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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Nineteen—Call to the Rescue

            Harry flailed deep in the dark, unending pit beneath the surface of his mind, the pit Blue Eyes had cast him into. He could hear the laughter, echoing everywhere, cold and hard and as liable to shatter his bones as boulders thrown at him.

            He thought the blue-eyed twisted had expected him to panic, or at best reach for his Patronus again, which wouldn’t do any good when Blue Eyes knew that trick now, and how to counter it. But Harry had heard Voldemort laugh, and it sounded worse than this. Voldemort had been more powerful, too, and more determined to kill him.

            You think I am not?

            The pressure was everywhere around him, a band of iron encircling his temples, making his tongue stick out and his voice gasp. Harry dragged his nails down his arm, and felt the pain centering him, for a moment before Blue Eyes swept that away and replaced it with stronger pain, deeper pain, pain that seemed to well up out of him as well as being inflicted from the outside.

            I will have you. I know how to conquer you now. But I see no reason not to torture you first, said Blue Eyes in a soft, wistful voice that scared Harry more than almost anything he had done so far.

            But he had had a plan to deal with this, with both Bainbridge and Blue Eyes, and although he would have to do it faster than he had planned on, he saw no reason not to go ahead with it. He brought up his wand, struggling against the forces that wanted him to keep his hands at his side, and felt Blue Eyes’s focus sharpen abruptly. He had assumed that Harry couldn’t do anything while he played with him, maybe, or he had thought that he would have time to master Harry’s muscles and wand before that could happen.

            Now Harry squinted and panted his defiance at the concern in his mind, and cast the first spell, the one that would establish the bridge between them, the link that he needed to complete the next part of the plan.

            “Creo pontem,” he whispered, and the spell seemed to fill up the inside of his brain, expanding, pushing outwards, at his cerebellum and brainstem, and he laughed aloud and his words echoed like clicking pebbles to the sound of the screams.

            The bridge that was opened raced along from him, from his scar, specifically, burning and shining, in the direction of Blue Eyes. He tried to jerk away, but he had come too far into Harry’s head, and perhaps, even now, he didn’t want to reveal his body’s location to Harry.

            Even though Harry was beginning to suspect he knew it.

            The bridge landed, and the supports linked and locked and leashed into place. Harry could feel the connection between his mind and Blue Eyes’s, swaying like ropes, like gossamer, like the silk of cocoons. But strong for all that, strong, strong, strong. Harry lifted a hand to his forehead and clenched his fingers into his scar.

            The similarities between them were the ones he had suspected all along. He had been right when he told Draco that most of the Socrates Aurors had flaws, that they could be twisted too if the Ministry just changed their definitions a little bit. And Blue Eyes had acted all along as though he cared about twisted, either eliminating them before they could challenge them or trying to prevent Harry and Draco from getting too good at hunting them.

            Because then we could go after you. Isn’t that right?

            There was no response in words, only the panicked thrashing at the end of his line, like a large, hooked fish. Harry nodded in response and murmured the spell again, fixing it harder in him.

            He had a gift, a flaw: seeing visions of future murders. It had always seemed rooted in his scar, the way that Draco’s ability to feel Dark magic was rooted in his Mark. And that meant Harry was similar, in his own way, to Blue Eyes.

            Similar enough to reach out through it, if he could come up with the right spell, similar enough to stay in contact as long as he wanted to. And he could do the same thing to Bainbridge, if he could control his fear of what he would find in that corrupted mind.

            More dangerous than Blue Eyes?

            Yes. Bainbridge did seem that way to him. At least he’d been in contact with Blue Eyes before, if never willingly, while he never had with Bainbridge, and wasn’t looking forward to the experience if he did have to have it.

            Blue Eyes called his attention back by wrenching against the bridge again. Harry repeated the spell once more, and felt the alignment between their minds strengthen to the point where it would take outside magic to separate them.

            Fortunately, Harry had a source of that outside magic not far away.

            He opened his eyes and turned his head, and found chaos in the Atrium: Aurors gathered around a pale and staring Head Auror Ernhardt, Draco casting spells to keep the people trying to attack and arrest him at bay, and Hermione standing in the middle of it, her arms spread and her head tilted back as if she was offering herself to the gods of the ceiling.

            “I am Sarah Offer!” she said, making her voice thunder. “If someone wants to come and claim my life, then I proclaim here and now that I can tell my own story, and I have no reason to want someone else to tell it! I was born into a small family in Hogsmeade, and from the first, my dear mother—”

            There was a half-explosion to the side, and when Harry turned his head, he could see Bainbridge moving forwards, clad in that dark, buzzing, smoke-like magic that obscured his face but not his intent.

            Harry took a quick, deep breath, and hoped that Draco and Hermione would both remember their parts as he had drilled them, and not break the plan because they were afraid for him, and that Blue Eyes wouldn’t show a previously unsuspected ability and break free. Then he began to cast the spell that would link his mind with Bainbridge’s.

*

            Draco cast Shield Charms and defensive hexes only, as Harry had told him, even though he knew spells that could have made the petty wizards trying to punish him for the crime of political unorthodoxy writhe on the floor and spew their guts out. They couldn’t look like the evil ones, Harry had explained, and they would, at least if they cast too many Dark Arts spells.

            Draco was nearly ready to tell Harry to sod off, though. Harry had dropped to his knees with his hands wrapped around his head and—

            And now he was back on his feet, and Bainbridge was moving in, right on schedule, aimed at the disguised Granger as though he was incapable of seeing anything else.

            Draco swallowed. Right. This mad plan of Harry’s was actually working, when he had never thought it would. That meant he had to remember what came next. He fell back a step and raised the largest Shield Charm yet in front of himself, one that would take even the most skillful Aurors’ curses a while to work through.

            Then the shadows swirled, and grey-clad wizards filled the Atrium.

            Draco heard Granger’s voice falter, which didn’t seem to deter Bainbridge. He did slow a bit, but his wand was still out, and Draco could hear him saying something soft and soothing about how everyone would know the truth of her life soon. The Shadowborn oriented on Harry and him, and raised their wands as one.

            Then Bainbridge shrieked, and that sound was so truly awful, so glass-shattering, that wizards who had been preparing to fling hexes at Draco turned to look.

            Harry had achieved the spell that linked their minds and their flaws together, he thought as he saw Bainbridge on his knees with his hands clasping either side of his head and the exact same expression on his face that Harry had worn when Blue Eyes began invading his mind.

            That meant Draco and Granger had to move. He caught her eye and nodded, hoping that the spells they had trained to cast together would still work now that the Shadowborn had arrived and made everything infinitely more complicated.

            Granger smiled and stood upright, waving her wand so that a scroll began to unfurl in the air in front of her. The blood-red lettering on it was huge and could be read from a distance: the history of Blue Eyes, the facts about the Shadowborn that Granger had gathered in her research, the way that twisted only existed in a Ministry definition. There were people who tried to read it instead of running or casting, of course. Count on the wizarding world’s curiosity to make it pause in the middle of a battle to read gossip.

            And in the meantime, Draco closed his eyes and touched his wand to his Dark Mark. They had agreed it should be this way, because while Harry’s flaw seemed linked to his scar, Draco knew that his was linked to his Mark, and it was easier to complete the spell when there was a tangible physical thing to earth it in.

            I still could have played the other part. Blue Eyes might have attacked me instead. Harry could have done this. His scar has borne powerful magic before.

            But things were as they were, and Draco had agreed to this. He would keep faith with Harry now. He scraped his wand back and forth, and the answering tingle from the Dark Mark as he chanted the spell nonverbally meant that he knew everything was working as it should be, that the magic was rising to the fore.

            His arm seemed to burst into invisible flames. Draco turned his head, gasping, and focused on the nearest Shadowborn, who was tracing his wand back and forth in delicate curves that left the air scarred with dove-grey letters.

            The Shadowborn met his eyes, and hesitated.

            Draco half-shrugged. The man had been chosen as the victim and conduit of the spell because he was casting the first Dark Arts spell Draco had felt after increasing the sensitivity of his flaw. He jabbed his wand forwards, and the magic pulled tight between him and the Shadowborn, dumping his sensations on the man. He screamed and began ripping at the sleeve that covered his left arm, distracting most of his companions.

            Draco smiled and faced Harry, casting the spell that would link them with much more confidence this time. He couldn’t feel bad about this, even if he felt pain. Linking himself to Harry was—

            What I want to do. A dream.

            No dream, Harry seemed to whisper as the link flowed open between them, and Draco caught a trace of three linked minds, Harry and Blue Eyes thrashing on the line and Bainbridge screaming in panic, unused to sharing his thoughts with anyone. We are doing this, and I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you, Draco.

            Draco nodded, eyes closing, and cast the final spell, the one that would make the magic inflicting pain on the Shadowborn increase.

            And then come back to him.

            He screamed as it poured through him like a thundering waterfall, sweeping sanity and habit and custom aside, and then hit the full confines of the link. For a moment, it eddied, and Draco believed the plan wouldn’t work, that he would be left with the agony contained in him and nowhere for it to go.

            Then it found the way, and leaped down the path to Harry, through the connections between their souls and their flaws. And Harry directed it, although screaming himself, throwing it in a burning, bile-colored flood down the link to Bainbridge and Blue Eyes, splitting it two ways. They were both bound to him, but not to each other, and Draco heard the screaming that came from Bainbridge’s mouth as Harry forced the pain away from him, into Bainbridge’s flaw and veins.

