Title: The Best Aurors in the Department

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: ~3400

Challenge: for incinerapture

Keywords: iPhone, water, purple
Dialogue: "It's too early."

Summary: Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are the best Aurors in the Department, but even they don't usually bring in traumatized prisoners muttering through their own drool. It's up to Minister Kingsley Shacklebolt to get to the bottom of this.

Author's Notes: Unbeta-ed, sorry. Warnings for profanity, violence, and implied sex.

The Best Aurors in the Department

"And you're certain you can't get any sense out of him?" Kingsley didn't mean to sound snappish, but the utterly terrified look on the face of the subordinate who had summoned him and the half-incoherent babbling the man had inflicted on him as they raced down the corridors drove him to it. At least if he sounded snappish, there was less chance that he would sound out of breath.

"None whatsoever, sir." The man paused in front of the door that opened on the holding cells where the Aurors traditionally placed their prisoners for an initial questioning, and gazed at Kingsley. There was powerful magic in the air, from defensive wards to alarm spells that were meant to snatch a wand out of an unauthorized user's hand. There had to be, to keep this part of the Ministry safe from the Dark wizards and other criminals the Aurors usually tracked. Even so, Kingsley knew it was fear that kept the man's hair standing on end, not any sympathy with the magic. "We've questioned him twice already," he said, and then paused impressively.

Kingsley would have demanded he get on with it, but the next words made him less impatient and increased his dread both at once.

"We've let Bellona at him."

Kingsley whistled under his breath. Bellona was the most experienced interrogator in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. She went into shut rooms with a small smile, and she came out with answers. She never left any marks on the prisoners she questioned. She didn't need to.

"And still nothing?" Kingsley asked.

"No, sir." The man sighed and opened the door that led to the holding cells. "Perhaps you can get something out of him, though. He might give an answer to the man who can protect him from Aurors Potter and Malfoy."

Kingsley shot him a sharp glance, but the man had already vanished down the corridor, and once again Kingsley had to follow at a brisk pace if he didn't want to be left behind. Fifty-two steps of crackling, blurred air—this much magic did odd things to the places it occupied—passed them, and then the man paused in front of a door and tapped his wand against it. An iron key materialized out of the wood and was laid solemnly in Kingsley's hand.

"Merlin go with you, sir," the man murmured, and stood back.

Frowning, Kingsley tapped his wand in the right place to summon the lock, and then went through an identification and ward-lifting process he could do in his sleep. His mind was resting more heavily on the hint that the Auror had let fall, that Potter and Malfoy had something to do with this.

Kingsley had warned them against what would happen if they let their newfound relationship disrupt their work. And it sounded as if that was what had happened. If Potter, for example, had used more force than necessary on a criminal because he thought the man might hurt Malfoy…

Kingsley exhaled hard. He'd discipline them, break them apart if necessary. He wouldn't have any choice.

He stepped into the cell, and found the prisoner curled on the floor, crying. He was at least sixty years old, to judge by the mangled beard that he was chewing on and the ash-grey color of the hair hanging in his face, clumped by bogies and tears. That only made his condition all the more disturbing.

Never taking his eyes away—this was still a Dark wizard, after all, and Kingsley was not about to discount the possibility that this was meant as a trick—he Summoned the file that would remind him who this man was and exactly what he had done. He read through it once, and then nodded in satisfaction. The man's name was Emmet Gascoigne, and he'd been casting spells on Muggle artifacts that turned them into "harmless, fascinating" toys which then harmed Muggles. His case had originated in Misuse of Muggle Artifacts, but when the spells turned Dark and deadly, that Office had gladly handed the job of tracking and arresting him over to the Aurors. He had killed someone with something called an iPhone, enchanted so that more of the Muggle's mental and emotional essence passed into the device after each use, ultimately leaving her an empty, soulless shell in a way that mimicked the Dementor's Kiss.

Kingsley knelt until he was on Gascoigne's level. "You have two minutes to tell me why what happened to you isn't a fitting punishment for what you've done," he said sternly.

Gascoigne stopped crying and stared hard at him through a maze of tears. Kingsley felt a moment's relieved disgust. They tried everything they could to get the truth out of him, indeed—

"Can you protect me from them?" Gascoigne whispered, and his voice took on a pathetic eagerness. "I'll confess to whatever you want me to, honest! I'll go to Azkaban! I'll do anything, anything, to put a wall between me and those lunatics!" He hugged his shoulders and began to rock back and forth.

