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Until the Solstice Rises	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5148 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Title: From Inside the Morning

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco, Luna/OMC

Warnings: Angst

Rating: PG-13

Wordcount: 3500

Summary: One holiday to Japan. One night. One long, running argument.

Author’s Notes: This is another of my Advent fics, for ghighines’s request of Draco/Harry Established Relationship sorta. They are going to a friends wedding in Japan. They are going through a rough patch in their relationship and a visit to an overnight temple is where they start working things through. It's not pretty. Happy ending. Here you are. I apologize in advance for any mistakes in Japanese language or landscape; they are entirely my own. The imaginary temple in this story is based (in looks) on the Kinkaku Ji Temple in Kyoto.

From Inside the Morning

            “You never told me why you wanted to come here.”

            “To see Luna.” Harry kept his eyes focused straight ahead of him as he leaned on the slender railing around the temple, staring at the water. The pool rippled with the light of the setting sun, what little reflection leaked through the high clouds, and a small breeze moved through the leaves of the trees off to the side. Harry feared he didn’t appreciate it properly, though, and couldn’t as long as his lover’s annoyed voice sounded in his ears. “You know that.”

            “Not here, Japan. Here, this temple.” Draco was prowling around him, kicking pebbles and making enough noise that Harry winced and glanced over his shoulder. Luna had told them that there would be few people in the temple tonight, but still. “Why?”

            “I thought it would be relaxing,” Harry snapped, and whirled away, towards the temple itself. It was yellow, not the color of gold but the color of autumn leaves. It looked as if it had two floors above the ground one, but no one moved on those floors. Harry walked under the bigger awning, and then stopped.

            Draco followed him. “You thought what, and why?” he demanded.

            But Harry was getting tired of accounting for his thoughts to Draco. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, trying to let the atmosphere inside the temple cascade down the back of his neck, soothe the muscles, wash the irritation away. People had walked and prayed and thought and explained here for hundreds of years, Harry thought, and places picked up the resonance of what was done inside them, especially wizarding places. If he could absorb a small bit of that deep thought, then maybe he could solve his problems with Draco.

            “Why?” Draco repeated, his voice like the buzzing of a wasp.

            Harry turned around and glared at him. “You know that this isn’t the place to have this row, Draco,” he said, keeping his voice low to model good behavior, and walked further into the temple. The floor creaked softly underneath him. The shadows inside the temple seemed deeper than Harry had reckoned on, and he paused uncertainly.

            “Lumos,” Draco drawled from behind him, and the shadows sprang away. “Honestly, sometimes you forget you’re a wizard.”

            Apparently this is the best place for the argument, after all. Harry turned around, his shoulders hunched and his hair standing on end along the nape of his neck.

            This was supposed to be their holiday. Luna had gone to Japan some years ago to study one of her imaginary creatures and had met a man named Sato Botan, a Japanese wizard who tended populations of the Triple-Horned Snorkack, which turned out not to be so imaginary after all. Luna had decided to marry him—or maybe Botan had decided to marry her; Harry wasn’t sure about which—and had invited Ron, Hermione, Harry, and, impartially, Draco, to her wedding. Harry had hoped being in another country could help him and Draco simply enjoy each other’s company for once.

            But because Draco had decided to carry this stupid argument with them, that wasn’t going to happen.

            “And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” he asked. “You can never forget that I was raised Muggle. I heard what you said about me to your friends at Christmas.”

            Draco’s eyes widened with true surprise before he turned his head away and shrugged. “It’s only true, yes. You forget to use simple charms to clean up after yourself, and you expect my friends not to remark on crumbs?”

            “With Gregory as one of their friends,” Harry said tightly, “yes.”

            Draco flinched, but Harry stood his ground. The same friends, mostly Parkinson and Bulstrode, who made outraged and shocked comments about Harry in low voices tolerated Gregory Goyle biting into a chocolate cake and spewing bits of it when he laughed. There was no difference in manners there, except that Harry’s were better. It always and ever came down to blood.

            Hell, Harry thought, Draco had probably only pursued him in the first place because he was one of the richest and most influential wizards in the world following Voldemort’s defeat. What Harry couldn’t fathom was why Draco stayed with him. He had to know by now that he couldn’t make Harry over in his own pure-blood image.

            “Pansy and Millicent are accustomed to better entertainment than they found in your house that night,” Draco said, and turned his head away, a graceful motion of his neck that Harry used to admire until he realized it led to Draco being a stubborn bloody martyr about everything. “Yes, I said what I said to soothe ruffled feelings. That’s all.”

            Harry smiled tightly. Draco might not realize what he had just said, but Harry did. Draco had taught him that, the quickness to insult and notice nuances.

            “Don’t you mean our house?” he asked innocently.

            Draco faced him, arms crossed, his wand projecting towards a corner so that the shadows came back again. Not that Harry needed to see Draco’s face. He knew what expression would be on it.

            “That’s what I said,” Draco insisted.

            Harry shook his head. Of all Draco’s argument tactics, he hated most the one where Draco insisted that Harry couldn’t trust his own ears or eyes. Harry knew perfectly well what he’d said, and that Draco was being an idiot.

            “You said my house,” he said quietly. “It’s still not your home.” He paused, and a moment trembled between them like a raindrop. Harry was the one who made the drop fall, who spoke the words that had been forever coming, and not long enough. “Why don’t you just leave, Draco? You don’t like me, you don’t consider my house yours even though we’ve lived together for years, and you pick at me all the time. I can see you’re not happy, and I can’t make you that way, because my manners are never good enough no matter what and my blood isn’t going to change. Why are you tying yourself down? Go away.”

            Draco stood there, staring at him, his arms drooping as though he had started to fold them and then forgotten why he was doing it. In the silence, Harry watched the light from his wand, and looked up into his face, and couldn’t bring himself to regret his words.

            Maybe this was a good idea after all. Not relaxing, but it helped me say things that needed to be said. Harry wondered idly if the deep thoughts here had included heated arguments.

            “You don’t mean that,” Draco said.

            Harry turned away, pushing his fringe up and away from his forehead. “There you go again, telling me that I don’t mean something or I didn’t do something that I’m bloody sure I do mean, or do do,” he said wearily. “It’s another reason for you to leave. Go and get a partner you can trust more. I’m done.”

            He started to walk towards the far side of the temple. There might be something to see there. And he didn’t light his own wand. Perversely, he liked the thought of being plunged into darkness when Draco left.

            Draco followed him, though, his voice holding the low, wary bafflement that he’d shared the first time he realized that Harry bought birthday presents for all the Weasleys, not just Ron and Hermione. “You don’t mean that because you don’t want me gone,” he said.

            Harry reached a small space of bare floor that he sank down onto. There was a spill of dust in front of him, and he traced his fingers lightly through it. “I don’t want you gone,” he said quietly. “I love you. But I’d rather love you from a distance than have you tell me, over and over, that I’m wrong, and I don’t need this, and I don’t love that, and I need to change when I can’t please you anyway.”

            “This isn’t really all about that thing I said to my friends at Christmas, is it?” Draco demanded. “You can’t be that offended that I admitted I wished you were cleaner, and cleaned up after yourself more.”

            “You didn’t say that, Draco,” Harry said through gritted teeth. “You said dirty, that you wished I wasn’t so dirty. That I wasn’t so muddy.”

            A startled silence. Then Draco said, “I didn’t mean it like that. I was talking about the time you tracked mud into the house.”

            “No,” Harry said, smiling bleakly at the wall. “I heard the whole conversation. You were talking about crumbs on the table, and the handprints I left on the wall when we had sex there, and the hair in the tub. Not mud.”

            Draco was quiet. Harry was quiet. Now it did seem as though the thoughts of the people who had prayed here had entered into them, because Harry could feel his thoughts slowing down and his breathing slowing.

            Draco broke it again, of course. “I sometimes slip into those metaphors when I spend time around my friends,” he mumbled. “It’s not my fault.”

            Harry turned his hands outwards. “Then whose is it? Mine? Because if you still think that way about me after years of being together, Draco…nothing will change. I can’t change who my mother was to please you. And I wouldn’t if I could,” he added, because he knew the way Draco’s brain worked and the question he was heading towards. “I like my mum. I like knowing that she saved my life, if she couldn’t be alive to be around me. I don’t want to change things. That’s the way it is.”

            Draco’s breathing retreated into quietness again. Then he said, “It’s not as though you’re good to me all the time, either.”

            “I know,” Harry said wearily, bowing his head and massaging his forehead. The pain that was coming on was the kind that would last for a few hours, at least. “I know I argued with you about going public and that I don’t get along well with your friends. But that just means that we’re wrong together, and all the people who told us we were bad for each other were right.”

            “I refuse to let them be right.”

            Harry blinked and looked up. “What?”

            Draco stood in front of him—Harry hadn’t even heard him rise—arms folded and with the glare that had challenged the Fiendfyre and the press and all the Weasleys when they came in teary-eyed, mostly because Ginny had been teary-eyed at the news Harry was gay and not because they inherently hated the idea. Harry rocked a little with the force of that gaze, and wished he could look away, but from the way his eyes stayed locked on Draco, that wasn’t an option.

            “I refuse to let them be right,” Draco repeated, softly, harshly. “The thought that they’re right and we can’t be together is intolerable to me. Let’s work this out.”

            Harry laughed wearily. “We’ve tried that already, Draco. There’s nothing left. It always founders, and we yell at each other, and then have sex later, and accomplish nothing.”

            “Sex isn’t nothing.”

            “But it isn’t what we need.” Harry pressed his palms to his eyes. The headache was growing worse, and the thought of another “session” where he and Draco tried to work everything out made it worse. “Let me go. Please.”

            “That means you can’t walk away from me on your own,” Draco said, satisfaction in his voice.

            Harry glared at him. “I always think you’re least attractive when you’re gloating over someone else’s pain,” he snapped.

            “Gloating,” Draco said, in a tone so deep that Harry was actually tempted to back away from it, and took a step forwards. It looked as though Draco just stopped himself in time, and then he stood there shaking his head. “You think that’s what I’m doing. You think…that’s what I’m doing.”

            “Yes,” Harry said. “And you needn’t repeat yourself. You can’t change my mind that way.”

            “Then how can I?” Draco edged nearer again. “Because we don’t agree, and we shouldn’t be together, but you’ve admitted that you don’t want me to leave. How can I change your mind so that we both agree, the way we should?”

            Harry ran his hands through his hair, and ignored the cluck of Draco’s tongue. The fact that he cared so much about the way Harry looked when Harry had long ago given up on it was only another reason they weren’t suited. “You can’t change,” Harry said. “You’ve made it clear that you don’t want to, and I’m unfair for asking you to do it.”

            Draco shook his head. “I refuse to accept that.”

            “Another reason we aren’t suited,” Harry pointed out. “We can’t fucking compromise.”

            “Or compromise fucking,” Draco said, and sighed when Harry didn’t smile. “Listen. I want—I want to be with you, and not only when we’re fucking. And the stupid little comments I make to my friends don’t mean much. I don’t mean them, not the way I mean what I say to you when we’re alone.”

            “But that includes more comments on my appearance, and my hair, and my clothes, and the way I eat, and my friends.” Harry shook his head. “If you didn’t want to change me, then maybe we could be together, Draco. But that’s really the whole core of the problem. You can’t even wait to argue with me about my smallest perceptions. I think you’re being abrupt, and you have to say that I must be imagining things. Not even that you weren’t abrupt. You degrade the way I look at the world, and you wonder that I find you exasperating?”

            Draco stood there, and blinked. Harry blinked back. He had only said what he was thinking, and he was sure he must have done that at least once before. But Draco was acting as shocked as though Harry had really given him new information.

            Finally, Draco whispered, “Do I really—degrade the way you look at the world all that often?”

            “You’ve done it already since we’ve been here.” Harry turned to look out the temple’s doorway, since being inside had yet to bring him peace. He could see the water that way, and the trees, although they were dim shadows now that the sun had set. “Telling me what you think I really mean, whether or not that’s what I think I mean. I don’t want that, Draco. I could put up with the insults and the way you talk to your friends about me, but not the insistence that I must really look at the world this particular way, when I know I don’t.”

            Draco stood there with his head bowed. Harry hoped he was indulging in some serious thinking, but he didn’t know if he should hope for that or not.

            Then Draco said, “What if I promised—really promised—that I wouldn’t do that anymore?”

            “You don’t even notice you’re doing it,” Harry said, eyeing him. “How can you promise to stop something like that?”

            Draco took a deep, silent breath, one that reminded Harry of the way Luna had stood breathing in her husband’s breath this afternoon, after a soft conversation they’d had about their wedding.

“I never want you to permanently change,” Draco said at last. “Even your horrible hair. You represent a challenge, and that’s what I want the most from you. If you—if you challenge me some more, if you tell me when I’m doing it, and you tell me to stop doing it, I won’t take that the wrong way.”

Harry gaped at him. Draco had never said before why he wanted to be with Harry, other than offhand comments to his friends about money and power and looks. Harry had never taken the looks part of that equation seriously, either, not when Draco was always pushing at him to change.

Now he remembered the time that he had put on a pair of new robes to go to a party at Parkinson’s house, because Draco had been so sharp about Harry not embarrassing him. And when he had come downstairs, Draco had stared at him for a little while, and then asked him in a choked voice to please go back up and change. Harry had assumed his choice of new robes was worse than the old one, because that was the sort of fashion problem Draco was always accusing him of.

It seemed, though, that it might have come from Draco’s astonishment that Harry had given in to him for once.

“You seriously won’t?” Harry asked.

“I love you,” Draco said, though with a little grimace that made it look as though saying that caused him physical pain. “I love the way you challenge me, and the way that you stand up to me, and the way you fight back when I’m trying to—I don’t know, pin you to the bed or something. I wouldn’t be with you if I didn’t like that. I know I don’t say it often, and I’m sorry. But I do like you for who you are.”

“Muddy blood and all,” Harry said.

            Draco shook his head. “I don’t mean that, any more than you mean the nasty remarks you sometimes make about Slytherins when you’re with your friends. I’ll try to keep in mind that you don’t like it, but at the time, I didn’t mean it. It slipped out.” He met Harry’s eyes and held them. “I wouldn’t touch you, wouldn’t be with you, if I really believed that about you, Harry. You know it.”

            And he did know it, Harry had to admit. Draco complained about him and picked at him and battled him, but he touched Harry with reverent hands, and had rushed Harry to hospital when he’d hurt himself in a stupid accident with a terrible look on his face, and the one time he had come to Harry’s help in an actual battle situation, the way he’d reacted to someone else spilling Harry’s blood was terrifying. Meanwhile, the rest of the Slytherins who really believed that way could barely tolerate being in the same house as Harry.

            “Okay,” Harry said, shaking his head a little. “And I’ll try to keep in mind that I like fighting with you, too.”

            Draco’s mouth crooked. “I don’t think you like it as much as I do.”

            Harry grinned. “It doesn’t express itself the same way, but why do you think that I’m always talking about your friends, or Slytherins, or pure-bloods, or some other group that I know you’ll come to the defense of?”

            Draco rocked back on his heels, evidently thinking of some of the occurrences of the last five years that he hadn’t considered in-depth at the time. Then he said, “You little shit.”

            Harry smiled at him. “Well, yeah. But you seemed so serious about the things you said to me that I never thought of them the same way. If it was for the sake of arguments, then I can think of it differently.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. “The way I look during those rows is just one of the differences between us. Stop being so sensitive.”

            “Maybe now I finally can,” Harry said, taking a step towards him, “now that I know—well, that I can challenge you if you tell me that I’m oversensitive, or wearing stupid robes. I want to be with you, Draco. You’re right about that. I didn’t want to let you go. But it seemed to be making us both so unhappy.”

            “I would be unhappier without you,” Draco said, catching his arms. “And I’ll try to show you that you would be, too.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ll try to speak more openly like this, more honestly, if you need it.”

            “I’d like it,” Harry corrected. “But that you did it once already—and even apologized—is a huge help.”

            Draco scowled at him. “My apologies aren’t that rare.”

            “Name three of them in the last year,” Harry pointed out, drawing nearer.

            “I meant the apology I gave you just now,” Draco said, and then paused to think, his forehead wrinkling in a way that Harry found adorable, but also knew meant that Draco might be standing there and thinking forever.

            Harry kissed him instead.

*

            Morning found them looking out from inside the temple, two arguments past, their eyes on the trees and the water and the rising sun.

            And their hands linked. Harry rubbed Draco’s knuckles and thought, Yeah, we’ll be all right.

            The End.

*

            delia cerrano: Thank you!

            SP777: Thanks. The problem is that a lot of the prompts people asked for are ordinarily things that would take a much longer story, but the time constraints meant I couldn't write novel-length after novel-length. Hence this. And I don't think I'm doing too badly.
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Until the Solstice Rises