Chapter Eleven of 'A Black Stone in a Glass Box'- The White Map
Chapter Eleven.
Title: A Black Stone in a Glass Box (11/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Blaise/Astoria
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Weird magic, DH-compliant in most ways but ignores epilogue, some angst, OC character death.
Summary: Harry has made a sacrifice to protect the wizarding world. And Draco Malfoy is going to find a way to reverse it if it kills him. After all, if he doesn’t reverse it, then he’ll only die of boredom anyway.
Author’s Notes: This is based on the fairy tale of Koschei the Deathless, which is where the familiarity in the plot will probably come from. It’s going to be an action/adventure and humor story more than a romance, mostly in Draco’s POV, and although the first chapter is fairly dark, the rest are definitely lighter
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eleven--The White Map
Draco knocked and waited. Then he cursed and knocked again. Most of the time, he found it useful to have friends, but he had to admit there were times when they made life bloody inconvenient.
Despite the second knock, and then the third, it was still long minutes before Pansy came to the door. When she opened it, Draco understood. She wore a languid puff of silk that was only a dress because people chose to call it that, and she watched him with raised eyebrows and her hair dangling in long, loose curls down her back.
"So who is it?" Draco demanded, stepping into her large entrance hall and shutting the door behind him.
Pansy rolled her eyes. "No one you know, and no one worth staying in bed for."
"Really?" Draco grinned at her. "You took long enough to answer the door that I assumed he was at least skilled."
"I took long enough because you woke me up," Pansy said, and every word was sharp, precise, as if edged with diamond dust. She turned back to the drawing room she'd come out of, and Draco followed. The rich colors around him, pinks and pale lavenders, glowed in the sunlight coming through the window. "Now. I got your ridiculous letter about Potter. What did he do now?"
Draco pressed a hand to his heart. "What makes you think my visit has anything to do with that?"
"Because you've been out of England for five years and only wrote me when I sent you Howlers." Pansy turned around and put her hands on her hips. "I'm not going to be patient with this load of bollocks, Draco. Tell me. Now."
Draco sighed. He had forgotten that most of his Continental friends liked being teased more than Pansy did. "He got hold of the next component of the chain ritual that I need and Apparated Merlin knows where."
"Careless of you to let him do that." Pansy shook her head and tapped her fingers on her hips, making the silk rustle. "I suppose you want me to locate him for you?"
Draco crept closer and looked at her from the corner of his eye. "No one can do that as well as you can."
"I accept that as truth and flattery," Pansy said. "It's just lucky for you that I'm in the mood for that particular mixture of both. Come on." She turned and marched deeper into the house, through the drawing room and a door that led into a long corridor with rooms and stairs leading off it. Draco had never found out where all of them gone, just as he had never found out where Pansy had got the money to purchase this huge house after the war. He was glad she was here, though. If she had been at her parents' house, she would have been leading the decorous life she pretended to lead, and he couldn't have counted on her help.
Pansy stepped at last into a little dark lab that Professor Snape might have appreciated, although the vials on the shelves held mostly completed potions and the equipment on the tables wasn't meant for brewing, precisely. "I suppose you do have Potter's hair, or something similarly close to him, that I can use?" Pansy asked, opening a cupboard briskly.
"Uh," Draco admitted.
Pansy sighed so deeply that her dress almost came off. "Well, the fact that you were close to him and probably picked up some trace of his magical signature will have to be enough, then," she muttered, and whirled towards him, drawing her wand. "Stand still."
Draco did so while she stroked the wand over his forehead and around his hair, muttering and frowning to herself all the while. When she took it back, Draco couldn't see anything clinging to the tip, but it still glinted as Pansy carefully brushed it across the inside of a copper dish lined with obsidian.
"Good enough," said Pansy, after a critical stare at the pan, and reached out to snap her fingers at the table. Draco jumped as a flame sprang to life through a hole in it, and then shook his head at her.
"Show-off."
"While you were learning mountain-skimming and how to drink trolls under the table, I was learning this," Pansy said, and bent over the pan. Draco thought about saying something as her hair almost fell into it, but Pansy pushed it back behind her ears and raised her eyebrows at him in a way that said she knew what he was thinking and didn't appreciate it. Draco dutifully pinched his lips shut and watched instead as she stirred her wand back and forth inside the pan. "Hmmm."
That was all she said, while Draco waited patiently with his hands behind his back, not touching any of the equipment in the lab, because he remembered what Pansy had written him about that. Pansy's frown grew deeper as she waited, but she didn't give up, and indeed came back to him and traced her wand around his hands, wrists, and legs, going back to the pan with something invisible except when it fell into the obsidian each time.
"Did he ever touch you?" Pansy finally demanded as she arched her neck and studied the far side of the pan critically.
"He held me close to Apparate me," Draco said.
"That's enough, then," Pansy said, and plunged her wand into the pan. It had been empty a moment before, or so Draco would have sworn, but now she pulled her wand back with something seething and white on the end. As Draco stared in fascination--he had read her descriptions of the process, but it was still strange to see--Pansy whipped her wand at another pan on the other end of the table, this one brass.
The white coil flew into it and shimmered, curling up until it resembled a sheet of parchment, and then uncurling to show that it was a sheet of parchment. Pansy gave a grudging nod and walked over to pick it up.
"Not the best I've ever done," she murmured, turning the paper back and forth and watching the edges of it as though she thought it would crumble apart in her hands. "You rushed me too much for that, Draco. If you would have gone more slowly and let me--"
Draco took the map from her without caring. It was a blank white parchment except for a small black dot in the center. As Draco watched, names appeared near the dot. The one right beside it said The Burrow, and beyond that was another labeled Ottery St. Catchpole.
Draco relaxed and snorted. "He's gone to the Weasleys. I might have known." Or perhaps he could be excused for not knowing, he had to admit. It hadn't seemed likely that Potter would go back to his friends when he was still under the influence of the chain ritual. He had tried so hard to keep them out of this before now, and he would have a hard job explaining the bit of eagle beak in his possession.
"Well, you didn't know, or you wouldn't have come here." Pansy folded her arms. "And this is the last time I help you with something this mad, Draco. You're on your own from now on."
"Darling Pansy." Draco took her by the arms and smiled into her face. "You've given me the help that I most needed, in the hour of my crisis. I admire you more than I can say. No one else could have learned to create maps from the mere trace of a magical signature. I--"
"When will you send me the Galleons?"
Draco stopped and pressed his hand over his heart again. "A lot of people are happy to receive the romantic coin that I pay them in, I tell you."
"And I'm not one of them." Pansy reached out and flicked him in the middle of his forehead with her long nails, enough to hurt, or at least make Draco wince. "I just want to know when you'll send me the Galleons."
"It might take another week to end this business with Potter," Draco said, and stepped back to nurse his injured dignity. "Or at least make sure that he doesn't set up another chain ritual the minute I stop this one. I'll get you the money then."
"Why do you care so much?" Pansy was studying him as though he was again the boy she'd thought about marrying when they were both children. "You know that he'll curse you for interrupting this, not be thankful. And I never thought you cared that much about achieving Potter's thanks, anyway."
"I don't," Draco said. "Not his gratitude. His attention, and the way that he glared at me when he realized I was winning the battles and that I tricked him to win this latest one...yes, that I think I want."
"You think you want them, and you chase him and his magical animals over half England? Or beyond that, since I don't think some of the places you mentioned were in England?" Pansy shook her head. "I'm glad I'm not you. And not male."
"Well, someday you'll meet someone who'll risk that much for you," Draco told her magnanimously. "Not your husband, but someone else."
Pansy rolled her eyes. "Maybe, but that isn't the sweet compliment that you mean it to be, Draco, not when I've seen what you think it's worth risking your life for."
"I leave you with the money I have on me, then, since all the compliments I can pay you go wrong," Draco said sadly, and handed over a clinking bundle of money wrapped in a handkerchief. Pansy joggled it in one hand and nodded to him, turning to go back upstairs.
"Good luck on your mad journey, and good luck in keeping Potter's attention for longer than it takes the next Dark wizard to cross his path," she called over her shoulder.
Draco smiled when she wasn't there to see anymore. He had his own plans for keeping Potter's eyes fixed firmly on him, and if it would take a little more work than he had anticipated when he first attacked the chain ritual...well, at least that meant he wouldn't have the time for boredom. That was enough to keep him whistling as he walked out of Pansy's house, checked the map one more time to make sure Potter hadn't moved, and then Apparated.
*
Draco had thought about sneaking up on the Burrow or waiting for Potter to leave, as he probably would when the influence of Draco's battles faded and he began to fall back into apathy again, but he found he hated the thought of time undoing all his gains and making Potter collapse into that will-less automaton again. Besides, his friends might keep him there when they realized how much was wrong with him, and Draco didn't have the time to wait.
There was only one way to satisfy his own craving for Potter's attention and make sure that Potter couldn't use his friends as a refuge from Draco, and Draco put it into action by marching up and knocking boldly on the front door.
It opened at once; the Weasleys must have been expecting someone else. And in the middle of the doorway was the original Weasel, his head turned back over his shoulder as he mumbled incoherently through a mouthful of meat and bones. Draco managed to make out something about, "Leave it here."
"I came to remove something, not leave something," Draco said.
To a pleasure so intense that it made his body shake, five years hadn't diminished the Weasel's reaction to his voice. He whipped around and nearly stuck his wand up Draco's nostrils. It was a shame that Draco didn't know any spells he could cast with bogeys alone. He moved a step back and smiled politely. "Just give me Potter, and I'll leave," he said.
"Malfoy." Weasley still made his surname sound less desirable than black plague, and Draco hummed in contentment. It was good for some things never to change. "What the fuck do you think Harry has to do with you?"
"I've been breaking down the chain ritual that he established to enslave his heart," Draco said. "With that much invested in him, I think I have a right to at least talk to him." He paused and laid his hand on his heart again when Weasley's mouth fell open. "Oh, dear, he didn't confide that in you when he came here to hide? How unlike a brave Gryffindor."
There was a scrambling sound behind Weasley--Draco chose to think of it as the sound of someone pushing back a table they'd hidden under--and Potter stormed up beside his friend. Draco was pleased to see that his teeth were still grinding and his eyes had the look of a forest fire in progress, despite the hours that had passed between the time he'd Apparated and now.
"You don't have any right to come here, Malfoy," Potter said. His voice was low enough not to qualify it as a bark, but it was still grating. "None. Take your lies and get out."
"They're not lies, as you know very well," Draco said, standing tall because he wanted to. "You did create a chain ritual that promised to save the world at the small price of your heart. And then you didn't tell anyone else. Maybe you don't remember it now, but I'm sure at the time, you knew your friends would interfere. You predicted them interfering. You never thought I would, but, well." He shrugged a little, charmingly. "None of us can predict all the tedious necessities of life."
"What chain ritual?" Granger's face poked through the gap behind Harry, although Draco knew her more by her voice than anything else. He couldn't catch even a glimpse of frizzy hair from this angle. "What is he saying, Harry?"
"Lies." Potter's eyes never wavered from Draco's face, and Draco smiled a little, impressed despite himself with how hate-filled Potter could be. "The way he always does, the way he always will. He has to make himself important even now, when it doesn't matter. We haven't seen each other for years, and he hasn't cared about what I do for years. Why does he suddenly care now? For no reason, except that he wants to annoy me."
Draco planted a hand over his heart. "I am shocked, tragically shocked," he said. "Why don't you show them that piece of eagle's beak, Potter? How are you going to explain that? Do you regularly go eagle hunting on the weekends for fun?"
He was watching, and saw Potter's fingers twitch towards his pocket. So he knew to move his own wand behind his back in the Summoning Charm, and since he had learned a long time ago how to perform that one nonverbally--it was so useful when he didn't want to wake up the snoring person beside him and didn't want to get out of bed to fetch the Hangover Potion--the bit of beak flew up and out of Potter's pocket before he could prevent it.
Potter snarled at him and grabbed for the beak. Draco snatched it and turned it back and forth.
"No chain ritual?" he asked. "I'm lying? Why don't you tell your friends what this is, then, and what it was doing in your pocket, and why you care so much that I have it?"
Weasley and Granger had turned their searching eyes on Potter now--eyes full of faith, of course. Draco doubted he could convince them all in a moment that their precious friend had done something wrong. What he could do was make sure that they didn't let him off the hook. Potter was a horrible liar. Draco cast a charm that would make the bit of beak stick to the lining of his own pocket, and smiled pleasantly.
"That's something I recovered that he was trying to steal," Potter said. "He's back in England after five years, suddenly. Why? What reason except to try and cause mischief? And this is an object that a friend of his stole five years ago and hid. Now Malfoy is here, trying to profit from it."
Draco raised an eyebrow. That was more innovative than he had expected Potter to be, and he thought the lie might have worked. If he hadn't turned red the minute he began speaking, of course, and kept calling the bit of eagle's beak the "object" and the "something." If he had known that much about the case, to work it as an Auror, he would speak the name.
Weasley looked as if he wanted to be convinced anyway, but Granger was speaking. "All right, but how did you find out about this, Harry? I thought you were working a different case." She paused, then added, "And I don't know...you said something the other day about Dark Lords and how they wouldn't trouble Britain anymore, and there was that abrupt change in the rumors--"
Potter turned to deal with his friends. Draco backed a step away, then another quiet one. Even Weasley looked as if he had better things to do right now than rush Draco. Draco moved off, until he was beyond the anti-Apparition wards, and cleared his throat.
Everyone turned to look at him.
"Thanks," Draco said, to Potter for being helpful and his friends for being helpful in a different way, and Apparated.
Potter's rather musical roar of rage was unfortunately cut short as he did.
Chapter Twelve.
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