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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.

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Chapter Seventeen—Enemies Within and Without

            “We shouldn’t be here.”

            Draco nodded in response to Harry’s words, but didn’t stop his digging through the official files in Ernhardt’s desk. “This is the best chance we’ll have, and even though I don’t doubt your Memory Charm skills, someone else might still find out that a spell mucked with Okazes’s mind,” he said, not looking up. “They won’t know what he told us, but they’ll increase their locking charms.”

            Harry stepped forwards and put a hand on Draco’s left forearm. He deliberately let his hand rest where he knew the Dark Mark would be. It wasn’t something he’d done before, although he hadn’t flinched from the Mark when he and Draco were in bed together.

            It worked. Draco turned to him and stared him in the eye.

            “Why are you so upset about this?” Harry asked him quietly, and then shook his head when Draco opened his mouth. “I don’t mean finding out that we have enemies. I’m upset about that, too. But why are you taking risks like this? Ernhardt isn’t a loving, caring boss. He barely speaks to us. Why are you taking his betrayal so personally?”



            Draco’s hands were on his chest now, pushing more than a little ungently, shoving Harry back until he swayed on his feet. “Because I dedicated my bloody life to this Ministry, and this is the way they value us,” he hissed.

            Harry relaxed a little, nodding. “I can see that. You made the decision to give up your family for them, and they didn’t take you seriously.” He ran both his hands up and down Draco’s left arm now, trying to soothe the bunched muscles. “But if you’re irritated mostly for me, you don’t need to be. I’m used to what they think of me, how they try to use me.”

            Draco leaned forwards, to the point that Harry thought Draco was going to nuzzle his neck or something. Instead, Draco whispered into his ear, “I’m not. And I don’t think that you should ever have grown used to it, either.” He move Harry’s shirt aside, viciously kissed Harry’s shoulder, and then bit him hard enough to make Harry reel and almost have to sit down.

            “Fucker,” Harry said, when he could talk again. “Fine, we’ll talk about this later. And we are not doing this in the middle of the Ministry offices,” he added, when he felt Draco’s hand slipping lower, aiming for his groin. “You got your way, now we’re going to have mine. You said that you had a plan to find out from Okazes why they wanted to hunt us, and we did,” he clarified, when Draco just stared at him. “And I said that I had a way to solve our other problems. So come on.”

            “That’s what I’m trying to do.” Draco’s hand hovered above the erection that had sprung out of nowhere, at least for Harry. Harry shook his head, wondering why that had happened.

            But he knew the answer. He could always get it up for Draco. A little humiliating, perhaps, but perfectly true. And he would have to be the one to make the decision if he didn’t want to come in the middle of Ernhardt’s office, because Draco didn’t seem capable of making it right now.

            Draco’s hand tightened, and Harry reached out, hooked an arm around his neck, and kissed him. “Not here, I said,” he whispered.

            “But it would be so much fun,” Draco whispered back, his hips rolling at a steady, continuous pace now, almost enough to make Harry shudder and forget about what the fuck they were doing here and what the fuck they needed to do next. Almost, but not enough, in the end. “Think about coming on Ernhardt’s reports, and his files, and leaving it there for the next time he touches it.”

            Harry choked, and was glad that he had Draco holding him up at the moment. Draco grinned at him and slid his hands under Harry’s arse, hoisting him up as though to sit him on the desk.

            “No,” Harry said, and pulled away, just shaking his head all the harder when he saw the flat look on Draco’s face. “No. I did your plan. You’re going to do mine. And we’re going back home.”

            “I don’t want to do this on your bed in that disgusting Muggle flat, either,” Draco snapped.

            Harry reached for his fingers. It was hard to think. “If you put up the strongest wards you can manage first, then I’ll let you Transfigure the bed in the flat,” he gasped. His wrists stung, his fingers tingled with the way that Draco was touching him, and the way that Draco stared at him only made him harder. “To whatever you want. You can even put on those silly curtains and canopies you like if you please.”

            Draco blinked at him, and then his lips pulled back from his teeth in a gesture that Harry suspected he would regret. “Done.”

            The air around them trembled with the speed that Draco used to escort him out of the Ministry, and burned from his hand low on Harry’s back. Harry shook his head several times as he thought about that. He didn’t know how they had got here so fast from a simple statement of fact he’d made about the way the Ministry tended to value him.

            Because that’s not the way that Draco tends to value you.

            Maybe that was all it was, at bottom. Harry blinked at nothing, and then shrugged. Well. If that was the case, then at least he would get a bloody good fucking out of it.

*

            Draco concentrated on setting up the wards. He didn’t want anything that would let loose a whisper of magic outside them, so if Aurors or the Shadowborn were scouting for them in the narrow Muggle street beyond the flat, they would still walk past convinced this area was pure Muggle.

            Draco was thinking about protecting their lives, but also about protecting his private time with Harry. There was no way that he would let that go, no way he would pass this chance up.

            He dropped his robes to the floor, his hands already flying over them, and turned around. Harry was sitting in the middle of the bed in the dingy room, his smile faint as he watched Draco. The smile dissolved, and there was a darkness in the green eyes instead that Draco had only recently come to recognize.

            Well, he had only recently started seeing it, too. Draco was glad it had happened, even though he mourned, a little, all the chances he might have missed before that, all the times Harry might have been aroused and he wouldn’t have known the emotion for what it was.

            “You don’t need to rush,” Harry said quietly, as Draco flicked his wand at him and Transfigured the bed into one of those green-sheeted monsters that had stood in his rooms in Slytherin all the long, difficult years he was in Hogwarts. It wasn’t much on originality, but it was the first image that came to mind, and Draco had to admit there would be a certain kind of satisfaction if he fucked Harry in one. “We have time.”

            “We have the meeting with Granger soon,” Draco said, but then he shook his head and was quiet. That wasn’t the reason he felt as though claws were tearing up his insides when he looked at Harry, or the reason his blood was rushing around his veins, or the reason he wanted to pound Harry into the bed.

            Maybe sensing that, Harry shut up, and then reached up and welcomed Draco instead as he bent over him and gave him another savage kiss like the ones they had traded in the Auror offices.

            Draco rolled Harry beneath him, panting. He used his hands to take Harry’s clothes off one by one, and slapped Harry’s away when he tried to help. Harry snorted at him and rolled his eyes, but he let Draco do it. He would almost always let Draco do something like this, even if he didn’t understand why it was important.

            Why he’s important.

            That was what had set it off, Draco thought as he summoned the lube and nudged Harry’s legs apart before Harry had decided how far he wanted to spread them. Hearing Harry speak so casually of the Ministry’s hatred of him, as though they had the right to hate him, as though Okazes’s stupid argument about Harry consuming more resources than other Aurors was a valid one.

            It wasn’t. Draco knew that, and tried to convey it with every dig of his fingers into Harry’s hips or Harry’s arse, every sharp brush of his lips against Harry’s neck, every tap and curl inside him. It would never be, and if the Ministry felt that way, then they should have sacked Harry the moment they understood what he was costing them.

            But they hadn’t. They had kept him, and even decided that Draco was nothing more than an instrument to destroy him.

            “You’re special,” Draco told Harry as he slid into him and Harry sucked in his breath, staring up at him as Draco caught Harry’s legs and hauled them over his shoulders with more savagery than he’d ever shown before. Harry blinked and murmured something, and Draco nodded. “And they wanted to take advantage of that without paying the cost.”

            That was it, that was what hit Draco in the pit of the stomach and stirred him to rage. He had been taught from earliest childhood that if you wanted something rare and pure and special, you paid the price. You didn’t cheat a jeweler who was making a wedding ring for you. You didn’t refuse to pay your dueling instructor for giving you his time to make you a better fighter.

            And you didn’t enjoy all the advantages of having the Boy-Who-Lived as an Auror and then fuss about the careful handling he needed.

            He moved as carefully as he could when he was longing to tear and smash through the barriers that kept Harry from realizing the truth of that. In some ways, Harry was still part of the Ministry that undervalued his skills and Draco’s, still so used to thinking of himself as less than he was, as less important than he really was, that he didn’t realize how much that insulted Draco’s taste and good sense in choosing him.

            Harry reached up and put a hand on Draco’s face as he thrust frantically into Harry’s body, rocked with him and swayed with him and was there when Draco came with a furious howl and then sagged over Harry, breathing. Harry reached down with their joined hands and brought himself off, eyes closed as though he was trying to remember what their original argument had been about.

            Draco leaned in and kissed Harry’s cheek, and then shook his head when Harry looked at him and raised his eyebrows. “You can’t—do that again,” he said, his voice ragged. “I don’t want you speaking as though you agree with the Ministry’s evaluation of you.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “This is going to be like the thing with the death wish again, isn’t it? I can try to convince you that I don’t think of myself the way the Ministry does, and you won’t believe me. Just like you wouldn’t believe me when I said that I didn’t have a death wish.”

            “I didn’t believe you because of what else you said,” Draco said. “And what I saw you do.” He tightened his hands on Harry’s shoulders and waited for his answer. They only had perhaps an hour until their appointed meeting with Granger, a few more than that until the storm inspired by Skeeter’s article would break over the wizarding world, but he would take as long as he needed to make Harry understand him.

            “That argument’s done,” Harry said, with a little slashing motion of his head that made Draco love him and want to strangle him in the same moment. “We decided what we were going to do as a result of that belief, and I’m not willing to have it again.” He paused, and his eyes deepened, in a way that had nothing to do with color. “So. All right. I’ll accept what you say for now and not fight it.”

            Draco bowed his head and closed his eyes, letting his fingers on Harry’s shoulders relax. “Thank you.”

            Harry kissed him, and they lay there for perhaps twenty minutes with their arms around each other before Harry poked Draco in the ribs with an elbow and reminded him that they needed to get moving to attend on Granger. Draco let him do it and didn’t snap at him for it. Harry had agreed.

            Sometimes, he had learned, Harry’s love for him would let him do what Draco asked of him without protesting too much about it.

*

            “Are the wards up?”

            Harry didn’t turn around as he cast the spell that would check the security of the wards one more time, because the expression on his face would probably give her the wrong idea. She had every reason to be nervous, he thought. She had risked a lot to find this information, and then had chosen not to share it before now even though she must have known that both he and Ron would have liked to know it.

            And Draco, too.

            As he turned around from his fifth check of the wards wrapped tight around this little room in the back of a pub, Harry wondered for a moment if Draco becoming his partner had been part of the reason Hermione had put this off. Ron had left the Aurors two years ago. She knew that Harry was already an outcast in the Ministry by then. Why not just tell him when Ron was no longer in danger and let him use the information about the Shadowborn as he willed?

            But seeing the way she sat with her head bowed and her hands folded in front of her on the table as though drawing up the strength through the wood, Harry dismissed the thought. It had been true fear that drove her. Nothing else would make her look as ill as she did.

            He looked to the side and caught Draco’s eye. Draco nodded, and kept whatever ruder words he might have said imprisoned in his mouth, instead reaching out and setting a mug of butterbeer down in front of Hermione.

            Hermione blinked and looked up at him, then at the steaming mug.

            “We thought it might warm you up,” Draco said without inflection, and without the sexual innuendo Harry had been half-afraid he would put in there. He took the chair at an angle from Hermione across the round table, leaving Harry to take the one directly across. He reached out and stroked Harry’s hand, then rested both his hands on the tabletop as if he needed Hermione to see them. “What do you have to tell us?”

            Harry moved his right leg and let it rest against Draco’s. He didn’t trust the way Draco was looking, like a hound ready for the kill.

            Hermione took one sip of the butterbeer, and then said, “I found it when I was reading about discrepancies in some of the laws concerning house-elves.” Harry tensed in anticipation of her being about to launch into a lecture, and found himself staggering all the more when Hermione simply continued. “There was clerical work done to cover it up, but the clerks can’t do their jobs when you won’t tell them about the secrets that they’re supposed to be hiding.

            “They were there. Around the edges, if you looked. Coincidental deaths, and Aurors punished for errors on cases after the Wizengamot or the Head Auror had declared them innocent or given a lesser punishment. And someone had written most of the changes into the files with grey ink.” She swallowed. “Someone who wanted to leave a pattern, or maybe just keep a record for their own purposes. I don’t know.”

            Harry reached across the table and caught her hands between us, chafing them the way he would if it was cold out, while still keeping his leg resting against Draco’s so Draco wouldn’t get jealous. “Tell us at your own pace, Hermione.”

            “I think it was a record for their own purposes,” Hermione said, her voice speeding up, “because no one could remember everything I found. And it was scattered among so many random files, too. They had to have a way to identify it. They probably thought no one would want to get into the files on house-elves.”

            “Of course not,” Draco said, flat as a mirror. “They’re boring.”

            Hermione glared at him, and Harry opened his mouth. Then he saw the eyebrow Draco had raised, and fell silent in embarrassment. Yes, well, he should have thought himself that Hermione would fare better if she had someone to be angry at.

            “You think that because you had them as slaves,” Hermione said hotly. “They’re remarkable creatures—”

            Draco simply looked at her, and seemed to tell her both what he’d done and why they needed her to get back on the path. Harry wished Draco would teach him the trick of that. Hermione swallowed, stopped, cleared her throat, and took another sip of the butterbeer before going on.

            “Once I knew what to look for, it was easy to find. A corps of wizards hired to hunt down Aurors and Hit Wizards and duelists who went rogue. A way to keep a leash on them when they were too strong, most of the time, for anyone to really do that. But the Ministry uses them—or they use themselves—whenever they want to. There’s no provision for anything like a review.” Her lips cramped. “And they’re empowered to kill.”

            Harry nodded to her, and tried to ignore the tension that made Draco’s leg against his feel like a pillar. “Do you know if they have their own superiors that tell them to kill? Or do they always obey the Ministry hierarchy?”

            Draco was staring at him. Harry ignored that. It only made sense, with what they had learned from Okazes, and sometimes he could come up with good questions, too.

            Hermione’s hand wavered between them before it dropped to the table. “Sometimes, I think they have superiors, and sometimes they seem to be blended more into the internal hierarchy of the Ministry. The notes on them were inconsistent. But most of the time, someone has to order them to attack. They don’t just decide on their own that Aurors aren’t solving cases the right way.”

            Harry nodded. He could feel the pulse in his neck speeding up as Draco stared at him, but really, he didn’t know why. He had made a logical connection. If Head Auror Ernhardt had set Draco up to fail, then he might have set the Shadowborn on their trail as well. It didn’t feel like a wild leap or a coincidence to Harry.

            And after decades of surviving by them, he had learned to trust his instincts. Lionel had made him stop doing that, but Draco had been the one to show him that Harry couldn’t have predicted the way Lionel would react to being told that Harry was in love with him, or Lionel’s death. This time, he could trust what he thought.

            “Then I think we know who our enemies are,” he said quietly. “Thank you, Hermione.” He hesitated, and then gave in. “What made you so frightened of them? Even a secret group hiding within the Ministry itself wouldn’t normally scare you that much. Hell, you can describe the Unspeakables as like that, sometimes. How much do we know about their experiments? But you aren’t afraid of them in the same way.”

            Hermione grimaced and closed her eyes. “I was reading one of the files that had notes in grey, and the letters rearranged themselves,” she whispered. “They became words that—that addressed me by name, and let me know they were watching. I never heard of spells that could do that. I’ve heard of ones that would be triggered when someone else opened the folder, but not at a random time in the middle of the file. And I’m sure that no one else was in the library with me.”

            Harry nodded. It made sense to him—if not for Draco, given the way his eyes were narrowed—that Hermione would fear someone who had knowledge she didn’t. And that made sense out of her pronouncement that the Shadowborn could hear and track people who spoke their name, which otherwise Harry didn’t know how she’d found out.

            “Thank you,” he said, when they’d waited a few more minutes and Hermione sat there in silence, her burning eyes fixed on them. “Thank you for telling us. We’re going to go up against them, but we’ll be careful.”

            “It’s like fighting Unspeakables, that’s the problem,” Hermione said, so softly that Harry almost thought she was talking to herself. “How can we know all that they know? How can we know what kinds of trick they might come up with next? It’s not safe to struggle against them because they could do anything.”

            “Thank you for giving us your expert opinion, as someone who knows a lot about revolution,” Draco said, his voice almost gentle. At least, he didn’t flinch when Harry gave him a sharp look, the way that he really should have if he didn’t mean it. “But we have no choice. They’ve already tried to kill us once.”

            “You can’t do this without allies on the inside.” Hermione looked at them, her fingers curling up into her palms. “I’m willing to be that. If you’ll let me.” She glared at Draco in a way that made it clear where she expected the opposition to come from.

            “Thank you,” Draco said.

            Harry heard the refusal that was coming and let his hand clamp down, casually—or not-so-casually—on Draco’s arm. Draco winced and leaned back in his chair. Harry nodded encouragingly to him, and then faced Hermione.

            “Thank you,” he said. “Yes, we’ll be glad to accept your help.”

            Draco had an expression on his face that Harry might have called sulking if he wanted to get his face punched in. Hermione relaxed in a rush and picked up her butterbeer. “Thank you. Now, Harry, we should work out a code so that we can refer to them and not get caught out in owls. If you’ll be on the run for a while…”

            “Too late.”

            Draco’s voice was gentle. Harry turned his head, tense. The wards were so thick that he couldn’t be sure what kind of enemies might have arrived, but when he concentrated, he could make out voices conversing just outside the room. The next second, the door resounded with a knock.

            Draco and Harry reached for their wands with one accord, a moment before the door flew open and the Shadowborn glided in.

*

            unneeded: Draco exactly agrees with you. No point in having an Auror like Harry if you’re not willing to pay the price.

            And the man who died before was another Auror in the Socrates Corps, Eric Latham, rather than the former Head Auror.

            SP777: Well, you’ll bet to see that next chapter.

            And I would say that my stories maintain an R rating for violence no matter what. In general, my more explicit sex scenes are toned down, but not my violent scenes.

            Seiren: Thank you! Don’t worry, Okazes will (probably) get what’s coming to him.
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The Library of Hades