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His Actium	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 9606 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Seven--Positions Negotiated

            Harry's head was reeling, and he felt as though he would probably do something to drive Draco further away from him if he didn't have a break from the intensity. He coughed and reached out a hand for the chair behind him. "Do you mind if I sit down?" he asked.

            Draco considered him as if wondering how many conspiracies he could organize from a chair, and then inclined his head in a gracious nod. Harry nodded back and sat down, trying to make himself breathe.

            It hurt.

            It hurt to know that he might have a second chance here, and not entirely why. It hurt to know that he might have done everything he could for Draco and Draco was just pulling him here to confirm that. It hurt to know that he might finally have found someone he wanted to date honestly, not just have sex with, and he had already screwed things up beyond all repair.

            But the only way he could find out any of those things was by going forwards and hoping it turned out that one of his suppositions was wrong. He nodded. "What would you like to know?"

            "You were looking for information on Potions businesses." Draco stalked behind his desk. In here, in control of his environment, Harry thought he had a dangerous edge to him that he might not possess even when he was prowling around with a whip of fire in his hand and Harry was naked. The edge made Harry's throat ache with desire. He concentrated on Draco's words instead of thinking too much about that. "It was easy to determine that, flailing about as you were."

            It was only flailing about if you were spying on me, Harry wanted to retort, but he didn't. He nodded instead. "I was looking for Potions information because it made sense to me that my superior, Head Auror Robards, would have some personal stake in ordering me to investigate you. The evidence against you was too thin. And I found it. He's invested in a rival business that's probably tried to trick or spy your secrets out of you, and failed. Now that he knows he doesn't have a prayer of uncovering them, he was hoping I would do his dirty work for him."

            Draco's eyes widened at him. "You didn't explain that when I had you," he said.

            Harry also ignored his impulse to argue who had had who, just then. Draco tying him up had to give Draco the edge. Probably. "I know. I only found it just now. And I have a witness who will testify, if it comes to a court case."

            Draco uncoiled and took a step towards him. "I mean that you never mentioned Robards's name when you were in my bed," he said, quietly but with an amount of force that caused Harry to nod in spite of himself. "Why change your mind and trade that information to me now? What do you want?"

            "At the time," Harry said, "I still thought there was a chance that the crime I was supposed to get information on was real. I think the chance is too small now to bother with. Robards is a fool. Take him down if you can. Otherwise I'll deposit what I found with a few of his enemies in the Department and watch the fireworks from a safe distance."

            "What 'crime' was I accused of?" Draco pronounced the second word as though it was the name of a small scaly creature he'd found in his soup.

            "Smuggling dragons' eggs," Harry said, and wished Robards could be here to watch the flush stealing across Draco's cheeks and down his throat. "Someone who managed to survive the usual fate of smugglers offered your name up to the Ministry."

            "I would never put any of my people in such danger," Draco said, and now the creature in his soup had sprouted hairs and proceeded to crawl up his arm. "I would have thought even you would know that."

            Harry shrugged. "I know a little about you." The way you taste. What you look like naked. That you like to take charge in bed and use whips and bondage on people. "That's not enough to be absolutely sure that you wouldn't smuggle dragons' eggs. I'm sure there are things you do smuggle."

            Draco reached out as if he was intending to touch an alarm or bell in the center of the desk, although Harry personally couldn't see anything where his hand would fall but a small depression in the wood. Harry shook his head. "That doesn't mean I'm going to arrest you for it. In the first place, I would have to have proof in front of me to do that. In the second, chances are excellent that I won't be in the Auror Department in a few days."

            Draco hesitated some more, and then let his hand fall back to his side. "You're taking large risks for someone you fucked once," he said stiffly.

            "I always did my best to make sure that I got the truth, one way or the other," Harry said. "And I like you. I hope that's not clouding my judgment, and that you won't do something stupid like go out and start smuggling dragons' eggs now. But I'm willing to take the risk."

            "You're stupid," Draco said, tasting the words as if they weren't quite the right ones but he couldn't find the ones that would be.

            Harry shrugged. "I don't think I'm risking any lives this way. Like I said, you're not the type to start smuggling dragons' eggs simply because someone told you they thought you were. If you're already smuggling dragons' eggs, then you'll keep right on doing it, and the people who volunteer for it should damn well know what they're doing. I don't think it'll come down to a duel between you and Robards, and he can take his own risks as far as I'm concerned. I won't be his tool now."

            "You still haven't considered what I wanted you to." Draco leaned forwards, his hands clutching at the edges of his desk, his arse hovering above it. His eyes were so compelling that it was hard to look at other part of him, though. "You still haven't reconsidered your actions as a whore."

            "You like that word," Harry said. "And I just forgot to tell you that part. I told Robards I wasn't going to act that way anymore. He was upset, but fuck him. I have people I can go to who would be happy to have me owe them favors or pay back favors they owe me."

            Draco narrowed his eyes. "You've become a very political creature. I'm not sure I like it."

            Harry stared at him. "Well, excuse me, Mr. Slytherin," he said, when he managed to find his voice. "Why do you care? As you explained, you wanted to fuck me, but that's a long way from caring about my moral well-being."

            The flush that climbed up Draco's neck this time was slower than the other one, which probably meant it wasn't a flush of indignation. Harry remained quiet and waited, wondering what in the world he was going to say.

            "You're not who you should be," Draco said, his voice so low that Harry thought he was probably pulling the words from the same place inside himself he'd taken some of the more honest words during their confrontation in his bedroom. "Not who I would have expected you to become after the war. Less honest, more conniving. Better at reading people, but you don't use it for the purposes that I would expect you to."

            Harry sighed. That was an element in the way Ron and Hermione thought about him, too, but at least his friends knew him well enough to have a right to that concern. Draco was going by old stereotypes, old ideas.

            "I would have ended up like that, maybe," he said. "If the world had been the way I thought it was, if all the people I associated with were as innocent as I believed they were. They weren't. By the end, I wasn't. It's regrettable, but it's not something I'm going to spend the rest of my life lamenting. I did make a mistake when I chose to work by selling my body, though. I've changed my mind. I have the right to do that."

            "But what are you going to do now?" Draco leaned forwards as if he thought that would intimidate Harry. It just made Harry think that he was probably in danger of falling all the way forwards, as far as he was already leaning. He was laughable--and endearing. "Did you really think that you'd be able to completely change your mind and the way you act? How do I know your new job won't be the same as your current one?"

            "You don't," Harry said. "No one else except Robards and you knows that I intend to quit my job yet, and not that many people knew about it in the first place. You don't have independent witnesses. You have my word, and that's all."

            Draco sneered at him. "I don't think you're going to change."

            Harry banged a hand down on the arm of the chair. Draco jumped and stared at him in offense, but Harry really didn't care. "Fuck you, Draco," he snarled, standing. "I've given you as much as you deserve, the apology and the change that you wanted me to make. I don't owe you a guarantee for the rest of my life. I'm sure that I'll do things you don't approve of, like continuing to work for the Ministry and wearing robes that don't suit me. Too bad. We fucked, you proved that you knew what I was up to all along, you made me face the truth, I apologized. That's it." He turned for the office door, shaking his head. He'd been a fool to let Draco Apparate him, really. There were too many bad memories between them. He shouldn't have slept with someone he had this kind of history with, though for different reasons than what he'd told Robards.

            "You don't think that what you did to me is worse than anything I did to you?"

            "No," Harry said, turning around. It appeared that he wouldn't get out the door without some final insults returned. That didn't mean it would go according to Draco's expectations. "Not when thinking that would mean wallowing, endlessly, and if that's what you want me to do, then yeah, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life. I asked before if there was something you wanted me to do to make up for it, and quitting my job seemed to be your price. Is there something else? I'm interested in atoning for my crimes, not sitting there and agonizing over them."

            Draco took a step towards him. His eyes were liquid and bright with confusion. "But..."

            "Is there something else?" Harry clenched a fist so he would keep his hand to himself and keep from punching Draco. "What is it?"

            "This isn't the way that," Draco said, and then stopped as if even he didn't know where that sentence was going. "This isn't the way I expected you to react," he said at last. "A normal person would either still be apologizing and upset for what he'd done to me, or he'd have refused to quit his job for me."

            Harry rolled his eyes. "So this whole thing comes down to my not doing what you wanted and expected me to do. Noted. Too bad. This is the way I live now. This is the way I developed to protect myself." He put a hand on the door and started to push it open, then hesitated. If Draco had brought them here by Apparition, there ought to be a way to leave by Apparition. He would certainly prefer that to leaving by the front office and fueling rumors Draco probably didn't want fueled.

            "Has it occurred to you," Draco said softly, pressing closer, "that the way you've developed to protect yourself is pretty fucked-up?"

            Harry turned around and snarled at him. "If I had refused to quit my job like the 'normal' person you're carrying around in your head, then you would have mocked me for not acknowledging the truth your spell showed me and gone away secure in the knowledge that I didn't really understand how I'd hurt you. I am still apologizing, and you don't want to listen. It's not enough. What will be enough? That's what I'm asking."

