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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 Eight—A Breakage in the Trust

            Harry sat down and closed his eyes. He’d just spent the past half an hour scribbling insults and outrage at Draco—

            Well, I reckon I should call him Malfoy, now, since that seems to be what he wants me to do—

            In his private diary, and now he locked the book with a complex wave of his wand and sent it to land on the mantle where it usually sat. The worst of the blood-boiling anger was out of him, but he felt limp and weary, as he often did when he’d written that much of it down, and he didn’t really want to move.

            Eat? That sounded good, but Harry didn’t think he was up to cooking anything complicated. Waving his wand from the chair towards the kitchen, he pulled a few slices of bread out of their drawer, toasted them with magic, and covered them with generous helpings of butter, then floated them directly to his chair. There was no plate, but he took a certain pleasure in eating through them and dropping crumbs everywhere.

            Malfoy wouldn’t approve.

            Then again, it didn’t seem as though he approved of most things Harry did. Harry rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Was that a good enough reason to do things like eat crumbs in the middle of his drawing room?

In the end, he shrugged and ate them anyway. It was his bloody drawing room. Malfoy didn’t have to come over if he didn’t want to.

            He Vanished the crumbs when he was finished and turned towards his bedroom, where he kept the files that he had brought home for more extended study later. Right now, he wanted to look at what they had on Nancy and compare her to other twisted. She had a symbol, she had a flaw, but she didn’t have companions. He wanted to make sure that there weren’t other cases like that before he dismissed her as different.

            See, Draco? he thought, grimly pleased with himself, as he sat down in front of a pile of folders and notes, and reached out to pull the first of them towards him. I can be methodical, too, when I want, and not everything depends on your way of doing things.

            Maybe it was also childish to talk to someone who couldn’t hear him. But Draco had made it clear that all he wanted was the polite façade of a partnership, the only thing Harry could give someone who insisted on him telling his secrets and then acted disgusted with him when he found out what they were.

            Stop concentrating on him.

            That was the best advice Harry had heard so far from the inside of his skull. He bowed his head over the notes and began to work.

*

            “Your name is Lauren Hale?”

            The woman in front of Draco glanced up at him, and then turned her head back to the vial in front of her, which was filled with crusted grey flakes that Draco recognized as the remains of a failed Interrogation Potion. She made a quick note on parchment before she asked, “Who wants to know?”

            Draco studied her back. She stood tall and straight, confident, in a way that reminded him of Pansy or his mother. Of course, she was pure-blood, like them; she would have the training to permit her to carry that confidence off.

            She had long, straight brown hair, looped up in a tail that would keep it from falling in her face but which also emphasized her cheekbones and chin. Draco thought, in her case, that she might have taken more care not to look so much like a skeleton.

            “My name is Draco Malfoy,” Draco said, and saw the corner of Hale’s eye twitch with recognition. “I’ve come to talk to you about the time that you were partnered with Harry Potter.”

            “Oh, yes, you’re partnered with him now, aren’t you?” Hale asked, not turning a hair and not looking away from the vial. “If you want me to take him back, then I’m afraid that you’re too late. I’ve already made the decision to join Virgil Corps.” They were the group of Aurors, Draco knew, that was called in the most often on Potions-related crimes. “Potter wouldn’t have a place there. His incompetence is ridiculous.”

            Draco bit his teeth against the urge to defend Harry, and said, “No. I’m content enough with him, I suppose. But I want to hear why you stopped being partnered with him. He told me something I can’t believe is true.”

            “That story about how he saved my life?” Hale made a small notation in a column and finally turned around to regard him. “Only because he endangered it first, and showed at the same time what an incompetent Auror he was.”

            “He told me that he’d only saved your life from a trap he set off,” Draco said, and dismissed the several defensive things he could have said, leaning back against her table to return her calm, cool stare. “Is that true?”

            Hale shrugged. “Yes. It was a trap that anyone else—for example, me—could have seen and known not to set off. But Potter has a confidence problem. He thinks he has to demonstrate to anyone and everyone that he has it, that he’s good, because at one point someone said that he couldn’t be because he was the Boy-Who-Lived. And he blundered into the trap. That he saved my life was only right, because he was the reason I was in danger. In that maze with a different partner, nothing like that would have happened.”

            Draco stared at her. She stared back. There was nothing passionate about her gaze, no flush to her face, nothing that suggested she was lying or trying to make herself look good to Harry’s current partner.

            Harry was right. She is cold.

            That was a trait that Draco had often admired in pure-bloods, and had once thought essential for the kind of woman he would take as a bride. But faced with it now, he had to fight to keep from stiffening in revulsion.

            “Was that the only thing you wanted to ask me?” Hale asked, and glanced back at her research with something like yearning in her eyes, the kind that at least reassured Draco she was a real person instead of an animated statue. “The outcome of a case depends on what I can discover about this potion, and how it went wrong.”

            Draco took one look at the vial, and sniffed. “They obviously added too much barley sugar. You can’t tell that from a glance?”

            Hale went still, although most people wouldn’t have noticed; it was only that she kept her head turned in the wrong direction for a moment too long, and then faced Draco with her best effort at a smile flickering on her lips. “I’m still in the middle of my tests for Virgil Corps,” she said pleasantly. “So, no, I could do with some more instruction.”

            She said nothing, but Draco felt the invitation lying in the air between them. If he offered that instruction, then it was possible that she would tell him more about Harry and the reasons she had ended their partnership.

            Draco felt a moment’s great temptation. That would be easy, wouldn’t it? A simple trade. He knew so much about potions that teaching her would be a simple effort and not take much time, and she had what he dearly wanted. And she was a pure-blood, too, from the same background as him. There would be none of the silly negotiation or emotional nonsense that he might have expected from a Gryffindor.

            He wanted to know more about Harry’s past. He wanted to know why Harry hadn’t fought the termination of the partnership, how ashamed he had been—although Hale didn’t look as if she was the best at observation of emotions—whether he had fought with Hale on some of the same terms that he and Draco used, and so on.

            But it was Harry’s voice that Draco wanted to hear saying those facts, and Harry’s lips he wanted to see shaping them, and Harry’s eyes he wanted to see blink or darken or close or glance away.

            “Too much barley sugar,” he repeated, and turned away. Again, there was a long moment of cold silence behind him before Hale spoke to his back, in a voice so flat and chilled it would have done for one of the Muggle inventions that Draco had heard of, called robots.

            “You should watch out for Potter. He might be nice to you as long as he likes you, but he can set up barriers like no one’s business the minute he stops deciding that you’re worthy of being partnered with him.”

            Draco turned around and opened his mouth to dispute that, but Hale was facing her instruments again, her frown faint but visible as she studied the notes she had made and then the vial. He would look ridiculous opposing her when she already seemed to have put him out of her mind, even if it was only seemed.

            So Draco swallowed his pride and took the long way back to the Socrates office, considering as he went what he should do.

            He had no proof that Harry’s parting from Hale had been any more complicated or embarrassing than the story Harry had related. He had no proof that his parents’ dark hints were true.

            But still he wanted both if he could have them: Harry and his inheritance. He decided that perhaps the time was right for firecalling his parents and giving them a mixture of truth and lies that they would swallow eagerly.

            Not pure truth. He had conceded enough to many people in his life, including them.

*

            Harry leaned back with a sigh. No, most of the files on the twisted that the Socrates office had accumulated over the years—including old ones on cases that occurred before the Ministry came up with the classification of twisted, but put in that category once it was invented—included both companions and symbol. Some of the recent ones, like the Alto case, included only companions, no symbol.

            Only one or two had symbol and no companions, and those were the results of muddled research, said later notes appended to the files, and twisted who had powers that worked on the minds of their victims. One could not be sure that the original observations were correct.

            Harry leaned back and shut his eyes, trying to remember if he had seen anything around or with Nancy. But that was the problem. He couldn’t remember anything of his encounter with her, only wandering to find Draco and then waking up at the table in the interrogation room with the scribbled notes in front of him.

            He sighed and shook his head. All right. Try something else. Try to think of anything unusual that happened to you in the days around or before that. Nancy could have been haunting the Department before her meeting with you. If Draco’s right, she could make you forget something else. Any other strange headaches that you can remember? Any times when you seemed to lose time, and wake up in a place you hadn’t expected to be?

            Of course, his mind went immediately back to the night that mysterious tugging had pulled him out of bed and to Grimmauld Place to look at the tapestry. And of course, he hadn’t seen anything wrong with it.

            That made Harry frown. That couldn’t have anything to do with Nancy, could it? Because she couldn’t affect written things, and the tapestry would have preserved whatever damage she had inscribed on it, including the morning star symbol, even if she had managed to make Harry forget seeing her. Besides, why did she have to get rid of the memory of herself in the Ministry later, after she talked to him, if she had already erased his memory of her in the Black house?

            Then Harry’s eyes popped open.

            Writing stays the same, but it doesn’t mean that we have the memory of what it means, even seeing it right in front of us. She couldn’t erase the ritual diaries that Jourdemayne wrote, but she did erase her memory of working with her, and what her name meant.

            In rising excitement, Harry walked out his front door and to the nearest Apparition point. He could Apparate to the inside of the house if he wanted to, as he had the night the tugging started, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to go over the house pace by pace and look for clues.

            Even if, as yet, he had no idea what he expected to find.

            He spun on the spot and Apparated.

*

            “This call is most unexpected, Draco.” He had reached only his mother from his home Floo, but she was smiling at him in the same smooth manner that Hale had used, that Pansy would use, that so many pure-bloods would. It was different from the way that Harry smiled, violently different, as if he didn’t consider the expression merely a means of hiding his emotions.

            Draco did not shake his head to clear the memory out, but only because he didn’t want his mother to think that he was trying to refuse her claim. “Yes,” he said. “But I have learned more about Lauren Hale, both from her and from Potter.” Calling him Harry, he thought, would only prejudice his case at the moment.

            “Ah?” His mother’s eyes had brightened, like the heads of nails catching the light.

            “What he did was stupid,” Draco acknowledged. “But I do not know that it should be enough to make me give him up, particularly when I have not come to the same sort of disgrace while partnered with him.”

            His mother’s face went smooth and cold, the brightness leaving her eyes. “How I wish that your father was here to discuss this with you,” she murmured. “I, of course, have little understanding of the precise laws that govern the Malfoy inheritance.”

            Draco stared at her. His mother stared back, so small, so contained, so calm, that Draco began to wonder if he shouldn’t have firecalled at all. They had told him that there was something damaging about what Hale could say, and so far, Draco had heard nothing that would make him think less of Harry. Perhaps there was something else, something that Harry had reason to hide and Hale would never discuss with him without payment—

            Then Draco shook his head impatiently. He was being stupid, thinking that there was more there without the hint of more there.

            He was falling into the trap that his parents had always set for him and which he had come to dread: thinking that their perceptions were the definition of the world, and if they seemed wrong, it was the world’s fault for not living up to them.

            “No,” he said, loudly enough that his mother’s eyebrows twitched. “I know that you know as much about the inheritance as he does, Mother. You would have made yourself familiar with all the documents before you married him, after all, just in case you had a child that was faulty somehow.”

            “The House of Black does not produce such children,” his mother said, as gentle as snowfall. “And of course your father knows more about it, Draco, since he was born into this family. If you will wait a short time, then perhaps—”

            “I should have known,” Draco told her, and kept his voice low enough that she might miss the cutting edge to it, although she was a fool if she did. “I should have fucking known.”

            “I will thank you not to use such language to me.” His mother laid her hand on her chest, underneath the thick necklace of silver that coiled around her throat. Draco couldn’t remember her wearing such a thing before his parents had exiled him, but the time had passed when he could have asked her about it.

            “I’ll tell you whatever I want,” Draco said grimly. “Because that’s the way you decided to handle me, wasn’t it? You decided that you could tell me whatever you wanted, and I would obey you and trot off like a good little puppet. You never cared about letting me remain an Auror. The only thing you cared about was separating me from Harry. Because still, after all these years, the grudge you bear against him is the more important thing. Though Merlin knows where the grudge comes from, since he testified to let us all remain as free of Azkaban as possible. And you lied for him, Mother.”

            Narcissa looked at him with great liquid eyes and said, “You are overwrought, Draco, and prone to not making much sense when you are, which often happens. I will firecall you again when your father comes home. Perhaps then you will understand that—”

            “I’ll understand whatever I fucking well want to,” Draco said, in a low, violent voice, ignoring his mother’s faint sound of protest. “You turned against Harry after the war. You decided that he shouldn’t have—I don’t know what. I reckon him killing the Dark Lord was so great an offense that it overrode all the things he did for you. So you decided that you hated him, and the Aurors, and the elements of the Ministry you think mistreated you.”

            “We did not want you to become one of those who have used us shamefully,” Narcissa said, not moving a muscle in her face other than the ones on her jaw.

            Draco shook his head. “I could have accepted your dislike of Aurors, and the way that you cast me off. I did for seven years, after all.” He leaned forwards and stared into his mother’s eyes. “But now I want a straight answer. What was the point of telling me about Hale? What was the point of telling me that I could have my Auror career as long as I gave up having Harry as a partner? I want the truth. The truth, Mother,” he added, when Narcissa’s lips pursed.

            Narcissa sighed as if she didn’t understand why Draco would persist in this, but answered. “We know that you will go nowhere as long as you stay with him, Draco. Professionally, or—personally.”

            He had been meant to notice the hesitation before that last word, Draco knew, but he could not keep himself from asking. “What does that mean?”

            “We want you to marry the right kind of woman,” Narcissa said, staring straight into his eyes, her face not more neutral than her voice. “We heard the rumors that you were growing closer to Potter, the kind of closeness that we could not condone or desire if we condoned or desired grandchildren. We want you to marry someone who can give us those things.”

            “As always, then,” Draco said, speaking before he thought, because the words piled up on his tongue and tumbled out of his mouth like snow down a hillside. “You want to have control of my life, and that overrides anything I want personally.”

            “You must consider, Draco,” his mother said. She had her hands clasped in front of her now, and a severe look on her face that had usually been followed by a scolding for not caring about the flowers or the house-elves. “Do you want a man who cannot give you a family? Do you want to pass your years in loneliness until your father and I die and someone else inherits the estate, someone suitable? I am persuaded that neither option is truly what you desire. Sometimes we must give up something to gain something. Your father and I are reconciled to your Auror career. You must be reconciled to our choice of your wife.”

            Draco shut his eyes and stood there, his heart pounding, in exquisite silence.

            It always came down to this, with his parents, or so it seemed as his mind sped back over the years. The subtle threats modulating into bargains and into treatises on the proper way to behave. The faux courtesy and sorrow when they had to impose limits on him. The praise that was always measured and tempered with scolding, so that he knew that he could never entirely please them. The constant, constant, constant refrain of “not-good-enough.”

            Nothing would change. If they had decided they could tolerate his career, then they would only put more pressure somewhere else. Draco knew he would be allowed to reject, once or twice, the woman they had decided on for his wife, but they would win in the end. They would tighten the chains, hint at the loss of his inheritance again, remind him that they had been greatly tolerant in accepting him back even though he had done nothing wrong.

            And so he would come to believe that he had, and in the end, he would lose what he had gained.

            Because he had gained something in the years that he had spent by himself. Strange how long it had taken him to see it. The ability to think, the ability to reason, the determination to keep going even when someone in the Ministry told him off for being a Malfoy or the memory of his parents intruded.

            He would give up Harry if he went back to them, but he would also give up other things, not a good deal less precious.

            “The answer is no,” he said, opening his eyes and smiling at his mother. “Tell that to Father when you see him. The offer is tempting, and poisoned. I would never get back what I would give up to you.”

            His mother stared at him for long moments, her eyes so set and cold that they made Draco shiver. Then she nodded once and turned her head, and the fire went out, ceasing to exist.

            Draco stood there, rubbing his hands, before he took his wand out and cast Incendio. He suspected that was not the last he would hear of this, not if his parents had been desperate enough about their lack of an heir to approach him in the first place.

            But this time, he was forearmed.

*

            Harry knelt down in the air—he had cast a spell that would let him hover, with some difficulty, a few inches off the floor—and examined the thick dust outside the tapestry room. He cursed a moment later and straightened up, staring at the walls and wondering if the morning star symbol could be there.

            So far, he had found nothing in his investigation through Grimmauld Place, no sign that Nancy had been there or ever would be. Harry shook his head and stepped into the tapestry room itself, which he had left for last. There was always the chance that she had worked the magic on him somewhere else, and if so, the symbol would have appeared in a different room, too.

            There was the tapestry, looking like always. Harry floated near it and studied the names he knew on it. Sirius. Narcissa Malfoy. Draco. The usual ones. He still saw nothing that he had forgotten, that Nancy had made him forget, sufficient for the ancestral Black magic to drag him out of bed and plant him in front of this thing.

            Well, then maybe the magic pulled you here for some other reason, and it has nothing to do with Nancy at all.

            Harry sighed. That was possible. When he was in the middle of a case, he had a bad habit to connect everything he looked at to the case, and half the time, it didn’t relate. He started to turn away from the tapestry.

            There was a flash of light behind his eyes, and a crumpling sensation in his head.

            Harry whirled back to the tapestry. He had no idea why Nancy would need to pull that memory-altering trick again, since he couldn’t see her even if she was here, but it must be important, it must have something to do with the tapestry after all!

            But once again, it was normal when he stared at it. Sirius and Narcissa Malfoy, the only Blacks he would have reason to be familiar with. He blew out a deeply disgusted breath and walked downstairs.

            He would have to go over the case notes again, and then talk with Macgeorge and Rudie, maybe even Warren and Jenkins, about what to do next. For a twisted this dangerous, he sensed that he would need the help of all the other Socrates Aurors.

*

            unneeded: Well, Harry would still like to be with Draco, but there might be a problem with that…

            SP777: Look at you, predicting the title of this chapter like that!

            If Draco had his way, they would have indeed hauled Jourdemayne’s ass downtown.
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