Alluring Lullaby

Authors Note: Many thanks to my beta Shannon for her work on this fic. Also, if anyone would like to know about updates and/or new projects you can find me on Facebook or my Yahoo Group (see my profile for details). Also (and this is the last Also I swear) for those of you who haven't already noticed, I posted two new stories -Becoming & Trophy. You should check them out because they are already new favorites of mine.

Chapter 11 The Final Choice

Draco nearly gaped at the sight before him. After six arduous and lonely years, there was Harry was sitting on his shimmering black rock in the center of the pool just staring across the glade at him. He had his legs pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around them while his jet-black hair fell around his pale body like a velvet cloak.

The emerald eyes of his former lover bore into him like a unicorn impaling his skull and Draco stepped forward into the glade. At once the arched opening he had been permitted to walk through transformed, the thorny branches knitting back together into a solid wall once more.

He turned to Harry, letting his eyes show the damage that the years apart had caused him and when he spoke, his words wavered with his fear of rejection. “I thought I’d never see you again,” Draco whispered.

“You were never meant to,” Harry called back over the water, his voice twisted and angry; not bell-like at all.

“I’ve been searching for you all this time, hoping I’d find you so that I could tell you how much I miss you,” he replied, trying not to let Harry’s anger shake him away from his reason for being there. This might be the only time he had to show Harry how he felt.

“What is it you miss most? Stringing me along while you plan to marry someone else or falsely accusing me of seducing your arse of a father?” the Nix replied bitterly.

Draco winced but nodded, feeling it was a fair argument. “I was behaving childishly,” he admitted. “But I’m different now, I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’ve grown,” he said at last.

“So I see,” the Nix muttered, gesturing to his state of general disrepair. “And what have your measly six years and facial hair taught you, Draco?”

Draco made to stride forward to the edge of Harry’s pool, but clearly the Nix was not amendable to that idea and Draco soon found himself suspended upside down by a strand of ominous looking vines. He sputtered and begged to be released but instead the Nix simply leapt from his rock in a gracefully fluid movement and stood next to where Draco dangled only a few meters from the earthen floor.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t simply erase your memory and send you back to the manor?” Harry asked, walking in circles around Draco’s body so that he had to twist uncomfortably to keep eye contact.

“I never want to forget you. Even if you reject me and leave me alone to my miserable existence, I still would prefer to remember you, Harry,” he replied with an edge of panic in his voice. He knew that Harry held the power to do just what he said and he didn’t know what frightened him more – the idea that he might never kiss Harry again or the idea of never being able to remember the first kiss.

“Stop calling me that,” the Nix growled. “I am not yours to name.”

“You were once and I would will it so again. Harry, I love you, please,” he begged. “I’ll do anything to prove it, anything to show you that you are my one and only.”

Before Harry could answer the forest shifted and rumbled around them. Trees swayed in the wind as if some immense storm approached and the water quivered as if a mighty troll were walking nearby.

Crimson and golden leaves fell to the ground below Draco, creating a welcoming berth to lay his heavy head. The vines twirled and released their hold on Draco’s legs, much to the Nix’s chagrin and the pale blonde fell to the ground, held aloft only by the bed of gemstone leaves.

Immediately Draco’s eyelids felt heavy, as if six years of not enough sleep was finally catching up to him in one fell swoop. He tried to fight it, but the need for slumber nearly suffocated him. He reached a hand out to Harry, who looked slightly panicked and confused. “Don’t let them take me,” he pleaded and Harry’s eyes shone with a fierce defiance.

“I won’t,” Harry promised just in time to watch Draco’s eyelids flutter shut and his breathing change to the familiar quality it would get when the blonde was in a deep and restful sleep.

“What did you do to him?” the Nix demanded of the wood, turning and glaring at each tree in turn.

The wind whistled and whipped his hair around him in violent flicks. He heard words on the breeze like a lover’s whisper telling him that they did what they had to do.

“You have no rights to the boy. He’s mine!” Harry shouted, all of his anger and bitterness falling away in the face of Draco’s danger. He had seen the wood take humans in sacrifice before, but it had been ages. He wouldn’t let them take Draco into their womb; he wouldn’t let them absorb all of his magic to selfishly replenish the forest, he would rather sacrifice himself.

“If he is yours, than claim him,” hissed the black snake that had spoken to him before.

The Nix sighed and stared into the aged face of his love. “I’m not sure if I can. I’m not certain I can accept another heartbreak when the first has not yet mended.”

“You give us little choice then,” the slithering obsidian creature responded. “We will give the boy one last test, and you should hope he passes it without assistance.”

Harry growled, his voice reverberating through the glade and sending a shiver through the wall of thorns. “You shall regret it if you harm even a hair on that boy’s head,” he promised.

“We shall take our chances,” the serpent replied with a hiss that sounded too much like laughter, and then he moved quickly back into the spring pool and out of Harry’s sight once more.

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The golden light that had been streaming into the glade gave way to black so pitch that Draco could not see his own hand in front of his face. He got a sense as though he was standing, but he couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet. There was no movement of air, not even a faint breeze around him and there was something else off-putting and unusual about where he was, and it was quickly apparent that it was because this place held no scent.

