Chapter Five of 'Corybantes'- Slit Throats and Silences

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Corybantes (5/10 or 12)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, OC character death, profanity, sex, mentions of random fetishes and suicide. Ignores the DH epilogue.
Summary: A mysterious death has occurred at Draco Malfoy’s club, Corybantes, which specializes in using magic to make its clients’ deepest fantasies come true. As Auror Harry Potter investigates, he finds himself admiring Malfoy’s courage and determination in achieving success. Which could be a problem, as there’s a fairly large chance that Malfoy is the murderer.
Author’s Notes: Corybantes were servants of the goddess Cybele who worked themselves up into ecstatic trances with drumming and dancing. Though applying to a different kind of ecstasy, it seemed a fairly good name for Draco’s club. This story will be about ten or twelve chapters long.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Slit Throats and Silences

“Pascal’s final papers are through here.” The voice of the woman who had met Harry at the door was low, and she kept one cloth in front of her face at all times, as though the light through the dim windows hurt her eyes. From the one unqualified look he’d got at her, when she opened the door, Harry thought that it was weeping that had done the damage. “Of course you’re welcome to look through any of them. We have already, but—we’re not sure how much significance to attach to what we found.” Her robes were thick, but Harry could still see the shudder that ran up her spine.

He gently touched her shoulder, and waited until she looked back at him. She had dark blue eyes and hair that was already going grey, though Harry thought she was only in her late thirties. “Madam Keatson,” he said, struggling to remember her first name. Anna, he thought. “What did you find?”

Anna Keatson swallowed, and her hands twisted the cloth. “Shouldn’t you investigate for yourself, without knowing?” she asked. “After all, we might prejudice your conclusions if we explain what disturbed us.”

Harry smiled at her and shook his head. “Any knowledge is useful in a case like this, madam. After all, there might be things you would notice and I wouldn’t.”

Anna looked at the ground for a moment, then glanced up at him. “We found many, many depictions of suicide,” she said quietly. “At first, we feared that he might have committed suicide. But none of the figures had his face.”

Harry nodded comfortingly. He would let the family—Anna was the victim’s sister—believe what they needed to believe. He himself had been on too many cases to discard suicide as a motive because of something as small as that.

“On the other hand,” she said, and by this time her voice was a whisper that Harry would have found hard to hear if he hadn’t been trained to hear far softer things, “we found other papers that show someone with his face abusing other people.” She gave the shudder again, and glanced up at Harry. “I can’t help thinking that maybe he died trying to kill someone else, someone who murdered him instead. I can’t—it doesn’t fit with the Pascal I knew, but I’m starting to think that I didn’t really know him.”

Harry gently gripped her arm and rubbed up and down. Normally he didn’t touch people he interacted with on cases, but she looked like she needed a firm hand just at the moment. “Mr. Malfoy says that no one but the fantasies could have intruded into those rooms,” he said. “Your brother went there to enjoy his interactions with imaginary people. They’ve discovered no evidence that anyone else was present.”

Once again, he kept what he thought to himself. There were so many of his thoughts down the years that other people hadn’t needed to know, because, if they did, they would only get upset. Or they were simply private suspicions that would be proved wrong in the end. Harry saw no need to burden anyone else with those, either.

Silence was the rule of his life. It was a good rule. Harry didn’t know what had possessed him to feel as if the rule was broken inside Corybantes.

But he wasn’t inside Corybantes now, and he was in control of himself again. Harry liked the way that felt. He smiled more broadly at Anna and imitated the voice of the Healers who had talked to him after his first partner died—through Harry’s sheer carelessness, something he would never forget. “It could have been suicide. It might have been murder in some way that Mr. Malfoy doesn’t think is possible right now. But I can assure you that if your brother fought back, it was self-defense, not because he had gone there prepared to hurt someone.”

Anna nodded, tears starting to her eyes. “Thank you.” She hesitated, then added, “The rest of the family doesn’t feel it like I do. They say Pascal had become a stranger. He did, but there had to be some reason that he decided he couldn’t talk to us. I’d like to know as much as I can, Auror Potter. Please.”

“I understand that,” Harry said softly, his voice deepening in spite of himself. Kingsley hadn’t wanted him to spend so long discussing Warren’s death with the other Aurors who’d been there; he’d been sure that knowing more about it would make Harry blame himself more. But Harry had needed to know the extent of that blame, and he’d discovered so much that might have been hidden from him if he hadn’t looked. Those errors could have killed another partner for him. Instead, the next two had survived, and then Harry had started working on his own and it was no longer an issue. “I’ll make sure you get the information you need, madam.”

Anna squeezed his arm and went back to the door without speaking. Harry opened the door of the room that had been Keatson’s private study, where most of his papers had been found.

Looking at a victim’s room could often tell Harry something about them, even more than with a criminal. After all, most victims weren’t interested in hiding evidence of their activities like Dark wizards were. He just stood in the doorway for several minutes, looking around.

The room was blue and white, brilliant colors rather than soothing ones. The walls were the color of fine sapphires in between windows that were painted a startling ivory shade. The white curtains on them billowed softly in the breeze traveling through the open windows. The curtains themselves were fine net, woven into elaborate patterns when Harry looked closely. The furniture was mahogany and ebony, so well-made that Harry, who knew almost nothing about furniture, had to stand there and admire it.

Keatson had loved beautiful things. Harry wasn’t sure right now how that fitted into the rest of what he knew about him, but it was certainly interesting.

Harry stepped into the room at last and studied it again from the center. The desk that held the papers dominated half the room, aimed at the largest window, which faced east. A shelf along the wall contained books that Harry would need to examine more closely. Two tall chairs near the western window faced each other. Two people could have been sitting in them, facing each other and engaging in conversation.

Maybe. Harry somehow doubted that Keatson had had many visitors.

He looked closely at the walls, and tapped on a few of them, but could make out no hollow places or secret passages. There weren’t any hooks or holes where recent pictures might have been ripped out, either. Harry always checked for those, since the case where everything would have been much easier if he’d known from the beginning that a portrait of the victim existed.

At last he turned to the desk, noticing that whoever had been through here last had arranged the papers neatly in stacks. One had a label pinned to the desk above it, saying “Legal Documents,” but the others had none. Harry left the Legal Documents pile alone for now and dug into the largest of the unlabeled piles. He didn’t want to intrude on the privacy of the Keatson family unless he had to.

Keatson apparently hated two things: consistency and people who had actual drawing talent. His pictures were made in strong, slashing lines, and Harry had to wince as he considered the lack of skill in them. Two figures appeared again and again, a man who looked enough like the corpse to be a self-rendering and a naked, kneeling, adoring woman.

Harry grimaced and pushed aside the top three drawings so that he could look at the one that was most detailed. He had already known that Keatson had unrealistic, exaggerated desires. Malfoy had said as much the first night Harry went to Corybantes.

Malfoy.

Harry grimaced again. He had carefully kept the name out of his thoughts, because he knew he wasn’t prepared to answer all the questions that arose when he didn’t.

He still thought much the same about Corybantes that he had when he first went there. Most of the people who used it had distasteful fantasies. Harry wouldn’t try to interfere in them, but he couldn’t respect them, either.

But about Malfoy himself, he had strange reactions and plenty of questions and the uncomfortable suspicion that Malfoy wanted him—for no apparent reason that Harry knew of, because what did he have to offer someone who didn’t need an Auror or a celebrity?—and…

And not much else.

It was simultaneously too much and not enough. Harry couldn’t ignore his knowledge and he couldn’t make a decision based on it.

He grunted at last and glanced down at the drawing again, since that was germane to the investigation he was actually conducting in the first place.

Keatson sat on a throne in the middle of what looked like a flowering field in spring, though the entire sketch was in black and white, and so Harry couldn’t be sure. His face was stern. In front of him knelt a naked woman with her hands bound behind her, staring up at him with a quivering lip and huge tear-filled eyes. Two other women stood over her, one of them holding a whip and one a—muzzle? Harry had to bend his head sideways to look at it, and even then, he wasn’t sure. He shuddered and looked at the background.

There was a strange shape there, drawn sideways and in flight, so that at first Harry thought he was looking at a bird. Either expectations adjusted his eyesight for him or his eyes adjusted themselves, because he suddenly saw it for what it was. A hurled knife, thrown by someone who stood outside the scene.

It was aimed straight at Keatson’s throat.

Harry raised his eyebrows. Are we dealing with a fetish, or with a suicide wish, or with a paranoid fantasy about someone trying to murder him?

He put aside that drawing and looked through the rest, though he had to roll his eyes at the great majority of them. Women kneeling to Keatson, women looking up imploringly at Keatson, women sitting on Keatson’s lap and wrapping their arms around his neck as they wept. Harry was glad that Malfoy hadn’t offered him further details of the fantasies that the club’s rooms enacted for Keatson. He’d need a long shower.

And there’s Malfoy in my head again, as real as if he never left.

Harry sighed in disgust and slammed down a drawing on the desk. One corner of the parchment bent, and the next moment he shook his head and felt silly. Why should he let stupid things like this upset him?

All it argued was that he needed greater control. Keatson was a victim. Harry’s primary mission was to find out how he had died, and bring the murderer to justice if there was a murderer. He could think about his disgust when the case was done.

And that solution would have to apply to Malfoy, too. Maybe they could explore whatever hovered between them later, when the case was done. Harry didn’t see any way that he could deal with them simultaneously, though.

He gathered up several of the most “interesting” drawings and went to ask Anna what was in the pile of legal documents. If there was something that clarified or explained the death, he thought he’d have heard about it already, but on the other hand, Keatson was estranged from his family. Maybe Harry would have to violate their privacy after all.

A realization stopped him as he glanced back once at that neat, beautiful room, which revealed so little of its owner’s mental existence.

He wasn’t sure that he could control himself and stop himself from reacting to Malfoy if he went back to Corybantes.

On the other hand, passing the case on to someone else, or stopping the investigation, would be nonsensical and disrespectful of Keatson as well as Kingsley, who had trusted Harry enough to assign him to it.

Harry went out the door still chewing on the problem.

*

Looking through Keatson’s legal documents hadn’t proven fruitful. He hadn’t left anything complicated or convoluted in his will—and he had made a will, though one charmed not to be visible until one of the executors touched it. There was no quarreling over his tiny legacies. He hadn’t made any strange final requests that might have shed light on the case in some way.

That looked to Harry like suicide. Not many people who weren’t old left their legal affairs arranged so neatly, even if they meant to—and if they were people neat enough to do it genuinely, that usually showed up in either areas of their lives. Every area of Keatson’s life argued for the opposite: overflowing, slapdash, or hidden.

Dirty.

Harry sighed and shook his head as he stepped out of the shower, rubbing his hair briskly with a towel. He shouldn’t react like this when someone was dead and his fantasies had always been private and he had taken steps to ensure that he didn’t hurt anyone else because of them, but Harry still felt slimy even now.

If Keatson had decided to commit suicide, then only two problems remained, or one depending on how they were looked at. There was the lack of a weapon, and the fact that Corybantes’s fantasies couldn’t cause lasting physical damage. On both accounts, Harry had Malfoy’s assurance that it was impossible for Keatson to have hurt himself.

Malfoy.

He would have to deal with Malfoy again in order to make progress on the case. There was absolutely no other choice.

“It’s not even that I don’t trust him,” Harry muttered aloud as he wrapped the towel around his waist. It was his house, the place he could relax, and so he could talk aloud to himself if that was what he needed to solve the case. “It’s that I don’t trust myself.”

“Harry? What are you talking about?”

Harry hastily whipped his wand up from the corner of the sink and Summoned the robes that were hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Ron had come through the Floo into the house—he had to have done it, since that was his voice—the way he sometimes did in the evening. Trust Harry’s luck to mean that Ron had heard what he was saying.

This is why I really can’t relax or let my guard down, Harry told himself as he pulled the collar of the robe over his head and cast a Drying Charm on his hair. It’s always going to hurt someone or confuse someone, even if I don’t think it will.

“Just a minute, Ron,” he said calmly, and stepped through the door, waving away the heated air that followed him. Ron, who was standing in the middle of the living room and staring at the books on Dark curses on Harry’s shelves, turned around with a strained smile that Harry had got used to seeing lately.

“Hi, Harry.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I came to ask you over for dinner this weekend. Hugo’s been asking where his godfather went.”

Harry sighed with relief. Ron hadn’t been close enough to the door to overhear Harry’s words, then, or he would have asked him what he meant at once. He had probably just heard Harry’s voice and wondered what he was saying.

Ron mistook the sigh, and puffed up like a peacock who’d seen a rival. “If you don’t want to come, you don’t have to,” he said stiffly.

Harry smiled at him. His friends were still the best part of his life, even if he’d lost touch with them somewhat. “No, I’d love to come,” he said. “I was sighing at the thought of how long it’ll be before the weekend.” He rolled his eyes. “And then I don’t even get to take time off those days, most of the time. Criminals never sleep.”

Ron didn’t smile back. “I don’t understand why you don’t quit the Aurors, Harry,” he said, in a way that told Harry he must have been thinking about the words for a while. “You’re always stressed. You’re always tired. You barely have the time to spend with us.” He was speaking more quickly and confidently as he went on, and looking Harry in the eye now. “You could do something else. You know you could. And since you’ve started talking about how dissatisfied you are sometimes, I know it’s not that you love your job.”

Harry let his smile fade, too, because he knew what kind of conversation this would be now. “Because I’m addicted to saving people,” he said. “And because, most of the time, I can handle the stress.”

Ron jumped and stared at him. “You mean—you know that you have an addiction to saving people?”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “I’d think it would be bloody obvious by now,” he said dryly. “And I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent observer.”

“But then, why don’t you stop?” Ron asked the question as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

“Because it’s a calling.” Harry shrugged helplessly when Ron looked stubborn. “I complain, yeah, but everyone complains about their job. I’d be miserable away from it, like someone who’s a good singer would be miserable not to sing anymore even when he doesn’t feel like facing an audience. This is what I’m good at.”

“You could find something else you’re good at,” Ron said.

“I could,” Harry agreed, “but I know it wouldn’t be Quidditch, because I’m too old now to play as well as most of the younger blokes.” He ignored Ron’s spluttering attempts to deny that. “And in the meantime, I’d sit around stewing, and wondering how the Department was getting on without me, and Kingsley would firecall and ask me to handle one small thing, and I’d be an Auror again before you know it.”

“That’s tyranny,” Ron said earnestly.

Harry had to grin, though he tried to restrain it when he saw how hurt Ron looked. “No, it’s not,” he said. “Really, Ron. I have the right to choose my employment, and right now this is what I choose. It’s an ordinary job in the end, or at least it causes me an ordinary amount of stress. Maybe that’s not true for other people, but it is for me.”

“But you never take a holiday,” Ron said, in the tones of someone who’d been anticipating this exact conversation for a long time and still hated the way it was going. “You never relax. There are so many things that you won’t tell us.”

“And I’ve told you all the reasons for those.” Harry paused in swiping at his hair—it seemed that the Drying Charm hadn’t taken care of the two longest and wettest strands, something that happened to him frequently—and studied Ron curiously. “Do you not believe me?”

“You could tell us about the things you experience!” Ron snapped. “We tell you about our problems!”

“Yes, but those problems don’t count murder,” Harry said quietly.

Ron seemed to sag then. “If you’re happy,” he said, “I reckon that we can’t complain. But I don’t think you’re happy, and neither does Hermione. That’s the reason we bring it up so much.”

Harry shook his head.”I’m happy in different ways than other people.” He didn’t add that he hardly thought it could be otherwise, when so much of his life had been strange and abnormal. “I promise you, if Auror life ever becomes intolerable to me, I’ll let you know, and then you can pull me away from it if I insist on staying.”

Ron regarded him with wide eyes, then gave in and nodded when Harry went on smiling at him. “I suppose we have to trust that you know yourself,” he said. Then he gave Harry a brief curious glance. “It is possible that you’ve forgotten how to relax?”

Harry laughed. “You don’t forget how to do that, Ron. And just to prove it, I’ll sit around with you tonight in the Leaky Cauldron and drink as much Firewhisky as you like.”

Ron seemed satisfied, and started talking about the joke shop while Harry Summoned robes that were more appropriate for going out in public. But Harry, who knew himself, had been aware of how long it was before he could call up the breath to laugh, and the sudden jolt that Ron’s perceptive words had given him.

It’s not just Keatson’s fantasies I find so slimy. I think of my own fantasies and I shudder.

But there were other ways to relax than indulging your fantasies, and Harry found one that evening, when he came home with his cheeks aching from how hard he’d smiled.

*

“Malfoy.”

Harry had not the slightest idea how to act after the revelations that Malfoy had made to him, so he kept his head up and his face calm and friendly as he nodded to the other man. He extended a sheaf of Keatson’s drawings before Malfoy had time to do more than nod back. “Do these seem representative to you of the kinds of things Keatson desired?”

Malfoy took the papers and examined them without apparent surprise, though Harry wasn’t sure if that was because he had seen them before or because he had expected something like them among Keatson’s effects. Harry studied his hands, and didn’t see them shake or pause in their turning over of the papers.

He did notice more about them than was comfortable, such as how slender the fingers were, before he focused his attention back on Malfoy’s face. Malfoy was giving him a slow, pleased smile. Harry flushed. Yes, he’d been attracted before to people with slender hands, but he shouldn’t be thinking about such things in the middle of a case.

“They’re the kinds of scenarios that he regularly had his fantasies act out,” Malfoy said quietly. “But generally, the ones that he used in the last few months had more and more violence directed towards himself, and not others.” He turned one picture to face Harry. It was the one Harry had noted that seemed to have a flying knife in the background. Malfoy’s tracing the figure with a finger showed that he’d seen it immediately. Perceptive, Harry thought, and remembered that he often thought perceptive people were attractive as well. “I don’t think these are recent drawings. He might have hidden those.”

Harry shifted and cleared his throat. “I’ll look for them.” He hesitated, and wondered if he really had to spend time on the questions that crowded his brain. He still needed to ask Malfoy about the fantasies and if it was really impossible to sneak a weapon in, after all.

But these questions were distracting him, so Harry thought it best to get them out of the way. “What are your fantasies about me?’

Malfoy took the change of subject without any apparent surprise. The heat deepened in his eyes—Harry realized suddenly it had always been there—and he leaned forwards, placing his hands on the desk between them. They were in Malfoy’s office again, but this time the paperwork was gone. Malfoy had very little around him but bare wood and bare walls, Harry thought, as if he felt that the fantasy rooms should be ornate but not his rooms for business dealings. Harry could appreciate the mindset.

Even if I don’t want to.

“I want you,” Malfoy said. “That’s it, really. That simple. I want you because you’ve changed so much, now, from the way I knew you at Hogwarts. I want to see your face flush with anger again. I want to watch you fly. I want you to lean your head on my shoulder and confess all the weaknesses that you won’t confess to anyone else. I want to trace the connections between the person you were and the person you’ve become.”

Harry swallowed. The idea was so like his own musings on Malfoy the other evening, when he had tried to find the schoolboy in the mature man, that he couldn’t speak.

Malfoy stood up again and said in a cheerful tone, “I believe I have found something that might interest you. Follow me?”

He turned away and sauntered off. Harry forced his legs to work so he could follow.

But in the meantime, his head hummed and kept humming. He had thought Malfoy’s words would bury his curiosity, kill it with the same disgust that Harry felt when he thought of Keatson’s fantasies. Instead, the images whirled through his mind and he wondered what it would be like to experience Malfoy’s fantasies as the recipient of them.

He could feel something even more disquieting than curiosity or confusion making its presence known as he watched Malfoy striding in front of him, the confident, piston-like motions of his hips and the rounding of his arse.

Desire.

Chapter Six.