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Parsimony	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14122 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Thirty—Blood Magic

            Harry sat down on a log and blinked hard at the hand. Then he looked into the wolfwere’s eyes and said quietly, “Where did you get this?”

            The wolfwere placed the hand gently on the dirt in front of him and looked up at him with piercing eyes that Harry winced away from in spite of himself. “You think I killed someone,” he said, and paused to lick blood from his teeth. “You do not trust me to bring you a piece of a human that is discarded, and can help you.”

            “I still want to know whose it is,” Harry said, and tried to find a way to explain as the wolfwere watched him with polite incomprehension. “For the same reason that you wanted to sniff the bodies of your pups,” he finally added.

            The wolfwere paused, and then stepped back in one fluid movement. “I wanted to smell their death,” he said. “I knew they were not coming back when I saw them. And I can assure you that this human is not, either.”

            Harry swallowed, and tried not to feel disgusted—

            But why not? He had the right to feel that way, if he wanted to, as long as he didn’t let it keep him from helping the wolfwere. Draco would probably say that he was going too far in his selflessness if he wanted to change his emotions for someone else, and he would, probably, be right.

            Harry bowed his head and said, “But I wish to make sure that I can mourn that person properly. It would help if I knew who they were so that I can understand the magic I am using better, you see.”

            The wolfwere paused and then scratched at his ear with one hand, in a gesture that was more human than lupine. “Very well. He was one of the people who hid in the Forest, the ones you hunted, but he had left them before you captured the rest. He came back two nights ago, and he tried to attack me when I confronted him and asked for information.”

            “You killed him?” Harry asked.

            The wolfwere looked at him, and didn’t answer.

            “I don’t—I won’t hurt you if you did,” Harry said, and managed to calm down his breathing and even hope that he looked slightly bored. “I just want to know who it was. It’ll make the magic so much easier.”

            “He carried this,” the wolfwere said, and reached up to his neck, feeling for something in the thick fur. He pulled out a dirtied silver tag, which Harry nearly flinched from before remembering that wolfweres were different from werewolves and might not be affected by silver. He picked it up and turned it around. On one side was the Dark Mark. Harry thought the Death Eater’s name would be on the other side.

            Instead, there was a harp, a sharp-looking instrument like the one that he had seen Parkinson cutting her hands on the night that he and Draco went to the encampment in the Forest of Dean. He swallowed back the excitement that wanted to curl through him and handed the tag back to the wolfwere.

            “All right,” he said. “At least I know where he comes from. Now. How do you think this hand can help me in my magic?”

            He tried not to feel queasy as the wolfwere turned the hand over. The wrist was a gnawed mess, with bones sticking out of it and the ends of them covered with blood, but Harry did his best to look away from them and just stare at the fingers. And the lines on the palm, which the wolfwere rested his own shaggy fingers on a moment later.

            “These are the lines that see,” the wolfwere said, staring at him. “You can trace back the course of his life down them. You can find out where he came from.”

            Harry blinked. “Divination? I’ve never been good at Divination.”

            The wolfwere twisted his ears at Harry. “I do not know that word.” A growl in the back of his voice suggested that he should, though, and that Harry should rectify the problem immediately before the wolfwere decided to take up the matter.

            Harry swallowed hastily. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Divination is the art of seeing the future. The centaurs are good at it. I studied it in school, but I never saw anything, and I never heard a true prophecy except once.”

            The wolfwere settled back on his haunches and panted in what looked like genuine enthusiasm. “That doesn’t matter, then,” he said, his voice a little blurred as his tongue caught on his teeth. “This is seeing the past, and not the future. You don’t have to be good at—Divination—for that.”

            Harry opened his mouth to argue, realized that he didn’t actually have any argument that would contradict what the wolfwere had said, and then shut it again. “All right,” he said, picking up the hand and trying to convince himself to think of it as a fake from a costume or something. “What kind of spell do I need to cast?”

            The wolfwere leaned forwards until Harry thought he would lose his grip and tumble into Harry. “You need to find that out.”

            “All right,” Harry said, holding up one hand in a placating gesture that just made the wolfwere consider his palm and fingers in turn. He pulled it back and stood, shaking his head. It was so hard to remember, sometimes, that the wolfwere wouldn’t understand human gestures that would be second nature to most of the people Harry interacted with. “I’ll find something out and come back to you before the next time the moon changes.”

            “And then I shall know who killed my pups,” the wolfwere said, and turned and bounded into the Forest without another word.

            Harry grimaced and cast a spell that would create a small carrying bag. He couldn’t stand holding the severed hand for long. He would have to go back to Gryffindor Tower and wash his hands thoroughly.

            But there was a throb of excitement in the bottom of his stomach nonetheless. This might be useful in figuring out what the Death Eaters had been doing in that camp—especially if the potion Snape had brewed told them that Lucius wasn’t in Azkaban, but nothing else.

*

            “You have it.”

            Draco’s eyes glittered as though with fever, and he had tugged Harry into the classroom where Firenze used to teach. Harry set his back against the wall and nodded. Draco darted his gaze over Harry as though searching for signs of a potions vial, then looked back up at him.

            “Well?” he demanded. “Where is it?”

            “Right here,” Harry said, and took the vial out of his pocket. He supposed he felt a little hurt that Draco only cared about the potion, and nothing else, but then again, this was the potion that might tell him what the fuck was going on with his father. It wasn’t surprising that he cared about it and not much else right now.

            Draco held the potion up to his eyes and stared at it for a second as though, just by looking, he could tell what Snape had made it out of. Harry opened his mouth to ask if he could, but then Draco uncorked the vial and tossed the potion towards his mouth.

            Harry created a Protego before he even thought about it, shielding Draco’s mouth from the potion, and then Levitated the liquid before it could touch the floor. Draco stared at him, mouth open in what looked like a shriek, but Harry glared at him.

            Draco struggled for a moment between the shriek and, Harry thought, asking in a more reasonable manner. Then he said, “Tell me why.”

            “Snape said that we should each drink half the potion,” Harry said. He thought about telling Draco Snape’s reasoning behind that, but he saw no reason to, not right now. It would only hurt Draco’s feelings. “You looked like you were about to drink the whole thing.”

            Draco massaged his forehead for a moment with one hand, and then nodded abruptly. “You’re right. I was. Sorry.” He focused on the potion, shaking his head. “Professor Snape would scold me for not asking about the safety instructions for a new potion,” he murmured.

            Harry dared to smile. “I’m sure he never thought that he would be the one telling me what they are, or I would be the one telling you, not in a million years.”

            “Sometimes I wonder,” Draco said, and glanced at him thoughtfully. “Sometimes I caught him watching you with this weird expression, as if he didn’t understand you and he’d kill anyone who forced him to try.”

            Harry thought about his mum, and the way that Snape had reacted in those memories he gave Harry when Dumbledore had told him Harry had to die, but he just shrugged. There were some things he wouldn’t do for Draco, yes, and confessing Snape’s secrets was another of them. “He was weird about that sometimes,” he said. “All right. So. Do you want to drink the potion now, or do you want to wait?”

            “Professor Snape said nothing about how long it would last, or what the side-effects might be?” Draco’s eyes were locked on the potion now with a slightly different light in them, as if he was contemplating what might happen if it made them writhe on the floor in convulsions or lasted a whole hour.

            Harry shook his head. “Just that it would work best if we each took half, and that both of us would see the vision.”

            Draco glanced up abruptly. Something in Harry’s voice must have revealed him, because Draco was scanning his face and nodding. “That’s the reason he told you to take it that way, isn’t it?” he whispered. “Because he’s afraid of what might happen if I went into the vision by myself.”

            Well, it seems I confessed one secret without even meaning to. Harry lifted his left shoulder in a shrug. “He was afraid of what you might see,” he said. “That it might not be real, the same way you were wrong about being able to use that spell to pull off the glamour of your father’s face in the Death Eater camp.”

            Draco leaned towards him, calm and cold and furious in a way that Harry had rarely seen since Draco had told him about torturing Blaise. “I used that spell perfectly,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to foil it.”

            “It could have been your father,” Harry suggested, and swished the potion around in its vial. “That’s why we’re going to take this in the first place, remember?”

            Now Draco looked as if he didn’t care about the potion, even flicking a hand as if he wanted Harry to toss it aside. “Snape doesn’t trust me,” he said. “And you don’t trust me to take it alone.”

            “Well,” Harry said, and tried to think of words that would soften the one he was about to say. In the end, he couldn’t, so he shrugged again and said, “No.”

            “Why the fuck not?” Draco’s voice was rising, and Harry cast a Silencing Charm at the door of the classroom with his wand behind his back. “I showed that I’m capable and mature enough to take that fucked-up charm off my friends. We can do the Triad Charm together. You trust me—you’re bloody in love with me! So why won’t you trust me with this?”

            “Because you’re not sane when it comes to your family,” Harry said. Bluntness it would be, then. “You chose to risk your life because you were so sure it wasn’t your father in the Forest of Dean, and my life, too. Professor Snape thinks that you might see the truth with the potion and then twist it around to suit your own ends.”

            Draco paused, and his eyes met Harry’s. Then he lunged forwards and seized him by the shoulders, shaking him and pressing him backwards at the same time.

            Harry went with it, but he had one hand on his wand. The minute Draco tried to do something like punching him or cursing him, then Harry would use it. For now, he was more puzzled than angry. He didn’t know why this, of all things, should set Draco off.

            Draco finally slammed Harry’s back against the wall and held him there, all but growling into his face. “You think that I wanted to risk my life and yours? That I would have chosen to do it that way? I thought I knew what I was doing! I brought the artifacts from the Blacks and planned everything! I just didn’t expect the spell not to work. That was all. That was the only thing I did wrong. And if I haven’t groveled to you enough for saving my life then, you bloody well should have asked me to grovel some more—”

            Harry got hold of Draco’s wrists, because Draco was reaching up as if he would choke Harry, and shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong,” he said, as soothingly as he could when Draco’s face was completely red and he looked almost ready to cry. “I promise, I don’t think that you should grovel. But you didn’t plan everything. You obviously expected the spell to work and didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do when it didn’t. That’s what makes me think it was dangerous, Draco. You slumped there and I had to carry you out, and you didn’t do anything to help yourself.”

            “And why do you think that was?” Draco’s eyes were narrowed, his mouth a small, grim line in the center of his face.

            Harry paused and eyed him. Draco stared back, his hands flexing open and shut on Harry’s shoulders now. At least he hadn’t actually tried to strangle Harry again.

            “Because it never occurred to you that the spell might go wrong?” Harry asked. “I already said that.”

            Draco shook his head. “Why do you think I just went passive like that? At least I could have jumped up screaming like a banshee and got us out of there on sheer rage. Or terror. Why did I fold up like a limp little rag instead?”

            Harry sighed and pushed his glasses up his face with one finger. He knew what he had to say, what he really believed, but Draco wasn’t going to like it.

            Draco seemed to sense what he was thinking, and gave him another little shake. “Don’t think about how you’re going to be diplomatic,” he snapped. “In fact, I would prefer it if you didn’t. Just—tell me, why do you think I did that?”

            Harry nodded. “Partially for the reasons I already gave, that you never really considered it could be your father or someone else who had the means of resisting the spell. And partially because—you got used to being helpless over the summer. You thought nothing could help your friends’ minds after you cast that Memory Charm on them. You didn’t trust my help at all, and you were sure that I would leave you to rot after you told me the truth about torturing Blaise. At every setback, you were ready to give up if your first plan failed. Remember all those times that you almost flung the books on Memory Charms at my head? Remember the way that you expected me to walk away from you? You’ve forgotten how to fight.”

            Silence. Draco’s face turned redder. He leaned near until his nose was a few inches away from Harry’s and said, “I could give you a demonstration that would convince you sure enough that I hadn’t.”

            Harry braced himself against the rocking and shaking of Draco’s hands and shook his head. “Not against me. Against circumstances. And I think you’re better now than you were when we went into the Forest of Dean. I really thought you would fall apart there. But here, you pushed yourself into finding the solution to your friends’ problems, on your own.” He found Draco’s hand and tentatively squeezed it. “I’m proud of you.”

            Draco went back to staring at him, apparently on the pretext that he didn’t know what else to do, so it might as well be that. Then he shook his head impatiently and moved backwards, away from Harry, leaving him to slump and rub his shoulders and his throat.

            “I’m not helpless,” he whispered. “And we’re going to use the potion and find out what happened to my father, if he’s still in Azkaban or not.”

            “Yes, we are,” Harry said, and reached out so that he could squeeze Draco’s arm again. Draco avoided him without seeming to do so. Harry sighed. Well, he had thought that Draco might be more pissed about this argument than the other ones they’d had in the past. “And I think we’re already missing Defense. Did you want to go ahead and use the potion now?”

            Draco glanced back at him, the turn of his head quick, hawk-like. “You would volunteer to irritate Klein to please me?”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “No need to sound so surprised. I think I’ve already shown that I can irritate her to the point of threatening me in order to please you.”

            “It’s still nice to be reminded,” Draco said, his head bowed and his voice muffled as he picked at his robes. “Did Professor Snape tell you anything about the effects of the potion?”

            “No,” Harry said. “Only the draught we should each take, and his promise that it would work the way he said it would.”

            Draco wavered back and forth for a few minutes more. Then he held out the potions vial to Harry.

            Harry accepted it with a smile, understanding the silent apology that Draco was offering at the same time. Draco would let Harry choose when he had drunk half and when to stop. If Harry wanted to, he might very well tip out the whole potion on the floor, or swallow it all.

            But Harry didn’t. He sipped carefully at the vial, noting that the potion had a sharp coolness like cold water against his teeth but otherwise didn’t taste of anything at all, and drained it until he thought half was gone. Then he held it out to Draco. Draco swallowed it far more hastily, his face turning red as he gulped.

            Already, Harry’s sight was wavering and blurring. He sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and half-closed his eyes. Draco knelt down beside him, his head bowed and his face turning redder as he heaved and gasped. Harry worried for a moment that he really would vomit it up or something.

            But Draco hadn’t by the time he closed his eyes and reached out to grip Harry’s elbow as if to keep himself from falling to the floor. Harry reminded himself it probably only was that, rather than Draco reaching for him for support, but he was smiling anyway as he closed his eyes and leaned his head back.

            There was the school, Hogwarts, already small and falling farther away beneath them, as if sights their eyes saw every day weren’t enough for this potion. Harry felt his stomach cramp and twist as they sailed up and up. He had ridden higher and faster on a broom, true, but there, he had trust in his own skill, and he knew he could land whenever he wanted to. He had no idea what the potion might do to them.

            Courage.

            That was Draco, whispering in his ear, and torn between his wonder that they could hear each other this way and that Draco, of all people, should have to tell him that, Harry forgot to be frightened. He looked down again, wondering if their new sight would carry them to Azkaban automatically or if he and Draco would have to direct the flight.

            It seemed it would be the first. Long grey miles blurred away beneath them, effortlessly, and Harry caught a glimpse of distant stone walls. For a moment, wards confronted them, dancing white lines of spark and light, and Harry flinched and ducked his head away instinctively, wishing he could cover his face.

            Then the wards were past, and they were floating down towards a series of rooms and tunnels beneath the stone bulk of the prison. Next to him, Draco was making a kind of keening noise, very quietly, and Harry reached out without thinking. There was no physical sensation of contact here, but Draco seemed to draw some comfort anyway; Harry felt a ripple travel through him that was like Draco blinking, and then he stopped making the small noise.

            Then they were out of the greyness altogether and charging through lit dimness. Harry had no idea if Azkaban was less dark than he had always assumed or if the potion was creating the lights for them, and he didn’t care. He pressed eagerly forwards instead, wishing they could go faster, wondering when they would arrive at Lucius’s cell.

            They swept around a corner and rose and fell for a moment like birds on the wind, apparently confronting one last ward. Then their flight halted in front of a set of bars, and Harry turned and peered past them.

            There was Lucius.

            For a moment. Then he seemed to flicker, the way that Harry had once seen a bad Muggle movie do, and there was no one there at all. Then he was present again, sitting on a hard stone chair in the corner of the cell, his head bent and his face marked with dirt and weariness. Then he was gone again.

            Harry stared, wondering if there was a spell that would allow someone to escape their cell from one moment to another, or if this was a glamour that was meant to conceal Lucius’s flight from Azkaban. He could feel Draco tightening up beside him, and turned his head, trying to seek him out.

            The gesture apparently exhausted the potion. Harry found himself opening his eyes to Firenze’s classroom again, more shaken and confused than before.

            Draco said nothing. Harry turned to him, ready to console him on their not having a solid answer despite the potion.

            But Draco’s face was set in a way that it might have been if they had gained answers. And then he stared at Harry and said simply, “She did it. She really did it.”

            “Who?” Harry asked, wondering if he was talking about Parkinson, if she would have tried to curse Draco’s father in addition to Harry.

            “There’s a spell,” Draco whispered. “It mingles people. It allows two people to have the same existence, the same life, and so they can be in two places at once. Suffering can be split, and they can exchange places whenever they want. Unfortunately, it also drives the people who use it mad, but she wouldn’t be thinking that was a real price, would she?”

            “Who?” Harry asked, leaning forwards to put a hand on Draco’s knee, and hopefully inspire Draco to look at him at the same time.

            “My mother,” Draco whispered.

            And suddenly, although Harry didn’t know every explanation of the situation yet, he thought he understood.

*

            polka dot: Thank you!

            ChaosLady: Thank you! They don’t know yet, but should soon.

            Makoto_Sagara: They don’t know anything about Pansy yet. And as for Blaise, well, Draco did torture him. I don’t really blame him for being reluctant.

            Thank you! Snape will at least go on his way with clearer eyes, if not a completely improved mind.

            SP777: Harry would probably say that they’re pretty serious already!

            Yes, Snape left. He was sending letters to Harry for the last few chapters but not in the Shack.

            unneeded: I don’t think Snape really has any motivation to help Hermione, unless she decides to ask him and Harry mentions that he’d like Snape to do it as his final favor.
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Parsimony