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The Library of Hades	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4439 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Three—An Old Friend

            “Ginny?” Harry took the lead when they came to the door of Weasley’s house, of course, knocking and calling out as though he wished she wouldn’t hear him. Draco leaned against the wall of the house and looked around with his hands in his pockets.

            He had to admit that Weasley had done well for herself. This house, in Hogsmeade, near the center and the shops, was large, built of brick, with stone railings on the small veranda in front and stone walls around the garden. When Draco glanced over the wall, he saw climbing vines and sunflowers, and a few deep-colored blossoms that made him raise his eyebrows. He wondered if Harry understood what it meant for someone who wasn’t a Potions master to have those flowers in her garden.

            The door opened before Harry could knock again, and Weasley’s voice said, “Did you want to—oh, Harry. It’s you.”

            Draco closed his eyes and bowed his head. He had to admit that he wasn’t always the best judge of tone in the voice of someone he didn’t know well—spending so much time around his parents as a child had ruined him for the nuances in the voices of others—but Weasley didn’t sound exactly thrilled to see Harry.

            All to the better. Draco judged it was the right time to swirl away from his post against the wall and stand beside Harry, so that Weasley could see him. She looked at him once, with a flicker of her eyelids that could have meant a number of things, and then turned to look at Harry again.

            “I’m sorry, Ginny,” Harry said, with a sober restraint that Draco wished he would use more often when they were interviewing witnesses. “But we’ve uncovered evidence that Michael Corner may be involved in one of our cases. Can we come in?”

            Weasley paused, frowning. She had grown far taller than Draco remembered, taller than he might have anticipated, with deep auburn hair that glowed as if it had coals in it. She had direct eyes, too, and calluses on her hands that looked as if they came from complicated wandwork, or intense Quidditch. She ignored Draco better than his parents could, and finally said, “I’m not dating him right now.”

            “But you have more recent information on him than we do,” Harry said, and waited. Draco bit his tongue, only placing a hand low on Harry’s back where Weasley could notice it if she wanted.

            Weasley rubbed her forehead. Then she sighed and began, “It’s not a great time.”

            “A woman is dead,” Draco said, voice low and even, level, pleasant. “A woman who did no harm to anyone, a woman who was flayed alive and had her skin spread on the wall like a book, and the truth of her life, or what her killer thought was the truth, written on it in blood. We have no leads. No one saw the killer. She let him in, by all the signs. The carpet is still deep enough in blood to squash when one walks across it.”

            Weasley clicked her neck around to look at him. Draco leaned forwards over Harry’s shoulder. “You can still deny us entrance, if you want to,” he said. “I only wanted you to understand what we’re working on, so that you can answer our questions better.”

            “Draco,” Harry said in a low hiss, but Draco didn’t care.

            Weasley flung up her hands and stepped aside. “Why not?” she snapped. “You might as well come in and argue with me in my house as out on my doorstep where anyone can see.”

            Draco smiled as he stepped in. “Worried about what your neighbors will make of an Auror visit, Weasley?”

            Harry interrupted with noisy protests that Draco didn’t have to pay attention to, because he knew their content beforehand. His attention was on Weasley, and the violent way she turned her back on them, walking towards the kitchen where a kettle was singing.

            Interesting.

            He sat down with one leg crossed over the other, and spent a moment adjusting the perfect angle of his knees. Then Harry hissed at him sharply enough to attract his attention, and Draco smiled at him. “What?”

*

            Harry wanted to rip the hair from his head. Or Draco’s head from his shoulders. Either would have been acceptable, really, and Harry thought he was as close to one as the other.

            “You said you wouldn’t antagonize her,” he hissed. He glanced over his shoulder, but Ginny was still in the kitchen, and the longer Harry went without having to see her still, questioning face, the happier he was. Her welcome had been far from what he expected, even given that he was a former boyfriend asking about another of her former boyfriends. “And you did that immediately, even though you must be able to see that she doesn’t want to date me.”

            “Indeed not,” Draco said, with the smiling affability that made Harry want to kick him sometimes. “And did you wonder why she seemed so unhappy to see us?”

            “You think you know already, so why don’t you tell me?” Harry turned away and prowled restlessly around the huge drawing room of Ginny’s house, which had been the reason, she had told him, that she’d bought the place. It occupied the entire ground floor except for the kitchen and a bathroom, and it had so many windows that Ginny had to keep a giant fire roaring in the hearth. She had more bookshelves now than she had had when he last visited. Harry gave them a suspicious look and sheared away to look out the window in spite of himself. Ginny had large flowers in her garden, too, he noticed, red-purple blossoms that drooped and overgrew their stems, but kept well back from the wall. Ginny pruned them with sharp-edged spells.

