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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 Two—Confusion in the Air

            Draco tapped his wand against the newly-appeared note and murmured a spell that would probably get him sacked from the Aurors in most Corps while Harry comforted Jourdemayne. Of course, Draco did watch that from the corner of his eye, too, so as to ensure that there was not too much comforting happening.

            But no, so far Harry only had a hand on Jourdemayne’s shoulder and his head close to hers while he whispered soothing words, his other hand gesturing in the air. Draco knew exactly what his eyes looked like when they burned with intensity, and this wasn’t it.

            Not that I’ve had much chance to see them burn with intensity myself, when he got back from his holiday three days ago.

            Draco bit his lip and concentrated on the parchment again. Perfectly ordinary parchment, of the kind that many wizarding households would have around and which could be bought by the ream in any shop in Diagon Alley. He held it up to the light while he waited for his spell to take effect, and then shook his head. No clues in the weave of the paper, or a secret watermark crouched in one corner.

            The spell took effect then, and the parchment turned blue for a moment, the color spreading out to the edges of the sheet and making it look as if it were made of considerably more expensive material than it actually was. Draco turned his back slightly on Harry and Jourdemayne, out of necessity. He didn’t think someone who thought other people could believe she was related to Hilda Moonborn was any threat, but Harry might see the spell, and Draco would prefer not to get into a row about it right now.

            The blue color trembled, and then deepened to a sapphire shade. Draco held his breath, waiting for it to darken all the way to black.

            It didn’t. It stayed that deep blue color for a long, stubborn moment, and then vanished. One of the advantages of charms such as this was that they left no physical trace behind, and unless someone was ready to use Priori Incantatem on the caster’s wand or actually saw it, it was hard to tell.

            Draco smiled. Interesting. No one made it appear with a Dark spell, then, but it has been around Dark magic. I wonder what?

            He cast a few more indicator spells, but none of the others had any effect. So. Subtle Dark magic, and not a kind that had been used to make the paper actually appear of thin air, or write the words, or to make this kind of message appear and nothing else.

            Yes. Interesting.

            He turned around when Harry softly called his name, to find that Jourdemayne was nodding in front of her fire. Harry had convinced her to take a Calming Draught, as Draco saw after a glance at her. He raised an eyebrow at Harry and indicated the doorway out of the room with a little tilt of his head.

            “What do you think?” Harry asked quietly when they stood in the corridor. “Jourdemayne doesn’t have any involvement with it herself, I don’t think. She was too afraid when she was speaking to me—kept jerking her head around as if another one of them might appear at any moment.”

            Draco shook his head. “No. I don’t think she does. But the note has been around Dark magic, interestingly enough.” He tapped his fingers against the edge of the parchment, and watched the way it bent. There was nothing out of the ordinary in that, either. The sheer mundaneness of it made the mystery far more intriguing to Draco than it would have been without. “One of the spells I used showed that.”

            If Harry had been the cat that he sometimes resembled, Draco knew, he would have had his ears pinned back. “In a victim’s house?” he hissed. “Draco, they might sack you for that.”

            “And you think that we aren’t expected to use Dark magic in the pursuit of our duty?” Draco stepped closer to Harry and lowered his voice, though, just in case that Calming Draught hadn’t sent Jourdemayne straight to sleep. “You haven’t used it yourself?”

            “Not in a victim’s house,” Harry muttered, but he passed his hand over his brow, touching his scar the way he did when something wearied him. “Anyway. Sorry. It’s not important. Could you tell how long ago the note had been around or touched by someone with Dark magic?”

            Draco shook his head reluctantly. There were times he would have liked to claim expertise that he didn’t possess—any chance to make Harry’s eyes light up and lock on him was a good chance—but Harry would only find out the truth later, and Draco would feel horribly embarrassed about the very idea of deceiving him. “That particular charm has no way of letting me know something like that.”

            Harry grunted and fiddled with his battered gold watch on its chain for a moment. A present from the Weasleys, Draco had surmised. Harry kept an awful lot of rubbish around or on him because of its connection to his friends. “All right. Any idea where we go from here? I don’t have any. I thought Jourdemayne could tell us more than it turned out she could.”

            Draco curled his lip a little. “I had no idea of getting much help from her,” he said, and Harry shot him a sideways glance. “But yes, I think I know where to go. There’s a morning star reference that she missed.”

            Harry smiled. “I’m not surprised. Where is it?”

*

            Harry locked his legs. They were at the entrance to Knockturn Alley, and his skin crawled as a thick odor came blowing of the alley’s mouth, curling around his face and polluting his lungs, thick as smoke. “Draco. You can’t be serious. I don’t know if Okazes could overlook going in there even for Socrates Aurors.”

            “Since when did you worry about breaking the rules?” Draco shone against the dirty wall of the alley that he half-leaned on (after having cast charms to protect his cloak and robes, of course). “Seeing this morning star for yourself in its natural context will make it real for you.”

            “I learn perfectly well from words,” Harry said, and heard the plaintive note in his own voice with surprise. “You could just describe whatever you were going to show me, and I think I would know what you were talking about.”

            Draco brought his head slowly around until his eyes locked on Harry, and Harry shivered from the impact of his gaze. He hadn’t meant to sound quite so whiny, and especially not as whiny as the way that Draco examined him made him sound to his own ears.

            “I want to show this to you,” Draco said, voice low and eyes as strong as they had been all along. Harry didn’t think he’d shifted a muscle in his body since leaning back, either. For Draco, that really was the equivalent of pacing a room while throwing his arms in the air. “I want you to share this with me, and know that I’m revealing something I would otherwise have kept a secret. I want that. Why are you worrying so much about rules when everyone around you knows that you don’t?”

            Harry winced. The answer to that question would sound stupid said aloud, but then again, he didn’t have another one. “Because I don’t want you to get in trouble,” he mumbled. “Ever since—I did a lot of thinking on my holiday, okay? A lot of thinking that didn’t wind up in the letters to you, even. I want you to have a good career as well as a good partnership with me. And you can’t if you’re constantly in trouble because I am. So I’m trying not to be as much of a fuck-up.”

            Draco stared at him. The stones in the alley wall seemed to stare at him. The world around him seemed to hold its breath. Harry did, too, in solidarity and because he was waiting for everyone to tell him how stupid he was.

            Then Draco said, in a voice of strange gentleness, “Thank you, Harry. But my career is in my charge, not yours. If I was concerned about that, I wouldn’t have brought you here. Or I would ask you to stop, or I would find a different partner. And none of those things is happening at the moment, or didn’t you notice?”

            A smile worked its way across Harry’s face, entirely unbidden. “Wanker,” he muttered. “I ought to know that you couldn’t say something romantic without also saying something that would deprive the entire thing of any romantic feeling it had.”

            “Let me say something romantic, then.” Draco still didn’t move closer, but his heated voice seemed to blow all around Harry’s ears. “Do you know how jealous I was watching you with Jourdemayne earlier?”

            Harry gritted his teeth. This was the kind of thing that he might want to hear, but not in the middle of Knockturn Alley. Or at the entrance to it, or whatever. He shook his head.

            “You don’t know,” Draco said, watching him, his head half-lowered, and his hand extended. “But I was, Harry. You have no idea how much. The way you put your head close to hers? That’s the kind of thing I want to do. The way you touched her, your hand on your shoulder as if you were doing more than comforting her? That’s the sort of thing I want to do.”

            Harry shuddered, feeling as though someone had reached out and brushed fingertips all over his skin, especially up and down the back of his neck and around the corners of his jaw. “You can,” he said. “Just not in public.” He couldn’t help looking over his shoulder, wondering when someone would come around the corner, see them there, and react. Sure, they weren’t in Auror robes, and they wore hooded cloaks, but he thought criminals hardened enough might be able to see what they were from their stance.

            “I wondered when you would begin to put those kinds of restrictions on me,” Draco said, and his eyes and tone both had the brittle fragility of ice. “Yes, I wondered.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Look, I don’t mind if you don’t that other people will know about us,” he said. “But—I thought that you probably wouldn’t want to reveal that in front of people in Knockturn Alley, or use our real names here.”

            Draco nodded at him. “That is thoughtful of you,” he said. “It is a real kindness, and it is a real problem.”

            Harry sighed when he saw the way that Draco still stared at him. “And not a solution for you,” he said. “Why not?”

            “Think about it,” Draco said. “But privately. As you say, we shouldn’t be standing here, out in the open where anyone can see us, and with real names.”

            He walked towards Knockturn Alley as if he did it every day. For a moment, that prompted Harry to wonder about what he did with his time off, and then he rolled his eyes at himself this time and followed. Draco wouldn’t do anything that could endanger his career as an Auror, and spending time in Knockturn Alley that he couldn’t connect to an investigation would.

            But so does spending time with me.

            Harry bit his lip and wondered if he could trust Draco to be so careful with his career after all.

            The usual scuttling people passed them, and the usual shadows, and the usual feeling of grime clung to Harry’s skin. He always wanted to take a shower if he came here—and he had, more than once, when chasing a suspect and when he had wanted to find something to resurrect Lionel.

            After the Alexander case, at least, every trace of that desire was gone. Harry focused his eyes ahead and smiled grimly, wondering if he should be happy that it had taught him something worthwhile. Everything else was the kind of thing that would increase his responsibility and his vulnerability.

            Only if you let it trouble you.

            Draco walked ahead of him, with the easy stride of someone who knew the place and wouldn’t be disturbed. A few times, he paused in front of a shop and appeared to examine the sign or the wares shining in the dim front windows, before he sniffed and proceeded. Harry kept tensing, until he realized that Draco was creating a cover story for what they had really come to the alley to find. He sighed and shook his head at himself. There were things he was good at as an Auror, including keeping his latest partner alive, but subterfuge and stealth would never be second nature to him. Everything he knew about that was hard and dearly learned.

            Draco finally slipped into a doorway that Harry barely saw, the roof of its shop projected so much above it. Harry followed, and found that Draco was knocking on a heavy door made of darkened oak, hardened to an iron-like consistency. Harry reached out curiously with a spell and found wards that made his teeth ring and several gargoyle-like heads on the door come to life and turn towards him with extended tongues and gleaming eyes.

            “Don’t do that,” Draco said quietly, without looking at him. “Show some respect. Belinda will expect you to.”

            Harry nodded and didn’t ask who Belinda was, because he thought he would find out soon. Then the door rang with a shake of a delicate bell above it and opened, and a voice straight out of the best fairy tales cackled, “Who’s come to the Sign of the Morning Star, then?”

            Harry started and looked at Draco. Draco tipped his head to the side, subtly indicating a wavy starburst in the center of the door, as he replied.



            “Two petitioners who seek your advice, Belinda,” Draco said, and half-bowed his chin, so that his hair fell around his face. It looked more attractive than Harry would have thought it would if someone had asked his opinion, and he bit his lip and blinked, reminding himself that they weren’t discussing things like that in public. “Will you grant us a moment of your time?”

            The witch stood studying them, or so Harry assumed; he couldn’t actually see into the dim shop. He heard the sound of fingernails, or maybe claws, tapping, and then Belinda sighed and leaned forwards so that Harry could see a glimpse of dark red hair.

            “Advice?” Her voice had changed, without so much of the cackle. “That’s all you have for me, Malfoy?”

            “This time,” Draco said, calmly looking up and into the darkness, “yes.”

            Another sigh, and then Belinda stepped back and said, “You’d better come in, then.”

            Draco walked in without hesitation. Harry just made sure his wand was at his side—Belinda apparently knew Draco, and under his real name, too, but she didn’t have any reason to trust him—and followed.

            The shop revealed had walls and counters, crates and boxes, curving out like vines in a jungle, ready to trip anyone up that they could. Draco moved like someone who knew his way around, and Harry followed him. The floor seemed to tremble and shift underfoot, too, for all the world like a swamp. Harry wrinkled his nose, and the smell of rot and decay came to him strongly enough to make him choke.

            But Belinda was watching him, and she might have a hooked nose and dark eyes and be ugly enough to make Harry stare, but the last person Harry had known like that was Snape, and he had turned out to be more intelligent and important than Harry had ever suspected. So he bit back his immediate response, nodded to her, and let Draco do the talking.

            “I want to know what you’re doing here,” Belinda said to Draco, moving behind a counter and touching something that made the smell stronger. Harry tried to imagine what it could be, and came up with a bloody corpse. He grimaced and didn’t cast a charm to take the smell away only because, as Draco said, it probably wouldn’t be “respectful.” “If you don’t have something to sell me—”

            More things I didn’t know about Draco, Harry thought, and worked not to stare.

            “This is better,” Draco said. “Did you know that a certain customer of yours is receiving notes warning her against the Morning Star? Notes that appear from nowhere, in her own handwriting, but without her having any memory of writing them? And notes that have been around Dark magic?”

            Belinda went still, eyes scanning Draco’s face as if she assumed that he must be lying because most people who came to her shop did so. Then she shook her head. “No customer of mine would be careless enough to leave the signs lying around,” she murmured.

            Draco sighed. “You know that I don’t like to use other people’s names in this place, Belinda, but I feel I must. The name Jourdemayne, for example.”

            Belinda’s fingers twanged apart, and then she expelled a sigh and said, “She’s never bought anything from me directly. I would have remembered someone like her.”

            Harry finally accepted that this was the questioning of a witness, in a way, and silently set himself to remember what was happening here. Draco had to conduct the interrogation, and he had a better memory than Harry did, but Harry might notice something that Draco couldn’t as long as he was focused on Belinda’s expressions and gestures.

            “Someone like her?” Draco lowered his head and folded his arms on the counter. “With her pretensions to pure blood, you mean?”

            Belinda shook her head. “Those other pretensions of hers is what I meant.”

            Harry had no idea what she was on about, but Draco either did or was skilled at pretending that he did. He leaned back and gave Belinda the faintest hint of a smile. “Ah,” he said. “I hope that I can count on you not to admit just anyone to the Order.”

            Belinda snorted. “There are many who have the ambition, but few who have the sense or the skill or the devotion, Malfoy. No, candidates are rare enough that you can be sure I won’t prostitute my knowledge.”

            “Even for the sake of a few quick Galleons?” Draco was smiling at Belinda, but she was blind if she didn’t see the edges to the smile, Harry thought. “I’m surprised, Belinda. I thought the ruling force in your life was money, not devotion.”

            Belinda straightened and threw her head back, eyes fastened on Draco. Harry was glad, again, that he had half-drawn his wand, although he didn’t think he would need it. Surely Belinda wasn’t foolish enough to attack someone like Draco, who she must know had training in the Dark Arts as well as ordinary battle skills.

            Then again, this is Knockturn Alley. She probably has skill in the Dark Arts, too.

            “Jourdemayne did not come to me,” Belinda articulated, stressing her words hard enough that Harry wouldn’t have been surprised to hear them hitting his bones like pebbles. “She came nowhere near this shop. If she bought something of mine, she bought it from someone who sold it once it was in their possession. That is all I know.”

            Draco stood regarding Belinda for a few minutes more, in absolute stillness and perfect silence. Then he swept a bow that made her start despite herself, probably because it was sudden. Hell, Harry nearly cast a curse before he realized that it was just Draco’s melodramatic nature asserting itself.

            “Thank you, Belinda,” he said. “I believe you. And I am glad that you have not betrayed the Order. I don’t think I could…stand it if one of the few sources of stability in my life decayed like that.”

            Belinda narrowed her eyes, but didn’t respond. Harry wondered if she was standing on her dignity as best she knew how, or simply didn’t know what to say.

            He would have bet on the latter, if someone had asked him, not that anyone would. Draco in this mood was extremely hard to understand. Harry had certainly never seen him in it since they became partners.

            “Come, then, Horace,” Draco added over his shoulder, to Harry, and turned to leave the shop. Harry watched Belinda’s eyes flickering over his disguised form, her lips moving as she committed the name to memory, and bit his lip again to avoid bursting out in laughter. Trust Draco to give away “information” that’s utterly useless and won’t aid the untrustworthy person it’s spoken in front of in tracking it down.

            And then Harry stopped wanting to laugh, although Draco was sensitive enough to his moods that he glanced at Harry curiously as he walked past him.

            That’s a common Auror tactic, Harry, one that you’ve used yourself, not one that requires a great display of cleverness. Why would you react to it as if it did? Draco is attractive and smart, certainly, but not so much more than anyone else.

            That was when Harry began to suspect that his feelings for Draco were deep enough that they might interfere with the cases. Which he didn’t want. There was the fact that keeping Draco safe was his bloody job, for one thing, and for another, he still didn’t know that they agreed about the Socrates Aurors being twisted.

            To try and distract himself, and because he should know, he asked, the minute they were out of the alley, “And what is the Sign of the Morning Star? Or the Order? I heard you mention both.”

            Draco held up one hand, and then reached out and took Harry’s arm, Apparating them both to a Diagon Alley Apparition point. Harry accepted it without comment, and waited to speak again until Draco had escorted them both into the Leaky Cauldron and ordered several scones and cups of tea hot enough to boil Harry’s brains if he swallowed it without sipping.

            Then he looked at Draco, and maintained the look through the swirling steam of the tea, until Draco sighed and lowered his cup.

            “It’s a group that studies the more powerful spells, including the ones that the Ministry has classified as Dark,” Draco said quietly. Harry noticed that he was careful not to mention the Morning Star by name even here. “And they make sure that everyone has copies of the most important books. They have to be copied by hand, usually; you can’t print them or create copies with spells, it doesn’t work. That’s their major work. Sometimes they sell artifacts or the less rare books. That’s Belinda’s business.”

            Harry nodded slowly, and concealed dismay at his thought that Draco was involved with this group. It was really none of his business, as long as Draco didn’t let anyone else from the Ministry know. “And you thought that perhaps these people were responsible for the notes Jourdemayne is receiving?”

            Draco snorted with what Harry thought was bitterness. “It would fit with the general aura of mystery that Belinda and others like to throw around the proceedings.”

            “But you believe Belinda when she says she’s not,” Harry finished.

            “She treats it like a religious calling, even more than a business,” Draco said. “She wouldn’t betray the principles for anything. Now, there’s plenty of other things she would do for enough money, and someone easily could have bought something from her and given it or sold it to Jourdemayne—something she doesn’t remember, something that’s driving her mad. But Belinda despises people like Jourdemayne who, she was hinting to me, only play at the Dark Arts, or attempt to cast the spells without understanding them, without approaching the whole thing as a structured discipline with steps and initiations and all that rot. That’s what she meant by her pretensions.”

            Harry found his shoulders dropping a burden he had barely realized he carried. “So there might not be a twisted here after all, just an artifact.”

            Draco looked up swiftly. “Why do you sound so happy about that?”

            Harry stared into Draco’s eyes. Were they going to have this conversation now? It seemed they were. “Because I don’t want to kill any other twisted if we can avoid it,” he said simply. “Knowing what we know about them.”

            Draco’s nostrils flared, and his face turned red enough that Harry would have predicted a stroke if he hadn’t known the cause. Then he stood and slapped both his money and his cup down. “We’ll have a talk about this back in our office,” he said.

            Harry stood up, not looking away from Draco at all, never flinching. Yes, they would talk about this. And Harry would defend his side.

            If he and Draco and Macgeorge—and maybe the other Aurors in their Corps, who knew?—were or had the potential to become twisted, then it was wrong of them to hunt down other people who were while remaining under the protection of the Ministry itself. Harry had changed a lot over the years, but he wouldn’t do something so unjust.

            Even if he suspected he and Draco were about to have their first real row over it.

*

            SP777: The question about Harry won’t be answered for a while.

            Draco isn’t ashamed of people knowing, as you see in this chapter, but in this case, he does want to be sure that he and Harry are on the same page with everything.

            unneeded: It could be seen as bad if Auror partners started dating, just because it would affect their perceptions of each other when they were working.
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