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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Nineteen--Further Into Research

            "All right. What do you need?"

            The words startled Harry out of the list of notes he was making, about a historical case that he thought had some similarity to the Malfoy one in his dreams. He leaned back in his chair and watched Malfoy's head pop around the corner of the office door.

            I don't know why I should have been startled in the first place. It's always going to be him when I hear someone talking to me who's not immediately familiar and has no reason to be here.

            "I'm sorry?" Harry asked. "What do you mean? I thought you were consulting dream experts, because what I need is a solution to the problem of the dreams."

            Malfoy didn't respond at first. He seemed far too interested in studying the shaky piles of books on Hermione's desk and clucking his tongue. Harry wondered if he was distressed by the books' subjects or by the fact that she had them on her desk instead of sitting neatly on shelves. He had got the impression over the past few days that Malfoy was an impeccably neat person.

            Another reason that we wouldn't get along, Harry told himself, virtuously and self-righteously and probably entirely without truth. I would be a slob and annoy him, and he would be too neat and irritate me.

            "That's what you need in this world." Malfoy shoved himself up to sit on a corner of Hermione's desk, after having spelled some of the books out of the way. Harry reckoned he'd just been looking for a clear place to plant his bottom. Malfoy swung his legs back and forth, and watched Harry with troubled eyes. "What do you need in your dreams?"

            Harry blinked twice, and then managed to pick his jaw up off the floor. "I'm sorry?" he asked. "What do you think you can do? I know that you can't enter the dreams. And you don't think of them as another world anyway," he added belatedly, suddenly figuring out why Malfoy's words had sounded so strange to him.

            "Let's say that I do for now," Malfoy said, his eyes boring into Harry. He leaned forwards on the desk, his legs stopping their nervous swing. "Let's say that I want to see you given what you need, because it's terribly obvious that you won't be content until you have it. Let's say that I can agree that the dreams are another world for long enough to give you what you need."

            Harry swallowed. Then he told himself that he was allowed to feel his breath coming short when Malfoy said those words with that intent look on his face.

            "I need Draco cleared," he said, closing his eyes and picturing Draco's face and the trusting look there, a look that Malfoy had never shown him and never could. "I need the Malfoys in general cleared." Malfoy made a little sound in the back of his throat, probably because Harry had spoken his last name as though it had nothing to do with him, but Harry ignored him. "Right now, I need to understand most of all what Discipula is doing, because there seems to be no clear reason for her to go after them, and yet she is."

            "All right," Malfoy said. "I need you to tell me more about Discipula, because you haven't described her much so far."

            Harry opened one eye and frowned at him. "But like I said, you can't enter the dreams. You would always be missing some crucial detail that I can't provide, because I'm not a very good witness."

            Malfoy gave him a faint smile this time. "Can you put your memory of the dream in a Pensieve? That would be one way to let me see her and your interactions with her."

            Harry paused, startled. "Why didn't I think of that before?" he muttered. "Shit."

            "Because you didn't have me around before," Malfoy said, in the sort of patient "of-course" tone that Harry associated more often with Hermione.

            Harry half-glared at him as he rose to his feet. "I don't keep Pensieves in the office," he said. "You'll have to come with me."

            "That could sound threatening," Malfoy said as he stood aside to let Harry pass, "if I let it."

            Harry half-heartedly glared at him. Malfoy only smiled back, his smile deep at the corners, his eyes bright, and Harry shook his head. "You're only being nice to me because you think that might persuade me to forgive you."

            "Well, yes," Malfoy said. "Given that that's my goal, being unpleasant to you would be counterproductive."

            Harry sighed as he opened the door. "You could try reacting honestly," he suggested. "That way, people like me wouldn't be judging you every time you opened your mouth or announced your goals."

            "I did try that," Malfoy said, his voice suddenly soft. "And you never noticed."

            Harry shrugged. "You can't blame me for that," he said, deciding to try a new tactic so that they didn't get pulled back into the same old morass of a conversation. "When was the last time that you just backed away because someone denied you something you wanted, rather than going after it with a screaming temper tantrum? That's what I saw you do in Hogwarts."

            Malfoy sniffed. "Allow me to think that I have learned more sophisticated versions of the screaming temper tantrum as I aged."

            "Still doesn't explain why you didn't use them on me," Harry said over his shoulder as they descended.

            "They're for people I don't mind irritating," Malfoy said. "I minded irritating you. Unpleasantness? Counterproductive? Does this remind you of anything?"

            "So instead," Harry said, reduced once again to rolling his eyes as they emerged from the office building, "you decided to cast a spell on me that you knew I would be angry about if I ever discovered it?"

