Always Something - Dramione

Chapter 10

The Malfoy Memory Institute was still mostly empty, early in the morning, when Draco opened the front door to a truly symphonic knock. As he flung the door open, he might have been looking forward to telling off a reporter, but that was not who he found calling.

"Mr. Malfoy!" a voice trumpeted into his face. "Lovely, just lovely!"

"Mr. Lockhart," Draco said, extending his hand to Gilderoy Lockhart who, thanks to some expensive, finely crafted preservation spells, was looking much the same as he had when he came to teach at Hogwarts, decades before. "What an unexpected -- spectacle."

"Yes, well I simply could not stay away. Your delightful mother sent me an albatross, way off in Taiwan, requesting I come back at once to see to your wife. So tragic, what's happened. I say so from a position of experience, and from a position of indebtedness, after all you have done to help me regain my own powers of recollection."

At the mention of Hermione's accident, Draco had taken Gilderoy Lockhart by the arm and pulled him inside. Lockhart -- honestly, what had his mother been thinking?

"Do allow me to introduce my illustrious associate from Taiwan," Lockhart remembered, motioning to the stranger following behind him. "Yes, I'm quite a sensation in Taiwan. "Magical Me" has only just been translated into Chinese. Can you believe that? They have honored me with my very own Chinese name. Isn't that something? What is it again?"

"Gao Fu Shuai," the man behind him said.

"Yes, Gou Fu Shuai!" he said.

They both laughed.

Draco extended his own hand to the stranger. "Draco Malfoy."

Lockhart jumped. "Oh yes, this is Dr. Huang Haonan."

"Pleased to meet you," said Dr. Huang.

"That's about all the English he knows, unfortunately," said Lockhart. "You'll have to use my Chinglish generator for the rest. It's not pretty but it gets the job done. Allow me to summarize what I can before you begin. Dr. Huang is a leading neuro-magical researcher."

"Yes," said Draco. "Dr. Huang, I've read your papers on magical brain wave patterns. Fascinating."

Lockhart slapped the doctor on the back. "That's our Huang. He's pioneered the conversion of Muggle medical technology for mapping the brainwaves of witches and wizards. Simply ingenious, and the very first person I thought of when your mother contacted me."

Lockhart was digging in his bag for his Chinglish generator -- a crude but serviceable gadget that would render Draco's articulate English and Dr. Huang's articulate Chinese as a mutual mess that would be somewhat intelligible to both of them.

Dr. Huang spoke perfect Chinese into the generator's mouthpiece, but it came out sounding like, "Hear said, your witch-wife not can remember."

Draco nodded. "Right."

"Witch-wife's memory crushed like not-wizard person's memory, so not so?"

It was thick, but eventually Draco nodded. "So."

The generator churned on, stammering something about checking witch-wife brain.

Draco sat back from the machine. "Lockhart, this machine is awful. I don't think I'm getting it."

"I am." It was Hermione, standing in the doorway. She nodded at Gilderoy. "Please, Mr. Lockhart, don't get up. What I think he's saying is that, since I have memory damage like the kind they see in Muggles, if they scan my brain with his device and compare it to the scans of Muggles with the same memory loss, it can tell us something useful."