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Chains of Fool's Gold	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Eight--On Wings of Rumor

"You think we can trust them?"

"It's not so much a matter of trusting them," Draco retorted, picking up the copy of The Witch's Eye that Prince had retrieved and looking at it critically. "It has more to do with convincing them what we might do."

Harry sniffed a little as he picked up the tray of food and cast a Lightening Charm on it, shifting it easily across his arms a second later. "I don't think fear is the best tool for the job. There were times the Dursleys frightened me, and Voldemort, but that never meant that I stopped fighting them."

"You were rather an exception," Draco pointed out, arranging the paper carefully in his arms so that the picture of Harry's glamoured, disfigured face showed easily to someone beside him. They had discussed casting another glamour on the paper so that it looked like theDaily Prophet, but Draco had argued against that. If their prisoners got out and found that their captors had lied to them about what paper contained the story of the Ministry's treachery, they might start thinking rationally about other things, too, and the chance would be lost. "We'll just have to hope that we don't have too many Gryffindors among these Aurors,"

He saw Harry rolling his eyes out of the corner of his gaze. Draco smiled. Making Harry roll his eyes was one of life's little pleasures, for him.

He flicked up the latch, paper still carefully arranged, and together they entered the makeshift dungeon.

The Aurors immediately crowded to the front of their prison to stare at them. Draco kept his head up, looking neither to right nor left--at least on the surface. He had long ago learned to watch from the corner of his eye when he wanted to see someone taking something in and not be seen watching himself.

The Aurors saw the face in the photograph peering above his arm, and the headline too, which Draco had to admit had been brilliantly contrived by the reporter Prince and Harry had visited. PRISONER DISFIGURED IN BIZARRE MINISTRY PLOT!

"That's not true!" called the first Auror who dared to speak, a woman who had complained almost endlessly since the brought her here. Draco felt she was a bit of a kindred spirit, really.

"I don't know what's true and what's not," Draco said. Putting the paper down face-up on the floor, he turned to help Harry serve the meals. "The lies that keep appearing in the papers and coming out of the Ministry's mouths have taught me a whole new definition of what it means to be truthful." He smiled at the complaining Auror over his shoulder. "Have you thought of telling the Ministry that what they say can't possibly be true?"

The woman gripped the bars of the cage as if she would wrench them from the floor and throw them at Draco. "We were doing out jobs," she said. "The way you were until you decided to be too kind to the twisted."

"Is that the way the spun it for you?" Draco cocked his head winsomely in her direction, then shook it. "Oh, dear."

He must have got the note of amused contempt in the last words right, because this time the woman rattled the bars in a teeth-grinding way. "Tell us your side of the story, then," she sneered. "If it wasn't being so kind and forgiving to a twisted that you got an innocent killed, what was it?"

Draco sighed and slid her tray under the bars. The woman stopped it with one foot, never taking her eyes from him. "To hear our side of the story," Draco told her, eyes gentle and unwavering, "you would have to listen. Not stuff your ears with cotton made of your orders and believe you were enlightened."

The woman snorted loudly enough to scatter food, if she'd had it in her mouth, and looked around the prison. "I think someone here can give you an open mind," she said. "Start talking. You might be surprised."

"Tempting," Draco said, rising gracefully to his feet and reaching for another plate to slide beneath a different part of the bars. "But we have other things to do."

"I'd like to hear it, if she wouldn't," said a different Auror, a man with long tangled brown hair who stood near Arthur, the one Weasley had taken blood from. "I'd like to know what you thought you were doing, and what the Ministry thought you were doing."

"I want to hear it," said the complaining woman, giving the new Auror an evil glare. "I never said I wouldn't. I just never promised to believe it."

"I don't need the stress and worry of telling the whole story to a hostile audience," Draco said, shaking his head at her again. "A mildly sympathetic one might do. A curious one. But not you."

He was almost sure he heard Harry snicker behind him, and don't turn around to frown at him only because that would be more disastrous than the snicker. But from the quarrels that were springing up now, he thought the chances of them hearing it were lessened.

"I never said that I didn't want to hear it," the complaining woman said, and looked like she would stamp her foot on the floor, except that she was wearing Auror robes and some things were beneath her dignity. "I just don't know what they could say that would challenge what we heard from the Ministry."

"There speaks the implacable bias," Draco inserted sadly.

She turned around and glared at him. "Has it occurred to you that the best way to remove the bias is to tell your bloody story?"

"You provide me with such a temptation," Draco said, making sure that she saw the roll of his eyes as he reached for another tray.

"But this is the only way that your story will be seen and challenged for what it is," the woman insisted, leaning against the bars and squashing the sandwich that Kreacher had so kindly prepared for her. Draco thought of telling her that she wouldn't get another one, but she was in full flood and disinclined to listen to him. "Lie or truth, you can only get people to believe it if you tell them."

"But with a completely hostile audience, all I would be doing is wasting my breath," said Draco. "You haven't offered me a good reason so far."

She looked as though she might rip her hair out, but she did manage one smile that could have been triumphant, seen from a different angle. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Once a Death Eater convinced that the audience will be hostile to him, always a fearful Death Eater."

There was a clatter behind Draco as Harry put the trays he still held on the floor. "So you would believe it if the former Chosen One told you?" he asked. His voice was harsh.

Draco rolled his eyes. They had agreed that Draco would handle the acting, because he was better at it. Harry had done all right going along on that interview with Prince, but frankly, all he'd had to do was sit there and drip. He would be less effective blending truth and exaggeration into the delicate brew they needed the Aurors to swallow.

On the other hand...

Draco studied the Aurors pressed against the bars, staring at them, who were in turn studying Harry. Draco had them halfway to convinced that they hadn't been told the whole story. They might listen better to Harry than to him at the moment.

With a fluid motion, Draco stood, leaving the food where it was and shaking his left sleeve back from his Dark Mark. "They're all yours," he told Harry, and tried to sound resentful.

Harry bowed his head a little and turned to face the silent, watching Aurors again. "How much were you told about Head Auror Ernhardt?" he asked.

Draco raised his eyebrows, but maybe that was the right place to start. He leaned back against the wall, and tried to make himself invisible. Their attention should be solely on Harry now.

*

Harry knew very well they were glaring at him, and why. They might listen to him more easily than they would to Draco, given the Mark on Draco's arm, but another way of looking at things was that he was the hero who had betrayed his own side.

But he could tell the truth, and they would send them out int the wizarding world once they heard it. If even one of them thought it could really be the truth and spread it around, they would have a weapon to counter the Ministry's side of things.

So he waited, and finally the Auror Harry couldn't help thinking of as the whiny one muttered, "We know he was the Head Auror. And you killed him."

"Did anyone ever offer you a good reason for that killing?" asked Harry into the silence that followed her words.

Glances went back and forth between them. Harry barely contained his snort at some of the kinds of glances they were. Uncertain, shoving, the kind he used to get when a horde of his fans confronted him all at once and then stood there waiting for some uniquely brave one to attack him first.

"You hated him," said the only Auror among them Harry had known slightly. She was a haughty woman named Vesta Bernos, her voice and face just as hostile as those of the woman Draco had spent so much time playing with. "That would be enough reason."

"He assigned you to the Socrates Corps and left you there to rot," said someone else. "Everyone knows that wasn't a promotion."

"Everyone except me," Harry said dryly. "I was fool enough not to question it. I'd just lost my partner." He hesitated, but decided there was no reason for this bunch of vultures to know just how close Harry had been to Lionel, even if they were vultures that they were training to fly at their command. "I had seen something that wasn't supposed to exist--a kind of insane Dark wizard, similarly evil to Voldemort if not that bad. I knew some of the other Aurors in that Corps had seen similar things. I thought we were isolated to concentrate our secrets. Not to throw us away."

"You were always making trouble," Vesta said, her eyes narrowed with dislike. "It's not surprising they would have started resenting you, when your fuck-ups were always on the front page."

"And that's enough reason to kill someone?" Harry smiled at Vesta. "What an interesting idea you have about the morality of being made Head Auror. I suppose I should hope that you never end up there."

Vesta gave him the ugliest sneer he'd seen in a while, which was saying something, with the amount of practice Draco had. "You think you would get your job back, after this? That's almost...charming, really."

"I don't hope it for my sake," Harry told her quietly. "But for the sake of those who come after me, and probably won't know any more than I did about Ministry politics when they start. Nothing about the way other Aurors resent the ones who get written up in the papers. Nothing about how other people don't see the blood, only the glory you never wanted anyway."

Draco coughed gently behind him. Harry knew why. He was meant to tell them the truth about Ernhardt, not rejoice in his own sad story that they probably wouldn't believe anyway.

"Ernhardt was a twisted," Harry said. "He had the gift of possessing other people, riding their minds and bodies. Their eyes turned blue when he did. He discovered that we could be dangerous to him when we started solving cases that killed twisted, instead of nicely and neatly dying the way they had all expected us to."

“I heard something about that,” said Vesta, in the kind of tone that implied only someone with a defective brain would believe the rumors she had heard. “That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“If you don’t want to give me a fair hearing, you might as well not listen to me,” Harry snapped back. “You can cover your ears and I’ll speak to the people who want to hear.” He turned his back on her and faced the others. “We set a trap for Ernhardt. It was difficult. How could we trap someone who could leap bodies? If we killed his original body, then he would just turn someone else against us. We had to make sure that we trapped him in his original one.”

“Why did you have to kill him at all?” asked a smaller Auror, a man, with a neatly pointed beard that was starting to grow out of neatness the more time he spent in the prison. “Why couldn’t you bring him in, the way that Aurors are supposed to do with their prisoners?” He looked around at the others and preened a little, as though he suspected himself of having scored a point.

Harry snorted in spite of himself. “You don’t know very much about Socrates Aurors, or you didn’t pay attention when we were trying to tell you.” He ignored Draco’s chiding frown at him. Well, the idiot hadn’t paid attention, it looked like. “We were allowed to kill the twisted we hunted. In fact, we had to, unless we could fulfill a whole bunch of other conditions that were all aimed at preserving other people’s lives. That was the difference between us and the rest of you. We had to commit murder. And the Ministry was fine with that, until the time came when we turned against its Head Auror and they had to witness a murder live.”

The small man looked ill. Someone else said, as hastily as though they didn’t want Harry getting angry at him, or maybe talking about murder again, “But it wasn’t a murder, was it? Someone said that you were still hunting Ernhardt after his supposed murder. So you didn’t kill him.”

“The Ministry wants it both ways,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “They want to pretend that we didn’t kill him because it made a good way to punish us for failing, but on the other hand, they had a body. When it suited their purposes, then they could accuse us of murder later, using that body as proof.”

“Not everyone who works in the Ministry is the same,” muttered the little man. “Not all of us knew the truth. Some of us supported you.”

“Well, you sure as shit didn’t speak up about it where we could hear you,” Harry snapped back. “So the fuck what if you supported us in your hearts? That doesn’t mean that you support us now, or that you’ll stand up for us against the Ministry.”

Vesta coughed to get Harry’s attention back again. “We might,” she said, “if you could tell us what happened at the supposed scene of Ernhardt’s murder, and make it comprehensible.”

Harry shook his head right back. “He jumped bodies. We thought we had him trapped in his, but he escaped into one of the Socrates Aurors who had been consumed by her own practice of dabbling in necromancy.” He wasn’t sure he should reveal yet that a lot of the Socrates Aurors had their own flaws, and might have become twisted with a little push in the right direction. “We had to hunt her. We finally managed to rescue her and eliminate Ernhardt, but we can’t offer a body this time. So the Ministry can accuse us of murder with the body we did present and say we didn’t offer enough defense of our actions to show that Ernhardt is really a twisted, and not just someone we didn’t like.”

“You can’t blame them for that,” Vesta said. “It’s widely known that you didn’t like him.”

Harry stared at her, then snorted. "Widely known by who?" he asked. "Neither of us had any more contact with him than an ordinary Auror until we started chasing him."

"I believe she refers to the common perception that you got into as many scrapes as you did to disoblige the Head Auror," Draco drawled. He was watching Vesta with what looked like amusement, but it was hard to tell with his eyes lidded the way they were. "So you must have hated him."

Harry chuckled despite himself. "It was usually Okazes I annoyed. If I annoyed Ernhardt before I became a Socrates Auror, it's news to me."

"I said it was a common perception. I didn't say it was right." Draco rolled fluidly to his feet. "And they'll always have some pretext to disbelieve you. I say let them. Get rid of them. We'll find a way to let the world know the truth without them."

Vesta held up a hand. "No need to be hasty, " she murmured. "I never said that we weren't interested, you know. You were the ones who wanted to convince us, not the other way around."

"Those two statements contradict each other, at least in their suggested course of action," Draco replied, staring at her. "I think you don't care and you're stringing us along while you try to come up with some way to escape."

Vesta flushed in a way that made Harry think Draco was probably right. But she cleared her throat and turned back to Harry as though she had never looked away. "The Ministry was supposedly also creating these twisted that they used you to hunt?"

Harry nodded at her, with a small smile. "And Ernhardt was the one who controlled the assignments to the Socrates Corps. He saw that we were dangerous, and by reviewing the files, he could keep track of other twisted who might be able to challenge or locate him."

Vesta looked suddenly thoughtful, but someone else said, "Hang on. I thought twisted were like You-Know-Who--insane. How could Ernhardt stay sane enough to run the Auror Department, if he was really in that state?"

Vesta looked a little smug, this time. Harry shook his head. "We met a twisted who could make other people into twisted, and not even realize she was doing it. I don't think all of them are insane. Healer Alto came across as the victim of a lot of obsessive admirers, not a twisted. Ernhardt was another one of those, I think. Not as sane as Alto, but enough to recognize threats coming his way and deal with them."

The man with the neat beard chewed his lip and muttered, "And from this stew we have to try to choose what to believe."

"We can't force you to believe a certain thing," Harry said gently, and ignored Draco's mutter about the Imperius Curse from behind him. "We can only give you information about us to replace the false sort the Ministry gave out."

They didn't look entirely convinced, but after a minute Vesta mumbled, "You can go on."

"Thank you for the permission," Harry said sweetly, and ignored the scowl on her face to continue telling the tale of Ernhardt and what he had done to them.

*

Draco watched the faces of the Aurors watching Harry, and saw the way their eyes hardened and glowed. Not all of them believed, but some doubt was entering their minds. And this was gossip, this was rumor, about the Chosen One and a Death Eater. Draco knew they would be hard-pressed to keep it to themselves once they left.

And that was all they wanted, to turn them into gossip-mongers and rumor-spreaders, not allies.

Draco sniffed and leaned back against the wall. He would have done it differently, he had to admit. He would have spun the story out further with threats and suggestions, and dangled the truth in front of them for them to worry and bite at. He would have made them afraid notto spread it by the time he was done.

But he had agreed that Harry could do this, and Harry seemed to enjoy it, in an odd way, even when he had to correct really stupid misconceptions about what Ernhardt had done. He wasn't born for the part of a hero, he kept claiming. Draco thought he put his life in danger and played up to the public like he was one.

Draco did see belief growing on a few faces, though, and more attention than they would pay at first, when he was talking with the woman who complained all the time. If Harry responded to adoring faces, they responded to him.

It would work. Draco was reasonably confident that the Ministry would rue the day it tried to destroy their lives, at least.

And then?

Draco cocked his head. He hadn't thought much about what they would do once they had reclaimed their reputations and punished the Ministry for betraying them.

One thing only he knew: he no longer wanted to be an Auror, one of these people peering wide-eyed from the cages.

Maybe it was worth thinking about what he wanted to be instead.
*
SP777: The Draco of the past would think the Draco of this future is crazy. Especially to be risking so much for Harry.
We’ll go to the Ministry in a few chapters!
- 7
- 8
- 9
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Chains of Fool's Gold