Chapter Twenty-Four of 'Changing of the Guard'- Against All Hope

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Twenty-Four—Against All Hope

Harry frowned when he took the message from the owl that had just fluttered to the window and realized it had come from Draco. He really didn’t know why Draco would need to write to him when they had just seen each other a few hours before. Harry had spent those hours calming Nusante, reassuring him that the Aurors wouldn’t remember anything of the attack, and then sitting stiff-faced through a conversation with Ron and Hermione in which Ron had chattered on about the raid—of which he’d heard rumors—and how much he wished he could have gone on it. No matter how many times Harry told himself that Ron was looking forwards to arresting the criminals who had caused a riot (as far as he knew) and not to the destruction of gay witches and wizards, there was still a small wound inside him from Ron’s words that refused to heal.

And then he had come back to Grimmauld Place hoping that he would find a response to his letter from Narcissa. How long would it take for her to acknowledge that, yes, Harry was still keeping his part of the bargain by attempting to leave Draco, even if he had to resort to false cheating in order to do so? Perhaps she was having trouble locating a piece of parchment that would show she was telling the truth.

Instead, there was this message from Draco. Harry ripped it grimly open, expecting an invitation to a date or a suggestion that Harry come over so they could have sex. That would be like Draco, who despite his cleverness and unexpected depths was still one of the most thoughtless, impulsive, shallow—

Harry:

My father disowned me.

Harry froze, staring at the letter. His hands were shaking, and he only noticed when the paper startled to rattle. He took a deep breath and licked his lips and read on.

My father disowned me. He made threats, of course. I have the notion that he’s started plans, perhaps even participated in them, that he hopes will destroy the rebellion we’re raising. We should discuss the best way to get in touch with Nusante and warn him about this. The next meeting place can’t be too obvious, and though Nusante has passionate belief in his cause, I don’t trust him to choose a place that’s not obvious. Come visit me tonight. I’m in the flat that you first came to in your Brian disguise. Our conversation might not be long, but it should prove interesting.

Draco.

Harry shook his head, growling softly. Draco could have made a few suggestions in the letter, and waited for Harry’s return owl. That would have allowed them to have half a productive conversation, anyway. He only wanted to see Harry again so he could ask troublesome questions and leer.

And then Harry closed his eyes and fought the temptation to smack himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand.

The most momentous piece of news is still the one he put first.

Draco had hired Brian to help him get disowned. It sounded like the plan had succeeded brilliantly, even with Brian’s less-than-direct help for the last part of it. That meant Harry had fulfilled the contract, and that meant this was the end of the job, and he owed Draco nothing more.

Harry purred deep in his throat. Then he stopped, frowning. That sound belonged to one of his personas who liked hunting and always purred when she crouched over a dead animal, expressing a mingling of human and feline satisfaction.

Well, you still haven’t quite regained control of yourself after your confrontation with Draco. A little confusion is to be expected.

Harry leaned back on the wall of his bedroom, not far from the closet which contained his selection of robes, and took several deep, calming breaths. All was well now. He would be free to take up other jobs for Metamorphosis, to forget about the danger dogging his heels from the moment Narcissa had figured out who he was. Mrs. Malfoy ought to be happy, he thought absently, even if she wouldn’t write him back and tell him she was. He would stay away from her precious son. And Draco would have to forget about him and go on. After all, what could he do? Send Harry Howlers?

I’ll go in to Metamorphosis tomorrow, he decided, straightening. Who knows? Among the letters may be a case that will require the creation of an entirely new persona, perhaps the best one I’ve ever invented.

And if he felt a small wound as he had when he listened to Ron’s ranting earlier that evening—well, none of the other promises he’d made Draco had been binding. No money had changed hands, and no one would be hurt.

Nusante and his followers?

They’d have Draco. And maybe Draco was impulsive and arrogant and shallow, but if he knew how to do anything, Harry thought, it was how to engage in activity that would make Lucius Malfoy want to kill.

He went to tell Kreacher that he’d have Italian food tonight—the house-elf had hidden inside the kitchens of several Muggle restaurants to learn how to cook the more unusual food choices—whistling under his breath all the way.

*

At first Draco watched the sky for an owl every few minutes, in between reading Harry’s letter to his mother over and over again and trying to figure out how to feel. A coldness lurked behind these words that felt forced and feigned to him, rather like the story of a ten-year crush that Harry had tried to sell to him and, apparently, to Narcissa. Was that all Harry knew how to do when confronted with the truth, lie? And why did he try when he was so bad at it?

At one point, Draco woke from a fantasy of what Harry would say when he finally responded to the owl, and realized that he’d been sitting in his very comfortable chair in the dark for some time. He cast a Tempus charm, the bright glow of the numbers cutting through the gloom.

Nine-o’clock. And Harry hasn’t written me back.

Draco sat still, his mind roaming over all the available evidence in much the same way it had when trying to figure out the specifics involved in Harry’s wrist movement to Transfigure himself. Harry might have been hurt in the fight with the Aurors, but Draco thought he would have noticed a wound, or the results of a curse, during those long moments they’d stood talking after his use of the mind-reading potion. He might have been with his friends for the evening, but that wouldn’t have prevented him from stealing a moment to respond, even if only to tell Draco he was busy. He might have not opened the letter, but Draco hadn’t written anything on the envelope or used the Malfoy seal (he thought he should start observing the scruples that applied to a disinherited son); he would have had to open the letter to find out who it was from.

Which must mean he wasn’t going to write back.

And why?

Draco’s shoulders tightened as he remembered his own letter, written in the first flush of excitement after he left the Manor. He had told Harry that his father had disowned him. That was the very first sentence. The invitation followed it, and Harry would have to be stupid not to glance down the rest of the parchment.

But Harry could be stupid when he wanted to be, couldn’t he? He was very good at simply not allowing certain facts to enter his head.

What if he thought that, since Draco had hired him for a specific purpose and that purpose had been fulfilled, he could pull back now? What if he sought to end their association in the simplest manner possible, by vanishing from Draco’s life and hoping he wouldn’t follow?

Draco rose slowly, deliberately, to his feet. His hands were clenched into fists, and his breath sounded in half-hungry rasps over his lips. He observed himself from a distance, aware that his anger must be quite astonishing, though as yet his mind was insulated from the full force of it.

Then the dam broke, and he and his anger were the same thing, swimming in liquid as sour as bile and hot as acid, and his breath had become one long, continuous hiss, as if he and not Harry were the one who spoke Parseltongue.

He turned and flicked his wand, issuing the soundless call that would summon a house-elf from the Manor. Normally, of course, a disinherited child should never have been able to do such a thing, but this was a Black spell, not a Malfoy one, taught to Draco by Narcissa one summer day long ago when he’d been fretfully searching for things to do. He was nearly certain that Lucius would not have set up wards to prevent his house-elves from hearing it. Now, of course, it was the elf’s choice whether to respond.

Rini seemed to know what was good for him. He appeared a moment later, bowing frantically even as he banged his head against the floor, punishing himself for disobeying the orders of the Lord of the Manor.

Draco’s words made him look up, eyes wide, and stop moving immediately.

“Take me,” Draco whispered, “to the house that you entered once before. The house where you found Harry Potter.”

Rini’s mouth dropped open, and he whimpered for a moment. Then he said, “I is trying, but I can’t bring Master Draco through the wards, Master Draco! Just room enough for one house-elf at a time! Sorry! So sorry!” He grabbed his ears and whacked his face into the floor again.

Draco curled his lip in distaste. The small gesture was enough to make Rini be still.

“Simply lead me to the house,” Draco said. “Once there, I will do the rest.”

He thought of Harry complacently sitting in his house, probably whistling as he planned how to spend his seven hundred Galleons, and his rage increased.

Did anything we did matter to you besides the money, you bastard? What kind of person are you, that you can ignore the offer of a passion you’ll never feel with anyone else?

Well, either Harry really wasn’t the kind of person Draco had thought he was, and Draco was about to correct his own misapprehension—

Or he would burn Harry’s shell to ashes with the force of his righteous anger.

Either way, I win.

*

Harry had just finished eating his dinner—he’d eaten at a leisurely pace, one of the weaknesses of his base self that he rarely took the time to indulge—and settled back into a chair in the library with one of those “modern Muggleborn novels” that Hermione had been encouraging him to read. They supposedly depicted in detail the dramas of young Muggleborn men and women trying to fit into a society as traditional and restrictive as the wizarding world. Harry, who considered that he lived daily with evidence of exactly how restrictive the wizarding world could be towards those it idolized or hated, saw no need to read fiction about it, but tonight he was in just the sort of amused, tolerant mood that a book like this needed. He’d won a victory he didn’t want to think much about, and—

And someone was out in the street, applying steady pressure against his wards. It wasn’t flashy magic, but more like a loud, sustained knocking.

Harry rose swiftly to his feet, his wand in his hand, smooth possibilities traveling through his head as he brought his cold persona forwards. If it were fans, he could scare them off. If someone from the Ministry wanted to talk to him and had given up in disgust at the blocked Floo connection, Harry could give the answers in a cold enough tone to ensure they’d never do this again.

