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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Ten—Bearing Burdens

            “When will the trial be?”

            Hermione—the dream Hermione, who served Discipula, and Harry reminded himself of that so that he wouldn’t be tempted to feel hurt because she wasn’t behaving like a friend—looked down her nose at him. “Of course we can’t know that right now.” Her eyes flickered over his head to the Malfoys. Her mouth twisted, and Harry shuddered a bit. He was utterly sure that the Hermione in his world had never worn an expression of loathing like that, no matter how much she had despised Draco for calling her “Mudblood.”

            No, Malfoy, Harry thought a moment later. I have to think of him as Malfoy, and this one as Draco. That’s the only way to keep them separate, and I want to keep them separate. Mixing them up would hurt both of them, and they don’t deserve to be hurt like that.

            “Why not?” he asked. “The execution was imminent until I volunteered to be their barrister. I would think that Discipula would want to have the trial as soon as possible.”

            Hermione stared at him. “Why?”

            “To embarrass me and give me less time to prepare, of course,” Harry said, blinking. He would have been more cautious with that announcement in front of Discipula herself, but he didn’t see a reason to pretend with Hermione. She had been careless with her own secrets, if her hatred of pure-bloods was supposed to be a secret, in front of him.

            Hermione shook her head as though to clear it. “My employer is—a complicated woman,” she said. “But she wouldn’t deliberately take away time that you could use to prepare. You may have a week to go.”

            “She’s giving me one, or that’s a possible estimate of how much time is left?” Harry asked, deciding to pounce before Hermione could change her mind and take even this away from him.

            Hermione sighed in annoyance. “I thought only I watched the nuances of words that obsessively,” she muttered.

            “I’m guarding three other lives,” Harry said, and heard Draco, who had so far watched silently next to his parents, make an inarticulate sound. Harry glanced back and smiled at him, trying to show that he appreciated the reaction and convey reassurance at the same time. “I have to be obsessive.”

            Hermione abruptly leaned forwards and peered at him from so short a distance away that Harry’s eyes crossed trying to keep the expression on her face distinctly in sight. She looked shocked and worried, as though Harry had done something that gave her reason to doubt Discipula, or herself. She shook her head and stepped away from him.

            “You can’t say that,” she said. “It’s not true.”

            Harry sighed. “Why not? Now you’re going to tell me that my clients were never in danger of execution, when I’m fairly sure they were.”

            “Not that,” Hermione said, and then turned and walked rapidly away from him. Harry rolled his eyes. He had thought Hermione was here as Discipula’s official messenger, giving him (grudging) notes about when the food and clothes for the Malfoys would arrive and how far they were permitted to move outside the room (not at all), but she hadn’t conveyed a lot of information beyond that.

            Maybe she wasn’t meant to, Harry thought, and turned back to face Lucius and Narcissa. There was something that he wanted to ask them before he woke up. “Are you going to let only your son fight for his life?” he asked. “Or are you going to do so, as well? I think he would fare better with you alive.”

            Lucius met him with what sounded like an honest question for the first time. “You’re doing this for him, and not for us, aren’t you?”

            Harry had to nod. Draco leaned against him from the back, now, having stepped behind Harry when he turned around to face Lucius and Narcissa. “Yes. I wish—” Well, no, he didn’t really wish that he could have done the same for Lucius and Narcissa, cared as much for them. Not when they were so determined to despise him for being a Muggleborn, and not when they also seemed determined to die.

            Lucius hummed under his breath, which immediately made Harry cautious. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he was sure that it indicated Lucius was coming up with something he wouldn’t like. “Will you be able to fight as strongly for us as you will need to, then, when you can’t care for our lives?”

            “I care for your lives as they affect Draco,” Harry said firmly, wrapping his arm around Draco’s waist. “And that’s enough.”

            Draco leaned against him with a little sigh. Harry resisted the absurd temptation to turn and sniff his hair. Where had it come from? Not a wish that could be indulged in front of his parents, even if he had wanted to indulge it in the first place.

            “I think him our best chance, Lucius.” Narcissa spoke as though they had spent a long time discussing this, and Harry reckoned they might have done so, when he was gone. “The only chance.” She rose to her feet and came across the room to stand with her arm through her husband’s. Harry glanced quickly at Draco to see if he was looking lonely again, but he wasn’t, this time.

            Instead, his eyes were fixed on Harry, bright and—

            Adoring? Harry shook his head to clear it. It couldn’t be that. He and Draco had only known each other for a few days. He was only doing something that someone else should have done—that anyone else who was honest and brave would have done. Really, Neville, this world’s Neville, should have been here instead of him, or a Hermione who cared about the rights of all people.

