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Marathon	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 52456 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Eight—Thunder Far Away
            “And are you sure that someone interfered with the wrist-bell?”
            Harry scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. Why did Robards insist on questioning him like this? Harry had given him all the details of the “crime” on the corner of Knockturn Alley and Diagon, had cleaned up the evidence so no one else would be alarmed by it, and then come straight to the Ministry and told them everything. It wasn’t like he was known for lying. The only thing he had done that might come under the category was cover up for another Auror when he needed a holiday.
            Malfoy stood in the corridor outside the office. He had fixed Harry with the same frozen stare before Robards shut his office door that he’d used ever since Harry told him that they needed to go to the Ministry first, instead of home for the conversation Harry had promised.
            Harry was sorry about that, but when his wrist-bell had jerked and rung, telling him to come to the Ministry at once, he had thought it best to obey. If this was another trap, the Ministry at least had enough people around, even in the middle of the night, that Harry could easily find help.
            Robards, the senior Auror who had called him, didn’t seem inclined to trust him, though. He had made Harry repeat the wrist-bell part of the story again and again, and now he leaned back with his heavy hands on the desk in front of him, an even heavier frown on his face.
            “I never heard of such a thing,” he said. “The Unspeakables were the ones who designed the bells. The ones who promised us that they were impossible to interfere with.”
            “The Unspeakables were wrong,” Harry said, and didn’t feel inclined to temper his speech even when Robards glared at him. He didn’t know what else Robards wanted from him. Harry had had the experience he’d had.
            “You’ll have to go and talk to them,” Robards said, and opened his office door again, even as he prepared a memo that Harry knew would fly ahead of him to the Department of Mysteries. “You’re bringing them quite the number of cases lately.”
            “I didn’t know what the black powder was,” Harry said. “The only thing I can say for certain after my encounter with the—the Spiders is that it is a powder, and it isn’t a solid object.”
            “Unless it’s something they made from grinding up a solid object.”
            Harry winced. Robards always made him feel stupid—not that Robards was a genius, but he saw around corners and could predict things in a way that Harry still couldn’t do. Harry was better with what was in front of him.
            “Right, sir,” he said, and watched the memo wing away before he stepped out into the corridor.
            Malfoy was waiting for him. Harry paused, one foot awkwardly in the air before he brought it down again. He was aware of Robards’s curious gaze, too, though Robards only muttered something under his breath that sounded like, “Watch yourself,” before he shut the office up.
            “Well?” Malfoy said. He spoke as if his lips had turned to ice.
            Harry sighed. “I have to go to the Department of Mysteries and talk to them about the wrist-bell and the ways that someone could possibly have interfered with it. You can go home, or you can come with me. I doubt they’ll really care.”
            “I’m a witness,” Malfoy said, and set out as though he knew the way to the Department of Mysteries better than Harry did. Maybe he did, Harry thought as he followed him. He knew that Malfoy had a lot of money, and he assumed that he’d inherited it, but maybe he leavened that with selling potions to Unspeakables or consulting with them about Dark artifacts or something.
            Harry studied Malfoy’s face sideways as he walked. Malfoy had ceased to look frozen and now merely looked lifeless. The Aurors passing, sometimes dragging a bound and Silenced criminal, didn’t gain more from him than the flicker of an eyelash. When they had to wait for the lifts, he stood as silently and stolidly as though he did that every day of his life, too.
            Harry cocked his head. He wondered if he had imagined the fear on Malfoy’s face after the black powder exploded, the passion making his hand shake when he told Harry that he thought Harry had done enough because Harry had nearly sacrificed his life to save everyone. This man didn’t look capable of that kind of emotion.
            “Since you can’t seem to stop staring at me,” Malfoy said, “proving our connection, this seems to be the perfect place to have that talk about life-debts you promised me.”
            Harry started, and stepped into the lift when it arrived with a sense of impending doom. “We really should wait,” he said. “There are lots of people who might overhear us here and use the information against you.”
            “Such concern,” Malfoy said, turning to face him, and yes, the mask was gone and Harry realized it had been a mask. Malfoy’s eyes were cold, his pulse beating in his throat as though it would like to leap out and box Harry’s ears. “There’s no one else in the lift with us, and we might have to wait a while when we get there. Do you have any idea of the problems you’ve caused?”
            Harry wanted to apologize. It was the thing he would have done with most other people who were angry at him. It seemed—well, the best thing to do, really. Most of the time, he was in the wrong. He just didn’t understand people that well, even the ones he was closest to, like Lily. And it saved time and effort and arguments in the future.
            But if he apologized enough to Malfoy, Malfoy would walk all over him. And Harry was supposed to be learning how to say no. He tilted his head back and asked instead, “Would letting you die have been any more effective? And you might have saved my life, canceling a debt, and then I’d have saved yours the next time and started another one. And you said that the debts from years ago were included in it, too. So I don’t see that it makes a difference, really.”
            Malfoy blinked rapidly, several times. Harry waited, but he hadn’t come up with any more answer than that by the time the lift reached the Department of Mysteries. Harry stepped off, rolling his eyes. He thought it likely that Malfoy would want to go home now. He could have nothing else to say to Harry.
            But he followed Harry all the way to the Department of Mysteries, and stayed on the bench outside the office of the Unspeakable Harry was directed to speak to, the one who had invented the wrist-bells. When Harry looked back once before that door shut behind him, he could see Malfoy’s eyes.
            They’re the most luminous things in here, Harry thought irrelevantly, and then shut thought out altogether and concentrated on remembering details, the way the Unspeakables liked.
*
            It was almost noon again by the time Harker, the Unspeakable Harry had been speaking to, was satisfied that he knew what had caused the problem with the wrist-bell and let Harry go. Harry shook his head as he stepped out. Harker, true to his kind, had made little noises of enlightenment, but hadn’t told Harry how he suspected the Spiders were tampering with the thing.
            And he hadn’t told Harry whether he could even trust messages from the bell in the future. Harry sighed.
            “It seems that your disregard for your well-being is a protective adaptation,” Malfoy murmured, falling into step beside him. “Since no one else gives a shit, either.”
            Harry started and blinked at him. “Malfoy? Thought you’d gone home hours ago.” He would have continued, but an embarrassingly noisy rumble started up from his stomach. He patted it and cleared his throat.
            “Come,” Malfoy said, and swept ahead of Harry. His frozen look had its uses, it seemed, in the way that he managed to send people scuttling out of their way. Harry stumbled a little in his wake, half-amused, half-curious. He had no idea what Malfoy thought he could accomplish by making people run away from him.
            But where Malfoy led him wasn’t a Floo or the Apparition point, as Harry had thought it would be, but to a tiny restaurant on the Ministry’s eighth floor that Harry had never suspected was there. Malfoy stared at the witch running it, and she piled biscuits and scones and butter on a tray until it threatened to collapse. Then Malfoy floated it over to one of the seven desks crammed into the office, which must once have been separate cubicles, and dropped it in front of Harry with an expressive thump. Harry meekly broke a scone and put some butter on it.
            “Let us discuss this,” Malfoy said, sliding into the seat across from him, and waving his wand. A sophisticated and subtle Privacy Charm sprang up around them; Harry thought he was the only one in the vicinity who noticed it, and he might not have if he was chewing something crunchier. He nodded to Malfoy in appreciation, but he couldn’t speak yet, and Malfoy swept ahead into the gap, leaning forwards and staring into Harry’s eyes. “Perhaps you are right that the life-debts would entangle us whether or not you had let me save your life last night.”
            Harry nodded, encouragement to go on, and reached for a biscuit that looked as if it might fill one of the empty, gnawing corners in his stomach.
            “But I am not one of those you must protect.” Malfoy’s voice had become glittering and diamond-edged as frost, and he closed his hands on the edge of the table. Harry sheltered the food with his arm. “I am not one of your helpless children. I am not your ex-wife, who was content to stay out of your life until she threw up her hands.”
            Harry tried to come to Ginny’s defense, but his mouth was still full, and Malfoy rolled on. “I will not be treated like a child or a dependent.”
            Harry finally swallowed enough, although it left his throat sticky, to say something coherent in protest. “I wasn’t treating you like a child. I was protecting you the way I would a partner.”
            Malfoy paused, and those cold eyes evaluated him until Harry almost squirmed in his chair. Then Malfoy shook his head. “No. You wanted me to stay behind in the alley. You would not have commanded a partner to stay so.”
            Harry finally opened a hand towards him, the way he had towards Ginny when their arguments over divorce or staying married had got to this point. “Fine, yes, I did. You don’t have the training that an Auror would to survive a battle like that. And you seized my arm and Apparated along with me when I didn’t know you were there! I could have hurt you without even realizing it! I had a low opinion of your common sense, okay? I wanted you to keep out of the way.”
            Malfoy went on staring, and then said, “You do not need to worry about me.”
            Harry leaned back and snorted. “Too late,” he said. “I’m worried about someone who takes risks like that and waits up for me. If you wanted me not to worry, then you should have gone about helping me in the most hateful way possible.”
            “Then you would not have listened to me.” Malfoy seemed to be considering flipping the table again, if the position of his hands was any indication.
            “But then I wouldn’t be worrying about you, either,” Harry pointed out, and popped a biscuit into his mouth in triumph, while Malfoy still sought words and his eyes grew cold enough to freeze his skin.
            “This is ridiculous,” Malfoy said at last, his voice low and very precise. “I am meant to be helping you, not the other way around.”
            “I don’t see why we can’t help each other,” Harry said. He was more pleased with the idea the more he thought about it. It would content Scorpius to know that his father wasn’t just laboring to help Harry with no reward, and that would content Al. And maybe it would give Harry the courage to go through the inevitable confrontations with Lily and Ginny and Ron and Hermione when they found out Malfoy was living with him, if Harry could think of him as someone he was helping, too.
            “Do you define yourself by service?”
            Harry blinked at Malfoy and put the biscuit he’d been about to eat down. “What? I’m more than an Auror, if that’s what you mean.”
            “But you define yourself by the service you can give to others.” Malfoy’s eyes had an almost hysterical glitter in them now that didn’t go well with their general coldness. “How you can help them. You think of yourself as someone who owes me help, not someone who’s owed.”
            Harry rolled his eyes. “That would be sort of hard with you complaining about the life-debt every time I turn around, wouldn’t it? And I don’t see why it’s a bad thing. If I can do something, I should. If I see a problem and I don’t solve it, who’s going to?”
            Malfoy’s face had a very strange expression on it. Harry didn’t understand it until he massaged his throat as if something was going to crawl up the inside of it, cleared it, and said, “I am not a problem, Potter.”
            Harry shrugged at him and took another scone. “Sorry,” he said, through the food, partially because he thought it should be said and partially to see Malfoy scowl about his lack of manners. “Didn’t mean to imply that you were. I just meant that you were terrified after the battle, and you took a risk by Apparating along with me without telling me that you were going to be doing it, and the notion of entangled life-debts upsets you. If I can ease one of those things, make you more comfortable, then I should.”
            “Why?” Malfoy now looked as if he would push himself up from the table and walk away, life-debt or no.
            Harry blinked. He hadn’t thought Malfoy, of all people, would need an explanation for something Harry wanted to do for him personally. He hadn’t needed an explanation of why Harry had wanted to save Scorpius, had he? The fact that it was his son seemed like it was enough.
            “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Harry said finally. He didn’t have any other answer. He never would, no matter how long Malfoy stared at him.
            Malfoy bowed his head and put his hand on his forehead. Harry watched him, still eating scones. He was sorry he was so exasperating to deal with, but maybe Malfoy’s advice about learning to say no had done him some good already, because he didn’t feel the need to apologize for it.
            “Auror Potter!”
            Harry turned around. One of the Unspeakables he recognized from a few meetings, although he hadn’t been in the office speaking to him this time, was bustling up to his table, frowning and tapping the bell that hung from his own wrist.
            “You need to come back in and let us look at your bell again, Auror Potter,” the Unspeakable said, his beard swinging as he shook his head. “We thought of something that could have caused the problem, a few tests we didn’t perform. It should take no more than four or five hours.”
            Harry opened his mouth, and then caught Malfoy’s eye across the table. He had dropped his hands from his face and gone frosty again, as if the outcome of the situation interested him, but had nothing to do with him.
            Harry reached up and unhooked the leather band that attached his own bell to his wrist, and dropped it into the Unspeakable’s reaching hand.
            “There you are,” he said, smiling up at him. “You have my bell, and you can perform any tests you want on it. I’m going home.”
            The Unspeakable stared at him, then shook his head a little. “Auror Robards assured us that you would cooperate,” he said.
            “What makes you think I’m not?”
            The Unspeakable frowned again, and then obviously rewrote recent history in his head to suit himself. As Harry had always known, they were more interested in objects than people, and they had the object. The chances that the problem lay with Harry himself were small, and they wanted to perform their tests on something that wouldn’t talk back. “Right,” the Unspeakable said, and bustled off again.
            Harry turned back to Malfoy. “Can we take these scones and biscuits with us?”
            Malfoy nodded and rose slowly to his feet, never taking his gaze off Harry. Harry raised his eyebrows. “What? Wasn’t that a good enough example of saying no?”
            “It was a wonderful one,” Malfoy said, and dipped his head a little. “Yes, we can take them with us.”
            He turned to make arrangements for another tray, and so he didn’t see the way Harry closed his eyes and took in a long breath. Good. Harry had the feeling that he would have said something cutting about it, namely that Harry shouldn’t let a stray bit of approval affect him like that.
            But Harry felt…
            He could feel appreciation sliding through him like marmalade.
            Wonderful, Malfoy had said. And even though the tone of his voice hadn’t altered much, it was all too clear that he had spoken with unqualified approval.
            If I can help you, it doesn’t matter much, because you’re helping me more, Harry thought, and was ready by the time Malfoy turned around again with the food. The least he could do was show his appreciation when Malfoy did.
*
            delia cerrano: When it comes to his marriage, he very definitely does not want to talk about them.
            SP777: Black powder, not white powder! It was just an idea I came up with.
            moodysavage: Ordinarily, he wouldn’t, but he doesn’t mind when it’s just a quick cleanup.
            polka dot: Doubt it. He would have had to figure out a way past the security on the wrist-bell, for one thing.
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Marathon