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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 Nineteen—Friendship in Public

            “Hello, Potter.”

            That was Draco, calling to him from the Slytherin table. Harry paused, and felt a slow smile form on his face, despite the righteously shocked expressions of half the Gryffindors.

            So that’s the way Draco wants to play it, is it? I had assumed he would want to keep it secret outside of the times that we’re alone, but...if that’s the way he wants to do it, then I’m more than agreeable.

            “Hello, Malfoy,” he said back, with an acknowledging nod, and sat down to toast and marmalade and scrambled eggs that looked more like fluffy mushrooms at the Gryffindor table. He poked at them, and frowned. He had to admit that sometimes he wondered about the house-elves’ cooking skills, and whether they were really as great as everyone claimed when they were discussing Hogwarts.

            “Why did Malfoy say hello to you, mate?” Ron muttered, leaning across to him as though his words didn’t boom out anyway, even in a whisper, and attract the attention of half the Great Hall. Hermione looked back and forth between them, but didn’t listen as avidly as she would have normally; Harry thought the bloody great book on Memory Charms in her hands was probably distracting her. She whispered a Cleaning Charm as he watched, to get rid of some of the flying crumbs that had dropped on it.

            “We’re sort of friends now,” Harry said casually, and bit into the eggs, finding them good after all, as he waited for the explosion to start.

            Ron didn’t explode, though. He sat there, blinking and building up steam. Harry took a hasty gulp of pumpkin juice, just in case Ron knocked it over when his arms started flailing around. That would be any moment now, or so Harry’s Ron-temper-sense judged.

            “What?” Ron hissed at last, but even that was closer to a whisper than an explosion. Harry approved. Whether Hermione had trained that into him or Ron had simply realized on his own that not everything needed to be a public spectacle, Harry didn’t know, but it meant they stood a chance of keeping private disagreements private.

            “In the hospital wing,” Harry explained, and glared as a glob of marmalade landed on his jumper. He spelled it away and then went back to eating his toast, until Ron’s glare sunburning the side of his face told him he would have to explain more than that. “He was there when I woke up, and he and I talked about the curse that Parkinson cast at me. Then we yelled some, and fought some, and it turns out that he isn’t all bad, when he forgets to act the part of the haughty pure-blood for three seconds. We’re sort of friends now. We shook hands and everything. We’ll see how it goes.” He darted a quick glance at Draco, only to find him speaking with a girl who looked like one of the younger Slytherins. Harry relaxed a bit. That was a good thing, if the spell he’d cast on his yearmates didn’t drive everyone in his House away. Newfound Gryffindor friend or not, Harry reckoned Draco needed other Slytherins to be around, too.

            “That makes no sense,” Ron said blankly. “So he was in the way when someone cast a curse at you. So you saved his life. You already saved his life, with the Fiendfyre. Why would he care so much about this?”

            “Oh, honestly, Ron,” Hermione said, and carefully marked her place in the book with a finger before she looked up, as if she thought the huge book was likely to fall shut any time soon. “Harry just said that they didn’t bond over something like that. They bonded over discussing things like rational adults. I’m proud of Harry. It’s about time that he got over his obsession with Malfoy.” She nodded to Harry, took a prim sip of milk, and then opened the book again and started skimming down the lines of what looked like a list, her lips moving.

            “But, Hermione,” Ron whispered. He looked around as if to make sure that no one was paying attention, cringed a bit when he realized that half the Gryffindor table was still paying attention, and went on in an even lower tone. “You know what he called you. You know how much he’s always hated you.”

            Hermione looked at Ron again, and gave a sweet smile. Harry hastily gulped more food. He knew that smile, even if Ron didn’t—and it was kind of weird that Ron didn’t, since he was Hermione’s boyfriend. It meant Hermione was about to strike out with words the way Ron did with chess moves.

            “And doesn’t that mean that I should be the one to decide if he gets forgiven or not?” Hermione countered. “Because I’m the one he called that, and the one whose feelings were hurt? Or do you think that you get to make the decision?”

            Ron was at least bright enough to get the tone, if not the smile. He smiled and spread his hands in what he probably thought was a helpless “don’t-hurt-me” gesture. “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t think you’ve thought this through, is all. He called you that. That means he can’t change, and—and just because girls might think he can doesn’t mean Harry should.”

            “Oh, shit,” Harry mouthed, and inhaled the rest of his toast with a speed that would have made Hermione scold him ordinarily. For right now, though, her attention was squarely on her next hapless victim. She even let the book really fall shut, and leaned forwards.

            “What you have to say is extremely important to me, Ron,” Hermione was murmuring as Harry squirmed off the bench, enchanted a portion of his eggs to fold up inside a bag that had Preservation Charms on it, and shook crumbs off himself. “And I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

            “Of course, Hermione,” Ron said, and gave a squeeze of her hand that basically had no way not to come off as condescending. “What you’re saying is important to me, too!”

            Hermione gave a wider smile, one that made her teeth look remarkably like fangs.

            Harry ran for it.

*

            “You have seen no sign of the pup-killers?”

            “No,” Harry admitted, and leaned back against the rock behind him. It was quiet here in the Forest, quieter than he had imagined it could be after a full and busy day in the castle. There was Ron to talk with, and Hermione to agree with, and Draco sometimes talking to him and sometimes ignoring him as if he couldn’t decide yet which option was the most comfortable, and Klein’s instructions to attend to, and a Transfiguration essay to rewrite because of what McGonagall called “a disgrace to spelling” in his last one. Lots to do.

            And now, the wolfwere to visit.

            “You have not been looking,” the wolfwere said, and Harry made himself listen for the tone underneath the words instead of only the words. He heard no fury, no great anger, even. The wolfwere simply stood still and looked at him, and asked as if this was a statement of fact. Or said it was. After all, if Harry had been in the Forest looking for the Death Eaters or their hiding place, the wolfwere would probably have smelled him.

            “No,” Harry admitted. “I’m sorry. I’ve had other things to do and think about.” He stifled another yawn. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a night’s sleep unbroken by worries about Draco, Snape, the wolfwere, or the Death Eaters. And now he had to add Parkinson to the list.

            “There is another way to search,” said the wolfwere, pacing slowly back and forth in front of him. It seemed to be comfortable on knees and knuckles, almost like an ape. Harry sometimes wanted to ask it whether it wouldn’t be easier to stand up on two legs or drop down to all fours, but that seemed rude.

            “How?” Harry sat down on the ground, and pinched his arm so he wouldn’t fall asleep. The moon was high above the clearing, shining in, and he would have thought that would keep him awake, but it might not be enough with his muscles trembling the way they were. Stupid lack of sleep.

            “There is a way to look from afar,” said the wolfwere, and he turned towards Harry with his teeth shining like cage bars. Or the bars in an Azkaban prison cell, Harry thought, and shivered. “But it requires meat.”

            “I can’t get any of their bodies for you,” Harry said patiently. “Even the werewolf’s.” He had asked the Ministry about releasing some of Greyback’s body parts, and received no answer. The Unspeakables, who studied werewolves, probably thought the request too ridiculous to bother with, and they were had to be the one Department in the Ministry who didn’t fear Harry making a fuss to have the corpse released to him.

            “Or bone,” the wolfwere went on, as though he hadn’t heard Harry. “Or blood.” He raised his head and stared Harry in the eye.

            Harry swallowed, wondering why his throat was so dry. Probably lack of sleep, too. “You have some?” he asked. “How?”

            “Blood splashed on a knife,” the wolfwere answered, and his teeth were really gleaming now, one hand-like paw picking up the dirt at his feet and crumbling it. “A knife the killers dropped. A knife they did not want. I took it and buried it.”

            Harry considered that for a second. He’d heard of spells that worked with liquid blood, sure, lots of them, but never any that worked with dried blood. He wondered for a second whether it was even worth trying, and then pushed the notion away. Of course it was, to settle the wolfwere’s mind and try to help him find peace. Whether Harry could do it was a different question.