            But because they weren’t, this universe had called out to him and made him come here. That was probably the source of these dreams, Harry thought. There was so much wrong with this place. He couldn’t imagine that Draco had been meant to die. He had to have been brought here to avert that fate.

            “Very well.” Lucius bowed his head. “Then I will give you the name of a witness you may call for me.”

            Harry sighed with relief, and Draco whooped beside him and threw an arm around his shoulders.

*

            “That was enlightening.”

            The voice so close to his ear made Harry dizzy for a moment. He had to blink and bow his head back until it hit the edge of wet metal before he remembered what had happened when he was falling asleep. There had been a smelly candle, and Malfoy murmuring to him, and stroking his scalp, Malfoy, of all people—

            Harry sat up fast enough to scatter drops of water from the sink a good distance across Moonflower’s little sanctuary for fake magic. He didn’t care. He had to get his wand, and then he had to find a curse that was sufficiently painful to make Malfoy pay for what he had done.

            Malfoy caught his wrist. That was wrong. He should have been retreating in terror, Harry fumed, not standing there looking as if he did this every day! And he shouldn’t have an expression like the one he wore, shocked and pleased and deep with something else all at once. Harry knew that Malfoy’s feelings were confused, that his own were confused, that everyone was as confused as fuck, but he was absolutely sure that the expression on Malfoy’s face had no place even in a confused universe.

            “I take it I didn’t disappear?” Harry asked sarcastically, because he couldn’t say half the things that he wanted to in front of Moonflower, and a quick glance to the side showed him that she was still there, one hand pressed over her mouth and eyes wide as though she didn’t know what to make of them. Bad enough that she was a Muggle. Harry didn’t want to show off his stupid twisted relationship with Malfoy in front of anyone, Muggle or not.

            “No,” Malfoy said. “You remained right here, the way that you said you did.” He still smiled, and his fingers had found a place on Harry’s wrist he seemed interested in caressing. “But I learned something anyway.”

            “What’s that?” Harry tried to pull away. God knew what Moonflower was thinking. Probably that they were lovers, or at least having a lovers’ quarrel. Or were just mental. Harry knew he shouldn’t care so much about her opinion, since he doubted that he would be seeing her again, but he had his dignity to maintain.

            Malfoy held him still. “It’s not like normal sleep,” he said quietly. “Your eyes dart back and forth too quickly for that. And your hands move. Not as though you were touching anything, exactly. But they open and shut. And the moment the eye movements stopped, so did the hand movements.”

            Harry frowned uneasily. He had come to accept, in this last dream, that the universe was real, because that would mean Draco and his problems were real. It was hard to think that Draco might just be a projection of his imagination and nothing else.

            “For all I know, that always happens,” he said. “Or it could be a habit that I’ve picked up lately because these are a different kind of dream. That doesn’t mean that it’s a spell someone cast on me, Malfoy.”

            “What do you mean, for all you know?” Malfoy picked on the thing that mattered least in Harry’s little speech, of course. And he still didn’t move away. Harry was starting to suspect that Malfoy had a fetish for his wrists. “You should know what you look like when you sleep. Your lovers should have mentioned it.” His voice grew harsh on the word lovers, a bit, but Harry knew why and ignored it. It wasn’t as though Malfoy had a reason to feel jealous, and maybe he couldn’t help it.

            “I haven’t shared a bed with anyone in years,” he said. “Even when I was dating people, I generally didn’t. We went back to our own flats at the end of the night.”

            Malfoy stared at him. “What? That’s insane.”

            “It was the way it worked for me,” Harry said.

            Malfoy looked as if he wanted to pursue that, but he was smart enough not to, probably because Harry was glaring at him. He shook his head a few times and then said, “Fine. But your mates would have noticed when you shared a bedroom in Gryffindor.”

            Harry cast a wary glance at Moonflower, but although she looked completely fascinated, she didn’t look as though she had any understanding. And he still thought Malfoy would Obliviate her before they left. Or else he paid her enough that she didn’t care. “Not necessarily. I didn’t make any noise, did I?”

            “No,” Malfoy admitted. His brow was pinched.

            “Well, then.” Harry spread his hands. “You ought to hear Ron snore; he wouldn’t hear anything over that. Neville was too shy to investigate even if he did think something was wrong, and Dean and Seamus slept every night with the curtains closed.”

            “When you were a child, Potter,” Malfoy said. He sounded as if he were approaching the end of his patience, which made no sense. Harry was more and more inclined to think that the quick eye-movements and the hand gestures were just things that happened when he was sleeping, not signs that he’d been cursed. “Someone must have noticed then.”

