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Crimes of Passion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7423 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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<b>Part Two.In the Dark.</b>

            Draco sat in front of the fire with his eyes closed. Scorpius, who was on the other side of the room eating toast, sometimes asked him a question. Draco would grunt in response, and Scorpius seemed to have given up on getting answers; the only sounds Draco heard from him now were the crunch and the small pops as the house-elves Apparated in to gather up the crumbs that fell to the floor.

            Draco was thinking.

            And when he thought about it, he was quietly appalled at how many things he had taken for granted four years ago. He hadn't tried to question the two adolescents Potter had assaulted. He hadn't asked to speak to their Healers or the Aurors who arrested Potter--though since the press and the rest of the wizarding world never really knew what Potter had been accused of, Draco wasn't sure it had been a formal arrest. He hadn't gone to the Ministry and listened to Potter's testimony. He hadn't thrashed out all the details of any particular story and looked for gaps and inconsistencies, or, alternatively, the way that it linked up with details of Potter's behavior familiar to him.

            Why hadn't he?

            Unfortunately, that question was all too easy for him to answer. He had wanted to deny what had happened for as long as he could, and once he accepted the truth, he had wanted it to go away. Losing Potter had hurt enough. Scraping through all the evidence and dragging it into the light hadn't been something he could bear.

            Then. Draco thought he was rather stronger now, and energized by his encounter with Potter last night.

            A charm he had set to chime when the time of his meeting approached made its soft musical sound, and Draco stood up, nodding to Scorpius. "I'm off."

            "All right." Scorpius barely opened his eyes, apparently absorbed in the taste of his food. "Have a good time."

            Draco snorted silently to himself as he left the room. Scorpius had finished Hogwarts, and shown no interest in doing anything else after that, either as a career or to pass the time until he inherited the Manor. Well, Draco could hardly fault him; he hadn't shown any ambition, either, the year he was twenty-one. He had still been recovering from the war and adjusting to the changed world around him, so profound and shattering was the fall from prestige into--

            Draco frowned thoughtfully as he prepared to Apparate to the Ministry. Where were they now, the Malfoys? No one was indifferent to them after Draco's two decades of solid work, but he wasn't sure that he could call on the level of respect and fear that his father had been able to before the war, either. It might be that this was their middle age, their middlingness, their centrism.

            Draco shrugged as he watched the world dissolve around him. Well, it didn't much matter, and he had to focus on the goal ahead of him now, the one that was taking him away from the house. He had kept it silent as much out of pride as anything else; if it was futile, he didn't want anyone to know.

            For the first time since the organization began, Draco was going to miss a meeting of the United Potions Masters of Great Britain. He was going to the Ministry instead, to follow up on the ancient tale of the fall of a hero.

*

            "I'm afraid that I can't let you into the Archives, Mr. Malfoy." The official facing him offered him a polite, blank smile. She was someone too young to have been at Hogwarts with him, but the right age to have grown up hearing his father's name as one of the villains'.

            Draco nodded peacefully and took a vial from his robe. "Excuse me," he said. "Just a draught that I need to take for a weak heart."

            Of course it wasn't, but when he opened it, the fumes were invisible and only affected the person the vial was aimed at. They swirled lazily across the air between them and into the official's nostrils. She blinked hard, twice, then sat down and stared into nothingness with an ecstatic expression. A moment later, she was snoring.

            Draco snorted and slipped smoothly past her into the entrance of the Archives. The potion was his own invention, one that would give the person who sniffed it a few hours of sleep they wouldn't remember afterwards. Perfectly harmless and legal, though also, incidentally, untraceable.

            And if it also affected her memory before the sleep, so that she didn't remember him standing there to be admitted, that was no problem.

            The door shut behind him, and Draco started to murmur a LumosCharm, but instead nearly choked on his tongue as the lights sprang up all around him, from flameless lamps that sat within alcoves, on shelves, on the floor, and under the desks that stood two to a side. Draco spun in place, trying to see the faint, marvelous threads of magic that must surely control the lamps, but couldn't. The enchantment was probably old enough to have left no visible traces, he thought.

