Corybantes | By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 9752 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1 |
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter; that belongs to J. K. Rowling. I am making no money from this fic. |
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Chapter Five—Slit Throats
and Silences
“Pascal’s
final papers are through here.” The voice of the woman who had met Harry at the
door was low, and she kept one cloth in front of her face at all times, as
though the light through the dim windows hurt her eyes. From the one
unqualified look he’d got at her, when she opened the door, Harry thought that
it was weeping that had done the damage. “Of course you’re welcome to look
through any of them. We have already, but—we’re not sure how much significance
to attach to what we found.” Her robes were thick, but Harry could still see
the shudder that ran up her spine.
He gently
touched her shoulder, and waited until she looked back at him. She had dark
blue eyes and hair that was already going grey, though Harry thought she was
only in her late thirties. “Madam Keatson,” he said, struggling to remember her
first name. Anna, he thought. “What did you find?”
Anna Keatson
swallowed, and her hands twisted the cloth. “Shouldn’t you investigate for
yourself, without knowing?” she asked. “After all, we might prejudice your conclusions
if we explain what disturbed us.”
Harry
smiled at her and shook his head. “Any knowledge is useful in a case like this,
madam. After all, there might be things you would notice and I wouldn’t.”
Anna looked
at the ground for a moment, then glanced up at him. “We found many, many
depictions of suicide,” she said quietly. “At first, we feared that he might
have committed suicide. But none of the figures had his face.”
Harry nodded
comfortingly. He would let the family—Anna was the victim’s sister—believe what
they needed to believe. He himself had been on too many cases to discard
suicide as a motive because of something as small as that.
“On the
other hand,” she said, and by this time her voice was a whisper that Harry
would have found hard to hear if he hadn’t been trained to hear far softer
things, “we found other papers that show someone with his face abusing other
people.” She gave the shudder again, and glanced up at Harry. “I can’t help
thinking that maybe he died trying to kill someone else, someone who murdered
him instead. I can’t—it doesn’t fit with the Pascal I knew, but I’m starting to
think that I didn’t really know him.”
Harry
gently gripped her arm and rubbed up and down. Normally he didn’t touch people
he interacted with on cases, but she looked like she needed a firm hand just at
the moment. “Mr. Malfoy says that no one but the fantasies could have intruded
into those rooms,” he said. “Your brother went there to enjoy his interactions
with imaginary people. They’ve discovered no evidence that anyone else was
present.”
Once again,
he kept what he thought to himself. There were so many of his thoughts down the
years that other people hadn’t needed to know, because, if they did, they would
only get upset. Or they were simply private suspicions that would be proved
wrong in the end. Harry saw no need to burden anyone else with those, either.
Silence was
the rule of his life. It was a good rule. Harry didn’t know what had possessed
him to feel as if the rule was broken inside Corybantes.
But he wasn’t
inside Corybantes now, and he was in control of himself again. Harry liked the
way that felt. He smiled more broadly at Anna and imitated the voice of the
Healers who had talked to him after his first partner died—through Harry’s
sheer carelessness, something he
would never forget. “It could have been suicide. It might have been murder in
some way that Mr. Malfoy doesn’t think is possible right now. But I can assure
you that if your brother fought back, it was self-defense, not because he had
gone there prepared to hurt someone.”
Anna
nodded, tears starting to her eyes. “Thank you.” She hesitated, then added, “The
rest of the family doesn’t feel it like I do. They say Pascal had become a
stranger. He did, but there had to be
some reason that he decided he couldn’t talk to us. I’d like to know as much as
I can, Auror Potter. Please.”
“I
understand that,” Harry said softly, his voice deepening in spite of himself.
Kingsley hadn’t wanted him to spend so long discussing Warren’s death with the
other Aurors who’d been there; he’d been sure that knowing more about it would
make Harry blame himself more. But Harry had needed to know the extent of that blame, and he’d
discovered so much that might have been hidden from him if he hadn’t looked.
Those errors could have killed another partner for him. Instead, the next two
had survived, and then Harry had started working on his own and it was no
longer an issue. “I’ll make sure you get the information you need, madam.”
Anna squeezed
his arm and went back to the door without speaking. Harry opened the door of
the room that had been Keatson’s private study, where most of his papers had
been found.
Looking at
a victim’s room could often tell Harry something about them, even more than
with a criminal. After all, most victims weren’t interested in hiding evidence
of their activities like Dark wizards were. He just stood in the doorway for
several minutes, looking around.
The room
was blue and white, brilliant colors rather than soothing ones. The walls were
the color of fine sapphires in between windows that were painted a startling
ivory shade. The white curtains on them billowed softly in the breeze traveling
through the open windows. The curtains themselves were fine net, woven into elaborate
patterns when Harry looked closely. The furniture was mahogany and ebony, so
well-made that Harry, who knew almost nothing about furniture, had to stand
there and admire it.
Keatson had
loved beautiful things. Harry wasn’t sure right now how that fitted into the
rest of what he knew about him, but it was certainly interesting.
Harry
stepped into the room at last and studied it again from the center. The desk
that held the papers dominated half the room, aimed at the largest window, which
faced east. A shelf along the wall contained books that Harry would need to
examine more closely. Two tall chairs near the western window faced each other.
Two people could have been sitting in them, facing each other and engaging in conversation.
Maybe.
Harry somehow doubted that Keatson had had many visitors.
He looked
closely at the walls, and tapped on a few of them, but could make out no hollow
places or secret passages. There weren’t any hooks or holes where recent pictures
might have been ripped out, either. Harry always checked for those, since the
case where everything would have been much easier if he’d known from the
beginning that a portrait of the victim existed.
At last he
turned to the desk, noticing that whoever had been through here last had
arranged the papers neatly in stacks. One had a label pinned to the desk above
it, saying “Legal Documents,” but the others had none. Harry left the Legal
Documents pile alone for now and dug into the largest of the unlabeled piles.
He didn’t want to intrude on the privacy of the Keatson family unless he had
to.
Keatson
apparently hated two things: consistency and people who had actual drawing
talent. His pictures were made in strong, slashing lines, and Harry had to
wince as he considered the lack of skill in them. Two figures appeared again
and again, a man who looked enough like the corpse to be a self-rendering and a
naked, kneeling, adoring woman.
Harry
grimaced and pushed aside the top three drawings so that he could look at the
one that was most detailed. He had already known that Keatson had unrealistic,
exaggerated desires. Malfoy had said as much the first night Harry went to
Corybantes.
Malfoy.
Harry
grimaced again. He had carefully kept the name out of his thoughts, because he
knew he wasn’t prepared to answer all the questions that arose when he didn’t.
He still
thought much the same about Corybantes that he had when he first went there.
Most of the people who used it had distasteful fantasies. Harry wouldn’t try to
interfere in them, but he couldn’t respect them, either.
But about
Malfoy himself, he had strange reactions and plenty of questions and the
uncomfortable suspicion that Malfoy wanted him—for no apparent reason that
Harry knew of, because what did he have to offer someone who didn’t need an Auror
or a celebrity?—and…
And not
much else.
It was simultaneously
too much and not enough. Harry couldn’t ignore his knowledge and he couldn’t
make a decision based on it.
He grunted
at last and glanced down at the drawing again, since that was germane to the
investigation he was actually conducting in the first place.
Keatson sat
on a throne in the middle of what looked like a flowering field in spring,
though the entire sketch was in black and white, and so Harry couldn’t be sure.
His face was stern. In front of him knelt a naked woman with her hands bound
behind her, staring up at him with a quivering lip and huge tear-filled eyes. Two
other women stood over her, one of them holding a whip and one a—muzzle? Harry had
to bend his head sideways to look at it, and even then, he wasn’t sure. He
shuddered and looked at the background.
There was a
strange shape there, drawn sideways and in flight, so that at first Harry
thought he was looking at a bird. Either expectations adjusted his eyesight for
him or his eyes adjusted themselves, because he suddenly saw it for what it
was. A hurled knife, thrown by someone who stood outside the scene.
It was
aimed straight at Keatson’s throat.
Harry
raised his eyebrows. Are we dealing with
a fetish, or with a suicide wish, or with a paranoid fantasy about someone
trying to murder him?
He put
aside that drawing and looked through the rest, though he had to roll his eyes
at the great majority of them. Women kneeling to Keatson, women looking up
imploringly at Keatson, women sitting on Keatson’s lap and wrapping their arms
around his neck as they wept. Harry was glad that Malfoy hadn’t offered him
further details of the fantasies that the club’s rooms enacted for Keatson. He’d
need a long shower.
And there’s Malfoy in my head again, as real
as if he never left.
Harry
sighed in disgust and slammed down a drawing on the desk. One corner of the
parchment bent, and the next moment he shook his head and felt silly. Why
should he let stupid things like this upset him?
All it
argued was that he needed greater control. Keatson was a victim. Harry’s
primary mission was to find out how he had died, and bring the murderer to
justice if there was a murderer. He could think about his disgust when the case
was done.
And that
solution would have to apply to Malfoy, too. Maybe they could explore whatever
hovered between them later, when the case was done. Harry didn’t see any way
that he could deal with them simultaneously, though.
He gathered
up several of the most “interesting” drawings and went to ask Anna what was in
the pile of legal documents. If there was something that clarified or explained
the death, he thought he’d have heard about it already, but on the other hand,
Keatson was estranged from his family. Maybe Harry would have to violate their
privacy after all.
A
realization stopped him as he glanced back once at that neat, beautiful room,
which revealed so little of its owner’s mental existence.
He wasn’t
sure that he could control himself
and stop himself from reacting to Malfoy if he went back to Corybantes.
On the
other hand, passing the case on to someone else, or stopping the investigation,
would be nonsensical and disrespectful of Keatson as well as Kingsley, who had trusted
Harry enough to assign him to it.
Harry went
out the door still chewing on the problem.
*
Looking
through Keatson’s legal documents hadn’t proven fruitful. He hadn’t left
anything complicated or convoluted in his will—and he had made a will, though
one charmed not to be visible until one of the executors touched it. There was
no quarreling over his tiny legacies. He hadn’t made any strange final requests
that might have shed light on the case in some way.
That looked
to Harry like suicide. Not many people who weren’t old left their legal affairs
arranged so neatly, even if they meant to—and if they were people neat enough
to do it genuinely, that usually showed up in either areas of their lives.
Every area of Keatson’s life argued for the opposite: overflowing, slapdash, or
hidden.
Dirty.
Harry
sighed and shook his head as he stepped out of the shower, rubbing his hair
briskly with a towel. He shouldn’t react like this when someone was dead and
his fantasies had always been private and he had taken steps to ensure that he
didn’t hurt anyone else because of them, but Harry still felt slimy even now.
If Keatson
had decided to commit suicide, then only two problems remained, or one
depending on how they were looked at. There was the lack of a weapon, and the
fact that Corybantes’s fantasies couldn’t cause lasting physical damage. On both
accounts, Harry had Malfoy’s assurance that it was impossible for Keatson to
have hurt himself.
Malfoy.
He would
have to deal with Malfoy again in order to make progress on the case. There was
absolutely no other choice.
“It’s not
even that I don’t trust him,” Harry muttered aloud as he wrapped the towel
around his waist. It was his house, the place he could relax, and so he could
talk aloud to himself if that was what he needed to solve the case. “It’s that
I don’t trust myself.”
“Harry?
What are you talking about?”
Harry
hastily whipped his wand up from the corner of the sink and Summoned the robes
that were hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Ron had come through the
Floo into the house—he had to have done it, since that was his voice—the way he
sometimes did in the evening. Trust Harry’s luck to mean that Ron had heard
what he was saying.
This is why I really can’t relax or let my
guard down, Harry told himself as he pulled the collar of the robe over his
head and cast a Drying Charm on his hair. It’s
always going to hurt someone or confuse someone, even if I don’t think it will.
“Just a
minute, Ron,” he said calmly, and stepped through the door, waving away the
heated air that followed him. Ron, who was standing in the middle of the living
room and staring at the books on Dark curses on Harry’s shelves, turned around
with a strained smile that Harry had got used to seeing lately.
“Hi, Harry.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “I came to ask you over for dinner this
weekend. Hugo’s been asking where his godfather went.”
Harry
sighed with relief. Ron hadn’t been close enough to the door to overhear Harry’s
words, then, or he would have asked him what he meant at once. He had probably
just heard Harry’s voice and wondered what he was saying.
Ron mistook
the sigh, and puffed up like a peacock who’d seen a rival. “If you don’t want
to come, you don’t have to,” he said stiffly.
Harry
smiled at him. His friends were still the best part of his life, even if he’d
lost touch with them somewhat. “No, I’d love to come,” he said. “I was sighing
at the thought of how long it’ll be before the weekend.” He rolled his eyes. “And
then I don’t even get to take time off those days, most of the time. Criminals
never sleep.”
Ron didn’t
smile back. “I don’t understand why you don’t quit the Aurors, Harry,” he said,
in a way that told Harry he must have been thinking about the words for a
while. “You’re always stressed. You’re always tired. You barely have the time
to spend with us.” He was speaking more quickly and confidently as he went on,
and looking Harry in the eye now. “You could do something else. You know you could. And since you’ve started
talking about how dissatisfied you are sometimes, I know it’s not that you love
your job.”
Harry let
his smile fade, too, because he knew what kind of conversation this would be
now. “Because I’m addicted to saving people,” he said. “And because, most of the
time, I can handle the stress.”
Ron jumped
and stared at him. “You mean—you know that
you have an addiction to saving people?”
Harry
raised an eyebrow. “I’d think it would be bloody obvious by now,” he said
dryly. “And I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent observer.”
“But then,
why don’t you stop?” Ron asked the question as if it was the simplest thing in
the world.
“Because it’s
a calling.” Harry shrugged helplessly when Ron looked stubborn. “I complain,
yeah, but everyone complains about their job. I’d be miserable away from it,
like someone who’s a good singer would be miserable not to sing anymore even
when he doesn’t feel like facing an audience. This is what I’m good at.”
“You could
find something else you’re good at,” Ron said.
“I could,”
Harry agreed, “but I know it wouldn’t be Quidditch, because I’m too old now to
play as well as most of the younger blokes.” He ignored Ron’s spluttering attempts
to deny that. “And in the meantime, I’d sit around stewing, and wondering how
the Department was getting on without me, and Kingsley would firecall and ask
me to handle one small thing, and I’d be an Auror again before you know it.”
“That’s
tyranny,” Ron said earnestly.
Harry had
to grin, though he tried to restrain it when he saw how hurt Ron looked. “No,
it’s not,” he said. “Really, Ron. I have the right to choose my employment, and
right now this is what I choose. It’s an ordinary job in the end, or at least
it causes me an ordinary amount of stress. Maybe that’s not true for other
people, but it is for me.”
“But you
never take a holiday,” Ron said, in the tones of someone who’d been
anticipating this exact conversation for a long time and still hated the way it
was going. “You never relax. There are so many things that you won’t tell us.”
“And I’ve
told you all the reasons for those.” Harry paused in swiping at his hair—it seemed
that the Drying Charm hadn’t taken care of the two longest and wettest strands,
something that happened to him frequently—and studied Ron curiously. “Do you
not believe me?”
“You could tell us about the things
you experience!” Ron snapped. “We tell you about our problems!”
“Yes, but those problems don’t
count murder,” Harry said quietly.
Ron seemed to sag then. “If you’re
happy,” he said, “I reckon that we can’t complain. But I don’t think you’re
happy, and neither does Hermione. That’s the reason we bring it up so much.”
Harry shook his head.”I’m happy in different
ways than other people.” He didn’t add that he hardly thought it could be otherwise,
when so much of his life had been strange and abnormal. “I promise you, if Auror
life ever becomes intolerable to me, I’ll let you know, and then you can pull
me away from it if I insist on staying.”
Ron regarded him with wide eyes,
then gave in and nodded when Harry went on smiling at him. “I suppose we have to
trust that you know yourself,” he said. Then he gave Harry a brief curious
glance. “It is possible that you’ve forgotten how to relax?”
Harry laughed. “You don’t forget
how to do that, Ron. And just to prove it, I’ll sit around with you tonight in
the Leaky Cauldron and drink as much Firewhisky as you like.”
Ron seemed
satisfied, and started talking about the joke shop while Harry Summoned robes
that were more appropriate for going out in public. But Harry, who knew himself,
had been aware of how long it was before he could call up the breath to laugh, and
the sudden jolt that Ron’s perceptive words had given him.
It’s not just Keatson’s fantasies I find so
slimy. I think of my own fantasies and I shudder.
But there
were other ways to relax than indulging your fantasies, and Harry found one
that evening, when he came home with his cheeks aching from how hard he’d
smiled.
*
“Malfoy.”
Harry had not the slightest idea
how to act after the revelations that Malfoy had made to him, so he kept his
head up and his face calm and friendly as he nodded to the other man. He
extended a sheaf of Keatson’s drawings before Malfoy had time to do more than
nod back. “Do these seem representative to you of the kinds of things Keatson
desired?”
Malfoy took the papers and examined
them without apparent surprise, though Harry wasn’t sure if that was because he
had seen them before or because he had expected something like them among
Keatson’s effects. Harry studied his hands, and didn’t see them shake or pause
in their turning over of the papers.
He did notice more about them than was
comfortable, such as how slender the fingers were, before he focused his
attention back on Malfoy’s face. Malfoy was giving him a slow, pleased smile.
Harry flushed. Yes, he’d been attracted before to people with slender hands,
but he shouldn’t be thinking about such things in the middle of a case.
“They’re
the kinds of scenarios that he regularly had his fantasies act out,” Malfoy
said quietly. “But generally, the ones that he used in the last few months had
more and more violence directed towards himself, and not others.” He turned one
picture to face Harry. It was the one Harry had noted that seemed to have a
flying knife in the background. Malfoy’s tracing the figure with a finger
showed that he’d seen it immediately. Perceptive,
Harry thought, and remembered that he often thought perceptive people were
attractive as well. “I don’t think these are recent drawings. He might have
hidden those.”
Harry
shifted and cleared his throat. “I’ll look for them.” He hesitated, and
wondered if he really had to spend
time on the questions that crowded his brain. He still needed to ask Malfoy
about the fantasies and if it was really impossible to sneak a weapon in, after
all.
But these questions
were distracting him, so Harry thought it best to get them out of the way. “What
are your fantasies about me?’
Malfoy took
the change of subject without any apparent surprise. The heat deepened in his
eyes—Harry realized suddenly it had always been there—and he leaned forwards,
placing his hands on the desk between them. They were in Malfoy’s office again,
but this time the paperwork was gone. Malfoy had very little around him but
bare wood and bare walls, Harry thought, as if he felt that the fantasy rooms
should be ornate but not his rooms for business dealings. Harry could
appreciate the mindset.
Even if I don’t want to.
“I want
you,” Malfoy said. “That’s it, really. That simple. I want you because you’ve
changed so much, now, from the way I knew you at Hogwarts. I want to see your
face flush with anger again. I want to watch you fly. I want you to lean your
head on my shoulder and confess all the weaknesses that you won’t confess to
anyone else. I want to trace the connections between the person you were and
the person you’ve become.”
Harry
swallowed. The idea was so like his own musings on Malfoy the other evening,
when he had tried to find the schoolboy in the mature man, that he couldn’t
speak.
Malfoy
stood up again and said in a cheerful tone, “I believe I have found something
that might interest you. Follow me?”
He turned
away and sauntered off. Harry forced his legs to work so he could follow.
But in the
meantime, his head hummed and kept humming. He had thought Malfoy’s words would
bury his curiosity, kill it with the same disgust that Harry felt when he
thought of Keatson’s fantasies. Instead, the images whirled through his mind
and he wondered what it would be like to experience Malfoy’s fantasies as the
recipient of them.
He could
feel something even more disquieting than curiosity or confusion making its
presence known as he watched Malfoy striding in front of him, the confident,
piston-like motions of his hips and the rounding of his arse.
Desire.
*
polka dot: Playing
hard to get did nothing at all, so Malfoy went for the more direct approach.
puresilver:
Thank you! I think it’s all the funnier that Harry is more knowledgeable and
thoughtful than normal in this fic.
I’ve added
you to my update list.
nekoyoka:
Thanks! This story is updated between every three days and every five days. It
was not updated over the weekend because I was working on a fest fic.
hieisdragoness18:
This isn’t that long a story, so yes, soon.
MewMew2:
Thanks!
SP777: A
lamia is a female creature, usually pictured as part snake, that seduces men.
There’s a Keats poem about it.
As Draco
told Harry, he opened Corybantes to cater to people’s pleasure and give himself
some control over that pleasure (though he did not phrase it that way).
Corybantes
is on the corner of Knockturn Alley and Roof Alley (mentioned briefly in the
first chapter).
And I know
lots of people online who rather wish they had been born animals or had the
features of animals.
callistianstar:
Thank you!
This Harry
is different from my usual versions of him in having more perception but less
curiosity. It doesn’t seem that Malfoy’s reactions are important to the case at
first, so he doesn’t pay attention to them. And Harry has an unconscious bias
against noticing when people react to him,
since he hates the attention.
chantalmalfoy:
Thank you so much! I think some of the individual ideas are quite similar to
ones I’ve seen before, but I try to combine them into a unique whole.
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