Chapter Ten of 'Sanctum Sanctorum'- In the Midst of Plans

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Nine.

Title: Sanctum Sanctorum (10/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Sex, torture, violence, child abuse, gore, angst, ignores the epilogue.
Summary: The new Divination professor predicts that Harry and Draco will someday live together, with a family. Horrified, Harry goes to Draco to warn him that someone might spread rumors about this. It only takes one pebble to begin the avalanche.
Author’s Notes: While this starts out as a light-hearted fic, it gets dark fairly quickly. Also, please heed the warnings. I don’t yet know how long it’ll be, though I estimate between twenty and thirty chapters.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Ten-In the Midst of Plans

Draco waited until he had seen his assistants begin to relax and talk over their potions. He had not appeared that morning, although they had, but they knew their place in such circumstances: continue their studies and brewing according to the instructions that he had left for them months ago. So they had, and only slipped into chattering half an hour after the shop had opened. Draco had watched from the shadows at the mouth of Chemic Alley to make sure that no clients appeared whom he would have to intercept.

But so far, nothing of the sort had taken place. Now that it was eight-thirty, Draco thought they could put their plan into motion.

“Malfoy.”

Draco’s back stiffened. That Potter would whisper and haggle with him now, when Draco had asked him several times before this if he had any objections, irritated him. But he tried to keep his expression and voice both bland as he glanced over his shoulder. “Yes, Potter?”

“Remove the potion from me.” Potter’s teeth and eyes both shone in the shadows, again wolf-like. Draco had ceased to fear him when it came to those, however. Potter had enough power in his magic that he could rely on that alone to intimidate someone. Draco had no intention of allowing the expression on someone’s face to do it.

“There’s no way to do that,” Draco said. “Not without feeding you a special antidote, and I don’t have that on hand right now.”

“Then brew it, and send it to me.”

“Not right now,” Draco said. “I can do that in a few weeks, once I’m assured you won’t attempt to attack me with Dark Arts along the way and ruin all the plans I have for you.”

“What would those be?” Potter asked, and his voice was so soft Draco could have moved a step away and ceased to hear it. “Drawing my blood for use in a potion? Trimming my hair so you can Polyjuice into me? Grinding my bones for the marrow?”

“Keeping you alive,” Draco said, and began to move towards the shop. He knew Potter would follow perforce; too much depended on what they did now, and they had spent too much time yesterday planning it, for even Potter to ruin it simply because. But he didn’t expect much more compliance than that, so it was up to him to take the steps that would produce it. “And making sure you don’t stab me in the back.”

“I’ve never yet betrayed an ally.” If Potter had had flexible ears like a cat, Draco knew, he would have folded them back in agitated disgust.

“I know that,” Draco said. “Not on purpose. But you could cast Dark Arts spells that would bring the Ministry down on us, even if you don’t mean to cast them in an area which has wards.” He paused with his hand on the door and glanced back at Potter, already assuming the mask for the drama they had chosen to play out this morning before his assistants. “And the Ministry is larger than you, Potter, with a sum total of power and knowledge that is much greater. Sooner or later, you’ll make a mistake your own knowledge can’t protect you from, because it means that you’ve slipped up in front of someone like Moonstone, who has every reason to notice what you’ve done and no reason to forgive you because of how useful you’ve been in the past.”

Potter frowned at him, but said nothing. Draco thought he was already settling into his role, too. He opened the door and stepped into the shop, meeting the shocked stares of his assistants with a faint frown.

“You have been keeping the shop well?” he asked, and glanced around as though expecting to see the shine of dust from far corners. His nearest assistant, de Burgh, whose job it was to keep the shop clean since he was the youngest in seniority, began to flush. Draco pretended not to notice, and turned around to nod a regal dismissal to Potter. “Now that you’ve seen the inside of my shop, Auror, you may conduct your inspection. I hope you will find no cause to…linger.”

Potter gave him such a double-edged smile, such a perfect Auror smile, that Draco might have been impressed had he not known what lay behind it: training rather than genuine emotion. In every way that mattered, Potter was not like most Aurors.

“Whether or not I have cause to linger depends on what I find,” he retorted, and began to move further into the shop, casting a series of low, chanted spells that made the various containers and the shelves glow. The assistants huddled closer together. Draco half-shook his head before he could stop himself. Did they really think so well of themselves as to believe that he would have honored them with his confidence about where the illegal ingredients were kept? He had hinted instead, so that if someone questioned them they would be able to seem as if they were in his confidence without, in truth, revealing anything important.

“I thought so, Malfoy. Fire beetle eyes?”

Potter had been using real spells, then. Draco moved forwards and touched the barrel whose lid Potter had raised accusingly. “Declared legal two years ago, Auror Potter,” he said. “As you would know, if you’d kept up on the most recent regulations.” He paused, then leaned nearer and lowered his voice into the kind of whisper that his assistants couldn’t help but overhear. “If you had sense enough to follow the regulations.”

Potter’s back snapped straight, and for a moment, his eyes met Draco’s, a silent question in them as to what, exactly, Draco meant. Draco smiled back blandly and then turned around, walking to the far end of the shop so he could get a look at what his most senior assistant, Patula, was brewing. She ducked her head over her cauldron, but that was not enough to hide the signs of her usual superior work. Draco made sure to praise her with all the force and coolness he usually used, and then leaned against the counter and began to cast the spells that would keep his balances shining and well-weighted.

Potter prowled around the shop, and whenever Draco looked at him, he had cast some spell that seemed to do exactly what he wanted it to, if the contented smirks he gave in Draco’s direction were any indication. Draco shrugged and kept casting his own spells. This wasn’t the important part of the show. It only had to last long enough to make his assistants wonder, considering that the last they knew, he and Potter were on friendly terms.

“And this is it, Malfoy?”

Draco took his eyes off the scales and studied Potter with a sneer. He stood in front of Draco with his arms folded and his head tilted arrogantly back. His muscles bulged for a moment as though they would burst free of the sleeves, and then he turned his head to the side and spat. That wasn’t part of the original plan, and Draco could only be grateful that the spit landed in the center of the floor instead of in one of the cauldrons. There were a few potions they brewed that were sensitive to the slightest touch of human body fluids, including saliva. Draco assigned them to teach his students to be more careful about what, exactly, they added to their brewing.

“That’s all the ingredients I have, yes,” Draco said. “If you want to come back in a week, then I can show you the newly-arrived orders.” He faced Potter with insolent slowness, letting the scales collapse back down with a sharp ting. It was the only sound in the quiet, aching shop.

Potter showed his teeth and shook his head. His arrogance was back full-force, blazing in his eyes, and Draco restrained the motion he would like to make in answer to it. This was their plan, they had both agreed to it, and it would do no good if he was the one to make it mess up. He held Potter’s eyes, and saw the moment when the flicker in them made them brighten. Potter was going along with the original plan after all, then. Good. Draco had no desire to try and adopt another in mid-flight.

“Fine, Malfoy,” Potter said. “Be that way. If you’re going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, be that way.”

“I will,” Draco said pleasantly, and gave Potter a smile that he knew would make the other man’s teeth ache, whether or not they were playing this for real. “Seeing as I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Potter turned away with a sharp flourish and walked to the door. Over his shoulder, he added, “Someone will bring you down someday, Malfoy. Wish I could say that it would be me, but that doesn’t look likely. But I’ll wait, and watch, and the moment I see a toe set out of line, I’ll be there.”

“Given your history, I’m sure I will know when you come,” Draco said.

Potter gave him a truly inspired deranged grin, and then shut the door of the shop silently behind him. That made the assistants wince, Draco noted as he glanced around again. Every single one of them had been waiting for Potter to slam the door.

Draco turned around and met the eyes of everyone looking at him, which was everyone except Patula, who looked nervously at her cauldron instead. That one would make a Potions master, Draco thought. She didn’t let herself be disconcerted by outside events, and she cared about the potion first. The rest, he wasn’t sure about.

“Potter might sniff around after this,” he warned them gravely. “Give him nothing. Tell him that you don’t know what he’s talking about if he corners you and insists on special knowledge. And summon me.”

Patula looked up then, after she had reached the part where she could safely cast a Stasis Charm on the potion. “What should we do if he approaches us outside the shop, Potions master?”

“Then you can send an owl to me after the conversation,” Draco said. “Keep in mind that he has no reason to arrest you. It’s me he wants.” He cocked a smile at them that was much like the hand he had cocked on his hip. “And there’s no reason for him to think he can have me, except sheer arrogance.”

He could see them accepting it, deciding that Potter had a grudge against him that no amount of findings in a clean shop would help. They nodded, and Draco nodded back and went up to his flat to begin brewing the potion that would give them access to Schroeder’s thoughts. He would need more ingredients first, of course, including some that wouldn’t arrive until next week in the shipment he had mentioned to Potter.

It remained up to Potter to play his part, by continuing the Auror investigation with Weasley and appearing at their prearranged discreet meetings.

And if he thinks that I’ll make his precious antidote the priority when I have this potion to brew instead, Draco thought as he looked at the vial of crushed unicorn horn in front of him and estimated its purity, then he’ll simply have to learn better.

*

“No progress yet? I expected better of you.”

Harry didn’t bother looking up, although he could feel Ron blowing up a puff-fish without even looking at him. But what was the point of responding? Grinder was always like this, a pestilential failure who had never attained to Auror status despite being in the training program for five years. They had finally given him an ambiguous position whose official title was Liaison to the Muggle Community, and whose unofficial one was Royal Berk.

“After all,” Grinder continued, sliding into the room, “you’ve had this case for several days now.” His voice stabbed and dripped concern, all at the same time. “Has the talented pair of Weasley and Potter found itself outmatched this time? Are these criminals too much for them?”

“You should write copy for the Prophet,” Harry murmured, without looking up from the missing child reports in front of him. “I hear that Rita Skeeter’s looking for an apprentice.”

“Fuck you, Potter!”

Grinder would have lunged at him, but there were wards on the door to the office that Harry had specifically designed with him in mind. When he hit them, he stiffened for a long, agonizing moment, his tongue sticking out of his mouth with the shock of several lightning bolts through his body. Harry nodded to him and then pushed the report he had finished out of the way so he could look at the one beneath.

Ron sat down behind his desk, too, and paid studious attention to the pile of parchment in front of him. Harry didn’t have to look up to know that his shoulders were shaking with the effort of holding back the laughter.

Grinder recovered at last, and Harry met his eyes because someone had to, and he didn’t want Ron to always have that burden. “You can’t do that,” Grinder whispered. “It’s a violation of Ministry protocol to have wards like that on your office.”

“Is it?” Harry gave him a gentle smile, with more than a hint of tooth involved. “Somehow, I missed that memo. And I’m sure it was a bright and shiny one, too.” He paused, waited until Grinder started to build up another head of steam, and then added, “The memo that told us we couldn’t have wards on the door that would only activate when someone wanted to kill us.”

A frozen moment, rather like the one when the wards had shocked Grinder, and then he uttered a loud, fake laugh and stepped away, running strands of his thin blond hair between his fingers. He looked like Malfoy would with thirty more pounds of weight and thirty less of aristocratic pretension, Harry thought. “What are you talking about, Potter? I don’t want to kill you. I was just angry at you, that’s all.”

Harry held his eyes and waited until Grinder flinched and looked away. Then he said quietly, “The wards measure the excess of someone’s emotion. They can tell what you’re feeling in the moment you feel it. At the moment you lunged, you felt strongly enough about me to kill me.”

Once again, Grinder tried to splutter some denial, but Harry turned his head away and investigated a claim that a young witch had gone missing on the bank of the Thames two months ago. There was another report saying she had come back home a day later, and then a third from her parents stating there was something wrong, that their daughter had nightmares and an unexpected drain in her magic levels. From what Harry could tell, the Ministry had done nothing further with the case.

Of course, why would they, when that girl had come back home, as so many of the victims they tried to find didn’t? Harry marked it for further consideration anyway and set it aside. He was starting to develop a pattern from reading numerous complaints from parents whose children had been returned to them.

“I’m sorry, Potter,” Grinder said at last, trying for dignity and falling short in the same way a Flobberworm would have. “I didn’t realize I hated you so much.”

Harry looked up and nodded. His mouth was stretched in a wide gape, so anyone walking behind Grinder and glancing into the office would see it as a smile. It was the look in his eyes that made Grinder scramble away from him, his own mouth open and a shout starting to life in his throat. “Thanks, Rupert. That reassures me.”

One more pause, Grinder opening his mouth as though to protest, and then he turned away and shuffled out without a sound. Harry watched him go, his hand resting on his wand.

“Mate, look at this.”

Harry shook off the mood and turned to the file Ron was holding out to him. He was glad to have something to think about that wasn’t that arrogant trainee, and from the way Ron stepped back from him, he was glad that Harry had something else to think about, too.

Harry sighed and took the report. He really didn’t mean to frighten his friends this way, and he would hate for Ron to be permanently afraid of him. But what else could he do? He had got himself into this, the use of Dark Arts and the identification with the dead. He hated the way it affected his friends, but it let him catch criminals and get justice for their victims. Ron would also hate it if Harry suddenly stopped concentrating on his job.

Harry scanned the report in front of him, and then paused when he got to the phrase that Ron had underlined. “Eyes removed,” he read aloud, and glanced up at Ron. “Does it say in another part that the face was scraped off?”

“Well-no.” Ron sighed. “But that’s the closest I’ve come to the face being scraped off. And you know that that girl wasn’t their first victim. Why couldn’t they have taken someone else and then done something different to them each time?”

“Because I think all of the children they’ve taken are Muggles,” Harry said quietly, his mind still full of those hateful voices that sounded in the girl’s last memories. “They wouldn’t have a reason to take wizarding children.”

“We only have Campion’s confession for proof of that, and this one body.” Ron leaned on his own desk and cocked his eyebrows at Harry. Harry smiled back, glad that he at least hadn’t frightened his friends out of arguing with him. “They’re wizards. What would they want with Muggle children? Children of people they know would make the better targets for blackmail or ransom.”

“Of course they would,” Harry said. “Assuming they want such things. But then, the parents would have reported ransom demands, and the children are less likely to turn up dead. The minute you murder someone’s child, you lose every hold you had over them, and then some.”

“Oh, yeah.” Ron’s ears blushed before the rest of his face did. That had been true when they were at Hogwarts, and it still was. Harry focused his mind on that. See, Malfoy? I’m closer to the living than you think I am. “But-well, we are looking at children that were murdered. Make the politics murky enough, and the parents might not report the deaths or want anyone to find out what they went through to get their kids back. Some of those old pure-blood families take pride to a ridiculous extent,” he added, with the nodding wisdom of someone who seemed to forget that he was pure-blood half the time.

“Maybe,” Harry said. He’d put it aside as an explanation for now, although he wasn’t convinced. He picked up the marked report and turned it around. “What do you think of this?”

Ron read the report and frowned. “Mate, this one is still alive.”

“Yes, but drained of some magic,” Harry said. “Unusual if she was only defending herself or using magic to relieve some of her fear when she was gone.” Those were well-known side effects of accidental magic in lost children. “But perhaps not unusual if someone was taking it from her.”

Ron’s mouth tightened again, in a deeper frown. “Mate. I don’t think anyone’s ever found out a way to take magic that lasts.”

Harry shook his head. “I know.” There were spells that could use an opponent’s strength against him, and others that could duplicate a rare magical gift-such as the bond to a phoenix, although not Parseltongue-and still others that mimicked a spell to drain magic. In the end, though, the power still belonged to the one it was taken from, and was likely to leave the wizard who tried to take it even more drained and weak. You’d require a full Dark magical ritual to permanently acquire another wizard’s power, and that would mean the death of the victim in an unmistakable manner. None that Harry had ever heard of required scraping someone’s face off.

And there remained the problem that the girl who had died had no magic, and the one that had it returned to her parents alive.

“I’d like to talk to these parents anyway,” Harry said, and tapped the report with his quill. “See what other effects they noticed, and whether their daughter ever gained back the power they thought she’d lost or not.”

Ron grimaced, but nodded. “We have no other leads right now.”

“Not at the moment,” Harry said, and took his hand off his wand with an effort. When had it become habit to touch it, so much that he no longer noticed when his fingers went to it? He wondered if he could design a spell that would warn him when his elbow bent in that particular way. “There are some I could cast that would-”

“Mate.”

Ron didn’t sound like that often, and the way he reached out as if he would grip Harry’s shoulder and drag him around to the right way by force was irritating. Harry hunched his shoulders, nodded, and said, “Fine. No spells at all. The one I was going to suggest was Light, but I reckon that doesn’t matter.” He twisted fluidly to his feet.

“That isn’t it,” Ron said, with a dignity Harry had to admit did him credit. “That wasn’t what I was going to suggest, either. I don’t want you using spells that could be dangerous for you in any way. You put yourself in danger enough as it is.”

“I quite agree.”

Harry twisted around, to find Lucas Schroeder lounging in their doorway.

Seeing him reminded Harry of all the good reasons he had to hate Malfoy, which he had somehow managed to ignore when working together with the bloke. Malfoy had the same polished, more-than-casual grace that somehow suggested the air you breathed and the area you traversed belonged to him, and you should be grateful that he was allowing you to remain alive. Harry wanted to shake his head over that, but he could do that in front of Malfoy, who was his ally but otherwise didn’t matter to him. Wizengamot members like Schroeder would note the gesture, figure out what it meant, remember it, and use it against you twenty years from now. Or your children, although so far Harry had never found a woman he wanted to have children with.

Schroeder stood taller than Harry did, with grey eyes colder and clearer than Malfoy’s and black hair with a single grey streak down the middle, like a ripple of silvery moonlight in dark water. He smiled at Harry and said, “Auror Potter, would you come with me for a moment? I have to congratulate you on your arrest of my nephew. He has been causing me a bit of distress lately, and I have been worried that nothing would stop his career before he stumbled into a serious crime. There is more information I have to impart to you, and,” his eyes flickered minutely to Ron, “you alone.”

Of course it was part of a game, all part of the dance. Harry knew that. The question was figuring out the music.

And of course he glanced apologetically over at Ron, and of course Ron waved to him to leave as though he was used to handling this by himself, and settled back with a handful of papers. They had to play Schroeder’s game.

For now.

But Harry, as he smiled pleasantly and followed Schroeder out of the office, gossiping good-naturedly about Celestina Warbeck’s latest scandal all the way, was already thinking of ways to change the rules.

Chapter Eleven.

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