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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
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Seventeen—Talking
            “What do we need to talk about?” Harry thought he knew, but he also thought they’d talked it out already. Draco had said that he resented Harry for casting that spell, Harry had apologized and said that it was necessary, and then they had fought together and worked on taking down the Ministry’s enemies together. Didn’t that prove that the spell Harry had had to cast hadn’t damaged their partnership? Harry couldn’t imagine Draco fighting beside anyone he didn’t trust.
            “The resentment I have of you.”
            Harry blinked. All right, that was at least better than Draco assuming they were both equally at fault. “Fine,” he said. “Why do you still resent me so much when it was you who did the stupid thing this time?”
            Draco’s shoulders rose, and his wand with them. He immediately dropped them both, but Harry had seen. Draco felt so strongly about this that he had almost threatened Harry before he remembered who he was talking to.
            “Tell me,” Harry said. “I did stupid things like rushing into danger, and I don’t think you were as angry at me then as you are right now.”
            Draco stared at the chair Hale had sat in, as though that could give the answers. It didn’t, and Harry waited. Draco finally turned back to him and said, “You’ve just been taking command lately. It hasn’t felt like a partnership.”
            “We made the decision to go back to Cuthbert’s Corner together,” Harry reminded him. “And when you needed extra proof of what Hale was saying, we got it together.”
            “There was a time when you would have just told me that you suspected Hale was under a version of the Breathlessness Curse, instead of having to demonstrate it to me.” Draco stood as still as a disenchanted portrait, his eyes fastened on Harry as if that would make his words make more sense. “Instead, you pushed me to the background and made it seem like I was an idiot because you knew what would happen when she tried to confess and I didn’t.”
            “Did she say that to you?” Harry demanded. He knew that pure-blood methods of communication were subtle sometimes—Harry found it tiring to read and analyze every gesture—and Hale and Draco might share some of the same ones, since they had both been raised in pure-blood families. But he hadn’t thought Hale had said anything like that as they stood there talking to her.
            Draco shook his head. “But she sees the weaknesses and the flaws in our partnership. If she can notice it, when she only worked with you for a little while, then we’re in trouble.”
            Harry grunted. “Fine,” he repeated. “But I don’t understand what you want me to do. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you—but I already apologized. Do you want me to say that I shouldn’t have cast the spell to free you from the possession at all? Because I won’t. I want you to be alive and hating me instead of dead from a fever, if it comes down to that.”
            He listened to his own words with a shade of surprise. He hadn’t thought he would say all that as openly as he had. He had tried to be soothing, to respect Draco’s feelings. He had suffered a little himself at watching the spell tear Draco open like that.
            But it was also silly for Draco to demand more than an apology from him. What could Harry give him?
*
            Draco ground his teeth. Harry didn’t understand what causing him pain like that had done to Draco’s trust in him, didn’t understand why it was wrong in the first place.
            Then maybe you should tell him, said a voice in the back of his mind that sounded suspiciously like his mother’s.
            Draco had to nod. He hadn’t told Harry all the reasons why, he supposed. Harry still thought it was all the pain.
            “You treated me like a child afterwards,” he said. “As though casting that spell to read the bones was stupid and childish—”
            “It was.”
            Draco opened his mouth, then shut it. Well, he had wanted honesty, hadn’t he? And Harry was going to give him that.
            “You wanted to know the truth behind Ernhardt,” Harry said. “But you’d already found the parchment. We already knew Thacker’s name. Even with the vision from the bones, you had no way of knowing that it would show us what Thacker looked like. And we think that those were probably Thacker’s bones and he was probably dead, but that turned out not to be the most important thing. What he did for the Ministry was the important thing.”
            “I couldn’t know that at the time.” Draco had no intention of flinching or backing down. He stood there with his arms folded and looked down his nose at Harry instead. He couldn’t believe that Harry had come this far in criticizing Draco. Had he decided that the pain he’d caused Draco didn’t matter, compared to this?
            “Exactly,” Harry said, taking a step forwards, and his eyes flashed as though he wanted to rip Draco’s head off. “No one could know that at the time. You said that you were going to cast that spell because you had to know. But you didn’t know it would be worth it. You didn’t have any idea what it would tell you. You took the risk anyway, because you wanted to know so badly. You treated that possible knowledge as worth more than my life, yours, my peace of mind, or the possibility that I might distrust you for casting a necromancy spell. You put yourself first, and that might work most of the time, but not when we’re supposed to be partners and you keep insisting that we can’t trust Athright and Hale and the rest of them. We only have each other to depend on? Then act fucking dependable, Draco.”
            Draco stared at Harry with his mouth hanging open. He didn’t think Harry had ever scolded him like this, as though he knew exactly what had been going on in Draco’s head, his motives for acting as he had, but also as though those weren’t worthy motives.
            “I couldn’t know the spell would react like that…” he said, and then trailed off. Harry was glaring at him, his hand on his hip.
            “I didn’t know what the Sectumsempra spell I cast on you in sixth year would do, either,” Harry snapped. “That was no reason to cast it. You would have died if Snape hadn’t been there. Do you want an apology for that? You can have it. I’m sorry. It was stupid of me. But using a spell in a house that we knew had been flooded with Dark Arts and traps, and a spell that we knew was risky because it was necromancy, was even stupider.”
            Draco could feel his cheeks burning. He could see Harry’s point. If they had waited and taken the parchment with Thacker’s name on it as sufficient evidence, then it turned out that Athright’s contacts could have told them plenty. And Hale was going to find out more.
            “You didn’t want me to cast the spell,” he whispered. “I didn’t realize how strong your desire for me not to do that was.”
            Harry snorted, and relaxed a little. “What, the fact that I decided to hurt you when I hate hurting you, because it was the only way to remove the fever, didn’t tell you?”
            Draco shook his head, not so much in denial as because he was overwhelmed. No, it hadn’t occurred to him, to tell Harry (and himself) the truth. He had thought Harry was being overcautious and whining, but because it was Draco. Harry took risks and made plans; he just didn’t want Draco doing it.
            Which, now that Draco thought about it, didn’t make much sense as a motive, unless Harry was so petty that he was trying to get even with Draco for the months, in their early partnership, when Draco had made more of the plans and known better.
            “Maybe I shouldn’t have cast it,” Draco said, as much as he was willing to concede right now.
            Harry held his eyes, and Draco decided that he would either have to concede more or win the argument. “No shit, genius.”
            Draco sighed and rubbed his temples. “I didn’t know the consequences, and I didn’t know that I would resent you as much as I did. I’m sorry for the way I reacted. Is that enough?”
            He waited, then finally realized that he couldn’t see Harry and so he might miss something he had done. He opened his eyes and turned his head, and Harry was smiling at him. It was so light and gentle an expression that Draco’s heart leaped before he gave it permission to, and he found himself smiling back.
            “Apology accepted,” Harry said, extending a hand. Draco gripped it, and then pulled Harry close and kissed him, because while a handshake was nice, they were lovers, after all.
            Harry leaned in as if hoping to drown in the kiss, and for the next few minutes, Draco allowed that to happen, hope beating and shimmering like a gong inside him.
            This is what it means to love someone.
*
            “I didn’t know where you were.”
            Harry winced a little as Jenkins strode up to them, but he couldn’t regret the extra time he and Draco had taken, both to go to Grimmauld Place and to renew their partnership, when Draco’s hand rested low on Harry’s back and Draco stood with his head almost leaning on Harry’s shoulder. “Sorry,” Harry said. “We thought you would have owled us if it was urgent.”
            Jenkins studied them, then snorted. “Maybe you thought right,” she said, and spun around to face the darkness on the cliffs above Cuthbert’s Corner. “Thomasina?”
            Warren, Jenkins’s partner, stepped out of the darkness. She held something large and white to her chest, something that made Harry stare. For a second, he wondered if they had managed to escape from the Ministry with a whole box of files.
            Then Warren set it down, and Harry’s eyes readjusted. It was something much heavier than a box of files, more square, and made of white stone. There was a delicate carving around the top, a long, thin line that traced the edge of the box into a smaller square.
            And here and there were stains that Harry recognized, as if a stone could rust.
            “You found that where?” Draco’s voice was odd. He had straightened up beside Harry, and leaned forwards now as if he wanted to run to the stone and touch it, even as he shook.
            “Inside a corner of the Ministry that no one else is supposed to remember exists, anymore,” Jenkins said, and her smile came and went. “But some people’s memories are better than they should be. Or, at least, they can have good memories when they’re threatened with exposure or bribed with enough Galleons to choke an elephant.”
            Harry wondered for a second how they were going to repay Jenkins and Warren if they’d spent their own money, but decided he would let it go until they brought it up. “What is it?” he asked. “I know that someone’s been bled on that. Is it a place that they collected the blood from infected people?”
            “It’s an altar,” Draco said. He breathed out the words. “I was wondering about that. The Ministry wanted to create twisted. They could have captured people who were already insane from their flaws, but then, they would have had to know what twisted were for a long time. I thought they only came up with the current definition after the Dark Lord was defeated. They didn’t really know what twisted were until recently.”
            “They didn’t,” Jenkins said. Her voice scraped like steel on a whetstone. “They knew what they wanted, though, and they used a ritual to create them.”
            “I didn’t think of a ritual,” Draco said, talking almost to himself. He finally left Harry’s side and stepped up to the altar, running his hand up and down the side. Harry flinched. He wondered what it would feel like, smooth as the marble it resembled or simple stone, and which would be worse. “I should have, given that our enemies were trying to damage Harry with one, but I didn’t.”
            “This altar has been used for a long, long time,” Warren said, her voice startling Harry into nearly jumping. “I can’t tell you all the rituals that it’s seen, but I can tell you how old those stains are.”
            “Tell me, then.” Draco had fallen to one knee beside the altar, and his voice was absent. Harry shook his head and came up to it. The altar wasn’t evil in and of itself, Harry thought, and it couldn’t harm him. He supposed that his jumpiness around it came more from the fact that he’d been the subject of several rituals in his life.
            “At least three hundred years old.” Warren cast a spell nonverbally, with a flick of her wand so simple that Harry had no idea what it was, and two stains on the left of the altar began to glow. “And almost solely Dark magic, at that.”
            Draco cast her a withering glance, maybe to indicate that he wouldn’t expect the altar to be used for anything else, and Harry jumped in before someone could say something they regretted. “Do you think that there’s any way of telling what rituals they were?”
            Warren looked at him. “Maybe. Why?”
            “I was thinking how good it would look to the crowd I’m hoping to gather at the Ministry, if we can raise the vision of a ritual performed on that altar,” Harry said simply. “All visual proof, and hard to deny.”
            “Someone would find a way to deny it, knowing the Ministry,” Jenkins said, but her eyes shone. “Yes, that’s an idea.” She inclined her head to Harry. “And in the meantime, we should move as quickly as we can.”
            “Why?” Harry asked. “Has someone come close to discovering that you’re helping us?”
            Jenkins shook her head a little. “No, but I can’t imagine that they won’t check up on the altar soon, either to make sure that it’s safe or to use it in a ritual to locate you. If they were desperate enough to use Dark magic in the past, they could use it again.”
            “And when they find it’s gone,” Warren said, “they’re likely to suspect you, simply because you’re their go-to villains now. I stripped the altar of all the locator charms I could find, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be something else there.”
            Harry heard Draco mutter something about Gryffindors, even though they hadn’t the least idea what House Warren had been in, and then he sat back. “I want to try something with the altar,” he said. “Something that doesn’t involve conjuring the vision of the last ritual to be performed on it.”
            Jenkins and Warren looked at him, but didn’t say anything, maybe because they hated to pander to Draco’s need for an audience. It was up to Harry to sigh and say, “What is it?”
            “This,” Draco said, and hissed something under his breath as he began to perform an incantation, one that Harry had never heard and couldn’t identify. The only thing he could make out for certain was “speculum,” the Latin word for “mirror.”
            And that was enough to tell him what Draco was probably trying to do. He kept silent, and watched.
*
            Talk about Gryffindor. What is relying on intuition, if not that?
            But the notion had come to Draco and preyed so powerfully on his mind that he couldn’t let it rest. If he was wrong and his spell produced no results, at least he would know he was wrong and be able to move on.
            The spell settled onto the altar, and for long seconds only trickled and wavered around it, making the altar look as though it was running with water. Draco curled his lip. He didn’t want to make the altar look beautiful or clean, but the side-effect of the spell was inevitable.
            Then there was a soft chime, and one stream of light rose from the near side of the altar, growing larger and more diffuse the further away it moved, until it formed and illuminated an image of a mirror, large, with an elaborate frame that repeated a pattern of flowers and eyes. Another chime, another beam of light, and this time the mirror was a tiny handheld one that Draco thought was probably used for communication more than looking. And another chime, and another stream of light, and another mirror.
            It wasn’t until the sixth stream of light that Draco saw what he was looking for. He sat back on his heels and hissed. He thought he heard Jenkins snicker. Maybe the hiss was more appropriate than he had meant it to be, given that the mirror in the image was encircled with snakes, but what mattered was that he had seen that particular mirror before, hanging on his parents’ wall in Malfoy Manor, before he broke it. And his spell to locate possible connections between the altar and other magical artifacts, in this case mirrors, had paid off.
            “I assume that you will tell us what this spell means?” Jenkins’s voice could be taken as polite, if you wanted to do that.
            Draco stood up and dusted off the stone and dust clinging to him before he responded. And then, he looked to Harry, who would know something about this already. “So it seems the altar was used to research ways of defending against the twisted as well as creating them,” he said.
            Harry nodded. “Or to defend against becoming a twisted.”
            Draco inclined his head. He still wasn’t sure when his mother, by that definition, had become twisted, before or after he had smashed the mirror, and he didn’t want Warren and Jenkins’s stares to grow any sharper than they were. Part of the truth would have to do.
            “We met someone who seemed to be using a mirror and necklace to protect herself against falling into the full mindset of a twisted,” Draco told Jenkins and Warren. “She may also have had a second mirror, though we found only the evidence of where it was hung and not the mirror itself. At one time, I knew her well, and I would swear that she was sane. In fact, she was sane a few months ago, when she helped me on one of our cases. But since then, she’s begun the descent into a twisted.”
            “What’s her flaw?” Jenkins asked.
            “Something to do with snakes,” Harry said, before Draco could. “You’ll notice that the mirror in the image was surrounded by snakes. I also spoke Parseltongue to a scar around her neck, and it moved of its own accord to attack me.”
            Draco’s skin crawled. He thought Harry must have told him that before, or maybe not. He scrubbed at the skin around his neck, and had to smile a little when he saw Warren raising her hand to do the same thing. She lowered it a second later and shook her head at him.
            “But you know no more than that.” Jenkins tracked back and forth between them with her eyes, as though trying to decide how important it was to force them to reveal more.
            “No,” Harry said. Draco nodded. Nothing except the most dire necessity, or someone else guessing the truth, would force him to speak about this occurring in his own family.
            What was your family.
            Draco hid his wince. If the words actual people said to him couldn’t make him visibly flinch, then there was no way a voice in the back of his own head would do so.
            “Then I don’t see how this information is useful.” Jenkins folded her arms and seemed to consider that the end of the discussion. “You believe that the mirror would make a convincing demonstration to someone who didn’t know its history?”
            “It might make a convincing demonstration to that particular twisted,” Draco said. He was sure now that his parents retained their memories of the mirrors and the way that his mother seemed to be sliding down into madness, whether or not they remembered him. “And it confirms that whatever happened to her, it stemmed from this altar.”
            Jenkins studied him for a few moments, seemed convinced they weren’t getting any more out of him, and turned to Harry, letting her arms fall to her sides. “What do you think we should do next, then? This altar would be useful in your mad plan to show the twisted to the greatest number of people, but I don’t think the time is right for it yet.”
            Harry paused and looked at Draco. “Not right yet,” he said.
            Draco narrowed his eyes. He knew that particular tone. “What mad plan do you have in mind now?” he asked. He wondered how long it would take him to get reconciled to it. Maybe not as long as with the plan to show everyone the truth at the Ministry. He’d had the extra resentment driving him from the necromancy spell and its aftermath then.
            “Something you said about the—the twisted gave me the idea,” Harry said, his eyes bright and remote. “I kept wondering how we were going to clear space in the Ministry and show everyone the truth without being stopped and arrested. I was thinking they might give us a public trial.”
            “Not at this point,” Warren put in. “You’re too dangerous. They’ll take you off and kill you and show everyone the bodies later.”
            Draco nodded in reluctant approval. It was what he would have done.
            “But there’s a way,” Harry said. “It would take a while to collect all the snakes I could with Parseltongue, but there’s carved snakes in the Ministry itself, too, and they should respond. If the snakes held people back and cleared the way, then we might have an arena for the show we need to put on.”
            Draco realized he was holding his breath, and choked it out again.
            “You want to use Dark magic, or what’s acknowledged as Dark magic, to show that the Ministry’s been involved in Dark magic?” Jenkins considered Harry from head to foot, as if trying to decide what part of his body the crazy was coming from. “You think anyone’s going to be enthusiastic about that?”
            Harry laughed. “I think that the Ministry’s already blackened my reputation so much that one use of Dark magic isn’t going to matter. And at least, for the people who are more rational, they’ll remember that I’ve had this particular gift for years. Yes, it might make a difference. It might allow us to actually do this instead of having to give the plan up because it’s too difficult.” He held Jenkins’s eyes and smiled. “What it will do to my reputation afterwards is the least of my worries.”
            Draco saw the moment when things tilted, when Jenkins nodded with approval instead of disdain and Warren’s eyes sparked. And then Harry turned and looked at him.
            Draco held his hand out. Harry clasped it, tilting his head down as if to shield his eyes behind his fringe and brace himself for disappointment.
            “We will do it,” Draco whispered.
            And he couldn’t regret agreeing, not when Harry’s eyes were as bright as rain.
*
            Sasunarufan13: Thank you! I hoped it would make sense.
            As you saw here, Draco doesn’t want Harry to think he’s weak or childish because he needs to be rescued. He doesn’t appreciate having his judgment doubted, either. But now he can admit that he probably didn’t have the best judgment when he cast that spell.
            Eve: Good luck with the translation, and thank you for saying that you like the story!
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity