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Writ on Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3959 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Seven—Answers In Time

            “You will tell us more.”

            “No.”

            Harry leaned back in the corner of Jourdemayne’s home and scratched at the beads of sweat that had popped up beneath his fringe, and stayed that way ever since he began to realize the implications of the time travel that Jourdemayne’s Order had discovered. Jourdemayne herself sat in front of him, at the table in the dining room, with her hands folded on it and a simple, severe smile on her face. It was the same smile she had worn since they first began to question her, or, in the state Harry had been reduced to, ordering her to tell them what she knew.

            He couldn’t help thinking that questioning her in the surroundings of the Ministry might have been more productive, but she hadn’t done anything wrong. To bring her in, they would have to charge her with something, and that would reveal not only secrets that she had trusted them with, but secrets that the Ministry might misuse.

            Harry didn’t trust his superiors to order lunch for a dozen Aurors the right way, never mind with the secrets of time travel.

            “If you won’t explain when you worked with Nancy or how you think you could have forgotten her when her name is everywhere in your ritual diaries,” Draco said, from above and behind Harry, “then will you explain why your Potions lab looks as though a whirlwind has been through it?”

            Harry glanced up, a warning dying on his tongue. Draco had agreed to leave the interrogation, or the pleading, or whatever it had become by now, up to Harry while he explored the rest of the house, and he had mentioned how neatly the lab had been cleaned. But seeing the expression on his face, carefully blanked the moment Jourdemayne turned around and stared at him, told Harry to keep silent.

            “I have no idea what you mean,” Jourdemayne said at last, after a pause long enough to eat an apple in. “I have not worked much in my lab lately. I apologize for the dust.”

            Harry watched the stiff way she held her head to the side, the way her fingers had curled up under her on the table, and hid a triumphant smile.

            “It wasn’t the dust,” Draco said, and paced towards the table, moving like the stalking predator that Harry sometimes dreamed of him as. Of course, in those dreams he wasn’t entirely stalking witnesses. Harry cleared his throat and hoped that both Draco and Jourdemayne were too involved in their own confrontation to notice the flaring red of his face. Luckily, it seemed so. “It was the degree.”

            “The degree.” Jourdemayne managed simultaneously to make it sound as though she had never heard of the word and as though it was Draco’s fault. Harry was coming to realize that they had underestimated her, as much for her ridiculous mannerisms and fear when they first met her as anything else. “I have no idea what you mean.”

            “Here,” Draco said softly, and stretched out his wand above the table, ignoring the way that Jourdemayne started and crowded against the back of her chair. “Let me show you.”

            Harry leaned forwards instead, because he was always eager to see what Draco might teach him. Draco swept his wand backwards and forwards, murmuring something that might have been an incantation or only windy words. Harry had learned that Draco kept some of his best spells nonverbal so that others couldn’t steal them.

            The air above the table wavered and clouded over, like a mirror that someone had splashed milk on. Then an image of Jourdemayne’s Potions lab formed. Harry caught his breath. It really was perfect; he’d gone to see the lab himself after the information they found in the ritual diaries, at Draco’s insistence, and he knew that he couldn’t have recreated an image like this.

            Draco turned the image from side to side, pointing with one finger and speaking like a fussy professor, just in case Jourdemayne, who by now was white-knuckled against the back of the chair, didn’t quite get it. “See, here and here? The degree is the angle that you can see this from the door. The door is the point of reference, it’s not visible without that. Congratulations on a thorough cleaning of your brewing area, Madam Jourdemayne.” He turned his head so that his teeth showed, and his eyes were full of something like wild lightning. “But not thorough enough for another Potions master to ignore.”

            Jourdemayne shook her head slightly, her eyes still fastened to the image. “I’m not a Potions master. Not if you are one.”

            “This apparition?” Draco wagged one finger at the image, accompanied, Harry was sure, by a wand movement that neither he nor Jourdemayne saw, and it vanished. “Play, Madam Jourdemayne. Only play.” He bent down towards her. “Either claim right now that the clearing of the lab had something to do with the secrets of your Order, or else explain to us what it was.”

            “I don’t have to answer your questions!” Jourdemayne snapped, rising to her feet. “The Aurors cannot command cooperation from anyone, even those with a known crime.”

            “You have an unknown crime,” Draco said, never once unfolding from his lazy posture. “Thanks to our twisted’s powers that play with memory, and your own Order’s games with time, it could be anything. I wish you to think carefully whether this is something you can confess to us, and then explain your decision to us when we return.” He turned and nodded at Harry. Harry blinked but hurriedly started to turn, nodding once at Jourdemayne. He was a bit surprised that she hadn’t tried to lie and claim the lab had something to do with her Order, but then, perhaps she was against lying when it came to them, in case it weakened the ritual magic or something.

            “Wait.”

            Harry saw the wolf shark’s smile Draco wore, but there was no trace of it when he turned around and bowed gravely to Jourdemayne. “Yes?”

            “If I said it was for a good reason, the clearing of the lab,” Jourdemayne said, her voice slow as though she was speaking each individual word for the first time in her life, “would you accept that? Would you take me at, at my word?”

            Draco turned around as though he was considering every individual movement the way Jourdemayne had considered her words, and then slowly nodded. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps. It would depend on what the reason for the clearing was, of course.”

            Harry reached out and slid a hand down behind Draco’s back, not quite touching the spine but keeping it hovering there. He thought actually touching him would be an obvious signal to Jourdemayne. In any case, the smaller one worked. Draco fell silent and waited to see what Harry would do, if only out of astonishment, Harry thought.

            “She wants to tell us that it was for a good reason, and nothing else,” Harry said, his eyes locked on Jourdemayne’s. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That you want us to be able to trust you that far?”

            Jourdemayne licked her lips, swallowed, nodded. “You have no idea how much this would help me,” she said. “I need—I need time. The same thing that is involved in this case from the beginning, from the other side. Please, help me.”

            Harry hesitated and looked at Draco. His face was blank, his arms folded and his head lowered as if he had thought of something distressing. But he said nothing. He seemed to leave it up to Harry to make the decision, since he was the one who had started this conversation in the first place.

            Very well. Harry faced Jourdemayne and nodded. “You need to consider one thing before we agree,” he said.

            Jourdemayne looked up with her face shining. “Just one?”

            Harry gritted his teeth and reminded himself not to shout. There might be a real reason that Jourdemayne was acting as if she needed a reprieve, rather than simple shame, and if he shouted at her, any information she might have to give them could be taken from them forever. In the end, solving this case was more important than getting his own way.

            Besides, he thought that if Jourdemayne was capable of seriousness when she was talking about her Order and their rituals, she might be capable of it elsewhere.

            “Consider that our lives might be in danger,” he told her gently. “And other peoples’ lives, if, as she’s done to us and to you, this twisted erases their memories of her, or travels through time around them. There have been documented cases of people playing with time hurting not only themselves but also others who were in the area when the spell was cast. I understand why you want to keep your secrets. But by keeping the identity of this twisted secret, you might be hurting other people who’ve done nothing to harm you.”

            Jourdemayne’s lips quivered for a second. Then she clamped them shut and said fiercely, “I won’t—I would never hurt someone like that.”

            “Not even to protect your Order?” Draco’s question slid across and insinuated itself into the air.

            Jourdemayne gave him a steady, anguished look, and then faced Harry. “Really,” she insisted. “Please believe me. I would never do anything to hurt others. I would have refused to study time travel if I thought we couldn’t control it.”

            Harry bit his tongue on the desire to say that everyone who studied time travel thought that. He leaned back against the wall and nodded. “Then we’ll accept your word for now,” he said. “We’ll come back in a week—”

            Draco hissed.

            “In three days,” Harry corrected himself, “and we’ll await your answer then.” He gave her a little bow and turned away, walking towards the front door. He counted six heartbeats before Draco followed him.

            Draco waited to say anything until they were outside the house and walking towards the Apparition point, which was beyond the edge of Jourdemayne’s warded garden. Then he murmured, in the idle way that he had of talking about something that had truly displeased him, “We’ll accept your word for now?”

            Harry held up his hand; he didn’t think Jourdemayne was ordinarily the kind paranoid enough to put up wards that spied on what people in her garden were saying, but she might have become so since those notes started appearing. Draco blinked, and then looked as if he wished he would have thought of that himself. He kept silent until they were out of the garden, at least, and then Harry turned to him and nodded.

            “Did you see any alternative with her?” he asked. “She wasn’t going to tell us. Maybe she does have a good reason, and in that case, we’ve given her time to figure out another way of handling it. Maybe she’s afraid, and she needs time to gather her courage. And maybe it has to do with her Order, and if that’s true, we already know she won’t talk. It costs us nothing to wait a little and see if she’ll confess the truth of her own free will.”

            “Except possibly our lives, if her information is vital,” Draco said, his eyes narrowed. “Except possibly the lives of other people this twisted might kill.”

            “She hasn’t killed anyone yet,” Harry began.

            “How do we know?” Draco demanded with quiet intensity, leaning forwards. “If she can manage to make people forget that she exists, she could commit murder right in front of them, and they wouldn’t know what happened. And something else worries me, Harry. We have no evidence that her powers only extend to herself.”

            Harry stared at him. “What do you mean?”

            “I mean, that she might be able to make us forget that other people existed, too. What happens if there are murder victims lying out there, unavenged, unknown? What if there are people who think someone known to them simply disappeared, and every day they’re stepping over the dead body?”

            Harry said nothing for a moment. Then he reached out and took Draco’s arm. Draco let him do it, but he stepped away from Harry the moment they arrived at the Apparition point outside the Ministry and resumed his stare.

            “You come up with some of the most disquieting ideas I’ve ever heard,” Harry muttered, scrubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. “I—I don’t know, Draco. It might be true. But so far, we don’t have any evidence that it is.”

            “Of course,” Draco said smoothly, and walked into the Ministry. Harry followed him, but Draco didn’t speak again until they were at the doors of the Socrates office, and he was pushing them open, smiling back at Harry over his shoulder with teeth a fox would envy. “By all means, let us have evidence.”

            “I don’t understand you,” Harry snapped, and shut the doors behind them. No one else was in the office right now, thank Merlin. Harry wasn’t actually shy about discussing their cases in front of the other Aurors—they’d had to have Warren and Jenkins help them on the Larkin case—but he had had enough of the others hearing them arguing. “I only want to make sure that we know what this twisted is doing, as much as we can. It would be awful if she is murdering people and disposing of them like that, but we don’t know yet. She could be creeping from house to house of these Order members and trying to find shelter with them, the way she’s tried with Jourdemayne. She could really have been a prisoner of the blue-eyed twisted, the way she told me she was, and now he’s captured her again. We can’t say anything one way or the other until we have some proof in front of us.”

            Draco turned around to face him, hands clasped in front of him as though he was going to seize a weapon and use it to dig a hole through Harry’s body. “I am referring to the twisted, of course, and the way that you seem inclined to spare their lives even when they’re as profoundly dangerous as this Nancy is. But I am also referring to the way that you let Jourdemayne walk away from us.”

            “Pressing her was the wrong thing to do right now,” Harry insisted, leaning back against his desk and doing his best to relax his lungs with each breath. “I know that. I’m certain of it. All the instincts that I’ve developed when I interview witnesses were speaking up. She might tell us something later. Not now.”

            Draco bowed his head, eyes gleaming like those of a bull about to charge. “Your instincts? Or the same kind of morality that encourages you to forgive the twisted and spare them? You would spare everyone, it seems, Harry, except me and yourself.”

            Harry sighed and wondered how he could make Draco see the truth. In the end, there was no way, he thought, not if Draco was determined not to believe him, just as there was no way to force Jourdemayne to tell the truth right now when she didn’t want to.

            “If you think that,” he said, “then I can’t clear myself of the charge.”

            “Yes, you can,” Draco said, and stepped forwards.

            “Do you want me to remove myself from the case?” Harry asked in bewilderment, since he could think of no other way that he could do something Draco wanted. “I’ll go and ask Okazes for that if you want, but he refused to let me work by myself for long. I don’t think he’d want you to go without a partner, either.”

            Draco stood there, his breath coming out fast enough to make him sound sick. Harry met his eyes and wondered what the fuck was going to happen next.

*

            Draco wanted…

            Part of him wanted to wait. Wanted to trust Harry, wanted to believe that Jourdemayne would confess the truth to them because of Harry’s tactics and that they would catch the twisted as partners, the way they always had.

            But part of him wanted more. Wanted some assurance that Harry cared most about him, more than about his terrible morality and more than for the comfort of witnesses like Jourdemayne. The way Harry had held her hand and whispered to her, and the way that he spoke as though he thought Draco wanted to kill innocents when they hunted down the twisted, wasn’t terribly convincing on that front.

            He wanted to go ahead and use the weapon that he had promised himself to hold in reserve.

            “Prove that you trust me most of all,” he said, aware of the world spinning around him and Harry watching him with wondering eyes. Well, he could go on wondering all he liked. What Draco was most interested in was his honesty. “So far, the secrets you’ve told me have been under duress. You told me about Lionel because you wanted to save my life and sanity from Alto. You told me about other cases because Mind-Healer Estillo recommended that you do so. I want you to talk about something else.”

            Harry wrinkled his forehead. “If I tell you about them just because you’re asking, then that’s still under duress, isn’t it? Or not of my own free will?”

            “No.” Draco shook his head. His mouth felt charged with lightning, he was so eager. “I will promise to think of it as your own free will. But you have to tell me.”

            Harry, eyes bright and cautious, finally nodded. “All right.”

            “Who was Lauren Hale to you?”

            Harry flinched back, and then hissed like one of the snakes he used to speak to at Hogwarts. Draco, his heart pounding crazily, met his eyes and thought with less triumph than he had expected to be able to feel, So my parents were right.

            “I won’t ask where you heard about that,” Harry whispered, “because plenty of people know that we were partnered, and any one of them could have told you. But I did think better of you than that you would ask about it.”

            Draco shook his head. There was something pressing against the back of his mind that he thought would turn into regret if he let it, but only if he let it. He had asked the question, and he thought he had a right to know.

            “I’m your partner,” he said. “I had the right to know about Lionel, since it was a factor that influenced your working with me. And now? Lauren? Or should I call her Hale, since you hardly seem disposed to call her by her first name?”

            Harry stood there, gazing steadily at him. Then he shook his head. “Why bother? The same person who mentioned the name to you can tell you the story, and what you’ll get from them was essentially true. There was never anything hidden between us, the way that there was with me and Lionel.”

            Draco frowned. “Come, come, Harry. You said that you would tell me this freely. You asked. I told you what you could do to get me to trust you again. And now you’re refusing?”

            “I’m asking you to withdraw the question, rather.” Harry seemed to stand taller, though really, Draco didn’t see what right he had to do that. He was the one who was making proposals that could put their lives in danger, including leaving Jourdemayne free not to tell the truth. “Please, Draco. If you—if you care about me, as a partner and more, then pull it away, and let me tell you something else.” He spoke in a low voice, and caught Draco’s eye with a bright desperation that made him look like a frightened bird for a moment. “I would appreciate it if you would.”

            Draco bit his lip, and felt the trickle of blood down the back of his throat. He had once lived for moments like these, with someone else at his mercy. He’d had few of them since the war, and even fewer once he entered Auror training and met people who thought he was as far beneath them for his name as others thought he was above them.

            “No,” he said. “I have some reason to distrust you lately, Harry, with you putting the supposed innocence of imaginary twisted above my life. I want to know what happened between you and Hale, and I want to know now. Was it another crush? One that she had on you, this time, instead of the other way around?”

            Harry seemed to freeze from the inside out. He nodded deliberately and put his hands down on the desk in front of him, but Draco didn’t think he was nodding in answer to Draco’s question. The pressure of the possible regret became stronger. He ignored it and continued to watch Harry.

            “Not a crush,” Harry said quietly. “Ron had decided to quit the Aurors, and I was moping around and feeling sorry for myself. I would have preferred to stay on desk duty than be assigned another partner, right then. But it’s always suited the Ministry’s interests to have me working in the field if I was going to work for them at all. To show the public that the Chosen One is bravely defending them and all that. So they partnered me with Hale.

            “She’s not a bad Auror. She’s not a bad person. But she’s cold pure-blood. The kind of haughty person that Macgeorge is, except even less relatable. She let me know that she despised me for my mother and considered that my arrests and even my exploits during the war were exaggerated.

            “I went overboard trying to prove myself to her, because she goaded me and because I wanted my partner to trust me enough to save my life if we got into a dangerous situation. On one of the cases, something—went wrong. I nearly killed her. It was accidentally, but she decided it was on purpose, and she complained. After that, they yanked me away from her and partnered me with Lionel.”

            “Not so easily,” Draco murmured, quietly, but loud enough, he hoped, to silence the clanging alarm bells in his own head. “I want to know, Potter. What happened?”

            “That was what she called me, too,” Harry said distantly. “Potter. In exactly that tone of voice.

            “We were hunting a Dreamless Sleep addict who’d started murdering his suppliers with the Killing Curse. He set up a maze, of sorts, and filled it with traps. Lauren disarmed the first two of them and then mentioned that I was being useless. I went ahead of her, determined to spring the next one and show her that I could disarm it before it injured either of us. It sprang before I was ready, and a poisoned arrow went flying at her head. I stopped it with a Shield Charm, but it was a near thing. She blamed me for it.”

            He glanced into Draco’s eyes. “And now that you know, Malfoy, I reckon we can move on, and that’s the end of it. I’ll go report to Okazes on Jourdemayne’s reluctance, so that he’ll understand our not pulling her in today is entirely at my insistence.” He turned and walked away with stiff strides in the direction of the door.

            “Wait,” Draco thought to say, after a long moment of silent wonder that Harry was calling him by his last name.

            “No,” Harry replied, and stepped out into the corridor with a quiet but final click.

            It left Draco feeling that he had lost something, and unsure exactly what.

*

            unneeded: You jinxed the argument factor!

            But yes, at the moment Harry and Draco don’t really know what they need to do, or what the twisted’s power is.

            SP777: Even romantic intrigue? Because I think this chapter is disappointing on other fronts.
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