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The Name I'll Give to Thee	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 42130 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 6
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Eleven—Passion in the Dance

            Harry didn’t see how dancing with Malfoy—Draco—was going to fix the problem that even the Ministry hadn’t managed to cure in him, that he was too open about his emotions and couldn’t look people in the eye without making them jerk back and glare at him, but he didn’t say anything. It was Draco’s idea, and maybe that meant it had more merits than Harry could see right now.

            He didn’t know anything about the pure-blood world, he was coming to realize, despite his grasp of table manners. He didn’t know how or why the people talking to him expected him to respond. They wanted interest, but not too much of it. They wanted him to ask questions, but they didn’t want questions that would make them rethink their opinions. They expected him to stand there stiffly and say nothing and smile when they referred to Mudbloods, but they also wanted some kind of reaction.

            This isn’t the kind of thing you can learn out of a book, this invisible line. Maybe I was foolish even to try.

            They arrived in the center of the large room, which Harry thought was a dining room, where Draco had chosen to hold the party. Draco nodded to Ossy, who closed his eyes and held his hands out for a moment. The music that Harry had been hearing distantly in the background came to the foreground, and a lot of the conversations stopped so that eyes could focus on them.

            Harry didn’t recognize the music, and looked silently at Draco, wanting to tell him so. Draco’s eyes simply met his and held, his fingers tightening on Harry’s shoulders as though to tell him that pulling back now would be punished with the removal of some skin.

            In the end, Harry shrugged and waited for Draco to lead. He didn’t know any dances, not waltzes or tangos or hops or skips, so it was all one to him.

*

            Draco recognized the gleam in Harry’s eyes, and had to bite his tongue to avoid saying something. They were here to dance, not talk.

            He began to move in the smooth glide that this particular dance required through the opening steps. He wondered for a moment what would give Harry the biggest problem, the “glide” or the “smooth,” and soon discovered it was both. Harry followed along with him, but passively, trying to let Draco steer him rather than take any active part and anticipate where their feet would go next. Draco leaned near him during a part in the music when he could do that and hissed into his ear.

            “You have to start taking some part. I refuse to think you can be that bad at dancing.”

            Harry’s eyes lit, and a smile worked its way across his face that Draco loved and wished he would keep, even if it was arrogant and seeing it directed at him also made him want to smash glass. “You want to see how I dance?” he asked. “All right.”

            And he launched Draco into a tight spin that was the exact wrong step for that moment in the music, leaning back and away from him as though he would break the circling hold of his arms, and then coming back in and pulling Draco tightly to his body, humming. There was mischief and menace in his eyes, and that smile, which was the most pure-blood thing he had done all evening, still on his face.

            Draco kept his balance with difficulty, and squeezed his fingers into Harry’s shoulder muscles again, hoping for some sign of pain. But Harry didn’t change his eyes, or his smile. Draco didn’t think he’d blinked so far, either. He was enjoying himself too much.

            “Not like that,” Draco hissed. “Can’t you listen to the music, listen to the way that it moves around you, and let your body move in response?”

            “I don’t know any dance steps,” Harry said, and gave him a mad smile, the arrogant edge fading and giving Draco reason to mourn its loss, “so no.”

            “There are more than a few that you’ve got right so far,” Draco murmured back to him, and tried to forget the watching audience. Of course, in some ways that was impossible; he and Harry were doing this for them, to convince the watching, judging pure-bloods that there was no way the Malfoy family had lost pride and face and strength, no matter what the circulating rumors said. Draco had to think of Harry as the most important thing, and the dance between them as the second most important. “The lean, for instance, and the glide. But they come at different points in the dance.”

            Harry gaped at him. Draco wondered why. Had he really never heard of those dance steps, even when going through Auror training or reading Prophet articles about the life of pure-bloods of high fashion?

            But then Harry shook his head and said, “You’re being nicer about this than I expected. Nicer than the people who tried to teach me dance steps in the Ministry, anyway.” The clutch he had on Draco softened and became gentle, the way he bent and leaned away from him less an escape than a part of their circling dance. “I think—I think I could learn. Tell me what we have to do for the next part of the dance.”

            Draco took a deep breath and made one of the bravest decisions of his life. He held up his hand, and although he could feel a second of freezing disapproval from across the room, Ossy stopped the music. He would always do what Draco said, although not always without protest.

            “Watch,” Draco murmured to him, and reached out and laid an arm around Harry’s shoulder, thinking of the way Harry had walked into the Forbidden Forest. “You have to lift your head, and you have to focus on me, and you have to follow where I lead, but you have to also keep in mind where your place is in the circle. This dance is all about circles. First we make several, and then we part except for keeping our hands touching, and make another circle—well, more like a spiral, I suppose—with our hands as the center. And then we come back together and make another circle with our hands on each other’s shoulders. Can you remember all that?”

            “I can try,” Harry said, and he smiled, still another kind of smile, the first one of that kind that Draco could remember seeing on his face. He reached out and steadied himself for a moment with his hands on Draco’s shoulders again. “Is this the way that we should stand when we make the first circle?”

            Draco shook his head, and did his best to keep his eyes fixed on Harry. He would do a lot for a smile like that. “No. Move back a little, so that you’re standing within the ring of my arms but not touching me except maybe with your hands on my sides.”

            The whispers and murmurs surged around him. For a Malfoy to teach his spouse the steps was incredible. To do it so openly, and in front of others, was unheard of.

            But Draco would rather be seen teaching, and not having taught before, then relying on supposedly learned behaviors and tripping up over them because there was no way to know if Harry had understood all the steps and manners and other things he was supposed to read about and learn. He had already stained his reputation; he had already showed that he was imperfect and sometimes emotional. He would rather continue in a way that would gain new respect in the end than to try and regain respect that was probably already gone forever.

            And the look in Harry’s eyes as the music started again, drowning the voices, and he began to understand what Draco had done for him…

            Draco could understand the seduction of someone at your side who appreciated the risks you had taken for them, at least once their appreciation showed up.

*

            Harry was trying to find his balance. Not literally, but mentally. He hadn’t thought Draco would do anything tonight but expect him to know all the pure-blood manners and snap at him if they weren’t perfect.

            Obviously he wasn’t going to be perfect, and he couldn’t learn everything he needed to know in a day, and there were some things—like being an actual graceful dancer—that Harry was firmly convinced he would never be able to learn. So he had resigned himself to Draco snapping.

            But this wasn’t that. He stood within Draco’s arms, and yielded, and followed the pattern he set. Once they had made two circles and it was a little familiar, then Harry found it not so impossible to keep track of both Draco’s steps and his own place in the circle at the same time. No harder than keeping track of both the position of a Snitch and two Bludgers in the middle of a Quidditch game, anyway.

            Then they reached the point in the pattern where Draco, from the way he shifted and glanced at Harry, would expect him to touch his hand and then walk apart from him in that spiral-circle he had talked about. Harry nodded reassuringly to him, wondered when he had started being the one who reassured Draco about things like this rather than the other way around, and stepped back so that only their fingertips were touching.

            Draco guided him through the pattern, his eyes burning into Harry all the while. Harry stared back. He could understand that this might be a requirement of the dance, or else that Draco wanted to make sure he didn’t mess up, but he didn’t know what he had done to earn quite that level of intensity.

            He wants to make sure you don’t mess up again. Only that.

            But if that was all Draco cared about, then Harry thought he wouldn’t have risked stopping the music and guiding him through the steps in the first place. He cared about looking good. He cared about impressing these ridiculous people who thronged into his house and ate his food and made low-voiced remarks they thought Draco didn’t hear. But he also cared that Harry not make an utter fool of himself for Harry’s sake, along with the family’s.

            Unless he thought of Harry and the family as a unit…

            Harry shook his head. This was one reason he hated coming to parties like this. He would try to figure everything out, from little motions and jokes and raised eyebrows that everyone else already understood, and end up looking more like a fool for the effort than he did for ignoring the delicate webs he breached. So he might as well breach them and refuse to learn anything.

            But he’d never had a dance teacher like Draco, patient with him when he stumbled as they came out of the last hand-touching circle and Draco reached for his shoulders. Draco murmured something liquid and uncondemning, and then said, “Look into my eyes as we make these turns. Yes, that’s right. Let your hands rest on my shoulders—lightly, don’t grip as if you were drowning. And we’re going to turn to the left this time.”

            They had made all their circles so far to the right, but Harry assumed there was a reason, and he was content to go along without asking. He did what Draco suggested, aware of the way that Draco looked at him all the while, the hot way Draco’s eyes caressed him.

            And that realization makes no sense, either. Why would Draco look at me like that even if he found me fit? We can’t have sex, or the demi-marriage would be much harder to dissolve.

            He blinked as he realized that his feet were moving smoothly across the floor now that he wasn’t thinking about every step he should take, and stumbled. Draco was there again to catch him, to murmur encouragement into his ear, to stroke his back and let his hands wander down towards Harry’s arse.

            Harry relaxed as he remembered the reason Draco had probably snatched him into the dance in the first place, though. What’s happening is important for other people’s eyes, not ours. We already know how we feel. If Draco can convince them that there’s some great passion between us, though, or that we’re united for other reasons, then it can only help in the future.

            He leaned back into Draco, letting his hands slide down from Draco’s shoulders towards his waist, since Draco had done that to him. Draco jumped, though, and gave him a long, slow look that made Harry return his grip to Draco’s shoulders, blinking an apology.

            I don’t know. Maybe only one partner in the dance is supposed to touch the other one like that.

            There was still so much he didn’t know, but as Draco guided him through the last, slow glides, and then pulled away from him and bowed, Harry began to think he could learn it. Which was better than feeling as though he was facing an icy mountain he could never climb, because nothing he did would be good enough.

            Draco flicked an eyelash at him, and Harry bowed to him in turn. It was a little like a duel, he thought, and he could see why a bow would be appropriate.

            The applause nearly knocked him over.

            Harry straightened up and stared at the other guests. Oh, it wasn’t applause like the bellows of approval that Harry would have got from the Weasleys in a similar circumstance, just a polite touching of finger to finger and some cold smiles.

            But they needn’t have done it at all, he thought. They weren’t required to approve of someone traipsing around a dance floor looking less than confident; he had thought, in fact, that pure-bloods had that pinched look to their faces by nature, and anything less than perfection wouldn’t get them to relax it.

            Draco bowed to their spectators in turn, and Harry echoed him, because why not? He knew from the faint flush in Draco’s cheek that he hadn’t expected this reaction, either.

            Well, good. Harry would be more comfortable if they were both drifting around in uncertainty, rather than one of them always being the distant and knowledgeable master, and the other the beginning student.

            He didn’t mind as much when the teacher was as good as Draco, though. So there was that.

*

            They had rescued the evening.

            Draco moved through the crowd, and smiles were fainter than before, but warmer. Someone held out a glass of wine to him even though he could perfectly well have got his own, and Ossy appeared a moment later with a tray looking martyred. The point was that they didn’t need to make the gesture, but they had, and Draco knew from that how much they had appreciated the dance.

            He sipped from the wine that lay inside the glass, and murmured thanks, and glanced back at Harry, who was discussing dance steps with a pair of young witches who wanted to give him all sorts of hints about how to better perform the dance Draco had chosen. Draco gave a thin smile. That was a topic Harry was unlikely to go wrong about, given that everyone had seen exactly what level of skill he had.

            And had chosen to be impressed by it, instead of disdaining him for it. That had been the reaction Draco had wanted to produce when he made the decision to treat their audience as though it didn’t matter, but not the one he had thought he would get.

            It was the contradiction in the pure-blood character, he thought, as he traded a wary set of barbs with Daphne Greengrass, who didn’t know where she stood with him now, having started the evening with subtle insults. They admired effortlessness and poise and neutrality most of the time, with the sparkle of wit on top. But if you could do something in front of them that was daring, take a risk that paid off, you might find yourself admired. The secondary risk was, always, that you never knew if the first one would pay off.

            This time, it had. Spectacularly.

            Draco swallowed a bit more of the wine to ease his dry throat, and then turned around when a new conglomeration of voices attracted him. Daphne had moved over to Harry and stood facing him as though she thought she would get him to charge her or break down. Harry merely looked at her over the rim of his wineglass, not closed-off as most of the people around him would be, but without interest.

            Draco continued to watch them. This was the kind of thing that could burst apart if he didn’t watch out, and he didn’t want anyone to get hit by the shrapnel. Daphne was quick-witted, and he knew that she would like to see Harry brought down. She had blamed him all throughout their seventh year for not finishing the Dark Lord off quickly enough, and subjecting them to the Carrows’ tortures.

            But he thought Harry might surprise her. He sipped his wine again, and waited.

*

            “What’s the real reason that you married Draco?” Greengrass demanded, pressing close.

            Harry studied her, and didn’t respond. He didn’t owe her answers; Draco had said, when Harry asked earlier in the evening, that only cousins by blood within the second degree would be owed the answer to a question like that. Greengrass was a third cousin only, and then only by marriage.

