Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Burning Day	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10061 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
- 5
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four—One Hoof
            “She’s wonderful.”
            Harry had to smile as he sat down next to a breathless Hermione for a quick meal in his office. She’d been talking with Lenneal, the woman Draco had convinced to help them, for several hours now, and apparently Lenneal had an idea which of her contacts in Knockturn Alley could help them track down the poisoned Wolfsbane ingredients. In fact, Hermione was clutching a list of names. Harry was glad that things were going right for somebody.
            “I’m glad to hear that,” Harry told her, and sipped at his pumpkin juice with a grimace. He and Hermione had spent too much time talking before he ate, and the juice had gone flat. “And you think you’ll be able to track back the ingredients to the exact person who distributed them?”
            Hermione nodded, eyes glowing. “Of course, if that person did it because Gorenson told them to, then the real culprit is already dead,” she added. “But maybe we can make them realize that it’s still wrong and prevent them from doing it again.”
            Harry held back a cynical comment on exactly how likely Hermione really was to reeducate their opponents. “Do you think there’s a chance Lenneal could help me track down the source of the centaur rumor, too?”
            Hermione blinked. “I don’t know. She says that she has most of her contacts in Knockturn Alley and the Dark apothecaries. Do you think it would have come out of there?”
            “At least they would know whether people have been asking them about aphrodisiac potions and using centaur foal hooves in them lately,” said Harry. “Yes, speak to her, please.” He still burned with the desire to avenge the centaurs, but he knew that he wouldn’t do well in an investigation like that. He was too recognizable, and he would thrash around in his anger and make things even more unsubtle than they already were. “I’m going to work on strengthening the wards around the Forest and Hogwarts.”
            Hermione frowned. “Do you want help?”
            “You and Lenneal go on working together, for now.” Harry squeezed her hand. “Please,” he added, when Hermione opened her mouth as if to object. “I want to be sure that someone is doing something else to help the centaurs. My efforts to strengthen the wards might be useless, at least against the kind of artifacts that the Ministry was using to bypass them.”
            After a second, Hermione nodded. “If you want us to.”
            “I do, thanks,” said Harry, and finally applied himself to his food. He doubted that Draco was letting doubts and worries make him nervous enough not to eat, even though this was the night when he had another major party, the last one before the election. And he had told Harry that he would start spinning the story of their “real” connection to each other at this party.
            Maybe he’s not nervous, but I still wish I could be there, at his side.
*
            “How do you feel, now that your victory is all but assured?” Skeeter’s voice dipped sympathetically. “And now that you’ve mostly recovered from the wounds Dark Lord Potter dealt you when your Manor exploded?”
            Draco took a sip of his champagne, letting his eyelids flutter as he looked down at the floor. Skeeter could take that as a sign of his modesty or his nervousness. Draco would be pleased if she did.
            He was strangling his irritation with her and stirring up the right emotions behind the mask, but at least he was past the stage when he blamed himself for having those emotions.
            “I feel that a victory would be the best solution to both problems,” he said at last, “the problem of what’s best for the wizarding world and the problem that Dark Lord Potter presents, as someone that we can’t help but deal with. He’s hurt me, but he hasn’t slaughtered me yet, the way he did to poor Gorenson.” He looked up then, and caught Skeeter’s gaze, so she wouldn’t get suspicious. “That’s the way I have to think of it, you know? That there’s always something worse that could happen to me?”
            Skeeter’s fingers twitched on her quill, and her eyes brightened. “Do you care to explain to the public any of your strategies for containing Dark Lord Potter yet?”
            Draco looked around, ostentatiously making sure that none of the other people—reporters, pillars of the Ministry, pure-blood supporters, his parents—at the Manor party were near them. Skeeter obligingly cast an anti-eavesdropping spell.
            “This is a strategy that I can only tell you right now,” Draco whispered. “If you published it, it would lessen its effectiveness.”
            Skeeter pouted at him, and Draco could practically see her two main impulses fighting behind her eyes: the desire to know more about his strategy and be trusted with this secret versus her impulse to publish everything. “But you might let me tell the public the truth eventually?”
            Draco hesitated, then nodded. “With time passing, I can snare the Dark Lord Potter more effectively. Finally, when you publish, he won’t believe the story even if someone in his court insists that he should.”
            “Ah!” Skeeter whispered, her eyes brightening. “So you do intend to fool him?”
            “Dark Lord Potter wants a victim,” said Draco. “A single victim. Witness how he blamed everything wrong with the Ministry on Gorenson, even though lots of people have been involved in fighting him. And how he tortured Gorenson and burned him alive. That’s the person he chose to focus on, despite everything else that went wrong.”
            Skeeter looked as if she was about to dance in place. “And you’re going to offer yourself up as that single victim?”
            Remember that Skeeter is smarter than she looks, Draco told himself firmly, and gave a modest inclination of his head. “I am. But I can’t tell him exactly what I’m doing at first, because then he might kill me for trying to manipulate him.” He let his voice sink. “By the time I tell you it’s safe to publish, then I think I’ll have him firmly enchanted. He’ll blame me for everything. If anyone else tries to tell him otherwise, then he’ll dismiss it as a ridiculous plot.”
            “A victim,” said Skeeter. “A sacrifice.” She looked like she might clasp her hands to her bosom, but that would mean putting down the ink and the parchment to do it. “You’ll play the most romantic part I can think of.”
            Romantic? Draco did look at her uneasily, wondering if she somehow suspected the relationship between him and Harry. They had acted like that once in front of her, although things had changed so much since then that she had never referred to it again.
            But Skeeter just went on beaming. “I’ll be sure to keep what you told me secret until it’s safe to release,” she said. “Thank you.”
            And away she walked, almost on air, at knowing something that no one else in the party did.
            Draco sighed and picked up a glass of wine from a house-elf, then went to refresh his nerves and his speech one more time before he made it to a bunch of Ministry people who wanted to know what their relations with the Dark Lord Potter would be like if he took over the Ministry.
            They know, at the bottom, that I’m their only real choice, the way Lenneal says.
            And of course that was true, but that didn’t mean Draco couldn’t do his best to ease their fears, to make things smoother in the future for himself.
            And Harry, he thought then, swallowing one more gulp of wine. I’m doing this for Harry, too, always.
*
            “Lucy thinks that she might have found something.”
            Harry started and glanced up. He had been talking to one of the people Draco had recommended for a place in his Court. Her name was Serena Lowell, and she clasped her hands on her lap, covered by a fancy blue robe, as she scowled at Hermione. Harry squeezed her hand and got her to smile at him, reluctantly, before he stood up.
            “I’m sorry, Miss Lowell, but this interview will have to be concluded later,” he said. “I do think that you have an excellent chance of entering my Court, though.”
            “Thank you, my Lord,” said Lowell, and left the room with no more than a cursory glare at Hermione. Harry didn’t think Hermione noticed. She was too busy almost dancing in place, blurting out the news the minute that the door closed behind Lowell.
            “Lucy found a contact in Knockturn Alley who remembers having sold some Wolfsbane ingredients to someone named Imber,” said Hermione, whipping out a long parchment full of names and plunking it in the middle of his desk. “And Imber is the name of one of Gorenson’s aliases.”
            Harry sighed. It wasn’t definitive proof, but at least it might lessen the paranoia of the werewolves who lived with him, if they knew that the one who had poisoned them was most likely dead.
            Still, he wanted the definitive proof if he could get it. “But buying the ingredients for Wolfsbane isn’t the same thing as poisoning the ingredients that got sent here.”
            “No,” Hermione agreed. “But we know that Gorenson had his fingers into everything.” She rolled up the parchment, staring intently at him. “I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that he suborned someone who was supposed to send the ingredients to me and slipped his own in instead.”
            Harry nodded thoughtfully. “Do what you can to find out, but good luck. Has Lenneal found out anything about the centaur foals’ hooves and that rumor?”
            Hermione’s shoulders tightened, and her eyes dropped to her hands, contemplating the way they tied up the scroll. Harry sighed. “I’m not going to blame you if you haven’t found anything,” he said quietly. “You know that, Hermione. It’s a hard thing to do, and I only asked you to do it recently—”
            “I wasn’t feeling bad about that.” Hermione caught her breath with a gulp and looked up into his face. “I’m feeling bad because we did find something. Yesterday. But it was so horrible that neither one of us wanted to come and talk to you about it.”
            Harry clenched the back of his chair with one hand, and swallowed back as much irritation as he could. “All right. What are you talking about? What did you find?”
            “We found a butchered centaur foal,” Hermione told the center of the table.
            Harry closed his eyes. “Where did you find it, and what did it look like?” Perhaps it was a little much to ask Hermione to relive that much horror for his benefit, but he would pull the memory from her head and place it in a Pensieve if she wanted, rather than make her go through it again.
            It sounded as though Hermione was swallowing either the impulse to be sick or a dry sob. She whispered, “We found it as ingredients, chopped up. I don’t think that either of us would have recognized it, but we went in disguise to the apothecary, and the shopkeeper showed it to us when we started asking about aphrodisiac potions. And I recognized the hooves.”
            Harry felt himself go cold. Slow and deep and cold, as if he had turned not only into a shark but the water that the shark was gliding through.
            “Harry?” Hermione’s hand was on his shoulder, but he felt as if it was on the other side of a thick wool coverlet. “Are you all right?”
            “What apothecary was it?” And Harry’s voice sounded like the growl of a dreaming dragon, he thought. His fingers flexed against the table, and small splinters fell off and drifted around in a circle. All around him, Hogwarts was thrumming with magic.
            “His name is Garrick Killian,” said Hermione, and she had taken a step back as though she needed to see Harry from a good distance in order to understand him. “What is wrong with you? I know you want to speak to him about this, but—”
            “Damn right I want to speak to him about this,” Harry said, and moved his hands in a complicated pattern. The stones of Hogwarts beneath his feet understood and opened up for him, dropping him into a tunnel that sped him through the stones like the tunnel that led down to the Chamber of Secrets.
            Harry could have reached out and touched the Chamber as he went past it. He could have summoned a basilisk made of stone. He could have done a lot of things.
            But he only wanted the tunnel to bear him to the edge of the grounds and the edge of his power, which it did. Then he closed his eyes and stood there, swaying a little, despite being blown by the cold wind of his rage.
            The last thing he had gone charging into a situation with parameters he didn’t fully understand, it had resulted in his capture. And even though he thought he had planned for the one after that, the one that had forced him to destroy Persephone, he had ended up misjudging it. He wouldn’t be caught that way this time.
            Besides, he’d neglected to get Apparition coordinates to the apothecary from Hermione.
            He would go to someone who could help him. He would try to make sure that he didn’t terrify her too badly.
            Harry opened his eyes, knowing he was smiling, and unpleasantly, before he disappeared.
*
            “Candidate Malfoy?”
            Draco lowered his list of bribes and people who needed to be bribed with a frown. It was true he had given Lucy Lenneal, as someone who had worked with Granger and was working with Harry, permission to contact him privately by Floo if she wanted to, and bypass all the elaborate safeguards Rosenthal used to determine if someone should be able to contact him or not. But he hadn’t expected Lenneal to casually use that access, either.
            But from the way Lenneal had her jaw clenched, this wasn’t a casual firecall. Draco leaned forwards and adopted the smooth manner that he thought Lenneal would expect from him. “Yes? What is it?”
            “The Dark Lord was just here,” Lenneal whispered, and seemed to realize a second later that Draco might not know where “here” meant. “I mean, in my office. He said that he had come to—to gather information on the discovery that I made yesterday with Granger.”
            “What discovery?” Lenneal winced. Draco rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to do whatever you think Dark Lord Potter did. But I do want to know what you found out, since you didn’t see fit to tell me.”
            “I was trying to think of the right way to break the news.” Lenneal threw her hair over her shoulder and finally seemed to realize, from his impatient glance, that she should settle down and give Draco the report. “The Dark Lord’s associate and I discovered what I’m certain are the remains of a slaughtered centaur foal in an apothecary, Darkest Signs, owned by a man named Garrick Killian.”
            Draco breathed a curse. He knew Killian’s name, although he didn’t think he had ever been in his shop. But Professor Snape had bought ingredients there, and so had his father. Killian was an experienced Dark apothecary. He should have been smarter than to have ingredients like that in his shop or antagonize the Dark Lord of Hogwarts.
            “And why did the Dark Lord need to come to you to learn this, when Granger presumably went back to Hogwarts?” Draco asked.
            “She did,” said Lenneal. “But he didn’t know the Apparition coordinates of the shop or what it was called. He came to me to learn.” She winced and shook her head when she met his eyes. “And I don’t know why he didn’t ask Granger. I suppose he thought there was the possibility that she might not tell him.”
            And Harry wouldn’t want to force her to tell him, even though he could. He just barely repaired their relationship last time he did something without telling her. This would destroy it forever. Draco held his face immobile. “Did you give him the coordinates?”
            “Yes,” said Lenneal. “But he left only a few moments ago. You may still be able to catch him if you hurry. I can give you the coordinates of the shop if you don’t have them—”
            “Why would I be able to catch him?” Draco stood up with a snort even as he Summoned his cloak nonverbally and it settled around his shoulders. “You know that I can deal with him as England’s future Minister, but that isn’t the same thing as forcing him to stop and listen to me.”
            Lenneal held his gaze. “I think that you’re capable of a lot more where it concerns Dark Lord Potter than you ever wanted us to know,” she said simply.
            Draco cursed, but only to himself. That was the worst part of having intelligent allies: then you had nothing to do but Obliviate them or live with it if they figured things out. And Lenneal seemed to have divined the relationship, or part of it, that lay between him and Harry. With luck, she wouldn’t have thought it was love, though.
            “I don’t think I need to remind you of conclusions that you should keep to yourself?” Draco asked softly.
            Lenneal shivered. “I just saw the Dark Lord of Hogwarts in all his glory. I still believe that he won’t attack us if we don’t attack him first, but h-he was angry. And I could see it.” She swallowed. “I wouldn’t be mad enough to oppose someone like that.”
            Draco nodded curtly and cut short the Floo call. He could Floo to an “abandoned” shop in Knockturn Alley that was actually a common destination for wizards who wanted to reach that alley without going out in the open and being noted by any Aurors hanging about. It would be faster than racing through the Manor to the edge of his grounds and his wards.
            He didn’t think it likely, actually, that he could hold Harry back from doing something to Killian. And he might not want to even if he could, because Harry might owe that response to the centaurs by virtue of his treaty with them.
            Draco was just trying to keep it to “understandable vengeance,” rather than “complete and utter destruction.”
*
Jester: He’s confident that Harry knows how to deal with that artifact.
But he isn’t always confident that Harry will make the best impression, as you see here.
- 3
- 4
- 5
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Burning Day