Recast 1/2
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Mention of violent death?
Word count: 18,406
Summary: Epilogue compliant. Draco works in the Pensieve Archive and is beginning to get over his divorce. His life is disturbed when a serial killer strikes the Wizarding world and seems to have a particular interest in Draco. Somehow it all stirs up his Potter issues. Written for hds_beltane.
Draco had his eyes shut when the cavalry arrived. He heard them, though, and the routine phrases that meant arrest. They’d live, happy ending, the allegorical basilisk had been slain. First, he kept his eyes shut as he gave himself up to the relief crashing though him, making his knees weaker than the fear had. Then the bitterness seeped in. Too late now. No heroics from Draco, no tapping of that resource he had spurts of belief in, no mastering the situation with the strength of his will or magic.
“Malfoy? Malfoy?” asked Potter. Draco didn’t open his eyes until Potter stumbled over a bone on the floor, which cracked beneath his foot.
“I know, it’s all over,” Draco snapped.
“Neither of you two too traumatised?” Weasley called. “Let’s get back to the Ministry and get this whole business over with so we can celebrate.”
Even as he spoke, Aurors were drifting out of the innermost Chamber of Secrets, among them the Aurors gripping the murderer, now bound, by the arms.
“You okay, Malfoy?” asked Potter. He looked for some reason more luminous and large than usual. Draco managed to stop staring blankly and tried to look alert and businesslike. When Potter turned his back Draco narrowed his eyes at it.
I’ll get you for this, he thought. “This” being the act of being Potter, which he was almost enjoying finding suddenly unreasonably incendiary. Once and for all, I’ll get you. And so the curtain fell on what would be considered the scene of Harry Potter’s greatest triumph since the death of Voldemort. It would rise again on Draco’s Revenge, Draco told himself, and to be fair, melodrama had been the keynote of the day.
*
Daphne’s death was the beginning of it for Draco, purely a family affair, though she wasn’t even his family anymore, their own personal awfulness, nothing to do with the Boy Who Lived. Except apparently, as it turned out, he’d been tangled in it before he was born. Sitting opposite Astoria with her white face telling him about it, having just stepped out of the Floo, brought home to him how much Astoria was undeniably family, even though their marriage had ended. An only child himself, when he’d wanted to take Astoria and everything belonging to her inside him in some way, some expansion had been required for a sibling relationship. The way Astoria was still quick to resent Daphne as the older sister who got to things first and devoured opportunities, leaving none for Astoria, though they’d only been a year apart. Astoria had determinedly involved herself with what Daphne did at Hogwarts, so as to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. She’d given Theo Nott money to make him, for once in his life, do something as gregarious as take her to the Yule Ball (dancing was included in the price) so she could be there like Daphne. When he’d first started seeing Astoria, Draco had had a vague idea they didn’t get on that well, but, feeling free to say something vaguely critical about Daphne, had been smacked down smartly. Astoria was one of those “I can say it but not you” defenders, not least because Daphne tenderly ignored all Astoria’s jostling and grievances: Astoria was her little sister. Which was of course again annoying. They sought success for each other, Daphne overtly, Astoria covertly, and while Astoria might indulge in traditional smearing of any too shiny surfaces in her sister’s life, she emphatically rejected and tried to chase away any real misfortune or failure.
Astoria had not been there to chase away this. “I keep wanting to talk to her about it, find her and make her be okay after being abducted and violently murdered. But she’s not there.”
Draco felt empty of things to give back to this absence. He thought about saying that, even if it wasn’t true, she must believe the damage to the body occurred after Avada Kevadra. But that, like almost anything, seemed a wrong disruption. For a moment, he thought they were married still, and tried to project the impact on their relationship, because this kind of thing didn’t go away in a hurry, leaving everything where it was. Then he remembered they’d been divorced two years, and she’d only come to him because she needed to tell someone who didn’t know, like a disease itching at her until she passed it on. And now neither of them knew what to do with it.
Though of course they had to have a funeral. Scorpius came home from Hogwarts the day before it, shocked, quiet and worried about his mother. It was in the newspapers with all the gory details, and Scorpius hadn’t had the experience of being in the same place as the news before. Draco had wanted him never to have it; he’d wanted to move on from all that messiness in his youth to the success of family life, where everything was quietly functional and Scorpius would be set on the middle of a path he couldn’t fall off of and have to try and scramble onto another. The divorce had not been what he’d had in mind, but that hadn’t made the path buck beneath them in such a suddenly jarring way.
It was hard to remember at the funeral that the people there were nothing to do with him anymore; Astoria and Daphne’s parents and Daphne’s husband, that after this he didn’t know when he’d ever have another meal with them, keeping up with their progress in “getting over it.” Daphne’s husband Robert was perhaps the nicest man Draco had ever met, and Astoria had always made a joke of pretending he was loathsome to her in various ridiculously trivial aspects, to avoid simple hearty congratulations on Daphne’s find. He didn’t seem to be doing well. It didn’t take long for Astoria to feel it impossible for him to go back to his and Daphne’s empty house and tell him he should come back with her after everyone had gone.
Draco would probably have left when most of the other attendants did, but it didn’t seem right to leave Scorpius there. He remained at the Greengrass’s house until evening, when Scorpius’s portkey back to Hogwarts activated. It didn’t seem right to send him off for weeks on such a dismal note, but then there didn’t seem much he could do about it.
*
It was less than two weeks after Daphne died when it happened again. Not to anyone in Draco’s orbit, which he could not give enough thanks for. A wizard this time, someone he’d never heard of before his dying made the news because, apart from anything else, the Muggles found the body on the steps to his home first, and extensive Obliviation was required so that Joe Aveling did not make the Muggle news as well. Daphne Greengrass-Lyte was no longer so lonely, so exceptionally unfortunate; her name had Joe Aveling for company. From disgustedly begrudging every mention made in the Daily Prophet of Daphne’s murder, Astoria went to eagerly following the coverage on Joe Aveling. Draco wasn’t sure what she was getting out of it, though, as he pointed out, surely the more crimes committed, the more likely that the perpetrator would be caught.
“Yes. Though there’s no Dementors,” said Astoria.
*
“So you’ve seen her?” asked Theo later. Draco often had lunch with him in Diagon Alley - Theo had a bookshop in Knockturn Alley.
“Yes, a couple of times. I think she has to keep getting breathers from Robert,” said Draco.
“You know, this is the kind of time when people break up if they’re together and get together if they’re not,” said Theo.
“Oh no. This isn’t the kind of time people get together in. And anyway...” Draco wasn’t sure he wanted to go into emotions with Theo.
“Mmm?”
“You can’t go back.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t remind you, but you used to go on about how if you had a Timeturner you’d go over your marriage however many times it took to get it right,” said Theo. The glint of curiosity in his eyes was unusual; a large part of the reason Draco confided in Theo from time to time was the way his nonchalant impassive manner seemed to absorb without trace anything he disgorged.
Draco instinctively flinched from his own words repeated back to him. The prospect of fanatically tracing the precise cause of his marriage’s failure seemed incredibly depressing now, the idea seeming to come from a painfully uncomfortable place that lay behind him, as if through a series of interlocking chambers that had grown progressively larger. He felt slightly chilled and cheered at the same time. “I think I’ve got over it. How healthy,” Draco said.
*
Draco was, in his capacity as a responsible Pensieve Archivist (Head Pensieve Archivist in the Pensieve Archive section consisting of himself and Grace), Ministry worker, and, indeed, member of the wizarding public, was bound to notice and report information that seemed important. It was doubtful he’d have experienced the same alacrity and heartfelt hope in doing so if Daphne and her family had been names in the paper to him, however. The two largest categories of memories in his custody were evidence for trials, and historical records. The Ministry had accumulated a fair amount of memories in the latter without even trying, but in the last couple of decades they had made a conscious effort to “capitalise on the most precious resource, the living memory of wizards and witches.” Draco himself, in his younger, unpromoted days, had gone round nursing homes for the wizarding elderly and the premises of various little societies for outdated interests, gathering memories of archaic robe designs, charms that had fallen out of fashion, the very last Anglo-Saxon Scorcher dragon, the pitifully unstandardised brooms in the days of artisans rather than brands, which the old people always assured him had idiosyncratic brilliance never achieved by those things churned out by geminio, old history... Draco had learnt a lot in his job, much of which he hadn’t at all appreciated at the time, but he now realised added much dimension to what he saw about him in the modern Wizarding world. He’d also realised, somewhat earlier, that if this was Wizarding culture, it wasn’t really what his parents had tried to instil in him. This, of course, was the message the Ministry was trying to convey at the same time as offering a sop to the more conventional or prejudiced sectors of Wizarding society: no bloodshed needed to preserve the true spirit of the Wizarding world!
Draco was dealing with a clutch of bottled memories to do with Seers. Divination was beginning to become a little more reputable, after decades out in the cold, and the Head of the Archive had suggested they acquire some memories of the Seers who were esteemed the last time the subject was fashionable. Draco preferred to write the catalogue entries himself, accuracy being essential, and it was necessary to not only sit through the memory several times but observe. Also, often people who needed to check facts for professional or academic purposes did not bother or were not permitted to view the memory itself, so his summing-up, inevitably tainted a little by personality, was what counted. These Seers, Draco was prepared to admit, were a tad less irritating than Professor Trelawney, but the clasped hands and the self-consciously portentous manner that sandwiched even the prophecies that later turned out to be onto something were familiar. Perhaps the fact most people would find it silly was part of the point, a screening process, Draco thought, screwing himself up to generosity. Watching memories had the potential to be as irritating as a disappointing Quidditch match, so many opportunities irrevocably not taken and mistakes made. Draco had ended up developing his empathy skills to compensate.
This was the memory of Julietta Braidwood’s daughter. Madam Braidwood was remonstrating with her daughter for sliding up the banisters when a change came over her. Draco, standing at the foot of the stairs, saw the little girl gaze at her in consternation but not panic. The sudden absence behind her mother’s face was probably something she’d seen before but wasn’t exactly used to. There was a sustained period of sharp, quick breaths and closed eyes darting in their sockets. Draco leaned on the banister post and waited for her to get on with it.
“There will be a man who is still called a boy. He is special and not special. There is someone who leaves bodies behind him. The man will follow the bodies and succeed in ending the carnage, because he is himself.”
Draco was now standing upright, head turned sharply towards Madam Braidwood. No more followed. The little girl said “Mama? Mama?” and tentatively waved a hand in front of her mother’s face. Draco was back in the Pensieve Archive.
He’d come across his grandfather once unexpectedly in someone else’s memory. There had been the same shock of personal relevance where he sought none, but this was intensified by the sense of expediency. He sent off a memo to Potter at once, and wandered around waiting, too keyed up to return to work.
“Something up?” asked Grace, looking up from labelling pensieves.
“You’ll see in a minute.”
Potter came down accompanied by Weasley and Auror Ribner. They’d obviously hurried down and were breathless and eager.
“Something about the Greengrass and Aveling cases?” Potter prompted.
Draco gestured to the pensieve on his desk. “The Greengrass and Aveling cases?” Grace repeated while the three Aurors experienced the memory.
“Wait,” said Draco. He wasn’t sure the Aurors looked excited enough.
“Well, it does sound like she’s talking about Harry,” Weasley said.
“As the Head Auror, it’s obviously my responsibility. It’s not a personal mission,” said Potter, sounding as though he was instinctively rejecting something. “Although obviously it’s good to think we’ll succeed,” he added promptly. There was the usual sense of underlying stiff effort from Potter and Weasley to maintain professional politeness, with an extra muffling from the awareness Draco was the ex-brother-in-law of one of the victims.
“Not so good to think we’ve hardly begun the trail of bodies,” said Auror Ribner.
“It’s a shame she wasn’t clearer about what I’m supposed to do about it,” Potter said, looking more anxious and awkward.
“I’d just do your job as normal and not worry about it if I was you, Auror Potter,” Grace chipped in.
“Yeah, really it’s just a prophecy that you’re going to be where you are now while this case is happening. So basically you’ve already done it,” said Weasley. Like Grace, Weasley was obviously concerned that Potter’s sensitive soul should not be burdened by another prophecy, another mission.
“Mind you pay attention to your job, then, Potter,” said Draco, something he doubted he’d have got away with in normal circumstances.
When the Aurors had gone, that funny grinding sensation of wanting to force some admission from them left him, replaced by a calmer feeling of things in their right place. Surely Astoria would like to hear that her sister’s killer would be caught, and once they were, Daphne’s death wouldn’t feel part of an ongoing story. Draco felt a guilty pang at being so eager to put her away. She’d been good during the breakup of his and Astoria’s marriage; Draco knew she’d represented him to Astoria in the same kind deciphering light in which she represented Astoria to him.
*
I wish I could do it,” said Astoria later. Draco had hesitated but felt he ought to Floo Astoria and Robert. “I wish I could see whatever leads and clues and theories the Aurors have. I have this idea the right ones would just loom out at me. I kind of wish the prophecy had been about me.”
“I guess the universe just loves giving Potter all the jobs. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be special,” Draco said.
He and Astoria’s gaze slipped glumly to Robert. Somehow, he looked as if he was trying to find a way to make the prophecy suggest the murder victims would be resurrected.
*
The next day Draco had to attend the Archive Department meeting. He had to sit through a lot of boring stuff about the other Archive sections before getting to hear the praise due to him as “a very innovative Pensieve Archivist.” Then he heard that his reward was to be a third member of staff in the Pensieve Archive, something he’d been asking about for ages.
“They managed to find the funding, then?” asked Draco. “Is the post going to be advertised or--?”
“No, there’s someone already lined up. I may as well tell you they’re a nephew of the Department Head of International Magical Cooperation. Ryan Cobbing, starting on Monday.”
Draco sighed but said nothing. A troublesome nephew, no doubt, and it wasn’t as if he’d be given any right to complain, as an ex-Death Eater who’d been given his own start in the Pensive Archive.
*
Ryan Cobbing was alright at first glance. As yet, he was in the “wouldn’t mind a no doubt ill-advised fuck with if the stars align and he swings that way” category of alright. He came in with an apologetic air that didn’t suit him, like a tall man ducking down under a low ceiling. He soon dropped it and was sitting on Grace’s desk asking lots of questions.
“Do you have memories of celebrities?” Ryan asked.
“Some, yeah. We don’t really care about them, but people send us them sometimes. Just bursting to share the time they served one of the Greymalkins or Harry Potter. If they don’t write and offer to sell for a very reasonable price, that is,” said Draco.
“So you take any memories that get submitted, then?” asked Ryan.
“Mostly,” said Grace. His puppyish enthusiasm was beginning to irk both Draco and Grace - particularly Grace, as Ryan was sitting on her desk and had taken her quill to fiddle with. He twirled it between his fingers in a peculiarly flirtatious way in between shooting glances at her, Her eyes were fixed on it, leaning away as if expecting him to chuck her under the chin with it.
“We do get some that are completely useless,” said Draco, who after all had to make sure Ryan knew what he was doing. “We’re squeamish about chucking them altogether, though; we put them in that corner and go through them every couple of years. We end up keeping too many of them, actually. On the one hand, we haven’t got infinite space; on the other, it’s easy to get sentimental about saving a particular sunset for posterity or whatever. Now that you’ve put it into my mind, that can be a first day task for you.” Draco didn’t mention that, with a dwindling but still present regularity, memories of him as a Death Eater would turn up amongst unsolicited submissions. These did not get put into the corner with memories of sunsets and anonymous people fucking and crup fights; Draco of course treated them like any other historically relevant memory. He and Grace never referred to them.
Ryan got on with the job without asking too many annoying questions and Draco could admire the sandy-gold hair at the back of his neck in idle moments.
*
A few days later, Draco came home from work to find a rather large flat rectangular parcel had been dropped by owls inside a window. He hadn’t ordered anything and there was no return address. On opening, it proved to be a picture, the glass covering it in shards, no doubt as a result of being dropped on the floor from a height by owls. Draco mended it and looked at the picture. It was a vista of rooftops on which rain was falling. The rooftops looked like ordinary London rooftops, but the light picked subtle shades of mauve, green and blue out of the shining slates. The raindrops trickled and dripped hypnotically and the picture had a calm gleam; Draco found it oddly appealing. Except, it was a mysterious picture from an unknown source, very likely designed to have some sinister effect on him. Dammit, this was not wanted to deal with when he came home. He was tempted to run some tests on it himself but he didn’t think his awakened paranoia could be quietened even he found nothing wrong with the picture; there might be something lurking about it unfound, or, worse, he could be already compromised, unfit to discern anything amiss. Some form of Imperius designed to have him commit a crime with no input of his own will could well be someone’s idea of revenge served cold. Or someone could simply be planting a Dark Object on him. Better by far to go back to the Ministry and take the picture in to the Aurors for inspection. The idea of Aurors in general still made Draco twitchy, but it was much better to be demonstrably innocent.
He tucked the picture under his arm and Floo’d back to the Ministry. Preparing himself in the lift to be a dutiful member of the wizarding community reporting anything at all suspicious, he latched onto Potter coming out of the loo by the lift.
“Oh, Potter, I’m just coming to see you - well, the Auror Department. I’ve just found this picture had been delivered to my house, and I’m a bit concerned because I didn’t buy it or anything, and there’s no clue as to the sender. And then I wondered if I was finding it too alluring for rainy rooftops.”
Harry’s head jerked up at that. “Alluring?” he asked, as if the idea of someone fancying rooftops was going through his mind and setting off alarm bells.
“Attention-getting,” Draco snapped. “It’s difficult to phrase.”
“Well, I can see why you’d be concerned to receive something with no explanation,” said Potter. He took Draco through to the Auror Department and motioned Draco to sit at his desk. “I’ll try some things; I should be able to tell one way or the other.” He took the picture into an inner office. Draco wondered if there were special instruments for detecting suspicious spells in there, or if Potter didn’t want to let Draco see what tests he used.
Draco had been encountering Potter, Weasley and Granger too from Law Enforcement for years as they came down to fetch and hand in memories for their cases, since he’d first started. They’d found it hard to deal with him normally; Weasley obviously didn’t trust himself and ignored him in favour of his colleagues even when inconvenient. This was no longer possible when Draco’s superior retired, and in any case Weasley’s ire had faded somewhat. Draco had found it hard to deal with Potter, particularly. The knowledge that they were no longer two boys at the same school and therefore in many ways on equal playing ground, that Draco was mired in infamy he could never shake off while Potter was proved once and for all a hero, destined for great things, rankled. He clenched up with burning resentment when Potter was in the same room. He had to get over it a bit when he and Potter had to speak to each other, because of the need to unclench his teeth, and because glaring at Harry Potter with narrowed eyes, too choked with resentment to hear what was said to him, was not the way to make friends and influence people.
Potter came back with the picture. “It’s a perfectly normal picture. Well, magical picture, anyway.”
“You can promise that?” asked Draco.
“I can promise you that the latest magical analysis and Dark detection methods find it to be harmless. It’s extremely unlikely that there’s something there I didn’t pick up on, but it’s your call. It’s still something you were sent mysteriously, but perhaps you’ll get some kind of explanation.”
Draco considered. “Now that I look at it again it looks a little familiar. I’m not sure...”
“It is a little familiar,” Potter pointed out. “Not that rainy rooftops are going to be unfamiliar in any case. And raindrops can be a bit hypnotic, if you’re still finding it alluring. I have to get on now so if you’d just take your picture...?”
He went off into another office before Draco could say anything.
Draco took his picture and left quickly before anyone could take too much notice of him. Home again, he left the picture on the kitchen table, where he sat down to write a TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN letter. If he died, or was otherwise involved in something strange or bad, the mysterious picture he’d received was at the bottom of it, and more particularly, Harry Potter’s incompetence as an Auror.
*
The Pensieve Archive had been given a memory containing Muggle state secrets. It was mostly a memory of two wizards having an important conversation that lead to one of them writing a very important book a decade ago, but the wizards in question were infiltrating the Muggle equivalent of the Department of Mysteries at the time, and people were talking Important Secret Business in the background. Draco sourly wondered if they’d ever got the stinging whack on the wrist they deserved for their total unconcern for things like the Statute of Secrecy and maintaining their cover, or if genius carried all before it.
The important thing was that Draco needed to register the Ministry’s possession of this memory at the Muggle Liaison Office. The Ministry did not liaise with Muggles often enough that they needed more than one person to help them do it, but at least that person was a Muggle, not even a Squib. Draco wondered when this kind of thing came up whether Eric Teanby had authority invested in him by Muggles to hand out permission in this way, or if it was just a gesture on the Ministry’s part.
When Draco Floo’d in to the Muggle Liaison Office, he noticed with irritation that Eric was not at his desk. The two adjacent rooms in which Eric was sometimes ensconced were empty, as Draco could see through the wide open doors, so he wasn’t off doing his job. The kitchen was absent of Eric making coffee. It wasn’t lunchtime. Finally Draco noticed that the door leading to the fire escape, leading down to the ground or up to the roof, was open. It was held open by a stack of leaflets. Now Draco was looking, the shelves usually holding leaflets on the subjects the Office dealt with most frequently - Muggle families struggling to understand their magical relatives, how to break the news to your Muggle lover, so you think you want to work with Muggles - were looking ransacked. Draco stood by the door and looked at the paper trail. He had a bad feeling.
It would perhaps have been more like Draco really to turn tail back to the Ministry, but morbid curiosity seemed enough to push him slowly up the stairs. He noticed first that Harry Potter was standing on the roof, with a rush of relief connected, in a precognitive kind of way, to the body Potter was standing by, which he noticed second. It had Eric’s build and hair colour. The rooftop was quite liberally daubed with blood, though it was already hard to see under the gleam of rain reflecting a dull white sky. There was a pool under Eric, which the rain was making larger. Draco, his mind wincing away, tried to imagine Eric’s pain and fear being diluted and washed away like the evidence. The third thing he noticed was that the roofscape around him was not just like, but a lot like, the picture someone had sent him.
“Petrificus totalis!” said Potter, a rude interruption of Draco’s gratitude for his presence. He strode up to Draco and searched him, quickly finding his wand but persisting nonetheless in feeling him up. His handkerchief was knocked out and fluttered into a streak of blood and water.
“Priori incantatum! Potter retrieved nothing more exciting than Draco’s breakfast preparations and clothes summoning of the morning. He released Draco into full possession of his body again. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I came to register a memory. Grace and Ryan will tell you,” said Draco, his voice thin. One of his worst nightmares seemed to teeter on the brink of coming true.
Potter gave him a hard look. “Alright. I guess you’ve noticed that this looks like your picture. I suppose I should have given it more thought.”
“If it means something in relation to this, rather than being a plot in itself, I still don’t see what it means,” said Draco.
“I’ll admit I don’t either,” said Potter.
“How can it be a clue, it’s a rooftop, how fucking specific are rooftops? Even if you Aurors all went: the next murder will take place on a rooftop - where’s that going to get you? What if it means: you’ll be next? Do you think it could mean that?”
Potter put his hands in his pockets and sighed. “It’s not a very clear way of saying that, anyway. We have to assume the picture says something in serial killer language, which is thankfully quite obscure to the rest of us. Caution won’t be misplaced, Malfoy, that’s all we can say right now.”
Draco didn’t find this soothing. He remembered the prophecy and tried to find that soothing.
“You’d better go back to work. I’ve got a long day ahead of me,” Draco heard him say once he was already heading down the stairs.
It was surprisingly awkward to tell Grace and Ryan. Draco did think about not doing so as he made his way down to the archive, but he didn’t think he could get on with work as if nothing had happened. The awareness of something so dramatic, so disruptive to desultory work small talk, made him hesitate between cheesy theatrics that seemed gossipy and unfeeling, and affected “oh by the way, another one bites the dust” nonchalance.
“Eric’s dead,” he said.
“Really?” said Grace.
“Just now, I mean. There’s been another murder.”
“You didn’t see it?” said Grace.
“Eric?” said Ryan.
“The name of the guy at the Muggle Liaison Office. No, I found him on the roof. Harry Potter was there.”
“You mean it was already a crime scene? They should have told people; it’s obvious people are going to be going there,” said Ryan.
“He’d only just got there; he got all jumpy when I turned up. I’m probably lucky it wasn’t Weasley, I bet he’d have been even more eager to believe I’m a mad serial killer.”
“Why, did Potter think about arresting you? Surprised he didn’t, actually. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible thing; it’s like when they’re in the arresting frame of mind they can’t help but arrest anyone they see,” Ryan said, with a well-worn dark earnestness.
“Hmm,” said Draco, reminded of Ryan’s troublesome past.
“Was it really horrible?” asked Grace.
“I managed not to look much,” said Draco. “But it didn’t make me very happy, no.”
“Do you think you should go home?” asked Grace.
“Nah, sitting at home’s not going to make me feel better. Maybe I can find some more cheerful memories to work on,” said Draco. Maybe sitting at home would make some people feel better, he didn’t know. Even when he did go home, he didn’t find anyone and tell them. It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends to show sympathy and share his fears but somehow it didn’t seem like enough. They couldn’t really make anything better. It was all his, in the end. There wasn’t someone who was to do with him, someone he felt with. He wanted someone whose presence absorbed everything, making it neutral or special. He wanted to be in love again. This was a channel he’d half-consciously eased himself into, sliding into a familiar melancholy self-pity to give himself something else to worry about.
He considered going out, seeing if he could pick someone up, but in his present mood he felt such a transparent attempt at self-manipulation would fall flat. He might end up staring at the ceiling afterwards, beginning a speech on whether there was a meaning to life. (It had happened before.) This was not to say that, now he thought about it, rediscovering the simple pleasures in life would not be invigorating. Draco resolved to stretch his bisexual wings, have a man and a woman.
When he felt less moody, he did, and was cheered. Not least, he realised the second morning after, as he beamed at himself in the mirror, because it made him feel he was still attractive. He shouldn’t have needed reassurance, he scoffed to himself, of course he was - possibly more so than in his youth. More fully realised, less transparent and unfinished. And he still had almost all of his hair.
Draco avoided the papers for a few days. He hadn’t been taken in for questioning. He’d managed to put away the memory of the Muggle Liaison Office, and, so far, the almost aimless, wandering chill that came with it hadn’t escaped its confines. It turned out it didn’t need to; it could come again in a whole new guise.
*
He was eating his breakfast when he saw the owls approaching through the window. They carried a parcel. He wasn’t expecting one from any reputable sender. He thought about just not opening the window, refusing to take this delivery of trouble. Whatever was afoot could just carry on without involving him. The owls’ faces glared at him though the glass. The owls alone would be hard to escape if they were really determined, let alone their employer, of whom Draco dreaded to think. Who was obviously looking at Draco in a way Draco had never wanted to feel looked at again. This person knew who Draco was, had made him a part of their plan.
In a kind of submission to dread, he opened the window. The owls dropped their burden on the table and swooped out again without asking for payment. Absurdly hopeful at the last minute that the parcel was innocently unconnected to a serial killer’s stupid plot, Draco examined the brown paper for a return address, and looked inside it for a note. Nothing. Now he observed a ticking sound coming from the box. It did not encourage him to open it and his hands hovered. But he would obviously have to fetch in the Aurors and he would feel better and less cowardly in their presence if he knew he’d got up the nerve to open the horrible thing.
It was a chocolate cake. On it was written in green icing MERCY YOU’RE 21!!. That irritating flash of déjà vu. Draco couldn’t solve it and anyway he’d spotted the timer attached to the inside of the box. Four hours, thirteen minutes and a falling number of seconds until something.
Four hours thirteen minutes was actually probably too long to mentally prepare for something. And he had no real hope of the Aurors cracking the cake code and mounting a just-in-time rescue of whoever needed it, so the speed with which Draco scribbled a Howler and gave it to his owl was probably irrational. Then he rushed to put his shoes and socks on, and paced up and down.
It was Potter and Ribner who tumbled out onto the hearth. Draco pointed mutely to the box on the table.
“I wonder if it could be a weird reference to mercy, abstract mercy, I mean,” said Ribner.
“I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but with both this and the picture I had this feeling, just a little feeling, that I’d seen them before somewhere,” said Draco.
“Okay, I think there’s a bomb in there. We’re going to need to get someone to deal with it,” said Potter.
“Bombs kill people, don’t they?” asked Draco.
“Yep,” said Potter. “I would have got Teanby to find us someone, but obviously he’s dead, and hasn’t been replaced yet. We haven’t really got time to worry about dealing with ordinary bomb disposal people. We’d better--”
“Try going through Teanby’s files,” said Ribner.
“And we’ll have to put you in one of the holding rooms, at least until the countdown is over. You’re obviously at risk. Better grab a book or something,” said Potter.
“Can’t I just go to work? Surely it’s basically as safe there?” asked Draco.
“No. Sorry. Someone could disguise themselves as a Ministry worker, and we’re much more cautious in the Auror Department. Someone might even be a Ministry worker,” said Potter.
Draco couldn’t find any arguments, but he didn’t like the thought of sitting alone for hours, worrying.
Potter sent off a stag Patronus to tell a colleague to come and take Draco into protective custody. It reminded Draco of the resolution he kept making to conjure one himself someday.
Draco sat down and looked with distaste and discomfort at the intrusi¬ve presence of Aurors in his home.
“We’re working hard on this,” Potter said suddenly. “And we’re pretty competent. Maybe we’ll even finish it today.”
Draco was slightly at a loss. He almost said “Thanks,” but managed to just nod. He actually felt a little reassured. That was the whole point of Potter after all, right? He was the Chosen One, the one who mastered things. It was only later that it occurred to him to wonder if Potter suspected him and was making a threat, but even then, on consideration, he thought not.
Draco spent some tiresome, anxious hours in a room probably the subject of some Fidelius variant. He attempted to relieve his feelings by demanding coffee and some cauldron cakes. He wondered what the Aurors were doing. He did not quite wish he was with them, or one of them, but he did feel lacking in the advantage they possessed of knowing all that was known of this unseen enemy. Draco was thrown back on considering what he knew. He hadn’t had the pensieve itch for a while. Since the novelty had worn off, he’d usually had to be in a particular mood, moody, in fact, introspective, narcissistic, greedy for something unfulfilling. Often this frame of mind still left him flinching from more direct confrontations with what was on his mind. Now, though, Draco wanted to see. Maybe he could dredge up the source of the truncated association trail the picture and the cake set him on. See if he could make any connection that explained why he was being brought into this.
His palms sweated as the time passed and he was facing After Cake Timer time. He expected, sheltered as he was, for the room, his own body, to fly apart. He remained tensed for some time afterwards, and jumpily alert for longer still. Nobody came to see him. Draco began to think about calling some annoyed Auror just to assure himself there was still an outside world. He was still at the stage of saving it until he needed it when the door swung open, bouncing against the wall. It was only Potter. He looked weary and irritable, perhaps upset round the edges, and had the bloody cake box under his arm. He was in fact eating a slice of cake, fingers sunk into gooey chocolate icing.
“Well?” Draco demanded.
Potter subsided into a chair opposite him and sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Draco wasn’t getting the impression of good news. Not the promised breakthrough.
“The timer was a clue and the cake was a clue and the bomb was a distraction. A woman who works in the bakery in Diagon Alley was killed when the timer ran out. You know, no one could have got the rooftops thing ahead of time, but I really think we should have got this. We could have got it, we just didn’t.” Potter took another bite of cake, his eyebrows drawn together.
Draco wasn’t used to Potter talking to him like this, and didn’t know what he was supposed to do when Potter basically expressed to him that he was having trouble with his feelings. He realised that, despite himself, Potter had become the Boy Who Lived to him, an inhuman public figure. The new murder itself seemed vaguely unsuitable material for comment.
“Did the cake come from that bakery?” asked Draco.
“Doesn’t seem like it, we did ask. Did you want some cake? The bomb’s been taken out of it and there’s nothing else wrong with it.”
“No thanks, I’ve been eating cauldron cakes all day.” It was lunchtime and Potter had no doubt had a tense morning without breaks, Draco told himself, a little put out by Potter cake-scoffing at a time like this.
“So. We’re not any nearer the killer right now and we really would like to try and get a handle on what you’ve got to do with it. We’re thinking about sending you into hiding.”
Draco hesitated. No doubt the Aurors’ train of thought was that being in hiding would, as well as keeping Draco safe from the world, keep the world safe from Draco.
“We also thought that it might be better not to do that, if someone is using you to create more associations and evidence for us. Evidence we haven’t worked out how to use yet, but it’s there.” Potter’s eyes were calmly assessing on Draco.
The Aurors were apparently turning over something of an ethical dilemma - be careful with Draco or consider whether not being careful with him would ultimately foil the killer.
“You wouldn’t mention the second part if you weren’t hoping I’d understand where my duty lay,” said Draco.
“No, I seriously don’t want to pressure you,” said Potter, sounding quite earnest. “I just want you to be informed.”
Draco raised his voice over Potter. “I don’t actually want to go into hiding; it’d be boring and worrying. But I’m not going to actively try and be bait or whatever you had in mind. I’m going to stay with a friend.”
Potter looked as if he was kindly abstaining from pointing out what a fat lot of good that would be if anyone really wanted to send him sinister parcels. Draco knew that already and right now it was beside the point. “We’re willing to go with what you’re comfortable with. Hopefully, there won’t come a point when we feel we should insist on it. We want you to come and extract the memories of the people who were in the bakery shortly before or at the time of the murder.”
“One of them could be the crazy serial killer,” said Draco.
“That’s one of the things you’ll help us find out, yes,” said Potter.
It would soon become apparent if one of them was. Draco couldn’t really imagine that there’d be someone with the actual memory of killing inside them, so he didn’t bother to think how he’d feel about that. But the creep he’d feel discovering that something was just as wrong inside a probably quite acceptable seeming member of the human race - the white noise, the empty fizz of Obliviation or Imperius, the edge, never disguisable, of the false overlaying the true. Draco could imagine that.
“Probably the killer was Disillusioned and it’ll be unlikely anything will show up,” Draco pointed out, almost hopeful.
Potter’s face acknowledged this as he held the door open.
Draco was needed to practice a technique he had invented; that of extracting something of the subjective experience, isolating it from the bulk of unconscious knowledge present in the whole memory. The half of the room that had not been paid attention to would be lightly sketched in, not reproduced from assumption, previous knowledge and snatches of subconscious awareness. Certain individuals loomed more vivid than others - the good-looking, the revoltingly sniffling. Snatches of conversation were recommended to the intruder’s attention. This kind of memory was useful, in conjunction of course with the more panoramic approach, because it often highlighted what was being sought. In this instance, no one had witnessed the murder itself, but uncertainly aimed magnifications of the bakery pre-murder might take them up closer to the grain of the killer’s modus operandi.
In general, Draco found dealing with subjective memories made him like people more somehow. So limited, with a small but sometimes deep faculty of perception. So similar, always reminding him of his own memories on which he’d made his first experiments, but separate too, unique enough that they always rounded out a story more, no matter how many memories were collected of the same event. Draco had wanted to find a more personal way still, something that took him into the source’s bodily experience, to have their thoughts appear in his own mind, to smell what they smelt, to feel their wet feet or even their orgasms. Draco and Astoria had been quite eager to feel each other’s orgasms but, thus far, it seemed there was a divide between one person and another and one time and another that could not be breeched.
Draco was always gratified and flustered when he was temporarily placed in the same kind of officialdom as the Aurors, sat on the same side of a desk with one, facing the individual about to deliver their memory into their hands, or, more accurately, into the waiting pensieve. These days the Aurors usually managed to project a gracious sense of working with Draco, rather than a sense of suppressed menace and that Draco had better do his job with no funny business. Every time Draco found himself grateful that he had crossed to the other side, the gratitude was quickly followed by the remembrance that it should be him dispersing menace or graciousness.
The people from the bakery were, as witnesses asked to contribute to a criminal investigation so often were, positively asquirm with anxiety. Disturbed by what they had crossed paths with, frustrated by the interruption to their day, suspecting, almost always irrationally, that they would be suspected, they were sullenly silent even while forced into a kind of communication, or so full of talk and questions that the taking and viewing of their memories got postponed.
A prominent point of convergence between the memories was a man who wet himself while standing in the queue. He drew attention to himself by being so obviously surprised and horrified by the embarrassment. A woman behind the counter Banished the puddle on the floor and the man in front of the unfortunate, to whom he was in off-putting proximity, applied a Drying Charm to his robes. The incontinent offered apologies and protestations that it had never happened before.
“Distraction,” said Draco at the same time as Potter, when they were watching this occurrence for the second time.
“Definitely. What we want to find out is whether he’s a willing or unwilling accomplice,” said Potter.
The man in question was reluctant to give up his memory of the painful incident.
“We already know what happened,” Draco said impatiently.
“So you don’t really need me to-”
“It’s your duty,” said Potter, delivering the phrase with all the stern encouragement one expected of the Boy Who Lived.
The man resentfully surrendered. The memory was quite intact, no signs of interference apparent. The magnifying, unedifying direction of the focus was convincing. When they resurfaced, Potter quizzed the man on whether he’d accepted anything edible or otherwise absorbed into the body from a stranger or any source without credentials. He said he couldn’t think of anything, which had to be taken with a pinch of salt, and Potter had someone take a sample of his blood.
The next memory they took revealed the most, in a way. Just before the incontinency episode, a woman watched a shadow flicker for a moment over a wall. Though it wasn’t really a shadow, not exactly, just a visual impression too indistinct to be anything else. The grain of everything was larger, somehow, in personalised impressions, and when Draco and Potter used the standard type of memory, the presence of a Disillisioned person was only detectable, insofar as it was detectable at all, because they knew it was there; the faintest disturbance in empty air.
“He hardly needed the man to piss himself. Likes to go over the top,” said Draco, though analysing serial killers was Potter’s job.
“It doesn’t allow us the satisfaction of focusing on what little we’ve got. He obviously wants to be chased, and maybe caught, too, but he can’t resist being unkind to us,” Potter said.
“I’m sure he’s a completely loathsome person. I wish I didn’t have to think about him,” Draco snapped.
A slight pause. “It could be a woman,” Potter offered.
Having physical evidence of the person who’d sent him ominous parcels made it all seem more real. Draco found it hard to shake off the chill, the sense of almost resigned doom that settled upon him. When he’d extracted all the memories, he went down to the Archive to catalogue them.
“Where’ve you been?” asked Grace. She and Ryan appeared unoccupied. “We were wondering whether we should tell someone, only we weren’t sure who.”
“I’ve been in the care of the Aurors. They should have let you know, really.”
“The Aurors?”
Draco couldn’t really see a way out of telling them. So for the first time, he told the dramatic tale of the serial killer from the newspapers who’d started involving Draco in his crimes. He was surprised to find he enjoyed it, despite his initial reluctance.
Grace and Ryan were a gratifying audience, and quick to see the implications for Draco’s peace of mind.
“I don’t think you should catalogue those memories, it’ll only keep you thinking about it,” said Ryan.
“I’ll do it!” said Grace. “I have to learn, anyway.”
Draco ignored what seemed like a reference to Draco’s retirement or death and uncharacteristically agreed.
After work he went home only to pack a bag, and Floo’d to Theo’s place, hoping Theo wasn’t still in the shop downstairs. By luck, he was just that moment coming in by the door.
“What’s with the bag?” asked Theo, at the same time as Draco announced “I’m staying with you for a bit.”
“Why?” asked Theo, somewhat unwelcomingly. He remedied his tone by saying, “I mean, I suppose you can if you want.”
“I feel too much of a sitting duck at my place. The serial killer has been playing games with me.” And Draco told the story of the rooftop picture and Eric Teanby, and the cake bomb and Coralie Ensign.
“I wonder why,” said Theo at the end. “Did he choose you at random for someone to scare, or is there some kind of deep, significant pattern?”
“If only I knew,” said Draco. Theo’s calm seriousness settled his stomach even when not overtly soothing.
“When the Muggle Liaison guy was killed people wondered if there was a political agenda in it somewhere. But they’re already saying maybe there isn’t, because they can’t fit the baker woman or Joe Aveling in. If the press knew about you, it’d be different. Having you in the picture right away makes it look more political. Not necessarily rightly so.”
Draco tried never to think about being an ex-Death Eater, and as these days he managed to go long stretches of time without being reminded to his face, he realised now that beyond the realms of unconsidered, automatic paranoia, he’d failed to ponder the relevance of it in this context.
“It doesn’t seem to simplify things. Who knows where the killer’s coming from? If he’s trying to make a point he’s fucking useless at it.”
“I think the most important thing is the Aurors and you. So far, we can’t be sure, but it sounds like things are alright,” said Theo.
“I don’t think I’m their number one suspect,” Draco admitted. “Though that is exactly the sort of thing they’re supposed to conceal.”
“Just make sure you don’t act like you’re thinking too hard about the effect you’re having on them. Assuming you have to deal with them again,” said Theo.
“Where do you think it will all end?” asked Draco. He knew Theo couldn’t answer, but he wished he could believe that he could.
Theo knew Draco knew it was pointless to ask. He exhaled. “You can always go into hiding. You don’t even have to have the Aurors know where you are.”
“That’s true. I don’t think I’d go that far, though.”
“Anyway, if anything else happens it should give you more information. So, if you want to think positively, you shouldn’t dread it--”
“But look forward to someone being gruesomely killed!”
Theo had the sense to change the subject over dinner, and came up with a lot of customer-related grievances. Draco was glad to be with someone else. Somehow disaster seemed less likely to strike him in Theo’s flat than in his own.
He felt more resolved than relaxed as bedtime approached, though. Even before he’d had the serial killer to worry about he’d been feeling the itch, like something needed to be unpeeled, that he got as a precursor to a pensieve session. And now he felt he really ought to do all he could to discover why him. Go through his associations.
When Theo had gone to bed and was guaranteed not to interrupt for any reason, Draco retired to the spare room and got his pensieve out of his bag. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, he held his wand to his temple, and watched the memories coalesce in the basin. The silver-white milky mist spiralled and spilt into the thicker consistency of the dull-gold stands of subjective memory. Draco wanted a good variety with his most recent preoccupations meeting several layers of older memories, so he kept going for a while.
Draco liked, perhaps best of all, the moment when he first stirred the memories and they sparked and any surprising image, something he’d hardly noticed before or something he loved and was glad to see again might appear in the basin like a beautiful flower suddenly shooting up.
What he got now was Rain He Had Known. Rain dripping on window panes, strings of water lashing the ground, rain slanting into his own small, slightly shocked face in the days when he was not allowed to do magic. Draco waited patiently for the obvious carriage to bring up the rear in this train of thought: a slick of bloody water with the impress of his shoe sole in it. Then himself, his face young and fixedly sullen and tired, being interrogated by Aurors. His excuses, his protestations. No, he never did that - he wouldn’t. Yes, he did do that, like the witness said, but he had to. Trying to construct a new moral identity for himself as well as for the Aurors. Ryan Cobbing: “Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible thing.” Ryan Cobbing didn’t sink down into the basin, but lingered, going though the Miscellaneous memories like he had on his first day. Ryan. The timing, of course - he’d started at the Archive just before Draco received the painting. A montage of Ryan played as Draco’s blood ran a little cold and he thought. That seemed to be all, though, just the timing thing. Draco both relaxed and felt a little disappointed. It would have been good to find the killer. It would have been a better relief than feeling fairly sure it wasn’t Ryan. Even Potter, from his serene height, would surely be piqued to have a prophecy snatched from under his nose. Anyway. Now he’d thought about it he’d notice if Ryan did something strange.
The pensieve abruptly changed to show rainy rooftops that weren’t quite the Muggle Liaison Office rooftops, or the ones in the picture. They were replaced suddenly again by Daphne, sitting opposite him and talking and laughing on some occasion he couldn’t place. Astoria saying she wished she was in charge of tracking down the killer. A chain of himself doing what he was doing now, examining pensieves, stirring thoughts up with a wand. Potter winning at Quidditch, Potter being declared a hero - several of this small selection of Potter-being-declared-a-hero occasions were the potent, individualised kind of memory, and Draco could not help a laugh at his own expense to see the glorious close-ups of Potter’s face, magnifying any sign of gratification. Somehow resentment was inescapably implied in the very air against which Potter was outlined. Draco sighed and gave up hope of finding something useful. He prodded around the basin for good things to go to bed on; being a great father to Scorpius, fresh Spring days, that kind of thing.
Part Two
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Mention of violent death?
Word count: 18,406
Summary: Epilogue compliant. Draco works in the Pensieve Archive and is beginning to get over his divorce. His life is disturbed when a serial killer strikes the Wizarding world and seems to have a particular interest in Draco. Somehow it all stirs up his Potter issues. Written for hds_beltane.
Draco had his eyes shut when the cavalry arrived. He heard them, though, and the routine phrases that meant arrest. They’d live, happy ending, the allegorical basilisk had been slain. First, he kept his eyes shut as he gave himself up to the relief crashing though him, making his knees weaker than the fear had. Then the bitterness seeped in. Too late now. No heroics from Draco, no tapping of that resource he had spurts of belief in, no mastering the situation with the strength of his will or magic.
“Malfoy? Malfoy?” asked Potter. Draco didn’t open his eyes until Potter stumbled over a bone on the floor, which cracked beneath his foot.
“I know, it’s all over,” Draco snapped.
“Neither of you two too traumatised?” Weasley called. “Let’s get back to the Ministry and get this whole business over with so we can celebrate.”
Even as he spoke, Aurors were drifting out of the innermost Chamber of Secrets, among them the Aurors gripping the murderer, now bound, by the arms.
“You okay, Malfoy?” asked Potter. He looked for some reason more luminous and large than usual. Draco managed to stop staring blankly and tried to look alert and businesslike. When Potter turned his back Draco narrowed his eyes at it.
I’ll get you for this, he thought. “This” being the act of being Potter, which he was almost enjoying finding suddenly unreasonably incendiary. Once and for all, I’ll get you. And so the curtain fell on what would be considered the scene of Harry Potter’s greatest triumph since the death of Voldemort. It would rise again on Draco’s Revenge, Draco told himself, and to be fair, melodrama had been the keynote of the day.
*
Daphne’s death was the beginning of it for Draco, purely a family affair, though she wasn’t even his family anymore, their own personal awfulness, nothing to do with the Boy Who Lived. Except apparently, as it turned out, he’d been tangled in it before he was born. Sitting opposite Astoria with her white face telling him about it, having just stepped out of the Floo, brought home to him how much Astoria was undeniably family, even though their marriage had ended. An only child himself, when he’d wanted to take Astoria and everything belonging to her inside him in some way, some expansion had been required for a sibling relationship. The way Astoria was still quick to resent Daphne as the older sister who got to things first and devoured opportunities, leaving none for Astoria, though they’d only been a year apart. Astoria had determinedly involved herself with what Daphne did at Hogwarts, so as to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. She’d given Theo Nott money to make him, for once in his life, do something as gregarious as take her to the Yule Ball (dancing was included in the price) so she could be there like Daphne. When he’d first started seeing Astoria, Draco had had a vague idea they didn’t get on that well, but, feeling free to say something vaguely critical about Daphne, had been smacked down smartly. Astoria was one of those “I can say it but not you” defenders, not least because Daphne tenderly ignored all Astoria’s jostling and grievances: Astoria was her little sister. Which was of course again annoying. They sought success for each other, Daphne overtly, Astoria covertly, and while Astoria might indulge in traditional smearing of any too shiny surfaces in her sister’s life, she emphatically rejected and tried to chase away any real misfortune or failure.
Astoria had not been there to chase away this. “I keep wanting to talk to her about it, find her and make her be okay after being abducted and violently murdered. But she’s not there.”
Draco felt empty of things to give back to this absence. He thought about saying that, even if it wasn’t true, she must believe the damage to the body occurred after Avada Kevadra. But that, like almost anything, seemed a wrong disruption. For a moment, he thought they were married still, and tried to project the impact on their relationship, because this kind of thing didn’t go away in a hurry, leaving everything where it was. Then he remembered they’d been divorced two years, and she’d only come to him because she needed to tell someone who didn’t know, like a disease itching at her until she passed it on. And now neither of them knew what to do with it.
Though of course they had to have a funeral. Scorpius came home from Hogwarts the day before it, shocked, quiet and worried about his mother. It was in the newspapers with all the gory details, and Scorpius hadn’t had the experience of being in the same place as the news before. Draco had wanted him never to have it; he’d wanted to move on from all that messiness in his youth to the success of family life, where everything was quietly functional and Scorpius would be set on the middle of a path he couldn’t fall off of and have to try and scramble onto another. The divorce had not been what he’d had in mind, but that hadn’t made the path buck beneath them in such a suddenly jarring way.
It was hard to remember at the funeral that the people there were nothing to do with him anymore; Astoria and Daphne’s parents and Daphne’s husband, that after this he didn’t know when he’d ever have another meal with them, keeping up with their progress in “getting over it.” Daphne’s husband Robert was perhaps the nicest man Draco had ever met, and Astoria had always made a joke of pretending he was loathsome to her in various ridiculously trivial aspects, to avoid simple hearty congratulations on Daphne’s find. He didn’t seem to be doing well. It didn’t take long for Astoria to feel it impossible for him to go back to his and Daphne’s empty house and tell him he should come back with her after everyone had gone.
Draco would probably have left when most of the other attendants did, but it didn’t seem right to leave Scorpius there. He remained at the Greengrass’s house until evening, when Scorpius’s portkey back to Hogwarts activated. It didn’t seem right to send him off for weeks on such a dismal note, but then there didn’t seem much he could do about it.
*
It was less than two weeks after Daphne died when it happened again. Not to anyone in Draco’s orbit, which he could not give enough thanks for. A wizard this time, someone he’d never heard of before his dying made the news because, apart from anything else, the Muggles found the body on the steps to his home first, and extensive Obliviation was required so that Joe Aveling did not make the Muggle news as well. Daphne Greengrass-Lyte was no longer so lonely, so exceptionally unfortunate; her name had Joe Aveling for company. From disgustedly begrudging every mention made in the Daily Prophet of Daphne’s murder, Astoria went to eagerly following the coverage on Joe Aveling. Draco wasn’t sure what she was getting out of it, though, as he pointed out, surely the more crimes committed, the more likely that the perpetrator would be caught.
“Yes. Though there’s no Dementors,” said Astoria.
*
“So you’ve seen her?” asked Theo later. Draco often had lunch with him in Diagon Alley - Theo had a bookshop in Knockturn Alley.
“Yes, a couple of times. I think she has to keep getting breathers from Robert,” said Draco.
“You know, this is the kind of time when people break up if they’re together and get together if they’re not,” said Theo.
“Oh no. This isn’t the kind of time people get together in. And anyway...” Draco wasn’t sure he wanted to go into emotions with Theo.
“Mmm?”
“You can’t go back.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t remind you, but you used to go on about how if you had a Timeturner you’d go over your marriage however many times it took to get it right,” said Theo. The glint of curiosity in his eyes was unusual; a large part of the reason Draco confided in Theo from time to time was the way his nonchalant impassive manner seemed to absorb without trace anything he disgorged.
Draco instinctively flinched from his own words repeated back to him. The prospect of fanatically tracing the precise cause of his marriage’s failure seemed incredibly depressing now, the idea seeming to come from a painfully uncomfortable place that lay behind him, as if through a series of interlocking chambers that had grown progressively larger. He felt slightly chilled and cheered at the same time. “I think I’ve got over it. How healthy,” Draco said.
*
Draco was, in his capacity as a responsible Pensieve Archivist (Head Pensieve Archivist in the Pensieve Archive section consisting of himself and Grace), Ministry worker, and, indeed, member of the wizarding public, was bound to notice and report information that seemed important. It was doubtful he’d have experienced the same alacrity and heartfelt hope in doing so if Daphne and her family had been names in the paper to him, however. The two largest categories of memories in his custody were evidence for trials, and historical records. The Ministry had accumulated a fair amount of memories in the latter without even trying, but in the last couple of decades they had made a conscious effort to “capitalise on the most precious resource, the living memory of wizards and witches.” Draco himself, in his younger, unpromoted days, had gone round nursing homes for the wizarding elderly and the premises of various little societies for outdated interests, gathering memories of archaic robe designs, charms that had fallen out of fashion, the very last Anglo-Saxon Scorcher dragon, the pitifully unstandardised brooms in the days of artisans rather than brands, which the old people always assured him had idiosyncratic brilliance never achieved by those things churned out by geminio, old history... Draco had learnt a lot in his job, much of which he hadn’t at all appreciated at the time, but he now realised added much dimension to what he saw about him in the modern Wizarding world. He’d also realised, somewhat earlier, that if this was Wizarding culture, it wasn’t really what his parents had tried to instil in him. This, of course, was the message the Ministry was trying to convey at the same time as offering a sop to the more conventional or prejudiced sectors of Wizarding society: no bloodshed needed to preserve the true spirit of the Wizarding world!
Draco was dealing with a clutch of bottled memories to do with Seers. Divination was beginning to become a little more reputable, after decades out in the cold, and the Head of the Archive had suggested they acquire some memories of the Seers who were esteemed the last time the subject was fashionable. Draco preferred to write the catalogue entries himself, accuracy being essential, and it was necessary to not only sit through the memory several times but observe. Also, often people who needed to check facts for professional or academic purposes did not bother or were not permitted to view the memory itself, so his summing-up, inevitably tainted a little by personality, was what counted. These Seers, Draco was prepared to admit, were a tad less irritating than Professor Trelawney, but the clasped hands and the self-consciously portentous manner that sandwiched even the prophecies that later turned out to be onto something were familiar. Perhaps the fact most people would find it silly was part of the point, a screening process, Draco thought, screwing himself up to generosity. Watching memories had the potential to be as irritating as a disappointing Quidditch match, so many opportunities irrevocably not taken and mistakes made. Draco had ended up developing his empathy skills to compensate.
This was the memory of Julietta Braidwood’s daughter. Madam Braidwood was remonstrating with her daughter for sliding up the banisters when a change came over her. Draco, standing at the foot of the stairs, saw the little girl gaze at her in consternation but not panic. The sudden absence behind her mother’s face was probably something she’d seen before but wasn’t exactly used to. There was a sustained period of sharp, quick breaths and closed eyes darting in their sockets. Draco leaned on the banister post and waited for her to get on with it.
“There will be a man who is still called a boy. He is special and not special. There is someone who leaves bodies behind him. The man will follow the bodies and succeed in ending the carnage, because he is himself.”
Draco was now standing upright, head turned sharply towards Madam Braidwood. No more followed. The little girl said “Mama? Mama?” and tentatively waved a hand in front of her mother’s face. Draco was back in the Pensieve Archive.
He’d come across his grandfather once unexpectedly in someone else’s memory. There had been the same shock of personal relevance where he sought none, but this was intensified by the sense of expediency. He sent off a memo to Potter at once, and wandered around waiting, too keyed up to return to work.
“Something up?” asked Grace, looking up from labelling pensieves.
“You’ll see in a minute.”
Potter came down accompanied by Weasley and Auror Ribner. They’d obviously hurried down and were breathless and eager.
“Something about the Greengrass and Aveling cases?” Potter prompted.
Draco gestured to the pensieve on his desk. “The Greengrass and Aveling cases?” Grace repeated while the three Aurors experienced the memory.
“Wait,” said Draco. He wasn’t sure the Aurors looked excited enough.
“Well, it does sound like she’s talking about Harry,” Weasley said.
“As the Head Auror, it’s obviously my responsibility. It’s not a personal mission,” said Potter, sounding as though he was instinctively rejecting something. “Although obviously it’s good to think we’ll succeed,” he added promptly. There was the usual sense of underlying stiff effort from Potter and Weasley to maintain professional politeness, with an extra muffling from the awareness Draco was the ex-brother-in-law of one of the victims.
“Not so good to think we’ve hardly begun the trail of bodies,” said Auror Ribner.
“It’s a shame she wasn’t clearer about what I’m supposed to do about it,” Potter said, looking more anxious and awkward.
“I’d just do your job as normal and not worry about it if I was you, Auror Potter,” Grace chipped in.
“Yeah, really it’s just a prophecy that you’re going to be where you are now while this case is happening. So basically you’ve already done it,” said Weasley. Like Grace, Weasley was obviously concerned that Potter’s sensitive soul should not be burdened by another prophecy, another mission.
“Mind you pay attention to your job, then, Potter,” said Draco, something he doubted he’d have got away with in normal circumstances.
When the Aurors had gone, that funny grinding sensation of wanting to force some admission from them left him, replaced by a calmer feeling of things in their right place. Surely Astoria would like to hear that her sister’s killer would be caught, and once they were, Daphne’s death wouldn’t feel part of an ongoing story. Draco felt a guilty pang at being so eager to put her away. She’d been good during the breakup of his and Astoria’s marriage; Draco knew she’d represented him to Astoria in the same kind deciphering light in which she represented Astoria to him.
*
I wish I could do it,” said Astoria later. Draco had hesitated but felt he ought to Floo Astoria and Robert. “I wish I could see whatever leads and clues and theories the Aurors have. I have this idea the right ones would just loom out at me. I kind of wish the prophecy had been about me.”
“I guess the universe just loves giving Potter all the jobs. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be special,” Draco said.
He and Astoria’s gaze slipped glumly to Robert. Somehow, he looked as if he was trying to find a way to make the prophecy suggest the murder victims would be resurrected.
*
The next day Draco had to attend the Archive Department meeting. He had to sit through a lot of boring stuff about the other Archive sections before getting to hear the praise due to him as “a very innovative Pensieve Archivist.” Then he heard that his reward was to be a third member of staff in the Pensieve Archive, something he’d been asking about for ages.
“They managed to find the funding, then?” asked Draco. “Is the post going to be advertised or--?”
“No, there’s someone already lined up. I may as well tell you they’re a nephew of the Department Head of International Magical Cooperation. Ryan Cobbing, starting on Monday.”
Draco sighed but said nothing. A troublesome nephew, no doubt, and it wasn’t as if he’d be given any right to complain, as an ex-Death Eater who’d been given his own start in the Pensive Archive.
*
Ryan Cobbing was alright at first glance. As yet, he was in the “wouldn’t mind a no doubt ill-advised fuck with if the stars align and he swings that way” category of alright. He came in with an apologetic air that didn’t suit him, like a tall man ducking down under a low ceiling. He soon dropped it and was sitting on Grace’s desk asking lots of questions.
“Do you have memories of celebrities?” Ryan asked.
“Some, yeah. We don’t really care about them, but people send us them sometimes. Just bursting to share the time they served one of the Greymalkins or Harry Potter. If they don’t write and offer to sell for a very reasonable price, that is,” said Draco.
“So you take any memories that get submitted, then?” asked Ryan.
“Mostly,” said Grace. His puppyish enthusiasm was beginning to irk both Draco and Grace - particularly Grace, as Ryan was sitting on her desk and had taken her quill to fiddle with. He twirled it between his fingers in a peculiarly flirtatious way in between shooting glances at her, Her eyes were fixed on it, leaning away as if expecting him to chuck her under the chin with it.
“We do get some that are completely useless,” said Draco, who after all had to make sure Ryan knew what he was doing. “We’re squeamish about chucking them altogether, though; we put them in that corner and go through them every couple of years. We end up keeping too many of them, actually. On the one hand, we haven’t got infinite space; on the other, it’s easy to get sentimental about saving a particular sunset for posterity or whatever. Now that you’ve put it into my mind, that can be a first day task for you.” Draco didn’t mention that, with a dwindling but still present regularity, memories of him as a Death Eater would turn up amongst unsolicited submissions. These did not get put into the corner with memories of sunsets and anonymous people fucking and crup fights; Draco of course treated them like any other historically relevant memory. He and Grace never referred to them.
Ryan got on with the job without asking too many annoying questions and Draco could admire the sandy-gold hair at the back of his neck in idle moments.
*
A few days later, Draco came home from work to find a rather large flat rectangular parcel had been dropped by owls inside a window. He hadn’t ordered anything and there was no return address. On opening, it proved to be a picture, the glass covering it in shards, no doubt as a result of being dropped on the floor from a height by owls. Draco mended it and looked at the picture. It was a vista of rooftops on which rain was falling. The rooftops looked like ordinary London rooftops, but the light picked subtle shades of mauve, green and blue out of the shining slates. The raindrops trickled and dripped hypnotically and the picture had a calm gleam; Draco found it oddly appealing. Except, it was a mysterious picture from an unknown source, very likely designed to have some sinister effect on him. Dammit, this was not wanted to deal with when he came home. He was tempted to run some tests on it himself but he didn’t think his awakened paranoia could be quietened even he found nothing wrong with the picture; there might be something lurking about it unfound, or, worse, he could be already compromised, unfit to discern anything amiss. Some form of Imperius designed to have him commit a crime with no input of his own will could well be someone’s idea of revenge served cold. Or someone could simply be planting a Dark Object on him. Better by far to go back to the Ministry and take the picture in to the Aurors for inspection. The idea of Aurors in general still made Draco twitchy, but it was much better to be demonstrably innocent.
He tucked the picture under his arm and Floo’d back to the Ministry. Preparing himself in the lift to be a dutiful member of the wizarding community reporting anything at all suspicious, he latched onto Potter coming out of the loo by the lift.
“Oh, Potter, I’m just coming to see you - well, the Auror Department. I’ve just found this picture had been delivered to my house, and I’m a bit concerned because I didn’t buy it or anything, and there’s no clue as to the sender. And then I wondered if I was finding it too alluring for rainy rooftops.”
Harry’s head jerked up at that. “Alluring?” he asked, as if the idea of someone fancying rooftops was going through his mind and setting off alarm bells.
“Attention-getting,” Draco snapped. “It’s difficult to phrase.”
“Well, I can see why you’d be concerned to receive something with no explanation,” said Potter. He took Draco through to the Auror Department and motioned Draco to sit at his desk. “I’ll try some things; I should be able to tell one way or the other.” He took the picture into an inner office. Draco wondered if there were special instruments for detecting suspicious spells in there, or if Potter didn’t want to let Draco see what tests he used.
Draco had been encountering Potter, Weasley and Granger too from Law Enforcement for years as they came down to fetch and hand in memories for their cases, since he’d first started. They’d found it hard to deal with him normally; Weasley obviously didn’t trust himself and ignored him in favour of his colleagues even when inconvenient. This was no longer possible when Draco’s superior retired, and in any case Weasley’s ire had faded somewhat. Draco had found it hard to deal with Potter, particularly. The knowledge that they were no longer two boys at the same school and therefore in many ways on equal playing ground, that Draco was mired in infamy he could never shake off while Potter was proved once and for all a hero, destined for great things, rankled. He clenched up with burning resentment when Potter was in the same room. He had to get over it a bit when he and Potter had to speak to each other, because of the need to unclench his teeth, and because glaring at Harry Potter with narrowed eyes, too choked with resentment to hear what was said to him, was not the way to make friends and influence people.
Potter came back with the picture. “It’s a perfectly normal picture. Well, magical picture, anyway.”
“You can promise that?” asked Draco.
“I can promise you that the latest magical analysis and Dark detection methods find it to be harmless. It’s extremely unlikely that there’s something there I didn’t pick up on, but it’s your call. It’s still something you were sent mysteriously, but perhaps you’ll get some kind of explanation.”
Draco considered. “Now that I look at it again it looks a little familiar. I’m not sure...”
“It is a little familiar,” Potter pointed out. “Not that rainy rooftops are going to be unfamiliar in any case. And raindrops can be a bit hypnotic, if you’re still finding it alluring. I have to get on now so if you’d just take your picture...?”
He went off into another office before Draco could say anything.
Draco took his picture and left quickly before anyone could take too much notice of him. Home again, he left the picture on the kitchen table, where he sat down to write a TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN letter. If he died, or was otherwise involved in something strange or bad, the mysterious picture he’d received was at the bottom of it, and more particularly, Harry Potter’s incompetence as an Auror.
*
The Pensieve Archive had been given a memory containing Muggle state secrets. It was mostly a memory of two wizards having an important conversation that lead to one of them writing a very important book a decade ago, but the wizards in question were infiltrating the Muggle equivalent of the Department of Mysteries at the time, and people were talking Important Secret Business in the background. Draco sourly wondered if they’d ever got the stinging whack on the wrist they deserved for their total unconcern for things like the Statute of Secrecy and maintaining their cover, or if genius carried all before it.
The important thing was that Draco needed to register the Ministry’s possession of this memory at the Muggle Liaison Office. The Ministry did not liaise with Muggles often enough that they needed more than one person to help them do it, but at least that person was a Muggle, not even a Squib. Draco wondered when this kind of thing came up whether Eric Teanby had authority invested in him by Muggles to hand out permission in this way, or if it was just a gesture on the Ministry’s part.
When Draco Floo’d in to the Muggle Liaison Office, he noticed with irritation that Eric was not at his desk. The two adjacent rooms in which Eric was sometimes ensconced were empty, as Draco could see through the wide open doors, so he wasn’t off doing his job. The kitchen was absent of Eric making coffee. It wasn’t lunchtime. Finally Draco noticed that the door leading to the fire escape, leading down to the ground or up to the roof, was open. It was held open by a stack of leaflets. Now Draco was looking, the shelves usually holding leaflets on the subjects the Office dealt with most frequently - Muggle families struggling to understand their magical relatives, how to break the news to your Muggle lover, so you think you want to work with Muggles - were looking ransacked. Draco stood by the door and looked at the paper trail. He had a bad feeling.
It would perhaps have been more like Draco really to turn tail back to the Ministry, but morbid curiosity seemed enough to push him slowly up the stairs. He noticed first that Harry Potter was standing on the roof, with a rush of relief connected, in a precognitive kind of way, to the body Potter was standing by, which he noticed second. It had Eric’s build and hair colour. The rooftop was quite liberally daubed with blood, though it was already hard to see under the gleam of rain reflecting a dull white sky. There was a pool under Eric, which the rain was making larger. Draco, his mind wincing away, tried to imagine Eric’s pain and fear being diluted and washed away like the evidence. The third thing he noticed was that the roofscape around him was not just like, but a lot like, the picture someone had sent him.
“Petrificus totalis!” said Potter, a rude interruption of Draco’s gratitude for his presence. He strode up to Draco and searched him, quickly finding his wand but persisting nonetheless in feeling him up. His handkerchief was knocked out and fluttered into a streak of blood and water.
“Priori incantatum! Potter retrieved nothing more exciting than Draco’s breakfast preparations and clothes summoning of the morning. He released Draco into full possession of his body again. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I came to register a memory. Grace and Ryan will tell you,” said Draco, his voice thin. One of his worst nightmares seemed to teeter on the brink of coming true.
Potter gave him a hard look. “Alright. I guess you’ve noticed that this looks like your picture. I suppose I should have given it more thought.”
“If it means something in relation to this, rather than being a plot in itself, I still don’t see what it means,” said Draco.
“I’ll admit I don’t either,” said Potter.
“How can it be a clue, it’s a rooftop, how fucking specific are rooftops? Even if you Aurors all went: the next murder will take place on a rooftop - where’s that going to get you? What if it means: you’ll be next? Do you think it could mean that?”
Potter put his hands in his pockets and sighed. “It’s not a very clear way of saying that, anyway. We have to assume the picture says something in serial killer language, which is thankfully quite obscure to the rest of us. Caution won’t be misplaced, Malfoy, that’s all we can say right now.”
Draco didn’t find this soothing. He remembered the prophecy and tried to find that soothing.
“You’d better go back to work. I’ve got a long day ahead of me,” Draco heard him say once he was already heading down the stairs.
It was surprisingly awkward to tell Grace and Ryan. Draco did think about not doing so as he made his way down to the archive, but he didn’t think he could get on with work as if nothing had happened. The awareness of something so dramatic, so disruptive to desultory work small talk, made him hesitate between cheesy theatrics that seemed gossipy and unfeeling, and affected “oh by the way, another one bites the dust” nonchalance.
“Eric’s dead,” he said.
“Really?” said Grace.
“Just now, I mean. There’s been another murder.”
“You didn’t see it?” said Grace.
“Eric?” said Ryan.
“The name of the guy at the Muggle Liaison Office. No, I found him on the roof. Harry Potter was there.”
“You mean it was already a crime scene? They should have told people; it’s obvious people are going to be going there,” said Ryan.
“He’d only just got there; he got all jumpy when I turned up. I’m probably lucky it wasn’t Weasley, I bet he’d have been even more eager to believe I’m a mad serial killer.”
“Why, did Potter think about arresting you? Surprised he didn’t, actually. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible thing; it’s like when they’re in the arresting frame of mind they can’t help but arrest anyone they see,” Ryan said, with a well-worn dark earnestness.
“Hmm,” said Draco, reminded of Ryan’s troublesome past.
“Was it really horrible?” asked Grace.
“I managed not to look much,” said Draco. “But it didn’t make me very happy, no.”
“Do you think you should go home?” asked Grace.
“Nah, sitting at home’s not going to make me feel better. Maybe I can find some more cheerful memories to work on,” said Draco. Maybe sitting at home would make some people feel better, he didn’t know. Even when he did go home, he didn’t find anyone and tell them. It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends to show sympathy and share his fears but somehow it didn’t seem like enough. They couldn’t really make anything better. It was all his, in the end. There wasn’t someone who was to do with him, someone he felt with. He wanted someone whose presence absorbed everything, making it neutral or special. He wanted to be in love again. This was a channel he’d half-consciously eased himself into, sliding into a familiar melancholy self-pity to give himself something else to worry about.
He considered going out, seeing if he could pick someone up, but in his present mood he felt such a transparent attempt at self-manipulation would fall flat. He might end up staring at the ceiling afterwards, beginning a speech on whether there was a meaning to life. (It had happened before.) This was not to say that, now he thought about it, rediscovering the simple pleasures in life would not be invigorating. Draco resolved to stretch his bisexual wings, have a man and a woman.
When he felt less moody, he did, and was cheered. Not least, he realised the second morning after, as he beamed at himself in the mirror, because it made him feel he was still attractive. He shouldn’t have needed reassurance, he scoffed to himself, of course he was - possibly more so than in his youth. More fully realised, less transparent and unfinished. And he still had almost all of his hair.
Draco avoided the papers for a few days. He hadn’t been taken in for questioning. He’d managed to put away the memory of the Muggle Liaison Office, and, so far, the almost aimless, wandering chill that came with it hadn’t escaped its confines. It turned out it didn’t need to; it could come again in a whole new guise.
*
He was eating his breakfast when he saw the owls approaching through the window. They carried a parcel. He wasn’t expecting one from any reputable sender. He thought about just not opening the window, refusing to take this delivery of trouble. Whatever was afoot could just carry on without involving him. The owls’ faces glared at him though the glass. The owls alone would be hard to escape if they were really determined, let alone their employer, of whom Draco dreaded to think. Who was obviously looking at Draco in a way Draco had never wanted to feel looked at again. This person knew who Draco was, had made him a part of their plan.
In a kind of submission to dread, he opened the window. The owls dropped their burden on the table and swooped out again without asking for payment. Absurdly hopeful at the last minute that the parcel was innocently unconnected to a serial killer’s stupid plot, Draco examined the brown paper for a return address, and looked inside it for a note. Nothing. Now he observed a ticking sound coming from the box. It did not encourage him to open it and his hands hovered. But he would obviously have to fetch in the Aurors and he would feel better and less cowardly in their presence if he knew he’d got up the nerve to open the horrible thing.
It was a chocolate cake. On it was written in green icing MERCY YOU’RE 21!!. That irritating flash of déjà vu. Draco couldn’t solve it and anyway he’d spotted the timer attached to the inside of the box. Four hours, thirteen minutes and a falling number of seconds until something.
Four hours thirteen minutes was actually probably too long to mentally prepare for something. And he had no real hope of the Aurors cracking the cake code and mounting a just-in-time rescue of whoever needed it, so the speed with which Draco scribbled a Howler and gave it to his owl was probably irrational. Then he rushed to put his shoes and socks on, and paced up and down.
It was Potter and Ribner who tumbled out onto the hearth. Draco pointed mutely to the box on the table.
“I wonder if it could be a weird reference to mercy, abstract mercy, I mean,” said Ribner.
“I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but with both this and the picture I had this feeling, just a little feeling, that I’d seen them before somewhere,” said Draco.
“Okay, I think there’s a bomb in there. We’re going to need to get someone to deal with it,” said Potter.
“Bombs kill people, don’t they?” asked Draco.
“Yep,” said Potter. “I would have got Teanby to find us someone, but obviously he’s dead, and hasn’t been replaced yet. We haven’t really got time to worry about dealing with ordinary bomb disposal people. We’d better--”
“Try going through Teanby’s files,” said Ribner.
“And we’ll have to put you in one of the holding rooms, at least until the countdown is over. You’re obviously at risk. Better grab a book or something,” said Potter.
“Can’t I just go to work? Surely it’s basically as safe there?” asked Draco.
“No. Sorry. Someone could disguise themselves as a Ministry worker, and we’re much more cautious in the Auror Department. Someone might even be a Ministry worker,” said Potter.
Draco couldn’t find any arguments, but he didn’t like the thought of sitting alone for hours, worrying.
Potter sent off a stag Patronus to tell a colleague to come and take Draco into protective custody. It reminded Draco of the resolution he kept making to conjure one himself someday.
Draco sat down and looked with distaste and discomfort at the intrusi¬ve presence of Aurors in his home.
“We’re working hard on this,” Potter said suddenly. “And we’re pretty competent. Maybe we’ll even finish it today.”
Draco was slightly at a loss. He almost said “Thanks,” but managed to just nod. He actually felt a little reassured. That was the whole point of Potter after all, right? He was the Chosen One, the one who mastered things. It was only later that it occurred to him to wonder if Potter suspected him and was making a threat, but even then, on consideration, he thought not.
Draco spent some tiresome, anxious hours in a room probably the subject of some Fidelius variant. He attempted to relieve his feelings by demanding coffee and some cauldron cakes. He wondered what the Aurors were doing. He did not quite wish he was with them, or one of them, but he did feel lacking in the advantage they possessed of knowing all that was known of this unseen enemy. Draco was thrown back on considering what he knew. He hadn’t had the pensieve itch for a while. Since the novelty had worn off, he’d usually had to be in a particular mood, moody, in fact, introspective, narcissistic, greedy for something unfulfilling. Often this frame of mind still left him flinching from more direct confrontations with what was on his mind. Now, though, Draco wanted to see. Maybe he could dredge up the source of the truncated association trail the picture and the cake set him on. See if he could make any connection that explained why he was being brought into this.
His palms sweated as the time passed and he was facing After Cake Timer time. He expected, sheltered as he was, for the room, his own body, to fly apart. He remained tensed for some time afterwards, and jumpily alert for longer still. Nobody came to see him. Draco began to think about calling some annoyed Auror just to assure himself there was still an outside world. He was still at the stage of saving it until he needed it when the door swung open, bouncing against the wall. It was only Potter. He looked weary and irritable, perhaps upset round the edges, and had the bloody cake box under his arm. He was in fact eating a slice of cake, fingers sunk into gooey chocolate icing.
“Well?” Draco demanded.
Potter subsided into a chair opposite him and sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Draco wasn’t getting the impression of good news. Not the promised breakthrough.
“The timer was a clue and the cake was a clue and the bomb was a distraction. A woman who works in the bakery in Diagon Alley was killed when the timer ran out. You know, no one could have got the rooftops thing ahead of time, but I really think we should have got this. We could have got it, we just didn’t.” Potter took another bite of cake, his eyebrows drawn together.
Draco wasn’t used to Potter talking to him like this, and didn’t know what he was supposed to do when Potter basically expressed to him that he was having trouble with his feelings. He realised that, despite himself, Potter had become the Boy Who Lived to him, an inhuman public figure. The new murder itself seemed vaguely unsuitable material for comment.
“Did the cake come from that bakery?” asked Draco.
“Doesn’t seem like it, we did ask. Did you want some cake? The bomb’s been taken out of it and there’s nothing else wrong with it.”
“No thanks, I’ve been eating cauldron cakes all day.” It was lunchtime and Potter had no doubt had a tense morning without breaks, Draco told himself, a little put out by Potter cake-scoffing at a time like this.
“So. We’re not any nearer the killer right now and we really would like to try and get a handle on what you’ve got to do with it. We’re thinking about sending you into hiding.”
Draco hesitated. No doubt the Aurors’ train of thought was that being in hiding would, as well as keeping Draco safe from the world, keep the world safe from Draco.
“We also thought that it might be better not to do that, if someone is using you to create more associations and evidence for us. Evidence we haven’t worked out how to use yet, but it’s there.” Potter’s eyes were calmly assessing on Draco.
The Aurors were apparently turning over something of an ethical dilemma - be careful with Draco or consider whether not being careful with him would ultimately foil the killer.
“You wouldn’t mention the second part if you weren’t hoping I’d understand where my duty lay,” said Draco.
“No, I seriously don’t want to pressure you,” said Potter, sounding quite earnest. “I just want you to be informed.”
Draco raised his voice over Potter. “I don’t actually want to go into hiding; it’d be boring and worrying. But I’m not going to actively try and be bait or whatever you had in mind. I’m going to stay with a friend.”
Potter looked as if he was kindly abstaining from pointing out what a fat lot of good that would be if anyone really wanted to send him sinister parcels. Draco knew that already and right now it was beside the point. “We’re willing to go with what you’re comfortable with. Hopefully, there won’t come a point when we feel we should insist on it. We want you to come and extract the memories of the people who were in the bakery shortly before or at the time of the murder.”
“One of them could be the crazy serial killer,” said Draco.
“That’s one of the things you’ll help us find out, yes,” said Potter.
It would soon become apparent if one of them was. Draco couldn’t really imagine that there’d be someone with the actual memory of killing inside them, so he didn’t bother to think how he’d feel about that. But the creep he’d feel discovering that something was just as wrong inside a probably quite acceptable seeming member of the human race - the white noise, the empty fizz of Obliviation or Imperius, the edge, never disguisable, of the false overlaying the true. Draco could imagine that.
“Probably the killer was Disillusioned and it’ll be unlikely anything will show up,” Draco pointed out, almost hopeful.
Potter’s face acknowledged this as he held the door open.
Draco was needed to practice a technique he had invented; that of extracting something of the subjective experience, isolating it from the bulk of unconscious knowledge present in the whole memory. The half of the room that had not been paid attention to would be lightly sketched in, not reproduced from assumption, previous knowledge and snatches of subconscious awareness. Certain individuals loomed more vivid than others - the good-looking, the revoltingly sniffling. Snatches of conversation were recommended to the intruder’s attention. This kind of memory was useful, in conjunction of course with the more panoramic approach, because it often highlighted what was being sought. In this instance, no one had witnessed the murder itself, but uncertainly aimed magnifications of the bakery pre-murder might take them up closer to the grain of the killer’s modus operandi.
In general, Draco found dealing with subjective memories made him like people more somehow. So limited, with a small but sometimes deep faculty of perception. So similar, always reminding him of his own memories on which he’d made his first experiments, but separate too, unique enough that they always rounded out a story more, no matter how many memories were collected of the same event. Draco had wanted to find a more personal way still, something that took him into the source’s bodily experience, to have their thoughts appear in his own mind, to smell what they smelt, to feel their wet feet or even their orgasms. Draco and Astoria had been quite eager to feel each other’s orgasms but, thus far, it seemed there was a divide between one person and another and one time and another that could not be breeched.
Draco was always gratified and flustered when he was temporarily placed in the same kind of officialdom as the Aurors, sat on the same side of a desk with one, facing the individual about to deliver their memory into their hands, or, more accurately, into the waiting pensieve. These days the Aurors usually managed to project a gracious sense of working with Draco, rather than a sense of suppressed menace and that Draco had better do his job with no funny business. Every time Draco found himself grateful that he had crossed to the other side, the gratitude was quickly followed by the remembrance that it should be him dispersing menace or graciousness.
The people from the bakery were, as witnesses asked to contribute to a criminal investigation so often were, positively asquirm with anxiety. Disturbed by what they had crossed paths with, frustrated by the interruption to their day, suspecting, almost always irrationally, that they would be suspected, they were sullenly silent even while forced into a kind of communication, or so full of talk and questions that the taking and viewing of their memories got postponed.
A prominent point of convergence between the memories was a man who wet himself while standing in the queue. He drew attention to himself by being so obviously surprised and horrified by the embarrassment. A woman behind the counter Banished the puddle on the floor and the man in front of the unfortunate, to whom he was in off-putting proximity, applied a Drying Charm to his robes. The incontinent offered apologies and protestations that it had never happened before.
“Distraction,” said Draco at the same time as Potter, when they were watching this occurrence for the second time.
“Definitely. What we want to find out is whether he’s a willing or unwilling accomplice,” said Potter.
The man in question was reluctant to give up his memory of the painful incident.
“We already know what happened,” Draco said impatiently.
“So you don’t really need me to-”
“It’s your duty,” said Potter, delivering the phrase with all the stern encouragement one expected of the Boy Who Lived.
The man resentfully surrendered. The memory was quite intact, no signs of interference apparent. The magnifying, unedifying direction of the focus was convincing. When they resurfaced, Potter quizzed the man on whether he’d accepted anything edible or otherwise absorbed into the body from a stranger or any source without credentials. He said he couldn’t think of anything, which had to be taken with a pinch of salt, and Potter had someone take a sample of his blood.
The next memory they took revealed the most, in a way. Just before the incontinency episode, a woman watched a shadow flicker for a moment over a wall. Though it wasn’t really a shadow, not exactly, just a visual impression too indistinct to be anything else. The grain of everything was larger, somehow, in personalised impressions, and when Draco and Potter used the standard type of memory, the presence of a Disillisioned person was only detectable, insofar as it was detectable at all, because they knew it was there; the faintest disturbance in empty air.
“He hardly needed the man to piss himself. Likes to go over the top,” said Draco, though analysing serial killers was Potter’s job.
“It doesn’t allow us the satisfaction of focusing on what little we’ve got. He obviously wants to be chased, and maybe caught, too, but he can’t resist being unkind to us,” Potter said.
“I’m sure he’s a completely loathsome person. I wish I didn’t have to think about him,” Draco snapped.
A slight pause. “It could be a woman,” Potter offered.
Having physical evidence of the person who’d sent him ominous parcels made it all seem more real. Draco found it hard to shake off the chill, the sense of almost resigned doom that settled upon him. When he’d extracted all the memories, he went down to the Archive to catalogue them.
“Where’ve you been?” asked Grace. She and Ryan appeared unoccupied. “We were wondering whether we should tell someone, only we weren’t sure who.”
“I’ve been in the care of the Aurors. They should have let you know, really.”
“The Aurors?”
Draco couldn’t really see a way out of telling them. So for the first time, he told the dramatic tale of the serial killer from the newspapers who’d started involving Draco in his crimes. He was surprised to find he enjoyed it, despite his initial reluctance.
Grace and Ryan were a gratifying audience, and quick to see the implications for Draco’s peace of mind.
“I don’t think you should catalogue those memories, it’ll only keep you thinking about it,” said Ryan.
“I’ll do it!” said Grace. “I have to learn, anyway.”
Draco ignored what seemed like a reference to Draco’s retirement or death and uncharacteristically agreed.
After work he went home only to pack a bag, and Floo’d to Theo’s place, hoping Theo wasn’t still in the shop downstairs. By luck, he was just that moment coming in by the door.
“What’s with the bag?” asked Theo, at the same time as Draco announced “I’m staying with you for a bit.”
“Why?” asked Theo, somewhat unwelcomingly. He remedied his tone by saying, “I mean, I suppose you can if you want.”
“I feel too much of a sitting duck at my place. The serial killer has been playing games with me.” And Draco told the story of the rooftop picture and Eric Teanby, and the cake bomb and Coralie Ensign.
“I wonder why,” said Theo at the end. “Did he choose you at random for someone to scare, or is there some kind of deep, significant pattern?”
“If only I knew,” said Draco. Theo’s calm seriousness settled his stomach even when not overtly soothing.
“When the Muggle Liaison guy was killed people wondered if there was a political agenda in it somewhere. But they’re already saying maybe there isn’t, because they can’t fit the baker woman or Joe Aveling in. If the press knew about you, it’d be different. Having you in the picture right away makes it look more political. Not necessarily rightly so.”
Draco tried never to think about being an ex-Death Eater, and as these days he managed to go long stretches of time without being reminded to his face, he realised now that beyond the realms of unconsidered, automatic paranoia, he’d failed to ponder the relevance of it in this context.
“It doesn’t seem to simplify things. Who knows where the killer’s coming from? If he’s trying to make a point he’s fucking useless at it.”
“I think the most important thing is the Aurors and you. So far, we can’t be sure, but it sounds like things are alright,” said Theo.
“I don’t think I’m their number one suspect,” Draco admitted. “Though that is exactly the sort of thing they’re supposed to conceal.”
“Just make sure you don’t act like you’re thinking too hard about the effect you’re having on them. Assuming you have to deal with them again,” said Theo.
“Where do you think it will all end?” asked Draco. He knew Theo couldn’t answer, but he wished he could believe that he could.
Theo knew Draco knew it was pointless to ask. He exhaled. “You can always go into hiding. You don’t even have to have the Aurors know where you are.”
“That’s true. I don’t think I’d go that far, though.”
“Anyway, if anything else happens it should give you more information. So, if you want to think positively, you shouldn’t dread it--”
“But look forward to someone being gruesomely killed!”
Theo had the sense to change the subject over dinner, and came up with a lot of customer-related grievances. Draco was glad to be with someone else. Somehow disaster seemed less likely to strike him in Theo’s flat than in his own.
He felt more resolved than relaxed as bedtime approached, though. Even before he’d had the serial killer to worry about he’d been feeling the itch, like something needed to be unpeeled, that he got as a precursor to a pensieve session. And now he felt he really ought to do all he could to discover why him. Go through his associations.
When Theo had gone to bed and was guaranteed not to interrupt for any reason, Draco retired to the spare room and got his pensieve out of his bag. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, he held his wand to his temple, and watched the memories coalesce in the basin. The silver-white milky mist spiralled and spilt into the thicker consistency of the dull-gold stands of subjective memory. Draco wanted a good variety with his most recent preoccupations meeting several layers of older memories, so he kept going for a while.
Draco liked, perhaps best of all, the moment when he first stirred the memories and they sparked and any surprising image, something he’d hardly noticed before or something he loved and was glad to see again might appear in the basin like a beautiful flower suddenly shooting up.
What he got now was Rain He Had Known. Rain dripping on window panes, strings of water lashing the ground, rain slanting into his own small, slightly shocked face in the days when he was not allowed to do magic. Draco waited patiently for the obvious carriage to bring up the rear in this train of thought: a slick of bloody water with the impress of his shoe sole in it. Then himself, his face young and fixedly sullen and tired, being interrogated by Aurors. His excuses, his protestations. No, he never did that - he wouldn’t. Yes, he did do that, like the witness said, but he had to. Trying to construct a new moral identity for himself as well as for the Aurors. Ryan Cobbing: “Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible thing.” Ryan Cobbing didn’t sink down into the basin, but lingered, going though the Miscellaneous memories like he had on his first day. Ryan. The timing, of course - he’d started at the Archive just before Draco received the painting. A montage of Ryan played as Draco’s blood ran a little cold and he thought. That seemed to be all, though, just the timing thing. Draco both relaxed and felt a little disappointed. It would have been good to find the killer. It would have been a better relief than feeling fairly sure it wasn’t Ryan. Even Potter, from his serene height, would surely be piqued to have a prophecy snatched from under his nose. Anyway. Now he’d thought about it he’d notice if Ryan did something strange.
The pensieve abruptly changed to show rainy rooftops that weren’t quite the Muggle Liaison Office rooftops, or the ones in the picture. They were replaced suddenly again by Daphne, sitting opposite him and talking and laughing on some occasion he couldn’t place. Astoria saying she wished she was in charge of tracking down the killer. A chain of himself doing what he was doing now, examining pensieves, stirring thoughts up with a wand. Potter winning at Quidditch, Potter being declared a hero - several of this small selection of Potter-being-declared-a-hero occasions were the potent, individualised kind of memory, and Draco could not help a laugh at his own expense to see the glorious close-ups of Potter’s face, magnifying any sign of gratification. Somehow resentment was inescapably implied in the very air against which Potter was outlined. Draco sighed and gave up hope of finding something useful. He prodded around the basin for good things to go to bed on; being a great father to Scorpius, fresh Spring days, that kind of thing.
Part Two