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A Determined Frame of Mind	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16811 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Sixteen—Questions and Answers

            Draco tried his best to restrain himself when he saw the way Harry was staring at him, absently licking his lips every now and then. His instincts were shrieking for him to lunge forwards and kiss and bite and nip. Do everything that he could in order to convince Harry.

            He wanted this. It wasn’t so much physical lust as a pulsing ache that seemed to be located just beneath his sternum. After the way he had seen Harry confront his memories, he wanted to get as close as possible to someone who had that kind of courage, who would face his own terrors so unflinchingly. He had wanted to share Harry’s mind and soul; now he wanted to share his body. The desperation he could feel coursing through his veins wasn’t very attractive, but fuck attractive. He wanted to be inside Harry. It was the only way of expressing this desire that he knew of.

            Harry was watching him with uncertain, wide green eyes, though, and Draco thought he might know why. He let the silence endure as long as he could manage, and then gave Harry a small smile. “Or you could fuck me,” he suggested. “Believe me, either would be—satisfactory.” He didn’t think that having Harry inside him would be quite as good as the other way around, the way he was feeling right now, but on the other hand, who knew? It would join their bodies, and if Harry made love that way as well as he did with his hands and his mouth—

            “It’s not who’s doing it,” said Harry. “It’s the action itself.” He paused, and his voice had gained strength when he went on. “I’m still straight.”

            Draco laughed in spite of himself. Then he half-panicked, wondering if that had been the smartest thing to do, but Harry drew up and gave him an offended look before his fear could go very far.

            “I’m going to assume that you didn’t mean that the way it sounded as if you meant it,” Harry said, his voice gone cold.

            “How did it sound as if I meant it?”

To Draco’s dismay, Harry slipped out of his arms and retreated, putting some distance between them. He tried to step closer. Harry narrowed his eyes and moved to the side again, probably so that he wouldn’t seem to be backing away from Draco.

“As if you doubted what I said,” said Harry. “As if you’re about to tell me that I’m bent, even though I’m straight.”

“I wasn’t about to say that,” said Draco. “But you could be curved, like me. Have you ever thought of that?” His hands felt oddly dry. The distance between him and Harry stretched like a strained tendon. All he really wanted to do was hold him again, and then do his best to share the immense connection.

“So far,” Harry said, his voice still cold and still controlled, “I haven’t really done anything with you that I haven’t done with Ginny.”

Draco snorted in spite of himself. “Unless you’re about to tell me some extremely interesting things about your girlfriend—“

“Fiancée.”

“Of course, of course.” Draco put up a hand, irritated with himself for forgetting that. It had been in Harry’s St. Mungo’s file, and he had known all along that it was the word Harry preferred to use when he was speaking of her. Sexual frustration was addling Draco’s brain more than he had realized. “Then I think that what we have done is different in some very important ways.”

Harry only looked more stubborn than ever. It was endearing, but Draco so wanted to fuck that look off his face at the same time.

“I just—I’m not comfortable with that,” he said.

“Do you think you’ll ever be?” Draco asked quietly. If Harry wasn’t, then he wanted to know immediately.

Harry blinked, as though he hadn’t expected such a sudden cessation of Draco’s resistance. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “But it seems—“ He paused, and half-shut his eyes, obviously fighting for words.

“What?” Draco made sure to pitch his voice low and seductive, the way he’d used just after they awakened together. “You can tell me, Harry. You can tell me anything.”

*

Oh, really? Harry snarled, in the privacy of his own head. I can tell you anything, when I’ve already seen that you laugh at me for it?

But he bit his lip and held still. He didn’t really think that Draco had meant to do that, for one thing. He still didn’t understand, but on the other hand, how could Harry expect him to unless he explained? He had had more than enough experience this past year to know that, no matter how hard he wished it, no one was just going to cut through his “lies” and his body language to find the truth of his thoughts.

And that was so even with someone who could hear his words as the truth.

“It’s too much,” he said at last. “It would be like—if we had met in a more normal way and you’d managed to break the curse without Psyche-Diving. This is like your asking me to let you into my soul now.”

“I won’t do you any harm.” Draco’s voice was soft and eager. “I promise, Harry. And if you want to do it the other way around, I have no objections at all.”

Harry met his eyes. It didn’t really look as if Draco had any objections, no. In fact, Harry reeled a little from the force of the desire in that gaze. He had no idea at all why Draco Malfoy was sticking to him so relentlessly—just general admiration for his strength wouldn’t equate to respect, let alone this—but he suddenly doubted, for the first time, that it would be easy to convince him to stop.

He swallowed. Suddenly his own throat was dry with excitement, and he could feel his cock twitch at what those eyes promised.

“Maybe you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from doing harm,” he said, to defend the more vulnerable part of himself from his instincts. “I’ve heard it’s painful, the first time with another bloke, no matter what you do.”

“There are spells.” Draco’s voice had softened again. Harry couldn’t understand how he was still hearing it. “I would promise—Harry, I would be as gentle as I could. I would use all the magic you needed. I would take as long as you needed.”

Harry swallowed again. “Why? If you want me as strongly as you say you do, I mean,” he clarified, when Draco looked at him incredulously. “How could you hold back?”

“Because I want this again, and again, and again.”

And there was the sky-look, storm-look, sun-look, in Draco’s eyes again. Harry had to believe that it was directed at him now, that he was the actual reason for Draco wearing that light on his face, because there was no one else. He turned away.

“And because I never want to hurt you again, if I can help it.” Draco’s voice had altered again, now to a soft, lulling stroke like the smoothing of waves on a shore. Harry wondered absently if it was the sort of tone he had used on his mad patients. “There will be times I hurt you and don’t mean to, of course. But in a situation where I know I might and can avoid it? I don’t think you can comprehend how much I want to see you growing stronger and laughing and surviving unhurt.”

Harry shivered.

“How much I want to see you finding joy.”

Draco had crossed the floor towards him, and Harry turned to find him there. Immediately his mouth was taken in a kiss, and Draco’s hand smoothed down his spine, then ran back up again, which rucked up the robes but made a bone-deep shiver of desire rise from Harry’s flesh.

I don’t understand how he can make me feel this way. No one has, not even Ginny. And I’ve only known him properly a few weeks. There’s nothing in our previous history that would have led to something like this—

Yet, for the first time, Harry was coming to think that maybe his lack of understanding didn’t matter. Indifference towards every nuance would have killed him when he still labored under the Cassandra Curse without an ally, but maybe it was all right to let go now, to relax, to trust that Draco would, actually, care for him.

Just not fully, not right now.

“Not yet,” he said, when he pulled back.

Draco didn’t bother to conceal his look of disappointment, as if he had understood that Harry wouldn’t castigate him for it.

“But soon,” Harry said, since he wasn’t sure that he could resist the combined force of Draco’s want and his own hunger, and then stretched up to kiss him again. “In the meantime,” he added, when he pulled free once more, “we can do other things.”

Draco’s eyes flared, and his hands began working on the buttons of Harry’s robes. “Don’t mind if I do,” he murmured.

*

            Malfoy. There are rumors abroad in the Ministry about the Cassandra Curse. Your doing?

            Draco smiled thinly and put the letter down on the table. Eugenie had owled him, only three days after he’d sent her the owl explaining why he’d told her about Harry and what he wanted done. This cryptic response was par for the course with her. She would be trying to feel him out, to see what he wanted before she committed herself, so that she could decide what benefit it would offer her.

            “Good morning,” someone said behind him, or so Draco reasoned out after he listened past the enormous yawn that interrupted the words.

            “Good morning,” he echoed, twisting around so that he could watch Harry saunter in. He had made it clear that Harry didn’t have to wear full robes around the house if he didn’t want to in the last few days, and Harry was only wearing a shirt and a pair of pants right now. Draco averted his eyes so that Harry wouldn’t see how his mouth was literally watering. “I’ve heard from Eugenie.”

            “Have you?”

            Draco felt a thrill at the change in Harry’s tone, and the way he suddenly looked. He had been ready for something like this, but not until later. It seemed that a few days of regular meals and sex—well, of handjobs and blowjobs, at least—had done Harry better than Draco expected. The man looking back at him now resembled a tame cheetah kept on the end of a chain, ready to spring forwards and hunt.

            “Yes.” Draco passed the letter over to Harry, and watched, as he had expected, the green eyes narrow and the scarred brow furrow. Harry was relearning his political instincts quickly, but he was still an Auror, and not someone who had worked directly for the Head of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. And Draco knew Eugenie much better as a person.

“What does she want?” Harry asked, handing the letter back and helping himself to a plate of scones.

“If I’m not mistaken,” Draco said, tapping the letter against his chin, “and I almost never am—“

That won him a snort.

“—then she’s telling me that the rumors are indeed spreading, and she wants to know why I told her and only her, if I was going to put the rumor out there anyway.” Draco shrugged. “She could be responsible for spreading the word herself, of course. But I doubt that. She’s still looking for the angle that will benefit her.”

“Can we trust her?” Harry asked through a mouthful of bread. Draco reached out, caught his chin, and tilted his jaw gently closed. Harry rolled his eyes at him and chewed a little more slowly and thoroughly.

“Of course not,” said Draco. “Not the way that we can trust Lila, at least. But she’s still predictable in the way she asks. The clue is figuring out what she could want before she decides she wants something else, and then giving it to her.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We take you to meet her, of course.”

Harry stiffened, and wide-eyed alarm flooded his face.

“Oh, not in the Ministry,” Draco said airily. He knew exactly what would have surprised Harry most. He congratulated himself on how well he knew his partner. “Somewhere else. We stage a crisis that only the Head of her Department can solve, outside the Ministry, and then we meet her, and then we promise that you’ll use your influence on her behalf.”

“What influence, exactly?” Harry’s fingers hooked like claws and drove down onto the table. “The influence of being a madman and a known liar who tried to kill himself, as far as everyone else is concerned? There’s nothing I can do for her right now, Draco, and not for a long time. I think she’s smart enough to realize that.”

“You still don’t understand,” said Draco. He squashed the impulse to reach out and cradle Harry against him. He needed to be calmer and more rational right now that he would feel if he once touched his lover. “Your influence isn’t the sort that can decay that easily, Harry. The Ministry thinks of you that way. Not everyone else in the country.”

“The story of my suicide would have been reported in the Daily Prophet.”

            “And even then? How would it look against the cases that you solved in the past year, along with the defeat of the Dark Lord? Your prestige is of the kind that doesn’t decay, Harry. Eugenie will understand that she can’t do much with your help right now. But when your name is cleared and Scrimgeour has been brought down—“

            “You mean to make sure that everyone knows about that?”

Draco checked a sigh. While Harry’s blindness to most Ministry politics was endearing, there were times that Draco couldn’t help feeling how much easier it would be if Harry were the kind of person to understand the limits of his fame and try to take advantage of it.

“It would be sort of hard to explain why we were attacking the Minister otherwise,” he said dryly. “Besides, Harry, do you really want him to have any public credibility left when this is done? I don’t.”

“I just—“ Harry stopped, frowning. Then he said, “After we make him pay for this, I just imagined that he would—go back to his normal life. What reason is there to make him suffer for years and years?”

Draco reached out and slid a hand down the side of Harry’s neck, because he had to. “Can you really ask that?”

“But that would be vengeance, not justice.” Harry’s gaze was turned inwards as he brooded. Draco, who didn’t like being exiled from Harry’s attention for that long, took his shoulder and turned Harry to face him.

“Yes,” he said. “Exactly. And that is what this is, Harry. The moment he cast the Cassandra Curse on you, he moved outside the boundaries of justice. We have to do this on our own—even with Eugenie’s help, it’s still on our own, since we’re not exactly moving through official channels. You realize that, don’t you? You realize that no one’s going to pop out of the woodwork and help us out of the kindness of their hearts?” He paused a moment, then added, “If there’s something that you can’t bring yourself to agree with in my methods, Harry, you have to tell me now. Because you know that I’ve never been very good about listening to other people where ethics are concerned.”

*

Harry breathed in silence, his eyes locked on his hands. As he watched, they curled around the edges of his knees until the fingers were digging into the skin. Since he wasn’t wearing either trousers or robes, it hurt.

Draco’s hand descended in an open-palmed smack on his knuckles. Harry sat back with a yelp and a glare. “What the hell was that for?” he snarled.

Draco watched him with storms building in his eyes, but Harry knew well enough that this wasn’t a look of sexual desire. “I told you that you’re not allowed to hurt yourself again,” he said. “I insist.”

“Yes, don’t you just,” Harry muttered, and sighed. “I don’t know, Draco. I thought my sense of right and wrong was permanently warped from living under the Cassandra Curse. Even the thought of how much pain I would cause the people who loved me by suddenly vanishing into the Muggle world wasn’t enough to make me stop doing it, after all. But now—if I can afford to be ethical, shouldn’t I? That’s the kind of person I was before the curse, and that’s the kind of person I still want to be.”

“Is it unethical to take vengeance on Scrimgeour?” Draco’s voice had a ballast weight of heavy patience at the bottom.

“That’s the problem,” said Harry, with an unhappy little laugh. “I was thinking it wasn’t. And then I considered the actual consequences. Now I don’t know.”

Draco turned Harry to face him. His voice was soft and earnest. Harry shook his head a little and tried his best to listen to the words and arguments behind that tone, instead of just melting when he heard it and agreeing with whatever Draco said.

“Harry, you have to understand all the factors here. I’ve already slammed the truth into Lila’s and Eugenie’s minds. I can’t take that back. And they know about you. Even if we tried to vanish now and work on Scrimgeour on our own, they’d still know, and God knows what they’d do with that knowledge, unguided.

“Then there’s the fact that Scrimgeour still believes everything he ever did about you, even if you’ve changed your mind about him. He won’t back down. If you go towards him with open hands, he’ll still fire curses. I won’t see you hurt because you underestimated his hatred and his fury.

“And then there’s me.”

“Of course there’s you,” Harry muttered, but any rancor that might have been in his voice had long since thawed. “What are you but the determining factor in my life right now? Even if I wanted to escape you, I couldn’t.”

Draco’s eyelids lowered, and he looked extraordinarily pleased. He picked up Harry’s left hand and turned it over to kiss the palm before he went on.

“You have to understand one thing about me,” he said. “This is as unusual for me as it is for you. I don’t exactly find myself with new friends or new lovers every day. And then I want to help you. That’s rare, too, when I’m not getting a favor for it in return. And I haven’t had anyone in this country to love since my mother fled and Snape made it clear that he’s never coming back to England—at least, not for some years.”

Harry was still stuck a few words back. He blinked and swallowed.

“You—love me,” he said.

Draco narrowed his eyes, and looked more pleased than ever, as if he were glad that he had taken Harry by surprise with that declaration. “Yes,” he said.

“I—you just didn’t say that before,” said Harry, feeling obscurely as if he had to explain his own startlement.

“Well, now I have,” said Draco. “And, actually, I did say it the first time we made love. You were simply, understandably, too involved in other things to listen.” He cocked his head. “Surely you can understand now?”

Harry watched him in silence, his head reeling, his own breath coming harsh and quick.

For someone like Draco to love someone like him…

No, wait. For someone like Draco to love, there would be complications that Harry could hardly imagine. The few pure-blood wizards and witches he knew in the Ministry, the Weasleys excepted, were so undemonstrative that he found it hard to imagine them hugging or kissing someone else. Remnants of a crumbling political system, as Hermione had explained to him. They’d once sought to differentiate themselves from Muggleborns, who were thought to be too expressive, with that kind of coldness and distance.

Harry couldn’t imagine Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy raising their son to be anything but like that in public, no matter how he might be in private with his family. And then there was the fact that he would have very few experiences of love outside his family, either.

When he did come to that kind of love—

It would be with someone he thought he could relax around, someone he could trust with those most guarded parts of himself.

Possessive did not begin to cover it.

Harry shivered, not sure if he was chilled or warmed by his realization. He reached up and took Draco’s head between his hands, staring searchingly into his face, trying to find something that would either validate or crush his conclusions. Draco bore the scrutiny, though now and then he raised his eyebrows as if to say that he was getting tired of it.

“You really can’t leave this alone, can you?” Harry asked. Then he wanted to wince. The reverent tone in his voice was—well, it was wrong. Harry couldn’t really excuse any breach of principles because of love, could he?

But from the way Draco looked just then, he was coming to think that he would have to be prepared for that, at least if he wanted to stay with Draco.

*

The comprehension that Draco had been waiting for was in Harry’s eyes. He shook his head, making Harry lower his hands, and then caught them and kissed both palms, then both scarred wrists. Then he folded them back into Harry’s lap and kissed his lips.

“I can’t,” he said when he pulled away. “Thank you for saying that. You saw me at the end of sixth year, Harry. You are like that for me, important to me like that. I’ll risk whatever I need to, do whatever I have to, in order to keep you safe. And leaving Scrimgeour able to rise up behind you again and stab you in the back won’t work for me.”

Harry watched him, but there was less of a brooding darkness in his eyes than Draco had expected. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I don’t think that we’re so different after all.”

“Oh?” Draco licked his lips and shifted closer. Harry licked his lips in reflexive response. Draco was delighted. How many other gestures can I get him to copy, I wonder?

“No,” Harry said. “I risked my life without hesitation whenever someone I cared for was in danger. Of course, I did that for innocent bystanders, too—“

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking me innocent,” Draco drawled, “whatever else you do.”

“Oh, I know,” Harry said, and gave him a stunningly sweet smile. “But I can see, now, why you need to do this. It’s my impulse, too. I didn’t stand around waiting and worrying when a basilisk threatened Ginny in our second year. And I sure as fuck didn’t hold back from killing it when it turned out I had the chance.”

“Someday,” Draco said, suddenly remembering how little he knew about Harry’s life except for the last year, “you must tell me about that.”

Harry waved it away as if it were only one incident in a lifetime full of exciting incidents. That, of course, only made Draco the more determined to hear about it. “So. I’ll insist on having some input into this. But you can hurt Scrimgeour all you like, so long as you don’t kill him—“

“Of course not,” Draco said. “People don’t suffer when they’re dead, unless you make them into Inferi.”

Harry rolled his eyes to show what he thought of that idea, and then continued. “And I’ll do what has to be done to promise help to Eugenie. Now, how soon do you think we can come up with that excuse for her to leave her office?”

Before Draco could answer, he leaned forwards, and Draco was graced with yet another sweet, warm kiss.

“By the way,” Harry added softly, “I love you, too.”

Draco wanted to know how he was supposed to concentrate on meeting Eugenie and making elaborate plans after that, but with the force of the superhuman control and calm he had always known he possessed, he turned his attention to it.

He did insist on toying with Harry’s fingers while he did it, though. And reveled in the new openness and peace that had crept into Harry’s face, even if he did have to do it silently.

*

Mangacat: Well, for Harry being straight is a fundamental part of his sexual identity. Changing it overnight is different from changing sexual behavior; this is a change of attitude, which is usually harder to make.

McAbacus: Thank you! Draco will go back to Psyche-Diving in the future; in fact, it will be portrayed at least one more time in this story.

Thrnbrooke, LadyKatie, rainwater: Thank you for reviewing!
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A Determined Frame of Mind