Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28254 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Eight—In the Dark

            Harry leaned back on the tiny pallet they let him have in these cells and looked up at the ceiling. It was invisible in the darkness, of course, but that didn’t matter. He had much better night vision than he’d had a few years ago. The longer he squinted, the more he could see, since a faint light did play from the guard station a few corridors away.

            The front of the cell was a line of bars, in keeping with tradition. But there wasn’t straw or rats. The Ministry, Harry had decided a long time ago, was deficient in the way it tried to keep with tradition. The floor was pale, pure, smooth stone, with no cracks to hide anything in or objects to hurl. The pallet was bolted to the floor, and in one corner was the bolted bucket that he was supposed to use as a latrine.

            And, well, there were the wards. Harry reckoned no mental journey around the Ministry’s Dark Cells was complete without a mention of them. The lines of grey and black were invisible unless one tried to get close to the bars or use a Dark Arts spell. Then they flared to life and jolted through one’s body with terrible force, stealing the concentration needed to escape or use powerful magic.



            Harry closed his eyes. Nothing to see, nothing to do, and he wouldn’t challenge the wards or try to escape unless there was an emergency. No use in letting the Ministry know that he could challenge the wards and win, because he had walked paths in the last few years that had made him learned in pain.

            He knew what Ron and Hermione would say if they were here now; he could hear their voices, conjure their worried faces. “Harry, sooner or later they won’t be content with the Dark Cells. They’ll investigate you, and then what will they find?”

            Harry shrugged. A whole lot of nothing was what they would find, although it was easier to argue with the imaginary Ron and Hermione in the darkness than it was to argue with them in reality. He had been careful. He had the Dark Arts books and parchments and scrolls locked away behind wards where no one would notice them in the first place, or in his memory. He had the mask he had been building for years, the mask of the meek Harry Potter who always did exactly what the Ministry told him, and for that reason was a valuable tool. He had the ability to kneel, to say what they needed him to, to put any expression on his face. Everyone knew Dark Arts users were arrogant and impossible to control, and they couldn’t control themselves, either. Someone who could wasn’t a habitual user.

            The Dark Cells were meant for holding those Aurors who seemed to be drifting in the direction of such spells, either because of constant contact with Dark wizards or because they were wild with grief and rage. They could perform any other kind of magic, but the pain—so ran the theory—would make them start to associate Dark magic with something they hated. Make that connection strong enough, and it would overcome the pleasure that could come with the use of the spells, instead.

            Harry didn’t believe the theory, but it was too useful to him to give up. He had spent five or six nights in the Dark Cells, and always after or during cases where someone could easily believe that he had used the spells because of understandable frustration with the process or the suspects.

            This case of the dead girl was one such.

            Harry’s hands clenched, although he had been lying back on the pallet until then with them resting, relaxed, next to his head. Should someone could by, he had to have the ability to fool them. He would look penitent and bored. That worked so much better than angry, he was amazed everyone didn’t do it.

            He shook his head and closed his eyes. Give himself away too soon, get himself arrested for real and true, and he couldn’t help her. He was far more likely to get locked away instead, and someone else who cared less would take the case.

            Ron doesn’t care less than you do.

            But he did, in one way. Ron hadn’t felt her die. He hadn’t understood the extent of her terror, her pain, her helplessness. Harry had. He raised the cry in his head again, and the sounds of those merciless voices, and the babble of Campion’s confession. All Campion had cared about was distancing himself from it, so no one would blame him. He didn’t care that someone had died. He didn’t care that the children he identified and snatched went through such horror. Perhaps he would care if he did, perhaps he would throw up or moan or mumble some more, but that wouldn’t bring any of them back.

            Harry froze the thoughts in his head, and held them there as a block of ice, glittering and turning in deep black water. His magic would rise if he didn’t watch out, and although he mostly cast through his wand, he could do…other things.

            The other things were his business. His property, just like some of the rituals he had learned and the potions he knew the theory behind and could identify, if not brew. He couldn’t give himself away. What he did was too important.

            Steps along the corridor. Someone had felt the magic pressing against the wards and was coming to investigate. Harry let his head loll to the side and his eyes drift closed, his chest rising and falling as though he was waking from a normal stage of sleep. When he sensed someone at the bars, he looked up.

            The man wore the black-and-silver robes of those who guarded the Dark Cells, the silver visible as fading sparks in the faint light here and there, and carried a lantern that would shed light for his eyes, although none for Harry’s. He stared at Harry, and Harry blinked and looked back. He shivered a little, then turned away with a grumble and settled himself on his side, tugging the thin blanket around his shoulders.

            There was a silence so long and tense that Harry wondered if this was a new guard, eager to investigate any disturbance no matter how minor. Most of the guards in the Dark Cells knew Harry as a model prisoner, and would have informed the new ones of that.

            Then the guard snorted and stomped away again. Harry listened to the sound of the departing footfalls, and compared them to the sound of the dead girl’s cry in his mind. One was infinitely less important than the other.

            He never slept safe anywhere except in his own bed, with his wand under the pillow and wards singing around him, but in the Dark Cells, he could relax enough to doze. Anyone who might try to use Dark magic here would suffer for it, inside or out. He let his mind drift, focusing on images of chains and racks and ropes. Sometimes he thought they were drawn from his conjectures about the fate of the dead girl and the others who had been taken; sometimes he thought they were what he would like to do to the captors.

*

            “M’lfoy? It’s too bloody early.”

            Draco bit his lip so that he didn’t respond as he wanted to. It was, in fact, almost ten in the morning, and although Weasley had worked late last night, Draco didn’t think he could have gone to bed much later than Draco had. Writing his letter, doing it carefully, had consumed almost an hour.

            And Weasley hadn’t owled back, which he easily could have, which meant Draco had to take the battle to him and firecall his house.

            Weasley’s wild red hair stuck out every which way, and he kept running his hand over his face, leaving red streaks behind. There were red rims around his eyes, as well, and his lips looked brighter than necessary. Perhaps his goal is to be crimson in every way.

            Draco allowed fifteen seconds to pass before he snapped, “A man and woman took Potter away last night. I want to know where.”

            Weasley changed. One moment he was an ordinary bloke crouched in front of his fireplace on his knees, answered an unwanted call early in the morning; the next moment he uncoiled and seized his wand from somewhere Draco hadn’t seen him put it, leaning in as if he would tear out Draco’s throat even through the flames that burned safely between them. “What?” he hissed. “What are you talking about?”

            Draco remained still, although it took more courage than he thought it strictly should have. “What I said in my letter to you,” he said. “Potter and I were stopped on our way out of the Ministry last night. A man and woman he seemed to know, who put chains around his wrists and took him away.”

            “Did they say anything about him using Dark Arts?” Weasley demanded. The sleep had vanished from his eyes. He could whirl around and kill another new Grindelwald in the next moment, and Draco would not be surprised. For the first time, he felt he understood why Potter might remain partners with the oaf. Not an oaf at all times, and a useful partner to push work off on when he is.

            “Yes,” Draco said.

            “Damn it,” Weasley whispered, ducking his head. “The Dark Cells. Holding places for Aurors who need to calm down and stop using addictive curses,” he added, as if he could see Draco’s eyebrows rising. “Harry’s been there—five times now? Six? No, wait, I think this is the seventh. I’ve told him that sooner or later the Ministry’ll notice he’s using it too much and see through that mask he wears, but he never listens to me.” An old bitterness there, in the back of his voice, like a burned-out cauldron, Draco thought.

            “He does this often?” Draco asked quietly, thinking of the intensity in Potter’s green eyes, and the way he held himself, and the tightly leashed energy coiled under the surface of his skin. He had thought Potter had grown more relaxed morally in the last few years. He had not realized he might be close to an edge that not even Draco’s father had ever crossed.

            “Not sure why I should tell you,” Weasley said, pulling himself back with a brusqueness that left Draco reeling. Then he paused and shook his head. “What were you doing in the Ministry, anyway? What did you say in this owl of yours?”

            In a brisk voice of his own, Draco confessed all the important parts of their evening, including the arrest and the way that Potter had dismissed the Aurors. He left out the way that Potter’s changes had confused and startled him, and how he felt when Potter touched him. Those were private, for his viewing alone.

            And perhaps for Potter’s, someday.

            Remember that this may lead to the vision.

            “Huh,” Weasley said at the end of his recitation, and bowed his head again. Draco held himself back. Thoughts would race under that red hair, if he let them. That much was plain. He did not like the waiting, but then, he had not liked it with Potter, either. At least Weasley seemed less likely than Potter to explode into motion and change Draco’s world with him.

            “No, I don’t know why Moonstone and Schroeder would have wanted to arrest you,” Weasley muttered at last. “But Harry’s right that I didn’t get any more out of Campion. He shut up after a while, as though he was afraid of saying too much, but by then he was starting to repeat himself.” He smiled grimly. “I should have let Harry at him. I reckon Harry might have used those memories of the girl’s death to—”

            “What?” Draco asked quietly.

            He’d used the right tone, one that got enough under Weasley’s defenses to make him answer before he thought about it. “The ones he got with the Retrovoyance spell. What he saw.” Then he stopped and stared at Draco. His eyes were harder than rubies. “You can’t tell anyone about that, Malfoy.”

            “I have no intention of doing so,” Draco said, while his mental picture of Potter changed again. This time, it had jumped off a cliff.

            He is mad. Or dying. Walking around, breathing, presenting the image of sanity, but mad or dying.

            “You have spoken to him about this spell?” Draco asked Weasley. “That it could permanently alter his mind to be exposed to the feelings and memories of the dead?”

            Weasley didn’t answer for long moments, which Draco hadn’t expected. He opened his mouth to snap that a simple “yes” or “no” shouldn’t have troubled Weasley so much to utter, then shut it again when he saw Weasley’s face. There was anguish there only his parents’ expressions during the war had equaled. He waited.

            Weasley swallowed, and then began to speak in a bare whisper. Draco leaned towards the fireplace.

            “Harry doesn’t give a fuck about the living, I think, except me and Hermione, and my family to a certain extent. He cares about the dead, the people who die on the cases and the people who died in the war. Do you know what he does with his weekends? Visits graves. And buys gifts for the families of the victims from our cases that he can safely pretend came from somewhere else. And makes sure that their children, or their little siblings, or whatever, are doing well in school. He tortured two people on the last case. He thinks he stays on the right side of the thin line between Light and Dark magic, but I don’t think he does. Or that he can for long.”

            “Of course he can’t,” Draco said, trying not to think of those green eyes turning the color of coal, or why it bothered him so much that they should. Simple. The one who saved me from arrest is now my ally, like it or not. And that means his safety is my concern. “The Retrovoyance spell does exactly what you’re describing, draws the caster in the direction of the dead and makes them more real to him than the living.”

            Weasley sighed, a sound that seemed to leave him swaying as if he was light-headed. “I know,” he said. “That’s what all the books say.” Draco bit back the comment of shock that Weasley read, and was glad when Weasley’s flood of reminiscences continued uninterrupted. “But I don’t know how to stop him. It’s—weird. He gets so intense about it, and he drags you into it with him. He makes it sound so reasonable when he talks about it.”

            Draco showed his teeth in spite of himself. “Of course that happens. Another sign of the spell altering the caster’s mind. I would wager that most of Potter’s changes in the last few years can be traced directly to that spell.”

            Potter. You idiot.

            Weasley looked up at that, with a flash of his own teeth. “You’re ridiculous, Malfoy. It’s not like that’s the only spell Harry uses. I would wager that the combined effect of all the spells is changing him.”

            “Again,” Draco said. “Why don’t you force him to change?”

            “Partially the arguing, like I said,” Weasley said. “And partially—” Again the sigh. “Because it does feel pretty bloody good to arrest people who would commit crimes like scraping someone’s face off. And partially because Harry hasn’t done a bunch of other things someone who’s committed to the Dark Arts would do. He hasn’t studied it obsessively. He hasn’t dropped all his friends. He hasn’t become insane and incapable of love. He still values other people before himself. I want to get him some help, but I don’t think I could convince any Mind-Healer or anyone at the Ministry to do it. They would talk to him and see someone completely normal. That’s what’s happened with all the Mind-Healers he had to go and see after our most troubling cases, anyway. They basically return him to work with this happy little note about how honest he is and how he doesn’t have any major problems.”

            Draco closed his eyes. So Potter danced on the edge, never falling over it, and because he was Harry bloody Potter, doer of impossible deeds with no precedent in the history of the world, he managed it.

            The cramp that seized his gut as he thought about that was part fear, part exasperation, part desire, part envy.

            “So,” Draco said. “And these people who took him to the Dark Cells are—only more who’ll let him go in time?”

            Weasley nodded. “Whether it’ll be in enough time to do something about Moonstone and Schroeder, I don’t know. That sounds like something urgent.”

            “It could be,” Draco murmured, thinking. His mind burst in several directions, trying the new image of Potter he now had against the one he’d built up over the last few days. He wondered how much of the darkness in Potter’s eyes came not from anger or irritation at putting up with Draco, but the spells eating him alive.

            Weasley says they don’t…

            Weasley is hardly likely to recognize the more intimate signs of Dark Arts addiction.

            “But I contacted you because you’re Potter’s partner and I thought I would need your help in breaking him free,” Draco said, going on briskly with a small nod to Weasley. “Obviously I don’t, not if he’s spending his time in a group of cells that he’s been in before. What?” he added, because Weasley was gaping at him, exactly as if Draco had done something wrong instead of speaking the truth as openly and positively as he could.

            “You said—break him free.” Weasley shook his head. “I never thought that you would agree to do something like that, take a risk for someone not connected to your family.”

            “Potter has taken risks for me,” Draco said, and maintained his mask-like face and cool voice. “I can’t forget that. I don’t disdain it. It does mean that I think he should be free as soon as possible because he’s the only one who might help me work through the scattered pieces of the puzzle into some kind of true understanding.”

            “I could do the same thing,” Weasley offered. “I know as much information about the case Campion was arrested in relation to as Harry does, and you’ve told me about Moonstone and Schroeder.”

            Not everything, Draco said, but he shook his head and replied with a temperance that he knew would make his father proud of him. “Strange as it is to say it after our childhood, Weasley, I trust him more than I trust you.”

            Weasley blinked, and then offered him a flash of teeth. “Yeah. I reckon I know what you mean.”

            Draco nodded back. Their blood feud simply ran too deep to be put aside like a bad apple. Potter had done something evil to Draco, but that paled beside all the wounds their ancestors had inflicted on each other—wounds that called for blood and would produce ever more of it, because the people who had committed those offenses were dead now and the original meaning had changed.

            For a moment, they hovered in that pure-blood understanding, and then Weasley turned his head ahead and listened. “The other Floo just chimed,” he said, as if Draco’s sharp-edged silence had pierced his ears. “Hermione’ll answer it, but I thought it might be Harry.”

            And if it was, they could end this uncomfortable, revealing conversation, Draco thought, and fell silent, waiting. He heard footsteps, a low voice, and Weasley responding in a muffled tone that sounded as if he sat underwater.

            Weasley’s head popped fully back into the flames, and he nodded at Draco. “It is Harry,” he said. “He’s Flooing over in half an hour. Do you want—” He hesitated, then ground the invitation out between clenched teeth. “Do you want to come and meet him here?”

            Draco only needed a moment to think. His pragmatism was stronger than any clasping chains of custom and habit, and they needed a private place to speak, something they couldn’t be sure of if they came to his shop. Moonstone and Schroeder had had one man connected to Potter’s case among his assistants. There might be more.

            “Yes,” he said, and watched Weasley’s face turn puce before he wrestled himself back under control.

            “Good,” he said, and might even have meant it, in another universe. “I’ll tell Harry.” And he pulled out of the Floo, and it shut down in front of Draco, who pulled slowly back from the fireplace and dusted soot from his knees.

            So. He would have Weasley’s help, as well as Potter’s, fighting Moonstone and Schroeder, if that was what he decided he wanted to do.

            He didn’t see that he had any choice. If the two Aurors, or Unspeakables, or whoever they were, hadn’t interrupted them last night, then he would have had it already, since Potter would have confessed everything that had happened to Weasley. It might be better this way, since Draco had been able to pick and choose what he wanted to say for the first introduction.

            It would work out. They would find some way around Moonstone and Schroeder and the blocks they might set up in the way, and discover their reasons for arresting Campion and Draco in the first place. With two skilled Aurors on his side, Draco thought, the investigation would go substantially faster than it would have if he had worked alone, or only with Potter.

            And the less time he spent alone with Potter, the less likely that that ridiculous vision of Plumm’s would come true.

            He ought to have been pleased by the way things were working out, with the possible exception of the need to spend more time in Weasley’s company. He should not have felt this tremble in his stomach that threatened to spread up his limbs and become dissatisfaction.

            I do not understand it.

            But he would understand it in time, as was eventually the case with all potions, all questions, all mysteries. Draco stood and went down to his shop to explain to his assistants that he was about to begin a complicated brewing procedure which would take him some hours and during which he must be absolutely undisturbed.

*

            “Malfoy’s coming over, mate.”

            Those were the first words Ron greeted him with when he arrived in their home. Harry blinked and ran his fingers through his hair, then shrugged. Well. He would put up with it if both Malfoy and Ron could. He was only surprised that Malfoy had contacted Ron in the first place, which he must have, because otherwise Ron would have had no reason to suspect Harry had vanished in Malfoy’s company.

            “That’s fine,” Harry said, when Ron went on staring at him as though he expected some violent reaction that would destroy the house.

            Ron rolled his eyes at the ceiling and shook his head. “We could use his help, if this arrest of yours is really tied to our case,” he said, and then went into his bedroom, his absurdly starry sleeping robe dragging behind him, while he checked over his shoulder the whole way, as if he thought Harry would vanish.

            “Is something wrong?” Harry called after him, through the shut door.

            “He told me something about one of the spells you use,” Ron called back, voice choked. “Something serious.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and sat down on the couch to wait for Ron to finish dressing. It was useless to continue the conversation. Harry had tried to explain the reasons that he used Dark Arts before, and Ron had accepted it but doubted it. If Malfoy brought new arguments to the table, then Harry would just have to destroy them with the same efficiency.

            Besides. What’s important are children with their faces scraped off, not the spells I use to find the people who would do that.

            Harry bared his teeth as the crying sounded in his head again, and the pain of that death tingled across his face. And Malfoy and Ron might want to be in at the kill.

*

            AlterEquis: Sorry about that! But thank you, I’m glad you liked it.

            digital blasphemy: Thanks! Sometimes I forget how overwhelming the chapter counts will be to someone who hasn’t followed along with them as I post.
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