Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Two—An Extraordinary Meeting

            Harry shaded his eyes and shook his head. No, no matter how long he spent watching the other patrons in the Leaky Cauldron, the shade of red around their heads as they boasted and bragged and lied didn’t change.

            The Unspeakables could have tried harder to invent a different color.

            Not that they knew what they were doing in the first place, Harry thought as he swallowed an enormous gulp of butterbeer, inventing an artifact that was supposed to allow Aurors to detect lies and making it something that could explode. Why wouldn’t they test it first?

            Oh, right, this was the wizarding world, and they were allergic to logic, as Hermione would say. Harry shook his head. He wondered whether he would be happier living in the Muggle world if his little problem didn’t get fixed. He would see just as many lies there, as the programmes on the telly proved, but there would be no one running around telling him earnestly that magical artifacts were perfectly safe when they weren’t.

            There was a motion behind him, and Harry turned around, wondering if it would be Malfoy. He was the one who had wanted to meet in this pub at one-o’clock on a Tuesday, but he was late.

            Instead, he saw an owl—and not the elegant grey bird that Malfoy favored for the delivery of his messages, either. This one was an ordinary brown color, with eyes that looked as if they crossed. Harry sighed and held out his hand for the letter. The owl fluttered randomly around his head before finally landing on his arm and dropping its envelope into his hand. Harry noticed the Ministry seal on it and rolled his eyes, but reached for a bit of his meal to give the owl anyway. It wasn’t the bird’s fault that it served a stupid master.

            You’d think it’s my fault, if anything. I know what the Ministry’s like, and I go on working for them anyway.

            He foisted the owl off with some crumbs of bread and bacon, and tore open the envelope, taking some satisfaction in cracking the seal right down the middle. A few people looked over, twisting their heads as if they could somehow make it casual, and twisted right back again when they caught Harry’s stare instead.

            Harry looked at the signature first, and snorted when he noticed the Sincerely was glowing red. Well, yeah.

            The name wasn’t one he recognized—Lancelot Youngblood. But the quick skim he’d taken of the letter said that he was one of Kingsley’s Under-Secretaries, which was less surprising. Kingsley had decided to take the opposite approach to the problem that Cornelius Fudge had created by making a post of Special Under-Secretary to the Minister that someone could get into and use to cause havoc. Instead, Kingsley had so many secretaries writing for him and handling his business that no one could keep track of them all. Harry approved. It also meant that people couldn’t figure out who to bribe.

            The letter, when he smoothed it out and read it, proved to be full of lies every third word or so. So this Lancelot had no great talent for the job he was supposed to handle, then. But that was so usual in the Ministry that it was almost comforting, rather than otherwise.

            Dear Auror Potter,

            You may not know me, but I’m your Ministry contact for the duration of this disaster.

            Harry raised his eyebrows, impressed despite himself. In the whole letter so far, only the “Dear” was a lie.

            It’s my job to let you know the latest things that the Unspeakables have discovered about the artifact, and how they plan to free you of the stains on your hands—as soon as possible, let me assure you! No one wants to see you endure this time-consuming and tiresome problem longer than necessary.

            Harry sighed and took another drink. “And you were doing so well,” he told Youngblood. “Or maybe no one told you that I can detect lies in written words, too. Or you’re so naïve as to think that I really have no enemies in the Ministry, no matter what someone else says.” He hoped that last wasn’t the case, for Youngblood’s own sake. He wouldn’t survive the sea of Ministry politics without more sophistication.

            The Unspeakables have currently determined that all combinations of water will not work in washing away the stain.

            “No shit,” Harry muttered. They had determined that before he even left the building after the first three days were up. He took another sip of his butterbeer, and ignored the way that Tom frowned at him. Harry attracted more business than he drove away, people hovering in the corners to look at him or gather up their courage to try and approach him about one of the “business opportunities” that had sprouted in their minds since Harry’s little problem occurred.

            They have also determined that combinations of vinegar, nightsoil, wine, beer, and whisky do not work.

            Harry arched an eyebrow. For some reason, the only word in that whole line that glowed red was “vinegar.” He decided idly to try that when he went home. If the Unspeakables hadn’t tried it just because they thought it wouldn’t work, that was all the more reason for him to do so.

            And if they hadn’t used it because they thought that it might react explosively to the artifact’s residue, then Harry really wanted to hurry up and make the test. He needed a little excitement in his life.

            We hope that you will continue to inform the Ministry of your plans in the future, and come in soon, so that the Unspeakables can resume their tests and learn from you what they should be doing next.

            “Nothing, you morons,” Harry muttered, focusing on the nice shade of scarlet that “learn from you” and the “Sincerely” above the signature blazed. Yeah, right, they wanted him there to learn from him, instead of harness him up like a captive animal and drain all the blood and all the magic they could from him. Harry had had a lot of reasons for leaving when he did, including the deep belief that the Unspeakables were wankers, but he had also caught a few of them trying to save his hair for use in Polyjuice Potions. Which, as he had explained to them with a few nice words and a lot of not-so-nice incantations, was not on.

            “I don’t know that you need me to break in. You sound as though you’re having a nice conversation by yourself.”

            Harry whirled around before he could stop himself, calculating distances, calculating angles, and knowing exactly how he would use the table as a shield if Malfoy attacked. And then he forcibly calmed himself, raised his eyebrows at Malfoy instead, and cocked his head to the side as he realized that Malfoy was simply standing there, his arms folded.

            And no red glow surrounding him.

            Malfoy had grown taller than Harry remembered him, taller than his father. His blond hair hung around his face in a sleek, straight fall, and his face looked less pointy than it had. He was wearing exquisitely-tailored pale robes, though, and he sneered at Harry’s jeans and trainers. That made Harry relax. Certain things would never change.

            “Malfoy.” He ignored the open stares around him as he charmed the chair on the opposite side of the table to pull out for the git. Everything he did would end up on the front page of the Prophet anyway, he might as well do what he wanted and deal with the fallout. “Fancy a seat?”

            Malfoy took it with a graceful economy of motion that made Harry purse his lips in reluctant admiration. He would have made a good Auror; he could have outdone some of the ones that Harry knew in reflexes and speed, and that was the highest compliment Harry could give. “Butterbeer, Potter?”

            Harry cocked his head further when he realized that there was still no red glow there. Malfoy should have sneered at what he was drinking while secretly reveling in the fact that Potter was drinking the lower-class beer that he’d always thought he should. Instead, Malfoy sounded as though he had expected a harder liquor.

            “No,” Harry said calmly. “I didn’t know how this meeting would go, and Firewhisky gets me drunk.”

            “Useful information.”

            And again, Malfoy didn’t glow crimson. Harry shook his head. Malfoy hadn’t bridled his sneer at Harry’s clothes, or even tried. That meant he had no reason to restrain his sarcasm. But still, here he was, saying all these things that should have come across as false or at least not what they seemed on the surface, and they didn’t show up that way. Huh.

            “If you say so,” he said placidly. “Do you want Firewhisky?”

            “I can pay for it.” Malfoy flashed Galleons between his fingers, and pushed his chair back as if he would go to the bar.

            “I know, but I thought I’d offer.”

            Malfoy paused and studied him as though Harry was as great a mystery to him as he was to Harry. Harry leaned back and grinned at him. Malfoy probably thought that because they were having a halfway civil conversation at the moment. Let him be around Harry for any length of time, and he would find out that Harry’s honesty was just another weapon.

            “Interesting,” Malfoy said, and walked away with no red glow continuing to sprout around him.

            Harry leaned back, shaking his head, and clucked his tongue. He waited until Malfoy came back to say anything more, but watched the way he moved, and was quietly impressed. So many of the people Harry knew, now that was an Auror, looked simply off when they were walking or running or even doing such simple things as standing still. They didn’t have the training that Harry did, the ability to explode in any direction on a moment’s notice, the quickness with their wands. Harry would find himself thinking about how they would survive if dropped in a battle situation, and then had to remember that for most of them, battle situations were not everyday life.

            Malfoy would do well. He came back to the table and sat there sipping his Firewhisky, and even the motions of his arms and elbows were right, relaxed enough not to hurt his muscles with tension but not so loose that he couldn’t get his wand up in time. And Harry knew that he wouldn’t drink too much, either.

            “So let me get this right,” Harry said. “You want my help to find your father and haul him back to Azkaban?” If there was a lie to such a direct question, he would walk out the door. Disappointedly, but he’d walk.

            Malfoy nodded. “I want him to go back to prison because he’ll take over my life if he’s out for long,” he corrected himself, probably because he had noticed Harry watching him. “The hunt for him, and watching over my shoulder for him in case he decides to come home. I don’t want that. I want my own life, outside his clutches.”

            A surge of fellow feeling struck Harry so strongly that it nearly took him off his feet like an ocean wave. He lifted his mug to Malfoy, smiling. And no lies. Even if Malfoy had managed to find a way to baffle the magic somehow, which seemed more likely at the moment than him making that long a speech without lying, Harry still had to salute him. Maybe he could teach that magic to Harry if Harry paid him enough, and then Harry could use it to find some way out of his little problem.

            “All right,” Harry said. “But I don’t know if it’s going to work the way you want it to. After all, one sight of my face would send most people running, especially people as skittish as your contacts will probably be. Especially since the news about this is all over the wizarding world,” he added, and turned his palms towards Malfoy so that he could see the dark stain that covered them.

            Malfoy leaned across the table and caught his left hand instead of leaning back. Harry blinked. Most people didn’t want to touch the stained skin, as if assuming they would catch the spell, although the Unspeakables had done more than enough tests to prove that couldn’t happen. Harry didn’t blame them. The stain was damn ugly, the color of ink when you first looked at it but worse the longer you went on looking.

            But Malfoy cradled Harry’s hand in his and peered at it intently, his breath light and easy as he played his fingers over Harry’s palm, his nails scraping at the heel of the hand as though he thought he could find a place to begin unraveling the purple splash there. Harry squirmed. He had discovered since the war, or at least since he completed Auror training and began noticing the way people moved, that he was then attracted to people who moved like that.

            Having one of them touching him was too intimate an experience, one that made him want to take back the hand before Malfoy had clearly finished with it.

            But then he thought of how Malfoy would react if he realized Harry was hard, and the laughter broke from him. Malfoy looked up, head tilted and face frozen.

            “Are you laughing at me?” he asked.

            Harry shook his head, and smiled at him. “No,” he said. “At myself. I was having an absurd thought, one that made me anxious, about you, and then I thought about your expression if I ever told that thought to you.”

            “Really.” Malfoy leaned nearer towards him, as though he knew that Harry wouldn’t want anyone around them to overhear—no, as though he cared that Harry wouldn’t want anyone around them to overhear. “What was the thought?”

            Harry hesitated. But he had taken truth as his own duty since he got this stupid stain, and he wanted to compare Malfoy’s real expression with the imagined one that had made him laugh.

            “That having you look at my hand that way feels bloody good,” he said.

            Malfoy gave one tiny jerk, as though Harry had hit him on the shoulder. Then he leaned back in his chair and quirked one eyebrow up.

            “Someone has not touched you enough,” he said.

            And, again, that was really what he thought. Harry’s erection twitched, and he had to resist the urge to lick his lips, which Malfoy would almost certainly take the wrong way now. This was thrilling. Why couldn’t everyone be honest around him all the time? Maybe everyone who did that would be attractive, now, when he had the curse to make him see it if they weren’t.

            “I don’t have a partner right now,” Harry said.

            “Of course not, as an Auror out of work.”

            Malfoy flashed a corner of a tooth when he smiled, and Harry had to blink so that he wouldn’t sit there simply staring like an enchanted idiot. “No,” he said. “I meant a partner in the boyfriend or girlfriend sense. So it’s not someone’s specific fault that they haven’t touched me. It’s just my fault for not getting fucked enough.”

            Malfoy’s hand came down on the table, and Harry jumped. Was he going to make no swearing a condition for working with him? At the moment, Harry was bedazzled enough that he would even have promised to honor that.

            But instead, Malfoy bit the corner of his lip while his cheeks turned slightly pink. He was concealing laughter?

            “Well,” Malfoy said, shaking his head at last. “It doesn’t matter.” And Harry could relax again, because that was true; it was just something that had happened, that Harry had admitted, and Malfoy could let it go. “I can pay you in one of two ways: Galleons, or information that would lead you to a Potions master who might be able to help you with a cure. Which do you—”

            “The contact information,” Harry said at once, firmly. And Malfoy looked at him again as if he hadn’t expected the answer, which made Harry relieved, to have found something about his new idol that didn’t impress him. Of course Harry wanted to be free of this curse more than he wanted money. Who wouldn’t?

            “Hmmm,” Malfoy said at last, and then no more about it. “Well. It seems that you’ve agreed to help me. Shall we begin the hunt?” He swallowed most of his Firewhisky in a single swallow that didn’t look like a gulp, for some reason, and then pushed his chair back and stood, eyes on Harry.

            Does he think that after everything we’ve just talked about, I would disdain to walk out of a pub at his side? Harry thought, but he knew people made odd distinctions in their minds. After you’d listened to Dark wizards talk earnestly about how they hadn’t murdered people, they had just stopped their process of living, you got used to hearing about those distinctions.

            He stood up and cocked his head, enjoying the way that Malfoy’s muscles flexed in the slim hips, just visible over the curve of his grey trousers. “Let’s go.”

*

            unneeded: I do, too. And the angst mostly comes from things like hunting Lucius down, where I think it’s inevitable.

            moodysavage: At the moment, Draco is telling the truth, and Harry doesn’t think he’ll have to probe further for secrets. Yet.

            ArienAngel529: Harry and Ginny split up over his devotion to his job. That’ll be mentioned later, though. And thanks for reviewing.

            SP777: Spotting all the lies would have entertained him, anyway.
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