Chapter Six of 'I Give You a Wondrous Mirror'- A Life Augmented
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Chapter Six-A Life Augmented
“If you’re sure it’s safe.” Ginny’s eyes were shadowed when she handed the letter back to him.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Harry admitted, turning the letter around in his hand and staring at the signature. The only thing he could say for sure was that it wasn’t Malfoy’s-well, Draco’s-or Narcissa’s.
I hate associating with so many people named Malfoy. It means I have to think of them by their first names.
“Then I don’t think you should go,” said Ginny firmly, folding her arms. “You’re already giving up time that you can’t really afford to give up to them, Harry. I know that Teddy would have liked to spend another hour with you yesterday, and you could have visited longer with Andromeda if you didn’t need to run back home to relieve George. And you could have stayed home with the kids for the morning if you hadn’t had to go to Malfoy Manor.”
Harry nodded. What Ginny said was all true, of course. He really didn’t have a reason to be at the Malfoys’ beck and call, life-debt or not. He could spend some days doing research on the case and seeking an outside perspective that might give him details Narcissa had forgotten or “forgotten.”
But he felt a dull ache of foreboding behind his eyes when he looked at Marian’s letter. He’d ignored it before, and usually at his peril. It was like his instinct for danger; it wasn’t always right, but it tended to lead him in the direction of something that was.
“I’m going to answer it,” he decided.
Ginny huffed out a breath.
Harry embraced her with one arm, holding the other hand out so that he could continue to study the letter. “I won’t go alone,” he reassured her. “Molly is watching Rose and Hugo today, since she hasn’t got to spend much time with Hugo yet. Ron can come with me.”
He felt the relaxation enter Ginny even though he still didn’t look at her. He smiled and kissed the top of her head. Ginny trusted her brother, more than she had ever done during the war.
But Ron had proved himself well enough since then, working part-time in the Blood Reparations Department and as a consultant with the Auror Department, dispensing advice about curses, unusual Dark magic, and pure-blood customs that the new influx of Muggleborn recruits wasn’t familiar with. He had proven to have a good memory when Hermione wasn’t trying to stuff it full of homework. He picked up facts from everywhere-Hermione’s lectures, Bill’s discussions of his curse-breaking, Molly’s gossip, his heated conversations with Ginny about Quidditch and the Holyhead Harpies’ chances of making it to the top of the league-and had learned to put them together into new and interesting configurations. Harry thought he really shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Ron had always been a good chess player.
And he was still as good with a wand as ever, and as fiercely devoted to Harry.
“Write her back, then,” Ginny murmured. “Just make sure that you meet in a public place. Tell her that you’re ready to use glamours if necessary, but not to meet her alone.”
“Yes, Mum,” Harry mocked lightly as he turned to find parchment and ink.
Ginny caught his arm, and he felt bad about it when he looked into her face. Her lips were still pinched in the sort of smile that said she was trying very hard not to worry and did it anyway.
Harry kissed her on the forehead. “I promise, Gin,” he said solemnly, “no wild stunts. And no going out of my way to help the Malfoys just because I owe them a life-debt, either. I promise. But I really do think that, the more I learn about this situation, the sooner I can be done with it.”
This time, he received a softened smile for his efforts, and he went to fetch writing materials and gather up a whimpering Lily on the way.
*
Draco was spreading marmalade on his toast when he felt a stare on the back of his neck. Since he also knew who it was-Narcissa always announced her entrance into a room immediately, due to her desire to make her son pay attention to her-he simply raised an eyebrow and continued eating. The Daily Prophet was spread in front of him, but he found nothing of interest there. Neither the pure-blood supremacist groups or the Muggleborns who thought they should rule the wizarding world had made an interesting move lately. That was one reason why the Aurors were so desperate to link Draco to the Malfoy crest found at the scene of Goldstein’s murder, despite knowing that it was a stupid clue.
Marian coughed delicately, at last, as though she thought Draco had gone long enough without regarding her. Draco glanced up, then turned around, making sure his face reflected his lack of interest in the situation.
In truth, she had managed to catch his attention by the fact that she wore outdoor robes, expensively light garments meant for extensive travel in the summer heat, and that she had applied a glamour to her features which made them sharper, turned her eyes blue, and striped her hair with waves of strawberry blonde, while another illusion concealed her burn scars. But Draco would be damned if he showed that attention. His wife would never know how much he had changed overnight, if he could help it. She would try to remove all the books on life-debts from the library if she knew, just to spite him.
“Did you want something?” he drawled, in the tone of his that he knew irritated her most.
She glanced away from him, and her mouth tightened. “I want to do some shopping,” she said, petulant. “I need new shirts, and Scorpius should be measured for his first set of formal robes.”
Draco’s amusement at the situation evaporated. “You are not taking my son past the wards.”
“I only said what should happen, not what would.” Marian turned one hand palm-up in front of her. “I had one of the house-elves take his measurements, and I’ll bring them to Madam Malkin’s. As you can see, I’m under a glamour, so I doubt that I’ll attract the notice of our enemies.”
As far as Draco was concerned, his enemies could take his wife and welcome. But there was the safety of the rest of them to worry about, and Marian might be able to bring outsiders through the wards, so he lodged a token protest. “And this errand can’t wait? Or we could send one of the elves-“
“I’ve been waiting a month,” Marian snapped. “And the elves never bring back anything properly sized, you know that.”
Draco knew that. House-elves were wonderful with cooking, cleaning, and tending to clothes their masters had already chosen, but their creative capacity, if they had any, was badly skewed. They were as likely to bring back gigantic shirts or robes sized to fit them if they were sent.
“If you must leave, do so.” He turned back to the paper and his breakfast, listening as Marian stalked towards the door. “Perhaps the air will clear your head and make you leave behind any ridiculous thoughts about taking Scorpius with you.”
His wife paused on the threshold of the dining room, and turned to give him a long look. Draco returned it with equanimity. Perhaps she had heard some of the spark in his voice after all.
But if she had, she obviously chose not to confront him about it, slipping out of the room. Draco heard her speaking to one of the house-elves, and then the front door of the Manor opened and closed.
He ate for a few more minutes, estimating the number of strides it would take her to reach the edge of the Manor’s anti-Apparition wards. Then he stood, dusting crumbs from his hands. Bitty, the youngest of the house-elves, appeared with a pop and took his plate with two deep bows. Draco hoped absently that Bitty would lose those servile mannerisms as it grew older. He preferred elves who knew their place and did not make too big a fuss about it; the best were the ones who inflicted even their self-punishments quietly.
He had as much skill with his wand-more-as Marian did. He could also apply a glamour, and leave the Manor undetectably.
And he wanted to see where his wife went.
He had done nothing like this in years. But that seemed all the better reason to do it now.
*
Harry’s letter had been returned extraordinarily fast. Marian had agreed to meet in one of the smaller food shops in Diagon Alley, which had an outdoor eating area and served small cups of tea, chocolate, or fruit slices. Harry traveled there under a powerful glamour that both made his features appear utterly ordinary and deflected attention from his face. It was more effective than spells that changed the color of his hair or eyes, which he could never manage properly anyway, and it was double protection against others peering at his brow in search of the lightning bolt scar.
He sipped his chocolate, and scanned the crowds passing him with an idle air, as if he were waiting for a wife or child to hurry back from a shopping expedition. He was aware of Ron in the meantime, the trademark Weasley red hair concealed under a hood, “asleep” on a bench across the street.
It was nearly twenty minutes past the time Marian had agreed to meet him, and Harry had his hand on his wand, when a woman with an intriguing mixture of red, blonde, and brown in her hair paused in front of his table and murmured, with the distracted air of one recognizing an old acquaintance, “Harry?”
“Marian?” he asked, afraid to speak her last name aloud here. He still didn’t know enough about the enemies behind this, and reading over the documents Narcissa had given him only increased his frustration. Did no one in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement have the slightest idea what people might have both a grudge against the Malfoys and the money and courage to carry out a war against them? Blood magic practitioners didn’t come cheap, partially since their art was, well, illegal.
Marian summoned his attention back to her by smiling and dropping into the seat opposite him. Harry didn’t have to look across the street to know that Ron had adjusted his position so he could watch them both. “Yes, that’s me,” she said. “And I meant exactly what I said in my letter.”
“Excellent,” Harry said, and forestalled her attempt to tell him immediately by turning and smiling at the server who had stepped towards them. He didn’t want to draw attention, and a woman without a drink in this place, speaking in an agitated and excited manner to the man across from her, might do it. “She’ll have something to drink,” he assured the server, who smiled and bowed. “What would you like?” he added to Marian.
She blinked for a moment, then shrugged impatiently. “Tea will do.”
The server then questioned her about what kind of tea she wanted, and she waved one hand and chose the first he named in a clipped manner. That increased Harry’s suspicion that she’d never done anything like this before. One thing he had picked up from Ron and from Hermione, who had created the Blood Reparations Department against the opposition of several powerful people in the Ministry, was that you didn’t let the importance of your mission make you careless and forgetful. Act casual and relaxed and normal when on an assignment, and other people were much more likely to ignore you-which would lead, in turn, to them not noticing important things. Aurors could get away with using force, but they had official backing.
“You wanted to tell me something?” Harry asked, leaning towards Marian and covering her hand with his. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to look like lovers or good friends to anyone who might glance at them.
Marian’s fingers flexed beneath his, but she didn’t try to draw her hand away, for which Harry was grateful. “Yes,” she whispered. “There is something about the night of the murder only I know, and which Draco would never tell you.”
Notice the hatred with which she says his name, Harry noted to himself, dispassionately. Ron would tell me not to take anything she says on trust.
Lucky for him he had his own personal Ron in the back of his head, and that he had smiled at enough cameras to present a welcoming, sympathetic expression to Marian now.
“Tell me,” he said.
*
The man sitting on the other side of the table from Marian was difficult to look at, but Draco knew him for all that. He would have known him on the other side of a dark room at midnight, from the frisson of awareness that raced up his spine, and the sudden soft burning of the scars on his chest.
Potter.
Licking his lips, Draco adjusted his seat so that he could see them a bit better. He’d chosen a table behind the Sweets’n’Eats-and wasn’t that a name fit to make him vomit?-so that he was less likely to be observed by Potter and whatever protection he’d brought along. Surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to meet a woman he didn’t know and had no reason to trust by himself.
At least, Draco hoped he wouldn’t. Remembering some of the things Potter had got up to during his Hogwarts days, he had to admit that he wasn’t sure of Potter’s exact level of intelligence. Granger had always been there to ensure that he wouldn’t have to answer too many questions.
Draco spent a moment gazing into his glass, at least to all appearances, though he was in truth performing a complicated spell with his wand beneath the table. A moment later, all the noise around him grew almost unbearably sharp. Draco gritted his teeth, knowing that particular effect only lasted a short time.
And so it did. The noises fluctuated around him like a rushing wave, and a moment later he was hearing only Potter and Marian’s conversation. It was a somewhat risky spell, since he would be all but deaf to anyone who asked him a question, but it was also a spell that Potter-or Granger-was unlikely to have countered, since an ancestor of Draco’s had developed it and kept it within the family.
“Tell me,” Potter was just saying, and even under a glamour Draco thought he could feel the intensity of his eyes. He felt a responding intensity surge in his chest.
And they weren’t near any mirrors. Draco had to admit it was Potter who had called up his spark, made him interested in life again, made him determined to find some way to wrench himself free of the curse that currently limited him. He needed a challenge, and there had not been enough of one in these past few years. His wife’s passive hatred was not a wall he could batter against, and she wouldn’t argue with him, unlike Potter in school.
Could that be the reason that I keep seeing visions of us together? Because he’s the person who most challenges me?
Draco snorted to himself. Even if that were true, he had no intention of abandoning his comfortable home and his son, or even his marriage, for Potter. He wouldn’t mind if they fucked now and then-the marriage vows didn’t object to that-but Potter would never enter his soul.
Marian said, her voice low and yet sharp, “The night the Goldstein girl was murdered, I went to Draco’s room. We don’t share a bed anymore, you understand.” Her eyes were lowered, but Draco knew she would be looking up from under the lashes, and her voice was almost-coy. Almost appealing. Draco snorted again. And she thinks she’ll sway Potter, Saint Potter, Devoted-to-His-Wife Potter, with this transparent ploy? “But there are, now and then, odds and ends that find their way from my rooms to his, and I have to fetch them.”
“What was the odd or end this evening?” Potter’s control over his voice had improved, at least. It sounded cold and smooth, like a pane of glass, and not prone to giving anything more away. Draco had to grudgingly admire him, though he wondered why Potter had so openly showed his anger when he came to the Manor. Perhaps the incident with their fading had rattled him enough to do so.
Perhaps I rattled him enough to do so.
“A hairbrush,” said Marian. “Made of chestnut wood, with silver backing. I’ll be happy to show it to you if you like.”
Draco rolled his eyes. Marian did indeed possess such a hairbrush, but by itself, that didn’t prove anything.
Potter seemed to agree, or at least Draco thought he saw skepticism in the way he tilted his head. “So you went to find it. And what did you find there that made you suspicious of him?”
“It was more what I didn’t find.” Marian sat up and pushed her hair back behind her ear with one hand. Draco recognized the sign. She was preparing to tell some dramatic truth. She had done it the evening she ended up trying to take Scorpius from him, too. “Draco should have been in the room.” She paused for even more dramatic effect. “Instead, he was gone.”
Draco frowned. I was at home-
Oh, bloody hell.
He had been at home, but in a part of the Manor that Marian had never been granted access to, and in fact had no idea existed. He’d been walking the catacombs past the remains of his ancestors, morbidly wondering if, when they laid him here with the rest, the dead would be proud of him, and welcome him home. More to the point, would his son be proud of him?
No outsider had ever entered the Malfoy burial chambers. Even those who were part of the family by marriage and not blood were only allowed down on immense sufferance. Draco could not prove Marian’s tale false without also revealing a cherished secret.
He had not thought it would be a problem before, because he had spent only an hour in the crypts. Marian and his mother had known very well that he was at home from seven in the evening until midnight, and that he’d spent a good portion of the time playing with Scorpius.
But that missing hour would look bad for him, if Potter chose to believe his wife. After all, someone could have killed Esther Goldstein in that timeframe, if he had used the right amount and kind of magic.
Draco prepared himself for Potter’s widening eyes.
*
Harry didn’t need a Ron in his mind or a Hermione at his shoulder to tell him that Marian had planned for her information’s impact on him to be stronger.
It simply wasn’t, however. He had spent enough time investigating cases of pure-blood “harassment” of Muggleborns for the Blood Reparations Department that he was no longer inclined to believe someone else simply because they believed themselves. Sometimes the harassment turned out to be real, or even the work of a supremacist group; often enough, it turned out to be a misunderstanding or a sincere effort on the pure-blood’s part to learn about Muggle culture which had simply gone too far. Hermione would write another document recommending cross-cultural classes and perhaps even start one that only the most pathetically eager pure-bloods would attend, while Muggleborns fought being exhibited like stuffed animals at a museum.
And this-
Well. A missing hour. And I have to give even Malfoy the benefit of the doubt, since I don’t think he’s a killer.
“That’s interesting,” he said, and kept his voice and face deliberately as expressionless as he’d done so far. “However, that doesn’t prove that your husband killed Goldstein, does it?”
Marian blinked a bit, and sat up. “Well-it doesn’t,” she said. “But it doesn’t look good for him. I can promise you that he never told the Aurors who came to question him about that missing hour.”
“And you never did, either?” Harry couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t. That would have been in an official context, and if she really wanted to betray and shame her husband, as seemed likely, the best place would be in front of several Aurors who probably had bad memories of the war and the part the Malfoys had played in it.
“Contrary to what you may think,” Marian said, her eyes darkening a bit, “I don’t want my family to become the center of a scandal. I’d like my son to be the heir to what he’s owed without laboring under the stigma that his father and grandfather carried.” Yes, she hates him, Harry thought. With a good bit of contempt mixed in, too. “The Aurors would have taken the opportunity to tarnish everyone who bore the name of Malfoy. I think you can separate Draco from his family.” She looked directly at him, eyes wide with appeal now, instead of flirtatiously lowered. “And with your testimony that Narcissa and Scorpius and I did nothing wrong, the public is more likely to believe you. The Aurors wouldn’t bother giving that testimony.”
Harry cocked his head thoughtfully. I can rule out her conspiring against her mother-in-law and her son, I think. She’s not a good liar, and so I doubt she contacted those blood mages and whoever else might have tried to harm her family. Unless she went too far with people she trusted, in trying to throw Draco to the wolves. And now those wolves are turning on her.
It wasn’t a possibility he could rule out yet, so he simply said, “What you’ve told me is interesting, and no, I doubt that Draco would have confessed it to me.” The name Draco felt far too familiar in his mouth; he’d moaned it in countless dreams. Harry suspected that using Malfoy right now would feel too much like an attack to Marian, though, since she’d asserted her right to claim the name. “However, I hope you’ll understand that I can’t march off to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement just yet.”
That drew a reluctant smile from her. “I understand.” She paused a moment. “But you won’t take what he says for granted, either?”
“Certainly not,” Harry said. He had labored too long and hard to keep his dreaming life separate from his true life to give Draco the trust that part of his brain urged him to give. That part of his brain was the one that dreamed, and knew and loved a man who didn’t exist in this world. “I’ll continue to investigate, and try to catch who did this, whether it’s Draco or someone else. I promise you that I’m fully committed, and not only because of the life-debt. No one should have to die the way Esther did, and no one should have to live in the fear that your family has.”
“Thank you,” Marian said, and kissed the back of his hand, and then stood and walked away from the table. Her stride seemed more relaxed now. Harry approved. She would look like a lover casually departing to anyone who watched, and the most anyone might suspect them of was adultery.
He rose to his feet, and paused for a moment as the scar above his heart caused by the locket seemed to burn. But when he glanced around, he could see no sign of Malfoy-and anyway, how did he know that the scars would burn when Malfoy drew near? He didn’t. He had only met the man for the first time in ten years yesterday, and he didn’t know anything about the magic that was trying its best to control both their lives.
He caught Ron’s eye subtly, inclined his head, and Apparated out. He would want to talk it over with his friend when they both returned home.
*
Draco sat back with a long sigh and folded his hands behind his head. His hair was gray in the glamour, and he grimaced as it sifted through his fingers. It even felt old.
But at least he knew what his wife had told Potter. And he’d been witness to Potter’s polite refusal to accept what she said at face value.
And to his declaration that he would keep searching, keep hunting.
Draco had never thought they would receive that, not when his mother had tricked Potter into fulfilling his life-debt this way. It caused an odd satisfaction to flicker to life in the pit of his stomach.
No matter what you might think, Potter, we’re tied in more than one way.
He Apparated from his chair to his study in the Manor-being the heir of the family meant he could get around the wards-and once again reached for a book on life-debts, banishing the glamours with a wave of his wand. Should his wife look in on him when she returned from her “shopping expedition,” she would find him ensconced in research that looked no different from the desultory reading he was always doing.
Certainly not the pose of a man who had managed to come partway back into his own.
Chapter 7.