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This Enchanted Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3669 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Three—Thoughtful In Moderation

            “I can’t even describe what it was like, the headache I got from it.” Erin Syles’s hands came up and waved around her hand, then dropped. When she nodded, her thin blonde hair flew. When she put down her cup of tea to gesture again, the table rocked. “I had to go home and lie down under a Dreamless Sleep Potion for six hours just to get it to go away.”

            “And why is that?” Potter asked, leaning forwards with a faint smile, the same he seemed to use to romance everyone around him, from Leah to Healer Limerent to, now, this woman who had been the first to touch one of Alexander’s globes. Draco cleared his throat pointedly and let one hand glance off Potter’s knee. Potter never looked away from Syles, but did tilt his head to the side, as if to ask Draco what he should stop doing.

            As if he doesn’t know. Draco knew that part of this—this friendliness came from the manner that Potter used to interview everyone. He wanted to act cheerful, to draw them out. Draco used different methods. He was the one people turned to when they wanted a stern accounting of what had happened to them, some reassurance that their tormentors would be caught and punished.

            But I never flirt.

            “The Dreamless Sleep?” Syles rocked back and forth on the couch, her fingers drumming on the edges of the cushions. Draco hid an expression of acute nausea as best he could. He would hate to live with someone like Syles every day, who made every gesture a campaign of conquest, whose words overran others’ in conversation like soldiers overrunning a border. “Because I was seeing these visions in my head. Hallucinations, from the headache. Dreamless Sleep was the only way I could get them to go away.”

            “Ahhh,” Potter said, a drawn-out noise that Draco didn’t think he needed to give as much emphasis as he did. “So you had dreams. Nightmares, or—”

            “How can they be dreams when I was awake when I was having them?” Syles snapped back towards him and frowned at him. They were in the center of her overlarge drawing room, so big that it pushed the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom back towards the edges of the house. Rather like her, Draco thought. In the middle of all that space, a trio of white chairs huddled as though hiding from predators. “No, they were visions.”



            “Pleasant ones, or unpleasant ones?” Potter changed his words with a smile at Syles that made Draco grind his teeth. Yes, he liked being partnered with Potter in many ways, and he didn’t want what he had suffered at the twisted Healer Alto’s hands to break them apart, but he would never be as unprofessional as Potter was being.

            “Pleasant ones, of course!” Syles took a step nearer and lowered her voice to an intense half-shout. “That’s the way they trick you, artifacts like that. They give you something pretty to look at, and they trick you into taking them home.”

            “So when you touched the globe—”

            “I didn’t know this Alexander bloke had thrown it as a weapon,” Syles said, repeating information that had been in the original file they’d been given, information that Draco thought they could dispense with. When he shifted his body in a formal signal, however, both Potter and Syles ignored him, so intent on staring into each other’s eyes that they didn’t notice the hard-working Auror they disregarded. “It was just on the ground after one of his attacks.” Then she paused and cocked her head, hair once again wisping around her like the far edge of a maelstrom. “But can you call it an attack if it didn’t injure anyone?”

            “It caused property damage,” Draco intervened coolly, “and it could have injured someone, given that we still don’t know the exact effects of the globes. It was an attack.”

            Syles shrugged at him and went on as though his opinion were unimportant. And Potter was still watching her, smiling. Draco turned to study the marble hearth, the only thing in Syles’s home that spoke of any taste, with its delicate blue patterns and sharp classical lines, and listened to the conversation with only half an ear.

            “I was envisioning my mother,” Syles said. “She died when I was young, and I only knew her from my father’s stories about her. But I could see her just the way she must have been. Pretty, you know, and young.” Another flip of her hands, as Draco could see from the corner of his eye. He turned his head further away. “She looked at me and smiled, and then she told me that I could be with her, and have her alive again, if I just found the key to the globes.”

            Potter went still. Draco watched him again in turn. Yes, this must be something connected to his visions of Vane, something he hadn’t mentioned when Draco questioned him. Draco felt his lips draw up. This is something else we need to discuss, clearly.

            “And do you know what that meant?” Potter asked quietly. “Did you want to take the globe home, keep it?”

            “Those are two different questions,” Syles said, and cocked her head at him with a sharp smile that made her look like a squirrel. Draco relaxed a little against the back of the couch. “But yes, I wanted to keep it. And no, I didn’t know what she meant. But I thought I might, if I just studied it a bit longer.” She chewed the nearest part of her lip, and Draco sniffed. Syles swung around to face him. “Stop doing that.”

            “I don’t know what you mean,” Draco said, lifting his eyebrows. Potter was looking at him, too, and Draco relaxed his shoulders again before he remembered that he had reason to be irritated with his partner. “I didn’t intend to express contempt of you, Miss Syles. I simply wondered whether you had any more concrete information to give us.”

            Syles studied him, and then Potter, and gave him a most annoying smirk before she shook her head. Draco hoped his smirks had never looked like that back at Hogwarts. If they had, he could see why Potter had remained his enemy for so long. “No. But I do think—do you have to arrest him? If he’s just going around showing people visions of the dead, what has he done wrong? I don’t think you have to arrest him.”

            “Our duty is to make sure of that distinction, between those we must arrest and those we need not,” Draco said smoothly, before Potter could say something romantic or sympathetic or irritating, or, knowing him, all three at once. “We will find Alexander, and learn from that whether we must arrest him. Your information can help us make the decision.”

            Syles, as he had known she would, seemed pleased to have that more active role. She settled back with a small smile and a nod that seemed to dismiss them, along with the flick of her fingers, as someone royal would dismiss a peasant. “Very well. You should find out as soon as possible whether he’s harmless or not, then.”

            “We will,” Potter said, bowing over her hand, and giving her a smile Draco was glad of, since it was much more charming than his would have been. Draco cocked his head, wondering if Potter would kiss her hand, but Potter drew back long before his lips could have touched the skin. “May we contact you again if we need more information about your experience?”

            Draco bit his tongue to say that they didn’t need to ask permission, they were Aurors. But of course they did need to ask if they could talk to a witness who was implicated in no criminal activity. Much as it would have cheered his heart to find out that Syles’s mannerisms came from guilt, he doubted it.

            “Of course,” Syles said, and then jerked her chin at Draco. “Although you could leave the sulky one at home, Auror Potter, and come by yourself.”

            Draco kept his hand away from his wand. He was proud of the control that kept his hand away from his wand. He stared above Syles’s head in the direction of the wall, and let his eyes unfocus as he thought of the painting of icy lakes that had hung on his mother’s bedroom wall at the Manor. He remembered watching it when he was a child, marveling at the deep blue and green and purple colors that could occur in white ice, and tracing the drifting of the bergs back and forth on the currents with a finger.

            He must be like those icebergs if he could. Cool and deep and quiet, with most of himself hidden beneath the surface. It would be the only way he could work, he feared, on the rest of this case.

            “Ooh, have I hurt his feelings?” Syles whispered, and smirked on the last words as though she wouldn’t be satisfied until Draco cursed her.

*

            Harry might not understand exactly why Syles had annoyed Malfoy before this, but now he did. He shook his head and moved in front of her, shielding her from Malfoy’s eyes. He turned to face his partner as he did so, though, because at least part of what annoyed Malfoy seemed to be Harry spending too much attention on Syles.

            “I think we should leave,” he said. “We won’t get anything productive done here, and we have what we need from her.”

            They were out of the house before Malfoy looked at him. Harry swallowed at the color of his eyes, such a deep and icy blue that he would have hardly believed they usually looked grey. Then he shook himself. Since when have you started paying attention to the color of your partner’s eyes?

            He could remember the color of Lionel’s, of course, and all the better since he had had that recent dream—

            No. Vision. Syles was right about that much, that it was more like a vision than a dream. It was so real, a glimpse into some other place—

            And then his breathing stopped as he thought about that, and put it together with some of the other words Lionel had spoken, and he had to hit himself in the chest to start his breathing again.

            “Potter?” Malfoy had one hand on his arm, his eyes so bright that they resembled grey seas again. Harry smiled at him, and he knew it was a shaky smile, and that he would have to account for it somehow.

            He held the tender suspicion in his mind for a moment, and turned it around, and found it hard to let go no matter how much it would probably be better if he did. “I’m all right,” he said aloud, but inside his head, his mind chattered like a million frogs in springtime.

            What if I could make the vision real, the way Lionel said I could? What if I could find a way to a world where Lionel never died?

            He had to put that glorious, overwhelming thought into storage along with all the rest of the thoughts he couldn’t let himself think in front of Malfoy, though, at least for a while. It was a treasure to be hoarded and looked over and cradled and held at arm’s length because he could hardly believe it was true.

            And it might not be. We still don’t understand everything about the globes. We still don’t know that they have a benevolent purpose instead of a malevolent one.

            “Potter.”

            Malfoy hovered over Harry when he glanced up, and his eyes had acquired a sheen to them that Harry had seen several times since the Alto case and hated to see in them. His hand found its way to Malfoy’s and squeezed, and Malfoy leaned against him hard for a moment and closed his eyes.

            “It’s all right,” Harry said quietly. “Only I think I may have figured out what the globes do.” He couldn’t keep the secret all to himself, not when there might be some people Alexander had attacked, and Malfoy would be angry if he found out Harry had lied. But Harry could—just cherish the dream for a while, surely, before he had to give it up? Before he had to expose it to Malfoy’s relentless eyes and Malfoy told him Lionel was dead?

            Which—Harry knew, of course. Which was true. But there was a difference between ordinarily true, which was the kind of dull hurt that Harry dealt with every day, and Malfoy-true, which glared as if made of diamonds.

            Malfoy’s hand tightened on his arm to the point of pain. Harry shook off the ridiculous fantasies that clung to him and said, “Yes. I think the globes give the people they strike dreams of an intense time in their past—or an alternate universe where things went differently. There’s no reason that Lionel had to die. There’s no reason that Syles’s mother had to die. It wasn’t destined, or fated. It just happened.”

            Malfoy grunted slowly. Then he said, “But not everyone who touched a globe that Alexander left behind had those dreams. The Aurors who handled them, and the Unspeakables who took their photographs for the file, certainly didn’t. How do you square that with you and Syles having the dreams?”

            Harry paused. Then he offered a weak grin. “We both lost our mothers at a young age?” he asked.

            Malfoy would have grinned at that on some occasions, or at least returned the small, chilly smile he used when he didn’t want to show something as vulgar and low-bred as amusement. This time, he only shook his head.

            “No jokes, Potter,” he said quietly. “No games. I don’t want to hear it. I want an answer, and I don’t want you taking unnecessary risks.”

            “Well, obviously,” Harry said. “But to you, most risks are unnecessary. I’m only trying to come up with reasons that I think work, and I didn’t think of the fact that other people hadn’t had those dreams. Damn.” He flexed his arm in Malfoy’s grasp, hoping his partner would take the hint, but Malfoy only tightened his hold and looked as if he could keep on holding Harry that way for hours, if he needed to. “So. The next obvious step. Talk with the rest of the witnesses who had a strange reaction to the globes?”

            “Yes,” Malfoy said, and turned to one side as though he would lead the way. He was finally forced to drop Harry’s hand, which cheered Harry up. He tried not to rub his wrist as he followed Malfoy, though; the git was always so sensitive to signs that he’d hurt Harry, since the torture.

            “Let me guess,” he told Malfoy’s back, when he just kept striding along Syles’s street, instead of checking for an Apparition point. “The next person with an odd reaction to the globes lives somewhere around here.”

            “Yes, and I know him,” Malfoy said, and turned to the side and knocked on the door of a smart house that made Harry smile. Aunt Petunia would groan in envy if she saw it. The walls were perfectly balanced stone, without a sign of mortar, as if the owner had simply raised great boulders carved in the desired shape from the earth. The garden in front had flowers that stood in precise lines, as if they wouldn’t dream of growing across into another’s furrow. They were all painfully straight lines in shape, too, Harry noted. No climbing plants for this Slytherin.

            Or was he a Slytherin? When the man opened the door, Harry didn’t see the look he’d come to expect when Malfoy was greeting someone who had shared his House at Hogwarts: a slight narrowing of the eyes and a gesture of the head that was neither nod nor shake, as if they wanted the option to accept and deny at once. He was tall, and had long dark hair to his shoulders, and an air of permanent sleepiness around his eyes.

            “So,” the man said, and paused, as though waiting for Malfoy to fill in the blanks. Malfoy gave him the look a long, elegant horse might give when someone invited it to run on a muddy track, and the man grinned and gave in. “Malfoy,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s been a long time.”

            “Not long enough, some would say,” Malfoy said, shaking the man’s hand and looking as if he would wipe his fingers on his trousers.

            The man laughed easily. Harry felt an ache in his chest as he watched him. He wished he could have a bond like that with Malfoy, make him laugh instead of hesitate and stare into space. Perhaps things would be better between them after they had one of their joint sessions together with Mind-Healer Estillo. Harry did know that Malfoy seemed glad Harry had told him about the vision of Lionel right away after he had it.

            “Tolliver Stuart,” he added, seeing Harry’s stare. “I was in Hufflepuff, which is one of the reasons Malfoy here barely condescends to acknowledge me. Unfortunately for him, I have more money than his father ever saw at one time in one place, so he has to nod to me as having some worth.”

            “Your House placement was wrong,” Malfoy said, and brushed past Stuart into the house. Harry hesitantly followed, after a glance at Stuart to make sure he was welcome. Stuart nodded, smiling, and then leaned in to whisper in Harry’s ear as he passed him.

            “He always says things like that. But he doesn’t mean them. You must have noticed that by now if you’re still working together.”

            Harry tried not to bristle. Was the man saying that Malfoy made a deliberate effort not to get along with his partners? As far as Harry knew, Malfoy had worked with the same man, Kellen Moonborn, for four years, until he died on the Sussex Necromancer case, while Harry had drifted between three partners in the same time period.

            But Stuart grinned at him, and then nodded at Malfoy, who had turned around in the middle of what seemed to be an enormous kitchen without beginning or end except the door they’d come through, and was waiting for them. He was near enough to hear the whisper, and he would have said something—Harry hoped he would have said something—if it offended him. He inclined his head stiffly at Stuart and said, “Explain about the globes.”

            Stuart leaned against the nearest table, one of about four made of pretty, pale wood, and grinned again. “Aren’t you supposed to introduce yourselves as Aurors first and tell me that I have a choice to talk, but that my explanation would help your investigation and bring criminals to justice?”

            “You know why we’re here.” Malfoy’s voice had a tint like new-fallen snow on top of it, but Harry was sure it must be a cover for amusement, that they shared some deeper bond, that Stuart wouldn’t stand there and grin back at him if Malfoy was as angry at him as that tone seemed to say he was…

            Good God, are you jealous?

            Harry was glad that both Malfoy and Stuart were focused on each other at the moment, so that his whole-body flinch went unnoticed. He didn’t have the right to feel like that. He knew he didn’t have the right to feel like that. Even if Malfoy had slept with men in the past, he had just broken up with his fiancée, who had committed an impulsive, practically sociopathic murder, and he felt isolated and alone. And the Alto case had come between them since the start of their partnership and scarred them further.

            And there was Lionel. If Harry stood a chance of winning Lionel back, or being with him in a different world, then he didn’t have to feel jealous. Malfoy had not been the great love of his life, or the one whose death had cast Harry into depression that was only now lifting, through his mind-sessions with Healer Estillo. Six months ago, Harry had known that Malfoy was an Auror, but hadn’t worked with him or talked to him in years. Lionel had been the center of his universe.

            Why should it always stay the same?

            Why shouldn’t it, if I can have him back, Harry answered savagely, and went back to listening to the actual conversation.

            “And I picked up the globe because it was lying on the ground, it was pretty, and no one told me better,” Stuart was finishing.

            Malfoy folded his arms and sneered. “Why am I not surprised? You would have picked up the Dark Lord’s snake if it wasn’t too heavy for you to lift.”

            For the first time, Stuart looked halfway sober. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and shook his head. “I wish you wouldn’t joke about things like that, Draco,” he said quietly. “The war is over, but we still have our brands from it.” He turned his left arm to the side, in a posture that probably would have meant nothing to someone without Harry’s particular history, but he had that history, and it did.

            He caught his breath, and looked harder at Stuart than he meant to. So he had been a Death Eater, too.

            Malfoy glared at him. Harry could practically hear the words filtering through the mental connection that Malfoy liked to pretend they shared in times of intense emotion, and then was perfectly ready to forget about in other times. Don’t ask him.

            Harry wouldn’t have asked, but he had other questions he needed to know the answer to. “Did you have intense visions when you picked up the globe?” he asked. “Dreams that night of something you wanted to have, and now actually had the chance to have, never mind how? Did you see and speak to someone who told you the globes were real, and the key to understanding them was to study them?”

            Stuart whirled to face him. “I never put that in the official report I made,” he said sharply. “How did you know that?”

            “Because that’s what happened to me,” Harry said. “Look, can you tell us the details of your dreams? I didn’t know you had them until I saw your reaction just now.”

            Stuart folded his arms and eyed Harry. Harry could see the pinched lines around his mouth and thought he understood why Malfoy might have had something in common with him, even without that Death Eater past. He bit his lip so he wouldn’t say that aloud and tried to look innocent, which just made Malfoy glare at him harder.

            “Very well,” Stuart said at last. “But if I’m going to tell you about those frankly mental dreams—which I didn’t even think were connected to the globe I touched at first—then I’m going to need a drink.” He faced a cupboard in the nearest wall and gestured sharply down with his hand.

            Harry was standing close enough to see that there was no wand in that hand, only the empty fingers, but the door of the cupboard flew open and one of the drinks inside—in a distinctly Muggle can—flew out, skimmed the distance, and slammed into Stuart’s palm. He took a drink and stalked in the direction of what must be non-kitchen somewhere in the house.

            “I didn’t realize he was powerful enough to do wandless magic,” Harry murmured as he passed Malfoy on his way to follow Stuart. He could usually sense someone’s level of power on first meeting, though it certainly wasn’t infallible.

            Malfoy’s lip twitched. “I’ve never known him to be,” he said. “But he could have practiced that spell, if he used it a lot, until he could do it wandlessly.” He glanced at Harry. “And it’s not as though you have much room to speak against someone having a weird magical ability.”

            Harry opened his mouth, then shut it again.

            “Yes?” Malfoy bent towards him solicitously.

            “I…nothing,” Harry said. He had caught hold of the thread of a thought, but it vanished, trailing tauntingly, as he tried to catch it. He shook his head and prepared himself for a conversation with a potentially hostile witness, all the while wondering when the thought would come back. It was something important, something about Alexander and Stuart and the globes and Malfoy’s words, but he couldn’t hold it now.

*

            unneeded: Well, Harry really and genuinely doesn’t feel anything wrong with him, so it’s a risk worth taking, to him.

            SP777: The globes do something, I promise you. They’re not just useless, pretty toys.

            Anna: I don’t consider it a spoiler to say that Lionel will appear again in this story.

            DemonLordLife: Thank you.

            Rina: You’re talking about Lackey’s Last Herald-Mage Trilogy? I did read them years ago, so they probably influenced that scene a little.
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This Enchanted Life