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The Library of Hades	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4439 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Ten—Promises Made on Blood

            Draco shut his eyes when Harry began talking. He hadn’t told Harry what to say, and he wondered for a moment if his blush would carve permanent flames into his cheeks.

            On the other hand, he hadn’t told Harry not to say that, either. And his lips twitched when he thought of his parents’ reaction. He would have to insist on viewing Harry’s Pensieve memories after they had returned home.

            Which we won’t if you don’t concentrate more on opening the wards.

            Draco shook his head and turned back to the wards in front of him. They still spat when his hands came near them, but he had cast several Dark spells that struck at their foundations and unraveled them, and the flaring was less than it had been. Now they sounded like angry kittens instead of angry flames.

            Draco studied them with patient eyes that had the benefit of Auror training now as well as Malfoy training, and smiled when he noticed the weaknesses threaded through them. Cracks from his spells, cracks from age, cracks from the way that his parents had forced them to react against his presence seven years ago. It was centuries since a Malfoy had become so completely outcast as Draco, and that meant his parents didn’t know all the intricacies of how to change the wards so as to eliminate his presence.

            He bent closer and blew out, adding magic to his breath by means of a nonverbal spell that he’d learned from an unlucky duelist. The wards flickered and wavered, and their resemblance to flames increased. Candle flames this time, though, and they were thinning further as he watched them.

            Draco held up his wand and waved it back and forth, twice. He heard the wards straining to follow it, and knew that this was the dangerous moment. If his parents looked around now, they couldn’t help but notice the strange behavior of the wards, and they would come down on him like hunting hounds.

            But red and gold light flaring up from the front of the Manor said that his father was trying to hit Harry with the spells that became fists, and Harry was laughing and taunting them with his flying as much as with his words. Draco didn’t think he needed to worry about being noticed for some time to come.

            He blew again, and chanted the same weakening spell, and the wards shuddered and vanished from a circle as long and tall as his body, leaving the wall undefended. Still a rock wall, still challenging to climb, but Draco wasn’t a Socrates Auror for nothing. He laid his wand against the stone and whispered yet another incantation.

            The stone dissolved into grey flecks like snow. Draco walked through them as they crumbled to the ground, laid a glamour over the hole to cover the damage in case someone happened to look through the windows while he was inside, and then turned towards a side door with his lungs shivering in anticipation.

            He had been in the Manor less than a month before, but this was his true homecoming.

*

            “You will take wine, Mr. Potter.”

            Harry wondered if Lucius knew how to speak except in orders. Perhaps he didn’t speak so to Narcissa, considering the way she sat beside him like a leopardess in front of a kill and now and then flicked Lucius a glance. He felt those glances like reins, Harry thought; he changed direction without his expression wavering.

            “I don’t want any, thanks,” Harry said.

            Narcissa turned her glance on Harry now, but Harry had spent all his childhood with people trying to put bridles of one sort or another on him, and his Ministry career hadn’t been free of it, either. He wasn’t a mount for anyone’s riding.

            Except Draco’s.

            He smiled and flushed at the thought, and perhaps that was why Narcissa blinked before she said, “We have sworn you safe conduct in the Manor. You insult us by refusing.”

            “I don’t like wine,” Harry said, truthfully enough. He would drink it for Draco’s sake, or to blend in on a case, and otherwise only used it when he was tormenting himself with memories of Lionel. “I prefer water. I wouldn’t mind pumpkin juice if you have it, either.”

            Narcissa and Lucius slid glances towards each other that Harry could translate easily, although he might have expected they would be in High Pure-Blood. This is the man that our son abandoned us for?

            Harry smiled, and wondered both how long it would take Draco to break into the Manor’s library and how they could see it as Draco abandoning them for Harry when they had driven Draco away years before he and Harry were partnered.

            Then again, speakers of High Pure-Blood always seemed able to find ways to ensure that nothing was their fault. Harry was glad that Draco had learned to speak a different dialect.

            “Water, then,” Narcissa said—pumpkin juice was apparently right out—and gestured towards the house-elf that Harry had seen hovering in the corner of the doorway. It immediately ducked out of sight and returned with a brimming glass. Harry took it and held it.

            That occupied one hand, which was a little unfortunate, but he could bring wandless magic to his defense if he really had to. And he had to trust to the safe-conduct to at least give him warning.

            “What do you want to leave Draco?” Lucius spoke briskly, but Harry had learned enough to keep his eyes on Narcissa, and he saw her grimace. Her husband’s crassness seemed to disgust her. As she leaned back, that silver necklace around her throat glowed again, and Harry made a mental note to find out what magical properties it had, if he could. He didn’t think the metal itself was important as much as the shape of the coils and the way it hugged her skin like a snake.

            “The bribe, you mean?” Harry sipped from the water, or appeared to. It was a useful trick he had learned at Ministry functions, back when the Ministry still wanted him there. It made him appear drunk and babbling when he was still sober and setting traps for suspects in his speech. “I don’t want any bribe. Draco himself is enough.”

            “You realize that Draco would have more chances for life, for wealth, if he was our son once again,” Narcissa said. Her words were as plain and calm as snowfall.

            “I didn’t think he’d ever stopped being that,” Harry replied. “Unless you’re talking about that experimental charm that someone came up which ensures pure-blood families aren’t really related anymore to their exiled children.”

            Narcissa’s fingers twitched once. Harry expected her to ask about the spell, which didn’t exist, and which he could then have some fun weaving her in lies about.

            Instead, she leaned forwards and said, “Draco was reared and trained as our heir. He does not do well in the outside world with those instincts and precepts guiding his behaviors. Not as well as he would do in the place he was raised for.”

            “You make him sound like a dog it’s hard to housebreak,” Harry said, and grinned a little when he saw the way that they both stared at him. They’d probably never had a dog, and wouldn’t have housebroken it if they had. Instead, house-elves would have magically cleaned up its shit. Harry wasn’t entirely convinced that that didn’t happen with Lucius and Narcissa themselves. “Anyway. I don’t want to leave him, and I think that Draco is a good Auror. Even if he has to fight to fit in, so do I, and I didn’t have the same background that he did.”

            Lucius and Narcissa exchanged another pair of flowing glances, and Lucius nodded. Narcissa said, “That is evident.”

            “What is evident?” Harry sipped at his water again, swallowed air, and tried to show them his widest eyes and stupidest expression.

            “That you had a very different background than Draco did.” Narcissa’s words bounced like sleet now. “Not just Muggle, but abusive.”

            And Harry found his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth as dryly as though they had offered him nothing to drink, after all.

*

            Draco stepped into the library, and relaxed.

            This was one of the magical places of his childhood. Here he had hidden from his parents’ boring lessons and learned new and interesting ones, in the years before he went to Hogwarts. Here he had learned about Dark Arts, and what separated them from ordinary magic (the Ministry ban, usually), and the grand and proud history of his family. No matter how much his parents had forced him to leave behind, they couldn’t take his memories from his mind, and they had probably never known how many private impressions he’d formed as he sat here reading, instead of walking the gardens or exchanging polite and chilly conversation with his friends the way his mother and father had thought he was doing.

            He didn’t know everything they would have liked him to know. He knew more.

            He moved on through the shelves, his hand up and trailing down the edges of the books. His parents hadn’t bothered to improvise wards in here that would catch him. Draco halted at the end of an aisle and turned his head, eyes shut as he thought about the relative position of the history books, the Dark Arts books, and the books on recovering from mental illness. (His ancestors had had a very small portion of people who would trust themselves to St. Mungo’s; the rest depended on themselves).

            Yes, there. Draco strode over to the shelf that glimmered behind a blue shield of wards, sufficient to keep a child out. When he touched them, the wards sniffed out his adult Malfoy blood and vanished. Draco picked up the first book.

            A Guide to Possession. He studied the dark cover and the gilded braiding on it carefully, the sketches of the letters, and the rubbed place on the spine where the author’s name had once been before he lifted his wand and created a glamour in the book’s place on the shelf. It would fade once someone had held it for a few seconds, but he only wanted to cover up the evidence of his theft for immediate purposes.

            He rather liked the notion that his parents would realize what he had stolen once he and Harry were safely away.

            He went down the shelves, sorting out Healing Possessed Minds, The Legilimens and the Occlumens, The Hidden Art, Dark Wizards of History, and others, and dropping them into the conjured satchel he had taken to carrying. Harry had mentioned the spell his friend Granger used to expand a bag inside, and Draco had figured it out after a few experiments. Each book received study and its replacement glamour in time.

            Then he reached the end of the shelf and turned around.

            And found that there was an addition to the library, one he hadn’t known about, glimmering on the far wall. Unprotected by wards. A brilliant mirror, the same color as the silver necklace that his mother had lately taken to wearing.

            His eyes narrowed, Draco took a step forwards. He could see his own face in the mirror, pale and gold-wreathed, and his eyes still narrowing as if they would reach the condition of slits and then vanish altogether.

            Magic shimmered around the thing—not unusual for Malfoy Manor, but with a sharper edge than Draco remembered from the wards. He moved closer and closer, wanting to know what it was, and reached out a hand to touch the frame, which had less magic than the glass and was carved with writhing snakes.

            Silent light unfolded from one of the serpents’ mouths and seized his arm, yanking him in and close. Draco stumbled, then recovered his balance and braced his feet. He was not going any nearer to the mirror than he was already.

            It drew him, however, shining through and through, and utterly quiet, so that Draco did not think it was a ward that had alerted his parents. He would have to fight it in the same silence. He cast Locking Charms and charms to baffle sound at the door of the library, and then settled into the battle.

*

            Harry knew his lips had cracked where he’d stretched them around his narrow smile, but he didn’t know how to heal them without being obvious. He settled for clearing his throat and saying, “Excuse me? You must be mistaken. You know full well that I was raised away from the wizarding world by Muggles, not pure-bloods like yourself.”

            Lucius’s eyes glinted in a way that said he would remember that insult, but Narcissa’s never changed. “We know you were,” she said. “We have spoken to your relatives. And they told us about the chores. The lack of food.” She paused, like someone about to lay down the final piece in a game of chess. “The cupboard.”

            Harry said nothing. He could feel the pounding in his ears, and wondered for a moment why the Dursleys would even have spoken to the Malfoys, instead of slamming the door in their faces because they were wizards—

            Money. Of course. It had been even more important to Vernon than being normal. And he probably got used to wizards during the war, at least a little bit. The Malfoys could have persuaded them to talk.

            “Interesting information you have there,” Harry said, and shook his head. “From people who hated me. If you plan on exposing how naughty I was to the population as a whole, I think you should remember that they probably exaggerated.”

            “I was not,” Narcissa said, “planning on exposing your actions.”

            Her eyes said it all. Harry wondered if he should be depressed or maddened to realize that he could read her so clearly, but that was a distant, intellectual thought, separate from the emotion trying to crest in him.

            He had just barely got people to ignore him except for when he made a spectacular arrest. This would bring back all the bollocks about the “poor Savior” and the “torment he suffered” when he was a child. It would bring back the requests for interviews, from Mind-Healers convinced they had the right treatment, from people who wanted him to know how they had been abused or hurt so they could compare experiences. It would undermine him and preoccupy him.

            It would make him a much less sufficient support for Draco and a much less efficient Auror. It was a good threat.

            Which meant Harry had to counter it with one as good, although he wouldn’t have the evidence to back it up that Narcissa did.

            He let his eyes rest on her necklace for a moment and then said, “I think you heard during the war that I could speak Parseltongue. The only one in England other than Voldemort who could.” Ah, that name was good for a little flinch, or at least a back-and-forth sway. “And since his death, the only one who can.”

            “Tell us why that matters.” Narcissa, blunt again, but polished as a cat’s claws, sitting there with her hands folded in her lap.

            “That necklace of yours,” Harry said, and smiled at the coils of it, and hissed once, sharply, not a word in Parseltongue but a random noise. At the same time, he chanted a nonverbal incantation in his mind as strongly as he could, trying to force and focus his wandless magic so it would obey him, trying to make the necklace move—

            Narcissa’s hand flew up as the necklace twitched against the skin of her throat, and she stared at him. Harry swept a small bow and came up shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, with so much insincerity that Narcissa seemed as if she would really have liked to slap him. “But you see, I recognize certain truths in you, too. Truths that I would have no reason to hold back on if you exposed mine.”

            “You would not do such a thing if you cared about Draco,” Lucius said.

            “What makes you think I care about him that much?” Harry shook his head. “I already told you all the things that we do in the bedroom together. And he’d already be dealing with the backlash from what you revealed about me.”

            Narcissa and Lucius turned towards each other, and aside from a few murmured words that Harry couldn’t make out, appeared to communicate entirely through their eyes and the shape of their mouths. Harry curled his lip. Was their appearance really so important to them that they would keep it up in front of an enemy who they’d threatened and who had threatened them back?

            Narcissa turned to him with her eyes as large as moons, at last. “We will have to…consider what to do, Mr. Potter. And if you can be trusted to keep your silence for the sake of protecting Draco.”

            Harry smiled at her, all edges and shadows and shine, the way that he had learned from Draco and from her. “I hope that you will think carefully and make the right decision, Mrs. Malfoy.” And he sipped at the water, watching her stroke the silver necklace again. It had only been a wild guess that it had anything to do with Parseltongue, but he thought he had convinced her that he could influence it.

            Which meant she was willing to wear it and worry about that influence rather than simply remove it, where it could not threaten her anymore.

            Interesting.

*

            Draco tried a simple Blasting Curse first. It was aimed at the center of the mirror, but the wards deflected it aside and into the arms of silver light that were holding onto Draco and drawing them nearer.

            One of the ones that clutched him near his left shoulder shattered.

            Draco half-bared his teeth. So that was the way it was? He hurled more curses at the mirror, and more and more arms shattered. Draco stepped behind a small table piled with books and braced his hip against it. At this rate, he thought he might soon reach the point where the mirror couldn’t pull him anymore.

            Then he realized that the serpents’ mouths on the edges of the mirror were growing more limbs, reaching out as if that would make it easier for him to surrender, and he half-snarled and changed tactics. This was Dark magic, and needed to be fought in the same way, like the twisted that he and Harry had encountered.

            Draco crouched so that the arms had to reach for him around the edge of the table, and launched a swift incantation that surrounded him in a glowing aura of purple-black light. Then he waited for the newest silver arms to settle on him, ignoring the way that the mirror continued to pull with the ones that already held him. Those arms were having a hard time reaching him at the angle where he crouched.

            The newest silver limbs touched the aura—

            And blew apart in a flurry of silver sparks that started a small fire on the floor. Draco smothered that by rolling on top of it—a true fire would cause alarms to go off despite the silencing charms he had cast—and then got out from under the table and began another deep chant, this one a spell he had learned from books in this very room.

            The mirror was pulling him nearer in the meantime. Draco ignored that, because he had to or it would drive him mad. Instead, he reached deeper and deeper for that spell, pushing and pouring his strength into it, reminding himself again and again that he had to win against this, and that his parents couldn’t know he was there. They would destroy Harry. They would destroy him. He would never stand a chance of getting his heritage and his money back.

            It was impossible to say which of those reasons was the strongest, but reminding himself of them all did the trick, and made it possible for him to resist. When he got close enough to see the blurred outline of his reflection in the mirror, he thrust his hand forwards, his wand shimmering with an aura that echoed the one burning around Draco, and the sparks brushed the edge of the mirror.

            There was a shuddering sound both in and outside the room. Draco saw the mirror shimmer, dance, and then fade like a flame.

            The reaching silver arms vanished, too. Draco dropped to his knees and shut his eyes, his head twitching to the side and his arms and shoulders falling into place as he relaxed. The spell was one that could make solid objects cease to exist in the same way that dispelled glamours would. He hadn’t known if he could make it work on an artifact as powerful as the mirror; he had never done it before.

            Then he opened his eyes and turned his head as he heard screams.

            He snatched the satchel, tore open the library’s door, and began to run towards the wall. The screams weren’t in Harry’s voice, which meant he was getting out of here instead of investigating the way he would if they were.

*

            Harry leaped to his feet and found himself pressing backwards as the necklace around Narcissa’s throat abruptly shattered in a series of flying silver shards. He avoided the shards more by accident than by design; they seemed to be aimed at the couch he was sitting on, but now he wasn’t there.

            Narcissa had both hands up at her throat, tearing, her fingers sliding on the blood and the cut skin. Lucius was kneeling next to her, calling and shaking her desperately, but she could only kneel and scream. Harry wondered if the necklace had cut her jugular. No, surely not, or she would already be dead. It was probably magical trauma instead of physical pain.

            Narcissa went silent at last, because Lucius had cast a spell that rendered her unconscious. He sat back with the jagged pieces of the necklace in his hands and looked up at Harry.

            Harry recoiled before his gaze.

            “I will remember that you did this, that you controlled it, and then this happened,” Lucius whispered. His hands began to close down on the silver pieces, and they bent and warped. “It is only my safe-conduct that holds me back now. Go.”

            Harry turned and left the Manor. His own private guess was that the necklace breaking had something to do with Draco breaking into the Manor, but he had no idea, really, and no desire to stay. He would count on Draco’s expertise to mean that he had already left the Manor and needed no help, and no further distractions.

            Once he was back on his broom, flying back to the agreed-upon meeting point, then he had time to think about what was wrong with that assumption. But he saw the flash of white-blond hair through the trees, and a waving hand, and he could let go of his own fears when he landed and put his arms around Draco, bowing his head to place his nose in Draco’s hair.

            “Harry?” Draco sounded bewildered, although he was stroking Harry’s head without asking all the questions that Harry would have in his place. “Is something wrong?”

            Harry looked up and shook his head. “Just realizing that I’m still lucky to have you,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”

            “And I have plenty to tell you, as well,” Draco said, and seized his arm for the Side-Along Apparition, so quickly that Harry barely had time to grab his broom before they both vanished like Narcissa’s serenity.

*

            SP777: Oh, yes, they wanted to. But not as much as they want to now.

            The blue-eyed twisted may or may not be obvious.
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The Library of Hades