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Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
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Chapter Fourteen—A Subtle Perfume
            Harry leaned across his desk. He could feel the tension radiating down his shoulders, spreading through his arms and hands. Ever since the debacle with Malfoy, being on desk duty instead of in the field had become a double punishment.
            Not that Kingsley could have known that, and Harry reminded himself again not to take his frustration out on the harmless—if irritating—Auror in front of him. “Tell me what you saw.”
            Auror Ivan Bailey obediently closed his eyes. He was a heavyset man who, Harry thought from the expert eye he had developed for wand calluses, probably used more offensive than defensive magic. He needed to spend more time practicing Defense if he wanted to duel someone and survive, Harry thought clinically. Of course, who was Harry to talk, with the way that he had messed up his life?
            He wasn’t qualified as an adviser except about things that didn’t remotely relate to Malfoy or himself. Luckily, this case was one of those.
            “I saw him draw the wand with his right hand,” Bailey muttered. “That was the first strange thing, because I knew they’d reported the Dark Snake as being left-handed.”
            “Good!” Harry said encouragingly, although he didn’t really think it was strange at all. Sometimes witnesses made mistakes in the heat of the moment, especially when they were trying to prevent someone from taking their children. “Then what did he do?”
            “He leaped over to the side and used the Blasting Curse.” By now, Bailey was deep in the effort of remembering, and his lips moved while sweat stood out on his forehead. Harry strangled his impatience. It was just harder for some people to remember than others. He shouldn’t blame someone who was doing the best he could. “He was trying to tumble some boxes off to the side so they would fall and block the door.”
            “And did you hear some crying beyond the door?” Harry prompted. That was what the other Aurors had said, but Bailey hadn’t mentioned it in his report, and Harry was curious to know if his memory matched up with the others’.
            “No,” Bailey said, and blinked at him, apparently halted in his tracks. “Just silence.”
            Harry leaned back a little, sighing. It wasn’t something liked to contemplate, but he had to. “Then the children might already have been moved when you arrived there.” The other Aurors had thought the children were there and snatched by accomplices while the Dark Snake dueled them, but Harry had his doubts about that. This kidnapping ring was intelligent—damnably so—and quick.
            Bailey might be wrong, of course, and the other Aurors right. But none of them had mentioned the detail of the Dark Snake holding his wand in the “wrong” hand, either.
            “Does that mean you think they’re dead, sir?” Bailey leaned forwards.
            Harry looked up, blinking. “What? The children? No, I think the chances are very good they’re still alive.” Although they couldn’t be sure since this group of kidnappers had only left a symbol at the houses of the stolen children, not sent any taunting notes or ransom demands, Harry thought the children were being taken to wizarding parents who hadn’t managed to have any babies of their own. Every single one of the children was under the age of two, and most not talking yet. But every one had shown early signs of accidental magic.
            The symbol was an eagle clutching a snake in its talons. Harry’s research had uncovered a group of pure-bloods in wizarding Britain in the nineteenth century who had used that symbol and held open meetings where they debated taking young children from Muggleborns or Muggles, as long as they were magical, and forcibly adopting them into pure-blood families. They had never put their plans in practice.
            It sounded as though someone meant to, though.
            “All right.” Bailey gave a stolid, comfortable nod. “As long as you think we have a chance of rescuing them. It would be horrible if we didn’t.”
            “It would be,” said Harry, and smiled back at him. Once again, his silent judgment of someone had caught up with him. Bailey and he had the same thoughts. There was no reason to think he was particularly slow. “The Dark Snake got away?”
            “Yes,” said Bailey simply. “Although he was wounded, and I did bring in a bit of the blood…” He raised one hand when Harry opened his mouth. “I know that there’s objection to blood magic among the other Aurors, sir, but I thought that using his blood to track him down can’t be horrible. Right?”
            Harry hesitated. Then he said, “Well, maybe, but I’m not on field duty right now, and I’m not sure that anyone else who is would have the same thoughts about blood magic.”
            Bailey looked so disappointed that Harry added hastily, “But maybe if I took the blood and performed the tracking spell myself, that would be enough? I could give the results to you, and you could follow them.”
            Bailey smiled at him. “That’s right. And you can send me a Patronus any time of the day or night, sir. I really want to find those kids.” He dug in his pockets for a moment, which clinked and rattled in a way that told Harry what his hobby was even before Bailey gave him a more embarrassed smile and murmured something about being an enthusiastic Potions amateur.
            At last, he came up with a vial of blood that he handed to Harry. Harry held it up, himself, and considered it carefully. The blood looked normal, but Harry continued watching it, and grunted in satisfaction as he made out the small dark red flakes floating near the surface.
            “Sir?”
            Harry waved his hand at Bailey, and he obediently shut up. At last, Harry set the vial down and smiled at Bailey. “This is going to be useful,” he said, feeling a kind of dampened excitement stir in him.
            Bailey obviously didn’t see the need to come up with a new word when the one he had already used would do just as well. “Sir?”
            Harry rubbed his hands together. “I thought the first time someone mentioned the Dark Snake commanding snakes that something was strange,” he said. “I would have heard if there was another Parselmouth around.” He was sure of that. People were always contacting him to brag about having scars that were shaped kind of like lightning bolts, or having some vague blood connection to the Potters. Rumors of a Parselmouth would have spread fast. “He isn’t a Parselmouth by birth. He’s taken the Snake Tongue potion.”
            Bailey gaped at him. “But isn’t that—”
            “Poisonous,” Harry finished with a grim smile. “In the extreme. It’ll kill him in the end, but right now, it gives him the ability to make snakes do what he wants.” With telepathy and not Parseltongue, admittedly, but he doubted that someone watching an unknown person command snakes silently would notice much difference. “This will make it easier to track him down, if I can focus on the substances in his blood. Good job, Auror Bailey.”
            “Thank you, sir.” Bailey sighed. “How long do you think it will take you to use the tracking spell?”
            Harry considered the vial of blood again. There was a good amount there, but he had only read about the spell and never performed it himself, which would probably mean more than one attempt. “I think I can have the results by midnight tonight.”
            “I won’t go to bed.”
            “No, do.” Harry grinned at Bailey again, astonished to find how much of a purpose having a spell to perform that could help in a case gave him. Yes, this would have to be the new anchor of his life, besides Teddy and his friends’ children. “You’ll want to be at least a little rested to go after this bastard.”
            Bailey’s sharp answering grin transformed his face, into something much worse than a mere Auror’s face. Harry gave him a vague wave as he left the office, and then focused on the vial in his hand again.
            He was going to give that stupidly named but nasty Dark Snake a nasty surprise of his own.
*
            That, at least, was what he thought, until he arrived home and found Malfoy’s owl sitting there and waiting for him.
            Harry spent a long, silent moment staring at the owl. Then he turned around and put the vial of blood gently down on the table next to the one where the owl perched.
            The bird watched him. Harry walked away from it, used the loo, and came back. He prepared a small meal of biscuits and cheese and ate that without offering anything to the owl. He prepared himself for the spell by reading some of the book that he knew discussed it. Then he came out and peered around the corner.
            Malfoy’s bird hadn’t moved. It had been looking at the far wall, but it turned its head now and locked patient eyes on him.
            Harry hissed under his breath. After everything that had happened between them, what could he and Malfoy have left to say to each other? It made no sense, and the only thing he could think of was for Malfoy to do something that also didn’t make sense—like threaten Harry with the exposure of Ethan. That Malfoy couldn’t do that without exposing himself was something that might not weigh with him, if he was crazy enough.
            That thought was enough to rouse Harry’s anger, though. After he had left the path open for Malfoy to leave and even his connection with the warlocks to escape investigation, Malfoy was determined to act like an idiot?
            He held out his hand roughly for the letter. The owl took flight and landed heavily on his arm a second later. Harry ignored it, except to toss it a bit of the cheese off his plate, as he opened the letter one-handed.
            Potter,
            The reason I started this in the first place was to get answers—answers as to how I might raise Scorpius better and if there was anyone in the world who would help me. You might say I got some I didn’t like. But I never learned why you wrote to me in the first place. What was so attractive about a begging letter that you decided you had to answer it? Why pretend to be Ethan Starfall instead of use the power of your name to recommend your advice? After all, at the beginning you didn’t know who I was, either.
            He hadn’t bothered signing it. Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t need to.
            The owl pecked his hand.
            Harry hissed and pulled his bleeding palm back. “After all the sitting here you’ve done, this is when you decide to get impatient?” he demanded.
            The owl stared back, a stare that seemed to go all the way through Harry. Harry sighed. Yes, it was when it started to get impatient for a reply, he decided. It could only put up with being ignored until Harry actually read the letter.
            Reluctantly, Harry reached for ink and parchment, and tried to deposit the owl back on the table. It refused to go until Harry wrote the first few letters of his reply, and then took a long, deliberate step back, flashing the talons on its feet as if to let Harry know that it possessed plenty of weapons to get a response from him if he decided to ignore it. Harry scowled and turned his back on it as he wrote.
            Petty revenge, but wasn’t what all of this was about?
            Malfoy,
            All you need to know is that Ethan is who I wanted to be—the normal, happy wizard without any experience of having gone through a war and none in the realms of being extraordinary, who could answer the way I would have if I was normal. Someone who could help a stranger without having to worry about his real name. I already apologized as much as I’m going to for what resulted from that. The rest is up to you. Worry about being a good father to Scorpius, and not about me.
            Harry didn’t sign the letter—fair was fair—and slipped it at once into an envelope. The owl was already speeding over to take it, but strangely, the bird didn’t fly out the window right away. Instead, it hovered in front of Harry and hooted softly.
            Harry stared at it. He had no idea what was going on.
            The owl abruptly spun in midair and flew out the window. Harry leaned on the nearer table and watched it out of sight.
            Then he turned back to setting up the tracking spell that, after all, was his job and his reason for existence. Ethan belonged to the past, just like Malfoy and Scorpius and Harry’s plans of having a family. This was his present, his real life.
*
            Draco raised a skeptical eyebrow at the letter Potter had sent him. Then he laid it down in front of him and looked at it again. One thing the debacle so far had taught him, at least, was to look closely at these letters, to read them twice.

            Ethan is who I wanted to be.
            Draco didn’t believe that, actually. Potter couldn’t have helped being a part of the war, with the Dark Lord after him, but he certainly could have helped being an Auror. He could have quit that job and become the good father he wanted to push Draco into being. Instead, he had stayed an Auror and divorced the woman he’d supposedly had a perfect relationship with. His choices made no sense.
            “Is that the mysterious correspondent Blaise told me about?”
            Draco looked up, then took the cup of tea Theodore was bringing him with a murmured thanks. “Yes,” he said. “He and I needed to talk about some of the things he said and some of the things I did. He wrote back to me, and I have to admit his response is strange.”
            “Things with mysterious correspondents usually are,” said Theodore comfortably, and poured his tea into his own cup.
            Draco settled back, and found himself smiling. “You should know, with as many letters as you get from different people all over the world.”
            “But I do meet most of those people,” Theodore said, dropping into the chair across from him. He was still tall and lanky, but he smiled a lot more than he’d done in Hogwarts, and his hair was wild and shaggy in a way that Draco knew would never look good if he tried it on himself. “Eventually. Whenever I’m in their countries on a mission.” He peered over his teacup at Draco. “I know that you didn’t resist visiting me for so long because of the people I was talking to, though. Blaise told me that much.”
            “Blaise has a very big mouth,” Draco muttered, burying himself in his tea.
            “What was the real reason you didn’t come?” Theodore asked quietly.
            “You said Blaise told you.” Damn him, anyway. That was a trick Theodore had had at Hogwarts, inconveniently leaning across at breakfast when Draco was struggling with sleepiness and asking why he’d skipped a study session the night before, or why he hadn’t helped with Greg’s Potions essay the way he’d promised to, or why he wasn’t going out with Pansy yet. At least this time Draco thought he had a way to escape being honest.
            Theodore’s return look was deeply unimpressed. “He told me that it wasn’t because I move around so much, or because I have strange friends. He didn’t tell me what the reason actually was.”
            Draco grimaced. He couldn’t travel back in time and change what he had said, and he couldn’t pretend that his opinions had completely changed, either. So he would have to stand by them.
            He stood up and strolled slowly across the floor of Theodore’s flat—well, a flat that belonged to one of his lovers, but the lover was dead and had left it to Theodore—and stared at the roofs of Vienna. They were in the wizarding part of the city, but that didn’t distract Draco. From this distance, at least, it looked too much like Diagon Alley, and London, and specifically the part of London where he had met Potter with the warlocks.
            “Draco?”
            Right. It’s not going away. Draco swallowed and turned around. “I didn’t like the way you flitted from lover to lover,” he said.
            Theodore stared at him and blinked once. “Don’t let me hear you championing relationships based on pure affection now. It’s a bit late, after the way you married Astoria.”
            Draco waved a hand irritably. “That was—business. I didn’t love her.”
            “Exactly. Can I ask what the problem is, that I do love mine?”
            Draco had known it would come down to this, and that Theodore would be angry, and still he hadn’t braced himself properly. The anger that roared through him in response was the dangerous kind, the torrent that had overwhelmed him the last time he saw Potter.
            “It’s—I never had another lover while I was married to her,” he said, and stared some more at Vienna. Still there was nothing there to hold his attention and distract him from what he would have to say. “That’s not because I loved her. It’s because I know the rules, and the rules say that you have to be discreet.”
            “Why do I have to obey those rules? That’s only for people who are married, and I’ve never been.”
            And what are you going to do when your father starts asking about the Nott name? But Draco knew that would probably never happen. There had been some kind of explosion between Theodore and his father years ago, just after the war, and shortly after Theodore had entered a Potions apprenticeship in Romania that removed her from his father’s sphere of influence entirely.
            “There are other standards you maintain, so you can look at people at a party without blushing.”
            Theodore laughed, but there was a bitter edge to it. “That’s for people in one country, Draco. Most of my lovers would have to do six hours of traveling to be in the same room together.” Draco heard the chair creak as he shifted. “And anyway, they knew about each other. Some of them have permanent partners of their own while I’m with them. The last time I saw Marissa, she invited me—”
            “It doesn’t matter.” Draco recognized the tone of his voice as panic only when he was speaking aloud. “Listen. Listen, Theodore.”
            “I’m listening. So far, I haven’t heard anything yet that sounds like you have a reason. Except obsession with tradition and making sure that everyone knows you’re a good little emotionless automaton.”
            “I’m not emotionless, either,” Draco muttered, and despite what he’d endured at Theodore’s hand so far, he had to smile. “If you’d seen me in the last little while, you’d know that’s the last thing I am.” And not for lack of trying, either. It would have been easier if he’d cared about nothing but tradition, the way Blaise had also accused him. Then he would have raised Scorpius without a care, not because he was a better father, but simply because Scorpius’s protests wouldn’t have mattered to him.
            Is that the way my father did it?
            No, Draco was certain a moment later. There was always love there. But Draco himself hadn’t managed to strike that balance yet.
            “You’re trying to be,” said Theodore, and from the sound of it, he had folded his arms and maybe even kicked a chair. “And you think everyone else should be, too. That and the rules. You and your bloody rules. You never cared that much about them in Hogwarts.”
            “That was something I learned after Hogwarts,” Draco admitted, turning around again. “I thought that I didn’t know what to do anymore, because I didn’t trust my own judgment, and all those decisions I made went wrong.”
            Theodore hesitated, then gave him a rueful, dazzling smile. “That was because everything was fucked-up then, Draco. Everything. Your decisions were part of the same process.”
            “I know,” Draco said softly. “But part of it is just that I was jealous you were so happy and having so much fun, I reckon. It’s—different now. I’m trying to figure out how to have fun and not just hover over Scorpius all the time.”
            Theodore grinned slyly, and Draco knew he was forgiven. “I could introduce you to someone.”
            “I think it’s too soon for that.”
            Theodore snorted. “How long have you and Astoria been divorced? It’s not like you’re hopping from bed to bed—”
            “No, I mean that I need to focus on myself for a while, and being a good father,” Draco interrupted, and if he had stolen an opportune phrase from Potter, then he really didn’t care. “I don’t want to start another relationship until I know that I won’t focus obsessively on that person like I did on Scorpius.”
            One of Theodore’s eyebrows rose slowly to join the other. “He must be good.”
            “Who?” Draco turned to face Theodore fully. “I really don’t have a lover.”
            “I know, but this mysterious correspondent of yours.” Theodore let his chair legs fall to rest on the floor, and considered Draco intently. “If he can make you think about things, he’s good.”
            Draco scowled mildly. “It’s more than that. Some of this realization I did come to on my own, though.”
            “Was he the one who suggested you visit me?”
            “No.” Draco gave Theodore a superior look. “Blaise was, and then I decided to.”
            “Hmmm.”
            Draco rolled his eyes, glad now that Potter hadn’t signed the letter, even though he knew Theodore wouldn’t look at his post. “I did make the decision. I couldn’t have come if someone was forcing me to.”
            “I know.” Theodore’s eyes were shadowed for a moment. “I just wonder how much influence this person has over you, and if it’s always going to be the right kind.”
            “If he influences me at all, it’s in the opposite direction,” Draco muttered, although he had to wonder. He had always been prone to react strongly to Potter—not this way, but strongly. He might do what Potter didn’t want or try to spy on him or take the opposite side of a war from him, but it was strong.
            “Right.” Theodore clearly didn’t believe him, and also was just as clearly relieved to let it drop. “So. Do you want to go out tonight?”
            Draco walked back over and folded up Potter’s letter before he responded. He almost felt as though he should answer it first, but that was absurd. It might not even need an answer.
            And he did need to reclaim his life, and stop worrying about answers he might already have.
            “Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”
*
NadiaMalfoy: Harry really would have no reason to go there.
Jester: Harry’s having a more difficult time of it than Draco at the moment, I think.
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