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Acts of Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21189 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Twenty-Four—Upcoming
            Harry looked around curiously. He’d arrived for another meeting with the people who were discussing what kind of compensations the children who had suffered under the Carrows needed. Usually, the room—one of the many empty professors’ quarters at Hogwarts, with a large round table in the middle—was so crowded he had to squirm along to get anywhere.
            This time, people backed away as soon as they noticed him.
            But given the way that one tall woman turned towards him and firmed her jaw, Harry wouldn’t have to wonder for very long.
            “Is it true that you’re dating a Death Eater?” she demanded.
            Harry blinked a little, then smiled faintly. He thought it was probably Ginny who had spread the news, but it could have been any of the Weasleys, really. He hadn’t bound them to keep it a secret.
            Or Minerva could have said something, or even Mournegath and his man, if they had been more observant than Harry had thought. He shrugged a little and said, “Yes. I’m dating Draco Malfoy, who has the Dark Mark on his arm and served six months in Azkaban for his crimes.”
            That made everyone press further away. Harry sat down in his usual chair at the table and pulled the lists of names towards him. A few were crossed off at the top, he saw. Either families who had the compensation they wanted, in the form of some money and apologies from the Ministry for being so weak as to get invaded by Voldemort, or ones who had decided that their need for compensation wasn’t so urgent.
            Harry wanted to cross off at least three more today.
            “Why?”
            “Well, sitting down makes me more comfortable, which means that we don’t need to spend as much time here and we can all go home early,” Harry explained, with a kind smile at the witch who had asked, and carefully glanced at the fourth name.
            “No, why are you dating someone who was in Azkaban.”
            “Because I like him.”
            “That’s not an answer,” said a man who made sure that everyone knew all about his pure-blood grandmother and what she would have done to the Carrows if she was still alive every time someone asked, and most times that they didn’t.
            “Of course it is,” Harry said calmly. “It just isn’t the one you want to hear, which makes it different.”
            “What do you think we want to hear?”
            “I’m sorry I’m dating him!” Harry cried abruptly, and buried his head in his arms. “He enchanted me! He seduced me! It’s nothing I could resist. I’m sorry, and I’ll stop immediately, now that you’ve opened my eyes!”
            He raised his head a second later, and shrugged. “That’s what you’d prefer to hear. But it’s not true.”
            There was a scathing murmur stirring among the people in back of him. Harry had known it would be scathing. He sat there, grinning, and let it build, until Professor McGonagall forced her way forwards, shaking her head.
            “I don’t see that this matters,” she told the crowd, and took the seat across from Harry. “Last time, we were discussing the Claytons’ claim. Their daughter was abused by the Carrows two Septembers ago. Mrs. Clayton? Are you here?”
            “No, I want to know about this!” snapped the man with the formidable grandmother. “You wouldn’t just excuse me for going off and dating the enemy, would you? That means you can’t excuse him!”
            “No one would have to excuse you because no one would care, Sanding,” someone muttered from the back of the crowd.
            As the man turned pale and then pink, Harry turned around and frowned at him. “Yes, and we’re wasting time that we could use getting on. I don’t know about you, but I want justice. And then I want lunch.”
            “It still matters,” someone else insisted.
            “It doesn’t matter here,” Harry said quietly. “Draco served his time, and paid with real money and magic as well, because of the punishments mandated by the Wizengamot. And I don’t need to consult with you before I start dating someone.”
            “It betrays—”
            “What? Tell me what it betrays.”
            “Everything we’re struggling with here!” That was Sanding, who Harry supposed had found his voice again.
            “I don’t see how,” Harry sad. “We’re struggling for fairness and justice and deciding what’s a good compensation for things like torture—things that are hard to determine any kind of compensation for. It’s imperfect. That’s why it’s taking so long. But no one would be able to tell us what kind of compensation should be offered if we didn’t talk about it. And remember that I’m paying the compensation out of my own money. So I’m part of this.”
            “Then you shouldn’t date a Death Eater.”
            “What do you think it’s going to do?” Harry held out his hands. “Make me sympathetic to the Carrows? Have you seen any sign of that so far? Make me less willing to help your children? Again, have you seen any sense of that?”
            “You might funnel some money towards Malfoy,” said someone else.
            “It’s my money,” Harry pointed out coolly. “What I do with it is my decision. And if Draco Malfoy was tortured by the Carrows and wants to ask for something because of that, he would have as much right as anyone else.”
            A few people turned and walked out of the room. Harry ignored them. If they were going to be that unreasonable, there was no getting through to them anyway.
            He turned to the rest of the people who were left. “You don’t all approve of each other anyway,” he said. “Some of you have relatives who were also condemned Death Eaters.” He looked pointedly at one witch near the back of the crowd who he knew was some kind of Nott cousin, here to represent a family whose son hadn’t survived the battle. “But this is the way we’re doing things.”
            There was a stirring and a shuffling. One other person peeled away and left. But no one else did.
            Not even Sanding.
            Grunting, Harry turned back to the paper in front of him and asked, “Can someone tell me whether the Claytons are here?”
*
            Draco breathed shallowly, so as not to get dust in his lungs. There was dust all over the place in this small room he had come to look at in Hogsmeade, the sole room on the “first floor” of a small cottage.
            “Do you like it or not?” demanded the witch behind him.
            She was small enough to have a lot of goblin blood, and rude enough for it, too. Draco ignored her for the moment, turning in a circle instead, his hands out as he imagined walking down the width of an aisle of Potions ingredients. The barrels of beetle eyes could go there. The sturdier shelving for Occamy livers, there. He would need to build and add and restore and rip out part of the wall that jutted in an odd angle for no reason, but that was no more than he had expected when he was thinking about opening an apothecary anyway.
            “Do you like it or not?”
            “I like what it could be.”
            She was silent, and Draco turned around, wondering too late if the woman had decided not to rent it to him after all. But instead, she was giving him a smile that made the corners of her face and eyes look more like a fox’s than a goblin’s.
            “Good answer,” she said. “You have the transforming gleam in your eyes, I can see that. Three Galleons a week.”
            Draco choked. “A week?” He could probably afford the rent for a few months, but that wasn’t the point; he needed a long-term investment, not something he could buy lavishly for a little while. “No. A month.”
            “This is my only chance lately to make a little money,” the woman said. “Two Galleons and three Sickles a week.”
            “Then maybe you should keep the room in better condition, so that people don’t cough their lungs out when they come up here. One Galleon a week.”
            “One Galleon sixteen Sickles a week.”
            “That’s still almost two,” Draco pointed out, beginning to be amused. “One Galleon three.”
            The woman hesitated, then shook her head. “I really can’t afford the distraction from my rituals for only that. All the people tromping on the steps and coming to see you and so on,” she added, when Draco started to open his mouth to question what she meant. “One Galleon eight.”
            Draco thought about it, glancing around the room. He would have to put in a lot of work. He would have to find people willing to work for a convicted Death Eater. Or he would have to buy all the materials and then do a lot of the Transfiguring himself, and he’d never been as good at Transfiguration as he was at Charms.
            But on the other hand, this was the most suitable place he had seen in some time, and he ended up nodding. “That’ll do.”
            “Swear.”
            Draco turned around, surprised. The witch was holding out her left hand with a small, bloody cut across the middle of it. It was the old way of blood-swearing that not many people practiced anymore. Draco drew his wand and used one of the Cutting Curses that had been in the earlier editions of the first-year textbooks, and they touched hands, bloody cut to bloody cut.
“Good.” The woman stepped back and nodded. “My name is Elizabeth Cutting.” Draco had to smile. “And your first payment is due immediately.” This time, she put out the hand she hadn’t cut.
Draco shrugged, dragging out his money pouch. He had brought some of the money he’d earned with potions on purpose to bribe people if he couldn’t convince them to simply let him in to view the rooms. “No problem,” he said, and noted the way Cutting’s eyes shone as he dropped the Galleon and eight Sickles into her palm. Yes, goblin-descended. On the other hand, that meant she would probably fiercely protect his privacy as long as he paid her on time.

            And it explains why she would let me in even though I have the Mark. Goblins don’t give a shit about things like that.
            When Cutting had left, Draco began to examine the walls. He thought they were thick enough, on the whole, to withstand some of the inevitable explosions, but there were chinks he would need to repair. He could conjure rags, though.
            He’d just lifted his wand to do it when an owl soared straight through the window. The shutters were standing open, but it still gave Draco a nasty shock. He turned and stared the owl in its hostile eyes as it landed on his arm.
            The letter on its talon was short, and had a coin tucked in the corner of it that Draco took care not to touch. When he’d read the letter once, he had to stand back and consider what he was going to do.
            Malfoy,
            Harry’s right about one thing. I should be fighting my own battles. And I’ve fought all the ones I can with him. I think we ought to talk. The coin is a Portkey that will bring you directly to me.
            Ginny Weasley.
            Draco breathed out slowly and considered it. On the one hand, he shouldn’t go. This was still a matter more between Harry and Weasley than him, and when Weasley said she should fight her own battles, she might mean an actual duel. Draco would be at a disadvantage there, with his first-year spells.
            On the other hand, the reference to fighting her own battles seemed to prove this was Weasley, not someone trying to lure him into a trap. And…
            Draco had learned from the war how much he hated long-term threats dangling over his head.
            He touched the Sickle, and watched the world blur around him.
*
Severus1snape: I’m afraid it wouldn’t help.
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Acts of Life