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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 Twelve—A Watch on the Twisted

            “You want me to talk about her? Why?”

            Skeeter’s quill hovered above the parchment. Harry bit hard at his lip. Trust her to ask questions and act like a responsible reporter at the moment that they were trusting her not to be that. He cast a glance under lowered eyelids at Draco.

            For a moment, he thought Draco would stay back the way he had when Harry was giving the first interview to Skeeter and leave everything up to him, but then Draco uttered a gracious little sigh and stepped forwards. “I think that you misunderstood what we’re asking you to do, Madam Skeeter,” he murmured. “We’re asking you to offer tantalizing little hints to the public. Not everything. Because this twisted will be scared off by too much information.” Harry nodded. That was a good compromise between a complete lie that Skeeter would distrust and the truth, which might lead to Skeeter publicizing everything and Smoke and Mirrors losing interest because then their created Sarah Nickell would be too famous for him. “Simply point out those facts we revealed to you in discreet and interesting ways. Think of the way that you wrote Albus Dumbledore’s biography. You had to keep your readers interested up until the twentieth chapter, and revealing everything juicy in the first one wouldn’t have been the way to do it.”

            Skeeter cooed and fluffed her hair, while Harry shot Draco an incredulous look. You read that rubbish? he tried to say with lips that barely moved.

            Draco shrugged at him and rolled his eyes. Harry thought he understood, No. But I know enough to realize how she works.

            That sounded a lot better than Draco staring in fascination at the pages that purported Dumbledore and Harry had had sex. Harry turned back with relief to Skeeter, who was sitting up with a serious expression on her face, nodding slightly.

            “It makes sense when you explain it that way, Auror Malfoy,” she said. “A little bit at a time, to enable you to track him down.”

            “Exactly,” Draco said, and closed one eye in a conspiratorial wink that would have made Harry gag if he wasn’t stronger than that.

            Skeeter chuckled and began doing what they had wanted her to all along, which was writing down the barest facts about Sarah Nickell in a way that Harry and Draco hoped would intrigue Smoke and Mirrors without frightening him off or making their imaginary victim too famous for him. Harry watched her thoughtfully, and looked at Draco, who stood with the expression of a martyr on his face.

            Perhaps sometimes it was worthwhile going along to get along, and using less direct methods, if they yielded results like this.

*

            “Are you sure that you’re going to be comfortable?”

            Draco rolled his eyes, and then rolled over on the blanket, startling Harry, who paused in spreading his own blanket beside him. “More likely to be comfortable than you,” Draco murmured, keeping one eye on the house in front of them, a run-down hovel that they had chosen to pretend Sarah Nickell, reclusive witch who had invented a number of love potions, or perhaps lust potions, or perhaps hate potions, lived in. “I have a thicker blanket.”

            “The point isn’t to be comfortable,” Harry said, and shook out his blanket as though he was trying to show off its fluffiness to Draco and disprove his point. Since Draco could see the starlight shining through some of the tatters in it, that didn’t really work. “We have to keep awake in case he comes.”

            “So your blanket is like that because you don’t want to fall asleep?” Draco asked, turning back to face the house fully again. “Or just because you can’t be arsed to learn and use Reparo properly?”

            Harry made some sulky retort. Draco didn’t listen to him, instead watching the front door of the house and listening to the creaks around him. They were protected by strong, anchored wards, but that didn’t make much difference when they were in the Forbidden Forest, watching the cottage from behind the root of a gnarled tree.

            Of course, this stratagem limited them in the first place. Sarah Nickell couldn’t live in London or Hogsmeade or Ottery St. Catchpole or any other place with a relatively large population of wizards; Harry and Draco couldn’t bribe them all, as they had Skeeter, to pretend that she existed. And it made sense that someone who didn’t want others to know about her would live on a plot of land in the Forest that she had acquired through Merlin knew what shady transaction. All this land was supposed to belong to Hogwarts, but Skeeter had been kind enough to hint otherwise in her article. Something else that should draw Smoke and Mirrors over to them, if they were lucky.

            Or unlucky.

            Draco reached out again with his wand to touch the wards that encircled them. Harry claimed that he had got his friend Granger to teach him some of the spells that would keep them hidden, supposedly undetectable by any physical sense, until Smoke and Mirrors showed up. Draco only knew he hadn’t had to deal with the weasel-loving woman yet, and he was content to keep it that way.

            “Don’t touch them,” Harry murmured, curling up on the blanket next to him. “They’re supposed to hold from the outside, not the inside.”

            “What you’re saying is that they’re fragile,” Draco said, grinning up at the stars and listening to Harry’s splutter from beside him.

            “Not exactly,” Harry said at last, and reached out to clasp Draco’s hand. “But I don’t know much about these spells, other than that I couldn’t see or smell or hear anything from outside. I would just as soon not disrupt them.”

            Draco tilted his head in silent agreement, and resumed watching. Harry moved up beside him and settled into a position with his head on his arms that Draco wouldn’t have found comfortable. Then again, he wasn’t Harry.

            Draco’s chest loosened, despite the danger, until he was breathing delicately and deliciously, seeming to draw in more air each time until it swelled and filled his head. The slight sounds of Harry shifting his weight behind him and the squeaks and hisses and groans of animals in the Forest behind him filled him up the same way, until he felt totally relaxed and totally alert, both at once.

            They hadn’t done much of this, he and Harry, waiting for criminals. Of course, most of their kills so far had been during flat-out chases or hostage situations, not ambushes.

            It was almost nice to be doing something so normal. Normal for Auror partners, at least. Draco remembered ambushes with Kellen, where they had waited side by side and seemed to breathe for each other, and the soft murmurs of small talk they had exchanged back and forth.

            “Do you need to talk about your parents?” Harry asked quietly. Draco glanced at him and saw that he had curled up in an even more absurd position with his hands beneath his chin like some sort of big cat, his eyes fixed on Draco.

            Not small talk like this. Then again, he and Kellen Moonborn had never been lovers.

            “Why would I?” Draco studied the front door of the broken-down house, and turned his head when a shadow moved in the corner of his vision. It wasn’t a smoke-clad figure of Dark magic, however, only a deer. It jerked its head up once, but went on grazing, though with ears turned in the direction of the house. Draco relaxed. If their wards could fool an animal’s sensitive nose, then he had more confidence when it came to Smoke and Mirrors.

            “Because we did end up hurting them,” Harry said. “If accidentally. And they must have figured out what happened by now, and that will make them more prejudiced against you than ever.”

            Draco sighed as his relaxation dissolved again. But Harry couldn’t have known he was talking about something absolutely inappropriate for the setting, by Draco’s measure.

            But what else would they talk about? Harry’s abusive relatives? His friends Draco couldn’t stand? Their own relationship, which seemed even more inappropriate? The blue-eyed twisted and his violent possessive magic? Macgeorge?

            Our lives are a mixture of Dark Arts and violence, Draco thought, as he sat up and stretched. Rather sad, really.

            “I know that they’re prejudiced against me,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the house still. Another shifting shadow, but he saw it was four-legged, and discounted the immediate leap of suspicion. Smoke and Mirrors’ usual disguise wouldn’t extend that far, he thought. He meant to baffle sight, not make himself look like an entirely different creature. “I never had any hope of becoming the Malfoy heir again, except for the five minutes when I believed that I could reconcile them to you.”

            Harry snorted quietly. “Still,” he said, and waited.

            Draco laced his fingers on his knee, and thought about it. He wondered if he could make Harry understand what it had been like to lose everything, and then be offered the promise of regaining it.

            Probably not, because Draco didn’t come close to understanding it himself. He had lived for seven years with a constricted chest, counting his Galleons, devoting himself to duty and taking more dangerous cases than he would have otherwise because he knew that his family wouldn’t grieve. Then he had the chance of a golden, glittering future offered again.

            Except that by then he had Harry, and except that his capacity to believe in that future had withered over the seven years since the last offer. Deprivation made his heart stony, not more yielding, not more yearning. He wanted what his parents had seemed to offer, but as a dream. Not something he had believed, deeply, could come true.

            He stumbled his way through a few lines of that, and stopped. Harry reached out, and squeezed his shoulder.

            “There was a time when I thought I would give anything for my relatives to love me,” Harry whispered. “And then I realized that wasn’t true, anymore. Maybe I could dream of it, treasure it, wish for it, but believing in it? No. If they had said that they loved me one day, I would have decided they were all under Imperius.”

            Draco reached back and silently squeezed Harry’s hand. Harry leaned his head on Draco’s shoulder in response.

            Draco half-shut his eyes. No, we don’t make normal small talk. We may never live normal lives and go home at the end of each day and cook together and argue together and listen to the wireless together like a normal couple.

            But there are things we can do. And I would rather have them.

*

            Harry had mostly waited with Ron in situations like this one before now to catch a criminal approaching a target, or a Dark wizard they had lured by spreading the rumors of an exciting cache of Potions ingredients, or animal skins, or whatever it was that they found themselves compelled to steal. Ron made jokes all the time and napped and woke the moment Harry moved.

            Lauren Hale had observed Harry with constant, quiet hostility in her eyes during the one watch they’d shared together, but then, the hostility was always constant. At least it was quiet.

            And he had shared an ambush with Lionel only twice, both times tormented by the knowledge that he was falling in love with him. Lionel joked even more than Ron did and rocked on his heels, peering forwards and making little muttered remarks out of the side of his mouth about the way that he would have set things up if he was the Ministry. Harry had watched him and thought everything he did perfect.

            Draco was different from all of his other Auror partners, so it shouldn’t have surprised Harry that he waited differently than they did. But he hadn’t known what the source of the difference would be, or how it would affect him.

            Draco breathed gently through his mouth and never spoke, after that brief conversation, unless Harry spoke to him. He turned his head from side to side at the slightest sound, and didn’t seem to believe that the deer and the lone centaur they saw wending their way through the Forest wouldn’t glimpse them, despite Harry’s trust in Hermione’s wards. He lay there and seemed to retreat into himself, enfold his being in silence.

            But Harry was still sure he was there, for all that, present and ready to leap to Harry’s aid if he was threatened.

            Harry lay down beside him and let his head rest on Draco’s shoulder, finally. It was the only way he could be close enough to express what he felt without somehow hindering Draco’s wand arm.

            Draco gave him a fleeting smile and then fixated on the house again as something moved near the door. This time, the figure resolved into one on two legs. Harry still squinted and blinked, thinking he saw flashes and edges of faces swarming over it, and then the corners of soot and darkness that he had glimpsed when they went after Smoke and Mirrors in the Three Broomsticks.

            “Him,” Draco said, shaping the word with his lips so that Harry felt the puff of air behind the word more than he heard the sound.

            Harry nodded, and stood up.

            Draco was gliding behind him, his hands resting at the very edge of the wards. Harry flickered a glance at him, and raised his eyebrows. Draco nodded back to him, the movement jerky, and crouched, his hand still flexing out.

            Harry felt a thrill run through him. It was like the silent conversations he had used to have with Ron and Lionel, but better.

            Smoke and Mirrors circled the house, peering in at the cracked windows, and halted again near the door. Harry hoped he wouldn’t allow the apparently deserted state of the house to put him off. Then again, Skeeter had hinted in her article that Sarah Nickell, mysterious and odd witch that she was, liked to live under glamours that would convince a casual passer-by that no one was in the house at all, unless they came close enough to force her to reveal herself.

            Smoke and Mirrors raised his wand—or so Harry thought the odd twitch of shadow probably was meant to be, under the glamour. He held his breath and shifted closer, and Draco was there, right behind him, shoulder to shoulder, skin against skin, and they broke the wards and charged after Smoke and Mirrors as one creature.

            The blurred figure spun towards them. Draco hissed. Harry knew without asking that he had felt the scalding splash of Dark magic on his left arm again.

            He didn’t need to ask. He knew without asking. Harry stretched himself out to run in the faint moonlight, and the connections between him and his partner and their prey throbbed.

            He knew that Smoke and Mirrors would dart left before he did it, and spun to stop him.

            They crashed against each other, and Harry felt something rake down his side. It felt like a knife, but he couldn’t see it, and he didn’t dare risk staying that close until he knew more. He kicked out, at least, as he spun away and felt blood flowing down his ribs, and had the satisfaction of hearing Smoke and Mirrors grunt in what sounded like agony.

            Draco shouted, and Harry flowed to his feet and to the side. His muscles knew what Draco was going to do, and on some level, so did his brain, even if Draco hadn’t explained it with words.

            Smoke and Mirrors, rising behind Harry and stabbing down at him with what might have been that hidden knife, took Draco’s curse in the chest. His knife flew away, and Harry heard a distinct breath like a sob. Then he crashed to the forest floor, and began writhing and screaming in a way that made Harry flinch.

            He scrambled up and stared at Draco, who shrugged back at him and made his way towards Smoke and Mirrors with his wand still out. “I’ll use what I need to stop him,” Draco said. “And it’s not as though you haven’t sometimes done worse.”

            Harry nodded, slowly. Then he stood up and moved behind Draco. He would cover him from that direction if Smoke and Mirrors had protections or allies waiting, although Harry doubted it. Whatever this man was, he seemed to be the kind who normally worked alone.

            Draco knelt down beside the thrashing figure, and waited. Harry wasn’t sure what for, at first, until he realized that the thrashing had calmed a little, and Smoke and Mirrors was making sounds that weren’t screams, but more like pitiful whimpers for attention and explanation. Then Draco moved his wand down, his eyes closed, his face bone-white with concentration.

            And Smoke and Mirrors’ disguise blew apart with an arching fury of Dark magic that flung Harry from his feet and made the twisted scream once again.

*

            Draco opened his eyes. He knew he was smiling, and that the sight would hardly be reassuring for either Smoke and Mirrors or Harry, but the first of them didn’t deserve to be reassured, and Harry…

            Well. He would put up with it, that was all.

            Why should Macgeorge be the only one who could focus and use her flaw? Draco had focused on clarifying the throb of Dark magic along his Mark, and demanded more information about it when the pain had begun to subside. The more he thought about it, the more magic came to him, and finally there was nothing more for him to learn—except by destroying the illusion and seeing what lay beneath.

            What lay beneath was a tall, lanky young wizard with brown hair that dangled in his face and the bluest eyes Draco had ever seen on someone not possessed by their enemy. He tensed at first, in fact, thinking that perhaps the blue-eyed twisted was here, but these eyes didn’t shine in the same way. They had pupils, too, which didn’t usually happen when their old enemy made them shine.

            Smoke and Mirrors cowered the moment he realized that Draco was looking him in the face, and tossed an arm over it, and tried to roll aside. Draco shot an arm out and casually stopped him. At the touch of his hand, Smoke and Mirrors shivered, and moaned, and collapsed. Draco smiled. A handy side-effect of the curse he’d used, which was another one he had picked up in his reading among his parents’ books.

            “Do you recognize him at all?” Harry asked, crouching down on the other side of Smoke and Mirrors and watching their prey carefully.

            Draco shook his head regretfully. “I had hoped I would,” he admitted. If Smoke and Mirrors was a pure-blood, Draco might have seen the general family resemblance, and they would have a place to begin looking.

            But those blue eyes were either a product of a Muggleborn parent or of magic tinkering in the womb. Draco settled back with a sigh and said, “He doesn’t look like any of the reports that you’ve studied in the past few months?” Harry had a passion for staring at files on wizards reported missing. He claimed that they could perhaps spot the next twisted that way, but Draco knew it came from his hero complex, more than anything else.

“No,” Harry said, after subjecting the twisted to a stare so intense that the man cowered again. So he was sane enough to note fear and threats, Draco thought. Well, that made sense, given that he had run from the scene of his crimes and left no obvious clues behind, only the ones that his insanity or his flaw compelled him to. “I suppose we can do worse than begin at the beginning. What’s your name?” he asked the twisted.

Draco repressed the urge to roll his eyes. Yes, they could do that, but the twisted was as likely to lie as anything else. Most of the time, they had known the name of their prey before they began hunting and didn’t need to rely on them for information.

To Draco’s amazement, the man lying on the ground hesitantly cleared his throat and said, “Wallace. Wallace—Bainbridge.”

The last name might be a lie; the first one didn’t sound like it. Draco sat back further and turned the questioning over to Harry with a cock of his head and a minute twist of his mouth. Harry looked like the one who might get better results right now.

            Draco turned back to face the Forest. It wasn’t impossible that Bainbridge could have allies out there, still, or might use a distraction from that direction to attempt escape.

            Besides, this was still the Forbidden Forest, for all that they had turned it into the scene of a trap. Best to have an extra pair of eyes.

*

            Harry took his time sitting down next to Bainbridge, making it seem from the way he stretched and settled himself that he wanted to relax. He’d learned the technique from Lionel, and it worked this time, too. When he faced Bainbridge, the twisted had gone still and looked at Harry the way he might a casually-met stranger and not an Auror.

            Harry smiled slightly, and held his eyes. “How many people have you told the truth about?” he asked.

            Bainbridge reached up, faster than Harry, and clasped his wrist. Harry quietly transferred his wand to his left hand, but Bainbridge seemed uninterested. Instead, he stared at Harry and blinked several times. “You know?” he whispered. “You know what I was trying to do?” His arm relaxed, the hand almost slumping to the ground. “And I didn’t have to tell you.”



            Harry raised his eyebrows, but said, “I know you wanted to tell the truth about people you considered neglected. Everything you wrote on Adriana Lugar’s skin was the truth, wasn’t it? And the same was true about Michael Moxon.”

            “Yes,” Bainbridge said simply, while his face burned with hope. “That’s it. That’s it. Everyone in the world deserves to have their story as well-known as yours. You aren’t a horrible person,” he added, as though he thought Harry might blame him. “But they have all those secrets. The ones that other people neglected or never tried to find out about. They need the chance to have other people read them.”

            Harry nodded, while trying to repress the little stir of emotion that said maybe Bainbridge would be the first of the twisted they could take alive. It depended on how well his flaw might let him escape. “Could you contact them and ask them to write their life-stories?” he asked. “Not skin them and write them in blood.”

            Bainbridge shook his head, slow as slow, back and forth between two pebbles. “They would always forget something. This is the only sure way.”

            Harry opened his mouth to ask another question, and Draco said, “Harry,” in a voice as sharp as a log cracking.

            Harry moved so he could look where Draco was sitting without taking his eyes off Bainbridge—

            And faltered as Macgeorge emerged from the forest, jaw hanging like a skull’s, her fingers scrabbling at her face.

            In that moment of pity tearing like a thrown nail through Harry, Bainbridge moved.

*

            unneeded: Even if she feels those things, Rudie definitely wouldn’t want to admit those feelings to people she thinks don’t care about Macgeorge.

            And yes, this twisted is different in that, to a certain extent, they can predict his victims, or at least influence him into choosing a certain one.

            Seiren: Thank you! I appreciate that you’re enjoying this story, and that you read all the way through the series.
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The Library of Hades