lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-07-10 10:01 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-07-10 10:01 pm
Entry tags:
[Songs of Summer]: Needs No Accuser, Harry/Cedric, Harry/Voldemort, R
Title: Needs No Accuser
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Cedric, implied Harry/Voldemort
Content Notes: AU (Cedric lives), angst, unreliable narrator, violence, discussion of torture, implied past underage, dubious consent, discussion of disfigurement
Wordcount: 4200
Summary: Cedric survived the graveyard, but Harry disappeared, and for the last four years Cedric has been plagued with guilt, searching for Harry obsessively. When Voldemort attacks the Ministry, Cedric, now an Auror, sees the figure at his right hand, and launches a rescue mission.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This story is for a prompt by hoars, asking for Cedric/Harry and Cedric is declared the only survivor from that night, or so everyone claims, until Voldemort takes over the Ministry with a very familiar wizard by his side. I’ve altered the prompt a bit so that it’s an attack rather than a takeover, and while this might someday be a longer story, this shows only a flash of the relationship between Cedric and Harry. The title comes from the proverb, “A guilty conscience needs no accuser.”
Needs No Accuser
Cedric rolled over, and then sat up completely as he saw the lynx Patronus standing in the middle of his bedroom.
“All Aurors and Auror trainees to the Atrium,” Kingsley’s voice said in a hollow, echoing tone. “The Ministry of Magic is under attack.”
The lynx disappeared, and Cedric took a long breath as he grabbed his robes. It seemed Voldemort had made his move at last. Cedric was finally going to get a chance to duel some of the bastards who had been there when Harry disappeared.
If he got a chance to curse Voldemort himself, he could die happy.
*
Not a second after Cedric stepped out of the Floo, the whole of the Ministry seemed to shudder. Cedric grimaced and put a hand to his head as he felt a distant headache. He’d always been sensitive to magic, and he knew what it was like when the spells preventing Apparition fell.
Black-cloaked figures began appearing, bone-white masks gleaming in the light of the fireplaces. Cedric grabbed his wand and crouched. A few Aurors were already setting up shields along the front of the line, just as they’d drilled with Kingsley. Cedric knew he had to wait for those to break before he cast his first offensive curse. While he and the others were doing that, the defending Aurors would fall back behind them and raise more shields, which Cedric would duck behind if they were driven back.
Cedric hoped they weren’t driven back. He wanted to curse them so badly.
The last person to Apparate into the Atrium was a monstrously tall figure who wore no mask. Voldemort’s skin gleamed as pale as the Death Eaters’ masks, though, and his burning red eyes were as dangerous as Cedric had always heard they were. His fingers twitched around a long, pale wand, and he said something in sibilant Parseltongue that made more than one scream rise up from the Aurors’ ranks.
Still, Cedric could barely concentrate on You-Know-Who. He was staring at the slender figure at Voldemort’s side. This one did wear a mask, and didn’t hold a wand of any kind that Cedric recognized.
But it didn’t matter. Cedric would know those green eyes anywhere, from the amount of guilt-ridden dreams he’d had about them.
“Harry?” he whispered.
The figure’s head snapped around to regard him. Cedric didn’t see any emotion on his face, but that might have been the result of the mask.
And he said nothing, but Harry hardly would, would he? He would probably be under Imperius and commanded not to say anything to someone from his past who might recognize him.
Who had dreamed night after night of pulling him from the graveyard. Who had dreamed night after night of what might have happened to him after Cedric had been Portkeyed away by the Triwizard Cup—the Cruciatus, the Entrail-Expelling Curse, or any other savage death.
Kingsley barked an order that Cedric paid no attention to. He had to get to Harry. He had to save him. Kingsley and the other Aurors wouldn’t make it a priority. To them, Harry would be one Death Eater among many. Everyone thought he was dead, anyway.
As the first of the Death Eaters’ curses slammed into the shields, Cedric took a step backwards and cast a silent charm on his boots and legs. Then he charged the shields.
He heard alarmed cries. Heard them, but couldn’t pay attention to them. Because Harry was there, and Cedric had to get to him. Nothing else mattered.
Cedric leaped, and soared straight over the top of the shields. Kingsley was shouting something Cedric heard this time—“Diggory!”—but he didn’t care. Cedric tore straight for Harry, the only one who mattered, the first innocent victim of this war.
Everyone thought he was dead. But not Cedric. Cedric had only imagined he was dead. He’d never seen proof in the waking world.
Now he could stop reliving those nightmares over and over again. If he could only get to Harry.
He thought Voldemort might cast a curse to stop him, but Voldemort only laughed at him and stepped out of the way. Cedric spun a mobile shield up in front of himself to catch anything Harry threw at him, but didn’t stop moving. Harry was taller than he’d been, but still slender. Cedric imagined all the whip scars that probably lay under his robes, and ran faster.
Harry turned slightly to the side, so he was out of the path of Cedric’s charge, and whipped his wand through the motions of a cross, silently casting some curse Cedric didn’t recognize. It shattered his shield and broke his left arm. Cedric tossed his wand to his right hand and kept coming.
He overbore Harry and knocked him to the floor. Harry gasped, staring up at him with wide eyes. Cedric wrapped his right arm tight around Harry.
“I’ve got you,” he panted. “I’ve got you.”
And then, since the Death Eaters had already brought down the anti-Apparition spells all around the Ministry, Cedric Apparated straight home, clutching Harry so close that their breaths mingled together.
*
Cedric deposited Harry in his bedroom, after knocking him unconscious with a swiftly applied Stunner. He couldn’t take the chance that Harry would fight him off and try to run back to Voldemort’s side. Hopefully the Imperius would have worn off when he woke up.
Cedric used the time to cast a basic healing spell on his left arm that would hold the bone in place and start the knitting process. He could use it, a little. He conjured a sling and bound his arm in it without taking his eyes from Harry.
Merlin, he was beautiful. The first thing Cedric had done after Stunning him was to remove the mask, and there could be absolutely no doubt that it was Harry. Even if two people could have that luxurious tumble of wild black hair or those stunning green eyes, no two people had that jagged lightning scar on their foreheads.
It did surprise Cedric, a little, that it was a solid silver line instead of red and inflamed. That was how it had looked that night in the graveyard, before one of the Death Eaters had banished the Triwizard Cup at Cedric and he’d grabbed it instead of using his wand to deflect it. Cedric had assumed Harry’s scar would always look like that when Voldemort was near.
On the other hand, if Harry was under the Imperius full-time, then maybe Voldemort had found some way to stop the scar from tormenting him. Cedric hoped so. He wouldn’t wish any pain on Harry that he hadn’t already endured.
Except the little extra pain he would probably go through when he woke up and remembered what had happened to him during the last several years.
It was torture for Cedric to wait until the Stunner wore off, but as he’d suspected, it didn’t take that long. They always lasted for a shorter time on wizards and witches of extraordinary power. Harry’s eyes fluttered, and then he sat bolt upright, staring around.
“What—”
“Finite Incantatem,” Cedric cast, just in case waking up hadn’t removed the Imperius from Harry.
Harry blinked and put a hand to his head. He looked at Cedric for a minute, and then slowly around the room. Cedric hoped that he was seeing how much work Cedric had put into finding him. It wasn’t always obvious, because only some of the newspaper articles tacked on the walls had a picture of Harry in them, but there were also the maps with markings that tracked locations where people had supposedly sighted him, copies of Voldemort’s known strategies from the first war, descriptions of torture spells and the effects of the Imperius Curse, and, in the pride of place on the bookshelf, the battered Triwizard Cup.
“Uh,” Harry said.
Cedric smiled. That was better than Harry immediately screaming at him for being a traitor to Lord Voldemort. He sat down on the edge of the bed, which was covered in green sheets. Cedric hadn’t found the color as soothing as he would have hoped, but it had helped remind him of his sacred task. “Are you all right, Harry?”
“Diggory?”
“Call me Cedric,” Cedric said quickly. “Please.”
“I—all right,” Harry said, and frowned as he rubbed his forehead again. “It’s kind of hard to remember the last few years. I—it’s foggy.” He frowned harder and pulled back his left sleeve.
Cedric leaned over and covered the hateful Dark Mark with his own hand. It unfortunately wasn’t big enough to hide the whole thing, but at least Harry didn’t have to look at the sign his mortal enemy had branded him with. “It’s not your fault, Harry. You can’t be held responsible for anything you did under the Imperius.”
“But I can throw off the Imperius,” Harry said in a small voice. “I did it in Moody’s class just last—” He stopped.
“That was four years ago, Harry,” Cedric said, as kindly as he could.
Harry took a deep breath, and his eyelids fluttered. For a second, Cedric thought he would faint, but Harry had always been strong, just the way that Ron and Hermione’s stories had said when Cedric eavesdropped on them from under a Disillusionment Charm. “But I can resist the Imperius,” he repeated.
“Voldemort’s Imperius?”
“Oh. You think—”
“No one knows exactly what happened to you after I left,” Cedric said, and gripped Harry’s Dark Mark harder. “I’m sorry, Harry, so sorry. I never meant to. One of them banished the Cup at me and I didn’t know it was a Portkey when I grabbed it. I would have come back for you. I swear. I Apparated back with help as soon as I could, but you were already gone. I should have pretended to be Stunned longer. I’m sorry. I’m—”
“Yeah, you’re sorry, I understand.” Harry rolled his eyes a little, but he also smiled, and Cedric felt as though he was bathed in sunlight. He settled back against the pillows with a little sigh. “So I was, what? Fighting beside the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters? You’re obviously an Auror.” He looked at the robes Cedric was wearing. “And looking pretty good—”
Harry immediately clapped one hand over his mouth and flushed brilliant red. Cedric chuckled. “It’s all right, Harry. Say whatever you like on that front.”
“You—really?” Harry flushed harder. “You were the star Hufflepuff Seeker and the real Hogwarts Champion. I was just a scrawny little kid.”
“Not anymore,” Cedric said, and smiled. He hoped that he wasn’t making Harry uncomfortable. But compared to what the Death Eaters must have done to him in the past few years, it wouldn’t matter. Harry could probably use some praise about his body, in fact. They would have shouted that he was the son of a Mudblood at him and tortured him and—
Cedric looked away with a jaw he knew was ticking. It did that sometimes.
“Cedric?”
“I’m so sorry,” Cedric whispered. “What they did to you. I would have stepped into your place if I could. I—I want you to know that I won’t hold the scars against you, either, Harry. No more than the Dark Mark.”
Harry nodded slowly. Then he winced and hissed, clutching his arm. Cedric looked down. The Dark Mark had ignited with slow pulses of black energy, and Harry was bowing his head, biting his lip.
“He’s calling you through it?” Cedric asked. He thought that was probably the case, but the only Death Eaters he’d managed to capture and interrogate were the lower-ranking ones, not parts of Voldemort’s inner circle, and none of them had known exactly how the Dark Mark worked.
“Yeah,” Harry gasped, tears starting to slide down his face. “He can track people through it. He can—he’ll find me, Cedric.”
“I won’t let that happen, Harry,” Cedric said. “I know some really powerful Severing Curses.”
Harry stared at him. “What?”
“I can amputate your left arm if you want me to. Then you’ll be free. I’ll make sure that you don’t die. If I need to, I’ll take you to St. Mungo’s, but I would prefer to avoid it. You know there are people there who would try to put you into a holding cell at the Ministry.”
“Oh,” Harry breathed. His face was blank for a long minute. Then he said, “Look, Cedric, now that you’ve told me about the Imperius, I think I can probably—I can practice throwing it off before I go back to him. But you know I have to go back.”
“No, you don’t!” Cedric snapped, and then took a deep breath and shook his head when he saw the look on Harry’s face. He didn’t want to act like a fucking Death Eater. He ran his hand down his face for a second and then said, “You really don’t, Harry. We can have someone at St. Mungo’s do the Severing Curse if you’d rather. Or we can try to remove the Mark another way. But don’t—you’re thinking of being a hero, aren’t you? Of spying? Don’t. You’ve already sacrificed enough.”
Harry looked down at the Mark on his arm. Cedric was afraid he would argue. And he did, but in a softer tone than Cedric had thought he would. “If you really think…but people aren’t going to accept this or me, are they?” He suddenly looked very tired. “They won’t accept that I’ve come back to life. They’ll blame me for having the Mark, whether or not I was Imperiused when I took it. They’ll put me in Azkaban. I read about that law the Ministry passed last month. You’re put in Azkaban for life if you have the Mark, no questions asked. No trial needed.”
Harry was shaking, tears in his green eyes that made them larger, and Cedric thought it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. “Cedric, I have a terrible reaction to Dementors. You remember when I fell off my broom during that Quidditch game we played because there were so many Dementors around? I can’t be exposed to them. I can’t.”
“Shhh,” said Cedric, and wrapped his good arm around Harry, rocking him gently. Harry felt all grown-up under his robes, but Cedric forced his mind away from that. He felt a little ashamed for thinking it.
He was thinking about other things. It seemed likely that Harry was right, and the magical world would turn on him when his Mark was revealed. And it would be. No one seemed able to keep Rita Skeeter out of anywhere she wanted to go, or else she was just that good at finding people who were desperate to tell her what was going on. So lying about Harry’s Mark wouldn’t work, and if they cut off his left arm, it was going to be more than obvious why.
Cedric didn’t want to damage Harry that way anyway, unless they had no choice. Not his beautiful Harry. He had suffered enough.
Cedric sighed at last and sat back, stroking the hair back from Harry’s scar. His Dark Mark still pulsed, but the pain seemed to have gone quiet. Maybe Voldemort thought Harry had been captured but the Mark might not have been revealed yet, and he didn’t want to alert anyone who might find it.
“You’re sure you can throw off Voldemort’s Imperius?” Cedric asked. “And fake it?”’
Harry nodded bravely, his hand resting for a second on Cedric’s left arm over the broken bone. It hurt, but Cedric was sure it was nothing compared to what Harry had already endured. “I remember a little more now,” he murmured. “It’s like the memories are coming back from under this dense fog. The Dark Lord could only control me in the first place because he tortured me with the Cruciatus—”
Cedric jerked Harry closer to him, kissing him frantically. He wouldn’t have, he hadn’t planned on it, but hearing that that terrible spell had been used on Harry made it impossible to stop.
Harry started, and then shivered and leaned into the kisses. He didn’t really respond, but he didn’t try to break away, either. That was all right, Cedric thought as he leaned back. That was perfect. Harry had grown up, but he was still the innocent boy Cedric remembered underneath. It made sense. What kind of normal lover could he have had among the Death Eaters?
“But he thinks that I’m his obedient little slave now,” Harry said, eyes on the duvet. “So he hasn’t bothered to torture me in a really long time. He just casts the Imperius anew every few weeks.”
“Every few weeks?” Cedric blurted. He hadn’t realized Voldemort was that strong. And Harry was strong enough to throw it off. He looked at Harry with renewed admiration.
Harry smiled a little. “Yeah. So he’ll cast it again when I go back, and he’ll probably look into my mind to see what happened to me during that time, but I know Occlumency. I can hold him at bay.”
“Who taught you Occlumency that good?”
“Snape.”
Cedric started. “Snape’s a Death Eater?”
Harry nodded grimly. “He pretends to be loyal to Professor Dumbledore, but I know the truth.” He leaned closer and whispered, “Don’t trust him, Cedric. He might approach you after he hears that you grabbed me from the Atrium. But anything he says will go straight to the Dark Lord. Don’t tell him anything, or lie to him if you have to talk to him.”
“Why do you call him the Dark Lord?”
“Force of habit. Sorry. For a while I was tortured if I called him anything else.” Harry shrugged weakly.
Cedric nodded, trying not to imagine how horrible it had been for Harry. How horrible it would be when he went back.
But he was willing to do it. And try to do some good with it. Cedric sighed. “I feel like I didn’t save you, I only made your life more difficult,” he explained when Harry glanced at him.
“No, no!” Harry shook his head vehemently. “You woke me up, Cedric. You reminded me that there’s a life outside the Death Eaters.” He sighed and stared down at his hands. “But it’s true that things are going to be more difficult for a while when I go back. There are some of the bastards who don’t trust me at all. Bellatrix Lestrange, for example.”
“Why her in particular?”
“She wants the position that I have,” Harry said, and he had a funny little smile on his face. Cedric suspected it was the kind of smile he wore when he was trying not to succumb to hopeless anger. It had looked like that in some of the photographs from the Tournament when he was upset about Skeeter being there. “I’m very, very close to the Dark Lord.”
“Close?”
“His right hand.” Harry shrugged, and the little smile deepened and turned real. “Lestrange’d like nothing more than to prove that I’m disloyal. It was one reason that Snape taught me Occlumency. She knows Legilimency, and she was breaking into my mind and bringing out memories, times I interacted with the Dark Lord, that made her scream at me in rage.”
“And torture you?”
“Sometimes.”
Cedric nodded and hugged him one-armed again. He wished that his left arm was back to normal so he could give Harry a real hug, but this would have to do. “I’m sorry. If there’s anything I could do to make it up to you…”
“There is, actually.”
“What’s that?” Cedric asked, a little breathlessly. Harry’s head was ducked, and his smile had turned coy. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility that he could feel about Cedric the way Cedric did about him, but if he did…
“Could you—well, it looks like you’ve done a lot of research on what the Dark Lord did during the first war,” Harry said, and gestured at some of the maps and strategy plans on the walls. “I didn’t get the chance to do that kind of research. Didn’t even think I’d need it, during most of the time I was under the Imperius.” He made a face. “Could you tell me what you learn from studying that kind of thing? It could help me undermine him from within better, be a better spy for your side.”
“Sure, but I don’t know how to send a Patronus messenger,” Cedric admitted. It was a test he’d always failed after the graveyard, conjuring a happy enough memory, although now maybe that he’d kissed Harry he would have one. “And I couldn’t exactly send you owls, could I?”
Harry smiled and dug into his robe pocket, pulling out a bone-white coin a little smaller than a Sickle. Cedric accepted it curiously. When he looked at it, he could see a symbol in the center of it that looked like a snake coiled around a wand. Letters and numbers marched around the sides.
“A number of us carry these,” Harry explained. “Death Eaters, I mean. They’re connected by a Protean Charm, and when you tap it with your wand, you can change the letters and numbers on it to convey information. I’ll tell them that I destroyed mine to hide Death Eater secrets when you took me captive, so they’ll give me a new one. And then I only have to risk one spell to make sure that I can alter information on my coin and have it show up on yours without alerting the others.”
Cedric grabbed Harry and kissed him again. Harry was still in his arms, gasping, overwhelmed. Cedric drew back and smiled at Harry. “That’s brilliant. And we can set up times and dates for meetings?”
“And exchange of information. Yeah. It’ll be a lot more secure than owls.” Harry tilted his head at the coin. “Just don’t let anyone else see that. I think that some of the Aurors are aware of them, and if they found out that you had one…”
“Yeah, don’t worry.” Cedric slipped the coin into the pouch on his belt where he kept his most precious things, like the Snitch that Harry had caught in his first match. It had taken some doing to remove that from Hogwarts, but he’d managed.
“You’re going to be in trouble for capturing me and leaving the battle,” Harry said, his teeth worrying his lower lip.
“I’ll tell them that we fought and you escaped. And that it wasn’t you anyway. They all think you’re dead.” Cedric didn’t care about the bitterness leaking into his voice. They had just given up on Harry. He was the only one who had remained faithful. Even Ron and Hermione had thought Harry was dead, and they’d told Cedric so during the last owl they’d sent him, which was several months ago.
“They won’t discipline you?”
“They might put me on Mind-Healing leave for a while. But they need all the Aurors they can get. And this?” Cedric gestured to the maps and plans on the walls. “This was mostly research done on my own time anyway. It’s just easier if I have access to the Ministry archives.”
“You’re a wonder,” Harry breathed, and squeezed Cedric’s hand. It wasn’t as nice as a kiss, but it would do.
They spent their last few minutes together making arrangements for Harry to “escape” and Cedric to cast some spells at the walls of his flat that would make the story of a fight with a Death Eater more realistic. They also arranged to meet for the first time at ten-o’clock three nights later, in the graveyard at Little Hangleton.
Harry stood up and smiled at him. “Thank you so much, Cedric. For keeping up the search for me, and for understanding why I have to go back.”
Cedric nodded. There was a huge lump in his throat as he watched Harry put the awful mask back on, but he understood. And at least now he knew Harry was alive, and he would see him again.
Feel the touch of his hand. Hear his voice speaking sweet, gentle words.
“Thank you,” Harry repeated, and gave Cedric a long look but, sadly, no more kisses, before he spun on his heel and Disapparated, following the call of his Dark Mark.
Cedric sprawled back on his bed and closed his eyes. He would have to go report to Kingsley soon, and cast the spells that would damage the walls and doors here, and do some more damage to himself, too. The broken arm would help, but it wouldn’t be enough to convince the more suspicious people among the Auror ranks that he’d fought Voldemort’s right hand.
Cedric shuddered as he thought about that. Poor Harry. But underneath the Imperius and the mask, he was the same sweet, brave boy Cedric knew so well.
And now, someday, they had a chance of a future.
Someday, Harry would be free.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Cedric, implied Harry/Voldemort
Content Notes: AU (Cedric lives), angst, unreliable narrator, violence, discussion of torture, implied past underage, dubious consent, discussion of disfigurement
Wordcount: 4200
Summary: Cedric survived the graveyard, but Harry disappeared, and for the last four years Cedric has been plagued with guilt, searching for Harry obsessively. When Voldemort attacks the Ministry, Cedric, now an Auror, sees the figure at his right hand, and launches a rescue mission.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This story is for a prompt by hoars, asking for Cedric/Harry and Cedric is declared the only survivor from that night, or so everyone claims, until Voldemort takes over the Ministry with a very familiar wizard by his side. I’ve altered the prompt a bit so that it’s an attack rather than a takeover, and while this might someday be a longer story, this shows only a flash of the relationship between Cedric and Harry. The title comes from the proverb, “A guilty conscience needs no accuser.”
Needs No Accuser
Cedric rolled over, and then sat up completely as he saw the lynx Patronus standing in the middle of his bedroom.
“All Aurors and Auror trainees to the Atrium,” Kingsley’s voice said in a hollow, echoing tone. “The Ministry of Magic is under attack.”
The lynx disappeared, and Cedric took a long breath as he grabbed his robes. It seemed Voldemort had made his move at last. Cedric was finally going to get a chance to duel some of the bastards who had been there when Harry disappeared.
If he got a chance to curse Voldemort himself, he could die happy.
*
Not a second after Cedric stepped out of the Floo, the whole of the Ministry seemed to shudder. Cedric grimaced and put a hand to his head as he felt a distant headache. He’d always been sensitive to magic, and he knew what it was like when the spells preventing Apparition fell.
Black-cloaked figures began appearing, bone-white masks gleaming in the light of the fireplaces. Cedric grabbed his wand and crouched. A few Aurors were already setting up shields along the front of the line, just as they’d drilled with Kingsley. Cedric knew he had to wait for those to break before he cast his first offensive curse. While he and the others were doing that, the defending Aurors would fall back behind them and raise more shields, which Cedric would duck behind if they were driven back.
Cedric hoped they weren’t driven back. He wanted to curse them so badly.
The last person to Apparate into the Atrium was a monstrously tall figure who wore no mask. Voldemort’s skin gleamed as pale as the Death Eaters’ masks, though, and his burning red eyes were as dangerous as Cedric had always heard they were. His fingers twitched around a long, pale wand, and he said something in sibilant Parseltongue that made more than one scream rise up from the Aurors’ ranks.
Still, Cedric could barely concentrate on You-Know-Who. He was staring at the slender figure at Voldemort’s side. This one did wear a mask, and didn’t hold a wand of any kind that Cedric recognized.
But it didn’t matter. Cedric would know those green eyes anywhere, from the amount of guilt-ridden dreams he’d had about them.
“Harry?” he whispered.
The figure’s head snapped around to regard him. Cedric didn’t see any emotion on his face, but that might have been the result of the mask.
And he said nothing, but Harry hardly would, would he? He would probably be under Imperius and commanded not to say anything to someone from his past who might recognize him.
Who had dreamed night after night of pulling him from the graveyard. Who had dreamed night after night of what might have happened to him after Cedric had been Portkeyed away by the Triwizard Cup—the Cruciatus, the Entrail-Expelling Curse, or any other savage death.
Kingsley barked an order that Cedric paid no attention to. He had to get to Harry. He had to save him. Kingsley and the other Aurors wouldn’t make it a priority. To them, Harry would be one Death Eater among many. Everyone thought he was dead, anyway.
As the first of the Death Eaters’ curses slammed into the shields, Cedric took a step backwards and cast a silent charm on his boots and legs. Then he charged the shields.
He heard alarmed cries. Heard them, but couldn’t pay attention to them. Because Harry was there, and Cedric had to get to him. Nothing else mattered.
Cedric leaped, and soared straight over the top of the shields. Kingsley was shouting something Cedric heard this time—“Diggory!”—but he didn’t care. Cedric tore straight for Harry, the only one who mattered, the first innocent victim of this war.
Everyone thought he was dead. But not Cedric. Cedric had only imagined he was dead. He’d never seen proof in the waking world.
Now he could stop reliving those nightmares over and over again. If he could only get to Harry.
He thought Voldemort might cast a curse to stop him, but Voldemort only laughed at him and stepped out of the way. Cedric spun a mobile shield up in front of himself to catch anything Harry threw at him, but didn’t stop moving. Harry was taller than he’d been, but still slender. Cedric imagined all the whip scars that probably lay under his robes, and ran faster.
Harry turned slightly to the side, so he was out of the path of Cedric’s charge, and whipped his wand through the motions of a cross, silently casting some curse Cedric didn’t recognize. It shattered his shield and broke his left arm. Cedric tossed his wand to his right hand and kept coming.
He overbore Harry and knocked him to the floor. Harry gasped, staring up at him with wide eyes. Cedric wrapped his right arm tight around Harry.
“I’ve got you,” he panted. “I’ve got you.”
And then, since the Death Eaters had already brought down the anti-Apparition spells all around the Ministry, Cedric Apparated straight home, clutching Harry so close that their breaths mingled together.
*
Cedric deposited Harry in his bedroom, after knocking him unconscious with a swiftly applied Stunner. He couldn’t take the chance that Harry would fight him off and try to run back to Voldemort’s side. Hopefully the Imperius would have worn off when he woke up.
Cedric used the time to cast a basic healing spell on his left arm that would hold the bone in place and start the knitting process. He could use it, a little. He conjured a sling and bound his arm in it without taking his eyes from Harry.
Merlin, he was beautiful. The first thing Cedric had done after Stunning him was to remove the mask, and there could be absolutely no doubt that it was Harry. Even if two people could have that luxurious tumble of wild black hair or those stunning green eyes, no two people had that jagged lightning scar on their foreheads.
It did surprise Cedric, a little, that it was a solid silver line instead of red and inflamed. That was how it had looked that night in the graveyard, before one of the Death Eaters had banished the Triwizard Cup at Cedric and he’d grabbed it instead of using his wand to deflect it. Cedric had assumed Harry’s scar would always look like that when Voldemort was near.
On the other hand, if Harry was under the Imperius full-time, then maybe Voldemort had found some way to stop the scar from tormenting him. Cedric hoped so. He wouldn’t wish any pain on Harry that he hadn’t already endured.
Except the little extra pain he would probably go through when he woke up and remembered what had happened to him during the last several years.
It was torture for Cedric to wait until the Stunner wore off, but as he’d suspected, it didn’t take that long. They always lasted for a shorter time on wizards and witches of extraordinary power. Harry’s eyes fluttered, and then he sat bolt upright, staring around.
“What—”
“Finite Incantatem,” Cedric cast, just in case waking up hadn’t removed the Imperius from Harry.
Harry blinked and put a hand to his head. He looked at Cedric for a minute, and then slowly around the room. Cedric hoped that he was seeing how much work Cedric had put into finding him. It wasn’t always obvious, because only some of the newspaper articles tacked on the walls had a picture of Harry in them, but there were also the maps with markings that tracked locations where people had supposedly sighted him, copies of Voldemort’s known strategies from the first war, descriptions of torture spells and the effects of the Imperius Curse, and, in the pride of place on the bookshelf, the battered Triwizard Cup.
“Uh,” Harry said.
Cedric smiled. That was better than Harry immediately screaming at him for being a traitor to Lord Voldemort. He sat down on the edge of the bed, which was covered in green sheets. Cedric hadn’t found the color as soothing as he would have hoped, but it had helped remind him of his sacred task. “Are you all right, Harry?”
“Diggory?”
“Call me Cedric,” Cedric said quickly. “Please.”
“I—all right,” Harry said, and frowned as he rubbed his forehead again. “It’s kind of hard to remember the last few years. I—it’s foggy.” He frowned harder and pulled back his left sleeve.
Cedric leaned over and covered the hateful Dark Mark with his own hand. It unfortunately wasn’t big enough to hide the whole thing, but at least Harry didn’t have to look at the sign his mortal enemy had branded him with. “It’s not your fault, Harry. You can’t be held responsible for anything you did under the Imperius.”
“But I can throw off the Imperius,” Harry said in a small voice. “I did it in Moody’s class just last—” He stopped.
“That was four years ago, Harry,” Cedric said, as kindly as he could.
Harry took a deep breath, and his eyelids fluttered. For a second, Cedric thought he would faint, but Harry had always been strong, just the way that Ron and Hermione’s stories had said when Cedric eavesdropped on them from under a Disillusionment Charm. “But I can resist the Imperius,” he repeated.
“Voldemort’s Imperius?”
“Oh. You think—”
“No one knows exactly what happened to you after I left,” Cedric said, and gripped Harry’s Dark Mark harder. “I’m sorry, Harry, so sorry. I never meant to. One of them banished the Cup at me and I didn’t know it was a Portkey when I grabbed it. I would have come back for you. I swear. I Apparated back with help as soon as I could, but you were already gone. I should have pretended to be Stunned longer. I’m sorry. I’m—”
“Yeah, you’re sorry, I understand.” Harry rolled his eyes a little, but he also smiled, and Cedric felt as though he was bathed in sunlight. He settled back against the pillows with a little sigh. “So I was, what? Fighting beside the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters? You’re obviously an Auror.” He looked at the robes Cedric was wearing. “And looking pretty good—”
Harry immediately clapped one hand over his mouth and flushed brilliant red. Cedric chuckled. “It’s all right, Harry. Say whatever you like on that front.”
“You—really?” Harry flushed harder. “You were the star Hufflepuff Seeker and the real Hogwarts Champion. I was just a scrawny little kid.”
“Not anymore,” Cedric said, and smiled. He hoped that he wasn’t making Harry uncomfortable. But compared to what the Death Eaters must have done to him in the past few years, it wouldn’t matter. Harry could probably use some praise about his body, in fact. They would have shouted that he was the son of a Mudblood at him and tortured him and—
Cedric looked away with a jaw he knew was ticking. It did that sometimes.
“Cedric?”
“I’m so sorry,” Cedric whispered. “What they did to you. I would have stepped into your place if I could. I—I want you to know that I won’t hold the scars against you, either, Harry. No more than the Dark Mark.”
Harry nodded slowly. Then he winced and hissed, clutching his arm. Cedric looked down. The Dark Mark had ignited with slow pulses of black energy, and Harry was bowing his head, biting his lip.
“He’s calling you through it?” Cedric asked. He thought that was probably the case, but the only Death Eaters he’d managed to capture and interrogate were the lower-ranking ones, not parts of Voldemort’s inner circle, and none of them had known exactly how the Dark Mark worked.
“Yeah,” Harry gasped, tears starting to slide down his face. “He can track people through it. He can—he’ll find me, Cedric.”
“I won’t let that happen, Harry,” Cedric said. “I know some really powerful Severing Curses.”
Harry stared at him. “What?”
“I can amputate your left arm if you want me to. Then you’ll be free. I’ll make sure that you don’t die. If I need to, I’ll take you to St. Mungo’s, but I would prefer to avoid it. You know there are people there who would try to put you into a holding cell at the Ministry.”
“Oh,” Harry breathed. His face was blank for a long minute. Then he said, “Look, Cedric, now that you’ve told me about the Imperius, I think I can probably—I can practice throwing it off before I go back to him. But you know I have to go back.”
“No, you don’t!” Cedric snapped, and then took a deep breath and shook his head when he saw the look on Harry’s face. He didn’t want to act like a fucking Death Eater. He ran his hand down his face for a second and then said, “You really don’t, Harry. We can have someone at St. Mungo’s do the Severing Curse if you’d rather. Or we can try to remove the Mark another way. But don’t—you’re thinking of being a hero, aren’t you? Of spying? Don’t. You’ve already sacrificed enough.”
Harry looked down at the Mark on his arm. Cedric was afraid he would argue. And he did, but in a softer tone than Cedric had thought he would. “If you really think…but people aren’t going to accept this or me, are they?” He suddenly looked very tired. “They won’t accept that I’ve come back to life. They’ll blame me for having the Mark, whether or not I was Imperiused when I took it. They’ll put me in Azkaban. I read about that law the Ministry passed last month. You’re put in Azkaban for life if you have the Mark, no questions asked. No trial needed.”
Harry was shaking, tears in his green eyes that made them larger, and Cedric thought it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. “Cedric, I have a terrible reaction to Dementors. You remember when I fell off my broom during that Quidditch game we played because there were so many Dementors around? I can’t be exposed to them. I can’t.”
“Shhh,” said Cedric, and wrapped his good arm around Harry, rocking him gently. Harry felt all grown-up under his robes, but Cedric forced his mind away from that. He felt a little ashamed for thinking it.
He was thinking about other things. It seemed likely that Harry was right, and the magical world would turn on him when his Mark was revealed. And it would be. No one seemed able to keep Rita Skeeter out of anywhere she wanted to go, or else she was just that good at finding people who were desperate to tell her what was going on. So lying about Harry’s Mark wouldn’t work, and if they cut off his left arm, it was going to be more than obvious why.
Cedric didn’t want to damage Harry that way anyway, unless they had no choice. Not his beautiful Harry. He had suffered enough.
Cedric sighed at last and sat back, stroking the hair back from Harry’s scar. His Dark Mark still pulsed, but the pain seemed to have gone quiet. Maybe Voldemort thought Harry had been captured but the Mark might not have been revealed yet, and he didn’t want to alert anyone who might find it.
“You’re sure you can throw off Voldemort’s Imperius?” Cedric asked. “And fake it?”’
Harry nodded bravely, his hand resting for a second on Cedric’s left arm over the broken bone. It hurt, but Cedric was sure it was nothing compared to what Harry had already endured. “I remember a little more now,” he murmured. “It’s like the memories are coming back from under this dense fog. The Dark Lord could only control me in the first place because he tortured me with the Cruciatus—”
Cedric jerked Harry closer to him, kissing him frantically. He wouldn’t have, he hadn’t planned on it, but hearing that that terrible spell had been used on Harry made it impossible to stop.
Harry started, and then shivered and leaned into the kisses. He didn’t really respond, but he didn’t try to break away, either. That was all right, Cedric thought as he leaned back. That was perfect. Harry had grown up, but he was still the innocent boy Cedric remembered underneath. It made sense. What kind of normal lover could he have had among the Death Eaters?
“But he thinks that I’m his obedient little slave now,” Harry said, eyes on the duvet. “So he hasn’t bothered to torture me in a really long time. He just casts the Imperius anew every few weeks.”
“Every few weeks?” Cedric blurted. He hadn’t realized Voldemort was that strong. And Harry was strong enough to throw it off. He looked at Harry with renewed admiration.
Harry smiled a little. “Yeah. So he’ll cast it again when I go back, and he’ll probably look into my mind to see what happened to me during that time, but I know Occlumency. I can hold him at bay.”
“Who taught you Occlumency that good?”
“Snape.”
Cedric started. “Snape’s a Death Eater?”
Harry nodded grimly. “He pretends to be loyal to Professor Dumbledore, but I know the truth.” He leaned closer and whispered, “Don’t trust him, Cedric. He might approach you after he hears that you grabbed me from the Atrium. But anything he says will go straight to the Dark Lord. Don’t tell him anything, or lie to him if you have to talk to him.”
“Why do you call him the Dark Lord?”
“Force of habit. Sorry. For a while I was tortured if I called him anything else.” Harry shrugged weakly.
Cedric nodded, trying not to imagine how horrible it had been for Harry. How horrible it would be when he went back.
But he was willing to do it. And try to do some good with it. Cedric sighed. “I feel like I didn’t save you, I only made your life more difficult,” he explained when Harry glanced at him.
“No, no!” Harry shook his head vehemently. “You woke me up, Cedric. You reminded me that there’s a life outside the Death Eaters.” He sighed and stared down at his hands. “But it’s true that things are going to be more difficult for a while when I go back. There are some of the bastards who don’t trust me at all. Bellatrix Lestrange, for example.”
“Why her in particular?”
“She wants the position that I have,” Harry said, and he had a funny little smile on his face. Cedric suspected it was the kind of smile he wore when he was trying not to succumb to hopeless anger. It had looked like that in some of the photographs from the Tournament when he was upset about Skeeter being there. “I’m very, very close to the Dark Lord.”
“Close?”
“His right hand.” Harry shrugged, and the little smile deepened and turned real. “Lestrange’d like nothing more than to prove that I’m disloyal. It was one reason that Snape taught me Occlumency. She knows Legilimency, and she was breaking into my mind and bringing out memories, times I interacted with the Dark Lord, that made her scream at me in rage.”
“And torture you?”
“Sometimes.”
Cedric nodded and hugged him one-armed again. He wished that his left arm was back to normal so he could give Harry a real hug, but this would have to do. “I’m sorry. If there’s anything I could do to make it up to you…”
“There is, actually.”
“What’s that?” Cedric asked, a little breathlessly. Harry’s head was ducked, and his smile had turned coy. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility that he could feel about Cedric the way Cedric did about him, but if he did…
“Could you—well, it looks like you’ve done a lot of research on what the Dark Lord did during the first war,” Harry said, and gestured at some of the maps and strategy plans on the walls. “I didn’t get the chance to do that kind of research. Didn’t even think I’d need it, during most of the time I was under the Imperius.” He made a face. “Could you tell me what you learn from studying that kind of thing? It could help me undermine him from within better, be a better spy for your side.”
“Sure, but I don’t know how to send a Patronus messenger,” Cedric admitted. It was a test he’d always failed after the graveyard, conjuring a happy enough memory, although now maybe that he’d kissed Harry he would have one. “And I couldn’t exactly send you owls, could I?”
Harry smiled and dug into his robe pocket, pulling out a bone-white coin a little smaller than a Sickle. Cedric accepted it curiously. When he looked at it, he could see a symbol in the center of it that looked like a snake coiled around a wand. Letters and numbers marched around the sides.
“A number of us carry these,” Harry explained. “Death Eaters, I mean. They’re connected by a Protean Charm, and when you tap it with your wand, you can change the letters and numbers on it to convey information. I’ll tell them that I destroyed mine to hide Death Eater secrets when you took me captive, so they’ll give me a new one. And then I only have to risk one spell to make sure that I can alter information on my coin and have it show up on yours without alerting the others.”
Cedric grabbed Harry and kissed him again. Harry was still in his arms, gasping, overwhelmed. Cedric drew back and smiled at Harry. “That’s brilliant. And we can set up times and dates for meetings?”
“And exchange of information. Yeah. It’ll be a lot more secure than owls.” Harry tilted his head at the coin. “Just don’t let anyone else see that. I think that some of the Aurors are aware of them, and if they found out that you had one…”
“Yeah, don’t worry.” Cedric slipped the coin into the pouch on his belt where he kept his most precious things, like the Snitch that Harry had caught in his first match. It had taken some doing to remove that from Hogwarts, but he’d managed.
“You’re going to be in trouble for capturing me and leaving the battle,” Harry said, his teeth worrying his lower lip.
“I’ll tell them that we fought and you escaped. And that it wasn’t you anyway. They all think you’re dead.” Cedric didn’t care about the bitterness leaking into his voice. They had just given up on Harry. He was the only one who had remained faithful. Even Ron and Hermione had thought Harry was dead, and they’d told Cedric so during the last owl they’d sent him, which was several months ago.
“They won’t discipline you?”
“They might put me on Mind-Healing leave for a while. But they need all the Aurors they can get. And this?” Cedric gestured to the maps and plans on the walls. “This was mostly research done on my own time anyway. It’s just easier if I have access to the Ministry archives.”
“You’re a wonder,” Harry breathed, and squeezed Cedric’s hand. It wasn’t as nice as a kiss, but it would do.
They spent their last few minutes together making arrangements for Harry to “escape” and Cedric to cast some spells at the walls of his flat that would make the story of a fight with a Death Eater more realistic. They also arranged to meet for the first time at ten-o’clock three nights later, in the graveyard at Little Hangleton.
Harry stood up and smiled at him. “Thank you so much, Cedric. For keeping up the search for me, and for understanding why I have to go back.”
Cedric nodded. There was a huge lump in his throat as he watched Harry put the awful mask back on, but he understood. And at least now he knew Harry was alive, and he would see him again.
Feel the touch of his hand. Hear his voice speaking sweet, gentle words.
“Thank you,” Harry repeated, and gave Cedric a long look but, sadly, no more kisses, before he spun on his heel and Disapparated, following the call of his Dark Mark.
Cedric sprawled back on his bed and closed his eyes. He would have to go report to Kingsley soon, and cast the spells that would damage the walls and doors here, and do some more damage to himself, too. The broken arm would help, but it wouldn’t be enough to convince the more suspicious people among the Auror ranks that he’d fought Voldemort’s right hand.
Cedric shuddered as he thought about that. Poor Harry. But underneath the Imperius and the mask, he was the same sweet, brave boy Cedric knew so well.
And now, someday, they had a chance of a future.
Someday, Harry would be free.
The End.