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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.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Two—The Hogwarts Express Bears Witness

            “He’s not here.”

            Harry looked up from his conversation with Luna. As usual, he had no idea what she was describing, beyond that it had something to do with a trip to Switzerland last month to find Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, but he was enjoying himself, and that was rare enough lately to make him not care.

            “Who’s not?” he asked Ron. Ron was staring fixedly at the door of their compartment, as though he expected someone to appear outlined against it. Maybe Snape, Harry thought, and then shook his head. Once, the realization that Snape was dead used to hit him all the time, every few hours. Since his farewell funeral, though, there were times he forgot, until he remembered that Slughorn would teach Potions and someone new would be in the Defense position.

            “Malfoy.” Ron tapped his wand against his arm and frowned deeply. “He usually comes by to laugh at us and flaunt his pure-blood pettiness. Where d’you think he is now?”

            “Honestly, Ron,” Hermione said, with the kind of frown and shifting away from her boyfriend that Harry hated to see, because he knew that Ron would moan to him later about it. “Isn’t it possible that he grew up? The way we did over the summer? Or that I had hoped we did, at least,” she added, and didn’t quite do it under her breath.

            Ginny, sitting against the wall beside Harry, snickered. Neville grinned, and Luna said, “Did you know that full-grown Snorkacks can toss an unwary wizard around on their horns? I would never go hunting them by myself.”

            “It’s just that so much else is the same,” Ron muttered, looking down and fidgeting with the edge of his sleeve. “The train leaves at the same time, and there’s so many of the same people, and the letters were the same, and—and I thought this would be the same, too.”

            Hermione almost visibly melted and reached out to lay her hand on Ron’s shoulder. “Of course you did,” she whispered. “You almost expect to see him coming along the corridor playing jokes, don’t you?”

            Harry looked away politely as Ginny drew a little closer to Ron and Ron nodded and closed his eyes. This was one of the times he felt he stood outside the Weasleys and their mourning for Fred. When moments passed and that tight, private feeling from the other side of the compartment went on and on, Harry cleared his throat and stood up. “I’ll just pop out and see where the cart is, shall I?” he murmured.

            No one seemed to notice. Luna was staring out the window, and Neville watched Ron and Hermione and Ginny with an expression that made Harry think he probably mourned Fred, too. Harry slipped out and shut the door gently behind him.

            It wasn’t that he didn’t mourn Fred, he thought, walking slowly up the corridor towards the back of the train. He did. It was just—different, for him. Held at a distance. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he knew all the time that Fred wasn’t his brother, and it felt kind of—kind of bad of him to cry too much. Or maybe just because he knew Ron needed someone to carry on like things were normal and he wanted to be that someone.

            And he’ll never be your brother-in-law, either.

            Of course he couldn’t, because he was dead, but Harry came to a stop in the middle of the corridor and blinked. Well. That answered one question.

            He’d been thinking of trying to rekindle his romance with Ginny, but it never seemed to be the right time. She had Fred to mourn and her family to think of, and Harry would have felt like an idiot for insisting she pay attention to him when all that was going on. Not to mention greedy. He’d survived the war and most of his friends had, too; he could wait to count the rest of his blessings.

            But it seemed it was more than that. He might just not be interested in a romance with Ginny, and so far, she hadn’t made any moves towards him, either. If she did, he’d tell her the truth, that he’d rather be there for her than be for her.

            Thoughtful, Harry started walking down the corridor again, and then someone slammed into his back and nearly knocked him down. He caught hold of a door handle and spun around, adrenaline rushing through his veins. It had been three months since he last fought Death Eaters, but the rumors of them had flown everywhere over the summer, and he didn’t think he’d forgotten how to fight.

            Malfoy picked himself up slowly from the floor and glared at Harry, the walls, the doors, the ceiling, and anything else that wasn’t the person behind him, who had shoved him.

