lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2008-05-24 03:43 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2008-05-24 03:43 pm
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Chapter Thirty-One of 'Changing of the Guard'- The Meeting
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Chapter Thirty-One—The Meeting
“I’m glad to see you again, Elizabeth.” Nusante’s smile was anxious. He reached out and took Elizabeth’s arm hard enough to make her wince a little with the pinching of the skin. “Where is the meeting? The Apparition coordinates I received told me to come here, but it can’t be here. It’s too public.” His eyes darted about for a moment, as though he expected Aurors to come pouring out of the stone walls around him.
Elizabeth watched him for a moment, biting her lip to hold back the pity. Nusante had seemed so confident when he met them that first day at the Theater-in-the-Round, agreeing to change his play in a way he knew would cause an immediate public response. Now he looked hunted.
“You know, Raymond,” she said softly, even as she turned and led him along the alley, “if you don’t want to stay involved—if this is too hard—“
He jerked away from her and faced her with his arms folded, his eyes suddenly hard and without any trace of fear. “I never said that,” he snapped. “I can do this. I’ve always wanted to be free to love whom I wanted, and this is my best chance to do that. If I sneak away now, that leaves—how many people in the lurch? Hundreds, probably, and certainly the dozens I know who are depending on me. I may feel that I should have had a different position in the rebellion than that of leader, but I’m not about to abandon it, now that I have it.”
Elizabeth smiled at him. She had heard similar speeches from Muggle leaders of gay pride movements who in the end had decided to stay and work for it, daring mental scars and physical violence. “You’re brave,” she said, and discovered, to her amusement, that a woman’s compliment could still make him blush.
“Do you know if Draco Malfoy will be attending this meeting?” he asked, allowing her to draw him down the alley again. “There are some people who are only coming on the off-chance that they’ll see him. They—were very impressed by the way he got himself disowned. We all know he has his own business, of course, but still, it can’t have been easy for him to risk losing everything he expected to inherit.”
“I can say with some confidence that Draco Malfoy will be there,” said Elizabeth, and then leaned closer to him and lowered her voice. They were coming up on Diagon Alley now, and it was for the best, just in case someone happened to be looking at or listening to them. “And that rumor I passed along about the house we’re meeting in?” She had sent a second owl to Nusante hard on the heels of the first one that gave him the correct Apparition coordinates. “That’s true.”
Nusante jumped as if stung, then flushed again and glanced about as though someone would pay attention to them just for that. Seeing the bland or harried faces of the wizards and witches who poured past them on errands seemed to reassure him. Turning back to her, he whispered furiously, “But that’s nonsense! Harry Potter isn’t one of us. There’s no one who has more to gain from keeping the world the way it is.”
Elizabeth struggled to keep up her smile. It felt as though a menstrual cramp had invaded her belly at the moment. “I agree that he’d have a lot to gain. But maybe his motivation is the same as yours. Maybe he’s tired of not being able to walk about in the open with his lover. Maybe he’s afraid and weary at the thought of all the work the rebellion entails, but he’d still rather face that than having to hide every day for the rest of his life.”
Nusante shook his head, but in wonder this time. “I—there’s never even been a rumor about him.”
“He’s been mostly fucking Muggles, I think,” said Elizabeth, and pushed away an inappropriate pride for Nusante’s lack of suspicion. “After all, there’s the celebrity factor to make it especially unwise for him to indulge himself in the wizarding world.”
“True enough,” Nusante said, and then began to grin. “Do you know if he’ll put in an appearance at today’s gathering?”
And there was a moment when Elizabeth felt a cliff-edge she had not expected to feel beneath her feet. She crossed it without waiting for the cleverest corner of her mind to speak to her.
“That might be a possibility,” she said. “At least for a moment, and near the end. He won’t want to distract attention from the main purpose of the meeting.”
Nusante straightened and glared around the Alley, as much as though to say all these ordinary straight people couldn’t trouble him when he had Harry Potter on his side. Elizabeth concealed a giggle—it would make her sound drunken at the moment, which was approximately how she felt—and took his arm for the Apparition.
*
“Just keep me away from the women,” Pansy said, for the third time, as she, Blaise, and Draco appeared on the doorstep of Grimmauld Place.
Draco rolled his eyes and flung the door open. “Don’t be more stupid than you can help, Pansy,” he said. “Not every lesbian wants a straight woman. Besides, you’ve gone to the effort of polishing yourself up like a cold diamond. Most of them want a woman with a little more life in her.”
Pansy gave him a particularly venomous glare that Draco knew meant he would pay for that remark later. But really, Pansy could not go about saying stupid things like that in the middle of this meeting. She didn’t believe them, anyway; they were just an effective mask for her nervousness.
They stepped into a corridor that looked nothing like the entrance hall of Harry’s house, decorated as it was with glamours of marble floors and stone walls warmed with hanging tapestries. The glamours were layered, so that even if someone sensed the first ones and removed them, they would only see slightly dingier marble and stone than before, and think Harry was trying to conceal a lack of cleanliness rather than a completely different type of building material.
Blaise, of course, was in his element in moments, joining the largest group of people and adding an original punch-line to the joke being told. Someone laughed. Someone else passed him a glass of wine. Blaise looked thoughtful, swirled the wine around on his tongue for a moment, and then said something else, which made the entire group erupt in laughter. Draco took a moment to cast the Killing Curse on his envy. That was one talent he’d never have, not for a lack of charm but because his name and face were too familiar in an unnerving way.
Thanks a lot, Father, he thought. At the moment, he would have given much to have been born into an ordinary, low-ranking pure-blood family, one that didn’t need to join Voldemort or Dumbledore because they were too small for either side to notice.
Then he reminded himself his support wouldn’t mean what it did to the rebellion if he were someone else, and turned around, Pansy trailing behind him, to scan the room for Harry.
His eyes locked on the woman standing next to Nusante, and narrowed. She was that woman who had bored him with her speech at the meeting the Aurors raided, wasn’t she? Elizabeth someone-or-other. Draco hoped she would let someone else speak today. At the moment, she was rather monopolizing Nusante’s time.
Then she turned and caught his eye, and Draco felt the slight crackle of a time-delayed spell, apparently set to take effect the moment they looked at each other. For a moment, Elizabeth’s rather nondescript eyes were a brilliant green.
Draco swallowed a curse. The bastard. This is his way of winning Nusante’s confidence and telling me his latest little secret without actually confessing it to my face, isn’t it? The way the glamours on the house are a way of hiding its true provenance and a show to me of how much power he has in this area.
For a moment, worry churned in his gut. If Harry was this skilled at acting, he could absent himself from Draco’s life without changing a single habit. Draco could search for him forever and never find him.
But he would not let that happen. He would make himself so brilliant that Harry would be charmed into staying with him, gazing at him admiringly, wanting to know what he was thinking and what he would do next.
He turned, plucked a glass of wine from someone who was wasting it by gesturing everywhere and letting the wine splash to the floor, and intimidated the woman with one glare when she tried to protest. He took a swift sip for courage and then strode towards one end of the room. A whip of his wand, and the floor Transfigured itself, molding up into a stage as high as the bottom step of Harry’s real stairs. He leaped onto it, and cast Sonorus on his throat. By that time, he had the attention of most of the room.
“I’m sure many of you know me by name, face, reputation, and Prophet articles,” he said. A few smiles appeared here and there in the audience, and Draco relaxed. He could feel himself taking the reins now, gathering up their emotions and manipulating them into new patterns. “What you read is true. My father has disowned me for daring to go against him and love whom I want to love.”
Stamping and shouts and whistles answered him. Draco let the noises build on themselves until they began to die down again. He knew Pansy would be making faces at his back, telling him to get on with it already, and that was another advantage of starting to speak when he did.
“I did try to appease my parents,” Draco continued, “because they are my parents and I love them.” He wanted to pause for a moment, because he didn’t think he’d ever admitted that in public before, but the tide of the speech was carrying him onwards. “I wanted to live in peace with them if I could, to have both my partner’s companionship and theirs. I’m sure most of you have experienced the same struggle, the sense that if you only did something right, the problem could be solved, and it was your own fault that it wasn’t.”
Heads nodded all around the room. Draco let his own pride catch and catapult him high. No need to be modest now, not when he had them.
He paused, both to emphasize the words he was about to say next and to make sure that Harry’s eyes were resting on him. A glance out of the corner of his eye showed Nusante and everyone around Nusante staring at him as if they could not look away.
“But that isn’t the way it happens,” Draco went on. “It’s not our fault that we can’t live in peace. It’s the fault of irrational prejudices that retreat when questioned, only to fasten on some new object like spiderwebs. I’ve asked my father why he has such objections to two men sleeping together. He mutters something about hygiene. I tell him that spells exist which can protect men from disease as surely as they protect men and women. Then he comes up with some objection about children. Adoption exists, I remind him. And so he delves up some nonsense about how ‘unnatural’ it is.” Draco snorted, feeling free to express his disgust about those conversations with Lucius for the first time. “If he would just admit that he’s worried about a man desiring him, making him the one looked at for once instead of the woman, then I would have a lot more respect for him.”
Applause and raised glasses answered him. Draco smiled and deliberately did not glance to the side. Are you watching, Harry? This is for me, yes, and for them, but mostly for you.
“And the scope of my disrespect has dramatically increased with my abortive arrest for flagrant public displays of homosexuality,” he said. “The Ministry is now included in it.” He paused, aware that their gazes had sharpened to the point where the expectation in the room was actively painful. “That’s why I am going to announce that all the profits from Malfoy’s Machineries which had gone to the charities used and established by the Ministry are being redirected to the disposal of the rebellion instead. People like us, people who will find very little help in the wider world if we do not help ourselves.”
He couldn’t have timed it better. People were still staring at him with astonished eyes, and the applause was tentative and just beginning, when a tawny owl swooped through one of the open windows and aimed towards him. Draco held up his arm imperiously, and the owl settled into place, holding the letter out to him with what Draco could easily imagine was a bow of its head. The letter bore the seal of Gringotts.
He opened it, scanned the contents quickly to make sure they said what they should, and then smiled at the crowd. “And the transaction is complete, thanks to the quickness of our goblin colleagues,” he said.
The cheering was hysterical then. Draco bathed in it for long minutes, and shook the hands of the people crowding forwards for that purpose, before he turned his head to the side and looked at Elizabeth.
Her eyes were wide and green when they met his, and there was a warmth of admiration in them that made Draco want to stride over and kiss her/him in the middle of the meeting. But he modestly stepped aside and let others take the platform, including some people who Harry had told him would give them a good summary of the laws Counterstrike and the Ministry might try to use against them. Draco planned to listen to those intently. He trusted Elizabeth to excuse herself soon and come back to his side as Brian.
He could wait patiently in part because his heart and his soul were humming with eager warmth.
He admires me. He trusts me. He has reason to see that I’m as committed to this course of rebellion as he is. I want all of that.
Not that the public admiration doesn’t feel bloody good as well.
*
Given that Nusante had a speech of his own to make, and Elizabeth was scheduled to do nothing in that line, it was easy enough for her to slip away. In a corridor that only she would have known was there behind the piled glamours, she clasped her hands to her burning cheeks and closed her eyes.
Draco’s gift was utterly unexpected, even though she knew he had spent the last few days making “preparations.” She had simply assumed that the preparations concerned his Slytherin friends and nothing else. Zabini and Parkinson had followed him in, so those activities had been successful. As to what else might have happened, she hadn’t thought to question it.
She let out a sharp breath, and then the Elizabeth persona flickered and vanished, and Harry opened his eyes—not as himself, but with his own mind burning and racing behind the Transfigured mask.
Oh, God. His father will be so angry with him. So will the Ministry officials and committees that depended on that income to their charities. Other people will see how committed he is and investigate the rebellion, because they will think any cause Draco Malfoy supports is serious enough to demand some attention. He’s done more for us at a stroke than anyone except Nusante has.
He’s running an enormous risk. And he doesn’t care. Or rather, he’s weighed it, and decided that it’s worth the consequences.
Harry paced back and forth, glancing now and then at the glamour that hid him. If someone had seen him walk through the wall, there could be trouble. But no one intruded, and that meant Harry couldn’t help being drawn back into the whirlwind of his thoughts.
So many risks to run. He’s flung himself headlong into a problem he could have ignored altogether, or only supported from a distance. And I’m certain his friends advised him to do stay distant.
Harry paused and, drawing his wand, created a small hole through the layers of glamour, which should be invisible to everyone outside it unless they happened to be gazing in exactly the right direction when the hole appeared. Then he bent down and put his eye to the hole, seeking out Zabini.
Zabini was standing near Draco, one arm around his shoulders, his head bent towards him. Draco’s mouth was open in laughter, his head tilted back as if he trusted Zabini to support him completely. Harry didn’t think he’d seen him so relaxed, except perhaps after they made love. And even then, Draco had either been trying to discover Brian’s secret or convince Harry to tell the truth. He hadn’t looked so much as if he trusted Harry, as he looked like he trusted and loved Zabini.
Jealousy was an ugly thing. Harry closed his eyes and pressed his hand to his abdomen, envisioning the emotion swelling like a tumor. The darkness behind his eyelids roiled with orange and red, yellow and pea-green—all the colors of vomit.
They’re probably just friends, the voice of his reason argued. Why would Draco be pursuing you so strongly if he had a secondary relationship that would content him just as well? And Zabini appeared because he heard Draco was in trouble, not because Draco invited him. Draco wouldn’t scheme against you like that.
But the jealousy replied that Zabini was charming, open about himself, and relentlessly interested in Draco, if the way he smiled at him from one corner of his mouth was any indication. And he was making Draco laugh. And there were so many problems that lay between Harry and Draco, so many of them the result of Harry’s own stubbornness. What if Draco did decide that, as much as he wanted their relationship to succeed, Harry simply hid too much for him? Draco Malfoy was not someone to pine uselessly forever after someone who would never return his love. He would move on, and expect Harry to do the same thing.
But—
But I don’t think I can. Where else am I going to find someone as strong and beautiful and intelligent as Draco? Where else am I going to find someone fascinated with my personas, even if uneasily, rather than frightened of them, or someone whom I can never tell?
Maybe Draco is the one person I don’t have to wear masks around.
Harry waited expectantly for the merciless voice to speak up, or the voice of his reason, or the voice of his jealousy. But he was alone inside his head, and if the silence scared him, it also goaded him.
You can’t depend on any persona to snare Draco, because he’s already told you what he wants—all of them, and not just a facet. He doesn’t like you lying. He doesn’t like you sleeping with anyone else. He’s inviting you into a bond like the one Ron and Hermione have, one you thought you never could have after you had to tell Ginny you were gay.
But he wouldn’t want to just seize this chance because he might never find something better. That would be insulting to Draco.
Harry put his eye to the hole in the glamours again and watched Draco, who had stepped away from Zabini and faced him with his hands on his hips. He was snapping something at him, to the great amusement of the group that surrounded them. Zabini retorted, and the crowd roared. Harry didn’t miss the smile both men exchanged.
And Harry knew he couldn’t let this go, and it had nothing to do with his not wanting to spend the rest of his life alone. He had become resigned to that long since.
Draco was the one who woke him from resignation. Draco was the one who promised him that something better was possible, even likely. But he couldn’t force Harry to accept him or believe him. Harry would have to do that on his own.
His wand shook when he aimed it at himself, and Harry had to pause and close his eyes. His breath was loud in his ears, not helped by the enclosed space in which he stood. He suffered a brief, wild urge to claw at his face, to drop the wand and run, to go upstairs and fetch the reverse Pensieve.
But he had made his decision.
“Finite Incantatem,” he said, and the world danced and shrank and realigned as his center of balance shifted, as he lost Elizabeth’s breasts and height. He shivered as he ran a hand through his hair and discovered it was a tangled mess.
Then he turned and stepped through the glamours into the room where Draco waited for him.
*
Draco lost the thread of his conversation with Blaise as he looked up and in the direction of the gasps and murmurs and pointing fingers of the crowd. The noise quickly died away under the pressure of Draco’s own frantic heartbeat.
Harry was walking hesitantly towards him, his head up and his eyes brilliant with the kind of feverish glaze a unicorn might show before it ran away and hid itself in the woods. But he kept walking towards Draco.
And he wore no disguise at all.
Draco began to tremble. He took a step forwards, swayed, and found Blaise’s hand bracing him. Harry’s gaze darted to the hand, then snapped to Draco’s face, and his stride became faster.
He came up to Draco and stood for a moment, scanning his face as though seeking out a signal. Draco held his breath and hoped silently that Harry would find whatever it was he needed to see in his expression.
Harry found it. He nodded, gave Draco a small, panicked smile, and turned to face the people shouting about him. They fell silent at once when they saw his mouth open, and leaned forwards. Draco winced. The weight of expectation that had met his own speech was nothing to this.
“Yes, I’m really Harry Potter,” Harry said clearly. “Yes, as you might have decided by now, I am gay. And for the past few weeks I’ve been going about under the guise of Brian Montgomery, Draco’s boyfriend.” He looked sideways at Draco, and his hand slipped down to Draco’s elbow, clasping it with frantic tightness, out of the sight of anyone in front of them. “We were protecting me from publicity. I wasn’t ready to let anyone but Draco know I preferred men. But the time comes when every mask has to drop.”
He turned to face Draco, and reached out.
Draco met him halfway there, seizing the back of Harry’s neck and kissing him hungrily. Harry opened his mouth in a soft gasp, his tongue darting out as if he thought he could content Draco with a single pass, and then he leaned forwards and snogged him back, his hands clasping Draco’s shoulders until the bones hurt.
Draco was dizzy with happiness. He wrapped his arm around Harry’s waist and pulled him closer, vaguely sorry they were in the middle of an audience and he couldn’t simply lay Harry down on the floor and make love to him right there.
But Harry’s gesture of courage and trust and terror and love would have to do for now.
Chapter 32.
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