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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 Thirteen—Desire in Restraint

            “What happened to you?”

            Draco raised his head and smiled at Harry, a little helplessly. His fingers were wrapped around the cup of strong tea that one of the Healers—he thought it was Isral, the slightly frightening woman who seemed to control everything—had insisted he have, and he was leaning forwards on a table in one of the private offices he’d passed earlier. The Healer who owned it was nowhere in evidence, leaving the low chairs and lower tables and softly-blazing fireplace all to them.

            He kept silent for a few minutes, studying Harry’s face. Harry had exhausted-looking eyes. His hands twitched around his own cup of tea. He reached out now and then as though he wanted to touch, and drew his hand back as though he feared Draco’s reaction if he did. His hadn’t looked away from Draco or blinked much since they sat down.

            “I’d rather discuss what happened to you first,” Draco said softly. “Did you feel something missing in your life?”

            Harry paused in shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Thinking back to how it felt is strange, now. But I think I would have noticed something a lot sooner if she hadn’t erased the memories of the other Socrates Aurors as well.” He half-snorted. “Well, of course, that’s why she did it. But she didn’t know about Estillo, or thought we wouldn’t meet her.”

            “We owe her a lot,” Draco said simply, and plunged past that moment. “Harry. I missed you.”

            Harry glanced at him as though surprised by the hard tone in his voice, then dropped his head and flushed. “I—I know. I missed you, too. I didn’t know how much until the memories returned, but I did.” He finished the motion of his hand this time, and managed to grip Draco’s fingers. Draco returned the clasp convulsively, and turned Harry’s hand over to kiss the back.

            He had planned to start his own story of capturing Jourdemayne and taking her to the Manor then, but Harry leaned over the table and continued the kiss, this time on Draco’s lips. Draco put his hands up and pushed at Harry’s shoulders only once. Then he went with it, and only broke the kiss to maneuver around the table and make sure they didn’t spill their tea.

            Harry leaned back in the chair, kissing him fervently as Draco half-collapsed on his lap, his hands sneaking behind him to cup Draco’s back and arse, fingers rubbing up and down and trying to squirm beneath his clothes. Draco moaned as openly as he wanted to, knowing no one would hear, and wrapped his legs around Harry’s waist.

            Harry twisted his head and came up almost underneath Draco, his lips parting and his tongue sneaking out to catch his mouth. Draco moaned again, and nipped at Harry’s mouth, holding it open for a kiss that went so deep he almost lost control of his breath, never mind Harry. They were both panting by the time that Harry pulled back.

            “God, I missed you,” Harry muttered, in a voice made rough with kissing, cradling Draco’s face between his palms as he stared at him.

            Draco caught his breath and licked Harry’s fingers, but smiled and nodded when Harry pulled his hand back instead of letting him continue. “I felt the same way,” he said. “Except worse, I think, because you didn’t even know what you were missing, while I felt it all the time.”

            Harry tensed, and for a minute Draco was afraid that he would argue about that or start apologizing for something that wasn’t his fault. Luckily, he seemed to remember he had a sense of humor, and smiled instead. “Well, now I know,” he said. “And you were about to tell me what happened to bring you here.”

            Draco twisted to the side, ready to climb off Harry’s lap and go back to his own chair, but Harry restrained him easily with Auror-heavy hands on his arse and waist. Draco cocked his head at him. Harry flushed, but had a determined smile on his face as he said, “Well, you can talk about what happened to you just as easily from here, can’t you?”

            “If that’s the way you want to play it,” Draco said, and leaned in, resting his back against Harry’s chest and closing his eyes as welcome relaxation and warmth stole through him. “I went to Jourdemayne. I thought that if anyone could tell us about Nancy, it would be the woman who brought us into the case.”

            Harry nodded. “And she wasn’t helpful?”

            “She tried to kill me,” Draco said quietly. “I captured her and brought her to the Manor. My plan was to have my parents help me question her. They would have demanded a price, of course—they did—but it was one I never intended to pay.”

            Harry shivered hard for a minute, and Draco could feel him repressing all the questions he wanted to ask, the ones that weren’t immediately relevant at the moment. Draco twisted around and kissed him again, as a promise that they would address those questions later. Harry returned the kiss, hard and sloppy, before he linked his hands together over Draco’s belly and asked, “How did that go?”

            “My mother threatened her,” Draco said. “She wasn’t impressed. We fed her a potion that released her inhibitions and should have made her talk about whatever was passing through her mind at the moment. I think it did, but not in ways that we could understand.” He frowned, trying again to think of a connecting thread between the various things Jourdemayne had babbled, and failing. “She was self-aware enough to say some of the things in a different language, anyway. And then she—vanished.”

            “The way that Nancy did?”

            Draco shook his head. “My mother and I still remembered her. But she wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know what happened. There was a weird thing I remember seeing as she burst from the ropes, as if she were growing wings. I passed it off to my mother as a wild Veela and pretended I was going to the Ministry to look up birth records on Jourdemayne.”

            Harry frowned and leaned back, which caused so many interesting things to change under Draco that it took him a moment to concentrate on Harry’s words. “What were the things she said to you? Can you remember them?”

            Draco closed his eyes and took a moment of the discipline he’d had to impose on himself to get through the Auror program—where there were also plenty of distractions, though none as pleasant—to forget where he was sitting, and think back to what Jourdemayne had said.

            “That she knew the future,” he murmured. “That she was the High Priestess of her Order, and not merely a member. That someone had apparently warned her that things were going to fall out this way. She didn’t name that person, but I’m almost sure it was Nancy.”

            Harry nodded, his hair rustling against Draco’s cheek and tempting him to turn his head and take in a mouthful. He didn’t, but it really was an effort of heroic self-control that restrained him, rather than good sense. “All right. That would make sense. What else?”

            “That she was wrong about the reason she could travel in time,” Draco murmured, eyes closed. “That she thought it was because of her Seer’s gift, but she was wrong. She implied that other members of her Order didn’t have the success she did.”

            Harry stiffened beneath him, and not in any way that Draco would have considered complimentary. He turned his head and opened his eyes, and saw Harry staring into the distance, as though he could see beyond the walls of the Healers’ offices, his fingers curling into claws.

            “Harry?” Draco whispered.

            “Hush,” Harry whispered back. “It’s coming, I think. I think that—I might have an idea, if you’ll be quiet for a moment and let me think. It needs time to form fully.”

            Draco raised an eyebrow, but leaned across the table and picked up his tea again, so he would have something to do with his hands while he waited.

*

            Harry shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair, ignoring the way that Draco fit into his lap for the moment. It was very nice, and very distracting, of course, but he needed to think about Nancy instead.

            Nancy could erase memories. They had accepted, without thinking, that that was her flaw. Of course, they had had hardly any chances to study her, and had to work with what they knew.

            Draco shifted in his lap again, and reminded Harry of how much he would have liked to pin him to the table and kiss him some more. Or just hold him, running his hands up and down and letting his body do everything that it had wanted to for months, forgetting about the row he and Draco had been having before they fell victim to Nancy’s manipulation…

            No. He did want to do that to Draco, but they should wait at least a short time first and make sure that they had Nancy under control. He was sure Draco would agree, even as Draco shifted again to put the teacup down.

            Well. Reasonably sure that Draco would agree.

            Harry bit his lip and reminded himself that they would have plenty of time later to talk and do whatever they wanted, and yanked his mind back to the small thought that had been building when he asked Draco to remain silent for a bit.

            Okay, yes. So Nancy’s flaw wasn’t what they thought it was. She didn’t destroy memories, she didn’t erase them, she sealed them behind a barrier of time. She reached in and twisted the perceptions of time in a human skull, which were always funny anyway. And she could do it for herself, and also other people. And she could do it to multiple people. It made sense that she had done it to both Harry and Draco where she was concerned, because they were the Aurors hunting her. And to Jourdemayne, because she wanted Jourdemayne to forget she had worked with her Order. But…

            “Did Jourdemayne say anything about why Nancy went after you and not me?” he asked quietly, not opening his eyes. “I mean, why she decided to erase my memory of you instead of the other way around?”

            Draco paused as if startled, and then said, “She did, actually. She strongly implied that it had something to do with the way that I behaved when we first visited Jourdemayne. Although I don’t know why, given that I didn’t see Nancy until the second time we were there, and she made me forget her immediately.”

            “Ah,” Harry breathed.

            And there it was. An insane idea, glittering in the middle of his head and incomplete in places, like one of those gem puzzles that he had seen Bill and Fleur’s children playing with. He would have to talk it out with other people before he could complete it.

            But he was sure, now, that it wasn’t as simple as Nancy erasing her existence or others’ from people’s minds, and leaving them with no idea of how to fight her. Especially given the tugging that he had felt in the middle of the night, leading him to the Black house, before he had ever begun the case. He knew that she had made him forget someone else besides Draco on the tapestry, although of course he didn’t know exactly who it was now. But what reason would she have to do that?

            If she knew that they would be the ones working on the case. If her gift concerned time far more than it concerned memory, and she wanted to make sure it worked on him.

            If she could see the future, and travel to it, and from it. If she came from it.

            He sat up, nearly fast enough to dump Draco off his lap. But Draco rose to his feet independently of him, and stood looking down at Harry with his eyebrows raised, his head shaking slightly.

            “What is it, then?” he asked, gripping Harry’s chin and turning it back and forth while staring critically into his eyes, as if he thought that he might have to give Harry something for his vision. “What did you find out?”

            Harry licked his lips. “Think about the way that we acted when we first visited Jourdemayne,” he whispered. “Both of us. I chirped and cooed and acted sympathetic to her. You didn’t.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. “Because I could see the mockery she was making of a pure-blood heritage she had no right to claim. Because I still thought, then, that the notes didn’t come from a real twisted. I had no idea of Nancy’s powers. Of course now I know she could have sent the notes from the future—”

            “Notes in Jourdemayne’s handwriting?” Harry raised his eyebrows.

            Draco blinked, and fell silent. Then he said, “Yes, that was a detail I had forgotten. But there’s still no inherent objection to that idea. If we’re looking for one woman who can travel in time, then she might have taken Jourdemayne’s notes to the future, and brought them back from there. Notes stolen from the back of Jourdemayne’s ritual diaries, perhaps. If Nancy worked with her, she would have known where to find them.”

            Harry shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said softly. “Jourdemayne was afraid of you, Draco. Whether because she knew that you saw through her pretensions or because you didn’t react to her fear by trying to soothe her. That was the reason Nancy attacked you. But why should it matter to Nancy what Jourdemayne feared, if they were enemies?”

            Draco stared at him. Then he said, “Something about this doesn’t make sense. Do you have hold of an answer that does? It would explain, perhaps, where Jourdemayne is now, and how Nancy helped her escape.”

            “Jourdemayne didn’t escape you,” Harry said. “Nancy did.”

            Draco rolled his eyes again. “Yes, yes, I know that, but—”

            “How great a coincidence would it be,” Harry asked softly, the words falling out of him doused with the tingling certainty that he was right, “if we were dealing with two women who could see the future and travel in time when no one else in Jourdemayne’s Order managed it? I think we’re looking for one woman, Draco. Not two.”

*

            Draco stared at him. And then he leaped back and began to pace around the office, the thoughts flowing as fast through his head as they must have flowed through Harry’s a moment before. Harry watched him with a hungry expression, apparently wanting to share in that flow, and Draco obliged him by speaking aloud.

            “That,” Draco breathed, “is why she cleared the Potions lab the way she did.”

            “I don’t understand that part.” Harry sat up with his hands folded in his lap, like an obedient student, but his voice vibrated.

            “Because,” Draco said, spinning around and pointing one finger, “we’ve seen one man become a twisted by drinking the blood of a twisted. We are the only Aurors in the Department who have experience with such a thing. She might have known that we, or at least I, would recognize the same sort of materials lying around as we found in Leah’s Potions shop during the Alexander case.”

            Harry opened his mouth, then shut it. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he whispered. “I had thought that Jourdemayne became Nancy, that she knew she was going to become Nancy, but I hadn’t thought about how. You think she did it with a potion?”

            Draco smiled grimly. “I think she was trying to find out how to do it that way, at least, or perhaps keep herself from it. And think about it. Jourdemayne’s sister was a twisted. We don’t know that the ability runs in families, because there really aren’t that many twisted we can study, but we know the ability to do wandless magic does. And what is being a twisted but the ability to perform Dark, powerful wandless magic of a specific kind?”

            Harry shook his head, but Draco knew that he wasn’t shaking it in disagreement, and was almost prepared when Harry stood up and came forwards to clasp his hands. “You’re so smart,” he whispered, bending close enough that he could have kissed Draco if he wanted, except that that would have prevented him from speaking.

            “I wouldn’t have figured it out if not for the brilliance that you came up with.” Draco shrugged, and put his hand in Harry’s hair, drawing him close for the kiss that he found himself hungry for. Harry moaned, and Draco thought about pinning him to the wall and finishing what they’d started earlier.

            They really did have to finish this instead, though, so he drew back with a little sigh and said, “That doesn’t explain everything. But it gives us a place to start.”

            Harry nodded, his eyes focused on the far wall. “And some of the things that Nancy said might even have been true,” he whispered. “In the future, perhaps the blue-eyed twisted really did capture her, and she thought coming to me to seek help would be a good idea. But then she grew too nervous and took my memories of her away.”

            “And perhaps,” Draco said, his mind surging along pathways that he thought Harry’s might have followed already, “that’s why we saw her disappear the way she did. The moment when she transformed—when she became a twisted—that was what my mother and I saw. And what she foresaw. She was acting awfully strange when we questioned her, not terrified of the potential pain but desperate in a different way. If she knew she was going to change into Nancy then and didn’t see a way of preventing it…”

            Harry nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. “She didn’t want us finding out that she was Nancy, I’m certain,” he said. “And it makes sense that she vanished. You couldn’t see her any longer, and all she would have had to do was reach out and erase the memory of her appearance from your mother’s mind.”

            Draco frowned. “I still don’t understand exactly what we did see, though. Why that moment drove her to become Nancy, why we saw the wings that we thought we saw unfolding from her shoulders.”

            “I believe I can explain that.”

            Draco started, and whipped around, his hand on his wand so fast that it was hard even for him to believe he held it until he saw he did. Healer Estillo, standing against the door of the room, blinked and then stared mildly at them, shaking her head.

            “I don’t mean to threaten you,” she said. “Even if I had ever had such mad ideas, seeing the way you fight would have cured me of them.”

            “Then what do you mean?” Draco hissed at her, and dropped his wand down to rest at his side. He was still thrumming with adrenaline, uncertain with it, and he stalked back towards Harry as he thought about the source of that strange reaction. Harry wrapped his arms around Draco’s waist and kissed the back of his neck, as though he didn’t have the same reaction.

            Oh, Draco thought at last, his mind working through the ideas that should have been organized already. Because I nearly lost Harry, and he nearly lost me, and we’re a bit sensitive to anything that threatens that right now.

            He settled for putting his hand on top of Harry’s elbow and giving Estillo a stern look, rather than explaining. If she knew what they were like, then it was her fault for surprising them.

            “We have seen cases like this before,” Estillo said quietly. “Some of those we treat are Seers, and their perceptions of time can drive them mad, or change their memories, or make time inside their heads function so strangely that Mind-Healers have to be specially trained to deal with it. I’ve worked with some of them myself. In fact, it was thinking that the woman who did this to you might be a Seer that gave me the idea for breaking through the barrier of time inside Auror Potter’s head.”

            Harry nodded behind Draco, not incidentally bringing his head low enough that he could kiss the back of his neck again. “Good,” he said. “So, what were you going to explain?”

            “Minds, under great stress,” Estillo said, voice going slightly distant as if she were reading from a textbook, “can change the body. And magical minds can change magical bodies more than Muggle ones manage. Sometimes, that leads to the growth of wings and other body parts that are unexpected. That is the source of many stories about those with the blood of magical creatures when the blood is not actually documented.”

            “But I don’t think that my mother and I saw wings,” Draco said forcefully, determined to get that point across. “I think we saw something like wings. It wasn’t very clear, even given that the woman she transformed into was one that I couldn’t remember.”

            Estillo nodded. “There are other changes that can be worked. Some wizards have made themselves into different people, under fear that they would be found and destroyed or hurt otherwise. And with Seers, who can come to see and fear the future…” She opened one hand as though letting grains of sand sift through her fingers. “Well. Fear of what one might become can sometimes drive one into becoming that thing.”

            “Yes,” Harry whispered behind Draco. “It can.”

            Draco wanted to turn around and ask him what he meant, but Estillo was there, and Harry had a sound in his voice at the moment that made Draco think he might not welcome the question. So he focused on Estillo. “You think that she turned herself into Nancy because she saw that she would turn into Nancy?”

            Estillo gave him a hard smile that made Draco remember she wasn’t always gentle and understanding and kind; she had trained as a Mind-Healer, after all, and would have seen some hard things in the minds she investigated. “What were you doing to her when she changed, Auror Malfoy?”

            Draco flushed, and only Harry’s squeezing his waist kept him from retaliating. As it was, he managed to say, with immense dignity, “I wasn’t the one who was doing it to her.”

            Estillo inclined her head in a way that told him she would accept that rebuke for now, but said, “Still. She may have feared revealing a secret to you, or feared the ways you would hurt her. Or both. But I think that is when she changed—a change that she had already foreseen, a change that she undergone in the future. And that future self came back to walk, and meddle, and change things. Perhaps to prevent herself from coming to be.”

            The pieces settled into Draco’s mind, and made sense. From the soft sigh Harry uttered behind him, he thought that was happening to him, too.

            “So, now,” Estillo said, and bowed. “I understand that you want to decide how to capture and punish her. Please let us know how we can help.” And she turned and left the office as quietly as she must have entered it.

            That left Draco to blink, and Harry to lean his head against Draco’s and murmur, “Yes. Capture a woman who can see the future and has removed herself from our minds and no longer exists in one form, and can probably make us forget each other any time she likes. Let’s think about that.”

*

            SP777: Don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect you to believe it was a Veela. ;) That was just a convenient lie that Draco used to fool his mother.

            And thank you! I’m glad you like this story.

            Kind of a reunion, kind of an investigation.

            unneeded: Now that they’re together again, there’s the possibility that Harry can help him with his parents as well as with Nancy.
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