            That person was Gregory Goyle, Harry saw. He blinked slowly. The idea of Goyle turning on Malfoy was so foreign he couldn’t take it in at first.

            Goyle sneered at him, but it was another voice—a voice Harry would find hard to forget, since the last time he’d heard it it was suggesting he be turned over to Voldemort—who spoke up, behind Goyle’s shoulder. “You really should watch where you’re going, Draco. How dare you intrude into the personal space of the Hero of the Wizarding World?”

            Pansy Parkinson stepped out from behind Goyle, her face flushed and her eyes bright. It was a face Harry had seen her make before when she was teasing one of the Gryffindors girls. But to see her look at Malfoy that way…

            I could walk away and leave this. It’s probably private Slytherin business, and no one will thank me for interfering.

            Yeah, right, Harry decided with a little internal sigh. It would probably be more peaceful to leave things that way, but it wasn’t what he was made for. He glanced at Malfoy as if the rest of them didn’t exist and said, “You all right?”

            Malfoy paused, one hand lying flat on his robe where he’d been dusting himself off. Then he raised his head and stared at Harry.

            Harry flushed, suddenly aware how he must look, with his wand half-out and his body poised as if for flight. Then he shrugged it off and shook his head. So what? Lots of people had looked at him over the summer with worse expressions than the one Malfoy was using now. There were the ones who thought he could have finished the war sooner, and there were the ones upset with him for running away from Hogwarts instead of staying to fight the “real war,” and there were the ones who wanted some bigger conclusion to the battle with Voldemort or more interviews than he wanted to give or for him just not to be famous at all. It was part of the price for living, and Harry was willing to pay it.

            “You look all right,” Harry pursued gamely into the silence, aware that Parkinson’s smile had faded and she looked as stunned as Malfoy. Or Malfoy didn’t look stunned, simply surprised. And contemptuous. Already, Harry regretted the impulse that had made him speak. Private Slytherin affairs, right, of course, it must be, and he should have walked away and left it. But it would probably look even stupider to do that now, and no one thought he should be known for common sense. “No broken nose or black eyes or anything.”

            “Of course he is,” Parkinson said, and crowded around Goyle to stand in the corridor closest of all to Harry. She held her robes aside so that they didn’t touch Malfoy, and he arranged to be where she wasn’t. “Draco is always all right, no matter what happens.” She sneered sideways at him. “We all know what he did.”

            Harry used his very mildest voice, and tried not to look at the expression on Malfoy’s face, which had changed in a way that embarrassed him. “What, chose the right side in the end and decided not to kill for that crazy fucker? That’s smart, in my eyes. Don’t Slytherins make a point out of following power and finding the winning side?” He let his eyes sweep up and down Parkinson’s robes, and didn’t bother to try and hide his sneer. “Doesn’t look to me as if you make as good a Slytherin as he does.”

            Malfoy had gone rigid with astonishment, his face white. Parkinson’s hands tightened in her robes until Harry thought she would fly at him. Again he shifted his body weight so he was in the right position to strike.

            But Parkinson, to his surprise, bit her bottom lip and her top one and slowly shook her head. “What he did this summer,” she said. “Not during the war. After the war was over. You ought to ask him about it, Potter.”

            Goyle spoke, startling Harry. “Don’t, Pansy. You know we can’t agree.”

            “It looked like you agree on bullying Malfoy,” Harry said. He was trying to listen for other people in the compartment behind Goyle, to know how many he might be facing, and thought he heard some, but it was hard to make out. “Unless someone else pushed him out here.”

            Goyle had to pause to think about that, but Malfoy didn’t. He took a sudden step towards Harry, which made Harry look at him again, because, defending the git or not, he wouldn’t let Malfoy attack him. Malfoy’s face was white, and he shook his head. There was a bubble of spit on his lips, which made Harry stare. As far as he knew, Malfoy would never show that much emotion normally.

