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Black Phoenix	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21568 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eighteen—The Seen Danger
            “Gorenson was what you saw in this picture.”
            Once again, the picture that Briseis had said she felt the strange, vague warning around was in front of him. Harry tapped the figure of Gorenson, who stood in the background, behind Tillipop. There had been no reason to pay him any attention at the time, but now Harry wanted to shake his head at his own ignorance. Of course he should have realized that an unknown man who appeared next to the Minister in a position of such importance was someone he would have to watch.
            “Yes, my lord,” Briseis agreed, leaning over to study the photo again. She cast a little glance at Harry as she moved, and Harry had to smile at the brightness and relief shining in her eyes. “If he was the one who kidnapped you, the one Persephone showed everyone, then he has much to answer for.”
            “It’ll be difficult to make him answer for it.” Harry stood up and paced slowly around his office, his hands clasped behind his back. Persephone sat on her perch and watched him with bright eyes.
            Harry cast her a cautious glance. Ever since he had won his own release from Ministry captivity, she had puzzled him. She no longer seemed to do everything he didn’t want her to do simply to be contrary. She no longer often flew into the Forbidden Forest to kill small animals. She watched him with eager curiosity, instead, and flew around singing whenever he and Draco were together.
            That was embarrassing, but at least few people knew who Draco really was. The public at large only knew that Harry had a lover—Draco under a glamour, beneath his name of Louis Downe—whom he had kissed in public.
            The papers were going mad, of course. Harry had paid little attention to them. Easing himself back into the charge of Hogwarts, reassuring his court, and telling Briseis and the others the truth about Gorenson and how they were going to repay him had occupied his time.
            And worrying about Persephone, he had to admit.
            He stepped up to her now and offered a finger. She didn’t watch it as though it was a tasty treat. She ducked her head and curled her neck, as if offering it to him to pet.
            Harry stepped back, wise to that particular trick. Persephone hooted sadly and cocked her head to the side, watching him as if she could make him tell her why he had retreated. Harry shook his head at her.
            “What’s wrong with you?” he murmured. “You were supposed to bite me just then, not sound as if you wanted reassurance.”
            He could almost hear Briseis opening and then closing her mouth behind him. She knew as well as anyone that he wasn’t mad, and if he wanted to speak to his phoenix, she might be thinking, then let him.
            Persephone spread her wings so that they drooped and held her body parallel to the perch, inching forwards. Harry moved closer again. Maybe she would bite him this time, and his concern would be relieved.
            Instead, though, she gave what sounded like a little croon of distress, and bent her head so urgently that Harry gave in and began to pet her feathers. He reckoned he could always snatch his hand back in a second.
            She didn’t try to bite him. Instead, she closed her eyes in what looked like ecstasy and cocked her head even further down, getting his fingers to scrape into the recesses of what seemed like tough-to-reach black and purple feathers. The noise she made was unusually deep for a bird, and she almost toppled off the perch crowding close to him.
            “My Lord?” Briseis’s voice was full of wonder, perhaps fear.
            “I don’t know,” Harry answered truthfully. “I’ve been seeing this change in her since I came back. I wondered if Gorenson could influence her from a distance.”
            “I can research that, my Lord.” From the sound of it, Briseis was making a little note on parchment. But that didn’t take Harry’s eyes away from the bird in front of him, or how Persephone was swaying back and forth now, wings out in what seemed like a last effort to keep her balance. Her voice was soft and restless, rising in a little whistle that trailed off at the end. It was a sound that Harry had heard a normal phoenix make a few times, but never her.
            “Please do,” Harry said. “I know there won’t be much available on her, because she’s unique, but even phenomena that are similar to her would help me.” He cast his mind around in circles, trying to come up with something that would have done this to Persephone without external influence, but each time, he had to shake his head again.
            Persephone opened one eye and looked up at him in a peeved manner. Harry caught his breath, but she just shut it and returned to stillness and complacency the instant he started tickling her neck again.
            “If she’s part of your soul, my Lord,” Briseis said, voice hesitant, “could you tell if she was being influenced?”
            “I don’t know enough about her,” Harry said quietly. He took his hand back quickly when Persephone began to twist her beak towards his fingers, but Persephone only straightened the rest of the way, gave him a steady look that seemed to express her disappointment, and then took off, flowing towards the far window. In a flick of her wings, she was out of the office, vanishing into the depths of the sky. Harry tried to take some comfort from that, since she had disappeared to hunt so often before, but it was hard.
            He was certain now that the danger Briseis sensed had come from Gorenson. And Gorenson knew that there was a connection between his and Persephone’s souls, although he had been wrong about how much control Harry had over her.
            How much was it possible to do to someone’s phoenix-familiar from a distance?
