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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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Chapter Fifteen--An Oracle Less Mysterious

            "This is the room where your Mysterious Oracle lives?"

            Harry kept his mouth shut as he shook his head, because trying to explain at this point would only lead to Malfoy coming up with more misconceptions, and Harry was getting to the horrifying point where he no longer found those misconceptions as charming as he once had. What would he do if he ran out of the ability to find them charming altogether?

            "Well? Answer me."

            "You're demanding for someone who thinks that we should split up for our own good," Harry said mildly, and sidestepped the hand Malfoy had used to reach for him. "There's one more corner." He nodded ahead at the blank brick wall ahead of them, which ended in a round, blunt shape that did make it difficult to see the end of the wall against the corridor from beyond. Still, Harry thought disapprovingly, a Potions master should have better eyes than that.

            Then he remembered about the way Malfoy had stared at him when Harry said he fancied him, and smothered a sigh of irritation.

            "Anyway," Harry continued, because thinking too much about Malfoy's obliviousness would only depress him, and he hated being depressed, "there's one more room. That's the one the Oracle lives in."

            He stepped around the corner, and felt Malfoy follow him. That was the only good thing about Malfoy's distrust of him: it made him think he had to keep Harry under observation at all times, which occasionally led to a delicious shiver like now, when Malfoy's knee had just brushed Harry's arse.

            The room beyond the corner was still not one that Malfoy would have called impressive, probably, but it would have been a haven of space to Harry when he lived at the Dursleys'. He reckoned that was a sign of a great and profound difference, and so a great and profound truth, between them, but he didn't have the patience to figure it out right now.

            "Hullo, Oracle," he said to the shape in the middle of the room.

            It looked like an eddying mass of purple smoke, though Harry had never dared breathe it and figure out whether it was real smoke. It formed, more or less, the shape of a high-sided chair that also looked like a bathtub, and in the center of the chair squatted a massive human body. Well, sort of human. You had to ignore the extra eyes, tentacles, and heads.

            Harry was good at that, though. He reckoned that childhood years of pretending Dudley was human had also encouraged him to do it with everything else.

            "You come," said a low, bubbling voice. Maybe the smoke hid water. It moved in that heavy way sometimes; a stream of it was making its way from the top of the bottom of the Oracle now, like liquid that someone was slowly tipping from a bowl. "You come to ask--questions?" The last word was a whip-quick dart.

            "I do," Harry said, and grinned as he watched the Oracle try to turn itself inside out, the edges of the smoke becoming pink and white and then gradually settling back towards purple.

            "You cannot," the Oracle said. "I will answer only one."

            "Yes, but it's so much fun to watch you remember the difference between the plural and the singular and the fact that other people sometimes use them interchangeably," Harry murmured, and turned to face Malfoy. "I think I ought to ask the question. I can make it specific enough."

            Malfoy turned to stare at him. "What is this?"

            "Not a charade, if that's what you mean," Harry said, blinking a little. He hadn't expected that Malfoy would come so far and still manage to disbelieve this. Shouldn't it be obvious that the magic that made the Oracle was beyond anything Harry was capable of? "You can ask your question--well, I can ask your question--and you'll get an answer."

            "But what is it?" Malfoy hissed in a whisper into Harry's ear. It was so pleasant that Harry decided not to tell him the Oracle could hear everything that was said in its room. He would find out in a minute anyway. "What is it made of? You have to tell me."

            "I don't know the answer to that myself," Harry pointed out with a mild nod, and faced the Oracle. "Name your price."

            There was more silence, during which the Oracle's shifting shape settled back into more humanity, and Harry could see two heads, one like an elephant's and one like a dragon's, staring at him. He resisted the urge to cross his eyes. Sometimes the Oracle imitated what it saw humanity do, but watching two large, moist eyes exchange their place with two reptilian ones was more excitement than Harry wanted for this afternoon.

            "A hundred Galleons," the Oracle answered at last.

            Malfoy squawked. Harry nodded. The Oracle had no notion of relative value, really. It simply chose numbers and then watched the reactions of the people visiting it. He had no idea what it did with the money, but then, considering he didn't know what it was made of or what it ate, either, its shopping was one of his lesser concerns.

            "Done," he said, and pulled out the heavy pouch of money he had removed from its hiding place in his home while Malfoy was in the bathroom. There were limits to how much he was willing to trust someone who wouldn't even acknowledge that Harry was infatuated with him.

            "What?" Malfoy hissed, grabbing his arm. "How can you just decide that when it hasn't heard the question?"

            Harry raised his eyebrows a little. "You think a question about your father is worth more than any other I could ask?" Maybe Malfoy did think that, if he hated the idea of spending one more afternoon in Harry's company, but that didn't compel Harry to give up more money than the Oracle had required.

