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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Two--A Barrister Across Universes

            "Are you going to tell me what this famous idea is, now?" Harry tried to keep the snap out of his voice, because he could practically hear Hermione frowning behind him at the mere sound. But it was hard to hold back the fear that Malfoy was talking a load of bollocks about this idea that would let him enter Harry's dreams, because he hadn't said anything concrete since the initial pronouncement.

            Malfoy grinned at him--cockily, the way Harry hated--and turned back to the blue potion brewing in the cauldron which sat on a marble block in front of him. Hermione leaned forwards over Harry's shoulder to watch. Harry ducked out from between them and paced around Malfoy's home, looking at things.

            It was different being here when he didn't have the confidence of his anger driving him. Now he could notice the subtle, expensive good taste Malfoy had furnished the place with, and the portraits on the wall. There were pictures of his parents, which was to be expected, and other pale-haired people that Harry suspected were ancestors. But there was also one of a handsome dark-haired man who alternately played with a poodle and smiled at Harry and wore potions-stained robes. Perhaps he was a famous Potions master, but he looked too kind to be on Malfoy's walls.

            Harry had to keep rethinking things in the last few days. It gave him a headache.

            All I wanted was a place in the world I understood after I quit Auror training, he thought wistfully. What I get is half-completed barrister training that probably won't serve me that well in my first case, a parcel of stupid bloody dreams, and a stupid bloody wanker who comes up with plans he won't share.

            Oh, and revelations that I don't want. There's that.

            But the problem was, bitching wouldn't make the dreams go away, or improve his relationship with Draco, or make his relationship with Malfoy settle into one definable pattern. Harry had to go ahead and act as though he understood everything and was committed to doing what Malfoy told him. It was the only way things would change.

            Well, things could change in the dreams on their own, I reckon. But if it really is my mind directing events there, I hate to see what it would come up with.

            Harry turned back to the cauldron, feeling his face set in lines of new determination. He would do what he had to do. It was less hard than facing up to what Dumbledore had planned for him, really, or finding out that the old man had been less wise and benevolent than Harry thought he was. He'd walked into the Forbidden Forest to his death. Anything else he did had to be less difficult than that. Right?

            They don't tell you that living is the hard part.

            The cauldron was cheerfully belching yellow smoke now. Harry tried to ignore the smell of rotten eggs it also produced, and settled into place beside Hermione. She gave him a quick approving glance, then reached out and squeezed his hand. Harry squeezed it back.

            The potion abruptly solidified into what looked like a ton of egg yolk. Malfoy dipped in a ladle and pried loose a dripping chunk, dropping it into his mouth. He chewed it, flecks of foam falling from the sides of his lips. Harry bit down hard on his own lip. He didn't think either laughing or throwing up would help at this particular moment in time.

            "Now you," he said, and held out the ladle to Harry.

            "Hermione?" Harry asked without moving. "Is there anything poisonous in there?"

            Malfoy's brow creased, and Hermione gave him a little shove. "I would have stopped him if he'd used anything like that, Harry," she said.

            Harry nodded in resignation, took up the ladle, and used the edge to cut his own chunk of potion. He discovered that it was like trying to chew glue when he took the first bite, and the rotten-egg smell had its equivalent in a taste that crept down his throat like acid. He gagged, and then kept eating. Malfoy hadn't told him what the potion was intended to do, but Hermione trusted him, and he was trying to help Harry, and he had come back even past several brush-offs that Harry could offer him, and that had to mean something.

            Well.

            At least, Harry thought so. He reckoned it was possible that Malfoy was just a particularly good actor and persistent stalker.

            When he swallowed, nothing remained of the potion but the watery horror in his mouth, and nothing happened. Harry made to spit, but Malfoy frowned at him, and so he swallowed again. "What's this supposed to do?" he asked.

            "It'll allow me access to some of the deep parts of your mind, and it'll do the same thing for you with regards to mine," Malfoy said. "Among other things, it means that we'll share dreams and some memories. Nothing while we're conscious," he added, apparently because of Harry's expression. "It's most likely that you'll feel me, besides the dreams, in your mind during those moments when you thrash between sleep and waking, and feel as though you're falling."

            "Along with all the other illusions," Harry muttered.

            Malfoy's face worked through a complicated expression of his own before he said, "I wish I knew why you distrust me. Perhaps that's something I'll find out now that we have the potion linking us."

            Harry stared at him. "Seriously, Malfoy? You want to know the answer to that question? Take your bloody pick. The curse you cast on me, your lies, your inconsistent behavior, the way you still--"

            "I don't think this is helpful," Hermione intervened, with a stern glance at the both of them that made Harry want to ask her when she had forgiven Malfoy for cursing her best friend. Of course, the fascination of doing research with him probably outweighed that, he decided grimly. "Of course you believe different things about...recent events. But you should at least try the potion before you dismiss his help, Harry. And I recognized it. I wouldn't have let you drink it if I thought it would hurt you."

            Harry rolled his eyes and turned away. "That doesn't change the fact that you still could have warned me," he said in a muffled tone. "You didn't. And Malfoy could have explained what the potion was before he made it or had me drink it. It was simple. But no, I have to be left in the dark."

            "Potter," Malfoy said, coming forwards to stand next to him. Harry glared over his head at the wall. He didn't care if it made him look moody. The point was that Malfoy had kept secrets when there was no good reason to do so, except that it helped serve his bloody pride. "Harry. Listen to me. I didn't think you would agree to let me into your dreams this way, that it would be too intimate for you."

            Harry flicked him a sharp glance that Malfoy stepped back from. "So you decided the way to get my cooperation was by lying and tricking me? As usual. I just wish someone considered me competent enough to make my own decisions." He widened his glare to include Hermione this time, but she put her head up and bore the stare with more equanimity than Malfoy did.

            "I did," she said. "You made the decision to agree to Malfoy's plan, and to drink the potion without knowing what it was, didn't you?"

            "But why not tell me?" Harry asked again. He felt less angry than weary, he realized. No matter what kinds of bargains he and Malfoy made, no matter how close they came to understanding each other, there was always something held in reserve. Some lie, some omission, some consideration that Harry wouldn't understand Malfoy's grand master plan. It didn't have to be that way, but Malfoy continued thinking it did in the face of the evidence. And now Hermione had joined him.

            He looked back up in time to catch Hermione and Malfoy exchanging glances, and snorted. "Oh, yeah, this is about my need to be needed and your decision that I have to be treated like a child because I've acted like one," he said. "Fine, I reckon I can see that. But I started thinking the other day about how I treated Ginny, coddled her when she didn't want to be coddled and refused to accept her as an equal partner, and I can see now that I've reacted to Draco in the dreams the same way. I'm still coming to terms with that. I hadn't told you everything. But you didn't ask me or make arguments anymore, either. You just decided to go ahead and sweep me up in your plans, trick me and lie to me, because you thought it would be easier that way. For you, not me."

            "Harry," Hermione said. Her voice was so low Harry couldn't tell what she was feeling. "I'm sorry you think that way."

            Malfoy reached for him. Harry dodged his grasp and walked to the door. "We don't have to be close together for this potion to work, do we?" he asked over his shoulder. "It'll just automatically start doing what it needs to do when we go closer to sleep?"

            "Yes," Malfoy said. "But Harry, I want to talk to you."

            "You've said enough already." Harry opened the door and then paused, fighting the anger and weariness to say one last thing. "You wanted me to change. You kept telling me I was wrong. But you must have thought that I couldn't ever really change at all, because the arguments stopped awfully quickly. I'd prefer nagging to coercion, I really would."

            He shut the door instead of slamming it.

*

            Harry opened his eyes and turned to face Wellworth as she climbed onto the stand. He couldn't see Malfoy yet, he realized absently. He could feel Draco's stare on his back, though, and Discipula's stare from up in the stands.

            It was useless to look around and hope that Malfoy would appear in some sufficiently invisible form. They hadn't even bothered to explain that much. Harry had waited, but neither Hermione nor Malfoy had approached him for the rest of the day. Ron had been the one to eat dinner with Harry and play a chess game with him before he went to bed.

            When this dream business is solved, then I'm going to have a long talk with Hermione. And I don't want to ever see Malfoy again.

            He focused on Wellworth and asked, "Would you tell us how you first met Narcissa Malfoy?"

            Wellworth was a lively and entertaining witness, at least if the calls from the crowd and the focused attention from Discipula were anything to go by, but Harry couldn't spend much time listening to her answers. He kept twitching, wondering if Malfoy would appear next to him, or in the stands--where it was possible Discipula would see him--or behind him, next to Draco. Or perhaps he would appear in Harry's lodgings. They'd never discussed this.

            You never gave him the chance to discuss this.

            But Harry pushed the thought away. He'd forgiven Malfoy too easily for casting the spell on him that had started the dreams in the first place, he thought now. He was going to hold onto his anger. Malfoy could have told him what the potion did instead of clinging to his secret until the last moment.

            Wellworth was a good witness, answering the questions as casually as she would have during daily conversation, and refusing to be flustered even when Discipula asked, earnestly, if she'd known Narcissa Malfoy so well because they were both Death Eaters. In fact, she laughed heartily at that one, slapping her hands together and rocking back and forth until Harry thought Discipula's smile grew a bit fixed.

            "I never had the attention span for being a Death Eater," Wellworth said, shaking her head and wiping a tear from her eye. "Neither did Narcissa, poor dear thing." She leaned forwards and lowered her voice, as if sharing a secret with Discipula rather than the entire courtroom. "But she had plenty of people who were jealous of her beauty or her devotion to her husband. Notice how almost all the witnesses accusing her of being present at the battles were female? Jealousy, my dear, jealousy! We've encouraged it far too much among our pure-blood girls, and I, at least, am tired of it."

            Discipula nodded at last and leaned back in her seat. The fixed smile continued, perhaps because she hated being called "my dear." Harry asked a few more questions that didn't make much impact and which he hadn't expected to, and then nodded at Wellworth to leave the stand. She pressed his wrist on the way, which Harry thought meant she, at least, was satisfied with her performance.

            When he turned around, he saw Malfoy.

            He was a hint, a shimmer, in the air, and even then you had to know what you were looking for. Harry thought he only saw him because he was sensitized to the bastard's bright hair and eyes. He stood with arms folded behind the chairs that held the witnesses, and if he had paid attention to the trial or Discipula at all, Harry couldn't tell it. His gaze was fixed on his dream-self as if nailed there.

            Draco obviously hadn't noticed him. He was looking at Harry instead, with a scowl that made Harry wince.

            For more than one reason, really. While he still hoped that Draco would forgive him for the crime of treating him like a child, Harry distrusted his own impulses now. Why did he want the forgiveness that badly? Did he want permission to treat Draco like a child, because Draco was leaning on him and trusting him implicitly, the way he had when the trial began?

            Distrusting yourself like this is a bitch.

            Harry had to turn his back on the most interesting pair in the courtroom, though, and make a bow to Discipula and the watching members of the Wizengamot. "Thank you for allowing me to introduce the character witnesses for my clients," he said, the usual sort of formal nonsense that Hermione had taught him had to go here. "I hope you will pay heed to their words."

            Discipula stood up and bowed back, which Harry hadn't thought would happen. "We shall consider all their words," she said, in a flawless voice that Harry would bet she saved for minutes like this. "Most carefully." She smiled at him, and her teeth glinted like iron before she sat back down.

            Harry didn't know what that meant, and he wasn't going to try and figure it out. He went and sat down next to Draco, because he'd rather repair the one breach he was fairly certain of healing.

            "I'm sorry," he whispered.

            Draco jerked as though Harry had woken him from a reverie, although he'd been looking directly at Harry when he sat down. "For what?" he whispered back. "As far as I can tell, you defended us competently."

            "Yeah, but I'm sorry for making you think you were a child and acting like an arse while I was doing it," Harry said, and then waited to see what that did. The temptation was strong to glance over his shoulder at Malfoy, but if he did, then he thought Draco's eyes would be drawn with his, and Draco would see him, too. And Harry had no idea at all how he was going to explain that one.

            Draco closed his eyes and chewed on his lip. Harry listened to his opponent make a long, smooth speech about how individual witnesses had inconsistencies, but one could trust the composite of their testimony, and how horrible Death Eater crimes were, and how letting the guilty ones go would be a mockery of their victims' pain, and so on. Harry didn't think the speech was very good, himself, smooth or not, but then, it accorded more with the way that people thought in this world, so he would probably convince them.

            "I just," Draco said. He stopped, groping for words. Harry was aware of Lucius's freezing glare on them, but he thought he managed to ignore it pretty well, and instead nodded, silently encouraging Draco. "I thought you were different from the others," Draco finished at last. "That you respected me in a way they didn't. My parents treated me like a child, Discipula and our other enemies barely paid attention to me--I was an afterthought--but you made me think that my words were important, and I could rescue my parents."

            "I still believe you can," Harry said simply.

            Draco shook his head. "Things have changed. When we got into the courtroom, I could see that you let your training take over. I couldn't match that. And you were humoring me when you told me that my words and memories were important. I don't like to be humored." His voice was soft, but savage.

            Harry winced, thinking about his own experience of that from Hermione and Malfoy. They hadn't bothered talking to him about the potion, he knew, or explaining a bloody thing because they thought he would only resist, argue back, misunderstand. "They were important in helping me understand this place," he said. "I told you I was a stranger, and why."

            "But I wanted to be important in my own right," Draco said. "Not just as an accessory to someone else. I've been an accessory to my father all my life. He thought I would be an appendage and his second youth, his obedient son. He didn't listen to what I dreamed of or wanted. When you told me I could be a hero, I believed you. At least it would be a new role. But now..." He shook his head and lapsed back into silence.

            "He's right, you know. You did treat him like that."

            The barely-breathed words that made the hair on the back of Harry's neck stand upright were Malfoy's, he knew. He did his best not to hear them as he kept his gaze fixed on Draco. "But it's true," he said. "I couldn't have accomplished my defense or found the witnesses without you."

            "But it's still only helping." Draco's hand curled into a loose fist on his knee. "When does my turn come to be the one who makes the difference? When is someone going to look at me and see someone who can help him, rather than someone who needs it?"

            "Mr. Evans, are you ready to give your speech?"

            Discipula was looking down on him with such cold politeness that Harry was sure it wasn't the first time she'd asked that. He rose to his feet, looking down helplessly at Draco. Draco looked back, mouth turned down, and then away, denying Harry a smile or a last moment of eye contact that might have done them both some good.

            Harry moved away from the chairs. Malfoy breathed on the back of his neck again, implying that he had come with Harry. The only good thing about that, Harry thought, was that it at least meant he wasn't staring at Draco anymore.

            He really, really wasn't in the mood to give a speech.

            There are times that you won't be, Hermione's voice said in his mind, in answer to his thoughts. And you have to anyway, because your clients deserve the best defense that you can give them.

            Harry nodded, lifted his head, and began.

            "You have seen for yourself the numbers and quality of witnesses produced to implicate the Malfoys," he told the crowd that waited around the perimeters of the courtroom, staring at him like hounds eager for his words. It was a look he had normally seen only on the faces of reporters, and Harry turned his head away so that he could speak to the members of the Wizengamot instead. They would be the ones casting the deciding votes. "You've noted the inconsistencies in their stories, and the expressions on their faces. I don't know about you, but I noticed a lot of jealousy, a lot of glee, a lot of greed for someone else's pain."

            Discipula shifted as if she would speak, but the witch in yellow robes caught her eye and frowned at her, and she subsided. Harry hoped that Malfoy had noticed that. It was that kind of thing he was supposed to be in the dream to observe, rather than how Harry treated Draco. He would get plenty of flak from his own mind for that last part, thank you.

            "These witnesses didn't speak up because they wanted to see justice done," Harry said. "They spoke up because they want to see the Malfoys arrested and condemned. Even someone who was just eighteen years old when this bloody war happened, even someone who was only supporting her husband." Draco and probably Narcissa were glaring at him now, but Harry didn't think he could afford to surrender such an important part of the defense. "Why did none of them come forwards immediately after the war and give their testimony then? Why didn't any of them push for a trial, if they were so sure that only their words were needed to condemn the Malfoys? They don't want justice. They don't want prosecution, for that matter. They want persecution."

            Some people in the crowed were calling out to him now, and more than one of the witnesses looked offended. Harry ignored that. They weren't the people he needed to convince.

            "I still think that no matter what they've done, everyone deserves a fair trial," Harry said. "Otherwise, we're no better than Voldemort and the Death Eaters, who killed people they thought deserved to die, without a trial, without a jury, often without giving them a chance to defend themselves." He knew that he was taking a risk with that one, since he didn't know the history of the war in this world, but if things had been significantly different in that respect, he knew he would have picked up on it from the other witnesses' testimony. "We say we're different. We say we value peace, and justice, and what's right. We don't if we just let everything go to pieces the moment someone we don't like is involved."

            "You don't understand!" one of the Wizengamot members in the back yelled, not paying any attention to the way the witch in yellow robes frowned at him. "You weren't here for the war. This isn't a matter of dislike."

            Harry snorted. "Because hatred is so much better?"

            He had a few people laughing now. Harry half-glanced at Discipula, and then decided that he would just keep his eyes away from her. She was unnervingly good at looking blank. He didn't need anything else coming along to upset him right now.

            "I ask you to consider your own hearts," he said. "I ask you to consider whether you are judging the Malfoys more harshly than you would someone else committing the same crime. The rumors are too thick now for fairness otherwise, never mind justice. The truth of what my clients did is buried under snow and fog. It would be best if they were allowed a new chance, a new life."

            There was a bit of applause when he sat back down, not much. Harry didn't know where Malfoy was, and he didn't care. He only cared that Draco had kept his head turned away, and that made Harry feel simultaneously sick and depressed, and guiltily relieved. Maybe he should let Draco go and stop trying to pursue a relationship with him now that he knew how he tended to treat the people who needed him.

            Malfoy bent down and whispered in his ear, "I know who Woburn is."

*

            I’m putting review responses here for right now, as the site where I usually post them isn’t loading for me.

            polka dot: I don’t know which one that would more likely be, right now.

            Erin_49: Most people accept that Woburn is wearing a glamour because they think of him as a mask for a disgraced pure-blood. It wouldn’t be noteworthy or unusual.

            Harry was wary of paying the price for Woburn’s information.

            SP777: Yes, in a way, but revealing his presence would require explaining waaaay too much.
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Sleepless