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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 Twelve—Dawn of a New Era

            Harry opened his eyes slowly. For long moments, he only knew that light was falling over him like a dream of peace, and he didn’t want to wake further. He wanted to lie here and hope the feeling would continue.

            And then he realized it would. It had reason to.

            He could feel hope again.

            He lifted his head, eyes blinking in the intense sun. The window next to his bed was open, the curtains whisked away, which explained why he had been woken—

            No. It was the window next to a bed, but not the one where he had slept since he had come to the Manor.

            And there was a warm shape behind him, which half-rolled over when Harry moved, and the arm around his waist hooked him more firmly. Harry drew a deep breath, shivering with possibility, and finally rolled over in turn to see who held him.

            He knew who it would be, of course. The memories had returned and locked into place like the notes of a composition. But there was a difference in remembering the moment when he had opened up fully to someone for the first time in a year, and seeing the face of that man now.

            Harry half-wondered if he would be disappointed. Maybe fears and doubts would fill him. Maybe he would suddenly find it necessary to remind himself that he wasn’t, as far as he knew, bent. Maybe he would be suddenly shy. After all, even though he knew that he and Draco had come up and fallen into the bed without having any further sex, he was naked; Draco had insisted on that, and spent long moments admiring Harry with his eyes half-lidded, as though to show him that he was more than worthy of attracting Draco Malfoy’s attention.

            Harry observed his own emotions from a detached distance, wondering which ones would dominate.

            And then he saw Draco, and he realized that it could only have been one. The light made Draco’s pale lashes glint like brushstrokes, and his face was wonderful, the tight lines softened to show the strength underneath. This was a portrait of hope, Harry thought, and reached up to brush his hand gently along said portrait’s jawline.

            Draco caught his wrist before Harry could touch him, and made a deep, satisfied sound, perhaps what a lion would have sounded like if lions could purr. Then he opened his eyes and said, with a faint smile, “All that you expected?”

            “Not everything,” said Harry. The hope had stopped leaping in him like lightning, the way it had yesterday. Instead, what he felt was a settled, steady burn. He held Draco’s gaze, and it was—not hard. Still not the easiest thing in the world, still lacking in the confidence that he would have felt before he spent the year under the Cassandra Curse, but much more than he could have done twenty-four hours ago. “I want more than what we had.”

            Draco exhaled, and Harry was startled to realize that he could read relief in that sound. Draco turned his head to the side and tongued Harry’s palm like a cat seeking cream. His voice had sunk. “Oh, you’ll have more than that.”

            He drew Harry into a kiss. Harry went clear-eyed this time, and wondered if it would be as overwhelming as the one yesterday.

            It was different. Harry could feel the exact way that the jabs of Draco’s tongue in his mouth awakened his groin this time, as though Draco weren’t nudging his cheeks and lips, but buttons that introduced different levels of arousal when pressed. Harry swallowed around Draco’s tongue, which got him a moan, and then rolled on top of him.

            Oh. Harry’s eyes drooped shut and he had to stop moving for a moment, even his part in the kiss falling still. He had been naked yesterday while Draco touched him, but he’d felt skin to skin only on their cocks. Now there were—nipples, and—hair, and hipbones, and—roll just a little bit to the side, yes, and—

            Harry found himself rocking back and forth with no conscious plan to do so. But it would have been a waste to have laid on top of that gorgeous body and done nothing. He wondered now, idly, what Draco had felt when Harry fell on top of him to protect him from Lila’s curses.

            I put an elbow in his stomach. I don’t think he was this happy. Draco’s hands had risen to frame his face and rake through his hair, and Harry’s muscles tried to go limp. He shook off the temptation. I want to make him happier, and it’s time I knew a few of his weak spots. He’s controlled our encounters for far too long.

            And with that thought, a new determination took root in Harry, right beside the one that said he was going to get the curse removed and the one that said he was going to go on feeling hope. He was going to go forwards alongside Draco, neither ahead nor behind. That meant sharing his confidence. It meant actively wanting a part in the sex, and not fearing his own desires. And it meant showing Draco that he wasn’t some patient that he had to be careful of, not any longer.

*

            Draco sank his fingers deeper, wanting to see the drugged, languid haze in Harry’s eyes again, but Harry moved his head to the side, and shook it once. Then his gaze met Draco’s, and locked.

            Draco stared. There was calmness there, but other emotions, too. Draco wondered if he was staring into the eyes of the Auror.

            He didn’t object when Harry pulled the hands out of his hair, kissed both palms, and then laid them on either side of Draco’s hips. It was harder to lie still, though, when Harry began to explore his body, lingering on everything that made him twitch, his tongue rasping as he coated Draco’s abdomen with kisses, his fingers light enough to tickle as he slid over the ribs like a snake seeking a soft resting place.

            Draco had expected this, but not so soon. He had thought they would have a few more meetings of the bodies where he coaxed Harry past his barriers and into the open, and taught him to see that sex was something he could enjoy again.

            But apparently, when Harry decided to overcome his hesitations, he did it in a big way.

            He lifted his head at one point, to regard Draco, as if he were asking a mute question. Draco couldn’t read the exact terms of that question, but he nodded, trying to convey that Harry had his permission for anything. He couldn’t imagine Harry hurting him.

            Unless accidentally. He’s never been with a man before, and he might do something painful.

            But Draco didn’t really believe it, and besides, he could always tell Harry to stop if that was the case. And a moment later, when Harry’s mouth closed softly but firmly around his cock, he really didn’t believe it. His chest inflated, and a small snort of breath escaped his nose, but otherwise he tried to hold himself still, not wanting to pump his hips into Harry’s mouth too soon.

            Even if the pleasure he caused was rather begging for it.

*

            Harry could feel his own emotions arguing against this, if he really listened to them. There was shame, which said that sucking cock was something that only happened to weaklings or—or people who were gay, which in the common terminology of the Auror Department was almost the same thing. There was trepidation, as to what this meant and whether he would hurt Draco. There was uncertainty, urging him to hold back for a little while and try bringing Draco off with his hand instead.

            And there was fear, sharp as a wall of razors, slicing down the middle of his mind and asking what he would do if Draco rolled over, said, “Thanks for the fuck,” and walked out of the bedroom. He had what he wanted from Harry now, after all. What reason did he have to stick around?

            But Harry pushed the emotions away, and if the rebellion he chose against them—sucking cock—was an odd one, it was still his choice. He eased his mouth around the head first, pacing himself as he sank down, sucking gently and not straining his jaw or his tongue, tucking his lips around his teeth and keeping them always covered. He couldn’t imagine Draco would enjoy the odd scrape of a tooth any more than Harry had when Ginny used to do this to him.

            Ginny. You’re betraying Ginny! gibbered the most fearful part of his brain, trying to find any excuse for him not to make himself more vulnerable.

            She’s gone, she has someone new, Harry answered himself, and shut his eyes, and concentrated on making Draco feel good.

            It was an oddly silent process, though Harry could glance up if he wanted and see the pleasure washing Draco’s face blank and slack. Then it dawned on him that Draco was trying not to make any noise. Perhaps he thought Harry would take any sound he made for one of pain, or perhaps—

            Perhaps he feared to make himself vulnerable first, when he hadn’t turned Harry into a moaning mess with a few glides of his fingers.

            Harry grinned to himself, and then began moving his tongue in quick, light jabs, while his hands dropped lower and toyed with Draco’s balls. That was another new thing; without the protection of the orgasmic haze that he’d had yesterday, he almost cringed from touching them, but they weren’t disgusting under his hands, the way he once would have viewed another bloke’s bits as being. They were still warm skin, taut, wrinkled, and Draco shifted and gasped and thrust deep, once, which made Harry’s jaw ache but which was worth experiencing again anyhow, so he sucked some more and tugged again and—

            His mouth was suddenly flooded.

            Harry reared back in surprise, and most of it trickled out on the sheets. He thought he swallowed some of it, too, but he couldn’t be sure. The taste wasn’t too awful, he supposed. He wouldn’t want to make a regular diet of the stuff.

            Except that he might be able to, for Draco’s sake.

            He felt so strange, Harry thought, as he raised his eyes to Draco’s face. There were still the fears, silenced for now but not forgotten. There was the unexpected strength that had led him to do this in the first place, which he thought was far more than he should have got from just being held and stroked to orgasm, but which he wanted to follow. And there was the uncertainty about the future, which for once was not crippling. He didn’t know what would happen tomorrow, or today, but he was confident that he could handle it, whatever it was.

            “You could warn a bloke, you know,” he said, and then tried a cautious smile to see what would happen when he did. His face felt stretched shiny and taut and very new, like the skin around a burn.

*

            Draco stared up at Harry in a daze, and realized two things at once: he should have let the sounds he was making through, because Harry had obviously had no idea that Draco was that close to coming; and Harry was the most wonderful and amazing and astounding person he had ever known.

            “I’ll be sure to do that next time,” he said in a hoarse voice, flavoring it with wonder, and caught the surprise that flashed across Harry’s face before his eyes lowered. That reassured him a little. He wasn’t somehow at the mercy of an unaffected Harry, though he had been so busy attending to Draco that he hadn’t tried to touch his own cock, which still curved red against his belly. He could still be turned on and shocked by Draco.

            “So—there will be next times?”

            The dear voice trembled, and Draco could feel the courage it must have taken him to ask that question. He knew only one way to answer that.

            He hauled himself upright and caught Harry around the shoulders, pulling him down, pulling him deep, rolling him under him and kissing him thoroughly, so that there could no doubt about what he felt. He scraped Harry’s skull with his fingers again, and this time Harry allowed his eyes to roll back in his head.

            “There will be next times and next times and next times,” Draco whispered into his ear before he began to slide down Harry’s body. “This isn’t some quick tumble, and this isn’t some infatuation based on sex, either. I want you. If you don’t want me as much right now, that’s fine, but you will. I want you to.”

            “It takes a lot just to let me have sex,” Harry said, propping himself up on one elbow to watch Draco as he descended, his green eyes wide and far too serious. A curl of dark hair, turned almost red by the sunlight, fell across the lightning bolt scar. “And I still think of myself as a straight man acting bent, for your information.”

            “I won’t demand that you be perfect all at once,” Draco said, and held his eyes. “I would never demand that.”

            And then he sank and began to suck.

            Harry let out a startled, full-throated cry that was mostly, “Yes!” Draco was glad. He was glad that Harry had emerged from his shell of caution, but he would hate to have him treat this thoughtfully all the time, soberly, cautiously, as if he could never bring himself to feel pleasure.

            And pleasure was what Draco gave him as he teased, most of the time just lightly enough to make Harry whine and shift, after that first initial suck. He put his hands to good use, fondling skin that Harry didn’t even know about yet—because Harry Potter had probably been too heterosexual and too uptight to let his hands wander much between his erection and his entrance.

            If he had been, he wasn’t now. Draco looked up and saw the curve of Harry’s neck against the pillows, as taut as it had been yesterday, his skin shivering and sweating and shining. He wasn’t at all inhibited in sounds, needy grunts and broken sobs working past his lips as he writhed, and then he came and Draco felt his mouth work apart in a hungry snarl. He owned this, this sight of Harry against the pillows like a bird fallen from heaven, wings broken by joy.

            Not always, not entirely, but at this moment and like this, Draco owned him—and needed the sight of him.

            He lowered his head to rest on Harry’s belly when they were both done. He breathed in the scent of sweaty skin and semen, and licked a strip of wetness up Harry’s abdomen, then blew cool air on it, causing Harry to stir restlessly. A moment later, Harry’s hand descended and hesitantly stroked his hair.

            Draco shut his eyes. He had never felt anything like this. The sunlight bonded them in warmth. His own limbs were trembling as though with a second orgasm.

            Whatever this was, he welcomed it and wanted it with all his heart, and unlike the momentary sight of Harry at the height of pleasure, he would not let it leave him.

*

            “I feel like I’ve been asleep for a year,” Harry said, as they sat at the breakfast table and a smiling, whistling Batty served them large glasses of orange juice, plates of ham and bacon hefty enough that Harry doubted he could eat it all, and bowls of porridge that seemed to slide more smoothly down his throat than ever before.

            Draco smiled at him. “And now you’re awake?”

            Harry nodded. He didn’t want to stop looking at Draco—who sat in a chair next to him instead of across from him, as was more usual—and his hand kept stealing out of its own volition to stroke Draco’s cheek, or slide through his hair and hold some of it to Harry’s nose and lips, or glide along his arm. The best explanation Harry could give was that he needed to do this. He shifted closer.

            Draco pulled back his chair from the table, and Harry hesitated, wondering if he had made some mistake. Perhaps men didn’t touch like this when they got up from the bed. But Draco only turned to face him, and started eating with his right hand only, so that Harry could more easily reach his face and neck.

            “Thank you,” Harry said, and resumed his touching, this time rubbing his thumb along Draco’s earlobe to learn the texture of it. Draco closed his eyes. His voice had returned to the same piercing, husky tone he’d used yesterday when he was trying to convince Harry of his interest.

            “Does this mean that you accept we can be lovers, and that what I want from you is neither simple nor over?”

            “Yes,” Harry whispered. His hand had wandered to the back of the other man’s neck, and he was fascinated by the differences between Draco’s hair and his own. His curled tightly and crisply there; Draco’s was wavy, as though someone had partially flattened it but then hadn’t managed to make it lie still.

            Harry felt very strange, as though something could go wrong any moment but probably wasn’t going to. It wasn’t quite solemnity, since both joy and terror weren’t far away, but it was like that.

            “So new,” he said.

            “Yes,” Draco said softly, and regarded him full-on for a moment with the same sun-like intensity that had shocked Harry yesterday. This time, he tried to return the gaze, and had the satisfaction of seeing Draco blink before he turned away to finish his porridge.

            Harry had already finished eating, and he leaned in for a kiss on the cheek. Draco accepted it, then put down his spoon, pinned Harry to the back of his chair, and leisurely kissed him on what felt like every square inch of his face.

            Harry’s hands twitched with the need to touch, but Draco kept him at bay until he was groaning impatiently and his fingers actually opened and closed like lobster claws. Then Draco sat back, with a sound half huff and half laugh, and met and held his eyes.

            “I think we still need to talk about some things,” he said. “I’m glad that you’ve recovered enough to touch me, but that’s not the only thing that should bring us together, or keep us that way as we hunt Scrimgeour.” He spoke more seriously than Harry had ever heard him, even when he was talking about the shard of his soul buried in Harry’s core.

            Harry was distracted for a moment. Was that why he felt so fervently attracted to Draco? Was the soul-shard creating compatibility between them that didn’t exist otherwise?

            And then Harry realized that he didn’t care. That might have been the start, but it had gone far beyond that on his part, and on Draco’s, too, from the way his eyes gleamed like iron as he waited for Harry’s answer.

            “I know,” Harry said. And since Draco had moved the conversation from touching, which was easy and delightful to do now, to more serious matters, it was his turn to do something daring. He flung himself off the cliff before he could change his mind. “I’m ready to tell you why I tried to commit suicide.”

            Keeping his eyes locked on Harry’s, Draco lifted his right wrist and kissed the scar above the vein.

*

            Draco was enormously relieved. He had thought he would have to tug and coax Harry even now. Sex was a bodily instinct that could always be relearned, but Harry had been far more starved of trust under the Cassandra Curse than physical contact, and Draco wasn’t sure how skittish he would be outside bed.

            He was conquering his skittishness, what there was of it. He’d led them immediately to the room where Draco had met with Shacklebolt, as if he didn’t want the distraction of windows that would show him the sky and gardens. He sat down in a chair, looked straight at Draco, waited for a moment until Draco nodded, and then began.

            “I didn’t expect the effect that the Cassandra Curse had on other people in the Ministry,” Harry said. “I knew they’d hate me and think I was lying—at least, I knew that once I met it the hundredth time—but I didn’t realize that I’d be assigned to so many cases alone. And of course, they thought I was glory-mongering, and when I said that I hated the hard cases, they only heard me saying that I desired more. As it went on and on, I realized I’d become a precious commodity to the Ministry, in exactly the wrong way. If I simply vanished from the wizarding world into the Muggle one, they’d hunt for me, and haul me back—not for any altruistic motives, but simply to keep their solve rates up.”

            Harry shut his eyes and cut his lower lip with his teeth. Draco feathered his fingers over Harry’s wrists and waited.

            “But if I were crazy,” Harry whispered, “and vanished from St. Mungo’s, then they wouldn’t bother. I’d be more an embarrassment than a benefit to them even if they found me. And they’d have to pay for my medical treatment, since no one looking at my history would believe stress from cases didn’t have something to do with my collapse. So I decided on suicide that would be stopped at the last moment. Whether I survived or not, the Ministry would turn its back on me.”

            “Whether you survived or not,” Draco said quietly, and his fingers pressed a bit harder than he’d intended, stretching and wrinkling the scarred skin. Harry nodded and opened his eyes. They still didn’t have the depth of regret in them that Draco would have liked to see.

            “Yes,” Harry whispered. “I hoped I would be found—I dropped plenty of hints around Ron and then cut my wrists relatively near his office—but if I didn’t, I was…resigned to that. I didn’t welcome death. I just didn’t mind it.”

            Draco said nothing, but hauled sharply on Harry’s arms. Harry yelped as he staggered to his feet and then sat down again on Draco’s lap. Draco embraced him and bowed his head, whispering the words he spoke next, low and fierce and sharp, into the hollow between Harry’s neck and shoulder.

            “Never do that again. If you suffer the temptation, tell me at once. I want your promise that you will.” No matter what Harry might think, such apathy was its own temptation, and he might go back to it as a relief from the cacophony of emotions he’d been forced to feel.

            “It might be my only option—“ Harry began, his shoulders tensing.

            “No,” Draco said, and though he whispered, he knew his word had the force of a scream. Harry stopped. “Trust me,” Draco said to him, and shook him a little. “Trust that I’ll rescue you, that I’ll come for you, no matter how hopeless the odds.” He shifted and put one hand over Harry’s heart, causing the soul-shard to start purring. “I did it once, didn’t I?”

            Harry’s breathing deepened. Draco might have thought he was falling asleep if he didn’t know better. Then Harry slipped a hand under his chin and brought his head up so they were face-to-face. Harry’s eyes shone with subdued happiness.

            “Yes,” he whispered. “I promise.”

            “Yes,” Draco whispered back, and then kissed him. He felt his need surge in him, unsatisfied by two times with Harry, and started to move him so that they could reach each other’s waists.

            Then he felt a warning stab from his wards, and leaned back, blinking in confusion. Harry moaned in protest and sought his mouth again.

            Draco closed his eyes and reached out, telling the wards to bring him images of the people who waited outside the gates—

            And then Harry pulled away from him and said, his voice trembling, “What are Ron and Hermione doing here?”

*

            Myra: They’re together, but, as you can see from this chapter, they still have some issues to work out—not least how Draco will react to Harry’s friends.

            Mangacat: Harry is at least determined not to go backwards.

            Hotmamma82: Heh. Well, this is closer to full sex, so I hope it was still satisfying! ;)

            McAbacus: Thank you! I have zero ability in music, but I love it, so having my writing compared to it makes me happy. :) And, as you can see, Harry is determined to keep feeling hope.

            LadyKatie: No regrets. Just…carefulness.

            So love this fic: Thank you! I hope you believe this continuation is just as romantic.

            Leslie, Chris, thrnbrooke, mariahs_fantasy, Jiall, rAiNwAtEr, Darthkripple: Thank you for reviewing!
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A Determined Frame of Mind