Title: Heraclitean Fire

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Rating: R

Warnings: Heavy angst, sex, violence, profanity, dub-con, minor character deaths, no epilogue.

Summary: Hit by a curse that will slowly destroy him, Harry makes his will and looks about for something to fill the last fortnight of his life. An invitation from Draco Malfoy to help him clear an inherited property haunted by something other than ghosts may be just what Harry needs—in more ways than one.

Author's Notes: This is a fairly dark story, and will be irregularly updated. I'm anticipating nine to ten chapters. The title refers to a concept advanced by the Greek writer Heraclitus, about the primordial nature of things: "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be eternal fire."

Heraclitean Fire

Chapter One—Your Wildest Nightmares

"There's no doubt. I'm sorry, Mr. Potter."

Harry closed his eyes. It was odd, he thought, but the voice of the Auror Healer in front of him held more sorrow than he could feel himself right now. It was probably because, from the moment that blue light had hit him from the wand of the Dark wizard he was trying to capture—the first Dark wizard, since he'd just come out of Auror training—he'd felt it was something serious. Ron had laughed and clapped Harry's shoulder when they ended up bringing in the wizard anyway, telling him not to worry, but the conviction had remained in the back of Harry's mind, gnawing a place for itself.

"Thanks for telling me," he said, his voice creaking. "For being honest." He opened his eyes and smiled at the Auror Healer. Her name was Aphrodite Mistborn, and she smiled back through her tears.

"I'm so sorry," she repeated.

"I know." Harry heaved himself to his feet with a sigh. "It isn't even an obscure curse," he muttered, "but one well-known and understood. I wonder if he thought about that when he was casting it at me?"

"Oh, most likely not." Mistborn sounded a little shocked. "Wizards like Herne aren't—they aren't sane. He knew by that point that you would stop him, and he wanted you to suffer. That was why he chose the Withering Curse."

Harry nodded, shook Mistborn's hand, and then left the Healers' division of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, walking back to his own office. The people who passed him whispered under their breaths or behind their hands and gave him compassionate, shocked looks. Harry ignored that as best as he could, continuing to walk with his head held high. He wouldn't break down in front of people who all but fed on his misery, who couldn't feel for him as a fellow sufferer but were only interested in "how the Savior would bear his agony," as the Prophet would have phrased it.

The Withering Curse. It would destroy him slowly, wilting various parts of his body: twisting his limbs, shutting down his inner organs, making him forget things and suffer from personality changes as it attacked his brain. It was an old curse, invented centuries ago, but studied thoroughly since people began to use it. There was no cure, and the pain was awful.

Well, Harry thought again, because Mistborn had been precise, there is one cure, but one I won't take. He would have had to murder an innocent in cold blood, splitting his soul. Through some mystical magical theory Harry didn't understand, the Withering Curse connected body and soul. A murder affected the victim in such a way that it would disrupt the curse's hold on the body and free the victim from it.

But Harry would never do that, and he didn't even have to worry about someone doing it for him; the murder had to be performed of the victim's own free will, or it meant nothing. He was going to die.

It was over.

He reached his office, grateful that Ron wasn't there right now, and sat down, his legs extended to the fire while he thought. He knew what he wanted to do—run screaming—and he knew what he had to do. He wanted Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, the Potter and Black vaults, his Invisibility Cloak, and his other things to go to people who could appreciate them. That meant a will.

It seemed so strange and so foreign that he could almost have laughed. He'd got through the war with Voldemort, he'd survived Auror training that he thought sometimes would kill or break him, and he'd even fought off a few people who had turned murderous along the way because they'd been so jealous of him or seen a chance to get famous by killing the Savior. He'd come into what was supposed to be the prime of his life, twenty-two years old, ready to arrest the people he'd spent the last three years training to defeat.

And now he was going to die.

It helped to think about that fact over and over, Harry decided, pounding it into his head like a blunt nail. Otherwise, he might start hoping and dreaming, shoving the start of the curse away into the future. Mistborn had confirmed that he had a fortnight from today—seventeen days from the day of the curse—before the pain would begin. Seventeen had been an important number to the original creator of the Withering Curse, because his little sister had wasted away from a disease that took seventeen days to kill her, and, in hatred against an unjust world he believed could have helped her, Jeremiah Dill had decided that anyone affected by his curse would suffer anticipation for as long.

They understood everything, from Dill's madness to the best way to solve the problem, Harry thought. They couldn't hope for a sudden, miraculous cure out of nowhere. Hermione had spent the last three days with books, but Harry knew it wouldn't help. Mistborn had told him the truth: the lore on the Withering Curse was extensive and had been centrally organized from the beginning. It just wouldn't help.

The door opened. Harry glanced up and saw Ron standing there, his face twisted.

"Mistborn confirmed it?" he whispered. Their last hope had been that Herne, the wizard they'd been hunting, hadn't used the Withering Curse, but some other spell. That was why Harry had visited Mistborn this morning, after having given the Healers some time to examine his body for traces of the curse.

Harry nodded.

Ron closed his eyes and gave a single, long, tearing sob.

Harry stood up and made his way across the office to his friend, patting him clumsily on the shoulder before he hugged him. Ron grabbed him and hugged him back, a pressure that made Harry grunt and feel as if his ribs would stave in his lungs. But Ron continued to hold him, and after a minute, Harry could think about what he was feeling and understand.

They stood there for so long that Harry wondered if he'd need to take Ron home, but his friend stepped back, wiping his hand across his nose and sniffling without a thought for how it would make him look. Harry had to turn back to the fire. When Ron didn't care about looking manly, then he really was affected.

"What are we going to do?" Ron's voice was low, still tear-choked, but expectant. Harry knew that he was looking to Harry to be the leader he always had been, during their adventures at Hogwarts and the Horcrux Hunt and during Auror training. Harry had told Ron that he was just as good at thinking for himself, like the way he'd reasoned out the strategy for the chess game when they went after the Philosopher's Stone, but Ron grinned and said he preferred to have someone else do the leading, whether that was Harry or Hermione. That way, he could come in with the idea that saved everyone at the last instant and get the glory with none of the work.

Those thoughts made Harry smile and take a deep breath. Ron and Hermione and the rest of the Weasleys were still going to be here when he'd gone. The least he could do was think of ways to make their lives happy and comfortable.

"I need to go home and think about what I'm going to leave where," he said. "But I can make the will tomorrow. Right now, you can come home with me and get roaring drunk."

Ron pounded him on the shoulder in approval, and they left together, Harry determined not to think beyond the next few hours.

"And to my son, Draco Malfoy, under the terms of my will…"

Draco raised his eyebrows. Frankly, he'd been surprised when his father's solicitor commanded him to attend the reading of the will in Hogsmeade. Lucius hadn't exactly approved of Draco's "activities" during the last few years. Those activities had included both fucking men and altering Dark artifacts so that they could be classified as Light and sold for a considerable sum. Draco wasn't sure which one had worried Lucius the most, actually.

But he was here, and his mother, graceful and composed and perfect, was here, and if she had inherited the Manor and most of the money, it seemed that Lucius had left Draco something after all. Draco prepared himself to hear that it was some paltry amount of money, just large enough to be insulting.

"…I leave the house called Bubonic, which stands in the west of Surrey." The solicitor laid down the will and cleared his throat. He was a large, nervous-looking man who fiddled with his glasses so often that Draco was amazed he could see out of them; they must be covered with fingerprint smudges. "That's all. Your father did not specify what he wanted done with the house. You may sell it or tear it down or live in it, as you will."

"Bubonic," Draco repeated, with his eyes narrowed. He'd thought he knew all the names of all the Malfoy properties, as well as the Black ones that his mother had brought—or should have brought—into the family. Lucius had repeated them over and over again in the last few years since he'd returned from Azkaban, an endless litany of curses against the people who had inherited those properties, most of them not even pure-bloods, due to the vagaries of some ancestor or another. "I don't know the place."

His mother made a small sound. Draco glanced at her and saw her sitting with her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.

Draco hadn't often seen his mother display fear, but he knew it when he saw it. He turned back to the solicitor and spoke quietly. "What is this place? Why did my father leave it to me when he left nothing else?"

The solicitor shook his head and took his glasses off, probably so that he could pretend to be busy polishing them. "The late Mr. Malfoy didn't confide in me about his intentions, Mr. Malfoy. I'm sorry. I wish there was something I could tell you. But what I mentioned already is true. This is a free gift, with no conditions. You don't have to accept it."