"You'll have to tell me what they did to you, first." Kingsley could feel himself moving, reluctantly, towards a conviction of his Aurors' non-innocence. They had done something to frighten Gascoigne this badly, and it didn't sound as if Dark magic or the taint it left on one's soul scared him, so it must have been something extreme.

"I'll do better than that. I'll show you. You can have my memory, if you have a Pensieve about." Gascoigne laughed, a sudden, despairing sound. "It'll be worth it to have the images out of my head for an hour or two anyway. And their words!" Shuddering, he buried his head in his hands.

Keeping a wary eye and wand on the prisoner, Kingsley stood and called for a Pensieve.

The first thing Kingsley noticed when he plunged into the Pensieve memory was the steam. He frowned, wondering for a moment if Potter and Malfoy had tracked Gascoigne to one of the private baths in the Roman mode that some wizards and witches operated around Diagon Alley.

And then a purple pinwheel flew past his head, and Kingsley ducked automatically even though he remembered it was a memory, and he decided that the steam was probably the result of prior spells. The memory had begun where Gascoigne had heard the voices.

"See if I ever sleep with you again!"

Kingsley blinked and stepped sideways to be out of the way as a panicked Gascoigne pelted past him. He realized in a moment that there was no way out of the blind alley and turned, his wand steady in his hand and his eyes filled with the desperate look of a hunted creature. Unwillingly, Kingsley's respect for Potter and Malfoy increased. He wouldn't have wanted to approach someone as cool as Gascoigne looked right now, much less try and reduce him to the sobbing creature Kingsley had met in the cells.

"And why would you think I'd want to?" That was Malfoy's voice, slippery as the stone underfoot, which meant the first voice must have been Potter—though, distorted with rage, it hadn't sounded like his. "You couldn't get your leg around a spavined unicorn who was attracted to non-virgins."

Potter snarled wordlessly. Gascoigne pointed his wand towards the sound, causing Kingsley to tense, but a soundless red burst of light leaped out of the steam to his left, grabbed his wand, and slapped him on the cheek with it. Gascoigne lifted his hand to the stinging welt as if he weren't certain what had happened, then made a tentative grab for his wand. The red light smacked him across the lips with the handle.

"Admit it, Potter," Malfoy said, teasing, goading. Kingsley listened intently, but he couldn't hear their footsteps even on the wet stone. They must have taken at least some of the lessons in Stealth and Tracking seriously, instead of constantly eye-fucking each other across the room; he couldn't see them, either. "That's the real reason you haven't bottomed before. You're so clumsy you knew you would scrape your partner's eyes out with your toenails."

"You prick—" The air shimmered and turned into several silver clouds the size of Muggle bowling balls, which flew towards Malfoy's voice. Kingsley heard the man laugh breathlessly. A moment later, the ball-shapes burst apart like dandelion pods scattering their seeds.

"Temper, temper, Potter. Just for that, I'm not going to cast the healing spell on your arse that I promised."

"Oh, that's a lack I'm going to feel." Potter's voice was low, grating. "Considering I barely felt anything go up there in the first place."

Malfoy yowled like a stepped-on cat. Gascoigne snatched for his wand with a small smirk on his face, seeming confident that his pursuers were utterly distracted with their own row. Kingsley blinked to see the wand poke abruptly into the soft skin at Gascoigne's throat and hold him there. He wouldn't have thought that Malfoy could muster the strength to keep the red light spell, whatever it was, stationary whilst he argued with Potter. Perhaps there had been some low scores reported on the Strength and Development Exams. Lord knew Malfoy had enemies in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, still—

A cascade of boiling water traveled past Kingsley's nose, and made Gascoigne flinch. It vanished in Potter's direction. Potter hissed in the next moment, the way Kingsley himself had adopted when chasing Dark wizards in the field and wanting to avoid letting them know that he was in pain.

But apparently Potter wouldn't give his partner the satisfaction of knowing how hurt he was, either, because he was talking again in the next instant, voice crackling with self-satisfaction. "You want to know the real reason I don't bottom, Malfoy?" Two sharp arrowheads of green appeared in the steam, thrummed for a moment, and then vanished. Malfoy yowled again, which seemed to indicate they'd found their target. "Because I've never found anyone who can give me half the pleasure that I can give someone when I top, so I'm reduced to toys and fantasy lovers. Don't worry, you're not going to penetrate those exalted ranks any time soon."

"You enjoyed yourself, I know you did." Malfoy's voice was surprisingly ragged. Of course, Kingsley thought, as Gascoigne made another grab for his wand and this time it jabbed hard enough into his larynx to reduce him to choking sounds, that could be from the pain he was probably in by now, or the effort of holding the spell that cornered Gascoigne steady.

"I didn't come." Potter sounded smug and outraged at the same time, a bad combination for him and anyone else in the area. Abruptly, a quick tap-dance sounded out of the steam; Kingsley reckoned Malfoy had sent a spell after Potter that he couldn't see from this angle. "You might have noticed that, if you hadn't been so busy grunting and rocking your way into oblivion. But then, you barely notice anything in the midst of sex, do you? Certainly not anyone else's pleasure. Certainly not half-formed questions on lips. Certainly not—"

Malfoy interrupted him with a wordless cry, and then a spell Kingsley could only make out the shadow of, but which brought several near-soundless gasps from Potter. He caught a glimpse of a silhouette for a moment: Potter, he decided, bent over with his arms wrapped around his gut. Then the steam closed in and took it away again.

Kingsley was beginning to experience a queasy feeling, and understand a bit of Gascoigne's terror. These were all extremely sophisticated spells, the kind Kingsley would not try without hours of preparation, and they were being done all at once and nonverbally, in tandem with the exchange of angry words and the magic that held Gascoigne prisoner and kept the steam rising. Yes, Potter and Malfoy were the best Aurors in the Department, and at the moment, it was easy to see why.

"If you would once understand why I do that—" A series of spells like smoke-rings, except that they landed near Potter with the clang of iron. The spell holding the wand on Gascoigne caused it to spew ropes that wrapped around his limbs.

"If you would once take heed of someone else—" Potter had evidently escaped the iron, and he sent back several dazzling forks of lightning at Malfoy.

"I did want to take care of you—" A shield splintered the lightning and caused it to boil away as harmlessly as the steam.

"Rubbish—"

"Listen!" Malfoy was shouting now, the tone of his voice entirely at odds with the words emerging from his lips. "I made a mistake, and I was wrong, and I'm sorry! But you didn't exactly enter me painlessly our first time, either."

Ringing silence from Potter's direction. The loudest sound right now, Kingsley thought, trying his best to be clinical in the midst of the flying residue of spells and the unwanted details about his Aurors' sex lives, was Gascoigne's whimpers as he hung upside-down in the grip of the ropes. Kingsley hadn't known it was possible to use someone else's wand to cast Incarcerous, either, at least not without touching it.

"I didn't promise it would be painless, either." Potter sounded sullen, but he had lowered his voice. Kingsley hoped that might mean the end of the row was coming. "I don't make promises I can't keep. I told you the truth, and that's why you grew to like bottoming. I just thought you preferred to continue the way we'd got used to, that was all."

"So my hints of wanting to try a different position meant nothing, did they?" Malfoy sounded like a viper slithering its way up the walls, or maybe that was the next spell he cast. Kingsley caught the edge of a vast, spoked orange wheel that made him glad he couldn't see the magic more clearly. "I reckon you think that I ask to top for fun. You would all but pat me on the head when I suggested it."

"I patted you elsewhere," Potter corrected. "And you liked it."

This time, Kingsley saw one of them move, in a leaping, cat-like motion; he thought it was Malfoy, because he was fairly certain Potter had been standing in that direction, but the steam was still writhing around and confusing his senses. Gascoigne had closed his eyes and was moving his lips in what might have been prayer as the ropes tightened. Kingsley found it hard to blame him.

"If you listen to me," said Malfoy, from what was definitely closer, unless they had enchanted the mist to play tricks on Kingsley as well as Gascoigne, "then maybe I'll listen to you. I have wanted to top, for a long time, and because you seemed to get so much pleasure out of it."

"If you're going to tell me you didn't enjoy yourself when it was your turn to bottom—" Kingsley had never heard the same amount of outrage and desperate, wounded pride as were mixed into Potter's voice at the moment.

