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Marathon	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 52456 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Thirty-Three--Unpersuasive Arguments
            "Would you mind explaining to me why it had to be you saving the day once again?" There was little precision and less emphasis in Draco's voice, which somehow made the whole thing worse. It was the way Harry could have imagined him talking to Ginny.
            Harry took off his cloak, handed it to Kreacher, who had popped up with a silently demanding face and outstretched arms, and shook his head. "It had to be me because I was the only one they wanted to negotiate with."
            "That's not an excuse, and you know it."
            Harry winced a little. What made it really bad was that he could hear the pain glittering in the back of Draco's voice, as pointed as an icicle. He sighed and turned to face him. "I know that Robards shouldn't have summoned me like I was a dog and he wanted me to come running to his whistle. And we didn't capture all the Spiders, so other people can handle them. But I had to save lives, Draco. What would have happened if I'd just left them to die?"
            Draco folded his arms. "Other Aurors would have rescued them, doing the job they're supposed to do." He ran his eyes coolly up and down Harry's body. "That's what you forget. It's not a choice between leaving them to die and risking yourself. It's a choice between risking yourself, doing everything like usual, and demanding that your colleagues and superiors back you up the way they said they would."
            Harry bit his lip hard enough that he winced and reached up to touch it a second later. Draco sighed and muttered a Healing Charm. Harry nodded his thanks and led the way into the drawing room, where they could sit down in front of a fire.
            Kreacher popped up with two steaming cups. Harry blinked when he sipped his and found mulled wine instead of cocoa. He wondered idly if Kreacher had decided to serve that in deference to Draco's sensibilities. Or maybe Harry looked like he needed it.
            "You're right," he said finally, looking into his cup rather than at Draco. "But they did have other Aurors standing by in case anything went wrong."
            "What would have counted as 'wrong?'" Draco asked simply.
            Harry frowned at him. "The Spiders coming up the stairs, me losing control of the negotiation, the Spider I was talking to managing to Stun me instead of the other way around."
            Draco nodded. "So all of it things that would mean you were already in danger. No one was thinking about keeping you out of danger at the time."
            "That's wrong. You were."
            Draco's smile was a fleeting thing, but it reassured Harry that they were okay, at least. Draco settled back into his chair and sipped at his own mulled wine with no expression of surprise. "You need to stop thinking that risking your life is somehow acceptable, as long as no one else gets hurt," he said quietly. "It's not. And things could have gone wrong when you bolted down the stairs."
            "I know," Harry said. "But again, that's why those other Aurors were there. They would have come pouring after me if something had happened."
            "We couldn't see you once you went down the stairs," Draco said. "And the Spiders might have taken you and then ghosted out of the building, the same way they managed to come in and take over the Department of Mysteries, whatever way that was. You admitted that some of them got away like that. What do you think Robards would have done then?"
            Harry frowned. "Got some people to go after me. It wouldn't do for him to have to face the press and admit Harry Potter was kidnapped."
            Draco dealt the arm of the chair a ringing slap, and Harry started and nearly dropped his wine. "That's it exactly," Draco said. "The press is what he would be thinking about, and the possible effects on his reputation. Not about what could happen to you. Not about you as a person." He set down his wine, shifted, but didn't get out of the chair. "Don't you want a job with a boss who gives a fuck about you as a person?"
            "I don't have the Auror job anymore, so that leaves me free to find one."
            Draco gave him a flat look. "Resigning wasn't very effective, if you go running the minute he calls your name."
            Harry leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. Draco kept saying that Harry didn't look at this the right way, as if it was about someone else instead of him, so Harry decided that he would try that and see what happened.
            What would happen if Robards had tried to order Ron, or another Auror, into this kind of danger, and hadn't come down the stairs behind him, and had only dreaded the newspaper reports if they got kidnapped?
            Harry gasped at his rush of anger. He opened his eyes, and Draco was nodding. "Do you finally see why this isn't any more acceptable just because it's you, and you're used to being the Auror who plunges through shit?"
            Harry worked his hands thoughtfully on the arms of his own chair. Nothing in here to break or burn, or at least nothing he could break or burn without Kreacher getting extremely upset at him, unfortunately. He at last leaned back and sighed. "Yeah. I see what you mean. Ron, especially. If it was him, and he's such a good Auror and he was put in danger just because Robards thought the Spiders needed to talk to him..." He trailed off.
            Draco nodded. "Exactly. And letting the Spiders have exactly what they want wasn't the smartest idea, anyway. What happens if they take over another part of the Ministry and demand your head presented to them on a platter? Or demand that the Minister be the one to conduct this negotiation? They'll think they can get it, because Robards already gave in to them once."
            "We don't know that that's exactly what will happen," Harry said, but he knew his voice was weak, and the way Draco looked at him just made it worse.
            "No, of course not," Draco said. "In the same way that we don't know if the Spiders will attempt to take over part of the Ministry again. I am only mentioning what is likely to happen, using this art often called prediction by many people."
            Harry sighed and set his glass of wine down. "Fine. But what can you suggest? Because I'm never going to be willing to give up rescuing other people."
            "Remember that you aren't an Auror anymore," Draco told him. "Find another job as soon as possible, so that Robards can't call on you to do things like this for him."
            "But if I knew that I could do something, and I didn't solve the problem, that would make me just as culpable as the Spiders," Harry argued.
            "No," Draco said. "It would not. They are the ones doing things such as breaking into the Department of Mysteries, taking Unspeakables prisoner, and trying to kill me and you with spider bites. You are ridiculous if you think you should take on the guilt they don't suffer from. The person who sees a problem isn't always responsible for solving it. Did Robards make any effort to solve this one? What about the other Aurors? The Unspeakables who weren't trapped i the Department of Mysteries? Any of them?"
            "Robards said a few other people had tried, but they couldn't do anything."
            "When did he say that?" Draco leaned in. "Because I was listening to the whole of the conversation you had with him in the fire, and he didn't mention anything like it."
            "I thought it was implied..."
            "Bollocks." Draco stared at him again. "Come on, Harry. Why are you so reluctant to admit that the Ministry was using you? You'd already admitted that the Aurors who wanted you to do their work, and especially Robards, shit on you all the time."
            Harry struggled with the words for a few minutes, and then sighed. "It's just that there has to be something that's true in the middle. Somewhere between my extreme of doing everything and you saying that people were only using me. That wasn't true all the time. I was a real partner to Ron, and he was one to me. And other Aurors helped me, too. Saved my life. Never asked me to do a favor for them unless they were willing to return it. Just because Robards is an idiot doesn't make the whole Department corrupt."
            "What about the Aurors who stood behind you today, and yet never rushed in to help, the way we had been promised they would?"
            Harry had to smile. "We?"
            "Yes. Because you won't think that you're entitled even to the most basic consideration, you have to have someone along who considers himself the negotiator in this enterprise." Draco raised an eyebrow, and when Harry looked back at him in confusion, prompted, "Well? What about all those Aurors who didn't rush down the stairs the way it seemed promised they would? Are all of them just innocent dupes of Robards?"
            "Maybe some of them," Harry said. "But it's also risky to interrupt a hostage negotiation, you know. If they'd come rushing down the stairs just because you thought they should, then they would have been doing a stupid thing."
            "Yes. Rescuing you, or doing something for you, is always a stupid thing." Draco touched the side of his wineglass with one finger. "I have to wonder. Do you consider all effort on your behalf stupid? Then I might as well stop trying to argue you into sense right now. I have to admit, it would be a relief on my mind."
            "You don't mean that." Harry tried to catch Draco's eye, but he was looking around.
            "You keep acting as though the last thing you want is someone fighting in your corner." Draco's voice was brittle. "If that's the case, then I told you, I might as well stop while I'm ahead."
            "I want someone fighting for me," Harry said. "As long as he can understand that I’ll always need to save people, and sometimes people who want me to do something for them aren't using me. They're just trying to protect and save their own lives. They're just victims, and that means people who need to think first about the horrible situation they're in and how to get out of it. They can decide things about credit and blame later."
            "I can do that." Draco whispered the words. "But I need some reassurance that you won't go running back to people who have a proven track record of using you. Robards is at the top of that list."
            Harry hesitated once, then nodded and said, "Fine. If Robards summons me again, then I won't go." Even if someone else dies because I don't? Even if the Spiders strike again?
            Draco was watching him as if he'd heard the doubts in Harry's mind. "Remember they have other Aurors," he said. "Individually, maybe you were the most competent one in the Department. Collectively, they have to be more powerful. And preventing incursions like this in the Ministry is one of the tasks Aurors were invented for. I don't want you to tell me that you have to go because no one else can do what you do."
            "Not as fast. Not as skillfully."
            "I told you," Draco murmured. "Individually, maybe not. But why should the Ministry's Department of Magical Law Enforcement rely on one individual? Why shouldn't it use all the resources it can get its hands on, in order to create the best solution possible? Robards should have put up a false front when it came to the Spiders asking to negotiate with you and done something else than just tossing you into the situation. What would have happened if you were with your children when he firecalled, or in the middle of another rescue?" He paused, then added, "If you were with me because I needed you?"
            Harry wanted to say that this was the same argument he had had with Ginny, and Draco knew how that one had ended. But it would have been false, and he stared into the fire with something stuck in his throat instead.
            Draco was more important to him than some of the situations Robards would call on him for. He had thought earlier that that couldn't be so, that he would always plunge into situations like this because collectively, to steal Draco's word, those multiple lives were worth more than his own life.
            But now...
            "You're saying that you might depend on me someday," he whispered. "You're saying that it might be more important for me to be here to raise my children than risking my neck for a bunch of other people."
            "Risking your neck without backup, yes," Draco said. "I'm not saying that everyone outside your family deserves to die and fuck them--although I used to think that way." Harry had to smile, although he kept his face turned away. "But you still don't seem to have grasped that you could have someone working with you, and they could help you save people. I don't understand why. You had a partner."
            Harry sighed. "I know, and I took less risks when I was with Ron. But if I'm not an Auror anymore, then I don't have him, either."
            "Is there a law that your partner has to be him?"
            Harry looked up swiftly. Draco sat in the chair across from him like a bird of prey, glittering and snowy-pale all over, his hands clasped around the cup of mulled wine that he clutched now like talons.
            "But you have other things to do," Harry said, too dazed to be polite. "And you wouldn't want to spend your life rescuing people."
            "Perhaps not rescuing." Draco shifted his weight to settle more comfortably in the chair. "I wouldn't be against helping them, if there was something in it for me and I could avoid tense battle situations. And if I was doing it with someone I trusted." He raised his cup to his mouth and sipped, watching Harry again.
            Harry blinked. "Well, there are ways that you could avoid tense battle situations," he said, not able to think of anything else to say.
            "So I thought." Draco's mouth curved up behind the cup, which he hadn't lowered yet, for some reason. "If you want a partner who will work with you and help you make your rescues matter beyond the immediate moment, then I could be that person."
            "I do," Harry said, reaching towards him. "But I have no idea what we could do yet, especially if I'm not to risk my life."
            "You could do it in situations where you weren't just springing into the risk wholesale." Draco reached out and caught his hand. "I never said that you should never do anything for anyone, Harry. Although I would rather like to live long enough to enjoy you more than I have. But properly calculated risks are different." He put down the wineglass and stood up.
            Harry watched him, confused. Draco looked as if he was ending the conversation, but he still had hold of Harry's hand, and wasn't going anywhere.
            "In fact," Draco continued, in a tone that suggested he was sorting through his options with a business partner, "I think that the way you scared me today, and the way you could have died so easily, means that we ought to do some of that enjoying right now." He slid his hand down Harry's neck to the curve of his shoulder and then lower, as if he was trying to test and see how sensitive Harry was. Harry jumped and shivered, shivers far different from the little surges of fear and nerves and visions of things going wrong that he'd had when he was confronting the Spiders. "Don't you want to see what happens next, Harry?"
            Harry raised his head and smiled. "Yes. If you're sure that you want to see it."
            Draco rolled his eyes. "And sometimes you are overcautious," he said. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the way you acted around your children and wife--ex-wife, that is."
            Harry snorted. "You can hardly blame me for forgetting if you make the same mistake."
            "Of course I can. I allow myself a certain amount of unreasonableness each day." Draco pulled Harry to his feet, with gentle strength that didn't really let Harry think he had the option of staying down, and stood there with him in his arms. "This time, I think I'm allowed my quota."
            The words were gentle, but the way his fingers clenched into Harry's arse wasn't. Harry gasped a little, and then said, "I don't think this is--unreasonable."
            Draco said, "No. Now that I think about it, you're right. Savor the words. I don't say them often." And then he waited, chin at the proper angle that they could lock eyes.
            Harry swallowed. Right. Draco was waiting for him to do something that would suggest Harry wanted this as more than an order from Draco, something that would show, in fact, that he wanted this equally.
            So Harry clasped his hands on Draco's arms and tugged in the direction of his own bedroom, and Draco's smile warmed him more than wine and fire together.
*
delia cerrano: Where Draco loves, he loves deeply, so he wouldn’t just storm off like that. But he does think that Harry mostly sees his value to other people, rather than seeing himself as intrinsically valuable.
polka dot: Well, right now he isn’t being paid anything, since he isn’t an Auror.
SP777: Thank you!
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Marathon