Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Sympathy for the Predators	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Lucius Views: 14906 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Sympathy for the Predators
- 2-Tiger
- 3-Cheetah
- 4-Wolf
- 5-Fox
- 6-Falcon
- 7-Jaguar
- 8-Killer Whale
- 9-Lion
- 10-Dolphin
- 1
- 2
- 3
Thanks for all the reviews! I’m not sure how long this story will be, but definitely more than ten chapters.

Part II. Tiger.

Stalking, hidden, in the grass.

            “I never thought you one to be interested in that rag, Father.”

            Lucius smiled without lifting his eyes from the papers spread out in front of him. Draco had doubtless seen the headline of the Quibbler, which would be visible from the doorway of the library. Lucius reached out and adjusted the nearest paper in a leisurely fashion, so that he could see the photograph of Potter standing in the doorway of the Ministry better.

            “I do not think you have learned everything there is to be known about me yet, Draco,” he said.

            There was a long hesitation after that. His son relied on knowing Lucius’s moods, but he exhibited no great skill in reading them. He would be sifting this particular sentence through his mind, looking for various ways that it could become a threat.

            Lucius envisioned the words tumbling through the sand of Draco’s thoughts, being so coated with it that they would become part of his mind and not part of Lucius’s at last. Lucius was content that it should be so. He had long since ceased to influence his son with direct punishments and touches to the reins. Draco had to stand forth, independent, and cast his own shadow as part of the Malfoy forest. Lucius took care only that the tree he had rooted in fertile soil should not grow taller than his own.

            “Well, all right,” Draco said, shoving the thing he couldn’t understand behind him into the distance, as he often did. He pushed himself away from the doorway and came further into the room. Lucius did not glance up, but he knew that the expression on Draco’s face would be at once conciliating and challenging, the look of a wolf who did not—yet—feel himself ready to attack the pack leader. “I’m going to France for a month.”

            “Are you?” Lucius felt interested enough now to lean back in the chair and look up at his son, resting one hand on the desk. Draco shone in the dimness of the library; Lucius preferred fire to read by, for the uncertain gleams and shadows it threw as much as for the warmth. But, Lucius had to admit, his son did not shine as much as Potter. The eleven years since the war had done much for Draco, but they had not transformed him completely. “Business?”

            Draco smirked slightly. “Pleasure. Blaise’s half-sister is going to be there, and, well…” He spread his hands elaborately.

            Lucius nodded. Blaise Zabini had discovered he had a half-sister named Ellen Steele some years ago, fathered by the same unfortunate man who had sired him and died at his mother’s hands, and she and Draco had charmed each other immediately. Lucius thought his son had conducted the affair with admirable discretion; Mrs. Steele’s husband thought he was the reason that Draco took such care to attend on them in France. Thus, Lucius had nothing to complain of.

            “Enjoy yourself, my son.” Lucius turned back to the photograph in front of him, ignoring the article that went along with it. Yes, Potter had made a speech about not being able to trust the Ministry to be free of corruption, but that meant little or nothing. What did was the look on Potter’s face in the photograph. Lucius had first seen Potter as a work of art, and he would continue thinking of him that way, because it amused him.

            “Father? What are you looking at?”

            There was a note of uncertainty in Draco’s voice that many might have found endearing. Lucius did not especially enjoy it. Such uncertainty usually preceded one of the tantrums Draco threw when he found out that his father did not intend to gratify one of his tiny desires.

            “Art,” Lucius said, and tilted his head to the side. That did not always bring things into focus, but it did now. He could see the stubbornness deep in Potter’s eyes, the courage in the way he held his head, even the half-tamed wildness in the tumble of dark hair, though he did not wear it as long in this picture as Lucius had seen it at the exhibition last night. Lucius sighed slowly, a bare motion of breath through parted lips. He could imagine reaching out and placing one hand on that solid shoulder, the way Potter would draw in his breath and shift under the touch, uncomfortable but drawn despite himself—

            “Potter isn’t art.”

            Lucius stopped, his eyes locked in place, his imagination dancing the last steps of the dance that he had begun to construct with Potter. He reminded himself that Potter was not present, and so he had not lost control of the situation the way he would have had Draco made that childish outburst in the other man’s presence.

            But the interjection had offended him badly enough that, when he lifted his eyes and fastened them on Draco’s face, his son paled and took a quick step backwards.

            “If I say he is,” Lucius said, his voice distant and soft, “then he is.”

            Draco shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself as though it had suddenly started to snow. “Do you need new artwork?” he asked desperately. “I could look for pieces in France. I know that de Mann is supposed to have returned to public life. Do you want one of his sculptures? Or there’s Madame Lasalle. I could ask her to come back and perform a private dance for you…”

            Lucius looked at him. It was enough to make the words dry like spit in Draco’s throat. He bobbed his head and backed away.

            “I will acquire the art I wish to acquire,” Lucius said. He made sure that his voice did not express anything that he would have wished unexpressed. Still, it was important for Draco to understand how things would be. “In the way I wish to acquire it.”

            “I—yes, of course, Father.” Draco had recovered enough to sweep him a bow, his eyes bright with resentment. “No one said that you shouldn’t.”

            Lucius checked a sigh. His sighs around other people were for the purposes of theater only, small sounds that could stir the course of politics or art in new directions for several months. He did not sigh in relief, or exasperation. One should have more control of one’s breath than that.

            “I do not enjoy banter this morning, Draco,” he said. “Leave.”

            Draco stepped out of the room, flashing him one last look. He seemed to believe it was unfair that Lucius had not only survived the war, but survived his mother’s death, and still continued to exist as the head of the Malfoy line and fortune. Lucius knew that Draco’s visions of the future had included complete independence and wealth while he was still young.

            Never mind that the important thing about youth is how it is used, and not how it is enjoyed, Lucius thought, turning back to the photograph in front of him. He used one finger to trace the curve of Potter’s cheek, moving it above the photograph, not touching it. He did not wish to touch until he was certain of his reception.

            Potter’s eyes blazed with a melancholy, irate fire, and his stance was not unlike the one Lucius had seen him use last night when confronting Rossetti. He would defy the whole of the Ministry to conquer him, even if it tried.

            Lucius let his eyelids fall to half-mast over his eyes. He felt so much excitement, simply sitting there at the table and studying a photograph, that it was almost painful.

            This was not the boy he had known. Although he looked at the pictures now, he had read the articles, and he knew Potter had left the Ministry in rage and disgust to encourage political projects elsewhere, far from the centers of power.

            Because Lucius had always preferred the centers did not mean he could afford to ignore the margins.

            And now he would hunt them with particular eagerness, knowing the tempting prey that awaited him there.

*

            “Why did I take this job?”

            Harry made a sympathetic noise and put Hermione’s drink down in front of her. It had been his turn to dodge through the crowd that was jammed into the Broken Barrel tonight, including the people who assumed that seeing the scar on his forehead gave them the right to touch him. Harry had perfected a glare that sent most of his “admirers” rocking back on their heels, but it didn’t always work on drunken ones.

            “I don’t know,” he said, sitting down and sipping at his own drink. The Dragons’ Breath, made of Firewhisky combined with some secret ingredient that always enflamed his throat, hit hard enough that he grunted. But it was just what he wanted after a long week in which he’d had to deal with countless letters begging him to give speeches, take various jobs, support causes and projects that sounded like little more than attempts to increase pure-blood wealth, and buy art that was ugly. Not to mention the usual mixture of politely-worded pleas from the Ministry to come back and rejoin the Aurors and insane love letters. “But I think the real question is: Why are you still there?”

            Hermione leaned back in her chair and sighed. Harry had already cast a spell that enabled him to pick out her voice from the background noise, luckily, or he couldn’t have heard her with even that small amount of extra distance between them. “I thought I could make a difference,” she said. “You see how that turned out.” She sipped from her drink again and coughed.

            “That answers your question, but not mine,” Harry said, smiling when Hermione scowled at him. She opened her mouth to answer, but the table shook then and their third flung himself into the chair next to Hermione.

            “Sorry I’m late.”

            Harry grinned at Ron. He had a burn mark on one cheek, and the hair on the left side of his head stood up in a series of scarlet spikes. Hermione rolled her eyes and cast a spell at the hair. It started to flatten down, then straightened up again with a small buzzing noise. Hermione blinked. “What happened?”

            “Combination of Shield Charms and Blasting Curse hitting at the same time,” Ron grumbled, and lifted the drink he must have bought on the way to his mouth. Harry shuddered as he watched Ron practically inhale the wash of amber liquid that stank like a sewer. Well, if he wants to drink it, that’s his problem. “Why Arturo had to cast Protego at my head I’ll never know. I think he panicked.”

            “But Shield Charms and Blasting Curses couldn’t do that.” Hermione tried another charm, and this time the hair turned slowly blue, but didn’t otherwise change.

            “Tell that to my head,” Ron said gloomily. “I heard both incantations.”

            While Hermione and Ron bickered comfortably over what was possible when Shield Charms and Blasting Curses collided and whether they should just give up and use a glamour on Ron’s hair, Harry took another drink and smiled at them both. Bitter or not, disillusioned with the grand lives they thought they would have after the war or not, these were still his best friends, and he loved them.

            Ron had stayed in the Aurors, but he’d long since given up thinking that he would make much of an impact. He hunted down Dark wizards, but for the most part they’d only stolen cursed items that no sane wizard would want back anyway. He put up with the corruption there by ignoring it.

            Hermione was still fighting. It seemed that every time she dragged another official who’d accepted bribes or secretary who’d abused house-elves out into the open, though, someone did something to hush up the resultant mess. Harry thought they’d have sacked Hermione long ago if she wasn’t a war heroine and didn’t also do genuinely useful work for the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures.

            Harry could understand why they were doing what they did, but not why they stayed with the Ministry.

            On the other hand, trying to argue them out of staying with the Ministry just led to Hermione pointing out that you couldn’t free house-elves by supporting art, and Ron complaining that he would have enjoyed the Aurors a lot more if Harry hadn’t left. They all had their subjects that were sacrosanct, and one of the reasons their friendship had survived as long as it had was that they knew when to back off.

            A puff of smoke clouded Harry’s view across the table for a moment, and he blinked hard to clear it away. When it was gone, he could see that Ron’s hair lay flat on his head and was its normal color again. The only problem was that it looked as stiff as wire. Ron touched it and made a disgusted face.

            “Don’t ask me for better results than that.” Hermione slipped her wand into her sleeve. “If Arturo can’t have better aim or less paranoia than he does, it’s not my fault.”

            “No.” Ron picked up his drink and sipped at it. “It’s Harry’s.”

            “What?” Harry squawked, leaning forwards across the table. “No, it’s not my fault that he’s an idiot.”

            “If you had stayed,” Ron said, “then I would have the partner I was supposed to have.”

            Harry felt his mouth tighten, but he didn’t think Ron was completely serious, so he shook his head and kept his voice as light as the rain falling outside right now. “Imagine how much trouble you saved because I didn’t stay, Ron. This way, you’re not dragged up before the Head Auror every time your partner does something stupid. You just have to go visit the Healers.”

            “That’s not an improvement.” Ron sucked moodily at the lip of his drink, eyes never leaving Harry’s face.

            Perhaps this is more serious than I thought it. Harry sat up. “You know why I couldn’t stay,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

            “What are you changing now?” Hermione countered.

            “What are you?” Harry asked.

            Hermione sighed and shut her eyes. “I suppose I deserve that,” she whispered. “But, Harry, it hurts me to see the kind of life you’re drifting through, the way that you never make contact with anyone.”

            Harry stared at her, baffled. It was true they hadn’t met many of his artist friends, but they knew Risa Turner and Giles Burne-Jones, and they’d heard Harry talk about most of the others. “I know plenty of people,” he said. “I’ve supported several different artists so they can make their own work without having to take commissions or look for patrons, and I’m about to start supporting another. Risa, you remember her? There are a lot of pictures and statues and songs in the world because of me.”

            Hermione toyed with her glass and exchanged several dozen glances with Ron, it seemed, in the space of a few minutes. Harry could almost see them tossing the responsibility of talking to him back and forth like a poisoned Galleon. The air was full of silent You do it. No, you do it exchanges.

            That told him what it would be about long before Hermione took up the gauntlet and turned to him with a sad face.

            “You haven’t dated anyone since Ginny died,” she whispered. “I know those rumors in the Daily Prophet are only that. You’re not connecting with anyone new, Harry. Not in the deepest way, not in the way that really matters.”

            Harry shut his eyes and clenched his hand on the table, refusing to let his anger get the better of him. Hermione was only speaking out of concern. He knew that. And she couldn’t really understand, because she hadn’t needed to find someone new, someone she hadn’t met at Hogwarts; she’d had Ron for decades.

            Getting angry with his best friends would accomplish nothing, because it wasn’t really them he was angry with. Instead, he would try one more time to explain the real reason he hadn’t accepted anyone new.

            “She died saving my life,” he said carefully, opening his eyes. “There’s no way that I can forget that, or diminish the debt I owe her.”

            “I loved my sister, too, Harry,” Ron said, leaning across the table to put a hand on his arm. “But she wouldn’t have wanted me, or you, to stop living.”

            Harry glared at him out of the corner of his eye. “I do still live. I have friends, I socialize with people, I have hobbies. Quidditch and ranting about the Ministry,” he added, when he saw Hermione opening her mouth to ask what hobbies. “And finding artists to support. If I made a decision about who I wanted to date and decided it should be a permanent one, that’s my business.”

            “But most people don’t do that,” Hermione said.

            “Normal people don’t do that,” Ron added.

            Hermione glared at Ron and punched him under the ribs, but Harry smiled and shook his head. He understood why his best mate had said that, and it was the kind of thing that Hermione was thinking, though not what she’d say aloud.

            “You’re right,” he said. “I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to be normal, and other people’s attempts to force me into that mold weren’t very satisfying. So this is only one more way I’m different among all the rest.”

            “If the only reason that you’re not sleeping with anyone is loyalty to Ginny, though,” Hermione said, “I think that’s misguided.”

            “It’s not loyalty,” Harry said. “It’s a way to honor her, to remember her as she was.” He had to close his eyes before he could say the next words. “I loved her, Hermione. And I’m never going to find someone like her. You know what the people who want to sleep with me are like.”

            “Oh, Harry.” Hermione’s voice was soft in an instant, and she patted his arm.

            “To Ginny,” Ron said, seizing his drink and lifting it.

            Harry smiled and touched his glass to Ron’s, joined an instant later by Hermione’s. These were his best friends, the best part of his life. There was no reason for him to look further.

*

            Interesting.

            Lucius leaned back in his chair and toyed with his glass. He was surrounded by a Complete Disillusionment Charm, a stronger version of the simple spell that he doubted either Potter or his friends would know. The one he had been uncertain of was the Auror-trained Weasley, but he had looked at Lucius’s table and let his gaze sweep onwards. It was well.

            Lucius had gained the table by the simple expedient of coming in earlier and then appearing to vanish. A subtle Repelling Hex kept anyone from trying to sit at the table or the servers from coming near it, assuming that they cleaned the tables in this place.

            Lucius curled his lip at the thought. Truly, this was where Potter preferred to spend the few precious hours that he had to meet with his friends?

            But the more he looked around, the more Lucius could appreciate the—understated—lure of the Broken Barrel. It was ordinary, loud and bustling and dirty. It was a place where life flowed so fast and the people who swam in the stream were so occupied with their own concerns that Lucius doubted they would notice even a celebrity like Potter.

            Besides, there was one unexpected benefit. His surroundings made Potter shine like a Galleon cast down in dust, or a statue by Willow Yeats perched unexpectedly on a street corner.

            Lucius leaned forwards again and studied Potter, but his interactions with his friends were falling into more regular patterns, ones that Lucius had noted the last time he had observed him. He felt free to let his mind drift across the fields of newly-gained knowledge and pluck the most useful facts.

            Potter still mourned his dead lover, then. That was good. It meant that he was not of the sort to have sex indiscriminately. It was a matter of some pride to Lucius that he entered into cold beds, not ones warmed with the constant passing of other limbs.

            And from what Potter had said…

            Lucius smiled. This particular fact was so delicious that he had to approach it slowly, circling around it, sniffing carefully for every trace of the scent before he opened his jaws.

            From what Potter had said, and if his perceptions and protests were to be trusted, he had had no other lover in the past seven years.

