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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
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Chapter Sixteen—Breathless

            “I don’t believe her.”

            Harry rubbed his hand over his forehead. He and Draco had been arguing the same point for several hours, and he wasn’t sure what else he could say. Draco had acted as though he believed Hale yesterday, and now, today, with Hale held prisoner in another room and the rest of the Aurors thoroughly Obliviated and dumped in random places without their wands, he had decided that she was lying.

            “What she said makes sense,” Harry said. “And it makes certain points about Thacker make sense, too. Why did no one ever suspect him? How could he experiment with Dark magic and infected blood and not get caught? If he had the Ministry’s backing. If he had the Ministry’s approval.”

            Harry wanted to spit when he thought about that. The same Ministry that had wanted to use his visions and would have been fascinated with some applications of the other Socrates Aurors’ flaws if they knew about them had made twisted of its own. And now it wanted to destroy the twisted remaining and cover up any mention or memory of Ernhardt.

            Well, no, all right, it made sense, more than some of the other things the Ministry had done. Covering one’s own arse was a time-honored move there. Harry just didn’t understand how they had thought this would remain a secret.

            “But why tell her?” Draco had halted and turned his head to the side, watching Harry over his shoulder with one eye only. Harry didn’t know if that was supposed to convince him or what, but it was bloody annoying, not being able to see the whole of Draco’s face. “Someone who’s a rigid, stickler-for-the-rules Auror? They had no reason to reveal it.”

            Harry snorted. “They knew Hale and I didn’t get along. If we can believe everything the Montgomerys say, then Hale was part of a pattern, where they hoped I would get fed up with having stupid partners and quit, or get discredited. I don’t believe the Ministry could have anticipated she would talk to me instead of keep it secret from us just because it was me.”

            Draco shook his head. “But why trust random Aurors with this information? Say Hale kept the secret. Someone else could have turned.”

            “That, I do have a theory on,” Harry said, and turned towards the bedroom where they’d put Hale. Halfway there, he stopped and looked back at Draco. “Are you coming?”

            Draco sighed heavily enough to tear some of the dust floating around the room apart, and then he followed. Harry hid his smirk as well as he could. Draco would probably kill him if he saw it.

            Sometimes, Harry was the one who could see the plots and plans and turns of the Ministry’s devious, corkscrew collective mind. He hoped that wouldn’t give Draco a complex.

*

            You haven’t wanted him to be really good at anything since he hurt you.

            Draco winced away from the thought, watching instead as Harry’s head bobbed in front of him, climbing the stairs. No, he told himself. No, that wasn’t true. How could it be true? He had forgiven Harry for hurting him. They’d discussed it. They’d fought side by side since then, and successfully, even if it had been Harry who devised the trap that finally captured Hale and the other Aurors. Draco had killed one of them with the mist he summoned from his Black ancestors. That had to count for something, after all.

            It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t think it.

            But the suspicion remained, lingering, poisoning the back of his mind. Draco didn’t trust Hale, thought Harry was foolish for doing so, and might have believed the things she said about the Ministry if they came from someone else’s mouth.

            But he still didn’t think the Ministry would have let that information about experimenting with twisted escape so readily. Maybe a few months ago, when few people knew what twisted were or exactly that the Socrates Aurors were told to kill them, instead of just frequently having to do so because that was the way mad Dark wizards were.

            Since the embarrassment of Ernhardt, though, Draco thought they would have wanted to cover up any participation in helping or creating twisted as much as possible. But Harry seemed certain of this. So he bit his tongue and climbed the stairs behind Harry, taking some pleasure in watching his arse.

            Merlin knew it was the only pleasure he was likely to get from the next few hours.

*

            Harry stepped into the room where they’d left Hale bound to a chair and nodded to her. She sat up at once and asked, “What have you done with the others?”

            Harry shrugged at Draco, leaving the choice of whether to tell her up to him. Harry didn’t think she needed the information, but he also couldn’t see the harm in letting her have it. If she went back to the Ministry and told them what had happened, it wouldn’t make her look good.

            “They’ve been Memory Charmed and dumped in random places without their wands,” Draco said, his face the emotionless mask that Harry, in theory, should have been wearing more often. “They’ll make their way back home, eventually, but it’ll take some time.”

            Harry exhaled, and then wondered what his reaction had betrayed to Hale. But this time, she only paid him a small amount of attention before she returned her gaze to Draco. “Thank you,” she said, leaning against the back of the chair. “I didn’t want them to suffer for anything I may have forgotten to tell you.”

            “I don’t understand, then,” Harry said, seizing the comment, because it would provide him with a way to introduce his theory. “You think we’re the sort who would make other innocent people suffer because of your mistake, but you also trusted us with the secret of what the Ministry told you?”

            Hale turned her stare on him. “I don’t believe you’re the monsters the Ministry said you are,” she said. “But sane monsters could have decided to hold others hostage for good behavior. It’s what I would have done.”

            “Ah,” Harry said, nodding. “Tell me. When they gave you the information about them creating the twisted, did anyone cast a spell that trailed green or purple light through the air?”

            Hale blinked. “They told us in a large office—it had to be, to hold all the Aurors going on this hunt—and full of officials, too. I couldn’t see someone cast a spell like that.”

            Harry nodded again. He’d thought so. Hale would have been more cautious about what she told them if she’d known. “Well. Imagine, for a second, that one of us is holding a wand on you.” Hale stared at him, and Harry rolled his eyes and drew his wand, aiming it at about the center of her chest. “Here. I’ll help.”

            Hale only nodded, though, and said nothing.

            “I’m going to start casting a curse,” Harry said. “When I reach the middle of the incantation, then try to tell us about the twisted again.”

            It was becoming clear that Hale had no idea what he was on about, but Draco had taken a deep breath from behind him. Harry shot him a quick smile. Convincing Hale would be useful, but this demonstration should do that. In the meantime, convincing Draco would ordinarily take longer.

            “Aedifico,” Harry began, the first word of a curse that would bury the victim alive.

            Hale opened her mouth—

            And nothing came out, except a squeak of suppressed air. She collapsed in the ropes that bound her. In the next instant, her hands had risen against the bonds and were clawing at her throat.

            Harry stopped chanting, dismissed the lingreing magic that he could still feel waiting to form into the Burial Curse, and dropped his wand to the floor. At the same time, Draco cast a hex that forced the victim’s mouth to open and their lungs to expand. It was usually used to embarrass someone who was making a noise they wanted to suppress, but it worked this time, making Hale cough and gasp and stagger, and then begin to breathe normally again.

            Harry picked up his wand, making sure to keep his movements slow and exaggerated, so that Hale wouldn’t start choking again. Hale shook her head in response, eyes dazed but coming more and more alive as she stared at them.

            “Right,” she gasped, when she could say something. “What was that?”

            “The Breathlessness Curse,” Harry said.

            He would have gone on to explain, but Hale looked at him with flat eyes, and said, “I know what spell has that effect. But you weren’t casting it. Explain it.”

            “That’s what I so enjoyed about working with you, Hale,” Harry drawled. “Your cheerful personality and complete willingness to let me get on with the job.”

            Hale’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Go on.”

            For once, Harry could give thanks for that porcelain pure-blood composure that nothing could break for long. He nodded. “The Ministry tied the Breathlessness Curse to the information they told you. If you attempted to confess it to someone, then you would find yourself unable to speak.” He didn’t need to say the rest of it. Try to go on confessing, and the curse would go on choking, to the point that it would probably kill.

            “We’ve seen a variation of how the Ministry protected its secrets once before,” Draco murmured.

            Harry nodded. “Okazes.”

            “That makes no sense,” Hale said. “Why would it activate only now, after I’ve already told you the truth?”

            Harry laughed. He knew that the others were scowling at him, united for once in their disdain of drama, but he couldn’t help it. It was so perfectly Ministry, both the way they had come up with to protect their secret and what they had never foreseen that might get around it.

            “Because the only way they could imagine anyone telling us that, when they’d been so earnestly blackening our reputations, was under threat of torture,” Harry said. “They triggered the curse to react if you were about to be cursed and tried to say something, the way you were when I was chanting the Burial Curse.”

            “Which it is dangerous to know, by the way,” Hale said, staring at him.

            Harry waved his hand. “They wanted you to be prepared to face twisted. It wouldn’t surprise me if they thought Draco and I had been conducting experiments of our own, in order to gain some of the powers that their created twisted probably had. Have, if any of them are still alive. So they gave you the information, but ensured you couldn’t speak it.” He smiled at Hale. “The one thing they never considered was that you might give it to us of your own free will, instead of being ‘convinced’ to part with it.”

            Hale kicked the back of her chair, but Harry thought it was in irritation at not having figured that out herself. “Because the blackening of your reputations included telling us that you were evil and should never be trusted,” she muttered.

            Harry nodded. “And this is the Ministry. They either believe we’re evil now, or have convinced themselves that since anyone finding out the truth would be utterly horrible, it’s preferable to lie and lie. You were our enemies, besides. You probably wouldn’t take a chance on trusting us no matter what.”

            “I’m the Ministry’s enemy now,” Hale said flatly. “Let me go, and I will start spreading the word that they should not be trusted.”

            “That’s exactly why we can’t let you go,” Harry told her. “We do have a plan for ensuring that everyone sees the truth—”

            “If you can call ‘rushing into disaster’ a plan,” Draco muttered.

