Chapter One of 'Hero's Funeral'- His Own Funeral
Title: Hero's Funeral
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Warnings: OC character death, angst, gore, violence, ignores the epilogue.
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, mentions of Ron/Hermione.
Rating: R
Summary: Auror Harry Potter has always had the "gift" of seeing murders in visions. Now he's seeing visions of his own death, and all while trying to work his first case for Socrates Corps. It's a good thing that his partner, Draco Malfoy, is there to help.
Author's Notes: This is the first longer fic in the "Cloak and Dagger" series, where Harry and Draco are Auror partners investigating a variety of dark cases. The series will eventually move to a slash relationship, but not right away. This particular fic should have between six and eight parts, and be updated every Wednesday evening.
Hero's Funeral
Chapter One--His Own Funeral
"Potter."
Harry kept his head down, his eyes on the desk in front of him as he arranged the old files that he'd brought with him from Aristotle Corps. They were the most useful for his new job, containing records of wizards that he now understood as some of the twisted. He would only hunt future twisted as his official Socrates work, although he could help out on other cases when they didn't have one to hunt.
From what Auror Latham had said while briefing them, Harry was sure that they would have more than enough twisted to go around.
"Potter," said a heavier voice behind him, and Harry turned around to face Draco Malfoy.
They'd seen each other several times before this as the other members of Socrates Corps briefed them, gave them advice, and explained the basic rules and regulations governing this most secretive of the Auror groups to them, but they hadn't had time for long conversations. And this was their first day together as official partners. Harry reckoned he should make an effort, or Malfoy would complain about him to their superiors, and he'd be right to do so, by most measurements. Harry gave a shallow fraction of a nod. "Hullo, Malfoy."
Malfoy sat down in his own chair and ignored Harry for the next few minutes, as though he had got what he wanted. Harry shrugged and went back to arranging his files. They were in an order that Hermione had argued didn't make sense, but they did to Harry; they were arranged from most to least traumatic. If half the information he had received about the twisted was true, then the more innocent cases he'd been called out to investigate wouldn't help him, or at least not often.
Harry let his hand linger on the top file for a second. It recorded the Gina Kendricks case, called after the first victim. Most of the time, the cases were named after the criminals, but in this case, they'd never got the official name of the creature that did the killing before Harry brought it down.
They can call it Hendricks all they like. For Harry, it would always be Vane.
"Potter." Malfoy's voice was sharp.
Harry sighed and turned around. They'd got along well enough during their first few encounters, if stiffly. He hoped Malfoy wasn't trying to revive their rivalry. It would be boring. Harry had changed enough from that person to no longer find even his memories all that interesting. "Yes?"
Malfoy held out a file to him. He was slender enough that if he stood broadside to a shadow, Harry thought, he would disappear. He had cut his blond hair short, but the cut was nowhere near unflattering. "We have a case."
Harry narrowed his eyes and took the file from him. Auror Latham had cautioned them that it normally took weeks of work to identify a twisted; in fact, most of the time Socrates Corps was called in on what had looked like a normal case at first, and which only displayed the characteristics of twisted work after intensive investigation. It seemed a nasty coincidence that they received their first case their first official day at work.
"Read it, Potter, don't caress it."
Harry didn't look up at Malfoy, because he wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He began reading the case file instead.
The suspect was a wizard named Alasdair Larkin, who had been accused of breaking into a witch's house and stealing some valuable family jewelry. The day before she was supposed to testify against him, the witch had dropped dead in the middle of a party, with no one near her and her first glass still in her hand, untouched. Less than an hour later, Larkin was gone from his holding cell, snatched away by a band of what the witnesses called "soft ghosts" and with a symbol left behind on the wall: a black, broken sketch like a snapped unicorn's horn.
Companions, and symbol, Harry noticed. The briefing had included the information that a twisted wizard, one driven mad by excessive use of Dark Arts, would always have companions around and serving him or her, and would create a personal symbol usually left behind at crime scenes and imprinted on the bodies of companions.
A lot of things about Voldemort had made more sense, when Harry heard that.
Larkin had likewise demonstrated two of the other five signs that the wizard they were dealing with was a twisted: he used only Dark Arts in battle, no matter what spell were flung at him, and when one of the Aurors who had captured him after the theft opened a small cut on the back of his hand, he proved incapable of healing it, although that charm was simple. Twisted were proficient in Dark Arts and preferred them above all else, and they could not use healing magic.
So far, though, there was considerable doubt about the fifth sign, the most dangerous one--Larkin's flaw. Every twisted had an ability of wandless magic, called the flaw, that they mostly used to kill or torture their victims.
Harry hoped fervently that this one's flaw wasn't something like focusing on a particular victim and willing them to die, which was the main guess in this file. Larkin would be next to impossible to capture, if that was the case.
"Are you done with the file, or do you need to clutch at it a little longer?"
Harry started and looked up, scowling. Malfoy stood with his hand extended for the file, snapping his fingers as if he assumed that Harry existed to give it to him and for no other purpose.
You're here to be partners, Harry reminded himself, and passed the file back over. Not schoolboys.
"There's no doubt about him being a twisted," he said, glad that his voice was cool and not full of the enmity that Malfoy seemed to be trying to stir up behind them. "Are we going to interview the witnesses first, or go after Larkin's family members?"
Malfoy opened his mouth to answer. His words amounted to nothing more than a roaring in Harry's ears, like the call of a distant ocean. The world around him stretched and warped, flowing away, and the colors in front of Harry smeared and changed.
Not again. Harry went to one knee, grimacing, and closed his eyes. Since the war, he'd had visions of the most violent murders in Britain, sometimes in time to do something about them, sometimes with details that would let him catch the murderers. It was an invaluable gift for an Auror, but it did rather tend to take over his life when it happened.
He waited for the victim to swim out of the colors around him. The vision always centered on the victim first, sometimes to the extent that Harry watched them die through their eyes.
But he saw no victim this time. Instead, there was only a giant metallic shape flying directly towards him, surrounded by what looked like silvery mist, and manic laughter somewhere in the background. The shape hit him, and Harry jolted and cried out as he felt his bones breaking, his heart smashing and his lungs piercing under his ribs as they bowed inwards. He writhed in pain, and it flooded him, and it was the world, and it was more intense than anything he had ever experienced before.
For long moments, he thought his heart might stop simply because of what he was feeling.
Then it was gone, and he was kneeling on the floor of the Socrates office, with Malfoy staring down at him. He looked impatient, which gratified Harry. He couldn't stand fussing over him when he had these visions. They were inconvenient and violent, but they were a necessary part of his life, and nothing he had tried got rid of them. He might as well use them.
"What was that, Potter?" Malfoy asked, voice cold as Nagini's heart.
"I get visions of deaths," Harry said, and reached out a shaking hand until he was sure that he could get hold of his desk and stand up. "Most of the time, they can give me some details of the victim or the murderer. Sometimes they haven't happened yet, and we can catch someone."
Malfoy narrowed his eyes. "I understand your high arrest record now."
Harry snorted, but made no answer. He had other gifts, but Malfoy would discover those as they worked together as partners; he had no need to reveal them all at the moment. "This was different, though," he said. "More violent."
Malfoy nodded. "Does it link to Larkin?"
"I don't know," Harry said, thinking again about the intense pain, the way that he had no idea who the victim was, and shuddering as the sensations roared through him. He really had thought he was dying, not just observing a death.
Dying.
"I think," he said, and was proud of himself for keeping his voice steady as he spoke, "that the death I saw in the vision was mine."
*
Draco did not need this.
He was already impatient enough with his assignment to Socrates. He knew his superiors wanted to see him fail, and that he would impress them and drive them into grudging acknowledgment of his greatness. But as yet, he had seen no enemy moving openly. He didn't know who he should target.
And then Potter, the one person whose hostility he thought he already understood, displayed this bloody character flaw.
Draco paused. Perhaps the recent facts they'd learned about the twisted were still too much in his mind, but he did wonder if Potter's magic, these visions that apparently most of the Auror Department knew about, were a flaw.
But he had no answers, and he had more important things to attend to, so he said impatiently, "Well, you're not dead yet, so this must be one of the visions that happens before the death. What did you see?"
Potter shook his head. "Mist. A weight of some sort flying at me, falling on me. It crushed me, and that's how I died. Someone laughing."
Draco waited, then sighed. "And no more than that? That's not a lot to bloody go on."
Potter swung around to glare at him. Draco felt slightly comforted by that. Matters weren't actually that bad if Potter could glare at him so. "So sorry, Malfoy," he said, voice aimed at what would have been an acceptable sneer if he had more practice. "My death doesn't live up to your standards any more than anything else about me."
Draco let his gaze linger on Potter's hair, and said nothing. The silence would do all his work for him. Potter's nostrils flared, and he turned away as if he had nothing more to say on that score.
"I'll watch your back," Draco said. "To reply to your question that started all this--since I doubt you heard me--we should go to Larkin's relatives first. We already have most of the details about Serena Whitley's death that the witnesses could give us, in the report."
"We have to figure out what the flaw is before we can hunt him," Potter argued, with a frown.
The "trauma" from his vision is wearing off already, I see. Just as well that he won't turn into a sobbing wreck that I have to take care of. "His relatives are closer to him than a lot of random wizards were to Whitley," Draco said. "They might have some idea of the flaw as well as of hiding places."
Potter snorted something that was evidently meant to be agreement, but sounded like a horse blowing its nose. "Come on, then." He turned and walked out of the office, his back straight. Draco followed, watching him and wondering again why no one had thought to inform Draco himself of those visions. This one had dropped Potter for a good five minutes.
If that happens in the middle of battle, then I'll probably have to take care of him after all. Or at least his corpse.
Draco sighed. He should have known that when he received what was technically a promotion--the Socrates Corps hunted the most dangerous Dark wizards in Britain--it would turn out to be covered with shit on the bottom.
*
"I know that it must have been a shock." Harry kept his voice soothing, lulling, the way he had learned to do with witnesses, victims who'd survived, and other people connected in some way to the killer. Other Aurors could work better with humor, with aggression, with toughness, or even with silence, but this was the way he worked. "To think that someone that close to you could do something like that..."
"They don't have enough evidence to convict him!" Rebecca Larkin interrupted, leaning forwards and glaring at Harry around the shoulder of her teary-eyed mother, Joanna. "It was only hearsay that Alasdair even stole her jewelry, never mind what else you're saying about him!"
Harry turned a patient smile on her, and said, "You're an intelligent young woman, Ms. Larkin. Do you really think that all the evidence points to someone else? If so, let us know. We'd be just as happy to think that Ms. Whitley's death was an accident and we can arrest someone else for the robbery."
Malfoy, gone silent and tense behind him, relaxed again. Harry could tell that much without looking at him. He sighed soundlessly. Good. He'd seen in their first five minutes here that Malfoy didn't have good interview technique.
"Make some tea for them, please, Rebecca," Joanna said in a small, dignified voice.
"They're Aurors," Rebecca said, focusing on her mother in a way that made Harry suddenly aware this small, shawl-clad woman might command in this house after all, rather than her daughter. "You know what they're here to do to Alasdair, Mum! You can't tell them anything!"
"I believe," said Joanna, glancing at her daughter from behind square glasses, "that I know as much about who they are as you do."
Rebecca's head drooped. Her mouth worked for a moment, as though she would interrupt out of spite, but at last she got up and went to the kitchen. The flat was small, though, and Harry knew she would hear any sound they made from there. Her glare over her shoulder said she planned to use that to her advantage. But at least it got her behind a wall and out of sight.
"Are you all right, Mrs. Larkin?" Harry asked quietly.
Joanna sighed and mopped her glasses on the edge of her shawl. She had the dark hair that her daughter and son shared, although hers was tinted with grey, but her eyes were a bright blue that reminded Harry of Lionel's.
The Vane case, he thought, and used it like a lullaby to put the memories to sleep.
"I am," she whispered. "And I have to say that I can believe it of Alasdair, even though Becky doesn't want to. Oh, I can believe it of him."
"Did you see him using Dark Arts?" Harry asked. It was such a basic question he had skipped asking it at first, because he had assumed both witnesses would be hostile based on Rebecca Larkin's demeanor. But Joanna nodded, her eyes shut now, as if looking into the past.
"Yes. He was fascinated with the great Dark Lords of the past, you know. Grindelwald most of all. He didn't think much of You-Know-Who." A dry puff of a laugh slipped from her throat. "Thought he was too common, too obvious. But I thought it was an interest in history at first, and I never prevented him from studying it.
"Three years ago, I caught him sacrificing a stoat on the night of the full moon."
Malfoy hissed between his teeth. Harry opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, about whether it was blood magic, but Malfoy beat him to it.
"To summon another body for himself?" he asked.
Joanna nodded to him. "Exactly," she said. "He told me that, freely. He seemed to think there was no reason I would disapprove." She sighed. "I realized later that he interpreted my not restricting his reading as a sign that I would be on his side."
Harry kept his mouth shut, because Malfoy had moved smoothly into control of the interrogation, but his thoughts raced furiously. He'd never heard of summoning another body for someone as part of Dark magic. He wondered why Malfoy's mind had leaped there immediately, and when he planned to inform Harry of what he was thinking about.
"I told him he would have to leave the house if he did something like that again, and for a time he kept it quiet. But then I found blood in his bedroom, and books he couldn't explain on his shelves, and turned him out. He hasn't lived with us for the past two years." Joanna hesitated.
"Anything could be important," Harry said, recognizing the hesitation for what it was, an uncertainty about whether she should speak the next words or not. Malfoy, who had been preparing a speech of his own, hissed like a snake thwarted of food for her nestlings, but Harry ignored him. He might tell the git about the comparison later, though. Knowing Malfoy, it would probably flatter rather than insult him.
"He kept saying to me--in the days when he would talk about Grindelwald and his studies under the impression that I was on his side--that the greatest weapon any Dark Lord could have wasn't his soldiers. I think I mentioned that he was rather contemptuous of the Death Eaters." Malfoy stirred again behind Harry, but Harry thought he managed to tamp it down before Joanna noticed. Good. We're going to meet any number of people on cases like this who will think everything connects back to Voldemort, and it'll be hard to deal with them if he's so sensitive. "He said that their greatest weapon was fear. We became afraid to pronounce You-Know-Who's name, and that was when, according to Alasdair, he'd won. It was the one thing he admired about him."
Harry felt the deep sensation of rightness that usually touched him when he knew that he'd learned an important fact about his target, if not how it fit in yet. He smiled at Joanna. "One more question, and I hope that you don't mind it being a personal one. What did he think about You-Know-Who's defeat?"
"Tea!" Rebecca announced loudly, stepping out of the kitchen and glaring at them as if she dared them to refuse.
"He couldn't believe it had happened, at first." Joanna reached for the first cup of tea without looking, as if she knew exactly where the tray would be, and indeed Rebecca moved over to ensure that her mother could reach. Harry was glad to see that. Sometimes it needed work to remind himself that a loud or unpleasant person they dealt with in the course of their jobs really wasn't a bad person. "Then he excused it by saying that You-Know-Who had let the fear falter. You weren't afraid of him, Auror Potter. Or not afraid enough not to fight him," she added, with a shrewd glance that made Harry a bit uncomfortable. "That was his version of all the Dark Lords' successes and defeats, as I think I told you."
Harry nodded. "Thank you, Mrs. Larkin. You've been very helpful."
"Isn't that nice?" Rebecca asked in a bright, brittle voice, and shoved the teatray at them. "Here, take what you like."
"No, thanks," Harry said, with a nod at her, and stood up.
"Because you don't trust me, I suppose." Rebecca puffed up. "Because you think that I'd poison you to help Alasdair or something."
"Yes, that's exactly what we think," Malfoy said, before Harry could intervene with something diplomatic. "Or at least I do, and I trust that everyone in this room recognized that I'm the brains of the partnership."
Harry turned and glared at him. Malfoy looked back, unimpressed--until the moment when his eyes widened and he leaped on Harry, bearing him to the floor.
The teatray went by with a rapid swish above their heads. Harry's eyes fixed on it for a moment, and he saw that it was silver.
A silver metallic weight, descending on him, surrounded by mist that could also be interpreted as the white sleeves of Rebecca's robes swishing alongside it. Only the laughter--Alasdair's laughter, Harry presumed--was missing.
He rolled to the side, dragging Malfoy with him, and so they weren't there when Rebecca slammed the teatray into the floor, either. Harry dragged again and got Malfoy behind him, drawing his wand.
"Rebecca," Joanna whispered, a world of fear in her tone.
The violent emotions that had made Rebecca attack were already wearing off; she stood there with a white face and her hands clasped to her mouth. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what happened--I was thinking that you'd take Alasdair to prison, and how afraid I was of that, and suddenly I had to attack you--I had to--"
Malfoy spoke a quiet, competent binding curse, and Rebecca dropped to the floor, her hands roped together behind her back, a gag over her mouth. Harry glared at him and said, "We need her able to talk."
"Then take the gag off," Malfoy snapped, standing with his wand leveled at the young witch. "She tried to murder us."
"It was a tray," Harry said, but the resemblance to his vision was crimping his voice off. He knelt down next to Rebecca and took the gag off. She stared at him, trembling, her eyes fierce with terror behind the tears.
Terror.
"Let me guess," he said, gentle because he could be, because he understood. "You felt fear that we would take your brother to prison."
Rebecca, eyes locked with his, nodded. Hers were dark, Harry thought, unlike their mother's, but very close to the photographs of Alasdair Larkin that he had already studied.
"Fear so great you would do anything to prevent it."
She nodded again, and shut her eyes, turning her head away.
Harry stood back up, catching Malfoy's eye. He mouthed, I know what his flaw is.
Chapter Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/372275.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Warnings: OC character death, angst, gore, violence, ignores the epilogue.
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, mentions of Ron/Hermione.
Rating: R
Summary: Auror Harry Potter has always had the "gift" of seeing murders in visions. Now he's seeing visions of his own death, and all while trying to work his first case for Socrates Corps. It's a good thing that his partner, Draco Malfoy, is there to help.
Author's Notes: This is the first longer fic in the "Cloak and Dagger" series, where Harry and Draco are Auror partners investigating a variety of dark cases. The series will eventually move to a slash relationship, but not right away. This particular fic should have between six and eight parts, and be updated every Wednesday evening.
Hero's Funeral
Chapter One--His Own Funeral
"Potter."
Harry kept his head down, his eyes on the desk in front of him as he arranged the old files that he'd brought with him from Aristotle Corps. They were the most useful for his new job, containing records of wizards that he now understood as some of the twisted. He would only hunt future twisted as his official Socrates work, although he could help out on other cases when they didn't have one to hunt.
From what Auror Latham had said while briefing them, Harry was sure that they would have more than enough twisted to go around.
"Potter," said a heavier voice behind him, and Harry turned around to face Draco Malfoy.
They'd seen each other several times before this as the other members of Socrates Corps briefed them, gave them advice, and explained the basic rules and regulations governing this most secretive of the Auror groups to them, but they hadn't had time for long conversations. And this was their first day together as official partners. Harry reckoned he should make an effort, or Malfoy would complain about him to their superiors, and he'd be right to do so, by most measurements. Harry gave a shallow fraction of a nod. "Hullo, Malfoy."
Malfoy sat down in his own chair and ignored Harry for the next few minutes, as though he had got what he wanted. Harry shrugged and went back to arranging his files. They were in an order that Hermione had argued didn't make sense, but they did to Harry; they were arranged from most to least traumatic. If half the information he had received about the twisted was true, then the more innocent cases he'd been called out to investigate wouldn't help him, or at least not often.
Harry let his hand linger on the top file for a second. It recorded the Gina Kendricks case, called after the first victim. Most of the time, the cases were named after the criminals, but in this case, they'd never got the official name of the creature that did the killing before Harry brought it down.
They can call it Hendricks all they like. For Harry, it would always be Vane.
"Potter." Malfoy's voice was sharp.
Harry sighed and turned around. They'd got along well enough during their first few encounters, if stiffly. He hoped Malfoy wasn't trying to revive their rivalry. It would be boring. Harry had changed enough from that person to no longer find even his memories all that interesting. "Yes?"
Malfoy held out a file to him. He was slender enough that if he stood broadside to a shadow, Harry thought, he would disappear. He had cut his blond hair short, but the cut was nowhere near unflattering. "We have a case."
Harry narrowed his eyes and took the file from him. Auror Latham had cautioned them that it normally took weeks of work to identify a twisted; in fact, most of the time Socrates Corps was called in on what had looked like a normal case at first, and which only displayed the characteristics of twisted work after intensive investigation. It seemed a nasty coincidence that they received their first case their first official day at work.
"Read it, Potter, don't caress it."
Harry didn't look up at Malfoy, because he wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He began reading the case file instead.
The suspect was a wizard named Alasdair Larkin, who had been accused of breaking into a witch's house and stealing some valuable family jewelry. The day before she was supposed to testify against him, the witch had dropped dead in the middle of a party, with no one near her and her first glass still in her hand, untouched. Less than an hour later, Larkin was gone from his holding cell, snatched away by a band of what the witnesses called "soft ghosts" and with a symbol left behind on the wall: a black, broken sketch like a snapped unicorn's horn.
Companions, and symbol, Harry noticed. The briefing had included the information that a twisted wizard, one driven mad by excessive use of Dark Arts, would always have companions around and serving him or her, and would create a personal symbol usually left behind at crime scenes and imprinted on the bodies of companions.
A lot of things about Voldemort had made more sense, when Harry heard that.
Larkin had likewise demonstrated two of the other five signs that the wizard they were dealing with was a twisted: he used only Dark Arts in battle, no matter what spell were flung at him, and when one of the Aurors who had captured him after the theft opened a small cut on the back of his hand, he proved incapable of healing it, although that charm was simple. Twisted were proficient in Dark Arts and preferred them above all else, and they could not use healing magic.
So far, though, there was considerable doubt about the fifth sign, the most dangerous one--Larkin's flaw. Every twisted had an ability of wandless magic, called the flaw, that they mostly used to kill or torture their victims.
Harry hoped fervently that this one's flaw wasn't something like focusing on a particular victim and willing them to die, which was the main guess in this file. Larkin would be next to impossible to capture, if that was the case.
"Are you done with the file, or do you need to clutch at it a little longer?"
Harry started and looked up, scowling. Malfoy stood with his hand extended for the file, snapping his fingers as if he assumed that Harry existed to give it to him and for no other purpose.
You're here to be partners, Harry reminded himself, and passed the file back over. Not schoolboys.
"There's no doubt about him being a twisted," he said, glad that his voice was cool and not full of the enmity that Malfoy seemed to be trying to stir up behind them. "Are we going to interview the witnesses first, or go after Larkin's family members?"
Malfoy opened his mouth to answer. His words amounted to nothing more than a roaring in Harry's ears, like the call of a distant ocean. The world around him stretched and warped, flowing away, and the colors in front of Harry smeared and changed.
Not again. Harry went to one knee, grimacing, and closed his eyes. Since the war, he'd had visions of the most violent murders in Britain, sometimes in time to do something about them, sometimes with details that would let him catch the murderers. It was an invaluable gift for an Auror, but it did rather tend to take over his life when it happened.
He waited for the victim to swim out of the colors around him. The vision always centered on the victim first, sometimes to the extent that Harry watched them die through their eyes.
But he saw no victim this time. Instead, there was only a giant metallic shape flying directly towards him, surrounded by what looked like silvery mist, and manic laughter somewhere in the background. The shape hit him, and Harry jolted and cried out as he felt his bones breaking, his heart smashing and his lungs piercing under his ribs as they bowed inwards. He writhed in pain, and it flooded him, and it was the world, and it was more intense than anything he had ever experienced before.
For long moments, he thought his heart might stop simply because of what he was feeling.
Then it was gone, and he was kneeling on the floor of the Socrates office, with Malfoy staring down at him. He looked impatient, which gratified Harry. He couldn't stand fussing over him when he had these visions. They were inconvenient and violent, but they were a necessary part of his life, and nothing he had tried got rid of them. He might as well use them.
"What was that, Potter?" Malfoy asked, voice cold as Nagini's heart.
"I get visions of deaths," Harry said, and reached out a shaking hand until he was sure that he could get hold of his desk and stand up. "Most of the time, they can give me some details of the victim or the murderer. Sometimes they haven't happened yet, and we can catch someone."
Malfoy narrowed his eyes. "I understand your high arrest record now."
Harry snorted, but made no answer. He had other gifts, but Malfoy would discover those as they worked together as partners; he had no need to reveal them all at the moment. "This was different, though," he said. "More violent."
Malfoy nodded. "Does it link to Larkin?"
"I don't know," Harry said, thinking again about the intense pain, the way that he had no idea who the victim was, and shuddering as the sensations roared through him. He really had thought he was dying, not just observing a death.
Dying.
"I think," he said, and was proud of himself for keeping his voice steady as he spoke, "that the death I saw in the vision was mine."
*
Draco did not need this.
He was already impatient enough with his assignment to Socrates. He knew his superiors wanted to see him fail, and that he would impress them and drive them into grudging acknowledgment of his greatness. But as yet, he had seen no enemy moving openly. He didn't know who he should target.
And then Potter, the one person whose hostility he thought he already understood, displayed this bloody character flaw.
Draco paused. Perhaps the recent facts they'd learned about the twisted were still too much in his mind, but he did wonder if Potter's magic, these visions that apparently most of the Auror Department knew about, were a flaw.
But he had no answers, and he had more important things to attend to, so he said impatiently, "Well, you're not dead yet, so this must be one of the visions that happens before the death. What did you see?"
Potter shook his head. "Mist. A weight of some sort flying at me, falling on me. It crushed me, and that's how I died. Someone laughing."
Draco waited, then sighed. "And no more than that? That's not a lot to bloody go on."
Potter swung around to glare at him. Draco felt slightly comforted by that. Matters weren't actually that bad if Potter could glare at him so. "So sorry, Malfoy," he said, voice aimed at what would have been an acceptable sneer if he had more practice. "My death doesn't live up to your standards any more than anything else about me."
Draco let his gaze linger on Potter's hair, and said nothing. The silence would do all his work for him. Potter's nostrils flared, and he turned away as if he had nothing more to say on that score.
"I'll watch your back," Draco said. "To reply to your question that started all this--since I doubt you heard me--we should go to Larkin's relatives first. We already have most of the details about Serena Whitley's death that the witnesses could give us, in the report."
"We have to figure out what the flaw is before we can hunt him," Potter argued, with a frown.
The "trauma" from his vision is wearing off already, I see. Just as well that he won't turn into a sobbing wreck that I have to take care of. "His relatives are closer to him than a lot of random wizards were to Whitley," Draco said. "They might have some idea of the flaw as well as of hiding places."
Potter snorted something that was evidently meant to be agreement, but sounded like a horse blowing its nose. "Come on, then." He turned and walked out of the office, his back straight. Draco followed, watching him and wondering again why no one had thought to inform Draco himself of those visions. This one had dropped Potter for a good five minutes.
If that happens in the middle of battle, then I'll probably have to take care of him after all. Or at least his corpse.
Draco sighed. He should have known that when he received what was technically a promotion--the Socrates Corps hunted the most dangerous Dark wizards in Britain--it would turn out to be covered with shit on the bottom.
*
"I know that it must have been a shock." Harry kept his voice soothing, lulling, the way he had learned to do with witnesses, victims who'd survived, and other people connected in some way to the killer. Other Aurors could work better with humor, with aggression, with toughness, or even with silence, but this was the way he worked. "To think that someone that close to you could do something like that..."
"They don't have enough evidence to convict him!" Rebecca Larkin interrupted, leaning forwards and glaring at Harry around the shoulder of her teary-eyed mother, Joanna. "It was only hearsay that Alasdair even stole her jewelry, never mind what else you're saying about him!"
Harry turned a patient smile on her, and said, "You're an intelligent young woman, Ms. Larkin. Do you really think that all the evidence points to someone else? If so, let us know. We'd be just as happy to think that Ms. Whitley's death was an accident and we can arrest someone else for the robbery."
Malfoy, gone silent and tense behind him, relaxed again. Harry could tell that much without looking at him. He sighed soundlessly. Good. He'd seen in their first five minutes here that Malfoy didn't have good interview technique.
"Make some tea for them, please, Rebecca," Joanna said in a small, dignified voice.
"They're Aurors," Rebecca said, focusing on her mother in a way that made Harry suddenly aware this small, shawl-clad woman might command in this house after all, rather than her daughter. "You know what they're here to do to Alasdair, Mum! You can't tell them anything!"
"I believe," said Joanna, glancing at her daughter from behind square glasses, "that I know as much about who they are as you do."
Rebecca's head drooped. Her mouth worked for a moment, as though she would interrupt out of spite, but at last she got up and went to the kitchen. The flat was small, though, and Harry knew she would hear any sound they made from there. Her glare over her shoulder said she planned to use that to her advantage. But at least it got her behind a wall and out of sight.
"Are you all right, Mrs. Larkin?" Harry asked quietly.
Joanna sighed and mopped her glasses on the edge of her shawl. She had the dark hair that her daughter and son shared, although hers was tinted with grey, but her eyes were a bright blue that reminded Harry of Lionel's.
The Vane case, he thought, and used it like a lullaby to put the memories to sleep.
"I am," she whispered. "And I have to say that I can believe it of Alasdair, even though Becky doesn't want to. Oh, I can believe it of him."
"Did you see him using Dark Arts?" Harry asked. It was such a basic question he had skipped asking it at first, because he had assumed both witnesses would be hostile based on Rebecca Larkin's demeanor. But Joanna nodded, her eyes shut now, as if looking into the past.
"Yes. He was fascinated with the great Dark Lords of the past, you know. Grindelwald most of all. He didn't think much of You-Know-Who." A dry puff of a laugh slipped from her throat. "Thought he was too common, too obvious. But I thought it was an interest in history at first, and I never prevented him from studying it.
"Three years ago, I caught him sacrificing a stoat on the night of the full moon."
Malfoy hissed between his teeth. Harry opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, about whether it was blood magic, but Malfoy beat him to it.
"To summon another body for himself?" he asked.
Joanna nodded to him. "Exactly," she said. "He told me that, freely. He seemed to think there was no reason I would disapprove." She sighed. "I realized later that he interpreted my not restricting his reading as a sign that I would be on his side."
Harry kept his mouth shut, because Malfoy had moved smoothly into control of the interrogation, but his thoughts raced furiously. He'd never heard of summoning another body for someone as part of Dark magic. He wondered why Malfoy's mind had leaped there immediately, and when he planned to inform Harry of what he was thinking about.
"I told him he would have to leave the house if he did something like that again, and for a time he kept it quiet. But then I found blood in his bedroom, and books he couldn't explain on his shelves, and turned him out. He hasn't lived with us for the past two years." Joanna hesitated.
"Anything could be important," Harry said, recognizing the hesitation for what it was, an uncertainty about whether she should speak the next words or not. Malfoy, who had been preparing a speech of his own, hissed like a snake thwarted of food for her nestlings, but Harry ignored him. He might tell the git about the comparison later, though. Knowing Malfoy, it would probably flatter rather than insult him.
"He kept saying to me--in the days when he would talk about Grindelwald and his studies under the impression that I was on his side--that the greatest weapon any Dark Lord could have wasn't his soldiers. I think I mentioned that he was rather contemptuous of the Death Eaters." Malfoy stirred again behind Harry, but Harry thought he managed to tamp it down before Joanna noticed. Good. We're going to meet any number of people on cases like this who will think everything connects back to Voldemort, and it'll be hard to deal with them if he's so sensitive. "He said that their greatest weapon was fear. We became afraid to pronounce You-Know-Who's name, and that was when, according to Alasdair, he'd won. It was the one thing he admired about him."
Harry felt the deep sensation of rightness that usually touched him when he knew that he'd learned an important fact about his target, if not how it fit in yet. He smiled at Joanna. "One more question, and I hope that you don't mind it being a personal one. What did he think about You-Know-Who's defeat?"
"Tea!" Rebecca announced loudly, stepping out of the kitchen and glaring at them as if she dared them to refuse.
"He couldn't believe it had happened, at first." Joanna reached for the first cup of tea without looking, as if she knew exactly where the tray would be, and indeed Rebecca moved over to ensure that her mother could reach. Harry was glad to see that. Sometimes it needed work to remind himself that a loud or unpleasant person they dealt with in the course of their jobs really wasn't a bad person. "Then he excused it by saying that You-Know-Who had let the fear falter. You weren't afraid of him, Auror Potter. Or not afraid enough not to fight him," she added, with a shrewd glance that made Harry a bit uncomfortable. "That was his version of all the Dark Lords' successes and defeats, as I think I told you."
Harry nodded. "Thank you, Mrs. Larkin. You've been very helpful."
"Isn't that nice?" Rebecca asked in a bright, brittle voice, and shoved the teatray at them. "Here, take what you like."
"No, thanks," Harry said, with a nod at her, and stood up.
"Because you don't trust me, I suppose." Rebecca puffed up. "Because you think that I'd poison you to help Alasdair or something."
"Yes, that's exactly what we think," Malfoy said, before Harry could intervene with something diplomatic. "Or at least I do, and I trust that everyone in this room recognized that I'm the brains of the partnership."
Harry turned and glared at him. Malfoy looked back, unimpressed--until the moment when his eyes widened and he leaped on Harry, bearing him to the floor.
The teatray went by with a rapid swish above their heads. Harry's eyes fixed on it for a moment, and he saw that it was silver.
A silver metallic weight, descending on him, surrounded by mist that could also be interpreted as the white sleeves of Rebecca's robes swishing alongside it. Only the laughter--Alasdair's laughter, Harry presumed--was missing.
He rolled to the side, dragging Malfoy with him, and so they weren't there when Rebecca slammed the teatray into the floor, either. Harry dragged again and got Malfoy behind him, drawing his wand.
"Rebecca," Joanna whispered, a world of fear in her tone.
The violent emotions that had made Rebecca attack were already wearing off; she stood there with a white face and her hands clasped to her mouth. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what happened--I was thinking that you'd take Alasdair to prison, and how afraid I was of that, and suddenly I had to attack you--I had to--"
Malfoy spoke a quiet, competent binding curse, and Rebecca dropped to the floor, her hands roped together behind her back, a gag over her mouth. Harry glared at him and said, "We need her able to talk."
"Then take the gag off," Malfoy snapped, standing with his wand leveled at the young witch. "She tried to murder us."
"It was a tray," Harry said, but the resemblance to his vision was crimping his voice off. He knelt down next to Rebecca and took the gag off. She stared at him, trembling, her eyes fierce with terror behind the tears.
Terror.
"Let me guess," he said, gentle because he could be, because he understood. "You felt fear that we would take your brother to prison."
Rebecca, eyes locked with his, nodded. Hers were dark, Harry thought, unlike their mother's, but very close to the photographs of Alasdair Larkin that he had already studied.
"Fear so great you would do anything to prevent it."
She nodded again, and shut her eyes, turning her head away.
Harry stood back up, catching Malfoy's eye. He mouthed, I know what his flaw is.
Chapter Two.
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