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The Conservation of Fame	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 22392 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Ten—Hot Pursuit
Since you won’t let me contact you any other way, I borrowed your friend Weasley’s owl again.
That was the way Draco’s letter opened. Perseus had come early that morning and sat on Harry’s pillow, staring into his face, until Harry got tired of pretending he didn’t care about owl-talons so close to his eyes and sat up. Then Perseus had dropped the letter triumphantly into his lap and leaped up on the perch that Harry kept for him in a corner. Harry shook his head and opened it.
And you’re an idiot.
“What definition of wooing does that fit under, then?” Harry muttered, and held the letter up to the light. He’d slept poorly, spent half the night worrying whether he was doing the wrong thing by keeping knowledge of his real self from Draco or the wrong thing by not allowing him closer, and then the other half having nightmares. About what would happen if he told Draco the truth, or at least might happen. If Draco told other people, then it was back to constant owls, crazed fans under the bed, photographers climbing out of his closets, no life and no time to call his own.
This time, he might really finish what George had interrupted.
Harry sighed and focused on the letter in front of him, snagging his glasses from the table beside the bed. He’d managed to read what was there so far without them, but Draco’s writing grew smaller and more cramped towards the bottom of the page, as though he’d become angrier and angrier as he wrote. No surprise there.
Do you know how rarely I offer to someone what I’ve offered to you? And it’s not just because of my past or because I’m an Unspeakable that I have to be cautious. It’s because I so rarely find someone worth the kind of burning desire I want to unleash on you, someone who’s capable of being my equal.
Harry grinned hard at Perseus. “Nice to see His Arrogance hasn’t changed,” he said, and wondered if he should just crumple up the letter now and save everyone a lot of trouble.
But in the end, he sighed and kept on reading. Because he hadn’t really offered to anyone else what he’d offered to Draco, either. Granted, that was because everyone he knew now, really knew, was already in the secret of the spell and no one else had broken through his wards the way Draco had, but it was still an exception. He knew something about the fascination that Draco seemed to think burned between them.
You deny and hide and lie and deny again. Tell me why I should give you another chance. Tell me why you deserve to be courted.
Draco.
Harry lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “Did he really think that would get me angry enough to respond?” he asked Perseus, who ruffled his feathers and looked around as though anticipating treats. Harry used a lazy wave of his wand to float over the canister of them that he kept on top of the wardrobe. “I reckon he did.”
He shook his head and looked at the letter again. Yes, in some ways it would be so much simpler if he turned his back now. Draco knew what he wanted, but what he wanted was a shadow, a phantom, a Harry Potter who didn’t exist, who couldn’t, because he and Draco had only been friends for a fortnight, and enemies for a lifetime.
But he was going to answer it, because if Draco was this angry he deserved some response. Perhaps Harry could even find a way through the maze, a way to reassure Draco and yet keep his desired privacy.
Maybe.
But when have I ever taken the safe option? It would have been safer not to let him stay here in the first place, to take him to Ron and Hermione the instant I realized what was going on. If I’d taken him through my Floo, his enemies wouldn’t have had any idea where he’d gone. There were other options.
There were now, too, but he made the choice to pick up his quill and write.
*
“Is it safe for you to be out without a minder?”
Draco’s voice spoke with a sharp hiss. He was standing outside the iron gates of Malfoy Manor, where he’d told Harry to meet him, with a grey cloak around his shoulders and his head lifted in that same old way. For a moment, Harry let the years roll away, let himself be transported back to Hogwarts. Maybe it was that simple. If he could hate Draco again, then he certainly wouldn’t want him to come around.
But in the end, he simply shook his head and let the impossibility go. “I could ask the same of you,” he retorted. “Did the Department of Mysteries decide that your enemies weren’t going to take vengeance?”
For a moment, Draco blinked, and drew his head back. Harry wondered if he wasn’t used to being scolded, or wasn’t used to being worried about. It could have been either. Draco probably still had his friends, his family, his lovers, but his job would keep some of the intimate details of his life hidden. Perhaps Harry was the first one who had ever figured out the details of what Draco did on his own without having to be told.
That was—that had no reason to light a fire of such dense red satisfaction in the middle of Harry’s belly, it really didn’t.
“They did,” Draco said at last. “They’ve had a few attacks on the Department already, probing for the mirror, but no one seemed interested in me even when I went out in public. The meeting I had with you in the Atrium was a test of that kind.” He leaned back with a thin smile and cocked his eyebrows at Harry. “I presume that I don’t need to ask you if you’ve been safe, not with those iron wards of yours.”
“Sometimes someone gets past the barriers,” Harry said, and let whatever he was feeling fill his eyes as he looked at Draco. If Draco was smart, it would drive him away, the uncertainty and the exasperation and the liking.
Draco wasn’t smart, or maybe Harry wasn’t. He bit his lip and nodded, reaching out with one hand. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come in.”
Harry stepped through the gates, and couldn’t help shivering for a moment as he saw the house. He had never been back here since the war, but he could remember Hermione’s helpless screams as Bellatrix tortured her, the cold air of the cellars that Dobby had pulled them out of, and the way that the Snatchers had dragged him to the front door.
And the way that Draco had refused to identify him, and the way his face had looked when Harry snatched at his wand. Harry couldn’t help looking down, seeking and finding the hawthorn wand as Draco gestured with it to shut the iron gates.
Draco saw him looking and smiled. “Want to touch mine, since I touched yours?” he murmured, voice full of filthy innuendo, and held it out.
Harry hesitated before he touched it. He didn’t know what, if anything, this would tell Draco. But in the end he decided on the risk, because even if Draco picked up some sensation from it, even if the wand remembered Harry, he wouldn’t know the circumstances, time or place. Harry thought he had to trust in the spell more often. It had guarded him for several years now, including in front of Aurors he had worked with. They knew him better than Draco had.
His finger connected with the hawthorn wood—
And he felt a distinct thrum travel up his arm, and Draco gasped and took a step away, his jaw hanging with shock.
“Harry,” he whispered. He didn’t ask. He simply extended his wand the rest of the way between them and laid it along Harry’s arm.
Harry shuddered. It felt as though Draco had pushed magic into him. He swayed on his feet and clutched at the iron gates, remembering only too late that they were warded and might sting him. But perhaps that didn’t happen from the inside, or perhaps Draco didn’t will it to happen, because he felt nothing.
Nothing except the shake of remembered power in his muscles and Draco’s bright, awe-filled stare.
“How much of my own past did you take from me?” Draco whispered, his words angry but his voice quiet, half-worshiping, as if he admired Harry’s cleverness even as it hurt him. Perhaps he does at that, Harry thought as he gulped air. Slytherins are capable of some fairly twisted things. “You must have taken my wand at some point, used it or touched it. What do I not remember because of you?”
Harry shivered, then relaxed. This just showed how powerful the spell was, if it could make Draco forget about the Boy-Who-Lived stealing his wand during the war, or simply disconnect those memories from the rest of his mind so that he couldn’t make the link between Harry and the person who had stolen his wand.
This is cruel.
His own voice that time, speaking softly and securely inside his head, without any need for Hermione’s morality at all. Harry winced and shook his head, not in denial of his words, but of Draco’s.
“I told you how the spell works, what it is,” he said, and held Draco’s eyes. “Maybe it would be for the best if you just let me walk back through those gates right now, before I do anything else that you don’t like.”
Draco surged forwards across the distance between them and caught Harry’s wrists in a crushing grasp. Harry flexed his hands and got them in a position from which he could throw off Draco’s grip as soon as he needed to. Draco didn’t notice, though, or else didn’t care. He bent down and spat the words into Harry’s ear, complete with flying saliva.
“That’s what you want me to do. That would make everything easier for you, wouldn’t it? If I just backed off and left all these secrets unexplored, all these questions unasked? Then you would go merrily on your way and not have to live with someone confronting you, and forcing you to think about what you’ve done.”
Harry swung to the side and shook his arms, and Draco stumbled, flying back towards the gates. He caught himself before he slammed into them and watched Harry with eyes that shone, his hands still opening and closing.
Harry stalked the distance between them and leaned near enough to make Draco’s eyes cross.
“That’s the sign that you really know nothing about me, if you think I used this spell lightly,” he whispered. “And that’s the sign that you need to care about yourself first, and not me. This isn’t worth it, is it? Not the way I’ve betrayed and tricked you, made you forget. I’ve violated the integrity of your mind. I don’t think I could forgive that if someone did it to me. The question is, can you, or should I walk away?”
“You try to go outside those gates and I’ll kill you myself,” Draco said.
Harry let his wand fall into his hand and his power gather around him, not released, but thrumming in the air hard enough to make Draco wince and raise a hand to his jaw, where his teeth would be aching. “I’d like to see you try,” Harry said, evenly.
For a long moment, they glared at each other. Harry swallowed against the excitement in his throat, excitement that could easily cause other unwanted reactions. This was explosive, sure, and an interesting change from the routine that had seemed boring since Draco came, but it was also probably the reason that they would never be good friends or lovers. Even when Draco knew nothing about his past with Harry, they ended up reacting to each other like this.
Then the moment passed, and Draco half-lowered his head and gave Harry a crooked smile. “I’ll remember that,” he said. “Your power, and the way you react when I threaten to kill you. It’s something new to add to the memories I have of you taking care of me.”