            Harry felt his face shut down. There was no way that he was going to talk to Malfoy about sleeping in a cupboard most of the time he was at the Dursleys’ and then in a bedroom by himself, where the only people nearby wouldn’t have cared if he screamed himself to death. “They didn’t,” he said shortly.

            “So this is new,” Malfoy said, stroking his finger with one thumb again. “And connected to these dreams.”

            Harry sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know, Malfoy. I reckon that it’s interesting for you when I do things like move my hands and dart my eyes around, but God knows why. And I don’t know if this is something new, or connected to the dreams, or what. I promise I don’t.”

            Malfoy peered at him. “I told you,” he said. “I’m not sure how I feel about you from day to day, but I do know that I don’t want you harmed. And I think this magic that some unknown person has cast on you could get fucking complicated.”

            Harry bit his lip savagely so that he wouldn’t respond, and turned away. Moonflower was still there, and how should he respond to Malfoy’s words? Harry couldn’t prove that he wasn’t concerned. All that talk back at the office about wanting to have Hermione available to Harry if he started distrusting Malfoy sounded like it. But he didn’t have to stay here and have a useless argument, either.

            “I wonder whether you could ever want me,” Malfoy said speculatively to his back.

            “Not when you act like a right berk,” Harry said shortly, and jerked open the door of the dim little shop.

*

            “Are you all right, Harry?”

            Harry blinked and looked up. He’d been sitting in the drawing room with a book for ages, it seemed like, staring into the fire and not saying a word. He could understand why Hermione would be a bit concerned.

            He did have to hide a smile when he saw her, though. Her lips were glistening, her cheeks red, and one side of her head had hair sticking up on end. It was perfectly obvious why she hadn’t accosted him earlier.

            “Ron asleep?” he asked. “Like he usually is right now?”

            Hermione flushed more than she already was and swatted his knee. “You could get your own place if you wanted to,” she muttered, sitting on the couch next to him. “If it bothers you so much that we’re, um.”

            Harry laughed at her openly this time. She’d come right up to the edge of saying the word “shagging,” but now that she was there, she couldn’t go on. Hermione was one of the bravest and most unconventional people he knew, but bring her up to an abyss of sex and she wouldn’t be able to jump over it.

            “Shut it, you,” she muttered. “I asked you if you were all right, and I still want to know. Since you’ve started this Quidditch training with Malfoy, you’ve acted strange.”

            Harry hesitated. He was still reluctant to talk to her about the dreams unless and until he had to. She would be more concerned than Malfoy, and would probably want to haul him off to one of those experts in dream magic right away. But there was something else that he wouldn’t mind discussing with her.

            “Malfoy kissed me,” he said.

            Hermione fell off the couch.

            Harry laughed again, in spite of his own concerns and the dreams and Malfoy’s confusing him, in spite of everything, because she looked so funny sprawled on the floor and staring up at him with parted lips. “I always thought that Ron would give me that reaction, if I ever announced that I was dating someone unsuitable,” he said.

            “I’m not—it’s not—you just—”

            Harry snickered again. Hermione usually wasn’t so unable to speak, either.

            Hermione took her time about dusting off her robes, and then climbed up and deliberately sat close to him on the couch. “He kissed you,” she said. “Does that mean that you’re dating him? Those words about Ron—”

            Harry shook his head, already sorry for saying them and properly punished for the way he’d been laughing at her. Her eyes had that gleam of curiosity that said she would chase down the things he’d been talking about to the ends of the earth, if she could. That wasn’t at all the response that he had hoped to elicit. “No, Hermione, no dating. But he did kiss me, and he says that he likes me, but he also feels pulled to despise me. I don’t think he really started this training as a cover to be close to me, but he acts as though it helps. He wants me to focus on him, and gets angry when I don’t. But he found me looking at the Death Eater trial records and thought it meant I was going to try and get his parents arrested for something else. So he doesn’t trust me, whatever he says.”

            “Well, then the best option is to assume that he’s telling the truth.” Hermione spoke with authority, leaning forwards. “How do you feel about him, Harry?”

            “Irritated and confused,” Harry said, startled into telling the truth himself. “What else is there to feel? He behaves so confusingly that I would have to be Dumbledore to really understand him, and I don’t see why I can’t feel irritated.”

            Hermione gave him a tolerant look. “I know that. What I meant was, do you feel that you want to date him? Snog him? Do you feel attracted to him?”

            “A relationship between us would never work,” Harry said. “Starting with the fact that I would have to attend Ron’s funeral if I ever announced that I was dating him.”

            “You’ve managed to put up with the rows that Ron and I have, the early-morning cooing, and the way that we sometimes put you in the middle of our arguments and demand that you pick sides for years now,” Hermione said. “I think Ron could get used to this. Don’t think about our reactions. Think about your own. Do you want to date him, Harry?”

            Harry took a deep breath and scraped his fingers through his hair. He almost hoped that he would find something there he could use to disprove Hermione’s theory, or distract her. What did he feel, and why was it important?

            The thought came to him with blinding clarity as he sat there, such clarity that he had to grunt and turn his head away a little.

            He didn’t want to feel anything for Malfoy, because he wanted his emotions and concern to flow towards Draco instead.

            “Harry?” Hermione saw that, of course, of all the things that he didn’t want her to notice, leaning intently towards him and nodding a little. “What is it? You just thought of something that makes this make sense?”

            “I—don’t want to date him,” Harry said, still trying to deal with the knowledge that had come to him. Since when he did he think about Draco that way? He had thought that he wanted to save him, protect him, not hurt him, yes, but it was a long way from that to wanting to date him. Someone in trouble with the law, someone dependent on Harry, someone who might not even exist. “I don’t think so, at least.”

            “Well.” Hermione settled back with a sigh. “Then perhaps you can’t blame him for being confusing, if you’re also confused.”

            “I’m confused because he’s confusing!” Harry snapped. He was the only one in the room who knew that he really wanted to talk about Draco when he was talking about Malfoy, though, and he stood up with an irritable shrug of his shoulders. “Thanks, Hermione, but I think I’ll go to bed. I can’t figure out what I want do right now.”

            Other than see Draco again. He wondered if the dreams would come to him tonight when he had had one in the middle of the afternoon. And he wondered if he was becoming obsessed with them, if he should think in more detail about the possibility that someone had cursed him to stop him from paying attention to the real world.

            “All right, Harry.” Hermione gave him a gentle look. “You know, I do hope that you find someone for you someday, even if it’s Malfoy. You’ve been without a permanent partner for too long, and you’re someone who needs to settle down and needs a family.”

            “You make me sound like a girl, Hermione,” Harry told her flatly.

            “That isn’t the insult you mean it to be, given who I am,” Hermione said, and there was a tightness in the back of her tone that told Harry to go to bed before he did something stupid.

            He nodded to his friend and shuffled away to the bathroom, where he stood brushing his teeth until his mouth stung, trying to come to terms with what he had realized.

            The person he wanted wasn’t real, or at least might not be. The person who wanted him, or pretended to, was real, but such a shifting mixture of emotions that Harry would have more luck trying to gain the Dursleys’ forgiveness than trying to understand him.

            Harry spat toothpaste into the sink and shook his head. Yes, there was nothing he could do for right now, except grow closer to Draco without hurting him and put Malfoy off, and he was better off sleeping and storing this all in the back of his head for right now.

            But just as he was lying down on his pillow and getting comfortable, something knocked on the window. Harry sat up with a groan and reached for his wand, ready to hex any owl that might appear carrying a Howler or a request for an interview.

            It wasn’t either of those. It was a letter from Malfoy, and Harry stared at it in disbelief once he got it open, the owl settled on a perch in the corner, and the fire lit so that he could read the damn thing. The light from the Lumos Charm wasn’t bright enough, given his eyesight.

            It started with a long list of names, and ended with a paragraph that Harry should have known Malfoy would write, despite all his assurances of the afternoon.

            These are the names of all the experts in dram magic I could find who had a generally good reputation. Some of them live on the Continent, but none of them are impossible to reach. You should look over them and choose one you think you can trust. I didn’t learn enough about the dreams today, so you should see someone who can really help you.

            Stay safe.

            And his signature.

            Harry closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples. Yes, in fact, he had come to a conclusion after all.

            The dreams might be strange in origin, and he might be falling in love with the Draco in them when there was every chance that their love affair would be doomed, but that was better than Malfoy and his stupid interference. As Harry had told him once, those Quidditch practices, and now the way Malfoy behaved around him in other settings, was the only thing that didn’t make sense in his life. Even Draco made sense in one way, was beginning to fit with his life, gave him a purpose and a sense of being needed.

            Harry couldn’t figure out what Malfoy would need from him, and probably it would sound like gibberish to his ears even if Malfoy tried to voice it.

            In the morning, I’ll tell Malfoy that he needs to leave me alone, he thought, and lay back down on the pillows. Smoothing his life out again and getting rid of the piece that didn’t fit would be a profound relief.

*

            Review responses for the last chapter can be found at http://lomonaaerenrr.livejournal.com/6550.html
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Sleepless