            He could see, from the way she had her hand curved around the wineglass, that she wanted to throw it at him. And her eyes were narrow, and her lip curled in the way that Ministry flunkies curled their lips when they were about to deride him for his mother’s blood. Well, she could go ahead and do that, if she really wanted to. It would mean he would never take anything she said seriously again, but perhaps she was willing to give up any pretense of an advantage over him, come to that.

            “Did you hear me?” Greengrass smiled at him then, and there was a depth of malevolence behind the smile Harry thought he was meant to find dazzling. It was only boring. “Or are your ears as clumsy as your feet?”

            Harry shrugged and sipped at his drink again. Ossy, looking pained, had agreed that Harry could have some butterbeer. Harry thought Ossy was more worried about Harry embarrassing the family if he got pissed than anything else, but, well, they could have different motives for the same act, and it would work out in the end.

            “Draco seemed to find them graceful enough for his taste,” he said. “And he’s the one I have to please.”

            Greengrass’s fingernails rang against her glass as she continued tapping them. Then she leaned in close and said seriously, “Do you? I’m sorry for you. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have that kind of life.”

            Harry laughed. He felt people looking over, and then looking away again. That was all right. Draco would probably say they needed more than one triumph in an evening to hang onto their social position, but Harry thought the applause was enough. They would have the chance to build on it later, in other contexts. “I don’t think you can imagine what it’s like to have my life in any capacity,” he said, and sipped at his butterbeer again.

            Greengrass stepped back from him. Then she seemed to realize that wasn’t a threat, and reached out to caress his wrist. “Does your marriage contract with Draco say anything about fidelity?” she asked.

            Harry wanted to snap, because this was one question Draco hadn’t told him how to field. In the end, he decided that he should answer as he would if someone at a Ministry party had asked him the question.

            “No,” he said. “I don’t think most pure-blood marriage contracts do, do they?”

            Greengrass leaned near him and widened her eyes. They were green, and close to the color of his, but Harry didn’t find that attractive. If anything, it would be like looking into the mirror if he was in the same bed as she was, and remind him of how ridiculous he generally looked. “But yours might. Wouldn’t Draco want all that animal passion in bed with him? They do say muddy blood burns hotter.”

            Harry thought of several things he would have liked to do to her. Then he thought of the reaction of the party if he did them, and didn’t do them.

            He looked Greengrass up and down until she trembled a little, and then said, “I reckon you’ll never know,” and turned his back.

            Greengrass didn’t follow. Perhaps she was sharing gossip with her friends, if she had any here, and that meant she had won the encounter. But Harry thought he was starting to understand how much depended on audience, here, and the things that they thought about you. He kept walking until he reached the far side of the room, where a tall glass window opened its panels to the cool night air outside. He stood there breathing in the coolness until the sweat on his forehead had faded.

            He felt a person arrive beside him, and try to press a wineglass into his hand. He turned his head, about to refuse, but it was Draco who stood there when he looked, his eyes as intense as they had been during the dance.

            “Well done,” Draco said.

            Harry didn’t know whether the compliment was sincere, or whether Draco was acting this way to convince that inevitable audience that they supported and favored each other. He nodded and took the wine, to keep up the pretense either way. Then he smiled, because the words cheered him in spite of himself.

            “I reckon you were right, and I’m a better dancer than I thought,” he said, and raised his glass in a small toast to Draco.

            Draco waved a hand as though brushing away cobwebs. He continued not to take his eyes from Harry. “You would have figured it out sometime in your life.”

            “I’m glad you were the one to teach me,” Harry said, and squeezed Draco’s shoulder.

            For a moment, Draco went so stiff that Harry was worried he had committed another faux pas. Then Draco took his wrist in turn, closing his fingers around it and smoothing up and down as though Harry’s arm were some rare artifact made of glass.

            “You’re welcome,” he said.

*

            Seiren: Maybe one, but not the other.

            SP777: Because that was the natural place to end the chapter!

            disgruntledfairy: Thank you! I think everyone in the story loves Ossy, except Harry.

            delia cerrano: It will definitely take a while for him to think that. As far as he knows, Draco will make fun of him and do everything else a pure-blood would; he’s not used to thinking of Draco wanting him to do anything but present a good façade.

            unneeded: I think Draco does expect miracles from Harry, considering he’s saved the world twice.

            moodysavage: Draco is hoping that everyone will decide that Harry just wanted attention from him and is pleased now that he could focus on Draco and get Draco to focus on him, yep.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee