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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 Seven—A Lifetime’s Courage

            Harry stared into the fire at his house and swallowed. He didn’t like bringing work home with him, no, but he had little choice when the work practically swarmed up his shoulder and shouted in his ear like a hungry dragon hatchling.

            How did one write a letter to someone like Malfoy acknowledging that he had been right all along and asking for his helping without sounding like he was begging? Harry didn’t know much about Malfoy; he had stayed out of trouble, which kept him from crossing Harry’s path in the most obvious way, and he rarely attended the Ministry galas without a cloud of his friends around him, which kept Harry away in the physical sense. But he didn’t think it would be a good idea to grovel. Malfoy had enough pride for both of them tucked up in his arrogant head.

            Harry finally sighed and pulled a sheet of parchment towards him. He would state the truth in the simplest language he knew, and hope that Malfoy couldn’t find a purchase in the words to either gloat or brag.

            Someone knocked on his door. Harry reacted instinctively, throwing a book that lay on the table over the piece of parchment even though he hadn’t written anything yet and turning to pick up his outer robe, which he hadn’t Transfigured into pyjamas for the evening, from the back of his chair. He closed his eyes and summoned his first soul to the surface.

            “Harry,” said the voice behind his door.

            Harry recognized it, of course. He hesitated, wondering if he should change the soul he wore back to the second one, and then shook his head. Not this late in the evening. He stepped across the drawing room and opened the door for Callia.

            She ducked in out of the rain at once, shivering. Harry cast Warming Charms for her with one hand as he shut the door with the other. Callia kept her head bowed, the wetness making its way slowly down the back of her neck and to the tips of her golden hair. Yes, the first soul had been the right choice, Harry decided. It let him view her wetness and dishevelment from a gentle, judging distance, and didn’t involve him in any intimacy.

            “What brings you here?” he asked.

            His tone made Callia straighten and push her hair out of her eyes, arranging it behind her ears. “I couldn’t simply have missed my fiancé and wanted to visit?” she murmured, leaning forwards to accept a kiss.

            Harry offered it to her. His lips were as cold as hers, at least if the way she nodded as she stepped away from him was any indication. She didn’t like him to show too much passion.

            “Not this time of night,” he said, vocalizing one of his own thoughts aloud, and took off her cloak, casting a few Drying Charms on it before he hung it up on a hook. He tried to think of the hook beneath his hands as something separated from him, divorced from him, rather than a possession that she was seeing and touching and had no right to. He had always known that the day had to come when he allowed Callia some access to the home that had been his fortress for so long.

            But does it have to come, now?

            Harry paused. He hadn’t even thought of that. The moment Callia had shown up, his mind had slid back into the defensive role it always took when it came to the implements of his future. He had forgotten about Malfoy’s help and the fact that he might find some way out of this situation, which included finding some way out of the marriage.

            He shook his head sharply a moment later. This wouldn’t help him. Among other things, there was no way that he could stand here with the cacophony of souls, and desires and dreams and wishes that belonged to different souls, in his head, and hope that Callia wouldn’t notice. Harry was too used to operating on different wavelengths, knowing that all the thoughts from his first two souls were subject to questioning and sharing.

            He turned around, first soul firmly in place, and gave Callia a meaningless smile as she sat down on the couch. “Is one of your family ill?” he asked. That had been the first reason he had thought she might seek him out on an evening like this, so that they could discuss pushing back or changing the wedding plans.

            “No.” Callia linked her hands together. He had given her a ring the other day, slim and made of platinum that twirled and coiled back on itself, holding a topaz in the middle. She spun it around on her finger now, and Harry blinked, thoughts from other thirds of himself surfacing. He had never seen her make such a gesture before.

            She glanced up, caught his eye, and seemed to realize the picture she presented. She cleared her throat self-consciously and leaned back in her seat. “It’s only that I heard a disturbing rumor about your blood heritage,” she said. “And I wanted to know if it was true by going to the source.”

            More of your help, Malfoy? Harry didn’t try to keep his shoulders from tensing. Callia, like most pure-bloods, was good at reading body language, because the bastards communicated so little with their actual voices. She would just think, with any luck, that his tension came from the fact that someone was spreading a rumor about him. He sat down on the couch across from her and reached for her hands. “Who from? And what was the rumor?”

            Callia held his hands and looked searchingly back at him. Harry tried to smile. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or stupid. Her face had the perfect, sculpted cheekbones that he had seen in the face of Astoria Greengrass when she appeared in public. Her hair was soft spun gold, her eyes wide and green as summer fields. And she had been able to figure out fairly soon that he didn’t obey every request Sandborn made of him. She had let him know that a little quiet rebellion against the Ministry was all right with her, and they had gone on comfortably, peacefully, ever since.

            Sandborn had introduced her to Harry in the first place because he had known without asking that Harry needed an anchor of some kind, someone he could talk to at formal functions when his friends weren’t there, or when he was tired of the effort of fooling his friends. Harry thought Sandborn was related to Callia somehow, or had once done a favor for her family. It didn’t really matter. Callia knew about everything except the contract, and they had agreed that they would marry.

            Harry had been content, because there was nothing else for him to be. Now, he had to bite his lip as his heart banged and rattled in his chest.

            You can’t think about that. Not now. This information you’re going to get from Callia could be important. Harry shut down the thoughts of his third soul with an effort, and waited.

            “I heard it from Pansy Parkinson,” Callia said. “Pansy Nott, to give her married name. I am unsure how often she uses that,” she added, frowning slightly, as if a potentially mistaken bit of etiquette was the only thing that needed to concern them right now. “She told me that you carried a genetic flaw in your line that killed the daughters of your family in pregnancy, as well as the women the sons married, by turning the children to stone in their wombs, and then their entire bodies. Is that true?”

            Harry stared at her in shock. He hadn’t known that Malfoy meant it when he said a group of Slytherins owed him debts. Harry had paid for Pansy’s freedom as much as anyone else’s, but from what Harry could tell, she wouldn’t feel she owed an Auror for saving her life, never mind anything else.

            And that she would spread that rumor, of all things, one of the most ridiculous and over-the-top magical theories Harry had ever heard…

            “It’s not true,” he said, before he could even think about it. Well, he was going to accept Malfoy’s help—not that he could think about that with Callia around, not that he wanted to think about it—but not by means of a rumor that had terrified Callia and would probably do horrible things to his chances of marriage after this if it was allowed to circulate. Harry did know that he wanted to get married and have children someday. Not with Callia, ideally, but with someone. And he could not think about this. He bit down on his tongue hard enough to make it bleed and smiled apologetically at Callia. “I don’t know where she would have heard that. Perhaps she’s jealous of you.”

            Callia looked away from him, her eyes falling for a moment, even as her grip on his hands redoubled. “She’s never seemed jealous,” she murmured. “And I spent today looking at the publicly-available records. There are a lot of only Potter sons, and a lot of Potter daughters dead in childbirth or while pregnant.”

            Harry paused. He had never known that. Why had he never known that? He tried to remember the last time he had felt the urge to look up information about his family, or do something concerning them, other than look at his photo album or visit his parents’ graves, and couldn’t.

            “I don’t know why that would be,” he said at last. “Just a natural run of bad luck, I suppose. But it doesn’t have anything to do with that rumor. I think Parkinson—Nott—whatever her name is—probably wants to prevent you from getting married.”

            “From marrying you, specifically?” Callia toyed with the edge of his sleeve. “Or just in general?”

            “It could be in general,” Harry said. He was thinking about it again, as much as he dared, in flickering surges under his surface thoughts, and had come up with another problem. All right, so the Slytherins owed him for their freedom and their restored property. But why would Parkinson be going after his marriage with Callia, instead of doing something that related to what she owed him? His marriage had nothing to do with the Slytherins. “Is this the first time you’d met her in a while, or has she been following you?”

            “If she’s good enough, she could have been following me and I wouldn’t have seen her,” Callia pointed out.

            Harry frowned. He hadn’t thought of that. “Damn.” Callia blinked at him, and Harry remembered that he didn’t usually swear in front of her. He forced his breathing to calm, his heartbeat to slow the way that he often had to do when he was facing Sandborn, and smiled at her. “I’d like you to go a few unusual places tomorrow, and see if Parkinson follows you. I can give you a Locator Charm like the ones that we use when one of our Aurors is in danger.”

            “I know how to do one.” Callia stood up and pulled her hands back from his. Although she hadn’t yet gone to the door or gathered up her cloak, Harry had the impression that she was folding in on herself, trying to hold herself back from contact. He wasn’t sure why, and sat there, gazing searchingly up at her. She avoided his eyes and shook her head a little. “You’re sure that there’s no truth to this rumor?”

            “I’ve never heard it,” Harry said. “And I really think the chances are higher that Parkinson made it up than that everyone else missed it.” He smiled at her, trying to cheer her up. “The papers would have loved that one. Future Potter Children Born as Statues? They’d lap it up.”

            Callia didn’t smile back at him. “If you could see this from my point-of-view,” she said softly, “you would understand why I don’t find it funny.”

            “Of course not,” Harry said, dropping the smile and the glimpse that he had tried to give her into his second soul. It wasn’t working, and he should have known better than to try, he thought. He wondered if some of his other impulses, such as showing Malfoy his third soul, had been mistaken, too. “You’re the one who would be at risk.”

            Callia nodded and held out her hand. Harry stood up so that he could clasp and kiss it, and then escorted her to the door, settling her cloak around her shoulders. He banished the small, wet puddle it had made beneath itself without a thought. He didn’t want a trace of Callia in his house once she left.

            “Do you want to marry me?”

            Harry choked. He looked down and saw her eyes on him, so questioning that Harry had to resist the impulse to squirm away.

            She had never asked him that before. One of the reasons Sandborn had approved of their relationship, and Harry had liked it, was that they didn’t ask each other questions like that. Callia knew why he had dated her and agreed to wed her; she was the right choice, the one who would settle him in the Ministry’s eyes and the public’s. She was pure-blood, which made a nice romantic story, the powerful half-blood being folded back into the pure-blood world by means of a beautiful woman. She was of a family who had a few members that had been suspected of being Death Eaters, but altogether had stayed neutral. That family was neither too powerful nor too rich. She was smart enough to make a tolerable companion. Everything was set to work out, and she would have prestige and money.

            Harry had never thought she would ask for more than that.

            “I proposed to you,” he said. “I know that you agreed. And that’s all I think I can safely say on the matter.”

            A small smile quirked Callia’s lips. It didn’t look like a smile that she wanted to be wearing. “That’s all you can say? So patient and so cautious. As though you’re talking to a reporter instead of your fiancée.”

            “Yes,” Harry said. “Did you want to marry me?” Fair was fair, and he could turn the tactic back on her.

            “Past tense,” Callia said. She touched the edge of her sleeve as though she would begin worrying it, and then dropped her hand. “Are you so worried about this rumor that you’ve already decided I’ll ask for an escape?”

            “You haven’t said that you believe me,” Harry pointed out. “Although you have no reason to trust Parkinson, you think something in her words matters enough to keep from committing to my belief.”

            “You’ve shown incredible ignorance of your family and its history tonight,” Callia said softly. “That means you could be ignorant of something like this disease that changes children to stone.”

            Harry held himself still. He wouldn’t show what he felt, because, right now, almost anything would be inadequate. He simply nodded, after a moment, and Callia examined the motion with a close eye, as though she assumed some extra stony stiffness might show up in his neck despite his safe birth.

            She turned and went into the rain without bidding him farewell. Harry closed the door behind her and stood there with his eyes closed.

            Then he turned and put away the book on the table as well as the piece of parchment lying beneath it. Sod writing a letter to Malfoy. He would speak to the bastard himself, and ask what he’d meant by setting Parkinson on Callia. If there was anyone who had behaved disgracefully when it came to that marriage, it was Harry, and perhaps Sandborn. Callia had nothing to do with it, and didn’t deserve to be hounded.

*

            “Malfoy! A word with you.”

            Draco honestly didn’t recognize the haughty voice that called out behind him, and he turned around with a curious smile. He’d been on his way through the corridors of the Ministry to meet with Theo, who had been called there to consult on a potions accident. As far as Draco was concerned, Theo wasn’t pulling his weight in the matter of freeing Potter from Sandborn’s contract.

            It was Potter. He had a long stride Draco hadn’t seen before, and a hard light in his eyes that must have changed his voice.

            “I don’t think we should be talking here,” Draco said with a chirp of warning in his voice. Granted, there was no one in this corridor, but someone could appear at any moment. What was Potter doing, thinking it was a grand idea to be seen standing together? Draco started walking again, guiding Potter towards the shadow of an alcove. He touched his wand, considered a Disillusionment Charm, and then decided against it. Potter didn’t seem to be interested in keeping as silent as the Charm would require.

            “I want to know why you sent Parkinson to attack Callia.”

            Draco raised a shimmering barrier of light and noise that would convince a passerby two Ministry officials stood there talking about something important and deadly boring, and looked at Potter. Potter leaned on the wall, his ankles crossed, his shoulders thrown back so that the scarlet Auror robe hung down behind him to good effect. He didn’t have his arms folded, Draco thought, because the defensiveness of the gesture would give too much away.

            Potter was thinking about his actions, his gestures, his body language, on the level that told Draco he was being the Ministry automaton again. Draco leaned on the wall, let himself slouch, and shook his head.

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “except that I’m sure Pansy did exactly as I asked, and that you’re a berk if you’re not grateful for the attempt we’re making to separate you and your girlfriend.”

            Potter shook his head back. His hair hung more heavily around his face, somehow, or he had moved his head so that it did. Draco wondered what else Potter had sculpted his body to do, what silent messages he wanted to send, messages that Draco didn’t even know he was responding to. He tried to keep his shoulders slumped. He didn’t want to show Potter the intense uneasiness he felt when he thought about that.

            “You don’t need to do that,” Potter said. “You need to do something to make sure that you have your freedom and your money, still, independently of Sandborn. My marriage has nothing to do with what you owe me.”

            Draco parted his lips, then closed his mouth again. “I see,” he said. “I should have realized that. An understandable consequence of what I said. But I did not mean that we would only find a way to free you of the portion of the contract that applies to us. We mean to see you completely free of it.”

            Potter stood up very straight, his neck snapping around as he stared at Draco with a focus that made Draco want to take down the spell and run. He held still, and the moment passed, although Potter’s neck still quivered with whatever tension had made him start up like that in the first place.

            “You don’t—have a reason to do that,” Potter said, and Draco wondered what words he had intended to jam into the pause in his sentence before he corrected himself. “Freeing me that way would only mean that I owed you a debt in turn.”

            Draco sighed. “We can settle that later. At least it means that we aren’t trapping you into a contract the way Sandborn did.”

            Potter’s face looked like carved granite. “I told you, I was the one who approached him with that idea. And it’s an equal exchange. I’ve always known what I was doing and what price I had to pay.”

            Draco closed his eyes and massaged the center of his forehead, between his eyes. “Potter, do you want to be free or not? You were speaking a moment ago about being upset that we interfered with your marriage, but apparently we can go ahead and get you out of the part of the contract that concerns our debts. You know as well as I do that Sandborn won’t let a partial challenge to his authority stand. You either have to commit to fighting him completely, or you have to tell us to fuck off.”

            He didn’t get a response, and opened his eyes to see why. Potter stood with his arms down at his sides, his gaze fastened on Draco’s face. He drew in a breath, his own lips parting, and then just remained there with it whistling out.

            And then Draco understood. He should have seen it at once, the way he should have seen that Potter would think Draco’s words applied only to the Slytherin part of the contract, not all parts. He had spoken solely in terms of their debt, after all.

            Potter hesitated on the brink of accepting their help. But he didn’t know what might happen next, where for seven years his life had been governed by the security of the contract, and he didn’t really like or trust or know Draco and his friends. He didn’t know what might happen if he reached out and they let him fall.

            Draco wasn’t in the habit of making sentimental gestures, even if they might help ease his relationship with someone else. But he put out his hand now, and took Potter’s, sliding his fingers around the cold wrist and up an arm that felt more like the limb of a statue than anything else. He didn’t try to hold Potter, simply pressed down, so that Potter would feel the weight and warmth of his hand and could judge for himself.

            “I promise you,” he whispered, “we won’t let you fall. We’ll help you figure it out. You’ve served and suffered seven years for the sake of the wizarding world, Slytherins as well as Gryffindor. We can free you in six months.”

            Potter stared at him. Draco knew that he would never understand what the man was feeling in that moment. He couldn’t. He wasn’t the one in this situation, and he would never have put himself there.

            But he held still, and he let Potter look for what he needed in his eyes and his face, and it seemed that Potter found it, because he looked away. His fingers turned and closed backwards on Draco’s hand, clutching with a desperate strength made slippery by sweat.

            “Thank you,” he whispered.

            Draco smiled, partially because he thought Potter needed to see that right then and partially because Potter was taking his hand now, and hadn’t rejected him when he reached out, the way Draco had thought would happen.

            “You’re welcome,” he murmured, and then slipped away, dissipated the spell that had guarded them, and set out in search of Theo again. He suspected Potter needed time to recover from what had passed between them before he contacted Draco once more.

            For that matter, so did Draco. He had no idea how Potter lived with that intense courage and commitment every single day. It would make Draco break out in hives if he didn’t have a holiday now and again.

*

            Erin_49: I think Callia might have a few things to say about you agreeing with her!

            polka dot: Harry would give a great deal to be free of the marriage, but he doesn’t want Callia hurt because of it.

            unneeded: Thanks! The jolt is coming along, as of this chapter.

            purple-er: Thanks! Though I’m sure Callia doesn’t agree.
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