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Secrets & Lies	By : Digitallace Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14570 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or anything associated with the fandom, nor do I get paid to write or post this work.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
Author's Note: Thanks to all my lovely readers and reviewers and thanks to the amazing Shannon for looking this chapter over for me. It's not long now.

Chapter 14 Dreams

Bells chimed from overhead, seeming to echo through Harry's body. At their toll, the assembled masses sank into an eerie silence, sending a shiver down his spine. Harry straightened his tie nervously and stared out into the crowd of gathered friends and family. Only it was all wrong. He caught the eye of Sirius in the front row, his head bowed toward Remus' in a teasing manner as if sharing a witty anecdote. Tonks smiled up at him from Remus' other side, their son cradled in her arms.

"But Teddy's almost old enough for Hogwarts," Harry said aloud, his face basked in confusion.

"And his parents are dead," Ron replied, patting Harry amicably on the back. He was dressed in deep burgundy dress robes, his hair pinned into a perfectly smooth ponytail. Harry looked back to the front row and gasped as the dear friends staring back at him were, indeed, quite dead. Tonks' grin was broken and putrid, her eyes sunken into her head. Remus was missing large chunks of hair and his skin seemed to hang from his bones, while beside him, Sirius seemed to almost wink in and out of existence, shimmering into sight one moment only to disappear the next.

"Stop it!" called a voice from the end of the long grey aisle. "Can't you see you're upsetting him?"

Ginny stood there in a blood red dress, a bouquet of lilies clutched tightly in front of her. Lucius Malfoy stood beside her, him arm hooked through hers. "What the hell is going on?" he demanded, turning to Ron, who shrugged and then to Hermione who stared at him from across the wide platform. She looked at him with the saddest eyes he'd ever seen and would only shake her head and look away. When he followed her gaze, he noticed Dumbledore standing between them, a large tome in his hands as he chuckled merrily. His eyes sparkled as he met Harry's, but as he watched they shifted from clear blue to crimson and slit like a snake's.

He tried to step away, tried to draw his wand, but he was frozen as the Headmaster's robes turned dark and billowed all around him in ominous shadow. His face melted like candlewax, leaving the greyish skin of Voldemort behind. "Who gives this woman to this man in holy matrimony?" the Dark Lord hissed.

"No, no, no. This is all wrong," Harry shouted, panicky and confused.

"Stop. Ruining. It," Ginny bit out, her face tight and cruel. She clutched Lucius' arm tighter and they began their march down the aisle toward Harry.

"I do, my Lord," Lucius replied at last, as if completely ignoring the couple's outburst. He dropped to his knee, his head bowed, but when he looked up again, it was Draco's face that stared back. Not his father's. "This is who Potter is to marry."

A sadistic smile curled Voldemort's lips as he held his hand out to Ginny and to Harry's horror, she stepped forward and accepted it. "Potter," he spat. "Do you take this woman as your wife?"

Harry shook his head, his eyes locked on Draco's. "No," he replied boldly, as loud as he could shout it.

"And you, Weasley, do you take Potter as your husband?" he continued.

"I said no!" Harry shouted again, flailing his arms when no one would even look his direction. "I want Draco!"

Ginny narrowed her eyes and gave Voldemort a meaningful look and the Dark wizard lifted his wand. "We can take care of that easily enough," he mused gently, aiming his wand at Draco's chest.

"NO!" Harry screamed, trying to leap in front of Malfoy, save him from the cruel blast, but his feet wouldn't budge and scream went unheeded.

"Avada Kedavra!" Voldemort shouted, and the whole hall seemed to echo the curse in unison as Draco was hit from a hundred directions. He collapsed, his mouth open in a silent scream as the light drained from his eyes while Harry watched on. His heart shattered and he pleaded with Ron or Hermione to do something, but Ron merely shrugged again.

"It's your choice, Harry," Hermione said sadly. "Your choice."

"No! I didn't choose this! I choose Draco!" he cried, but no sound escaped his lips. Ginny smiled warmly and held up a mirror. Harry stared at his reflection. He didn't look like himself. He looked like his pictures in the Daily Prophet, Ministry Poster Boy, not Harry. Only he was different still. He screamed again, but it was no use. His lips were sewn shut with crude golden thread. His fingers went to his mouth at once, trying to pry it off, but he couldn't tear it away.

And then the hall began to laugh, a thousand voices all taunting him.

Harry woke in a cold sweat and a strange bed. His heart started to race and he bolted upright, blinking into the darkness of the room. His fingers immediately went to his lips and breathed a sigh of relief as he found them unmarred. A flash of blond hair beside him relieved him further and a flood of memories filled the gaps that his nightmare had left behind.

Draco.

He smiled at the way the blond was sprawled out, taking up most of the bed and still partially curled around him. He was desperate to sink back into those arms, but his nightmare lingered and made him too tense to lie back down. Part of him wanted to wake Malfoy up and make him keep him company while he settled his mind, but the man looked far too peaceful to wake. Carefully he slid from the bed without stirring the slumbering ivory dragon and tiptoed across the room to his neatly folded clothes.

Flashes of his dream remained and chilled his blood. He needed to end things with Ginny once and for all. He needed to go to the Burrow and tell her that he needed her to move out and that they were over. Waking her in the middle of the night may be cruel, but he reasoned that dragging it out any longer would be equally unkind if not more so. He had to do it now, before it was too late.

He felt a little guilty setting a note on the bedside table, but he had to take care of this while his courage was fresh. There would be no more procrastinating. Harry was done with this game. He'd tell Ginny that they were through and then he'd tell Draco what he'd come here tonight to tell him in the first place and pray that the man liked him enough to forgive him his treachery.

As he slipped quietly from the room, he cursed the distraction Malfoy had provided when leading Harry up to his room the night before. He tried to call up memory of the map the Ministry had provided him with; almost wishing he'd had it tattooed on his skin. Malfoy Manor was like a terrible maze and he had no idea how to find his way back to the entrance hall. He only hoped this maze wasn't lined with traps as the Tri-Wizard Tournament maze had been…and that no one would die at the end of it.

It was difficult to shake his nightmare as he wandered the corridors, but a set of ebony doors took his mind away from it entirely. He hadn't seen these on his initial search of the manor and he thought he'd been quite thorough. This room was not on the map, he was sure of it. It had an ominous essence about it that felt like it was trying to push Harry away, make him forget.

No. This room definitely hadn't been included in his original search, and the voices in his head waged a battle over whether to go inside. Malfoy was sleeping a few doors down the hall…or a similar hallway close to this one, completely oblivious to Harry's maneuvering. He had but a split second to weigh his priorities. Stay on mission or leave as planned from his first date with Draco Malfoy.

In the end there was no real choice. Harry Potter was an Auror to the bone, and Draco was still his suspect. With a tired sigh, almost wishing he'd taken a different corridor, Harry pushed his way through the wards and into an opulent study. He had a hard time imagining Draco in this room. It was rich, like the rest of the home, but there was definitely a sinister feeling, as if the very air Harry took into his lungs was setting out to poison him. He immediately felt ill at ease, and cast a few quick charms to detect areas of saturated magic. In a place like Malfoy Manor, a place that had been the home to several generations of powerful wizarding families, every surface contained residual magical signatures, but Harry had a good eye for spotting heavy or complicated spellwork.

After studying the walls, laden with plenty of books giving off their own wafting energies, Harry swished his wand toward the desk and nearly gasped as the magic hovering in the air seemed to crackle and spit. Perhaps it was some artifact in the drawers, but a quick search revealed nothing out of the ordinary. He frowned. Something was off, but he couldn't tell what and it was frustrating him. Now more than a mission to search out Malfoy's guilt or innocence, it was a mission to conquer this desk and find out what it hid.

Chewing his lip, Harry circled the desk a few times before falling on his knees in front of it, peering below for a secret cubby of some kind. What he found surprised him and gave him pause. An oiled bronze handle nestled between two wide planks of wood from the desk above and the air seemed to shimmer around them. Harry was sure the desk base would look completely solid without the assistance of his detection charms.

He tried pulling, pushing, Parseltongue and even hexing the blasted lever, but it refused to budge. There was some key, some secret to revealing whatever this lever opened, but it was evading him with every passing minute. He had no idea what he would say if Draco were to stroll in now and catch him snooping around. He doubted that 'looking for the loo' would get him very far.

With a defeated sigh, Harry climbed back up and slumped into the massive chair. It looked soft and cushiony from across the room, but he actually found it to be rigid and quite uncomfortable. The person who sat here clearly didn't get a lot of work done, or was a serious masochist. Or both.

The desktop was mostly clean, just a couple letters bearing no consequence and a handful of framed portraits. An older couple, which Harry assumed were Draco's grandparents, an image of Lucius and Narcissa at their wedding and a very stiff family portrait featuring a much younger Draco with his parents. Harry smiled, lifting the frame and holding it closer as he watched Draco's image shift uncomfortably and his father's hand squeeze ever so slightly to still his fidgeting son. It was such a subtle nod to the obvious tension within the family, not to mention how thin and tight Narcissa's lips were pressed together as if she were holding in some deep, dark family secret, and he supposed in a way she had been.

This was the boy he knew, the spoiled, arrogant prat he'd fought with constantly and quickly became the bane of Harry's existence. To think that mere hours ago, he'd spent a passionate night with the same man was still uncanny to him, but he couldn't help the smile on his lips as he gently touched the portrait and felt a shiver of want all over again.

A loud click made him freeze in place, his eyes immediately darting toward the door. His heart was hammering in his ears, but he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the door was still sealed securely shut. When his nerves settled and his breathing evened out, Harry's eyes went wide with a new revelation. The noise…there was only one thing it could have been. He slipped to the floor, ignoring the sharp pain that stung his knees and found the lever had shifted. With an easy yank it released and Harry was forced to leap back quickly as the ground shifted and fell from beneath him.

Harry eyed the ominous black opening with renewed confliction. This is what he'd been seeking all along. He knew without even peeking into the dank hiding spot that this room would seal Malfoy's fate one way or the other, and he couldn't help but shake the feeling that he should just turn around and leave it alone. He knew it wouldn't be good. He knew there was no way Draco had some kind of underground flower garden or a hidden puppy emporium tucked away below the study. In his experience, no one went to such lengths to hide something unless it was very valuable or very illegal, and Gringotts was still a perfectly safe place for expensive heirlooms.

He soon found himself shifting from one foot to the other as he stared, unsure whether to bolt or sink down the dark staircase. In the end, his innate sense of curiosity and the same deep-seeded need for do-gooding that made him an Auror won out. He needed to go down there, needed to see if Malfoy was truly guilty of what he was being accused of, and more importantly, he needed to see what kind of man he'd just imagined a life with.

With trepidation that made his palms sweat and his drawn wand tremble in his hand, Harry began the long, steep journey into Draco's secret room. He'd never been so afraid on a reconnaissance mission, not even when he was moving through untouched parts of Hogwarts looking for a Basilisk, and he quickly realized why, though he was loathe to acknowledge it. He didn't want to know Draco was guilty.

It was easier than Harry would have liked to navigate the occasional traps he came across on his trek. It was almost like the house was begging to reveal its secrets to Harry now that he'd broken through the original spells to deter him. He didn't start as the torches lining the walls flamed to life and he didn't find the shadows they created particularly intimidating. This was his job. He'd done this a million times before for a million other cases.

So why were his very veins screaming at him to turn back?

But he ignored his body's influences and plowed ahead, heedless of his internal warning bells. At the very end of the hall he encountered a door. He squinted at the massive slab of mahogany and pursed his lips. It was woven with intricate spells and would take hours he didn't have to dissolve them each in turn. Especially without Hermione's help.

Perhaps that was an omen that he should turn around and give this whole thing up, but he had to know what lay behind the door. He felt like a total arse as he lifted his wand and shouted 'Alohomora', even so much as laughing at himself. As if it would be that simple.

No sooner had the self-deprecating thought left his mind, he felt the telltale shiver of the wards dropping. He hadn't even noticed the soft hum, like a thousand dragonfly wings beating in unison, until it came to an abrupt stop. He blinked and reached forward, his hand tentatively closing around the cold metal handle.

This was it. Just on the other side of this door was his answer – the ruin of a relationship that might never have been. Squaring his jaw, his teeth clenched, his countenance tense and unyielding, Harry opened the door and stepped through the threshold.

A shiver ran up Draco's spine and he woke with a gasp. Clutching his chest to still his erratic heartbeat, Draco scanned the dark room for what must have woken him. He was met with a silence so deep it threatened to smother him. Only vaguely could he recapture snippets of his dream. Flying, the broom firm and familiar in his hands. Laughter, exuberant and light. Harry's. He couldn't recall anything sinister or cautionary, only a warm feeling of acceptance. So, why had he woken feeling cold and clammy?

Harry was missing from the bed, and of course, part of Draco had expected as much. It was only fair after he'd run out on him earlier for Harry to return the favor. It wasn't as if they'd actually had a conversation about everything. Draco sighed and scrubbed his face, trying to clear the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes and his brain. He wondered for a moment if it were too early to give chase, pin Harry down, explain everything and let the cards fall where they may.

His heart pounded viciously at the idea of rejection, but in the back of his mind he wagered he had less to worry about than he might otherwise assume. A slow grin tugged at the edge of his mouth when he thought about Harry, about their night together and the potential for many more like it.

Peeling back the covers, Draco swung his legs over the edge of the bed, stretching as he stood and rummaged in his bedside locker for a pair of pajama pants. Maybe Harry was still in the manor, gone to the loo or went downstairs for a drink, but one glance at the top of the nightstand told him otherwise.

A note.

From Harry presumably. With a sigh, he grabbed it up, scanned it twice with a frown as he drank in every word of the hastily scribbled note.

Draco,

Last night was…beyond words. I have some things I have to take care of, but I hope you'll wait for me. I promise it won't take long.

Harry

"Well, that settles that," Draco murmured to the empty room. It seemed obvious from the note that Harry still wanted him, but he asked for space, and Draco would grudgingly accommodate. No longer intending to track the wayward Gryffindor down, Draco wriggled out of his sleep pants and threw himself back into bed, pulling Harry's pillow tight to his chest. He could still smell him there, a mixture of scents he couldn't even begin to identify, but it didn't matter. It was Harry. All Harry. And Harry was his, or would be soon enough.

Draco slipped back into slumber, a pleased smile on his face, and he resumed his dream of flying side by side with Potter, their laughter echoing around their old school pitch.

Author's Note: only a few chapters left of this one, but soon I'll start posting up a yet-to-be-named fic that's just a few brief scenes away from being complete.
- 13
- 14
- 15
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Secrets & Lies