Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3831 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 10
- 11
- 12
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Eleven—Infection

            “Masters is going back to the nasty house?”

            Harry had to cough and turn away from Kreacher before he started laughing aloud at the sight of the little elf standing there with his arms folded. “Yes, we are,” he said, when he was facing the wall and could focus back on the task of strengthening the wards in case Montgomery and Hannah tried to break out while they were gone. “We have to,” he added over his shoulder, when he received nothing except stubborn silence. “We have to find out something that we can only find out there.”

            Kreacher sniffed, a sound that was longer and wetter than it had any right to be. “If masters insists,” he said. “Kreacher will make food.”

            He vanished with a small bang, and Harry nodded to where he had been with gratitude. He knew they would want fresh food in Cuthbert’s Corner.

            In truth, he wasn’t looking forward to going back to the house, either, but what else could they do? They hadn’t made much progress on what was supposedly one of their major goals, finding proof that Ernhardt had existed and was the twisted they thought he was so that they could show other people he had been the cause of the corruption in the Aurors and the reason Harry and Draco had had to use Dark Arts. Harry knew he had wasted time by fighting the Malfoys and getting himself caught, but right now, there was little they could do about the Malfoys. It had to be Ernhardt.

            “Harry? Why does Kreacher look as though he would have liked to swear at me?”

            Harry turned around and smiled at Draco, who gave him a wary nod in return. He stood in the doorframe of the bedroom they’d shared, his arms folded and an expression that could turn into either a smile or a frown depending on the way he twisted his lips on his face.

            “Because I told him that we have to go back to the ‘nasty house,’” Harry told Draco, picking up on a hole in the wards at the same moment. He held up his hand, and Draco stepped obediently backwards while Harry concentrated on repairing the hole. He finally nodded and turned around again, when he was satisfied it would hold. “He’s not enthusiastic at the idea that he can’t serve us any longer.”

            “Why can’t he serve us?” Draco demanded. “He could just come with us. When I saw him making food, I thought that was what he was going to do. Just use the kitchen here, and pop in and out of the wards when he felt like it.”

            Harry blinked. He hadn’t even considered the possibility of Kreacher coming with him, which he supposed showed how out of it he was. He shook his head a little and said, “I didn’t think the wards and the defenses on the house would let him do that.”

            “We should at least ask him,” said Draco, and turned around to call Kreacher. Then he paused and added over his shoulder, “Although he had no trouble coming to me in Cuthbert’s Corner when I called for him, so perhaps we already know.”

            Harry knew his face was burning. He cleared his throat and gave Draco a weak smile. “It’s good that I have you here, to keep me from completely forgetting about important things?” he offered.

            Draco smiled and kissed his cheek. “It’s always a good idea for me to be with you,” he murmured, and then joined Harry in strengthening the wards.

*

            “Kreacher will be cleanings! Kreacher will be cleanings!”

            Kreacher had a martial light burning in his eyes as he surveyed the wreckage of the corridor outside the bedroom and bathroom Harry and Draco had cleared. He didn’t even pay attention to the bloody letters burning on the walls, Draco noted. Well, they probably didn’t affect him. Even wizards who lived with house-elves often didn’t build protection into their wards and walls against them, because it would interfere too much with their own popping up when they wanted them, and most others just overlooked them completely.

            “Good,” Draco said, as casually as he could make it. “I would enjoy living in a clean house again.”

            Kreacher nodded to him in a grim manner. “Kreacher is understandings what Master Draco be wanting!” he declared, and then sprang into action, a bucket of soapy water and a broom and cloth appearing beside him. Draco shook his head. He had long since stopped trying to understand where house-elves got their things or how house-elf magic worked.

            However, in this case, he thought it highly likely that Kreacher had brought those things with him from Grimmauld Place.

            Draco turned to Harry. “Shall we?” he asked, gesturing down the first corridor where they had found the bloody letters. It was the one that led to the hidden staircase, and thus the Potions lab Ernhardt had worked in.

            Draco was careful to keep his face blank when Harry glanced at him, both because he didn’t think it would reassure Harry to see how fearful Draco really was, and because he didn’t think seeing glee would appeal to Harry, either.

            And it wasn’t like Draco was really looking forward to seeing blood and bones. He had never got over his dislike of torturing people who hadn’t hurt him personally. He would flinch and turn away from the evidence the first time he saw it. He’d done that when they’d investigated the lab with Warren and Jenkins.

            But Ernhardt had either been a genius or guided by madness that was close to genius, and Draco could admit that he really did want to look more closely at his work. If there was nothing they could use there, there would still be the fascination of understanding something difficult and important about Potions.

            Harry led the way, both to the room with the hidden panel and then down the hidden staircase. Draco let Lumos flare from his wand this time, illuminating the slime on the walls and the thick dust that drifted and floated around them, disturbed by their passage. This time, they knew that there were no necromantic defenses left in the house that could harm them.

