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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 Forty-Six—Underhanded
            “You’re smiling.”
            Harry didn’t look up from his breakfast. He had covered a piece of bread in honey, and was now carefully twirling it around and around so that it would absorb as much of the honey that had spilled on his plate as possible. “Am I? Well, yes, that’s what happens when you’ve thought up a plan.”
            He could feel Draco’s gaze come to rest on him long before Draco lowered the legs of his chair to the kitchen floor and leaned forwards. “Tell me.”
            Harry looked up at him, still smiling. “Is Lily still outside practicing that spell you taught her?” They had given Lily Draco’s wand for the duration, after Draco had cast several complex spells on it that he said would protect it even from the machinations of a ten-year-old. “I don’t think she’s old enough to hear this.”
            “If your plan involves sleeping with someone else, then I do object to it,” Draco murmured, but he went to the kitchen window to look.
            Harry leaned back and ate his bread and honey, filled with a contented glow of warmth that felt as golden as the honey. “Nothing like that,” he said, when he had sucked his fingers clean. He noticed Draco’s gaze following his fingers, and was a bit smug. “Only she has a lot of faith in the Ministry. It’s the place that her grandfather and a lot of her uncles work, and I used to work. I don’t want to dent that faith right now. When she sees the articles in context, then I hope she’ll understand.”
            Draco half-smiled. His eyes had gone an intense, stormy color that Harry had never seen before. “I hope, from the sounds of that, that you’re going to flay some people alive when you speak to the press,” he murmured.
            “Oh, no.” Harry finished the last of his bread and honey and flicked the honey back onto the plate with a few easy motions of his fingers. “Only reveal a few long-kept secrets that it would have been inconvenient to talk about before, and let the press flay certain people alive.”
            “I do hope that you’ll explain what you mean by that.” By now, Draco was steadily thumping the heel of one palm on the table, glaring at Harry.
            Harry thought about saying that Draco could wait until the press conference to find out along with everyone else, but he wasn’t that sadistic. Or that unwise. Draco still slept in the same bed as he did, after all.
            “Yes,” Harry said, and splayed his hands out on the table in front of him. “I learned a lot of things about how the Ministry operated during Auror investigations that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t reveal them to the general public, because it would have undermined our effectiveness during those cases. It might even have hurt the trials, or the witnesses, or the victims of the crimes we investigated. But I still didn’t like them.”
            “You shock me.”
            Harry blithely ignored that. “So now I’m not on a case, and the Spiders, the most dangerous case that the Ministry has had in a while, has been wrapped up, and I don’t know the details of enough other investigations to know if anyone would be hurt by me talking about those general procedures. But it really is time that the public knows.”
            “You don’t know the details, and you won’t take the time or trouble to acquaint yourself with them,” Draco finished up.
            Harry met his eyes. “Yes.”
            “There’s the Slytherin part of you I know and love,” Draco murmured, and reached across the table to clasp Harry’s hand tightly.
            “Really?” Harry cocked his head to look down his own body. “I thought there was a specific part of me you loved, and it didn’t have anything to do with Slytherin. Unless you wanted to make bad jokes about snakes.”
            Draco kissed him hard enough to shut him up, and Harry was doubly glad for the wards on the house and Lily’s infatuation with the notion of being able to cast real magic.
*
            “Thank you for coming here today.”
            Harry was really impressed with himself for mustering that sober tone. Especially because what he wanted to do was burst out howling like a hyena.
            The nearest person was, of course, Rita Skeeter. She didn’t nod or move, just watching him like a predator crouched to spring. Behind her were more reporters, all of them staring up at Harry in expectant silence. Now and then, quills twitched and someone coughed. That was almost all the motion in them.
            Harry had chosen to hold the press conference in the garden of Grimmauld Place. Not that many people could fit into it, but that was part of the point. He had reporters and maybe one or two people who weren’t really reporters but Ministry spies. There wasn’t a large crowd who could shout out contradictions of what he was saying and try to make him shut up when he started condemning the Ministry.
            “I know that you all think of me as a paragon of goodness and light,” Harry said, pacing back and forth in front of the two chairs he had set up, one for Draco and one for himself. He kept his gaze carefully away from Draco’s face. Look too hard and he would burst out laughing. “And you know that one of the virtues I value is loyalty. Well, that’s why I’ve never spoken up before. I was so afraid of what would happen, of betraying my friends.”
            “Your friends?” Skeeter was writing already, but she glanced up at him, and snuffled like a rat.
            Harry nodded. He kept his nod slow and regal. He and Draco had discussed this part of the plan, and how it was going to work when Harry wasn’t a good actor. Handling it like this was the best thing Harry could think of. “Because some of my friends work in the Ministry, you know. Or they believe in its ideals. I didn’t want to think about what would happen to them if they had to acknowledge the truth.”
            “Truth is another virtue, I believe.” Skeeter’s fingers were twitching as though she couldn’t control them. Harry would have believed it was a nervous tic, at one point. Now he knew better.
            “Yes,” Harry said. “But I was able to convince myself I shouldn’t tell the truth because—oh, because of many things. Other people who worked in the Ministry told me I shouldn’t, and I convinced myself they were right. Because they weren’t me, so they had to be right, didn’t they?” He smiled a little whimsically when Skeeter blinked. “You haven’t ever felt that way yourself?”
            Skeeter’s return glance showed that of course she hadn’t. She was used to trusting her own instincts, and twisting loyalty and honesty and all the other virtues into knots based on her own desires.
            Harry shook his head gravely. “But now I’m not an Auror, and I have to think about what would keep the general public safe. I’m sure my friends would understand.”
            “You’re building this up,” said a woman in the back, in lavender robes, who kept craning her neck to see over the tall people in front of her. “I don’t think you’re going to justify all the suspense.”
            Harry turned around and walked over so that he could see her clearly. The woman reached up and patted at her hair, clearing her throat. Harry had to grin. At least not everyone in the wizarding world believe he was gay, then.
            “I’m going to try and justify the suspense,” he said, still looking at her. “Did you know that the Ministry regularly authorizes Aurors to eavesdrop on the victims of thefts? Not because they’re trying to set up wards to catch the thieves if they come back, but because they assume that victims always hold something back and they want to find out what? Eavesdropping wards connected to the Ministry are in hundreds of private homes or businesses around the country. And most of them have been there for years. The Aurors don’t remove them when the crime is done and the thief is caught, or when the case is shelved.”
            There were indignant gasps, or excited ones—it was hard to tell the difference—from several people. Not from Skeeter, of course, Harry saw. Her quill was already flying. Of course it would be. She bowed her head over the parchment, silent and intent, but her ears seemed to quiver from the force of her listening.
            The woman in the lavender robes seemed to have decided to appoint herself spokeswoman for the reporters. “But that can be understandable, right?” she asked. “Sometimes you don’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty. It makes sense to put those wards up. And sometimes people pretend to steal from themselves.”
            “It might make sense to put the wards up,” Harry said, nodding. “It might even make sense not to tell the victims of the thefts about them, sometimes, because the Aurors could suspect that they’re involved. If an Auror has that intuition, it should be respected. But what can justify leaving the wards up for months after the case is solved? Or years?”
            More quills were scratching now. The witch in the lavender robes opened her mouth again, but Skeeter raised her head and asked a question of her own, her voice deep and dignified. “Do you acknowledge that you should have told the wizarding world of this secret earlier, Mr. Potter?”
            “I should have done it, yes,” Harry said, and lowered his head a little and stared at his feet. Honestly, he was surprised that he didn’t feel more guilty, but then again, it wasn’t as though he had had a lot of time to think about this. He had once brought up some of the things they had to do with Ron, but Ron had shaken his head and advised him not to make trouble. And for a lot of the time he worked in the Ministry, Harry didn’t want to make deliberate trouble for himself. Merlin knew he had all sorts of unofficial troubles following him around. He didn’t need more.
            “Why didn’t you?”
            “The concerns about safety and loyalty that I mentioned before,” Harry said, and turned easily away from Skeeter. He wasn’t going to let her make this into some article about him, when it wasn’t. It was about exposing the Ministry’s terrible, awful problems and high-handed treatment of its own people.
            Well, and about getting his revenge. But Harry found that the two goals blended more nicely the more he thought about them.
            “Another thing the Ministry does,” Harry told them, “is say that it won’t use Veritaserum on someone who’s not willing. You’re supposed to have the ability to choose whether to tell the truth, because Veritaserum is so invasive.”
            “And that’s followed,” said the tall man with sandy hair who was standing towards the back. “I’ve attended all sorts of trials, and they always ask if the defendant wants Veritaserum, and they always say no.”
            Harry had to snicker a little. “You would say no, too, if you’d already taken the stuff.”
            They all watched him, looking impressed and a little scared—except Skeeter. She was too busy scribbling away to look up from her notes.
            “Oh, yes,” Harry said softly. It was strange, standing there. He could feel as if he was in two places at once, literally two minds. He understood, with one part of his mind, all the justifications that the Ministry and the Aurors had come up with to pressure criminals to take Veritaserum. It guaranteed the confession, and gave the surviving families of their victims, or the victims themselves, peace. Otherwise, a case might go unsolved for months, officially, even though the Aurors had the guilty one in their grasp. And before the invention of Veritaserum, sometimes Aurors had beaten the truth out of victims. This way was preferable. They were already guilty. Being “encouraged” with guilting tactics and lies to take it was sparing them as well as other people a lot of pain.
            There was that justification, and as far as it went, it was a good one. Harry could believe it. He had believed it. He thought Ron probably still believed it, and he really couldn’t blame anyone who did.
            But there were different ways to look at, and he thought he had found one.
            “The vast majority of criminals that the Aurors capture, criminals that they know are guilty, are heavily encouraged to take Veritaserum,” Harry told them calmly. “They don’t necessarily want to. They are encouraged, like I said. It’s not a bad arrangement. They know that they’re guilty. This way, the confession is real, and the families are spared pain.”
            “But what about the criminal?” It was Skeeter who said that, and Harry glanced at her. A moment later, he was reassured by the way her eyes shone. All right, she wasn’t suddenly turning soft on him. She didn’t care about the violation of human rights so much as the chance for a good story, because she knew that some of her readers did care. “Does it actually benefit them?”
            “Not much of the time,” Harry said. “If the Aurors have them dead to rights, of course, they probably deserve to go to Azkaban.” He smiled at the way Skeeter looked at him. “Surely you would agree with that, Madam Skeeter.”
            She cleared her throat. He wondered if she was remembering, the way he was, the penalty for being an unregistered Animagus, and his smile widened despite himself.
            “Of course I would agree with that,” Skeeter managed, sounding a little strangled. “But what if the criminal turns out to be innocent?”
            Harry shrugged. “Then they’re let go.” He paused. “Unless they’re awfully convenient for the crime that the Aurors want to pin on them, and there’s no other good suspect.” He remembered being present at several arguments, long and fervent, as those who had no doubt of the criminal’s guilt labored to convince those who had the gravest doubts. “And even if they are innocent, their mental privacy has been violated with Veritaserum. I doubt that it’s a good deal for them.”
            Skeeter was again scribbling. Harry suspected she would be away from here first, which meant the honor of publishing the story first would go to her. Well, why not? She had been his enemy, but what he wanted most at the moment was to embarrass the Ministry. She would delight in doing that. Anything that got her more readers was her goal. He already knew that she didn’t give a fuck about breaking rules and sneaking into places.
            Harry did have to glance over his shoulder at Draco, as the thought of what Skeeter had done in the past brought up some other memories of his lover. Draco cleared his throat innocently and looked the other way. Harry snorted and turned back to face Skeeter and the rest.
            The witch in the lavender robes seemed more interested in something else. “Did you ever participate in that kind of interrogation yourself, Auror Potter?”
            Skeeter looked up, as caught as anybody else, which meant Harry would have to answer this question, and sooner than he had liked.
            He sighed and looked at his hands for a moment, as much to gather courage as to delay his answer, and then looked up. “I wish that you wouldn’t call me Auror anymore,” he said. “I gave up that title. But yes.”
            A low buzz moved through the crowd, and several people opened their mouths at once, their voices mixing in a cacophony. But the tall, sandy-haired wizard got there first. He had a revolted look on his face.
            “If that’s true,” he said, “why should we trust you?”
            Harry gave him a blank look, not pretending. He was truly lost. “What do you mean? Trust me to do what? I’m no longer an Auror. You don’t have to worry about me participating in arrests and wrong sessions of interrogation anymore.”
            “Trust you to tell the truth.” The sandy-haired wizard’s hand was tight on his quill, and his nostrils flaring with such distaste that Harry wondered if he was a new reporter. Or maybe one of those people who had thought Harry was perfect. It could be hard for those people to have to confront the real actions of someone they had thought was a hero. “If you did that, if you twisted the truth once, then you could again.”
            Harry had to snort. “But you believe me when I tell you about the interrogations? And that I participated in them? You only know about them because I told the truth, right? How are you going to separate truth from lies now?”
            The man hesitated.
            “You don’t need to believe everything I say,” Harry said, and turned back to the other reporters. “But disbelieving everything I say is no more productive.”
            Someone else tried to ask a question about his time in the Aurors, but Harry cut them off smoothly, and started telling them about some of the lies that the Aurors—including himself—had used in interrogations to persuade criminals to take Veritaserum. He didn’t want this to be a story about him, although some people would probably write one. At least he could avoid making it a story he told, though.
            And all the while, the information he had loosed flowed into the outside world, mucking up the works, making it harder for the Ministry to do things, to deny things, to get away without embarrassing themselves.
            Leave me the fuck alone, Robards. Maybe this will finally convince you to.
*
BAFan: Thank you! Glad you liked it.
delia cerrano: Well, it’s easier for Lily to join the party because she isn’t at Hogwarts yet. But Harry will get his chance to try parenting Scorpius.
SP777: Thank you!
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Marathon