            "You don't know it needs a hundred Galleons to tell you the truth," Malfoy said, and faced the Oracle with his arms folded. "Bargain."

            Harry put a hand over his face. Malfoy turned around and caught him at it, which meant he missed the Oracle's next spectacular, silent explosion, which consisted of red puffs of smoke shooting out sideways and which Harry thought strangely impressive. "What?" Malfoy demanded. "You're thinking the worse of me because I try to save you money?"

            "I told you already why I was willing to spend it," Harry muttered, shaking his head. "And I'm wondering why you're willing to be cheap about this now, when you've done a lot of things that are distasteful to you in the name of finding your father. Such as hiring me, and spending time around me, and letting me pay for this." He met Malfoy's gaze and held it.

            Malfoy flushed with color all the way up his throat, something Harry hadn't known he would find as fascinating as he did. "I never said that I hated to spend time with you," he corrected stiffly.

            "Really?" Harry waved his hand around at the Oracle's building. "Because you seemed fixated on the notion that we would come here, and spend one more 'adventure' together, and after that, you would be free to do whatever you want."

            "I didn't mean--"

            "No bargains." The Oracle was now in the shape of the human body with the elephant's and dragon's heads, but hanging upside-down, and floating with its "arms" on either side of the chair. "A hundred Galleons. Then I answer."

            Harry tossed the sack of Galleons at it before Malfoy could object. It hit the center of the purple smoke and disappeared with an enormous hissing sound that was more like steam. Malfoy turned and glared at him.

            Harry met his eyes and shrugged. "You didn't want gifts from me anyway," he said. "You can hardly object to how I choose to spend them."

            Malfoy was opening his mouth to dispute that anyway, it looked like, when the Oracle made a grumbling, burbling sound, and Harry shushed Malfoy. The Oracle wasn't above making some of its words so soft that you would lose the answer to the question, or not realize when it was time to ask it.

            "Ask your question," the Oracle said, and turned a number of colors that mingled rose, red, and white.

            Harry took a deep breath and did so. "What is the full story of Lucius Malfoy's life from the time he left Azkaban this year?"

            The Oracle turned deep purple, and its four eyes glared at Harry. Harry could feel Malfoy gaping behind him, too. He ignored both of them, not even bothering to fold his arms. It had been the best question he could think of to ask, since it left the Oracle no room to fob them off with a single-word answer, and didn't let it tell them the story of Lucius's life from the time he had been arrested during the first or second war, either.

            The Oracle muttered and gulped and mumbled, and finally said, "He had a letter. He did not know who the letter was from. He panicked. He knew he might have enemies coming for him, and that they had chosen to mask their enmity under affection to fool the guards.

            "He did not speak to any of the guards because he feared they might disbelieve him. He hid the letter, and a second one when it came. The second letter frightened him far more. It spoke of an obsession with him, and an obsession with the cleanness and goodliness of his soul. He feared he might be sacrificed."

            Malfoy opened his mouth to interrupt. Harry nudged him hard in the ribs with one elbow. It made him gasp and wheeze, and Harry decided to tell him later that even that sound was beautiful.

            "Then the one who had written the letter came." The Oracle glared triumphantly at Harry, spouting a third head, like a hydra's, in order to do it with. Harry didn't turn a hair. They knew who had written that letter, though he had a hard time believing it of Kingsley. "They would have granted him anything he wanted, given who he was. They gave him Lucius Malfoy. But he Obliviated the guards, and they thought it was an escape. It was easy to Obliviate them," the Oracle added. "They are not very wise."

            It was the Oracle's worst condemnation of anyone, and as much as he hated giving the Oracle anything to hang onto, Harry found that he could only agree. He nodded, though, instead of speaking. The Oracle would seize on anything anyone said as another question, and use that as the excuse to interrupt its recitation.

            The third head sank back into the Oracle's shoulders, and it sighed gustily. "Lucius Malfoy was in the Ministry for three days. He is not now. He is in the nest." And it shut its eyes, dissolved into a shapeless, floating puff of smoke, and eddied around and into the cracks in the brick.

            "That's no answer," Malfoy said loudly.

            Harry raised a hand. "Thank you, O Wise and Powerful and Mysterious Oracle," he said, and bowed his head. "We thank you for your wisdom." And he turned and walked out of the room, taking a little pleasure in hearing Malfoy scramble to keep up with him.

            Only a little, though. He was thinking. The Oracle would usually add more riddles than that, but it seemed the specificity of Harry's question had helped this time. Only another reason to ask it himself, and pay for the answer, instead of letting Malfoy ask it, Harry knew. Malfoy would have wasted the question on something like, "Is my father in the custody of the Minister?"

