Chapter Seventeen of 'Soldier's Welcome'- Partners in Interrogation

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Soldier’s Welcome (17/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairings: Harry/Draco preslash, Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Violence (and plenty of it), profanity, references to sex, takes account of DH but ignores the epilogue, heavy angst.
Summary: It’s the first year of Auror training for Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and…Draco Malfoy, But with Hagrid, Snape’s second Pensieve, rogue Death Eaters, Auror classes, and someone trying to start a second war to worry about, Harry might not have the time to pay that much attention to Malfoy. At first, anyway.
Author’s Notes: This story is the first in a trilogy called Running to Paradise, which takes its title from a W. B. Yeats poem. Each story will be novel-length, and each will cover a year of Harry and Draco’s training as Aurors. Though there are a lot of fics out there about them acting as Auror partners, there aren’t as many about their training, so I hope to cover some original ground there. I’m indebted to a reader named SP777 for suggesting a training fic for me to write.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seventeen—Partners in Interrogation

Harry was grateful that Draco gave him a quick nod when he saw him and launched straight into a discussion of how they would need to conduct this investigation, rather than asking how his talk with Ron had gone. “Dearborn never made it clear, when you talked to him, whether they still had the false Death Eaters in custody or not?” Draco asked. He had met Harry at his rooms, and had his head ducked as he dropped his books and gathered a belt hung with potions flasks. Harry eyed it, hoped there was nothing illegal in it, and decided not to say anything as long as Draco didn’t force him to notice the illegality.

“No. He told me it was privileged information and they couldn’t share it, especially because they fear that I have a tracking spell on me.”

Draco whipped around with a sneer. “A cage of mice could run itself better than this barracks,” he muttered.

Harry gave him a temperate smile in return; he agreed but didn’t want to let the conversation be deflected. “So how do we begin, then? I don’t think that corridor where we encountered them can tell us anything more, and if they’re in custody, we’re unlikely to be able to talk to them.”

“Oh, aren’t we.”

Harry felt the hairs on his neck and shoulders standing to attention at Draco’s dark drawl. He licked his lips and said, “Do I want to know what you mean by that?”

Draco lifted his head, his eyes narrowing. He looked like a proud cat that someone had called a kitten. “We know that we deserve to know what’s going on,” he said, “because they attacked us.”

“Right,” Harry said, eyeing the belt of potions that Draco had picked up with more uneasiness than he had before.

“And we know that we’ll have no chance of that as long as the false Death Eaters stay in Ministry custody.” Draco muttered a Disillusionment Charm with a slight twist to the incantation that Harry hadn’t heard before, and the potions belt dimmed.

“The instructors might tell us sooner or later—” Harry began, but broke off when he saw the slow, sardonic look that Draco was surveying him with.

“When you acted on your own in Hogwarts,” Draco said quietly, “it was because you had to. Because the professors wouldn’t help you, or you tried to tell them the truth and they didn’t believe you, or because you knew that you deserved to be included in whatever was happening and they thought you didn’t.”

Harry swallowed, thinking of Sirius. There had been another nightmare last night where Bellatrix explained in a patient voice that Harry could have saved Sirius if he had just learned Occlumency. “The best results didn’t always come from including me,” he said.

Draco shook his head. His eyes glittered with piercing intensity. “But they depended on you to save the world,” he said. “Treating you like any other student was a mistake on their part, because they also wanted to give you responsibility beyond anything any other student carried. This time, the Death Eaters—or whoever they really are—have attacked us, and the instructors know that they have. They’re gaining nothing by holding the information away from us. Except their own pride and peace of mind.”

Harry wanted to argue that the two situations weren’t exactly the same, but every argument he could think of died before the force of Draco’s stare and his own desire. Besides, they were older now, and the instructors should be able to trust them more, not less, than they would have trusted Hogwarts students.

And how long should it take them to decide whether he had a tracking spell on him anyway or not? Harry felt his resentment growing. Dearborn was making the whole process unnecessarily complicated.

“I can see from your scowl that you agree with me,” Draco murmured, his voice gentle, his eyes anything but. “I know, in fact, that the Death Eaters are still being held, and where. I overheard Portillo Lopez and Ketchum talking about it. I’m going there and I’m going to find out the truth, whether or not they want me to. Are you with me?”

Harry felt his nostrils flare. He didn’t want to let Draco go into danger alone, and the sheer thought of being left behind while the most adventurous thing that he’d been involved in since Hogwarts happened without him was irritating.

“I’m with you,” he said.

Draco reached out a lightning-fast hand, fast enough to make Harry tense. But all Draco did was let it lie on his arm as he gazed deeply and earnestly into Harry’s eyes. Harry blinked back at him and stood still. This seemed important to Draco, though why, he didn’t know. He didn’t think Draco was using Legilimency to read his mind, since he felt no sharp-edged shoving at his thoughts.

“Good,” Draco said at last, in a voice hardly above a whisper, and his hand made a tiny caressing motion on Harry’s arm as he took it away.

Harry shivered, and didn’t know the “why” of that, either.

*

Potter’s face was a study. Draco thought he should have made friends with him long before this, if only for the pleasure of shocking him.

“That’s Veritaserum,” Potter said suspiciously as he watched Draco remove a few careful drops from one of the larger flasks on his belt.

“Yes, it is,” Draco said peacefully as he scattered the drops on a piece of cake he’d stolen from the dining hall that morning, and waited for the next inevitable question.

“Who are you going to use it on?”

Draco turned his head by slow degrees and gave Potter a toothy smile.

“Using Veritaserum without permission from the Ministry is illegal,” Potter whispered, his face a brilliant red. Draco pictured Granger reading Potter and the Weasel a lecture about illegality and almost laughed. She would do it with that exact same expression, he knew she would. “Do you want to be kicked out of the Auror training program in your first term?’

“Lots of things are illegal,” Draco said. He corked the flask of Veritaserum again and shook the cake a bit to make sure that it had completely absorbed the potion. It didn’t squish in his hand, so it had. He dipped a finger in the thick chocolate that covered the top of the cake. “Legilimency, for example. Occlumency. Using Unforgivable Curses. I’ve done all three, and I’m still here and an Auror trainee.” He extended the finger covered with chocolate to Potter. “Want some?”

Potter glared at him. Draco would have laughed, he was so priggish, but he couldn’t help but think of what would happen if Potter wasn’t so priggish. The way his tongue would dart out, curling around Draco’s finger, the way his mouth would open and how his throat would feel as he swallowed around the chocolate…

Draco caught his breath and concentrated on Vanishing the chocolate from his finger without removing his skin along the way. Potter, meanwhile, proving that he had no idea what Draco had been thinking about and thus lacked basic observational skills as well as Legilimency, demanded, “How do you think you’ll keep from being caught? Snape could use Legilimency at Hogwarts, where he was under Dumbledore’s protection, but this will be in the Ministry itself.”

“Chocolate absorbs and hides Veritaserum,” Draco said patiently. “When they look for traces of it in the prisoner’s system, they won’t find anything. All he’ll know is that he felt like chatting to us today.”

Potter’s eyes narrowed. “If that’s such a simple trick, then surely they’ll figure out that you must have used it.”

Draco shook his head. “First, Veritaserum is usually given directly or in a liquid, not hidden in food, and the Ministry is hidebound. If they suspect—which I plan on giving them no reason to do—then they’ll question the prisoner we feed the cake to about that, not about food. Second, I plan on using a small Confundus Charm to ensure the prisoner doesn’t remember the cake. And finally, the effect of chocolate on Veritaserum might be simple, but it’s not widely-known. It’s something Professor Snape taught me, a reaction that he discovered himself through the kind of experimentation that the Ministry never lets its Potions masters do.”

Potter bowed his head for a moment. Draco reckoned he was thinking about Professor Snape and silently paying tribute to him in his mind or something. The fact that Draco sometimes felt tempted to do the same was not the point. He waited, one eyebrow rising higher and higher, until Potter looked up and nodded sharply, once.

“So where are the prisoners held?” he asked.

Draco smiled, conjured a box that would wrap the cake and preserve it from getting crushed, Disillusioned the box, and jerked his head down the corridor. “Follow me.”

And Potter did. Draco wished he had an audience so that he could preen. The Great Harry Potter following a Malfoy was no common sight.

But an audience would defeat the purpose of secrecy, so Draco kept his eyes fastened straight ahead and his forming grin to himself.

*

The room holding the Death Eaters turned out to be in a corridor of holding cells not far from the main body of the Magical Law Enforcement Department. Harry frowned, perplexed, as he noted that there weren’t many wards or guards around. Why would they treat Death Eaters so casually?

Maybe they’re fakes, the way Draco suggested.

But then, it seemed as though the Ministry could have quickly finished interrogating them and decided to try or release them. And that meant the instructors could have told Harry and Draco the truth about them much sooner.

Harry scowled as he followed Draco along. Draco had taught him how to look as if they had business here—heads up, shoulders pulled back, expressions somewhere between boredom and resentment on their faces—and had reassured Harry that instructors and third-year trainees used first-years as errand-runners all the time. Harry had no problem playing the resentment part, at least.

Still, there were too many problems with this for him to think they would get away with it. He muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Someone is going to remember seeing us here, and then what will we do?”

“Come up with a plausible lie,” Draco said, slowing and checking the doors of the cells. Harry glanced at them, but even when he scanned them closely, he could make out no marks that separated them from one another. Draco grunted in satisfaction and halted in front of one, though. “Of which I already have several.”

Harry folded his arms. “Tell me one.”

Draco grinned over his shoulder. “Why ruin the surprise?” Then he faced the door and knocked firmly.

The door opened almost at once. The trainee behind it divided her gaze between Harry and Draco, frowning. Her eyes widened when she saw Harry, but her hand also tightened on her wand. She had grey eyes a shade or two less bright than Draco’s and pale brown hair that hadn’t known the touch of a comb in several years, Harry thought. “Yeah?” she demanded.

Harry stifled a grin. Hestia would be horrified by the trainee’s lack of proper greetings to fellow trainees according to the Auror Code of Conduct.

Draco sighed and ran a hand through his hair. The expression he wore was one that Harry remembered seeing on his face several times in History of Magic. “Let me guess,” he said. “They didn’t tell you anything about the message Auror Dearborn wanted sent.”

The trainee couldn’t keep her eyes off Harry for very long, but she did look at Draco then. “What message?”

“Well, if they’d told you, then you would know, wouldn’t you?” Draco held up a piece of parchment Harry was ninety percent certain was blank. “He wanted to request you for a training exercise. Unless your name isn’t Ursula Kendrick,” he added, suddenly sounding less certain, and starting to lower the parchment back to his side.

“No, no, it is,” Kendrick said, and took a step forwards into Draco’s personal space, reaching anxiously for the parchment. Harry bristled and stopped himself from moving up to Draco’s side with an effort. Draco let the parchment go without effort, though, and Kendrick stepped back again and read it with greedy eyes. Harry frowned at the back of Draco’s head in confusion.

“At last,” Kendrick whispered. She looked up, cocking her head. “You’re here to take over my guard duties?”

Draco folded his arms and glanced to the side with a sulky pout. Someone who knew him would have thought it was too dramatic, but Harry doubted Kendrick knew him. “Unfortunately,” he muttered.

“Have fun, first-years,” Kendrick said, with the same kind of mild sneer that Percy had sometimes used during Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, and she sprinted down the corridor of identical doors. Draco watched her go with a much more vicious expression, then turned and waved Harry into the room.

Harry stepped in, looking around. The room was large and featureless, with plain stone walls and torch sconces shielded with wards. The only furniture was a chair between the two doors, and in front of it sprawled a book he thought Kendrick must have been reading. Harry picked it up and then snickered in spite of himself. How to Impress and Influence Your Superiors.

“God knows she needs that,” Draco said with a certain relish as he shut the outer door behind him. “She’s been trying to get someone to mentor her personally since she entered the program, and she’s failed.” He raised an eyebrow at Harry. “You can see why a message that seems to offer a coveted connection with Dearborn would be…eagerly accepted.”

“Until she gets there and finds out Dearborn never sent such a message,” Harry had to point out.

“He did, actually.” Draco wore an expression of thick smugness. “Last week. I daresay that trying to figure out why the original messenger didn’t deliver it will occupy some of his time, and hers.”

Harry laughed in spite of himself, but said, “And won’t Dearborn think something is off because you were the one to deliver it?”

“Not when I can spin him the long story of how the message got traded between various people who dislike Kendrick and wanted to deprive her of the chance for a mentor,” Draco said. He was already walking towards the door on the other side of the room, considering the wards that crawled over it. “Which is perfectly true. The use I decided to make of it is what will intrigue him, and that’s where another of those plausible lies comes in.”

Harry shook his head. “I don’t think I ever came up with a plot that complicated in Hogwarts. Polyjuice Potion to try to find out if you were the Heir of Slytherin was as complex as it got.”

Draco paused and glanced over his shoulder. “I did think Vincent and Greg were acting strange that day,” he said slowly.

“Yes, well, that’s why.” Harry stepped up to Draco’s side, trying to ignore the edge in his gaze. Perhaps he hadn’t been wise to mention any Hogwarts memories at all; for all he knew, they were getting along well at the moment because neither of them had reminded each other of that time. “And you have a clever plan, by the way. Simply unnecessarily complex.” He paused then, frowning, as he realized that the wards on the door all came down to a single glowing line. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. “Why would they put Death Eaters behind a Grimson’s Ward?”

“A what?” Draco’s voice pitched high.

Harry paused. Then he cast a look sideways at Draco. “Well, well, well,” he muttered. “Have we found something that you don’t know?”

“Tell me what a Grimson’s Ward is.” Draco stared at Harry as if he could convince him to ignore Draco’s ignorance by the sheer force of his stare.

Harry wondered if he should tease him some more, but he doubted they had time before someone came to check on Kendrick. He still couldn’t believe the Aurors were as careless as this setup made them appear. Perhaps it was a test for any trainees intrepid enough to seek out the Death Eaters and wonder how they had got into the barracks. “It’s a very simple kind of ward,” he said. “It’s listed in the back of the Offensive and Defensive Magic textbook. It confines your enemies, but it does nothing else. It doesn’t warn you if they get loose. It doesn’t hold up to repeated blows.” He grinned and drew his wand. “It doesn’t give a warning if it’s tampered with.”

Draco frowned, and went on frowning while Harry touched the top of the door, then the bottom, with his wand and whispered the incantation that seemed to come effortlessly to his lips. He was still best at the things that most related to Defense Against the Dark Arts, he thought as he watched the ward disappear.

“Do you have your poisoned cake?” he asked, letting one hand rest on the doorknob.

“You and your dramatics, Potter.” Draco adopted a bored expression at once, as if he hated the thought of being caught off-guard again. “It’s hardly poisoned.”

“They might think so, if they have enough loyalty not to want to betray their purpose here,” Harry muttered, and opened the door.

*

What Potter had described of Grimson’s Ward made Draco all the more convinced that the Death Eaters were fakes and that they had some other purpose in the trainee barracks besides a true attack.

Well, the first thing Potter’s description convinced Draco of was that he needed to spend more time studying his textbooks.

But when he and Potter eased into the “prison” room and discovered that the Death Eaters were confined in simple cages of wards, without sleeping potions or complicated alarm spells or bonds on them, then Draco’s suspicions came roaring back to life.

Too much conflicting information was present here. The Ministry apparently considered these people no threats—as they shouldn’t, since the Dark Lord’s dangerous followers had died in the war or been arrested already—but still held them. They weren’t threats, if their skill in combat was any indication, but they had somehow possessed enough magic to pierce the heavy defenses on the trainee barracks.

Draco paused and scowled at them in general. They stared back at him and Potter, a few blinking. They were mostly young men and women; the oldest Draco saw couldn’t have been more than thirty. He noted the dark eyes, arched brows, and sharp chins that were characteristic of various pure-blood lines. He recognized no one immediately, however.

“Well, well,” one of them, a man with a large mouth and sardonic brown eyes who looked like a DeChancie, muttered, “what’s this? A Malfoy and a Potter, come to interrogate us?”

“We’re your new guardians,” Potter said, his voice thick with anger and sullenness. Draco approved of his quick wits. He himself was caught off-guard; he had expected all the prisoners to be isolated from each other, as would have been usual procedure, so that they could feed the cake to one of them without interference. But Potter gave a good performance, folding his arms and ducking his head so that he could scowl at them from beneath his fringe like a barbarian. “Much good we’ll do the Auror Corps here.”

As though they had planned this, Draco found himself picking up on Potter’s cues and translating them into a new response. “Now, Potter,” he said, with a light scolding tone, laying a hand on Potter’s shoulder and shaking it slightly. “You know the trainees’ motto. We can serve wherever we are.”

DeChancie sneered before Potter could respond. “What are you going to do, Malfoy?” he asked. “Threaten them with the corpse of your family’s reputation?”

Potter moved in front of Draco as if by accident, and blew a sigh through pursed lips. “We’re supposed to learn interrogation techniques,” he said, stressing the words and pouting so hard that Draco had to work hard to refrain from laughing. “And I might as well pick you, since you’re showing an inclination to talk at the moment.” He undid the wards around DeChancie and prodded him out of the room with his wand, glancing at Draco in disgust in the meantime. “Do you have that stupid list of questions with you?”

Draco nodded and followed Potter and DeChancie back out of the prisoners’ room into the area where Kendrick had waited. That had gone as smoothly as if they’d plotted beside each other for years.

And DeChancie had swallowed every word, if the way he took Draco’s offered piece of cake was any indication. “Oh?” he said, holding the cake in front of him and smirking at it. “This would be the part where you assure me there isn’t any Veritaserum buried in that cake, no, really?” He glanced sideways at Potter. “Not that Potty the Perfect would ever consider breaking the Ministry’s rules like that.”

Draco whispered the Confundus Charm under his breath just as DeChancie’s teeth closed in the cake. He blinked and looked terribly bewildered a moment later, staring around even as he chewed and swallowed.

“What’s your name?” Potter asked briskly.

“Geoffrey DeChancie.” He rubbed his throat and stared at his hand, which seemed to come as a revelation to him. Draco thought he would have started numbering his fingers, but Draco interrupted.

“Why did you dress up as Death Eaters to attack the trainees’ barracks?” he asked, making sure to keep a tone of scorn in his voice. If he was right, the Charm combined with the Veritaserum should make DeChancie interpret that as a slight to his honor that he had to defend himself against.

Sure enough, he jerked his head up and squinted at Draco. Oh, yes, the terrifying squint, Draco thought, and worked very hard to contain his laughter. “We weren’t Death Eaters,” DeChancie said. “We would never have followed that Great Blunderer with his unpronounceable name. We were adopting a convenient disguise for striking terror into the hearts of those about us, so that in the end we can make the name of our master known.”

“And what name is that?” Potter demanded, before Draco could ask it.

DeChancie gave them a vacant smirk. “Nihil.”

Potter exchanged a silently triumphant look with Draco. Then Draco asked, “What does Nihil want? To raise the pure-bloods to a position of power again and destroy the Mu—Muggleborns, the way that the Dark Lord did?”

DeChancie sighed and rolled his eyes as though confronted by a pair of children. “I told you, he’s nothing like that. He doesn’t share the same goals. He wants to complete the work the war began, the work of tearing us apart, and beyond that—beyond that—” DeChancie’s voice dropped, and Draco thought that he was trying desperately to sound impressive “—his great and real project begins.”

“That is?” Potter breathed.

DeChancie opened his mouth.

And went on opening it. As Draco watched, his skin split open down the sides of his head, along the line of his mouth, like a collapsing bag, and his body sagged and slithered to the ground.

Out of its disguise reared the red and black magic, an expanding, poisonous, blooming flower, which turned and draped all its tendrils over Potter as Draco watched, drawing him into its gaping maw.

Draco stared, paralyzed, for a moment.

Then Potter screamed, an inhuman sound of terror and pain.

And Draco decided that he should probably save his partner.

Chapter Eighteen.