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Contracted	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18657 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Eleven—Six Days and a Bit

            “There’s no way that you can find a way to keep yourself and all your friends safe from Sandborn.”

            That was what Potter had said to him when Draco made his announcement about how he would be the one responsible for keeping Sandborn off their backs. Draco let his smile widen, thinking about it now, as he leaned back in his chair at home and watched the fire dance between the feet he’d levered up onto the table.

            “Ye of little faith,” he murmured in response to a man who was probably lying in an uncomfortable bed right now and trying to pretend that he was sleeping the sleep of the virtuous. Draco had looked around the house briefly before he left. Disgraceful, especially for someone who was pretending to be his lover. Draco would have to see about ordering a few tapestries and having them delivered anonymously. At least that would conceal some of the sharp corners and awkward angles. “I’ll teach you to believe in me yet.”

            He stretched and yawned. He knew that he should go to bed soon. He had to meet Theo early the next morning to set his plan in motion.

            But for the moment, he wanted to watch the flames dance and remember Potter’s expression whenever he looked at Draco, and what he wanted had always been more important to Draco than what he was supposed to do.

            He could get used to that expression.

            But before he did, Potter would have to clean up his act and show signs of actually wanting to survive and enjoy himself like a normal human being. Draco had his private rules that he tried to obey more often than not, and one of them, after an unfortunate experience right out of Hogwarts, included Never date someone with a terminal case of self-loathing.

*

            “Callia! Just the woman I wanted to see.”

            Callia flinched and looked as if she’d like to crawl under a bed. There were none handy, so she couldn’t, and had to settle for glaring at Pansy. Pansy smiled back at her. Poor little bitch, there was no master here to run interference for her and make her look like a proper pure-blood lady.

            “Don’t call my name like that.” Callia shifted the bag on her arm and turned about to peer over her shoulder, as though she assumed anyone cared enough about her activities to spy on her.

            “What should I call it like?” Pansy asked, interested, as she stepped into the small alley that ran away from Madam Malkin’s and into a shadowed corner that some people used as an Apparition point. She didn’t think anyone would use it this early in the morning, or she would have suggested that she and Callia meet somewhere else. Despite what the little cunt might think of her, Pansy really wasn’t an idiot. “With the emphasis on the last syllable? I admit, that would make sure that no one could mistake you for anyone but who you were.”

            Callia closed her eyes and tried to take a breath, as if that would help her recover her temper. Pansy shook her head. She had never recovered her temper that way. All it did was make her light-headed. It was out of pure good intentions that she interrupted before Callia could do that to herself and be worse company than she already was.

            “I have the report that you wanted.” She gave a glance over her own shoulder as she took the parchment out of her pocket. Of course it was purely for show, since she knew no one was coming—unlike some people’s, her ears worked—and even if someone had found the parchment, it was all lies from beginning to end. But there was the slight chance that Draco would be annoyed if these particular lies about a man he was pretending to pursue came out. Perhaps. Pansy toyed sending an owl to Rita Skeeter, simply for the joy of watching Draco’s eyes flash as he tried not to explode at her. He really did have a life that was too easy.

            “How did you get it?” Callia reached out a hand, then snatched it back as if it had only now occurred to her that Pansy might have poisoned the paper. Pansy hadn’t, but only because she hadn’t had time to find the particular contact poison that would cause the victim to lose control of her bladder.

            “It seems that you’re not the only one interested in Potter’s seed,” Pansy said, and saw the expected revulsion flick into being across Callia’s face. Too bad. Pansy sharpened her smile and cocked her head. “I found this already written up. It was only a matter of calling in a favor or two, learning a few unlocking spells.”

            It really was convenient that she’d been in Slytherin when she was a student, she thought as Callia grasped the paper with a trembling hand. The idea of calling in “favors” was vague, but everyone thought they knew what it meant, and it covered a multitude of sins.

            Or, in this case, a whole lot of nothing.

            “It’s real,” Callia breathed.

            “Of course,” Pansy said. Once again, she was telling the truth. The report did exist. She’d spent a lot of time writing it, deciding on the choice phrasing that would make Callia believe that Potter’s family had the curse on them that made most of their daughters die in childbirth and their children turn to stone in the womb, and then aging it with a few appropriate spells, as well as changing the handwriting. It should fucking well look real.

            “I don’t know why he never told me.” Callia stared at the report and turned it over a few times, as though the reason for Potter’s silence was written on the back. Then she reared back and looked Pansy in the eye. “Why are you helping me?”

            Little idiot. She should have realized I’d have no motive to do so and figured out the lie from that. But Pansy had no trouble in keeping a look of boredom on her face. It didn’t differ that much from a look of contempt, after all. “Because Draco’s announced an intention to go after Potter. I don’t particularly want him to. Brunets and blonds don’t look good together.” Callia angled her a burning look. Pansy pretended not to notice. “Embarrass him badly enough, and Draco will drop the chase.”

            “I never said that I intended to publish this,” Callia said, her fingers tracing along the crease now.

            Pansy gave her a bored look again. Her hands were shouting the intention.

            “But I can use it,” Callia added, as though afraid Pansy would take it back again if she admitted that she didn’t have an immediate use for it, and tucked it into a pouch at her waist. Turning her back, she started to walk towards the mouth of the alley.

            Pansy called after her politely. Occasionally it paid to use politeness, to confuse one’s victims. “There is the matter of payment.”

            Callia turned her head over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t ask you for this. You chose to give it to me.”

            Pansy smiled at her, and waited for her to understand. Payment, and the necessity for payment, didn’t change because one hadn’t asked for something. Callia had accepted the report, and that was as good as having asked in the first place.

            Callia turned her head and walked back towards her, all but kicking at the puddles left over from last night’s rain. Pansy chose to allow her that childish indulgence because it cost her nothing.

            Besides, Callia’s face was uglier than ever when she flushed. Pansy wanted to see and remember it in case Potter ever needed convincing about what a hag his bride was via Pensieve.

            “What do you want?” Callia asked. “You haven’t mentioned anything.”

            “As I said, Draco has too much interest in Potter for his own good, or for the higher interests of fashion,” Pansy said. She paused, but Callia simply looked at her. Pansy sighed. Whether stubbornness or stupidity was keeping the woman silent, she did deplore Potter’s lack of taste. Perhaps she should oppose Draco’s attempts to help him in truth. They would get Potter free of this entanglement and he would only find another bint to hang on his arm. “I want you to show Draco that he’s not welcome around your future husband.”

            Callia’s eyes went wider when she smiled. Pansy despised the gesture. It showed too much emotion. “That will be no problem,” she said. “And you’re sure that you want that as payment?”

            “Did you want me to demand something else?” Pansy asked, in growing disgust at how stupid Callia was. Her lungs ought to have stopped working by now; it should be too much effort to walk and breathe at the same time. “I certainly can.”

            Callia ducked her head and murmured a few words that might have been a refusal. Pansy didn’t deign to listen to them closely enough to determine if they were. She waved her hand, dismissing Callia from her presence, and turned away.

            She did listen after that, and heard the moment of the indrawn breath when Callia realized that Pansy had her back turned to her. Pansy didn’t let her hand brush her wand. If Callia struck now, foolish enough to believe that she paid no attention, then Pansy would have payment of a different kind.

            But she didn’t. Instead, Pansy heard the swish of her robes as she hurried off.

            Pansy sniffed and headed for the Apparition point. She should find out whether Theo and Draco were still working on the potion, and drag her husband away if they were. She was in need of a good shag to remove the taste of dislike from her mouth.

*

            “You said that it would be ready yesterday.” Draco kept the whine out of his voice. He never whined. He spoke in a deep and manly tone, and sometimes that tone happened to be a bit higher-pitched than it was at other times.

            “I thought it would be.” Theo pushed his glasses up his nose as he stared down at the potion. It had changed colors three times now, from dark green to dark blue to dark red, and still none of them were the rich, amethyst-like purple they needed. “I don’t understand,” Theo added, propping his chin on his fist as he stared at the bottle.

            “That’s fucking obvious,” Draco muttered.

            He thought he saw a shadow pass by the door of the potions lab, and rolled his eyes. Pansy had this odd rule that she was the only one who could swear at her husband. She hadn’t even bothered doing that yesterday, only taken Theo’s arm, smiled at Draco, and pulled him out of the lab. Draco had shut the door so that he didn’t have to hear the sound of bedsprings being abused. He objected to abuse of any kind. That was why his beds at home were deep and soft and comfortable, with many layers to spare the bedsprings.

            “I’m sorry that I left so suddenly yesterday, all right?” Theo snapped. “You’re right, we probably would have had it finished by now if I hadn’t.”

            “I didn’t say anything about that,” Draco said, raising his eyebrows. Raising one’s eyebrows was a good way to proclaim innocence and annoy the fuck out of someone at once.

            Theo simply glared at him. Then he shook his head and bent over the bottle. “Let’s figure this out.”

            Draco slipped easily into the rhythm of shop-talk. Theo was the only one of his friends who understood enough about potions for him to do this with. Astoria, poor dear, thought too much about sex, and Blaise thought too much about Astoria, and Pansy wasn’t interested in any potions unless perhaps they invented one that would increase the total amount of stupid people for her to torment. But Theo understood. Potions came to life under his hands. Bubbles purred when they saw him. Stirring rods begged to be picked up by his hands.

            But not this time.

            Draco squinted thoughtfully at the potion and then twisted his head to the side. He laughed aloud when he saw the floating patch of dark purple there, and tapped the side of the bottle. The patch moved away from him, clumping together as if it was some kind of floating raft of fungus.

            “What are you on about?” Theo bent over from the other side, saw the patch, and let his mouth fall open. Pansy’s shadow crossed under the door again as if she had seen him do it, and Theo hastily shut his mouth and coughed. “I can’t believe I didn’t come up with the obvious explanation,” he muttered, and dived into a pile of scribbled notes, adding to them with a quill that shook in his excitement.

            Draco patted him on the shoulder. “There, there,” he said. “You needed someone around to add the necessary spice to your ideas. It happens to the best of us.”

            Theo didn’t bother glaring this time; he turned his back on Draco, which was sufficiently rude. Draco turned back and smiled at the potion, unable to let Theo’s antics upset him now that he understood the problem.

            The potion would slowly change from color to color, according to its description, and clump before it did so. Draco had thought the change would take a shorter time than it evidently had, and Theo had followed his lead without thinking about it from the commonsensical perspective of a Potions master, which meant never reacting fast or slowly, but as the situation demanded. The potion was congealing now.

            Changing.

            Draco leaned back on an imaginary wall and smirked. It would still be a few days before they could use the potion on Sandborn, but he could imagine it working now, instead of admitting that he’d made a mistake.

            Will Potter notice, I wonder?

            He shook his head in amusement at himself, that it was Potter’s attention he thought of attracting. Well. So long as he did not forget what was pretense—his “hopeless” love affair with Potter—and what was real—his admiration of Potter’s skills and his courage in holding up under Sandborn’s domination for so long—it didn’t matter.

*

            “Ginny? Are you all right?”

            Ginny coughed and picked herself up. She reckoned that walking into a wall because you were preoccupied with the story on the newspaper’s front page would make enough of an impression to catch even Luna’s attention.

            “Fine,” she called, and stepped around the corner from the drawing room into the kitchen. “The paper startled me, that’s all.”

            Luna looked up, dreamy-eyed, from where she was feeding a blue dove by hand. A ring of tiny winged unicorns flew around her head. Ginny privately thought they should have been golden, to represent the brilliance of her thoughts. “Startling,” she said. “We have no animal specifically devoted to startling someone.”

            “We don’t need one, either,” Ginny said firmly, before Luna could get any ideas. “Anyway. Look at the front page.” Luna’s reaction would confirm whether or not she was dreaming.

            Luna looked at the story, and then nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I expected it.”

            “You did?” Ginny knew that her lover had lots of insights that would never occur to anyone else, but she usually shared them with Ginny before they came out like this. “Harry was here last week, and I didn’t see anything—”

            “Oh, not with this specific person.” Luna reached down, picked up some coated seeds, and made low, cooing sounds at the dove. It pecked up more seeds and listened carefully to her. They were trying to decide which voice to give it. So far, Luna, unexpectedly conventional, favored the mourning dove’s call, but Ginny wanted to go with the nightingale’s song for variety. “But with someone. Those questions about honesty, the way Harry’s hands danced. They didn’t shout out to you that he was in love?”

            “With Callia, I thought,” Ginny muttered, and went back to looking at the photograph.

            The photograph on the front of the paper was taken at a Ministry gala, with bunting on the walls and well-dressed drunken people in the background. Then again, most of the pictures Ginny saw of Harry were taken at places like these, unless he was stepping out of a building covered in ashes and blood, an unconscious Dark wizard draped over his shoulder. That wasn’t the part that had surprised her.

            No, it was the part where Draco Malfoy leaned forwards, his soul in his eyes as he gazed soppily after Harry. And Harry, who had his arm around someone—probably Callia—who kept ducking beyond the border of the photograph, only stared away from Malfoy about a quarter of the time. The rest, he looked over his shoulder at him, his eyes sharp and speculative.

            The headline was POTTER-MALFOY LOVE AFFAIR!

            “More like potential love affair,” Ginny muttered. She was sure she would have heard of it if Harry had a reason to seriously fancy Malfoy.

            But she wondered if even Harry knew how much potential was in his eyes.

*

            Turn the lockpicks. Slowly. Slowly. Listen to the tumblers. Listen to the soft hiss of the wards, which she hadn’t been able to disarm and which would go off when the lock clicked open. She would have to move, fast, and her head spun and her heels sparked with the brilliance of it.

            The tumblers clicked.

            Two lines of yellow light sprang into being behind her and cut sharply inwards to the door.

            But Daphne was already gone, springing and spinning and somersaulting into the room, where she undid the lock with one hand and slammed the door with another. The wards found the door shut and the lock once more engaged, and didn’t bother checking to see if anyone else had entered. They settled down, and she heard the hiss of their disappearance a moment later.

            Daphne leaned back, grinning and panting, and looked around the Ministry’s Archives.

            She had never broken into them before. That was what had made her agree to accept the job from Draco. They were interesting, the things he asked her to steal.

            Of course, she would ensure that she had the Galleons in hand before she left the country. Friendship couldn’t be stolen, gratitude and debts were nice to have in one’s possession, but money made a sweet sound that Daphne had grown accustomed to hearing. And she had already stolen the contract for him, already done her part to get out of the debt that she owed Potter.

            She stood up, stretched, and began to move down the aisles. Polished wooden and stone shelves gleamed at her, filled with books and scrolls and ledgers and jars and wax tablets and clay tablets and etched pieces of marble. Some wizarding civilizations had had odd ideas about the best way to record their history and valuable truths. Daphne looked longingly at a strip of blue dragonhide with runes etched on it. She knew a collector who would have paid a full year’s worth of fine meals for that.

            But no, she had to focus. She turned forwards and saw the wide aisle that Draco had told her to expect, with the low bank of shelves in the middle of it. Here were kept the Death Eaters’ testimonies and other documents relating to the war. All of them, thank Merlin, were in simple scrolls that would be easy to carry.

            Daphne smiled when she saw the wards that glowed around their corners. These, she would have to disarm, but she knew how to do so. She used a silver needle to prick her finger and draw a drop of blood. Then she took out a vial from her pocket that had a single drop clinging, still liquid thanks to the spells in the vial, to the crystal facets. She opened the vial, placed her own drop inside, capped it again, and shook them long enough for the properties of the separate drops to thoroughly mingle into one another. Then she knelt and poured them into midair, over the wards that gleamed above the scrolls.

            The wards flickered, guttered like candles that someone had snuffed, and then went out. Daphne rolled her eyes as she put the vial back in her pocket. Very romantic, of course, to use your hero’s blood to guard the records of the war he had helped to stop, and also very satisfactory, in the narrative sense, to decree that the wards could only be nullified by his blood mingling with an accused Death Eater’s.

            Not very practical, though, not when the hero was working with the accused Death Eaters.

            Daphne settled down to an enjoyable afternoon of gathering both the necessary record and the information she would read in the course of her search, information that would surely become important gossip later, once she reached the Continent.

*

            “Potter.”

            Sandborn’s voice had a world of meaning in it—cold meaning, and cold purpose. Harry rose to his feet from behind his desk and nodded to Ron. Ron looked worried. Of course he did, Harry thought somewhere in the depths of his first soul, trying to summon the compassion that rightfully belonged to the second. Sandborn sent his lackeys to fetch Harry, he didn’t come himself.

            “It will be fine,” Harry said, as if his wish could change the future.

            But Ron had had plenty of chances to believe in the past few years that it could. He settled down with a smile for Harry, and Harry returned it and faced Sandborn, trying not to let his heartbeat race out of control.

            Why? What did someone with his first soul, the obedient servant of the Ministry, have to fear? Nothing, Harry reminded himself. Nothing at all. He inclined his head to Sandborn, inviting him to go in front.

            Sandborn went, but with a glance full of heavy meaning back at Harry. Harry chose not to understand it. He nodded one more time at Ron and then followed the Minister.

            They walked towards his office in the middle of freezing silence. Harry moved without consideration for the stares they attracted. They would always attract stares. The Ministry, which meant the public, would always gossip about the Minister and the star Auror being seen together. Accepting those stares and doing nothing to refute the gossip unless it was actively harmful was one of the prices that Harry had paid to Sandborn years ago.

            Sandborn turned around when they entered a small corridor, still far from his office. Harry stood and watched him, letting nothing show in his face, because there was nothing to show. His first soul wouldn’t find this strange, or feel a reason to show uneasiness. If he had such a reason, he would take care to make sure that Sandborn didn’t know about it.

            “No one can hear us here,” Sandborn said.

            Harry nodded. “Did you want to talk to me about Madam Rettern, sir?” Sandborn had accepted Harry’s explanation of Rettern’s refusal without surprise, and Harry had taken care to hint that he had seen no signs of Alex Spender’s work, but might need to return again to check. That provided both the opportunity to curb Rettern if he had to, and a chance to go back if she summoned him again.

            Don’t think about that now. It belongs to—

            Harry paused, confounded. His first soul was loyal to the Ministry. His second soul was for his friends, and he couldn’t count the Slytherins among his friends. Not yet. But his third soul was private. Where did his activities to free himself belong? To which part of himself?

            “What do you know about this?”

            Harry looked up, and felt a swift chill pass through him. Sandborn held a half-full bottle of purple potion.

*

            SP777: Thank you! And Harry's not going to stop the witty conversations any time soon; although it saddens him because he knows his own friendships aren't like that anymore, he does enjoy listening to them.
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