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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.

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Chapter Forty—The Setting Hours
            “I’m here. Show yourself.”
            Draco thought the challenge was a little silly, perhaps, but he had the dragon with him, and the Muggle portion of the village seemed to be sleeping. Besides, Granger hadn’t said where Draco was supposed to meet her in Godric’s Hollow. Maybe by the ruins of Harry’s house, but Draco had never been here before and wasn’t going to wander around searching for it.
            So, when he’d come near the statue that changed to reveal baby Harry with his parents, Draco had decided that was far enough. He would stand here, and they could either come to him or not.
            There was a long, ringing silence that seemed to fill the air with cold. Then the shimmer of a Disillusionment Charm moved off to the side, and slipped off to reveal Weasley and Granger.
            Draco tensed, but at least he didn’t jump, thanks to the dragon spreading his wings and hissing a little a second before the charm dissipated. Weasley and Granger moved towards him, their wands both drawn.
            Draco counted steps. When they were about twenty from him, he drew his own wand. They froze and looked at him.
            “I’m not Harry,” Draco said calmly into the silence between them. “He’s a much better person, and I promised I would let him have a chance to prove his goodness to you, but that only means not attacking you. I’ll defend myself.”
            The dragon sat up and flapped its wings once, as if adding his voice to the consensus. Weasley and Granger looked at each other, silently conferring, and then Granger nodded and moved forwards.
            “We need to know what Harry was doing with you,” she said.
            Draco frowned. Were they going to require some storytelling from the very beginning of the time when he’d gone to Harry? He’d thought they’d known about that. Granger had certainly come and visited Grimmauld Place when he was there.
            “He was planning a rebellion,” Draco still began, obediently. If he tried, he could keep it short, mostly by not giving them the chance to ask questions. “And he thought he could get the Ministry to realize that—”
            “That’s not what she means,” Weasley snapped. “We want to know what she was doing with your lot. Death Eaters,” he elaborated, maybe because of the blank look that Draco could feel on his own face.
            Draco had to control himself severely then, when he wanted to yell about the differences and be done with them. But again, he had made a promise to Harry that came before everything else. And that was the only thing that kept him standing here and looking at them.
            That needn’t matter, though, as long as he could do it. He said quietly, “Harry was pretending to be Voldemort, to fool them.”
            Weasley leaped at the name, but Draco saw the way Granger’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. She had probably noticed his use of the Dark Lord’s name rather than his title. Draco stood there and looked back fearlessly as the dragon settled down on his shoulder once again and Granger made whatever calculations she needed to make.
            “Why would he need to do that?” she asked. “What plans could he have that involved them?”
            “They were an obstacle that needed to be dealt with,” Draco said. “And he needed them to be spies and messengers and get him the ingredients he needed to build the reverse Lightfinder. So he pretended to be Voldemort—” really, the way Weasley flinched was very satisfying “—and he overawed them into doing what he wanted.”
            “He didn’t need to do that,” Weasley whispered fiercely. “He could just have come home.”
            “With everyone as mad as they were after the Lightfinder exploded?” Draco gave him a polite, nasty smile. “Excuse me for not believing that.”
            “It is true,” Granger said. “We would have hidden him and stood by him. I don’t know why Harry decided that the Death Eaters were the better bet.”
            “Because he didn’t have much choice when they came into his house and I decided that the best way of chasing them off would be imitating Voldemort’s laugh,” said Draco wearily. He already felt as though he had told this story a hundred times before. But Harry, with people interrogating him, would probably have to tell it more often.
            The thought gave Draco courage. He straightened his back and looked from face to face to make sure both Weasley and Granger were paying attention before he continued. “There were clever Death Eaters it would have been hard to fool there, and Fenrir Greyback, who’s not hard to fool but too stubborn to simply gave up once he believed he’d found his Lord again. Harry did the best he could. And he succeeded in burning that madness out of the people who were caught in the Lightfinder’s explosion. You must have noticed the difference.”
            “Well, yes,” said Weasley reluctantly. “They’d accused my brother of being Dark and then imprisoned my sister-in-law when she went to rescue him, and they’re not upset about that now. But of course people are still afraid of Dark wizards. And they’re still upset about Harry.”
            “Harry told lies he didn’t have to,” Granger said. “He stirred up rebellion when he didn’t have to. I’m afraid the Ministry is still going to find things to try him for even if being tested Dark in the Lightfinder isn’t a crime anymore.”