The name of the place is hardly promising, Draco thought dryly. I reckon there's a curse attached, and my father hoped it would consume me.

But when he thought about it, he realized that he was considering this the wrong way. Lucius Malfoy's gifts were never so single-edged. There had to be something in the house that could eat Draco—in one way or another—but also something that would reward him if he was clever or daring enough. Lucius had been full of the praise of daring in his last years, especially lamenting when Potter's luck outraced any number of risky attempts on his life.

"I'll accept it," Draco said.

His mother gasped again. Draco didn't look at her, but knew that they would be talking later.

Finally, they were outside the solicitor's office again, and Draco stretched his arms up to the air. His sides ached with the long compression it seemed they had suffered in the office. He had breathed air redolent with the presence of his father, and it was hard to realize that he would never suffer such a thing again.

"I wish you had not done that, Draco." His mother spoke in a subdued voice, keeping her attention on the thin white handkerchief that she was twisting between her hands.

"Why not?" Draco asked, turning to her. "Is it better to sell the house instead, do you think? It's true that I could use the money to work on my projects."

His mother only set her lips and didn't respond. Draco knew she didn't like his "projects" any more than his father had. She thought Dark artifacts should be left the way they were, as though there was some strict line between what people called Dark and Light—as if that was a law of nature, instead of a human and legal perception. Draco thought he had gone further into the true philosophy that so many of the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord had professed to believe, that there was only power and no Light or Dark. If that was right, then he could change a few things and make one into the other.

Draco smiled faintly as he thought of the latest artifact that had come into his hands. It was true that some cases were more difficult than others. Among other things, he suspected this particular artifact would require two people to work on it, and there simply wasn't someone he trusted enough to know the artifact's secret right now. He was considering the costs and benefits of hiring someone from the Continent or putting someone under the Imperius Curse.

"The story of Bubonic is a long one," his mother said, "and we should require seats."

Draco recognized one of his mother's delaying tactics. Well, this time he didn't intend to accept it. He simply nodded and held out his arm. "I've been wanting to try that new restaurant in Diagon Alley. Why don't you come with me?"

His mother grimaced lightly and took his elbow. Draco Side-Along Apparated them with great pleasure, partially because his mother dropped his arm as soon as she could. Perhaps she thinks that the hands of a man who fucks men shouldn't touch her, Draco thought.

He had come a long way from the days when the approval and love of his parents was all that mattered to him. Of course, they had become shadows of themselves after the war, and he had started to look about him and seen that he would have to make his own way in the world if he wanted a place in it at all.

The new restaurant was down a slight side-alley, the only building there, and set into the stone of the walls. Draco smiled when he stepped through the doors and saw the cavern theme continued with walls that glittered like geodes, a floor patterned with a mosaic of an abyss, and stalactites of basalt and granite hanging from the ceiling. His mother, behind him, gasped when she walked out over that shining black abyss.

"A table," Draco told the waiter who came to lead them in, clad in robes of purest white, so as to glow in the dim place. Luckily, their table had candles. Draco wanted to be able to see every flicker of expression on his mother's face as she spoke.

When they were seated and had ordered drinks—the house's specialty of orange-flavored wine for Draco, water for Narcissa—the waiter left them alone, and Draco leaned forwards, arms folded in front of him, and looked patiently at his mother.

"Don't put your elbows on the table," she said, but it was obviously automatic, with nothing of her heart in it. She looked from left to right, and waited until her water had come, after which she began to drink it compulsively. Draco sipped his wine and waited.

As he had suspected would happen, the dark atmosphere and the grief at her husband's death broke down his mother's resolve. She shoved her water away from her hard enough to slop some on the table; Draco thought about commenting on that but didn't. Her mouth was finally opening, her eyes grim and fixed on him, and he thought he would get the answers he deserved and desired.

"Bubonic remained in the Malfoy family when the properties were parceled up among your ancestors' cousins centuries ago because no one else wanted it," she said abruptly. "It is a haunted place."

Draco snorted. "You forget that ghosts have held no terrors for me since I went to Hogwarts, Mother."

"There are other ways in which things can be haunted," Narcissa said, and her fingers dug into the obsidian-smooth top of the table. "Your father intended to tell you about it once you came of age, the way that other Malfoy heirs have been told. But he saw your daring and your—courage, and he concluded that you would think you could go in and tame the house, rather than simply accepting the treasures from it."

"Treasures?" Draco asked, cocking an eyebrow. Contrary to what his parents thought, he would be content to reap rewards for lesser work, as long as those rewards were good enough.

Narcissa nodded quickly. "The house produces four black diamonds each year, at the turn of each season. If you gather them, as your father did, and sell them, then you can be rich enough to satisfy your wildest nightmares without the inheritance. The diamonds are always found lying outside the house's front door."

Draco tapped his finger against the table. If Bubonic had been that simple, his mother would have had no reason to show horror at the bequest (other than that, perhaps, it could have made Draco independently wealthy). And Lucius would have had no reason to give him such a simple gift.

"What else?" he asked. "What happens if I enter the house?"

Narcissa shut her eyes. "Lucius never considered me worthy to learn the innermost secrets," she hedged. "He never seemed to think that anyone without Malfoy blood should know the truth."

Knowing how much more his father had valued her than Draco, Draco simply arched a brow in doubt and waited.

"But there is something else in the house," Narcissa continued. "Something that makes it haunted, something that will produce great wealth—greater than the black diamonds—if conquered. I don't know what it is. I think the stories of wealth a myth, myself. But those are the stories."

Draco nodded. "And did my father ever venture inside after this secret?"

"Soon after he came out of Azkaban," Narcissa said. "It was the source of the weakness in his lungs that killed him."

Draco sat up. "I thought that was simply the cold environment of Azkaban and his disappointment with me."

Narcissa gave him a speaking glance, as though to say that Lucius's disappointment had had more than enough to do with it. Draco looked calmly in return, and once again she backed down in front of him.

"I never saw anything like the scars on his lungs that the Healers showed me," Narcissa said softly. "They could have been the marks of claws, but of course, if they had been, he would not have survived. I think that the house is haunted by a spirit of disease, hence the name, and that anyone entering it will be extremely lucky if they manage to survive."

Draco grunted. He still thought it was possible that Lucius's weakness had come from the prison alone, and that this tale was the one Narcissa told herself to lessen her shock and fear that her husband had died so young. But the scars on the lungs were an intriguing piece of evidence.

And a spirit of disease…such spirits had to have someplace to live. Draco thought it possible that a Dark artifact was in the house, a more powerful one than he had ever encountered, and of course his fingers itched to possess it.

"I'm not saying what I'll do yet, Mother," he said. "Black diamonds sound like more than enough wealth to tempt anyone."

His mother gave him a suspicious look. "But you value other things more than wealth."

Draco smiled and sipped his wine.

He still hadn't exactly decided what to do the next morning, when he opened the Daily Prophet and caught sight of the photograph and the headline. The photograph was Potter turning away from the camera, his head bowed and a look of devastation on his face. The headline screamed: SAVIOR DYING FROM THE WITHERING CURSE!

The accompanying article cast everything into the brave, martyred Gryffindor mode that Draco would have expected from Potter, saying that Potter wanted to spend the fortnight he still had before the pain began doing something to help others. He didn't know what that would be yet, but he invited people to contact him if they had projects he could help with.

Draco smiled and smoothed a thumb down the page. He wasn't really satisfied that Potter was dying, but he had to admit a cool unsurprise. That one was never destined for a long life, the way he charged into things.

And then he sat still for a moment before he laughed. He was still smiling, unusually for him before the work of the day had begun, as he stood and made his way to his Owlery.

Potter might say, or imply, that he'd rather work at charitable projects, but Draco knew better. The impulse to adventure ran deepest in Potter's being, rather than the compassionate one. Having discovered a tendency to that himself as he worked with Dark artifacts, Draco could sympathize, a bit.

If Draco offered an opportunity for Potter to adventure in Bubonic with him, Potter would probably snatch it. He could explain to his friends that he wanted to redeem Malfoy, or something equally stupid. He could do whatever he wanted. But Draco thought it was a hook that would catch him.

And meanwhile, he would venture into the place with a powerful, Auror-trained wizard at his back—one who feared no death the place could fling at him.

Draco grinned down at his letter as he composed it.

Dear Potter,

So sorry to hear that you're dying…