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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
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Chapter Nineteen—Speaking Parseltongue
            “She says that she’ll do it.”
            Harry took a long moment to look up from the letter they had received from Athright that morning, and when he did, he blinked at Draco with what Draco considered a distinct and unflattering lack of attention. “What? Who says she’ll do what?”
            Draco stifled a growl. Harry had agreed to come with him, had even suggested that he be the one to come with Draco. That meant that he still wanted to, and Draco would go on believing that until Harry himself said otherwise. “My mother,” he said patiently. “I told her that I was a representative of the organization that had proposed a solution to her problem—”
            “How do you know the Ministry did that?” Harry interrupted, tossing aside Athright’s letter and sitting up.
            “I don’t,” Draco said. “I mean, not as if I’d heard my mother say it. I’m doing this thing called assuming, which I also assume is familiar to you in several of its manifestations.”
            Harry rolled his eyes. “Don’t be a berk. I just want to know why you knew the Ministry contacted them first, instead of the other way around.”
            Draco gave them a remote smile. “How would they know about problems my mother was having, you mean? Actually, I assume she did write to them first, or was directed to them by someone she knew who had worked with the group using the altar in the Ministry. But it would have been the Ministry who contacted her to say that they had a solution. I doubt that she waited around there until they came up with the necklace and the mirrors and the right ceremony to do on the altar.”
            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know that much about rituals. I thought she might have, if it was important enough. How would they have figured out the right ritual, anyway?”
            “Samples of her blood, and hair,” Draco said. “Divining magic, which isn’t the same thing as that Divination bollocks you were learning in Hogwarts. And sacrifices that the altar would accept in return for leading them to the right answer.”
            Harry wrinkled his nose. “Sacrifices that don’t include blood?”
            Draco sighed. It was difficult to explain it to someone who hadn’t grown up with rituals, but he would try, because the less Harry understood, the more things would go wrong. “I mean that the altar would take the sacrifices of animals, and of human blood, other than the blood they were using to try and find a means of protection from my mother’s flaw. I’m sure that my parents paid the people who made the sacrifices well.”
            Harry understood now, from his expression, but he still looked a little sick. “And the Ministry—I mean, they would kill people?”
            “Most likely only animals,” Draco said. “That’s the safer course, and if you kill enough of them, it’s the same as killing a human.”
            “What do these rituals demand?” Harry said, kicking his heels hard against the bed. “The magical power that people are always saying is in the blood, or what?”
            “The pain,” Draco said reluctantly. “The more that someone can anticipate their death and the pain they’re going to suffer, the more powerful the sacrifice is. But animals can be afraid, too. That’s why an animal sacrifice can be equivalent, eventually.”
            Harry closed his eyes and stood up. “I don’t think I need to know more about this,” he said, and held out his hand for Narcissa’s letter.
            Draco surrendered it easily enough. It was a plain, spare letter, of the kind that his mother wrote to anyone she didn’t know well. It said simply that she would be interested in meeting with him to discuss a solution to her problem, and her former dealings with his organization had been satisfactory. There were times that Draco loved the empty language of formal letter-writing. Everyone was so coy in case the information fell into the wrong hands, like saying “organization” instead of “Ministry,” that it was easy to fit into the dialogue and take it over without knowing the specifics.
            Harry leaned back and handed the letter to Draco. “It sounds like it’ll work,” he said. “Will meeting in this abandoned Malfoy property alert them?”
            Draco shook his head. “That house used to be Unplottable, but my ancestors had to give it up a long time ago to pay a debt. The person they gave it to—a Crabbe, I think—let it fall into disrepair to show his contempt and that he was rich enough not to need Malfoy property. The Ministry knows about it, and anyone who’s pure-blood would know the story and also know about it. It makes a sensible place to meet.”
            Harry grunted. “All right. Do we have time to go before them and find a place for me to hide? Do we have time for you to practice your glamours?”
            Draco smiled and stood. “Yes to both. I intend to lead the way.” He paused, his eyes going back to Athright’s letter on the bed. “What were you reading that made you so upset? She didn’t really send us any new information, did she?”
            Harry sighed. “No. Just more confirmation that the Ministry was probably involved in these experiments to create twisted. It’s easy to find evidence once you know what you’re looking for.” He rubbed his mouth. “It just makes me sick, to know that I was working for and believing in an organization that could do things like that.”
            Draco patted his shoulder. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that the wizarding world was just like that, that someone would use Dark Arts as long as they were there to be used, and so any organization that Harry could have worked for would do the same. But Harry didn’t need to hear that right now. “Come on. The more we can do to combat this kind of thing and save some twisted, the less useless our years with the Ministry need to be.”
*
            Harry looked around the courtyard of the deserted manor, and shuddered. It was a more open place than Malfoy Manor, and really didn’t look much like it, since it was built of dark stone instead of the marble that seemed to be everywhere there. And time had broken into the walls and laid them open to the sky. There were bare rooms and huge windows with branches growing through them. It was hard to find it a threatening place for any of the same reasons that Harry had found Lucius and Narcissa’s home threatening during the war, or recently.
            But Harry could feel the Dark magic worked into and shining out of the stones. He thought anyone who’d been an Auror could. Draco had grimaced and clasped his left arm the instant he stepped through the arched entranceway. His flaw was sensing Dark magic as a tingle or burn in his Mark. Harry thought the effect had diminished somewhat, or Draco would have started screaming minutes ago, but it still couldn’t be pleasant.
            Harry, right now, was considering a suitable hiding place—one where his magic wouldn’t give him away, and one where he didn’t have to constantly flinch and jump every time something of the power these stones had been soaked in hurt him.
            “What about here?” Draco walked up behind Harry and pointed over his shoulder at a far corner of the courtyard. Harry was still having a hard time telling if this place had been a garden or just the approach to the house, but it was walled on all sides and the oaks that had broken the stones grew overhead, their branches arching, so it was a wild version of a garden now. The place Draco had pointed at was next to the arched doorway, in a pool of shadow where the branches trailed on the ground.
            Harry stepped towards it, then froze and shook his head. It was like wading into cold water. “No. Absolutely not.”
            “Why not?” Draco controlled the snap in his voice, which was all that Harry could ask for. Their perceptions must be giving them completely different answers. “You know that there’s nothing there that can harm you. I promise, all traces of Malfoy wards faded a long time ago. I would never have suggested coming here if there was something that could hurt you.”
            The impatience in his voice made Harry wince, but he still couldn’t bring himself to move forwards. “There was—something there,” he said. “Something died there, or got killed there, I don’t know which. Maybe one of those sacrifices of pain and blood that you talked about there with the altar.”
            Draco didn’t answer. Harry turned to look at him, and saw Draco studying him with narrowed eyes. He turned from the corner under the tree back to Harry, and then murmured, “I didn’t know that your flaw included seeing deaths from the past, now.”
            Harry sighed. “It doesn’t. I just—think some very powerful Dark magic took place there, and I don’t want to be there, the same reason you wouldn’t want to be in a room that had been the site of a murder.”
            “Almost every room in the Manor could fit that designation, after the war,” Draco muttered, but held his hand up when Harry would have opened his mouth to protest. “Yes, Harry. I know that you have different experiences. Don’t hide there, then. We’ll find somewhere else for you to fit.”
            Harry turned around in a slow circle, and then nodded. “What about that?” He pointed to a clump of tall grass gathered around the base of a ruined fountain. The figure in the center of the fountain was vague, but Harry thought he could make out raised wings and an opened beak, which meant a bird of some kind. At least it didn’t give him the same feeling of cold, Dark magic that almost everything else in the garden did.
            Draco shrugged. “As long as you keep up spells that will blend you into the grass, it should be fine.”
            Harry nodded again and dropped to his hands and knees to explore the clump of grass, and make sure that nothing was hiding in there that would make the experience too unpleasant to be going on with. The grass revealed nothing but a few scuttling ants and one frightened bird to his patting hands, though. He turned around on his knees, stretched out, and cast the glamour that would make his clothes and face match the grass.
            Draco watched him, nodding himself when the glamour made Harry assume the right color and consistency. “Good. You can even move around as much as you want, and I don’t think they’ll notice. You know how to cast the glamour of a bird flying up, if you need to, to explain any sound?”
            “Yes,” Harry said, and tapped his fingers on the stones. “Speaking of which, they’ll probably be here soon. Shouldn’t you put on your glamours?”
            Draco shrugged, but held his wand up to his face. “I did put up a perimeter ward that would alert me to anyone Apparating in nearby, and I doubt they would Apparate directly into the house, anyway. They would want to investigate from a distance, the way we did, and see where we’ve already arranged ourselves.”
            But his face began to change the moment he finished speaking, so at least Harry didn’t need to scold him for that. His hair thinned and receded, and turned a sandy-brown color so unremarkable that Harry thought there were probably two thousand wizards in Britain with it. His eyes narrowed and the angles of his face became smaller, and a few pimples popped out here and there.
            “Don’t you think that’s overdoing it?” Harry asked.
            Draco ignored him, but the pimples got smaller, and his eyes turned blue from their distinct, clear grey. Then he went over to look at himself in the water that remained at the bottom of the fountain basin, murmuring a last-minute series of instructions to Harry.
            “Watch her scar as much as you can, but don’t reveal yourself. Don’t try to do anything with my father. If the worst comes to the worst, then I’m going to let you handle my mother and her flaw. I’ll take care of my father.”
            Harry nodded. He probably would have suggested them both going up against Lucius if Lucius hadn’t had Harry’s curse on him that made it impossible for him to use harmful spells. Lucius was the only one they knew was sane, and Draco had described well how desperate he would get once he realized they were using spells to influence Narcissa.
            But as it was, Harry would trust to Draco’s dueling skills and Auror training.
            “Make sure that when you start hissing, you’re prepared for the attack to start, too.” Draco turned and stared at him. “I’m going to try and convince them with the stone I enchanted to look like the altar, but even if I do, they might not submit to all the spells that I’ll need for the fake ritual.”
            Harry nodded again. He knew that this was the heart of Draco’s plan: tempting the Malfoys with the thought that there was another ritual to cure Narcissa, although they’d left the real altar at Cuthbert’s Corner and brought a fake one here. If they could entrap his mother into falling asleep or lying down on the fake altar, Draco thought, then they might be able to keep her still long enough for Harry to do something with Parseltongue, or at least pour Veritaserum down her throat and figure out what had happened with the mirrors and the necklace.
            All of that would depend on lulling the Malfoys’ suspicions and keeping Lucius out of the picture, of course.
            Draco cast another quiet charm that would prevent any use of Hominem revelo or other spells to detect a hiding person, and then turned and faced the arched entrance, poised dramatically in the middle of the courtyard. Harry settled back to wait, making sure the grass didn’t rustle around him.
*
            Draco made himself not pace back and forth, because if his parents did manage to evade the wards and arrived suddenly, then they would be suspicious of anyone so nervous. He stood in front of the makeshift altar and locked his hands in front of himself instead, forcing relaxation on muscles that didn’t want to relax.
            This was risky, he knew that. But he couldn’t come up with a plan that had less risk but was also going to give them what they wanted. All right, what he wanted, and needed, to do. He doubted that his mother was that important to Harry, except as someone who mattered to Draco.
            Draco could remember lessons that his father had given him about keeping his face under control, his breathing, the nervous motions of his hands that Draco had been prone to when he was a child. It wasn’t really the other children or even the other pure-blood families that Lucius invested so much in keeping secrets from. But he thought Draco would go into politics someday, and he told Draco again and again that fortunes or political influence could be won or lost if you made someone suspicious at the wrong time. You didn’t want to make them nervous because you yourself were fluttery or upset when you had no reason to be.
            The atmosphere of this place helped him to relax, once he was used to the constant stinging on his left arm. There had once been people here who would risk everything to help their family, and although it hadn’t belonged to his ancestors for centuries, it was still something that had. Not something completely alien.
            Whether or not his parents remembered the blood bonds that connected them, Draco was starting to think what mattered was that he remembered them.
            He felt the tingle of the wards travel through his body like a wave when they Apparated in. Draco straightened at once and assumed the ancient, formal expression that they would probably expect from an expert in magical rituals. He thought he heard Harry snicker in the grass nearby, but he ignored that. What mattered was that his parents could believe in him in this guise, not Harry.
            And he knew Harry would keep quiet when it mattered.
            They came forwards with a glow of spells around them; Draco could tell that from the wards at first, and then from the sight of the sparks and lights dancing in front of their steps. He stood still with his hands clasped in the sleeves of his robes, and bowed only when they were directly in front of the arched entrance that led into this courtyard. He saw his father stop Narcissa with a hand on her arm.
            His mother looked at Draco with flat eyes, or eyes that were trying to appear flat. Draco could see the distant quiver at the corners of them, and the way she turned her head to the side a second later, holding up her hand as if to block Draco’s gaze.
            Lucius immediately stepped in front of her, wand out and eyes on Draco.
            Draco avoided biting his lip. Yes, the way his father was trying to protect his mother was similar to the way that Draco would try to protect Harry in the same situation, but that didn’t mean he could start feeling too much sympathy for them. He stared past them instead, pretending not to notice their weakness.
            Slowly, Lucius came forwards. Narcissa walked behind him, sometimes touching his shoulder, sometimes holding onto the sleeve of his robe. Lucius practically stalked through the gate, daring Draco to say something. Draco held his tongue, bowing only when both of them came out from beneath the arch’s shadow into sunlight.
            “You understand that we have a right to be suspicious, Mr. Verger.” Lucius’s voice held no inflection. That was meant, Draco knew, to tell him that he knew Verger wasn’t Draco’s real name.
            Draco didn’t care. It wasn’t as though he intended to ever use the pseudonym again. He smiled without passion and said, “Yes, you do. But I hope that you will listen to me when I tell you about the procedure I have discovered that might relieve Mrs. Malfoy’s…troubles.”
            Lucius sneered at him, but turned and put his hand on Narcissa’s shoulder, whispering to her. Narcissa nodded jerkily. Her hand rose to touch the scar on the side of her neck.
            Draco had his chance to study it closely for the first time, and realized that Harry might have been right about the scar being older than the explosion of the necklace. It didn’t look like a burn, or like something heavy and jagged had cut into Narcissa’s skin. It looked like the slice of a blade, and one that had been healed deliberately so as to leave a scar.
            Which, of course, left Draco wondering what the hell had happened and when, without coming closer to an answer.
            Lucius turned back to him and said, “My wife would like an exact explanation of the procedure that you claim can relieve her troubles.”
            Draco nodded seriously. He hadn’t come this far without being able to invent an explanation based on magical theory that would sound plausible, even if it was complete bollocks. He stepped aside a little, as if introducing the fake altar behind him gently to their notice, and said, “You will know that there are rituals that depend on the accumulation of blood and pain in order to work successfully?”
            Lucius only nodded. Narcissa’s eyes flicked to the altar, and then back to Draco. Draco couldn’t tell if there was trust in them or not. He forced himself to proceed without responding to the little gesture.
            “I have discovered that a certain kind of ritual may work, backwards,” Draco said, “with the use of pleasure and saliva instead.”
            Lucius straightened. Draco kept himself from smiling, but bowed again. Yes, he had thought that would catch his father’s attention. It was nonsense, but it sounded like educated nonsense, and Lucius was desperate enough to grasp at any possibility.
            “Why saliva?” Lucius asked, with a glance back at Narcissa as if to ask whether she wanted to add anything. She only stood there, though, her hands clasped in front of her and trembling a little, her eyes fixed on Draco, so Lucius faced him, too. “Why not some other liquid from the body? Why not blood itself, which is widely acknowledged as the most powerful magical material that the human body can produce?”
            Draco waved his hand. “This is a ritual of the via negative, Mr. Malfoy, unbinding instead of binding power and constructions together. If I used blood, it would make the ritual too powerful, and it has the potential to destroy the central object’s magical core in that case.” More nonsense, but Lucius was too used to reading grimoires and knowing things that other people didn’t; he could accept that Draco might have read something that would make that make sense, too. “Instead, saliva is the right consistency, with the thinness, and it comes from the mouth, making a passage for the food that is often a component of the ritual. I presume that your wife would not want to indulge in other sources of pleasure in front of someone else, so having her eat something that she likes is the easiest way to go about this ritual.”
            For a moment, his father gripped his wand, which Draco had anticipated. He had to admit it made him feel a little sick to talk about his own mother having “pleasure” in front of someone else, but it was part of his plan to get her free, and if it worked, then he would watch his parents have sex, if it came down to that.
            Even if he really didn’t want to.
            His father turned back to his mother and said something else, so quietly that Draco knew there would be no point in trying to listen. He turned slightly aside as if bored instead and studied the walls, the grass in the garden, the arching trees that threw down shadows that dappled the ground and sometimes made his parents’ faces hard to focus on.
            “We will try it.”
            Draco turned back to Lucius and nodded. “Then Mrs. Malfoy is willing to lie down on the altar and let me cast the measuring spells?”
            “Measuring spells?” Lucius was gripping his wand again.
            Draco made a bored gesture. “I need to cast a certain series of charms that will take the place of the information about one usually derived from the blood. Even spilling some blood would be too powerful and disrupt the delicate balance of the ritual, hence the need for these charms instead. If Mrs. Malfoy lies down on the altar, I can cast them better, since I already know the magical properties of the altar and won’t mix them up with hers.”

            One more hesitation. Draco knew without speaking it would be the last time. He put his hand lightly on his wand. Harry, be ready. This will be the best chance you have to examine her scar and use Parseltongue if you need to.
            Finally, his mother came forwards, floating like a ghost, and stretched out on the altar. Draco rearranged her so her legs were side by side but her arms spread out above her head, and her hair flowing and draped over her shoulders. The more fussing he did, the more likely his parents were to accept this as a variation of an authentic ritual.
            “Now,” he said, and drew his wand to cast some harmless charms.
            And Harry began to hiss from the grass.
*
            Sasunarufan13: Harry doesn’t know why Narcissa’s scar reacted that way, either, but presumably Narcissa’s flaw doesn’t include understanding Parseltongue, because then she would probably understand what he was saying to the scar when she last saw him.
            SP777: Well, does excitement count as a casualty?
            I don’t really know whether Draco’s parents would let him get close again. I do know that Draco wants to help them this one last time, and then he would be okay knowing they were okay.
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity