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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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Chapter Seventeen--Ever a Busy Life

            "Did you find your parents?"

            Harry had seen the answer in Hermione's eyes before he'd asked the question, but he'd hoped desperately for a different answer anyway, and so he asked. She looked away from him and stuck a spoonful of porridge in her mouth to close her mouth. But the shake of her head, that almost got her hair in the porridge, was answer enough.

            Harry nodded to Ron, who had his hand on Hermione's back. Ron nodded back and leaned over to say something to Hermione in a low voice. A moment later, they left the Great Hall, Hermione with her shaking hands clenched in front of her. Harry watched them go, then sighed and turned back to his breakfast.

            "Do you think she'll ever find them?"

            Harry blinked and turned to Ginny. He hadn't realized she was sitting so close, or that she had overheard. She gave him a tentative smile, and Harry nodded back and smiled in return. "I hope so," he said. "She'll never give up searching until she does. I don't know if she can undo the Memory Charm when she does, though. Sometimes those charms last forever no matter what you do, like the ones that Lockhart did, or the ones that backfired on him."

            "Yeah, but he got an unusual faceful of them," Ginny pointed out, crunching through her toast in a pointed manner. "Not an ordinary one. I'm sure Hermione was careful to only cast the ordinary one on her parents."

            "Maybe." Harry licked his lips. He hadn't thought of it before, and he wondered how he hadn't, because of course that was the perfect disguise for doing research about the spell on Malfoy's friends. "Do you know where they keep all the books about Memory Charms in the library? Are some in the Restricted Section?"

            Ginny tossed him a puzzled glance. "I thought you would know. Hermione told me you were in the library researching all sorts of things, and some of them would have included the books on Memory Charms."

            Harry looked around as if to watch for people nearby, and then leaned towards Ginny and lowered his voice. "I found some. But not the ones I want most, the ones that talk about how to undo unusual Memory Charms. You know, on people who aren't wizards. Or the ones that you cast on yourself, like the ones on Lockhart." That was kind of Malfoy's problem. His desire to forget what he'd done had interfered with the spell he cast on his friends, after all.

            Ginny twisted a strand of hair around her finger and tugged it out straight. "Who knew that that stupid essay I had to write for detention would come in useful after all?" she muttered.

            "What do you mean?" Harry demanded. He could feel his heart beating fast, and tried to calm it with an irritated little breath. He had enough to worry about without jumping about like a frantic frog because someone told him something that might help.

            "I had to write an essay for detention the year before last about where all the books in the library were," Ginny said, standing decisively. "McGonagall told me that it would help me remember what a library was for."

            Harry blinked. "What were you doing that got you a detention with McGonagall?" Most of the time, everyone in Gryffindor Tower would have heard about it if their Head of House was displeased with one of them.

            Ginny flushed. "Never mind," she mumbled, and Harry smirked and followed her to the door of the Great Hall, only snatching a piece of toast and a banana to take with him. He did feel eyes on his back, and turned around, as if casually, in the doorway to find Malfoy looking at him. Malfoy had been watching him all morning, as if wondering when Harry would start to blurt out his secrets to everyone.

            Harry tried to nod to him reassuringly. That only made Malfoy recoil and shove his chair back from the table, stalking towards him. Harry sighed and signaled Ginny to wait, taking a hasty bite of the toast in case Malfoy spelled it out of his hand to hit the floor or something.

            Malfoy stopped in front of him and stared at Harry, vibrating a little in place, as though someone was shaking the floor under him. Harry gazed back blandly, swallowing the corner of toast that seemed stuck in his throat. He was glad that Malfoy's eyes didn't have the dull glaze in them that seemed usual when he was around his former friends, although he didn't entirely trust the clear gleam they did have.

            "Surely you have better ways to spend your time than hanging about with your girlfriend and going off to snog in a corner?" Malfoy drawled.

            Ginny was the one who answered, folding her arms and leaning against the side of the doorway as though she assumed they had all the time in the world. She didn't see or ignored the way Harry shook his head at her. "At least he has people to spend time with, Malfoy. Don't think that no one's noticed the way you sit down your table from the rest of your friends and cringe if they look at you."

            Malfoy stared at Harry, accusing. Harry shook his head frantically. No, really. He hadn't said anything. But it was true that Malfoy's distance from the group of his friends was noticeable. If he had thought that he could keep that a secret from the rest of the school, he'd been wildly optimistic.

            "Besides," Ginny said, and moved forwards until her nose was an inch away from Malfoy's, "you ought to keep up with gossip better. Harry and I aren't together anymore. I found someone else, and he hasn't found someone else yet but she's sure to be pretty when he does. Do try to use the right ones if you must insult people." And she whirled and marched off with her nose in the air.

            Malfoy met Harry's eyes in the moment after she left and Harry had to follow or risk looking suspicious to the curious audience watching them. Malfoy's lips shaped the words: is it true?

            Harry nodded, once, and then mouthed back, I didn't tell her about you.

            Malfoy gave a sad smile, one that seemed directed inwards in a weird way. "I didn't mean that," he breathed, and turned around to wander back to the Slytherin table, dodging the Tripping Jinx that someone aimed at him from under the bench. Considering that that provoked an immediate, stern speech from McGonagall about how the returned eighth-years were adults now and should know better, Harry was just as glad to leave.

            He shook off the mood once he found Ginny waiting for him--and watching for him--but the memory of Malfoy's smile remained with him as they went to the library, and he wondered how long someone could really endure taunts from old friends and attempts to kill you and all the rest of it without going insane. He found Malfoy hard enough to deal with now, never mind if he was mad.

            I'll rescue him. If only to spare the rest of the world, and me, from him.

*

            "Potter? I have something to say to you."

            No mistaking Parkinson's shrill voice anywhere, although Harry wondered why in the world she thought it was a good idea to talk to him in the Potions supply cupboard. His eyes still burned from reading through eighteen pages of dense writing before he came down to Potions, and concentrating on the complicated instructions Slughorn had given them before he came in here didn't make it any better. Harry made sure he had a light and easy grip on his wand, and turned around with a smile that might reassure Parkinson if she was stupid. Of course, she was, but he wasn't sure how deep it ran. "Parkinson. How can I help you?"

            Parkinson leaned against the entrance of the supply cupboard, her arms folded, her posture so close a mimicry of Ginny's from earlier in the day that Harry immediately became convinced it was a trap. He blinked and looked around for other Slytherins, but there was no one there.

            "Stay away from Draco," Parkinson said. "If you know what's good for you."

            Harry stared at her, and waited. She stared back. Harry sighed at last and said, "That's all you have? A terrible threat that sounds like it was stolen from a Muggle movie?"

            Parkinson flushed, and hissed, "We know it was you who got us in trouble with Slughorn. We know it was you who rescued him. We just want you to know that this is a private, Slytherin matter, and however Draco got the Great Protector of the Weak on his side, it was a lie. Leave it alone, and leave it to die a natural death."

            Harry gave her a smile, and he knew it was hard. "What? Like the kind that you plan to give Draco?"

            Parkinson staggered back from him and barely caught herself against the doorway to prevent flopping to the ground. She watched Harry with an open mouth as he stalked towards her, and then flapped her hands out and shook her head. "You don't understand!" she whisper-wailed. "You don't understand what he did to us."

            "I know that none of you can agree on it," Harry said. He had briefly thought of telling her the truth, but for all he knew, the spell itself might prevent an attempt to fix matters that way, and he wouldn't want to betray Draco's secrets. "I know it was something horrible, and I know that you feel he deserves retribution for it. But just running around screaming your head off about it doesn't work, you know." Parkinson opened her mouth, probably to object to the "screaming your head off" bit, but Harry plowed ahead. "And killing him or injuring him doesn't work, either. He didn't kill or injure you."

            "He--some of us, he did," Parkinson said, and picked herself up again. "Some of us say he did. That's enough for me."

            "You trust them more than Draco?" Harry asked mildly. "I thought you liked him better than any of them."

            Parkinson froze, and her eyes went wide. Then she shook her head. "He couldn't respond when Blaise accused him," she mumbled. "There has to be something there. He did something to hurt someone."

            Harry didn't know exactly what that meant, though he hoped that a memory of how Blaise had challenged Draco and Draco had tortured him was starting to surface, and instead just shrugged. "All I know, Parkinson, is that you've threatened him, and hurt him, and I'm going to protect him." He brushed past her and out of the supply cupboard, then realized he had left behind the packets of crushed dandelion heads that he'd been supposed to get. With a sigh, he Summoned them.

            Parkinson was shaking her head when he turned back to her. "I did try to warn you," she said. "We don't want to hurt anyone else in our quest to punish Draco. No one else did anything to us. Until now." Her eyes narrowed. "I really would step out of the way, unless you want to be hurt. And if there's something we're good at, I know it's that."

            "You were so scared of Voldemort that you said we should throw me to him," Harry said, and he couldn't keep the scorn out of his voice. "But you didn't volunteer for it yourself, I notice. And I bet you didn't always escape when the Carrows and their kind tortured people, either."

            Parkinson's expression flickered at the reference to torture, but then she shook her head, and her face hardened again. "I just tried to warn you," she said, brushing past Harry hard enough to nearly make him drop the packets. "Don't blame it on me when something happens to you."

            Harry rolled his eyes as he returned to his seat. He would believe that the Slytherin students were as dangerous as full-fledged Death Eaters when they proved it to him.

*

            "And did you find out anything about the yellow aura?"

