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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
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Chapter Nineteen—Against the Light

            Draco cast a Darkness Hex without thinking about it, the moment his eyes began to be blinded by that glowing light. He had had the spell in the back of his mind ever since he realized that Elder’s flaw was fire. Better to have it ready and not need it than to be cursing and stumbling in circles, the way Harry was.

            The cool blackness spread out around Draco like a pool of calm water, and he heard Elder curse him in a low and savage voice. Draco smiled with a bare movement of his lips, and began to work his way around to the left, keeping his back against the wall once he found it. “What’s the matter, Elder?” he whispered, casting another spell so that his voice would seem to bounce from several different directions. “Not so used to keeping your language in check when you serve Dark wizards?”

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and neither do you.” Elder’s voice was low and rough. “Your parents are trying to cut themselves off from their Dark pasts and become good people, and you are the one who would hold them back from that.”

            Draco laughed without sound, and paused, listening. He thought that Elder’s voice was coming from his right, but he wasn’t entirely sure. He forced himself to ignore the pained groans from Harry for right now. If Elder moved like—

            Then another flare of light cut the darkness, and Harry screamed. Draco caught a brief glimpse of Elder standing beside him, and then Elder said with some satisfaction, “There. Now I have your partner. If you make another move against me, I’ll make sure that he loses an eye or an ear.”

            Draco restrained the first outraged quiver in his muscles. He thought he knew what was happening, now. Elder’s words had cleared his mind to the state of a fine crystal. He flexed his wrists on his wand and waited until Elder began to seek him again. As Draco thought, that glow of light and fire hadn’t dissipated the Darkness Hex. Elder was unused to using his flaw except in the middle of battle, and when no one was immediately threatening you, magic based on emotions was usually harder to summon.

            “Don’t you care about your partner?” Elder’s voice had gone rough again. “I thought you would at least care about one that you took as your lover. Or do such distinctions no longer matter to a Dark wizard?”

            “You tell me,” Draco said, his voice booming from near his desk. Elder turned in that direction, as the brief blast of green light a moment later said. Draco chuckled, and Elder turned around and around, searching for him. He was drawing Harry with him, from the sounds, the shuffling and the soft gasps and moans. “How does it feel, Elder, to know that you’re serving Dark wizards, that you used Dark magic to leave that note for us in hospital?”

            “Lady Malfoy said the magic was not Dark.” Elder, by the sound of it, and certainly by the vision Draco was carrying in his mind, had gone stiff and still, listening.

            “And you believed her?” Draco laughed gently, and then began to move, out in a diagonal line, a path that would carry him past the desks. He was wagering that Elder didn’t know the Socrates office well enough to avoid them. “The word of a Dark witch, the wife and mother of former Death Eaters? Elder, Elder, Elder. I knew that you weren’t a good Auror, and that you were a fanatic, but I never thought you were this stupid.”

            Because that was it, of course, the only possible answer. Elder had been tricked by Lucius and Narcissa and become their pawn. A Light wizard who would get close to Draco, who had a previous grudge against him, who would believe that he was doing a good thing by murdering him. He had probably been their backup plan for some time, ever since they knew the Dementor might fail because of Harry’s skill at Patronuses.

            Elder obviously barked his shins on a desk in the next instant, and cursed. Draco moved, floated, towards him, listening all the while for Harry to make another move or noise. He had gone silent, and Draco didn’t think Elder had killed him. Elder would make it more of a production than that, announcing to Draco that he didn’t want to do it but the Chosen One had used too much Dark Arts, and so on and so forth. As long as Elder didn’t make an announcement of Harry’s death, Draco would choose to believe that Harry was alive.

            “You’re wrong,” Elder said, repeating it like a hymn. “I know that she didn’t lie to me. She couldn’t.”

            “Why not?” Draco had come to a halt between his desk and Harry’s. He reached out and braced his hands on them, gently enough that Elder didn’t seem to hear a sound. He knew there was nothing convenient to throw on them, but he knew where there would be. When he began to move again, he was aiming for Macgeorge’s desk.

