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Hero's Funeral	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4933 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seven--Under Fire

            Draco had enough time to figure out what was going on, although he didn't expect Potter's wild rush out of nowhere. Perhaps the vague way Potter had talked about the vision he'd had had prepared him better than he'd thought at the time.

            He was borne down and rolled under Potter's weight. He heard Potter scream, choking, as the curse hit him. Draco cast the first spell that came to mind, the one that had been hovering there ever since he realized how hard Larkin would be to kill. "Fin temporum!"

            It was a Dark spell, in much the same way that Time-Turners had been Dark. Altering time had such bad consequences that the Ministry classified all magic that could do that under Dark Arts automatically. But this particular incantation had a limited range, and Draco was sure that he could use it to limit the damage that the curse would cause to Potter; it was just a matter of making sure that he had enough power behind it and that he said the words correctly. Fin tempore would have caused all sorts of problems.

            The light that whirled out from the end of his wand took the form of a spiral, so white-silver that Draco found it hard to look at. He knew it would seize Potter and seal him within a bubble of frozen time, during which nothing would change; his body and mind would experience a subjective moment, forever if necessary, or until Draco broke the spell or died. It would isolate Potter in the midst of his pain, but it would also prevent the damage Larkin's curse had done to him from getting any worse.

            Draco rolled out from under Potter and came to a kneeling position. Larkin still stood where he had been, mouth open like a jackal's. Draco spat the Leg-Locker jinx at him and watched it bounce off a shimmering dark shield that sucked in all the heat in the weak sunlight.

            "Come here," Larkin said. He was regarding Draco with wider eyes and still wider mouth, as if Draco's soul was something he could swallow. "You are more interesting than I thought, a practitioner of the Art yourself. You ought to know that you can't capture me. You kill or you die."

            Yes, you do. Draco was a fool, he knew, to have tried so harmless a spell.

            He rose to his feet and walked towards Larkin. The area seemed very quiet, deserted. He didn't know where Warren and Jenkins were, if they had fought free of the ghosts and might be circling around even now or if they were still occupied by Larkin's defenses. He could do nothing to help them right now, anymore than he could change things for Potter. His priority had to be killing Larkin.



            "More interesting than I thought," Larkin said thoughtfully, and then twitched a finger. His wand was in his other hand, Draco thought, even as his Auror instincts reacted to the finger and threw him sideways, and that meant that he cast a curse into the path of Draco's fall.

            It was nonverbal, but Draco knew enough Dark magic to recognize the effects: the swirling net of green and gold that came to life in front of him would flash over him and strip the flesh from his bones if he fell into it.

            Draco twisted himself in mid-air and took a jarring blow on the hip from the cobblestones as he landed next to the net. Then he twisted and somersaulted away from the next curse, this one a more straightforward one that would simply cause pain. Larkin snorted and walked nearer.

            "Does a Dark Lord refuse to duel the enemies who come to him?" Larkin's voice was thick, probably with anger. With Draco's luck, it wouldn't be simple madness, and he wouldn't be on the verge of collapsing of high blood pressure. "He does not! You are no true heir of mine."

            I don't know what he means, and I doubt it matters. Draco's shield got in the way of the next curse, and then he was up on his feet and circling away so that he had a clear shot at Larkin. There was something he wanted to try, but the incantation was long and he doubted he would get all the way through it before Larkin jumped him again. He had a chance to distract him, though.

            "You have no idea, do you?" Draco whispered, while the first words of the incantation began building in his head. Ignis, flamma ignis... "You have no idea who you were trying to kill."

            Larkin snorted. "If you mean me to think that you are more than an ordinary Auror and the heir of a pure-blood family who threw away what his family had earned, then you must try again." He feinted suddenly and ducked in as Draco brought his wand around defensively. This particular curse raked a line of blood down Draco's side, but it didn't disable him. He wondered for a moment if Larkin had intended that result, if he wanted to kill him slowly.

            No. The Piranha Death spell argued otherwise. Larkin was twisted, which by definition meant mad, not in control of himself. He was choosing his spells randomly, now wanting to kill Draco, now wanting to torture him.

            "I meant Potter," Draco said. "The only one who could fight and kill a Dark Lord in the last fifty years. Do you mean to say that you don't know what happens to the power of a Dark Lord when he's defeated?"

            Insecurity was suddenly brightening Larkin's eyes, coming from a depth that Draco knew he would never have recognized if not for Joanna Larkin's stories. She told us that he studied fear and measured himself against the great Dark Lords of the past. That impulse is still there. "Nothing," Larkin insisted. "It dissipates into the air like the power of any other wizard."

            Draco actually paused long enough to give him a look of pity. Ignis, flamma ignis, potens flammae... "No," he said. "There was a reason that Dumbledore became so renowned after he defeated Grindelwald, and there's still a reason people mention Potter in hushed tones eleven years after the Dark Lord died."

            Larkin backed a step away and looked over his shoulder at Potter, sucking his teeth uncertainly. Draco concealed a triumphant sneer and continued chanting the spell to himself. He would have to repeat it several times to be sure, he thought, until it was filling his limbs and blood with destructive force and he could unleash it in a ringing torrent that would obliterate Larkin. Potens flammae, casses animae, flamma ignis...

            "He is not," Larkin said, and he sounded as if he was arguing with himself rather than responding to Draco's words.

            "Not the heir of the Dark Lord?" Draco shrugged with one shoulder. "Not in any conventional sense, no. But Dumbledore took something from Grindelwald that day, or how could he have defeated him so easily? He wasn't especially powerful or important before then, although some people admired him. After that, he only gained in renown."

            Larkin sneered, and the balance in his mind had probably tilted the other way. Ignis, ignis, ignis, Draco chanted to himself. "He can't have been that powerful or renowned. He ended his days as a Headmaster of a school, not doing anything more important."

            Draco let his voice turn sly, in the very best way he had learned from his father. "What, and you've never thought of the power to be gained by shaping the brains of your followers young? Training them to love and fear you, to feel nostalgia for their schooldays that they can't ever shake off? There were so many mourners at Dumbledore's funeral, even in the middle of a war, that they didn't have enough seats for them all."

            "That was the end of him," Larkin said, though the uncertainty still thrummed in his voice. "He was killed by one of his followers he hadn't trained well enough."

            "But he wasn't a Dark Lord, either," Draco said. "He didn't choose to take his power in that direction. And the power fades year by year if it isn't used, until it does become nothing more than the ghost of a smoke trickle that you were talking about." This was so much bollocks, but it was also fertile, and it nourished Larkin's fantasies of delusion and kept him talking. Warren and Jenkins hadn't appeared. They weren't coming. Draco thought he could talk as long as he wanted. "Now, Potter still has that chance. But he won't if someone kills him without taking the power from him in the right way. And neither will anyone else."

            Larkin's eyes shone like the eyes of a fish on the hook, fighting not to bite. Draco smiled at him, while words of flame and doom swirled and circled in his mind.

            "What would happen if someone took the power in the right way?" Larkin whispered, finally falling in the direction that Draco had wanted him to.

            Thank you, Merlin. Draco turned his head away, shaking it. "I don't even like to think about it," he whispered. "Because the world will change, and I know that I could be the one to make it do so...but I've never had the courage to kill." The chances that Larkin knew about the Sussex Necromancer case were small, since the file had been sealed. And it didn't take long to slip bitterness into his voice, not when Draco had been thinking and talking about Dumbledore. And right now, he needed Larkin to believe that Draco was useful to him, no threat.

            Invisible force seized Draco around the throat in a collar, bending him to the ground and nearly making him lose control of the building spell. "I demand that you tell me!" Larkin shrieked in his face. "How do I take the power?"

            Draco sneered at him. "I told you. You've already done something stupid. That spell is going to kill him the minute my spell is gone." He hadn't looked at the bites that the acidic curse had laced Potter's body with, but he knew they would go deep and probably bleed out unless Potter was in St. Mungo's.

            "No. No!" Larkin whipped back around and stared at Potter, floating motionless in his motionless bubble. "There's still time," he whispered, as if there was someone around he had to convince, besides Draco and himself. "There has to be a way." He glanced at Draco. "If I spare your life, will you help me?"

            Draco pretended to think about it, frowning. Ignis, ignis, ignis. "I thought that you despised the Dark Lord," he said at last. "That you thought he didn't get enough fear out of his followers, or something."

            "That doesn't matter, not next to the power." Larkin said the words with a sliding, deepening tone, a sexual longing that made Draco shudder, although he thought he hid it successfully. "If you can teach me how to pull it out of Potter and make it my own, then I'll be stronger. I can make more people fear me." His eyes flashed. "And I'll teach you how to call the ghosts."

            Some part of Draco, more than half-buried during his years in the Aurors, seriously considered it for a moment. He didn't know any way to pull the Dark Lord's power from Potter, of course, because no such transfer had happened. But there were ways of extracting ordinary magic from the dying. Larkin would be happy with that, most likely, since Potter was strong. And then Draco would have the chance to avenge himself on more than one person who had scorned him...

            But Draco shook his head. No. He had chosen differently, and he would not make his parents say that he had gone back on his choices before more than a decade had passed.

            Besides, Larkin was insane. Twisted. Any bargain he made with Draco wouldn't endure, even if he swore the most solemn oaths; he would forget about the consequences of breaking them, and do so anyway.

            "If you can do that," Draco said, and tried to make it sound as though he was concentrating deeply on the details of Larkin's offer instead of the spell that was building in his head, "then you would be more powerful than anyone else. You would--you would terrify lots of people because they wouldn't know whether you might pull something out of your pocket that had been yours, or Potter's, or the Dark Lord's."

            Larkin smiled at him. His eyes danced with fiery sparks, literally; they leaped out of his face and fell to the ground. Draco wondered, with the part of his mind that was always detached and thinking no matter what the situation, whether that was another sign of a twisted that he could put on the record.

            If he got out of this situation, of course. There was always that to consider.

            "You're clever," Larkin breathed. "I could use someone like that to watch my back." He turned and looked speculatively, again, at Potter. "How do we begin?"

            "Well," Draco said, and laded his voice with doubt, while the spell continued singing in his head through one repetition and began another, "you'd have to reverse the curse on him so that he didn't immediately die when I brought him out of the time bubble. And then we'd have to find some other way to kill him."

            "That's simple enough," Larkin said dismissively. "Those kinds of curses can just make a ghost die again." And he snapped his fingers in front of him, at the same moment as he reached out and ripped through Draco's magic preserving Potter's life as though it was a curtain he was moving aside.

            Draco caught his breath harshly, but the blood hadn't begun to trickle from Potter's wounds before Larkin was sending a ghost to cover him. Draco didn't recognize this one, though by the long robes it might have been Whitley, dying at her party. The spell leaped off Potter in the same clear swirl of light as before and bit into the ghost instead, and with a wail she vanished.

            Potter lay there, breathing slightly, his skin unmarked.

            Larkin nodded to Draco. "Whenever you're ready."

            Draco moved forwards in a stately fashion and bent over Potter, pretending that he was making a magic circle around Potter when he was in reality emptying random Potions ingredients from his pockets and making meaningless passes with his wand. The spell waited just behind his lips, and he had to figure out some way to be able to cast the whole thing without Larkin suspecting him.

            And without Potter interfering, for that matter.

*



            Harry knew he was still alive the moment the pain left his body. It was a jolting, flying moment, because in the middle of a breath he was dying of his wounds, and the next he wasn't.

            He had learned not to ask about the other miracles he had been granted, though, until the immediate danger passed and left him with some chance of surviving them. He lay there, head sagging to the side, eyes shut, and he plotted.

            He could feel Larkin bending over him for a moment, and then he straightened and said something. Then Malfoy was close, and by lifting his eyelids the tiniest bit, Harry could see that he was tracing his wand back and forth in large circles over Harry's body, the kind a swaying pendulum might make.

            There was another flying moment when Harry was convinced Malfoy was a traitor, that he had been working with Larkin all along, and that was the reason Larkin's kill count was so high--

            And then Harry forced the stupid suspicion out along with his breath. No. Larkin would have been successful the first time he tried to kill Harry if that was true. No point in saving Harry for later.

            So. Malfoy must be doing something else, something that would fool Larkin and convince him Malfoy was on his side, or hold him at bay until Malfoy could summon help or a spell. Harry could help by lying still and pretending to be senseless. He did, and he didn't even reach for his wand, which sprawled beside him, strong though the temptation was.

            He would wait for a signal.

            "You're certain this is going to work?" Larkin asked. His voice had a hard edge now. "That you really can drain the power from another wizard and add it to your own? I've never heard of it."

            To suppress his grin was harder than to suppress any sign of alertness, but Harry managed anyway. So that's the lie Malfoy used to lure him closer. Clever.

            "That's because the books mostly don't mention that you need to do it in the moment of death," Malfoy said, his voice cool and polished and without a trace of the breathlessness that Harry knew he must be feeling, other than a slight edge to the words that could be attributed to having his concentration broken. "They just assume that it's something that happens or doesn't happen, and the wizards who do have the power added to their own sometimes think they're experiencing an adrenaline rush instead of magic."

            "Oh." Harry heard the sound of Larkin shifting from foot to foot. "If it's not in books, then how did you learn it?"

            "My father was the Dark Lord's right-hand man for a long time," Malfoy said, his voice even more cool, even more distant. Harry felt the hairs on his arms stand up, and reckoned Malfoy was drawing strongly on his magic, preparing a spell-blast that ought to weaken Larkin. Well, at least hopefully it would. "Did you think that all of the knowledge that enabled him to rise that far was contained in books?"

            "That isn't far compared to being a Dark Lord himself," Larkin objected. "If he knew this technique, he could have become one."

            "Only if the enemies he harvested the power from were Dark Lord-level themselves," Malfoy said, his voice faint. "And they weren't."

            Harry wished he dared turn his head and estimate how close Larkin was, but he didn't, even though he thought at the moment that he had never wanted anything more. He began to draw in his magic, though, because if Malfoy didn't have a plan, he would need to. And it was as well to be prepared against any of the ghosts who might appear.

            "Why did Potter never use the power he has, if he's on the level of a Dark Lord?" From the sound of it, Larkin was drifting closer and still closer. "You would have thought he would, if only to capture the criminals that he pretends are such a great concern." A sneer in the last of those words, but Harry couldn't tell who it was directed against, the Aurors who thought they were doing good or the petty criminals around him who thought they were so great.

            And it might not matter, truly. Harry began gathering his muscles beneath him, so slowly that he doubted Larkin would see it if he didn't know what he was looking for. He would spring and fling a blast of the power Larkin so wanted right into his face. That might serve to slow him down.

            "He wanted to do other things." Malfoy's voice still had that odd faintness. It could come, Harry thought, from weariness or from wariness around Larkin or temptation to take Harry's power for himself, if there was any way to do such a thing...or, sudden thought, from the concentration necessary to gather up a huge spell, of the kind that would do actual damage to Larkin. "Arrest people without the other Aurors fearing him. Get some recognition that didn't depend on reminding people that he'd killed the Dark Lord."

            It's scary how well he knows me, if he can use that much truth in a lie meant to fool Larkin. Harry wondered if he should shift and groan, attract Larkin's attention so that Malfoy could move.

            But Larkin was mad, that was the problem. They didn't know if he would strike out at Harry, send his ghosts in, run away, or even assume that Malfoy had betrayed him and lash out at him in turn, just because.

            "I will not be so foolish," Larkin said, and he chuckled. The sound raised all the hair on Harry's nape and arms not currently standing up. "When I have the power, I will hold onto it."

            Malfoy didn't answer, but his breathing became slightly faster. Harry had heard that before from Ron when he was on the edge of a major spell.

            And from Lionel.

            In the end, Harry chose to trust that Malfoy knew what he was doing, and to lie still and keep his eyes closed. He could hear Larkin breathing as he shuffled closer, soft exhalations like muttered prayers.

            And then Malfoy roared aloud, and Harry felt the wash of heat across his head, almost setting his hair on fire, as the flames leaped out of Larkin's body, cooking his bone marrow first, and then boiling his blood, and then roasting his skin.

            Larkin was screaming, but whether the screams were curses or summons to his ghosts, Harry didn't know, and didn't have to care, because they didn't work. He rolled forwards and hit Malfoy in the knees, bearing him to the ground and shielding him with his own body as the flames raged on. He knew the curse Malfoy had used, called the Flame Net, and he knew that the touch of a single spark on someone other than the intended victim could still light that person on fire and roast him. Malfoy grunted and said something in an acidic voice that Harry didn't bother listening to, either. He knew that Malfoy would be content later to be alive.

            Or, at least, he had bloody well better be.

            They lay there until the sound of the flames died, and then Harry lifted his head and opened his eyes. There was nothing left where Larkin had stood but a fine, light mound of ash, already stirring in the wind, as though the world wanted to scrub him away and forget that he had ever existed. Harry swallowed and stood up, stretching his muscles as he glanced around. Warren and Jenkins were running towards them, their faces set in stiff masks. Not quite believing masks, Harry thought. Perhaps they believed that Harry and not Malfoy should have destroyed Larkin.

            He looked down at Malfoy, who still leaned against the wall where Harry had placed him, in a half-sitting position. "Thank you," Harry said, as politely as he could. "You saved my life."

            Malfoy eyed him, reaching up to touch a lump on the back of his head as though he thought Harry had made that appear on purpose. "You're welcome," he said. He paused, checked on the progress of the other Aurors, and then added, "We have things to talk about."

            Harry knew that, but Warren and Jenkins were coming up fast, and he could use them as a convenient excuse. He nodded and said, "I know. Later?"

            Malfoy flashed his teeth, and said, "Later," in a way that made the word a promise and threat all at once. Then he stood, braced himself against the wall, and answered Warren's first shouted question in a lazy drawl.

            Harry closed his eyes and sighed out. I never really thought about what would happen if I survived that vision, because I didn't expect to.

            Now I have to think about it.

            Shit.

*

            unneeded: Harry is not looking forward to explaining what the heck he thought he was doing.

            Mehla_Seraphim: Harry would probably have tried to change the vision if he knew that only he would be hurt if he did so. But he thought he had to die to save Draco's life, and since his last partner died, he's very big on that.

            Zip: Oh, don't worry, I've never discontinued a story because of reviews. I've only stopped working on some because I got stuck or because, more likely, I got tempted by other stories. ;)

            Glad you like them.

            SP777: Draco thinks Harry is crazy, certainly.

            Thanks!

            Harry and Draco could complement each other well. The question becomes if they'll be allowed to do so.
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Hero's Funeral