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Hero's Funeral	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4933 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Two--Flawed

            "That makes no sense at all."

            "Why not?"

            Draco didn't grit his teeth, because he knew, after years of lectures by his mother, what that did to the shape of someone's jaw. But he did attempt to reason with Potter. The man had a brain, as he had shown in the interrogation of the Larkins; the pity was that he so often packed it away into a crate at the base of his skull. "Because it doesn't fit what we know about Larkin, from the way that Whitley died to what his mother said about him."

            "Fine, then." Potter gave Draco a small, mean smile. They had returned to the Socrates office, so that they might have a private space to talk, and Potter sat on the edge of his desk, swinging his legs. Draco was certain Potter knew how much that annoyed Draco and had chosen to use it for that reason. "Then explain to me why it doesn't fit. I've already given you my reasons in support of the theory."

            Draco took a moment to marshal his thoughts. Unlike certain people who had gone through the war and learned nothing of the theory of generalship, he had learned the proper way to lead, although the only place he would ever have the power to exercise it was in his own skull. Then again, that was likely the most important place to exercise it.

            "You claim that Larkin's flaw is that he causes fear from a distance," he said. "So he interfered with his sister's emotions, and with Whitley's, and with yours."

            Potter nodded, his eyes bright as he watched Draco. Draco turned his shoulder towards him so that he could pace in comfort without having to worry about what effect his words would have on Potter.

            "If that's the case, then his performance has been inconsistent in the extreme," Draco pointed out. His voice was just the way he liked to hear it, calm and collected with a scrim of ice on top. His father would have been proud of him--

            No. That would not happen. His father would never be proud of him again. Draco flared his nostrils out and let his voice flow on, hoping that Potter wouldn't notice the pause or think about the reasons for said pause.

            "We have one death, one attack, and one vision," Draco said. "Why didn't he manage to kill you with this vision, then, if you're going to theorize that it's the same kind he used to attack Whitley? Why didn't he try to kill his sister, after the attack if not before?"

            "Because his power is more flexible than that," Potter said. "And he would have a little more reason to spare his sister, who loves and believes in him, than the woman who accused him in the first place or the Auror who's hunting him."

            Draco paused. He had to admit that, sometimes, Potter was capable of coming up with a halfway logical thought. "That still doesn't explain the difference between your reaction to the vision and Whitley's death."

            "I'm more used to the visions," Potter said. "This was more intense than any I've ever experienced, and I could feel the physical reactions in a way that I usually don't. I think he counted on killing me. He didn't count on the fact that I've seen so many of the horrific bloody things that I have more resistance." A small, grim smile played around his lips.

            Draco shook his head. "And what would Whitley have been afraid of? How could he have reached out and killed her from his prison cell? There were wards around it that should have prevented any remote exercise of magic."

            Potter reached behind him for the Larkin file and flipped it open to the top page. "Wards around the cell," he quoted, "were tuned to Larkin's wand." He raised an eyebrow at Draco. "And as we both know from our Socrates briefings, the definition of the twisted includes an ability of wandless magic. Called the flaw."

            Draco narrowed his eyes. "They had identified Larkin as a twisted by the time he was in the cell. They would have put up stronger wards."

            Potter shook his head. "Final identification came only after the witnesses watched his removal from the cell and found the sign of the broken horn on the wall. Until then, they didn't know he was a twisted. He used Dark Arts, but he was arrested for theft, not murder, the way most of the twisted are." He turned the file around so that Draco could see a photograph he'd already spent too much time studying, the wall of Larkin's cell with the broken horn sketch imprinted on it. "When he vanished, then people started putting the clues together."

            "You still haven't explained the inconsistencies," Draco said. "I've read the records as closely as you have."

            Potter glanced at the Larkin file, then looked innocently up at the ceiling. Draco ground his teeth this time, forgetting his mother's warning, and then stopped. In some ways, it was ridiculous to try and live by the rules of people who had kicked him out, but in several other ways, it was the only anchor he had.

            "Flaws aren't all-powerful," Draco said. "How could he reach out across the distance, and why would he affect his sister so differently than the two of you?"

            "The way she described it, she had a vision of her brother in prison," Potter said, triumphantly waving the file back and forth. "That's what happens. The vision he sent to his sister inspired her to attack. The ones he sent to me and Whitley were probably the same, but hers stopped her heart--"

            "Yes, yes, I understand," Draco said impatiently. "That still doesn't give us any practical limits. There has to be a way in which he's limited, or else he would have reached out and inflicted the same visions on his mother and on me. His mother was closer to us for longer than his sister, and told us things that were more damaging. Surely it would be best and simplest to make her a victim?"

            "That's the part I haven't figured out yet," Potter admitted, leaning back and frowning at the ceiling. "After all, if he knows that I've been assigned to his case this quickly, then he ought to know you've been assigned, too. But you haven't felt the slightest fear of him, have you?"

            "I feel the natural and proper fear," Draco returned, and yes, the ice in his voice was perfect this time. Anyone who came around the corner would have known what Potter didn't seem to, that Draco was the smarter and tougher one of the pair. Potter had died to save everyone, which was different from holding his own and fighting for them, the way Draco had done with his parents.

            And then they kicked you out.

            Draco shook his head to clear it and focused on Potter again. "Aren't you afraid of him?"

            Potter paused, a thoughtful expression on his face. Draco found himself actually interested in hearing the answer, although knowing Potter it would be wound up in incomprehensible Gryffindor philosophy and Draco would have to dig down to actually know and understand the truth.

            Then Potter fell off his desk and tried to swallow his tongue for the second time that day, and Draco had other things to worry about than how tangled his philosophy was.

*

            The vision slammed into him without warning, the way that all of them did, but this one had the pulse-pounding blood-fear in the corners of his brain that Harry remembered from the last Larkin-inflicted hallucination. He gritted his teeth so that he would do less damage to his tongue and began to repeat over and over to himself in a connected chant, It's not real. It's not real.

            The vision opened. Harry found himself lying on some hard, white, gleaming material that stretched out around him. A floor of bone, of tiles? He tried to study it, to use the details to detach himself from the main component of the vision.

            The ball of snarling teeth and claws that was eating his legs.

            Harry could feel them, the fangs splintering bones, digging deep for the marrow, the cracking and the shaking. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes and endured, but the pain was still there, and his blood was flowing, and the fear that he would never walk again hit him hard enough to refuse him breath.

            He couldn't see the creature that was eating him. It remained an indistinguishable ball of chewing. That didn't matter, Harry tried to remind himself. The last vision had only come true because Larkin had interfered with his sister's mind and made her attack Harry. This one would only come true if he could artificially do the same thing. The real point of this vision was that he was trying to kill Harry.

            And he would do it with terror, if he could.

            Harry retreated into himself, away from the pain, away from the idea of having mangled legs for the rest of his life, into a quiet serenity that he only found sometimes. Being tortured by the creature that had killed Lionel was one of those times, and walking into the Forbidden Forest to confront Voldemort was another. He brought the calmness up and out of him.

            He couldn't choose the way he would die--from the moment he had seen death in his first Auror case, he had never been so foolish as to think that--but he could deny his enemy what he wanted.

            He opened his eyes and smiled into the face of the blurry beast. "Can you hear me, Larkin?" he whispered around a mouthful of what felt like blood and shattered teeth. "You can't terrorize me into death. There's nothing you can do to me that I'm afraid of, not when I've already faced the Dark Lord that you despised."

            A whistling, harsh shriek of frustrated fury cut past Harry's ears, and he gasped with the force of it. Then he rolled out of the vision and was lying on the floor of the Socrates office again, blood running steadily from his mouth.

            Malfoy knelt a few feet away, eyes wide.

            The sight of him gave Harry an unexpected anchor to haul himself out of the terror. He took a few deep, gasping breaths and flattened his hands against the floor. He had been terrified at points in the vision, yes, but at least he was used to suddenly seeing death and even feeling it, at greatly scattered intervals. Malfoy had no experience with these visions and no real understanding of what Harry--and probably Whitley and Rebecca Larkin--had seen.

            "This time, he tried to convince me that I would die with some sort of beast devouring me from the legs up," he murmured, and managed to make his voice dry. "Perhaps so I would see it coming, since it would save the head for last. Bloody wanker."

            "This is more than that," Malfoy said. His eyes were on the blood dripping from Harry's mouth. "How can we work if he keeps attacking you with visions that drop you like that?"

            Harry smiled in a way he hadn't thought would happen at all. In some ways, Malfoy was the best partner he could have in this situation. Ron, before he retired to work in George's shop, would have been frantic with concern because of the "best mate" situation. Lauren Hale, his temporary partner for less than a year, would have thought he was making half of it up. And Lionel...

            He's dead. You don't have the right to think about him like that.

            But Malfoy kept his eye on the important things. Harry shrugged. "The visions specifically will keep on coming. There's nothing that can stop them. But what you should do if one of them happens in the middle of battle is keep on fighting. Cast a Shield Charm over me, but it's more important that we catch Larkin before he kills again than that I survive."

            "You have a death wish." Malfoy's voice was flat, certain.

            Harry shook his head impatiently. "What it is is that I don't mind dying if it keeps a Dark wizard from killing someone else. That's not a death wish. That's just the way it is. You must feel something of the same sort yourself, or you wouldn't have become an Auror."

            Quicksilver seemed to flow across Malfoy's face. He shook his head. "Never assume that you know the reasons I became an Auror," he said, in a voice that would have been more threatening if it hadn't broken at the end.

            Harry shrugged. "Whatever. The answer is that you can still fight Larkin if you stop thinking that I'll die from the visions. I think Larkin is trying to find the thing I fear enough to kill me, the way he managed to find it with Whitley. But I'm more experienced with these visions. They horrify me, they hurt me, but they're not new, the way they were for Whitley and Rebecca. I have a better chance of surviving than any of his other victims do."

            Malfoy frowned fiercely at him, but held out a hand. Harry leaned on his arm and let Malfoy help him up. His mind was flashing, churning, trying to link the symbol and the companions that they knew Larkin had to the power he had of causing fear in people.

            And trying to come up with a counter for it. If Larkin did turn his attention to Malfoy--as he had to eventually, when he found out Malfoy was hunting him, even if he didn't think of Malfoy as a threat right now--then Malfoy stood a strong chance of dying the first or second time.

            "It might be for the best if you took out some of the memories of things that frighten you and left them at home in a Pensieve tonight," Harry said cautiously. "He can't draw on those memories to create the visions, if you do that."

            Malfoy turned his head and pinned Harry with a hawk's relentlessly haughty stare. "For fuck's sake, Potter. Will you set some limits on this flaw that you're attributing to him? He can reach out from any distance, he can use any kind of fear, he can control people's actions--now he can use memories, rather than just his knowledge of the people in question or random guesses?"

            "There has to be some vulnerability," Harry agreed, a little breathless, as he leaned against his desk. He didn't want to remind Malfoy that that wasn't one of the criteria for identifying a twisted, just what they had to hope was true so they could fight Larkin. "But we don't know what it is yet. If you take out your memories and nothing happens, or something happens despite that, then it might give us a clue."

            Malfoy's lips were pressed together, his nostrils twitching. Harry regarded him for a moment and wondered what the Head Auror thought he was doing, pairing them together. They couldn't trust each other, and Malfoy didn't take even simple suggestions well, coming from him. He would probably do better with some other partner.

            As for Harry, it would serve him right if he never had a partner ever again, considering how he had failed Lionel.

            On the other hand, he remembered the instinctive way they had saved each other in the Larkin home, and the way that Malfoy had known just how to get Harry back on his feet after the last vision. There might be some connection between them after all, some way to work together. But going after it consciously might not be the best way to find it.

            "I'll try it," Malfoy said at last, in a tone that conveyed he was doing a huge favor for Harry, and Harry had better not ask for another one any time soon.

            Harry nodded. "Thanks. Now, I think, we ought to go and look at Larkin's cell."

            Malfoy narrowed his eyes--it seemed to be his go-to gesture for expressing general suspicion and distrust of Harry--and shook his head. "Why? Interviewing those who saw Whitley die is the best course, so that we can check if her symptoms were consistent with intense fear."

            "We can do both," Harry said. "But so far, I don't see what the symbolism of a broken unicorn horn has to do with Larkin's abilities. From the cases they had us study, most twisted choose something that's fairly obvious once you understand them. They had a lot of facts on Larkin's background in that file, but nothing about that. Aren't you curious?"

            "I would never own up to something so," Malfoy said, and visibly searched for a word that would hurt, "childish."

            Harry grinned. "Don't worry. You can blame any curiosity on me. But I think the more we understand about Larkin, the better. Interviewing his mother about his reading produced enough information on his flaw to understand it."

            "If you're right," Malfoy said.

            "When you come up with a theory that fits the facts as well, then you can tell me," Harry retorted.

            Malfoy was silent as he followed Harry towards the holding cells, though Harry could feel the man's eyes burning away on his back. Honestly, that didn't bother Harry much. As long as Malfoy did what he was bloody told and stopped acting so high and mighty, then Harry would accept just about any other behavior.

            Well, and he could save Harry's life if he needed it, the way he had in the Larkin house. That would be nice, too.

*

            Draco had to stop and close his eyes for a minute on the threshold of Larkin's cell. The stink of Dark magic was everywhere in the corridor outside it, and only intensified as they came closer to the small room, floating in the air like that bloody darkness powder that the Weasley twins had sold to him in sixth year.

            "Malfoy? Are you all right?"

            At least he's mastered the right way to ask a question like that, Draco thought, opening his eyes. Potter's tone was guarded, wary, as if he would draw his wand if he didn't get the right answer. In this world where anyone who used Dark Arts could become more warped by them than Draco had imagined, that was the right response.

            "Fine," he said shortly, and checked his left arm under the cover of lifting his hand to wipe away the sweat. The Dark Mark there tingled briefly, but didn't yank his arm to the side. It would do for now. Draco braced himself a little more against the overwhelming miasma and stepped inside the cell.

            Potter turned his head away from Draco and crouched over the fine lines of the drawing, having stepped with careless grace among the strung lines of wards that protected the cell from contamination. Draco performed the same dance and came to a stop beside Potter, staring.

            The sketch was nothing grand or imposing, and wouldn't have attracted attention if the "ghosts" that helped Larkin escape from the cell hadn't signaled to knowing observers that they had a twisted on their hands. On first sight, Draco would have been tempted to dismiss the image as a jagged mass of lines. On the right side, slanting up towards the ceiling, was the larger part, rounded and smoothed on the base, with a few faint parallels across it that might have been intended to connote the spirals found on most alicorns. On the left side was the smaller, shattered point, broken like a puzzle piece. If the two pieces had been drawn together, Draco thought absently, it would been more obvious that they couldn't fit into one another, and others wouldn't have been so quick to call it a unicorn's horn.

            "How did he draw this?" Potter murmured, as if to himself. "They didn't let him have the charcoal that it looks like it's drawn with, and there was none left behind in the cell..."

            "He could have compelled someone into bringing it to him," Draco suggested, though he had to admit that it was rather hard to imagine a vision of fear that could convince someone they had to bring charcoal to a violent prisoner right now.

            "He could have," Potter said, which was a better reception than Draco thought his idea probably deserved. "And then taken it with him when he went." He let his fingers hover above the drawing, and Draco winced in case he was about to touch it. The Dark magic was stronger there than anywhere else. But Potter drew his hand back, thank Merlin, and shook his head. "I feel I should understand it better than this," he murmured. "A broken unicorn's horn. Unicorns are symbols of--what? Virginity, beauty, innocence, healing..."

            "Maybe it's not a horn," Draco said, to be contrary.

            "What else would it be, then?" Potter rocked back on his heels and blinked up at him.

            Draco bent close to the mark instead of answering. He had to study it more before he would have a good alternative theory. The skin on his balls tried to crawl up inside his body, but Draco had got good at ignoring Dark magic since he'd become an Auror. It was an unfortunate necessity of being a resonator, someone whose body responded to particular concentrations of it.

            His vision altered, or maybe that was the angle of his neck as he tried to see things from a different side. And he recognized the symbol after all. All those nights studying Potions books when he had thought to go for a mastery instead of becoming an Auror came in useful after all as his brain clicked into place.

            "It's an old representation," he murmured. "Of a Mandrake."

            Potter made a face. "Those roots we had to take care of that time in Herbology? But it doesn't look like one."

            Draco shook his head. "Of course not. Those are the modern Mandrakes, bred by wizards who were literalists and thought it should look like its name. The old ones were simply plants, and they were represented by the part that stayed embedded in the ground--it was thought--and the part that was pulled out and used." He let his finger hover above the break between the two parts of the drawing, though he took care to touch neither. "I think that Larkin's symbol is the root, the older plant."

            Potter frowned in thought. Draco was vaguely surprised that he could tell. "All right. Any idea why a Dark wizard would care to take one as a symbol? I mean, a skull is fairly straightforward, and so are things like the wilted rose that one of them used."

            Draco gave him a faint, grim smile. "Think about it, Potter. The root is used in multiple Dark potions. It shrieks when it's pulled from the ground. Shrieks in fear. And--" He drew in a deep breath, trying to ignore the reek of evil that came with it. That was really just a product of his overexcited brain. One could use Dark spells without becoming a twisted. "Of course."

            "Of course what?" Potter was rapping his fingers against the wall. Draco gritted his teeth against the temptation to tell him to move his hand further away so he wouldn't brush against the material that had been used to make the drawing. Potter would surely touch it just to be contrary.

            "That would be the reason he chose it as his symbol," Draco murmured. "There are a few old, banned potions that use the ancient mandrake. They cause fear. They cause hatred and terror, and they can make people attack." He felt an intense excitement coiling in his guts. If he could prove that Larkin had used potions instead of visions to attack Whitley and his sister, then Potter's visions could be put down to his usual talent, and that meant he would have proved Potter wrong as well as located Larkin's flaw.

            Potter's eyes lit up, and he stood. "Let's go."

            On the way up, Potter's palm brushed against the drawing.

            Draco didn't have time to react. The shattered halves of the drawing snapped up and down, forming into massive jaws, then thrust out of the wall and attached themselves to Potter's legs, biting down hard. Potter screamed as his ankles, from the sound, broke.

            Draco drew his wand and hurled himself into battle.

*

            unneeded: Thank you! Yes, this is the first lengthy story in the Cloak and Dagger universe, and hopefully the forerunner of many more to come.

            Mostly, I'm on holiday right now (and all summer), so that's why my pace steps up during the summer. I'll have to slow down again when I go back to school in the autumn.
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Hero's Funeral