Chapter Fourteen of 'Changing of the Guard'- Counterstrike

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fourteen—Counterstrike

Harry spent a few moments pacing his bedroom when he returned to Grimmauld Place. The rest of the evening had been nothing very remarkable. Draco had introduced him to a few more “friends”—none, he had informed Harry in a whisper, as close to him as Pansy—and they had shown varying mixtures of shock, resignation, disgust, and despair. Their hostess, Helena Clothilde, had nodded on them frostily from a distance, and after that everyone was a bit more polite.

And then Draco had led him out into the great entrance hall of Clothilde Castle before he would let Harry depart, and kissed him sweetly, slowly, his hands working into Harry’s hair and his thumbs rubbing the back of his neck. His face when he leaned away from Harry was more open than it had been since they’d started this pretense.

“I’ll see you later,” he said softly.

And Harry had nodded and somehow managed to Apparate home without Splinching himself—how, he didn’t know, when his mind was so full of Draco.

Draco. Damn it. The problems began the moment you started thinking of him as a person instead of just a client. Sympathy with the clients’ problems is fine. Being happy that you can help them is fine. Caring about their lives as if they were going to be part of your life forever is not, and you know it.

Harry growled under his breath. He knew it, yes, but it didn’t seem to be something he could help in the case of Draco. His feelings were braided with the other man’s. When Draco smiled, Harry felt the echo of the expression like a warm throb just below his sternum. When Draco seemed genuinely distressed by some of the things said at the parties (it showed in the way he drew in his breath sharply before he answered), Harry had to stifle the impulse to drawl back at the offender in Brian’s voice. After all, Brian had no social reputation to maintain.

And Harry could accept, now, that it was too late for him to leave without hurting Draco.

But there is still lesser pain as opposed to greater.

Pansy had known Draco a long time. Draco had trusted Harry enough to leave “Brian” alone with her instead of insisting on being present every moment. She probably knew facets of his character Harry couldn’t begin to imagine. He was the one who had intruded into Draco’s life, whilst she had always been there.

Harry knew that this problem was his own fault. He shouldn’t have trusted to Draco’s emotional control so much. He should never have had sex with him. He shouldn’t have assumed that Draco could encounter a man who really was perfect for him—apparently—and not want something more.

As it was Harry’s problem, it was up to him to fix the problem, to look out for the future that Draco seemed to be neglecting at the moment for the purpose of having fun with Brian. He could not do everything—that was why he would need Pansy and Narcissa’s help, and he had already sent an owl off to Narcissa, playing on the story of the lies he’d told her and bewailing the fact that he didn’t have the strength to extricate himself when he knew it would be the best thing for Draco—but he made a set of resolutions then and there:

No more sex. It just distracted them both and made everything more muddled.

Display a few of Brian’s faults—the way he flashed forth his quick temper without completely understanding a situation, for instance. Show Draco that Brian wasn’t the perfect man he’d thought he was, and he might have to give up too much to be with him, even if he still wanted to.

Manipulate Draco in some obvious and clumsy ways he could easily discover. That would lead to greater distrust on Draco’s part and more cautious evaluation of Brian’s potential as a long-term partner.

Harry could not be emotionally closed to Draco, not any longer, not after what they’d shared. But he was still lying. His ideal of completing every job perfectly was already tarnished. He would walk the thin line between what his principles would permit him to do and what they wouldn’t, and do everything permissible.

He realized he had come to a halt in front of his mirror and was staring into it, as though the face with the scar on its forehead and the green eyes could tell him something Brian’s could not. Harry glared impatiently at himself.

“You’re the one who caused trouble,” he told the Harry Potter who still lived inside him, thin and tattered as a rotting curtain. “You were the one who let your libido get the better of your wariness, and if you didn’t have this ridiculous Gryffindor sense of fair play, things wouldn’t be so hard.”

The face in the mirror said nothing back. Harry intensified his glare, then realized how silly he was being and whirled away, clattering down the stairs to talk to Kreacher about meals for the next day.

No matter how hard he tried to kill himself, his own preoccupations and limitations, when he vanished into a new personality, some of them insisted on clinging to life anyway. It was very frustrating.

*

Draco leafed slowly through the Ministry records, shaking his head with each page he turned. No Brian Montgomery had applied for an International Floo passport in the last thirty years, either, or given evidence of his having achieved wizarding education comparable to the level of British NEWTs in another country, or acted in any wizarding theater.

You knew he was a liar, Draco thought, leaning back in the chair. He probably didn’t expect you to look into his background because this was just a job, and so long as he did his job perfectly, why would you care who he really was?

He had cared, at first, because Brian might be spying on him or manipulating him for some larger purpose. And now, when his feelings had changed completely, the lack of evidence was still vexing.

Draco reached across the table and tapped another stack of parchment with his thumb. The Argus Association, a company specializing in keeping an eye on every single prominent family line in Britain, had been happy to send him information on the Handler family for a modest fee. The Handlers were pure-bloods and had nothing to hide. And none of the family had had, in the last eighty years, a daughter named Emma.

There could be explanations. But Draco was beginning to think that most of them were not very comprehensive ones.

And then there had been the familiarity of Brian’s magic last night, the way it had sparked and connected them. Draco was certain he had never made love with this man before under a different name, but he might have met him. And yet, at the same time, wouldn’t he have remembered meeting him? That kind of magic could not easily be hidden.

Questions, and more questions, and they only open into more questions yet, without answers, as if I were a rat running in a maze.

Draco rose restlessly to his feet. He still had some hours remaining before he would go to Haut Alley with Brian. At the moment, he thought he needed to do something else than sit brooding on paperwork, which meant swinging past Malfoy’s Machineries was out. Perhaps he would go play Quidditch in the garden, or swim in the large pool that magic kept heated and free of ice year-round. The house-elves had supposedly managed a new piece of spellwork to counter the intense cold of the water that always assaulted Draco when he first jumped in, no matter how warm it was.

He paused with one foot on the stairs, his eyes narrowed. There was a stranger in the house; he could hear a voice flowing out from the direction of his father’s study that definitely should not be there.

Now Draco had a problem. He could hardly approach Lucius’s study without alerting his father that something was wrong. Indeed, Lucius had probably not put up a privacy spell in the first place only because Narcissa was out and Draco had assured him he’d be up in his own study all morning. The moment Lucius heard footsteps, that would change.

And Lucius was also very successful at detecting eavesdropping spells, a trick he’d taught Draco.

Draco sat down where he was on the steps and silently drew his wand. Rather than casting a spell to bring the sound of the voices closer to him, the usual means of overhearing a conversation, he sharpened his own hearing. He winced when he could hear a spider climbing on the walls somewhere above him and the muffled squeaks of house-elves preparing lunch in the kitchens, but that was just the price he would have to pay for listening to his father and the stranger. Lucius probably wouldn’t take this tactic into consideration; he was politely but implacably against everything that caused him inconvenience, and assumed Draco was the same way.

Assuming I’m your mirror image has caused you quite a few problems, Father, and yet admitting you’ve been wrong would cause you more, Draco thought, and leaned an elbow on the banister as he listened.

“…rather an extraordinary request, Lucius,” the stranger was saying. Even listening hard, Draco didn’t manage to identify him. “After all, you know that social pressure accomplishes most of what you want to do.”

“Social pressure is no longer enough,” Lucius said tightly, “not if my son feels free to flaunt his disgusting behavior in the face of his marriage prospects.”

Draco’s fingers tightened around the railing of the spiral staircase.

“Well, that’s true enough,” said the stranger in a conciliating fashion. People often sounded like that when Lucius had offered them money. “And looking through the books is not such a hard task. What’s the name you want for this organization?”

“Counterstrike.” His father sounded as if he were relishing the word. Draco wondered sourly if it had taken him all night to come up with it. He tightened his fingers on the railing again and stared unseeingly at the brilliant sunlight cascading through the enchanted windows in the entrance hall.

“I like it,” said the stranger, sounding pleased. “Neutral. Almost….polite.”

“It will be the most polite organization you can imagine, to counteract my son’s rudeness,” Lucius said. “Excuse me a moment.” And he must have realized he’d better not chance Draco coming down the stairs, and cast a privacy ward after all, because no matter how hard he listened after that, Draco couldn’t hear anything new.

He stood slowly, ending the spell that had sharpened his hearing, and exhaled several times. He had to consider what he’d heard in a rational frame of mind, in order to tease out all the possible nuances from it.

Lucius was forming an organization to counter Draco’s rudeness. And given the stranger’s comment about social pressure, it was probably specifically to act against homosexuality. The reference to the books could only mean that the organization would busy itself with looking up all the laws about public homosexuality that the Ministry didn’t enforce any more, having trusted to the small size of the wizarding community and its concern with prestige to keep people from doing such disturbing things.

Lucius was fighting back, but not directly, the way Draco had assumed he would—offering bribes and threats and even curses if Draco didn’t act like the proper heir he had brought him up to be. His father had evidently decided that such personal opposition was unwise, given how much he had to lose by it. Instead, he would work behind the scenes, as he had done during the years after the Dark Lord was first banished.

