Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

One Honest Heart	By : Andreas Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5285 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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25. Chrysalis Chamber

We found the broken banisters four floors up; weakened but not rotten. It was clear that whoever had leaked the blood below had been thrust through the banisters. Simple leaning wouldn't have sufficed. To my reporter's nose, the place reeked crime scene. And the stench thickened as we ventured deeper into the castle.

Of the three of us, only Henry seemed curious rather than wary. If not for his brisk pace, it would have taken us much longer to locate the source of the stench. He smelled out the corpse like some particularly elegant bloodhound. While Charles gasped and I whimpered, Henry stepped up to the dark wooden desk, drenched in scientific rubble and spilt liquids, picked up a pair of pincers and a magnifying glass and walked over to the wall to examine the chained Dementor, or what little was left of it.

It was grey and withered, its once billowing black robes hanging limp and dusty on its emaciated body. Its mouth was frozen in an otherworldly expression of terror, suggesting a scream perpetuated beyond the veil, split open at the bottom by a deep gash that disappeared beneath its ripped robes.

Something had burst forth from inside the Dementor, as though it were nothing but a chrysalis for some darker evil.

The Dementors may never have been alive, but I had never expected to see one so irrevocably dead. Nor had I expected to see Draco Malfoy (so elegant and fashion conscious in all those shots I had trawled through when researching his gossip history) look so much like an Azkaban inmate. His hair was long, greasy, tangled, and torn. The nails on his claw-like fingers had grown long and hooked. His cheeks were sunken, his skin greyish. His ribs stood out in stark relief beneath his unnaturally defined pectorals; his waist looked ready to snap. He had starved, but whether that had been the cause of death in this chamber of potential decease - poison bottles, potion jars, pointed weaponry and a chained Dementor on the walls - was not at all clear. Nothing was.

He was propped against the front of the desk; placed, not of his own volition. A trail in the dust suggested he'd been dragged from just in front of the dead Dementor. Scratches in the wood next to his hands indicated some final struggle before he had died, perhaps of starvation, perhaps of poisoning.

Henry squatted beside Malfoy, examining his left hand. 'It's been out of use for quite some time.' He turned to me. 'He was demented long before his body died.' Little did I know he was only half right.

While I remained near the entrance, still paralysed by shock, Charles moved up behind the desk. Indicating a curiously empty stretch of soiled wood, he pointed out that one of the many spilt liquids was most certainly blood, and lots of it. As he and Henry panned the surface with their flashlights, I approached. There was a pattern to the coagulation of the blackened blood. There were outlines.

And suddenly we had a new mystery on our hands: Where was the body now?

We eventually found it - him - on a king-sized bed, laid out in its centre, arms crossed across his chest, or what was left of it. He was in a curious state somewhere between decomposition and mummification. At least, Henry called it curious. I mostly found it nauseating. If not for his still present glasses and barely discernible scar, identifying Harry Potter would not have been easy. He had been dead for a long time. While Henry was certain his body had initially been preserved in some way, he was equally sure that Potter's death predated Malfoy's.

The fact that someone or something had propped Malfoy against the desk and put Potter on the bed was worrying enough. That something had also placed Potter's heart on a small bedside table was downright terrifying.

Next to the heart, I found the second journal.

We decided to look through Malfoy's chamber (as we called it then) once more before we reported our findings to the Ministry. Borrowing a demented Bellatrix Lestrange with, we firmly claimed, the best of intentions was one thing. Letting the leaders of the wizarding world learn about the death of their favourite boy hero through the pages of the Quibbler was out of the question. Ms Lovegood had made that perfectly clear. But with me being an investigating journalist, Henry an ambitious scientist, and Charles a Muggle not much bothered with wizarding procedure, they could hardly expect us to leave the crime scene untouched. We had put our lives on the line - and we wanted something in return.

Though, in retrospect, it might have been better had I left the journal for the investigators to find. Still, considering the response I got when I did bring it forward, it does seem unlikely.

And leaving my other souvenir in the state I found it certainly wasn't an option.

I was snapping some shots of the empty chamber when I heard faint breathing from behind one of the large shelves stacked with jars and bottles. Muster the courage to move a single muscle took me long enough for Henry and Charles to return and ask what on Earth was taking me so long. With them as backup, I advanced on the shelves, peered into a dark corner, and saw a small, dark figure huddled there. It looked like the insubstantial shadow of a goblin.

'Don't mind me,' it muttered, 'high'm just dis-hintegrating quietly towards my dhoom, in a dhark, dhank corner, has requested.' Its large head turned towards me, ears flapping. It stiffened, as if only then realising I was not just a figment of its morbid imagination, and it solidified, eyes glinting in the darkness. 'Hand I'm stuck. Hand horribly, horribly bored. Reminds me hoff han old goblin hit, hit does.'

Charles thought I was slaughtering a pig. Henry made it stop by pointing out that he'd be up for slaughtering some less tangible ham.
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