It was void of anything sensory and that fact made Draco shiver in fear. “Where am I?” he asked to the dark, but his voice made no sound, just a shifting of emptiness in an already vacant world.

A spot of color appeared then, and if Draco had been able, he would have laughed. Black against black approached him as if a shadow were able to slither. He recognized the serpent from the wood; not by his shimmering scales but rather it’s piercing yellow eyes, which were the only color in the dark.

Behind him the world began to shift and fill in and Draco could see the forest as it was, dying and begging for help. Everywhere he looked, Draco could see rotted wood and parched plants as if the forest behind the manor was becoming a desert.

“Your choices are beginning to grow slim,” the snake hissed, the sound making the tiny hairs on the back of Draco’s neck stand on end. “We have little time left, and you have turned our Nix into a petulant child. He’s become as stubborn as you it seems.”

“I apologized but he wouldn’t hear it,” Draco sighed, happy that his voice was making a sound at last, though it still sounded hollow in his own ears. “He hates me.”

“Which is why we interfered,” the serpent replied. “You have two destinies before you, young Malfoy. Both will bring peace to the wood, but only one will bring that to you as well.”

“Well clearly I want that one,” Draco replied with narrow eyes. “Why do you continue to toy with me, why not just tell me what to do?”

“Would you curse yourself to an immortal life even though the Nix no longer loves you?” the serpent asked, ignoring Draco’s question. “Or would prefer a swift and painless death?”

The words fell onto Draco’s ears like a grim reaper’s sentence being dolled out. He loved Harry more than anything and the opportunity to live forever with him would be nearly impossible to turn away. On the other hand, it was clear that Harry no longer loved him, and seemed to rely only on bitterness and anger. Could he live another hundred years in the pain that he was experiencing now, could he live a thousand? A forever of affliction seemed like a very long time. Wouldn’t death be final and sweet in comparison with the torment and anguish he had been feeling for the past six years?

“I don’t know,” Draco admitted. “Neither seems like an ideal option.”

“You have only a short time to think on it,” the snake replied. “Just call out your answer when you have decided and we will hear you. If you say nothing than a decision will be made for you.”

With that the serpent left, slithering away into the rotted wood and the color and images Draco saw began to fade with him until around him was nothing but pitch and emptiness once more.

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Harry watched Draco’s sleeping form and started to worry even more than before. He looked like an angel, seemingly at peace and only dreaming of sweetness and fluff, but the Nix knew better and he knew his wood well enough to know when it was up to no good.

He let the innate part of himself –the part that allowed him to communicate with nature- flow out of his body like vine tendrils reaching for the sunlight. He sought through his glade and past, his body going rigid when he felt the death of the earth beyond his thorny wall. With renewed determination he pushed past and felt the sickness of the forest spread wider and wider.

How had he not noticed this before? How had he remained oblivious to his forest dying all around him?

“You see now why we must resort to such drastic measures?” hissed a familiar voice. He wasn’t sure why the wood had recently adopted this serpent form but he was beginning to feel like Adam.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” the Nix asked, his voice livid and wavering with his anger.

“We tried but you had no mind for anything but the boy,” the serpent replied.

“I would have done something,” the Nix protested, his entire body shaking with the rage and grief he felt upon feeling the death of his home.

“What could you have done with your heart so broken and shattered? You’ve been useless to us, Nix. You’ve been a cancer we’ve contained here in the glade and even that is beginning to lose its luster,” the snake chastised.

“So, now what? You kill Draco to preserve it?” Harry demanded.

“If that is what it comes to, yes,” the snake replied, and it was clear that the forest had no qualms with taking a human life in payment for the renewal of the wood and glade. “He has strong magic within him, and either way he will help us grow back to what we were and flourish beyond even that.”

“What do you mean either way?” Harry asked, confused with what the wood would mean by that.

“All will reveal itself in due time, my son,” the snake replied and slithered away once more.

Harry slumped beside his sleeping love and stared at him, willing him to open his eyes. His Draco looked different, older and more worn than when he had left. He ran his fingertips softly along the darkened skin beneath Draco’s eyes and mourned for his lost years, years that he could have been by the boy’s side.

All the love he had ever felt came rushing back to Harry in that moment and he knew he could not let go of the cherished blonde so easily. He called out for the serpent to come back, but he got no answer, in fact the glad had gone deathly quiet.

Just as he moved away to investigate, a movement from Draco’s leafy bed caught his eye. It took him a moment to realize what was happening and the panic set in making his immortal heart thud violently in his chest.

Slowly but surely Draco was sinking, or rather being pulled, into the bed he rested upon. Harry lunged and tried to pull him back up to the surface but the force dragging Draco under was far stronger than his own. With pained cries, Harry scrabbled at the leaves, trying to shove them aside and unbury his love, but it was no use, for by the time the leaves began to blow away in the breeze, Draco had already been swallowed into the ground.

Falling to his knees Harry cursed the forest and screamed his grief into the open air. A tear fell from the eye of everyone close enough to hear the sorrow ridden howl. At last, completely spent, Harry collapsed to the ground and curled in on himself, willing the forest to finally let him perish.

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Authors Note: I know it's been a while since I updated this story, and here I am leaving you with yet another cliffhanger. I'm evil, I know. I've made peace with that. *wink