Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Conservation of Fame	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 22392 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 14
- 15
- 16
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fifteen—Such an Explanation

            “I want to come back home with you.”

            Harry, who had turned around in the middle of the street to hold out his hand to Draco and bid him farewell, paused. Yes, all right, he should have anticipated that would be one of Draco’s desires, but he’d never thought that Draco would ask so openly right now. He could have patience when he wanted to, Harry knew that.

            Evidently, he didn’t want to now.

            Harry faced him. Draco was standing in the middle of the street outside Fortescue’s, Harry’s shopping floating behind him—he had scooped up all of it when he cast his Levitation Charm, and Harry didn’t see the point in a row—while he watched Harry. He might look patient, from a distance, with the way his mouth had become a smile, but his teeth showed. And those eyes…

            “I don’t trust you that much yet,” Harry said.

            “I don’t want to betray you,” Draco said. “For the excellent reason that it would give more people the chance to have a piece of you, when I want all the pieces for myself.”

            Harry grimaced and shook his head. “That—I don’t enjoy that metaphor, I told you. Too many people wanting to chop me up into real pieces instead of metaphorical ones.”

            Draco blinked for a moment as though disconcerted that Harry might take it that way. Then he said, “Fine. I want to keep you to myself and have your attention, day and night, until this devouring need for it ceases. And it won’t, not for a long time, not now that I know how fervently you cut me out of your life.” He met Harry’s eyes again. “That metaphor more to your taste, lover?”

            “You have a bit of ice cream on your chin,” Harry murmured in response, and when Draco reached up for it, he waited until his finger met dry skin. Draco’s eyes slid back to him and flared in response.

            “There,” Harry said, stabbing out a finger so that Draco froze with the expression on his face. “That’s the reason I don’t want to invite you back. I might trust you not to tell anyone. I don’t trust you not to get angry at me and start trying to take my life apart in other ways.”

            “I keep thinking, when you walk away, that I’ll never see you again,” Draco said.

            Harry snorted. “This is only the second time that’s happened since you knew. And the first time, well, I believe we’ve been over my dislike of being a stone statue that you stick in a corner of the cellar somewhere.”

            Draco gave him a slightly feral smile. “It wouldn’t have been the cellars. My bedroom, so I could watch you and ponder whether feeling you under me again was worth the price of letting you out.”

            “I want the option of walking away from you,” Harry said, lowering his voice further. “Because of that. Because of that desire to possess me, which I didn’t think you had at first but your spells and your words prove you do. Plenty of people out there who wanted to own me. Doesn’t mean any of them can.”

            “I don’t want to own you in the same way.”

            “Really?” Harry raised his eyebrows in what someone else, seeing his face from the side, would take as polite disbelief, but Draco could see his eyes just the way that he’d been able to see Draco’s earlier, and this time, Draco’s smile was the one to vanish.

            “No,” he said, his voice thick for a moment, and then he closed his eyes and obviously tried to slow down, to stop, to think. Harry appreciated the effort, which would have a good effect on everything except his ice cream, but then, he’d had a replacement for that anyway. He watched Draco’s face, the soft lines of his cheeks he wanted to touch, the wand he wanted to blast out of his hand, and wondered if there was any compromise good enough to content both of them.

            “I told you why I reacted that way,” Draco said. “It wouldn’t happen again.”

            “Uh-huh,” Harry said. “And just now you implied that it would, because of how much you hate to see me walk away from you.”

            “It was a joke, Harry.” Draco reached out and let his fingers trail up and down Harry’s wrist. “You’re so…I wanted you to pay attention to me, I wanted you to do something that was less than perfect so I could win for once, and then I just wanted you. All these desires are mixed up inside me. I can’t promise that I’ll always talk about them in a way you’re comfortable with, or that don’t resemble the ways your fans talked about you.”

            Then his hand closed down, and Harry had to remind himself of the holly wand in his pocket and the way he had torn down the wards of the Manor before he could breathe again. Draco crowded close, breathing Harry’s air, taking the same space.

            “But I can promise,” Draco whispered against his ear, “that with me you’ll never need to fear anyone else owning you, ever again.”

            “Good,” Harry whispered back, light-headed with something that was not exactly fear, not exactly. “But since I don’t intend to ever break the spell, you’re offering me a service I don’t require.”

            Draco pulled back, and blinked at him. “You didn’t intend to ever break the spell? I thought it was just a temporary measure to keep you safe. I…” He fell silent, frowning, and his grip on Harry’s wrist faltered a bit.

            “Of course not,” Harry said, but softened his voice a bit at the bewilderment he saw in Draco’s face. “Why would I? There’s no reason for me to do so. I like the life I have now, and no one important to me was left out of the spell.” That had been one of his fears, that they would find out when they cast the spell that someone who had pretended to know him really didn’t, but that hadn’t happened.

            “You should change things,” Draco said, and moved a step nearer again. Harry didn’t know what had made his eyes shine, what had fired him up from the inside, but he stood and awaited the next words. “If you came out of hiding, then you and I, together, could make sure that you were safe.”

            Harry grimaced. “But you couldn’t stop the photographs and the requests for interviews and the rumors and the stares,” he said. “I hated that just as much, before the end, as the more dangerous things. It implied that I wasn’t allowed to have any life of my own, ever, and it meant that the people who wanted that kind of thing accepted that it was the regular state of things for me to flinch. That prepared them to accept the Ministry’s policy that I shouldn’t be helped or protected.”

            Draco stared at him some more. Then he said, “Granger helped you come up with that phrasing.”

            Harry folded his arms, and thus tore away Draco’s grasp on his wrist at last. “No,” he said, more coldly, and let his voice clang. “Sometimes I can come up with something on my own.”

            Draco winced, and ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t mean to insult your intelligence, Harry,” he said.

            “It seems to me that you do a lot of things you don’t mean to.”

            “I’ve already apologized for some of it,” Draco said, watching him closely now. “That doesn’t mean I’ll continually apologize. I don’t want to.”

            Harry shrugged and looked around the street. No one was watching them closely yet, although with the mention of Hermione’s last name, he had been afraid of that. Part of the spell had transferred some of his excess fame to Hermione. “I don’t like talking about this in public.”

            “And you don’t want to invite me back to your house yet,” Draco said.

            Harry exhaled hard, more relieved than he cared to admit that Draco had accepted that prohibition. “No,” he said.

            “And you don’t want to come back to the Manor yet?” Draco spun his wand in his hand, and then looked down as if he had forgotten he held it. Well, maybe he had, Harry thought. Draco would have his own kind of scars and paranoia from the war, but that didn’t mean it would be the exact same kind as Harry’s.

            “No,” Harry said. “Thank you, but—no.” Then he hesitated, because he was thinking of the way that he had torn through the wards, and thinking he could do it again, and he also didn’t want to allow Draco to walk away with these words and nothing else between them. “Unless you were to let me tell my friends where I was going first, and leave your wards open a little bit so I could get out if I wanted to.”

            Draco stared at him. “The first surprises me that you think I would forbid that,” he said. “The second is impossible.”

            Harry gave him a hard little smile. “Then so is my visit. Sorry.”

            “No, you don’t understand,” Draco said. “I have enemies, as an Unspeakable, and more of them since I removed the mirror from its former owner. You wouldn’t lower your wards for an instant, or the armor this spell gives you, so I don’t see why I should have to.”

            Harry pictured himself going to the Manor without some sure way out. The panic and nausea that cramped his belly made the decision for him, and he bent over and closed his eyes, clutching his stomach for a moment, giving himself time to recover.

            “Are you all right?” Draco was staring at him as though he thought the ice cream had been poisoned; in fact, he turned and looked darkly over his shoulder at the window of Fortescue’s.

            “No, I’m all right,” Harry said, standing back up and shaking his head. “It was just a stupid reaction, anyway.”

            “It wasn’t,” Draco said, catching his eye in one of those bruising gazes that was so hard to look away from. “Nothing that makes that expression appear on your face is stupid. It was there when you were discussing the people who wanted to chop you up and put you in boxes. Explain.”

            A demand, Harry thought, licking his lips and regarding Draco for a moment. He still thinks that he can order me around.

            But this didn’t feel the same way that Draco’s attempt to turn him to stone had. Well, of course it didn’t, that had been an incantation and this was simple words, but still. Draco had explained his reasoning.

            And the way he stood and looked at Harry made Harry wonder if there wasn’t more to the Slytherin declaration of love than he had thought there was.

            “All right,” he said. “I understand why you don’t want to lower your wards. Really. As you pointed out, I won’t do that myself, won’t even consider it.”

            Draco only nodded, and waited.

            “But I have to have a way to leave,” Harry said. “I don’t trust you well enough to get behind the Manor wards without it, not yet. Even if I tore them open again to escape—well, I don’t want to. That was hard on me, and it angered you. Both of those are things that I would like to avoid, if possible.” It sounded stiff and stupid when he explained it like that, but it was the truth, and Draco had said he wanted the truth. Within certain limits, Harry would do a lot to ensure that Draco got what he wanted.

            Draco only considered him, head on his side, and then nodded without smiling. “All right,” he said. “I think I can understand. I just—will you promise to talk to me again if you leave now?”

            Harry nodded. “I can’t hide behind the wards forever. I need food and clothes and ways to keep my mind busy, and that’s what I find in Diagon Alley.”

            Draco hesitated. Then he said, “But you would stay away if you thought I was endangering you.”

            Harry met his gaze without blinking. “Yes.”

            “All right,” Draco said, and surprised Harry by smiling wryly. He had thought Draco wasn’t really in a smiling mood. “I suppose it’s like the hawk I worked with one summer. I had to—to trust that he would come back when he flew away from my wrist, because he could have left, and I couldn’t have prevented him. Even if he was trained, he’d been wild once, and he might decide to fly.” He looked straight at Harry.

            Harry smiled back at him. “The way that I have to trust that you won’t betray me,” he said softly. “Yes. Exactly like that.”

            “You could Obliviate me,” Draco said, voice as soft as the murmur of flowing waters. “You’re easily powerful enough to do that, even with my Unspeakable training.”

            “I could do that,” Harry said, inclining his head modestly. “The way you could at least have tried to Obliviate me when you knew that I knew the truth about your job. But you didn’t. And I didn’t. And we’re already in trust to each other, as vulnerable as it makes us.”

            “And you don’t want to take my memory of you away.”

            Draco’s eyes were as bright as wind. Harry smiled helplessly back. “No,” he said. “I wish that—I could have wished that the way you discovered the spell was easier on both of us. But now that you’re with me, I don’t want to change things.”

            Draco reached for him, movements slow and obvious, and drew Harry’s hand to his lips. Then he stepped back, and said, “Why don’t you owl me?”

            It was another concession, and a marvelous one, an implicit promise that he wouldn’t turn to Perseus to reach Harry anymore, even though he could. Harry grinned back at Draco, feeling giddy and silly. So many times, during the past few years, he’d thought of all the things he was free to do now that he had his privacy back, and hated the thought of restraining himself from any desires. But now, it was nice to know that there was someone he was trusting, and something he was restraining himself from.

            Not because he couldn’t do it. Because he didn’t want to.

            “I will,” he said. “Thanks.” He hoped that Draco wouldn’t ask about the last word, because he didn’t know if he could explain it.

            Draco nodded back exactly as though he knew what Harry was thinking, and then turned and walked away up the street. A few people gave him hostile glances, as though they recognized the face of a past Death Eater, but made way for him without trying to attack. No one looked twice at Harry.

            Harry weighed for a moment how wonderful it was that that was still true, and how he trusted Draco for it to keep being true, and then turned and walked away up the street in his own direction, to the next Apparition point.

*

            George lifted a forkful of sausages from his plate and aimed them at Harry. “I told you you needed someone in your life!”

            Harry rolled his eyes and reached out with his wand to heat the cooling tea in the cups back up. Neither of them had really touched the food while Harry was reciting his story, although of course he’d left some details out because they weren’t the kind that George needed to hear. “Yeah. Although I never thought it would be him.”

            “It’s the way things worked out.” George leaned back and sipped at his tea, enormously pleased with himself. “But I was right, wasn’t I?”

            Harry rolled his eyes again—he got a lot of practice at that with George around—and reached for his own plate. “Don’t get used to it, where Draco Malfoy is concerned,” he muttered. ”I think he has a lot of surprises in store for us all, and even some for himself.”

            But he knew one thing, one thing that thrilled and contented him all around and all through.

            He was joyful.

*

            polka dot: I don’t really think so, when he’s making Draco yield to what he wants here.

            SP777: What do you think?

            GreenEyedCat: Yes, it’s the saying that’s impressive. This Draco does think that he did something stupid quite often, he just doesn’t admit it, because other people don’t need to know these things.
- 14
- 15
- 16
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

The Conservation of Fame