            From the frown Snape gave him, maybe he shouldn't have asked the question, Harry knew, but the continued silence was driving him mad. He had come tonight because Snape had told him to, but so far, Snape had looked through his books and now and then grunted, or tossed another handful of ingredients into the simmering potion that hung above the central brazier. From the pungent smell that mingled those of some of the flowers Harry had owl-ordered, he thought it was probably the Resurrection Potion.

            Snape didn't answer for long minutes. Harry watched the Resurrection Potion to distract himself. The bubbles rose and burst against the rim, then subsided. He suppressed the urge to reach out and tickle one of them. Not only did the blue chalk circle and most of the Shack still separate him from it, touching it probably wouldn't be a good idea.

            "The books said nothing about yellow auras," Snape said abruptly. "But they did say that gold and blue auras sometimes mingle to create a green one."

            Harry held himself back from rolling his eyes, because he could just imagine the reaction that gesture would produce. "Okay, so why do I have one?"

            Snape bared his teeth. "That is the point, Potter. You should not have one. The gold aura belongs to someone who has had a close encounter with a werewolf in the past and managed to escape infection that time as well as this. But the only werewolf that you were around in the past was Remus Lupin, and I know for a fact that he didn't bite you."

            Harry blinked. "So my personality was influenced by the blood, and--somehow I was supposedly exposed to a werewolf bite before? Or werewolf blood?"

            "Werewolf blood." Snape reached down, caught up one of the heavy dark books that Harry had brought for him, with a cover more like wood than leather, and flipped through it until he evidently located the part that he wanted Harry to read. He tossed it towards him, and Harry caught it mechanically and bowed his head.

            The gold aura of the indicator potion denotes a close transformation-peripheral incident in the recent past, and can demonstrate a more than passing acquaintance with the dangers of death in a life as a whole...

            "It buggers me how you can make anything out of this," Harry said frankly, and looked up at Snape. "But it says recent past. How recent?"

            Snape frowned at him, and engaged in a silent, Snape-like struggle between, probably, telling him off for language and telling him off for discovering a point that Snape hadn't brought up. Harry waited, his fingers resting on the page of the book. He had learned during the summer that sometimes keeping quiet and waiting for another person to bring up what they wanted to talk about was the most efficient method of getting them to actually talk about it.

            Snape said finally, "Usually, your encounter with a werewolf would have had to occur in the last five months."

            "Definitely not that, then," Harry said decisively. "Even Greyback grabbing me and bringing me to Malfoy Manor was less recent than that." He paused, and his eyes darted down to the book again.

            Then he began to laugh.

            Snape waited all of two seconds before demanding, "Potter, if you intend to laugh at me, I will know the cause of it."

            "Not at you," Harry said, wiping his tears away. "It was right there in front of me, and I didn't see it." He grinned at Snape. "It says that a gold aura might indicate that the person in question knows a lot about death. And what happened to me sometime in the last five months to make me know a lot about death? Sir, I died. Maybe the indicator potion is just trying to tell someone who looks at the aura then, as best as it knows how."

            Snape's eyes narrowed until it seemed they would disappear into the slits. "It is true that the indicator potion was not developed for use on someone who had died and come back," he said slowly. "Or on someone protected by a mother's love, or someone who survived the Killing Curse twice."

            There was a wistful look on Snape's face when he mentioned the "mother's love" part that kept Harry's head twisted to the side for a few seconds, so Snape could wipe it away. Then he turned back and said, "Well, that ought to be simple, then. Some of my personality traits are amplified, and the rest is just that I died and came back, and that's something the whole world knows."

            Snape nodded, and now his face looked like the cover of the book Harry held. Harry gave up on understanding him. This ought to be good news, but Snape would probably tell him to prepare for his funeral, just because. Harry floated the book back across the fire to him and stood up, preparing to leave.

            Then he paused with his hand already in the tunnel that he knew led under the tree, and turned back. Snape looked up from the cauldron once more, but his own hands were still at work, shredding bark and twigs and what Harry had reason to know was a whole owl's claw, since it had pricked him more than once when he was carrying the package down to Snape.

            "Yes?" Snape asked, in the voice of a man tired to death.

            Harry's eyes went once more to the leaves covering the wound on Snape's neck, and he hesitated. But he had promised himself he would ask this, so he nodded and said, "Draco admitted that he cast the spell on his friends. Or miscast it. He tortured Zabini, and he wanted them to forget, but he couldn't decide if he wanted himself to forget, too, so he tried to stop the incantation in the middle."

            This time, Snape might have been looking into strong sunlight. His hands fell limp into his lap. Harry tensed for a moment, then told himself Snape was too good a Potions master to let himself be startled by this unless the potion was going to be okay without constant tending. "He admitted it, then?" Snape whispered.

            Harry nodded.

            "You forced him to confess?" Now Snape was looking at Harry as if he were the torturer, with hot whips hidden in his bedroom or something.

            "No!" Harry thought of the way he had caught Draco with one of the Half-Blood Prince's spells and herded him into the Room of Requirement, but, well, like he would have talked about it any other way. "I just told him what you told me, and that I wanted to know the truth. If I'm going to help him, lies just muck up everything. I know where some of the books on Memory Charms are now, in the Restricted Section, and if I smile and look charming enough, they should let me in."

            Snape started to speak, stopped. Then he said, "You did not use your name and your money nearly as much while you were a student in Hogwarts as you do now."

            Harry shrugged. "You just now noticed?" Snape stared at him, and Harry relented. "Well, no. I was too young and stupid to realize how to do it even if I wanted to. But mostly, I just wanted to be normal and for people to ignore me."

            "Why use them now, then?" Snape pressed.

            "Because that's the only way to get what I want," Harry said. "And I learned this summer that what I want can be important enough, sometimes, to overcome all those little moral scruples I have."

            "What you want," Snape said, moving his hand in a circle as though drawing one where Draco would stand, "is to help us."

            Harry nodded, not seeing what was so remarkable about that. Hadn't Snape called on him for help because he was relatively sure Harry would do it? "And for you to help Draco, if you can. If you know anything about Memory Charms, or the ways that his spell might be messed up."

            "You may bring me certain books, and Draco's notes," Snape said. "I feel it would be disruptive to my concentration, and thus to my work on the Resurrection Potion, if I were to see him now."

            Harry blinked and cocked his head. "But I'm not disruptive? Most people would be sure it was the other way around."

            Snape maintained his position, eyes on his potion, for a few moments. Harry turned to look, too, but although the potion was now a deeper blue than it had been when he entered the Shack, closer to purple, he didn't see what had attracted Snape's attention.

            "Go away, Potter," Snape said at last, but with a gentler tone in his voice than Harry had known he was capable of when dealing with a student he thought was stupid. "You are trying my patience."

            Harry shrugged and left through the tunnel, swinging his Cloak over him as he did. He reckoned that the good news about the golden aura was enough to expect out of Snape tonight.

*

            "This doesn't make any sense."

            Harry frowned and bent over the notes Draco had spread on the desk in front of them, keeping one eye out for Flitwick. Draco had smiled when the professor asked them if they wanted another partner to make their group a group truly working on Triad Charms, and said sweetly that they were getting along well now and would like to provide a study contrast to the other groups. Harry hadn't thought Flitwick would fall for it, but he'd been squeakingly excited.

            And since Harry and Draco could already do ordinary Triad Charms easily, that meant they could spend the time in Charms class working on the project to reverse the screwed-up Memory Charm on the Slytherins.

            "What doesn't make sense?" Harry asked, after looking over the notes and seeing nothing more than variations of the spells he and Draco had already discussed and agreed wouldn't work to make things better. He shot a glance at Draco under his lashes, and found him sitting with his chin propped up on one hand, staring down at the paper.

            The pose made Harry's stomach quiver in something that it took him a moment to recognize as approval, rather than a sign that he was about to heave up his lunch. He bit his lip and frowned. So, what, did he approve of Draco acting like an ordinary person rather than a perfectly poised and rational one? But he hadn't acted like one of those since the beginning of the year, anyway, and it was silly to reach back into the years of their rivalry when what was important was what they shared now.

            "This theory that says Memory Charms always have to be reversed." Draco's finger nearly chopped off Harry's nose as it flashed down and pounced on that innocent word. Harry blinked and jerked his head back, touching his nose to be sure it was still there. Draco, bent over the parchment, didn't notice, and Harry felt a helpless surge of pleasure as he watched the way Draco's hair fell off and over his ear. "What we want is to cast another spell in place of one."

            Harry decided to save the argument for later. "Hmm," he murmured, nodding. "Well, this is only one book, you know. Maybe not all of them say that."

            Draco glanced up, and stared at Harry, his eyes widening. Harry wondered what he would open his mouth to say.

            It couldn't have been a warning, because he was looking in the opposite direction of the curse and there was no way that he would have seen it approaching. Harry himself only had the blue light spreading out in a shape like an owl's wings as an indicator, and then he seized Draco and shoved him under the desk, following a moment later.

            The spell burst, and Harry heard fire crackling, clicking noises like claws on bone, screams--

            And then, utter silence and darkness.



*

            Sp777: If they even want to listen to him once it is.

            Zip: No, don’t worry, I understand. That’s one reason Harry and Draco aren’t sure what to do yet, because the problem is so complicated. There is a breath of hope in the fact that they all remember different experiences, though. It means that their memories aren’t getting reinforcement from each other, and there’s always that seed of doubt there.

            Fullmoons_wings: That would probably depend entirely on how they remove the spell and how close they grow during it. But yes, I think you can see the first real hints of a true slash relationship here.
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Parsimony