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Contracted	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18657 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Twenty-Six--Miles in the Distance of Time

            "Thanks."

            Potter's words were a bit baffled, wary, but at the same time heartfelt. Or at least Draco thought so, as he watched Potter press the glass of Firewhisky against his forehead. He'd drunk half of it straight off, without a flinch. Draco had been torn between disgust that he didn't appreciate the quality of it more and admiration that he could do such a thing. No doubt Ministry banquets had inured him to it.

            And there came the emotions that he wouldn't have expected to feel under any circumstances, the pity that it had been so and the consuming curiosity as to why Potter had let the contract go on for so long. Perhaps Pansy and Daphne were on to something when they said this was different from his previous infatuations for the sake of sex, after all.

            "You're welcome." Draco curled his legs elegantly beneath him on the couch and leaned forwards. "Right now, Potter, there's something I'd like you to tell me. If you feel up to it, of course."

            "What?" Potter's face reflected a tempered caution now as he took another sip. His face changed. "This is good, and I was tossing it down my throat like it was a Muggle product, wasn't I? Shit, I'm sorry."

            Draco's admiration rose a notch, but he shrugged as if it were of no great consequence. "Why the contract?"

            "What?" Potter blinked again. He really did look better without those awful glasses, Draco thought, but he could understand why Potter had kept them. They added to the charm and the feeling that someone who wanted to capture Potter's attention was talking to the iconic hero instead of someone only pretending to be him. Of course, anyone who had spoken to Potter in most of the past decade was talking to a facade, but most people wouldn't know and wouldn't care about the difference. "But I told you the story of why I thought it was a good idea."

            "Not that," Draco said, although perhaps he had meant that, because now Potter had said those words, he found himself unsure what he had meant. He spent a few moments sipping Firewhisky and thinking about it, while Potter watched him, his eyes hidden in the shade of his fringe. Draco finally snapped his fingers, pleased that he had been able to think of a way to phrase it. "I want to know why you didn't make an effort to get free when it started depressing you and you hated the way you lived."

            "But you know that, too," Potter said. "You know that I was too deeply involved to break free. And I'd already spent years lying so that my friends could have nice things. They would hate me whether they found out then or ten years from then, I reasoned, so I might as well go on lying."

            "That is pathetic," Draco said softly.

            "Yes, it was," Potter said, and finished the Firewhisky with another tossed gulp, ignoring Draco's wince this time. Draco frowned. That wasn't a good sign; probably Potter was getting into the sort of mood he did when he was at those Ministry banquets. "But it was the only move which made sense to me at the time. And...to be honest, it took you to show me why I was wrong. Until then, I was the only one who was unhappy. Sandborn was all too happy to have a pet Auror dancing attendance at his side. My friends had most of what they wanted, and some things they might not have been able to get otherwise. Callia knew what she was getting out of marriage with me--no passion--and that satisfied her. Why change things?"

            "Because..." Draco had wanted this, this exposure of a mindset that was utterly foreign to him, and it didn't satisfy him as much as he had thought it might. He again waited and thought about his words, while Potter waited and watched. Another house-elf appeared beside Potter, bowing as it held out the glass of Firewhisky. Potter showed no hesitation in accepting it.

            "Because," Draco said at last, "one person being unhappy is enough reason to want to change things."

            Potter eyed him wryly. "If that was so, then I think you would have still insisted that I get out of my situation on my own, since I was the one who put myself there. Why should it matter to you? I wasn't your friend. I wasn't your lover--then," he added, after a pause that weighed like an oncoming thunderstorm on Draco's mind.

            "The debt," Draco said.

            Potter nodded. "Yes. All right. But--I have to ask. If there was no debt between us, if the contract had only covered my friends and you'd got free some other way, then would you have the felt the necessity to rescue me?"

            Draco shook his head. "No."

            Instead of irritating Potter as he'd expected, his answer made the git relax, leaning back in his chair and taking a smaller swallow of his drink this time. "Then I can understand, and trust, you on a level that I can't with my friends," he said simply. "I spent so much time lying to them that they can't trust me, and I wouldn't want them to. And I don't know who I am with them, anymore. I know who I am to you because we're both on the same level of understanding."

            Draco stared at him, amused and annoyed at the same time. "A Slytherin who lives a happy life is like a broken-down Gryffindor just released from a life that made him miserable?"

            "I know what you want," Potter said. "I know what kind of person I want to be around you, and the kind it's okay to be around you. Like I said, I don't know that with my friends, not yet. I hope I'll learn," he added softly. "But it might not be possible, and if it's not possible, I won't spend the rest of my life weeping and wailing about it." He took another drink.

            Draco sat there blinking. It was the kind of honesty he praised in himself, but refracted back at him from some strange lens in Potter's soul.

            "I don't think you could have a casual relationship if you tried, Potter," he said, because that was the only immediate practical application he could think of for the man's words.

            Potter chuckled, though, and toasted him with his drink. "I could try," he said. "But you're right, it would probably end in heartbreak. What's more important is that I know you rescued me because of the debt, so I didn't start out with any romantic delusions. And you helped me because of the debt, so you weren't expecting me to slobber gratitude all over your feet."

            "What a disgusting idea," Draco said, honestly appalled that Potter's imagination could travel in directions like that. "When I want you to touch me that way, Potter, I'll have you kiss my feet. Not slobber on them."

            A reckless spark lit Potter's eyes, and he put the Firewhisky aside and sat up. "You're still the same demanding little shit as always," he said, as if he was merely making an observation. "Should I show you the way I'd do it?"

            "I don't need to know what you and your fiancée got up to in your free time," Draco said, but he couldn't hide either the way his spine shuddered or his voice grew richer.

            Potter merely smiled at him, deep and quiet, and stood up so that he could saunter over to Draco. He stood over Draco's chair, staring down. Draco stared back up at him, his heart pounding so hard that it nearly drove all thoughts of wit out of his head.

            "As it happened," Potter murmured, meeting him eye-to-eye and not looking away, "this is something that I never did for Callia. I think she would have been appalled, yes. Passion was anathema to her. But you..." He slid gracefully to his knees, and then reached out and caught one of Draco's shoes in his hands, pulling it off.

            Draco didn't have the words to make Potter stop or continue, and he wasn't sure which one he would have wanted more anyway. But he sat there, staring, silent, fascinated, and Potter's smile tilted up more and more at the edges, became stranger and stranger. By now, he had Draco's shoes off and was staring at his feet as if wondering whether he had the courage to go through with what he'd started. Draco finally found the words to whisper, "Do you know what you're doing?"

            "No," Potter said frankly, looking up at him. "Do you want me to stop?"

            "No." Draco was still fascinated. Odd as this was, he wanted to watch it play out. He'd been able to predict most of what Potter did, whether he was in self-pity mode or slowly waking back into his fire. This was the first time Potter had leaped away from the neat rails that Draco had laid out in his mind, and he had to know what would happen next.

            Potter smiled and ran his fingers up the soles of Draco's feet. Draco felt his back arching without conscious input from his mind. His breath was getting shorter, and Potter's touch stayed just shy of tickling. Potter locked his fingers together and slid them smoothly from heel to toe of one of Draco's feet, then the other. "Thank you," he whispered.

            Then he bent down and kissed the top of the left foot, followed by the right. In each case, he pressed his lips down hard enough that Draco thought he could feel the thrumming of it in his bones.

            "That's, that's," Draco said, as Potter sat back on his heels and stared up at him. "I don't know what to call that."

            Potter smiled slyly at him. "Glad that one thing can make you speechless, at least."

*

            Harry looked at himself critically in the mirror, then stepped back so that he could see the robes better. They were his usual Auror robes, but with added charms that would make them seem to sparkle and shine in the light of any cameras aimed at him. Harry had never used such spells before--why should he, when his name and his deal with Sandborn already guaranteed that he was the center of every gaze at public functions?--and he was dubious about them.

            "You'll do fine, dear."

            Harry drew his wand, then realized the voice had come from the mirror. He relaxed with a weak snort. "Of course that ponce would have enchanted mirrors to tell him when he looks good," he muttered.

            "Oh, no, he always hushes me," the mirror assured him, sounding in deadly earnest. "You wouldn't believe the type of rubbish he prefers in terms of compliments! Why, some of the things his last girlfriend told him were criminal. I'm glad that she's gone now." The mirror's voice turned sly. "I much prefer you, you see. I always did admire that contrast of the dark and the light coloring."

            Harry blinked, trying frantically to remember if he'd kissed Malfoy's feet in a room with a mirror. He didn't think so, but there were so many decorations in the bloody place, it was a wonder that a dozen reflections didn't follow Malfoy around constantly.

            "Don't get used to it," he mumbled at last. "I probably won't stay that long."

            "Really?" The mirror sounded disappointed in the same way that children tended to be when Harry wouldn't cast a binding spell on one of them. "But you're so good for him! So bold in your coloration, and you make his pulse beat faster and his face flush, did you know? The way his eyes follow you around, I think he might have found someone to give him the proper way to relax at last." The mirror tilted a little in its frame, towards Harry, and its voice lowered to a whisper. "Of course I admire the way he looks, and I say all the proper things, but frankly, he needs to spend less time preening and more time putting those good looks to use!"

            "Didn't anybody ever teach you not to pay attention to magical mirrors, Potter?" Malfoy asked, sailing in through the doorway of the bedroom he'd lent Harry as if it was his--which it was, technically, Harry had to admit. "Always concerned with the way things look, never the way things are."

            The mirror sniffed, and Harry wondered crazily for a moment what Mr. Weasley would say about magical objects that kept their noses where you couldn't see them. "You're just jealous that you didn't get to see him naked as much as I did."

            Malfoy gave a lazy smile at the room in general, so Harry couldn't be sure who he was including in it, the mirror or Harry, and reached out as if he would lay a hand on the collar of Harry's robes. "That could be remedied," he all but whispered.

            Harry danced away like a nervous horse, and knew he was acting ridiculous from the way Malfoy's eyes followed him, and tried not to care. "You need to give me a minute or two to get back into the mood to talk to the press," he whispered harshly. "I'm not used to letting my third soul take care of things like this."

            Malfoy looked at him, inviting an explanation with no more than the tilt of his head and the lift of an eyebrow. In some ways, Harry hated that he'd become so adept at reading the bastard. It made him feel too relaxed.

            "Look," Harry said. "I had to teach myself to behave in certain ways around Sandborn and other people. The first soul. The second soul was for my friends, and the third soul was just for myself. That was the one I used to laugh and think all the sarcastic thoughts I didn't dare have around Sandborn, just in case I slipped up and said them aloud. But you can't make me laugh like this, or splutter like this, right before I go to meet members of the press. That makes it likely that I'll slip up around them, too."

            Malfoy spent enough time standing there and staring at him that Harry thought he would have to slip past him out of the room and take on the press conference himself. Then Malfoy reached out and straightened a minor wrinkle in Harry's robes that surely would have escaped his attention. His eyes were intense.

            "You can do this," he said. "I believe you can. And I believe that you'll be better at it with access to all the facets of your personality, your sense of humor and your fire and your exasperation and all."

            Harry shook his head. "It's only one part of me that can act well. I need to shut the rest away."

            Malfoy's hand came to rest lightly on his arm, as inarguable as an iron bar. "You did," he said. "That doesn't mean you need to do it now. And I'm going to show you. Come with me. I'll fill in the holes that you're worried about leaving. I'll be your guard and your defense, the one you can trust your back to."

            Harry grimaced. "No one's going to believe that you've become my lover and trusted confidant that fast."

            "I'll make them believe it," Malfoy said earnestly. "I'm very good at that."

            Harry looked doubtfully at him.

            "He is, you know," the mirror said. "I've watched him charm the feathers off an owl."

            Malfoy beamed.

            "Weren't you the one who just got through telling me never to trust magical mirrors?" Harry muttered.

            Malfoy shook his head. "Sometimes your having a sense of yourself instead of being the perfect political automaton can be...inconvenient," he said, but his smile never wavered. "Will you trust me or not?"

            Harry hesitated. He still sometimes felt that he didn't know what Malfoy wanted, other than to be a pain in the arse. But the man had risked and suffered and sacrificed for him (although perhaps the suffering hadn't been very deep), and it was true that he hadn't betrayed him yet. Harry suspected the thought would never occur to him unless Harry betrayed him first or until the debt was paid.

            Will it ever be paid?

            Harry had no idea. This had begun with the debt, it hadn't stayed there, and he didn't think he could name the place where it had ended up yet.

            "Yes," he said. "For this, I'll trust you to convince people if I falter."

            Malfoy looked at him with a half-jaundiced expression that a smile kept fighting its way from under. "So sure that you can make a good political speech on your own?" he murmured. "As I understood it, Sandborn wrote most of your speeches."

            Harry gave him a small, hard smile. "Not all," he said. "Although the majority, that's true. And--there are things that I never thought about at the time, because I treated it as the normal business of politics. Perhaps it is. But brought out and revealed to the open morning light, it's going to seem much darker."

            "Like a stone that changes colors depending on whether it's wet or not," Malfoy said approvingly, which just proved that Harry was never going to be able to keep up with the jackrabbit jumps of his mind. "All right. What are you going to say?"

            "You're just going to have to wait to hear like the rest of them," Harry said, and swept haughtily out in front of him.

            The magic mirror snickered and said something about "a suitable partner." Harry could hear Malfoy casting a charm of some sort that was probably meant to hush it, and hid a smile in his sleeve, so that he was walking along like a solemn old man by the time that Malfoy caught up with him.

            Malfoy was bringing out a new side of him. Harry didn't know where it was going to end up any more than he knew where their relationship would. Kissing Malfoy's feet last night had been unanticipated; thinking about it made him want to blush.

            But it was different, it was new, it was changing, and none of those were words that he could have applied to his state under the contract.

*

            They had called the press conference outside the gates of Malfoy Manor; there was no way that Draco was going to have these people trampling his roses and getting hung up on the fact that he had a few man-eating plants in his gardens. They were valuable, and the endless appeals for him to get rid of them if they ate someone would simply be too tiresome to endure.

            Potter stepped out looking regal. The robes he had chosen, although they were ordinary for the most part, enhanced his appearance, Draco had to admit. The mirror had been right. (Not that he would ever tell the conceited object that. Even the Silencing Charm he'd cast had perhaps been an overreaction, letting it know that it had spoken truths he didn't care to hear).

            The reporters fell expectantly silent when Potter held up a hand. Draco was sure that he was the only one standing near enough to hear Potter's slow, rattling intake of breath. The confident pose was only that. He didn't have the might of the Ministry backing him up anymore, and he was going to war against Sandborn.

            But the moment passed, and Potter said, "I come here today to confess to you what kind of person I am, and what kind of person your Minister really is."

            Draco slewed his head around and stared at Potter. Is he going to tell them about the contract? That's going to mess everything up--

            Potter half-shook his head, a brief motion that Draco barely caught, and plunged ahead. "You think that I play the game of politics," he told the reporters. "The moral game of politics. You think I never bribed anyone, that I acquired my victories simply by wit and charm, and that I never aided the Minister in threatening anyone." He paused, in a silence so deep Draco could hear the faint, shrill trumpeting of one of his peacocks from back in the garden. "Well, I did."

            The reporters pressed forwards, but they seemed so enchanted with the story Potter was telling that they didn't say anything for a long moment. Potter took advantage of the silence, speaking with calm, measured words.

            The tale he spun was one that was undoubtedly true, although it wasn't one Draco would have pictured him choosing, because it made him look as bad as it did Sandborn. There had been bribes to Wizengamot members, though sometimes the bribe was nothing more than Potter going over to their homes for a dinner or making himself look like a friend for the sake of a skeptical visitor. There were threats laid out more or less subtly against the Heads of Departments in the Ministry who had disagreed with Sandborn. Draco had been aware that Head Aurors had a tendency to change frequently in the first few years of Sandborn's term, but he hadn't known the reason.

            Potter had been complicit in that. He admitted it, and that he had been Sandborn's tool in other, more minor things, too: snubbing someone at a Ministry party to let them know of the Minister's displeasure; refusing invitations or accepting them in a random pattern to keep Sandborn's political opponents rattled and off-balance; cutting off investigations that might have revealed the extent of the corruption in the ranks of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. He looked sad as he admitted it, resigned, but there was a creeping relief under the other emotions, too, that Draco thought he was the only one privileged to see.

            As far as Draco could tell, he answered all the questions the reporters put to him honestly, except why he had gone along with all this. His response to that one was that he'd been tired of political fighting he didn't have the instincts for, and that Sandborn had persuaded him it wasn't so bad.

            To Draco, it wasn't so bad, the sort of things politicians did all the time. But Sandborn's problem was that he had set himself up as the sort of Minister who was uncompromisingly honest and listened to everyone's side, helped by his star Auror. He had tamed Potter to fit into the Ministry, and Potter had helped by making Sandborn a politician you could trust.

            This exposé wouldn't have damaged Sandborn if he hadn't chosen to stake everything on Potter's reputation.

            And for that, Draco doubted anyone could forgive him.

            The questions wound to a halt at last, the reporters standing there and blinking like overstuffed children. Then they began to steal off, all too transparently wanting to be the first ones to write their stories down. Draco watched them go with some amusement, and turned around to find Potter was leaning against the gates, shaking his head.

            "That's torn it," he said softly.

            "You weren't still hoping you could go back to the status quo, were you?" Draco asked. He felt disgust turning the inside of his mouth sour, and he hated that. He would have to have more good Firewhisky to wash it away.

            "No," Potter said. "But I didn't set my bridges on fire until now." He stretched his arms above his head and lowered them back to his side. "The world burning by them looks bright, actually," he said, sounding surprised.

            Draco moved in and kissed him, because he couldn't not. Potter turned his head and gaped at him in surprise at first, then yielded and kissed back. Draco lifted a hand to the back of his neck and grasped it, hard, yanking him towards the Manor.

            A distant camera flash made them pull apart. Potter shook his head at the reporter who'd photographed them and glanced at Draco. "Well, that's torn it in a different way. Do you mind?"

            Draco licked his lips. The inside of his mouth tasted sweet now. "No," he said, and proceeded to show Potter how very much he didn't.

*

            polka dot: Harry knows that he has some money to live in, even if Sandborn sues him.

            SP777: Harry mostly was used to having someone to tell him what to do, and it took him a while to work up the confidence to act. But here, even though Draco promised to have his back if he faltered, he really didn't need anyone else.
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