            The shelves stretched back into what looked like infinity, though logically Draco knew there was a far wall somewhere. (Well, there once had been. Perhaps someone had expanded the Ministry Archives with wizardspace). On them stood boxes, books, ledgers, scrolls, clay tablets, harps that sang history when you touched them, diaries, newspapers, slick magazines, and scribed dragons' talons. And probably other things that Draco didn't know about, too. He'd only been in here a time or two as part of an official research mission for the Wizengamot, or rather against the Wizengamot, since they had to grant access to the Archives to Potions masters when they issued a legal challenge against them.

            What he wanted should be fairly near the door, as all the recent documents were. Draco held up his wand and whispered, "ComperioHarry Potter's trial testimony."

            There was a faint, muffled thump, and then one of the lacquered boxes began to glow. Draco nodded smugly. The spell was his own, specially modified version of a Summoning Charm. He could locate the documents without moving them and thus potentially warning anyone else who might look at them that they had been disturbed.

            He walked carefully across the floor towards the box, avoiding the most obvious build-ups of dust and papers so that no one who came in later and surveyed the room with a more accustomed eye would be able to detect his presence. When he reached the box, he cast a few charms that would scan for the most common defensive spells, and then a quiet incantation that many pure-blood families would have given a great deal to know, looking for personalized traps and invented spells. Nothing appeared.

            Draco felt his eyebrow go up. He couldn't believe that the testimony from Potter's trial was simply sitting here unprotected. He conjured gloves of snapping energy around his hands, that should at least protect his skin from any traps his spell had unexpectedly missed, and then gingerly reached out and hooked his fingers around the box's lid.

            When it flipped open and he saw the papers staring up at him, Draco frowned in disgust. Of course.The box was unprotected because it was the testimony Potter had given in trials where he captured the criminals and then had to act as a witness. Draco's wording in his version of the Summoning Spell hadn't been specific enough.

            He shut the box again, stepped back and looked around thoughtfully, trying to put himself in the place of a Ministry Archivist who had to decide where to hide a bunch of incriminating documents that nonetheless must continue existing, because someone who might investigate them in the future shouldn't be able to hang the Ministry by its own rope. The hiding places he could see were all out, but he had once heard a rumor that the Archive had safes and other caches hidden in the walls, caches and safes that contained papers too important to destroy but too dangerous to leave visible.

            He held up his wand again. "Comperiotestimony from the trial of Harry Potter for torture and murder." That ought to be specific enough. How many of them could there be?

            Nothing happened. The walls remained still. The shelves slumbered. The boxes didn't glow. Draco frowned again.

            The only solution he could come up with was that Potter's documents wouldn't have been held in the Archive at all, but in some place more secure.

            In which case, Draco had wasted his time by coming here.

            He cast the spells that would remove traces of his presence, stepped out of the Archive, and quietly shut the door behind him, scowling as he tried to come up with the place that he would search next.

*

            Draco flattened himself against a wall and waited until the two talking Aurors brushed past him. He trusted in the efficacy of his Concealment Potion--so much more reliable than a Disillusionment Charm--but they would still notice something was off if they touched him. He didn't think the Ministry hired stupid Aurors.

            Especially not after the last day.

            He had investigated every office he could get access to in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement's office, including the Head's, thinking that it would make sense they wanted to keep track of the papers that revealed Potter's mental illness and the mistakes they had made in hiring him. Perhaps they had entrusted the papers to one of Potter's close friends, or to some innocent dupe who wouldn't be told what was in them, only that they must be protected.

            Nothing. Draco's respect for his opponents kept going up. They either thought like Slytherins or had learned to through tracking so many former members of Draco's House.

            That left only one place that was really likely--bar some ridiculously safe and secret vault, which Draco had discounted the possibility of because he knew that he would have heard a rumor.

            And it would be much more difficult to explain his presence here than it would have been if he was caught in the Archives.

            The Aurors had turned the corner. Draco made his way carefully down the rest of the corridor until he stood before the great oaken door. From there, he cast several nonverbal spells that should disarm all the traps, wards, and alarms without alerting anyone.