            "But you probably wouldn't have discovered it," Malfoy said. "So that didn't particularly bother me. The spell didn't compel you to love me or anything like that," he added, as if he'd heard Harry's unspoken objection. "Once it directed your attention to me, it was up to me to keep and hold that attention. So it really did no more than give me a fighting chance."

            Harry stopped and just stared at him. Malfoy stared back, his eyelashes looking longer and darker than they should over his serious grey eyes. Harry wondered if part of the change was that he had never seen Malfoy look that serious before.

            "Why are you saying things like this?" Harry asked finally. "You must know that they don't impress me or make me want to give you a second chance."

            "Because this is the kind of person I am." Malfoy's voice was tight. "Someone who will do anything for something he wants, the way you already said I was, but not always with a screaming temper tantrum. Someone who has to struggle to be nice, because it's against his nature. You said you wanted honest. This is it. This is me."

            Harry began walking, revolving various arguments in his head. Malfoy kept pace with him, darting him little glances now and then.

            "I reckon I didn't think you would be this honest," Harry said. "Or like this. Perhaps I should have said that I didn't think you would be this honest, yeah."

            "You can always choose not to date me," Malfoy said, giving his head a small, nervous shake. Then he straightened his shoulders and glared sideways at Harry. "But you can't contradict yourself. If what you want is the lying exterior, then you should say that."

            "I want you to want something more than me," Harry said, so exasperated he could barely speak. "You shouldn't choose what to do based on what other people want of you."

            Malfoy snorted. "As if you don't."

            "I don't!" Harry had reached the Apparition point, but he didn't Apparate. It would have felt like cheating to end this conversation that way, or like letting Malfoy win. He swung around to face him instead, frowning. "Everybody said I should be an Auror, but I chose barrister work. And even Hermione thinks that I should give you a second chance, maybe be your friend, maybe date you, but I'm not doing that yet, am I?"

            Malfoy rolled his eyes. "And yet you still play the hero, because that's what people expect you to do. I wonder if you would have cared as much about saving people if you'd had a normal life and not had to protect the whole bloody wizarding world."

            Harry shook his head. "It's a good thing for you I do have it, isn't it? Otherwise, you might not have had anyone to testify at your trial."

            Malfoy's eyes widened for a moment. Then he nodded. "Yes, all right, I can admit that. But you should still be focused on saving real people, not ones who appear in your dreams."

            "They feel real to me," Harry said stiffly. He had been sure that his words would get Malfoy angry, and now that they hadn't, he didn't know what to do.

            "We were going to have you put one of the dream-memories of Discipula into a Pensieve, so you could show me," Malfoy said, and began walking again. "I can't say how real they are until I experience them for myself."

            "I don't know how well that'll work," Harry muttered, but followed him. His mind was on Malfoy's unexpected reaction more than the walk or the Apparition that followed, though.

            Malfoy might--just possibly might--be a little bit less of a bastard than Harry had thought him.

            Once again, though, Harry didn't know what he was supposed to do with that knowledge.

*

            Malfoy stayed bent over the Pensieve for longer than Harry would have thought possible. He rapped his fingers on his knee and stared around the library for lack of something better to do. He had no urge to view the memory himself, which was the one where Discipula had introduced Nora Potter to him. He felt as though he knew it well enough, from the sight of his great-great-aunt's pleading eyes to the small smirk on Discipula's face.

            What was going to happen if Malfoy surfaced from the memory and said that it didn't feel real to him?

            Harry shrugged irritably. He couldn't change the way he felt about the dreams because of someone else's say-so. The best he could hope for was that Malfoy would take him seriously enough to offer the help he had said he would, and then Harry could put him to work sniffing out Discipula's motives. A pure-blood might understand her better than Harry could, who had grown up in such a different world.

            If anyone can understand a figment of my imagination.

            Harry stood up and started to prowl restlessly about the room, casting glance after glance in the direction of Malfoy's bent head. He wished he could know what the git would say before he said it, and that he could stop feeling so nervous about it all. If this was Draco, he knew, he wouldn't be nervous. He could anticipate Draco's reactions, from the wide-eyed look he would give Harry to the way his brows would bend down over his forehead when he offered advice.

            Draco's a lot simpler than Malfoy.

            Malfoy pulled his head up with a sudden shudder and splash, and shook himself for a moment, gaze abstracted, before he turned and focused on Harry again. Harry straightened his shoulders and found that he was reaching for a wand, the way he would in a duel. He made himself curl his fingers into his palm, forming a loose first, so he could stop.

            "Well?" Harry asked. "Is she genuine?"

            "I can see why you feel that she has her own independent existence," Malfoy replied thoughtfully. "But no, she's not genuine in any sense of the word."

            Harry snorted and rolled his eyes, obscurely glad to be back on bad terms with Malfoy. "Oh, right. Because the people in my head aren't real, and you're not going to do anything that would admit they are."

            "It's not that," Malfoy said. "Or not just that." He might not have noticed the sharp tone Harry couldn't keep from creeping into his voice. He sat down in the chair next to the Pensieve and stared at the ceiling with a frown, his tongue flicking out like a lizard's as he thought. "She--doesn't act as confident as someone should who's in a position of power. I must admit that she's intelligent, since she figured out that you have a connection to the Potter family despite not knowing who you were. But that's something that anyone with a moderate level of intelligence and the ability to observe your face in the right light could have done."

            "I don't think so," Harry said sharply. "I don't look that much like my father."

            Malfoy stared at him. "Yes, you do," he said. "How many photographs of your father have you seen?"

            "A lot," Harry said stoutly, ignoring the fact that they were all the same ones, the ones in the album that Hagrid had made for him. "Anyway, you'd think the fact that Harry Potter was never actually born in that universe would have made people less likely to suspect me. I don't look like someone who died, I look like someone who never existed."

            Malfoy snorted. "Nora Potter, who doesn't strike me as the most brilliant woman around, still managed to see the connection between you and someone who was never born. Yes, I think you do have to worry about your identity being suspected. But we were speaking about Discipula," he went on, before Harry could argue any more about his family. "She doesn't act like someone in that position should be expected to act. I was watching her face while you spoke with Nora. She wasn't smiling. She was looking at you narrow-eyed, as though she didn't expect her tactic to work."

            "Well, she couldn't have known it would," Harry said, and then stopped, wondering why he was arguing the opposite side of the argument from Malfoy. He had wanted Malfoy to analyze Discipula as if she was a real person, and he was doing that. Harry couldn't figure out why the conclusions bothered him.

            "No, that's true," Malfoy said, once again not seeming to notice the perfect opening Harry had handed him. "She couldn't have known. But I would still expect more self-confidence in someone who's risen as far as she has, who has the friendship of the Boy-Who-Lived and basic control of the Death Eater trials. She should be less uncertain. Instead, she acts like--" He snapped his fingers triumphantly. "Like Millicent Bulstrode."

            "What?" Harry asked blankly. He didn't have a lot of memories of Bulstrode from Hogwarts, but it was hard to imagine two women more unalike than the poised, confident Discipula and the awkward girl he remembered.

            "Bulstrode's parents lost most of their money a year after she was born," Malfoy said. "They couldn't keep up the standard of living that Slytherin pure-bloods were expected to have. Bulstrode was terrified that we would find out. She learned Mending Charms early, for example, and Color-Changing Charms, so that we would think she was wearing new and different robes when she was wearing the same ones again and again."

            Harry felt a sudden fierce blast of empathy for Bulstrode. "Wish I'd known them," he muttered, thinking of Dudley's clothes.

            Malfoy raised his eyebrows. "What are you talking about? You've always had plenty of money."

            "Not always," said Harry, and then once again hauled himself back to the appropriate subject of conversation just as Malfoy's eyes started to shine in curiosity. "Anyway. So you think Discipula's family is poor?"

            Malfoy shook his head. "Not necessarily. But she has that same wary walk that Bulstrode did, the same air of someone protecting a secret. I don't think it's visible to people who know her very well. They're probably fooled by the deflecting mechanisms she sets up. But she doesn't know what to do with you, and so it showed when she was watching you."

            "A secret," Harry muttered. "Well, I knew she probably did, since she wants Draco's family dead so badly. But I reckon you can't tell what it is?"

            "Not exactly." Malfoy's jaw worked for a moment, and then he leaned forwards. "What else can I do to help? What would help you to get through these dreams, do what you think you need to do in them, and then go on to something else?"

            Harry stared at him. "What?" he asked at last, when he could get his mouth open. "You mean it? But you think they're dangerous!"

            "I have a theory that Granger didn't receive kindly, but which I still believe is true," Malfoy said grimly. "These dreams have taken such strong root in your head because they combined, not with any leftover magic from your scar, as she thinks right now, but with your need to be needed. That makes them almost pathologic in their addiction and their hold on you. It would explain their form, creating a situation parallel to one in the real world where you found yourself needed: saving me and my family. They won't end until you fulfill that need."

            "So you want to help me so they'll go away faster," Harry said, relieved. This fit the Malfoy he understood, rather than creating a whole new one that he would have to work to grasp.

            "Yes." Malfoy shook his head. "And once you see this version of me liberated, then you might stop wanting to go there."

            Harry sighed. "I don't know," he said. "It's hard to imagine a time when Draco won't need me."

            Malfoy made a thick, disgusted sound in his throat and rose to his feet, striding across the room.

            "Wait," Harry said, confused, scrambling to his feet, too. "Where are you going? Didn't you want to help?"

            "Yes," Malfoy said, leaning against the doorway. He dug his fingers into the wood, actually peeling splinters away, before he seemed to have control of himself again and simply stood there breathing. "Yes, I do. But I wanted to leave before I blurted something out that you wouldn't want to hear."

            "Tell me," Harry insisted. At the moment, he felt as though he could handle anything Malfoy threw at him.

            Malfoy whipped back around, eyes wide. "How can you ever be free of these dreams if you always have someone who needs you?" he asked. "Why can't you have someone who wants you? What's so bad about that? No, I didn't need you to become the best Quidditch player ever--although it would have helped me--or to save my life or to free me from Azkaban after the trial. Why does that make me inferior to someone who needs to lean on you?"

            "Not--inferior," Harry said, baffled because he'd never thought of it in those terms. "I told you, I just have trouble fitting someone like you into my life."

            "But why?" Malfoy took an insistent step back towards him. "Is the thought of someone wanting you scary?"

            "Most of the people who wanted me only wanted me for my fame," Harry said dryly. "And Ginny and I just didn't work. I've become wary of dating people who don't fit in with the rest of my life."

            "I work well with Granger, at least," Malfoy said. "Weasley might learn to get along with me in time."

            "Not that kind of fitting," Harry said, ignoring the fact that he had once considered it a problem even if he had wanted to date Malfoy. "Fitting with me, with who I am. We're opposite in all these important ways. I'm half-blood and you're pure-blood. You're analytical and I'm not. You change your mind all the time, and I don't. I need people to need me, and you don't."

            "I'll grant those first three," Malfoy said. "Not the last one. I can protect people who rely on me. I'm honored that my mother actually leaned on my strength during the last phase of our trials, and so did my father. Do you know that he never did that before? Not once? He was always the adult, and he made me be the child. But not that time. I was the one who held him when he thought Mother would be condemned. I got to be strong, and I enjoyed it."

            Harry blinked. He felt as though he had been admitted to a private sanctum in Malfoy's house, the way Malfoy looked and sounded as he shared that story. He didn't know what to say or where to look, and he ended up scratching the back of his neck and looking away.

            "So don't say that I don't fit with you," Malfoy whispered. "Not yet. We haven't tried."

            "It's just an endless process of trying, isn't it?" Harry asked, feeling weary now. "That's another reason that I'm reluctant to--to be with you, Malfoy, to be more than friends. I can see a defined goal with Draco, rescuing him and his family. I can see myself becoming a barrister. All this study is going somewhere. But I can't see the end with you. I don't know whether we would break up or kill each other or walk away from each other one day or what. And you're still the person who cursed me, and I'm still the person who ignored you."

            "What I want to do is change that."

            Harry blinked and looked up. Malfoy stood so close to him that his eyes were big enough to drown in, and he rested his hands on Harry's shoulders for balance as though he was drowning himself.

            "I'm trying," Malfoy said. "To be less selfish, to help you, to tell you things about me that I've never told anyone. I don't think it's working so far, but that's no reason to stop trying."

            Harry shook his head. He wanted to argue, but hadn't he almost told Malfoy about the Dursleys and the clothes they made him wear? They seemed to be reaching out to each other, slowly and reluctantly, but inevitably.

            Maybe.

            "I still find it hard to forgive you," Harry said abruptly, taking a step backwards. "If you can't realize that, then--then I'm not sure what else I should do to make sure that you do."

            Malfoy's head tilted downwards, and he gave a private smile. "I'll work for your forgiveness," he said. "I've apologized. I'll see what else I can help you with. Right now, I'm going to research Discipula and see if I can find out who was born in this world in her place, or at least what her family was like."

            He slipped away, leaving Harry reeling and blinking. One moment, his hands and eyes seemed full of Malfoy, and the next, he was gone.

            And it's good that he is, Harry thought a moment later. He had spent the longest time not thinking of Draco at all, because he had been with Malfoy, that he had since the dreams began.

            And even when he had the time and space to return to his research, or to begin thinking about the secret Discipula was hiding, he found it hard, because his mind would keep going back to Malfoy and the passionate, broken way he spoke.

            I know something about him no one else knows.

            That's so strange.

*

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Sleepless