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Justice's Voice	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2796 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Justice's Voice
- 2-Chapter Two
- 1
- 2
Title: Justice’s Voice
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Content Notes: Dark Arts, violence, angst, Auror fic
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 3600 words
Summary: After a case he botched, Auror Harry Potter has to train with Draco Malfoy to learn the difference between Dark magic, which he doesn’t always have to pursue, and evil magic, which the Aurors were formed to eradicate. He didn’t expect his lessons to get so…intense.
Author’s Notes: Another July Celebration fic, based on a prompt that someone gave me a few years ago. This will be two parts, with the second of them posted tomorrow.
Justice’s Voice
“So I’ll be training with the Unspeakables?” Harry asked Madam Kellen, his immediate supervisor, as he stepped off the lift into the Department of Mysteries.
“Nothing so plebian, Potter.”
The voice echoed against the dark stones of the corridor. Harry jerked and turned around, but kept his hand off his wand. After the sanctions that the Wizengamot had threatened to place him under, he wasn’t going to touch it in the Ministry unless it was a life-threatening emergency.
Malfoy stepped up to him and studied him in a leisurely way. Harry looked back at him and made sure to keep his grimace off his face. Malfoy wore heavy dark blue velvet robes that made him look as if he was on his way to a ballroom. They had small silver dots sprinkled over them that sparked like gleams of fire.
Definitely not what Unspeakables wear.
Madam Kellen cleared her throat. “You’re to tell him only what you absolutely must, Mr. Malfoy.”
Harry clenched his teeth, but said nothing. It was true that his Occlumency was still piss-poor. Anyone could read secrets out of his head if they tried hard enough and had the right level of Legilimency.
“Of course, madam.” Malfoy studied Harry one more time, and then held out his arm and gestured grandly behind him. “We’ll go through that door. I’m to conduct your training to make sure that you understand the distinction between Dark wizards and evil wizards.”
Harry glanced at Madam Kellen, but she only nodded sternly at him, her thick black hair moving around her face. Harry bit back another grimace. He knew this was the lightest penalty they were willing to give him and have him remain in the Aurors, after he’d made such a mess of the Sunderstar case.
“All right, Malfoy,” he said, and walked past him. There was a plain black door there, like the one that had led to the revolving room when he was here in his fifth year. But when his flinching hand touched it, nothing happened except that it opened and revealed another lift, this one made of what looked like black metal.
Malfoy said something to Madam Kellen that Harry didn’t try to overhear, and followed him. He touched a section of the lift’s wall that looked no different from the others to Harry, and the lift whirled around a quarter of a turn and began to rapidly sink.
Harry waited with his arms folded for Malfoy to say something. But he didn’t until the lift had started slowing down at what was presumably the bottom of the shaft.
“I wondered why they were asking a Starling to train you,” Malfoy murmured. “But I think I see it now. You have some potential for the Dark Arts.”
“I don’t think I need to know Dark Arts to learn about the differences between kinds of magic,” Harry said, keeping his gaze fastened on the side of the lift. It slid soundlessly open a second later, and Harry saw a corridor ahead with subdued light glowing through one wall. It made the building—cavern, tunnel, Harry couldn’t tell what it was—look like the inside of a black diamond.
“Of course you’re going to be practicing them, Potter,” Malfoy said with easy indifference, as he walked ahead of Harry and opened a door in what looked like air. Harry started, but then followed him through the glassy panel before Malfoy could shut it. Now they appeared to be in a slightly brighter room with paneled walls and a huge fireplace. Malfoy shed his robes and floated them up to a strip of glittering marble in the wall. “How can you know how they feel otherwise?”
“But all I need to know is how to arrest the right kind of people.”
Malfoy grinned and turned around. “And that’s what an Auror does, according to you?”
“I thought an Auror protected people from Dark magic, but apparently I was mistaken.”
“You trespassed on private land and interrupted an inheritance ritual. What did you think was going to happen?”
“The trespassing part I got,” Harry snapped. He’d thought he had authorization to be there, but it had become obvious, around Madam Kellen’s fifth scolding, that he didn’t. “But what the fuck is an inheritance ritual?”
Malfoy stared at him. “You don’t know that?”
“No one would bloody explain it!”
Malfoy sighed as he flicked his wand at the wall and some more lights came up, brilliant white ones that made Harry wince and want to shield his eyes. “They probably assumed you knew already,” he muttered. “Most of the wizards in our world either grow up with that or don’t get jobs that require them to know these things.”
“Yes, I know all about the prejudice against Muggleborns in the Auror ranks.”
Malfoy gave him an odd glance, but said nothing except, “Why don’t you take off your robes, Potter? This is going to take a while.”
Reluctantly, Harry slid his Auror robes off his shoulders and looked up at the line of marble on the wall. He couldn’t tell how Malfoy had hung his there, unless he’d used a Sticking Charm. Harry got ready to try one, but Malfoy took them from him instead.
“I’ve spilled my blood in every corner of this room,” he told Harry softly, and flung the robes up into the air. They turned of their own free will and stuck to the marble next to Malfoy’s. “One of the more innocent applications of blood magic there is. Yet wizards who don’t understand the Dark Arts want to ban that, too, of course.”
Harry sat back in his chair. Now that he could see better, he noticed a few separate circles of chairs, each of them made of a pair placed around a low central table. “What do you need to tell me that’s going to take a while, Malfoy?”
“Not tell you. Show you. Attune you.” Malfoy sat down in the other chair, which looked identical to Harry’s, and laid his hand on the table with a look of intense concentration on his face. The table shuddered, and a hole opened up in the middle of it. With a soft sound, a glittering, faceted crystal rose out of the hole and settled with a click into the wood. Harry stared, and blinked. The crystal looked like a geode, deep purple with explosions of blue and black in the facets. Malfoy arched an eyebrow at him. “You’ve never seen one of these before.”
“I’m pretty ignorant, you’re acting like.”
“You are,” said Malfoy calmly. “But this crystal will help me see how much I’m going to have to teach you.”
“How?” Harry eyed the crystal, ready to draw his wand if it spoke or something. After his experience with Tom Riddle’s diary, he tended to heed Mr. Weasley’s advice about magical things with no visible place for their brains.
“It’s hard to explain—”
“Try, Malfoy.”
“Surely by now, Potter,” Malfoy said, his voice smoother than Harry remembered from Hogwarts, “you’ve noticed that I’m not being hostile to you. That’s because I can’t if I’m to teach you about the Dark Arts. Teacher and pupil have to have absolute trust in each other.”
Harry stared at him. “You are shitting me.”
Malfoy sat there and looked at him.
Harry sighed and laid his wand across his lap. “Okay. How will this crystal help you find out what I need to—attune, or whatever?”
Malfoy smiled, a slight, inflexible bend of his lips. “It will tell me how great your talent for Dark Arts is, how Dark your magic is. Or your soul. There are different names for it. I prefer to call it talent, because none of the names really capture the essence of the whole.” He waved a hand at what seemed to be Harry’s robes. “The crystal resonates with your talent. It shows me what kinds of explanations I need to give and what I can skip, and what sorts of spells we can start with.”
Harry tried to ignore all the warning bells sounding in the back of his head about Dark souls, and his memories of Voldemort. He focused on the crystal when Malfoy pointed his wand at it, and tried to breathe slowly and normally.
The crystal seemed to grow until it loomed over him. Harry would have asked if that was normal, but he found he couldn’t take his gaze from the crystal or speak. Sparks were leaping across the facets. Harry leaned closer, and found the chair was gone, too. He seemed to be floating in darkness, just him and the crystal.
The purple-black colors swirled in front of him, drawing him further and further in. Harry breathed, and reached out a hand because it seemed like the right thing to do. A facet hovered right in front of him, inviting him to touch it.
The minute he brushed it, a rich, deep note sounded from the crystal, one so deep that it sounded as if it was coming from beneath Harry. Harry gasped. The next second, he was back in Malfoy’s room, sitting across from him while Malfoy watched him intently.
“Well.” Malfoy was smiling more broadly this time, although it still looked like a nasty expression to Harry. “You resonate at a deep, Dark level with the crystal, Harry. It’s not going to be as much of a pain teaching you as I thought it was.”
“Why call me by my first name?” Unnerved, Harry pulled back as the table opened again and the crystal sank into it.
“The bond between teacher and pupil in the Dark Arts is built on trust, I told you that,” Malfoy said softly. “And we’re going to have to descend rather far to create this one. All you have are bad memories of me saying your last name. So I’ll replace those memories.”
Harry bit his lip against what he wanted to say. He had botched up the Sunderstar case, he repeated to himself. So he had to be here. He had to pass this test, whatever it really was, and then he could go back to being a regular Auror.
“Fine,” he said. “Can you tell me what you mean by being a Starling? And where am I going to sleep? And eat?” Madam Kellen had made it plain that Harry would be staying in the Ministry for the duration of his lessons, which was depressing. But Harry was resigned to it.
Malfoy gestured at the wall again, and this time the band of glittering marble lit up so that light spilled everywhere in the room. There was a small kitchen set off behind a half-wall over to the side, and Harry saw another door standing open with beds behind it. “You’ll share my kitchen and bedroom,” Malfoy said, and turned around to watch him as if waiting for his objection.
You want your job, you want your job, Harry repeated to himself. “Okay, Malfoy—”
“Draco. You say my name with hatred and contempt. It’s a name for a boy you’ve made up in your head. You’re going to say my name, and mean me, your teacher.” Malfoy’s eyes were as dark and intent as the crystal.
“Okay, Draco,” Harry said. “Can I have something to eat? And why do they call you lot Starlings?”
“Of course,” Malfoy said, and waved his hand again. The cabinets in the kitchen opened, and plates and forks and bowls floated out. Harry blinked as another cabinet with the slight glow of a Freezing Charm around it did the same thing, and leaves of spinach, accompanied by shredded cheese, bits of tomato and egg, and some kind of condiment tumbled free and began to arrange themselves into a salad.
“I did say I had spilled my blood everywhere,” Malfoy remarked, turning around and seeing Harry’s gape.
“And blood magic can do that?”
Malfoy nodded and lounged back into his chair. Harry leaned cautiously back, too. He supposed the chairs were more comfortable than he’d thought, since they were covered with thick, almost satiny cloth. He just hadn’t noticed because he was sitting too far forwards on the edge of his, waiting for something to happen.
“Yes. What do you know about the distinction between Dark Arts and other kinds of magic, Harry?”
Harry’s skin prickled when Malfoy called him that. He decided to ignore it. “Only that three spells are Dark for sure. The Unforgivables. And there are others, curses that I’ve trained to fight against, which—”
Malfoy held up a hand. Harry fell silent. “No,” Malfoy said. “The Unforgivables are purely evil magic, meant to cause pain or obedience or death in a subject that isn’t willing.”
Harry narrowed his eyes. “Why would someone agree to be tortured or die or have their will taken away?”
“If they wanted to get through a hard healing? If they wanted to suffer because they thought they owed it as a penance? If they wanted to die because no one could get them to a Healer in time, or they were suffering from a degenerative disease there was no cure for?” Malfoy cocked his head a little. “You can imagine scenarios for all of those, Harry. I know you’re more intelligent than you let on at Hogwarts.”
In and out, in and out Harry’s breaths went. “Yes, all right. But then why would you say that the Unforgivables are evil? The Killing Curse would kill someone painlessly.”
“It causes intense pain at the moment of death,” Malfoy said, and his eyes glowed with something like temper before he glanced to the side and apparently let it go. Their plates of salad floated over to them then, joined by bowls of some creamy dressing that Harry hadn’t seen before, but which smelled of lemons. “Not many people know that. But no, those spells were invented to cause unwilling deaths and pain and to draw on the ambient power, not the inner power.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ambient power.” Harry poured a little dressing on his salad and tasted it. It was delicious, much as he hated to admit that.
“The power around you, outside you,” Malfoy said, a little impatiently. Then he seemed to take a calming breath of his own, and a bite of his salad apparently settled him further. “The power from your environment. All magic other than the Dark Arts pulls on that. You have to be a witch or wizard in the first place to access it, but you pull the power in through your wand, and then release it again. The way you do air from your lungs when you exhale.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “And the Dark Arts come from—”
“Your soul. Your blood. Your own willpower. Sometimes other body fluids like tears and saliva.” Malfoy leaned forwards and smiled at him, gesturing so hard Harry thought he was going to drop his plate. “Called dark because they were esoteric for a long time, just like they are now. And they come from the dark places inside you.”
Harry swallowed a mouthful and waited a moment for the flavors to stop lighting up the inside of his mouth. “Then why would it be banned by the Ministry?”
“It wasn’t always,” said Malfoy. “But it got in the way of their ideal of a meritocracy.”
Harry sighed a little. “I don’t know what that means—Draco.”
Malfoy just nodded. “I know. I’m telling you the political ideals behind it. Magic drawn from ambient power can be performed by anyone. It just depends on enough practice with the wand movements and the incantations. Most weak wizards who know that kind of magic are weak because they never studied enough to learn many spells. But the Dark Arts come from inside you. Think about people with weaker wills, or who don’t want to draw their own blood, or who have souls that are always wavering and indecisive. They can’t do as much as people who are stern and committed and don’t mind using blood for a purpose. The Ministry of centuries ago thought that was unfair to wizards who are weak of will.”
Harry grimaced and ate some more salad. He could totally see the Ministry doing that, really. “Okay. Then why are you here? What are Starlings?”
“Starlings are birds that seem black at first, when you’re looking at them from a distance,” Malfoy said softly. “But come closer, and you see how iridescent their feathers are. Every time they move, new light shatters from them. We’re the light in the darkness of ignorance, Harry. We keep the knowledge alive, and the Ministry uses us when they need to understand Dark Arts, or understand artifacts that were empowered by blood or a wizard’s will, or need certain very specific actions performed that no one can know about. Or need someone taught.”
“If Dark magic isn’t evil, why not teach it openly?”
“It would be vulnerable to the same political objections as last time,” Malfoy said calmly. “I don’t mind keeping it silent and secret, as long as the Ministry doesn’t try to stamp it out entirely.”
“You don’t mind keeping it secret from Muggleborns, either.”
“They don’t usually ask. And enough of them have apparently grown up with evil tales of imaginary witches spilling blood and wishing ill on their neighbors that they probably wouldn’t want to learn it, anyway.”
Harry held back his objections, and crunched through at least half the salad before he asked another question. Malfoy lounged back, waving his hand to get the plate to float to the kitchen when he was done.
Harry finally gave in and asked, “So I have to learn it instead of just learn about it—why?”
“So you can feel it when it’s in progress. Someone who knows Dark Arts feels the difference between it and ambient magic when it’s being performed.”
“Look, I had no way of knowing there wasn’t some evil magic going on at that ritual! Not only did they have a woman bound and bleeding on an altar—”
“It would have been her blood, her choice.”
“They had fires burning all around them. That sounds like ambient magic to me. Unless you’re going to say that they were burning their hair or something.”
“It’s likely.” Malfoy shrugged when Harry stared at him. “If you don’t want answers, you shouldn’t ask the questions, Harry. And the people who practice Dark Arts do sometimes use the trappings of ambient magic, you know, including elements like fire. The difference is that it plays a purely symbolic role in Dark magic. It’s there to influence the perceptions of the person performing the ritual. It’s secondary, a prop.”
Harry groaned and shut his eyes. “I’m never going to figure this out.”
“Let me teach you a piece of Dark magic, and then you’ll know.”
Malfoy had suddenly surged forwards as if he was about to rise from the chair, his eyes pinning Harry to his own seat. Harry paused in the act of drawing his wand, and grimaced again. This was what he was here for. “All right.”
Malfoy smiled and drew a small silver dagger from his robe’s belt. “Let me cut your palm,” he whispered. “Think of the way that you’re giving the blood freely, that you’re doing this of your own free will.”
Harry wanted to object to that, but it seemed pointless. He swallowed and nodded. Then he watched Malfoy slice a small line across his palm.
The blood that danced across his hand felt different. It tingled and prickled the way his skin had when Malfoy said his first name earlier. Harry met Malfoy’s eyes and wanted to back away from the burning intensity there.
“Think about what you want the blood to accomplish,” Malfoy commanded.
Harry shut his eyes. He could only think of one thing. “All right,” he said.
“Touch the object—or the person—that will bring about your desires.”
Harry leaned carefully past Malfoy, so he wouldn’t touch him, and rubbed his bloodied hand across the table.
The blood flared for a second, with the same twinkling stars that were lost in the darkness of Malfoy’s robes, and then the light died. Malfoy clucked his tongue. “You have to want this, Harry. I know you can break the Imperius Curse. You have more than enough will. Do it.”
Harry clenched his teeth and pressed his hand down harder, making more blood flow. It was hard not to envision Malfoy flying across the room or something, but that probably wouldn’t work if his will and blood ruled the whole space.
Instead, there was a click and Malfoy said, “It worked. You’re going to be good at this, Harry.”
Harry opened his eyes and blinked. The crystal had arisen from the wooden table in front of him. Just as he’d willed. He lifted his hand and stared at it.
He’d done that with nothing more than a bit of blood, and a bit of will.
“Oh, yes,” Malfoy said softly, from a distance that was at once far away and too close. Harry turned to him and licked his lips at the burn in Malfoy’s eyes. “Not even good. Great.”
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Justice's Voice