Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Ancient and Noble Houses	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 29877 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twelve—Like a Throb in the Blood

            “Harry.”

            Harry kept his face down, his fists on his knees. He just couldn’t accord anything outside his head the importance it should have had right now. He kept thinking of the way that his blood had throbbed when he was looking into Malfoy’s face, after the git had cut his hair.

            “Harry.”

            It had been real, no doubt about that, the same way that the surges of rage and hatred were real. But different, Harry thought, because it connected with some of his old memories and drew on them, instead of being entirely new.

            The memories of Malfoy being all pointed and pale now emphasized his cheekbones and the shape of his forehead, whispering to Harry of how much of his face was Black. His mother had been of that House, it was true, no matter what his last name was. And his hands…long, slender, and graceful, the way a pure-blood’s hands should be. Harry should want to hold them, caress them. He had trusted them near the nape of his neck and his throat, with a spell that was meant to cut hair but could be adapted to slice through skin. That had to mean something, didn’t it, that he trusted someone who had so recently been an enemy?

            “HARRY!”

            “What?” Harry snapped back, turning around on the bed so that he could look into Hermione’s face.

            She had come up to the boys’ bedroom the way she rarely did in the Burrow; she and Ron seemed to have their private places on the ground floor, or they sat and snuggled in the kitchen. Now that they were back at school, Harry supposed they’d had to find other places.

            Following the thought came cold, white indifference. He wanted to go back to thinking about Malfoy, not scrape his mind through the puddles of shallow, dirty water that Hermione wanted him to be interested in. And that was all her concerns were. Shallow, dirty, unworthy of being considered by someone who’d won a war and had other things on his mind.

            “I’m worried about you,” Hermione said, and sat down on his bed, looking at Harry’s hands.

            Harry became aware that one of them was on his wand, and took it off, stretching it up his pillow and trying to make it seem as if he had touched his wand accidentally, not on purpose, on the way to somewhere else. The emotions blurred and surged in him like storm-waves, and he blew out his breath and tried to remember what Hermione had done for him during the war, how she’d been his best friend sometimes when Ron was gone, how smart she was and how steadfast.

            It was harder than it should have been. If his old memories of Malfoy were sharp and clear, these were fogged like black glass.

            “I’m fine,” Harry said at last, when Hermione didn’t move or speak and he realized she wanted an answer to her question. “Just fine,” he repeated, because that first one didn’t reassure her.

            “I wonder,” Hermione said. “You said that you were over what the house did to you, but the last few days, you’ve been snapping at people.” She hesitated, but Harry wasn’t sure whether that was because she didn’t know how to phrase it or because of the expression on his face, until she spoke again. “And now you’re glaring at me.”

            “I never welcomed it when you tried to pry too hard,” Harry whispered, looking down. “I asked you to leave it alone when I said that Ginny and I probably weren’t getting back together, and I asked you to leave the Dursleys alone, and I asked you to stop trying to counsel me about Sirius, and—”

            “Fine,” Hermione said. “But most of the time, you were just hurting yourself with that, and maybe Ginny. But Ginny seemed fine with it, so I didn’t question that part.” She hesitated again, bit her lip, and then apparently decided that she needed to jump over the edge and fully commit herself. “Now, I think you might.”

            “What makes you think I might?” Harry was drawing his wand through his fingers again. He made himself stop, lay it down, and look her full in the face.

            Hermione blinked. “Did you cut your hair?”



            Harry snapped his fingers in front of her face, and watched her jerk back with an emotion too sluggish and cold to be called satisfaction, but which was pretty close to it. “Focus, Hermione,” he hissed.

            “Fine,” Hermione said, and her courage rose to meet him, bright and fierce. “Because you roared at Ron last night, and you sat through class this morning snapping at people and clutching your wand, and you went to the library and I saw you reading a book from the Restricted Section.” Harry caught his breath, waiting for her to say that she’d seen his meeting with Malfoy, but she went on without a pause. “Look, if it’s a curse or something, or a manifestation of your grief, then I think you should talk to a Mind-Healer.”

