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Chapter Seven—The Weapon of Honesty

"No," Harry said, running his fingers in distraction over the pile of papers that covered the table in the library. "Al thought he was sick, but James had just crammed a bunch of food in his mouth and then pretended to vomit. You know it's a trick he likes to play."

"Hm." Ginny folded her arms and regarded him with a jaundiced eye, as if he hadn't been sharing fully in the care of the children since they brought James home from St. Mungo's. "And you're sure James never had a fever at any point during the day? A cough? He didn't complain about any headaches?"

"I'm sure." Harry turned and smiled up at his wife, aware as he did so that he was just waiting for her to leave the room so that he could subsume himself in the Malfoy mystery once more. Her concerns irritated him. He held his tongue for a moment, though, reminding himself that Ginny had been at practice all day, and thus not there to see the devilish grin on James's face after he'd convinced his little brother that he was sick and about to die. "I know Rosie's sick, but Ron doused himself with anti-infection spells before he visited me yesterday. Hermione would never have forgiven him if he didn't." Harry shuddered slightly. An angry Hermione was never good news for anyone.

"Well. If you're sure." Ginny's fingers tapped her elbow, but a little more slowly than they had done. "Is dinner ready?"

Harry pulled his attention firmly away from the papers and stood. "Yes. Just simmering under a Stasis Spell while the children nap." He had made a dinner of odds and ends, the sort of thing Ginny liked to have when coming home after a practice: potatoes, strips of meat mixed in with vegetables, soft bread with butter, and a thin soup of the kind that Aunt Petunia had once prided herself on cooking for hours. It was easier with magic, of course.

"Good." Ginny took his arm and led him out of the library, though she hesitated near the doorway, peering into his face. Harry looked inquiringly back. He was hungry, too, and he could hear Al starting to fuss down the corridor, as he often did when he woke from a nap in the middle of the day and found himself alone.

"I just don't want you to spend too much time on these documents of the Malfoys'," Ginny said, tightening her hold on him. "It makes me feel distant from you, in a way that I don't when I know you're thinking about Ron and Hermione, or your job."

Surprised, Harry turned and hugged her. "Gin," he said into her ear, "you know that if I'm not taking care of you enough—"

"It's not that." Ginny's eyes flickered briefly up to his scar, and then away. She had gone to a great effort since the war not to look directly at it. Harry had thought she did it because she knew how uncomfortable the stares in Diagon Alley and other public places made him, but it seemed she might have her own reasons for it, after all. "At least, not wholly. I—I don't want to find out what will happen if you walk far enough away from us."

Harry opened his mouth to ask what she meant, and then shut it and settled for kissing her forehead.

He should have seen it before. He and Ginny never talked about the lack of mirrors in the house, or his dreams, or the burning of his scars, or anything else that could refer to the strange magic that ruled so much of his life. He knew it made Ginny uneasy, and he hadn't wanted to cause her pain by discussing in detail what he did with Malfoy in his dreams.

Now, for the first time, he realized that she actively feared what could happen if he paid too much attention to the curse, and, by implication, too much to the Malfoys. She could lose him, and not through any fault of her own, but because there was this strong unexplained influence pulling him in the other direction.

Harry tightened his lips and gave a fierce little shake of his head. He would not do that to his wife. He would shut the Malfoy mystery out of his head except during the mornings, as he had promised. He would even more earnestly avoid mirrors and awakening Ginny in the night. And he would—

You'll approach this like an adult, won't you?

Yes. He would have to.

He would cease running and acting like a coward, the way that Malfoy had accused him of doing. He would discuss the matter with him frankly and openly, and refuse to allow the other man's insults get under his skin. He would bring his unanswered questions and lay them before Malfoy, instead of sneaking about. Why hunt for information he couldn't find when he could get it directly from the hippogriff's mouth?

Of course, he couldn't trust everything that Malfoy said. But he could propose another solution, and since Malfoy was so in favor of being honest, he ought to agree to it.

Harry's mouth twitched. He would have to see George in the morning, before he went to the Manor.

He kissed Ginny once more, and this time there was passion and strength behind the gesture. She looked up at him, and he saw she was both startled and pleased. That saddened him. Has it really been days since I made her believe that she's the center of my life?

"You're right," he said quietly. "I was a Gryffindor, right? Courage and honesty ought to be more my style than this creeping uncertainty. I'll bull right ahead, and take the help that Malfoy offered me, and solve this mystery as soon as possible. Then I'll have even more time to spend with my family, who deserve the lion's share of my attention."

He didn't think Ginny had kissed him so deeply since their few weeks of sunshine together at the end of sixth year. He kept one arm around her as they went to wake the children, more content than he had once imagined he could be.

Draco smiled slightly. The wards on the Manor had buzzed to let him know that someone was at the gates, of course, and again when Potter reached the door of the Manor, conveying an image to the side of his right eye. He had let those particular spells lapse for far too long, but he'd established them again yesterday. If he was to take a more active role in trying to disentangle the mystery that had engulfed him, he should also take a more active role in other parts of his life, including the defense of his family.

He saw no need to leave the room and engage Potter in a duel of words that the coward would only attempt to slip out of, though. He was sitting with Scorpius right now, who had fallen asleep listening to another story. His body slumped back against Draco's arms, his head half-dangling, the strands of blond hair around his face fluttering with soft snores. Draco was disinclined to move. Let Potter speak to his mother. He would ambush the man on the way out.

That was part of the reason he was so startled when someone knocked softly, with an open palm, against the door of the nursery and he looked up to see Potter standing there, eyebrows raised.

"Malfoy." He spoke at just the right volume to let his voice carry and yet avoid waking Scorpius, and Draco was surprised until he remembered that Potter had children himself. "May I come in and speak to you? It's important."

Draco hesitated a moment longer, then gave a curt nod .Loathe as he was to surrender his private time with his son, refusing now might defeat Potter's courage, and he'd never take the chance again.

Potter walked carefully across the nursery, obviously looking for scattered toys that weren't there. His eyes flitted between the huge shelves full of books, the large and open trunks full of magical toys, and the cot guarded with shimmering wards. Probably taking note of the luxury and comparing it to whatever poor arrangements he'd made for his sons and daughter, Draco thought, concealing a sneer. He wondered if Potter would make some snide comment about spoiling children to him.

But Potter's eyes came back to Scorpius in just a few moments, and softened. In fact, he looked more at the boy than anything else in the room, and Draco felt a weird pride rise in his chest. Scorpius had been so protected, especially in the past month, that Potter was the first stranger who'd been anywhere near him (not counting the Healers who had attended on him at his birth and various childish illnesses since). And Potter was obviously smitten with him.

"That's your son?" he mouthed, when he stood next to Draco's rocking chair.

"It is," Draco whispered back. "Transfigure something into a chair for yourself, won't you? He's rather pinning my wand at the moment."

Potter gave him an easy smile of complete understanding, and then selected a piece of dust from the carpet and Transfigured it into a small stool, deliberately lower than Draco's chair. Draco raised one eyebrow, reluctantly impressed. Potter still wore relatively shabby robes, given what Galleons he could have commanded at any clothing shop in Diagon Alley, and his hair still looked as if it had never heard of a comb, but he was no slob at magic.

"I've decided that you're right, Malfoy."

Draco just stared. If the sight of Harry Potter in his son's nursery was unexpected, then hearing those words was…unbelievable. He fought the temptation to look away, which might tell him if he'd accidentally stared into a mirror too long and come to think that the vision it portrayed was real.

"Excuse me?" he said at last.

"Oh, come off it and don't look like that," Potter muttered, but reached into a pocket of his robe and withdraw a vial that sparkled with clear liquid. Draco wondered what Potter wanted with a vial full of water, but understood in seconds as Potter said, "This is Veritaserum. I borrowed it from George Weasley, since he uses it in some of the pranks he makes. I can promise you that it's quite genuine; I tested it this morning. I'd like you to agree to take some while I question you about the night Goldstein was murdered, and your potential involvement in it."

"You what?" Draco said, again a few moments after he should actually have answered. He hoped the sheer spittle from his spluttering didn't splash on Scorpius's forehead and wake him.

"I'm tired of not getting answers." Potter's glasses sparked as he leaned forwards, but it didn't look as thought his brilliant eyes needed the help. "I can't find the information I need to know about this murder, and then your wife came to me yesterday and offered to betray your deepest darkest secrets, which turned out to consist solely of the fact that you were absent from home for an hour on the night Goldstein died. And I've thought more and more about what you said concerning—well, mirrors, and the fading that happened to us." He cleared his throat, and his face flushed slightly, but his voice was determined. "That's what you're right about. We need to address it, and to end it if we can. I'm tired of feeling I can't call my life my own."

Draco blinked again and again. He would have reached out and slid his fingers down the skin of Potter's wrist, just to make sure of his reality, but the reality of Scorpius kept his hands rather pinned.

"When you decide to charge," he said at last, "you spare no effort."

Potter gave him a small smile. "Will you agree to the Veritaserum, Malfoy? And then we'll work together on both mysteries. I pledge you my full cooperation in return for your agreement to drink this." He gently sloshed the vial of Veritaserum back and forth.

"And if I say that I want more than that?" Draco cocked his head and let a sly undertone drop into his voice. Potter wouldn't trust him if he agreed right away, after all. "That I need your help in something else?"

"It would depend on what this other thing was, of course," Potter said, sitting back. "And how long it took."

Draco studied him for a moment in silence. Then he decided that he might as well be honest in return. It would cost him too much with most other people in his life, even his mother—whom he had tried to talk to honestly about the mirrors for years, earning only her disbelief and sadness in return—but Potter was, Draco suspected, literally incapable of using the information against him.

"I want my life back," he said.

Potter blinked. Then he said cautiously, "Mrs. Malfoy did tell me that you'd spent rather a long time in the house these past few years. And I know that you don't have an occupation now, and that you didn't have good standing after the war. But after we stop the curse that's working on us through the mirrors and my dreams—"

Your dreams, Potter? How interesting.

"—I don't see what else you would require from me. You could go forth and get a job if you wanted to, or you could remain home with one less thing to worry about." Potter glanced at Scorpius, and once more his face softened. "It wouldn't be so horrible to stay with your son, would it?"

"Have you wondered why Marian was so eager to betray me yesterday?" Draco spoke the words without thought. For the first time in ten years, Slytherin instinct had surged up inside him—the same instinct that had made him remain at Hogwarts and try to capture Potter in the Room of Hidden Things. That had worked out disastrously, but Draco tended to think his intuition was sound. It was only his execution that sometimes lacked finesse.

"I didn't think to ask," Potter said, and readjusted his position on the chair as if it were beginning to hurt his tailbone. "I tend to try and stay out of other people's martial disputes. That's good advice learned from hard experience, believe me."

"She was happy with me until Scorpius was about five months old." Draco knew he was taking a risk; Potter might not accept the idea of using magic on a baby any more than Marian did. But he was going to be working too closely with the man to keep many secrets, especially one this important, and once again, given how much Potter favored honesty, it would look better if Draco told him than if Marian managed it later. "Then it became clear Scorpius was going to look like her, or like a mixture of us, instead of like a Malfoy. The Malfoys have been blond and had blue or gray eyes for hundreds of years. But Scorpius was born with dark hair, and his eyes might have been hazel or green as easily, which wasn't acceptable." He glanced up at Potter. "No offense to people with green eyes intended."

Potter nodded tersely. He was literally leaning forwards on the edge of his chair. Draco felt a soft bloom of warmth in his chest, that he could command this man's attention so effortlessly.

"My mother convinced me to work magic on Scorpius, to change his appearance." He ran his hand through his son's fine, and utterly pale, hair again. There wasn't a trace of black or brown showing. He had done a fine job, if he did say so himself. "I would never have used the spell if there was the slightest danger to my son, Potter. I love him." And that was not so very hard to say. "But Marian was convinced the magic might hurt a baby. She tried to take him from me and run. Only the house-elves stopped her in time."

"And now?" Potter's voice was edged with wariness.

"He's been kept behind wards since then, so his mother can't touch him, though I can," said Draco simply. "And Marian hates me."

Harry gusted out a breath and blinked hard. He could see both sides of the argument. He knew what he would have done had Ginny taken one of the children and tried to abscond with them. On the other hand, he also knew what he would have done if Ginny was working magic he believed was harmful on a baby.

But, of course, magic had been used constantly around James and the others from the moment they were born, and even on James when he was younger than Scorpius, to heal him from a dangerous sickness that had managed to crawl into his lungs. So Harry couldn't take the position that Marian apparently had, that any kind of magic could hurt a baby. One merely had to be careful with it.

And is an appearance-changing spell taking care?

"You said you want your life back," he said, trying to wrench his brain away from contemplating the ethical difficulties of the Malfoy marriage. "Does that mean that you want help in separating from your wife? I'm not a solicitor, Malfoy, and not a barrister either."

Malfoy waved an irritated foot at him, since he couldn't move his hands. "Not that. I can separate from my wife well enough on my own, if it comes to that. But I need the energy. I've been apathetic too long."

"And I give you energy?" It was true that Malfoy looked sharp and keen-eyed, not at all the listless wizard Narcissa described, but he had looked like that the first day Harry came to Malfoy Manor, too.

"You do." Malfoy smiled at him, and Harry caught his breath. This must be the smile he used when he wasn't plotting revenge or trying to bully someone else. It lifted his cheeks high and made his eyes less tired and turned his face incredibly handsome, receding hairline and all.

It looks exactly like the smile in my dreams.

Harry put that idea away. He would not listen to the part of his brain that still urged him to trust Malfoy. It was out of the question.

"You challenge me," Malfoy said, and his voice was not husky, that was Harry's imagination, and why did he have to have such a good imagination? "You give me something to stand up and fight towards. Remain my friend when this is done. Write me letters. Meet me for drinks. Yell at me when I do something that violates your stupid Gryffindor sensibilities. I honestly think that's what I need." He met and held Harry's gaze. "Will you do that?"

Harry swallowed. This was exactly the level of entanglement that he had wanted to avoid with Malfoy. Finish extricating him from guilt for the murder—which no one deserved—and work together to end the curse that hovered over their lives. That was well enough. But remaining in close contact with him, turning into a friend, giving him time and attention when all of that should go to his family…

And then Harry pictured the life that Narcissa had told him Draco led. Locked in his house for fear of enemies and, well, fear; living with a wife who could hardly stand him; having no energy even to go along with his mother's plans for him, which would have been the simplest thing to do; carrying no honor or distinction worth mentioning from the war, so that his past seemed as much a failure to him as his present.

No one deserved that, either.

And so it was a sense of the rightness of things, much more than a sense of obligation, that Harry met Malfoy's eyes and nodded slightly. "You have yourself a bargain, Malfoy." He held out the vial. "Now. Will you take the Veritaserum? I doubt that my wife expected me to be gone this long."

Draco wanted to close his eyes and purr, though he found the mention of Potter's wife rather jarring. He would have what he needed, but more than that, he would have what he wanted. He could be friends with someone who did him good, and continuing friendship was what he wanted.

If not something else.

But there were too many obstacles in the way for that, their marriages not the smallest among them, so Draco wouldn't think about them right now. He simply smiled at Potter and said, "I still can't move my arms from beneath Scorpius. I'll need you to put the Veritaserum on my tongue, Potter."

Potter looked at him narrowly, but his gaze flickered down to Scorpius, and he nodded. As he stood, uncapping the vial, Draco added, "And you can't ask me where I was for an hour on the night of Goldstein's murder."

Potter huffed at him. "And why not?"

He could give his children lessons in whinging, Draco thought, amused. "Because it's a family secret," he said. "Given the other questions you can ask me, I should think you'd be able to find out the truth about my involvement in Goldstein's murder easily enough, unless you're as incompetent an investigator as you were a Seeker."

Potter opened his mouth to snap indignantly back, then seemed to notice his smile and peered hard at him again. "Malfoy?" he asked at last. "Did you just make a joke?"

"Of course." Draco leaned his head against the back of the chair and widened his smile. "It's the kind of things friends do, I'm told. And I quite tire of hearing you spit my surname out as if it were a rotten fruit. Call me Draco. Harry."

Potter nodded hesitantly, then took three drops of Veritaserum on his finger and held it out to Draco's mouth. Draco swallowed obediently, but made sure to flick his tongue against Potter's fingers before they could retreat. That provoked a tiny flush of his cheeks and a widening and dilation of his eyes that Potter probably wasn't even aware of.

His dreams are about the same things we see in the mirrors, I would be willing to wager, Draco thought, in the moments before a gentle blankness took over his mind.

Git, Harry thought, and wiped his finger free of saliva on his robes. Then he took a deep breath, to dismiss the feeling of wetness and smoothness against his fingertips from his mind, and asked, "Did you murder Esther Goldstein?"

"No," Draco said, staring at the far wall with glassy eyes. His hands had gone slack, and slipped a bit from around his son, who fussed. Without thinking about it, Harry reached out and folded them into place again, the way he would have held Al. Scorpius—poor kid—uttered a dreamy sigh and dropped back to sleep.

"Do you know who did?"

"No."

"What was the origin of the piece of cloth with the Malfoy crest found at the scene of her murder?"

"It must have come from the Manor," said Draco. "I can't imagine that anyone else would want to carry it."

"How did it get there?"

"I don't know."

"Would your wife have any reason to suspect you of the murder?"

"She would try to blame me for it." One's voice was supposed to be a monotone under Veritaserum, but a twist to one or two of the words conveyed Draco's disgust. "She wants sole custody of Scorpius, which she'll never get otherwise. But that is the only reason."

Harry asked a few more questions about the information that Narcissa had given him, but it soon became apparent that Draco knew even less than his mother. He was innocent, and he had every reason to want to clear his name.

Harry sighed, and paused. He could think of nothing else that might work to elicit information. He thought of asking about what Draco saw in the mirrors, but that was akin to taking advantage of a drunken man. He would wait until they could pool their resources and solve the problem of the curse together.

"Thank you, Malfoy," he said.

"Draco," the man said, and gave him that breath-catching smile again. "And you're welcome, Harry. You're welcome in the Manor at any time, in fact. I meant what I said about your becoming my friend."

Harry inclined his head with a nervousness he couldn't hide, and then turned and moved rapidly across the nursery towards the door. He rubbed the mark of the locket above his heart, which had begun to burn again.

His brain kept urging him to trust Draco. But his brain was foolish. He felt as if he knew this man, but he didn't. He knew a deception, a dream-self, who shared a life with Harry that didn't exist anywhere and never would exist. He would do well to remember that Draco was still a Slytherin, for all the friendliness he exuded—someone ruthless enough to keep his wife away from her child permanently when he decided he could no longer trust her.

They might become friends of a sort. Harry would face the images in the mirrors in the course of figuring out how to stop them.

And once he could stop them from coming, he need never think of them again. There was room in his life for many friends, but only one lover.