Chapter Thirteen of 'The Rising of the Stones'- The Old Crowd
Chapter Twelve.
Title: The Rising of the Stones (13/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, mentions of Draco/others and some canonical pairings
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, some violence, soulmate markings AU
Summary: Draco Malfoy has become the Ministry’s best Auror. He executes all kinds of unusual assignments, including one to go after the unexpectedly fugitive Harry Potter. But as he chases Potter down, Draco learns a lot more about what the Ministry has been hiding from the wizarding world than he ever wanted to know-secrets that may impact more than just his ability to arrest Potter. Updated every Monday.
Author’s Notes: This will probably be between twenty and twenty-five chapters. It does involve soul-marks, the idea that soulmates can identify each other by corresponding marks on their skin. However, this doesn’t necessarily promise perfect happiness between the soulmates in question.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen-The Old Crowd
“He wants to bring in who.”
Potter’s dismay at the message Draco had had to give him was even better than Draco had thought. Potter closed his eyes and leaned his head against the fireplace behind him. He gravitated to the things in Draco’s home made of stone, Draco had noticed. In fact, right now he had one hand resting on the mantel as if he wanted to count all the tiny cracks in the marble and think about how he’d vanish through them.
“That’s what Doge said,” Draco murmured. “Not me.” He hesitated, then added, “I take it you know this…Auntie Muriel?”
“Only briefly. Only enough not to want to know her any more than I do.” Potter opened his eyes and shook his head. “She’s related to Ron. A great-aunt, I think. She’s loud and unpleasant and she got into a fight with Doge at Bill and Fleur’s wedding. Why does Doge want to talk to her?”
“Because she dispenses gossip with the best of them, apparently. And has a huge gossip network. And knows what rumors are going to be about almost before they happen.”
“She sounds like my nemesis.”
“How dare you give away the place I thought I occupied, Potter.”
Potter smiled faintly. Then he said, “Would she actually talk about me sympathetically, though? The one time I met her, she seemed to believe everything Rita Skeeter wrote. She certainly wouldn’t believe Doge when I tried to defend Dumbledore.”
“That obviously shows she’s a woman of sterling good sense,” Draco began. He held up his hands when Potter glared at him. “But she’s connected in important ways for us, like I said, and she’s a measure of the common people. What she believes, they’ll believe. We just need to get her on our side.”
“Which might be impossible.” Potter splayed his hands through his hair, which made it so messy that Draco had to glance away lest the sight inspire nightmares for him. “Do you think it would be easier if I stayed here?”
“What? Instead of be at the meeting?” Draco rolled his eyes. “I’m not the one who can inspire them to march on the Ministry, Potter.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Potter said, and sighed in the exasperating fashion he had. “I just mean that I might poison Muriel against the cause before anyone else can open their mouths, if she sees me there.”
“You have a political mind when you want to,” Draco said. He grinned as he watched Potter struggle with a response. There was part of Potter that would forever think that an insult, probably. “But in this case, you need to weigh things in the balance. Your presence will at least persuade her that we’re serious, right?”
“I don’t know. She seemed pretty determined to think Dumbledore was a liar during the war.”
“You met her once. You don’t know that much about her. If Doge says we need her, then we do.”
Potter only nodded once. “I wonder who else Doge is going to have us recruit,” he did mutter. “Are they all going to be gossipy old biddies?”
Draco graciously pretended not to hear. “Come here and help me decide what we’re going to tell them,” he commanded. “Not all about your earth magic, I know that, but we need to decide whether you’ll talk in detail about the Elder Wand or not, and how you mastered the magic of the human-forged stone tools.”
And Potter did come over to him, flop into a chair, and talk to him. Draco thought he managed to hide most of his beaming smugness about that, but maybe not all of it, if the suspicious glances Potter shot him were any indication.
But knowing he could say something like that to Harry Potter and be obeyed…
It was more fulfilling than Draco could have dreamed.
*
“Merlin.”
Draco did have to raise his eyebrows when he looked out over the room Doge had given him the Apparition coordinates for, a huge gathering hall in an unfamiliar house. It did look as though most of the heads bobbing around before them were grey or white or bald, and all the beards on the men were long and white, and all the robes were old-fashioned.
There was even a woman with a vulture on her hat, which Draco stared at in horrified fascination before he remembered why it seemed familiar. Longbottom had dressed his Boggart of Professor Snape in that hat-his grandmother’s. Draco shook his head, a little dazed. Of course Augusta Longbottom fit the profile that Doge was trying to construct, old and suspicious of the Ministry and inclined to pay attention to rumors, but he hadn’t thought Doge would reach out to someone so closely connected to Potter’s friends.
Although I suppose, when you add together how close Potter is to the Weasleys, Auntie Muriel probably isn’t any more distant, Draco thought, and patiently waited for the crowd to notice them. They’d Apparated onto a balcony along one wall, close to a ceiling that had a much simpler version of the enchantment in Hogwarts’s Great Hall on it. This one only projected beaming sunlight, no matter what the weather outside did. Draco watched it and picked out strands of weakening in the charm until he heard the expected chorus of gasps.
Performance time.
Draco glanced at Potter. He half-thought that he might have to drag Potter out there after him, considering how reluctant he’d been to do this, but it seemed Potter was perfectly capable of getting over his reluctance when he didn’t have a choice. His head was up instead, his eyes distant, and his face visibly changing expression.
He’s lying with his face, Draco realized abruptly. He’s giving them what they’d expect to see. The tormented hero. Or the shy one. Potter’s eyes and smile were still changing, turning sadder than Draco had expected. He couldn’t tell exactly where they would end up.
Potter is so much more Slytherin than he’s let on that-
Draco didn’t know what followed “that.” He shook his head and stepped behind Potter as he went to the edge of the balcony and locked his hands in place on the railing, bowing his head a little. That seemed to be all the signal the old witches and wizards beneath them needed to go quiet.
Then Potter looked up and said softly, “Thank you for coming. I know you’ve heard a few hints from Elphias Doge about what I have to tell you, but not much.”
There was a fervent rustling and bobbing of hats from beneath them. No, they didn’t know, Draco translated that, and they wanted to.
Potter reached up and drew aside his fringe from his scar with what looked like a practiced, natural gesture. “I know the rumors flying around about my scar,” he said. “That it was my soul-mark. That it covered my soul-mark. That it had changed my mark somehow.”
He dropped his eyes and took a deep breath. Even Draco leaned in for a second, until he realized what Potter was doing and snapped himself out of the spell.
“But in truth,” Potter said, raising his gaze instead and using a trick of letting his eyes rest on many points of the room that must have convinced most people he was looking straight at them, “I have no mark. I was born without one.”
That provoked outcries and questions, and the old woman with a hideous hat and hair of dusty white who must be Weasley’s Auntie Muriel asked the loudest question of all. “Then how are you still alive, Mr. Potter?”
“I don’t know,” said Potter, with a wounded, fragile smile, and he struck the pose they’d agreed on, letting his head dangle a little while leaving his grip on the balcony railing seemingly the only thing to support him. “I suppose I should count myself lucky that I’ve only been deprived of destined love, not the ability to breathe and live.”
There were murmurs, of course, but none of the doubting ones that Draco had more than half expected. He supposed they were probably more inclined to believe in love than a lot of people; few of them were people of his family’s political stamp, and many had been Gryffindors or Hufflepuffs.
“There are other children born with this-lack of a soul-mark?” asked Augusta Longbottom then. She was frowning. Draco wondered if she was thinking of the possibility for her own grandchildren. Rumor had it that Longbottom himself was fairly serious in his courting of that Abbott chit.
“Many of them,” said Potter. “But-” He paused dramatically.
That was Draco’s cue. Potter might still have the lingering reputation around him of someone who spread lies and challenged the papers and was the subject of public gossip more often than he started it, especially for people like Auntie Muriel. That was where Draco came in.
“There would be many of them if they survived their first year,” said Draco grimly. He knew he looked every part the polished Auror as he stepped forwards. Nonetheless, some people still narrowed their eyes at him. Just as Potter had a lingering reputation, so did he.
But Draco didn’t slow down right now to worry about that. He and Potter had judged things like this to a nicety, and he would have to hope that they had judged rightly. He held out a hand as though to clasp a rope and use it to pull someone to safety.
Potter fell slightly back and to his side, providing a solid support at his flank.
“But they don’t,” said Draco, and lowered his voice and looked intensely from face to face, his own version of Potter’s trick. He chose the people whose gazes he caught carefully, but Auntie Muriel and Augusta Longbottom were the first. “Because the Ministry kills them.”
There was an immediate explosion of clucking, but Draco didn’t mind. There was a reason for the contracts Doge had had them sign before they’d been allowed in here.
He waited until he was sure at least some people were straining to hear instead of shouting themselves, and continued, “I had no idea of the horror being perpetrated by our Ministry until Mr. Potter informed me. He was the one who discovered that other children have been born without soul-marks and killed because the Ministry thinks they might become Dark Lords. Note that they don’t know for certain that they would. They only suspect, because some Dark Lords and Ladies in the past were born without soul-marks.”
“But how could someone survive without a soul-mark?” Muriel insisted. “There’s no way it could happen!”
Potter shook his head a little, drawing attention back to him. “Have you heard of the rain unicorns?” he asked. “The people who live with them, the ones who supply most of the unicorn parts to Britain, have no soul-marks themselves. Rain unicorns would devour those who had marks-which means most wizards and witches find it useless to try and treat with them. Their allies are rare, but they do exist.”
“I’ve never heard of them,” said Muriel, in a way that made it imply it was the unicorns’ loss.
“I have,” said an older woman with wide, startled eyes who Draco vaguely remembered seeing at Hogwarts when he took his OWLS exams. After a second, he recalled her name: Griselda Marchbanks, who had just resigned from the Wizengamot and the Wizarding Examinations Authority a few years ago. His respect for Doge grew. Draco wouldn’t have thought of asking Marchbanks, on the theory that she simply wouldn’t respond to anything that went against the Ministry. “I didn’t know they were still alive. You think-you think they don’t affect soulless people, Mr. Potter?”
Draco tensed. He had coached Potter on his tendency to refer to people without soul-marks as soulless. That could be something the Ministry thought of them as. But it would only panic and confuse people if Potter insisted on using the word.
“They don’t have soul-marks,” Potter said gently. “Which means they don’t have soulmates or the ability to use wand magic. I don’t myself. But it’s the combination of the two things that makes a soul-mark, and that makes people vulnerable to rain unicorns.”
“Oh.” Madam Marchbanks considered him, then turned to Draco. “What makes you think there aren’t already people working to stop this, Auror Malfoy?”
“Because people like our dear Minister keep the birth of markless children a secret,” Draco responded equitably. It wouldn’t be wise to attack the Ministry power structure in front of someone like Marchbanks, who had worked with and for it for so many years, but an individual she probably didn’t like either was acceptable. “They’re rare in the first place.
“That doesn’t mean that some people haven’t doubted the supposed advantage of killing children without soul-marks,” Draco said, and nodded to the side, where Potter was taking out the book he had shown Draco. “This is some propaganda written a few decades ago to convince Minister Bagnold that it was necessary when she questioned it. Copies of this book are available for anyone who wishes to read it.”
“I’ll want one,” said Madam Marchbanks, standing straight and tall. There was a shimmering expression in her eyes that made Draco conceal a smile. He suspected she’d just been waiting for a crusade in order to relieve her boredom.
“And me,” said Mrs. Longbottom.
Auntie Muriel sniffed. “I suppose I’ll have to read it. Even though I suspect Mr. Potter here of making yet another attempt to discredit the Ministry.” From the way her eyes shone, she wouldn’t mind reading that.
Draco hid a quiet snort, and turned to Potter. Potter nodded and held the book out to Draco. “You’ll have to do the honors,” he added when Draco blinked. “I can’t anymore.”
Of course. He can’t copy it because he can’t do wand magic, and he hasn’t found a way to substitute earth magic for that yet. Draco hid a wince as he cast the necessary spell, and then wondered why he’d winced. Potter had chosen this himself. Draco knew he could have taken up the Elder Wand, but he hadn’t wanted to.
No need to feel sorry for him. He didn’t choose to be born without a soul-mark, but he chose everything else.
As the small books multiplied on the balcony, Muriel called up another loud question. “Is this the reason you broke up with my great-niece, Mr. Potter? Because you didn’t have a soul?”
Potter tensed, but Draco thought he was the only one who noticed; he was so close that he couldn’t help but notice when Potter’s little hairs seemed to stand on end. Potter’s voice was rational and mild. “No, madam. It’s because she had a soul-mark, and she deserved to have someone who loved her the way she was meant to be loved.”
Idiot, Draco thought, shaking his head and mouthing the word at Potter.
But probably all the Weasleys came of the school that thought soulmates always married, because Muriel didn’t ask another question. Mrs. Longbottom did instead. “How does the Ministry account for You-Know-Who having a soul, when Dark Lords usually don’t?”
As Potter started another explanation about how most of the Ministry people didn’t know, and the information about markless children was restricted to the highest level of the flunkies, Draco watched him silently. Potter spoke with fluid motions of his hands. He had pain on his face, but it was the sort of pain that would make things more convincing to their audience. And Draco had already thought about how well he could lie with his expressions.
Well, he isn’t going to lie to me.
*
“I think the meeting went well,” said Potter, with a little sigh, as he sat down in the chair near the fireplace.
Draco cast a spell that would make sure no one had managed to intrude into the house and no one was currently eavesdropping on them with a charm, and then turned and frowned at Potter. “You still believe that nonsense.”
“What? About being soulless?” Potter sat up, ready for battle. “If you would listen again to the evidence I have, and the way I talked about the rain unicorns ignoring the people who trade with them-hell, even Dementors ignored me, and you know how drawn to me they always were before now-”
“I didn’t mean that nonsense,” Draco cut in. “Although it is. That nonsense about how only true soulmates determined by soul-marks can love each other, so you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life because you don’t have one.”
Potter blinked and fell silent. Then he said, “Maybe not alone. Maybe just bereft of someone who can understand me fully and completely.”
Draco rolled his eyes. “Hasn’t it hit you yet that you have extremely romantic notions about that? As pure and stupid, in their own way, as the Ministry’s notions about children without soul-marks being Dark Lords.”
“You can’t compare me to their stupidity!”
“Why not?”
“Because my friends found each other, okay?” Potter bounded to his feet and took a turn or two around the room. “Ron and Hermione, and Neville and Hannah, and Luna and Rolf, and George and Angelina, and Bill and Fleur-all of them are soulmates, and I’m almost the only one who doesn’t have someone-”
“Ginny Weasley hasn’t found her soulmate yet,” Draco interrupted. “And I know who mine is, but I’m never going to go to her. She’s useless. Stop being an idiot, Potter. Stop martyring yourself. The Ministry would be eager enough to do that for you, if de Berenzan wasn’t such a ditherer. Concentrate on what’s really important.”
“Politics?” Potter turned a weary gaze on him.
“Life,” said Draco. “Life without some vision of perfect love that isn’t going to come.”
Potter looked away and shook his head. “Maybe if my friends didn’t have it,” he whispered. “Maybe if my parents hadn’t been soulmates, and everyone didn’t want to tell me about the moment when they realized it. But as it is-what hurts most of all isn’t knowing that the Ministry wants to kill me and I can’t use a wand. What hurts is knowing that true and perfect love is possible for some people, and I’m never going to have it.”
“Stop being so dramatic, Potter. If-”
“Yes, I’m being dramatic and a martyr,” said Potter. “Excuse me for the night, if you will.”
And he reached over, and touched the stones of Draco’s fireplace, and disappeared through them.
Draco hadn’t known he could do that. He gaped at the fireplace for a second, and then closed his mouth firmly. Any moment, he would start saying they’d betrayed him, and that would only put him in Potter’s insane company.
He turned away, shaking his head. He had to think about what they’d accomplished today to get his mind off Potter, and the fact that the conversation hadn’t gone the way he wanted it to.
Even though Potter had agreed with him.
It wasn’t the agreement I wanted, Draco thought, and then didn’t know what that meant.
Chapter Fourteen.
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