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Building With Worn-Out Tools	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54266 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Five—In This Moment of Transition

            Harry kept an eye open for owls, packages, letters, hidden pranks, or Dungbombs as he packed his clothes in his trunk. He could have used his wand alone, but when he was as angry as he still was about the near brush with the Poisoned Missive, it was better to use his uncontrolled magic to help. It had great fun dashing around the room, grabbing robes and shirts and trousers, shaking them the way Crups shook Muggles’ legs, and then depositing them in the trunk.

            Harry paused for a short time to watch. He had the odd feeling, only in force during moments like these, that his magic had its own personality now, that it was a being he could feel out and communicate with. But that always dissipated again when it did some senseless thing, like slamming the doors of his closet back and forth. No, it was witless and nothing more.

            “Mate? You here?”

            It was Ron’s voice, but all the same, Harry had turned and aimed his wand at the doorway before he recognized that. He sighed, lowered his wand, spent a few moments counting to five, and then called, “In the bedroom, Ron.”

            Ron came stomping up to the door, complaining indistinctly about Harry’s wards, but paused. Harry knew the trunk would have been the reason. He didn’t look up, though, just keeping his eyes focused on the motions of his hands. Some of the robes were dress robes, and needed to be neatly folded. If God hated him, those would be the robes he’d be required to wear to dinner at Malfoy Manor.

            “Letting Ginny have the house?” Ron asked softly. “I didn’t think you would.”

            Harry turned around, shaking his head. “No. The wards are set so neither she nor Zabini can come here. But Zabini sent me a Poisoned Missive that almost killed me this morning, and I decided that enough was enough. I’ll be staying at Malfoy Manor, under stronger wards, for the duration of the trial.”

            Ron stared at him. Harry raised an eyebrow and finally intoned the Pack spell to take care of everything still lying about the room.

            “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Ron asked at last.

            “Staying with you and Hermione would put a strain on you that’s not fair,” Harry said softly. “And a flat or a house isn’t safe right now. Even if Ginny and Zabini decide to be good little opponents and leave me alone, there’re the reporters and old friends deciding my divorce is the perfect time to see me again and the Dungbombs from the twins…” He shook his head. “It’s the best plan.”

            “I’m thinking less of safety and more of Malfoy trying to poison you against Ginny.” Ron folded his arms.

            Harry blinked. “She’s doing a pretty good job of that all by herself, Ron.”

            “Yes, but he’s an Arguer. And he’s a Malfoy.” Ron made this pronouncement as if it were the equivalent of Malfoy appearing with a signed and sealed scroll for the sale of his soul.

            “I know,” said Harry. “And what’s he told me about the process does not make it sound attractive. But Ginny’s left me no other choice.”

            “She told me she contacted you trying to reconcile.”

            Harry couldn’t restrain a bark of laughter, or the way his magic painted a smudge of some kind on his cheek—it felt like pure dirt—and then erased it again. “Yes. She’d nicely just take half my money to pay for the cost of raising and educating Zabini’s kid, and that would be enough.” He shook his head and turned away to scan the room one more time. His magic was idly banging the closet doors now. Harry thought the smaller room looked as empty as his heart felt. “I don’t know why she can’t do it with Zabini’s money.”

            “I thought you knew,” Ron said. “Zabini’s poor.”

            Harry turned around and stared at him.

            “Well, not poor,” Ron said, and scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably. “Not like Dad and Mum used to be. But he has more debts than Galleons. He keeps up appearances, but hiring an Arguer was impossible for them. He hoped Malfoy would agree to do it for free.” He let out a tense breath. “And so they need your money. Things’ll be hard for Ginny.”

            “And so you’d suggest I give her the money she asked for?” Harry cocked his head and studied Ron, hoping he looked cool from the outside. Inside, he could feel his emotions churning like a mud pool. He didn’t want to hurt Ginny, but she had been the one who decided to destroy their marriage, the one who just couldn’t wait, as he’d accused her, five minutes in order to walk away from Harry and enter Zabini’s bed legitimately.

            She doesn’t deserve to be hurt. But she hurt me. Does that make her deserving?

            “Not quite that,” said Ron. “But if reconciliation was possible—“

            “No.”

            “Listen to me, will you?” Ron’s face was turning red, the way it always had in the past when Harry interrupted him. “I’m not saying that you should have to pay for bringing up another man’s child. I’m just saying that you should try to make this divorce as easy for yourself as you possibly can, and for her. And that would be easier if you talked to each other, without Zabini and fucking Malfoy there to interfere.” He leaned forwards and stared intently at Harry. “My best friend and my little sister are going to war. That’s what cases like this mean, you know. I don’t want either of you to get hurt.”

            “So you’re worried about the pain and not the money,” Harry said.

            “Why can both you and Hermione say what I’m thinking in less time than it takes me to say it?” Ron whinged, but he was still watching Harry hopefully out of the corner of an eye.

            Harry stared at the carpet. He knew what Malfoy would say. Ginny had made her choice, and now she should lie in the bed that choice had, in turn, made for her.

            But he remembered Ginny’s smile, her laughter when she told him she was pregnant, the quiet grief in her eyes and the way she still reached out to him that first night after the baby died…

            He wasn’t in love with her any longer, but that didn’t mean he was willing to see her suffer.

            “Can she and Zabini raise a child on what he has?” he asked quietly.

            Ron let out an explosive breath. “Maybe one,” he admitted. “Zabini’s mother is healthy, but she might die sometime soon, and then they’d have more. They can pay for Hogwarts, I’m sure. But Ginny will want more than one baby. And Mum will push her to have more. You know she will.”

            Harry nodded. Molly Weasley was almost in hysterics, sometimes, that Fleur and Hermione both preferred working to having children, that Ginny’s first pregnancy had failed, and that the rest of her children showed no interest in marrying yet.

            There were other considerations than just Ginny, too.

            “And you think that, if I talked with Ginny and did what I could to resolve the situation, the twins would stop sending pranks after me?” he asked, unable to keep the hopeful tone out of his voice.

            “Maybe not right away,” said Ron in an authoritative tone. “But she’s the one who suggested it. That would matter to them, yes.”

            Harry drummed his fingers on the bedpost for a moment. Then he spelled his trunk to hover behind him. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

            “While you stay with Malfoy?” Ron couldn’t quite keep the scandalized tone out of his voice.

            “I promise I won’t let him talk me out of this.” Harry rolled his eyes. “Did you think I would mention in front of my Arguer that I have reasons to think about discontinuing his case?”

            “Oh.” Ron relaxed slightly, then tensed again. “But he might still convince you. He’s sly like that.”

            “And I can still resist,” Harry said dryly. “I’m stubborn like that.”

            “If you can resist Hermione and Ginny and me all telling you to do something after the final battle, you are,” Ron muttered.

            Harry gave him an irritated look before he could stop himself, but managed to restrain his equally irritated magic when it reached for Ron. He sighed, rubbed his hand across his face, and then turned away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe we can talk more about what this talk with Ginny might require.”

            Ron’s voice had a grin in it. “Sure, mate.”

*

            “Spill, Potter.”

            Potter blinked at him from across the dining table. They had ended up eating alone together after all; Narcissa had had one of her screaming fits and remained upstairs under the care of the house-elves. Draco wouldn’t admit it, but he found the flickering shadows of the many candles on the crystal and the glass and the pale tablecloth unnerving when he had to eat there by himself. Potter’s green eyes at least provided a fleck of another kind of color. “I’m sorry?”

            “You’re hiding something.” Draco gratefully pushed aside his own wineglass. He didn’t drink much at the best of times, and in the worst, it was better to practice his wand movements in case Lucius appeared. “It’s been obvious since you came back from your house. Was your wife there?”

            Potter shook his head and sipped at his own wine, but nearly slopped it over the rim of the glass. Draco was well-bred enough to hide his well-bred wince. “I’ve set up wards so she can’t get inside.”

            “Tell me who it was.”

            “It wasn’t anyone, Malfoy.” Potter’s voice had edged towards irritation, and the crystal on the table rattled.

            “I will have you know this tableware cost more than one of your precious Firebolt brooms,” Draco said mildly.

            Potter flushed and dropped his gaze. “Sorry.”

            “Not half as much as you will be if you don’t tell me who you met there and what they started you thinking about—“ Then Draco held up a hand, several clues sliding together all at once: Potter’s silence, the way he stared broodingly off into the distance and avoided Draco’s eyes, the way he sometimes glanced to his left as if someone should be sitting there. “No, never mind, I think I know. Someone convinced you your poor, innocent, little wife doesn’t deserve to have her stupidity rubbed in her face.”

            Potter flushed. “Well, she doesn’t.”

            Draco narrowed his eyes. “Have you listened to yourself, Potter? If she doesn’t deserve it for adultery and carrying a bastard’s bastard in her belly, what would she deserve it for? Breaking into Azkaban and letting everyone there go?”

            “She just—“ Potter sighed. “Did you know Zabini has almost no money?”

            “Not enough to hire me, I know,” Draco said smartly. Then he grinned, because he couldn’t stop himself. “Oh. You’re worried about your poor little wife suffering the loss of her pretty little things?”

            “More than that. Trying to bring up a child—“

            “Who’s not yours.”

            “But she’s Ginny’s child—“

            “Already decided it’s a daughter, have you?”

            “Ginny wants a daughter.”

            “And whatever Ginny wants, Ginny should have.”

            Potter’s mouth, open to snap something back, closed. Then he took a deep breath, and half his strength seemed to leave him. “I thought you were an Arguer, not a Mind-Healer,” he muttered.

            “I am,” Draco said, sitting back and keeping a cautious eye on Potter. The man was so terrible at lying that Draco didn’t think he’d only pretended to give in, while still believing that his slut of a wife really deserved anything but pain. Yet, one had to be cautious. “I argue people back into sanity. Your mistake was thinking I only do it in the courtroom.”

            Potter looked up for a moment, startled. Then his eyes lit, and he laughed.

            The power of that laugh struck Draco like an avalanche. He didn’t think he’d ever heard it come from Potter’s mouth; the defeated little chuckles he’d sometimes given in the past few days, as they worked on what Draco needed to know about the marriage, were bitter. This was pure merriment, caught up in a net and then shaken out over anyone who happened to be nearby. Draco was glad that he was sitting down, because he would have done something imbecilic like stagger and grab at the table if he’d been standing.

            As he recovered and found Potter staring at him in concern, obviously unaware of the power of his own voice, he realized that it might be more than his magic that made Potter attractive.

            Licking dry lips, Draco managed, “So long as you believe, now, that she doesn’t deserve to see a Knut of your money.”



            “That might be true,” Potter muttered, and picked up his wineglass again. He sounded half-convinced of “poor Ginny’s” victim status again.

            “I mean it, Potter.” Draco leaned forwards, until those remarkable green eyes rose and met his again. “You have to believe this. You were the one she victimized. If you don’t think that, then you stand a good chance of going into the courtroom and hesitating in the wrong place, saying the wrong word, being a bit too slow with the information that can make a difference.”

            Potter’s mouth opened on a long, slow exhalation, then closed again. And then he gathered himself and seemed to shut both the weakness and the openness Draco had heard in that laugh behind a door. “You’re right, Malfoy. I’ll concentrate on the case, I promise.”

            “Draco?”

            Draco turned his head, startled, the warning he’d intended to deliver to Potter dying on his lips. Narcissa stood in the doorway that led to the stairs, her hands out and clutching the sides of the arch white-knuckled, her pale gown making her look like a ghost. Her face was startled, but Seeky hovered at her side, and Draco knew the house-elf wouldn’t have let her out of bed if she were acting like her mad self.

            “I heard the most marvelous laugh,” said Narcissa. “Who was it?” She gazed at him expectantly, as if Potter didn’t exist.

            And Potter, bless him, responded as if Narcissa were sane and he encountered compliments like this every day.

            “I’m honored to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Malfoy,” he said, standing with just enough speed that Narcissa could turn and face him, and make it look natural on both their parts. “If you thought my laugh good, I’m equally honored, but I hope that you’ll flatter us both with one of your own, so we can hear what true beauty sounds like.”

            He walked over to her, with the same gentle steps that one might use in approaching a feral animal, caught her hand, and kissed it. Narcissa stared a moment longer, then gave him a fragile, gentle smile of delight.

            Draco stared, too. After the stuttering way that Potter had reacted to the mere title of “savior” in the courtroom, he hadn’t expected this to happen.

            But Potter seemed instinctively to know what Narcissa needed: that gentle flattery that let her say anything she wanted and nothing she had to mean. He kept his gaze focused on her, nodding gravely as she pointed out the decorations in the dining room, and listening attentively even to Seeky’s high-pitched interruptions.

            And Draco sat where he was and watched his mother treated gently, not patronized or humored, and wondered where in the world Potter had acquired social skills like that.

            And if he can do things like that, why doesn’t he do them more often?

            Well, he’ll learn to. I won’t have anyone I’m attracted to acting the lazy layabout. It’s time to push him, and see what happens.
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Building With Worn-Out Tools

Chapter Five—In This Moment of Transition