Chapter Six of 'Chains of Fool's Gold'- The Challenge

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Five.

Title: Chains of Fool’s Gold (6/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Blood, gore, violence, torture, angst
Rating: R
Summary: The Ministry has driven Harry and Draco, formerly Aurors of the Socrates Corps, too far. Now they’re turning at bay, and they’re going to take the whole Ministry down with them—if they have to.
Author’s Notes: This is the sixteenth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, following "Invisible Sparks", Hero's Funeral, Rites of the Dead, Sister Healer , Working With Them, This Enchanted Life, Letters From Exile, Writ on Water, "Evening Star,", The Library of Hades, "There Was Glory", A Reign of Silence, "Dictionary of Losses", Mansions of a Monstrous Dignity, and "The Horn That Was Blowing". I don’t yet know how many chapters it will have, although somewhere between fifteen and twenty is a good guess. It will be updated every Wednesday.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Six—The Challenge

“You’re sure that you want to watch this, Granger?”

Harry nearly inhaled his breakfast, and then had to cough desperately and reach for a glass of water to soothe further coughs. Draco didn’t understand anything about Hermione if he thought that she would stay behind with a challenge like that in front of her.

“I was going to watch Harry use the Unforgivables on a bunch of Aurors,” Hermione said coolly, without glancing up from the latest edition of the Prophet. Harry had given up on reading it, since it only ever printed lies, but Hermione insisted on knowing the twists and turns of the story so that she could counter them when they went to the Ministry. “I think I can handle watching some memories of someone becoming a twisted.”

“Even someone we have in a cage upstairs?” Draco came to put his elbows on the back of Harry’s chair. Harry reached up and felt the tension in his shoulder. He sighed, caressing Draco’s muscles. Draco quivered, but didn’t look away from Hermione.

Hermione looked up and eyed Draco for a second, before she asked, “Why are you asking this, Malfoy? Is it because I’m the only woman here? Or because you’re closer to Ron now that he’s helped you with a few things?” She shook her head, hair rustling over her shoulders and eyes so cold that Harry felt Draco flinch. “No. I know that the memories have happened, and there’s nothing I can do to change the past. I can change the future, though. If we use Jeremiah’s testimony to help bring down the corrupt members of the Ministry, then that’s all I ask. And I’m going to be there for that.”

She turned back to her newspaper. Harry glanced up and pressed on Draco’s shoulder again. Draco shut his mouth with a click and moved back.

“I just thought I would give you the chance, that’s all,” he muttered, and began scooping up his own breakfast from the mound of food Kreacher had prepared.

Harry rolled his eyes. He thought Draco’s motive had actually been to get Hermione to stay behind so that he wouldn’t have to be with her in the Pensieve memories, but once again, he had gone about it completely the wrong way.

Draco glared at him over his shoulder. Harry glared back, and Draco shut his mouth and flopped heavily into his seat, scowling.

“I know some different ways to do things,” Hermione said, without looking up from her paper. “That doesn’t mean they’re inferior ways.”

Harry snickered. Draco buried himself in his food and didn’t say anything until they were standing up, ready to go to the Pensieve upstairs and lose themselves in the memories of Jeremiah becoming a twisted. Then he looked at Harry and muttered, “Maybe I should have asked if you didn’t want to watch. I know your saving-people thing. Maybe it would be overstimulated.”

Harry stared at Draco. A second later, he understood. “There’s no shame in not watching,” he said. “If you don’t want to.”

Hermione was there, and Harry thought later that was unfortunate; maybe Draco could have backed down and admitted that he didn’t really want to look at those memories if they didn’t have an audience. But he wasn’t about to do it in front of a Gryffindor, someone who was used to thinking that a Slytherin was the embodiment of cowardice. He swallowed with an audible click, but shook his head. “I’m not afraid.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Harry began, but the words faded away as Draco turned and began to climb the stairs.

“I don’t envy you the possession of him, really,” Hermione said thoughtfully before she followed Draco.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one with any good sense, Harry decided, as he brought up the rear. And considering how many times I’ve felt like I’m reckless, that’s really not a good sign.

*

Draco concealed his scowl by keeping his head down as they assembled around the Pensieve holding Jeremiah’s memories. Since six of them—all except the half-giant, who was assembling his own memories of Ernhardt—were going to be viewing them, they had put the Pensieve on a stone platform that had once been used for cauldrons. Draco glanced at the potions stains on the sides of the platform and hoped none of them would interfere with the operation of the Pensieve.

Or is that that you wish they would interfere?

Draco grimaced this time, and concealed that by looking away, too. Harry had touched nearer to the matter than he knew. Draco didn’t fear what they would see in Jeremiah’s memories so much for themselves as for the reminders they would bring up.

Reminders of his mother.