            "Nothing," Draco said, and his face was finally shining with a sort of glow of rage. "Not after the way Blaise hurt me, and you did the same thing."

            Harry bowed to him. "Then we're done," he said. "If I hurt you unforgivably, then why should you forgive me?"

            And he Apparated, straight through the wards Draco had lowered so they could get in and not put back up, back to the grounds of his house, where he walked for a long time in the gardens before he gave up and went back inside. He would upset Fovea if he handled her in this mood, but she was already screeching because she had seen him through a window and he hadn't come inside, so he might as well enjoy the company of his bird.

*

            "Wow, mate." Ron sat across the kitchen table from Harry and stared at him, not quite concealing the glow of happiness in his eyes. "So what are you going to do now?"

            "Go to someone higher up than Robards and explain what happened and what my skills are." Harry drained the rest of the cup of tea and set it down with a thump on the table. He was still burning from the confrontation with Draco, which he hadn't told Ron about, although it had been yesterday. What did Draco want him to do? Act like the Gryffindor he used to be, seemed to be the answer, and Harry was sorry, but that wasn't the kind of person he was anymore. "They can probably find a job for me."

            "You could be my partner--"

            Harry snorted. "I didn't get all the Auror training I'd need to do that, Ron. And the problem of putting you in danger still applies, especially now that I'm more likely to have people who are relatives of the ones I arrested after me. No, I'd rather do something that would let me use the skills I developed--reading people, using my fame in a way that makes people feel happy and satisfied and that I can live with--than try to get caught up in a field that I'm probably too old for anyway. I'll never be as good as you."

            Ron stared at him in confusion. "But that was all you wanted for years, when we were in school," he said.

            "What is it lately," Harry snapped, his rage igniting, "with people thinking that I must have to be exactly like the person I wanted to be in school, or else I'm not happy and not fulfilled? I don't want to be an Auror, I don't want to marry a perfectly nice girl and have eight kids, I don't want to pretend I'm exactly the same as everybody else because I know I'm not."

            Ron held up a hand. "Why are you taking this out on me?" he asked, eyes deep and kind. "I think you're angry at someone else."

            Harry sighed and ran his hands through his hair. "Sorry," he said. "Yeah, you're right. But the problem is the same. Everyone thinks that because I'm changing one thing about myself, I should go right back to the naive, loyal, honest Gryffindor who wanted to do nothing but chase Dark wizards. I don't want to, Ron. I've changed. Why can no one see that? Yeah, some of the reasons I changed sucked, but they happened. I can't just reverse the changes because that would make other people more comfortable."

            "They could be a sign of psychological problems--"

            "Why?" Harry asked harshly. "Because my not being what you think I should be is inevitably a sign of psychological problems?"

            Ron deliberately sipped his tea before he replied. "I didn't know you would be so angry about this," he said quietly.

            "I want to know, though." Harry leaned forwards intently. "And this is about you, not other people. Why are the changes I've gone through a sign of psychological problems? I'm almost thirty, Ron, and I didn't know I was a wizard until I was eleven. I've spent longer as this changed person than I spent as the person you think I should be. Do you really think that that's who I am? Why? Haven't you changed from the teenager you were?"

            "No one forced me to change," Ron said, his frown drifting across his face like a slow-building thundercloud. "That's the difference."

            "So marriage and having a child didn't force some differences on you? Losing Fred? Becoming an Auror?"

            Ron breathed out slowly. "I--well, I didn't make all the changes to the corruption in the Ministry that I thought I was going to," he admitted. "And I can get along with people now that I would have disdained when we were at school, either because they were Slytherins or because they were richer than we were."

            Harry nodded. "Exactly. That's the place where I am. If I could go back and learn about the people who surrounded me and how eager they were to use me less harshly, then I would. But I'm not mourning my lost childhood and thinking about how to get it back all the time. This is who I am."

            Ron finished his tea and sat back in his chair, studying him. "I thought having sex a lot was something that was part of you, too," he said. "And you gave that up."

            Harry had to laugh. "Good point. But I still like having sex, and I'm still not going to look only at people I can get married to and have a family with. That's the way you and Hermione thought I was going, didn't you?"

            Ron nodded. "And it would have been perfect if you married Ginny, because that way we'd all be part of the same family." He studied Harry now as if he could see the future where Harry had had three or four children, all with red hair, all perfect Gryffindors and perfect Weasleys.

            "I still feel like part of the same family as you," Harry said firmly. "A chosen family, not a blood family. The difference is that we're a little more separated than we were in school, with different lives and different goals. And I think the bigger difference, at bottom, is that I've accepted I'll never fit into the crowd and I'll never stop people from saying whatever they like about me. I've accepted that enough to use it against my enemies, now. That's all."

            "If you're happy, mate," Ron said. "That's really all I ask for."

            Harry relaxed. "Good." That was all he asked for, too. And he was lucky to have friends who would stay with him through as much as Ron and Hermione had, he knew. If they asked questions and forced him to think about things, well, he would have done the same thing if they had suddenly declared that they wanted to end their marriage so that Ron could become a lawyer and Hermione an Auror.

            The major, frustrating thing was that he had made his changes long ago and his friends kept acting as if he would reverse them overnight. But they might finally be on the road to not thinking like that anymore, which was good enough for him.

*

            Fovea woke Harry up the next morning with a series of screeches that didn't sound as though they came from her normal hunger or boredom. Harry opened his eyes and swung his feet out of bed with a frown. He was still clad in a dressing gown, so he wandered out of his room and headed for her aviary just as he was.

            Fovea was hopping up and down on her perch, staring out the glass walls that looked towards Harry's outer defenses. Harry reached up and scratched her on the head, as much as he could when she kept bobbing that head past him. Fovea fluttered awkwardly to his shoulder and screamed in his ear about the intensity of the problem and how no one listened to her.

            "Someone might listen to you if you were a bit quieter," Harry told her, and was nipped on the ear for his trouble. He cast a charm that ought to let him see through the glass without letting anyone else see inside or disrupting the wards. It looked as though a piece of the glass had suddenly vanished.

            Draco was there, walking back and forth as if he were searching for a weak point in the defenses. Harry felt his heart speed up as he stared at him. Then he shook his head.

            "He must be a masochist," he told Fovea. "Why else would he seek out someone who tricked him, betrayed him, and who he can't forgive?"

            Fovea, now that he had noticed the intruder, didn't seem interested. She shit down the back of his robe and whistled, cocking her head in the way she did when she was trying to coax treats out of the universe by saying, "I am cute."

            "I don't know that I'm interested in dating a masochist," Harry muttered, even though he knew he would shortly be lowering the wards and letting Draco in. "He might end up wanting me to dress like Zabini or something."

            "I am desperately cute," said Fovea's head-tilt this time, the feathers of her crest almost brushing Harry's shoulder.

            "You can wait a while," Harry told her, and put her back on her perch.

            "I am so cute I cannot believe you did that," said Fovea's head-tilt and turned back.

            Harry shook his head and walked towards one of the carvings of a rose on the wall in his dining room. Touching it made the wards flicker and vanish for a brief moment. Harry waited until he knew that Draco would have had the sense to cross, then touched them again and brought them back up. No telling what reporters or spies for Robards might come in if he left them down too long.

            He cast a charm to straighten his hair as much as it ever got straightened and put on his shoes. Then he hesitated, shrugged, and cast a breath-freshening charm.

            He was probably being presumptuous, but no more than Draco was by coming here in the first place.

            When he opened his front door, Draco stood on the stoop. He eyed Harry's dressing robe without comment, and then met his eyes and smiled. Harry had to stop himself from promising to do whatever Draco wanted in exchange for another smile. He wasn't that desperate.

            Honestly.

            "I thought of something you can do for me," Draco told him.

*

            unneeded: Draco doesn't have seem to have much planned for him at first, which frustrated the hell out of Harry. Maybe he does now.

            vuurvlieg: Harry honestly hadn't considered that he would break people's hearts because the victims he slept with didn't have such a strong effect on him. Draco does, though, and because of that, he can see why this might be something wrong. He would have changed his ways long before had he met someone he liked as much as he did Draco.

            Harry thinks that Draco hasn't recovered from Zabini's betrayal, or he wouldn't have lost control the way he did whenever Harry mentioned it. That's what Harry thinks he needs to heal from, not the way he slept with Harry. If Draco can't recover, then at some point Harry has to stop trying to make him.

            Hopefully this makes them more understandable?

            SP777: As Harry explains in the first chapter, Hermione suggested the name Fovea because it's Latin for trap. Harry adopted it.

            The last story in the Fox and Wolf series is going to be a very long novel (or at least it seems so right now). I don't want to start it at a time when I have two other mega-novels going. (I'm getting tired, to a certain extent. There's a reason that 'Flare' has shorter chapters).
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