Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28254 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Five—In the Interrogation Room

            “If you’re innocent, then it shouldn’t be too hard to explain to us what you meant when you told Harry that you were recruiting.”

            Harry rubbed his chin and shook his head, smiling. He was on outside the interrogation cell, of course, looking in through a window that appeared like a solid wall from the inside of the room, thanks to concealing enchantments. There was no way that anyone would let him handle Campion’s interrogation, not when he had erred by interrupting the confession at a critical point back in Malfoy’s shop.

            There were other reasons, too, but Harry preferred not to think of those reasons right now. He watched Ron and listened to him instead.

            Ron was doing everything right. He had a soothing voice, and he kept leaning forwards, nodding whenever Campion glanced at him. He had even called Harry by his first name, which might seem like a mistake on the face of it—since Campion would be inclined to grant them less respect—but which also reassured the prisoner that Ron was on his side and that he could handle the big, bad Harry Potter as he pleased. After all, he had the art of referring to Harry by his first name down pat.

            “I don’t want to be here.” Campion’s voice was as low and wounded as it had been all the time they were interrogating him, for three hours now. He said little else but nonsense and claims that he was innocent. He sat there rubbing his arms and staring at the wall as if he could see the hidden window.

            “I know that, mate,” Ron said, bobbing his head and taking a sip from the cup of cold tea beside him. “I don’t really want to be here talking to you, either. Rather be home with my wife.”

            Harry grinned, and Campion blinked as if that would never have occurred to him. Well, of course not. One thing that Harry thought no one could say of Campion Fipps was that he was less than self-centered.

            “So.” Ron sipped from the tea and put it aside again, fixing Campion with an intensity that Harry knew he himself couldn’t have used. Intensity from him was too intense. Either people babbled because he was the Great Harry Potter, or they shut up because they were afraid of what he might do to them. “Look. I know something is the matter. You were telling Harry that. Tell me, and we can get out of here and go home.”

            “Maybe you can.” Campion turned his head to the side, followed by his arms. It was the most motion Harry had seen him make since he came in, and it tugged at him, made his mouth water the way it had when he confronted Campion in Malfoy’s shop. He couldn’t go into the interrogation room, he reminded himself. Even the signals that Campion was giving off now would be tainted if he did. “I know they won’t let me leave.”

            Ron shrugged. “That’s true whether or not you tell me the truth. If you do, and you’re as innocent as you’re saying, then we can let you go because you’re no danger to anyone. But if you don’t say anything, here we sit.”

            Campion blinked again, and then bowed his head and shivered. Harry stirred. Yes. This was the moment that he recognized from the interrogations he did conduct, and from most of the ones he watched, unless the criminal was someone who had committed multiple crimes before or an excellent liar. Water in Harry’s mouth, light in his eyes, and if Campion tried to escape, he would be on him so fast that he would bear him to the ground and break his neck before he could make the corner.

            “I’m so tired,” Campion whispered, a high whine creeping into his voice. “No one told me it would be like this, all those people who were so convinced that they would be the ones taken if they were taken at all. I didn’t want this secret. I didn’t want someone to tell me, and I didn’t want to be part of it.”

            Ron nodded. “I know,” he murmured. “No one ever asked me if I wanted to be part of the war. It just happened.”

            Campion didn’t seem to notice the words, which told Harry this would be one of the more disjointed confessions, rambling things out, rather than working them out with the aid of the interrogator. Then again, Campion’s first confession had been like that, and he’d been fully aware of Harry’s presence in the room at time. Another thing I can’t accuse him of is being neat and tidy. Wonder if Malfoy knows that.

            “I recruited,” Campion said. “But only people I really saw wouldn’t be missed. They told me to look for the bright ones, but the bright ones have parents, and they’re closely watched.”

            This time, Harry felt the shudder in him like a rattlesnake’s tail. That was all the proof he needed that Campion had abducted children like the girl he had found dead, had felt die. He felt the rush in his head, heard the voices speaking about her like she was rubbish to be discarded. He hissed, and no one could hear him.

            She cried, and no one could hear her.

            “So I chose the ones who were smart in the ways of survival,” Campion concluded. “The ones with no one to watch them, or the ones who had parents who didn’t care. And I took them, and I handed them over. I swear, that’s all I did! That’s all I know!” His face was waxy white, and his lips were trembling. “I never saw them again. I don’t kn-know what my uncle and Moonstone are doing with them. I don’t. They just told me that they’re offering the children the chance to be like us.”

            “Wizengamot supporters?” Ron asked. His voice rang with steel now, but Campion was too occupied to notice.

            “I don’t know,” Campion said, and leaned forwards, apparently not about to be denied his full share of sympathy as a victim. “That’s what my uncle said, all he said. The children are offered a chance. They can join us—them, the ones like my uncle and Moonstone. And if they don’t, I don’t know what happens to them.”

            Harry clenched his hands, then relaxed them as the window in front of him vibrated. It wasn’t enough, it didn’t make up for the crying inside his head, but it was more truth than he had had just a moment before. That would have to be enough.

            Ron, with that attunement to Harry’s emotions he had, seemed to know the interrogation had done all it could, and nodded. Campion was staring at his hands and didn’t notice. Harry relaxed further. Good. Ron would take care of it. He would coax Campion through the last few shreds of specificity in his confession—though Harry didn’t know how much more there was to be gained—and Harry could return to the office and revise a few more facts of the case. He turned, already wondering whether they should show the photographs of the faceless girl to Campion to watch his reaction.

            He’d probably faint. Which does no one any good.

            Marching footsteps in front of him made him look up. He stared. Then he started moving rapidly, raising his voice, since the two Aurors had their backs to him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

            The nearest Auror, a bulky fellow named Jonathan Wilding, spun around with one hand on his wand. The other one, his partner Tyler Kinzie, winced and ducked his head. Harry didn’t know whether that meant he was embarrassed by Wilding’s reaction or embarrassed that Harry was the one to confront them.

            The man between them, Draco Malfoy, whom Harry had recognized from the back, gave Harry a distant, cool, cutting glance.

            Harry narrowed his eyes and immediately shook his head, refusing whatever accusations Malfoy wanted to dish out to him with that glance. He turned to Wilding again. The man had recognized him and was staring at him with a face wiped clean of emotion. “Well?” Harry demanded. “Why did you bring him here? I was at his shop less than seven hours ago. I would have noted any dangerous Potions ingredients.”

            Wilding’s lips parted, his teeth showing. Harry ducked his head and smiled back. Wilding was the one who turned away.

            “Good job for you, then,” Wilding muttered. “But that’s not what we arrested him for, is it? He’s here for harassing an innocent.”

            Harry cocked his head. He had despised Wilding since he caught the other Auror accepting bribes from Louisa Harrow, one of the Wizengamot members who usually worked together with Lucas Schroeder. “Really,” he said. “Who is this innocent, and why was he only arrested now?” He prided himself on his instincts. He would have noticed if Malfoy made his living through “harassing innocents,” whatever that meant as a charge.

            “You don’t want to get involved in this one, Potter.” Kinzie lifted his head for long enough to meet Harry’s eyes. “Really,” he continued, when Harry did nothing but stare at him patiently, because his words were so ridiculous. “You don’t. This is beyond you. What you could have done to affect this has already been done.”

            Kinzie, who had always been decent, was trying to warn Harry that this was indeed what he thought it was, then: some form of twisted revenge on him for arresting Campion. Schroeder probably knew that fighting Campion’s arrest was pointless right now, since Ron was too loyal to Harry and had been with Campion every moment since his arrival at the Ministry. But he could hurt someone he thought was an ally of Harry’s.

            Or something more than that, Harry thought, grimacing as he remembered that little joke he and Malfoy had played the other day when he left the shop. Campion had probably reported that to his uncle, too. And now Schroeder would think they were friends, or intimate allies, or lovers.

            If he thinks that, then he should have remembered the lengths I would go to to protect my friends. Harry flashed up his hardest and most brilliant smile. “I don’t think it’s beyond me when I’m the one who can usually sense the difference between the guilty and the innocent,” he said.

            Wilding’s face flushed all over with deep color. Harry held his gaze and didn’t move. If Wilding wanted to escape embarrassment, then he shouldn’t have fucking arrested twelve people on “suspicion” of taking illegal potions, only to have it turn out that they were affected by a mild Muggle drug with a distinctive smell instead.

            Harry had been the one to notice the smell and question the arrest in that particular instance. He was only continuing the tradition now.

            “You don’t understand,” Kinzie said, and his voice had gone hollow enough that Harry looked away from Wilding despite his conviction the man would lunge at him in a moment. Kinzie had one hand stretched out, but he snatched it back when Harry looked at him, probably because he’d seen the fire shining in Harry’s eyes. “You—you can’t do this,” Kinzie said. “We all have our orders, and this isn’t a situation where you can fight them.”

            “Isn’t it?” Harry asked.

            Kinzie, the fool, took that for an actual question. He nodded, blinking. “Yes. Thanks for backing off, Potter. You have to—”

            “Tell me the nature of Potions master Malfoy’s crime,” Harry said. He didn’t know if Malfoy’s title would impress them sufficiently, but he was willing to do whatever he needed to convince them that they didn’t want to tangle with him. “You must have been sent to the shop, rather than coming when someone there called you.” He knew Malfoy wouldn’t have, and his assistants seemed (rightfully) too terrified of him to have summoned the Aurors merely because one of their own number had arrested Campion. “Who sent you?”

            “You have to back off,” Kinzie said, miserably enough that Harry smiled. Kinzie shivered and glanced away. Harry moved a step forwards—

            And bumped into Wilding’s wand. He looked up into the face that went with it, and saw Wilding was grinning at him, if you could call that a grin, baring cracked teeth. “You want to think about it more than once, Potter,” Wilding said. “You have to back off. You heard the man.”

            The spark in his eyes said he hoped Harry wouldn’t follow Kinzie’s advice. Harry showed his teeth back and reached up to touch Wilding’s wand, while keeping his hand on his own, hidden in the robe pocket where he had put it after arresting Campion. “You don’t want to do this,” he said.

            “I don’t?” Wilding shook his head, and something like a bark came out of his mouth. “If you think you can always get away with everything, that everyone loves you and that’s the reason you’re never stopped or denied—”

            Harry could have said, I’m never stopped or denied because I’m too valuable, and I can defuse arguments easily, and whenever the Ministry looks too closely at me, they see someone meek, someone who despises his fame. It’s all about hiding what you are from everyone except those you can trust not to betray you.

            He could have said all that, yes. But it took so much time to speak the words, when he would rather just cast a spell. He hissed the breath between his lips, softly enough no one but him could have picked it up. “Commuto mentem.”

            Wilding staggered, and his face turned pale around the lips. Then he dropped his wand to the floor and released Malfoy’s arm, which he had kept such tight hold of all the time that Harry knew it had to hurt, flopping into a chair set outside one of the interrogation rooms. He buried his head between his knees, taking noisy breaths.

            Harry blinked and stared as if he was just as surprised as Kinzie, but the blinks gave him the chance to close his eyes briefly and concentrate. Yes. He could feel the lines and links of Wilding’s emotions and thoughts, zinging through his own mind now, connected to him and to his influence for a few moments. The spell was difficult to hold, and Harry could already feel Wilding’s will fighting to assert itself. Harry couldn’t read the man’s mind, precisely, and he couldn’t make him obey the way he could with the Imperius Curse, which was this spell was not classified as Dark. The Ministry considered the idea that anyone would actually manage to pick the right thought to influence, out of all the possible ones darting through an unfamiliar mind, laughable.

            Harry had learned the secret. He didn’t try to influence thoughts. He reached out and dimmed the dull red glow of the two strongest emotions in Wilding’s mind, anger and resentment. Blown on, they flickered like embers and went out, leaving Wilding probably more clear-headed than he’d been in years, since he lived in their sullen blaze most of the time. It was doing him a favor, really, Harry thought magnanimously, releasing the spell.

            Wilding shuddered and snapped his head up, looking at Harry, as if he suspected Harry would try to kill him in the next instant. He lifted a shaking wand with one hand. Harry gave him a supremely uninterested glance and turned away to speak to Kinzie, who kept staring at him and then at Wilding in turn.

            “Are you sure I can’t do anything?” he asked quietly. “So sure I can’t do anything to make it worth your while to let go of Malfoy?”

            “He’s right, Tyler,” said Wilding, his voice calm and sane. Harry turned around with wide eyes, as though nothing had surprised him more than to hear such words out of the other Auror’s mouth, but he was biting his lips frantically so he didn’t start smirking. “If you think about it,” Wilding added, “the people who called us in on this case aren’t worth trying to protect. Not when it’s going to be our arses on the line if something goes wrong.”

            Kinzie stared some more, then blurted, “But you were the one who said that we should take it because—”

            Wilding gave him a glare and shook his head. Harry blinked again, but inwardly, he could feel his heart beating harder and faster with pleasure. He couldn’t change Wilding’s mind completely and make him less selfish and prone to taking bribes. He didn’t want to, not when someone would notice the instant he did. But he could clear away the passion of hatred for Death Eaters and Harry himself and make him think about the long-term consequences.

            And the long-term consequences wouldn’t be good for any Auror who let the Wizengamot use him as a pawn, as Wilding had finally realized.

            He gave Harry a stiff inclination of his head, and then turned and nodded at Kinzie. After a few seconds of gaping indecision that made Harry wonder whether he would have to use the same spell on Kinzie, he sighed, dropped Malfoy’s arm, muttered something that might have been an apology for the way they had treated him—although if Harry knew Malfoy, he would demand more as soon as he could—and hurried off after his partner.

            Harry nodded and turned to Malfoy. He expected disdain, outrage, everything but gratitude.

            And, apparently, the expression he actually saw there, since it made him blink.

            “What do you think you’re doing, using Dark Arts in the middle of the Ministry?” Malfoy whispered fiercely, stepping closer to him.

*

            Draco could still feel the shock of the magic that Potter had wielded running over him like a snake’s tail down his spine. He hadn’t heard the incantation, and if Potter had made the necessary wand motions, he had done so with his wand still in his pocket, but he knew the effects. Wilding should not have changed his mind so quickly no matter what pressure Potter could bring to bear. Draco knew his type: all the more stubborn for being contradicted, ready to cling like mules to the truth they had been taught rather than admit they were wrong even when it would be more advantageous for them to do so.

            It was a spell that could call unwelcome attention down on them, particularly with the alarms and wards Draco thought the Ministry sure to have. He didn’t know what Potter was doing, casting it here, but he thought he could guess. Potter was simply too caught up in his own mythology to comprehend the danger that might attend someone like Draco being in the presence of known Dark magic. Potter could walk away without concern for the consequences; tonight’s arrest had proved Draco could not.

            Potter studied him without the cringing and the denials which Draco knew such an accusation once would have brought out of him. Then he nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yes, I see what you mean. Come with me.” He raked the corridor back and forth, then turned and led Draco down it at a rapid pace.

            Because he had nothing better to do and no idea where he should go with his arrest apparently cancelled, Draco did as Potter asked. A door shut behind them before he thought that Potter might have lured him here to eliminate one of the witnesses to his no doubt usual Dark magic. The back of Draco’s neck broke out in a fine sheen of cold sweat, and he turned around, calculating the distance from him to the door, Potter’s position, and the relative positions of the furniture in the room.

            Potter, caught up in lighting the candles that stood on the table with tiny flicks of his wand, didn’t seem to notice. Then he caught Draco’s eye and snorted. “I won’t try to kill or Obliviate you,” he said, turning one of the chairs around and sitting in it. This was certainly an interrogation room, Draco decided, and tried to remember if he’d seen a window from the outside. No, he doubted Potter was careless enough to have brought them to a place where someone could spy on them without his noticing. “But we do need to discuss your arrest and how it relates to what Campion’s done.”

            “Has he done something?” Draco raised an eyebrow and leaned against the chair that Potter seemed to mean for his instead of sitting. “If you’re prone to Dark Arts, you might also be prone to arresting someone on simple suspicion.”

            Potter, astonishingly, grinned at him and folded his arms in front of him, on the back of his chair, dropping his chin down onto them. “I don’t know exactly what he’s done,” he admitted. “But Ron’s interrogating him, and he’s begun to confess. His uncle recruited him to kidnap Muggle children, the ones who wouldn’t be missed, and turn them over to Schroeder and a man named Moonstone.”

            “I know that name,” Draco said, while the floor beneath him seemed to fall away into an abyss where stars whirled.

            “Do you?” Potter sat up, and Draco was reminded of the way he had stalked Campion. Although he had made one arrest today and interfered in another, he looked ready to charge out and make another. “Potions master? Wizengamot member?”

            “He’s been both, in his time,” Draco murmured. “Although he only stayed in the Wizengamot for a year before he left. But…Potter, you don’t want to get in the way of a project he’s started. He can use Dark magic that I’ve never seen bettered, his rivals disappear and no one asks for them again, and he’s made Muggleborns terrified enough that they leave schools in countries where he’s lived. I think only Dumbledore’s presence at Hogwarts kept a similar exodus from happening there.”

            Potter only nodded. “And do you think he might have come back here to try and force Muggleborns out of schools again?”

            “I doubt it, not if he’s kidnapping Muggle children. Though I don’t know what he wants from them or how he could stand to be around them, since he’s so disgusted by them—” Draco broke off as Potter made a soft sound in the back of his throat. “Leave it, Potter,” he said sharply. “We should concentrate on why they arrested me, rather than crimes you have no proof of yet.”

            Potter simply nodded with an abstracted look in his eyes that told Draco Moonstone was not forgotten. Then he said, “Describe the circumstances of your arrest.”

            Though he drew in his breath at the peremptory tone, Draco did. He would have expected Potter to defer to him the same way if he was describing a potion. Potter listened with his eyes half-closed, nodding now and then, though at parts that Draco didn’t always think were relevant.

            “Ah,” Potter said, and sprang lightly to his feet when Draco was done. “There’ll be an arrest order, then. No doubt with a false name, but any arrest generates mounds of paperwork. If we find it, we’ll have a better chance of knowing why Schroeder or Moonstone thought silencing you would gain them anything.”

            Draco snorted bitterly as he followed Potter towards the door. “Isn’t it obvious? They think we’re connected, or that I might have done something to harm Campion. They’re basing it on my closeness to you, nothing else.”

            Potter raised an eyebrow at him. “If this Moonstone is as subtle as you described him to me, then I doubt he would have only one reason or motive for anything he did. The same with Schroeder, who’s played politics for so long he probably recites the rules in his sleep. Come with me.” He paused, cast a listening spell on the door, and then opened it and glided down the empty corridor.

            “You’re going to a lot of trouble to help me,” Draco murmured to his back.

            Potter glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes seemed to catch the light the way a leopard’s would. “You were arrested after I arrested Campion,” he said simply. “Too much of a coincidence to have nothing to do with it, even if I doubt it was for a simple reason.” He smiled, and Draco’s chest tightened in a way that was not completely unpleasant. “And I pay my debts.”

            How many people have heard those as their last words, down the years? Draco thought, following Potter. He’s changed, with the lack of hesitation at using Dark Arts among other things.

            But Draco, despite his irritation that Potter’s presence in his shop had dragged him away from the confines of his comfortable life into possibly being noticed by dangerous enemies, knew one thing.

            He liked this new Potter.

*

            polka dot: Well, harassing people connected to important people is often treated as a law, whether or not it is one.

            SP777: Thanks!

            lunajen: Thanks! I hope you did go back and get something to eat, though, especially with this chapter delayed. ;)
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