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Chapter Forty-Seven—Various Brilliant Plans

Draco tensed as he watched Harry kiss Grey, even though he knew Harry was perfectly disguised and no one else would ever suspect that he’d cheated even that much on Draco. Could he help it that he found watching his boyfriend with another man hard?

And then Therris appeared, and only the need to maintain their act kept Draco from snarling. That was another surprise Harry hadn’t told him about. They would have to have a small talk when they were done acting out their plan to diminish the threat of Grey and embarrass Nusante.

Grey jerked away from the kiss, one hand prizing like an iron claw at Vivian’s—Harry’s—face. Harry stared at him with lips parted for a moment, then assumed an expression of incredible alarm and fumbled for his wand. Grey was reaching for his, too, but he hadn’t been prepared as Harry was, and his movements as well as his reaction time were slowed. Harry managed to lift his wand and gesture frantically first.

Draco moved his wand under the table at the same moment, reciting the incantation Harry had had him practice with such effort in his head. He used the force of his own anger and shock to power the spell. The sooner they were done with this, the sooner he could have his little talk with Harry.

Surrogo Harry Potter in loco suo con vultu meo!

Once again he was seized and shaken through a tunnel rougher than any Apparition, and then he landed in the seat where Harry had been sitting, his glamour dispelled. Harry had warned him he would have to give some explanation to Grey as to why he’d suddenly staggered, but he’d envisioned them as standing on opposite sides of the table at the time. Draco was still sitting, so he only had to slump backwards and make a loud noise of shock.

Not hard, under the circumstances. And it was better than laughing at the absolutely stunned look on Grey’s face when he saw Draco Malfoy replace Vivian Wilde.

Across the room, Harry, in the place Draco had held and with his own face—to all appearances, he would never have moved at all—leveled his wand but let his mouth hang open. Nusante was on his feet, staring back and forth between the two of them. Therris, the reporter, still stood with his camera trained on Grey, but his muscles twitched in a way that Draco knew meant he wanted to turn and photograph the new arrival.

“What,” Grey said at last, in a low voice like rocks grinding, “is the meaning of this?”

“I want to know that, too,” Draco said, and leaned forwards. He was good at feigning certain emotions—he’d been doing it in front of his father for years—even if he wasn’t good at glamours and Transfigurations, and this time, he had some genuine anger to exercise. Harry blinked at him for a moment, as if suddenly realizing that Draco might have found his unspoken surprise unpleasant.

“You have plotted with your cousin to embarrass me, of course,” Grey said. He recovered quickly, Draco would give him that. He was holding his wand halfway between Draco and Harry now, studying both of them. “You have plotted with Harry Potter as well. A strange thing, as I did not think your cousin was gay. But—“

Draco snarled at him. “I knew nothing of this,” he said. “Ask Harry. He’ll tell you that one reason we haven’t appeared in public in the last few days is that I had disappeared, and he was trying to find me. He didn’t know of Vivian’s existence; it’s not something my family generally admits. And I had no way of getting a message to him, as my cousin kept me bound and without my magic in a dark cellar.” He shut his eyes and put a hand to his forehead. “He told me he’d perfected Apparition, the dunderhead. I didn’t ask what he meant. It’s perfectly obvious now, isn’t it? He meant to switch places with me and let me take the blame whenever he’d done—what he intended to do.” He blinked up at Grey. “What did he do, anyway? It must have been something boorish, or you wouldn’t stare so.”

Grey peered at him. Draco peered back. Harry had warned him that this was the most dangerous passage of the plan. Grey had every reason not to believe Draco, and to persist in thinking it was a plan between him and Harry. On the other hand, Apparition that switched two people was at least as plausible as a spell that switched two glamoured people and made it look as though one of them had never moved—especially when no one had reason to think that Harry was good at playing anyone other than Brian.

And Harry was actually counting on Grey not to believe it immediately. It was the reason he had brought Nusante.

Grey took a step back from the table. Then he said, “I will learn the truth sooner or later, and I see no need to waste time responding to your ridiculous lies. Veridica simulatio!”

The spell splashed Draco like a glass of ice water in the face. He gasped and shivered, clutching the edge of the table, then shook his head. Merlin, that was worse than the Disillusionment Charm, which at one point had been his standard for uncomfortable magic that was not actually fatal.

When he glanced up, it was to see that Grey had aimed the spell at Harry, too. Harry, instead of trying to deflect the spell, had reacted by raising a Shield Charm in front of Nusante. Draco knew the movements would have been practiced, smooth, instinctive; Harry had shown him before he assumed the appearance of Vivian that morning.

And Nusante would have been able to see that, too—to see that Harry had fought for him at last, had protected him from physical harm, as he had long demanded.

Right now, his face looked devastated. Draco had to fight hard to keep down a grin. Was his spell setting in now and lashing Nusante with the full weight of guilt he hadn’t had to feel yet? Was seeing Harry defend him enough to make him understand how much Harry had sacrificed? Draco hoped so. Harry had brought Nusante into this plan in the first place so that he might convince him Harry had protected him from genuine danger, but if they could punish him and convince him in the same moment, Draco was all for it.

Meanwhile, Grey was once again staring. His spell had been a powerful one that would have dissolved the strongest of glamours, as well as most other appearance-changing spells, including Transfigurations. If Vivian Wilde was still in the room disguised as either Harry or Draco, his magic should have revealed him.

Draco shivered and glared up at Grey. “Are you satisfied now?” he demanded. “My cousin isn’t here. I can only conclude that he did perfect his Apparition, and is right now making preparations to flee the country. He rambled on about doing that if his plan didn’t go as he said it would.”

“How fascinating,” Therris said. “Tell me, Mr. Grey, are you going to follow your absent lover?”

Grey spun towards him, teeth set. Draco caught the slight movement of Harry’s head out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t need it. He had already made a clucking sound and reached out, scooping up the documents “Vivian” had given Grey.

“What’s this?” he said. “Donations that I meant to go to the rebellion, diverted?” He looked up into Grey’s eyes, speaking softly but clearly, so that Therris, at least, would hear every word. “How odd. Why would you need so much Malfoy money, Mr. Grey, when you’re wealthy enough on your own?” He paused, as if his brain was at the moment piecing together important clues he hadn’t had time to notice before. “Could it be,” he murmured, “that you need to fund an organization connected in some way to the rebellion? It would explain why you were willing to come here when my cousin summoned you—you, so careful about avoiding public places and acting on your own initiative. You needed money for Counterstrike. Your people invaded a peaceful private meeting and a peaceful public party. Of course you can’t show yourself as connected to such a group.”

Grey went white. Draco felt a tiny breeze lift his hair and knew Harry’s wandless magic was working, this time concentrating on Grey, pushing at his mind. He was so experienced in holding his balance whilst accusations flew around him that Harry hadn’t trusted he would lose that balance now, not without help. Better, Harry had said, to plant a few paranoid suggestions in his thoughts and shift his mood, making it harder for him to be rational about this encounter.

Therris, Draco suspected now, had been part of that same plan, to make sure Grey didn’t have time to recover and think about what he was doing. But Harry could still have told Draco he’d have a reporter present.

“I don’t—I don’t have anything to do with Counterstrike,” Grey said.

“Really?” Draco stared at the documents again. “Yet my cousin met you to provide you with these, if he didn’t do something else—“

“He kissed Grey,” Therris interjected helpfully.

“Ah.” Draco raked Grey with a slow, thoughtful glance. “And of course, Vivian can be clever, even if he’s not particularly sensible. He had to know that a way to lure you in would be to give you a way to weaken our rebellion. And you came, didn’t you?” He lowered his voice insinuatingly on the verb of the last sentence.

Grey lost his temper, though Draco doubted he would have known it if he hadn’t been so close to the man. It was a certain iciness in the muddy eyes that warned him, and the way he took a step towards the table as if he would like to reach across it and wrap his hands around Draco’s throat instead of rescuing the documents.

“You may tell your cousin Vivian Wilde,” he said, voice low, “that I shall never rest until I have hurt him as much as he has hurt me.”

“You’ll have to run him to ground first,” Draco said, barely moving his lips. “And it might be difficult to do that and manage Counterstrike at the same time.”

Grey’s glance was so frustrated that Draco felt a small smile tug at his lips. But he reminded himself that he was supposed to be angry over Vivian’s kidnapping him and trying to divert his money to Grey, and he schooled his mood until he could sigh and hold out his hand.

“I would be willing to tell you what I know of him and his movements,” he said, “as well as what little he revealed to me of his plans to leave the country. He spoke of some of them in front of me for want of another audience. But in return, I would demand that you back away from Counterstrike, and leave our rebellion fighting against prejudice as its sole enemy, rather than your cleverness and your money.”

Grey stared at him for a moment, then at Therris. There was a thoughtful look on his face, which Draco had expected. He was a man well used to “gentlemen’s bargains” and silent deals that changed the face of the wizarding world without anyone ever knowing where they had come from. He would like this, Draco thought, better than the public battle he must otherwise engage in, trying to punish Harry and Draco for something that he couldn’t prove they were connected to.

“Silence him as well,” he said, twitching his head at Therris, “and I’ll consider it.”

Draco shook his head. “I don’t have any power over him,” he said. In reality, there was no way he would give up causing Grey some public embarrassment. It was a safeguard against his changing his mind later and renewing Counterstrike. “But if you back away gracefully now, then I’ll deny the full extent of your involvement if anyone asks me. A newspaper story can only thrive so long in the absence of hard evidence.”

Grey paused, no doubt thinking how it would affect him when the Prophet printed the photograph of him kissing Vivian Wilde. Then a different kind of look came over his face, one that touched the corners of his eyes more than his expression. Draco suspected that life was about to become difficult for Therris. He would have to remind Harry to warn the reporter of that.

I could have done that already, if Harry had told me he would be here.

“Very well,” Grey said. “I will, of course, feel free to resume my backing if it turns out that you fed me false information about your cousin.”

Draco inclined his head gracefully. “I would expect nothing less.”

Grey had recovered his balance now, but it was on the side favorable to them. He would feel some of the same self-blame Draco had when he cornered Harry and tried to force a confession out of him. Such a reaction was common when a pure-blood wizard discovered that his own stupidity had contributed in part to the difficulty of the situation he found himself in. Grey, from the tilt of his head and a variation of an expression Draco had seen Lucius wear, was wondering what in the world had possessed him to believe Vivian and show his face in public in the first place.

He would back away from this. He would be able to recover from this stumble in time, or so he would be telling himself. But he would find it harder if he insisted on pursuing Counterstrike—and here his eyes traveled to the documents on the table—when his enemies were aware of his connection to the organization. Better to let that go for right now and focus on preserving his reputation and punishing the man who had lured him into his trap.

Draco knew now why Harry had insisted on Draco’s being the one who should handle the latter part of the negotiation with Grey. Harry understood pure-blood culture well, but Draco had been raised within it, and his ability to closely follow the calculations Grey made, because they were the ones he would have made himself, was nearly as good as Legilimency.

“The information about your cousin first,” Grey said.

Since Vivian did not actually exist, and Grey would be tracking a phantom, Draco obliged, spinning out a tale that he and Harry had already agreed on, and Harry had supported by appearing as Vivian to several people in the Ministry and asking anxiously about Portkeys. Grey swallowed it without pausing, though sometimes his jaw twitched with suppressed anger. Of course he would assume that a man who had tricked him and hadn’t convinced him to be his lover would flee the country in fear of him. He was far too impressed with his own power, and committed to thinking that other people were, too.

That part, Harry had predicted. Draco would have been more disturbed than impressed at how well he knew people if Harry hadn’t failed to predict that Draco would be angry when Therris appeared without warning. Harry still had some weaknesses and some limits to his power, and that meant Draco still had a chance to be equal to him.

With Therris hovering nearby to absorb every nuance of the bargain, Draco and Grey traded. In the end, Grey shook Draco’s hand, barely seeming to flinch at touching a gay man—he had touched one already today, as far as he knew—and then he turned and stalked out of the restaurant. Throughout their talk, he had entirely ignored the audience of ordinary patrons staring at them, and Draco thought he might as well keep up the same tradition.

He rose now and extended his arm to Harry, who had been commendably quiet. Harry leaned towards him and hugged him hard, as would be consistent behavior from a lover who had known Draco was missing for the last few days but hadn’t been able to tell anyone for fear of looking weak. Then Draco looked at Nusante. The man was ashen, and supporting himself with one hand on the table where he and Draco had briefly sat.

“Well,” Draco said. “I hope you can see that Harry does intend to fight for you if he needs to, and that Grey isn’t just a threat to your friends.”

“No.” Nusante evidently felt his voice was too quiet, so he cleared his throat a moment later and tried again. “No, he’s not.” He hesitated, and then looked at Harry and caught his hand so swiftly Therris couldn’t have snapped a picture of it. “I’ll think about what you did for me,” he said. “Thank you. I—I should go.”

And he turned and hurried away, his movements jerky. Draco smiled. Yes, the guilt spell would be taking effect. Perhaps Nusante had been so convinced Harry would never make any gesture of physical violence against another person for the sake of the rebellion that this one gesture had been enough to overset the balance of his mind. And the sympathy Draco had found himself unwillingly showing before might have helped.

“Thank you,” Harry whispered into his ear. He sounded close to exaltation. Well, Draco supposed, he had cause. The plan had come off more or less as Harry must have envisioned it, and without a casualty, even of their secrets. “I can’t believe—there’s no one else I could have trusted with that.” His hand slid up and down Draco’s spine as though he were trying and failing to find a way he could express his gratitude.

