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A Black Stone in a Glass Box	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10351 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Sixteen—Black Humor

            “No!”

            The voice came from the side, so sharp that Draco thought for a second it was an incantation. It distracted the wolf, at least, and it turned its head. Draco got his legs up and kneed the damn beast in the belly.

            The wolf sprang off with a howl that came out sounding just on the edge of words, and whirled around to face Draco, its mouth open. Draco staggered up and put his back against a tree, banging the wolf with the fang before it could vanish again. Another ragged patch of fur fell off, this time along the side of its right flank.

            Blink, and it was gone. Draco panted for a second before he turned to face Potter.

            Potter stood with his wand out and aimed at the spot on the ground where Draco and the wolf had been wrestling. He was flushed, his mouth half-open and his eyes wide. Draco had to admit he found the vision intriguing, but he didn’t know what was going on. Had Potter seen something that meant they couldn’t kill the wolf?

            “What?” he asked, as things just continued like that instead of resolving one way or the other, and Draco was getting bored.

            Potter lowered his wand and swallowed, addressing the holly wood instead of Draco when he spoke. “I just realized that I don’t really want to see him kill you,” he mumbled.

            Draco blinked. Then he blinked again. Then he said, “That’s flattering, Potter, really,” and scratched his back for a second. The wolf had torn open long runnels that still bled. Draco touched his wand to them and healed the wounds with the best Episkey he could muster, not taking his eyes off Potter. “You didn’t think about this before? You would have been content to see me die if I was fighting the snake or the eagle?”

            “Shut up,” Potter said, glaring at him. “You know that I wasn’t myself then, and that means I couldn’t—”

            He clamped his mouth shut hard enough to rattle a few teeth, but it was too late. Draco had heard that particular admission, and he had no intention of letting it go. He smiled at Potter and repeated in a soft voice, “You weren’t yourself. So you admit that the chain ritual changed you more than you thought, and you weren’t really your own person when you were under its influence?”

            “I’m still under its influence because part of it still exists, you berk,” Potter snarled, taking a step forwards. “So maybe this compassion for you is part of it! Did you ever think of that?”

            “No,” Draco said simply. “Because you demonstrated compassion for me at least once before when you weren’t under it, and I think saving people is part of your essential character.”

            “What occasion was that?” Potter looked about a second away from putting his hands on his hips.

            Draco held his eyes. “Don’t Fiendfyre and the Room of Requirement mean anything to you?” he asked.

            Potter looked off to the side, chewing on his lip with teeth that suddenly seemed to have grown sharp enough to hurt him, and Draco smiled.

            That, of course, was when the wolf appeared, on a tree branch above Potter, which cracked under its weight. However, the sound was damp and muffled, and Potter didn’t appear to notice the animal plunging towards his head.

            Draco spun his wand and Levitated the branch away from Potter, high enough into the air that he would defy even the wolf to jump off it and land on someone. Trust Potter not to be paying enough attention to his defense, even when the magical animals had shown that they were just as likely to attack him.

            Of course, the wolf didn’t stay on the branch and be trapped like a good little magical creature. It growled and vanished again.

            Draco rolled his eyes. Then he paused, and looked from the fang in his hand to Potter’s wand. He shook his head slightly. “The obvious way to defeat the wolf was staring me in the eye all the time, and I never noticed,” he muttered.

            “What? What are you talking about?” Potter demanded, leaning towards him.

            Draco sighed. “You used a wind charm against it, and just now I used the Levitation Charm,” he said. “It can’t be attacked directly by magic, any more than I can stab it with this fang. But what happens if I use the wind to blow the fang against it?” He held up the fang and glanced around for a suitable tree.

            “That might work,” Potter allowed, blinking.

            This time, the wolf appeared right between them, as if it wanted to have an equal chance of doing harm to them either way it turned. Draco threw up the fang into the air and hurled the wind against it and the wolf at the same time, pinning them to the trunk of the great grey giant behind Potter.

            The wolf snarled and yipped, but only until the fang touched it. Then it cried out, and went on struggling as Draco adjusted his blasts of wind, moving the fang over its body. Wherever it touched, the fur came off the wolf.

            Draco winced as he realized that the wolf was almost naked now, with the fang currently resting on top of its head so that curls of fur were peeling away around the ears, and still there was no sign of it dying. What would he have to do, stab it through the heart while it writhed beneath him like a plucked chicken?

            But as soon as the last of the fur melted from around its ears, the wolf stiffened. For an instant, Draco saw the plucked chicken he had imagined. Then the wolf slumped to the ground, losing definition as it went, flesh melting like paint around the quartz stone at the center, which must have been the object that Potter formed it from.

            Then the fur came flying from all over the clearing, and collected together into a shimmering blanket as Draco watched. The whirlwind stopped soon, and left the fur as a great gathered cloak glowing from the inside in the grass at Draco’s feet. Draco picked it up, stroking the white softness where it draped around his arms, and blinked at Potter.

            “Did you know that would happen?” he asked.

            “Obviously not, or I would have told you to hit the wolf on the flank with the fang in the first place,” Potter said. He had a sharp frown carved between his brows as he watched Draco holding the fur blanket. Draco doubted it was because he really cared about the messy manner in which the wolf had died, and his next words proved that. “It seems an odd way for one of these creatures to go, and an odd gift to leave behind.”

            Draco shrugged. “What? Do you think that was a false wolf, and another one is hiding around here somewhere? The real one?” He hoped not. His joints ached stiffly from fighting and being held in Potter’s web and swung around on the silver rope behind the eagle, and he wanted to go home and get a good night’s rest before Potter dragged him off somewhere else.

            “No.” Potter glared at him. “I know that’s the real one, because of this.” He picked up the piece of quartz and stared at it for a second before slipping it into his pocket. “I’m just saying that it’s strange, that’s all.”

            Draco snorted. “Fucking strange, yeah.” He draped the wolf-fur cloak around his shoulders. He would have shrunken it to fit into a pocket, but he wasn’t sure how much these magical weapons should be changed. “See you tomorrow.” He turned around to walk to a suitable Apparition point, which would mean a place where he wasn’t about to Splinch himself on a tree he didn’t see.

            “Wait!”

            Draco glanced back at him with a scowl. “What? Did you think of something else I need to do?”

            Potter flinched a bit from the blast of Draco’s eyes, but shook his head. “I didn’t mean that. I meant—where are you going?”

            “Home,” Draco said. “So I can sleep. I don’t know about superhuman Aurors like yourself, but regular humans need a bit of sleep.” He yawned, and touched his wand to his shoulders to send a Warming Charm flooding through the muscles to relax them. He was going to use the massaging capabilities of his bed once he was back in the Manor, that much was certain.

            “You’re pretty superhuman yourself, to have done this much,” Potter muttered. Draco decided to let the compliment pass unnoticed. Potter was almost sure to retract it if he realized that Draco knew it was a compliment. “I just meant…can I come with you?”

            Draco was sure he let his jaw fall. Potter turned his head away. “I don’t think I’d be welcome in the Burrow right now,” he mumbled.

            “What did they say to you?” Draco demanded in fascination.

            “Will you stop harping on that?” Potter’s eyelids had drawn down almost enough to hide his eyes, and he turned his head away further, so Draco could only see a telltale quiver of nostrils. “It’s nothing important.”

            “Important enough to make you seek out the shelter of the Manor,” Draco said. He hesitated. He didn’t want to discourage Potter from coming with him and giving Draco the chance to talk him out of his idiocy, but he had to explore all the options or Potter would accuse him of not being fair later. “Don’t you have your own home?”

            “It doesn’t feel welcoming, lately.” Potter reached out and slapped a trunk, only to withdraw his hand and wipe the moss that covered it off on his robe. “To be perfectly honest, that’s where the blue book is that I got the chain ritual out of. I think it’s better if I’m not around temptation right now.” He finally turned to face Draco, his hands locked behind his back as though he was preparing to recite a Potions recipe. “And I don’t want to be lonely.”

            Draco smiled and reached out to take Potter’s arm, since it was his turn for a Side-Along Apparition now. “Then of course you can come with me, and the only hard thing will be explaining you to my parents.”

*

            “Draco, why is Harry Potter at our dining room table?”

            His father did well, Draco thought, as he stood up to greet Lucius. He had taken one step through the door from the drawing room and stopped immediately, looking back and forth between Draco and Potter, but he had at least asked for an explanation this time, instead of drawing his wand and blasting away. Draco didn’t like to think about what had happened the one time he had mentioned bringing Louis home.

            “Because I invited him, Father,” Draco said now, in the perfect schoolboy tone of respect that Narcissa had tried to encourage Draco to use for his father when he was at Hogwarts.

            Lucius looked at Potter, who had frozen over his meal of bread and toasted cheese, the only thing he would accept from the Malfoy house-elves. Apparently he hadn’t thought Draco was serious when he said Potter would have to be explained to his parents, although Draco couldn’t tell why. It wasn’t like he had engaged in much lying to Potter over the last day. “Let me phrase this another way. Is there a reason why Potter is a guest instead of his head being measured for a position on the wall of the Pale Sitting Room?”

            Draco rolled his eyes and scratched gently at the back of his neck, where the house-elves had applied a poultice to his wolf bite. “Don’t be ridiculous, Father. His hair would clash horribly with the color scheme in that room.”

            Across his father’s face, a smile drifted like a cloud. “Ah. You are right.” He inclined his head to Draco a little and turned away. “I have words to speak to your mother,” he added over his shoulder.

            “I’m sure you do,” Draco muttered, watching him go. At times like this, his parents would get together and condole over the many trials and tribulations their son brought on them. Draco knew because he used to eavesdrop. They never said anything new over many years, no matter what varied challenges he set himself to present them with. He wondered that they could still find the conversation stimulating.

            “Malfoy, your father just walked out of here without hexing me.”

            Draco turned and sat down in the chair next to Potter, taking a few bites of his own considerably more luxurious meal, which had colors other than white and yellow in it. “Is there something in you that wanted him to?” he demanded. “Honestly, am I the only representative in this house of a newer, more modern, less bloodthirsty world order?”

            Potter did another series of blinks, and put his bread, hanging uselessly in his hand, down on the plate. Draco eyed it, wondering whether he could get the elves to swap it out for something more nourishing. The state Potter was in at the moment, he might not notice. “It would have been normal,” he said.

            Draco had to lower his head so that raspberries and blueberries wouldn’t go leaping away from his plate with the force of his snort. “When have you led a normal life? And when have you been around my parents since the war? What would you know about how they entertain a guest?”

            Potter’s eyes closed and his teeth clipped together as though he was considering a different kind of reply than the one he eventually made. “Your father doesn’t seem to know how they treat them, either. Or did you forget to send the engraved invitation to me, and that’s what’s pissing him off?”

            Draco shook his head. “I’m so much more forgiving and peaceful in outlook than most of the people I associate with,” he murmured, swallowing another forkful of mixed fruit a moment later. “It must be spending all those years on the Continent. One gets used to civilization, you know, and the amenities that go along with it. Like wit, and the way that hereditary enemies will ignore each other for the sake of not acting like barbarians at breakfast.”

            “It’s dinner.”

            Draco smiled in spite of himself. “Well done, Potter. You might not fit in as badly as I thought you would.”

            Potter picked up his bread again, dashing Draco’s plans for the house-elves, and took another bite of the cheese sandwich as though it was his lone friend in a cold and hostile world. Then he burst out again, hard enough that some crumbs went skipping from his lips. “Why, Malfoy? Why bring me here?”

            “Who asked to come, now?” Draco murmured, addressing his glass.

            Potter was silent in the way that a volcano might be silent right before it exploded. Draco leaned forwards to take some more of the ham from the plate that the house-elves had left in the middle of the table. “You were the one who wanted to come,” he said, when he decided that Potter had been silent for long enough. “It’s true that perhaps this stay at my home isn’t going to be all you thought it was, but you preferred it to your friends’ house or your own.”

            Potter bowed his head and pushed his hands up his forehead into his hair, muttering something to himself that Draco graciously chose not to listen to. The muscles in Potter’s shoulders were taut and trembling. He would have liked to destroy something, Draco thought, and he knew that Potter would have welcomed something breakable and unimportant to shatter even more.

            “Listen,” Draco said, when it became clear that Potter had retreated into silence again. “You made a stupid mistake. That doesn’t mean that you have to go on making stupid mistakes for the rest of your life. But you have to get past this one, and you have to think about it and talk about it and—I don’t know, do whatever else you think is necessary to help yourself out of this situation.”

            Potter jerked his hands down and stared at Draco for a second. Then he dropped his hands on the table, sat up, and said, “Fine. Then we’re going to go upstairs, and you’re going to tell me how you survived the last five years without making a stupid mistake.”

            Draco rolled his eyes around his mouthful, and swallowed before speaking. “Did I say I had? I’ve just got past them more gracefully than you have.”

            “Then tell me,” Potter insisted. “Tell me what you’ve been doing, where you’ve been, that makes you able to—the kind of person who can resist this.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows and thought of all the many answers he might give to that.

            But Potter had leaned forwards and was focused on him, bright and intent and new, and Draco had to admit that he would rather encourage this Potter to stick around than turn his back on him. He nodded back. “All right. Let me finish eating.”

            Potter spent the rest of dinner watching every bite Draco lifted to his mouth as though it was the only thing standing between him and a normal life. Draco had to admit that he didn’t find the attention off-putting, even though he probably should.

            Quite the opposite.

*

            Seiren: Sort of getting on? Yes.

            SP777: Hey, if I knew all the people who read my stories in real life, no way would I dare do that.

            polka dot: But it’s not a real wolf. It was a piece of quartz.
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A Black Stone in a Glass Box