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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3831 -:- 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 Fifteen—Heat of Battle

            Harry recognized the burning little device the instant that the Auror on the stairs flung it.

            It had been one used and tested in the Heliodorus Corps when Harry had still been a part of it. The weapon was meant to act like a lightning strike, the contained magic in it mimicking a Muggle bomb. But because magic never worked exactly like technology, and even more, Harry thought, because the wizards who had designed it weren’t familiar enough with Muggle technology to recognize all the differences, it had ended up being a “lightning strike” that could hit someone’s magical core.

            Right now, it was just light and noise. But anyone who cast a spell around it in the next minute would have their strength permanently reduced.

            Draco’s hand was rising, his wand clasped in it. Harry knew that, even though the whiteness still dominated his vision and he couldn’t see, because he felt Draco’s arm moving next to his ribs. Harry slammed his arm down on top of Draco’s instead, and Draco made a sharp, pained noise and struggled against him.

            “Damages your magical core if you cast a spell in the minute after it,” Harry hissed into Draco’s ear, not having time for more complicated explanations. He trusted this one would suffice. After all, Draco believed in him.

            He thought.

            Harry stifled the memory, again, of the spell he’d had to cast to relieve Draco from necromantic possession, and thought instead of the way he and Draco had fought the blood-tide in Cuthbert’s Corner, and rolled them again and again, until they hit the edge of a wall. Harry reached up with one hand and felt around, and recognized it. They were lying along the wall beneath the place where Walburga’s portrait had hung.

            And from the curses Harry could hear drifting from the direction of the staircase, both magical and otherwise, some of the Aurors hadn’t known the truth about their own weapon, and had tried to cast spells. Harry and Draco had a few seconds, perhaps as much as a minute, before anyone came after them.

            Harry snapped his eyes open, ignoring the way the afterimages seared across his vision. So what? He could see enough to be going on with, and he shook Draco’s shoulder roughly when Draco whimpered and tried to curl into him. “Come on. The minute when we can’t use magic will be up in a few seconds.”

            “You’re keeping track?” Draco raised his head and turned towards Harry. Harry bit his lip so he wouldn’t laugh at the soot or dirt around Draco’s lips and his hair standing out from his head. From the way Draco narrowed his eyes, he had probably sensed Harry’s amusement anyway.

            “Yes, in the back of my head,” Harry said. “And from seeing those weapons used before. Come on.” He hauled on the side of Draco’s shoulder and got him on his feet. They crept towards the kitchen. Harry flicked his wand and disarmed the tripwire ward there before he thought about it. Then he flinched, but there was no sharp draining on his magical core like the victims of the bomb had reported. Besides, from the reactions of the Aurors down the corridor, it was painful.

            “And you call me reckless,” Draco muttered as he stumbled into the kitchen, but he caught the wall in time to keep from making any noise.

            “I didn’t do it recently,” Harry said, and ignored the way Draco said something about the necromancy spell. He pitched his voice low enough that Draco twisted his head towards him, but Harry was sure no one else would hear. “Kreacher?”

            There was a slight disturbance of air near him, and then Kreacher was standing there, the most silent Harry had ever seen a house-elf be. His hair was bedraggled around his head and his eyes were wide with rage, but when he saw both of them, he closed them and flung his arms around Draco’s legs.

            “Masters is being all right,” Kreacher whispered, and although he didn’t shout, Harry felt as though all the volume he would have added into the words had gone into intensity. Harry could feel his bones shivering.

            “Yes, we are,” Harry said, bending over. “But not for long. Is there anything you can tell us about the house’s protections, Kreacher? Anything we can trigger?”

            Kreacher shook his head and snapped his nose up towards Draco. “Master Draco Malfoy is already triggering the most powerful.”

            Harry blinked, because he didn’t know what that was, but it had probably slowed down at least one Auror, and they didn’t have time to debate about it. “All right,” he said. “Then can you distract the Aurors and herd them into the drawing room?”

            “Why the drawing room?” Draco asked, with almost no breath behind the words.

            “Because that’s the place where I’m going to set up my trap,” Harry said, and ignored the way Draco’s brows pulled together. He had trusted Draco enough not to ask lots of questions; now Draco would have to trust him the same way. “Can you do it, Kreacher?”

            Kreacher executed a clumsy bow that made Harry’s throat tighten and his eyes prickle. “Kreachers can be doing it,” he whispered. “Kreacher is doing anything to be serving masters.”

            Harry nodded. “Good. Then go.”

            Kreacher vanished. A few seconds later, Harry heard a loud yell from the direction of the staircase. “What the hell is that thing?”

            Clear light played along the floor, making Harry smile. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a spell effect he had seen before, and he thought the Aurors would be intrigued enough to follow it, especially since they didn’t know a house-elf was the one making it.