“Trusted me with much,” Draco whispered to him, as he turned and embraced him more strongly. Therris was snapping pictures with happy abandon, and either that or Harry’s name and face was enough to keep the restaurant’s owner from moving in and ordering them out of his establishment. “But not with Therris’s appearance. And you also didn’t say how long you would kiss Grey for.”

Harry stiffened for a moment, and Draco prepared himself for evasion. But Harry sighed instead, and said, “You’re right. We’ll need to talk about that. For the moment, will you accept that the reason I didn’t tell you is because I didn’t think of it?”

“For the moment,” Draco said, and then he put an arm around Harry’s waist, nodded to Therris and to the people watching them gape-mouthed, and escorted Harry out of the restaurant.

He could hardly wait for tomorrow’s headline.

*

Harry settled himself on the couch with a cup of the tea that Kreacher had had waiting when they walked in the door. Harry wondered idly whether Draco had ordered him to make it or whether he could read his masters’ moods well enough to know that they would want refreshment as soon as they returned.

He looked up as Draco stopped in the doorway of the drawing room and observed him narrowly. Harry smiled ruefully and patted the couch beside him. Draco crossed the room to join him, his shoulders dropping. Someone else might not have noticed the release of tension, but Harry always would.

As he turned to face Draco, he experienced a moment of dizzy terror at how necessary Draco had become to his life in such a short time. Harry could no longer imagine wanting to wake up alone, or to keep all the arrangements for Metamorphosis to himself simply for delight in the secret; his life would have lost something if he couldn’t have told Draco about the new persona he was creating or the slightly risky plan he had concocted to take advantage of an enemy’s weakness. He didn’t expect perfect sympathy from Draco, but an argument from him was more precious than the most ardent agreement from someone else.

What if he feels like this about me? Even half as much, or a fourth as much? Harry swallowed. For the first time, he understood exactly why Draco resented it so strongly when Harry left him out of something.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently, and raised a hand when Draco opened his mouth to speak. “Just a moment. If I don’t say it right now, I’m afraid I’ll never find the words again.”

“I didn’t think you had trouble finding words,” Draco muttered, but he subsided.

“Those words belong to me,” Harry said softly, “but more strongly to my personas. They come back to me like echoes at a distance.” He paused, mind straining for a moment after the thought he wanted to express. “I want you to know I’m sorry for not telling you about Therris not because I’m afraid of being scolded, or because you need to know everything I’m thinking—you don’t—but because it would have been better for us both if I’d told you. I could have shared the delight with you of knowing he’d show up. I could have asked you if you had suggestions for improving the plan, and doubtless you would have offered them.” The dry tone in his voice made Draco smile, and that gave Harry courage. “I could have expanded the possibilities, the good possibilities, for the situation. And I would have remembered, if I’d done this, that you have a say in my life too, now. It’s been a long time since I wanted to allow someone that kind of a say. I thought Ron and Hermione would only disapprove if they knew everything, and I wasn’t truly close to anyone else. But you—I don’t know how you do it, Draco, but you make me more than I was. And given how many different people I can be when I want to, I would have thought that was impossible.” He had been staring at their hands during the last part of the speech; his hand had crept out and linked his fingers with Draco’s. Now he drew a deep breath and glanced up.

Draco was looking half-stunned. He reached out and trailed his other hand down Harry’s face.

“It would be better,” he said, “if you could back up those words with actions more often. But you do well with the words, when you want to.”

Harry turned his head and kissed the palm offered to him. “I know,” he whispered. “I am sorry. I kept silent from sheer force of habit, more than anything else. I would have known you wouldn’t disapprove if I’d sat down and thought about it. But I didn’t want to think about it. You know how much I hate being disapproved of—“

“Yes,” Draco whispered. “It’s a cowardice you’ll have to get over eventually.”

Harry smiled. The words might have sounded harsh to someone else, but he knew Draco was fighting hard to keep his own principled stand, and not simply give in and let himself be swayed by Harry’s speech, no matter how honest it was.

And couldn’t he be excused for having some doubts about my honesty?

“I will try,” he said. “Please tell me if you see me slipping.”

Draco leaned forwards and kissed him for an answer. The desperation in his lips told Harry more than ten thousand words could have. He wrapped his arms around Draco and laid his head on his shoulder when the kiss ended.

Having someone else to depend on wasn’t as terrifying as he had always thought it would be.

Chapter 48.