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Burning Day	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10061 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Thirteen—Two-Pronged
            Harry opened his eyes, and knew a threat was coming through the wards. This time, he had tuned the grounds of Hogwarts so that they were sensitive to the feet of humans moving around on them during the night. It had been a nuisance at first, because he caught students sneaking out of their common rooms and no one much else, but now he felt the sharp tingle of a presence away to the west, beyond the lake.
            Harry sat up swiftly and silently, and cupped his hands beneath him. The stone slid aside, opening up a speaking tube through itself, beneath his bed, into the room where Hortensia slept.
            “Can you be ready with the poison that will destroy rituals in five minutes?” he asked.
            “I will be, yes, my Lord,” said Hortensia, sounding as alert as though Harry hadn’t just woken her out of a sound sleep.
            Harry snorted as he let the stone slide shut again. For all he knew, he hadn’t, and Hortensia spent all night lying awake and inventing new poisons. Maybe she slept while they were brewing.
            There came another insistent tingle from the newly sensitive grounds, and Harry let his fancies go with a grimace. It didn’t matter what Hortensia did with her night hours, or how much sleep she got, as long as she would defend her adopted home, and Harry thought she would, without trouble.
            He dressed quietly, wishing as he did that Draco was here to give him admiring looks while his robes slid over his head, and then opened another tunnel in the stones and dropped through it as silent as breathing. The tunnel bent and curved like the one he had once ridden down to the Chamber of Secrets, heading straight for the far side of the lake. Harry wrapped his arms and legs close together and rode the bouncing, jolting route in a haze of memories.
*
            Draco opened his eyes and drew breath.
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” said a voice at the end of a sharp blade. Draco didn’t swallow; he knew it would cut his skin if he did. “Good. I see that you’ve already appreciated the unique aspects of your situation and decided to cooperate.”
Draco said nothing. He wanted to say a good many things, especially when a wand tip flared with a Lumos and he saw how many grey-clad Unspeakables stood in his bedroom, but he knew enough to bow his head submissively and keep silence.
“We need to know how much of what you showed us is the truth,” said the Unspeakable who held the blade at Draco’s throat. “Perhaps that memory was a little too good. Perhaps there are ways of faking even such an impressive and abject display of degradation.” His knife eased a little deeper into a fold of Draco’s throat, teasingly scratching the skin. “Perhaps we need to investigate just a little bit more.”
Draco said nothing, because he was thinking about how they had got past his wards instead. He would have to investigate in the morning, himself.
Assuming I survive that long.
            “You’re much more intelligent than I assumed,” said the Unspeakable, with a faint smile that only let Draco see a dark moustache under his hood. “Now. Summon the Dark Lord.”
            Draco began to laugh despite himself, a faint, hysterical bubble of sound that made that Unspeakable nearly withdraw the knife. He frowned, and then turned and said something to another of his subordinates. She nodded, and a shock of cold water came down on Draco.
            His involuntary laughter had already determined the tack Draco would take with this, and so he gasped a little and shook his head, but didn’t try to stop laughing. “Listen. You think that the Dark Lord would leave me some means of summoning him? I do whatever he wants at his pleasure, not mine. He would never leave me anything that’s even capable of being linked to him. He doesn’t trust me to be strong when my weakness is what amuses him.”
            Draco fell silent at the end of that speech and looked at the Unspeakable. “I don’t think it would amuse him very much if you killed me. But I can’t actually stop you.” He flicked his eyes to the blade that had come back to hover less than a hair’s breadth away from his pulse. “And I can’t summon him no matter what you do to me.”
            The Unspeakable went on looking at him as if he thought he should try and put that to the test, then nodded once and made a gesture to the woman who had the Lumos Charm on her wand. She stepped back and seemed to melt through the nearest wall, but not before Draco caught the gleam of a nasty little silver artifact in her hand. He didn’t curse, but it was a near thing. Of course they had used Dark artifacts to win their way through his wards. Gorenson had done something similar before Harry killed him.
            “So,” said the Unspeakable, with a solemnity that Draco hated immediately. “We cannot force you to summon the Dark Lord, even if we torture you? I happen to believe that. But if we take you to the place where the Dark Lord is now…then perhaps we can see whether your danger will summon him.”
            He stepped back, and several of the Unspeakables cast Chain Charms and Body-Bind Charms on Draco before he could even think of trying to escape. Then they scooped him up and tipped him into a stretcher of some kind. Draco sighed and lay still, since he didn’t have much other choice.
            He would just have to hope that Harry’s magic and reputation could carry the day, the way they had so often before.
*
            Harry landed in silence on the far shore of the lake, and looked around. It didn’t take him long to pinpoint where the attack was coming from. He could see the flashes of golden crystal a few meters away from him.
            Harry held up one hand, and called fire. It lit around his fingers, with a purple flare that reminded him unpleasantly of Persephone, and the Unspeakables holding the golden crystals started and looked around.