*
            “I want to know if I should counteract these rumors.”
            Draco had to roll his eyes. “I thought you would be thrilled at these rumors,” he said, picking up the paper from the top of the pile. Rosenthal had been saving and collecting them, evidently feeling that it would be best if they had all the photographs of Harry kissing him in his glamour available at a moment’s notice.
            Looking at the photograph that showed Harry tilting Draco’s head further and further back until his tongue apparently tried to crawl down Draco’s throat, and his hands gripping Draco’s neck and shoulders, while Persephone sang overhead, had been amusing at first. Then it had filled Draco with complex emotions that had taken some time to smolder and die. Then it had made him swing back around to semi-hysterical laughter.
            “You wanted me disassociated from Harry,” he repeated, when he looked up and found Rosenthal staring at him. “I know you did. Why are you so distressed about this happening now?” He laid the paper flat on the table and smoothed it out. He thought the pictured Harry winked at him for a second.
            “There were rumors that you were close to Lord Potter,” said Rosenthal, watching her notes instead of him. “I think some people believed you were his lover, based on the initial interview Skeeter printed. And now they want to know who Louis Downe is, and what you know about him.”
            Draco waved his hand. “That’s easy enough. He’s a distant relative who’s spent most of his life moving around the world. Disreputable, you know. We suspect his mother was Muggleborn. If Lord Potter has taken a liking to him, well, we won’t say too much about him. We think that he might be encouraging Lord Potter in some of his wilder behavior.”
            “Wilder?” Rosenthal looked up.
            “Offering sanctuary to werewolves, and the like.”
            “Ah.” Rosenthal had a faint smile on her face as she turned back to the notes. “I did wonder if your political instincts were ever going to return.”
            Draco controlled his childish urge to stick his tongue out at her back, which was definitely not a political instinct, and glanced at the paper again. He wondered what people would say when no Louis Downe appeared in public at Harry’s side, and then grinned.
            I might just have to assume the glamour and appear with him, to put any rumors about the legitimacy of our relationship to rest.
            “Has there been any progress on identifying the Unspeakable who tried to assassinate me?” he asked, forcibly putting the more intriguing matter from his mind, and turning back to Rosenthal as she shifted from one pile of notes to the other.
            “Not the person,” Rosenthal said, but with a quiet satisfaction in her voice that warned Draco she did have some good news. “I believe I have identified the artifact that permitted him entrance to the wards, though.”
            “Oh?” Draco leaned forwards. Rosenthal had an expertise in research among her other talents, but then, she had worked for the Ministry before him, and had had access to all sorts of confidential records. Maybe even some of the Unspeakables’ documents.
            Rosenthal nodded and took a piece of parchment from her pocket, holding it out to him. Draco squinted at it in confusion. It looked like a photograph, but nothing in the picture was moving, even dust. It was just a picture of a flat grey box with small legs, the sort of thing that Draco’s mother might have kept her jewelry in if she had had no taste.
            “I don’t understand,” he said. “Is it some kind of Muggle picture?”
            “Exactly,” said Rosenthal. Draco kept his eyes on the photograph so he wouldn’t preen at the surprise in her voice. “The artifact was one last seen in the Muggle world. The Ministry obtained this picture of it, but the person who took it had to use a Muggle camera instead of a wizarding one. The chance that he would be caught was too great. By the time the Ministry went to retrieve the artifact, it was gone.”
            “It doesn’t seem like anything large,” Draco said, to lure her into talking. He knew well enough that something didn’t have to be large to cause trouble.
            “I know. But it has caused its fair share.” Rosenthal frowned. “Perhaps I should say artifacts like it have. There’s no indication that it’s unique.”
            “Will you tell me what it is?” Draco put the photograph down on the table beside him. He thought he had learned all he could by staring at it.
            Maybe deciding that the exasperation in his voice was enough reward for teasing him, Rosenthal nodded. “It’s a box that can collapse all defensive magic in a given area. That includes wards, Shield Charms, and the like.” She added, before Draco could open his mouth to demand why the assassin hadn’t caused greater destruction, “But there’s a limitation on it, perhaps introduced by whoever made it. I suspect it was made for mischief, myself. If it is used to collapse wards, it can be used to take down more wards, but not to do anything else, until an hour has passed. So the Unspeakable who sneaked past your wards would have been unable to defeat a Shield Charm, except with his own natural magic.”
            “Hmmm.” Draco leaned back against his desk. “It was probably made by a Light wizard. They’re the only sort who would think that limitations on something as powerful as that were a good idea.”
            “Perhaps you should be thanking that ancient wizard, whoever it was, for the limitation, or you would be dead.”
            Draco waved his hand carelessly. “Something would have come up to ensure that I survived.” He went on before Rosenthal could argue. “But it does mean that whoever used it would have to have at least some Light magic, not be so steeped in the Dark Arts that his body rejected Light magic on principle.”
            Rosenthal sighed at the ceiling. “Those tales of being that steeped in Dark Arts aren’t true. Dark wizards use Light artifacts and spells all the time.”
            Draco looked her in the eye. “You never lived with the Dark Lord.”
            There was a pause when Rosenthal seemed to be trying to decide how to take that, and then she nodded. “Fair enough,” she said. “Let’s say that rare Dark wizards become so corrupted that they can’t use Light magic anymore. But that’s not the case for most people. So that still leaves us a wide field to search.”
            “Perhaps not that wide. What do you think about Gorenson, the man who captured Harry?”
            Rosenthal shook her head. “He was capturing him at the same time that he supposedly appeared here to assassinate you.”
            “I don’t think he was with the Aurors who actually went to Hogwarts to capture Harry. He’s not a trained Auror.”
            “Then he’s probably not a trained Unspeakable, either.”
            “We should write a letter, and ask Harry what he said,” Draco said. He watched Rosenthal note that down, and added, “I just find it odd that we have some assaults that are actually well-organized, two of them, out of a Ministry that up until now has been incompetent. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same planner was behind them.”
            “Why didn’t they assign Gorenson to do something about you before now?” Rosenthal frowned at the list of notes she had as if the answer would leap out at her if she looked for it long enough. “It seems even stranger that they would just leave it up in the air and let you and Lord Potter get away with as much as you did before they tried to clamp down.”
            Draco grunted and closed his eyes, trying to recall his memories of the conversation between Harry and Gorenson that Persephone had showed him. “He said that he drifted around from place to place, I think. From Department to Department of the Ministry. Maybe they had him working on something else, and then he finally saw the mess we were making, and decided to take care of us.”
            “Make up your mind,” Rosenthal said dryly. “He was an Auror, he was an Unspeakable, you can’t remember what he said he was, you do remember. He was assigned somewhere, he made the independent decision.” But when Draco opened his eyes, she was writing down what he had said on her list.
            “I think that we need to take him seriously,” Draco said. He knew it was wishful thinking, but the more he concentrated on it, the more he thought that he could picture the Unspeakable who had attacked him from the roof as being Gorenson’s height and size. He wasn’t very different, at least, Draco did know that. The memory Persephone had shown him had been good at picturing relative sizes. “In fact, I’d like you to devote most of your effort for the next few days to that. Find out who he is, where he comes from. You never ran into him when you worked in the Ministry?”
            “I also remember him saying that he moved around from place to place, and that he took different names when he did so.” Rosenthal looked a little disgusted, as if there were some tactics too political even for her. “So I could have worked with him and might not even have known it, if it was under a different persona.”
            Draco almost asked her if he had looked familiar, but restrained himself. Rosenthal was competent enough to have informed him of that immediately, if she did notice something she knew. “Well. Do what you can for the next—three days. That’s when my next interview with Skeeter is set up.”
            Rosenthal nodded and left the room. She had the confident stride of someone who knew exactly what she should be doing and no doubt of her ability to do it, Draco thought.
            He wished he could have the same confidence. He roamed in circles in front of the fireplace, stroking his arms.
            Harry had told him about Briseis’s supposed ability to sense danger, after their lovemaking at Hogwarts after his return. Harry’s voice had been soft and sated and sleepy, and his hand wandering up and down Draco’s arm as he talked, and Draco thought that his mind had wandered the same way, without paying much attention to what he was telling Draco.
            “I think the danger must have been Gorenson,” Harry had said, right before he drifted off to sleep. “He seemed to know more about Persephone than anyone else I’ve met so far. And it’s true that he was more competent at doing damage to me.” He’d rolled over on the bed and smiled at Draco. “And now that we know who he is, we can keep an eye on him, and stop him before he tries anything else…”
            Draco had waited for more, but Harry had fallen asleep then, sliding it into the way Rosenthal had strode out of the room.
            Draco couldn’t name, even to himself, the reason for the jittery fear that flooded him and made him spell the fire to leap up. He couldn’t find the logic in the fear he felt of Gorenson, far more than he ever had for Tillipop even when Tillipop seemed a serious challenger to his election to Minister.
            But the fear was there, and, accompanying it, the fear that Briseis’s ability hadn’t seen the half of it.
*
BAFan: Thanks! I’d like to see that, too.
Meechypoo: Yes, Gorenson is going to be a recurring problem.
CareLessLover: Draco won’t be able to use it as much as he did in the past, but no one knows it was him, so he’ll finagle some advantage out of it.
SP777: Yes, well, more things turn out not well in the next chapter.
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Black Phoenix