            “No,” Malfoy whispered. “They’re right, Potter. You have to leave me alone?”

            “Really.” Harry looked back and forth between them. “Then, if you drag it out into the corridor in front of me, you don’t have an objection to telling me what it’s about, do you? Since you are here and all.”

            Malfoy bit his lips hard enough to leave dents in them, small, bleeding dents that sent red trails careening down his face. Harry blinked. That wasn’t the reaction he would have pictured to being asked for an explanation.

            He lowered his wand and his voice at the same time, trying to persuade Malfoy that he meant no harm. “Come on, Malfoy. Just let me know. If you want to fight it out with your friends, I’ll leave you alone, but you don’t have to be. Alone, I mean,” he added, because Malfoy’s eyes had got clouded with confusion.

            “He wants to be,” Parkinson said, her voice opening new worlds of loathing to Harry. “He thinks he’s too good for the likes of us, don’t you, Draco? You’ve always thought that, but this summer was the first time I ever heard you talk about it.”

            Her voice practically exploded at the end, and Harry could see the flying pieces of it hit Malfoy. He bowed his head, but said nothing. There was more blood on his face now, and Harry would have said something, but Goyle was speaking.

            “It has nothing to do with that,” he said. “It has everything to do with betrayal. You could have grabbed Vince and brought him along with you. You could have. You just didn’t want to, did you? You always wanted to be alone with precious Potter, you always cared about yourself more than your friends. And here we are.”

            “He didn’t deliberately leave Crabbe behind in the Fiendfyre,” Harry pointed out, because it sounded like that was what Goyle was saying, and he didn’t like it. “I was there, remember? Crabbe died before we could grab you.” He thought about adding that it was Crabbe’s fault, since he was the one who had cast the spell to call the Fiendfyre in the first place, but decided it wasn’t the best idea.

            “He told me so,” said Goyle, and his eyes shone like mad little jewels. Harry almost thought he could see the Fiendfyre shining in them again. “He told me so, over the summer, while Pansy thought he was telling her that he’d prefer to be alone and never date anyone again, and she hates that because she’s been after him since fourth year—”

            “Since birth,” Malfoy said, with a snap in the back of his voice Harry remembered, and felt relieved to hear.

            “I was not!” Pansy looked as if she would have gone after Malfoy and torn him apart with her nails, except that that wouldn’t have been dignified and ladylike. “I only ever wanted to be your friend, and I thought we should stick closer together after the war practically made us social outcasts, and you spurned me and told me I wasn’t good enough—”

            “He never said that—”

            Harry stared in fascination. The Slytherins seemed to have forgotten he was there, which they’d never done before. Sure, he’d spied on their private conversations before, the way he’d done in their compartment sixth year and when Malfoy thought he was talking to Crabbe and Goyle but it was actually just him and Ron Polyjuiced, but this was different. They screamed and spat like normal people, not the spiteful caricatures they presented themselves as. He shook his head.

            The even stranger thing was that Malfoy was standing back, his arms folded, instead of trying to take the lead like he normally did. The expression on his face was—strange. Harry would have expected anger, or irritation, or boredom if he’d heard this fight more than once, but it was none of those things. The only thing Harry knew for sure was that he’d been shivering like he was cold for a while.

            Harry aimed a subtle Warming Charm at him, and Malfoy jerked around and stared at him. Harry shrugged. Then he raised his voice and interrupted the row, which seemed to have descended into a series of screaming complaints about whose mother was uglier and more prone to sleeping around with Slytherin pure-bloods who could have been the other person’s real father.

            “How can you be social outcasts if you’re back at school? I know the Headmistress invited you all back.”

            It was as though he’d turned a key and made a Muggle toy start moving, or rather, stop moving. Parkinson’s face froze up, and Goyle glared at Harry as if he was the one who had started all this in the first place. Then they both turned and marched back into the compartment, slamming the door shut behind them.

            Malfoy didn’t try to scurry away. He stayed in place, his arms still folded, his uncertain gaze on Harry now. Harry tried to convey with his faint smile that he was happy to listen if Malfoy wanted to talk, but nothing happened. So much time passed that Harry began to wonder why his friends hadn’t come looking for him, or Malfoy hadn’t started a duel.

            Then Malfoy spoke a single word. It was the one Harry was expecting, or he might not have made it out in that small, strained voice.

            “Why?”

            Harry shrugged. He thought he owed Malfoy the truth. There was the fact that the git had saved him, after all. Even if the git was still a git. Maybe he wasn’t, if he hadn’t done what his friends said he did. That was the weird thing about the way Parkinson and Goyle argued with each other; both of the things they said could have been true, but they acted as if only one could be.

            “Because I owe you,” Harry said. “Because it’s after the war, and we really shouldn’t all be arseholes to each other if we can help it.” He paused, then added, “Because you looked like you needed help.”

            That was probably the wrong thing to say even if it was the truth, he decided an instant later. Malfoy’s freezing glare could have stopped Crookshanks in mid-leap. He turned away with a sniff and said, “Then go and help some Weasley who needs to get her skirt free from a door, Potter. That’s something you might be good at.”

            He marched down the corridor, but Harry knew that way of walking that was only meant to convince people you had somewhere important to go, instead of actually having one. He’d seen it an awful lot at the Burrow this summer, especially when Mrs. Weasley and Ginny were trying to be strong for all the men in their family. Harry jogged after him. Malfoy jerked his head around and tried a glare, but those had never been strong enough to work on Harry.

            “You needed help right then,” Harry said. “Because someone pushed you into me and they were arguing about you. That’s embarrassing. I know.”

            “As if it’s ever happened to you in your life,” Malfoy said, this time probably in a voice that could have frozen Crookshanks’s paws. “As if you’ve ever listened to people argue about anything but a chance to get close to you, or touch you, or who’s going to get to lick your shoes today.”

            “You’d be surprised,” Harry muttered darkly, thinking of the ways Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon would argue about whose turn it was to take him over to Mrs. Figg’s or ensure that he did his chores.

            “No, I wouldn’t. Because the answer is zero.”

            Harry shook his head and came to a stop. Why was he doing this, anyway? He had thought he could finally devote his life to his friends and the dead now, and Malfoy didn’t fit either category. Besides, he was stuck in a state of probably permanent ingratitude.

            “Fine,” he said to the back of Malfoy’s head. “Be that way, when you know perfectly well that you could use some help because everyone could. And because it sounds like someone used magic to confuse your friends. Why couldn’t you have dropped Parkinson like a wet rag and told Goyle you left Crabbe behind on purpose at the same time? But apparently, you can only do one.”

            Malfoy froze, staring straight ahead. Harry waited a few seconds, but he didn’t turn around, and Harry was getting impatient. He shook his head and started back down towards his friends’ compartment. They’d probably finished their mourning over Fred by now and might even be wondering where he was.

            “Wait.”

            Malfoy’s voice, behind him, was practically a croak. Harry turned around with his arms folded and leaned against the wall, bracing himself a little as the train shuddered. He wondered how close they were to Hogwarts, and how soon they would have to put their robes on.

            “Yeah?” he asked, when Malfoy stood there, his face twitching like he was struggling with a volcano buried under his skin or something. Despite himself, Harry’s voice got softer. He knew what someone who needed help looked like, and this was it. It had been several days before Ron could bring himself to admit how much he missed Fred, but he had looked like this all the time.

            “I—there’s a reason,” Malfoy whispered.

            Harry nodded, although Malfoy had his head bowed, so the gesture was probably wasted. “Uh-huh. Go on.”

            “But I can’t tell you what it is,” Malfoy finished in a miserable rush, and then blinked at Harry as if he thought that would make him march away.

            Harry was tempted, in fact. It was really hard to help someone who didn’t want to be helped, and Malfoy sounded like that, right now. By the way his face was changing and tightening, he knew it, or at least he was interpreting Harry’s hesitation the right way.

            “Fine, then,” he said, and his voice had a trace of sullenness as he started to turn around again. “Don’t listen.”

            “I want to,” Harry said. “It’s just, if you know what’s going on and can’t tell me, or someone used magic to confuse your friends and you can’t tell me, then I don’t see what good me listening will do. You need to find someone you can tell this to. Or you need to find whoever cursed your friends and punish them.”

            “Listen.”

            Malfoy’s voice was enough to stop Harry from both speaking and moving. He blinked a little, mildly impressed by how powerful it was. If Malfoy wanted to, he could probably make a fortune collaring people in Diagon Alley and dragging them into shops to try new products. They wouldn’t dare disobey that voice.

            Or is it just me he has that powerful an effect on? He wasn’t stopping his friends from bullying him.

            Then his thoughts narrowed down to just Malfoy, who was standing with his hair wisping across his collar and his head bowed so Harry could make out about one square unit of his jaw and chin. Malfoy’s voice whispered and hissed around him like a snake speaking Parseltongue with a foreign accent. Maybe he sounded that way, too, when he spoke it, Harry thought. Another way they were alike.

            “Something did happen this summer,” Malfoy whispered. “We tried to stay close together, the lot of us with accused parents. And some of us were accused, too. Some of us stood at the trials.”

            Harry nodded. He knew. He’d been to more than enough trials, sometimes to offer testimony, sometimes to be a witness, sometimes to be a witness whether the Ministry wanted him to be or not. He knew Kingsley Shacklebolt had been grateful to have him there, but others would probably have been more comfortable if they just could have locked all the Death Eaters up without Harry asking why they were doing that.

            “But towards the end of July,” Malfoy whispered, “there was one hot night when we were sick of fearing for our lives and just wanted to have fun. We all went out and lit a fire in a field and danced around it and yelled and cried and fucked.”

            Harry felt himself flush, but luckily Malfoy wasn’t looking at him and wouldn’t know everything from his expression, like that Harry was still a virgin and didn’t really want to change that yet. “Go on,” he managed to say.

            “The night—we were whirling around,” Malfoy whispered. “Everyone was dancing. There was—I thought something was different, but I didn’t know what.

            “Then someone cast a spell. And the next morning, everyone hated me, but for a different reason. I betrayed them, or I betrayed their parents, or I cast a spell on someone, or I bragged about how much better I was going to be after the war than they were because you testified for my mother, or something. I don’t know why. I think one of them did cast the spell, but if they did, then they confused themselves along with everyone else.”

            His shoulders shook, once, and then he stood up and glared at Harry. “And if you tell anyone I told you this, I’ll kill you,” he said. “I just needed a pair of convenient ears, and you were it.”

            Harry held Malfoy’s eyes until he glanced away. “Keep telling yourself that,” Harry said quietly.

            Malfoy hastily turned and marched down the corridor, as if nothing was more imperative than getting away from him. Harry let him go. He thought Malfoy had probably had all the contact with both Harry and his (former) friends that he could stand for right now.

            But yeah, it seemed as if Malfoy could use help. And if Harry could give it and it wasn’t something wrong, then he would.

            Why?

            Because it was after the war, and they were both alive. Things had changed.

            Although maybe I still want to be a hero, Harry acknowledged to himself ruefully as he made his way back to his friends. It’s just who I want to be a hero for that’s changed.

*

            SP777: Well, thanks! I hope to do several interesting things with it, especially because Harry isn’t so screwed-up as in some of my other stories.

            unneeded: There are some more WiPs left, yes, but I hope to start clearing the old ones off my plate gradually.

            Harry is younger than in most of my other stories and less interested in things like finding criminals, so that is probably part of what makes it different.
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Parsimony