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Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28254 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Seventeen—In Circles

            They had left the river. They had gone back to Malfoy’s flat, because he had said he had books there that contained images of the branching patterns Galen of no last name had used, images like the ones on the ring. He was virtually certain that that was what they were, but he wouldn’t be completely certain until he had checked.

            Harry knew that. Of course he knew. He and Ron proceeded on most cases the same way, getting the evidence checked and substances analyzed by Potions masters and Healers who could tell them about wounds. Most of the time, Harry made his final mad charges either during the moments when they were dealing with humans—witnesses or criminals—or during the battles that resulted in captures.

            Sometimes in captures.

            He sat on a chair in Malfoy’s flat, his head tilted back, his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. Ron really was, napping like the soldier that Aurors were supposed to resemble a lot of the time and Ron was more than Harry was. Malfoy stood over yet another book that didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, from the way his fingers rapped the table it was spread out on. His lips rolled up into a frown that Harry didn’t think he would display if he knew he was the target of observation.

            He was so deep in the books, in fact, that Harry doubted he was paying attention to the bond that the mind-control potion created between them, or he would have reacted, by now, to the ideas rippling through the back of Harry’s thoughts.

            He knew two Dark spells that would get them the information they needed. One stood a chance of destroying the ring, but was undetectable outside the four warded walls of the flat. The other would leave the ring intact, but bring the Ministry down on them if they found any trace of it.

            He was fighting the temptation to use one or the other of them.

            And Harry knew people said that phrase and didn’t mean anything in particular by it, but for him, it was real. He was fighting, engaging some strong dark part of himself in constant rolling and plunging and churning in the back of his mind. He was wrestling in waist-deep water, water that ran deeper and swifter and colder than the little stream where the kidnappers had taken Emily Steele had ever dreamed of running.

            He could do it. He knew he was faster with his wand than Malfoy. Malfoy had no potions nearby at the moment—Harry had checked the lines of his pockets and sleeves, letting his eyes run back and forth under drooping lids—and he didn’t know as many spells as Harry. No one knew as many spells as Harry, because he had made up enough to become dangerous.

            But Malfoy had asked him not to. He had explained the dangers to their investigation. So had Ron. Harry had promised. He could picture the way their faces would change when he did this, and they might cut him out of the investigation altogether, which meant he would have taken the risk that the Ministry would find them and broken his promise for nothing…

            The tail of the great dark beast strayed around his legs, between them. Harry jerked his head backwards with a snarl and braced himself against its thrashing in the water, while all the time keeping his exterior bland and asleep. He’d had a lot of practice at that, really. All those meetings when someone proposed something that enraged him, all those times he’d wanted to kill a prisoner and brought them in alive instead, all the times that he’d hoped to save the victim and found a bloody scrap of human skin on the floor and hair on the chains and scabs on the cuffs…

            He stood there, and he fought. And in the end, he pushed the beast-like part of himself back under the water and drowned it. He imagined the way it would die, the bubbles drifting up past its nose, the tail clapping once against the surface and then hanging limp. He forced the restless energy through the image, and relaxed in the end instead of pretending at it.

            And in the silence, he heard Malfoy’s voice say, “I wondered if you could subdue the impulses. Well done.”

            Harry opened his eyes and turned his head, feeling oddly as if he were turning to meet his fate.

*

            Draco looked at Potter from behind the table, and wondered why he had thought Draco so thoroughly distracted by his research that he would risk such a struggle. The impulses in the back of Draco’s mind had changed the moment the fight began, of course, and he had stood silent, listening to them, keeping his eyes blinking and his fingers moving in his own version of Potter’s contrast of still body and tense mind.

            Then he had felt Potter sway against the swirling darkness, against the thoughts that said Cast. Kill. Find. Destroy, and come back to himself. He would have said nothing, only moved, if Potter had decided to cast one of the spells. But Potter had won against himself, which meant Draco would speak.

            Potter moved with slow deliberation after a moment, hooking his legs over one another and tilting his fingers together. Draco had a sudden surreal vision of him receiving delegates from other countries that way. A few came every month, the lower-ranking entourage of ambassadors who would meet with the Minister, and they always wanted to meet the famous Harry Potter.

            He’d entertain them, Draco thought, with a certainty as heavy and dark as hematite. He’d bow and smile and flatter them, and tell the acceptable war stories, the ones that have worn out in the telling from being repeated in the papers each anniversary of the victory. And then he’d come back home, and no one would ever guess that someone who could kill them all in six seconds was walking among them.

            “I wonder why you’re like this,” he said softly. “The day you first came to me about the vision, before you arrested Campion, you weren’t.”

            Potter shifted to the side, restless as a fire, and the impulse in the back of Draco’s mind that said Hide if you can was less disturbing with how he felt also revealed on his body. “Yes,” he said. “But in the days between, I used the Retrovoyance curse.”

            Draco paused. “I know the effects of the Retrovoyance curse,” he said.

            “Do you?” Potter raised his eyebrows and leaned forwards, the impulses in the back of his mind stifled to a soft murmur of waters again. “You’ve studied it, I suppose.”

            “Yes, of course,” Draco said. “How else would I know what it is?”

            “There’s a difference between the sort of knowledge that one picks up of Dark spells in general, and knowing much about this,” Potter said. “You know that it brings back the screams of the dead? The last memories of the dead? The promise of vengeance?” His eyes were the color of jade cooled in black blood. “That you can feel the pain of their last moments, exactly as if you were there? Well, I felt the pain of a girl with her face scraped off. If I’ve been—erratic—that’s one of the reasons. But not the only one,” he added after a moment. “Some of it really is just the way I’ve always been.”

            Draco leaned one hand on the table, and hoped that it didn’t look as if he was bracing himself against the sort of storm-surge that Potter had faced when he was fighting down his wish to cast a Dark spell. “I’ve heard of most of that,” he said. “But not the physical sensations. It rarely achieves that. You felt everything she did.”

            “Oh, yes,” Potter said, and his voice became a soft sound that would have made Draco run away if he heard it behind him in Diagon Alley some dark night. “She lives in my head. It’s the next best thing to having a ghost there.”

            “You have madness on a leash, then,” Draco said, and shook his head. “Perhaps I should be surprised at the existence of the leash, rather than that it’s short.”

            Potter half-bowed his head. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me,” he said, voice still raw, but one that Draco wouldn’t have run away from now. “I—could not have controlled myself at some junctures if not for your first potion, and I believe the second one has been useful as well.”

            “For me, not you,” Draco said. He hesitated, but Potter stared at him, and the impulses in the back of his head were flowing in longer thoughts, less easy to understand than the single-word ones, if more reassuring. “I had thought—rumors since the war said you fought for your freedom against the Ministry. Subtly, but you still got to do things that you wanted to more often than not, and persuaded people that they should pay attention to you. You could control yourself.”

            “Oh, yes, that,” Potter said, with a flutter of one hand. The chattering in Draco’s head was barely distinguishable from the chatter of a stream now. “But there’s a difference between freedom that matters and freedom that doesn’t.”

            “Tell me the difference.” Draco moved around the table and leaned one hip on it, keeping his hand on the book as a connection with the research. If Weasley woke up, it would not do for him to think that Potter and Draco had been gossiping this time away, with nothing productive to show for it.

            “The freedom that matters is the freedom to save people,” Potter said. “To do my job. To fight for what I believe is right. The freedom that doesn’t matter is—calls on my time. Luxuries, like sleeping late. Other luxuries, like having the normal life that I once craved and which I know I won’t get, now.” He stared at Draco, and his eyes were as bright as stars shining through dusk. “The job is what matters.”

            Draco stood there for a moment. Then he said, “Selfishness and selflessness are so twisted in you that I don’t think one can separate them.”

            Potter shrugged. “I stopped worrying about questions like that a long time ago, because they’re philosophical and I can’t answer them.”



            “You don’t want to answer them.”

            “I’m not intelligent enough to.” Potter’s teeth flashed briefly. Draco had never seen an expression more perfectly balanced between a snarl and a smile. “I’m not known for great and shining brilliance, you know, or I never would have used the Retrovoyance curse. I would have looked it up, found out what it did to you, and chosen some other spell that would let me discover the truth.”

            Draco cocked his head. Perhaps here lay a way out of the tangle that was Potter. “You acknowledge it would have been better to choose some other spell that affected your mind less?”

            “Of course,” Potter said, and the impulse in the back of Draco’s mind said, Think this is strange. “I know now what it did to me. With a clearer mind, I might have been able to make more progress in the case.”

            “And all you care about is your job,” Draco said, suppressing the impulse to clench his hand into a fist and drum it on the table. It would be stupid to do so, when it would probably wake Weasley up, and he didn’t have the right to react like that to an announcement of Potter’s anyway. “Nothing else. Nothing that could—nothing else that could change things, or make a difference.”

            Potter blinked. “Most successful Aurors care a great deal about their jobs,” he said. “Ron is good, too, in some respects better than me, and you know he thinks about it a lot. You couldn’t have worked together if he didn’t, if he still thought that—oh—you being a snotty pure-blood of a Slytherin was more important than investigating the case or springing me from the cell. Thank you for that, by the way. I did say thank you, didn’t I?” he added.

            Draco licked his lips. Perhaps he shouldn’t, but he could feel the muscles in his shoulders bunching when Potter was like this, when he said or did something that made him, for a moment, more accessible. More human. Not a beast, not a machine. Just a man.

