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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 Seventeen—In the Case of a Riddle

            “Well, it must mean something.”

            Harry kept his eyes closed and his voice lazy and flowing, draping over Draco’s taut muscles like a piece of well-woven cloth. It was becoming painfully evident that Draco liked to withdraw after sex and think of other things, as if that could make up for what he had “done.” It had happened the first time; it was happening now. At least Draco sat on the couch wrapped in a plain robe instead of dressing completely, and even his voice had a softer edge than normal. Harry opened one eye for a quick glimpse of him tilting his head back and shutting his own eyes, although they snapped open in the next moment. Harry hastily shut his own.

            “Of course it means something,” Draco snapped. “The stupid patterns your books are arranged in on your shelves mean something. That doesn’t mean we can figure out what it is simply by applying our brains to it.”

            “The Oracle chooses the most obvious metaphorical meanings it can,” Harry said, and tilted his head to the side, then his neck, then his arms, then his whole body, before he sat up. “What we have to think of is what a nest can mean and then slowly eliminate the significances that don’t make sense. What?” he added, because this time Draco was gaping at him, and sad to say, Harry didn’t think it had much to do with the long, lean lines of his own body under his robes.

            “You know the word significances?”

            Harry clapped a hand to his forehead and leaned back. “Dear Lord and Master,” he intoned, “someday help me to know what I did to offend Draco Malfoy so that he will forgive me and I can spend the rest of my life worshipping at his feet. Amen.”

            Draco flushed again and touched his palm to his forehead, which seemed to be a means of calming his own agitated thoughts. “Bloody hell, Harry, this is new to me, too.”

            “I know,” Harry said. “But insulting my intelligence, particularly when you’re relying on it to help you solve this riddle, doesn’t strike me as a particularly smart thing to do.”

            Absurdly, Draco relaxed, smiling a little and turning his head as though to look out a window that wasn’t there. “So now that we’ve both insulted each other’s intelligence, we can get back to thinking about the riddle?”

            Harry rose to his feet and bent over to kiss the top of Draco’s head. “I’m willing.”

*

            “A nest can mean a place where an animal lives, of course.”

            Harry nodded solemnly and wrote it down. Draco had insisted on getting fully dressed again, and now he paced back and forth behind Harry’s chair, his arms folded and his head bowed as though he was hunting down the trail of the riddle. Harry sat at his table, the same one where they had spread and studied the letter from Kingsley, and played scribe.

            “And it can mean a sheltered, enclosed space.” Draco paused to snort. “If it means that, good luck finding anywhere in the wizarding world that doesn’t qualify.”

            “The Forbidden Forest,” Harry said promptly.

            “There are plenty of the other kind of nests in there.” Draco turned around to scowl at him. “A nest can be a place something is born.”

            Harry opened his mouth to respond, and thought better of it. Best to keep the quill moving for now, and hope that Draco would take any flat contradiction of his words better later. He wrote that down and added a question mark against the word “something.”

            “Or a nest can be a name for a group of people that’s far too tight and entwined,” Draco said, stopping in his pacing. “I’ve heard the word used about Slytherin, for example. They thought of us as a nest of serpents.”

            “So they did,” Harry said, voice neutral and, he had to admit, exquisite with it, and wrote that definition down.

            “They,” Draco said, swinging on him. “You might as well admit that you thought the same thing, Gryffindor that you were.”

            Harry made a show of leaning back and slowly lifting his eyes to Draco’s face, as though oppressed by a great weight. Then he said, “Shall I tell you something? Something I’ve told very few other people?” There were only Ron and Hermione, really, and they had taken the news better than Harry had expected.

            “Yes, what?” Draco faced him with head up and taut and trembling, as though daring him to try and escape the accusation of his House identity.

            “The Sorting Hat would have placed me in Slytherin if it had its way,” Harry said pleasantly, and watched.

            Draco stepped back from him. Then he looked down as though expecting serpents to slide from under Harry’s nails. Harry held up his hands and turned them innocently back and forth, giving Draco the chance to admire them, and, incidentally, remember the pleasure that those hands had brought him.

            “No,” Draco said. “You’re lying.”

            Harry sighed. “Why would I? It’s true I refused, because two people I trusted had hinted that everything bad happened in Slytherin and I didn’t want to become a wizard like the one who’d murdered my parents. But if the Hat had been more stubborn, or if I hadn’t known anything and just let it put me wherever it wanted, then I would have been your Housemate.”

            “You’re lying to make yourself appear a better partner to me,” Draco said, and turned away with his arms folded protectively around his midsection.

            Harry tried to keep his expression under control, but he really couldn’t, and the snort worked itself out through his nostrils despite his tight restraint. By the time that Draco had turned around to glare accusingly again, he was laughing, his head bowed, his chuckles turned into helpless chortles against his hands.

