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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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews! (This is being put up early as I won’t have the chance to do it tomorrow).

Chapter Sixteen—The Dark Lord’s Torturer

            “Malfoy! We have an appointment.”

            Malfoy hadn’t come to Potions that morning, or Transfiguration. The other Slytherins looked smug and walked back and forth with expressions on their faces that Harry would have liked to punch off them. Slughorn looked unconcerned, McGonagall sighed and said that she thought Mr. Malfoy was in the infirmary, but no one except Harry seemed to think that his missing two classes was weird.

            Well. Harry did. And now he had finally tracked the idiot down near the Room of Requirement, which Harry had told him was a safe place to stay for the time being. If it was the bedroom he had told Malfoy to make it into, with a door that would only open to someone who didn’t intend him harm, he ought to be protected enough.

            Malfoy had flinched and whined when Harry mentioned the room, no doubt thinking about the time he had spent inside it repairing the Vanishing Cabinet and then how he had nearly died in it during the Fiendfyre episode, but he had moved in. Harry had been glad to see that sometimes his practicality could trump his stupidity, after all.

            But not when it came to this little matter of a miscast spell.

            Malfoy kept walking as if he didn’t hear him. Perhaps he thought he could get away with that, up here in the seventh-floor corridor with only a few portraits watching him. Well, he couldn’t. Harry stepped up right behind him and grabbed his shoulder.

            Malfoy spun around, cradling his arm against his side, and hissed, “That was my broken arm, you idiot!”

            “No, it isn’t,” Harry said, his eyes on the sling that covered the arm Malfoy was using to hold his supposedly wounded one. “Now, stop acting like an idiot and actually be sensible for once in your life, can’t you?”

            Malfoy straightened up. His face was white, except for the thin line of color where his lips were pressed together, but he faced Harry instead of bolting, and that was a good start. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he hissed.

            “I know that you cast that spell that made your friends hate you,” Harry said. “I even know that you probably didn’t want to tell me that because you had your pride.” He managed to say that without spitting or snarling, he noted. Good. “What I don’t know is why you told me that someone else did, and sent me on a series of wild chases through the research books. I could have helped more if I had known the truth of that night.”

            Draco stared at him with even his lips pale now. Then he whirled around and tried to run towards the Room of Requirement. A wooden door appeared, marking it, and Harry doubted that he would be able to get through it if he tried to follow Draco in there now.

            Which meant it was up to him to make sure that Draco didn’t get in there or get a chance to barricade the door behind him.

            “Levicorpus!” Harry shouted, and felt the magic cut and curl and charge through him, snaring Draco and tugging him off the floor. In moments he was dangling with his robes falling about his head. His struggles were so wild that Harry cast a spell that made him turn back over so he could see. Maybe one of his former friends had done something to him and now he had a panic attack when he couldn’t see. Harry didn’t want to be cruel.

            But Draco had already put off this conversation for too long, and he had lied, and Harry was tired of being made a dupe of. He also wanted to help, and keep Draco from being beaten up by anyone else, if Draco would just let him.

            “Now,” he said, as Draco stared down at him from what probably felt like a revolving, invisible top made of air. “I’ll let you down if you promise to listen instead of running. I need your help to figure out what we should do.”

            Draco’s nostrils flared, and he gave a bright, false smile. “Right,” he said. “Let me down, and I promise to stay there.”

            “I learned over the summer to tell when a lot of people were lying,” Harry said conversationally. “Reporters who promised that they wouldn’t print my story in their papers, for example, and then who did. People who wanted a moment of my time, and then it turned out that they wanted a lot more. Ron and Hermione, when they pretended that they weren’t grieving at the moment. They always were. Try again.”

            Draco glared at him. “You have no proof that I did that,” he said. “If you tried to prove it, no one would believe you.”

            “Of course not,” Harry said. He hoped that his calm stance and comfortable grip on his wand hid how hard his heart was actually pounding. “It’s a silly thing to accuse anyone of, because it’s a silly thing to do. But it would mean that someone would have to recognize that there’s a spell, and they would start trying to figure out how they could free you of it. What would happen if they recognized it as a spell that you cast yourself?”

            Draco shut his eyes and turned his head away. “It doesn’t work like that,” he whispered. “It doesn’t behave like that.”

            “Really?” Harry cocked his head and gave Draco a skeptical smile. “I hope that you’ll excuse me not believing that without proof. I should have demanded proof in the first place, but I don’t know what you have could have given me.”

            “Why should I have to give you anything?” Draco was snarling at him suddenly, his expression a respectable match for the wolfwere’s, even if on a face that was more human. “You forced yourself into this. I wouldn’t have asked for your help in the first place if I didn’t have to have a story so you would leave me alone.”