He reached out with his awareness of magical signatures, sliding around his own wards, trying to tell if it was a stranger or a friend standing there. Probably stranger; Ron and Hermione were keyed into his wards, after all, and so were most of the other Weasleys—

He reeled back when he felt the blazing magical signature, and caught himself with a hand on a bookshelf. What the fuck was Draco doing here? How the fuck had he known where Harry lived?

Harry felt the storm building in his head again, the flickers and flakes of his personalities breaking apart from one another and flying in circles. He immediately barked an order at the fragments, pulling himself—himselves—back together with a physical jerk. This kind of reaction whenever he thought of Draco was unacceptable. They had to live in the same world together, since Harry wouldn’t give up visiting the pure-blood social circles Draco moved in. And he had managed to fool Draco once already, hadn’t he? Draco hadn’t looked twice at Elizabeth Gouldier, and in fact hadn’t seemed very interested in anything she had to say.

Draco could not make him break down and do stupid things. That was all a problem Harry had created for himself, because he had leaped from knowing that Draco knew one of his secrets to anticipating the day when Draco would discover them all. He was attributing a cleverness to Draco that the other man simply didn’t have any reason to possess.

There’s no doubting his persistence, though, Harry thought in irritation as the wards kept resounding like a badly played piano.

With his cold self foremost in the front of his mind, and not-so-incidentally casting a spell that highlighted the mouth-shaped bruise on his neck, Harry went downstairs.

*

Harry opened the door after Draco had knocked more than a hundred times. His eyes were wary, his face set and cold, and altogether he looked like nothing so much as a stag preparing to charge. Draco could see the same sort of noble courage in his half-flared nostrils and tightly-clamped lips.

If he had real courage, he wouldn’t find telling the truth so hard.

Draco pressed in as soon as the wards were lowered. No chance that Harry could tell him to wait on the doorstep and Draco would fall for it. He turned the moment he got inside the door, so that he could have his back to a wall. No telling how violent this would get before they were finished, either.

Harry raised an eyebrow and shut the door slowly. “Come right in,” he said, every word tart and acidic.

With his own acidic anger still boiling and churning in his head, Draco hardly cared. He had planned to handle Harry very carefully, dancing around the topic at first, hoping to lure him into confessing of his own free will. But that was before Harry had decided to ignore his owl and pretend they meant nothing to each other.

How stupid is he? It hadn’t escaped Draco’s notice that Harry’s breathing had quickened the moment he stepped into the gloomy entrance hall, and that he stood a little straighter, now, as if Draco’s approval were something to be courted. We reach out to each other whether we want to or not. We would react to one another in a crowd of a thousand.

“You might as well give up your sham of cheating on me,” Draco said, and drew out the letter his mother had given him, flinging it at Harry. Harry caught it with that same quick motion, the Seeker’s catch, the twisting wrist. Draco shivered, and wondered if he should be annoyed or grateful that he was shivering with desire. I cannot be free of this shared obsession either, it seems. “I know that you’re not.”

Harry lowered his eyes to the letter, and then turned absurdly pale. Draco found himself actually tensing to take a step forwards, thinking Harry might faint and he would have to catch him. But when Harry’s head came up, his eyes were brilliant and furious, and he was crumpling the parchment in his hand as if he could hide the evidence of his deception that way.

“She had no right to share this with you,” Harry said, and his hand slipped back towards his robe as if he were feeling for his wand.

“She’s my mother,” Draco said, a new scathing gout of rage breaking out beneath his heart. “What is she to you but someone else who’s trying to get you to tell the truth?” He did take that step forwards now, ignoring the way that Harry’s wand—a polished wooden wand quite different from the one he used as Brian—pointed straight at his chest. “Do you ever tell the truth, Harry? Or do you just hide behind all the deceptions you can and gnaw rat-like at every trust that someone tries to put in you? Do your friends know who you are, what you are? A liar, and worse, someone who lies to himself about what he wants and what matters to him? I would never have thought that you, the hero of the hour, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Chosen One, could be such a coward and a hypocrite. But I see I was wrong. The truth is frightening, isn’t it? And you can’t handle it. You build masks. You—“

*

Harry didn’t realize consciously what he was doing until it was done. He just wanted Draco to stop saying those words. Someone else couldn’t suspect that he’d made masks up and hidden behind them. Not multiple ones. One was fine. One was Brian.

And the names Draco was calling him—speaking as if those names actually belonged to him, as if all of Harry Potter was confined and held in the Chosen One, or the Boy-Who-Lived, or whatever other labels the wizarding world decided to adopt for him. That Harry Potter wasn’t real, never had been, but Draco was trying to make him be, and it was intolerable.

His wand flicked, and Draco flew backwards across the entrance hall, slamming into the far wall. His head sagged forwards on his chest as something seemed to explode in his body, and Harry, staring out of the haze of rage and magic that had for a moment consumed him, suddenly realized what he had done.

His wand clattered to the floor as he put his hands over his eyes.

No. Oh, no.

He wanted to claw at his own body, tear the magic out of himself. He shouldn’t have it if he misused it like this. It was the real Harry, the weak Harry, who had done this, and the real Harry was as stupid and undeserving of any gift or blessing as Harry had always thought he would be. Of course he was. He was nothing more than a shell of others’ expectations wrapped around the ashes of his self-confidence, wasn’t he? Nothing made sense for him anymore. Harry couldn’t stand being him anymore.

His head lifted as the thought cut through him. He couldn’t stand being him anymore. Yes, that was right. And though he might have had no option but throwing up desperate walls a moment ago, trying to make himself believe that he was not that person anymore when he would know all along that he was at core and bottom and center, he was thinking clearly now, and he remembered that he had another option.

Upstairs, the reverse Pensieve waited. Harry had to brew the potion that went with it, but that would not take long. He had familiarized himself with every step of the potion; it had been his bedtime reading when he found himself locked in the persona of the weak Harry Potter and he couldn’t sleep. Yes, that would do. He would make it now, and he would wake up as—

As whom?

There was an endless list of possibilities stretching before him, endless personas he could become, endless people he could be. He only needed to choose the one that had the fullest personality, the most curious life. And he would bury himself inside that person and become them, with their memories, and forget all about the horrible thing he had just done.

He started to turn away.

And then Draco groaned.

Harry turned back slowly, staring. He had been so convinced Draco was dead that it felt, now, as if the world had tilted off its axis, or death had reversed itself, even though Dumbledore had told him it was impossible to resurrect the dead. He swallowed. He had come to peace with himself as a murderer, because he was going to annihilate the person who had done that. Could he come to peace with himself as someone who had hurt Draco?

Draco stirred weakly. Harry crept back towards him, slow step by step, and then caught him as he crumpled to the floor, the force of Harry’s magic no longer holding him against the wall.

Harry felt horrible, clumsy, weak with guilt and the fear that he might touch a broken bone and exacerbate Draco’s pain. He was breathing hoarsely as he Summoned his wand with a flick of his hand and then ran it gently over Draco’s body, using a simple spell to determine the source of any pain. Draco arched and groaned as the wand traveled over his bottommost rib on the left side. Harry breathed softly now, because he had learned a spell in his bodyguard training that might help with this.

He reached down, his wand resting against the rib, and closed his eyes. He had not performed this spell on someone else before, but he was used to doing it through cloth and flesh. In the midst of battle, there was no time to strip down and have all the luxuries he might be permitted in hospital.

Carefully, he Transfigured Draco’s rib from a broken bone to a healthy one, feeling out the lines of breakage and the chips of bone, removing them or realigning them according to what the magic dictated. The spell proceeded slowly, and more than once Draco groaned and shifted uneasily, his hand rising as if he would clasp Harry’s arm and make him stop. Harry shifted so that he could give Draco a hold on his shoulder; with one arm slung beneath Draco’s body, supporting him, and the other controlling the wand, he had no hands free.

It took perhaps ten minutes, which felt like two hours to Harry when he sat back, his muscles trembling. This time, though, the spell he cast to detect pain revealed only a slight soreness on Draco’s left side, quickly fading. Harry cast one more spell just to make sure; this one illuminated the flesh from the inside, briefly, and let him examine Draco’s bottom left rib. He sighed a breath of relief when he compared it to the one just above and realized it was as whole as the others.

The desperate task done, his guilt came crashing to the forefront. Harry put an arm over his eyes and sobbed.

His weakness had caused this, but it was not simply the weakness of vulnerability to Draco’s words. He had the ability to maintain control of his magic; he had hung on through worse insults, harder flayings with words, such as the night he had come out to Ron. He had not injured Ron the way he had Draco.

And then to simply assume Draco was dead without checking! He had suffered minutes of pain Harry could have spared him.

There were certain things Harry did not do. He could justify the games he played with Metamorphosis to himself because he was practicing an art, having fun, making money, and hurting no one else. Not his clients, anyway, the people who mattered. He had hurt people who tried to attack his clients when he was playing bodyguard, and sometimes others, like Lucius, who had their worlds spun upside-down by the “revelation” the client had hired him to provide—that they were straight, or capable of attracting a lover other than the one their parents proposed for them. But those were risks Harry evaluated before he ever took a case. He could be at peace with them because he had decided they were acceptable. He did not take cases where the main motive seemed to be petty revenge.

Now, with his vision ripped open, he wondered when he had started accepting that it was all right to cause pain to Draco. The moment Narcissa had discovered his identity? The moment they had slept together? The moment they had met?

He had blamed Draco for causing him to lose his emotional control, but if Harry had really mastered himself as he had always liked to think he had, he would have found it easy enough to refuse to sleep with Draco, to withdraw from the relationship when Narcissa threatened him, or to sit Draco down and explain. If Draco had been a raging arsehole about the explanation, Harry could have Obliviated him.

Those were the things he could have done, should have done, if he were really at the top of his game. Now, it was beginning to seem like mere luck that he had not become emotionally involved with a client in this fashion before.

Or maybe—

Harry swallowed. He didn’t know what part of himself, what persona, was speaking these words to him with cold, merciless clarity. Perhaps a new one. It didn’t sound at all familiar.

Maybe it was different because you really do share something with Draco that you didn’t share with any of your other clients. Avoid calling it liking or infatuation or love if the words make you uncomfortable, but the emotion is there, and running from it involves you inflicting emotional and finally physical harm on others. That is not acceptable. How could you ever think it was?

Harry stared down at Draco and ran a hand through his hair. Yes, he was guilty—

Forget about guilt. It does nothing productive. Atonement, reparations, restitution. Those are the words you should be thinking on.

Harry sighed, and relaxed. He felt as if he’d been placed under the Imperius Curse and had it suddenly lifted. Glancing back over his actions in the past week, he was horrified at his stupidity.

He had prided himself, before, on how good he was at creating personas that could face up to every situation. He could create one for this situation.

The new voice in his head, his own voice, speaking to him, would be the core of that persona. It could have the strength of the cold Harry, the principles that the weak Harry Potter wouldn’t surrender, and the openness of the person Draco needed.

The persona would have to have all those qualities, or Harry didn’t think he could make things up to Draco.

He gently slung his arms beneath Draco’s waist and back, lightened him with a flick of the wand, and then carried him upstairs to one of the bedrooms that Kreacher kept scrupulously clean, even though it was never used.

*

Draco opened his eyes slowly. Memory took a moment to return, and when it did, it made his throat ache.

He turned his head to the side, and a hand held a glass of clear, cold water to his lips. Draco gulped eagerly, then opened his eyes to see his savior, expecting to find himself in St. Mungo’s or back in the Manor. Harry would have owled Narcissa about him, surely, and she might have sneaked him in.

Instead, Harry sat on a chair beside the bed, gazing steadily at him, hope and caution and an incredible weight of sorrow in his gaze.

“You have every right to ask me to leave you alone forever,” Harry said quietly. “And that’s what I’ll do, if you want it. But I want to ask you what you want. What I did was inexcusable, and because of that, it has to go beyond an apology. What do you want?”

Draco stared at him in silence. Harry looked back. Draco didn’t think he had ever seen anyone look so tired before, and so determined to fight back against the weariness and do what was right anyway.

This was the man he had seen, briefly, when they lay in bed together.

For a moment, Draco toyed with the idea of asking Harry to leave him. He had been hurt—he could still feel the remnants of pain in his left side when he breathed deeply—and he had never been into love games that almost killed him.

On the other hand, you should have known better than to confront a dangerous, emotionally unstable, magically powerful wizard the way you did. Back a lion into a corner and what do you think will happen?

Draco grimaced. What he felt was not self-blame, exactly, as much as it was disgust with himself for being so stupid. That was unacceptable. He’d come off the high of defeating Lucius and finding out his mother was still on his side, but he ought to have been Slytherin enough to rein in his emotions and subtly get the answer out of Harry.

Harry, it seemed, had already arrived at that calm, clear-headed position, and would do what Draco wanted even if it hurt him. Draco was not going to be stupid enough to throw this chance away because of his own mistake, or in pique.

He reached out and took Harry’s right wrist, squeezing just enough to be painful. Harry raised an eyebrow and said nothing, waiting.

“I want you to do the most difficult thing of all,” he said quietly. “I want you to tell me the truth.”

Harry gave him a half-smile, the right corner of his mouth twitching up. “Yes,” he said. “That is very difficult. But you’ll have it.”

Chapter 25.

Comments

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I liked the chance to write about revelations, epiphanies, and general smartness in this chapter, instead of stupidity.