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Chapter Three—Anger

"I do know what's making everyone act this way, Potter."

Harry, his attention on the sandwich he was making, jumped, but didn't give Malfoy the satisfaction of turning around. He simply nodded and tucked a slice of bread on top of the cheese. "Yes. Fear and paranoia and the desire to pay the Death Eaters back for what they suffered, or think they suffered, during the war." He slammed the bread down with a flourish and turned, finally. Malfoy was leaning against the doorway of the kitchen, his eyes still holding the feverish intensity Harry had seen in them when he'd touched his scars. But he had on a shirt now.

Harry was glad. Already he was starting to feel embarrassed about what he'd said to Malfoy in his bedroom, and the way he'd touched the scars without even asking permission. Malfoy had probably had enough of people putting their hands all over his body without giving him the chance to defend himself.

And he was losing the high intensity of that moment, even though Malfoy seemed to have retained it. His days of being a hero were past. He had felt strong and powerful with his hand on Malfoy's heart, as if he could change the whole course of the Ministry, but Malfoy only wanted vengeance on his captors, who were probably Death Eaters anyway. That was all Harry had promised to help him with.

"More than that." Malfoy came further into the room, on silent feet. He looked infinitely alien in Harry's kitchen, throwing the patched tile and half-painted cupboards into sharp relief. "You never wondered why everyone suddenly seemed to fall in love with terror after the war? You never wondered why everyone you know joined in, with not one person protesting or holding back, if only for the notoriety of it?"

"I didn't wonder that," Harry said. He became aware that he was holding the plate in such a way that the sandwich would probably slide off it and splatter on the floor in a minute, and so he slid it back onto the counter, using that as an excuse to break Malfoy's hypnotic gaze. "I wondered if something was wrong with me, for noticing and trying to protest in the first place."

Malfoy halted behind him, and then his hands came to rest on Harry's shoulders. Harry held himself rigid. Malfoy's fingers were hooked, as if he would rip flesh from Harry's back to match the scars on his own. His breath in Harry's ear was as hot as air shut up inside a tomb.

"I know why," Malfoy whispered. "That's the knowledge my captors didn't want me to have, the thing they were laughing over. Every now and then, a Dark magical artifact with the power to sway the minds of many people at once gets loose. It encourages a common delusion, feeds on and fosters it until it spreads from mind to mind like a plague. The only people who escape are the ones persecuted by the infected—always a minority. This artifact was behind the centaur persecutions in the fourteenth century, and some of the witch-hunts, and even one or two of the worse Muggle revolutions. The moment my captors mentioned it by name, I was stunned that I hadn't recognized its effects myself."

Harry forced himself to straighten and move out from under Malfoy's touch, down the counter to where he'd put a glass of butterbeer. He sipped from it, staring determinedly at the window in the opposite wall. That showed him a blurred reflection of Malfoy. He lowered his eyes and coughed. "Your theory has one problem," he said. "I'm not part of the persecuted minority, and I didn't have my mind infected by someone else."

"This particular artifact," said Malfoy, his tone so low he might have been speaking to a lover, "takes a charisma focus."

Harry raised an eyebrow and stared at the reflection in the window again. "Congratulations," he said. "I have no idea what the bloody fuck that means."

Malfoy took two strides towards him and whipped him around. Harry found himself far too close to that presence that thrilled him and shamed him and dragged him out of the blinding darkness and towards the blinding light. He would have loved to close one hand into a fist, but that would result in him breaking the glass or punching Malfoy, one of the two.

"You should have studied better," Malfoy whispered. He doesn't have to bloody whisper all the time, Harry thought, uneasy emotions racing through him and colliding and falling back like waves clashing around a rock. "A charisma focus means that the artifact latches on to one particular person and convinces the people under its spell that they're doing everything they do in his name. A leader—a priest—a hero. The focus himself isn't affected by the spell, but since it's usually his principles the victims are touting, he often goes along with it to some extent." His gaze speared Harry.

Harry couldn't even growl under his breath, the way he would have liked to, because Malfoy was partially right. "Who cast the spell? If it was the Death Eaters, that was stupid of them—"

"No," Malfoy said. "No one had to cast it. The artifact is sentient, Potter. Once someone digs it up, it begins to exert its influence on that person, and from there it can spread as I told you."

"What is it called, then?" Harry managed to wrench his eyes away at last and wiped his mouth free of a film of butterbeer with the back of his hand. He was disgusted to see that his fingers were shaking.

"The Troublestone. It's a huge sapphire, with the propensity to teleport itself. When its hold is broken, either because its focus dies or because someone outside the range of its influence notices what's happening and tries to destroy it, it takes itself somewhere else, into a hidden vault or crypt. Then it waits for someone to find it, and to begin the cycle again." Malfoy's eyes flashed. "I won't be content with sending it somewhere else. I want to smash it."

Harry eyed him. "And you overheard how to do that, as well?"

"Don't be ridiculous. They would have destroyed it themselves if they knew how." Draco's lips drew back to show his teeth. "They were Death Eaters, yes, as you might have reckoned by now from my mention of the pure-blood manor and what they did to me. Your side hasn't gone quite that far. Not yet."

"Then how will you smash it?" Harry asked, determined not to be side-tracked for the moment, though he did wonder exactly what Malfoy's quest was. Smash the Troublestone, take revenge on the people who had tortured him, break the power of the Ministry so he didn't have to live in fear anymore—that was all a bit much for one man who could barely walk and one broken-down hero to do by themselves.

"How will we smash it?" Malfoy leaned forwards, staring deeply into his eyes, and that was unnerving.

"I asked you the question first," Harry countered, staring back.

Malfoy gave a sharp bark of laughter and stepped away from the counter, letting Harry have room to move and breathe again. "Good," he said. "Simply making sure you'll keep your promises." One of his hands wandered out and closed on Harry's arm, squeezing, until Harry winced. Malfoy didn't seem to notice. "Now. I need to get a look at the Troublestone, if at all possible."

"There's wards on the Ministry to track anyone with interdicted blood who appears there," Harry said quietly.

"Interdicted blood?" Malfoy swung back in close again, and wasn't torture supposed to give people a fear of that? "I thought your side was always saying there was no different between pure blood and Muggle blood. Such a spell ought to be impossible."

"It's tied to specific bloodlines," Harry said. "Genetic codes." He looked at Malfoy and found his blank expression satisfying. At least there was one arena of life in which the smarmy git's experience was not equal to Harry's and Hermione's. "It would identify you because you were a Malfoy, not because you were a pure-blood," he explained. "There's no way you can go into the Ministry."

"How kind of them," Malfoy muttered, but didn't explain what he meant, or give Harry a chance to demand an explanation. "I know I can't go into the Ministry. You're to go yourself. You'll bring back Pensieve memories for me to look at."

"I don't have a Pensieve."

"You're telling me the Chosen One can't acquire whatever he wants, whenever he asks for it?"

Harry flushed. People had offered him all sorts of things in the last year, from powerful magical artifacts (including the Sword of Gryffindor) to their children and their naked bodies. But he hadn't felt right asking for anything, not when he saw that he couldn't get everyone's bizarre behavior to stop. His conscience said it wasn't right to demand personal favors when he couldn't demand the one thing that would be best for the wizarding world.

"Yes, all right, I'll ask for a Pensieve," he said.

"Not so easy to be a hero when someone's clamoring at your heels ordering you to do it, is it?" For a moment, Malfoy's eyes were far away, and Harry wondered if he was seeing their sixth year at Hogwarts or something that had happened since, something Harry hadn't a clue about.

He took a deep breath to blow away the sudden curiosity clogging his throat, and said, "I still don't know where the Troublestone would be likely to be."

Malfoy tilted his head, eyes shut as he bit so fiercely at his bottom lip that he drew blood. Harry raised a hand instinctively to catch his jaw and try to stop the motion, and then dropped it again, flushing. Bloody hell, he had strange reactions around Malfoy. He couldn't remember swinging so wildly from one mood to another since he broke up with Ginny, for one thing.

"Based on its history," Malfoy muttered, "it will seek a center of power, a room or place that symbolizes ownership. It prefers to influence legal authorities, so it would be more likely to appear in, say, a council chamber than the house of a Dark Lord. And it would have to be somewhere out of the common way, or it would have to deal with people not under the spell seeing it." He opened his eyes. "It also prefers to choose a place which matters to its charisma focus, but I don't know if that applies in this case, or you'd think it would have chosen somewhere in Hogwarts."

Harry caught his breath as if a punch had driven it out of him. He'd been eliminating possibilities in his mind as Malfoy spoke, and that last sentence had cut the choices down to one.

"I know where the Troublestone is," he said.

Malfoy didn't question him, but once again caught and squeezed his arm until the tendon pressed to bone and Harry winced. He didn't apologize, either.

Harry put his chin up and strode down the corridor, trying to look as if he had business in this part of the Ministry. He realized a moment later that he needn't have worried. Everyone looked at him as if he did have business in this part of the Ministry, and faded quietly out of the way. Some of them even called soft good-luck wishes after him.

God, they don't know what I'm doing, it could have been anything, Harry thought in disgust, and then shook his head. That was the whole point of the Troublestone's charisma focus, as Malfoy had pointed out to him a few hours ago. The leader whose "wishes" the stone's victims fulfilled had to go unquestioned, or it was possible that some people would resist the spell or manage to awaken from it once infected.

Harry took a deep breath and laid a hand on the door of the Wizengamot courtroom where he had been tried five years ago for underage magic. He paused, but he could only feel the general glow of magic that seemed to infest the Ministry lately, from Apparition-detecting spells to countercurses against obscure Dark Arts no Death Eater had ever tried to employ. He opened the door and stepped inside.

The difference of magic when the door was open was immense, and he could only guess it had something to do with the spells already wound into the Ministry's walls, or perhaps an innate protective measure from the stone itself. Waves of rushing power poured across him, making every hair on his body rise and his legs tremble as if they couldn't hold him any longer. Harry pushed his back against the door and fought to take, and keep taking, long breaths. He wasn't about to let a stone defeat him.

Even if it was a dark blue sapphire the size of Voldemort seated on a throne, with gleaming facets that looked as sharp as obsidian.

When he thought he could keep his feet instead of groveling before the stone, Harry took a single step forwards. The stone vibrated and quivered. Harry froze before he realized that only the dance of light along its facets had changed; if it was aware of his intrusion, he didn't see any sign of it. Malfoy had said it was sentient, yes, but that didn't mean it was intelligent on the same level as humans.

Well. There it is.

Harry stared at the sapphire, and once again a wave of weariness washed over him. What was this going to prove? Malfoy could show the Pensieve images to any number of people, and if they were under the thrall of the Troublestone, they wouldn't react. Or, well, they wouldn't react at best. At worst, the sapphire would marshal them to defend itself, and Malfoy would be tortured again. And if it was former Death Eaters who had inflicted all those scars on him, Harry didn't think the other side united enough to make an effective stand against the Troublestone.

But Malfoy had told him to get a good look at the Troublestone, and so Harry wandered in circles around the Wizengamot courtroom, obediently peering into corners so that he would be able to put a detailed plan of the room into the Pensieve. The sapphire rested near the chair in which he'd once sat to face Umbridge and Fudge and all the other people who hated him for telling the truth about Voledemort, and probably for being alive.

Harry shivered with the force of his anger for a moment, and then sighed. What did it matter? Fudge was dead, killed by Fenrir Greyback after the war in futile revenge—that had been what started the intense persecution of werewolves—and Umbridge sent to Azkaban long ago.

What did anything matter?

The sapphire sparkled and trembled before him, shining with its own internal light. So keen were the vibrations that it could have risen from the ground, and Harry wouldn't have been surprised.

He wasn't going to be able to achieve what he wanted. He should go back and turn Malfoy in, really. He couldn't make a difference in the world in the way he thought was morally right, so why take on the extra bother of protecting a fugitive who had done plenty of horrible things in his time? Who had almost killed both Katie Bell and Harry's best friend in their sixth year at Hogwarts, and had made things harder than they had to be in the Room of Requirement during the war?

Harry froze. He couldn't remember when he had shut his eyes, but he stood now without trying to open them, listening to his own breathing, calm and cool.

What's happening to me?

He had given in to despair in the past, but never despair that would hurt someone else. When he had thought Ron or Hermione showed signs of coming out of the trance of revenge that consumed them and the rest of the wizarding world, he had stood by them, protected them from people who disparaged their ideas, and tried to encourage them.

The encouragements had always failed.

But he had not abandoned them. Not for any reason would he abandon someone who needed him, since there seemed to so few people in the wizarding world who actually did. These thoughts about abandoning Draco were foreign ones, being pressed into his mind like fingers into a snowbank.

Harry backed up, his breathing coming faster now, his eyes open and fixed on the stone. The light flickered over its surface like darting fairies at Christmas, and then calmed. Now the Troublestone was quiescent as it had ever been.

Nevertheless, Harry was sure it had tried to clutch at his mind. Why, he didn't know, because Draco had told him that the charisma focus was the one person not affected by the spell. But it had happened anyway. And he could feel the sensation better now, sharper and colder than he had realized, slicing his own thoughts to pieces. It felt like Legilimency.

A new, deeper rage bloomed in him. After he had finally managed to push Voldemort out of his head for good by dying and losing the bit of soul that made him a Horcrux, he had sworn he would never allow anyone to invade his mind again. That vow had gone by the way in the last few months, as had everything else, mostly because no one had tried to invade his mind. But now—

Now it was personal, and now he no longer wanted to get rid of the Troublestone merely to help Malfoy or free his friends.

He glared at the stone, stepped out of the courtroom, and walked back to the Auror Office. Some of the people who saw him pass were the same ones who must have heard by now that he'd planned to take a few days off, but even they never questioned him. Gazes full of wide-eyed respect and adoration followed him, and one witch actually fainted when she caught the edge of his scowl.

But now Harry knew they didn't have a choice about feeling those emotions. The Troublestone had chosen to make them feel them, because that was its way of fucking up the wizarding world in general and Harry's life in particular.

Harry snarled and walked faster.

Harry had asked Kingsley for a Pensieve, and of course he'd been granted one. He'd put the memories in it for Malfoy. Malfoy bent his head over the silvery liquid without a word when Harry gave the Pensieve to him and submerged himself in it. So Harry went into another room to pace and fume and try to work out his anger.

He wasn't succeeding.

God, couldn't he get any peace? Couldn't the people who had fought so hard during the war get any peace? Harry imagined Ron and Hermione waking up in a month, or a week, or however long it would take him and Malfoy to make the Troublestone move on—despite Malfoy's optimism, Harry didn't think they'd manage to destroy it—and looking with clear eyes at what they'd done. They'd despise themselves. Hermione in particular; she had encouraged the registration of werewolves and the "management" of house-elves who'd served some of the accused. That should have been his first clue that something was deeply wrong.

Harry paced faster and faster through his drawing room, then whipped around and hurled a curse at an ivory music box on a delicate carved table, both of them accepted in the days when the expression of disappointment on the face of one of his admirers still cut him too deeply to let him refuse gifts. The music box blasted into shards. The table, cut neatly into three pieces, tumbled to the floor and lay there smoking. Harry snapped, "Stop," at the small blaze that was spreading onto the carpet, and it did. He barely realized he'd used wandless magic to prevent the fire from spreading.

He was furious.

He'd forgotten how it felt to have an emotion this strong and clean roaring through him. Or maybe not clean, because it was carrying the accumulated muck of the last year, the pain and horror he'd felt when he first began to realize what was happening. But it filled him with energy again, and he no longer fought to control the trembling of his muscles and the jumping of his magic—or only enough to ensure that he didn't destroy his flat—but rejoiced in the fact that he had power enough to punish his enemies.

If he could. He hoped that Malfoy really did know a way to destroy the Troublestone. If he didn't, then Harry would have to find out what pure-blood family was likely to have basilisks carved into the walls of its dungeons. He had to take revenge on someone, and Malfoy's scars ignited his rage as much as the memory of his mind being tampered with.

"Potter."

Harry swung around, every muscle tense, ready to lash out on general principles. But it was Malfoy standing in the entrance of his bedroom, regarding him with a steady, unflickering gaze, and something like approval.

"I've studied the defenses on the stone," said Malfoy. "I'm sure we can get to it. And then we can destroy it." A manic smile lit his face. Harry thought he might have found it disturbing four hours ago. Now he felt a thrill of heat stab down from his throat to his groin.

"Good," Harry said. "But how are we going to do that?"

Malfoy laughed softly. "If I were to tell you right now, you would probably charge off and try to do it on your own," he said. "It'll need to wait until I'm recovered first, so I can go with you." His smile widened, and he stared over Harry's shoulder at the wall, his fingers flexing open and shut.

"The wards on the Ministry that detect the Malfoy bloodline—"

"We'll find some way around them." Malfoy's voice was too casual for Harry's liking, but he had a different question to ask.

"The stone managed to make me consider giving you up." At the moment, nothing was more unthinkable than that, with the way Malfoy had a faint, eager flush working its way up over his cheeks, but Harry didn't see that that last observation had to be shared with the object of it. "I thought you said it couldn't affect its charisma focus."

"Not in the same way it influences everyone else, with that spell that drives them mad," Malfoy said calmly. "And it doesn't want to kill you, because its power ends if you're dead. But it can make you consider not fighting it. It can try to drown your horror in apathy, your rage in despair." He arched an eyebrow. "Sound familiar?"

Harry began to steadily swear, words he had learned from Snape and words that he'd heard Dudley use when his parents were away. Saying this many crude words in a row wasn't something he'd ever done before; Hermione would intervene with pleas for him to stop before he got that far. But it felt good, and Malfoy stood listening to him with evident pleasure.

"I'm so angry," Harry whispered at last, when the last curse had escaped from his lips, leaving them raw and his throat aching and his emotions only a little subdued.

"Good." Malfoy's voice was thick and low. "I like you angry."

Harry snapped his head up. There was something—off—about the intensity in Malfoy's voice, and about the greedy way in which he surveyed Harry now. No, the proprietary way, Harry thought.

"That will make it easier to destroy the stone," Malfoy explained, not seeming to notice Harry's increased scrutiny.

Harry licked his lips. He had no plans to be suspicious of Malfoy at this point, because he had correctly predicted the involvement of the Troublestone and he was the only person Harry knew who was willing to destroy it.

But it might not hurt to keep an eye on him.

"Yes," he said.

Malfoy's eyes shone with that fever-like heat again, and Harry wondered if he would so resent it if Malfoy had ulterior motives.

He lowered his eyes and frowned a moment later. Some new emotion was stirring in him, thick and complex and many-edged as the light that had flickered around the Troublestone. He couldn't tell what it was, and that worried him.

But at least it's new.