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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 Nine—Watcher in Oblivion

            “Nasty day for headaches.”

            Harry blinked and glanced up. Macgeorge had come in early, just a few minutes after he had, and stood rubbing her temple in front of her desk. Harry knew that she often spoke scornfully to him, but he decided to risk an overture now, since it might be the same thing that had been bothering him. “Like a crumpling sensation behind your eyes?” he asked. “And a sort of flash of light?”

            Macgeorge turned and stared at him, a less-than-flattering gape on her face. Or maybe I should consider it flattering, Harry thought wryly, given the sheer number of things that she might say to me instead of doing that.

            “Yes,” Macgeorge whispered. “Potter, do you know what’s causing it? I don’t understand. Rudie said that she’d experienced something like it, too, but I don’t know what we could have eaten. We never share meals together, and we’ve done separate research and interviews for the last few days, too.”

            Harry hesitated. Then he decided he could trust her this far. At least the Aurors in Socrates Corps would have each other’s backs about the strange and disturbing cases they handled, and from some of the encounters Macgeorge had described, she wouldn’t disbelieve in one specific twisted’s powers, either.

            “Here,” he said, and pushed the notes he had been making about Nancy that morning across the desk to her.

            Macgeorge read them with her head cocked to the side and a frown forming on her face. Harry could practically see the objections forming along with it, so he contented himself with turning off to the side and casting spells to conjure more sugar into his tea. For some reason, he felt the need of that this morning.

            “A twisted who can travel in time, and perhaps make people forget her,” Macgeorge muttered when that was done. “Well. But why would she need to make us forget her? You’re the Auror working on the case.”

            Harry shrugged and pulled the file back to him. “I don’t know. But I actually think that her primary flaw is the power she has over memory. Studying time travel could have been something that particular Order was doing and that she was involved in, not something related to her magic.”

            “Hmmph. Maybe,” Macgeorge said, and seated herself on the edge of her desk, swinging her legs. Harry raised his eyebrows—he rarely saw her so informal—and then wondered if he should because she might take it the wrong way, but luckily, she didn’t look up. “Do you know how you’re going to capture her?”

            Harry grimaced and shook his head. “I have to go back and talk to Jourdemayne first. With time, she might have thought of something else that she’ll feel comfortable telling me. But after that, if it turns out that she really is as formidable as I think she is, it would be nice to have some backup.” He eyed Macgeorge expectantly.

            She gave him a sharp-toothed smile. “Working as the only Socrates Auror without a partner must get lonely sometimes, huh?”

            Harry shrugged. He had never really wanted another partner after Lionel, and for once he had used his fame to his advantage, convincing the Ministry that he didn’t need one. But he had to admit, sometimes it would be nice to have someone else there who could cast the curse at the escaping suspect’s back, or interview a witness in a different style than the one Harry used, or just discuss ideas with him.

            Macgeorge nodded. “Rudie’s out on that research expedition, as I said, but I personally don’t think this case will come out to anything at all. There are too many contradictions in the witnesses’ stories.”

            “That in itself can be a sign of a twisted,” Harry quoted grandly, from the files that every Socrates Auror was given on joining the Corps.

            “Not when two of them admit to being drunk and one of them also thinks he saw a blue winged unicorn the same night,” Macgeorge said flatly. “Only sometimes.” She grinned at Harry again. “Let me know if you still need help this afternoon.”

            Harry rose and tapped the file against his forehead. “Aye aye, madam. The interview with Jourdemayne is the only thing that should really occupy my time today, and one way or the other, I ought to be back by noon.”

*

            Draco stood in the middle of the Socrates office with his heart beating like a cold drum in his ears, and stared back and forth from Harry to Macgeorge. He didn’t think they were ignoring him. They were unseeing him. They looked past him. They didn’t turn their bodies to avoid him; they simply didn’t walk through the space where he stood. And from the words they exchanged, they seemed to think that Harry had been without a partner since he joined this particular Corps.

            Nancy had been at them.

            Of course, Draco could see why she might have wanted to erase his memory from Harry’s mind. Destroy the effectiveness of the Auror team hunting her, the ones who had managed to come up with the best conclusions about her and her powers so far, and she might never be captured. And it made as much sense to erase his memory from Harry’s mind as it did to erase Harry’s from his.

            But why go after Macgeorge, and Rudie, and likely the other Aurors they shared the office with, Warren and Jenkins? Draco shook his head. Unless Nancy was simply covering the bases by making sure that no one else would ask Harry where his partner was, although one would think that leaving Harry to answer awkward questions would destroy his effectiveness, as well.

            I don’t know yet, Draco thought, and then turned for the door. But there’s someone else who might be able to tell me, someone who remembers me, and who I have to move fast to get to before Nancy reaches.

*

            Harry had his head buried in his files as he walked down the main Ministry corridor, usually something that other people were able to see in time and avoid. Sometimes he felt that he’d taken Hermione’s lessons too much to heart when he became part of the Ministry, he thought, shaking his head. There was such a thing as too much reading and studying, and he must be approaching saturation point.

            But this morning, someone didn’t avoid him. Harry collided with a solid form in the sort of slippery robes that Healers wore, and stepped back with a gasp, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured, ducking his head and feeling his cheeks burn. “I could have watched where I was going.”

            The woman, who looked vaguely familiar and wore the robes of a Mind-Healer, smiled at him, but didn’t walk away immediately, the way that Harry had assumed she would. Instead, she laid a hand on his arm and said, “It’s been a long time since you’ve come by for an appointment, Auror Potter. Did you want to start making them to see me without Auror Malfoy again? I can understand the impulse, but would advise against it.”

            Harry stared at her with his mouth open. “Lucius Malfoy is an Auror?” he asked, dazed. “And you think that he wants to have appointments with me, for some reason?”

            The Mind-Healer blinked and stared in turn, although she didn’t let her mouth fall open. Harry became aware of how his jaw was dangling and shut it in embarrassment, shaking his head. But that still didn’t make her words make any more sense.

            Shit, if Malfoy can be accepted into Auror training now, then they really are taking anyone they can get their hands on. I reckon Ron will be happy to hear that, though. It had partially been Ron’s conviction that the Ministry was all corrupt that had resulted in him quitting the Aurors.

            And subjecting me to a series of piss-poor partners. Well, all right, two of them. And I can’t call Lionel’s work piss-poor, just his ending. Harry swallowed down the lump of emotion that the thought of Lionel’s death always brought to his throat, and wondered if someone had told the Mind-Healer to talk to him about that.

            He was just framing a polite denial and defense of his mental health when the Mind-Healer said, “I meant Draco Malfoy. Auror Draco Malfoy. Your partner. Did you have a quarrel?”

            Harry blinked some more. He tried to recall if he’d ever heard of anyone else named Malfoy besides Lucius and Narcissa, but he didn’t think so. He knew that Lucius had been an only child and so had his father, which would mean precious few cousins or opportunities for other people to have the name, and of course Lucius and his wife had never had any children.

            “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, as gently and as courteously as he could. Perhaps the Mind-Healer had been into her own potions. That happened sometimes, with the ones who heard the worst stories of abuse and attacks from the Aurors they counseled. “Do you want me to accompany you to the Head Auror’s office? That might be the best plan. You can check the rolls there.”

            “Legilimens.”

            Harry stiffened and glared at her, but reckoned, slowly, that it might be all right. Might. Mind-Healers were licensed by the Ministry to use that kind of magic. It would have been nice if she had asked first, though.

            “How fascinating,” the Mind-Healer said, when she had spent a few minutes staring into his eyes, and evidently the depths of his brain. “The memory of Draco Malfoy appears to have been—obliterated from your mind. Yes. Obliterated is not a bad word. Would you follow me?” She turned and began to lead Harry down the corridor.

            “What’s your name?” Harry asked, standing still. He didn’t want to go anywhere with a Mind-Healer who might be mad. His enemies had tried that a time or two, sending someone after him disguised as a Healer. The Alto case, for example.

            “Estillo,” said the Mind-Healer, and looked at him with her head on one side. “I don’t think that whoever did this to you meant to take that. But because the memories that you have of me are all connected with your memories of Auror Malfoy, destroying them destroyed the ones that held me as well. Fascinating.”

            Harry thought, irritably, that only a Mind-Healer would find the destruction done to someone else’s mind “fascinating” instead of disturbing. “All right,” he said. “But—what does that mean for me? Am I going to be walking around with a hole in my mind for the rest of my life? A hole that I don’t even feel?”

            Because that was what it was like. Estillo was talking about something he had lost, and if that was true, then Harry wanted it back, because it wasn’t anyone else’s to take. But he felt no gaping wound, nothing he couldn’t identify, nothing that he couldn’t imagine. He had always been alone in his work since Lionel’s death, and that was the way he liked it. If nothing else, if he got lonely, he always had Ron and Hermione.

            “I don’t know,” Estillo said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. And if you really don’t remember…” She turned and began to walk in another direction, one that led to the corridor that Harry usually avoided, because it contained the Healers’ offices. “It wouldn’t do any good to show you the records of Draco Malfoy’s existence in the Head Auror’s office, which was what I planned to do. I will show you something else instead, and have other Healers look at you to confirm my conclusions.”

            That was new, in Harry’s experience, a Healer who explained what she was doing instead of just rushing ahead and doing it. He hesitated, then gave in and followed. At the very least, another Healer might be able to confirm that Estillo was delusional or high on potions, and not right.

*

            Jourdemayne’s wards had tried to close the house off from him. Draco put his wand back in his pocket after he had dealt with them—certain cutting spells were classified as Dark because they destroyed defensive magic—and knocked firmly on her door.

            Another ward tried to blast out of the door at him, but Draco flicked his wand and shut it down before it got too far. Then he waited, destroying the ones that tried to cut his kneecaps and stab him in the hip as well, until he heard footsteps getting closer on the other side of the door.

            “What do you want?” Jourdemayne snarled, flinging it open. “I already told you that I showed the ritual diaries to—oh.” She stopped when she saw him, staring.

            Draco smiled at her and made a small circling motion with his hand, privately glad for this evidence that she did remember him. “Go on,” he said. “I found your first sentence extremely interesting, and wish to hear more about it.”

            Jourdemayne darted her eyes around a few times, as though Draco would have six other Aurors standing to the sides, and then grabbed his arm and dragged him into the house. Draco let himself be pulled, but made a point of straightening his robes fussily the moment he was inside the door. Jourdemayne, who had turned away and started pacing around the house’s entrance hall, her head bowed, didn’t notice.

            Draco sighed soundlessly. So much effort wasted today, and it wasn’t even noon yet. “All right,” he said. “You know more about this than I do. Start talking.”

            “I don’t know what you mean,” Jourdemayne muttered, head bowed. “You said that you would give me three days to think about it, or your partner did, and I don’t want you to break your word.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows at the odd wording, but persisted. “Something else has arisen. Your pet twisted removed the memory of me from my partner’s head, and apparently from the heads of most of the other Aurors I work with. I want a way to put it back. Since you’re the one who knows the most about this woman, even if it is in writing that you haven’t read in a while, you’re going to help me.”

            He’d expected rage, maybe, or the same kind of helpless whimpering that Jourdemayne had done earlier when they’d confronted her with the notes. Instead, she turned towards him and lifted her wand in a smooth motion to point at his heart.

            Draco’s Auror instincts had taken over before he realized it, making him dive to the side as she tried to use the Blasting Curse on him. Draco rolled through the doorway of what looked like a storage room and glanced swiftly around. A closet on the far     wall with its door open, but that would be a bad place to retreat to; there was no way out he could see. The door, pressed all the way back to the wall. Stacks of crates that, from the dusty, musty smell of them, might contain more ritual diaries, all stacked and arranged.

            Draco rolled his eyes, smiled wryly, and dived between the crates, wedging his shoulders and his arse in when they wouldn’t immediately fit. He burrowed as deep as he could and then crouched down.

            He heard Jourdemayne’s quick steps, and felt the hesitation. He didn’t think it was feigned. He waited, counting heartbeats and listening for the sound of Jourdemayne’s own breathing, which might tell him what she would do next.

            “I think you misunderstood me,” Jourdemayne said, and began to walk slowly to the left. “I only thought you might be in league with her when I fired the curse at you. I didn’t want—I don’t want to be trapped in here.”

            I’m not fond of it, either, Draco thought, and told himself to remember her words. At the moment, they might serve only as a distraction, but Jourdemayne didn’t strike him as someone who had a great power of invention, or much dignity outside the specific Order she was a priestess of. She might speak something that was closer to the truth than she meant, unwittingly.

            “Do come out,” Jourdemayne said, and her voice had descended to that level where Draco thought she might be speaking to herself as much as him. “Can you doubt that I want to help you, now? Can you doubt that there might be something to the reason she did this?”

            Draco nearly put his head around the crates at that, to demand what she knew about Nancy, but he heard the indrawn breath that so many people took before they cast nonverbal spells, and dived to the side instead. He heard the spell break open crates this time, and shook his head as he scrambled up. Perhaps she was only trying to eliminate his hiding places, but he was seriously starting to wonder if the Blasting Curse was the only offensive spell she knew.

            He raised a Shield Charm in front of him as he jumped to the top of the next pile of containers—not as good as Harry’s, but more than adequate, especially given the drilling they’d done together since being partnered—and then rode the crashing stack down to the floor. Jourdemayne’s eyes widened as she saw them coming towards her, but she waited too long to decide whether to run for the door or just dodge.

            Draco got to his feet immediately. Jourdemayne, buried under boxes of what looked like books, groaned feebly and didn’t.

            “Now,” Draco whispered, kneeling on her chest and pointing his wand at her throat, “you’re going to tell me what you did, what connection you have to Nancy, and the real reason that you tried to attack me.”

            Jourdemayne stared up at him, and then she shook her head and laughed. Draco didn’t permit himself to flinch, because Malfoys didn’t, but he did shiver. That was one of the strangest sounds he’d ever heard, rattling and rocky, as though Jourdemayne was close to choking to death.

            “There’s nothing you can do to me that’s worse than what she will do,” she whispered. “Nothing at all. And you have no idea about the full extent of her powers, about what happens when she makes someone else forget you. You might still retain some idea of her, especially if you have writing about her. But if she blots you from someone else’s mind? They’ll ignore even writing that proves your existence. It’s gone. It’s dead. It’s done. Accept that you can’t solve this case and move on with your life, Malfoy.”

            “Not as long as my partner’s in danger,” Draco said. He didn’t move or let Jourdemayne go. She was revealing more of an acquaintance with Nancy than he had actually suspected she had, and not claiming that she couldn’t tell him because it was part of the “Order” this time. Wasn’t that interesting? “Why did she decide to target me and not him? Do you know that?”

            Jourdemayne laughed and laughed and laughed, the thready sound that made Draco’s scalp creep. But he could play and win the waiting game with better opponents, and in the end, Jourdemayne closed her eyes and spoke in a flat, exhausted tone. “You should have thought of the way you behaved when you came to my house.”

            Draco waited, but apparently that was all she intended to say. Perhaps half-an-hour went by, and Draco thought she was in a fit or faint, from the way her eyes shut and the cold feeling of her cheek when he touched it.

            Well, if she wasn’t, she soon would be. Draco Stunned her and then rose to his feet, gathering her up in a Body-Bind and placing her inside a Disillusionment Charm. He took her wand, too, although he didn’t know if it would do him much good. Then he Summoned the ritual diaries and shrank them to put inside a pocket.

            The one good thing about Nancy having made his fellow Aurors forget him was that no one would suspect him in Jourdemayne’s kidnapping.

            And Draco knew a place he could take her where he would get answers. For a price, of course.

*

            Harry was trying to suppress his scream of irritation. None of the Healers who had peered into his mind had said anything about the hole that Estillo claimed was there. They simply stared, and then clucked, and then went and fetched another Healer, who would do the same thing. By now, Harry thought he must have three-quarters of the Mind-Healers who worked for the Aurors concentrating on him alone.

            Just what I wanted. Attention.

            He leaned against the wall of the common office that the Mind-Healers seemed to use for a gathering place in the Ministry and smiled tightly at the latest woman to approach him. She didn’t smile back. She simply lifted her wand and Legilimized him, without speaking the spell around. Harry hoped that meant she was the best one and she could find out what was going on and he could get the fuck out of here.

            Because he really didn’t believe that he had lost the memory of an imaginary Malfoy who had been his partner for months. He thought he would feel different if that was the case. Lost. Alone. Glancing over to the side for someone who should be walking there and wasn’t.

            Something.

            “Yes, there is a hole,” said the Mind-Healer, stepping back. Harry regarded her with more attention. It was the most words that any of them except Estillo had addressed to him since he stepped into the office. She was small, her head only coming up to his heart height, with pale brown hair pulled back in a severe bun that reminded him a bit of the way Hermione sometimes wore it to keep it from getting in her face. “I don’t think it happened long ago. The edges of the wound feel recent.”

            “You think so, Matron Isral?” someone asked from the back. Harry saw the way they were all standing in ranks and staring at her, and decided they must have deliberately made this much of a fuss so that Matron Isral—obviously a person of some experience—would think it worth looking into.

            That still didn’t really do anything for his temper.

            “Yes, I do,” Isral said, with sharp, bobbing pecks of her head. “And I think that the only way to recover the memories is to lead Auror Potter to the Circle.” She turned and started walking, apparently confident that Harry would follow.

            “What is the Circle?” Harry asked, not raising his voice, but making himself very present, in the way that he sometimes did when he wanted people to shut up. The other Healers certainly did.

            Isral looked back at him, face remote. “Something that will help you.”

            Bloody Healers, Harry thought, but he followed her. At least Estillo seemed to be coming with them, and she was the one who actually spoke to him like a human being. Maybe this would turn out to be a mistake after all.

*

            Draco’s mother said nothing when she opened the gates of the Manor; the wards had kept Draco outside the gardens. She simply looked at him, and then towards the spot where the invisible Jourdemayne floated. The wards would have told her there were two people here, even if she couldn’t see one of them.

            “I need your help,” Draco said.

            Narcissa met his eyes again. “And in return, you will pay us the price we demand?” she asked.

            Draco half-lowered his head. Everything depended on the next few moments.

            He caught her eyes. “Yes,” he snarled, and tried to put the right tone in his voice, reluctance and denial and anger and interest, nuances that he didn’t think she could sense but would want to.

            “Yes,” he said again.

            And lied as he said it.

*

            SP777: Draco really wants to know everything, and until this point, he’s not had any reason to think that Harry has good reasons to hide things.

            Nancy does have a reason for doing this to Draco, but I don’t know if it’s guessable yet.

            unneeded: It might have been a bit soon to cheer, given what Draco does in this chapter, but at least he’s not following along blindly anymore, even if he does go back to his parents.

            We’ll have to see!
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