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Parsimony	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14122 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Fourteen—Hunting the Hunters

            “Why did you bring him here.”

            Snape’s voice was too flat even to make it a question. And Harry ignored him anyway as he dumped Malfoy on the floor of the Shack, at the foot of the circle Snape had made, and rubbed his eyes. He had captured the broken pieces of the hawthorn wand and brought it along, and that had been all he could think to do through the first haze of rage.

            But he heard Snape’s voice, now, and Klein’s in the back of his head asking him if his first response when someone was hurt was always going to be to kill, and McGonagall’s telling him that he had to find out who had done this before he could do something about it. Or was that Hermione’s voice? They sounded an awful lot alike, sometimes.

            “Why did you—”

            “Because someone had dumped him right by the tree and this was the closest safe place,” Harry said, speaking over Snape. He would only say the same stupid thing as before, and Harry was tired of listening to him. “They might have meant the Willow to kill him, I don’t know. Or they might have seen me going here. It doesn’t matter, Snape. What matters is that he’s hurt and you have to help him.”

            For a moment, Snape closed his eyes and seemed to retreat inside himself. Harry tensed and shook himself down. No, he couldn’t go elsewhere for help, not right now. He could take Malfoy to Madam Pomfrey, sure, but it was pretty far and some of the wounds looked threatening. And what would happen if he did that and she asked him what had happened and he accused the Slytherins? They would have some story to support each other, since all of them hated Draco.

            Snape waited a little more time before he said, “What are his injuries?”

            Harry swallowed the temptation to gloat and nodded. “A broken arm,” he said. “You can’t have an arm like that and not have it be broken. A head wound. A—a wound on his side.” He peeled back Malfoy’s cloak as he spoke, and winced. He didn’t know what to call the clumsily gaping hole in Malfoy’s skin, which seemed as though someone had just removed a lot of the muscle and flesh around his ribs.

            “The arm must be stabilized,” Snape said. “He will need potions for the pain. Can you brew them?”

            Harry stared at him. This was something new. “You would trust my brewing abilities?” he asked. He had assumed Snape would send him to fetch more ingredients, but he saw now how silly that was. Snape couldn’t take the time to brew the potions when Malfoy needed them right now.

            Snape hissed. “How can I not? What other ally do I have?”

            Harry shook his head this time. “He needs the potions now, and it would take too long for me to brew them even if I was a Potions master like you. Slughorn has some of the potions I’ll need in his storage cupboards. I’ll break in and get them.”

            Snape stared at him, his eyes shining like two black stars through the gloom and smoke of the brazier. “And what will you say when he accuses you of stealing them?” he asked finally.

            Harry smiled. He had the impression it was a smile of the kind that would have convinced Klein he was a killer. “Leave that to me,” he said. “I think I have some idea of who did this to Draco, and I’m going to leave evidence that points straight to them.”

            Snape half-bowed his head. “Be careful,” he said. “I left alarm spells that would preserve an image of anyone stepping into my storage cupboard. Horace may be using the same spells, or may have renewed the ones I used.”

            Harry bit back what he wanted to say—that the spells hadn’t stopped Hermione when she got the ingredients for the Polyjuice potion—and nodded. “All right,” he said. “If Malfoy wakes up, tell him I’ll be back as soon as possible.” He turned to the entrance of the tunnel and flung his Cloak over his head again, already thinking about what he would do.

            “I will have to explain more than that,” Snape said, but his voice was fading, and Harry let it fall away completely as he crept through the tunnel.

            Let’s see. What can I do? What will make the Slytherins look like the guilty ones if I take Blood-Replenishing potions and Painkillers? And probably one of the Pepper-Up Potions, too. If Malfoy turns out to be too tired to stay awake and tells us who the attackers were…

            By the time he emerged from the tunnel and trotted across the grass towards the castle, Harry had come up with his plan.

*

            “P’ter?”

