Chapter Twenty-Two of 'An Image of Lethe'- The First Confrontation
Chapter Twenty-One.
Title: An Image of Lethe (22/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Bill/Fleur
Warnings: Angst, violence, minor character death
Rating: R
Summary: The Ministry finally has a way to test people for Dark magic and separate the Dark wizards definitively from the rest. Harry Potter undergoes the test, produces an utterly unexpected result, and finds himself swept up in a political conflict that materialized out of nowhere yesterday, it seems: the fight over whether Dark wizards have a right to continue mingling with "normal" society. Updated every Sunday.
Author's Notes: This story idea has been brewing in my head for several months. This will probably be a long one, and very political. The title is from a poem, "The Coming of War: Actaeon," by Ezra Pound.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Two--The First Confrontation
Draco moved slowly and cautiously through the corridor of the manor house the Death Eaters had claimed, looking around at the walls when he thought he might find a coat of arms or other indication of who the manor had belonged to. He found it hard to imagine any Death Eaters, even ones led by his father, would have simply stumbled on a house this well-hidden and safe.
His imagination seemed to have conjured his father. Lucius stepped from around the corner and performed a low bow he held for a number of silent beats of irony before he straightened. He gave Draco a chill smile.
No more indicative of his feelings than rock is of fire beneath it, Draco thought, and concealed his shiver with the thought of what they would lose should Lucius know, for certain, that they were pretending instead of only suspecting it.
"I am sure you have many things to tell me," Lucius murmured, and managed to make that sound like a threat.
In truth, Draco thought as he held Lucius's gaze, his father could manage to make anything sound like a threat. Draco had to anticipate that reality and work with it rather than wish it never happened.
"I do," Draco said, and he made his voice calm and confident. "Where would you like to have this discussion?"
His father turned and walked away without replying, but Draco had no intention of letting that power play ride unchallenged. He locked his legs and called pleasantly after Lucius, "Where was that?"
Lucius turned. His eyes were unforgiving.
Draco held them anyway, until his father nodded and said, "The kitchen," in a voice like a raven's.
Draco nodded as pleasantly and accompanied him, not showing that his heart rate was fit to make rocks leap.
*
Harry sneered a little at Greyback as the werewolf sidled up to him. They were once again in the dining room, this time with a meal spread in front of them. Harry wondered if even Death Eaters could see the silver and crystal and utterly ignore the pitiful quantity of poorly cooked food on the plates, but then, Death Eaters were pretty good at ignoring other things.
Such as common sense, Harry thought, turning to face Greyback. And sanity.
"Master," Greyback breathed, bending himself down so he could bow like a dog begging someone to play. "You can spare a minute for your most faithful servant?" He arched his neck around Harry's chair to snarl at Astoria and Parkinson, who sat further down the table on Harry's other side.
Astoria looked like she was going to faint. Parkinson gave Greyback a cool look that was the product of Merlin knew how many acting skills, and went back to eating.
"Always," said Harry, and waited for the dawning of Greyback's smile before he added, "Which means that you are cut out from the category," and faced Astoria and Parkinson again. "How soon will you be able to resume your research?"
He made sure that his voice was deeper and colder than the one he would have used to them otherwise, and laid a hiss on the last word. Astoria still blanched, but Parkinson met his eyes without fear and said, "As soon as possible, my Lord."
Harry doubted that anyone else in the room would read the emphasis she placed on her own last word as something coming from rage instead of a desire to curry favor with the all-powerful Dark Lord. He smiled back as smarmily as he could and nodded. "Then you will need to find the books in the library to your taste." He swiveled back to face Greyback, who immediately came to life and fawned again instead of continuing to stand there with a scowl on his face. "You can do a service for my faithful servants."
This time, Greyback seemed inclined to swallow any insult, and only nodded frantically. "I live to serve you, my Lord."
"Of course you do," said Harry, dismissively. He must have done it right, because Greyback looked ready to faint with adoration. Harry stared down and added distantly, "Any books on soul magic, Dark magic, Light magic, and the reasons for affinities." He waited until Greyback nodded before he conjured the most horrible smile he thought he was capable of and looked away. "Do this, and you will be properly rewarded."
Greyback backed out of the room with breathless assurances, and left Harry alone for the moment with Parkinson and Astoria. Well, technically alone. There were still Death Eaters hovering against the wall in servile positions, but none of the others had Greyback's assurance, to approach without asking permission and demand attention.
Harry waved his wand and with a single disdainful glance set up a charm that would prevent eavesdropping. The Death Eaters sagged a little, but none of them came forwards and tried to interrupt. Harry arched his eyebrows in a way that he hoped promised a Cruciatus Curse if they dared before he leaned in and whispered quietly to the women.
"I want you to look for a way to build a Lightfinder that will reverse the Lightfinder's effects."
"You think we'll get away with building such a thing." Parkinson was good at talking without moving her lips much, and also at making things that should be questions into statements. Harry hoped he hid his own disconcerted reaction as he nodded.
"Because the research will only remain in your hands, and Draco's." Parkinson eyed him sideways. Harry laughed harshly, which made a few people who had been looking at him glance away. The laughter was probably obvious beyond the charm he'd cast, Harry decided. "The rest of these idiots will be running in circles chasing their tails."
"You're the idiot if you think that Draco is going to do research with the rest of us," Parkinson said. "You're going to need him at your side, to negotiate the treacherous waters around here. It's what his father trained him for all his life. He's better than the rest of us at it."
“I might need him sometimes,” Harry said. “But what do you think will happen if I look as if I’m favoring him? You think anyone will spare him?” Already the thought of what would happen if Draco was harmed made him have a headache. Of course, he had done it himself, with Lethe, or at least it could have been worse than it was. “I need you to keep him occupied as much as yourselves.”
“And the rest of the Death Eaters?” Astoria was twisting her fingers in the crumbs of her uneaten meal. “We can fool them along with everyone else?”
“That’s what I’m hoping will happen,” Harry agreed. He kept his head up and his expression distant, poised. The Death Eaters would take a lot from that.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” Parkinson whispered suddenly, putting one hand over his and squeezing down as though she was going to grind the bones to powder. Harry touched the back of her hand with his own finger, and she was smart enough to snatch back hers and wring it as if she was hurt. But her eyes remained on his, burning. “You’re only going along from moment to moment and playing the game that you need to stay alive. Right?”
“That pretense is going to spare your lives,” Harry told her distantly, no longer really interested in what Parkinson said. “No, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. But I have plans.”
“Oh, because that comforts me.”
Harry turned his head and stared at her. Parkinson either saw something real in his eyes or she remembered their surroundings, because she grimaced and ducked her head far enough to shield her eyes with her hair. Astoria shook her head and caught Harry’s gaze, one hand reaching out in what someone watching from beyond the charms and wards could take as an appeal.
“Forgive her,” she whispered. “She’s a little distraught at no longer finding herself in control of her own fate.”
Harry only nodded and shoved back from the table. He had eaten all he wanted, and he thought it might be strange if the Dark Lord seemingly made a hearty meal. Well, he was experienced in all the mechanisms of starvation.
“Do what I have commanded you to do,” he told Parkinson and Astoria as he ended the charm around them, and then he turned and stared at the Death Eaters again. “I will know who is good at messages among you. I will know now.”
He must have said it with the right edge of harsh coldness, because Rabastan Lestrange edged forwards and bowed to him. “I can charm up something that’s almost like a Patronus, my Lord!”
Harry bit back the urge to ask why Lestrange couldn’t master a real Patronus. He knew how hard it had been for some members of Dumbledore’s Army, and honestly, he doubted most of the Death Eaters had all that many happy memories. “Very well. I will want you to send a message to specific Light wizards.”
“Light wizards?” Lestrange’s mouth was open, and he looked back and forth between Harry and a specific point on the wall as though he would find the answer written there as to why Harry was acting so strange. “My L-lord?”
Harry sneered at him, but this time Lestrange wasn’t the only Death Eater looking as if he was a nutter. Well, time to prove that Harry could do an even better Voldemort impression than they’d thought.
He raised his wand and began to twirl it slowly through his fingers, the way he knew Voldemort often had before he tortured someone. Lestrange seemed to be trying to turn into a statue. Harry rounded the end of the table and walked up to him, reaching out with one hand and trying hard to remember the shape that Voldemort’s fingers would have curved into when he touched someone on the face. Of course, Voldemort had had longer fingers than Harry, so it wouldn’t be a perfect imitation.
“How long,” Harry said, and let his voice descend into a grating hiss, “do you mean to doubt me?”
Lestrange looked as if he expected Harry’s hand against his chin to start burning him any second. “N-never, my Lord!” he squeaked, and tried to abase himself. Harry followed him down, hissing, and Lestrange curled up and cried out, “My Lord, I won’t question you again! I was only s-surprised that you wanted to contact Light wizards.”
Harry knelt there and stared down with his lips slightly parted, trying to give the impression that he would kill Lestrange any second. Then he drew back and laughed and laughed. Lestrange half-relaxed, still staring up at him anxiously.
“Yes,” said Harry, shaking his head. “Of course. I should have known, should have suspected…” He leaned more comfortably back and used his wand to push his fringe off his forehead. “You still see me as Harry Potter, don’t you, Rabastan? You still think of me as the weak little boy who I conquered and not the Lord you served?”
“No, my Lord,” Lestrange said, and smashed his face against the floor.
“Yes, you do,” said Harry, and touched his wand to the curve of Lestrange’s spine, tracing down until he could feel the quivering muscles. He wondered if he should cast the Cruciatus Curse. At that moment, trembling on the brink of hatred so intense that it was like a revelation, he knew he could have done it.
But other things would convince them. He stepped back from Lestrange, stood up against the dining room table, and started laughing.
No one in the room relaxed. Harry went on laughing with his hand on the base of his throat, as if he was about to choke, and then spun around and snapped to Lestrange, “I want to contact the Light wizards because they will help us thinking I am him. Do you understand now?”
“You want to fool Potter’s friends, and then they’ll help you and we can trick them!” That was a Death Eater who bounced up and down with his tattered robes flapping around him, clapping his hands and cackling.
Harry gave the man a full, deep smile. He thought it wasn’t as effective at being crazy as the one the man gave him in return, which showed several cracked and a lot of yellowed teeth. “Yes. We will pull them in, and then we will crush them.” He lowered his voice into a croon. “Potter is utterly annihilated, but I still owe his friends some rather-special treatment for their help in trying to kill me.”
Several other Death Eaters started laughing them, as if they wanted to show willing. Harry turned around in the middle of them, with his arms spread and smile stretched out and heart withering and hollow inside him.
This needs to be worth it, in the end.
*
There were no house-elves in the kitchen, but several cups of tea and plates of warm bread and honey waited. Draco had barely laid eyes on them before he realized how hungry he was. He was able to sit down and pick up one steaming cup of tea and attend to his father instead of slamming around the room in search of food, though. He wouldn’t show the weakness of hunger until Lucius had begun to eat.
Lucius seemed to want something to do with his hands, so he picked up a plate of bread soon enough. Grateful for the implied permission, Draco casually drew the plate towards him, chose a piece of bread, and began to eat. He wouldn’t have dared if he and his father had been at Malfoy Manor and Lucius was about to interrogate him, but he needed to show that he wasn’t under his father’s sway here.
Or I’ll never get out.
“You seem to be extraordinarily comfortable with our Lord,” said his father, and propped up one foot against the table leg, watching Draco with eyes that, in their own way, were as famished as Draco’s stomach.
“Not comfortable with him,” said Draco. This was one trap he could see no matter how long he had been out of playing the game. He swallowed a mouthful of steaming sweetness and ducked his head. “Useful to him.”
“Ah.” Lucius left the word lingering in the air with a wealth of meaning, but Draco kept his head bowed over his plate and didn’t look up. Lucius had to start speaking himself, which probably annoyed him, Draco thought. “So you did not go to the Dark Lord and offer your services to him from the beginning?”
“How could I, when I thought he was Potter?” Draco shrugged. It was risky, spinning a lie like this when he hadn’t had time to consult Potter, but on the other hand, he thought Potter would probably have told him to take free rein. He seemed pretty good at responding to the lies Draco came up with and elaborating on them instead of contradicting them. “I went to Potter because I thought that, as an accused Dark wizard, he could help me fight for my freedom.”
Lucius flattened out one hand on the table. “When will you learn that there is no compromising with Light wizards?” he whispered. “And Potter was the Lightest one of all.”
Draco resisted the temptation to blink. He supposed that information might have been hard-put to come by for Lucius, both because of his isolation and because Death Eaters like Greyback would probably keep it to themselves to encourage power plays. “They put Potter through the Lightfinder. He tested Dark.”
Lucius sat up. “What?”
“About midway down their ridiculous scale of Dark and Light.” Draco permitted himself a sneer, an honest one. If he had no honest reactions, his father would stumble onto the game a lot sooner. “Green, the fourth color out of seven. And since then, he’s tested Darker yet. Indigo.” He paused and shot his father a look. “But considering who he really is, that’s not a surprise.”
“Of course not.” For some reason, his father’s voice was soft, and he looked into the distance as though he was constructing a backup plan because one of his had failed. Draco blinked. Was it only that Lucius wouldn’t find himself in control of the Death Eaters now that the “Dark Lord” had returned? Perhaps. If Lucius had wanted out of this altogether, Draco knew he would have stayed far away from the rest of the Death Eaters after he escaped.
And that meant Draco had something else to worry about. “How did you escape?” he asked. “Or did you never go into custody in the first place, and Mother lied to me?” He couldn’t escape the hurt that entered his voice on those last words. It was one thing for his parents to keep secrets when he was a child, but he had suffered to think of his father under the Dementors’ control. His mother could at least have sent him a reassuring message.
“Your mother doesn’t know that, and neither should you.” Lucius looked directly at him. “If someone tries to read your mind, it’s better if you don’t know.”
“On the other hand, if I don’t know and the Dark Lord wants me to tell him, then I’m going to suffer,” Draco retorted. Lucius had to be talking about their supposedly resurrected leader. There weren’t any other Legilimens among the Death Eaters now that Snape and Bellatrix were dead, and precious few people in the Ministry competent enough to get through Draco’s barriers.
Lucius squinted at him once, and then drew back his sleeve. There was something around his wrist. Draco leaned over to stare at it. From a distance, it probably just looked like a band of pale skin, the kind that might form where someone wore a bracelet too tightly.
Close in, Draco could make out the overlapping rounds of silver and pearly-colored skin, turned to metal. He didn’t recognize the nature of it, but he knew what it was. A promise sigil. Draco sat back and stared at Lucius.
What kind of deal had his father made?
“I summoned something whose name you need not know,” said Lucius, casually. He must have picked up on some of what Draco felt from his expression. Draco dropped his eyes and flushed. He would need to school his reactions more carefully, or his father might pluck information from them that would hurt Potter and the rest of them. “You may rest assured that I can give the thing what it wants.”
Draco ate some more bread, and olives from a bowl that had appeared noiselessly on the table, and had no idea what to say. Lucius had taught him about promise sigils, the brands that wizards wore when they had made bargains with some of the older forces of magic, when he was young. He had always made Draco swear to never use one.
They’re more trouble than they’re worth.
That was what Draco still heard whenever he read or thought about promise sigils, the heavy words in his father’s unusually heavy voice that day in the library. He sat back, his eyes on Lucius, and wondered.
He would have to find out why his father had broken out of prison in the first place, he thought, to understand. It had to be for more than leading the Death Eaters, or he wouldn’t have risked this kind of binding.
Lucius held his gaze, and then turned casually away. “Whose interests do you serve the most,” he asked, “the Dark Lord’s or mine?”
Draco choked on an olive. That was unexpectedly blunt. He put down the dish of olives and stared at his father, who looked blandly back at him. Draco clenched his fingers around the edge of the small plate and thought furiously for a moment.
“I serve the interest of staying alive and free,” he said. “The Ministry tried me and let me go, but then started hunting me again the minute I Apparated away. And they’re hunting Pansy, and Astoria for helping us. Those are the things I want.”
“Freedom and happiness for your friend and your lover?” Lucius looked him straight in the eye. “You realize that you have options other than Miss Greengrass, if you do not want to be married to her.”
The first thing that rose in Draco’s mind when Lucius said that was the image of Potter, standing before the kneeling Death Eaters in Grimmauld Place and laughing in his imitation of the Dark Lord. Draco blinked it away. No matter what he might have to pretend, he could not serve Potter any more than he could his father.
Given that, it was no bad thing that Lucius might think he was in love with Astoria. They were close anyway, and Draco wouldn’t object to marrying her if he had to, and it made a useful disguise for spending time with her.
“Yes,” he said. “And myself, of course.”
Lucius gave him a small nod. “I’m afraid that you will have to expand your goals, now that you’re here,” he said casually, and picked up another piece of bread. “I doubt our Lord will let you simply sit around all the time and stare into Miss Greengrass’s eyes.”
If you knew. Draco contented himself with another nod. “Of course. I’m prepared to fight Light wizards if I have to, or sneak around on secret missions. I assumed that was what we would have to do anyway, now that the Lightfinder has been destroyed.” He didn’t say anything about Lethe, since he didn’t know yet whether Lucius would have heard about it.
Lucius paused once, then put down his plate. “I was unaware that that was the import of the news Greyback was spouting.”
Because it was Greyback, Draco knew, as much as anything. Greyback might lie as part of a power play, but he would also be hard to trust when he was reporting the truth because of his excitability.
“Yes,” he said. “Our Lord wanted it done, and the Black library has a lot of books. I got the method I had worked out to Blaise, and he did the rest.”
“Well,” said Lucius. Once again, his eyes were distant, and his mind, Draco was sure, racing. He wondered why his father was having to so visibly recalculate his plans. Could he have come up with something that took advantage of the Lightfinder’s existence? Unlikely, if he didn’t even know that Potter had tested as Dark.
Then Lucius leaned forwards and smiled at Draco and said, “We can work together, Draco. We can make sure that we achieve renown for our family now that the Dark Lord has returned and you have returned to me.”
The relaxation that had been subtly building in Draco’s stomach disappeared. Of course that was the way it was going to be. Even if he had succeeded at some things on his own and impressed his father, of course it would turn out that Lucius wanted to use him more as a pawn than someone he could respect.
But it didn’t change the fact that he would have to deceive Lucius. It only changed the tenor a bit. Draco bowed his head. “I’d like to listen, Father.”
He must have made his voice breathless and eager enough, because Lucius smiled and began to talk. Draco waited with his heart pounding hard and his eyes fastened on the far wall of the kitchen.
My first loyalty is still to Astoria and Pansy. He can’t change that.
Another figure rose in his mind, and Draco acknowledged the thought with a sigh.
And to Potter. I can’t change that, either.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
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