Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Marathon	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 52456 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Two--On the Staircase
            "I don't like this."
            Harry managed not to roll his eyes, but more because he knew that would hurt Draco if he saw it than anything else. "Yes, so you've said several times," he murmured, and eyed the staircase that led down to the Department of Mysteries. They'd got off the lifts at the eighth floor, and now there were these steps in front of him. They seemed more shrouded in shadow than usual, but Harry didn't know if that was because the Spiders had been using charms to make them dimmer, or because of his imagination.
            My imagination, probably.
            "They do intend to leave the negotiation up to you," Draco insisted. He had a hand on Harry's shoulder and wasn't releasing it yet. "Those Aurors stopped at the lifts up there. They never intended to accompany you."
            "They're here as backup," Harry said out of the corner of his mouth. Draco was Disillusioned behind him, but Harry didn't know how well the deception would hold up if someone saw him talking to empty air. "They'll come if I'm in trouble. That's all that Robards promised me, especially as I need to meet with them myself to fulfill the terms of the agreement."
            He wished that Draco hadn't insisted on coming this far, really, but no member of the Spiders had yet appeared to talk to him, and Draco had overcome his fear to walk down the stairs. Harry knew how much that courage had cost him.
            "I don't like--"
            Harry held up a hand. There was a stir of light beneath him, a bright white spark that he had never seen before. He narrowed his eyes and breathed lightly through his nose, measuring the distance between him and the light, and then nodded.
            "Go back up now," he said.
            There was one long moment of hesitation when Harry thought he might have to remind Draco, again, that this was his particular battlefield and he should be the one in charge here, but then he heard slow footsteps. Harry counted them, and they became softer when they should have, when Draco reached the top of the stairs. He sighed in relief and stood waiting, his own wand held up so that the Lumos illuminated his face.
            "Are you going to talk to me?" he called down, when the spark did nothing but sit beneath him and glow. "Or am I going to have to go back up and tell the Aurors that you're not willing to negotiate after all?"
            The spark sharpened in response, as if the caster had heard his threat and could appreciate it. Now Harry could see that it was a pool of white widening around him, and the color splashed and foamed in cold light over the walls around him, too.
            The caster took a step forwards and stood there, woodenly staring at him. He was a tall man, but his face was as pale as the legs of the spider that had come through Harry's fireplace, and on his throat was a tattoo in the shape of a web.
            What is it with Dark wizards and strange markings? Harry thought. Not that he would say that in front of Draco, what with the Mark and all, but still.
            "Harry Potter?" The man's voice spiraled up at the end as if he wasn't sure, which Harry thought was stupid. Hilarious, in its own way, but stupid. Why would they ask for him as a negotiator if they weren't even sure who he was?
            "That's me," Harry said, and swept his wand up so that his Lumos showed off his scar and his eyes, the two parts of him people were most likely to recognize. "You said that you wanted to talk to me. What about?"
            The man's shoulders hunched as if he would grow wings, or swing up into the darkness on a web. After some of the things the Spiders had shown themselves capable of, Harry honestly wouldn't have been surprised. He tensed in response.
            "You realize what you have done by resigning from the Aurors?" the man whispered.
            Harry stared at him in wary disbelief. Was this man in a conspiracy with Robards? Or anyone else who didn't want him gone from the Aurors?
            "No," he said at last, when he realized that the man hadn't paused just for drama but because he wanted Harry to answer. "What have I done?"
            "You have deprived us of attention," the man hissed. "We are brilliant inventors and innovators. Creative antagonists, as you must have figured out for yourself by now. But there is no reason why you should have ceased to pay attention to us. By resigning from the Aurors, you made some of the papers lose interest in our story. They surely would have devoted more time and attention to us if the great Harry Potter was still on our trail!"
            Harry wanted to close his eyes and rub his forehead. He couldn't believe he was hearing this shit.
            But if he took his eyes off the Spider for an instant, Harry thought there would probably be trouble. He maintained his bland posture and eye contact instead, and asked, "How can I be that famous and respected, when you didn't even recognize me at first?"
            "I was giving you the chance to declare that you were under a glamour or Polyjuice," the man told him quite seriously. "But you sound as though you were the real thing, and none of the spells that we can use to detect lies indicated deception."
            Is this what all of them are like? Harry wondered. A combination of stupid naïveté and magical theoretical brilliance?
            "Fine," Harry said. "But if you have a great invention, why didn't you bring it to the attention of the Ministry in the normal way? Or even of the Unspeakables? Instead of using it to murder people?"
            "You think that would have worked?"
            Harry resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "I know other people who have approached the Ministry about a successful partnership, and now have their attention, and the ability to make and sell their inventions," he said. "I don't know how it would have worked with you. Can you use your inventions to do anything other than kill people?"
