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Chapter Twenty-Two—In Midst of Battle

Draco cried out as something cut him from the back, slicing a long, jagged line between his shoulder blades. He dropped to the floor, and, though it hurt, rolled over and under his chair so that any other spells which flew through the door would have less of a chance of hitting him. He had never been a master strategist, but he did remember where the doors of the room were, and thought it likely that any attack was coming from there.

He wished he could reach for his wand and heal himself, but people were screaming around him, and one of the voices was Harry’s. Draco had no way of knowing if Harry had suffered the same thing he had or something more serious. Did the attackers have an extensive knowledge of curses, or had they depended on one alone to destroy the room and their opponents?

No use speculating yet, Draco told himself, and forced his eyes open. There had been an enormous dazzle of white light that had blinded him, but it was gone now, and he must see what had happened.

The room was full of shouting, screaming, panicked people, not including a few who lay still and face-down. Each of them seemed to have a bloody gash in the middle of their back. Some were also clutching singed robes. Draco nodded. A combination of a Cutting Curse and a Lightning Curse, then, the latter probably useful only for the blinding effects and to scare Nusante’s group a little.

He turned to look at Harry, and found him already on one knee, his wand in his hand, his eyes cool and traveling the length of the room and then back again. Draco shook his head. At the moment, he wouldn’t ask where in the world Harry had learned to move like an Auror, but he would demand an explanation later.

For that and so much else.

“Who?” he asked, pitching his voice low. If anyone in the room was likely to know, it was Harry, but the others might find it odd that Draco was speaking to his boyfriend as if he were an expert on the situation.

“Aurors,” said Harry. “My charm told me that someone wearing Auror robes is out there, and probably several people.”

Draco stared. He knew some Aurors were just as hateful towards homosexuality as anyone else in the wizarding world, but that they would take an enormous, coordinated action like this against normal people, when they had to know what would happen if they were found out—

So perhaps they don’t plan to be found out.

Before Draco could deal in his mind with the full consequences of that notion, another curse hurtled through the doors. This was a red liquid that flew over the heads of the ducking and screaming crowd and lodged like a blob of mucus on the opposite wall. Then it began to steam, and the air filled with fumes. Draco held his breath instinctively and turned in the direction of pounding feet.

Harry seized his arm. “Follow my lead!” he yelled into Draco’s ear. “I know that curse, and I know how to get rid of it, but it’s a complicated incantation. I’ll need you to defend my back whilst I speak the spell.”

Draco nodded, then snorted when Harry added, “And don’t breathe that stuff in if you can avoid it!”

“That, I think I could figure out without any help from you,” Draco snapped, but Harry had already turned to face the far wall, windmilling his wand through a wide pattern as he began to chant. Draco leaned against Harry, back-to-back, and waited until the first seven attackers were fully in the room before he struck.

Mindful of the fact that the curses used so far hadn’t actually been Dark Arts, Draco chose a devastating but still legal spell that exploded the floor in front of the Aurors, causing them to go flying backwards or, more than once, take splinters of flying stone and wood in their faces. One of them cried out, and Draco felt a stab of vicious satisfaction.

But his advantage didn’t last for long. The attackers got used to the idea that someone was striking back easily enough, and then a storm of curses were flying at Draco, who had to spend more of his time constructing Shield Charms than taking the offensive.

And no one else in Nusante’s group seemed to be fighting back at all. The Aurors, mostly men and women in nondescript dark clothing, were steadily closing in on Draco, and he knew his shields would weaken without some reinforcement.

Snarling, Draco prepared himself to stand it as long as he could.

*

Harry quelled the temptation to turn around and see what Draco was doing only with difficulty. He could hear grunts and curses and harsh breaths working out of the body pressed against his. That didn’t matter, he told himself again and again. Focus on the curse on the wall. Clear the air. Those were the tasks he’d assigned to himself, and those were the tasks he had to accomplish.

It didn’t help that the countercurse for this particular spell involved work on two separate levels: one to dissipate it and one to contain the fumes and keep them from wiping the memories of the people in the room clear, as they were designed to do. Harry had to chant steadily, conquering the temptation to take deep breaths in recompense, whilst performing the complicated wand motions that caged the fumes just beyond his face.

He narrowed his focus down, calling on the parts of the cool Harry Potter persona that had the strength to refuse Draco and even run a deception on him, ignoring the way people in the corner of his eye writhed and struggled and cried. The fumes bent away from him, wavered, and then flowed in a long plumed line towards the Aurors. Harry called them back with a sharp wand movement; he didn’t want to be accused of poisoning his enemies later, however tempting the notion might be.

One more push and pulse of magic, his will flowing through the incantation along with his words, and the blob of the curse vanished from the far wall. The fumes dissipated with it, sucked into a hole that opened in the air. Harry hissed in triumph and reached around, steering Draco with him so that they stayed back-to-back.

He had the time to see that Draco’s face was gray with pain, he was limping, and there was a long streak of blood down his side, joining the blood from the wound the Cutting Curse had made on his back.

And then Harry’s anger and the need for defense combined, and dropped him into the middle of a personality he had only ever experienced in battle.

He hurled the first curses that came to mind, choosing ones that hovered just on this side of illegal but not Dark, forcing the Aurors back—and he recognized some of their faces; had the Ministry gone completely mad?—and then going to work to knock them down and keep them down. Incantations left his tongue and his lips stinging with how fast they flew. Constructing Shield Charms with a good portion of his power left him free to fight on the offensive most of the time, because he was strong enough for it to take twenty or more spells before his shields would begin to crack and bent. He was moving miles mentally whilst physically keeping almost still, his back against Draco’s, though he dodged and weaved as necessary.

He became pure war, and all thoughts of other strategies, other personas, other ways of being, were stripped away and left far behind him.

*

Draco was sure, now, that Harry had to have received Auror training.

There was no other source for that combination of grace and skill with which Harry moved behind him, tossing off spells that flung the attackers from their feet, spells that bound them to the floor, spells that dazzled and confused and made illusions burn in front of their eyes so that they struck at the invisible and the imaginary. Yes, with his power he could have learned spells like that on his own, outside the confines of the Auror program, but where had he learned to combine them? How had he known which ones worked well together? How did he know which spells the Ministry classified as Dark Arts and which they didn’t?

On the other hand, watching could only go so far. Draco had taken the chance to heal the wounds on his back and side, and do what he could to ease the pain in his battered leg; healing muscle aches and soreness was not a specialty of his. He wanted to show that he had some part in this battle, too. It would give him good publicity, in a way, demonstrating that he was serious about the people and the ideals he had committed to. And it would be a nasty surprise for Lucius, who Draco thought must have had something to do with this raid.

He waited for a pause, as the remaining attackers backed away from Harry and conversed together about the way they could get around him, and then tugged on Harry’s arm. Harry whirled around, glaring.

“What?” he snapped.

Draco choked on swallowed air. Harry looked magnificent, his hair tousled and blown-back as by a strong wind, his eyes brilliant even behind their disguise. Draco felt himself grow half-hard. It was a struggle to ignore that response.

“Let me,” he whispered. “I think I know something that will knock them out.”

“I’m doing all right.” Harry dragged a hand through his hair and countered a spell that an overconfident witch flung at his back without even turning around. She quickly retreated to the huddle of her allies.

“I know you are,” Draco said, “but we still don’t know who these people are or where they came from, and there might be reinforcements arriving at any time. Besides, they have some measure of you now. When they strike again, it’s going to be specifically to counter the tactics you’ve been using against them, and they might succeed if they coordinate their magic.”

Harry drew his breath in as if to respond, then paused and cocked his head. Emotions raced across his face, so many of them that Draco had to fight the urge to take an involuntary step back. There were many people struggling in front of him, it seemed, not just one. And then Harry bowed his head, and the door slammed on the glimpses of hidden depth that Draco had seen.

“Very well,” Harry said, and moved out of the way. Draco stepped up beside him and raised his wand.

The Aurors, or whoever they really were, immediately started raising Shield Charms. Draco sneered at them. Such plebeian tactics stood no chance of working against what he planned to use now.

Slipping one hand into a pocket of his robe, he closed it around a smooth glass vial. He carried this potion for emergencies only; he didn’t exactly want the Ministry to get wind of his brewing skills or the ingredients that had gone into the potion. But no one on the opposite side would stop or slow down, and no one had shown hesitation at the sight of his hair and face, so the Malfoy name wouldn’t carry the day this time. This qualified as a damn emergency.

Besides, if he did this right, none of the enemy would be in a position to report much about the potion.

Draco pulled the cork from the vial and flung it in a high, twisting course, over the Shield Charms and down inside them. The vial spun end over end, and the liquid inside sprayed like heavy rain across the faces and robes of the Aurors. Someone laughed, as if relieved there was no more to the attack, though many wands remained cautiously trained on Draco.

Draco closed his eyes and braced himself for the onslaught.

It started with a shimmer in front of his eyes, as if from one of Harry’s illusion spells. Then his field of vision flooded with information: faces, voices, memories, pains, pleasures, maps. The potion had spilled into the eyes of at least some of the attackers and was bringing the contents of their plundered minds into Draco’s head.

The potion was one that Severus Snape had invented, but never had the chance to use. It would have been too risky to steal Death Eaters’ secrets, and he had no one worth using it on where Dumbledore and his followers were concerned. But he had field-tested it on Muggles, and passed the recipe on to Draco during those nightmarish few days when they had run from Hogwarts together. Draco was confident it would work.

The images sorted themselves out, the repetitions fading, the overlaps condensing into clear pictures. At once Draco knew that these were indeed Aurors from the Ministry, chosen carefully for their special dislike of homosexuality. They were going after a “terrorist” group that they’d been informed had started the riot in the Theater-in-the-Round yesterday. They were to round up all the people they found in this house and bring them to the Ministry for questioning, keeping the capture quiet enough that it would never reach the newspapers.

None of the people whose minds he read, to Draco’s frustration, knew anything about the source of the information on the meeting.

He opened his eyes and watched the secondary effect of the potion with some satisfaction. Their minds suddenly and violently emptied by the action of the potion—the memories would be replaced and regrown in time, but not for a few hours—the Aurors simply collapsed. Those who had managed to block the potion from pulling anything from their minds were exhausted by the struggle, and joined their comrades in unconsciousness. The floor was suddenly littered with three dozen fallen Aurors, and the air laced with traces of dissipating Shield Charms.

Draco smiled and turned to face Harry.

The expression of devastated admiration on Harry’s features, false though they were, was everything he could have hoped for, and it grew deeper as Draco explained, calmly, just who these wizards and witches were, and what they had come here to do.

*

Harry was good with magic. He had always enjoyed spectacular effects. Some of his favorite memories centered on the demonstration of Patronus Charms, deadly curses that would kill the caster if they were used wrong, and the skillful layered glamours he had seen applied by some of the teachers he’d studied with.

But he had never seen anything as inexpressibly wonderful as the way in which Draco Malfoy folded his arms and bowed his head—

And his enemies collapsed in front of him, whilst Draco stood as patient and immovable as some Muggle Zen student.

Draco was a skillful businessman and a skilled player of the games that occupied the upper pure-blood classes. But Harry had not realized before that he might also know the right thing to do in a tight corner; that seemed to be the way in which this Draco had changed the most from the one Harry had known at school. He was clever, and thought on the fly as well as in long-range plans. Harry admired improvisation, and it was the one quality he had assured himself Draco did not have.

Now, here, Harry could see that he did.

He fought to keep his mind on the words, to realize that these were Aurors who had come with official sanction from the Ministry and the danger that might pose. Of course, he had to ask Draco what the potion had done. Draco explained.

And when Harry realized Draco had stood motionless through an assault of reverse Legilimency, his admiration only increased. That had been something he’d never been able to do in his own lessons with Snape.

“Harry?”

Draco was eyeing him strangely, he realized, one hand reaching out as if he thought he would have to grip Harry’s shoulder and brace him against losing his balance. His face also seemed closer than before, though Harry was sure he had not stepped nearer since he began telling the story.

I must have moved closer to him.

And the truth of what this admiration could mean burst in front of his eyes like a firework.

He stepped hastily back, avoiding Draco’s hand, and shut his eyes as if in intense concentration. In truth, he simply wanted a few minutes to organize his thoughts in the packed layers they should have already assumed.

This admiration for Draco did not belong to the persona he had chosen for today, the one who could survive a battle and create the illusion of another lover. It belonged to the Harry who had briefly joined Draco in bed yesterday, the one who was open and which Draco would probably call the “real” Harry.

It was the first time Harry could remember that he’d lost conscious control of a persona when he hadn’t been under great stress.

No, he thought then, recalling the moment when his Brian disguise had shattered, at least in the eyes of Narcissa and Draco. There was no imperative for you to do that, no exhaustion or extreme grief. There was nothing to make you do that but indignation on Draco’s behalf. Draco has been the common factor in every risk you’ve taken in the past week, every slip, every near-disaster, every cracking in the mask or breaking of the disguise. He can make you do this when no other person has ever been able to.

Panic caught Harry’s lungs in an iron hand. He shivered, and then shivered again. What he really wanted was to bolt out of the house and leave everything—the rebellion, Nusante, the conflict with the Aurors, Draco’s efforts to get disowned, the sexual entanglement that had sprung up between the two of them—behind. He would return to Metamorphosis and take up a new case. It was the only solution challenging and intriguing enough to make him think about it instead of thinking about Draco. The way he cared about Draco was twisting and glittering in him like a disease or a time-delayed Imperius, controlling his actions and influencing his thoughts even when he believed he was free of it.

“Harry.” Draco’s voice had a snap to it, as if he had called Harry’s name more than once and heard no response. Harry opened his eyes and hoped fervently that that wasn’t true. It would indicate a lack of responsiveness to the real world, a vanishing into the internal turmoil he ought to have been able to still, even worse than what he’d already suffered so far. “What are we going to do about the Aurors?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough,” Harry said. “You said your potion wouldn’t leave them with any memory of the attack.”

Draco snarled a little. “No, it won’t, but you mistake my point. Someone in the Ministry will still know about the raid and remember that they’ve been sent on it. We can’t hide that this happened.”

