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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 Fourteen—Draco the Magnificent

            Draco wasted no time. The moment that he and Harry stepped through the door of the Manor, he summoned Batty.

            Batty appeared in front of him, took one look at his face, seized her ears in her hands, and began to drum her head into the floor.

            Draco sneered and slid one arm around Harry’s waist. He darted a look at his lover, but Harry was watching Batty punish herself without apparent concern. Draco wondered if he had had a house-elf after all, though from what he remembered of Granger’s war against their “enslavement” in Hogwarts, he doubted it.

            Or maybe he just enjoys the sight of someone who tried to hurt him suffering.

            Draco realized he was stroking the waistline of Harry’s robes in approval, and made himself stop. If he once opened Harry’s clothes, he was likely to forget all about Batty’s punishment. He kept his hand in contact with the warm, giving flesh as he spoke, though. He also didn’t want to go too far with the punishment and make himself appear some kind of monster in Harry’s eyes.

            “Batty,” he said, and was proud of the way his voice emerged, sliding and slithering like a serpent around cage bars smeared with grease. “Did you post letters that Harry Potter had written to his friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger?”

            Deprived of any possible opening that would let her lie, Batty wailed out a confused mixture of protests and denials and how “Batty always has the best intentions towards Master Malfoy, always, always, always!” Draco heard her out, because interrupting a house-elf in this mood meant receiving the same tirade again, louder than before.

            Harry did give a slight wince during the wail, though. Draco wasn’t sure what bothered him—the helplessness of the creature or the mere pitch of the sound—but he acted at once.

            “Batty,” he said, “silence. You will answer my questions only by nodding or shaking your head, is that clear?”

            Batty calmed at once, and, nodding, peered up at him through large eyes leaking with tears. Draco didn’t miss the venomous glance she darted at Harry through those tears, though.

            Even now. Draco’s mouth tightened in exasperation. He had planned to use a punishment that his father had often inflicted on an elf named Dobby when Draco was a child, but this was too much. Batty had done her duty, as she saw it, and obviously part of that duty was protecting Draco against Harry and everything Harry’s presence in the house implied. Even if Draco forbade her from hurting Harry, she would find some way around the orders. A house-elf’s overriding imperative was to do what was best for their master’s family, whether or not the master’s family said so. That was one reason they could be trusted to take care of children.

            And it was the reason he could not trust Batty now. If she sincerely believed Harry was a danger to Malfoy blood or property or prestige, Draco could make all the protestations in the world, and she wouldn’t believe him, instead thinking that he was blinded by infatuation. She would act against Harry again, and next time, it might not be a strike that Draco could understand or turn to his advantage so quickly.

            He pulled Harry closer to him. Harry glanced at him curiously. Draco ignored that. He wanted Harry, as well as Batty, to understand exactly why he was doing what he was doing before he did it.

            He was grateful that he hadn’t been required to speak that sentence aloud. The words he did say were more than enough.

            “Batty,” he said, “I want you to understand that your attempt failed. Harry Potter’s friends did come here, but they did not take away the impressions that you wanted them to take away. Harry Potter is still safe here, and always will be. You know that we’re lovers.”



“Master Malfoy should not touch a half-blood whose paternal line is younger than the benches in the Malfoy gardens!” Batty screamed, standing to her full height and disregarding the order to keep silent. She punished herself immediately afterwards, pulling on her ears until new tears shone in her eyes, but she kept screaming. “Master Malfoy must find a suitable partner, someone with clean blood and clean magic who will be good to him!”

Draco snarled, but Harry put a hand on his arm and leaned to whisper into his ear. Draco noticed with some satisfaction that this caused Batty to writhe and squeak harder than ever. She wouldn’t have many more chances to watch him being intimate with Harry, but he liked to imagine her reaction standing in for that of Harry’s friends when they were once more confronted with the reality of Harry’s new life.

“I think it might be the curse,” Harry whispered. “I was never around any house-elves in the last year. But why shouldn’t it exaggerate their reactions towards me and make them incapable of trusting my good intentions?”

            Draco snarled again, this time cursing himself. He should have anticipated that and taken proper precautions to protect Harry.

            The sense of protectiveness he felt towards Harry really was astounding, he noted, attempting to think about it in a detached manner. He knew that he would take hexes for Harry, plot and plan and intrigue and quit St. Mungo’s for him, but the all-consuming emotion that ate his attachment and spread across his mind like a red-black stormcloud when he thought of Scrimgeour or any of Harry’s other enemies was more than that. It was hard to think rationally, or to look at Batty and feel something other than wild hatred.

            “You’re not going to punish her on my account, are you?” Harry asked.

            “She put you in danger,” Draco murmured, turning and speaking almost into Harry’s mouth. “I can’t forgive that.”

            Harry’s eyes lingered on his for a moment, and then he nodded and stroked the back of Draco’s hand with two fingertips. Draco felt exultation cut through the protective storm like a beam of sunlight.

            He trusts me. He trusts me to know what’s best and what’s right, and not to go too far.

            “Batty,” he said, and smiled as the house-elf immediately straightened. That was the tone he used to give her regular orders. Perhaps she hoped that the crisis had passed, and that he was going to forgive her or even get rid of Harry. It was the kind of thing his father would have done, Draco knew. Lucius held to many rules of cold courtesy, but considered hospitality an obligation to be dispensed with as soon as possible. He had once shoved the wife of an annoying neighbor who wanted to beg him for a favor into the Floo without her wig.

            “Accio cloak,” he said, and the garment zoomed towards him before he had lowered his wand completely. Harry looked hard at him, but said nothing, and Draco was glad. Batty would fuss enough for all of them.

            “Master Malfoy is to be leaving the house now to dump the filthy half-blood’s body in a ditch?” Batty was bouncing gently on the balls of her feet. “Batty knows many good ditches. Batty will go with him!”

            Draco flung the cloak. It drifted in the air and settled gently over Batty’s head. “I’m giving you clothes,” he said.

            Batty began to scream like someone being burned alive.

            Draco tapped his wand on his throat, casting Sonorus, and spoke so that his voice could be heard not only above Batty’s cries but all across the house. He wanted other elves who might have a grudge against Harry because of the curse to hear and understand him. None of the others were so devoted or so mad as Batty, but that only made it imperative that he do this, so that danger would not come from an unexpected direction. “No one living under this roof is to act against Harry Potter, directly or indirectly. From this day forward, he is to be accepted as a full member of the Malfoy family and given rights that are equal to mine.”

            Harry’s face was brilliant red, but he had an expression that Draco suspected he had perfected during ceremonies where he was being given the Order of Merlin and other awards he didn’t want. He nodded, as if he agreed fully with everything Draco said.

            “Batty, I’ve given you clothes,” Draco repeated, turning to look at the struggling mess of limbs under the cloak. He felt no pity. If Harry’s friends had been inclined to go to the Ministry before coming to the Manor, they could easily have lost everything. “Go from me now.”

            Batty vanished with a wail, and Draco felt the pang a moment later as she separated from the wards that controlled the entire household. She was gone, and he had no authority over her any longer. On the other hand, she was so devoted that this was as good as a death sentence to her.

            He tapped his wand against his throat again, murmuring, “Finite Incantatem,” and then faced Harry. “Do you understand why I had to do that?” he asked.

            Harry grimaced. “I think so. But it’s never pretty.”

            “I wouldn’t require you to find it so.” Draco put a hand on his shoulder. “Come. We should plan my movements in the Ministry.”

*

            Harry folded his arms behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. He’d retreated to the wing that Draco had given him—and how strange was that, to be given a whole wing of someone else’s house? But not so strange now that he understood where Draco was coming from—the moment Draco left for the Ministry. He didn’t feel comfortable lying in the other man’s bed when he wasn’t there. Besides, this room was the quietest and least distracting place he’d seen in the Manor so far, without Draco’s wonderful view of the gardens, and he needed to think.

            So.

            He had a lover. He had hope again. He had shed some burdens when he yelled at Ron and Hermione, and expelled some of the anger. He knew who his enemy was, and had a powerful ally at his side, plus the less powerful ones like Lila and the woman Draco was visiting this afternoon to try and convince.

            Harry smiled, wryly. By any objective measure, he was doing better than he had been in a year.

            But there were still some dangers that he had to face on his own. Draco could protect him from snooping Aurors and rogue house-elves. He couldn’t save him if Harry’s own strength failed and he collapsed into a sodden, dependent heap reliant on Draco merely to move.

            Harry felt his fingers tighten behind his head. He let them. He even let himself think about how different the tense motion was from the combing that Draco did, the way he tugged and pulled on the strands to send shivers of sensation racing down Harry’s nerves. He had to think.

            He had to keep some part of himself separate from Draco, or the other man would swallow it all.

            It wasn’t that Harry didn’t appreciate what Draco had done for him. And he no longer misunderstood his motivations. This wasn’t a shallow desire. The numerous ways Draco had helped him alone proved that. But—

            But.

            Draco was magnificent, might as well admit it. He could say that he admired Harry’s strength to bear up under the curse all he liked, but Harry thought he might understand his own strength better. It was a stoic, passive, grinding thing. Harry could clench his teeth in a rock and hang on against the waves trying to batter him. He was no longer sure that he had the kind of power that would enable him to stand up and run away from the waves. Draco did.

            His was a leaping strength, brilliant as lightning, savage as storm unleashed. Harry flushed to find himself thinking such poetic words, but then, he was no longer capable of feeling neutral about Draco. Might as well admit that, too. Harry wouldn’t call what he felt love, or even a crush—how could it be, when he was still straight as far as he knew?—but it was something far stronger than casual regard. Draco Malfoy was his best friend in the universe right now, and his lover. Maybe Harry didn’t need to find words for him other than that.

            But he had to fight to get back on his own feet, to make sure that he contributed as much to the battle as Draco did.

            So far, the plans had all been Draco’s. Harry had followed them with some protests, because there had been aspects of cruelty or impetuosity to them that he hadn’t liked, but he had followed them. That couldn’t happen forever. Draco would get tired of supporting his dead weight in the end. Harry had to do something, had to take an equal place at Draco’s side.

            And that was for himself as well as Draco, Harry finally admitted. He distrusted the way he weakened under Draco’s touches even as he yearned for it; the fact that he couldn’t keep his hands away from Draco at the breakfast table that morning was something Draco probably viewed with satisfaction, but to Harry it had seemed like an addiction. Hell, thinking about the man had made him start to harden. That was frightening. Harry had to fight off fear by giving himself less cause to be afraid.

            He had to be stronger.

            Harry’s hands clasped together, hard, behind his head.

            He thought he knew a way to do that, if Draco would lend him a Pensieve.

*

            “Draco!” He could hear the laughter barely concealed under the surface of her voice, just as the flush was barely concealed by the thick glamours caked along her cheeks. “I didn’t expect you today.”

            Eugenie Figg-Warwick, the Head of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, leaned back in her chair and watched him with half-lidded, appreciative eyes as he came in. Knowing that she would look for it, because he had acted like this when he first met her, Draco allowed himself to strut. His hair dangled down to his shoulders in fine strands when he did that, and he could show off the shape of his shoulders and torso and neck. Ordinarily, he was too amused by the act to think about anything deeper when he did it, but now he found himself wondering what reaction Harry would have to this display.

            Maybe no more than an innocent widening of eyes, he thought. He still doesn’t know his own physical responses around a man very well.

            With some regret, he tucked the thought away. He couldn’t afford to be thinking about Harry more than as the general reason he was doing this when he faced Eugenie, or he could lose the contest. She was no Legilimens, but she kept so many secrets that Draco never knew when he might find himself at a disadvantage. And she had been a Slytherin, on top of it.

            With a wave of her wand, Eugenie cleared a chair for him. Her office was crowded with paper and clocks, her favored way for keeping track of the magical creatures the Department regulated. On the walls, werewolf heads, mostly asleep, projected from numbered faces that kept track of the phases of the moon. When a werewolf went rogue, the head would wake up and howl. A name flickered across each, but in faint colored letters that moved too fast for most people to see. Only Eugenie was supposed to have access to the Werewolf Registry that listed each lycanthrope in Britain.

            In practice, of course, Draco knew some…other people who had read it.

            More clocks, though none as numerous, hung around and between the lycanthrope ones. Some were made of webbing, and kept tabs on the Acromantulas that the Department had discovered living in the Forbidden Forest not long ago. (Draco was almost certain that bunch was the half-giant’s fault). Still others had the delicate curves of shells, for the seafolk. And there were more, made of flint and metal and bone, which Draco had never looked closely enough at to identify. It didn’t do to take his eyes off Eugenie for long.

            She was a large woman, not fat but strong with muscle. And her personality made her seem larger still. She always sat with one knee folded on top of the other and her hands clasped on both, and she always wore plum-purple robes edged with silver lace. Draco thought that was purely to distract attention from her cool, calculating gray eyes. Her hair was black streaked with gray, and writhed in complicated curls around her ears. Maybe it had been meant to imitate the Acromantula clocks, and maybe not.

            “Eugenie,” he said, and she gave that girlish giggle which Draco had learned the hard way was another defense against detection and people taking her seriously.

            “I’m ever so pleased that you call me by my first name now, Draco.” She gave him a narrow, heavy-lidded look. “Is there something that I can help you with?”

            “Yes,” said Draco, and made his voice just a touch breathier, letting his eyes linger on the nape of her neck and the curve of her cheek, her finest features. Eugenie was dangerous, but he was more so. Above all, he knew how to feign attraction. “I—I wasn’t going to ask you this, but I find myself compelled to.”

            Eugenie flushed again, but she wasn’t foolish enough to fall into the trap right away. “Something about your troubles with Harry Potter?”

            “I would go to Umbridge for that,” said Draco. “I’ve already spoken to her about the problem, in fact, and his constant harassment of me.” If only she knew how much I wish his harassment was continual. “No. I came to you for something else.” He looked down at his hands, and then let his eyes rise in a deliberately flirtatious manner, just delicate enough to catch her interest. “Something only you can help me with.”

            Eugenie was cautious; on the other hand, she had wanted him for a long time. She leaned forwards, her hand resting an inch from his elbow, an invitation he could take if he wanted. “Yes, Draco?” she asked, and turned her head, blue highlights glinting in her eyes. Draco had never been able to determine if they were natural or the product of a well-placed glamour.

            He took the hand and kissed it. With his wand up his sleeve, his eyes on hers, his lips against the warm wrinkled skin of her knuckles, he murmured, “Legilimens.”

            He found himself inside her mind at once.

            And then he found himself engaged in a desperate battle.

            Eugenie was not a Legilimens, and he knew that, but it appeared that she was an Occlumens. And in the mind of an Occlumens, the darkness was not the simple blankness Draco was used to when peering into the minds of his mad patients, but a shaped and controlled set of responses, obedient to the will of the mind’s owner, not the mind’s invader.

            Powerful coils wrapped Draco’s awareness and tried to drag it into oblivion—a particularly nasty tactic that he knew meant he would lose his senses and sit in Eugenie’s office, slack-jawed and drooling, until they took him away to the Janus Thickey ward or some worse place. He struggled once, but couldn’t get clear of the coils. He grimaced, and reduced his presence in Eugenie’s mind until he was a mere slip of light and wind, melting out of the serpents’ grasp.

            They returned, lashing after him, and trying to slam the walls of thought shut so that Draco could get no grip. He dived instead, pulling a storm of memories after him, pretending he was searching for just one thing but so quickly that the serpents couldn’t tell what it was. He passed through numerous small swirls of outrage, and knew Eugenie would be directing her Occlumency to smash him now. If he returned to his body at all, it would be with a raging headache.

            But Draco didn’t mind. Anger as keen as exhilaration, and hard to differentiate from it, raced through him. He concentrated on Harry as he dived and dived, passing through Eugenie’s childhood and her first love affair, and wrapped himself in his own coils of determination and tenderness. Once again, his desire to defend and protect welled up around him, and it was like a dragon with wings spread and fiery breath flaring, more than a match for the serpents of Eugenie’s will pursuing him.

            He let the emotions go out all at once, the conviction of unassailable truth in Harry’s words, the sensation when the curse had cleared to reveal his soul’s core. Beauty and power spiraled out from him, piercing Eugenie’s prejudices like fists driven through glass. Draco shivered with pain, much as his hands would have if he actually plunged them through a window, but he drove on, searching for the moment when he knew he would wreck Eugenie’s disbelief.

            It actually came faster than it had with Lila. Eugenie could defend herself, but all her strength was concentrated on shoving him out of her mind, and not protecting this weak point. Besides, she had no reason to think that he would defend Harry Potter, while Lila had known of their association by the time Draco undertook the task of “persuading” her.

            Draco called back the light of his memory and scattered the last of her darkness. The snakes shriveled and died. Eugenie’s Occlumency defenses shivered and lay down. She believed.

            Draco could have done anything he wanted to her mind, but the temptation had ceased to be beautiful, now that he only wanted to know one mind inside and out, and that with the owner’s express consent. He withdrew, and fought to keep from gasping as he opened his eyes. Pain gripped his temples in a cage of iron and made yellow and red swarm in front of his face. That had taken much more effort than crushing Lila’s resistance; he’d paid for swiftness with exhaustion.

            He looked with more respect at Eugenie. He had not thought she was concealing a secret as dangerous to him as that. It was just as well that he had chosen her for their next target. If Scrimgeour had enlisted her to hunt Harry instead, she could have been a problem.

            “Merlin, Draco.” Eugenie pulled her hand from his to carefully touch the side of her face. “You could have told me.”

            “With the consequences of the telling being what they are?” Draco didn’t bother to keep his flirtatious tone as he leaned back in his seat. Neither of them needed it. “I think not.”

            “Well,” said Eugenie, and Draco knew she was considering the information about the curse he had planted in her mind. “Yes. I can see that.” She folded her hands and stared at him evenly. If she blamed him for hurting her, the desire for vengeance had been buried. Draco reminded himself not to turn his back on her, however. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

            “I want—“ Draco began, and then the door opened and someone stepped into the room behind him.

            He twisted, and found himself looking into Scrimgeour’s eyes.

            “Ah, Eugenie.” The Minister smiled. “I’m afraid that I need to borrow Mr. Malfoy for a moment. I was told when he entered the building, but it took me some time to track him down. I understand,” he went on, facing Draco when Eugenie gave a faint nod, “that we have a common enemy in Harry Potter.”

            Draco, his head pounding, some of his normal defenses in shreds, knew that this could be the moment when he managed to condemn Harry and himself to death, or soared above it all to fool their enemy.

            What to do was never in doubt, of course.

            He smiled and leaned closer, dropping his voice. “We do indeed, Minister. Shall we talk in private?”

*

            Mangacat: Yes. Harry very definitely needed to get some anger out, and now that it’s gone, he can start picking up some more determination of his own (and not expressing so much inappropriate anger at Draco).

            McAbacus: This chapter was a good demonstration of Draco as masterplan!man, I hope. ;)

            LadyKatie: Thank you! Since Ron and Hermione were Obliviated, they didn’t really suffer from the revelations.

            SilentInvictus: What’s your e-mail address? I couldn’t find it.

            Thrnbrooke, Myra: Thanks for reviewing!
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A Determined Frame of Mind

Chapter Fourteen—Draco the Magnificent