Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Corybantes	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 9752 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter; that belongs to J. K. Rowling. I am making no money from this fic.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
- 3
Thank you for all the reviews!

Chapter
Two�Appearances and Memories

�� The room
that Keatson had died in was ordinary enough, with a couch in the middle of a
sea of carpet that made Harry grimace. He didn�t understand why you would want a carpet that felt as if you could
sleep on it. Carpets and beds were separate things with separate purposes.

�� Although the purposes of things are perhaps
less sharply defined here than elsewhere.

�� He stood in
the doorway and spent a few minutes looking in every direction, checking for
obvious clues such as spilled blood or the lingering presence of Dark magic.
There was nothing. They had cleaned the room because they needed it for other
people. Of course they had. That was typical of the stupidity that Harry was
coming to expect from Malfoy and his employees.

�� He drew his
wand and whispered an incantation that should let him detect the spell-nets. It
would make them gleam with white light that only Harry would be able to see.

�� The next
moment, he was almost blinded. There were spell-nets in every direction,
threading under the ridiculous carpet, through the walls, through the material
of the couch, and especially concentrated in the corners where walls met
ceiling.

�� That would
make sense, Harry thought as he rubbed his jaw. Few people spent much time
peering into those corners, unless they were the sort who found spiderwebs
intolerable and must check for their presence in every new room.

�� Lord
Malfoy said that you wanted to speak with me. Auror Potter.�

�� Harry had
to swallow, hard, to keep from bursting into laughter at the silly title Malfoy
made his employees call him. That wouldn�t earn him Shadow�s sympathy, and he
needed her sympathy, or at least her cooperation, in order to make sense of
what the evidence was telling him. He turned around and gave her a small smile.
The sapphire eyes and small teeth and other things, when he was braced for
them, weren�t so surprising. �Yes. I understand that you were the one to
approach the room and call for Keatson to show himself when ten minutes past
his deadline had elapsed.�

�� Shadow
nodded. She seemed reluctant to come close to him, as if Harry was the one who
had unknown Dark magic implanted in his body. �Yes, sir. The rooms never fail to work like that, so I knew
something was wrong right away. But it made sense once I understood it. The
rooms are designed to eject living people who overstay their welcome. They
don�t get rid of objects, and the corpse was just another object to it.�

�� Harry made
a soft interested noise in the back of his throat, another possibility for the
murder occurring to him. �Could someone else have brought in an object and left
it concealed in the room, to kill Keatson when he arrived?�

�� Shadow gave
him a blank look, which she was good at with gems for eyes. �Everyone who
enters the club is searched for weapons, sir.�

�� What if it
was something that didn�t look like a weapon?� Harry had seen plenty of things
during his career as an Auror that fit that category, but had turned out to be
deadly to someone all the same.

�� We would
still find it, sir, and ask that person what he was doing with it.� Shadow
looked disapproving.

�� I�d like a
list of the people who used this room before Keatson.� Harry turned around to
pace through the room, suffering only a slight qualm about turning his back on
Shadow. He would have been far more uneasy if Malfoy was still with him, but
�club business� had called him away. �It�s not beyond the realms of possibility
that someone managed to leave something here.�

�� But then
they would have to have access to the club�s roster of clients,� Shadow said.
Harry could hear her shuffling back and forth. Generalized nervousness, or is she fearful I might find something here
that she doesn�t want me to know about? �No one has access to that except
Lord Malfoy and the employees of the club�and even us, not until right before
we�re scheduled to bring someone to a room. Someone who brought and left a
weapon couldn�t have known that it
was Keatson they were going to kill.�

�� Hmmm.�
Harry didn�t want to expose all his theories at once, and he thought he had
given Shadow quite enough to carry back to Malfoy, but even if what she said
was true, there were explanations and possibilities. One was that the killer
had been a Dark wizard who didn�t care whom he killed, as long as someone died;
Harry had met people like that, too. The second was that the security around
the list wasn�t as tight as Shadow thought it was and someone had managed to
get hold of it.

�� Shadow did
some more fidgeting while Harry examined the place on the floor they had
already told him the body was found. Yes, all trace of blood was gone. Harry
rolled his eyes. Kingsley better let me
have a long holiday after this.

�� He already
knew what would happen if he really asked for a holiday, of course. Kingsley
would tell him that no one could handle cases like he could, with the perfect
combination of swiftness, skill, and discretion, and herd him gently back into
doing his job. Harry did get to relax occasionally, but only when most of the
criminals in Britain decided to take a simultaneous nap.

�� While
seemingly staring intently at the floor, he conjured a mirror in his palm so
that he could see what Shadow was doing without looking over his shoulder. She
was staring in another direction, bored.

�� Harry
hissed the spell he had already decided he needed to use under his breath. A
sharp-edged wind, turned sideways, slashed a scale from Shadow�s hand and
fluttered it over to him. Harry left it floating beside him, within the shadow
of his robe, for now. He didn�t want to touch it and possibly contaminate it.
Some of the alterations that people made to their bodies with transformational
magic were notoriously fragile.

�� Did you
feel a bit of a draft in here?� Shadow asked. The mirror showed her rubbing her
wrist. The wound wouldn�t begin to pain her until hours later, and by then
Harry would be gone.

�� Harry
glanced back at her curiously and shook his head. It wasn�t hard to conceal a
victorious smile. He had the scale now, and he could easily compare it to the
scale that had been under Keatson�s fingernails and see if it was the same. It
certainly looked the same.

�� Hmmm.�
Shadow sighed and stared at the floor.

�� You don�t
seem overly concerned about what happened here,� Harry noted, standing up and
turning around to face her. �Why is that?�

�� Shadow
hunched her shoulders and glared at him. Her forked tongue flickered out,
accompanied by another small plume of flame. Harry would enjoy charging her
with multiple crimes if it turned out that she was the murderer. �The magic
used in the rooms is complex and new,� she said stiffly. �It isn�t such a
surprise that someone would die in one someday. I know that none of us caused
his death, so I�m more worried about the idea that you�ll decide we did and
shut us down.�

�� You didn�t
care about Keatson?� Harry let a sympathetic lilt enter his voice. Keatson had
seemed the kind of man who would be hard for a woman to care about, if all he
wanted was their worship.

�� He was a
client,� Shadow said. �I�m sorry he�s dead, but I�m more concerned about the
way it affects Corybantes.�

�� You weren�t acting concerned, Harry
thought, but decided to let it go for now. Shadow could be an innocent person
who just didn�t think about the way her actions and words made her appear�and
Harry knew plenty of them�or she might have something to hide. If so, Harry
didn�t want her to think he had any reason to suspect her. He nodded and looked
around the room one more time before he said, �I think I�m done here.�

�� He stepped
out, and Shadow shut the door behind him. Then she caught his hand. Harry held
still, settling for a raised eyebrow. He did have to wonder if Corybantes had
trained its employees in a special wrist-grasping program.

�� We�ve
heard a lot about you,� Shadow said. �I think that we all knew you would walk
through our doors someday.�

�� We being the employees of Corybantes,
Harry translated to himself. He let his shoulders relax and his eyes grow
bright with curiosity. �Because you expected a death in one of those rooms
someday?�

�� Shadow
stamped her foot on the floor with frustration, which Harry hadn�t observed in
anyone above five years old. �No, that�s not what I meant. The source of our
knowledge about you��

�� That will
be all, Shadow.�

�� Malfoy�s
voice swept the corridor like a desolating breeze. Shadow froze, then bowed and
scurried away. Harry turned to face Malfoy, who leaned on the wall with his
arms folded and a disapproving scowl on his face, and kept his voice light,
though his mind was buzzing with the possibilities. �You don�t like your
employees gossiping with the Chosen One about his fame?�

�� Malfoy
ignored the question entirely, staring at him in a way that made Harry wonder
wearily why their hatred from Hogwarts had lasted for him. Then Malfoy said, in
a voice that sounded as if every word had been hammered out of bronze, �I think
gossip like that is terribly vulgar, yes, but that�s not why I intervened. I
know you have questions. I prefer that you ask them of me, and not Shadow.�

�� All
right,� Harry said. �The first one. If the fantasies are supposed to appear
from the mind of anyone who walks into a room, why didn�t your fantasies
appear? Or Shadow�s, when she took me here?� He jerked his head at the door of
the death room.

