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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 Three--Foiling the Future

            For the second time in less than a day, he was in trouble and having to depend on Malfoy to save his life.

            Harry hated being in this position, almost as much as he hated having his legs devoured from the ankle up.

            He seized his wand and tried to concentrate though the pain of breaking bones, of splitting flesh, of knowing that his legs were vanishing into the jaws and perhaps hidden mouth of the enormous beast. It didn't work. The pain was too great, and so was the fear, surging through him and filling him with visions of a future where he couldn't walk again, where the Healers couldn't regrow what he had lost, where he had to depend on his friends for everything--

            No. That won't happen. I'll make sure, somehow, that it doesn't happen.

            And then rational thought fled before the blinding pain, and try as he might to think of Voldemort and the Forest and all the other dangers he had faced before this and come out alive, he couldn't, because he couldn't think.

*

            Draco had studied the jaws sticking out of the wall even as he began to cast his first spell, and realized they had few vulnerable places. No fur sheathed them, and no metal either; he had sometimes dealt with criminals who created servants and defenses out of machinery, as though they were Muggles. No, these were simple bone jaws, with the teeth sticking directly out of them. Little to do unless he could come up with spells that would attack them there, in that way.

            He had studied some spells like that, luckily.

            "Dentes frango!" he roared, and through his mind passed a memory of a dusty afternoon sitting in his father's study, staring in silence at the spell in front of him and wondering if it would serve, finally, to humiliate Potter and make him cower before Draco in impressed, awed shock.

            The jaws trembled as the invisible blow of the spell collided with them, but didn't loosen and didn't let Potter go. Draco cursed frantically, steadily, under his breath, and cast the spell again, louder and stronger this time. One of the fangs broke with a faint snapping sound, but the jaws had plenty of others left to carve Potter's flesh. And so much blood coated the floor now that Draco knew he was probably running out of seconds to choose the correct spell; at some point, they would have to lose Potter from loss of blood.

            "Another one, then," Draco said, although there was no one there to hear him, not with Potter drowning in his own screams. "A Darker one." He closed his eyes, trying to ignore the reek that assaulted his senses and the delicate squirming in the middle of his stomach that said it would grow worse when he added his spell, and thought, not said, Debilitatem creo.

            The spell left him this time in a visible ripple of water, coursing along just above the surface of the floor in a wave and slamming into the nearer jaw, the bottom one. For a moment, it paused. Draco stepped back, wincing as his left arm vibrated and jerked and the reek grew stronger and stronger and stronger.

            Then the jaws gave a great cry--the first noise Draco had heard them make, other than sheer chewing--and began to fall apart. Draco smiled grimly and caught himself with one hand on the wall. The Weakness Curse was designed to deal with extraordinary magical threats, up to and including nundu. Larkin was twisted, but even he didn't know about all the curses that existed and ways to defend against them.

            Cracks spread up through the bone in the jaws, and weakened the teeth and made them fall out. The jaws released Potter and let him fall to the ground as they thrashed back and forth. Draco thought they were seeking to withdraw into the wall and become more charcoal drawings again, as if that would stop their imminent destruction.

            It didn't. The cracks surged forwards, creating river-like patterns that stretched to the back of the jaws, and they simply broke apart, raining down in dust. There came a last, anguished cry, and Draco lunged forwards and dragged Potter clear, just in case the magic was vengeful enough to try for a final bite.

            It wasn't, or else Draco's magic was too strong. They faded.

            Draco knelt down beside Potter and examined his legs, hard as that was to do with the blood and the bone in the way. A short look convinced him that he wasn't able to do anything about it with his limited healing skills, and he winced and cast a few spells that would clot the blood. A second spell bound the shards of bone into place; Draco had the vague idea that the Healers would find it easier to treat Potter if they knew where all the pieces of the chewed part of his body had gone.

            Then he used a Lightening Charm, and scooped Potter up.

            "You saved my life."

            Draco looked down. Yes, Potter was still conscious, his eyes locked on Draco as if he were having a revelation. Or another vision, Draco thought grimly, which he would not discount this time if it happened.

            "Yes, Potter," he said. "I did. And next time, maybe you could refrain from touching the Mark full of Dark magic, hmmm?"

            "W-warn me, and I will." That was all Potter seemed able to say, as his head drooped against Draco's shoulder and he shut his eyes. Draco snorted in disgust--honestly, who wouldn't make every effort to stay away from a marking left behind by a dangerous criminal just in principle?--and strode out of the cell, avoiding the wards by habit. He was already making up the report in his mind as he Apparated.

*

            Harry woke in familiar surroundings, and leaned back with a grim little smile. No doubt he would see his favorite Healer soon, and get his favorite scolding.

            Well, it's not as though I go out intending to get hurt. Between the people I chase and the ones who try to kill me because they think that will give them a reputation to brag about in Knockturn Alley, the chances were always good that I'd end up here.

            "Still determined to give me a heart attack, I see, Potter."

            The Healer who stood in the doorway now, regarding him with no very favorable glance, was a tall black woman with tightly braided hair. Her hands were closed down so hard on the stack of parchment she held that Harry thought she was going to rip some of it. He half-hoped she did, so he could point out something that was her own fault and not his, as everything else in the world seemed to be.

            "Hullo, Healer Tella," he said cheerfully. "That's one ailment you're not going to die of, since it would require you to have a heart to attack."

            "The height of Auror wit," Healer Tella told any listeners--and there were a few listeners, actually, apprentices who clustered behind her with wide eyes--and moved in like a whirlwind, slapping the parchment down on a desk in the corner of the room and advancing on him with her wand held in front of her like a lion-tamer's chair. "I ask for a patient I can Heal, and they send me someone who wants to die before he's thirty."

            "That gives me less than a year," Harry felt the need to point out.

            "Only means that you'll step up your efforts." Tella cast a general diagnostic spell, and looked critically at the list of numbers and words that appeared in the air next to the bed. Harry craned his neck, but as usual, all the words except his name were abbreviations and meant nothing to him. Tella sighed. "You're going to live," she told Harry, in the tones of someone who'd been left at the altar.

            "Oh, no," Harry said. "You still haven't broken your streak of keeping me alive."

            Tella ignored that completely, but Harry understood why when she spoke her next words. She had something much worse to tell him than the mere flippant comment she could have dispensed otherwise, and she spoke with slow relish, now and then checking his expression to make sure he fully understood what he was hearing.

            "All the bones in your feet were broken, and most were half-eaten," she said. "Most of your skin and flesh on your feet is gone as well. That means that we'll need to use Skele-Gro and the Epidermis Curse."

            "Curse?" Harry asked faintly. It didn't sound like much of a Dark spell at first, the one to regrow skin on someone's feet, but the more he thought about it, the more possibilities he saw.

            "Curse." Tella smiled at him and gestured for the terrified young mediwizard who attended her to enter. He stepped in, carefully keeping his eyes away from Harry's wrapped feet, and Harry understood that there might be more reasons here to be horrified than Tella's diagnosis. "You have no idea how much pain you're going to be in, Potter. Perhaps this will teach you not to have your feet half-devoured by mystical drawings on walls."

            "You think I do this for fun?" Harry asked flatly, and then braced himself as the mediwizard raised his wand. Clearly, this would be too easy if Tella did it herself.

            "I think that you do it when you could have chosen a different career a long time ago," Tella answered, leaning towards him and speaking more seriously than he'd ever seen her do. "And I think that because of your name, I'm pulled off cases more devastating to make sure that you're all right. You could, as a professional consideration to me, stay away from some of the things that have broken, splintered, shattered, and crushed you over the years."

            Harry blinked. He'd never thought about it that way. "I never thought about it that way," he mumbled aloud, before he could stop himself. That was the sort of thing you didn't say around Tella, because one never knew what she would do in response.

            "And that's the worst of it," she said back, in a quiet tone that was much more cutting than any joke she might have made, and turned and walked out the door.

            Harry would have called some sort of half-arsed apology after her, but then the mediwizard unwrapped his feet, and Harry had to look away. He heard the stuttered syllables of an incantation, and gritted his teeth, but the spell to regrow his feet didn't hurt half as much as the chewing of them had.

            Besides. Tella had given him enough to think about that he doubted his hours in hospital would be profitless.

*

            Draco sighed and leaned back against the wall in the flat green room where it seemed all the Aurors with partners temporarily in hospital had been sent to wait over the years. He could see scraps of scarlet cloth caught here and there on chairs, and the table was littered with rings from cups of tea and coffee and the sort of periodicals that the St. Mungo's wizards seemed to mistakenly think Aurors would prefer. Draco looked at the cover of one called Wickedness Weekly and looked away again with a shudder. It was exactly the kind of shiny, glossy thing that was responsible for half the starry-eyed trainees who thought they would become Aurors in a month and solve crimes for a living without any hard work or blood on their hands.

            They had thought he was that kind of Auror, when he applied.

            Then Draco smiled grimly. No, they had thought he was wrong, and mistaken, and an idiot to believe that anyone would willingly work with him. But they had probably never believed he had that particular delusion. Everyone knew that Malfoys didn't sign up to do a bit of good in the world.

            He looked up as he heard someone approaching. It was the tall Healer he had seen going into Potter's room earlier, who had made sure that he removed himself. She came to a halt in front of him and gave him a strict evaluating glance, as though to see whether he needed treatment of his own.

            Draco gave her nothing back but a bland mask. He never knew how strangers would react to him, whether they would see the Malfoy or the Death Eater or the Auror first, and so he preferred not to give them a chance to see any real emotions.

            The Healer shook her head at last and said, "Your partner will need to stay here overnight. You are welcome to stay or leave, but you should not go into his room." She pivoted on her heel and strode away, already checking a sheaf of parchment in her pocket and calling questions to another Healer, who hurried over to her waving a potions vial.

            Draco scowled. Just like Potter to get himself incapacitated on a case that really needs two of us.

            But he could solve the Larkin case without Potter's help, certainly. In fact, Draco didn't know why he felt so abandoned. Potter had had a few ideas so far, but they might well be wrong, and he got in trouble. Draco should be able to do more by himself, because so far Larkin hadn't seen fit to target him.

            He decided that he would check in with Potter once, since it was part of procedure. That way, the git couldn't claim later that Draco had gone out to do work that he wasn't part of and knew nothing about, and if it went wrong, he wouldn't be able to excuse himself from having some responsibility for it.

            Draco met a young mediwizard slipping out of Potter's room, who gave him a nervous look before he turned away. Draco smiled at Potter as he stepped in. "What did you do to scare him?"

            "Screamed."

            Draco paused. Potter's face was pale, the beads of sweat that stood out on his forehead looking like dew. He caught Draco's gaze and shrugged. "It doesn't matter," he said. "How do my feet look?"

            "Of all the questions that I never imagined hearing," Draco murmured, but bent down so that he could take a glance. Potter pulled the blanket back so that Draco could make it out.

            Potter's feet looked like they'd been boiled in scalding water. The extreme stretched and shiny pink newness of his skin made Draco shake his head. He didn't know how soon Potter would be walking on them, though they did at least have the right number of toes and when Draco reached out, he thought he could feel the right bones beneath the skin.

            "You'll live," he said coolly, pulling back. "But Healer Tella told me that you'll be here overnight, and I don't think the case can afford that long."

            Potter, unexpectedly, grinned at him. "Right," he said, and sat up, reaching for the cloak that had been draped over the headboard.

            Draco put a hand on the cloak and, with a silent raised eyebrow, demanded to know what the fuck he thought he was doing.

            "The case can't wait," Potter explained. "It's been less than a day, and already there's been two attempts to kill us and interference with the mind of a third person. I have to get up and join you on it."

            "Two attempts to kill you," Draco corrected him. "I think I might be safer working alone."

            For some reason, Potter's shoulders hunched, and an emotion flashed through his eyes that reminded Draco of the way a rat had looked when it was cornered by the house-elves. Then he shook his head, and said, "It might be. But in that case, I'll stay in the office and consider your conclusions while you go out and do the dangerous fieldwork. We can't afford to have someone just lying uselessly in hospital."

            "Even if that means that you might recover faster and be less useless to me in the end?"

            Potter shook his head, silently denying the care that Draco was only trying to extend to him. "In the end, you're going to need two people to bring down Larkin. What happens if you find him and I'm still in hospital?"

            "I can take him on my own," Draco said, and let his voice grow colder. Did Potter really think that Draco was so incompetent as an Auror that he would let a Dark wizard slip through his fingers? "Or I'll take a temporary partner. Auror Latham told us that there were Socrates Aurors available to help on other cases, because we're not always hunting twisted. I'll take one of them."

            Potter sat on the edge of his bed for long moments, eyeing Draco. Then he nodded and lay back down, swinging those disturbing feet under the covers. He closed his eyes, which made his face seem much more blank. Draco shook his head. He should be happy about that. Potter had always been too expressive for his own good. And now for Draco's own good, since they were partners and his life might someday depend on how well Potter could control his face.

            "All right," Potter said. "I hope that you get a solid lead tonight. Thank you for saving my life."

            Draco stared at him for a few minutes, waiting, but apparently that was the end of Potter's heroism for tonight. With a loud sniff, Draco left the hospital room and nearly slammed into the young mediwizard who had healed Potter's feet, hovering in the corridor.

            "What is it?" Draco asked. The mediwizard cringed, and Draco shook his head and asked again, more graciously.

            "Um," the mediwizard said. "He really shouldn't walk on that new skin for twenty hours after it's healed."

            "Tell him that," Draco said, and continued down the corridor, obscurely disappointed for some reason. "He's the only one who's going to profit from that warning."

*

            Harry leaned back in his bed and closed his eyes. The mediwizard who had come back into the room to tell him not to walk on his feet for twenty hours avoided his gaze the entire time, and scurried back out. Harry reckoned that he'd met either Malfoy or Healer Tella as he was coming in to report.

            Harry sighed and shifted. His new skin rubbed against the blankets and sent a flare of pain up his legs that only seemed to end at his knees. He winced. Yes, well. Perhaps walking around in shoes, especially the dragonskin boots that Aurors were supposed to favor and wear at all times, wouldn't have been the smartest idea after all.

            And it wasn't Malfoy's fault that he'd said the exact words, about being safer working alone, that Lionel had, right before the end.

            Harry allowed himself exactly two minutes to wallow in the pain, and then put that thought aside and turned to something else instead.

            Larkin's flaw couldn't simply be sending his victims visions born of fear. That might have worked when he could reach out and inspire his sister to try and murder Harry, but he couldn't have known that Malfoy and Harry would go to his cell, or that Harry would be the one to touch the drawing instead of Malfoy.

            Which meant Malfoy was right. There was more to this than a simple talent to reach across the distance and implant someone with a vision of whatever they most feared. Besides, it still didn't explain why he'd been able to murder Whitley but Rebecca and Harry had been affected less strongly.

            Harry wasn't allowed to have his wand in St. Mungo's since what everyone involved had been careful to refer to only as the Beef Incident. But he had perfected a few spells without it, and he used one of them now, murmuring a Numbing Charm that froze the offending skin. Now not every brush against the blankets wasn't a blast of agony, and he could actually think.

            So there had to be something else, some component to Larkin's flaw that both he and Malfoy had overlooked. How had Larkin known that they would go to the cell, and how had he known that Harry would touch the drawing?

            There was only one scenario that made sense, although Harry barely wanted to admit it because it made Larkin so powerful. He circled up on it reluctantly, finally facing it head-on.

            I think Larkin can see the future, just like I can. But he has the power to send those visions to other people, to share them, and he can see more than just deaths. And he picks and chooses the visions that he shares based on what will cause the most fear. He sent Rebecca the vision of himself in prison, because he knew that would scare her into acting.

            Which meant one thing Harry hadn't dared to consider so far. If the visions came true, that meant Larkin was going to end up in prison.

            He was elated only until he remembered that the mission of the Socrates Corps, as Latham and others had explained it to him, was to kill the twisted. Not bring them in alive, not unless a whole slew of conditions were met, some of which involved there being no danger to anyone else in the capture.

            What did it mean, then?

            Harry leaned back, frowning, and wondered if Larkin was manipulating a vision of the past so it looked like the future. That meant he could send his sister a picture of himself in the holding cell, before he escaped, and scare her that way.

            But, as Ron had learned before Harry had during Auror training and taught him, it was silly to think up additional explanations unless you turned out to need them. It was more likely that what Larkin was sending was a true vision of the future, and that he would end up in prison again at some point. Maybe they would corner him and manage to move him there without fuss after all.

            Or maybe he isn't going to stay there.

            Cold gripping his insides, Harry rang the small bell that would send vibrations traveling to one of a series of bells on the ward mediwitch's desk. She showed up a few minutes later, yawning through a hastily-placed hand and asking him in a mumble what he needed.

            "Ink, parchment, an owl," Harry said tersely. "Or access to a Floo. Now."

            The mediwitch stared at him, then hurried off. Harry leaned back in the bed and closed his eyes.

            I just hope that Larkin doesn't decide to send me another vision while I'm writing. Or Malfoy one.

*

            When Draco stepped back into the Socrates office, he saw Latham coming towards him. Latham nodded once, and said, "We have someone who positively identified Larkin in the Leaky Cauldron. He hasn't moved in the last half-hour. We're going to go after him and kill him."

            Just like that, Draco found himself swept up in a bustle of preparations, hauled away and pressed into service as part of a team, and thinking as he went that this might be the end of the case, and wouldn't Potter hate to miss it because he'd landed himself in hospital?

            That thought didn't inspire as much glee as he'd expected it to, but it didn't inspire guilt, either. Potter was the one who had been wounded, and he must have known that certain developments might happen on the case while he was out of action.

            As they left, Draco saw an owl spiraling down towards him. He shrugged as he Apparated. Whatever the message was, it could wait until the case was over.

*

            unneeded: Harry thought the visions would be less painful than they looked, the same way that the falling object from the first one translated into a tray.

            And I put the story in the wrong category at first. That might be why fewer people have reviewed.

            SP777: I've been planning this series a long time. I just never got the right impulse to write it down until now.

            And yes, you'll see Latham again. He's briefly mentioned here, after all, and then he'll be in the next chapter.
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Hero's Funeral