Stress Balls
Draco could feel himself shutting down. Panic welled in his chest and urged him to run—to get the fuck away before they locked him in a cell again or hauled him off to Azkaban—but he couldn’t move. He knew that leaving wasn’t an option. They probably wouldn’t even let him go to the bathroom if he asked, and leaving after that question would just look suspicious.
Everything was spinning. The edges of his vision blurred as he tried to reason with his own mind. He couldn’t go anywhere. If the door wasn’t locked, then it sure as hell would be the second he tried to stand up or reach for it. His nervous system was in overdrive.
This wasn’t Harry.
Unable to run or hide, Draco did the only thing he could and turned inwards on himself. He could feel himself slipping away. Falling, falling, falling until his body felt dull and disconnected from him, like a machine he was merely operating. He became extremely aware of his outward appearance. His face was set in a neutral expression, his chest was rising slow and steady despite the actual speed of his breathing, and his hands were folded neatly beneath the table where no one could see that he was drawing blood with his nails.
This wasn’t Harry.
That was the only thing that made sense to this new, detached version of his mind. Harry would never say things like that or imply that Draco had killed one of his best and only friends, regardless of the reason. But, staring at the Auror across from him, Draco couldn’t find any difference. It was the same green eyes, the same dark skin, the same bird’s nest he called hair—it was still Harry.
Which meant that Harry thought he’d killed Ariana.
Something vague and meaningless began to sink in Draco’s chest, but he barely noticed it. Harry—the same Harry who had used a glamour, who had seen him panic, who had answered his bloody drunk owl—thought he was capable of killing someone. Not just a random person even, but someone he loved.
In hindsight, Draco should have expected nothing less. Harry had been the first (and only) to accuse him of trying to kill Teddy when he’d had a bad reaction to the potion. Draco could still remember his trial in the hazy, insincere way that he remembered most of the year following his arrest but he knew distinctly that Harry had brought up Dumbledore. He’d talked about how Draco hadn’t been able to kill him.
How Draco wasn’t capable of murder.
At the time, it had felt like an answer from the Fates themselves. Draco had been days away from ending his own life just to escape an Azkaban sentence and he might have even done it that night if Harry hadn’t sounded so fucking honest. Draco Malfoy wasn’t capable of committing a murder, he’d said.
Not even his own.
Harry had lied. True, Draco hadn’t been able to kill Dumbledore and he’d gotten just as much grace and leniency for that inaction as he had judgment for his cowardice. Somewhere in the back of his mind though, he’d always known that Harry hadn’t meant it. There was no way that someone like Harry—the Golden Boy, the Chosen One, the Savior of the entire fucking Wizarding World—would ever be able to testify on behalf of someone like Draco Malfoy without lying. He knew that, and yet the realization still stung.
Because maybe in his darkest moments following the trial, he’d let his brain point to Harry’s testimony as evidence. Maybe he wasn’t fundamentally rotten and bad deep down in his core. If someone like Harry Potter could still say semi-decent things about him, then maybe Draco still had a chance of turning his life around and becoming the kind of person who could look at himself in the mirror. Maybe he wasn’t irredeemable.
But that’d all been a lie.
“Mr. Malfoy, can you please answer the question?”
Shit. How long had he been staring off into space like that? Long enough to be suspicious? One glance at the Aurors told him more than he ever wanted to know: the other Auror looked mildly inconvenienced or maybe even curious but Harry… Harry was the picture of barely contained rage.
The thought of Harry being angry at him should have had more of an impact. If Draco hadn’t found himself at the other end of the Gryffindor’s wand too many times to count and if he’d been less hidden inside his own mind, he might have cared. As it was, the glare barely sparked a hint of anxiety in him. All he could manage to think through the fog and the constant repetition of can’t go back can’t go back can’t go back was:
I should have known.
“Mr. Malfoy, are you alright? Do you need a Healer to be called for?”
The other Auror’s voice was enough to make him jump and he leveled his gaze on her. She seemed neutral enough. Harry wanted to send him to Azkaban, that much was clear, but he might be able to convince her still. He could focus on her.
“No, thank you, I’m quite alright. My apologies, can you repeat the question?”
His voice was calm and even—the same tone he’d had drilled into him since birth and the same one he’d used during his own trial. Aristocratic. It was his default state, the voice he went to when he was too withdrawn or too freaked out to summon up his usual wit and sharp tongue. Both Aurors clearly noticed the change, but said nothing. Harry looked back at his paper.
“Mr. Malfoy, did you have any reason for wanting Ariana Windsor dead?”
Oh. So hearing it the second time didn’t make it hurt any less. He curled his toes as tightly as he could, straining the muscles in his feet and relishing in the pain. This conversation was on the record. It was important to remember that, and to phrase his answers very carefully because he was not talking to a friend. Harry had shown him that very quickly.
“No, I didn’t benefit from her death in any way.” That sounded logical and reasonable, right? “As far as I know, she left no will and had no assets that I might have inherited. Like I said, I thought she’d already moved to New York so I didn’t question the lack of letters or communication, I just assumed she’d moved on.”
The other Auror wrote something down and Draco tried to focus on the speed of her pen or the loops of her words. She wrote in cursive. He couldn’t read it from where he was sitting, but it was easier than looking at Harry and seeing the pure anger and disgust plastered onto his face.
“Did you have any reason for wanting Ariana Windsor alive?”
She was my friend. She was smart and funny and she made horrible, watery hot chocolate. New York was supposed to be her next big adventure, even if she never spoke to me again.
“Not on paper, no. I cared about her very much and hoped that one day we might meet again but I knew it was unlikely. Once we got away from Halfway Lane, she was free to move on to bigger and better things. She deserved bigger and better things.”
More writing. Were they noting his use of the past tense as suspicious? He’d been the one to ID her body and it’d been a few weeks at this point, so it was logical for him to have shifted to past right?
“Was Ariana a person you confided in?”
Draco stiffened. They’d already asked him if Ariana ever confided in him—which he’d answered as honestly as he could: she did, but never about work or business—but this? Why did they want to know whether he’d ever told her things? She was dead, it wasn’t like they could subpoena her memories and learn his deepest, darkest secrets. Necromancy was illegal, even for the Ministry, wasn’t it?
“Yes, in some ways. She was the only person I was close to for the first six months after my release. I didn’t break the terms of my NDA with the Ministry, though, or influence the rest of the trials in any way I promise I—”
“Mr. Malfoy,” The other Auror cut him off and Draco was bloody grateful. “Did you ever talk to Ariana about the war?”
Fair skin and dirty blonde hair that managed to look almost brown compared to his own platinum. Hundreds of sleepless nights. The feel of a warm body curled small and non-threatening against his side. Cheap wine. The warmth of gentle, feminine fingers around his wrist—not scary, the only female he’d ever been truly afraid of was Bellatrix and she’d never grabbed for him like that—and a gentle laugh.
“Damn, Draco! Compared to you, I looked downright tan!”
Then she’d noticed the tears on his face. He’d told her everything. After a year of isolation in a cell, he’d latched on to the first kind voice he could find and he’d talked for hours. She’d pet his hair and hidden his Muggle razors. The night he’d told her he’d cast the Cruciatus curse on someone, he’d expected her to push him away in disgust.
Instead, she’d held his hand and assured him that, if she’d had any family left to protect during the war, she would have cast a thousand Unforgivables on anyone they told her to. She’d called him loyal. Not to the Dark Lord—she’d been very clear on that—but to his parents and his family.
Even now, he still found himself aching with the desire to believe her.
“Yes, I told her a lot of things. Nothing classified, of course, and nothing in the NDA but I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone else really, so…”
He shrugged as if that explained everything well enough but the Aurors both kept quiet for a few more seconds just to see if he’d jump to fill the silence. They’d done that during his previous interrogations too, and during the negotiations at his trial. They’d locked him up then.
“Mr. Malfoy, is it possible that Ariana had any valuable or sensitive information? Not necessarily that the Ministry would have found useful, but maybe something that someone with ill intent might want to know?”
Draco’s stomach flipped. It was the only thing he managed to feel over the rapid beating of his heart and he prayed that he wouldn’t throw up. He heard the implication, though. They were suggesting that someone (Broken Crown, probably) had killed Ariana in an attempt to get information out of her. Information that Draco had given her.
They thought it was his fault.
Did that count as involuntary manslaughter? He didn’t think it did, but he’d been wrong before and the Ministry had proven that they could ignore any rule they wanted to if it was convenient for them. They were going to arrest him again. Another surge of panic swelled in his lungs but there was nothing he could do about it. He was in their headquarters sitting in their interrogation room so, if they decided he was guilty, then he was.
Draco was at their mercy.
“I don’t remember… A lot of what I told her was meaningless or insignificant but I don’t know what kind of information a person like that would find valuable. It might have been.”
Both Aurors wrote that down. Harry flipped through the next few pages of his question packet, skimming through them and crossing off a few, but Draco just waited. His heart thudded. He could hear the thrum of air conditioning somewhere in the building and it was unbearably loud in the silence. Would they bother with another trial? He’d already had one and, sure, this was a different crime technically but they would be eager to get rid of him. Draco wondered if Azkaban really had been cleared of Dementors like the papers said it had. He doubted it.
“Mr. Malfoy, are you willing to declare under oath that you will remain honest and transparent with the Ministry about your involvement with and your connection to this case?”
That was an easy question. There was clearly a right answer and a wrong answer, which let him suck in a bit of oxygen. He was good at questions like that—good at saying what people wanted to hear and wiggling his way out of situations.
“Of course. I’ll make a vow if you want.”
Harry looked up sharply and Draco shrank back, suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that he’d said something wrong. The other Auror looked impassive as ever, though. Maybe she already knew that he was going to be arrested and was just participating in this charade to cover the Ministry’s ass?
“Alright, one last question. Do you, Mr. Malfoy, feel capable of maintaining a professional and ethical level of involvement in this case?”
No.
That was not an easy question. He could be professional and ethical, of course, but capability was another issue entirely. Draco didn’t feel capable of maintaining anything right now, much less anything that would be watched and monitored by the Ministry. Why were they even asking him this? Did they want him as some sort of informant inside Azkaban?
“Yes, I do.”
He’d missed it when they’d said ‘last question’. The Aurors stood and dismissed themselves, wishing him a good rest of his day. They left the door open behind them. For a full minute, Draco sat there at that steely interrogation table and he didn’t breathe. Was this a test? If he tried to leave, would they call it resisting arrest and use it as a justification for whatever bruises or curse marks he ended up with?
After another minute, an intern entered the room. They were young and clearly new but they seemed to have no desire to make small talk with the convicted Death Eater. He was expecting cuffs. It was weird to have this kid arrest him when they weren’t even wearing Auror trainee robes, but maybe it was such a done deal that they wanted to let a new recruit practice?
“Mr. Malfoy, if you’ll just follow me to the floo point. Right this way.”
Mechanically, Draco stood and followed the teenager in front of him. They led him back down the hall—fuck he knew that hall, and he still remembered the way it stretched and wobbled when you were forced to walk down it with your ankles chained together—but then they were in the atrium. The intern pointed at a floo and disappeared.
It was the floo back to Whirlwind.
They were letting him go.
Draco had half a mind to check for tracking spells or listening devices before he stepped through the fireplace, but he had absolutely none of the capability to. If they were watching him, then they were watching him. That was nothing new. He didn’t quite believe it yet, even as his hand threw the floo powder and his voice announced his destination, but if he could just—
He was free.
The dusty, cluttered shelves of Helen’s shop greeted him and Draco suddenly sagged against the mantel. They’d actually let him go. He couldn’t breathe right and his entire body was shaking so badly he couldn’t manage to hold on to anything for balance. Somehow, he ended up sitting on the floor.
Helen rounded the corner, already babbling something about inconsiderate floo users knocking over displays, but she stopped short when she saw him. Draco was already struggling just to look at her. Everything was blurred and swirling together like someone had charmed his eyes into fish bowls and he couldn’t really hear her voice over the dull thrumming in his ears.
Hands touched his arm. Female hands—the only reason he didn’t stop breathing all together—and then they were guiding him to sit on something soft. Vaguely, he felt something warm and hard being placed in his hands. A mug of tea, maybe? Regardless, he didn’t drink it because he wasn’t that stupid, even in whatever altered state he was in.
He hadn’t been arrested. That was good, of course, but the relief of it was blotted out by the memory of what had just happened. Even if they’d let him go, they still thought Ariana’s death might be his fault. Harry thought it was his fault.
Harry had lied. He wasn’t redeemable and he wasn’t a good person forced to make horrible choices, he was the kind of person Harry Potter thought would murder his best friend and his cousin. Draco fell asleep—passed out? Blacked out? Was spelled asleep? Regardless, the last thing in his mind as everything went dark was the little voice he’d always used Harry’s testimony as evidence against.
You’re bad. You’re rotten and evil and so inherently bad that nothing can ever fix you. People will always realize that. Then they’ll leave you and you’ll be bad and alone. Exactly as you should be.
Harry slammed the folder down on his desk with a dramatic thwap! He spelled the door of his office closed and cast about a hundred locking and silencing charms, making sure no one would come in or notice, before he began throwing things. Small, soft things off his desk—things he’d put there just for this reason. Stress balls, mostly, and a few squishy desktop toys that he’d been gifted over the years for various holidays.
It didn’t help.
For the first time in five years, Harry genuinely considered quitting his job. He’d mentioned it before and he joked about it as often as the rest of his coworkers did, but he’d never meant it. Being an Auror was what he was good at. He saved people, he stopped criminals, and if he ever had to look into the eyes of someone that terrified and ask them for a motive ever again he was going to quit on the spot. Kingsley could go fuck himself.
Half-heartedly, Harry tried to take a few deep breaths. It would work if he did it long enough, but he didn’t even bother counting for them. He wanted to be angry. Fuck the Ministry for their bullshit procedures, fuck Kingsley for his thoroughness, and fuck Aidan for slipping in those questions that were so carefully worded to sound innocent but cause panic.
Harry threw another stress ball at the wall. He should have caught those questions when he’d first read through the packet but he’d been distracted with the case and he’d assumed it was the standard set they’d used since training. He should have known.
Biting his lip, Harry picked up one of the stray squishy toys and chucked it at the wall too. It gave a satisfying little thump but even that didn’t help. He should have known better. He should have anticipated that Aidan would try something like that and that Kingsley wouldn’t read into it. He should have protected Draco.
Fuck! Draco.
Harry had never watched someone disassociate that quickly or that dramatically before, even in St. Mungo’s after the war. He’d recognized it as soon as it started, of course, but he couldn’t do anything. Not when their every move was being recorded. Not when it was his relationship with Draco that was already being called into question and when messing that up could cost Draco his consulting contract.
His fingers throbbed and twinged, reaching for something that wasn’t there. He wanted to Apparate straight to the blond and murmur apologies until his voice gave out, holding them both steady for as long as it took to remember how to breathe.
But he knew better. Ginny and Ron had both chased him after the war whenever he disappeared. Now, possibly for the first time in his life, he understood that urge and he genuinely believed that they’d followed him out of concern and a desire to help, not because they wanted to hurt him while he was down.
Back then, though, he’d felt hunted. He’d wanted nothing more than to retreat into his chosen hiding spot and lick his wounds until things weren’t so overwhelming. And once things were a bit easier, he hadn’t gone to them. He’d avoided Ron and Ginny like the plague because he hadn’t wanted to spark that same frantic reaching out behavior.
After he’d weathered the worst of it alone, he’d gone to Hermione. The only person who had given him space and let him appease that deep, primal instinct to hide while he was vulnerable. Chasing Draco wouldn’t help now, even if every fiber in his being was aching with the need to fix this. He couldn’t fix this. Not yet.
There was something different this time. True, ever since the glamour incident (and also the Teddy incident, and the whole ignoring him out of nowhere incident), there’d been a bit of a barrier between them. It was natural and understandable. Draco didn’t trust him entirely—and why would he?
But Draco had trusted him. The blond had let Harry hold him while he cried and had let Harry ward both his office and his apartment. He’d accepted Harry’s explanations and his hot chocolates, though never letting Harry forget that he was by no means completely forgiven, and they’d been making progress. Draco had even drunk owled him for Christ’s sake! That took a considerable amount of (albeit intoxicated) trust, right?
But not anymore. Harry wasn’t sure if it was the disassociation or if it was something else, but Draco had looked at him without an ounce of warmth or trust in his face. He’d reverted back into the shell of a person he’d been at the trials. Cold and apathetic. Not even panic had managed to completely overwrite the expression that Harry had memorized by heart during Sixth Year.
Back then, he’d called it Draco’s ‘plotting something’ look. But now he saw it for what it really was: the pure, calculated part of Draco’s mind that rose up in a last stitch effort at self-preservation. Thinking, constantly thinking, and trying to anticipate or see a way out. It made Harry’s skin crawl to have that look directed at him and he physically gagged when his brain reminded him that Draco was completely justified.
Harry had put him in that panicked, think-on-your-feet headspace. That was the absolute last way that he ever wanted Draco to look at him, but he knew he had no right to be upset by it. He also had no right to try to fix it—not yet, at least. Not when it would just do more damage.
Without another few throws of the closest stress ball, Harry spelled everything back into place on his desk and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He just had to wait. It would be shitty and it would be agonizing, but he would wait because it was also the only hope he had of salvaging this. The wait would also give him time to plan.
Draco was not okay. After reassuring Helen at least fifty times that he was fine and blaming his blood sugar, she’d let him go with a sharp look. Back at Whirlwind, he disappeared into the safety of his office and tried to understand why it all looked so unfamiliar. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, but… wrong.
After a minute reflecting, he decided that no one had cursed his office and that this new, distorted view of things was a byproduct of whatever mental state of pause he was in. In the back of his mind, a little voice said he was dissociating. There was nothing he could do about it though, and acknowledging the fact didn’t change the situation so he ignored it. Work would be a good distraction, right?
He tossed a few cacao stems into the nearest cauldron and added a bit of peppermint oil to his modified insulating potion trial batch. Andrea had been pushing him to try to perfect the new recipe so she could, quote ‘stop looking like I just walked out of a poorly run sex dungeon’ and Draco had obliged because it was hardly that much more work when he had a second set of hands helping him. It wasn’t perfect yet, but it was the closest they’d gotten so far.
He’d spent the last few days prior to his ‘routine questioning’ (when not drinking or embarrassing himself, apparently) pouring over his list of remnants from the potion he’d analyzed at the scene, as well as the recipe scrap. As far as he could guess, it was an incredibly complex recipe with at least two separate parts, but possibly up to twenty.
There were sweet, harmless ingredients: rosemary and bluebells for loyalty, heliotropes for devotion, and black-eyed susans for justice. But they were all tainted somehow. Draco had already tried to brew a few miniature batches to test out his strongest theories, but none of them had turned out remotely correct so he was left fiddling with his quill. He was certain that something had been added to make the magic dark but what? Even blood magic couldn’t corrupt that quickly.
The second part (or at least what Draco was currently theorizing was the second part) did not help with his general uneasiness. There were herbal ingredients that might be harmless: black dahlias for betrayal and dishonesty, narcissus for selfishness, and bird-foot trefoil for revenge. But there were others that were not so harmless, too. Namely: tansy (a poisonous war declaration). Poppy was also a possibility (symbolizing death) but, given that it was a prominent ingredient in Grave Dust, which their victim had been addicted to, Draco hadn’t listed it as part of the recipe yet.
The rest of the herbs and plants Draco had identified had been thrown haphazardly into a generic ‘part three’ that was subject to change, but all shared similar themes. Marigolds, cypress, foxglove, rue, and hydrangea, among others. Pain, grief, death, repentance, and sorrow. Not to mention the fact that foxglove contained digitalis, a chemical that could easily kill an adult human without warning.
Draco did not like this potion.
Even with all the symbolism and meaning of those plants, though, nothing could have rivaled the few non-plant ingredients. The first one Draco had only managed to guess because he’d seen his mother preparing it once the summer before Sixth Year: a rat heart stuffed with mint for corruption, betrayal, and suspicion. He’d never had the guts to ask her then what potion it had been for, but now he wished he had. What kind of person would even think to use a rat’s heart stuffed with suspicion?
There were at least three other non-plant ingredients that Draco had yet to only guess at. He hated all of them. Two were a complete mystery—though he had a sinking feeling that one of them was going to end up being human blood—but the last had been found in a 6th century book on hex bags.
A snake injected with its own venom.
How pleasant, Draco thought, as if focusing on the obviously dark intentions of the brewer would let him forget what had just happened. Broken Crown (or Broken Crown’s brewer, at least) was a seriously fucked up human being. They were also a very talented potioneer, if this recipe was anything to go by. In a sick way, he kind of admired the intelligence behind the magic, even if it was evil magic.
Immediately, Draco stopped himself. He dug his nails into his forearm and scratched at the Dark Mark until his eyes began to water. How could he dare to forget? So many lives had been lost and so many people hurt just because they had admired power, regardless of how evil it was. He would not make that mistake again.
Harry had spent four days attempting to plan and had yet come up with a single option that wouldn’t just make Draco hate him more. No apology or gift would even scratch the surface. A few times now, Harry had cursed the Dursleys for always making him apologize for things that weren’t even his fault. All those “I’m sorry for existing”s had culminated in a deep, entrenched avoidance of ever saying those two little words, even when it was in a justified situation.
Even almost a decade later, he was still shit at apologies. Ones he’d had to make before were easier—small ones, especially, that he’d rehearsed and practiced in therapy until they said exactly what he meant rather than what his defense mechanism wanted to scream—but this situation did not warrant a small apology. He also couldn’t ask his Mind Healer what to do because he didn’t know how to explain Draco to her.
Harry realized suddenly that he didn’t know the blond as well as he’d thought he did. They hadn’t done this before and he couldn’t predict Draco the way he could whenever Ron or Hermione were mad at him. He didn’t know if recovering from something like this with Draco was even possible.
Which, admittedly, was how he’d ended up in a bar that morning, sitting across from Pansy Parkinson. She was frowning and wore a sweatshirt with leggings. He’d never seen her in anything other than her Hogwarts robes, but in this dim corner of a bar that shouldn’t even be open, he was struck by how Muggle she looked.
“Jesus, Parkinson. It’s 10am—what are you drinking?”
Pansy narrowed her eyes but he couldn’t tell if it was in response to the last name or the question. Just to be petulant, she chugged the rest of her drink and motioned for another. He could see how she and Draco were friends.
“My mistake, Saint Potter. I assumed that your SOS owl meant that this was going to be a difficult conversation.”
Her new drink arrived and Harry tried not to be jealous of it. Realistically, he knew he had much more money in his vaults than any of the old Pureblood families did and he could have spent his weekdays drinking alone at 10am, but he had a job. Showing up intoxicated was not something Kingsley would overlook (nor did Harry think he should). Still, it would have been nice to nurse a firewhiskey or something just to dull the anxiety brewing in his chest.
“I fucked up.”
Pansy just stared at him.
“I’d assumed.” She took another long drink. “So, are you going to tell me what happened?”