            Well, they sort of knew it, anyway. Draco supposed it was possible that they hadn’t found and disarmed all the nasty little surprises Ernhardt had left behind, the same way that they didn’t know what all the bloody letters meant yet.

            They came out into the lab, and Harry went towards the back, the place where they’d found the chained skeleton. Draco grimaced and moved towards the front, the home of the dissecting tables and the blood grooves in the floor.

            Nothing had changed. The blood was still dried flakes, and the tables still clear of any fresh victims. Draco had had a brief nightmare about there being someone fresh here last night, but he’d woken with Harry’s hand on his shoulder, and that had turned into another desperate mixture of kissing and sucking.

            But even though they wouldn’t find fresh victims here, that didn’t mean Draco couldn’t discover important information. He crouched over the tables and began to study the signs carved there, wondering if it would be more bloody letters or other sigils that made up part of the code Ernhardt had left on the walls.

            He found a strange mark right away. It was scratched on the right front leg of the table, and it could have been natural damage to the wood, the sort that even the most well-made furniture would endure as it weathered. But he knew when he ran his fingers over it that that wasn’t so, and he moved his head and was sure when he caught a metallic flash from inside it.

            He shut his eyes and let his fingers wander the scratch, tapping here, pressing there. A charm enveloped his fingers that would guard him from the sudden thrust of needles or other traps if Ernhardt had left them there. Draco didn’t think there was much of that kind here, though; Ernhardt had relied more on hiding things and never letting anyone know enough about him to make them dangerous.

            And at last he found it, the place where his fingers fit into the groove, the way they could hook and pull, and what had seemed a scratch became the edge of a lid. Or a panel, Draco reckoned, opening his eyes as he watched the roundest part of the table leg turn outwards and reveal a small scroll of parchment coiled within the hollow space. Draco took it out, carefully, floating it with his wand rather than touching it. He didn’t fear the Dark curses and spells so much as the spiderweb of brown age on the parchment’s back. It might crumble if he touched it, and he didn’t want that to happen.

            “You found something?”

            Draco started, hard. The parchment might have fluttered to the floor if he had less control of his magic. He tilted his head back and frowned at Harry. “Yes. No thanks to you. I didn’t know you were coming up behind me,” he added, when Harry frowned at him and shook his head, not understanding his crime.

            Harry grunted and said, “I still haven’t found anything that we didn’t before. What is this?” He took a seat on the floor, folding his legs with a fluidity that made Draco mutter to himself, and looked at Draco expectantly.

            Draco nodded grudgingly to Harry and unfolded the parchment in midair with spells that his father had made him learn before he would let Draco read most of the rare texts in the library. There was paper out there, suited to holding magical spells, that would be corrupted by the oils on human skin. Draco suspected this was a similar case.

            At the same time, the lettering that appeared as he unfolded the paper didn’t look as though it was very old. The ink was dark and glittering, not faded, and Draco could see the shadows of something faded underneath it. A piece of old parchment that Ernhardt had found and used, Draco thought, rather than something genuinely ancient in its contents.

            Harry had leaned forwards and was squinting, but seemed to have taken a cue from Draco not to touch it. Draco said anyway, “Don’t touch it.”

            “Do you think I want to pick up some bloody poison that Ernhardt left behind?” Harry retorted immediately. “I’m not foolish.”

            “Most of the poisons he used probably wouldn’t make you vomit blood,” Draco said, feeling perverse. “He wouldn’t want to waste blood that way, when he was so intent on collecting it.” He gestured to the channels cut in the floor.

            Harry looked patiently at Draco, and waited until Draco blinked and looked reluctantly back. Then he shook his head and said, “Draco. What is it? The atmosphere of this place? Or the writing itself?” He leaned in and studied the parchment again, not touching it but with his nose closer than Draco liked. “I can’t decipher anything yet.”

            Draco swallowed and shook his head. “The atmosphere of this place,” he muttered. “Sorry. I think it’s getting to me.” He cleared his throat and leaned closer, trying to relax and let his eyes unfocus, tracing the curves and dips of the letters, and shaping them into a message that made sense.

            There was Ernhardt’s name, or at least the name they had known him by, repeated again and again along the upper edge of the parchment. Draco tried to see what had been written on the parchment before that, the faded ink marks, but had to give it up as a bad job. It probably didn’t matter, anyway. If there had been a powerful Dark spell or ritual inscribed on this, Ernhardt would have retained it rather than use this to scribble his message on.

