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Acts of Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21189 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Nine—Relying
            “Harry, I need to talk to you,” said Ginny.
            Harry opened one eye in surprise. It was a lazy day, for once, surprisingly warm for early April. He had planned to lie on the grass for most of the afternoon and listen to the sound of Ron and George whacking a Bludger back and forth.
            Now, though, he sat up, because Ginny was sitting beside him with such a serious expression that he thought he owed her at least that much respect. “Sure,” Harry said, reaching out to twine his fingers through hers. “What is it?”
            Ginny abruptly looked over. Harry followed her gaze, but he couldn’t see anything remarkable there, just Hermione sitting in a chair and reading a book that was supposed to help her study for the NEWTs. She was pretty good at ignoring the sounds of the Bludger and Ron’s occasional yells for help when George dived at him.
            “Are you going to do this forever?”
            “What?” Harry asked, turning back to her. “Lying on the grass? As long as I can get away with.”
            That didn’t even raise a smile, which was unusual for Ginny. She twined their hands together harder, and tugged Harry towards her. Harry reached up and pushed a strand of her hair gently back. She still looked so—serious and lost and devastated. Harry wondered how long she’d been thinking about this conversation.
            “Politics,” said Ginny. Her voice was low, but Harry could hear her words even better than George’s mock howl as Ron batted the Bludger away from him. “Throwing your name and fame around to get results.”
            Harry stared with his mouth a little open. He hadn’t realized that was what Ginny was objecting to. She had sometimes looked upset when he ran away to talk to the Wizengamot or give an interview or testify at a trial, but he had thought it was because they didn’t get to spend as much time together.
            “Oh,” he said. “Well. It’s been pretty effective so far.” He stopped flailing in his head and thought a second. Ginny disturbed at least as much courtesy and truth as Harry would give an ally like Kingsley. “To keep people from going to prison who don’t deserve it, or at least don’t deserve it for long. And to get the Ministry to respect beings like the centaurs.”
            Ginny shut her eyes. Her breathing was fast and shallow. Harry looked towards Hermione again, this time wondering if he might need someone to help him get Ginny inside the house. She really didn’t look well.
            “I don’t like you doing it,” Ginny whispered, and she opened her eyes and pinned him with a stare so intense that Harry felt himself freezing like a bug on a pin. “What’s going to happen when you don’t have any causes left?”
            “The last thing I’m worried about is running out of people who need me,” said Harry, a little dryly. He really didn’t.
            “Not that,” said Ginny. “When you don’t have worthy causes left. Are you going to go on being political? Are you going to go on—Harry, there was a time when you didn’t want to use your fame at all.”
            “Oh.” Harry stared at their hands, and turned them gently over, watching the way their fingers ran in and out of each other. It reminded him of some of the vines draped over the Burrow. “That.”
            “Yes. That.” Ginny took a breath that seemed to suck in most of the air lingering around the pitch. “Harry, what happened?”
            Harry wanted to say, “I grew up.” But that would be cruel, and imply Ginny hadn’t, and…oh, he didn’t know. What mattered was that she was upset, and Harry had to explain how he’d got here.
            “I realized people weren’t going to treat me like an ordinary person no matter what happened,” he said. “At least, they won’t until years after the war.” He had thought of that too, that of course someday they would stop listening to him so much. “It’s either really good or really bad. I want to do what I can to make sure that it’s at least good for other people. I think that’s better than ignoring it, or pretending that Rita Skeeter and the Wizengamot are going to treat me like an ordinary person when they’re not.”
            Ginny shut her eyes. “But aren’t you afraid of where it’s going to end up? That you won’t ever be able to stop? Or that you’ll do something wrong even though you mean to do something right?”
            Harry studied her, but because she was sitting there with her eyes closed, she didn’t see him doing it, and didn’t respond the way Harry thought she would have most of the time. Harry was the one who had to end up asking the question. “Do you think no one can be good in politics, Gin? That they just get more and more corrupt all the time?”
            He was ready to argue, to say that Ginny’s own father was in a prominent position in the Ministry now and he was doing all right, and that Kingsley was also still a good person. But Ginny opened her eyes and gave him a simple glance.
            “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I think.”
            Harry only held her hand tighter, not knowing what to say. He supposed he had thought the same way, once, because he had disliked all the Ministers he’d known before Kingsley. But he’d trusted Dumbledore, and that was a political position.
            Even more than I knew, with what Draco told me about the way Dumbledore protected the magical creatures near the school.

            He supposed what Ginny really wanted to know was when he had changed his mind.
            “I think differently, now,” he told her, with a quick smile and a squeeze of her hand. “I saw people doing some great things right after the war, to make sure that criminals got fair trials even when they were Death Eaters and we got control of the Ministry back from Voldemort’s allies.”
            “But they did horrible things, too,” said Ginny. “Like whoever sent you the wrong time for the start of Malfoy’s trial.”
            His name is Draco. But Harry wasn’t enough of a fool to think that little correction would matter to her. He only nodded and said, “Yes, but someone else sent me the right one. Not everyone in the Ministry is good, Ginny. I’m not saying that. Just that some of them are, and some of them aren’t but will help me for their own reasons.”
            “There! That!” Ginny pounced on it, pulling away and pointing the hand Harry had been holding at him. “You wouldn’t have wanted to cooperate with those people, once. You would have wanted them to believe the same things you do. What happens if they decide it’s not convenient to help you later?”
            “Then I suppose they’ll fight me.” Harry swallowed, trying to come to terms with a change he hadn’t even realized was happening in himself. “I suppose that—Hermione fights one way, she crusades and she wants people to change their minds, and I want them to do things. As long as they do, I don’t suppose I care that much about what their motivations were.”
            Ginny stood up, all flowing red hair and flashing eyes. Harry, looking up at her, felt his breath catch. She was magnificent, and her words were full of passionate conviction. He really wanted to believe what she was saying.
            “I think people should do the right things. I wouldn’t work with someone who believed Muggleborn witches and wizards were worth less than pure-bloods, just because they might say the right things. I think you need to think really carefully, Harry Potter, about who you are and what you fought for.”
            And she turned away.
            Harry watched her go, blinking a little. He thought of what he could say to call her back, and nearly opened his mouth. But he shut it again without speaking.
            Because it wouldn’t be sincere. Because he would only be doing what he knew he had to to get along with her, not because he agreed.
            And if he understood the new Ginny at all, she would despise him for that.
*
            Draco slowly tapped his stirring rod on the edge of the cauldron and stepped back from it. The Boil Cure Potion looked up at him, shimmering slightly.
            He had done it. He had done it. He wasn’t as useless as he had feared he was. He hadn’t kept his hand in with potions in the last year the way he had with casting spells, and he had been afraid…
            Draco shook his head and let his hand fall to rest on the edge of the table. Well, he had made this potion. It was a simple thing—for him—but it might sell for a good enough price in some of the apothecaries in Diagon Alley. He would have to contact them and find out who would try to cheat him and who wouldn’t.
            Although I might have to accept the price they offer even if they cheat me, Draco admitted to himself. There wouldn’t be as many people willing to deal with a Malfoy as there had been before the war, and maybe fewer who would be willing to meet with a Potions brewer that had restrictions on his movements the way Draco did.
            “Draco?”
            Draco turned around, staring. This wasn’t one of the days Harry was supposed to visit, and he had thought Harry would never come without sending an owl, anyway. He seemed to assume he was unwelcome in Malfoy Manor unless they had an appointment.
            But Harry was there, his mouth quirking in a hesitant smile that warmed as his eyes passed from Draco to the cauldron and back. “Here,” he said, holding out a book wrapped in green paper. “I wondered if you would use something like this, but it looks like you will.”
            Draco took the gift and stared at it. “It’s not my birthday,” he said, appalled at the nonsense that tumbled out of his mouth even as it tumbled. “And I already have all the first-year textbooks I can use.”
            “I know that. Open it.”
            Draco opened it. There was only so much resistance to gifts that he could politely offer, he thought. And he was itching to see what Harry had gone to the trouble of wrapping in Slytherin-green paper.
            Harry leaned on the wall, and watched him with eyes that were honestly almost that shade of green. Draco looked down before his embarrassing thoughts could take control of his mouth again.
            The book was on Potions. Draco had suspected it would be from the way Harry had looked at the cauldron. But it was one Draco had never seen before, with a bright, embossed silver beetle climbing the side of the pictured cauldron.
            Gains Without Galleons, said the large title, and beneath that, Common Potions Ingredients You Don’t Need to Buy. The author was one Ares Cornstryker, a Potions master that Draco had heard of from some of Professor Snape’s comments.
            Draco swallowed and looked up. Harry smiled back at him.
            “I thought,” Harry said, with one wave of his hand, “that since it might be a bit difficult to buy ingredients in the shops, and your ancestors’ store has to run out sometime…”
            Draco cleared his throat. “Thank you.” It was difficult to speak. But once again the stupid thoughts took over his mouth. “Would Weasley approve of you giving me something like this? Something that would let me earn my own living, I mean.”
            Harry laughed, free and easy, where he had tensed up at the mention of Weasley’s name. Probably afraid Draco was going to insult his friend again or something. “No. After all, it’s not like I’m giving you money. I’m giving you the chance to earn your own money. If you don’t take it, that’s not up to me.”
            Draco smiled in silence at him. Harry laughed again and crossed the room to touch Draco’s hand where it rested on the book.
            “You should do that more often,” Harry murmured to him. “It improves you like you wouldn’t believe.”
            And he departed, and Draco was left staring at the book in wonder.
            It was only later that he thought the gift of the book might have been prompted by something else. Not that Draco was undeserving of the gift, or that Harry wouldn’t have seen it and thought of him. But perhaps…
            Perhaps it was a means of helping Draco, soothing Draco, because he couldn’t help or soothe someone else.
            Draco thought at the time it was a political defeat he would read about it in the paper in a few days. And then those days passed, and he didn’t, and he forgot about it, absorbed into the hum of his newly busy life.
            It was only much later that he began to understand.
*
starr: No one is really going to make Harry’s life hell. He is going to have arguments and discussions with them, though.
ChaosLady: Yes, especially since, in a way, he’s also Harry’s friend.
SP777: Well, he may or may not have the fame and popularity to get that far. It would probably take years, and as he pointed out to Ginny, eventually his reputation will start to fade.
moon: Thank you!
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Acts of Life