            By the time he was done, he was sweating, and his joints ached. Expending this much magical energy would once have been nothing to him, but he wasn't a careless boy anymore.

            He waited five minutes after that, although his heart was shrieking in his ears so hard he might not have heard the wards if they had rung. Then he stepped forwards, swung the door, and was inside the office of the Minister of Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt.

            The man had been Potter's friend. It made sense that he would hold the papers, if only to prevent anyone else from becoming seriously disillusioned with the wizarding world's favorite hero.

            The office itself was surprisingly spare, with bookshelves that mostly held serious-looking account books, a few framed photographs of Shacklebolt meeting with other wizarding leaders, and a Pensieve. Draco turned resolutely away from the Pensieve, although he knew it might help him learn more about the development of new laws that would affect the United Potions Masters, and performed his finding charm once more.

            A drawer on the lower left half of the desk glowed.

            Draco released his breath in a silent hiss. He was shaking. Until now, he hadn't realized how much he had staked on Shacklebolt having the appropriate papers, or on those papers existing in the first place.

            The drawer bore the kind of lock that Draco had expected, one opened only by a drop of blood from the Minister himself. Draco drew a crystal vial from his pocket, one he had paid an enormous price for years ago when he had thought about taking vengeance on Shacklebolt for a petty insult.

            This is much more important, he thought, and turned the vial precisely upside-down above the lock, watching as the drop made its slow, hesitant way downwards, trembled at the lip, and then fell.

            It hit the lock. The lock shook in response and then turned to grey water, melting down and over the drawer. Draco waited until it was all gone, and then cast a spell that should detect more wards, locks, alarms, traps.

            Nothing. Finally, he could hook his fingers delicately over the edge of the drawer and pull it open.

            It was immediately obvious what he was searching for; the drawer was empty but for it. "It" was a single set of two sheets of parchment, hooked together with a Pasting Charm. Draco reached down, became aware his hands were trembling, and forced them to still before he actually lifted the documents out of the drawer. He didn't want to touch the sides, in case there was a charm on the metal that he hadn't detected.

            He cast a few more spells that should tell him if something was hiding in the drawer disguised, but they revealed nothing, and a glance at the top piece of parchment did show the name "Harry Potter." Draco finally allowed himself to believe that he held what he had been searching for.

            His face twitched oddly. His heart galloped while a sheen of cold sweat covered his skin, and he closed his eyes and breathed tremulously out.

            He wanted to sit down right there on the floor and read both of them, but he knew that would be stupid when Shacklebolt--who was currently at a press conference--might come back. And he couldn't take the original papers with him, as they would be missed. Even a Copying Charm might be risky.

            Instead, he skimmed intently over the papers, making sure that he looked at every line without necessarily absorbing the sense of it. He would be able to put the memory in a Pensieve and look at it more closely later, the Pensieve reproducing what was really there, not his blurry memory of it.

            Even then, enough jumped out at him to make his heartbeat shake his body.

            Potter...not resisting arrest...talking about the game...Ministry is agreed...necessity of protecting Mr. Malfoy...has not requested before...

            Protecting me from what? Draco thought, for a moment angry enough to hunt down Potter and rip his lying tongue out with his bare hands. And shouldn't I get a say in my own protection?

            He finished and carefully arranged the parchment back in the drawer, then shut it again. The blood lock melted back into precise and perfect coordination with the edge of the drawer. Draco smiled. He hadn't known that would happen, but he had suspected it. It was simply too much trouble to cast a blood-aligned spell every time it was needed. Instead, Shacklebolt would have one that could be dissipated by his blood, but would return when he shut the drawer.

            And apparently he reached into that drawer frequently, Draco thought, eyeing a few drops of rust in the edges of the metal that would be caused by someone regularly using his blood to dissolve the lock into water. Why, four years after the fact?

            Well, now Draco stood a good chance of finding out.

            He departed from the office, making sure to put everything back just as it was, and slid carefully out of the Ministry, forcing himself to pay attention to his current location instead of his rush to reach the Pensieve. His precautions would do no good if he was caught, here, now, like this.

*

            Draco sat back and closed his eyes. The fire in his room still blazed warmly, but it couldn't touch the chill that had covered his bones.