            The second line contained another name, one that Draco searched his memory for carefully before he had to admit that he’d never encountered it before in his life. Jared Thacker, Jared Thacker, Jared Thacker…

            Even when Draco thought about it like that, the way the name was written on the parchment, in a steady, silent stream of words, it awakened no echo in his mind. He shook his head and passed down to the line beneath it, already wondering if the parchment would be all names, and if they were the names of people Ernhardt had possessed or consumed, or been in the past. They still had no absolute proof that Ernhardt had lived all his life in the body they had known, rather than jumping out of one that was dying and into Ernhardt’s when he was still a young man.

            But the third line was not a name, unless there was a wizarding family out there Draco had never heard of with the moniker of Blood. And there was no first name paired with it, either. It repeated again and again and again, not only on the third line, but on the fourth and the fifth and the sixth, until Draco gave up counting.

            He nearly missed the last message, written down near the bottom of the parchment, on what would be the last line if it wasn’t ragged and crooked, marching into the margin. This, at last, was a joined sentence.

Infection through the blood by Thacker, passed on, becoming the one who passes out.

            Draco shuddered. Harry leaned closer over his shoulder, asking without words what was wrong, and Draco let his finger hover above the last line, still not touching. Harry read it and sucked in a breath.

            “So someone else, this Thacker person, infected Ernhardt and made him a twisted through swallowing a twisted’s blood, the same way Alexander got infected,” Harry whispered. “The same way Ernhardt might have infected other people.”

            Draco nodded silently. Then his doubts caught up with him, and he sighed. “Remember that this parchment is a silent witness,” he said, echoing some of the lessons drilled into their heads when they were Auror trainees. “There is no reason to think that you’re interpreting its message correctly without outside evidence.”

            “I think it’s pretty bloody clear.” Harry’s voice rose a little. “We know that the infection can be passed on, that you don’t have to study Dark Arts to become a twisted. For that matter, just using your flaw a lot could do it. Macgeorge became twisted when she used that necromancy to help us.”

            “Necromancy is a Dark Art,” Draco felt compelled to point out. “And she was studying it rather a lot, so that she could help us in the investigation.”

            Harry only shook his head, refusing the semantic distinction. Draco had to admit that he would feel the same, in Harry’s position. “Someone made Ernhardt what he was. He was a victim, if you think about it that way.” Harry’s hand closed in a stern spasm on Draco’s shoulder. “It’s not like I ever wanted to feel sorry for fucking Ernhardt. Sod the bastard. But it might not have been his fault.”

            Draco only bowed his head, and said nothing. He wanted to say that they still didn’t know. Maybe Ernhardt had asked for the infection, longing for the power that having a gift of wandless magic would give him, without realizing that it would drive him insane, or how terrible the power to possess others would be.

            But Draco’s eyes went back again to the blood grooves in the floor, and the tables. Dissecting tables, yes, of the kind that couldn’t just be ordered from any ordinary furniture-maker, not when the cuffs had to be positioned just so. They had to be custom-made, or built by oneself. And these were old.

            Older than Ernhardt, perhaps? Older than his possession of the house? Could they once have belonged to a man named Jared Thacker?

            Draco climbed shakily to his feet. “We have a name to search on now, at least,” he said aloud. “And that’s something.” He caused the parchment to fold itself again with a few swishes of his wand, and floated it off to the side, so it could accompany them up the stairs without their having to touch it.

            Harry nodded. “I think that Kreacher might be able to get into the Ministry for us, if Jenkins and Warren don’t want to search. And that’s better than anything we had before.” He put a hand on Draco’s shoulder, guiding him back to the stairs.

            Draco did pause to look back at the closet where they had found the skeleton. “Did you find anything new?”

            Harry shook his head. “A few more bones. No names. No parchment.” He looked sideways in awe at the parchment hovering next to Draco.

            Draco spun his wand in his hand for a moment. He knew the wisest thing to do would be to leave the lab. They had the name of someone who had either worked with or hurt Ernhardt, and it would be easier to track that name, which many fewer people could know about, through history and archives and files than it would have been to track Ernhardt.

            But part of him still wanted answers. Concrete answers, quick ones, ones that they would have now instead of weeks from now.

            And Draco knew a little of necromancy, which he had looked up and studied a bit when Macgeorge was helping them, although he didn’t have her gift—or flaw—for it.

            “Get that smile off your face.”

            Draco blinked and turned to face Harry. “I was unaware that I was smiling.”

            Harry shook his head firmly. His eyes had gone narrow and deadly, and he considered Draco as if Draco was someone who might need to be imprisoned soon. “Well, all right, it’s not really a smile. But the way you focus on something that makes your lips turn up and your eyes squint. I know that you’re plotting something that could get us into trouble, and I want you to stop it. Right. Now.” He took a step towards Draco.

            “I was considering using necromancy to make the bones in the closets talk,” Draco admitted. “I know a spell that would do that, just make them reveal their memories of the past. People even used it up to forty years ago, when everyone got so paranoid about necromancy that they banned every spell remotely related to it.”

