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Changing of the Guard	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 58627 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fourteen�Counterstrike

�� Harry spent
a few moments pacing his bedroom when he returned to Grimmauld Place. The rest
of the evening had been nothing very remarkable. Draco had introduced him to a
few more �friends��none, he had informed Harry in a whisper, as close to him as
Pansy�and they had shown varying mixtures of shock, resignation, disgust, and
despair. Their hostess, Helena Clothilde, had nodded on them frostily from a
distance, and after that everyone was a bit more polite.

�� And then
Draco had led him out into the great entrance hall of Clothilde Castle before
he would let Harry depart, and kissed him sweetly, slowly, his hands working
into Harry�s hair and his thumbs rubbing the back of his neck. His face when he
leaned away from Harry was more open than it had been since they�d started this
pretense.

�� I�ll see
you later,� he said softly.

�� And Harry
had nodded and somehow managed to Apparate home without Splinching himself�how,
he didn�t know, when his mind was so full of Draco.

�� Draco. Damn it. The problems began the
moment you started thinking of him as a person instead of just a client.
Sympathy with the clients� problems is fine. Being happy that you can help them
is fine. Caring about their lives as if they were going to be part of your life forever is not, and you know it.

�� Harry
growled under his breath. He knew it, yes, but it didn�t seem to be something
he could help in the case of Draco. His feelings were braided with the other
man�s. When Draco smiled, Harry felt the echo of the expression like a warm
throb just below his sternum. When Draco seemed genuinely distressed by some of
the things said at the parties (it showed in the way he drew in his breath
sharply before he answered), Harry had to stifle the impulse to drawl back at
the offender in Brian�s voice. After all, Brian had no social reputation to maintain.

�� And Harry
could accept, now, that it was too late for him to leave without hurting Draco.

�� But there is still lesser pain as opposed to
greater.

�� Pansy had
known Draco a long time. Draco had trusted Harry enough to leave �Brian� alone
with her instead of insisting on being present every moment. She probably knew
facets of his character Harry couldn�t begin to imagine. He was the one who had intruded into Draco�s life, whilst
she had always been there.

�� Harry knew
that this problem was his own fault. He shouldn�t have trusted to Draco�s
emotional control so much. He should never have had sex with him. He shouldn�t
have assumed that Draco could encounter a man who really was perfect for him�apparently�and
not want something more.

�� As it was
Harry�s problem, it was up to him to fix the
problem, to look out for the future that Draco seemed to be neglecting at the
moment for the purpose of having fun with Brian. He could not do everything�that
was why he would need Pansy and Narcissa�s help, and he had already sent an owl
off to Narcissa, playing on the story of the lies he�d told her and bewailing the
fact that he didn�t have the strength to extricate himself when he knew it would be the best thing for
Draco�but he made a set of resolutions then and there:

�� No more
sex. It just distracted them both and made everything more muddled.

�� Display a
few of Brian�s faults�the way he
flashed forth his quick temper without completely understanding a situation,
for instance. Show Draco that Brian wasn�t the perfect man he�d thought he was,
and he might have to give up too much to be with him, even if he still wanted
to.

�� Manipulate
Draco in some obvious and clumsy ways he could easily discover. That would lead
to greater distrust on Draco�s part and more cautious evaluation of Brian�s
potential as a long-term partner.

�� Harry could
not be emotionally closed to Draco,
not any longer, not after what they�d shared. But he was still lying. His ideal
of completing every job perfectly was already tarnished. He would walk the thin
line between what his principles would permit him to do and what they wouldn�t,
and do everything permissible.

�� He realized
he had come to a halt in front of his mirror and was staring into it, as though
the face with the scar on its forehead and the green eyes could tell him
something Brian�s could not. Harry glared impatiently at himself.

�� You�re the one who caused trouble,� he
told the Harry Potter who still lived inside him, thin and tattered as a
rotting curtain. �You were the one
who let your libido get the better of your wariness, and if you didn�t have
this ridiculous Gryffindor sense of fair play, things wouldn�t be so hard.�

�� The face in
the mirror said nothing back. Harry intensified his glare, then realized how silly
he was being and whirled away, clattering down the stairs to talk to Kreacher
about meals for the next day.

�� No matter
how hard he tried to kill himself, his own preoccupations and limitations, when
he vanished into a new personality, some of them insisted on clinging to life
anyway. It was very frustrating.

*

�� Draco
leafed slowly through the Ministry records, shaking his head with each page he
turned. No Brian Montgomery had applied for an International Floo passport in
the last thirty years, either, or given evidence of his having achieved wizarding
education comparable to the level of British NEWTs in another country, or acted
in any wizarding theater.

�� You knew he was a liar, Draco thought,
leaning back in the chair. He probably
didn�t expect you to look into his background because this was just a job, and
so long as he did his job perfectly, why would you care who he really was?

�� He had
cared, at first, because Brian might be spying on him or manipulating him for
some larger purpose. And now, when his feelings had changed completely, the
lack of evidence was still vexing.

�� Draco
reached across the table and tapped another stack of parchment with his thumb.
The Argus Association, a company specializing in keeping an eye on every single
prominent family line in Britain, had been happy to send him information on the
Handler family for a modest fee. The Handlers were pure-bloods and had nothing
to hide. And none of the family had had, in the last eighty years, a daughter
named Emma.

�� There could
be explanations. But Draco was beginning to think that most of them were not
very comprehensive ones.

�� And then
there had been the familiarity of
Brian�s magic last night, the way it had sparked and connected them. Draco was
certain he had never made love with this man before under a different name, but
he might have met him. And yet, at the same time, wouldn�t he have remembered meeting him? That kind of
magic could not easily be hidden.

�� Questions, and more questions, and they only
open into more questions yet, without answers, as if I were a rat running in a
maze.

�� Draco rose
restlessly to his feet. He still had some hours remaining before he would go to
Haut Alley with Brian. At the moment, he thought he needed to do something else than sit brooding on paperwork,
which meant swinging past Malfoy�s Machineries was out. Perhaps he would go
play Quidditch in the garden, or swim in the large pool that magic kept heated
and free of ice year-round. The house-elves had supposedly managed a new piece
of spellwork to counter the intense cold of the water that always assaulted
Draco when he first jumped in, no matter how warm it was.

�� He paused with
one foot on the stairs, his eyes narrowed. There was a stranger in the house;
he could hear a voice flowing out from the direction of his father�s study that
definitely should not be there.

�� Now Draco had
a problem. He could hardly approach Lucius�s study without alerting his father
that something was wrong. Indeed, Lucius had probably not put up a privacy spell
in the first place only because Narcissa was out and Draco had assured him he�d
be up in his own study all morning. The moment Lucius heard footsteps, that would
change.

�� And Lucius
was also very successful at detecting eavesdropping spells, a trick he�d taught
Draco.

�� Draco sat
down where he was on the steps and silently drew his wand. Rather than casting
a spell to bring the sound of the voices closer to him, the usual means of
overhearing a conversation, he sharpened his own hearing. He winced when he
could hear a spider climbing on the walls somewhere above him and the muffled
squeaks of house-elves preparing lunch in the kitchens, but that was just the
price he would have to pay for listening to his father and the stranger. Lucius
probably wouldn�t take this tactic into consideration; he was politely but implacably
against everything that caused him inconvenience, and assumed Draco was the
same way.

�� Assuming I�m your mirror image has caused
you quite a few problems, Father, and yet admitting you�ve been wrong would
cause you more, Draco thought, and leaned an elbow on the banister as he
listened.

�� rather an
extraordinary request, Lucius,� the stranger was saying. Even listening hard,
Draco didn�t manage to identify him. �After all, you know that social pressure
accomplishes most of what you want to do.�

�� Social
pressure is no longer enough,� Lucius said tightly, �not if my son feels free
to flaunt his disgusting behavior in the face of his marriage prospects.�

�� Draco�s
fingers tightened around the railing of the spiral staircase.

�� Well, that�s
true enough,� said the stranger in a conciliating fashion. People often sounded
like that when Lucius had offered them money. �And looking through the books is
not such a hard task. What�s the name you want for this organization?�

�� Counterstrike.�
His father sounded as if he were relishing the word. Draco wondered sourly if
it had taken him all night to come up with it. He tightened his fingers on the
railing again and stared unseeingly at the brilliant sunlight cascading through
the enchanted windows in the entrance hall.

�� I like it,�
said the stranger, sounding pleased. �Neutral. Almost�.polite.�

�� It will be
the most polite organization you can imagine, to counteract my son�s rudeness,�
Lucius said. �Excuse me a moment.� And he must have realized he�d better not
chance Draco coming down the stairs, and cast a privacy ward after all, because
no matter how hard he listened after that, Draco couldn�t hear anything new.

�� He stood
slowly, ending the spell that had sharpened his hearing, and exhaled several
times. He had to consider what he�d heard in a rational frame of mind, in order
to tease out all the possible nuances from it.

�� Lucius was
forming an organization to counter Draco�s rudeness. And given the stranger�s
comment about social pressure, it was probably specifically to act against
homosexuality. The reference to the books could only mean that the organization
would busy itself with looking up all the laws about public homosexuality that the
Ministry didn�t enforce any more, having trusted to the small size of the
wizarding community and its concern with prestige to keep people from doing
such disturbing things.

�� Lucius was
fighting back, but not directly, the way Draco had assumed he would�offering bribes
and threats and even curses if Draco didn�t act like the proper heir he had
brought him up to be. His father had evidently decided that such personal
opposition was unwise, given how much he had to lose by it. Instead, he would
work behind the scenes, as he had done during the years after the Dark Lord was
first banished.

�� Cleverer than I thought, Father. But I am
more clever still.

�� Draco stood
and headed back to his study at a brisk pace. It seemed he�d be spending the
afternoon with Brian after all, but not at lunch.

*

�� Harry
sighed in relief as a small tawny owl landed on his windowsill and held out a
letter to him. Though a letter sent to one of his personae had never yet failed
to find its way to him, thanks to certain modifications he added to his wards
when he took up a new Metamorphosis case, there was always a first time.

�� Pansy wrote
a neat hand, with slightly slanting letters that Harry imagined must have given
the teachers at Hogwarts considerable relief after essays full of
chickenscratch.

�� Mr. Montgomery:

�� I have come to the conclusion that the best
way to secure Draco�s status is for you to stop impressing him. This may sound
easier said than done, but in reality, Draco will be free to think only two
things about such an occurrence: that you really do not know as much about how
to suit him as you pretend and that your victories so far have been based on
luck, or that you are deliberately playing him for a fool. He will become contemptuous
in the first case, angry in the second. I advise you to have spells on hand
ready to deceive or distract him. At worst, you will need to secure your escape
from a very angry Malfoy.

�� Harry
snorted a little. Losing a physical contest with Draco was the outcome he
worried about the least. Draco simply did not have the power to trap and hold
Harry in any place where he didn�t agree to stay.

�� You will, of course, want to know why I
think these courses of action will be efficacious. I have seen Draco in
relationships before�including, briefly and disastrously, one with me�and I
know how his mind works. He is not usually so incredibly relaxed as he was with
you last night, but he does pass through an initial period of suspicion, during
which he believes the relationship must end at any moment, followed by a smug
period in which he wants everyone to see and acknowledge what a prize he has
won (and realize they cannot have it for themselves whatever the cost). This is
the stage he seems to have reached with you, but in a way I have never seen
before, because he is so insistent on showing you about.

�� Harry
snorted again. The stages Pansy described were visible in Draco, but she had
assumed they�d extended over a much longer time than Draco and �Brian� had
actually been dating.

�� But it is in Draco to hate being played for
a fool, and he never forgives someone who has become intimate with him and then
turns out not to be as he imagined. (In this he is more like his father than he
knows).

�� Harry
winced. Then he shook his head. Why should the thought of not being forgiven by
Draco hurt so much? Of course he was
going to get hurt. His own feelings weren�t important. What was most important
was Draco�s freedom and lesser hurt; Harry had to inflict a wound on him that
he could grow past and get over.

�� My own sin was minor: I happened to be
honest to him on an issue it would have been better to shut my mouth and look
wise about. He flew into a temper tantrum. He had conceived me to be perfectly
obedient to his will, and that the only thoughts in my head were thoughts he
had put there. What irritated him was not my contradiction of his opinion; by then he had learned that the world
would often contradict him. But he had not predicted my contradiction. He had
thought he knew me in every way. He will think he knows you by now. Simply show
him that he does not, that some of you was a lie or that all of you was, and the
shock of it will separate him effectively from you.

�� Harry let
his eyes fall half-shut and chuckled a little, though not without pain. It
sounded as though the most effective method to make Draco forget about him
would be simply to tell him that he was Harry Potter.

�� But that would
lead to the unraveling of the whole secret of Metamorphosis, and Harry could
hardly have that. He was not about to sacrifice his entire life for a few days
of pleasure.

�� And, yes, all right, exceedingly deep
emotional connection. But I went into this knowing it would be a bit of fun at
most. I have only myself to blame that I wanted it to be more than that.

�� He opened
his eyes and read Pansy�s last paragraph.

�� I do not trust you, and thus I will be
taking some precautions of my own to ensure that Draco is not too badly hurt by
this. If you attack him physically or probe with magic into his mind, be
assured I will hunt you down.

�� Pansy Parkinson.

�� Harry
relaxed a little. He did not intend to attack Draco physically or probe his
mind. And if Pansy was the kind to act on suspicions instead of reality, Harry
was still confident he could protect himself.

�� He reached for
a quill and sat a moment, smiling as he remembered the handwriting he had
chosen to adopt for Brian. Yes, the pretense was dissolving, and this would be
a mask he couldn�t wear again, but it still could give a few fine performances
before it was hung back on the wall.

�� He bent
over the parchment and began to write, thanking Pansy for her advice and
telling her it agreed with the conclusions he himself had come to.

�� That�s Brian. He knows he was hired out of Metamorphosis
and that nothing can be permanent. Pansy lacks the first piece of knowledge,
and Draco the second. I am ahead of both of them in the never-ending game.

�� If he
thought of it as a game, he knew it would hurt less. It always had.

*

�� Draco sat
back and considered the letter for a moment, then nodded. It laid out what he
had overheard from Lucius�s conversation with the stranger in neat, simple
terms, and gave evidence and support to his speculations. It told Brian that
they would need to get together as soon as possible and plan on how to
challenge Lucius.

�� Or Counterstrike, rather, since he has
chosen to let others do his dirty work for him.

�� Brian would
probably write back without the slightest idea that something was wrong. But Draco
intended the letter to accomplish more than that. He sealed it in an envelope and
called for a house-elf.

�� One
appeared in a moment, bowing low�Rini, who usually tended the gardens. Draco
raised an eyebrow. The elf squeaked, pulled its ears, and said something shrill
and incomprehensible about most of the other elves being involved in preparing
Master Lucius�s lunch right now.

�� Well, a
garden elf was better than none. And the task Draco wanted to request of this
one was not a usual job for any elf in his service. He leaned confidingly
forwards, and the elf�s eyes followed his hands and body intently.

�� I need
this letter delivered, Rini,� he said. �But I need you to give it to an owl you
can track.�

�� Rini stared
at him with big eyes, then blinked twice. �I
is tracking?� he asked.

�� Draco
nodded. �I need to know where the person this is addressed to lives, but I
think he�d have set up wards against the normal methods of tracking owls. So I
need you to follow the bird and keep him from knowing of your presence.� He lowered
his voice mysteriously. �Do you think you can do this properly, Rini? It�s very important.�

�� Rini sucked
in his breath.

�� Important
to the future of the family,� Draco added, which could be true for all he knew.
�And important to my future, too.� That was certain. Draco wanted Brian, but he
needed to know who Brian was in order to have him. The other man remaining in a
position of power over him�even though that position at the moment seemed to
consist mainly of knowledge Draco didn�t have�was not acceptable.

�� Rini puffed
out his chest with the breath he drew. �Rini can do it!� he proclaimed. �Rini
is following small insects in the garden from flower to flower, to find their
eggs and destroy them! Owls is much bigger. I can track them.�

�� Draco
smiled. �Good. Remember, secrecy is essential. You can�t let him sense you, no
matter what happens. If you think he�s going to sense you, then retreat from
the house the owl enters, even if you haven�t seen his face. Then come back and
give me a full report. If you can see
without being seen, remain hidden and spy him out, then come back and show me
that face in an image. Can you do this?� House-elf magic was fully capable of
all the things he was asking, Draco knew. It was a matter of making sure Rini
understood his instructions, so he didn�t come back with some awfully sincere
but half-baked result.

�� Rini bobbed
his head furiously. �Track the owl!� he squeaked. �Remain hidden! Retreat if he
might notice Rini and report to Master Draco! Come back if I sees him and
report to Master Draco with his face!�

�� Good.�
Draco held out the letter, and Rini snatched it and bolted from the room. Draco
leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. In a way, it felt
dishonorable, this spying on Brian�not at all the sort of thing Draco had
expected to have to do to someone with whom he had shared that emotional connection
last night.

�� But he was
not seeing the whole Brian, that was certain. And he wanted to. Even if the
truth infuriated him, Draco needed it. Because this was about more than defying
his father, now, and Draco had never been one to play games with his personal
future, however careless he might look from the outside. Pansy had been foolish
enough, at one point, to think he�d dumped her because he was enraged. But
Draco had done it because he knew she was not what he wanted, what he needed, to make his way in the world.

�� And Brian is? the skeptical part of his
brain asked.

�� Draco
laughed to himself. �He is certainly closer to it,� he said aloud, and then
stood up and strode towards the Malfoy legal library. He would make himself
familiar with all the laws against homosexuality that Counterstrike might dig
up and decide to use.

*

�� Master
Draco!�

�� Draco
jumped. He had been so deep into one of the legal books he�d discovered,
conducting a running disagreement in his mind, that he hadn�t noticed Rini�s
return. He sat up now and stared at the house-elf. Rini was practically bouncing
on his toes, which Draco thought was good odds he had succeeded in his mission.

�� Did you
find him, Rini?� he asked, forcing himself to relax again. Human excitement
tended to further excite house-elves, until they simply ran around in circles
and squeaked and relayed nothing coherent at all.

�� Yes, yes,
Rini did!� Rini puffed out his chest again. �Rini was smart! There was a hole for a house-elf in his wards, and Rini
waited until his house-elf went out, and then Rini sneaked into the hole and
persuaded the house to accept him!� He nodded importantly. �Is elf magic. Very
strong. No wizard guards against it.�

�� Draco felt
his eyebrows rise. Brian was living in Muggle London, and he had a house-elf? �And
what did you find?� he asked, his voice eager despite himself. �What does his
face look like?� He had to remind himself that Brian could be using his true appearance, and the image of his face would
tell Draco nothing. But if it was different in even a few particulars, Draco
might at least be able to discover who he was related to.

�� Rini waved
a hand in front of him, and an image appeared, hovering in the air a few inches
from Draco as if drawn on a piece of parchment.

�� It was
Harry Potter�s face.

�� Draco�s
fingers, clenching into a fist, ripped a page from the book he held.

*

�� Snappy pants:
Thanks! As you can see, Harry recognizes his own loss of emotional control
around Draco as an enormous problem.

�� Avihenda,
Noisette, Tepee712, Lola, Graballz: Thanks for reviewing!

�� SoftObsidian74:
Harry doesn�t think his own feelings matter all that much. So he shuts down,
draws away, when there�s a chance that he might be hurt�but at the moment, he
genuinely is more concerned about Draco�s feelings.

�� And no, he
has not tried living with himself that long. The moment one case ends, he takes
another. If he�s not one of the created personae, he�s practicing being one, or
he�s with his friends, not by himself.

�� Lunatic
with a hero complex: Harry has committed himself to ending the affair with
Draco, but he has no idea how fast events are moving.

�� Qwerty:
Just because Pansy has a Muggle lover does not mean she�s intent on challenging
the pure-blood culture the way Draco is doing. She�s more concerned about how
she can balance social acceptance and her private life.

�� Mangacat:
As you can see here, Harry does not control everything. As for who he is, he
believes he made the mess= he has to fix it.

�� Yume111:
Harry doesn�t think he�s falling in love. He thinks he was stupid, and
stupidity cannot create love. He has many of the same views on the human heart
that Narcissa does.

�� And he
knows Draco will be hurt; he just thinks there�s less pain for Draco his way.

�� He trusts
the way Draco relaxed around Pansy�particularly the way he left �Brian� and
Pansy alone for a few moments.

�� Yes, I
think the pure-blood society in this story is very, very uptight about sexual
expression. Sex is bound up with inheritance and economics and reproduction,
not expression and pleasure.

�� Hi-chan: I
don�t think Draco�s acting completely different. The newness of what happened
last night did take him by surprise; he�s more clear-headed in the morning.
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Changing of the Guard