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Business Meetings	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21371 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Twelve—Blood Drawn

            It says something about you and your life when you only feel alive going into a vampire’s lair.

            Harry shook his head and resisted the urge to mutter something to himself as he appeared in front of the mansion. He was sure that Malfoy would have a vampire on guard at the door, and those sharp ears would pick up his muttering and relay it to their master. Harry did not intend to lie, of course not, but there was a—a limit—to the weakness he wanted to show in front of Malfoy or his flock.

            Sure enough, the female vampire he had seen several times opened the door and bowed to him. This time, she flowed back to her feet instead of holding the bow, perhaps because she seemed confident that he would actually pass her into the recesses of the house.

            Harry gave her a smile and did so, trying not to feel the frigid aura that extended beyond her body. Not because it troubled him; he had stood much closer to Malfoy, who bore an iciness that was greater than hers.

            No, he did it because that aura no longer troubled him, and it should. How it should.

            Harry sighed, rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand, and moved on, walking through the shrouded corridors that he knew well enough by now to have navigated them blind. For a moment he pictured himself doing that as Draco’s mansion burned in a Ministry attack, and then shuddered. It was childish to tell himself that nothing would happen if he ceased to imagine it, but then, perhaps he was due some childishness after this week.

            “You smell tired.”

            Harry’s muscles barely tensed at the voice as he stepped into the throne room. Once, he would have snapped to life at the words, a rush of terror and rage ready to power his curses. But Draco could say almost anything now, and after last month, Harry thought he would accept it.

            Then he looked up as he neared his chair, and went still.

            A man knelt in front of Draco’s throne. From the warm tint to his skin and the way his chest heaved up and down, Harry knew he was alive. Draco had fisted one hand casually in the man’s hair, and had the other resting on the side of his neck as though seeking the pulse that Harry knew he could smell perfectly well.

            Harry didn’t have Draco’s nose, but he could see everything well, since the man was naked.

            The second thought that flashed through his mind was to wonder about the willingness of the donor, the third to dismiss the second, because Draco knew that draining someone unwilling would make Harry walk away from him. The first was, It should have been me.

            Draco lifted his head, his nostrils flaring apart, wider than they could go in a human nose. “I did not realize jealousy was so sweet a scent on you,” he whispered.

            Harry bared his own teeth and made himself sit down in the chair. There was a reason for this. It was a test, or a plot, or a push of some kind. Harry would push back. “I assumed it would smell sour,” he said. “Like spoiled plums. Like someone else’s blood.” He made a show of leaning back in the chair and frowning as though he was having trouble remembering. “Or was that a lie, that claim of yours that you would never take a lover whose blood didn’t smell good to you?”

            Draco smiled at him, or at least it seemed like it was a smile, with fangs fully revealed but mouth not gaping open. “When I take a lover, I’ll remember your words,” he said. “But that’s rather different than taking a meal, I think.” His hand in the man’s hair caressed it; the hand on the side of the man’s neck tilted as though he would tear open the skin with his nails instead of his fangs.

            Harry made himself shrug and glance away as if bored. “Did you want the report on the Ministry now, or when you’re finished eating?” he asked.

            “Oh, I always find it pleasant to conduct business over a meal,” Draco said, and pulled the man to his feet and over to the other side with main strength. The man endured it, doing no more than gasping. Harry wondered for a moment if he was drugged, or in such a trance state of fear that he no longer knew what was going on.

            He rejected the idea a moment later. Draco wouldn’t want to drink the blood of someone drugged, in case it affected his own reflexes.

            And the man was too flushed, and, as Harry could see from the way his legs shifted and parted, hard to care much about what was done to him as long as he got the fangs. Likely.

            Harry looked up at the ceiling and cleared his throat. “The Wizengamot shot down two new laws proposed this week,” he began. “The Minister wanted to make drinking donated blood illegal, but the Wizengamot preferred that to the rampage we would undoubtedly have if registered vampires couldn’t eat—”

            “Harry.”

            The voice floated over to him, curled around him, danced around his senses and muffled them, like a veil made of dust. Harry took a deep breath, and drew in the smell of copper.

            “Look at me,” Draco said, and stretched the words somehow, in a way that Harry couldn’t define, until they were draped around him like strings of candyfloss. “Tell me that you can endure this.”

            Harry turned back at the same moment as Draco’s fangs flashed, first white, then crimson. The man he held tilted his head back and voiced a long, wavering moan that collapsed into silence at the same moment as Draco began to suck.

            Harry watched. And Draco watched him back, his eyes never moving from Harry’s even as his hands guided the man’s head back and the throat closer to his mouth, even as one of his hands slid down and pumped the man’s erection.

            Harry swallowed. He understood what this test was about, now. Draco was showing him how he fed, what he went through and how he drank, and the teeth and the claws and the blood of it. If Harry could not endure that, he would have a miserable time trying to have—

            What? You know you’re not in love with him. You can’t call it love. Hermione would be horrified.

            Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing hysterically. It seemed strange to sit here watching Draco drink from someone else and thinking about Hermione.

            And because it was so strange, he let the thoughts fade and watched as Draco stroked the other man, and the way the muscles in his neck corded, and the lash of his tongue as he pulled his head back and clotted the blood, and the way his arms hardly bent when the man bucked against him in climax.

            The man slid to the floor. Draco gestured, and the female vampire who had attended Harry at the door rushed in, silently snatched the donor, and carried him out again as though he was a child.

            Draco sidled down from the throne. Harry thought it was the most normal he had ever seen Draco look when descending the steps of the dais, the most human, despite the strength the blood must have lent to his limbs, and he rose to his feet to meet him.

            Draco laid one hand on his shoulder. The other strayed along the side of his neck, nails lightly scratching where they could tear, and at first Harry couldn’t figure out what Draco wanted. Then his breath caught, and he swallowed. Of course. This is the way he touched the man just before he drank from him.

            “Do you think,” Draco whispered to him, “that you could do such a thing? And could you stand to see me drink from others when you were dazed and could not sustain it? Because such things would happen. Especially in a war.”

            Harry didn’t ask who their war would be against. He knew. He pulled in a ragged breath and then shook his head. “I don’t know. Watching you do that nearly made me sick from jealousy. Someone else having that, someone else having you…I don’t know.”

            Draco paused, and his eyebrows, which sometimes looked as if they were painted on his face, crept up towards his hairline. “How strange. Most people, I think, would describe that as me having him, not the other way around.”

            Harry thought for a moment of asking the man’s name, but he wasn’t really interested, and Draco, from the faint smile on his face, knew it. “I don’t,” Harry said. “I want you, and I want to have you, and I don’t want something like that happening.” He knew he was speaking too rapidly, knew that he was throwing the words away that he had planned to save and hoard and look at like Galleons in the darkness sometimes, and he didn’t care. “Do you have to feed every night? If you spaced it out, and fed well enough, and carefully enough, then I could be the one who sustained you. Even in a war.”

            Draco stood there, with that complete and utter stillness that no human could mimic, and met Harry’s eyes. Harry panted back at him, with no name for the emotion that swelled like tears in his eyes or thickness in his throat. He clenched his teeth when he would have asked, he locked his tongue in place when he would have named it, and he waited.

            Draco nodded, at last, a long, languid motion that looked like the scrape of a polar bear’s paw across ice. “I could ration the blood, even yours,” he said. “My control is not perfect, but you have tested it and made it stronger than it has ever been. With you to teach me, I could learn to hold back.”

            “From others,” Harry said, and pressed against a fragile, yielding barrier like cloth of silver between them. “From all others.”

            Draco’s other eyebrow rose to join the first. He leaned forwards and breathed across Harry’s face as if he was exhaling across a mirror. Harry pressed another step closer, and another, and now his forehead, bone covered with skin, rested against Draco’s, which felt like marble sheathed in lace.

            “You ask,” Draco said, his voice a trailing noise.

            “I do,” Harry said, and reached up. His hands hovered opposite Draco’s, mirroring their presence. He could move them forwards and touch Draco’s, he knew, those dangerous, marble-colored claws and the pale skin across the palms, and Draco would accept them, receive them, as he had accepted and received every gesture Harry had made so far.

            “I will give,” Draco said, “if you do something for me.”

            “Yes,” Harry said. “Anything.” Because he really thought he could give anything, if Draco promised not to touch another human like that again after Harry was with him.

            “Stay with me. Come away from the Ministry, and the life that makes you miserable, and stay with me.”

            Harry closed his eyes and let his hands fall. Then he moved a step back and stood there, with the silence between them echoing like one of the corridors of Hogwarts after students had finished running down it.

            “You won’t,” Draco said, and his voice was empty. Harry wondered if that was what his tomb had looked like, after he had risen from it. Or had he ever had a grave?

            “I can’t,” Harry said, opening his eyes and swallowing, or trying to swallow, the huge ball of disappointment that had gathered at the base of his throat. “I—I could still do some good, if I stay in the outside world. If I come inside this world, then you lose your eyes in the Ministry.”

            “I have some,” Draco breathed. “The spies who bring me word of most of the new laws before you come on the third of the month, and those people who long for the money or the pleasure we can offer and come to give us blood and words. What I do not have is you. What I want is you. Say you will come and be with me, forsaking all others, and I will forsake them, too.”

            Pressure spiraled in on Harry, crushed and drove and ruined. He shut his eyes. He could have what he wanted, and he was sure that Draco wouldn’t prevent him from seeing his friends, at least not any more than the Auror work had done, lately. He would have what he wanted, and what he was growing convinced he would need in the end, anyway—

            And the assault that he sometimes sensed growing around him, or thought he did, the rumors he hadn’t yet been able to track to their source, the people who shut up when he walked by, they might yet be able to destroy Draco and his flock.

            “No,” he said, forcing his eyes open against what held them shut. “Not yet. When—when I can. When you’re safe.”

            “The last thing I am,” Draco said, “is safe.”

            He reached out a hand and held it in front of Harry, but didn’t touch him. Harry appreciated the message of that, and managed to smile even as a paper-thin knife touched his heart.

            “Not yet,” he repeated. “Did you hear the second word?”

            “The one I hear most at the moment,” Draco said, watching him carefully, “is the first.”

            In the end, Harry was the one who forced himself to turn away. He walked out of the mansion with his head high and his heart burning and beating and brooding in him. He knew something was going to happen, although he didn’t know what yet. He knew that not all Draco’s spies would find it out. Or they might turn. Spies bought with blood and gold might turn the other way.

            He would be there, when the wave broke, and he would shield Draco and his flock from it in the way that only a powerful human Auror could.

            Pleasure was not stronger than duty.

            Not yet.

            It did not occur to him, until he was out of the mansion and on the starry, dusty street, that Draco’s feasting in front of him might have been not only scolding and test, but temptation.

            And Harry only closed his eyes and shook his head when he realized it, slightly smiling.

*

            SP777: I think you’re seeing that right now!

            Yami Bakura: Don’t worry about it! I’m glad that you’re enjoying it.

            unneeded: Things would have worked out already, except that Harry keeps delaying.

            AlterEquis: Oh, you mean hope for a peaceful solution with the Ministry? Yeah, at this point I don’t think that there is one.
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Business Meetings