            “He’ll tell the truth in his trial,” Draco said. “He told me that he was going to request Veritaserum.” He considered, for half-a-second, about telling them the other things Harry had said.
            But he rejected the notion. If Harry’s friends wouldn’t help him because they knew that he was in dread of the Ministry, then they didn’t deserve Harry. If it never came up and Harry never had to flee the wizarding world, then he would only be upset that Draco had got his friends rattled and on the defensive.
            “A Truth Trial,” Granger breathed, and Draco noticed the specific name. It was evidently something she knew about. Maybe Harry had, too. “That could work, yes. But it’s still an awful risk to take.” Her eyes came back to Draco. “And why did he take the risk for you, of all people?”
            Draco could have said lots of things, but again, most of them went back to the beginning of the story, which Weasley and Granger already thought they knew all about. And he didn’t know if he could tell them about what he and Harry had gone through in the hidden manor, the way that Harry had healed his father and the promises they’d made to each other.
            Instead, he said, as blandly as he could when he wanted to scream and laugh at the same time, “I’m his lover.”
            Weasley and Granger stood still enough that Draco really thought he’d frozen them, and considered snapping his fingers in front of their faces. That would probably only cause more trouble for Harry in the end, though. He folded his arms instead, and the dragon reared up and flapped his wings as though he was prepared to swoop out and burn people’s hair if it would help.
            “No,” said Granger. “You’re not.”
            “You can’t be,” said Weasley.
            Draco lost his temper. But not in the kind of screaming way that he had with his father. Instead, he enunciated his words in a cold, clear tone that he hoped Granger and Weasley would take note of. “You can accuse me of lying and stand here doubting Harry all you want. And then he’ll probably walk away from you even if the Ministry acquits him. He’s been through enough. You don’t know what it’s like, playacting for your life in front of people who would torture you to death in a minute. You can challenge him and talk to him and forgive him, but you can’t stand here deciding I’m lying and that you’ll never believe him again. Listen to me, you pair of Gryffindor idiots. Why would I lie about something like this? Why would I say that we were lovers instead of friends, if it wasn’t true? Why wouldn’t I come up with a story about life-debts and Harry feeling sorry for me, instead? Why not go with the lie that was simpler to accept, if I was lying?”
            Weasley and Granger exchanged uncertain glances. Then Granger shook her head a little and turned to Draco. “It’s just that Harry did a lot of ethically dubious things, and this is another of them.”
            The dragon hissed. Draco let the sound express some of his frustration, and only said, “Sleeping with me is ethically dubious. I see. Do you think I seduced and raped him? Do you think Harry would really go on being fooled by me all these weeks if that had happened?”
            Granger finally frowned in a way that made Draco think some of the point was getting through. Some of the point. She was much denser than he’d thought from Harry’s description of her. She put one hand on Weasley’s arm and murmured something that made him bristle, then sigh and nod.
            “No,” Granger said. “I don’t think that you could fool Harry for that long.” She turned and faced Draco. “But what do you intend to do? From the sound of it, Harry accomplished what he meant to. The effects of the madness are gone, and the—reverse Lightfinder worked. What are we supposed to do now?”
            Draco half-relaxed. Granger was more pleasant when she was looking to him for advice than when she was accusing him of crimes that she couldn’t even name, they were so foul. “I think we ought to go and rescue Harry, of course.”
            Granger paused. “Before the trial?”
            “Are you sure they’re going to allow him the option of a trial? Or will they throw him in prison and keep him there until the world ends?”
            Granger shook her head. “You must not have heard,” she said, and Draco let her get away with sounding superior then, he was so hungry for news. “They’re going to put Harry on trial tomorrow, most likely. They’re gathering the Wizengamot.” She hesitated. “They said—they said it was for a Truth Trial, but I didn’t know if I believed them.”
            Are you always this slow to follow Harry? Or do you not trust him to know what he’s doing? Once again, Draco held his peace, because nothing would go well for anyone if he screwed this up, and just nodded. “Then we need to be ready to take him out of there if the trial doesn’t go well.”
            “What would you define as not going well, though?” Weasley demanded. “If they decide that Harry is guilty—”
            “Of what?” Draco swung on him this time, because the dragon was stretching its wings and hissing, and he decided that meant Harry’s friends were over the border of what was allowable as well. “He played Voldemort. He didn’t torture the Death Eaters unless they forced him into it. He pretended to create Dark creatures and Light ones and torture me and my friends to make sure that we could survive. It’s not something he wanted to do.”
            “But there’s still whatever he did in the Ministry the day the Lightfinder exploded,” Granger said. Her voice was gentler now, at least. Maybe she could really believe that Draco cared about Harry, too. “I don’t know what it is. Kingsley didn’t seem to know how to explain it clearly. And the involvement he had with the Lightfinder’s explosion.”
            “That’s why he spent all the time he did coming up with a way to fix it. He fixed it. He’s atoned for it.” Draco found standing here and talking about atonement with Gryffindors more bizarre than he had playing Harry’s loyal Death Eater.
            “But the Wizengamot has to decide on that,” Granger said. “From what you said, it’ll be no problem, when there’s a Truth Trial and they can know that every word he’s speaking under Veritaserum is true.”
            Draco snarled. “Do you trust them to believe it, though? Any more than you did at first?”
            Granger stirred restlessly, but it was Weasley who spoke. “What are you going to do, if they decide to put him into Azkaban?”
            “Take him out.”
            Granger shook her head and chopped down with one hand as if that would cut the tension thickening in the air between him and Weasley. “We don’t even know what’s going to happen yet. And there are bunches of people who felt sorry for Harry and assumed he was forced into this even when the worst rumors were circulating about him. We ought to wait and see what happens before we decide one way or the other.”
            “We can’t wait,” Draco said. “Not if it goes badly tomorrow. I’d rather take him out of the Ministry than try to assault Azkaban.”
            “Wait,” said Granger, and glared at him. “I don’t want Harry to go to Azkaban any more than you do, and I’ll certainly protest it if it happens. But we don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen yet. And Harry would hate it if you disrupted the trial process and took him out of there. It would just make him look more suspicious than ever.”
            Draco was glad, now, that he hadn’t told them about Harry’s promise to come with Draco if his trial didn’t work out. They would just argue some more about believing. They didn’t see the truth the way Draco did.
            Their Harry Potter, the good little Light wizard and friend who believed in and trusted the Ministry, was gone. Probably he never would come back. But Granger and Weasley didn’t want to believe that, and were being obnoxious with it. Who knew how long it would take them to admit the whole truth to themselves?
            Well, Draco wasn’t going to stand around and wait for them to admit it. Harry was more important, ultimately, to Draco than his friends were.
            “Yes, he would hate it,” he agreed, and let the conversation drift into other channels, although they really had nothing more to tell him and he had answered most of their major questions.
            When they’d left, though, Draco stood a moment with his hand on the dragon’s back, and felt the fire churning bright and hot under his spine. He whispered, “It occurs to me that dragonfire could be really useful in an attack on the Ministry. If we had to make one. What do you think?”
            The dragon tilted back his head and threw a long lance of pure white flame into the night, in answer.
*
            Harry struggled furiously as the two Unseen took apart the chains and hauled him out of the chair. Everyone around him was still caught in the middle of that grey stillness. Harry had never heard of a spell that actually stopped time or made everyone move more slowly, but that seemed to be what he was looking at.
            “You are ready,” said Jungle to the other Unseen with the triangular stone in his hand. He was holding Harry’s arm with as much ease as though Harry was still. Harry tried to punch him in the face, and Jungle didn’t bother to duck. He only held out the glowing globe as the other Unseen nodded.
            Harry decided that anything physical wasn’t going to work, and he didn’t have his wand. He willed, as hard as he could, for accidental magic to hit the two Unseen and the two of them to fall over.
            It didn’t work either, but there was a flicker in the grey stillness that surrounded them. The Unseen whose name Harry didn’t know looked up and around abruptly. Harry did, too, and saw a flash of jewel colors off to the right, a second before the dragon hit Jungle so hard that he did go flying to the floor.
            The greyness broke, and everyone in the courtroom started shouting at once. Harry stood up and shouted louder than any of them. “The Unseen! They were trying to take my magic, drain it into Lethe and make me a Squib!”
            Since he was still under the Veritaserum, the Wizengamot must have believed him faster than they would have done otherwise. One of the tall women waved her wand, and the bubbling voices shut up for a second. Then she clapped a glittering dome of a spell Harry had never seen before around Jungle and the other grey-robed figure. It went all around them on either side and straight into the floor. Harry watched and wished that someone had bothered to teach him that, or the time-stopping spell. It seemed he got left out of all the really powerful magic.