            “And rightly.” Harry spoke harshly. Draco knew the images his mind was full of, because Draco’s was the same: creatures made up of the bones of many small animals, houses with walls of flesh, skeleton bats with sharp claws that would aim directly for the eyes. “We went through enough of that with Macgeorge. And Ernhardt might even have left traps here for those who used necromancy in this house and weren’t him.”

            “I want to try it,” Draco said softly. “I know that you’ll recognize if something goes wrong and be able to stop me.”

            “I don’t know Light magic specifically related to stopping necromancy,” Harry retorted.

            “You know enough,” Draco said, and stepped forwards.

            Harry tensed beside him, and Draco knew that he might be reaching out to grab him and stop his wand from moving. He didn’t look around. Merlin knew that he had followed Harry on enough half-witted plans and the like. He would have thought that, just once, Harry could trust him and stop being a paranoid bastard.

            And Harry didn’t stop him, although he did hiss under his breath and hover close, as if that would make any difference to the necromancy getting out of control.

            Draco smiled over at him before he closed his eyes and immersed himself fully in the spell, which he didn’t know all that well. He had read up on it a month ago, he had learned it for the first time when he was young in his parents’ library, but that didn’t make it the same as a charm or curse he cast every day.

*

            This is a bad idea.

            But Harry bit his lips and stayed silent. Draco seemed driven since he had found that parchment. Harry could see the light stirring behind his eyes, the abrupt and jerky movements of his hands and hair and head.

            He didn’t want to think that Ernhardt had been a victim, in any way. And Harry would agree that he mostly hadn’t. What Ernhardt had done to stay alive argued that he wasn’t entirely insane, the way some of the other twisted were, and Harry thought that made him responsible for his actions.

            But Draco seemed to hate and reject the idea that Ernhardt might have been turned into a twisted rather than born as one. Even though they had known that infection by drinking someone else’s blood was possible for a long time now, and even though there were signs here that experiments like that had been performed.

            Maybe he would have to acknowledge that I’m right, and killing twisted all the time is a bad idea?

            But Harry managed to put even that notion aside as he watched Draco struggle with the spell. This was bigger and more important than about who had been right in that stupid debate. If this spell eased Draco’s mind, Harry would let him cast it.

            Draco breathed out, finally, and Harry tried to ignore the sensations of cold against his skin and the grave dirt he thought he smelled. Then Draco whispered, “Ossi voco.”

            There was a long, rattling stir that raised the hairs on Harry’s arms, and then the bones Harry had seen in the closet rose up and assembled in front of Draco. Draco stretched out a hand. A fingerbone and something that Harry thought really could have come from anywhere in the body settled into his outstretched palm. Harry rubbed his own palms fiercely on his trousers, and tried to be ready.

            Draco gasped, his eyes flying open. Harry took a quick step forwards, but Draco seemed to see that even through his distraction, and shook his head again. “Let me,” he whispered, in a voice as dry as the bones themselves. “Let me do this. Let me see this. Let me speak this.”

            So Harry stepped back, and waited, and listened as the words seemed to rise far down in the back of Draco’s throat, making their way up slowly but steadily. Draco exhaled, and cold mist did drift out into the air and fill the cellar. Harry stomped his feet and hissed, rubbing his hands together.

            The mist came together, and formed pictures.

            Harry would recognize Ernhardt anywhere, and in any guise, and that was what he saw now: Ernhardt, with his hands chained behind his back and eyes wide open and mouth open in a scream, having blood poured down his throat. The wizard who stood over him wore a cloak and hood. Harry assumed it was Jared Thacker, although there was no way to be sure of what features he really wore, given the concealing clothing.

            Ernhardt staggered, and whatever spells had made him keep his mouth open and swallow the blood seemed to fade. He began to choke and gasp and sob, and blood leaked out of the corners of his mouth.

            Harry shuddered and looked at Draco. Draco’s face was so pale that he looked as if he would faint, but he didn’t take his eyes off the pictures forming in front of him.

            Then the picture faded, and Draco did fall, but Harry was there to catch him, and cradle him, and march him back up to the top of the stairs, the parchment floating beside them and the bones still wrapped so tightly in Draco’s fist that Harry thought he would have no luck in prying Draco’s hands open. Draco had done what he had to do, but Harry hated that it had been this hard for him.

            He did wonder one thing, though. Why had the bones shown them that vision, Ernhardt in his recognizable body, rather than the vision of what had happened to the person they originally belonged to?

*

            Sasunarufan13: Thanks! I think Kreacher would be a bit miffed to hear you call him adorable, though.

            SP777: There will be one or two more one-shots and one more story beyond this. It’s going to take that long to do something about Draco’s parents, at least.

            Seiren: Thank you!
- 10
- 11
- 12
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity