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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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Chapter Four—Scene of the Crime

            Draco came out of the Apparition crouching, his wand extended before him, his muscles tensed in a way that made Harry’s heart and throat ache. He half-wished that Draco didn’t have to do this, that he didn’t have to put his life in danger and that they weren’t Aurors, that Draco could have a morning unbroken by Harry’s visions—

            But then they would never have met, and Draco wouldn’t consent to be left behind when Harry dashed into dangerous missions. Harry swallowed down his melancholy and paid attention to what was in front of him, even though the vision of the murder had already shown him where they would need to go. He only saw the moment of death, not what happened after. The twisted could still be here.

            Most of Hogsmeade was silent, as it tended to be in the early mornings. Harry let his attention spread out and could smell tea, opening flowers, something strong and spicy from the direction of the apothecary. He heard no shouts or screams. He nodded. The twisted had managed the kill silently, which fit with what he had seen in the vision.

            He touched Draco’s shoulder and gestured ahead. Draco flowed ahead of him like a stream of silk, and Harry followed, looking up at the windows. He thought he knew what room the victim had died in, but he couldn’t be sure.

            He scrubbed at his cheeks and hands for a moment as a sensation of filth crawled over him. How was he really better than the twisted, when it came right down to it? Their powers slaughtered people, deprived them of their memories or their magic, took them apart for the pleasure and amusement of someone insane. But Harry’s powers invaded a victim’s last moments and showed him things that the victims would probably have preferred to die without showing to anyone.

            He remembered Draco’s answer to that, in the Forest of Dean, as they lay side by side. You didn’t kill anyone.

            Harry swallowed shakily. That was probably still a pretty good dividing line.

            Draco tensed ahead of him. Harry shifted to the side, hip touching hip, to let him know he was there. Draco closed his eyes and held his left arm up in front of him.

            And that was Draco’s gift, or flaw to use the terms the Ministry put them in, sensing Dark magic. His Mark would burn and alert him when that happened. Harry waited silently. Draco might be able to tell whether the twisted was still there or not.

            Draco opened his eyes and screamed, and at the same moment, the door opened.

*

            Draco had never felt the pain that assaulted him through the Mark before. This was burning oil, scalding water, and his arm was plunged to the shoulder in it. He shook and screamed again, and felt Harry pushing him to the ground at the same moment as something whirled in front of him and struck out at head height.

            Draco rolled on the ground, cradling his left arm close to him, trying to see the battle and respond to his training and attend to the pain all at once. Another flashing thing cut at him, a sooty arm holding a curved blade, and he knew that he would have died if Harry hadn’t flung himself in between, using his shoulder to divert the blade.

            For once, Draco wasn’t even inclined to shout about how Harry shouldn’t have risked his life for him. This wasn’t needless.

            Draco sat up, still cradling his arm, and saw Harry fighting something in front of him. The figure was extraordinarily hard to focus on. It flickered and shimmered from one shape to another, and sometimes Draco thought he saw a flying cloud of soot, other times of pieces of paper circulating around each other, and other times of a man in a mirrored mask and long black cloak that wrapped his body in sightless folds.

            Then the figure broke away from Harry and ran. Harry tried to cast a spell that would trip it up, but the soft pop of Apparition was final.

            Harry swore and knelt down beside Draco. “How badly are you hurt?” he gasped. “I thought he cut you before I could get there.”

            Draco shook his head and felt at his arm. No, there was nothing there. And now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure that he had seen a blade at all, just another aspect of the twisted’s illusory guise.

            “Let’s go find out what he left,” he said grimly, standing up, “since we don’t have any idea where he went.”

            He winced as he shifted his left arm, and of course Harry didn’t miss that. It was impossible to think that he would, Draco decided. Harry traced his fingers lightly through the air above the cloth that hid the Dark Mark, and looked steadily at Draco.

            “I can go on,” Draco said, and Harry hesitated once more, then nodded and turned towards the Three Broomsticks. Draco smiled at his back. Harry wouldn’t have taken his word for it three months ago.

            They found a few dazed people who’d been on the ground floor having breakfast, and tried to interview them. They hadn’t seen more than Harry and Draco had, though. Someone dressed in shadows or smoke. Some said they’d heard a scream, but only one scream. And Madam Rosmerta, holding herself stiffly at the sight of Draco, said that she didn’t know who the person had been, and hadn’t seen him enter the inn.

            Harry made a sign with one hand low down by Draco’s hip, and Draco nodded. It was useless trying to ask these people anything else. They had to go find out what was waiting in one of the upper rooms.

            “We’re sorry,” Harry told Madam Rosmerta gently. “But we think someone was murdered here.”

            While Rosmerta screamed and shrieked and absorbed Harry’s attention by fainting, Draco cocked his head to the side. Something else had occurred to him, something so basic that he should have thought of it during the fight.

            Why had the twisted run from them, and dealt in illusion, rather than using his flaw? There was no way to block having your skin stripped out of you that Draco knew of.

            He touched the Dark Mark on his arm where no one could see it, and wondered.

*

            When they finally saw the room, it was as awful as Harry had expected. He held a bit of wadded cloth to his nose while Draco briskly threw open the windows, admitting both light so they could see what they were doing and noise from below. Harry set a shimmering, invisible ward across the door that would increase the stink of blood outside the room. That might keep anyone from interfering at first.

            Draco glanced up at the whisper of magic across his Dark Mark, and his smile twisted. “Why, Auror Potter,” he murmured. “What would Deputy Head Okazes say if he knew you were using Dark Arts?”

            “He wouldn’t say anything, because I would have already shoved his head up his arse for complaining,” Harry said briskly back, and crouched down next to his partner, glad to hear Draco laugh, even if it was a shivery sound. He touched Draco’s back, moving his hand in a slow circle. “How are you doing?”

            “As well as you are,” Draco said, lifting his head. “I know that you haven’t seen more gruesome crime scenes than I have.”

            Harry only nodded, and held his peace. Both of them had “won” assignment to the Socrates Corps because of cases they had worked dealing with Dark magic and grotesque crimes, cases that had killed their former partners, but Draco’s case was sealed as an official secret and Harry still couldn’t bear to talk about the creature that he had slain. There was no way to prove or disprove Draco’s statement. “Any sign of the symbol or the companions?” he asked, studying the skin pinned to the bed.

            It looked much the same as Adriana’s had, but in person was worse than the pictures, of course. Harry breathed through his mouth and stepped close enough to read the writing in blood that twisted and writhed all across the skin like a growth of alien vines.

            michael moxon regretted never visiting the muggle world has no regrets in the name of love slept with valerie turner for two years said that he wanted to sleep with a man but was joking considered applying to the aurors admired and envied the ministry believed in a mysterious and personal god…

            And on and on the blood flowed, the words, the secrets of a life taken and turned inside-out. Harry reared his head back when he could take no more and studied the skin for signs of the viscera blobs that had attached Adriana’s flesh to the wall. No sign of them. Perhaps the twisted hadn’t felt the need for them when the bed was a flat surface.

            “Look.” Draco’s voice shook a little. Harry turned and saw that he was holding the camera he had used to take pictures in Adriana’s flat.

            But his finger pointed at something else. Harry looked, and discovered the symbol of the scroll on the hem of the bedsheets, this time made of crushed organs in a thick paste—it had to be crushed organs, from the smell of them and the color of the liquid—and easier to read. It bore two words instead of one.

            OFFER SARAH.

            Harry nodded. “I think these are the names of the victims,” he said as calmly as he could. “Not Michael Corner, but ‘corner Michael.’ This skin says that the victim’s name was Michael.” He felt guilt hammering on his brow like heatstroke, but did his best not to give it credence. He couldn’t have known, and Draco, whom Harry was accustomed to thinking of as a lot smarter than he was, hadn’t known, either.

            Draco nodded, his face blank. “I think you’re right. We’ll look for someone named Sarah Offer, but otherwise, we only have the first name to go on.” His face hardened, his nostrils flared, and Harry saw the frustration that he knew Draco would conceal from everyone else in the Department, even the other Socrates Aurors. “I don’t know how we can save them if we only have the first names. How many people are there in the wizarding world named Michael and Sarah?”

            Harry pressed flat on Draco’s shoulder with the palm of his hand. “And even half-bloods who returned to the Muggle world, or Squibs,” he added.

            “You’re not helping.” Draco jerked his head like he was biting a thread off with his teeth.

            He relaxed a moment later, though, and Harry understood that he’d been understood. Draco knew someone else shared his frustration, and sometimes, that was the best thing a partner could offer.

            “Pictures,” Draco said, standing up, holding the camera in a posture that Harry reckoned was the best one—he knew nothing about photography, really, and hadn’t wanted to learn, after Colin—and beginning to click. “Detailed ones, this time, ones that we won’t have to rely on other people to give us.”

            Harry nodded, pressed Draco’s shoulder one more time, and turned around to scan the room again. There were no books here, which might mean the twisted had left no companions lurking, but since they knew so little about his powers yet, Harry wasn’t going to discount it until he had examined every item in the room.

            It turned out he had to Levitate them one by one with his wand and peer at them from a distance, though. The sheets, the shelves, the table, the glasses that Michael Moxon had apparently owned, his robes draped over a chair for tomorrow—today—had been so soaked with blood that Harry couldn’t bring himself to touch them.

            Those items told him nothing. Harry particularly looked for any paper that might bear Adriana Lugar’s name or a connection to her business, and found none. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

            “We will catch him. We nearly caught him today.”

            Draco spoke behind Harry’s shoulder. Harry leaned back, knowing Draco would catch him, and briefly squeezed his hand. Draco bowed his head and closed his eyes, letting his hair and his skin touch Harry’s.

            “I know,” Harry said. “When I feel helpless, I can rely on you.” He stood up and moved out of the way so that Draco could snap more pictures of the blood-soaked objects, and made himself continue reading the story in blood on Moxon’s skin. At least it didn’t seem to claim that he had no relatives left, the way Adriana’s did. That meant they might have more people left to interview.

*

            “No luck?”

            Draco glanced up. He had come alone to the office to put their evidence away, while Harry went home to rest. He and Harry had argued about how they should divide their labor, and Harry had wanted to come with him at the least, but he was more shaken than he would admit from the aftereffects of Moxon’s death, and Draco’s agony from the Dark Mark was over quickly.

            So he was the only one who saw the complex expression on Macgeorge’s face as she sat at her desk, watching him lay the photographs and files on the desk.

            Draco shrugged and chose the appropriate drawers to put them in. “Another murder.” He kept half his attention on her and half on the evidence. It seemed odd that she was here at all hours lately, and without her partner. Draco was not stupid enough to think that that connected to their case somehow, but he wanted to know the answer. Macgeorge was pure-blood, like him, and Dark, like him, and had a flaw, like him. “Just like the last one. An inoffensive person, one who apparently had never done anything objectionable in his life.” They had interviewed Moxon’s parents and one of his sisters so far. Shock, grief, anger, but no signals like the ones Draco had received from Weasley, indicating that she had been lying. Another dead end.

            “I might be able to help.”

            That was so far from what Draco had expected Macgeorge to say that his hands froze on the papers, and he turned around to stare at her. Macgeorge promptly flushed all up and down her throat and turned her head away with a flap of her hand. “Unless you distrust me for some reason,” she said bitterly. “No reason why you should, but no reason why you shouldn’t, either, I reckon.”

            “I didn’t expect you to offer,” Draco said. “And you know that I distrust the way you asked me questions about my interest in Harry before we began dating.” Sometimes, direct was the best way to disconcert someone like Macgeorge—someone like himself.

            Macgeorge glanced back at him. “I wondered what you meant to do with him. There was a time when I had the childish crush that so many people of our generation did on Potter. But not now,” she added, probably because she could see the tide rising in Draco’s eyes. “Working closely with him has taught me that he’s a lot more damaged than I want to deal with.”

            Draco nodded stiffly, and made a mental note to make sure that Harry didn’t have any unsupervised time with Macgeorge in the office for the next few weeks. “How do you think you could help with this case?”

            Macgeorge glanced once at the door of the office. Draco flicked his wand and raised the buried rank of wards the rest of the Department didn’t know about, the ones that prevented anyone else from eavesdropping by dazing them.

            Macgeorge smiled, once, a smile that didn’t touch her hazel eyes. “Thank you. And I meant this.” She turned and gestured to the withered hand in a glass globe that sat on her desk, pinning down two curling sheets of parchment.

            The globe rose, and the fingers curled inwards to the palm of the hand. When they uncurled again, they clutched a thin sheet of skin that Draco was sure hadn’t been there before. Macgeorge unscrewed the glass top of the paperweight, and Draco’s wand crossed his chest without his conscious volition. He realized that he was sniffing for the scent of dead things, but there was no rot, no decay. Only Macgeorge, and that hand, and the thin strip it held and which she lifted up and stared at.

            A moment later, she shook her head. “It doesn’t have enough information on the case to help me yet,” she said, turning the strip so that Draco could see it. “Perhaps I should speak to the dead by looking at their bodies.”

            Draco stared. The strip wasn’t skin after all, but a thin, yellow-brown parchment. The letters that lay on it were the proper dark of ink, not red like the blood that their twisted had used to write out Lugar’s and Moxon’s stories on their bodies. The writing said Inconclusive evidence.

            “What is this?” Draco asked, and looked back at Macgeorge.

            “I know what I am,” Macgeorge said, and her hands flexed once, as if imitating the dead one. Draco told himself that he wasn’t squeamish, but he was relieved anyway when she remembered the open paperweight and closed the glass globe down to encase the hand again. “A woman with a Dark gift that could become the flaw of a twisted if I pushed it hard enough or went mad studying the Dark Arts.”

            Draco stared, and Macgeorge laughed, her nostrils pinching shut in a look that Draco had seen often on his father’s face. “Did you think that you were the only one who could figure something like that out? No. Especially since I had the patience to look through testaments by former Socrates Aurors.”

            “The corps was only formed recently,” Draco said. “Harry and I went as far back through the historical records as we could, but it’s difficult to identify twisted when the records don’t call them that.”

            Macgeorge smiled, slowly enough that Draco had to watch her smile spill across her face like boiling water. “Is that what you think? How innocent.”

            Draco waited, but she said nothing to explain what she meant, so he snapped his head down and said, “Your flaw is necromancy. I know that. But the Ministry also punishes anyone for practicing that, wandless or not.”

            Macgeorge rolled her eyes. “As though you haven’t done enough Dark Arts to condemn anyone not in our…unique positions.” A flick of her eyelids indicated the wards that glowed on the door of the office. “I know exactly what the Ministry punishes, and how secret I need to keep this. I’m offering to help anyway.”

            “Why?” Draco asked. “Other people have died on our other cases, You haven’t used it then.”

            Macgeorge shook her head. “The only twisted you’ve pursued since Isla and I joined the Corps didn’t kill people. I reserved my magic for our own cases, and I think that Isla and I get results, if not as often as you do, since the Ministry reserves the choice tidbits for their most infamous pair.”

            Draco bit off the retort that he could have made. It was true that he hadn’t paid as much attention to Rudie and Macgeorge’s cases as he should have, and hadn’t sensed any use of necromancy, or even that she was studying twisted and what might cause someone to become one. He would have to look more closely at his fellow Aurors.

            “Very well,” he said. “But we already had to give the bodies back, so you can’t have as much access to them as I’d like. The first victim has already been buried. It might still be possible to reach Moxon’s. The victim who died today,” he added, when Macgeorge turned her head to the side.

            Macgeorge nodded and stood. “If he died today, then I can look forward to an interesting conversation.”

            Draco briefly checked his watch. The holding cell for the body was in the Ministry, and Harry should be asleep. He thought it wouldn’t distress Harry unduly if he went with Macgeorge to that holding cell and tried to find out what the dead would say to her.

            “Let’s go, then,” he said, and set out with Macgeorge walking at his side. It was weirdly unlike the way he walked with Harry, and he found himself outpacing her, putting more distance than he meant to between them. Macgeorge called irritably after him, and a few people in the corridors turned around and stared.

            Draco ignored the flush that mantled his cheeks. So this would start new rumors about him dating someone else, cheating on Harry. Any action they took would cause rumors, when they were both well-known. He had to admit that and work with it, instead of trying to conceal it.

            Those rumors wouldn’t have the chance to reach Harry, anyway, since Draco intended to explain everything to him this evening.

*

            Harry woke up when his Floo chimed. He lay there for a few moments, fuzzy-headed and licking at the fuzz that also seemed to have accumulated on the inside of his gums. Shouldn’t Draco have been back by now? Or had he overestimated the amount of time he’d been asleep?

            The Floo chimed again, and it wasn’t its usual sound. Harry stood up and staggered out into the drawing room, taking care that he wore a shirt and trousers before he did so. There had been a few incidents with his friends since Draco had started staying over. Draco had enthusiastic hands and no idea of his own strength.

            The face hovering in the fire made Harry pause immediately, his hands on the sides of the doorframe. As far as he knew, that wasn’t a face that should be there, not only because it belonged to a person who had nothing to say to him but because he had never opened his Floo to allow access.

            “Mrs. Malfoy,” he said, with some difficulty, when she went on looking at him and said nothing. “What do you want?”

            “A glimpse of my son,” Mrs. Malfoy said, leaning forwards as if resting her elbows on a shelf in front of her. She probably did have one, for long Floo calls, Harry thought. After some of the things Draco had mentioned about his childhood, no luxury in Malfoy Manor would surprise him, Harry thought. “But I will settle for talking to you instead. Has Draco told you that we aided him in his last case?”

            Harry stared at her. Then he said, “What? He took—I know he brought someone to you. But that doesn’t sound like helping to me.”

            Mrs. Malfoy gave him a smile that glittered with diamond edges. “Oh, dear, is that what he told you? In reality, we had contacted him a few days before, and told him that we wanted him back, as our son and heir. The price, at the time, was dropping you.”

            Harry snorted, and had the satisfaction of seeing her stiff face wrinkle like crumpled paper. “Well, excuse me for believing that he’d never accept such a bargain. If you thought he would, then you really don’t know him at all. And you should know someone you plan to make your heir, don’t you think?”

            Mrs. Malfoy spent some time looking at him, and then nodded. “One should. And how much better should one know someone who is one’s intimate partner, guarding one’s back in danger and one’s sex life in bed?”

            Harry hated the blush that crept up his neck, but he managed to grin at her. “I think you mean that I don’t know Draco, but I do. Unless I lost the sense of the sentence with all those ‘ones’ you kept throwing in there.”

            “Did you know that Draco went and spoke to your former partner, Lauren Hale?” Mrs. Malfoy smiled calmly at him. “And that he promised to honor our requests and become our heir again, with no balking at the price, if we would help him with the woman that he brought to our home? Such a pity that his father was gone at the time. He would have known how much Draco was lying.”

            “Yes, he was lying,” Harry snapped. “He came back to me.”

            But inwardly, his stomach cramped. Draco had spoken to Hale? He had never told Harry that.

            And his parents had wanted him to drop Harry, and he had agreed? Even in pretense? That was—it had worked out, but it was still disturbing.

            Mrs. Malfoy bowed her head to Harry, the light gleaming off the silver necklace around her throat. “You might consider what he could be doing now,” she whispered, “so late in the evening, without coming home to you.”

            Her face vanished, and the fire flickered calmly to itself.

            Harry hesitated. Then he picked up a handful of Floo powder.

*

            Unneeded: Harry hadn’t needed them because the crimes they were investigating didn’t concern murders. But now they do, so they’re coming back.

            Draco wonders about those things, too.

            SP777: Thanks! This is the longest series I’ve ever written, and I think that establishing a relationship like that between characters is something that can only really happen in a long-running series.

            No matter how aristocratic he is, Draco would still horrify his parents. ;)

            I really appreciate that you enjoy Harry’s characterization, too. I often do write him too angsty, I think.
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The Library of Hades