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Parsimony	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14122 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Twenty-Two--Bursting the Bounds

            Reducto Catenis!

            Three Blasting Curses unfolded in a chain in front of Harry and Draco, hurling the nearest Death Eaters away and into other Death Eaters. Harry saw them hit a few of the werewolves, too, and was glad to see that they didn't have any unusual sense of balance or even any real strength, from the way it sent them flying. He bent low, muttered a Lightening Charm for Draco and Shrinking Charms for the Black artifacts, and seized all of them, running for the Forest.

            Of course someone got in front of him, a tall, stern woman with white hair and grey eyes who might have been Lucius's cousin. She couldn't seem to see them well--perhaps part of Draco's spell was still working--but she fired off a curse that proved she didn't have to see them to hurt them. Harry dropped to his knees and bent his head under it, feeling like someone waiting for a headsman. The spell went by closely enough to ruffle the back of his neck.

            Draco moaned something, and started to struggle. Harry paused to roll his eyes. Wonderful. He cast a mild Calming Charm this time that would keep Draco from running away, and tightened a chain around the woman's feet with a nonverbal incantation. She staggered and fell, too, and Harry once again headed towards the far side of the circle.

            He knew he could defeat the Death Eaters, if he turned and fought them. He knew that he didn't want to get involved in those fights, for more than one excellent reason. He would kill if he did, his mind would go clear and he would do what he had to do to protect Draco and himself.

            And the people he had killed in the last month were enough.

            Something soared over his head and landed in front of him, then turned with a snarl. One of the werewolves, Harry saw. This one looked like it stood two meters tall at the shoulder, and the teeth that parted around the tongue let loose a wash of stinking breath.

            Harry dodged to the side and cast the first charm that sprang to mind, an illusion flavored with memory. Fenrir Greyback materialized in front of him, springing the way he had when he tried to kill Harry by leaping out of the ring of Aurors.

            The werewolf crouched flat with a yelp, and then rolled over on its back with its paws waving in the air. Again, Harry jumped and headed towards the Forest.

            A robe snapped around someone's ankles, and then Lucius Malfoy, or the person imitating him, was in front of them, aiming his wand. His voice sounded like Lucius's, although Harry had to admit that he wasn't as familiar with it as Draco would be.

            "I can see you. I know who you are and what you're doing here. And whatever my son told you about me, it wasn't enough."

            A hot wind began to blow against Harry's face, coming from Lucius's lazily lifted wand. He heard a piercing scream in the next moment, and then the air around him turned gold and dusty yellow, a creature soaring towards his face the way his illusion of Greyback had flown at the werewolf, its paws spread wide.

            Harry didn't hesitate. This one, he could kill. Ventus rufus!

            The spell blew straight through the creature on the wings of a knife-edged wind. The creature split apart in bloody chunks, and Harry tried to duck so that it wouldn't spatter him in the face the way the werewolf blood had. He thought he succeeded, though Draco moaned as wetness pooled in his eyes.

            He looked up to find Lucius Malfoy staring at him in undisguised shock. Probably he hadn't thought Harry Potter would use a spell like that.

            Harry smiled back and took advantage of the distraction while Lucius was still staring at them. Caeco!

            Lucius was the one who staggered this time, his hand flying up to his eyes. Harry ran for it. The blinding spell was temporary in most cases, but Harry couldn't pretend that he would feel bad if it was permanent this time, except as far as Draco was concerned.

            Draco. Who had come here so convinced that his father wasn't his father, that he could clear his family's name and not have to have Aurors involved until after they were sure that the leader was not Lucius Malfoy.

            Harry tightened his teeth. He would have to think about that later, would have to reassure Draco later, would have to decide what he was going to tell the Aurors later. They were only a few feet beyond the tents now, but that meant they were within a few feet of freedom, as well. He had to--

            A Tripping Jinx coiled around his legs. Harry ran on and slipped to one knee, then staggered up again. He had kept from falling a few times in practice with Dumbledore's Army because of moves like that.

            But it meant that someone had had the chance to catch him up, and that person was Pansy Parkinson, her long hair flying behind her and her eyes so bright with rapture that Harry hated her.

            "My lord, my lord, he's here!" she bellowed over her shoulder, and trained her wand on Draco, her smile rippling across her face. "They're both here."

            Harry still didn't want to kill her. He didn't want to kill anyone tonight, if he could help it. She was under Draco's spell, she didn't know what she was doing, he could invent any kind of excuses for her that he wanted and they would all be true.

            But it was also true that he wasn't going to let her capture or delay them any more than absolutely necessary.

            He began to whisper the spell he needed, not that she would hear anything with Snape's potion still functioning. He repeated it several times, and felt the power building up in him, getting ready to strike through his wand. He knew it would hurt, especially with the magic he had already used this evening, but he could--he would have to--Apparate them out of the Forest. As soon as they were beyond the spells spread around the Death Eater camp that prevented it, of course.

            When he was ready, he tilted his head back and cast the spell around himself, to include both Parkinson and the people running up behind them. Those people included werewolves, from the sound of soft paws. Harry wondered if it would work on them, if he had made it strong enough, if it was going to be possible to cast it at all when he couldn't speak the incantation aloud--

            And then the spell soared away from him, and Harry realized he needn't have worried after all.

            From a patch of calm ground where he and Draco crouched, concentric rings of force spread, down into the earth, waking it, making the trees tremble, ripping up the tents, shaking everyone around them from their feet. Harry leaped up and felt the ground pause as if to breathe, and then the second earthquake came, stronger than the first, deep and persistent and violent, making the Forest actually appear to bounce in his vision.

            Shouts and panicked screams came from behind them as the third quake started. Harry knew he would have to Apparate them from here, and screw waiting for the wards to dissolve. He would punch straight through them if he had to. And there might still be a little bit of protection left from the spell Draco had done that used his blood.

            He lifted his wand, he braced his muscles, he made sure that he had hold of Draco, cradling him close, and he threw all his remaining power into the Apparition, tearing through the wards along with casting the spell. He thought he felt them tear and wisp around him like cobwebs, and wanted to laugh. Not so strong after all.

            Then the world blinked around them and they were on the grounds outside the front gate of Hogwarts, sprawled on the grass. Gasps from close by alerted Harry they'd been seen. He tried to lift his wand and cast a Disillusionment Charm--

            And exhaustion rushed in on him, trampled him, drowned him, smashed him, and made it impossible for him to rise. He dropped his head to the ground and found that his fingers weighed too much to move.

            Oh. Reckon the anti-Apparition spells were stronger than I thought after all.

*

            "He must not be moved."

            Madam Pomfrey, how lovely to hear your voice again, Harry thought, and then grimaced as he realized that he'd nearly opened his mouth and said it aloud. He didn't know yet if Snape's potion was still functioning, and that meant he had to be careful of anything he said, in case words popped out that could implicate him or Draco.

            He let one eye sneak open and his hand move around on the bed as if randomly, feeling at the sheets. Well, at least no one had thought they should restrain him, as one particularly mad Healer at St. Mungo's had thought they should that summer. And he was in the hospital wing, and could see a shock of blond hair sticking out of the sheets of the bed next to him.

            Someone cleared her throat, and Harry realized there must be more people in the hospital wing than he thought. That was the way McGonagall sounded right before she spoke about her disappointment on the subject of Transfiguration homework. "While of course I am glad that Mr. Potter and Mr. Malfoy escaped harm, I must insist on speaking to them about their whereabouts tonight as soon as possible. They are already under a great deal of scrutiny because of their...pasts, and they are among the few students currently attending the school who are legal adults in the wizarding world. We must know what happened."

            "And you'll know, Headmistress," Madam Pomfrey said, and Harry saw a shadow move across the corner of his eye, as though she was shifting to plant herself between them and McGonagall. "As soon as it's not dangerous to wake Mr. Malfoy up."

            What happened to Draco? Harry nearly sat up, but he wasn't sure if that was the best idea at the moment. He concentrated harder on the blond hair, but it told him nothing. Draco lay still, and that could be the result of either injuries or a sleeping potion. He couldn't tell.

            "As long as you understand the importance of this," McGonagall said, and walked towards the door of the hospital wing, from the sound. Then she paused. "Professor Klein, are you coming?"

            "I must speak with Mr. Potter," Klein's low voice said, and this time the shadow moved towards Harry. "I think he is awake?"

            "He should be," Madam Pomfrey said, and turned back towards Harry with a click of her shoes. "He had no injuries, mental or physical. Though if I find out what he did to cause such magical exhaustion..."

            I hope what happened to Draco is just the shock he fell into when he saw his father, then, nothing physical. Harry had thought he'd guarded Draco well enough that any attack would have hit him before it hit Draco. Things had been so mad that he wasn't sure, though.

            Harry decided it was useless to try and pretend any longer, and if Snape's potion was still active, Klein would just have to put off questioning him. He sat up and yawned, then glanced at the Auror. She gave a faint nod as though to say she understood and appreciated his circumstances. The gentle smile on her face contrasted with the warning in her eyes, though.

            "Where were you, Mr. Potter?" Klein nodded to him a second time and took a seat on air at the side of his bed, watching him intently. "And why did you not use the Portkey that you have on your person to escape?"

            "I didn't have it with me," Harry said. He was actually telling the truth. He had left the Portkey behind because, for all he knew, it was the carrier of the tracking spell, and he couldn't risk Klein stopping him and Draco before they left the school grounds. "I wanted--we wanted to do this on our own."

            "It was a planned project between you and Mr. Malfoy, then?" McGonagall loomed up behind Klein like a planet behind its moon. "We thought at first that Mr. Malfoy had kidnapped you."

            Harry hesitated for a long time. He had the choice now of either lying and likely being caught, or telling the truth and maybe blackening the Malfoy family's name further. He wished he could have talked to Draco before this.

            Klein leaned nearer, trying to loom in her own way and intimidate him. Harry glared back.

            And felt a sudden rush of shocked pleasure as he saw the way Klein flinched, and remembered that he had some weapons of his own, if he dared to use them.

            "No, he didn't kidnap me," Harry said. "But he did ask me to keep quiet about what we went to do, because he was terrified of what the Ministry would do and say." He leaned forwards and lowered his voice to the point that Klein swayed towards him to hear. "Why did the Ministry allow Lucius Malfoy to escape their custody, Auror?"

            "What?" Klein started to stand, and then reached out and placed a hand on the bed to hold herself in place. Her face had changed color, but already Harry could see her smoothing her imaginary ruffled feathers, making herself calm down. "Lucius Malfoy is in Azkaban, and will stay there."

            "It must have been his evil twin who was in the Forest of Dean, then," Harry said, "organizing the Death Eaters for a new invasion. A new attack. His evil twin who led them all this time, and who commanded Fenrir Greyback to attack you, and who sent the Death Eaters into the Forbidden Forest. Because when Draco, who thought he should take care of this on his own because it's his family's honor and his family's shame, cast a spell at him that should have removed any glamour, his face stayed exactly as it was."

            Klein opened her mouth far enough Harry thought he could see every one of her gums, but said nothing. McGonagall had that brooding silence Harry had seen her exert after a Quidditch loss by Gryffindor.

            "The reason he had to do that, and the reason I went with him?" Harry raised his voice a little, but kept it at the same growling, rolling pitch. He had to hit everyone who could accuse him of madness hard enough to keep them from hammering back. "Because he doesn't trust the Ministry not to either kill his father or implicate him in a conspiracy, despite the fact that he's been at school the entire time. And neither did I."

            "We have always strived to treat our suspects fairly," Klein began.

            "Bollocks, and you know it," Harry snapped. "I lost my godfather because no one could bother to give him a proper trial. I've been tried and condemned in the press, by the Minister himself, more times than I can count. The Ministry reacts the same way in the aftermath of Voldemort's defeat each time. Some people are tried and pardoned, guilt is glanced away from, and innocence doesn't matter."

            McGonagall cleared her throat the way she had before she spoke with Madam Pomfrey. Harry thought he heard Draco's voice hissing in his ear. Don't allow her to speak. She would slow you down, and you can't allow her to do that right now, not for anything.

            "Draco has tried to act like a different person since he was here," Harry said in a low, deadly voice, glancing back and forth between the two women. "Fighting the Death Eaters. Making friends with me. And he was stalked by Fenrir Greyback, even though he was under the command of his own father. It says a lot that, despite everything, he still didn't trust the Ministry enough to go to them."

            "We can do nothing about someone's lack of trust in us if he will make no effort to feed us the most important information," Klein said, beginning to resist his attack. She folded her arms, though, and from that, Harry took heart. "If he had told us at once about the Death Eaters--"

            "He discovered it because I told him," Harry said. "And I only knew because I performed a magical ritual on the advice of the wolfwere who wanted to know where the killers of his pups were. Yet has the Ministry made an effort to find them? Would they have reported the information to him if they had? No. They consider magical creatures too far beneath them to!"

            "Mr. Potter." McGonagall had a weird warning tone in her voice, as if she didn't know whether she should really be warning Harry or Klein. "You must remember that the roots of our prejudices in this case are long--"

            "Prejudices against who?" Harry demanded. "Against the wolfweres, who most people         don't know exist? Against Draco, who did his best to reform? Or against me, because some people in the Ministry don't trust me?"

            Klein flinched. Harry nodded, following up his advantage. If he let anyone retreat here and make up the ground, then he would lose. "Yes. I've spoken with Auror Klein, and I know she thinks differently of me than she used to. But there's a whole lot of people, Aurors, who don't, and she can only do what the Ministry tells her to do. I think I have to protect Draco and the wolfwere, or no one else is going to."

            "And it didn't matter to you that the Death Eaters have not harmed only Mr. Malfoy?" McGonagall gave him a grave look. "That you have now scared them off, and they may be gone to some place where we cannot find them?"

            Harry bit his lip and stared at her. "It mattered to me," he said. "I thought a long time about what I had to do."

            "But in the end," Klein said, "that was siding with Mr. Malfoy, not us."

            "Yes," Harry said. "Because you were the ones who made it into a side. What would you have done, Klein--"

            "Professor Klein," McGonagall said, but Harry ignored her. Because he was Harry bloody Potter, and right now, he was the only champion Draco or the wolfwere had.

            "If I had come to you and told you that Lucius Malfoy was leading the Death Eaters in the Forest of Dean, but that it might not be Lucius Malfoy? Would you have believed me? Or would you have run away and reported to Olversvald, and then gone and crashed into their camp?"

            Klein frowned at him and slowly shook her head. "It is impossible to know what I may have done, since you did not give me the choice."

            "I know," Harry said grimly, "what the Daily Prophet would have done. They would have dragged your lot over the coals for not keeping Malfoy from escaping, sure, but they also would have insisted that Draco be expelled from the school, and some parents might have backed them up. And they would have asked why I was the one who discovered the location of the Death Eater camp, and someone who saw the real death of Fenrir Greyback might decide to tell them about that. They could support me or turn against me at any time, and the Ministry can do the same. Everything's just food for a story or food for politics, and the only thing that changes is the name of the thing you feed me to. No, I think I need to make my own decisions. If I was wrong, I'll admit that and I'll take the consequences I need to from it. But I can't trust you. That's the reason I decided to support Draco."

            "You could trust us," Klein said. "We have already made bargains with you that we have made with no other private individual. And we could have protected you from the Prophet."

            "The way you did when Fudge claimed I was a liar and the Prophet said I was insane?" Harry asked quietly. "The way you did when that reporter lied his way into Remus's funeral and the Aurors who were there, following me around when I said I didn't want their protection, refused to arrest him, because he had the right to be there and the right to harass us?" His jaw clenched when he thought about that, about Andromeda breaking down in tears because the reporter wouldn't stop demanding what she was thinking, to have accepted a werewolf as a son-in-law. "I don't trust you, because I don't think we're on the same side. You're on the side of having as little trouble as possible. I'm on the side of living my life."

            The silence stretched after that. Harry sat back, panting, and surprised to realize he was doing so. He touched his forehead with the back of one hand and found it damp. He closed his eyes.

            He had done all he could--and some of the words that came out of him were strange, not ones that he thought he could have spoken. Then again, he had a lot of pent-up anger at the Ministry.

            He leaned his head back on the pillow and kept his eyes shut. If Klein and McGonagall were going to have a silent conversation about how impossible he was, then they would just have to do it without him watching their facial expressions.

            "Mr. Potter," McGonagall said at last. "Why did you risk so much for Mr. Malfoy?"

            Harry opened his eyes and stared at her. "All that, and that's the question you ask?" he had to say.

            A faint smile flickered through McGonagall's eyes, but her face did not change. "Answer the question, if you please, Mr. Potter."

            Harry thought about it, then nodded shortly. Fine, if she wanted to, then he would. "Because no one else fights for him. Because his House and the press and most of the world seem to think he's a Death Eater traitor or he should be in Azkaban with his father--well, where his father was," he had to add, glaring at Klein. "But he's more than that. He's better. He's special. He just needs time and for people to see that. But he won't get the chance to have that if he's thrown into a cell. And I'm the only one with enough power to protect him who wants to protect him."

            McGonagall gave him a long look, as if they had all the time in the world and she was responsible for judging him. Harry tensed his muscles and glared back, ready to challenge her if she said something. Well, if she said something that challenged his right to protect Draco and the wolfwere, at least. And Snape, although Harry doubted she knew about that yet.

            "Will you talk to Professor Klein and explain what went on?" McGonagall asked.

            Harry nodded. "And I didn't kill anyone tonight," he said. "In case she's worried about that."

            Klein opened her mouth, but McGonagall got there first. "That's good," she said. "That's the first rebuilding of a bridge of trust between you and the Ministry."

            "You're taking his side?" Klein turned her stare and open mouth on McGonagall.

            "I believe him," McGonagall said. "I think that is different." She glanced at Harry, and suddenly she was his intimidating Head of House again even though she hadn't changed a muscle in her face. "And I think that you and I will have detentions to talk over in the near future, Mr. Potter."

            Harry nodded, dry-mouthed.

            "Then start the explanation, and Professor Klein can take the information back to the Ministry," McGonagall said. "Matilda, I suggest you stay within the bounds of questions about tonight only." And she left the hospital wing.

            Harry stared after her. Even though he might have detentions later, even though he had to talk to Klein--

            Even though Draco slept through the whole thing and missed how I feel about him--

            he'd won.

            I'll have to start standing up for myself more often, if this happens, he thought, and turned cheerfully to speak with Klein.



*

            ChaosLady: That's the question Harry would like to know the answer to, too.

            unneeded: It was mostly having to take Draco along that impeded the way Harry escaped.

            Fullmoons_wings: Draco may not have cast the spell properly. At least, that's what he's currently going to hope.

            I meant a tattoo as in the rhythm something creates when it's drumming.

            Zip: Thank you! I hope you have a good New Year, too.
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Parsimony