. It's bloody depressing."

Draco stared at Potter. He was accustomed to understanding from his colleagues in the matter of his calculations and experiments, but he hadn't known that Potter could be personally accommodating that way.

Potter caught his eye and laughed ruefully. He didn't have any compunctions about disordering his hair, as he proved with a hand through it. Then again, Draco thought, it already looked like a hedgehog that had barely survived a battle with a mountain lion. Potter couldn't make it worse. "Yeah, Malfoy, I know. Who would have thought that we could get along?"

Draco looked away. He thought he would ruin the moment with speech. Potter waited as if he wanted Draco to comment, and then rose and prowled again.

Draco closed his eyes. He wondered if having a tolerable companion would make the time seem to pass more or less slowly.

Parabola

There was something.

Harry woke and slept, and slept and woke, and each time he opened his eyes, there was a tempting, teasing image in his mind, just out of reach.

He tried to ignore it at first, but at last it returned so persistently he was more or less compelled to pay attention to it. He sat up, arms looped around his knees, and looked over to where Malfoy slept. Then he had to look away again. There was something about the soft color of Malfoy's lips and his relaxed, sleeping face that made it hard to concentrate.

So he thought of the teasing image instead, fixing his mind there until his head hurt. Then he relaxed and breathed in the way that Malfoy was always doing, staring at the frosted crystal patterns on the walls until the thought crept tentatively back into his mind and he could pounce on it.

Malfoy's time magic seemed to be all about shapes. There was this shape to do this and this shape to do that. Some shapes constrained time, he said, and some shapes constrained the body and the mind.

Couldn't they create a shape inside the teardrop that would make a difference? Harry didn't see why not, the longer he thought about it. He wasn't entirely sure what they would use to make it. So far, none of the spells he'd used had created anything permanent, not even an etching in the glass. But Malfoy might have some ideas.

Harry's excitement ebbed a bit when he remembered the definite way Malfoy had spoken. If it was so simple to create a shape and get out of the trap, then Malfoy would know about it and would have suggested it, right?

On the other hand, Harry had seen lots of experienced Aurors freeze when confronted with a situation that they hadn't handled before. This might be the same thing. Could Malfoy envision all the shapes that time would take? He had already admitted that the Unspeakables didn't know everything about time.

Harry held up his wand and tried to draw shapes in the air before him, creating colored lines of light that would linger. Nothing happened. He knelt down and tried to scratch shapes in the floor of the pendant. Nothing happened. He sat back and muttered something uncomplimentary about clever people in which Malfoy's name figured prominently.

"Potter? What is it?"

Malfoy spoke in a sleepy voice. Harry turned to confront him, already boiling over with possibilities and ideas that could become concrete if only Malfoy hadn't been so stupidly smart and restricted magic in the pendant.

Malfoy's face stopped him.

It was nothing Malfoy said or did, he thought later, when he had time to analyze his own reactions. Instead, it came from the way that Malfoy's lower lip had a bit of glistening wetness on it, and the defensive way his eyelids fluttered, and the languorous blinks of his eyes. Harry couldn't be angry with someone who looked like that. He simply couldn't.

"I. . ." He cleared his throat. "I just was thinking that it would be easier if we had any way to write things down."

"Hmmm. That would be convenient for games and the like, I agree." Malfoy blinked again. Harry expected the fragile sheen of newness to vanish from his face at any moment, but instead, Malfoy gave him a simple stare that wanted to be complex. "You and I could play chess, if we had a board and pieces. If we could draw the pieces."

Harry cleared his throat again. The longer Malfoy sat there looking just like anyone who'd woken up from a daze or a trance, the more trouble he had having animosity against him.

Well, that might be a good thing. They would need to work together to get out of here, after all.

"I'm talking about something else," he said. "About getting out of here, actually."

Malfoy gave him a silly smile, and then frowned. Harry wondered if his words were beginning to trigger Malfoy's memories, unlikely as that sounded. Then he shook his head and snapped fully back into his usual self.

"I told you, Potter, that no one can escape the pendant," Malfoy said coldly. "It can't be done. The teardrop is too perfect as a prison."

"There ought to be another shape that's perfect as a key," Harry countered, relieved—and a bit mournful—that Malfoy was back to normal. "Why not? Shapes like the teardrop aren't made for holding people, but you adapted this one to that purpose. Isn't there some other shape that could be useful as a key?"

Malfoy's brows bent down as he frowned. Harry stared back at him and wondered what Malfoy was seeing in him, if it ever was or could be comparable to the gentle loveliness Harry had seen in his face.

What Potter said made sense, enough sense that Draco was ashamed of himself for not thinking of it first.

He sat there with his hair, which was somehow still windblown despite the fact that no wind existed here, and discoursed intelligently of shapes of time. He had even anticipated Draco's objection that there was no shape of time that was specifically made to free people from their imprisonment.

Draco closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples. He hadn't thought that someone who was a master of the higher geometry would ever be imprisoned in his prison, had he? The common criminal wouldn't have that knowledge, and the Unspeakables dealt on their own with those of their own who went rogue.

So, why shouldn't there be a solution that he hadn't thought existed because he hadn't thought he would be in this position?

Potter started to speak, but Draco waved a hand at him. "Shut up for a minute, Potter," he said sharply. "I want to think."

Miraculously, Potter shut up, though from the way he glared, Draco thought he might resent the insult. It didn't matter. Draco had more important things to think about than whether Potter was pleased or displeased with him.

Perhaps not, if you wish to escape.

But even if Potter had come up with the idea, it would be Draco's to implement. He sat there and forced his brain to stretch and wrap around the task, the way that he forced it to wrap around the equations for the higher geometry, while Potter waited impatiently next to him.

"Do you have an answer?" he asked, just when numbers had started appearing in Draco's head to form and cradle the answers he needed.

He snarled in response, and even Potter seemed to know what that meant, because he shut up. Draco bowed his head and clasped it between his hands. He had to stop thinking about Potter and the way he fidgeted and the way his hair smelled, and to do that, he started to force his mind through the first list of shapes he had ever learned, something as basic to the higher geometry as the alphabet was to the art of writing.

A circle repeats. A spiral proceeds. A teardrop holds. A square cages. A curve ends. A parabola opens—

And then Draco felt his sides relax and his breath drift away. Of course that was it. He had been stupid not to have seen it before. Then again, he hadn't thought the higher geometry could be of any use to him here except to help him understand exactly how badly they were trapped, and so it wasn't surprising that he hadn't felt much interest in using it.

"A parabola," he whispered. "That's the shape that we need. If we can only create it. How can we, when we have no magic?"

"A parabola?' Potter had caught and understood that one word, though from his blank stare, Draco thought it likely that he hadn't understood the rest. "What is that? How can we make it?"

"It's a shape," Draco said, biting back the urge to scream. Surely that it was a shape ought to have been obvious to Potter before now? "A sharp curve. It descends and then rises." He lifted his wand and scrawled the shape in the air, though since he couldn't cast a spell here, he couldn't create the line of colored light that would have best illustrated his point. "I don't know why I didn't think of it before. The parabola has a beginning and an end, while the middle forms a magical collecting point for time. The time brews there until it takes the path up and out, and that means that it should be able to combat the ultimate closing shape, the teardrop, that joins a slender stem as a collection point to a shape that doesn't end."

Potter was smart enough not to pretend that he understood. He only listened, shook his head when Draco finished, and then pressed ahead with what seemed to most concern him. "Then what? How do we make it? You're right, we have no magic. Is there something else we can use?"

Draco looked hopelessly at his straight wand, and then at his robes. Perhaps they could tear them into strips, but without a knife or a spell that would cut them along precise curving and straight lines, Draco didn't know that he wanted to trust that stopgap. They wouldn't get many chances to recut the robes, and only a perfect parabola stood a chance of opening the teardrop.

He looked at Potter's hair without much expectation, either. There were twisting strands there, but once again, they would need to be perfect, and Draco doubted that they could hope to make them so without the kinds of measuring devices that he usually used in the Department of Mysteries and objects to weigh them down.

As for his own hair, he didn't even consider it. The strands were simply too fine and straight.

"Well?" Potter was bouncing his useless wand off his knee, his eyes fastened on Draco and his frown so bright that it could have been mistaken for a smile from a distance.

"I don't know," Draco said, turning away and closing his eyes. "Leave me alone for a little while. Let me think."

Potter snorted and shifted restlessly. "You do that," he muttered. "Just remember that the more time that passes here. . ."

Then he trailed off, perhaps because he'd remembered that nothing would happen to their bodies no matter how long they lingered here. Draco smirked wearily and shut his eyes.

Figures of Imagination

Harry was ready to admit what he would have thought was impossible before he got trapped in here: Malfoy was scarily intense when he was at work.

He whispered numbers to himself, long strings of numbers that didn't repeat often enough or form regular enough patterns for Harry to be sure what they meant. He traced his wand across the floor and the walls and the air, and then stopped and shook his head. Harry was actually sure that his mind was seeing the things he traced but couldn't bring to life, and arranging them all in a dizzying, elemental flow.

For the first time, Harry thought, really thought, about the fact that Malfoy had invented the pendant around them. He tapped on the crystal and stood up to try and peer through the frosted walls, though as usual it was useless.

How smart must Malfoy be, to understand the magic that had produced this and then bring the magic to life? Harry had reminded him of the idea that one shape of time could probably combat another, but Malfoy was the one who had envisioned this teardrop and created it.

Harry couldn't know a tenth of the labor that had gone into that. And even though he still thought it was a rather horrible idea for a prison, it did prove Malfoy was smart.

Harry started watching him more closely. He noticed the small muscles that twitched and tightened near Malfoy's eye when he was concentrating. He watched the way that Malfoy's fingers curled around his wand and then smoothed out again, and he got to know the fluctuations that meant Malfoy's thoughts were whirling around futilely and the ones that meant he was being productive. He listened as Malfoy chuckled and cursed under his breath, and he didn't sound mad, he sounded intelligent.

Reluctantly, Harry had to admit that Malfoy was more than he had ever thought he was.

Harry settled down to watch some more, until he learned enough about Malfoy to give him the answers to the questions that were starting to bloom in his mind.

It was easier to work than Draco had thought it would be, with Potter staring at him.

He had believed that his old rival's eyes would cut into him and make him second-guess everything he did, which was no way for someone who wanted to find a way out of this trap to work. He needed his full concentration at every moment to counter the temptation to give in to despair, since he knew much about how well-constructed the pendant was, but nothing at all about the shape that might free them.

But instead, he grew in self-confidence as Potter watched him. When Potter slept, Draco would slow down and wait until he was awake again, staring at the crystal walls with his mind drifting in timeless contemplation. That was another technique that working among the Unspeakables had taught him, and it had come in useful more than once.

Potter, with his green eyes and his wild dark hair, was rapidly becoming as necessary to Draco as the training was.

He didn't understand why. He could only work with what he understood: the shapes that played in his mind, the knowledge he had acquired over five years of dedicated work, and the longings and the desires that had led him to shape the teardrop and enter the Unspeakables in the first place.

Acquiring new knowledge of himself and why he might want Potter would simply have to wait.

Making the Parabola

"It's useless."

Harry looked up, blinking. He had lost himself in a trance of watching Malfoy, and hadn't woken until now, focused as he was on the minute movements of the man's hands. It wasn't as though hunger or tiredness was going to disturb him, and he had gradually stopped wanting to sleep, because every moment he slept was a moment when he wasn't watching Malfoy.

"What's useless?" he asked, alarmed by the expression on Malfoy's face. He was breathing rapidly, his cheeks pink. If he had been on the verge of tears, Harry wouldn't be surprised, but Malfoy had just dashed his hand across his eyes, so he wasn't sure that was true.

"The attempt to make a parabola." Malfoy flung his wand away from him and sat there, arms folded, staring at nothing. "I've thought about it. Hair, robes, skin, blood—if we even had anything that could cut into our skin, which we don't—and magic of any kind are out, of course. I thought about breaking my wand and bending some of the splinters into parabolas, but I'm not sure that I could do it, and that would be a waste of a perfectly good wand."

"Don't break your wand!" Harry cried, appalled. "You know that the second one is never as good as the first. How are you going to do magic when you get back if you break yours now?"

"I want to get back, more than I want to go on being a wizard." Malfoy's bright eyes shifted towards him. "You must want that, too, Potter. Unless you think that you really would be content to stay here for the rest of your life."

"I could find some way," was all that Harry could think of to say, stupidly and uselessly. If Malfoy couldn't find a way out of this trap, then how could he? It wasn't as though Harry understood about shapes and maths and all the rest of it. He had come up with the initial idea, sure, but Malfoy was the one who would need to put it into action.

"Really? Are you sure?" Malfoy picked up his wand again and trailed it across the floor, watching the lines it created as though they were the answer. Perhaps they would be, Harry thought, and determined to ask.

"We can still draw things in the air," he said. "Why shouldn't that be enough?"

Malfoy snorted and let his head fall back so that it rested against the nearest wall. "Because the shape needs to be permanent, Potter. The only thing that would hold the shapes I draw in air is our eyes and our memories. I need something I can work with, something that will stay in place as I manipulate it. Besides, no one draws a perfect parabola the first time without magical help. One mistake, and we're stuck in here."

"Oh." Harry could see now why Malfoy had taken so long to work through to a solution of the problem, but he didn't see why Malfoy hadn't grasped the solution that lay right in front of him. "Why don't you use me?"

Malfoy gave him a miserable, scornful look and shook his head. "You didn't hear me, Potter. I already considered your hair. It's too curly. And your skin and your robes and your wand have the same objections against them that mine do."

"Not any of those things," Harry said. "I meant my body—me as a whole. I could lie down and try to get into the right position, and you could manipulate me as you need to." He swallowed, not sure why his face was getting so warm. He was just talking about what he and Malfoy needed to do to stay alive. It wasn't as though he had offered to let Malfoy see him naked, or something.

Although, when Harry thought about the errors that the robes could cause in the shape of his body, he realized that it might come to that.

Malfoy stared at him with his mouth open. Then, for some reason, he backed away until his body bumped against the opposite wall of the pendant. Harry watched him with confused eyes, not deigning to turn his head. He thought that, if someone had managed to break into the pendant, he would have heard them by now. "What is it, Malfoy?" he asked.

"You would volunteer that," Malfoy whispered.

"Well, yes," Harry said. "I want to get out as much as you do. I'm not sure it'll work," he added, thinking of the shapes that Malfoy drew in the air and the way that he talked about them having to be perfect. "But we can try, right? And if it doesn't work, then we're no worse off than we were before."

Malfoy continued to stare at him with parted lips and wide-open eyes. Harry frowned. He didn't know if there was something wrong here, if Malfoy perhaps had some magical theory in mind that made what Harry was offering impossible, but he didn't think so. Malfoy would have let him know right away if it was something like that, because he would love to gloat over Harry's incompetence.

"What?" he demanded, when the silence grated on his nerves as much as the boredom had begun to do weeks, or days, or months, ago.

Draco closed his eyes. The image that had sprung into his mind the moment that Potter offered—the image of Potter stretched naked before him, twisting his limbs in response to Draco's commands—still burned there, though, and there was nowhere he could withdraw into his mind that offered relief.

How can he—

But Potter didn't seem to have any idea that he might have done something unusual. He had only offered because it was the option that a Gryffindor would think of, Draco decided, with an attempt to recover his sense of balance. A Gryffindor would think with his muscles instead of with his brain. That was all they were good at.

The image of Potter lying naked (because of course he would have to remove the robes, they would get nothing done with those on) was Draco's own problem. There was no reason to reject Potter's suggestion out of hand because of that.

But still the image burned, and still it took Potter's impatient question to kick a response out from behind Draco's teeth. He swallowed and managed to murmur, "I—I think that might work, Potter. Take your robes off."

He expected an explosive reaction, and that meant he could open his eyes, and glare, and call the whole thing off. But instead, after a minute or so of hesitation, or what felt like a minute, Potter began removing his clothes.

Draco sat there, shivering, trying to pretend that he only meditated, in silence for bellbeats of time before he opened his eyes. This isn't real, he kept reminding himself. Of course not. Your words are imaginary here, your bodies don't really move or change, and this nakedness is going to be imaginary as well.

It ought to have been easy to remind himself of that. After all, he hadn't felt hunger since he'd been here, and he'd slept only to ease the boredom, not because he was tired—because of a mental sensation, not a physical one. It made sense, of course, that this desire he felt was only a mental sensation and not a physical one.

It didn't help.

Potter had already slid out of his robes and taken off his shirt. Draco's throat seized up when he saw him half-clothed, bending down to take off the boots. Potter's shoulders bent and flexed—of course, that was what shoulders did, Draco tried to tell himself, and it didn't help—and his skin rippled like water traveling over a streambed. Draco unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and cleared his throat.

"It'll have to be everything, Potter. Even an unexpected corner of cloth can cause problems with the parabola. We have to remove everything from your body that doesn't need to be attached to it."

"Does that mean that you want to shave my head, too?" Potter grinned at him over his shoulder. His eyes were alight with hope that Draco hadn't seen in them since Potter realized none of his spells worked.

Draco closed his eyes and turned his head away. His throat hurt. His heart hurt, jumping. Sweat soaked his palms.

"We can't shave your head, Potter," he said finally, striving for a tone as sharp as the one that had come to him without effort only a short time ago. "Nothing to cut it with, remember? Not that even yanking strands out by the roots wouldn't be an improvement," he remembered to add, because it was the sort of thing Potter would expect him to say.

"Shut it, Malfoy," Potter said, but there was no real malice in his voice. There was a last shuffling off of cloth and then silence, and Draco opened his eyes and turned his head, thinking Potter was finished.

He wasn't. He was lowering his pants, and Draco got to see his cock as it emerged, long and pale and relaxed, but darker than the shade of Draco's own skin just because—well, because Potter was darker. That was all there was to it.

Draco shut his eyes again. Then he told himself not to be such a baby, and opened them. Potter would notice his weakness soon, if Draco didn't conquer it.

He had worked among naked statues during his training as an Unspeakable, because they were some of the most common artifacts that Dark wizards tried to use, and which Aurors would seize and send to them. Draco had been able to ignore them better than this. That meant he should get used to this. Some of them were much better-endowed than Potter, after all. Draco told himself that, while his breath came in gasps and Potter asked concerned questions about his health.

Then he looked again, and Potter lay naked on the floor of the pendant, waiting for him, arms over his head in his own inexpert attempt to create a parabola.

Draco stood up, slowly, and walked towards him. His boots hissed and clicked, far too loudly, against the crystalline floor.

Because, of course, this wasn't the same as a statue. This was Potter's body, willingly yielded to him, ceded to him, his to arrange and do with as he liked.

That Potter trusted him that much. . .

Draco bent down and began considering the position of Potter's limbs, trying to keep his mind off how hard he was.

Shapes of Desire

Harry laid his head back on the crystal and tried to relax as much as he could. It was difficult, with Malfoy hovering near.

But not for the reason he had thought it would be. He didn't really think Malfoy would try to tear out his heart and make him a bloody sacrifice to bring Voldemort back, or any of the stupid things he might have thought before they were trapped in this crystal together. For one thing, Malfoy couldn't do magic any more than Harry could. He had built his trap too well. Harry had considered, a few—well, some time ago—that maybe Malfoy had trapped Harry in here, but not himself, and was sadistically pretending to be caught so that he could coax Harry into doing something awful. But this had gone on too long for Malfoy to be playing a joke, and Harry thought his distress was real.

Besides, he trusted the great bloody blond git now.

Malfoy's hands ran over his chest and then down his sides, poking at the skin between his ribs as if trying to measure exactly how far it stuck out. Harry swallowed. He wondered if Malfoy had done this often for other people, and tried to think that he hadn't. Back in the Unspeakables' Department, he would have instruments that could measure people without having them get naked, and he probably did experiments on magical artifacts and animals more often than people anyway. Despite how powerful the Unspeakables were, there were some things the Ministry wouldn't tolerate.

Well. Harry was fairly sure about that, anyway. If he thought about it deeply, he might not be.

Then he had another problem to occupy his attention, one that very efficiently took his mind away from the problem of whether or not Malfoy might have done this before. His cock started to stir.

Goddamnit! Harry breathed through his nose and tried to think only of calm, unexciting things, like the smoothness of the crystal walls or the expression on Ron's and Hermione's faces when they would see Harry again. They would ask what had happened and how he'd got out, and he would tell them about Malfoy, and neither of them would believe it.

The thought of their shock diverted Harry for a time, until Malfoy's hand ended up on his hipbone. He sucked in a startled breath and felt his chest bulge. Malfoy's voice interrupted in a drawling snarl, if there was such a thing. (Well, Harry reckoned there was, now, because he'd got to hear it).

"Don't interrupt me, Potter. You always have the worst timing."

"I do have to breathe, don't I?" Harry opened one eye in his irritation, unable to remember when he'd closed it. "Or is breathing going to mess up your parabola? Perhaps you'd rather kill me and use a perfect corpse that would do just what you told it?"

His voice trailed off, though, because Malfoy was staring at him with a flushed face and a hanging mouth.

Malfoy straightened and snapped his gaze away in the next moment, clearing his throat, but Harry knew what he had seen. His cock hardened a little more.

"Potter," Malfoy whispered, after a silence that burned and clanged with more emotions than Harry had a name for. All he knew was that arousal was among them. "Your—penis. It could mess up the shape."

"Sorry," Harry breathed, but he had the feeling that he didn't sound sorry, and from the look on Malfoy's face, he didn't feel that way, either.

