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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.

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Chapter Thirteen--The Ministry's Response
            "Well? We're waiting for an answer."
            Draco, who had landed with Carvenhoof and Harry and Harry's mare on the other side of the Atrium, still had no trouble seeing. He had remained on Carvenhoof's back, and the thestral was taller than all but a few wizards in the room. The cluster of Aurors, a few Unspeakables moving to stand with them, grimaced but didn't respond.
            "You can't just stand there and say nothing." Hale advanced on them, twirling her wand. "I know that you think you can, but you can't." Her voice was so condescending that Draco wanted to applaud. "We've laid out our story and accused you of driving people insane, of experimenting on them with Dark magic, of sheltering a Head Auror who was twisted himself and driving out the people who tried to inform you of that. There has to be an answer. What is it?"
            Draco thought for a few more minutes that they wouldn't answer. Hale didn't demand it again, having spoken once about it. She just waited, and Draco wondered if the Aurors realized that not only the contempt in her eyes but the scorn in the faces of their audience was deepening second by second.
            One of the Aurors finally cleared his throat, rackingly. Draco recognized him now as Jensen Bradley, one of the most senior members of the Department. "You don't understand," he whispered, hanks of grey hair dangling around his face as he stared imploringly at Hale.
            "Then make me understand," said Hale, and flung out her arms to indicate most of the room. "Make us understand. That's why we're here. That's what we're waiting for."
            The Aurors exchanged glances again. Bradley shifted from foot to foot, but he seemed to have been chosen as the sacrificial speaker, maybe because he'd already spoken, and so he was the one who went on. "You know that the Auror Department has always had to protect our world against threats..."
            "Yes?" Hale's face was pale, but fixed in a smile that Draco knew portended no good for the Aurors. He wondered if they knew that.
            "This was another threat." Bradley's voice was growing in strength. He swung to face Harry and Draco and studied them with no expression at all, although his voice was shaking with the force of his emotions. "Someone powerful and popular enough that he could bring down the Aurors if he wanted, and he kept getting into scrapes. And then his partner."
            Draco smiled and bowed, feeling eyes on him. Either way, he would never come back here as an Auror. He might as well enjoy his moment of notice while he had it.
            Bradley turned away as if disgusted and faced Hale again. "They might have been telling the truth. Ernhardt might have been a twisted. But can you imagine the embarrassment to the Ministry if people believed that? We couldn't have it. Auror Potter had managed to embarrass us enough on his own."
            Hale snorted and put her hands on her hips. "I'm no advocate for Auror Potter being treated better than other people. I was his partner, and I saw exactly how exasperating he could be." Her eyes went to Harry's face, and there was a smile in them that made Harry smile back. Draco then felt he could forgive her, a little. "But I'm no advocate for him being treated worse, either." She turned to Bradley, in profile, and even that one eye held enough winter to make him wince. "Why did you?"
            "He was embarrassing," said Bradley, with something perilously close to a whinge in his tone. Perhaps he knew it, because he cleared his throat and continued. "I know that doesn't sound like enough, but he was making people lose confidence in the Ministry. And his partner wasn't doing what he should have."
            "What's that?" It was Warren who asked, her face keen, and Draco wondered exactly how eager she and Jenkins were to have the Socrates Corps confirmed as nothing more than a sham.
            "He should have restrained Potter," Bradley answered tightly. "He should have shown him how to be a proper Auror. And he didn't."
            "Say it the way you mean it," Draco called down, not caring about the heads that swung to him. He felt light and reckless and free, like he might drift any direction any second, and wondered if this was how Harry felt all the time in the middle of battle. "I was meant to be a chain on him, dragging him down. Ernhardt--and other people--were counting on our old rivalry to do that. They never thought we might change."
            "How did you change?" That was a random person in the middle of the crowd whose face Draco never saw.
            Draco grinned. He couldn't believe there wasn't anyone who didn't know, between the circulating rumors and the Prophet stories, but maybe someone had managed to escape the current of gossip. In that case, Draco was more than willing to show them.
            He gestured, and Harry leaned forwards from his own mare's back. Their lips met to a chorus of shocked gasps, shouts of outrage, laughter, and a few camera flashes.
            Draco pulled back and winked at Harry, pleased he had gone along with that, even to the extent that he had. He could say that he had got his moment of being envied by the public for dating Harry Potter. And a moment was all he wanted.
            "Aurors being lovers is also against regulations," said another woman standing with Bradley, prim and grey-haired and possessed of a highly-lifted nose.