Cleverer than I thought, Father. But I am more clever still.

Draco stood and headed back to his study at a brisk pace. It seemed he’d be spending the afternoon with Brian after all, but not at lunch.

*

Harry sighed in relief as a small tawny owl landed on his windowsill and held out a letter to him. Though a letter sent to one of his personae had never yet failed to find its way to him, thanks to certain modifications he added to his wards when he took up a new Metamorphosis case, there was always a first time.

Pansy wrote a neat hand, with slightly slanting letters that Harry imagined must have given the teachers at Hogwarts considerable relief after essays full of chickenscratch.

Mr. Montgomery:

I have come to the conclusion that the best way to secure Draco’s status is for you to stop impressing him. This may sound easier said than done, but in reality, Draco will be free to think only two things about such an occurrence: that you really do not know as much about how to suit him as you pretend and that your victories so far have been based on luck, or that you are deliberately playing him for a fool. He will become contemptuous in the first case, angry in the second. I advise you to have spells on hand ready to deceive or distract him. At worst, you will need to secure your escape from a very angry Malfoy.

Harry snorted a little. Losing a physical contest with Draco was the outcome he worried about the least. Draco simply did not have the power to trap and hold Harry in any place where he didn’t agree to stay.

You will, of course, want to know why I think these courses of action will be efficacious. I have seen Draco in relationships before—including, briefly and disastrously, one with me—and I know how his mind works. He is not usually so incredibly relaxed as he was with you last night, but he does pass through an initial period of suspicion, during which he believes the relationship must end at any moment, followed by a smug period in which he wants everyone to see and acknowledge what a prize he has won (and realize they cannot have it for themselves whatever the cost). This is the stage he seems to have reached with you, but in a way I have never seen before, because he is so insistent on showing you about.

Harry snorted again. The stages Pansy described were visible in Draco, but she had assumed they’d extended over a much longer time than Draco and “Brian” had actually been dating.

But it is in Draco to hate being played for a fool, and he never forgives someone who has become intimate with him and then turns out not to be as he imagined. (In this he is more like his father than he knows).

Harry winced. Then he shook his head. Why should the thought of not being forgiven by Draco hurt so much? Of course he was going to get hurt. His own feelings weren’t important. What was most important was Draco’s freedom and lesser hurt; Harry had to inflict a wound on him that he could grow past and get over.

My own sin was minor: I happened to be honest to him on an issue it would have been better to shut my mouth and look wise about. He flew into a temper tantrum. He had conceived me to be perfectly obedient to his will, and that the only thoughts in my head were thoughts he had put there. What irritated him was not my contradiction of his opinion; by then he had learned that the world would often contradict him. But he had not predicted my contradiction. He had thought he knew me in every way. He will think he knows you by now. Simply show him that he does not, that some of you was a lie or that all of you was, and the shock of it will separate him effectively from you.

Harry let his eyes fall half-shut and chuckled a little, though not without pain. It sounded as though the most effective method to make Draco forget about him would be simply to tell him that he was Harry Potter.

But that would lead to the unraveling of the whole secret of Metamorphosis, and Harry could hardly have that. He was not about to sacrifice his entire life for a few days of pleasure.

And, yes, all right, exceedingly deep emotional connection. But I went into this knowing it would be a bit of fun at most. I have only myself to blame that I wanted it to be more than that.

He opened his eyes and read Pansy’s last paragraph.

I do not trust you, and thus I will be taking some precautions of my own to ensure that Draco is not too badly hurt by this. If you attack him physically or probe with magic into his mind, be assured I will hunt you down.

Pansy Parkinson.

Harry relaxed a little. He did not intend to attack Draco physically or probe his mind. And if Pansy was the kind to act on suspicions instead of reality, Harry was still confident he could protect himself.

He reached for a quill and sat a moment, smiling as he remembered the handwriting he had chosen to adopt for Brian. Yes, the pretense was dissolving, and this would be a mask he couldn’t wear again, but it still could give a few fine performances before it was hung back on the wall.

He bent over the parchment and began to write, thanking Pansy for her advice and telling her it agreed with the conclusions he himself had come to.

That’s Brian. He knows he was hired out of Metamorphosis and that nothing can be permanent. Pansy lacks the first piece of knowledge, and Draco the second. I am ahead of both of them in the never-ending game.

If he thought of it as a game, he knew it would hurt less. It always had.

*

Draco sat back and considered the letter for a moment, then nodded. It laid out what he had overheard from Lucius’s conversation with the stranger in neat, simple terms, and gave evidence and support to his speculations. It told Brian that they would need to get together as soon as possible and plan on how to challenge Lucius.

Or Counterstrike, rather, since he has chosen to let others do his dirty work for him.

Brian would probably write back without the slightest idea that something was wrong. But Draco intended the letter to accomplish more than that. He sealed it in an envelope and called for a house-elf.

One appeared in a moment, bowing low—Rini, who usually tended the gardens. Draco raised an eyebrow. The elf squeaked, pulled its ears, and said something shrill and incomprehensible about most of the other elves being involved in preparing Master Lucius’s lunch right now.

Well, a garden elf was better than none. And the task Draco wanted to request of this one was not a usual job for any elf in his service. He leaned confidingly forwards, and the elf’s eyes followed his hands and body intently.

“I need this letter delivered, Rini,” he said. “But I need you to give it to an owl you can track.”

Rini stared at him with big eyes, then blinked twice. “I is tracking?” he asked.

Draco nodded. “I need to know where the person this is addressed to lives, but I think he’d have set up wards against the normal methods of tracking owls. So I need you to follow the bird and keep him from knowing of your presence.” He lowered his voice mysteriously. “Do you think you can do this properly, Rini? It’s very important.”

Rini sucked in his breath.

“Important to the future of the family,” Draco added, which could be true for all he knew. “And important to my future, too.” That was certain. Draco wanted Brian, but he needed to know who Brian was in order to have him. The other man remaining in a position of power over him—even though that position at the moment seemed to consist mainly of knowledge Draco didn’t have—was not acceptable.

Rini puffed out his chest with the breath he drew. “Rini can do it!” he proclaimed. “Rini is following small insects in the garden from flower to flower, to find their eggs and destroy them! Owls is much bigger. I can track them.”

Draco smiled. “Good. Remember, secrecy is essential. You can’t let him sense you, no matter what happens. If you think he’s going to sense you, then retreat from the house the owl enters, even if you haven’t seen his face. Then come back and give me a full report. If you can see without being seen, remain hidden and spy him out, then come back and show me that face in an image. Can you do this?” House-elf magic was fully capable of all the things he was asking, Draco knew. It was a matter of making sure Rini understood his instructions, so he didn’t come back with some awfully sincere but half-baked result.

Rini bobbed his head furiously. “Track the owl!” he squeaked. “Remain hidden! Retreat if he might notice Rini and report to Master Draco! Come back if I sees him and report to Master Draco with his face!”

“Good.” Draco held out the letter, and Rini snatched it and bolted from the room. Draco leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. In a way, it felt dishonorable, this spying on Brian—not at all the sort of thing Draco had expected to have to do to someone with whom he had shared that emotional connection last night.

But he was not seeing the whole Brian, that was certain. And he wanted to. Even if the truth infuriated him, Draco needed it. Because this was about more than defying his father, now, and Draco had never been one to play games with his personal future, however careless he might look from the outside. Pansy had been foolish enough, at one point, to think he’d dumped her because he was enraged. But Draco had done it because he knew she was not what he wanted, what he needed, to make his way in the world.

And Brian is? the skeptical part of his brain asked.

Draco laughed to himself. “He is certainly closer to it,” he said aloud, and then stood up and strode towards the Malfoy legal library. He would make himself familiar with all the laws against homosexuality that Counterstrike might dig up and decide to use.

*

“Master Draco!”

Draco jumped. He had been so deep into one of the legal books he’d discovered, conducting a running disagreement in his mind, that he hadn’t noticed Rini’s return. He sat up now and stared at the house-elf. Rini was practically bouncing on his toes, which Draco thought was good odds he had succeeded in his mission.

“Did you find him, Rini?” he asked, forcing himself to relax again. Human excitement tended to further excite house-elves, until they simply ran around in circles and squeaked and relayed nothing coherent at all.

“Yes, yes, Rini did!” Rini puffed out his chest again. “Rini was smart! There was a hole for a house-elf in his wards, and Rini waited until his house-elf went out, and then Rini sneaked into the hole and persuaded the house to accept him!” He nodded importantly. “Is elf magic. Very strong. No wizard guards against it.”

Draco felt his eyebrows rise. Brian was living in Muggle London, and he had a house-elf? “And what did you find?” he asked, his voice eager despite himself. “What does his face look like?” He had to remind himself that Brian could be using his true appearance, and the image of his face would tell Draco nothing. But if it was different in even a few particulars, Draco might at least be able to discover who he was related to.

Rini waved a hand in front of him, and an image appeared, hovering in the air a few inches from Draco as if drawn on a piece of parchment.

It was Harry Potter’s face.

Draco’s fingers, clenching into a fist, ripped a page from the book he held.

Chapter 15.