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A Reign of Silence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3889 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Seven--The Greatest Fear

            Harry dropped to the floor immediately and raised a Spiked Shield Charm around him when the tentacles struck. He didn't know for sure whose fear it was, but whoever it was hadn't done anything about it yet, and that might mean they couldn't, or had only faced this fear in nightmares and didn't know how to defeat it.

            The tentacles hit the Spiked Shield Charm and lost most of their length, dropping chopped and writhing to the floor. Harry bounded up to his feet again and hit them while they were still confused. He had to focus on the tentacles as much as he would have liked to lash out at the unseen body, because Warren was in there, and Draco now, and Jenkins just barely backing away, and he would have hit somebody.

            Draco.

            Harry told himself sternly that yes, it was horrible, but he had dealt with having his partner in danger before, and he and Draco had talked about the crazy way he'd behaved on a few cases, and there were more important things than immediately rescuing him.

            Such as clearing a space and getting a look at what kind of creature they were fighting, and yelling at Jenkins, "Is this your fear?"

            Jenkins shook her head. Her face was white, but from the way she pressed her lips together and glared at the tentacles, Harry thought it was from rage and not terror. "No. I suspect it's Thomasina's. She's hinted a few times that she used to be afraid of things beneath her bed that would reach up and grab her. Some story her uncle disciplined her with."

            "Her uncle was an arsehole," Harry said, and slammed a Blasting Curse into one reaching tentacle so hard that it simply blew apart.

            "I agree," Jenkins said, and did a complicated spin on one heel that resulted in small bits of rubbery flesh all around her.

            Harry darted to the side. With the stone panels blasted off the beast's hiding place, he could see better, and here and there was a glimpse of a scarlet Auror robe, or a kicking leg or flailing arm. Still darkness beyond that, and the slimy feeling of Dark magic along his skin that Harry, by now, could identify as the fear curse. Still no sign of Draco or Warren coming back out on their own.

            "I'm going to do something Dark," he said, without looking at Jenkins. "You can report me later if you want, but right now we have to get them out."

            "Do your worst, Potter," Jenkins said, in a tone of voice that indicated she was already on her own way there.

            Harry nodded and closed his eyes, reaching for the memory of spells he hadn't performed since the Gina Hendricks case. These were complex enough that he would have to put aside all fear, all anger, all intention of charging in there and rescuing Draco. He couldn't see his enemy yet. He would be useless without it. All the lessons that Draco had tried to teach him in recent months marched through his head and then fell silent.

            He reached, and the power was there. He reached, and the concentration was there. He reached, and the feeling was there.

            He held his wand up to his lips and kissed the shaft, not because he had to but because it made him feel better, and shouted, "Confringo cordem!"

            The spell blasted out of him, directed by his will, and he opened his eyes in time to see Jenkins turning on him. She would be thinking only of the Latin translation of the spell, Harry thought, the words, not the intent.

            "This is intention magic," he told her. "I know what I'm doing. That spell was aimed at our enemy, and not anyone else."

            Before she could lay into him about how Dark intention magic was, or how dangerous, Harry heard the explosion. His curse had landed, and made the heart of the beast--which had to have a heart, which would be all reaching tentacles and writhing limbs in a child's imagination but would have a heart in that imagination mingled with the terror of an adult and the limits of the curse--blow up.

            "Now," he said, and strode forwards as the limbs began to fall still. Jenkins was right behind him, and didn't waste time in recriminations. Harry nodded to her. He valued Draco as the partner he had had the most, but there was something to be said equally for silent competence and rage primed to hunt.

*

            It had taken Draco long moments to realize that the beast wasn't going to kill him right away, that air leaked in around the edges of the gripping sucker pad and that he could move more than he should have been able to if those ropy arms had wanted to grab him and simply bind his limbs to his body.

            When he knew that, the fury blew through him.

            He gripped his wand, which the beast hadn't had the sense to take from him, and thought a nonverbal hex as hard as he could, since the sucker was blocking his mouth. A moment later, the beast lurched and let out a pained scream. Draco drew his head free from the weakening hold and stepped to the side in what looked like another cellar room, blank stone walls and floor and ceiling, throwing hexes in an unending stream, anything that occurred to him and sounded good.

            The beast recoiled from him, giving him more of a chance to look around. There was no sign of Warren except one waving arm that might have been her, but Draco could see a channel cut into the floor with the familiar streaks of blood there. He spat on the floor, and the beast lurched back at him, because in his disgust over what Ernhardt had done, he'd allowed himself to be distracted from his hexes.

            One arm around his feet, one whipping to bind his arms to his body, and this time, a thinner and more flexible tentacle with small protrusions on the end that might have been fingers probing at his wand. Draco gripped it all the more tightly, and thought of the war and his parents and the fact that Harry might not survive this without him to keep his fingers clutching.

            Warren screamed. Draco flinched. No question now whose worst terror this is.

            Then he felt the magic building around him, like a lightning storm in reverse, rising from the earth instead of the sky. Draco's hair stood on end, and he swallowed several times. More arms whipped around and away from him, in the direction of the main room, and Draco was sure the beast had felt the main threat and would go for it.

            Then the magic landed.

            Harry. It has to be. Draco's body rolled and rocked with the blow, a sympathetic echo of pain in his heart telling him what it had been. He hadn't known that Harry knew intention magic, or at least not that particular spell, which had been described as one of the most powerful and dangerous in the books his father had owned. It could make the heart of anyone who was in the room or the way explode, unless the caster was very careful to direct it only against one enemy.

            I don't think of Harry as careful. But he does always surprise me.

            Suddenly the arms holding him had gone limp. Draco shrugged and struggled out of them and ran further into the cellar, keeping eyes open both for some sign of Warren and further clues as to what Ernhardt had done here.

            There was no sign of her, no matter how far Draco ranged, but of course he couldn't get very far with all those mounded tentacles piling up in the doorway. Grimly, he set to chopping them apart, making flesh fly and choking on the foul blood, or purple-red liquid, that dripped and stank from them.

            "Draco?"

            Harry. Draco reached back and took Harry's hand without ceasing in his tentacle destruction. "What took you so long?" he asked, proud of the way his voice didn't tremble.

            "Oh, we just thought you could handle it on your own," Harry said, and rested his chin, hard, for a moment on Draco's shoulder, before he moved aside and let Jenkins pass them in the search for her own partner. Harry lingered to look into Draco's eyes and touch his hand. "You're really all right?" he breathed.

            "That wasn't my worst fear."

            Harry tilted his head. "True. I hope that Warren can hold up as well as you did."

            "A bit of help here, please."

            Draco turned in the direction of Jenkins with his wand out when he heard her tone. It didn't mean there were more enemies here, as he told himself a moment later. But he had never heard her sound like that, and he had heard snapping, and defensiveness, and smooth offensiveness presented without a break or a blink. Harry was moving forwards beside him, so at least Draco wasn't the only one who thought something was different.

            They found Jenkins crouched beside Warren with one hand on her partner's forehead and the other over her heart. From her intent expression, she might have been willing blood and energy into Warren to make the heartbeat continue. She looked up at Draco before her eyes moved to Harry.

            "You ended the beast's existence with your curse before she could," she said. Draco winced. He had seen thrown knives that were less sharp than the look on Jenkins's face. "But you said the one who had the fear should be the one to dispel it. Does that mean that she is lost in her own mind now, because you took the kill away from her?"

            "Let me see." Harry shoved Draco out of the way and went to kneel beside Warren as if he were a Healer. Draco rolled his eyes and followed, because clearly some people needed help. He crouched down beside Harry and took a long look at Warren.

            Her face was still, as if she had lost all power to form expression, or all the muscles in her cheeks, or both at once. Draco reached out, caught Jenkins's gaze, and waited for her nod before he touched Warren's chin. Yes, it was cold, and when he looked, her breathing was so slow he could have mistaken her for dead.

            "You have to revive her," Jenkins said to Harry, in the same calm, flat tone she might have used to discuss lunch. "You need to reverse the spell that slew the beast, and let her battle it."

            "I can't reverse a spell that made its heart explode." Harry leaned back on his heels and stared at Jenkins. "That's the way it works. There's no magic that can resurrect the dead." He shuddered a little as he said that, and Draco wondered why.

            "You died and came back." Jenkins's left hand was creeping up towards Harry's throat, while her right remained fastened on her wand. Draco shifted, ready to get between them just in case Jenkins got any ideas. "You can fucking well make sure that she gets the same chance. Bring back the beast."

            "I don't know how to do that," Harry said, with a violent shake of his head. "I'm sorry this happened. But I don't know why it did. What I told you about the curse is the sum total of knowledge I have about it."

            Jenkins laughed. Draco covered his ears, but dropped his hands quickly when he saw her mouth moving again. Any word she uttered might be a threat. "As if I would believe that, when you know all sorts of Dark spells and unexpected things. Give me a spell, now, or I'll take it from your mind." She aimed her wand at Harry's eyes.

            "Stop being an idiot," Draco said, sharply enough to shock even himself. "You know as well as I do that that won't help or change anything. Let me look at her, and perhaps I can come up with something."

            Jenkins said something about Dark wizards and Death Eaters that Draco didn't bother listening to. You should never listen to someone grieving, he had learned. Leave them room to cry it out, and then come and interview them later, when they could add some productive details to your list of them. He bent over Warren and took another look at her.

            Her face was too slack, Draco decided at once. Her eyes weren't moving under her eyelids as if she were dreaming; her skin was as cold to the touch as if she were dead, and it shouldn't have chilled that fast, not even if she was in shock. And she wasn't dead. Jenkins seemed certain of that.

            Draco abruptly sat back and looked up at Jenkins. He didn't know whether the suspicion thrumming in his mind was true, but he was certain enough to speak the words. "What kind of spell would you trust in a situation like this?"

            "I've already used all the spells I know." Jenkins sounded like a tiger about to charge, now.

            "You misunderstood my question," Draco said, his voice just getting lower. Snape had used that tactic in the past, and it was effective; now it made Jenkins shut the fuck up and listen to him. "If this had happened elsewhere and she was like this and you didn't have my partner to blame for it, what would you cast?"

            "A spell to keep her warm," Jenkins said. "A spell to make her heart beat."

            Draco nodded in reluctant admiration. Once Jenkins knew what was wanted, she at least didn't hold back on her answers. And now she watched him with her hand quivering on her wand, as though she would cast those spells again at a command from him.

            "I think those are the spells you should use now," he said. "One right after the other, as fast as you can."

            Jenkins understood before Harry, from his frown, did. She turned to Warren and jabbed her wand down so fast that she almost hit her in the eyelid. She hissed out the spells, what Draco recognized as a standard Warming Charm and another with an unfamiliar incantation, but one wouldn't usually pronounce them with such emphasis.

            Warren wavered as though she was underwater, and then broke apart into the same sparkling star-pieces that had marked the demise of the Dark Lord and his snake when Harry destroyed them. Harry gasped aloud. Draco smiled. And Jenkins scrambled up and turned towards a corner of the room that none of them had noticed before, as if it was blocked by an invisible wall.

            "That curse is powerful," Warren said grimly, stepping forwards and using her body a little to shield the tight clasp Jenkins had on her arm. "I was shouting at you for the last five minutes, and you couldn't hear or see me."

            "Because we were dealing with your partner's greatest fear," Draco said smoothly. "Which only leaves mine."

            "Call it forth."

            Harry glared at Jenkins. "What do you mean? You're barely over your panic at the thought of her being dead, and you want Draco to encourage something else to attack us?"

            "We can deal better with it when we know it's coming." Jenkins had gone back to her implacable self again. Draco wondered idly if the flaw locking her mind helped her keep her emotions at bay, as well. "We would have been able to deal with the tentacles if we had kept in mind that the curse would strike at another of us soon." She nodded at Draco. "If he puts what he fears in a form he can destroy, then perhaps the curse will end, since it's had purchase on all of our minds now."

            Draco had to admit that made sense, and he rose to his feet and turned to face one of those blank walls wondering if it would pull aside to reveal his fear.

            There was only one problem. Now that he thought about it, he didn't actually know what his greatest fear was.

            Several things he would have said were before the last few years of his life, like his parents disowning him or seeing Harry almost die, he had experienced, had gone through and survived. That meant he wasn't likely to see his parents come walking out of the walls with a Dementor at their heels and evil laughter on their lips. He stood tapping his wand against the heel of his hand, aware of Harry's concerned gaze and the critical silence coming from Jenkins getting thicker and thicker.

            Then Draco knew. He could feel an alteration in the darkness around him at the same moment as he realized it, the thickening, the tightening, the soft-breathing anticipation of the curse as it wormed its way into his mind.

            "What is it?" Harry whispered. He had come to stand at Draco's side, at Draco's elbow, without him being aware of it until now. Draco fell back a step so he could feel Harry's warmth there, and took a deep breath.

            "I think--I think it's the thing from the case they call the Sussex Necromancer case," Draco whispered. "They wouldn't call it that if they knew everything we knew. But I was ordered never to talk about it." He knew that was the reason Harry had never asked him what it was like, his last case as a regular Auror. Sealing the entire case under orders, the way the Ministry had, was almost never done, and one would be thrown out of the Aurors if one was found talking about it. No pauses, no exceptions.

            "Then we'll see it now, and I can share it with you that way," Harry said, and his hand tightened on Draco's arm.

            Draco felt grateful for one mad moment that he had a Gryffindor lover, who would consider the terrifying thing about to happen to them in the light of a bonding experience.

            Then the shadows parted, and the thing came out to stand before Draco, moving on hunched legs like a spider's, the way it had come out of the shadows a few moments before Kellen had died.

            The hunched legs were things Draco could have dealt with. And even the round head, and the long, flexible neck, and the way the claws tapped on the floor. He had battled worse beings before that Dark wizards had invented, or bred from magical creatures and set to guarding their domains.

            But this thing had dark eyes, huge eyes, liquid eyes, that locked onto his, and his soul began to change and drift. Memories that were not his own slanted through him like falling stars, and Draco could see paths of the future, tangled possibilities that represented roads he had chosen not to walk. In the half-world created by the creature, he was Voldemort's torturer, and loved it. He had never met Harry. He was a Hufflepuff and disowned by his parents when he turned eleven. No choices he had made mattered.

            This creature could rewrite the past inside a head. This creature could change souls. Most of the people Draco and Kellen had met on the Sussex Necromancer case had become its victims, and either killed themselves or died at the hands of terrified friends who had not known what they were becoming.

            Harry was the one who broke Draco free of the change that was happening to him. He shouted and cast a curse, and the creature gibbered and lurched backwards, turning its faceted eyes on him.

            Harry might have been caught in that gaze if he'd stood still, but he had more sense than Draco, who had confronted the thing twice and still looked into its eyes. He grabbed Draco's hand and ducked behind a pile of stone knocked loose by the writhing tentacles instead, and Draco heard the clicking and tapping as the creature came after them.

            Then Warren and Jenkins spoke at the same time, words Draco couldn't make out with the way his head was still ringing, and the creature screamed. And screamed. And screamed. The echoes of that cry were clanging through Draco's head even as he twisted out from behind the loose stone to go back to the battle.

            The creature lay still on the stone, its eyes burned away. Draco swallowed. He knew the body would have vanished if he had been the one to break the curse, the way both Harry and Jenkins had been with their fears.

            Instead, it remained, the way the tentacles around them did, and Draco found it hard to meet Harry's gaze when Harry turned and looked at him.

            Harry touched his chin, then bent down and kissed him. Draco knew Jenkins and Warren would be gaping. He couldn't care, though. Not when Harry's hands and Harry's lips felt so good, and Harry still touched him and held him and reassured him.

            "That's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen," Harry said solemnly. "I wouldn't have wanted to face it a second time, either."

            He looked at Draco, waiting, but Draco smiled at him and shook his head. He still couldn't talk about how he had defeated the thing, since that was sealed under the Ministry's orders. If he could have showed Harry, he would have. Harry understood without speech, likely, and squeezed his hand before letting go.

            "I think the combination of Ernhardt and our former colleague should logically be the most terrifying thing you've ever seen," Jenkins murmured, as if idly, scanning the walls and floors of the room. "Not that I want to tell you how to ration your fear, of course, Auror Potter."

            Draco opened his mouth to retort, but Warren shouted from another room before he could. Jenkins darted in that direction. Draco followed, smirking. If Jenkins teased him too much about his greatest fear, he would be more than happy to glance back and forth from her to her partner.

            Warren stood in front of a stone panel that looked as if a protective ward on it had been broken by the thrashing tentacles, or perhaps the final defeat of the curse. She turned to all three of them and nodded. "A map," she said.

            Draco held up his wand and stared at it in the light of the Lumos Charm; Warren's sunshine spell was beginning to fade at last.

            The scratched lines meant nothing to him at first, but then Harry made a muffled exclamation and unfolded the paper they had taken from Ernhardt's house, enlarging it with a murmured spell and tacking it to the wall beside the lines Warren had discovered with a Sticking Charm as it stretched.

            And there was, after all, a map of Britain, and in two corners were tiny dark blobs that were shaped like spirals when Draco looked at them more closely. One was clearly Cuthbert's Corner, where they now stood.

            The other was in Scotland, and as Draco stared, he was sure he knew where, even before Jenkins stabbed her finger out and caught the markings under it.

            "The Fobidden Forest," she breathed.

*

            Rina: Thank you! But it wasn't Draco's greatest fear, as you can see.

            SP777: Yes, he defended it well.

            Seiren: Hopefully this chapter was a little more terrifying!

            delia cerrano: Thank you! Hope you enjoyed this one.
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A Reign of Silence