            Harry smiled at them. “Hello. Did you want something?”
            The Unspeakables didn’t bother standing there gaping at him, although Harry had almost hoped they would. Two of them broke away from the group, facing him with their wands up, and twin streams of purple light came towards him.
            Harry recognized the purple light from his Auror training, a nasty spell that would make him feel like his flesh was boiling away without leaving a mark. He clucked his tongue and countered by disappearing beneath the earth and appearing again behind them, in the midst of their group. The Unspeakables who had tried to strike at him whirled around, disoriented, and in the meantime, Harry was distracting those who had been using the crystals by batting them out of their hands.
            “Hortensia!” he called.
            She was there, or at least had managed to make her way out of the castle and break the flask, or whatever she really needed to do. Harry saw the familiar yellow glow of the poison flowing from the other side of the lake. He pulled his own will back inside him, all but for the faint shield that still spread around him, defending him against the Unspeakables’ hasty attacks.
            The poison floated on the wind, expanding far more rapidly than it had back in his office. The Unspeakables who had their wands drawn snapped harsh words and spells at it, but nothing happened. Of course not, Harry thought. Unless the poison was made to attack them, they couldn’t do anything to affect it one way or the other.
            The Unspeakables who held the crystals made no attempt to defend themselves. Harry chuckled, grimly, to himself. He thought they were probably caught up in the rituals happening inside the crystals the same way he had been caught up in analyzing it and nearly drained of his magical core.
            A second after the golden glow of the poison reached their side of the lake, one of the Unspeakables shrieked and dropped the crystal he held. The others cried out a few moments later, and Harry made the flame flare higher around him so that he could see the crystals lying on the ground better. They looked as if they had been drained of all light and power, and now they were only odd, slick shapes that might look well on someone’s mantel.
            Harry had to smile. Hortensia had done exactly as she’d said she would. While he might distrust her for justifiable reasons in the future, he thought that he would never again doubt that she could do what she said she would when she talked about brewing a poison.
            “Dark Lord Potter!”
            That call came from still another direction, behind Harry, away from the Unspeakables who were staring in distress at their dead crystals. Keeping his shield up around him, Harry turned so he could see the speakers.
            He nearly loosed a torrent of magic right then. The Unspeakables who came towards him brought Draco with them, floating in bonds so tight that Harry could see his hands and feet losing their circulation.
            But he held still, only raising the shields tighter around him when the group who’d held the crystals tried new spells, and asked again, “Yes? Did you want something?”
*
            He’s so calm.
            Well, and why shouldn’t Harry be? Draco asked himself, in a bit of disgust, a moment later. He was surrounded by his own powerful magic, defended in a way that Draco knew he couldn’t match, that probably not even the nasty artifacts the Unspeakables carried could match. He wasn’t going to get hurt, no matter what happened.
            Then Draco caught his eye. He swallowed a little, as much as he could with multiple bonds and Body-Binds constricting his movements.
            Oh. Of course it was still possible for them to hurt Harry, if they hurt Draco, or someone else he loved. He just wasn’t going to be hurt in the crude way they had planned to take him, with magic.
            Draco tried to be confident, anyway. He knew, and he doubted the Unspeakables had any idea, of just how deep and strongly Harry’s magic ran. Harry would find some way to get Draco out of this situation, and himself, and all the people who depended on him. Draco just had to be patient.
            “We have the man that you say amuses you,” said the Unspeakable who had held the blade to Draco’s face. His hood was dangling on his shoulders now, maybe because he had decided that he didn’t care about disguise anymore, maybe out of excitement. His eyes certainly never moved from Harry’s face. “What will you give us for him?”
            Harry seemed to be listening to advice from an invisible source, although Draco didn’t know who that could be. The only other person out here was probably Hortensia, or whoever had released that poison from the other side of the lake. Among the many other reasons that he wanted to live past this night, Draco admitted, was that he wanted to know how that poison worked and how it was made.
            The biggest reason he wanted to live looked at the Unspeakables and said quietly, “Your lives.”
            “It must be more than that,” said the dark-haired Unspeakable. He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “Consider what we can do if you don’t cooperate. We can destroy the man that you want to be Minister in a few seconds. We can—”
            The grass writhed, and the waters of the lake. Even knowing what would probably happen, and that nothing Harry commanded would hurt him, Draco still gasped in anticipation of pain as the mingled ropes of earth and water rose up and danced around the bodies of everyone in sight except for Harry himself.
            One particular grassy rope had spread quickly up Draco’s arms and legs, and was winding around the neck of the Unspeakable who had just threatened Harry. That Unspeakable’s lips were open, but he didn’t get the chance to move them. The grass’s tendrils pushed down on his tongue, and probably would have entwined his mouth if that hadn’t already been sufficient to keep him from talking. The Unspeakable’s eyes were bulging.
