[one-shots]: Executioner's Summer, R, 1/2
Oct. 11th, 2010 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: Executioner’s Summer
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, gore, heavy angst, multiple character deaths, no epilogue.
Wordcount: 16,200
Summary: As Harry watches the Death Eater executions from a distance, summer lies heavy on the land.
Author’s Notes: This is a dark and twisted little one-shot from a world where all is not happy in the summer immediately after the war. It's being posted earlier than I meant to since I won't get a chance to post it when I thought I would.
Executioner’s Summer
The heat was a dragon, and it had them all inside it.
That thought came to Harry Potter one afternoon as he was walking home after the trial, surrounded by his defensive group of elite Auror bodyguards. He frowned and put his head on one side to regard the thought, not sure what had made it occur to him. Generally, he didn’t have that sort of poetic musing. Why would he? He lived in a world of hard realities.
The hardest realities of all had started when he killed Voldemort.
But, when Harry looked around, he thought he understood. The thought had come to him because it was inevitable, because theirs was a world of stone and flame.
People hurried past each other in the wizarding part of London with their heads bowed and their eyes on the ground. Everyone had someone who had been killed in the Death Eater attacks after the war. The Death Eaters had decided to get revenge for the death of their Lord and had attacked everything and anything, demanding that the Aurors and the Ministry release Harry to them.
Harry thought he would willingly have gone to save some lives if he had been given the choice. He wasn’t. The Ministry snapped their defiance back and held Harry safe in their clutches, giving him Aurors who followed him even into the loo, to guard against the possibility of someone using a Portkey in there.
And they accelerated the trials.
Harry wiped one hand across his forehead. The Auror walking on his left, a woman named Jenna Perkins whom Harry had come to know as much as he knew any of them, clucked sympathetically and cast a Cooling Charm. Harry nodded his thanks, although, strangely, it didn’t really help. He could still feel the heat outside the charm, lying around them like a skin tent that contained the breeze blowing on his face.
“Nasty weather,” Perkins remarked, wrinkling her nose. She had a cute face, Harry thought, and sometimes he wondered how she had ever become an Auror. When she wrinkled her nose, though, he could see it. That pulled her lips back from her teeth and showed the ferocity that lay behind her mask—that lay behind the face of anyone who was calling himself or herself an Auror right now. “We’d all be a sight easier if it was gone.”
Harry nodded without speaking. Speaking felt like too much effort in this heat. In this summer.
He was keeping count, in his head. He didn’t know if anyone else was, except the official record-keepers at the Ministry. The Prophet continually inflated the numbers to get more readers and “hearten” the “besieged” wizarding world, and Harry had quickly understood that the crowds who came to watch the trials were waiting for the spectacle of death and revenge. One trial was the same as another to them.
Sixty-three executions since the summer began.
*
“No.”
Narcissa Malfoy spoke the single word as the Aurors led her forth into the broad, open courtyard where the Ministry held all the executions. She didn’t sound as if she was pleading, Harry thought, surveying her in wonder. She walked with her head up and her eyes wide open, and she looked as if she knew the costs of what might happen if they had to drag her in: her last moments wouldn’t be honorable ones, and the crowd would go from silent to baying in an instant. She spoke the negation as if she could wipe this all out of existence with the word.
On the other side of the courtyard, the Dementor waited.
It floated next to its handlers and stared at the woman condemned to die at its mouth with hidden eyes. They always left the hood on, Harry had noted, until the last minute. Then the Dementor would pull back the hood and stretch its jaws wide, taking the victim’s soul into them in such a way that everyone in the courtyard would be able to see it.
It was meant to be impressive. But the strange thing, Harry thought, was that it was also meant to be a warning to the watchers that any of them could also be arrested and executed by the Ministry if they were found “aiding” Death Eaters, and yet they never seemed to take it that way.
Or maybe he was imagining that message.
It was possible. He had been informed that he was imagining a lot of things in the last few months, by the Ministry and by Ron, who was glad that the trials were happening and the executions were happening. It was revenge for Fred, he said. And for Tonks and Remus, and for Moody, and for Snape, and for all the others who had had to die because their side wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, and there were Death Eaters everywhere.
Ron clutched his wand when he said that, and stared into the shadows. Harry wondered if he knew that he did.
Or what his eyes looked like, when he did.
They were blind, all of them, Harry thought, the summer pouring into their faces, the sweat pouring into their eyes.
And he no less than the rest, standing here and watching the executions and wondering if there was something he had missed, because he was the only one who seemed to feel differently. If everyone else enjoyed it, then didn’t that mean that he was the odd one, the outsider who had to justify his presence, instead of the rest of the wizarding world?
It should be. At least, it seemed to make sense to him that way. Harry didn’t know if it made sense to anyone else.
The Ministry Aurors with their chains drew Mrs. Malfoy across the expanse of ground between her and the Dementor. She made that noise of refusal one more time, and then, amazingly, went to meet her fate, her head lifted, her feet tapping out small, urgent sounds on the stones.
The Dementor pulled back its hood and bent over her. Harry blinked, seeing the sun glare off the back of the Dementor’s head. He didn’t know that he had seen that before, and wondered if it was something he had missed in the executions before, or a delusion now.
A delusion, he thought. Had to be. Everyone else had said and done so many strange things since the end of the war that he had learned to distrust his own perceptions. What were the chances that, if a madness had taken over the wizarding world, or a curse, as he sometimes thought, instead of a normal desire for revenge, he would be the only one left standing outside it?
And yet, sometimes he thought that maybe other people felt the same thing about the lack of justice in the executions, and the strangeness of the evidence that always turned up at the last minute, to show that the Death Eaters in question had in fact committed heinous crimes, even when it seemed the worst thing they had done was sit about with snake tattoos on their arms, torturing when Voldemort asked them to. But since he only saw the Weasleys and his Auror bodyguards, and the Death Eaters and the crowds at a distance, he didn’t know if anyone else thought the same things.
The Dementor sucked out Mrs. Malfoy’s soul. Her body fell to the ground and lay there, still. Harry knew it would be burned before the day was done. The Ministry had reassured the people who depended on it to keep order and enforce justice that there was nothing to fear from that, that the soulless bodies couldn’t feel anything anyway.
Harry knew that was true. And he felt almost nothing by now, stained by the blood and the heat since the end of the war.
But he still turned his head away when they carried the body off.
*
“Malfoy’s trial is going to begin soon.”
Harry started and looked up from his cup of tea. He’d been sitting in the Weasleys’ kitchen and watching the shadows of his Auror guard pass back and forth outside the windows. He turned around now and paid attention to the conversation between Ron and Hermione for the first time. “What do you mean? I thought the Malfoys were all dead.”
“Oh, no,” Ron said, and gave him a slow smile. It made Harry’s heart tighten when he thought of how different that smile was from the one that Ron would have given last year, but the summer had changed them all. “They killed his parents, sure. But cowardly little Draco Malfoy himself was in hiding. They managed to convince someone to turn him in at last, and now there’s going to be a trial. Which is all the git deserves,” Ron added, sounding vicious.
Turn him in, Harry thought, and swallowed a new gulp of tea to give himself time to think. Because that sounds so much better than “betray.”
Hermione caught his eye and gave him a strained smile. Harry knew that she didn’t agree with the executions as much as Ron did, but she was swept up in the Weasleys’ grief, too, and in the casualties of the war that kept coming more and more to light every day. The Death Eaters had tortured all sorts of people in little villages that they’d never known about, until the Ministry began to check and update its records. And Harry had heard her say that sacrificing her parents’ memories was as hard as anything that Voldemort’s favorites had to go through.
Sometimes he heard her crying at night, when they were staying in the same house. But she never had any tears in her eyes in the morning. Harry thought the heat had dried them.
“I’ll be glad when he’s dead,” Ron said, standing up and moving to the window so that he could look out, too. Harry had no idea what he was watching. The parched and withering grass, perhaps, or the shadows of the Aurors in his turn. “Then maybe I can stop thinking of death and start thinking of life.”
Hermione stood up and went to put her arms around him, leaning her head on his shoulder. Ron reached up and stroked her hair, but he never, Harry noted, took his eyes off the withering world outside.
“He’ll be all right,” Hermione said, when Ron had left the room. “I’m sure he will be, once he has a chance to stop hearing about death every day and reliving Fred’s death every time he does.”
Harry nodded back, and wondered who Hermione was trying to convince, him or herself.
*
“Draco Lucius Malfoy, you are accused of torture, of complicity in torture, of cooperation with the World’s Enemy, of…”
The voice of the Ministry’s official accuser did rather tend to drone on, Harry thought. He couldn’t blame Malfoy for the tense look on his face or the way his arms flexed and rippled in their bonds, but he didn’t understand how the crowd could be interested, turning their faces back and forth between the accuser and Malfoy like fans at a Quidditch game.
The Wizengamot’s old courtroom had been suitable for secret trials, but not for the public ones that the Ministry had insisted on for the Death Eaters and other Dark wizards who had come out of the war, and not for all the people who wanted to watch. So they were trying Malfoy, condemning him and the others, in a field not far from Hogsmeade. Harry didn’t know who had suggested the site first, but since the Death Eaters had done so much damage to Hogwarts, he reckoned it was appropriate.
If anything could be.
Harry leaned on the railing of the wooden ring that surrounded the field and kept the seats for the jury, witnesses, attending officials, and accused away from the place where the commoners gathered. Kingsley and other Ministry officials had offered him a chair in the circle, but Harry had refused. He said that he thought he’d had too much attention already and he didn’t want to distract the press from the progress of justice. That had been enough to satisfy Kingsley, and the other Ministry flunkies hadn’t cared all that much.
The heat rippled over the ground, strongly enough to make tiny mirages start up from the corners of people’s eyes. Harry wondered if others were seeing trees and water. He kept seeing hooded Dementors everywhere he looked.
The accuser finally reached the end of the long list of crimes for which Malfoy was charged, and paused. “What is your appeal?” he prompted, because Malfoy appeared not to know that he had to provide the audience with its entertainment now.
Malfoy lifted his head. His tension had gone. Harry saw the contempt he felt for the people around him, the ones who weren’t on trial for their lives, in the pale pink of his cheeks and the bloodless press of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes.
“It hardly matters,” Malfoy said. “Since you’ll find me guilty anyway.”
The crowd bayed, the accuser sighed, the Head of the Wizengamot intervened to demand silence and remind Malfoy that only evidence would condemn him, and the trial began.
As they led Malfoy to his chair, he turned his head and caught sight of Harry. To Harry’s surprise, that was the only thing that seemed to shake him. In moments he had turned his head the other way and clamped back down into silence and boredom.
That pose never wavered again, although they kept him there all day, answering questions, in the midst of that summer.
*
“What did he mean by that?”
Harry frowned and took refuge behind his glass of cool lemonade. Ron was pacing around the kitchen and staring out the window towards Fred’s grave, the way that he often did when he was angry. Harry had expected he would be gleeful after the first day of Malfoy’s trial, which had revealed evidence and witnesses that he had tortured many innocent people for Voldemort, not only Death Eaters.
Instead, he was obsessed with one answer that Malfoy had made, and hadn’t let it go since they had come back home.
“What?” Hermione asked. She was on the other side of the table, watching Ron with exhausted eyes. Harry thought of telling Ron that he was making her upset and sick, but he didn’t think Ron would care, and he didn’t want to watch Hermione hurt by his indifference.
“Why did he say that he had nothing to do with Fred’s death?” Ron spun around and pounded his fist down in the middle of the table. Hermione jumped. Harry had anticipated something like this, and simply watched in silence.
It occurred to him suddenly that he did a lot of that, and he wondered why.
The answer was simple, swift, and brutal.
Because I’ll only get one chance to act, and I want that chance to matter.
Harry shook his head and attended more to what Ron was saying. Sometimes his own mind puzzled him, especially since the war, when he seemed to observe more facts but absorb them more slowly.
“Because he didn’t,” Hermione said, carefully, as though she didn’t know why the words mattered to Ron. “Because he was over on the other side of the castle when it happened, and he didn’t cast the curse or anything like that.”
“But he must be lying.” Ron’s eyes were bright and feverish as the heat shimmers outside, and he turned and stared at Harry. “You know that he must, right, mate? You were there. You saw Fred die.”
“I never saw who killed him,” Harry said. He was being careful, too, he realized. The obsession in Ron’s eyes struck him as wrong. Of course, Ron had wanted Fred’s killer arrested from the beginning, and they had never found him—or her. It was Harry’s opinion that the killer had probably been executed without confessing to the crime, because they couldn’t remember who had died from one particular spell in the chaos of the battle.
But he couldn’t say that to Ron. For Ron, Fred’s death was the center of the universe, and he couldn’t grasp that that might not be true for everyone.
“But Malfoy is almost the only one left,” Ron said, and turned away again, fingers clenched into fists and then opening, as if he was casting a handful of dust away. “If he didn’t do it, who did?”
Hermione sighed. “We might never find the one who did it, Ron. Would that be so terrible?”
“Yes!” Ron spun around and stared at her. “If we don’t have vengeance, how are we ever going to have peace? We might lie awake for years, wondering where Fred’s killer is and if they managed to escape after all. You know that some Death Eaters fled Britain when they first started hunting for them and found refuge on the Continent. What if his killer was one of them?”
“Then they’ll get brought back by the extradition treaties that are already in place,” Hermione said firmly. “The Ministry is committed to not letting any of them get away, Ron. It will be all right. You’ll see,” she added, and reached out an arm to catch his and bring him back to the table. “You’ll see,” she added gently.
Ron sat down, head bobbing as though it was being pulled on a string. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Kingsley wouldn’t let them get away. He’s a lot more committed to our future than Scrimgeour was. I have to remember that.”
Harry sipped his lemonade and watched the dust hanging in unfaltering arcs above the ground. The sun struck and glared through it, and he was reminded of the glare above the Dementor’s head when he had watched it suck out Mrs. Malfoy’s soul. He closed his eyes against it.
*
“Prisoner.”
Malfoy looked up. He had refused to pay attention when they called him by that name at first, and they had removed him and brought him back in the custody of two burly Aurors. Harry hadn’t seen any visible bruises, but Malfoy had walked more slowly and with his head bowed as though he wanted to make sure his feet were still there. He hadn’t missed a cue after that.
Harry found himself leaning forwards. Today, he had accepted a seat as close to the wooden circle as possible, although still not inside it. He had felt an inexplicable distaste about doing so.
“Prisoner,” the accuser repeated. “There is evidence that you killed the young wizard known as Fred Weasley. What say you to this?”
Malfoy sat up straighter. Harry wanted to take his eyes off him and look around for Ron, who he knew had contrived to get the question submitted, but he literally couldn’t look away from Malfoy now. He had to know how he would plead.
If he knew for certain that Malfoy had killed Fred, he would…
Harry didn’t know what he would. Sometimes he thought the summer had paralyzed his will, cooked it to death as it seemed to be in the midst of cooking them all.
“There is no evidence but what that crazed Weasley has in mind,” Malfoy said. He licked his lips. They were cracked, Harry saw. They hadn’t given him any water all day. “I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t in that part of Hogwarts when the battle started.”
Harry heard a shout from the side, where Ron was seated. He was probably upset that Malfoy had called him crazed, or maybe that Malfoy had denied all knowledge of Fred’s death. Harry leaned further forwards, focused on Malfoy alone by this point, waiting, along with him, for what the accuser would say next.
“There is evidence,” the accuser said, and his voice was thin and dry. “Do you wish to reconsider your answer?”
Malfoy laughed. The sound was so unexpected that Harry actually flinched. He had thought it was something else for a moment, he told himself, trying to settle his unsteadily beating heart. A Dementor moving in, or a cry that Voldemort had returned, or—something. Something that would allow him to live with himself and his timidity.
But aren’t you timid already, if you’ve let the trials go on this long without attempting to object to them?
“What does it matter?” Malfoy asked. He stood up, as far as he could stand with the chains on his wrists that linked him to the chair arms, and stared around the crowd. Most of them flinched with his eyes’ passing, Harry noticed, as he hadn’t seen them flinch from any other person. Harry didn’t, and Malfoy stopped and gave him what looked like a tiny nod of acknowledgment before he went on. “Why should I care? You’ll sacrifice me to this twisted notion of justice that you have no matter what I say. I might as well stick to what I know to be the truth. I can’t hope for real justice, or real mercy, so I’ll die in the embrace of truth.” He flopped into his chair suddenly and tilted his head back so that it rested against the bare wood. “Of all the unexpected ideals to die with,” he murmured. “My father would be ashamed of me, but he’s not here. You won’t understand, and you are here. That’s the way it is.”
Harry waited for the accuser to continuing his questioning. He did, but only after a long pause that Harry knew the Ministry would disclaim later. They would say that of course their man had been shocked, but it had been because Malfoy had the audacity to claim that the trials were farces of justice.
The honesty, Harry thought, staring at Malfoy with his heart beating and his chest aching as it hadn’t ached all that long, numb summer.
The honesty to say what we should all be saying.
*
“He has to admit that he was Fred’s killer. I’ll make him admit it.”
Harry caught Hermione’s eyes and shook his head. She had started to rise to go to Ron, but she settled back with a little frown. They were in Harry’s house this time, his Auror guard standing outside the drawing room and politely pretending not to listen, rather than in the Burrow. Harry thought that made a difference in her self-confidence. Hermione practically was a Weasley now, and had adopted the Burrow as home.
“Listen, Ron,” Harry said, watching as his friend picked up a cushion from the couch and manipulated it back and forth, so that rents appeared in it and stuffing leaked out of them. “You can’t change reality. If Malfoy didn’t kill Fred, then he didn’t. You should look elsewhere so you can find who really did, instead.”
Ron whirled around towards him and stared, a muscle bulging in his jaw. Harry stared back. He wanted to say that his friend looked alien, but in reality, he looked no stranger than the face Harry had watched in the mirror that morning as he cast his Depilating Charms.
We’ve been in a dream all summer, the lot of us, the whole wizarding world. It’s one of those dark fevers that I heard about in primary school. They take the Muggle world sometimes. Everyone passively goes along with something they know to be wrong, because it’s—it’s hysteria, or something like it. It gets into your heads, and it changes you from the good person you thought you were into someone who can watch evil and not turn a hair.
Harry was ashamed of how long he had been asleep and sick with that fever, but he couldn’t waste time being ashamed, the way he would have when he was a kid, before or during the war. What he had to do now was obvious. But he also had to wait, because moving too soon would take the chance away from him and, what was far more important, Malfoy.
“All the other Death Eaters in Britain have been tried,” Ron said. He spoke quietly, but his words rushed along. That should have told me something was wrong a long time ago, Harry thought sadly. Ron has the fever worse than the rest of us. “The ones they thought had escaped justice, didn’t. They’ve been killed by the ones who found them. There’s only him left. Do you understand, Harry? Him, and it’s over.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” Harry said staunchly. “That way, everyone will finally have peace or justice—” the Ministry had a policy against calling it revenge “—and we can all go back to our normal lives.”