            Harry waved his hand at Draco behind his back and went on. “But it depends on waiting a while, until a bunch of people can be gathered in one place, and literally see what happened. It doesn’t include you spreading rumors. Do that, and those people will just say that we have you under the Imperius Curse or some such thing. This isn’t a situation where one voice can make a difference.”

            Hale squinted at him. “But two can?”

            “Maybe three.” Harry faced her squarely. “If we let you go, can we trust you to stay here and speak only when we tell you to speak, or are we going to have to bind you?”

            Draco said something inarticulate behind him. Harry ignored him. Maybe Hale wouldn’t stay here, but they needed her somewhere nearby, to produce her at an appropriately dramatic moment. He did think Hale could be an asset to them, just not running around and being a voice in the wilderness.

            “You can’t completely trust me,” Hale said. “I have to do what is right. I have to serve a cause worthy of being served. That’s why I told you what the Ministry said about their experiments in the first place. Those prove that they aren’t worthy of my service. But if you ask me to wait, neither are you.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. And now he could damn that pure-blood composure he’d been so eager to embrace before. “We can give you something else to do,” he said. “Something that should provide you with some solid proof.” And keep you busy for at least a few days.

            “What?” Hale sat up.

            “You’d have to pretend to serve the Ministry a little longer,” Harry cautioned her. “You’d need access to their records and archives.”

            Hale made an impatient motion.

            “There was one researcher we’re sure of,” Harry said. “The name of one person who was working with infected blood and creating twisted. He supposedly had a spotless reputation, but I think that’s because the Ministry protected him when he was alive. We need to know if he’s dead, or if we can find him. We know something about his background, with a Muggle family, but it’s probably false.”

            “Don’t give her that,” Draco said from behind Harry, his voice so low and charged that Harry flinched.

            “Why not?” Hale asked. “If you put a version of the Breathless Curse on me, one that is more sophisticated and won’t allow me to betray what happened, willingly or otherwise, then you wouldn’t have to fear that I could tell the Ministry. But you could trust me fully with the information, and that way, I could actually be an effective ally for you.”

            Harry had to raise his eyebrows and grin in spite of himself, especially when he saw the narrow-eyed way Draco was looking at Hale.

            “Why would you submit to it?” Draco asked.

            A grave kind of smile played around Hale’s lips that Harry had never seen before; he thought he might have liked her better if he had. “Shouldn’t you be asking, why would I suggest it?” she countered. “I don’t want to betray you, and I want to know some way that I can combat the Ministry. This is the best way to be sure that you’ll trust me enough to let me fight.”

            Pure-bloods, Harry thought, shaking his head a little, when her argument appeared sufficient to convince Draco. Well, that was really all Harry could ask for at the moment. “Should you do it, or should I?” he asked Draco.

            “Let me do it.” Draco drew his wand. “That’s the only way that I can be sure it’ll be thorough enough.”

            Hale nodded as if that made sense, and leaned back in her chair. Harry shrugged and stepped aside. He could never work with Hale as a partner, but as an ally, it seemed that she wasn’t so bad.

*

            Draco caught Hale’s eye as he raised his wand, in silent warning. You should know that I don’t trust you as much as Harry does. He tried to convey the full force of that without using words.

            It got him only an unimpressed look in return. Hale knew he didn’t trust her, but she trusted him to make sure there were no consequences to Harry’s decision.

            Draco wove, nonverbally so that Harry wouldn’t get upset, a much more thorough version of the Breathless Curse. It was more like strangulation, and would cast the victim into a coma if they—she—persisted in trying to speak. Writing was out of the question, as it would make the hands cramp up so badly they couldn’t hold a quill. Hale shuddered a little when the magic settled into her bones after a blue blaze of light, and then nodded in approval. It didn’t really surprise Draco that she recognized it.

            “All settled?” Harry was looking back and forth between them as if waiting for them to stop being stupid.

            Hale half-smiled and waved a hand at Draco. “All is settled as far as I am concerned.”

            Draco had to nod. They had taken all the precautions that he could think of, some of them reasonable and some not so, and in the meantime, they needed to move.

            “Good,” Hale said. “Now give me the name.”

            “Jared Thacker,” Harry said, and Draco watched her face for any sign of recognition, but only saw a slight frown, as though she was memorizing the information. “He was known to have Muggle parents, or supposedly Muggle parents, but at least one person who knew him thought that information was false and he had used Memory Charms to make these people think they were his parents…”

            Draco let Harry tell Hale what they had discovered, while he took a step back and considered. Another ally in the Ministry, he supposed. Although the chances that she would discover something Athright and Jenkins—if they could ever meet with Jenkins and get the information—hadn’t already found was remote, she might be valuable in other ways.

            But they were going too slowly. They could gain allies and pieces one at a time, but they hadn’t even convinced Hale. It had been the Ministry’s stupidity that had done that, and she had come to them of her own free will. It wasn’t an example they could rely on to convince others and win them to their side as quickly.

            “Draco?”

            Draco glanced up quickly. Harry stood there with his arms crossed, frowning. Draco held up his hands. “What did I miss?’

            “I said,” Harry murmured, “or rather Hale said, that she has an idea on how to deal with the Montgomerys.”

            Draco turned to her. “Do you?” He made his voice heavy with meaning, and let his eyes scrape over Hale. If she betrayed them, he could do worse than the version of the Breathlessness Curse that he had cast on her.

            Either Hale understood what he meant and agreed with it so thoroughly that Draco needed to say nothing else, or she was harder to impress than he’d thought. She met his gaze and nodded slowly.

            “Then what is it?” Draco demanded, when it seemed that no one was willing to tell him outright.

            “Leash them to me,” Hale said.

            Draco stared at her. “How do you know that spell?” he asked.

            Hale gave him one of those freezing glares that Draco had previously been under the (foolish) impression that she only reserved for Harry. “I am pure-blood, after all,” she said, and then took up the task of explaining to Harry. “A leash will confine them to follow me within a certain distance, to obey me, and to use their magic only if I let them do so.”

            Harry flinched a little, the way he had when Draco wanted to use the painful potion on Montgomery, the way Draco had known he would. “It sounds like the Imperius Curse,” he said, eyes straying to Draco before they settled back on Hale.

            Hale held herself upright in the ropes and shook her head. “No,” she said. “It is more humane. The Imperius Curse gives the victim no choice in resisting. The leash would let them disobey me—or try. It would be intensely painful, but it is no more cruel than what one would do to a dog.”

            “Human beings aren’t dogs,” Harry said.

            “If they did what you have implied they did, then they are,” Hale said, with a small shrug.

            It was clear, Draco thought, that Hale was like his parents, able to effortlessly dehumanize everyone who didn’t obey her and downgrade them into a lesser kind of being. Draco didn’t enjoy associating with someone who did that, not after the way his parents had thrown him off, but it would serve its purpose in this case.

            “Fine,” Harry said. He turned to Draco. “If you’ll tell me why you were surprised about her knowing the spell.”

            Draco sighed and rubbed his eyes. “It always comes down to suspicion with you. Doesn’t it?” he added, his neck throbbing with the memory of what Harry had done to him when he cast that spell to relieve Draco of the necromantic possession. It didn’t matter how long they had been together. Harry still couldn’t trust that Draco knew best sometimes, or resist the temptation to expose the flaws in their partnership to someone else.

            Harry looked at him, silent and stubbornly knowing, and Draco gave in. “It’s a Dark spell,” he said. “I was under the impression that Hale was a Light witch. That’s all.”

            “It’s one of the spells that was officially designated Dark and then reclassified some years ago,” Hale corrected him, with a little hum under her breath. Draco could guess the kind of complaint it hid. “I don’t mind using it in a good cause, and there is no way we can trust the Montgomerys otherwise.”

            “That depends on our trusting you,” Draco said.

            “You have your guarantee that I not talk.” Hale looked him in the eye. “If I went to the members of the Department who sent us on this mission, they would scarcely be content if I tried to act in their best interests without being able to tell them why I was doing so.”

            Draco licked his lips. He had been about to demand that she let one of them leash her, but he knew what she would say in response to that: she would refuse to work with them. And it wouldn’t be practical, with the Apparition they had to do, to put her under a spell that would force her to stay within a certain distance.

            He stepped up to her. “I’ll cast the leash,” he said. “I can do that, and put someone other than myself in the position of holder.”

            “Fine,” Hale said.

            Draco bent near enough to her that Harry couldn’t hear them, and whispered, “You betrayed him once. Don’t think that I’m not watching you, in case you try to bring him down again.”

            Hale only watched him, and then smiled. “Worry more about the cracks in your own partnership, before you lecture me on one that’s over,” she said.

            Draco nearly stepped backwards and slapped her. As it was, he cast the leash spell with a shaking hand.

            Harry released Hale from her ropes, and she stood, nodded formally to each of them, and left the room to go to the ones where the Montgomerys were and assume her command.

            When Harry tried to follow, Draco cast another spell that shut and locked the door of the bedroom. Harry turned and blinked at him.

            “I think we need to talk,” Draco told him, quietly.

*

            Sasunarufan13: As you can see, the Ministry did have precautions. They just couldn’t imagine that someone would want to tell Harry and Draco willingly what they’d discovered, or trust them to handle the knowledge responsibly.

            SP777: It’s not necessary that Thacker have a position in the Ministry, just that he seemed to have no reputation at all for Dark magic.

            In Chapter 17!

            Eve: That’s fine, but I meant the rest of the series. Are you up to translating the thirteen fics before this one? I don’t think it stands well on its own.
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity