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A Potion Named Desire	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10877 -:- 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—Blood and Lavender

            “Evening, Potter.”

            Harry automatically stepped out of the way as Malfoy strode past him, but kept his palm on the door to hold it open. Any visit from Malfoy after five-o’clock was unprecedented, and Harry intended that it be a short one. The anniversary of Ron’s death was today, and both he and Hermione were exhausted from a short visit with the Weasleys. It didn’t help that there was an empty chair left for Ron, and that Harry had accidentally met Ginny’s eyes once or twice during the afternoon. Each time, she glanced away, so much pain in her face that Harry was forced to consider she might never be free of it. He would have come home and got quietly drunk if he was alone. He probably should be grateful Hermione was here. She kept him from doing something stupid.

            But now Malfoy was here as well, which meant the stupid thing might have come to him. Harry trusted the prat a little more now after their blood oath, though the bond created by it had faded with the Veritaserum, but one arrogant comment was much more likely to set him off than usual.

            “Evening, Malfoy,” he said, and watched in some bemusement as the other man arranged several ingredients on the table in front of him. He frowned when he realized that Malfoy obviously intended to stay a while, and shook his head, even though Malfoy wasn’t looking at him. “This might not be the best idea.”

            Malfoy laughed, and turned around. Harry paused. His eyes shone as they had the other day, like banked snow, but with a feverish touch to the glitter that made Harry uneasy.

            “It might not be the best idea?” Malfoy echoed him. “Potter, this is the best idea. I think I’ve finally come up with a way to create the ideal Desire potion.” He paused a long moment—just, Harry knew, for the delight of seeing him squirm. “But I need your help, and we need to do it now.”

            “Does it rely on the phase of the moon or something?” Harry slowly let the door fall shut, anxiously glancing at his bedroom as he did it. Hermione had kissed his cheek when they returned to the flat and said she really only wanted to go to bed. She hadn’t seemed more depressed than usual, but her usual was pretty damn bad. “I don’t want to wake Hermione up.”

            “Nothing to do with the phase of the moon.” Malfoy snorted and flicked his fingers as if brushing the dust of crushed lavender petals off them. “We have to do this before I think it all the way through and lose my courage.”

            Harry’s eyebrows strayed near his hairline when he raised them. “Um. And you still think this is one of the best ideas you’ve ever had?”

            Malfoy laughed like a loon, and then reached out and snagged Harry’s hand, dragging him close. Harry found himself going very still, save for a mild tremor, like he had when Malfoy opened his magical core to him.

            “Yes,” Malfoy whispered into his ear. “I’m certain. You see, I’ve been leaving too much of the work to you. It’s no wonder that the potion hasn’t come out right. It’s not just alchemy or ingredients or magic that we need. Do you know what makes a Potions master, Harry?”

            “Not really.” Combined with his first name, the soft, hot breath against his ear was extremely distracting. Harry felt his body taking an inappropriate interest, and frowned. Since the Incident, one thing he had prided himself on was acting on liking instead of lust; he had found Susan and his other girlfriends attractive, but he had always known them as people first. Finding Malfoy attractive separately from admiring his personality was stupid.

            “Because we reach out to potions with our passive magic,” Malfoy whispered, “rather than our active. We open our magical cores to them, on a very basic level. That’s not something you do with any other magical art, except maybe Divination and Care of Magical Creatures, to the extent that you can call those arts.” His hand twitched against Harry’s stomach, where it had wandered for some reason. “There, the wand is the conduit. But mostly, you don’t use your wand to directly affect a potion, only its ingredients. You’re unusual. But even you must have used passive magic when you brewed your own variation of this potion.

            “Then you started to use your passive magic with a different set of ingredients. That didn’t work. You only knew how to handle the one. And I stood back and almost never involved my own passive magic. The one time I did was the time that we came closest to success.”



            “We still failed.” Harry was striving to clear his mind from the peaceful fog that seemed to be enveloping it.

            “But we came close,” Malfoy said, and rucked Harry’s shirt up to touch warm skin. Harry shivered more violently, and finally broke loose from his grip and twisted around to face him.

            “If you brew it, and I add my magic,” he said, “we should succeed? That’s your grand insight? If you always knew this about active and passive magic, why didn’t you figure this out before now?”

            Malfoy’s eyes shone with something like joy. Harry fell back a bewildered step. He might trust Malfoy more now, but that didn’t mean he understood him.

*

            “Why, Potter,” Draco said, though he would have been willing to use Potter’s first name now, “one might think you were irritated.”

            His own joy overwhelmed him like glittering, leaping cascades of both light and water. He wanted to laugh, except that laughing too much would lead to hysteria, and then he couldn’t brew the potion. He wanted to hold Potter again, to feel the heat of lightly trembling skin under his fingertips, but that might tease Potter into refusing to work with him. He wanted to do this now, now, now.

            Potter merely folded his arms and glowered at him, which Draco thought was poor return for the effort he was putting into this relationship. He was about to tell Potter so, when the other man said, “You didn’t answer my question. Why didn’t you figure this out before now?”

            “Why didn’t you?” Draco countered. Triumph blazed in his throat, his eyes. God, it was so hard to hold himself back. He wanted to snatch the ingredients and begin the motions of brewing immediately, but he hadn’t explained to Potter his part in this yet, and he would have to.

            “Malfoy.”

            Hearing his name in that tone was enticing. Draco bit his lips to keep from grinning and assumed as much of a sober, penitent expression as he could. “Honestly? I was so fascinated watching your magic at work that it didn’t occur to me brewing didn’t go into it. You perform nearly the whole process through the medium of your wand. I thought I could learn to duplicate it eventually, by hand. But we never got to that point. We only approached through your magic. And since that’s the part I wanted to learn, because it’s very different, I let novelty value take precedence over thinking.” He shrugged elaborately. “Or you could say that I’ve grown so used to the higher, abstract, complex practices of Potions making that I neglected to go back and relearn the basics.”

            “Wait.” Potter blinked at him. “That made sense.”

            “You are by no means as stupid as you think you are,” Draco said, at peace with the universe and willing to say almost anything if it would mean that Potter joined with him in the process.

            Potter gaped.

            “Open compliments too much?” Draco cocked his head. “Very well. You probably are as stupid as I think you are. But I don’t hold your low opinion of your skills. I’ve seen them in action, and I judge them more fairly and honestly than you do. Isn’t that sad?” He couldn’t help himself, and he reached out to touch Potter again, running his fingers over the line of his shoulder and collarbone. “I value you, and you value me more than you state—I know it—and I’m sure this is the best way to overcome the problems we’ve been having with the potion, and can we please brew now?”

            He ignored the way his voice probably sounded like a whinge on those last words. If he wanted to whinge, he had a right.

*

            It was like being seduced.

            Harry literally didn’t have it within him to resist the entreaty he saw in Malfoy’s eyes. It was as if Ron had asked him to play a Quidditch game; Harry might doubt that his presence was absolutely vital to Gryffindor’s victory, but that his friend wanted him there was enough to quell his doubts.

            And Malfoy had just given him compliments, and spoken without a trace of the pride and aloof dignity that Harry sometimes found absurd in him.

            “All right,” he whispered.

            Malfoy gave him a genuine smile, which was enough to make Harry catch his breath like an idiot teenager, but Malfoy had already whirled away and approached the cauldron again, so it was possible he didn’t see it. Harry followed him, only pausing to cast a spell on the bedroom door that should prevent Hermione from hearing what they were doing out here but which would let him know if she cried out in her sleep.

            He came to a halt beside Malfoy and automatically lifted his wand to light the fire. Malfoy caught his wrist and shook his head.

            “No,” he said. “I need to do this part, to start the potion off as brewing rather than strictly a wand-process. You’ll open your magical core to me at points during the brewing, though—“

            “I don’t know how to do that.”

            “Yes, you do.” Malfoy smiled again; Harry felt himself flush. “It’s instinctive, once you trust someone enough. You fall into the necessity of magical lending, you realize what’s going wrong or what might be a weakness, and you release yourself into it. Believe me, Potter, I think it’ll be harder for me than for you.”

            Harry nodded dazedly.

            “And then you’ll use your magic, and I’ll open my core to you.” Malfoy gestured, as excited as a child who’d figured out a new play in Quidditch. “That was the other part of the insight, the really important part. We can’t create a potion like the Desire potion if only one person does the brewing, or if the magic and the brewing are handled in complete isolation. This is a very delicate potion, one that can be attuned to individuals, and the base is most definitely attuned to you. It would become attached to either you or I if one of us does the majority of the work. We have to prevent that. By handing the work back and forth, by mingling spells and brewing, active and passive magic, we’ll create a general solution that can cure what anyone most loathes about themselves.”



            “That part, on the other hand, I’m not so sure I understood,” Harry muttered.

            “You’re perfectly capable of doing so,” said Malfoy, and leaned forwards to stare at him. Harry shuffled a step back. Malfoy pursed his lips as if he were being too generous to call attention to this. “I’ll give you a simple analogy. Some Crup puppies have the tendency to bond with just one person, if only that person feeds them. You really need two people working together to keep a Crup as a friendly pet. We’ll both feed this potion, to prevent it from imprinting on either of us.”

            “And that will automatically make it friendly to anyone?”



            “Yes,” Malfoy said comfortably. “It should. It has to do with the difference between active magic and passive magic, Potter,” he added, when Harry’s eyebrows rose again. “Active magic is what you feel in someone’s magical signature. It’s different from person to person. Passive magic, though, can hardly be distinguished. It’s what gives wizards the ability to fly brooms, to live long lives, and to connect with wands. And basically, anyone above the level of a Squib can do that, even if they’re not very good at, say, flying. Fed on an exclusive diet of just one person’s passive magic, this potion becomes attuned. Given more than one, it can’t distinguish them, and it will bond to everyone. I promise.”

            Harry wrinkled his nose. It still sounded odd to him, but…well…

            The simple fact was that he did trust Malfoy enough to do this.

            And he was curious about what might happen.

            He nodded. “All right.”

*

            Draco had often had perfect moments in his life—usually the moment when inspiration for overcoming a potions problem struck him, but also the day his shop opened, and the day he realized the Dark Lord was dead and he was going to live, and the times when he had confronted a memory from the war and managed to overcome and live with it. But they were always fleeting. He recognized them later, for the most part, and regretted that he had been much too busy living at the time to appreciate them.

            This time, he knew, as soon as he lit the fire under the cauldron, that a perfect moment was coming. And then it turned into a long stream of them, and they simply never ended.

            He conjured water, but poured it into a likewise conjured glass and dumped it in, rather than using the Aguamenti charm to send a spray directly into the cauldron. He hadn’t exactly planned that; it only came to him, he knew it was right, and he did what his instincts demanded of him. He waited, weirdly calm in the middle of his impatience, like being in the eye of a storm, whilst the temperature in the cauldron rose to the correct point.

            Potter was beside him when Draco stepped back and raised his wand, aiming it at the ingredients on the table. His face was openly startled; obviously he had assumed that he would perform the Diamond-Cutting Hex. But this was a great excuse for Potter to use his passive magic and feed it to Draco, and Draco chose to force the issue. Potter knew how dangerous the spell was, and he would share Draco’s determination not to let the potion fail. That should provide all the impetus he needed to open his core.

            Potter closed his eyes and tilted his head back. His breathing stilled for a moment, and then Draco felt a stream of magic passing into him and blending with his own power. He choked, breathless, dizzy with the strength of it, and began to cast.