            And the screaming that emerged from the mouth of Head Auror Ernhardt.

            Draco felt his head turn in that direction, felt his mouth open, in what seemed like a Time-Delayed Charm. The realization thundered in his ears, stronger for a moment than the screams, stronger than the echo of the pain.

            He is Blue Eyes.

            Harry seemed to realize it at the same time, and started surging physically across the room towards Ernhardt. Shadowborn scrambled to stop him, and Draco aimed his wand and let loose with a carefully-aimed Blasting Curse that hit in the middle of them and sent them rolling and flying like dropped paper clips. Then he leaped away from Granger’s side and towards Harry. Granger might have needed his protection during the first part of this plan, but Harry was the one who needed it now.

*

            No wonder the Head Auror hated us so much. No wonder he seemed to always know what we were doing. No wonder he assigned Draco to me; he must have hoped that any chance that I would find and arrest twisted, and get close to him, would be frustrated by having a partner who wouldn’t cooperate with me.

            No wonder his voice sounded familiar.

            Harry wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got to Ernhardt. It wasn’t as though he had any physical proof that the man had tried to kill him. All he had was the link vibrating between them, still pouring pain—pain that Harry hoped would be sufficient to burn out the man’s flaw altogether, to damage his gift to possess others—and anguish into Ernhardt’s head. For the moment, Ernhardt was too distracted to defend himself.

            But there were others who would defend him, particularly when they saw Harry and Draco both running towards the Head Auror.

            Harry jumped over a Shadowborn who was lying on the floor to aim her wand at his ankles, and found that he had come directly into the path of another curse, which he caught on the chest. He grunted and dropped, ignoring the burning that spread across his chest, even the sound of sizzling flesh. It was nothing compared to the pain that he had sent through himself like a flood only a few minutes earlier.

            But it made Draco change direction, from the sound of his footsteps. Now he was running towards Harry instead of Ernhardt.

            Harry jerked his head up and forced his stinging eyes to clear from the tears of pain they wanted to weep, focusing on Ernhardt as some of the Shadowborn surrounded him and started to escort him towards the lifts. He couldn’t walk on his own, but they would support him, and away from Harry, the link would weaken.

            He might regain control of himself, and be able to punish someone else, possess someone else.

            Harry couldn’t have that. He pushed his hands beneath himself and jolted back to his feet in the same moment as Draco got there and tried to tear open his robes to see the wound that the burning curse had left on his chest.

            “Don’t care,” he gasped, swatting at Draco’s hands. “We’ve got to stop him. This is the only chance we’re ever going to have to take him by surprise, and we can’t have—”

            A loud snarl came from the side, and Harry turned his head. Bainbridge was back on his feet, and in his eyes was the madness of a man carried beyond pain into another country altogether. He lifted his hand at Harry, and Harry felt the pull of Dark magic even before Draco winced next to him and tried to cover his Mark with one hand.

            Bainbridge was going to use his power to flay people and write the truth in blood on their skins against them. He no longer cared about whether the victims were famous or not.

            Harry shoved Draco out of the way. He would be the one to deal with this and face it, since it was the vestiges of his plan gone wrong.

            “Harry,” Draco said, staggering as he caught himself on the Fountain of Magical Brethren, a promise in his voice deadlier, in its way, than the growl gathering beneath Bainbridge’s. But Harry couldn’t pay attention, couldn’t turn towards him, could see nothing but the whirling, building tunnel of Bainbridge’s magic.

            Someone crashed into Bainbridge from the side, before Harry had time to do more than tug a little on the pain flowing through him, trying to send more to Bainbridge through the link that still faintly connected them.

            Not someone, something, Harry saw a moment later. An enormous skeleton of a dog, its jaws pointed and crushing, its fangs unbroken and driving straight into Bainbridge, binding flesh to bone and drawing blood. The dog reared, its claws sinking into Bainbridge’s shoulders, and then it shook its head, sending the blood leaping. Bainbridge shrieked and staggered back, minus several of his fingers.

            Harry turned his head and saw Macgeorge standing off to the side, her hands twisting. Perhaps it was because of the link between him and Draco, but he thought he could feel the Dark magic steaming off her, evaporating almost as soon as it touched the air, but present, and overwhelming, and choking.

Macgeorge’s attention was all on Bainbridge, and more of her bone creatures hurtled down from the ceiling towards him. Harry couldn’t take the time to worry about what it would mean, to show necromancy this openly. Bainbridge was handled for the moment, couldn’t stand in their way.

And Head Auror Ernhardt, with his escort, had nearly reached the lifts.

            Harry sprang forwards—

            And an arm curled around his waist, halting him. He turned, nearly screaming with frustration. Was it Hermione? Didn’t she realize that their plan had worked, that they had found the home body of the blue-eyed twisted, and that they needed to reach him as fast as possible so that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else?

            Not Hermione, he realized a moment later when the familiar scent trickled into his nostrils and he recognized the strength of the arms around his waist. Draco. Holding him as though he thought Harry would sprint into danger and leave him behind.

            Oh.

            Harry let his muscles relax for just a moment, and cleared his throat. “I made the decision for you,” he said, speaking as rapidly as he could. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. We should share the risks together, even from twisted. Now, will you let me go?” And he lunged hard, breaking Draco’s hold and heading for the lifts.

            “We’ll discuss it more later,” Draco said calmly. “I agree that this isn’t an appropriate place. You wouldn’t hear half the words I wanted to say to you.”

            Harry turned to glare, and it was only that which made him miss a curse one of the Shadowborn had hurled. He swallowed, nodded, and reached out a hand to Draco, who took it.

            Together, they ran for the lifts.

*

            Draco had no intention of taking the lifts themselves. For one thing, they were too slow, and Ernhardt—it was still strange to think of the blue-eyed twisted as having a name, and one that was known to them—could be safe in his office by now, or through a Floo, and they needed to reach his office before then. Draco was absolutely sure he would go there. It was part of the psychology of twisted, that they so often needed a place to be secure, and would think of their lairs before anything else. The problem was finding them.

            And for another thing, Ernhardt might still have the authority or the magical power to possess someone and order the lifts used against them.

            He grabbed Harry’s hands when he started pounding on the buttons next to the lifts and closed his eyes. A quick swirl of his wand around his head and Harry’s, and they blurred and blended and slipped sideways and—

            Rose through the stone, swam through the stone, seeking and finding cracks, aiming for light, turning sideways, finding it, coming out in a familiar corridor, learning the concepts of size and space again—

            And stood in the corridor that led towards the Head Auror’s office. Draco brushed some flakes of stone dust off his clothes and began to run again, not letting go of Harry’s hands.

            “I didn’t know you could do that,” muttered Harry, from somewhere in the middle of embarrassed silence.

            Draco smiled and kept his eyes focused ahead, letting Harry’s hands slip out of his when he felt Harry tug. “It’s a Dark spell,” he murmured. “Not one that I would ordinarily want to use on Ministry grounds, and ones that I haven’t used successfully before.”

            “That could have killed us.”

            “The Shadowborn, Blue Eyes, Bainbridge, Aurors,” Draco murmured, simply naming the other things in the room at the same time that could have killed them, and then wrenched open the door in front of him. He knew it wasn’t the one that led to Ernhardt’s office, but he had heard noises behind it, and at the moment his instincts were charging and flinching around him, driving him, making him respond to things before he had consciously realized that he should.

            Ernhardt was leaning heavily on a desk with his eyes closed. The Aurors who had got him out of trouble stood in a loose circle around him.

            Ernhardt lifted his head, eyes turning that shining, unnatural, pupil-less blue color of supernovas. Draco aimed his wand, thinking with one part of himself how stupid they had been to assume Blue Eyes had to have blue eyes when he wasn’t using his flaw. That color was magical, so why shouldn’t it appear and disappear at will, leaving his eyes looking some other way?

            “I have a hostage,” Ernhardt said, his voice shuddering and harsh. The Aurors who stood between him and Draco looked at him uneasily, but didn’t retreat. They still trust the Ministry that said we were rogues more than they distrust his magic, Draco thought in radiant disgust. “You will not come near me.”

            Abruptly, he flinched and howled. Draco looked over his shoulder and saw Harry standing with his hand pressed to his forehead, his eyes shut and his hand screwing slowly back and forth as though driving a nail into his scar. Ernhardt sagged and clutched at the desk, his fingers sliding across it. Draco wouldn’t be surprised if they were leaving grooves in the smooth wood.

            “I can still hurt you,” Harry whispered. “Let the hostage go, and—”

            Ernhardt let himself slump, and Draco knew his mind had gone hunting out from his body again. He remained poised, ready to react at the first touch of the slimy foulness against his own mind, but knowing Ernhardt might reach for Granger, too, if he had figured out who she was.

            Instead, though, a door behind the desk opened, and a slender woman stepped out, walking up to stand at Ernhardt’s side with her eyes blazing. The woman rested one hand on Ernhardt’s shoulder and drew a knife from her robe pocket with the other, laying it against her jugular.

            “Ginny,” Harry said, heartsick.

            Ginny Weasley smiled and said with Blue Eyes’s voice, “Did you miss me, darling?”

*

            Seiren: Thank you! And, well, things worked out. Sort of.

            SP777: Well, you were right about the Blue Eyes connection.

            And thank you for the compliments! And the challenge.

            unneeded: Good guesses!

            At least Draco agreed to go along with the plan. Harry couldn’t have done it without Draco’s help.
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The Library of Hades