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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 Six—Nancy in the Pages

            When she opened her door to find them on her front step, Katherine Jourdemayne looked as if she might faint. She tightened her hands on the shawl that looped around her throat, a bright red as though she was hoping she could warm herself that way, and looked wildly from one to the other of them.

            “You haven’t caught them yet,” she whispered. “You haven’t caught them.”

            Draco opened his mouth to speak. Harry tilted his hand down at his side, and Draco luckily caught the gesture and swallowed whatever he had been about to say. Harry knew it would have been something scathing, something impatient.

            He knew that Draco easily became irritated with what he saw as weakness. That was why Harry could sometimes interview suspects better. He moved forwards and lowered his voice to ask, “What have they done now?”

            Jourdemayne caught her breath with a gasp and a sob, and reached out to him, drawing him close. Harry went, bowing his head so that her voice could reach his ears.

            “They left me a threat. A threat. The writing is different on this one. I mean, it’s not my writing. But I don’t know how it got into my house, and I don’t know what it means, and even if I wanted to I can’t do what they want if I don’t know what it means…” Her voice trailed off in an incoherent wail.

            Harry knew that Draco was curling his lip without looking back. He didn’t intend to let that bother him. He let his hand lean on Jourdemayne’s shoulder instead and lowered his voice still further. “Can we see the note?”

            Jourdemayne looked up at him like a rabbit, and spent a few moments standing there, trembling, as if she wanted someone to show up and make the decision for her. Harry held still, and held her gaze, and tried as hard as he could to look like the shining, trustworthy Boy-Who-Lived, one of the few times he had ever wanted to play that role. But if it would convince her now to tell the truth instead of shutting them out, then it was justified.

            “All right,” Jourdemayne whispered finally, bowing her head as if surrendering to the inevitable, and turned her back. “You can come in.”

            Harry resisted the temptation to glance back at Draco, and instead nodded and followed her. Sometimes Draco’s methods, the icy way he spoke and the more indirect questioning, worked wonders, but not always.

*

            Draco was no more impressed by Jourdemayne’s home than he had been the first time they visited. He wondered idly if Harry realized what a torment it was to someone who had received a proper pure-blood raising, to see precious artifacts taken and willfully misused. Jourdemayne was aspiring to a heritage that she would never have, something that could not be absorbed the way she was trying to absorb it. And she was intelligent enough to know that, cringing coward that she was. There were times cowardice was only good sense, and against a twisted that could erase one’s memory might be one of them.

            But even if Harry had had that kind of pure-blood raising, Draco doubted he would have accepted the perspective Draco automatically took.

            Harry crouched down by Jourdemayne when she tried to collapse into a chair, whispering into her ear the way he had by the door. She looked up at him, appeared to listen for a moment, and then nodded towards a small table, burying her head in her hands again and letting her long and tangled hair fall around her fingers.

            The note was obvious, a small square of white as it was in the middle of a dark table. Harry Levitated it rather than picked it up and read it through. A small frown pinched between his brows before he gestured to Draco and stood back to let him read the note.

            Draco bent close. The hand did indeed look different from the writing in the other notes that Jourdemayne had received; he’d stared at those long enough in the file, and when casting spells on them, to know. It was awkward, curved and looping and sprawling. If pressed, Draco would have said it that it came from someone who had injured their hands recently.

            Shelter me. Take me in. Say nothing of this. The morning star.

            But no name, and no directions other than that, and Draco could see why it would be frightening if Jourdemayne had no memory of the writer. He stepped back and jerked his head a little at Harry, indicating he could have this one.

            Harry knelt at Jourdemayne’s feet and took one of her hands, gazing up into her face like a worshipper. Draco restrained his snarl with an effort. He decided that he could do worse than leave the room while Harry interrogated their witness, so that his scowl wouldn’t interrupt the questioning, and stepped out.

            Jourdemayne’s house was bigger than he had originally thought it was, with multiple corridors leading in all directions and shining rooms with light coming through many and varied windows, but none of it was in any better taste. Draco walked past a rank of portraits he would have given much to restore to their rightful families and halted to peer into another room.

            It was a potions lab, or so he thought from some of the cauldrons and vials still on the shelves. But what struck him was how scrubbed it was. The tables gleamed. The floors looked as though someone had swept not only Cleaning Charms but Deep-Cleaning Charms over them.

            In fact…

            Draco moved a step back and raised his eyebrows. Yes. Viewed from the door, it was obvious that someone had indeed swept something off a large swathe of the shelves and tables and benches and desks. It began about three degrees to the right of the door itself and carried on, in a general arc shape, until close to the far wall, at which time the normal clutter of an active brewer (dirty vials, caked cauldrons, splatters of unknown origin) abruptly appeared again.

            Draco gave a thin smile and moved further into the room. He reckoned that he should have noticed this the first time they had investigated Jourdemayne’s house, but then again, they had been mostly occupied with the notes that first time. And he doubted he could have seen the removal of clutter so clearly from anything but that one particular angle.

            He moved among what was left, using a thin layer of air when necessary to insulate his skin from what was around him so that he wouldn’t disrupt any of the evidence Aurors might need to figure out what had happened here. Or, well, that he and Harry would need; at this point, it seemed foolish to assume that someone else would be brought onto the case unless he and Harry both died.

            He crouched down, his knee hovering above what looked like a random smudge of dust on the floor, but which resolved into an image the longer he stared at it. The image of a star with waving rays about it, which one could see as the rising sun if one squinted and was a bit imaginative.

And it doesn’t take much imagination to be part of the Order of the Morning Star.

“What are you doing?”

Draco turned his head. A young woman stood in the center of the doorway of the lab, her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes staring at him. She shook her head as she caught his gaze and muttered, “But he said it wouldn’t happen. She said it wouldn’t happen.”

Draco didn’t think he would have recognized her without reading Harry’s “nonsense,” but that was enough to tell him who she must be. He slipped his hand down to his wand while smiling blandly at her, the same smile that had convinced his Auror instructors he had left his “horrible past” behind when he started his training. “Miss Nancy, I presume?”

Her eyes flashed at him, and she gasped. She flung out one hand in front of her, and Draco dodged. If she used her flaw with gestures, then he would avoid being in the direct line of them, and that meant he should be able to—

She caught his eye, and there was a crumpling noise in his ears and a flash of pain in his head. Draco cursed softly and raised his hand to touch his brow, dropping his wand. Luckily, the spells he had cast meant that it rolled across the floor instead of landing directly on something, and spared the dusty picture of the morning star.

            What had he been doing? It wasn’t as though something had sprung out of nowhere to assault him. In fact, he had the impression that he had been involved in an important investigation and discovering important things until whoever or whatever it was had come along and interrupted him.

            He stared around. The lab stared back at him. There was no way to recover the fleeting thoughts that he had let go, he thought, but—

            Then his eyes fell on the image on the floor, and his stomach tightened at the same time as it dropped. The dust had fallen away from the picture, and no imagination or squinting was required to see it now. The symbol of the morning star practically shone, with a faint silvery sheen to its edges that Draco thought would have been on the parchment copy Harry possessed, too, except that it had been burned in instead.

            Their latest twisted had been here.

*

            “There is something else.”

            Harry managed to keep the triumphant grin from appearing on his face, but it was difficult. This was the sentence he had been waiting to hear for the almost twenty minutes that he’d been speaking to Jourdemayne. He kept his face calm and his voice low as he said, “Is there?”

            Jourdemayne gave a shaky gulp and an even shakier smile and nodded. “Yes. I kept—diaries for most of the last year. Ritual diaries.”

            You were right, Draco. She did have some contact with this Order at some point. At least, Harry couldn’t imagine that Jourdemayne would have a reason to keep ritual diaries without that. He inclined his head and said, without inflection, “May I see them?”

            Jourdemayne considered him for a long time. Harry had the strong feeling that she would let him look at them, having told him of their existence in the first place, but he didn’t want to hurry her into feeling that she had to offer. He kept still instead, looking at her the whole time, and finally Jourdemayne nodded, jerkily. “Yes. I—I have to blur out some names, first. Otherwise, you would learn secrets that aren’t mine to tell. I looked at the diaries the other day, and not even I can know who everyone was. And they only used their false names when I was around, but even those are too sacred for an outsider like you.”

            Harry didn’t smile. Jourdemayne, he thought, was someone who would only talk in full flow when she had her confidence, and had reason to feel that someone else respected her. Let her feel superior to him as an initiate of this Order or whatever the technical term was. As long as he solved the case, someone else’s incidental superiority to him really didn’t matter. “All right. Just don’t blur anything you think might let us solve this persecution.”

            Jourdemayne drew herself up, tangled hair and all. “I have to protect the members of my Order. That’s more important than anything else.”

            Seen like this, she had a kind of dignity, and proved that she could also have courage. Harry inclined his head. “Then do what you have to do. Just—make sure that you don’t obscure anything that you don’t have to.”

            Satisfied with that injunction, it seemed, Jourdemayne nodded at him and hurried out of the room. Harry sat up, stretched, and wondered where Draco had got to.

            He had felt him leave, of course; they couldn’t work as closely together as they had, and be as close together as they had, and not have Harry feel that. But it didn’t tell him the answer. Harry rose to his feet and looked around the room, taking in the disorder and clutter as he had before, and then raised his eyebrows when Draco came around the corner at something very near a dead run.

            Draco checked himself when he saw that the room was empty, and cocked his head at Harry. Harry smiled. “Jourdemayne thinks she has some other writings where mentions of this twisted might survive,” he said. “Ritual diaries.”

            Draco nodded. “I think I saw her,” he said. “I can’t remember it, but the image of the morning star was faint on the floor of Jourdemayne’s Potions lab, and then it came to life after a sensation in my head as if someone had crumpled my thoughts.”

            Harry smiled more widely. It was frustrating hunting an enemy you couldn’t remember, but at least they had a description of her from the writing Harry had done, and they knew the telltale signs now. “Then she’s a regular twisted, fitting the classic definition,” he muttered. “The symbol—but you haven’t seen any sign of companions, have you?”

            Draco shook his head with a faint frown. “And no sign that she only uses Dark Arts and can’t use Healing magic. But those have always been the hardest parts of the definition to determine, unless you actually see them in battle.”

            “And we can’t see her in battle now that she’s erased the memory for us,” Harry finished, and snorted. “I thought she vanished, or that I might have hallucinated her. But now I know. She was probably still in the room with me, and just walked out. I would ignore her utterly as long as the memories were gone.”

            “That makes no sense,” Draco murmured. “She came to you for help, or it sounds like she did. Why erase your memory and leave again? I can understand what was happening with Jourdemayne, perhaps an experiment gone wrong. But—why you?”

            “She couldn’t withstand the full force of my charming personality,” Harry suggested, and had the privilege and pleasure of seeing Draco grin.

            Jourdemayne, coming back into the room with a stack of slender books that were presumably the ritual diaries, eyed them warily. Harry gave her a smile and reached out a hand. “These are them? Thank you,” he added, when Jourdemayne stood still and refused to let them go. “Or haven’t you finished the spells that would blank out the names non-initiates aren’t allowed to see?”

            Draco started to open his mouth, but Harry flicked him a glance, and he shut up. Jourdemayne still looked back and forth between the two of them before she answered. “I—thought that you would be reading them by yourself,” she said. “Not your partner.”

            “What’s the matter?” Draco asked, his voice a soft, taunting, tilting balance. “Afraid that I might recognize names you would prefer I didn’t?”

            Harry jumped and then glared at Draco, wondering how in the world he had misjudged Jourdemayne so much. He was usually better than that with witnesses.

            But maybe he had noticed that Jourdemayne had recovered her courage, and thought that meant he could ask questions like that, because instead of retreating with a wail or collapsing back into her hands-over-the-face posture, Jourdemayne scowled at Draco and replied, “Yes, I am. You have no idea how delicate those names are, and what kind of magic they conceal. You have the training to recognize that kind of thing. Your partner does not.”

            Harry had not the slightest idea what they were talking about, or how Draco could see through an obscuring charm of the kind that Jourdemayne had talked about casting. But he didn’t snap. He folded his arms instead, and watched. Draco did indeed know the right way to handle a witness, even one Harry thought from time to time that he felt scorn for.

*

            Draco felt his lips part. He could feel the words waiting on his tongue, tasting like finest brandy. And Jourdemayne, from the looks of it, was ready to protect what she felt as hers, hunching her shoulders and glaring like a lioness crouching over her cubs.

            Harry kept silent. Draco didn’t know whether that was wisdom or instinct or just confusion, and he didn’t intend to glance over to check. This was a simple contest between him and Jourdemayne now, and he knew that Harry wouldn’t interfere. That was enough.

            “These are the delicate records of a delicate order,” Jourdemayne said, and balanced the journals for a moment as though moving them would change the fate of a world. “Secrets never meant to bear the light of day.”

            “And yet,” Draco said softly, almost too softly, as he saw Jourdemayne balance on her heels in turn and lean forwards to hear him, “they are meant to change and order lives, to teach you how to live. It isn’t as though they were never meant to be learned by someone else.”

            “You aren’t the right person to learn them.” Jourdemayne’s eyes were almost impossible to see the color of now, they were narrowed so far.

            “Tell me why.” Draco folded his arms and smiled at her. “As you yourself acknowledge, I surely have the right heritage.”

            “You aren’t initiated.”

            Draco almost smiled again. Yes, this was something he understood. The right language for something like Jourdemayne’s rigid order was grandiose, and he could do that.

            “The war initiated me into pain and suffering,” he said. “Attending Hogwarts initiated me into knowledge that my father wasn’t always right, and that might have been the most painful thing of all. What is human destiny but a series of learning experiences, of engagements, of teaching anew? And within the past year, I have joined a new Corps in the Aurors, and acquired a new partner, and learned things about myself that I cannot share with you, revisions of my past and changings of my past.” He leaned forwards. “Tell me again that I am not experienced enough to know about your Order.”

            Jourdemayne stood a moment, her arms still folded, cradling and hiding the books both at once. Then, all at once, she bowed her head and closed her eyes.

            “You still do not understand,” she whispered. “The names would tell you things that they should not. Not about the blood but the soul of the possessors.”

            Draco nearly snorted. So it was that kind of objection, was it? He should have known it. Jourdemayne’s compatriots had chosen pretentious Latin titles, then, the sort that they believed revealed their “inner nature.” And they believed that their own secrets and possessions were of as much interest to others as they were to them.

            “I don’t care about the people in your Order, unless we see the name of the twisted we’re hunting,” he said. “We believe she might linger in your records. That’s all we want, and the reports we write don’t have to include every detail of the investigation.” He put out his hand, and waited.

            Jourdemayne still considered him with narrowed eyes for a long moment. “You have no idea what you’re asking, what we’ve learned.”

            Draco licked his lips, and held back the acid words that he knew exactly what they had “learned”: nonsense incantations that didn’t work but which they believed came to them from some other world which had a different kind of magic, patterns to meditate on that were indistinguishable from scribbles done by St. Mungo’s patients under repeated memory charms, “secrets” that consisted of Latin words repeated over and over until they blended and changed in their memories. He only looked into her eyes and asked, “Do you want to go back to a life without these notes appearing everywhere, or not?”

            Jourdemayne closed her eyes and moved her mouth in what might have been a prayer. Then she handed the books over.

            Draco winced as he accepted them. They were heavier than he had expected for journals that small, a weight that made his wrists ache. He opened them wondering if they had pages of lead, or gold, an affectation that some of the richer secret Orders had practiced in the past.

            Then his eyes fell on the first page, written in a mixture of twisting characters that he suspected were Jourdemayne’s obscuring spells and ordinary English letters, and the bottom dropped out of his subject.

            Shit. The weight came from the pages and the letters themselves, which were so thick with magic that they looked incised into the page.

            Jourdemayne’s Order was real. They had found something that Draco hadn’t seen before, a dance on the edge of meaning that tantalized his mind even though he wasn’t dazed with incense and chanting and all the other rituals that were meant to bedazzle the minds of initiates at these ceremonies.

            He met Jourdemayne’s eyes, and she looked back at him, so calm that Draco shuddered. He was seeing her as he thought she probably was in her Order, a priestess in the center of her mysteries. He asked, “What did you do?”

            “Draco?” Harry’s worried voice said, somewhere far away. He couldn’t come into the center of the circle. For a while, for the moment, he was not important.

            “We have not done it all yet,” Jourdemayne said. “But yes. This is true magic. I know what you thought we were, and it is understandable. But we are not.” She reached out and touched the cover of the open diary Draco was holding, and he felt it become inexplicably lighter in her hands.

            Draco stared some more at her. Jourdemayne looked back, still as calm as a queen. In the end, he shook his head and began to flip through the pages, looking for some sign of the morning star.

            He found the symbol near the bottom of a page, surrounded by letters that looked like hieroglyphs but that twisted, again, when he tried to look at them. He held stern until he thought they had settled and then began to read, letting his finger lightly trace the lines when he began to lose his place again.

            Yes, there was the name Nancy, but no identifying last name, and no description. It was no wonder that Jourdemayne had forgotten this reference existed, in among all the names of the other people she had studied with.

            And what they had been studying—

            “You can’t do that,” Draco snapped, looking up. “All the Time-Turners are gone.”

            “We can do that,” Jourdemayne said, standing tall, unmoved. “Perhaps not your precious Ministry.”

            “Draco?” Harry moved a step towards him and rested a hand on his shoulder again. “Is there something wrong?”

            Draco, staring at the woman in front of him whose journal had just revealed that her Order had discovered ways to go back in time in stable, sturdy loops, found no response to so grand an understatement.

*

            SP777: Harry has changed his mind a bit about the last few twisted. Alexander wasn’t a killer until the end, and Alto honestly didn’t understand what she was doing. And now, this one seems more frightened than anything. He would feel differently about, say, the blue-eyed twisted.

            Mehla_Seraphim: Well, with Draco’s discovery in this chapter, there’s now another possibility.

            unneeded: Probably not as much as in the Alto case, but they’ll be confronting him more soon.
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