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Chains of Fool's Gold	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3178 -:- 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 Five—Hard Evidence
            “Remind me again why we captured—them.”
            Draco sighed. He really didn’t fancy explaining himself to Weasley again, but he supposed that Weasley also wasn’t used to seeing Aurors in cages. After the experience he and Harry had had at Grimmauld Place, and then before that with capturing the Montgomerys when they tried the ritual to render Harry helpless, Draco was comfortable with it now.
            “Warren and Jenkins—you do know who they are?” he added over his shoulder to Weasley as he led him into the room where they were keeping the prisoners. It was a large study that Ernhardt had probably used for experiments. The major advantage it possessed was the utterly blank walls, plus the solid floor. There was no way to drill through the stone or escape through a secret passage, at least not without a wand.
            And Draco had made sure that all the Aurors Granger and Harry had brought in were unarmed, without so much as the tiny knife that some of them carried to slit open envelopes, before he had put them into their cells.
He and Weasley became the target of glares the second they stepped into the room. Draco ignored the curses that flew his way, and walked over to the large cage set apart from the others. They had constructed the cages just by conjuring bars from floor to ceiling. A small hinged door sat in the front of each one, for passing food through.
            Draco crouched and studied the twisted he and Weasley had captured. He had remained in a deep sleep, aided by more Stunners and then the Draught of Living Death, since they had taken him. Draco set the covered bowl and the vial he carried on the ground and opened his wand to unlock the hinged door.
            “Going to torture someone, Malfoy?” howled an Auror from a cell down the way. “I hope that you don’t think I’ll be that quiet when it’s my turn!”
            Weasley flinched and ducked. Draco kept himself from sighing with a force of will he hadn’t known he possessed. “They’re not even talking to you, they’re talking to me,” he said as he broke through the intricate warding spells, courtesy of another invention of Prince’s that disguised itself as an ordinary bar in the cage. “Ignore them. You’re the free one, and they’re the ones that are caged.”
            “That’s what bothers me.”
            Draco turned around and stared at him. Weasley avoided his gaze, staring steadfastly at the floor. Draco sighed, shook his head, and nodded at the dish as he picked up the vial. “Lift that. Not with your wand,” he added, as he saw Weasley about to draw. “You might spill it.”
            Weasley gave a long-suffering sigh and picked up the dish. At least being able to be irritated at Draco seemed to have cured him of the tendency to lament about captive Aurors. “Yes, I’m familiar with Warren and Jenkins from Harry telling me about them. What do they have to do with this?”
            “They’re the Aurors assigned to pursue him.” Draco lowered his voice. They would Obliviate the other captives later as necessary, but he preferred not to have to do it without good reason. Keeping their conversation down would prevent them from exposing Warren and Jenkins to harm. “This particular twisted.” He touched the filthy hair on the wizard’s head and pulled his hand back, grimacing. It felt as though it was covered in slime, though Draco knew it was probably just dirt.
            “So what?” That was Weasley’s favorite expression, going by how many times he’d uttered it over the last few days. He dusted his hands and sat back, glaring at Draco. “That doesn’t mean that we’re going to kill him in their place, not the way you’ve treated him so far.”
            Draco curled his lip in some amusement. That was more clever than he had expected Weasley to be. “No. But they found a note in his file that led them to believe that he might be one of the twisted the Ministry made, by experimenting on them.”
            Weasley smothered a sound that could have been a word or a curse, and stared at the man. Draco uncorked the vial and peered at the liquid inside. He had brewed it himself from instructions found in a book here, and trusted the book more than the seemingly identical potions he’d discovered hidden behind the wall in Ernhardt’s lab. But he had never used this before, and there was no harm in checking the color one more time.
            “Why would anyone want to be or look like that?” Weasley whispered. “Why would anyone want to have the power to put their enemies into a coma?”
            Draco glared at him over his shoulder. “You really don’t understand that last part?”
            “Oh, excuse me,” Weasley muttered. “I should have remembered the bloke was probably a Slytherin, and that’s a sane desire for you lot.”
            With an effort of breathing, Draco kept his temper. They couldn’t afford any quarrels tearing their little band apart. “The altar the Ministry used probably made him into this. They didn’t plan on the companions, I think. They were playing with Dark magic they didn’t understand. It was supposed to give the people they experimented on wandless magic, but it did far more than that.”
            He decided, finally, that the potion was as close to the color of “a ruby’s heart” as he would get, and prepared to tip it. At the same time, he lifted his wand and murmured the incantation that dispelled the Draught of Living Death from the man’s blood.
            “What the fuck are you doing?” Weasley hissed.
            Since they had gone over the plan right before they came into the room, Draco ignored him. He had enough to deal with, as the man’s eyes snapped open and he turned his head to regard Draco, widening his mouth for what would probably be a scream. Red light from his flaw was already crackling around his fingers.
            Draco snapped, “Hold him!”
            Weasley did what he was supposed to, finally, and cast a Sticking Charm that bound their screaming, hissing “friend” to the floor. Draco leaned over and poured the red potion down his throat. It slid out of the vial more thickly and slowly than Draco had guessed, as if it really were made of the liquid rubies that it looked like, and dripped into the man’s mouth as Weasley strained and struggled to hold it open.
            The potion almost went on the floor as the man turned his head away, but another Sticking Charm solved that problem. Draco knew the other Aurors were leaning forwards from their cages, trying desperately to get a glimpse, but he ignored them. None of them were twisted, so none of them would get this treatment.
            When he reached down to massage the man’s throat and make him swallow, filthy teeth snapped at his hand. Draco conjured a gag, conquering his urge to snatch his hand out of reach. The screams that promptly came out when the gag settled into the imbecile’s mouth were at least muffled by it.
            “Now what we do we do?” Weasley was shifting behind him, his hands clasped in front of him.
            “Now we wait,” Draco said, distant. He knew that Weasley didn’t really want to be here with him, but Harry and Granger were training with the thestrals this morning—they were still the two riders who struggled the most—and Prince and Weasley’s brother had left to work on more tricks. That left the two people this really needed.
            For a minute, two, time ran by and there was no change in the twisted. Draco narrowed his eyes. He knew he had brewed the potion perfectly, but perhaps the instructions in the book had been mad, even though they seemed to agree perfectly with the potions theory Draco understood. There was no indication that Ernhardt had been sane when he wrote it, after all.
            Then the screams behind the gag cut off. The man shook his head and shut his eyes. Draco raised an eyebrow and Vanished the gag, but signaled Weasley to keep the Sticking Charms in place. They didn’t know how much of his sanity the potion had given back this man. He might retain enough to plan, but not enough to realize that they were trying to help him.
            “Where am I?” whispered the twisted.
            That was at least promising. Draco cleared his throat, waiting until the man opened his eyes and looked up. They were clearer than they had been, which meant without the flickering haze that had haunted and glazed them until now. “You’re in the custody of friends,” he said. “Friends working against the Ministry that twisted you. Do you remember the ceremony where they put you on the altar?”
            He was taking a risk—after all, Warren and Jenkins only suspected that this was one of the twisted made by the Ministry, they didn’t know—but when the man’s eyes darkened with anger, Draco had to smile. Yes. Galleons in the bank.
            “I remember,” the man whispered, and began to struggle so hard to sit up that Draco gestured to Weasley to release the Sticking Charms. Weasley hesitated, but Draco didn’t see why. Draco was the one who was sitting close to the bloke, after all, and the one who would get the first brunt of his fists if he chose to hit out at something.
            Finally, the charms dissipated, and the man sat up and gaped at Draco, his tongue lolling out like a snake’s. Draco ignored that. He had done some of the same things himself, when he was under the control of Healer Alto. “My name is—is Jeremiah,” said the man.
            That wasn’t what the file Warren and Jenkins possessed had said, but the file had also said that it was impossible to bring the twisted back from insanity and that he should be killed immediately. That emphasis was another thing to attract suspicion. Of course the Socrates Corps had license to kill all twisted, and this man wasn’t as dangerous as some of the others they had faced. Why make it a point to kill him at once?
            Before he could talk, Draco thought, and looked the man in the eyes again. “We can call you that. Tell us what you remember.”
            For some reason, Jeremiah’s face clouded, and he worked his hands together. “You look like an Auror. Are you going to let me have my revenge on the Ministry?”
            Draco didn’t look away from him as he nodded. “Yes. The Ministry accused us of treason and murder when we did our best to protect them, and now we want to destroy them. It sounds like you have reason to hate them, too.”
            Jeremiah grinned at him. If he noticed the smell of his own hair and skin, he didn’t comment on it, although Draco heard Weasley gag from behind him. “Good,” he snarled through his yellowing teeth. “This is the way it happened. I wanted the power to make people sleep as easily and naturally as possible while I Healed them.”
            “You’re a Healer?” Draco asked. That might make it easier to find records for him, although the Ministry had enough contacts with St. Mungo’s that they could have tracked them down and destroyed them.
            Jeremiah looked at his arm for a second. Draco looked, too, and saw a small, intricate symbol like a tattoo near the corner of his elbow. The symbol that twisted had, the equivalent of Voldemort’s Dark Mark, he supposed.
            “Was,” Jeremiah whispered.
            Draco couldn’t bring himself to squeeze that dirty shoulder in compassion, but he nodded. “So you agreed to this experiment because you thought good would come out of it.”
            Jeremiah bobbed his head hard enough that Draco wondered if it was possible for your neck to grow more flexible during the period when you were a twisted. He didn’t remember much about his own exposure, but the physical sensations and memories were so blurred and shifting that he supposed he could have undergone something similar and not remembered it.
            “I thought that I would be able to bring relief with a touch, so we didn’t have to wait for Dreamless Sleep,” Jeremiah whispered. “We were always running out of it in hospital. People suffered who didn’t have to.” He jerked his head up to look at Draco. “I wanted to be as fierce as fire for them. As fierce as a lion.”
            “Gryffindor?” Weasley asked, leaning over Draco’s shoulder and showing an interest in the conversation for the first time.
            Jeremiah looked up at him and nodded urgently again. Draco snorted a little. That might explain why his companions took the form of lions, at least outwardly. “I wanted to help,” he whispered. “I never knew that they would do something like this.”
            “Did you know they would use Dark magic?” Draco asked, moving on to the next important point. They wanted to use Jeremiah as a witness against the Ministry, but it would compromise him a little if he had knowingly agreed to a crime.
            Jeremiah shook his head, though. “They told me that they had a ritual that would work with Dark magic, and I refused. Then they told me they had figured out a way to do it without using Dark Arts. That was the only reason I agreed.” Tears were spilling out of his eyes and washing down his cheeks, carving little pale paths in the grime there. “They lied to me. They stole months of my life.”
            Draco wanted to get up and dance. He forced himself to crouch there instead and ask in a voice as calm as possible, “They did this to you only months ago?” He had thought the Ministry had mostly stopped creating twisted at least a year prior.
            Then again, his mother’s experience had been relatively recent.
            Jeremiah nodded. “They said—they said it was safe. They said it was going to be all right, and that I would have the power to soothe patients the way I wanted to.” He went still and tense, suddenly, staring towards the door of the room, beyond the cage bars. “I’ll bloody kill them,” he whispered.
            Draco reached for his wand, but Weasley was the one who stretched his hand out and shook his head a little. “Come on, mate,” he said. “What good can you do right now?”
            “I can raid the Ministry,” Jeremiah said. “With my companions.” He looked around as though he expected the fire-lions to leap into view from nothingness. Which they might, Draco thought, as long as he was awake, and kept a sharp eye out for signs of it. “You could come along if you wanted, though.”
            “We do plan to expose the Ministry,” Draco said gravely, and bit his lip to avoid laughing. The thought of this ragged man charging the doors of the Ministry and expecting to be admitted inside, or to win the ensuing battle, had to prompt amusement.
            Of course, he hadn’t done badly with his companions against Draco and Weasley in the ravine, and that was something Draco promised himself that he would remember. But that wasn’t the same as confronting a full squadron of battle-trained Aurors, the same kind that Draco expected to confront them when they arrived at the Ministry.
            The solution, of course, was to try and get some of them out of the way beforehand. Draco regretted that it wouldn’t be as simple as locking all of them up in these cages the way they had already locked up the ones they captured, but they would have to live with that.
            “You’ll take me along?” Jeremiah leaned forwards as if he intended to overpower Draco into agreeing by his smell.
            Draco didn’t wrinkle his nose, but only because he was working as hard as he could on holding his breath. He nodded, exhaled, and turned to Weasley. “Why don’t you talk to him about what part he could play?” he asked. “I’ll bring you a Pensieve, and he can start putting his memories into it.”
            Weasley narrowed his eyes at him. No doubt he thought Draco was getting off easily. But Draco only nodded to him and tapped his wand once, conjuring the hourglass of the Tempus Charm. It was less a way to see what the time was than to remind Weasley that the potion to make Jeremiah sane would last an hour, and extracting the memories would take considerably less time than that.
            “What’s going to happen to me?”
            Draco, getting up with his hand on the door of the cage, turned around and looked at Jeremiah. If he hadn’t deigned to pay much attention to the dirt and stink that covered him yet, Draco decided, he must know about it. He sat with his hands folded on his legs now, as if trying to cover himself up from even his own gaze, and his eyes hadn’t wavered from Draco.
            “I gave you a potion that restored your wits,” Draco said quietly. “But you’re still insane, and the potion will wear off. We have to take your memories of the ritual and then put you back to sleep. But we’re working on a way to restore your sanity permanently.” Now that they had the altar that the Ministry had used to create the twisted in the first place, Draco thought it would be much easier than otherwise.
            “I’m afraid,” Jeremiah said, simply.
            Weasley reached out and patted him clumsily on the shoulder. “You’ll get through it,” he whispered. “You were a Gryffindor.”
            That seemed to be all the simpleton needed to grin with broken teeth. Draco half-rolled his eyes, and stepped around a grasping hand from the cages that held the Aurors, which tried to trip him. He would fetch the Pensieve, and he would leave it with Weasley so that he could collect Jeremiah’s memories.
            In the meantime, he had a partner to talk to.
*
            “Now yeh get it, Harry!”
            Harry dashed drops of sweat from his forehead and smiled at Hagrid. He had been turning corners for hours, and it felt as though his body still wanted to lean and follow the impulse of the last flight, but he managed to contain himself and stand still on the ground. He had to brace himself against a thestral, but at the least the stallion he had ridden ignored him, munching the scraps of mostly raw meat that Hagrid had thrown him.
            “I don’t know how I rode so well when I was fifteen and I can’t ride well at all now,” he said. “I must have been mad.”
            Hagrid nodded, and laid a finger alongside his nose. “Verry likely yeh were,” he said. “Thestrals respond to that, y’know. The madness in a rider. How much the rider is like them. How much death they’ve seen.” He looked pale for a second, and Harry took a step forwards, worried for him, but in the next instant Hagrid plucked himself up and shook his head with a smile. “But now you’re learning the other way, by education instead of instinct.”
            “Where are you getting all the food for them from, Hagrid?” Hermione was asking. She had watched the meat thrown without a word, but she turned to face Hagrid now, and planted her hands on her hips in a familiar gesture that made Harry want to back away. He stayed near Hagrid out of solidarity more than anything else. “I know thestrals need meat, but in the Forest, they can hunt it for themselves. Where is it coming from now?”
            Hagrid chuckled. Harry relaxed a little. He had been afraid they were in for another of Hagrid’s rambling confessions that wasn’t a confession, trying to talk around something horrible. Harry had been a bit worried that the meat might come from pet dogs and cats that belonged to Muggles. “Yeh don’t need to worry about that. They went hunting in the Forest before we came, and I cut up the meat and had the house-elves preserve it. The house-elves gave me some of the meat that Hogwarts gets, too. It’s enough for them to last a while longer yet!”
            Hermione dropped her hands back to her sides and gave Hagrid a look that was so unexpected it took Harry a second to interpret it: an approving one. “You thought ahead, Hagrid,” she said. “I’m very proud of you.”
            Hagrid winked at her. “Maxime’s influence,” he said happily. “She wanted me to do a lot of things before I left, and she was right.”
            Hermione muttered something Harry couldn’t hear, and then glanced up as Draco appeared out of the warded door of Cuthbert’s Corner. He caught Harry’s eye and nodded to him, speaking to him alone, Harry thought. Hermione and Hagrid could consider themselves included in it by courtesy only. Harry would have rolled his eyes, but by now it was Draco’s way, and objecting to it would only make Draco try harder at making himself obnoxious. “We used the potion that was supposed to make twisted sane, and it worked. He says his name is Jeremiah, and he was a Healer. He wanted to have the ability to touch his patients and send them into a healing sleep.”
            “And it went wrong,” Hermione murmured, her eyes alive. Harry smiled. She might not like Dark magic, but for the chance to reverse Dark magic, he thought, she would show herself all eagerness. “Let me talk to him. There might be a way I can help.” She pushed past Draco and into the house.
            Harry raised his eyebrows. It wouldn’t hurt Ron to have help with Jeremiah, but… “You already gave Ron the Pensieve?”
            Draco nodded. “He agreed to allow us to use his memories to support his testimony. It’ll be better if we can make him sane and have him there to say it himself, but if necessary, we have this.”
            “Yeh can use memories against the Ministry?”
            Harry glanced at Hagrid and spoke before Draco could. The tone of patient resignation in Draco’s voice was as likely to set Hagrid off as if it was to provide the explanation. “Yes. That’s what we’ll mostly use. Memories of what people have told us about twisted and the way the Ministry made them—”
            Hagrid was pursuing another tack, though. “What about memories of the thestrals and the things the Ministry have done to them?” he asked, patting the flank of the lead stallion who stood beside him. It made a noise like a hollow drum. “Yeh ought to be fighting for them, too! They’re fighting for yer lot.”
            Harry winced a little and ignored the way that Draco leaned towards him, touching his wand. No, cursing Hagrid wasn’t the solution. “We’re just trying to expose the twisted and the way they made us hunt them down even though they were the ones who created a lot of them, Hagrid,” he said gently. “The thestrals deserve to have someone fight for them, but it would confuse people if we were trying to combine two causes.”
            “But the thestrals can show that the Ministry used Dark Arts!”
            Harry blinked. He hadn’t expected that. “How?”
            “That bloke you mentioned to me,” Hagrid said. “The Ernhardt bloke. He had a place in the Forest where he did experiments.”
            Harry felt Draco take a step forwards next to him, staring. He didn’t look at Draco, but did reach out and put his hand on Hagrid’s arm. “You mean…”
            Hagrid nodded fiercely. “He was torturing the lil’ baby thestrals,” he said, his eyes gleaming intensely. “I found his name and his brand on some of them.” Hagrid let out a growl that reminded Harry, as few things except his size did anymore, that he was half-giant. “I wanted to git ‘em, but he left before I could. I have memories. Lots of memories.”
            Harry could see Draco smiling out of the corner of his eye, and thought it might be the first time Draco had ever smiled at Hagrid like that in the course of his life. Well, it made sense. They had a lot of proof of other things, but not as much as they’d like of the fact that Ernhardt actually had been a twisted and not the innocent the Ministry had accused them of killing.
            Now, it seemed, they might find it.
*
SP777: Draco is really good at excuses like that! But no real foreshadowing intended with the thestral, sorry.
Christopher: You’re right. Harry and Draco have become used to having permission to use Dark Arts, and then, when the Ministry started trying to hunt them down instead, they kept on using them because they were defiant and wanted to live.
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Chains of Fool's Gold