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Chapter Thirty-Three—Answering

Draco paused for a moment before he entered his flat. He envisioned the chairs he kept in the main room, and made a silent wager with himself about where Pansy and Blaise would be sitting. If he was right, he would have gauged their mood correctly enough to have an advantage over them in the conversation that followed. If not, then he would have to be on his guard and play defensive for the moment.

His hands tingled as if he had slept on them as he opened the door. That might have been simply an effect of the wards, which he had given Pansy and Blaise the ability to bypass, but he thought it was anticipation. The secret was out now, and no matter what happened, he and Harry would not be able to act as they had before.

And if his friends were still as rattled as they had obviously been at the meeting, then Draco could knock down their objections joyously whilst still explaining enough to soothe their fears and worries.

Pansy and Blaise were sitting across from each other in the two chairs nearest the hearth, leaving the one between for him. Draco smiled as he closed the door behind him. Yes, he had thought they would do this. They would want him subject to attack from two fronts, and that chair was also the least comfortable one, used mostly for clients with delusions of grandeur who needed to be set in their places. But the very fact that they had chosen it for him argued that they were not as confident of their ability to convince him as it might appear.

Draco sauntered towards the chair, not showing his own increasing excitement that made his belly tighten. I wonder how people who aren’t Slytherins conduct themselves in situations like this, he thought as he sat down in the chair and spun slightly to face Blaise and Pansy. Whatever they do, it can’t be half as fun.

He thought for a moment of the way Harry would act and think when he was confronting his Weasley friends, and then knocked the thought away. Harry had insisted Draco leave him shortly after their lovemaking, and that he was strong enough to deal with any owls, Howlers, or impatient visitors who might come through his Floo himself. That he was recovering strength, Draco knew; he had only been set reeling by the first open disapproval and ridiculous demands on his name in ten years, and Draco’s protection and show of love had done what Draco hoped it would, allowed him to recover enough to defend himself.

Draco would not want a partner who needed to be sheltered all the time, and Harry would have hated to be that person. He had created dozens of personas in an effort to escape that fate, in fact. But Draco suspected they were more likely to have the opposite problem, with Harry refusing to recognize his need for moments of rest. At least this time he had.

“Did you mean what you said, then?” Pansy led the charge. “Are you really in love with him?”

Draco smiled at her, barely managing to quell a laugh. She had waited to question him until she saw him sinking into contemplation. No doubt she thought she would catch him dreamily smiling and make him flounder that way. Too bad for Pansy that he never let himself relax so much around people who might be hostile.

And that goes double for anyone who might be hostile to Harry.

“Yes, it’s true,” he said, and carelessly crossed his legs, making the gestures so large that they couldn’t doubt the expansiveness of his mood. “Why not? He’s handsome, he’s clever, he’s brave, and he complements me extremely well in the weaknesses he does possess.”

“There are other people who fit those criteria,” said Pansy. She was leaning forwards with her hands on the edges of her knees. Ostensibly, the pose was neutral, but Draco darted a glance at her hands and saw the knuckles whitening. “Blaise, for example. Why choose a Gryffindor? Why choose someone who will cause you political trouble? I know you, Draco, and I know that you wouldn’t simply tumble into something like this without due and careful consideration. So share those careful considerations with us. Tell us what makes Potter so perfect.”

“Yes, do,” Blaise echoed. “If I had known you wanted your parents to disown you, I would have been happy to come back and pose as your boyfriend. No need to go to Potter, of all people.”

Draco smiled gently at Blaise, which made him draw back into his chair and narrow his eyes. Well, good. That was the first step in his doubting his own conclusions and coming to see how ridiculous his statement was.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You who know me so well, Pansy, do you think I would have tried to force my parents to disown me if I had any other choice? I did seek other options, and all of them ran against the blank wall of my father’s refusal to listen. I chose to come out in the end because it was Potter I was dating—“

“Bollocks,” Blaise snapped. “You were just as stunned as the rest of us when he revealed himself today. It was in your eyes.”

“Because of the sort of person he was,” Draco said, with exaggerated patience. “Not because his public reputation might help me. He wanted to go under the disguise of Brian Montgomery at first, and I agreed to that.” He tilted his head against the back of the chair, appearing to luxuriate in how uncomfortable it was, and smiled at them. “Consider that. I agreed. Can you imagine me letting anyone whom I didn’t love remain safe whilst I took the risks?”

The glance that flickered between Blaise and Pansy over that was brief, but Draco saw it. They really weren’t very subtle at the moment, he thought idly. He would have to remember to thank Harry for his sudden decision. If Draco had been in on the plan from the beginning, his friends would have picked up clues from his behavior, and he wouldn’t have been able to surprise them so well.

“But it might not be safe for you,” Blaise said, taking the lead this time whilst Pansy leaned against the back of her chair and frowned at Draco. “Perhaps you have fallen in love. You know I always was pants at Legilimency, so I can’t know for certain. But I want you to consider this rationally. Don’t let your emotions override your logic. You’re in enormous danger as it is, proclaiming yourself gay in a wizarding society like this.” Blaise’s lip curled, and his right hand made a sharp motion as if he were seizing a rock. “And then there’s the extra risk of what any number of people, not only your father, will do when they find out you’re dating Harry Potter. Do you really want that risk? Is it worth it?”

“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing, Pansy,” Draco said idly. “And it had better be nothing more incriminating than Finite Incantatem.”

Pansy, about to begin the second gesture of a spell with the wand she’d drawn quietly from her robe pocket as Draco listened to Blaise, fell still. Then she shook her head and spoke with hard tones of exasperation edging her words. “I only want to find out if he’s cast a spell on you.”

“A love spell? Imperius? A lust enchantment?” Draco snorted. “What makes you think he’d want me to be in love with him, even?”

“You’re everything he is, and you have extra qualities that he doesn’t,” Blaise answered at once.

“Since you know him so well after ten years,” Draco murmured.

“It has everything to do with logic,” said Pansy. “You didn’t listen well enough to Blaise’s words, or you would have anticipated this, Draco. There was no warning of this. No rumors that you were dating someone new, no strange mentions of Potter in any unusual places, no speculation that Potter was gay—“

“And now you know why,” Draco said. “He’s good at hiding. So am I.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” said Pansy. “And frankly, I think it’s more likely that he’s lying to you than that he’s really in love with you.”

Draco held her gaze. “Really.”

Pansy nodded. She had tensed, as if she were prepared to cast a Shield Charm if Draco even looked like he was reaching for his wand.

“How nice to know that you assume I could never catch the attention of someone like Harry,” said Draco. He had a simmering coil of hurt gathering in his body, but it was the cold anger he directed through his voice. He started to rise to his feet. “Well. That’s clearly left the conversation at an impasse. You think I’m not in love with him. When I say I am, you accuse me of lying. Or being under a spell, which is as good as the same thing. And Harry must, of course, have enslaved me for mysterious purposes of his own. That’s logic, for you. There’s really no reason for me to stay beside you when you can’t trust me with the most basic knowledge of myself, and want to put me on leading strings. I do hope that you will continue to contribute time and money to the rebellion, but I think it’s for the best if we don’t meet anymore.” He strode rapidly towards the door.

“Draco!” Pansy had never cried his name like that before, the kind of shriek Draco imagined a mouse would utter before an owl swooped down on it. He paused with his thumb on the handle of the door, but didn’t turn around.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Blaise said to his back. His voice still held an edge of the demand that Draco believe him, but now there were nervous harmonics to it, too. Draco smiled at the door. “You’d abandon us for him? Even though you’ve known us for years and him for only a few months, at the most?”

Draco glanced over his shoulder. “You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense that the people who claim to be my best friends would make me choose between them and the man I’m in love with.”

Blaise closed his eyes. Pansy rose to her feet and hovered, not quite daring enough to move away from her chair yet. “You don’t—“ she said, and then stopped and shook her head, starting over. Draco was grateful. Sentences that started with “you” in the middle of an argument were not often a good idea. “We didn’t know you were capable of falling in love this fast, and with someone you’ve despised since you were a boy,” she said. She extended her hands towards him, clasped, in what was not quite a gesture of peacemaking. “You can understand our confusion?”

“I can,” said Draco. “But you’re also demanding that I place your confusion above my own feelings, that I abandon Harry because it turns out you don’t know me as well as you thought you did.” He leaned an elbow on the door, because pressing his back to it would seem too defensive.

Pansy winced, but then gave him a faint smile. “That’s about the size of it, isn’t it?” she said. “And it doesn’t sound so flattering, in those terms.” She hesitated, searching his face. “As far as you know, you’re not under any spell or any potion?”

“As far as I know,” Draco said solemnly. “If it turns out I’m wrong, you have my permission to curse Harry, assuming you can get to him faster than I can.”

“And as far as you know, you’re in love with him?”

Draco shrugged. “I’ve never felt anything even remotely similar, but if it was indigestion, I think I would know by now.”

Pansy laughed, sounding as if it were very much against her will. Blaise stepped closer to her side, his own face taut. “Pansy—“

“No,” said Pansy, her gaze clear and untroubled. Her hands reached out for Draco’s again, but she was extending them to hold his now, and Draco strode up to her and took them. “If he’s our friend, we have to trust him, and privilege his understanding of his own feelings.”

“Thank you,” Draco murmured, and kissed the back of her hand.

Blaise clapped his shoulder then. “It’s a great thing,” he said when Draco looked at him. “Assuming it’s real.”

Draco raised an eyebrow, and said nothing. For the moment, he had them on his side, and that would be enough.

*

Harry had owled Nusante, but he did not actually expect to hear from the other man from hours, and even then he thought it likely that he would only respond with a Howler. Nusante had been caught so completely off-guard by Harry’s emergence that he had reacted emotionally instead of logically. It would take him some time to recover from embarrassment, possible jealousy, and disappointment, and begin thinking about the future of the rebellion instead of what his future in it would be.

There was another factor Harry planned to keep in mind, too, which made him doubt whether he could reconcile Nusante and some of the more outraged men and women who had supported him to his own reappearance. They had been children when the war with Voldemort happened. To them, Harry had literally become a legend, someone they had never known, as Draco had, as a student who got red-faced when he shouted or nearly fell off his broom when he played Quidditch or got bad marks in Potions. They would demand that he not be human because, as far as they knew, he wasn’t.

But if he had to endure that, he would.

There was Draco.

It was for his sake that Harry had summoned up strength after a few minutes of resting with his head on Draco’s shoulder and told him to go talk to his friends, that Harry would be fine. Draco gave him several doubtful glances which turned into lingering kisses and soft touches, and Harry thought they might have made their way to bed if he hadn’t grabbed Draco’s wrist and squeezed it warningly.

“You’ve done what you could to spare me having to face everyone at a time when I was vulnerable,” he said. “But it’s best for me to control the Ministry’s and the wider public’s reaction as much as I can. For the moment, we shouldn’t appear together, or they might come to the conclusion that we can’t act separately.” He gave Draco a smile that he hoped wasn’t as watery as he felt. “And we need to show them that we’re powerful on all levels, in all ways, so they’ll be more likely to fall in line with us.”

Draco laughed, and then said, “Are you going to confront your friends?”

Harry released a shaking breath. “Not immediately,” he said. “I need to tell them about Metamorphosis as well as the fact that I’m gay and dating you.”

“They may feel betrayed that they didn’t hear it from you first.” Draco had been still, his gray eyes searching Harry’s face. Harry wished he wouldn’t do that. It made him want to hand all his burdens over to Draco, in the unknown luxury of having someone who could actually comfort him instead of make him wind himself up more tightly trying to please them and be what they needed.

But to become that would be to truly betray Draco and what he had sacrificed to support Harry. Somehow, Harry managed to straighten and smile. “They heard the first part before anyone else did. The second part—they’ll be angry in any case. Let me worry about this,” he added more insistently when Draco opened his mouth. “Please. I’ll tell you if you can do anything to help.”

Draco had stood gazing irresolutely at him for a moment, then nodded, kissed his cheek, and departed to Apparate to his flat.

Harry allowed himself five minutes to wrap his arms around his torso after he heard the door close and wonder how in the world he would do this. Then he closed his eyes and listened for the merciless voice.

Nothing. And still nothing.

I’ll have to do this on my own, then.

He stood and went to owl Nusante, Narcissa Malfoy, Ron and Hermione, Kingsley, the witch named Caroline Garrett Draco had told him about who’d stopped him in the Ministry, and another of Horace Longbottom’s long-time letter friends, a reporter on the Daily Prophet named Malcolm Therris who produced less drivel than the others. Each letter would contain a different request, a different explanation. He doubted that any of them would be enough to satisfy the people who received them, especially Therris, though he would probably follow up on the invitation Harry extended to him to visit the house for an interview as soon as possible.

His hands shook when he wrote out some of the letters. Annoyed, Harry stopped and thought of the way Horace would write them, and his writing steadied. He didn’t think he made more ink-blots than was natural in the margins, and he was sure he’d spelled all the words correctly. Then he sent the owls flying and sat down to wait.

Less than twenty minutes later, his Floo in the library flared, and the head of a wizard with glasses and thinning blond hair appeared in the flames. He glanced up at Harry as if to make sure he had the right address for a long time before he spoke. Then he said in a high, cracked voice, “Harry Potter? There’s—this owl you sent me.” He paused, and then spoke in a tone that conveyed disbelief and excitement all at once. “Really?”

“Really,” Harry said with as welcoming a smile as he could manage. He’d been sprawled on the couch in front of the fireplace; even if he had to face the public as himself and not a persona, there was no reason he couldn’t use the lessons he’d received over the years in body language and facial expression to make himself appear as relaxed as possible. He sat up and stretched his arms casually along the back of the couch. “I’m gay and want to explain my reasons for saying so and my relationship with Draco Malfoy to the public. And you’re the reporter I’ve chosen to interview me. Aren’t you lucky?”

Therris’s face smoldered with the look of a werewolf about to make a kill. “I’ll be right there, Mr. Potter.”

*

Draco had got Pansy and Blaise out the door via a system of threats and vague promises, under which they went away satisfied that he would notify them before making any important move even though he not exactly said he would do so. Of course, they had probably also been lying when they said that they wouldn’t watch Harry from the corners of their eyes and be prepared to attack every slight mistake he made. By means of such oil did Slytherin friendships run.

He was glad for every moment he’d spent at it when he turned around and saw his Floo flaring. The face that formed in the flames was his mother’s, and even through the green color, Draco could make out that she was pale.

“Draco,” she said. “I have just received a letter from Potter in which he stated his intention to make your relationship public by going to the Daily Prophet and asked if I would support his actions.” There was a long pause, during which Narcissa opened and closed her eyes in a series of slow blinks. “Did you agree to this course?”

Draco knelt down slowly in front of the fireplace, using the motion as a chance to recover from his own shock. By the time he was level with his mother, he thought he had. “I agreed to whatever Harry feels comfortable doing,” he said. “It was his decision to show himself, and though I didn’t expect that either, it turned out well enough.”

Narcissa shook her head slowly. “Lucius is going mad already, Draco.”

Of course the news would have reached him. Draco knew better than to think that his father didn’t have spies in their group, whether or not he had access to the person who had informed Counterstrike and the Ministry of the rebellion’s first meeting. “What about, specifically?” he asked. “Harry is the one who’s putting himself in the most danger, after all. The wizarding world has already had some time to come to terms with the idea of me as gay.”

Narcissa shut her eyes and sighed. “I do not think you have ever understood how much your father cares for you,” she said.

“You’re being very careful not to say the word love.”

“I do not think you would call his emotion by that name, no.” Narcissa continued to speak with her eyes shut. Draco would have thought it a way to deny that the situation was real, but his mother was not so great a fool. More likely she wanted to disguise her own reaction from someone who could read her as well as her son could. “It is—a mingling of loyalty and possession, Draco. Do what you can for the Malfoy name, and he will repay you by doing what he can to see that you inherit it with the reputation spotless. He has felt he owes you a debt for decades, because of the bad decisions he made in serving the Dark Lord that tarnished the name. Thus he has been patient and tolerant with you, and even his suggestions of marriage have not increased until recently. But now the balance has tipped. He will feel that you owe him a debt, and that you should redress it in any way possible.”

“And if I refuse to acknowledge such a claim?” Draco asked. He let his pride inform his words, making them steel covered with ice. His parents had taught him the tone, and if they had thought it would never be used against them, they should reconsider now. “If I say that he has no authority over me any longer, since he has disowned me?”

“He will remove the obstacle he feels responsible for your disowning,” Narcissa said, and opened her eyes to look at him again. “He feels certain that he knows what it is now. I saw his face when he heard the message. He never looks like that but when he is certain.”

“If he hurts Harry—“

“I would not put it past him to try,” said Narcissa. “However, I think he has learned at last that such an action would only confirm you in your stubbornness, and increase your pride in your opposition to him. I think he will target you instead, but subtly.” Her eyes had a shine of careful fear in them now, which made Draco more than a little alarmed when he thought of how much terror she must be hiding. “Oh, my son, be careful.”

“I’m not afraid of Father,” Draco said, which was not a lie. He was afraid of what Lucius could do, but that was not the same as being afraid of the man who had raised him and looked up at him in pride as he flew for the first time.

“I know,” said Narcissa. “And I think he will use that fact to his advantage.”

Draco clenched his jaw. He could do nothing but brace and respond to Lucius’s attack when it came; he had more active steps that demanded his attention. “And will you stand by Harry’s side, as he asks?”

“I do not know yet.” Narcissa smoothed a hand down her skirt and didn’t look at him.

“Mother,” Draco whispered.

“It may very well be natural and the best outcome for you to challenge Lucius by yourself,” said Narcissa. “I am not sure that having Potter at your side will make it better for you.”

Draco clenched his jaw again. He remembered the way his mother had slowly come over to his side after she had learned who Harry really was. And she had already done much for them by warning him of Lucius’s reaction. It would be cruel to ask her to do more than she was ready for.

“I understand,” he said. “Thank you. And I do love you, Mother, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes.”

Narcissa smiled back at him, and closed the Floo connection.

Chapter 34.