            “I think you may have,” he said gravely. “But—Potter, Weasley has a wife. He has a life outside the Aurors, one that he can flow back and forth to when he needs to, and then restore himself before he returns to work. What do you have? I don’t believe most of the rumors in the Prophet about you dating someone.”

            Potter shrugged. “Good. You shouldn’t.”

            Draco waited, and then clenched his teeth and his hands, even the one that he had kept in contact with the book in case Weasley woke up. “So tell me what you have, Potter,” he said. “If you think that I’m unworthy of being granted even that small measure of trust—”

            “I have no one to date,” Potter said. “No one for a long time. Some people have looked promising, but I haven’t found one yet.” He shrugged again, and looked as calm as though he was one of those Muggle religious statues they put on top of tombs. “Someday, when I can find the right person and I have the time, I’ll have a family. But there’s no reason to rush. I might live for a hundred years yet.”

            “When will you have the time?” Draco asked.

            “Someday.” Potter glanced at him and turned the attack back on him, as the impulses in the back of Draco’s mind said, Question. “And what about you? You have the money and the space and the time to have someone if you wanted. I don’t suppose you do?”

            “That’s true,” Draco said. “But I also don’t spend all my days brewing. I still have friends, and I attend meetings that have to do with brewing, and I teach my assistants. I don’t think you have a life outside your job.”

            “So be it,” said Potter, still not turning a hair.

            “You should,” Draco said.

*

            What is this, the Get-Harry-Potter-A-Life Day?

            Harry shook his head. He couldn’t believe Malfoy was really that stupid. He had better things to worry about than Harry’s dating life. He was only trying to make conversation, and perhaps understand something that had puzzled him.

            It’s a long time since you’ve assigned motives that neutral to anyone.

            Harry snorted. He didn’t have to listen to the cluttered chaos of his own mind, either, if he didn’t want to. The only person in the room he owed a response to, as long as Ron was asleep, was Malfoy.

            And that was more of a relief than it should be, to know that he wasn’t alone in his own head. He wanted the end of this case with a longing as hot and hard as revenge itself, but perhaps part of him would mourn it, to find Malfoy’s departure coming with that end.

            No need to think about that, yet, when we’re still in the middle of it and a long way from the end, he thought, and pushed the disturbing part of his mind into a secure case that he locked after it. “While I’m using spells like the Retrovoyance curse on myself,” he answered, still mild, since it seemed to be the best way to make Malfoy actually respond, “then it’s hardly a good idea for me to find someone else. What would happen if I lashed out and destroyed them in a fit of violence?”

            Malfoy’s eyes narrowed. Harry smiled back. He could almost see the man running the argument through his head, and coming up with the fact that he had told Harry himself his use of Dark Arts could make him dangerous to others. He could hardly go back on that now and insist it wouldn’t matter.

            But he tried to argue, because he was Malfoy, and that was one of the things he lived to do. “When you’re past that moment. When the contamination of the curse begins to fade and the ghost in your head is satisfied.”

            Harry shrugged. “Maybe. It depends on a lot of things. What other cases are coming up next. Whether Ron and Hermione have that baby they’re talking about. He might need to miss some work for that, and he’d need me to cover for him. And the Ministry sometimes wants me to do several festivals or openings or appearances in a month. That doesn’t leave much time for going on dates.”

            “It could if you would make time,” Malfoy said, and leaned forwards, as if to loom over Harry. It was a long time since Harry had allowed anyone else to loom over him, so he ended up watching in polite interest. Malfoy rolled his eyes and hissed, and dug in with renewed vigor. “You’ve fought for your freedom in subtle ways, Potter, and still left the Ministry convinced that you’re its most faithful servant. You could fight for the freedom to go on dates if you wanted to.”

            “If I wanted to,” Harry echoed.

            Malfoy paused, and then turned back to his book. Harry watched his back for a moment, and then nodded. He reckoned the conversation had put Malfoy off or annoyed him for some reason. Well, he would leave him alone to read and research, and Harry would close his eyes and go over the inscriptions on the ring and the footprints on the riverbank and the site of the houses and what he had heard Schroeder and Campion say again, in case there was a clue lurking there that he had missed.

            Or perhaps he would join Ron in slumber. Sometimes that was the best thing to do, when one’s mind was racing in useless directions. At least he knew he could do something productive for his own mind if he was asleep, if not for anyone else.

*

            This is not the Potter I knew in school. I would have sworn that one wanted a family before anything else, except perhaps to remain friends with the Weasel and the Mudblood.

            Draco shook his head and bent over the book. He had spent too much time tonight thinking over Potter’s love life already. He had to concentrate on finding the exact patterns that covered the ring. He had seen similar ones in the books he had that reproduced Galen’s research, but he wanted the identical ones. He couldn’t know what their purpose was if they weren’t exactly identical.

            He did manage to eliminate a few patterns that looked much the same but had a different number of prongs or thorns, or reached in different directions, but then Potter distracted him again.

            It was nothing physical he was doing this time—when Draco glanced at him, he was leaning his head on the back of the chair and resting his hands on his knees, his breathing light and easy—but, once again, his mind. Draco could feel the small ripples of the stream running back on each other, colliding and lashing into one another, producing longer thoughts that shared words but blended into new ones along the way.

            The ring? The ring is the key. Why leave it there? Leave it there and trap someone. Why there? What was there, besides Muggle—Muggles? But no, Schroeder despises—Moonstone despises—what is it—

            Draco rolled his eyes and faced the book again. He reckoned he should be glad that Potter’s thoughts weren’t only one word long anymore; it seemed less likely now that he would march over a cliff at any moment. But at the same time, he couldn’t hear everything, even with the longer form of Potter’s thoughts. He heard only half, the unconscious half, the impulses and the momentary desires. He didn’t know what Potter was thinking, what plans he was turning over or what structures of logic he might put together.

            Well, good. You should be alone in your own head some of the time.

            Draco nodded, and finally managed to chase out the thought of listening to all of Potter’s mind by reminding himself that that would mean listening to constant, careless chatter about the Weasels. And with that, he focused on the book in front of him.

*

            Harry went over the conclusion he had drawn, one time and then another, slowly and carefully looking for places that it might bristle around him and trip him up.

            No. That could be the reason. We don’t have any evidence that it is, yet, but it could be.

            He knew Moonstone and Schroeder both despised Muggles. And they had had Campion on hand to kidnap Muggle children they thought wouldn’t be missed and introduce them to the people who had tortured and killed and tortured—

            Harry paused to wait until the ghost’s call had died down in the back of his mind. He realized that the soft sound of Malfoy turning pages had stopped. He sighed and sent a silent apology, although he had no idea if Malfoy would feel it, and then returned to consideration of the facts as he knew them.

            Moonstone and Schroeder’s plan—assuming they were right about what that plan was in the first place—required contacts in both the Muggle and magical worlds. They would have to have someone to take children like Emily Steele, and people on hand to snatch Muggle children. Harry wondered for a moment why they would use children instead of adults, and then snorted. It made too much sense on every level, from the fact that the children wouldn’t be able to give evidence as clearly as adults to the fact that they couldn’t fight.

            He locked his muscles against the surge of rage and went back to considering the evidence again.

            Schroeder and Moonstone were working with Muggles. They had to be. Perhaps Campion had done the actual taking of children not watched by their parents, but it made sense that someone would occasionally find those children, herd them in the right direction, or cover up for any mistakes Campion made. (Harry couldn’t personally imagine Campion going a single day without making some mistake, but perhaps he was biased by the way he had arrested the green little bastard).

            So there was another possible lead, another way they could start. Perhaps they didn’t dare approach Moonstone or Schroeder or anyone in their employ right now, but they might be able to find the Muggles. And unless the Muggles had magical defenses that Moonstone and Schroeder had given them, there must be some way to trick the truth out of them with magic.

            Harry smiled. He didn’t yet know where to start—

            No, he did. Why take Emily Steele to that cluster of houses unless there was someone there to meet them? The wizards, according to the spell Harry had used that made their footprints appear, had walked through a river and then vanished. No reason to expect to find a wizarding child there. No reason to linger simply to bury a ring that would only be useful in the first place if someone managed to find out what they were doing and track them.

            Someone must live in those Muggle houses who knew something. Or someone had lived there; Emily Steele had been kidnapped several months ago, after all.

            Harry opened his eyes, smiling, and met Malfoy’s gaze. What he saw there made him stand at once, drop the smile, and move over to Malfoy’s side.

            “What is it?” he murmured.

            Malfoy spread the book out, and stabbed a finger at the page. Harry obediently bent down and scanned it.

            He recognized the branching figures as the ones on the ring, or at least ones that looked like them. Then he looked at the caption under the picture.

            Based on divergent and further research, it is now believed that Galen would never have achieved his goal of allowing adult wizards to hold the power he planned to take from others. But with a pattern such as this, he believed, children might hold it…and become, overwhelmed by the sudden existence of a new magical core, little more than mindless tools for the guiding hand of a master.

*

            SP777: Well, then you might like this chapter even more for the H/D aspect!

            ChaosLady; Glad you’re enjoying it.

            AlterEquis: Their first moments of attraction are starting, I think, but they’re not going to be very conventional.

            unneeded: And more here
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