Chains of Fool's Gold | By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1 |
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Chapter Seven—Forerunners “Of course we’re sympathetic, Mr. Infanta.” The reporter probably wasn’t as insincere as Rita Skeeter, Harry thought, but she sure sounded like it. She divided her smile between Prince, who was disguised as Mr. Infanta, and Harry, disguised even more heavily by glamours with a thick hood over his face. “Who’s your friend?” They were sitting in a small, neat office of a small, neat paper, called The Witch’s Eye. It was meant as a sort of rival to the Daily Prophet, but they’d had trouble attracting an audience, Prince had told Harry. Harry had objected to going there to spread rumors instead of to the Prophet itself, and Prince shook his head. “They have too many wards on those offices that detect glamours. The Witch’s Eye can’t afford that kind of security.” So Harry had agreed to come here to start their lies, and he knew from Prince’s nod that he should take the hood down. He pulled it back slowly, trying to give the motion the right sense of drama that Prince had talked about. The witch gasped and cowered back in her chair. Harry knew his face looked awful, and he had only been allowed to watch from the corner of one eye as Hermione and Prince applied the glamours in the mirror. It made it look like he had a long, ragged red scar bristling with infection running from the corner of his jaw up the right side of his face, and burns on the left side, and one eye gone. He let his head loll on his neck and tried to keep from laughing. Luckily, Prince was talking smoothly, and could distract the woman. “You see why we didn’t want to go to the Ministry.” The reporter swallowed and raised a hand to touch the chunky gold necklace around her neck. Harry remembered her name then, seeing her toy with her jewelry. Opal Richards. Not that she wore an opal, but, well. What he remembered, he remembered. “Why not?” Richards whispered a second later. “It looks like a matter for the Aurors to me.” Prince leaned forwards, his face mysterious. Up to this point, he had got them into the reporter’s presence on whispers and half-truths, but he was going to reveal the “truth” now, Harry knew. “Not if the Ministry is the one that did this to my friends.” Richards gasped again, but Harry recognized the sound this time. Not so much fear as revelation. Almost satisfaction. She knew why they had come to her now, and unless Harry was mistaken—which he usually wasn’t after years of meeting reporters—she was going to be happy to oblige them. “Tell me everything,” she said, and got out her quill. This one had some gold on the shaft, Harry noticed, privately amused. Who could write with a golden quill? Apparently a pretentious reporter who would really like to be Rita Skeeter but wasn’t there yet. “How long ago did this happen? What happened? Who did it? Why hasn’t the Ministry stopped yet?” Prince began to murmur the tale they had agreed on. “The Unspeakables approached my friend here and asked him to help them in an experiment. They said they weren’t completely sure, but they were fairly sure they could give him wandless magic. Of course, he agreed. Who doesn’t want that?” Me, Harry thought. But his role here was to sit still and drip, so he just let his jaw sag open and moaned a little. Richards gave him an uneasy look, but she was breathlessly focused on Prince’s story the next second. “What kind of wandless magic did they say they could give him?” “Anything. Everything.” Prince spread his hands. “He didn’t ask about the specifics. They couldn’t tell him any. They just said there was power, and if they could perform the ritual on him, he would have it. They didn’t care about having power for themselves. They just wanted to give it to him, and then study it.” Richards shut her slightly gaping mouth and shook her head at Harry. “That’s the point where I would have said that it was too good to be true, and run in the opposite direction,” she murmured. Harry let his jaw sag open some more. Maybe that prompted Richards to pay attention to Prince, or maybe she decided that she was tired of looking at him, but she swallowed and focused more on Prince for the moment. And Harry could see it working just like Prince had said it would, the story, mingled with parts of Jeremiah’s memories, and Narcissa’s, and what they knew about using the altar, but not too much that was true, right at first. Their strategy was going to be to spread around dark rumors that were horrifying and grotesque, and then catch the public’s attention, and reveal more and more of the truth later. That would lead their readers along a path where they were struggling not to pay attention, but were caught by the sense that the worst lay ahead. And showing off the worst—the memories of Jeremiah and killing the twisted and anything else they could lay their hands on—wouldn’t happen until they were ready to make the final move and cage their audience in the Ministry. Finally, Prince ended his story with a little bow of his head and the whisper, “So, you see, we cannot trust the Ministry. The Unspeakables have tendrils everywhere. There may be people there who would know what we’re talking about and try to help us, but they could be silenced or tricked or bribed too easily.” Richards’s eyes were shining. Harry concealed a snort, which wouldn’t go well with his glamour. Yes, she was going to appreciate a story of conspiracy and all the ways that she could exploit it more than she would a simple, straightforward one. Hermione had had questions for Prince at first about how the plan would work; Harry knew she liked to believe the wizarding press was better than it was. But even she had to admit, at last, that this was genius. “You can count on me,” Richards said, with a firm nod. “I’ll spread the truth, and the Ministry won’t crush us. I have an uncle who works there, high up in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. There’s no way that he would allow them to do something to me.” That had probably been another reason Prince chose Richards, Harry realized. Or George had. He had thought they were simply approaching the best reporter of a smaller paper, but having kin in the Ministry was no small consideration. “Thank you.” Prince stood up, bowed to her, and held the bow for a long second. “You have no idea how relieved you make me. To see justice done at last…” He let his voice trail off, and took out his handkerchief to dabble at his eyes. He was an acting master, Harry thought. There had probably been some of that about Snape, too, for him to fool so many people as a spy. He thought this was a little over-the-top, really, but Richards swallowed it. She even gave Prince a smile that was almost maternal and patted his arm. “We’ll see justice done. We will.” She gave one more fascinated glance at Harry’s glamour, and sighed. “I suppose there’s no chance of a photograph?” Prince shook his head and put his arm protectively around Harry’s shoulders. “And no real names, either. I’m sorry. If all goes well, we’ll come back in a week and let you take some pictures.” He paused. “You’re sure that you’ll be safe if it doesn’t go well? I hate to think of you getting in trouble because you were brave enough to help us.” Richards smiled at him, a little, wise smile that made Harry think she might be smarter than she looked. “I’ve had a few tangles with Unspeakables myself. They shouldn’t be allowed to do what they do to decent people. Don’t worry. I’ll settle things.” “Thank you,” said Prince, and bowed again, and bowed one more time. Harry resisted the temptation to dig an elbow into his ribs; he wasn’t supposed to be coherent enough for that. But he didn’t want Prince to overplay it and make Richards start suspecting something. On the other hand, from the way she sighed and mooned over his face a bit, Harry supposed the chance of that was lowered. She was clearly a reporter who believed the world worked the way Rita Skeeter only wrote it worked. They’d made a good choice. They Apparated once they were outside the Witch’s Eye building, and Prince made a good show of peering theatrically from side to side, in case someone was watching them from the building and they had to put on that good show. They appeared outside Cuthbert’s Corner, and Harry immediately removed the glamour from his face. Prince snorted a little. “It’s not so bad, compared to the way that people usually look at you, is it?” he asked. “Having someone gasping at the way I look because they think I’ve been tortured isn’t really any better than having someone doing it because they recognize the famous scar,” Harry said dryly, and put his wand away. “What’s next?”* “You think you can come up with some way to make them see the truth?” Draco asked, leaning back and studying the cage bars that bound in the Aurors Granger and Harry had captured at Number Twelve. “That would really be the best. Trained Aurors are a resource we shouldn’t waste.” As he had thought would happen, those words made the Aurors start hooting derisively. Weasley—the one with the tricks—grinned next to him, and that made a few of the more cautious Aurors shut up immediately. The rest kept talking, and Draco was glad. That meant they missed the threat, and it was only effective on the few intelligent ones, the ones who could recognize an opponent when it appeared right in front of their faces. “I think,” Weasley said, “that I can come up with something.” He flicked his wrist, and Draco took a step back. Even though Weasley had reassured both of them—all of them—over and over that this was safe, it still had the effect of not making Draco want to stand too close to him. There was a whirring noise that finally silenced the more determined jeers from the cages, and a tiny creature similar to Prince’s metal hummingbird soared up from Weasley’s hand. It had the form of a bird, too, but one that resembled an eagle. And it was made of gold that sparkled and glittered in the permanent Lumos charms they’d left to light the prison room. The bird spun around slowly. Draco could hear Weasley muttering under his breath, and he knew it was a mixture of prayers and incantations that told it to stay in the air. They could use this particular trick only once, maybe twice if the bird didn’t self-destruct on the way back to Weasley’s hand, and that meant they had to pick the Auror they used it on very carefully. Draco let his eyes travel along the staring rows, and found the victim he was looking for. He was one of those Aurors who had tried to ask questions about Jeremiah when Draco and Harry’s Weasley had come out of the cage. He stood near the back, not the front, and his eyes were wide enough, and he panted enough. Draco thought his name was Arthur something, and he wasn’t someone Draco remembered as being particularly corrupt. He caught Weasley’s eye and nodded to Arthur someone. Weasley spun around and released the tiny eagle with a crack of his wrist. Draco concealed a wince. It sounded impressive, but he hoped that Weasley didn’t need to use a wand today. The little eagle flew straight at Arthur someone, nearly as fast as the hummingbird, and it was a long time before he thought of flinging his hands up in defense—too long. The bird dug into his shoulder, burrowed in with beak and claws, and got soaked in his blood. Then it buried itself there, and Arthur dug at it for a second, trying to pull it out. Then his hands dropped down to his sides and he stared straight ahead, his jaw hanging and a stupefied expression on his face. “So it begins,” Draco told the other Aurors with supreme indifference. He ignored the mutters that were building up. “We can learn everything about you, and we can use it to our advantage. So this is what you’ll get if you refuse to cooperate with us. You think the Unspeakables and the rituals they performed were bad?” He smiled around at all of them. “We’re not actually bound by the Ministry’s code of conduct anymore. We know that they’ll kill us if they catch us. So we might as well go ahead and do everything we can to learn your secrets. There’s no one to stop us now.” Weasley coughed a little. Draco turned to him as if reluctantly. “Yes? You had something to say?” Weasley sighed and shook his head. “I do think that we shouldn’t try to damage them,” he said, his eyes on his bird. “They could tell us a lot more if they were allowed to keep their own minds.” “But we can get the secrets out of them, and they won’t tell us anyway,” Draco said, shaking his head wisely. He stalked back and forth in front of the cage bars, smiling, unable to stop smiling. Even though this was an act, he found that it was an act he liked. He was tired of playing nice, of agreeing with everyone, of not speaking up against the Ministry because it would only make things worse. The Ministry was the one who had created most of the twisted. They were the ones who had assigned Harry and Draco to the Socrates Corps and told them to kill the twisted, and then exiled them because they were too good at it. Draco wanted to destroy them, and he was going to be good at it. “They’re loyal to the Ministry,” he said, and he put a shadow of his father on his face, in his voice. Lucius had taught him much, and if this was the only way his memory would ever matter to Draco again, it at least meant that he would put on one more show worthy of a Malfoy. “They won’t tell us anything. They’ll think that their loyalties are greater than their lives. I don’t see why we should allow them to keep either one. Let them go, and they’ll only run squealing back to our enemies.” “But we don’t have to let them go,” said Weasley, sounding a little weak. Draco wondered if he was about to lose control of his laughter, and hoped not. That would ruin everything. “We could—keep them here. At least for a while.” “And where would we get the money to feed them?” Draco sneered. “We already couldn’t manage if it weren’t for having a house-elf. The Ministry froze our accounts. The Ministry turned the public against us. There’s everything except fairness here. I don’t see why we should have to be fair to enemies who aren’t fair to us.” He spun around in place and stared at the nearest Auror, who recoiled. She was watching him instead of Arthur someone in fear now, and that was all to the good. “No, we have to get rid of them eventually. I think killing them is the most efficient way.” “Malfoy.” Weasley touched his arm. Draco glanced at him. He was about to lose control of the laughter, or so Draco thought for a second, given the way his eyes shifted about. Then Draco realized the truth. Weasley’s face was a bit pale, and he kept staring at Draco as if he had never seen him before. He believed Draco. Draco was the one who had to force down laughter this time, and instead turn around and scowl at the Aurors. “We’ll still have to dispose of the bodies,” he muttered. “But even that would cost less than the food.” He saw Weasley relax out of the corner of his eye. They had never seriously intended to murder the Aurors, and it seemed that Weasley was finally remembering it. But Draco had to congratulate himself on his performance, if he had managed to keep Weasley going like that. “I think our patient is finished,” Draco added, as the tiny eagle finally pulled away from Arthur someone and flew back to Weasley. Weasley gave him a stern look, as much to say as he knew that, and would appreciate Draco not interrupting his grand moment. Draco grinned back at him and stepped away, leaning against the wall, leaving their prisoners to stare uneasily at him. Weasley cast his spells on the eagle, and it seemed that the snap of his wrist had been merely cosmetic, after all. Nothing crawled out of the blood on the eagle’s claws, and the spells flowed easily back and forth across it. Then the blood began to turn silver, and Draco nudged the Pensieve into the prisoners’ view. Until then, it had been sitting on the floor near Weasley’s feet, out of easy sight. Draco smiled as he heard several low curses from the watchers. Yes, they might well feel that way. Some of them would realize what was going on now. An invention that changed blood into memory, and made literal all the pure-blood metaphors that most of them would have grown up hearing, either from pure-blood families or single parents, was indeed a wondrous thing. Draco turned around to bend over the basin and see what the memories were doing. He saw Weasley holding his hand over the Pensieve, his expression intense and rapt, and then Weasley knelt down and plunged his head into the liquid. As near as Draco could determine, they were normal memories. He didn’t join Weasley. They would both put their backs to the prisoners that way, and if there was any time they might try something desperate, it was now, when Draco and Weasley had thoroughly frightened them. Draco looked at them instead, letting his eyes pass over their faces, absorbing what he could of their fear and their anger and their disdain. Arthur someone was rubbing his arm and glaring especially hard. “It hurt,” he said. “When it first attacked me.” Draco nodded. “And it would have hurt if you had managed to curse us. You were hiding inside Harry’s house intending to curse us, weren’t you?” Arthur looked away. Draco smiled. Yes, they had chosen their victim well. They had wanted someone who had a bit of sympathy for them, and a bit of interest in what the Ministry was doing to the twisted without being told. Arthur asking about Jeremiah had been a good sign. Weasley surfaced with a gasp, and stood up, and turned around to face Arthur. Draco moved out of the way a little. If his face or his voice or the combination of them both had frightened Weasley before this, now Weasley frightened him. Not the expression, exactly. He just looked intense enough that Draco would have thought long and hard about opposing him. “I know what you wanted most,” Weasley said softly. “I know that you wanted the wandless magic to prove to your father that you were as powerful as you said you were, the summer you stole your sister’s wand. I know that you didn’t mean to wave it and curse your sister with those boils that still mar her face, and then you wished for the wandless magic to undo it. But you never could, could you? And you still think of your sister with those boils on her face because you weren’t powerful enough.” Arthur recoiled from him. “What do you—you can’t—” His voice croaked out. Draco smiled, and Weasley smiled with him. Weasley’s bird had been made to seek out any memories associated with wandless magic, including negative ones. This was the way into sympathy for the rest of them. “I know that everyone wants it at one time or another,” Weasley said, and turned around to meet pair after pair of eyes. “The wandless magic, the accidental magic. You want to cure wounds, or cause them. You want to grant your own wishes, or someone else’s. You want to have the magical creature of your dreams, rescue one, take one away from someone else. But you never get it, and you forget about the dreams and wishes after a while, because why do you keep thinking about something impossible?” They were all staring at Weasley. Draco kept from nodding, but just barely. Weasley had written most of this speech before they came into the room. At the moment, Draco was mostly impressed with how natural he was making it sound. “That was what the twisted that the Ministry created wanted,” Weasley whispered, now stalking back and forth in front of the cage. “Just a chance to have their dreams come true. The Unspeakables told them they could, and all they had to do was trust those same Unspeakables. People who knew all about Dark magic and artifacts and ways to use them safely. People who have those artifacts because they aren’t safe for the general public to use. People who are supposed to be guardians and custodians.” He whipped around and made a woman near him recoil. “Would you expect to be turned into an insane monster because you tried to follow your dreams?” he demanded. The woman shook her head, staring. Arthur was rubbing his arm as if wondering how all of that had come out of his blood. “And neither did they expect it,” Weasley said, letting his voice lower. “And they didn’t deserve it.” He paused, and Draco thought he was the only one in the room audibly breathing. “But that’s what the Ministry did to them. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to prevent more of. That’s the kind of thing the Ministry is fighting to defend, and you’re fighting to defend if you continue serving the Ministry.” He glared at them impartially, and then turned and stormed out of the room. Draco shrugged at the gaping Aurors and followed him. “Good one,” Draco murmured, once they were far enough down the stairs that he was sure no one could hear. Weasley grinned at him. “You, too. You were brilliant. I was a little afraid you meant it.” “Only a little?” Draco asked, and then laughed when he got a sideways grin. It seemed Weasley was a better actor even than Draco had taken him for. And if this ploy worked the way it should… They would have a troop of witnesses on their hands. Maybe even willing fighters, or news-spreaders.It was worth the risk.
*SP777: Yes, they are. Though they’re trying to make sure they can get as many people curious and worried about it first as they can.
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