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The House That Lovers Built	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14853 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Fifteen--Oh, What a Conversation

            Harry moved around the living room, lighting the candles on the shelves and tables by hand, although he could have used his wand, or simply lit the fire on the hearth with equal ease. He could feel Draco behind him, and the hungry quality of his gaze, and he knew very well he was putting things off.

            Draco knew it, too, but he remained quiet until Harry had lit the last candle and turned around to nod to him. Then he smiled and let his eyes run around the room. "This is a handsomer place than I expected," he remarked.

            Harry looked with him, trying to see it the way a stranger would--no, the way Draco would, which was far more immediately relevant. The wood was all dark, but it no longer looked grimy, thanks to efforts by Harry and Kreacher. The fireplace had dark stone around it, and red brick that glowed in the candlelight. There were a few lamps with crystalline shades, and some bookshelves that Harry had enchanted to have lighter wood.

            "Yeah, well," Harry said, and gave Draco a faint smile. "Your ancestors had good taste."

            "So do you."

            Harry licked his lips and felt his throat squeeze. He couldn't retreat every time Draco said something like that, he reminded himself. Draco was giving him compliments, keeping silent when Harry asked him to, bringing gifts along like the roses that he probably wouldn't give ordinarily but thought were the kind Harry wanted. Harry had to meet him halfway.

            "Thank you," he said quietly, and took a seat on the couch across from Draco. Kreacher popped up with two glasses of wine. Harry took his and watched Draco accept the other, his fingers curving around the stem. "Now. You wanted to know more about my childhood?"

            Draco hesitated, then said, "Yes. But not if talking about it hurts you the way it seems to."

            "It always hurts me, at least a little," Harry said, and shook his head. "I wouldn't have talked to you about it if it made me faint or something. I can stand this."

            Draco nodded. "That bad, were they?"

            Harry looked up with an instinctive protest on his lips, and saw Draco leaning forwards, gripping the edge of his couch, his drink forgotten enough to tilt towards the floor. Yeah, Harry, don't lie now, Harry thought, shaking his head. There's only so far you can go in fending off people who want to express sympathy.

            "Yes," Harry said. "They were pretty bad." He swirled his drink in his glass, and was glad suddenly that Kreacher had brought them. Harry thought it might be a bad idea if he ended up drinking anything, because him in a room with Draco and impaired judgment was just asking for trouble. But it gave him something to do with his hands, and meant he didn't have to meet Draco's eyes every single second. "They punished me for accidental magic. And they were determined to keep me away from Hogwarts. They kept tearing up the letters and driving away to avoid them."

            Draco blinked. "Don't they know that that only means more letters arrive?"

            "They didn't," Harry said. "Although you'd think they would notice when hundreds more letters came pouring down the chimney or through the door. But no, my uncle kept snatching them away from me, and then he took me and my aunt and cousin to this island off the coast. He was sure that no one would find us there." He smiled a little. "He didn't count on Hagrid."

            "That was the reason you liked him," Draco murmured. "He was the first one to tell you you were a wizard." He reached across the distance between them, even though it made for an awkward stretch, and put his hand on Harry's knee. "I'm sorry, Harry. I never would have made fun of him if I knew."

            Harry met his eyes. "But you would be keeping quiet just to be polite. I mean--it wouldn't be what you really believed."

            Draco snorted faintly. "And are you keeping silent on the subject of my parents, and especially what my father did to Weasley's little sister, because you've spontaneously decided they were good people, or because you don't want to upset me?" He held Harry's eyes, not letting him look away this time. "Being polite is part of what we need to do around each other, Harry--I'd say more often. It doesn't turn everything into a lie."

            Harry shut his eyes, nodded, and swirled his drink again. "Okay. Thanks." He felt Draco's hand squeeze, and pushed ahead with the story. "They--they kept me in a cupboard for most of my childhood. I mean, that was my bedroom. And that was where they locked me when they thought I'd been bad, like fighting with my cousin or asking for birthday presents or doing accidental magic. They would always tell me to be quiet when someone else came over, because they knew some people would be upset by them doing that."

            "Like me."

            Harry looked. Draco was quiet, and it felt as though he had drifted a hundred miles from Harry, even though he still sat there with his hand on Harry's knee. He was looking at the far wall. Harry shivered. He thought Draco looked more frightening than he ever had during the war when he was trying to pretend to be a big, bad Death Eater.

            "You look as though you want to kill them," Harry said, the first words that came to mind for the look on Draco's face.

            Draco shrugged a little, and smiled at him. "Do I? Yes, I suppose I do. But I know that you probably wouldn't want me to." His fingers traced up and down Harry's knee, and Harry gulped as awareness seemed to flare there, in skin that he hadn't thought was that sensitive before. "I just think about it, though, and think about the way that you probably had to crouch in that cupboard, and how small you were." He broke off and stared directly at Harry. "They didn't feed you much, did they?"

            Harry frowned. But Draco had probably guessed that because of his size when he first came to Hogwarts, rather than through something specific Harry had given away. "No," Harry admitted. "They thought I only deserved food at specific times, and when I'd misbehaved wasn't one of those times."

            "Let me guess." Draco's fingers stopped their distracting trace around Harry's knee and tightened there instead. "They thought you'd 'misbehaved' an awful lot."

            Harry nodded. "By their standards, I reckon I did. They were terrified of magic, and I did better in school than Dudley--my cousin--and--"

            Draco reached up and put his hand over Harry's mouth, and although his eyes were soft, he was smiling in a way that made Harry shut up. "I don't want to hear you excuse them," Draco whispered. "Please."

            Harry squeezed his arm in return. He had noticed this before, how talking about the Dursleys seemed to hurt his friends more than it did him. That was another reason he didn't do it often.

            Draco sat back at last, picked up his glass, and took a gulp of his drink. "I never knew," he whispered. "I don't think many people ever did. But it makes what you did during the war make a lot more sense."

            Harry stared at him. "What?" He couldn't think of anything he had done during the war that he hadn't done before. Defending Muggles wasn't new, and neither was defying Voldemort.

            "The way that you think you're not worth as much as other people." Draco continued to look evenly at him, but his hand on the glass shook a little. "The way that you jumped into the middle of any dangerous situation. Even the way that you reacted when--when my aunt tortured Granger. You still think of yourself as smaller than others, don't you? If you could have suffered for Granger, you would have done it."

            Harry had to shake his head. "I'm not as good or as broken as you think I am," he told Draco. "I would have jumped into Hermione's place, but she's my friend. If I saw Bellatrix being tortured? Sorry, I know she was your aunt, but I would have laughed and walked right on by."

            "I wonder if you would have."

            Harry shifted from side to side. "I didn't tell you this about my relatives so that you could analyze me. I told you about it because I want to show I trust you, and I brought it up and so I owe you an explanation."

            "I understand that," Draco said, which, Harry noted to himself, was not actually a promise to stop analyzing Harry. He put his drink down and leaned across the gap between the couches again. "Can I tell you something? Not something about the war. I think you know enough about that. But something about the way I've brewed Potions since the war, why I turned to Dark things."

            Harry nodded. He had forgotten about it under the pressure of everything else and because the Wizengamot had accepted his interpretation of events, but Draco was still a wanted criminal. Trying to date someone who did illegal things would hardly work when he was an Auror. "All right."

            "The Dark potions are the more powerful ones," Draco whispered, his voice low as if he was disclosing trade secrets. Hell, for all Harry knew, he was. "The ones that require the most work and skill to brew, the ones that can go wrong in an instant if you don't know what you're doing. That's mostly because they're meant to influence someone's spirit or mind or body, and so they require a sacrifice that's similar from you."

            That made sense to Harry, more than most of the similar Potions theory Hermione or other people had tried to teach him. "And you wanted to be powerful?" he whispered back.

            Draco nodded. "I never was, you know. It was my father and his money that people feared when they talked to me, not me. And then--then the war came along and showed me that I wasn't even as strong or smart as I thought I was. Never mind feared." He made a soft disgusted sound, like gargling spit. "There were too many people out there better at it than I was."

            "I think you don't need to be," Harry said, and squeezed Draco's wrist, not quite knowing when he'd taken his hand.

            "At that time?" Draco nodded again, slowly. "I needed to be as strong and deadly as I thought I was if I was going to protect my family. But the Dark Lord taught me I couldn't do that. I suffered, and broke, and came out of the war knowing no one cared much about me."

            There didn't seem to be much to say, so Harry squeezed his wrist again. Eventually, as Draco sat there, he found words. "So you decided to brew Dark potions so that you would never be helpless again."

            Draco gave him a sharp smile. "Yes, I did. A good guess. You can analyze me as much from what I say to you as I can analyze you from your words, can't you?"

            Harry made a helpless little gesture. He reckoned that was true, although he hadn't thought of it in those terms. "So we become equally vulnerable to each other?"

            Draco nodded. "The way we weren't in the house." He took Harry's hands and chafed them back and forth. "That was another reason I wanted you. You seemed so strong, so powerful. If you paid attention to me, that meant I was someone worth paying attention to. Of course, since I was a Dark Potions master and you were an Auror, that was just another reason it would never happen."

            "And now?" Harry looked into his face. "Are you going back to brewing the same kind of potions?"

            Draco hesitated a fraction of a second. Then he said, "It would depend on how this works out. I can brew other potions that take less time and make me more money. But sometimes I think I'll be weaker in the face of this exchange with you than I ever was before." He continued chafing, and didn't look away.

            Harry slowly nodded. "I don't think I could ever give up being an Auror. And it seems selfish to ask you to give up your career."

            Draco shrugged with one shoulder. "It's a matter of desires. If I have you, then I have something I want more than I want to be able to brew Dark potions. It's not as though you're asking me to give up potions forever because it reminds you of Professor Snape or something."

            "Well, now that you mention it..." Harry began, and then had to laugh aloud at the look on Draco's face. "No, don't worry about it. I wouldn't do that to you."

            Draco nodded, then fixed him with a hard stare. "Of course, if you're going to report me for what I've already done, I have no reason to give it up, either."

            "I don't think I should have to," Harry said. "I didn't observe you brewing the potions. I don't know which apothecaries you purchased the ingredients from, whether any of them were illegal themselves, or who you sold the potions to. If you did something like set up a Dark lab in my house, that would be a problem."

            Draco nodded a third time. "Do you think--do you think, at this point, that it's going to work?"

            Harry bit his lip. There was nothing to be done but face hard truths this evening, it seemed. "Can you put up with Hermione as someone who's going to be bossy and annoying sometimes, and who doesn't always say the right thing at the right moment? Or do you think she's inferior and you're going to flinch every time I hug her, because I also touch her?"

            Draco blinked. "Well. That's direct enough."

            "But I have to know," Harry said. "Because I could ignore it for a while, but in the end, you would think about me the same way you did about her. Or you would flinch when I brought my mum up, and not because she was the real reason the war ended and I could defeat You-Know-Who."

            Draco reached out and let his hand lie on the table between them. "You ask me questions like that, but you're willing to soften his name for my sake?"

            "Not the same thing," Harry said, with a small shake of his head. "I knew lots of people who were afraid of saying his name. It didn't make them cowards, though when I was a kid I thought it did. But hating someone because of their blood makes you hateful and disgusting. I can make allowances for what you did when you were a kid, if you can forgive me. I won't make allowances for someone who's an adult."

            "I want you. Isn't that answer enough?"

            "You want to fuck me," Harry said, while Draco winced from the word that he had said himself in the house. Harry thought that was interesting, but he also thought they should finish one conversation before they began another one. "Do you want to kiss me? Touch my hand? Look into my face? Have me touch you when you're sick? Bring you gifts? Or will you always think my blood is tainted and that taints everything except maybe the sex that you want despite yourself?"

            "I'm starting to see why you never had any other lovers," Draco muttered, and took a long drink. "They probably couldn't stand the storm."

            Harry nodded. "I was pretty demanding. I'm going to be demanding of you, too. I'll want to know what you think and believe a lot. You get to ask me anything you want in return. I'll be as honest as I can."

            Draco put his glass down on the table. "All right. So I'll ask you something, and if you agree to answer it, then I'll answer yours." Before Harry could consider, he rushed on. "How badly do you think the war messed you up? Do you have nightmares? Do you wake up in the middle of the night reaching for your wand? Do memories sometimes pounce on you, or are there things you can't do because of it?"

            Harry smiled. "I can answer that. So you can do the same. I'll go first, shall I?"

            "Merlin." Draco drained his glass this time, although he ignored the way that Kreacher immediately popped up with another full one. "There's one thing that the stereotypes about Gryffindors didn't exaggerate. You're a brave one."

            "I just don't know any other way to be," Harry said, shrugging. "So I don't know if it's a virtue or not. Yes, I do have nightmares. Not as many since I spent a lot of time talking about it to my friends, and I was on Dreamless Sleep for a while. But they're still there. I have to have my wand near me. As for other effects, you saw me during the time we were in the house. I wanted to be free. I had to be free. I wanted to know what had happened with the Solitary Brewer and the case I was working on, and I couldn't stand being trapped. I would rather face him half a dozen times than be trapped somewhere where I can't do anything."

            "Thank you," Draco whispered. "I don't know if I can be honest in the same way, but I said that I would be, and I’ll try." He sat up with an expression on his face that Harry would have thought he'd have worn when confronting the Wizengamot. But it wasn't Harry's place to judge what Draco looked like, except when it came to whether Draco was attractive to him. He sipped at his own Firewhisky and waited.

            "I find you distracting, and maddening, and attractive, and desirable," Draco said, staring at him. "But you're a half-blood, and you were born to magic in a way that Granger wasn't. No, hear me out," he added when Harry stood up with his mouth open. "You had an unhappy childhood. You just told me that. You were ready to leave your family behind and come join us because there was really nothing more for you in the Muggle world. So I can trust that you're making a whole-hearted commitment.

            "But Granger was raised in total ignorance of magic, and she probably had a happy childhood. We never know whether Muggleborns are going to embrace living in the wizarding world, the way she has, or whether they'll want to go back. And the ones who go back are the ones that could prove dangerous to us."

            "That's one of the reasons the Obliviators exist," Harry snapped. "And pure-blood wizards could betray our existence to Muggles, if they wanted to."

            "But your friend Granger, and others, have talked for years about how the use of Memory Charms on unwilling victims is horrible," Draco said, his smile almost a skull's grin. "I think Granger is actively campaigning against continued use of Obliviators. You can see why she makes me nervous."

            "And that's the same thing as hating her for her blood?" Harry stared at him. "It's a more rational basis for fear than I've heard before, but none of the pure-bloods talked about it that way."

            Draco shrugged. "That's why I'm going to be uncomfortable around her, probably for the rest of my life. She wants to change too much about the way I live. As for hugging her or touching her or whatever, she won't be doing those things to me, so I don't care. I won't insult her if she doesn't insult me. I'll treat her exactly as she treats me. The minute she strikes at me, I'll strike back."

            Harry would have opened his mouth to say something else, but instead he sat down and sipped at his drink again. Draco blinked in turn and started on the drink Kreacher had brought him, watching Harry all the while. Harry didn't think he blinked again while Harry thought.

            As much as it probably would have been good to scold Draco and tell him about the Muggles' Golden Rule and how it worked...

            Well, the way Draco felt about Hermione was the way Harry felt about most people.

            He liked the people who were nice to him, and he would be nice to them in return. He saw no reason to treat enemies kindly. Decently, sure. He would make sure criminals weren't beaten up or injured in custody, and he had only ever killed when he was an Auror to defend himself. It didn't matter what they'd done and how angry he was about it, it mattered that he had them tied up and he was in control and he wasn't going to do to someone what his relatives had done to him when he was too young to fight back.

            But he wasn't going to hug his enemies or forgive them. He wouldn't trust the people like Rita Skeeter who prattled on about how good he was to his face and then gossiped about him behind his back. He still resented Snape and Dumbledore, even though they were also heroes and they had died to save the world. He would have liked to be able to tell everyone to fuck off and save themselves from Voldemort, even though he never had.

            But the pure and true hero so many people thought he was wouldn't have even had the thought. Harry lived a lot more by Draco's rule than Hermione would have been happy to hear about. He thought most people did.

            "Sure," he said at last. "I can see the sense in that. Maybe don't phrase it that way to her, but if you're polite, she should be."

            "What about Weasley?" Draco touched his throat a second later, as though surprised the words had escaped. Of course, maybe he'd thought he needed more time to absorb the information about Hermione.

            "If you're polite to Hermione, you've won a lot of points with him." Harry put his drink down, because his head was starting to spin, and he didn't think he needed any more. "And if he starts getting rude, Hermione will make him be quiet."

            "I won't take insults sitting down, Harry." Draco's eyes glittered in a way that probably didn't have much to do with alcohol. "I told you that. If he starts something, I'll let him start it, and I'll finish it."

            Harry rolled his eyes. "I just told you that. Hermione will step in and make you both finish it early, is more like. I'm willing to accept that, Draco. I'm willing to accept a lot from you, as long as it's honest and different from the house."

            "Different from the house."

            Harry stared at him, at his bowed head and hanging hands, and, unusually for him and Draco, figured out what the problem was before Draco told him. "Oh, for," he said, and then took the shorter course to making Draco pay attention and just reached across the table and shook him. When Draco gaped at him, he snapped, "It doesn't mean that we can't ever have sex again. I just want to have different sex than the kind we had in the house. Where I can agree to everything, and we're doing it because we both want it, not because we're being pushed into it in hopes of escaping."

            "It was never about that for me." Draco said the words quietly, leaning close with those glittering eyes. "God, just being near you makes me drunk. Please, Harry? A kiss?"

            "Not just because you want it, or the house wants it," Harry told him. "Because we both do."

            "There's no house here," Draco said. "There's me, and you, and it goes as far as you want it, because you're the saner one." He looped his arms around Harry's neck and kissed him, and Harry leaned across the table, dragging Draco onto it by main force, and then leaned back onto the couch, so that Draco was pulled on top of him, and flung himself into it.

            It felt different, incredibly different, from just surrendering the way he had in the house. This was like leaping into a raging river and trying to swim. Draco fought him, his muscles twitching and his sleek body turning, and Harry fought back, circling his legs around Draco's hips and using them to position him how he wanted him. Draco moaned, Harry was silent through forcing himself to be by biting his lips, and it was lovely.

            When they broke apart, Draco stared at him with his mouth open, lips slick, and Harry smiled and twisted to his feet. "Bedroom," he declared, hauling on Draco's wrist.

            Draco followed, still dazed. Harry pulled on him again, impatient. He wanted to see what sex was like when he wanted it.

*

            SP777: Thank you! I’m rather proud of how that chapter turned out.

            Happy New Year to you as well.

            Diana: Here you are.
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The House That Lovers Built