Chapter Text
“Take all this nonsense about Azkaban,” said Rufus Scrimgeour, gesturing expansively at nothing in particular. “Just a crowd of children who’ve spent no time around the place, trying to fix what isn’t broken! Now, I spent several years there as a guard when I was a young man-“
Harry Potter inclined his head. It wasn’t quite a nod, more like a gentle sort of courtesy, but it did what he intended it to do and encouraged Mr. Scrimgeour to continue reminiscing about his frankly mostly uninteresting life. While he talked, Harry peacefully pursued his own thoughts and paid only enough attention to recognize pauses that just might require some sort of noise or gesture from him.
It was a long-familiar routine, especially so in the last two-ish years since he’d acquired a cursed knee injury during a Quidditch game. He couldn’t move particularly quickly even with his cane, so escaping boring conversations had stopped being the option it had once been. Of course, even before that he’d lived with the Weasleys, all of whom (with the exception of Ron, which was a big part of why Ron was Harry’s best friend and favourite Weasley) tended to go on and on about whatever was on their minds and not really require anything but the occasional ‘oh, really?’ or ‘wow!’ or ‘how awful!’ from their audience.
Some people that Harry had been called upon to listen to were themselves quite interesting people, or at least pleasant to look at, and Mr. Scrimgeour was at least the latter. He was a fairly handsome old fellow with a great mane of dark hair, even if he had something of a tendency to always turn his head so he was never quite facing whoever he was talking to. It was no real difficulty for Harry to offer him an (inattentive) audience while he enjoyed what there was to see, which was less the old man himself and more the beautiful and quite intensely blue Caribbean sea.
It had been so kind of the Weasleys, really, clubbing together to send him to St. Honoré. Harry knew they’d been worried about him, he’d been much, much less social since his injury. He’d bought his little cottage, moved into it, and rarely left. At first it really had been because he was depressed – he’d lost his livelihood, his only real skill, and a significant part of his identity after all! But after a while, he lived quietly at home because he’d discovered he liked it. Harry had come, slowly but surely, to understand that while he missed Quidditch and missed being good at something, he didn’t actually miss the constant travel, the wild social life, the one-night stands. He liked having a real home, a place that was his, a place he always felt welcome and comfortable. It was surely a great deal to do with a mostly unsettled childhood and early adulthood, but realising that what made him happiest was home was perhaps the only good thing to come out of what was still a genuinely painful event and aftermath.
But this was a lovely holiday, really. The constant sunny warmth of the Caribbean days did seem to be good for his knee, and by some strange chance there were several people here that Harry both knew and thought well enough of to appreciate the opportunity to catch up. He did rather wonder if any of the Weasleys had known who else would be at the Silver Palm and had arranged matters to not just get Harry out of his cottage but ‘force’ him to socialise. (The only ones who might think to check, he thought, were Molly and Percy, and of the two only Percy would trust nature to take its course and not apply a harder push to Harry up-front. But Percy generally also respected Harry’s privacy enough that while he might have thought to check, he wouldn’t have done so without Harry asking him to. So, on the whole, probably no one had checked and this was a coincidence.)
He returned to the present to catch a pause in the flow of story and an expectant look from Mr. Scrimgeour. Harry smiled warmly at him. “A very unusual experience. Very interesting! Do please go on.”
Mr. Scrimgeour went on with his story about, apparently, some cult-like group of Dark wizards, and Harry resumed thinking about the odd familiarity of many of the others at the Silver Palm.
The hotel had been selected by Arthur Weasley, from what Harry had been told – he’d said it was run by a couple that he and Molly had known in their own school days, the Sandersons, who were good sorts and would look after Harry. It had turned out, however, that Arthur’s information was almost two years out of date: the Sandersons had sold and gone, and the new owners were none other than Draco Malfoy and his husband Quirinus. Draco and Harry had been enemies for the bulk of their time together at Hogwarts, but their relationship had shifted somewhat in fifth year as both of them worked out that they preferred boys to girls. Arguments had turned not into fights but into making out in closets, and by the time they graduated they’d more or less been friends. (No longer lovers, by that time, but resuming their past rivalry had seemed like too much work, so they’d settled on friends.)
It was a little odd that Draco Malfoy of all people had up and moved to the Caribbean, having apparently decided that what he wanted to do was work for a living. Not just work, even, but run a hotel! A business that all but required a fair amount of Muggle knowledge and involvement. Certainly the Silver Palm itself was as wizard as it was possible to be, but it was the only wizarding area on the entirety of St. Honoré and as such had substantial Muggle improvements to blend in. Electricity, for one. Harry rather suspected that Quirinus had been the driving force behind the decision – he’d apparently taught Muggle Studies at one point – but it had to be said that Draco seemed genuinely happy both with his work and his husband, wherever the idea had come from.
Also present at the hotel were the Patil twins, Padma and Parvati. Both had been in the same year at Hogwarts as Harry, though he’d never really gotten to know either of them at the time. Padma had been a Ravenclaw and thus her class schedule was generally wildly different, and Parvati had been… well, not to put too fine a point on it, she’d been very girly, and Harry had avoided her because of it. He felt rather badly about that now, because it turned out that Parvati was an inveterate gossip and thus very fun to talk to. Not being friends with her all along meant he’d missed years of deep and occasionally catty dives into the personal lives of their mutual acquaintance.
With a start, Harry realised that Mr. Scrimgeour had left off telling stories about his time as a prison guard and had moved on to, apparently, some time spent on exchange in Canada and the Dark creatures that apparently ran amok there. “Now don’t you agree?” he was saying triumphantly.
Harry blinked a few times in a way that he knew for certain made him look rather dim, but appealing. His experience suggested that people of Mr. Scrimgeour’s type definitely enjoyed feeling superior. “I don’t feel at all qualified to say. I’m afraid I’ve lived quite a sheltered life.”
“Oh, of course you have, dear boy. Of course you have.” Scrimgeour reached out and patted Harry’s hand. “Forgive me, I tend to forget how peaceful young lives are these days.”
“You’ve had such a varied life,” Harry said, abruptly determined to make up his former pleasurable inattention. It wasn’t exactly Mr. Scrimgeour’s fault that he was bad at telling stories.
“Not bad, not bad.” The older man seemed to be trying for modesty, which was somewhat funny considering how much of his conversation was centered around telling stories about himself. He did seem to be inclined to a break from the stories, though, as he turned his head to look out at the blue sea. “Lovely place, this.”
“It really is,” Harry agreed. “Do you think anything ever actually happens here?”
“Quite a lot, I should say. Scandals aplenty. Why, I could tell you-“
But it wasn’t exactly scandal that interested Harry. What most people considered scandal Harry honestly found quite boring. Just people changing partners and calling attention to it instead of sorting themselves out like rational people.
“There was even a murder here a couple of years ago. It was big news, even made the Prophet. Phillip Westen, I daresay you remember it.”
Harry nodded without enthusiasm. It had been big news because everyone involved had been rich, flashy, played Quidditch or some combination of the three, but there had been nothing interesting about it. It had seemed entirely likely that Westen had indeed killed his wife’s lover and equally likely that his alibi had been bought and paid for. Booze and drugs had featured heavily, and certainly almost everyone involved had been very pretty to look at, so the affair had been described as glamorous and a spectacle. But it was far from Harry’s cup of tea, and so he’d paid no more attention than he had to. (He’d still been with the Cannons at that time, and further annoying him about the whole thing had been Molly’s insistence that it could have been you, Harry, these are your friends when he hadn’t known any of them. He hadn’t even known people who’d known them. Ginny, in her first season with the Harpies, had been closer to being involved than he had! She actually was interested in that sort of thing and probably had known at least one or two people involved.)
“And if you ask me, that wasn’t the only murder around here at that time.” Scrimgeour nodded, clearly gearing up to launch into more story. “I had my suspicions-“
A few of Harry’s colored pencils slid off his lap onto the ground, and Scrimgeour bent (gallantly was the descriptor he was probably going for) to retrieve them. Harry smiled at him again, accepted the pencils, and did his best to look fascinated.
“But speaking of murder, I heard quite a good story once. From a Healer, of all people – of course, Healers see quite as much of the Dark as we Aurors, even if it’s just doing the cleanup afterwards. Anyway, this Healer fellow told me about a most peculiar midnight call. Some young man pounded on his door in the middle of the night and hauled him back to his house, crying that his wife had hanged herself. Apparently his fire had gone out, so he couldn’t call or Floo, and in a panic he’d actually hared out to the first Healer he could find. Well, my friend went along with him and sure enough there was his wife, dangling. She wasn’t dead, though, and my friend was quite good at his work, so he brought her round. Her husband about died of joy, it came out that his wife had had odd depressive fits for a while and he’d been worried but never thought she’d try anything. Well, all’s well that ended well, or so it seemed. About a month later she took some potion or other and died.” Scrimgeour sighed and shook his head. “Just goes to show, my boy, if someone’s determined they’ll get the job done.”
Harry nodded and carefully did not allow his distaste for the man’s phrasing to show. It seemed disrespectful in the extreme, as well as horrendously over-simple. That young man’s wife, and probably the young man himself, had been desperately in need of a good mind healer. The story wasn’t done, though; his nod had encouraged Mr. Scrimgeour to go on.
“And that was that, but I imagine you’re wondering how a rather sad story comes to my mind when we’re talking of murder. Well, about a year later, my Healer friend was talking with a colleague, and this lady told him a story about a lady who’d tried to drown herself, was rescued by her husband, and then a few weeks later gassed herself with a Muggle oven! Quite a coincidence, eh? My friend told the other Healer his story, and they marveled at the similarity. Well, my friend had taken a photo – of quite a nice hibiscus by that young fellow with the poor wife’s front door, and quite by accident had caught the fellow himself. Blurry, but recognizable. He took out the snap and showed his colleague and she said damned if it’s not the same man!” Scrimgeour nodded, as if backing up his own story. “I actually tried to follow it up, but the fellow Jones or whatever his name actually was had covered his tracks too well. Seems a little fantastical, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t think that anything like that could really happen.”
“Oh yes, I would,” Harry responded without thinking. “Practically every day.”
“Do be serious!”
“If someone gets a formula that works, they won’t stop. They’ll go on.”
“What an imagination you’ve got, dear boy!” Scrimgeour smiled, a put-on and unfelt sort of thing, and Harry was sure that he’d mis-stepped. The old man wanted to be impressive to a pretty, dim young thing, and Harry had shown himself to have a slightly sharper edge than he liked. Well, there was nothing to be done about that now. “Anyway, my Healer friend let me have that snap as a curiosity, I think I’ve got it around here....” He started digging through his pockets. “Lots of things in here, don’t know why I keep all these things....”
Harry thought perhaps he knew. All the ‘things’ were Mr. Scrimgeour’s stock in trade, as it were. Souvenirs and snapshots illustrating his seemingly-endless repertoire of very similar stories. The story he had just told, Harry was sure, had originally been nothing like what Harry had heard. It had been worked up, embellished, and then smoothed out over time.
Scrimgeour had come up with a stack of snaps and was flicking through them. “No... no... hah, I remember that business, fine looking woman, you wouldn’t have thought that she... no... ah, the tusks on that one, I must remember to tell you... here!” He held up a photo faced away from Harry, and grinned. “Like to see a photo of a murderer, Harry?”
Harry obligingly held out a hand, and the photo was about to be passed when Mr. Scrimgeour froze in mid-motion, staring fixedly at... something over Harry’s right shoulder, he thought, and then realised he could hear footsteps and voices. Abruptly, Mr. Scrimgeour shoved the photo back into his pocket and said loudly, “As I was saying, I wish I could show you those tusks! Biggest erumpent I’ve ever seen – ah, hello there!” His voice took on an entirely put-on (to Harry’s ear) hearty quality. “The quartet returns! Any luck with the flora and fauna?”
The footsteps resolved themselves into four hotel guests Harry knew by sight, two married couples who went about together almost all the time. One of them, at least ten years older than the other three, was famous in himself – the author Gilderoy Lockhart. He insisted quite cheerily that everyone should call him ‘Gil’ and the one positive aspect of his character was that he actually didn’t talk about himself as much as Mr. Scrimgeour did. Not that he was less than self-absorbed and overconfident, just that he seemed to enjoy pretending to be incognito when there was no chance he would ever actually be so. His wife Marietta was slender and pretty, with big dark blue eyes and silvery-blond hair cut just shorter than shoulder length – attractively elfin, probably, if you liked women. The other couple were Cedric and Cho Diggory, they were herbologists and magizoologists, at least on the hobby level, Harry seemed to recall.
“None whatsoever!” Gil returned cheerfully, with a hearty laugh. “Of course I knew we wouldn’t. We went out at completely the wrong time of day, you know. But the hike was pleasant nonetheless, wasn’t it, my dear?”
Marietta flipped her short hair. “Pleasant and too damn hot. If I don’t get a drink immediately or sooner, I will die.”
“Can’t have that!” Gil waved to Harry’s left and called out, “Hi, Q! Any chance of some drinks?”
Quirinus, sitting at a table with Draco some ways off, going over some paperwork or other – Harry thought probably the hotel accounts – waved back, then kissed his husband on the cheek and came over to the group of guests. “Of course! What can I get you?”
“Planter’s Punch?” Gil looked around briefly as if to ask if that was acceptable to his companions, but in reality he was just counting up. “Six of them, it looks like.”
Harry cleared his throat and waved slightly himself, then pointed at his knee. “Just lemonade for me, please. I’m meant to avoid alcohol.”
“Oh yes! Of course, I should have realised!” Gil never seemed to mind being corrected, on the rare occasions he even acknowledged it. “Five Planter’s Punch, one lemonade, and join us, Q!”
Quirinus laughed and shook his head. “Not possible, I’m afraid. We’ve got to fix up these accounts, and I can’t make Draco do it all himself. Steel band tonight!” He sailed off to get the drinks.
“Good!” Marietta, it seemed, was a fan of steel bands, getting her drink soon, or both. She winced as she sat down though. “I’m all over thorns. Cedric, you beast, you shoved me into that thorn bush on purpose.”
“Lovely pink flowers, it had.” Cedric, Harry noted, did not deny the accusation.
“And lovely long thorns! You’re a sadist, Cedric Diggory.”
“Unlike me!” Gil declaimed cheerfully. “I’m positively full of the milk of human kindness.”
The bickering conversation went on, and eventually became a competition of vicious-plant stories between Gil and Mr. Scrimgeour. (Gil was the decided winner not because his stories were better - though they probably were - but because he was so much better at telling them.) Cho settled near Harry and conversed quietly on nothing topics – such as the weather, which was always the same and thus not actually worth talking about. It wasn’t a conversation that Harry had to pay any real attention to, so he let his mind wander a bit.
Mr. Scrimgeour had been about to show him a picture of a wife-killer and hadn’t, because the two couples had come up the path. And now here he was, acting a bonhomie larger than life as though the word ‘murder’ had never come out of his mouth.
Interesting!