Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of Writ on Water. This story will be followed by a one-shot, "Evening Star," next Wednesday. Thank you for reading.

Chapter Fifteen—In Argument

There was a blur of confused movement. Draco felt as though someone had yanked a growing plant out by the roots, and the roots were in the soil of his mind. He swayed, and put out a hand to hold onto Harry, who was enchanted, under his Imperius, and Harry's wand was still in his hand, and they were connected—

And then they weren't, and Harry wasn't, and the Imperius was done, and he was springing towards someone Draco couldn't see.

And then it was blindingly obvious what had really happened, what kind of stupid scheme Harry had come up with, and Draco snarled and charged after him. He couldn't see Nancy, that was true, he was in more danger from her than Harry was, but he wasn't going to let Harry stupidly risk his life for him while he sat around with his thumb up his arse and no say in the matter.

Nancy made a throwing gesture, and Harry waited for the sensation like crumpling paper behind his eyes for a moment, for the loss of the new and old memories that he had recovered concerning her.

But nothing happened. Perhaps she couldn't use her flaw on someone who had broken through her powers once. Perhaps the Imperius Curse was still working in some way, and Harry had to obey Draco's order to remember.

He didn't know, and then he didn't have time to think about it, because he crashed into her and bore her backwards against the wall.

Nancy gave a thin wail. Her eyes were full of dark fire, and behind that fire wasn't rage, as Harry had thought there would be based on Draco's descriptions of the way that Jourdemayne had attacked him, but hopelessness. She reached out with stiff arms and pushed at Harry's shoulders, and her fingers curled around her wand, Jourdemayne's wand, as she began to incant a curse.

Harry lashed out and kicked her between her legs. That wasn't as effective for a woman as for a man, but it still got her attention, and she sagged in pain, panting, her head hanging. Harry punched her in the temple. If he could knock her unconscious, then he was sure she would be less dangerous.

But she melted through his hands like a soap bubble, and when he turned around, she was behind Draco, her wand pressed to his throat and her eyes fixed on Harry. She was trembling, but that made it all the worse. And from the way Draco stood still, it was also obvious that he had no idea what was really pinning him in place, that he could neither see nor hear her.

"You will tell him," Nancy said, with her voice wavering like a Muggle wire in a high wind, "that you are going to put down your wand and back away. When you do, I will let him go." She smiled, and Harry wished that he hadn't seen that smile. "My business is with you."

"Why?" Harry asked quietly. "I thought you feared him, or at least the person you used to be did. That was why you took my memory of him instead of the other way around, and fought him when he came to her house." He moved to the side, mostly by shifting his muscles rather than taking a step, wondering if he could make Nancy focus on him enough to give Draco a chance to do—something.

"Have you not figured it out yet?" Nancy whispered, with another unforgettable smile, and her voice steadied. "You're the one who kills me."

Harry watched her fingers, her face, her eyes. He needed to watch everything, and he needed to speak the right words, so that he could understand and make sure that another of his partners didn't die.

Another of my partners that I love. That I'm in love with. I've acknowledged that much even to him. I have to save him.

"Then you know that trying to escape is useless," Harry said, and his voice didn't shudder and break with fear of what else she might have foreseen, such as that she killed Draco. "Why not simply surrender and come along? Perhaps you can still change the future. Perhaps everything you see isn't destined to happen."

Nancy closed her eyes for a moment, and Harry tensed to move. But she blinked them open too quickly for him to do anything. "No," she whispered. "My sight stops at the moment of my death. I know how I die. And it will be—it will be a relief, in so many ways."

Harry watched her, and wondered for a moment what it would be like knowing that you would become a twisted, that you would do it at a specific point in time, and that you would die and could do nothing to stop it. Then he put the sympathy aside. It would dull his aim, and he had to let Draco be all in all to him right now. If a twisted threatened to kill Draco, then he was going to try and hurt them, no matter how sorry he might want to feel for them.

No matter how much he might feel that he and Draco, and the other Socrates Aurors, were similar to them.

"But I don't know," Nancy said, voice dripping out like oil, "what happens beyond the moment of my death. I know that I am going to cast a certain curse. And I don't know if it lands." She smiled at Harry. He could remember now the way she'd looked when whispering to him about the blue-eyed twisted, and this was worse. "I wonder, what would you give to know who I cast the curse at?"

"I think that you don't have to do that at all," Harry said, and then he looked sideways in spite of his intention to keep his focus on Nancy. The expression on Draco's face made Harry shudder. He can only hear my side of the conversation. He has no idea what she's saying. He turned back to Nancy with all his muscles shuddering and decided that he had to concentrate on getting her away from Draco as soon as possible. "I think that you can drop your wand and walk away from this."

"I think that I can't," Nancy said. "I know that I can't. I've seen this for so long. I looked into the future for the first time after the night my sister died, and then I saw, and then I knew. Nothing I did could make the date hurry closer. Or the confrontation. Every step of this dance was planned out." A violent motion ran through her body, as though someone had jerked on strings that bound her shoulder. "I hate the planner."

Keep her talking. Harry put, too, from his mind, the thought of what Draco might think of the conversation. It would only distract him when he needed to think through every nuance. "Then rebel against him," he said. "Put the wand down. Come with me. We can try to make sure that you'll live."

"I see," Nancy whispered. "I know. I know every word that will come from your lips, and every one from mine. You think you can change this?"

Harry reached up and touched his fringe, pushing it slowly aside to reveal his scar. "I know what it's like to be subject to the future," he said. "To a prophecy. I think that you can work with that prophecy and still have chances that you never imagined, the way to resist it somehow and come out alive—"

He stopped when he heard an echo. Nancy was speaking the words in tandem with him, not even a step behind. She cocked her head and smiled.

"I know this moment," she said simply. "And the time when I die and I cast the curse is less than two minutes away now. I've been here before, and I measured it with a Tempus Charm from every possible angle."

Harry felt the slow, sick pounding of his heart when she admitted that, and had to clench his fists to keep from lashing out. It would do no good for him now, and probably wouldn't help him to resist or defeat her. But he needed to make sure, to make absolutely sure, that Draco knew that information, because it might mean that he could survive.

Which was of more importance than Harry's survival, frankly.

"Two minutes," he said, and Draco's eyes snapped and darted to him. "Two minutes until the end."

"I did tell you it was less than two," Nancy said, and her smile was thin. "And I know what you're doing, Auror Potter. It won't work. This was always destined, you and me." She paused. "A minute, now."

Harry wondered for a moment how he could fight someone who could see his every move, who had apparently studied his moves multiple times from all angles, if her tale of traveling here before and watching the struggle was true. And then he put that thought aside, where it could join the sympathy he did have for Nancy but which he wouldn't let interfere. Doing too much of this was doing the thinking on her terms. She might feel that she couldn't rebel and couldn't change anything, but Harry wouldn't yet accept that the same was true of him.

"Then I have to do anything I can to stop you," he said. "And it won't make a difference which spell I choose. Because you won't tell me?"

That last part was a question in spite of himself, and Nancy shook her head, her dark eyes fathomless. "If you had been able to help me," she said.

"But if everything is unchangeable," Harry began in frustration.

"Thirty seconds, now." Nancy's voice was soft. She kept her eyes locked on Harry's face, but her grip on the wand shifted, and Draco went back on his heels. He wouldn't know what was keeping him there because he couldn't actually feel the wand, Harry thought, but he would make a pretty good guess. "Good-bye, Auror Potter. I wish things could have been different, but I always knew they wouldn't actually be."

Harry told himself he wasn't making a choice—

And that he was. Just because Nancy foresaw what would be didn't mean that she also foresaw the reasons he had for making the choice. Inside his head, he was still free.

He cast.

Draco knew that there was a pressure at his throat holding him, but only because his head bent backwards and he found himself unable to move. He couldn't feel the wand. He couldn't see the person who held him, couldn't hear their replies. He only had Harry's side of the conversation to go on.

But thanks to the way that Harry had mentioned the timeline, he knew when it would happen, if not what.

And he was ready when Harry cast the charm that formed around him, a strengthened Shield Charm that would keep Draco safe from all sorts of magical attacks and also force someone away from him. He ducked and rolled, and the Shield Charm came with him, tumbling along like a glittering ball.

He looked up in time to see Harry cast another spell, one that burned across the air in a streak of purple lightning and earthed itself in, apparently, nothing, and another spell must have burst from the air and struck Harry.

Blood flew. Harry's head fell backwards, and he tumbled to the floor, his head hanging, his throat bleeding freely from the spell that had cut it.

Draco didn't hesitate. He cut a hole in the Shield Charm with a spell he had never told Harry he knew, and then made his hands into a scoop and hissed, "Cruore conservo."

The air between him and Harry turned transparent and thick, like glass, with streaks of red running down and through it. Draco didn't let himself think about Harry's cut throat in more than flickering flashes, didn't let himself think about the blood as more than material for his spell. He was powerful enough, magically, to do this, and Harry was still alive as long as the blood danced in response to Draco, which it was doing.

Draco closed his eyes and continued the chant, which was the initial incantation repeated over and over, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he was glad that it wasn't more complicated. The blood surging from Harry's throat listened to him, and hesitated, and turned on a slow, red pivot that he could see when he opened his eyes. The pivot splashed back down on Harry's throat, and nestled into the cut, and formed a shining mask that held the edges of the wound together. Draco spoke again and again, and still the blood rose and fell, and still there was more of it—when he used his wand to open a shallow cut in Harry's arm—to add to the sort of bandage that Draco was making.

Dark magic, of course, blood magic. Draco frankly didn't care. He kept his eyes on Harry and his mind on the present. The future could come later.

It seemed like a long time before the incantation froze when he tried to speak it, and he realized that he had no more flowing blood to use as a tool. Only then did he stand up and walk over to Harry, kneeling down. Harry lay there still as death, pale as death—no, that made a nonsensical comparison, at least to Draco's mind. Death was red.

He touched Harry's throat, winced at the sound of crackling blood beneath his fingers, and pulled his hand back. "Harry," he said, and his voice was steady and controlled and a marvel of auditory engineering. "Can you hear me?"

Harry's eyelids fluttered rapidly, and then he turned his head. He tried to say something, but Draco shook his head. "Speaking would not be a good idea right now," he murmured. "I want you to blink once for yes, twice for no. Blink once if you understand."

Harry blinked once.

"Good," Draco said. "Are you sure that Nancy's dead?"

Blink. Draco smoothed his hand down Harry's cheek, closed his eyes, and let himself think the words, He's going to live. He really is.

"Good," he said again. "Then I want you to think hard about this. Are you ready to be moved yet?" He opened his eyes in order to catch the hesitation, and then the two rapid blinks.

"The right answer, I think," Draco said, and stretched out on the floor next to Harry. "Think about this, now. Do you still believe that we need to let the twisted go and try as hard as we can to spare them?"

Harry stared at him, then rolled an eye towards what Draco assumed was Nancy's invisible body. Blink.

Draco shook his head and sighed. Perhaps this was the wrong thing to talk about when Harry was still inches away from death and he was giddy with the relief of saving him, but it was something to talk about. "She didn't kill anyone, I'll give you that, but not from lack of trying. And she caused us loss of time that could have been used to prevent some other twisted from killing people, if she'd admitted what she knew from the first time we visited her." Harry opened his mouth to argue. Draco looked at him evenly, and he shut it again. "And she made you forget me, and tried to kill you at the end. Those are crimes, although given the way that you tend to disvalue yourself, I can understand why they might not feel that way to you."

Harry tugged on Draco's arm, and then lifted his wand. Draco held his eyes, but Harry cast the spell nonverbally, although the way he turned pale a moment later made Draco resolve that he would limit Harry's magic during his recovery as much as possible.

The images formed slowly in midair, streaked with color the way that Draco's spell had been at first. He reckoned that probably came from Harry's weakness at the moment rather than the inherent magic of the spell. He saw an image of Nancy, holding the wand to his throat, and nodded. "A good picture," he said, finding that he needed to splay his hand flat on Harry's chest to reassure himself with the beat of his partner's heart. "But what exactly am I supposed to be looking at?"

Harry lifted one careful arm and pointed at her face. Draco leaned forwards. Perhaps Harry was pointing to the way her mouth moved as she spoke words that he couldn't hear, but he didn't think so. Knowing him, it was the despair in her eyes.

"I know that she saw things she couldn't change," Draco said. "But so do other Seers, every day. Most of them don't become time-traveling killers because of it."

Harry sighed and turned his head away. The blood on his throat crackled warningly. Draco shook his head. "At this point, I think we need to get you to the Mind-Healers. Not bringing you to them could cause more danger than moving you does." He cast Lightening Charms and then snaked his arms around Harry's body, lifting him and cradling him to his chest.

"You might as well," he said into Harry's hair, satisfied that Harry would hear him later if not now, "get used to the fact that I don't care as much about people like Nancy as I do about you."

Harry tried to grunt and say something, but Draco paid no attention to him as he walked towards the stairs. He had no fears about leaving Nancy's body. Harry could raise the wards, and they could come back for it—or Draco could—when he was satisfied that Harry was under care. The Mind-Healers were mostly experts with such things as Legilimency, yes, but they had also been trained in the most basic care of the human body, and they had no stupid bans like the one that St. Mungo's had issued against treating Harry.

Harry settled back against Draco's chest at last and closed his eyes. Draco was glad. Not only would it be better for him to relax and wait, but it gave Draco a chance to think about what they should do after the case.

He had several ideas.

Harry turned his head and opened his eyes. A young Mind-Healer, a woman he vaguely recognized from the circle that had helped him open his first memories of Nancy, bent over his bed and looked at him.

Her eyes were bright, depthless blue.

Harry groped for his wand, but the blue-eyed twisted shook his head and clucked his tongue. "I don't mean to hurt you," he said. "You've been useful to me so far, slaughtering the competition. But I will tell you this." He smiled. "You're poaching now. Be careful."

And then the blue eyes dimmed to ordinary human ones, and the young Healer said anxiously, "Auror Potter, are you all right? You look as though someone punched you in the gut, and that can't be healthy for you." She began to fuss with his blankets.

Harry let out his breath a little and shook his head. He knew it was useless to speak to her about what she remembered from the last few minutes; the victims of the blue-eyed twisted never remembered anything from the moments he possessed them. "Will you ask Auror Malfoy to come in here, please? He can't be far away."

"I'm right here."

Harry turned his head immediately, and reached out with one hand. Draco took it and pressed it to his lips, ignoring the breathless squeak from the Healer. His eyes were shadowed, but there was an intensity to them that made Harry glad he was lying down, because otherwise his legs might not have supported him.

"Can you leave us, please?" Draco asked, without taking his gaze from Harry. "There are things we need to discuss that aren't for the ears of Mind-Healers."

The young woman gaped at them, Harry could see from the corner of his eye. "He nearly died," she said, voice loaded with frigid disapproval. "I think you really need to reconsider whether what you want to do away from the ears of Healers is appropriate."

She thinks we want to fuck. Harry could feel the heat stinging his ears, but Draco seemed more than willing to manipulate the Healer's perceptions if it would force her to leave them alone. He smiled. "I saved his life in the first place. I promise, I'm not going to do anything that puts him more at risk than he normally is." His gaze swung back to Harry, and his eyes sparked. "He does enough of that on his own."

Harry flushed and thought of denying it, but there was no point, really. After a moment, he glanced at the girl and nodded. "You can leave me alone with him. All we're going to do is talk."

The Mind-Healer kept frowning, but in the end, she swept out of the room with a sniff and a half-muttered comment about how it would be their own faults when Harry's wound opened again. Draco turned and sat down on the bed, staring deeply into Harry's eyes.

"The case is finished," he said quietly. "I compiled the reports and gave them the official cause of death, and we retrieved Nancy's body. Your wards like me enough to let me through, or else my Black blood did the trick." He raised his shoulders a little. "You don't have to worry about that. I managed to leave my parents' involvement out."

Harry nodded. "And you want to talk about what's going to happen next? Perhaps about what twisted we should rescue and which ones we shouldn't?"

"I think we need time to talk about it," Draco said. "Time we won't get if we go straight from your hospital bed into another case, which is what tends to happen." He raised his hand when Harry opened his mouth. "I'm not saying that that's all your fault, Harry. The Ministry works us hard, and I've gone along with that in the past. But for right now, I'd like to enjoy some time with you, not spend time worrying about you nearly dying."

"Draco," Harry began. He wanted to talk about a lot of things, Draco's parents and the blue-eyed twisted and Nancy's desperation, but he thought that wouldn't happen on the kind of holiday Draco appeared to be planning. They would talk about a lot of things then, sure, but they would be more personal and less part of their jobs. And Harry had just had an extended holiday from the Ministry; their superiors wouldn't be that keen on granting him another one.

"I saved your life," Draco hissed at him, and suddenly his hands were gripping Harry's shoulders much harder than had seemed possible so far. Harry winced and kept his eyes steadily on Draco's face. "You can think of this as me calling in in the life-debt and demanding that you adhere to it if you want, and you can explain it that way to Okazes and the rest of them. But I do demand that you come with me. That you take time to relax. That you do something other than simply land yourself in hospital—or the makeshifts that we've found since St. Mungo's banned you—time after time."

Harry blinked and stared. Then he reached out and laid his hand gently over Draco's, letting himself feel the strength in Draco's fingers, the tautness of his skin over tendon and bone, the way that Draco's hands rippled and then stilled.

"Whatever you want," he said softly. "I'll be happy to go with you."

Draco blinked. He had thought it would take a lot more resistance, a lot more arguing, than that, especially considering the way Harry had attempted to argue over Draco's treatment of twisted when he was so near death.

But perhaps that was the difference. They weren't in the middle of a case right now. They weren't near death. Draco was asking Harry to focus on him in a way that didn't include protecting him from a murderer.

Harry had no choice but to think about it and admit that he'd like to go with Draco, without the distraction of something more "important."

There would be enough consequences from this case to compare to the ashfall from a volcanic explosion, Draco knew. The Ministry was satisfied with his explanations right now, but wouldn't be forever. There were his parents still waiting on the horizon, and Harry's moral compassion, and the fact that the blue-eyed twisted was hunting them, and the people who might disapprove of them beginning a relationship.

But those things weren't equally important all the time. And perhaps, for right now, he and Harry could have what Draco had wanted in the first place: the time and space to concentrate on each other, the ability to speak.

The ability to remember each other, and stabilize their lives, and think about companionship—and even love—in a way that didn't vault them from moment to moment of danger and forbid ordinary declarations.

He bent down and kissed Harry, long and slow enough to make Harry gasp and arch his neck to get more of that, his hands massaging long strips of deliciousness into Harry's shoulders. When Harry began to stretch the delicate spellwork on his throat to kiss back, Draco pulled away and shook his head.

"You should get your sleep," he murmured, and laid his hand on Harry's, to show that he had no intention of leaving him alone while he took it.

Harry fell asleep smiling, and Draco watched over him.

The End.