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An Image of Lethe	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21751 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Thirty-Nine—The Resting Hours
            Harry leaned his head over to the side and spat. He hated the particular taste left in his mouth when a Stunner wore off. Ron always said there wasn’t one, but Harry thought he’d been Stunned more often than Ron, and he knew.
            It was better to think about the taste in his mouth than to think about the situation he was in, though. Particularly when he was sitting in a cell that had no windows and no sign that anyone had ever come there in years, other than a general absence of dust on the floor. They hadn’t even given him a chair and a bed, just a little mattress like the one that Harry used to sleep on in the cupboard.
            And the amulet the Unseen had given him, the one that had let him lie to anyone around him with ease, was gone.
            Harry leaned further back and settled his shoulders against the wall. The worst thing was the boredom. He hadn’t seen anyone. They kept Stunning him when they brought food and then casting the reversal on him from a distance, so Harry would just wake up to find a tray of soup and bread steaming on the floor. He was getting tired of glimpsing only the edge of a wand around the door.
            He didn’t know whether Draco had escaped. He didn’t know whether they had captured all the Death Eaters. He didn’t know how much the Ministry believed him, or what the effects of the reverse Lightfinder and the leopard might have been.
            He didn’t know where Ron and Hermione were, or what they were thinking.
            But Harry thought that perhaps Draco had escaped. It was highly likely they would have shown up to torment him if Draco hadn’t, by taunting him that they’d captured someone he’d been plotting with. Or tried to tempt him by making a deal for Draco’s freedom, in exchange for the facts.
            Harry would choke them with facts, if they gave him the chance. That they kept Stunning him argued that they thought he was really dangerous.
            Or the Unseen are in charge, and they don’t want any more of their precious futures to be messed up.
            The door creaked, and Harry tensed, ready to spring up and move if he had to. But instead of a wand, an actual person stepped around the side of the door this time, and stared at him with so piercing a gaze that Harry clenched his hands.
            It was Kingsley, and beside him was someone in a cloak Harry thought was probably a member of the Unseen, not just an Unspeakable. That person lingered near the door with their head bowed, though. Harry turned to Kingsley and sat there. He saw no point in saying something until Kingsley did.
            “Harry,” Kingsley finally whispered, and shook his head. “How could you have plotted with Death Eaters? Pretended to be Lord Voldemort?”
            “The same way you could have fallen victim to the Lightfinder, and started thinking I would destroy the wizarding world because of what color my aura was.”
            Kingsley paused. Then he turned to the Unseen member. The hooded head shook, but Harry couldn’t hear any words.
            “That’s—not the confession we were hoping for,” said Kingsley, and turned back to Harry.
            Harry remembered something Kingsley had said once, back when he was in the habit of imparting small bits of information about Aurors to Harry like tidbits that would lure him into training. He sat up. “I’ll confess everything. I just want to be under Veritaserum and in front of the Wizengamot when I do it.”
            Kingsley froze. But what made Harry all the happier was that the Unseen by the door had gone still.
            “What?” Kingsley whispered. “No one has invoked their right to a Truth Trial in decades.”
            “I know. You told me that. But you also told me that it was the right of every criminal no matter what they were accused of.” Harry met Kingsley’s eyes and smiled a little. “Or does that change for people who’ve pretended to be Dark Lords and were really victims of the Ministry?”
            Kingsley jerked as if he was offended, and didn’t turn to look at the Unseen this time. Harry couldn’t help doing it, and he could see the frantically shaking head and the open mouth.
            But Kingsley didn’t look, and he was the one who said, “Of course we treat any criminals fairly. It’s wrong to say we don’t.”
            “Good.” Harry tried to sit there and look as though he was cool and composed and didn’t even have to care about the answer, because he was so absurdly righteous and in the right. It shouldn’t have been harder than pretending he was a murderous bastard for the Death Eaters, and that was something he had a lot of practice at, so maybe he did manage better than it felt as if he did. Which was “not at all.” “Then I can have my Truth Trial?”
            “You will,” said Kingsley shortly. “It’ll take two days to assemble the Wizengamot and enough Veritaserum to make sure that it won’t wear off during the trial.”
            “And a list of the questions that they’re permitted to ask?” Harry knew there were few enough restrictions during a trial like this, which was another reason that not many people invoked their right to one anymore, but there had to be some.
            “Yes.” Kingsley hesitated. “Although you’re not permitted to see it before the trial, you understand. It would give you too much chance to think up ways to resist the Veritaserum.”
            Harry raised his eyebrows. “Does anyone actually manage to do that?”
            “People who have sufficiently strong wills sometimes can deflect questions or only tell part of the truth.” Kingsley glanced over his shoulder again. “And Healer Jungle here was telling me that you have sufficient strength to resist the Imperius Curse. That might mean Veritaserum would be less effective in this case than with some other people.”
            Healer Jungle? The name was as false as Oratory’s had been, of course, but Harry doubted that the Unseen changed their pseudonyms all the time, either. People who weren’t part of their exalted Order had to have something to call them.
            “Then you can try it on me now.” Harry was curious to see if they would. Maybe he could get some indication of how Kingsley felt towards him.
            Kingsley took a step back as if Harry had conjured another snake, or leopard. “No. That’s—all right. I think that we can trust you to tell the truth since you were the one to call for the trial in the first place.”
            His gaze lingered curiously on Harry, as if he wanted to ask about his motivations anyway. But the Unseen murmured something, and Kingsley nodded, said, “I’ll go talk to the Wizengamot members and make sure that they know all the procedures for a Truth Trial,” and left the cell.
            Healer Jungle remained. Harry watched, and the hood flew back with a wave of one hand that had a skeletal glamour on it. The face beneath the hood looked like a skull, too, although one with a crown on top of it. Harry glanced down into the empty eyesockets that weren’t empty, and smiled a little.
            “I’ve seen more frightening illusions than that,” he said. “And met more frightening things within my own mind.”
            “That does not surprise me.” Healer Jungle’s voice was hollow and booming, like the closing of grand doors. More impressive than the skull he supposedly had for a face, Harry had to admit. “You have caused a great many troubles. It would be astonishing if you never regretted your actions.”
            Harry sat there with his hands folded in his lap, and said nothing, except for giving Healer Jungle a penetrating stare. Jungle turned away from Harry and fiddled for a moment with something Harry couldn’t see.
            When he turned back around, he held a heavy golden globe in his hand. “Do you recognize this?”
            Harry glanced at it. But aside from some shadows sliding over the surface, it was blank. “No,” he said, and turned to Jungle.
            “This was one of our maps of the future,” Jungle said harshly. “A reliable one. One that still showed several possibilities of what could come to be, but mapped them with remarkably little divergence from each other. We knew the major events that threatened wizarding Britain, and we could predict them and learn from them.”
            “I didn’t wipe your memories,” Harry said quietly. “Can’t you remember what those possibilities were and still learn from them?”
            Jungle closed his hand over the globe. “We knew what they were.” He opened his hand again, and the globe was gone, but Harry could do nonverbal magic like that, too, and he remained silent. “Now we don’t know. All our maps of the future went blank at the same instant.”
            “Which one was that?” Harry knew what Jungle would say, but there might be something interesting or noteworthy in the way he phrased it.
            “The moment when you took your magic back from Lethe.” Jungle moved a step closer and stood looking at Harry for a moment as if he assumed that his height might intimidate Harry. Then he spun away with an exclamation of disgust when Harry only sat there and looked at him.
            But he had said something unexpected, if not intimidating, and Harry took a moment to sit there and think about it. He had assumed it would be the moment the Lightfinder exploded, because that had literally changed people’s minds. He had almost forgotten about Lethe, honestly. He had taken his magic back. That was all that mattered when it came to Splinter’s machine.
            “You can’t have expected I would just sit there and passively let the Ministry consume my magic,” he told Jungle’s back. “Why did you think that?”
            “Because you had been the hero several times before, and the possibilities pointed towards you being the hero again.”
            “Not the hero,” said Harry, as he understood and blinked his way through it. “The sacrifice. You thought I would let Lethe take my magic, and then you could—what?”
            Jungle looked at him in scorn and looked away again. “You changed things,” he said flatly. “You’re trying to change them again. I can tell you that it will not work. For centuries, we have watched the possibilities and guided them to the best outcome for the wizarding world. We will do the same again.”
            He left, slamming the cell door behind him. Harry sat there and stared at it, wondering what in the world was going to happen. Did this mean the Unseen would try to cancel his trial? Influence the Wizengamot members to cast him into prison? Take his magic by some other means?
            And why would Lethe taking his magic lead to the outcomes that the Unseen wanted anyway?
            He slept badly that night, barely tasting the food they’d given him, and woke up early in the morning to spend more time staring uselessly at the blank walls.
*
            “You are not going back to rescue Potter.”
            Draco didn’t bother looking up from his intense study of the Ministry plans that he’d found in the little house his parents had fled to. Of course his mother had rescued books from the Manor that had things like that in them.
            It wasn’t worth arguing with his father over something that certainly was going to happen. Besides, the dragon sitting on the floor beside Draco reared up and did it for him, hissing with small curls of steam exploding beside his nostrils.
            Lucius withdrew from the library.
            Draco reached down and trailed one hand over the dragon’s warm spine, the way Harry used to do. The dragon didn’t move away and spend time rubbing pointedly against the wall as if to remove his touch, however, the way Draco had also seen him do with Harry. Instead, claws rasped against the table, and a jewel-colored muzzle appeared beside Draco, aimed at the book.
            “I do intend to rescue him,” Draco told the dragon quietly.
            The dragon glanced at him and stretched his claws out, gently touching the edge of the page.
            “But I can’t do it if you rip the book,” Draco ended, and moved the map further away.
            The dragon lay down beside the book, neck still stretched out as if it wanted to keep an eye on the map and make sure it didn’t change.
            Draco smiled faintly. Then he looked back at the map and studied it again.
            The map showed all sorts of secret passages and hidden doors and underground entrances and tiny areas free of Apparition-preventing spells that someone could land in. Draco’s ancestors had contributed money to construct the Ministry building and make sure that it would contain at least some of their own secrets. That meant Draco could in theory go lots of places inside the Ministry.
            Theory suffered a blow when it came to the fact that Draco absolutely couldn’t predict where they would keep Harry, or for how long. And if they announced a trial place and date, that might not help. It would be far harder to break in during the middle of a trial than it would be into a hidden cell.
            Draco sighed and ran a hand through his hair. The last thing—well, not the last, but the one that came after all the other considerations—that bothered him was the promise he had made to Harry, to let him have a shot at convincing his friends. If Draco intervened too early and took Harry away from the Ministry, that meant he’d look guilty and probably never be cleared of guilt in the eyes of Light wizards.
            After the performance with the reverse Lightfinder and the leopard, Draco thought that Light wizards who couldn’t accept Harry’s innocence were idiots, and not worth the cost of trying to convince someone. But Harry had made him promise, and Draco intended to keep that promise.
            Not least because, if he didn’t, he would have to deal with Harry feeling guilty and wondering again if he could have changed their minds. Draco didn’t want to have to deal with that ever again, once Harry was out of Ministry clutches.
            He finally sat back from the map and closed his eyes. The same map appeared on the back of his eyelids, gleaming in cool blue, with red spots indicating the most dangerous places to Apparate or try to rescue someone from, and green spots showing the next most dangerous ones.
            “All right,” Draco breathed slowly. “So all we have to do is wait until we know for sure what they’re going to do with Harry.”
            The dragon screeched.
            Draco spun around with his wand in his hand. If his father was going to come and Stun him or something else equally stupid and sneaky…
            But it was a shadowy silver otter, which looked at him with dubious eyes and said, “Malfoy, we have some questions about the time you and Harry spent among the Death Eaters. Come to Godric’s Hollow at midnight tomorrow.”
            In seconds, the otter had dissolved, and Draco sat back and set to work choking down both his excitement and his hope.
*
            Harry marched into the courtroom where the Wizengamot liked to gather and looked around, ignoring the balconies and galleries and chairs packed full of staring people. This was going to be better than the trial he’d had for using magic in front of Muggles during his fifth year in one way and only one. Harry knew what he was on trial for this time, and he knew more about his chances of surviving it.
            Otherwise, it was worse. But at least Harry didn’t think he had to worry about Death Eaters cursing him anymore. He hadn’t dared to ask Kingsley about whether any Death Eaters had escaped, just in case they decided that meant he was concerned about their fates and thus about them as people, but at least no one else had decided to accuse him of plotting to let them escape, either.
            There was the single chair, but this time, several people stood around it. All of them wore Auror robes, except a hooded person Harry was sure was a member of the Unseen. And there was one person in fussy green robes, examining a potions vial with a keen eye.
            Probably a Healer or whoever brewed the Veritaserum, Harry thought, as he strode over to the chair. The Aurors behind him would prod him if he was too slow, anyway, and that wasn’t the sort of impression he wanted to create on the Wizengamot.
            The woman turned around as he came up to her, and Harry saw the bone-and-wand symbol of St. Mungo’s on her robes. She examined Harry in much the same way she’d examined the potion. “Minister Shacklebolt says you have a strong will.”
            “I’m also the one who invoked my right to a Truth Trial. I’m not going to fight it.” Harry sat down in the chair when one of the Aurors prodded him, and winced a little as the chains snaked out from the arms and grabbed onto him. “I appreciate that it’s hard to believe, though.”
            The Healer nodded and studied him some more. She had cloudy grey eyes, but she didn’t remind Harry of an Unseen, except in the intensity of her gaze. “I’ve brewed the Veritaserum myself. Any attempt to interfere with its proper administration will…bother me.”
            Harry smiled politely at her. “I don’t plan to interfere, Healer.”
            “Good,” said the Healer, and stepped back and looked around the courtroom. Harry looked with her. He thought every single member of the Wizengamot was there, unless maybe there were some old or sick ones missing. And every one of them was either glaring at him or looked scared.
            Wonderful. Well, Harry supposed that even curing the irrational fear the Lightfinder had spread wouldn’t make people less afraid of him.
            “The trial will start now,” called Kingsley’s voice at last. Harry turned his head a little and saw him sitting off to the side, a member of the Unseen who was probably Jungle next to him. Then one of the Aurors standing behind the chair prodded him again, and Harry bit his lip to keep from retaliating and faced the front again.
            Kingsley made a long speech about how Harry had invoked his right to the Truth Trial, and the kinds of questions the Wizengamot could ask and those they couldn’t. It seemed that only questions about Harry’s sexual activities and Hogwarts marks were off-limits. Harry noticed that the Healer got stiffer and stiffer in the back as the speech went on, but he didn’t know if that had to do with anger or something else.
Finally, Kingsley looked straight at Harry. “Are you sure that wish to proceed with the Truth Trial?” he asked, sounding as if he was pleading for Harry to do something else.
What, afraid of what’s going to come out and make you look like a fool, Minister? Harry didn’t remove his gaze from Kingsley as he replied, “Yes, I am.”
            Kingsley sighed as though he didn’t know why people insisted on being idiots. Harry bit his tongue before he could tell Kingsley to glance around him, and concentrated on looking as bored and patient as possible while the Healer turned to him with the Veritaserum.
            “You know what this potion is,” said the Healer.
            “Yes,” said Harry, and watched as calmly as he could. His heart was beating fast, but as far as he knew, no one in the chamber was a werewolf. They shouldn’t be able to hear it and make any decisions based on it.
            “You know what it does.” The Healer sung the vial back and forth as if she was hoping to hypnotize him with the swinging silver liquid inside it.
            “I do.” Harry smiled at her and waited some more.
            “And you agree to take it,” said the Healer, and raised her voice a little. Maybe she had enemies on the Wizengamot that she wanted to see react to this, Harry thought, or maybe she was just making sure everyone heard. “Of your own free will?”
            “I do,” said Harry. Make his replies as spare as possible, and there were fewer things they could twist around on him and pick apart for mistakes later.
            The Healer studied him one more time, apparently needing to be convinced. The Aurors behind Harry were muttering. Harry shut them up by extending his tongue and leaning his face forwards.
            The Healer chuckled. Harry blinked a little, surprised to hear her make such a human sound, and in that moment the Healer moved neatly forwards and dripped three drops of the Veritaserum on his tongue.
            The world seemed to slow down and turn sideways. Harry could feel barriers in his mind that he’d raised drying up and blowing away. He slumped a little in his chair. His vision was clear, but it felt as though his inhibitions had taken a holiday.
            Kingsley moved forwards a single step. “I have questions to ask you, but first the test questions. What is your name?”
            “Harry James Potter.” Even the words seemed to form in the air in front of him, although Harry didn’t actually see the letters. He watched them in interest as their invisible forms also dried up and blew away.
            “What are you most known for?”
            Harry heard someone muttering on the Wizengamot, seemingly over Kingsley’s choice of question, but he had no problem with it. “Defeating the Dark Lord Voldemort.”
            That made a few people scream. Harry had no time to wonder why before Kingsley was off on the next tangent, charging ahead with a resigned air. “Why were you being tested with the Lightfinder?”
            “Because you were convinced that I would test Light, and so I would be a test case to prove the Lightfinder worked.”
            Harry was close enough to see Kingsley flush. He coughed and said, “Yes. Well. Members of the Wizengamot, the floor is yours.” He backed away until Harry couldn’t see him, although Harry was convinced he was closely watching from the side.
            The woman who leaned forwards looked slightly familiar, but Harry’s brain was still sliding in and out of focus, and she spoke before he could decide why she looked that way. “You said that you were the host of a shard of You-Know-Who’s soul. Is that true?”
            “At one time, it was.” Of course they would start with the worst thing they possibly could, said a part of him not subdued by the Veritaserum. It’s all true.
            Half the audience jerked in shock. It seemed that the rest of them started murmuring, and the voices grew into a roar that overwhelmed the next question asked. Harry just sat there. He couldn’t answer questions that he couldn’t hear.
            Finally, someone managed to shout, “You’re saying that you don’t have the shard now? What did you do with it?”
            “Voldemort killed it when he fired the Killing Curse at me in the Forbidden Forest.”
            For a moment, Harry’s real feelings broke through the dullness that the Veritaserum imposed on him. It was amusing to see these people reeling with shock, their defenses broken, and trying to deal with the truth their own questions were bringing forth.
            What Harry thought was the same woman from before snapped, “What were you, if you had the connection to You-Know-Who? Is that why you turned Dark?”
            “I was a Horcrux. I didn’t know I was Dark until the Lightfinder test.”
            “What did you do when you plotted with the Death Eaters?”
            “I pretended to be Voldemort until I could maneuver them into a position where I thought the Ministry could trap them.”
            There was more murmuring, but this time, the question got through to Harry clearly, although he couldn’t see who’d asked it. “Why did you think that you had to do something so insane instead of coming to the Ministry for help?”
            “Because the Lightfinder had affected your minds and driven you mad with irrational fears of Dark wizards. This was the only way I could think of to get some time to come up with a means that would restore your sanity.”
            And then the world…went grey. Harry’s first thought was that it was some strange side-effect of the Veritaserum no one had ever told him about, and then he saw Jungle and the Unseen who had been beside his chair moving towards him.
            Jungle held the brass globe that he had shown Harry in his cell, or one just like it. The other one held a flat, gleaming, triangular black rock in his hand that had a smaller triangle of silver imprinted on it.
            “Now,” said Jungle softly. “To change the future back to what it should be.”
*
SP777: Harry never actually wanted to do that, which would have interfered with the reverse Lightfinder’s successful operation.
moodysavage: Well, the Unseen know how they want it to settle!
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An Image of Lethe