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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 Nineteen—The Rose Leopard

            “Good morning.”

            Harry gave him the greeting in such a flat voice that Draco thought, for a moment, they were going to pretend that nothing had ever happened yesterday. He checked his own sigh of exasperation. If Harry wanted to pretend that, then Draco couldn’t force him to do otherwise.

            Then he saw the way Harry’s cheeks flushed and he ducked his head behind the cup of steaming tea in front of him, and Draco smiled. He took the chair next to Harry instead of opposite him; from the startled way Harry twisted around to face him, that was against expectations. Draco also served himself from Harry’s plate, noting that he had decided to trust the house-elves enough to eat a full breakfast today. Kippers weren’t very important to Draco, but building trust with Harry was.

            Draco took several delicate bites and swallowed, and then caught Harry’s eye and raised his brows. “What? Is something wrong?” he asked, in great concern.

            Harry flushed and glanced down. “No, nothing,” he muttered.

            “Good,” Draco said decisively, and went on eating. Harry sat beside him, playing with the handle of his cup. Draco didn’t smile. It wouldn’t be wise, and what he wanted now was for Harry to come to wisdom through Draco, to see what mattered and what didn’t, and stop blaming himself for ridiculous things.

            If that’s possible.

            In the end, Harry did go back to eating and stopped darting looks at Draco that suggested Draco would burst into flames and consume him. But he froze again when the far door into the dining room opened and Draco’s mother entered, shrugging into a delicate blue robe and placing a hand in front of her mouth to stifle a yawn.

            Draco put down his fork and watched indulgently. He didn’t believe for a single second that Narcissa had entered the room not knowing who was here, but he was willing to pretend with her if she wanted.

            Narcissa lowered her hand, looked around the dining room as though surprised to see anyone there—although it was Draco’s normal time to get up—and then widened her eyes comically. “Oh, goodness! Mr. Potter! I had no idea that our house had such a distinguished guest.” She came forwards with her hand held out. “Do forgive me for my lack of courtesy. Of course, I would have done something to make you welcome if I’d known.”

            Harry took her hand and even bowed over it, but his eyes were sharp, and Draco grinned. Harry had to suspect that his father would at least have discussed the intrusion with his mother, even if she didn’t intend to do anything about it.

            “It’s no problem, Mrs. Malfoy,” Harry said, and glanced at Draco from the corner of his eye, shaking his head a little. “Draco has been making me more than welcome.”

            Narcissa glanced in turn at Draco, and raised her brows. Draco lowered his eyes demurely, and sucked on the insides of his cheeks.

            “Ah,” Narcissa said. “Good.” She turned to face Harry and clasped her hands together, her face lighting with that expression of benevolent good-will again. “But please let me know if you want for anything else.”

            “I will.” Harry was holding his teacup, and it didn’t actually look like a barrier between Narcissa and his face. Draco approved. Harry had picked up a sense of politics from somewhere, maybe from those Ministry functions where he’d probably been forced to listen while everyone else discussed matters that bored him stupid.

            “Good,” Narcissa repeated, and glanced around. “I find that I would like a tray in my bedroom after all,” she declared, and wandered out the far door.

            Harry leaned back in his chair with an explosive breath. Draco went back to eating, but also to watching him, and blinked when he saw the way Harry’s eyes had crinkled with his frown. “What?” Draco asked.

            “I didn’t mean to chase her away from eating here,” Harry muttered, and pushed his plate away, with more untouched food than Draco thought he ought to leave on it, considering how ridiculously thin he was. “I didn’t mean—do you think if I called her back and explained that we weren’t really having a private conversation, she would—”

            Draco tried to restrain himself, but he couldn’t; the chuckles broke out of him. Harry turned to him, his arms folded and his face red enough to tell Draco that he had just entered the category of “enemy” again as far as Harry was concerned. “What?” Harry snapped.

            “You saw through her playacting when she came in here and pretended that she hadn’t known you were here, but you don’t think she left to give us the chance to be alone?” Draco shook his head. “You are stupid sometimes.” But he let Harry hear the fondness with which he said it.

            Harry flushed and lowered his head. His gaze remained on Draco, and Draco smiled. There was a look in those eyes, a light, that said Harry might go further than Draco had thought he would. He might ask. Draco found himself holding his breath, leaning forwards in his chair, his smile bright as he silently encouraged Harry to do it, to ask.

            “You want to go after the next animal as soon as we finish our breakfast?” Harry asked his plate.

            Draco sighed and eased back. It seemed he would have to give Harry a little more time to decide what he wanted. He could do that, Draco told himself. He could be patient. Not often, but when the reward was as great as this, then he could.

            “Yes, of course,” Draco said, and reached into his pocket to pull out the cloak of white fur from the wolf, which he hadn’t dared shrink in case that altered some property of it, but which folded up to make a much smaller package than he’d expected. “Do you know what we have to do with this thing, besides take it along?”

            Harry shook his head. His cheeks were bright, and he kept his gaze on the cloak as though the shining silvery color would advise him what to do next. Draco restrained himself from rolling his eyes. No, Harry had said that he didn’t have much knowledge of the magical animals, although he had known about the wolf’s ability to Apparate.

            “Then take me to the place where your next challenge awaits,” Draco said, and stood up, leaving almost as much food on his plate as Harry had.

            Harry stood with an anxious look almost perfectly divided between him and the plate. “Shouldn’t you—I mean, don’t you think—”

            “That I should eat more?” Draco asked sweetly, and smiled as Harry blushed again. “I could ask the same of you.”

            “I’m used to going without food for days at a time, if I have to,” Harry said, flinging back his head and scowling at Draco. Draco wondered what his parents would have said, could they see that scowl. It was a bit much to hope that his father would immediately pronounce Harry perfect for him, but he might think that Harry wasn’t such a bad addition to the Malfoy family, if he could be that fierce. “Auror training teaches you how to do that. But you—I don’t want you fainting just as we confront the leopard.”

            Draco reached out to take Harry’s hand and play with his fingers for a moment, solely because Harry immediately reclaimed his hand and flushed another lovely color. He wouldn’t push Harry much more, but he could tease. “I won’t,” Draco said quietly. “Don’t worry about that. What matters is that you have enough food.”

            “And you don’t matter, I suppose?” Harry seemed to have leaped straight into aggression. “Because I’m more important than you?”

            “Don’t worry about it,” Draco repeated, and gave Harry a smile before turning away. But he paused halfway through the movement, because he couldn’t help himself, and whirled back around to widen his eyes at Harry comically. “Harry! Are you telling me that you’re worried for your best enemy?”

            Harry growled at him and stomped past him, snatching the wolf-fur cloak from Draco on the way. “Come on, then. I’m worried about how we’ll beat the leopard, not about you,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed for the front door.

            Draco did a little skipping step that Harry looked back in time to catch. Harry faced the front with what he tried hard to pretend was a disgusted snort.

            He would have to try harder than that if he didn’t want Draco to take some pride in the sound, Draco thought contentedly.

*

            To Draco, it would have made sense for the leopard to have lived in the middle of the same humid jungle where the dog’s palace had been located. At least the wolf had lived in a forest and the horse in a place it could run and the eagle in the sky. Snakes in sewers and birds in caves were a bit more unusual, admittedly, but Draco could take that in stride.

            But this…Draco stared at the trees rising around them, and then turned around and gave Harry a smile that made Harry raise his wand a little. At least that was a sign that he could read Draco the way Draco was learning to read him, Draco thought, half-proud.

            “You put the leopard in a swamp?” Draco asked, and raised one foot, plunging it down into the middle of the murky water. It eddied around him and soaked his ankles, grey-green and covered with a floating, gleaming scum that Draco was sure would cling to his clothes. Over the trees around them draped moss that made it look as though every single tree wore a lopsided wig. The smell in the air was horrific.

            “I didn’t choose the landscapes,” Harry said, staring around. “The spell did.” But he sounded as though he didn’t think the chain ritual was a good idea anymore, even in the part of him that was still stupid, and that went a little way towards mollifying Draco.



            Then Harry faced him and smiled a little. “But you can repair your clothes with charms, can’t you? Are you a wizard or not?”

            Draco snarled at him and kept forcing his way through the water to avoid giving a lecture about magical cloth and how it never felt the same if you used a charm to repair it instead of a tailor’s complex and subtle magic. Harry had said that the Apparition would at least bring them near the point where the next magical creature was hanging about. It ought to be easy to spot a leopard in all of this. Their coats weren’t made for the camouflage.

            But an hour passed, and the heat grew worse, and the smell grew worse, and the mosquitos buzzing over the waters grew worse, but nothing else changed. Draco tried to stand on a small island, a heap of moss-covered stone, in the middle of the water, and hope that helped, but all that did made him do was slide slowly down and back into the water, then fall with a sudden splash.

            Harry just shook his head at Draco from the trunk of a fallen tree where he was sitting. “I never knew you knew those words.”

            “I’m not always the perfect and polished pure-blood you think I am,” Draco said, shaking some water from the hem of his robe, or trying. It clung in thick, oily grey droplets. “Particularly when my clothes are being ruined.”

            He expected some response to that, at least, even if it wasn’t compassion, and looked up in surprise when he didn’t get one. He saw Harry staring into the distance, between the twisting branches that pushed green to the furthest edge of ugliness. As Draco watched, Harry’s wand slowly rose.

            “I think it’s close,” Harry whispered. “I thought I heard a snarl when you were in the middle of your little conversation about your clothes.”

            Draco scowled and opened his mouth, and then went down into the water, choking, as the weight hit his back. Distantly, he heard Harry yell. He didn’t have time to hear what, because then water was flooding his ears and his mouth and his lungs.

            The weight on his back continued to hold him down, and Draco could feel it half-vibrating, which probably meant it was growling. He still had hold of his wand, by some miracle, so he swished it through the water beside him and bellowed out the only spell that might help him in this particular instance.

            He rose straight up, rebounding from the floor of the swamp—or the compacted mess of moss and mud and rock that substituted for the floor—as though it had suddenly turned into rubber. He spun and turned and saw the trees pinwheeling past him and reached out a hand, and meanwhile the leopard on his back was flung a good distance. Draco listened hard, hoping to hear it crack into a tree, but no such luck.

            Draco caught a branch and spun himself around it at the angle that would let him land in the crook of it without breaking either his arm or his back. He’d had practice on some of the wilder broom flights that he and Louis took. When he was motionless for the first time since he’d almost died, he writhed around and looked for the leopard.

            It stood in the tree three over from his, silent except for the low snarl coming through its parted jaws and the noise its wildly swishing tail made as it hit the moss, and it was the strangest leopard Draco had ever seen.

            Wild, beautiful in a way, but strange. The coat was a dark, dusty rose, shot through with deeper pink rosettes. Otherwise, it looked normal, with green eyes, even, but still. Pink. Draco giggled a little, hysterically.

            The leopard crouched. Draco started to draw himself up, ready to voice another spell.

            But then the leopard leaped, and Draco saw the reason it had knocked him into the water in the first place, the reason it was so dangerous. It moved faster than any normal creature could have, perhaps as fast in its spring as the horse in its run. It crashed into Draco again before the first syllable could leave his lips.

            Draco started to roll off the tree branch, but he managed to press his back against the crook of bark and keep upright that way. The leopard was snarling directly into his face. Its breath smelled like carrion, and its paws had crept into the cloth at his sides, starting to draw down. Draco could feel the claws, as pointed as hooks.

            He did the only thing he could think of, and screamed.

            The leopard’s ears flattened back along its skull, and it spat. That wasn’t a reaction as severe as Draco had hoped for, but it gave him a second to make his decision, and he cast the spell he’d been thinking of before, one that raised a torrent of fetid water from the swamp below. Vaguely, he could hear Harry yelling, but since Harry wasn’t obliging enough to come and rescue him right then, Draco thought he’d better manage.

            The water grabbed the leopard and soaked its fur. It gave a sound that might have been an ordinary cat’s startled cry and leaped off Draco, heading back through the air to the first tree where it had landed.

            Potter’s spell, or rather the water channeled by Potter’s spell, hit it halfway there.

            The leopard gave an agonized yowl. Its body tumbled and writhed, and the water bore it off course, slamming it into something solid enough that it sounded like stone. It slid down the stone, limply. Draco stood up and cast his next spell at a tree branch directly above it, thick enough, he hoped, to do the job.

            The leopard had just started to lift its (pink) head from the water when the branch broke off from the tree. As Draco had hoped, the creature looked up at the sound instead of bounding out of the way. Or maybe it had been too badly hurt to bound.

            The branch landed on top of it with what Draco thought was a satisfying thunk. The leopard yowled and then lay still, its paws twitching. Draco nodded and turned to look over at Harry.

            He met a frown deep enough that he frowned back, wondering what he could have done. He had a few scratches, sure, but all in all, this had been the quickest of their battles, and the only real damage done was to his clothes.

            Then he remembered. The cloak of fur that the wolf had shed in their last fight, the cloak that was supposedly instrumental to defeating the next creature, still hung out of Harry’s pocket. They hadn’t used it at all in the battle against the leopard.

            And the tree branch shifted and fell down into the water, and Draco turned around to see the leopard rise to all fours, as sleek and uninjured as it had been when this mad chase started. It was even totally dry, as though the water hadn’t soaked it. It began to snarl again, though this time audibly enough that Draco could hear it at this distance, and started to crouch down for another of those magnificent leaps.

            “The cloak!” Harry shouted, splashing towards Draco.

            Draco turned his head and snapped, “Yes, of course, the cloak, I know. But that doesn’t tell us what—”

            That was as far as he got before Harry, yelling incomprehensibly, snatched the cloak out, dragged it through the water—and Draco mourned in spite of himself at watching those white hairs turn foul—and flung it into the air. Draco stared up, and realized the cloak had come between the leopard and its intended target, muffling its head and getting caught around its neck.

            But the target was Harry, not him, and in the next second the blinded leopard had hit Harry on the chest and both of them had vanished beneath the surface of the swamp.

*

            delia cerrano: And I think Harry has begun to figure that out.

            SP777: It would probably make Harry tear his hair out. ;)
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A Black Stone in a Glass Box