            The nest. It wasn't a very complicated riddle, not by some of the standards of the ones that Harry had solved.

            "What the fuck."

            Harry turned and raised an eyebrow at Malfoy. "Upset that we might have to stay together until we figure out what the last riddle means?"

            Malfoy stomped up to him and leaned down, breathing into his face. Harry reached up one hand, knowing he was taking a risk but unable to imagine doing it any other way, and towards the side of his hair. Malfoy didn't seem to realize what he was doing until Harry's fingers lightly brushed his head, and then he danced backwards and glared at him, forgetting whatever he might have said.

            "Yes?" Harry whispered, bowing his head and fluttering his eyelashes for all he was worth. "Did you have something to--say to me?"

            Malfoy folded his hands into fists and turned his back, glaring at the brick walls of the Oracle's building now, as if they had been the ones that deceived him, or disappointed him, or whatever other unimaginable thing beginning with the letter d Malfoy thought Harry had done to him. "I don't understand why it told us everything else so clearly and then hid the last answer," he whispered harshly.

            Harry shrugged. It was a magnificent shrug, a real roll of his shoulders with a lot of insouciance added, and completely ruined because Malfoy didn't turn and look at him while he did it. Harry sighed. "It wasn't completely clear. The only reason you think it was is that we spent so much time hunting and learned so much before we came here. Otherwise, how would we have known who wrote the letters to him? Someone high-ranking in the Ministry is all we would have had to reckon on."

            Malfoy went on snorting like a teakettle for a minute, and then said, "So Kingsley Shacklebolt is in on the conspiracy to destroy my father's soul."

            "No," Harry corrected gently. "I think Kingsley--or someone else, because if your father isn't in the Ministry anymore someone must have removed him--is in love with your father."

            Malfoy turned to him and said nothing. His jaw had simply silently dropped open, and he shook his head back and forth. Harry was compelled to admit he found even that attractive.

            "He hid his intentions under sticky, sappy words to deceive the guards," Malfoy said, in the kind of tone that begged Harry to agree with him.

            Harry sighed. "No, I don't think so. The first time I really read the letter, instead of just reading it to you, I thought it sounded like a lover's letter. God knows how or why my boss fell in love with your father, but there you are. It would be unthinkable of him to Memory Charm his own guards and remove your father from their custody, sure. But I don't think someone who would do that would then be evil enough to want to destroy his soul. Why not just destroy the guards? Trick them in some way that would result in them losing their jobs? No, I think Kingsley is secretly infatuated, not secretly evil."

            Malfoy fell back a step from Harry and pointed a trembling finger at him. Harry blinked in return, not understanding.

            "You're like that," Malfoy whispered.

            "Secretly evil?" Harry folded his arms and snorted. "I resent that. Everything you could have called me evil for, I've done quite openly."

            Malfoy swished his head back and forth. His eyes remained wide and staring, "Falling in love with a Malfoy," he said. "When you're an Auror and a symbol of good in the wizarding world and there's no reason for you to do it. I'll have to research. Did someone secretly cast a curse on my generation? On my father's? Was it at the trials? Did you--"

            Harry gave into another deep longing and stepped smartly closer. Malfoy at once fell silent, seeming hardly able to breathe.

            Harry slapped him smartly on the side of the head, and Malfoy caught his wrist and glared, which was better by far than that pathetic babbling.

            "I like you because of the way you move," Harry said fiercely into his face. "Because you picked yourself up and told Corinna that you would forge a new life when I disrupted your old one by taking the sapphire from her. Because you fell in line with me at once and trusted me when I told you Flint and the others were lying. Because you're graceful and clever and I think what you want more than anything else is to be free of the shadows of the past, rather than enslaved to them the way you will be if your father stays out of Azkaban, and the only times that you act really stupid now are when you babble at me about how horrible it is that I like you. Because you told the truth and you had the courage to come seeking the help of an old enemy in the first place. Because you can take the blows to your pride and roll with them. Because you're beautiful and have good hands and come here, you clever idiot." He seized Malfoy's head, tugged it down, and kissed him.

            And Malfoy, despite his faltering hands, despite his mumbled protests, despite his stupidity about curses and what was right in front of him and all the rest of it, kissed back.

*

            delia cerrano: Not penetrative sex, but I think it still counts.

            And thank you!

            jujukitty: And he will keep being that way, because he's not going to change the way he is for anyone.

            SP777: Really? The humor doesn't feel particularly subtle to me, but that may be because I know the effect I'm striving for.

            unneeded: That's what Harry suspects about Kingsley, too.

            And he's doing his best to court Malfoy. I don't know if Malfoy thinks of it like that, though.

            Nightlo: Maybe not!
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