            The Spider opened his mouth, and something behind him hissed like an angry cat. There was a click and rustle of legs, and an actual spider clambered up to the stair behind the man, its back arched and its front pair of limbs tapping like someone playing a drum. Harry eyed it cautiously. It didn't look all that much more formidable than the ones he'd already defeated, except for the giant red hourglass in the middle of its back.
            "I cannot tell you things like that," the man whispered, and crouched down beside the spider. Harry watched critically. He assumed another invention they had was the ability to magically command spiders, or maybe grow ordinary ones to enormous sizes and bond with them.
            The man made clucking and buzzing noises that faded after a second, but it still seemed like he and the spider were in intense consultation. Harry had had enough visions of Voldemort speaking with Nagini, and seen enough memories of himself from the outside speaking Parseltongue, to reckon that they still were.
            The man stood up and turned back to him. "We wander from the purpose," he said, but Harry thought there was an undertone of regret in his voice. "I cannot consult with you in this way. We took hostages. We will release them."
            "Yes?" Harry prompted without waiting this time, because the prompt was so fucking obvious.
            "As soon as you agree to take their place," said the man, bobbing his head like a bird too excited to peck up its seeds the first time.
            Harry went on staring, and the man's smile slipped a little. Harry looked at the black spider crouched beside him, but if it made any gestures, it was more than Harry could tell. It wasn't like he had spent a lot of time perfecting his ability to read arachnid body language. He finally shook his head and asked, "What? As a hostage?"
            "Yes," the man said. He was smiling again, and he even glanced back down the staircase as though he expected to see his comrades marching the hostages up, ready to surrender them.
            Harry took a slow breath. He could feel the steam coming off Draco at the top of the stairs, assuming he could hear this conversation, which he probably could. And he knew, intellectually, that handing himself over to a bunch of people who could command unknown magic and had no reason to wish him well was a stupid thing to do.
            The thing was...
            The thing was, he also had every reason to think that he could pull this off, as long as he was careful. Particularly because the man had said they would release the hostages on Harry's agreement. The important thing was to get the people they held to safety. That was his first priority as an Auror, and it was as an Auror that he had to operate right now.
            "How do I know that you're going to keep your word?" he asked the man. "You haven't shown that you have much concept of friendly contracts so far."
            The man placed his hand in the middle of the spider's back. The spider itself was rearing up so that Harry could catch a glimpse of bright, small eyes. "When you agree, we will send the first of the hostages up the stairs."
            Harry sniffed arrogantly and crossed his arms, the way they had probably expected from the beginning. "Send the hostages you have so far to the bottom of the stairs. I want to make sure that they're alive and safe and that I'm not bargaining for dead people."
            The Spider seemed to find that eminently reasonable. He clicked and buzzed, and the black spider rushed back down the stairs. A few minutes later, Harry heard the tramp of feet.
            Six or seven Unspeakables were standing loosely at the bottom of the stairs, their hoods flung back so Harry could see their faces. They looked pale, the way they would with some blood loss, but none of them were swaying. Harry nodded to the Spider in front of them. "Have them remove their cloaks."
            The man frowned, but turned and shouted down the stairs. Harry's hand tightened on his wand.
            The cloaks came off, and Harry exhaled hard with relief. He could see no big wounds on their bodies. Although he extended his senses as far as he could, he also couldn't smell the subtle stink that would come off them if large amounts of Dark magic had been used, either. It seemed as though they really did mean to release the Unspeakables relatively undamaged.
            "Good," Harry said. "If I give you my word to become your hostage, you'll let them come up the stairs here?"
            The Spider nodded. His eyes weren't much less bright than the real spider's had been. He even leaned forwards, as if he was going to rush Harry and wrap him up in a web.
            "Good," Harry said. "I want to see them coming past me, mind. I want to see them fully released before I come down to you. Or you might decide to try to keep both them and me."
            The Spider shrugged. "What use would we have for them? We only took them to get you to come to us."
            That sounded--ominous, Harry had to admit, but only for him. Not for the Unspeakables, and they were the ones Harry had to be concerned about.
            "All right," Harry said. "I give you my word."
            There was a prompt scuffle from the top of the stairs, where it sounded as though Draco was trying to come down to him, but Harry kept his eyes focused in front of him on the Spider. That bastard smiled and bowed, and held out his arm. Whoever had been keeping an eye on the Unspeakables moved back, from the motion of their shadow on the wall, and the former hostages climbed up the stairs past Harry.
            Most of them gave him pitying looks. Harry smiled back as reassuringly as he could, waiting, waiting for the moment when the last trailing grey robe passed and he had the room he needed to move.
            The last former hostage trod past, and there was a motion of clicking legs and human feet at the bottom of the stairs.
            Harry Stunned the man in front of him without a pause, and then raised the biggest Shield Charm he was capable of across the front of the stairs. The orange curse and the flying web that slammed into it a second later shook it, but it didn't shatter. Harry held up his wand next and hissed, "Lux, lux, lux!" He might have been able to manage that spell nonverbally, but not without a reduction in its power.
            Light flooded the stairway, gleaming bright as a thunderbolt, but with the yellow color of homey firelight. Harry cast the spell that would float the Stunned Spider towards the top of the stairs, and rushed down them.
            He had the advantage of surprise, the fact that they had been counting on his agreement to mean the same thing as his surrender, and he had only a few moments.
            Something--several somethings--ran away from the light as he reached the bottom of the stairs, but there were still humans facing him. All of them were surrounded with the same pool of white radiance as the man on the stairs had carried. They blocked and dimmed it when they saw Harry rounding the corner towards them.
            That didn't matter. None of them had managed to counter the brilliant enchantment that Harry carried with him, which meant that he could see all he needed to.
            A click above him warned him a second before the black spider dropped towards him. Harry bowed his head and rolled forwards, slamming into the stomach of one of the human Spiders facing him. The man grunted and went down, and Harry Disarmed the two women behind him with two quick stabs of his wand.
            Then the black spider that had fallen from the ceiling rushed towards him. Harry turned and cast a Compression Charm, without haste.
            An enormous, invisible boot descended from above and crushed the spider, so that green goo and guts and black chitin went flying everywhere. There was a short, anguished scream from back in the tunnel, a human cry. Harry guided his Stunner that way, and heard a thump a second later.
            There was a wild clash of legs, and this time pink spiders the size of pigs spilled out from the edges of his light, all straight towards him. Some of them were spinning loops of silk that looked like lariats.
            Well, this is a bit harder than I thought it was going to be, Harry thought calmly.
            Then he lashed out with Sectumsempra, cutting through the ropes of silk and severing the legs of many of the spiders. They fell, and some of the bodies piled up and made brief trouble for the ones coming behind them. Only brief, since the spiders could clamber over the corpses more easily than humans could, but that gave Harry time to act, and decide that he'd like to capture some of the spiders just as he'd captured one of their human companions.
            He chanted rapidly, his eyes fastened on the spiders and how they came at him, and a cage formed around them. It was huge, made of steel, its bars wide. Some of the spiders slipped out before Harry could thin and narrow the bars, but enough remained that he felt confident he could call this particular capture a success.
            Smiling, he flipped his wrist, and the cage flew up and away from the ground, dangling from an invisible string in the air. Harry turned to the Spiders that would be coming at him from the other direction, his hand already on his wand.
            They were gone. No matter how long Harry peered into the darkness, he couldn't see a single trace of anyone.
            Harry snorted, shook his head, and raised some Shield Charms around himself just in case. Then he started up the stairs with his cage of spiders and his Stunned prisoners.
*
            The Aurors crowded around him when he reached the top of the stairs, asking so many questions rapid-fire that Harry gave up on answering them. He did glance at Robards, and then away again. He'd hoped that his quick solution to a problem that none of the other Aurors was apparently fit to handle might have annoyed his former boss, but Robards just looked smug. He thought he'd made the right decision calling Harry in, then.
            And Harry had to admit that he had. It had turned out that the Spiders were arrogant and under-prepared, but no one else had known that, and no one might have known it if it had turned out that the Aurors who went down there were less skilled than Harry.
            There was a shimmer of air in front of him, and Draco stepped up to grip Harry's shoulders, his Disllusionment Charm shed. Harry looked into his eyes, and only then did he feel his smile falter. Draco looked as if he'd like nothing better than to scold Harry the way he'd scolded Jamie.
            "What?" Harry mouthed back at him.
            "You took an unacceptable risk," Draco said, and his posture was so rigid, including the way his hands clamped Harry's shoulders, that Harry thought he probably wouldn't give in enough to talk about it rationally.
            There were too many people watching, though, so Harry said, "We'll talk about this later," and reached up, calmly removing Draco's hands from his shoulders, before he turned to walk out of the Ministry.
            On the way, though, he felt his face heating up, his stride stiffening. Draco had the ability to get to him like no one else had in months, now, not since the initial shock of Ginny announcing that she wanted a divorce.
            Well, maybe that's appropriate. And maybe he does have things to say to me that I haven't heard before.
            Then Harry sighed. That's unlikely. But he might have things to say to me that I need to listen to.
*
            delia cerrano: If the situation had been imaginary or less serious, Harry would have told Robards off. But he doesn't feel like he can leave innocent people to suffer.
            CareLessLover: The Ministry is too public a setting. Inviting Harry to a private meeting if he was going to assassinate him would be the very least of the things Robards is smart enough to do.
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Marathon