Chapter Fifteen of 'Bard of Morning's Hope'- Backlash
Chapter Fourteen.
Title: Bard of Morning's Hope (15/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, Lucius/Narcissa
Warnings: Minor character death, violence, angst, gore
Rating: R
Summary: The Bard of Morning's Hope is a seemingly unstoppable murderer stalking former Death Eaters and former Slytherins, enacting vengeance on them in an untraceable way. In the wake of Lucius Malfoy's savage death, Harry Potter becomes the Auror assigned to guard Draco and Narcissa Malfoy from a similar fate.
Author's Notes: This is based on a prompt by Kain, who requested, among several other things, Harry being hired to guard Draco and Narcissa from a killer who was murdering Death Eaters in revenge, Harry having a good relationship with the Weasleys, and a slow-burn romance between Harry and Draco. This story should be somewhere between twelve and twenty chapters, and will be updated every Saturday.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fifteen-Backlash
“I can still recognize people,” Draco remarked, after long enough that he thought Potter might only sit on his chair, a frozen statue, forever, if Draco didn’t say something. “That was Creevey, right? The one who died in the battle?”
He hadn’t known Creevey well. No reason they should, when he was in a different House, younger, Muggleborn, and on the opposite side of the war. But Draco had seen that face a few times behind a camera, and he had seen it among the dead after the battle. It had leaped out at him in a flash, because Creevey was one of the youngest who had died.
Potter’s head finally moved in a small nod, and he slung his hands out and looked at them for a second as if he had no idea what to do. Then he sat up and turned with a long noise like a boiling kettle to face Draco.
“His spirit must have wanted revenge,” he muttered. “I don’t know how it got that way. That’s not Colin. But-”
“People change when they become ghosts,” Draco suggested quietly. “The Bloody Baron isn’t the same man he was when he was alive, even if he was unnerving when he was alive, too. And who knows? Perhaps the injustice of Creevey’s death was so great that his spirit couldn’t rest, and that’s why he rose.”
Potter hesitated for long enough that Draco had to take his shoulder and shake him a little. “Potter,” he said. “You know that we have to deal with this. We have to do something about this. If he’s the Bard of Morning’s Hope, then we need to bring him down and stop him. Obviously not the same way that we would with a mortal criminal, but something needs to be done.”
“We?” That proved Potter’s mouth could move in an expression other than a frozen cry of distress. Draco smiled in relief. “Since when did you become an Auror, Malfoy?”
“Since the real Aurors froze up and stopped doing their job,” Draco replied crisply, and poked Potter in the chest when he didn’t respond. “Well? Are you going to help me with Creevey, or not?”
“I don’t see how I can do that, when he’s not here,” Potter muttered. But at least he was stirring and acting somewhat like himself again. His hands were unfolding with a long creak and crack of tendons. “I-you’re right. We need to think about what’s going to happen when we tell the others that it’s Colin.”
“Ghosts can be bound,” said Draco thoughtfully. “Made harmless.” He hesitated. “You think his brother knew?”
“Yes,” said Potter, looking into the distance as if he was watching Creevey die again and again. “Or he knew something, at any rate. I could tell that. I just couldn’t ask the right questions.” He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “That was why he didn’t want any other Aurors there. Someone else might have managed to ask the right question and find out what he was hiding.”
“Stop beating yourself up,” Draco ordered. He didn’t know that was what Potter was doing, but he was fairly certain. “So you didn’t find out what he was hiding. That doesn’t make you evil. No one else so much as suspected the Bard was a ghost, either.” He tapped Potter’s shoulder. “So we need to move on and ask this Dennis some more questions. About whether he’s tried to bind his brother already, for example.”
Potter’s eyes were coming back to normal. He nodded. “You’re right. And we need to see if we can soothe his desire for vengeance, or not.” He shrugged. “I didn’t think of ghosts partially because all the ones I’ve known were either good-natured or at least not interested in harming the living. Moaning Myrtle maybe being an exception, but she was exorcised.”
“She could be sympathetic,” Draco muttered, and then flushed as Potter looked at him. But Potter smiled a little and nodded, and Draco didn’t have to feel careless for bringing up that scene in the bathroom they both would have tried hard to forget.
