ils. If nothing else, we know that we’re dealing with awork now, and what at least some of the players look like without glamours on.” Harry doesn’t mention that neither of them had the faintest idea who theirpanions were yesterday, or what they were at Malfoy’s to steal; he doesn’t really think he can bear Malfoy’s response to that without the drink he turned down at the bar.

Malfoy’s smirk softens into a more considering expression. “That’s something, at least,” he says grudgingly.

“We think so,” Harry says, and resists the urge to roll his eyes. “So, look, Malfoy: I really do need you to take me through the crime now. I’ve got other questions, but thates first.”

“And by ‘take you through the crime,’” Malfoy says, “you mean what, exactly?”

Harry’s mouth is opening to deliver a sharp reply when he notices that one of Malfoy’s hands is fiddling with the sleeve of his sweater, a nervous little movement that betrays more than he probably thinks it does. Harry realizes again that for everything else Malfoy might be, right now he’s just a civilian, the victim of a robbery and an assault, and it’s Harry’s job —like, his real, actual job—to treat him as one.

“Just tell me what you remember, as you remember it,” Harry suggests. The words and the low, non-threatening tone he uses to deliver them are so practiced and familiar they’re almost dear to him, an old friend in times of trouble. He pulls a quill and the report file out of his bag, flips it open to the blank Details Of The Crime page. “Don’t worry about going in order or getting every detail in. Just tell me what happened.”

Malfoy nods, the movement slow, careful. Then he narrows his eyes at the quill in Harry’s hand. “No, thank you. If I must do this, I’m not going to do it listening to you scratch ‘YOU GIANT GIT’ onto an official record in your caveman writing.” He gets up and walks over to the bar, taps his fingers against it twice, and then tosses Harry the little glass vial that appears in his hand with more force than is strictly necessary.

Harry catches it, of course, but still. “What’s this for?”

“For your memory of this conversation,” Malfoy says, giving him an incredulous little look. “Aren’t you supposed to be an Auror, Potter? This is literally why Pensieve technology exists; it’smon practice for law enforcement to use it. Even I know that.”

“Er,” says Harry, who does seem to remember some seminar or other about this, though all he seems to have retained is its truly terrible name (Pen-SAVE Yourself Some Time!).

“I should ask the DLME to send me someone else, you’re clearly not their best and brightest,” Malfoy sighs, but he sits down in his chair again anyway, wearily meets Harry’s eyes. “All right. Where do I start?”

I don’t know, the beginning? Harry does not say, because he’s better than that. Because he’s a professional. “Well. When did you first realize something was wrong?”

Malfoy’s eyes go unfocused almost at once, and his body language changes—shoulders hunching slightly, hands drifting together so that one’s thumb can dig into the center of the other’s palm. “I suppose…just after the L.E.A.R.N. group arrived. Normally the logbook enters the name of anyone who crosses the threshold automatically, but when I checked it, none of the children’s names were there; the teacher’s, either. I had to write them in myself. I thought that was odd.”

“Not as odd as you’d think,” Harry says, making a mental note to look into whether a Befuddlement or Confundus Charm would be more likely to work on a logbook. “It means they cased the place first, picked out and disabled any magic that might track them. It’s smart.”

“Don’tpliment the criminals, Potter.”

“I’m notplimenting them,” Harry starts hotly, before he notices the amused little curve of Malfoy’s mouth and realizes he’s being wound up on purpose. “Oh, for fuck’s—just. Okay, Malfoy. Fine. What happened next?”

Malfoy’s expression of small pleasure at petty malice sinks into a frown as he considers the question. “Well, the children always seem to enjoy meeting Vicky; I don’t know why, no one else ever does. Their underdeveloped senses of self-preservation at work, perhaps. Who knows? I took them all up to see her, in any case.”

“Vicky,” Harry says blankly, and then, the realization dawning with mild horror, “is the Venomous Tentacula in the attic.” He stares at Malfoy, boggled. “You have the oldest violent plant in the world living in your attic and you named it Vicky?”

“Well,” Malfoy says, bristling with defensiveness, “what would you have called it?”

“Not Vicky,” Harry says at once. “I don’t know—Spike, maybe? Fang?”

“Spike?” Malfoy repeats, perfectly horrified. “Fang? Oh my god, what kind of— Venomous Tentacula don’t even have fangs, Potter, why on earth would you call one that?”

“Why on earth would you call one Vicky?”

Malfoy crosses his arms over his chest, sits back in his chair, and fixes Harry with a glare so intense that it makes Harry doubt, suddenly, that he meant a single thing he said to Neville about the plant being a nightmarish monster he’d love to be rid of. He’s clearly attached to it, and, also, quite mad. “She looked like a Vicky.”

“Of course she did,” Harry mutters. He hates that Malfoy was right, but he really wishes he hadn’t put the quill away—his fingers are itching to write down some very rude things he can’t say right now. “Okay. Focusing. You took the kids upstairs to see…Vicky… and then?”

Malfoy pauses, thinking, and then jerks up in his chair in realization, arms falling from his chest. “One of them must havee in the through the skylights,” he says, as if solving a little mystery for himself. “The smaller of the men, I think—I remember a tap on my shoulder, and when I turned around he sucker punched me.” Malfoy gestures at his black eye with a little grimace. “It wasn’t enough to knock me out, but he must have cast something on me before I could get up; the next thing I knew, I was sitting tied up on the floor of the study with the children.”

“The study?” Harry says. “Not the parlor where I found you?”

“No, the study.” Malfoy’s face flickers, and the expression that crosses it this time is so raw, so wounded, that Harry has to look away. Almost snarling it, Malfoy says, “They carted us around from room to room with them and made me watch as they tore each one apart. I suppose they thought it was the most likely way to make me talk, and in fairness, they were right. I would have given up what they were looking for in an instant to save even half of what they damaged, if I’d only known what it was they wanted.”

Harry is a professional, so he ignores the way the words seem to catch on their way out of Malfoy’s mouth. He’s seen this all before, and there’s no reason to fixate on it. “So they never came right out and asked?”

“They did,” Malfoy says, and drops his head into his hands. “In a sense. They kept saying the source—that they needed to find the source, that they knew the source had to be here, that the source wasn’t in whatever room we were in at the time. I must have asked them ten times to just tell me what it was, but every time I did the woman would laugh and tell me not to play dumb. I couldn’t make her understand that I wasn’t playing,” Malfoy exclaims, his voice increasing dangerously in both volume and pitch with every word, “that I genuinely didn’t know what in unholy creation she was talking about, but it was like every time I said I didn’t know she got more convinced I did!”

For a horrible moment Harry thinks he’s actually going to have to attempt tofort Malfoy, which he imagines as not unlike attempting to put a sweater on a porcupine. He’s saved, as it happens, by the bell, when Kreacher appears directly to Malfoy’s left and says, “Master Draco, Mr. Zabini is at the door.”

“Oh,” Malfoy says. He lifts his head and looks at Harry, and for a hanging second their eyes meet and all Harry can see is his misery, his frustration, his helplessness and fear. It’s written into every inch of him, so visceral and intense that Harry draws in a breath and ets to exhale for a moment. They just stare at each other, Malfoy looking half-mad and Harry feeling it, until Malfoy seems to remember who exactly he’s looking at. His face reverts to an expression of cool indifference so quickly that Harry thinks it must have actually hurt, but the edges of his mask are visible now, not hiding nearly well enough the raw emotion underneath.

“Well, I can’t leave Blaise alone with the valuables,” Malfoy says with obviously forced levity, standing and stretching. “He’ll leave with half my collection and I’ll be beggared. Kreacher, tell him I’ll be down directly. Potter, I trust you can entertain yourself for a few minutes?”

He arches an eyebrow as he says it, like he doesn’t actually trust this at all, but Harry doesn’t really have the heart to snipe at him just now. He just nods, and Malfoy’s other eyebrow rises to join the first before he huffs and turns away, stalks to the door and slams it behind him.

Harry stares blankly at the wall for a few minutes, trying to think it all through. Then he gets bored, and goes to spy on Malfoy.

It doesn’t take him very long to find a spot where he can hear Malfoy and Zabini in the long hallway of the foyer; he remembers, if a little fuzzily, where those places are. Harry creeps up to the rail of the stairs on the balls of his feet and hears:

“—stop it right now, I said it’s for the press.” Clearly Malfoy’s voice, but even his irritated drawl sounds several degrees fonder than Harry’s ever heard it before.

“I don’t care what it’s for,” snaps a deeper voice—must be Zabini. “It’s massive and unsightly and it looks like it hurts. I can’t believe none of the Aurors healed you!”

Harry, who isn’t honestly entirely sure he could pick Blaise Zabini out of a lineup, nevertheless feels his heart cry out in agreement and support. They’re obviously talking about Malfoy’s black eye, and it’s exactly the discredit to the department

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