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Writ on Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3959 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
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Chapter Twelve—Time In Time

            “What just happened?” It was a mark of how much the strange disappearance had shaken his mother that she asked a question Draco might take as a plea for reassurance. Even as Draco turned to look at her, she was pursing her mouth tight, her hands folding into one another as if she would call the question back and crush it like an insect.

            “I don’t know,” Draco said, and faced the bed, staring down at the ropes. Even if Jourdemayne had suddenly acquired Nancy’s ability to erase herself from their memories, or if Nancy had come in and erased her, the ropes should still have been around her body. Or else he and Narcissa wouldn’t have been able to see them at all.

            That what had just happened was connected with Nancy, he had no doubt at all. But he did not know how to prove it, or how to gather the knowledge he needed.

            I have to have Harry.

            Draco shook his head slowly. In the end, he thought, it was need and not desire. Just as he had once needed his parents to support him, and without them he would not have lived, he needed Harry to complete the investigation.

            That meant telling someone that Nancy had erased him from Harry’s memory. And it could not be someone in the Socrates Corps, as he had seen this morning; Nancy had struck there as well.

            “Draco.”

            He jerked his head up and turned. He had forgotten that beside him was one of his parents, someone who had long experience watching his face and might understand some of the conclusions he had come to without his ever explaining them. Now, she took a step closer and raised one hand as if she would trace her fingernail over his cheekbone.

            Draco caught her wrist and held it at a distance in a delicately punishing grip. He didn’t want to, he thought, but he didn’t trust her. She could have poison on her nails, or even a grain of the crystallized potion he had used earlier. Draco had no instance in spilling his guts before his mother, literally or figuratively.

            “What happened?” Narcissa asked, standing still in Draco’s grip and managing to sound as though she was slightly bored.

            Draco let his nostrils flare in response, and smiled. “You didn’t know?” he asked, deciding that the wings of lies were the ones that would best spare him from the need to admit he didn’t know himself right now. “You didn’t notice?’

            “I noticed what looked like something leaving our guest’s body,” Narcissa said coolly. Draco marveled that, under the circumstances, she would still refer to Jourdemayne as a guest and not a prisoner, but he knew that it took all sorts of people to make the world turn round, and some sorts had to be his parents. “Perhaps with wings—”

            “The wings were what I meant.” Draco leaned close enough to his mother that her eyelids flickered, although she still didn’t move backwards. “You didn’t see the way they spread. You didn’t see the face she turned to us…?”

            He let his voice trail off enticingly, and his mother followed the false trail laid down in the way Draco had hoped she would. Her face tightened. “A Veela.”

            Draco nodded. “It’s possible that Jourdemayne has creature blood. That might account for her gifts as a Seer, perhaps even her ability to travel in time.” He believed no such thing, of course, but it was a marvelous load of bollocks, and would keep his mother looking in the wrong direction for just long enough. He shook his head and stepped back, staring a moment longer at the empty bed, memorizing the position of the equally empty ropes. The exact memory might be important in the long run. “I know someone in the Ministry who owes me a favor, and might be able to check birth records.”

            “You came home so short a time ago, and now you are leaving us?” Narcissa moved a step closer again, her robes swaying around her ankles. “Draco, darling. I dislike that.”

            Which, of course, meant something more profound, and more dangerous. Draco looked at her, and smiled. “Mother,” he said. “I made my choice. This is the last case I feel an obligation to solve. As you point out, Potter is—not as much to me as I thought he was, as I wanted to be to him. After this case, I will return. Surely a short-term sacrifice that results in a long-term gain is acceptable?”

            It was one of the proverbs she had been most proud of when he first learned to repeat after her instructions. His mother frowned at him a moment more, then gave a small, soft smile and stepped back.

            “As you will, Draco, darling,” she said. “Only return soon. I expected your father back before now. When he returns, he will be sorry to have missed you.”

            The warning in her words lay as light and as deadly around his neck as a poisoned locket. Draco inclined his head once and then turned and made for the front door.

            Harry couldn’t remember him, but there were people who would, and who would, if necessary, translate his words to Harry and help convince him that this was real. Draco was thinking in particular of one special Healer.

*

            Harry came so slowly back to himself that it was frightening. He felt pieces gathering, connecting, blooming, here a fragmented memory, there a scrap of words and light and noise. He opened his eyes unsure of what he would see or even if the sense of sight had returned to him, unsure of everything.

            He found himself in the middle of the room that the Healers had stood in. No, wait, at first it looked like that. And then he saw the Circle beyond them, crowded up against one wall of the room, and that definitely wasn’t real. In the chamber it occupied, it lay in the exact center.

            “What’s going on?” he croaked, once he convinced his dry tongue to work.

            Matron Isral turned towards him and nodded, her face so remote that Harry winced back from her out of instinct. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care; Harry would have been willing to wager on the latter. “We’re going to make sure that you can access your memories,” she said. “There is the barrier.” She pointed towards the far side of the room, opposite the fake Circle, a place Harry had instinctively faced away from.

            He turned to look at it, and nearly lost his balance.

            The barrier was enormous, reflective, and rippling slowly. It reared in place like a wave that had refused to break, and as Harry looked at it and shuddered, he could see touches of silver and steel in its colors, bubbles like foam along the tip, a wavy ripple at the base. He wondered if this twisted had somehow imprisoned his memories in water.

            “We know the answer now,” Matron Isral said, voice as harsh as a crow’s, as happy. “We know that she put your memories beyond a barrier of time.”

            Harry stared. Then he said, “Excuse me?”

            “It’s the only thing that makes sense, given everything else she’s done,” Estillo said, stepping forwards from her place among the Healers. They were all concentrating together at once, eyes closed, and Harry suspected that he didn’t want to disturb them. Estillo looked tired, and as if she would have liked to be back with the others, but she gave that comforting smile that had convinced Harry to trust her in the first place. “She split your memory into two different pasts. The vast majority of what you’ve experienced remained in the normal one, with you. The memories of your partner are in the other past.” She nodded at the shining barrier.

            “That’s not possible,” Harry said at last, his voice dragging and slow despite himself. “I mean—is it? Someone can’t possibly—how can you make time pass differently inside someone’s head like that, instead of the way it does outside?”

            Estillo gave him a smile that was almost joyous. Harry had the impression that she was someone who enjoyed learning new things, the same way he had the impression that Draco was someone who had helped shape him in the months since Lionel’s death, although he didn’t have a true memory to go on in either case. “But don’t we do that all the time?” she murmured. “Sometimes we live by the clock, and sometimes we don’t. And sometimes we can think that time drags, and others that it passes fast.”

            Harry just shook his head and said nothing. He didn’t know if this twisted was the most dangerous they had ever faced—

            That you ever faced. Draco isn’t right here with you, now.

            But it felt that way. And he still didn’t think he understood the limits of her flaw. Was it time travel, altering time for other people, or altering time for herself? Or perhaps it was all of them. No one had ever seriously settled down with twisted and explored whether all of them had a single Dark gift, or several shoved together.

            Estillo turned to face the barrier, and Harry shook away the temptation to ask more questions. She looked as if she was going to need all her concentration, right now.

            Estillo closed her eyes and struck out with her wand, and what felt, to Harry, like reaching tendrils of magic, although he couldn’t see them. He heard her breathing quicken. Then her hair began to stream back from her head, as though she was facing into a strong wind that no one but her could feel.

            Matron Isral said something, chanted something, strong and steady and sharp. Harry thought it was a spell, but he didn’t recognize the words, and it was hard for him to take his eyes off Estillo at the moment, anyway.

            Estillo took a single step forwards. The hair streamed back faster, and now her clothes were billowing, too. Harry looked at her wand and hand, and yes, they were still as steady as ever. He rubbed at his arms, where the ambient magic had made him break out in something worse, because deeper and more penetrating, than goosebumps.

            Matron Isral’s chanting wove around them all, and the other Healers began to pull together into a line, as they had done before when they were getting ready to follow Matron Isral into his mind. Harry wondered absently whether this was happening at all, or whether they were just someplace in his imagination, which he should have thought of before. What did the spell and what Esitllo was doing look like from the outside?

            He caught a frown on Estillo’s face, and stiffened. He didn’t want to imagine what could cause that—

            But immediately, of course, his mind reacted with all sorts of horrible images, so he might as well not have bothered trying to hold them back.

            Then Estillo smiled, and her smile was the first thing that had made her look really familiar to Harry, instead of simply interested in his case or trying to be comforting.

            “Imperio,” she said softly.

            The world trembled around them, and froze for a moment into a shining, perfect image, like an etching: the thin lines of Healer arms and robes and Estillo’s outstretched wand, the curls of now-visible magic rising from her like a clumsy artist’s depiction of water, the light and the darkness overlaid on each other in sharp shadows.

            And then the world blasted apart, for the second time.

*

            “You can’t go in there.”

            Draco swallowed hard. Although exposure to his mother should already have proved to him that not everyone had been forced to forget him, it still made something grateful catch at his throat when the apprentice Healer in the outer office stood up to glare at him. He passed a smile on his face and said, “Actually, I think they would want to see me as soon as possible. I’ve been here as a patient of Healer Estillo’s several times.”

            “Well, maybe you have,” said the apprentice, who was glaring at him now with the petty, sullen look of someone who knew or thought he knew Draco and didn’t intend to let him in anyway. “They’re busy right now.”

            “I’ll wait,” Draco said evenly, although his impatience felt as though it would boil over like a kettle heated on a dragon’s flank, and took a seat near the door, his legs neatly crossed and his face assuming the expression of boredom he had trained himself into in situations like this. Looking bored around Okazes and the like got you into appointments faster than looking eager.

            The apprentice took the desk again, and continued to stare at him. “I’m not going to let you in on good behavior, you know,” he said after a moment.

            “I know that,” Draco said, and smiled at him, and fastened his attention on the painting on the wall across from him, a quite good landscape.

            He had just decided that the distant haze of blue in the back of the painting was meant to be mountains, after all, and not simply a dab of paint here and there, when the apprentice said, “Is your name Draco Malfoy?”

            Draco heard the thin singing that sometimes presaged the need to move quickly in his ears, but didn’t take his gaze off the painting for a long moment, before turning to the apprentice and blinking. “What? Yes, it is.” His hand was on his wand already, comfort, long-established training, and his mind had catalogued the apprentice’s age and rank as marked by the color of his robes, and thus the level of training he was likely to have in Healing spells that could hurt when reversed.

            “Then I have a message here,” said the apprentice, unfolding a piece of parchment with thick, clumsy fingers. Draco thought one of the finest moments of self-control in his life came when he simply sat and waited instead of leaping the desk to take it away from him. “Says that you’re the only one allowed back there right now, that you’re to come in as soon as you arrive.” He grimaced. “But it’s a ritual they’re conducting right now, and you’re not to intrude.”

            He said it as though Draco was a child who might not understand about taking one more sweet from the jar. Draco kept his face smooth as he inclined his head. “I see. Thank you.”

            “They have Auror Potter himself in there,” said the apprentice, and pointed a finger at Draco. “Don’t you interfere.”

            Draco kept his smile, but his steps quickened as he passed through the doors behind the desk, and into a cooler corridor where the doors of more private offices stood. These looked as if they would be the places where the Healers kept their private experiments and more confidential files, unlike the slightly public office where he and Harry usually met with Estillo.

            He raised his wand and breathed out a tiny amount of power. If the ritual was going on as the apprentice had said, then he didn’t want to use a spell that could disrupt it. “Point Me,” he whispered, and didn’t even use the name. Harry’s name was singing in his magic, in his body, aiming the spell already.

            There was a flicker, light as a shadow, down the corridor. Draco walked that way, and now felt the magic pressing on his skin, building and building, as though they had reached the most important part of the ritual. He wouldn’t have needed the apprentice’s warning not to interfere, had he felt this at first.

            Then something seemed to burst, the magic storming past Draco hard enough to sting tears from his eyes, and he heard Harry screaming.

            Draco never asked himself what he should do next. He knew it. He lowered his head and began to run.

*

            Harry felt the rush and the crash around him, he knew great waves were coming to sweep him from his feet, he heard the hiss and the snarl of the magic that made for him, like enemy serpents who didn’t care that he could speak Parseltongue—

            But he didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing.

            He hurled himself backwards and upwards, reacting the only way he could, as an Auror who was trained to fight. His wand trembled in his hand and felt as if it would fly away, but he didn’t know that it would, and the Healers hadn’t told him this would happen, and Harry needed the protection of something more than his fragile image of Draco right now. He cast a Shield Charm.

            It appeared in front of him, familiar silver glimmer. Harry felt that he was standing on something solid, and he drew in a grateful breath, positioning his feet beneath him, ready to run if necessary.

            Something joined the Shield Charm in front of him, something that wore white robes and stood with folded arms, facing away from him and towards the darkness where the threat had come from.

            Draco. Harry knew it even without the sight of that unusual hair, Malfoy hair. He took a step forwards, wondering if he could reach through the Shield Charm and graze his hand down Draco’s back. It wouldn’t take long; he just had to—

            And then another roar sounded from the darkness, not one that was inherently hostile but one like the sound of falling water, and Harry remembered what the barrier that had prevented him from access to his memory had looked like. He whirled to face it, and found himself spreading his arms before he thought about it.

            The memories came falling all about him, and soaked him, and made the darkness wet with stars.

            There was a Draco standing beside him, wearing Auror robes, wielding his wand against an enemy that Harry couldn’t see but could almost remember. This one turned his head, and although Harry knew they weren’t in the same moment, the offered smile still made him smile in return.

            There was another stepping towards him with hands outstretched and desire in his eyes that made Harry think of Lionel, and then wonder if he should. He tried to reach back, but his hands struck the immaterial ones and slid through.

            There was a third Draco who sat at a desk, or at least in the posture one would use for a desk, his head tilted down over invisible paperwork. He looked back and up and over his shoulder, apparently at a Harry who was part of his own time, and his face softened. Harry’s mouth watered.

            How could he have forgotten this, how much he wanted someone who wasn’t Lionel? Someone who worked with him, who was part of his life, who wasn’t a friend but more than a friend, a partner?

            That was the point the Healers had been trying to make when they cast these particular spells, perhaps, Harry decided. The flaw that the twisted had used banished more than memories. It took emotions away, and those emotions crawled through time, and should have left traces behind them, brilliant flashes of the ones that were seared into the mind in a moment, sullen and glimmering trails for the ones that took time to burn. That the twisted could have removed all of them was unusual. Harry might not have remembered who Draco was, but when he saw his image, he should have remembered more of these feelings.

            Unless the whole thing was taken away, and placed in another time.

            Unless…

            But his world was trembling again, and Harry had heard the roaring and crashing slow but not stop around him. He suspected that the moment was coming when he was about to be hit by the biggest part of the memory, the part that he should have known was coming, but which he had managed to fence away and forget about. He turned around, shivering, and found the wave poised above him.

            The wave dived down. It took everything Harry was capable of to stand still and not move in that moment.

            It crashed home, and soaked him with emotions, with memories, with tattered scraps of time flying so fast and so heavy that Harry screamed. Although he still didn’t move, and let the broken, ravaged time run over him, let it do its work.

            He had the impression that the chanting circle of Healers was around him again for a moment, and then that another barrier had broken that he hadn’t been able to see, and then the memories ran through his head like waters breaking down a dam that held them back, and he was as he had been—

            No. Broken, further. Tattered.

            But remembering.

*

            Draco had expected wards on the door he was racing towards, but there were none. Or perhaps the Healers had expected him, in that weird way that Healers sometimes had—he shuddered as his mind brushed against the memories of Healer Alto—and had left the path to the ritual room open because they knew he would need to be able to enter.

            He flung the door open, and saw something that ever afterwards he could never describe accurately.

            But he did try, if only to make sense of it in his own mind. He saw a whirling tube of glass, of wind, bearing down from the ceiling to the floor, and in the center of it crouched Harry, his knees bleeding, his arms tucked around his head. He was screaming steadily, but more than that, he was streaming, faint colors cascading down his face and around his ears, faint trails of blood running from under his nails. The streams formed and reformed and vanished to be replaced by new ones. He was soaked.

            Draco held himself back from rushing in. He thought he knew what this was.

            And, well. If the reversal of Nancy’s memory block was that violent, then it made it all the more imperative that they find and capture her.

            He found someone staring at his back, and turned his head. The Healers were gathered behind him, in a circle. Draco found himself wondering how he had rushed through them and not noticed, but then dismissed that idea. He knew they hadn’t been there a moment ago. It wasn’t a matter of ignoring them; it was a matter of them being in one place and then in another.

            Harry stopped screaming. Draco couldn’t turn and look at him yet, though. He said to Healer Estillo, “What did you do?”

            Estillo blinked and looked faintly surprised, as if she thought that Draco shouldn’t have singled her out even though it made sense, as she was the Healer that both Harry and Draco knew. “Used the Imperius Curse to push against the barrier of time,” she said. “I knew that he was resistant to that curse, from what he told me himself. And the process of the mind resisting the Imperius Curse is so hard, the reflex needed goes so deep, that I hoped it would push against and break the barrier on his memories as well.”

            “That is not the theory as it is commonly understood,” said another woman beyond Estillo. “Perhaps I can excuse your unorthodoxy on the grounds of effectiveness, Estillo.”

            Draco turned away from them and took a step towards Harry. Then he had to stop, because he couldn’t move, for the same reason that he hadn’t been able to look at Harry a moment earlier. He ached, all over.

            Harry was standing. He leaned on a walking stick he must have conjured without thinking about it; Draco had seen him do that sometimes, when he forgot about using magic as a tool or a self-conscious thing to make his life easier, and simply used it as an extension of his body. He stared at Draco.

            There was—

            “Draco,” Harry whispered.

            There was recognition there.

            Draco took a step forwards, and clasped Harry’s hand.

*

SP777: You mean, does it have a connection to Lucius? No, not really.

And I think the explanation has enough clues now that you might figure out that last scene of Chapter 11 before I mention it!
- 11
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- 13
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