            Then the dragon settled on his shoulder and nuzzled his face fiercely. Harry smiled as he reached up to pet it. Maybe not all the really powerful magic.
            “We are going to find out what is going on here,” declared the Wizengamot member who’d cast the spell, and then turned and stared back and forth from Harry to Jungle. “What are the Unseen, anyway?”
            She’d probably been asking Jungle, but the Veritaserum forced Harry to answer since it was a question he knew. “They’re a secret organization that’s part of the Ministry who try to predict the future. They gave me an amulet that would let me lie better and fool people. And then they started telling me that me escaping having my magic drained had changed all their maps, and they were going to take it away from me and change the future back to what it should be.”
            The woman stared at him, and then turned to Jungle. “What are you?” she demanded. “Who are you?”
            Jungle didn’t try to answer. He simply folded his hands into the sleeves of his robe and gently dissolved. The other Unseen faded away right along with him. The globe and stone dropped from their hands and rolled on the floor.
            “That’s impossible!” someone who must have managed to cancel the Silencing Charm yelled, and then there was so much arguing that Harry honestly couldn’t understand most of what they said. He sat down with his hand on the dragon’s back. It curled up around his shoulders as though to say someone would have to tear it away before it would leave. Harry smiled into its side.
            “Harry.”
            Far sooner than Harry wanted, it seemed someone was paying attention to him. He looked up and found that Kingsley was standing in front of his chair. His face was pale.
            “Where did Jungle go?” Kingsley asked almost plaintively. “Why would the Unseen want to sacrifice you?”
            “I don’t know,” Harry said, and then, the Veritaserum running faster than what his tongue wanted, “They did say that they needed my magic to strengthen Lethe and make the future what they wanted. That’s all I know.” The dragon nuzzled him again, and Harry returned to stroking his back.
            Kingsley turned away and began to talk to the Wizengamot again. From what Harry could hear, they wanted to know more about who the Unseen were, and Kingsley didn’t want to tell them everything.
            That’s the problem about resting so much of your government on secret organizations, Harry thought as he glanced around the courtroom. You don’t know how to explain their actions when they inevitably desert you.
            He froze as he saw someone standing near the door. The Aurors and Wizengamot members didn’t seem to have noticed him yet, but Harry certainly had. He would have known both that pale hair and that pale face anywhere.
            Get out of here, he tried to mouth, but Draco stubbornly ignored him and simply looked at him as if memorizing his face. Then he nodded and slipped out of the doorway. Harry slumped back against the chair and hoped that Draco would manage to outrun any Aurors who might get sent into the corridors of the Ministry to look for the Unseen.
            Why did he come here?
            But a second later, Harry was sure he knew. He glanced at the dragon on his shoulders, settling down for what seemed to be a good long nap.
            Draco had sent the dragon in as a distraction, because it was safer than coming himself, and for all he knew, the dragon had magic that would protect him from most of what the Ministry could do. But Draco couldn’t simply sit back in the corner and wait for the dragon to save Harry, hoping it would work. He’d had to come for himself in the end and make sure it worked.
            Harry smiled at the empty doorway, and turned around only when he heard Kingsley walking up behind him. Kingsley’s face was grim, although he did give a slight, baffled smile at the dragon that was a little softer.
            “We need to talk,” Kingsley said. “This isn’t going to be easy, even if the Unseen played a part in this—this thing of yours.”
            “I know it won’t be easy, Minister Shacklebolt,” Harry said, relieved that Kingsley hadn’t asked a question and so he didn’t need to answer in the mindless way that Veritaserum would have made him do. “But I do think that you need to hear about the Unseen and the part they played in—all this.”
            Kingsley stared at him curiously, then nodded. The dragon gave a cute little snore. Harry stroked his back once more as he turned back to the face the Wizengamot.
            It might not be over, but at least he wasn’t going to be dragged off to Lethe right this moment and made to surrender his magic. That made things a lot more tolerable than they would have been otherwise.
*
Christopher: At the very least, they don’t trust anyone to share the future with them.
moodysavage: Sorry for the savage cliffhanger! But I think this chapter did answer most of your questions.
Parselmouth: Thank you! Yes, I’ll give you permission to translate this story.
SP777: You would greatly offend him with that nickname. Just so you know.
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An Image of Lethe