Chapter Three of 'A Reign of Silence'- Reporting In
Chapter Two.
Title: A Reign of Silence (3/20)
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.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Three-Reporting In
“Is anyone interested in what we do now?”
Harry only shook his head as he followed Draco down the corridor towards the Socrates office. “You know that they’re only letting us run on the leash that they are because they think it’s the best they can do without actually acknowledging Ernhardt’s existence as Blue Eyes,” he said. “They don’t want to change their definitions. With reason. Because if you start thinking of all the real people who have died because of the definition of the twisted, then they have to start being moral.”
“Not this again.” Draco turned around in the middle of the corridor and shook his head at Harry. He’d recovered remarkably well from nearly having his soul devoured by a Dementor, Harry thought, and then told himself not to be stupid. Of course he was in denial, and would continue that until he could deal with it, probably. “Listen, Harry. I acknowledge that you were right about the definitions being wrong and unsuitable in lots of cases. But we have to catch the twisted we’re hunting, not theorize about the definitions being wrong.”
Harry raised his hands, and said nothing. Draco was right. They had enough enemies to focus on without arguing with each other.
They stepped into the office with tightened shoulders at the same time, Harry noticed, and looked at Rudie’s and Elder’s desks together. But no one sat there, and Draco relaxed and moved towards his own while calling over his shoulder, “We should look again at the files on the old twisted and see if there was anyone else who had necromancy. It might tell us what they did to hunt them, anyway.”
Harry opened his mouth to comment that Draco ought to have enough knowledge on necromancy without that, given that he had hunted a dangerous one right before he was assigned to the Socrates Corps.
“You’ve worked alone long enough.”
Harry whipped around with his wand raised before he thought about it. Thomasina Warren stood behind him, another Socrates Auror with red hair and brown eyes. Behind her was Simone Jenkins, her partner. She had her wand out, but aimed somewhere between Harry and Draco, in a stance that Harry understood was meant to imply no threat.
“I’m sorry,” Draco said, once again the polished politician in the face of mere human opposition. Harry was happy enough to fade into the background and leave him to get on with challenging the other two Aurors’ preconceptions. “The Ministry gave us this case. We’re doing our job.”
Warren and Jenkins exchanged glances. They were the pair of Aurors in the Socrates Corps who had worked together the longest, Harry knew, although he didn’t know them very well. From the moment he and Draco had come into the Corps, they had isolated themselves and mostly worked on their own.
He understood now that part of that had been a deliberate tactic-and not theirs. Ernhardt, as Head Auror and someone who wanted to destroy Harry before Harry found out a way to destroy him, had arranged matters so that rumors of Harry’s danger and incompetence would spread, and had enlisted Draco as his partner because he thought their old rivalry would drag the partnership down.
And even after he and Draco had started getting along better, well, the Aurors in Socrates worked together less than the Aurors in any other Corps. That had been almost comfortable, for Harry. He could withdraw into a small world that consisted of him and Draco and enjoy their blossoming love affair, and he could convince himself that the mistakes he made mattered to fewer people. Well, of course, they all mattered to Draco, but there was a difference between one loving, critical pair of eyes as an audience, and a lot of them.
“I know,” Warren said. “But for the first time in a long time, I think the Ministry hasn’t the slightest clue what it’s doing.”
Harry blinked. He had never talked much with Warren, but he had known she trusted the Ministry more than he did. Then again, everyone trusted the Ministry more than he did.
“The Ministry’s definitions of twisted need some work,” Jenkins said, folding her arms and leaning back almost primly against the wall. Warren nudged the door shut and cast some complicated charms that made Harry’s ears water. He reckoned they would do at least that, and probably worse, to anyone trying to eavesdrop. “And so does their definition of a Corps, and partnership. We want to help you.”
“You don’t have any extra responsibility towards Macgeorge,” Harry said, because he suspected he knew where this was coming from. “We do. We were the ones who involved her in our case, and we were the ones who should have known from the outset what it was doing to her.” He saw the way Draco frowned at him, but ignored that for now. If he could convince Warren and Jenkins to back off, then that was one less pair of people they had to watch out for.
“We’re all Aurors,” Warren said. “And we’re the only ones who are entrusted with this dangerous work. This necessary work, I would have said, but knowing who our Head Auror was makes me question it.”
Jenkins rolled her eyes. She had long blond hair and was a lot less frightening when she didn’t smile. “You’ve said that before, Thomasina, and had it taken the wrong way. They’ll be thinking that you approve of what Ernhardt did as Head Auror next. Explain to them what you meant.”
Warren glared at her for a moment, and Harry wondered if they were about to witness the outbreak of a duel. He didn’t know enough about them to know who would win, though in a duel between Rudie and Elder he would have bet on Rudie.
And in a duel between me and Draco?
The thought was painful, and Harry put it aside. But he knew, with the certainty that came from gauging their magical strength and participating in numerous duels as well as different kinds of battles, that he was the magically stronger and the quicker. That might not matter if Draco got off a Dark spell Harry didn’t know first, and it certainly wouldn’t matter, given that Harry didn’t want to hurt Draco in any way at all. But he was stronger.
Warren? Perhaps, with the strange spells she seemed to know. But she subsided after a long moment of glaring at Jenkins, and turned around again.
“I meant,” she muttered, with a flicker of a glance at Jenkins that didn’t appear to sting, “that the Head Auror didn’t fit the profile of a typical twisted as we were taught to look for them, and neither do a lot of the other twisted we’ve hunted.”
“I could have told you that ages ago,” Harry said, unable to help himself. He fell silent at a glance from Draco, and fell back with a nod when Draco gestured to him. Obviously Draco wanted to handle this part of the conversation.
Draco looked fixedly at Warren and Jenkins for a moment, and then asked simply, “What help could you give us? We work best alone, and that remains true now.”
“You don’t work best alone,” Warren said. “Not as quickly, not as efficiently. And while you kill your man, or your woman, you bring yourselves into danger each time you do it. Have someone else with you, or a pair of partners, and you can investigate further and stand less chance of being wounded in a confrontation.”
“Yes, perhaps,” Draco said. Harry was pleased that he had at least realized this much was true, and it would be silly to deny it. “But the rest of the Ministry blames us for Macgeorge and Ernhardt, or is waiting to see what happens in regards to how blame falls. I don’t want to deal with your prejudices on top of that. You might blame me and Harry for what we did, or didn’t do. You might not blame us now, but will as you know more about it. Allies that we can’t trust are worse than none at all.”
This time, Jenkins was the one who stepped forwards, and she did it fast enough that Harry’s wand was up before he finished seeing her motion. Jenkins stopped and looked at him. “Do you trust me enough to speak to me without a guard dog, Auror Malfoy?” she asked.
“Not right now,” Draco said, and Harry felt the faint pressure of a warm hand against the middle of his back. He knew that Draco stood behind him, now as always, and resisted the temptation to lean back against Draco, to almost collapse against him. That might ruin the united front they were presenting, with Draco as brain and Harry as muscle.
*
Harry is doing well.
Of course, Harry always did when someone gave him a chance. Draco thought that Harry might have even tried to understand Blue Eyes and give him some room as a twisted, provided that he didn’t hurt anyone else. That would have been like someone of Harry’s sickening, sterling moral character. He had argued with Draco before about whether they really needed to kill twisted, or whether it would be enough to give them some sort of warning and protection and shut them away from ordinary people.
But Blue Eyes had been prejudiced against him instead, and had assigned Draco to contain him, and forged his own doom that way.
Draco shook his thoughts away when he realized how intently Warren was watching him. She would sense weakness, he thought, faster than her partner, although it was Jenkins who had taken the point position right now. He waited in silence, raising an eyebrow as moments passed and neither one of them spoke.
“Very well,” Jenkins said, with a sudden motion of her hands. “Then we’ll talk to you about our plans and give you our suspicions about where Ernhardt might have gone without asking you to trust us, right now.”
Draco snorted. “You have some suspicions?”
“Yes,” Warren said, and Draco marked the way that Jenkins stepped back and Harry’s wand on her relaxed a little. They had their own rhythms, then, these partners. “We came here because of cases that we worked in the past, the way that you worked the Sussex Necromancer case, and you worked the Gina Hendricks case.” She nodded to Harry. “And the one that I worked on involved Ernhardt.”
Draco blinked. “I’m surprised they let him have the post of Head Auror, if he was involved as a suspect in a case.”
Warren shook her head. “Not a suspect, so much as a-complicating factor. And this happened after he was already Head Auror.”
“All right,” Draco said. He tried to keep the gratitude out of his face and voice, because it would only encourage them. Besides, he didn’t know if gratitude was the right emotion to feel yet. It was true that he would never have known anything about this if Warren and Jenkins hadn’t approached them, and wouldn’t have thought to ask, but still. “So what was it?”
Jenkins touched Warren’s shoulder. Warren shrugged once, as though asking silently what else her partner would have her do, and plunged ahead into the tale.
“Ernhardt was related to the twisted I hunted then, though of course I didn’t know that he was a twisted, or that the term or the classification had been made,” Warren said flatly. “He was in a more classic mode, like Larkin, the first case you handled, instead of some of the other unusual ones. Wanted to be a Dark Lord, had apparently driven himself mad by studying Dark Arts. But his companions were viruses.”
Draco blinked. “Excuse me?” He knew something about the term, because a little bit of the knowledge had migrated into the wizarding world with the last Spotted Plague outbreak, but he didn’t know much of what viruses were or did. From the way Harry stirred beside him, he did, and the expression on his face was sharp.
Warren nodded. “His flaw wasn’t disease, which fooled us all at first, and allowed him to keep on working for a while. Instead, his flaw was cracking someone’s bones open with a touch, and his companions were diseases that attacked those who hunted him. Viruses of all kinds. My partner suffered from the worst case of influenza I’ve ever seen, for example.”
Draco shivered in spite of himself. He was just as glad that he hadn’t been around to face this twisted of Warren’s. He had no special fear of disease, but watching Harry sicken, perhaps to death, was not something he wanted to envision. Better to face a twisted who would honestly try to control your brain or make you forget her presence.
“We took him down,” said Warren. Her eyes were distant, her hand closed in front of her, in the narrow tunnel that would ordinarily hold a wand. Draco was just as glad that she wasn’t holding one now, given the expression on her face and the one on Harry’s. “It cost us a lot, but we did.
“Before that, though, we talked to Ernhardt, as someone who had known our twisted in his youth and might know a little more about his flaw. Ernhardt refused to tell us much. He hinted, instead. He smiled and shook his head and made it seem as though the questions we asked were the real reason for his refusing to answer outright, instead of his own stubbornness.”
“And you suspected nothing wrong with that?” Harry asked, his voice as low as Warren’s. “You didn’t think it strange that the Head Auror would withhold vital information like that?”
“Did you think it strange that the Head Auror should wish to persecute one of his Aurors the way he went after you?” Warren countered. “No. It’s only in hindsight that one can see how wrong the situation was.”
Harry subsided, and nodded. Draco frowned a little. He was used to being the only one who could subdue Harry.
“The point of this is,” Warren said, “is that he did throw out one name, one place, that he thought our twisted might have gone to hide. The name of a house that they’d shared when they were young men trying to make their way in the world and the Ministry. Ernhardt succeeded, his cousin didn’t, but the house was still in both their names. Cuthbert’s Corner, it was called. It’s where we eventually faced and brought down his cousin.”
Harry hissed air out. Draco nodded despite himself, but did say, “And you think that he’d be careless enough to go back there when he has to know that he told you about the place?”
“I doubt he will be thinking of me,” Warren said coldly. “Since you are accustomed to working on your own, and he might reasonably think that you wouldn’t join up with other Aurors even for this. Or that other Aurors would blame you for too much to want to help you in the first place.” Her head turned, eyes focusing on Harry.
Harry was the one who nodded this time, and said to Draco, “It’s more than we had before. A place to start.”
“If we accept the price for their aid,” Draco said. “Note that dear Thomasina here has only given us a name, not a location. She wants to be with us when we go there to search for Ernhardt.” It seemed easier to call him by that name, instead of the blended concert of names he and Harry had used before, in front of other people.
“No,” said Jenkins, with a lazy smile that made Draco nearly snap his tendons restraining his hands from reaching for his wand. “We want to go. I didn’t work that case with Thomasina, but I bloody well plan to be there for this one.”
Draco held her eyes. She didn’t look away. Draco sighed. He didn’t know if she understood the extent of the danger, but he had the feeling it wouldn’t mean much to her even if she did. She would still insist on being there, and with her would come Warren.
Someone else to worry that Ernhardt might possess.
“You don’t understand what’s happened to Macgeorge since Ernhardt took her body over,” Harry said. His voice was reasonable, measured, to Draco’s surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t have been, since it made Warren and Jenkins both turn to him with folded arms and frowns. “It blended their flaws. He can possess other people, now, but he can also use the necromancy that she had. We’ve found evidence since then that argues for the necromancy, at least. And there’s no reason to think he would lose his own flaw. Imagine what would happen if he jumped into one of your bodies and turned you against us.”
Warren and Jenkins glanced at each other again. Jenkins raised one hand, palm up, towards Warren. Warren shrugged with one shoulder.
“That can’t happen with me,” Jenkins said calmly.
Harry snorted. “I thought it couldn’t happen with me, either, since I can resist the Imperius Curse, but it did. It was only luck and extreme pain that let me fight him off, not any skill.”
“I mean, it can’t,” Jenkins said, and shifted her weight significantly.
“Your flaw,” Draco said.
Jenkins eyed him and nodded. “Like yours, it’s not one that’s as visible or impressive-not like Potter’s visions, not like Nicolette’s necromancy. But I have absolute control and command of my own mind. My only dreams are lucid ones. No one can reach me with Legilimency. Spells like the Imperius Curse don’t work on me, either. It’s definitely magical. It had it tested by people who don’t care about the distinction between Light and Dark magic and would have broken me down if they could. They couldn’t, and that’s an end of it. Even someone who had a-variation-of Ernhardt’s flaw couldn’t break into my thoughts. It’s still a risk to go up against someone as strong as he is, I know, but I don’t think you need to worry about him taking me.”
“That sounds impressive enough to me,” Harry said, and gave Jenkins a little salute that made Draco twitch. “Well.” He turned to Draco, expectantly, and Draco lifted his head a little when he realized that the others were looking, too. “Do we want to risk it?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Draco said, glancing at Warren. “We won’t have the information unless we risk it.”
Warren’s mouth tightened when she sneered, in a way that Draco frankly thought made her look unattractive. Not that she would care about his opinions, but he noted them to himself to share with Harry later. “We would give it to you if we thought there was no chance we could stand up to him,” she said. “Give it to you, and let you act on your own. But with Simone’s gift and the difficulty of this case, we’re more confident.”
“No one can be,” Draco said, and met her stare.
“Then you can’t be, either, especially since you confronted him and failed once before,” Warren snapped back. “We’re not denying that this is hard, Auror Malfoy, and that we should have helped you before now and failed to do so. But this is the last chance, maybe, for us to stop the most powerful twisted any of us have seen before he goes on some kind of rampage. We’re willing to give you our help. Fucking accept it, would you?”
Harry’s mouth twitched. Draco kept himself from making a motion of irritation, because of what would happen-the weakness he would reveal to Warren and Jenkins-if he did.
“Very well,” he said. “You can come with us. But remember that we might have to kill you, or at least harm you, if there’s a chance that you could harm us.”
“The same to you,” Jenkins said, with a shimmery little toss of her hair that Draco thought belonged on a more feminine woman.
“Very well,” said Warren, after a long investigation of Draco’s eyes that seemed to convince her he was telling the truth. “Cuthbert’s Corner is in Cornwall, the extreme south, very near to the place where Arthur was supposedly conceived. I’m sure that’s one reason Ernhardt and his cousin went there to study and told themselves they were destined for greatness.”
“A desert of a kind,” Harry said.
Draco thought of how close it was to the ocean, and nodded. An ocean wasn’t a desert, but it wasn’t rich land, either, and in the warped mind of a twisted, that might work out to the same thing.
“When we’ve brought him down,” Jenkins said, “then we’ll have to talk more about the definitions of twisted and the work that the Ministry has had us doing. There is no reason that we should continue blindly killing people when we might be able to save them.”
Draco rolled his eyes. He had two martyrs on his hands now-perhaps three, if Warren agreed with her partner. “But you don’t have any problem with hunting down Ernhardt in the meantime?” he had to ask.
Jenkins looked at him. “Given what he’s done? No. But for some of these twisted, their evil lies more in their potential than in what they’ve done. And if a flaw is enough to get someone executed, then at least three of us here have a lot to answer for.” She touched her chest above her heart, her fingers folded in.
“Not four for lack of trying,” said Warren.
Jenkins nodded to her, and turned back to Harry and Draco. “Ernhardt mentioned something of the defenses around the house to Thomasina, too. We need to gather materials and spellbooks. Shall we meet back here in an hour’s time?”
“Three hours,” Warren said. “It’ll take at least that long.”
Jenkins sent her hair sliding down her neck with her long, gracious nod. “Very well. Three?”
Draco nodded back, and the pair left. Harry stirred and slid his wand slowly back into its holder, shaking his head. “Do you think this is going to work?” he asked.
Draco made sure the door was shut and the wards engaged before he answered. “It looks like we’re committed to finding out, doesn’t it?”
Chapter Four.
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