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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Eighteen—The Altar
            “The altar would have to be the cornerstone of any plan that we made to show visions to the masses.”
            Jenkins had a crisp way of talking that Draco admired most of the time. She was practical; she would use Dark Arts when she needed to, and never mind the Auror code of conduct that somehow said it shouldn’t be necessary when they were dealing with people who wouldn’t hesitate. But right now, her voice grated on his ears. He shifted on the bed in Cuthbert’s Corner and glared at Harry.
            Harry picked up on the glare, tilted his head in response, and faced Jenkins. “You think that it would have to be?” he asked. “What about my plan of projecting memories?”
            Jenkins said something. Warren leaned forwards and added her own suggestion. Draco turned his back and walked out of the room, and he didn’t care who watched him go. They had Kreacher with them, and he could bring messages or destroy any of the Dark Arts traps that waited around the house, Draco was sure.
            And he wouldn’t be foolish enough again to cast a necromancy spell here.
            He wandered down the corridor and stepped into a room Kreacher had cleaned of Dark influences, which had a desk in the middle of the floor, but no chairs. Draco leaned against the desk and rubbed his eyes.
            He’d had a headache since he saw that vision of the mirror linked to the altar, and thought some of it was the influence of the house. But Harry had refused to go back to Grimmauld Place when Draco asked. Now that the Ministry knew they might come there, he said, he didn’t feel safe.
            Draco sighed and shut his eyes. The house, the tension, the lack of safety, all of those were things that contributed to his headache. But he knew the real cause, and it was cowardly to try and hide from it any longer.
            There had to be a way to get his mother free of the flaw that apparently possessed her.
            He didn’t know how the mirrors had worked, but they had formed a barrier of some kind. And she had been sane for a long time, he thought, at least for a twisted. He didn’t know when the flaw had manifested, but it was a few months since he had seen his mother wearing the necklace of snakes that was linked to the mirror. Most twisted went insane from Dark Arts in much less time.
            There had to be a way to free her.
            Draco bit the corner of his lip. He could hear the questions he should ask himself, and they were actually in Kreacher’s voice, strange as that was, not in Harry’s.
            Why is Master Draco wanting to be helping them? They not be his family any longer!
            Draco nodded. And they never would be again. Even if the ritual by which they’d forgotten him wasn’t irreversible, they had made their choice when they exiled him before that. He’d chosen seven years of working, his career, over his family. He couldn’t erase that, or forgive them.
            But he still wanted his mother free, if he could. Maybe that was an example of the “do the right things” mentality that ruled so many Aurors, including Harry, and others whom Draco had mocked in his head for years. But this was his right thing, not theirs, and he wanted his mother free.
            His father didn’t seem to have a flaw, so Draco wouldn’t worry about him for right now. He would learn all he could about Narcissa’s flaw.
            And the best way to do that was with a private scouting mission.
*
            Harry sent Jenkins and Warren on their way at last. They’d discussed various plans using the altar, and although they’d hammered out two or three options, they hadn’t decided on one yet. It would take time and working with the altar to make it give up its secrets before they could see it, Harry was certain.
            Also, it was becoming obvious that he needed to talk to Draco again.
            Draco had walked out in the middle of their conversation with Warren and Jenkins, and Jenkins had looked at Harry, narrow-eyed. Harry had waved a hand at her, not wanting to deal with it for right now, and Jenkins had nodded and continued speaking. But then Draco had wandered back in and leaned against the wall, staring blankly. That was when Harry had hurried to make sure that their conversation reached an end.
            “Draco?”
            It was a long moment before Draco stirred and looked at him. “Yes?” There was a gritty sound to his voice that made Harry have to remind himself Draco had slept as much as he had last night. It had been a long day, though.
            “What is it?” Harry could have asked in ways that danced around the bush, but he and Draco had always been blunt with each other. They might as well continue that tradition.
            Draco bit his lip and ran his hand through his hair, gestures that Harry thought of as belonging to himself, not Draco. Harry almost smiled as he reached up and gently caught Draco’s hand, bringing it down again and shaking it. Draco smiled back, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
            “I can’t hide anything from you,” Draco said.
            “I’m glad that we have the kind of relationship where that’s true.”
            Draco blinked and shifted for a second. Then he said, “Yes. Well. Maybe.”
            Harry shook his arm again.
            Draco nodded. “Right. It’s my mum.” His voice cracked, and he stopped and cleared his throat as though he hadn’t anticipated that. Well, to be honest, neither had Harry. “I know that she’s not my mum anymore, that she thinks she never had children, but…I want to free her from the flaw. I don’t want her to spend the rest of her days insane. And the thought of someone having to hunt her down makes me sick.”
            “Or your father having to do it,” Harry finished, nodding.
            The flinch Draco made tore Harry’s hand free. “I never thought of that,” Draco whispered, looking away from him. “Why did you have to put that in my head? Oh, Merlin.”
            Harry winced, and then moved forwards and gently settled an arm on Draco’s shoulder. “So you want to come up with something to help her? To—turn her flaw around?” Harry had no idea how it could be done. They had encountered twisted who didn’t know what they were and twisted who had become as they were through no fault of their own, but he didn’t think anyone had ever rescued one.
            “The altar might be able to tell us.” Draco leaned against Harry’s shoulder, almost taking him from his feet until he scrambled to brace them. “She had a mirror, didn’t she, and a necklace? There have to be measures out there that could protect her. I was the one who was responsible for destroying the ones she had. I think I should be offering to replace them.”
            Harry nodded and stroked Draco’s neck. He knew what Draco meant, and it was independent of whether his mother ever knew that he had done it, or thanked him. He wanted her free, and that was it.
            Harry thought he might have had similar feelings about his parents, if they’d lived.
            He stepped back and said, “Then you need to use that spell on the altar again, I think, the one that conjured the vision of the mirror. And maybe you can use a variation that would show the necklace, whatever the Latin word for necklace is.”
            A faint laugh shook Draco, and he stepped back, shaking his head. “You have no idea what the Latin word for necklace is,” he said. “Even though I know it’s in some spells that you’ve cast before.” He rubbed his eyes roughly with one hand. “Your education is shockingly incomplete, and you’re never curious about the right things.”
            Harry smiled faintly. Draco insulting his education was at least better than Draco wallowing in despair. “Fine. Can you perform the spell that way or not?”
            “I can,” Draco said. He focused on the altar, which Warren and Jenkins had left with them, on the reasonable grounds that it would be worse for them to be caught with it than it would be for Harry and Draco. “Do you want me to do it now?”
            Harry raised his eyebrows. “What else do we have to do? We can’t invade the Ministry until we have more allies—and ideas.”
            Draco nodded and closed his eyes, his face contracting, his eyelids drawing down. Harry watched in fascination. He doubted Draco knew what his expression looked like when he did intense magic, but to Harry, it was as beautiful as everything else about him.
            “Torquis,” Draco whispered at last, and if that was the Latin name for a necklace, it was one that Harry couldn’t remember ever using in his own spells. Draco gestured towards the altar, his movements coming faster and more intense than ever, and then the words spun out of his mouth, faster than Harry could translate. “Torquem coarguo…”
            And Harry lost track after that, but he could see the effect. The altar seemed to pour with water, the way it had before, and then the blood grooves flashed. Harry frowned.
            Draco had his eyes open again and seemed to be past reciting the spell, so Harry asked him, “What does that flash mean?”
            “It means that the spell has been performed recently.” Draco stood up on his toes and leaned forwards, his wand gripped in his hand as though he expected the altar to produce something they would have to fight.
            But what came forth were visions, so many that Harry despaired of picking out Narcissa’s necklace among them all. There was a long chain that was made of gold with lions dangling from it, and then something that looked like it would complement Ravenclaw’s diadem, and a thin silver band, and a pendant that Harry had to hide his eyes from, since even in the vision it flashed so brightly, and…
            But Draco was either more alert or more focused than Harry was, because he hissed and pointed. “There. Look! There it is.”
            Harry followed his finger, and saw it, the heavy silver necklace of snakes that Draco had said was so unlike most things his mother would have considered wearing. He nodded and leaned forwards to study it. The snakes looked exactly the same as they had in the original, but the vision didn’t show any connection to a mirror that he saw. “Do you have to cast the spell about the mirror at the same time?”
            Draco didn’t answer him. Harry turned around and saw him aiming his wand at the vision of the snake necklace.
            “Ligo,” Draco said, and hissed the word so passionately that Harry wasn’t surprised to see the vision freeze in place and turn towards them, although he hadn’t known that was possible. He wondered if it would be possible to hold the visions in place when they used the altar, and the other parts of their plan, yet to be defined, to show the truth to the Ministry.
            The vision began to spin. Draco walked around it, staring at it. Then he called out sharply, without words, and Harry hurried over to him.
            The back of the necklace was made of snakes’ twisting bodies, as Harry had assumed it would be, although he hadn’t ever had a chance to see the part that had stayed against Narcissa’s skin. But there was something else. The clasp was huge, split into two hinges. Each hinge was set with something. The one on the right looked like a faceted jewel, but the silvery color of the vision kept them from seeing what it was. The other was a small, equally faceted, mirror.
            “I never noticed this before,” Draco murmured, running his fingers over the air in front of the vision as though he could touch the necklace and unclasp it. “At least it explains the connection of the mirrors to the necklace, if she was wearing one all along.”
            Harry nodded absently. The vision reminded him of something, but his mind had to struggle after it. It couldn’t be something that he remembered well, if he had to think this hard about it.
            “I wish we knew what the jewel was.” Draco took a step back and eyed the vision. “Different jewels would perform different kinds of magic. You can’t enchant a ruby the way you would an emerald.”
            Maybe it was the reference to an emerald that jarred Harry’s memory. He snapped his fingers, and Draco turned to him. “What?”
            “There was a case Ron and I worked when we were partners,” Harry said, eyeing the vision again. No, it really did look like his memory. “We found a bracelet, not a necklace, but it had a clasp like this, with a mirror on one side and an emerald on the other. We couldn’t figure out what it did and our prisoner wasn’t talking, so Ron put it on.”
            Draco closed his eyes and used one hand to push his hair off his forehead. “Well, you came by your recklessness honestly, if it’s an inheritance from Weasley,” he muttered.
            Harry glared at him, and kicked him a little. “It turned out not to harm him permanently,” he said. “What happened was that suddenly he could see out a mirror that turned out to be hanging on the prisoner’s bedroom wall. And the emerald was bringing him sounds of an Abraxan that the prisoner kept in a corral on the other side of the wall.”
            Draco frowned. “Sounds,” he repeated.
            Harry nodded. “The problem was that the perception was startling, and Ron lost his head and crashed into a wall because he couldn’t see or hear normally. They got the bracelet off him at last.” He eyed the necklace vision again. “I’m just saying that if that jewel is an emerald, then it might have been bringing sounds to your mother.”
            “Sounds of what?” Draco paced back and forth as though he could make the vision give up its secret simply by staring at it.
            Harry stared at him in turn, but it was a long time before Draco spun back around and noticed it. “Snakes,” Harry said at last. It seemed simple to him.
            Which might mean that it’s not really simple at all, and you’re wrong. But Harry thought he could put up with that, if so.
            “My parents can’t understand Parseltongue,” Draco said. “Why would they keep snakes?”
            Harry shrugged. “People do all the time, as pets and familiars and guards and Potions ingredients.” He’d been called often enough on other Auror cases when someone else needed him to use Parseltongue to know that. “And I don’t think it was your mother that needed to understand Parseltongue. I think it was her scar.”
            Draco once again stared at him. Harry reached up and felt his forehead. “Did I turn into a genius when no one was looking?” he asked. “You don’t need to look at me that way, Draco.”
            “You said that her scar responded to your Parseltongue,” Draco muttered, and gave a violent shiver. “I just didn’t think about how that—how that would translate into her needing to hear the language of snakes through a mirror.”
            “Well, we don’t know for sure,” Harry said. “That jewel might not be an emerald. Even if it is, it might not be enchanted the same way. There must be lots of things that you can do with an emerald.”
            “Perhaps, but it’s not a branch of magic that many people study anymore.” Draco paced in a slow circle around the room. “So you think that my mother was linked to a mirror, and to a lot of snakes that she could hear speaking Parseltongue. Words that would keep her scar contented and happy?” And then he spun around and frowned at Harry. “Wait a minute. The scar was the result of the necklace exploding. It couldn’t have been there to listen to the Parseltongue before that. So what was listening?”
            “Maybe the necklace covered up the scar, it didn’t create it,” Harry said quietly. “You said yourself that the necklace was really thick and blocky, not something your mother would ordinarily wear.”
            “So where did the scar come from in the first place?”
            Harry shrugged. He thought Draco had a talent for asking questions that they probably wouldn’t find the answer to, rather than ones they would. “I don’t know. Or maybe it was her flaw that was responding to the Parseltongue, whether or not she could understand it, and then it became her scar after the explosion. We know Morningstar changed a lot when she became a twisted. The same thing could have happened to your mother.”
            Draco shut his eyes. “Except that she’s not insane yet.”
            “I don’t know anything about that,” Harry said quietly. He didn’t think he’d interacted enough with Narcissa Malfoy to say whether she was insane.
            Draco opened his eyes again and turned to face Harry. “So I’m going to need you with me when I do something about my mother, then, if her flaw can only be subdued by Parseltongue.”
            “Speaking to her scar that way only seemed to infuriate it,” Harry said. “Maybe your best chance would be to leave me here.”
            Draco leaned forwards. “Then I want you with me when I go back to the Manor, because my parents might still have snakes around and you’re the only one I know who could command them.”
            Harry stared at him, a little surprised. “You want to invade the Manor again?”
            “I want my mother to be all right,” Draco said. “I need to gather more information, anyway. Will you come with me?”
            What could Harry say to that? He hadn’t done well the last time he had gone to the Manor by himself, but that had been due to the Montgomerys, not because he’d actually managed to gain access to the house and then not known what to do. And he knew that Draco would go without him, just like Harry would ultimately have gone to the Ministry with just his allies if Draco had said no.
            “Harry?”
            Draco reached towards him, his eyes so wide that Harry’s calculations and reasons flew out the window. He’d never been good at them, anyway. He reached out and clasped Draco’s hands.
            “I’ll go with you,” he said quietly, “although I don’t know how much I can help.”
*
            Draco felt as if his shoulders had melted with the weight of his relief. He would have tried to do this without Harry, but he didn’t know if he would have succeeded.
            “Good,” he said. “I think I even have a way to get into the Manor, if you don’t mind using Dark magic.”
            Harry clapped his hand over his chest. “Oh, no, Dark magic! Whatever will I do?”
            Draco hit him on the side of the head, or tried. Harry dodged, grinning, and it was hard to do anyway when Draco still had hold of one hand by the wrist. “Shut up. I know that you wanted to use a Light spell last time.”
            “That’s because it was the best way to pass the wards.” Harry shrugged and kept his eyes fastened on Draco. “But they might have come up with a good way to guard against it, now that I’ve actually used it. Our big advantage last time was surprise. What’s it going to be this time?”
            Even Draco’s fast heartbeat was calming, he realized, marveling. Harry had that effect on him, now that he was no longer alone.
            “There’s no advantage in secrecy,” Draco said. “I’m going to write a letter to my parents and hint that we know a way to cure my mother.”
            Harry stood there for a second. Then he said, “How are we going to meet them? They might still not recognize you, but any glamours you wore would be stripped off by the wards, and they know that I’m their enemy by now.”
            Draco smiled. “I know my parents,” he said. Ex-parents, whispered in the back of his mind, but Harry knew all about that, and if he wasn’t going to require Draco to say it, then Draco didn’t need to say it. “My father would do anything for my mother, and I think that’s only truer as she slides down into madness—if she is—because he knows otherwise that he might have to kill her to defend himself, or else die and know that someone else is going to kill her. We have to lure them away from the Manor, and for the promise that we know how to cure her, they’ll come.”
            Harry took a deep breath. “And where do you suggest we bring them? Here? We can’t go to Grimmauld Place, your mother would recognize it.”
            “And the Aurors are probably swarming over it by now anyway,” Draco said dryly. “I doubt that the ones we Obliviated and dropped off were the only ones who knew about it. No, I thought meeting on the cliffs outside, the same place we met Athright, might help.”
            Harry looked into the distance for a long time. Draco let him look. It was a risky plan, and unlike the risky plans that Harry kept coming up with, it was something Draco was asking him to do now, and without allies.
            Then Harry nodded and turned back. “All right. Do you think you can come up with a glamour that will protect you? And I’ll need to hide, or be under a glamour myself. It might be better to hide. The minute I start hissing, they’ll know who I am, anyway.”
            Draco smiled. “I can cast a powerful glamour charm when I need to and have the right amount of time,” he said. “I was just always miserable at it when I had to do it quickly. Decide on the right hiding place…”
*
            Harry watched Draco. His eyes were wide, but his manner was calm. There was no sense that this was a desperate plan, although Harry knew it was, or that he would suddenly change his mind and declare this parents could handle themselves without help from him.
            A pity.
            But Harry knew he would help Draco. Of course he would. He was committed to helping him, and he loved him, and although he disliked Lucius and disliked both of them for the way they’d treated Draco, he would have wanted to save them if they were his parents.
            So he nodded, and smiled, and held Draco’s hands except when he broke away to pace about the room and gesture, and accepted that he would have to take some risks.
            But how is that different from normal life?
*
            Sasunarufan13: They will find out more about Narcissa’s flaw in the next couple chapters.
            SP777: Harry has been distant from Ron and Hermione mostly since he became a Socrates Auror; he wasn’t supposed to tell them what he was really doing, and they can’t help him now. He did write to them, briefly, when he and Draco were on the run, to tell them why they couldn’t him.
            Glad you liked the conversation.
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity