Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28253 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twelve—In the Blood

            Harry was once again lying in the darkness and thinking, but his conclusions were rather different from the ones he had come to in the Dark Cells, the night the Ministry held him there.

            For one thing, he had light this time. They kept a light on continually in the holding cell, in fact, a sparkling ball of radiance that floated up near the height of the ceiling and kept the small pallet he lay on under constant observation. It was a way for the Aurors to look in on him without actually entering the cell. Sometimes it dimmed so he could sleep—never at times that corresponded to night in the world outside, which Harry knew was deliberate—but it never went out.

            He had better accommodations than he had in the Dark Cells, but he knew that was for the convenience of his jailers more than it was for him. A more traditional loo was easier to clean, and there were more wards here, subtler ones, ones that wouldn’t simply react to the use of Dark Arts but to any magic. He had ink and parchment and a single, blunt quill that would only become sharp in reaction to parchment, not to the touch of anything else, on a table in the corner. He could write a confession if he liked.

            Under certain circumstances, Harry might have tried. But he could only muster so much interest. He slipped in and out of thought again, dozing sometimes, and then opening his eyes and looking up at the light. He wondered what the guards saw in his face.

            He doubted he would ever know.

            I fucked up.

            Harry sighed. He had acknowledged that before, but usually only when Ron flung an angry challenge at him and demanded that he acknowledge it. Even then, it was easy to raise a pleading hand, smile and nod while Ron glared at him, and go away secretly convinced he was in the right.

            I even have to be grateful for that bloody potion, since it prevented me from using Dark Arts on Schroeder.

            So, the answer was, could he be of any use to the investigation Ron would try and continue now? Harry rubbed his left wrist, which he’d shattered tackling a Dark wizard in a raid two years ago and which sometimes still ached now, with his right hand and frowned at the ball of light. Perhaps, if he was careful and they let him see Ron. But any conversation could be monitored, and he wasn’t always good at subtlety.

            Suggest he bring Malfoy with him…

            But that wouldn’t be good, either, when they’d gone to such lengths to convince even Malfoy’s assistants that Harry and Malfoy despised each other now. Harry chewed his lip and kicked his leg against the side of the pallet, and as he did it, he was sure he felt the watching guards’ attention sharpen through the ball of light.

            Well, fine, arseholes, stare. It won’t do you any good as long as I don’t do something else stupid and give you permission to come down on me.

            All right. So a simple conversation with Ron and a simple conversation with Malfoy were both impossible. Was there anything else he could do?

            Yes. Harry smiled a little. When an Auror was arrested—and he’d done his share of those kinds of arrests, he knew how it worked—he had to make arrangements for his files. What needed to stay with his partner, what needed to be handed on to other partner teams, and what needed to go to the Minister’s or Head Auror’s eyes only were the usual categories.

            He could make sure that he placed the most important files in Ron’s care, including the ones that told the stories of magical children coming back to their parents with low power levels. And he would put those first on the list. Ron wasn’t stupid, although perhaps even less subtle than Harry. He would notice the order of the cases, build on their earlier conversation, and work out what to do with them.

            Harry closed his eyes. He could feel the tension easing and collapsing out of his chest, his lungs working properly again and the blood flowing.

            All because you might have settled the disposition of the cases correctly?

            Harry rolled his shoulders up in what he would know for a shrug, though he had not a clue what his guards would make of it. And that wasn’t the important part. The important part was what he made of it.

            He was at peace. Whatever happened to him, there was at least the chance that Ron and Malfoy together could discover what had happened to those children, who had scraped their faces off, and whether the other children coming back with low levels of power had anything to do with it.

            He wasn’t the important one. He had made the mistake of thinking he was, that he was the only obstacle in Schroeder’s way and the only Auror who could solve the case. But that wasn’t it. That had never been it.

            Harry showed his teeth to the light. The important thing was to keep Schroeder thinking it, too. If he kept his attention focused on Harry, even chained up, then he would ignore Ron, and perhaps Malfoy. Malfoy should be wary, since he’d already been arrested once before, but Harry was confident the bastard could do that.

            Well. If his part was to keep them focused on him, it was time to act, then.

            Harry stretched, then paused mid-stretch and blinked as though a disturbing thought had just occurred to him. He sat up on the pallet and pressed his fingers against his temples, bowing his head. He could almost feel bored eyes widening.

            He stood up and crossed the room to the table with the ink, parchment, and quill. He’d begin a false confession, and the real, important list of files to be distributed, and blot the confession many times, and turn his back on it, and then come back and continue working as if obsessed.

            He had to keep their eyes on him, so Ron and Malfoy stood more of a chance. Because, in the end, the really important people were the victims, not the Aurors, and he had forgotten that.

*

            “You’re sure you know what you’re doing.”

            Weasley didn’t make it a question, perhaps because he didn’t want to hear the answer. That allowed Draco to return a faint smile and turn away, focusing on the man in front of them. They had entered the pub he knew their prey liked to frequent at this time of day, but disguised; anyone who looked at them would only see a pair of dusty, down-on-their-luck warlocks with tattered robes. The servers had been rude to them, which Draco remembered and would punish someday, but at least it meant their glamours were good, if their inherent quality didn’t shine through.

            Campion, seated at a table three away, took another gulp of Firewhisky and motioned the woman who had served him the first three mugs to bring another over.

            “Yes, I do.” Draco played with the potions vial in front of him, glamoured to look like another mug. It had been easy enough to acquire the scraps of Potter’s hair and skin that he needed to finish it, since Weasley had access to his flat. “Free, the man’s a nuisance. He might spread rumors about us or attempt to put my clients off. Locked up, he can’t cause trouble. There’s much to be said for locking someone up.”

            From the corner of his eye, he saw Weasley grimace. Draco had parodied it on purpose, since it was the kind of thing an Auror might say. Draco flashed him a private smile and then stood, the disguised vial firmly in his hand.

            “I would ask you to wish me luck,” he murmured over his shoulder, “because I will need it to be clumsy. Malfoys never are.”

            “Oh, blow it out your ear,” Weasley muttered, but he drew his wand under the table and held it ready on his lap. Draco appreciated the silent show of support.

            He crossed the room towards Campion, weaving enough that most of those who looked at him later would say he was drunk, but not so much he couldn’t deny it if he had to. That was part of the point, of course. Confuse the witnesses, and the Aurors or anyone else who came to investigate this would have little to go on.

            He had already uncorked the vial at their table, and now he turned to the side and tripped over Campion’s foot—an easy task to accomplish, that, when Campion had so little grace—and the contents of the vial poured out in a steady stream towards Campion’s mug.

            “Oi!” Campion jerked up and tried to focus his bleary eyes in Draco’s direction. “Howr’sh—what’re you—”

            “You stole my drink!” Draco screeched, taking a step back and glaring at Campion. Of course the liquid that had poured into the mug would look like Firewhisky, and there were already a few people laughing in anticipation.

            Campion leaned back, looked him up and down, and then grinned. Draco had chosen a glamour of a thin, sallow face with broken teeth, missing teeth, and chipped teeth—the kind of face a man might have if he had bad health but also regularly got into fights he lost. The recently-broken nose in the glamour and the shaggy hair, hanging loose around a scar that was visible whenever he tilted his head, completed the picture.

            “Seems to me,” Campion said, and Draco knew he was concentrating hard to produce words that clear, “that if you pour—if you fall the whisky into my drink, it’s drinkers’, keepers.” And he picked up the mug and swallowed.

            Draco watched more closely than he usually watched humans, except Potter, to see if Campion detected any difference in the taste. It was one reason he had been glad to see Campion drinking Firewhisky; it was so strong that it would mingle with and drown the potential vileness of the potion effectively.

            He swallowed convulsively several times, and then reached up and put a hand to his throat. Draco took a step back as if getting out of range, but balled his fists and scowled anyway.

            Then Campion laughed and nodded at Draco. “I think you ought to t’ank me for’er favor,” he muttered, his head bobbing. “They were serving you dragon piss.”

            That made the woman who had served Draco and Weasley turn around with a scowl, and several other people look up. Draco snorted disdainfully. “Often sneak out to the—the Keepers and drink—it, do you?” he hiccoughed, swaying on his feet.

            Campion lunged at him, but mostly succeeded in bearing him to the floor. Draco went with it, and rolled with the punches, and made it seem as though Campion had succeeded in thoroughly chastising him without taking a blow except those he could deal with and incorporate into the glamour as much worse than they actually were.

            He stepped back with an imaginary purple bruise spreading over his broken nose, and scowled at Campion, cradling his face. Campion laughed up at him, and then rolled away and got to his feet with a slow, ponderous motion that worried Draco more than anything had so far. Potter moved like a great cat, lithe and light. The simulacrum the potion would make Campion into had its limits, and changing Campion’s gait to a reasonable mimicry of Potter’s would probably be one of them.

            “And let that be a lesson to you,” Campion said, and sat down to take a long, intoxicating—in more ways than one—drink of his mingled Firewhisky.

            Draco, snuffling, stumbled back to his table and fetched Weasley, and they scurried out the door as thought wanting distance between them and Campion, Weasley only tossing a handful of Knuts onto the table behind them when the woman who had served them called out a stern warning.

            They walk-shuffled away as fast as they could, and when they rounded the corner that led into Diagon Alley away from the pub, Draco removed the glamours on their faces and cloaks. Weasley took a deep breath, as though being the man he had been disguised as choked him. Draco eyed him sideways in mild amusement, and said nothing.

            “That—that was harder than I expected,” Weasley said, huffing his breath out as though picking carefully through the words.

            “Really? When you did nothing?” Draco asked idly, and kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, on the cobblestones in front of him. He knew the potion would work as it was destined to do. But it was the first time he had used it, and he couldn’t help the Potions master’s anxiety for a new creation hopping out into the world. Should he ever sire children, he imagined, he would feel much the same.

            And then there was the question of how they would get into the holding cells, but Weasley had promised to handle that end of things. Draco had his own private plans in place, which he would not tell Weasley about unless they became necessary. He was not so much of a fool as to reveal his doubt in his ally. Of course, he was also not so much of a fool that he would not make backup plans.



            “Bloody ha-ha,” Weasley muttered, and scowled at his feet. “This is going to change everything, you know,” he said.

            “I believe we have discussed how it may not,” Draco said mildly. “As far as anyone knows, you will prove your loyalty to the Ministry without a doubt. As far as anyone knows, Potter will remain in his cell, and I will occupy myself with blameless brewing.”

            “Someone’s going to catch us,” Weasley said, darting glances up and down as they turned into Chemic Alley.

            “We need only wait an hour,” Draco returned, because at least giving Weasley something else to worry about would change the subject.

            That led Weasley to talk about how no one could be that certain of the consistency of potions and the time they would last, and how he’d never heard of a potion that had that precise a delay in its beginning, anyway. He quoted experimental potions theory Granger had probably told him. Draco checked his watch, and waited. As far as his assistants knew, he was entertaining Weasley’s proposal for a particular potion with extreme skepticism, and so they had reason to linger talking in the street outside, since going into the shop would compromise Weasley’s pure Auror principles.

            Then Draco saw the hands of his watch reach the correct time, at the same moment as shouts erupted from the pub they had left.

            “Ah, yes,” Draco said, and turned around to check that the expression on Weasley’s face had the proper fierceness. “Right on time.”

*

            Harry was halfway through his latest false confession—the one he thought might pass muster with Schroeder—when he felt his face begin to change. He paused and stared down at his hands as though he had been caught by surprise, while above him the guards reacted with shouts of alarm.

            The wards didn’t clang at him, Harry noticed at once, which meant this wasn’t magic from the outside. A potion, it had to be. If he had somehow ingested the potion since he entered the cell, he had to give his enemies his admiration for cleverness. He had eaten nothing so far, which his time with the Dursleys rendered merely an inconvenience rather than a horror, and he would have recognized the taste of all the common potions that could be dissolved in water without a telltale color.

            Malfoy.

            The clever, clever bastard. And since Harry had seen that particular pattern of ragged nails recently, he even knew who he was supposed to be.

            By the time the guards came to open the door of the cell, he was ready.

            “What happened?” asked the first Auror through the door, Kinzie, keeping well-back. He was staring at Harry with his mouth open, but he had his wand drawn, and the good sense to block Wilding, who kept trying to get into the cell behind him.

            “I d-don’t,” said Harry, and bowed his head, and shivered. He knew perfectly well what had happened, but not how Malfoy had done it. His voice was Campion’s. His clothes were the kind of wildly expensive robes that Campion seemed to favor, and could afford, as the nephew of a Wizengamot member. He raised his head and shook it, then balled his fists up. “I—I can’t tell you what happened, because I don’t remember it.” He had no idea which story Malfoy would spin out of the two likely ones—that Harry Potter had escaped and assumed Campion’s identity with a glamour, or that they had switched places in some sort of wandless, ward-bypassing Apparition—so claiming memory loss was the simplest tactic.

            “Keep him in there.”

            The overseer of the holding cells, a tall, grey and greying woman named Hallana Longwatch, nodded to Harry and then blocked Kinzie and Wilding out of the cell with no more than a glare. “Your pardon, Mr. Fipps. But this is irregular, and we have to make sure that we don’t make a mistake.”

            Harry chose to sit down and bury his head in his hands. His breath quickened with the adrenaline flooding through him, but that was all right. They could think he was on the verge of a panic attack or hyperventilating, if they wanted to.

            Malfoy had done it. He had. And Harry’s thoughts bounded and danced in his head, rejoicing in the new freedom, even as Longwatch spoke quietly with Kinzie and Wilding and sent a memo to Schroeder.

            He was free now. He could join the investigation again. And this time, he wouldn’t fuck it up, no matter the temptation. He could almost find it in him to be grateful to Malfoy for the potion, not because he liked it, or liked Malfoy, but because this meant that he couldn’t fuck up specifically by using Dark Arts in any way.

            Harry sat with his head in his hands, the way that poor, sweet little Campion would undoubtedly do, and waited to see what would happen during his rescue.

*

            Weasley did it well, Draco had to admit. He came in through the door of the pub with his Auror robes streaming behind him, his eyes bright and his wand drawn, and then jerked to a stop and stared at the simulacrum of Potter standing where Campion had stood.

            I feared for nothing, Draco told himself, looking over Weasley’s shoulder. Of course a potion that so thoroughly changed the way the drinker looked could deal with something like Campion’s clumsy gait. He had Potter’s hands, and Potter’s eyes, and Potter’s messy black hair, and Potter’s faded scar. Draco saw the way gazes all over the pub locked on that. They might decide that they didn’t know Potter without his trademark glasses, but that scar gave him away.

            Or gave Campion away. In truth, Draco was less concerned about the fool managing to upset the plan than he was about Potter, but he wished to watch the moment when he first realized who he had become.

            It was worth it. Draco had never known eyes could go that wide, or hands could flail like that. Then Weasley shook his head and stepped forwards, pressing the wand gently into his flank.

            “You know you’re supposed to be locked up, Harry,” he said quietly. It had been the front page story in the Daily Prophet that morning, one reason Draco had insisted that they wait until today to do it. “I don’t know how you got out or what you did with Fipps, but they’ll find out at the Department. Come along.”

            “This isn’t me!” Campion wailed, and then looked around and seemed to realize he was the focus of every unsympathetic eye. “I mean—I’m not Potter! I’m Campion! This is some mistake! You need to fetch my uncle!”

            Draco shook his head slightly. The voice was Potter’s, and he could see by the way some of the people around the walls flinched and then pressed forwards that they were familiar with it.

            “I wish I could believe you,” Weasley said, his eyes perfectly shadowed and his voice perfectly sad. “I would rather believe that you’re Fipps, the victim of a prank, than I would that my best mate broke out of a holding cell after he attacked Member Schroeder. But that’s impossible to believe until we got someone to look at you more closely. Come along, now.” He motioned with the wand.

            Campion struck out wildly. Weasley hesitated nearly long enough for the punch to hit him, and Draco frowned. He would have to remember that Weasley was affected by Potter’s appearance on a man he should have every reason to strike.

            Luckily, Weasley’s training took over after that. He struck hard, hard enough that Campion’s head rocked back on his neck, but he did it in the ribs, where it would bruise and startle him more than it would injure. Then he cast the Stupefy, and Campion fell precisely into Weasley’s waiting arms.

            “Oh, Harry,” Weasley whispered, just as Draco had told him to, and thus started a hundred rumors that this was the truth.

            Draco stood out of the way so Weasley could carry Campion past him. Weasley’s eyes met his as he passed, and Draco read the warning in them with dangerous ease. If he somehow managed to screw this up and not rescue Potter, Weasley would do far worse than hit him with a Stunner, as he had hit Campion.

            Draco smiled back without pretense, but with a twist to the smile that made Weasley look away and spit on the ground. That, too, was real enough in its way. Weasley didn’t think that this next part of the plan would work, that they would be able to get Potter out of his cell and switched with Campion. The Ministry would want to keep them both under observation, Weasley had argued, and if Schroeder came to talk with Potter while he still wore Campion’s guise, Potter would give himself away.

            Draco touched the pocket of his cloak and gave Weasley’s back the kind of look that would start another set of rumors circulating. Someone might wonder what Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley had been doing together that day, but they wouldn’t think the association had continued. Those who had seen the touch would caution Weasley to watch out for poison in his tea, in fact.

            Well. The pocket contained the solution, but not the kind of solution that would rid the world of Weasleys forever (which Draco was obliged to concede was a less desirable goal today than it would have seemed a month ago).

            Weasley would just have to trust him. And leave the planning up to him, which he should have done in the first place.

            This second potion had been brewed with Potter’s blood, and that made all the difference.

*

            SP777: Yeah, Harry isn’t as smooth as he likes to think he is. And it doesn’t help that most of the time, he has managed to get away with what he wanted to, so he’s not used to paying the consequences of his actions.

            No, I haven’t really written a story like that, just because I have trouble seeing Harry get into Dark Arts and not be disturbed by it, or at least have to convince himself that he’s using them for a higher purpose.

            AlterEquis: Yes, exactly. And he has his plans for what will happen if people don’t believe that Campion and Harry simply switched places.
- 11
- 12
- 13
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

Sanctum Sanctorum