lomonaaeren | Chapter Thirty-Three of 'I Give You a Wondrous Mirror'- No Questions Answered

Remember, DH SPOILERS in this story!

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Chapter Thirty-Three—No Questions Answered

For Draco, it was like a dream.

He had known, vaguely, that his mother’s sister and his own cousin existed. But they had never been a part of his life. How could they be, when his aunt had had the bad taste to marry a Mudblood and then her half-blood daughter had chosen a werewolf? A werewolf whom Draco had never liked, or had any reason to? Not even Harry spoke of Tonks and Lupin often, and he was the only reason Draco would have considered them as worth anything.

But it was one thing to know that an aunt and cousin he would probably never see existed somewhere in the world, and something else altogether to think they had been taken out of it.

And then to see the look in Harry’s eyes, caught between fury and blank misery, with the guilt not far behind…

Draco wanted to follow him on the path he was taking, and avoid letting him fall into the vortex of his own emotions. He put an arm around his shoulders and turned to look steadily at Granger. “What can we do?”

Granger, who had been watching Harry in terrible pity, glanced up at him. Draco thought she was glad to have someone to speak to, and permitted himself a mental sneer. He had done it for Harry’s sake, not hers.

“The site has been put under the control of the Blood Reparations Department already,” she said quietly. “We’re investigating to see if we can uncover a clue as to why the Masked Lady chose to attack them—or to Andromeda and Teddy’s survival.” She cocked her head a little, and Harry stirred under Draco’s arm. “I was thinking that Harry might like to come along.”

Draco didn’t think it was a good idea. On the other hand, it would have taken the force of a hundred Death Eaters to hold Harry back now.

“What is this about?”

Draco heard his mother enter the room behind him, and felt another sorrow smite his heart. Andromeda had still been—maybe still was; it would be best if he could convince himself to be optimistic—his mother’s sister. She was about to suffer a loss that Draco was almost sure she would feel more keenly than he did.

“The Tonks house has been attacked, Mrs. Malfoy,” Granger murmured, at least keeping her voice properly respectful, and not sneering over Draco’s last name. “By dragons. We think—we think that Mrs. Tonks and her grandson might be dead. But we’re going to look, so that we can make sure we’re not dismissing evidence out of hand.”

There was a long silence, and then Narcissa sighed and said, “Of course you must go. But my son will come, too.”

“Yes, Mrs. Malfoy,” said Granger. “We’re—not sure why they attacked Mrs. Tonks, and there are some spells that might help us find out and can only be performed by a blood relation. If we find a body, that is.”

Draco felt his mother’s hand brush against his back, and he knew how to read the way she touched him without further instruction. Go. Do whatever you can, and then come back safely, to me.

He touched her hand in return, and thought of Scorpius, and Harry’s children. He would go into battle beside Harry, and he found the thought exhilarating, but there was no reason to take unnecessary risks.

Harry himself was pale, but he nodded several times, as though Granger’s words needed his personal approval. “We’ll be along as soon as we can make sure we have everything we need,” he whispered.

Draco was grateful for the extra minutes. He didn’t have his wand on him, he needed to dress properly, and he wanted to take along a few of the more battle-ready potions that he had taken to keeping on hand. Not to mention the fact that they would have to cage Tutela so they could Apparate with her.

Given the way Harry had gone mad the last time he attacked the Masked Lady, Draco didn’t think it was a good idea to leave the owl behind.

*

Harry nearly didn’t recognize the house.

He knew it was the right place, because he hadn’t Splinched himself, Draco, and Tutela in the Side-Along Apparition there. But fire had melted it, slagged it, burned it down to its foundations. He shuddered slightly.

Draco’s hand, resting on his elbow, curled around his arm in question. Harry glanced up, and saw the concern in his lover’s face.

He shook his head determinedly. He didn’t need to go back. He opened the cage, and Tutela hopped to his shoulder, a warm, comforting presence who hooted now and then. Then Harry walked forwards, steeling himself for more.

If Andromeda and Teddy had died here, he might be the only one who would be able to confirm it for certain, blood relative spells or not. He knew what they looked like more intimately than anyone else alive. Ron and Hermione didn’t visit that often, and neither did Ginny. Andromeda had never encouraged visitors. Remembering the conversation she’d had with him about grief, Harry thought he knew why now.

He only hoped that she was still alive to feel that grief. Regardless of what tortures she and Teddy might suffer at the hands of the Masked Lady, they could come back from most of them. Death, they could not.

They started in the gardens, or rather the mass of fused sand and glass that had been the gardens. Nothing green and alive was left. Harry had to use considerable cooling charms before he could walk comfortably on the ground. He forced himself to lower his gaze and search carefully for familiar landmarks, as well as anything out of place.

He frowned almost at once, and reached out to pick up something that lay just on top of the glass.

“Not so fast, Potter,” Draco said, and then flicked his wand. The hot shard rose up in front of him. Draco arched an eyebrow, and Harry blushed and tried to pretend that he hadn’t nearly risked burning his fingers off to do something that simple magic could do.

He turned his attention to the shard instead. It was large and white, with a faint iridescence to it, like mother-of-pearl. It seemed to be made of ceramic. It made a faint ringing sound when Harry punched it.

“What is it?” he muttered.

“I’m not sure,” Draco said, and then cast a charm Harry didn’t know, but which sparkled red around the edges of the shard. He shook his head when the red glow faded. “That charm would have told me if it was something I’d had contact with before. Whatever it is, it’s completely strange.”

Harry ranged away, though Draco was never far from his side, and Tutela was swooping back and forth above him, now and then drifting low enough for her wings to touch his head. Harry had to admit it was strange and comforting at the same time. He did most of his Blood Reparations work alone; he hardly needed a partner to convince Muggleborns to come back to the wizarding world. For the first time, he wondered if he should have become an Auror after all, if this experience of companionship was what Ron felt all the time.

There was no sign of a corpse, but so thoroughly had the garden been burned that Harry was not sure there would have been. He imagined, for a morbid moment, that he was walking just above Teddy’s ashes, or Andromeda’s bones. He imagined the dragonfire melting their faces, turning their eyes to jelly in their sockets—

He made himself stop imagining it, especially when Draco gave him a concerned look, probably at the expression on his face, and Tutela perched on his shoulder and hooted into his ear. They were getting closer to the house, which had still smoked with too fierce a heat to let anyone approach when Hermione’s people first arrived. He had to steel himself for the fact that they might find answers there, and that the answers would be uglier than anything he had ever seen.

He had to be strong. Whether Andromeda and Teddy were dead or prisoners, that was still true.

*

Draco hated everything about this place. His skin prickled unpleasantly with the heat. He had to continually stop and renew the cooling charms on his boot and robes. And he didn’t like the expression Harry wore, or the way that Tutela spent more time on his shoulder than in the air now. He was wrapping his grief up in rags and shoving it to the back of his mind.

Well, what would you have him do? Draco thought, as he floated another shard of ceramic, or ceramic-like material, into the air. He can hardly break down crying in front of all these witnesses, and you know that he wouldn’t feel able to take comfort even if you offered it right now. Leave it to his owl. That’s why you got her for him.

He was still trying to decide how he should feel, and wondering if Marian had been here, when the first Inferius erupted out of the ground in front of him.

The ground above it was glass and slag, a packed mound of gray and brown and half-white as firm as anything Draco had strode on in his life, but that didn’t matter. The corpse clawed its way upwards, the soil cracking and trembling and flying away from its hands, and then stood in front of Draco, hunched, rotting, jaws parting a moment before it flew at his face.

Draco whipped his wand around in front of him and spoke, without thinking, one of the Dark spells he’d spent some time studying when he first knew this was war. “Memoriam revert!”

The Inferius screamed pathetically as Draco’s spell tore through it, a thin, keening sound that resembled the wailing of wind through rock. And then living memories exploded in its head and clashed with the Dark magic that had made and driven it, and it collapsed, pounding its own fists into its skull with pulpy sounds.

Draco dodged past the screaming thing, heading for Harry. He crumbled a few more Inferi on the way, mostly by melting them or Transfiguring their legs into masses of hopping frogs and crawling grubs. He really had no doubt what he would see.

Harry was turning in tight circles, casting furiously, gold and green light whipping from his wand. A ring of Inferi surrounded him. They were so intent that Draco wondered how Harry had survived so far.

And then he actually caught a glimpse of Harry casting spells, and understood.

Harry’s wrist traveled further than Draco had known a wand could work. His mouth was slightly open, even though he was probably casting half his spells nonverbally. He seemed to know instinctively when a monster was about to close in behind him, and he would whirl and leap and let the Inferi crash into one another. Strong as they were, they were also heavy, and once they built up momentum, they didn’t turn aside easily. They would smash forwards, and then Harry would leap away like a kitten taunting a lion, and he would land in the clear while they went down in a mass of dust and tattered strips of cloth. Meanwhile, his magic tore their faces off and sank their legs into the ground so they couldn’t move.

Draco realized he had dropped too openly into admiration when a hand curled around his neck and yanked his head backwards. He screamed, but the sound was muffled, and the Inferius had grasped his wrist with its other hand, so he couldn’t get the wand up in time.

He felt Harry’s green gaze on him as if they were connected with a mental bond, and then Harry crouched slightly.

*

Harry didn’t know how he managed to leap over the Inferi. He only knew that seeing Draco about to die tore a bolt of panic through him—no, no, I just found him, we just fell in love, this can’t be happening—and then he was in the air, landing miraculously on sand clear of Inferi and ignoring the burning sting in his knees and ankles as he hurtled towards Draco.

He cast the Cutting Curse without thinking about it, without worrying that he might slice Draco’s hand off instead. He knew it was already perfectly aimed, the way that he always knew when he was about to catch the Snitch. The Inferius’s hand exploded into a curtain of gray powder, and Draco was able to bring his wand up.

But he still wasn’t going to be in time.

Harry screamed, and his wandless magic rose and lashed out with a fury and force he hadn’t known himself capable of.

The Inferius vanished. It simply—went. Harry didn’t know if he had melted it, or disintegrated it, or made it cease to exist. He was already beside Draco, examining the fingerprints on his throat, making sure that he could breathe, his half-formed questions coming out of him in great ripping gasps.

Draco just shook his head, wordless, and then Harry’s vision went white-gold.

He had braced himself to fight the pull of one of those tunnels the life-debts were fond of before he understood what had happened. The magic had appeared only briefly, healed the fingerprints on Draco’s throat to shadows, and then faded again. Harry had no doubt that he would have similar shadows on his throat if he reached up and touched them.

He had saved Draco’s life a fourth time.

“Eighth life-debt,” he murmured.

“And I think there will be more,” Draco said, and then pulled Harry forwards and took his mouth in a kiss so ferocious that Harry couldn’t do much more than submit to it. Harry felt a sudden surge of gladness that he had a lover who was willing to do that, and that not even killing could turn Draco into a different person.

Then the Inferi came at them again, and Harry turned to meet them.

Now that he could fight side-by-side and back-to-back with Draco, their numbers didn’t seem as overwhelming. And Tutela was back by now, screaming and swishing past the Inferi, so silent and so keen-eyed in the dark that their lumbering swipes had no chance of catching her. Harry felt laughter rising in his throat. It was hysterical laughter, so he didn’t voice it, but even that felt better than the bitter despair that had started to consume him when the ring of Inferi he’d been fighting earlier pressed in.

And then he fell.

He didn’t know exactly how it happened; perhaps some piece of the burned ground had twisted itself out from under him and cracked open in such a way that his braced foot couldn’t take it any longer. Or perhaps another Inferius had actually burrowed up from under and grabbed him. But he was down, and he knew he was being drawn further away from Draco, and his casting of Cutting Curses at the arms that held him didn’t appear to have any effect at all.

He raised his head and snarled, knowing he might die, but more frustrated than frightened. He was leaving Draco exposed, and his children without a father—

A low flash of golden light exploded past him and destroyed the arm pulling him with a cascade of what looked like blazing water. And then the magic of the life-debt came in answer, and Harry knew he had the marks of hands on his legs, too, and that Draco had saved his life again, and shared the scar.

He burst back to his feet and turned. Draco was watching him with a contented smile—not looking at the Inferius coming up behind him.

Harry blew its head off just as the great arms reached for Draco, and there was a silent flash of gold-white once more, like lightning without thunder. Harry wondered idly where the life-debts had put the scars this time, since he had saved Draco’s life before he was wounded. In its passing, he saw Draco grinning at him, and felt a sudden surge of outrage.

He probably let me save his life on purpose, just so that we would have ten binding us, like the couple Hermione told Ginny about.

The little—

The ground rocked, and he was thrown from his feet. Seeing the fountain of blue sparks that rose from the north of the house, he didn’t think it would be a good idea to try and regain them. He crawled towards Draco instead, who had his head tilted back and was regarding the blue light with a gaping jaw.

“What was that?” he demanded.

“Hermione,” Harry said, feeling warmth race through him as all the Inferi in sight turned to stone. “She developed a spell during the last few years that could cope with infestations like this, because a few of the pure-blood supremacy groups we pursued talked about experimenting with Inferi. But it’s enormously complicated—more a ritual than a spell, really—and she would have had to have people defending her and taking the pressure away from her before she could perform it. She must have had just long enough.”

Draco leaned on him silently. Harry stroked his forehead, and then glanced curiously down at him. Sure enough, his robes had shredded around the hems, and Harry could see the silvery marks of wide-spread hands on his ankle.

Draco touched his throat and smiled wryly at Harry. “I reckon that we’ll have a chance to look for that last scar later,” he murmured. “For now, should we look for your godson and his grandmother?”

Harry nodded, and offered a hand to help Draco to his feet.

*

Nothing. And nothing, and nothing.

That was the best thing that could be said of their evening’s expedition, Draco thought, warming his hands with a cup of tea as he stood near one half-crumbled and blackened wall of the Tonks home. They had found no trace of Andromeda and Teddy Lupin, no sign of a struggle. The Masked Lady might have killed them and burned their bodies thoroughly. On the other hand, she might have taken them with her. Harry had described how frail and grief-filled the old woman was. A threat to her grandson, the only family she had left in the world, would probably have been enough to make her roll over.

Which didn’t answer the question of what the ceramic shards were, or how the Inferi had come to be buried under the grounds.

Granger strode towards him. Draco took a moment to watch her in admiration. He would never admit to that admiration, of course, but he had felt the sheer strength of the magic that washed over him when the Inferi turned to stone, and he knew how much concentration and power that must have taken. Granger was still a Mudblood and an interfering bitch, but she knew her work.

At the moment, she was an interfering bitch who looked half-frantic, Draco thought. He put his cup down and stepped forwards to meet her halfway.

“What is it?” he asked, trying to run everything his father had told him about Inferi through his mind. He wasn’t an expert on the subject, but he might know more than Granger’s team of “good” wizards and witches did.

“I need you to come with me right away,” Granger hissed. “Ginny’s here, and she’d made her way to Harry before I saw her. With Harry in the mood he’s in…” She shook her head and turned around again.

Draco followed quickly. Though he hadn’t seen where his lover had gone—he had known that Harry wanted time to mourn privately, and he had trusted Tutela to keep an eye on him—he knew where he must be. After all, he could feel the magic building up from one corner of the gardens, beneath a series of twisted shapes that might have been the roots of a toppled tree.

And if Harry was already that angry…

Stupid Weasley. Draco thought she deserved to lose her life. But he knew that Harry wouldn’t agree, and it was for Harry’s sake, not the wench’s, that he hurried.

He found Harry leaning on the tree, his hand splayed as if he would like to dig his fingers in but knew the crumbled bark wouldn’t stand it. And Weasley was in front of him, tears streaming from her eyes, her fingers reaching out as if she could drag him back to her side.

“It’s for the children’s sake, yes,” she was saying in an impassioned voice as Draco came up. “But also for mine, and yours. I love you, Harry. I miss you along with James and Al and Lily. And you can’t say that you never loved me, that you don’t miss me, that the bond of trust has been so broken that you wouldn’t want me near you again, after a lot of time and work on my part—“

And then Draco came up beside Harry, and the world broke apart around them.

Draco had thought the tunnels that the life-debts tried to draw them through before this were insistent. He had not known the half of it.

His feet left the ground. He could hear the hungry wailing like the cry of an Inferius, like the bellow of a dragon in mating time. The light swarmed and bulged and rippled with strange shapes wherever it liked. He could make out squiggles of brown and orange in the gold and white, but he wondered if they were actually real or just the result of his eyes desperately seeking any other color.

The air opened in front of him, twisting and lifting as if he had already traveled through part of the tunnel, and he saw an image of the Manor’s gardens, in the dawn of an autumn morning, with Harry in his arms and Tutela fluttering around them, while their children, Scorpius and Al looking at least four years old, played on the grass, and Lily toddled about, waving her fists—

The vision grew sharp as if it was edged with diamonds, and Draco could feel it breathing itself into reality.

And then Harry snarled, “Teddy has to be there!” and the tunnel dimmed and dropped them and vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

Draco, breathing hard, reached down to Harry, who had dropped to crouch on the ground. He couldn’t help wishing that that vision was real, but they would have to survive the Masked Lady and somehow settle matters with Marian and Weasley first.

And then Harry threw back his head and screamed.

Draco, stricken, dropped to his knees beside his lover and wrapped his arms around him. Dull, sickly light was welling from Harry’s body—gold-white on the side closest to Draco, and brown- red like dried blood on the side closest to his wife. Harry was shuddering as if he were about to be ripped in two. Draco swallowed fear and tried to hold on, since he didn’t think he could do anything else.

“Ginny, go!” he heard Granger’s voice bellow.

She Apparated out, and the red light vanished. The gold-white clung for a moment, eddying around Harry like mist, as if it wanted to be sure that he would be there for it to manipulate in the future. Then it vanished, too, and Draco was left with a shaking Harry and a Granger whose eyes looked as old and burnt-down as the ashes around them.

“What was that?” he asked her.

“That,” Granger said quietly, “was your life-debts and Harry’s wedding vows engaged in a struggle against each other. We saw the red light at Harry and Ginny’s wedding, when they bonded.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m afraid that you’ll create so many life-debts they’ll become exactly as strong as the wedding vows.”

“And what happens then?” Draco asked.

“I don’t know,” Granger said tiredly. “Every other record of a similar situation I can find had the involved partner staying with his or her spouse, Malfoy.”

And she turned and walked away, leaving Draco there on that field of no answers whatsoever, with the horrid image of Harry actually being ripped in half.

Chapter 34.