Potter was getting hard. All from no more than a few simple touches and Draco leaning down to look more closely at his groin.

The more cynical part of Draco wondered if it was simply that Precious Potter was a virgin, with no one to meet his high standards, and wanted to sneer. He could offer Potter a wank, and the prat would probably fall all over himself and only feel embarrassed later. Draco could take it as a chance to see what happened when someone wanked inside the prison, a variable he hadn't taken account of in his initial tests of the pendant. After all, wanking involved a change in the body, but a small one. Would the victim simply imagine his pleasure and the resulting hand movements?

The newly bruised, or bruisable, part of Draco was the stronger, though, and it couldn't imagine saying something like that, when he was embarrassed and Potter was embarrassed. He cleared his throat and tried to focus on solutions for the problem. He might be able to arrange Potter into a parabola, but anything that interrupted the clean line of his body would be a problem. The cock, the penis, jutting out from his groin like that, would put paid to their attempt to escape right away.

Draco took a deep breath of air as he realized what he would have to do. There really was only one solution.

He tried not to think about how eager he was as he reached out and ran his fingers down Potter's cock. Was there such a thing as too eager, anyway? Of course not. He just wanted to make it absolutely clear that he was helping.

Potter took in his own deep breath, and then whimpered. The whimper was the most exquisite sound Draco had ever heard. It rang strangely from the crystalline walls, and it made his hand shake.

"What are you doing?" Potter whispered, but not as if he was about to ask Draco to stop. His voice trembled, and that was exquisite, too, as was the weight and warmth of Potter's cock in Draco's hand. Draco's arse clenched down on air despite himself, and he felt his mouth fill with saliva. He swallowed before he could reply.

"You have to be—fully hard. We have to be able to arrange it along your stomach, so that it doesn't interrupt the line of your body," he whispered. "We could do something else if we had magic, but we don't."

"Oh," Potter said.

Unable to resist the temptation any longer, Draco looked at his face. Potter was flushed and blinking, his dusty dark eyelashes sliding down over and then sliding back from green eyes so deep and dreaming that Draco clamped his legs shut.

"If you say so," Potter whispered, and shut his eyes.

Draco went on stroking. The blood under his hand flooded into the cock and made it harder and warmer. He sucked in a quiet breath, decided not to think about sucking, and then went on stroking and caressing until the penis arched back towards Potter's body.

Letting go of it was the hardest thing he'd ever done, and as he stood up and backed away from Potter, he promised himself that he would do—well, he would do something, a lot of something, when they got back into their own world to make up for it.

Curves and Straight Lines

Harry tilted his head back. He felt deliciously full and warm, as if he had eaten one of the meals denied him since they had come here. He could still feel the burning imprint of Malfoy's fingers against his cock, which was ridiculous, because he also felt the empty coldness that told him Malfoy was no longer touching him but standing back from his body, near one of the walls of the pendant.

Harry wanted to open his mouth and command him to come back over here and finish what he'd started.

But the whirling dash of energies through him frightened him at least as much as it aroused him. Harry didn't know that he was afraid of Malfoy, not anymore, but he feared what Malfoy represented, maybe, or something like that. He didn't know what would happen if he met Malfoy the way he wanted to meet him right now, bodies straining together, arms standing straight out from their chests as they rutted together. What shape would they make?

Harry swallowed. These thoughts were probably because he'd spent so much time around Malfoy, he told himself sternly, and not from any more than that. Didn't people sometimes go crazy when they were locked up in prisons or attics and talk to the walls or form relationships with people they would never look at twice outside? This was just something like that. Malfoy was the only other person around, the only other attractive person Harry had access to, and it was no surprise that his blood leaped at a touch from the other man.

But then he remembered the way he had looked at Malfoy over the last—time—since he'd seen him working, and his breath caught in doubt.

"Potter." Malfoy's voice was so calm and collected and cool that Harry felt a mixture of hatred and envy for him. "I want you to bend at the waist. Don't bend over," he added, as Harry started to shuffle around so that he could get up. "I want you to lie on the floor, but arch so that your arms are reaching above your head to the left and your legs are extending up to the right. Can you do that?"

Harry had to cough and clear his throat before he could continue. "Don't—don't I have to have my head encased between my arms? It would break the straight line of the curve, anyway. If you can talk about a straight line of a curve."

"Very good, Potter," Malfoy said, and Harry wanted to smirk, because now his voice was strangled, too. "Yes, that's true. Turn on your left side. Rest your head between your arms. Keep your—penis—along your stomach, or catch it between your legs if you can. It mustn't stick out."

Harry nodded dumbly and did as Malfoy said, trying to imagine that he was becoming one of those shapes that Malfoy had traced in the air. He thought it was the only thing that would help now. His hair had to flow into a smooth curve, when it hadn't done anything smooth in his life. His limbs had to relax enough that he could endure lying in this position and yet remain taut enough that he could move them if he needed to. It wasn't easy, especially on the hard floor of the pendant, to get comfortable.

But he did it anyway, and he thought he could have done more, if Malfoy had needed him to. He could still feel the git's fingers.

Potter had the natural flexibility of someone young and Auror-trained, thank Merlin. Draco tried not to imagine what would have happened if he'd been trapped in here with one of the older Aurors.

He didn't want to be trapped with anyone but Potter.

Draco shuddered and shook himself like a dog shaking off water. He had to get rid of this state of mind. It wasn't a good one for dealing with the complicated equations he would have to perform, even if Potter achieved the perfect parabola. He couldn't distract himself by looking at the dusky flush that had spread along Potter's skin or the straight perfection of his cock. He would have to be careful, precise, delicate.

