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The Auror Method	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7771 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen—Explanations For All
            The black sphere exploded in the air near Harry’s chest. Draco realized that he was holding his own breath so tightly his lungs were shrieking, and he tried to remember everything he could of wandless magic. He was probably going to end up saving Harry.
            But instead, Harry’s wand was up, and a shield had formed tight to his body, so close around his skin that Draco couldn’t see any break in it. It was as though Harry was wearing a hat and gloves and cloth over every inch of skin.
            The explosion hit Harry and threw him, and then Draco had to duck as small, jagged pieces of what looked like glass radiated outwards from the center of the explosion. His heart was pounding, his throat dry. That could have been so much worse than it was. Of course the goblins would have tried a trap that would kill both of them, not just one.
            But Harry was already back on his feet, unwounded. Draco reckoned the shield must have protected him from impact with the wall as well as from what the goblins’ magic had tried to do to him. He was smiling, juggling a small ball of magic, blazing fire in one hand, and his eyes flared with a depth Draco had never seen before.
            “Trying to murder an Auror,” he said aloud, his voice slow and thoughtful. “The one crime for which the Ministry allows us to strike back with lethal force against goblins.”
            Oldridge was moving forwards, his face twisted into such a snarl of rage that Draco thought he probably didn’t even hear the words, or understand the warning. He had something else in his hand now, a ball of razor-shards that Draco didn’t understand how he could hold without skin being scraped away.
            “Oldridge Shatterstone,” said Harry, and his voice vibrated with a force Draco had never heard. “This is the last warning you will receive. Stop.”
            Oldridge just stepped up again, and his arm curved back as if he was going to hurl the ball of shards. Draco flinched despite himself, despite the fact that it all seemed to be happening in slow motion, and despite the fact that Harry wasn’t falling back.
            The other goblins, though, had scattered. When Draco stared around the room, looking for some way that he could hold back Oldridge’s magic, he saw none of them in sight. Apparently they knew what it meant when an Auror was about to use lethal force.
            Draco didn’t, not really, but he found himself edging closer instead of away. One thing he was certain about was that Harry would never hurt him.
            Oldridge howled and hurled the ball of razors, at the same time as Harry traced his wand in what looked like a cross-like pattern in front of him and whispered, “Quattuor.”
            The ball of fire left Harry’s hand and soared at Oldridge, expanding into a ring of fire so intense and hot that Draco had to scramble back, coughing. Harry’s hand caught at the back of his robe in the next instant, hauling him further out of the way.
            The ball of razors dissolved in the heat, and the ring of fire went on, spreading, but not far. Oldridge either didn’t believe it could harm him or didn’t move fast enough.
            Or maybe, Draco decided, eyeing the way that the goblin’s feet seemed rooted to the floor and his eyes attached to Harry, he’s just too furious to think about the way that he’s going to lose.
            The ball of fire hit, and the bank rocked with the silent explosion, or so it seemed to Draco. He blinked his eyes open desperately against the impulse to keep them shut, snatching at the wall. He had to see what happened, had to be prepared when Oldridge survived it and moved again, if he did.
            It took him a long moment to understand what he was seeing. When he did, he had to clench his jaw shut to keep from throwing up.
            No wonder Harry had triggered the spell by whispering, Quattuor, the Latin word for “four.” Four pieces of Oldridge lay on the floor, quartered neatly by the fire that had blasted straight through him. And there was no sign that the fire had hit anything else, even when Draco looked around for signs of it.
            “Are you all right, Draco?” Harry was suddenly in front of him, as though he wanted to protect Draco from the sight of how real Auror magic worked. “Come on, we have to get out of here—”
            “My wand!” Draco insisted, shocked from his stupor by that all-important fact. “Where did Oldridge put it? I know it was here a minute ago—”
            Harry winced. Winced.
            “What?” Draco demanded, trying to peer over his shoulder. Perhaps Oldridge had dropped it and it had rolled into a far corner of the bank, and if so, then it should be possible for Harry to simply cast a Summoning Charm and retrieve it.
            “Oldridge was holding it when the fire struck him,” Harry said quietly, quickly. “There’s nothing we can do about it, and staying here is just going to invite the goblins to finish what they tried to start. Come on.” His hand yanked hard at the back of Draco’s collar again, and Draco found himself towed after Harry without the ability to stand on his own two feet.
            Draco went because he had to, but his mind was dancing dizzily, unable to find a place to stand. How could it be true that his wand was gone? He had come into the bank intending to come out with money, a good reputation, the honor of fooling the goblins and their supposedly impenetrable protections, and the possibility of more compensation later because his vault was among those “robbed.”
            Now he was leaving with nothing. He had never done that, even in his early thefts when he hadn’t planned enough and had almost got caught. He always left with more than he came in with, if only by a few Galleons.
            Not this time. And it seemed that Potter had no intention of letting Draco go to recoup his losses where he could.
            Not that he could, without a bloody wand.
            Draco shut his eyes and turned around so that he was running next to Potter, instead of being dragged. He got one look of approval from green eyes before Potter also seemed to reason that they need to concentrate on their flight.
            Draco didn’t care about that approval as much as he would have only five minutes ago. And with his chest dully on fire, he just couldn’t. That was the way it was.
*
            “It happens sometimes, you know. Especially among the Aurors. People get injured, they fall on their wands and break them, they have to leave them behind when they’re being—rescued from someone who captured them.” Potter’s voice caught in his throat as he went on speaking, soothingly, while he pressed Draco down on his bed. “They can bond with new wands. So can you. We’ll go to Ollivander’s in the morning.”
            Draco didn’t pay any attention, simply curling up and planting his forehead and hands between his knees. He didn’t want to listen to Potter chatter about speculations that Draco knew were useless, because they were. He wasn’t going to get a new wand. He wasn’t going to bond with a new wand. He would have a devil of a time talking himself out of the inevitable questions Potter would ask without a wand and the potential to cast Memory Charms if he had to.
            “Draco?” Potter’s hoarse whisper, as he knelt down beside him. “You know you can do this. You know you can get past this.”
            “How would you know?” Draco asked, and his voice was tired and dusty despite himself. “I don’t—I know that we slept together and that means something to you. I’m glad it does. But you don’t really know me.”
            Silence answered him instead of the stream of reassurances he’d expected. Blinking, Draco looked up.
            Potter had leaned back on his heels and was regarding him in a new way, almost the cool approval that he had used when Draco finally started running from the bank. But there was something else in it that made Draco sit up, hand sinking to his side before he remembered and clenched it into a useless fist. No wand there that he could use to defend himself from whatever was lurking in Potter’s eyes.
            “Well,” said Potter, “for one thing, I know that you don’t have a bad leg. And while I was giving you the chance to tell me that the goblins kidnapped you out of bed with their magic—which the Shatterstone clan could certainly do—you didn’t tell me that. So I think I do know something about you, yes.”
            Draco sat in stunned silence on the bed a moment too long before he tried to move.
            Potter’s spell raised walls of gleaming, flexible light around the bed. Draco had seen them before, the shield spells that someone could use to stop a child or a pet animal from falling into trouble. He had never encountered one of such strength that it only bent beneath the assault of a determined adult man and threw him back on the bed.
            He scrambled up on his hands and knees. The walls were up and shining in every direction, and Draco already knew that he wouldn’t get far if he attempted to make a break for it.
            Potter had risen to his feet. He was coolly appraising Draco in a way that Draco hadn’t known existed, either, that look in the eyes of a Gryffindor. He stared back and waited for some kind of explanation. He didn’t reach for words to offer his own, because there was no way that he would come up with something to satisfy Potter.
            “You see,” said Potter, spinning his wand slowly between his fingers, “we knew for a long time that a thief with the protection of blood wards and an old pure-blood house was active, because there was no other way to explain some of the clues we found and the ways that carefully-guarded objects vanished into thin air. But we couldn’t catch you, and we couldn’t get involved until we had some proof of the Dark Arts.”
            “And some proof altogether,” said Draco, tossing his head back, hoping that he could distract Potter with the line of his throat. Hey, it had worked before. “I’m not a thief.”
            Potter’s lip curled, and Draco inexplicably flinched before he could catch himself. “Don’t play like that now,” said Potter. “Don’t pretend. It doesn’t become you.”
            “And, of course, being caught on a bed like a misbehaving child does.” Draco stared at the shields of light.
            Potter didn’t respond, but went on. “Then you did use Dark Arts at the sight of one of the thefts. There was no other way that someone could have got around the MacDougal blood wards, which are powerful and Light. So we had our excuse to send Aurors. And we had the rumors that made us certain that it was you.
            “But we still couldn’t arrest you without proof. And there was no excuse to search your Manor, and the rumors didn’t provide us with forewarning enough to track you down.”
            “Maybe because there was no forewarning,” said Draco, and gave an acid smile when Potter’s jaw clenched. If he was going down no matter what, he at least wasn’t going to play along with Potter’s game and confess everything like the good little broken toy Potter would obviously have preferred. “I didn’t do those things.”
            Potter stared him dead in the eye and continued speaking. “Then, at the same time as rumors started spreading about some sort of full-scale assault, we got the news that you were receiving death threats. And from the description of them, I recognized them right away as what they were. Goblin magic.”
            Draco responded before he could stop himself, although it was playing into Potter’s hands. “So you knew all along what was going on!”
            “Yes,” said Potter, and shook his head. “But fool that I was, I really did hope that you would confess of your own free will. So we came along, and I baited the trap with someone I knew to have a grudge against you and someone who’s a really good actor. In fact, he used to be an actor before he was an Auror. Top marks in Stealth and Disguise. I hoped that if you saw me kicking Greengrass-Rosier out of the house, you would trust me more.”
            “Your actor didn’t help you much,” Draco jibed. “Since he was hardly here, and I still didn’t trust you completely even after you kicked him out.”
            Potter laughed aloud at him. “Did you misunderstand me? I didn’t mean that the person with a grudge against you and the person who was an actor were the same person. The actor was Mytherian. I think you’ll agree that he was supremely convincing.”
            Draco clenched his jaw to keep from screaming. “So you were going to trick a confession out of me? How legal.”
            “No,” said Potter tightly. “I foolishly thought that I could make you confess. I already said that. But there was no reason that we couldn’t give you encouragement on more than one level. Mytherian was pretending to hate me, and if you still hated me, we thought that might give you a common bond to talk to him. And in the meantime, he was hinting that these little rumors were spreading, like Ron and me having a falling-out. If you’d pounced on them and shown him a bit of trust, you might have shown him more.”
            Draco shook his head. He felt dazed. “But I overheard you and Shacklebolt speaking. Your plan was apparently to seduce me all along, wasn’t it?”
            Potter’s eyes flickered for the first times, and his cheeks were red now. “What I told you about the one time I slept with someone I was guarding is still true. I was ashamed of it then.” He looked up again, and the embarrassment was already gone. “But I’m less ashamed of it now, now that I know you knew.”
            Draco snarled a little in response. “Why were you arguing with Shacklebolt?”
Potter shrugged. “He wanted me to go ahead and advance the plan of seduction, before the goblins killed you. I did take the duty of protecting you seriously, you know,” he added wistfully. “Otherwise, if I’d only wanted you dead and punished for the crimes you already committed, all I had to do was not save you from the goblin spells. Only a few Aurors know that I know how to counter them.”
Draco brushed that aside. “And you planted Greengrass-Rosier near the wards to invade and prove that I could trust you more, I suppose?”
Potter shot him an exasperated glance. “He planted himself. I thought you had some grand plan when you accused him of being the one who sent you the information for the attack on Gringotts. I alerted the Ministry of it—”
Draco was about to ask how, but then he remembered all those times that Potter was out of the room where Draco sat, prowling around the wards and plotting ways to “protect” him. It would have been easy enough for Potter to contact the Ministry then, especially when he was keyed into Draco’s wards and not stopped from sending messages through them.
“But they sent Elian without telling me what he planned.” Potter rolled his eyes. “For that matter, they might not have known. He might not have known. Elian was always impulsive, and he acts without thinking, and he really does have a grudge against you. He might have thought sneaking through the wards and playing the enemy was the best means to force you to confess. At least he was smart enough to go along with it when he figured out what I wanted him to do.”
Draco felt his face work. He remembered Greengrass-Rosier’s tearful apology to Potter, an apology that had seemed forced out of him. He remembered that Greengrass-Rosier had confessed to writing to Draco after Potter had reminded him what was “really important,” even though Draco had certainly never written to him.
“You shits,” Draco whispered. Then he shook his head and seized the one comfort that was left to him before Potter could speak. “But at least you didn’t anticipate everything. I could have died when that second goblin spell came through the wards. They put you to sleep, too.”
Potter gazed steadily at him.
And Draco remembered the way Potter had flushed when Draco referred to him being asleep, and how he had sprung so suddenly to his feet and dashed to rescue Draco.
“You were pretending,” Draco breathed. “Again. You—you pretended to be asleep to see what would happen?”
Potter nodded slowly. “But you’re still right that you could have died. I almost waited too long. I was waiting to see if you were more powerful than you’d told us, if you might have managed to counteract the curse. Shatterstone is a strange clan. That they were plotting with you against the bank was a possibility I couldn’t discount, especially when you were so bloody reluctant to confess anything. A secret alliance with them would have accounted for that.” He sighed. “But then I saw how clueless you seemed at the mention of the name Shatterstone the next day, and I realized that that wasn’t it.”
“You knew it was Shatterstone after me?” Draco whispered. “How?”
“I recognized their style of magic.”
Draco closed his eyes and sat there, silent and bitter. In part, it was against himself for not having realized sooner what Potter could teach him, and forging a different kind of alliance with him. In great part, it was against the Shatterstone clan for having forced this situation in the first place.
In greater part, though, it was against Potter and the Ministry for having captured Draco when he was on the brink of his greatest theft, before he managed to really make a life for himself.
He managed to force his eyes open, and looked at Potter. “So what happens now?”
“I’m going to recommend leniency,” Potter replied. “I rescued you from the bank before you could steal anything.” He stood up, hesitated, and then said, “For what it’s worth, I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. That’s why I was encouraging you to confess so much. There was—there was nothing much I could do in a situation like this, but if you had confessed and made proper restitution by returning items you stole, the Ministry would have only levied a fine or something. Now…” He trailed off helplessly.
Draco stared at him, and said nothing. What good were Potter’s apologies now, when they couldn’t change anything?
“Or you could have gone along with me, and realized that being with me is worth more than being with the Ministry,” said Draco. “You lied and pretended as much as I did.”
Potter’s eyes abruptly flared with fire that made Draco roll back, before he remembered the shield around the bed and stopped moving so he wouldn’t crash into it. “I’m not the one who wouldn’t tell the truth even when I was begged to do so,” Potter whispered. “I’m not the one who was so arrogant that he never even bothered to look into the possibility that someone else was lying, too. If you had confessed, I would have told you the truth right away.”
“Would you?”
“Yes.” Potter never flinched, never looked away from him. It was Draco, in the end, who looked away.
Potter sighed hard enough to make the walls of the shield flutter. “I’ll still recommend leniency, but I’m not sure how much good it’ll do.” The bed rose from the floor, still surrounded by the shields. “Let’s go.”
*
MoonlightVampiress: Well, they did have a talk, if not in the way you might have wanted! But there is still one more chapter left.
delia cerrano: Harry is not going to do what Draco wants, anyway. But he’s not neutral on Draco, and there is one more chapter left.
SP777: Now you can say anything you want.
streaklight: Thank you!
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The Auror Method