            The voice was slurred, but recognizable. Harry sighed in relief as he knelt over Malfoy and started casting the spells Snape had told him to use, the ones that would stabilize the bones in the arm. They weren’t broken in lots of little pieces; he thought most of the effort had gone to that big hole in Malfoy’s side, which was one reason he’d used a charm to stop the bleeding and try to ease the pain before he’d ever moved Malfoy down the tunnel. “Yes, Draco. I’m here.”

            Draco made an inquiring noise, and then let his head fall back against Harry’s arm curved behind his shoulders, grimacing. “Hurts.”

            “I know,” Harry said. Snape gave him a sharp look, as if he had sounded condescending. Well, too bloody bad. Harry picked up the Blood-Replenisher next to him and held it up so Malfoy’s blurry eyes could focus on it. “Can you take this?”

            Malfoy swallowed once or twice, then said, “Yeah.” Harry held his head up so he wouldn’t choke and fed the potion slowly down. Malfoy grimaced more than once or twice, and Harry nodded when he thought the motion wouldn’t distract Malfoy. He hated the taste of the stupid things too.

            Draco swallowed the last of the potion, and blinked his eyes open and shut. “What happened?”

            “We don’t know yet,” Harry said gently. “I thought some of your—former friends probably attacked you, but that’s the best I could come up with. One wound on your side, one broken arm, one head wound.” He held his fingers up in front of Malfoy’s eyes and waved them back and forth. “Can you see?”

            “Yes,” Draco whispered. “If you’ll stop fucking moving them.”

            Harry grinned and stopped his hand. “Sorry.” He liked to hear that tone from Malfoy; it seemed to get inside him and give him a spine of steel. “Memory intact? They—they broke your wand. Sorry,” he added, when Malfoy stared at him and Snape only shook his head as though he had expected a clumsy breaking of the horrible news from Harry, but not one that clumsy. “But I thought it might anchor your memory.”

            “They stepped on it,” Malfoy whispered. “Yes. I remember that now. Blaise, and Pansy, and—was Theodore with them? I don’t remember that part. But I remember Pansy held me down, and Blaise told her they were going to create a hole so deep they could see my ribs, and she suggested the heart, to make sure I had one.” He shuddered and closed his eyes.

            Harry ran his hand up and down Malfoy’s back, saying nothing. He was clumsy, but he was also good at comforting people who were grieving. He had done it a lot for George and Ginny and Mrs. Weasley this summer.

            “They told me that I was so lowly, so much worse than them, that it wasn’t worth their effort to make me die,” Malfoy whispered. “They’d just snap my wand and ensure that I had to learn magic all over again from child-level.”

            “Not going to happen,” Harry said. “I’ve been thinking about that. You can defeat me in a mock duel and take my wand.”

            Malfoy stared at him, mouth gaping. Harry had the impression Snape was doing something worse from the opposite side. He didn’t look over. “Which one are you going to use, then?” Malfoy whispered.

            “The Elder Wand,” Harry said.

            Snape made a strangled sound from his corner. Harry looked at him once, and then turned away, facing Malfoy. Nothing was more important than his slowly widening eyes, he thought, or the way his hands tightened on Harry’s as though he never intended to let them go. Snape probably couldn’t help sounding strangled, anyway, with the way that Nagini had bitten his throat, Harry thought charitably.

            “You can’t,” Malfoy said. “The Elder Wand—it—it kills all its owners.”

            Harry shook his head. “Dumbledore used it for years, and no one knew he had it. I think I’ll be safe as long as most people don’t know I do, either.” He tried a smile, wondering when Malfoy had stopped breathing, and reached for one of the pain potions. He knew that he hadn’t done a very good job of healing the deep wound in Malfoy’s side. “How many people are going to come close enough to realize that my wand is elder and not holly?”

            “Very many people,” Snape said, voice like the hiss Voldemort made in Harry’s nightmares sometimes, “if the Boy-Who-Lived is involved. Do you know what questions reporters will ask if they think they can get away with it? Do you know how many of them will seek to touch your wand for themselves, and how many people will want to take it from you once they realize what it is? Better to use the Elder Wand to heal Mr. Malfoy’s.”

            Draco’s body twisted as if he would try to rise. Harry put his hands carefully on Draco’s shoulders to hold him down and frowned at Snape. “Couldn’t you have warned him before you spoke?” he demanded.

            “Since that would also have involved speaking,” Snape said, “no.”

            Harry rolled his eyes and looked down at Draco. He still wasn’t facing the right direction to see Snape beyond the blue chalk circle, so Harry turned him so he could. He knew the moment he’d achieved what he wanted, because Draco’s body went so still it felt stony. Harry measured out a dose of the pain potion into one of the cups he’d brought along and carefully didn’t look.

            At last, Draco said, “I thought you were dead.”

            “In the beginning,” Snape said, and Harry saw a shadow move in the corner of his eyes as though he was reaching out a hand, “so did I.”

            Draco drew a deep breath, and then flinched. Harry held out the cup of pain potion. “This is about as much as you should take,” he said. “Can you swallow it?”

            Draco did, but he insisted on staring at Snape the entire time, and turning his head so he missed the rim of the cup more than once. Harry patiently pursued him with it, and shook his head when he thought about what he was doing. His friends wouldn’t believe it if they could see him now, apothecary for Professor Snape and healer for Draco Malfoy.

            He paused, struck by a new thought. He looked at the pain potion, and then at the way Malfoy was sitting up more easily now, as the agony from his wound passed, and cocked his head. The satisfaction that struck him at the sight was deeper, thicker, more blood-like, than the satisfaction he had felt when he killed one of the Death Eaters.

            I wonder…if I shouldn’t try for Auror training after all. I already know that I don’t fit in well with the Aurors who are there, and they might not teach me to control my violent instincts. But if I was a Healer, then I could still help people.

            It was a thought.

            “I would have helped you if I’d known that you were alive,” Draco whispered, and his shoulders were stiff. Harry tried the pain potion again, but the cup was empty and Draco swiped it from his hands with one stiff motion. Harry caught the flying cup neatly and put it down, wondered if he should try to make Draco lie flat again, and changed his mind at the look on his face. “I could have done something for you.”

            “How, Draco, with you barely able to help yourself?” Snape didn’t speak loudly, but what he said was enough to make Draco jerk to a stop. Harry saw his face turn white and his chin tremble, although he said nothing aloud. “No. I know what I want. No fair trial, no return to life at all, but a swift disappearance and a vanishing in the distance. I need the Resurrection Potion to help me do so, but when the brewing is done—”

            “You’ll go and leave us?” Draco swallowed, and Harry thought he could feel the emotions crashing around in him. He wondered if Snape could, too, and if he didn’t care or just felt the need to ignore them. “Leave all the Slytherins who need you? Slughorn isn’t a Head of House, compared to you.”

            “The Slytherins who did this to you?” Harry saw Snape’s hand move again, and could imagine the way he was gesturing to Draco’s wounds. “Potter, I think you will need to retrieve Skele-Gro as well. And I still insist that young Master Malfoy should be moved to Madam Pomfrey in the morning, if not sooner.”

            “The break is clean,” Draco said roughly. “I know that much. I won’t need Skele-Gro, only a few potions that will encourage the bone to heal.” He leaned forwards. “There’s a reason they did that. They’re under a spell—”

            “Are you, as well?”

            Harry glanced up, and then tried to pretend he was busy counting the potions he’d stolen again. He didn’t want to miss the answer, but he didn’t want to discourage Draco from answering by paying too much attention, either.

            He wondered, too, how Draco knew what a cleanly-broken bone felt like, and then if he really wanted to know.

            Draco closed his eyes. Then he shook his head. “I don’t remember enough about the spell, the day,” he whispered. “I don’t have any idea what spell it was, or why it made my friends react the way it did.” He opened his eyes and leaned forwards again. “But, sir, if you were to come back, then you might find out.”

            Harry’s hands tightened on the vials before he could catch himself. Luckily, nothing broke. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, though, because he didn’t want to show them what was there. Of course. The minute Snape comes back to life, Draco begs for his help. I’m inadequate as a researcher because a few weeks of searching with scattered details turns up nothing as yet. Of course.

            For a moment, he felt bad, because Draco probably hadn’t meant it like that; he simply wanted help. But he had given himself permission during the summer to feel as selfish as he wanted or need to, so he did.

            Besides, it wasn’t as if it would ever matter to Malfoy as long as Harry didn’t say something aloud.

            “I do not want to come back,” Snape said, and there was a clean harshness in his voice, the same way that the break to Malfoy’s bone was clean. “I have had enough of that kind of life, where I must do something I despise to gratify the whims of others. I will stay here. I have more than enough to occupy myself in the meantime. Potions I never got to brew. Learning what the world is like since the war. Finding a safe and secure place for myself where I can do as I wish.”

            Tormenting more people, probably. Snape might not want to be a teacher anymore, but Harry thought he would find it hard to go without victims.

            “You wouldn’t even help me?” Draco’s voice was thin and thready. He turned his head and stared at the far wall as if he was trying to find a way through it, as if he couldn’t stand to stay in the room with Snape. Harry sighed and began rooting among the pain potions again to find another one that Draco could take.

            “I have helped you all I can,” Snape said. “I am the one who needs help now, and Potter has been providing it.”

            Draco jolted and turned to face Harry. Harry blinked at him and tried to ignore the feeling gnawing at the base of his spine that whispered he would never have forgotten Draco’s presence in a room.

            “I didn’t know you could brew,” Draco said, his voice stronger again, but still not normal. Not the voice of the clear-eyed boy who had offered to ally with him in the Forest, Harry thought, or stood with him against Klein.

            And when did I start thinking of him being like that as normal?

            “Not brewing,” Harry said. “I got the ingredients for him, and I’m getting more ingredients for him because he can brew a potion that should tell me what the magenta color to my face means.” He serenely ignored the way that Snape jolted, in turn, on the other side of the room. He wasn’t going to lie to Draco, even if he lied to Harry in return.

            “So you’re helping Potter, but you won’t help me,” Draco said, and swiveled his head back to stare at Snape. “Is it because he saved the world? Do you still think you owe him a debt for that?”

            “He shouldn’t feel that way,” Harry put in, coming up with the right pain potion. “In fact, I don’t think he did. He was the one who practically told me that I owed him the Resurrection Potion and a way out of death. Draco, can you take this one?”

            “That doesn’t matter,” Draco said, and then he moved to try and brace himself on his broken arm and gasped, all the color draining from his face.

            “Yes, it does,” Harry said dryly, and turned so that he could pour the bloody potion down Draco’s throat. Draco accepted it, but swallowed with what sounded like the force of desperation, never taking his eyes from Snape’s face.

            Snape made a slow, massive, irritated gesture. “Draco, I have chosen to help with something limited and within my expertise. There is no potion I can brew that will make the other Houses treat Slytherin as they should be treated, or help you with what seems to be a miscast spell.”

            For some reason, Snape’s voice got heavier on those last two words, and he was staring at Draco hard enough that Harry had to quell the impulse to move between them and shield Draco with his body. He turned his head to see if Draco knew what Snape was talking about, and he found Draco pressed back against the wall of the Shack, his breathing shallow.

            Harry reached out, hesitated, and then pulled his hand away from Draco. “Draco?” he asked quietly.

            Draco shook his head and returned to the present with the jerk. “That doesn’t matter,” he said, and now his voice was unnaturally loud. “I don’t believe that you want to help Potter out of the goodness of your heart.”

            Snape sneered at him. “I do not. That goodness died in me when my body did, if I ever possessed it.” You did, Harry thought, but no one had asked him, so he kept silent and held the next cup of pain potion up to Draco’s lips again, watching as he swallowed it. He did wonder if he could be that interested in any patient’s health if he became a Healer, or if he should acknowledge to himself that Draco was special and he would have a hard time valuing anyone else as much.

            “Please,” Draco whispered. “Just enough research to find out what this spell is and why my friends turned on me. My—my arm and my wand are both broken because of this. That’s a high enough price, I think. I don’t want to pay anymore.”

            “You know the price, Draco,” Snape said, and Harry thought he was referring to some price Snape wanted him to pay before he continued. “This is the price of the past intruding into the present. You could not go through what you did during the war and expect to emerge totally unscathed. Neither could the others.”

            “But this isn’t a result of the war,” Harry said impatiently, leaning forwards, “unless you’re going to say that someone cast the spell on Draco for what he did during the war. Can’t you help for that much?”

            Snape gave him a single hard look, and turned back to Draco. “I am not the one you should ask,” he said, voice alive with the same silky, cutting menace he’d always used when catching Harry out after curfew. “Mr. Malfoy appeals to me for help, not you.”

            “Malfoy?” Harry asked, turning back to him. “Can you—I mean, do you think you need Snape to find out what the spell is? I can continue my research, and that should be enough, shouldn’t it, if I step it up a bit and you tell me any other details that occur to you?” He hated to sound like he was pleading, but he hated even more the idea that his research wasn’t good enough for Malfoy, that Malfoy had to seek out someone else’s help because Harry simply couldn’t help him.

            Malfoy stared at him for a moment, and then turned back to Snape with a deliberate shake of his head. “Severus,” he said, and Harry saw how still Snape went when he heard the name. “Please. You told me to use your name if I was ever in a situation that I couldn’t get out of, and I think this is the one.”

            Snape waited so long that Harry felt the tension stretch between them like a taut string. But then Snape shook his head and turned his head to the side, his face distant and pale. “You do not know what you ask of me, Draco,” he said. “If the Dark Lord’s lingering magic was paining you, or the Dark Mark, or something Dumbledore had done, then yes. Those are pains I experienced myself. But not this. Not something that you have—”

            Draco made a sharp little noise and curled in on himself. Snape didn’t finish the sentence, but continued on darkly staring in his new direction. Harry crouched by Draco, murmuring to him, trying to get him to look up, but Draco had buried his head in his arms and was rocking back and forth.

            Harry finally left a hand in place on Draco’s back, to tell him in a few seconds if Draco looked up, and glared at Snape. “Does it cost you that much of your precious time, when he begs you like this?” he asked.

            “When I am barely alive, and must hide in the Shack from the Ministry?” Snape’s eyes shone like black diamonds. “Yes.”

            Harry stared, then sighed and once again began to search among the pain potions for a way of easing Draco’s pain and stabilizing his broken arm. “Will you at least advise me on healing him?” he asked. He hoped he kept his voice calm, level, without a trace of the groveling that apparently annoyed Snape.

            “Yes,” Snape said.

            Harry wanted to ask what the difference was between that and helping Draco with the spell that had made him need healing in the first place, but thought it best to shut his teeth on the words and work in silence.

            I thought it would be easier when Draco knew about Snape and Snape knew about Draco’s problem. Silly me.

*

            unneeded: Thanks! And no pairing with Snape; Snape’s just in there to make things more difficult.

            ChaosLady: Well, now you know.

Zip: Yes, I will try to update it more often. And yes, I am one person working alone, which is why some stories don’t get updated as fast as others.

SP777: Yes, but as he thinks here, that may not be the most ideal trait for an Auror.

shannara: Thanks for reviewing! I hope you enjoy this chapter.
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Parsimony