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The Conservation of Fame	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 22392 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—A Bloody Stubborn Argument

            “Come, Harry. Surely it shouldn’t be that hard to stop lying. I know that you can speak truthfully to me about things like mustard and sandwiches. You still have a grip on honesty.”

            Draco’s voice insinuated itself around Harry’s thoughts, and he scowled at him, shaking his head. He needed to know who these people were in order to keep Draco safe, and himself, he reasoned out. But there might be other places he could find out the information, especially if Draco really did work for the Department of Mysteries as he suspected. Meanwhile, he would never get the safety of his home back if he told Draco the truth, even once.

            “Mustard and sandwiches,” he said, again slowing his voice down so that Malfoy might have a chance of understanding and comprehending his objections, “are small things. This is something larger, something more important.”

            “I don’t know that it’s necessarily more important,” Draco said seriously, tilting his head to the side and seeming to consider the problem. “After all, have you ever had too much mustard on a sandwich? It runs everywhere and stains your robes. Not the sort of thing you want to happen before a lunch with the Minister.”

            Harry filed those words in his memory—they were yet more proof that Malfoy had been someone important in the Ministry before this—and said, “This is important in a different way. This time, blood might stain our robes.” Draco only smiled at him, and Harry snarled and finally blurted out what had been bothering him from the first time that he realized Draco seemed to care more about figuring out Harry’s lies than what his enemies were doing next. “Doesn’t it matter to you? You’re happy here, you act as though you’re on holiday! Why?”

            “I trust the spell,” Draco said simply. “I know it would bring me to a place of absolute safety, that it wouldn’t betray me no matter what happened.” He leaned forwards and reached out as though he would brush a hand down Harry’s arm, but Harry glared at him and he stopped. His voice was small as he whispered, “And I trust you.”

            “Despite the lying,” Harry said, not managing to make it a question, when it felt as though endless beats of silence had passed.

            “Despite the lying,” Draco said. “This is going to sound ridiculous, but I am familiar with what basic honesty in someone looks like, even if I’ll never attain it myself.” His smile was sharp and pointed, but Harry could sense the serious purpose behind it and refrained from smiling back. “I know what you have. I know what you can give me: protection.”

            “Yes,” Harry said, when he had waited a minute to see if any more words would be forthcoming. “Not truth.”

            “But that’s unnatural for you,” Draco said, leaning forwards as though he had forgotten all about the bodies on the floor. Harry hadn’t, and moved slowly away, casting another Stunner at the man as he stirred. “Unusual. I can tell. Why do you trust other people, despite the wards, and not me? What did I do to you that was so awful, when I can’t remember your face?” He paused, and for a moment shivered, as if he stood in the shadow of a cloud. “Or was it something my father did?”

            Harry smiled. Hermione had told him to take advantage of the stories people would make up for themselves after he cast the spell, and here was an example. He nodded. “Exactly. I don’t expect you to answer for his crimes, or make up for them. But I can’t forget it, either. So I have enough reason for disliking you, and I think I’ve done enough just by taking his son in and nurturing him. I don’t want anything more from you than the truth. Is that so hard, when you’re insisting on it from me?”

            Draco stood still, his arms folded across his chest as if he was cold, his body poised, apparently on the edge of leaping off a cliff. Then he said, “No, that’s not it.”

            Harry wanted to throw up his hands and storm away. What, Draco wouldn’t believe the truth when he heard it? It was true that Harry still disliked Lucius for what he had done to Ginny, even if he didn’t hate him after the end of the war, and would prefer to have as little to do with him as possible.

            “It is,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you if you don’t believe that someone can hate the parent and yet still be courteous to the son. But that’s all I’ll ever be to you, courteous.”

            “You’ve joked with me,” Draco said. “You’ve done things you didn’t have to do, like bringing me a second blanket when I was cold, instead of just casting a Warming Charm.”

            “I have too cast Warming Charms—”

            “Only when you were doing something else to help me at the same time,” Draco said, and smiled at him. “But otherwise, you do what’s more personal, because you sensed—how, I don’t know—that that would help me recover faster than the totally impersonal charms.” He moved closer to Harry and lowered his voice. “I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how you sense what I need and offer it at exactly the right time. But whatever is behind the emotions you feel for me, it’s not hatred. For my father or otherwise.”

            Harry let his nostrils flare at the same time as he ground his teeth. “Fine. Let’s say that I strongly dislike your father. Now. If you aren’t going to tell me anything, then I think I should take these people and find someone who will.” He flicked his wand, and more bonds appeared around the wrists and ankles of both the man and the woman. If he was going to transport them, then he wanted to be sure they were secure on the way.

            “Wait!” Draco took a single stride forwards and then stopped when Harry pointed his wand at him. Harry relaxed a second later, snapping the wand up and looking away, his heart and his blood both beating in his cheeks. It was a stupid, battle-oriented reflex, but there you were. His caution from his Auror training, the war, and the paranoid years when he had to check that someone was hiding under his bed before he slept in it still hadn’t gone away.

            “Wait,” Draco repeated, more quietly. His eyes were on Harry, and there was a yearning in them that Harry didn’t understand. He hesitated, then said, more slowly, “I think that you might get in trouble if you left with them right now. As long as they’re inside your wards, those robes they wear won’t tell anyone else where they are. The magic you wield is too powerful.” He tried to make even that into some sort of bloody compliment, catching Harry’s eye and smiling at him, but Harry scowled back, and he gave up. “If you step outside again, then they’ll start advertising their location.”

            “All right,” Harry said, and folded his arms, and rocked in place on his heels for a moment. “You have one minute.”

            Draco blinked at him.

            “One minute to explain what that means and why you didn’t tell me before,” Harry said, with patience that he thought remarkable to have endured all of Draco’s silly pretenses. “Or I Stun you and take you with them, to be dumped off in some place where you can’t bloody bother me anymore!”

            Draco looked him in the eye, and then shook his head slightly and said, “Someone who cares about people the way you do wouldn’t do that.”

            Harry leaned forwards until he was a centimeter shy of having to catch himself on something or collapsing, and aimed his wand between Draco’s eyes. “Come any closer,” he whispered, “and I’ll show you what I can do. Or did you think that someone who protects his home the way I do is going to be useless?”

            Amazingly, in the face of everything, and because he apparently lived to exasperate Harry even when he didn’t know who Harry was, Draco smiled. “That gives the final lie to the idea that you’re a coward and didn’t participate in the war,” he said, clucking his tongue at Harry and slowly shaking his head, so that his cheek brushed Harry’s wand. “You never should have told that one, you know. You betray it with every breath you take.”

            Harry wondered how many people over the years had had detailed fantasies of murdering Draco and dumping his body in the Hogwarts lake. “Get. To. The. Point,” he said.

            Draco paused a moment as though hoping that Harry would join in his teasing, and then sighed when Harry didn’t. “If that’s the way you want to play it,” he murmured, with the air of someone denied a favorite treat.

            “This has nothing to do with how I want to play it.” Harry folded his arms and wished for a moment that he hadn’t been as nice to Draco as he had. If he had been sterner, more threatening, mean, then Draco might have realized that he couldn’t jerk Harry around this way. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

            Draco nodded—apparently Harry had finally managed to pass whatever test of seriousness Draco had set in his own mind—and said, “All right. These people belong to a group that opposes the group I belong to.”

            Harry toyed for a moment with the notion of not saying anything, and then decided, The hell with it. Draco was already acting as though he didn’t intend to tell Harry any more than the bare minimum, so Harry had nothing to lose by talking about it. “The Unspeakables?”

            Draco fell back a step and lifted a hand in the same instinctive defensive gesture that Harry had seen the other day. “The fuck—how did you know that?” he demanded, staring into Harry’s eyes as though he assumed they would suddenly change color or otherwise reveal Harry as someone new, someone dangerous.

            Harry gave him a nasty smile and no other response. Draco’s shock had tricked him into speaking the truth. Good. Harry waited, his fingers tapping gently back and forth on his arm, and giving Draco an expectant look.

            Draco finally seemed to realize what he was waiting for, because for the first time since he’d come to Harry’s house, Harry heard the sound of his teeth grinding. “Fine,” he said at last. “Never mind how you know that.”

            Harry just nodded. Now Draco was finally acting like someone sane, someone who realized they had more important things to talk about than the flirtations he seemed intent on conducting.

            “These people oppose Unspeakables who are sent out on delicate missions to bring back Dark artifacts,” Draco said, beginning to pace around the bed. Harry caught himself admiring the flow of muscles in Draco’s back and the way his legs moved, and told himself to stop it. “Most of the time, they’re people who the Ministry has taken artifacts from in the past, who don’t want to lose any more. At other times, they’re independent…” Draco sought a word from the many that seemed to float in ashes in his mind, and then shrugged helplessly. “Researchers who want the artifacts available so they can work on them.”

            “So you’re thieves,” Harry said, and couldn’t suppress his grin. Every time he found out something to the detriment of the Ministry that had failed to protect him, he did that.

            Draco swung around and glared, then shook his head. “Do you really want those artifacts free and drifting around the wizarding world? You have no idea what they can do, what harm they could cause if this group acted in enough concert. So far, they’ve mostly banded together to stop what, yes, they do see as thefts, but someday, they might decide that it’s worthwhile to wield the artifacts as weapons against us. Some of those objects are meant to work together, to cause widespread destruction, and the only thing that stops it are the jealousies of their owners. Better that we should gather them and prevent them from seeing the light of day ever again.”

            “Why not destroy them?” Harry asked. He was sure Draco would have an answer for that, since it wasn’t like no Unspeakable would have thought of that option before, but he wanted to hear it.

            Draco sighed. “Some of them resist destruction. Others are potentially useful, as long as you’re using their good traits and not the bad ones. Those, the Ministry wants us to study until we locate the source of that strength, and we can recreate it in other artifacts. Then we can destroy the originals.”

            “And what about the ones that aren’t protected and aren’t useful?” Harry laughed aloud at the glare that Malfoy had given him. “I can’t believe that all of them fall into the first two categories you named.”

            Malfoy closed his eyes and bowed his head as if praying for patience. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “There are some things that even Unspeakables have to take on faith, you know.”

            Harry nodded. “I’m surprised that you’ve told me as much as you have.”

            Draco blinked at him, and Harry sighed at the look in his eyes. “If you think that you can Obliviate me, you’re wrong.”

            Draco made a little gesture with his right hand, shaking his head. “You have no idea how dangerous it is for you to know this.”

            “Probably not,” Harry had to agree. “It really doesn’t sound any more dangerous than some of the things I knew during the war.”

            Draco’s stare sharpened. “Who were you?” he whispered.

            Harry decided that he could work with the verb tense in that sentence later, but for now, he simply sighed and shook his head mock-sadly. “At least you understand, now, why I might want to live here, now that I’m not as important as I was during the war,” he said.

            “Not—really,” Draco said, and then apparently abandoned the tact that had held him back so far. “The only reason that I told this to you at all is that you’ve helped me and you seem utterly uninterested in interacting with the outside world. Even then…there are some of my superiors who would have my head for as much as I’ve spoken about.”

            Harry paused, looking into his face. Then he shrugged. He had his private suspicions about how much Draco knew and how much he could really say, but he was willing to let them go for now. “What did you steal from them?”

            Draco’s eyes went storm-colored.

            Harry smiled sweetly at him. “Telling the truth is a virtue, or haven’t you heard the sermons of one Draco Malfoy on the subject?” he murmured. “Of course, perhaps I should say that Unspeakables believe it’s a virtue for other people, since I haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary yet.”

            Draco turned his back and walked to the far side of the room. “If I left,” he told the wall, “I believe that no one else would hide outside your wards and come after you.”

            “They would stay unless they saw you leaving,” Harry pointed out. “And then they would pursue you again, and that would make you end up in the same situation as before. This time, I might not be there to rescue you. I’d prefer it if you didn’t tear out the bandages that I’ve put on you just as I got them settled in.”

            Draco turned around to stare at him, and then laughed, without much humor. “I’ve never met someone who irritates me like you do.” Then he paused. “At least, I don’t think I have,” he said, his voice musing in tone.

            “We have to get you back to the Ministry,” Harry said, not wanting to leave Draco too much time to think about where he might have met Harry before. “That’s where you were headed when they came after you, isn’t it? Don’t you want to get there with your stolen artifact or your news before your enemies do?”

            Draco sighed. “You don’t understand the subtleties of the situation,” he whispered.

            “No, wait, I think I do,” Harry said, cursing himself for not thinking of this before. Of course, he hadn’t realized that Draco was an Unspeakable in truth instead of simply idle speculation before, either. “You would have gone to the Ministry when you cast that spell if it was the safest place for you. Which it should have been.”

            Draco half-raised a hand, then let it drop. “There might be more than one reason for that. You said yourself that the magical theory was untested. Perhaps it took me to the safest place it could find, the nearest one. It might be no more than that.”

            “The safest place for you should have been the bloody cellars you people work in,” Harry said evenly. “Why wasn’t it?”

            “I’ve told you enough,” Draco said. “I want the payment I asked for in the first place. Tell me something about you, now.”

            Harry smiled at him, said nothing, and floated the bound man and woman out of the room, pausing for a moment to Stun the man as he stirred back towards consciousness again. He didn’t shut the door of Draco’s bedroom, and heard the other man’s feet behind him as he escorted the prisoners towards his study.

            “Harry!”

            “I never agreed to give it to you,” Harry called over his shoulder. “You were the one who went ahead and gave me some of the truth in the trust that I would. And trust is good for you, you know. Like truth!”

            Draco slammed his door. Harry chuckled, and went about setting up a secure warded environment for his two prisoners.

            He knew enough to construct some plans, now. He looked down at the abstract silver designs on the prisoners’ robes, considering.

            Then he smiled, and his smile went on widening the more he thought about it. It was a brilliant plan.

            And Draco would even get to help.

*

            SP777: Thank you. That was a detail that, you’re right, pleased me as well.

            A standoff that Harry wins, mainly because Draco wants to tell him the truth, reluctance or not, more than Harry wants to tell him his.

            unneeded: Harry has probably given more than he realized, but not nearly as much as he thought he might have to at first, so he counts it as a win.

            polka dot: Physically well enough, maybe, but Harry is also not looking forward to seeing him get his arse kicked after he spent so much time trying to heal him, so he’s glad that there’s a breathing space.
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The Conservation of Fame