Page 379
That weekend, Draco made a solid attempt at not letting himself mope. He took a long walk to the nearest little pebble beach, he searched for sea glass, he cleaned his entire apartment, and he found a discount book on the properties of herbs that he read cover to cover. Somehow, by the time he’d finished all of that—though Draco could have sworn he’d spent at least a couple hours on each task—it was only 1pm.
Irony was a bitch. On any other weekend, it would have taken him the entire forty eight hours to even manage to get off the floor and clean his bedroom, let alone the whole apartment. Granted, it wasn’t a huge space, he just usually had the patience and attention span of a toddler. And the energy level of a ninety six year old dragon pox patient.
Draco wanted to be unconscious. He considered taking a sleeping draught, despite the consequences, but couldn’t make himself put on his shoes to go buy one. Leaving the apartment felt like a very, very bad idea for some reason… But he wasn’t going to question that instinct because it had saved his ass multiple times when the Dark Lord had lived in the Manor.
So, instead, Draco gave himself the task of ‘anything but thinking’. His mind had moved naturally to the child’s reaction to the potion (he really ought to figure out his name) and to developing his next few ideas for later trial batches. With those ideas, though, came the memories of Mr. Doe, of Aurors, of Aidan, and of Potter accusing him of attempted murder. Which, apparently, was a bit of a touchy subject for him.
He’d promised Andrea that he wouldn’t return to work until Monday because she had a meeting with a seller in Beijing and wouldn’t be able to get back if he decided to put in some overtime. She was worried because of the second dysprosium incident and so was Draco, if he was being honest, but no one would be there on a weekend, would they? He felt antsy and on edge. His office wouldn’t be any safer than his apartment, of course, but it would at least give him something to do.
Draco sighed, but hauled himself up off the floor. Kaiser had already left for their vacation, which meant that Sal was his new acting supervisor. Sal wouldn’t mind him working a few hours on a Saturday, would he?
Pulling on his boots, Draco tried to remember anything he’d ever been told about the man who now held his occupational fate in his hands. He’d met Sal when he’d still been doing contract-by-contract work for Whirlwind. Late fifties, Draco had guessed, with salt and pepper hair, a goatee, and a soft voice that Draco had immediately preferred over Kaiser’s booming commands.
Sal hadn’t seemed to pay Draco any special attention, either. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t abuse this newfound power, of course, but Draco held on to the hope that they could be productive and civil for the next two weeks. Maybe he would actually be able to get things done now that Kaiser wouldn’t be breathing down his neck.
Draco opened his office door, bracing himself for some kind of explosion or to see all of his brews turned to worthless sludge. Everything looked normal, though. None of his potions looked off, none of his equipment had been moved, and there were no weird smells or strange noises in the room. Breathing a sigh of relief, Draco moved to sit at his desk.
Andrea was just being paranoid, he told himself, and he welcomed her company/protection during working hours but no one was going to come in on a Saturday just on the off chance they could mess with him. Besides, he needed his collection of books for research and he couldn’t exactly just visit the local public library asking about wolfsbane recipes.
He leaned back in his chair and grabbed the first book he’d been wanting to dive deeper into: A Wrinkle in Thyme - Herbal Properties Circa 400 BCE. It was dense and highly inaccurate, but it might give him ideas. Skimming, he thumbed through the pages until he got to a chapter on magical ailments but, naturally, there was no mention of lycanthropy because it had been extremely stigmatized from very early on.
Draco sighed and decided the only way he was going to get valuable information from this book was by chance. He bent the hunk of pages, applying pressure and letting them flutter through the air until he randomly let them still and found himself looking at page 379: wart treatment. That was… not helpful.
Just as he was about to start the whole process over again, Draco paused. A small, dark hair about three inches long was tucked into the crease at the center of the book like some kind of bookmark. He pulled it out, surprised by how coarse it felt. The hair was straight and distinctly inhuman but Draco couldn’t remember working with any ingredients or specimens that had hair like that.
Confused, he set it to one side and began flipping through the pages once again. Only, this time, he was subconsciously scanning for any other hairs on the off chance that this whole book had been mauled by some sort of creature. A creature who mysteriously tucked single, individual hairs between pages.
