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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3831 -:- 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—Escaping a Mansion

            Harry saw the window crack down the middle, saw the miserable jump that Draco had made through it become a headlong fall as Lucius’s curse struck him.

            He saw that, and nothing more, because Draco was falling.

            Harry whipped a hand back, and in the hand was his wand, and in his wand was enough power to break the Malfoy wards apart, if he had unleashed it all at once before. He hadn’t, because he thought that he didn’t want Narcissa and Lucius (and any enemies they might contact) to find out everything he could do. But he did now, and the rage and the magic flew together, twin battering rams as he roared out, “Reducto! REDUCTO!”

            The spells landed with a sound that Harry knew he would hear in his dreams almost as often as the splintering of that window glass, because this was the splintering of magic. Down and down and through and over the wards cracked, and Harry hit them with another Blasting Curse, and then a single, pure wave of raw power that he didn’t remember casting the spell for. Maybe he hadn’t. There was nothing compared to the agony of seeing Draco fall.

            The wards in front of him weakened and moaned and fell apart in drifting pulses of power. Harry took a single long stride forwards, and he was on the Malfoy grounds.

            Too late to cast a Cushioning Charm for Draco, of course, who had already landed on the hard ground, probably unconscious. But not too late to keep Lucius, who was leaning out the window and staring at the intruder, from doing something else that would harm him.

            Harry lifted his wand again. The spell surged into his mouth, another of those Light magic spells like the one that could use love to pull someone through wards. One of those Light spells he wasn’t precisely supposed to know, but he did, and he would use it. “Insons!”

            The spell hit Lucius in a single wave of white-gold radiance, spreading out from Harry in the way he imagined sunshine would, if he was ever lucky enough to replace the sun. Lucius staggered back and disappeared from view with a cry. Harry couldn’t pay attention to that. He had one person in the world he wanted to pay attention to right now, and he ran for him.

            Draco was lying motionless when Harry scooped him up. He hastily cast a Lightening Charm, and even more hastily cast the diagnostic spells that would tell him if Draco had a broken limb or ribs or was in danger of dying immediately. It didn’t seem so, which meant Harry could move him. He slung Draco over his shoulder and turned to run. His assault on the wards had only opened a hole in one very specific part of the defense system, it hadn’t made it possible to Apparate off the Manor grounds.

            A sharp word startled him. He glanced up and saw Narcissa Malfoy leaning out of the window that Lucius had been at, her hand on the thick scar around her neck again. She had a look in her eyes that Harry thought was meant to be threatening, but at the moment, all he really cared about was that, with the angle at which Draco’s head hung, there was no way she could see his face.

            “You,” Narcissa said, and her voice was so deep that it sounded as if she was choking on blood. “We made a bargain.”

            “One that you never intended to keep,” Harry retorted, sure of that now. He had distracted them easily, and they had agreed too easily when they could simply have sat behind their wards and ignored him, or even firecalled the Ministry and told them his current location. “You were going to come out and kill me, or hurt me, or something else. I’m going to take my partner and leave, now.” He took another step, and continued walking even while Narcissa spoke, although he was sure she had cast a spell to make her voice clearer, he could hear her words so well.

            “You will suffer for this. You will lose your partner. You will lose your freedom. You will lose your magic.”

            Harry did stop near the hole in the wards and glance back. “Well, really. The most you could do was charge me with trespassing for breaking your wards.”

            “The spell you cast on my husband,” Narcissa said, and now she was hanging out the window the way Lucius had. “What was it?”

            “I believe you heard the incantation as well as I did,” Harry said, and held her eyes. He could feel the smile on his lips. It was vanishingly rare that he could smile like that, but it had always made his enemies at least turn pale, the way it did with Narcissa now. “And you know that’s not an illegal spell. It’s one the Aurors use on released prisoners they still consider a risk all the time.”

            “You have prevented him from being what he is,” Narcissa whispered.

            Harry shook his head. “That spell merely prevents him from casting if his intent is to harm another person. He can do anything else, even use Dark Arts spells, as long as they just benefit himself or others, or save his life. No offensive magic. That’s all.”

            “You are barbaric,” Narcissa said, and turned away, probably to bend over a fallen Lucius on the floor.

            No, Harry thought, as he walked outside the hole in the wards and Apparated back to Cuthbert’s Corner, cradling Draco in his arms. I am more than you can understand, both Light and Dark, and able to use the weapons of both.

            And for this, I could have done worse. For this, I may yet destroy you.

*

            “How are you feeling?”

            Draco started and opened his eyes. It didn’t take him long to recognize that he was in the bedroom of Cuthbert’s Corner that he and Harry had cleansed of Dark influences, and that Harry was hanging over his bed, staring at him with anxious eyes.

            Then he shifted, and his back blossomed into fire—although part of that was in memory, as Draco realized when he could breathe again through the intense pain. His back didn’t hurt quite as much now as it had done when he first jumped through the window.

            “I jumped through a window at the Manor,” he said, trying the words out on his tongue, to see how they sounded. “And my father cast some spell at my back that was meant to slow me down.”

            Harry gave a quick nod. His eyes were dark. “I treated the visible burns I could see, but I think it goes deeper than that, and it’s Dark magic. You’ll need to tell me what you know about it, and we can see what books you found there.”

            Draco smiled and looked towards his robes, which Harry had taken off and flung on a chair, probably when he was removing them to treat Draco’s back. “There are several that might be interesting,” he said. “But I doubt that the curse will have gone deep enough to threaten my life. My father would have wanted to slow me down and capture me alive.”

            “You?” Harry frowned at him. “Even though he doesn’t know who you are?”

            “I meant any intruder, really,” Draco said, and thoughtlessly tried to sit up. He hissed as his muscles protested.

            Harry gently rolled him back onto his stomach. “I opened a hole in the wards to get you out of there,” he said, “and I’ve been casting spells for the last few hours to make sure that you were safe and to try and find out what the curse may have done. Can you rest for a while? Because I need the rest.”

            “Sorry,” Draco muttered, and reached out a hesitant hand to put it on Harry’s shoulder. Harry endured that in silence, only glancing at him and wincing a little. “Are you all right?”

            Harry shut his eyes and nodded. “Now,” he said. “Seeing you fall like that—it was one of the worst moments of my life.”

            Draco scooted to the side, so Harry could lie down on the bed. “Then lie beside me, like this,” he murmured.

            Harry did, but hesitantly, his eyes flickering to the wounds on Draco’s back that Draco still couldn’t see. “I don’t want to open your injuries again because I touch you in my sleep.”

            Draco snorted gently at him. “And you think that’s likely to happen? You worry too much.” Again he tugged on Harry’s arm, and this time Harry grunted and fell onto his own stomach. Draco sighed as he arranged him, with Harry’s head tucked into the curve of his neck and Harry’s arm tucked around his shoulders. “Yes. That way.”

            Harry smiled. Draco knew that because he could feel Harry’s lips moving against his neck. “You’re awfully smug sometimes,” Harry muttered sleepily.

            Draco shook his head, then paused, because that came near to disarranging them. “Only practical. I see a problem, and I set out to solve it.”

            “Of course,” Harry said, and sighed a little. “There’s a lot of things we ought to be doing. Reading those books, and investigating whatever else you brought out of the Manor.”

            “A mirror shard,” Draco said, but pressed down on Harry when he instinctively tried to sit up. “Shh. Later. We haven’t been as good to ourselves as we should be, jumping straight from one adventure to another. Let’s have some peace.”

            “If we can in a place like this,” Harry muttered, but he shut up when Draco poked him.

            Draco closed his eyes, and sighed. This was more than enough, for right now, with his lover beside him, and the mysteries that waited in the bloody letters on the walls of Cuthbert’s Corner and the mirror shard inside his pockets held in abeyance. They wouldn’t figure out those mysteries by exhausting themselves and starving themselves of relaxation.

            He breathed in and out, held in place by Harry’s comforting presence as much as by his own determination to relax, until he slid into sleep.

*

            “I can’t find any Dark magic on this.”

            Draco glanced up. He had spent most of his morning deciphering the code on the parchments that Harry had scribbled down, while Harry worked over the mirror shard that Draco had taken from the wall. Harry sat back now, rubbing his hands through his hair and scowling down at the mirror. It made Draco want to stand up, go over, and massage his shoulder. With a bit of difficulty, he refrained.

            “Maybe it’s the kind of spell that you can’t sense unless the whole mirror is there,” Draco said. “What made it stranger is it looked like that mirror had been deliberately removed, not shattered the way the other one was when I interfered with it. As if they’d decided that another one was too dangerous to have around after my mother was injured.” He held his hand to his mouth and stifled a yawn as well as he could. Even after almost ten hours of sleep last night, he didn’t feel completely equal to the task of working his way through the mad symbols and madder meanings that Ernhardt had scattered over the walls.

            Harry stood up at once. “Do you need to rest for a little? Have me take a turn at the symbols?”

            Draco shook his head. “I think it’s still leftover exhaustion from the curse, the way you were yawning this morning from your magical exhaustion.”

            Harry flushed and turned back to the small desk he was working at. They’d dragged in two from one of the rooms on the first floor, after they had taken them through another one of those endless cleansings to make sure they were free of Dark magic. They were small and battered and scarred from acids, but Draco thought they would do. “I didn’t think you saw that,” muttered Harry.

            “You don’t need to hide from me,” Draco said, and spoke the words with the kind of intensity that Harry would know meant he needed to look up.

            He did, finally, a timid little flickering and darting of his eyes. Draco smiled at him and nodded firmly. “I meant it. And I appreciate the offer to take over for me, but no. These symbols are based on the kinds of private code that Potions masters use among themselves, and I don’t think you know enough about that to pick them out.”

            “Maybe not,” Harry said. He cast a Tempus Charm and blinked at it. “But maybe one reason we should stop is that we’re hungry. Do you want some of those sandwiches the werewolves packed?”

            Draco nodded. They had some food from Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade that they had purchased in disguise, but he wanted to hold off on replacing that for as long as they could. The search for them was becoming more and more frenzied, the longer the Ministry took to find them.

            Harry left the room and came back quickly with a few packages wrapped in paper, Preservation Charms practically glowing on them. Draco smiled. Not all the werewolves in the Demlan Pack could cast spells, since some had been Muggles before they were bitten and others had had their wands broken, but those who could practiced their magic ferociously. It was something they might have lost, and they were determined not to.

            The sandwiches were cheese and tomato, nothing special, but they filled Draco up. He studied the symbols and shook his head a little, carefully brushing away a crumb that had fallen onto the parchment.

            “You have some idea of what it says, don’t you.”

            Draco glanced up. It hadn’t been a question. Harry was holding his own sandwich, without a bite as yet, and leaning forwards as though staring would yank the answers out of Draco all by itself. Draco gestured, and Harry sighed, took a large and obvious bite, and went on staring at him as he chewed.

            “I do,” Draco said. “Part of it is the spells that are meant to drive any stranger who stays long insane.”

            “And the rest?”

            Draco grimaced. Right, he had already mentioned something like that to Harry once before. Harry always showed interest in knowing what each new danger was now, probing and grasping and testing.

            “Another spell I can find says that—well, basically that any Dark magic used here can be absorbed into the house.”

            “And become part of the house’s defenses?” Once again, Harry had paused, this time with only one bite of the sandwich down.

            “I talk, you eat,” Draco snapped, and turned towards him so he could keep an eye on Harry and make sure he fulfilled his part of the bargain. Harry muttered something that, with his mouth full of cheese, Draco couldn’t make out for sure, but which sounded like, “Yes, Mum.” Draco let it pass. This time. “Yes, if it’s defensive Dark magic. Otherwise, it seems as if the house can use it as a weapon.”

            Harry grimaced and had to perform a few complicated swallowing motions before he could talk, which Draco was pleased to see. “Eurgh. That means that anything we use to defend ourselves against the magic here, or against anyone who attacks, could basically be used against us.”

            Draco nodded. “Exactly.”

            “What about those nightmare wards that we cast the first night?” Harry asked, gesturing so hard he nearly dropped his sandwich. “Are they going to come back to haunt us?”

            Draco shook his head. “It looks like it means only Dark magic used within the ring of the house’s symbols. The wards are technically outside. At least, I haven’t found the kinds of gaps in the message that I would have if some of it was on the outer walls. I think we have everything that Ernhardt wrote on the walls and ceiling.”

            “Why would he leave an exception like that?” Harry frowned down at his sandwich. Draco reached out and picked up his wrist, leading the food more towards Harry’s mouth. Harry grimaced at him and rolled his eyes. Draco rolled his right back. He wasn’t above forcing his partner to eat if nothing else would work. “In the wards, I mean,” Harry added, after an exaggerated bite that nevertheless didn’t seem to fill his mouth with much bread. “It seems like a space that anyone could creep through who wanted to.”

            “I don’t really think Ernhardt thought like that,” Draco said. “That he was that sane. And remember that he had powerful wards on the house, like the dark dogs. No one could just ‘creep through who wanted to.’ If they were inside the house, presumably he wanted them to be, and he had other methods to deal with them.”

            Harry huffed and nodded. “Anyway,” he said, and turned back to the mirror shard. “I haven’t found anything more than a faint trace of Dark magic on this. I don’t know what they used it for, but you’d think there would be more magic if it was a defense.”

            “I don’t know,” Draco said slowly, thinking about the mirror he’d shattered, and the thick silver necklace that his mother wore, and the rough patch where the second mirror had been removed. “I don’t know if it was a defense against anyone coming into the house, I meant,” he added, when Harry looked at him and blinked hard. “My mother was wearing that necklace. She would have had to come close to an enemy to launch spells from it or through it, and I know my parents. They don’t favor close combat.”

            “Plus,” Harry added, a quiet dawning of understanding in his face, “the mirrors didn’t sense you when you entered the house, did they? Or that one that you faced, at least. It wasn’t until you interfered with it that it reacted.”

            Draco nodded. “If it was defensive magic, it was a poor example of its kind.”

            Harry exhaled slowly and faced the mirror shard again. “I thought I would recognize a defense against Dark magic of any kind,” he muttered. “But what if I was looking for the wrong thing?” He picked up his wand.

            “What do you mean?” Draco leaned forwards to look over his shoulder.

            “I don’t know, exactly,” Harry said in an abstracted voice. “Let me think.”

            Draco fell silent. He knew what it meant when Harry spoke in that voice. He was on the brink of an insight, a fragile, fugitive thought that would run away again if Draco disturbed it. Draco still leaned over his shoulder, ready to offer help in an instant if he could, but not speaking, and barely daring to breathe as Harry’s wand flickered over the mirror shard. Draco didn’t think he was casting spells, so much as tracing out the movements of a series of spells he had already cast, or might cast.

            Then Harry stuck out a hand. Draco stared at it, not knowing what he wanted.

            “You said that one of the books you brought out of your parents’ house was a natural history book with no markings in it,” Harry said. His voice had grown hard and distant, as though he and Draco didn’t know each other at all. “Let me see it.”

            Draco clamped his lips shut over all the many things he could have said, and hurried to the bed where they had sprawled the books out. Harry had taken a look at them that morning and admitted he didn’t have any more idea than Draco did why the natural history book would be worth protecting.

            Maybe he’s coming up with something new.

            Draco bit his lips and nodded to himself. He might have, and just because Draco didn’t ordinarily think of Harry and books in the same sentence didn’t mean that Harry was stupid.

            He plopped the natural history book into Harry’s hands. Harry whispered a spell, and the book fell open to the second page, with several more places later in it glowing red. Draco knew that meant the magic had located the word or phrase Harry was looking for.

            Harry read the sentence his magic had found, something Draco couldn’t do because the book was propped up right in front of Harry’s eyes, and exhaled hard. Then he held it up so Draco could read it. Draco leaned close, eagerly.

            But in rare circumstances, wizards may share the traits of magical creatures that they interact with…

            Draco blinked and flipped to another place in the book. There was a sentence there about wizards creating spells that mimicked the gifts of Lethifolds. And another sentence about three-quarters of the way through, when Draco let it fall open to that page, talked about how wizards could develop those spells until they were wandless and “natural.”

            Draco shook his head and turned back to Harry. “So what?” he asked aloud. “You can make any spell that you cast often enough natural to you. I know you can do a wandless Summoning Charm. I can do a few spells wandlessly enough when I concentrate. And there’s no evidence that my family ever interbred with vampires or the like, thank you very much.”

            “I don’t think vampires can have children anyway,” Harry said absently, “since they’re corpses.” He snatched the book back and looked up at Draco with a shining revelation in his eyes that Draco didn’t share yet, but wanted to, very much. “Don’t you see, Draco? That necklace and the traces I found on the mirror shard were defenses against themselves. Probably against your mother, I would say, if she was wearing the necklace.”

            “You’re making no sense,” Draco snapped. “My parents still act as one. My mother went through with the ritual to forget me, after all.” That made him hurt as though he’d cracked a tooth. He tried his best to ignore it. His parents had exiled him seven years ago. You’d think he’d be more used to the pain that came with any thought of them.

            “Not a wandless spell,” Harry said. “A natural, innate gift. One that might start exercising itself without your conscious will, because you lack the will necessary to oppose it. The way someone could if they’d spent too much time studying Dark Arts and could no longer tell the difference between the right and the wrong time to use it, for example.”

            Draco took a step back from him. “You’re saying—”

            “That I think your mother is twisted, and was trying to protect herself against exercising her flaw?” Harry finished. “Yes.” He leaned forwards, eyes on Draco. “And when we shattered the mirror and the necklace, we destroyed her chance. She’s sliding down into the darkness, probably going mad steadily, and we have no idea what her flaw is, or how sane she still might be.”

*

            Rina: Draco doesn’t know how his parents would react. The ritual they performed was pretty powerful.

            And Lucius and Narcissa were planning to renege on their “promise” to Harry even before that. That’s the conversation Draco overhears when he’s hiding in the library.

            Seiren: Thanks! And no, the Made By Hands series isn’t finished yet.

            SP777: Sorry about the cliffhanger! I hope this one also satisfied some of your needs.
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity