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The Library of Hades	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4439 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Sixteen—Much-Wanted Answers

            “You have not the slightest idea what you’ve cost the Ministry.”

            Harry blinked, and stepped back despite himself, when Okazes spoke those words. He had assumed without thinking that the Deputy Head Auror wouldn’t give them anything until they started threatening him. But Okazes’s mouth was definitely moving, and there was a rage and bitterness in his eyes that Harry hadn’t seen even when the blue-eyed twisted was possessing him.

            “In terms of time and money,” Okazes continued whispering. “In terms of difficulty of labor. A certain Auror might go too far and cause problems with the public. We know that. We’re prepared for that. But we’ve never had someone cause as many problems as you have.”

            There didn’t seem to be an answer for that. Harry swallowed, and found that air and what felt like blood were sticking in his throat. He fell back another step, and hit a solid body behind him. Draco put an arm around his shoulders that felt like it would have done as much good wrapped around his throat, and smiled at Okazes.

            “That doesn’t give you the right to harass him,” he said pleasantly. “That doesn’t give you the right to assign him to a Corps with a brand-new partner where the high death rate probably persuaded you that he would die soon, too. That doesn’t give you the right to endorse the ridiculous ban that St. Mungo’s gave him. What sort of Healers refuse to help a man who might bleed to death without them? And the Ministry went along with it.”

            There was silence, from Draco because he seemingly had no more to say at the moment, and from Okazes because it looked like he was speechless from rage, and from Harry because he was looking sidelong at Draco. He had had no idea that his ban from being treated at St. Mungo’s had upset Draco so much. He had certainly given no indication of it before.

            Or, at least, not in those words, Harry amended, remembering some of the things Draco had hinted at when they were working with the Mind-Healers in the pay of the Ministry, the only ones who would reliably treat Harry.

            “You have no idea what he’s cost us,” Okazes whispered again, in what sounded like a daze of wrath.

            “Then why don’t you tell us?” Draco cocked his head to the side and gave Okazes almost a winsome smile. “This is your chance. We’re a captive audience—if you’ll excuse the pun where it applies to you—and Harry was never in the right mood to listen to you before. But now, he wants to know.” Draco’s voice almost vanished as he whispered, his hand clenching low on Harry’s back as he leaned forwards. Harry was willing to bet money that the hand would be white-knuckled, and also that Draco would keep it carefully out of Okazes’s vision so he couldn’t see it. “Harry would never listen before. He’ll listen now.”

            That won’t tempt him, Harry thought, eyeing Okazes and the way that he still flexed his hands in his bonds as if that alone would break the Incarcerous ropes. It can’t, not really.

            But it seemed that either Draco had spoken better than Harry thought he had or Okazes really thought he had nothing to lose, because he nodded curtly and creaked his head around to face Harry. “You,” he whispered. “It’s always bloody you.”

            Harry didn’t move. The best thing he could do to provoke Okazes, he had discovered long ago, was to act as if none of his criticisms mattered. And sure enough, Okazes pounded on as usual, trying to discover something that would break and alter and change Harry.

            “You’re always the center of public attention, and public inquiry,” Okazes continued, voice scoring Harry like some of the acids he had used in Potions class. “Whenever an Auror gets injured, we get owls asking if it’s you. And whenever you do something that ends up on the front page of the Prophet, we have to spend hours doing interviews about it. Then you go and do something frankly mad, like your actions in the Gina Hendricks case.”

            “So you’re…” Harry let his voice trail off. He couldn’t believe that he had been about to suggest that Okazes was jealous, but God, that was what it sounded like.

            “You’re one Auror,” Okazes said, and his voice had dropped and dripped into a bitter, bitter whisper. Yes, Harry could use it as acid to remove his beard stubble if he wanted. “One Auror. We don’t have the resources to give everyone your level of attention, and we don’t have the resources to do everything that the public insists we do for you. Yet if we don’t, there’s always someone ready to trumpet that we don’t value the Boy-Who-Lived enough. And then there’s the work that you create when you take a risk on a case and end up concussed or cursed or nearly dead.”



“That’s only happened once since he was partnered with me,” Draco said, his arm tightening around Harry’s shoulders. “And that was the time he went to St. Mungo’s before he was banned. The rest of the time, we took care of it ourselves.”

Okazes turned his head to Draco. “Why couldn’t you do what you were supposed to do?” he whispered.

            “What I was supposed to do.”

            Draco didn’t say that as a question. Harry reached up and took his arm, this time, for support, and moved forwards so that he would be able to block the motion of Draco’s wand. He didn’t really want to think about what that particular tone meant for Okazes.

            “Yes,” Okazes said, and although his face had turned pale and he was squirming in his bonds again as if he could break them, he wouldn’t turn back now. “You were supposed to drag him down, make him sane, act as an anchor on him. If you had questioned him more often instead of working with him as a partner, then our administrative load would have lessened, and he would have stood more chance of annoying you instead.”

            Draco said nothing. But it was the sort of saying nothing that, again, Harry knew, and he pressed close to Draco, resting a hand on his arm, murmuring back to him, talking to him, letting him know that Harry didn’t believe Okazes’s words, and that he would never have expected Draco to do such a thing.

            Because he had seen that look on Draco’s face only right before Draco engaged in Dark Arts, and he didn’t want to see Draco unleash them here.

*

            They intended me to be that.

            It hardly mattered that Draco would never have been that, partially because he didn’t want to be but more because he had always wanted to work with his partners instead of drag them down. When he had found out he was partnered to Harry bloody Potter, he hadn’t liked it, but he had never once thought of sabotaging their cases or arranging matters so that Harry would get less credit than he did.

            No, it was that Okazes and his cabal had not accepted Draco at face value as a good Auror. Instead, they had wanted him to be their little pet, their obedient servant, doing the tasks they assigned him, playing the role that they wanted him to play.

            Just like his parents. Just like the Lucius and Narcissa who had wanted a compliant little Malfoy heir instead of a son. It didn’t matter that Draco had proven them wrong, in the end, about how compliant he really was. They still had seen him that way, had tried to pry and prod and manipulate him into being that.

            And the Ministry had been his shield against them, the Auror career a bid for freedom from their games. He had never trusted the Ministry, but he knew how to operate there, knew the games of favors and intimidation, and had never doubted that most people saw him as a formidable player.

            Now he learned that Okazes—and whatever others had thought he would act as a chain on Harry—hadn’t seen him that way at all.

            Just another puppetmaster.

            Draco’s hand clenched on his wand until he had to forcibly use the image of it being broken in two pieces to drive himself back. He pulled away with a little whistling cry and shook his head when Harry leaned in and whispered into his ear, “We can leave, if you want. You don’t need to stay here and endure this.”

            No. As much as he loved Harry for sensing what he was feeling and caring enough to want to intervene—caring more for Draco’s comfort than for what they could learn from Okazes—he wasn’t leaving without more answers.

            “Give me names,” he told Okazes. “Give me the names of the people who thought that assigning me to Harry was a way to chain both of us.”

            Okazes looked carefully at him. Then he said, “They did not intend to chain you, Auror Malfoy. You have nothing like Auror Potter’s record of bad and foolish decisions. You were the convenient tool, not someone we hated.”

            Draco smiled. That was worse, that they had seen him only in terms of his effect on Harry, not as someone independent and worth dealing with in his own right. That made his heart pound all the harder and his mouth flood with saliva that he had no intention of wasting on Okazes’s face. That made his hand rest the harder on his wand, until Harry took his fingers and pried them open one by one.

            Draco could have been angry about that on another day, because they were showing weakness in front of an enemy, but he was the one who had made the prying necessary, and he was also the one who intended to search Okazes’s mind after they Obliviated him to make sure every trace of this conversation was gone, so it didn’t matter.

            “I was used,” he said calmly. “And someone decided that our partnership was a way for me to be used. Who was it?”

            Okazes shook his head. “You’re making this sound like some deliberate effort to enslave you, and it was anything but that. You should be flattered by the attention of so many powerful wizards who thought that you could be useful.”

            “Flattered,” Draco whispered.

            Harry was in front of him, standing there with his hands flat on Draco’s chest. He didn’t shove. He didn’t need to. His eyes said it for him.

            “I won’t hurt him more than we already planned on,” Draco said sweetly to him, and watched Harry tighten his shoulders and bow his head. “Don’t worry, Harry. Not at all. But I want to know the answers to this, and Okazes hasn’t shown me that he doesn’t know the answers. He’s just trying to dissuade me from asking for them.” He turned and aimed his wand at Okazes, straight between the ropes at his gut, where a wound would hurt the most and take a long time to kill him. “You can’t. Tell me, now.”

            “I should have known this wouldn’t work,” Okazes whispered. “I told him that Potter had a record of influencing his partners badly. Hale, who could work with anyone, refused to work with him. And Lionel Vane was never the Auror he used to be after he had worked with Potter for a month.”

            Harry flinched beside him, but at least Draco knew that Okazes wouldn’t realize the deeper reason for that. He was the only one, besides perhaps Mind-Healer Estillo, who knew of Harry’s failed crush on Vane, and the way that Vane had carefully distanced himself from Harry after Harry had told him.

            Still, that the words hurt Harry was enough. Draco nodded a little and whispered, “Contactus.”

            Okazes flinched, and screamed. Draco shook his head, smiling. “Come,” he said, as he nonverbally conjured a flame on the end of his wand. “I haven’t even hurt that part of my body joined to yours yet, let alone done something to make you sound like that.”