“Yes, we can,” Harry said, surprised that Draco had taken up revolutionary politics without studying the tactics of revolutions. Elizabeth Gouldier had certainly talked about them in detail. Hadn’t Draco been listening? “We’ll go underground, that’s all. Not be as public as before. We’re going to win support still, but we’ll be doing it through rumor and art and parties targeted at that younger set we’ll be pulling most from anyway. People of your generation.”

Draco’s brow wrinkled. “And your generation, too, Harry,” he said quietly. “You’re two months younger than I am, after all.”

Harry took a deep breath to damp a spark of irrational anger. Draco kept trying to insist that Harry was in this with him, that they were, somehow, together. If that meant emphasizing the most trivial bonds they shared, Draco obviously wasn’t above doing it.

“I’m not a pure-blood,” he said, smiling at Draco. “You saw how badly my attempts to play one collapsed.” Make your weakness your strength. Convince Draco that you’re not a natural actor, and that you’re not acting now. “Anyway, we’ll make sure that the next meeting is much better protected. I have some ways that we can locate the traitor who might have told the Ministry about this.” He nodded to Draco. “Until I owl you. I need to go help Nusante organize the removal from this house and make sure no one breathed the fumes.”

He turned away, and Draco’s hand closed on his elbow like a steel wire. Harry wasn’t sure what he despised more: the panic tightening his chest up again when he knew perfectly well he was magically and physically strong enough to break free from Draco’s hold, or the longing to stand there in the hold, not resist, move closer.

I’m breaking. Pieces and pieces of my selves mixing. Why can’t they all be obedient enough to stay in their proper places?

“We still need to talk about two things,” Draco said tightly. “First of all, if no one can remember this attack, how is being at this meeting going to help me get disowned?”

Harry raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Do you think your father is going to be satisfied with the result of this raid, especially when he and Counterstrike probably instigated it? You can hint easily enough that you were here, and even that you had something to do with stopping it. Does he know about that potion you used?” Draco shook his head. “Well, drop what hints you can without revealing its existence. When a strange, powerful event centered on a Malfoy happens, I’m sure he’ll be happy to swallow the notion that you were responsible. Or I can show up in my Brian disguise if you want and talk cryptically about the raid.”

Draco simply nodded, which could have been an answer to several parts of Harry’s statement or just one of them, and then said, “The second thing is why you were late.” He turned Harry to one side and touched the bruise on the side of his neck. “Does it have something to do with this?”

Harry froze when he felt Draco’s fingers brush his neck. The immediate response was one of vulnerability, but he didn’t want to pull away to physically protect himself. Instead, he just barely kept from leaning towards Draco and begging for a deeper touch, for—

What the fuck is wrong with you? shrieked the voice of his cold Harry Potter persona. You’ve known Draco as he is for a few days. That’s not enough time to form an emotional connection of this depth and magnitude, and I don’t care how great the sex is. You’re reacting irrationally, and you’ll give up your whole life for him if you don’t watch out—at which point he’ll despise you.

That thought gave Harry the strength to yank away, easily breaking Draco’s hold on his wrist. He snarled at him, said, “How much do you really know about me? Think really hard, Draco,” and then strode towards Nusante.

He could feel Draco’s eyes on his back, but he was sure they held no understanding. He was already engaged in rebuilding his personas, putting everything back together the way it had been. Facts and memories flew around his head like a whirlwind. When he emerged from them, it was as a whole person once more.

Wonderful how easy this is to do, when I’m away from Draco.

As he smiled at Nusante and took up the helpful part of Brian Montgomery, Harry silently admitted that it would be best for his own sake, as well as for Draco’s and Narcissa’s, if the connection between them was severed.

*

Draco stared after Harry. The way he had behaved in the last few moments had been extremely—strange. It was true that he might be motivated by the desire to leave the manor house before Ministry reinforcements arrived, but he had been abrupt and too forceful, when he could have made his point with coldness and tact and had Draco believe him completely. And Harry was too knowing of both pure-blood behavior in general and Draco’s behavior in particular to make a mistake like that.

A conscious mistake, at least.

Just as he was too good with Transfiguration to leave a bruise like that on his neck.

Draco’s eyes narrowed. Deliberate. It was deliberate. It has to be.

I don’t know what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, but no matter how far or fast he runs, I’m not going to forget him or let him go.

Draco was smiling a little as he Summoned the vial the potion had filled, just to make sure he wouldn’t leave any traces behind for the Ministry Potions experts. He’s slipping. He doesn’t really want to leave me, I think, even as he seems to be aiming at that end.

At this rate, I won’t have to beg or drag his secret from him. He’ll end up confessing it to me of his own free will.

Not that a little—encouragement—will hurt.

Chapter 23.