            The duckweed, the Antipodean Opaleye scale, the coil of copper, the Demiguise hairs, and the black unicorn’s hoof scraping—a mixture of the potion’s original ingredients and substitutes that Draco had introduced and liked the symbolism of—severed themselves. Draco choked again. He had never felt anything like this. He hadn’t been able to do this, and now he could. He extended a trembling hand before him, and wondered if Potter ever felt the temptation to simply unleash his power and take over the world. Draco would have suffered from that temptation, were this magic available to him at all times.



            Potter cursed suddenly, and Draco turned in time to see him casting a crushing spell directly at the anemone petals. It was true that they hadn’t crushed them first, the way the original directions for the potion called for with the lavender petals, but Draco couldn’t bring himself to regret it.

            This was right.

            Draco opened his passive magic to Potter for the spell that would Transfigure some of the anemone petals into daisy petals and meld them into the copper. He had imagined it would weaken him to let the magic go; instead, it felt as if he were simply opening a sluice gate and pouring water through. Potter accepted it with a tiny tilt of his head, and then the copper was studded with daisy petals—

            But Potter had left the distribution of the crushed anemone petals that were still anemone to him.

            Draco gathered them in the cup of his right hand, rolled them between his fingers, and tossed them into the cauldron at the exact same moment as the copper fell in. He didn’t know why he did that. He only knew that it felt right.

            His mind tried to come up with calculations about the salt in his skin and how that might balance the overabundance of copper in the metal coil and the blood represented by the blood-colored flowers, but Potter had opened his core again, passing a roaring tide of floodwaters back to him, and Draco was swelling with too much confidence to work on theory. He had to plunge forwards, Gryffindor-like, unchecked.

            He Summoned the Opaleye scale and cradled it in his hand as Potter had, but that was no longer enough. The anemonepetals had the influence of his skin; the dragon scale would have to have something else. And Draco lowered his head and breathed on it, a breath pregnant with magic, and then threw it like a Chaser tossing a Quaffle, splashinto the potion.

            Potter laughed. Draco glanced at him, saw his cheeks flushed and his eyes brilliant with something like passion, and felt a throb in his lower abdomen. Well, just like theories on the amount of salt in the potion, he could think of what to do about that when this brewing was over.

            He poured passive magic into Potter, who Summoned one of the Demiguise hairs, breathed on it in turn, and then propelled it into the potion with magic. A cloud of fragrant purple steam rose above the cauldron, but nothing exploded. Draco took a deep breath. He would have expected something to go wrong before now, if something was going to go wrong.

            On the other hand, Potter had said that this was the dangerous part in the original brewing Draco had watched.

            Draco picked up the scraping from the black unicorn’s hoof and conjured salt onto it. Potter poured magic into him, and the scraping was in the potion before Draco had blinked, followed by the release of the Diamond-Cutting Hex on allthe ingredients at once, which he hadn’t known he would do. He was moving so fast that he was only remembering his actions like afterimages of a speeding figure.

            But Potter had already claimed some of the passive magic, or else Draco had given it at a silent demand without even noticing, and he was the one who raised his wand and arched an eyebrow. He did the spell that turned the remaining Demiguise hairs and duckweed into obsidian nonverbally. More than that, Draco realized a moment later, he completed the process that had previously taken five spells in one step.

            In the lump went. Potter altered the temperature of the water with a simple sweep of his hand, and called, “Draco!” as he tossed the rope of passive magic back. Draco nodded once, and seized the silver stirring rod lying beside the cauldron, beginning to turn the liquid in a pattern that resembled the maelstrom Potter had before created using a spell.

            He watched the ingredients jostling against each other, worrying over the thickness and the texture of the potion in the back of his mind. The front of his mind was far too concerned with smug exaltation in the power he could feel connecting both him and Harry. It didn’t leap back and forth between them now; it simply traveled, like water poured into an infinity symbol, always curling around to Harry’s magical core, always entering Draco’s and departing again.

            Draco could hardly move, save for his stirring hand, which continued its frantic pace. He didn’t wantto move. The web of links that bound him to Harry was incredible, sweet and strong and striking warmth into every part of him. It was the most intense bond he’d ever felt to any human being. He closed his eyes for just a moment, to savor it.

            Harry lunged past him in the next moment, grabbing his wrist and stilling his hand, and then picked up the glass stirring rod lying on the left side of the cauldron. He broke it with a spell this time, and dropped the smaller shard into the liquid. Draco approved, in the small part of his mind that wasn’t completely thrilling with the way Harry’s limbs tugged on his own as they moved. Draco could almost see the pattern of magic that connected them now, flickering in and out of view like the spider web of violet and gold one got from staring at the sun too long.

            And that was the final step. Draco blinked, and waited for the potion to do something.

            Another puff of fragrant smoke arose; this one smelled like lavender petals and blood. And then it settled. Potter flicked his wand to douse the fire, slowly, his face full of its own listening expression. Draco reckoned he was also responsive to the gravity of their tied bodies.

            And then it was done.

            Draco knew he should shut his magical core and break the connection between them, but damn, not yet. This was too delicious. The longer he and Harry stayed tied, the more their magic traveled back and forth, and the closer he felt. Draco found himself swaying towards Harry, his mouth slightly open, his eyes shut.

            Strong hands caught his wrist and turned it over. Draco opened his eyes in time to see Harry bow his head and lick his pulse point. He managed to blink languorously, and Harry glanced up in time to see it and understand it was a question.

            “It wasn’t fair that the anemone petals should get to know what your skin tasted like and I didn’t,” he said. His eyes were flaring, the way Draco had seen them do the day he forgot to take his potion. That was passion battling its way to the surface, and Draco reached out for it, trying to draw Harry’s emotions into him the way he had drawn his magic, naturally, without thought.

            Harry held his wrist tighter, and his eyes darkened. Draco was delighted to discover a new way of being wanted—an experience he had always enjoyed. The expression Harry watched him with was not lust for his body, but lust for touching, tasting, connection. Draco leaned nearer still, reaching out to curl an arm around Harry’s shoulders.

            And Harry stiffened, all at once, and then shut his magical core. Draco hissed soundlessly as the blow went home like a stab to his guts. He bent over, holding his stomach, and it was long moments before he could bring himself to look up again. He knew the glare of betrayal he fixed on Potter was slightly ridiculous, but he had never had someone violently endone of his perfect moments like that before.

*

            Harry turned away, panting heavily, his body shaking. He was on the verge of running off to the loo to be sick. If he hadn’t just taken his potion the other day, he wasn’t sure what would have happened.

            You cannot afford to feel like this, and you know it. You do terrible things when you feel like this. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t shut out Ginny’s face, scarred with horror and pain.

            “What the hell, Potter?” Draco’s—Malfoy’s—voice was weak, but he managed to convey his outrage clearly enough.

            “I’m sorry,” Harry said. “It had to end, and I—ended it badly. I’m sorry.” He drew several sharp breaths, and said, “How long until you can know whether we succeeded with the potion?”

            “Two hours,” Draco said, stiffly.

            “I’m sorry,” Harry repeated, and then he thought of Ginny’s face again, and what Draco’s face might have looked like if Harry had done the same thing to him, and he really did have to run for the loo. “Sorry,” he gasped as he slammed the door. “The smell.”

            He bent over the toilet and was noisily sick. Then he lowered his head into his arms and ignored Draco’s knocking for a while.

            We’ve got to figure out a less intimate way of brewing the potion.

            When he came out of the loo, he avoided Draco’s eyes, and they stood in studied silence until Draco at last went to the cauldron, and cast several spells that Harry couldn’t hear. He turned around with an expression of strained triumph on his face.

            “We did it,” he said.

            Harry closed his eyes, and nodded. He made himself think of a happy Hermione, and nothing else.

*

            Dezra: The relationship between Nott and Diggory is a bit more complicated than that, but this isn’t gone into detail about until the second story.

            Mangacat: Well, Hermione is probably trying to control Harry’s attitude towards the potion because it’s one of the few bits of control she currently feels up to exercising.
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A Potion Named Desire

Chapter Ten—Blood and Lavender