            “Draco,” Harry said quietly.

            Draco turned and looked at him. “What?” he asked. “Why can’t I? Because it’s Dark magic?” He held the wand closer to his left hand. Okazes watched the flame the way a moth would, a way that told Draco he knew perfectly well what the spell did. Draco smiled. So much for Dark magic not being practiced in the offices of the Ministry’s higher echelons.

            Harry’s hand closed gently around his wrist. He didn’t jerk, he didn’t even restrain, he simply held. Draco sneered at him, too, but Harry looked into his eyes and didn’t look away.

            That was what made Draco listen, in the end. Before Harry, so many other people had looked away, leaned away. He had got along well enough with Kellen Moonborn, his last partner, but even there, it had been a business affair, no deep bond like the one he had with Harry. Kellen simply hadn’t been interested enough in him.

            “You don’t need to torture him like this, because you’re not the kind of person who needs to torture,” Harry told him, soft and simple and sane. “You’re not his kind of person. Not the kind that set you on me intending you to make me fail, either. This is something they want. Fine. They can have it. They can practice the pain spells and whatever that one is.” He nodded to the flame burning on Draco’s wand. “But you don’t have to. You’re better than that.”

            “I think we’ve established by now,” Draco whispered, barely moving his lips, “that I don’t think everyone who avoids using Dark Arts is a good person.”

            “I know that.” Harry’s eyes were so bright and so somber, and they never moved. “But torture…that’s something different again, Draco. What will the spell do if I let you go ahead and put that flame to your hand?”

            “Give him the pain I would be feeling otherwise,” Draco said, turning back to Okazes and smiling. Okazes flinched and cowered in his ropes. Draco hissed disdain and defiance. Yes, he thought someone could use the Dark Arts and not be corrupted instantly the way the Ministry believed they would be, but on the other hand, one had to have the courage to bear the consequences. Someone who couldn’t stand the thought of pain had no business wielding magic that powerful.

            “Yes,” Harry said, as incisive as though he was refuting another argument about the morality of hunting twisted down. “There’s no need for you to do something like this, Draco. I mean it,” he added, when Draco turned his head and sneered at him again. “Not because it’s Dark Arts. Because it’s torture, and I think you’ve had enough of that and more.”

            “You heard what he said,” Draco murmured. “That it was deliberate. That they didn’t just plan for us to clash, that they planned for me to destroy you.”

            “And they didn’t succeed.” Harry reached out and placed his hand in front of the flame this time, making Draco jerk the wand back instinctively. Harry didn’t have the Joined Contact spell on him, but the fire was real, and it could still burn him. “That’s the hell of it, Draco. What they wanted to do to me was horrible, but really no surprise. What they wanted to do to you is worse. They wanted to make you into a tool.”

            Draco tilted his head to the side, but didn’t turn completely away. It was what he had thought a few minutes ago, comparing the Ministry officials and his parents in his mind. His only wonder was how Harry had divined it.

            Harry’s hand rose and smoothed along the side of Draco’s throat, touching a muscle here, the pulse there. “You shouldn’t do what they want. You’re you, and you have an independence and a mind of your own. They shouldn’t leash you.”

            Draco glanced back and forth from Okazes to the flame on his wand, and then snorted. “And you think that what I’m about to do is something they want me to do?”

            Harry shook his head. “Not so much that. But you’re doing it because of them. Rebelling against someone doesn’t really work, not if the only reason for the act of defiance is to rebel. Think about your parents and your decision to become an Auror. You did it for yourself, not because you wanted to spite them. They cut you off because of your decision, but you didn’t know that would happen.”

            Draco reached out and stroked back Harry’s fringe, baring his scar. Part of him felt silly and strange doing this in front of Okazes, but he was going to lose the memory anyway. They might as well be alone. “I think that you think of your own nobility as inherent in everyone else. And that you’re being a bit of a hypocrite.”

            Harry smiled, but said, “We aren’t talking about me right now. We’re talking about you, and the fact that you don’t have to do this.”

            Draco looked back at Okazes again. He was staring at Harry as if he’d never seen him before.

            “Yes,” Draco said softly, in answer to both Harry’s words and that stare, as he flicked his wand and dismissed the flame. “Don’t you wonder why in the world you didn’t see him as he really was, someone who would protect even people who tried specifically to destroy him? How did you miss it?”

            Okazes looked back at Draco, and his face flushed. “It doesn’t matter what he would do in a situation like this,” he said. “The question is whether he would continue costing the Ministry resources if we let him continue unchecked. And the answer is yes.”

            Draco shrugged, not showing on his face the confusion churning in his gut. If the Ministry felt this way about Harry, and so little about Draco that they could sacrifice any usefulness he might have to make him into an anchor, and if they had cast them both into the Socrates Corps to let their drama play out…

            Then the Ministry didn’t seem to care as much about the twisted being hunted and caught as Draco had assumed they did. And that meant things for Harry’s argument about the morality of hunting them that Draco didn’t want to think about.

            Well, luckily I don’t need to think about them right now. Draco swished the notion away and said, “I believe that you were about to tell us other things. Such as who the wizards were that came hunting us.”

            Okazes shook his head. “I can’t name them,” he said, and something about the word can’t made Draco cock his head. “Besides, I wasn’t the one who made that decision, just like I wasn’t the one who made the decision to partner you. That comes from higher up,” he added, with venom in his voice that Draco had to admit would have been fun to see him unleash against proper targets. “Those who command the Shadowborn—”

            He stopped, and his throat worked for a moment. Harry glided up to Draco’s side and cast while Draco was still trying to decide what was going on and what he wanted to do next. Okazes sagged over to the side, his breath coming fast and shallow, bruises darkening into place around his neck that looked like the marks of strangling fingers.

            Draco looked at Harry. Harry sighed. “I recognized the spell,” he said. “There are spells that will literally stop someone from speaking the truth, not letting their lips form the words—”

            Draco rolled his eyes. “There’s more than one student of Dark Arts in this room, you realize.”

            “Sorry, oh great student,” Harry said, and grinned at him, startling Draco with the suddenness of the gesture. “I thought you’d prefer to be called a master.”

            There was nothing to say to that, just like there was nothing to say to ten percent of Harry’s mad comments. Draco leaned back and gestured for Harry to go ahead.

            “And there are spells that act more like the Unbreakable Vows, and simply punish you if you break the prohibition,” Harry continued smoothly. “I stopped one of that kind from killing him just now. Okazes seemed to think he was under one of the first kind of spells, but it was this kind instead.” He looked at Okazes, and cocked his head. “Of course, if he was lying about not knowing the name of those grey wizards, he might have been lying about lots of other things.”

            Draco shrugged. “We always knew that he was a limited source of information. There are some things the spells won’t let him say, and other things he might not know, and other things that even the threat of torture won’t make him give up.” He glanced at Harry pointedly and raised his eyebrows.

            “All the more reason not to use the threat of torture.”

            Another argument that we probably can’t settle. Draco restrained the temptation to snap, and said instead, “All right. We have a name.” He didn’t care to say it again, in case there was a tracking charm that would lead the Shadowborn straight to them, but said, “Have you heard of them before?”

            Harry hesitated.

            “Well?” Draco demanded. He glanced back at Okazes and cast a Renervate at him. Okazes jerked, and his breathing deepened, but he didn’t wake up yet. At least Harry’s spell meant his tongue would still be free to move. “Have you, or haven’t you?”

            “Not under that name,” Harry said at last. “There was something I heard on the—the Gina Hendricks case that I think now might have referred to them. I’ll have to think about it. Try putting the memory in a Pensieve, maybe.”

            Draco nodded his acceptance of that, and then knelt down in front of Okazes. Maybe he couldn’t torture him, but Harry hadn’t said that he couldn’t threaten him in other ways.

            “Wake up,” he whispered, using a nonverbal charm to give Okazes the sensation of a hand slapping his cheek. Okazes started and sat up, his eyes wide with something like terror.

            “Now,” Draco said calmly into his face. “I don’t believe that you know nothing. You’ve just proven that you don’t even know your own mind, if you thought you were under a spell that prevented you from speaking the truth about those wizards who attacked us, and it turns out that you aren’t. I want a name. Who suggested that I be partnered with Harry? Who thought I would drag him down?”

            Okazes closed his eyes and opened them. “You aren’t going to let me live,” he whispered.

            “Of course we are,” Draco said. “We have our own means of making sure that you don’t tell anyone the truth.” He nodded to Harry, who stepped up to the side, with his wand at the ready.

            Okazes didn’t look at Harry, simply continued to stare at him. Draco brought his mouth close to the fool’s ear. “Harry prevented me from doing what I wanted to once,” he whispered. “It doesn’t mean he’ll always be here, or always want to watch out for you, particularly if you continue to block us from the truth.” He touched his wand to Okazes’s throat, his ear, his forehead, light, glancing touches. “Just imagine what I can do then.”

            Okazes shivered, but either he had been shaken by his own revelation that he might die from a careless word, or Draco frightened him more than his superiors did. He whispered the breathless reply.

            “Head Auror Ernhardt.”

*

            SP777: No, they were not Hit Wizards. Harry would have recognized the color of those robes.

            Seiren: There is so much stuff. This story might be longer than the 20 chapters I planned on.

            And thanks! Although I think Harry also went for a flat in the Muggle world because he knew that getting anything in the wizarding world would attract more attention.

            unneeded: Harry’s plan has to wait for a chapter or so, but it will be epic when it happens.
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The Library of Hades