            “What?” Draco demanded. “You can’t deny that you want to sleep with me more than I want to sleep with you, and you might try that kind of thing to impress me. Come up with a way to convince me that you had the mind of a Slytherin, and I might have to believe you—”

            He stopped.

            Harry began to applaud softly. Draco glared at him with more red working its way down his face and neck.

            “There speaks the intelligent man I know and love,” Harry said, nodding, and totally ignoring Draco’s whole-body flinch at the last word. “The one who captivated me, the one who’s teaching me daily about my limitations and my preconceptions. You know that I have a Slytherin mind already; I hope I’ve showed you that. And I’m intelligent, and I can detect lies, and I’m magically powerful, and I’m mad about you. Why wouldn’t you keep me near you? The advantage lies with you, as the one less in love. You ought to have seen that by now.”

            Draco stood there, head down, but the flush gradually fading from his cheeks. Harry realized that he had no idea what he was thinking. But Draco kept silent, and in the silence, Harry pushed on.

            “It’s not like you, or at least the person you like to think of yourself as, to give up the advantage I represent,” Harry said, and pressed a little harder when Draco bowed his head further, so that it was impossible to see his eyes at all. “You’d want to remain in contact with me after the case ended, and here I’m offering you a way to do it. You can keep me on a long leash, not spend every moment with me, and I would accept it. I want to be your lover. It doesn’t mean that we’d spend every waking moment together. I’m offering you the ideal situation. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of it?”

            Draco shivered a little and lifted his head. His face was gaunt and sharp, but Harry caught his breath at what he saw in his eyes.

            “You’re right,” Draco whispered, and held up one hand as though snatching the declaration from the air. “You’re right. I have no reason to be avoiding this as hard as I can, for as long as I can, except that I’m afraid. And why am I afraid? That somehow you would manage to betray me harder than anyone else ever has, more painfully than anyone else ever has? So what? I’ve had friends betray me, and contacts, and enemies, and I’ve weathered it. For me to worry about it this much suggests that you already have deeper hooks in my heart than I thought you did.”

            Harry found himself smiling. He reached out his hand, and Draco was there to clasp it this time, staring fiercely into his face.

            “I like to know myself,” Draco said. “I like to be in control of myself. Lately, I haven’t been. I want to tame the advantage you represent, use it to let me understand myself better, not give it up.”

            And he tightened his hands on Harry’s and pulled him close for a kiss.

*

            “I don’t see anything that stands out more than anything else.”

            Draco’s voice was low and savage as he stared at the piece of parchment on the table, the one that Harry had written all the various meanings of “nest” they could think of down on. Harry rose up and stood behind him, gently massaging Draco’s shoulders. He kissed the nape of his neck and murmured condolences.

            “The riddle has to mean something,” Draco said, leaning against him. He was still a little stiff, but more open and free than he had been with Harry before. Some of that was self-consciousness, Harry knew, pure determination to hold onto the knowledge he had gained of himself, but it led to the same results for Harry, so he still valued it. “You said that, right? That the Oracle didn’t spout meaningless nonsense, it always gave something that could be interpreted?”

            “Right.” Harry increased the pressure of his hand rubbing on Draco’s shoulders. The tension flowed away as he touched it.

            “The problem is that the riddle’s too wide right now, or what we’ve come up with is.” Draco braced his hands on the table on either side of the parchment and leaned forwards, bringing his nose closer to the writing but incidentally (or perhaps not) also increasing the pressure that Harry could bring to bear on his tension. “We’re thinking of too much. A nest of vampires might have kidnapped my father, but the possibility is low.”

            Harry hummed, and went on stroking Draco’s shoulders.

            “Are you even listening?” Draco twisted around and frowned at him.

            Harry smiled at him. “Of course I am. It’s a pleasure to me to listen to your brain rattle along the smooth tracks towards a conclusion. And when you’ve run out of track, I can lay down the final few rails to get you to the goal.”

            Draco narrowed his eyes. “You think you’ve thought of something I haven’t thought of?”

            “As you pointed out yourself,” Harry said patiently, “I chose to be a Gryffindor and not a Slytherin. I always think I’ve thought of something you haven’t thought of.”

            Draco shoved at him, but Harry didn’t choose to be moved, and it just made the both of them sway ridiculously. After a moment, Draco seemed to realize that, and cleared his throat roughly. “Fine. What do you suggest?”

            Harry fluttered his eyelashes at him. “Sex?”

            “Besides that.” Now Draco looked as though he were trying not to laugh and was irritated at himself for finding the temptation so hard to resist, which cheered Harry immensely.

            “Fine,” Harry said, when they’d had a staring contest for a number of minutes and he knew that Draco wouldn’t let him simply turn away from this. “I think the word ‘nest’ is metaphorical, not real. As you pointed out, vampires could have taken him, but we don’t know that, and we should stay close to what we know.”

            Draco shook his head in disgust. “Which is a mysterious letter evidently written by a man who’s in love with my father, and a man who wants my father to destroy his soul.”

            “We don’t know it was him Immortal wanted,” Harry corrected him scrupulously. “He never mentioned his name, and I would have sensed a lie.”

            Draco started, as he continually did now when Harry brought that up, as if he had to forget about it to be comfortable. Harry leaned back and held his eyes. “Otherwise known as the reason you hired me,” he added.

            “Yes, yes.” Draco made brushing-aside motions with his hands. “But do you always need to protect the honor of criminals like this?”

            “Yes,” Harry said brightly, and waited. As expected, Draco shoved him.

            This time, though, Draco continued on instead of letting himself be distracted. “What do you think the nest means, then? Metaphorical instead of real, fine. We’re not looking for a dragon’s hoard or a vampires’ colony. But what does it mean? A metaphorical nest still leaves us with too many places.”

            Harry opened his mouth to answer—

            And his brain leaped and spun and came down gently on the right answer, what he was sure was the right answer, the same way he had been sure that the stone in Lucius’s cell concealed the letter, the same way that he had known in the past that a “witness” was lying before he gained this stupid ability.

            “I think I know,” he said. “But I need you to answer me a question first, about that charm you used to determine who had written the letter, because I’m not familiar with the magic and the answer to the question will make the difference.”

            Draco blinked and studied his face as though looking for some cause of the unaccustomed seriousness in Harry’s tone. Then he nodded slowly.

            Harry licked his lips. “Does the charm have anything to say about willingness? That is, could someone have enchanted or forced Kingsley to write that letter? Would the charm show the name of anyone else under those circumstances, or would it always be him as long as his hand physically moved the quill?”

            Draco stared. Then he said, “Yes, he could have been enchanted or forced to write it, and the charm would still reveal that it was his handwriting, because it is. But then you posit a whole nest—pardon the expression—of enemies out there that we don’t know about, and that perhaps my father’s soul has already been destroyed.”

            He was getting steadily more upset, and Harry reached out to gently stroke his hair down and shake his head. “Sorry for upsetting you. What I meant was—I think I might know someone who would have reason to force Kingsley to write that letter, perhaps with the Imperius Curse, and still take your father away. And the nest idea makes sense with that person, as well.”

            Draco leaned forwards. “Who?”

            Harry met his eyes again. “Your mother.”

            Draco looked as though someone had hit him across the face. It gave Harry an excuse to put his arms around Draco again and hold him, but he found it less satisfying than he would have if he hadn’t been the one to make Draco look like that.

            “She couldn’t,” Draco whispered. “She knows—she’s been on her own for years, only coming home sometimes, and she knows the risk it would be to get my father out of Azkaban. She wouldn’t do it.”

            “What if she found out about the threat that Immortal represents, and leaped to the same conclusion we did, that they wanted your father for his body, to bring back the Dark Lord?” Harry shook his head. “Not unreasonable, when we straight there ourselves. And the nest idea—the nest is a place where you’re born, yeah, but it can also be a home. We talk about birds having nests, not just young birds. Malfoy Manor.”

            It was almost cute to see the way that Draco’s brain was scrambling to keep up. Well, Harry was sure that there were things Draco could think and talk about that would leave Harry dazed in much the same way. Potions theory, for example. Harry would invite him to talk about some of them when this case was over, and then Harry would lean back and listen to him in love and awe.

            Is it love?

            Yes, it is.

            The certainty settled in Harry’s chest, a ballast of contentment, at the same moment as Draco said, “She still wouldn’t take the risk. And it would be a risk to use the Imperius Curse on the Minister and force him to go to Azkaban, take out a prisoner, and then use a Memory Charm on his own guards.”

            “Maybe she did it some other way, then,” Harry said quietly. “But that’s the best idea I can come up with.” He was also sure that he was right, but it was hard enough to explain his “hunts” to other Aurors and give them the right idea, let alone to someone like Draco, who had little idea of what Auror work entailed. Harry would explain it later if he really wanted to hear, though.

            “All right,” Draco whispered. “We should—if we just go to the Manor and confront her, then she’ll probably face us down, and then move him. We need to go about this subtly.”

            Harry lounged back and smiled at him. “That’s where you come in.”

            As he had known would happen, that made Draco’s eyes brighten and his face relax as he found something new to work towards. Harry knew that about him, that he was happiest when he had something to do.

            As was Harry, for that matter.

            This really is a match made in heaven. Or, well, hell for some people, he added conscientiously, because he tried never to neglect the perspective of his enemies.

*

            Nightlo: Thank you!

            delia cerrano: I think Draco will please you in this chapter.

            Makoto_Sagara: Well, you have your answer now.

            polka dot: If you think Draco’s family can be cultish, at least.

            Silverkitten: Captivating to some people, at least.

            Seiren: Thank you!
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