            “She’s the mother of a Dark wizard who wants to separate herself from him.” Elder’s voice had gained strength, and Draco heard a kind of grunt that wizards tended to make when someone stabbed them in the back with a wand. Harry was alive, then, and under Elder’s control, but not for long. Draco smiled and kept moving. “That proves that she’s good, to want to put distance between herself and you.”

            Draco sighed, a loud and dramatic sigh, which would go whooshing around the room with the rest of his voice and confuse Elder, too. “But did you consider why she wanted to separate herself?”

            “Because you’re evil.” Elder said it in a way that made it clear it was one of his articles of faith. “The same reason that you managed to bedazzle the Boy-Who-Lived. You wouldn’t have gained control of him, and you wouldn’t have made him go Dark, if there wasn’t something fiendishly clever about you.”

            “Now I have to get rid of you,” Draco murmured. “The kind of wizard who says fiendishly and means it doesn’t deserve to survive.” He heard Harry snort, and then grunt again as Elder prodded him with his wand. Draco paused with the surface of Rudie’s desk beneath his hand. “Every pain that you inflict on my partner,” he added casually, “I’ll make you suffer. You might want to think about that.”

            “That’s what I mean about you being Dark,” Elder said, and Draco heard him jab his wand again. “You can’t take the slightest joke. You want to kill people for trivial things. You want to take revenge on me for disciplining a Dark wizard.”

            Draco said nothing else. He had reached his destination, the object he had been afraid to Summon for fear that Elder would figure out his intentions. He picked it up and held it close to him, cradling it for a moment. Yes, the glass was still intact, and although he knew that Rudie had taken it home at least once, the mummified hand rested inside. He could feel the dark thrum of necromancy like the spells that had powered the bones raining down on them in the clearing in the Forbidden Forest, and the wards on Cuthbert’s Corner.

            “Where are you, Draco?” Elder’s voice had moved a little, and again Draco heard the grunt that marked Harry’s presence. “I call you that, you see, instead of Malfoy, because you have no right to the name Malfoy anymore. Your parents are moving on, forgetting you, becoming Light wizards. They deserve to have an unmarred past and name.”

            “I’m sure Harry will let me take up Potter as a last name if I wish,” Draco said lightly, and touched his wand to the glass of the paperweight. It opened with a simple Peeling Charm, and he took out the hand. It clenched down briefly on his fingers, then opened and began to thrum. Draco nodded and cast other spells over it, Dark spells, silent spells, more spells from the books that his parents had owned.

            It suits me that their library should help me defeat someone they sent to destroy me.

            Draco smiled. The smile had little joy. He didn’t think that he would ever associate much joy with his memories of his parents ever again, now that they were set against him and might already have cast the spells that would allow them to forget. But what he had was his, the heritage of his mind and hands, and he would use it.

            “Draco?” Elder was dragging Harry with him by the arm now, Draco knew, and another spark of light marked the tip of his wand. “You should know there is no possibility that your lover will survive to give you his name.”

            Draco nodded. Of course Elder would say that. It was true, and besides, Elder was enough of an Auror to have noticed how threats to his partner would enrage him.

            But Draco had descended so far into that crystal state of mind that he felt like the glass that had encircled the paperweight. He picked up the mummified hand and held it lightly between his. The hand opened and closed into a fist, and Draco found himself stroking the back of it, laughing in something like joy.

            “Draco?” Elder had moved so that he now stood by Warren’s desk. “You don’t know how it pains me to have to end the life of a man who was once a powerful Light wizard, but I will do it if you don’t reveal yourself now.”

            “All right,” Draco said mildly. He touched his heart, and his forehead, and felt both heart and mind clear. He had come this far. He could kill without remorse now, and he thought that was the way it needed to be done. Elder would never listen to reason, or any attempt to explain how he had been tricked. Draco had tried. “I’ll give myself up as long as you show me that Harry is still alive first.”

            “I’m going to kill him immediately after you’re dead, but all right,” Elder said, and then another glow of light, one that Draco looked into this time, showed Elder with his burning arm looped around Harry’s neck. “Does this satisfy you?”

            You would make a horrid hostage negotiator, Draco thought, and nodded. “All right,” he said, and ended the charm that made his voice seem to come from every direction. Then another Finite, a more powerful one, ended the Darkness Hex and showed how close they were standing to each other.

            Elder looked at him, and there was a faint smile on his face, more in his eyes than on his lips. He shook his head a little. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” he whispered. “Thinking to murder me by flinging something at my head? Didn’t you know how easy it would be for me to avoid that?”

            “I didn’t think to murder you,” Draco said, and smiled at him. “Not exactly.” He bent down to the mummified hand, whispered, “Auror Elder,” and let it fly.

            The hand soared across the air between them. Harry leaned his head back, but he needn’t have feared, since there was only one victim named Auror Elder in the room. The hand closed around Elder’s throat and began to squeeze.

            Elder cried out in the moments before his air became too faint for him to speak, and he began to claw at the hand. Harry ducked out of his grip and raced across the office to Draco. Draco caught him close, kissing him once and looking him over for wounds, before he tucked Harry to his side so they could watch.

            The spells Draco had used weren’t pure necromancy, which he didn’t have Macgeorge’s gift for, but a combination of Dark hexes that were more potent yet when they did mingle with the necromancy on the mummified hand. His parents’ books had been full of spells like that, supposedly innocent in themselves, but deadly when they were mixed with some other kind of magic.

            And it was that mixture which was killing Elder now.

            Draco stood there and watched as the hand strangled Elder, the fingers curling around his throat and cutting off any chance that he could use his voice to end the torment. Of course, Elder might still have managed nonverbal magic, although Draco had never noticed that he had any particular gift for it. But it was a little hard to concentrate on a spell, nonverbal or not, when something was choking off your air that persistently.

            Elder’s own hands rose and pawed. His wand trembled for a second as though he would get it under the dry skin of the hand choking him and pry it off. Draco cast a Disarming Charm. The wand soared across to him. He slid it into Harry’s hand, and went on watching Elder die.

            “Draco.”

            That was Harry’s voice, low, close to his ears, and hoarse in a way that made Draco sure he knew what was coming next, although he tightened his shoulders against it. “What?” he whispered, not taking his eyes from Elder.

            “We can’t just let him die like this. Watch him die.” Harry shook his head and lifted his wand, as Draco saw from the corner of his eye. “We can kill him in battle, the same way that we did with the twisted to defend our own lives, but not in cold blood.”

            “What happens if he survives?” Draco whispered, just barely moving his own lips. He didn’t have to speak louder than that. His words filled the office, and Harry hesitated, looking at him. “What will he do next, in his conviction that he deserves to be able to kill me and my parents deserve to be able to put me aside? Do you think he’ll stop? This is self-defense. It just takes a little longer.”

            Harry closed his eyes and exhaled. Draco thought he could feel the balance of Harry’s mind wavering, tipping, not between madness and sanity, but between love for Draco and loyalty to the law. Draco caught his hand and stood there with him, in silence, not saying anything. He wouldn’t try to stop Harry, but—

            Harry said, “Finite Incantatem,” in a voice like thunder, and aimed his wand at the mummified hand.

            The fingers spasmed open, and it dropped to the floor. Draco watched it, and said nothing, although his heartbeat was painful in his ears.

            Elder staggered a few steps, coughing. His hands went up to his throat, massaging, and he winced as he touched the bruises. Draco thought of the way his voice would come out, the thickness in the back of it, and tried to think to himself that he was satisfied with that as a punishment.

            But he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. His mouth ran with bile, and he licked his lips, shaking his head.

            “You dared to do that,” Elder whispered, and he was looking at Draco. Draco lifted his wand, although his wrist ached with weariness. He had come up with the perfect way to kill Elder, one that would be blamed on a necromantic artifact gone out of control, rather than on him. Why couldn’t Harry leave it alone?

            It hadn’t changed things. Elder nodded to Harry, said, “I suppose even a Dark wizard can have a moment of conscience,” and focused on Draco again, reaching towards his stolen wand with trembling fingers. Draco clutched it tighter.

            “I saved your life,” Harry said. “I claim the life-debt. What I want is for you to leave Draco alone.”

            Draco stared at him. That was an unexpectedly clever twist of the idea, and not something he would have thought Harry had come up with at all. Perhaps he would be forced to respect Harry’s knowledge of pure-blood customs.

            Elder laughed dryly. “I don’t respect any custom or institution which has been used to shelter Dark wizards,” he whispered. Already his voice was growing stronger, and although he didn’t have his wand, the look of implacable hatred that he turned on Draco still made Draco chill and heat at the same time. “Which life-debts have been. If you’ll stand out of the way, Auror Potter, then I’ll arrest you in a little while.”

            “What for?” Harry’s voice was hushed. Draco wondered if it was in awe at Elder’s stupidity. God knew that he felt rather that way.

            “Because you used Dark magic in the skull-house,” Elder said, his voice near-pitying as he glanced at Harry and then away. “You didn’t think that you were going to get away with something like that, did you?”

            “I thought—I thought you might give more consideration to someone who saved your life.” Harry sounded a little dazed.

            Elder nodded. “Understandable, but not likely in this case, Potter. You’re still trying to shelter a partner who’s murdered multiple people and whose parents want to be rid of him. For the sake of Light wizards trying to start lives of their own, if nothing else, he has to die.” He moved another step forwards.

            “How can you kill him?” Harry demanded, turning so that he stood between Draco and Elder. “You don’t have a wand.”

            Elder’s arm began to glow with light. “My gift will help,” he said. His eyes had found Draco’s, and he didn’t intend to look away, or at least Draco thought that was the meaning of his glance, as long as they were both alive. “Please clear out of the way, Auror Potter. I would prefer not to implicate you in either self-defense or defense of a Dark wizard.”

            Harry shut his eyes. “Draco,” he said. “You know that I love you.”

            Draco would have liked to snap something about how he would have appreciated the sentiment more if it didn’t sound like Harry was about to choose between him and Elder, but Elder interrupted first. “That is another mistake, Auror Potter. Dark wizards are incapable of love. You must not mistake what he says and does for the behavior of someone in love.”

            Draco wanted to destroy him. The desire held him still where he stood, because he couldn’t comprehend how badly he wanted to hurt Elder. There were many things he might have said, many he might have done, and still his body flamed with terrible and pure hatred.

            “I’m sorry for interfering,” Harry went on in a low voice. “I still wanted him to die humanely, not in a bloodthirsty way, but I should have remembered who we were dealing with.”

            The light had made its way along both Elder’s arms by now. He raised them and shook his head. “You think you have Dark gifts,” he said. “I’ve learned about both of them, what they are and what they did. You know that you won’t be able to stop me. They’re defensive. The Light has succeeded in granting me a gift that is offensive, perfectly matched to yours and more powerful.”

            “The Light,” Draco said, and he didn’t recognize his own voice, so deep had it become. “And you think that you were assigned to the Socrates Corps by accident, Elder?”

            “I was assigned because your former parents wanted me to get close to you and remove you,” Elder said. “No other reason.” His gaze was unwavering, his arms lifted as though to gesture flame and light down on him and Harry.

            “You fit in,” Draco said. “Because that gift you call Light is the equivalent of Nicolette’s necromancy, and my ability to sense Dark magic, and Harry’s visions. That gift is a flaw, you idiot. You’re on the verge of being twisted, the same way we are.”

            Elder went still, staring at him. And Draco took a step forwards, because in Elder’s own stillness Draco had seen the seeds of a way to destroy him more thoroughly than Macgeorge’s mummified hand would have.

            “Why do you think the Ministry hierarchy didn’t argue against you transferring into the Socrates Corps?” he asked, while Harry hovered behind him and said nothing. Draco hoped that he would continue to say nothing. He loved Harry, yes, but he had interfered enough in what was essentially a private conflict between Draco and Elder. “They didn’t all know your plan, and they wouldn’t all have agreed with it if they had. They let you go because you’re flawed. You’re on the edge of sanity. Sometimes that happens to the rest of us.” He let the memory of becoming twisted under the pressure of Healer Alto’s flaw flood his mind, and linger in the back of his eyes as he looked at Elder. “You just don’t know it.”

            “You can’t be sure of that.” Elder’s lips were drawn back from his lips. “I’ve never studied the Dark Arts—”

            “But you knew enough of them to create Dark magic in hospital that I felt,” Draco said, and reached towards the Mark on his left arm. “Does that sound like the action of an innocent man? Does anything that you’ve come up with so far sound innocent? Or does it sound like the claims of a Dark wizard trying frantically to justify why he isn’t insane or Dark?”

            Elder fell back a step. Draco hadn’t expected that tactic to work so well, so fast, but now that it had, he wasn’t about to give it up, either. He pressed forwards, dropping his voice to a hiss.

            “That’s the way it begins, the process of becoming a twisted. You start to think that everything you did is natural and justified. We’ve hunted a twisted who was convinced that people randomly stopped being her friends and turned on her, because she didn’t know that her flaw was turning other people into twisted. We’ve hunted a man who thought he was justified to cast other people into comas, because that would somehow be better than living with their flaws. He was like you, in fact,” Draco said, and moved closer and closer, while Elder cowered into a corner. “He thought he was justified in destroying other people, other twisted, the ones most like him. The only idea that came to him was that, well, why not? The world shouldn’t be polluted with their presence. But he was mad all the same.”

            “I cannot be mad.” Elder had stopped retreating and stood with his arms folded, glowing with the light of his flaw.

            “Because you think you aren’t? Only those who are absolutely convinced that they’re sane are mad.” Draco reached for his left sleeve, never taking his eyes from Elder. This was the moment, the moment when he knew that his means of pressing Elder would stand or fall. “Then look at my Mark, at a moment when the only magic in this room is your own.”

            He turned his left arm towards Elder so that there was no mistaking it, and pulled his sleeve back.

            Elder stared. Then he shut his eyes and flung his hand over them.

            Draco looked down to see the Mark looking sorer and more irritated than ever. That might have been with its exposure to the soul-stealing spell and the magic he had used on the mummified hand as much as anything else, but Elder didn’t know that.

            Draco lowered his arm and smiled at Elder. “Dark wizard,” he whispered.

            Elder screamed. Draco started. He had hoped for this, in some ways, but it was still hard to hear the sound of someone’s soul shattering.

            Elder continued to scream, without break, without breath. He raised his own left arm, and Draco ducked back, ready to get between Elder and Harry and block any blast of fire that Elder might fling.

            But Elder thrust his hand into his mouth. That blocked the sound of the scream, but not enough. Draco saw the moment when his eyes flared, and then he shut them, and directed the fire blazing along his skin into his own throat.

            There was a burst of brief brilliance, as the light cut through Elder’s mouth and ears, eyelids and nostrils. Through the singe of burning hair, Draco watched in silence as his body slumped to the side, and his hand slid out of his mouth. He watched as the fire went out, and the scent of burning flesh grew worse.

            “What happened?” Harry whispered in the ensuing silence.

            Draco reached back and took his hand. “He burned his brains out.”

*

            SP777: I like them.

            Seiren: I think Nicolette and Rudie have been through so much that the choice to like them or not is entirely up to you.

            delia cerrano: There’s some more about them in the last chapter.

            Rina: But this is my torture series! *tortures them some more*
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A Reign of Silence