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The Serenity of His Rage	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16981 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Eighteen—Reunions

            “We missed you so much, Harry.”

            Harry flung his arms around his friends. Well, it was Hermione and part of Ron, really. Ron had seemingly had yet another growth spurt that Harry had missed, and now he stood almost as tall as Charlie.

            “Why did you go to Malfoy of all people?” Ron asked him, pounding Harry once on the back and then dancing out of the way so Hermione could have a turn. He was grinning, though, and the question didn’t have an edge. “We wanted you with us instead!”

            “I thought you would turn me over to Dumbledore if I left Privet Drive before my birthday,” Harry said honestly, and stepped back to study his friends.

            Ron’s grin dropped away. “I—I never thought about it that way,” he said. “I didn’t know that you blamed him for something.”

            “I blamed him for not telling me why I needed to stay there,” Harry said grimly. Then he relented and hugged Hermione, who had gone stiff in his arms. “But now he has, and although I don’t like the reason, it didn’t work anyway. So it’s all right.”

            “What was the reason?” Hermione stepped back and brushed frizzy hair out of her eyes, frowning at Harry. “I mean, I asked him a few times, and he didn’t give me a response, but I thought he’d written it to you.”

            “He wanted me separated from Draco so our bond would weaken,” Harry said, and sat down in the corner of the bedroom at Grimmauld Place where they’d met. It looked like Hermione’s bedroom, from the books sprawled on the bed and under the bed and at the foot of the bed, but this time, there was no indication she was sharing with Ginny. “Because he thinks I’m going to die in this war destroying the Horcrux that’s in me, and he didn’t want Draco to mourn over me.”

            “There’s more.”

            “What?” Harry blinked.

            “You always twist your lips like that when you’re trying to avoid saying something unpleasant.” Hermione folded her arms and tapped her foot on the floor.

            Harry swallowed. He noticed they hadn’t really reacted to him saying anything about the Horcrux in him, which meant Dumbledore must already have told them. Maybe he’d wanted them to be prepared, too.

            Or maybe he thought they would take it better and it would sound less shocking coming from him. Maybe it was a way to keep them allies of his instead of allies of mine.

            Harry reminded himself firmly that he had no proof of that, though. And anyway, he knew his friends would always fight by his side.

            “Well?”

            Harry dragged his attention back to Hermione and Ron, and told them what else he had to say. “And he wanted me to be less attached to Draco. He was afraid that if the bond was really strong between us and I liked being bonded to him, then I would be more reluctant to die the way I have to.”

            “I—suspected something like that,” said Hermione, and gave a deep sigh. She must be really upset, Harry thought, considering her. She would normally never have spoken a cross word against Dumbledore. She sat down on the bed. “But we’ll find some way that means you don’t have to die. So Dumbledore doesn’t have to worry about you staying bonded to Malfoy, either.”

            “It will have to be a spectacular way to escape,” Harry warned her. “Because otherwise, we’ll have to destroy the soul-bond. I won’t have Draco dragged into death because his soul is still attached to mine when the Horcrux is destroyed.”

            “He couldn’t be dragged a little? Just enough to bruise?” Ron asked wistfully. He flushed when Harry glanced at him, with Harry didn’t-even-know-what kind of outrage in his eyes. “Sorry.”

            Harry hesitated, and then decided he might as well lay everything out on the table. They’d done the same with him. “I’ve decided that I want to—date Draco.” It sounded stupid as well as bald, put like that. How could you date someone in the middle of a war?

            But the way Ron turned pale and sat down with an abrupt choking sound took Harry’s mind from the stupidity of the words. Hermione turned and cast a Throat-Clearing Charm at Ron, then shook her head chidingly at Harry.

            “Different ways to break it,” she said. “Different ways to break it would have been appreciated.”

            “What, a gentler way?” Harry asked, trying to understand. “I mean, I suppose I could have tiptoed up on it, but Ron wouldn’t have understood, and then you would have and blurted it out, so either way he had to hear it like that.”

            “Oi!” Ron had normal color in his face again, which might not be all Hermione’s spell, and glared at them with folded arms. “I’m not stupid.”

            “No, but you have no context for this kind of revelation,” Hermione told him absently, studying Harry all the while. “Maybe you’re right, Harry. I have to say, though, the notion of you dating Malfoy strikes me as strange. Are you even gay?”

            “I have no idea.”

            “Well, then,” said Ron, sounding hopeful, “you can try dating a girl and seeing if you like it before you date Malfoy. What about Ginny? She’d broken up with Dean, and she still fancies you, you know. And she plays Quidditch. So it’s not like we’re asking you to jump straight from a boy to a girl who faints all the time and giggles over her nails, like Lavender.”

            “Ron!” Hermione snapped. “Considering that you were dating Lavender most of last year…”

            “I don’t mean she’s an idiot. Just not the kind of girl that would attract Harry,” Ron defended himself. “And we have to find a girl who will.” He turned to Harry with an air of determination. “What do you like?”

            “Draco.”

            Ron sighed and bowed his head. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it,” he said in a low voice. “Maybe it was from the time you started staring at him last year.”

            Harry shook his head. “Or from the time we soul-bonded. But I’m not going to let him go now. When we go on the Horcrux hunt, he’s going with us.”

            “Then there is going to be a hunt,” said Hermine, with a little wriggle of satisfaction in her chair. “I told you,” she added to Ron, who was grimacing. “We weren’t just going to stay in Grimmauld Place doing research all the time.”

            “I didn’t say we were. Just that it’d be preferable.” Ron rubbed one ear, glanced at Harry with a look of embarrassment, and then looked away again. “You understand, right?” he muttered under his breath. “I don’t want to run around in the middle of a war. It’s not that I’m a coward. I just don’t want to do that.”

            Harry only nodded. “And I don’t want to be a Horcrux, and I don’t want Draco to be in danger. I know it might not seem like it, but I do understand.”

            Ron glanced at him with the flicker of a smile. “Yeah, you do.” He paused for a second, his eyes cutting back and forth between Harry and Hermione, who had started rooting in a book on the end of her bed, muttering something that sounded like she was searching for clues about the Horcruxes.

            And that would be another reason not to want to go anywhere that might bring her into danger, Harry thought, as he tried to wink at Ron without making it obvious. I don’t want to do that to Draco, either.

            Unfortunately, it seemed like neither of them would get a choice.

            And the soul-bond was starting to do something Harry could only describe as tightening, throbbing softly as though Draco was concentrating on him as hard as he could. Harry cleared his throat and stood up. “I think I should go,” he said. “Draco is missing me.”

            “And that’s painful?” Hermione’s head popped up over the edge of the book at once, as if she was so fascinated to learn something about the operation of a soul-bond that she couldn’t not ask the question.

            Harry smiled a little. “It can be. It was when we were separated during the summer. But that was the point when we thought we might not ever see each other again. It’s easier now. I just think he wants me to come home.”

            Hermione a thoughtful sound between her teeth. “I wonder if that’s one reason the blood protections were weak.”

            “Dumbledore told you about that, too?” Harry was a little startled.

            “No, I reasoned it out. I knew they had to be weak because it was obvious that people who loved you didn’t live there, and blood protections depend on love as well as shared heritage.” Hermione’s eyes flashed for a moment, and Harry had the feeling that he and Draco hadn’t been the only ones to ask persistent and uncomfortable questions. “But if you never thought of the place as home, that would be another reason.”

            “I tried,” Harry said, uncomfortable with the knowing way Ron looked at him. “Dumbledore said it was important. But Hogwarts was always more home to me, and then the Malfoys’ house.”

            “I’m so glad that we don’t have a Time-Turner anymore,” Ron muttered unexpectedly.

            “Why?”

            “Because now I don’t have any temptation to go back in time and bring forwards your past self so he can hear you saying that you think of the Malfoys’ house as home.”

            Harry rolled his eyes, and grinned. “And your past self would probably think poorly of you for putting up with that kind of declaration so calmly.”

            “I know the context. He wouldn’t.”

            Hermione broke in before they could continue the context. “If Malfoy’s going to come with us, Harry, then he’ll have to promise not to cast any Dark Arts spells. Professor Dumbledore has done a lot of research, and he thinks that Horcruxes increase any angry and hateful tendencies you have when you’re in contact with them. We’ll be in enough danger without Dark Arts.” She gave Harry a stern look, and probably didn’t expect him to respond with a little grin and shake of his head.

            “Sure, I can tell him that,” said Harry. “But I don’t think that it should be one-sided, as if he’s the only problem we might have. You’ll have to promise not to get angry at him, either.”

            “No matter what he says?” Ron snorted. “Malfoy can’t go a minute without making some bigoted comment about Hermione, mate.”

            “He will if I ask him to,” Harry said quietly, absolutely certain of that. If nothing else, Draco wouldn’t enjoy the recoil of Harry’s unhappiness on him down the bond. “He’ll do anything I ask him to. And he would even refrain from Dark Arts spells, too. But the angrier he gets, the more I’ll feel it. And it’s not fair to put all these restrictions on him and not have them on us.”

            “He’s the one who always starts it!” Ron exclaimed.

            Harry smiled at him. “Then you should have no trouble refraining from saying anything about his family, right? Or his name. Or his hair. Or Slytherin and how it’s filled with sneaky spies and criminals. Or his father and how horrible it is that he escaped from Voldemort. Or people with the Dark Mark on their arm and how they’re all terrible. Or—”

            “All right, all right.” Ron held up his hands in surrender. “But it’s too bad, you know.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Some of those would make great insults.”

*

            “Dumbledore doesn’t have much idea of what these Horcruxes are or where to find them, does he?”

            Harry sighed a little and leaned against the side of his chair. Draco didn’t mind that. It would be even nicer if Harry was leaning against him, but at least the side of the chair he’d chosen was the one nearer Draco.

            “He knows a few,” said Harry drowsily. Draco suspected the sunlight, huge and heavy and lazy, was having an effect on him, from the way Harry yawned. “The diary that I destroyed in second year. The ring that he destroyed. And now he’s practically sure that the cup he showed me in a few memories of Tom Riddle is one. The one that belonged to Helga Hufflepuff?” he added, when Draco made an inquiring sound. “Salazar Slytherin’s locket. He’s not sure about the Ravenclaw artifact yet, but he’s still looking.”

            Draco reached out to run his hand casually through Harry’s hair. Harry jumped a little, then smiled and closed his eyes. They were still new to touching each other, Draco thought, and they shouldn’t be that new. But as long as Harry enjoyed his touch, then he had nothing to complain about.

            “That doesn’t make the full complement.”

            “Well, the Ravenclaw artifact.” Harry shifted lazily so that more of his scalp was directly under Draco’s searching fingers. “Dumbledore doesn’t think Voldemort would make one out of an artifact that was important to Gryffindor, and I think I agree.”

            “He might want to,” Draco said, thinking back to what he knew of the Dark Lord. It had taken a few months, but now he could think of him without flinching. “He might think it was a desecration. Or do it for spite.”

            Harry shrugged, moving Draco’s hand in a way that was pleasant for Draco, too. “Maybe, but there’s just a lack of candidates he could have changed. I mean, there’s the Sword and the Sorting Hat. They’re both safe at Hogwarts, and Dumbledore would be able to sense if they had a piece of soul in them, now that he knows what to look for.”

            “Mmm.” Draco could feel the temptation of laziness himself, his fingers wanting to skitter away from the top of Harry’s head and wander to his neck. “He’s sure about that?”

            “Yes. Or otherwise he couldn’t know that I had a bit of Voldemort’s soul in me.”

            Harry shivered, despite the sunlight and the way Draco touched him. Draco shook himself back to awareness and put down the heavy book that contained information on soul magic. “No thinking about that,” he ordered. “You’re going to think about something pleasant instead.”

            “What would that be?” Harry rolled his eyes, even as Draco felt a lighter, sweeter current make its way through the bond. He sat up and stared at Draco with a smile. “The harder you tell someone not to think of something, the more they think about it.”

            “Sure,” Draco said, unimpressed, “if the person who tells you to think about something doesn’t provide you with a distraction.” He turned around and put his legs on the ground instead of coiled up in the chair. Then he spread them and patted his knees.

            It took Harry a second to understand, which made Draco want to laugh, but then he did, and smiled. He scrambled down until he was sitting between Draco’s legs, leaning back against his knees.

            “Yes,” Draco said softly. “Now I’m going to give you a massage like the one I just gave you, but more intense. If you can still think of anything after that except my hands, I’ll give up and never do it again.”

            Harry bowed his head and shivered. Draco both saw and felt that. It was a ripple in the bond that turned it all to blazing, streaming gold for a moment, and it was a sensation in Harry in front of him, making his shoulders shake.

            Draco thought the best thing he could say at the moment was nothing at all. He reached out and ran his fingers through Harry’s hair to begin.

            “You’re so good at that,” Harry muttered, his head hanging forwards and the bond trembling in a variety of ways, mostly sideways. Draco touched the back of his neck. “Is that why you became famous in Slytherin?”

            Draco tried very hard not to laugh, although he thought some of what he felt must have leaked into the bond anyway. Harry opened one eye and glared at him, only to close it again and sigh in bliss as Draco rubbed hard with his thumbs.

            “For my scalp massages? No.” Although now that he thought about it, Draco reckoned he should have tried it with a few people. Particularly the people who shouted all the time and got on his nerves. It might have improved their tempers.

            “Oh, good.”

            Draco paused. “Why? I would have thought that would dismay you. It means I’m not practiced.”

            The bond was once again going through one of those weird fits where it wavered back and forth, but so quickly that Draco couldn’t get much of a glimpse at Harry’s emotions. At least until Harry tilted his head back and smiled sweetly at him, shaking his head a little.

            “I know. But it means more to me that I have your fingers all to myself.”

            Draco blinked. His throat was thick. And from Harry’s expression, the bond was doing interesting things in his head as well.

            “Hell, Harry,” Draco breathed. “Sometimes you know just the right thing to say.”

            “Being in your soul probably helps.” Harry cleared his throat and ducked his head, his cheeks turning so pink that Draco would have known what he felt even without the bond. “As it is…I think you were going to touch me like that again?”

            “Yes, I am,” Draco said, and dug his fingers deep.

*

            Harry drifted slowly, in utter relaxation, his eyes closed. He couldn’t remember anyone caring this much about how he felt. And it was probably partly because Draco could tell how he felt and he would hurt if Harry was uncomfortable, but…

            Harry was pretty sure he was allowed to not care about that.

            He could feel each individual stroke of Draco’s fingers through his hair, down the nape of his neck, along his shoulders and towards the middle of his back. He could feel the way Draco’s fingernails scraped him, and hear Draco’s harsh breathing. He could feel, too, the temptation to twist around and take hold of Draco’s lips in a sudden kiss.

            But the temptation was distant. Mostly, his muscles were puddles of warm liquid. He breathed deeply himself. The bond drifted over his head like another sun. He was there, he was breathing, but it didn’t matter. What mattered most was the way Draco touched him.

            And all in all, it was wonderful.

            Harry drifted. There was grass beneath him. Sunlight overhead, behind a cloud right now, but still sunlight. Warmth on his back. A soft smell of distant flowers in his nostrils.

            Fingers massaging his shoulders. They hesitated, drifted down to the middle of his back, and then began to dig and work, soothing out knots that still lurked there even when he felt as if he was made of oil. Harry sighed in soft contentment.

            The bond flowed over him, liquid and gentle. Harry had never drifted in a huge, slow-moving bath except when he’d briefly gone into the Prefects’ bathroom to examine the golden egg, but now he knew what it was like.

            Draco paused in his digging and whispered, “How much tension do you carry?”

            “Lots,” Harry said simply. It didn’t sound stupid or defensive or weak. This was the way it was.

            “Then I’ll make sure I can take care of all of it,” Draco said, and he slid down from the chair and knelt behind Harry so he could reach his back and shoulders better.

            Harry closed his eyes again. There were distant bird sounds now, a pair of birds scolding each other. Leaves rustled. A shutter on an upstairs window banged back and forth. Draco’s fingers hesitated at the top of his arse.

            “Go on,” Harry mouthed into his folded arms.

            The hands began confidently moving again, stroking through cloth—I didn’t even take my clothes off, Harry thought muzzily—and easing down over his arse. Harry spread his legs. Draco massaged his thighs, and Harry felt the bond bow and wriggle between them, replete with emotions Harry didn’t need to describe.

            “Turn over.”

            Harry flowed over, not sure what would come next, only knowing it would be good.

            Draco bent down and kissed him again. This time, it wasn’t hard and desperate the way it was when Draco was trying to think of some way to keep him alive. It was gentle. Warm. The way it should be, Harry thought, and pulled Draco down on top of him.

            They kissed for so long Harry’s lips were numb at the end of it, his tongue tingling. But Draco, even if he hurt more, didn’t try to pull away. He only laid his head down on Harry’s chest and sighed away some of his own tension—which had been there, Harry was sure. He touched Draco’s throat and ran his fingers up it.

            “It’s a shame not all our days can be like this,” Draco whispered.

            “But some will be,” Harry murmured, not knowing where the words came from, only that he believed them. “Because we’ll fight, and hunt Horcruxes, and do whatever we need to do, and then we’ll come back here and make the days like this.”

            “We will,” Draco said, and his fingers curled again into Harry’s shirt.

            Harry cupped the back of his neck and kissed his cheeks. “Thank you for being so good to me.”

            Draco closed his eyes hard enough to make him look sick, but the bond was alive between them, singing contentedly. That was all Harry needed to make him know the truth.

            I don’t want to leave him. I might not want to leave him even more than I want to defeat Voldemort.

            And wasn’t that a scary thought?

            No. It can’t be. Not with Draco here in my arms.

*

            Jan: Not more scared than Harry is that he’ll lose Draco.
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The Serenity of His Rage