Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

A Reign of Silence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3889 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 16
- 17
- 18
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seventeen--Conquering

            It seemed like an hour, and might have been, before Macgeorge's eyes closed and then opened without a trace of blue. For a moment, her hands still rose and clawed at the air, but they settled back at her side so quickly that Harry might have missed that if he'd blinked.

            She turned around, kneeling, inside the circle, and stared at them. She bowed her head when her eyes fell on Rudie. Harry relaxed a little. Macgeorge might have come back dangerously twisted and inclined to use more violence than before, but not everything good in her could be dead if she recognized her partner.

            "Isla?" Macgeorge licked her lips and touched her throat as though she didn't know where the hoarseness came from. "I don't understand--the last thing I knew, you were telling me that you would kill me if I used necromancy again."

            How much of her memory is really gone? Harry suspected they might never know. Hell, they didn't know if Ernhardt was truly exiled from her soul yet, or if a piece of him might linger, clever enough to disguise its presence for the time being.

            "I would have killed you," Rudie said, opening her eyes and staring at Macgeorge. "Maybe I should have. It would have spared you from what came after this." But her lips were trembling, and she turned her face away and shut her eyes again, in a way that made Harry feel he shouldn't be looking. He cleared his throat.

            That snapped Macgeorge's attention to him. "What are you doing here?" she demanded, before she looked at the rest of Socrates Corps and frowned. "What are you--what are the rest of you doing here?"

            "You were possessed by Ernhardt." Jenkins was the one who spoke, cool and precise, her wand down at her side but in the kind of position where Harry knew it could come up quickly if Macgeorge made a wrong move. Harry was more than willing to let her handle this. He suspected she would know what information to give, which could be dangerous and which wasn't, if Ernhardt still lurked somewhere in the back of Macgeorge's mind. "He used you and your necromancy to fight us. If he had had the time to face us head-on, he might have been more dangerous. As it was, we seem to have defeated him."

            "Seem," Macgeorge whispered. She looked around the inside of the cavern. "This is some place he brought me?"

            "Yes," Rudie said, and surged forwards an anxious step, only stopping at the boundary of the ritual circle. "He's had some sanctuaries that we destroyed, and this was his last one. Do you think you subdued him?"

            Macgeorge touched her throat and her forehead as though feeling for soreness or a fever would tell her. Harry caught the way Draco's eyes were narrowed from the corner of his eye, and half-nodded. He would distrust the way Macgeorge acted, too. Being under the control of someone as volatile as Ernhardt for weeks had to change a person.

            And they had never known of someone who was fully controlled and then recovered like this, either. They had fought him off themselves, and he had possessed a few people, like Ginny, temporarily, leaving of his own free will. The other victims had all been his to do what he liked with.

            "I think I did," Macgeorge whispered. "But there is a test I can perform that should make me sure. Will you let me perform it?"

            Harry blinked, wondering why she was asking their permission when the old Macgeorge wouldn't have, and then recalled that she was still inside Jenkins's circle. That prevented her from working any magic.

            "Here," Rudie whispered, holding out a slender shaft of beech wood. "Here's your wand."

            "A second," Draco said, more coldly than Harry had ever heard from him. "I'm sure this is lovely, but I don't think I want to let her out of the circle yet. We don't have any proof that she's subdued Ernhardt."

            "You don't have any proof that she hasn't, either." Rudie turned around and glared at him. "Are you going to keep her prisoner forever on the off chance that she might be dangerous to us?"

            "It's hardly forever right now," Draco said, and took a step forwards. Harry moved at his side. As sympathetic as he was to Rudie, he didn't think it was a good idea to let Macgeorge out without some kind of further test, either. "I'm sure Nicolette understands. Don't you?" He nodded familiarly to Macgeorge, who gave him a hard, complicated smile in return.

            "Of course," she said, and sat waiting for them. Harry glanced at Draco. He didn't have any idea of what kind of test someone could implement to "prove" that a powerfully possessing person was gone, and he didn't think Draco did, either.

            But Draco knelt down outside the ritual circle and said, "I'm a good Legilimens, when someone lets me in. Will you?"

            Macgeorge started and looked as if she would like to crawl into the crack in the cave wall where she--where Ernhardt--had hidden and watched them. Then she shook her head. "No one else has the right to read my thoughts."

            "They do when you might become a danger to them because you didn't let someone else read your thoughts," Draco said, and shrugged peacefully, and moved back with a glance around the circle of Socrates Aurors. "Does anyone else have an idea how we could find out? Because that was my only one."

            Rudie stepped forwards. "She's been tormented more than any of us can imagine in the last month," she insisted in a low voice. "Why should we torture her further by implying that we don't trust her?"

            "That's not torment," Jenkins said. "That's the truth."

            Harry winced a little, and hoped he had concealed it when Rudie turned wide eyes to him. He agreed with Jenkins and Draco, but it seemed cruel to say it aloud.

            "But you have to understand that we can't be sure of anything until we let her out of the circle," Rudie went on, in the kind of calm, sane voice Harry remembered using himself after Lionel had died and he was trying to make other people understand what to do about the body and how important it was not to bury it so that Lionel wouldn't be stuck under the earth when he woke up. "And then it would be too late if she did mean us some harm. So we have to take it on faith, and trust."

            "If she let me in, then I could see for myself," Draco said.

            "Why should she?" Rudie snapped. "What have you ever done but pull her into your cases, and distrust her?"

            "Part of that was my fault, Isla," Macgeorge interrupted. She had been sitting back with her arms folded, watching them argue as if she was watching parts in a play, but she leaned forwards now with an intent little frown on her face that Harry had never seen before. "I knew exactly what might happen to me if I used too much necromancy, since I'd studied it. I wanted to help in their case anyway."

            "But they didn't say thank you," Rudie said, turning on her with a savagery that made Harry's hands silently clench. "They could at least have given you more trust now, since it's the only gratitude you'll get."

            "I understand their attitude," Macgeorge said, and smiled, although Harry thought it had to be hard with her teeth grinding against each other like that. "Not that I like it, but I understand it. And I'll wait until they come up with some test that satisfies them."

            "We have," Draco said, examining his nails. "And you rejected it."

            "Would you let someone else look into your mind without Legilimency, if there was a way to achieve it?" Warren asked in a quiet voice before Macgeorge could respond. Harry had almost forgotten she was there. She moved forwards a step or so now, and her eyes were fixed intently on Macgeorge's face.

            "There is no way to get inside someone's mind without Legilimency," Macgeorge said, staring at her. "Unless you want to possess me the way he did, which--" She paused as if reconsidering what she was about to say, then shrugged and said it. "I'd kill myself first, before I let that happen again."

            Rudie cried out, but neither Macgeorge nor Warren paid attention to her. Harry wondered what to call the way they looked at each other. It wasn't angry, exactly. They just watched each other like professional duelists.

            Finally, Warren said, "Are you at least willing to let me describe the way that I can get into someone's mind without Legilimency?"

            Macgeorge didn't nod so much as bow her chin down to her knees. She sat there with her head and arms supported on them, shaking a little. Harry wondered if she was shaking because she was angry, or upset, or trying to reclaim her limbs and the feeling of living in her body after Ernhardt was gone from it.

            If he is really gone.

            "Fine," Warren said. "This is a spell that does reach into your mind, but it pulls the thoughts and dreams and desires outside of it and makes them into pictures that other people can see, instead of letting the caster read your mind directly. It was more common before they invented Veritaserum. And, of course, it's still used with people who can't talk and children so young that asking them questions under Veritaserum wouldn't produce sensible answers. The images will need some interpretation, but you'll be fully conscious."

            Macgeorge narrowed her eyes. "The images will be the response to your questions?" When Warren nodded, she said, "Mind the questions you ask."

            Warren only nodded again, and then stood there as though waiting for something. Jenkins flicked an eloquent glance at her, and removed the ritual circle.

            Warren acted blurringly fast, before Rudie could toss Macgeorge her wand or Macgeorge could use necromancy. Harry didn't hear the incantation, but then again, it might have been nonverbal. Macgeorge's eyes gleamed green for a second, light spreading inwards from around the socket, and her head rocked back.

            When she brought it down again, she glared at Warren and slowly rose to her feet. "You didn't say it would hurt so much," she muttered.

            "You didn't ask that," Warren said, and then, "Do you think you have any trace of Ernhardt still in your head?"

            Macgeorge let loose with a long, low, hissing sound, like a kettle. Harry wondered what she intended to say, or if she simply resented being asked the question, necessary though it was. Then he realized the hiss was coming from her eyes, and the mist pouring away from them to form into images in the middle of the room, between them.

            Harry winced a little. There might be reasons other than the dominance of Veritaserum why people had stopped using this spell.

            Draco's hand took his elbow and held on hard. Harry nodded without looking away from the images. He didn't want Draco to lose time thinking he had to reassure Harry.

            The image that formed was a familiar one, of the bone-bats that had attacked them when they first arrived in this sanctuary. The bats jerked and fell apart in mid-flight as Harry watched them, and then a shadow he hadn't been aware underlay the picture withdrew. They were looking at an ordinary cave. Harry knew he would have a hard time telling anyone what he found unfamiliar and disquieting about it.

            The second image that followed it was the skull-house Ernhardt had fled to in the Forbidden Forest. The house changed as Harry watched, though, the size of the eyesockets altering and new pink things protruding from the sides and the mouth, as though Macgeorge found the picture aesthetically offensive and planned to change the shape.

            And a third image, of the bones in the clearing in the Forbidden Forest rising and plunging down towards them like arrows. Harry saw himself perform the spell that turned them aside. He saw Warren take a small step forwards as if it mattered that this image was exactly like the reality instead of changed, but he had no idea what was important in that, or if anything was. He didn't know how to read this spell.

            Macgeorge continued to sit with her hands tightly closed. Her eyes were open, but Harry half-thought that was only because they had to be for the spell to work. She certainly didn't seem as though she was paying attention to the dancing pictures in front of her.

            Finally, an image appeared that Harry didn't recognize. It looked like his old cupboard, but it was made of stone instead of wood. Macgeorge leaned against the door, pounding on it and screaming at whoever stood on the other side.

            Harry relaxed a little as the door in the image swung open. Maybe that was a sign that Macgeorge was no longer imprisoned in her own mind and could take control of it back. Maybe it meant that she had finally broken free because Ernhardt was gone.

            "I cannot tell," Warren said, after a long and weighted silence. She nodded to Jenkins, who moved to close the circle around Macgeorge again before anything else could happen.

            "How can I reassure you, then?" Macgeorge's voice was cold and sullen, the ashes of a long-dead fire. She crouched in the middle of the circle and bowed her head, seeming oblivious to Rudie's sound of distress. "You take away the best chance that I have, you insist that I'm not telling the truth and this isn't real, and then you shut me up again like a criminal."

            "The best chance you have is to let Malfoy use Legilimency on you," Warren said.

            "I've had my mind invaded once." Macgeorge's eyes couldn't have looked fiercer were they blue. "It won't happen again."

            "And you really think that the Ministry will accept you back at your job without some kind of interrogation?" Harry asked, because that seemed to him an obvious fact that no one else was thinking about. "The last they knew, you were the home of the twisted who not only tricked them for years by posing as the Head Auror but embarrassed them with the very public manner in which you left. And you know the Ministry forgives anything more readily than embarrassment. They'll want to read your mind or give you Veritaserum or something before they let you have your job back."

            "That's ridiculous," Macgeorge said, staring at Harry with the same sullenness she had shown Warren. Harry decided it didn't matter who had cast which spell on her at the moment, she would still show the same demeanor, which he had a hard time blaming her for. "I'm the innocent victim here."

            "I happen to agree with that, but the chances are good that they won't," Harry pointed out.

            Macgeorge's face folded into hard lines. "Maybe I would rather have strangers interrogate me than you lot."

            "Why?" Draco asked. He spoke in a completely calm and detached voice, and, Harry saw when he looked sideways at him, leaned against the wall with his arms folded, studying Macgeorge as if she was some new and fascinating specimen of stupidity. "You know what the Ministry hierarchy is like. You know how stubborn and set in their ways they are. You know what can happen to someone who displeases them. And you still would rather allow them in your head than me, an ally?"

            "You weren't much of an ally to me in your last case."

            "You weren't," Rudie said, and faced Draco with a quivering face that made Harry want to tell her to lie down somewhere, instead of taking a part in her partner's conflict with the rest of them. But that was useless, given the way she had stepped into this case from the beginning. She wouldn't retreat during the last moments. "You would have watched out for her safety and stopped her from using necromancy if you really cared about her."

            "What happened to the part where she was an adult and made the choice to exploit her flaw?" Draco still didn't move. Harry wondered if he was the only one who realized the message of the tightening muscles in Draco's legs and his clenched shoulders. Draco could push off in any direction, charge the circle or curse Rudie or escape to the side before Warren and Jenkins could restrain him. "A few minutes ago she was insisting on her complete freedom and independence from Harry and me, and now she's refusing to let anyone look into her mind."

            "It's her mind," said Rudie. "Would you want someone to look into it if you'd spent the last few weeks under the possession of someone else?"

            "I wouldn't," Harry said, because he was tired of the way this was going around and around, and Macgeorge had seemed to listen to him, enough to respond, the last time he spoke. "But I would do if it was the only way to get my job back and get my co-workers to trust me again." He stared pointedly at Macgeorge.

            "Some of those co-workers won't let you out of the circle again until you make the decision to have your mind examined," Jenkins added pleasantly. "You could choose to sit there until the stone crumbles around you, of course. But I can go elsewhere and entertain myself. You have to stay inside the circle."

            Macgeorge and Rudie moved at the same moment. Macgeorge stood up and charged the line of the circle. Rudie spun towards Jenkins with both her own wand and the one she had held out to Macgeorge leveled.

            Jenkins concentrated all her attention on Rudie, taking her wrists in one hand and slamming them together so that Rudie cried out and lost her grip on the wands. In another second, Jenkins had swung her further so that Rudie's arms were bound up behind her back and she struggled madly but without effect to kick Jenkins in the shin. Warren, meanwhile, gathered Rudie's wands without a blink.

            Macgeorge had hit the side of the circle, had her foot bounced back by a shimmering curtain of light, and reeled into the center of the ring again. Now she sat rubbing her foot and wincing when she met Warren's gaze.

            "My partner's magic is stronger than yours," Warren said simply. "Especially if you are free of Ernhardt now and don't have his personality to back yours up. It's much simpler to submit to the sure test."

            "You don't even know if Malfoy is a good enough Legilimens to clear me," Macgeorge said, bowing her head so that her long, dirty brown hair trailed the floor.

            "I'm going to trust him to tell us if he feels like he isn't," Warren said, and cocked an eyebrow at Draco. Meanwhile, Jenkins cast a Stunner on Rudie. She shrugged when Harry looked at her.

            "She needed the sleep anyway," Jenkins mouthed.

            Harry nodded. Either Rudie needed the sleep or she was better off out of the way, and he honestly wasn't sure which. He faced the circle again as Draco said, "I will let you know if I don't feel I can be sure."

            "That's all I ask," Warren said. "Do you agree, Nicolette?"

            The use of Macgeorge's first name was a calculated blow, and Harry could see from the way her shoulders quivered that it had struck her. She leaned back on her hands and heels and stared at Warren with a kind of helpless fury.

            "I don't have a choice, do I?" she snapped.

            "No." Warren's voice was gentle for all it was so implacable. Harry was glad that she was the one handling things right now instead of him or Draco. He would have been too sympathetic and made Macgeorge feel she did have a choice. Draco would have been too snappish.

            "Then, fine," Macgeorge said, and Draco stepped forwards and through the circle as Jenkins cast to relax it for him, renewing it behind him. Draco immediately cast a Body-Bind on Macgeorge. Harry relaxed and let go of his wand.

            Then Draco leaned forwards and said softly, "Legilimens," and they all entered into the eternal process of waiting again.

*

            Draco held his breath. He was walking through something so thick and hot and fetid that it felt as if the stink was a separate entity that had invaded his nose, and he opened his eyes unsurprised to see that it was a swamp. Why the center of Macgeorge's mind should be a swamp was her business, he felt, and he didn't intend to question it. But he did grimace as he stepped forwards and the dark water slapped his legs.

            He walked, or waded, further in. There was no path here, nothing he could see except moss-draped trees and small hillocks and humps so thick with shadow that it was hard to tell whether they were more sunken trees, or stones, or simply islands. He didn't know what he was looking for.

            But Legilimency usually guided its practitioners to the right place by instinct, the same way that a person's mind assumed the right shape for them on instinct. Draco would recognize what he was looking for when he saw it.

            As he walked, he breathed, for all that he didn't want to, and nodded a little. The foulness around him was familiar, the same foulness that had tainted it whenever he encountered Macgeorge's necromancy. But he didn't sense the same intense darkness that he had when it came to Ernhardt.

            And he had had Ernhardt in his head, as well as watched him possess other people, even Harry. He would know.

            At last he saw a raised island ahead, and something small and bright red in the midst of all that black and grey-green shadowiness. Draco crouched down to look at it. It was a lacquered box, with an illustration of a long-tailed black bird on the cover, an almost skeletal one.

            Gently, Draco reached out and opened the box. The lid swung back to his touch as eagerly as though something inside it were pushing it open.

            Inside lay a small, barely-fledged, extremely pissed-off bird. It rose to his eye level as Draco watched, a hummingbird with black feathers and bony feet. When it opened its beak, it shrilled at him in a tone that made him wince, and then darted away into the swamp.

            And the stink receded somewhat, and while the air didn't turn clear or the water clean, Draco could breathe now. He stood back up, nodding. There was no trace of Ernhardt. He had freed the last imprisoned bit of Macgeorge, the humor that had made her joke with them sometimes and rendered her more than the implacable human hunting machine she had been during the Bainbridge case.

            He thought they could all relax now.

            He moved back and half-bowed his head, opening his hands to release the hummingbird to its dominion over Macgeorge's mind while he retreated. He opened his eyes and smiled at the look on her face before he glanced up and nodded.

            He released Macgeorge from her Body-Bind at the same moment as Jenkins released the ritual circle. Macgeorge rose stiffly to her feet, glared some more, and shuffled over to pick up her wand from where it had fallen when Jenkins Stunned Rudie.

            And there was no attack.

            Draco relaxed, and turned back to face the admiring smile on Harry's face and the sensation of a job well done, of Ernhardt conquered at last.

*

            delia cerrano: He will, once they return to the Ministry.

            SP777: It's probably okay to trust Rudie as long as you don't mistreat her partner. And, of course, she decides what mistreatment is.
- 16
- 17
- 18
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

A Reign of Silence