            Draco swallowed to keep from laughing, and then paused as he realized he had moved his throat freely. Where the ropes of grass and water had moved across his skin, they had dissolved the spells and bonds that the Unspeakables had used to hold him prisoner. Draco was amazed that Harry had control that fine-grained, to free him and imprison the Unspeakables at the same time, but he snorted a second later. That was one of the advantages of being a Dark Lord, he supposed.
            Harry swaggered towards them and stopped a distance away. He didn't move towards Draco or give him a gesture at all. But Draco had known better than to look for it. Harry was playing the role of the canny Dark Lord to the hilt, and that role didn't care about Draco except as a toy.
            There might be a time when that will start to annoy me.
            For now, though, Draco could still appreciate the hidden thrill of knowing something about Harry that other people didn't. He could watch the way that the Unspeakables' eyes almost sweated, looking at Harry and the swirling aura of power that had started to surround him. Harry bent down towards the man who had threatened Draco, then breathed on him. The man moaned a little, his eyes fixing in a gaze past Draco's head. Draco grinned viciously. If the idiot was now looking at his worst nightmares, then it was the least he deserved.
            "I know what this was," said Harry, his voice low and sepulchral enough to make Draco shiver with desire. Let other people think it was fear if they wanted; Draco and Harry could be the ones who knew the truth. "This was a test, wasn't it? You wanted to see what would happen if you attacked Hogwarts and threatened the Minister-elect I said amused me at the same time. You wanted to see what I would do." He paused, while the breath of the Unspeakable in front of him grew more and more labored.
            Draco felt another little thrill of desire. He knew it wasn't long ago that a charade like this would have been so disgusting to Harry that he would have tried anything to get out of it. But now Harry was doing it, and in large part because Draco had been in danger.
            “And this is what I will do,” said Harry, and snapped his fingers in a complicated pattern that Draco didn’t think he could follow even with his eyes, let alone his hands. The ropes that still entwined the Unspeakables wound closer, and began to sink into their skin. “Leave you with marks of your very own, for daring to disturb me. They won’t bother you unless you decide to try something stupid like this again. Then they’ll come to life and strangle you, the way they would have done tonight if I had wanted them to. Then you can have the amusement of picking them out of your skin and trying to separate something that has become a part of your magic from you.” He winked at them. “Do you understand?”
            “Please,” whispered the Unspeakable Draco had come to think of almost as his, the one who had threatened him. “Please.”
            “You want some other punishment?” Harry considered that, his fingers wound about each other, his hand rising as if he was going to pry open the air. “I suppose that I could take the ropes away and give you something worse.”
            “No!” the Unspeakable Draco remembered as holding the lit wand on him screamed abruptly. “Let us go with these! These are good enough!”
            “Fine,” said Harry, and spread his fingers again. The flowing ropes became mere faint shadows against the Unspeakables’ skin. “But remember. They live if your betrayal lives. I find that I’ve become tired of this nonsense.” And he turned away and walked towards Draco. “Are you all right, little toy?”
            Draco shuddered at the word, but then again, Harry had his back towards the Unspeakables, and what he really felt shone in his eyes. And the deep peace that Draco received when he saw the anger there—when he saw the way that Harry regarded him and the way he would have acted even more openly if not for their audience—soothed him. He nodded, and Harry bent over him and sneered.
            “Good. Then see that you maintain your safety. Take some of these artifacts and use them to defend your home if need be.” Spheres and cubes and cones, all of which looked like they were made of silver or crystal, shot out of the Unspeakables’ pockets and landed on the grass next to the lake. “Study them, make duplicates of them, do whatever you want with them.”
            Draco bowed, trying to hide his glee. He had wanted to make sure that the Unspeakables didn’t intrude into his home again, and now he had a way. Though he hoped that the Unspeakables wouldn’t challenge Harry once they saw his power close up, he had bene wrong about that before.
            “Thank you, Dark Lord Potter,” he said, and made his voice quiver with enough abjection for their audience, if the way their eyes widened was any indication. “Wh-when should I expect you to summon me again?”
            “I’ve seen you tonight,” said Harry, and reached out carelessly for his shoulder. Draco thought he was the only one who would even bother looking for the caress in the rough touch. “I’ll send you a message by my own channels when I want to see you again.” He nodded to Draco, and then turned and dropped into a tunnel in the earth, heading back towards Hogwarts.
            Currents of water lapped out from the lake and floated the Unspeakables towards the edge of the grounds. Meanwhile, they floated the artifacts that had dropped from the Unspeakables’ robes and his wand towards Draco. Draco stooped and picked up the wand, then conjured a pouch he could put the artifacts into, his mind spinning with possibilities.
            But more than he wanted to think about whether this display of power would finally impress the Unspeakables into leaving them alone, he wanted to think about the next time he would be alone with Harry—and how much he looked forward to it.
*
SP777: If there needs to be one, then yes, she is!
Jester: Not while he’s at Hogwarts. He has too many advantages that the castle grants him to spend the time on it right now, including some of the benefits that being an Animagus could give him (like getting around quickly).
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Burning Day