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Nature of the Beast	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 48976 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 11
- 12
- 13
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twelve—Readiness and Reluctance
            Harry didn’t stop running, or hurrying, along until he got to his bedroom. Then he shut the door behind him and stood there for a second with his eyes shut. He wondered if he could trust Narcissa and Malfoy, and now Aloren, not to intrude on him while he was here.
            Then he snorted in bitterness. Of course not. Hadn’t Narcissa already come in when she wanted to, simply because she wanted to talk to him? And Malfoy would pity him now that Aloren had said what he said about the bond. He wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with him because the bond wouldn’t take. He would think it was everything wrong with Harry.
            I would rather have him scrabbling at me and sniffing my neck and trying to force the bond than pitying me. At least then I would know for sure what to feel about him.
            Harry opened his eyes a second later. He already knew, didn’t he? The situation with Malfoy was really no different than the situation with the Dursleys. There was the “love” that both of them said they would feel for Harry if he behaved a certain way. All Harry had to do for his aunt and uncle to love him—he had believed this once, anyway—was to get rid of his magic. “All.”
            And all Harry had to do for Malfoy to love him was give up his independence, his free will, his very sense of self.
            Never. Dumbledore might have wittered on and on about how Harry’s greatest power was love, but Harry had learned to live without the kind of love the Dursleys offered. If it was conditional, if it would make him into a different person if he just tried, then he didn’t want it. And he never would.
            Someone knocked on his door. Harry tensed, turning his head. His neck hurt from how tight his muscles were. He laid his hand on his wand, although if it was Malfoy he wasn’t sure how effective it would be.
            “Mr. Potter?” That was Aloren’s voice, and he spoke so gently that it set Harry’s teeth on edge. “I haven’t come to plead for Mr. Malfoy. Just to talk to you.”
            Harry laughed harshly and leaned his head down, panting. If he broke away from the door, he wondered if Aloren would try to come through. These rooms weren’t private, after all. Not the way they probably would be if he was a true submissive.
            The thought of Malfoy holding the rooms’ privacy out as some kind of incentive for Harry to submit to him made Harry burn and boil all over again. He held his voice down to a level tone, though, because the kind of scream he wanted to make would burst Aloren’s eardrums. “You don’t have anything to talk to me about.”
            “I want you to know something more of how a submissive and dominant truly relate, when there is no damage to the bond and no longing to have a different kind of relationship.”
            Harry laughed harshly. “And that isn’t what I want, is it? No matter how much Malfoy tells me I should, I don’t have those instincts that he’s talking about.”
            “The submissive ones? No. But I think you may have misunderstood the role of the submissive in a bond. I don’t think that either Mr. Malfoy or his mother explained it to you adequately.” For a moment, Aloren’s voice dipped. Harry thought it was on Narcissa’s name. “If you understood, perhaps you wouldn’t resent it so much.”
            “I would resent it more. Because that’s the role you want me to play, that you and Malfoy and his mum all want to force me into.” Harry paced slowly across the room, turning his head now and then to make sure the door was still locked. “And it’s the role I’m never going to play.”
            Aloren sounded surprised for the first time. “You never want to be loved, or give someone else the pleasure of taking care of you?”
            “What kind of pleasure would that be for me? I don’t love Malfoy. I don’t care about bloody seeing him happy. Just alive.”
            Aloren was silent again for a moment. Then he asked, “Could I come in? If you could listen to me about what else you need to do besides serve your dominant—other things that submissives experience and feel and do—then you might understand better.”
            “Serving the dominant is the catch, isn’t it?” Harry shot another Locking Charm at the door, just to be sure. Of course, maybe Aloren’s wings or strength or something would let him come through the door, and then he would learn about some of the spells that Harry had seen the Aurors use in combat. “I’ll never do that.”
            “Even the terms of service may have been misunderstood.” Aloren seemed resigned to speaking through the door, which reluctantly impressed Harry. He was the first person Harry had met who was willing to have a conversation about this on Harry’s terms, even if he had asked for other things. “It doesn’t mean taking care of them or crawling at their feet like a slave.”
            “I don’t want to be a slave or a servant.”
            “This is hard to explain to someone who didn’t grow up hearing about it.” Aloren sounded a little wistful.
            “Imagine that I’m a child,” said Harry, and if there was laughter in the back of his voice, harsh and cackling laughter, well, he didn’t need to explain that to Aloren. “Tell me the way you would a child who comes to you for the first time and asks about submissives and dominants. Remember that I can ask questions a child wouldn’t ask, though.”
            “You’ve already asked several, I’m unlikely to forget,” Aloren murmured, but began. “Dominants are the ones who face outwards. Submissives are the ones who face inwards.”
            Harry tilted his head back. “Why do all these magical creatures like speaking in metaphors?” he asked the ceiling. “Explain to me what that one means. So far, it seems like the submissive mostly faces inwards because they’re crouched on the floor with their arse in the air all the time.”
            “Submissives are the ones who handle private matters.” If Aloren was upset that Harry was speaking disrespectfully of the supposedly sacred Veela bond, he didn’t show it, simply answering the question with a patience that actually startled Harry. “Dominants are the ones who handle public matters.”
            Harry shook his head. “That does sound like the division that Malfoy was explaining to me, and I’m afraid I’m not going to follow that one, either. I have an active political career.”
            “Most submissives don’t,” said Aloren, as if he assumed that a statement of fact was a demand for more information. “They find that they have enough to do keeping the home in order and being the heart of the house.”
            “My friend Hermione said something about that phrase,” said Harry. “It sounded like I would look through portraits’ eyes at people and control what the wards of the houses did or something. And no, thanks.” He shuddered. The thought of being responsible for Malfoy’s safety and what would happen to him if something got through the wards and wounded Malfoy was enough to give him nightmares.
            “It is more than that,” said Aloren. “They did not explain it to you?”
            “They only explained that I was supposed to be Malfoy’s servant and in love with him.”
            “Not that I do not wonder what went wrong with the bond to damage it so badly,” said Aloren, sounding brisk now, “but they do need to explain more of this to you. So. A submissive being the heart of the house means that the house revolves around him. The house-elves come to him for orders. He needs to be consulted about any guest who arrives and what the family will give to the guest. He needs to be the one who decorates the rooms and chooses the food for the meals and decides what should happen to the children when they cause trouble inside the house. If they cause trouble in public, then the dominant disciplines them.”
            “Life as a housewife,” said Harry, thinking of the chores he had done for Aunt Petunia and shuddering again. Telling house-elves to do them didn’t sound any more interesting than doing them himself.
            “I don’t know what you mean,” said Aloren. “Is it a Muggle term?”
            Harry sighed. “Where do the parts about the wards and the portraits’ eyes come into it?”
            “The submissive is also responsible for defense of the house, of course,” said Aloren. “He keeps the people around him safe and happy, and he roots out the causes of the hatred and unhappiness and depression they are suffering. He gives permission for certain spells to be cast in the house, and rules out others. He dictates whether children can be allowed to practice their magic on warded property that would hide their practice from the Ministry. He uses the portraits and the wards as part of the system of defense, and the wards are linked to him.”
            Harry paused. That was the only part that didn’t sound so bad, he thought. He would have liked to live somewhere with his friends and defend them and support them.
            But he wouldn’t have a choice about who to defend, would he? He would have to defend Malfoy or his mum or whoever was living in the houses at the time. And he would never get the chance to invite his friends over.
            “What if I’m not interested in that?” he asked. “Or what if I wanted to do some of that and not all of it? Or what if I wanted to do it but also have a political career?”
            “Being heart of the house involves one more duty.”
            Harry heard the slowness in Aloren’s voice, and smirked. I knew we were going to come to it eventually. “Let me guess,” he told the ceiling. “That duty is serving the dominant.”
            “Well, yes,” said Aloren. “And most dominants don’t want their submissives venturing out into danger. Almost everything beyond the walls of a house is dangerous for the submissive. People might want to force them to grant them access to the house, so they can steal the family’s money or artifacts. They might try to kidnap their children, or use them to take revenge on the dominant’s family.”
            Harry shook his head, all the more confirmed now in what he had already suspected. “There’s no way for me to be me with a role like that,” he said. “It’s all about the dominant and his family. Even say that I didn’t hate Malfoy and I didn’t have a political career and I wanted to do some of this shit. It doesn’t leave a place for me. I’d be a thing. An object. A prized artifact. The ward on a house. Something valuable, but not for itself. What it can do.”
            “That’s not true.” Aloren sounded for the first time in a while as though he might try to break through the door, and Harry put another charm on it. “Dominants love their submissives. Of course they want them to have what they want.”
            “Just not an independent life, if that’s what they desire.”
            “I don’t know.” Already Aloren sounded wretched. “It’s not something that’s ever come up before.”
            Harry snorted. “Well, now it has. And I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Malfoy. I’ll do the compromises that will keep him alive. And me alive. And my political options alive. Nothing more than that. I’m not his fan or his friend any more than I’m his submissive.”
            “If you knew how much it hurts a dominant when his submissive doesn’t listen to him or pay attention to him--”
            “And it hurts me to be forced into this sort of life,” Harry interrupted. He almost wished he’d opened the door to Aloren so he could see the bastard’s face now and make him really understand what Harry was talking about. “I know Malfoy didn’t choose it. Neither did I. I’m not going to give everything up, no matter what, so that he gets what I want and I get nothing.”
            “He would love you,” Aloren whispered. “I do truly believe that he has the capacity for that.”
            “But I don’t, according to your bond-reading spell.” The thought of that thing still made Harry want to flinch, but he thought he understood now. It didn’t mean he couldn’t love his friends or that what he’d felt for Ginny wasn't real. It only meant that he didn’t have the capacity to love Malfoy in a Veela bond. Which was what he’d been trying to tell him all along. “Compromise is about all he can ask for. I’m not giving anything else up.”
            “What happened to you, leaving you unable to love or submit?”
            “To love a Veela,” said Harry sharply. He wasn’t about to let Aloren go around thinking he couldn’t feel love, not when he’d bloody well walked into the Forbidden Forest to make the sacrifice of his life for people he loved. “That’s not the same thing as anything else.”
            “What happened?”
            “There was this Dark Lord who wanted my head, you see.”
            “It must be more than that.” Aloren’s voice dipped again, and Harry pictured him leaning against the door, his claws out as if he would tear down the wood. It was probably the posture Malfoy would take if he was there. “Maybe it’s the sort of thing your mate can heal, if you tell him about it.”
            “War trauma doesn’t heal that easily, and you can’t bring back the dead.” And some of it, like the Horcrux, Harry would never tell anyone about. Knowing Malfoy, the git would probably want to make one just in case.
            “This trauma is older than the war.”
            “And I won’t discuss it.” Harry snarled in a way that he hadn’t done since he’d pinned Malfoy to the wall of the library with his magic. He’d begun to think they could live together, and then this happened. Knowing Malfoy, he wouldn’t leave it alone; he would insist that he had some sort of right to know everything that had ever happened to Harry.
            It was horrible, in a way, because Harry had hoped that he would be able to tell everything to somebody someday. To lay out in words what it was like to find out you were a Horcrux and someone had manipulated you most of your life.
            But he had told his friends, and Ron and Hermione were great friends. If he was never going to have a wife or lover he could be with, well, he still had more than a lot of people with Horcruxes in their heads might have.
            “Harry,” said Malfoy’s voice abruptly.
            Harry jerked his head back, wondering where Aloren had gone and why Malfoy had taken his place. “What are you doing, Malfoy?” he asked, “I was talking to Aloren about something.”
            “I know what he probably wanted to talk to you about.” Malfoy sounded as though he also resented the fact, but he went on before Harry could snap at him. “And I want you to know that what you talk about with him will remain--private. Between the two of you.”
            Harry blinked some more. But a private conversation with Aloren really didn’t matter to him very much. He wanted a different kind of promise. “You won’t ask me about it, either? About the damage to the bond or why we can’t bond?”
            There was a moment of silence so sharp that Harry could have used it as a weapon.
            “I want to ask,” said Malfoy finally, and there was a longing in his voice that was foreign to Harry. It sounded a little like the desire some of his fans had to ask him questions, but that had never been as yearning as this. It was more greedy. “But I won’t. If it’s that important to you to keep silent.”
            “Aloren seemed to think that we had to work it out and heal it somehow.” Harry couldn’t help himself, even if Malfoy had sincerely meant his promise. He wanted to push further, to push against the boundaries and make sure that Malfoy wasn’t going to break his word at a later date.
            “We have the time to work out a compromise and test it,” Malfoy said. “All our lives. There are things I want to change, but maybe we can find a way to change them without discussing the past. As much as I want to know. And you can tell me if you ever want to.”
            Harry relaxed a little. Yes, Malfoy was the same Malfoy. Those last words had been the most eager ones he’d uttered yet.
            But if Harry could trust him a little, and hold him to his promise about not prying into his past, then the sort of compromise he’d proposed might be tolerable.
            “I want your word that you won’t ask anything,” he said. “If I feel comfortable enough to say something to you, that’s one thing, but no asking.”
            Silence from the other side of the door.
            “Malfoy?” Harry leaned on it. “I can work with you and do what I need to without talking about things that don’t matter. You know it.”
*
            Draco winced and closed his eyes. He did know it. But even though he had said he wouldn’t break into Harry’s silence without a reason, he wanted to break it. He wanted to ask, and he wanted Harry to freely answer.
            Freely.
            That, he would never win unless he left the choice of when and how to speak up to Harry. And although his Veela screamed at him inside his head about how it needed its mate, its submissive, ultimately Harry freely giving him what he wanted was the greater prize. It might happen someday.
            It was on the trust and hope of that someday that Draco nodded, took a deep breath, and murmured, “All right. No asking. No prying. As long as you do tell me if you feel like telling me.”
            Silence in turn, and Draco wondered if that wasn’t good enough and he should open his mouth to promise something else. But then the door opened, and Harry stood there, scanning him up and down as though he thought Aloren’s bond-sensing spell should have left a kind of visible residue on Draco.
            Draco gave Harry a tight smile. It was hard to remain calm when he thought of Aloren, who he’d summarily sent away, but he could do it for Harry’s sake. Harry was more important to him than any dominant could ever be, even if the dominant had been intent on stealing Harry, which Draco didn’t think was the case here.
            “All right,” Harry said, guarded, an answer and a question both at once.
            “All right,” Draco echoed back, and in a way it was. At least he had an answer now for why the bond wasn’t functioning , if not an answer in all the complete detail he wanted.
            Harry gave him a tentative smile, and that was enough to content Draco’s Veela for now. He nodded, and stood back to let Harry precede him down the stairs.
            Harry did pause with his hand on the railing and say, “I would appreciate it if your mother didn’t poke at me anymore about not respecting the bond and you enough. Bring problems to me if you have them. If there’s something you need to live.”
            Draco grunted. He hadn’t been pleased by his mother springing Aloren on them, either, even though he had managed to live with it. “You can count on that.”
            Harry shot him one more, far more dazzling, smile, and allowed Draco to touch his back with a wing as they walked down. Draco felt he couldn’t ask for anything more.
            Right now, anyway.
*

            delia cerrano Not so much narcissistic as desperate. He thinks he’s the only one who can fix it.
            BAFan: Thank you!
            SP777: Harry doesn’t want to lose his spirit, either.
            moodysavage: No, I get what you mean. It’s pretty much exactly what Harry feels.
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Nature of the Beast