Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Leopardspaw	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21311 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Thirteen—For the Best

            “You could have warned me before you did that.”

            Harry concealed a smile as he lifted the cup to his lips. They had gone back to his home, after extracting themselves from the startled Aurors on the island with apologies and promises to tell them what the note said as soon as Harry had “deciphered” it. Pretending that it was written in code was unsporting, perhaps, but Harry couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed a pretense so much. “Yes, I could have,” he agreed. “But your reaction wouldn’t have been as natural as it was.”

            Malfoy snorted and wrapped his hands around his own cup. He had turned his head away from the tea Harry was making when he saw what kind it was, but then turned it back as soon as the smells had started filling the kitchen. “Was it wise, to reveal me that way, or any kind of way at all? They’re going to think that there’s something suspicious about me now, that I’m somehow connected to the investigation.”

            Harry shook his head and took a biscuit from the pile in the center of the table on a small, elegant plate. Unlike the tea, Malfoy had shown no sign of yielding where his biscuits were concerned, yet. But Harry lived in hope. “They’re going to think that anyway. They probably haven’t come to interview you already because they didn’t want you to know about Lucius’s escape if you didn’t. Now they’ll think that someone’s trying to get you imprisoned, and they’re more likely to treat you as innocent.”

            Malfoy gave him a stare so dead that Harry grew concerned and waved his hand up and down in front of the git’s eyes. Malfoy blinked and looked away. “Should I be concerned that you’re so good at reading the minds of people you hate?” he asked.

            “You mean the Ministry?” Harry stared at him. “I don’t hate them. I destroy people I hate, like Voldemort. I just despise the Ministry and the credulous idiots that don’t see what’s right in front of them.”

            Malfoy rubbed his eyes, hard. “You would destroy them,” he said.

            “If I felt they had done something that made me hate them, yes,” Harry said. He saw the way Malfoy looked at him this time, and smiled and patted his hand. “But you don’t need to worry about that. I like you.”

            Malfoy just went on staring. Harry leaned back and kicked his legs out in front of him. “Everyone thinks I’m dangerous,” he complained. “When they’re not staring at me in awe and studying my every move so that they can learn how to be real Aurors, I mean. They tell me that they love me, they tell me that they admire me, and then they think that I’d become another Dark Lord, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

            “Sometimes I think you might be capable of it,” Malfoy whispered.

            Harry sighed and shook his head. “You don’t understand, do you? I would only become a Dark Lord if I had an excellent reason, just like I would only destroy someone or something with an excellent reason.”

            “But your excellent reasons might not be the same as other people’s.” Malfoy’s hands were getting tighter and tighter around his teacup.

            “That’s true,” Harry said, and thought about it, and ended up stretching his limbs over his head to get rid of some of the kinks in his back that bending over in the cell in Azkaban had brought into it. “But they never think the same thing as me anyway, no matter what happens, so I might as well have my fun.” He smiled at Malfoy. “Now, don’t you want to find out what that parchment from your father’s cell says?”

*

            When they first unfolded it, Harry thought his lie to the Aurors might have been a truth, after all, and that it was a code. But then he made out the shapes of recognizable letters, and smiled in relief. Whoever had written it only had bad handwriting. Harry had seen worse on Auror reports.

            Malfoy squinted at it. “What does it say?”

            Stifling his tendency to crow about his superior ability to read bad handwriting, Harry bent gravely over the letter. He didn’t really think that being able to read it right away was such an important skill. He just liked it that Malfoy was dependent on him for something sometimes, so the chances that he would dash out of Harry’s life the second he could were lessened.

            “It’s addressed to ‘my dear,’” Harry said. “And it says, As we discussed, I will come for you after the full of the moon. You may make what preparations you deem necessary. You will need to take very little with you. Every comfort will have been provided for, and your needs anticipated in advance.”

            Malfoy shuddered and closed his eyes. Harry reached out and grasped his shoulder. Sometimes, caught up in his own giddy delight at being around him, it was easy to forget that Malfoy’s father was the man who had been given this whether he wanted to have it or not, and that his soul might already have been devoured.

            “That’s all it says,” Harry finished quietly.

            Malfoy opened his eyes. “I know spells that can trace handwriting,” he said. “But it destroys the original. Are you amenable to having this destroyed, knowing you might never be able to produce it again?”

            Harry blinked at him. “Why not create a copy and work from the copy instead? Or won’t the charm work from anything that isn’t original?”

            Malfoy stared at him a moment, then lowered his eyes. “I never thought of working with a copy,” he said. “The original, most of the time, was one of those documents that I was glad to destroy, and which I was never going to forget, anyway.”

            Harry nodded his understanding, and laid his hand on Malfoy’s arm for a moment. “It’s up to you. I don’t intend to have to produce anything. If it would work better with the original, we can do that, but let’s try the copy first.”

            Malfoy nodded, subdued, and Harry punched him lightly on the shoulder before casting the charm that would make the copy. He liked Malfoy better when he was looking down his nose at Harry for ruining his criminal life than when he was moping.

            He’s meant to be proud, to be free. I wouldn’t want to destroy that simply because I might want to prove myself right.

            The copy appeared on schedule, on the parchment that Harry had designated for it, and he set it aside and waited for Malfoy to perform his magic. It would be almost the first spell he had cast except the glamours on Harry and whatever had let him bypass the wards into Immortal’s interrogation room.

            Speaking of which…

            “How did you get into the room where I was interrogating Immortal?” he asked.

Malfoy glanced at him. “This is a very delicate spell, and you shouldn’t interrupt it,” he said.

No red glow of a lie, so it was no use challenging what he said, even though Harry knew that meant he was among the one percent of people who had learned to dodge his curse by using one truth to mask another. He leaned back and studied Malfoy thoughtfully as he chanted the spell in a low voice, gesturing hard with his wand to make sparks leap out and cascade down on the copy.

            He was powerful, sophisticated, skilled, and known, if the reactions from Flint and his cronies, and the fact that he had a standing invitation to Corinna’s creepy house, were any indication. Harry wondered why he hadn’t done something more with it. He had said that he could give up the illegal side of his trade and continue practicing the legitimate business of Potions without regret. What had made him get into the illegal one in the first place? More money?

            I don’t want to think that he would do anything as vulgar as lust after money.

            Harry considered the phrasing of that for a moment, and then changed it in his head. No, what he didn’t want to think was that Malfoy would do anything for paltry amounts of money. If he committed crimes for fortunes and treasures, that was another thing, a sin Harry was quite prepared to forgive.

            “Anyone would find this spell hard to use when you’re staring at them that way,” Malfoy said over his shoulder. “It’s off-putting.”

            Harry stepped back at once, and fixed his eyes on the bookshelves.

            “And that’s not much better,” Malfoy complained in an undertone. “You’re concentrating so intensely that I can still feel the stare.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and turned his back, walking across the room to pick up a book that he had started several times, and abandoned in a fit of frustration each time he reached the scene where the hero killed someone and told himself he was justified because of his tormented past. Harry couldn’t figure out if the author agreed or disagreed with the hero.

            He tried again to find out, not listening to Malfoy’s quiet chanting, insofar as that was possible when they were in the same room together.

            No, he still couldn’t find out. The author condemned the man in a few sweeping omniscient paragraphs, and then let him speak, and he excused himself again. And that was the end of the chapter. Harry rolled his eyes and put the book back on the shelf. At least do something evil for a good reason, and be able to admit the reason to yourself. He had no patience with people who argued back and forth in their heads, which it sounded like the author was doing.

            “It’s done.”

            Harry blinked and turned around. He supposed he’d been successful at ignoring the chanting after all, since he hadn’t noticed when it stopped. “Really?” He strolled towards Malfoy, and ignored the eyes which turned on him. They looked smoke-stung, which was interesting, but not particularly relevant right now.

            “Yes, Potter, really,” Malfoy said, and pointed to the small pile of ashes that had been the copy of the letter. Harry cast a spell that whirled them up and put them in a small wooden box on the top bookshelf that he had never found anything to put in. Malfoy just looked at him, then closed his eyes and shook his head. “The handwriting—it doesn’t make sense. But there’s the answer, if you want to look at it.”

            Harry looked around, wondering where. He had assumed Malfoy would have to have yet a third piece of parchment to put the answer on, but there was none—

            Oh. Of course. He had made it appear on the same parchment as the original, like a signature. Harry picked it up and smiled at Malfoy. “Waste not, want not.”

            “You are the strangest person I’ve ever known, Potter,” Malfoy said, sounding almost resigned to the fact. “Except perhaps the person who wrote that letter.” He turned away with another shake of his head.

            Harry looked at the signature, the name that Malfoy’s spell had discovered and pinned to the handwriting of the letter.

            Kingsley Shacklebolt.

*

            “Are you done brooding yet?”

            Harry turned around. It was true that he had spent quite some time staring at the wall and muttering curses to try and make Malfoy’s spell come out a different way, but that wasn’t the same as brooding, and he thought Malfoy should know it.

            The sight of Malfoy’s face stopped him, though. His eyes still looked as though he’d been exposed to smoke, and his hands shook more than a little on the cup of hot tea he was drinking. Harry nodded his thanks for the spell and his apology for being snappish, and then he said, “I just can’t believe it was Kingsley. I would have known if he was lying about Immortal, and we assumed that whoever took your father was working with Immortal.”

            “Well, perhaps they weren’t,” Malfoy said, folding his arms as if he was cold. “Or perhaps Shacklebolt took my father from the prison for a different reason and then he escaped, and then ran into the people who wanted to use his body to resurrect the Dark Lord.”

            Harry made a soft, unhappy sound, and shook his head. “That doesn’t make much sense, either,” he said, and ignored the way Malfoy flinched from his words. It didn’t make sense, and Malfoy would simply have to learn that he wasn’t above criticism, if he had thought he was. “It just—we assumed that the whole risky operation was to get your father out of prison so his soul could be eaten and his body used, and Peabody saying he acted strange would have been because of the letter he got. But then this. If Kingsley wrote this, he either has to be involved with Immortal’s people and somehow managing to lie to me, or this letter has nothing to do with the reason your father vanished.”

            “Which would mean we’re back to the beginning, with no evidence at all accumulated.”

            Malfoy looked so tense and miserable that Harry couldn’t help himself. He leaned in and put his arms gently around Malfoy. Malfoy started and glared at him, and Harry smiled in spite of himself.

            “Listen,” he said. “No, I mean it.” Malfoy had made a motion as if to shrug him off, but he paused and turned his head reluctantly towards Harry. “There’s one way that we could find out. I could take this letter in to Kingsley, confront him with it, and—”

            “Do that,” Malfoy said, with a snarl in the back of his voice, “and I think we have no chance to continue our investigation. Can even you come up with a lie that Shacklebolt can’t see through? I don’t think so. He has power in the Ministry, and your accident only gives you the power to see lies, not tell what the truth is if someone doesn’t say it.”

            Harry paused, then sighed. Perhaps he had become overconfident with the success of his plans in seducing Malfoy and getting into Azkaban and all the rest of it lately. “Right. You’re right. So we have to come up with something else.”

            He turned back to the parchment, contemplating it. He supposed that by itself it didn’t look particularly sinister, which was probably why the planners (Kingsley) had written it that way. If someone else found it, they wouldn’t think that Lucius had any reason to be nervous, and they wouldn’t step up their guard on him.

            He read it again, while Malfoy paced and muttered and shook his arms and glared at nothing beside him. My dear, As we discussed, I will come for you after the full of the moon. You may make what preparations you deem necessary. You will need to take very little with you. Every comfort will have been provided for, and your needs anticipated in advance.

            “That doesn’t sound like a threatening letter,” Harry said aloud.

            “What do you mean?” Malfoy turned to him with a frown. Harry suspected that he had been contemplating what the Minister, who had the most power in the Ministry, could potentially do to his father, and scaring himself out of his head with it.

            “It doesn’t sound like something that someone would write who was planning to destroy your father’s soul and didn’t care if he knew it.” Harry leaned back to view it from a distance, ignoring the disgusted look Malfoy tossed him. No, it wouldn’t look literally different from that angle, but doing this had shaken thoughts loose for him before. “It sounds like someone who’s anxious that Lucius should look at him favorably. Every comfort will have been provided for. As though he’s inviting your father to stay as a guest in his home for a little while.”

            Malfoy laughed bitterly. “Who knows what other letters he sent him, what other things he said to make him think that he needed to be on his guard? And someone who hates Death Eaters is capable of letters like that.” He shuddered, and Harry wondered what sorts of things he had seen in the past.

            He would have liked to find the people who had sent Malfoy threatening letters and blow them to pieces.

            But since that wasn’t on the agenda, he said instead, “I don’t doubt they are. But why would Kingsley write it like this? Why write it at all? Why choose the gentle tone? I don’t understand. Can the charm that you cast be fooled?”

            Malfoy smiled from one side of his mouth. “Only if someone is aware of the person who would cast it. The countercharm has to be tailored to any individual who might cast the spell. I suppose it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that your Shacklebolt might guess that I’m involved in the investigation on behalf of my father.”

            Harry nodded. “Fine. Then I’ll cast the same copying charm and you teach me the spell, and we’ll see if it comes out with a different result.”

            Malfoy looked at him, and there was something awful and moving in his face, something deep and vulnerable. Harry hated to see it, and was honored to see it. He reached out and punched Malfoy on the shoulder, to give him a chance to recover his scowl.

            “Come on. I’m curious, now, and I can’t wait to see what turns up if we do this.”

            Malfoy’s mouth twisted, and he began to teach Harry the spell with unnecessary emphasis. But Harry watched his mouth, and his eyes, and his hair, and enjoyed the lesson anyway.

*

            Seiren: Thank you! Harry in this story does use his fame, but he knows it won’t work if he uses it too often and he finds the operation of it distasteful, so he only does it now and then.

            unneeded: Harry is done raging against their stupidity. If he can change things around, then that’s all he’ll ask for.
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