Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Chains of Fool's Gold	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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—Pulling in the Chains
            Draco had expected the Ministry might try something like this. If they couldn’t deny the memories, their best tactic, really, would be to deny them the chance to show the memories.
            He touched Carvenhoof’s mane, and Carvenhoof snorted and dropped straight down. Over the heads of the panicking crowd he bore Draco, his wings hardly seeming to move; he snapped them up and then straight down, his nose aimed at the far wall. Draco could see that much in the dim light of the Lumos Charms that had sprung up around and below them.
            He didn’t light one himself, not wanting to become a target. Besides, he knew from the sounds of wings flapping behind them that Harry’s mare was following. That was enough to keep them together, and that was all he was truly concerned about.
            “Draco?”
            Harry’s whisper, reaching across the air between them, linking them. Draco reached back with one hand, hoping Harry could see it and understand the intent of the gesture, even if they couldn’t touch at the moment. Harry seemed to comprehend, and shut up.
            They were almost to the far wall. Draco didn’t know exactly what they would do when they arrived, but Carvenhoof had understood his intent, and was heading there for a reason. Hagrid had told them that some of the thestrals could focus on the magic of individual wizards and tell them apart from the general population. It was one reason why they sometimes took a liking to people, the way Carvenhoof had to Draco; their magic felt congenial to them.
            On the other hand, if they could identify friends, there was no reason that they shouldn’t be able to do the same for enemies.
            Draco saw Carvenhoof’s wings tilt upwards, and managed to brace himself just in time as the floor rose up towards them and their height dropped away. Carvenhoof was swooping towards a corner that seemed particularly thick with shadow, even given the absence of light, and Draco was able to recognize some of the protective enchantments his father had once taught him.
            Why, such Dark magic to use in the middle of a Ministry dedicated to the Light, Draco thought icily, and whipped his wand down, hissing the strongest spell he knew. Not a Finite, not here, but a spell that would cast glaring light into that corner and disrupt the charms that shielded the face of their attacker.
            The charms fell. The man stepped backwards, raising a hand to shield his face. Draco recognized the Unspeakable from Jeremiah’s memories—well, one of them. He was already turning to run, through a door that Draco had never realized was in the Atrium, opening in the wall.
            Harry shouted. Draco turned around sharply on Carvenhoof’s back, although he hated to take his eyes off the enemy. But he trusted Carvenhoof to keep an eye on the Unspeakable and track him down if he tried to escape. He was already ducking his head and beating his wings in the funeral march that meant they were going through stone.
            Granger’s thestral was swinging and screaming as ropes of silk rose to snare her hooves. Another rope almost stole the Pensieve from her grasp. Granger managed to scoop the Pensieve up and duck her head so that she was saved from the spilling of the memories, but Draco knew that they might get her on the next strike and ruin their whole purpose in coming here. He hesitated.
            Then he saw the lead stallion, half-giant on its back, soaring towards her, and Prince and the Weasleys closing in. He nodded and called back to Harry, “They’ll have to help her. If they can’t, no one can.”
            Harry’s answer became blurred in Draco’s ears as they once again soared like ghosts through stone. This time, the experience was less strange, and Draco was further from panic than he had been before. It was too much to say that he enjoyed the ride, but he managed to sit back and link his hands in Carvenhoof’s mane instead of giving in to the impulse to lean off to the side, or maybe spring off the thestral.
            The imagination of becoming solid as he splattered on the stones did help, too.
            Once, he looked back, and thought he saw a shadow following him. That would be Harry, on his mare. Draco smiled a little as he faced forwards again. As long as they were together, he and Harry, he was confident of their ability to do anything.
            Carvenhoof snorted a little, and Draco stroked his neck. It was like stroking a table covered with a velvet cloth. “And you’re a vital part of this, too,” he whispered soothingly. The words rippled and seemed to turn sideways; for a second, Draco thought he could see them leaving his mouth. He winced and shut his lips tightly.
            Carvenhoof did seem to fly better after that, more strongly. Draco smiled. He would speak stranger words than that to reassure a friend.
*
            Harry leaned forwards, as if he could make his mare fly faster and catch up with the Unspeakable, or at least Carvenhoof. She bristled beneath his touch, hair along her withers rising like hackles, and Harry sighed and leaned back. He knew she was going as rapidly as she could. They had to catch the Unspeakable, not outpace him. If they didn’t, then there was every possibility that the darkness back there couldn’t be dispelled. Harry knew as well as Draco that only the one who had cast that particular enchantment could break it.
            One way or another, Harry thought, and let his hand rest against the approximation of his wand that he carried here. There are ways and ways of persuasion.
