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The Conservation of Fame	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 22392 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Eight—Call the Tune

            “Draco.”

            Harry had thought that if he said the word with just the right intonation, stressing both syllables equally and rolling his eyes at the same time, Draco might see how absurd it was, to keep Harry literally dangling here above the ground without his wand, while Draco’s hand must be getting tired holding up Harry’s full weight.

            As if answering Harry’s thoughts, the way that he seemed to be disturbingly good at, Draco smiled and spun his wand once. Harry felt the Lightening Charm creep over him, and scowled. It wouldn’t keep him from being hurt if he hit the ground, but it would make Draco feel as though he was holding something no heavier than a balloon.

            “You’re still a bastard,” he snapped, shaking his fringe out of his eyes and glaring up at Draco. At the moment, he would almost have welcomed Draco seeing his scar. Get this ridiculous dance out of the way, and over with.

            But then he remembered what he would lose, the peace and the ability to study whatever he wanted and the conversations with his friends where they didn’t have to worry about someone breaking through the wards or trying to kill the Weasleys in a jealous fit because they thought all of them were Harry’s secret lovers, and shuddered. No. He would actually almost rather die than go back to that.

            “Still?” Draco stretched out along his broom with that careless grace that used to annoy Harry so much when he showed it off in Potions class and smiled down at Harry, his fingers gently raking the air. “So you’re ready to admit that you did know me, before, when we were at Hogwarts?”

            “Didn’t you ever hear about not trusting confessions that you get under torture?” Harry shook his head and once again flung the hair out of his eyes. Sweat was starting to trickle down his forehead and get in the way of seeing Draco, and it was vital that he do that, so he could study his face for some sign of yielding. “I would probably tell you anything to get back up on the broom again.” He gritted his teeth. The Lightening Charm had lessened the pain of hanging from Draco’s grip, but his arm still hurt.

            “This is hardly torture,” Draco said, smiling at him. “If you would give me this one thing I want, then we could go inside the safehouse and I would treat you to a dinner of the kind that you’ve never seen.”

            “I thought you wanted to keep the safehouse secret,” Harry whinged, even as he remembered how the idea of having him look away had been Draco’s and how the prat had probably been planning even then to knock him off his broom and hold him like this.

            “I wouldn’t mind you having one of my secrets, then, when I had one of yours,” Draco murmured, and peered down at him with luminous eyes.

            “I fed you,” Harry said, giving up on subtler tactics and going straight for the blunt instrument. “I saved your life. I tended your wounds. I fought your enemies. That doesn’t matter to you? That isn’t enough to make you let this go when I ask you to let it go?”

            Draco turned his head slightly to the side, a faint frown curling his lips, and Harry’s heart leaped. But the next minute, he shook his head and sighed melodramatically. “Sorry, no. More of those Slytherin faults you so deplore. I’m selfish enough to accept all that and still want to know what you’re hiding.” He gave Harry another smile. “But I will keep my promise about the dinner, if you tell me.”

            Harry rapidly revised his options. He could refuse, and possibly plummet to his death—or, well, no, he didn’t think the Draco he had come to know in the past few days would really let that happen, but he would do something else to make Harry’s life profoundly uncomfortable. He could tell the truth, and lose everything, including the new camaraderie with Draco, who would probably think that spreading the news of the Boy-Who-Lived and where he lived far and wide was sufficient payment for the betrayal of trust. He could lie, which he wasn’t much good at in the past few days.

            He could—

            He didn’t give himself time to think, because he knew if he did, Draco would probably see the decision reflected in his eyes and have enough time to react. Harry flung himself sideways, concentrating with all his might. He didn’t do wandless magic that often, only when he had to. He preferred to rely on wards and defensive potions and all the magic that he’d perfected over the years as he built his house into a fortress.

            But now he called, and the broom he’d ridden drifted towards him. Harry grabbed it with his free hand and swung himself around and down towards it, kicking wildly at Draco’s arm as he went.

            He never knew if Draco released him in sheer surprise or simply had to because of the angle that Harry was twisting at; Harry’s foot sure didn’t hit him. Either way, Harry was mounted on the broom again a second later and thrusting out his hand. “Accio wand!” he bellowed, focusing so hard that starbursts showed up in front of his eyes.

            His wand leaped out of Draco’s robe pocket, and—

            Stuck to Draco’s hand as the utter bastard cast a Sticking Charm.

            Harry snarled and clung to the broom with both hands, leaning forwards to glare. Sadly, Draco did not cower before the awe-inspiring power of the glare and meekly restore his wand to him. He kept it, turning it around and around as though admiring the make.

            “Such a nice wand,” he murmured. “Holly wood, I think, and with a phoenix feather core?” Harry would have asked how he knew that—although he reckoned Unspeakable training probably let you pick up all kinds of strange things—when Draco abruptly stiffened and stared at him.

            “Holly,” he whispered. “Phoenix feather. There was someone who had a wand like that. Someone important.” He closed his eyes and apparently spent a silent minute battling his own mind before he gasped, “Why can’t I remember?”

            Harry grimaced. He needed his wand back and he needed to be gone from here, but as much as he hated to admit it, there was something he needed more. To soothe the pain on Draco’s face, to keep him from thinking that the failure was in his own mind. And he didn’t even have to tell the whole truth to do it.

            The spell would probably keep me from telling the whole truth anyway, he reasoned with himself as he cleared his throat. “Um, Malfoy?”

            Draco’s head ripped around, and he said, “For a moment there, in your inflections, I almost knew you. And you hated me.”

            “I was someone important during the war, yeah,” Harry said, deciding to ignore that but also to only call Draco by his first name from now on, even if the courtesy was stupid for someone who had stolen his wand. “But I did something that the Ministry really didn’t approve of, and I needed to retreat for my own safety. So I cast a spell that made most people forget who I was.”

            Draco leaned forwards far enough that Harry started to worry he would fall off, though Harry should have been able to get away without worrying about that, Merlin knew. “Including me?”

            Harry nodded. “Including you.”

            “That was—unwise,” Draco said, and Harry had the feeling that he had debated among several different words before choosing that one. “Exceedingly so. I am angry, Harry.” His voice was flat and almost casual, and he was smiling, but one look in his eyes could have told Harry the truth even if he had no familiarity with the man Draco was now.

            “I don’t really care,” Harry told him. “We were never friends before this, and I cared more about protecting my bloody life than I did about insulting people who hated me.” Let Draco think the wards around his house were because Harry feared enemies for his imaginary mistake, rather than because he feared for his solitude.

            “End the spell.” Draco’s voice started out kindly and flicked like a steel whip at the end.

            Harry shook his head, staring into his eyes. “No. Not even if you break my wand.”

            Draco’s hands flexed for a moment as if he would do just that, and Harry held his breath. The next moment, Draco huffed and half-lowered his head. “Haven’t I earned some trust?” he whispered. “You’ve come to know me now, you must realize that I’ve changed since we were children. Please?”

            Harry’s mouth dropped open at the last word, but he shook his head. “Sorry, but no. No one who dangles me over my broom by one hand and steals my wand has earned enough trust to warrant the canceling of this particular spell. Sorry,” he added again, because there was something truly wounded, and not only pretending to be so, behind the way that Draco stared at him.

            But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Harry sought in his mind for some reassurance that he wasn’t the one being unreasonable here. He’d helped Draco. He’d told him all along that he would hate the truth if he found it out. Draco was the one who couldn’t accept that, who pushed and pushed and pushed, and then had the gall to look hurt when Harry told him that he didn’t want to share anymore.

            Yes. Harry only felt bad because of the bloody spell. There was part of him that had always hated casting it on people, altering the way they thought about him. It sounded like something Voldemort would do (although he wouldn’t do it to keep people from paying attention to him, rather the reverse).

            But what else was he supposed to do, when no one else in the whole bloody wizarding world except his friends thought he deserved a normal life?

            “Harry.”

            Harry’s eyes snapped up to Draco. Draco was shifting back and forth on his broom. Harry raised his eyebrows politely. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

            Ah, yes, the look that he got back was pure poison. Harry grinned at him, relieved they had moved this back to familiar ground. This would be so much easier when they were antagonists, and when he could leave.

            But then Draco did something stupid, something that made everything hard again. Because Draco couldn’t leave well enough alone.

            He tossed Harry’s wand to him.

            Harry was so busy gaping at him that he nearly fumbled the catch. Draco gave him a small smile, something that seemed odd and unshielded without the masks that Harry thought he would normally have fastened over it. “Easy to believe that you were never a Seeker, whatever your skills on the broom,” he murmured.

            Let him keep on thinking that, Harry told himself, and swallowed the instinctive protest. “Why?” he asked, holding up his wand.

            “You don’t seem happy to have it back.” Draco’s grin widened, and he leaned forwards on his broom with the air of someone offering a polite favor. “I’ll be happy to take it again if you want to lend it to me.”

            Harry moved his hand behind his back, and Draco smiled at him in a way that told Harry he had meant him to do that. Well, fine, he would just pretend that he hadn’t noticed the smile, and talk in a normal way.

            “Because,” Draco said, losing the smile at last and speaking with a kind of quiet intensity that fascinated Harry far more than it should have, “I know that you’ll never give me your friendship or trust if I don’t.”

            Harry shook his head. “But I just admitted to casting a spell on you. Why do you want my friendship or trust?”

            Draco sighed. “It was a spell on everyone?” he said, while his fingers flexed up and down and gripped his broom in a way that said he would react if the answer turned out to be different from what he thought it was. “Not just on me? It makes everyone in the wizarding world forget who you are?”

            Harry nodded. He had thought about noting the exception for his friends, but then again, Draco had the brains to figure that out for himself, given the way they had helped Harry and Draco confuse Draco’s enemies.

            “That makes it a little easier to tolerate than it would have been if you’d singled me out as the recipient of a grudge that I couldn’t even remember,” Draco murmured, and reached out to smooth down the bristles of his broom, behind him. He didn’t look away for more than a second at a time, or blink for longer than that, either. “I want to know who you are. I want to know who’s real, the person who helped me or the one I forgot.”

            “I’m both of them,” Harry snapped. And that was true. He had never felt like the Boy-Who-Lived, but he had felt like Draco’s enemy, if only because Draco had antagonized him so much. “You can’t get around it and stop being angry at me that easily.”

            “You think I should be?” Draco looked at him, his head on one side. “And here I could have sworn that you were agitated and upset at me being angry—at least with the anger expressed by my taking your wand and putting you in an awkward position—and would have preferred that I not be.”

            Harry stared at him. “Dangling me over the side of my broom and stealing my wand is a bit much even for you,” he said.

            “Another answer reflecting intimate knowledge of me in the past,” Draco said, and leaned back on his broom and stared up at the sky. “Now it only remains to ask why you want me to be angry. What purpose it would serve. Why you didn’t want to tell me about this spell in the first place, and now expect it to do the trick of pushing me away.”

            “You’re tiresome,” Harry said, and made sure that his wand was indeed whole and unbroken before he turned his broom in the direction of home.

            “Harry.”

            Harry looked back. Draco was lying forwards over his broom now, arms folded and draped on the shaft, his smile so bright that looking at it made Harry’s breath come sharply. He wished that he hadn’t had a dream last night about how that mouth might taste.

            “I think you care about me,” Draco whispered. “In fact, I’m certain of it. Someone who didn’t wouldn’t go to all this trouble to help me escape, wouldn’t care whether I lived or died.”

            “There’s a difference between basic compassion and thinking that someone cares for you,” Harry began.

            “There might be, but you’ve gone above and beyond that,” Draco said. “You didn’t even ask me to apologize for what I just did. No, I think that you want me to be angry because that would make it easier for you to separate yourself from me. Forget about me. You don’t want anyone to crash through your precious barriers, and I managed. Now you want to wall yourself up again and forget it happened.”

            “Shouldn’t you be getting into the house before your enemies find you?” Harry snapped, staring around and wondering what was keeping them. Surely Draco had been out long enough to render the part of the exercise that was meant to protect him almost useless?

            “But I’m not going to forget it happened,” Draco said, and gave him the kind of long, slow smile that Harry could only compare to a morning of lying in bed, sleepy and warm, and under the conviction that there was absolutely nothing that he needed to do that day unless he wanted to. “This threat from my enemies can’t last forever. When it ends, then I’m going to make bloody sure that I find you and woo the answers to all my questions from your throat. Don’t forget about me.”

            He turned his broom towards the house, finally. Harry shook his head and yelled after him, “What makes you think that you can contact me once you’re gone? It’s not like you even know my Floo address!”

            Draco winked back at him over his shoulder, and kept flying. Grumbling, Harry Disapparated.

*

            He came home late that evening exhausted, having Apparated fifteen more times with the mirror before he finally hid it in a tightly warded enclosure where he kept copies of his parents’ photographs and other things that were precious to him and might conceivably be destroyed by a direct attack on the house. The tracking spell couldn’t call from behind the wards. But the main point was that the mirror’s former owner would have felt the signal simply vanish, and not know what happened to it after that.

            Sighing, Harry fell into his chair and Summoned bread, cheese, and tomatoes from the kitchen with a few lazy waves of his wand. He didn’t even bother to assemble them into a sandwich, just bit and chewed and swallowed, and let the food gradually revive him.

            He knew he would get used to the silence of the house again. He would learn to invite someone else over for lunch or dinner if he wanted company, and in the meantime, he would have conversations with his friends and work in his gardens and study spells not related to immediate danger, the way he used to.

            But…

            He couldn’t help the feeling tugging him along low in his belly, like a chain, or the way he kept turning his head to the side to see if Draco was there.

            “Can’t help,” Harry thought, as he crunched his way fiercely into a slice of tomato and ignored, for once, the way that the juice ran down onto the arm of the chair, isn’t the same thing as “needs.”

            Right. And he would just have to get used to it, and stifle his impulses to go check on Draco. Draco was the first person he’d taken care of since the war who wasn’t one of his friends, he thought. That probably explained it. His saving-people thing was going into overdrive during the years when he’d barely used it.

            He would have to meet Draco one more time to hand over the mirror when it was safe. Or, well, they could do it by owl.

            That might be safest, Harry thought, as he swallowed and then shook his head.

            He thought that his own attachment to Draco might threaten his wards a lot more than what lay beyond them.

*

            kit: Thanks! I hope the denouement was worth the buildup.

            elementalwitch: Thanks! I’m glad you like it.

            I don’t write for publication. Maybe someday.

            LeaniaSTL: As Harry thinks here, Draco probably wouldn’t drop him. But it was meant to impress on Harry how seriously Draco takes the situation.

            moodysavage: Yes, it is. And even though he does know part of the truth now, it’s only going to make his drive to know the whole truth greater.

            polka dot: Harry could, too, since he knows that Draco really wanted to know the secret, so he’s not as mad about it as he could be.

            SP777: Harry’s not quite that far gone yet.

            I don’t know how different that scene was from others that I’ve done in the past, but it was really freaking fun to write.
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The Conservation of Fame