            “She didn’t want an Auror visit right now,” Draco said, maddeningly. Harry stiffened his back but kept it turned. “Why is that? It’s not that she didn’t want to see you; this is more simple and more complicated than that. She might hate me, she might despise you, but she looked panicked when you opened the door.”

            “No,” Harry said.

            “Yes, she did.”

            “You were standing back to the side, you couldn’t see anything anyway,” Harry snapped at him.

            Draco leaned gracefully back at the same moment as the kitchen door opened again and Ginny came in with a delicate green enamel tray and three cups of tea. “You have to consider the possibility.”

            “What possibility?” Ginny glanced back and forth between the two of them as she set the tray down on the only table in the room, a low thing in between the couches that faced the fire. Harry came reluctantly over and sat down. Ginny didn’t have a huge table because, she said, she had no interest in encouraging her guests to stay for long.

            “The possibility that you might know something about Corner,” Draco said, and picked up the nearest teacup, and beamed at her.

            Harry opened his mouth to apologize for his partner, but Ginny charged in first, and the way her eyes flashed reminded him that she could take care of herself. He sat back with his own cup of tea and watched.

            “Of course I know something about him,” Ginny said. “That he’s loyal and good and would never do anything worthy of bringing himself to Auror attention. That’s what.” She picked up her own cup and swallowed so much tea that Harry thought steam would shoot out her ears like it would with a Pepper-Up Potion.

            “That’s not what we meant,” Harry began.

            Ginny spun on him, and Harry banged his knees on the table with how fast he tried to sit up. “It’s what he means,” she said, quiet, dangerous, jerking her head at Draco. “It’s the kind of thing he always means, because he can’t give up this stupid grudge that he thinks lies between our families.”

            “How many of our ancestors would agree with me and not you?” Draco asked the ceiling.

            “It doesn’t matter,” Ginny said, though now she was glaring at some point between them, not directly at them. Harry didn’t think that was much of an improvement. “I’ve left that behind me. I don’t hate you, Malfoy. But I won’t help you with whatever grudge you have against Michael, either.”

            “It’s not a grudge,” Harry said, wishing that both of them would think about what they had really come here for. “We found his name written at the scene of the crime that Draco told you about, Ginny.” It seemed better, at the moment, to skip the details of exactly how his name was written. “We’re trying to find out what’s going on, and we have so few other clues. Do you know if he knew anyone named Adriana Lugar?”

            Ginny looked blank. “No. Should he?”

            “That’s who died,” Draco said. “The one flayed alive, held there being cut and struggling for her life the whole time, and the one who—”

            “Fine,” Ginny snapped, and held up a hand as though she could ward back the words. “Why come talk to me?”

            “We thought you could tell us some things that we should know before we interviewed him,” Harry said, telling Draco with a glance that he should shut up and let Harry handle this. Of course, he had tried to tell Draco that in the past with very little effect. Draco shrugged amiably at him and sipped at his tea. Harry tried to ignore the slurping sound at his back as he appealed to Ginny. “Whether he knew her. Whether he was involved in the business of a correspondence course for Squibs at all. We’re afraid that he might be the next victim. Nothing to do with the case right now, but if whoever this is tracks him down…”

            Ginny played with the teacup for a moment. Harry knew it was time to keep silent, and let her make the decision. But yes, it had been the right idea to come here. There was something going on, although Harry thought it likely they wouldn’t know what until they had spoken to Corner himself.

            “All right,” Ginny said abruptly. “I don’t know where he is right now. He left the country a year ago. He firecalls me occasionally and says he’s in Paris, or Brussels, or Budapest. But any owl I send to him always comes back unopened. Some of the things he says frighten me. That’s all I know.”

            Draco caught Harry’s eye. Harry caught it right back, because this time he didn’t know what silent message Draco wanted to convey, and smiled at Ginny. “Thank you. Do you know why he left?”

            Ginny shrugged. “He said that England was suffering from the ruins of the war, and he wanted to find a place that wasn’t so ruined.”

            “Many people have said that.” Draco said in his blandest voice. “Though, generally, people who left in the years immediately after the war, instead of waiting until eleven years afterwards.”

            Ginny’s look should have shamed him, or fried him. But Draco had a thick skin relative to both of those, and did some more tea-sipping. Ginny hopped around in her seat to face Harry. “Are you going to let him keep doing that?” she asked.

            “Questioning you?” Harry sighed. “Sorry, Ginny. I know he’s obnoxious, but he does have a point. That’s the kind of thing I’ve heard said a lot, to the point that the Prophet uses it as a cliché. Are you sure that it would be true in Michael’s case? Or do you think he was using it as an excuse?”

            Ginny pulled strands of hair away from her face as she considered. “Is he going to get in trouble?”

            “Perhaps,” Draco said. “We don’t know what he’s done yet.”

            Harry punched Draco in the shoulder, and didn’t care if Ginny saw him doing it. “We don’t know. But he might be in trouble if he doesn’t come back. We’re not the only Aurors in the Socrates Corps, and the Ministry could pull us off this case and put someone else on it if they thought that we were trying to protect him, or something like that.”

            Ginny watched him with a broad, cynical face, and then snorted. “That’s not what you think, Harry. You think that he knows something, and you want him back so you can question him yourself.”

            “Or we want a holiday on the Continent.” Harry smiled at her and leaned forwards to touch her hand. She whisked it out of reach. Harry closed his hand and dropped it down at his side so that he wouldn’t look stupid by leaving it to dangle in midair. “Ginny. Look. I do want to be fair to him. But his name turning up at a crime scene like this is a hell of a coincidence. It might be, for all I know. Or he could be the twisted’s next victim, and in that case, he’s probably somewhere where we can’t get at him and protect him in time without more information. But we can’t know anything about what it really means until we talk to him.”

            Ginny picked at the knees of her trousers for a moment. Then she turned and walked to the other side of the room, pulling a drawer in a small cabinet open. Harry relaxed. She would give them something, although how useful that thing would prove to be, he couldn’t know until he’d had a chance to use it.

            “Here’s the last Floo address I had for him,” Ginny said, coming back with a scrap of parchment in her looping hand. Harry took it, memorized the directions in case something happened to them, and slid the parchment into his pocket. “You’d better not use it to antagonize him the way you did me.”

            “We’ll be approaching him as at least a potential suspect,” Harry reminded her, and stood up to nod his thanks. Touching her right now didn’t sound like a good idea, both because of the way she had reacted before and the way that Draco was quietly bubbling beside him. “It’s going to be different, one way or the other. Thank you, Ginny. I mean that.”

            “You can show your thanks by getting out of here and not showing back up with him ever again,” Ginny said, not even looking at Draco, and whipped around to storm back into the kitchen.

            Draco opened his mouth. Harry seized his arm. Draco looked him in the eye, and that was enough to make Harry release him.

            “I’m perfectly willing to let him visit you without me in the future,” Draco told her, his voice so cold that Harry knew he was going someplace dangerous despite how good his words sounded on the surface. “Now that I know he isn’t interested in you, and that only confirms he would rather date me.”

            Ginny paused. Harry was sure that he could hear all three of their heartbeats in that moment. Or maybe it was only his, thumping so crazily that he felt as though someone was running towards him.

            Ginny turned around instead of running, and her face was more closed than it had been when she first opened the door. “Harry?” she asked.

            Harry licked his lips. This wasn’t the way he’d wanted his friends to find out, but they had to know sometime. “Yeah,” he said. “Draco and I are partners, and—partners.”

            Ginny just turned her back and walked away again. Harry closed his eyes. He would have felt better if she had shouted at him.

            “That went well,” Draco said aloud.

            Harry just nodded to him and walked out of Ginny’s house. Discussing it in front of her wouldn’t do anything to heal the wound that he was afraid he had just inflicted between Ginny and himself. Walk, and breathe, and think about the fact that she had treated them with suspicion from the moment they appeared, and maybe it would hurt less soon.

*

            Draco woke suddenly, his hand on his wand. He turned his head from side to side, slow, minute movements that any intruder might mistake for someone settling deeper into sleep.

            But he sensed nothing, certainly nothing that would require a wand. Harry’s home was simply older and creakier than any building he was used to sleeping in, and he woke like this with the conviction that he had to hurt someone.

            He laid his wand on the bedside table and turned over to regard Harry.

            Harry lay with his head turned away, his body hunched around his curled fists. Draco reached over his shoulder and smoothed his fingers up and down the fist, trying to persuade it to unclench. Harry stirred, but it was only to move further away and not closer. Maybe he had slept alone for so long that he didn’t know how to do anything else, Draco thought. He knew that Harry had never actually slept with Lionel Vane, and as for relationships before then, perhaps the last one had been Ginny Weasley.

            Who had something to hide, however little Harry wanted to believe it.

            Draco stood up, stretched, cast a Warming Charm on his bare skin so he wouldn’t have to dress, and padded through the bedroom to the kitchen. Harry rarely made himself anything more complicated than toast, but that changed when Draco stayed over, because Draco refused to let his standard of living sink. He had done without house-elves for seven years, which made for some intense learning of charms.

            As he began to crack eggs now, his mind wandered back to Weasley. He didn’t think that his initial suspicion had foundation; she didn’t seem interested in Harry. But she had stiffened up before she realized they were dating. She had looked away from them and hadn’t looked as pleased to see Harry as Draco would have thought she would, even if he was there visiting her in an official capacity.

            What was she hiding?

            As Draco cast the charm that Transfigured a spoon into a whisk, and the second one that would set it going constantly without the need for human intervention, one possibility came to him. That Corner had fled for a crime he was afraid would implicate Weasley. Draco had checked the files when they returned to the Ministry and found nothing on Corner, but if he had fled, he could have taken the evidence with him.

            Harry had used the Floo address, after a long argument over which one of them should. Draco had pointed out that he might be able to question Corner with the greater efficiency, but Harry had pointed out that Corner was unlikely to open the Floo at all for someone he still considered an enemy.

            Harry won, and used it. The fireplace revealed a confused young woman who talked to them in French, which Draco had to translate. She knew nothing about Corner, and as far as Draco could tell, that was genuine, not a cover-up for a hidden lover.

            The eggs had reached the point where he could begin on the toast. At neat motions of Draco’s wand, the bread rose into the air and began to flip itself back and forth over a conjured flame. He watched it brown.

            Did Corner’s crime have anything to do with the twisted hunting him?

            Possibly. That was the problem with knowing so little about this twisted, Draco thought. He might want Corner for an insane reason, or because Corner knew Adriana or was associated with her somehow. Corner might be the twisted. The crime Corner had committed before going abroad might have nothing to do with it.

            The toast was nicely browned. Draco checked on the progress of the eggs and began to brew coffee, which Harry preferred in the mornings for some reason.

            Either way, Draco accepted that they would get no more information from Weasley. She would shut her mouth to him, and to Harry since she knew that anything she told Harry would get to Draco. And if she was the sort of wizard to stay loyal to someone who had committed a serious crime simply because she knew him, then there was little chance of her suddenly cracking and deciding to tell the truth.

            Draco paused on that thought. Wouldn’t he stay loyal to Harry if Harry had committed a crime, simply because Draco knew him?

            Draco shrugged a moment later. That was different, because he would know it, and he would know what Harry’s motives and actions for. In this case, he had no idea. Corner could deserve the loyalty, or not, or have nothing to do with the crime. But the longer Weasley kept her mouth shut, the more suspicious it was.

            All things considered, Draco thought they should go talk to Lugar’s business partner next. She was the one who was most likely to know some of the truths they were seeking. She could start by verifying whether the blood the twisted had inked on Lugar’s skin contained the truth or only a fantasy.

            Harry hadn’t got up yet, and he usually did once the smell of coffee began to infect the house. Draco turned and called his name, keeping one eye on the eggs. It had taken him a long time to master scrambled eggs, and even now, they still sometimes stuck to the bottom of the pan.

            Harry didn’t respond. Draco set the cup of coffee down silently on the table and began to pad towards the bedroom.

            Harry screamed. Draco began to run.

            He got there in time to find Harry sitting up in the sheets, shivering, his arms wrapped around himself. He turned his head as Draco came up and said hoarsely, “I saw the twisted murder someone else.”

            Draco nodded without speaking. That was Harry’s Dark gift, the one that he insisted on comparing to a flaw in the twisted. Draco began to pull on his uniform robes. “Where?” he asked, once he had his head through the collar.

            Harry’s hand was still on his neck. Draco hid a wince. Harry’s gift gave him visions of murders—always and only murders, not anything else, and he experienced the pain that the victim did. In this case, the twisted must have started cutting there.

            “Hogsmeade,” Harry said. “The Three Broomsticks.” He gave Draco a weak smile. “Thanks for making breakfast, but I don’t think I could eat right now.”

            Draco nodded back. He was glad for his own empty stomach. “Then get dressed, and let’s go.”

*

            SP&77: Draco didn’t try to do much on purpose, because that would have obstructed their case. But he enjoyed the ability to make Ginny uncomfortable, oh, yeah.

            I plan for the story to either be sixteen stories (eight one-shots and eight novel-length stories), or seventeen (the sixteen plus a concluding one-shot to tie everything together).

            AlcyoneBlack: Yeah, not eating is a good idea!

            Harry still feels sorry for Nancy, and since the only person she actually tried to kill as a twisted was him, he thinks that she could have been one of the ones she’d saved—if she hadn’t hurt Draco’s mind.

            unneeded: Yeah, Harry is thinking now that taking Draco along may not have been the best idea.
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The Library of Hades