AN: I have written and rewritten this chapter about five times. I hope this one is the best rewrite, because editing this became the bane of my existence for a while. Thanks for all your favorites and reviews! You guys are great.
Chapter 21: Growing Old
"They hugged, Pansy. They hugged," Draco emphasized, leaning over the medi-witch's cart.
She looked her friend up and down, from his disheveled hair to his wrinkly robes. Beside him, Maggie stood sipping a bottle of coke. At least she wasn't smoking. Taking a deep breath, Pansy knew that Draco needed some honesty right now. "I am saying this out of love, Draco, but you look like a complete mess. Not in a hot way, either."
"I am a mess!" He'd drank everyone's alcohol for them the night before, and even wound up being too drunk to say a proper goodbye. Harry was so annoyed with him in the morning that he left without exchanging more than three words with him. Bloody Gryffindors. On top of that, Harry would be at the hospital interviewing the kid who'd been sneaking around Vince's summer house. Draco felt as if it had been violated by him. All of the memories of them running up and down the halls fell from in between his fingers. Maybe it was just because he felt violated in general. Even a hangover potion hadn't been able to clear up his racing mind.
Carefully, Pansy put her moisturized hand on his shoulder. "Maybe," she said quietly. "You should take a break. Fix yourself up in the locker-room, get some food…"
He shook his head. "I don't need any food."
"Would you prefer therapy?" Maggie asked, flippant as ever.
"Malfoys don't do therapy," he said sharply. In blatant horror, Draco realized he sounded exactly like his father. "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm going mad, and it's all because they hugged!"
"Okay, so they were being sentimental gits. What else is new?" Pansy shrugged. She figured since Draco lived with one of them, he would have seen something gushy like that coming. Or at least not have an aneurism over it.
Draco took a second to gather his words. "What's new is that they are having a baby, and I am supposed to be the fucking godfather."
"Godfathers don't have to do anything," she replied, toying with a strand of her hair. "Severus was your godfather and he barely lifted a finger over it."
"Maybe that's why Draco's so crazy," Maggie suggested with a grin. It was her own way of telling Draco that his fears weren't as bad as he had built them up to be. Severus hadn't really affected Draco that much at all, just like he would probably not affect his future godchild too greatly.
Pansy held in a laugh the best she could. "There are many other reasons, dear."
'Dear'? Since in the hell did Pansy call Maggie her 'dear'? Draco would have normally been all over that, but he was emotionally compromised. "You don't understand. There are definitely responsibilities that come with the title. Responsibilities I never asked for! Harry just said 'yes' for the both of us because we're a damned unit or something rather than two separate people," he said, his voice getting louder. When people started to stare, he lowered his volume. "What I am trying to say, is that I cannot do this right now. When he gets here, just show him to his witness and tell him I'm in surgery and that I'm too drenched in blood to come out."
Maggie and Pansy exchanged a look before Pansy spoke again. "Fine. We'll tell him that, and you go splash some water on your face."
"Whatever," Draco murmured, sounding almost like an angsty teenager as he stalked away down the corridor.
"What the hell has gotten into him?" Maggie asked. Underneath all of the sass and sarcasm, she was concerned. "Was a group hug really that traumatizing?"
As Draco disappeared around a corner, Pansy tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together. "With Draco, it's never about a group hug. Or a falling soufflé, or an ill-timed thunderstorm. He internalizes everything. In a way, the world really does revolve around him sometimes," she said with a distant smile. "It could be paranoia from our admittedly well-to-do raising, the idea that everyone else's lives affect him. Either way, that's just how he is. He takes everything so personally."
The redhead nodded, her curls swaying with her head. It made sense. "So you've known Draco your whole life?"
"Since we were kids," Pansy said proudly. "We were born in the same year, so our parents thought they could arrange our marriage. When we got to Hogwarts, I quickly learned that wasn't about to work out according to plan. Although, I did promise him that if worst came to worst, we could marry to please our parents and I'd look away while he screwed our pool boy."
"Sounds like a plan," Maggie laughed. "If your pool boy was Harry Potter."
"I'm sure he'd offer his cleaning services at a modest price," she replied slyly.
"What, one kinky shag per hour?" Being Draco's coworker for so long had allowed Maggie to have some insight into his strange life behind closed doors. They'd even played some rather revealing games of 'truth or dare' at the company Christmas party. It was Maggie's favorite game, after all.
Pansy giggled, looking around her to make sure nobody was watching. Wouldn't want to clue The Prophet in on how down and dirty their friends liked to get. It wasn't Pansy's fault that people trusted her with information in spite of the knowledge she was an unchanging gossip. "Okay, so did he ever tell you about that one time where they dressed up in their old school uniforms and—"
"Er, Pansy?" Harry asked, trying to make sure he was talking to the right medi-witch. When Pansy spun around and he saw her glittery eyeshadow, he felt relieved. "Thank Merlin it's you. I've been wandering around this place for what feels like an hour, and I couldn't even find Draco. Do you know where he is?" Harry wanted to have a sober conversation with him detailing just why he was given the cold shoulder that morning. Needless to say, he was angry.
"Surgery," Maggie and Pansy answered at once.
"Oh. Okay, then. Which room is my witness in, then?" Harry asked. He was eager for a new development in his case to get his mind off of his fiancée's strange behavior.
Pansy stepped forward and pointed down the hall. "Just around the corner, there. Room five-hundred B. He's bound to the bed, no chance of him getting out."
"Thanks," Harry said with a nod, waving a small goodbye as he strode towards the room. At least it was cool enough in the hospital to not feel as if he was sweating to death in his black robes. Whoever's bright idea that was happened to be in for a very stern talking-to from Harry.
A St. Mungo's guard stood watch by the door, and Harry flashed his badge for entrance to the room. When he was finally face-to-face with his only witness, it seemed a little off. The kid was shackled down to the stretcher, and didn't look very happy about it. However, when he saw Harry was there, his face lit up. "You're Harry Potter!"
"Yes, yes I am," Harry said, forcing a smile like it wasn't the fifth time he'd heard that since he woke up. He moved to the chair beside the youth's bed and took a seat. "And you are?"
"Who I am doesn't matter! I'm Will, though. You're the Harry Potter." His blue eyes were as wide as lakes. "You were the youngest to ever kick arse in the Triwizard Tournament, you killed the Dark Lord as a teenager, you're on your way to being Head Auror, and you're a queer for someone who used to be on the enemy side! Your life is amazing. You're like, my idol."
Harry had no idea what to say to that. "Er."
"I honestly worship the ground you walk on. Not in a creepy way, though! I promise," he assured him. "Well, maybe in a creepy way. But only sometimes! It's just, I'm sorry, you're great, and, yeah."
"Okay, then," Harry said slowly. He never knew how to react to fans. There should have been some sort of training seminar on how to deal with people putting you on posters in their rooms, or quoting things you said in interviews.
"What I'm trying to say, is that you are pretty fucking awesome."
"You look sixteen years old. Where did you learn language like that?" he teased, trying to gain a little friendly ground with him. Ron could curse up a storm by age fifteen, but never in front of an adult. His fear of Molly washing out his mouth with soap was too great.
"You think I'm sixteen?" he asked excitedly.
Giving him a strange look, Harry shook his head. "I'm not the best at guessing ages. Everyone younger than me is sixteen; everyone older than me is forty."
The boy laughed as if that was the funniest thing in the world. "I'm actually fourteen. You're off by two years."
"Fourteen?" Harry asked, raising his eyebrows. He really was getting old. "Has the hospital contacted your parents yet? It's usually customary for them to be here when I ask you questions."
"That's why you're my idol! You're like me," the boy stressed, leaning forward in the hospital bed. His eyes practically glowed with excitement against his tan skin, until he realized what exactly it was that Harry had asked him. He folded his hands in his lap, taking a deep breath. "My parents were killed during the second war, I live with my aunties."
Harry felt as if someone had just slapped him in the face. Whenever he met victims of the war, he blamed himself immediately. It had become as natural as blinking or breathing. "I am so, so sorry," he offered, knowing that could never be enough. He tried to think of what he had wanted someone to say to him when he was a kid without parents, but all he came up with was telling himself about how great his future would be. In all honesty, he knew nothing about this kid. He only knew his name. 'Will'.
He shrugged. "It's not your fault," Will said as if it were obvious. Harry felt like kicking himself. Everyone was always telling him that, and now some kid was. It wasn't any more believable out of his mouth.
"Where are aunts, then?" Harry asked, trying to change the subject.
"They're at work right now."
"Right," Harry remembered, feeling caught in between his adulthood and childhood all at once. Kids tended to do that to him. Even so, he couldn't help but feel a little happier around them. It brought him back to the period before the war, when everything was a little lighter. The world hadn't worn down on his shoulders yet, and he could sip pumpkin juice by the common room fire without knowledge of all the deaths he felt responsible for. "I'm just trying to figure out if you saw anything suspicious in the estate. Anything strange, or off... That place you were staying in—"
"It used to be the Crabbe house, I know," he cut him off. "That's why I was there, because they hadn't lived there since the war. My friends and I were hanging around it, friends from the neighborhood and stuff."
"Were any other of your friends inside the house?" Harry asked in a quiet panic. If a team of Aurors couldn't find a couple of teenagers, how were they supposed to find a murderess was beyond him.
To Harry's relief, Will shook his head. "It was a dare. A double-dog dare. You can't turn those down."
"I certainly never have," he said with a smile. This kid was a resilient one, he knew that.
"Yeah, so they dared me to spend the night in the house. They said it was haunted by the Crabbe that died in that fire. You were there, right?"
Harry nodded. It wasn't something he liked to think about. "I was there." There to not stop one of Draco's friends from being consumed by his own flames.
"So, I tell 'em there's no damn way he haunts that place, we'd see him, you know? So I was sleeping there when you came in with Auror Weasley, who is totally cool also, and I didn't know what to do."
"You can't go back into that house," Harry said sternly, now fearing for the child's safety. "It's falling apart, and you could hurt yourself. On top of that, there is an ongoing investigation with Mrs. Crabbe, which is why we thought you were her in the first place. You wouldn't want your guardians to worry about you."
Will shrugged. "They were just pissed I got mixed up with Aurors again."
"Don't worry, nobody is about to bring you in for trespassing. We only need to know what you saw," Harry persuaded, trying to get him to open up. "You can trust me."
"Of course I can!" Will laughed. "I repeat, you are Harry Potter. Plus, the Crabbe family hated my aunts since they're mudbloods."
"Woah, woah," Harry said, stopping him right there. "That's a really harsh word to use. My mother was a muggleborn, but it doesn't matter who you are. Using that word isn't right." He'd trained Draco out of using it, and he'd be damned if he couldn't do it to the whole wizarding world.
"Sorry," he said quietly. After years of living in that house, he had thought everyone said it.
Sighing, Harry realized now wasn't the time for a political correctness lesson. "Don't be. I guess I'm only trying to tell you that the word offends certain people. Anyway, this has gone extremely off-topic. What I wanted to ask you was if you saw anyone in the house aside from yourself. A woman, maybe?"
"Nope," he answered frankly.
"Are you sure?" Harry tried again, his heart sinking in his chest. He had really been counting on this being a lead.
The teen nodded. "Nobody was there. Tommy lied."
Disappointed with the entire search, Harry started to get up. "Well, you can tell that to Tommy when you see him again at your house." They were back to square one all over again.
"No!" the boy said quickly, trying to reach his hand out towards Harry. "I can, erm, I can think really hard about whether or not I saw something while you stay here!"
"Look, I'm sorry, but I really have other things to do—"
"A circle!" he yelled, leaving Harry to freeze in his tracks. "In the cellar, there was a magic circle. It was the only place without cobwebs, I swear."
Harry tried to process what he just heard. "In the cellar?"
"Yeah, there's a door in the kitchen leading there!" Will answered happily. It was his dream to help Harry Potter solve a case, and he was living it. Harry, on the other hand, felt like hitting himself again. He'd been too distracted by the dower scene to have even noticed a door leading somewhere else. He really was off of his game that month.
"Then we'll go check that out right now. Thank you, that really does help."
"Promise you'll come see me again?" he asked quickly, not wanting to give up his one possible shot at becoming friends with the greatest wizard in the world. Well, in the esteemed opinion of Will Gunner, he was the greatest.
Maybe it was the whirring of the overhead lights that was driving Harry crazy, or the fact that he simply wanted to high-tail it out of there, but he considered it. "Sure," he decided, apparating back to his office to tell Ron.
xxxxXXXXxxxx
Lucius shook his head, looking up to his wife. "You shouldn't have said anything."
"If Matilda has done something against the law… I don't know if you remember our history with the Ministry," Narcissa responded sharply. "But I would prefer to stay within legal parameters."
"We would be staying in legal parameters if we stayed silent," Lucius reminded her, adjusting his thin-framed glasses. He only wore them in comfort of his study, not willing to admit that his eyesight was leaving him. Piles upon piles of receipts and checks lay out before him in a black and white ocean.
Narcissa didn't even pause the process of her vanity potion, shaking her head right back at Lucius. "What's done is done. I was merely trying to help our future son-in-law. I thought you were starting to come around to see that Harry is a permanent part of our Draco's life."
"I am," Lucius protested, scratching out a few more numbers with his quill. "But I will not stand for anyone going after Matilda."
"But if she's really done what the papers are saying she has—"
"Then she's a troubled woman," he said plainly, still engrossed in his knut-pinching. "I doubt she needs any more input from us on that."
Feeling a lump of anger rise in her throat, Narcissa tried to cool herself down. Lucius always seemed to act as if they owed her something. She never thought her husband would be the type to fall victim to survivor's guilt when he wasn't even involved in the incident in the Room of Requirement. "He cast those flames himself."
He let out a gasp of indignation. "I cannot believe you would even say that." Vincent Crabbe cast that spell, but Death Eaters were the ones who taught it to him. Death Eaters told him that the Malfoy family was falling out of favor with Voldemort. Lucius didn't even believe he really knew what the spell could do until Vincent saw it first-hand.
"It's the truth," Narcissa reminded him. Without any pun intended, the truth burned.
Lucius felt it sink in all over his skin, and felt like he was suffocating in his dark robes. He said what he always thought when Narcissa brought up the incident. "What if it had been our Draco?"
"I cannot believe you would even say that," she hissed, looking up from her bubbling cauldron. "We protected Draco every step of the way, the best that we could. He would never turn on a friend like that, he would never. Those flames were meant to kill, and that was what they did."
"I'm not saying Draco is anything like him," Lucius countered. "But what would have happened to us if anything had happened to Draco?"
Narcissa couldn't look him in the eye. "I wouldn't be able to live. He's safe now, that's all that matters. He's safe."
Putting down his quill, he tried to get his wife's attention again. "I'm not trying to upset you," Lucius said, attempting to be soft with her. "But we used to be a community. Our family will always come first, but we spent our holidays with them. Our sons grew up side-by-side. What would you do if you were in her place?"
"I can't afford to think like that," Narcissa murmured. She stood up and abandoned her potioneering, too distraught to continue her work. Lucius' grey eyes caught hers across the room. Even behind the expensive frames, she could practically read his mind through a single look. Years of marriage had refined their nonverbal communication without a doubt. They knew each other inside out. Narcissa could tell when Lucius was holding something from her by the twitch in his lips, and Lucius knew when Narcissa was upset by the curve of her back.
After a long pause, Narcissa told the truth again. "I would go mad." Lucius couldn't help but agree. "But that's not the way things are. Harry saved our Draco." She considered adding an 'in more ways than one', but it would no doubt only solicit an annoyed groan from her husband. Even so, it felt like a role reversal of a conversation. Since when was Lucius the empathetic Malfoy?
"Draco would have found his own way out," Lucius said smugly. There it was again. That reliable old shell of self-preservation. Narcissa almost saw him shrink back into himself, back into his chair and back into his piles of checks.
She walked behind his chair and leaned over him, giving the top of his head a kiss. He was right about Matilda having some very strong reasons for going rogue, but she could never even imagine herself in a world without her son. It was impossible for her to go to that place emotionally when she'd spent all of Draco's life trying to avoid it. "Fine, then. Harry helped," she tried. Reasoning with him was almost an art form, considering how much training one needed to do it.
Lucius didn't even look up from his work to address her. The side of Lucius that cared about their one-time friend and allowed himself to be grateful for the fact that his son was even alive was a transient side. "Your potion will boil over," he reminded her.
"I suppose it will," Narcissa said quietly. She wished they could elaborate on the points brought up about their Draco. It seemed that just when Lucius was on the brink of something he backed up into his little corner and screwed his eyes shut like a child. All Narcissa wanted was a decent conversation.
"Gerda will clean it up, then." From the angle Narcissa was at, she could see the grey hairs in his white-blonde locks. His hairline was receding in spite of the vanity potions they both brewed. It felt strange to realize that they were getting older.
It seemed that one never noticed aging until it crept up behind you in the mirror, or reflected how young you once were in a photograph. They were aging with the rest of the world, and nothing seemed like a constant. Even their son was growing up and getting married.
Instead of a verbal response, Narcissa simply leaned down and kissed his head again. He could be such a stubborn fool, but he was her fool.
xxxxXXXXxxxx
The next day, after the tireless work of the Ministry researchers, they'd come to the conclusion that like the spell had existed before. It wasn't an entirely helpful conclusion, but it was a start. The incantations and runes found within the circle were extremely rare and pricey, so it made sense that the Crabbe family would be able to bankroll it. Yet, if they sold the pattern, it could fall into the hands of any bidder.
Kingsley Shacklebolt was afraid of just that. He was prepared to lock the design in a Ministry vault for reference, and try to extract the memories of those who saw it. The reasoning behind his fear came from the highly malicious intent of the spell.
It was an 'Alohamora' on steroids. If the circle was drawn correctly and the incantation spoken precisely outside of a building, a hole would appear in the wall the size of that circle. It happened to be a rather big circle, too. A big circle with no care in the world for wards, protective spells, or locks. Kinglsey's mind immediately went to the three most important buildings to keep sealed in the entire wizarding world. Gringotts, Azkaban, and the Ministry itself.
Some things lurked under Ministry wraps that would not only endanger, but possibly devastate even the most powerful wizards and witches. He had increased security around all three, but even the most hardened Aurors were wary to go near the dementors of Azkaban. He'd assigned Harry and Ron to Gringotts, considering they were the only ones to ever successfully make a break in there.
Harry had mumbled about the hours interfering with some wedding thing, but Kingsley had stressed how important the mission was. Eventually, he convinced Draco to change the appointment time.
With an hour left until Draco's flowery extravaganza and Harry only working at night, he found himself lazing around the Ministry atrium. He'd already browsed the nearby vendors, gotten a slightly stale cookie from the cafeteria, and read the Ministry's mission statement three times over when he heard someone clearing their throat behind him.
"Go home, Potter."
When Harry turned around, he could see his boss staring at him suspiciously. "I was leaving in about an hour," he defended.
"Then why are you still wearing your Auror robes?" Kingsley asked, raising an eyebrow.
"I just happened to have them on. Black is very slimming, you know," Harry said with a grin. In reality, he hated the damn things. He simply wasn't as fashion-forward as Draco to know what exactly he hated about them.
Kingsley directed a wary glance his way. "I can't have you overworking yourself. You remember what happened on the dementor case."
What had happened was Harry almost falling asleep every other minute because he hadn't left the office in a few days. He couldn't stop working while dementors were out there attacking muggles at random, by command of some insane wizard. Draco had been furious with him for spending so much time at work, and demanded he take some sick days afterwards to get back to sleeping and 'behaving like a functioning member of society'. "I slept at my own flat this morning," Harry pointed out, hoping it would get Shacklebolt off of his back.
"Even so. What are you doing hanging around here?"
"I'm actually waiting for someone," he said before realizing how sketchy that sounded. "Draco and I have wedding things to do."
"Good," Kingsley approved. After starting his management of the Auror department, he quickly noticed that all of his employees were basket cases. In order to avoid overworking wizards and keeping them in fighting condition, he took an interest in their personal lives. The Kingsley Shacklebolt version of 'taking an interest' was ordering them out to bars and pushing them towards social normalcy. When he found out that Harry and Draco were dating, he'd done everything but kick Harry out of the office to get him out into the world beyond his Auror duties.
"Well look who it is," Draco boomed from down the busy hall. "The Head Auror himself." He took long strides towards the two, clearing his own path through the rush of people. He'd tried to put the group hug –or what he referred to as The End of My Life—behind him, moving forward with his current schedule.
Kingsley acknowledged him with a nod. He had been hoping to get rid of the Head Auror title for a while now, and the current Minister of Magic was of failing health… "Malfoy, get your betrothed out into the real world. He needs some fresh air."
Draco grinned and hooked his arm around Harry's. "Will do. He'll be out of your hair before you can say 'Viola labradorica'."
"What?" Harry and Kingsley both asked at once. Draco rolled his eyes.
"It's the botanical name for purple violets, which we are going to be looking at a couple species of," Draco clarified, giving Harry's arm a tug.
Feeling the same quiet dread of cake tasting and ring shopping, Harry held in a groan. "There's more than one species of violet?" he asked with a slightly miserable tone.
"Of course," Draco laughed. "That, and we need accent flowers. We'll be on our way now, Shacklebolt."
"By all means," he responded, motioning towards the door. "Have a good shopping trip, and I'll see you," Kingsley said, pointing to Harry. "At eight o' clock sharp."
Draco began to drag his fiancée towards the door, Harry too in love to tell him to turn around. "Don't worry," Draco said over his shoulder. "I'll give him back to you in one piece."