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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3830 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Title: Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairings: Harry/Draco, Lucius/Narcissa

Warnings: Violence, angst, gore, torture

Rating: R

Summary: Alone in the cursed house that’s the only place that will shelter them, Harry and Draco labor to prove their innocence, get revenge on Draco’s ex-parents, and earn their jobs as Aurors back. But not without quarrels and danger, of course.

Author’s Notes: This is the fourteenth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, about Harry and Draco as Auror partners who hunt down Dark wizards. It follows “Invisible Sparks,” Hero’s Funeral, “Rites of the Dead,” Sister Healer, “Working With Them,” This Enchanted Life, “Letters From Exile,” Writ on Water, “Evening Star,” The Library of Hades, “There Was Glory,” A Reign of Silence, and “Dictionary of Losses.” You should read those fics before tackling this one. This fic will probably be somewhere between 15 and 20 chapters.

Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity

Chapter One—Cuthbert’s Corner Again

            “This is farewell.”

            Harry, standing behind Draco, didn’t have as good a view of the tall, silver-haired man in front of them as Draco did, but he didn’t think he was wrong about the relief in those dark eyes. The man nodded once, then stretched his hand out. Scars covered the palm, threading back and forth, making marks like the seams of a Muggle baseball.

            “You have been good friends to me,” Draco said, shaking the man’s hand.

            And they’ve been better friends than us, Harry thought. Perhaps the thought was reflected in the eyes of the man before he lowered them.

            “Come back when you need to,” he murmured. Ris, as he called himself, leader of the Demlan Werewolf Pack, had a thick voice and sounded like he was growling even when he made a deliberate effort to sound light and sprightly. “You know that the debts of friendship you created in the past can never be repaid.”

            Draco was moving tightly enough when he stepped back from Ris that Harry clasped his shoulder. Draco reached back and took Harry’s hand with a slow, caressing motion, but didn’t remove his eyes from the werewolf as he studied Draco from top to foot.

            “I doubt that,” Draco said. “I know that our coming here caused you trouble, and I’m not even a member of a powerful pure-blood family that can make it worth your while to shelter us anymore.”

            Ris grinned abruptly enough that Harry’s hand went to his wand. He hadn’t learned much comfort around the suddenly moving werewolves in the last fortnight. “You weren’t a member of that family when you came to us in the first place, Draco. It’s only the official stripping of your name that was missing. It’s the Ministry and not your family that worried us.” He reached up, slowly enough that neither Harry nor Draco touched their wands again, and tapped his balled fist gently against Draco’s temple. “Come to us when you aren’t being hunted and you’ll have a better reception.”

            He turned and loped into the shadows of the forest before either of them could say anything. Draco blinked at Harry for a second, then snorted and turned away. “Come on. We need to make sure that the defenses around the house are sufficiently down.”

            Harry only nodded as he followed Draco, but he didn’t think it likely they would have a battle on their hands, considering the effort he and Draco had had to use to get past the wards and the dark dogs and the other nasty surprised Ernhardt had left around Cuthbert’s Corner in the first place. Draco wanted to get out of here, though, and Harry couldn’t really blame him.

            They Apparated at the edge of the forest, and reappeared high on a stony cliff, above a crashing sea and under a driving rain that made Harry turn, instinctively seeking out the house with his eyes although he knew it was hard to spot from here. The rain curled under his cloak collar and soaked the front of his face, and he sneezed and spluttered as water went into his mouth and ears.

            “Cold?” Draco cast a Warming Charm on him, and then an Impervious Charm above them both, before he began to climb. “Sometimes you forget that you’re a wizard.”

            Harry chose not to answer that, and to ascend in dignity. Yes, it was true he had grown up with Muggles and his first instinct was to hide his face from rain instead of cast a spell. He liked to think he would be better off than Draco if they suddenly found themselves in some wild and remote place where magic didn’t work.

            Or in the middle of a Muggle flat, for that matter. Draco had stared at most of the appliances in Harry’s small hidden flat, the one time Harry had brought him there, as if he didn’t know what they were.

            Harry sighed as he recalled the flat. He wished they could have gone back there in order to hide from the people hunting them. They would be back in familiar surroundings, at least for him, and Muggle places often exposed a wizard’s hidden weakness. Most of the Aurors would be barely able to operate there, unless they happened to send a group that was entirely composed of Muggleborns.

            “You don’t really think we should go to Cuthbert’s Corner?”

            Harry caught Draco’s eye and forced himself to stretch his mouth in a smile. They had argued for what felt like a week after Jenkins’s owl advising them to go to Cuthbert’s Corner arrived, although it was only a single afternoon. A solid afternoon, though, filled with the silent stink of the row they weren’t having.

            “I think we should,” Harry forced himself to say, with a little shrug. “We don’t have many other options. I thought of my flat,” and he ignored Draco’s curled lip, because he would only get angry if he thought about Draco’s refusal to be in a Muggle place right now, “but they must know that it exists, if they’ve gone through our files. I’m surprised they didn’t think to look in the Demlan Pack for us, actually. They probably have the names of your friends on file, too.”

            Draco nodded, already beginning the climb up the steep part of the cliff that would take them to Cuthbert’s Corner. “But they couldn’t move against a pack they’ve given permission to exist without causing a political incident. At the very least, they’d have to negotiate with them to come onto their territory, and we would have heard about that in time. My guess is that they knew where we were, but didn’t want to pursue us until we moved.” He paused and glanced at Harry, his hands already arranged above him on the rain-slick stone. “And they might come now. Are you going to follow me?”

            Harry grimaced and did as Draco advised. He didn’t know what could be done to cure the anger that boiled and bubbled between them, except to fight about it. But they couldn’t afford a fight right now, either, couldn’t afford the feelings that it would bring up.

            They hadn’t talked about Elder, how he had died or how Harry had tried to save him from the first method that Draco had chosen to dispatch him. They hadn’t spent enough time discussing Draco’s parents in any context except one of pure strategy. Harry knew they needed to. But they needed to be reasonable about it.

            Right now, neither he nor Draco could act that way.

            “Home sweet home,” Draco muttered as he stepped up and fixed his eyes on what looked like a patch of rock and darkness until you looked more closely.

            Harry grimaced as he climbed up beside Draco, his skin crawling and his palms flinching back from contact with the cliff lip near the front door. He hated this place. Memories of rotting hippogriffs would invade his mind, and cellars with skeletons and blood groves, and—

            He shook himself back to reality before Draco could do it for him, and jerked his head up at the house. “Do you think we’ve disabled enough of the defenses to approach it without worrying about the dark dogs, or not?”

            “Only one way to find out,” Draco said, and moved forwards with a lowered head and lifted wand.

            And he calls me reckless. Harry rolled his eyes and followed. He couldn’t blame Draco if he thought about it, because the strain they were under was affecting both of them. Harry just tended to handle it with irritation, and Draco with action. Harry came up close behind him and squeezed his shoulder as they walked.

            Draco twitched, but turned his face towards Harry and nodded a little.

            No dark dogs, arguably the most dangerous part of the house’s defenses before this, assaulted them. Harry let his shoulders fall. The trips they had made over the last week to change the wards and disarm the traps and spells Ernhardt had left must have worked to clear the traces of any Dark magic.

            Draco touched his shoulder as they moved up to the threshold. “You realize that we’re going to have to use Dark magic to set up our own wards?”

            Harry swallowed and nodded. He had used Dark magic during his time as an Auror and barely hesitated with it anymore, at least when it was to save someone else’s life or protect his own. He had never used for anything else, only disarmed it.

            But it made sense that they would have to become Dark wizards, as the Ministry had already accused them of being, in order to protect themselves. He nodded again and moved up behind Draco.

            “What are the good spells for it?” Harry added. “I never tried to set up wards before that would hurt someone instead of hold them away.”

*

            Draco considered Harry meaningly from the corner of his eye. Harry stood quietly beside him, though, and even if his breathing had quickened, he seemed poised to do what he had to do now. He smiled when he caught Draco’s eye.

            Good. Draco hadn’t enjoyed the feeling that they were growing apart despite all that had happened to connect them. The frantic planning and exchange of ideas and false letters and false identities they had come up with, even their work together to disarm the old wards on Cuthbert’s Corner, had seemed like he was spending time with a cooperative stranger, not a partner.

            When was the last time we had an hour to ourselves, an hour that we didn’t spend planning how to hunt down enemies? Draco thought, shaking his head. It’s no wonder that we’re snapping at each other, or following each other dumbly like master and hound, when we have no other relationship at all right now.

            He took Harry’s hand, rubbing along the back instead of answering. He felt Harry relax, and he leaned against Draco’s shoulder for a second instead of demanding an answer to his question, the way he would have a few days ago.

            “I think the best Dark ward is more a defensive than an offensive one,” Draco said calmly. “It’s what it does to someone’s mind that makes it illegal.” He flicked his wand twice to the side, slowly, so Harry could spot the distinctive turn of the wrist that made the spell work. “Mens obscuratio!”

            The darkness around them trembled, and then a slow question mark of heavy smoke began to grow in front of Draco. He dismissed from his mind the way it resembled some of the magic they had seen when they were hunting Ernhardt, and instead watched as it twitched and assumed the form he had wanted it to. A small gargoyle crouched there, tail whipping and ears cocked forwards as it watched him.

            “Defend the left corner of the house,” Draco said, gesturing up at the nearest part of the roof, and watched the tiny thing blaze away. He turned and looked at Harry. “That’s it. You can make as many of these guardians as you like, and they won’t interfere with each other unless you tell them both to guard the same thing. But it does mean that you have to create a lot of them to cover the entire property.”

            Harry’s mouth was gentler than Draco had seen it in a long time. He nodded. “I can do that,” he said, and whispered the spell himself, with a movement of his wrist that was a trifle off. Draco took his hand and showed him how to make it. Harry shivered, but Draco didn’t think it was with the power of the Dark magic running through him.

            The little creature appeared, a black stag. Draco thought he could see shimmering silver antlers for a moment before Harry told it to guard the right corner of the roof and it left. He relaxed. Harry had to be feeling better, and not too apprehensive about this spell, if he could give the guardian the form of his Patronus.

            They worked in silence for a long time, other than the soft murmur of the spell and the instructions to the creatures that formed out of the air. When the house was clustered with their hovering forms, and so were most of the cliff walls down to the sea and the road along the top of the cliffs they had used to come in once before, Draco took Harry’s hand and tugged him towards the house.

            “We should go in and rest,” he said. “I think we need it.” He put his other hand on Harry’s hip and rubbed in a significant circle. “And I think we need other things, too, even more than that.”

            Harry tilted his head back and rested it against Draco’s shoulder, sighing. “Yeah,” he said. A pause, and then he asked, “What exactly does this spell do to someone who comes in contact with the wards?”

            Draco let his chin rest on Harry’s hair, silently exulting. He didn’t ask until then. He trusts me enough to use Dark magic that he doesn’t know the effect of, just because I told him it would be a good idea.

            He tugged Harry towards the house faster, as he answered, “It darkens the mind of anyone who touches one of the guardians, and they’ll make sure that they touch anyone trying to walk or climb or fly into their designated area. He’ll stand there trapped in nightmares until we rescue him.”

            “I like it.” Harry’s smile was savage. “There are people in the Ministry I’d like to give nightmares to.”

            Draco stopped him on the threshold and kissed him there, just because.

*

            Harry tilted his head back and shut his eyes. One could wish for a house-elf and not have one, but then, he had got used to that over the years. Hermione wasn’t a comfortable friend for people who couldn’t do their own dishes, and clothes, and household cleaning charms.

            So Harry had cast charms until his arms shook with exhaustion, on two rooms that were on the ground floor of Cuthbert’s Corner, while Draco, who wasn’t good at them, went around tapping on walls and casting spells that should identify anything harmful hiding in unwatched corners. Nothing appeared. Finally, they’d cleared out a bedroom and attached bathroom, and Harry was relaxing in a tub filled with heated water Draco had conjured.

            The room still looked grimy and grey when Harry opened hazy eyes at the click of the door, but it was tiled, and there was a limitation to how much even dust and neglect could damage that. The mirror had cracked, but Harry had simply Vanished the glass. He wasn’t addicted to looking at himself, anyway. And there were spiders everywhere, but Harry had banished them with his cleaning charms, grinning at the thought of the description he could write to Ron and how quickly Ron would burn the letter.

            Draco knelt down beside the tub, and watched him, such a long and earnest look that Harry reached up to push his hand through Draco’s hair. Draco shut his eyes and shivered, tilting his head towards Harry.

            “You have no idea how much I want you,” Harry whispered to him.

            “Yes, I do,” Draco said, opening his eyes. “Because I feel the same way.”

            “Really?” Harry smiled in spite of himself, and let his hands float out around him, his head falling back further. “Prove it.”

            He heard a few muttered charms, and a wince. Draco was as close to magical exhaustion as Harry was. The wards had taken a lot out of them. But Harry felt safe—well, as safe as he could with the Ministry hunting them and when they were staying in a house that had belonged to a murderer—and he knew Draco was there with him, between him and the door, where he always positioned himself unless Harry stopped him. There was nothing to prevent Harry from enjoying himself.

            Draco’s hands raked the shampoo deep into Harry’s hair. Harry turned towards it without meaning to, but Draco pushed his head back into position and hushed him with a click of his tongue. Harry nodded. Draco only put his chin back into position and made the hushing noise again.

            The water flowed around Harry, the heat renewed with a lazy wave of his wand. Draco’s hands went deep and deeper, into parts of his scalp that Harry would have sworn didn’t exist before this, or at least didn’t have nerves. Sparks of pleasure raced through his body. He made a soft sound despite himself, not a distressed sound but one that urged Draco to move, and his neck rolled back until he thought he knew every chip on that part of the tub intimately.

            “Quiet,” Draco said, a noise so soft itself that it was hard to hear. Harry would have nodded again, but that would have meant moving against the force of Draco’s hands. So he drifted, letting his compliance speak his compliance.

            Draco took a long, deep breath. Harry wondered what was taking him so long. His hands had paused, and his arms were tense. Did he want some sort of signal from Harry after all? Was he wondering if Harry would welcome this, when they’d been snapping and sniping right before they got to the house?

            Harry thought of something he could do that wouldn’t mean moving his head and wasn’t a word either, and opened his eyes. Draco started when Harry caught his gaze, and then looked at him in wonder. Harry lazily licked his lips and winked at Draco.

            “You want…” Draco began.

            Harry blinked once, and shut his eyes again. He had thought he had given Draco all Draco needed.

            He had. Draco bent to kiss him, and although he was probably now grinding those chips in the tub into his elbows, still he maintained that tight hold on Harry, his tongue stroking Harry’s own, parting his lips, filling his mouth with warmth. Harry moaned and leaned further back, wondering if there was a way he could drag Draco into the tub without hurting one or both of them.

            Draco solved the problem by casting one more spell, although Harry had to imagine that by now, sharp claws were dragging across his magical core. He floated up and over into the tub in the next second, and his clothes were gone when he settled on top of Harry, which made Harry grin up at him.

            “Comfortable and convenient,” he whispered into Draco’s mouth.

            Draco hummed back, and they settled onto each other heavily enough to make some of the water overflow. Harry didn’t care. Even Draco’s weight felt good, even on his aching limbs and his half-compressed chest. He spread his arms wider and lapped at Draco’s chin, and Draco bit his and wrapped his legs around Harry’s waist.

            They rubbed against each other, slow with the motion of the water, with their own languid exhaustion, with the pressure of the emotions that had built up in them over the last few weeks and now seemed to trickle out instead of rush through the crack in the dam. Harry lifted a hand, gasping with pleasure as he traced Draco’s face. Draco’s cheeks twitched under his touch, but he said nothing, his eyelids fluttering but staying closed.

            I’d nearly forgotten what he looked like. What anything looked like except that bloody parchment and the quill and the ink we were writing things down with. I should look more often. Harry splayed his fingers out and slid them from Draco’s forehead to his chin. Draco hissed encouragingly, and Harry did it again. I should—He’s beautiful—

            His thoughts became ragged along with the thrusts of his hips, and Draco finished above him with a shudder. Harry came a second later, and hugged Draco hard enough to make Draco growl at him. Draco turned his head and kissed Harry’s shoulder, speaking for the first time since the charm that had let him levitate into the tub. But since his words were muffled against Harry’s wet skin, it didn’t really sink in. Harry raked his fingers through Draco’s hair, touched the nape of his neck enough to make him raise his head, and whispered, “What?”

            “I needed that,” Draco said.

            “We both did.” Harry kissed him and fumbled for his wand, casting the charms to clean up the water, to dry them both off. Draco rolled his eyes when he felt the spell scrape across his skin—Harry knew that he didn’t perform them with enough finesse for Draco—but since they hadn’t found a scrap of cloth anywhere in Cuthbert’s Corner, there were no fluffy towels waiting for them.

            “But next time,” Draco said, as he let Harry half-lift, half-lever him out of the tub, “I want to do it in a bed.”

            Harry smiled at him. “Yes, we should.” He remembered the moment when he had hesitated between doors, right after they had come inside, wondering whether he should choose a single room or separate ones. Then Draco had opened the door to one and stepped inside and give him a single intense look that made him realize he was stupid to be wondering.

            “Mmm.” Draco’s eyes were lidded, lazy. He tilted his head from side to side, stretching. “I needed that more than I realized.”

            “Yes, you did,” Harry said, and touched his wand to his hair to dry a few last stubborn places. “Me, too.”

            “I like you in this mood,” Draco said, grinning at him. “You agree with everything I say.”

            Harry tackled him to the floor in a sudden rush, determined to show him how far that went, but then both of them ended up on the floor without enough energy to continue things. Draco laughed into his shoulder, and Harry laughed back, and they made their way off the floor, and into the clean pyjamas they had managed to acquire in Diagon Alley, and so into bed.
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Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity