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Contracted	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18657 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Six—Life in a Few Moments

            Draco spent the evening reading through the contract Daphne had stolen. He was fascinated, he had to admit, especially by the graceful legal turns of the language. He had assumed that Sandborn relied on one of his secretaries to write speeches for him, as most of the Ministers had down the centuries, but based on this, it might be possible that he was writing them himself. Or at least he knew expert advice when he saw it, and took it from several people rather than one.

            He was also appalled.

            Every gain that Potter could think of, every gift he could give his friends, every action he could take to make the world better, was laid out here. The words churned past Draco’s eyes, and several times he had to fetch the legal books that his ancestors had left behind in his library so he could confirm some of the terms and syntax. But yes, it seemed as though Potter had signed himself over to be a virtual slave so that he could win—

            What?

            Oh, yes, some of the gains were worth the sacrifice, Draco had to admit. If Potter had told him seven years ago that he’d intended to sign himself into the Auror program and to become a Ministry spokesman so that Draco and his friends could have their freedom and their money, Draco would have urged him to do it. After all, he’d thought that Potter wanted to be an Auror anyway. And the Ministry wouldn’t let a hero like Potter remain outside their orbit for long. Potter would have found himself plagued with requests to speak if he hadn’t agreed to it. The agreement was the adult thing to do, in Draco’s eyes.

            But the law to prevent physical abuse of house-elves? Draco was sure Granger could have achieved that on her own, if she wanted.

            The guarantee that the Ministry wouldn’t prosecute George Weasley for the disastrous failure of several of the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes that had injured the children who’d bought them? Draco understood that Potter wanted to protect one of his friends, but he should have stood aside in this case. Weasley had deserved at least a short term in prison or a large fine, if not Azkaban.

            The passing of legislation that meant Hogwarts would remain free of Ministry control forever? Draco snorted and leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. Few Ministers had wanted dominion over the school anyway. Sandborn had surely never been interested in it. Fudge and his predecessors were an exception because they feared Dumbledore. He was gone now, and Draco suspected there would never be a Headmaster as powerful, which meant that Hogwarts could go back to the tertiary place it was always meant to occupy as a source of influence, behind the Ministry and the powerful families.

            Draco folded up the contract at last and put it aside. His hands ached as if with cold, and he had to hold them out to the fire and then call for a mug of hot mulled cider before he could get rid of the chill.

            Potter was an idiot. All that magical power, all that political power, all that power of recognition and people who would trust him—he really could have reshaped the world after the war, as the Wizengamot and Sandborn had feared. Instead, he’d let cowardice cow him. He’d wanted desperately to fit into the wizarding world, and he’d been willing to give up everything to ensure that he would.

            Draco narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. That was another factor in the sea of chaos bobbing around him. What had made that fear so different from everything else for Potter?

            He remembered Potter’s words from the conversation with him last night perfectly well—that it had been like rolling in slime to read the Wizengamot’s fear of him—but that didn’t perfectly explain his answering fear.

            That’s the next thing I’ll ask him, Draco decided cheerfully, and then went to bed.

*

            “Come in, Harry!”

            Harry opened the door cautiously. At any moment there was likely to be something flying through this particular room in Ginny and Luna’s house, either small and determined animals or the fumes of some experimental potion.

            But it seemed he had arrived during one of those rare stretches of time when nothing was aloft. The main room was empty of anyone, in fact, allowing Harry to admire the deep greens that Luna favored in her decoration. Climbing plants draped the walls and the windowsills in a riot of life that meant all sign of their original pots was lost. The furniture, small cushiony islands in the middle of the greenery, shone blue and red and black. Harry shook his head at the clash and moved forwards, stepping cautiously around leaves and vines that reached curiously for his ankles.

            A shape darted towards him, and Harry reached for his wand, but it landed on his shoulder and cheeped at him. It was a tiny winged unicorn, Harry saw, with huge faceted eyes like an insect’s, and a voice like a bird’s. It rubbed its horn against his cheek. Bemused, Harry petted it in the middle of a back. It flopped down like a cat. Harry shook his head.

            “Is this one of those creatures you’re trying to invent to be pets?” he called. “It can’t decide what it wants to be.”

            “Did he get loose?” Luna appeared in the entrance of the kitchen, wiping her hands free of what looked like heavy green mulch on her apron. “Bad Tomasino!”

            Luna was taller than she had been in Hogwarts by a considerable margin, challenging Ron, in fact, and sometimes making Harry feel inferior. Her blonde hair was twisted back in a bun—it usually was, when it wasn’t cut short or singed because of some accident in the labs—and her glasses were pushed back on top of it. She smiled at Harry, and then frowned at the unicorn and held out her hand. “You come here right now,” she said.

            Tomasino drooped his way across the air to her palm. Luna cradled him there and made a cheeping noise herself that Harry assumed was a scold of some kind. Tomasino kicked up his crystalline hooves and turned his tiny back on her.

            “Unicorns,” Luna told Harry. “He’s out of sorts because the chernals were chasing him this morning.” She turned back into the kitchen again. “Come and have a cup of tea. We’ve improved the taste.”

            “Chernals?” Harry asked, ducking the sway of some hanging moss above the doorway into the kitchen. It sniffed at his hair. Harry shuddered. He honestly would have preferred it if it had just caught at him. These creatures Luna and Ginny bred that were half-animal and half-plant always creeped him out the most.

            “The spirits of dustmops,” Luna told him. She stood near the large table that took up most of the kitchen, which was made of glittering blue tiles bright enough to see reflections in. Harry avoided the sight of his face as much as he could. He’d had enough of mirrors lately. “What kind of tea do you want? Raspberry or vinegar?”

            “Um,” Harry said. The last tea he’d had here had given him hallucinations for two days, but turning it down was never a good idea, not when that would upset Ginny. “I don’t really need any, Luna. It’s fine.”

            “The vinegar it is, then,” Luna said, with the sensation she often gave him of conducting a completely different conversation with the Harry who lived in her head, and pushed a single shining cup across the table to him. Harry sighed and pretended to sip at it. That was something he had lots of practice at from Ministry functions, at least.

            Luna sat down at the table, Tomasino on her shoulder now and seeming to have forgotten his sulk, and folded her hands in front of her as she regarded him earnestly. “Now, what is it?”

            Harry hesitated. He still had to make sure that he told Ginny and Luna the truth without revealing the truth of Sandborn and the contract. On the other hand, they were probably the only ones among his friends he could have done that with, because they weren’t demanding and they wouldn’t want to know all the answers right away, the way Ron and Hermione would. It was why he had come to them in the first place.

            “Ginny?”

            Harry turned, glad for the momentary distraction. Ginny had appeared from the lab, waving away the fumes that entered the room with her. They were thick and green, making Harry wonder about the potion she’d been brewing, but he knew he wouldn’t understand what was going on even if Ginny and Luna tried to explain it to him. He had always been useless with Potions theory.

            Ginny was taller, too, and she had her red hair tied back with a slender ribbon, as it was most days. She moved over to Luna and bent down to kiss her cheek. Tomasino reared on his hind legs to get kissed, too, and Ginny took him away from Luna, smiling. “He shat on your shoulder again,” she mentioned.

            Luna didn’t even reach up to touch it. “It will come out in the wash,” she said serenely. “We designed them for that,” she added to Harry.

            Ginny dropped into the chair beside Luna and gave her a much more thorough kiss. Harry cleared his throat and looked at the door from the Potions lab, making sure it wasn’t open. Swallow some of the fumes from their brewing experiments that brought new miniature animals to life or created healing veterinary potions, and he’d have worse problems than a few days of hallucinations.

            “Harry is here because he needs help,” Luna said seriously when she pulled away, and pulled Harry’s attention back to her. “But he hasn’t told me what kind of help he needs yet.”

            Harry blinked at her. “How do you know that?” he asked, although he realized that he might as well have saved his breath. He had given up years ago on trying to find out how Luna knew what she knew.

            “You only come here when you want help,” Luna said.

            Harry winced. And then sometimes Luna, normally so vague and sweet, came out with one of those diamond-bright thrusts like a needle made of light.

            “Not always,” Ginny said, but she was watching him keenly. “What is it, Harry? It’s not something that happened to my brother, is it?” But she didn’t sound as concerned as she probably should have been, Harry thought. On the other hand, she had to know that he would have reported damage to Ron immediately, especially since he was Ron’s Auror partner.

            Harry took a deep breath. He had settled on what to tell them. He only hoped that it would make sense without the surrounding context, and that Ginny wouldn’t ask for too many details.

            “Say that a bunch of Slytherins found out that they owed you a debt,” he said. “Not a debt that you think they owe, but you know what Slytherin honor is.” Ginny snorted; Luna gave him a dreamy smile. “They want to pay you back. Unfortunately, you can’t tell them what they should give you. What they’re offering has a marginal chance of making your life better, but a much better one of twisting it up and down and sideways and rupturing some of your dearest friendships. Would you take their aid?”

            “Fuck, no,” Ginny said, clapping her hand down hard in the middle of the table. With gratitude, Harry watched his tea spill. “I don’t care what they have to offer me. My friendships are important to me. They’re based on honesty and genuine good feeling, and that’s something Slytherins have no chance of understanding.”

            Harry winced, but hoped he kept it away from their observation. “Honesty,” he said. “Right.”

            “I would accept it,” Luna said. “The help. The debt. What they said. All of it.”

            Ginny turned and gaped at her. Harry leaned back in his chair. Luna’s advice was the advice he had come for, but he had expected that she and Ginny would think pretty much the same. It seemed they’d never discussed Slytherins before, though, if the way Ginny leaned towards her was any indication.

            “Why would you?” Harry asked, because he thought it was the right question to ask. Luna seemed to be in one of her saner and more forthcoming moods. He would be an idiot not to take advantage of it.

            “Because they wanted to help me,” Luna said simply. “And because so few people have ever wanted to help me.”

            Ginny’s hand tightened on Luna’s shoulder, and she exchanged a sharp glance with Harry. Harry wondered if she was thinking of the same picture that he was, the image of Luna standing there with a sign in her hands that listed her missing belongings, and how she would never, ever, think of those missing things the same way anyone else would.

            “All right, fine,” Harry said. “But what if the thing they told you that they owed you a debt for—it wasn’t about them? It was some collective Slytherin delusion? And the help has the chance to make your life worse, remember.”

            Luna laughed, a clear sound that made Ginny start and look at her in wonder. Harry suddenly and rather violently wished that Ron could be here. He had complained before that he didn’t understand how Ginny and Luna had fallen in love. The look on Ginny’s face at that moment would have enlightened him.

            “Everything has the potential to change you like that, Harry,” Luna said. “The moment you walk down your front steps could be the moment you trip and sustain a head injury that would do you brain damage, or it could be the one that would break you of some sorrow that’s always consumed you because you see someone you presumed dead coming towards you.” She smiled, leaning out and patting Harry’s hand. “I know that you think only certain moments can be like that. You’ve had so many of them. But every breath of every day is like that. You just have to let it be.”

            Harry shook his head. The answer was the one he had come here hoping—and fearing—to find. He pressed Luna’s hand back, but pulled away before Ginny could read anything into it. She was rather jealous, sometimes. “Thank you,” he said, quietly. “I’m going to remember that, and I’m going to let this change me, I think.”

            Ginny gave him a long, level glance. “What do you mean, Harry?” she asked. “How hypothetical is this situation?”

            “I can’t tell you that yet,” Harry said, and stood up. He knew he was running away, but he didn’t see that he had any choice. He couldn’t let his friends interfere with what the Slytherins were doing, not yet, and he wasn’t ready to have the conversations that would justify their interference. “Please, Gin, don’t go tell anyone else,” he added when she opened her mouth. “This is something I have to think about for myself right now.”

            They had been lovers, once, and were still good friends. Ginny studied him, blew out her breath hard, and then leaned back against the wall and shook her head. One of her hands brushed through Luna’s hair in what looked like a self-soothing rhythm. “Fine,” she said. “But I think that you should come to us and tell us the instant that things change.”

            Harry nodded back and escaped, ignoring Luna’s calls that he hadn’t finished his tea, and did he want some more?

*

            “What a surprise,” Callia Greengrass said, turning around in the middle of the aisle at Flourish and Blott’s and regarding Pansy with such a perfect mask that Pansy couldn’t tell whether the bitch was surprised or not.

            Then again, it didn’t matter what she fucking thought. Pansy gave back a smile as meaningless as her mask and reached past her so that she could pull a heavy grimoire from the shelf. Callia’s eyes followed the path of Pansy’s hand in spite of herself, and then she stepped out of the way, managing to disguise it as a gesture that would give Pansy more room to do what she wanted.

            “I don’t see why,” Pansy replied, flipping the book open and letting her eyes read the title page. She had this same book at home, but the author had written a new introduction, as he tended to do every few years instead of actually updating the book. Pansy read a few lines of pretentious nonsense before she looked up at Callia. “Anyone can be in a bookshop and wish to peruse the wares.”

            “I saw you following me before that.” Callia’s eyes darkened and narrowed. She didn’t have her cousins’ ability to keep her face under control.

            Pansy raised an eyebrow. “You’re mistaken. I Apparated into being outside the shop just a moment ago. Some of us are able to spend our mornings in bed.” What she said was absolutely true, which meant that the small blots of sudden color in Callia’s cheeks came from the truth. Pansy gave her a stretched, slow smile and went back to reading the introduction.

            This time, Callia let her get to the second paragraph before interrupting. “If you mean to have him yourself,” she said in a low, quick voice, “then you can’t.”

            “Have him?” Pansy looked up again. “I assure you, I have my husband every morning and twice on Sundays. It’s a bit rich for you to tell me that I can’t.”

            “I mean Harry. Of course.” Callia folded her arms and took a step away, her gown rustling around her. It looked far too rich for her to have afforded on her own, Pansy thought critically. Borrowed money, of course. It didn’t suit her, making her face look even more like dog shit than normal and her green eyes like scum growing on the surface of a pond. “I’m going to be married to him. He’s proposed already.”

            “Then you should be consumed with happiness, and unable to consider me a rival, anyway,” Pansy informed her in a bored tone, and went back to looking at the book.

            “You would take him from me if you could,” Callia said. “I’ve seen the way that you look at him when you come to Ministry functions.”

            Pansy burst out laughing. She could afford to do so. When she went to Ministry parties, which was rare, she spent the night talking with Draco and seeing how close she could make Theo come to coming in his pants. And if heads turned in the bookshop at the sound of her laughter, wondering what they were talking about, Callia had far more to lose from public notice than Pansy did.

            Callia knew it, too. Her nostrils flared, her hands smoothed up and down her skirts, and she flushed before she turned her head away. “You must know that plenty of women would kill to marry him,” she said.

            “Of course,” Pansy said. “But not a pure-blood woman who’s already married and who’s heard about that taint in his family.” Then she paused and busied herself with the book, as though she hadn’t meant to say that last.

            “His Mudblood mother?” Callia tossed her head, making the blonde curls dance. “I know all about that already. And he’s certainly powerful and wealthy enough for a half-blood. They do say certain things about hybrid vigor, you know.” She gave Pansy a look that indicated she’d thought she’d won.

            “Oh,” Pansy said. “So you haven’t heard about it. Well, of course, no one would want to advertise it, and it’s not as though he has any family around who could contradict his careful public presentation of himself.” She put the book back on the shelf and shrugged. “But you must have decided that it’s worth the risks, including threats from jealous women.” She turned and started to walk out of the aisle.

            “What?”

            Pansy glanced over her shoulder. Callia was standing with her lips pressed together, as though she regretted calling after Pansy. But her eyes had the glitter of someone poisoned by curiosity.

            “It’s not important,” Pansy said. “You’ve already committed to marrying him, and I’m sure that someone like yourself would never back away from your given word.”

            Callia’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment Pansy thought that she would pull her wand; her hand had dropped to her side as if she would do so. A moment later, she shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Not really. There’s always someone willing to spread rumors about Harry, and my marriage to him will make me a target, too. I’ve accepted that as a worthy sacrifice for marrying him.”

            “I’m sure,” Pansy said. “Too bad that this would come as a threat from the inside, not the outside.”

            She turned away again and kept walking. This time, she counted three heartbeats before Callia came after her. She was mildly impressed. The woman had more self-control than she would have thought.

            Callia grabbed her arm and dragged her into another aisle. Several people nearby gave them suspicious looks, but Pansy smiled and shrugged, and they turned back to their browsing, apparently not inclined to interfere.

            “You’ll explain what you mean,” Callia said, and her wand dug into Pansy’s throat. “I don’t know what you intend by threatening me and walking away, but I won’t let you intimidate me, or keep me from marrying Harry.”

            Pansy sighed. “Ask him yourself. I really ought to have let you do that, not come between you and him like that. I’m sorry.”

            Callia’s fingers slipped on the wand. “He hasn’t mentioned anything,” she whispered. “What is it?”

            Pansy sighed again. “Fine. But you’ll have to remember that the Potters managed to destroy and alter some of the records. They didn’t want this getting out when there were still enough of them around to be a viable pure-blood family.”

            “Assume I understand that,” Callia said tersely. “Go on.”

            “It’s a genetic defect,” Pansy said. “They interbred too much in the years before they started accepting Mudbloods as wives. Did you ever think about why they did that, in fact? There was no reason they couldn’t have found brides among their own kind. But they seemed to think that it was imperative to have outside blood.”

            Callia again had a good mask, but Pansy could follow the progress of her thoughts, because she had put them there. All pure-bloods were interbred to some extent. If the Potters had smashed into one nasty result of that intermarrying, they would have had a powerful motive to look outside the immediately relevant bloodlines and become tolerant.

            “If you’re going to say that they produce a high number of Squibs,” Callia said, with something approximating bravery, “I won’t believe you. Harry’s too powerful to have children like that.”

            “With a Mudblood, oh yes,” Pansy said. “But not powerful enough to prevent his children from turning to stone in the womb. And the bride with them, usually. That’s why the sons of the family tended to survive.” She’d spent some time the night before studying Potter genealogical records to make sure her lie would work, and there was a preponderance of only sons in the Potter line, or their female children dying young.

            Callia looked as if she might not have the strength to stand. Pansy gently pushed her wand back, patted her on the cheek, whispered, “Ask him,” and left.

            Potter would deny it, of course. And Callia might believe him.

            For a while.

            It was why Pansy had more than one deception up her sleeve, and why she was glad that Draco had asked her to help. There was little she enjoyed more than tricking people so stupid she wondered how they managed to breathe. After all, give their brains enough to think about and their lungs might stop from the effort.

*

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