It was all well and good for Harry to say that Draco was rid of his parents now and didn’t have to spend any more time thinking about them. Sure, he didn’t have to think of them anymore if he wanted to forget most of his life and the way he had grown up. But this wasn’t as easy as that. Here, he knew that he would look, in spite of himself, for clues that the ritual resembled the one Narcissa had undergone hoping to gain control of Parseltongue.

“Ready?” Harry asked, and when everyone nodded—bar Draco, but Harry had caught his eye anyway—they tilted their heads down and placed them into the Pensieve as one.

There was the dizzying, disorienting fall that Draco had always hated, and they stood in the middle of a dark cavern. Draco frowned. Then he saw bookshelves out of the corner of his eye, and relaxed a little. This was in one of the Ministry archives, then, or maybe a place in the Department of Mysteries. At least it was good that it was under the Ministry, instead of elsewhere. It would be much harder to prove the altar’s connection to the Ministry if it was elsewhere.

Granger turned and walked towards the shelves. Draco would have felt good about that if it wasn’t obvious that she was only checking on the titles, maybe for themselves, maybe in hopes of identifying the room later.

In the meantime…

A harsh groan sounded from in front of them. Draco turned around to watch what they had come to see, braced for it.

Or so he thought. It turned out that seeing a human being bound to an altar of white stone, his limbs spread out with chains and someone leaning over him with a wand dripping blood, still wasn’t an easy sight to face. Draco clapped a hand over his mouth and bit down, hard, on the center of his palm.

The slight pain helped to calm him. He had endured that. And as Granger had said, Jeremiah had already endured this. They could help him most by watching what had happened and understanding it, so they could explain to their audience at the Ministry exactly how evil it was.

The person with the blood on his wand was an Auror Draco knew slightly, one of those in Heliodorus Corps, named Andrew Hapton. He was tall and thick and round-shouldered, but he chanted with dedication, keeping his eyes on Jeremiah’s screwed-up face as if that would tell him when the pain was enough.

Or maybe he was looking for some other signal, because he took an abrupt step backwards and flicked his wand, sending the blood on it in a high arc. From the way the blood splattered down over Jeremiah’s face and the altar, though, Draco was sure the gesture was planned. The pattern formed a notched arrow, pointing straight up the altar and to Jeremiah’s forehead, between the eyes.

Hapton chanted something else, his eyes closed and his head tilted back, and then his hand reached out and closed on the air over Jeremiah’s face. He began to draw it back, grunting, his shoulders bulging, as though he pulled on an invisible cord.

And Jeremiah’s face began to crack apart.

Draco shuddered, but made himself watch. Harry reached out and gripped his hand beside him, and Draco nodded his thanks. He didn’t even care if Granger and Weasley saw. There were some things that should be hard to watch, and seeing someone nearly have his face torn off was one of them.

The broken pieces of Jeremiah’s cheeks and nose writhed and dipped together as they danced above his head, like a mask that someone was tearing into shreds with invisible hands. Then they settled back into place, and Jeremiah turned his head and opened his eyes.

Draco caught his breath. He hadn’t noticed before, but the features that Jeremiah had worn as he lay on the altar weren’t precisely the ones that he had worn in the cage. Now, though, he looked like the man they had captured, minus only the ragged, matted filth of hair.

It’s no wonder that that file Warren and Jenkins had had some confusion about his name.

Hapton moved back and examined Jeremiah from a distance. Then he conferred with a couple others who came forwards. They were in Unspeakable robes, Draco saw, with some satisfaction, and they kept their hoods pulled forwards so that Draco couldn’t see their faces, although he saw Granger sneaking close and looking up to try if she could catch a glimpse.

The Unspeakables gave Hapton orders that seemed to consist entirely of gestures. Hapton nodded and turned back, raising cage bars around the altar with a spell similar to the ones that Draco had used to make the prison upstairs. Then Hapton strode around to the head of the altar and spoke to Jeremiah. “Come on. Wake up, now.”

Jeremiah was already awake, to Draco’s eyes, but at the words, he turned his head around and focused on Hapton. Hapton nodded encouragingly to him. “You wanted to be able to put people to sleep,” he murmured. “Can you do that now?”

Jeremiah looked at the Auror, and then down at his own hand. A second later, his fingers rose, aiming. Hapton, maybe from the Auror instincts he had been neglecting up until now, obviously realized it was a good idea to duck aside, and did so. The red beam of Jeremiah’s flaw struck over his head and hit someone in the background, who immediately slumped to the floor.

Draco smiled grimly. He supposed that he knew where some of the detailed information in Warren and Jenkins’s file had come from.

There was chaos a second later, as Jeremiah chattered something in a language that made sense only to him, and fire-lions manifested to either side of him, looking more like real lions than the beasts that Draco and Weasley had seen in the ravine. The Unspeakables spat curses and tried to strengthen the bars, but it was too late. The first fire-lion had already sprung forwards and melted them. The cage collapsed, and the fire-lions ran out into the middle of the cellar, heading for the door. Jeremiah staggered along behind them, aiming his hand and casting the red light of his flaw at anyone who tried to get in the way.

One Unspeakable shouted something Draco couldn’t make out over the noise. He saw Granger’s face tighten, though. The second one who had come up to give Hapton orders responded, and this bit, Draco did hear. “Why do all of them always go insane?”

Maybe because you’re bloody well using Dark magic to make them, you idiot, and you just rearranged his face, Draco thought grimly.

The crackling of the red light and the flames on the fire-lions made the cellar bright with radiance, but only for a little while. Then Jeremiah raced up the steps and out of there, and the Pensieve swirled around them and the memory ended.

Draco caught his balance with hands on the edge of the Pensieve, breathing hard. At least he wasn’t the only one doing that, or who looked ill.

“That was enlightening,” said Granger, her voice so quiet that Draco wasn’t sure he’d heard her at first.

Harry looked up and nodded, his expression calm and grim. “Why did they—why did they take apart his face like that?” he asked. His hand was on his wand, as if he could have interfered in the memory. Draco knew the feeling. “It didn’t seem to have anything to do with giving him healing power.”

“That’s because they’re doing it wrong,” Draco said. He had suspected it before, from what his mother had told him about the ritual that had changed her into a twisted, but he knew it now. He nodded as Harry turned around to look at him. “They—they can’t use Dark Arts to give someone a gift. You could make a sacrifice to do it, or you could make a potion, or you could try to go to one of the places where pure magic lingers and ask for it as a blessing. You can’t do it the way they’re doing it.”

Granger, of course, with her interest in magical theory, was the one who pounced on it first, though Draco saw that Prince had a thoughtful look on his face and decided he might have jumped in if Granger hadn’t. “But I’m sure I heard something about sacrifices in a lot of Dark Arts rituals. And why wouldn’t they do it those other ways, if it would be surer? I thought these people who became twisted really wanted the wandless magic.”

“They did,” Draco murmured, thinking of his mother and her political motivations for trying to become a Parselmouth. “But they get impatient. They decide that they might as well take a risk, and try to become—well, not twisted, but gifted, through a ritual. They decide it would be faster.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question about his face,” Harry muttered.

Prince spoke up then. “Mr. Malfoy is right, as far as he goes, but more than impatience went into that ritual. I think they were becoming desperate and trying to add to the ritual to come up with a new result. If they made him into a new person, the reasoning probably went, then he would have new power. And that twisting of his face was one way to make him into a new person.” Prince was smiling, but tightly, and looked as if he wished he could gag. “They didn’t think it through.”

“Plus there’s the altar itself,” Draco added. Speaking about explanations, theory, in a way that didn’t touch the practical aspects of what they had just witnessed, was a means to shield himself, he had found. “That’s had Dark Arts practiced on it for generations, probably long past the time when it should have been destroyed. The Dark magic lingers there. Dark magic’s hungry. It wants new power poured into it, the same rituals performed. When those rituals aren’t, or when the Ministry tries to change them, the Dark magic—it’s not sentient, so it can’t take revenge, but that’s what it amounts to. It tries to change their rituals into the ones it’s familiar with. This is the result.”

Prince nodded. “I think you are right. That was a complex collision of old and new ritual magic, and it’s no wonder that the result was a mess.” He shuddered. “What did they think they were doing with the blood they splashed across his body? Trying to create a pattern that they could build off, essentially, but of course the new blood from the tearing of his face mingled with it…”

“Is the evidence going to be convincing enough to an audience consisting of people who hate us?” Harry asked. His face was a little green. Draco knew it wasn’t cowardice as much as nausea, but he was glad that he wasn’t the only one disgusted by what they had witnessed.

“I would think so.” Prince’s voice was low and vicious, his eyes shining. “What do you think, George?”

“I think so.” The Weasley—the other Weasley, as Draco still sometimes thought of him—stood there with his arms folded as though to protect himself against the cold, but his eyes were so bright that they could have matched Prince’s. “I think the evidence is very interesting, and the fact that you can see some faces clearly just makes it better.” He looked at Draco. “Did you recognize that Auror who was casting the spell? I thought I saw you gape at him.”

Draco ignored the temptation to say that he had never done anything so undignified as gaping. The last thing they needed at the moment was to get into a pissing contest about definitions. “I did,” he said. “His name is Andrew Hapton.”

“And I recognized the lead Unspeakable.” Granger’s voice was so low that Draco didn’t recognize it at first. “I didn’t know he was an Unspeakable, though. He’s testified at some of the committee meetings I set up, arguing that house-elves need to remain servants because of some mystical reasons that I always suspected him of inventing on the spot.” Granger gave a harsh smile that made Draco like her a little more. “It seems that he at least has conducted some of those experiments he was always babbling about.”

“What’s his name?” Weasley, the original one, his voice low. He put his arm around Granger’s shoulders. Only then did Draco remember they were married. He shook his head. He supposed there was someone for everyone out there, but it was strange to think about for people like they had been at Hogwarts.

“Orlando Furioso.” Granger sighed the name as though it hurt her, and clenched her hands in front of her. “I wonder how many house-elves he’s had under his wand?” Then she seemed to think of something, and turned to Prince. “But why did they keep performing the rituals once they realized they weren’t working? Why not give up and try some other method of giving people wandless magic?”

Prince shrugged a little and looked at Draco and Harry. “Perhaps someone who understands the inner workings of the Ministry during the last decade can answer that better than I can. I would have used myself for the experiment, and done it properly, with all the length of time it was meant to take.”

“I think I can answer that.”

Draco almost wondered if he was speaking himself without meaning to, and then he realized the words had come from Harry. He turned to his partner, and found that he was green in the face again. At least Draco didn’t think it was from immediate nausea this time.

“Harry?” Granger asked, an invitation to explain.

Draco wrapped his arm around Harry’s shoulders in silence. Just because Weasley did it to Granger didn’t make it a useless gesture, and Harry looked like he could use the support right now.

*

I can’t believe I never made the connection.

In fairness to his younger self, though, Harry had to admit that he’d been a brash young Auror, still working with Ron, still fighting the press, and not concerned with the inner workings of the Department the way he would become later, when they gave him a partner he despised. He hadn’t thought anything of the weird request at the time. He got all kinds of weird requests, from petitions to donate parts of his body for Potions ingredients to marriage proposals that would involve him marrying half the witches in Britain at once, so they could all be satisfied.

“An Unspeakable asked me to be part of a ritual,” Harry murmured. “That was right after I had the first vision of someone being murdered. I didn’t think anything of it. Just that they wanted to study my ability. I told them no, and I did it well enough that they shut up and didn’t contact me again. But…they said something about an altar. I wonder now if they were hoping to find out how my wandless magic worked so that they could duplicate it in someone else.”

“And they let you go because you were the Chosen One and people would have noticed if you disappeared,” Draco said, nodding. “Yes, it wouldn’t surprise me. What year was that?”

Harry hesitated, thinking about it. It would have been two years before Ron left, which meant… “Five years ago now.”

Draco smiled grimly. “So they were performing the experiments then, too. I wonder if they’ve stopped, in the last few decades? Except during the war, I suppose. The Death Eaters might not have let them have the time or the victims then.”

“I think they would,” Hermione murmured, looking sick. “Furioso was charged as a collaborator. He said that he was acting as a secret spy on the Death Eaters and passing information on to the resistance, and they were getting information from inside the Ministry at one point. They couldn’t prove that it was Furioso who gave that to them, but they couldn’t prove it wasn’t, either. One of the benefits of being so secretive. He was never charged for any of the experiments that I know he performed on Muggleborns.”

Harry reached out to touch her shoulder. He didn’t know Furioso, either; he hadn’t participated much in the political side of the Ministry, and it was other people, known Unspeakables, who had approached him about studying his visions. But he could add the rest of the story, now.

“They’re obsessed with finding out where magic comes from,” he murmured. “That’s the way I would describe the ones who approached me about studying my visions, although of course they didn’t use the word ‘obsessed’ themselves. They wanted to know how Muggleborns got magic, was their word, as if they believed that nonsense during the war about Muggleborns stealing pure-bloods’ wands. They talked about how great wandless magic would be if everyone could use it. I think that was supposed to encourage me to believe that they would make a responsible study of my visions and so I could hand myself over to them. But they were part of the same faction. They have to be. They won’t slow down and they won’t conduct rituals on themselves because they want to watch their subjects instead. God forbid that the experimenter risk himself in the middle of the experiment.”

Prince was smiling. Harry raised his eyebrows at him, and Prince nodded a little.

“This is the key of the story we need to present when we stage the demonstration to the Ministry,” he said calmly. “The story of some people suffering might not move the public, unfortunately. Neither will the story of corruption in the Ministry. The Daily Prophet does an article on that every week. But the story of secret experiments going on for decades, experiments that anyone could suffer from and the Ministry hierarchy could plausibly distance themselves from, pretending it was only a small group? Oh, yes. That story, we can sell.”

He leaned forwards. “And if you’ll listen to me, I have an idea about planting rumors before we even start releasing the real story that will prepare the ground for us.”