Chapter Three of 'Incandescence'- Irritated Parents
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Chapter Three-Irritated Parents
“Draco. How wonderful to see you.”
Draco smiled and leaned in to kiss his mother on the cheek. She looked wonderful as always, with a white shawl around her shoulders and her hair combed to hang in a long, straight sheet of blonde silk over the shawl. Her robes underneath that were blue, the sort of sky-blue that Draco always described in Quidditch scenes. He hadn’t liked playing in the rain when he still played; why should he inflict that on his characters? Unless he was irritated with them, of course, or needed the rain for a plot point. Everything in his novels ultimately bent to serve the needs of the story.
“I heard that you have been seen with Potter,” Narcissa murmured, holding out her arm so that Draco could escort her into the dining room. “Tell me, Draco, is your interest in him political or predatory?”
Draco rolled his eyes at an angle so that his mother couldn’t see him rolling them. She still knew it was happening, of course, and smiled at him with perfect serenity.
“Neither,” Draco said. “It’s novelistic. His story has never been told in the way that I would tell it, and I’m trying to get permission from him to tell it.” He tilted his head speculatively; he’d come to the Manor just to have dinner with his parents, but he remembered something now that might help him with the Potter books. “You saved his life in the Forbidden Forest, didn’t you, Mother?”
“I was not the reason he survived the Killing Curse,” Narcissa said, a prim undertone in her voice. She expected Draco to know more about the workings of magical theory than that. “I have no more idea about why that happened than anyone else.”
“I know, but you lied to Voldemort for him.” Draco smiled temptingly at her. “Tell me the story again after dinner? I need to know the way Potter looked when he walked into the Forbidden Forest, how long it was between the time he supposedly died and the moment when Voldemort ordered you to go to him-everything.”
“I will try to remember.” The primness was more pronounced than before. Of course, that was almost all reporters had wanted to interview his mother about after the war, how she had rescued Harry Potter.
Draco ignored the warning tone. He could get away with outrages that no reporter could. His parents did not always like what he did, but they tolerated it.
They knew how close all of them had come to having no family left to tolerate.
He swept Narcissa through the doors, decorated with gold and silver inlay, into the wide dining room where Voldemort had so often sat and held strategy sessions. It had taken Draco some time to conquer his bad memories of this place, including the way Voldemort had fed his snake on helpless prisoners, but he had been determined to do it, as had his parents. This was their home, and they would not give it up to nightmares.
His father was sitting at the head of the dining table, consulting his heavily jeweled watch with an air of impatience. He rose to his feet when he saw them. “You are late,” he said sternly to Narcissa, the way he always did.
Narcissa held her head high, the way she always did, and gave him a cool sigh. “Perhaps you should get a better watch,” she said.
“Or a better wife.” Lucius rounded the end of the table, moving towards her with a quick stride. Draco stepped smoothly away from his mother as she lifted her hands. She hardly pushed against Lucius’s chest, but he stopped as though he had run into one of the walls of the dining room.
“Could you find one as beautiful as I am?” Narcissa asked, and tossed her head so that light ran and rippled through her hair. “Or one who kisses as well?” She rose on her toes and pressed her lips to Lucius’s.
Draco looked away with his face flaming. It was no use protesting, because they would do this; the most he could do was not look.
“Perhaps not,” Lucius grumbled as they parted. “But make sure that you’re not late again.”
“I’ll buy you a better watch for your birthday,” said Narcissa, in the voice of someone who has to put up with enormous trials. Draco heard the rustle of cloth as she linked her arm with his father’s, and he finally felt safe to turn back.
They shone as they stood beside each other, both in white robes, both blond-though Lucius’s hair was paler than Narcissa’s-both tall and pale and slender. Draco felt a deep tug of pride and love and envy move through him. He doubted he would ever find someone he looked as well beside as his parents looked beside each other.
He knew the problem was his own imagination. He had been hearing and constructing the story of his parents all his life. He knew how well they suited each other, and, in the war, what they had risked to stay together. He wanted someone who could partner him with the same kind of depth. He wanted to live a romance.
But true romances were rare, and Draco doubted that he would be fortunate enough to walk into one.
“Come and sit down, dear,” said Narcissa.
Draco gave her a grateful smile. Romances were rare, but family histories weren’t, and Draco was glad that he lived in a family like this one instead of the tangled families that Denise Bellanthe was forever describing in her long historicals, where everyone had hidden siblings and murderous feuds with half their relatives.
For that matter, he thought, as he moved forwards to take the seat beside his father, to the immediate left of the head of the table, there are some people who have almost no family history at all.
He wondered if Potter felt left out when he looked at the Weasleys, with their crowd of family members, or the Blacks, with their long history, or even his own godson Teddy Lupin, who had a grandmother who could tell him tales of his parents. It wasn’t the lack of physical bodies that would be so bad, Draco thought, but the lack of stories. He’d read the same biographies everyone else had; he knew that Potter had grown up with Muggles who told him nothing about his parents, that he hadn’t known he was a wizard until he was eleven years old. That was a long, long time to be without an origin story.
Is that the reason he’s never married? Because he’s been without a story for so long it would seem strange to him to start one?
“Draco, please pass the salt,” Narcissa said, in the tone that meant she had asked him the same thing three times and was beginning to let the discrepancy between her question and his response tell on her nerves.
Draco started, hastily passed the salt, and gave her an apologetic smile. Then he sank back into wondering and dreaming about Potter. His parents conversed with each other, as always, and only occasionally asked him a question. Among the things they politely tolerated was his career. As Lucius said, he could not understand the tendency to communicate so often, but at least it was not working for a living.
Does Potter think the same thing? That this isn’t really work? Is that why he told me to just make something up?
Draco smiled a moment later. Well, he and Lucius are right in one sense. It isn’t work in the fashion of industry. It’s art.
*
“I’m not sure how well I can remember, Draco. It was sixteen years ago, after all.”
Draco snorted and tapped his finger against his wineglass, making it ring. “You’re no older than this crystal, Mother, and you can produce many sounds finer.”
Narcissa lowered her lashes with a pleased smile. She was sitting opposite him in a comfortable chair in the Small White Room, which she had chosen because it made the firelight complement her hair and cast a deep shine on her white robes. Lucius had sat with them for a short time, but business had called him away to his aviary. Draco had taken the opportunity to get in a few jabs. If his father could not imagine Draco as a novelist, Draco had a hard time imagining his father as a pigeon fancier.
“Well,” Narcissa said, in a slow, reflective tone like sliding water, “Potter made no attempt to defend himself, I can tell you that. He simply stood in front of the Dark Lord and fell over when the Killing Curse hit him.”
“Voldemort,” Draco said insistently. He thought it ridiculous that, so long after the war and the final demise of the bastard, his parents went on granting Voldemort a title.
His mother flashed him an unexpectedly sharp glance, which made Draco wince like poison applied to the nerves. “We endured more from him than you did,” she said. “We felt his power. And we lived longer in the midst of Dark magic. Permit us a sign of what is caution, instead of fear.”
Draco lowered his eyes and nodded, fighting the blush that he could feel forming. He hated disappointing his mother, and it wasn’t the most intelligent thing to do when he needed her to tell the story of what had happened in the Forest.
“He fell over,” Narcissa continued. “The Dark Lord made a speech that I haven’t bothered remembering, about triumph and how he had finally defeated his nemesis and a lot of other nonsense. Then he sent me to check on Potter. I knew the moment I knelt over him that he was breathing.”
“But you didn’t actually see the moment when he returned to life?” Draco demanded. He was a bit disappointed. He had thought someone must have, but it looked as though that ultimate secret remained locked tight in Potter’s hands and heart.
I must convince him to open them.
“No,” Narcissa said. “For all I knew, he might never have stopped breathing at all, or started doing it again a moment after his body hit the ground. I asked him what had become of you, and he told me that you were alive. That was when I decided that I would lie to the Dark Lord.” She shook her head slightly and looked away, one hand tightening sharply in her hair.
Draco sat still. He knew this was the bravest thing his mother had ever done in her life, and he could be silent in respect for it.
“And from there,” Narcissa said simply, “you know what happened. The Dark Lord commanded the half-giant to carry Potter back to the school, and then he revealed he was alive and defeated the Dark Lord.”
“What exactly made you decide to lie?” Draco asked, a question he had never felt able to ask before because they were still too close to the event. “You could have taken the information about me from him and told the Dark Lord the truth.”
“I had seen enough torture,” Narcissa said. “I did not think the Dark Lord would leave you alive for long after he killed Potter, whilst there was at least the chance that Potter would. And-” She paused, shaking her head.
Draco leaned forwards. He knew moments like this. Lovegood had had them, and Longbottom, and Granger. In these hesitations and silences was the meat of the story. “What was the final deciding factor?”
“The expression on Potter’s face when he came walking into the clearing,” Narcissa said. “He didn’t expect to survive, Draco, no matter what he may have said later. He thought the Dark Lord would kill him, and he came walking to face his fate anyway. I couldn’t take away his chance to live after that display of courage.”
Draco gave a slow nod. That might have been something he had heard before, but to have confirmation made all the difference. The shadows of a story were stirring in his mind.
“I can write about a hero like him,” he murmured. “Or at least I can try, if he’ll just yield and give me the story.”
Narcissa rose abruptly to her feet. “I did not realize that you were this intent on writing a novel about Potter, Draco,” she said. “Do you intend to force him?”
Draco blinked at her. “How can I force him, when he has more magic than I do and a higher reputation? Of course not. I simply want to persuade him to give me the story, so that I can tell it.” He could feel a yearning in himself when he spoke those last words. Maybe “private” people like Potter and “secretive” people like his parents didn’t understand why Draco needed to tell stories, but at bottom it was to fulfill this yearning that coiled in him like a hungry viper.
Narcissa narrowed her eyes. “He saved you, Draco,” she said. “He saved you by saving himself, and he did that by telling me the truth. Not to mention the way he saved your life during the battle.”
Draco stared at her in puzzlement. “I know that. Why did you think I wanted to hear the story again?” He tried a smile, but in the face of his mother’s penetrating stare, he dropped it. She would have looked exactly like a hawk if her eyes were ringed with gold, he thought. “Mother, what is it?”
“He’s done enough,” Narcissa said, with a quiet force that Draco hadn’t heard her use since he was five years old. “I don’t think he needs you pursuing him for a story that he must have decided to leave buried.”
Draco folded his arms. In spite of himself, he could feel the blood rising to his face and his skin prickling with discomfort. “Mother, I need to tell this story. It’s the right one to tell. You don’t know what that’s like.”
“I don’t know exactly what Potter’s situation in the wizarding world is like, either,” Narcissa said, “but I can imagine. And I know that my imagination walks more easily with him than with you.”
She turned and left the room. Draco collapsed back into the chair and frowned at the fire, torn between wondering when his mother had become Potter’s defender and trying to decide what kind of character would use the words she had just spoken, which he liked.
*
“Look, Malfoy, just because I cooperated with you once before doesn’t mean I’ll trap Harry into talking to you.”
“I don’t want to trap him,” Draco said, frustrated beyond belief. “I want him to agree freely to give me the story. But it’s hard when he’s apparently ordered the Aurors to stand around him in a wall. Look, will you just carry a message to him?”
Granger cocked her head meditatively. She sat behind her huge desk completely at her ease, small though the office around the desk was. The Ministry’s latest tactic to discourage her was apparently to give her a small office and hope she would drive herself mad with claustrophobia. Draco didn’t think it would work. Granger was a brilliant lawyer, and she would go right on reforming the laws that dealt with centaurs, vampires, house-elves, merfolk, and other magical creatures. The Ministry tried to pretend those attempts-and the changes to law she actually made-didn’t exist, while using Granger’s talents to convict wizards who committed horrible abuses even they couldn’t ignore. Draco thought they would regret it when they turned around and found Granger was Minister someday.
“But I don’t see any reason to do that,” Granger said. “If Harry doesn’t want to talk to you, he shouldn’t have to.”
Draco took a deep breath. She was a lawyer, so he would try an appeal to logic. “You were happy with the way your novel turned out, weren’t you?” She should be; her novel, Fire in the Darkness, had been the hardest to write, and also a bestseller. Granger gave him a tiny, private smirk, as if she was remembering that.
To this day, she was the only one of Draco’s subjects who had insisted that she receive ten percent of the profits from the book about her.
“I’m not the same person as Harry,” Granger said. “It was difficult enough for you to subdue your prejudices and preconceptions when it came to me. How in the world are you going to work with him, when you hated him so much?”
“I didn’t hate him,” Draco said. Granger folded her arms and raised an eyebrow, declaring that he was lying without a word. “I disliked him greatly,” Draco continued, because he should know the truths of his own soul better than Granger did. “But we’re adults now, and I have no reason to dislike him since the war. He hasn’t tried to embarrass me, or harass me, or force me to fulfill the life-debts. Why does everyone assume I’ll do such a terrible job?”
“I don’t know about everyone,” said Granger, with that fussy precision that Draco had had to tone down so much in Astraea Millhouse, the character based on her, “but I know why I assume that. I can explain, if you’d like.”
Draco spent some moments gazing at her, trying to allow his empathy to reach into her head and pull out the answer, but Granger’s mind was frustratingly opaque to him. Draco reckoned he really shouldn’t be surprised. It was several years since he had written Fire in the Darkness, and he had shrugged off the harness of Astraea’s mind as soon as he could, relieved at being able to do some softer thinking.
He must have scowled or nodded or given some sign that he wanted Granger’s “expert” opinion, because she spoke in an exceptionally dry voice. “You sensationalize things, Malfoy. You play up the dramatic aspects of the lives you write about, and skip over the ones that you think are less important. But Harry’s been exposed to so many ‘big events’ that he’s numb to them by now. You won’t be able to write about him in any truthful manner unless you can write about the small things. And I already know that you can’t write about the small things.”
Draco gritted his teeth. Simply because he had left Astraea single at the end of the book instead of trying to describe her unusual marriage arrangements with the character based on Weasley-“I could try it.”
“But you wouldn’t succeed.” Granger picked up one of the scrolls lying on her desk and bent her face over it, her words muffled by the angle of her head. “That’s why you would be so terrible. Somewhere out there might be Harry’s perfect biographer, or even the person who could perfectly turn Harry’s life into a novel without betraying who he was, but you’re not her.”
Draco went on staring at her for some time. She never looked up. Granger could ignore people more thoroughly than anyone Draco had ever met, with the single exception of his mother.
Finally he stood and left the office, turning up the corridor with a scowl that he made no effort to hide. His reputation didn’t rise and fall by the expression on his face, like an actor’s. His life was his words.
And I said that I was the best person to write this novel. Did I mean that, or was it only the kind of protest I automatically make when I’m told that I can’t do something?
Draco paused, new thoughts whirling and buzzing through his head like a tornado of fleas.
I said that I want this to happen. It doesn’t look as though Potter or Potter’s friends will talk to me, and even my own mother warned me to leave him alone. There’s doubt on every side, and I can’t possibly respond to that by simply letting it go. I have to show them I’m the best writer no matter what, and that means serving the story.
No matter what.
Draco licked his lips and shot a nervous glance up and down the corridor. At the moment, it was bereft of people. It was nearly noon, and most people in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement seized that hour to go eat lunch. Potter was among them, as Draco knew very well. His movements had been reported carefully enough in the latest newspaper articles, after all, and Draco had no reason to think that they had changed. A change would have been newsworthy enough to merit an announcement.
That meant that neither Potter nor his partner were likely to be in Potter’s office right now. And that meant that Draco might be able to learn something from investigating Potter’s office, if he was clever and lucky.
And swift, he added to himself, looking at his watch. He would have to keep a sharp eye on the time, since he was sure that he could spend literally hours investigating Potter’s secrets.
It was easy enough to look as if he belonged in the department, or at least had business there. Draco fastened the slightly bored, slightly harassed expression that most people got when summoned to the Ministry on his face, and strode along, now and then checking his watch and sighing. No one asked where he was going or if he needed help, probably glad to escape the necessity of dealing with him by fleeing to lunch.
Now, whether I can enter his office depends on what sort of celebrity Potter is.
Luckily, Potter turned out to be the right sort of celebrity-that is, the kind who had become comfortable in his environment and trusted to other people to provide protection for him, instead of locks and wards. Draco had the wards that did exist on Potter’s office door undone in a few seconds. There were advantages to having parents who considered the kind of magic taught by Hogwarts extremely limited.
He stepped into the room and made a face at the mess scattered across the two desks. In fairness, I will assume that most of this is Weasley’s.
He chose a desk at random, thanks to the large photograph of Potter with his two best friends on top of it, and smiled when he realized that most of the reports sprawled across it before the familiar messy signature. I am clever.
Since he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for and the slightest thing might be valuable, he picked up the first packet of papers and flicked through them. Reports on cases, dry statistical reports, new files-
What’s this?
It was a small, folded piece of paper, which had slipped out of some deep cranny no doubt meant to conceal it. Draco picked it up and unfolded it with lively curiosity. It had no salutation and no signature, so he concentrated on the first paragraph. Maybe this is one of Potter’s mysterious letters.
It certainly seemed so. The writing was neat and in capital letters, to make it harder to trace, and the first line made Draco’s eyebrows rise. I KNOW THAT YOU’RE SEEING THINGS NO ONE ELSE CAN SEE, POTTER.
“MALFOY!”
Badly startled, Draco dropped the letter and the stack of paper on top of it. He hoped that the scatter of various different parchments would hide what he had been looking at.
When he glanced up and met Potter’s furious eyes and drawn wand, he realized that that might not matter. He was in trouble whether that was revealed or not.
“I told you to leave me alone,” Potter growled. “And instead you look through my private papers?” He laughed darkly. “Of course, I should have remembered. Privacy means nothing to you. Otherwise you would leave people decently alone instead of picking through the wreckage of their worst memories looking to fatten yourself on the carrion. Scavenger.”
Draco drew his breath to defend himself. Potter’s eyes became the color of jade, and he gestured sharply with his wand. Draco’s tongue literally tied itself in knots.
“Get out of here,” Potter said, a visible glow of magic spreading out like a heat haze around him. “You make me sick.”
Draco didn’t remember clearly how he got out of the room-only that he stood on the street in front of the Ministry a short time later, shuddering, with the ache in his tongue a match for the ringing shame in his brain.
And the raging curiosity that the letter had roused and that all Potter’s anger could not quench.
Chapter Four.