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Acts of Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21189 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 9
- 10
- 11
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Chapter Ten—Communicating
            Harry spent a long moment snuggling back into his blankets and closing his eyes with a delicate sigh. He didn’t really want to get up and go downstairs and face the words he knew were hovering in the air, even if no one was speaking them right now.
            They didn’t need to speak them. He knew everyone expected him to attend to them anyway.
            And one word was dependent on the other. The first word was “wedding,” and whenever Harry heard-didn’t-hear it, it was accompanied by glances darted back and forth between Ginny and him. The second word was “out,” and it would materialize more strongly than ever if Harry didn’t say the first one.
            In fact, Harry thought, sitting up idly and stretching his arms out, I might be the only one who hears that word, right now.
            He faced the day, because he had to, and took a quick shower and brushed his teeth. The face staring at him in the mirror startled him. He looked—well, a lot less apprehensive than he had thought he would.
            Because I know the answer to those questions, Harry thought, and leaned over the sink to spit into it. I know what words I need to speak.
            That didn’t make it any easier to put on his clothes and march downstairs, into the swirling chaos of the words.
            “Good morning, dear.” Molly’s smile was tender the way it always was after the main breakfast, when she had seen Arthur and George out the door and could sit down with a cup of tea. There was still plenty of food on the table, though, and Harry inhaled the delicious scent of baking bread from the next room. “Are you ready to eat?”
            Harry smiled and started to respond, but he heard footsteps behind him just then, and he recognized them. The footsteps he would have to speak the words to.
            It was July, and Ginny had come back from her seventh year at Hogwarts. Her last one, with her NEWTs successfully and impressively passed, and questions in her eyes whenever she looked at Harry.
            Harry took a cup of tea and turned around to face her. “Good morning,” he said. “Sleep well?”
            Ginny widened her eyes and shook her head a little, as though she couldn’t believe Harry was avoiding his duties with her. “Not so well as I could have,” she said. “I was dreaming about whether an important day would actually happen this summer or not.” She reached for the plate of fresh bread without taking her eyes off Harry.
            Huh. Harry had thought the confrontation would happen with most of the Weasleys there, and he had been prepared for that. He hadn’t thought Ginny would force it with only her mother as witness.
            It seemed even Molly didn’t want to be a witness. She stood up in a flutter of robes like a hen’s wings and said, “I’d better check on the biscuits,” then escaped to the warmth of the kitchen.
            Harry and Ginny stood facing each other across the table, as if it was a battlefield. Harry saw Ginny’s hand tightening on a fork. He got ready to raise a quick Shield Charm if it was necessary, and mentally sifted, also, through the quick packing charms he knew.
            “It’s time, Harry,” Ginny whispered. “While I was at Hogwarts you had a legitimate excuse, but it’s time now.”
            Harry blinked. “What are you talking about?” He hadn’t realized Ginny’s family thought he should wait to propose until she wasn’t at Hogwarts. He had just thought they expected it now because Harry and Ginny were spending so much time together.
            Ginny stood as tall and straight as an arrow planted in the ground. “You had a legitimate excuse to run around and play politics and concentrate on other things. But I’m a grown woman now, and you’re a grown man—more than. It’s time for us to set a date for the wedding and start planning our future.”
            That broke Harry of his paralysis at last. Maybe it was because someone had finally said the word that had hovered around the table for so long. He leaned forwards and murmured, “Do you love me, Ginny?”
            Ginny blinked like an insect had flown into her eye. “What? Of course I do.” She rearranged a few plates on the table while Harry stared at her. “I wouldn’t want to marry you if I didn’t. I would never want to marry without love.”
            She gave her hair a defiant little toss on the last word, and Harry smiled back at her and nodded. “Neither would I. And that’s why I can’t marry you.” He forced himself to keep calm and keep talking as tears began to pour down her face. “I’m sorry, Ginny. I really am. I like you, a lot, and if we could wait and get married in five or ten years, then maybe I’d love you and it would be fine. But I know you want to get married right away, and I don’t.”
            “What do you want to do?” Maybe it was just the tears choking Ginny’s voice or the tight grip she had on the table, but her tone sounded a lot like contempt.
            “Politics,” Harry said, and held her gaze. “Helping people to make their way in the world and heal the ravages of war. What I’ve been doing.”
            He didn’t say, My life’s work, which you disagree with. The words hung in the air between them, even more thrumming than the words before this had.
            Then Ginny gripped the table and flipped it towards him. It was so heavy that it didn’t really move that well, but plates toppled to the floor and smashed, tea spilled, teacups rolled and cracked, and Molly’s voice bellowed from the kitchen, “Ginny!”
            Harry didn’t think Ginny even heard her. Her face was as red as her hair, and she was yelling at him, “Then get out! Get out!”
            At least someone finally spoke both of them, Harry thought, and nodded to her and murmured words she didn’t hear. He was sorry, and he wanted to apologize, but staying to make sure she heard them would only make things worse right now.
            He went upstairs to cast the packing charms that had run through his mind, his heart lighter than it had been in some time. Who knew unspoken words could be so much worse than spoken ones?
*
            Draco stepped carefully out of the Floo. It wasn’t so much the unfamiliar hearth that he thought would trip him, but the soot he could both see and smell. He tucked his sleeve around his nose right afterwards.
            “What, does my house stink?”
            Draco dropped his sleeve and grinned at Harry as he came into the drawing room. The drawing room of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. Draco was still trying not to gape at the home of his Black ancestors, which he’d never seen.
            “I was trying not to breathe in the soot and die that way,” Draco responded, holding out his hand. “I thought it would be a messy way to expire.”
            “Oh, that was the fireplace Kreacher was complaining about!” Harry exclaimed, catching his hand and shaking it. “He kept mumbling there was one he hadn’t cleaned, but he’s getting so old now that I wanted him to rest. And I thought he was just having a delusion, anyway.”
            Draco had to admit he almost reveled in the words, in being friends with someone who would treat a house-elf that way instead of how his father or most of his other ancestors would have. Draco had discovered that a lot of the pure-blood world had shut its doors to him because he’d had the disgrace of being arrested.
            Well, he would shut his doors on them and join the other side, because it was the one that would have him. And he had to admit, it was a lot harder to treat house-elves with thoughtless cruelty now that he was no longer a child.
            “I know you only invited me for my potions, not because you wanted to plan my death in an amusing way,” Draco said, and reached into his robe pocket. “I have the Doxy Bane right now.”
            “No, I invited you for a surprise party.”
            Draco jerked in true surprise when he looked up and found that Harry was wearing the green robes that Draco had advised him to buy a few months earlier, when he had seen a photograph of them among the wares of a new robe shop in Diagon Alley. Draco blinked, and blinked again, and went through the days in his mind.
            “I didn’t think it was the thirty-first,” he said cautiously, as Harry walked up to him, clapped him on the shoulder, and steered him towards what looked like a first floor corridor.
            “It isn’t,” said Harry. “But I won’t be able to celebrate with you then. The entire wizarding world will throw me a party, practically.” He grimaced. Draco had come to accept that Harry found his publicity distasteful unless he could use it to help someone else, no matter how strange such an idea was to Draco. “And, well, I didn’t get to celebrate with you on your birthday.”
            Draco flushed. That had been his fault as much as Harry’s. He’d been feeling sulky and broody that day, after a spectacularly unsuccessful visit with his father in Azkaban, and so he’d taken it out on Harry when he arrived late. Harry had left the gift and gone away.
            And then, well, neither of them had wanted to bring it up again. They avoided most subjects like that, Draco thought, for a good reason. It was a way to strain their fragile friendship if they tried it too much.
            “I wish you wouldn’t put it so neutrally,” Draco muttered, staring down at his hands. “It was my fault.”
            “Partially your fault,” Harry corrected firmly. “Anyway, don’t worry about gifts. I bought these robes and told myself they were your gift to me, because I wouldn’t have looked at them twice if you hadn’t recommended them to me.”
            Draco smiled tentatively, then gasped. They’d passed through gloomy wastes of corridor and down dusky stairs without him noticing much, but now they were in the middle of a sparkling bright kitchen, and presents and sweets covered the table.
            Draco’s eyes fastened immediately on the cake, which was enormous. It looked like it could crush everything else if it fell over. There was a wash of chocolate icing and sliced fruit and something colorful and glittering down the sides. Draco put out a finger, unable to help himself, and scooped up the side of the cake to taste.
            Vanilla, and more chocolate, and the glittering things turned out to be sprinkles that went off with small bursts of tartness like fireworks. Draco shook his head and turned to Harry.
            “You didn’t have to,” he said.
            “Precisely why I did it.” Harry grinned at him again, and waved at the gifts. “Now, aren’t you going to open them? Most people I know would have attacked them the instant they came into the room.”
            Draco wanted to reply that most people had no taste or sense of taste, then, but he knew Harry was still a bit sensitive about the way he’d left the Weasleys’. He nodded and started opening the gifts.
            Some he could guess immediately by their shape—Harry had wrapped them with more enthusiasm than skill—but they managed to surprise him anyway. He knew Harry had got him a cauldron, but he still stared in stunned silence when he opened that package to find out it was a gold cauldron.
            “I know some complicated potions need one,” Harry said, and shrugged and grinned at him on the other side of the discarded paper.
            There were new vials, a year’s worth of crushed black beetles, two Potions books so new they still smelled of ink, and container after container of slightly rare magical ingredients Draco was running out of, like black rose seeds, or sea serpent’s blood, or hen’s teeth. Draco paused when he got down to the bottom of the pile, trembling a little.
            The shape of this one was obvious, too, but the rest of the presents and the towering cake had somewhat obscured it. Draco laid his hand on what was obviously a broom handle and looked at Harry with eyes he knew were a little desperate.
            “Open it.”
            Harry’s eyes on his were so deep and compassionate that Draco knew he would get no teasing from him. His hands did tremble as they opened the broom, but not as badly as he had thought they would.
            Inside was a Firebolt. Draco couldn’t look closely enough to identify the make. He might not even have known what it was, as much time as he’d spent ignoring the Quidditch pages lately. His hands were back to trembling badly as he stroked the smooth, gleaming wood, and lifted the broom out of its wrapping of paper.
            It was perfect. At least, Draco thought he could still say so, even if he hadn’t flown in—it felt like years. The wood had a honey-brown gleam that made Draco seem to see reflections falling away into its depths, and the bristles were all gently aligned in a way that would make sweeps around corners seem effortless, and Draco could already hear the wind whistling past his ears as he rose on the new broom.
            “Draco?”
            Harry. Without taking his eyes from the broom, Draco reached out and took Harry’s hand.
            It silenced Harry effectively, the way Draco had thought it would. There was nothing for the next few minutes but silence, Harry staring down at the hand that Draco clasped on top of his, Draco turning the broom back and forth. It moved in absolute silence in his fingers, without squeaking, even though something so polished usually would, from the pressure of a hand against the smeared oil.
            “You’re welcome,” Harry said finally, from an endless distance away.
            And it was the right thing to say, and the right distance. Draco nodded, and looked up. “Let’s start the cake, then,” he said. “I’m starving for a taste of something that good.”
            He didn’t need to say anything else. Harry looked at him once with his lip twitching, then nodded and reached for a huge knife lying next to some of the candied orange peel.
            Sometimes, Draco thought, leaning one hip against the table and managing to watch Harry, the cake, and the broom all at the same time, unspoken words are the most powerful ones.
*
starr: Yes. This isn’t the end of Harry and Ginny’s relationship as such, but she wanted a lot of things he didn’t want, and they’re both figuring that out.
SP777: You find out more about that later. ;)
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Acts of Life