Chapter One of 'This Enchanted Life'- Faithful to the Grave
Title: This Enchanted Life
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco pre-slash, mentions of Ron/Hermione.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, mental torture, flashbacks to physical torture, angst.
Summary: The newest wizard Harry and Draco have to hunt fits all the characteristics of a twisted, but the artifacts he leaves behind don’t seem to damage or kill the people who use them. Combine this with Harry’s changing feelings about his partner, their mutual attempts to get therapy, and a new theory about twisted, and their case is going to be anything but easy.
Author’s Notes: This is the sixth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, an alternating series of one-shots and longer fics where Harry and Draco are part of the Socrates Corps, hunting insane Dark wizards called the twisted. So far, the stories in order are: “Invisible Sparks” (one-shot), Hero’s Funeral (eight chapters), “Rites of the Dead” (one-shot), and Sister Healer (ten chapters), and “Working With Them” (one-shot) in that order. This fic will probably be ten or twelve chapters. The series is updated every Wednesday.
This Enchanted Life
Chapter One-Faithful to the Grave
“Looked at the new file yet?”
Harry tensed his shoulders. Malfoy didn’t know, couldn’t know. There was no one who could know, because Harry very carefully hadn’t told anyone.
He looked up and smoothed out the tension, because he wouldn’t have anyone know now, either, when he had successfully concealed it for this long, that those were the very words Lionel had spoken to Harry at the beginning of the Gina Hendricks case, which had killed him. Harry shook his head and held his hand out. “No. It was on your desk when I came in. A definite twisted?”
“They don’t know.” Malfoy leaned back on his desk, his hip against it, and watched Harry with eyes as pale as rainwater. He had taken to doing that a lot lately, since the Alto case. Harry mentally shrugged and pulled out a handful of papers from the file, most of which seemed to be photographs. Well, if he paid attention, then it was possible that they wouldn’t wind up in a situation like the Alto case again, with Malfoy going steadily mad under the influence of a twisted’s power.
“They don’t know?” Harry let his voice climb the scale, for the pleasure of winning a smile from Malfoy. This smile was gone in a few seconds, but Harry still felt the pleasure bubbling under his skin like warm tea. “I thought they weren’t going to waste our time on cases any more that they weren’t sure of. The time of Socrates Aurors is too valuable to be wasted, as Okazes would say.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Malfoy said, and sat down behind his desk. “His name is Reynard Alexander, and he fits the characteristics of a twisted. But he doesn’t seem to have killed anyone yet.” He nodded at the file when Harry stared at him. “It explains it all in there.”
Harry turned back to the photographs, wondering what they could be of, if not grisly murders. Perhaps Alexander injured his victims, instead, and left them alive.
Instead, the pictures were of small globes, little glass balls that sparkled and shone as if filled with fairy lights. Harry frowned and flicked through the papers, seeing more and more globes, all of them with subtly different patterns of lights, all of them doing nothing more than rolling back and forth at the flick of an Auror’s finger. “And this is what they’re worried about?” he asked at last, not trying to keep the disgust from dripping into his voice like dust into a clean room. “That he’s catching fairies and trapping them?”
“Not fairies,” Malfoy said, and stepped around Harry to lean over his shoulder. Harry arched his head back in spite of himself, the small hairs on the back of his neck prickling with Malfoy’s closeness. Malfoy didn’t seem to notice, and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did. He ran his finger up and down one photograph, which showed a bright golden globe with an inner center of blue that reminded Harry of phoenix flame. “He makes them on his own. It seems to be his flaw.”
“Little glass globes,” Harry said blankly, and spread out the photos on the desk, hoping they would have at least one worth their time. Nope. All of them were globes, each one more beautiful than the last, but without any sign of why they needed to be handed over in a case file to the Socrates Corps. He tilted his head back to look at Malfoy.
Malfoy spread his hands. “A few people who held them have reported strange effects: tunnel vision, dizziness, intense dreams. And it’s sure that Alexander did commit a theft-he stole some Potions ingredients from the shop where he used to work-and used Dark magic during it, and didn’t use Healing magic when the shattering glass in the air opened a minor wound on his arm. Not to mention that he has companions with him, creatures straight out of nightmare. Specific nightmares,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth to request more detail. “As in, the nightmares of the people facing him in the shop.”
“Huh,” Harry said, and rapped his fingers against the table. The globes glowed all the colors of the rainbow, and some combinations that should have been garish, and were instead gently pretty. Ginny would have loved one of these as a present when we were dating, he thought, and shook his head. “Any symbol?”
“No,” Malfoy said quietly, shifting nearer. “But you were the one who discovered during the Alto case that twisted don’t always have them.”
Harry nodded unwillingly. The discovery had been unwelcome for the other Aurors in the Socrates Corps. They had a list of five characteristics that meant someone was twisted-symbol, companions, use of Dark magic, lack of ability to Heal, one ability of wandless magic-and they used it to act as executioners. Questioning that meant they might have to question some of their past captures and kills, and start doubting themselves.
“I think he is twisted,” Malfoy said, and for a moment shadows lingered in the corners of his eyes, softened the corners of his mouth, and tainted his smile. “I have more reason than anyone to know that they can have unexpected abilities, and are dangerous whether or not they fit all the criteria.”
Harry looked away for a moment. Yes, and if he had interpreted the reasons for Alto’s not fitting those criteria properly, then perhaps Malfoy would have been spared a great deal of unnecessary trouble.
“You’re thinking about her again,” Malfoy said, and his fingers rasped across Harry’s shoulder, rucking the cloth up across the skin.
Harry shrugged and tried to move his hand off. It stayed. Harry blew out his breath and admitted to himself that he didn’t quite mind it staying there. “Of course I am. But you only said that I couldn’t blame myself for what happened to you, not that I couldn’t think about her.”
Malfoy raised one eyebrow and bent towards him, his breath puffing out into Harry’s ear and making him start before he thought about it. “I know when you’re blaming yourself,” he whispered. “Your eyes turn a unique color that I never see at any other time.”
He watches enough to notice that? Harry had heard the same thing from Lionel a time or two, but Lionel had reason to watch him that closely. He had been-
Your partner. The same as Malfoy. And that was all he ever was, no matter what someone else might think, or you might wish.
Harry relaxed, tilting his head back and pressing against Malfoy’s fingers until he had to let go or risk getting them crushed. “Maybe I am,” he said, and made sure to keep his voice deep and distant. “But I’m going to the Mind-Healer this week like a good little boy, so you can be sure that those thoughts won’t stay for long.”
“Does she force you to watch your memories in the Pensieve, then?” Malfoy stepped back from him, not even wringing his hand. Harry didn’t know what to make of that, but pushed the thought aside. There were so many more important things to worry about, from the aftermath of the Alto case to whether Alexander was really a twisted or not.
“Yes,” Harry said simply. “And she’s got me to acknowledge that there was really nothing I could have done to prevent Lionel’s death.” Except not tell him about being infatuated with him in the first place. But Mind-Healer Estillo didn’t know that, because Harry hadn’t told her. He had confessed the secret, once, to save Malfoy’s life and sanity. He never would again.
“Mmm.” Malfoy settled back in his chair now and gave Harry a steady look. “I know the reasons that you argued we not go our sessions with Healer Estillo together-”
“And they’re good ones,” Harry interrupted. There were a whole host of reasons, but the two he thought best were that he and Malfoy might not confess their secrets as readily with someone else there, and that he couldn’t know some of the details of the Sussex Necromancer case, the one where Malfoy had lost his former partner and which he would need to talk about with someone. The Ministry’s rules said that, once a case file was sealed, only those who had been there and the Healers helping them recover could know what had happened on it. The records were never released to historians, and certainly not the papers.
“Mmm,” Malfoy said again, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin, a habit Harry thought he might have picked up from Healer Estillo. He wanted to bare his teeth each time Malfoy did it. It made him look so calm, but Harry had looked into his eyes while the man tortured him and knew that sometimes he was anything but. “I was reconsidering that. It is true that you would not ordinarily be allowed to know any details of the Necromancer case, but the case I truly need help with is the Alto affair.”
“And I already know most everything about that one,” Harry finished reluctantly.
Malfoy leaned forwards, and hell, his eyes could be piercing silver nails when he wanted them to. “Everything,” he whispered. “Except the details Estillo has learned since the case, the nightmares I have and the lingering effects of being under the control of someone who could do what she did. Come with me and learn them.”
Harry swallowed. He wanted to turn away, to laugh, to remind Malfoy that he hadn’t extended the invitation in return for Malfoy to attend his sessions and really didn’t want to, but he didn’t know a graceful way to refuse when Malfoy was staring at him.
Which meant he didn’t know a way to refuse.
“I-all right,” Harry said. He blinked, and shook his head. No, Malfoy hadn’t held out his hand as if he wanted to clasp Harry’s and draw him to his feet. Why had Harry thought he had? He was getting too little sleep and too much of everything else, Harry thought, although that was normal for him these days. “If you really want me to,” he added then. “I don’t want you to feel that you owe me something you’re not comfortable with.”
Malfoy turned his head back so that his eyes were fastened on Harry, and his gaze was so bright Harry flinched a little. “I’m aware of exactly what I owe you,” he said, and then he turned back to the Alexander file and was normal again. “Now. What do you want to do first, interview the witnesses to Alexander’s theft or investigate what’s known about the globes he makes?”
“I could do the interview, and you could investigate the globes,” Harry suggested. “Says here the Unspeakables have them. They’d be more likely to talk to you than to me.” Harry’s reputation as the Auror Department’s problem child had spread all over the Ministry.
“Mmm,” Malfoy said again, and Harry was starting to hate the shape his lips went when he did that. “Together, I think.”
His words were metallic enough that the “I think” was obviously a courtesy. Remembering how they had split apart during the Alto case, though, and what had happened as a consequence, Harry couldn’t blame him. He nodded and stood. “All right. So which first?”
*
Draco looked around the interior of Eleanor’s Enchantments, and nodded once. Not the cleanest apothecary he had ever been inside, but a long way from the worst. He reached out a hand, and the dust that came away from the shelves under his fingers was made of crumbled powder from moth-wings, not the ordinary dust of dead skin cells and drifting sunlight.
Draco smiled. Clean, for the most part, but not careful.
He wondered if Alexander could have taken the ingredients he wanted without disturbing the shop owners, and then shook his head. Alexander would do nothing sane when he was a twisted.
Which led to the question of what he thought he was doing with small glass globes that shone with light and did nothing else. He had placed two of them on the ground outside the shop before he began his theft, but since he had smashed straight through the shop’s front window to steal the ingredients, they seemed useless as a covering gesture or a measure of stealth.
Draco turned back to listen to Potter’s conversation with Eleanor, or the woman who stood in her place; she had said that her mother was the one who had set up the shop. Leah Anderson was a straight, small, proud woman with thin blonde hair that clustered around her forehead and a mouth that never stopped moving, though what she was chewing was usually either a quill or a sherbet lemon instead of words. Draco wrinkled his nose at the piercing smell of the sweet. She was the first person he had met since Dumbledore who actually liked them.
Potter leaned on the counter, smiling at her. She smiled back, even as her mouth continued to work and she turned her eyes aside. People liked to smile at Potter, Draco had found, whether or not he had done something for them during the war. Something about the bright green eyes and the way his dark hair curled appealed to them.
Draco turned back to the shelf he’d been inspecting and found that his fingers had curled down on the shelf-edge, jolting a few of the jars towards him. He replaced them with careful hands, sniffing in spite of himself. He had chosen not to work with Potions, but he loved and understood the art, and trying to find out what Eleanor’s Enchantments had in stock was as natural as trying to learn the details of a witness’s experience.
Soot in one, he thought. Powdered bat-eyes in the other. And in the one in front of him, a scent he didn’t recognize.
Draco subtly glanced over his shoulder. Leah was laughing now, and Potter had a light in his eyes that one could take as flirtatious.
If one did not know, as Draco did, his dedication to his job and his secret love affair with his dead partner.
So secret that even Vane did not share in it, Draco thought, and shook his head as he carefully withdrew his hand, brushing as if by accident against the lid of one of the jars so that it tilted to the side and revealed the contents. The man was a fool if he thought he could put Potter off with a façade of normality and have him simply accept it.
Potter’s obsession, though, mattered little next to the facts of the case they were investigating, save a wound that Draco had to keep in mind the way he would a half-healed injury his partner had not recovered from. At the moment, he was more interested in the contents of this jar.
Red dust, he thought at first, and wondered if it was something as ordinary as powdered brick that had fooled his nose. Some of the apothecaries in the wizarding world kept artifacts from the Muggle world on hand; there were Potions masters who believed them more efficacious in some brews than ingredients that could absorb lingering magic around them. Draco knew those Potions masters were fools, but they did not often ask him for his opinion.
Then a cloudy, sweet odor from the jar struck his nose, and he raised his eyebrows. He still didn’t recognize it specifically, but he knew the copper scent of blood whatever had been done to disguise it.
“What are you doing?”
Leah had noticed his preoccupation, then. Draco turned around with a bow, letting the lid fall back into place on top of the jar. “Your pardon, Miss Anderson. I knocked the shelf and nearly knocked the jars over.”
Leah bustled past him to fix the jars and glance into them as if to ensure that he hadn’t stolen a pinch of dust. Potter narrowed his eyes at Draco in question over her shoulder, and Draco stared back, telling him without words that he had a good reason for his supposed carelessness and not to bother him.
Potter half-tossed his head and glanced away. He had done that more and more often lately, Draco noted in the back of his mind, and not because he didn’t know what Draco was trying to say to him. Rather, their communion, their growing ease around each other at work if not outside it, disturbed him. Perhaps he thought it disloyal to Vane or Weasley to work well with someone else.
Too bad, Draco thought, and his fingers tightened again, on his wand this time, as he thought about it. Because you’re mine now.
“I really must ask you to come away from there,” Leah said, apparently satisfied that he hadn’t taken any bat’s eyes or dried blood with him. “The ingredients can be changed by-oh, any number of spells.” Her hands fluttered anxiously over all the jars, but Draco knew it wasn’t his imagination that she lingered too long over the one with the red dust. Draco smiled at her, though, and strolled back to the counter, already determined to see what else she might be hiding in here.
“And that’s a full list of the ingredients he took?” Potter asked, shifting forwards as though to hide Draco behind his shoulder. Draco took advantage of the distraction to cast a nonverbal charm on his nose.
The smells of the shop immediately sharpened to the point that Draco had to clench his teeth, because good God, he was overwhelmed. His training in Potions at Professor Snape’s hands helped him here; he breathed in, breathed out, and began to sort through the scents that were unfamiliar, finding the ones he knew and separating them in a catalog in his head.
Fur, amber, common spices such as nutmeg and marjoram, half a hundred different kinds of flowers, powdered unicorn horn, dragon scales and eggshell and claws, and more cloudy and sweet odors than he could comprehend at once. Draco frowned. Why would a shop have that many different kinds of powdered blood on hand?
Dragon’s blood, perhaps, if the shop was carefully licensed. Unicorn blood, though at a fabulously expensive price. Merfolk and centaur blood, those almost without asking. Draco had even heard of apothecaries who maintained stores of house-elf blood, though that was not used for many potions. But this…
It was not even human blood, or not exactly. Human blood would smell a bit different coming from a different person, but, over and above all, coppery. This was not that. Draco’s nose twitched, and he sneezed. That made Leah glance up from the list she was looking over with Potter.
“Is something wrong, Auror Malfoy?” Her voice had a polished tone it hadn’t had before, and she had swallowed or spit out whatever she was chewing. She suspected him.
Draco turned around with the same faint smile he had used before to try and convince her nothing was wrong. She suspected him anyway, because of his surname, and it was the reason he had left Potter to talk to her. “No, madam. But I am unusually sensitive to some of the odors in a shop like this. It’s one of the reasons I chose to be an Auror instead of a Potions master myself.”
He had thought that a reassuring lie, but Leah’s eyes dilated, and she fell back a step. Then she swallowed, said, “Of course,” and tried to turn back to the list in front of Potter as though nothing had happened.
Potter was the one who prevented that, laying a fragile hold on her wrist with one hand and leaning in as if he would sniff her hair. Draco had to turn away and study a shelf of ingredients to keep from spitting with contempt.
“Are you all right?” he heard Potter ask. “Has Alexander threatened you?”
“Not directly, no,” Leah said, and sniffled as if, now that she didn’t have something in her mouth to hold it back, snot would come out her nose. Draco sniffed himself, discreetly, but the charm had begun to fade, and he smelled only the dying traces of those intense smells that had come to him before. “But it’s more than that. It’s the way he looked at me when he walked into the shop, as if he despised me and all I stood for.”
Something he and I have in common, Draco thought, and eased forwards. There was a crate of what looked like half-opened jars in the corner. He wanted to see whether those jars held more of the red dust. He wouldn’t be surprised if they did, but he would be curious to hear what Leah’s explanation was for them.
The bell above the shop door jangled softly. Draco turned to look, already forming an explanation in his mind of “important Auror business” that would encourage the visitor to leave.
He lost his breath when he saw the man. He had silver-white hair that reminded Draco of his father’s, and calm dark eyes. He wore a much-patched blue robe, and walked about with his hands in his pockets, as if he was going to pull out a string of handkerchiefs like a Muggle magician.
But none of those details by themselves would have made Draco react that way. The last time he had seen those dark eyes, they were staring at him from a photograph on the first page of a file.
Reynard Alexander smiled at them and drew his hands out of his pockets. Each held a glass globe, one of them swarming with blue and gold, another with purple and green. He hurled them straight at Potter and Draco. Draco dodged to the side, and chanted up a Shield Charm around himself.
When he turned to look, it was to see that Potter-like the idiot he always was if Draco wasn’t there to catch him-hadn’t Shielded himself, but Leah, and flung his body in the way of the flying globe. The globe hit Potter’s skin and clung there a moment, glowing fiercely, before it burst apart.
Potter cried out as flying shards of glass and sparkling lights swarmed him. Draco dropped the Shield and moved forwards to stand next to him, staring at Alexander. Alexander bowed to him and turned away, vanishing out the door.
Potter opened his mouth as though to say he was all right. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped, boneless, to the floor.
Leah screamed.
Draco cast a Silencing Charm on her without thought and stooped down to gather Potter in his arms, fierce hopes and wishes jostling in his head. He can’t be dead. He wouldn’t dare. Please.
Chapter Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/415468.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco pre-slash, mentions of Ron/Hermione.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, mental torture, flashbacks to physical torture, angst.
Summary: The newest wizard Harry and Draco have to hunt fits all the characteristics of a twisted, but the artifacts he leaves behind don’t seem to damage or kill the people who use them. Combine this with Harry’s changing feelings about his partner, their mutual attempts to get therapy, and a new theory about twisted, and their case is going to be anything but easy.
Author’s Notes: This is the sixth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series, an alternating series of one-shots and longer fics where Harry and Draco are part of the Socrates Corps, hunting insane Dark wizards called the twisted. So far, the stories in order are: “Invisible Sparks” (one-shot), Hero’s Funeral (eight chapters), “Rites of the Dead” (one-shot), and Sister Healer (ten chapters), and “Working With Them” (one-shot) in that order. This fic will probably be ten or twelve chapters. The series is updated every Wednesday.
This Enchanted Life
Chapter One-Faithful to the Grave
“Looked at the new file yet?”
Harry tensed his shoulders. Malfoy didn’t know, couldn’t know. There was no one who could know, because Harry very carefully hadn’t told anyone.
He looked up and smoothed out the tension, because he wouldn’t have anyone know now, either, when he had successfully concealed it for this long, that those were the very words Lionel had spoken to Harry at the beginning of the Gina Hendricks case, which had killed him. Harry shook his head and held his hand out. “No. It was on your desk when I came in. A definite twisted?”
“They don’t know.” Malfoy leaned back on his desk, his hip against it, and watched Harry with eyes as pale as rainwater. He had taken to doing that a lot lately, since the Alto case. Harry mentally shrugged and pulled out a handful of papers from the file, most of which seemed to be photographs. Well, if he paid attention, then it was possible that they wouldn’t wind up in a situation like the Alto case again, with Malfoy going steadily mad under the influence of a twisted’s power.
“They don’t know?” Harry let his voice climb the scale, for the pleasure of winning a smile from Malfoy. This smile was gone in a few seconds, but Harry still felt the pleasure bubbling under his skin like warm tea. “I thought they weren’t going to waste our time on cases any more that they weren’t sure of. The time of Socrates Aurors is too valuable to be wasted, as Okazes would say.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Malfoy said, and sat down behind his desk. “His name is Reynard Alexander, and he fits the characteristics of a twisted. But he doesn’t seem to have killed anyone yet.” He nodded at the file when Harry stared at him. “It explains it all in there.”
Harry turned back to the photographs, wondering what they could be of, if not grisly murders. Perhaps Alexander injured his victims, instead, and left them alive.
Instead, the pictures were of small globes, little glass balls that sparkled and shone as if filled with fairy lights. Harry frowned and flicked through the papers, seeing more and more globes, all of them with subtly different patterns of lights, all of them doing nothing more than rolling back and forth at the flick of an Auror’s finger. “And this is what they’re worried about?” he asked at last, not trying to keep the disgust from dripping into his voice like dust into a clean room. “That he’s catching fairies and trapping them?”
“Not fairies,” Malfoy said, and stepped around Harry to lean over his shoulder. Harry arched his head back in spite of himself, the small hairs on the back of his neck prickling with Malfoy’s closeness. Malfoy didn’t seem to notice, and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did. He ran his finger up and down one photograph, which showed a bright golden globe with an inner center of blue that reminded Harry of phoenix flame. “He makes them on his own. It seems to be his flaw.”
“Little glass globes,” Harry said blankly, and spread out the photos on the desk, hoping they would have at least one worth their time. Nope. All of them were globes, each one more beautiful than the last, but without any sign of why they needed to be handed over in a case file to the Socrates Corps. He tilted his head back to look at Malfoy.
Malfoy spread his hands. “A few people who held them have reported strange effects: tunnel vision, dizziness, intense dreams. And it’s sure that Alexander did commit a theft-he stole some Potions ingredients from the shop where he used to work-and used Dark magic during it, and didn’t use Healing magic when the shattering glass in the air opened a minor wound on his arm. Not to mention that he has companions with him, creatures straight out of nightmare. Specific nightmares,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth to request more detail. “As in, the nightmares of the people facing him in the shop.”
“Huh,” Harry said, and rapped his fingers against the table. The globes glowed all the colors of the rainbow, and some combinations that should have been garish, and were instead gently pretty. Ginny would have loved one of these as a present when we were dating, he thought, and shook his head. “Any symbol?”
“No,” Malfoy said quietly, shifting nearer. “But you were the one who discovered during the Alto case that twisted don’t always have them.”
Harry nodded unwillingly. The discovery had been unwelcome for the other Aurors in the Socrates Corps. They had a list of five characteristics that meant someone was twisted-symbol, companions, use of Dark magic, lack of ability to Heal, one ability of wandless magic-and they used it to act as executioners. Questioning that meant they might have to question some of their past captures and kills, and start doubting themselves.
“I think he is twisted,” Malfoy said, and for a moment shadows lingered in the corners of his eyes, softened the corners of his mouth, and tainted his smile. “I have more reason than anyone to know that they can have unexpected abilities, and are dangerous whether or not they fit all the criteria.”
Harry looked away for a moment. Yes, and if he had interpreted the reasons for Alto’s not fitting those criteria properly, then perhaps Malfoy would have been spared a great deal of unnecessary trouble.
“You’re thinking about her again,” Malfoy said, and his fingers rasped across Harry’s shoulder, rucking the cloth up across the skin.
Harry shrugged and tried to move his hand off. It stayed. Harry blew out his breath and admitted to himself that he didn’t quite mind it staying there. “Of course I am. But you only said that I couldn’t blame myself for what happened to you, not that I couldn’t think about her.”
Malfoy raised one eyebrow and bent towards him, his breath puffing out into Harry’s ear and making him start before he thought about it. “I know when you’re blaming yourself,” he whispered. “Your eyes turn a unique color that I never see at any other time.”
He watches enough to notice that? Harry had heard the same thing from Lionel a time or two, but Lionel had reason to watch him that closely. He had been-
Your partner. The same as Malfoy. And that was all he ever was, no matter what someone else might think, or you might wish.
Harry relaxed, tilting his head back and pressing against Malfoy’s fingers until he had to let go or risk getting them crushed. “Maybe I am,” he said, and made sure to keep his voice deep and distant. “But I’m going to the Mind-Healer this week like a good little boy, so you can be sure that those thoughts won’t stay for long.”
“Does she force you to watch your memories in the Pensieve, then?” Malfoy stepped back from him, not even wringing his hand. Harry didn’t know what to make of that, but pushed the thought aside. There were so many more important things to worry about, from the aftermath of the Alto case to whether Alexander was really a twisted or not.
“Yes,” Harry said simply. “And she’s got me to acknowledge that there was really nothing I could have done to prevent Lionel’s death.” Except not tell him about being infatuated with him in the first place. But Mind-Healer Estillo didn’t know that, because Harry hadn’t told her. He had confessed the secret, once, to save Malfoy’s life and sanity. He never would again.
“Mmm.” Malfoy settled back in his chair now and gave Harry a steady look. “I know the reasons that you argued we not go our sessions with Healer Estillo together-”
“And they’re good ones,” Harry interrupted. There were a whole host of reasons, but the two he thought best were that he and Malfoy might not confess their secrets as readily with someone else there, and that he couldn’t know some of the details of the Sussex Necromancer case, the one where Malfoy had lost his former partner and which he would need to talk about with someone. The Ministry’s rules said that, once a case file was sealed, only those who had been there and the Healers helping them recover could know what had happened on it. The records were never released to historians, and certainly not the papers.
“Mmm,” Malfoy said again, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin, a habit Harry thought he might have picked up from Healer Estillo. He wanted to bare his teeth each time Malfoy did it. It made him look so calm, but Harry had looked into his eyes while the man tortured him and knew that sometimes he was anything but. “I was reconsidering that. It is true that you would not ordinarily be allowed to know any details of the Necromancer case, but the case I truly need help with is the Alto affair.”
“And I already know most everything about that one,” Harry finished reluctantly.
Malfoy leaned forwards, and hell, his eyes could be piercing silver nails when he wanted them to. “Everything,” he whispered. “Except the details Estillo has learned since the case, the nightmares I have and the lingering effects of being under the control of someone who could do what she did. Come with me and learn them.”
Harry swallowed. He wanted to turn away, to laugh, to remind Malfoy that he hadn’t extended the invitation in return for Malfoy to attend his sessions and really didn’t want to, but he didn’t know a graceful way to refuse when Malfoy was staring at him.
Which meant he didn’t know a way to refuse.
“I-all right,” Harry said. He blinked, and shook his head. No, Malfoy hadn’t held out his hand as if he wanted to clasp Harry’s and draw him to his feet. Why had Harry thought he had? He was getting too little sleep and too much of everything else, Harry thought, although that was normal for him these days. “If you really want me to,” he added then. “I don’t want you to feel that you owe me something you’re not comfortable with.”
Malfoy turned his head back so that his eyes were fastened on Harry, and his gaze was so bright Harry flinched a little. “I’m aware of exactly what I owe you,” he said, and then he turned back to the Alexander file and was normal again. “Now. What do you want to do first, interview the witnesses to Alexander’s theft or investigate what’s known about the globes he makes?”
“I could do the interview, and you could investigate the globes,” Harry suggested. “Says here the Unspeakables have them. They’d be more likely to talk to you than to me.” Harry’s reputation as the Auror Department’s problem child had spread all over the Ministry.
“Mmm,” Malfoy said again, and Harry was starting to hate the shape his lips went when he did that. “Together, I think.”
His words were metallic enough that the “I think” was obviously a courtesy. Remembering how they had split apart during the Alto case, though, and what had happened as a consequence, Harry couldn’t blame him. He nodded and stood. “All right. So which first?”
*
Draco looked around the interior of Eleanor’s Enchantments, and nodded once. Not the cleanest apothecary he had ever been inside, but a long way from the worst. He reached out a hand, and the dust that came away from the shelves under his fingers was made of crumbled powder from moth-wings, not the ordinary dust of dead skin cells and drifting sunlight.
Draco smiled. Clean, for the most part, but not careful.
He wondered if Alexander could have taken the ingredients he wanted without disturbing the shop owners, and then shook his head. Alexander would do nothing sane when he was a twisted.
Which led to the question of what he thought he was doing with small glass globes that shone with light and did nothing else. He had placed two of them on the ground outside the shop before he began his theft, but since he had smashed straight through the shop’s front window to steal the ingredients, they seemed useless as a covering gesture or a measure of stealth.
Draco turned back to listen to Potter’s conversation with Eleanor, or the woman who stood in her place; she had said that her mother was the one who had set up the shop. Leah Anderson was a straight, small, proud woman with thin blonde hair that clustered around her forehead and a mouth that never stopped moving, though what she was chewing was usually either a quill or a sherbet lemon instead of words. Draco wrinkled his nose at the piercing smell of the sweet. She was the first person he had met since Dumbledore who actually liked them.
Potter leaned on the counter, smiling at her. She smiled back, even as her mouth continued to work and she turned her eyes aside. People liked to smile at Potter, Draco had found, whether or not he had done something for them during the war. Something about the bright green eyes and the way his dark hair curled appealed to them.
Draco turned back to the shelf he’d been inspecting and found that his fingers had curled down on the shelf-edge, jolting a few of the jars towards him. He replaced them with careful hands, sniffing in spite of himself. He had chosen not to work with Potions, but he loved and understood the art, and trying to find out what Eleanor’s Enchantments had in stock was as natural as trying to learn the details of a witness’s experience.
Soot in one, he thought. Powdered bat-eyes in the other. And in the one in front of him, a scent he didn’t recognize.
Draco subtly glanced over his shoulder. Leah was laughing now, and Potter had a light in his eyes that one could take as flirtatious.
If one did not know, as Draco did, his dedication to his job and his secret love affair with his dead partner.
So secret that even Vane did not share in it, Draco thought, and shook his head as he carefully withdrew his hand, brushing as if by accident against the lid of one of the jars so that it tilted to the side and revealed the contents. The man was a fool if he thought he could put Potter off with a façade of normality and have him simply accept it.
Potter’s obsession, though, mattered little next to the facts of the case they were investigating, save a wound that Draco had to keep in mind the way he would a half-healed injury his partner had not recovered from. At the moment, he was more interested in the contents of this jar.
Red dust, he thought at first, and wondered if it was something as ordinary as powdered brick that had fooled his nose. Some of the apothecaries in the wizarding world kept artifacts from the Muggle world on hand; there were Potions masters who believed them more efficacious in some brews than ingredients that could absorb lingering magic around them. Draco knew those Potions masters were fools, but they did not often ask him for his opinion.
Then a cloudy, sweet odor from the jar struck his nose, and he raised his eyebrows. He still didn’t recognize it specifically, but he knew the copper scent of blood whatever had been done to disguise it.
“What are you doing?”
Leah had noticed his preoccupation, then. Draco turned around with a bow, letting the lid fall back into place on top of the jar. “Your pardon, Miss Anderson. I knocked the shelf and nearly knocked the jars over.”
Leah bustled past him to fix the jars and glance into them as if to ensure that he hadn’t stolen a pinch of dust. Potter narrowed his eyes at Draco in question over her shoulder, and Draco stared back, telling him without words that he had a good reason for his supposed carelessness and not to bother him.
Potter half-tossed his head and glanced away. He had done that more and more often lately, Draco noted in the back of his mind, and not because he didn’t know what Draco was trying to say to him. Rather, their communion, their growing ease around each other at work if not outside it, disturbed him. Perhaps he thought it disloyal to Vane or Weasley to work well with someone else.
Too bad, Draco thought, and his fingers tightened again, on his wand this time, as he thought about it. Because you’re mine now.
“I really must ask you to come away from there,” Leah said, apparently satisfied that he hadn’t taken any bat’s eyes or dried blood with him. “The ingredients can be changed by-oh, any number of spells.” Her hands fluttered anxiously over all the jars, but Draco knew it wasn’t his imagination that she lingered too long over the one with the red dust. Draco smiled at her, though, and strolled back to the counter, already determined to see what else she might be hiding in here.
“And that’s a full list of the ingredients he took?” Potter asked, shifting forwards as though to hide Draco behind his shoulder. Draco took advantage of the distraction to cast a nonverbal charm on his nose.
The smells of the shop immediately sharpened to the point that Draco had to clench his teeth, because good God, he was overwhelmed. His training in Potions at Professor Snape’s hands helped him here; he breathed in, breathed out, and began to sort through the scents that were unfamiliar, finding the ones he knew and separating them in a catalog in his head.
Fur, amber, common spices such as nutmeg and marjoram, half a hundred different kinds of flowers, powdered unicorn horn, dragon scales and eggshell and claws, and more cloudy and sweet odors than he could comprehend at once. Draco frowned. Why would a shop have that many different kinds of powdered blood on hand?
Dragon’s blood, perhaps, if the shop was carefully licensed. Unicorn blood, though at a fabulously expensive price. Merfolk and centaur blood, those almost without asking. Draco had even heard of apothecaries who maintained stores of house-elf blood, though that was not used for many potions. But this…
It was not even human blood, or not exactly. Human blood would smell a bit different coming from a different person, but, over and above all, coppery. This was not that. Draco’s nose twitched, and he sneezed. That made Leah glance up from the list she was looking over with Potter.
“Is something wrong, Auror Malfoy?” Her voice had a polished tone it hadn’t had before, and she had swallowed or spit out whatever she was chewing. She suspected him.
Draco turned around with the same faint smile he had used before to try and convince her nothing was wrong. She suspected him anyway, because of his surname, and it was the reason he had left Potter to talk to her. “No, madam. But I am unusually sensitive to some of the odors in a shop like this. It’s one of the reasons I chose to be an Auror instead of a Potions master myself.”
He had thought that a reassuring lie, but Leah’s eyes dilated, and she fell back a step. Then she swallowed, said, “Of course,” and tried to turn back to the list in front of Potter as though nothing had happened.
Potter was the one who prevented that, laying a fragile hold on her wrist with one hand and leaning in as if he would sniff her hair. Draco had to turn away and study a shelf of ingredients to keep from spitting with contempt.
“Are you all right?” he heard Potter ask. “Has Alexander threatened you?”
“Not directly, no,” Leah said, and sniffled as if, now that she didn’t have something in her mouth to hold it back, snot would come out her nose. Draco sniffed himself, discreetly, but the charm had begun to fade, and he smelled only the dying traces of those intense smells that had come to him before. “But it’s more than that. It’s the way he looked at me when he walked into the shop, as if he despised me and all I stood for.”
Something he and I have in common, Draco thought, and eased forwards. There was a crate of what looked like half-opened jars in the corner. He wanted to see whether those jars held more of the red dust. He wouldn’t be surprised if they did, but he would be curious to hear what Leah’s explanation was for them.
The bell above the shop door jangled softly. Draco turned to look, already forming an explanation in his mind of “important Auror business” that would encourage the visitor to leave.
He lost his breath when he saw the man. He had silver-white hair that reminded Draco of his father’s, and calm dark eyes. He wore a much-patched blue robe, and walked about with his hands in his pockets, as if he was going to pull out a string of handkerchiefs like a Muggle magician.
But none of those details by themselves would have made Draco react that way. The last time he had seen those dark eyes, they were staring at him from a photograph on the first page of a file.
Reynard Alexander smiled at them and drew his hands out of his pockets. Each held a glass globe, one of them swarming with blue and gold, another with purple and green. He hurled them straight at Potter and Draco. Draco dodged to the side, and chanted up a Shield Charm around himself.
When he turned to look, it was to see that Potter-like the idiot he always was if Draco wasn’t there to catch him-hadn’t Shielded himself, but Leah, and flung his body in the way of the flying globe. The globe hit Potter’s skin and clung there a moment, glowing fiercely, before it burst apart.
Potter cried out as flying shards of glass and sparkling lights swarmed him. Draco dropped the Shield and moved forwards to stand next to him, staring at Alexander. Alexander bowed to him and turned away, vanishing out the door.
Potter opened his mouth as though to say he was all right. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped, boneless, to the floor.
Leah screamed.
Draco cast a Silencing Charm on her without thought and stooped down to gather Potter in his arms, fierce hopes and wishes jostling in his head. He can’t be dead. He wouldn’t dare. Please.
Chapter Two.
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