            They swirled and bore through the stone, and Harry caught scattered glimpses of stairs in a way he hadn’t on the journey to the Atrium. He supposed it had something to do with going slower now and in pursuit of a single enemy, not the one place that everyone was being herded into.
            And then he saw a glimpse of a shadow running ahead, under what looked like the shadow of Carvenhoof’s legs when they were in this state. He didn’t shout, seeing what had happened to the sound Draco made earlier, but he did lean forwards and try to convey his general eagerness to take the Unspeakable on.
            The mare dropped further, and Carvenhoof rose above her. Carvenhoof neighed, a sound that rang perfectly in Harry’s ears, without the distorting effect that the stone seemed to have on human noises. The mare flicked her ears in a way that Harry thought signified she understood the message.
            Or he hoped she did. Because suddenly she dropped, and they were spiraling around and around, so deep that Harry held his breath before he realized that that made no difference, in this shadow-state. He shook his head and let it out again, and then winced as the oppressive burden of magic beneath them made an assault on his sensibilities.
            Of course. They were headed towards the Department of Mysteries, and the accumulated power of all those artifacts—and probably Dark rituals, like the ones that the Unspeakables had performed with the altar—would feel like this.
            Harry gripped his wand. A new thought had occurred to him, and he couldn’t wait to communicate it to Draco. Draco had said something last night about how at least they knew that no one else was being turned into a twisted, because the altar was gone and the Unspeakables couldn’t do that particular ritual without the Dark and ancient magic imbued in it.
            But now, Harry wondered whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to deprive them of other artifacts, and other ways of tormenting the innocent.
            The thestral mare burst into the air again, circling the ceiling of a room that Harry recognized. A sharp shudder clawed its way up his back to his shoulders as he heard the rustling whispers of the Veil.
            The whispers tried to hook into his ears, to make him think that he heard Sirius’s voice, and Snape’s, and Dumbledore’s, but he shook his head and focused on the thestral mare’s neck until that impulse to listen subsided. It probably was a good thing that he was riding a thestral, he thought. He could hardly leap off and run into the Veil unless he wanted to break his legs. And the mare wouldn’t go anywhere near the Veil.
            A second later, she zoomed past it and out the doorway that led to one of the constantly changing complex of rooms. Harry held his breath for a second, then relaxed. All right, fine. She would pass near the Veil. But that was still a long way from letting him go through.
            As they soared down a broad corridor with dark blue walls that Harry didn’t remember, a door opened ahead of them. Harry picked up his wand, glad that he could use it here as he couldn’t when they were flying through the stone walls, but wary about the Unspeakables that he might have to confront.
            But the man that stepped out was the one who had fled through the door in the Atrium. He stood for a second contemplating the stairs behind him as if to reassure himself that Carvenhoof wasn’t coming down them, and then quietly shut the door and turned around.
            Harry grinned. He had to respect the thestrals’ maneuver then, if he hadn’t before. The man’s expression at the sight of Harry and his mare was priceless. The mare even managed to be hanging in the exact center of the corridor when the Unspeakable turned, so that he saw there was nowhere to go.
            Harry leveled his wand. “We can make this easy on you,” he said conversationally. “All you have to do is end the darkness enchantment that you put on the Atrium.”
            The man’s head jerked a little, as though he was repressing the urge to say something nasty. Then he turned and ran up another side corridor, a tiny dark-shaded opening that Harry hadn’t even noticed. And he ought to have done, considering there wasn’t even a door or part of the wall over it.
            Harry cursed, but before he had time to kick the thestral mare, she had already taken off. She flew easily through the tunnel, part of her body but not Harry’s in the wall, and that left him free to cast at the Unspeakable.
            Harry tried a Stunner first, but it hit something flat and metallic buried in the wall that hummed and then absorbed it. Harry scowled. Some kind of shield, he was sure. It would be just the artifact that even the Unspeakables weren’t supposed to have, in case some of them turned traitor to the Ministry, and of course they had it anyway.
            The Unspeakable leaped in the air as though crossing a wire. Harry squinted, and made out the shimmer of a ward in midair.
            He barked at the thestral mare. She ducked more fully into the stone and took him with her, an unpleasant experience when Harry wasn’t prepared for it. He grimaced and rode the rippling waves of cold through his body, eyes still aimed ahead so that he could see the Unspeakable if he made another turn for it.
            Then they arrived in a broad room that opened out in front of them, empty except for something in the middle, bright and so sheer white a color that Harry’s eyes couldn’t focus directly on it. He had barely lifted a hand to shield his face when he saw something descending from the ceiling on his left. He snapped his wand towards it.
            The thestral mare snorted, and Harry made out that it was Draco and Carvenhoof—partially from Draco’s flying hair. He stayed his hand just in time, watching as they soared and swirled around the white thing, and landed directly in the path of the fleeing Unspeakable.
            The man either couldn’t halt his momentum in time or was too busy looking back at Harry to notice Draco before he crashed into him. Carvenhoof stood as solid as a wall, and the man fell to the floor, in the instant before Draco’s Stunner surrounded him.
            Harry flew up beside them, panting, and Draco stood up and nodded to him before Levitating the Unspeakable’s body into his arms. “We should get back as quickly as we can,” he said. “I have faith in Prince’s wasps to keep them from escaping, but we can’t be sure that someone hasn’t managed to spill the Pensieve.”
            “Then we’ll have to add our own memories,” Harry said grimly, and Draco nodded at him as they flew straight up through the stone, this time. Harry wondered for a second what would happen to a passenger who was merely borne by and not riding a thestral, but it seemed that he passed through the stone like the rest of them.
            Harry did think that he saw a muscle in his face twitch, though, and managed to grin. They didn’t want the man dead, but there was no reason that they had to make the penalty for his attempt to destroy them pleasant.
*
            Draco oriented ruthlessly the moment they flew out of the walls of stone. The Atrium was directly ahead of them, but this corridor was broad enough to permit the thestrals to fly in open air, which they obviously preferred. Draco reached down, curving an arm around their prisoner’s shoulders and holding a wand to his throat so he didn’t get any funny ideas, and muttered the incantation that would awaken him.
            The first thing the idiot did was thrash. Draco held him on as ruthlessly to keep him from falling off Carvenhoof, and told him, “You’re going to remove the darkness enchantment that you put on the Atrium.”
            The man huffed and puffed for a second, as if trying to recognize his bargaining position. Draco smiled thinly. Yes, well he might. It didn’t mean that he was going to get away with anything, though, and he was an idiot if he thought he would.
            “You can’t drop me,” he said a second later. “That’s the only threat you can make at this height, and you wouldn’t drop me, because you need me to make the spell go away.”
            “Harry?” Draco called over his shoulder, and Carvenhoof began to drop, hovering all the while, until he was nearly parallel with Harry’s own mightily-flying mare. Draco was more than a little impressed that the mare had managed to get to the Department of Mysteries before they had, even though he knew that had been Carvenhoof’s plan, to split them up and get someone ahead of the Unspeakable and one behind.
            “You needed me for something?” Harry’s face was pleasant but blank otherwise as he ended up beside them. He glanced from the Unspeakable to Draco’s drawn wand in interest, and then to the entrance of the Atrium, approaching fast in front of them.
            Draco nodded to the Unspeakable. “He thinks we can’t threaten him with anything except a fall, which we don’t dare carry out.”
            He and Harry were enough in tune right now that Harry knew what Draco desired without asking: for him to be the one to make the threats, because they would be more unnerving coming from the former Chosen One than they would from someone who had always been considered Dark by more than half the Ministry. Harry’s eyes shone, and he nodded as he drew his wand.
            “I wouldn’t use anything as boring as the Cruciatus Curse,” he told the Unspeakable conversationally. “But I do know a variation on the Patronus Charm that’s very uncomfortable. Would you like to feel it?”
            The Unspeakable stared at him. Then he scoffed. “The Patronus is Light magic,” he said. “It’s hardly going to force me to tell you what you want to know.”
            “Really,” Harry said, and leveled his wand at the Unspeakable’s chest. They were almost to the entrance to the Atrium, but Draco pressed his heels against Carvenhoof’s sides, and he halted, hovering. “Then you won’t mind if I send the Patronus to run through the middle of your chest, will you?”
            The Unspeakable’s mouth fell open. Draco smiled, not nicely. There was always rubbish around—some of it rumors, some of it supposedly from real experience—about the results of “experiments” conducted in making Light magic more threatening. When their prisoner was an Unspeakable, the chance that they had participated in those experiments, or at least read about actual ones, increased.
            “No,” the Unspeakable whispered. “I don’t want that.” He shuddered and again almost fell off the thestral. Draco could tell from the shiver under his thighs that Carvenhoof was getting tired of correcting for him. But the Unspeakable simply continued whispering. “Take me into the Atrium, and I’ll remove the darkness enchantment.”
            Harry glanced at Draco. Draco nodded back. From his experience of reading intimidated faces, the man was telling the truth.
            So they soared on, into the Atrium, the brass wasps that hovered at the entrance not doing anything to stop them.
            Only to find that the darkness in the room had already been pierced by a soft, silvery light.
            Draco turned his head instinctively towards Granger. She was brilliant enough to have found a counter to the darkness enchantment, if one existed. He hadn’t known one could do anything other than force the caster to remove the spell, but there was even the possibility that she could have come up with something on the fly—
            Then he stared.