            "Piss it out your ear," Draco said, and laughed at her shocked expression. "You and I both know that that's not what this was about." He swept his eyes around the Atrium. "You and I and every other Auror in your little group know that there were suspicions about Ernhardt around before we exposed him. But you couldn't bear to think that you might have made a mistake in the Head Auror you chose. You didn't want to deal with the work that exposing him and holding him in a prison cell would take, if he was really twisted. You didn't want to deal with the consequences of an investigation by the Corps whose business it was to look into the twisted bearing fruit inside your own Department..."
            He paused, and smiled winningly at the staring eyes and parted lips. "That's the way it was, wasn't it?" He hadn't known for sure, but it was a logical sequence of events, and the way they thought about him and Harry and Ernhardt had to be logical in at least some ways. Otherwise, there was no way that their minds could have functioned at all, as simple as they were.
            Bradley began speaking again, but the grey-haired woman talked over him. "You didn't know what was wrong with Auror Ernhardt! You made no formal complaint!"
            "How could we have, when the complaint would have gone straight to him?" Harry interrupted, bristling in irritation. Draco placed a hand on his back, but not to chide him. He just liked to feel the way Harry's muscles and lungs worked when he was in the middle of a righteous yell. Harry seemed to know it, from the way that he didn't try to shrug Draco's touch off. "When we didn't know who else he'd possessed? When the Ministry had already turned against us once and tried to hunt us down?"
            "You're not trustworthy." Bradley, seeming committed to stealing back the crowd's attention, folded his arms. "You have to see that. Of course we would believe the Head Auror over you..."
            "Then Harry is right, and we might as well not have complained," Draco pointed out. "Why are you complaining about our not complaining, then?"
            A few of the Aurors exchanged glances. Draco nodded, though he tried to make it subtle. Some of the smarter ones in their little group were finally figuring out that they were in trouble, and wouldn't be able to get out of it by flinging blame wildly at Harry and Draco.
            "You don't understand." Bradley licked his lips, a quick lash of his tongue that made Draco roll his eyes. It was obvious to anyone who paid attention that he was nervous, but then again, Bradley didn't have to fool an audience of high intellects. Maybe that made him more unsubtle than he would have been otherwise. Draco hoped so, for the sake of the Ministry. "The Ministry has a certain reputation to keep up. We can't have our Aurors doing anything they want to."
            "I quite agree," Draco murmured. "But if they have a certain reputation to keep up, why did you hire a Death Eater in the first place? Former Death Eater," he added generously, when Bradley glared at him.
            "That was a mistake that I did not have any input into," Bradley said. "Made by other people." He glared at a few different Aurors impartially.
            "Well, you had me," Draco said. "And you never wanted to sack me openly, or Harry, either. That would have been too embarrassing for your precious Ministry, wouldn't it? You couldn't hang onto the Boy-Who-Lived, and even a Death Eater had better things to do than work for you." He was amused and proud of himself for the indifference that he managed to pour into his voice. Of course he had wanted the Auror job far more than that, enough to give up his family when they had driven home the point, but Bradley didn't need to know that. "So you tried to drive us out instead."
            "We did try to sack you," insisted one of the women behind Bradley.
            Draco switched his gaze, and his smile, to her. "Why didn't it take, then? What were your attempts before these accusations that supposedly came from Ernhardt and Ernhardt alone?"
            She hesitated. Draco smiled more widely, not nicely. They wanted to claim Ernhardt as an innocent victim when it suited them, so they could accuse Harry and Draco of murder, but they also wanted to claim that he was the originator of all these plans, because he was conveniently dead and they could blame it on him.
            It was a contradiction Draco had noted before, and which was liable to hang them. Here they were caught on it, again.
            Bradley coughed and interrupted. "We did give you difficult cases. You were supposed to handle them--less gracefully than you did."
            A murmur moved through the audience, which included plenty of non-Aurors, and Bradley seemed to realize precisely what he had said. He flushed and looked around pleadingly, extending his hands.
            "I didn't mean it like that," he said. "Auror Malfoy asked what the attempts were, and I had to answer him, didn't I? We are trying to pursue a policy of honesty--"
            "You just admitted that you gave difficult cases not to Aurors that you thought could handle them, but to Aurors that you hoped to destroy," Draco summarized, nodding pleasantly all the while. "Never thinking that perhaps other people would feel unsafe as a result. Or what would have happened if we had failed to take down those criminals? Would you have sent regular Aurors after them then? How long would they have stolen or killed or kidnapped until you managed to contain them?"
            "If you think about it," Harry said, in that thoughtful voice that all his enemies who knew him should dread, "they really did the same thing that Voldemort did, in the last years of his life. He put destroying me and punishing his enemies ahead of the safety of his followers and their nominal goals. And now the Ministry is doing the same thing."
            Draco wanted to laugh at the bright smile that Harry sprayed all around like flame, but he managed--just--to hang onto his stern face as he nodded. "Something to think about," he said, and then slipped in, because Harry would be too noble to say it, "Especially all of you who still flinch at his name."
            "What justification did you have?" Harry turned on Bradley and the others, his voice lowered and throbbing. "To punish us? If we embarrassed you, discipline us. Don't assign us to a Corps and to cases that you thought would kill us."
            "That wasn't my decision." Bradley was fidgeting, his eyes on the floor.
            "Really?" Harry was leaning forwards, his thestral mare pushing a little ahead of Carvenhoof. Draco allowed it. The control of the conversation had shifted to Harry, and Draco did think they should be partners in all things. "But we saw you in the memories that made people into twisted. Something was your decision, wasn't it? Somewhere in there?"
            Bradley closed his eyes. His face was a stiff mask of sweat. "I didn't come up with the idea of those experiments," he whimpered. "I was only following orders."
            "Of course," Harry said. "The perennial excuse. Well, we were following what we thought our orders were: to track down Dark wizards and protect the public safety, and use any means we could think of to do it. We should have known better, right? Somehow guessed what the Ministry wanted and got ourselves quietly killed."
            Bradley glared at him. "Anyone else would have known how to play the political game, you bastard, and quit the Ministry before he became that unwelcome."
            "Right," Harry said lightly. Once again, Bradley seemed to ignore the crowd's reaction. Draco smiled. He had resented Harry's fame at times, as well as his oblivious refusal to use his fame, but it did have its uses, namely in convincing Ministry workers that he was the greatest threat and they had to focus on him. "But you ought to have known by my first year as an Auror trainee that I didn't play politics. Why not handle me? Why not come up with someone who could take me on and turn me in the right direction? If I was that stupid and you were that smart, it ought to have been easy."
            "I'm not the one who made these decisions," Bradley mumbled again. Maybe he had noticed what the crowd was doing, because he glanced uneasily around. "I never...no one told me..."
            "Of course not," Harry said, as kindly and dismissively as though he was going to drop it. Draco, who knew better, grinned. Harry paused, then added, "You just know enough about it all to tell me what I ought to have done to make the Ministry more comfortable."
            Bradley threw up his hands. "You have no idea how hard this was! You have no idea how much we had to put up with from the public whenever we tried to discipline the Boy-Who-Lived, or whenever you made a mistake! All the owls that called us for to sack you, all the owls that called for you to be kept on! How were we supposed to choose between them?"
            "By coming up with a decision and sticking to it," Harry said, his voice dipping down cold again. "Not shoving the decisions continually over onto other people."
            Bradley opened his mouth to continue arguing, but Draco had already gripped Harry's hand and squeezed it a little. He had seen Hale and Warren and Jenkins coming together to form a little triangle, and he knew what they wanted. The conversation had got rather off-track from the Ministry knowingly creating twisted, which after all was the major crime here and the one that Harry and Draco had been hounded so they wouldn't uncover it. They would never have become Socrates Aurors if the Ministry hadn't had to cover up its bloody mistakes.
            Bloody in every sense of the word, Draco thought idly, as he watched Hale touch her wand to her throat and cast a nonverbal Sonorus, so that the voice would come as a surprise to everyone not already paying attention to her.
            “We have veered off-topic,” Hale told everyone, and Draco enjoyed watching those who hadn’t noticed her touching her wand to her throat spinning around and staring. “The Ministry was brought up on charges of creating twisted by experiments. We have gone off into the question of whether or not they unfairly persecuted two Aurors. That is interesting to many of us because of the one Auror’s celebrity status, but surely the attention should be returned to the larger crime?”
            Draco scowled. He knew Hale disliked Harry, hadn’t been able to work with him as a partner, and had had the audacity to claim that was Harry’s fault. He suspected that she was taking pride in reminding everyone about it right now.
            Harry leaned across to him. “She’s right, you know,” he murmured. “That is the larger crime. What they did to Jeremiah, and your mother, and the rest of them.”
            “She didn’t have to phrase it like that,” Draco muttered back.
            Harry smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder. “I know. If it makes you happy, I think their crimes against you are as big as any of the rest of them. Ernhardt could have killed you.”
            Draco deliberately didn’t point out that that applied to Harry, too. It was too sweet, the concern Harry had for him that no one else would have had. He leaned against Harry’s shoulder, and watched Hale face Bradley with an air of condescension that Draco admitted he would have had a hard time imitating. He had been away from pure-blood circles and the kind of manners they used for too long.
            “We are still waiting for answers,” Hale said. “We understand, now, some of the mistaken impulses that led you to blame Aurors Potter and Malfoy for your own mistakes.” At least we get that much, Draco thought. “But why create twisted? What was the point of experiments in Dark magic that the Ministry had banned and forsworn?”
            Bradley was whimpering a little, or at least Draco thought it likely from the movement of his throat, even if he couldn’t actually hear it. Draco wondered if someone else would take his place for him, and it quickly became obvious that someone would. The grey-haired woman he had noted before patted Bradley on the shoulder and stepped past him.
            “You are a pure-blood, are you not?” she asked Hale. “I recognize the name. Not from a prestigious family, but I recognize it.” She really did manage to make it sound as though her recognition was the greatest honor Hale could ever hope to aspire to.
            Hale narrowed her eyes a little, but her face remained generally agreeable. “I am. What does that have to do with the question I asked?”
            “You ought to know, better than most of the Muggleborns out there,” said the woman, and looked around the room as though all the pure-bloods were right there with her, “that we are fighting to protect our culture. That means creating defenses for that culture, for those traditions. And understanding the effects of even magic that is forbidden, in case Muggleborns later start pushing for stricter laws or practicing such Dark Arts themselves.”
            “Excuse me,” said Jenkins, pitching her voice so low, and with such a friendly smile, that the woman turned towards her expectantly. “Are you claiming that you created the twisted out of self-defense?”
            “That’s exactly right,” said the woman, with a regal nod. “I will admit that they didn’t turn out exactly the way we wanted them to, but what weapon does? One is always running into unexpected sharp edges and ways of using them that didn’t occur to the original creators.”
            “Then why not admit that the weapons were going wrong and stop making them?” Jenkins’s voice rose a little. “Why not admit the danger, so that the public could understand what it was up against and take appropriate precautions?”
            The grey-haired woman gave her a look of utter disdain. “Can you ask?”
            “Yes,” said Warren, the single word as effective as a stone wall. Draco hid a smile. Jenkins had the sharper temper in that pair of partners, but Warren was the blunter and, in some ways, the stronger. At least people listened when she spoke, in a way that they didn’t always to Jenkins.
            The woman sighed and explained with the air of a teacher who had already spent all afternoon trying to impart a lesson to a class of troublesome students. “Because the Muggleborns would blame us, and start trying to twist the blame around so that no pure-bloods could be trusted with responsible positions in the Ministry. That’s the reason. The only reason,” she added, with a stern glance at Warren, as if she thought that Warren would interrupt with another one.
            Warren wouldn’t, Draco saw, looking at her. Warren was too stunned to interrupt. Jenkins looked as if she might be the same way, and although Hale was looking at the woman with no friendly smile on her lips, it seemed as if she didn’t know what to say any more than they did.
            Luckily, someone did.
            “So it’s the same old stupid blood politics,” Harry called down, his voice shaking. The shake was made of fury and not fear, though, as anyone ought to be able to see from his red face, Draco thought, glancing at him. “The same old shit. I ought to have known it. I ought to have known that every time the Ministry does something stupid and hides it, it’s because of this.”
            “You are a half-blood.” The grey-haired woman turned her chin a little towards him, but not her eyes. “You do not understand how hard we are working at the preservation of our culture.”
            “I understand that it’s shit.” Harry leaned forwards. “The twisted could have destroyed pure-blood Aurors as easily as Muggleborns, and there aren’t many of those left. Every one who can survive to have a child is precious, as people kept telling me and telling me when I was in the running to affect politics myself. Why is your culture more important than the people who keep it alive?”
            The grey-haired woman frowned, but only as if she didn’t understand, Draco thought, not as if she was thinking better of it. “Because the culture is eternal and can be carried forwards by only a few people, of course. Individual lives are not necessarily expendable, but are not as precious.”
            Harry leaned back and looked at Draco. Draco shrugged, feeling almost merry, for the first time in eight years, that his parents had rejected him, and then even more recently had chosen to forget him. He could no longer say that he was part of that culture, or understood it. Perhaps he had once supported such ideas as strongly as this Auror supported them, but he couldn’t remember the time now.
            He had a different life, a different love. He would still mourn what he had lost, but not as strongly as he once would have.
            “I think we have heard enough,” said Hale, and turned to face the crowd again. “What do you say? Is creating insane Dark wizards that then turned against the public and the Ministry who created them justified, with pure-blood culture as the justification?”
            The outcry came from too many throats to tell exactly what it said, but the general intent was clear. Hale turned and looked at the grey-haired woman and her followers, and her gaze was clear and cold.
            “I suggest that we begin making arrests immediately,” she said. “As Aurors, we are empowered to do that, are we not?”
*
SP777: Yep, just a few to go. So start trusting Hale!
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Chains of Fool's Gold