            “And then you could have done something else later, once you were out of the immediate situation, instead of encouraging me to believe the lie,” Harry said. “Told me I was mistaken. Gone to someone else for help—”

            “What the fuck do you think I was trying to do with Snape?” Draco leaned forwards despite his precarious position in the air, his eyes blazing. “If he would have helped me, then I could have dispensed with your little knightly heroics!”

            “He was the one who told me the truth,” Harry said. “He suspected it from the beginning. Why should he help you when you did it to yourself?”

            “It wasn’t like that!” Draco’s face was a ferocious blaze, and his voice rose to something that Harry would have called an indignant squeak, except it was worse than that. “You don’t—you don’t know about the kinds of things I had to do during the war!”

            “I know you tortured people,” Harry said quietly.

            Draco jerked, but didn’t say anything. Harry decided that he might as well continue. He couldn’t remember how much of this Draco might already know, so he would tell everything, and hope that Draco would see that Harry was willing to make himself vulnerable by laying out secrets, if Draco needed that.

            “I had a link to Voldemort. Sometimes I could control what I saw, and sometimes I couldn’t. I tried to use it to spy on him sometimes, but it didn’t work that well. I know that he had you torture people. I know that you didn’t want to. And I know that when we were captured and brought to the Manor, you lied to save our lives and Bellatrix was the one who tortured Hermione. She’s dead. And Greyback was the one who brought us there, and I killed Greyback. There’s no one there I want revenge on, including you. Are you going to tell me the truth, or are you going to dangle there and deny everything to a person who could have helped you better from the beginning if he knew the truth?”

            Draco shut his eyes. Then he said, “You might know that, but you don’t know the truth of what I did to them that night. And I’m not going to tell you out in the corridor.”

            Harry knew he had won a partial agreement from Draco then, and, smarter than Snape probably would have expected him to be, he didn’t press for more right now. He nodded and lowered Draco to the floor. Draco brushed his robes off, though being hoisted in the air should have got the dust off, if anything, and led Harry to the wooden door.

            He paused there with one hand on it, and turned his head to stare at Harry. Harry studied the silver chasings around the handle and hinges of the door instead of meeting his eyes. “Have you ever tortured anyone?” Draco asked.

            “Yes,” Harry said, and met his eyes. “I used the Cruciatus Curse on Amycus Carrow.”

            “The Carrows.” Draco tilted his head back, and his laughter was harsh in his throat, choking the spit that he probably wanted to send out. “You can’t count that. You can’t pretend that you’re sorry about that, not when they deserved to be tortured for everything they did to kids here.”

            “Most of the people you tortured were Death Eaters, too,” Harry said, and leaned close to him, until Draco’s eyes had to stop darting everywhere and focus on his face. “Are you going to say that you don’t feel bad about torturing them and that means there’s no reason to hide your secret?”

            After a single moment of staring contest, Draco whirled around and opened the door. Harry followed him into the room and glanced around for a few seconds, noting the escape routes and the position of the furniture in case he had to fight. Eventually he hoped that he would be able to overcome that instinct, but right now, that would be asking too much of himself.

            The walls were a deep, dark grey, which Harry thought was depressing but which Draco probably found comforting, or why imagine them that color? Harry thought he could see dim shades of green and red and black out of the corner of his eye, too. He half-shrugged as he noted the huge fireplace and the huge bed and the comfortable, cushy chairs around a central table that probably mimicked the one in the dining room at Malfoy Manor. Nothing less than he would have expected, and why shouldn’t Malfoy have what he wanted when the Room provided everything?

            Harry stood there and waited for Malfoy to choose a seat, while Malfoy did the same thing with Harry. He bit his lip several times, and finally took one of the chairs near the fireplace. Harry took the one facing it. There was more distance between them than he would have liked, but he could hear Malfoy, and he didn’t think the other boy was about to bolt out the door. There was no place out there safer than this.

            “So.” Draco leaned forwards and stared down at his feet, his hair hanging around his face. “We were talking, that night around the fire, about our futures and the war, and trying to decide whose parents were going to prison and whose—weren’t.”

            Harry settled back in the chair at once, and said nothing. He thought too many questions would only discourage Draco from repeating the story, and he had waited long enough to hear it.

            “I knew that my parents were in the most danger.” Draco swallowed, and then swallowed again, and licked his lips as though he assumed they needed more moisture than they were getting. “I couldn’t stop myself from boasting, though, that I had done worse than any of them during the war and got away with it.

            “Pansy challenged me. She seemed to think that declaring you should be thrown to the Dark Lord was the worst thing ever. And Greg said that Vincent casting the Fiendfyre was the worst thing, and that he would have received the Dementor’s Kiss for that if he was still alive. It was—a weird sort of competition.” A painful smile spasmed across Draco’s face. “We compete in everything, all the time. But that was the strangest.”

            Harry merely nodded. He thought he could see it, he thought he could imagine it: the group of Slytherins grouped around a bonfire in the middle of the night, drunkenly yelling at each other, tossing challenges of crimes and insults back and forth.

            “So I told them I’d tortured people, and they didn’t believe me. They all thought I was too soft for it. Pansy tried to make them leave me alone, but Blaise took the lead and got right up in my face, yelling that he didn’t believe me, that I was just making up lies to make myself look better, that I would have gone to Azkaban for it if anyone knew, and someone would have found out—”

            Draco took a deep, quick, painful breath, and followed it with words on the exhale that Harry hardly heard. “So I tortured him.”

            Harry thought he hadn’t heard right, for a moment. He blinked and stared at Draco, but he just went on staring at the floor, saying nothing. So Harry cleared his throat, and breathed out himself, as if reluctant to disturb the silence of the room, “Excuse me?”

            “You heard me.” But Draco didn’t look up to make sure of that, just went on with his eyes burning holes in his own boots. “I—I tortured Blaise. I cast the Cruciatus, and then when he was writhing on the ground, I added a curse Aunt Bellatrix taught me, one that made all your bones feel like they were being wrenched out of your sockets.”

            Again Harry cleared his throat, and again he found nothing to add. He waited.

            Draco looked up at him, his eyes wide and tearless. “I overdid it. But he was screaming, and I was laughing, and for a minute I felt so good that I didn’t care. I was worse than any of them. I won the competition, I won the game.

            “But then I saw Pansy backing away from me, and Greg looking like he wanted to vomit, and Theodore already doing it, and I realized what I’d done. It was one thing talking about doing that to people none of us would ever see again and none of us liked anyway, but it was another thing to do it to one of them. They’d remember, and I’d lose all my friends.

            “I panicked. I tried to cast a spell that would remove their memory of that night and just replace it with one of Blaise beating me up. I didn’t mind that they thought I was weak, as long as they didn’t think I would hurt one of them.”

            Harry nodded slowly. He could understand now what had happened, why Draco would go through anything he needed to erase his friends’ memories.

            But.

            “Something went wrong?” he asked quietly. “Them forgetting what happened that night shouldn’t have meant they started hating you.”

            “Two things went wrong.” Draco lifted his head and gasped in a desperate gulp of air. “First, I was thinking too hard about how they would hate me and never be my friends again, and that got wound up in the spell and ended up giving them memories of different things to hate me for. Second, I was thinking about erasing my memory, too, but part of me was afraid I would torture someone again if I did that, if I forgot about how awful it felt. So I said the incantation partway through, to include me, and then I stopped and tried to start it over again.”

            Harry winced in sympathy. Maybe it was because that kind of thing had happened in “demonstrations” last year to kids at Hogwarts, but their professors had emphasized over and over again this year what could happen if you tried to change a spell without completing it.

            “There was this—burst of power—that knocked me out,” Draco whispered. “And then I came to, and they did, and they started all their stories about the different things I supposedly did to make them hate me.”

            Harry nodded. He could understand it better now, he thought. Intent fucked with magic, a whole lot. Hermione had told him that if he’d walked into the Forbidden Forest intending to do anything other than die, he probably would have survived without trouble when Voldemort cast that second Killing Curse at him, and the Horcrux in him would have survived, too.

            “All right,” he said. “So that makes things different. You can tell me the spell you used, and put the memories in a Pensieve, and that means we can look at the effects of the spell instead looking for the spell itself.”

            Draco jerked as though Harry had spitted him or something. He stared at him and shook his head. “Why would you?” he whispered.

            “Try to help you?” Harry sighed. “Because you don’t deserve what happened to you any more than Blaise deserved what happened to him. And you need to have this spell undone, and they need to have this spell undone.” He thought he understood now why Draco’s behavior had varied so much in school and the Forest. Sometimes, when he was near his friends, he fell under the same spell and forgot part of what had happened, as he had wished. When he was away from them, then his memory became clearer and sharper, and he could focus on people other than his former friends.

            “I still think Snape would be the better choice,” Draco whispered. “You don’t know anything about magical theory.”

            “You like sabotaging yourself, don’t you?” Harry shook his head when Draco paled. “That wasn’t fair. Sorry. I don’t know about the magical theory, but you do, and I have a whole load of raw power. You can tell me what to do, and I’ll lend you the power to help you.” He found himself smiling. “Just like we’re already doing with that bloody Triad project in Charms.”

            Draco closed his eyes and lowered his head. Harry didn’t think there was a tear in his eye, but there was something close to crying in the way his body shivered and relapsed, and in the tearing way he drew his breath in.

            Then he said, “What happens if I make a mistake? I’ve told you what I thought happened, but that doesn’t mean it actually did. Professor Snape would say that I didn’t deserve to be trying this on my own again anyway, in case it ends up being a mistake and I make a—a worse mistake trying to correct it.”

            “Like what?” Harry asked, and then flinched simultaneously with Draco. He could imagine several things with that phrase, and none of them sounded like things that they wanted to happen.

            He leaned across the distance between them and took Draco’s hand, which was awkward but doable. He wondered if the Room of Requirement had adjusted things when they weren’t looking, since he could have sworn that he was further away from Draco than that when he sat down.

            “Listen,” he said quietly. “I can try to help you. I’ll do all I can. And you can talk to Professor Snape if you want an expert opinion. But I think—I think some of this work should be yours, so that you can be the one to figure out what went wrong and put it back together again.”

            Draco sneered at him, and again there should have been tears in his eyes from the sound of his words and there weren’t. “Because I was the one who made it go wrong in the first place, of course. You sound very sure that my friends deserve their revenge on me.”

            Harry sighed. “No, not like that. I mean that it’ll content your pride better if you’re the one who comes up with the solution.”

            Draco paused, then tugged his hand fretfully out of Harry’s. “I’m not some child who needs to be humored, Potter. You don’t know much at all about who I am and what I want, whatever you thought you saw through the Dark Lord’s eyes.”

            “I don’t know everything,” Harry replied quietly, and met his eyes. “But I know that you’re someone who suffered from a miscast spell, and suffers from other people’s suffering.” Draco started to reply, but Harry held up a hand. “And you don’t need to tell me that Slytherins are selfish and don’t care about other people’s good opinions. You cared enough about your friends’ to erase their memories. And as long as they’re convinced you did something evil to them, then they’re going to go after you. When they’re free of the spell, you’ll be free of that particular danger.”

            Draco watched him intently. Harry couldn’t figure out why until he said, “Most people would walk away from me after that, when they find out that I’ve lied to them. Why aren’t you?”

            Harry smiled a little. “Because I’ve made mistakes, too,” he said, thinking of Sirius. “Mistakes that hurt people, although mine were worse. So. I think I can forgive you, although I don’t know if Blaise will, once he has his memory back.”

            “I never meant to do that.” Draco’s voice was like a foghorn in the dark, low and remorseful. “I never did.”

            “I know that,” Harry said gently. “But I’m not the one you tortured. Do you want to go through with this knowing that it might mean you have your friends back, but at least one of them will still hate you? Because your intent influenced the spell so much last time, I don’t think we dare take the chance that, this time, you’ll go in without a much clearer vision of what you want.”

            “You think—you think you’ll have to cast another spell to replace this one,” Draco whispered. “That’s it not a matter of finding what wrong and removing it.”

            Harry blinked in response. “I never considered that,” he said. “As you pointed out, I don’t know enough about magical theory to know what’s required yet. But yes, maybe we would have to do that. I know changing Memory Charms is complicated enough that they usually can’t just remove them, and that’s the ordinary ones.”

            Draco swallowed through what was obviously a dry throat. “And you think Professor Snape would help me?”

            “If he knows that you acknowledge that it was your own fault in the first place, maybe. Or if I ask him,” Harry added reluctantly. Maybe Snape would do it as a favor for getting him his books.

            “Then we can try.” Draco climbed to his feet and paced back and forth. “I’m sick of this. I’m sick of living like this. I wish—I wish something had been different.” He rubbed at his stiff arm.

            “I know,” Harry said. “Now. Decide when we’re going to meet, preferably at a time when we can disguise it to look like we’re meeting to study Charms, because I doubt that you want most people knowing about this.”

            Draco paused and gave him a single, intense glance. Harry stared back, raising his eyebrows. He had done all he reasonably thought he could to give Draco a fighting chance, but he expected an objection to his tone or his words anyway, because that was Draco.

            Instead, Draco said, “Perhaps someday, I’ll be able to say ‘thank you.’”

            “Perhaps someday,” Harry echoed, and smiled at him. If his smile was a little dry, well, that was him. “In the meantime, all I ask is that you don’t lie to me again. It causes too many problems.”

            “No more lies,” Draco whispered. “No more lies to you, ever again.” His eyes burned. He opened his mouth as if he would say something else, and then whirled and stalked to the far side of the room.

            Harry eyed him, then shrugged and retreated to his own side of the room, the one that had the door that led out.

*

            ChaosLady: It does indeed.

            unneeded: Harry is mostly focused on helping Draco now, but he’ll try to speak to the wolfwere about whether it’s a good idea to eat the flesh of an insane werewolf. ;)

            Snape should be brewing his potion as long as he can concentrate through all the other things going on around him.

            SP777: Well, Snape was in there for months before he found Harry to bring him the ingredients. I think he can wait a little while.

            Zip: Hope the secret pleased! Snape would have noticed a tracking spell on the pin, don’t worry.
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Parsimony