"I did," said Malfoy, and his voice had softened. "But the best pleasure palls in time, if it's never varied." A puff of red smoke rose as he spoke the word "palls"; Potter laughed, and Kingsley saw the sweep of an arm that might be his blocking the spell. Malfoy sighed a little, and then spoke on as if he had never interrupted himself. "So I asked for variation. And then you gave in with bad grace."

"Well, that's a match for your level of skill at topping," Potter retorted, and Kingsley heard a sound like the snarl of a great cat. For a moment, a shadow that was definitely not human flickered past him. Gascoigne's prayers surged into the audible range.

"No one can be perfect the first time—"

"But it doesn't need to feel as though someone's shoving a stick up your arse—"

"Funny, from the way you've behaved today I imagine it would have been company for the one you have up there already—"

Their voices hushed suddenly, and Kingsley wondered if they'd remembered their audience. But no. Instead, a series of wet sounds came through the steam, and then soft moans, and then Potter's panted murmur, "Damn it, I never could resist you when you were yelling into my face."

From Malfoy, a wordless growl, and more loud noises. Kingsley rolled his eyes and hoped the steam wouldn't dissipate, though that was rather pointless, since this was a memory and whatever was going to happen had already happened. Perhaps the sight of Malfoy and Potter coupling had been what caused Gascoigne to become practically catatonic.

"I'm topping this time," gasped Potter.

"No, I am."

"Why don't we make it a contest?" The spark of challenge had entered Potter's voice, and Kingsley could picture the expression on his face perfectly. It was the way he had looked the first day Malfoy was introduced to him as his new partner: frustrated and ready to overcome that frustration by any means possible. "The one who can scare Gascoigne the most wins the right."

"You're on," Malfoy said, and together they emerged from the mist and walked straight towards Gascoigne.

Potter had several odd burns around his eyes and ears, and a swollen mouth that would have let Kingsley guess in a moment what he had been doing, if he hadn't had the evidence of his ears. Malfoy's hair was wildly disordered and burned away on the left side. For all that, they both wore intent, predatory expressions that caused Gascoigne to twitch in his ropes.

Potter held his wand out and raised an eyebrow. Small, serrated blades at once began to grow out of the ropes, curving in towards the terrified man like teeth from the mouth of a shark. Gascoigne closed his eyes and tried to twist his arms over his head, which made some of the blades cut him. His face grew white as the blood flowed over his skin, and Kingsley felt a stab of pity as well as one of annoyance. Yes, he would need to talk to Potter. The magic he was using was not Dark, any more than the simple conjuring of a knife to aid in cooking was, but an Auror was supposed to keep to the spirit and not just the letter of the law.

Malfoy watched Potter's efforts with a faint, contemptuous smile. Then he leaned closer to Gascoigne and waited until the man opened his eyes and stared at him through runnels of sweat and blood.

"They lied, you know," he whispered. "We're not actually the best Aurors in the Department. We're the weakest."

Gascoigne stared at him for some moments, his face growing paler and paler. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he began to gibber.

"You win," Potter said, with disbelief in his eyes and a curl to his lips that suggested to Kingsley he wasn't so displeased as his expression might suggest.

Malfoy leaned towards Potter, eyelashes almost fluttering. "I promise to be careful of your sore arse, Potter."

And there the memory ended.

Carefully, Kingsley pulled his head from the Pensieve and stood staring down at it for some moments. He pondered what punishment to assign to Aurors Potter and Malfoy. They had been playing a dangerous game, launching spells at

each other when they were supposed to be capturing a dangerous criminal. And their relationship was getting in the way of their work, just as he had foreseen that it would.

On the other hand—

"It's too early," he murmured to himself. Potter and Malfoy had only been working together for five months, and shagging for a shorter time than that. Kingsley had the feeling that he'd barely seen what they could do.

And Gascoigne was a Dark wizard, responsible for the loss of at least one person's soul. He didn't deserve death or to be tortured, but he might deserve not much short of that.

In the end, Kingsley left the isolated room where he had viewed the Pensieve with arrangements made for Gascoigne's trial and a satisfied smile hovering around his mouth. He would write a letter to Potter and Malfoy, lightly reprimanding them for their contact and praising them at the same time, so that they wouldn't be sure how much the Minister knew and how he had found it out. It was best to keep a hold on them if he could, and encourage them to be respectful.

After all, they were the best Aurors in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and Kingsley would just as soon that they not have any grudge against him.

End.