"What is the meaning of this?" Lucius stormed into Draco's office, despite the best efforts of Draco's assistant at running interference. In his hand he held a sheaf of documents. Unfortunately, Draco had a pretty good guess what those contained. He knew his father still liked to pretend like he had a say in how the corporation was run, and had a few of his spies scattered throughout the hierarchy. Plus, it was really hard to hide an influx of so much raw materials of unknown provenance, and zero cost. (Though he had tried to hide the windfall with a modest, if false, outlay of money, that eventually found its way into a private vault in Gringotts that he was setting up for his assault on the government.) Nevertheless, he wasn't about to give in to his father's blatant attempt at intimidation.
"I don't know what you're talking about." He raised his pointed chin defiantly, to look down his nose at his erstwhile sire.
"Just what are you really up, son?" Lucius leaned on Draco's desk, papers flat under one hand, cane in the other. "These budgets make no sense. Whatever it is you think you're doing, you need to be more careful to cover your tracks."
"I'm not doing anything illegal." Well, he wasn't. Granger was, he was sure, at least skirting the edge of the law, but he'd had a look at Granger's standard contracts and had a long talk with his lawyers about what could and could not be considered stolen goods. Once you got past the fact that there was no reasonable way for these materials to have come into existence (either by muggle means or magical means – no one ever would have thought to combine the two in the ways that Granger had), it was a simple matter of logic, the "filters" belonged to Granger. Her contracts specifically stated that any waste material caught in the filter became her exclusive responsibility to dispose of. (Though her employers would not have been so thrilled to sign over ownership had they known just what was going on.) Therefore, she was well within her rights to give the "waste" to him. It just looked highly suspicious, especially since he'd taken care that nowhere in his transfers of goods and moneys, did Granger's name or the true source of his windfall appear.
"Really." Lucius sat back and eyed his son curiously. Draco had assumed a poker face, and sat waiting patiently with his arms crossed, for his father to continue. "This . . . Whatever it is, doesn't involve smuggling? Theft?"
"What do you take me for, father? I am not a petty thug." Unlike you and the old death-eater cadre, his cool tone seemed to imply.
"I didn't raise you to be a fool, either."
"Of course not." But I'm still not telling you a thing. Even if he wanted to, Draco was pretty sure no good would come of his father knowing about Granger, and that as such, would violate the terms of his unbreakable. Damnit.
"I don't suppose this in any way relates to your recent. . . activities over at the ministry?"
So the old man had been watching him. Of course. It's not every day you teach your son legilimancy so that he can work his will upon the government.
"What do you think?" Draco challenged, the spark apparent in his pale eyes.
"I think, son, that you're up to your neck in something." Lucius had learned that the people Draco had been contacting at the ministry were not all people that could be validly said to be involved in the regulation of industry. He'd been seen lunching with the senior assistant to the deputy undersecretary of education. Not long after which rumors had emerged of a new bill being considered to push for mandatory muggle studies in school from first year on, as well as the possibility of teaching muggle physics alongside NEWT level arithmancy, and biology along with herbology, chemistry with potions. Such outlandish and unheard of notions, but apparently ones that suddenly had financial backing, with articles appearing in the papers touting the ideas (all by journalists well known to be swayed by an appropriate sum), leaflets and fliers being delivered to every home. There had been sightings of Draco approaching one or two bureaucrats under Weasley's supervision in the misuse of muggle artifacts division. Something deeply shifty was going on, and Lucius didn't trust a scheme that he wasn't in the thick of. Hell, he should know from bitter experience that tangling with the status quo was a sure way to land yourself in a heap of shit. He didn't want his son repeating his mistakes.
And so, Lucius convinced himself that he needed to know what was going on in Draco's head. He knew his son was an occlumens, but then, he taught him everything he knew. It should be possible to batter through his defenses.
Lucius frowned, and looked deeply into the suspicious grey eyes that mirrored his own. Cold and hard and blank. "Legilimens!"
But Draco was prepared. He knew his father could not abide being left out of the loop. He knew he likely couldn't withstand a determined assault from a man who knew he was hiding something. (Occlumency worked a hell of a lot better when the assailant only had vague suspicions to go on.) But he didn't need to. He just needed a distraction. Fortunately, his own assault on Granger several weeks before provided just the thing. He brought the memory to the forefront. A vague hint of a female psyche before the overwhelming blast of angst. Not enough to identify the originator of the sensation, but enough to know it didn't come from Draco. Lucius pushed. He pushed hard trying to break through the wall, but it was too much. Which was just as well, because the effort of remembering such mind boggling mental pain was making Draco sick to his stomach.
Lucius broke the connection with a gasp, and an irritated sense of pride in his son's ability to block him. "Hmm. . ." He sat back and tapped his chin thoughtfully with the head of his cane. "Blue Champagne, if I'm not mistaken. Just where – who – did you extract that memory from?" If he hadn't suspected Draco of being up to something, he certainly was now. "There must be some very interesting Doings at the ministry these days. Tread carefully, son, tread very carefully." Lucius reiterated absentmindedly. He had to think more on this development. With a distracted nod, Lucius carefully collected himself and departed.
"What the fuck?" Draco was still gasping from having forced himself to relieve his trip into Hermione's mind. "Blue Champagne?" Not something he had ever heard of. But he was going to find out.
--
Lucius lounged in the privacy of his study, gazing appreciatively at the tumbler of aged single malt swirling in his hands. He did so appreciate a fine distillation.
Blue Champagne, It had been many years since he'd last caught a whiff of that particular poison. Not that he would ever have dirtied his hands with it, himself. No, Lucius had always preferred to work behind the scenes, above the law, not below it, at least until Voldemort had torn his self-respect along with his respectability away from him. Bella, on the other hand, had heard about it, back in the salad days of the Death Eaters, before the birth of Harry-fucking-Potter. She wheedled and cajoled Severus into brewing a batch of it for her, and then she had slipped it into the butterbeer of an ex-lover who had once jilted her, now a married man with 3 children. The results had been . . . explosive. . . literally.
The thing about Blue champagne, and why Bella had been so eager to try it, was that it didn't kill the victim. Not in and of itself. Instead it tapped into a wellspring of self-doubt, despair, hate, regret, and remorse that everyone gets a taste of now and then, and brought it flooding to the forefront of their psyche, to the momentary exclusion of all other thought. A few drops and the victim would be ready to off themselves right then and there. Diluted, the poison could cause a black depression and prolong their torment. Lucius couldn't remember a single subject of Bella's experimentation that hadn't killed themselves in the end.
There was just one unexpected side effect of the potion. In addition to driving people mad with self-hatred, it was also among the most potent magical restorative potions known to mankind. This had delighted Bella by leading to a great number of . . . impressive . . . and volatile suicide methods. Take the ex-lover for example. He had gone home, sat down at the family dinner table, and set himself on fire. Using Fiendfyre. The entire house had burned in minutes. There had been no survivors.
Lucius had once used legilimancy on a victim of Blue champagne, and to this day, he remembered the experience vividly.
Of course, Blue champagne had been banned in Britain for at least 200 years, and was notoriously finicky to brew. So following the death of Severus and the destruction of the Death Eaters, he had never expected to find it in use again.
It was deeply disturbing to find out how wrong he was. And if someone was poisoning employees at the Ministry with it, what did that say about the stability of the government? Was another dark lord or lunatic on the rise? And what was Draco's role in all this? Was it simply a "lucky" and incidental peek at the victim's mind. Or was he in some way connected to the poisoner? He'd thought Draco had learned from him to keep his hands clean. God forbid he should be wrong. He couldn't bear it if his son ended up like him, old, disgraced, and discredited.
--
Bloody Hell! Draco flung the book across the room, heedless of the way its ancient pages folded and crumpled on impact. Granger was out of her fucking mind. He'd guessed, even before the warehouse incident, that Granger wasn't well, by her deplorable skin tone and wasted frame, but he had no goddamned clue just how bad the situation really was. No wonder she was so desperate for an ally that she had pounced on him. There were plenty of other potent stimulants and elixirs in the world, though few so efficacious as this. He wondered if anyone else had been so desperately in need of magic strengthening and so supremely sure of their mental fortitude to try what she had done. Was doing. To her herself. Perhaps a misguided squib? And how long would they have survived the effects on their psyche?
Well, he'd better start planning for how he was going to save the world himself, after Granger finally cracked and offed herself. Maybe things would work out more to his advantage if he didn't have to pretend to care about muggle and magical creature equality.
--
Harry took a deep breath and knocked on the heavy wooden door. He wished Hermione were here with him, but oh no, she was off on the other side of the world, and he didn't even know why.
After failing to catch her at her apartment the other week, he'd given in and owled Hermione making sure that as per her paranoid instructions, no mention was made of what he was doing or what he needed her help for, only that he had to talk to her. The next day, she'd shown up in his shop. Things had been awkward and strained between them, each remembering their last encounter and the barriers that had grown between them, until Harry had finally rid the shop of his last customer and ushered her into his heavily warded laboratory, and turned the conversation to his researches. It didn't take long then, for Hermione to become animated, her speech becoming rapid and enthused at all that he had done. Despite the fact that all he felt he'd done was fail.
"You have a still!" She'd exclaimed, looking at the disassembled glassware and clamps and random bits strewn across a workbench.
"Yeah, but . . ." Harry had started to explain that he didn't even know how to put it together, even as Hermione rolled up her sleeves and started reading the instruction manual.
"There! All ready." Hermione smiled in satisfaction ten minutes later, as she surveyed her handiwork. "Were you thinking of using chromatography with this? If you are, there are some spells you'll have to avoid using in the vicinity. Magic, you know, doesn't exactly follow muggle physical properties."
"I don't . . ." Harry tried to tell her that he barely understood what she was talking about, even after the books he'd waded through, but Hermione was in full thinking mode, and clearly wasn't listening to him as she pondered the options.
"No wait. . . . Hmm, what about? . . . Is it safe? . . . As long as he doesn't know. . . And how would they know? . . . a muggle should be ok. . . He does owe me a favor. Dirty old lech! Right then. It's settled!"
"Huh?" Harry stared at her in bewilderment, having forgotten much about her efficient take-charge attitude over the years.
"One of my old professors at Uni. Owes me a favor. If you can distill up a batch of this, and bring over whatever you get out, he'll run it through. Tell you what you got. Sort of."
"Huh?" Harry reiterated. "A muggle? How's he going to know what you're looking for?"
"Well," Hermione reverted to lecture-mode, "Presumably you've not found the magic component of this."
"Maybe it would be easier if you told me what you were looking for." Harry muttered under his breath.
". . .So, there must be something in the physical component." She continued heedlessly, "If magic analysis isn't working, then we'll just have to go for the muggle way: liquid chromatography- mass spectrometry."
"A lot of trouble for pumpkin juice." Harry grumbled, knowing that he was going to have to go read about that too. He could already feel a headache forming.
"For this?" Hermione put her hands on her hips and glared, "Harry, you have no idea just how many lives depend on us understanding this!"
"Again. It would help if you told me what you're looking for!" Harry was no stranger to her moods. "Didn't I get enough of this secrecy shit from Dumbledore? Remember the months starving in a tent, directionless and afraid, all because he kept secrets? Remember how you hated it? Remember how the locket almost drove us mad? Drove us apart? Don't do this to us again, 'Mione!"
Hermione clenched her jaw, willing herself to ignore his plea. She hadn't wanted to tell him anything, hadn't wanted to get him involved. Still, here they were. She was exhausted, and he was right, she couldn't keep every thing a secret forever. How could she tell Malfoy, but not Harry? If he was in this far, he'd have to come in all the way.
"Harry," she hated the pleading tone in her voice.
"Don't even think about giving me the old 'it's for my own good' spiel, either!"
"I. . ." She sighed in defeat at the look in his eyes, "It's not like I enjoy keeping secrets."
"But you do it so well." For a moment there, the sneering tone reminded her quite strongly of the way Ron would get when he felt he was being left out or neglected.
"It's just. . ." How to explain in such a way that Harry wouldn't forget it immediately? "There's something in the juice, I don't know what, that affects. . . perception, and memory."
"What do you mean? I've been drinking the stuff since I was 11, and there's nothing wrong with me. Or Ginny, or Ron. . or . . Ok, well maybe there is something wrong with Ron." the joke fell flatly in the air between them.
"Wrong? No. But then again, as far as I can tell, the effects are very specific."
"Well, maybe it doesn't affect everyone?"
"Sorry, Harry, why do you think I won't tell you what it is? You're affected by it too."
"I haven't noticed anything different." He was skeptical, as well he should be, what with his experiences, innate paranoia, and sensitivity to dark magic. Yet, despite all that, he'd not noticed a thing.
"My point exactly."
"Huh?"
"Take my word for it, I checked." Her tone would brook no argument.
"It's really in the juice? All pumpkin juice?"
"I presume so, otherwise I have to say the world is a lot more oblivious than I thought."
"How does it alter perception?"
"There are certain. . . facts of modern life, that you can't see, can't even question. And if these facts are brought to your attention, you cannot remember them."
"If someone had that sort of power, don't you think they'd have taken over by now and turned us all into mindless cattle?"
"I don't know. Harry, I don't know who did this or how. I only know the problem affects the entire wizarding world. Not just Britain. Like we've been confundused or obliviated. Or maybe the facts made. . . unspeakable. That's it. That's all I know."
"So what are these facts of life, that you're so reluctant to tell me?" Harry challenged.
She told him.
"Well, come on aren't you going to tell me?"
She told him again.
"Hermione?" He was getting impatient.
"I just told you twice." She sighed.
"Riiight."
"No, really, Harry. I did." She told him a third time. "So, that's what it does. Does that help? That's all we have to work with."
"That's not much."
"If I thought it would help, I'd've told you in the first place." Well, maybe she would have. Probably not though, if she were to be honest with herself.
"Huh." Harry grabbed a sheet of notepaper and his old potions textbook (the one that had used to belong to Snape) and started to scribble down notes, as he flipped through the heavily annotated pages. "Hmmm. . . Pumpkins are related to the gourdian knot vine, which can be added to pepper-up to improve clarity of memory, but cannot be mixed with. . . . What about Sucker squash? The leaves substitute for choly-melon root in some calming potions? What kind of pumpkins do we use for juice? Are they the same as muggle pumpkins? How similar are they to zucchini or butternut squash?"
Plainly inspiration had finally struck. Hermione smiled slightly as Harry ran a hand through his tousled hair, adjusted his crooked glasses and got to work. Who would have guessed Harry could be so involved in such a quintessentially academic pursuit?
She took her leave shortly thereafter, after writing down the phone number of the Prof. at Uni who she thought could help them.
So now here he was, three weeks later, dressed in Muggle jeans, his wand safely hidden in its arm holster, a bag of tiny vials slung over his shoulder. Harry squared his shoulders and knocked again, mentally rehearsing how to explain what he had done and why he needed to analyze fractionated substances with labels like jack-o-lantern 1, gourdian 7, and turban 15.
--
Hermione reeled and dizzily leant against the factory wall. Ok, that was it. No more apparating for this trip. Only one more plant to outfit, and she'd be done for now. The trip had been a huge success. Not only had she emplaced her magical filters at 15 of the country's worst polluting sites, but she'd met with several junior deputy ministers in the Ministry of magic and begun establishing contacts to help lobby for the export of magical items to the muggle world, and less restrictive rules governing the import and use of magical technology. Thus far, they were skeptical, but no more so than Britain's ministry, and possibly more receptive to the easing of boundaries, anything that would allow them, or their muggle counterparts to develop an edge, economic or otherwise against the rest of the developed world.
So much work was exhausting. Not to mention the sheer quantity of magic needed to build and install, much less maintain her units. When this was over, she promised herself that she would sleep for a week, even as her more pessimistic side warned her that she couldn't afford a break, and even if she could, Malfoy was going to need watching. She was sure he wouldn't be content to be in the backseat for much longer.
Hermione pushed herself to her feet and, swaying slightly as she fought her vertigo and general sense of complete and utter enervation, went off to find her translator. It was time to be moving on. (And maybe get something to eat along the way.) She would be so thrilled to be done here and get back to her own comfortable bed, her cat, and people who spoke the same language she did. But for now, she still had a job to do.
T.B.C.
-- questions comments whatever? Review. Why not? Next time, Hermione returns home, the boys fight, and Lucius continues to snoop, while Ron lives on in middle-class obliviousness off screen enjoying a pint or two, and Ginny (also off screen and unmentioned) begins to suspect Harry is cheating on her but we won't be talking about that because who cares about her insecurities, really?