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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 Five—Qualities of Mind

            “Welcome, Auror Potter, Auror Malfoy. Please do have a seat.”

            Mind-Healer Estillo spoke without glancing up from the paperwork in front of her. Harry had never seen her when she didn’t have at least one teetering stack of it on her desk. He winced and took a seat, wondering as he did so whether he would make one of the generous piles in front of her or off to the sides, on the other seats, slide to the floor. Draco sat next to him, and tucked his robes around him as neatly as a cat wrapping its tail around its paws. Harry felt a brief ache of envy. He could never do things like that.

            Estillo continued to work with her head bowed. Harry studied her. She had long white hair, braided back, but so few lines in her face that he had never really known how old she was, and hadn’t felt comfortable asking. Now and then she tapped her finger against her lips and then continued writing. Her hand was fast and smooth and easy, and Harry had envied it the first time he saw it. Now, after several weeks of receiving owls from her that reminded him of appointments and seeing the file she kept on him, he would have been happy never to write like that, if it meant he could stop seeing it.

            Draco shot a glance at him. Harry stared back, wondering what he had done wrong, and then realized his foot was tapping. He pressed down with his other foot on top of it to make it stop. Draco sniffed and faced the Healer again.

            “Now,” Estillo said, and shoved away the file she’d been working on exactly as if it wasn’t important. Harry had asked her why she did things like that during their first appointment, and she’d chatted away to him until he tried to ask her another question, at which point she asked why he was so much more eager to talk about what she was doing than what he was doing.

            Harry turned his head to the side. Of course, that attracted the Healer’s attention. They were most interested in reluctant prey, Harry thought. He had never seen them treat an Auror like that who came to their offices willingly.

            “You wanted your session with me together this time,” Estillo said, when Draco had sat there for some minutes in comfortable silence and Harry in uncomfortable. “Did you both agree to this? Do you know what sensitive material might be discussed?”

            Harry mumbled something. Draco met her eyes and gave a firm nod. Harry scowled at Draco’s shoulders. He wished he could do something like that, but he had too many secrets to protect—including the one he had realized a few minutes ago, and now had to hold against his chest like an egg to keep from getting crushed.

            “Auror Potter?”

            Harry sighed and met Healer Estillo’s eyes. “Yes, I agreed,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

            Estillo cocked her head and gave him a faint smile. Her eyes were grey, like Draco’s, but not as clear—and Harry bit his tongue as he realized what he was thinking. It was exactly the sort of soppy nonsense that he used to think about Lionel. Or at least Draco would characterize it as soppy nonsense, which made it another of the many things that Harry didn’t think he could share with him.

            “What else should I worry about, then?” Estillo asked quietly.

            “What?” Harry ran a hand through his hair, and wondered whether either Estillo or Draco would understand if he asked to be excused from the appointment. Probably not, he decided in some resignation. He could avoid Estillo for a time, but then along would come one of those neat little notes, and Draco would smile and ask questions with hard eyes.

            “You implied that I don’t need to worry about your agreement,” Estillo said. “What should I worry about? What is troubling you?”

            Harry bit his tongue. He badly needed to be somewhere else, he thought, doing something else. He needed time to work through his feelings about Draco—Malfoy, he should be calling him that if he wanted emotional distance from him—and space to exercise or do something else that would let the pain out. The pain, the wonder, the desire, the fear. All of those were dashing around in the middle of his head and making things hard. He had taken a Calming Draught the other times he’d come to see Estillo, but there hadn’t been time for that before Draco hauled him out of the office.

            Estillo clasped her hands in front of her, prepared to wait until the earth cracked open and swallowed Harry, the way he sort of wished it would right at the moment. And Draco’s eyes just grew harder and harder, brighter and brighter, shining like the sun.

            Harry swallowed. “So, all right,” he whispered. “This case we’re on. It’s given me dreams of my old partner.”

            “The one whose death hurt you so badly,” Estillo said, her voice full of flowing gentleness.

            “The one he was,” Draco began, and then stopped and looked at him. Because Harry hadn’t told Estillo about being in love with Lionel, and Harry hardly thought Draco in a hurry to share that information, either, if only because it would challenge Draco’s exclusive possession of it.

            “Yes,” Harry said, and raised an eyebrow at Draco that he hoped would communicate he really didn’t want to talk in detail about Lionel in front of Estillo. Draco’s mouth lowered into the lines of a frown, and Harry shrugged. His choice to tell how much he wanted Estillo to know, and yes, it probably would help if he gave more detail about Lionel, because that meant she would have more options for helping him, but it would hurt more right now to talk about it than to keep it hidden. “I want to know—I saw a vision. He promised me that there’s another world where he’s alive. The vision felt vivid and intense, more real than a dream. But how can I know if it is? And how can I trust my perceptions on this case? I need to think about the case, not about Lionel, but he’s all I can focus on.” Harry closed his eyes and tugged hard on his fringe, in case that would help.

            “Perhaps it would help to place the memory in a Pensieve?” Estillo murmured. She had suggested that several times before, and Harry had agreed to let her watch the memories of some hard cases he’d worked on, and the reprimands Okazes had given him that meant he didn’t trust the Ministry.

            Now, though, the thought of what would happen if Estillo and Draco saw that vision made Harry spring to his feet. “No,” he said tightly.

            “Calm down, Potter.” Draco’s hand settled onto Harry’s shoulder, firm as the grip of an iceberg. “No one’s suggesting that you have to do it right now. Eventually, when you’re more comfortable.”

            Harry nodded reluctantly and sat back down, not looking at Draco. He knew what he would see: those grey eyes gone cold with curiosity. Draco might want to see Lionel, to explore the vision, and Harry knew it would probably help the case and build trust between them.

            But he couldn’t. Not right now. He would probably crack if he had to listen to another of Draco’s speeches right now about how he really hadn’t loved Lionel, it was just obsession and a crush. He could listen to them tomorrow. Not today.

            “Then something else,” Estillo said. “Would you let me give you a more comforting memory? One that is drawn from your past, and that you could hold onto to remind you that there is more than just hardship and pain in the world?”

            Harry hesitated. Estillo had suggested this option several times before, but Harry had rejected it, thinking he would look weak to have to hold onto the comfort of a happy memory. Now, though…

            Now he thought it would probably settle his mind, and just because Draco was watching didn’t mean he would think Harry was weak. He knew something about the kinds of pressures this case was causing for Harry, after all, if not everything.

            “Yes,” he said. “All right. How are you going to do it?”

            Estillo smiled at him and laid her wand across his forehead, over the scar and between his eyes, leading down to the line of his nose. Harry blinked and stopped trying to focus on her wand, which was only causing him to cross his eyes and have a headache. He looked at Draco instead, who was lounging in his chair behind Estillo and had his arms folded and his legs crossed. His expression was so blank that Harry had no idea what he was thinking.

            Perhaps that I’m weak after all.

            The thought made Harry straighten his spine with a snap and glare at Draco. Draco blinked lazily at him in return, cocking his head to the side as if to ask Harry what he was doing. Harry turned his head away and listened to Estillo’s calm and simple explanation.

            “Every Mind-Healer learns how to do this. Happy memories feel different than unhappy ones. I’m going to enter your mind, but I won’t be able to see the memories, not in the way that I would if I was using Legilimency. I’ll just find one that has the right resonance and draw it forwards, all right?”

            Harry blinked, a little surprised that he’d understood every word of that as well as the theory behind it. He acquiesced with a shrug and leaned his head back, closing his eyes.

            “Now, do sit up straight and keep your eyes open,” Estillo admonished him. “It doesn’t do much good if you’re so relaxed; that causes your memories to feel more alike to me as I search them, even the bad ones.”

            Harry sighed and did as he was told, even if it meant meeting Malfoy’s eyes. At least Malfoy carried on looking exactly the same as Estillo whispered the spell, and she did it softly enough that Harry couldn’t even really make out the incantation. Now and then, Malfoy’s eyes narrowed as if he suspected something, but Harry didn’t see how he could. He kept his eyes firmly open, even when they started watering, and then Estillo reached the end of the incantation and made a whipping motion with her wand as she would if she was drawing a memory from his temple.

            The memory seemed to rush forwards; Harry could sense the passage of its motion, like the passage of time, long before it arrived. And then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he was in the memory.

*

            Draco had fallen asleep on his desk.

            Harry hesitated, then rose and made his way over towards him, telling himself that he didn’t need to do anything special. He would just make sure that Draco didn’t have a crick in his neck or hadn’t drooled on an important report.

            Well. If the last was the case, then he would preserve the report for all eternity, or at least the next week, to show Draco that Malfoys could be careless, too. But he would rescue it from further damage, and then Malfoy would owe him one when he woke up.

            Harry did indeed find a report under Malfoy’s cheek, the ink smeared, though it wasn’t in danger from drool yet. Grumbling to himself, with the wordless sounds that he knew he used to use around Ron, he moved the report aside and then conjured a cushion for Draco’s cheek instead. Moving his head there turned out to be a less than easy proposition, since Draco’s head was heavy and Harry was trying so hard not to wake him up. But at last he was in place, and Harry paused to glance down at Draco.

            The glance turned into a stare, even though he didn’t mean it to.

            It was less than a week after the time that Healer Alto had taken Draco’s mind captive and made him torture Harry, and Harry hadn’t thought Draco would fall asleep in the office at all. Not in front of him, the man he probably had to work harder than usual to trust. Yeah, Harry had been the torture victim, but he had still seen something vulnerable in Draco’s eyes, and Draco hated showing that to anyone.

            Yet here he was, his eyes closed and lashes fanned out across his cheeks, his hand open in a helpless half-curl next to him, the fingers still brilliantly stained and splashed with ink. Harry reached down, swallowing, and touched the center of that hand’s palm. Draco’s fingers curled around his, as reflexive as a baby’s.

            Then Draco stirred and murmured, opening grey eyes with a soft haze of sleep across them, and asked, “What? Harry? Have I been asleep?”

            There it was, even more than the fact that Draco had trusted him enough to fall asleep in the office. The wondering undertone to his voice, the half-smirk to his lips, and the use of Harry’s first name in the moments before he recovered full consciousness. And the way he held on to Harry’s finger.

            That was happiness.

*

            Draco first suspected that Estillo’s spell hadn’t worked the way she expected it to when Harry clenched his eyes shut as if to hold back tears and started rubbing his palms on his trousers. Then he sat up, took a sharp breath, and said with a smile so fake Draco wouldn’t have taken it as a gift, “Thank you, Healer Estillo. That worked. I think we can discuss this case now.”

            The Healer wasn’t stupid, though now and then she did things for her own reasons that Draco found hard to follow. This was one of those times. She leaned back on her heels and blinked, studying Harry; then she inclined her head and stood, going back to her desk. “Very well,” she said, obviously leaving it alone for now. “Tell me about the case.”

            Harry flowed into glib speech, of the kind that Draco would have thought he couldn’t use when he first partnered with him. But long experience had, by this time, taught him that Harry wasn’t stupid. He just didn’t see the need to talk like he was smart when he had other people around to do it for him.

            Now and then Estillo glanced at Draco and invited him into the conversation that way, but he restricted his contributions to nods and grunts, or short confirmations of the facts Harry had already stated when there was no other escape. Most of the time, he watched Harry.

            Watched the way his foot tapped on the floor next to his juddering knee, or how his head bent, or how his hand clasped empty air as if wishing for his wand.

            Perhaps this joint session with the Mind-Healer hadn’t been the solution to all their problems, but it was already proving more than worthwhile. Draco would have to trick answers out of his partner because Harry didn’t trust him enough to talk to him freely. Very well. Then that was what he would do. But he would get what he wanted.

            Healer Estillo leaned back in her chair again when Harry was done and propped her feet up on the desk. Draco fought to keep from curling his lip. Sometimes Estillo was prim and proper enough to satisfy even the standards of decorum that his mother had trained into Draco, and sometimes she was vulgar and strained or stained her formal robes by doing something like this.

            “I understand,” Estillo said, with a faint smile at Harry that suggested she really did. “You fear facing the past, and it unnerved you that the case brought you face-to-face with it without a chance to back away.”

            “I—that’s not exactly it,” Harry said, and Draco lifted a hand to his face to hide the smile. Of course it wasn’t. Harry would never want to admit to a situation where the word “fear” might apply. Harry darted a brief glare at Draco and then faced Estillo again. “I want to know what’s real and what’s not. I want to have the chance to put the past behind me if I can. A final conversation with Lionel, a final chance to say all the things that I didn’t get to say because I didn’t know he would die…that would be what I wanted.”

            Estillo frowned and cocked her head like someone missing some of the beats to a song. Draco knew why. She didn’t know that Harry had been in love with Vane, and that made some of his emotions and his obsessions appear not to make a great deal of sense.

            “Auror Malfoy?” she asked, turning to him after a moment when she had given Harry the chance to say something and he hadn’t. “Do you have anything to add?”

            “Only that my partner is correct in the essentials,” Draco said. “We don’t yet know what the globes do. He was injured when Alexander cast one at him, and unconscious for several hours. He apparently had a strong vision while unconscious, the way that other witnesses we questioned had. But not everyone has that reaction to the globes, and we don’t know why the few who had it did.” He glanced at Harry, wondered whether he should say something that Estillo would understand as a hint about Vane but Harry probably wouldn’t, and decided not to. He didn’t want any setback in their trust if Estillo did say something and Harry figured out where her information had come from. “The other witnesses we spoke to had lost some people they loved at a young age. And they reported the same vivid colors and sensations that Auror Potter here did. That at least suggests that the impulse to say good-bye, to make the final farewell more meaningful, is common across the visions and reflects a part of the globes’ functioning, though we don’t yet know why Alexander wants to give certain people those visions.”

            Harry smiled at him, radiating relief for anyone who chose to read. Estillo chose, and Draco saw her make a quick note. But Harry, although he turned back at the scratch on the parchment, didn’t seem inclined to question what she had written.

            “That’s about the latest case, then,” Estillo said. “Let’s talk about other things. Auror Potter, have you made any progress with the memory that we watched last time?”

            Harry sat up straight, and this time he looked as if he’d shut all his emotions behind an office door and thrown away the single key. “I haven’t,” he said. “It’s still difficult for me to accept, and—and I don’t want to discuss it in front of Auror Malfoy.” He all but rushed through the latest words, his hands clamping down on the chair this time.

            Draco blinked, then smiled slowly. “Thank you for the honesty,” he said. If he knew Harry was keeping secrets, and probably ones that were unrelated to the latest case, then he could at least work with that. They were unlikely to cost his life if they didn’t spring on him from nowhere and if Harry didn’t go to ridiculous lengths to keep their existence concealed.

            Harry stared at him. “I thought you would hate that,” he said.

            “I wanted you to talk about Alexander and your vision of Vane because it could be important to solving the case,” Draco said, and leaned forwards and let Harry have a glimpse of his face so he would understand how important this was. “I don’t want something rising up behind me and biting my head off, perhaps literally, because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell me something you thought was personal. But this doesn’t have anything to do with Vane? With Alexander? It’s something you spoke with Healer Estillo about before the case began?”

            Wide-eyed, Harry shook his head and then nodded, pausing as if he didn’t know which question he had answered.

            “I will testify that there was nothing about the memory that connected it to this case, or to Auror Potter’s fallen partner,” Estillo intervened quietly. “Well. Have you made progress with the memory I asked you to consider, Auror Malfoy?”

            Draco shuddered a little. He had hoped they wouldn’t dig into this, but he was asking Harry to consider some secrets in front of him. He had to do the same. “Yes,” he said, voice thick. “I—I think they were wrong.”

            “You have told me that before,” Estillo said, making another note on her parchment. “And yet, you don’t sound convinced.”

            Draco nearly ran a hand through his hair before he remembered who he was, and where. He had picked that habit up from Harry. It wouldn’t do to use it now. “They were right as they saw it,” he said, staring at a portrait on the Healer’s wall that showed a large woman dozing in a comfy chair, her eyes opening and closing as though she was a Muggle doll. “I can’t blame them for casting me out of the Manor and out of the family when the Aurors had hurt them so much. I can’t blame them for turning their backs on me.”

            “You can believe that,” Estillo said, “accept their decision, reconcile yourself to it. Many of my pure-blood patients who have, as they see it, turned their backs on their families to accept a place in this new world think that way. What I am concerned for is that you do not use that realization to torment yourself, to make you think that you are a lesser person for becoming an Auror in the first place.” She stood, strode around from behind the desk, and touched his hand.

            Draco avoided Harry’s eyes. He didn’t know what expression he would be wearing, and he wanted to concentrate on the slow, difficult words that he had known would be necessary from the moment he chose to look at this memory.

            “I chose what I chose in defiance of them, of their beliefs and their standards,” he said. “That was part of it. How can I lie to myself about that?”

            “A decision can be many things at once,” Estillo said gently. “Misguided in part, noble in part. You could have chosen to spite them and yet also have come to love the work. How many years have you been an Auror, Draco?”

            Harry answered, his voice soft and deep. “Four years. Not counting the three years he trained.”

            Estillo nodded to him in thanks, but never took her eyes from Draco. “So. This is difficult, demanding work, and few trainees make it all the way through the training program. Few are accepted in the first place, in fact. If you were determined to defy your parents and all they stood for, and only that, do you think you would still be an Auror?”

            That was something Draco could grasp, could understand, and an argument he would not have thought of. Sometimes it seemed as though he lived in the eternal moment when he had opened the owl from his father telling him he was disinherited unless he agreed to leave the Auror program, and that there would be no further communication if he did not. He had torn up the letter and banished the owl with a shout and a curse.

            It didn’t soothe all the pain. It didn’t change everything. But it did mean that he could think of it another way, and that there was a way to join the two images of himself in his head: good Auror, and horrible forsaken pure-blood without a family.

            “No,” he whispered at last. “I don’t.”

            “It will take time to believe it completely, I know,” Estillo said, and patted his shoulder before withdrawing. “Thank you for coming to see me. Harry, next time we’ll talk in more detail about the memory I asked you to consider.”

            Harry nodded, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Draco. Draco braced himself and met his eyes.

            No pity. Only wonder, and respect.

            Draco felt a dropping swoop in his stomach, and told himself he would think about what that meant later. He stood up and followed Harry out of the office, nodding a farewell to Estillo. He noticed the way Harry walked in front of him as if to protect him from the sight of others, and sped up so that they were walking side-by-side instead.

            This is where I want to be.

*

            unneeded: Draco does have his issues; he just doesn’t talk about them as much as Harry does. But they’re there, and they can prey on him.

SP777: Funny you should ask that...
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This Enchanted Life