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Acts of Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21189 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Three—Witnessing
            “Do you think you’ll be away long?”
            It was Hermione who asked as Harry finished dragging his dress robes across his shoulders and muttering at his reflection in the mirror, and her voice was so strange that he turned around at once. Hermione stood staring at the mirror, too, but she looked past him as though his reflection wasn’t there, and she certainly wasn’t looking at her own. Harry stepped up to her, concerned.
            “What is it? Is it Ron?” As far as Harry knew, she and Ron were getting along great. They still looked at each other as if they didn’t believe anyone was that happy.
            Hermione breathed in and shifted her eyes from the mirror to him. “I’m leaving for Australia this afternoon.”
            Harry blinked. “Oh,” he said at last. “I mean, I know you were, but…” He had thought Hermione was going to leave later in the summer, after some more of the funerals and trials.
            Hermione closed her eyes. “I need to find them,” she whispered. “I need a reminder that someone out there has a normal life, the way my parents and I did before—the Hogwarts letter came. I need—this is all too much.” She waved her hand at the wall, but Harry wasn’t stupid enough to think it was the Burrow she meant. “All the grief and death and war. I need to be somewhere it didn’t happen.”
            Harry nodded at once. He thought he knew what she meant. He would have probably been going mad himself if he didn’t have so much to do. “All right. I reckon that I’ll say good-bye to you and Ron now, then?”
            Hermione’s hands moved in the folds of her robe like she was afraid to raise them. “Ron’s not coming with me.”
            She stunned him a lot harder with that than she had with the Australia announcement. Harry gaped at her.
            He didn’t have to ask. Hermione answered anyway. “His mum really needs him right now, and he can’t bear to be away. We both need different things.” She turned her head, but not before Harry saw how her head was drooping, and yanked her into his arms. Hermione didn’t start crying, but he could feel the way she was shuddering, holding back those tears. “I need to be away, and he needs to be here.”
            It was just that simple sometimes, Harry thought, stroking her hair. He felt glad that he had purged a lot of his fear and anger in the last moments of the war, or at least it felt that way. Some Death Eaters had run away from the Battle of Hogwarts, and he wanted them captured, but he wasn’t going to walk around every moment in either fear or rage. He was alive, and Voldemort wasn’t, and there were people who needed him.
            Just that simple.
            “We’ll hang on,” he whispered. “I’ll help Ron. He’ll help me and Ginny and his mum and all the rest. We’ll be here when you get back. With your parents.”
            Hermione’s hands clutched at him hard enough that Harry knew he would have bruises later. But he also knew that the sleeves of his dress robes would hide them, and Hermione needed this more right now than he needed to show up at the Death Eater trials looking flawless.
            “Thank you, Harry,” she breathed.
            Harry held her close enough to remember the hug she’d given him all those years ago, when he was getting ready to go into the room where the Mirror of Erised and the Philosopher’s Stone were, and she had told him to be careful.
            “You’re welcome.”
*
            “Trial day!”
            That was Auror Peterson, the blond woman who honestly seemed a little sadistic to Draco. She had thought it was great fun to grab him and simply pull him out of his cell, propelling him in front of her down the corridor.
            Draco stumbled and watched as dust puffed out of his robes. He had worn the same set since they imprisoned him here; they’d explained, with apparent straight faces, that he might be concealing a weapon in an extra pair of robes from home, and if they let him have new ones, he could use the old ones to strangle himself. Draco had tried to point out that he could have used these to strange himself if he didn’t mind being naked when he died, and if he was, well, a suicidal idiot.
            They hadn’t listened, of course.
            Aurors.
            Draco touched his hair and winced. He knew about the importance of appearances, and he would walk in front of the Wizengamot with his hair tousled and his breath stinking and his face dirty.
            “A Freshening Charm?” he muttered at Auror Peterson, although he ought to have expected her answer.
            “Not for little Death Eaters, Malfoy,” she said, bustling past him and opening a tall wooden door banded with iron. Draco swallowed, trying not to look like he was intimidated, even though he was with the blank stone walls around him and the barely flickering torches. “You go in au natural.”
            The other Auror walking behind him, the silent man whose name Draco had never learned, made a faint cough. Peterson had already walked into the courtroom, and didn’t hear him. Draco glanced back.
            The man flicked his wand once. Draco didn’t have time to jump before he felt a Freshening Charm overcome him.
            “Thank you,” he whispered, amazed, as his hair rearranged itself, the dirt vanished from his face and robes, and his teeth felt as though someone had brushed them.
            The Auror glanced off to the side and shrugged with one shoulder. “No point in denying you basic courtesies,” he said. “That’s something your side might have done. We’re supposed to be better.”
            Draco blinked at him, a little startled, but then Peterson pulled him into the courtroom, and he had no more time to waste on pondering it.
            It looked as though the whole Wizengamot was there, Draco thought, after a quick glance around. And Potter wasn’t.
            Draco had to admit that made his heart sink, to see all those formidable wizards there in robes sparkling with gold chains and Orders of Merlin and what-not, and he was walking to the chair in the middle of the courtroom without a single friendly face. The Auror who had cast the Freshening Charm stood behind him, so Draco didn’t get to count him, either. He sat down and tried to drape his own robes around himself so they would hide how badly his hands and legs were shaking.
            Kingsley Shacklebolt, the temporary Minster, rose to his feet and looked around the room. Draco wondered if he was looking for Potter, too, but it was hard to tell from his neutral expression. He finally nodded and glanced back at Draco.
            “We are here to consider the case of Draco Malfoy, who stands accused of Death Eater activities, participation in torture, and several other crimes. Can someone—”
            Shacklebolt gestured at the courtroom door, and Auror Peterson, who Draco thought was probably the cause of it being left open in the first place, jumped and went to shut it. Before she could, though, a figure in bright green robes skidded through the opening, panting and shaking his head. He straightened up a second later and regarded the Wizengamot with a disgusted expression Draco would have known even if he’d been wearing a glamour.
            Potter. Draco had never thought his heart would grow warm at the sight of his rival, but he had never thought he would be sitting here, either. He sat back, and now the relaxation spreading through him was real.
            “Interesting thing about the letter the Wizengamot sent me,” Potter said, and held up a single piece of parchment. Draco saw at least one or two people stiffen from the corner of his eye. “It listed the wrong time for the start of the Malfoy trial.” He turned his head and met Draco’s eyes. “If someone else hadn’t owled me anonymously with the real start time, I wouldn’t be here.”
            More people in the gallery avoided each other’s eyes. Draco thought he heard the Auror behind him shift. He blinked. It wouldn’t surprise him if the man was the one who had owled Potter, after all, but of course he had no way to prove that.
            “Well, welcome, Mr. Potter,” said Shacklebolt, and the relieved smile on his face proved that he had been waiting for Potter after all. “Sit down.”
            Potter smiled and took a seat off to the side, the sort that Draco thought were usually reserved for witnesses, though his father’s lessons in court procedures seemed far away and long ago. Potter sat with his hands quietly folded and an intelligent expression on his face that Draco had never seen before. He kept stealing glances at Potter. Had he only started turning into this person since the end of the war, or was he putting on a special act for Draco’s benefit?
            The trial opened with accusations hurled so fast and thick that Draco wasn’t sure where they began and ended. He didn’t recognize most of the Wizengamot members who rose to their feet to accuse him, in fact. He supposed they might be family members of people he had tortured, but that would make them family members of Death Eaters. Voldemort had almost never used him on ordinary prisoners, thinking it was more fun to increase the other Death Eaters’ resentment against Draco by making him their torturer, and the ones Draco had tortured were Muggles who had all died later.
            The list of accusations went on and on, to the point that Draco started to grow almost bored and numb. Then the largest, most central wizard who seemed to be part of the Wizengamot itself asked, “You have something to add, Mr. Potter?”
            Potter rose to his feet. Draco blinked at him in wary disbelief. He didn’t know how Potter was keeping track of all these accusations. He didn’t look as though he had parchment and quill for writing them down.
            “Yes,” said Potter, his voice clear and calm and strong. “I can testify that at least one crime Draco Malfoy was accused of—turning me over to Voldemort—didn’t happen.” If he noticed the way that Draco flinched in his seat at all, he didn’t turn a hair, instead regarding the men and women of the Wizengamot with calm composure and absolute attention. “When he had the chance, when the Snatchers brought me and my friends to Malfoy Manor, he looked at me and said he wasn’t sure. I knew he recognized me. I mean, if nothing else, he would have recognized Hermione and Ron, and someone who was traveling with them would almost have to be me. But he held firm to saying he wasn’t sure. Even though he could be punished for it later. So that charge, at least, should be dropped, because it isn’t true.”
            There was a long rush of murmuring. Then Shacklebolt asked, “I understand that you said you had information on another accusation made by the honored Wizengamot?” He was fighting a grin, and he was focused on Potter.
            Draco shifted a little, although not too much, because he didn’t want to attract the attention of his Auror guards. If Shacklebolt wasn’t fully on the Wizengamot’s side, that might be good news for Draco.
            “Yes,” said Potter. He had his gaze darting from face to face, as though all of them were members of an opposing Quidditch team. “I at least have some information that might change minds. I noticed that none of the people Mr. Malfoy tortured are actually here?”
            There was some exchange of glances this time. Shacklebolt said gravely, “No. It is based on information gathered from Death Eater prisoners, but the prisoners themselves were not among those tortured. Most of those seem to have died in the Battle of Hogwarts.”
            Draco held back a grimace. He could have told them that. Those people the Dark Lord had encouraged to “compete” were all members of the Inner Circle, and that meant they had been first into the battle to show off their loyalty to the Dark Lord.
            Like I once thought I was.
            “Then I think I need to add some information,” said Potter, and Draco eyed him curiously. Was he about to be Draco’s character witness? Draco had hoped for something like that, but now, since Potter had admitted Draco was there with other Death Eaters at Malfoy Manor, he didn’t know what Potter could say to change things.
            “You see,” Potter continued in an absurdly calm voice, “I had a mental connection to Voldemort, and I saw a few times that he ordered Mr. Malfoy to torture someone. I think I had better talk about those times, since it’s the only direct witness account.”
            In the explosion of noise that followed, Draco didn’t think anyone paid attention as he shut his eyes in relief.
  I knew I could trust him. I just didn’t know how much.
*
ChaosLady: “Nice” and “sneaky” are two good adjectives to apply to Harry in this story.
Madam_Weasley: Monday is meant to be the update date; I’ve just had so much going on lately that I’ve had to post later in the week. Thank you!
starr: Thank you!
SP777: I honestly have no idea. It’s meant to cover a couple of years, but it’s episodic, so your guess is as good as mine.
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Acts of Life