Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Anarchy as Art	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 12617 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Four—Like a Fox After the Hound

            What would Malfoy want to steal?

            Harry knew he had to turn to Malfoy’s personal history for that, and it would be a hard, if interesting, challenge. The facts about Malfoy since the war were the ones everyone knew: his public apologies for what his parents had done, his donations to charities, his careful smiles in photos. He was spoken of in some places as an urbane and polished man, in others—though not in the Ministry—as someone who only pretended to make up for his past, but most people agreed that he was guarded about what he said now.

            So Harry sat down with Linton’s letters, and read them over.

            They were remarkably unguarded, but then, given what Malfoy had said to him at the Manor gates, Harry suspected that could also be a pose. Malfoy telling him that he was about to commit a grand theft was a risk, yes, but also something he could deny, not a confession. The letters must be in a similar vein.

            Must they? When you know that he loves to run risks, that it’s perhaps the one thing that he does love, and that the thefts are for the sake of that…

            Harry sighed and leaned back on his couch, running a hand through his hair. He would need to compromise; he couldn’t go through the letters assuming everything was simultaneously true and a conspiracy. He would read them with an eye to risk-taking first, and then again with an eye to how Malfoy could have protected himself.

            They made strange reading. Malfoy would give Linton practical Potions recipes and then spiral away into a flight of fancy about hippogriff feathers and unicorn blood, and how he would like to go hunting unicorns and convince them to give up their precious blood willingly. Harry snorted when he read that. How did Malfoy think he could do that, when unicorns hated and feared most humans?

            But that would be the risk of it, Malfoy’s voice whispered in his ear, as though he was still present in Harry’s skull despite all those attempts to banish him. That would be the glory of it.

            Harry narrowed his eyes and scribbled a circle around the unicorn blood passage. It might be worth warning the Potions masters who worked in London to keep an eye on their stock of the precious substance, assuming anyone had any. Or perhaps Malfoy was intending to steal the herd that lived near Hogwarts.

            It was several letters into the pile before Harry came across his own name, and his lip curled as he read. Malfoy really did sound like a hurt little boy who had never got over the first rejection dealt him.

            Do you know how much time I spend thinking about Harry Potter, Valerie? Far too much. I’ve actually made potions that can let someone else imitate the green of his eyes without Polyjuice. There are times I need to see him looking at me in a friendly manner, even if it isn’t him. A few hours is usually enough.

            Someday it won’t be enough. I know that. But when that time comes, I hope you’ll help me, Valerie. You and the other students I have scattered around the world, some of whom the Ministry will never find, or corrupt, or control…

            Harry snorted, and underlined the last line of that passage, too. It would be proof enough, for anyone reasonable, that Malfoy really had been training and corrupting people all along, spreading his skills and urging people to imitate him.

            Proof for anyone reasonable. But Harry was working under Thorin. He sighed and flipped to the next letter.

            This time it was some nonsensical rhapsody about how Harry worked hard and caught criminals fairly and, as annoying as it was to have them taken from Draco’s tutelage when he’d spent so much time working to make them independent Dark Arts users or Potions masters, Draco would rather have his protégés caught by Harry than any other Auror. Harry rolled his eyes so hard that he thought he saw the inside of his skull. Who was Malfoy kidding? That had to be contrived, because no one who trained as many people as he did would want them caught.

            And since when did you start thinking of him as Draco?

            Harry froze. The only sound he could hear in the room was his own breathing, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter, if certain people could investigate the inside of his head.

            Thorin would wonder whether his neutrality was compromised. Linton would smirk. Ron would spout his theory about how Harry’s desire to catch Malfoy was a cover for something else, and…

            And it was all shit that Harry had much rather not hear right now, thank you.

            He managed to write down a few notes on the letter, but his hand was shaking. In the end, he put the letters aside and walked over to the nearest window to clear the air.

            Harry had several enchanted windows in his house, but this one was real, a large glass window that looked out on the small part of wizarding London and the larger Muggle part near where he lived. Confusion of lights and noise or not, Harry relaxed when he looked at it. There was a world larger than he was out there, one that went on no matter what happened, one where normal people lived their lives and didn’t care about irascible, rules-bound Head Aurors or paperwork or whether Harry ever caught Malfoy or not. It was good to look at when he was getting too tangled up in his own head and believed that his own efforts were of ultimate importance. It had grandeur. It had depth. It had…

            Someone’s head dangling down in front of it.

            Harry stared. Yes, there was someone hanging there in front of his window, clinging to a rope that slowly wheeled them around. Harry started to cup his hands around his mouth to shout; his first thought was that someone had managed to hang themselves.

            Then he realized the figure was upright, and held a wand in his gloved hand, lit with a glowing light. As he turned back from his latest spin, the figure winked, and the light caught on his pale face and glinted from his golden hair.

            Harry’s rage shattered through him like the glass that would have flown if Malfoy had actually broken the window. He aimed his wand at him and whispered the command words that would make wards spring up around him—the kind of heavy-defense wards that he had woven into the stone but only used once or twice, when someone intent on vengeance for Voldemort was chasing him.

            The wards didn’t leap to life and enclose Malfoy in a snare the way they should have. Harry fell back a step in response. If Malfoy had disabled them somehow, then he could come right through the window, and there was precious little that Harry could do to actually stop him.

            “Potter,” Malfoy said, his voice eerie and wind-like but otherwise clear, as if he were standing in the same room with Harry. “If you had paid attention to me when we talked, you would know what I intended to steal by now.”

            Harry ground his teeth into one another, probably destroying a layer of enamel the way Hermione’s dentist parents were always on about, and said nothing. He knew that Malfoy’s words were misdirection and bafflement and half a dozen other things tangled around each other, but not the truth. Never the truth.

            “You would,” Malfoy said, as if he had seen the doubt in Harry’s eyes and wished to settle it. “Consider. I’m here in the dead of night, dangling from a rope that’s not as secure as I would wish—” He glanced up and tugged on it, then smiled at Harry when it held. “And I had to get around some powerful wards to be here. What is it I want? What would be worth stealing here, would be worth the effort?”

            Linton’s letters.

            Even as the knowledge hammered through Harry like a second heartbeat, he saw Malfoy brace his feet and swing inwards. If he had defeated the heaviest protections, then he would go through the minor ones, as well, and that meant he would break the window.

            Harry pivoted and dived for the table. He heard the glass crack behind him, but it didn’t break just yet. Malfoy cursed in that clear voice, and Harry could hear the creak of his rope as he swung out, probably to hit it from a different angle.

            Harry aimed his wand and cleared his mind. He had to ignore the sounds behind him and the fear that Malfoy would break in and snatch the letters from under his nose before he could finish the spell. This was like the Occlumency that Snape had tried to teach him, with the different (and important) result that Harry had actually managed to learn it.

            “Salutis.”

            The table in front of him shimmered, and then reformed, Transfigured into an iron safe. Harry sighed hard. He knew the papers were safe; the moment of concentration had allowed him to focus on simply changing the material of the table, and so anything that wasn’t made of wood on top of it would still retain its original form.

            He turned around to face Malfoy just as he hit the glass full on and the air filled with sharp-edged, singing shrapnel. Harry’s Shield Charm was instinctive, and the only thing he had to regret in the next moment was that Malfoy must have protected his face and hands in the same way, since nothing appeared to hit him.

            Malfoy straightened up in the middle of his drawing room and glanced around, nodding. “More space than I thought you would permit yourself,” he murmured. “Although you have frankly appalling tastes in décor.”

            Harry coiled his will tight and didn’t charge. He had to admit that Malfoy had impressed him so far. He hadn’t looked towards the safe, or tried to enchant it, or even looked disappointed that Linton’s letters were now beyond his reach.

            That must mean he had come here for another of his inane little talks. Perhaps Harry could use that against him this time, keep his temper and inspire Malfoy to tell him something that didn’t have fifty separate meanings.

            “You know,” he said, and was proud of the calmness in his voice, “that glass is going to be a bitch to clean up.”

            Malfoy turned to face him now, his smile sharper than some of the shards that had flown into the walls. “Really? You forget you’re a wizard more frequently than anyone I’ve ever known, Harry.” He waved his wand, and the glass soared out of the corners and secured itself back in place thanks to a nonverbal Reparo. A second one, and the cracks faded into nothingness.

            Harry was very aware that Malfoy had blocked the easiest path out of the room for himself, and of the pulse in his ears and under the palms of his hands. “That’s what happens when you grow up with Muggles,” he said, flowing with the moment, saying the first thing that came to mind because he thought it would work better that way.

            Malfoy cocked his head at him. “If I had known that about you, then I would have treated you differently,” he said.

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Oh, of course you would have. More taunts about being a Gryffindor and not knowing what Quidditch was and not knowing about my past.” He measured the distance between himself and Malfoy, and mentally shook his head. No, he couldn’t risk a charge. They both had wands drawn, and this would leave Malfoy too much time to curse him. And given how he’d disabled the wards, he had training that Harry didn’t.

            “I wouldn’t have assumed you knew everything already,” Malfoy said, his cheeks a dusky pink and his voice soft. Harry could marvel, in a detached moment, about what a good actor he was. Then again, he would have to be to convince everyone in the Ministry he was a harmless do-gooder. “I would have reminded myself that growing up without magic would have made you—well, not the Boy-Who-Lived. Not the Chosen One. You couldn’t have any idea how our world regarded you, no reason to suspect that you would have to choose sides in the war. I forced you to choose a side.”

            “I don’t know what you’re saying, Malfoy,” Harry interrupted. But he did: things that he had thought to himself sometimes, under his blankets in the dark of night, waiting to fall asleep. Which meant it had to stop. “But I object to the notion that you forced me to choose a side. Voldemort did that, and I did it, too, with my ignorance. I should have seen that you weren’t as bad as I wanted to think you were, that not all Slytherins were like that.”

            Malfoy’s eyes softened further. “Well, there is something to that. We were both little shits when we were younger.” Then he flashed the same kind of grin he’d shown Harry at the gates of the Manor. “But I still claim the title of being the worse little shit.”

            Harry’s mouth moved. It took him a moment to realize that he was smiling.

            Exactly as if Malfoy wasn’t a criminal. Exactly as if Malfoy hadn’t just broken into his home, Harry’s sanctuary from the crazed Prophet reporters and readers and everyone else who thought they were entitled to a piece of his flesh.

            Harry charged him.

            Malfoy moved, but slowly, probably because he had never thought that someone would actually try to punish him the way he deserved as long as he was charming. He leaped backwards, and then Harry was there, slamming one fist for his midsection in the moments before his training caught up with him. Wound a prisoner and you might just as well have handed the case to his advocate.

            He changed direction and let the momentum of his arm hurl him to the carpet, well beneath any curse that Malfoy might have used. He came up on one knee, arm extended, panting so hard that he sounded like a volcano. His wand was safely in hand, and that meant he was ready to counter whatever Malfoy threw.

            Malfoy stood there with one eyebrow raised, in a way that made Harry intimately aware of how he looked and sounded, grimy in comparison to Malfoy’s lithe elegance. He flushed, and more so when Malfoy clucked his tongue and shook his head.

            “Sometimes I wonder what I see in you, I really do,” Malfoy murmured. “But it’s an obsession of such long standing that it’s become almost a prize of its own. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I gave it up.” He turned, and his wand began pointing at random places around the room, including, Harry was sure, the safe that held Linton’s letters.

            Harry lunged in a tackle for his legs, already reciting finer points of his training in his head so that he could make sure he wouldn’t damage Malfoy accidentally. But Malfoy wasn’t where Harry had thought he would be, lifting his legs lightly and whirling out of the way. Once again, Harry crashed on the carpet, and this time, he hit hard enough that his sight reeled when he looked up dazedly.

            Malfoy knelt down next to him and ran his fingers beneath his chin. Harry stared at him, gasping, aware that he should react but not sure how he could. Perhaps Malfoy had cast a Freezing Charm when he touched him.

            “I know,” Malfoy whispered. “I know what it’s like to have to obey the rules, and to decide that you don’t want to. The only difference between us is that I made the decision not to, and you never did.”

            “That’s stupid, Malfoy,” Harry said, letting his tongue run on its own again. Malfoy must have cast a Babbling Curse on him, too. “I got in trouble all the time at Hogwarts. And you’re the one who knows the pure-blood rules better than I do.”

            Malfoy gave him a single, mysterious smile, and stood up. “I didn’t say that some rules weren’t worth obeying. I happen to think they are. But the Auror rules that you confine your life by, the endless reports you file, the respect you have to show to people who are above you in the hierarchy only because they’ve known how to be mindless drones for longer…Is that what you want for your life, Harry? Really? I’m asking out of intellectual curiosity, you understand, and also desire to show you how to live again.”

            Harry was catching his breath now, and the pain in his head was diminishing, and he could aim his wand at Malfoy’s ankles and cast a trip-line, he really could. Breaking into someone’s home or flat was worthy of an arrest, at least. And Malfoy hadn’t even tried to hide what he was doing.

            “I think there are better things you could be doing with your life,” Malfoy whispered. “And I’m just the messenger to make you realize it.”

            And he vanished, an Apparition so smooth and silent that Harry had to get up and go over to feel the space he’d stood to be sure it was an Apparition and not just a Disillusionment Charm. Well, if he had already removed the heavier wards on the building, of course there was nothing to prevent him leaving that way.

            It was then that Harry turned around and saw what Malfoy had done.

            The subdued beiges and blues of his home now glowed in rich greens and blues, with accents of brown earth tones. His beloved ratty old couch had new cushions that looked so soft Harry would probably fall asleep if he sat in them, and the doorway into the kitchen was wider and had an arch at the top. The fireplace had marble ornaments running along it, and a carved frieze of gamboling lions and serpents. There were landscapes on the walls—deep forests, high hills with a hint of purple on them, and meadows—that made Harry’s heart ache.

            And in the middle of it all was a framed photograph of Draco Malfoy, who smiled when he saw Harry and closed one eye in a lazy wink.

            Harry spent the rest of the evening trying, but he never could remove that bloody photograph.

            And his mood wasn’t improved when he went into the bedroom and saw the new green pillows, thick white blanket, and charmed banner above the bed which proclaimed SLYTHERINS DO IT BETTER THAN YOU THINK.

*

            unneeded: Harry does know that, but as far as he’s concerned, Malfoy wants to irritate him and punish him for capturing his trained criminals. Fucking him, Harry thinks, isn’t Malfoy’s goal as much as fucking him over is.

            Makoto Sagara: He won’t tell Ron about it at first, since he’s been ordered not to bring Ron in on this case, but that may change. I think Harry’s going to need the help!

            And thank you!

            SP777: I thought so, too, but I changed my mind. And it is still a chase, just a less literal one.
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