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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 Thirteen—Vengeance

            Harry had done what he should have long ago and explained to his friends that Draco wasn’t going to be visiting again, that he wasn’t permitted through the wards, and that he wouldn’t be owling him. He had made a special firecall to George, because he knew that he might lend his owl to Draco again otherwise.

            Which meant it made next to no sense when Draco’s Howler, delivered by Perseus, woke Harry from a sound sleep at four the next morning.

            “You ARESHOLE.”

            Harry shook his head and carefully pried himself away from the corner that he’d automatically leaped into when he woke up. No, he was all right, and no one was trying to sneak up on him. It was just the Howler, hovering in front of the bed and pivoting to face him as he moved—if a smoking red envelope could be said to have a face. Harry lowered his clenched fists and glared at the thing. It hung there in the air for a moment before it said more, and Harry got the distinct impression of an air of smugness.

            “Now that that’s out of the way,” the Howler said, in the neutral and faux-pleasant tone that Harry had heard Draco use before this only for making comments designed to get him to reveal his secrets. “I find it tiresome when someone else waits to announce his point, don’t you? Well, this point is clear and bright and on topic. You’re an arsehole, yes, but you’re more than that. You’re the enemy who stole the memory of his deeds from my mind and then greeted me as a friend. You’re the man who fucked me without letting me know that you were someone I hated.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and folded his arms. “And who was the bastard who didn’t take no for an answer?” he muttered. “Oh, Harry, it will be fun. Oh, Harry, I could never let you go.”

            The Howler continued, and Harry wondered if it was a coincidence that the length of its pause had been the length of Harry’s words, or if Draco knew him scarily well. Or even had a spell on the letter that would transmit Harry’s words to him. Harry wouldn’t put it past him, although he’d never heard of anyone else enchanting a Howler like that. “I told you secrets, right from the beginning. True, I never meant to reveal that I was an Unspeakable, but you figured it out and I didn’t take the memory from you. Or the memory of where I was hiding in the safehouse, or the memory of the mirror—which is a much more dangerous artifact than it appeared to be, by the way, I don’t want you making light of it.”

            “You crashed into my wards and involved me in your life unless I wanted to see you bleed to death on my threshold,” Harry reminded him. “And you were the one who sent me to retrieve the mirror. If it was so bloody dangerous, then you certainly didn’t exempt me from the danger.”

            “You can’t stand there and pretend that you didn’t know what you were doing,” the Howler snapped, shaking with the force of Draco’s agitation. “You can’t get away with this. You’re the Boy-Who-Lived. You can’t escape that. You can’t escape me.”

            Harry blinked. For a moment, he wondered if the words he had quoted a minute ago were true, and this was Draco’s way of hunting him down and keeping him close after all.

            Then he scowled. No. Of course not. Draco had his pride to avenge. He wasn’t about to let Harry off from paying for that insult, but it had nothing to do with wanting Harry there so he could get along with him and be with him. Or he wouldn’t have sent a Howler at four in the morning.

            “Tell me why you did it,” Draco said, and his voice had gone steady and quiet in a way that Harry had rarely heard from any Howler. Of course, he got the most of those from Ron complaining about the way Harry had “made” him stay with the Aurors after Harry quit, and Ron didn’t do steady and quiet much. “I want to hear from you in five minutes, or I’m sending another of these things. And more.”

            “Wanker,” Harry told Perseus as the letter blew itself apart. “Even if I wrote one in return, it couldn’t get to him in five minutes.”

            Unless he left his Floo connection open…

            Perseus abruptly fluttered into the air. Harry cast a gentle version of a Binding Charm that functioned as an invisible tether between him and the perch. Perseus gave a squeak as he was pulled back down, and stared at Harry with his break slightly open. Apparently Harry had bad manners.

            “Yes,” Harry muttered, unrepentant. “I do think that you would bring me another letter from him, and that you were probably getting ready to return to him, not George. That means you stay here until tomorrow. If he’s that impolite, he can wait on me. And what explanation does he think I’m going to give, anyway? I told him from the beginning that the spell wasn’t personal, that everyone suffered from it.”

            Perseus began to hoot in distress. Harry cast a Silencing Charm around the perch, scribbled a note to George that he Apparated to the shop to slide under the door—because, unlike some people, he wouldn’t wake his friends in the middle of the night for anything under an emergency—and then went back to sleep.

            Perseus was still hammering angrily with his beak on invisible air when Harry’s eyes slid shut.

*

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate.”

            For a moment, Harry considered the idea that George’s solemn expression hid no more than the truth. After all, if Draco had made friends with Perseus somehow, then he could have tempted the little owl to come to him with treats, and George might not have known anything about Draco using him to deliver the Howler.

            But they’d been friends too long, and Harry saw George’s guilty eye-twitch.

            “Yes, you do,” he said wearily. “You lent Draco your owl to bring his stupid fucking message. Look, can that just not happen again? I know that he can be convincing—” even without his tongue up your arse, he started to say, but his friends already knew more about his recent mistakes than he was comfortable with “—but it’s over, and I’m not going to talk to someone who tried to turn me to stone.”

            “I think you need someone,” George said evenly.

            “Someone who wants me to be a statue in his house for the rest of his life,” Harry said, and turned his head almost upside-down. “No, I’m still not seeing your point-of-view.”

            George sighed hard enough to make angels weep—sometimes Harry had an unexpected surge of sympathy for Mrs. Weasley—and leaned forwards on his side of the hearth. “Look. I know that you spend a lot of time with me and Ron and Hermione, but you’ve isolated yourself too much since you cast that spell.”

            Harry rolled his eyes hard enough that he winced a moment later. “As if I wasn’t isolated before that? People only thought they knew me. It wasn’t like I had a crowd of friends that I gave up on to have my privacy instead.”

            George showed him the kind of teeth-grinding grin he’d used to get through Fred’s funeral. “And Malfoy must know you pretty well, if he broke through the spell after being with you such a short time.”

            Harry shuddered. That was the part he was trying not to think about, just like he’d tried to avoid thinking about the pauses the Howler left in its scolding of him last night. For Draco Malfoy to have stepped inside the inner circle that Harry had intended to keep closed except for his friends from now on…

            “He did that because he was persistent, and because I was an idiot and slept with him,” Harry said, with a tooth-grinding grin of his own. “Look, George, it just isn’t that important. Can we please keep to what’s important? Namely, in this case, that he might tell everyone where I am, and that you keep lending him your owl.”

            “Perseus isn’t going to want to come near you for a while after this,” George said. “But you have to communicate with him somehow, Harry. Your face when you told me…you have to. I haven’t seen you look like that in, well, ever.”

            Harry sighed and ran a hand down the side of his face. “And if I hadn’t been mortal fucking enemies with him before this happened, we might have a chance. But when his first reaction was to try to light me on fire, well, that says a lot about the true state of things between us, don’t you agree?”

            George scoffed.

            “Come on,” Harry said. “I’d like for things to work out with him, but I also don’t want to be jerked around by someone who likes his pride more than me.”

            “You’ve hardly given him a chance to feel otherwise, since he knew who you really were,” George said smoothly. “And I think it’s a bloody unique chance, myself. Someone who’s never going to act like a crazed fan, someone who you don’t have to feel guilty about sleeping with because he’s not under that bloody spell, someone you already like. Where else are you going to find all those traits at once?”

            “I think I can find them in someone who’s not also trying to kill me,” Harry said. “Or cage me, or keep me locked up. Come on, George,” he added impatiently, when he saw George draw in his breath to say something else. “Are you honestly arguing for Malfoy as my best choice under those circumstances?”

            George sighed a little, and some of the fire seemed to drain out of him. “Not in those circumstances,” he admitted. “But if you wanted to pursue something with him, I don’t think you should let the past stop you.”

            “It’s not that so much as the present,” Harry said, and then sighed. “Although part of me does think that I’m insane for letting someone into my life in the first place who I knew was going to react badly to the spell, and someone I used to hate, I still like him. I still want him.”

            “So it really is the way he’s acting right now,” George said, studying him with his chin in one hand.

            Harry paused, then said, “George, you’d better not repeat this conversation to him.”

            “Did I say I was going to do that?” George clasped a hand to his chest and looked around in search of an invisible audience. “When did I say I was going to do that?”

            “I don’t want to block Perseus out of the wards,” Harry said, “but I will if I have to.”

            “But will you open your Floo to Malfoy or go to meet him any other way?” George asked.

            Harry glared. “No.”

            “Then how are you going to pursue him, the way you say you want to?” George held out his hands. “Letters are probably the safest way for you to communicate right now. A Howler might hurt your feelings, but it wouldn’t actually hurt you.”

            “Maybe,” Harry muttered, thinking of the way that the Howler had seemed to have weird enchantments on it, and the way that Draco was an Unspeakable. He glared again when George opened his mouth to speak. “Let me think about it, okay? I know that I like him, but not if he’s going to keep trying to kill me. I had enough of that with other people who were convinced that they were doing it for the best of reasons.”

            George winced, perhaps remembering some of the fans who had honestly tried to kill Harry, and thought they were doing it to spare him pain or something. “Right. Sorry, mate.”

            “It’s fine.” Harry sighed gustily and leaned back. “I really will think about it. But a Howler in the middle of the night isn’t the best way to get me to do that. If you do talk to Malfoy, you might tell him that.”

            George nodded again, and then vanished from the Floo. Harry sat brooding for a few minutes before he shook his head and stood. Brooding wouldn’t get the flowers tended to.

*

            “Potter.”

            Harry turned around slowly, his arms full of the shopping. A moment ago, he had been worried about whether the Freezing Charms on his ice cream would really last against the unexpectedly strong sun beating down from overhead. Now he had to worry about shattering everything so he could get his hands free and down to his wand.

            Already his instincts were sharpening, considering the people around him, the places, the way that things altered from moment to moment as people passed through Diagon Alley with their children, and the way he would have to take to dodge Malfoy’s curses and yet make sure that he didn’t hit anyone else.

            Draco took a step towards him. He’d been leaning against the front of Madam Malkin’s, as though he wanted to watch the passersby, but he moved with the eagerness of a hound now, and Harry could see his hand on the hawthorn wand.

            “Potter,” Draco repeated softly. Except for being deeper, he said it exactly the way he would have at Hogwarts.

            Harry tightened his arms and his defenses. He had been right to think of Draco as Malfoy at first, he thought. This man didn’t look as though he wanted to talk. “Malfoy,” he said, in the tone emptied of expression he’d perfected when the Daily Prophet wanted to interview him one too many times about someone proposing marriage to him.

            Then he waited. Draco had sought him out—and had George told him when Harry left? But no, it would be easier for him to have an alarm spell of some sort on the wards, and George hadn’t known Harry was going to Diagon Alley today—and so he would have to be the one to make the first move.

            A chilly smile touched Draco’s lips and he inclined his head. “As you will,” he said, although Harry wasn’t aware of choosing anything in particular. “You look as though you need help with the shopping. Shall I?”

            He didn’t move at all, and Harry realized that he was honestly trying to leave the choice up to him. That calmed Harry down a bit, and made him stop remembering all those times when he had to hold back to avoid hurting someone innocent but obsessed, and consider the situation that was in front of him.

            “I don’t want to invite you back to my house until I know that you won’t destroy it,” he said.

            “Why would I?” Draco was pale, although Harry didn’t remember seeing him turn that color. He just stood there, and his eyes were on Harry’s, and he looked as though Harry might blame him for a dozen things and not have any of them turn out to be the right one.

            “Because the things there matter to me,” Harry said. He was telling Draco nothing that he didn’t already know, so felt free to say it. “And I think you might destroy the things that matter to me out of revenge.”

            Draco paused, then shook his head. “Your house sheltered me,” he said. “Your gardens cheered me up. I wouldn’t hurt them. You, on the other hand…you did more than that to me.” His eyes were on Harry, hot as a predator’s.

            “Fine,” Harry said, and handed over the eggs and bread, so Draco had to juggle not to drop them. “So long as you understand that we’re going to meet somewhere near here, so we can discuss things. And if you threaten anyone else trying to get to me, that’s the end of it.”

            “Understood,” Draco said, his mouth surprisingly relaxing. He cast a Levitation Charm on the eggs and looked at the rest of the shopping in Harry’s hands in silent condemnation. “Given your background, I can understand why you would fear someone coming after you with a wand in public. How many times did it happen?”

            Harry swallowed as he thought of the three deaths he had witnessed from crazed fans starting after him and hitting someone else in the way. “Too many,” he whispered. Those people had gone to Azkaban, luckily, but for the murders, and the Ministry had continued to do nothing else about people hunting Harry, and the Daily Prophet had run stories that were sympathetic to them. There was a certain sense that the people deserved to have their hero, just not to kill others in pursuit of him.

            “Ah,” Draco said, and tried to take the rest of the shopping.

            Harry danced backwards. “I like carrying them,” he said, when Draco gestured with his wand at Harry’s wand. He left unspoken the thought that if he needed to bolt, at least he would have more of the food with him than he had given to Draco.

            From the way Draco looked at him, he understood that part of it, too, but chose not to contest it. “Where did you have in mind?”

            “Fortescue’s,” Harry said, and laughed despite himself at the look on Draco’s face. “You’re making me risk my ice cream melting, the least you can do is buy me more of it.”

            “Yes,” Draco said, and Harry caught a glimpse in his eyes of the pit of want and anger his words had fallen into, and found himself silent in the face of it. He was the one, in the end, to lead the way, and try to ignore the feeling of those burning eyes on his back.

*

            kit: Harry is not ever going to be comfortable around the violence or attempts to control him, mostly because those remind him so much of more of his stalkery fans.

            LeaniaSTL: Draco is reacting as he is mostly out of hurt pride, because Harry had that advantage over him and he didn’t have it in return. There’s no way in hell he’ll simply let Harry go. He has to repay the insult and figure out what else he wants.

            SP777: Yes. Although Harry is mature enough that he could have missed past it, if he absolutely had to, and if Draco had shown signs of telling the press, Harry would have Obliviated him.

            unneeded: Yes. Next chapter should be interesting!

            moodysavage: Thanks! Yes, I’m afraid this story does stay only in Harry’s POV, but you get to hear a lot of what Draco thinks in the next chapter.

            Aerie: Thank you! I’m glad that you’re enjoying it.

            polka dot: He would have regretted it more if Draco had immediately reported on him. But Draco does have some pride in possessing this secret all by himself.
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