Chapter Six of 'Corybantes'- Illusions and Allusions

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Corybantes (6/12)
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 Six—Illusions and Allusions

Harry stared at the object on the table in front of him for several moments before shaking his head and saying, “I give up. What am I looking at?”

Malfoy gave him a secretive smile from the other side of the table. Harry only glanced at him once before lowering his eyes back to the object. It might be bewildering—it had a body made of red crystal with projecting silver spikes that curved into tiny bowls on the ends, like Pensieves—but it was easier to look at than Malfoy’s smile. At least the object didn’t inspire thoughts that Harry had no business having.

“This is the equivalent of one of our rooms,” Malfoy murmured. Harry had the disconcerting feeling that Malfoy was looking at him instead of the object. He tried to ignore it. “We use it to screen our customers and make sure that they’re not harboring plans against Corybantes or desires that would be truly dangerous for us to fulfill. As I’ve told you, the combination of magic we use is new and not perfect. It cannot do everything.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit that about something important to you,” Harry muttered. He thought he could see a gleam of rising light in the center of the red globe. He squinted, and the gleam turned into a five-pointed star. Harry had no idea what that meant.

Malfoy’s voice sharpened in the way that Harry had known it would. He grinned inwardly at the success of his ploy, not thinking that Malfoy would be able to detect the slight change in his face. People who dreamed, or fantasized, about Harry didn’t know what his face really looked like most of the time. “I’ve changed my mind about more things than you know, Potter. The Dark Lord, for example.”

Harry shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him, as if he were sorry that he’d brought it up. In reality, he was relieved. He obviously couldn’t ignore Malfoy and hold his composure perfectly the way he should have been able to after hundreds of cases. The next-best thing he could do was to substitute the relationship they had shared at Hogwarts for the uncomfortable mass of swirling emotions in his chest.

“So the device screens their fantasies,” Harry said. “What does it have to do with the case? If you intend to use it on me, Malfoy, I think you should be prepared to die of boredom.”

Malfoy paused. “Your fantasies could never be boring to me, Potter,” he whispered.

His voice was odd. Harry didn’t look up into his eyes because he knew he would only regret it. He examined the device again. “What does it have to do with the case?” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard Malfoy.

There were long, promising moments before Malfoy responded, moments that seemed to be filled with his silent struggle to get himself back under control. “This device contains some of Keatson’s more recent fantasies,” he said finally. “I thought you might want to see it.”

Harry looked up then, because he would have had to possess an unviolated, quiet heart not to do so, and it was too late for that. “You’ve had this, and you only thought about telling me about it now?” he demanded.

“I didn’t realize we still had it,” Malfoy corrected. He was leaning against the wall, watching Harry with a small, triumphant smile that emphasized the redness of his lips far too much. “Usually, we destroy the star-globes after we make the decision to turn the client away or admit him to Corybantes. I kept Keatson’s out of the vague sense that he might need professional help to separate his mental visions from waking reality—someday. But I put it away when none of his violent fantasies seemed to endanger his sanity, and I assumed that Leon had destroyed it.”

“Who’s Leon?” Harry circled to the other side of the globe, because he hoped that viewing it from a different angle might tell him how to use it. That the movement put more distance between him and Malfoy was merely incidental.

“One of my other employees,” Malfoy responded. “I can call him in if you like.”

“It seems awfully convenient that this would be the one star-globe spared, out of all of them,” Harry muttered. His eyes searched the nearest side, and found no switch or incantation of any kind. Damn.

“Nothing about this case has been convenient.” Malfoy’s voice turned brittle, snapping in Harry’s ears like a chicken bone. Harry gave a small nod. Good. Maybe that was a sign that Malfoy was getting bored of him and wanted Harry out as much as Harry wanted to leave. “A great deal of it was forgetting and coincidence, I told you. It’s possible that I mentioned something to Leon when I gave him the star-globe that made him decide to save it in case we ever needed it again. I repeat, should I call him in?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah. But after you show me the fantasies that are in the star-globe.” He looked up at Malfoy, who simply stood there, staring at him, and raised one eyebrow. “Did you need help with what any of the words in that sentence mean?” he demanded.

Malfoy stepped around the table. His cheeks were flushed. Harry told himself that he should take some pride in spoiling Malfoy’s appearance, and that that pride should diminish the apprehension he felt at seeing him come closer.

“I’ve tried to cooperate with you, Potter,” Malfoy began, his voice full of quiet threats like arrows in a quiver. “I’ve tried to give you what you need to solve this case. And I’ve been far more open with you about my honest wishes than anyone else who has ever come into Corybantes. Must you insist on driving me away?”

“It’s unprofessional,” Harry said coolly. He dearly longed to point out all the ways Malfoy had not been helpful, but he decided that would be counterproductive. Malfoy wanted him to get emotional, to get angry, to let his guard down so that these bloody rooms of his could capture Harry’s fantasies. Harry saw no need to let his mind be raped that way.

Rape is an unnecessarily dramatic way of putting it, he thought a moment later.

But everything else was still true, so he waited stoically, quietly, for Malfoy’s response.

He could hear Malfoy’s rushing breath as if he was standing next to the man in a void. Malfoy’s face had turned red, and his head had tilted forwards as if he intended to stab Harry with his nose. Harry felt himself grow calmer and calmer. Malfoy seemed to be sucking all the anger out of the room. Given what lengths he had gone to to get Harry angry, Harry thought that was only fair.

“Professionalism means too much to you.” Malfoy’s hands had closed into fists, now, and he drummed one impatiently on the table next to him. Harry watched it carefully. He had seen people who seemed to make senseless gestures suddenly lash out before. “I can be professional. I can investigate my customers, and make sure that their fantasies cause no damage to themselves or other people. And yet I am friends with many of my clients, and I don’t turn away in disgust from what I find in their minds. Is there no way for you to act like an Auror and yet be friendly towards me?”

“Not when I have reason to suspect that you’re the murderer,” Harry said. “Or perhaps hiding the murderer.”

Strangely, those words seemed to make an impact on Malfoy. He stopped moving and considered Harry attentively, with his head cocked on one side. Then he swept a hand through his hair and nodded shortly. “I suspect this must seem rather alien to you,” he said. “Someone who’s so intense that he makes you feel threatened.”

Harry kept the words he would have liked to speak about his feelings to himself, and nodded back instead. Malfoy pursed his lips.

“Someone who seems to have other interests at heart than clearing the reputation of his club,” he said.

“I can understand that last part,” Harry said. “You have wealthy patrons who would continue to come even if I could prove that Keatson died as a result of carelessness here. But an accusation sustained with evidence would scare some of your clients away. You must know that.”

Malfoy might have stepped next door into another world and not heard Harry’s most recent words. His eyes were slitted as though he were a large cat reclining in the sun.

“Someone,” he murmured, his voice soft, “who seems interested in you, and not merely what you can do for them.”

Harry frowned. This sounded like it was straying into personal territory again.

“I know it probably doesn’t look like it,” Malfoy said, stretching out one hand so that his fingers curled slightly at the ends. Harry glanced into his palm out of habit, but he wasn’t holding a weapon. “But I’m not mad.”

“I never said you were, sir.” Harry instinctively used the defense that he called upon when Kingsley annoyed him, making his voice bland and soothing, while his eyes concentrated on a point above Malfoy’s head.

Malfoy’s face changed with extraordinary rapidity. He shook his head, and his leg twitched as if he would have liked to walk nearer, but he stayed where he was.

“You don’t believe that,” he said. “You feel overwhelmed. I understand. I would, too, if I came into what I thought would be an ordinary, if somewhat repulsive, case, and found out that the person who ran the establishment where the death happened had dreams about me.”

Harry examined him attentively. Malfoy’s voice was the slowest he had heard it, and the hectic flush in his cheeks had died away. No, he didn’t look mad.

Now, anyway, Harry admitted to himself.

“There are things I still need to think about,” Malfoy said. “Decisions I made that seemed good at the time, and now I think they were wrong. On the other hand, reversing them might not correct the wrong. It might make you respond worse than ever.”

Harry stiffened to his full height and spoke as sternly as he could. “I wish you would stop thinking about what the effect on me might be, sir. It’s solving the case that’s important.”

Malfoy’s smile had a tinge of sadness to it this time. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong there. The effect on you is the most important thing, and, for me, always has been.”

Harry closed his hands into fists and wished he could think of anything to say that would convince Malfoy they weren’t destined lovers, or whatever strange conception he’d worked up in his head.

“Now you sound mad, sir,” he managed.

Malfoy shook his head again. “You’re only saying that,” he said. “And I suspect that I haven’t been able to alter my approach enough to make you sure about me. I always thought that the best thing to do if I finally got you into Corybantes would be to come on strong. I thought you would need to be seduced by overwhelming you until you could acknowledge your own need to give in to pleasure.”

Harry held himself still, because a hasty response would be worse than the wrong one, and carefully probed around the insides of his Occlumency walls. No, they felt as firm as ever, which made him suspect that they hadn’t fallen or permitted Malfoy a glimpse of his fantasies. Instead, Malfoy had probably either guessed already or just happened to hit on a quirk of wording that came near what Harry wanted in the most shameful part of himself.

“I was wrong,” Malfoy said. “You need to be talked to and treated rationally, because you are rational. Repressed, yes.” He gave Harry a sidelong amused look. “But rational. And you’re too strong to treat like a conquest.”

“I don’t understand you at all,” Harry began, his voice crackling with the tension. He no longer cared if Malfoy knew it. “I was brought here to investigate a case—”

“Yes,” Malfoy said. “That had to occur when we knew the death had happened and what the inevitable consequence would be. But that’s not all you were brought here for.” He bowed to Harry and walked towards the door. “I’ll summon Leon. In the meantime, enjoy the visions that Keatson placed with me.” He waved his wand, and a whirlwind of sparks began to move in the star-globe.

Then he was out the door, and gone, and Harry had to clench his jaw against the temptation to shout. What the fuck was going on? Did Kingsley know about this? Did the patrons of Corybantes know that Malfoy considered toying with him more important than getting the club cleared of the imputation of crime so that they could return to their favorite decadent pursuits?

He wanted to shout and lash out. He wanted to do it so badly that he knew that was an excellent sign he shouldn’t do it.

He ended up taking enough deep breaths to make him feel light-headed instead, and then he turned to investigate the star-globe. The fantasies were bright and insistent, if smaller than Pensieve visions, and he had to concentrate. He had to.

But based on what the visions showed him and what Malfoy’s employee said, Harry hoped that he could make an arrest. Malfoy might be sane, but Harry wouldn’t be for much longer if he stayed in Corybantes.

*

“You wished to speak to me, sir?”

Harry stared. Of course he knew that the name “Leon” could indicate a lion, and given the ways of Corybantes, that should have prepared him. But the man who stepped into the room had a flaring lion’s mane around his face and lion’s paws in place of feet. His fingers were tipped with delicate claws. His eyes were far too bright a green—though not, Harry thought with a touch of scorn for himself for noticing, as bright a green as the ones he saw in the mirror—and had pupils like a cat’s.

“Yes,” he said, and did his best to sound relaxed and not ungracious. Malfoy’s employee didn’t deserve to have Harry’s ire at Malfoy taken out on him. “I understand that you happened to preserve the star-globe that belonged to Pascal Keatson.” He nodded to the globe on the table, keeping his eyes away from it. The visions he had seen in it still sickened and haunted him. Keatson wished to know what it was like to feel death coming for him, bright and sharp, and his favorite idea about it was that a knife would cut his throat. After watching him die in endless permutations, Harry had no taste for more.

Leon nodded. “Lord Malfoy—”

“Why do you call him lord?” Harry demanded, turning sharply around. One never knew, he told himself. This might be important. Maybe Malfoy had fantasies of supreme power and control, the kind that would make him conceal information because he wanted to solve the case himself. Harry had met plenty of people over the years who were convinced they could play Auror, and some of them had managed to pretend well enough to convince others.

You know that isn’t the reason that you’re asking the question, his conscience said, in a clear voice that Harry hated. It was the same way it had spoken when he did something that endangered his partners because of pride and stupidity. You want to understand Malfoy so that you can unsettle him, so that you can get to him the way he’s getting to you.

Harry clenched his teeth down on his tongue until he tasted blood. The question had been asked, and Leon looked no more than mildly surprised by it. In fact, he smiled knowingly and nodded again.

“It takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it, sir?” he asked softly. “Everything here is his. Under his control, produced from his mind, executed—or not—at his command. Some of our guests feel rather claustrophobic at first, convinced as they are that they should be able to command their own destinies.”

“So that’s why you call him lord?” Harry asked, to fix his attention on the words and away from how supremely creepy he found the results of Malfoy’s control.

Leon grinned, showing teeth that had become points. No surprise, Harry thought. “Yes. It started out as a teasing remark from Shadow, because of the way that he ordered everyone around. But the rest of us liked it, and started adopting it.” He cocked his head to the side and lifted a tail that Harry hadn’t noticed properly before, since it seemed to spend most of its time coiled around Leon’s legs. “It fits. He gives us what we most crave, and in return, we indulge his tiny caprices.”

“What about his fantasies?” Harry asked. He was wondering if the subservience that Malfoy’s employees exhibited, including the way that Shadow refused to talk to him about anything important in front of him, was meaningful. Perhaps most people here knew Malfoy had committed the murder, but they had gone so deep into the dark, hot labyrinths of Corybantes that they weren’t able to see that they should report the death. Harry had dealt with situations like that before.

And been in them. He shuddered as he thought of the way he had acted during an undercover assignment to investigate a group of demon-worshippers. He had never been so near to becoming what he despised.

“Oh, no, sir,” Leon said, sounding shocked. “He would never ask someone in the club to do something that intimate and personal.”

Harry stared at him. “But this place is all about trusting someone else with your intimacies,” he said.

Leon looked over his shoulder, then leaned confidingly towards Harry. “Well, sir,” he whispered, “between you and me, Lord Malfoy is a bit of a hypocrite.”

The richest, ripest snort of Harry’s life tried to work its way out of his nose, and he had to suppress it. A bit?

“He encourages others to lower their barriers,” Leon was continuing, with several wise nods that Harry thought made him resemble Hermione, “to bathe in the relaxation he offers, whether they want a literal bath or something as exotic as a group of dancing girls who are half-panther. The fantasy rooms must have been the centerpiece of your experience of the club so far, because that’s where Keatson died, but there are plenty of other rooms here as well. Massage rooms, bathing rooms, bedrooms where our clients can sleep in the assurance that their rest will be undisturbed.” He paused, with a faint, gentle smile on his lips. “Sometimes people come here who are parents and simply want to sleep, the way they can never do when they have young children around the house. We entertain the children so they don’t need to worry at all.”

Harry blinked several times. Trying to fit that imagined Corybantes into the one he had seen was impossible.

“But of course,” Leon continued, waving one paw above his head to show off the seriousness of what he was discussing, “Lord Malfoy thinks differently. His fantasies are private. I don’t think he’s ever confessed them to anyone but Shadow, because she’s been with him longest. And I reckon he’ll confess them to the person who can fulfill them,” Leon added, with a shrug of one tawny shoulder. “I suspect it’s one single person he wants with a devouring desire, the kind that sometimes destroys our clients before we can fully ease them of the flames. But I don’t know who it is.”

Harry had to close his eyes and swallow slowly, because only now did he understand the full impact of Malfoy’s admission in his office.

I’m the one he wants.

So many emotions bent back on themselves in Harry that he didn’t think he fully got to feel one before another intruded. There was wariness, and anger, and amazement, and concern for Malfoy’s mental health.

But most of all, making sparks dance golden behind his eyelids the way squeezing them shut too hard did, was confusion.

Why—why the fuck would he want me? Someone who understands the weaknesses desire unleashes as well as he does wouldn’t succumb to mindless celebrity-worship. And he said something about knowing that I wasn’t the same as I was at Hogwarts, so he can’t want the schoolboy. But there’s no way that he can know the real me, either.

Harry blinked and opened his eyes slowly. He had the impulse to seek out Malfoy now and speak to him, but the case was still the more important thing. He could do nothing as long as the fear that Malfoy was the murderer, or protecting the murderer, stood between them.

“We seem to have drifted a bit off-topic,” he said, smiling at Leon. The man had a polite look on his face still, so Harry didn’t know how much he might have guessed of the thoughts going through Harry’s mind. Harry hoped he hadn’t guessed much at all. “Why did you keep this star-globe?”

“Lord Malfoy is wonderfully cunning and clever,” Leon answered at once, with a brush of one claw across his mane, “but not always conscious. He said that Keatson’s fantasies worried him, but he couldn’t understand why, since he had seen more violent ones before. Well, I watched the visions and I understood why at once. There was a desire to die there without any of the usual motives for it.” He glanced at the star-globe. “You’ve watched them, sir?”

Harry winced, which Leon took for an answer. “He wanted to taste that special pain that comes on the brink of death. He didn’t think about what would come after that, so it wasn’t a wish to leave life behind. He didn’t want to make people sorry he was gone. He didn’t want to die because of some overwhelming sorrow in his life. It was—that taste of sensation. Nothing else.” Leon looked at once solemn and disbelieving.

Harry curled his lip. “So you kept it because you thought that Malfoy would probably want to look at them again someday, in case something happened?”

Leon bobbed his head. “Yes, but I never anticipated something like this happening, sir. Lord Malfoy’s protections are, as I said, all under his control. No one could have broken through his wards if he did not allow it.”

Harry licked his lips. The evidence that Malfoy was complicit in the murder seemed stronger everywhere he looked.

But he had no idea how that fit with the evidence of Keatson’s drawings and fantasies. Or the things Leon had told him. Or the fact that Keatson had been killed by someone facing him instead of from behind—although both positions had showed up among the visions he had just watched.

“Thank you,” he said. “No further questions.”

Leon bowed and retreated from the room. Harry bent his head and raked his fingers through his hair until he felt a bead of blood break from his scalp.

Malfoy had given him a gift. But was the gift poisoned, or meant to be a pure, sweet elixir? And even if Malfoy thought it was pure, did it still have poison hidden at the bottom of it?

Would he end up a sex slave if he listened more closely to Malfoy?

Then Harry laughed at himself, a short bark that sounded desperate.

No, the inevitable will happen. Malfoy will find out that I’m nothing like he thought me, and give up in disgust and despair.

Harry strode out of the club. He knew his next step, but he could not be on the premises of Corybantes when he enacted it.

And all the while, he subjected himself to a scathing with mental steel for worrying more about disappointing Malfoy than whether Malfoy was the murderer.

At least my priorities are in the right place, though. I need to be thinking about Malfoy and the other people who will be affected if the murder happened in Corybantes—including Keatson’s family—and not myself. Who the fuck cares how Malfoy’s fantasies affect me? He gave me the gift of his honesty under a mistake about who I really am. I just have to make sure not to drop it. There’s no question of taking it into myself.

That final idea couldn’t still the confusion whirling in him, but Harry made it serve as a stable point to fix his thoughts to, out of which he could grow his intentions.

And the first of those was sending an owl to Shadow, to ask her to meet him privately, and without Malfoy’s knowledge.

Chapter Seven.

Comments

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Draco can act sane when he's not around Harry. When he is, though, his desire takes over and he acts rather...off.

Harry thinks that Draco can't possibly know anything but what's been reported in the papers, since Harry and his friends haven't talked to him. And what's reported in the papers is far from the truth, as Harry knows all too well.