Harry blinked for a moment, completely thrown, and then lowered his wand. “You aren’t going to take the threat more personally?” he asked.
Draco snorted. “You didn’t take the threat to kill you personally, or at least it didn’t look like you did. Should I get upset because you were prepared to defend yourself?”
Harry shrugged, thinking of some of the ways that his “fans” had reacted when they found themselves pinned to the wall with his wand up against their throat. Bursting into tears or astonished indignation that they couldn’t sneak up on him or break into his home unannounced had been the least of it. “Some people have.”
“Those people are ridiculous, then.” Smoothly, Draco stepped away from the gates and into Harry’s personal space once more. “I hope I have more sense than that.” He reached down and gently teased Harry’s fingers apart, insinuating his fingers in between them. “Come inside with me. Have a nice meal.”
Harry looked up at him and spent a moment studying his face. This Draco seemed a lot more unpredictable than the one he’d known in school, but, well, of course Harry would see him like that, wouldn’t he, when he didn’t know him well? Perhaps the Slytherin schoolboy had been capable of spontaneity, too, inside the walls of the dungeons. It wasn’t like Harry would have been able to tell.
“All right,” he said, and tried not to either blush or roll his eyes when Draco picked up his hand and kissed the back of it.
*
“…We have thirty-six bedrooms. This, of course, makes the Manor better than your house.”
Harry smiled temperately at Draco and took another bite of what Draco claimed was fish cooked in some sort of coconut sauce. Harry hadn’t decided whether that was a load of bollocks or not. What really mattered was that the food was good, and he didn’t have to cook for himself for once, or worry about the food being dosed with a poison or a love potion.
At least, he didn’t think he did.
“At least I use all my space,” he said, letting the dark drink, not quite wine and not quite juice, that Draco had provided with dinner roll around on his tongue. “When was the last time that you were in some of these thirty-six bedrooms, or let them out to other people?”
Draco put an elbow on the table and leaned forwards, smiling at him. Harry resisted the temptation to point out that elbows on the table was bad manners and leaned a corresponding distance back in his own chair, smiling in turn.
“If you like,” Draco said, “we could spend time in every one of them. A new bed every night. A new window to look out of while I fuck you over the bed. What do you think of that?”
“I think I’m grateful that I wasn’t swallowing right then,” Harry said, and carefully put his glass down on the table, shaking his head. “Do you really think that coming to dinner means I’m going to let you do that?”
“I could only think of one reason why you wouldn’t.” Draco’s face was carefully blank, his head half-bowed, his voice soft.
“Tell me, then.” Harry wondered if Draco had finally thought of an objection that Harry hadn’t, something that really would separate them. He was in such a strange half-state about that, he thought. On the one hand, he didn’t want to leave. Draco was fascinating, he was funny—or at least, Harry found him funny when he was making fun of people who weren’t Harry and his friends, the way he had all through dinner with the witty stories he’d told—and Harry felt fully alive around him.
On the other hand, how much of that would survive when and if Draco learned the truth? It would shred his self-confidence, his memories, the way he acted towards Harry. Better, perhaps, to go before that all happened, if he could only persuade himself to do so.
But he had accepted that if Draco reached out, he would respond, so Draco was the one who would probably have to separate them if they were going to be.
“If you have another lover,” Draco said, and lifted his head and produced another perfect smile, if more predatory than the ones he’d worn so far. “You don’t strike me as the type to be unfaithful, if only because your lover would probably be as fierce as you are and kill you if you tried. I know I would never let someone like you go.”
“How inspiring,” Harry said dryly, while he tried not to show how dry his throat was and how his hands had closed in on each other beneath the table. “Someone who apparently wants to see me dead and despises my house for its small size. How ever could I refuse?”
Draco only smiled and leaned back, toying with his own glass. “You can choose to stay,” he said. “Or leave for now, and I’ll invite you back another time. Your choice.” He leaned forwards just enough for his shadow to touch the edge of Harry’s plate, and then stopped. “Always yours,” he whispered, his eyes lingering on Harry’s.
Harry believed that. He really did. But it just threw him back into the middle of his indissoluble problem, which was that he thought he should stop reacting to Draco but couldn’t as long as Draco was willing to act.
Draco’s smile turned bright as snow. “Well?” he asked. “Your choice, Harry. Stay or go.”
And the moment lingered, and turned on Harry’s breath, and still he had no idea of what to say.

*

polka dot: Harry can put up with him being an asshole as long as he gets to be an asshole back. The one thing he would have trouble dealing with is if Draco was deeply hurt by his deception.

unneeded: Well, if Draco continues to be this annoying, Harry might miss his presence less…

kit: Thank you!

SP777: He had it here! I hope it satisfied expectations.
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The Conservation of Fame