Since they didn't have access to their wands, there was only one escape from the teardrop that Draco knew of, even assuming that they managed to form a parabola. Draco would have to use his mind as Potter used his body, linking them both, creating a figure of openness and connection that would start time flowing irresistibly in a new direction and destroy the teardrop, the figure of imprisonment and stillness, separation of body from mind.

Draco was not entirely sure what would happen when two shapes were opposed to one another like that. Yes, he had studied the theoretical question in his normal courses, but that wasn't the same thing as performing the experiment.

But they had no other option, so he went on adjusting Potter's position, now and then kneeling beside him to reinforce his orders with a touch, to smooth his hair back into place, and to adjust the position of his cock.

That last more often than might have been necessary, Draco had to admit.

Potter watched him with deep eyes the entire time. Draco looked into them and then away, not sure which was easier. Turning away might indicate cowardice, and looking into them might show more of his own emotions than he would wish to show—or Potter to see.

Draco had to wonder about that. Potter had responded to manual stimulation the way that any man would. That didn't mean that it was a special reaction to Draco or Draco's hands, to what Draco could give him.

But they had to go ahead anyway, and at last a shudder flowed down Draco's spine and he rose to his feet, nodding. Potter was in as perfect a parabola shape as they were going to get. He murmured, "Be quiet, Potter, please," and then closed his eyes and fixed his mind on the complicated, combined equations and incantations.

Drawing the Figure

"Be quiet, Potter, please."

Harry let his eyes fall shut. Malfoy's voice had a tremor in the back of it.

He also knew that he had to keep still, or he would have arched up and voiced some rough sound that—well, it would have revealed something that he preferred to keep to himself for now, thank you.

So really, it was all for the best that Malfoy had told him to be quiet.

But no one had said that he had to keep his eyes shut, and so Harry opened them and gazed up at Malfoy's face, hanging over his body, his eyes focused beyond Harry, his hand opening and closing in a regular pattern that seemed to match his breathing. Harry counted breaths and yes, it did. He wondered if that was part of Unspeakable magic, too, and if so, how in the world he would know what it meant.

It had become intolerable not to know everything about Malfoy. He tried to imagine just walking away from him when they emerged from the pendant and couldn't. Malfoy would be the one who had got him out, the one who he'd spent all this nameless time in prison with, and the first person he had willingly stripped down in front of without lots of hesitation and worry about how he would look.

That last was the most important, somehow. Harry watched the contours of Malfoy's face, keeping his arms and legs locked in the positions where Malfoy had aligned them, and felt the prickle of those fingers through his hair and along the curves of his ears and along his cock. He couldn't wait to feel them again.

And to feel more than that.

Draco tilted his head back, moving slowly. The air had become crystalline around him with more than the shadows of the pendant, as the numbers flickered and came to life in his head, blazing with magic.

He had a task to keep them all balanced and whirling in his mind, none of them falling to the ground or cracking apart, but adding, dividing, multiplying, increasing. Somewhere beneath the shining maelstrom darted a single, solitary thought, running to shelter, that he was grateful the Unspeakables had insisted that their initiates learn to work without ink and parchment. Draco couldn't have done this if he had always relied on writing the numbers down.

Potter's body was just below him, heat, and Draco eased his fingers nearer, inch by inch. He would have to touch Potter to spark the connection between body and mind when he was ready, but if he touched him too soon, then the warmth would simply distract him from the brilliant cold world of the numbers.

Lines building up on either side of him, equations trotting and prancing in obedience like the pretty pegasi his father had once taken him to see, and still more numbers came. Draco chanted the equations, saw the parabola hanging in his mind, and fixed it there, as equation after equation drew it and made it real and reached out to the higher geometry, the maths that only Unspeakables knew.

Draco rose, soaring and spiraling and dipping through them, aloft on wings of numbers, his body made of incantations. He had only felt this exalted once or twice before, when he was working on the pendant, and he thought it a good sign that he would feel this way now, too. That was a sign that he was approaching the state where he had invented the pendant, and so this state might prove a match for that one.

The moment came. Draco hovered at the top of his climb, the pinnacle, and the light around him was brilliant. Draco could feel the chill of solitude in his bones. He was intelligent, clever, cunning, and alone.

He shot his hand forwards, at the moment when he was all but pure intellect, and his fingers curled around Potter's solid hipbone, which he had chosen earlier as his anchor.

Light assaulted him, inside and out, and Draco cried the incantations that the numbers dictated aloud, Latin syllables aligned with certain operations, words breaking and spinning and reforming in the flight of symbols, the wind of maths. Draco brought his other hand up, fingers humming with conjured magic, and touched it to the first.

Potter cried out with startlement. Luckily, Draco had thought that might happen, and it didn't distract him; his voice rose over Potter's, his chant so steady that not even a Muggle machine could have interrupted it.

Light abounded.

The Figure With Two Backs

Harry grunted and tumbled away to a floor, grainy and rough with stones. That alone was so great a relief that he splayed his hand out, his fingers investigating the cracks between the flags, before he remembered Malfoy and turned his head anxiously to look for him.

He saw the other two Aurors before he saw Malfoy, staring at him—at them both—with open mouths, and lying on the floor for some reason. Harry blinked rapidly, and then remembered what Malfoy had said about time moving in a stretched fashion in the pendant. Of course. If he and Malfoy had only spent a second in the pendant, then the other two Aurors would still have been diving to try and escape the explosion from where Harry had played with the lightning.

No longer interested in them, Harry turned his head and saw Malfoy lying next to him. Harry winced when he saw a lump swelling on the side of his skull, but it wasn't bleeding—at least on the surface—and Malfoy's breathing was steady. He had only injured himself when he fell to the floor as they came back into the real world, Harry deduced, and scrambled on elbows and knees to Malfoy's side.

"Malfoy?" he whispered, stroking his hair back from his face. "Draco?"

"Auror Potter," said one of the old men behind him, voice righteously shocked. "What happened? Why are you naked?"

Harry stared down at his body. Yes, he was naked, and erect. He hastily covered himself with one arm and then cleared his throat.

He had assumed, since Malfoy had told him that no changes that happened to their bodies in the pendant would be permanent, that the clothes would have come back with him. He had imagined speaking to Malfoy, taking off his clothes, and getting aroused from his touches. Hadn't he?

Except that didn't seem to have happened.

"The device malfunctioned." Malfoy spoke in a voice like crumbling dirt, coughing painfully as he finished. Harry still turned to him with a face full of hope. He was going to be all right. "When Auror Potter's hand strayed across the bonds between the pillars, it disrupted one of the connections that kept it working. Within the device, we spent some time, perhaps a subjective month. And to escape, Auror Potter had to use his body as a figure of the higher geometry that would allow me to make the calculations. He is to be commended for his willingness to act."

Harry's first reaction was to shudder. A subjective month? He didn't want to think about what a subjective thirteen months, the way that Malfoy said he had set the device to originally, would have felt like.

Then he realized what Malfoy was saying, and lowered his head, this time, to avoid showing his flushed cheeks as much as his erection.

The other Aurors asked questions, twittering on in what Harry thought were frankly irrelevant ways. What mattered to him, and he thought to Malfoy too, was finding some place that they could be alone.

Harry didn't know exactly what would happen once they were. Or, no, that was a lie. He didn't know what would happen after. The first moments of solitude didn't admit of much guessing.

But that was for later. For now, Harry had more important things to do, like accepting a pair of robes conjured from one of the other Aurors' sleeves and keeping his eyes on Malfoy to try and detect a trace of a bulge beneath those long clothes.

Draco could feel Potter's gaze. It made him lift his head, proud of the effect he was having, and lent a tone of silky pride to his voice as he explained what had happened to Trevors and Greyson. They were suspicious, of course, but Draco could easily direct the conversation into areas of theoretical intricacy that they knew themselves ill-equipped to pursue. They didn't try to follow him there, although they did give him more than one suspicious look.

Soon, very soon now, Draco would get to put one of his new discoveries—that he could arouse Potter with his touch—to the test.

The other, that he could unite body and mind even as he broke them apart, would have to wait for more vigorous testing. Draco wondered idly if Potter would be willing to leave his post in the Aurors and become an Unspeakable so that he and Draco would have the ability to test the theory many, many times over.

That's in the future, Draco reminded himself. He had learned to be patient about time, since he was an Unspeakable, though not patient enough to wait out the seemingly endless imprisonment of the pendant. Do not be greedy.

And he wasn't, but he was still ready to scream with impatience by the time that Trevors had put his last question and backed away with a frown, shaking his head. He seemed to think that Draco was deliberately hiding something from him, although what that could be, Draco didn't think he knew.

"Very well, Unspeakable Malfoy," he said. "We will, of course, request a full report on this device before we use it."

"Of course, Auror Trevors," Draco said, and gave a gracious nod to dismiss both him and the less suspicious Greyson. Greyson managed a smile before he left, but Draco had seen the way he eyed Potter, and thought the smile wasn't for him.

The minute that they were gone, though, he hauled Potter back to his feet and kissed him soundly enough on the mouth to make Potter squeak. He kissed back as soon as he recovered his balance, though, and with an enthusiasm that made Draco's reservations about this, about whether he wanted it more than Potter, melt away.

"Come with me," he said, and led Potter swiftly into the Department of Mysteries, to the small room that he retained there for the times when he wanted to sleep in the Ministry overnight to attend to an experiment, or for when he simply lost track of the hours. He would be spending a lot more time in it over the next few months, Draco judged, unless Potter had a place as secluded and convenient.

If this fling with Potter lasts that long.

Potter seemed inclined to stand in the doorway, stare around doubtfully at the cabinets and charts of equations on the walls, and ask questions. Draco already knew that he needed to take a direct approach with this one, though, and so he didn't let Potter hang about staring and questioning for long. He flung himself on the bed—which had been imported from the Manor and so was more than big enough—and spread his legs, turning his arse in Potter's general direction.

"Fuck me," he demanded.

A Lever to Move the Earth

Harry had to admit that, once Malfoy said what he wanted, it was extremely effective. He found himself jolting forwards as though Malfoy had pulled a key that was attached to his legs.

Malfoy lay on his bed, his legs spread, his arse thrust out. He was still covered with his robes, which Harry had to admit didn't give the best view, but it was more than enough to make him lick his lips.

Even though he hadn't done anything like this before. Even though it was still Malfoy, which meant that he should hold back out of sheer suspicion that the bastard was tricking him.

But he didn't. He couldn't, not after the way he had showed himself to Malfoy in the pendant and Malfoy had only done what he said he would do. Harry wasn't going to have anyone saying that a Slytherin was more honorable or trustworthy than a Gryffindor.

"If you're sure that we'll make a congenial shape," he couldn't help muttering as he climbed onto the bed and reached down to knead Malfoy's arse. Malfoy arched with a little hiss and shook his head. His eyes were half-shut, a smile drifting across his lips that seemed strangely independent, as if even Malfoy didn't know how it had got there.

"More than congenial," he said, and turned his head to catch Harry's knuckles between his teeth. "A beautiful one."

That was another spur, though Harry didn't know why it should be. He began to undress Malfoy, his hands moving with assurance that he wouldn't have thought he could show. But he had more than just the way Malfoy was looking at him now to give him motivation. He had the time they'd spent together in the pendant, and the way he'd started watching Malfoy there, and the erection that still throbbed between his legs, that had happened just because Malfoy was looking at him and touching him.

Harry had to admit that his body was wiser than his head, sometimes. It knew what it wanted.

Malfoy didn't help, just lay there watching Harry with narrowed eyes, as though he was considering whether Harry would make a good slave or house-elf. He did move his arms when Harry wanted to pull his shirt off and then his legs when Harry had to shimmy trousers and pants past his hips, but no more than that.

Harry wondered if he was sick to be even more turned on by that. Hopefully not, because he was going to shag Malfoy whether it was sick or not.

When Malfoy's arse was bared, though, Harry looked at the small hole rather doubtfully. It was tempting, there was no doubt about that, but he also didn't like to think of Malfoy hissing and clenching his teeth in pain when Harry was inside him. "You have lube of some kind?" he asked.

Malfoy looked at him as if Harry had asked whether he bathed. "Of course," he said, and gave a regal nod at the table nearest the bed. Harry searched through the drawer and brought out a small sealed pot of what looked like a potion, but Malfoy assured him it was lubricant. When Harry broke the seal, a smell of mint drifted on the air.

He didn't need to say anything. He just looked at Malfoy with raised eyebrows.

Malfoy flushed, but jerked his head at his own arse. "When you're ready, Potter," he said, and lifted his knees high, then paused and conjured a pillow beneath his hips so that he could lift them up further.

Harry flung back the Transfigured robe and knelt there, naked, in front of Malfoy, while he slicked his fingers and reached down to Malfoy's arse, grunting at the pressure that enveloped his fingers. It was almost painful on them. How much better—or worse—would it feel on his cock?

And all the time Malfoy's eyes glittered, and he gasped, and he was both the superior prat Harry had always thought him and not, so much more not, writhing on the covers as his face turned pink and muttering a constant stream of words in which Harry's last name was immersed. He had as much decision as ever, though, snapping his head down so that his chin struck his chest when he'd had enough stretching.

Harry hesitated, but Malfoy sneered at him. He knelt in front of him, lifted his legs, and slowly slid inside.

Warm, he thought dazedly. It's warm.

Potter wasn't the perfect lover by any means—he was going too slowly and acting as though Draco was either disgusting or more beautiful than he knew himself to be—but Draco knew potential when he saw it. The way Potter's shoulders tensed and trembled, the way he expelled his breath from his lungs once he was finally inside, and the way he shook his head and stared at Draco through dazed eyes, all argued that someday he would be the kind of bed partner that Draco most wanted.

Because there was no way that they were doing this only once.

And then Draco allowed himself to give up thoughts of the future and only concentrate on the present, because Potter was filling him and moving with him and muttering at him, and it was good.

Draco liked the way that Potter gripped him behind the knees and handled him, showing less and less gape-mouthed idiocy the more he moved. Draco pushed back into his thrusts, and gasped in satisfaction when Potter—more by accident than by design, of course—hit his prostate. He could convulse in pleasure then, and Potter, although he paused and stared at Draco, had to know it was pleasure and not pain.

From the enthusiastic way he resumed his thrusting a moment later, he knew it, or had figured it out, and Draco could arch his head back and close his eyes and listen to his own hair rustling against the pillow and sigh with relief.

With relief, because they were here in the world, again, and he had done something that had never been done, and Potter had trusted him, and there was something about the way Potter stared at him that healed very old wounds in Draco's soul, ones he had never realized weren't scabbed over.

There was the matter of his own relief, too, getting closer and closer, arching through him like a serpent made of fire, running its tongue over Draco's stomach and down between his legs, touching and choosing and bringing.

Draco shot all over his own stomach with a buck and a shout, ending in a gasp and a muted whine. He didn't sound very dignified, he thought.

But he was in time to open his eyes and see the screwed-in face that Potter made when he came, which suggested that he wasn't the only one in the bed who had come undone. Potter whined, too, and slammed his hips into Draco's as though he would be defeated, or suffer a worse fate, if a drop of his come escaped Draco's arse.

Inevitably, some did when he slumped backwards and flopped on the bed beside Draco, breathing harshly. Draco pulled him closer and felt him leave with some regret—he liked people to stay inside him if they could. On the other hand, Potter had never done this before, or Draco hadn't heard any rumors that he had, and he had done very well for a beginner.

"Well?" Potter muttered.

Draco was astonished to realize that Potter's shoulders were tense with something. Did he really expect Draco to reject him now, or mock and taunt him, when he was vulnerable? He had trusted Draco more in the pendant.

He trusted me to cooperate with him under an extreme set of circumstances where both our lives were at stake. That doesn't mean that I'll be the same outside the pendant.

Draco lowered his head and gave up a vulnerability of his own, by kissing Potter on the temple, the first utterly tender gesture either of them had made. Potter's eyes flew open, and he stared breathlessly at Draco.

"Very nice," Draco said. "Worth repeating." He hesitated, wondering if the term would really matter to Potter, then added, "Well-shaped."

Potter's smile, he discovered, had the power to lift his heart as well as any equation could, and warm it as no equation ever had.

The End.