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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Twenty-Three—In the Fire

            “You wanted to meet with my master?”

            Of course Draco had expected a lesser functionary to answer his call, instead of Moonstone himself, but he could pretend to be someone who resented it. He set his shoulders and stood there as if thinking about his response before he inclined his head and said, “Yes. If he has some time available this month.”

            The thin face in the fire hesitated. Draco had obtained this Floo address two years ago in exchange for a potion that involved a bit of unicorn blood. He knew it didn’t connect directly to one of Moonstone’s homes or business, of course, but it connected to someone who could introduce him to someone who could introduce him to someone else, and eventually the message would reach Moonstone.

            This dark man eyed Draco for some minutes, looking for the sarcasm, before he said, “I am not sure that he will have time for a Malfoy.”

            Do you know where he is? The words burned on Draco’s tongue. Do you have any idea, since Potter—or the powerful wizard he thought he could handle like a kitten, since we hope he doesn’t know it’s Potter—chased him away from that cavern yesterday?

            But if he had been foolish enough to ask the questions, they still might not have brought him an answer, since this man was low enough in the hierarchy to answer the firecalls. Draco sighed and made a great fuss of leaning back in the chair he’d placed in front of the fire and looking up at the ceiling. “Take a message, then,” he said, in the cutting, bored voice he’d stolen from his father. “I’m sure he will wish to see me, once he hears what I’m calling about.”

            “Yes, of course.” The thin face relaxed, and the man turned for parchment, his movements like a scrabbling rat’s. Draco touched his teeth together behind the protection of his lips. The flunkey was accustomed to dealing with those who had “important” messages for Moonstone, no doubt, and he took his time to assemble his material and poise his quill over the paper. Even then, Draco could have told him that he would have looked more impressive standing up, or at least sitting at a table. Moonstone had more protections but less sense of style than Draco had thought. “What is the message?” The man even cocked his head like a rat.

            “If he wishes to know what happened in the cavern and how to find the person who stole his property,” Draco said, “he should contact me.”

            The man’s hand froze on the quill, and he gave Draco a look of helpless terror. “Th-theft?” he asked. “I’m unaware of any of Mr. Dimshine’s possessions that have been stolen.”

            “You would be, wouldn’t you,” Draco said, and smiled.

            The man stood up. “It’s in your best interests to inform me of more than that, you know,” he said, and his teeth clashed together like some angry squirrel’s. “Mr. Dimshine left me in charge here, and he trusts me completely, completely. If I were to choose not to pass the message along to him—”

            “You would be very, very foolish,” Draco finished quietly. “This is stolen property, and do you know how Mr. Dimshine feels about someone stealing from him, or daring to defy him in general? Do you?”

            The man shrank away with a little whimper, and began to scribble. He glanced up with fingers and mouth both splattered with ink and said, “Do you—is there anything else that you want to add to the message, Potions master Malfoy?”

            “No.” Draco stood and reached out to cast the spell that would close the Floo connection undetectably, ensuring there was no way Moonstone’s flunky could call him back. “Give him that, in connection with my name.”

            The man’s face flamed like a dark star in the center of the fire for a moment, and then faded, surrounded by whirling green embers. Draco leaned back in his chair for real this time and crossed his legs, sighing.

            The first trap, baited and set.

*

            “You really think you can do this all by yourself?”

            Harry felt his spine shiver a little at the look Hermione was giving him, but he smiled at her and reached out for the cup of tea on the table in front of him. Adam had already eaten, a meal of biscuits and toast and a few eggs that Hermione had foisted on Harry, apparently under the impression that it was immoral for all the parts of a meal to come from the same food group or something. Now the boy stood by Harry’s side, his hand on Harry’s arm, and his solemn, blinking eyes locked on Harry’s face. He had said that he trusted Harry to tell him what other people were saying, but he still didn’t want to move too far away.

            “I don’t know that I can,” Harry said. “But I know two things.” He held up his fingers and folded them down, noting the way Adam watched him. “First, no one else around here can speak Parseltongue, and that means I’m the only lifeline Adam’s got. Second, I have to find and take down Moonstone and Schroeder.”

            “You value that over protecting him?” Hermione flicked her eyes Adam’s way rather than nodding at him. They had discovered this morning that he didn’t like gestures that pointed at him, any more than he liked drawn wands. Harry could hardly blame him, considering what he must have endured in that cavern.

            “I want to do both at the same time,” Harry said. “They’re both imperative. I want Adam safe. I also want any other children they’ve done anything like this to safe.” He flexed his fingers, and felt as if claws were springing out from sheaths at the end of them. “I won’t let anything else like this happen, Hermione. Nothing.”

            Hermione leaned nearer to him, and Harry let her. They were alone in her house. Ron had gone back to work this morning to try and find out any information he could about Campion and Schroeder, and even Moonstone if there was information there to be found, and Hermione didn’t have to work today due to completing all her paperwork earlier in the week.

            “You don’t know what they’re saying about you,” Hermione said after a moment, after surveying him so thoroughly Harry thought she probably knew what was written on the inside of his eyelids better than he did.

            “In the Prophet?” Harry nodded. “I think I do. That the stress of the war has finally driven me mad, that my case results should be dug up and looked at again, that those people I testified against or for might be innocent or guilty. It’s the same sort of shit that they’ve been saying about me all along, but now they have something more substantial than rumors to go on.”

            Hermione’s eyes widened. “And you still want to do this?” she asked, nodding at Adam.

            Harry looked down. Adam looked up at him, and seemed to unhinge his jaw, like a real snake, to get some of the Parseltongue syllables out. “What is she talking about? Are you going to leave, too?”

            “No,” Harry told him back, and let his hand rest on Adam’s hair before he turned back to Hermione. “Yes,” he said. “This is the end. I don’t know how long this has been going on, and I’ll probably never know the names of all the children they took and stole the magic from, or killed, or tortured.” He knew he was pressing down firmly with his hand, on Adam’s hair, and made himself relax. “But that doesn’t matter. I can only handle the pressures that I know about, and I can only help or avenge the victims that I discover.”

            “Even if you can never go back?” Hermione whispered.

            “If I have to abandon everything that I’ve built, stop being an Auror, become a fugitive on the run from the Ministry?” Harry held her eyes. It was no more than he had been prepared to do yesterday when he was talking about this step to Malfoy, after all. “This is more important than those things.”

            Hermione sighed. “I—Harry, I never knew that you took the cases so seriously. You sacrificed your life once, yes, but that was for the entire world. I didn’t know that you would do it for a child you barely knew.”

            Harry had the feeling that he was giving the wrong kind of smile, at least the wrong kind to convince Hermione he wasn’t mad, but he kept on giving it. “For anyone who needs me,” he said. “For someone else, if Adam hadn’t been there. For you and Ron, if you had ever needed me to. This is something I can do.”

            “And it worries you when you can’t do something.” Hermione’s eyes were fixed on him with more understanding than he’d like. “Worries you to death, that you can’t give everyone everything they want.”

            Harry shook his head. “What they want might be something I’m unwilling to do, Hermione. This is different. Something needs to be done, and I have the power, and I’m in the right place. That makes me the right person.”

            Hermione started to answer, but Adam tugged on Harry’s sleeve, and he bent down to listen to him. Adam put his mouth close to Harry’s ear; Harry didn’t think he’d realized yet that other people couldn’t understand the Parseltongue he spoke any more than he could understand their English. “Is she going to make you leave? I don’t want you to leave.”

            “I will not leave,” Harry said, and was glad of the Parseltongue despite the fact that it just sounded like English to his ears. He was sure it was a little more emphatic, that he could sound stern and impressive in that language in a way he couldn’t in English. “I promise you that. She could tie me up and drag me away, and that wouldn’t make me leave. That would just make me come back and get angrier.”

            “Really?” Adam was staring at him with perfectly round eyes. Maybe because he couldn’t imagine Harry getting angrier than he had when he had punished the Healers holding Adam down.

            “Really.” Harry stroked his hair again and smiled at him. “And you trust my magic, don’t you? It protected you when I was hurting the people who hurt you.”

            “I—don’t trust it,” Adam said, and then looked as if he didn’t know whether he should have said that or not, as if he was expecting to be punished from it. Harry gritted his teeth and held the anger back, flinging chains around it when it tried to escape. Bad things happened when he was full of rage like that, and Adam was more important than the thought of what Moonstone and Schroeder had done to him. “I don’t know what your magic did. And the magic they used on me was horrible.” He was whispering by then, looking over his shoulder.

            Harry leaned down and hugged him. Adam reached up with one hand and let it hover as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then brought it back down.

            “I’m sorry,” Harry whispered to him. And he was: for what he had made Adam suffer, for what the others had done, for everything Adam had gone through since he was snatched from his Muggle family. “I’ll try to protect you but not use that kind of angry magic all the time.”

            “I lived in a house with a yellow door,” Adam said, and his voice was thick. “With my Mum and Dad. Can you get me back there?”

            “I’ll try,” Harry said. And he would, although he knew it was hopeless unless they questioned someone more intimately involved in the matter than the two Aurors they had found were. Malfoy had tried to use Veritaserum on them, but they evidently knew nothing other than that they were well-paid for their time; they didn’t even know Moonstone and Schroeder’s real identities. In the end, they had Obliviated both “Midnight” and “Rosenbaum” and dropped them on the Ministry’s doorstep. “But what happens if we can’t find your Mum and Dad? Do you think you could live with me?”

            “Here?” Adam looked around Ron and Hermione’s house, which, Harry had to admit, had all the characteristic of a real home. Bright windows and big rooms and a huge wooden table and toys for their nieces and nephews.

            “No,” Harry said, and winced when he saw the look Adam gave him. Damn it, he wasn’t good at this, and he wished he knew what to say to make everything come out all right. As it was, though, he had to forge ahead and hope that somehow it would come out all right despite his deficiencies. He had told Hermione he was willing to give up everything in his life so far for Adam, now he had to be willing to prove it. “We’d had to find somewhere else to live. Somewhere out of the country, probably. And we’d have to heal you.”

            Adam gave him another blank look. Harry wondered if that was the natural tactic he adopted in situations he didn’t understand or if it had something to do with the trauma he’d suffered.

            I don’t know anything about this! For a second, he was sure he would start rocking back and forth in the chair, staring at the wall.

            He chained the panic just as he had the rage, and reminded himself there were other ways he could feel, more normal ways to be. He had forgotten a lot of them in the wake of the Retrovoyance curse, that was all.

            I don’t know anything about this?

            Then I’ll learn.

            “You aren’t speaking English,” he said. “You know that you can’t understand this lady?” He nodded at Hermione across the table, who was watching them with her hand over her mouth. Harry wondered if it was just hearing the language that was difficult for her. From a couple of the looks Malfoy had given him yesterday, he suspected that was the issue for him. “And she can’t understand you. You’re speaking a different language, and we are the only ones who speak it. We have to find a way to get you to understand other people again.”

            “We’re the only ones?” Adam demanded. “But where did they come up with the language? Who else speaks it?”

            “Snakes,” Harry admitted, watching closely. He had no idea what kind of outburst would follow that revelation.

            But Adam grinned, and looked around as if he thought there might be burrows in the walls. “Snakes? Really? I always wanted to talk to them! They’re smarter than my little brother. He still keeps going over and touching the stove after Mum told him not to.” He nodded confidentially to Harry. “But snakes always go somewhere else when they get too hot.”

            Harry grinned, encouraged by the enthusiasm, and said, “Yes, snakes can talk to us. I’ll find one for you later.”

            “’Kay,” Adam said, and reached for another biscuit on the edge of the table, popping it into his mouth.

            Harry looked up and found Hermione hiding a smile this time. “That seems to work with him,” she said. “But I don’t know if it will all the time. What did you promise him, to make him grin like that?”

            “To find him a snake,” Harry said. “He likes the idea.”

            “If he likes the idea, it might make things a little easier.” Hermione sighed. “But, Harry, what are you going to do with him when you fight Moonstone and Schroeder? I know you said you wouldn’t leave him, but he’d have to stay somewhere safe. What would happen if they tried to recapture him? What would you do?”

            “Destroy them,” Harry snapped.

            “That’s a good first plan,” Hermione said temperately. Harry had the feeling that she was trying hard not to snap at him, and leaned back to sling an arm around Adam’s shoulders. Adam snuggled against him and reached for another biscuit. “But you know that you’ll have to do more than that. Fight a battle with a child? Go on an investigation with a child?”

            “For what I have to do this afternoon, I can leave him here, if he’ll agree,” Harry said. “Otherwise, I’ll take him with me and hide him under a charm. I think that he knows how to be quiet now.”

            Hermione’s eyes were so narrow Harry wondered how she could see. “What do you have to do this afternoon?”

*

            “My lord.” Draco made a low bow, and he didn’t exaggerate it for effect more than half an inch or so.

            “That is a good form of address, Malfoy. I am pleased to see that someone like you has good manners. Make sure you keep to them.”

            The tall, cloaked figure who stepped into the room was probably Moonstone, Draco thought. Risky of him to come like this himself to a meeting, but then, he knew Draco had more than half-knowledge of his real name and motives, the same way that he had more than half-knowledge of Draco’s. They would politely dance around the real amount of knowledge in the room, and pretend not to know all the things they could say.

            “Yes, my lord,” Draco said, and caught a glimpse of the glamoured eyes—blue-black, a disturbing color, as though the pupils had expanded all over them to dominate them—widening. Then he turned his back deliberately and walked to the comfortable chair he’d placed in front of the fireplace, leaving Moonstone to take the even more comfortable one across from him. “Tea?”

            “Trust a Potions master’s tea, and you were born twice a fool,” Moonstone rumbled. His enchanted voice had a disturbing quality, too, like boulders rolling down mountains. Draco wished he could shrug without Moonstone understanding. Better to let him think that Draco’s wariness came from the glamours than from the true knowledge of his immense power. “And I was not born so even once.”

            “I understand, my lord,” Draco said, and turned and sat. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw nothing, but he hoped that nothing meant Potter was near enough in his Invisibility Cloak to listen. He’d had some trouble settling the boy in Draco’s back room, this time. The boy was terrified at the thought that one of the men who’d hurt him would be near, but he refused to part from Potter. “So. Will you agree to a promise on your magic?”

            Moonstone laughed, and this was like a volcano bursting open. “And why should I do that?”

            Draco set his fingertips together and stared the man down. “Because the information I can give you is that valuable.”

            Moonstone cocked his head and gave him a skeptical smile, but Draco had learned to read smiles like that long ago. He had Moonstone firmly in his grasp. Now the only thing he need do was make sure that he didn’t crush down with his fist and find himself with a palm full of spines.

            And work on your metaphors. You might do that, too.

            “We know you were associated with Rosefield,” Moonstone said calmly. “We know about your visits with Potter in the week before he went mad and had to be confined. We know everything you could possibly tell us.”

            “The loss of one of your test subjects?” Draco asked. “A boy who could speak Parseltongue, I believe. And that so surprising, too, when so few Parselmouths exist in the first place, and none of purely Muggle ancestry.” He swept another bow to Moonstone, this one from a sitting position. “A formidable discovery, my lord. Well done.”

            Moonstone’s laughter was gone. The glamour he had wound over his face made it seem mask-like, but that lack of the emotion when he had so far freely shown told Draco he had landed a blow.

            “Careful,” Moonstone breathed. “Careful what you say, what you do. Much rides on this meeting, more than you can know, and I have weapons standing ready outside the house.”

            Draco was sure he did, although those weapons were probably bought Aurors or the like rather than literal tools. But it didn’t matter. He had behind him—he was sure he did—a force of magic and strength like nothing Moonstone could either buy or imagine.

            And he had, carried in his breast, curled around his heart, a pounding excitement, a thrill that seemed to travel to the ends of his fingers, filling him with golden sparks. He wondered for the first time what he might have lost out on by not going into politics.

            “I know that, my lord,” he said, meeting Moonstone’s eyes and locking the Occlumency shields he had had no interest or use for in years around his mind. There was the murmuring tide of Potter’s thoughts to keep track of, of course, but for once they were almost silent, as Potter concentrated on the drama in front of him. And—was he used to them, now? Were they usual?

            Draco was not sure that he would call them that, but he had no time to worry about the terminology now, either, not when he was locked in the middle of his confrontation with Moonstone.

            “I would have expected no less of you,” he continued. “You have shown that you care about your secrets, and protect them well.” He touched his fingers to his lips, as though considering his next words. But he knew what they were. They burned and buzzed in the center of his mind, clear as the flashing chaos of Potter’s thoughts.

            Maybe this isn’t what I would have had if I went into politics. Maybe this is what I’m like when Potter is around.

            Another thought to chase and corral away from his thinking processes for the moment. He had too much else going on to care.

            “But you have also shown that you have power,” Draco continued. “And with power comes money.” He gave Moonstone a thin smile. “Both can be shared.”

            He didn’t miss the subtle way that Moonstone settled further into the chair, though only because he was looking for it. He could practically hear Moonstone’s thought processes shifting to click along new tracks. Blackmail would be a long-familiar tool, the handle worn smooth to Moonstone’s touch with use.

            Kill? asked Potter’s thoughts.

            Draco didn’t look around for what might have triggered that impulse, because he knew if anything noteworthy had appeared in the room, Moonstone would have reacted to it, too. It was probably simply Potter’s fury at seeing Moonstone so much at ease.

            Not kill, he answered as strongly as he could, though he knew the lack of a mental bond going the other way meant Potter wouldn’t hear him, and waited for Moonstone’s decision. No explosions from corners happened in the next few seconds, which Draco reckoned meant Potter had decided to calm down and await events.

            Moonstone lounged in his chair now, his eyes unblinking. Draco was sure that was an effect of the glamour, and countered with his own cold face and naturally blinking eyes.

            Moonstone at last gave a nod that might have been a challenge or an accepting gesture. “Very well, Mr. Malfoy. Let us negotiate.”

            And as they spoke, Draco felt the soft tingling settle over him that, he hoped to God, meant Potter was casting the spell to read Moonstone’s magical signature, and pull the necessary knowledge from it.

            Let him not sense it. You better not fuck this up, Potter.

            Those were the rational thoughts.

            But beneath it all still lay that irrational and glittering excitement, rather like—

            Rather like the throb in his cock when Potter had finished sucking him, in fact.

*

            ChaosLady: Not every chapter can be that intense.

            unneeded: As I imply in this chapter, there are other things they did than just leave the caverns with Adam. They did look, but found no one.

            SP777: Pretty soon!

            I titled the first two chapters that, and then decided to make it into a motif.

            AlterEquis: Can’t answer all your questions, but there’s a spell that can read a person’s magical signature like a Legilimens reading someone’s mind. Harry’s going to do it in the next chapter.

            Fullmoons_wings: Thanks so much! I’m glad you liked The Marriage of True Minds; I think that’s the fic for the last little while that I’m proudest to write.

            Harry does think that they were flirting, but he assumes Malfoy feels very differently about him and doesn’t want to continue the flirting.In the Fire
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