Chapter Text
Sometimes, Harry wondered why he'd been partnered with Draco. Other times—like now, in a meeting of all the Investigation Department Aurors, when he could hardly see the chalkboard—he thought it was so the inevitable pictures didn't show him half a head shorter than his partner. All the other men, and most of the women, were taller than he was. The official reason was something about mending fences in the public eye, but Harry noted they hadn't partnered him with Pansy.
"We've had reports of cursed chairs here and here," Percy said, pointing to the map tacked up next to the chalkboard at the front of the room. Harry leaned around Ron's shoulder, trying to get a better view. "The teapots are more distributed—as far afield as Mayfield and Clerkenwell. And now we've found five of the blankets: Soho and Holborn in addition to the two from Diagon Alley and the one from Covent Garden.
"It seems to be some sort of strangulation curse—the victims purchase household items, take them home, and choke when they touch the items again. As far as we know, all the victims have been rescued before death. St Mungo's and the research division are attempting to figure out what the curse is, but as of yet we are dealing with an unknown spell. We want to get out ahead of this—I'm sure I don't have to remind you of the Great Wool Scare of '02." A ripple of laughter moved through the room. "Smith, Redfern, Prewett, Khan, I want you looking for the dealers. Parkinson, tell Danielfield to be on time to meetings; you get to liaise with Muggle shipping authorities." Through a gap between Nero Smith and Rhonwen Redfern's heads, Harry could see Pansy wrinkling her nose. "Weasley, Fawcett, Weasley, Angel, victim interviews. Potter, Malfoy, you're on distribution channels. Curse neutralisation party tomorrow at half three. See you there." Percy stepped away from the map, dismissal clear.
Ron rolled his eyes at Harry. "He always puts me and Ginny on the same task," he said as they walked out. "Aren't you supposed to separate siblings in combat?"
"I think he just wants to avoid having to use your first names," Harry said.
"He says our partners' names," Ron said.
Harry smiled. "And you'd never switch places just to annoy him?"
"That's what he gets for joining our department."
"Well, victim interviews—at least you get to get out of this building."
"Yeah, to talk to little old ladies," Ron said.
"Fresh air," Harry said. "Open skies."
"You mean smog and skyscrapers?" Ron grinned. "This is what happens when you work well with people who like to sort through giant stacks of parchment."
"I know." They'd reached the door to Harry's office; Draco was already inside, rifling through a pile of folders with the Ministry stamp on the front. "Let us know what you find," Harry said to Ron.
Ron nodded. "Course. Pub later?"
"Yeah."
He continued down the hallway, and Harry ducked into his office. It was tiny, but it was also closest to the meeting room. He and Draco had personalised it as much as possible for such a small space: a threadbare Oriental rug swiped from an office redecoration upstairs; old dark-stained bookcases along the wall behind Draco's back; a squashy armchair next to two posters from the 1970 and 1974 Quidditch World Cups on Harry's side of the room. Draco had scrounged a floor lamp from somewhere and put it next to the tiny hearth they used for interoffice Floo. They'd pushed the two desks together in the centre of the room so they could face each other as they worked. After three years it felt as much like home as Harry's flat in a close off Diagon Alley.
He fell into his chair and started shuffling through the first folder Draco had thrown onto his desk. "Pub tonight?"
"Busy," Draco said, distracted.
"Anything interesting?"
Draco tossed a photo so it skidded across the surface of Harry's desk and hitched up against his arm. Harry'd been referring to Draco's plans, but he'd take work too. "That's a photo of the fifth blanket. It has kittens."
Harry held up the photo. The blanket was a soft blue, covered in images of white cats playing with green balls of yarn. As he watched, one of the kittens batted at a ball so it unrolled and disappeared beyond the hem of the fabric. "I don't know, it's..." He trailed off at Draco's disbelieving glare. "Right."
They'd worked together long enough that they didn't need to discuss how to split their tasks. Harry pulled a clean sheet of parchment, a quill, inkpot, and blotting paper from his desk, then flipped through the first folder of interview transcripts, looking for any relevant details about the items the women had purchased. Harry longed for a good biro, but the file clerks tended to yell at him when he used one.
Abbott, one of the trainees, staggered through the door carrying a stack of parchment as high as her chin. "Copies of ownership records and inventories," she panted as she dumped the pile onto their desks. "I'm to help you sort."
"Great, thanks," Harry said. "Could you take, hmm, half the inventories and mark anything that could've been the suspicious items, or could've hidden them in some way?"
"Sure, yes." She set aside the top two inches or so of the stack, probably the ownership records, then took half the remaining parchment and headed back out the door.
Harry wasn't seeing any pattern in the shops. Different neighbourhoods of central London, different kinds of goods. No pattern to the victims, either, except gender: the youngest in his pile was 22, the oldest had refused to say but was clearly a centenarian. One woman from Pakistan, one from Scotland, three London natives. Of course, the number of cursed items was small yet. He sighed and made more notes. The glamorous life of an Auror, his arse.
Across the joined desks, Draco sniffed and pushed his hair behind his ears. Harry remembered that hair through his fingers two nights ago, when he'd been sitting at his desk and Draco had closed the door, then dropped to his knees between Harry's thighs and—
"Potter."
He'd been staring. "Yeah. Yes. Sorry."
"Concentrate," Draco said. "I know you find me irresistible, but we really must work some of the time."
Harry smiled and went back to marking up the interviews.
***
"How about that one?" Ron asked, gesturing across the Leaky Cauldron to a twentysomething man in a brown checked shirt.
"I'm not on the market tonight," Harry said.
Nero sighed and fixed him with a paternalistic glare. Sometimes it was easy to forget he was years younger than Harry.
"I'm here to drink with my mates," Harry said to him, "not to pull."
Ron pointed to him with his pint glass. "If Percy keeps putting you on paperwork duty, your arse is going to take on the shape of your chair, so you'd better get in while you can."
Harry rolled his eyes. He didn't feel like bringing up Draco; he always eventually decided he needed to produce a Malfoy heir and went back to dating women, but since the sex was better than Harry'd ever had with anyone else, he'd take advantage while he could. "Not all of us meet the love of our lives when we're eleven years old," Harry said.
Ron made a face. "She wasn't the love of my life then," he said. "She was just..."
"...bloody terrifying?" Nero suggested.
"Yeah, actually," Harry said. He could remember her, hair a wild tangle, speaking so fast they could hardly get a word in edgewise, helping Neville find Trevor even though they'd only just met.
"Hasn't changed a bit," Nero said.
"Look at us, still hanging about in the Leaky Cauldron." No marriages yet, no families. All of Harry's peers seemed to be making up for the childhoods they'd lost. The marriage rates even for the students in George's year, still at war when they graduated, were far higher than the ones for Harry's.
"It's a good place," Nero said. "Nobody bothers us, even when we're being gruesome."
"Who's gruesome?" Ron said, and grinned. "Nothing but boring everyday blokes, we are."
Harry slid his Butterbeer glass back and forth on the table between his hands. "Aren't we the pride of the Ministry? We're in the paper enough."
"All your fault," Ron said.
Nodding, Nero said, "Rhonwen and I hardly ever get our pictures taken. And I'm so dashing, too."
"Our best undercover operatives on the front page of the Prophet? Percy would love that," Harry said.
"We're not really undercover. We just don't mention we're Aurors, sometimes. Not our fault if we look like lawbreakers." Nondescript and skinny, the both of them, if still both taller than Harry. They didn't half look like small-time criminals. "And you're one to talk, Weasley. You're in the papers rather a lot yourself."
"Reflected glow," Harry said.
Ron threw a chip at his head.
"Could you reflect some of that glow onto me?" Nero smiled his narrow smile. "Good-looking bird at the bar over there."
"Using Harry is cheating," Ron said.
"Easy for you to say, you didn't need him."
"I'm getting another," Harry said. "If she sees me, she sees me—which one are we talking about?"
"Cheating!" Ron said as Nero said, "Long hair, green jumper."
"Back in a moment," Harry said and headed for the bar.
***
In the morning, Harry and Draco headed to one of the shops on their list—one Abbott had marked, Harry noted. Draco spoke to the owner while Harry headed for the back to talk with the person in charge of the deliveries. This proved to be a spotty teenager, son of the owner, probably a recent graduate of Hogwarts. He had scuffed trainers and the improbable name of Antonius.
"Do you remember anything odd?" Harry asked.
Antonius shook his head. "Just the normal stuff, you know, lots of tea."
The items had all sold quickly: small mercies, since it meant the workers still remembered what had happened. "The usual driver?"
"Driver?" Antonius said.
Ah, right. Magical shop. He looked around: fireplace on the wall. "The usual, um, delivery man? Did they come through the Floo?"
"Yeah," Antonius said. "Except the dishes, those were Apparated here in a few trips. You don't want them getting smashed when they get thrown out, you know."
"Okay." Harry considered. The cursed item, a blanket, would have come by Floo. "And no oddities with the goods? The usual things you'd ordered?"
"Yeah. Right numbers and everything."
"Thanks," Harry said. He paused, an idea tickling at the back of his mind. "How did the items get on the shelves?"
Antonius scratched his neck. "I tagged them and put them all in place after we'd closed. Da helped."
"Hmm." Harry looked around the room again: no gloves. "With your bare hands?"
"How else would I do it?"
"And you didn't notice anything odd?" The curses were touch-sensitive. If there had been something there to feel, Antonius or his father would have felt it.
"No."
In fact, Harry felt a right plonker for not realising: if the curses were active when the items were purchased, they never would have been purchased at all. "Right. Have you counted your blankets lately?"
"Counted?"
"On the shelves," Harry said. "I mean, are you sure the blanket was actually one of the ones that came in? Or do you have one too many?"
"Dunno," Antonius said. "We could check." He grabbed a tattered notebook from the desk and headed for the front of the store; Harry followed.
But, no: the blanket had been one of the delivered ones. Dead end, except they knew for sure the curse was on a time delay or trigger of some kind.
***
They got to the meeting room early for the curse neutralisation party, which meant Percy put them to work: Draco setting up the scoreboard by the door, Harry pushing chairs around to clear a workspace. A little something to keep them sharp, Percy called these games, getting rid of the curses on items that the research department didn't need; Harry thought it was mostly so they didn't whinge so much about all the paperwork. Rhonwen was stirring up the bowl that held the scraps of parchment with their names. Harry hoped he got an early slot so he could choose one of the teapots, even if it meant less chance for uniqueness points—he was comfortably in the lead already.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Pansy walk in and divert to speak to Draco. Ron was waving his wand around—relaxing his wrists or some such thing, a habit he'd picked up from one of his former partners. Harry hadn't been able to convince him it made him look like a git.
The room was about full now, so up by the chalkboard Percy reached in the bowl and pulled out a name. "Khan."
Khan nodded and cast Finite Incantatem at one of the blankets. Always best to try the easy spells first, even if one might lose points on style, and Khan was the no-nonsense sort in any case. The blanket glowed briefly silver, and the revealing charm didn't show any spell residue. Khan nodded. Percy marked the points on the scoreboard.
Rhonwen got the next draw and stuck with Finite Incantatem as well. Draco was third; he chose the kitten blanket, got into duelling stance, and had "Reducto" out of his mouth almost before Percy had finished saying his name. The blanket disintegrated. He looked entirely pleased with himself; Harry wondered who'd have to explain to the former owner she wasn't getting her blanket back.
Harry did get a teapot. He cast Retexere on it, just to see. The teapot might have been warm when he touched it, might not, so he cast Finite Incantatem to be sure.
Whoever was creating these items wasn't trying very hard: by the end of the party there were no injuries, and everybody whose name was pulled got at least a point for the chart.
***
Harry was in the common area pouring himself a cup of coffee when Percy came in. Whatever time delay had been placed on the cursed items had failed. A customer in a shop in Covent Garden had picked up a toast rack and stopped breathing; the shop owner had rescued her and Flooed the Ministry. Harry and Draco, as the first team to hand, would get to see the item in situ.
The shop was tiny and crowded, with cute-animal-decorated everything. Harry had looked in the window a couple of times, as it was between his flat and his favourite Indian place. The toast racks were near the counter, luckily, since if the cursed item had been, say, the platters in the opposite corner, neither the shop owner nor any passersby would have been able to see the victim. Harry pulled out paper and pencil to sketch the layout whilst Draco scanned the other items nearby for curses.
"Nothing," he said as Harry finished. "Just the toast rack."
The owner had kindly left the offending item where it was when the victim collapsed. And it was offending—a white ceramic monstrosity with thin painted lambs to hold the slices of toast apart. Harry cast a charm over the shelf. Most of the items had a dim pearlescent glow, sign of handling by witches and wizards. The toast rack shone a bright indigo with faint turquoise streaks, lovely to look at.
"I've never seen that before," Draco said.
"Nor me," Harry said. He twitched his wand and the signature expanded. Nothing to be seen on higher resolution, only the same opaque colours as before.
"Hmm." Draco made notes in a little book of bound parchment—traditionalist, that one. Or he'd never seen paper notebooks until he was an adult. "New curses are all we need."
Harry nodded. "Do we know what the research department found yet?"
"No, but we can check with them." Draco finished his precisely scripted notes and closed the cover. "Would you care to talk to the owner?"
"Sure." They walked together to the back of the store, easily pacing each other. One of the Ministry staff had spoken to the owner, and the inventory records were already on a table. Draco went to look them over as Harry took a seat across from the owner. "Hello, I'm Harry Potter," he said, extending a hand.
"Oh!" the witch said, eyebrows rising. "Polly Lilliputia. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr Potter, a real pleasure." She was short and plump, almost the archetype of the kind of witch who'd own a shop full of animal-themed goods. Her hair was white and curly and mounded up almost to a point on top, rather like a wizard's hat.
"I wish it could be under more fortunate circumstances," Harry said. Polly nodded, her eyes still slightly wide. "Do you mind if I set up a Dicta-Quill?"
"Please," she said.
Harry pulled the quill and parchment out of his bag and placed them on the table. Couldn't get away from them, even if this was the useful sort. "Thanks," he said. "Could you describe the incident for me?"
She took a breath. "She had been in the store about five minutes. She was looking at our kitchen items, the pots, toast racks, all that. I was ringing up another customer and I saw her fall."
Harry nodded. "And how did you know it was the toast rack she'd touched?"
"I didn't then," Polly said. She rubbed one thumb along the hem of the jumper sleeve on the opposite hand. "I just saw her fall and I ran over as fast as my legs would carry me. Her mouth was working like a fish, poor thing, so I cast a breathing charm. That did the trick. She sat up and I had one of the other customers Floo the Ministry. They told me not to touch anything. Then those nice young men came and tested everything, and now you're here."
"That's lovely, thanks, Mrs Lilliputia." Polly beamed at him. "Had you noticed anything unusual about the toast racks before that?"
"No, not at all," she said. "In fact, I just moved them near the counter a few days ago. They were fine then."
Harry raised his eyebrows. "No sensation of warmth when you touched them?"
"No, nothing at all."
"Well, thanks, Mrs Lilliputia." Harry reached across the table to shake her hand again. "May we Floo you here if we need more information?"
"Yes, or at home." She smiled, fondly. "I'd be happy to speak to you any time you need."
Draco was scanning through the inventories. "Nothing," he said. "This particular odious item was delivered three weeks ago with a shipment of similar goods."
"Three weeks?" Harry said. "Before any of the other curses, isn't it?"
"Yes." Draco tapped the entry on the page in front of him. "So it seems to be a time trigger."
Harry frowned. "That doesn't explain why the other items triggered as soon as the owners got home."
Draco hummed and looked at the inventory again.
"The owner said she moved the toast racks a few days ago. Maybe there was something on the original shelf." He turned; Polly had already gone back to the front of the store, though the boys out front hadn't let her reopen yet. He hustled out. "Mrs Lilliputia, where were the toast racks before you moved them?"
She thought for a moment. "Where the pepper grinders are now, dear," she said.
"Thank you!" Draco had followed him, as Harry had known he would, and they hurried over to the far corner, where the pepper grinders and platters took up the available shelving. Draco cast the charm this time, and there it was: a spot of indigo-streaked turquoise on the shelf.
"That's two time-delay spells," Harry said. "One to set the charm on the shelf, one to wait after it's been moved."
"Shit," Draco said. The harder the magic, the more clever the perpetrator, the harder to catch.
***
By the end of the week, there were five new victims and three new neighbourhoods.
"I don't understand why it's so distributed," Nero said, looking at the map. "Why haven't they targeted one and stuck with it?"
"Maybe distribution is the point," Rhonwen said.
"Terror?" Harry said. "Never knowing where it's going to strike?"
Percy shook his head. "Why not a deadly curse, then?" Thursday's victim hadn't had anyone around to cast a countercharm, but had survived nonetheless, the strangulation easing after a minute or so. The mediwizard at St Mungo's had had a harder time removing the curse, though, since it had sunk beneath the skin and gone dormant.
"If it weren't so obvious when people were cursed," Pansy said, "I'd think they were trying to...seed something? Can curses transfer person to person?"
"Yes," Harry and Ron said instantaneously. Fred and George had tried that one year as a birthday present to themselves. Why they'd found it so funny when everyone spoke as if they'd inhaled helium, Harry didn't know.
"All right," Pansy said. "So...are they just incompetent? No casualties in a neutralisation party. How often does that happen?"
Draco shook his head. "Two time delays," he said. "It's neat work."
"Trying not to get caught?" Rhonwen ventured. Harry glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and noticed a fingerprint on one of his lenses, probably Draco's fault—he'd grabbed Harry for a quick snog before the meeting. Harry was often jealous of Draco's compartmentalisation abilities. He pulled his glasses off, breathed on the fingerprint, and rubbed it against the sleeve of his robe.
Distributed, distributed. Why would they be distributed? Harry looked at the map. The points were all clustered in central London, but they knew that; they were working...
...outwards. He put his glasses back on. "They're working from Diagon Alley outwards," he said. "Can we predict where the next objects will be?"
Percy nodded and flipped open a folder. "We know when the objects were delivered, maybe magical research can work out the pattern for the next deliveries."
"We can guess which neighbourhoods they'll hit next," Draco said, "and which ones are probably already cursed." He was making notes in his parchment book again.
Percy smiled slowly. "Anyone interested in a stakeout?"
***
Harry and Draco were assigned a shop in Kensington. It was relatively prosperous and had several deliveries scheduled for the day. Harry had tried to convince Draco that the Invisibility Cloak was a perfect solution (the required proximity being, in his estimation, a perk) but Draco had pointed out that they needed to hide all the time in case the deliveries were early or late, so instead they went for the less-reliable but larger Invisibility Hut charm.
"If this is a hut, there should be furniture," Draco said as he dusted the floor with another spell before sitting down.
"Be quiet, this doesn't protect against sound," Harry said.
Draco rolled his eyes. "There's nobody here."
Except for a couple of workers who already knew about them, this was true. The next delivery wasn't scheduled for another hour.
Harry leaned over and said into Draco's ear, "We could cast a silencing charm and have sex."
"Silences both ways," Draco said, "and I don't trust you to pay attention."
As though he'd be the one not paying attention. One of the primary attractions of sex with Draco was the bit at the end where he got wordless and unfocused.
Sighing, Draco stretched his arms. "Did you bring a deck of cards?"
"Cards?" Harry said.
"I'm given to understand it's a way to pass the time amongst Muggles," Draco said. "Or to pretend to do magic, which they think isn't real. Is that true?"
"Yeah." Harry pushed his glasses up his nose. "This is going to be boring, isn't it."
"Unbelievably boring, yes."
"We could still have sex," he said.
Three hours and two deliveries later, Draco looked like he might consider it. They'd scanned the goods as they came in and found no curses, just boxes and boxes of—who possibly could need so many salt cellars? There were only so many wizards in London!
"I almost miss the paperwork," Harry said.
"You're the one who wanted field work," Draco said.
"We've been in here too long." They had two hours left to go. "I usually picture something dangerous," Harry said wistfully.
"Gryffindors."
An hour later all the stock boys had left, and he had his hand down Draco's trousers.
"For the record," Draco said, breathless, a flush rising on his neck, "we are not going to do this every time we have a stakeout."
Harry hushed him and kissed his shoulder through his robes. "Whatever you say. But I'm not going to put my hand inside your pants until you promise me we can do it sometimes."
Somehow, Harry was turned on by the high-pitched frustrated whine that Draco made in response. "I'm a good influence," Draco bit out. Harry traced the head of Draco's cock, and Draco turned his face into Harry's neck and groaned.
"That didn't sound like a yes," Harry whispered into Draco's hair.
"Yes, dammit," Draco said.
Harry slipped his hand into Draco's pants and stroked upwards, fingers following the familiar curve of Draco's shaft. This never got old. Draco reached out and groped Harry through too many layers of clothing, lips still resting against Harry's neck, hair soft against Harry's cheek.
"I don't have any lube," Harry said, "so we'll have to stick to blowjobs."
"You think I'm going to make it through this handjob?" Draco said, irritated, and Harry laughed, and then the curse splashed against the wall over their heads.
"Fuck!" Harry yelled before he thought about it. Way to give your position away, Potter, he thought. Draco already had his wand out and was spelling up the wards; being pinned in place was usually a bad idea, but there were situations where the tradeoff was worth it, such as when your attackers already had good hiding places. Harry stepped in front of him and held up his wand, looking for the source of the curses. The invisibility spell was holding, but they'd been making noise, and then he'd yelled, and dammit Draco had been right.
Another bolt of red light splashed out from behind a pallet of new boxes; Harry hadn't even seen them come in. Percy was going to have his neck. Hell, Kingsley was going to turn his balls into a paperweight. Harry aimed an Expelliarmus at the pallet, but nothing happened. Draco was so close to done, and once the wards were up they could call for reinforcements—
From behind a second pallet a purple streak of lightning was coming towards them, almost in slow-motion. Towards Draco, kneeling on the ground, not paying attention. Purple was usually okay. Harry dove and it hit him in the stomach. He felt like all the air had been knocked out of him and he landed hard on the ground, but then the faint golden yellow of the wards rose around them and he didn't seem to be dead, so it was probably fine.
"Harry? Harry!" Draco was saying, shaking his shoulder. Harry rolled and met his eyes. "Thank fuck."
"We should probably tell Percy," Harry said. He tried to sit up, but it hurt. Draco looked down at him, eyes wide in horror.
The Floo flashed green and two bodies dove into it. Harry didn't see more than black robes diving through.
"On second thought, maybe we should pretend nothing happened," Harry said, but the wards were down and Draco was dragging him towards the fire. Harry managed to get his feet under him enough to help, and Draco threw powder on the flames and yelled, "St Mungo's!"