On page 37, the corner was dog-eared to mark it in a way that Draco had never done in his life. He kept flipping and found identical dog-ears also on page 39, page 73, page 79, and pages 93 and 97. Then none, until he got to the three hundreds. The book only had roughly 450 pages but Draco found hairs splattered seemingly at random throughout the 300-399 range and then absolutely none after that. 379 was the only page with a hair still, but evidently 400s were not even worthy of dog-ears.
Acting entirely on a sinking sensation of dread, Draco turned and grabbed another book off his shelf and thumbed to page 37. Sure enough, another dog-ear. This book was shorter—only about a hundred pages—but Draco was sufficiently intrigued so he grabbed a piece of parchment and began noting which pages had their corners folded and which ones had hairs.
After making his way through nearly half of his entire collection, Draco felt confident enough to hazard a guess at the pattern that was emerging. The folded corners coincided with page numbers that had either a three, a seven, or a nine. He could have guessed that after the first book, honestly, but he wondered then why pages like 73 or 397 didn’t have them.
It was just a guess, but Draco was fairly certain he knew the reason. Any combination of three, seven, or nine without any other numbers (no twos, for example, or fours) earned that page a folded corner. Their order didn’t matter, unless it was 379. 379 was evidently the perfect number as they were in order from lowest to highest with no other ‘impure’ numbers touching them. Every page 379 had a hair.
Every. Single. One.
Draco continued searching and had gathered a small pile of course, dark hairs by the time he ran out of books to check. Even his bloody notebooks that didn’t have numbered pages or had pages torn out contained a hair on whatever page would have been 379 originally. He grabbed the closest measuring tool—a ruler with imperial measurements he’d left on his desk—and laid out a few of the hairs. They were all the same length.
3.79 inches.
Someone had gone through every book in his entire office and dog-eared hundreds if not thousands of pages, carefully leaving a hair on every page 379. That had to have taken hours if not days and Draco hadn’t noticed a single book out of place. Whoever had done it had even managed to guess—accurately, mind you—at how many pages Draco had ripped from his notebooks and where so that the dog-ears and hairs were always placed in the right spot. Always.
Draco didn’t know if he was more unnerved or impressed. Nothing else in his office had been touched and even his small offering of bread at the hearth had gone undisturbed, which meant this was probably not just a stray rat. Because rats were totally capable of dog-earing delicate pages and of comprehending numbers.
Well damn. He didn’t know what to do, really, because it wasn’t like it was a threat he could report to anyone but it was still incredibly unsettling. Vaguely, he considered sending an owl to Andrea but he would see her on Monday and could tell her then. His brain then suggested owling Potter.
Draco quickly shut that down as quite possibly the stupidest idea he’d ever had, but still found himself reaching for his quill. Potter and Mr. Doe are the same person, his mind whispered, Mr. Doe was able to ground you and stop a panic attack—let him handle this too. Lifting his quill to the paper, Draco realized his hands were shaking again.
Thousands of pages. This was not a petty prank from a coworker or some half-assed attempt to poach his clients. Whoever had done this had been dedicated and meticulous to the point that it was honestly scaring Draco a bit. Who even had that kind of time on their hands?
In the end, Draco drafted and then tore up seven different notes to Potter before he gave up entirely. He was being pathetic. What would Potter say if Draco ran crying to him that someone had dog-eared the precious pages of his entire book collection? The git would probably laugh in his face and suggest that Draco just buy new books.
As if he could.
Shaking his head (and most of his limbs), Draco left his office and half walked, half ran back to the nearest floo point. Helen was behind her counter as usual and Draco offered a polite nod. Rather than ignore him like she usually did, though, Helen put up one slender hand and motioned him closer. Well, he had nothing to lose right?
“You’ve made a new friend.”
Draco raised an eyebrow in question because he most definitely was alone. She was looking just over his left shoulder and his skin prickled with the urge to turn around but he forced himself to ignore it. The last thing he needed was some voodoo witch putting ideas and vague warnings into his head.
“I wasn’t aware I had any friends.”
Her eyes snapped back to his face, but that only served to highlight that she had purposefully not been looking at him before. There went his idea of two lazy eyes…
“Yes, an Auror I believe. I didn’t know you worked with the Ministry, Mr. Malfoy.”
Draco rolled his eyes at the mere implication, but then supposed that consulting on a case actually did classify as working ‘with’ the Ministry. Helen was nosy, though, and most definitely did not need to know that. Harry had mentioned a floo point—she’d probably seen him come through once or twice when he decided not to Apparate, Draco reasoned.
“I don’t, and we’re not friends. I won’t be bringing any more Aurors through here, fingers crossed, so there’s no need for you to worry about it. If I’d known he was coming, I would have warned you.”
Helen did not shrug, but Draco felt a small shift in her overall energy that felt like indifference. She seemed less concerned about the presence of an Auror than she was curious about Draco’s personal life, which he was not surprised by. However, he also wasn’t inclined to indulge her.
“Well, glad we had that little chat. Have a good day.”
The floo powder was already in his hand when he heard Helen’s voice over his shoulder.
“Tell your friend hi for me.”
He paused, considering the situation. She was baiting him, but Draco desperately wanted to set the record straight so he gave in and muttered back:
“We’re not friends.”
They weren’t. Potter was as far from a friend as he’d ever been and Draco would not make the mistake of trusting him again. Helen snorted, and Draco stepped into the floo because that was enough conversation. He and Potter were not friends. Just as the flames flared up, he heard Helen’s voice call back:
“Does he know that?”
Harry spent the weekend pouring over ways he could try to keep Draco safe when the git had no reason to trust him and was definitely still mad. He understood why Draco was upset. He’d felt slimy about it from the beginning but had justified it as a means of protecting Teddy. And, to be honest, he’d still felt justified even if he knew it was a shitty thing to do because it was his responsibility to protect Teddy, especially from people like Draco.
Though, Harry wasn’t sure what ‘people like Draco’ meant anymore. He was pretty sure there was no one else like the blond in the entire world and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Protecting Teddy was his priority, though, so Harry had felt justified.
Until Andromeda, after tucking Teddy in, had looked wistfully at the floo and said: ‘You know they’re cousins, right?’
Harry had not known that. He’d nearly done a spit take, and had interrogated the witch relentlessly because there was no way that Teddy could be related to a Malfoy. But Draco’s mother had originally been Narcissa Black, he remembered, which made Andromeda the blond’s aunt. Had Draco known that? He hadn’t acted any differently around them, but then again it had been a high-pressure situation. If he didn’t know, Harry wasn’t sure whether it would be better to tell him, or to just let it stay surface level as a business agreement.
That felt gross too. ‘Business agreement’ sounded like some far off purchase of illegal goods, not what he and Draco had—or had had, at least. Harry wouldn’t have gone as far as to call them friends, but he’d seen a new and improved Draco that he found he rather liked and he ached at the lost opportunity to know that Draco.
He shook his head, reminding himself that Draco had every right to be angry and closed off. Merlin knew Harry deserved worse. Nothing broke someone’s trust quite like dropping a glamour and revealing that the nice, (hopefully) helpful businessman you signed a contract with is really your childhood enemy who almost killed you. On second thought, Harry would have been incredibly suspicious if Draco had taken that information in stride.
The blond was avoiding him now, which worked temporarily but would not keep him safe. Harry grit his teeth and remembered that, per his suggestion, Aidan now had full access to Draco whenever he wanted and would likely abuse it. So now he had to protect Draco from whatever the hell was happening at work and from his ex. He’d told Aidan so many stories about the blond… It was no wonder he’d latched on the moment he’d realized who their ‘expert potioneer’ really was.
Draco had also gone back to being a semi-git, which Harry supposed he deserved too. Andrea had ever-so-kindly informed him that he had done a bang up job handling the whole potion reaction situation, and that accusing someone of attempted homicide was not generally the way one went about ‘making amends’. Harry had thrown a stress ball at her and assured her he knew he’d messed up.
He didn’t tell her that Draco had looked more hurt by the idea that Harry could think so lowly of him than by the accusation itself. That sounded very self-focused outloud—he knew because he’d tried it in the mirror—and would not earn him any brownie points with the Gatherer who already thought he was pushing boundaries with the blond. And he was pushing boundaries, but he had no way to explain that that was just what he and Draco did.
They pushed each other. Constantly, relentlessly, and so over-the-top unnecessarily that everyone in Hogwarts had known about it.
Draco was the reason Harry had become such a brilliant seeker. Harry could have been good on his own, but the knowledge that Draco was right there, waiting to meet him at every challenge and working tirelessly to beat him, had pushed him to be great. He’d never told anyone that, of course, but he knew Ron had guessed. All it took was one mention of the blond during a rough practice and Harry would be back out there pushing harder than ever. Ron just didn’t know there was an aspect beneath it, now, that was more than just animosity.
“Any ideas yet, ‘Mione?”
She was six inches deep in the biggest book Harry had ever seen and he was hesitant to interrupt, lest he get pulled into ‘researching’ as well. Honestly, he was pretty sure she was just reading for fun at this point. She didn’t answer him and made a motion towards another stack of books that Harry knew from experience meant that he was supposed to help. He didn’t want to, but he had cornered her on a weekend for his own agenda so he supposed it was only fair.
Grumbling half-heartedly, he opened the first cover and began to skim.
On Monday morning, Draco told Andrea about the hairs and the dog-eared pages. She reacted rather well considering Draco had directly disobeyed her by going into the office alone that weekend, but he was not off the hook. He’d been around too many angry people in his life not to know when it was simmering in someone.
“Draco, dearest, may I ask you a question?” He shrugged, shuffling a bit farther away from her at the table. “Would you say that you like all your body parts connected to your body?”
Draco shuddered, but he’d been expecting this so he just swallowed down the fear. Best to get it over with, right? The sooner he let her take out that anger on him, the sooner it would be over and he could have his friend back. He gripped the edge of the table and slowly nodded.
“That’s interesting,” Andrea mused. “Because I seemed to recall threatening a rather important part of your body should you decide to put yourself at risk. Do you remember what that part was, darling?”
“My balls.”
“Yes! That’s it!” She turned on him, wand drawn but not raised, and Draco shrank back. “I must not have been clear enough the first time. You could have been killed, Draco, just because you didn’t want to wait or inconvenience me and that is unacceptable. Apparently, you don’t value your own life enough to be careful.”
She paused, giving him a chance to argue or deny, but it was true and they both knew it. Draco kept his mouth shut and continued bracing, just waiting for whatever hex she decided would be a good enough punishment. Andrea took a step closer, wand pressing into his gut.
“So, I will repeat myself just this once and gently remind you that if you ever do something stupid like that again I will do more than hex you. You will not have balls left for me to hex. I will peel the skin off of each testicle, individually, and I will hit them with curses you have never even heard of until there is nothing left to do but amputate. I will not kill you, but I will make you regret being alive if you ever put yourself in danger like that again. Do you understand?”
Draco nodded quickly, trying to give the desired response before she cursed him for sheer obstinance, but immediately her posture relaxed. She withdrew her wand, slipping it back into her sleeve, and stepped back. Without another word, she went back to slicing lily stems.
Draco did not know what to do with that threat, or with the lack of follow-up that had accompanied it. Andrea seemed completely calm now and content in the knowledge that Draco would not be disobeying her or putting himself at risk anytime soon. She wasn’t hexing him or cursing him. He had no doubt that she would, of course, but she hadn’t. Why not?
“Draco, darling, you know I love that shell shocked kicked krup look in your eye—so alluring—but I am not your bloody servant. Get your ass over here and chop.”
“Of course, milady,” he managed to force out.
Andrea smiled, turning that playful energy on him once again as if she hadn’t just threatened to turn his balls into seared fillet. He knew this dynamic, though, so he settled into it with relief. While he may not understand why she hadn’t hexed him, he was more than willing to accept the blessing and move on. She threw a pig’s tail at him.
“Very ladylike,” he muttered, but Andrea just laughed and threw another.
He was okay.