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Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28253 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Twenty—In Their Hands

            Harry opened his eyes.

            He had no choice, really, when there were fingers tugging at his eyelids, letting in light and pain. Harry kept his muscles relaxed as he groaned and rolled his head to the side. Reacting with violence before he saw what sort of situation he was in would just guarantee more pain.

            “Rodger! He’s awake.”

            Moonstone’s glamoured face bent over him. Harry blinked and panted up at him as though his brain was still fogged, though by now he knew that he was lying on a low couch in the middle of a dark room, with a fire burning not far away and incense drifting through the room. Harry admired the incense. It was filled with essence of lilac or something similar and powerful and sweet-smelling that would keep anyone from using olfactory clues to figure out where the building was located. Wards, or real dogs, also kept up a steady sound of barking from outside. Harry had no idea whether he was in London or the Ministry or another place.

            But he knew who Moonstone was, and they didn’t yet know who he was, or he thought they would have mentioned his name instead of speaking of him by a pronoun. That meant he had an advantage, for as long as he could hold onto it.

            He massaged his throat and swallowed, then fixed his attention on Moonstone. “Yes?” he drawled. They wouldn’t expect him to act afraid, not when Moonstone had captured him in the first place because of his powerful magical signature. He thought it best to play along with expectations, at least for right now.

            Moonstone smiled, or at least let the thought of a hint of a smile cross his mind, from the way his lips twitched. “Good,” he said. “You can be insolent. It fits you better than the cringing persona you adopted earlier.”

            Harry said nothing, simply maintaining his stare and his closed mouth. Moonstone stepped back from him and began to pace from one side to the other of a beautiful carpet. Harry caught a long coil of gold in the carpet, and felt his heart clench at the unexpected good luck. If that was really a snake, as it looked like, and if the faint hum of magic he felt came from the carpet, then he might have an ally here.

            “I don’t recognize your signature,” Moonstone said. “But it’s perfectly obvious that someone set you to spy on me. You’re going to tell me who it was, the Ministry or the Friends of Shadow or some other organization we don’t know about yet.”

            Harry blinked, but kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t heard of the Friends of Shadow, and wondered if he could pick up some information here that would serve him well in the future as an Auror. But he couldn’t decide what was the best answer yet, not until he heard a bit more from Moonstone.

            “A tough agent, then.” Moonstone came to a stop and stood studying him. “Not visibly discommoded at being captured by the enemy. Someone whose first thought was escape, not fighting, which suggests training that focused on preserving his valuable magic and life.” He paused, then nodded as if to someone standing out of sight behind Harry’s head. “Not an Auror.”

            Harry made a note to himself to remember there might be someone there when he needed to move. He shrugged a little, and said nothing. Moonstone might have thrown the suggestion that he wasn’t an Auror out to see his reaction, rather than believing it.

            Moonstone gave him a faint smile and practically pranced closer, bending over as if he thought that he could see the truth in the bottoms of Harry’s eyes or something. “Your glamour hasn’t faded yet,” he said softly. “Remarkable. You have been working with a Potions master, so that much is true. Lucas, do you recognize his work?”

            “Not immediately. But I have a fairly good idea who it would be.”

            The man standing behind Harry’s couch came into view and turned to face him. Yes. It was Schroeder. Harry controlled the immediate impulse to commit murder, and wondered if Malfoy, wherever he was, had felt the sudden spike in Harry’s impulses and the way he took care of it.

            Malfoy. Harry also wondered if the spell that let him hear through Harry’s ears had been cut off when Harry fell. He didn’t know, not having used that particular charm before. But he didn’t know if he could count on Malfoy’s aid. The most he could hope for was an independent witness to what Moonstone and Schroeder said, someone who could guide Ron when Ron came to rescue him.

            Surely Malfoy won’t come himself. Not when he already spent the time and resources to rescue me once.

