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Contracted	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18657 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Nineteen--These Dangerous Days

            "Will you not forgive me, Harry? I never meant to endanger you."

            It was easier than Harry had thought to meet Sandborn's eyes and nod. "I know, Jared," he whispered. "There's a lot you would be willing to do, but not that. I do know that."

            Sandborn looked at him with a face that was bright even though he wasn't smiling at the moment. Harry knew it was because he rarely called the man by his first name. Well, there were reasons for that, and Harry was never more glad that he had taken up the habit than now. It would be the first indication of difference, and if Sandborn wanted to take it as a good difference at first, that was fine. God knew that Harry would disabuse him quickly enough.

            "Good. Good, that's good," Sandborn said, and then seemed to realize how ridiculous he sounded and shook himself back to reality. "So. We have yet to discuss how we are going to handle Rettern's investigation."

            Harry frowned. "Is she doing anything worth moving openly to crush? There's been no further reports on it, that I heard. I can't believe that she's really going to uncover anything worth paying attention to."

            "She'll uncover nothing because there's nothing to uncover," Sandborn said, with a quick, keen look in Harry's direction.

            "Of course," Harry said, and glanced away for the first time.

            He could feel Sandborn studying him, watching every movement he made as jealously as a lover watching someone flirt with another. No, more jealously than that, Harry thought, because he couldn't imagine that Malfoy would feel jealous of anything except an orgy that Harry hadn't invited him to.

            That nearly caused a smile to cross his face. Granted, it would probably have been a small, tight smile, but still a distraction and a slip that Harry couldn't really afford.

            "What is wrong?" Sandborn's voice had heightened, quickened.

            Harry made himself turn back, and calmed the muscles in his body that wanted to snap and launch him in a quick leap to the side. It didn't take that much deception, after all, to feign fear of someone who had nearly killed him. "Nothing, sir. Of course you're right. The papers must have recognized that Rettern had nothing to back up her accusations with, and that's why they're not supporting her."

            Sandborn, leaning a hip on his desk, nodded, still looking at him with the subtle light changed to a frown. Then he shrugged, turned, and picked up a file from his desk. "There's something else I want you to look into," he said, turning around and tossing the file to Harry.

            Harry let himself flinch. Then he caught the file before it hit the floor, but the flinch had come first, and from the intense stillness in Sandborn's body, he had not only seen it, he knew what it meant.

            "What was that?" he asked. Harry wondered if he wanted to deny himself the knowledge or simply hoped to conceal his own reaction from Harry.

            "Sir?" Harry looked up from the file, which he had flipped open with indecent haste. "It looks like a file on Malfoy. You want me to look into his potion-making skills and find out what we have on him?" He carefully shaded his voice, his first soul glowing behind his eyes like a beating heart. There was resentment there, irritation, and eagerness that he hoped Sandborn would pick up on when he seemed so concentrated on the moment. Harry had to give the impression of someone drawn against his will to investigate Malfoy, but grateful for the excuse to spend time with him nonetheless.

            "Not that," Sandborn said, jerking his head at the file. "That. The way you ducked when I threw the file, as if you thought that..." He hesitated, as though the words would make it real, and then spoke them doggedly. Harry had never thought him a coward. "As if you thought that I was going to hit you."

            "Did I?" Harry pitched his voice a notch higher than normal, coughed, and dragged it back down. "Sorry, sir. Of course. I--didn't mean to."

            Sandborn used one hand to sweep aside a whole pile of excuses. "Never mind what you meant. What happened is what I'm interested in. Why did you do that?"

            "For silly reasons," Harry said promptly. This was the part of the conversation he had scripted out in his mind, and he was going to stick to it. Sandborn had stepped perfectly into the baited and set trap. "Because I had to think of the way that you attacked me as a battle situation, but I know now that it wasn't. It was simply your idiosyncratic reaction to a potion. I'll remember that, but it's one thing for my brain to know it and another thing for my Auror instincts to." He looked directly at Sandborn and offered up a weak smile that broke apart when Sandborn stared at him. "After all, when people try to choke me, usually I'm trying to arrest them in return, you know?"

            As he had meant it to, the joke fell flat. Sandborn shook his head. "I never meant to kill you," he said.

            "Of course, sir," Harry said, and his voice was almost perfect except for the tiny quaver of doubt, which he bit the inside of his cheek over. "I know that."

            "But you don't know it, not if you're acting like this." Sandborn sidled closer to him, one hand reaching out in a gesture that Harry would describe as yearning, if he wanted to describe it as anything at all. "Tell me what I can do to make you feel better."

            Harry took a deep breath and looked at the floor. "You don't have to change anything about the way you do things," he said. He made sure that Sandborn could barely hear his voice, and had to strain to get that much. "I'm the one with the problem, which makes me the one who has to change. I wish--I wish you would see that, sir. My problem is my problem."

            "My potions allergy caused the problem in the first place." Sandborn stepped gently away from him, as though he thought that motions like that would impact Harry's mood about the assault now. "If I promise that I won't do anything like that ever again, would that help?"

            "Can you promise not to be allergic to those particular potions ingredients again, sir?" Harry shook his head. "That's why I say it's my problem and not yours. You're the one who suffered, and I'm the one who's acting like--like you deliberately tried to kill me rather than being under the influence of something that made you act unlike yourself."

            Sandborn's face was shadowed. "I would still prefer it if you let me make restitution."

            Harry started to open his mouth, then slammed it shut again and turned his head to the side.

            "What is it?" Sandborn's voice turned harsh and brittle, as though it would break into shards of bone at any second. "I have asked you before not to lie to me, or to act as though anything I could give you would be too much."

            "I would prefer it," Harry said, letting his voice waver and break, "if I could work with someone else on matters like the Rettern investigation and the next few public appearances that I have to put in rather than taking orders directly from you."

            The silence in the room was loud enough then to qualify it as a noise in itself. Harry swallowed as much to break that silence as for any other reason and glanced up at Sandborn.

            Who was looking into a corner of the room, his jaw working as he evidently fought down the words he wanted to say.

            "Sir?" Harry ventured quietly.

            "I didn't realize that it had affected you that much," Sandborn said, and this time his voice had strength again, the strength of iron that Harry was used to hearing from him. It would have taken fine ears indeed, or long experience with the man, to realize that there was a tremor under the surface of the iron that rendered it molten and less than trustworthy.

            "You tried to kill me," Harry said, and now his voice splintered and rose again. His first soul was breathing in every motion he made, and he could only tell that he was acting when he listened to the center of himself where the third dwelt. "I can still feel your fingers on my throat when I go to sleep at night. No, it's not fun, and it's not pleasant, and I hate it." He paused and turned his back on Sandborn, clutching the file he'd tossed him as if he could wrinkle the papers inside it and thus render them harmless.

            "It wasn't your fault," he said. "That's what I keep telling myself. It wasn't your fault."

            "But I should have been able to hold back," Sandborn said, and his voice was full of all the earnestness Harry could wish, and would have felt awful about compelling if this had been real and Sandborn the friend that he had always wanted to consider himself to Harry. "I don't know why the potion made me so suspicious of you, although I think that was Malfoy's intent in the first place. If someone else has you, even just as a friend or employee, then he has to corrupt that link so that he can have you for himself."

            That was an interpretation that Harry hadn't thought of, and he twitched his head without looking back. "I don't get that impression from him," he muttered. "But we know that I'm not the most trustworthy witness when it comes to him."

            "No. Forgive me, Harry, but you aren't."

            Swallowing again, Harry turned around and gave Sandborn a hesitant smile. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for being so understanding and trying to understand. I want to work with someone else for right now, but I don't think it'll have to endure long. I'll...come back soon."

            Sandborn nodded. "Do what you need to do," he said. "Take as much time as you need. So long as you can come back and we can be partners again."

            Harry debated inwardly, decided that the time was wrong to take that as the insult to Ron that he wanted to take it as, and bowed himself to the door. Sandborn kept a smile on his face all the way, and as far as Harry could tell, it was sincere. That meant that Sandborn was convinced Harry's fear of him and desire to stay as far away from him as possible was temporary.

            Keep telling yourself that, Harry thought, and then stepped out of the office and stood there, shivering, until a convenient witness came by: Auror Stine, who was caught somewhere in between being convinced that Harry was the legend he appeared to be and trying to treat him like a normal person. She screeched to a stop and eyed him apprehensively.

            "Auror Potter?" she asked, when he didn't move. "Are you all right? Has someone tried to assassinate the Minister?" She gave his scar the covert glance that people used when they were trying to think of a good way to ask whether it was burning.

            "No," Harry said. "Something happened in the office that I wasn't comfortable with, but..." He pretended to notice who he was talking to and gathered himself with a little shake and a meaningless smile. "I'm fine, Auror. Thank you for your concern."

            He shivered again as he turned away, and saw the subtle blaze light in Auror Stine's eyes.

            The seed was planted.

*

            "Explain to me why I should welcome you into my house, Mr. Malfoy."

            Draco smiled. He knew better than the forbidding words would have let him, if he had chosen to pay attention to that only. Kelly Marks had that slight twitch at the corner of her eye that said she was interested in speaking to him, but she had her arms folded and her leg cocked behind her door in such a way that she could shut it with a slight motion. He would have to persuade her of her own interest.

            "Because I have a donation to make," Draco said. "Galleons that long to fly away from my impure hands and into a cleaner place." He smiled at her again, this time letting his lips widen until she smiled reluctantly back. "And I thought it might as well be the coffers of Labor Holds as anywhere else."

            Marks waited until Draco genuinely thought he would have to back away and try his luck elsewhere. Then she nodded slightly and stepped into the house, calling over her shoulder, "Come in."

            Draco did, glancing around as he entered. Marks's house doubled as the offices for Labor Holds, a charity that did its best to give work to unemployed wizards and experience to people who needed to do something while they worked out problems, like new illnesses or general malaise, that had driven them from their old positions. Draco admitted that the decor--plain white walls with unrealistically cheery pictures of waving wizards here and there, lists of jobs, lists of requirements--fit that role, but he wouldn't have wanted to live here.

            "Why the need to make this donation?" Marks asked, once they were seated in the inner office. Draco was relieved to see the few touches of something that made her human here, the desk larger than it needed to be and of a more shiny, reflective wood, and the walls behind her bright with personal photographs.             Marks put her hands behind her head and studied him, her red hair and brown eyes giving him the uncomfortable vision of a Weasley business owner. "I quite understand about Galleons burning your hands, but you're not the sort of person who understands what work means, or why it's important."

            Draco adopted an injured expression. "Simply because I don't do it myself doesn't mean I don't understand it."

            "Yes, it does," Marks said, uncompromising. "Tell me why."



            "Because," Draco said, and he dropped the gentle manner into the rubbish bin where it belonged, leaning forwards until he nearly crossed the shiny desk, "I found your name on a list of people who were prepared to testify against me when I was tried for being a stupid child, and I want to know why."

            Marks dropped her smile and narrowed her eyes as if squinting into strong sunlight. Draco squinted back, to let her know how ridiculous she looked, and Marks blinked and dropped her hands to her lap.

            "You weren't being tried for being a stupid child," she said, in the throaty, outraged murmur that Draco had heard her use when someone wouldn't hire a proven thief and incompetent. How dare they have common sense? "You were being tried for the Mark on your arm."

            "And because of who my parents were, and because the Ministry wanted my family's money and property," Draco said, nodding in the manner of someone who had heard the same story multiple times. "Fine. We can agree on all that. But what I want to know is why your name was on that list."

            Marks watched him. She had the ability, sometimes, to fasten a cold mask on her features that Draco couldn't penetrate and which no twitches would escape. But even the donning of that mask was revealing, Draco thought. This matter of offering her services as a witness was important to her, more important than Draco had anticipated.

            "You have no idea," she whispered at last, when Draco went on staring and so showed that he was impervious to her mask. Her voice shook, and she closed her eyes and gripped the air with one fist as though that would make the sound obey her, too. "You have no idea what it's like for honest wizards to see you living in that Manor of yours, with the vaults that you couldn't spend if you lived to be two hundred, doing nothing that you don't want to."

            Draco snorted. "I know exactly what sort of envy I would feel. And I know that most of your clients would trade their lots for mine in an instant. Don't pretend that we're of two different species, hardworking and lazy, or honest and criminal." He paused, then added delicately, "And at the time, the owner of the Malfoy properties and ability to be idle was my father. It makes no sense for you to be prejudiced against me, the heir."

            "I knew that if someone didn't put you in prison, too, you would simply take over the properties and vaults and continue the Malfoy tradition of uselessness." Marks gave him a tight smile. "I thought I would cut the evil growth off at the root. You had no children that I'd been able to discover, and that meant someone else, someone more deserving, would take them--"

            She broke off, because Draco was laughing soundlessly, making no effort to conceal it, his jaws parted and soft, soundless wheezes escaping. "What are you doing?" she demanded. "If you treat my words with so little seriousness--"

            "The Ministry would hardly have redistributed those Galleons once they had hold of them," Draco explained, shaking his head in pity. "They would have taken over the properties, too, and probably made them into Auror training barracks or something equally useful. Why would you imagine that a petty triumph against me would turn to real gain for you or all those 'honest' wizards you represent? You can't be that naive, after watching what happened to the property of the Death Eaters who were convicted."

            Marks shook her head. "How do you know that revenge wasn't enough for me?" she asked, but her voice lacked the undertone of fury and righteousness that Draco was listening for.

            "Because you would have made that clear if that was true," Draco said simply. "And you didn't. Therefore, it wasn't."

            Marks shut her eyes. "Explain to me why I shouldn't refuse your donation, then," she said, with a dullness that wanted to be triumph and wasn't anywhere close. "You've come in here, made fun of me, proven that you can't understand the people with whom I work, proven that you don't understand work itself...why would I want your money?"

            "Because it's a way of getting that revenge in miniature," Draco said calmly. "I give you permission to publicize what I'm doing today in any way that will benefit your organization."

