Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Under the Manor	By : WillGirl Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13318 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: I make no claims to Harry Potter, either books or movies, and all rights belong to JKR. No money or other recompense is being made from this story.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
Harry left work earlier than usual—although still later than half the people on his shift—and found himself walking up to that shabby window with its decrepit mannequins with no clear idea of how he had gotten there. He looked at the “closed for refurbishment” sign on the front of Purge and Dowse, Ltd., and wondered if he had lost his mind.

“Er, Harry Potter,” he muttered, “here to visit, ah...well, Draco Malfoy,” he admitted with a wince.

The dummy nodded, and beckoned, and Harry swallowed hard and went inside.

He was just checking in, Harry told himself, because he felt responsible. He was an Auror, after all. And the Malfoys had plenty of enemies. He just wanted to make sure that there had been no foul play involved; make sure that Draco hadn’t been cursed by someone; make sure that there was no crime that Harry and his co-workers should be investigating.

That was all.

He waited nervously in the queue before the front counter, trying to pretend that nobody was staring at him. He pulled on his best Auror-on-duty face and tried to look like he was there on official business. Harry couldn’t bring himself to go so far as to flash his badge, because that would have been a lie, but he did his best to couch his request as if it were an official one from the Ministry, rather than a private concern of Harry’s. “Auror Potter, here to speak with Draco Malfoy. My sources tell me he was admitted earlier today?”

The bored Welcome Witch had perked up immediately upon recognizing Harry, and now she nodded quickly. “Yes sir, Mister Potter,” she said somewhat breathlessly, “yes he was. He’s up on the third floor, sir, I’ll have Healer Pye escort you.”

“That’s really not necessary,” Harry assured her quickly. “I can find my own way, I’ve been here before, there’s no need to disturb anyone. I want to, ah, to keep my visit low key for now, you know what I mean? Nothing official,” he added with what he was sure was a garish attempt at a conspiratorial wink.

The Welcome Witch ate it up, though—sometimes there was an advantage to being Harry Potter—and she nodded violently. “Oh yes, sir, yes of course,” she breathed. “Yes, go right up. He’s in the Mickwick-Stathers Ward.”

Harry nodded. “Thanks,” he said, and quickly hurried out of sight, trying to ignore the whispers that were following him. Well, there would no doubt be rumors in the Prophet tomorrow, but with any luck they wouldn’t be too outlandish. So long as no one took his visit too seriously and decided that the Malfoys had been causing trouble, and tried to cause them some in return, it shouldn’t really end up being a big deal...Harry hoped.

He slowed as he reached the fourth door of the third floor, realizing for the first time how absurd it was that he had come here at all. What if Draco’s parents had bullied or bribed their way back through the Portkey Authority already, and were even now sitting in there with their son? What would Harry say to explain his presence to them—or, worse, what if they weren’t back yet, and Draco was alone? What would Harry say to him?

But he had come this far. It would be cowardly—not to mention stupid—to run away now. He had to at least pop in and say hello; do what he had come for, and make sure that Draco wasn’t the victim of some curse or attack. He had to, at least, do his job.

Harry took a deep breath and pushed the door open.

It was dim inside, and almost silent, aside from a low whistling noise, as if someone was having difficulty breathing. Harry tentatively edged inside and let the door swing shut quietly behind him. “Er...Malfoy?” he whispered.

The quiet whistling seemed to stretch out forever before someone spoke:

“Over here,” groaned a rasping voice from the far end of the room. A figure on one of the beds stirred and Harry walked over to it, trying to make as little noise as possible.

There appeared to be only one other person in the room aside from Malfoy: the recumbent patient from whom the quiet whistling issued, and he or she (or it) seemed to be asleep or at least immobile. Harry felt that his trainers creaked more than a rusty door in a horror movie, but the other patient didn’t stir even when Harry crept right past their bed.

He stopped at Malfoy’s side and scuffed his feet like a kid caught out after hours. “Er...hello,” Harry said, feeling his cheeks burn. He cleared his throat and wondered if it was too late to retreat.

Draco’s eyelids fluttered and finally opened, as if he had had to fight against a great weight to make them rise. The icy grey slits pierced right through Harry, spearing him on the hook of the other man’s cold gaze. He blinked at Harry and a sharp eyebrow arched. “Potter?” Malfoy asked, as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing.

“Um...yeah,” said Harry. “I just, ah...just came to check that you were all right.”

Draco certainly didn’t look it. He was thinner than he had looked the last time Harry had seen him, although it had only been a week. The waif-ish look was back and, swaddled as he was in the stark white of hospital linens, the tall man looked very small and almost ghostly. His skin was waxy and his pale hair was plastered to his forehead by a thin sheen of sweat. Malfoy was shivering despite that, or maybe merely trembling. The dark hollows underneath his eyes were very deep.

He struggled to sit upright against the pillows, his pointed face pulled into a disbelieving sneer. “Have you gone completely mental?” Draco snarled weakly. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I, I told you,” Harry stammered, “I just wanted to...I mean, if someone’s attacked you, or...I mean, well, it’s my job to investigate these sorts of...”

Draco’s cold stare silenced him. “Why are you here?” he asked again.

“I...said...”

“No,” Malfoy interrupted flatly. “If you were here on Ministry business, you wouldn’t be here.”

“I—what?” said Harry. He blinked, frowning.

“If this was an official investigation, you’d know not to have bothered to come, because you’d know there’s no need for an official investigation. No one cursed me, or poisoned me, or—well, all right,” he amended, “technically I suppose someone did, but it was me, so there’s nothing to investigate.”

“You...you poisoned yourself?” Harry asked, his eyes gone very wide. “Draco, don’t—whatever it is, whatever’s wrong, that isn’t going to—that won’t help, honest, don’t—”

“Oh for Merlin’s sake, Potter,” Draco snapped, “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Oh,” said Harry.

“I may be a selfish twat,” he continued mercilessly, “but I wouldn’t do that to my parents. Kill myself, really?” he asked, his face drawn into one of the harshest sneers Harry had yet seen upon it. “‘Devastated’ isn’t a strong enough word for how they’d react; I can’t put them through that.”

“Ah,” said Harry. “Well, good then. Right. Okay.”

“Merlin,” Draco swore quietly. His eyes slipped closed again.

“So, um, then...I mean, if it was an accident,” Harry said, “then, well...”

“I overdosed on some Dreamless Sleeping Potion, if you must know,” Malfoy said. He shifted uncomfortably in the bed and would not meet Harry’s eyes.

“Oh.” Harry blinked. “Can you...can you do that?” he asked.

“Obviously,” Draco snarled back, his tone reminding Harry quite suddenly and forcibly of Snape’s whenever Harry was being particularly thick in Potions Class. Harry shivered.

“Right, yeah, I get that, I just—how?” he asked. “I didn’t think it was, you know, dangerous...I mean, I’ve used it myself, for Merlin’s sake...”

“There’s using it, and then there’s over-using it,” Draco explained impatiently. “And I over-used it.”

“Oh,” Harry said again. “Well...how does that work?”

Draco was silent for a moment. Harry wasn’t sure if he was marshaling his resources for the conversation, or simply deciding whether or not he was going to deign to waste the time answering Harry. Either way, he eventually did speak to explain, tersely: “If you take it every night, for years on end, the potion builds up, and there is eventually a reaction to the mild toxicity of the ingredients.”

“Dreamless Sleeping is toxic?” Harry yelped.

“Only over extended periods, Potter, try and listen won’t you?”

Harry had to bite his lip to keep from smirking. Draco definitely sounded like a professor—the black-clad, sarcastic type of professor that tended to skulk about in dungeons, at least.

“The symptoms are mild at first,” Draco continued stiffly, “and easily masked by other, lesser potions or charms. A slight trembling of the extremities, weakness, nausea, irritability, headaches, lethargy—nothing overly debilitating or noticeable. But it does lead to a dependency on the potion, which often transforms into a true addiction, if one continues to imbibe on a regular basis. That carries with it rather more severe symptoms, including but hardly limited to very delightful things like stomach bleeds, brittle bones, deafness, blood clots, and aneurisms.”

Harry frowned. “If you know all that,” he said, “why did you keep taking it for so long?”

“It was the only way to make the nightmares stop,” Draco said simply.

“Oh,” Harry said again. He couldn’t think of anything to say, and looked away from Malfoy. He raked his eyes over the room, looking for something to talk about, and noticed the empty frame of a portrait. That made him think of Hogwarts, and the Headmasters, and of Severus Snape.

“You should be a teacher,” Harry observed idly.

Draco sneered, “and who on earth would want their children taught by me?”

“I dunno,” Harry replied with a shrug, “the last repentant Death Eater that Hogwarts had on staff seemed to work out all right...”

The stare Draco leveled at him was so intense that Harry could feel it, even with his back turned. He turned around to face Draco again, and shrugged, trying to shake that fierce gaze off his shoulders. It didn’t work.

Draco slowly shook his head, his eyes never leaving Harry’s face. “You really are something else, Potter,” he said.

Harry shifted awkwardly. “Um...thanks?” he ventured.

Draco snorted and settled back against the pillows. He didn’t seem quite as tired as he had when Harry had arrived; perhaps the conversation was helping him stay awake, or maybe the overdose was simply wearing off.

“Hey...about the nightmares...” Harry ventured tentatively. “Well, I just...I hope I don’t figure into any of them.”

“Don’t worry,” came that familiar sardonic drawl, “you weren’t that bad.”

“Not what I’m talking about,” Harry said flatly.

Draco waggled his fingers in a weak imitation of his usual sweeping, dismissive gesture. “If this is you fretting over that night after we got pissed at your place,” he said, a tired smirk at the corner of his thin lips, “then you can relax. The only part of that night that has me upset is the idea that there is any possibility, no matter how slight, that I could have been stupid enough to let some filthy Muggle does me with something. And I still maintain you’re wrong, and I didn’t.”

Harry felt something tight in his chest that he hadn’t known was there loosen at Malfoy’s words. A brief grin of relief flickered across his face, then faded behind concern for the exhausted man lying limply in front of him. “Well, good,” he said, “but I hope I’m not in any of your nightmares. In any sort of situation, or scenario.”

Draco’s eyes slid open. They were cold and inscrutable and made Harry shiver.

“I just, I’d feel really bad if I did,” Harry continued, “because I don’t blame you for anything, and I don’t want you to feel guilty about any of it, okay?”

“You don’t blame me,” Draco repeated dully.

Harry shook his head. “Not for any of it, Malfoy,” he said firmly. “Not for a single damn thing.”

Draco sighed heavily. “What do you want, Potter?” he asked.

“I want everything to be okay,” Harry said, “for everyone.”

Draco snorted. “Not too tall an order, is that?” he asked, his pointed face drawn in a tired but not entirely disbelieving smirk.

Harry shrugged. “Well...obviously,” he said, “yeah. But it’s still what I want.” He looked down at the wan, gaunt man on the bed beside him and frowned. “I want you to be okay, too, Malfoy,” he said quietly.

Draco raised disbelieving eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“I don’t blame you,” Harry said, “and I think I’m over you. I want you to get over me, too—or over what you had to do, actually; I guess that’s the part that’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”

Draco didn’t reply, but he didn’t have to. Harry knew.

“You have to let go of the guilt, Draco,” he said. “All of it—not just what they made you do to me, but all the rest of it, too. Every curse, every death, every failure, every success—the whole damn war. It was hardly your fault, any of it, and you’re not a bad person, not really.”

Draco snorted, and would not look at Harry, but Harry could see the sour expression on the other man’s pointed face, and could guess at the haunted look that must be lurking in the icy depths of his grey eyes.

“Draco...you have to let it go,” Harry said softly. He brushed pale hair off a pale forehead and trailed his hand down the crisp white covers until he reached other fingers, and enfolded them in his own. Draco’s hand felt thin and bare and oddly fragile without the heavy silver rings he usually wore, but the Healers must have made him remove those while they treated him.

Harry squeezed Draco’s hand and, after a moment, Draco squeezed back.

At this point, there are two options, dear reader. You can either continue with the story as written, in which case you would want to scroll to the chapter selection, and go to the final one. Or, if you would like, select the next chapter in order, which is titled DELETED SCENE, and then continue on to the end afterward. The story works either way; I personally think it works better without that other scene (the reason it’s “deleted,” obviously), but if you find yourself suffering from a disappointing lack of smut as the story wraps up, I suggest checking out that little aside. The choice is yours.
- 13
- 14
- 15
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

Under the Manor