Chapter Five of 'Incandescence'- Intimate Details
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Chapter Five-Intimate Details
“Why would you want to look through those?” Madam Pince’s voice was sharp as a chisel. She leaned forwards protectively across her desk, as though she thought Draco would try to spring over it and snatch what he wanted by force.
Draco offered the woman the rueful smile that he’d given Bertha when she asked why he needed to know details about ink. “Research for the next novel.”
If anything, the librarian’s eyes narrowed further. “Oh? And a novel that will be set in the modern wizarding world, as all of yours are-don’t think I don’t know your books, young man-requires details from newspapers that are fourteen years old?”
Listen, you old witch, Draco longed to say. I know those papers are doing nothing but rotting back there. You might as well let me have them. I’ll be the only one who’s read them in Merlin knows how long. What do you care if a few of them fall apart in my hands? There are always Reparo spells.
Except he couldn’t say anything like that, of course, both because it would be undiplomatic and because Pince was one of those people unmoved by practical or monetary considerations. Her obsession was her library, and she would believe that moving about or changing any of the contents was impossible.
Luckily, Draco had other tricks that were available to him, particularly when he knew his audience. He started intently into her eyes and lowered his voice. “I am producing a modern book, Madam Pince, but I despise the shoddy standards of modern printing. I’ve persuaded Murray’s that this novel should be made to last.”
Pince uncoiled like a snake that someone had offered a mouse. “Oh?” she breathed.
Draco held his wince back as her breath blew in his face. It smelled like dust and old leather. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed that far too many books nowadays fall apart after you’ve read them only a few hundred times. Disgraceful.”
“It certainly is,” Pince agreed in a hard voice, standing up straight. “Which is the reason that I must ban the students from reading some of the books. If they would listen to me, they would realize-”
Draco moved hastily. He didn’t want this to degenerate into Pince’s ranting about her students. He imagined she had years and years of remarks stored up that no one had bothered to listen to. “Yes,” he said. “But what if books existed that were more like the old grimoiries? Bound with powerful spells as well as the petty ones used now, and with glue and bindings that had themselves been enchanted?”
“You have my interest, Mr. Malfoy.” Pince pushed her glasses up her nose. “Such a book would be easier to appreciate and to store and repair.”
“Yes.” Draco laid a hand on her desk, which was the closest he wanted to come to touching her, and smiled charmingly into her eyes. “The novel I want to write now will be like that. But I want the contents to match the binding, you know. The binding will demonstrate some attention to history and sense of tradition. I want my writing to do the same thing. And for that, I need the details I’ll harvest from those newspapers.”
Pince stared off into the distance for a moment. Draco waited patiently. He could see the obsessive gleam in her eyes, and he didn’t want to interrupt the trance that might be his best way of getting her to convince herself.
Then she snapped her gaze back to him, and nodded briskly. “Your commitment to your artistic principles is immense, Mr. Malfoy, and should be encouraged. I will fetch the newspapers for you. There’s a room in the back of the library where you can read them in peace.”
Draco let out a sigh of relief as he followed her, mingled with one of regret. The Malfoy charm triumphs again. Now, if only Potter were so easy to charm.
*
Draco paged carefully through the yellowed copies of the Daily Prophet. Though the library contained other newspapers, which Madam Pince had also placed at his disposal, the Prophet was the paper that reported most often on Potter. The articles were full of lies, of course, but Draco wasn’t interested in the articles.
He wanted the photographs.
Notice the small details, Granger had told him, and Draco intended to. Particularly since the photographs moved, and he could tell much about Potter from looking at what his imaged self was doing-or at least he could tell much about the man Potter had been from sixteen to ten years ago, just after the war. He would have to be careful and perceptive about integrating this older picture and the modern man.
There was the photograph of Potter at Granger and Weasley’s wedding, in neat dress robes that contrasted with the tangle of hair that nothing could tame. Draco smiled in spite of himself as he watched Potter watching Granger and Weasley. The pure affection in his eyes made it easier to think of Potter’s friends as likeable.
Then Potter turned his head, and his eyes looked straight out of the photograph. At once his face took on a blank expression, and he edged backwards until his body mostly ducked out of the frame. Then he peered out like a small child looking around a door at a monster.
Draco blinked. Is that when he noticed the photographer?
The rest of the photos he looked at-at least the ones that had Potter in the background, usually as part of a larger group at a celebration-were the same. Potter tensed the moment he realized someone had a camera pointed at him. Probably the real Potter was too diplomatic ever to do so, but the image sidled off, or crouched down as if to hide himself, or ran away. Sometimes he hid behind a taller person, usually Weasley.
And each time, he wore a scowl on his face.
In the ones where Potter was the subject of the photo and couldn’t flee, he stood stiffly, his hands always clenched into fists or his arms folded. Sometimes he smiled, but the smile was on the edge of a glare. Draco wondered that the photographers didn’t seem to notice. Then again, some of them probably didn’t care what the picture looked like as long as they had a picture, and others would think Potter’s discomfort added an edge of tension that made the photograph more exciting.
Draco knew what he was looking at. He had seen the same look, though less intense, on Lovegood’s face when she spoke of what she’d endured in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, and on Granger’s when she confessed that there had been a time during the war when she was sure that she would never see Weasley again.
Potter was in pain.
But why would the mere snapping of a photograph make him seem so? Especially when he had been a celebrity since he had entered the wizarding world?
Thoughtfully, Draco looked at some of the more recent papers, the ones from between five and ten years ago. By then, another reason to photograph Potter had been added to the pile: he was a top Auror, involved in more captures than anyone else, and a lot of the people threatened by Dark wizards liked to see them in custody, to increase their feeling of safety. Now Potter was the center of attention, and he had a ready-made pose available to him, one that he had probably been trained specifically to assume, unlike the pose of hero.
He could have set his jaw and held a wand to the throat or temple of whoever he’d snatched today and looked stern and manly. It would have satisfied most of the audience, who wouldn’t know any difference between that pose and Potter the real person anyway.
Yet even in these pictures, Potter couldn’t seem to do that. He stood in a resigned way instead, muscles tensed to back up or run away, or kept his eyes fastened on the wizard or witch who stood in chains. Then, Draco noted, he could make his expression as hard as he liked.
Draco laid the papers down and leaned back in the chair, in part to give his eyes a rest, but also to consider what he’d just learned. He sneezed some dust out of his nose and stared at the ceiling, where, instead of windows, bright, cold lights hung. Madam Pince had explained that light might damage the more fragile old paper, and though Draco could easily have said that was what Preservation Charms were for, he’d nodded enough times to satisfy her.
The conclusion was inescapable, no matter how many times he tried to dodge it.
Potter would never be comfortable with his heroism, no matter how long it had been since the war-in part because he’d built up a heroic reputation in the aftermath, not just during it. And yet he went on acting as an Auror anyway. Mere discomfort was not enough to make him give up a job that protected other people.
He didn’t mind showing that discomfort, though it seemed to be in ways that most people didn’t notice. Maybe most people weren’t looking. So he was still terminally honest, Draco thought, as he had been all his life.
And the biggest revelation, the one that was most certainly true, the one Draco did not want to admit because it threw the whole concept of a novel based on Potter into peril…
Potter didn’t like attention.
Draco splayed his fingers over his eyes. Fuck. What do I do now?
The answers piled into him-not answers to the question he’d just asked, but to the question of writing a book based on Potter. Potter would hate the renewed interest in his exploits it would stir up. He would hate people asking him which parts of the story were true and which weren’t. No chance that he would adopt Granger’s cold stare and quick way with a hex when people thought they knew her through Fire in the Darkness, or Longbottom’s shy, embarrassed smile, or Lovegood’s serene response that all the parts of the story were true, in one way or another. He would hate the calls for interviews that many people, including Murray’s, probably, would issue.
He had told Draco that he was a private person in the Fire-Room and that was the reason he didn’t want to share his memories. Draco wondered if anyone but Potter himself and his closest friends realized how private. It was no wonder he clung to the secrets that he wanted preserved, and why he would be frantic if the mysterious letter-writer had perhaps discovered one of them.
He would not want to answer Draco’s questions, and he would never give permission for some of his most intimate details to appear in the book.
Draco placed that information side-by-side with the force that was still driving him to write the book, the golden energy shimmering up his veins when he thought of making Potter into a vision of glory.
One was reality, the other dreams. Draco needed both to accomplish the kind of writing he excelled at.
And they were both as strong as each other. He would need something else to help him make the decision as to whether to write the book or not.
Draco sighed and put the papers carefully back in their places, wearing the Gloves Charm that Pince had taught him. He doubted he could learn anything more than he already had from the public records of Potter’s life. He would have to talk to someone who knew him well.
There was bloody little choice as far as that went. Granger had made it clear she’d closed her mouth when it came to Potter. He’d angered his mother, and probably exhausted the little information she possessed. He didn’t want to think about approaching Weasley-the cretin had rejected every offer Draco made him, even the apology he tried to send right after the war-and the Aurors in the Department who had contact with Potter might be willing to talk, but Draco wouldn’t trust them to know the kind of things he needed.
Which left one person as a fairly good source.
*
“Draco.” Lovegood’s voice was soft and clear, the way it always was. She had dreamy eyes, the way she always did. She called him by his first name as if they’d been friends since childhood, and she smiled at him in a way that caused the tight coil in Draco’s gut to relax. “Come in. I’m going to finish a Wrackspurt hunt, and then I’ll prepare the chocolate.”
Draco followed Lovegood into the long, ramshackle house that she shared with Longbottom, her husband. It was on the borders of a forest that Draco didn’t know the name of, and which didn’t appear on a map; Lovegood had to relax the Unplottable Charm each time he decided to visit so he could get to it. The house itself was made of wood, the walls constructed of the trunks and roots of living trees. Draco admired the effect, but it made the floor underfoot rather knobby and caused leaves to fall in one’s hair.
“Neville’s not home,” Lovegood said, when she had assiduously traveled around the room twice, peering at the walls with a lens made of beaten gold, and then started to heat a pot of chocolate. “We received report of a black unicorn in the Forbidden Forest and he had to leave right away. Did you need to give me a message for him?”
Draco smiled in spite of himself. No matter how often he came to talk to Lovegood, she assumed he wanted to talk to Longbottom instead. “No. I wanted to ask you about Harry Potter.”
“Oh, I think Rita Skeeter knows much more about him,” said Lovegood seriously, as she settled into a chair across from him and started tying a garland of mint in her hair. “After all, I was only at school at the same time he was and fought in one battle with him.”
Draco blinked. That was something he didn’t remember hearing. Of course, he’d had more trouble in his interviews with her than with some of his others; she tended to wander from the point, and he tried not to bring her back too sharply, because he wanted to incorporate so much of her speaking style into The Hope-Well to serve Selene. “What battle was that?”
Lovegood looked at him with very wide eyes, as though he had heaped shite in the middle of her table. Draco coughed uncomfortably. Lovegood had a way of making her most outlandish actions seem normal, so that you began to think you were the one who lived in a different world from reality.
“When I was in my fourth year, of course,” Lovegood said, “and when Harry was in the year above that. We flew on thestrals to the Department of Mysteries. I was glad to be with him. Watching him fight was like watching a hippogriff fight.”
Draco thought that was an odd observation, but it was exactly the kind of small detail that might yield something important about Potter, so he said, “How is Potter like a hippogriff?”
“Oh, don’t say it that way,” Lovegood said, pained. “That sounds like the opening of a bad joke, and I would hate to think of hippogriffs or Harry as bad jokes. They’re rather good ones, the universe’s laughter.” She stood up as the pot of chocolate squeaked. “Think of a different way to ask,” she added over her shoulder, as she poured chocolate into two delicate cups.
Draco put his chin on one fist and watched Lovegood in silence. She hummed softly under her breath, her blonde hair floating freely around her. Her eyes peered in perpetual surprise from behind her large glasses, but Draco knew that she understood far more than she let on she did. She simply saw no reason to let that reality trouble her.
When Lovegood turned around with the two cups of chocolate, she was smiling. “I thought of a way for you to phrase it,” she announced.
Draco accepted his cup and sipped carefully. Lovegood never served a drink hot enough to burn his tongue. She had learned the spells to avoid doing so from studying house-elves, she had claimed. If so, it was the first time Draco had ever heard of the study of house-elves doing anything useful for anyone, apart from Granger. “How is that?”
“How does Harry fight like a hippogriff?” Lovegood beamed at him. A smear of chocolate was by her lower lip. “Do you see? Hippogriffs do other things than fight, and so does Harry, so it leaves part of them free. Some parts of us should always be free.”
Draco concealed his sigh under his breath and said, “How does Potter fight like a hippogriff?”
“You know how proud hippogriffs are.” For a moment, Lovegood seemed to glance at the scar on Draco’s forearm where the ugly beast had bitten him long ago, but he wasn’t sure she really had. “They fight because something offends their honor. Harry’s like that. Evil in the world offends his honor. He has to fight it.”
“I used to think he wanted to be a hero,” Draco said softly, more to himself than Lovegood. “I know that’s not true now. But are you sure that he didn’t just fight because he hated Voldemort?”
Lovegood’s face went through one of those rare transformations where suddenly she was sharp, and alive, and present, and Draco knew he was looking at one of the most intelligent people he had ever met. “Voldemort isn’t alive any more. Why would he fight all those Dark wizards when he didn’t have to? He could have retired. It would be safer, and he’s done enough. We all told him that. But he couldn’t stop, because there was still evil out there, and the world needs people like him as much today as it did yesterday. That’s what he said when I asked.” Lovegood smiled at Draco’s elbow. “Isn’t that a wonderful saying?”
It was. Draco definitely intended to have the hero he created to replace Potter in his novel say it-
If he decided to write the novel.
He cleared his throat and did his best to find an answer for one of the questions looking at the newspaper photographs had prompted in him. “Why hasn’t Potter learned how to live with his celebrity? He’s had over twenty years to do it now, and yet he still acts eleven years old when it comes to that.”
Lovegood gave him a look of surprising pity and shook her head. “The answer to that question is obvious,” she said. “Very unworthy of you, Draco. Ask more interesting questions, and you should receive more interesting answers.”
“It’s not obvious to me.” Draco heard the snappish tone in his voice and forced himself to calm. Lovegood tended to retreat into her own mental world if confronted with too much anger, probably a defense against all the taunting she had received at Hogwarts. He said in a smoother tone when he felt able to, “Potter’s endured so much. Surely he could endure this, which has to be less terrible than facing Voldemort each and every school year?”
“Of course not,” Lovegood said, sounding faintly shocked. “Harry doesn’t like standing in one place.”
Draco experienced a moment of despair. That wasn’t the first time Lovegood had said something that Draco thought was profoundly insightful, but which he lacked the ability to decipher. This time, it drove him more mad than usual. The information he needed to crack Potter’s shell open could be hiding in those words, but it was beyond his reach.
“A person does one heroic thing, and then stands still the rest of his life and contemplates that thing,” Lovegood went on, shaking her head. “He becomes enthralled with mirrors and reflections. But moving people go on, and do other things, and they see the reflections of other beings in the water.” She smiled serenely at Draco, as if what she said should make perfect sense. “Harry’s a moving person.”
You’ve solved harder problems than this in your time, such as why you find it impossible to write about Weasleys, Draco reminded himself. You can think about this, and find the answer, even though Lovegood won’t tell you.
He pressed his fingers into his temples and sat still for a few minutes, thinking. Lovegood rose to her feet and trailed about the room, flicking a cloth at parts of the wooden walls and murmuring to them under her breath.
The easiest possible interpretation of Lovegood’s words was that Potter wasn’t self-absorbed; he saw others’ reflections instead of gazing enthralled at his own. Well, Draco had already known that. A self-absorbed person wasn’t the kind who sacrificed his life for others.
Then there were her words about motion and standing still. Potter didn’t like to look back on his past. Again, Draco had already known that from the photographs and Potter’s refusal to tell someone he trusted about the details of his sacrifice before this. Anyone who studied Potter closely enough would know that.
So combine the ideas of reflection and motion.
Draco felt stupid in the next moment. Of course. Potter didn’t like being judged for a single heroic exploit. He didn’t want to stand still and rest on his laurels of killing Voldemort for the rest of his life, which might be part of the reason that he’d become an Auror, so that people would have to consider some of his other actions. That part of it charmed Draco, because it indicated a subtle selfishness, or at least consideration of self, in Potter that Draco had seen no sign of before. He would have feared that he might actually be writing about a perfect plaster hero, except that Potter had slammed him into walls and tied his tongue in knots.
And Potter must be uncomfortable with the attention he received because he thought, or suspected, that all of it stemmed from one incident in his life, his defeat of Voldemort. Or maybe even the definitive one before then, when he had survived the Killing Curse and become the Boy-Who-Lived.
What must it be like to have your life defined by an event that happened when you were a baby, an event that you can’t even remember?
Draco closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers gently back and forth over his temples this time, to soothe his building headache.
There was no way that Potter would ever consent to let Draco write a novel about him. Because what Draco wrote about was the war, and the way that people’s lives changed as a result of it. Potter didn’t want to be defined by the war. He would never give his sanction to a text that froze that part of his life and constructed his being around it.
Draco’s effort was doomed.
And if what he understood about Potter was true in all particulars, not just a few, he should not write it, because that would make him no better than all the people who slobbered over Potter for a single action, who tried to turn him into a picture when he was busy moving out of the frame.
But that realization did not kill his curiosity about the letters, or the feeling of golden rightness when he thought of writing about Potter, or-
Or his interest in Potter for himself.
Draco opened his eyes and stared at the table.
He had liked learning these details about Potter for their own sake. He wanted to know more, the kinds of things that Granger and Weasley would never give him. He wanted to sit across from Potter at a table again and ask questions that had nothing to do with the war, simply to see his eyes flare with something other than distrust. He wanted to find the letter writer and watch Potter look at him with uncertain gratitude.
But if I can’t and shouldn’t write about him, why do I feel this?
“Some questions are very hard to answer,” he said aloud.
Lovegood turned around and gave him an intensely sympathetic smile. “Such as all questions about Wrackspurts,” she agreed.
Chapter Six.