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A Reign of Silence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3889 -:- 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 Thirteen—Final, and Lasting

            There was a mingled blast of breath and hatred from Ernhardt’s mouth, and Draco had the confused, blurred impression that Ernhardt lashed out with fingers that might have claws on them. It was only a moment, only a second during which he saw them, but he felt his heartbeat soar because it was another thing Ernhardt had mastered, another unexpected gift, another flaw, and he didn’t know how they were going to fight someone who had three—

            Then the claws seemed to catch in something, white and loud like lightning striking in the same place, and Draco blinked and saw what had really happened. A mesh of pale light had sprung up in front of them, and it coiled inwards and downwards, tangling Ernhardt in it before he realized what was happening.

            Harry dragged Draco to the side at that point, and Draco fell with him, too surprised not to. He heard loud, tearing sounds, and wondered if Ernhardt had managed to wrestle his way free of Harry’s spell. But when he looked up, it was to see a dim figure still struggling furiously in the wake of the light, spitting curses that went nowhere.

            Then the sounds repeated in Draco’s ear, and he swung his head around.

            Harry was coughing, and wiping dark liquid away from the side of his mouth. Draco knew what it was, and shoved him to the ground, casting a Muscle Relaxation Charm when Harry tried to stand up again.

            “Draco, what the fuck are you doing—” Harry kicked his legs out, and snarled when he found they wouldn’t obey him. “You—”

            “You’ve exhausted your magic to the point that you’re coughing up blood because it’s taking strength from your body,” Draco said, reciting the details the way he would if he was reading them from a textbook page. It was the only way he could keep from screaming. “Internal bleeding is almost always one of the first symptoms. Stay still, you idiot, and maybe we can save your life if not your magic.”

            Harry blinked at him, and stayed still.

            Draco turned back to Ernhardt, shaking. He clutched his wand with fingers that shook, and that would never do. He might lose it, and with it he would lose his chance to access spells and defend Harry. So he forced his hand to stop shaking because he willed it, and looked carefully at what the mesh had done to Ernhardt.

            Apparently slowed him down long enough that Warren and Jenkins could join the battle; that seemed to be the main effect. Warren must have given up the Joining Circle Chant when Ernhardt interrupted and Harry used the magic to defend Draco rather than link back to her. They were pounding towards him with their wands out, and had already launched several curses. Some of the spells sparked and faded on the mesh, damaging neither it nor Ernhardt, and others landed on him but didn’t seem to do much damage.

            Draco studied Jenkins’s mouth and the tight set of it, and knew she had made the decision to destroy Macgeorge’s body if she could. They might have to risk Ernhardt leaping and taking over someone else. She wanted this enemy down and dead.

            So did Draco, for that matter. And a spell had occurred to him, welling into his mind from the memories of the books he had sorted through in his family’s library.

            It was a spell that he would never ordinarily think of using, because it was Dark, and more than that, it was something that had sickened him the first time he read it. He had shut his eyes and pushed his book away, nauseated and shaking, and hadn’t gone back to the library for weeks. Ever since then, he had carefully avoided the one grimoire he had found it in. His ancestors could cast such things, or his parents. Draco Malfoy, who would become an Auror, had no need of them.

            But Draco Malfoy who had become an Auror with a potentially dying partner and facing the hardest enemy they had ever tried to fight might have need of it.

            He could remember the incantation, because it had seared itself into his memory the way that horrible things so often did. He woke at night remembering the way Nagini had looked as she crawled towards him with her jaws open, the one time that Draco had thought the Dark Lord really would permit her to eat him, and he woke at night remembering this.

            “Animum liber,” he whispered, and heaved in a deep breath as the magic shook him. He was tired, too, although nowhere near the level of idiot tired that Harry was, and he thought he could do this. “Animum liber, bastard.”

            He hadn’t meant the spell enough the first time, it seemed, because it had to be cast with hatred and commitment, the way the Unforgivables did. But Draco had managed a convincing Cruciatus as the Dark Lord’s torturer, because he had to. And he cast the spell that would hopefully cut Ernhardt’s soul loose from the body he had possessed, because he had to.

            Elder stared at him with his face like a white flame. Draco ignored that. The spell was taking effect now, a swarm of curling dark tendrils under the white mesh that Harry had created, and Ernhardt was fighting it with all his breath.

            There was nothing physical for a spell like this to lock onto, but that had never been a problem with magic. That they had a hold Draco knew when they tightened and glowed, and then the black strands began to pulse. The way that Nagini’s body did when she was feeding, Draco thought, and shuddered, but didn’t look away.

            Harry’s hand reached up and clutched at his elbow, trembling. Draco bent down towards him, not taking his eyes from Ernhardt.

            “You didn’t need to do that,” Harry whispered. “Not for me.”

            “I needed to do that for so many reasons that I can’t count them,” Draco snapped back. He was still shaking, and he balled his hands into fists, so he wouldn’t lash out and hurt Harry. He wanted to order him to lie back down, but he still couldn’t take his eyes from that choking black light.

            “Finite Incantatem.”

            It was Elder’s voice, flat and almost gentle, the way Draco had heard him speak to crying victims. No one had ever said that he wasn’t a good Auror, Draco thought as he turned around slowly, his mouth opening to yell at Elder—

            But it was too late, and the spell had already crackled out and attacked the glowing light of Draco’s spell. It threaded through all the veins, and irradiated them with light—of course it did, Draco thought, because trust Elder to make even a Finite some sort of spell of the Light—and then tugged. And the web Draco had created to take Ernhardt’s soul from Macgeorge’s body and finally free them all from the threat collapsed and vanished.

            Ernhardt thrust and twisted, and for a moment Draco thought he saw his body fracturing like a flock of birds. But that was only the blue light from his eyes, flashing and fading in and out as his eyes blinked open and shut. Ernhardt lashed again, and the mesh Harry had risked his life to conjure broke around him.

            Ernhardt stared at them for a moment, at a panting Draco and a gasping Harry, at Jenkins who had closed in enough that she might be able to launch a deadly curse, and Warren, crouching down beside her partner and beginning to chant.

            Draco could almost follow the pattern of his thoughts, and wasn’t really surprised when he turned and began to run towards the remains of the torn dome, whipping his arms to the side, and then his whole body, when Warren tried to curse him.

            He went straight past a tree, and paused to use its shelter to Apparate. Draco’s throat was burning with his shouts, his head aching with his fury, and he would have run after him if he could have risked leaving Harry alone.

            But there was something else near Ernhardt besides the tree, something Draco had forgotten because he had enough already to think about. It moved, and its hand lashed out and closed around Ernhardt’s ankle, knuckles turning white with the kind of grip that Draco thought only death could dislodge.

            Rudie reared up and spat spells in counterpoint to Ernhardt’s incantations, and the air around them turned misty, steamy, from the competition of leaping, clashing magic. Draco winced and tried not to hide his head from the sheer noise and fury of it. He wanted to see what happened.

            Ernhardt wavered, and vanished in the next few seconds. Rudie went with him, still clinging to his ankle like a diver trying to drag a shark ashore by main strength.

            Then the clearing was quiet, or at least quieter than it had been, and they could relax amid the mud and the blood and the splintered bones, and the rage and hatred and fear that curled through Draco as he turned to face Elder.

*

            Harry knew that look on Draco’s face, because he had seen it before when they fought the twisted. It meant that Draco was ready to commit murder.

            But this time, Harry had to stop him, because the person he was preparing to kill was a fellow Auror. A stupid fellow Auror, of course, standing there with his arms folded and an expression of self-righteousness on his face, but still. Draco would spend the rest of his life in Azkaban if he slaughtered Elder right now.

            The problem was, Harry didn’t think he could lift himself from the ground. His limbs shook, still half-relaxed, and black stars kept exploding in front of his eyes. Harry knew he was lucky to have kept awake this long.

            So he used his weakness as a weapon the same way he would have used his strength. He coughed and winced when he felt the cough travel deeper than he had intended, and the next time he gasped, blood came out on his breath.

            Draco whipped around and dropped to his knees beside him instantly, and Harry winced when he saw that Draco was shaking. But the pain in his chest and his magical core, or at least that was what it felt like, went so deep that he was soon wincing for other reasons.

            “God, what a fool I am,” Draco whispered, and his arms curved around Harry like steel cables. “We have to get you to safety. Of course we do. Can you—can you forgive me that I ever thought anything was more important?” His eyes found Harry’s, and his expression was almost frantic.

            Harry smiled at him, then closed his eyes as another spasm racked him. This time it felt as if his lungs were dancing in his chest as they filled up with fluid, which was not a fun sensation. “Sure,” he whispered. “Meanwhile, the private Healer we’ve used before, please?”

            “He needs to go to St. Mungo’s.”

            That was Warren. Harry drifted, letting Draco himself argue with Warren and remind her about the ban on going to St. Mungo’s that Harry had earned. There was another conversation going on, too, but Harry was too ill to pay attention to it until the voices rose and seared themselves into his mind.

            “He was going to use a spell that destroys the soul—”

            “Who the fuck cares, when that would have meant stopping Ernhardt, and perhaps even bringing back Macgeorge, if her partner was right about her spirit surviving?” Jenkins said the whole thing in a flat voice that seemed to indicate how uninterested she was. “Instead, you prompted the escape of the twisted we were hunting, one of the most dangerous enemies the Ministry has ever faced, and the loss of another Auror. Good job.”

            “But not even someone like Ernhardt deserves to have his soul destroyed.”

            “I don’t want to argue with you.” Jenkins’s voice was low and very pleasant now, and Harry shivered while his mind wandered back to the argument between Draco and Warren—no, not argument, they had agreed to take him to hospital. Harry reckoned that was good. “Come with us.”

            “I don’t want to go anywhere with Dark wizards. And I have reports to make to the Ministry about the souls of their trusted Socrates Aurors, as well as preparations to make for my transfer into another Corps—”

            There was an agonized cry, and Harry heard the sound that someone’s arm made when you wrenched it up so that they couldn’t move without breaking the bone. He smiled faintly. Not that he would know that from personal experience, or anything.

            “I think you’re coming with us,” Jenkins said. “I won’t extend this very special and personal invitation again.”

            Then the blackness that had been waiting for Harry while he fended it off and argued that he needed to stay awake flowed over him, and Harry had no idea what might have happened next—although he resolved to make Draco tell him when he got a chance.

*

            “We do it the way we agreed.”

            Draco nodded. Jenkins had taken Elder somewhere, probably back to the Ministry. At the moment, he didn’t care where, as long as it was a place where Elder couldn’t fulfill his expressed intention to report Harry and the rest of them. He was glad that Warren was with him, anyway. She was more solid and calmer than Jenkins, and less scary. And their plan depended more on overwhelming the St. Mungo’s staff than on frightening them.

            Warren nodded back, and then walked through the entrance of St. Mungo’s as if she did this every day. Maybe she did, Draco reflected, following her with Harry still draped in his arms, made as comfortable as possible with Lightening Charms. He had no idea how many times she or Jenkins might have been wounded on duty.

            The welcome witch on duty recognized Harry, and stood up with her mouth opening. Warren didn’t give her a chance to speak. She simply cut her dead with a glare that made the poor woman sink back, trembling a little, and then turned to Draco and asked, “What are his symptoms?’

            “Coughing up blood,” Draco said. “Unconsciousness. Ragged breathing. Intense struggle even to stand or hang onto someone right before he went unconscious.” Speaking the symptoms didn’t make him feel any better, and if it would have done anything but make him feel better, he would have hitched Harry closer to him.

            Warren turned back towards the welcome witch, and the Healer who had appeared behind her. “What do those symptoms say to you?” she asked, looking back and forth between them as if she thought the answer was as likely to come from either.

            “Intense magical exhaustion, with concomitant draining of the magical core,” the Healer said promptly, and then frowned and brushed a hand down his green robes as if he had left something behind. “But—”

            “On the brink of death?” Warren asked, snapping out the words as though she was reading from a report in front of the Head Auror.

            “Yes,” the Healer said, and glanced at Harry and the scar on his forehead as if, by glaring at it, he could change the scar into a different shape.

            Warren nodded. “Then you will be responsible for Harry Potter’s death,” she said, “since he arrived on the brink of death and you refused to treat him. I’ll be sure to get your name from your superiors so I can spell it properly in my report. Come, Auror Malfoy.” And she turned on her heel to march out again.

            Draco grimaced, and followed. This was the riskiest part of their plan. He thought it more than likely that the Healer wouldn’t bother to call them back.

            But perhaps the Healer thought it wasn’t his responsibility to make that kind of decision, because Draco heard him say, “Damn,” helplessly, and then he called after them, “Bring him in! I’ll treat him! But you know I can’t promise to save him.”

            Warren turned around and widened her eyes at the Healer. “Of course not. We’ll just stay a bit outside the room, so we can make sure that you don’t have any unneeded help.”

            The Healer bowed his head, then nodded and swept a hand down the corridor where patients would usually go to wait. “Of course. Come along. I can do the initial Healing by myself, but I’ll need someone to give me a little of their magical strength to replace what I lose in the first spell. That first one’s rather overwhelming.” He looked back and forth between Draco and Warren.

            Draco opened his mouth, but he didn’t even get a chance to say the words. “I’ll do it, of course,” Warren said, and only looked at Draco indifferently when Draco glared. “You’re tired yourself, and you don’t like anyone who doesn’t like him. That means that you might not transfer your strength over efficiently.”

            Draco couldn’t argue with that, but he wished he could. He followed Warren reluctantly into the depths of the building.

*

            Harry opened his eyes and screamed. There was froth in his mouth, and froth in his lungs, and what felt like Dark magic crawling all over him, trying to tighten its net. He remembered the net that Draco had created to steal Ernhardt’s soul, and began to fight furiously, thrashing towards the edge of what felt like a bed.

            “Hold him! Hold him!” That was a voice from a shouting green robe, and Harry tensed. If he was near Healers—

            “It’s all right, Harry. I promise. I wouldn’t have brought you here if it wasn’t so serious, and we’ve got their promise to help.”

            The words sliced and seized through Harry’s skull, and he fell back on the bed, gasping. “You promise?” he whispered, reaching out and seizing Draco’s hand in return. “You promise?”

            “Yes, I do.” Draco gazed at him with a strange kind of expression on his face, almost pitiless, and he reached out and gripped Harry’s hand, holding him still and poised. “There’s no reason for me to lie, is there?”

            Harry swallowed and shook his head. Then someone cursed him, not personally but in a casual way that said he was interrupting their work, whatever it was, and someone else pressed down on his temple. Harry heard a voice that sounded like Warren’s mutter, “Is there anything you can’t say to him later?”

            “No,” Draco said, and retreated.

            Harry would have begged him not to leave him alone, but Draco’s hand was in his, and that was enough for now. He gave in to the hands pressing on him and the magic that flowed through his body and slid into sleep.

*

            “As far as they can tell, they saved his magic.”

            Draco leaned back in his chair and nodded. He felt nearly as drained as Harry, to the point that he thought he could have spoken to one of the Healers without snapping. But Warren had appointed herself as liaison to the Healers for him, and Draco was just as happy to let her go at it.

            “Will they know for sure by the morning?” he muttered, closing his eyes. He felt Harry’s hand in his, and caressed the still, stiff fingers. They didn’t have the telltale coldness that supposedly marked the skin of wizards who had lost his magic, but Draco had never been sure how much he believed in that legend, anyway.

            “They will.” Warren paused, and Draco forced his eyes open. She had something she wanted to tell him, or so it seemed. Otherwise, she would have left immediately, probably to make sure that Jenkins hadn’t vanished off the face of the earth.

            Warren leaned over the back of the chair and frowned at Draco as if he was a puzzle. She didn’t look much drained by the magic the Healer had taken from her to forge the link with Harry. Draco wondered if she was stronger than most wizards in general. If her flaw was flinging Dark curses, she might be.

            “I want to know everything you know about Elder,” Warren said.

            Draco blinked. “Not much,” he said. “I worked with him on one case before where he accused me of being Dark. I never thought he would be assigned to the Socrates Corps. He had too many connections and too many people who—I don’t think they agreed with him, but it was like they thought they should have. As if his standards were something they should aspire to because he was their conscience, or purer than they were.”

            Warren’s smile was wintry. “Yes, I have met many people in the past who are content to let someone else serve as their conscience, and in the meantime, they let their own lapse. Why do you think he was assigned to Socrates?”

            “For the same reason the rest of us were,” Draco said, watching her. If she thought something different, he couldn’t tell, not from her still face or the way her hands rested on the back of his chair. “Because he fought a twisted and they couldn’t conceal the secret of their existence from him any longer.”

            “A popular Auror, whose magic is Light,” Warren murmured softly, as if talking to herself. “And with most people not choosing to acknowledge, or not realizing, that the gifts we have would be flaws in someone insane. I wonder.”

            “His magic isn’t Light,” Draco said. “He just thinks of it that way.”

            Warren’s shoulders rose and fell. “In that direction lies a philosophical debate on the nature of magic, and whether anything can be truly Light if it’s powerful enough, and I don’t care about that. I wondered whether there was any reason they might have assigned him here, other than that.”

            “If they wanted to disband the Socrates Corps, they just could.” Draco rubbed at his eyes. “And Harry and I are in enough disgrace that they wouldn’t have to hire someone to discredit the Socrates Corps as an excuse to get rid of us.”

            “Who are they?” Warren looked like a baby bird, tilting her head to the side. Draco eyed her wand and decided not to tell her so.

            “The Ministry hierarchy,” Draco said. “Anyone who thinks that Elder would drag us down, and wants us dragged down. The only other person who would have a reason to want us to see us stopped that way is Ernhardt, and he could just spring into one of our bodies and take over.”

            “I am inclined to Isla’s view of the matter,” Warren said abruptly, and then straightened. “There must be some reason he hasn’t used his most powerful magic yet, and Macgeorge’s survival in her own body is as good a reason as any.” She clapped Draco on the shoulder. “You should sleep.”

            “But who do you think might be responsible for it, if not the Ministry and not Ernhardt?” Draco asked as she left.

            Warren paused and looked over her shoulder at him. “That’s what Simone went to find out,” she said. “And since she hasn’t returned yet, she needs help, and I will go and help her.”

            She left, and Draco leaned back, feeling Harry’s hand in his, and shook his head.

            They hadn’t died yet. That was the only comfort he had right now.

*

            delia cerrano: You might not like him right now…

            SP777: Well, everyone has to survive for there to continue to be more than four of them.

            Ernhardt? It’s one that people I know have had.

            The next part would be now.
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A Reign of Silence