            “Did you want to do it yourself?” he asked.

            The wolfwere shook his head. “I could do magic with the blood of the dead,” he said. “But this may be the blood of the living.”

            Harry nodded. If they didn’t know what Death Eater it came from, then they didn’t know if they were dead in the battle in the Forest, or murdered by Greyback, or alive and in Auror custody. “All right. What do I have to do?”

*

            Harry settled into his chair in Charms with his mind whirling. The wolfwere had been able to give Harry the knife last night and explain the ritual he would use to find the remaining Death Eaters, but it was so complex that it had to wait for the next day. It would be best under a full moon, anyway, or so said the books that Harry had consulted. He wondered—

            “Potter.”

            Draco slid into the seat beside him, staring at him so forcefully that Harry automatically looked around for a mess he’d made. Of course, he’d only been in Charms two seconds, but that might not matter to Draco.

            “You said that you would meet me last night to look at Memory Charms again,” Draco said, lowering his voice and covering it further by putting his Charms book and a selection of quills on the desk. “Why didn’t you?”

            Harry grimaced. He’d completely forgotten about the meeting with Draco in his haste to get out and meet with the wolfwere. He shook his head. Sometimes he thought he needed to be two separate people to get everything done he wanted to do.

            “Sorry,” he murmured, and nodded to Draco. “I wanted to meet—our friend from the Forest, and talk to him about the people he saw there.”

            For a moment, Draco’s fingers tightened around the quill he held, and Harry heard it creak. “He saw them?” Draco hissed.

            “No,” Harry said. “But he wants my help finding them again.”

            Draco laid the quill down, smoothing the feather. “I think that what I want your help for is slightly more important,” he said, not looking at Harry.

            “I think they’re both important,” Harry said, and then they had to pay attention as Flitwick started talking about Triad Charms. Harry thought they both probably knew more about the Charms than the professor gave them credit for, but, well, he was the teacher. Only a few more months of this, and Harry would never have to listen to another professor again.

            Unless he did something mad like go to a Muggle university or something. Harry shuddered.

            “You need to help me fend off my friends and figure out this spell, or else they could kill me,” Draco said, when they were free to talk again.

            Harry studied his face. “Did they do something else to you over the weekend? Only you look more frightened than you did.”

            Draco’s shoulders slammed back, and he gave Harry the most incredulous, haughty glare imaginable. “I do not look frightened.”

            “Yes, you do,” Harry said frankly. “Not a whole lot, but it’s there, and you have to remember that the Death Eaters tried to kill us, too, and did kill the wolfwere’s pups. I’m sorry I forgot. Let’s not start a row about it, okay?” He glanced back at the notes in front of him as he felt Flitwick’s eyes on his back.

            “I don’t look frightened,” Draco hissed at him.

            “Then I apologize for that, too,” Harry said. He reckoned he would be saying those words a lot, as he’d never had a friend as prickly and sensitive as Draco. Even Hermione, for all that she sometimes took Harry and Ron’s words completely the wrong way, was more willing to forgive them. “Do you have anything new?”

            “No. Because my research partner wasn’t there last night.”

            “Come off it,” Harry said. “I’m sorry I missed the meeting, but I have lots to keep up with, and lots to do.” He determinedly pulled out a section of the chapter from the latest book on Memory Charms that he’d read and copied into his notes. “Look at this. Does this sound reasonable?”

            Draco looked at the notes with an immense pinched expression on his face, as though he was doing Harry a favor, but his color increased and his eyes widened as he read on. Harry leaned back in his chair and swung his leg. He had thought it was rather remarkable, himself, but it was always nice to know that he’d been right.

            He found himself watching the way Draco’s hair hung over his ear again, and remembered that he’d been doing that the other day before Parkinson cursed him. And the way that Draco’s color faded and died, and the way his lips set as he read, and the way he reached up and pushed his fringe out of his face while, somehow, never disturbing the hair near his ear…

            I think this might be something other than friendship.