            “Come on,” he whispered to Draco, and slung Draco’s arm around his shoulders, turning him smoothly towards the drawing room. Draco shook himself free, though, and glared at Harry through narrowed eyes.

            “I don’t need help walking now that I can see,” he said.

            Harry nodded and stepped back with his hands in the air. If Draco was going to be like that, then it was best to treat him as if he had completely recovered. “Come on, then,” he whispered, and set off, walking carefully into the drawing room.

            They didn’t see any Aurors on the way, though. Whatever Kreacher’s distraction was, it had occupied all of them.

            Harry paused when they came into the drawing room, and glanced around with a faint smile. Yes, it was the way he remembered it. More to the point, the sharp corners of the bookshelves and the mantle were the way he had remembered them. Harry looked thoughtfully at the walls, then nodded. There were a few cracks in them, but none that were big enough to threaten his plan. Even in the derelict condition that Grimmauld Place had fallen into, most wizarding buildings retained their integrity.

            “What are you doing?” Draco asked from behind him.

            Harry drew his wand. “I’m going to make the drawing room into a Ricochet Chamber,” he said, and cocked his head at Draco. “You might want to wait outside. I never managed to learn to cast the spell to exempt anyone but myself from it.”

            Draco’s face went slack, and then he shook his head, said, “Only you,” and fell back beyond the far doorway, the one that didn’t lead towards the staircase, but back into one of the maze of twisting storerooms that Mrs. Weasley had partially cleaned out and Harry hadn’t touched yet.

            Harry leaned his wand against his hand and began to build the chant in his mind. It was too powerful a spell for him to cast nonverbally, but he knew he would have only a few seconds after the Aurors heard him chanting, and it was best to make sure that he had every word ready at his fingertips before then.

            Finally, he was satisfied that he knew what to do, and hefted his wand. “Contra sonitus,” he began.

            The spell billowed out around the room and settled into the sharp corners Harry had noted before, the mantle and the bookshelves. Overhead, he heard the Aurors’ startled cries and the reversing sound as their footsteps began to head down the stairs.

            Harry aimed his wand at the nearest corner and spoke again. “Contra magicum.”

            The footsteps were very near now. This was part of the trouble in casting the spell, that it needed absolute concentration, but once someone realized you were casting it, they would probably try to interfere in one way or another. Harry didn’t intend to let himself be hurried this time. He aimed his wand at the wall even as the air around him began to be charged with silent ringing, as though someone was frantically swinging bells he couldn’t hear.

            “Contra mundum.”

            The power of the spell settled with the final words, like dust to the floor, just as the first wizards charged through the doorway.

            Harry lifted his hands, his expression as innocent as he could make it, but with his hand came his wand. The wizard in the lead of course cast a spell at him, a Blasting Curse, which let Harry know how seriously the Ministry was taking this. They might not want to kill him, but they didn’t care much if they crippled him.

            The curse deflected from the air in front of Harry and rebounded, taking a chunk off the middle of the mantle. The three other spells that the Aurors had cast before they realized what happened bounced back, too, and knocked one of them cold. The others tried to yell out instructions or incantations, but their voices rebounded in the same way, and echoes filled the air, crippling everyone except Harry. Harry hoped that Draco was safely beyond range once he had left the room. It would be inconvenient to have him staggering.

            One of the Aurors dropped his wand and lunged at Harry. But Harry had managed to cast all three lines of the spell, not just the first two parts that repelled incantations and magic, and he lurched off-balance, landing on the floor. Harry smiled and Summoned his wand—as the caster, he was immune to the effects of the Ricochet Chamber—then Stunned him.

            There were other wizards behind that to worry about, but the smart ones had figured out by now that they couldn’t use magic against him or attack him physically. They rearranged themselves in their line, shuffling. Harry watched them and waited for another inspiration to strike. He made a gesture with his hand low behind his back, which he hoped Draco would interpret the right way—go and circle around the other side so you can attack them from behind. A greater silence beyond the drawing room a minute later let him hope that Draco had done as Harry had requested.

            The nearest witch finally edged enough out to the side that Harry had to look at her. It was Lauren Hale, his partner before Lionel.

            Harry blinked once, and then watched her steadily. He wondered why she had come along. Wounded pride? Assigned by the Ministry? Wanted the chance to finally see him stuck in a cell somewhere?

            Hale held up her hands in slow, exaggerated motion. Harry gave her a bloody-minded smile. Yes, she would have found by now that she couldn’t do anything to him, and any word she spoke would turn into meaningless echoes. If she intended to give him a gesture of surrender, though, he would graciously accept it.

            Hale folded her fingers down into the center of her palms, moving them with the care that someone would near an open flame. Then she flashed her fingers up again, turning her hands fully towards Harry, and slowly tucked the same fingers down again.

            Harry thought he understood. Ten Aurors had come, and five were down.

            Harry shrugged. He would have spoken, but although he could hear the words, the spell would make what he said turn into echoes for Hale, too. He thought the shrug could convey his meaning well enough.

            Hale watched him with a frown that went on growing when Harry did nothing. It deepened into a disgusted look that made Harry chuckle, and he didn’t really care what his enemies heard. Since when did Hale imagine that he would care about what she wanted, or about wounding Aurors from the Ministry that hunted them?

            Hale aimed one finger at him. It took Harry a second to realize that she was pointing to his lightning bolt scar. Then she tapped her left arm, about the place where the Dark Mark would rest, and widened her eyes as though staring at something invisible.

            Amusing as it was to watch Hale act this way, with the other Aurors staring at her as if she had gone mad, Harry understood what she was saying and found it tiresome to watch. Yes, he knew the Ministry thought he and Draco were twisted, with their symbols and their flaws. It didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered for years, even though most people knew Harry had the “gift” of seeing visions of murders, until the point when it did. The Ministry all over. Inconsistency and incompetence at its finest.

            At his sharply-gestured hand slash, Hale stopped acting, but didn’t seem disposed to back away. Harry sighed and floated a piece of parchment up on the air, scribbling rapidly on it, then turning it around to face her. Despite the fact that the room was an altered place for them, the Aurors should be able to read it—unless one of them lunged at him and tried to take the parchment away. The Ministry claims that we’re twisted. We’re not.

            Hale watched him with a brooding frown. Then she dropped straight down to the floor and linked her hands together in the middle of her back. Once again, the other Aurors stared at her.

            Harry didn’t—especially not when her wand rolled away from her, and she made no attempt to stop it. Of course, the altered nature of the room would have left her staggering drunkenly even if she had tried it, but that wasn’t the point. She let it fall and go where it would.

            And that, combined with the gesture of her hands behind her back, in the position that Auror prisoners were often tied, told Harry what she was doing. She was surrendering, totally. Yielding her wand and promising to let Harry bind her.

            On the condition, Harry was sure, that he take her out of the Ricochet Chamber and let her say whatever she was so desperate to tell him.

            He didn’t have to think about it long. He had worked with Hale long enough to know her skills, and they lay in potions and research. She was a good wizard, but not good enough to cast a wandless, nonverbal spell and rip her hands out of bindings that he conjured. If she was completely under his and Draco’s control, then they would be able to trust her, to the extent that such trust was still possible.

            Harry lowered his wand and stepped up to Hale. She didn’t flinch, despite the disconcerting echoes that must have bounced around the room, to her ears. He grabbed her shoulder and tugged her towards the door where Draco waited, ignoring the way that someone tried to stagger after him and ended up walking into the fireplace mantle. His trap would hold the rest of these clowns for a while.

            Hale, though, might have something interesting to say.

*

            Draco found Harry’s one-time partner no more intriguing than he had the first time he’d met her. Hale was ice, sitting there with her hands tied behind her back and both wands trained on her. She had glanced at Draco, but although he was the pure-blood between them and Hale valued purity of blood, she had since looked only at Harry.

            And she hadn’t said whatever she had surrendered to say yet.

            Harry didn’t seem inclined to rush her. He stood there, in the dim, dilapidated kitchen where he had bound her to the chair, and waited. His breathing was so soft that Draco could hardly hear it. His wand was drawn, but low at his side, bouncing off his leg now and then as if he didn’t need it. His gaze hadn’t moved from Hale’s face yet. Draco had to admit he was impressive.

            Maybe Hale had waited as long as she needed to be assured that they wouldn’t kill her, because she nodded once and then began. “The Ministry is afraid that you might uncover something it’s done.”

            “Tell us something that we don’t know.” The boredom, and, it seemed, the truth, startled Hale. Draco saw her sit up and straighten her neck before she became aware that that pulled against her bonds, and that seemed to injure her picture of Perfect Pure-Blood Dignity. She leaned back instead and shook her head a little.

            “But you don’t know what they’re afraid you might uncover,” she said.

            “We know that they want to blame us for the embarrassment of Ernhardt.” Harry’s voice was passionless as he answered, something Draco couldn’t help but approve of. Their chances of getting real information—assuming Hale had it—were greater if she thought them uninterested in her. “We know that they ignored real twisted in their ranks for a long time because they thought they could be useful. We know they dumped everyone in Socrates Corps that they could who was too ambitious, or too powerful, to do them good, and they let an actual assassin through to come after us.”

            “An assassin?” From the way Hale squirmed in her chair, this was news to her.

            Draco would have held the card to his chest a little longer, but perhaps because Elder was dead, Harry seemed to decide that it was no harm to give her the name. “Elder. Once an Auror with a different Corps, but one who transferred in when they realized that they couldn’t count on Draco to restrain me. He’d been hired by the elder Malfoys to kill Draco.”

            That information, Draco thought they could have restrained, but Hale glanced at him once, a keen-eyed look of such largeness that Draco relaxed. She understood what it meant for a pure-blood family to reject an heir, and she disapproved. She seemed to have something of that feeling for family that you got sometimes, among the sheltered ones. The family was more important than anything else, which meant that sins were overlooked, quarrels were patched up, and outsiders were turned away if they asked questions. Rejecting Draco because he had joined the Aurors wasn’t a crime Hale would think worthy of his parents forgetting him.

            “Yes, I heard something about that,” Hale said. “But did you know about the experiments they did?”

            Draco was proud of Harry then, for how still he remained, and the blank look he fixed on Hale. Draco wasn’t sure that he did as well himself, but luckily for them all, Hale wasn’t looking at him. She had leaned forwards in her chair, testing the ropes that bound her a little, and Draco thought now that he knew why she was so interested in Harry’s reaction. Draco would hold back from a public crusade, but everyone knew Harry Potter would fight for justice.

            Well. They had known that, anyway. Draco had to wonder how successful the Ministry had been in twisting the public’s perceptions of Harry with the articles they’d published about the hunt for them and Harry’s supposed murder of an innocent Head Auror.

            “I know that they did plenty of experiments with Corps organization,” Harry said. “And at one time, they thought my flaw could be more useful to them than it’s proved. They wanted me to try and foresee murders. They didn’t know that I can only see something that’s definitely going to happen, or at least be attempted, and then only a short time before.”

            “That’s not the kind of experiment I was talking about.” Hale was speaking quickly now, looking over her shoulder for a moment as though she thought someone Harry didn’t approve of would come through the wards. Considering how the Aurors had weakened them to get through, Draco had to admit that wasn’t impossible. “I meant, did you know about their experiments with the blood?”

            Draco knew he twitched, then. Hale looked at him for another fleeting glance, and then turned right back to Harry.

            Harry made one of those impossible decisions again, springing forwards and leaning on chance in a way that Draco never could. “No. Tell me.”

            Hale nodded, once, and then said, “They told me about them—us about them—because they thought it would make us more eager to hunt you down. And they wanted to give us the impression of being part of something important and secret, I suppose. But while most of the others either accepted it or said that we couldn’t rebel against the Ministry without turning into criminals like you two, I don’t think it’s worthy.”

            It took Draco a moment to understand what she meant. The Ministry had to be something worthy of serving, for a woman like her. A pure-blood like her. Otherwise, you might as well direct all your efforts towards your own family and not give a shit for anyone else.

            “Tell me, then.” Harry said the words the way he might another spell.

            “They used blood,” Hale said. “Blood from people, but I don’t know who or how much. They told us that blood can give gifts. Give flaws, I knew they were talking about, because they had to explain what you were doing somehow after Ernhardt died and they didn’t keep the twisted that much of a secret. They described experiments with wandless magic and trying to give people wandless magic by having them drink blood.”

            Draco knew his breath was hissing tightly between his teeth, so loud that he couldn’t hear if Harry was in the same state. But Harry again only nodded as though this was expected, and said, “Go on.”

            “So they had some people drink blood, and some people collect it and give it,” Hale said. “They didn’t tell us that much. But it was obvious that—that they were responsible, somehow, for some of the twisted. Maybe not all of them. Maybe not Ernhardt, or you. I think some of the flaws are natural. But some people drank blood, and some of them went insane, and the Ministry destroyed some of them.” She laughed in a scorching way. “That, they told us because they wanted to reassure us that it was okay to destroy you, that you were insane and just like those experiments they had to get rid of.”

            Harry made a barking noise under his breath, and Hale paused, as though she was wondering whether the Ministry had been right about his insanity after all. But Draco saw the moment when she shook the worry off and leaned forwards again. This time, the chair’s legs bounced beneath her with the force of her lean.

            “Anyway. There were experiments. Maybe Ernhardt was part of them. But I think that’s part of what they were afraid that you would find out, and part of the reason they’re hunting you down so hard. Besides all the other reasons.”

            Draco was thinking of what Athright had said, that Thacker had had a spotless reputation as far as she knew, and she’d never heard of the Ministry saying anything bad about him if he was into Dark magic.

            The Ministry.

            Draco had, it seemed, a true motive for following Harry’s plan at last.

*

            Sasunarufan13: Thanks for reviewing!

            The mist was that aggressive because Draco was desperate. Harry could possibly use the incantation, but it takes training in childhood as well as thinking of the place as the home of one’s family, so he’d be better off doing it in a Potter mansion.

            SP777: She would be! Too bad Harry really can’t communicate with her.

            Eve: Yes, you can translate it into Chinese, although since it’s the fourteenth story in a series, I don’t think it makes much sense without the other thirteen.
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity