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The Library of Hades	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4439 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 7
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- 9
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Chapter Eight—In Mind

            Draco saw the way that Harry started and jerked, and guessed what was happening. He kicked out, upsetting the brazier and the flame, which all the books on necromancy he had read had said would sever the connection between the world of flesh and the world of the spirit. If the blue-eyed twisted had no host—

            The brazier fell, the coals winked out, Moxon’s face disappeared. But Harry was still struggling and gagging on the floor, his nails ripping strands out of the carpet as he fought the blue-eyed twisted in his mind.

            He already made the jump, Draco thought as he stood. Harry is his host now, not Moxon, and that means I could have left the brazier alone.

            Part of his mind thought about and regretted the lost chances even as he struck out, fast and hard, at the side of Harry’s head. Knock him unconscious, and the blue-eyed twisted might lose his hold and thus his opportunity. Draco was perfectly willing to nurse Harry back to health if the blow hurt him.

*

            Harry felt the blow, but it was a minor stunning, dizzying point in the midst of all that pain and chaos.

            He fell because of it, he knew, but then, the drawing room had been going in and out of focus since the blue-eyed twisted flowed into his mind.

            He had never seen the process of possession like this. He wondered for a second if they had just missed the people the blue-eyed twisted controlled fighting him, or if there was something in Harry’s flaw or mind or resistance to the Imperius Curse that had kept him at bay for at least a few minutes.

            But such thoughts distracted him from the battle and chanced the blue-eyed twisted getting control of him. Harry coiled his body around and rolled, steady and back and forth, bringing all his will and all his power up, centered around the one goal of remaining free in his thoughts and getting rid of his enemy.

            Not as painful as when Voldemort was here, he thought, and wielded his memories of that possession, and the way that Voldemort had fled. He had probably left in part because Harry had been a Horcrux, but then, so what? There could be traces of the Horcrux left in him still. And he could resist the Imperius Curse, and twice he had survived the Killing Curse, and he had walked with the shades of the dead.

            All the special things about him that other people so desperately wanted to believe were true, Harry would admit were true if they helped him drive the blue-eyed twisted back.

            Slimy, dripping hands gripped and tore at Harry’s mind, but slid off on a coating of their own slime. Harry coiled and kicked back. I know what you are, he shouted into the silent face. I know what you want of me. You are not going to get it.

            The blue-eyed twisted snarled once, and then seemed to get a firm grip, because he laughed. Harry heard the laughter with the same senses that seemed to function in dreams and sometimes woke him with snatches of music that he knew he’d composed himself. Am I not? he asked as his foulness began to pour into Harry’s mind like unleashed oil. Just because you think that you’re special, Socrates Auror—

            Harry coiled his legs again, and coiled his power. Special. The word seemed to ring through his mind and echo back, down the years, to the first thing he had done—besides surviving the Killing Curse—that had ever made an adult tell him he was special. There were the basilisk and Quirrell before that, but too few people knew about them.

            Expecto Patronum! he bellowed in the depths of his mind, grinding his jaws shut at the same time so that no words of the spell could escape.

            The blue-eyed twisted gasped for breath in a voice Harry almost knew, and then a silver stag rose boiling from the depths of his mind, pale electric flames twisting around him. He caught the sense of foulness on his antlers and tossed it aside. At the same time, his hooves drummed on the chute that was pouring the oil in and slammed it shut.

            Harry tore and clung at the same time, trying to understand why the voice was familiar. But it vanished, it soared away, and he opened his eyes, panting, horribly bruised and battered, his head ringing.

            But free.

*

            Draco stepped back, wand in hand, when Harry opened his eyes. He could see no trace of blue darkening the brilliant green, though, and Harry’s eyes were so fervent a color that he was sure he would have. Draco dropped the wand down to his side, but didn’t look away from Harry’s face as he watched him touch the side of his head and wince.

            “I did that,” Draco said. “I thought it would give you a greater chance to fight him off. Sorry,” he added, the taste of the word still foreign in his mouth. It had been the word that nothing could make him say to his parents, and now he had said it twice to Harry within a fortnight.

            “It’s all right,” Harry said, shaking his head. “But I don’t think that worked. It only meant I had something to concentrate on, but he didn’t. I don’t think he feels the pain in the bodies he possesses the same way that the owners of those bodies do.”

            Draco paused. That was a new idea, and he wondered if it might let them comprehend the blue-eyed twisted’s flaw, which they had not managed to do so far. “Are you sure about that? It’s not the way that possession usually works.”

            “I wouldn’t know.” Harry had already aimed his wand at the side of his head, a movement that made Draco step closer no matter how competent he thought Harry was at self-healing, and murmured a quiet Episkey. When the lump shrank and began to turn pale, Draco relaxed a bit. “I was only ever possessed by Voldemort.”

            Draco let his eyebrows creep up. “That’s not something mentioned in the official biographies of the Boy-Who-Lived.”

            Harry laughed, and then stopped and clutched his head again. “If you know anyone who bought one of those biographies, tell them to return them. Most of them get the year of my birth wrong, and that’s just for starters.”

            Draco nodded. “When did your possession happen?”

            “At the end of my fifth year, when I was fighting off Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries.” Harry kept his head bowed, so that they wouldn’t need to look each other in the eye while he spoke about fighting a group that had included Draco’s father, and Draco kept silent so he wouldn’t need to speak about it. “Voldemort had been dueling Dumbledore, but then he possessed me, because he thought he could force Dumbledore to kill me. Then he let me go. I didn’t fight him off the same way I did the blue-eyed twisted, though.”

            Draco nodded. “What did you use just now?”

            Harry seemed satisfied that nothing else in his head was broken, and looked up with a grin. “Would you believe a Patronus?”

            Draco blinked twice, then said, “That only makes sense. They are supposed to protect you from an immaterial evil that you can’t touch, and which you can feel more than see, at least until it’s close. And it also makes sense that it would manifest in the middle of a mental battle rather than a physical one, since that was your greatest need at the moment.”

            “I thought something like that, although not in those direct words.” Harry shook his head. “He shut off the channel that connected me to the blue-eyed twisted, the way he was getting through. At least, it seemed like it.”

            Draco nodded. “Perhaps someone else would have managed to escape, too, if they had the same skills with the Patronus as you.”

            “Or if they’d thought to use it.” Harry sat up and laid his fingers gently in the middle of Draco’s forehead. His face was so serious that Draco let him linger there, staring into his eyes. “If he ever comes after you, I want you to remember that and use it. It was more than foul, it was like becoming mad.”

            Draco gave him a small, hard smile. “I think we both have our experiences of me being mad, under Alto’s control.”

            “This was worse,” Harry said. “Because I could feel the things that he would delight in making me do. Alto had no idea what she was doing and would have killed herself long before we found her if she had, I think.” Draco let that go for the moment; he disagreed, although it was true Alto was the one twisted they had ever met who had no idea of her powers and what they could do. “But yes, that’s what I felt. And when he was fading away, I did think that his voice was familiar. But I’ve met and interviewed and killed so many people down the years, it could have been any one of them.”

            “Probably not someone you killed,” Draco had to point out.

            Harry laughed as Draco had wanted him to, and then looked at the spilled brazier, shaking his head. “Well, we know that necromancy didn’t work. What do you think we should do next?”

            “Rest,” Draco said, and let his fingers briefly linger over the spot where he had hit Harry in the side of his head.

            Harry protested the way that Draco had known he would, but because Draco had known it was coming, it was also easier to combat. In the end, Draco got him into bed and lay there, watching him breathe.

            The way he could so easily have stopped doing. Draco didn’t know for sure what would happen to the blue-eyed twisted if the body he was possessing died while he was still in it, but they had killed some of his possessed victims before, and it seemed he had managed to jump out of them while they were writhing in pain. And perhaps he could convince the possessed to commit suicide, too.

            Harry could have died in front of Draco’s eyes.

            Draco caressed Harry’s hair, and thought. They needed another way to stop the blue-eyed twisted, since necromancy hadn’t worked. He knew books that would give them the solutions, books that dealt with situations of possession and told how to possess someone with the gift. Perhaps Dumbledore could even have used them to defeat the Dark Lord, or Harry could have, since he was the one with the connection to the Dark Lord through his scar.

            But those books were in Malfoy Manor.

            And Draco knew better than to think a simple lie, a simple promise, would get him through the wards this time.

*

            Harry shrugged when they came into the office the next morning and he found that Rudie was looking at the side of his head. A bruise must still have been visible. “A small tussle,” he said, and sat down, pretending to become absorbed in his work.

            Rudie let that last for about five minutes before she cleared her throat. Draco had gone out to use the loo, Harry saw when he looked up, and Macgeorge hadn’t been in yet this morning, if the state of her desk was any indication. Rudie stood with her hands clasped in front of her, so professor-like that Harry smiled. She was a little young for that.

            “What?” he asked.

            “Nicolette hasn’t been herself for the past few days,” Rudie said briefly. “First absorbed in study of that blood, and then yesterday saying she’d been involved in a training session that hurt her head. Except I’ve sparred with Nicolette, and the only time she’s looked like that, there have been visible wounds.” She gestured to the side of Harry’s head and raised her eyebrows.

            Harry sighed, wishing Draco was here to help him handle the interrogation. At least he couldn’t have gone far. “No, I didn’t fight with her. Draco was the one who struck me.”

            Rudie blinked. “I had thought you were too—close for that. Why?”

            “Connected with the case,” Draco said smoothly, stepping back into the office and lounging against the wall in a way that Harry knew well could put him between Rudie and Harry with one lunge. “Afraid we can’t tell you unless the Ministry grants us permission to share all the details.”

            Rudie smiled back at him, and she had acquired an iron edge to her expressions when Harry wasn’t looking. “You did something to Nicolette,” she said. “Convinced her of something, told her something, that closed her off from me. I want to know what.”

            Draco turned on Rudie the single most earnest expression Harry had ever seen him wear, even when he was lying to a professor in Hogwarts. Harry made a mental note to keep that expression in mind, and what harm Draco could do with it.

            “Have you considered,” Draco said softly, “that not all partner teams are that close? That this could have to do with personal things that she doesn’t want you to know about, just in case you distrust her? And that our stumbling onto those things by accident could have embarrassed her and made her determined to avoid us?”

            Rudie’s expression flickered, reminding Harry, again, that she was younger than most of the other Socrates Aurors, only a few years out of training. “She still would have told me. She knows that I worry.”

            “I don’t think she does,” Draco said, so smoothly that Harry wouldn’t have heard the lie in his voice if he hadn’t been listening for it. “She thinks of you as her little sister. And she thinks of you as Muggleborn.”

            “If you’re suggesting that she’s too influenced by blood prejudice to work with me,” Rudie began, turning towards the drawer in her desk where Harry knew she kept their pile of successful cases.

            “Not at all,” Draco said, back to earnest again. “I simply mean that sometimes pure-bloods get this odd protectiveness of Muggleborns. She thinks that it’s her duty to face up to the dangers of magic that she’s heard of from childhood and you know nothing about. And she’ll go charging into danger alone, in that case.”

            Harry kept quiet. He had seen that for himself, actually, when he was working with pure-bloods (other than Lauren Hale, who had simply been the wrong partner for him all around). But it would never have occurred to him to use it in a deception, and present it with that earnest a face. Another reason why Draco was a good liar.

            Once, he would have feared that that ability meant Draco would be able to turn on him more easily. But such fears had died now. Draco did what he had to do to protect them as a team and make their cases work. If that included lying and the Dark Arts, well, the Ministry had made that necessary for them.

            “She’s never said anything like that to me,” Rudie said, but she had frowned and reached up to touch her hair in a way that Harry knew meant she was almost convinced.

            “Of course she wouldn’t say that, when she knows that you would reject it,” Draco said, with the round, tolerant tones of a person Harry thought Hermione might be proud of. “But it is true that the bias is there, influencing her, even if unconsciously. Some of the things I’ve heard her say about you prove that.”

            Rudie remained still a short time longer. Then she said, “I’ll speak with her. You ought to know, however, that I’m watching.” She tossed Draco a thin smile and walked out of the office, presumably to hunt down Macgeorge.

            Harry shook his head at Draco. “You do think of things quickly,” he said, a neutral comment in case Rudie was still in earshot.

            “Everyone could do what I do,” Draco said, with a small shrug. “They don’t think quickly enough.”

            Harry blinked, so unused to Draco deprecating himself that he didn’t know how to answer. Draco moved on before he could, in any case, and leaned his hands on the desk. Harry eyed them, and then Draco’s face. Draco rarely looked like that unless something serious was in the wind.

            “I have an idea of how we could progress in this case,” Draco said. “But it would involve something you don’t like.”

            “I don’t always like all your ideas, but I don’t think I’ve hated the majority of them,” Harry said, and smiled at him. “What is the idea?”

            “That we get some books from Malfoy Manor that reveal how to combat the possession of people like the blue-eyed twisted.”

            Harry flinched before he could stop himself. Draco smiled at him, not having to say a word, and waited with his fingers stroking the desk.

            Harry looked at him, waited until the temptation to blurt out something unfortunate had passed him by, and then said, “Couldn’t you find the same books somewhere else?”

            “Not without alerting whoever owned the library that I was looking for books on the Dark Arts,” Draco said, and his eyes had an intensity that Harry wondered at. Perhaps it had been more common years ago, before his parents had disowned and exiled him. “That’s the problem with most of the libraries I know about, including the Ministry’s. And I have no friends anymore who would let me look at theirs quietly.”

            “But what does it matter if the Ministry knows about the possession?” Harry asked. “It’s only the other thing that’s intrinsically Dark.” He wouldn’t name necromancy without the wards up. “We could go and get all the books we need, and then we wouldn’t need to make you into a scapegoat for your parents.”

            “Is that what you think going to them is doing to me?” Draco cocked his head. “No. And I don’t want the Ministry to know what we’re doing.”

            Harry opened his mouth to argue, and shut it again. He could argue with the impulse on rational grounds, but on emotional ones, he understood what Draco was saying. The Ministry had cited them for breaking rules, let Harry get banned from St. Mungo’s, been perfectly happy to let them break up as partners when Draco had been under Alto’s control and Harry had asked to be assigned a different partner, and ignored the toll the twisted took on them by immediately giving them new cases. They’d had to trade favors for their holidays. The Ministry wanted them to handle the twisted, but otherwise, cared little about what happened to the Socrates Corps.

            It wasn’t a promotion to be placed here, Harry thought, not exactly. It was what they did with Aurors who had seen magic so Dark that they no longer obeyed the Ministry’s rules or thought some lesser Dark Arts were so important to keep banned, and the Ministry shoved them away in discomfort to a place where they could still be of some use.

            “All right,” Harry said. “But tell me that you have a plan to accomplish this which doesn’t involve you crawling on your hands and knees to your parents. The only one you should get on your knees for is me.”

*

            Draco knew he flushed from pleasure, and gave Harry a look that would have ended with them both on the floor if they didn’t have better self-control. Or perhaps if Draco didn’t have better self-control. From the way Harry sat up and stared at him, lips parted, he would have been happy to ignore their better knowledge and have some getting on their knees this moment.

            Draco licked his lips, and refrained. “Yes, I do,” he said. “It will need your help, and your magic. But I think that I can rely on you to conduct yourself in such a way that my parents won’t have anything to report to the Ministry. They tend to avoid the Ministry in any case, since they think the Aurors treated them so poorly after the war.”

            There was a time—not that far gone, from the glint in Harry’s eye—when Harry would have had a lot to say about how the Ministry had treated his parents. Now, he just inclined his head and murmured, “All right. But what do you think I can do to these wards that you can’t?”

            “The wards have been changed to keep me out,” Draco said. His throat thickened for a moment as he remembered standing on his parents’ doorstep—recently, with Morningstar, and several times before that—and feeling the wards crackle around him. “I don’t think my parents would have a reason to tune them specifically to you, since we’ve only been partners for a few months and it’s much easier for them to turn wards around against someone they once favored.”

            Harry blinked. Draco clarified, “The wards favored me, because of the blood connection, and would always have let me through. Now they’ve been turned over to aim specifically at my blood and body. It’s much easier to do that than to build in the same kind of antipathy towards someone not connected to my family with blood.”

            Harry nodded. “All right. But I want to hear this famous plan. And no crawling.”

            Draco smiled. “How would you feel about using the most powerful and Darkest magic you can against my parents’ wards, and then taunting them from a broom?”

*

            SP777: Harry thinks he might have met him. That’s all he really knows.

            unneeded: Well, he has taken actions to protect himself (like killing Leah, the woman who had the flaw that would let her know where other twisted were). He might care if he thinks Harry and Draco are enough of a threat.
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The Library of Hades