            Harry frowned, because while that very well might be true, he didn’t think he could stand the complication that would come with it. He would just have to put it aside for now, and hope it wasn’t, what with wolfweres and Snapes and everything.

            “That sounds…plausible,” Draco said at last, putting the notes down. “But that makes our task even more complicated.”

            “It does, doesn’t it?” Harry said, and glanced at the notes again just to make sure that he wasn’t misremembering what section of the book he had copied. No, it was the complex one. Of course. “Unfortunately, I think it’s right because there isn’t any other bloody thing that makes sense. The charm is wearing off, but what it leaves behind it are false memories, basically, that blend into dreams and nightmares and hallucinations. So they might just start casting curses everywhere.”

            “And their own desire to believe certain parts of it might solidify those memories into ones that seem real,” Draco said dully. “And if that happens, there’s no removing the charm at all.”

            “I know,” Harry said. “That means that we have to move fast, and not spend as much time on alternate paths. Did you consider the last suggestion I made to you?”

            “When would that be?” Draco tilted his head to the side and gave him a whimsical smile. “During that nonexistent meeting we had last night?”

            The way to deal with Draco when he was prickly over something like this, Harry was discovering, was to give him a neutral smile and move on. Don’t, no matter what, make him think that he could make you change your mind. “The suggestion about watching Zabini and the others to see what the Memory Charm does next.”

            “A suggestion that would also take time, and one that’s hampered by their not letting me near them anymore.” Draco curled his fingers into his hair, and Harry thought he would tug on it. He released it with a care that looked more manufactured than gentle. “I don’t know what to do.”

            “That’s why you asked for help,” Harry said. “And I’m a Gryffindor, you know, and also someone who has a link to one of them that you don’t. I can take the direct approach.”

            “What link?” Draco leaned forwards. “I swear to God, if you’ve gone and done one of those magical betrothal contracts that you were speculating about to engage yourself to Zabini or something—”

            Harry choked, and then chuckled. The betrothal contracts were something he had brought up to provoke a reaction from Draco on a day that he’d spent too much time staring glassy-eyed at the wall, not something serious. But wasn’t it interesting that that was what Draco chose to remember and believe in? “No,” he said at last. “Don’t be ridiculous. But Ron and Hermione saved Goyle’s life in the Room of Requirement, the same way I saved yours. I can ask them to transfer the life-debt to me, and then tell Goyle that I need to talk to him.”

            “How the fuck do you even know about transferring life-debts?”

            Harry grinned at Draco. His outrage colored his cheeks faintly pink and made his lips set in a way that Harry wanted to snog off.

            Okay, all right. So that’s distracting. But it’ll just have to wait its turn.

            “Says the one who wanted a more educated Gryffindor to work with, and lamented the amount of knowledge I didn’t have, about Memory Charms and Slytherins and, oh, pretty much everything,” he pointed out, and gave Draco a whimsical smile of his own. “You’re upset when I take your admonishment seriously and apply it to my education?”

            “You aren’t supposed to,” Draco began, and then bit back the things he might have said. He shook his head. “Fine. It doesn’t matter. What makes you think that your friends would give you that debt?”

            “Because they’re my friends,” Harry said, blinking at him. “And because there’s nothing they want of Goyle.”

            “Are you sure? They might want something in the future.” Draco looked the most—well, normal Harry had seen look all term, his arms folded and his face in the expression Harry had always thought of as haughty and now just called patrician. “You can never predict what useful knowledge or skills someone might turn out to have. That’s why you save life-debts, because you never know.”

            “And that’s why they’re precious, right?” Harry asked gently. “Because you never know.”

            Draco paused, watching Harry as if he thought Harry might be making fun of him. Then he nodded, slowly.

            “Well, it’s not my way to hoard my Galleons,” Harry said. “And I really don’t think Ron and Hermione would ever consider going to Goyle even if they knew that he had something they wanted. They would find another source of knowledge, or they would bargain for what he had, instead of trying to make him surrender it with a life-debt.”

            Draco’s eyes narrowed. “But you, the consummate Gryffindor, are willing to do that?”

            “I learned something over the summer,” Harry said, leaning in and inviting Draco to lean in at the same time by lowering his voice. “You see, I learned that I was a bit of a bastard.”

            Draco laughed; the sound was low, and clear, and unmistakable, and it changed his face, made it charming and bright and, for a moment, as though a small rainstorm that followed him everywhere had lifted. Harry stared at him and felt that change ripple through him at the same time, making his stomach contract.

            Definitely something that needs to be dealt with when I have time.

*

            “You have the dried blood.”

            The wolfwere’s voice dripped around him. Harry opened his mouth, wanting to say that he had thought to consult Snape first, that he wanted to study more about the ritual the wolfwere had explained to him before he began, but the wolfwere pressed forwards, and his hand reached out and touched Harry’s for the first time. Shorter fingers than a human hand, with ragged nails black with dirt, but real.

            “You have the chance to find them.”

            Harry nodded, and sighed, and picked up the knife that the wolfwere had given him last night. Carefully, he flaked the dried blood off it and into a vial; he had learned to do that much neatly, thanks to his Potions lessons. The wolfwere left his hand in place and only withdrew it when Harry had to move the vial to add the other ingredients. Then his hands dug into the earth and ripped it up, along with clumps of grass. A howl broke from his mouth, low and soft. Harry didn’t think he meant it to.

            The ritual called for living blood on the dead. Harry added three drops of his, and then held out his hand to the wolfwere. He looked at Harry, his head tilted so far to the side that his eyes looked amber instead of gold.

            “If you want to drink my blood,” Harry said, and then stopped. In the end, he couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it than the words he had already chosen, and so he used them. “Because you didn’t get to drink theirs.”

            The wolfwere carried on staring at him, to the point where Harry thought he wouldn’t accept the blood. Then he lowered his head and extended his tongue across the distance between them, as if he didn’t trust himself to use his hands. Perhaps he didn’t, Harry thought. His heart was pounding as though it was about to leap out of him, and he was already regretting offering this.

            But then the tongue scraped across the blood, and the sensation was strange and brief and suddenly gone. The wolfwere lapped at his muzzle, tilted his head again, and said, “Thank you for the gift. But you taste nothing like them.”

            Harry nodded back, awkwardly, and then spent a few minutes orienting himself to the moon and doing the requisite number of turns in a circle. The incantation began to fall from his lips as though forced out, surrounding him with a skein of silk, and then straightened and tensed around him. Harry lifted the vial to his lips and swallowed one tongueful of the mixture.

            Power seized him and tossed him high. Harry opened his eyes with his veins on fire, his arms as strong as a giant’s, his eyes an eagle’s—

            And he saw. Across the distance, he saw, and saw the Death Eaters’ camp, and saw the figure that stood in the middle of them, directing them.

            Saw Pansy Parkinson sitting at his feet, and the werewolves who prowled and snarled in circles.

            Saw that it was Lucius Malfoy.

*

            unneeded: Draco chose to make it public partially as a means of protection against the Slytherins, to warn them that someone will notice if something else happens to him.

            ChaosLady: Thanks for reviewing.

            Fullmoons_wings: Well, I think the end of this chapter counts as a substantial event, at least.

            But Draco wants other people to know about the friendship for personal reasons, as well as political ones. Ron and Hermione will eventually settle into being all right with it, given that Harry has changed and for the reasons that Hermione stated at the beginning of the chapter.

            Harry and Ginny realized they weren’t really for each other. As Harry pointed out, he does know himself a lot better now than he used to.

            SP777: It’s like the humor with Ron and Hermione and Flitwick here; Harry’s mind is still kind of immature and he wonders about things that he probably shouldn’t think about at inappropriate times.

            Silverkitten: Thank you! I hope you still continue to enjoy Draco here, although he’s not particularly prominent in this chapter.
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Parsimony