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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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of Acts of Life. I hope everyone else had as fun a time with this story as I did.
Chapter Thirty-Five--Rising
            The crowd muttered and flowed back and forth, taking up a good amount of the space in Diagon Alley, to the point that some people actually trailed into Knockturn Alley. Harry eased through them, murmuring polite excuses and sometimes showing his scar when there was no other way to get them to move.
            He couldn’t help noticing that even with all the people apparently eager to hear Mournegath speak, the crowd was a lot smaller than most that had come to hear him.
            Behind Harry, now and then uttering a deep sigh like he was trying to catch his breath in the middle of a forest fire, came Draco. Harry looked back at him more than once, and each time Draco nodded. Harry finally relaxed when they were in front of the hovering podium Mournegath had raised to speak at. He supposed he had to trust Draco at some point or else treat him like a child.
            The floating podium looked like it was made of pure gold, although Harry was sure that was only a clever illusion. It had a huge M on it in the front, surrounded with tiny sparkling decorations that made Harry have to stifle a chuckle. He nudged Draco and pointed it out to him.
            Draco frowned at it so hard Harry thought he would have to explain the joke. Then Draco caught on to what he was thinking and glared at him. “The Malfoys never did anything so pretentious,” he hissed.
            A few people in the crowd turned around at the name “Malfoy.” Harry gave them a calm look, and either the calmness or the fact that he was Harry Potter made them turn back to the front.
            Harry smiled at Draco. “You’re right,” he said. “You were much more pretentious when you had the chance.”
            Draco scowled in outrage, but at that point Mournegath floated up on the wings of an invisible charm and landed on the little disk behind the podium, and people started chattering, clapping, or cheering on principle. Draco had to scowl and poke Harry in the side with a look that promised vengeance later.
            Harry wasn’t afraid. Draco’s vengeance was always of the good kind. He turned cheerfully back to the front.
            Mournegath surveyed the crowd regally, apparently waiting for people to be quiet. People chattered more loudly instead. Mournegath finally seemed to realize he wasn’t up to inspiring silence with his mere presence, so he took his wand out and shot a stream of red sparks into the air, where they exploded.
            Harry snorted a little even as the crowd jumped and mostly shut up. The explosion was a good trick, but otherwise, that spell was something any first-year at Hogwarts could accomplish. Mournegath wasn’t a good walking advertisement for his own ideas about Dark Arts education being inherently superior.
            “Now that I have your attention,” Mournegath said, putting away his wand with a flourish, “I want to speak about the very important cause I’ve come here to talk about.”
            “The importance of always being redundant and speaking as if large crowds would have gathered around me for anything else,” Draco murmured into Harry’s ear.
            Harry grinned. “Are you translating from his natural language of Pretentionery?”
            Draco ignored that loftily and listened as Mournegath went on, “For too long have our people been restricted in power by the restrictions the Ministry imposes on us.”
            “I want to do whatever I want when I want it,” Draco whispered. “Including repeating myself.”
            “For too long we have had to hear our kind of people told that if they want their children to learn Dark Arts, they would have to send them to Durmstrang.”
            “Everything I want should be right near me to spare me having to find an International Floo.”
            “We have been lied to!”
            “It’s the normal process of conversation, but I can make it sound more dramatic.”
            Mournegath brought his fist down on the podium, which made it waver. Harry hid a snicker. It seemed Mournegath hadn’t even bothered to study the magic that was supposed to support him in the air. Harry hoped that would start to undermine people’s trust in him—assuming they had any. “We learned that Hogwarts was the greatest school of magic in Europe. How were we to know that was true?”
            “If I say something and imply that it’s not true, I don’t have to actually deny it and get in trouble.”
            A few people had started to pay more attention to Draco’s “translation” than Mournegath’s actual speech. Well, more than a few, Harry thought, as a ripple of laughter spread around them.
            It was far enough back from Mournegath that Harry had thought some of the crowd gathered directly beneath him might notice, but not Mournegath himself. He did, though. He leaned over the podium, making it rock again, and stared at them.
            “Explain why you do not have the courtesy to keep silent and let me speak!” he boomed.
            “Explain why you insist on believing in the truth and not simply falling in with whatever I want when I want it,” Draco mouthed.
            Harry let loose the laughter he’d been holding in, and saw the way Mournegath’s head reared back. He might actually recognize Harry’s laughter; Harry wouldn’t be surprised if Mournegath was sensitive enough to criticism to memorize his enemies’ merriment like that. And then Mournegath had his hand in motion, waving some of the people who might be bodyguards forwards.
            “Bring me the person who laughs like that!” he commanded.
            Harry wondered, for a second, as the dark-robed wizards came towards him, if he should encourage Draco to run. But a single glance at Draco’s face showed him the futility of that. Draco would never have left him.
            In fact, he might do more than not leaving Harry. Draco was grinning, the same kind of grin Harry used to see on his face almost despite his own spirit when they were spinning around each other in a game of Quidditch. Draco might tell himself that he’d only cared about winning, but it was more than that. It was love of the game.
            And this is a different kind of game, Harry realized, when Draco winked at him and moved to meet Mournegath’s guards. He stepped back. His hand was on his wand and he would intervene if Draco needed him, but he thought it only fair to let Draco have this moment of protecting him.
            They were in love, after all.
*
            Draco wondered, when he saw the scowls of those bodyguards, or whatever they were, if this was a mistake. Perhaps he should have waited for a better time to confront Mournegath, like when he didn’t have a horde of wizards staring at him and waiting for him to fail, or muttering among themselves when they saw his face.
            But that would be cowardly. And the one thing Draco never wanted Harry to think him was cowardly.
            “You wanted me, really,” he called up to Mournegath. “Because I was arrested for being a Dark wizard, and I can debate with you on equal ground. And I’m the one who made Harry laugh in the first place.”
            Mournegath stared with such a grim set to his mouth that Draco wondered for a moment if the great fool remembered who he was. Then Mournegath made a little grimace of distaste and shook his head. “You have five seconds to explain to me why you were making Harry Potter laugh.”
            This is going to be easier than I thought, Draco realized, and he relaxed as warmth spread through him. All I have to do is tell the truth.
            “Because I would rather be making Harry Potter laugh than doing anything else in the world,” he said, and then he glanced over his shoulder. Maybe if he was really strong, Draco thought, he would have kept facing forwards and not looked.
            But he wanted to see Harry’s face. That wasn’t a fault. That was a blessing.
            And Harry’s expression was brilliant, and he looked at Draco as if he was the center of the universe. That was more than enough inspiration for Draco to turn back to Mournegath and add gently, “And I think that might have been four seconds. Even shorter than your deadline!”
            That made more than one person laugh. Draco smiled and didn’t take his eyes from Mournegath. If he was ever going to be dangerous, as opposed to pompous, now was probably the moment.
            Mournegath lowered his head like a bull about to charge, but he was all huff and puff and no horns. “I understand that you also oppose draining the lake at Hogwarts and building a new Dark Arts school there.”
            “Yes.” Draco said simply.
            “Why?”
            Draco blinked a little, then shook his head and asked, “Isn’t it obvious?”
            “No.”
            Draco snorted a little. “There’s no evidence that merfolk harm people. Hogwarts has been independent from control like yours for hundreds of years. It has its own Board of Governors, without the need to play the tune that people like you want it to. And if you want your own Dark Arts school so badly, you could found it anywhere.” He paused, and then added something that might not be true but was an interesting thought he’d just had. “Unless the real reason you want to build on Hogwarts grounds is to keep yourself from having to buy land and fund the school on your own.”
            There was a long, low murmur of agreement from the crowd. Draco gazed up at Mournegath, and even though he couldn’t see him well because of the distance between the ground and the podium, he thought he could see the way his face flushed.
            Draco nodded and asked a question that didn’t have to be true to be devastating. “Is that a guilty flush I see?”
            Mournegath should have gone on. He should have sneered and said that of course it wasn’t, and then answered with some of the research that he had told people he’d gathered on the good consequences of the Dark Arts and the bad consequences of having merfolk in the lake at Hogwarts.
            But he didn’t. He turned abruptly away, as if he would leave the podium, as if he would flee the podium, and then turned back and opened his mouth as if he would continue the speech.
            His moment was lost, though. Draco’s moment had come. The welling laughter met Mournegath, and he didn’t try hard enough to fight it. He scowled instead, yelled something that not even the Sonorus Charm on his throat could make loud enough to counteract the crowd, and then turned and floated down from the podium. His bodyguards, or whatever they really were, closed around him at once, and then he was flitting into the crowd and gone.
            Harry stepped up beside Draco. Draco gazed at him, smiling, aware of the click of cameras and that a picture of them looking like this would appear in most of the papers tomorrow. Not that he minded, or cared.
            Then Harry bent and took his lips in a gentle kiss.
            There were whoops and yells and more camera flashes, and Draco realized he’d been wrong, on two counts. First, this was the picture that would be on the front pages of all the papers tomorrow.
            And second, he cared very much that Harry Potter was kissing him in front of all these people. He cared because he was pleased, and happy, and proud, and he knew he wouldn’t trade his place for anything in the world.
            This is what my life is about.
            The End.
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Acts of Life