Wings & Tails

Title: Dreams and Apparitions
Author: themaohour
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Prompt: #52 - The Grudge
Gift for: little_dumpling
Rating: R
Word Count: ~10,000
Summary: A mysterious kidnapping spree brings Auror Potter to sleepy, steamy Little Hangleton, where he confronts a horror whose history is more familiar than he knows.
Warning(s): (highlight to read)*Dead human beings of a variety of ages.*
Beta: Boundless, boundless love for crazyparakiss for fixen Sie booboos. You're amazing.
Disclaimer: This piece of art or fiction is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros. Inc. The Grudge belongs to the original authors and film-makers. No money is being made, no copyright or trademark infringement, or offence is intended. All characters depicted in sexual situations are above the age of consent.



Dreams and Apparitions



–
“We're almost done here, Potter; you can go home now.”

Harry looks up from the reports he has been examining. The unventilated office of the Hangleton Area Auror Division is suffocating. His hands shake when he stacks the papers loosely at the corner of the desk, a loose shuffle of papers that include details on five kidnappings, eight witness accounts, and the sum of eleven crime scene visits, most of which Harry conducted himself.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” he tells Augustus Ripsheare, the highest ranking Auror in Little Hangleton. There are only two, besides himself, and the other is a psychiatrist named Trixy Ackerly, who has asked for his autograph twice now. “Owl me if anything new comes up.”

He is eager to leave the claustrophobic office and get back to his flat. The back of his neck has been prickling all day, and he gets the sensation of being watched whenever Ripsheare or Trixy leave the room. Across from his desk, darkened picture-windows form an eerie mirror, one that he tries to avoid looking into whenever he can. Corralling the last of the papers into a neat stack, he bids goodbye to the other two Aurors and departs without looking bad.

That was so creepy...

The string of kidnappings had begun almost three months ago. Two of the abductions had taken place in the strip of land between Greater and Little Hangleton, a grassy knoll from which two schoolchildren had since disappeared during their daily walk home. The only residence nearby, a crumbling Victorian on Lavender Row that overlooked a small, black pond, had been empty for almost a decade. On discovering its vacancy, the Hangleton Area Aurors — and Harry Potter, who had been assigned to the case by an irritated Senior Auror — had completed a thorough sweep of the premises, in which they found no indication that either of the children had stopped at the residence. The second set of disappearances, a pair of siblings who had attended Hogwarts, occurred three weeks later.

The final kidnapping was the most baffling: Emily Shale, sixteen years old, had disappeared from her Physics class at Hangleton Secondary School, late Monday afternoon. The baffling aspect of the case was not how a teenage girl had disappeared in plain sight of twenty other students, but how a Muggle girl had become involved with a string of kidnappings that seemed to focus primarily on Wizarding children. Trixy had Obliviated the entire Hangleton Police force as soon as they had outlived their usefulness and begun asking pertinent questions, but that had done little to control the panic.

“It's ridiculous,” Ripsheare had said earlier, as he pried open one of the barred windows above the door. “Panic won't do anything for the case. You'd think they'd realize that by now.”

Harry puts the wailing students and candlelight vigils from his mind and Apparates home as quickly as he can.

-

Draco lies on their bed, reclining amidst the cotton pillows. His hair fans out from his face, fine and blond as flax; his eyes rest shut in sleep, fluttering with each even exhale. One hand settles on his stomach, swollen and widening, lost in the folds of Harry's oversized sleep shirt.

Harry sets his bag down as quietly as he can, but it's not quietly enough.

Immediately, Draco shifts onto his side and his eyes snap open. “When did you get back?” he asks, his voice cracked with sleep. His legs, slender and white as ribs, curl beneath him. Harry wants to touch them, run his hands along the curve of their length, wriggle between them and squeeze close to Draco's body. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“Just now,” says Harry. He tosses his shirt on the floor and climbs over Draco to his side of the bed. “Go back to sleep, we'll talk about it tomorrow.”

Draco shivers and presses himself against Harry's side. He buries his face in the crook of the other man's neck and inhales. “Chilly,” he whispers. “Cover me with the blanket.”

It must be a hundred degrees outside, but Harry complies wordlessly, wrapping the blanket around them both and draping a leg over his lover's hips. “Better?”

Eyes shut, Draco nods again. “I'm so glad you're here and not...Aurornapped...” Harry can feel the soft mouth on his bare shoulder. “I was so worried.”

Draco rarely admits to being worried. Harry kisses his forehead, a promise to come back safely from rolling hills and haunted houses and unventilated offices. “I can't leave my child without a father, can I?” His hands seek out Draco's body beneath the covers, eager to find the curve of his form. He means: I can't leave you.

They both know by now that they won't ever go back to sleep. Already, Draco's heart is beating sparrow-wing-quick inside his ribcage. Flushed with creeping arousal, he lies pliant and willing, unashamed of holding Harry's gaze. Fragile as an egg, the child that grows inside him belongs to them, to the life they have crafted for themselves.

Harry relishes reminding himself of this fact. He leans over to kiss Draco's neck. His mouth slips open over the delicate bones beneath the surface of his translucent skin. “Still cold?” he asks. His hand slips up Draco's smooth thigh. “It's the middle of summer, Draco.”

Their child will be born in Autumn. Until the harvest, they will walk in hope and in good faith; Harry loses himself, finds himself, frees himself, buries himself, exposes himself in the man he has come to know as a lover. Their bed is his most sacred place, a temple of prayers to the flesh.

Harry presses his hips down hard against Draco's. The blond man gasps into Harry's hair and his legs fall apart easily. When he yields, it is always unexpected: Harry never anticipates the sudden willingness. When the opportunity presents itself, he is quick to seize.

“You're insatiable,” Draco mumbles into Harry's shoulder, when Harry pushes two fingers into him. “Oh, do that again.”

Harry wraps his free hand around Draco's cock and strokes it firmly. Draco's mouth falls open and his eyes fall shut. For a moment, they rut hopelessly against each other, tangled in a web of tactile pleasure, and then Harry's inside, pressing his hips insistently against Draco's as he breaches the last boundary between them. He spreads his body over his lover's like a cloak, like nightfall. Everything is dark. He can hear Draco mewl his given name softly into the seam of their bodies.

“Don't stop.”

“I couldn't.

Draco's fingernails scrape over the broad plane of Harry's back. Harry relishes that feeling on his skin, just as he relishes burying himself in Draco's warm, perfectly-formed body. He wonders how he managed to find a lover who is always beautiful — tangled up in musky sheets and an oversized tee-shirt or at work, covered in indeterminate potion ingredients after a double shift at the apothecary, wrapped in blankets to stave off the cold that creeps in through the window panes in winter, drenched in sweat and wild-eyed from the fight, just now beginning to round with child.

Always.

Strands of pearly come shoot from Draco's cock. He bites through his lip; Harry tastes blood when they kiss, his own orgasm rocking through his body. They fit together perfectly, breathing hard in the dark, undulating against each other to stave off the stillness that always follows their coupling.

“What's wrong?” Draco asks, when they are finally stop moving and dawn begins to rise up over the shrubby hills. His chest rises and falls. “You're supposed to relax after sex.”

There is an edgy undertone to their post-coital dialogues. Something desperate that only rises to the surface when they've lost their defenses, broken the walls, and the ecstasy of the moment has passed. Something like suspicion, something like fear.

Harry shifts uncomfortably in the nest of wrinkled cotton. “The case,” he says. “That must be it.”

“It bothers me too.” Draco hand is on his stomach again. He's always touching it, and Harry, in turn, can't keep himself from seeking out its warmth. “I don't like waiting for you. Makes me feel useless.”

“You're not useless,” says Harry. He presses an open-mouth kiss to Draco's cheek and tries to shake the unease that has settled over him. “I'd have nothing to come back to, if it weren't for you.”

Draco looks away, his eyes suddenly bright. “I know. I just — ”

The groan of wood giving way interrupts whatever Draco was going to say. The subsequent crash rattles throughout the flat, and Harry feels Draco grip him tightly by the arm. He makes a soothing sort of sound and runs his hands through Draco's hair.

“It was at least a floor down,” he whispers. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds harsh, broken. “Let's go to sleep.”

Draco nods and his eyes shut again. When the stress of the day has fallen away from his features: he is most beautiful here, curled up like a seashell, his face buried in the damp bend of his elbow. His chest rises and falls, evenly now. Harry runs his hands over those smooth shoulders, down the long length of his spine.

“Stop pawing me and go to sleep,” murmurs Draco.

Harry finds satisfaction in this and doesn't hesitate to comply.

–

“You're being a lunatic.”

Draco moves through the kitchen with surprising ease. He'd never used a stove until he was eighteen, but he picked up a talent for preparing breakfast foods in the first few months of his relationship with Harry, who often forgets to eat breakfast. “This doesn't make me the woman,” Draco likes to say, even though it's surely a losing battle.

“I'm not mad,” says Harry. He pours dark coffee from the pot and leans against the counter. Light filters through the window above the sink, casting the room in the bright gold of summer. “It's just a feeling. I've been known to be wrong about them.”

Draco snorts and flips over one of the eggs in the frying pan before him. His hands are delicate. “Just try not to get yourself killed. Pour me a cup of that, will you?”

Harry raises an eyebrow and lets his gaze fall to Draco's stomach. “Should you really — ”

“Absolutely. Pour me a cup of coffee.”

Harry sets a second cup beside the stove and comes to stand behind Draco. “Smells delicious,” he says, and buries his face in the blond hair. He hears Draco gasp a little, and gratification surges through him as his hands come to rest on the blond's hips. “I could live off this.”

They say stupid things to each other. Never “I love you.” Always cagey, always just below the surface. Their friends think it's ridiculous; they've been living together for almost three years, and they are expecting their first child now. They should know how to hold hands in public, how to call themselves lovers in front of strangers, how to make promises to one another that they don't know how to break.

Draco's grip on the frying pan tightens. “A man can't live on bread alone,” he whispers, turning halfway towards Harry and away from the open flame.

Harry mouths at his gleaming clavicle. Draco's body is like bread, handfuls of sustenance, human and darkened with arousal. Harry doesn't have to go to work for at least another hour. In fact, he never has to go to work again, if he doesn't want to; he could stay here for the duration of every day, making impassioned overtures at his lover.

“I could stay today,” he says. His hands slip beneath Draco's shirt, running gentle fingertips over his hips, his belly. “They'd be fine without me.”

Draco shakes his head and slides away from Harry's touch. “Go to work,” he says. He slides an egg onto one of the pewter dishes and hands it to Harry. “Eat first.”

They sit at the table with the blue checkered tablecloth. Harry drinks his coffee and Draco doesn't. Their ankles brush together shyly. Their forks scrape against the flat surface of their plates, making little squeaking noises as they devour their meal in the scant minutes before Harry must depart. Outside, Britain is waking up to a new day.

Harry brings their plates to think sink and scrub them off. “There's no excuse not to use magic,” Draco calls from the table, but Harry ignores him. What's an extra thirty seconds to wash them with one of the yellow sponges from the supermarket? His wand is all the way across the room, sitting on top of his borrowed HAAD jacket.

“I shouldn't be back too late,” Harry says. He shuffles back to the table and leans down to kiss Draco's cheek. “I'll ring you if I am. Don't stay up.”

Draco tilts his head to solicit another peck. “I wasn't going to. You'd better not make so much noise next time, either.”

Harry grins at him. “Take it easy, lover,” he says, snagging his wand and jacket as he backs towards the door. “Don't overwork yourself watching soap operas again.”

Indignation sparks in Draco's face and Harry Apparates away, still smiling.

–

“Just in time, Potter,” says Ripsheare, when Harry is knocked into being in the middle of the office. He was aiming for somewhere near the water cooler, but he blames Draco's attractiveness for his poor deliberation. “You're going to interview one of Emily Shale's classmates.”

Harry hates working with Muggles. Not because they are Muggles, but because he has to lie to them as earnestly as he can, and sometimes they are Obliviated, which can make their testimony more difficult to extract. They are also more sensitive to Veritaserum, and that can lead to awkward slip-ups later. Harry doesn't want to hear exactly what this Ewan McAdams was thinking about Emily Shale that Monday in question.

“Be in the interrogation room in five minutes,” says Ripsheare. “You're on.”

“You'll do fine,” Trixy assures him, patting him quickly on the arm. “You've got an honest face.”

Ewan McAdams is a skinny Muggle boy of sixteen, blond-haired with scars on his knuckles. He reminds Harry a little of the Draco he knew in youth: angry, closed off, engaged in some constant war. “I don't know nothing,” he drawls, the second Harry walks in with a clipboard and a Hangleton Police uniform. Or the top half, at least. McAdams probably doesn't check for authenticity.

“It says here,” Harry pretends to study the clipboard, “that you and Emily were good friends. You don't know anything about her disappearance?”

Ewan's eyes harden. “I don't know nothing,” he repeats. “If Emily was kidnapped, I don't know who took her or where they gone. If she ran away, I'm happy for her, and I don't know where she gone, either.” He spits on the cement floor and sneers at his hands. His lips move as if in silent mantra.

“Do you have reason to think she's run away?” Harry asks. Maybe Emily Shale's disappearance only happens to coincide with the other disappearances, or maybe she planned it that way, if the tightness in Ewan's mouth and shoulders is anything to go by. “Mr. McAdams, I —”

“Ewan. Mr. McAdams is my father.”

“Ewan,” Harry begins again, and takes a moment to compose himself. “Ewan. We're just trying to get to the bottom of Emily's disappearance. If you know anything that can help us —”

“Help you what?” Now Ewan is looking at him, his eyes sharpened to points. “You know her pa hits her? Comes back from the factory and drinks all night and smacks her 'cause the dishes aren't done or the floor's got dust. Sometimes she bleeds. What were the police getting to the bottom of when Emily's lip was busted up?”

Harry has no reply.

“That's what I thought,” Ewan says. He leans back on the back legs of his chair, arms crossed over his chest. Harry can see the outline of his ribs beneath the thin cotton of his tee-shirt. “She walked around like that for weeks. Everybody knew by then. You know what it's like to have everybody know?”

A great many thoughts occur to Harry at once: that he does know what it's like to have everybody know; that a simple healing spell would have saved Emily Shale from her humiliation but maybe not herself; that Ewan McAdams probably cut his knuckles defending her honor from stone walls because he feels as helpless as anyone else does. Harry feels pretty useless right now, because he isn't any closer to finding Emily Shale, maybe further, and even if he were, he isn't sure she would be any better off in sleepy, muggy Little Hangleton. He wonders about the other four children who have disappeared, all younger, and questions their assumption that there is a connection.

When he looks back at Ewan McAdams, Ewan is staring out the window.

Harry takes a seat opposite him and sets the clipboard aside. It's for show: they record everything magically, just in case. “I want to find the person responsible for four or five kidnappings in the Hangleton statistical area. Those victims have families who want them returned. Who care about them the same way you care about Emily and want to see them home safely tonight. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Ewan sits very still for another moment. “I don't know nothing,” he says finally. “I can't help you. Emily used to spend a lot of time down on Lavender Row. Think she had a boy or something down there.”

Harry knows there aren't any boys living on Lavender Row, but he thanks Ewan for his time and sends him home.

“Did you get anything?” asks Ripsheare, looking up from the notebook he has been scouring. Harry shakes his head and says nothing. “Well, that's the trouble with Muggles. They're never very talkative. That's all right, if you could just head down to the scene of the crime and see if there's been any disturbances; then you can go home.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good man. Put those on.”

Harry takes one look at the exterminator's uniform and Apparates on the spot.

–

The sole residence on Lavender Row is impeccably maintained.

“They re-built it about ten years ago, but no one stayed,” the estate agent, Marcela Eadmund is saying. The keys clink against each other in her spindly hands. “Used to be a dreadful little hovel, but this place has just been updated with all the amenities of the twenty-first century. There's a lovely pond in the backyard, really top-notch landscaping. It's a shame it's so close to the site of those kidnappings, and that all those people died here. Makes for a hard sell in this economy —”

“People died here?”

Marcela climbs the five steps to the red front door and knocks twice before entering. There is no one inside. She flicks on the lights and Harry's wand, transfigured into an ostentatious Muggle watch and worn on the wrong hand, heats up against his wrist in protest. The inside of the house is nicely furnished with nondescript wooden furniture. The hardwood floors are maple. One of the windows looks out on the pond, overgrown with reeds.

“Did Laura not give you a full history?” Marcela turns to look at him. He thinks he sees something out the corner of his eye, but it's probably his sleep-deprived imagination. “This land used to be owned by the Gaunt family of Little Hangleton. Several people were murdered here by their lunatic son, who —”

All at once, Harry is sick to his stomach. “Stop,” he says, holding up a hand. He doesn't want to hear about the origin of the War from a Muggle estate agent. “Oh god. That's this house?”

“Yes. Didn't you know?” Marcela scowls at the floor, which is covered in nails and tacks. She picks one up and drops it with a yelp. “Fucking contractors.”

Harry shakes his head and coves his mouth. “I didn't,” he says. This instantly becomes something he will keep from Draco. “I suppose this is another one of those things everyone knows about, isn't it?”

“Of course,” scoffs Marcela as she picks her way over the floor. “There's more though. Some of the people working on crew died, and the place started to get a bad rap. None of the occupants have stayed long, and some of them died too. Not in the house, mind you, but one got in an auto accident last year and another got hit by a bus.”

Harry manages not to vomit.

Marcela shows him the house. He looks for whatever they missed: any clues to the disappearances of the magical children or Emma Shale. He looks for anything out of place in a Muggle home but finds nothing that doesn't suit the perky but impersonal rental. No dirt, no evidence.

"Has anyone else been by to look at the property?” Harry asks.

Marcela jumps. “What? Oh, I'm not sure, I've only just started showing it. Laura is on sick leave.” She turns at the hall and motions for him to follow. “Come look in the kitchen. I get the creepiest feeling in here.”

Harry follows her into a newly-renovated kitchen, which is tiled in blue and decorated with lemon-yellow accents. Decorative vinegars and artificial flowers line the window ledge. A sun-bleached curtains cover the thin, two-paned window. He can imagine Petunia living there, growing snapdragons in the planter box outside.

“See anything?” Marcela turns on the tap and sticks her bleeding finger under the water.

Harry looks around, but nothing appears to be out of place. He is just about to turn away when he hears her shriek and stumble over a half-full rubbish bin.

“Marcela?”

Marcela stares at her hand, which is coated in black slime. “I thought they fixed the fucking pipes!” she cries, slapping her hand down on the newspaper that covers the floor and heaving herself to her feet. “Those arseholes, I could have had a bloody showing today.”

“Does this happen often?”

“Every time I've been in,” she says. “Like a bleeding curse.”

She begins to ascend the stairs, but stops partway up. “Do you hear that?” she asks. One foot hovers above the next stair. “Listen.”

Harry halts his breathing and listens. At first, he hears only the sigh of an old house, the scrape of bare branches against the window panes of the clapboard stage set built atop a tragedy.

Then he hears the crying.

Marcela takes one, two steps backwards. Her slender hand grips the railing. “You hear it, don't you?” She looks to Harry for some kind of reassurance; he nods yes, he can hear it. She backs the rest of the way down of the stairs, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the stairs.

The lights begin to flicker and every window snaps shuts simultaneously.

“Oh my god,” Marcela cries. She's reached the second to last step now, but her face belies no relief. Instead, unadulterated horror creeps over her features and she misses the last step. Her footing falters; she lands hard at the bottom of the stairs.

A chill sweeps down from the upstairs and the crying gets louder. “My baby!” wails a woman's disembodied voice. “Where is my baby?”

Marcela lets go of her obviously-broken ankle and regains her footing with incredible speed. She takes a few reeling steps, but those seconds give Harry enough time to reach out and Disapparate them both. He lands them at his cousin's secondary school in Surrey.

“How did we get here?” asks Marcela.

Harry Obliviates her and puts her on a bus back to Greater Hangleton. He tries not to dwell; a splinching is a terrible accident.

Crack!

He's gone.

–

Harry gets home early.

When he gets to the flat, he finds the lights charmed off and the window shades drawn. Opening and closing the door does nothing to rouse the stillness. For a moment, he has as terrible vision of Draco's body lying on their bedroom floor without breath in his lungs. Harry sets down his bag, takes off his shoes, and creeps down the hallway, wand in hand.

The door to their bedroom is ajar, and beyond it, the room is dark. The fear, coagulated in his throat, blisters hot through Harry's body. Drawing a deep breath, he pushes in with his shoulder and casts a quick Lumos to illuminate the space.

On the bed, the sheets and blankets are heaped into one corner. Harry approaches them when he thinks he sees movement — he gets close enough to smell sweat and fear before he is sure that Draco is buried beneath them. “Draco,” he begins, moving to sit beside the pile, wand still held aloft. “Are you all right?”

“Go away.”

Harry swishes his wand to end the enchantment on the lights. They blaze to life, and the blankets give a start of alarm. “Relax,” Harry says quickly. “It's me.”

“Who else would it be? Leave me alone.”

Harry's hands scrabble over his knees where he tries to keep them still. He draws his legs up onto the bed so they don't dangle over the side. He lets the room get quiet again, listens to the sound of his lover struggling for sleep. Somehow, he manages not to say anything.

When their relationship began, Draco spent a lot of time alone. He'd come to live at Grimmauld place in the last stages of the war, and they'd developed a tentative camaraderie in the isolation that comes with being placed safely out of harm's way. Harry had come to know him as a sharp wit, something fragile and inexplicably worthwhile, though it had taken months of sitting silently in the library together and sharing staunchly rationed meals and sleeping in the same dark room before they were anything more than adversaries.

“Aren't you coming to bed?”

“It's only half seven,” says Harry.

“So?”

Harry pulls back the sheets and climbs underneath them. Draco's body finds his, presses insistently closer, and he moves to embrace it. Draco's hair smells like lavender and the sharp tang of the human body. He wants to ask have you had dinner yet? or how was the baby today? but his mouth is silent, open against Draco's neck.

He tastes salt.

Draco had been pregnant once before, but it didn't take. It had left him a little damaged, prone to solitude; different from the man Harry had first fallen in love with, but no less, no weaker. He fills his time with soap operas and his journals, lines of verse that Harry suspects he will never read, and stares out the window at the dim, smoggy horizon. There have been nights when Draco has woken in tears, cried out for an unknown child; in the morning, it becomes little more than a dream and a name he has forgotten.

After an appropriate two years, they have begun again.

“Can we just...lie here?” Draco's voice is soft, little more than a sigh between willow boughs. Harry forces himself to nod and roll onto his back, yearning and unfulfilled. “I'll make it up to you.”

Harry is quick to say, “I know.” A pale glow still creeps into the room, although the night is not far off. “But you're feeling all right?”

Draco looks away. “Fine,” he says. “There's takeaway in the friger-ator.”

“No, I'm not hungry.”

Draco's shallow breathing fans over the swoop of Harry's neck. “You're sure you're not lying, Potter? You sure?” He wraps his arms and legs around the trunk of Harry's body and holds as tightly to it as he can. His body feels like concrete. “Don't leave.”

A little muddled, overwhelmed by the day, Harry wraps an arm around Draco's shoulders and kisses him softly. He doesn't understand what's wrong, but he wants to make it better. “I'm not going anywhere,” he says, his eyes already shut.

It's been a longer day than he knows.

–

Augustus Ripsheare stays late every night.

He has good help. Potter is a good worker. Trixy is a little useless, but her heart is in the right place. Neither of them are adequately prepared to handle an investigation of this caliber, and so Augustus stays indefinitely, until the last report is filed and the final witness interrogated for information. This is a manhunt with a vanishing man, and he is determined not to lose the trail.

Beyond the metal door of the office, something smashes against the wall. Augustus jumps to his feet, heart suddenly on edge. “Hello?” he calls, taking a tentative step towards the doors. He grew up in Greater Hangleton; he knows the stories of the Gaunts and the Voldemort's origin, he just never expected them to be true. “Is anyone out there?”

The door swings open and Jorge, the janitor, sticks his head into the office. “Sorry, sir,” he says, holding up his mop. “The cart got away from me.”

Jorge is a man with an easy smile and five children. Augustus likes him the best out of all the janitors they have had at HAAD headquarters. He keeps things quiet, keeps to himself, and never causes any trouble. He's been working there almost five years now.

“No problem, Jorge,” says Augustus. “Have a good night.”

Jorge shuts the door, leaving Augustus alone in the office. The Auror heaves a sigh and sits down hard in the chair. His eyes flutter shut. He needs more sleep. Believing in fairy tales is for children, easily frightened by darkness, afraid of their own shadows.

“Go have a drink, Augustus,” he says aloud. “You need some courage in you.”

Outside, another smash, followed by a crack. Augustus reminds himself to add Jorge's raise to the budget. “Is everything all right out there?” he shouts, on his feet again. He lumbers towards the door, his body heavy with the length of the day. “Jorge? Did the cart get away again?”

He opens the door and finds the hallway empty. No sign of movement, or Jorge, or the cart. Augustus runs his hands through his thinning hair and begins towards the eastern exit.

“Hello?” he calls again.

Something that sounds like shuffling papers moves to his right and he whirls to face it. He faces the figure of the janitor, facing away from him to peer down the long hall. “Oh, Jorge, I thought you'd — ”

The moment Jorge turns around, it becomes immediately evident that something is terribly wrong. His eyes are strangely darkened, his hands limp at the end of his raised arms. His spine warps sharply to the left, bent over and at the same time elongated to a terrible length. Blood drips from the gash along the side of his sculpted face.

Most apparently, he has no jaw.

Augustus stumbles backwards with a yelp and scuttles across the floor. Jorge takes a few lurching steps towards him and falls to the smooth tiles. He begins to pull himself over the surface by his arms, moving like some kind of spider, leaving a trail of red in his wake. His jawless mouth hangs open, silent and malicious.

“Oh Jorge,” Augustus whispers. He draws his wand and aims it at the corpse. Fire blasts through it, ripping flesh from bone, searing into the greyish skin. Jorge stops moving and lies in the hallway beside the eastern exit. He is no longer breathing.

Augustus forces himself to stand and staggers to the restroom. He washes his face and hands, one at a time so he doesn't have to let go of his wand. His heart thunders in his chest. Sighing, he turns to lean against the basin of the sink, examining himself for any further damage, eyes flicking nervously through the derelict space.

When he falls through the mirror, he doesn't even scream.

–

At two-fifty am, the Floo begins to ring.

Harry had charmed it to sound like a telephone, which only intensifies his dread as he shuffles towards the living room. It could be Healer Zemke, Shacklebolt, Ripsheare, Hermione or Ron, St. Mungo's with an update on Narcissa Malfoy's condition...

He is not expecting Trixy.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, rubbing his forehead. Sleep hasn't come easy the past few days, and they've been decidedly sexless, which only aggravates the preexisting condition. “Can't this wait until tomorrow?”

“Ripsheare's dead.”

Oh. No, Harry supposed, that really couldn't wait until morning.

“What happened? Here, come through.”

Trixy stands in his living room, wrapped in an emergency medical blanket. “I was hoping I'd find you awake,” she says quickly, moving to sit on his couch. “It's terrible, Harry. When I got there, the entire office had been demolished and Ripsheare was in pieces and — ” She breaks off and buries her face in her hands. “Oh, it was terrible.”

“In pieces?” Harry moves to stand a little closer to her. “How do you mean?”

“They said it was because he tried to Apparate to a place that didn't exist,” she sniffed. “But I don't think that's it. He looked like someone torn him apart over a long period of time and arranged the body parts so — ”

“What the fuck?”

Harry and Trixy turn their heads at the same time. Draco stands in the doorway of their bedroom, still dressed in his clothes from earlier. One arm curls over his stomach and his eyes blaze like silver pentacles, imbued with fire and magic. He takes a step towards them, away from the support of the door, and he seems to wilt immediately in the light.

“Tell them you're done,” he says. His voice splinters under the strain of the words. “Tell them no more of this. You're finished with this case right now.”

Harry feels compelled to action but doesn't know how to respond to his lover's sallow skin or stringy hair or withered expression. He is as useless as he was to Ewan or Emily or Ripsheare except it matters now, more than anything. “Go back to bed.” You are barely standing.

“You can't lock me away!” Draco snaps. He takes another step towards them, and his knees threaten to buckle. “I'm not going to let you keep going back to work when your supervisor has just been arranged in the middle of the bloody office.”

He coughs hard into his elbow and drops down to sit in the recliner opposite the couch. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks Trixy.

“This is Trixy,” says Harry, who moves to stand beside the recliner. “She's a psychologist with HAAD.”

“This had better not be a really elaborate intervention.”

“It's not. I promise.” Harry glances over his shoulder at Trixy, who is still sitting on the couch, her ankles held primly together and her hands folded into a polite shape. “Trixy, this is my partner, Draco.”

Trixy sits awkwardly on the couch. “I didn't know you were...” She trails off, her eyebrows knitting together in what is less confusion than consideration, and waves with the fingers on one hand. “It's nice to meet you.”

Only after she has left does Draco look him in the eye.

“Promise me,” he says as he climbs back onto their now-cold bed. “You'll get another assignment. Work somewhere else.”

Harry just nods and hastens to touch Draco again. His hands skate over the smooth landscape of his lover's body; they fit together perfectly, their bodies lacing together like fingers. “What if they won't change my assignment?”

“You're Harry Potter. You'll come up with something.” Draco's breathing comes too fast for Harry's taste. “Or you can quit. And we can be poor together, like on the telly.”

Harry wraps his arm partway around Draco's waist. He wants to say you will never go hungry, but it comes out, “Yeah, just like on telly.”

They fall asleep like that, because Draco believes him.

–

“I thought you were done.”

Harry looks up from the blueprint of the House of Gaunt. It's not the House of Gaunt anymore, of course, it's a Four Bedroom Two Bath Colonial on Two Hectares. He's been looking them over all morning, tracing the path of the deaths geographically and chronologically. The latest point of data is the death of estate agent Marcela Eadmund, who suffered acute heart failure and died shortly after at her home. One of the photographs from the morgue shows pin-pricks all over her prone body.

“No. They wouldn't re-assign me.”

The argument is still fresh in his mind; first with Proudfoot and then with Draco. Hangleton Area Auror Division is down an Auror and no one will transfer in. I can't stay, I'll be dismembered. Hangleton Area Auror Division is down an Auror and no one will transfer in. You can't stay, you'll be dismembered. The same argument, same words, but he's got both sides — a bitter monologue for two.

“I thought they would. Must be worse than I thought.” Trixy sets her white coffee mug on the counter. They've been working out of a storage room on the south side of Little Hanglton, just over the hill from Lavender Row, and have made no breakthroughs. Harry wonders how much worse it could possibly be. “We'll get to the bottom of it.”

Harry's lip curls. “Do we really know any more about curses and demons than Muggles?” He holds his wand loosely in his hand and doesn't acknowledge that he couldn't set it down if he tried. “It's not a spell. It's something else.”

She's looking out the window. He meets the gaze of her reflection. “What kind of answer do you want from me?” asks her image. “You're right, we don't know what the fuck we're dealing with. Ripsheare's dead. The DMLE isn't sending any more Aurors out here. We have to handle this on our own, and and we're doomed.”

Doomed. Harry has been doomed before. It weighs heavy on him, but he isn't the hero of this story. He isn't even sure he knows what the story is. The life of a worry-worn bystander is already taking its toll on his body. “We're not doomed,” he says, dropping his body into the chair and his head into his hands.

“That's the chipper Potter I've come to appreciate,” says Trixy. “It's only death; we've all seen worse.”

–

“I get sick in the afternoons,” Draco says, running his hands through his hair. “I thought I was done with that.”

Harry tries not to let the concern bleed into his face as he sits down opposite Draco on the tiled floor. “Maybe you should talk to a Healer,” he says.

“Already been,” Draco admits. His eyes fall shut and he leans heavily against the bathtub. “There's nothing wrong with me. Some...people are sick until the day they give birth.”

Harry's dark eyebrows knit together. The deadened tone of Draco's voice immediately becomes cause for alarm — when he talks about their child, he speaks in the lilt of joyousness, carefully hidden behind a veneer of arrogance; his eyes light up and the corner of his mouth twitches into a rueful smile, the emotion behind it one Harry recognizes as his own. He never scowls. Never speaks ill of the unborn.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Harry's hands come to rest on Draco's cheeks. Despite their bright flush, they are clammy. “A chill, maybe?”

Draco shakes out of his grasp. “I don't have a chill,” he says, letting his head roll to one side. Harry studies the curve of his jaw, the only piece of Draco's face he can see. “Help me up. It's freezing down here.”

Harry climbs to his feet and hefts Draco up by the upper arms. Draco sways a little and falls against him. “You're coming to bed,” says Harry, who tries not to acknowledge the blind panic welling up inside him. “Just for a little while. I know you're fine.”

Draco nods. “Fine,” he echoes. “Just for a little while.”

Harry barely has time to catch him before he falls.

–

“There's nothing wrong with him,” says Healer Zemke as she stands up, dusting lint off her lime-green robes. “He's sensitive to temperature changes. Your flat must have a draft.”

Harry eyes Draco's sleeping body, sprawled out on the couch. His mouth is part-way open, and his breathing seems to be coming too fast. “I've noticed something in the bathroom,” Harry says. He's so tired of feeling like he's crazy. “Would you look? For something I've missed?”

Healer Zemke pushes up her wire-frame glasses and follows him down the narrow hall. Harry sits on the edge of the bathtub while she kneels down and checks for spell residue, mold spores, and cracked foundation. Her manner is methodical, thorough, and when she comes back with nothing, he can't seem to slow his racing heart.

“You've kept an immaculate bathroom, Mr. Potter,” she says, crossing to the sink. “There's nothing here to indicate an environmental cause. Male pregnancies are simply very particular and require a tremendous amount of energy from the man in question. The best thing you can do right now is make sure Draco is getting enough nutrients to sustain himself and the baby. If — what in Rowena's name is wrong with your sink?”

Black sludge splashes out of the faucet, drenching her hands and pooling above the drain. Harry takes a step back — was it doing that yesterday? — and fumbles with the latch to the towel closet. Healer Zemke shuts off the tap with her elbow, leaving the sludge to congeal in the basin, and stares at him incredulously, holding up her stained hands so they drip down her arms instead of on the floor.

So much for an immaculate bathroom.

“He didn't drink any of that,” Harry exclaims, offering a hand towel and a Scourgify to Healer Zemke. “We get our water delivered. And it's definitely never done that before.”

When they glance back at the sink, the tainted water is gone.

“Perhaps I'm not the professional to call,” she says, her lips tightening and going white. “There are individuals whose talents are better suited to situations like this.”

“Situations?”

“Hauntings.”

Harry's grip on the knob of the cabinet tightens. “My flat's not haunted,” he says. Across the wall, he can hear his neighbors preparing a late lunch. Metal scrapes against metal, wood against the linoleum floor. Garbled voices murmur amongst themselves. He wishes he had Hermione right now, but she's in Egypt with Ron until next month and by then it could be too late. “Do you think it has something to do with what happened to Draco?”

Healer Zemke shrugs. “I heal the body, Mr. Potter. Spiritual matters are not my area of expertise. I can assure you that both Draco and your child are in peak physical condition, that his body is handling the pregnancy very well, and that your consistent care and attentiveness has been invaluable to this process. You want to make sure that he is comfortable, and if this persists, know that it has little to do with any anatomical irregularity.”

Harry nods and shows Healer Zemke out. “Thank you,” he says, and she nods, expression grave, and Disapparates off the front step.

–

Dr. Trixy Ackerly spells her teeth clean and rearranges her hair in the women's lavatory for the fourth day in a row. The mustard cardigan she has been wearing smells like grass and marshmallows, courtesy of a free air freshener. At least she had the good sense to keep three extra pairs of socks and a packet of laundry detergent in her desk drawer.

She catches something out of the corner of her eye.

“Potter? Are you still here?”

He probably is. His lover has control issues and fears his own incompetence. She would put in long hours at the office if she had that kind of relationship, too. Harry needs someone who can nurture him and acknowledge his many-faceted identity; this needy, haughty hussy simply will not do. While she is thinking, one of the bathroom stalls opens, and Dr. Ackerly looks into the mirror to see who comes out.

Possession is like slipping into cold water.

She doesn't try to move. To move would be futile. To think would be futile. Her body flexes its fingers experimentally. She is walked away from the mirror and out of the room as she might walk herself. Her Imperio training is useless: the sensation is entirely unlike the blissful irresponsibility of the Unforgivable; instead, she resides inside a body that does not belong to her, whose will is not her will, whose thoughts are not her thoughts. A stranger's body. She doesn't even consider pushing back — these limbs don't belong to her.

Another door opens and she finds herself in front of Harry Potter's desk. He crouches over some document, scribbling in his initials with a low-grade quill. She wonders if she could reach out and knock it over. Probably not. She doesn't try.

“What can I do for you, Trixy?”

His voice sounds like a shout through the undergrowth. The volume is right, but the words are distorted, like static. She opens her mouth, and she expects herself to be unable to speak, but instead the restraints seem to lessen and she tries to gasp out a warning while she can.

“I have a theory about the house,” says the body in her voice. “We can walk down there whenever you're done.”

Harry's easy smile spreads over his face. “I don't have much to work on. Just some forms on the official story with Ripsheare.” His eyes move over her face, and a line appears between his eyebrows. “Haven't they contacted you about that?”

They have, actually. She's supposed to do a psych eval of Potter to make sure he still meets DMLE mental health standards. She was probably supposed to have done one before, when he first told her about the auditory manifestations and relationship with the residence under investigation, but she put undue faith in his constitution. Not that it matters now, as she intends to relieve herself from active duty as soon as she regains her agency, provided she ever regains her agency.

A rest somewhere.

The body stops talking. She doesn't need to talk, just beckon. It comforts her to have a purpose: get Potter out of the building and into the house on Lavender Row. She doesn't need to ask why, the importance of that question is minimal. Potter's upstanding presence in the yard will solve all the problems. Maybe she can do that psych eval.

She turns the brass door knob with a snap of her wrist. The door flings open, a little harder on the hinges than she intended. She glances down at her right hand, the ring finger of which has been snapped backwards. “Oh dear,” she says to herself, although her lips don't move. “Bodies are fragile.”

When she lunges for him, the action feels as natural as shaking hands or clasping his arm in consolation.

He is expecting it, of course. The Chosen One has his wand drawn quick and though she feels the compulsion to draw her wand, she reaches for her hip instead of the side of her thigh, where she keeps it strapped above her skirt-line with Muggle Velcro. He has his wand pressed against her collarbone and she wonders if it would hurt to lean into it, just a little. The spirit that has taken hold of her seems to understand the limitations of its form, and a muted fear begins to well up inside her. Just a little bit. Maybe he'd kill her.

But maybe he wouldn't. Why take the risk?

She doesn't move at all, and silver sparks shoot out of Potter's wand. The magic pierces the tender skin of her throat. Heat radiates from her core.

She is thirteen years old. She and her sister, Amanda, walk together in the orchard at the estate of their mother's father, which is just outside Vilnius. Autumn then, as it is autumn now: the sky is the russet of a setting sun, clouds that pink but grow greyer every day. They lived in the Old Country that year, the year of the war, speaking none of the language or knowing any of the customs. She met a boy that September, a first love, but his face is not the image that flashes through her muddled mind. Today, she eats apples from the trees, and, her hand sticky, reaches out to grasp her sister's. The milieu begins to fade with the northern night, and she is opening her eyes.

“What the fuck was that, Potter?”

“Modified Patronus,” he says. His eyes fixate on her neck, and she reaches up self-consciously to find the skin swollen. “Do you know where you are?”

She looks around. “Britain.”

“Do you know what just happened?”

“The ghost of Merope Gaunt possessed me and I tried to kill you.”

Potter looks a little surprised at that, as if it were impossibly difficult to figure out on one's own. Trixy likes to remind people that she's not stupid; she has letters after her name, after all. Trixy Ackerly, Psy. D. Everyone forgets that part.

“Merope Gaunt tried to kill me,” says Potter in his impossibly diplomatic way. She can tell he doesn't quite believe it. “Do you know why she wanted us to go to the house?”

“I have a theory about the house,” says Dr. Ackerly. The words sound like Merope's words. The words sound like her words. They are the same words. “I think she's hoping Riddle will come back.”

They call him by his Muggle name now.

“But he can't come back,” says Potter needlessly. He's a good soul, but far from creative. “I killed him.”

“Yes, we know.” When she'd told her nieces that Harry Potter was her new co-worker, they had immediately demanded she acquire his autograph. He still hadn't let her live that down. “How true are those rumors about what happened during the War? About your...connection with Riddle?”

It takes a second, but the understanding spreads over his face and then, suddenly, he vanishes.

–

Harry comes to stand at the edge of the pond. “Are you here?” he shouts. He has never summoned a ghost before, but he assumes it isn't that difficult, since he did it by accident. Then again, he has done many things by accident. Maybe this will break his streak. “Come out!”

Something moves beneath the black-mirror surface of the pond. The surface is too still for fish, without even the disturbance of wind to mar its reflectivity. Harry can make out his own face in the glitter of the water, but he is careful not to look too long.

The abyss stares back.

“I am here for you,” he says aloud. You is Merope, but also Draco, Ripsheare, Trixy, that Muggle Estate Agent, Emily Shale and Ewan McAdams. The knife in his hand feels staunch and cold. The metal threatens to cut into the soft span of his palm when he holds the blade cupped tight against his hip. He summons the bravery he so often forgets about: “Show yourself.”

The pond opens as a wide, dark mouth. From its depths rises the dark figure of a woman; her frame is a meter and a half at most, a skeletal six stone in life but weightless in death. Hair nearly indistinguishable from the water sprouts out of her peeling scalp and from beneath her fingernails. Her hands scrabble hopelessly at her distended belly.

Horror grips Harry. The hand holding the knife begins to tremble and sweat bursts from his pores. Why did he think he could do this? Wands had a way of feigning cleanliness and distance; the magic he intended to reverse had come from unholy earth and his body, his body...

The figure starts, and Harry drops the knife with a splash.

“Oh fuck.”

She doesn't hasten her pace as he tries to see under the opaque surface of the pond. The knife is lost, of course, and there goes the better half of his master plan. He looks down; surely he can find a rock, a slice of scrap metal, a —

A nail.

He snatches the long, rusted spike of iron and stabs it into the white flesh of his left forearm. Blood wells up in the filthy aberration and drips onto the ground.

The ghost stills.

Harry takes a step towards her, spurred on by the adrenaline coursing through his veins. “I am returning your child to you,” he says. His voice wavers and he clears his throat. She still doesn't move. “This blood is his life.”

The first scarlet drop diffuses into the water, and Harry Potter knows no more.

–

Harry and Trixy stand on the grassy knoll, watching the workmen drain the pond. A crowd of locals watch on a hundred meters back; among them is Emily Shale's muggle father, who resembles Uncle Vernon more than Harry would care to admit. The air smells like burning tar and gyros. “I hear they're going to pave over this,” she says. “Maybe it'll turn into a shopping center. At least no one will have to sleep here.”

A shrug. Harry will be leaving Little Hangleton shortly, and he doesn't intend to return any time soon. Trixy has a cosmopolitan streak; she can visit in the Autumn to watch the leaves change. He shuffles the sleeve of his bandaged arm into the sleeve of his other. It's too hot for jackets.

He'd woken up in St. Mungo's two nights previous; he'd been discharged this morning. They'd found nothing wrong with him except depleted zinc levels and a small loss of blood, and after he'd been given the good news of his impending survival. They'd let Draco in for a while, but he'd been so irritable and ill-tempered that he had been asked to leave. Needless worrying, honestly. They had parted a little angry.

Ewan McAdams stands on the edge of the pond, watching them dredge the bodies from the mud. They pull out six bodies, five of which are children and one, much older, is that of an adult man. The coroners handle them with their usual precision, off to determine guiltlessness for any of the suspects who languish in their prisons.

“She's not there,” Ewan says, when Harry comes to stand beside him. “She did run away.”

Harry nods. He'd like to think that Emily Shale has found a charming flat in the city somewhere, doing data entry work on the twelfth floor of an office building. “We're not going to look for her,” he says. He knows it as the right thing to do. “Are you upset she left you here? That she didn't take you with her?”

The wind ruffles Ewan's hair away from his face. His lithe finger against the bare, yellowed hills of the Hangleton Statistical Area draws a sharp line against a fluid horizon. Spine curved, he pushes his hands into his pockets and leans back on the heel of his boot.

“Never,” he says, his voice quiet in the cradle of the wind. “Don't blame her one bit, sir.”

–

Draco sits on the couch in the sitting room, haloed in sunlight.

“You're back,” he says. He wraps his arms around his stomach and leans into the pillows. He wears only an oversized tee-shirt, and his legs are pasty-white. “I'm sorry for shouting while you were in the hospital.”

Harry sits beside him. His hands search for Draco's, but settle for holding onto his elbow. “I'm sorry for being a reckless, stupid, inconsiderate arsehole.”

“I'm pretty sure I said reckless twice.” Draco turns his head to look out the window, and Harry can see the muscles in his lean neck tense with agitation. “But I suppose it was valorous. There's something to be said for being valorous.”

“And what is that?”

Then Draco is looking at him again, and the pierce of his metal gaze is almost too much. He swallows, and his Adam apple bobs. For a moment, Harry thinks he's made him cry, and he wants to take back what he's done, the valor in his heart, to fold his courage into an origami boat and let it sink to the bottom of the sea. He has been commended on a job well-done, and now that will unravel with the hooked tongue of his lover.

But the admonishment never comes. “I love you,” says Draco. “I don't know what I would have done if you'd died.”

Oh.

Harry feels his face flush. “I love you, too,” he is quick to return. He wants to say I did it because I thought it was going to get you but instead he leans over to press his mouth against Draco's, to run his hand over the swell of his stomach. The gesture is unexpectedly intimate after their separation; this is their child, the fruit borne from the seed of attraction but cultivated in the garden of affection.

Draco pulls away from him, just long enough to slither out of his oversized tee-shirt. Harry's oversized tee-shirt. “I want you to show me,” he says. His breath hitches when Harry kisses the bare, taut skin of his stomach. “Show me you love me.”

Harry pushes him back onto the couch and settles between his legs. Already, their bodies are warm at the places where they touch. Harry hooks his fingers into the waistband of Draco's underwear — maternity underwear is only ever sexy on Slytherins — and divests him of them.

“I want you,” he says aloud. “Always.”

He presses a spit-slick finger into Draco's body, and Draco's eyes fall shut. Breath slips from between his parted lips. “More,” he says, as if Harry can't read what is written across the arch of his spine. Another finger in. Draco's toes curl. “Harry...”

Harry's free hand struggles to unbuckle his jeans. He wears them when he's not on duty, but he's never really not on duty. They make good work pants. Now they're on the floor. His cock is raw, throbbing, and he casts one of those ubiquitous lubricant spells on it so he can push into his lover's body. The sensation makes him cry out — his eyes fall shut and he thrusts helplessly for a moment.

Draco's legs drape easily over Harry's shoulders. They move against each other in a way that accommodates the foreign landscape of his body, the strangeness of his belly, round as an orb. Harry can feel the life pulsing through Draco's body; he is as far from a ghost as Harry knows how to find. He presses his mouth to the back of Draco's knee and runs his hand over the length of his shaft. Their rhythm matches up with that of their hearts, a passionate struggle whose victory will be their victory both.

When the pearly ropes of come erupt from his swollen cock, Draco's eyes simply narrow; their gaze meets briefly before Harry's eyes roll back in his head and he follows, ardent, into the dreamscape of his own orgasm.