            He had expected to find something in the testimony that would make him despise Potter completely, something that would stop his breath from coming short when he thought about the encounter with Potter behind the Manor. What else could reading the details of torture and murder do? Draco had been a fool in some respects, he knew that, to believe in his lover's innocence at first.

            It wasn't as though he still did, but...

            But. Somewhere beneath the surface, there was a part of him that held stubbornly to his received notions of Potter, insisting that he wasn't a good liar, that he never could have concealed proclivities towards pain from someone, like Draco, who had learned to recognize people with them during the war, and that he really was the warm-handed, warm-hearted man Draco had believed in and loved and lived with.

            A part of him that still called Potter Harry.

            But he hadn't found confirmation either way in the testimony, only confusion.

            Potter insisted quietly, over and over, that he had tortured the two teenagers, that the Ministry had to believe him, but he gave no details of what he had done or why. And then he would say that the Ministry had to play the game with him, and that it was necessary to protect "Mr. Malfoy."

            Draco tensed. He had to suppress the impulse to simply scream when he thought about that. What in the world could Harry be protecting him from? If those two teenagers had been enemies of his, somehow, and plotting to destroy him, then Draco thought he should have had the option to know about it and decide what to do with them himself. And why did Harry have to torture them, and why sacrifice his life in the wizarding world to do it?

            You're calling him Harry.

            Draco clamped down on his mind and held it still, the way he sometimes did with a difficult potion, until it was calm and clear and he could think of Potter the way he had to, again.

            As it turned out, the testimony provided little that Draco hadn't already known, beyond that insane urge Potter apparently had to protect him. It wasn't even set up like ordinary trial testimony, which Draco knew well, having read the records from his parents' trial and his own more than once. It read more like a series of questions and answers, and the Ministry officials had been more baffled at the end than at the beginning.

            Like me.

            Draco smiled sourly and shook his head. Very well. This particular hunch hadn't worked out. He would have to choose something else, and do it soon, before Potter did whatever he had come back to the wizarding world to accomplish. Draco had the feeling that he would leave again when it was accomplished, and Draco might well never see him again. He had certainly done a good job of falling off the face of the earth in the past four years.

            Draco blinked, then, and wished he had thought to place a mirror in his bedroom so that he could see his own face properly.

            Until that moment, he had never realized that he had decided, without hesitation, to confront Potter when he had the truth in his hands. It wasn't necessary to the project of learning why. Draco could learn enough from the records and the memories of others, including the two children Potter had tortured. Questioning them would have to be the next step.

            But he did want to see Potter again, see those green eyes flash in the way they did when he was cornered, and taunt him with the fact that his precious lies had been all for nothing, that Draco had seen and known the reality of his guilt.

            Wanted to touch him and keep him from running away.

            Draco rose to his feet with a faint frown. That impulse could get him into trouble, if he let it. He would have to make sure that, if he confronted Potter, he did it armed with potions and spells to counter any dangerous move Potter made. What he had been thinking, throwing his wand away three nights ago?

            When he opened the door of his bedroom, he met Scorpius on his way to dinner. Scorpius turned and nodded to him, then peered more closely at Draco's face. "Are you all right, Father? You look as though you've been having bad dreams."

            Draco smiled back at him, although he was aware that it wasn't a cheerful smile. He would have to keep Scorpius from suspecting anything, he thought. He would only try to get in the way unnecessarily. He had put up with Potter when Potter and Draco were dating, but after the crime and the exile, Scorpius had confessed to Draco that he'd liked but never trusted Potter. "There was just something about him," he'd said.

            "A few," Draco said. "I go over the past at times and wonder what else I could have done differently, what would have resulted in better outcomes. Everyone does, you know that," he added, a bit defensively, since Scorpius was giving him a long, blinking look.

            "I don't," Scorpius said simply. Then he shook his head and smiled, offering his arm. "Come, Father. Let's eat together, and I can tell you about the spell that Severus Parkinson invented..."

            Draco let the chatter wash over him. Scorpius's friend Severus Parkinson was a spell-creator, and Draco usually enjoyed the details of his latest explorations, similar as they were to potions.

            But not tonight. Tonight, his mind kept going beyond the wards.

*

            A shock struck those wards at precisely three in the morning, Draco saw when his eyes snapped open and focused on the illuminated clock that Scorpius had given him for his birthday last year.

            For a moment, Draco's mind wandered, wondering if the attack was part of a dream. But no, the shock came again, and the way it rang in his bones--the wards were connected to him, as guardian of Malfoy Manor--told him the blow had been a heavy one.

            Draco sat up, Summoned his robe and boots with a snap of his fingers, snatched his wand, and surged down the stairs. He knew exactly where the muffled strikes were coming from: the wall on the western side of the Manor gardens, a place where Draco and Potter had sometimes sat in the spring sunshine on a bench beneath the peach trees. It made sense that Potter would choose to attack first in a place he knew well.

            Draco briefly dropped the Manor's anti-Apparition spells and Apparated directly from the stairs to just outside the wall. He landed with a deadly curse on his lips and turned his head, expecting to meet Potter's frustrated eyes.

            Potter was outside the wall, all right, but leaning on it instead of attacking right away. He was panting, a shallow cut running across his face from his jaw to his forehead. And there was something strange about the way his robe was hanging, Draco thought.

            Then Potter turned, and Draco got it. Potter's robe was soaked with so much blood that it swung away from his side, sopping wet.

            "Potter!" Draco barked.

            Potter stared at him with dazed eyes. Then he abruptly straightened with a snap, said, "It's all right, he's gone now," and Apparated away before Draco could stop him.

            Draco was left staring at empty ground and fuming. At least, that was, until he shook his head and cast a spell that levitated him a bit above the ground, so he could get near without disrupting the traces of the battle.

            And traces there were. The grass was matted together with Potter's blood, the wall was splattered with it, and the ground was churned into a mess of mud with footprints. Two sets, Draco judged. Potter's was one of them, but he had been in close quarters, circling and dodging and spinning around in fact, the other one.

            Those boot tracks had a faint smoothness around the edges that suggested high-quality dragonhide; Draco had learned to recognize them during that year when he'd endured that madness about "camping" of Theo's. They were also relatively shallow on the earth. Potter's opponent was either a small wizard or someone who walked lightly. Lightly, Draco assumed. Someone who was much smaller probably wouldn't have been able to hurt Potter so badly.

            Then he cast one of his own spells that detected curses, and sucked in a breath.

            No, he decided a moment later, his mind spinning in tiny circles. Itwouldn't matter what size the attacker was, not if he used that particular spell on Potter.

            The spell was called the Carver's Curse, and meant to separate the human flesh from the skeleton in the same way that a carved bird or joint would separate. Draco swallowed and stared at the place where Potter had stood before he Apparated. He knew that it was useless trying to go after him. Either Potter had already found help and wouldn't die, or he would have bled to death by now. And Draco had never learned the arcane spells that were necessary to trace an Apparition.

            Who could this have been?

            Unfortunately, the list of both his enemies and Potter's was long. Draco didn't even know what enemies Potter might have made in the past four years. Yes, he had been summarily exiled from the wizarding world, but that didn't mean that he had stayed away completely. He might have come back for visits to the Minister, given that odd testimony and the way that Shacklebolt valued it.

            Then Draco closed his eyes and shook his head. He was standing here and worrying about things he couldn't change. He needed to examine the traces that the fight had left behind, instead, and see if they could tell him anything new.

            There was something odd about the footprints of Potter's attacker, he thought when he studied them again, but he couldn't tell what. The information niggled along the edge of his mind, unmoving, refusing to come clear even when Draco ransacked his memory. Well, he would use the Pensieve memory of them later if he had to.

            And now...

            Why was Potter here if it was his enemy? Unless the enemy simply tracked him down and he was at the wards of the Manor when it happened.

            Or...

            Washe protecting me? And from what?

            Draco felt as if he understood nothing, and standing about in the dark and trying to reason the matter through didn't help. He went back to bed.

            And stayed there until morning, contending with his questions and the emotion that he couldn't name as anything other than what it was: worry over Potter.

*

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Crimes of Passion