            The soft, silvery light didn’t come from Granger’s direction, and the memory that played on the screen she’d raised didn’t come from the Pensieve Granger held.
            Instead, it was a memory of Warren, Jenkins, Harry, Draco, and Rudie confronting Macgeorge when Ernhardt had stolen her body. It showed clearly the necromantic creatures they had fought in his final lair, and the way that their magic had worked in partnership with desperation, bringing him down with tactics that Draco couldn’t have believed would work before they had to try them.
            Throughout it, Warren’s calm voice talked. “If you still think the Head Auror was innocent, this should convince you otherwise. He was a very clever twisted, saner than most, who had the wits to see that someone who could hunt down other twisted—indeed, a whole Corps of people he had put there to do something with them and give them a disgraced position in the Ministry—could hunt him down as well.”
            The perspective of the memory shifted, showing Rudie kneeling over Macgeorge, arms around her. Macgeorge was weeping, but when she lifted her head and opened her eyes, there was no trace of the blue glow in them that had been in the previous image.
            Jenkins spoke now, her voice drier and sharper than her partner’s. “We could only bring back Macgeorge because she was possessed, her intelligence forced into abeyance while Ernhardt used her body and the necromancy she had stumbled into. Think about that when you start telling us that we should have rescued every twisted we hunted, and made them innocent and whole again.”
            Draco glanced sharply at Harry. Harry had the grace to look embarrassed, but he gestured back towards the memory screen, and Draco obediently turned around.
            This memory showed the meeting where Draco and Harry had found out that the Aurors, and some of the Ministry hierarchy in general, had no intention of honoring them for their pursuit of Ernhardt. They were pursued, and almost arrested, and declared anathema again, this time not with Ernhardt behind it, but because they had been an embarrassment for the Ministry.
            Draco could hear the impact that particular memory was having, in the low ripple of murmurs spreading out over the Atrium crowd, almost all of them the kind of Ministry flunkies who would never be invited to one of those secret meetings. Likewise, their lives were governed by the kind of decisions made at those meetings.
            They could have been destroyed, if their superiors had turned against them, as effectively as Harry and Draco’s reputations had been destroyed.

            Jenkins spoke, softly. Draco reckoned she and Warren had decided that it made no difference whether they were known to be Harry and Draco’s allies or not. Whether the Ministry turned against them for it now or later, or didn’t turn against them, the reputation of the Socrates Corps was shot. They wouldn’t be working for it again.
            “This is the danger that the Ministry came up with, and then caged. As I said, Ernhardt was clever. There was no shame in no one realizing immediately what he was—a twisted with a talent for possessing people, even other twisted. No one like that had been seen before. But it is inexcusable—” her voice became even more pointed, an arrow “—that the Ministry cursed the messenger who brought the news to them, instead of trying to make sure that their rogue Head Auror could cause no more damage.”
            The memory faded. Jenkins moved her wand again, and the silvery light of the screen faded. Draco could hear Granger’s voice hissing, still trying to raise the darkness that lay across the Atrium.
            Harry leaned over his shoulder, mare hovering so close that his knee brushed Draco’s, and poked his wand into the Unspeakable’s chest.
            “All right, all right,” the Unspeakable whimpered, and took out his wand, watched narrowly enough by both Draco and Harry that Draco thought his head might actually explode. His wand traveled back and forth in a harmless enough motion, and the lights came back on all over the Atrium.
            Voices sighed and exclaimed, and Draco turned and looked at Granger. She nodded and raised the Pensieve, ready to dip back into the story she had been telling—unlike the one that Warren and Jenkins had told, without words. There was value in that, Draco thought, in allowing others to see the memories and pretend that they were making up their own minds as neutral observers.
            “Wait.”
            That was Lauren Hale, pushing her way forwards through the crowd. Behind her, not far away enough to stumble after her as if they were on leashes and so make their slavery obvious, came the Montgomerys. They struck threatening poses, their hands on their wands although they hadn’t drawn them yet. Poses were pretty much all that was left to them, Draco thought idly.
            “I think,” said Hale, “that we should listen, before we see any more memories.” And she turned, casting an enchantment that Draco didn’t know. A line of space opened up in front of her, pointing like an arrow at a cluster of Aurors that had just appeared in the memory of that meeting where Harry and Draco had been declared outcast.
            “I think we ought to listen,” Hale purred, “to what justification our esteemed leaders can give us for their actions. Experimenting on people to turn them into twisted and trying to murder Aurors who told them the truth are, after all, serious charges. And everyone deserves the luxury of a fair trial.”
*
            SP777: Yes. Although now it's a different kind of chaos.
- 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

Chains of Fool's Gold