            Marks opened her eyes and stared at him. "What? Why?"

            "The bargain," Draco said, "is that you and I have nothing more to do with each other. You don't think that you have some sort of power over me that can guilt me into donating again. You don't try and spread rumors. You insist that you don't know why I made the donation, or else you make up one reason and stick with that; I don't know, that would be based on your publicity. You don't come near me again. And I'll repay the favor."

            Marks shook her head. "But why? If you feel no guilt, then you have no reason to come near me again, no reason to do this in the first place."

            Draco stood and looked down on her. She colored and started to rise, then changed her mind and sat down again.

            "Call it," Draco said softly, "the price of a clean conscience. Mine, not yours. I don't want to hear your words about what I am and what I do with my money again, because all you've proven is that you don't understand different kinds of work." He bent towards her and lowered his voice. "And I want to make sure that I never need to hear them again. Don't send me begging letters by owl, either, the way that some have appeared on my desk. Understood?"

            "You," said Marks, and then no more words. She bent her head. One hand scratched out in a way that made Draco feel sorry for the wood of her desk, then fell back to her side again.

            "I'm so glad that we had this talk," Draco said dryly, and turned away, pausing only to drop a bag of Galleons on the desk as he went.

            Outside, he closed his eyes and tilted his head back, filling his lungs with the thick goodness of air somewhere people didn't hate him. Then he began walking. He waited until he had reached the Apparition point he'd used to come here and was sure that no one was watching him from the building.

            Then he permitted himself a single shark's grin, so wide that it would have stirred even the dim-witted Marks to suspicion, and swung a fist at the air.

            That had been some of his best acting ever, especially at the end. Marks would be questioning her judgment now, wondering if he was less idle than she had thought, if he was human with feelings to be hurt. And Draco had guarded against her offering testimony to someone who wanted to prosecute him, unless she wanted to forfeit both the money and her credibility in private bargaining.

            He was impressive.

            Swaggering just a bit, Draco Apparated to his next appointment.

*

            "Hullo."

            Daphne had to admit that it was amusing to see the calm, collected girl she remembered from school, who had grown into a woman as calm and collected, leap into the air and do a tiny two-step while uttering a shriek. She came down facing Daphne, with her wand drawn. Daphne, who sat on the windowsill of her private office, lifted her hands to show that she had no wand of her own.

            "What are you doing here?" Hermione Granger-Weasley had quieted enough to ask that. She didn't ask who Daphne was. Interesting. That probably meant she knew that she wouldn't get the right name. She took a step closer, eyes flickering to the door. Daphne took away the mental point she'd awarded her. She'd just come through the door herself; she ought to know that there was nothing wrong with the panel or the lock. "What do you want?"

            "Those are the same question," Daphne observed peacefully, always anxious to help. "You could ask who I was, but that wouldn't get you much further, seeing as I have no intention of telling you. So I'll tell you that I'm here to warn you to look to your legislation."

            Granger-Weasley dropped her wand at once, her eyes sharpening. This was obviously a kind of battle she understood, Daphne decided, or thought she did. "Threats won't work," she said quietly. "Everything happening in this office is heard."

            "Oh, the recording spells?" Daphne smiled. "They were nested. Clever. They'll come alive again about twenty minutes after I exit the office. A perfect time for any private conversations you want to have. Other than this one, I mean. The legislation you've got passed concerning house-elves. It passed too easily, don't you think? Look for a resurgence of your political opposition soon." There. That ought to be enough. Draco had asked Daphne to warn Potter's friend that one of the victories he'd won for her would start to falter soon, and Daphne had agreed because she thought it'd be amusing. But she hadn't said she would explain the contract or any of the rest of it. She stood to leave.

            "Who are you?" Granger-Weasley demanded, thus proving that she didn't listen to advice.

            Daphne nodded at her. "A friend. Farewell." Granger-Weasley stepped forwards with her wand still lifted, and Daphne sighed. "The trouble with most people is that they don't learn," she complained, and flicked her hand sharply downwards. Granger-Weasley's eyes followed the motion, of course, and she cried out as mist from the minor amulet Daphne had carried flooded the office.

            Under cover of the mist, Daphne exited the same way she had come, through the enchanted window. She carried an adapted Portkey that would briefly make it into a real window, a door to another place, and thus not trigger either the Ministry's wards on the doors or the wards that alerted the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to unauthorized Portkeys.

            That did mean that she came out twenty feet above the ground on the side of a Muggle building, but Daphne caught herself with an easy hold on the rope she'd left there, swung, and went about her business.

*

            Nubia: Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. And I think that Draco is going to have reason, pretty soon, to feel more for Harry than he thought he would.

            SP777: His plan is what he explained to Draco in the last chapter: he'll get back at Sandborn by hurting him and taking away his best support.
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