Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Seven--Seek and Ye Shall Find

“What the fuck are we going to do?”

Harry looked up with his eyebrows raised. He would have expected to say something like that himself as soon as he finished working through the options and realizing how hopeless they were, but the words had echoed from Malfoy's lips.

“What do you mean?” he asked, as he finished tying the sapphire ring onto the owl they had agreed would return it to Corinna. Well, at least it looked like the sapphire ring they were returning. “We may be able to come up with a way to get your father out of the Ministry yet. Cheer up.”

“Cheer up, he says,” Malfoy muttered, and turned away from Harry, roaming back and forth as though Voldemort had returned from the grave to possess him. No, on second thought, Harry decided, watching him, he looked more agitated than he would have done if that had happened. Maybe as though someone had threatened to cut his hair, then. “When we have no idea why my father is in the Ministry, and no plan to get him out, and no reason to think anyone is going to help us...”

Harry let him rant, all the while fastening the sapphire ring to the owl's foot with extra cords of twine. The owl, a gray bird hired anonymously from a little office Malfoy knew about in Diagon Alley, nuzzled him with its beak and hooted softly. Harry paused, studied it critically, and gave another twist to the twine.

“This goes to the Lady Corinna,” he said, and the owl hooted again and spread its wings, taking off. That had been the bargain, that they would return the sapphire when they were safely out of Corinna's domain.

Harry grinned and touched his pocket.



That had been the bargain.

He felt free to turn and study Malfoy then, watching him as he stalked around and around the little clump of trees that he had Apparated them to, an unknown rendezvous point.

He was magnificent when he was angry, sorry though Harry was to fall into cliché. His hair blew behind him, making him look like some god, some Mercury. His face changed with emotion, from that goddamn neutral mask Harry hated into what looked like porcelain flushed with wine. His hands chopped through the air and showed the speed he would doubtless wield a wand with.

The only problem with watching the way Malfoy moved was that he turned around and caught Harry at it. “What are you doing?” he snapped, hard as falling rocks.

“I was thinking that you looked like Mercury,” Harry answered, since it was true. He was a great proponent of truth in others now, so he might as well do it himself.

“You know who Mercury is?” Malfoy demanded, staring.

“Ouch,” Harry said mildly.

            Malfoy shut his eyes and stood a moment with his chest shuddering, his hands still clenched. “I did not mean that,” he whispered. “I did not mean that you were stupid, or uneducated. I meant that I was—surprised.”

            “I’m sure you are,” Harry said, with a faint shrug, and touched his pocket again. He decided that he would bring up the matter of the sapphire when Malfoy was in the sort of mood where he might listen to him. “Now. Let’s consider this logically. Could one of your father’s Ministry contacts be hiding him?”

            Malfoy shut his eyes harder. Harry thought he could make out faint traces of pink and red around the edges, and frowned. Malfoy’s eyes looked almost bloodshot. He wasn’t taking care of himself, then. Well, Harry had known that. Someone who was would already have a lover worthy of him by now.

            “I don’t know,” Malfoy said at last. “I don’t know his contacts well enough. That was why I needed you, remember.” He turned his head and opened his eyes, bitter blue and grey as condensed ashes.

            “I thought you meant that you needed me to tell when they were lying,” Harry said. “But you went straight to people you knew. So. Does that mean you don’t know who would do something like this? Assuming they’re helping your father hide, and they broke him out of Azkaban.”

            “There’s not many Ministry employees who would be trusted to go into Azkaban and cast any sorts of spells at all,” Malfoy said, and began to pace around the clearing again, as if movement was a solution to their problems. “That narrows the list down, but—maybe it was done another way. Maybe the Azkaban guards were bribed to look the other way. And that doesn’t tell us where to search.” He lashed out suddenly, and he must have had his wand in his hand although Harry hadn’t noticed it, because bark leaped into the air from one of the trunks not far away. “Bloody fuck!”

            Harry stepped up beside him, his wand at the ready and a healing spell under his tongue. But Malfoy turned a deadly glare on him, and Harry paused, raised his hands, then retreated. “All right,” he said mildly. “So. I can think of one class of Ministry employees who would be allowed in and out of the prison, and even allowed to cast spells on the island.”

            “Who?” Malfoy ran his fingers through his hair. Not a good look for him, Harry decided, eying the blond spikes that rose into the air from his scalp. There should only be one person with shaggy hair between them, and the spot was already claimed.

            “Aurors,” Harry said.

            Malfoy turned and stared at him, and Harry honestly didn’t know whether the poisonous contempt filling his eyes was for Harry or for himself, not having thought of that. “What?” Malfoy whispered.

            “Aurors regularly replace the guards on the island,” Harry said, with a little shrug and a mild wriggle that just happened to lift his shoulders higher and stretch his robes across them to emphasize their breadth. If Malfoy was overcome by some sudden wild attraction and hurled himself at Harry, Harry wanted to be ready. “Even though they don’t have Dementors there anymore, there’s still a problem with depression. So they have to rotate them in and out. And of course the new Aurors cast spells to keep prisoners restrained and quiet and to get their food to them and give them baths.”

            “How?” Malfoy whispered, barely breathing.

            Harry suppressed the temptation to ask if Malfoy was going to run through all the interrogatives one by one—although it would have been a good chance to see him start when he realized that Harry also knew the word “interrogatives.” He knew what Malfoy was asking.

            He smiled and touched his wand to his chest where the Auror symbol would hang if he was wearing the official scarlet robes, tracing out the symbol that marked him most days of his life. “It seems that you’ve hired an Auror after all.”

*

            “Harry! You want to be back on duty?”

            There was such eagerness in Kingsley’s eyes, and in his voice, at least, entire truth. Harry widened his eyes and gave Kingsley his best bright-eyed look in return. “Yes,” he whispered. “I thought it would be relaxing, a holiday, to be off for this long, and give the bloody thing a chance to wear off. But…” He let the words hang, and of course Kingsley picked it up. Honestly, it was so easy to manipulate people.

            Of course, that was because so many of them believed that he was a straight-and-narrow hero who wouldn’t even know what the word “manipulation” meant. Harry knew he shouldn’t ever become a Dark Lord, because that would lose him the advantage of surprise.

            A pity. He suspected he would have made a good one.

            “Of course,” Kingsley said, soothingly. Harry couldn’t remember the last time Kingsley had made soothing noises at him. But then, Harry usually handled the pressure of a case by going off somewhere and getting quietly drunk on a bottle of Firewhisky or hurling curses at innocent vases because they shattered with a satisfying noise, so it wasn’t like Kingsley would know. “Of course. With your need for action and excitement, you would want to come back as soon as you could.” He paused, and his eyes shone like a cat’s. “And would you, as long as you’re here, take a look at a suspect we’ve pulled in? He’s refusing Veritaserum and giving us all these riddling answers, and you might be the one who can unriddle him.”

            Harry kept smiling even though his jaw hurt. “We’ll see. I want to talk to some of the other Aurors and see what other cases I’ve missed, first.”

            Kingsley nodded. “Of course,” he said, and really, three repetitions of a single phrase was more than Harry gave anyone on a good day, so Kingsley had better not say it again. “Then we’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Harry.”

            The flames winked out. Harry leaned back and shook his head. He was the one asking to come back early from a holiday, and Kingsley thanked him as though Harry had done him some enormous favor.

            “They could all stop fawning soon, and I would like that,” he muttered.

            “They won’t.”

            Harry jumped and glanced over his shoulder. Strange how easy it was to forget about Malfoy when talking with his boss, although he hadn’t been able to look away from him for hours during the search. But Malfoy had taken up a deliberate posture in the corner of Harry’s room, his arms folded, his back against the bookshelves, as though he wanted to make himself small and forgettable. Harry thought it the wrong one for him, but he was confident Malfoy would find something else he could apply himself to soon, because ambition was his middle name.

            Even if Harry didn’t yet know what particular ambition involved recapturing his father and making him suffer the loneliness of a cell in Azkaban. But he would.

            “They won’t what?” Harry asked, and yawned, rubbing a hand over his face. It had been a long day, and he had used more magic than he’d realized, in the confrontations with Flint’s duelist and Corinna. Of course, the truth magic seemed to exhaust him a little, sometimes, at least when he was actively using it. “You can have the bed, Malfoy. I’ll take the couch. And a shower, first.” He moved towards the bathroom.

            “They’ll never stop fawning on you,” Malfoy whispered, voice low and salty and pointed. “And you’ll never stop doing things that encourage them to, so it’s your own fault.”

            Harry stood there looking at the wall for a moment. Then he turned back. Malfoy had risen to his full height, and his “forgettable” pose had fallen off him like a discarded cloak. His hand hovered over his wand.

            Maybe he’s going to take his frustrations out on me for going after Corinna, Harry thought, but the prospect no longer appealed as it would have a few hours ago. He licked his lips anyway, and Malfoy’s eyes came up to follow his tongue. Harry stalked to the side, and Malfoy followed him in the opposite direction, forming the duelists’ circle, his fingers constantly playing along his wand.

            Harry knew he could back away from this confrontation and go take his shower. He had followed Malfoy on this investigation and trusted him wildly so far. Trusted him when he said that he had a good reason for hiring someone with Harry’s new curse, trusted him when he said that he would provide the contact information of a specialist in removing the curse, trusted him when he took Harry into places where he would only go to arrest someone on a normal day. He could turn his back, and Malfoy would stand there and not curse him.

            But even if his senses were dulled, his muscles aching, his magical core feeling empty, he didn’t want to.

            “How do I encourage them?” he whispered, and saw Malfoy pause at how deep his voice had got. Well, good. That had been the effect Harry was going for, or one of them. Unfortunately, he saw no rising beneath Malfoy’s belt when he flicked his gaze down, which meant the other effect hadn’t worked. He would just have to try harder in the future. “I was hardly holding out a hand to Kingsley and telling him to lick it like a good dog.”

            “You don’t tell them to back off,” Malfoy said, without missing a blink or a beat. Harry wondered if he could see the effect his voice was having. Harry’s magical core was still hollow, but his mind was clearing, his instincts sharpening. “And you could. With your power and your temper, you could do the same thing that you did to Flint and Corinna, and they’d have to.”

            Harry snorted. “You think I go around cursing my friends? That’s only yours.”

            Malfoy’s gleaming, bared teeth said the temptation to debate about whether Flint and Corinna were his friends had been met and shredded. “You forced them to respect you,” he said. “Why don’t you do the same thing with people who mean more to you, who impact your life more than a passing fancy of a Dark wizard?”

            Harry shook his head. “You have no idea about the way that friends interact with each other on a day-to-day basis.” He paused, watching the flush that poured into Malfoy’s cheeks, and he succumbed to the temptation that he’d felt earlier, watching him pace around that little grove of trees, to make him angry, and thus make him magnificent. “Probably because you never had any real ones.”

            Malfoy unfolded from the wall like a Dementor, and billowed forwards rather than stalking. Harry turned broadside to meet him, wand out and the pulse in his throat thrumming an insistent beat.

            Malfoy was there, next to him, before he could decide on the course of action he wanted to take, a curse or something else. He pinned Harry to the bookshelf behind him, dangerously near the telly, and whispered, “You would say that. Because you haven’t changed at all, have you? You’re still the same uncaring, joking, boisterous idiot that you always were. Enjoying the attention and not caring about the things you do to disrupt my life, because you think that those bonds and contacts can’t possibly matter to me.”

            “Yes,” Harry said, watching the clear air around Malfoy’s head. He really had that impression of Harry. Well, Harry thought, he hadn’t done much to discourage it. Much. “That’s all I care about. Getting my own way and making you miserable.”

            Malfoy narrowed his eyes and stepped back, soft and wary. His gaze never moved from Harry’s face. “You sound as if you don’t believe it.”

            Harry laughed, and the laughter cracked and scraped at his ears. He didn’t know whether he was joking or serious now, and he almost thought it didn’t matter. “You think I don’t? I’m the one in my head, and I know what my motivations are. But I’m not surprised at what they look like to you from the outside.” Hurt, perhaps, but not surprised.

            Malfoy frowned, and studied him. Then he said, “What in the world could you have to gain from assaulting Corinna?”

            “Earning respect for you,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Why do you think I cared about forcing her to respect me? I’m never going to see her again.” Maybe. He didn’t move a hand down to his pocket, because that would reveal too much.

            Malfoy fell back a step. Then another. “You couldn’t be. You must know that, despite the deal we made with Corinna, I’ll have to watch my back, and this will disrupt my life and my brewing.”

            Harry shrugged. “If you thought the deal would cost you more than it would gain, then you could have not made it. I would have given the ring back to her if you told me to. I just thought I would see what I could win for you.”

            “Why?” Malfoy shot the question like an arrow.

            “Because,” Harry said patiently, “you idiot, I find you attractive. I probably won’t be around you for very long, but at least I can win this much for you, before I go. It was the same reason I wouldn’t let Flint get away with cheating you, even though he wasn’t technically lying right then about your father. You hired me for that, but I can go beyond the terms of my employment if I choose to, as long as it doesn’t violate orders you gave me.”

            Malfoy stared at him, lips parted and eyes alert in a way they hadn’t been before. He had known Harry was attracted to him, accused him of liking to admire his arse, but he hadn’t thought about this, Harry thought. He should have. He’d seen that Harry was active and not passive, why did he think that Harry was going to sit around all the time and not act on that bloody attraction that wouldn’t stop tormenting him?

            Malfoy shook his head, and several words tried to bubble out past his lips that didn’t get there. He took a step towards Harry. And another. Harry allowed it because Malfoy didn’t have his wand in hand, and he was curious to see what he would do.

            What happened was that Malfoy placed a hand on his right cheek and held it there. Harry waited for the slap. He was still waiting even when Malfoy lifted his other hand into place to hold his left cheek.

            And when Malfoy leaned forwards and kissed him.

            And then he got over his own attack of unaccustomed passivity and kissed him back.

*

            moodysavage: Well, he does now!

            unneeded: The connection between Lucius and the Ministry is not what anyone thinks right now.

            And yes, Harry is having lots of fun.

            Arisa: Thanks! I am having a ton of fun with this story.

            Seiren: Next chapter! Or possibly Chapter 9.
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