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The Dust of Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20634 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Seven—The Offer
            “Rob? Are you here?” Harry knocked again, and listened to the sound echo through what seemed like empty corridors.
            He was standing in front of a long, low house that seemed to be built back into a grey-green hill. Harry thought he was somewhere in Ireland, but since he’d made three Apparition hops based on the directions Rob sent him with the next owl, he couldn’t be sure. There didn’t appear to be any Muggles nearby, though. The air around Harry was quiet in a way that it never was when Harry was in Privet Drive.
            But who knows what things are like now?
            Harry shook his head a little. He kept thinking of things he would have to get familiar with after ten years of lost memories; one thing that he had thought about before but which wasn’t near the top of his list was the Muggle world, and the changes in it.
            The door whisked open at last. Rob stood there, in front of what looked like an enormous, empty room with big, polished flagstones on the floor and walls, staring at him.
            “You invited me here,” Harry finally said, when the staring started to irritate him. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
            “Of course. Of course.” Rob stepped back, shaking his head. “Forgive me. I’m not used to seeing you look—like you look.”
            “Sane?” Harry asked, as he stepped into the house. It was all made of stone, and it was all empty—at first. But then Harry started to see shivers and shakes in the air out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned around to fully face them, he could see better. The furniture in the room, and maybe other things too, were all under glamours or Disillusionment Charms.
            “You could call it that. You used to be interested in some Dark Arts things that horrified me,” Rob agreed as he closed the door.
            “Do you think I still am?” Harry gestured around the room. “Why is everything hidden underneath illusions?”
            A startled look flashed across Rob’s face, and he shook his head a little. “I didn’t expect you to notice that,” he muttered. A wave of his wand, and the furniture started to appear. There was a large table, and larger chairs around it. The fireplace seemed to take up most of the left wall. Harry could see two doors besides the one he’d entered through, each leading in a different direction.
            “You didn’t answer my questions.”
            “I think you’re saner than you were,” said Rob, turning to face him and crossing his arms. “If I really doubted that, then I wouldn’t have invited you in or offered to tell you this last secret. But I thought you might still betray me to Malfoy, and the less details you had about my house, the better.”
            Harry stared at him. “You’re afraid of Malfoy?”
            “Of course. He has a reputation as a Potions brewer that makes him out to be—well, not as evil as Kelvin, but only a little less good at potions in general. And he’s obsessed with you. And I know he wants me to die.”
            Harry wandered slowly over to a huge chair made of sleek wood, toying with the cushions that lay there. They were red, and had gold tassels. “I don’t think he wants you to die. But he doesn’t think you’re good for me.”
            “Neither is he.”
            Harry sighed and turned to face Rob. “I really didn’t come here to discuss Malfoy. I came to talk about the secret you said you had to tell me. Are you going to?”
            “I made a promise. Of course I am.”
            They stood there, and finally Harry felt he was the one who had to break the tableau, so he sat down in the chair and stared up at Rob. “All right. When?”
            Rob sighed and took the chair across from him, leaning his chin on his hand as he studied Harry. “Forgive me. It’s simply stunning to see you like this. And it makes me wonder if I should tell you the truth after all. At the very least, it’s going to make it harder for you to heal from the past the way you are now.”
            “Tell me.”
            Rob considered him again. “Are you even thinking about what I just said? Or are you just insisting on being told because you don’t like secrets?”
            “Oh, guess.”
            Rob winced a second later. “All right, I suppose I deserved that.” He waved his wand, and a tray containing two glasses of what looked like sparkling water came in from the other room. He offered the bigger glass to Harry. Harry didn’t need Malfoy’s paranoia to know that it might be a bad idea to drink it. He took it, but balanced the glass on the arm of his chair and went on watching Rob with polite skepticism.
            Rob muttered something about deserving it again, then shook his head and downed half his own “water” at a gulp. “I found out about this only after you turned your back on me,” he said. “Or your old self did. I thought about confronting you—him—with it, but he would never give me a chance. And if I had tried to simply talk about it to the papers, I would have had to reveal our relationship. Then he would probably have managed to spin it as jealousy about him leaving me and ‘falling in love’ with Weasley.”
            “I think he was as in love with Ginny as he could possibly manage.” Harry held up a hand when Rob started to open his mouth. “I’m not saying that you have to like it. Just that I want you to blame him, not Ginny.”
            “I understand what you’re saying,” Rob said, and the bitterness in his voice made Harry wince in spite of himself. “All right. I don’t need encouragement to blame him, though. He created a spell that resembles the Imperius Curse, but it was subtler, and could evade the ways the Ministry had of detecting the Unforgivable Curses.” He looked straight at Harry. “So he set it up in such a way that he was influencing the minds of at least a quarter of the other Aurors. That’s the truth.”
            Harry sat there, his fingers cramped around his glass. Then he drew in his breath and whispered, “What?”
            “I told you what it was.” Rob sighed. “You—he—never enslaved Weasley. He seemed to have some kind of sentiment about that.” He glared at Harry. “But he did it with plenty of other people. He just needed to get the Aurors alone once and cast the spell on them. He called it ‘attuning.’ After that, he needed to speak a series of words or give them some kind of series of gestures, and that made them recite a bunch of things back to him. Things they’d observed and learned since he last saw them. I think that’s how he got a lot of the information that let him make more arrests than any other Auror. Aurors who were actually assigned to the cases would come and tell him about them first.”
            Harry closed his eyes. He felt ill. Surely not even Old Harry would have done something that bad…
            On the other hand, this was the man who had donated blood and skin to Draco Malfoy and created a portrait with a shard of his soul inside that was essentially a Horcrux.
            “That means,” Harry said, staring over Rob’s shoulder at the wall and trying to speak as calmly as he could when he’d just been told that, “I wasn’t blackmailing all of them. Maybe I couldn’t find anything to blackmail some of them about. And the Enthrallment Potion…”
            “It didn’t affect all of them,” said Rob, with a shake of his head. “Or maybe some of them are resistant to it.” He shrugged. “There were Aurors who worked more closely with the Department of Mysteries than most of the others. It’s not impossible that they learned to resist potions like that. Some of them were taught to resist Veritaserum, I know.”
            “Oh.” Harry closed his eyes and sat there for a second. He didn’t remember a reference to a spell like that in any of the letters or books he’d uncovered, but then again, he wouldn’t have known about the Horcrux portrait either if not for his visit to Malfoy’s little museum of horrors.
            Harry finally managed to make his throat work and his voice come out clearly. “How did you know about it?”
            “Because I’m one of the people he explained it to willingly.”
            Harry opened his eyes at once. “Who are the others?”
            “None of them remember, now.”
            Rob was staring at him as if waiting for him to notice something, and Harry did, a second later. “Shit,” he muttered. “So when you said you figured it out later and confronted him about it, you had to do that because—”
            “He’d explained it to me,” said Rob, with a small nod. “And then Obliviated me. As far as I can tell, he Obliviated everyone else who helped him develop the spell, too. I only discovered the traces later because he was a little careless about some of the objects he left behind in the flat we used to share. He probably thought I’d hate him so much I’d just get rid of everything or send it back to him without looking through it.”
            “Why did you decide to look through it?”
            “Because I wanted to know why he’d decided to romance Weasley.” Rob leaned his head back wearily against the chair and closed his eyes. “Why love wasn’t enough for him, why he had to fulfill everyone’s expectations instead. I didn’t really find what I wanted as far as that went, but I did find the mention of that spell.”
            Harry thought of the memories he’d seen and the letters he’d read where Old Harry had begged Malfoy to design some potion that would make him a good person. And his greatest fear seemed to be someone finding out that he wasn’t really as good a person as he’d pretended, unless that person was already Dark themselves.
            Like Kelvin. Or Malfoy, the way Old Harry thought of him.
            Harry had to put aside the question for now of whether Malfoy had actually been Dark. Whether he still was, after he’d cast that spell that allowed him to live through all of Harry’s experiences. He opened his eyes. “So he went around Obliviating people and then blamed himself for it later,” he said. “Once again, he did something Dark that he thought was good, and then he used the Memory Charm telling himself it was for the best, and then he felt bad later.”
            “You remember?”
            Rob’s voice quivered like an arrow stuck in a target. Harry looked at him and shook his head. “No. I’m just extrapolating what I’m pretty sure was his mindset, based on other things I’ve learned about him, and the regrets he had.”
            “Oh.” Rob sank slowly back again and sipped some more at his “water.” “So.” He licked his lips and finished in a rush, “So this is information I’m giving you that I could have kept to myself, and you might never have known it.”
            “Yes?” Harry asked, a little more cautiously now. He could see a gleam in Rob’s eyes that might have matched the one in Malfoy’s eyes in intensity, although by the time Harry had really started paying attention, he thought Malfoy had toned it down a bit.
            “So you need to figure out how you’re going to make up for it.” Rob clutched the glass hard enough that Harry heard it creaking. “And I could help you do that. I’m the one who has the most details, and I can show them to you, and maybe from that and the echoes of your memories we can figure out—”
            Harry shook his head. “When I said the memories are gone, I mean it. I can’t use them to figure out anything, because they’re gone.”
            “You have some means of learning more about yourself.” Rob kept his gaze locked on Harry. “You just said it. You just said that some of his actions made sense to you because you’d learned things about him.”
            “Yes,” Harry said unwillingly. He was wondering if he should have come at all, or simply insisted on Rob telling him the truth by letter. Maybe Rob would never have done it, but Harry couldn’t see that this was worse than all the other crimes he’d committed. “All right. So?”
            “How are you going to make up for this?” Rob made a small motion with one hand, like he was ripping apart a veil between him and Harry. “You were talking about making up for your crimes the last time I saw you.”
            “Yes,” said Harry, and rolled his shoulders. He could guess why Rob had invited him over now. He wanted to be at Harry’s side when he became the man Rob probably thought he should have been.
            And only a week ago, Harry would have wanted that. But now he’d had time to think, and he’d been exposed to Malfoy’s arguments and the things Malfoy had told him about Old Harry that Harry didn’t think Rob had ever known.
            “You don’t feel like that anymore.”
            Rob’s voice was like frozen crystal. Harry looked him in the eye and shook his head as gently as he could. “No. I don’t. Sorry.”
            Rob slowly swallowed. Then his voice bellowed out, so loud that Harry covered his ears before he thought about it. “Why not?”
            Harry dropped his hands and simply said, “Malfoy. He said some things to me that made a lot of difference. He pointed out that this is my new life, and what point would it make for me to serve time inside Azkaban when I can’t even remember the crimes? Ron tried to help me go to the Ministry and testify, but there’s really no legal precedent for something like this happening, especially when they can’t get at the memories on their own. They did try. The thing they used broke. And then Kelvin came after me. I don’t think I should try to make up for what I did to people like him.”
            “Of course not! But people like the ones you used the Memory Charm on when you developed that spell, and the Aurors you used the spell itself on, and me—”
            “It sounds like you want me to make up for what happened to you by going to Azkaban,” Harry said. He looked at Rob and saw the way he had half-started up out of the chair. Harry laid his hand on the Elder Wand and tried not to listen to it laughing in the back of his head. “I’m not interested in doing that anymore. I’m really a different person. I can’t make up for what Old Harry did.”
            “Yes, you can.”
            “How?”
            “By paying whatever the penalty is for those crimes. If that means going to Azkaban, do it.” Harry flinched at how hard Rob’s voice was. “And when you come out, you’ll have at least gained one thing.”
            “What?”
            “Me.”
            Rob had risen from his chair now and was crossing the distance between them. Harry saw how he was looking at Harry’s lips, and he shook his head and stood up and drew his Elder Wand without thinking about it.
            Rob stopped and stared at him. “That’s not your wand.”
            “My wand broke during the duel with Kelvin, and I couldn’t repair it. This is my wand now, the one I conquered.” Harry wasn’t about to tell Rob that this was the Elder Wand. Rob would probably decide it was another sign that he was evil. “Back off, Rob. I appreciate you telling me about that spell. But I don’t appreciate you trying to make me feel that I’m evil if I don’t spend the rest of my life making up for my mistakes.”
            “But you wanted to do that!” Rob almost yelled the words, and then closed his eyes and tugged for a second on his hair. “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. You seemed sane and normal again—more sane and normal than you’d been for years—until Malfoy got hold of you, and then you started listening to him instead.”
            “I started listening to common sense,” Harry corrected him. “If I’m serious about being a different person from Old Harry, why in the world am I running around trying to make up for things he did? I can’t remember them. I didn’t do them. I can apologize. I could even donate money, if that would make up for something. Or send back the amounts of money I took from the people I blackmailed. But I can’t really make up for the pain and fear I caused them, and I’m not going to try it.”
            “You could make up for what you did to me.”
            Harry stared into Rob’s eyes. “How?”
            He saw the answer before Rob tried to lean forwards and kiss him. Harry stood up and waved the Elder Wand in a quick circle. Again a spell he’d never heard before had leaped into the back of his mind, just like the counter to the curse Malfoy had used to try and turn him into a tree. “Addo aspectum!”
            The air around him seemed to shake. Rob’s eyes widened, and he crashed to his knees, trying to wrap his hands around his face.
            “I—I thought you were a better person than that,” he whispered, and then he stared at Harry again and flinched back.
            Harry shook his head. He would have to look up what the spell did, but he was sure it had at least changed Rob’s perspective on him.
            “I’m sorry,” he muttered, and then turned and walked out of Rob’s house as rapidly as he could.
            His hand was shaking, he realized a few seconds later. But the Elder Wand was perfectly steady.
*
moodysavage: Thank you!
Severus1snape: Exactly what it shows here. Rob really isn’t all that subtle.
     moon: Well, no, he doesn’t. ;)
     Onobaby: Thank you!
     SP777: Yes, he is.
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The Dust of Water