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Contracted	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18657 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Four--An Evening to Change Everything

            "I want you to tell me why you're doing this."

            Potter had drawn himself up as though he was confronting Draco across the desk in an interrogation room. His eyes had pulled almost shut, and his nostrils were narrow and pinched. Draco shook his head. It was the prissiest he'd ever seen Potter be. He preferred the open, fiery gaze the other man had given him when he first appeared in the Floo.

            Indeed, although he hadn't planned this conversation like he'd planned his other interferences in Potter's life of late, Draco found himself smiling. He leaned forwards and said softly, "You know why I'm doing this. I've explained the situation to you already. You understand everything about it. What you can't deal with is the idea that some people in your life won't simply leave you to the untender mercies of that bastard Sandborn."

            Potter, being Potter, took that in the wrong way. His eyes widened again, and his hand dropped out of sight. "If you're implying that my friends know about this and want me to simply suffer, Malfoy--"

            "Not at all," Draco said, and beamed at him. "Thank you for confirming something I was unsure of, however. I thought it possible that the people surrounding you are such Gryffindors that they might accept you selling yourself for a greater cause. But they don't, do they? They don't know. They aren't there to listen when you call yourself a whore. They don't know you do. They aren't there to watch you sign away your life and happiness, and Callia's life and happiness, not to mention their peace of mind if they ever found out--"

            The fire flared and nearly went out. Potter's magic interfering with the Floo, Draco surmised a second after his heart leaped upwards. Impressive in one way, sloppy in another. By the time that they were Potter's age, most wizards had learned better control than he had.

            Potter wrenched himself back under control with a twist of his neck that looked painful, and said, "There's nothing I want from you. You don't need to pay me back because you don't owe me a debt."

            Draco let his smile vanish, his eyes narrow. "You're not the one who gets to decide that, Potter. I know you must be used to your position of judge and arbitrator, even fate, in the lives of your friends. Mr. Weasley doesn't know that you're the one responsible for obtaining that job for him, does he? He'll think it's the sheerest good luck, or his own merits." He leaned nearer, lowering his voice. "That's another thing you're taking from your friends, Potter: their ability to be confident in their own judgment. When they know, they'll need to spend time revising every decision and momentous event in their lives from the past seven years, wondering which they made on their own and which happened to them because of your interference. And, no doubt, impeccable good taste--"

            The fire flared again, but Potter clamped down on his temper before Draco could say anything. His eyes were still raw, his teeth showing, and Draco hoped he could do something with that. However, Potter's voice sounded too smooth and cool for his liking. "You think these arguments are new to me, Malfoy? You think I haven't lain awake at night, asking myself the same things, asking myself how hurt they would be if they learned the truth? And I decided in the end that it didn't matter. I've made the decisions, and if I regret them now, I still have to live with them. I can give them the gifts I fought for, at least."

            Draco shook his head. The last thing he wanted was for Potter to retreat to the comfortable, conscience-free perch he'd created for himself. "Things can change. We can give you your freedom back, and that, in turn, gives you the chance to change your mind." He paused and leaned forwards until, at least from his perspective on this side of the fire, his eyes were only a few inches away from Potter's. "Unless you're stupid enough to decide that you always do know best, and that your guilt means nothing."

            "Do you have any idea why I began this?" Potter asked softly.

            "No," Draco said, and tamped his voice flat, so as not to let out any of the revealing emotions. "Tell me."

*

            Harry hesitated. He had expected Malfoy to taunt him or say that it didn't matter why he began this, what mattered was what he did now. For a moment, he wondered if it was a trap, if Malfoy would do something else to disrupt his life and the contract with the information Harry gave him.

            Then Malfoy raised his eyebrows and tilted his head, and the skeptical look broke the reserves Harry was trying to keep in place. He snorted.

            "I thought I was the all-conquering hero after the war," he said. "You would have laughed at how naive I was being, how stupid. I was stupid. I thought I only had to ask for something and I'd be granted it. When I told the Wizengamot about your mother saving me in the Forbidden Forest, I was stupid enough to believe that would actually protect her."

            "Why didn't it?" Malfoy asked, and his voice was soft, sliding in around the edges of Harry's defenses, coaxing him along.

            Harry paused again, but Malfoy's face was hard, and that gave him the courage to go ahead. "Because the Wizengamot was afraid of me. The whole bloody Ministry was afraid of me. I gave them what they wanted, and all they could think of was that I would use the power of my victory against them, change the wizarding world in undesirable ways. So they were determined to prevent me from making any real changes, and freeing people on my testimony would have been one."

            Malfoy sighed a little. "But my mother--"

            "Still spent time in Azkaban that she shouldn't have," Harry cut in harshly. He didn't want to think about the way Narcissa's face had looked when she heard her sentence. It was the thing that had really started him on the path of the contract, but Malfoy would bitch and laugh if he heard about it, and Harry saw no reason to tell him. "I knew the rest of you would be next, because Sandborn sat me down and explained it to me. He's--not like the rest. He still would have taken me down, but he wasn't afraid. He saw more profit in an alliance with me than working against me.

            "And so that was it. An alliance, which meant that I did as he said and he did as I said. And I got what I asked for. I always have."

            Malfoy buried his head in his hands. Harry stiffened in anticipation. Maybe he was so disgusted that he would shut down the Floo conversation. Harry had used that tactic once before, on an idealistic young reporter who had come close to the truth of the contract. She'd backed off because confronting what he really was would destroy all her stereotypes about him as a hero.

            "Potter, you idiot," Malfoy said, voice hissing between his fingers like the winter wind. "Sandborn manipulated you. He made up the story about them being afraid of you, and that means--"

            "No," Harry said, and his lips twitched violently. He didn't want to tell Malfoy this, either, but he had to make him back off and realize that he was lucky to be free and in control of his property. Why wasn't that enough for him? "Your mother's sentencing happened before that, despite all the witnesses, Death Eater and other, who could confirm that she really did lie for me. And I can use--Legilimency, sometimes, when the other person isn't expecting it. I looked into the minds of the Wizengamot members I could, and there was fear everywhere. Fear of me. It was like rolling in slime. They were more afraid of me than they were of Voldemort."

            That had been the real tipping point, if he was honest with himself, even more than Narcissa's shocked and staring face, although that one made the better story. To know that he was a monster in their eyes, or could easily become a monster, that they saw the power of the mob at his beck and call, that they suspected him of wanting to rule the wizarding world...

            It made Harry sick with despair just to think about combating that. And to think that they might be right. His fame was a weapon, one that other people could misuse if he didn't control it. The only other option that might have settled their fears was retreating from the wizarding world forever, and he wasn't about to do that.

            "You realize that's nonsense."

            Harry snapped his head up. He was grateful for Malfoy speaking just then, although of course he would never let the bastard know it. He had nearly sunk into his own thoughts and forgotten who was in front of him. He had nearly stopped remembering that he was talking about this because he wanted to show Malfoy why the contract was necessary.

            He hadn't relived those memories in seven years. He should have known that dredging them up would cover him in much of the same stinking slime that he had felt when he stood in the Wizengamot's minds.

            "It's what I saw," he said steadily. "I'm not a very skilled Legilimens, and so what I felt could have been exaggerated, but--"

            "I meant," Malfoy said, grinding down on the word as if it had personally offended him, "that it's nonsense that they feared you. They should have been able to see what a noble, stupid Gryffindor you are, that you would have killed yourself before harming anyone else. And that's practically what you have done," he added, running his eyes over Harry as though he could see everything that mattered through a Floo connection. "Suppressed everything, made yourself into the one image they wouldn't fear. Who knew you were such a coward?"

            This time, Harry controlled the instinctive leap forwards to defend himself that he wanted to make. Malfoy knew things about him now that no one else did. That didn't make him a friend or someone Harry could let down his guard in front of. He blinked a little and called up the first, antiseptic soul behind his eyes.

            "Nonsense or not, it's what they believed," he said. "I could have worn myself out fighting them. In the meantime, you would have gone to Azkaban, my friends would have lost any chance at untroubled lives, the laws Hermione wanted wouldn't have passed, and your money and properties would have been distributed to other people. Scorn me all you like, Malfoy. You only know the world as it is, not as it would have been. I know both."

            Malfoy's mouth twitched. "Arrogant as hell," he said succinctly. "Setting yourself up as the ultimate pivot point between universes. How can you know that? How can you know that the burden rested on your shoulders?"

            "Because I made it so," Harry said. Calm, calm. He's only trying to irritate you, and he's got too much out of you already. "That might have been wrong. I'm prepared to bow to your definitions and accept that it was. But it's what happened. You can't change the past."

            "You annoy me enough to make me regret that no Time-Turners survived." Malfoy's gaze lingered on him. "You still don't understand, do you, Potter? How arrogant this was, is? How angry your friends will be when they find out?"

            "There, you're wrong," Harry said, and he was sure that he was right. His own words came out of a well of calmness at the center of him. "The first time I went to Sandborn and proposed the contract, he laughed at me. He asked why I thought that what I could offer was so bloody important, or whether I believed that he couldn't get along without me and outface the threat I represented. You could see by then that he was going to become Minister. No one else could take advantage of the chaos after the war the way he could."

            "You sound as if you admire him." Malfoy's voice curled around him like smoke.

            Harry smiled somewhere in the back of his mind, where his third soul lived when he wasn't using it. Let Malfoy become disgusted. The more he felt that emotion, the greater the chance that he would drop this and back away. Harry couldn't stress how much he wanted that to happen. "You should," he said. "He was the one who tamed the untamable Harry Potter. That's admirable, don't you think?"

            Malfoy stared at him, but he couldn't hide the shifting of his shoulders or the swift glimpse of his tongue between his teeth. Harry cocked his head. "I'm arrogant. I know that. But I'm the one who proposed the contract. I'm the one who agreed to all the deals, and proposed more of them myself. I'm the one who's snaring a woman who doesn't know about this into a marriage that will be false at the bottom, even if she's willing to put up with that for the money and the public exposure. I've sold myself to the point where I don't remember what honesty feels like. I've fucked myself over, and done it well, for the sake of sparing my friends and even my enemies from a fear that might only be nonsensical, that might not have had the consequences for them I feared it would. You were right about me."

*

            Draco felt the trembling impulse to shut the Floo connection and back away. Potter said everything without a flinch. He had no trace of standards left, no principles, no intelligence, not even the cunning that Draco had hinted to Pansy he must have to defend the truth from his friends and other inquirers. He was--

            Someone who did have that cunning, Draco was sure of it, and moreover, someone who had spent the last seven years spinning the truth until it squeaked, convincing everyone who looked at him that he was the basic, boring Gryffindor hero, the Minister's boy-toy, the known quantity.

            Draco leaned in until he could feel the heat of the flames on his nose. Potter looked at him, unmoving. No one held a still pose that naturally, Draco knew. He ought to have thought of the possibility of deception before. Potter wanted him to back away. What would he do but take actions that he thought he would ensure that?

            And it had nearly worked, too.

            Draco felt a stab of admiration, and let it show in his face because he knew it would confuse the fuck out of Potter. Sure enough, the big eyes blinked, and Potter shifted position, staring at him.

            "Good try," Draco said softly. "Did Sandborn give you tips on how to do that, or was that something you came up with yourself?"

            "I've always been honest," Potter said. "That was something you despised when we were in Hogwarts, I recall."

            "You did this to yourself, yes," Draco said. "But what you did involved other people. That's what I keep trying to get you to see. If you don't have the right to make decisions for others, you also don't have the right to use them as excuses for staying in this wretched position."

            Potter snarled. Draco saw the flex running through him, how his shoulders lifted nearly into hunching position, how his fingers curled down at his sides. Draco smiled back at him. He was the one who could make Golden Boy Potter lose control. He was the one who could make Potter think of something other than the chains he was wearing.

            Merlin, he was good.

            "I could go to Sandborn," Potter said. "Get him to promise to keep you away from me."

            Draco laughed at him. "What else do you have to give up? And what would he think if you asked him for something so simple? Especially when you're trying to defend yourself from someone you've previously tried to protect?" God, he hated the idea that Potter would consider him a helpless child in need of shelter from the Wizengamot, and incapable of fighting for his own money. It made his voice sharpen, drove him higher on a potent Firewhisky of outrage and amusement. "He'll think it strange, and he might start looking into this further, Potter. He might do something to me."

            Potter froze. That was the way to do it, Draco thought, turn back the chokechain of his own protectiveness on the bastard.

            Then Potter shook his head and bounced back to the poised statue that Draco was beginning to hate. He did it by changing only a few of the muscles in his face and a few of the lines about his mouth. It would be impressive control if Draco was in the mood to be impressed by something like that. "I warn you, Malfoy," he said. "There's nothing you can do legally. The contract would hold up any scrutiny the Wizengamot could give it."

            Draco smiled at him. "How convenient that you're dealing with Slytherins, who have never needed to limit themselves to legal methods."

            "Seven years after Hogwarts, and you still define yourselves by your House?" Potter surveyed him the way that Draco's mother might have looked at a wet spot on the marble. "I wonder whether you're emotionally mature enough to help me even if I requested your aid."

            About to respond in kind, Draco paused instead and listened. Potter could control his face better than he could his voice. The voice had a quiver in it.

            Then Draco studied his eyes. And he hadn't put everything away perfectly after all. He had embers burning still, embers of the honest emotion that Draco had forced out of him. He looked at Draco fearlessly, so he must have thought they were concealed, but Draco looked long and deeply enough to see them.

            Somewhere down under the surface, pinned perhaps but still existing, the Potter Draco had known was screaming. The fiery temper, the determination to survive, and, yes, the cunning that had let him hide his secret were still there. He wanted to be free. He would snatch at freedom if it was offered. The biggest problem was that he couldn't be persuaded that freedom was within reach, and he wouldn't make a move unless he knew that the gains he'd won from Sandborn would be preserved along with everything else.

            Convince me, his body said.

            "I'll try," Draco said.

            Potter blinked, then chose to interpret those words in light of the last ones he'd spoken. He did have a rather bad case of believing himself at the center of the universe, Draco thought tolerantly. Of course, the last half a decade and more wouldn't have contributed to breaking that delusion. "Trying isn't enough," he said. "Not against the forces Sandborn can bring to bear. And as you've pointed out several times, I can't be worth saving."

            "I've never said that," Draco said. "I think you are worth saving. The only thing I have to do is convince you, so that you'll fight on my side. When you fight for something you truly believe in, you're a powerhouse. I want that power behind me. I want you holding my back."

*

            The words struck a spot Harry hadn't thought to defend.

            Fighting for people, beside people, was what he did. He had changed his mind about becoming an Auror before he went to Sandborn, but he hadn't been able to think of another career that would let him struggle to defend others--and he had known that any contract he signed would be certain to require Auror training of him. It was the most convenient mold for a hero.

            Malfoy was talking like there was something else he could do, defend and fight and be with people, and in a way that didn't involve being Ron's Auror partner. His mouth dried out, and he sat there, head shaking like a mindless puppet, his hands dangling uselessly because he could think of nothing to do with them.

            "You're so unused to thinking of yourself as powerful that the mention takes you by surprise?" Malfoy braced himself on his knees and smiled at him. "It seems it does. I'll remember that for our future conversations."

            Harry called back moisture into his mouth and rubbed his right temple, forcing his brain into motion again. He had suffered harder blows when he struggled with Dark wizards, and had risen back to his feet.

            But no blow from them ever had the potential to change my life.

            "I'm powerful within the confines of the law," he said. "What I do would mean nothing without legal backing, without the authority that the Ministry grants to Aurors."

            Malfoy gave him a sweet smile. "You've used guile to fight me so far," he said. "You also mentioned the influence that your heroic stature gives you with the papers and the public in general. You also used a spell on me the last time but one we saw each other. None of those are legal means, are they?"

            Harry ground his teeth. "Malfoy." His third soul was surging up again. There was no other explanation for the sticky, bitter thoughts that filled his head.

            "Consider, Potter," Malfoy said. "Do you think we're powerless? Too weak? Uninterested in helping you, although I've already told you we want to? Help me here. What is the main barrier?"

            Harry met his eyes. Malfoy had a look in his face that Harry had seen before when he did something unexpected that startled Ron, as though Ron had to fit the new behavior into the pattern labeled "Harry" he carried in his mind.

            That was why he did it, Harry thought later. Because Malfoy looked a lot like his best friend in that moment. Not for Malfoy himself, not because of Malfoy himself.

            "I've tried to think about ways that I could change things in the past," he said. "Every night for six years. I've come up with nothing--nothing that would let me keep what I have, what you have, what my friends have, and let me keep my word."

            Malfoy was on the edge of laughter, or so Harry thought from the light spilling into his eyes and his smile. "That's easily solved," he said. "We can think of ways, and keeping your word means nothing to us."

            Harry stared flatly at him. "It does to me."

            Malfoy shrugged with one shoulder. "I believe that the capacity of most people to resist temptation is grossly overestimated," he said. "If we lay out a path to freedom for you, and the only thing holding you back from following it is your word, then I believe you will."

            Harry pushed himself back from the fire. He hated the way Malfoy's eyes followed him and focused on him, as if he were the most important thing in the world for just a moment.

            "I'm right," Malfoy whispered. "I can see the fear in your eyes, and you would have no reason to fear that exact situation unless you thought that it would play out as I said it would."

            "I didn't ask for your help," Harry said. "You don't owe me a debt. I'm the arrogant bastard that you said I was."

            "Irrelevant," Malfoy said. "Stupid, because we have a different perspective on debts and we say we do." He pressed himself up against the hearth, and Harry stopped breathing. The only person who had looked that intently at him in the last few years was Sandborn, and Harry had defenses against him that the Minister would never penetrate, because he would never allow himself consciously to acknowledge his guilt.

            Malfoy understood, and remaining upright in the face of his regard for Harry was like standing there while he swallowed fire.

            "And tempting," Malfoy said softly, "because the temptation to make you eat your words adds its own fuel to my actions." He cracked an open smile this time. "I believe I've already told you what I think about temptation."

            The fire, and Malfoy's image, went out. Harry wasn't sure if Malfoy had ended the Floo call or if his own flaring magic had.

            And it didn't really matter, he told himself as he went to bed, because nothing would come of it. Nothing had changed. Malfoy might think he could do something, but Sandborn had defenses that--

            Except his first soul, the public one, had no place in his home, and it blew away like smoke before the blue light of his truth.

            And his hope.

*

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