The Better Part of Valor 7/9 (PG-13, RW/DM)

[miss_clink]

Title: The Better Part of Valor (7/9)
Author: Nasturia W. Clink (mad_maudlin)
Recipient: Clarence Threepwood (wildegirl_05)
Pairing: Ron/Draco
Rating: PG-13/R

7.
I woke up in St. Mungo's on Monday morning, covered in green spots and suffering from something that might be called a headache, in the same sense that January in Antarctica can get a bit nippy. Recognizing where I was, and then deducing how I got there, was a slow and painful process with a totally unsatisfactory conclusion. I was in the private ward reserved for Aurors injured in the line of duty, the only patient (for now). The spots covered my skin just as they had Norrington's—I peeked inside my pajamas—yep, all over. Green hair all over, too. I wondered if the Healers would let me keep that for a while—without the spots, it might actually be an improvement...

I was pondering this idea when Harry and Aldershot entered the ward, both in uniform. It was gratifying that Harry seemed as annoyed by her as I was. "Mate!" Harry called down the aisle when he noticed I was up. "How're you feeling?"

"Been better," I said, rubbing my forehead. I could feel where the spots were starting to blister there. "What the hell happened?"

"We were hoping you could tell us," Aldershot said with a frown. "You Disapparated from inside the club some time before closing last night."

Harry sat on the edge of my bed. "You popped into the kitchen at three in the morning and started raving about glitter and brothels and—things—I thought you were just drunk until you started coming out in spots. And you stained the suit."

I shook my head. "I don't know. Last thing I remember, I was talking to Malfoy—"

"Excuse me?" Aldershot said. "You were what?"

I sighed. "Look, I ran into him Friday night, he mentioned someone named Higgs and acted guilty. I didn't fancy waiting around for the poisoner to act again, so I put a bit of pressure on Malfoy, just to find out what he knew. He took me around the back to talk and that's the last thing I remember."

"You ran into him?" Aldershot incredulously. "And you were going to tell the rest of us when?"

"I didn't know if it was significant or not," I said.

"And then you put yourself in a vulnerable position with a suspected poisoner?"

"I still don't think he's the poisoner," I said. "And I had to show some kind of trust in him if I wanted to get him to talk."

"You trusted him," Harry said in a weird tone of voice. "Of course."

I glared at him. "I don't think we should jump to any sort of conclusions here."

"Jump to conclusions?" Aldershot said faintly. "Jump to—Weasley, you've been poisoned just like the rest of the victims, and the last person you talked to was Malfoy, how is that jumping to conclusions?"

"Harry," I said, "you said I turned up home at three o'clock?"

"Or about, yeah," he said. "I wasn't really paying attention."

I looked at Aldershot. "I was talking to Malfoy at eight, maybe nine o'clock at night. Almost as soon as I arrived. You going to tell me that he had me locked up in the back of the club for six hours, poisoned me, and let me run free?

"He must know the poison causes memory loss, even if it isn't fatal," Aldershot said. "He could've done anything, told you anything, knowing that after he slipped you a doctored drink you'd never remember it."

I let myself sink back onto the pillows. "Yes, because Malfoy is the most devious Dark wizard on the face of the earth, the veritable second coming of Grindewald."

She scowled so deeply that I swear her bun slipped. "In case you've forgotten, he is a former Death Eater—"

"We haven't forgotten," Harry said. He's got this way of saying something, perfectly calm and kind of soft, that can scare the living shit out of people. I reckon he learned it from Dumbledore. Aldershot blinked at him, and I think that was the first time that she really realized who she was working with on this case. Harry added, "Malfoy recanted and helped to bring his former master down. Whatever else he may have done, it's not right to hold that against him forever."

"Are you saying that you agree with Weasley?" Aldershot said uneasily.

Harry looked at me with an eyebrow up. "That really depends on what Weasley's opinion is."

I sighed, and looked at the ceiling. The spots were starting to itch fiercely, and I wondered if they were like dragon pox, blistering up worse the more you scratched. "I think that Malfoy does know something about the poisonings," I said. "I do not think he is the actual poisoner. He was willing to tell me something last night, and I can only assume he did tell me, and I just can't remember."

"You must've encountered the real poisoner, though," Harry said, with a glance at my spot collection.

"Obviously," I said. "Which means Malfoy must've given me just enough information to stumble onto him, but not enough that I was on my guard when I found him, or I wouldn't have accepted anything to drink."

"You could've been compelled to drink the poison," Aldershot said—almost mumbled, really. "Or even knocked out first."

I rubbed my eyes, mindful of the spots, and ignored this. "The important thing is, Malfoy talked. When it came down to protecting himself, he was willing to talk."

"Just like old times," Harry said dryly.

"Meaning," I said, looking at Aldershot, "he might be willing to talk again. But only if the blame is still on."

Aldershot glanced at us. "What are you getting at, Weasley?"

I sighed. "I'm saying, it's probably a good idea to arrest him now. Keep him scared to keep him talking."

You would've thought Christmas had come early; it was the closest I'd seen her come to smiling all week. "I'll write up the paperwork for it immediately," she said; the I told you so was only implied.

I shut my eyes and listened to her go. Harry kicked his heel restlessly against the frame of the bed a few times. "I told your parents what happened," he said. "If it's any consolation, the clock never had you ticked for Mortal Peril."

"Comforting," I said.

"Though apparently it's been on Up To No Good with alarming frequency this week."

I sighed. "I didn't make a mistake here, Harry. I don't fancy Malfoy and my judgement wasn't impaired."

"Well, it's a moot point, at least for now," Harry said. "The Healers told me you'll be in here for a day or two until all the spots clear."

"Brilliant," I muttered.

"At least you don't have a tail."

I didn't exactly consider this a bright side.

Harry shifted his weight a bit. "There's one other thing that Aldershot forgot to mention—that Muggle Relations bloke of your dad's went and re-interviewed all the other victims yesterday, he said. Apparently they've all had a spot of financial trouble since they were poisoned—someone getting into their accounts and taking money out."

I frowned. "How is that possible? I mean, Muggles may not have goblins, but they've got to have some kind of security around their money."

"It's called identity theft," Harry said. "Hermione could probably explain it to you better—you get a hold of someone's passwords and identifying information, and you can pose as that person and get at their stuff, and the bank can't tell you're lying."

That term sounded familiar, but I couldn't initially work out where I'd heard it before. "Sounds too easy," I told him.

He shrugged. "It's not supposed to be. That's why it seemed like too much of a coincidence. But they can't figure out yet how it fits into the scheme of things."

"Me neither." I glanced at him. "You're not my replacement on this, are you? Because you have my condolences if you are."

He smirked and shook his head. "Nah, I'm still cavorting around Brighton with Tonks and hoping that no low-flying seagulls ruins my disguise. Kingsley just gave me the morning to take care of you."

"How touching," I said. "I hope he knows that my paperwork on that pot wizard isn't getting any less overdue while I'm working on this."

Harry's smirk turned a touch sadistic, and I noticed for the first time that he was carrying a scarlet file folder. A horribly, nauseatingly, despairingly familiar file folder. "He does, actually. And he also knows you've got plenty of free time right now."

"I hate you," I said as he flopped the folder into my lap.

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger."

Harry left, and the Healers came in and scrubbed me up and down with a thick, gritty potion that made the spots become tight and crusty and itchier than ever. They pulled the curtain so I could get at the more private areas myself, and then they let me be with a plate of mush trying to pass itself off as shepherd's pie, and my spots, and my paperwork, and my thoughts.

It's the proper thing to do, arresting Malfoy, I told myself while I scratched. He'll tell what he knows to save himself.

He's already done it once without much good effect, the Hermione-voice said. Do you really think he'll do it again?

It's an established pattern of behavior for him.

So was hating Muggles and fighting against Harry.

What am I supposed to do? I asked myself. I've got nothing. I remember nothing. He's got to tell me again.

You mean tell Aldershot again, since you're cooped up here with your spots.

Oh, that would be a conversation worth listening in on. If there was anyone who deserved to have Malfoy's personality inflicted on her, it was Aldershot. Of course, she was also wildly unlikely to get anything useful out of him...in fact, the more I thought of it, the more I thought that not even Malfoy deserved to have Aldershot inflicted on him. That couldn't possibly end well. But I'd be out of here in a day or two—unless I added some spots with a marking pen, so I'd have time to finish all my paperwork—and I could certainly take over questioning him, because he'd shown he was willing to talk to me. He had to know he could deal with me. Bloody hell, compared to his alternatives, he'd probably kiss me the moment he saw me...

Scratch that, bad line of thought to be going down. But speaking of alternatives—I still didn't understand where White fit into all of this. If White fit into all of this. The name "Lysander White" had to be an alias, but for who, and why? One of Malfoy's old mates from Slytherin trying to evade Ministry notice, maybe? I hadn't recognized his face, but that didn't mean he hadn't changed his appearance...and I had recognized his voice, and voices are one of the most difficult things to disguise. There had been something really familiar about his voice that night at the party, but I just couldn't place it. Perhaps I'd been too drunk.

Malfoy gets acquitted. Malfoy goes to work for Muggles. Malfoy shacks up with White. White works at Tiresias. Somebody poisons some Muggles. Malfoy finds out something about the poisonings. Malfoy snogs me...

Nothing made sense and I had too much shit to do. I prodded my folder of paperwork. It totally failed to leap up and complete itself. Bloody paperwork.

I got scrubbed again, and my family started showing up in shifts just after tea. First were my parents, who were appropriately weepy (Mum) and encouraging (Dad), just like they were every time I got hurt on the job. Dad had apparently heard something about the case from Rickler, but he believed me when I told him I couldn't tell him any of the details because it was still open and not in my department anyway. Mum fussed over the spots and kept telling me not to scratch because they'd only get worse, which was usual for her, but as they were getting ready to leave she suddenly grabbed my hand and squeezed. "Oh, Ronald," she said, "what are we going to do with you?"

"Bring me some real food while I'm stuck here, I hope."

She started to sniffle again. "I just couldn't bear thinking that the last time we talked to one another it was a row."

Bloody hell, she was going to bring up that, was she? "I'm not dying, Mum," I said. "It's not big deal."

"It is," she said, and squeezed my hand tighter; I didn't have the heart to interrupt and tell her she was squeezing right on a blistered spot. "Because you could've been hurt worse. Every time I find out you're in here again I worry..."

This sounded suspiciously like the opening prelude to her second-favorite topic of conversation after my lack of a girlfriend, which was how dangerous my job was. "Mum," I said, "I don't think I feel up to this conversation right now."

"I just want you to be happy," she said. "That's all I've every wanted for my children."

"I know, Mum," I muttered.

"Tell me you're happy, Ron," she said.

"I'm happy," I told the red file folder on the nightstand. Mum, for some reason, thought it was close enough.

Ginny popped by for about two seconds to take a picture of my spots, Bill stuck his nose in to offer condolences, and then the twins came round, with smiles on their faces that boded well for nobody.

"Well, look what we have here," George declared.

"I thought he was meant to be sick," Fred said.

"Nasty spots, is what I heard."

"Funny, I don’t see any difference."

I pretended to be engrossed in my paperwork. "You're real cut-ups, the both of you."

Fred swept a bow. "Just doing our duty to add some levity to the situation."

"Not that it's terribly difficult, mind you," George added.

"But we aim to please."

They both sat on the end of my bed, on opposite sides, with a bounce that caused me to blot the page. "Thanks for stopping by," I said (and managed not to grit my teeth too tightly between the words), "but I'd really just like to rest and wait for my next scrubbing."

"Aw, don't be grumpy, Ronniekins," Fred said. "You'll clear up eventually—just got to stop eating greasy food and touching yourself."

"This is supposed to cheer me up?" I muttered.

George sighed and patted my knee through the blanket. "Seriously, mate, you'll be out of here in a flash, right as rain. We had the same thing and we were right as rain in a week—right, Fred?"

"Right," he said. "Pretty soon your face will only be as ugly as it ever was, rather than, as it is now, pretty bloody hideous."

"You're one to talk," I muttered, then really realized what they'd said. "What do you mean, you had the same thing?"

"Eh, it was nothing," George said. "We were fiddling with a sweet a couple months for the Hogwarts market—Dismissal Dandies, we were calling 'em—"

"No," Fred said, "we were going to call them Freedom Fudges, because 'Dismissal Dandy' sounds stupid."

"It does not," George said, "and we figured out that chocolate wouldn't work with the Forgetfulness Potion."

"Only because you didn't stir it in properly."

"I'll stir your—" George noticed me making a fist around my quill in preparation for stabbing one of them through the eye—I wasn't picky—and quickly said, "Well, anyway, whatever we were calling 'em, we used some bad herbs in the preparation and they brought us out in blisters just like that. We didn't come here to get a fancy potion for it, though"

"And don't we regret that now?" Fred added, and reached out to ruffle my hair. "Such a lovely tie-dyed effect—ours just turned brown for a while."

I batted his arm away; puzzle pieces were suddenly falling together here. "Were the bad herbs you used, were they part of the Forgetfulness Potion?"

The blinked. "Yeah," George said. "Why d'you—"

I kicked off the blankets, and started rooting around under the night stand for my clothes. Fred looked alarmed. "What're you doing?" he asked.

"I need to go to work," I said.

"What? Now?"

"You just explained something important. Dammit!" Harry must've taken his suit home—I didn't have any clothes of my own here. "Look, can one of you be useful and fetch me one of my uniforms from the flat?"

They looked at one another, then shrugged. "Anything to help an Auror investigation," Fred said uneasily.

"Don't worry," I said, "it wasn't intentional."

George said, "Oh, good, I was worried for a moment."

"We do have a reputation to keep up..."

They both left, hopefully to get me clothing, and I paced around my bed despite the spot forming a blister on the sole of my left foot. A bad Forgetfulness Potion wasn't technically a poison, but even a trained Healer might not recognize the symptoms if she didn't know what she was really looking at. Aldershot had found a load of bad herbs on the market when she was looking into apothecaries. All the victims from the Golden Claw had lost their (well, our) memories...and all of them had lost big chunks of money around the same time, from their Muggle banks. I suddenly thought of the bloke in the horrible suit at the Golden Claw, the one who said lots of people at the club had lost money...but the poisonings only started recently...the same time those bad herbs were on the market...

I flipped one of the most useless forms on its blank side and wrote a quick letter to Bill; I paced some more, and submitted to another scrubbing, and still Fred and George didn't arrive. I wondered how bloody long it could take them to find a pair of uniform robes and bring them back here—unless they were rooting through my closet or something while they had the chance. All they'd find in there would be some fossilized socks and a load of gay porn, and at that point all I was thinking was that it would serve them right to find those and be traumatized for life. (The socks or the porn, both could do it; the socks had been back there for a very long time.)

I was still fidgeting when Aldershot came back with a stack of paperwork. "Weasley, I need you to sign off on these warrants as one of the investigators," she said, and thrust a stack of paperwork—another one—at me.

I grabbed and started signing away. "Listen, Aldershot, I think I've figured out what's really going on at the Golden Claw, and it's got nothing to do with killing Muggles. Hurting, yeah, but not killing."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean I think the poisonings were accidental." I flipped through a couple of pages and kept signing away. "I think someone is extorting money from Muggles at that club, or tricking them, or something, and then giving the victims a Forgetfulness Potion so they won't remember what happened. Except the potion's been tainted—these spots are an allergy—see?"

She frowned at me, not the usualy severe bun-popping frown, but the big-eyed frown that manages to convey I think you might be a little bit crazy without actually saying it. "Where did you get this from?" she asked. "Did you remember something?"

"No, but my brothers clued me in. And it'll be dead simple to check up on, we've just got to find out who's getting the money out of the Muggle banks and how they're getting it into Gringotts so they can use it."

"How do we do that?" Aldershot asked. "The goblins will never let us audit their books—"

"I've already got it taken care of." I reached the last page of the stack, giving it my best ROONIL WAZLIB with a flourish on the end for effect, and stacked everything back on top of one another. I started to hand the stack to Aldershot when something caught my eye—the name filled in on the primary warrant for arrest. DRACO LYSANDER BLACK MALFOY, alias DAVID BLACK.

Lysander White. David Black.

Fucking hell.

"Fucking hell," I whispered.

Aldershot folded her arms across her chest impatiently. "What now?" she demanded.

It didn't seem real even after I said it out loud. "Lysander White and Draco Malfoy are the same bloody person."

Chapter One
Chapter Six
Chapter Eight