He tried a smile, but Ron gave him a dead look. “How can I do that, if he won’t admit that he killed Fred?” he whispered. “I have to know. My life isn’t worth anything without knowing.”
Harry turned to Hermione in alarm. This was worse than he’d thought it was, and Hermione was the only one who could soothe Ron with any hope of success.
But Hermione hesitated, looked at Harry, and then turned back to Ron with what Harry thought was reluctance before she said, “Even if he won’t admit it, that’s fine, Ron. We always knew he was a liar.”
Harry opened his mouth to protest, then snapped it shut again. That was exactly the sort of thing that would start them suspecting that he wasn’t sick with the fever anymore. He leaned back and picked up the lemonade again. Malfoy didn’t need Harry to defend his honor. He had done it well enough himself yesterday.
“But I want to know,” Ron said, and his voice had the snarl of a chained dog in it.
Harry shook his head. “What if he won’t tell you? What if he doesn’t know? It could have been someone dead. The Ministry just might not have brought the question up in the right way when they were trying them.”
“There’s a way to find out,” Ron said, staring over Harry’s head at the wall.
Harry looked at Hermione to see if she knew what their best mate was talking about, but she looked just as blank. She did stand up and go to Ron, though, rubbing his shoulders in soothing motions and speaking in a low tone. Harry watched Ron stand there for an alarmingly long moment before his shoulders relaxed and he began nodding, sometimes speaking when Hermione questioned him.
I have to end this, Harry thought, rubbing his thumb over his palm. To free Ron as well as Malfoy. He’ll never be quiet until he learns about Fred. That means I have to come up with some answers for him.
Even if they’re fake.
*
“Harry Potter to see Draco Malfoy.”
Harry shivered a little as the iron gate in front of him ground open. The Ministry had decided that Azkaban wasn’t good enough, or secure enough, for the Death Eaters; too many of them had escaped from it. Harry had never been to the Steelhold, the prison they’d built to encase those who hadn’t had their trials yet.
But now he had.
It was a single huge block of iron, with the walls and the doors so solid that Harry couldn’t imagine someone getting through them with a sledgehammer. The Ministry could, though, and had decorated the building with wards at every weak point, and some at points that Harry would never have thought of as weak. He stepped forwards and found himself in a dark tunnel, an entrance hall with no windows. The light came from fiercely burning, spluttering torches on the walls.
“Even those can become traps,” said Auror Perkins, who had accompanied Harry into the Steelhold and seemed anxious that he be impressed. “They’ll reach out with ropes of fire if someone tries to escape. Or help someone else escape,” she added, with a tone of disgust in the back of her voice.
Harry nodded silently. He had already realized that nothing disgusted the Aurors, and Ron, and other people under the spell of this summer, more than a traitor.
Even if the traitor had only been trying to bring some fresh food or water to the prisoner. They’d flayed the woman who tried to help Narcissa Malfoy. She’d still been crying when they gave her soul to the Dementors.
Another reason for Harry to hold back until he knew he could do something for Malfoy that would save him beyond doubt. Too soon, and all Malfoy would have was someone to share his isolation.
Perkins marched him forwards. Harry passed round door after round door, all of them set into metal walls, all of them made of studded metal themselves. He swallowed, his skin crawling. The doors led into small and cramped cells, he knew, and looked more like doors to bank vaults than places where living people were kept. Harry thought now that he’d been avoiding the Steelhold because he must have instinctively sensed that it would snap him out of his half-daze, the one that had somehow made him all right with executions.
I have to do something.
They reached the end of the first corridor and turned. At the second door beyond the corner, Perkins halted. “Here,” she said, and reached out to lay her hand flat on the door, murmuring a few half-song phrases. It reminded Harry of the spells that Snape had cast over Malfoy after Harry used Sectumsempra on him.
Let me stand in a different relationship to him this time, Harry prayed silently as the door swung open.
The room beyond was dark, and Harry didn’t think it was his imagination that the darkness was more savage than the pools of shadow that lingered under the torches outside. They had used charms to make it frightening, he thought, and his heart gave one disapproving beat. Wasn’t it enough that the people held here were alone, in metal, egg-shaped chambers that wouldn’t allow them to stand up? Did they have to be scared, too?
Perhaps the Ministry thinks it doesn’t matter, when they’re scared of their executions anyway, Harry thought, and ducked down to enter the cell.
Perkins shook her head and held him back with one arm. “There are wards that will destroy anyone else who comes in,” she murmured to him. “You’ll have to speak from out here. And hurry,” she added, glancing over her shoulder. “The others Aurors will have to take him out to the trial area soon.”
Malfoy turned towards the light and looked up at them.
Harry’s planned words caught in his throat. Malfoy’s face was pale and chiseled, stripped down to bare essentials. He had thin, wiry muscles, and his body was slender to the point of starvation. Harry had known that kind of hunger. He half-closed his eyes as memories of the Dursleys swam in front of him.
Yet, stripped-down or not, Malfoy still had words.
“You don’t have to come all the way here to gloat, Potter,” he murmured. He moved, and Harry saw dark stains spreading across the floor beneath him and on his flanks. At first he thought Malfoy was bleeding from untreated wounds, but he understood when Malfoy shifted to the side. Malfoy was sweating. There were no Cooling Charms in his cell. “You could have done that easily enough at the trial.”
Harry swallowed, torn between horror, pity, and caution. He glanced once at Auror Perkins, who only gave him a curious glance, as if she, too, wanted to know why he had come here, but would never do anything so impolite as to ask.
“I—I didn’t come to gloat,” Harry said. “I came to ask if you had any idea about who might have killed Fred Weasley.” It was part of his errand, after all, he told himself. If Ron knew the truth, then he might relax, and wake up from his daze that much sooner. And then there would be one less voice urging Malfoy along the path to death.
Malfoy seemed to spasm. It took Harry a moment to realize that he was laughing, with almost no saliva left to do so.
“Why would you trust me?” he asked when he recovered. He sounded genuinely curious, and he leaned forwards with his eyes fastened on Harry’s face. Harry was reminded of times that they had confronted each other in the corridors of Hogwarts. Fuck, he had seen Malfoy there only three months ago, when the Battle of Hogwarts had ended and this summer hadn’t yet dawned. “You have every reason to think that I’m a liar, same as your blood traitor friend.”
Perkins stiffened beside Harry and acted as if she would aim her wand, but Harry touched her arm lightly. He was gambling now, hoping that she took his actions as a sign of innate mercy and compassion, laudable if misguided, rather than a sign that he was interested in Malfoy’s fate. “You said that you were telling the truth—out there,” Harry said, feeling rather absurd at making a gesture with his hand beyond the prison, but he thought Malfoy would understand anyway. “I want to think that there’s some honor even in an imprisoned enemy.”
Malfoy leaned nearer, and then nearer still, until Perkins made a warning sound under her breath. Even then, the way that Malfoy eased back on his elbows might have been coincidence, rather than because he respected her warning. “Interesting, Potter,” he murmured. “You’re the only one who’s said something like that.”
Harry licked his lips. He wanted to apologize, but that was absurd. He had been part of this great machine that had ground Malfoy almost to pieces, and at the same time, he wasn’t individually responsible for any of it.
Besides, apologies weren’t what Malfoy needed. He needed water and escape. Freedom. Justice.
A tall order for Harry to provide those, but he had awoken late. It would have to happen.
“I’m sure other people would have said it, if they thought of it,” Harry said, his eyes locked on Malfoy’s face. He hoped that Malfoy could somehow read his mind through them, and so read the message that Harry didn’t have the courage to speak in front of Perkins right now.
Malfoy slowly narrowed his eyes and twisted his neck to the side. Perhaps he was reading it, Harry thought, his hope rising. Certainly Malfoy would have no reason to be so interested in an old schoolboy rival unless he thought that rival could give him something.
“Or if they thought it at all,” Malfoy murmured. “Yes, Potter, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps there are lots of good people out there, just ready to prove themselves if I give them a chance.” His irony could have scored the metal walls.
“Of course there are,” Perkins said stoutly. Harry thought both of them ignored her. He did, at least. His heartbeat was fast enough by now to make his body sway as he stood there. He hoped that Perkins didn’t notice.
Malfoy leaned further forwards, so close that Harry could see the small flecks of blue in his eyes. “Or perhaps there’s only you,” he said. “The only one who would ever care. The only one who could make a difference.”
Message received.
Harry inclined his head once, then said, “Keep dreaming, Malfoy,” and turned to go. He wished that he dared conjure a glass of water for Malfoy, but he wasn’t going to waste his chance—their chance—on something that stupid. Besides, the Aurors wouldn’t want Malfoy to die of dehydration before the trial. They would give him something to drink before long.
“Potter.”
Harry paused and looked back over his shoulder. Malfoy was lounging now against the far wall of his cell, the curved, egg-shaped wall that wouldn’t allow him to lie down fully, any more than it would allow him to stand. His smile was bright and savage in the faint light that fell across his face as the door started to swing shut.
“Those clothes suit you.”
The door clanged shut. Harry looked down at his simple, grey robes, cloak, and boots in bewilderment. What did Malfoy mean? If that was meant to be another coded communication between them, Harry had to admit that he didn’t understand it.
“Like him to say that,” Perkins huffed, all but dragging him out of the Steelhold. “He would think of sex at a moment like this, when it’s almost too hot to see and he’s going to die in a few days.”
“Don’t you mean that he’s going to have justice delivered to him in a few days?” Harry asked softly.
“Er…” Perkins blinked at him and then recovered. “Of course. Yes. What did I say?” She was all but babbling now.
So it begins, Harry thought grimly as he walked down the sandy slope outside the Steelhold. The Ministry is going to start arresting people who aren’t Death Eaters next. It has to, because the fever isn’t over and the Death Eaters are almost gone.
He looked over his shoulder once. The Steelhold crouched under the sun like a grey dragon, uncaring of anything except to devour.
Grey…
Harry snorted bitter laughter as he understood what Malfoy’s last remark on his clothes had meant. They blended in with the metal walls, and made him look just like part of the machine.
But then Harry fell silent as he remembered another association that grey could have.
Neutrality, standing halfway between the Dark and the Light.
*
“I ask you again, Mr. Malfoy.” The accuser’s voice never wavered or varied. Harry wondered where they had found him. He was an old wizard, Harry could see that from his grey beard, but he wasn’t part of the Wizengamot—or at least, Harry couldn’t remember him sitting with them during the trials. Harry had never heard his name, either, only the title of his office. “Did you kill Fred Weasley?”
“I’ll answer the only way I can.” Malfoy’s voice sounded better this morning, Harry thought. Maybe they had given him more water this time than usual before they led him out of the cell. He was looking at the accuser only, instead of turning his head to stare into the crowd the way he usually did.
Maybe he’s given up hope of rescue.
I wish he wouldn’t.
“I didn’t kill him,” Malfoy was going on. “I don’t know who did, but that person is probably dead, with the way that you’ve killed everyone who bears this on their arm.” His left arm rattled as he tried to raise it, and the crowd broke into disgusted howls. Harry stood there with the sounds buffeting him and thought again that they sounded like a pack of hounds rather than a group of wizards. “But I can’t prove that. So the best course is just to say that I didn’t, and for you to let it go.”
But Harry knew already that the accuser was incapable of doing that. Whether Ron had bribed him or whether he was simply interested in the question on his own account, he would repeat it.
Sure enough, after a few moments in which the accuser seemed to wait for Malfoy’s defiance to die away—it didn’t—he continued, “Where were you during the part of the battle when Fred Weasley died?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Malfoy was grinning now. Harry wondered if he was the only one who could see an edge of desperation to that smile, and hoped so. “I don‘t know when he died because I was in some other part of the castle entirely, and I can’t tell you what was going on from minute to minute.”
“Mr. Weasley’s death made several stones collapse,” said the accuser. “A large part of the castle. You must have noticed that.”
Malfoy leaned forwards in his chair. He had got his second wind, Harry saw, another blast of courage. God knew where he had got it. Harry knew he wouldn’t have had any himself under the same circumstances. “Have you ever been in battle, Accuser? Were you at the Battle of Hogwarts?”
There was a little silence. Harry wondered why the crowd wasn’t screaming about Malfoy’s daring, and then decided that they were all shocked that he had had the daring in the first place.
The accuser said, “No, Mr. Malfoy, I was not there. I was in a few battles during the first war with You-Know-Who, however.”
“Then you ought to know,” Malfoy said, his voice as intense as the one he had used to talk to Harry in the cells. Harry found himself feeling oddly jealous towards the accuser. Only he should get to hear Malfoy talk like that.
He promptly shook his head and rested his forehead against his palm. Whoa, Harry. Think about something else.
“You ought to know,” Malfoy continued, “the way that your perceptions change in battle, how time stretches and warps. I didn’t notice anything outside what kept me alive at the moment I did it. I don’t know when the wall collapsed. I didn’t notice when Fred Weasley died. You can ask me again and again, but my answer won’t change.”
The accuser turned and looked at an Auror who had stood behind his chair. She nodded and handed him a document. The accuser took something out of it—something small, which looked like a photograph, Harry thought—and tapped it with his wand. Then he threw up a screen of colored light in front of the crowd.
“This says otherwise,” was all the accuser said, before the photograph leaped out of his hand and enlarged itself, filling the screen.
Harry stared. It was an image of Malfoy standing next to a castle wall, holding his wand against the stones and whispering to them. As they began to fall, the Malfoy in the picture whipped around to face his audience, his eyes wide, as if he didn’t realize that anyone had been taking his photo.
“It can be proven that the wall you caused to fall is the one that killed Fred Weasley,” the accuser said calmly. “We can all see the proof here.”
The voices from the crowd now, wordless shouts and cries of Malfoy’s name and all the insults ever devised, fell on Malfoy like a new set of chains. Harry was petrified in his seat. For a moment, his belief in Malfoy’s honesty wavered.
And then he thought, again, of all the “evidence” to “prove” that Death Eaters were more involved in certain crimes during the war than anyone had thought they were which had surfaced at the last moment—the moment when some people might have started to believe their denials.
The picture might have been genuine, but there was no reason that the wall had to be at Hogwarts. The Malfoy in the photograph looked a bit younger than he did now, Harry thought. It could have been taken last year.
Of course, the accuser showed the picture only long enough for the crowd to work itself into a shrieking, shouting frenzy, and then took it down again. So there was no time for anyone to ask questions or work through any such niceties of doubt.
Except Harry.
He found himself glancing around for allies, but there was nothing but hatred in all the faces he could see. Even his Auror guard, whom he had come to know, who were patient and kind with him and tended to answer all his questions, looked unquestioning.
Well, that leaves me, then.
*
Harry sat on his bed that evening debating what he would need. He couldn’t make a physical list, because someone would find it, and he wouldn’t be able to answer the questions that would produce. He would just have to make it in his head and hope that he didn’t forget anything.
Enough money for Malfoy to live comfortably somewhere else; that was certain. He couldn’t come back to England the way things were now, and Harry didn’t know when the fever would calm down. Perhaps it would with the end of summer, but that was still a month away. Harry wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead and cast a Cooling Charm again. One of the Aurors near his door stirred, but fell silent, probably because they’d checked for the presence of hostile magic and realized there wasn’t any.
A means of getting away. That made Harry really hesitate, because he didn’t know how to make a Portkey and it would be suspicious to ask. They would be watching the Floo network, and he knew there was a special watch kept on brooms along the coasts, too. Even innocent wizards from France had to wait a long time before they could come into the country. Apparition between countries wasn’t possible.
A wand. Harry didn’t know what had happened to Malfoy’s original wand, and he didn’t know a way that he could find out. Perhaps it would be for the best to seek “reassurance” of the Aurors, to make sure that the big, bad, nasty Death Eater wouldn’t be able to hurt Harry even if he got out of prison. They might tell him then.
Food for a few days. Harry knew that Malfoy would get to someplace soon where he could buy things to eat, but he would need time to recover—at least enough to cast a decent glamour—before he tried his luck in a wizarding village.
Those were the most essential things. Of course, when Harry thought about all the other things they needed, like the keys to Malfoy’s cell, he despaired a little, but he shook his head and kept his mind on his original list.
At least by the time dawn came, he had decided on the means that he would use to get Malfoy away. There was only one chance. They were watching brooms, but they had specifically scorned Muggle means of transport, because they believed—probably correctly—that no Death Eater would know how to use them anyway. Harry couldn’t drive and didn’t think it would be a good idea for Malfoy to take a train across England, but he could Apparate Malfoy to the coast and get him a boat. That would probably be the best and safest thing to do.
If anything can be safe.
If Harry looked out the window, he imagined that he could see the reluctance of anyone else to believe Malfoy was innocent lying above the ground like the summer heat.
*
“I was just wondering what had happened to Malfoy’s wand.”
Harry hated asking that directly, but he didn’t have any choice. He had spent most of the afternoon talking about how dangerous Malfoy was and how he didn’t feel safe around him, but his Auror escort had only patted his arms and head and cooed at him, instead of offering information. Harry hoped they wouldn’t think of any of the motives behind the question.
Well, they probably won’t, given that they believe you’re afraid of him and that you only went to see him in prison to ask about Fred.
Perkins glanced at him, wrinkling her nose slightly in that way she had. “Oh, don’t worry about that, Mr. Potter,” she said cheerfully. “The Ministry took away all the Death Eaters’ wands. They put them in a safe hiding place.”
Harry gaped at her, and he didn’t have to exaggerate his astonishment much to get it up to her standards. “They didn’t destroy them?”
Perkins chuckled. “Why would they? Of course not. They had to keep them because they want to make sure that no one manages to trick the Dementors into not sucking out their souls. It’s possible, you know, given that they were You-Know-Who’s allies during the war,” she added meditatively. She glanced up and down the street that led to Harry’s house, as if she wanted to make sure that Voldemort wouldn’t come back from the dead and hear her talking like that. “If the wand goes dull and won’t cast after the Dementor’s through, then that means the soul of its master is really gone.”
Harry swallowed queasily. He had never once considered that that might be the reason for keeping wands, and it seemed unnecessarily sadistic on the Ministry’s part, too; a sign of how much they had to doubt instead of trust that they were really conquering their enemies.
But it worked to his advantage, so he couldn’t be that sorry about it.
“But they’re out of England, at least?” he persisted. “Please tell me they are.” He softened his voice and looked over his shoulder in turn.
“Well, no.” Perkins looked a bit uncomfortable now, but she still smiled. “They’re in a secure room at the Ministry. The only Aurors who can access them are the ones, like us, who can open the cells in the Steelhold—the absolutely trusted ones. There’s no reason to fear corruption among us.”
But she looked at another of the Aurors as she said that.
Part Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, gore, heavy angst, multiple character deaths, no epilogue.
Wordcount: 16,200
Summary: As Harry watches the Death Eater executions from a distance, summer lies heavy on the land.
Author’s Notes: This is a dark and twisted little one-shot from a world where all is not happy in the summer immediately after the war. It's being posted earlier than I meant to since I won't get a chance to post it when I thought I would.
Executioner’s Summer
The heat was a dragon, and it had them all inside it.
That thought came to Harry Potter one afternoon as he was walking home after the trial, surrounded by his defensive group of elite Auror bodyguards. He frowned and put his head on one side to regard the thought, not sure what had made it occur to him. Generally, he didn’t have that sort of poetic musing. Why would he? He lived in a world of hard realities.
The hardest realities of all had started when he killed Voldemort.
But, when Harry looked around, he thought he understood. The thought had come to him because it was inevitable, because theirs was a world of stone and flame.
People hurried past each other in the wizarding part of London with their heads bowed and their eyes on the ground. Everyone had someone who had been killed in the Death Eater attacks after the war. The Death Eaters had decided to get revenge for the death of their Lord and had attacked everything and anything, demanding that the Aurors and the Ministry release Harry to them.
Harry thought he would willingly have gone to save some lives if he had been given the choice. He wasn’t. The Ministry snapped their defiance back and held Harry safe in their clutches, giving him Aurors who followed him even into the loo, to guard against the possibility of someone using a Portkey in there.
And they accelerated the trials.
Harry wiped one hand across his forehead. The Auror walking on his left, a woman named Jenna Perkins whom Harry had come to know as much as he knew any of them, clucked sympathetically and cast a Cooling Charm. Harry nodded his thanks, although, strangely, it didn’t really help. He could still feel the heat outside the charm, lying around them like a skin tent that contained the breeze blowing on his face.
“Nasty weather,” Perkins remarked, wrinkling her nose. She had a cute face, Harry thought, and sometimes he wondered how she had ever become an Auror. When she wrinkled her nose, though, he could see it. That pulled her lips back from her teeth and showed the ferocity that lay behind her mask—that lay behind the face of anyone who was calling himself or herself an Auror right now. “We’d all be a sight easier if it was gone.”
Harry nodded without speaking. Speaking felt like too much effort in this heat. In this summer.
He was keeping count, in his head. He didn’t know if anyone else was, except the official record-keepers at the Ministry. The Prophet continually inflated the numbers to get more readers and “hearten” the “besieged” wizarding world, and Harry had quickly understood that the crowds who came to watch the trials were waiting for the spectacle of death and revenge. One trial was the same as another to them.
Sixty-three executions since the summer began.
*
“No.”
Narcissa Malfoy spoke the single word as the Aurors led her forth into the broad, open courtyard where the Ministry held all the executions. She didn’t sound as if she was pleading, Harry thought, surveying her in wonder. She walked with her head up and her eyes wide open, and she looked as if she knew the costs of what might happen if they had to drag her in: her last moments wouldn’t be honorable ones, and the crowd would go from silent to baying in an instant. She spoke the negation as if she could wipe this all out of existence with the word.
On the other side of the courtyard, the Dementor waited.
It floated next to its handlers and stared at the woman condemned to die at its mouth with hidden eyes. They always left the hood on, Harry had noted, until the last minute. Then the Dementor would pull back the hood and stretch its jaws wide, taking the victim’s soul into them in such a way that everyone in the courtyard would be able to see it.
It was meant to be impressive. But the strange thing, Harry thought, was that it was also meant to be a warning to the watchers that any of them could also be arrested and executed by the Ministry if they were found “aiding” Death Eaters, and yet they never seemed to take it that way.
Or maybe he was imagining that message.
It was possible. He had been informed that he was imagining a lot of things in the last few months, by the Ministry and by Ron, who was glad that the trials were happening and the executions were happening. It was revenge for Fred, he said. And for Tonks and Remus, and for Moody, and for Snape, and for all the others who had had to die because their side wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, and there were Death Eaters everywhere.
Ron clutched his wand when he said that, and stared into the shadows. Harry wondered if he knew that he did.
Or what his eyes looked like, when he did.
They were blind, all of them, Harry thought, the summer pouring into their faces, the sweat pouring into their eyes.
And he no less than the rest, standing here and watching the executions and wondering if there was something he had missed, because he was the only one who seemed to feel differently. If everyone else enjoyed it, then didn’t that mean that he was the odd one, the outsider who had to justify his presence, instead of the rest of the wizarding world?
It should be. At least, it seemed to make sense to him that way. Harry didn’t know if it made sense to anyone else.
The Ministry Aurors with their chains drew Mrs. Malfoy across the expanse of ground between her and the Dementor. She made that noise of refusal one more time, and then, amazingly, went to meet her fate, her head lifted, her feet tapping out small, urgent sounds on the stones.
The Dementor pulled back its hood and bent over her. Harry blinked, seeing the sun glare off the back of the Dementor’s head. He didn’t know that he had seen that before, and wondered if it was something he had missed in the executions before, or a delusion now.
A delusion, he thought. Had to be. Everyone else had said and done so many strange things since the end of the war that he had learned to distrust his own perceptions. What were the chances that, if a madness had taken over the wizarding world, or a curse, as he sometimes thought, instead of a normal desire for revenge, he would be the only one left standing outside it?
And yet, sometimes he thought that maybe other people felt the same thing about the lack of justice in the executions, and the strangeness of the evidence that always turned up at the last minute, to show that the Death Eaters in question had in fact committed heinous crimes, even when it seemed the worst thing they had done was sit about with snake tattoos on their arms, torturing when Voldemort asked them to. But since he only saw the Weasleys and his Auror bodyguards, and the Death Eaters and the crowds at a distance, he didn’t know if anyone else thought the same things.
The Dementor sucked out Mrs. Malfoy’s soul. Her body fell to the ground and lay there, still. Harry knew it would be burned before the day was done. The Ministry had reassured the people who depended on it to keep order and enforce justice that there was nothing to fear from that, that the soulless bodies couldn’t feel anything anyway.
Harry knew that was true. And he felt almost nothing by now, stained by the blood and the heat since the end of the war.
But he still turned his head away when they carried the body off.
*
“Malfoy’s trial is going to begin soon.”
Harry started and looked up from his cup of tea. He’d been sitting in the Weasleys’ kitchen and watching the shadows of his Auror guard pass back and forth outside the windows. He turned around now and paid attention to the conversation between Ron and Hermione for the first time. “What do you mean? I thought the Malfoys were all dead.”
“Oh, no,” Ron said, and gave him a slow smile. It made Harry’s heart tighten when he thought of how different that smile was from the one that Ron would have given last year, but the summer had changed them all. “They killed his parents, sure. But cowardly little Draco Malfoy himself was in hiding. They managed to convince someone to turn him in at last, and now there’s going to be a trial. Which is all the git deserves,” Ron added, sounding vicious.
Turn him in, Harry thought, and swallowed a new gulp of tea to give himself time to think. Because that sounds so much better than “betray.”
Hermione caught his eye and gave him a strained smile. Harry knew that she didn’t agree with the executions as much as Ron did, but she was swept up in the Weasleys’ grief, too, and in the casualties of the war that kept coming more and more to light every day. The Death Eaters had tortured all sorts of people in little villages that they’d never known about, until the Ministry began to check and update its records. And Harry had heard her say that sacrificing her parents’ memories was as hard as anything that Voldemort’s favorites had to go through.
Sometimes he heard her crying at night, when they were staying in the same house. But she never had any tears in her eyes in the morning. Harry thought the heat had dried them.
“I’ll be glad when he’s dead,” Ron said, standing up and moving to the window so that he could look out, too. Harry had no idea what he was watching. The parched and withering grass, perhaps, or the shadows of the Aurors in his turn. “Then maybe I can stop thinking of death and start thinking of life.”
Hermione stood up and went to put her arms around him, leaning her head on his shoulder. Ron reached up and stroked her hair, but he never, Harry noted, took his eyes off the withering world outside.
“He’ll be all right,” Hermione said, when Ron had left the room. “I’m sure he will be, once he has a chance to stop hearing about death every day and reliving Fred’s death every time he does.”
Harry nodded back, and wondered who Hermione was trying to convince, him or herself.
*
“Draco Lucius Malfoy, you are accused of torture, of complicity in torture, of cooperation with the World’s Enemy, of…”
The voice of the Ministry’s official accuser did rather tend to drone on, Harry thought. He couldn’t blame Malfoy for the tense look on his face or the way his arms flexed and rippled in their bonds, but he didn’t understand how the crowd could be interested, turning their faces back and forth between the accuser and Malfoy like fans at a Quidditch game.
The Wizengamot’s old courtroom had been suitable for secret trials, but not for the public ones that the Ministry had insisted on for the Death Eaters and other Dark wizards who had come out of the war, and not for all the people who wanted to watch. So they were trying Malfoy, condemning him and the others, in a field not far from Hogsmeade. Harry didn’t know who had suggested the site first, but since the Death Eaters had done so much damage to Hogwarts, he reckoned it was appropriate.
If anything could be.
Harry leaned on the railing of the wooden ring that surrounded the field and kept the seats for the jury, witnesses, attending officials, and accused away from the place where the commoners gathered. Kingsley and other Ministry officials had offered him a chair in the circle, but Harry had refused. He said that he thought he’d had too much attention already and he didn’t want to distract the press from the progress of justice. That had been enough to satisfy Kingsley, and the other Ministry flunkies hadn’t cared all that much.
The heat rippled over the ground, strongly enough to make tiny mirages start up from the corners of people’s eyes. Harry wondered if others were seeing trees and water. He kept seeing hooded Dementors everywhere he looked.
The accuser finally reached the end of the long list of crimes for which Malfoy was charged, and paused. “What is your appeal?” he prompted, because Malfoy appeared not to know that he had to provide the audience with its entertainment now.
Malfoy lifted his head. His tension had gone. Harry saw the contempt he felt for the people around him, the ones who weren’t on trial for their lives, in the pale pink of his cheeks and the bloodless press of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes.
“It hardly matters,” Malfoy said. “Since you’ll find me guilty anyway.”
The crowd bayed, the accuser sighed, the Head of the Wizengamot intervened to demand silence and remind Malfoy that only evidence would condemn him, and the trial began.
As they led Malfoy to his chair, he turned his head and caught sight of Harry. To Harry’s surprise, that was the only thing that seemed to shake him. In moments he had turned his head the other way and clamped back down into silence and boredom.
That pose never wavered again, although they kept him there all day, answering questions, in the midst of that summer.
*
“What did he mean by that?”
Harry frowned and took refuge behind his glass of cool lemonade. Ron was pacing around the kitchen and staring out the window towards Fred’s grave, the way that he often did when he was angry. Harry had expected he would be gleeful after the first day of Malfoy’s trial, which had revealed evidence and witnesses that he had tortured many innocent people for Voldemort, not only Death Eaters.
Instead, he was obsessed with one answer that Malfoy had made, and hadn’t let it go since they had come back home.
“What?” Hermione asked. She was on the other side of the table, watching Ron with exhausted eyes. Harry thought of telling Ron that he was making her upset and sick, but he didn’t think Ron would care, and he didn’t want to watch Hermione hurt by his indifference.
“Why did he say that he had nothing to do with Fred’s death?” Ron spun around and pounded his fist down in the middle of the table. Hermione jumped. Harry had anticipated something like this, and simply watched in silence.
It occurred to him suddenly that he did a lot of that, and he wondered why.
The answer was simple, swift, and brutal.
Because I’ll only get one chance to act, and I want that chance to matter.
Harry shook his head and attended more to what Ron was saying. Sometimes his own mind puzzled him, especially since the war, when he seemed to observe more facts but absorb them more slowly.
“Because he didn’t,” Hermione said, carefully, as though she didn’t know why the words mattered to Ron. “Because he was over on the other side of the castle when it happened, and he didn’t cast the curse or anything like that.”
“But he must be lying.” Ron’s eyes were bright and feverish as the heat shimmers outside, and he turned and stared at Harry. “You know that he must, right, mate? You were there. You saw Fred die.”
“I never saw who killed him,” Harry said. He was being careful, too, he realized. The obsession in Ron’s eyes struck him as wrong. Of course, Ron had wanted Fred’s killer arrested from the beginning, and they had never found him—or her. It was Harry’s opinion that the killer had probably been executed without confessing to the crime, because they couldn’t remember who had died from one particular spell in the chaos of the battle.
But he couldn’t say that to Ron. For Ron, Fred’s death was the center of the universe, and he couldn’t grasp that that might not be true for everyone.
“But Malfoy is almost the only one left,” Ron said, and turned away again, fingers clenched into fists and then opening, as if he was casting a handful of dust away. “If he didn’t do it, who did?”
Hermione sighed. “We might never find the one who did it, Ron. Would that be so terrible?”
“Yes!” Ron spun around and stared at her. “If we don’t have vengeance, how are we ever going to have peace? We might lie awake for years, wondering where Fred’s killer is and if they managed to escape after all. You know that some Death Eaters fled Britain when they first started hunting for them and found refuge on the Continent. What if his killer was one of them?”
“Then they’ll get brought back by the extradition treaties that are already in place,” Hermione said firmly. “The Ministry is committed to not letting any of them get away, Ron. It will be all right. You’ll see,” she added, and reached out an arm to catch his and bring him back to the table. “You’ll see,” she added gently.
Ron sat down, head bobbing as though it was being pulled on a string. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Kingsley wouldn’t let them get away. He’s a lot more committed to our future than Scrimgeour was. I have to remember that.”
Harry sipped his lemonade and watched the dust hanging in unfaltering arcs above the ground. The sun struck and glared through it, and he was reminded of the glare above the Dementor’s head when he had watched it suck out Mrs. Malfoy’s soul. He closed his eyes against it.
*
“Prisoner.”
Malfoy looked up. He had refused to pay attention when they called him by that name at first, and they had removed him and brought him back in the custody of two burly Aurors. Harry hadn’t seen any visible bruises, but Malfoy had walked more slowly and with his head bowed as though he wanted to make sure his feet were still there. He hadn’t missed a cue after that.
Harry found himself leaning forwards. Today, he had accepted a seat as close to the wooden circle as possible, although still not inside it. He had felt an inexplicable distaste about doing so.
“Prisoner,” the accuser repeated. “There is evidence that you killed the young wizard known as Fred Weasley. What say you to this?”
Malfoy sat up straighter. Harry wanted to take his eyes off him and look around for Ron, who he knew had contrived to get the question submitted, but he literally couldn’t look away from Malfoy now. He had to know how he would plead.
If he knew for certain that Malfoy had killed Fred, he would…
Harry didn’t know what he would. Sometimes he thought the summer had paralyzed his will, cooked it to death as it seemed to be in the midst of cooking them all.
“There is no evidence but what that crazed Weasley has in mind,” Malfoy said. He licked his lips. They were cracked, Harry saw. They hadn’t given him any water all day. “I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t in that part of Hogwarts when the battle started.”
Harry heard a shout from the side, where Ron was seated. He was probably upset that Malfoy had called him crazed, or maybe that Malfoy had denied all knowledge of Fred’s death. Harry leaned further forwards, focused on Malfoy alone by this point, waiting, along with him, for what the accuser would say next.
“There is evidence,” the accuser said, and his voice was thin and dry. “Do you wish to reconsider your answer?”
Malfoy laughed. The sound was so unexpected that Harry actually flinched. He had thought it was something else for a moment, he told himself, trying to settle his unsteadily beating heart. A Dementor moving in, or a cry that Voldemort had returned, or—something. Something that would allow him to live with himself and his timidity.
But aren’t you timid already, if you’ve let the trials go on this long without attempting to object to them?
“What does it matter?” Malfoy asked. He stood up, as far as he could stand with the chains on his wrists that linked him to the chair arms, and stared around the crowd. Most of them flinched with his eyes’ passing, Harry noticed, as he hadn’t seen them flinch from any other person. Harry didn’t, and Malfoy stopped and gave him what looked like a tiny nod of acknowledgment before he went on. “Why should I care? You’ll sacrifice me to this twisted notion of justice that you have no matter what I say. I might as well stick to what I know to be the truth. I can’t hope for real justice, or real mercy, so I’ll die in the embrace of truth.” He flopped into his chair suddenly and tilted his head back so that it rested against the bare wood. “Of all the unexpected ideals to die with,” he murmured. “My father would be ashamed of me, but he’s not here. You won’t understand, and you are here. That’s the way it is.”
Harry waited for the accuser to continuing his questioning. He did, but only after a long pause that Harry knew the Ministry would disclaim later. They would say that of course their man had been shocked, but it had been because Malfoy had the audacity to claim that the trials were farces of justice.
The honesty, Harry thought, staring at Malfoy with his heart beating and his chest aching as it hadn’t ached all that long, numb summer.
The honesty to say what we should all be saying.
*
“He has to admit that he was Fred’s killer. I’ll make him admit it.”
Harry caught Hermione’s eyes and shook his head. She had started to rise to go to Ron, but she settled back with a little frown. They were in Harry’s house this time, his Auror guard standing outside the drawing room and politely pretending not to listen, rather than in the Burrow. Harry thought that made a difference in her self-confidence. Hermione practically was a Weasley now, and had adopted the Burrow as home.
“Listen, Ron,” Harry said, watching as his friend picked up a cushion from the couch and manipulated it back and forth, so that rents appeared in it and stuffing leaked out of them. “You can’t change reality. If Malfoy didn’t kill Fred, then he didn’t. You should look elsewhere so you can find who really did, instead.”
Ron whirled around towards him and stared, a muscle bulging in his jaw. Harry stared back. He wanted to say that his friend looked alien, but in reality, he looked no stranger than the face Harry had watched in the mirror that morning as he cast his Depilating Charms.
We’ve been in a dream all summer, the lot of us, the whole wizarding world. It’s one of those dark fevers that I heard about in primary school. They take the Muggle world sometimes. Everyone passively goes along with something they know to be wrong, because it’s—it’s hysteria, or something like it. It gets into your heads, and it changes you from the good person you thought you were into someone who can watch evil and not turn a hair.
Harry was ashamed of how long he had been asleep and sick with that fever, but he couldn’t waste time being ashamed, the way he would have when he was a kid, before or during the war. What he had to do now was obvious. But he also had to wait, because moving too soon would take the chance away from him and, what was far more important, Malfoy.
“All the other Death Eaters in Britain have been tried,” Ron said. He spoke quietly, but his words rushed along. That should have told me something was wrong a long time ago, Harry thought sadly. Ron has the fever worse than the rest of us. “The ones they thought had escaped justice, didn’t. They’ve been killed by the ones who found them. There’s only him left. Do you understand, Harry? Him, and it’s over.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” Harry said staunchly. “That way, everyone will finally have peace or justice—” the Ministry had a policy against calling it revenge “—and we can all go back to our normal lives.”
He tried a smile, but Ron gave him a dead look. “How can I do that, if he won’t admit that he killed Fred?” he whispered. “I have to know. My life isn’t worth anything without knowing.”
Harry turned to Hermione in alarm. This was worse than he’d thought it was, and Hermione was the only one who could soothe Ron with any hope of success.
But Hermione hesitated, looked at Harry, and then turned back to Ron with what Harry thought was reluctance before she said, “Even if he won’t admit it, that’s fine, Ron. We always knew he was a liar.”
Harry opened his mouth to protest, then snapped it shut again. That was exactly the sort of thing that would start them suspecting that he wasn’t sick with the fever anymore. He leaned back and picked up the lemonade again. Malfoy didn’t need Harry to defend his honor. He had done it well enough himself yesterday.
“But I want to know,” Ron said, and his voice had the snarl of a chained dog in it.
Harry shook his head. “What if he won’t tell you? What if he doesn’t know? It could have been someone dead. The Ministry just might not have brought the question up in the right way when they were trying them.”
“There’s a way to find out,” Ron said, staring over Harry’s head at the wall.
Harry looked at Hermione to see if she knew what their best mate was talking about, but she looked just as blank. She did stand up and go to Ron, though, rubbing his shoulders in soothing motions and speaking in a low tone. Harry watched Ron stand there for an alarmingly long moment before his shoulders relaxed and he began nodding, sometimes speaking when Hermione questioned him.
I have to end this, Harry thought, rubbing his thumb over his palm. To free Ron as well as Malfoy. He’ll never be quiet until he learns about Fred. That means I have to come up with some answers for him.
Even if they’re fake.
*
“Harry Potter to see Draco Malfoy.”
Harry shivered a little as the iron gate in front of him ground open. The Ministry had decided that Azkaban wasn’t good enough, or secure enough, for the Death Eaters; too many of them had escaped from it. Harry had never been to the Steelhold, the prison they’d built to encase those who hadn’t had their trials yet.
But now he had.
It was a single huge block of iron, with the walls and the doors so solid that Harry couldn’t imagine someone getting through them with a sledgehammer. The Ministry could, though, and had decorated the building with wards at every weak point, and some at points that Harry would never have thought of as weak. He stepped forwards and found himself in a dark tunnel, an entrance hall with no windows. The light came from fiercely burning, spluttering torches on the walls.
“Even those can become traps,” said Auror Perkins, who had accompanied Harry into the Steelhold and seemed anxious that he be impressed. “They’ll reach out with ropes of fire if someone tries to escape. Or help someone else escape,” she added, with a tone of disgust in the back of her voice.
Harry nodded silently. He had already realized that nothing disgusted the Aurors, and Ron, and other people under the spell of this summer, more than a traitor.
Even if the traitor had only been trying to bring some fresh food or water to the prisoner. They’d flayed the woman who tried to help Narcissa Malfoy. She’d still been crying when they gave her soul to the Dementors.
Another reason for Harry to hold back until he knew he could do something for Malfoy that would save him beyond doubt. Too soon, and all Malfoy would have was someone to share his isolation.
Perkins marched him forwards. Harry passed round door after round door, all of them set into metal walls, all of them made of studded metal themselves. He swallowed, his skin crawling. The doors led into small and cramped cells, he knew, and looked more like doors to bank vaults than places where living people were kept. Harry thought now that he’d been avoiding the Steelhold because he must have instinctively sensed that it would snap him out of his half-daze, the one that had somehow made him all right with executions.
I have to do something.
They reached the end of the first corridor and turned. At the second door beyond the corner, Perkins halted. “Here,” she said, and reached out to lay her hand flat on the door, murmuring a few half-song phrases. It reminded Harry of the spells that Snape had cast over Malfoy after Harry used Sectumsempra on him.
Let me stand in a different relationship to him this time, Harry prayed silently as the door swung open.
The room beyond was dark, and Harry didn’t think it was his imagination that the darkness was more savage than the pools of shadow that lingered under the torches outside. They had used charms to make it frightening, he thought, and his heart gave one disapproving beat. Wasn’t it enough that the people held here were alone, in metal, egg-shaped chambers that wouldn’t allow them to stand up? Did they have to be scared, too?
Perhaps the Ministry thinks it doesn’t matter, when they’re scared of their executions anyway, Harry thought, and ducked down to enter the cell.
Perkins shook her head and held him back with one arm. “There are wards that will destroy anyone else who comes in,” she murmured to him. “You’ll have to speak from out here. And hurry,” she added, glancing over her shoulder. “The others Aurors will have to take him out to the trial area soon.”
Malfoy turned towards the light and looked up at them.
Harry’s planned words caught in his throat. Malfoy’s face was pale and chiseled, stripped down to bare essentials. He had thin, wiry muscles, and his body was slender to the point of starvation. Harry had known that kind of hunger. He half-closed his eyes as memories of the Dursleys swam in front of him.
Yet, stripped-down or not, Malfoy still had words.
“You don’t have to come all the way here to gloat, Potter,” he murmured. He moved, and Harry saw dark stains spreading across the floor beneath him and on his flanks. At first he thought Malfoy was bleeding from untreated wounds, but he understood when Malfoy shifted to the side. Malfoy was sweating. There were no Cooling Charms in his cell. “You could have done that easily enough at the trial.”
Harry swallowed, torn between horror, pity, and caution. He glanced once at Auror Perkins, who only gave him a curious glance, as if she, too, wanted to know why he had come here, but would never do anything so impolite as to ask.
“I—I didn’t come to gloat,” Harry said. “I came to ask if you had any idea about who might have killed Fred Weasley.” It was part of his errand, after all, he told himself. If Ron knew the truth, then he might relax, and wake up from his daze that much sooner. And then there would be one less voice urging Malfoy along the path to death.
Malfoy seemed to spasm. It took Harry a moment to realize that he was laughing, with almost no saliva left to do so.
“Why would you trust me?” he asked when he recovered. He sounded genuinely curious, and he leaned forwards with his eyes fastened on Harry’s face. Harry was reminded of times that they had confronted each other in the corridors of Hogwarts. Fuck, he had seen Malfoy there only three months ago, when the Battle of Hogwarts had ended and this summer hadn’t yet dawned. “You have every reason to think that I’m a liar, same as your blood traitor friend.”
Perkins stiffened beside Harry and acted as if she would aim her wand, but Harry touched her arm lightly. He was gambling now, hoping that she took his actions as a sign of innate mercy and compassion, laudable if misguided, rather than a sign that he was interested in Malfoy’s fate. “You said that you were telling the truth—out there,” Harry said, feeling rather absurd at making a gesture with his hand beyond the prison, but he thought Malfoy would understand anyway. “I want to think that there’s some honor even in an imprisoned enemy.”
Malfoy leaned nearer, and then nearer still, until Perkins made a warning sound under her breath. Even then, the way that Malfoy eased back on his elbows might have been coincidence, rather than because he respected her warning. “Interesting, Potter,” he murmured. “You’re the only one who’s said something like that.”
Harry licked his lips. He wanted to apologize, but that was absurd. He had been part of this great machine that had ground Malfoy almost to pieces, and at the same time, he wasn’t individually responsible for any of it.
Besides, apologies weren’t what Malfoy needed. He needed water and escape. Freedom. Justice.
A tall order for Harry to provide those, but he had awoken late. It would have to happen.
“I’m sure other people would have said it, if they thought of it,” Harry said, his eyes locked on Malfoy’s face. He hoped that Malfoy could somehow read his mind through them, and so read the message that Harry didn’t have the courage to speak in front of Perkins right now.
Malfoy slowly narrowed his eyes and twisted his neck to the side. Perhaps he was reading it, Harry thought, his hope rising. Certainly Malfoy would have no reason to be so interested in an old schoolboy rival unless he thought that rival could give him something.
“Or if they thought it at all,” Malfoy murmured. “Yes, Potter, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps there are lots of good people out there, just ready to prove themselves if I give them a chance.” His irony could have scored the metal walls.
“Of course there are,” Perkins said stoutly. Harry thought both of them ignored her. He did, at least. His heartbeat was fast enough by now to make his body sway as he stood there. He hoped that Perkins didn’t notice.
Malfoy leaned further forwards, so close that Harry could see the small flecks of blue in his eyes. “Or perhaps there’s only you,” he said. “The only one who would ever care. The only one who could make a difference.”
Message received.
Harry inclined his head once, then said, “Keep dreaming, Malfoy,” and turned to go. He wished that he dared conjure a glass of water for Malfoy, but he wasn’t going to waste his chance—their chance—on something that stupid. Besides, the Aurors wouldn’t want Malfoy to die of dehydration before the trial. They would give him something to drink before long.
“Potter.”
Harry paused and looked back over his shoulder. Malfoy was lounging now against the far wall of his cell, the curved, egg-shaped wall that wouldn’t allow him to lie down fully, any more than it would allow him to stand. His smile was bright and savage in the faint light that fell across his face as the door started to swing shut.
“Those clothes suit you.”
The door clanged shut. Harry looked down at his simple, grey robes, cloak, and boots in bewilderment. What did Malfoy mean? If that was meant to be another coded communication between them, Harry had to admit that he didn’t understand it.
“Like him to say that,” Perkins huffed, all but dragging him out of the Steelhold. “He would think of sex at a moment like this, when it’s almost too hot to see and he’s going to die in a few days.”
“Don’t you mean that he’s going to have justice delivered to him in a few days?” Harry asked softly.
“Er…” Perkins blinked at him and then recovered. “Of course. Yes. What did I say?” She was all but babbling now.
So it begins, Harry thought grimly as he walked down the sandy slope outside the Steelhold. The Ministry is going to start arresting people who aren’t Death Eaters next. It has to, because the fever isn’t over and the Death Eaters are almost gone.
He looked over his shoulder once. The Steelhold crouched under the sun like a grey dragon, uncaring of anything except to devour.
Grey…
Harry snorted bitter laughter as he understood what Malfoy’s last remark on his clothes had meant. They blended in with the metal walls, and made him look just like part of the machine.
But then Harry fell silent as he remembered another association that grey could have.
Neutrality, standing halfway between the Dark and the Light.
*
“I ask you again, Mr. Malfoy.” The accuser’s voice never wavered or varied. Harry wondered where they had found him. He was an old wizard, Harry could see that from his grey beard, but he wasn’t part of the Wizengamot—or at least, Harry couldn’t remember him sitting with them during the trials. Harry had never heard his name, either, only the title of his office. “Did you kill Fred Weasley?”
“I’ll answer the only way I can.” Malfoy’s voice sounded better this morning, Harry thought. Maybe they had given him more water this time than usual before they led him out of the cell. He was looking at the accuser only, instead of turning his head to stare into the crowd the way he usually did.
Maybe he’s given up hope of rescue.
I wish he wouldn’t.
“I didn’t kill him,” Malfoy was going on. “I don’t know who did, but that person is probably dead, with the way that you’ve killed everyone who bears this on their arm.” His left arm rattled as he tried to raise it, and the crowd broke into disgusted howls. Harry stood there with the sounds buffeting him and thought again that they sounded like a pack of hounds rather than a group of wizards. “But I can’t prove that. So the best course is just to say that I didn’t, and for you to let it go.”
But Harry knew already that the accuser was incapable of doing that. Whether Ron had bribed him or whether he was simply interested in the question on his own account, he would repeat it.
Sure enough, after a few moments in which the accuser seemed to wait for Malfoy’s defiance to die away—it didn’t—he continued, “Where were you during the part of the battle when Fred Weasley died?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Malfoy was grinning now. Harry wondered if he was the only one who could see an edge of desperation to that smile, and hoped so. “I don‘t know when he died because I was in some other part of the castle entirely, and I can’t tell you what was going on from minute to minute.”
“Mr. Weasley’s death made several stones collapse,” said the accuser. “A large part of the castle. You must have noticed that.”
Malfoy leaned forwards in his chair. He had got his second wind, Harry saw, another blast of courage. God knew where he had got it. Harry knew he wouldn’t have had any himself under the same circumstances. “Have you ever been in battle, Accuser? Were you at the Battle of Hogwarts?”
There was a little silence. Harry wondered why the crowd wasn’t screaming about Malfoy’s daring, and then decided that they were all shocked that he had had the daring in the first place.
The accuser said, “No, Mr. Malfoy, I was not there. I was in a few battles during the first war with You-Know-Who, however.”
“Then you ought to know,” Malfoy said, his voice as intense as the one he had used to talk to Harry in the cells. Harry found himself feeling oddly jealous towards the accuser. Only he should get to hear Malfoy talk like that.
He promptly shook his head and rested his forehead against his palm. Whoa, Harry. Think about something else.
“You ought to know,” Malfoy continued, “the way that your perceptions change in battle, how time stretches and warps. I didn’t notice anything outside what kept me alive at the moment I did it. I don’t know when the wall collapsed. I didn’t notice when Fred Weasley died. You can ask me again and again, but my answer won’t change.”
The accuser turned and looked at an Auror who had stood behind his chair. She nodded and handed him a document. The accuser took something out of it—something small, which looked like a photograph, Harry thought—and tapped it with his wand. Then he threw up a screen of colored light in front of the crowd.
“This says otherwise,” was all the accuser said, before the photograph leaped out of his hand and enlarged itself, filling the screen.
Harry stared. It was an image of Malfoy standing next to a castle wall, holding his wand against the stones and whispering to them. As they began to fall, the Malfoy in the picture whipped around to face his audience, his eyes wide, as if he didn’t realize that anyone had been taking his photo.
“It can be proven that the wall you caused to fall is the one that killed Fred Weasley,” the accuser said calmly. “We can all see the proof here.”
The voices from the crowd now, wordless shouts and cries of Malfoy’s name and all the insults ever devised, fell on Malfoy like a new set of chains. Harry was petrified in his seat. For a moment, his belief in Malfoy’s honesty wavered.
And then he thought, again, of all the “evidence” to “prove” that Death Eaters were more involved in certain crimes during the war than anyone had thought they were which had surfaced at the last moment—the moment when some people might have started to believe their denials.
The picture might have been genuine, but there was no reason that the wall had to be at Hogwarts. The Malfoy in the photograph looked a bit younger than he did now, Harry thought. It could have been taken last year.
Of course, the accuser showed the picture only long enough for the crowd to work itself into a shrieking, shouting frenzy, and then took it down again. So there was no time for anyone to ask questions or work through any such niceties of doubt.
Except Harry.
He found himself glancing around for allies, but there was nothing but hatred in all the faces he could see. Even his Auror guard, whom he had come to know, who were patient and kind with him and tended to answer all his questions, looked unquestioning.
Well, that leaves me, then.
*
Harry sat on his bed that evening debating what he would need. He couldn’t make a physical list, because someone would find it, and he wouldn’t be able to answer the questions that would produce. He would just have to make it in his head and hope that he didn’t forget anything.
Enough money for Malfoy to live comfortably somewhere else; that was certain. He couldn’t come back to England the way things were now, and Harry didn’t know when the fever would calm down. Perhaps it would with the end of summer, but that was still a month away. Harry wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead and cast a Cooling Charm again. One of the Aurors near his door stirred, but fell silent, probably because they’d checked for the presence of hostile magic and realized there wasn’t any.
A means of getting away. That made Harry really hesitate, because he didn’t know how to make a Portkey and it would be suspicious to ask. They would be watching the Floo network, and he knew there was a special watch kept on brooms along the coasts, too. Even innocent wizards from France had to wait a long time before they could come into the country. Apparition between countries wasn’t possible.
A wand. Harry didn’t know what had happened to Malfoy’s original wand, and he didn’t know a way that he could find out. Perhaps it would be for the best to seek “reassurance” of the Aurors, to make sure that the big, bad, nasty Death Eater wouldn’t be able to hurt Harry even if he got out of prison. They might tell him then.
Food for a few days. Harry knew that Malfoy would get to someplace soon where he could buy things to eat, but he would need time to recover—at least enough to cast a decent glamour—before he tried his luck in a wizarding village.
Those were the most essential things. Of course, when Harry thought about all the other things they needed, like the keys to Malfoy’s cell, he despaired a little, but he shook his head and kept his mind on his original list.
At least by the time dawn came, he had decided on the means that he would use to get Malfoy away. There was only one chance. They were watching brooms, but they had specifically scorned Muggle means of transport, because they believed—probably correctly—that no Death Eater would know how to use them anyway. Harry couldn’t drive and didn’t think it would be a good idea for Malfoy to take a train across England, but he could Apparate Malfoy to the coast and get him a boat. That would probably be the best and safest thing to do.
If anything can be safe.
If Harry looked out the window, he imagined that he could see the reluctance of anyone else to believe Malfoy was innocent lying above the ground like the summer heat.
*
“I was just wondering what had happened to Malfoy’s wand.”
Harry hated asking that directly, but he didn’t have any choice. He had spent most of the afternoon talking about how dangerous Malfoy was and how he didn’t feel safe around him, but his Auror escort had only patted his arms and head and cooed at him, instead of offering information. Harry hoped they wouldn’t think of any of the motives behind the question.
Well, they probably won’t, given that they believe you’re afraid of him and that you only went to see him in prison to ask about Fred.
Perkins glanced at him, wrinkling her nose slightly in that way she had. “Oh, don’t worry about that, Mr. Potter,” she said cheerfully. “The Ministry took away all the Death Eaters’ wands. They put them in a safe hiding place.”
Harry gaped at her, and he didn’t have to exaggerate his astonishment much to get it up to her standards. “They didn’t destroy them?”
Perkins chuckled. “Why would they? Of course not. They had to keep them because they want to make sure that no one manages to trick the Dementors into not sucking out their souls. It’s possible, you know, given that they were You-Know-Who’s allies during the war,” she added meditatively. She glanced up and down the street that led to Harry’s house, as if she wanted to make sure that Voldemort wouldn’t come back from the dead and hear her talking like that. “If the wand goes dull and won’t cast after the Dementor’s through, then that means the soul of its master is really gone.”
Harry swallowed queasily. He had never once considered that that might be the reason for keeping wands, and it seemed unnecessarily sadistic on the Ministry’s part, too; a sign of how much they had to doubt instead of trust that they were really conquering their enemies.
But it worked to his advantage, so he couldn’t be that sorry about it.
“But they’re out of England, at least?” he persisted. “Please tell me they are.” He softened his voice and looked over his shoulder in turn.
“Well, no.” Perkins looked a bit uncomfortable now, but she still smiled. “They’re in a secure room at the Ministry. The only Aurors who can access them are the ones, like us, who can open the cells in the Steelhold—the absolutely trusted ones. There’s no reason to fear corruption among us.”
But she looked at another of the Aurors as she said that.
Part Two.
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