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Leopardspaw	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21311 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Five—Chosen Battlefields

            “We were lucky to get out of there alive after your ridiculous display of heroics.”

            Harry kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, as if nothing could be less interesting than Malfoy’s opinions, while beneath the skin his nerves sparked and he felt a coil of tension unwind, speeding towards arousal. He let his wand slip into his hand and resisted the urge to whistle a few notes, if only because that would let Malfoy know he was planning something.

            They had reached the grove of trees to which Malfoy had Apparated them in the first place. Harry turned to face them, and raised wards with a flick of a thought. It wasn’t like they hadn’t already attracted attention from the Dark wizards assembled at this particular meeting place. He wanted to make sure this conversation would go unheard.

            Because he intended to say anything and everything he wanted to.

            First, though, he was going to have a bit of fun. He met Malfoy’s eyes and lowered his own, tapping his mouth and frowning.

            “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Malfoy said, which made Harry want to grin again, because that was getting him to show more emotion. “You can speak now. You know why I issued that order.”

            Lie, but he believes it, Harry thought, and cocked his head winsomely. “No, I don’t. Of all the recognizable things I have about me, my voice must rank pretty low.”

            Malfoy frowned. “What do you mean? You—” And then he cut himself off, and a dull flush crept into his cheeks. He turned his head away and spent a moment studying the wall of trees, the rain falling still from the branches with a steady and monotonous drip, before he continued. “Yes, you’re right. I apologize.”

            Truth-telling, but not for the right reasons, Harry thought, and assumed an expression that he’d seen Dawlish use when the insufferable bore had thought of another reason for prolonging Auror meetings. “As your general on this campaign—”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “—This campaign to find your father,” Harry continued, his voice growing thicker and more solemn word by word, “I must know all the precautions we need to take and all the enemies we’re going to face. And that includes internal enemies, like the ones you might be battling in your head. I insist on knowing what you were about to say, the reason you banned my voice, Malfoy. The outcome of the entire war might depend upon it.”

            Malfoy carried on staring at him for a little while. That was all right, Harry thought, meeting his eyes and trying desperately not to let the merriness show. He could stare all he liked, since it gave Harry more of a chance to figure out what colors clustered around the pupils in his constantly changing eyes.

            Malfoy shook his head slowly, at last. “I recognized your voice before I stepped up to your table in the Leaky Cauldron,” he said, all the inflections Harry admired gone, the painfully neutral words as annoying as paper cuts. “I can remember it well, after all these years. I thought there would be other people like me among the Dark wizards here.”

            “Oh, I don’t think so,” Harry said immediately, determined to follow up on what advantage those words had given him. “After all, none of them were as intimately involved as you and I were.”

            Watching Malfoy stiffen was fun. “I beg your pardon?”

            “None of them have plotted my demise in the Slytherin common room, or shrieked for help in my ear as we flew through Fiendfyre,” Harry said, clasping a hand over his heart, and bringing the other one up to join it when Malfoy didn’t instantly curse him and he didn’t think he needed his wand. “None of them have stared into my eyes from a few inches away and still sworn that my face was too swollen for them to know me. None of them have a mother who risked her life for me.”

            “Are you teasing or serious?” Malfoy whispered.

            It was a pity that questions didn’t really count one way or the other as lies unless they were rhetorical, Harry thought, and therefore he couldn’t know which side Malfoy fell closer to. “Well, serious,” he said. “As you should know. Unless you mean to tell me that lots of Dark wizards have had those experiences. Have you been selling your Pensieve memories on the black market, Malfoy? I get that sometimes. But I’ve never had someone sell memories as intimate as that. You wound me.” He sighed mournfully.

            Malfoy took a long, springing stride towards him, and for the first time since Harry had met him again, his face was flushed with color, and his eyes were dark with it, and his hand was trembling as he gripped the wand. Harry grinned at him. This newly-trained Malfoy was good, but he looked better than his best so far when he combined with the old schoolboy Malfoy.

            “You listen to me,” Malfoy whispered. “I hired you, and I can dismiss you without giving you what you want if you don’t obey me. I hired you to find my father. No more.”

            Harry whooped as redness blushed around Malfoy’s face like sunrise. Malfoy pointed his wand, this time, at the center of Harry’s forehead, where the disguised fringe covered his scar.

            “A lie,” Harry said. “A red glow. And it didn’t appear until those last words. So you hired me for more than that.” He leaned nearer and lowered his voice. “Was it to keep you company? Because you can tell me if it was. You can tell me anything.”

            Malfoy looked as if he would fly into pieces if Harry could find the right place to press. He stepped back and tucked his elbows in against his sides. His face had drained of color again, but the red glow of the lie lingered, lending its own brilliance.

            “It was only to find him,” he said, and the lie’s light brightened again.

            Harry clucked his tongue, and took a step back. He could feel his mood tilting, fragile as it had been in the hours immediately after the artifact had burst apart and he started realizing the kind of changes this curse would bring to his life. “You can’t lie to me. Do you understand that? You can talk to me about things you think are true, and that makes me see them as truth. So Flint got away with some of his lies, because he believed that he had the right to take money from you for nothing, if he could get away with it. But they didn’t lie about those people they said we should talk to. Lie to me again like this, and I’ll leave, because someone so stupid would probably try to lie about the contact information he promised me, too.”

            Malfoy’s body went still again, the way it had when Harry first surprised him. Harry took his wand out again, spinning it in his hand, and shook his head. “You don’t want your legacy to survive as the stupid Malfoy, do you?” he asked. “You have some pretty hard competition, with your father breaking out of Azkaban and thinking that he can stay free forever, but I think you can beat him if you persist in lying to me.”

            Silence. Then Malfoy said, “I apologize.”

            Harry squinted. Then he went on squinting, and waved a hand up and down in front of his eyes, when he realized there was no lie-glow. “Wow,” he said. “You do.”

            Malfoy gave him the most fleeting form of smile, and folded his arms. “I like to think that I can learn from my experiences,” he said. “I lied because I was startled, and because I do not wish to tell you the other reason I hired you.”

            “Honest now, but stupid,” Harry noted. “How can I protect you or do the bodyguard job you hired me for if I don’t know all your reasons? You might do anything next. Lie to me. Run off with Flint. Kiss me.”

            “That seems to be rather a consuming passion with you,” Malfoy murmured back. “Perhaps I should hire someone else not so preoccupied with my arse.” He allowed all of two seconds for Harry to absorb that he had made a joke before he moved on. “And I didn’t hire you for a bodyguard.”

            “All right,” Harry said docilely, lowering his head, and thus obscuring the dancing of his eyes from Malfoy. The air around his face was clear, which meant Harry could eliminate that as a reason Malfoy had hired him.

            But there was another reason, beyond his ability to detect lies. By questioning now and then, and forcing denials about various reasons out of Malfoy, Harry would find it out eventually.

            Really, Malfoy should give up now. He wasn’t going to win this game.

            “We should go,” Malfoy said. “Flint and the others will recover from the terror that you caused them soon enough. Their brains don’t have the capacity to hold on to more than one emotion at a time. Indignation will replace the fear.” He paused, then added, “And I haven’t forgotten my original point. You shouldn’t have committed those exaggerated heroics.”

            “Exactly,” Harry said. “But I need to know exactly what I should have done. Allow Flint to curse you? Allow the duelist to do so? I want to know my faults so that I can keep from displeasing my employer in the future,” he explained, when Malfoy stared some more at him. “Also displeasing a man I admire.”

            “I begin to wish for your ability,” Malfoy murmured. “Not only could I have conducted this investigation on my own recognizance, I could know how much of your preoccupation with my arse is real.”

            “Don’t forget the way you move, and the intelligence that you display most of the time,” Harry added.

            Malfoy turned around and walked to the far side of the grove, waving his wand as he did so. Harry’s glamour dissolved with a feeling like water rushing up his body, the opposite of the Disillusionment Charm’s sensation, and he blinked and shook his head, then grinned. “And his magical ability,” he called. “It’s the sign of a practiced wizard, to be able to cast a spell without pointing your wand directly at someone.”

            Malfoy didn’t go still this time, merely held out his arm. “I recognize the location that Flint gave me,” he said. “I would like to Apparate you there now.”

            Harry didn’t point out that he was a wizard of great ability, too, and could memorize the Apparition coordinates of most places no matter how well Malfoy tried to disguise them. This grove of trees might be anonymous, but Harry would find it again, if he needed to. He simply came up beside Malfoy and extended his arm, as meekly as he’d bowed his head to the bastard earlier.

            He did flutter his fingers lightly against the muscle as they Apparated. Malfoy couldn’t say that Harry hadn’t warned him.

*

            When they appeared in a meaningless grey room with dingy walls and a single door and no furniture, Harry snorted. Well, he still had the information Flint had given Malfoy, that was true, but Malfoy had disguised this Apparition coordinate pretty bloody effectively.

            “Is something wrong?”

            Malfoy had gone cold and quiet, pulling his arm away from Harry’s the moment the darkness of Apparition ceased and walking towards the far side of the room, the wall near the door. There were no paintings there and no hidden doors that Harry could see—and he was pretty good at looking for hidden passages after that embarrassing incident in Devonshire last year. Which meant he had only done it to get away from Harry.

            “Not so much wrong as interesting,” Harry said, and chuckled under his breath at the darting glance Malfoy gave him. No, not so much darts as spears.

            “We are here to learn more about my father,” Malfoy said. “Keep your mind on that rather than flirting.” He paused, looked at Harry consideringly, and added another glamour. Harry didn’t conjure a mirror or try to remove it, although he was sure Malfoy had chosen one that would look embarrassing. He just breathed in instead, enjoying Malfoy’s attention, and had the satisfaction of seeing him open the door as though he was having trouble moving his hand.

            He did step up behind Malfoy as they left the room, because Malfoy would have trouble using his wand if his hand was inflexible like that.

            They entered a dim, quiet corridor. Harry narrowed his eyes. There was activity happening, he knew, just out of sight. He could hear the buzz that meant an auditory glamour was concealing voices. He could hear footsteps, and perhaps someone was standing right in front of him and he didn’t know it.

            A rent appeared in the air ahead of him, revealing bright blue tiles and a glimpse of a witch with blonde hair and a startled face. Harry took a step back, fumbling with his wand, and the tear closed up again. Harry dropped his wand, glancing at Malfoy for an explanation. He didn’t want to ask for one in case this was another place where fans of his who had dreamed about his voice for years lurked.

            “Only you,” Malfoy murmured, shaking his head, “would manage to pierce some of the glamours because your magic got agitated enough.” He brushed past Harry, reaching out a hand so that he touched Harry’s forearm. “Come on. The glamours disguise us and the wards keep us from bumping into other people. We don’t have to worry about what they’re doing here.”

            If it’s murder, or kidnapping, or something else vile, I do, Harry thought.

            But that just made it even more important for him to get a fix on the place and come back later. For now, he concentrated on following Malfoy through the corridors and trying to ignore the sensation that there were other wizards walking beside him, separated by the thickness of a hex.

            Malfoy came to a stop before a door that didn’t look any different than any of the others to Harry: thin and grey and with a brass knob in the middle, instead of on the side. He didn’t knock, but cast a spell that created a slapping sound of hands in the air in front of it. Probably wise, if it was warded as strongly as most of the rooms in the building seemed to be, Harry had to admit.

            “Enter.”

            Harry perked up for a moment, hoping Snape had survived the Shrieking Shack after all. That was exactly his voice, the cold, deep tones and the sharp edges to the word.

            But then they stepped inside, and Harry realized that it couldn’t be Snape, because Snape would never consent to disguise himself as a witch this pretty. She had smooth, thick brown hair, and it hung in waves to her shoulders, ending in curls that looked natural. She had just looked up from a book resting on the table in front of where she sat, marking her place with a finger. Her robes were green, and her eyes were blue, unnaturally so, echoed by the sapphire in the ring on her finger. Well, Harry reckoned he could forgive a glamour or two when he was disguised himself.

            It was Malfoy who apparently couldn’t. He came to a stop with so much strain in his face that Harry moved around him and aimed his wand at the witch.

            She looked at him and blinked a little, then said, “And we haven’t even been introduced. Most of the time, I know the names of those who would kill me. Or at least their motives.”

            “You’re not supposed to be here,” Malfoy whispered. “I know the information they gave me was right.” Harry felt a little glow of pride that he tried not to let show on his face, both because there was no need to let the witch know that he was Malfoy’s magic truth-telling machine yet and because it was a silly thing to feel proud about. He could do so much more for Malfoy than he had so far, if the git would only give him a chance. “The names didn’t include yours, Corinna.”

            The woman Malfoy had named before, who wouldn’t like what Flint and the other Death Eaters were doing, Harry thought. He didn’t let his wand waver.

            Corinna smiled slowly. “It pleased me to be here instead. And I can give you information on your father, Mr. Malfoy. There only remains the matter of the price.”

*

            Mehla_Seraphim: Thank you!

            unneeded: That’s the one part of Flint’s blather that Harry wishes Malfoy had paid more attention to.

            polka dot: Now that he knows he’s hanging around wanna-be Death Eaters and wearing the masks, he can come up with a dozen good reasons.

            alexkdp: Thank you!
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