“All right. Maybe there’s a way we can get through to Colin as well, then. Merlin, I hope so,” Potter muttered, and pulled himself up from his chair.
Draco hesitated once, but he needed to know. He reached out a hand and brushed it once against Potter’s shoulder. Only Potter turned, and Draco’s hand was resting more on his collarbone. It made Potter blink and go still, staring at him.
Draco cleared his throat, trying not to think about how awkward he sounded. “You know that we have to stop him?” he asked quietly. “It’s hard to destroy a ghost, and it’s usually not necessary, but it can be done. And I’ll see the Bard destroyed before I live in fear for the rest of my life because of him.”
Potter’s face was shadowed, but after a moment, he nodded. “I know that,” he said. “And it’s for the best, honestly. What sort of life-existence-whatever you want to call it-is it for Colin, if he spends the rest of it drifting around and feeling compelled to attack people?”
That confirmed Draco’s guess that Potter had a dangerous level of sympathy for the murderer now that he knew who it was, but he only nodded and let it go. For now, there was nothing to be gained by disagreeing with Potter, or protesting that at least the Bard still existed, while his victims didn’t have that dignity.
In important things, he thought, he and Potter were on the same side. Time enough to find out whether that was going to be true for the whole of the case.
*
“Merlin’s pants.” Ron was so pale that Harry would have taken him to hospital at once if he had passed him in the corridor at work and seen him like that. A second later, he shuddered and covered his face with one hand. “Poor Colin,” he whispered.
Narcissa shifted the shawl on her shoulders and glanced away. Malfoy only leaned on the wall and stared at nothing. Harry had insisted that both of them come with him to the Auror Department while he informed Ron. Colin’s attack had proven that he was still in the house, and he could lurk behind the wards and listen to them. Harry wasn’t going to leave them alone and come back to two more slaughtered victims.
“Yes,” said Harry, and nodded to Ron when he thought Ron was capable of listening. “But in the meantime, I need to talk to Dennis. I need to find out how much he knew about this and whether he ever realized that the Bard was his brother’s ghost.” He fell silent, going over the questions he had asked Dennis in his head again. How could there be a way for Dennis to know and yet evade the Veritaserum?
Then Harry groaned and let his head fall forwards. Of course. He had asked if Dennis knew who the Bard was. He hadn’t asked if Dennis suspected who the Bard was. If Dennis had only caught glimpses of a transparent face at times, the way Harry had during the last two attacks before Malfoy’s spell forced Colin to become visible, then he could easily have suspected the truth but never known it for sure.
“Why is Dennis so important, though?” Ron looked at him as if he was mad when Harry stood up. “Colin’s the one we’ve got to find a way to stop.”
“Yes,” Harry agreed heavily. “But I have to know if Dennis ever tried to bind his brother at all, or if he’s still running around causing trouble completely unbound. And I have to know if he did anything to aid him.” He looked Ron in the eye. “You know that the public, the bits of it that don’t sympathize with the Bard, is going to demand an arrest. We can arrest Dennis, if not anyone else.”
“I will demand an arrest, among other things,” Narcissa Malfoy murmured, voice shockingly cold. “Why would you let someone who may have helped my husband’s murderer walk free?”
“Because we need to determine how much he actually helped him and how much he knew,” Ron explained. Harry was impressed with the neutral tone of his voice, and how he nodded at Harry significantly a moment later. “Harry was the one who took Dennis’s original confession, for what it was worth, so he’ll be the one to find out whether he was telling the truth or lying.”
“We can still make sure that Dennis is arrested, even if he doesn’t know enough about the Bard to provide a good reason,” Harry added reassuringly, when Narcissa’s face turned towards him, blank as a lighted mirror. “He committed other crimes that I’d traced to him. So we can keep holding him.”
“You know Kingsley won’t let you-”
So Ron is more tactful than I thought, but still not as tactful as I need him to be, Harry thought, and shot Ron an eloquent look that at least shut him up. He was still scowling at Harry, though. Harry sniffed a little and turned away so he could look Narcissa, and then Malfoy, in the eye.
“We’ll hold him,” he said. “One way or another, we’ll hold him.”
Malfoy was the first to nod at him, while Narcissa still looked as though she’d like to sink her teeth into something and grip it. “I trust you, Potter,” Malfoy said, his voice making the speech as intimate as Dennis’s confession. “You’ll pull what you can from him.”
Harry smiled a little. “Exactly.” Then he turned to Ron. “I need you to stay here and guard the Malfoys while I interview Dennis.”
“No,” said Malfoy, so peacefully that he didn’t even have to explain his intentions, which made his next words so much wasted breath, as far as Harry was concerned. “I’m coming with you to see this man.”
“You know,” Harry said, with all the tact that he was personally capable of at the moment, “it doesn’t actually help our case if you murder Dennis before we can bring in the Bard, or convince Kingsley and the others who were about to pull me off the case that we know who the Bard is. You do something to Dennis, and the others will immediately put it down to not only vengeance but him not having anything to do with the real Bard. After all, he’s been questioned under Veritaserum, hasn’t he?”
Malfoy held his eyes.
Harry looked back at him and shook his head a little. “I’m not saying what I believe,” he said. “I’m seeing it through their eyes.”
“Well, stop,” said Malfoy irritably. “It’s disturbing.” But he did turn and nod to Ron. “My mother and I will accompany Potter.”
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea,” Ron muttered, and glanced at Harry, but Harry had already known he was going to lose this battle. He suspected the hardest thing would be to keep either of the Malfoys from trying to murder Dennis. But he could do that, while he wasn’t equal to try and make them stay here. His heart and head were full of tumbling pain. He waved a hand at Ron.
“If you try to hurt Dennis, then I’ll kick you out of the room and cast a spell on you that makes your hair turn brittle and fall out,” he told Malfoy.
Malfoy gave him a wondering stare, then snorted and said, “I’m not going to try and hurt him, Potter. I want to see what he has to say for himself, and that rather precludes breaking his jaw or something of the sort, since he wouldn’t be able to talk then.”
Harry shrugged in accordance and turned for the door. Malfoy came up beside him and rested a restraining hand on his shoulder, squeezing a little.
“My second reason is to make sure that he doesn’t hurt you,” he said, and then Harry had to walk down the corridor in silence because he had nothing to say.
*
Dennis Creevey didn’t look dangerous enough to be the leader of the Muggleborn Legion that supposedly wanted to eliminate all pure-bloods, Draco thought as they came into the room. He sat in the chair in his cell with his hands clasped in his lap and his gaze fixed on the far wall. When he turned to face Potter, his glance softened.
Then it fell on Draco and his mother, and Draco saw where the danger came from.
Creevey straightened in his seat, and his hand made a gesture that Draco didn’t know well but could recognize thanks to his time among the Death Eaters. Creevey didn’t act as if he was reaching for a wand that wasn’t there. He looked as if he was reaching for a weapon, as if he wanted a knife to cut Draco and his mother open, the way that Draco had sometimes seen Death Eaters like Bellatrix Lestrange do to prisoners.
Draco’s sympathy, if he had any, died. There was only curiosity left. It was a good thing Potter was here, so Creevey would get the sympathy he probably needed, but Draco wouldn’t offer it.
He stayed near the door with his mother while Potter stepped up to Creevey and said softly, “He can’t get in here, can he? No photographs.”
Creevey flinched as though hit by a body-blow. Then he straightened up, and he wasn’t going to make any more disturbing gestures at Draco and his mother, Draco thought, because all his attention had gone to Potter as if they no longer existed.
“So you know,” said Creevey.
“I know,” Potter agreed. “And I want to know the answer to my question.”
“Photographs are his gate,” said Creevey. “He can go anywhere that one of them has been, as long as it once had a connection to another place he’s appeared, or to him. So he couldn’t have gone into your house simply because you had photographs on the walls, but if you had one that he took or if someone brought one from a different house where he’d killed…yes.”
Potter closed his eyes. There was such weariness in his face that Draco wondered if Creevey would have pity for him, but he only met Potter’s weariness with his own and refused to look as if he was moved.
“He’s my brother,” Creevey whispered. “I couldn’t have betrayed him. I couldn’t have destroyed him. I wasn’t even sure that I saw him most of the time, or if it was just my grief and my hope bringing him back. You understand, Harry. You have to, when you lost so many people in the war.”
Draco could have told Creevey that that was the wrong kind of appeal. Potter would sympathize with a lot of people about a lot of things, but he wouldn’t let them off because of what he’d felt that wasn’t sympathy.
“I know how you feel about him,” said Potter. “And being uncertain about him is understandable. I felt uncertain even right after I saw him.” He leaned slightly forwards. “You must not have known it was him for sure, or you would have told me during the Veritaserum interrogation.”
Creevey nodded at once. “That’s right. I had my suspicions, but nothing else.”
Potter’s hand closed on the back of the chair he stood behind, although so low down that Draco didn’t think Creevey could see it. “But the thing I want to know now is why you agreed to the Veritaserum interrogation in the first place.”
Creevey blinked, and blinked again. Draco turned so that his attention was more on Potter than Creevey. For that matter, he wanted to know why Potter had asked that question himself.
If he felt those stares, Potter was obviously not going to let it disconcert him. He watched Creevey, as patient as a lizard.
Finally, Creevey said, “I wanted to show that I wasn’t the Bard, and my people weren’t either.”
“But you chose your answers so carefully, and you had to come near to fighting the Veritaserum a couple of times,” Potter murmured, his voice low, careful, vicious. “I think you did it to throw suspicion completely off any connection with you, so that for some reason, if I’d begun to think of Colin, I wouldn’t continue down that path.”
Creevey looked at him with narrow eyes. Considering eyes, Draco thought. He had believed Creevey was frightened, if only of them knowing the truth, when he first came into the room, but he no longer believed it. “And?” Creevey asked, in a low voice.
“I thought-when I found out it was Colin, I could see why you wanted to keep it a secret,” said Potter. “But then I thought of your answers, and I knew.” He paused, took a breath, asked another question. “Did you try to bind him or turn him away from his targets? Or warn anyone of how he could get through the photographs?”
“I didn’t know for sure it was him.”
“But you suspected.”
“You know I suspected.”
“Did you try to stop him?”
“How could I?” Creevey tightened his hands on the arms of his chair suddenly. “There were a few days when I thought I felt him nearby, the way I used to feel him on the edge of a conversation. He was shyer than you knew. He would just listen when people were talking, except around you. I think he was there, listening to the plans we made for dealing with the pure-bloods, but I didn’t look around. I thought-I thought, if he was there, if I wasn’t just going mad, that he deserved his revenge.”
Potter closed his eyes. Then he nodded once. “On people who didn’t kill him,” he said. “Even if he killed the person who did cast the curse that murdered him, he also murdered a whole lot of others who had nothing to do with it.”
“Death Eaters!”
“Some of who had served their sentences!” Potter yelled back, in a voice that made Creevey rock backwards. “I thought-I thought, Dennis, that you actually-that you believed in some sort of justice, that that was what you wanted with the Muggleborn Legion. But you don’t care if it’s mindless revenge, do you, as long as it’s Muggleborns killing pure-bloods and not the other way around?” He turned his back slowly and walked back towards the door. “All right. Ask your questions, Malfoy. I don’t care anymore.”
Creevey was staring at Potter’s back, and he shook his head. “Harry,” he called.
He might have ceased to exist. Potter stood beside Draco’s mother, his arms folded and his head facing the other way. Draco couldn’t begin to guess what had happened between them, why it mattered when Potter had already arrested Creevey and had suspected him of being a criminal for a long time, but it obviously did matter.
And seeing that, Draco decided that he didn’t have any questions to ask. Creevey both wouldn’t tell them the truth even if he had lied to Potter, and had already received his punishment.
“Let’s go,” Draco told Potter.
Potter’s eyes flashed towards him, still avoiding Creevey’s face, and he blinked. Draco nodded, and made his expression as gentle as he could. Potter hesitated once, then shrugged and stood straight, and accompanied Draco and his mother out of the room. Creevey’s calls from behind them went ignored.
Draco didn’t think he had words to explain how much of his desire to leave came from knowing they would learn nothing more, and how much came from the hurt done to Potter. He only knew that his mother didn’t complain, so she either was satisfied or didn’t think Creevey would answer them.
And he knew that when he put his hand out and squeezed Potter’s shoulder once, Potter looked at him and nodded, and that was enough.
Chapter Sixteen.
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