Chapter One Hundred and Seven of 'A Brother to Basilisks'- Investigations
Chapter One Hundred and Six.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (107/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence, some gore, AU from Prisoner of Azkaban onwards
Rating: R
Summary: AU of PoA. Harry wakes in the night to a voice calling him from somewhere in the castle-and when he follows it, everything changes. Updated every Friday.
Author’s Notes: This is a canon-divergent AU that starts after Chapter 7 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It will probably run to at least the mid-point of The Half-Blood Prince. It will also be long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter One Hundred and Seven--Investigations
Lucius slipped into the small office at the end of the dusty Ministry corridor the minute the door opened. The occupant behind the desk immediately spelled the door shut and glared at him with narrowed eyes for a minute.
"You promised that you would never come here again."
"Circumstances changed with the escape of Bellatrix Lestrange from Azkaban," Lucius said, and did enjoy the way the small woman's eyes widened from their narrowing.
"I heard nothing about that."
"I heard nothing about it. But I saw her in the corridor. There's no way that it was anyone but her. Who would dare use a glamour of her or Polyjuice, when it would make the Aurors hunt any visitors to her cell down?"
For a long moment, he thought Susana would challenge him, but in the end, she nodded and spelled a quill into her hand with the same precision as she had closed the door. "What do you want me to find out?"
"Ideally, when she escaped and who occupies her cell now," Lucius said, and leaned back in the chair as he watched Susana began to write far more than what he'd told her. Then again, he would never have employed someone who couldn't manage to have some of her own ideas. "At the very least, a list of visitors she had in the last five years." He took, from his sleeve, the folded letter that he had received from the Death Eater who had been working with the Dark Lord, inviting him into the resurrection plot. "This also isn't her handwriting, but she may have disguised it with a charm. I want you to see if you can break the charm without destroying the letter altogether."
Susana nodded, her shorn brown hair bobbing around her ears as she examined the letter. "They've made some advances in those spells lately. I should have the answers about who wrote this to you as soon as possible."
"That will be acceptable." Lucius hesitated for a moment. "I am working with Harry Potter."
Susana glanced up, her face paling with shock. "That is news. What do you want me to do about it?"
"At the moment? Nothing. But you might consider talking to the rest of your people, and seeing if they would be interested in coming out of hiding to ally with the Boy-Who-Lived."
Susana snorted very softly, but only shook her head when Lucius glared at her. "You know what we're waiting for."
"A prophecy that may never come to fruition."
"We have longer lives than you do, Lucius. We can afford to wait." Most of the time since he'd discovered her secret and put her to work to pay for his silence, Susana seemed frustrated when she talked about this, but now she only smiled at him, teeth smaller and sharper than a human's. "We are patient."
"The war that will consume the wizarding world--"
"Could be as bad as the first one, yes, I know. And we will weather it as we weathered that first one."
"Would it not be easier with help?"
"If your people would help mine, instead of only make them labor without pay, or try to turn them into another kind of house-elf." Susana was writing as she talked, looking at her parchment instead of Lucius. It was only one of her many infuriating habits. "But I know that's not going to happen. Look at the way you treat all other creatures."
"You could make a difference in--"
"So could you, but you've never chosen to make that difference."
Lucius leaned back with a small frown. He knew he could score a coup with Potter by introducing Susana's people to his cause. It would equal the possible luring-in to his side of the werewolves that he knew Lupin had been sent to accomplish. But he had no way to force Susana to surrender.
"Here, then," said Susana, and turned the parchment so he could see it. "Tell me if this is what you want."
Lucius read it over slowly, more to irritate Susana than anything else. Given how calm she remained, it didn't work. But it did look like it could be a remarkably complete list of visitors to Bellatrix's cell.
The problem was, none of them immediately stood out as a Death Eater. Lucius had expected to see Walden Macnair on it, or perhaps someone else who had managed to survive the purges unsuspected and still worked in the Ministry. But it was only the Ministers on their annual inspections, and Aurors, and the so-called Dementor "expert" who also came once a year in order to make sure the creatures weren't breeding. Lucius sat back, baffled.
"How did you assemble this information so fast?" he asked Susana, although he already knew she wouldn't tell him.
She didn't. She bared small teeth at him, and didn't answer.
Lucius sighed and took the list with him. It wasn't a bad start for his investigation into Bellatrix, and perhaps one of the names would provide extra insight later that it didn't seem able to provide right now.
*
Elena smiled as she looked over the careful letter Harry had sent her. Perhaps the boy was getting advice from someone with more political experience than he had. But Elena was sure the core of the letter was all him.
Dear Mrs. Zabini,
I understand why you might think that it would be a good idea for me and Blaise to get married, but I don't think it would be a good idea for either of us. Blaise might still think of himself as my enemy sometimes, and resent that he had to leave Hogwarts. And I can't think about getting married so young.
But it would be a great idea if you could work on a magical means of testing loyalty for me. Professor Snape said it's never been done, because it's too variable. But we really need something like that! Otherwise, it's going to be impossible to tell if any of the ex-Death Eaters are actually reformed or not.
Would you be willing to do it? It could be a potion, or a mirror, or a bracelet, or any other kind of thing. But we really need to be able to test someone's motives.
Thank you,
Harry.
He divined what was behind my request easily enough. Elena stood and stretched her arms towards the ceiling. She had grown bored waiting for some more movement on the political front. She did want a challenge, and in the absence of any real one, stirring up Harry and his allies with her request would have done it for her.
But this was more than a request, more than a challenge. It would cure her boredom and tie her more closely to Harry all at once.
Not bad for a fourteen-year-old. Although his fifteenth birthday was soon, wasn't it? She would have to decide what to send him for a gift.
*
"Try it once again."
Harry lowered his head, feeling he was about to charge like a bull. Fleur stood to one side, her face calm and expectant. But considering she had looked like that all the way through his other failures, Harry couldn't take it as a sign that he might succeed this time.
He snapped his wand furiously at the air and barked the incantation for the feather magic they'd been working on all this time, trying to send as much willpower as possible into the spell.
To his shock, it worked. The air in front of him shimmered and became covered with what looked like a film of calm smoke. Then the smoke dissolved and turned sideways, and Harry was staring at a curtain of purple feathers with glittering edges that completely blocked his view of Fleur.
"Formidable!" breathed Fleur, and then laughed and stepped around the curtain of feathers, grinning at Harry. "Perhaps I should have realized this, non? These feathers, they are not bird feathers. They are Occamy."
Harry blinked for a minute, then grinned. "Yeah, we should have thought about that earlier. I suppose being a Parselmouth--"
"Affects the magic, yes." Fleur nodded to him and walked around the curtain of feathers again. "You will be able to do it better now? You will think of feathered serpents. That will help." She abruptly glanced around the classroom as if just now realizing that Dash wasn't here. "Where is your other serpent?"
"He said he had something to do." Harry hadn't been able to help his suspicions, but Dash had nudged him gently with his nose, and they were trying to give each other some more freedom. He couldn't do what Dash wanted all the time, and he couldn't make Dash do what he wanted.
Fleur shrugged it away and pointed at the Occamy feathers. "Make them move from side to side. That is the only way to be sure they can be useful to you in the middle of battle, and able to turn a charm..."
Harry gladly concentrated on the feathers, and ignored the little creeping prickle of worry up his spine that happened whenever Dash wasn't there. He was away doing something that he had said would help. He had sworn it.
*
Severus stepped back from his cupboard with his eyes narrowed. He knew he had had more quails' eggs than that. They were a good, neutral base material to practice his experimental potions on. They reacted in extremely predictable ways to even the most concentrated or lethal ingredients, and they would never explode.
On the other hand, they were also among the cheapest ingredients. It seemed bizarre that anyone would sink to stealing them from his supply cupboard.
He turned around abruptly when he heard a little scraping sound, only to stop as he saw Dash crawling towards him, his head lifted carefully above the stone. His mouth was full of small oval objects. Severus ignored the impulse to let his hand tighten on his wand as he realized that he had only heard that scrape of scales because Dash had been prepared to let him hear it.
"You make too little noise for a snake so large."
Dash crawled up to his feet without responding in any way, and then lowered his head. The small round objects spilled out. Quails' eggs. Far more than Severus was missing, which he understood at once. This was an apology for taking them in the first place.
He stared at Dash. "What would you want them for? You can't brew. You haven't any hands."
Dash only cocked his head in response, and again Severus understood. The body was a basilisk's, but the soul was that of one of the greatest brewers in existence, at least if Severus went by the traditions Slytherin House cherished. Of course he would find some use for eggs, and other Potions ingredients, when he had been Salazar Slytherin.
Shaking his head, Severus waved his wand so that the quails' eggs soared away and resumed the place of the taken ones on the shelf inside his supply cupboard. Meanwhile, Dash nudged him on the hip with a gentle head and flowed out of Severus's office as silently as he had come.
Snakes. With plans. And a need for an ingredient that could be used in so many potions, Severus had no means of figuring out what Dash planned to create without more help.
Severus loved Harry and was glad that he had taken him on as ward. But sometimes, he wished he could have done without the giant snake that invariably accompanied him.
*
Conflagration had had enough of being petted.
Draco let him go with a sigh. Dash had had a "talk" of some sort with him, and now he did spend more time around Draco, but he also disappeared into the wilderness of the dungeons almost the instant that he decided he'd had had enough interaction.
Draco stood up with a stretch. He had spent so much time at Hogwarts that his mother had demanded he come home. This was his last evening, his last meal for a while with Harry and Professor Snape. He hoped that his mother would at least let him come for Harry's birthday, though, and stay overnight. It was going to be magnificent, to hear Professor Snape tell it.
Well, to anyone who wasn't Harry. Harry had no idea of the extravagant birthday party being planned in his honor. According to Weasley and Granger, Harry had never had a great birthday party with his Muggle guardians. Professor Snape had immediately taken that as a challenge to plan one.
Draco had his doubts about whether Harry would actually want this, but everyone else was swept away by the grandeur of it, so he was letting his doubts go for now.
At least, if Harry acted like he was distressed, Draco had faith in Dash's ability to immediately take Harry out of there.
Draco jumped when he finally lowered his arms and saw Dash peeking silently through the doorway into his room. "Yes, what is it?" he asked, before remembering that they could only communicate if Harry was here.
But Dash eased his bulk inside as if he'd forgotten that, and came straight up to rub his head against Draco's chin. Draco calmed down as he petted him. Dash's scales were as sleek as water, and they ran more smoothly under his hand as Dash twined about him and ended up putting his head on Draco's shoulder.
Dash stayed there until he, too, seemed to have decided he'd had enough petting, and slid away. Draco blinked, though, when his tail stayed behind, and uncoiled to drop something on the floor with a small thump. Draco bent down towards it.
It was an egg, white but sparkling with patterns of green and blue.
Draco looked at Dash, his throat clogged with hope. Dash bobbed his head in deliberate exaggeration, and kept doing it while Draco picked the egg up. The green colors of the Slytherin dungeon seemed to make the egg greener, and Draco tilted it very carefully up to the light, waiting for Dash to disapprove. He stayed still, though.
And against the light, Draco made out the shape of a small baby snake curled in the shell. He couldn't see much, but certainly he saw the edge of a flared hood, like Conflagration's.
"You made this for me?" he whispered, not taking his eyes from the baby snake.
Dash thumped his tail.
"Why now?" Draco lowered the egg to cradle it against his chest and turned to stare at Dash. "Why did you make this for me now, when you didn't want to do it before?"
Dash answered by twining his neck around Draco's neck again. It was a slow slide, so slow that Draco had time to think, and by the time Dash let him go and dropped to the floor again, he was sure he knew.
Dash had done this because he liked Draco. Purely, for no more reason than that. It was the same way Harry would make these ridiculously lavish gestures. What mattered to him was making someone he liked happy, not what other people would think.
Draco swallowed. His mouth was wet, but not for the usual reason. "Thank you."
Dash turned his head a little more, and then reached back to a coil of his body Draco didn't think he'd used earlier and plucked out a piece of parchment. Draco took it and read it as he half-watched Dash slither out of the room.
Dash says you need to keep the egg as warm as possible and carry it with you whenever you can. If your parents make you leave it in your room sometimes, then make sure you put it back in your shirt when you return. That's important, as it will make the snake bond to you as well as keep it alive.
Draco sighed and closed his eyes. Harry hadn't said anything about when Dash would give him an egg, probably because he hadn't known exactly when it would be ready, but his words were there all the same, curling up along Draco's spine and reverberating in his head as if he'd spoken them.
This is what it's like to be loved.
*
Harry stared at Severus. "What?"
"You can't go in the lab right now," Severus said, and whisked him around so that Harry was facing down the corridor. "Why don't you go outside and fly? Or practice feather magic. Young Miss Delacour was telling me about your prowess with it last night at dinner."
Harry blinked and let himself be shoved. He did glance over his shoulder, wondering if there was some delicate potion brewing that Severus didn't want him interfering with, but all he saw was the shut door.
Okay then. He basically gave me permission to have fun. Which means I don't need to attend to my studies if I don't want to.
Harry paused, then grinned. There were some things he'd barely done this summer, even with Draco and Ron and Hermione in and out of Hogwarts. He ran out of the dungeons, out of the main door, and onto the grounds, where Dash joined him. There were several suspiciously large shapes in the middle of his body.
Have you been hunting in the Forbidden Forest again?
I no longer need to enter. I wait outside and the smell and fear of me stampedes them into the open.
Harry eyed the shapes again as he made his way towards Hagrid's house. One of the lumps looked like it was cat-shaped. Their fear makes them run towards you? How does that work?
Haven't you heard of the way snakes charm birds? Dash swayed his head from side to side. It has a lot to do with that.
Harry would have asked more questions, but they'd reached Hagrid's hut and Dash stabbed his head out to knock with his nose. Harry shrugged. He supposed he could get the truth out of Dash later. At least his hunger was satisfied, which meant he wouldn't make any suggestive remarks about Fang.
Dash ducked his head and looked at Harry with only one covered, glowing yellow eye. What kind of suggestive remarks did you want me to make? Do you need help planning all the things you and Draco can do together?
Harry had only managed to splutter out one denial when Hagrid banged the door open and announced in a booming voice, "Look who's here! Dash and Harry!"
Hagrid hadn't spent much time with Dash lately, which meant he was probably going to coo over him and ask about how big a boy he was growing up to be and lots of other questions that Harry would have no part in. Amused, Harry sat on a bench in the corner and petted Fang, who was cowering underneath the bench. Dash let Hagrid pet him and examine the lumps in his belly and say all sorts of things that Harry normally couldn't imagine his basilisk taking from anyone.
Most people who would say such things would only do it to ingratiate themselves with you or with me. Hagrid, though, has genuine interest in me for myself alone.
That's certainly true, Harry thought, as Hagrid demanded to see Dash's fangs and promptly cooed, "Who has the longest and most poisonous teeth in the world, then?" No one was ever going to suspect Hagrid of not caring about Dash for himself.
Dash ended up sprawled along the floor while Hagrid rubbed his stomach, keeping away from the lumps of animals once Harry told Hagrid that was a little sensitive. Harry watched them with a little smile. They both looked utterly content. He wished he could feel that way.
You look this way when your Draco is around.
Harry blinked. That surprised him. Of course, it wasn't like he'd ever hauled along a mirror and stared at his own face when he and Draco were together. I don't remember feeling content when we sat like this.
What did you feel like, then?
Harry's face burned. Lately, at least half of what Dash said to him turned into this kind of trap. You know! I mean...you're there! You know! You can feel it down the bond!
I want you to describe it for me. It'll make for good practice when you have to write something in an essay.
Harry buried his head in his hands and groaned. Hagrid glanced up at once, his eyes kind. "Coming down with a stomachache or something, Harry?"
"No, just a headache," Harry lied, and glared at Dash around his fingers. You like Draco! You like me! You're not supposed to want to embarrass us!
Friends can embarrass each other all the time. Or half of the ways you interact with Hermione would be illegal.
Harry sighed, and then spent ten minutes trying to fend off Hagrid's offers of headache remedies and suggestions that he ask Severus for a potion and demands to know what Madam Pomfrey had said the last time he visited the hospital wing. At least Hagrid spent the rest of the visit fussing over Dash, who apparently wasn't digesting things fast enough.
When they left, Harry ignored the way Dash poked him in the ribs with his nose like the way he'd knocked on Hagrid's door. I'll talk to you when you can think of something less embarrassing to say.
There's an owl coming towards you.
That's just strange, not less embarrassing--
Harry found himself forced to cut off as the owl braked to a stop in front of him, hooting, and hovered down onto his arm. Harry glared at Dash and then took the letter away. His breath sped up when he saw the official Ministry seal on it.
Dash wasn't staring dreamily at the owl with plots of eating it in the back of his mind, the way he usually did. His voice was sharp and thready with concern, in fact. Maybe you ought to let Severus advise you on opening that before you do.
Can you smell any poison or Dark magic that was used on it?
There was a noticeable pause and a lot of flickering of Dash's tongue before he said reluctantly, No. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to just randomly open something with the Ministry seal.
Harry snorted and ripped the seal open. There was a soft puff of magic and air that had him tensing for a minute, but he remembered what Severus had said once; that was just a way for the Ministry to be sure their letter had been delivered to the right person. It would set off a ward of some sort back in an office to tell them.
Harry read the letter quickly, and then more slowly. He wasn't sure he understood it. The first paragraph was just Ministry puffery about how they were so glad to let him know the news, and the last one was about how they wished they could help him in the future, but the middle--
Does that really say what I think it says?
Dash draped his chin over Harry's shoulder to look. Keep in mind that I'm limited by your understanding of it.
Harry nodded curtly. But after a second, Dash said, As far as I can read the literal words, yes. They've found Cyan Scimgeour guilty of no wrongdoing, and when they went to tell him so, they found him vanished from his cell. I'm not sure what part of that is more concerning, that they thought he was innocent or that he disappeared.
Both could be, Harry said, and began to run towards Severus's quarters. He really hoped the man was done with whatever potion he was brewing. Harry needed help on how to react to this.
Chapter One Hundred and Eight.
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