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A Determined Frame of Mind	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16811 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Ten—Or Her Mind Will

            Draco rose to his feet at once when he saw the swirl of colors in the middle of the room that indicated Harry and Lila were returning. Harry had warned him that Lila was a battle-hardened Auror and might be—difficult—when they were trying to make an ally of her, so Draco had his wand out already.

            One of the two forming human shapes pulled violently away from the other. Draco aimed his wand at it, under the reasonable supposition that that was probably Lila, and cast the Body-Bind.

            He was a second too slow; he hadn’t known she could move this fast. In moments, she was behind the chair he had planned to place her in when she was frozen, and firing hexes at him around it.

            Draco would have dodged just fine on his own, but a heavy weight hit him and propelled him to the floor, knocking first the breath and then all the impulse to move out of his body. The second part came less from the blow and more from the fact that this was Harry on top of him.

            Harry didn’t seem inclined to enjoy their respective positions, which annoyed Draco. He ducked a crackling blue line of energy, almost slamming his forehead into Draco’s chin, and then swept his wand around in three interlocking circles. Yellow fire, almost too bright to look at, traced them, and bobbed away towards Lila’s chair like smoke rings.



            Since she seemed to be taken care of, Draco seized the chance to stretch his limbs luxuriously under Harry. He put out more heat than Draco had realized; that was one thing Polyjuice Potion didn’t alter. Of course, Draco had to wonder how different the experience would be with Harry in his own form on top of him, but—

            Lila cried out, causing Harry to jerk and dig an uncomfortable elbow into Draco’s chest. Draco wriggled. Harry tossed him an apologetic glance, then rolled off him and extended a hand.

            “It worked,” he said, to Draco’s raised eyebrows. As he pulled Draco up, he aimed his wand at the same time and floated Lila from around the chair. Her face was caught in a stark, staring expression of horror that Draco really didn’t see the point of. Harry settled her in the interrogation chair, took her wand from her, and tied her with ropes.

            “Just in case,” he explained.

            Draco nodded once, then settled majestically in his seat across from Lila. Harry paced back and forth, waiting for the Polyjuice Potion to flow away from him so that they could begin their real questioning. Draco studied him covertly and decided that the potion had actually changed Harry less than he thought. Anger that wasn’t Draco’s shone forth from the dear idiot’s body like a jewel gleaming from beneath a sheet of water, and his angry strides and abrupt gestures altered Draco’s entire look.

            “I acted exactly like you told me to,” Harry snapped, seeing his glance.

            “I understand,” Draco said. “And I suppose you didn’t mistreat my body, either?”

            Harry blinked. “What do you mean? If I’d wounded myself, the wound would still be there when the potion wore off. It’s not as though it would appear on you.”

            Draco lowered his voice teasingly, compelling Harry to come towards him to keep listening. “Come on, Harry, you can tell me. How soon did you vanish into the loo and have a look?”

            “Have a—“ Then Harry realized he was implying, and reddened more than Draco was certain he ever had. “That’s—that’s not—that’s not the kind of thing you do with another bloke’s body!”

            “It’s the first thing I’d have done with yours,” Draco retorted severely, trying to convey the impression that Harry had failed an essential test.

            “Yes, but you’re curved or whatever you said,” Harry muttered, in the kind of tone to set Draco’s teeth on edge. “That’s probably natural.”

            Draco couldn’t help it; he huffed, and it wasn’t beneath his breath. Harry cast a quick glance at him. “What?” he added.

            “Because I’m not straight and Gryffindor and perfect in every way,” Draco began slowly, “you think I’m somehow inferior to you? Or that I’m a sexual maniac who can’t control my slightest impulse?”

*

            Harry felt trapped. Since when had this become a discussion of what he thought about Draco’s sexual orientation? And he hadn’t implied that he was inferior, just that he was different. And to be having this discussion while he wore Draco’s face, and while he was now thinking about Draco’s bits, did not make him any more comfortable.

            “I never—I never said that,” was the best he could manage.

            “You implied it,” Draco said, swift as a striking snake, and like a Slytherin—or like Hermione; Harry didn’t want to start thinking of Draco as opposite to a Gryffindor—finding meanings in words that Harry didn’t even know were there. He gripped the arms of his chair as if that were the only thing that kept him from launching himself at Harry. “That it’s natural for me to be interested in the bits of every male I come across. That I can’t control myself. You’re taking something that I think any normal bloke would do, and implying that it only comes from my sexual orientation. You’re saying that I’m abnormal.”

            “Well, you’re saying the same thing!” Harry controlled the impulse to back away from Draco until he’d put himself safely against the wall, and the insidious whispering in his mind that said he’d known it all along, known that Draco couldn’t be trusted, known that he’d eventually be attacked for something he couldn’t help and didn’t mean. “That I’m abnormal because I didn’t go in the loo while I had your body and wank!”

            “You have a reason to be abnormal,” Draco said stubbornly. “You’ve spent a year under the Cassandra Curse and had all your sexual reactions twisted inside out and upside-down—“

            “God, Draco, can we not talk about this?” Harry closed his eyes. With the spell he’d used, there was a strong chance Lila wouldn’t remember any of this conversation even though she was hearing it, but he still didn’t want to have it. The mere thought of discussing sex with Draco made him blush horribly.

            “No, I think we should,” Draco said, his voice rising a little. “We’ve gone too long without talking about anything, Merlin knows. I wanted to wait for you to be ready, to come to me, but I know that you trust me. So. Talk. I want to know more about your suicide attempt, and I want to know what you really think of my sexuality.”

            “I don’t think you’re abnormal!” Harry snapped, falling back on honesty. As if this curse lets me have any choice. “I don’t, all right? I just—I don’t know why you want me to know about it, or why you keep talking to me about it, or why you keep touching me all the time, or why in the world you care what I think about what you get up to in bed or in the loo!”

            Draco’s eyes were sky-colored. He opened his mouth, and Harry flinched, wary of what he’d say—but also conscious that he was handling this much better than he would have only a week ago, when he still didn’t trust Draco as much.

            But just then, Lila groaned.

            Harry whipped away, more than glad to have an excuse to put off this conversation. No matter what Draco had to say about why his sexuality mattered, it couldn’t be anything good.

            And then he felt the ripple traveling through him that meant the Polyjuice Potion had lost its effectiveness and he was becoming himself again. He sucked in a sigh of intense relief. Maybe Draco had gained some self-confidence when he saw his own face staring at him, and once he saw Harry again, he would have second thoughts about acting as if this were Witch Weekly Confessional.

*

            Draco silently cursed Lila in his mind, and for more this time than just being an Auror or just knowing about the Cassandra Curse—maybe—and helping to shield the Minister. He would have told Harry some home truths in no uncertain terms, if only he’d had a moment more.

            But Harry was already training his wand on the witch, and saying, “Hello, Lila. You’re currently in Draco Malfoy’s house, and as I’m sure you can see, he’s been sheltering me.” He gave a slight nod to Draco, the agreed-upon signal that he should begin his part of the plan.

            Despite himself, Draco was gratified to see that Harry still trusted him to cooperate. He smiled at Lila and stood. “What Harry says is perfect truth,” he said, and waited.

            Lila narrowed her eyes. Hair ruffled, face still pale from whatever fright Harry’s spell had given her, wandless and tied to a chair, she looked ready to bite through the ropes and rush them if only her teeth were sharp enough. “I may not be able to tell whether or not you’re lying,” she said, “but I can hear the lie in his voice.”

            “Tell me,” Draco said, and began to circle closer, keeping her eyes mostly on him and her attention productively divided between him and Harry, “what did Harry say to you in the Ministry when he went there, disguised as me?”

            “That he knew where Harry Potter was,” said Lila, turning her head to follow him. One hand opened and closed, as if she were practicing the gestures of a spell for the moment when she was able to retrieve her wand.

            “And that wasn’t a lie, was it?” Draco asked, halting and staring straight at her. “He did know where he was, since he was standing right in front of you.”

            A strange expression washed over Lila’s face. Draco concentrated, but he couldn’t see the dark flicker in her eyes or about her temples as the Cassandra Curse worked. That disappointed him somewhat. He would have enjoyed seeing it function outside Harry’s soul—and on someone who wasn’t him.

            “Everything else he said was,” said Lila. Apparently the curse had decided the simplest way to make her continue think Harry was lying was to have her ignore the one truth he’d spoken.

            “But that still means he spoke truth once,” said Draco. “Doesn’t it?”

            Both Lila’s hands closed into fists. “I don’t know what you’ve done to me,” she said slowly. “But rest assured, when the Ministry finds out—“

            “No matter what happens here,” said Draco, with a small shake of his head, “they won’t find out.” He gave her a grin that caused her to shoot him a look of immense dislike. That was all right. If they had judged the woman’s character correctly—and Draco thought Harry had told him enough about Lila in the last few days to be sure of that—then she could dislike him all she wanted and she would still do the right thing.

            As long as we can convince her it’s right.

            “And he spoke two more truths to you just after you woke,” Draco continued, pushing, relentless. He wanted to use as many words as possible before he turned to Legilimency. “That this was my home, and that I’ve been sheltering him.” He lifted his hand and gestured around the room. It wasn’t the most comfortable drawing room in the Manor, but it was the grandest, with several pieces of antique furniture and paintings so real it looked as though someone not painted could step into them. “Do you doubt that this is Malfoy Manor?”

            “It could be anywhere,” Lila said. “You could have chosen one of your friends’ homes to imprison me in.”

            Draco nodded to Harry. Harry broke the ropes on Lila with one snap of his wrist, then Body-Bound her before she could react and floated her across the room. Draco touched the prepared iron rod on his waist; it controlled the wards on the Manor and would raise and lower them on a moment’s notice. Much simpler to repair such a breach than it would be if he’d torn a hole in the wards instead. He thought St. Mungo’s was still not recovered from the hole Harry had torn in their most powerful wards with wandless magic when they’d tried to stop him escaping.

            In seconds, they had Apparated from the drawing room to the front of the house, with the Malfoy crest clearly visible from several directions and the obvious wealth of a pure-blood family on full display. Draco faced Lila and smiled.

            “We came from a room to the outdoors,” she said; Harry had relaxed the spell enough that her jaw could move. “We could have come from everywhere.”

            Draco opened the front doors, and Harry Levitated Lila behind him as they trudged from the front of the Manor all the way back to the drawing room. Draco let Lila have a look in several directions, confirming this was not a parody or copy of the place they’d Apparated from, before Harry let the Body-Bind go and tied her to the chair again.

            Lila had her head bowed, her jaw trembling. Draco watched her with a small, eager smile. This was a solution that could never have been tried any time that the Cassandra Curse was employed before, of course, because no one who was not the caster had ever broken it—and thus no victim before would have had the link to the outside world that Draco represented.

            He glanced at Harry. Harry was watching him, but he looked stiffly away when he saw Draco’s eyes returning the gaze.

            I do have a position of such power over him, Draco thought, letting his eyes linger, because he could and because he wanted to. I could betray him, and he couldn’t do anything about it. I’m sure that’s part of what he feared when I first started Diving into his soul. But still, he trusts me. I will do anything to keep that gift.

            In a soft, troubled voice, Lila finally said, “There must be—exceptions.”

            “Exceptions to what?” Draco asked, and this time he stalked behind her until his elbows were resting on the back of the chair and she couldn’t see him without tilting her head at a supremely awkward angle. She did it, apparently not caring how ridiculous she looked.

            “Exceptions to—to his lies,” said Lila. “He must be able to tell the truth sometimes. Perhaps he has finally recovered the concern for others that he lost.” She shot Harry a look of unalloyed venom. He ignored it effortlessly, except for a very slight tremble in his shoulders. That reminded Draco of what he must have endured in the last thirteen months, and he felt his face soften once more.

            “Then he could speak to you, and you would believe him?” Draco asked.

            “He might start lying again at any time,” Lila countered harshly.

            “He has told you only truth since you came here,” said Draco, but stepped back and nodded to Harry.

            “I am under a curse called the Cassandra Curse,” Harry said flatly. “It’s among the Darkest of Dark Arts. It forces me to tell the truth, but everyone around me hears those truths as lies, unless I’m severely injured. I’ve uncovered evidence that it was Minister Scrimgeour who used the curse.” He studied Lila, waiting.

            Lila’s mouth opened. Then she snapped it shut again, and said, “No. I mean—that’s impossible. The Cassandra Curse is a legend.”

            “Have you heard of it before?” Draco murmured into her hair, stepping close again.

            “No!”

            “Then how can you be so sure that it’s a legend?”

            “If there were Dark magic like that, I would have heard of it! I conducted my own investigations when my sister died! I’m an expert on the Dark Arts!” Lila reared back and stared at him once more. “And even if it were real, I’d think it more likely that you put it on him! You’re a Death Eater, and you hated him in school, didn’t you? It’s inevitable—it’s not real—it—“

            “Find evidence that denies it,” Draco murmured. “Or tell me why you’re so certain that everything you hear from his mouth is lies, when you have heard him speak the provable truth.”

            “It’s all done with illusion,” Lila said suddenly, and her eyes were glittering. “You cast glamours that made me think I’m in Malfoy Manor. You used auditory glamours on your voices to make it sound like Potter was telling the truth, but really, he’s still lying—I—“

            “Then we could have cast glamours that would have overpowered your suspicion, too, and never allowed you to suspect us,” Draco interrupted, bored. He had thought the attempt to convince Lila via words wouldn’t work. She was too stubborn, set in her ways and her hatred of anyone who might possibly have practiced Dark magic, and the curse was too powerful. That was all right. He rather preferred Legilimency as a means of solving problems. And Lila could still be useful to them as a test case for the difficulty of breaking the curse on someone else.

            He drew his wand. Lila had her head bowed, lips moving as she rehearsed the “lies” and truths over and over to herself, trying, Draco knew, to separate out which was which.

            “Legilimens,” he said, cocking his head to come eye-to-eye.

            In a moment he was within the darkness of Lila’s mind. She was trying to fight him out, but she was even more untrained in Occlumency than Harry had been, and he slid by easily. He found himself in a rather simple web of signifiers, all of them leading straight back to two central points: Lila’s hatred of Dark magic and the never-ending quest to avenge her sister.

            Draco raised the imagining that represented his wand here in front of his eyes and cast, with as much care and concentration as he’d used the day he split his soul and gave Harry the missing piece.

            “Reapsememoria,” he whispered.

            The darkness around him blazed with light. Draco laid his wand against his temple, or what he thought of as his temple in a convenient shorthand for indescribable mental actions, and concentrated hard.

            Then he drew forth the memory of the moment when the Cassandra Curse had dissolved for him and he realized that Harry had been telling the truth all along—involuntarily as it was. He slung that memory into Lila’s mind like a stone into a pane of glass, a hard grain of truth, seeking out the point where her distrust resided.

            The memory bore down. Lila fought weakly for a moment to preserve her own mind’s integrity untainted, but Draco had no patience for that. She had shown herself unwilling to acknowledge what they said; now she would know, as Draco had known. Let the moment come to her as a shattering epiphany. She was one of the people who had believed the worst of Harry the past year; she deserved a little pain and the humiliation of realizing how very wrong she was.



            Draco curled his lip as he thought about that. Lila wasn’t the one he wanted to take revenge on, but until he could reach Scrimgeour personally, she would do.

            He watched her mind struggling to absorb or adapt what he had thrown at her, and hummed to himself. Either her self-righteousness will shatter—

            Or her mind will.

            And then the light shuddered around him, and became darkness again, but this time subtly charged with a splendid golden shimmer of memory. Draco smiled. It had worked. She shared the same glimpse into truth he had; he had torn the veil the Cassandra Curse cast inside her head.

            He pulled back from her mind and opened his eyes, to find Lila staring at Harry with an expression of sickness on her face. Most of the mixed emotions behind that expression weren’t guilt, he mused; perhaps she hadn’t come into enough contact with Harry to have treated him horribly. Probably she was imagining the situation he had gone through and empathizing with him, no longer detached enough not to.

            “I’m sorry,” she murmured then, in a tiny voice.

            Tiny words, too, to begin the apology the Ministry owed Harry, but Draco savored them anyway. Then he cast a few more undetectable spells while Lila was still reeling from the shock. They would ensure that Lila, whether she believed in Scrimgeour’s perfidy or not, would be unable to tell anyone but them about what she heard in this room. She was important as a test case and a silent ally in the Ministry; they didn’t need her spreading rumors about Harry’s true condition when Scrimgeour might hear them and be alarmed.

            “It’s real,” Harry was saying, when Draco paid attention to the room again. “And we have compelling evidence Scrimgeour’s behind it.”

            Lila’s nostrils flared. The same stubbornness that Draco had despised in her and found frustrating in Harry shone in her face again, but now it was stubbornness on their side, wielded for their cause. Her hatred of Dark magic had turned her as firmly against the Minister as she had ever served him, Draco thought idly.

            “Show me,” was all she said.

*

            Harry leaned against the wall when Lila had gone back to the Ministry—swearing that she was committed to their side, and set on creating a plausible excuse for her sudden absence—and closed his eyes. Shock still rang him like a struck bell. He couldn’t really believe that there was someone else walking around in the world who knew the truth about him, and could perhaps come to his rescue.

            Especially if Draco ever betrays you, his suspicion snarled, but Harry disregarded the words. That wouldn’t happen.

            He opened his eyes when a shadow fell on his face, and saw Draco half-smiling at him. “It went better than you expected?” he asked.

            “By miles,” Harry said. He pushed himself off the wall, feeling as near to joyful as he had in a long time. “I don’t suppose you’d be amenable to contacting one of my friends and reasoning with them next?” He wanted Ron or Hermione—or both—back as soon as possible. He trusted Draco, yes, but his uneasy, constantly shifting relationship with him was nothing like the comfortable friendship he’d had with Ron and Hermione. And if the curse was torn open, then maybe they could really go back to the way they’d been before.

            Draco’s smile faded. “I don’t think you’d want me to do to your friends what I did to her, Harry,” he said.

            Harry frowned. “Why? If it’s just persuasion—“

            “It wasn’t,” said Draco. “I had to force not only my memory of the moment when I realized you were telling the truth, but the emotions and the conviction of the truth itself, on her. It was making her believe what I believed. It stands a good chance of tearing the mind apart if it tries to resist too much. Your friends had more contact with you during the last year, and they’ve been more victimized by the curse. I don’t think you’d appreciate my ripping their minds open as I did with Lila.”

            At the moment, Harry was too upset to admire the concern Draco appeared to have for his friends.

            “What?” he whispered. “You never told me there was a risk of hurting her.”

            Draco blinked once, apparently thrown, and then a look of exasperation crossed his face. “Harry, you don’t care about her anyway,” he said, as though reasoning with a small child. “What’s the harm?”

            “I didn’t—“ Harry shook his head, anger and some other emotion he couldn’t identify rising in his throat. Now that Lila was gone, the memory of the conversation he’d had with Draco before she woke up was creeping back. “I don’t want anyone else to suffer just because I’ve suffered,” he said at last.

            Draco took a step towards him. “That’s too damn bad,” he said, “because Scrimgeour will be wailing in pain before I finish with him.”

            Harry gripped his wand for a moment. He didn’t want to talk about this, he didn’t want to talk about this—

            But he didn’t think he could avoid it any longer.

            “Why?” he whispered.

            “He hurt you—“

            “Not that,” said Harry, and he said it in a forlorn enough tone that Draco paused and listened to him. “Why do you want to take revenge on Scrimgeour? Not just force him to remove the curse, but hurt him? What does it matter to you?

            “Why do you care what I think of your sexual orientation? It’s your own business. Why do you want to touch me? What—“ Harry couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question less bluntly. “What do you want from me?”

            He stood there in vibrating silence when it finished, and held Draco’s eyes, and hoped he hadn’t just ruined everything.

*

            Draco had been patient. He’d been good. He’d had more self-control than he thought anyone could have expected from him.

            But seeing the true frustration in Harry’s eyes, the uncertainty, the misunderstanding, the complete disbelief that someone like Draco could ever want him for himself—

            Draco’s self-control fell away, and the hunger burned through. He felt a smile molding itself across his face. He knew what that smile looked like, even without benefit of a mirror.

            It was time Harry Potter, who spoke the truth, understood it as well.

*

            McAbacus: I don’t know if Harry is as clueless about his importance in book 7, but this story does not follow Book 7 canon and I do not have to consider that. :)

            Dezra: Can’t answer any questions about Snape, yet.

            Myra: They already have the Harry Potter file; Draco hypnotized Kingsley into getting it for them.

            Draco couldn’t break the curse on Harry just with Legilimency, but with Draco’s help, Snape might be able to hear Harry as he is.

            Nice Non Linear: Thanks! Snape has his own version of events, of course, which Draco’s does not cover.

            Rafiq, Mangacat, thrnbrooke: Thanks for reviewing!
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A Determined Frame of Mind