Chapter Sixteen of 'Changing of the Guard'- In the Dragon's Head

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Sixteen—In the Dragon’s Head

Draco stepped into the pub and glanced around twice before nodding his head slowly. He supposed the Dragon’s Head could be called a normal place, without any large offense against good taste saved the stuffed dragon’s head hanging from the ceiling. Hungarian Horntail? Or Welsh Green? The head had decayed somewhat before the wizard who preserved it applied any magic, and shreds of discolored skin clung to the bony eyesockets and long, pointed fangs. Draco did not think this aided patrons in discovering the dragon’s species.

“Welcome, welcome, sir. May I escort you to a table?”

Draco turned to the bartender hastening towards him, a small, plump witch whom he was gratified to discover recognized good breeding when she saw it. “Perhaps you can,” he said, “if the man I am here to meet has not already arrived. His name is Brian Montgomery—“

“Oh, yes, sir,” said the witch, and Draco was intrigued to see a mixture of horror and delight in her eyes. “Him what’s been in all the papers!” She looked at Draco, seeming to recognize him as the other person in the papers then, but didn’t do anything other than to wave her hand at a table on the far side of the room. Brian rose to his feet when he saw Draco, smiling extravagantly.

Draco never took his eyes from the other man’s face as he made his way towards him, even when he had to duck the corner of the dragon’s jaw. He wondered idly what the proper description of his relationship with Harry Potter was now. Were they rivals? Lovers? Partners in the confrontation of extreme social prejudice against anyone who dared to kiss another person of the same sex in public?

“Draco!” Potter said, somehow managing to slur his name, which Draco had never thought possible, and then flung his arms around Draco and planted an enormous, smacking kiss on his cheek.

At the moment, the proper description would be “drunk,” Draco thought incredulously. He had decided that Potter was too good an actor to want to lose control around him. Wasn’t he worried they would end up in bed together again if he consumed alcohol in Draco’s presence?

“Brian?” he asked, barely managing to say the proper name in his surprise. “Are you all right?”

“Just—just the news and all.” Potter took a deep breath, then tilted the bottle of Firewhiskey he had back and gulped noisily from it. “Your father,” he explained, when Draco went on staring at him. “Counterstrike.” He shivered, and his fingers tightened on the bottle. “This is a bigger task than I ever imagined it would be. I mean, we’re fighting for you to be free of your parents, that’s one thing, but now we’re crusaders?”

*

Harry watched the expressions on Draco’s face as he took yet another drink of the Firewhiskey—or seemed to take one. In reality, a very useful little spell cast on the membranes of his throat caused the drink to vanish as it touched them. Harry was proud of that spell, one he’d managed to rework and perfect from a book Hermione had given him for his birthday two summers ago. It had taken him a while to make sure all his saliva wouldn’t dry up along with the liquids he put into his mouth, but eventually he’d “taught” the spell to distinguish between those substances native to the human body and foreign ones.

It was a unique variation on a spell that had been uncommon in the first place, and that meant Draco was unlikely to sense it.

Harry had felt his senses stream into high alert the moment Draco stepped into the pub. Something was wrong. He paid too little attention to the dragon’s head, which had made Harry gawp the first time he entered the place. His gaze was too focused and alert on Brian’s face, too searching. He leaned back with his fingers steepled in front of him when they sat at the table, which was a gesture Harry could see Lucius making, but not Draco, particularly not when they were involved in fighting something as devious as Counterstrike. Draco always showed more of excitement, of life; his gestures in serious situations, like the meeting with the Manager of Metamorphosis, included leaning forwards and make small sideways motions of his hands. This was more the way he had behaved immediately after Harry showed off his magic in the Malfoys’ dining room: restrained because he was dealing with an onslaught of his own thoughts and emotions at the same time he was attempting to deal with the person in front of him.

Just as he hadn’t understood exactly what was wrong that time until he realized how Draco must view his magic, Harry didn’t know the exact nature of the burden Draco was laboring under now. It could not be that Narcissa had told him the truth; Draco would have stormed in then, or simply cast a painful and humiliating curse whilst Harry wasn’t looking. Any lesser disaster, Harry was confident he could deal with, even if he didn’t understand the cause.

“Brian,” Draco said soothingly, “it’s not that bad.”

Even the way he says my name is wrong, Harry thought, fighting the temptation to cock his head to the side the way he usually did when playing thoughtful. Right now, he was playing drunk. I wonder if he has second thoughts about the blowjob, too? Too intimate for him, too open. A man like Draco Malfoy rarely lets people close.

Harry felt relief score his insides. Draco’s own wariness would make Harry’s decision to retreat from him easier. He was more likely to decide Brian’s uncouth, rude behavior now was reason to let him go.

It was relief, and only relief, that made his throat ache as if he had swallowed acid, Harry told himself, and tipped the Firewhiskey bottle up again. Those other emotions didn’t exist, didn’t belong to the persona he was acting out right now.

*

Potter did have better acting abilities than he had realized, Draco thought, and folded his fingers like his father so he wouldn’t tap them on the table in his agitation and give himself away. If he hadn’t possessed the knowledge he did, he might even have believed that Potter really was drunk. After all, it would fit Brian’s personality to indulge in extraordinary gestures of despair, and this was certainly one of those—drinking in public where anyone could see him and someone disgusted with his behavior might be tempted to take the opportunity to settle the score. Potter had chosen a convincing, purposeful act that really left him in no danger whatsoever if he needed to move fast.

But what is his purpose?

To drive me away, of course. A Malfoy can’t have a partner who’s a drunkard, and he must know that. I was right. The connection between our minds meant I came too close to finding out who he really was, and he’s scared. Trying to make me think my choice of actors wasn’t such a great choice after all, trying to disassociate himself from me.

He really must find out how Potter managed to swallow all that alcohol and yet keep from getting drunk, Draco mused as he reached out a hand now and laid it on Potter’s wrist. A Sobriety Charm cast beforehand wouldn’t do it; Draco knew that from painful experiments during his own teenage years.

“Brian,” he said softly, and waited until the other man’s blue, blue eyes met his. Potter had green eyes, but they were the same intensity of color as these and had the same direct, steady gaze. The more Draco studied Potter in his mask, the more surprised he was that he hadn’t recognized the other man at once. “I don’t think this is wise, do you? We can’t let my father see that his action caught us by surprise.”

Potter snorted, rolled his eyes, and dragged his hand away to tip the bottle into his mouth again. Draco narrowed his eyes as he watched, but no, the Firewhiskey really did flow into his throat, not vanish just before it did. Extraordinary. “No one will know we’re drinking over that,” Potter muttered.

“Which we are you referring to?” Draco asked, lifting his eyebrows. “Do you perhaps have a small man in your pocket?”

Potter slammed the bottle down with a clink that made the witch who owned the pub glance over at them, then leaned forwards. “I got something in my pocket,” he said, with an exaggerated wink. “But it’s not small!” He giggled and lunged over the table to plant a kiss scented like rotten meat on Draco’s lips.

Draco clenched a fist and waited until Potter drew away from him. The tactic to irritate him was working, in one sense; Potter’s rudeness pricked along his dignity like a spur on a horse. But that was the effect Potter wanted to achieve, and, as such, Draco would not allow him to achieve it. He had to make a habit of evaluating Potter’s movements now and countering them on principle, unless they seemed more likely to serve Draco’s purposes than hinder them.

He makes me change my plans, my reactions, my feelings, every instant, Draco thought, and for a moment wondered if he could stand a lifetime of this.

Perhaps simply start countering these tactics, and he will realize that he needs to do something else—something that might be more serious, but less annoying. This time, when Draco reached out and snared Potter’s wrist, he didn’t allow himself to be shaken off.

“My father is conceited enough to think we’re drinking over him, even if we aren’t,” he murmured, and then waved his wand and cast a Sobriety Charm on Potter. The other man couldn’t quite hide a wince as the spell gripped his mind and forcibly cleared it. Draco clamped his teeth down on his lips so they could not twitch into a smile. A Sobriety Charm on the sober had less effect than on a truly drunk person, but it was still uncomfortable. “Should we go elsewhere to discuss Counterstrike, or do you consider yourself capable of having a serious discussion in the presence of alcohol?”

For a moment, Potter sat with his eyes closed, breathing lightly. Then he reached out, sighed, and covered Draco’s hand with his. “Thank you for that,” he said softly. “I—panicked, I suppose. I’ve never been good in a crisis—“

Liar, Draco thought fondly. Such a liar.

“—And resorted to a solution that used to be a lot more frequent with me than it is now.” Potter smiled, but his eyes were shadowed. Draco thought the shadow was probably pure Brian. Potter, with his need for control over what other people thought of him, wouldn’t allow himself to drink often. “I’m ready to discuss this rationally, I promise.” He squeezed Draco’s wrist in turn and leaned forwards until Draco had to struggle to keep his eyes from crossing. “So. Do you have ideas of your own about what our strategy against Counterstrike should be, or do you want to hear some of mine?”

Quick on his feet. Ready and able to switch strategies when he realizes that the one he’s using right now isn’t working.

Draco shuddered a little and knew his voice was hoarse with lust—though lust composed of far more than simple physical longing for sex—when he replied, “Let’s hear your ideas first.”

*

Harry smiled. That required some doing, when what he really wanted was to grimace, but he did it. He’d done harder things, after all, including pretending that everything in his life was normal and fine when Ron and Hermione made pointed inquiries, and spinning a delicate fabric of lies concerning the people who worked for the Charity and his relationships with them.

He thought he should have been able to force Draco to back off with his acting. Or, correction, he should have been able to do that if Draco meant nothing to him. But even he had sensed a certain desperation in his gestures, a falsity to the acting that undermined him. Draco did mean something to him—too much, given how he would despise Harry if he knew the truth about any of this. So Harry gave up the pretense of panic for now, and began another long-term plan instead. If he could not make Draco think Brian too uncouth and low-class to associate with, he could and would trick Draco into grand plans that needed his support and then desert him in the middle of the action.

Oh, he would take steps to ensure that Draco’s life wasn’t endangered, of course. But if he got Draco involved in fighting Counterstrike with an effort that needed two to continue and then buggered off, Draco should despise Brian with all his heart and soul as a result. And it would cut off a pattern of acting that obviously wasn’t working.

Harry was also confident of his ability to weave a plan that would draw Draco in within the week’s deadline that Narcissa had given him. And sudden, strong action now was likely to draw Lucius’s attention and make him more likely to disown his son. Harry could see no drawback to acting as if he meant everything he was saying for a time.

“There’s one advantage to not actually being part of the pure-blood social circles, though it does rather limit the opportunities to practice one’s dancing,” he said, with one of Brian’s flashing smiles at Draco. Though not one of Harry Potter’s usual expressions, it did not hurt to smile like that. What hurt was seeing Draco respond instinctively, and knowing that he wouldn’t respond to the real Harry Potter the same way.

The real Harry Potter is nothing but a cloak of shadows over a figure of ashes, and you know it.

“What’s that?” Draco whispered, leaning near enough that his breath stirred the hair just above Harry’s ear. Harry shivered and resisted the urge to toss his head back. Draco found all his sensitive spots without even trying, which wasn’t half-fair.

I’ll just have to do the same thing, Harry thought, and moved his thumb so that it brushed across the center of Draco’s left palm. Draco’s breathing deepened. Harry murdered the wish that he could hear that sound forever, instead of just for another week, and soldiered on.

“You notice what the gathering undercurrents are before the pure-bloods notice it themselves,” Harry explained. “There are some things that even people as clever as you are can’t notice, Draco, probably because you belong to scattered social groups and rarely step outside them.” A compliment can’t hurt. And it might relieve some of the futile large wishes if I make the small ones come true. “People across all sorts of circles and factions and families in Great Britain are getting tired of the constant social pressures against their freedom of expression.”

Draco blinked for a moment, but said, without a change in tone, “Self-expression is a fad imported from Muggles, really. Traditional pure-blood culture deals with restraint, the control of the self.”

“Traditional pure-blood culture, yes,” Harry said. He was speaking utter truth now, as far as he knew, except about the vantage from which he had observed the culture. He’d had plenty of chances to interact with it in the past few years, far more than Draco could have dreamed of, and probably more than Draco himself had had. Draco was as limited by his insider perspective as the member of any other small group in the larger society. “And I’m sure that worked fine for your parents, and it still works fine for them. Probably it would have kept working for the younger generation, too, if not for the war.”

“The war didn’t sever the continuity of our culture,” Draco snapped back instantly. His brow was furrowing, and Harry knew he didn’t like the direction the conversation was heading, for multiple reasons. “We’re still determined to hold on to things like the dances, the marriage customs, the funeral customs, the—“

“And that’s praiseworthy,” Harry interrupted impatiently. Yes, his vision is just too entwined with the barriers, perceiving the barriers as part of reality. “But dances and marriages and funerals are something different from the perspective that being gay is disgusting, Draco. Or do you really disagree with me?” He stared hard at Draco, waiting. What Draco said next would determine the argumentative tactics that Harry had to use on him.

*

You sound almost as though you believe it, Potter, Draco thought, and bit his lips to keep from smiling. Or perhaps he would have blurted out something unfortunate? In truth, Potter’s words had stunned him and set him back on his heels. He was no longer as sure as he had been that this newest attack was just another strategy to push him off-balance.

Potter leaned too near, spoke too persuasively. His eyes blazed as if he had spent time thinking about this, and constructing arguments—another skill, like disguise, that Draco never would have associated with the Boy-Who-Lived. Didn’t he just cast Disarming Spells at people he disagreed with, and have those spells kill them by incredibly lucky coincidence?

You cannot make assumptions about him, Draco thought. And yet, that is what you keep doing.

“Imagine that I do agree with you,” Draco said. “Imagine that I think certain—shopworn—attitudes unfortunate, and less important than the customs that we have preserved for centuries. What of it? That attitude is a rooted part of pure-blood culture now, and you cannot imagine people would be much more eager to give it up than to give up the way we get married. With the population lower than it was before the war, there are some new converts to that attitude, in fact.” Draco felt his mouth fill with a sour taste. People like Marigold Moonstone, who really believed not only that men and women needed to sleep together to have children, but that men and women could find satisfaction only in each other. Whoever had thought that one up was clever, Draco admitted grudgingly. Some adolescents who would fight against the notion that they should have children merely to boost numbers would swallow pretty words whole.

“You haven’t listened to me, Draco,” Potter said, with an iron patience in his voice that Draco was inclined to call the first indication of Potter’s true personality he’d received. Brian would have laughed his sarcasm off, or reached out and touched Draco’s cheek to show he appreciated his perspective. Potter simply spoke on, with a determination to share his thoughts that Draco found irritating and charming both at once. “There is a division in pure-blood society now. The people who believe that homosexuality is wrong and that breeding is all-important are mostly older. People like your father, your mother.”

Draco opened his mouth for a moment, thinking of Marigold, and then closed it again—because all the other names that filled his head were, indeed, people of his parents’ age. He thought of Pansy, with her Muggle lover, and Blaise, with his refusal to care what other people thought of him. Though neither of them was doing exactly what Draco was, those rebellions also showed them reluctant to conform to society’s codes. Pansy hid her lover, but if she had been the perfect daughter of tradition that her mother and father wanted her to be, she never would have thought of finding a Muggle attractive in the first place.

And there were others. Draco had found some of his lovers among half-bloods and Muggleborns, but not all of them. Constrained by the ancient idea that the only woman you were supposed to sleep with was the one you were married to, other pure-blood sons sometimes turned to each other for physical release, or out of curiosity, or simply because men in the exact same predicament were unlikely to betray them. And Draco had known some pure-blood girls who made a regular habit of sleeping with their own sex, too. Since some of the old guard actually thought two women couldn’t have sex together because of the lack of a cock, they were even more likely to assume “close friendship” between their daughters than they were between their sons.

“Say that I thought you were right,” Draco said. He knew the tone of his voice had changed, but he couldn’t help it. Brian—Potter, damn it—

Does he have the slightest clue how dangerous he is? He could change the world by himself if he had the ambition.

And maybe he did now. If there was one thing Gryffindors tended to care about, it was social injustice. Draco licked his lips, and it was his turn to lean closer, seeking out the lights and shadows in those brilliant eyes, noticing all the things that Potter didn’t want him to notice.

“Is there any way of gathering all the disaffected into a single movement?” Draco asked. “It hasn’t happened so far, despite fairly severe oppression. We do things like sleep with our friends under our parents’ noses for thrills instead.” He smiled and let his fingers play over Brian’s knuckles. “Or go to Metamorphosis.”

“Metamorphosis is closed for right now, so that temptation is shut from them.” Potter was still speaking with the firm tone that made Draco’s cock stir. He could be so much, just by himself. I know at least some of Brian’s qualities are innate to him. Why does he hide behind a mask instead of using them? The publicity can’t be that bad, especially with his lies absorbing part of the brunt. “And I think what’s held them back so far is the lack of a leader—and a sparking incident. If you look at Muggle history, revolutions are quite often only potential until someone makes a stand, or refuses to be dragged from his home, or fights back against the police during a bar raid.” Potter smiled for a moment, probably at a private recollection of some Muggle history book he’d read. Draco wanted to know what it was.

He wanted quite a bit, he thought. Down, boy.

“So you suggest a sparking incident,” Draco murmured. “But from what I’ve studied of Muggle history, you can’t really plan revolutions.”

“I don’t think we need to, in this case,” Potter said, half-closing his eyes. “Like I’ve said, the rebellion is there. Suppressed. And your generation is not significantly weaker in magical strength than your parents’ generation, nor are they wanting in understanding of the world. We need to show people that the stand can be made, that’s all. Preferably in a place where younger wizards outnumber older ones.”

Draco laughed in spite of his resolve not to, because the perfect location had immediately suggested itself to him. It seemed almost as if the world were organizing itself in obedience to his and Potter’s wishes.

That is not so, he reminded himself, because that dangerously twisted thinking might easily take root in his brain. It is only that Potter is teaching you to see in new ways, and so you look with open eyes at things that were present all along.

“You know a place?” Potter’s eyes were narrowed, his smile devilish.

Draco nodded.

*

Draco hummed under his breath as he entered his bedroom. He and “Brian” had spent the rest of the afternoon planning, and chosen a place, a time, and a specific action that would spark the rising they wanted to happen.

He was certain, now, that Potter’s intelligence and strategizing ability and understanding of pure-blood culture were native to him. But was his sense of humor part of his disguise? What about the way he sometimes sneaked looks at Draco, nearly in spite of himself, as if his brain needed those glimpses to work? Or the way he had reached out and caressed the back of Draco’s hand, absently, during the times when Draco expressed some doubts or worries about the plan?

The more Draco thought about it, the more he became convinced that Potter had some deep reason to hide himself—and that the reason would not be easily discovered.

He would, he thought, send a letter to the Manager of Metamorphosis. That was even more of a long shot than writing Potter’s friends; Metamorphosis closed whilst handling a case, and the Manager typically replied to no owl post until the case was done with. And he might not know the truth about Potter’s identity even if Draco could reach him, or be willing to answer questions.

It didn’t really matter, Draco thought. It was still worth trying, because anything was worth trying to win the contest against his father and to have Potter.

I’m fully engaged on all levels. There’s no drawing back now.

Chapter 17.