�� Malfoy gave
him a thin smile. �You ask one that isn�t any challenge to answer,� he said,
and he obviously wanted to make Harry feel that he had failed somehow. Harry
raised an eyebrow back. Malfoy dropped the smile and adopted the intense voice
again. Harry wished he knew why. �It would distract the clients if the
spell-nets reflected the fantasies of people who worked here, even if they only
did so for a short time until we could leave the room. Everyone in Corybantes
is keyed to the spell-nets so that their mental images don�t show up.�

�� Harry
nodded. �How sure are you that someone didn�t go into the room that Keatson
died in and leave a weapon there that could have slaughtered him?�

�� Sure.�

�� The tone of
that response gave Harry pause. Malfoy sounded as if he would have staked his
life on the answer. Harry was used to lies, but he had learned to detect truth
as well�or at least lies that someone believed in as the truth. If someone had
left a weapon in Keatson�s room to claim a random victim, Harry was sure it had
not happened with Malfoy�s knowledge.

�� Harry spent
a few moments studying him before he spoke again, trying to decide why Malfoy
unsettled him so. Yes, he had kept hold of a childish hatred that he should
have allowed to die out as the years advanced, but Harry had not been as polite
as he could have since he entered the club, either. And it was not as though
Harry had expected to be comfortable
here. Corybantes represented an indulgence that Harry found intolerable,
because it reminded him of the worst excesses of the Dark wizards he hunted.

�� Perhaps
that was it. He had to think of Malfoy the way he would think of a Dark wizard
while not being able to arrest him or show his scorn openly, the way he often
did. The tension between the two options was wearing at him.

�� But none of
that changed who Malfoy was as a person. None of that should make Harry less
able to do his job. Most of the problems he had with Malfoy were his problems. Harry couldn�t have
expected Malfoy to have matured into someone perfectly polite and reliable, who
shared his values, but he�d acted like that was a reasonable expectation.

�� Harry took
a deep breath and straightened, deliberately relaxing. It was Malfoy�s turn to
raise a brow, but Harry tried to keep his voice temperate as he said, �Can I
have that list of pseudonyms you promised?�

�� Malfoy�s
smile was a smidgen wider, this time. �Tell me why no fantasies came out of your
head when we went into the first room.�

�� Harry held
his temper sharply under control when it would have responded for him. Be polite even if he isn�t, he reminded
himself. This is the way you got your
reputation. You can�t decide what other people do, only what you do.

�� I learned
Occlumency,� he said calmly. �After several unsuccessful attempts, a bad case
convinced me that it was for the best if I could keep my thoughts caged. I have
my own fantasies, but I doubt your spell-nets could reach out and recruit
them.�

�� A bad case. Yes, that was one phrase for
the several days of torture he�d endured at the hands of Geoffrey Rosier, a
Legilimens who specialized in drowning people in their own thoughts. He had
made Harry believe that his skin was being flayed off him, that he was being
impaled, that he was turning into a swarm of insects, and that Ron and Hermione
had betrayed him. Harry had killed him by sheer luck, and worked grimly on his
Occlumency afterwards until he mastered it.

�� No one was
going to invade his head again without his say-so.

From that case, too, had come
Harry�s distaste for many of the kinds of indulgences that Corybantes offered.
Why would you want to walk into a
room and let your thoughts become real around you? There were monsters hidden
in the depths of the subconscious. Harry thought they were closer kin to the
fantasies than most people knew.

He looked up to find Malfoy
watching him with parted lips, his eyes soft and his face bright. Then he said,
�That�s an excellent reason, Potter. Thank you.�

�� Harry
blinked, a bit unnerved, and nodded. �Can I have the list, now?�

�� Yes. Of
course.� Malfoy turned around, and then paused. Harry waited, wondering if
Malfoy would demand another revelation from him. He would give it if he absolutely
had to�his job was more important than keeping Malfoy ignorant of him�but he
would choose his words with more care this time. He thought Malfoy had learned
some things from that last confession that Harry didn�t want him to know.

�� You know,
Potter,� Malfoy whispered, �not all the pleasures that we give our clients are
dark. Some people want violence and worship, but others simply want someone to
listen to them, or laugh with them, or cradle them in loving arms.�

�� Harry put a
bit of grim humor into his voice, because he had no other way to answer those
words. �Those are hardly the kinds of cases I�m likely to be called in about,
though, are they?�

�� Malfoy gave
a glance back at him. His eyes were brilliant with pity.

�� No,� he
said, �I reckon not.�

�� Then he
left to get the list, and left Harry feeling more open and exposed than he had
since the Rosier case.

*

�� How soon
do you think you�ll be able to give me an answer on the Corybantes case,
Harry?�

�� Harry
leaned back on his couch and gave a faint smile at Kingsley, whose face hovered
in his fire. The Minister looked grim and worn. He always looked like that,
though, and only the more grim if no immediate threat was in the offing, and so
Harry was not concerned. The day Kingsley showed up with a bright smile, he
would know to take out his wand, because Voldemort had come back from the dead
and possessed the Minister.

�� I can�t
estimate at this point,� Harry said. �I have a suspect, but it�s a suspect who
could have an innocent explanation. I have the suspicion of secrets in
Corybantes, but I don�t know that they�re the right kind of secrets.� The more
he thought about it, the more he thought Shadow had been about to reveal
something embarrassing to the club, rather than something incriminating, when
Malfoy interrupted her. Malfoy would already have sacked Shadow and turned her
over to the Aurors if he suspected her. �They�ve cleaned the death room, so
possible clues from the blood stain are gone. I did come to a tentative truce
with Malfoy, and he gave me a list of clients who indulge in the same kinds of
fantasies that possibly killed Keatson. Progress is going to be steady, but
slow.�

�� Kingsley
sighed. �I know, Harry, and I shouldn�t try to press you. I simply have several
well-connected Wizengamot members breathing down my neck on this one, and I�d
like it solved as soon as possible.�

�� I know,�
Harry said dryly. He had never understood why money and freedom to act seemed
to dispose people to be as decadent as possible, but arguing with it was like
trying to argue with gravity. �I�ll solve it, sir. I promise you that.�

�� Kingsley
gave a second martyred sigh that Harry grinned at. After so long in the same
business together, they�d become friends, and it didn�t hurt at all that the
horrible things Harry had seen during his cases and was silent on encouraged
him to not talk about other things.
The Harry Potter Kingsley had hired out of Hogwarts would never have been able
to keep his mouth shut about half the political secrets he knew now.

�� But Harry
wasn�t that Harry Potter anymore�sometimes to his own discontent and other
people�s, but once again, it couldn�t be helped.

�� Have you
thought of taking a holiday, Harry?�

�� Harry kept
from rolling his eyes, though the effort made his head ache. And this was
another part of the camaraderie he and Kingsley shared, proposing impossible
things that neither one of them could do.

�� You know
that you�re not serious, sir,� he said.

�� Well, no,�
Kingsley acknowledged, looking unrepentant. �But I still think it would be good
if you could make the gesture on occasion. Hermione sometimes comes by and
glares at me as if I were a slavedriver.�

�� Harry hid
his wince at the mention of Hermione�s name the same way he�d hidden the way he
wanted to roll his eyes. He still saw his best friends every week; he ate over
at their house when time permitted; he was little Hugo�s godfather.

�� But time
had put distance between them, time and Harry�s job. Ron had dropped out of
Auror training inside a year and started helping George with the joke shop.
Hermione thought that Harry should do something similar.

�� Being an
Auror has made you a harder person, Harry,� she�d told him a thousand times.
�And you don�t talk to us anymore.�

�� Harry had
tried to explain that he didn�t want to disturb their innocence with his
stories. Ron and Hermione still didn�t know much about what Dark magic could
do; their experiences in the war were the limits of their knowledge. Harry
didn�t want to see horror in their eyes that was associated with him, either because he had suffered that
horror or because he�d told them about it. He didn�t want them to start out of
nightmares the way he did, or see a mention of a spell in a book and know
exactly how it felt.

�� But
Hermione only glared at him when he said that and continued on complaining that
he could tell them anything. And Harry didn�t, and the gap that none of them
wanted to acknowledge went on growing.

�� Harry? Are
you listening to me? About that holiday��

�� I�m not
taking one yet,� Harry said, coming back to himself with a small jerk of his
head. He�d ignored Kingsley, and that was unacceptable. Kingsley had more to do
than he did, and he managed not to crack under the pressure. The least Harry
could do was bear up under the responsibilities that he had freely accepted. �When
I�ve finished the Corybantes case, maybe.
But don�t hold me to that.�

�� Kingsley
eyed him, then shook his head. �All right. Let me know the instant you need any help, any potions from the supply stores, any
backup��

�� I will.
Now, go get some sleep,� Harry said, congratulating himself on his timing as
Kingsley yawned.

�� Kingsley
gave him a dirty look, but said good night and closed the Floo connection.
Harry tucked his hands behind his neck and spent a moment watching the fire in
peaceful contemplation, wondering whether he should go to bed himself, or spend
some time looking over that list of pseudonyms Malfoy had given him.

�� In the end,
he did neither. He looked into the fire instead, watching the sparks that
leaped from ember to ember, listening as the wood popped and crackled, and let
his mind drift back to the greatest puzzle of the night.

�� Malfoy.

�� The more
distance Harry had from him, the more he wondered about him. The Malfoy he knew
had been fanatically concerned about purity, and not just with blood. He�d
wanted to escape from any taint of poverty, from having the wrong friends, from
political failure. Some of that he had no choice but to endure, but he�d tried.
Harry couldn�t imagine a person like that choosing a career like Corybantes.

�� Yes, he
knew that people had changed. But not many people turned so hard against their
former ideals.

�� Unless those were never really his ideals at
all, and you just thought they were.

�� Harry
nodded slowly. Yes, that was more likely. He had come to rely on his
perceptions in the last few years; if he hadn�t, he wouldn�t have survived. But
that didn�t mean that his perceptions had been as good when he was a Hogwarts
student.

�� Images of
Malfoy flashed through his mind. Hard training in the field had improved his
memory, and now speaking a single word or calling up an incantation or a
person�s name could give him so much information it was ridiculous. Harry coped
with the flood by sorting through it for the real gems, the images that would
give him a solid grasp on Malfoy instead of on his own prejudices.

�� There was
the way Malfoy had looked when Voldemort forced him to torture people.
Revolted, fainting with terror, but knowing that something worse would happen
if he tried to run away. That might have given him a disgust with and distrust
for reality, Harry supposed. He wouldn�t want to inflict real pain on people.
Fantasies, though, might be all right.

�� And they
would give him control of the situation, especially if the spell-nets were set
up the way he had told Harry, so that no one who came to the club and who might
look for blackmail material ever saw the images that thronged Malfoy�s subconscious.

�� There was
the way he had looked, or felt, when he clasped his arms around Harry�s stomach
and buried his face in his neck as they fled from the Fiendfyre. He had been
fully human in that moment, and Harry couldn�t think of him with quite as much
hatred as he had before.

�� And there
was the way he had tried so hard to solve the puzzle of the Vanishing Cabinet,
putting more effort into that than into his attempts to kill Dumbledore.

�� How much
would it please him to work out ways to please people, and answer wishes that
must have seemed unanswerable at first?

�� Harry
smiled. Yes, he could see some continuity between the present and the past
Malfoy if he was thinking it out correctly, and on that revelation, he would go
to bed.

�� He hadn�t
yet figured out why he was so interested, but he reckoned that he had to save
some revelations for tomorrow.

*

�� Alliandre:
Thanks. As you can see from this chapter, it�s because Draco�s the owner.

�� paigeey07:
Thanks!

�� Tessa:
Thanks! The whole thing should be 10 or 12 chapters.

�� Dezra:
Yeah, I think so. Harry in this story is much more thoughtful than my usual. He
did manage to work through some of his issues with Draco in this chapter.

�� polka dot: Malfoy
would probably widen his eyes innocently and say he�s only providing a service.

�� hieisdragoness18:
This. ;)

�� SP777: I
think the �slimy� and �creepy� comes in large part from Harry�s perspective.
Draco would have a different one, of course.

�� I�ll
probably still write �Blooming Narcissus� next, yes.

�� And I didn�t
mean for Draco to be dressed like that, but�

�� Byond_repair:
Thanks! Harry doesn�t think it�s so great, but then, he�s mostly watched people
acting out their fantasies on unwilling victims.

�� Tree802:
Thanks very much! The time between updates this time was longer than usually elapses,
but hopefully I can get this story on a more regular schedule now.

�� callistianstar:
Thank you so much! (For this and your other reviews). Poor Draco, he may have
let something slip there, but at least he can be satisfied that Harry quickly
came up with an alternative explanation that did not involve Draco wanting him.
- 1
- 2
- 3
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Corybantes