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Writ on Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3959 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Three—Arguments in the Office

            Draco noted absently that there were no other Socrates Aurors around when he strode into the office with Harry following right behind him. Good. Draco didn’t particularly feel like explaining himself right now, and that included to people like Macgeorge who would smirk at him over his relationship with Harry.

            He made sure that Harry was through the doors, and then cast the charm that locked them and Silenced the corridor outside. If the others showed up, well, they would have to understand that he and Harry were having a private discussion right now, and they could come back later. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t Summon their files if they needed them.

            A private row, more like.

            Draco grimaced as he spun around. So it was to be that, so what? Harry was the one who insisted on it, acting as though the twisted they hunted, and should probably be hunting in this case, were kin of theirs.

            Harry looked over his shoulder at the doors as they locked and then back at Draco. There was a sullen little flame burning at the bottom of his eyes.

            Draco frankly didn’t care. It was better than the silence that he thought Harry might have retreated into. He took up his station next to his desk and crossed both his legs and his arms. “Taking precautions so we won’t be interrupted,” he explained coolly. “I want to hear what you have to say without any breaks except the ones I make.”

            “You mean,” Harry said, and paced towards him, stopping several feet away—the optimum distance to hurl any number of curses from, Draco couldn’t help but notice—“the ones where you scream and swear at me because you can’t think of anything better to do?”

            Draco took a long, slow, deep breath, and made himself release it as slowly. Part of this was his whole fault. He really shouldn’t have talked about screaming at Harry as if he was a child. He nodded to acknowledge a hit and then took the chair behind his desk, spending a few moments gazing in abstraction at the files there before he leaned back and shook his head. “All right. What did you want to speak about with regard to the twisted? Why will you be so relieved if we don’t have to kill one this time?”

            Harry took a seat in his own chair, and crossed his legs so that one knee stuck up almost to his chin, and steepled his fingers in front of him. Draco blinked at him, then frankly stared. It was a posture he never would have associated with Harry, but now that he thought about it, he didn’t see why not. Harry couldn’t always be the fiery hothead that Draco was more familiar with, the one who got himself banned from St. Mungo’s on a regular basis (and sometimes, it seemed, would have got himself banned from the Ministry, except that they were more patient with the Chosen One). And now he had lost the advantage of surprise, because he hadn’t spoken while he stared, and Harry was speaking.

            “You know that we’re our own special kind of twisted,” he said. “We have the Dark gifts, and there are times that we’ve both acted less than sane.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Draco said coolly. “I have always acted with rationality and not let my emotions and desires lead me astray.”

            Harry stared at him. “Draco, normal, absolutely rational, emotionally-controlled people don’t see Mind-Healers.”

            Draco flushed. Sometimes he managed to forget about Healer Estillo, who was not a pressing kind of person, when he wasn’t actually attending sessions in her office. “I—that’s not relevant right now,” he said.

            “It isn’t?” Harry met his eyes and snorted. “For a short time, you were a full-blown twisted yourself, with companions. Yes, that was under the influence of someone who was a twisted, but you know that you can go that way. I think we need to acknowledge that we’re closer to them than we think. And when we use Dark Arts, that brings us closer still. We hunt twisted who’ve studied the Dark Arts and lost their minds to them, for the most part. What makes you think that we can go on studying that kind of magic forever and not fall ourselves?”

            Draco added another layer of Silencing Charms to the ones on the doors, and then put some on the desks, too. That probably wouldn’t stop the Ministry hierarchy from listening to this conversation if they really wanted to, since Draco hadn’t covered even half the room, but it made him feel better. “Because we limit our study,” he said. “And because we have partners to watch our backs and tell us when we’re using too much of them.”

            “If friends and family being concerned about twisted worked to turn them aside, then we wouldn’t have any of them at all,” Harry said, his voice as flat as a mirror. “Alexander had a mother who was still concerned about him. Alto had the gift for making friends, and despite their concern for her, the other Healers hadn’t actually stopped her working in hospital. And we talked to Larkin’s mother and sister ourselves. They did the best they could, but they couldn’t stop him from studying the Dark Arts, either.”

            Draco was tempted to add another layer of charms, but he controlled himself, and shook his head with a faint, condescending smile on his lips instead. He knew it was condescending, but that was part of the test. He wanted to make sure that Harry would shut up in sheer frustration and listen to him, instead of continuing with that line of argument, because the only one Harry would convince with it was himself.

            Harry snarled at him.

            “I meant partner in a different sense,” Draco said, and linked his arms behind his head, leaning back against the desk and gazing meditatively up at the ceiling. It had nothing interesting about it—in fact, since Harry had come back from his holiday, Draco had found little more interesting than his face—but it served the purpose of making Harry focus on him, and that was all to the good. “Someone who watches our back, someone who knows about the danger and can prevent us from becoming twisted.”

            “I couldn’t do that when you became Alto’s victim,” Harry said. “I never realized what was happening until it was too late.”

            Draco sniffed and made a dismissive motion with his hand. He knew that he couldn’t hope to dismiss the whole legacy of that particular twisted as cavalierly, but at the moment, he didn’t care. The important thing was to make Harry think he could, and to keep him from realizing how cold that incident still made Draco when he thought of it. “I don’t think becoming her victim was anything like the ordinary process of becoming a twisted. There would be other warning signs.”

            “Do we know that?” Harry leaned forwards and rubbed his hand across his face, as Draco saw from the corners of his uplifted eyes. “We know so little about twisted. We didn’t even know that they might not have all of those five traits that the Ministry defines them by until we met Alto, and then we learned the blood of other twisted might make them so, and we still can’t wake Unspeakable Retror up even though Alexander is dead and that should mean his stolen magic went back to him. I just don’t think that we know as much about twisted as we think we do, Draco. Not convinced at all.”

            Draco turned his head away with a faint sneer. “I see no point in playing with the knowledge that you claim we don’t have,” he snapped. “What matters most of all is that we won’t become the same.”

            “How do you know that?” Harry leaned forwards and swung his hands between his knees, his eyes fastened to Draco. “How the fuck can you possibly know that? We don’t know anything about them.” He took a deep breath that sounded like it hurt. “And that means that we don’t know if there might be a way out there to help them, either.”

            Draco bared his teeth at the wall. “Don’t.”

            “Don’t what? Tell the truth?” Harry rubbed his forehead again. “You sound—Draco, sometimes you sound like someone who’s more interested in denying the truth than in helping it along.”

            Draco turned his head slowly to face Harry. He realized that he was shaking, and that he felt as if the words were a lance stabbed through him. The only other time he had felt like that was when his parents had opposed him becoming an Auror, and told him that he could never come back if he made that decision.

            Of course. This is what happens when you let someone close to you, when you love someone.

            He thought of his parents, and he thought of his dead partner, Kellen, and then he sent the thoughts flying off into outer darkness. He had made his choice to continue being an Auror despite those losses, and he would not let them disarm him now.

            “This is my job,” he said quietly, and felt a little satisfaction as he watched Harry wince from the words. “This is the thing that I was assigned to the Socrates Corps to do. If it’s wrong, then it’s on the Ministry’s head, and not mine.”

            Harry stared at him. Draco stared back, tilting his head slightly, haughtily. He didn’t know what about those words shocked Harry as well as hurt him, but he believed in them, and would abide by them.

*



            Merlin. He doesn’t see—he truly doesn’t understand the difference, or even why it’s important that there is one.

            Harry swallowed, and spoke the simple truth. All the elaborate arguments he had prepared wouldn’t make sense to Draco, not if he didn’t accept the basic morality behind them.

            “If we don’t have to kill the twisted, what we’re doing is murdering people. And we’re the ones who are in contact with the twisted, and the ones who know the differences between them and the official definition. It’s up to us to make the decisions and change things and pay attention to the truth. Otherwise, we’re just killers.”

            Draco watched him with slitted eyes, his fingers tapping on the desk behind him. Harry waited. He didn’t know what one could say to that, because it was the truth and he thought even Draco ought to care about murdering people—he hadn’t wanted to kill Dumbledore when he was a student, and he hadn’t changed that much—and so he would have to change his mind.

            Then Draco said, “Even if we are like the twisted, we are still different from them. We don’t kill people. We don’t torture them. We don’t send our companions after them and take their magic away.”

            “That’s only because we don’t have companions,” Harry said, leaning forwards. “And not all the twisted that we hunt do, either. That means that we should think more closely about it and—”

            “You’re not listening to me,” Draco said, continuing in that cold, low, unalterable voice that Harry thought Aunt Petunia had used when she got angry enough. “There are more differences between them and us than you think. For one thing, we’re still sane.”

            “But we could be the same,” Harry said, and folded his arms, glaring at Draco. “That’s enough reason to rethink this policy of hunting them down and killing them all the time.”

            Draco watched him for a moment with his eyebrows arched. Then he said, “And we could, conceivably, decide tomorrow that we wanted to be rich and become international jewel thieves. Does that mean that none of us should ever come near Galleons or jewels again?”

            “We don’t have flaws related to that,” Harry hissed, glaring at him.

            Draco shrugged. “One could also argue that we have our particular flaws because they’re connected to the marks we’ve collected throughout our lives. I couldn’t do what I do now without the Dark Mark, which makes me think the flaw isn’t inherent in me, and that I wouldn’t have developed it without that. And I don’t know that you would have your visions of murders without that curse scar on your forehead, either.” His eyes flickered over as if he was considering the scar on Harry’s forehead for the first time.

            “We don’t know that,” Harry said. “Maybe they manifest through those things, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have them if we were unscathed.”

            “Unscathed.” Draco nodded slowly. “I like that word better than unmarked. I think I may use it from now on.”

            “Come on,” Harry said, when he realized that Draco didn’t intend to say anything else, and stood up to lean forwards. “Will you listen to what you said? All the other twisted don’t have flaws connected to marks. I think that we have them because they’re expressions of the Dark magic that would be useful to us. I want to save people, and the visions give me the means to do so. You probably hoped at one point that you could be sensitive to Dark magic so you could know when you were around people who used it, and that happened.”

            From the way that Draco’s face turned the color of milk and his nostrils flared, Harry knew he had come closer to the truth than Draco hoped he would. But still he stubbornly shook his head, and fastened his hands on the desk behind him. “You don’t know that—”

            “And you don’t know that the magic is connected to the scars that we bear, either,” Harry snapped back.

            “Exactly,” Draco said, and drummed his hand down hard in the middle of the desk. “We don’t know. There’s simply too much about this that we don’t understand. The Ministry’s definition of twisted isn’t perfect. Fine. We know that. Leah claimed we shared some traits in common with the twisted. Fine. We know that. It doesn’t follow from there that it’s true, or that we’re exactly like them.”

            Harry clenched his fists and turned away. He really thought he might punch Draco if he kept on looking at him, and it was made worse, not easier, by the fact that he was probably in love with him. “Fuck,” he whispered. “So you’re going to keep right on slaughtering them instead of trying to find some way to help them.”

            “Because they’re dangerous,” Draco said, in a tone that really did make Harry come close to hitting him. “The same way that keeping a dragon is dangerous, and fighting Dark Lords is dangerous, and trying to capture a hydra alive is dangerous. It’s inherent.”

            “I’ve fought a Dark Lord,” Harry pointed out, clinging to his patience with both hands. “I’ve kept a dragon—or helped Hagrid keep one—for a while. And it may be possible for us to split duties, you know. You could hunt down the twisted who really need to be killed, and I could talk to the ones who seem as if they might be more sane than the average.”

            That got him a stare from Draco that was so stupid Harry felt the need to say something. “What?” he asked.

            “You won’t do that,” Draco said, sounding calm, if you ignored all the suppressed emotions churning in the back of his voice.

            “Why not?” Harry cocked his head, feeling as if they might be able to move past this argument if he could understand Draco’s objections. “I’m offering of my own free will, and I know that speaking to the twisted who might be more normal is not something you want to do—”

            “You won’t do it because I won’t let you.”

            Harry paused with one hand still rising in front of him. Then he shook his head, and smiled pleasantly, and said, “I’m sorry. It sounded as though you said you wouldn’t let me do this. But that isn’t what partners do for each other, is it? They cooperate and guard each other’s backs. They don’t flat-out forbid someone else to do something.”

            “They do when their partner—and their lover—is a reckless idiot with no regard for his life,” Draco said. His voice and his face were quiet and flat, his arms still folded as though he had found nothing worth moving for yet.

            “You still can’t prevent me from doing it,” Harry felt the need to explain. But he did it kindly, because Draco seemed to feel a disconnect at bottom from the words Harry had offered so far. He would have to be patient with him, gentle. “You can make reasoned arguments, and I might listen to them and I might not. But you can’t forbid me.”

            “Yes, I can.” Draco lifted his head and turned it a little so that Harry could catch a better glimpse of his eyes, and Harry flinched from their coldness in spite of himself. Draco bared his teeth, looking pleased with his reaction. “I will.”

            “I’m starting to see why they have regulations that keep Auror partners from being lovers,” Harry snapped, leaning forwards. “When they get all judgmental and possessive, it interferes with moral considerations.”

            “We’re not supposed to make decisions like that,” Draco said, his voice a soft gust of breath. “We don’t have to. The Ministry hierarchy wrestles with hard questions like good and evil and how much they should pay us. We’re supposed to do what they tell us.”

            Harry snorted in spite of himself. “Yes, of course, because Draco Malfoy has always been so obedient to the rules.”

            “I’m obedient to these,” Draco said, straightening as though Harry had jammed a pin into his arse. “Because I don’t want to get sacked.”

            “What was it you were telling me a few hours ago, how you didn’t worry about your career?” Harry murmured.

            Draco flinched himself to his feet, or that was what it looked like. He stared steadily at Harry, head half-lowered. Harry stared back at him, and kept his hands from clenching on his wand by sheer force of will. With the way Draco looked, he might need it in a short time.

            “You are not allowed to worry about that,” Draco said. “I said that. And I won’t get sacked because of you.”

            “You can’t know that,” Harry began.

            “I won’t,” Draco said, his voice lowering still further. “Because I won’t allow you to sabotage me that way. I’ll quit being partners with you first.”

            “Why is what I’ve done so far not enough to make you say that, but proposing a compromise that would save you some of the labor is?” Harry stared at him in true bafflement, shaking his head.

            Draco shut his eyes and counted to thirty, audibly. Then he said, without looking at Harry, “What you’ve done so far has happened in the course of cases, of you trying to do your job, no matter how flawed some of your reasoning is when it comes to thinking about the job. But if you are proposing that we should stop doing what the Ministry pays us for—”

            “We should do the moral thing,” Harry said. “The moral thing is what I want.” His heartbeat was fast in his ears, and his lips were dry. He had never once considered that his principles might cost him Draco. Why should he? His Hogwarts days, and thus his days of thinking that the world was black and white, were long behind him.

            But it seemed that Draco might press the point after all, over something that Harry considered perfectly innocuous—that they shouldn’t murder people. Of course they shouldn’t, especially those people, like Alexander, who might have become twisted through no fault of their own. Why was it proving so hard for Draco to grasp that? Harry wanted to sit him down in a corner and make him talk until the truth came out, except that he suspected he wouldn’t really understand what he might say in that connection, either.

            “And what about the victims of the twisted that you’re trying to coddle?” Draco stared off into the corner that Harry had been thinking about sitting him down in, and spoke in a faraway voice. “Do you really want to explain to a woman who lost her child or a brother who lost his sister that we could have killed that monster, but your conscience got in the way, and now the person they love is dead?”

            Harry felt his heart knotting up. It blocked his throat. It was long moments before he could breathe properly again, longer before he could speak. “Don’t talk about things like that,” he whispered. “Of course I wouldn’t let that happen. If a twisted was really violent, then I would make sure that we captured them.”

            “And if you didn’t know that they were violent?” Draco went on studying him as though, once Harry had made him doubt his goodness, he would always have reason to doubt it again. “If they were like Alexander seemed at first, a little odd but harmless, or their gift was unknown, the way that the twisted on this case is?”

            “We have no idea if there is a twisted in this case or not,” Harry began, happy for an argument that might undo the knot in his throat.

            “And if there is,” Draco said, his voice so emotionless that it hurt Harry to listen to, “then you might lead someone to death after all, because you’ll be wanting to protect it and help it.” He leaned forwards until it seemed likely he would fall over. “And did you forget that the mandate of every Auror is to save the victims first? We can treat the criminals kindly after we ensure that they’re not going to harm anyone. And we can’t capture twisted at all unless we know that doing so won’t endanger someone else’s life.”

            “Back to the Ministry rules again,” Harry muttered, and dragged his hand through his hair. It was crowded with sweat, as though he had been running. He didn’t know why. “Don’t you see that we have to change things, we have to make decisions, because we’re the ones on the ground and the ones that the victims and the twisted both have to turn to? The ones who stay behind their desks all the time, the ones like Okazes, have no idea what we’re dealing with.”

            For some time, Draco sat still again, and Harry assumed he would stand up in a minute and walk out of the room, ignoring Harry entirely. Then he snapped his teeth on air and said, “I’m going to do what I’m told because those are the rules that keep us safe, and then the victims, and then the twisted. In that order, Potter.”

            He shoved his chair back from his desk and turned to gather up some of the files in front of him. Harry started and threw out a hand. “Don’t go,” he tried to say, only the words knotted around each other in his throat and hurt him again.

            Draco stared at him. Then he said, “If you want another partner, Harry, ask for one. As long as you’re with me, then you’re going to save my life and your own first, and then that of people like Jourdemayne. The twisted on rare occasions.”

            And he removed the locking spells and Silencing Charms on the door and walked out, leaving Harry to bury his head in his hands.

*

            SP777: I am amazed by your powers of prediction!

            Yes, this is going to be a stumbling block.
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