            Harry recoiled a little. “You never said that before.”

            “You never frightened me before.” Hermione locked her hands around her legs. Harry realized it was to keep from moving away from him, and began to laugh, his mouth tasting of ashes. Hermione didn’t move, though, just kept her gaze fully and stubbornly on him, and nodded as though Harry had come around to the point she wanted him to see. “Now, you do. Now, I think you should see someone.” Abruptly, she grabbed Harry’s chin and tilted it back, and he was so astonished he let her do it. “See? I knew it!”

            Since Harry could hardly see his own neck without a mirror, he conjured one, the motion of his wand feeling fluid and strange. He looked at the scars the silver Kneazle had left, and swallowed when he saw the shape the scars had taken in the mirror: a circle, with a scratch down the middle of it. It looked like the number 1.

            Harry swallowed again, and watched the scar bob. So, all right, it looked that way. That didn’t mean it was really counting down to something. The line that looked like a 1 could be a random scratch.

            He told that to Hermione, and got one of those withering looks that he could live without seeing again.

            “Right,” Hermione said. “But even if it was random and not a number, the fact is that your scars have changed! They were just thin lines before, and now they’re in a circle.” She poked Harry in the neck as if she could make the scars move and watch them do it.

            “I told you that before,” Harry said, arching his neck away from her and wishing there was a way to get further back. For fuck’s sake, Hermione, I’m not a project. He didn’t say that, because there was a dim sense in the back of his mind that he shouldn’t. “When I got the scars from the Kneazle, they were fresh and bleeding, and then they scabbed over, but then this happened.” He gestured at the scars that were still arranged in old, parallel lines down towards his collarbone. “Unless you don’t believe me about the Kneazle attacking me that afternoon.”

            “No,” Hermione said, and Harry was about to explode until she continued, “I believe you. But I didn’t see them change, and this time, I am.” She stared at his neck with rapt fascination. “Do you think you should call Kreacher and ask him to explain it?”

            “No.”

            Hermione ducked a little, then sat up and nodded. “Right, Harry,” she said, gently, carefully. “I didn’t mean to say that you had to. It was just a suggestion.”

            “No,” Harry repeated, keeping his head bowed. “He’s a part of it. He wanted me to go out into the garden right before the Kneazle attacked me. He wants whatever’s happening to happen. The only way he would tell me was if he thought I couldn’t stop it.”

            He didn’t want to admit that Kreacher was in terrible shape right now, healing but still wounded, and if he summoned the little elf, Hermione would see it. In a way, that would be a relief, to get all the confessions out into the open and hand over the problem to her.

            But he didn’t want to. The hard, cold rock at the center of him didn’t. And Hermione nodding and standing up with the “research look” on her face, her jaw thrust forwards and her hands on her hips, made his head hurt worse.

            “Right,” she said. “I’ll go see what I can find out.”

            She ran out of the room, and Harry groaned silently. So now Hermione was part of it, too. Malfoy would be disgusted, but Harry couldn’t see a way to shut her out.

            Malfoy…

            The memory of the throb in his blood came back again, and Harry nearly slipped into another memory-reverie about Malfoy’s face and fingers until he realized something else. His hand brushed something in his lap, an object that shouldn’t be there.

            He stared down at his own erection a moment, and then flung up Silencing Wards around his bed before he began to cast the spells that would numb it and push it down.

            This could not be happening. Parts of it were, like the transformation of the scars on his neck, but not others. He was not getting hard over Malfoy. He wouldn’t admit it.

            Or the throb in his blood, or the voice whispering and sighing Malfoy’s name in the back of his mind that sounded like a twisted version of his own.

            Or the sensation in his belly that he could only identify as hunger.

*

            moodysavage: Harry is pretty scary, but his friends know something’s off, now, and will be watching.

            delia cerrano: Thank you!

            ChaosLady: Thanks.

            CareLessLover: Because he saw what Harry feels in this chapter.
- 11
- 12
- 13
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Ancient and Noble Houses