            “Master Eelhardt mentioned Malfoy,” Schroeder continued, throwing Harry a smile as full of sweet venom as the conjured cobra he’d once talked out of attacking them on one of the more unusual raids. “That means that this agent is part of the same conspiracy that ended up placing Potter in prison. Not very well-organized, if so.”

            Harry smiled. He couldn’t help himself, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it because he knew they wouldn’t get out of his smile what he had put into it. If it came to that, if they figured out who he was and what Malfoy was doing with him and all the rest of it, Harry contained enough power in his body, without his wand, to kill both of them before they could step out of this room.

            Stupid of them to come within my reach.

            He wouldn’t do it unless he had to, because he didn’t know how well Malfoy and Ron could deal with the political consequences of the murder. But if they posed a direct threat to his friends, and based on what he already knew about the harm they had caused to the children they’d stolen, he would kill them without hesitation. That was the good side of being a soulless, heartless killing machine, he thought. Strange that Malfoy had never realized he might be protected by it. Would he have encouraged Harry in his thoughts that way, if so?

            No. He wouldn’t want me to do it no matter what.

            Harry grimaced. Well, there was that. He would set the plan aside for now, and return to only thinking about it if he had to. The problem was, he very well might have to, if Malfoy and Ron couldn’t follow the clues and come in time. And he had probably always known, in the part of his mind shut away that he didn’t want to acknowledge, that Malfoy would come, that there was no keeping him away.

            “I wonder,” Schroeder said, in the same soft and comfortable voice Harry had heard Wizengamot members use when they were proposing a law that would overturn several facts of life for other people just so that their cronies could have a minor benefit, “whether pain might convince him to talk.”

            Harry smiled again. They probably would use it. And he knew that he would scream under the Cruciatus, because sooner or later everyone tortured with it would scream, and he wasn’t that different from anyone else. He was made of the same flesh and blood, neither worse nor better.

            But he didn’t think they would use the Cruciatus right away. They would start with something else, smaller. And that, he might be able to endure until Ron and Malfoy arrived.

            “If you asked me questions instead of hinting around,” he said, leaning back on the couch he lay on and counting the number of paces that it was from the door, “then I might be able to give you the answers without putting your torturers to any inconvenience.”

            Schroeder looked at him carefully, perhaps because he came close to recognizing his voice. Moonstone nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Why call yourself Rosefield? Why come to us at all?”

            Harry sat up and let his arms dangle at his side. “You mean that you hadn’t figured that out?” he asked. “And two such smart men as you look to be, too. I thought you would have.”

            “Some tale of a sick child is unlikely to be the reality,” Moonstone said, and leaned in, smooth and confiding. “Will you tell us what is, Hector?”

            “Hector?” Harry cocked his head to the side and met smooth voice with whimsical smile.

            “I choose to give you the name of a brave warrior from history,” Moonstone said, “since you seem to have none of your own, and it was brave of you to walk into our nest, not knowing anything about us except that we had discovered the secret of storing magic.”

            Harry snorted and draped himself provocatively over the couch again. “I don’t know that you have. I was following the trail because I’m interested in the process myself, but no one has managed to solve the riddle in centuries, why should you have?”

            “Jealous, Hector?” Moonstone laughed, and it was the sort of laugh a normal politician would use, the sort Harry had done bodyguard duty for and escorted to lunch several times before. He tried to keep his face as neutral as he could while inwardly he burned and seethed. The man was too good an actor, and he needed to be destroyed. “We would share the secret with you, if we knew that you were someone valuable and to be trusted.”

            Schroeder shifted. Moonstone raised one eyebrow at him. “Of course you would still have full control of the people selected to deal with the magic and the means of getting it, Lucas,” he said soothingly.

            Moonstone is the one in control, not Schroeder. I wonder if Schroeder knows that or not. Harry decided that he would carry the knowledge out of here if he could, and if it was something Malfoy had expected and not knowledge worth risking his life to get, well, at least they had confirmation instead of Malfoy’s educated guess.

            “What you plan to use it for and what I plan to use it for are not the same,” Harry said. “Not even close.”

            “How do you know that, when we haven’t heard each other’s plans?” Moonstone took another step towards him, almost crowding him where he sat on the couch, his eyes bright and blank with intensity. “How do you know?”

            Good God, he’s trying to recruit me, Harry realized, and did his best to keep from gaping. He wondered if Moonstone would try this with anyone who had discovered their secret, or part of it, or whether it was the effect of his own strong magical signature, which had allowed Moonstone to find him out in the first place. Probably the latter.

            Either way, it gave him an advantage he hadn’t anticipated, and one that he didn’t think Malfoy and Ron would want him to waste.

            Harry paused, then inclined his head. “I don’t, of course,” he said. “But it seems unlikely to me that you would have gathered an organization around you if your purposes were the same as mine.”

            “You work alone?” Moonstone took a step back from him, his voice sliding down a few notches. “An interesting choice, when the work that uncovered the mechanism of storing magic was a group one.”

            And voluntary? Harry held his face smooth once again. Only someone connected to him with a mind-reading potion like Malfoy’s, he thought, would know the extent to which he hated the men in front of him. “Yes,” he said. “I couldn’t trust that anyone else would want to do the same thing. It’s a crazy idea. I dare say that it’s based on magical theory no one but me believes in, anymore.”

            “Tell us what it is,” Schroeder said, but his voice sounded weak next to Moonstone’s. And Moonstone held up a hand, and he subsided. Harry bit his tongue, and resisted the impulse to ask Moonstone to teach him to do that to annoying Wizengamot members.

            “Tell us,” said Moonstone, and his voice was a gentle invitation. He would soothe and counsel the grieving that way, Harry thought, and the gullible, and gradually convince them they could have anything they wanted.

            “I found a theory that says the reason for the increasing number of Squib children in pure-blood lines and the greater number of Muggleborns is that magic is leaving the wizarding world.” Harry lowered his voice into something like a reverent hush. He had indeed heard this theory from a mad wizard he and Ron arrested years ago, and he found himself glad that he remembered it now. “It’s flowing away from us. Not enough remains to be absorbed by people’s bodies anymore, so we have Squib children. And it goes to crown new wizards, those who can absorb it.”

            Moonstone’s eyes were narrow. “This would be based on the work of Sydney Vetch?”

            “You know of him?” Harry asked mildly, but flowed on. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t remember if the mad wizard had ever named the theorist he’d taken his ideas from, but it didn’t matter. “So we need more magic. We need to release it, after we’ve found the best places to store the containers, so that it can flow out over the wizarding world and come home. And it should be near pure-blood houses, because they’re the strongest lines and the ones who can take the most safely.”

            Moonstone stepped back from him. “Vetch’s ideas were brilliant,” he said. “Strange, but—brilliant.”

            Harry nodded demurely. “And I think there’s merit in what he thinks. I want to release the magic that’s gathered. You probably want to keep it for yourself. I think that’s where we differ.”

            “Perhaps not,” Moonstone said. “Let us show you how we gather and store the magic, and then perhaps we can come to an understanding.”

            Harry rose slowly to his feet. Moonstone and Schroeder didn’t try to prevent him, just watched him. Harry hoped they would take his sudden silence and paling face for excitement that he was about to witness something he had sought for long years but never expected to find.

            Instead, he was trying to cope with the idea of seeing a child butchered or blinded or tortured in front of him to force the magic out, or in, depending on if they were a wizard or a Muggle.

            I know all the reasons I shouldn’t. I know the long-term strategic reasons. I know that Malfoy and Ron are probably on their way to rescue me right now.

            But if the choice is between watching a child be tortured without recourse and rescuing them, I know what I have to choose. What I will always choose.

*

            “We have to find them now.”

            “And I’m doing the tracking the best that I bloody can, Malfoy,” Weasley hissed back. They were in Eelhardt’s shop, in the room where Potter had met Moonstone, and Weasley crouched near the chairs they had sat in, doubling his wand back and forth over the floor. Eelhardt was unconscious in the next room, all the better to make sure that he didn’t send a message to someone. “I have to have more to go on than this. They could have walked out the door and Apparated anywhere. You’re the one with the bloody link to Harry, you track him.”

            Draco set his teeth together and counted under his breath. Then he counted in French, and then in Spanish, because the French alone wasn’t enough.

            Did Weasley bloody understand that the link was what distracted Draco? The spell on Potter’s ears has not been renewed when Potter woke—his captors had probably noted it and taken it off as a precaution—but the link was nearly as good at telling Draco the general state of Potter’s mind. At the moment, sharp, dangerous spikes shivered through the water, rising and sinking like the teeth of a shark swimming with its mouth open near the surface.

            Draco felt the urge to kill, and he knew where it came from. Potter would kill without hesitation in defense of a child he saw being tortured, and Draco knew that would happen even if he had not cast the Retrovoyance curse. There were certain things one did not ask of a Gryffindor, and turning aside from the innocent was one of them.

            It was inevitable. It was praiseworthy, in some circles. Draco’s were not some of them, but on the other hand, he hardly would have felt happy advising someone like Potter to ignore the suffering of an innocent, either.

            It was death, if Potter did it.

            Moonstone and Schroeder were both there; the way Potter’s half-thoughts darted and clashed in the back of his mind told Draco as much. He had already noticed the tone they took on, like rapids running over rocks, that happened around Schroeder and no other person. They didn’t have Potter’s sheer strength, but they had whatever strange weapons their control of stored magic might have given them, and they were more ruthless.

            Then Draco paused and thought about that last idea.

            Perhaps not more ruthless, actually. But that didn’t negate their advantages of numbers and superior knowledge.

            “Found it.”

            Draco turned quickly. Weasley was rising to his feet, cradling something small in his hand. He held it up, and the light reflected from what Draco recognized as a button. On Potter’s borrowed robes, he deduced after a moment. Auror robe buttons didn’t look like that.

            “Whatever we wear,” Weasley said, “we always cast a spell that detaches a button and leaves it on the floor if we’re hit with a Stunner or a Confundus Charm or—oh, a couple other spells.” Draco reacted to this continuing proof of Weasley’s distrust in him with no more than a small curl of his lips, because he could. “I hoped Harry would remember to do it on those robes he Transfigured, and he did. It rolled into the corner, under the couch, and it’s dim as hell back there. No wonder I couldn’t find it.” He held the button to his lips and whispered something that made cold magic crackle around the button, the color of old glaciers.

            Draco stood still, and said nothing. He didn’t believe that Weasley and Potter would have come with something so useful, or at least it was hard to believe, but to say that right now would probably be a stupid idea.

            The button glowed once and then twice, like some of the Muggle lights that Draco had seen, and then sprang out of Weasley’s grasp and circled the room like a hyperactive dog seeking its master. The next instant, it spun out the door, and Weasley darted after it, calling to Draco to follow.

            Because someone had to think of these things, and because he was feeling generous on being reminded that Weasley and Potter did not think of everything, after all, Draco paused to cast a spell that rendered Eelhardt asleep and undetectable by any means at most people’s disposal before he followed.

*

            “This is the basis of where we work.”

            Harry tipped his head back as if to see the extent of the ceiling and made polite noises, while his mind and his eyes took far more note of the place than he was allowing Moonstone and Schroeder to see. Yes. Of course. This was a cavern, the walls cut by water or something else natural long ago, and that explained the strange absence of some sorts of magic found on the little girl’s body. In a normal wizarding environment, the background chatter of magic left a residue that Aurors could use to track someone across Muggle London if they could focus in on it. The girl had apparently been taken and held by Muggles, to hear the tale of that magic.

            But stone held such background chatter less well, and Moonstone and Schroeder hadn’t built it by wand. Harry could hear the calling of some distant stream, the intense, soft wailing of it, and wondered that it didn’t set their teeth on edge. Moonstone and Schroeder didn’t seem to notice. They moved easily through the cavern in the direction of a group of people waiting at the far end.

            Harry could see dark robes, and scarlet ones. Some Aurors were with them. The room spun, and the magic in his hands tried to spring out, but he met it at the barrier of his skin, barring the gates of his mind to turn it back. It was that or go swiftly mad. He forced a bland smile onto his face instead and dipped his head.

            “You’ll introduce me to your colleagues?” he asked Moonstone and Schroeder out of the corner of his mouth.

            “Of course,” Schroeder said, and swept a hand at the nearest Auror. “This is Auror Rosenbaum.”

            Harry smiled and nodded. He knew there was no Auror Rosenbaum in the Department at the moment, although the glamour was so well-done that he had to look out of the corner of his eye to see the faint shimmers of power at the edges of “Rosenbaum’s” lips and nose. The face was that of a strong, attractive woman in her mid-thirties, with blonde-brown hair and blue eyes. She smiled back at him, and Harry wondered if he was imagining that the smile was that bland or not.

            “And this is Auror Midnight,” Schroeder said. The slight distaste in his voice made Harry wonder whether it was for the obvious pseudonym.

            This was a young man with jet-black hair and white, nearly bleached skin that made him look unhealthy. He stared at Harry so long Harry thought Midnight recognized him and was about to blurt out an accusation, but instead he ducked his head and fastened his gaze on the ground, sticking his hands into his robe pockets. Harry scrutinized him carefully, but was sure he didn’t know him.

            “And our testers, Healers Adobe and Future,” Moonstone said, with more smoothness on the silly false names than Schroeder had managed. “They were about to show us the new method they had perfected, weren’t you, gentlemen?”

            The Healers stepped back into what looked like an artificial mass of shadows at the back of the cave. Harry had never seen a glamour like it, and ordinarily he would study it and try to figure out how they had done it.

            But not now. Not when he was trying to wrestle the beast at the back of his mind back down into the water again.

            The Healers brought forth what looked like a plank of wood with a magical circle floating on and above and through it. Harry could make out concentric rings of light, yellow and white and green and pink, and the constantly shifting smaller lights that darted around them, as if they were round racetracks. But he couldn’t make out what was in the middle of them. It was a changing mass of haze that made him look away, eyes watering.

            “Oh, do try to watch,” Moonstone urged. “It always takes one like that at first, until one gets used to it.”

            Harry turned back at the same time as one of the Healers ducked into the shadows and came out with a thin Muggle child. He had to be a Muggle, given that not a scrap of magic was on him. He was perhaps five years old, thin and clad in a white smock-like garment, with his stringy hair dangling in his eyes and his dark eyes wide and terrified.

            Harry tightened chains around himself like the ones that, from the marks on his wrists, had held the child recently. He would not charge anyone. He would allow himself time to absorb what was going on. They might not intend to hurt the boy. Although he whimpered, he wasn’t fighting yet. Perhaps they hadn’t hurt him yet, either.

            One Healer held the boy up. There was the gleam of a partial Body-Bind around his arms and legs, showing why he didn’t struggle. Harry felt the beast rear up in the back of his mind and join the watching.

            The other Healer put the block of wood containing the magical circles down on the floor. The circles shone like the rings of Saturn. The other Healer started to lower the boy into the middle of them. Harry made himself stand still.

            That is, until the boy’s right arm touched the top circle and the smell of burning hair and flesh filled the room, at the same moment as the boy’s scream.

            Harry let the beast go.

*

            tiggator: Thanks! Moonstone is going to be a real problem.

            unneeded: No, you can’t hide that. And Draco knew Moonstone might be able to recognize specific signatures, but he didn’t think about the fact that he could recognize their power, too.

            AlterEquis: Freeing Harry might not be the problem…

            SP777: They thought the spell on Harry’s ears was enough for safety.

            Moonstone is a sort of independent “investor” who has money and power on his own, and isn’t subject to the Ministry in the same way that Schroeder is.

            Yami Bakura: Thank you! I’m afraid this next chapter has a diabolical cliffhanger, too.
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