Chapter Two of 'A Reign of Silence'- In Search
Chapter One.
Title: A Reign of Silence (2/20)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, violence
Summary: After the debacle that occurred in the Head Auror’s office, Harry and Draco are hot on the trail of the blue-eyed twisted. If, of course, they can avoid the scrutiny of the Ministry, Draco’s parents, and everyone else who has a reason to be disappointed in them.
Author’s Notes: Welcome to the twelfth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, about Harry and Draco working together as Auror partners hunting down vicious Dark wizards. This 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, and
"There Was Glory". Don’t try to read this story without reading those others, as it won’t make sense. This one will probably be around twenty chapters.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two-In Search
“Well, you must admit that a glamour of a desert seen out a window, and a large room on the ground floor covered with mirrors, isn’t much to go on.”
Harry inclined his head in irritation. He was still looking at the transcript of his conversation with Nancy Morningstar, the twisted who had claimed that Blue Eyes had caught her and held her captive. Harry couldn’t remember the conversation itself, since Morningstar had used her powers to obliterate that from his mind, but he could be sure that this was what he had written down; Morningstar’s powers didn’t change writing. “I know, but that’s all she really said about it.”
“Then we’ll have to do what we can to find it.”
Harry smiled at Draco and touched his arm as Draco laid his own copy of the transcript back on Harry’s desk. “I appreciate you looking at this at all. It’s a clever idea, to try and track down Blue Eyes by what his prisoners said about him.”
Draco opened his mouth to answer, and then shut it again as Elder stepped back into the Socrates office. Harry hated watching the way Draco's mouth tightened and his eyes went shuttered and careful. Elder was responsible for that. Harry shifted his body again, ready to rise and defend his partner.
“I only came to ask a question,” Elder said, walking towards Rudie’s desk with his hands up.
Harry said nothing, but glanced back at the writing from his conversation with Morningstar as though that would remove Elder from his consideration. Draco was working, too, his head bowed, his cheeks flushed.
“Is it true that you promised Isla she could kill her partner if and when you caught up with her?” Elder asked.
Harry glanced up. Elder’s gaze was as steady as a stream of thrown curses, but it was on Draco. Still, this was a question Harry knew the answer to, so he didn’t see why he shouldn’t answer as well as Draco. “We did,” he said. “We know that she blames herself for not paying more attention to Macgeorge. Letting her have the kill seems appropriate.”
“Are you sure that you can’t save her?” Elder countered, turning to Harry as if Draco had never interested him. “That’s the sticking point. Isla doesn’t want to believe that Macgeorge is beyond help. There isn’t anything that could save a possessed twisted?”
Harry spread his hands. “Nothing we can find. And our one attempt to make Blue Eyes stop jumping from body to body didn’t work very well. He’ll know that tactic now, and he’ll fight back against it. If he did leave Macgeorge’s body, then he would probably leave it dead, and move on to a new victim as his primary host.” He had to assume that Elder knew everything about the case there was to know now, the way that Rudie and Harry and Draco had handled Blue Eyes and Macgeorge, because of the questions he was asking.
Elder waited for a few minutes with his mouth twisted. Then he said, “I don’t like this situation.”
“None of us like it,” Harry said. “But we need to make sure that we do what we can to catch Macgeorge and the twisted. If this is the tactic that works, so be it.”
Elder stood there a little while longer, looking at Draco, who labored on with his head bowed. Then he turned and stomped out of the room. Harry sat back and stretched his arms above his head, shaking his shoulders. After just a short time around Elder, he found himself wanting to break out like that, wanting to object.
“I hate him.”
Harry blinked and turned his head. “You do? I thought you disliked him.”
Draco leaned back and rubbed his neck as though he found Elder’s presence cramping, too. His gaze remained on the patch of floor where Elder had stood. “This is more than that. He’s trying to make me complicit in something I’m not complicit in, and make me into a criminal where I’m not.”
Harry nodded. He had the feeling that Elder was trying to blame and trap Draco in something, whether the something was the original crime Draco had overlooked or not. “It’s all right. We’ll go hunting, and avoid him.”
“Go hunting how?” Draco waved his hand at the papers in front of him and laughed humorlessly. “It’s not like we have any idea about where to begin.”
“I know,” Harry said, and stood up, reaching for his cloak. “But that only makes it more urgent that we begin somewhere. We know that the Ministry seized Ernhardt’s house and effects, but I don’t think they did anything with them. We should start there, shouldn’t we?”
Draco blinked and stared at Harry with his mouth open slightly. Then he nodded firmly and stood up. “Yes, that’s a good idea. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.”
Harry smiled at him. “You had other things to think of. For that matter, why didn’t I think of it?”
They left the office, bickering amiably about who should have thought of it first, and Harry was relieved to see Draco’s head lift and his steps straighten out. He could forget about Elder and the effect the man had on him as long as he was doing useful work, then.
It was a fact Harry intended to exploit as often as he could.
*
Draco frowned as he looked at the pile of papers in front of him. Most of the time, the Ministry would be more careful when cataloguing the possessions of one of its employees who had turned out traitorous. This time, he supposed, was an exception, and probably related to the high position Ernhardt had held and the extremely strange way he’d left it.
Draco shook his head and turned towards the neater pile of papers Harry had pulled out and put on the table beside them, which contained the files of the Socrates Aurors. Draco flipped idly through them and had to put them down on the table when he found his own folder. He wasn’t going to be tempted to look. He knew he would probably find notes about how Ernhardt had planned to use him against Harry, and he was going to ignore that as hard as he could.
“Draco, look at this.”
Draco bent down beside Harry, who had Macgeorge’s folder in his hands. Draco grunted, trying to indicate that he doubted it could tell them anything useful. Ernhardt had focused on him and Harry as threats among the Socrates Aurors, or especially Harry, since he had used Draco to try and slow him down. Macgeorge wouldn’t have registered for him until she started trying to hunt him.
But Harry opened it, and there was a photograph of Macgeorge, with notes below that included the words “necromancy” and “danger,” underlined. Draco blinked and bent closer to read the short notations.
Involves control over bodiless entities, such as spirits and ghosts. Possibly dangerous? Possibly not. I am not bodiless except in the Passage.
Draco snorted. “It sounds like he was rambling even when he wrote to himself.”
“Doesn’t it?” Harry shook his head. “At least we know now that he was aware of the threat she presented.” He put the folder down and began to wade into another stack of paper, most of it loose.
Draco turned his back and wandered in the direction of boxes that contained Ernhardt’s possessions. There were clothes there, he saw as he opened the first few, and more folders, and what seemed to be the sheets from a bed. He opened more, and picked through jewelry, and shoes, and disassembled chairs.
Then he picked up something that stung his left arm hard enough to make him drop it for a moment.
“Draco?” Harry was immediately at his side, standing on his toes with his hand lightly on Draco’s back. “Do you think that you found something?”
Draco nodded, and picked up the parchment again. Unfolding it, while he cast spells to restrict the violent Dark magic, revealed what looked like a series of random lines at first, and then a map.
Harry’s breath hissed out behind him. Draco obligingly moved to the side so that he could see, and then both of them stared at the parchment.
The lines resolved into shapes, although shapes that didn’t match any part of England Draco had ever seen depicted. There was a lake, or at least a long circle labeled as one, and a squarish rectangle that might have been a house, perhaps a manor house of the kind that pure-blood families had held more commonly in the past. There was also a large, bordered county that seemed to have no name, but had several scribbled lines on it like the world’s worst handwriting.
“This has to be a map to his house, doesn’t it?” Harry muttered. “Why else use those curses to protect it?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Draco pointed out, as he turned the map over to see if it made more sense upside-down. “It could be a depiction of something that only exists in his imagination. I have a feeling that Blue Eyes possesses quite a few things like that.”
“Could it be a map of something Unplottable, then?” Harry asked.
Draco let Harry see him rolling his eyes. “By definition, you can’t map something Unplottable,” he snapped.
“Maybe you could if you were looking at the world sideways, the way the twisted look,” Harry said thoughtfully. “Maybe it would make a difference depending on what you imagined or believed, as opposed to what you knew.”
Draco bit his tongue. Harry’s words sounded plausible, he had to admit, but then, they could sound plausible without being true. And they really had no idea what this might be, only that it was important.
“We’ll take it with us and investigate it more later,” he said firmly, casting one more Disarming Hex as the wards on the parchment tried to spring back to life and turn the paper to cut him. “It might be that we’ll understand it better with distance.”
Harry didn’t answer him, and Draco looked up, ready to repeat what he had said if he had to, although it annoyed him. Then he realized Harry was focused on something at the back of the room, looking to a casual eye as if he were inspecting a pile of boxes-but only to a casual eye.
“You see something?” Draco made his own tone low and gentle. He turned to the side as if the bedsheets had taken him and ran his fingers through the cloth.
“Against the wall,” Harry said, and drew his wand.
Draco gave a quick glance in that direction, and could see nothing. That made his breath speed up and his heartbeat seem to glow in his face. He turned his back and wandered towards the front of the room, whistling under his breath.
Behind him came a swift motion, a surge of magic that made his hair seem to tingle down to the roots, and a curse. Draco leaped in the air and came down facing Harry, his wand out and his arm straight and ready for action. Harry was shaking his head in disgust as he stepped back from the wall.
“You didn’t catch it?” Draco asked.
“I caught it, all right,” Harry said, voice still thick with distaste. He moved his hand to the side and the shape came swishing into Draco’s sight. Draco wrinkled his nose and stepped back, too.
It appeared to be a rat, but a rat that had been squashed some time ago and then set back on its feet. It was a thin strip of bloody fur and flesh, and the smell that rose from it made Draco open his mouth to tell Harry to put it back. They didn’t have to do anything with a corpse, and it was just more evidence of how unbalanced Ernhardt was-as if they needed more.
Then the rat’s head twitched and swung around on the short, thick neck to look at them.
Draco did think he was going to be sick then; his mouth was filled with thin water and yellow bile. The rat’s mouth opened, a thin, jagged sideways slash in the long muzzle, and it hissed feebly at them. Draco noticed Harry cock his head, and his eyes widen.
“Can you understand what it’s saying?” he demanded over the rat’s hissing. “Is it Parseltongue?”
“Not exactly,” Harry said, and cast another spell that suspended the ugly thing above them and a little off to the side, so that it stood less chance of catching them with teeth or tail or claws. “It resembles some of the words in Parseltongue, but it’s like trying to understand someone with a bad accent and broken teeth.”
Draco eyed the rat’s teeth. They were indeed broken, but he thought they could be dangerous for all of that. He told Harry so.
“Oh, I know,” Harry said absently, eyes still fixed on the rat as it swung and clawed and shook, trembling to get closer. “But I don’t think-I don’t think this is Ernhardt’s, if that makes any sense. You remember how he could possess twisted with different gifts, the way he did in the Alto case?”
“The way he’s doing now,” Draco added pointedly, remembering Macgeorge.
“Yes, all right,” Harry said, with an impatient wave of his hand. “But I think this rat belongs to another twisted. The way it speaks-it could do it if it’s commanded, but I can feel the magic that’s making it do so, and it doesn’t feel like Ernhardt’s.”
“Is it necromancy?” Draco asked quietly. He and Harry had both watched Macgeorge use the bodies of small animals to build bone-creatures and attack her enemies.
Harry paused, and then made the hissing sound again. The rat twisted and hissed at him once more. If it was intelligible, Harry didn’t look as if it was; he looked sick instead, his eyes shutting and then opening again.
“It could be,” he said. “It very well could be. We don’t know how well he can use her gift, but since the gift is part of her body and not her mind or spirit-”
“He can probably use it at least as well as the gifts of those twisted he sent against Alto,” Draco summed up. “Maybe better, since he’s spent more time in Macgeorge’s body and he’s more likely to know what it’s capable of.”
Harry nodded. “All right. Then we need to-”
The rat exploded, showering them both in chunks of fur and rotten meat. Draco danced backwards, swiping at his face, crying out before he could stop himself. The stuff was thick, and foul, and red in ways that he hated.
Harry cast a spell that flung the chunks of the rat off him, and Draco stopped his dance and nodded a stiff thanks. His cheeks burned with embarrassment, but the one good thing about that was that the mess probably concealed whatever he looked like from view.
“I don’t blame you for reacting that way,” Harry said. “I would have if more of it had landed on me.” He turned to scan the room again, then shook his head, but kept his back neatly turned, quietly giving Draco time to recover himself. “I don’t see any other message that Ernhardt could have left for us. Let’s go back to the office and see what sense we can make of that map.”
“Harry,” Draco called after him as he turned towards the door.
“What?” Harry glanced over his shoulder. His face had gone still.
“You said you could almost understand what the rat was saying,” Draco said. “A bad accent and broken teeth don’t keep all the sense out. What was it saying?”
Harry sighed and closed his eyes. “Welcome, friends, to the place where your death begins,” he whispered, and then left, his Auror robes swishing so hard around him that Draco missed anything else he added.
Draco lingered in the room for a moment, shaking his head. They knew Ernhardt would be a tough enemy to beat, and that he hated them personally. That made the words that came out of the rat’s mouth less of a surprise.
But he still couldn’t help the chill that ran down his back, similar to what he had felt when the exploding rat touched his face. The chill was anger, resignation, and horror at what they had to face up to, the enemy that their own failure had helped in part to create.
If we created him, we have to defeat him. As simple as that.
The facts that wouldn’t change gave Draco the courage to glance scornfully at the shadows lingering in the room, the shadows that would have concealed other surprises and traps, doubtless, if Ernhardt had had the time to set them up, and then walk steadily away. He was a survivor, and he was going to survive what Ernhardt tried to do to him as well as what the Ministry and his family tried.
*
Harry stared uneasily up and down the street outside Ernhardt’s house. There was nothing much there, only the blank faces of houses and the shut doors and shuttered windows that were usual for this part of the day; almost everyone who lived in this quarter of wizarding London worked for the Ministry, and would be there. Likely it was only the rat and the strange words it had hissed that left him jumpy.
But he still felt as though something was scratching up his spine, and he turned with relief and wonder when Draco emerged from the house.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I think Ernhardt left other wards around the house, ones that were supposed to make people who spent time here feel as if something was watching them.”
Draco smiled and opened his mouth. Harry waited eagerly for the explanation. Of course, Draco was an expert on much Dark magic that still eluded Harry, and his family had had all sorts of similar wards around their Manor. Draco would probably explain exactly how the wards worked, and in turn explain away all of Harry’s fear.
Then the Dementor arrived.
Harry saw the trailing edge of its cloak whipping around the corner, and turned to face it, aiming his wand with a hand that shook. The Dementor was upon them already, its hood back so that he could see the stretched, gaping jaws and the horrid eyes. Those eyes were fixed on Draco, who had fallen one step back and then stood still, his own eyes enormous.
Harry shook off his paralysis as that sight sank in. No, fuck it, he was not going to lose Draco. He would not, he was not, with all that he was he would not.
And into his mind came the memory of the times that he and Draco had made love, the times that Draco had written him letters and cornered him and forced Harry to admit that he fancied him, the cases they had finished together and the twisted they had killed. Not the most romantic of memories, but the ones that had bonded them, and memories that had become pleasure in the recounting, in the remembering, the way that their lives had entwined and become one.
More than enough happy memories to summon a Patronus.
“EXPECTO PATRONUM!” he bellowed, and the street was suddenly full of glittering, shining silver stag.
It didn’t pause and wait for orders the way it did so often; it leaped into the air, and came down between Draco and the Dementor like a rearing horse, the forelegs scraping at the Dementor's robe, the antlers bent as it huffed out a challenge. The Dementor paused at the sight of it, but then tried to flow past. It was so intent on Draco, never glancing at Harry at all, that he knew Draco’s parents must have done as they said, and contracted someone who could make bargains with Dementors.
The Patronus charged. For a moment, Harry thought he saw the Dementor’s eyes widen even further as the antlers tore its ghostly form to shreds, passing through its belly and stabbing into its cloak. It made a single sharp movement, and Harry heard a high, whistling sound like a scream from a great distance.
And then it was gone, torn free, ended, and Draco was sinking down on his knees on the cobblestones with his hands over his face. Harry huddled down beside him and checked his throat and cheek with a gentle touch, although he knew that Draco must still have his soul or he wouldn’t be moving.
A sound near his head startled him. Harry blinked up at the silver stag, which perked its ears forwards and tilted its heavy crown of antlers as though asking him what he wanted to do.
“I’m going to need you to keep watch,” Harry said quietly. “There might be more than one Dementor where that came from. Keep watch up and down the street until we Apparate. Then you can go away.”
The stag huffed out a breath in what might have been impatience but was certainly obedience, and turned away. Harry helped Draco stand gently, raking back his hair from his ears and murmuring, “Are you all right?”
Draco swallowed. “Yes,” he said in a low voice. “I always forget how much I hate the bloody things until I see them again.”
“I know,” Harry said fervently. He hadn’t had his usual reaction to the sight of a Dementor this time, probably because it was so focused on Draco, but he could remember the times he had with painful clarity. “Come on. If they’re going to chase you, we should at least make them work for it.”
Draco leaned on his shoulder as Harry led him down the street towards the Apparition point. Behind him, he could hear the faint clack of the stag’s cloven feet on the cobbles as it trotted back and forth, peering into shadows and blowing a challenge when one of them moved. It was only a shutter swinging open, though, someone staring into the street, too late now-or too early, if they had wanted to witness Draco dying.
Draco didn’t say anything for a long time. Harry thought he was in shock until he whispered, “They did it. I never thought they would-but they really did. They did decide that I was worth more dead than alive.”
Harry stroked his shoulder, and could think of nothing to say except, “Hush.”
Draco shuddered, and did.
Chapter Three.
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