Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Marathon	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 52456 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 6
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seven—Entangled
            His wrist-bell jolted Harry out of his sound sleep, so sound that he wondered if Malfoy had either cast another spell on him or slipped something into his food. He sat up, whipping sleep from his eyes with the back of one hand while he reached for his wand. “Tempus,” he muttered, and grunted sourly when he realized it was nearly three in the morning. At least that meant a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
            Harry held his wrist-bell out and read the letters printing out on the silver scroll. Another murder. Same method as the Madam Malkin’s one. Corner of Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley. Auror Potter to report.
            Harry cursed softly under his breath and flung himself out of bed. He should have known, he thought, as he dressed in a new pair of trousers and a new set of Auror robes. A Cleaning Charm made his shirt ruffle around him, and then he was ready to go.
            He had hoped that the Unspeakables could handle the case now that Harry and the other Aurors had confirmed a Dark artifact had destroyed the first victim, but of course not. They were better with things than people. They could research and sift and grind and come up with an answer in the end, but not fast enough to prevent the artifact from being used other times.
            Should I leave a note for Malfoy? Harry nearly did, but the bell on his wrist jangled, hard, and reminded him that he was the only Auror summoned, probably because his superiors wanted to avoid alerting a lot of people. This murder was much more public than the last. They would want someone to clean it up as soon as possible.
            And Malfoy would realize where Harry had gone if he vanished from his bed in the middle of the night. There was really only one good reason.
            Harry bounded out of his bedroom and towards the Floo. He was already running through the shops in his head that would still be open this late and let him use their Floo. He could Apparate in, sure, but the Ministry probably didn’t want this to be dramatic, or they would have called more Aurors—
            “Where are you going?”
            Harry started. He thought he hadn’t been that loud, but he had forgotten that he had to pass right by the door of Malfoy’s new bedroom to get to the drawing room. He waved a hand at him. “Sorry. Late night call. Sorry to wake you up.” That was incoherent, but Malfoy had never expected him to be anything else.
            “Who with?” Malfoy turned and walked back into his bedroom, but left his door open. Harry didn’t know why he cared.
            He answered, though, in the interests of keeping peace. “No one else. Just me.”
            A pause. Then Malfoy stepped up to the door and watched him with a cool mask on his face. “When you were up all last night? What are they thinking?”
            “That I had all day to sleep?” Harry rolled his eyes. “And thanks to you, I did sleep most of the day, so I’m fine. And I’m wasting time.” The bell on his wrist hurt this time, as hard as it rang. He turned to Apparate after all. He thought he could come out in an alley beyond Diagon’s main entrance and not alert anyone that way.
            Something was slightly wrong with the Apparition, but he didn’t know what, until he came out of it and checked to make sure he had all his limbs. Then he realized he had one extra. No, a whole body extra. He’d accidentally Side-Alonged Malfoy, who had grabbed hold of Harry’s arm.
            “You idiot!” Harry hissed at him, shaking his arm free and patting Malfoy down roughly about the head and shoulders. No, he wasn’t missing an ear, or his hair, or the whole back of his spine, the way Harry had seen once when the criminal he’d been chasing had Splinched himself horribly. Harry stood back and glared at him. “I didn’t know you were there! I didn’t make the right adjustments for bringing someone with me! I could have hurt you!”
            Malfoy was still and silent. He frowned a few seconds later, as though some of Harry’s statements had finally caught up with his ears. “You didn’t know I was there?”
            Harry shook his head impatiently. “Of course not! You must have grabbed me just as I vanished. You were lucky you’re only minus your common sense.” He turned away from Malfoy and found that at least they were in the little alley he’d been aiming for. “Good. Stay here,” he added over his shoulder, as he began to walk fast towards the murder scene.
            Of course, footsteps followed him. Harry whirled around. “There’s no reason for you to come with me,” he said, as slowly and clearly as he could. “You don’t have to protect me. There’s no one there for you to watch me interact with. And I’m already here, so you can’t put me back to sleep.”
            “If you die in the middle of a murder investigation, Scorpius’s debt is never fulfilled.” Malfoy’s eyes burned. “And if I can save your life, then the debt is fulfilled the old-fashioned way, and I can leave.”
            Harry hesitated, wondering if he wanted that. Malfoy had been right about several things so far, including the fact that Harry volunteered for more shifts than he had to and he functioned better with food in him.
            And in the end, he didn’t own Malfoy. He wasn’t his parent. He wasn’t his husband, even, and couldn’t ask him to stay safe for the sake of their marriage, the way he had with Ginny when she wanted to fly with a broken leg. He nodded. “All right. Come on.”
            Malfoy narrowed his eyes, as though he wanted to know why Harry had given in so easily, but Harry didn’t have time for his little crises. He herded Malfoy across the road and up to the murder scene.
            The body looked the same as it had in Madam Malkin’s, although of course this one was a different body: torn to pieces of cloth and splatters of blood, beyond recognition. Harry grimaced and crouched down. Yes, there were the little arrow-shaped notches in the stone of the road, each surrounded with a scattering of black flakes.
            “Don’t touch those,” he added, seeing Malfoy staring into one of the notches. “They’re the remains of a Dark artifact that even the Unspeakables don’t understand. We think the murder weapon left them.”
            Malfoy rolled his eyes and stood up. “You must truly think I’m stupid, to warn me so consistently,” he muttered, and moved back to lean against the wall that led into Knockturn Alley.
            “I didn’t know if you knew,” Harry muttered back. He returned to circling around the body on his heels, not touching anything except with the shimmer of a Protecto-Preservation Charm around his hand, to shield his skin and preserve the things he picked up.
            No telling who it had been. The clothes were exploded, the blood scattered everywhere. Harry grimaced and shook his head. Without an identity, they would have a much harder time learning if this was a series of random murders, the way that Dark wizards gone insane enough often engaged in, or if the people involved knew each other and the murderer. Perhaps the artifact had even been invented by several people and now one inventor was eliminating the rest.
            “Who reported this?”
            Harry looked up. “Hmm? What?” It took him a moment to realize it was Malfoy who had asked the question; his mind was far away. “Oh. Someone who owns a shop along the street. Probably in Knockturn Alley. They stay open a lot later than Diagon Alley.” He put his head down and worked in another circle, trying to make out footprints—mostly useless on cobblestones, but you never knew.
            “How do you know that? Did your bell say that?”
            Don’t you have another Auror you could ask? But Harry answered in as measured a voice as he could. “No. I’m guessing. Sometimes Aurors do that, you know,” he added, and went back to trying to estimate where the murderer would have stood to throw the weapon. Then he sighed. Kind of useless, without knowing how far the weapon went or what it looked like before it exploded the body.
            But he had seen in Madam Malkin’s that a grain of it could zip straight at someone and hurt them. What if it wasn’t the solid artifact that Harry had envisioned and the Unspeakables were working to find? What if it was just a powder? Then he would know what it looked like and approximately how far the specks could fly, based on his experience with the one flying at him in Madam Malkin’s. And he also knew, based on that, that the speck was unlikely to change directions in mid-flight.
            He raised his wand, intending to create a circle all around the body from the distance he remembered and work his way in from there, but Malfoy interrupted again. “Then how do you know who reported it at all? How do you know this isn’t a trap?”
            “Because,” Harry said, and bit back the spell he wanted to cast because it would probably come out as a curse on Malfoy at this point, “there’s the small matter of there being a body here.”
            Malfoy’s silence pressed on his back like a hand. Harry hissed over his shoulder, “Are you done? I have a theory about the weapon that killed them. I want to get on with creating a circle.”
            “That isn’t a body,” Malfoy said.
            “I’m sure that your friends probably enjoy you being so relentlessly literal,” Harry said. “I don’t. Yes, there isn’t technically a body, just rags and blood, but—”
            “Rags and blood, but no flesh,” Malfoy said, stepping up beside him. “Did you notice that? It would be ridiculously easy to create the appearance of a murder here with the excuse that the weapon destroyed the entire body.”
            Harry paused. He had worked with Aurors he despised before, either because of their politics or because they were prone to hero-worshipping him. He’d learned to listen to good suggestions, no matter where they came from.
            “Maybe the flesh is buried under the blood,” he said, even though he knew Malfoy was right and he should have seen something more than this. Even if the powder had pulverized all the corpse’s bones to dust, where was that dust? And the bits of torn flesh he had seen on the murder scene at Madam Malkin’s?
            Instinct made the hairs on the nape of his neck prickle and sharpened his hearing. Instinct made him twist his head and focus in the right direction, and then he knew what was coming as though someone had jabbed one of the missing bones into his throat. He knew.
            He didn’t bother wasting time with a warning. He just flung himself at Malfoy and bore him to the ground.
            A cascade of the powder soared overhead, landing in a messy circle where Harry and Malfoy had been standing. He heard it hiss like boiling water, and then the ground exploded. Harry winced. He rolled on top of Malfoy, shielding him from the flying dirt and stone that sprang into the air.
            “Let me up.” Malfoy was fighting beneath him. Harry knew why. He hated the idea of owing Harry another life-debt. He wanted to be up and protecting Harry so that he could discharge Scorpius’s in the simplest way possible.
            “Down,” Harry said, and he might have said it in Parseltongue, he wasn’t really sure. The point was that Malfoy stopped acting stupid and froze.
            Harry couldn’t raise a shield against the powder, not without knowing what it did. A simple spell to detect whether it was Dark had made it explode last time. No, he needed to take down the person throwing it, and as soon as possible. And he knew one way to do that, one that was a little reckless but not as much as it would have been if they hadn’t already thrown the powder. Darkness or no darkness, that indicated their enemy knew where they were.
            Harry thrust his wand up and thought, rather than said, Conflagro.
            The jet of light that flew up from his wand would have made a dozen Lumos Charms look small, and that was the point. It leafed out in the shape of a burning tree above Harry, his wand the trunk, the spreading radiance the many, eight-pointed branches. Harry laughed as he felt Malfoy flinch. He wasn’t afraid of exploding powder or mysterious weapons, but being exposed made him want to scuttle and find a rock.
            Harry whipped his head around. He’d prepared for the intense light, and hadn’t lost his vision. The people standing in the direction of the newest apothecary on Knockturn Alley, though, had their hands over their eyes and their heads bowed in a useless attempt at protection. They wore white robes, with an edging of blue around the hoods and the hems. Harry narrowed his eyes, absorbing as many details as he could. He had never seen that particular metallic shade of blue before, and thought it must be hard to weave, dye, or conjure.
            And each of them wore a symbol above their heart. The symbol had a writhing mass of eight legs. Spider.
            Harry lunged at them, only raising a Shield Charm around Malfoy when he was sure that he wouldn’t have any more of the black powder flying their way any second. The people on the ends of their little line turned and ran.
            The one in the middle, who Harry thought was a man, met Harry’s eyes coolly and held up another hand.
            Stupefy, Harry thought, and the red light left his wand and flew at the man just as he tossed the black powder.
            At the same moment, Harry heard footsteps coming up behind him.
            He had only seconds to decide what to do, and defensive instincts won out over offensive ones, the way they always did for Harry. He locked his legs and flipped backwards with an ease that he heard Malfoy damn him for, because the next instant he had crashed into Malfoy and borne him to earth. Because of course Malfoy had got around the shield and come up behind him, in his obsession with not owing Harry anything.
            “I forgive this life-debt before it gets started!” Harry snapped into Malfoy’s ear, or what he hoped was the ear, and swung back around, to see if his Stunner had landed.
            It hadn’t. It had met the black powder in midair, from the fading sparkles of angry little red explosions left behind, and not touched the man in the white robe. The man drew something that looked like a filmy veil across the lower part of his face. Meanwhile, Harry, knowing he was going to get away, memorized his deep blue eyes and the small scar that he could see curving around the outside of his right eye socket.
            Then the white-robed wizard whirled on the spot and Apparated.
            Harry sighed and stood up, wincing when his muscles protested. Yes, he was really getting too old for the more flexible side of Auror work. Luckily, he didn’t think gathering what he could of the black powder and any other evidence the white-robed wizards might have left behind would take much more bending.
            “You prevented me from aiding you.”
            Harry looked up at the sky, from which the last traces of his Blaze Spell were fading, and shook his head. Did anyone else ever have to cope with a burden like Malfoy?
            “This murder was probably fake, but I saw that weapon destroy someone so completely once before that we couldn’t identify them,” Harry said. “Of course I wasn’t going to risk it touching you. And I didn’t know where it would go when you came running up behind me, or that a spell touching it could neutralize it.”
            “I could have helped.”
            “You helped by being here and warning me it was a trap,” Harry said, finally turning to face him. “I probably wouldn’t have noticed in time. Thank you.”
            Malfoy was white and shaking. His wand gave little tremors now and then that made Harry suddenly realize he had probably never faced battle since the end of the war. It was such a commonplace occurrence to Harry that he had forgotten the threat of sudden violent death flying around unnerved normal people.
            “Hey,” he said, gently taking Malfoy’s arm and patting it a little. “You okay?”
            Malfoy drew away, closing himself down the way he did when Harry questioned his commitment to the life-debt. His eyes were wide and dark and horribly promising as he glared at Harry.
            “You saved my life again,” he said. “Twice. And you prevented me from helping you in all the ways that I should have, if my service to pay back Scorpius’s life-debt is to help you get your life into order.”
            “I did,” Harry said, and couldn’t keep the hopeful note out of his voice. Malfoy had already helped him, but Harry wasn’t looking forward to another three weeks of discussions like this. “Doesn’t that mean I’ve refused the service, and I can’t do that, and now you have to leave?”
            Malfoy seized the front of his robes and jerked him close. Harry went with it only because he knew all the many, many ways that he could dig his wand into Malfoy’s ribs from this angle.
            “I would have saved your life and this could have been over.” Malfoy’s voice was low and shook with passion. “Or you could have trusted that I knew what I was doing and shielded yourself instead of me.” He shook Harry a little. “Now, instead, we have a tangle to deal with. Do you know how many debts link us now, counting the earlier ones that we ignored?”
            “I thought we weren’t counting them,” Harry pointed out. “That’s what ignored means.”
            Malfoy closed his eyes. “More to the point, Potter,” he said, speaking as if he were utterly exhausted, “you have to consider that whoever set up this trap informed you of it by your wrist-bell. That argues, at the least, that Auror instruments have been compromised, and you may not be able to trust any message sent that way in the near future.”
            Harry stood still for a second, then sighed. “You’re right. Listen. Let me clean up some here and get what evidence I can, and then we’ll go home and talk about it, okay?”
            Malfoy waited for him in silence, not even tapping his foot or moving his wand around. Harry glanced at him now and then as he scraped dark powder up from the earth and put it in potions vials, mainly the powder that had met his Stunner. It seemed a lot more inert and less dangerous than the other stuff.
            I wonder if he knows how uptight he is, and that he might need help just as much as I do?
*
            moodysavage: I think Harry would have a harder time not saving Draco’s life. But it is very hard, nonetheless.
            pittwitch; Thank you!
            delia cerrano: Draco doesn’t have a job, other than dad, but he’s had a lot of time to think about what happened when he was younger.
            The facts about his divorce will eventually come out, but not right now.
            jadestonedreams: Thank you!
            SP777: Me too.
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Marathon