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Chapter Four—The Golden Feeling

Draco's head hurt so much that he felt certain something must have hit him. A stone, a storm, a spell, it didn't matter; his skull was still splitting and about to break, pieces of skin held together only by pain. He slumped against the wall, moaning, clawing at the door of the Manor as if it would be able to hold him up.

And then he felt something that terrified him even more than the pain in his head. The doorway began to fade and crumble away from him like mist, or the way the front gates did when they expected a visitor. Draco knew he would drop through it in a minute, and then he would land—

Where?

He clawed some more, and the stones only broke further. He began to tip sideways with slow, sickening inevitability. He wailed, and stuck out one hand as if his mother stood near him and could pull him out of danger, the way she'd attempted to do so many times during his Hogwarts years.

A hand caught his own, and then a pair of arms solid in a way the Manor currently wasn't wrapped around him, and Potter's voice shouted directly into his ear, "Hang on, Malfoy! Think about your family! It's the only way!"

In other circumstances, Draco might have argued just for the sake of arguing (and because it was Potter who had taken it on himself to tell him what to do). But now, he was far too terrified of his own tilting and his home's fading to resist. He pictured Scorpius with all his might, thinking of the warm weight in his lap when his son clung to him, the baby-breath in his face, the soft yawns and murmurs and demands for stories.

And the tilting, the fading, the horrible pain—

They stopped, leaving not an echo of themselves behind.

Even standing in Potter's embrace, a position that would have embarrassed him at any other time, did not take precedence over Draco's utter astonishment. He nearly fell, and this time it was a combination of Potter and the Manor's doorway that held him up.

Harry felt the ground fuzz beneath him, in a way that normally only happened to him in dreams, as if it had turned to dandelion fluff. Had he believed he would wake from this as a nightmare into another and better reality, he wouldn't have fought.

But he knew this was real, and he did not want to know where this strange, rippling magic thought it could take him. The only time he had suffered anything comparable was when he'd glanced up, seen Draco Malfoy's face and reaching hand in the mirror of his loo, and smashed the reflection with his own magic so he couldn't be drawn into it.

On the other hand, this time there was no mirror to break, and he had no idea how he could stop his going. Grimly, he reached out in thought to the people he loved; he could at least die with his last memory being of how Al had looked up from his toast and gaped at his enchanted counterpart when Harry floated the portrait of their family through the fireplace—

And the rippling vanished, and he knelt on grass again.

Harry fell onto his hands, breathing hard, the sound of his own heart so loud that for long moments he didn't realize Malfoy was still groaning. Then he bolted to his feet. A sparkling mist surrounded the other man, like—well, like light reflecting off broken glass. Harry suspected he was suffering from the same thing, and fellow-feeling made his feet light as he leaped up on the threshold and his arms quick as he seized Malfoy and pulled him against him.

He knew he shouted that Malfoy should think about family, but he couldn't remember the exact words. He was too busy being terrified that he could feel the shoulders and robes under his hands growing perceptibly thinner, as if he were trying to hold a beam of sunlight.

And then, with an audible crunch, as if the invisible mirror that surrounded them had broken all over again, Malfoy turned real again. Harry clutched at him in a paroxysm of relief, then did a little dance to avoid dropping him as he momentarily became dead weight. His hand slapped out and clutched the doorway, though, and he stood there, breathing, head dangling, cheeks lightly flushed with what Harry could only guess were the remnants of shock and fear.

Harry closed his eyes. Dreams tried to tell him that he already knew how Malfoy would smell and feel, from constant nights of holding him—even if not in the flesh. He strangled the dreams.

It didn't help that Malfoy seemed to be in no great hurry to draw back from Harry's embrace. His head rolled to the side and rested on Harry's shoulder for a moment, and his breaths stroked along the side of his neck. Harry shuddered—his neck was a sensitive place—and pushed him back a little more roughly than might have been strictly necessary.

Fuck that, he thought as he rubbed his hands on his robes. It wasn't strictly necessary for Malfoy to lean on me like I'm his sole source of support, either.

He retreated into the front room of the Manor, which he caught a glimpse of from the corners of his eyes as pale, filled with light and an enormous ornate fireplace and more silver knickknacks than ten wizards should need. "Are you all right?" he asked, loudly, ostentatiously. Where the hell were the house-elves? They should have come the minute they sensed their master in danger, shouldn't they?

"Well enough, for someone suffering under a curse," Malfoy rasped, and then his head lifted, and Harry found himself unwillingly forced to meet a pair of eyes brilliant with knowledge. "One that you're suffering from, too, Potter. Aren't you?"

Potter froze, as if he were going to deny it, and then he ended up just shrugging and saying nothing, though his lips tightened. Draco took the moment to study the man he hadn't seen in more than a decade.

He certainly looked more adult than he had ten years ago, but he wasn't unfamiliar. Draco had had the mirrors to tell him that Potter now wore his hair in a style that didn't quite resemble, "Look at me, I've climbed out of a rat's nest," and which artistically concealed his lightning bolt scar, even when he turned his head away from Draco's intent stare. His green eyes had brightened and deepened at the same time, acquiring a store of both experience and happiness.

Happier than I am, I'd wager, Draco thought, and felt a stirring of the old envy that seemed to be his constant lot in Potter's presence.

He wore robes that suited him much better than the Hogwarts robes ever had, of a shade just between black and deep green, and what Draco could see of broad shoulders, muscled chest, and warily held arms urged him to touch. The clasp of those arms lingered around him like the smell of smoke. He suspected that, if he permitted himself, he might have a new wank fantasy for a few days or weeks.

Not that he would permit himself, of course. Because it was Potter.

The knowledge that Potter suffered under the same kind of curse, though, was enormously heartening. Here was someone who would believe him, who would make it so that he wasn't alone anymore. And if Potter tried to deny that the same thing had happened to him, Draco would brain him with a broomstick.

"Stared your fill, Malfoy?" Potter said, and he still couldn't manage a proper sneer. Of course, Draco would like to think that what had just happened between them had unsettled Potter as much as him.

"Not quite," Draco said, modifying any appreciation out of his voice. "First of all, I want to know how you knew that thinking about my family would stop the curse, whatever it is."

Now that he thought about it, Potter might have known how to make Draco's life better all these years, and he had never come forth with the knowledge. He had certainly suffered less than Draco had. Selfish Gryffindor, as usual, not considering that maybe, just maybe, the man he saw in the mirror might be undergoing the same thing.

Draco folded his arms and waited for an answer.

Harry hated the way Malfoy stared at him, hated the way he spoke, hated the way he moved, hated everything about him. He had spent the last ten years trying to put the dreams and the unavoidable glimpses in any reflective surface away, and now that he shared a room with the git, all those memories rushed back at him, making the hairs along his arms and neck practically stand on end with awareness. He knew exactly how many feet away from him Malfoy stood, what the pattern of his breathing was like and, now, how his skin smelled.

Harry hated it. But then, he had always hated this strangeness. It made a part of his life that couldn't be shared with Ginny, the way they shared everything else—space, children, love, beliefs. He had lived with it. After all, if he never came back into contact with Malfoy, the strangeness should wither and die. And if it didn't, it made no more difference than the neglected hobby of collecting Chocolate Frog cards he had once had and which his wife did not understand, either.

All the more reason to be done with this business of fulfilling the life-debt as soon as possible.

"I didn't know that," he said roughly, and then cleared his throat. "Nothing like this attack has ever happened to me before. I thought I was—well, dying. I envisioned my son, and the shaking stopped." He snapped his head up, reminding himself that he didn't intend to cower before Malfoy. "And the same thing happened to you when you thought about your family, didn't it?"

Malfoy nodded. "My son, Scorpius."

Harry cleared his throat again, this time so he wouldn't snicker.

"And you know you weren't dying," Malfoy continued quietly. "You were going somewhere. Weren't you?"

Harry clenched his fists as all impulse to laugh died away from him. "I don't see why we need to discuss this, Malfoy," he said. "I intend to fulfill the life-debt your mother called in as soon as possible, and I need only deal with her. It would be convenient if you could put your memories of the night the girl was murdered in a Pensieve for me, but—"

"I'm tired of not being able to look at my reflection, Potter," said Malfoy, and advanced one step towards him. "I'm tired of not knowing when the hell the scars I received from you will burn, or what that burning means." Harry couldn't stop himself from starting, and Malfoy snorted. "It happens to you, too, doesn't it?" he asked, and in his voice Harry heard all the things he didn't want—strangeness, intimacy, a forced acknowledgement of this odd magic.

"It's my scars from Voldemort that burn," he retorted, and was pleased to see Malfoy flinch at the name even though it had been ten years. "You never gave me any scars worth mentioning."

Malfoy's nostrils flared. Harry spun on one heel away from him, partially because he didn't want to get drawn into an argument and partially because he could tell someone else had entered the room. Narcissa Malfoy stood in a doorway next to the fireplace, her eyes passing back and forth between them and a small, tight smile on her face.

"Welcome, Mr. Potter," she said. "I trust my son has not managed to antagonize you already?"

"Not completely, Mrs. Malfoy," Harry said, with a forced smile, and was absolutely delighted to see Narcissa look at her son with a frown. He'd certainly never thought he'd live to see his school rival receive a scolding from his mother.

Of course, he would rather have lived without seeing his school rival receive anything, even this.

He pushed the thought out of his mind and smiled more politely. "As I told you, unfortunately I have only a small amount of time each day that I can devote to this case. I am glad to be able to fulfill the life-debt, and I'll do all I can, but I can't solve it on the spot, or perhaps even within a few days."

Narcissa tilted her head down graciously. Harry thought she approved of his honesty; she probably would have distrusted a declaration of altruism more than one of self-interest. "The matter is not yet pressing, Mr. Potter. The evidence linking Draco to the crime is fragmentary, and the Aurors are hunting a few other suspects. Draco has already placed his memories in a Pensieve for you, which I have in another room and will escort you to, since my company will probably seem more congenial than my son's." She held out an elbow to him. "Shall we?"

"I would be delighted," Harry said, and took her arm, and left the front room without a glance back at Draco.

Draco was still staring after him when Marian's voice said from the direction of the front door, "He's more impressive than I thought he would be. Not least because he was not so impressed with you."

Draco didn't bother turning to face his wife. He knew she would have one hand on her hip, her head lifted in the imperious posture that she probably didn't even realize she'd copied from Narcissa, her face angled so that her scars were emphasized. He didn't care to see her at the moment.

"Potter's never been impressed with me," he said absently. "But in this case, he doesn't have a choice. We share the curse that makes it dangerous for me to look into mirrors." He turned to face her now, feeling less intimidated than he had done for over a year. Perhaps my hatred for Potter just drives other feelings out. "He'll have to listen to me to have any hope of undoing it."

Marian's lips parted in a faint smile, and she took a few steps forwards, like a witch preparing for a duel. Draco shook his wand into his hand—Marian had attacked him before—and waited.

"And if he insists that he doesn't need you?" she murmured. "If he can live with the curse in the way that you can't, because he's stronger than you?"

"That won't prevent me from seeking clues in his behavior, now that I know it affects more people than just me," Draco said calmly. "He can be my test case. I'm not unique, and my mother's theory that the curse came from the spells my aunt used during the war grows more and more unlikely."

Marian shook her head, just a bit. "I saw you," she said. "I saw you near the door. I saw you fading."

"Did you?" Draco studied her with narrowed eyes, reminding himself that he had no reason to be frightened. His wife wouldn't try to kill him. Narcissa would know, and so would the house-elves, who as a last resort could communicate with the very walls and floors of the Manor itself and draw forth any memories of threatening words or gestures. Besides, she wanted him alive so she could make him miserable. "Well, I highly doubt that you'll be able to do anything to exacerbate it, so don't flatter yourself."

"I saw you fading," Marian repeated softly. "I saw the man who endangered my child fading."

"I fathered him, too."

Marian flicked her fingers, never taking her gaze from Draco's face. "Unimportant. You've never felt another body inside yours, Draco, or a second heart beating alongside your own. If I hadn't felt the physical evidence, I would say that you haven't a heart. You love Scorpius as your heir, and that's all."

Draco blinked, surprised. Had Marian somehow missed how much he really cared for his son? Of course, he never did show his love for the baby in front of her. It was a weakness that would have resulted in mockery.

"That's not true," he said.

"You're having house-elves raise him. You let your mother saddle him with that name. You let your mother use magic on him." Marian leaned forwards. "Tell me, where in that is evidence of caring for him?"

"It's the way Malfoys care for each other." Draco hitched a shoulder. "Not that I would expect you to understand that, since the only Malfoy thing about you is your current last name."

"When will you learn that it's better not to antagonize me, Draco?" Marian murmured, and then she turned and left the room.

Draco snorted and shook his head. His hand tingled as it fell away from his wand, but then, most of him seemed to tingle, blazing with excitement.

Potter suffered under the same curse. And yet he seemed to lead a relatively normal life, and Draco had never heard any reports of eccentricities on his part—which avoiding reflective surfaces would surely be.

If he could do it, Draco could. Or he would ask Potter again and again, and study him, until he found out how he could do it.

Because anything Harry bloody Potter could do, Draco could manage.

He let out long, slow breaths, and felt as if he were breathing in sunlight.

Harry pulled his head back from the Pensieve, frowning. Narcissa sat in a heavy oak chair beside him, identical to his in everything but height. The Pensieve sat at one end of a long dining table that Harry imagined could have seated twenty with ease. Harry had had his head down inside the silvery liquid of Draco's memories for perhaps twenty memories.

Narcissa had already showed him the articles about the murder in the Daily Prophet and conveyed what information she had about the night it happened, which wasn't much. And while Harry could see why the Aurors suspected Draco, he had no clue how they could actually solve the case.

Or how he could, for that matter.

Harry shut his eyes, massaging his temples. He would go slowly, and rework the memories in his head. He would put them together, if he could, and try to spot gaps, or at least a place where he could begin.

The girl's name had been Esther Goldstein, and apparently she'd been distantly related to Anthony Goldstein, an old Ravenclaw classmate of Harry and Draco's. She'd entered Hogwarts two years before them, though, and completed her N.E.W.T's and left the school without incident. She'd settled into a nondescript Ministry job, filing paperwork for the Obliviators and occasionally filling in for them. Even when the damage was done to the relationship between Muggleborn and pure-blood witches and wizards during Voldemort's War—which nearly everyone Harry knew called the War of You-Know-Who or something else similarly ridiculous—she'd escaped persecution by vanishing in time, and then returning to take up the same job as before. If she had any political ties, both the Daily Prophet and Narcissa's contacts in the Ministry had been unable to discover them.

Harry had seen pictures of her face, and of the body. She was a quiet, brown-haired witch who looked a bit young for thirty, squinting into the camera and turning her head back and forth to study the observer with one eye, like a bird.

The body, which had been found a week ago, was mutilated to the point that the Aurors who found it had been unsure at first if it was human. Most of her fingers and toes were missing, but both thumbs and the right index finger had been stuffed down Esther's throat. Every limb was severed, most of the skin had been stripped off in small pieces, and the top of the skull had been opened and the brains scooped out. Worst of all, someone had apparently taken a knife to Esther and raped her with it before she died. The Auror reports Narcissa had obtained were written in a shaky hand, and Harry absolutely could not blame them.

The only sign of Draco's supposed presence was a strip of cloth with the Malfoy crest on it dropped nearby. Even the Aurors recognized it as obvious bait in a trap, but they had no other leads, so they'd seized on it.

Narcissa had also shown him the threatening letters that had arrived at the Manor starting six months ago, long before Esther's murder happened. Most of them threatened harm directly to Draco, but there were also some addressed to Narcissa, and even Scorpius, Draco's son, and his wife, Marian. Most described in lavish detail the mutilations the tormentors would inflict on their bodies.

Harry was familiar with such methods from his work with the Blood Reparations Department, though the actual infliction of such violence was rare. He was sure that he would have heard more about Esther's murder if the Aurors hadn't wanted to concentrate their attention on the Malfoys. Both the extreme pure-blood supremacy groups and those "revolutionaries" who wanted to ensure Muggleborn control of the wizarding world and full access for Muggles to all kinds of magical conveniences would use letters like these at times. Since the Malfoys were a prominent pure-blood family, it wasn't surprising they'd been targeted.

But the use of blood magic—Narcissa had showed him the spatters of evidence captured and frozen in the Manor's wards—and the apparent attempt to link the Malfoys and the murder was far more serious. Harry couldn't remember any case like it since Hermione had created the Department.

Harry had never cared for Draco, but he and his family didn't deserve to die at the hands of fanatics. He assured Narcissa solemnly that he would look into the case and do what he could to bring it to an end.

She accepted that, too, graciously enough, and accompanied him back to the front door of the Manor. Harry did pause on the way there, because his curiosity wouldn't let the matter entirely rest, to ask about Draco and mirrors.

Narcissa's brows drew down, and she sighed. "Has he told you about his belief that he cannot look at his own reflection safely, then?" She shook her head. "It is not true. I believe that, at most, some of the curses my sister—" her mouth twisted "—cast during the war have returned to haunt him. But the matter does not threaten his life, and is not as serious as he believes."

"But what are the symptoms?" Harry persisted.

"Not being able to look into mirrors. Some of his scars burn some of the time, apparently." Narcissa shrugged, patently uninterested. "It keeps him a little odd, perhaps, but it is his own lack of ambition that means he has done nothing with his life since the war."

Well, at least he doesn't have dreams. "He remained at home even before these threats arrived, then?" Harry asked.

"Yes." Narcissa snorted. Harry thought she might not have confided this to him at all, but she was frustrated at having no one to talk to. "He stays at home, and plays with his son, and avoids his wife, and does nothing else. He's only twenty-eight. He has more life in him than that. But he won't listen to me." She gave a single sharp nod. "I mean to make him listen, but my latest plan cannot proceed until this threat is past—"

She seemed to realize whom she was talking to suddenly, and snapped her mouth, shutting off the flow of words. She gave Harry a cool little smile before she turned her back and departed, and he took it as the signal it was to bow his head and get out.

Draco waylaid him before he could step out the door. Of course. Harry folded his arms, sighed, and leaned on the doorframe that he had rescued the git from sinking into an hour before. "What do you want, Malfoy?"

It was on Draco's tongue to say, "You," just to see how Potter would react, but that might make his wedding vows take notice and subject him to intolerable itching, and he didn't want that. He wanted the answers to a few questions instead.

"Do you think I committed the murder?" he asked.

Potter's mouth actually dropped open slightly. Then he shook his head and said, "Of course not," as if the possibility hadn't even occurred to him.

Draco blinked. "You don't? Why?" Surely his worst rival in the world—and someone stupid enough to refuse to admit he was suffering from the same magic as Draco—would want to believe him capable of a heinous crime.

"You're not a killer," Potter said. His voice carried firm conviction. "You never were. I—" He paused for a moment, then said, "I was there, that night on the Tower, when you couldn't kill Dumbledore. And I had a mental connection with Voldemort during the war. I could sometimes see through his eyes."

"You realize how insane that sounds, yes?" Draco couldn't resist interjecting.

Potter ignored the interruption. "And I saw him ordering you to torture people." His voice softened, and he gazed at Draco with pity in his face. "You did it, but obviously against your will. I never thought much of you, Malfoy, but I could never class you with the likes of the Carrows and Fenrir Greyback—or your aunt, for that matter. And it was someone like that who killed that poor girl. Not you. Never you. You have some essential decency in you."

Draco licked his lips and lifted his chin. His heart was pounding oddly fast. "And enough courage to face this curse, even when you don't."

Potter's face shut down. "Leave it alone, Malfoy," he murmured.

"You don't want to know?" Draco cocked his head. Emotions he hadn't felt in ten years were moving through him, energy that made his brain feel fuller and faster than a good meal could. "You're content to live the rest of your life in fear of your own reflection? How unlike you, Potter."

"I want to live my life," Potter said, enunciating each word clearly. His eyes stared directly into Draco's, and the intense feeling increased, thrumming through his blood like the healthy equivalent of the tension that had nearly destroyed him earlier, making him long to feel more of it. "Without this kind of strangeness. Without seeing you more than I have to. We got rid of that fading feeling once, but who knows when it might return?" Potter shook his head. "No. If I ignore it, it'll go away."

"I'm not willing to do that," Draco said.

"You can study it all you want. Just don't expect my help." Potter turned away as abruptly as he had when Narcissa summoned him and exited the Manor.

Draco closed his eyes. His chest heaved with a deep breath. The golden feeling of energy and well-being was cleaning out his veins, speeding through them, stirring sluggish blood. Ideas stirred in him, where for so long his brain had felt locked in ice, unable to work, unable to come up with anything that would change the basic, nerve-deadening situation in which he lived.

Perhaps it was the mere presence of his enemy. Perhaps it was knowing that someone beside him suffered under this magic, and that it was real. Perhaps it was the first statement of belief in him that someone who was not his mother had made in ten years—no, longer, because neither his parents nor the Dark Lord had been blind to his lack of ability during the War, and even Snape had continually doubted Draco's capacity for any task not related to Potions.

He wasn't free yet. Not by a long shot.

But he might be.

And for that, he was willing to risk everything he had in hand at the moment. Save for Scorpius, it was not as though he had anything to lose.