            That was a well-defended honor. That was a fortress that Lucius would take some pride in conquering.

            That was prey running with the hottest blood, the sweetest flesh.

            But Lucius would make no hasty move. Why should he, when a slow and careful one stood a chance of winning Potter and a hasty one of prejudicing Potter against him forever? He could wait, so he would.

            There was no one else partial to this private chase, and Lucius did not intend that there should be. He doubted Potter spent much time thinking about him. If he did, he probably shrugged and sneered and assumed that Lucius was one more mindless collector who would slather his palm with his own spunk because of the likeness of the Chosen One on his wall.

            Lucius did not yet know how to change Potter’s mind about him. When he did, then he would move. He would surge to the center of Potter’s life from the periphery in a single controlled burst of speed, chasing and claiming.

‘

            The first claiming, at least. With someone like Potter, Lucius thought there were many others to come.

*

            “It will do.”

            Harry managed to hide a smile, but it was hard. He’d labored for weeks to find a suitable place for a studio, and Risa walked in, looked at it, and said those bland and cool words. There was an undertone of excitement in her voice, and he’d known her for a long time, or he might have been hurt.

            The building had once belonged to a wizard who intended to make something—Harry didn’t know what, exactly—out of it. Maybe a hotel, maybe flats. It was certainly spacious enough, and not far from the outskirts of Muggle London, making it attractive to Muggleborns who spent a lot of their time between two worlds.

            The ceilings were high enough that Harry wondered absently if the former owner had planned an indoor Quidditch pitch, and all the walls had been knocked out of the room on the ground floor, so that it was simply bare space. Stairs still led up to the first and second floors, but from what Harry had seen, the rooms up there were hardly smaller. Large windows poured in light and air. There was broken glass in three of them right now, but that could be fixed in the flick of a wand. Harry wondered, from the way Risa was eying them, if she might even want more windows. He had only rarely watched her in the process of creating her art, and he didn’t know what else she might require for her students.

            “I want to see the other floors,” Risa said suddenly, and moved away from him.

            Harry relaxed with a tiny sigh. He could have sold the building if she didn’t like it, but the decisive tone in her voice said she did. If she hadn’t, he would have had to begin the search all over again, and that would have been discouraging.

            He followed her upstairs when he heard her exclaim sharply. He found her standing in one of the two large rooms that opened from the stairwell on the first floor, hands spread as if her arms would grow much longer without help and let her touch the walls.

            “This is perfect,” she said. “I could not have found a better studio had I searched for years.” She turned around and stared at him. “Did you study me? Did you read my mind, to find a place like this for me?”

            Harry laughed aloud this time. “If you knew how bad I was at Legilimency, you would understand how funny that is,” he said, when Risa continued to stare at him fixedly. “No. I hoped that it would suit you, but I didn’t really know. If I’ve managed to suit you, even if it was by chance, then I’m glad.”

            “You have something about you that is more than chance,” Risa said softly, cocking her head to the side and eyeing him as if she thought that he would suddenly sprout wings. Or as if she wanted to paint a portrait of him, Harry realized slowly. He had seen her look at other subjects that way. “Something about that you bears you through the graces and pains of fortune, and leads you where you need to go.”

            Harry tried to conceal his laughter this time, not because he was afraid that it would offend her, but because it was bitter. Risa blinked and stared at him harder, as if she could hear every nuance of the sound anyway and didn’t like it. But Harry didn’t intend to explain. He wasn’t about to inflict his bitterness on her. What did she have to do with it? She hadn’t caused his pain.

“Where I need to be,” he said, when he thought he wasn’t about to burst out in undignified cackling, “is apparently here, for right now. But perhaps you should see the second floor before you decide the place is perfect.”

            Risa eyed him one more time, and then turned and stalked up the stairs as if daring the building to taunt her with something less than wonderful. Harry followed, balancing his hands on the banisters. He hoped she wouldn’t turn around and look at him before she saw the rooms. He was still having some trouble controlling the blinking of his eyes in the way that he should.

            Damn it. He shouldn’t still be sensitive about this years after the war. He had a lot compared to many people. He didn’t have to work. There were some people who would have said that was a blessing all its own. And he had wonderful, supportive friends, and a cause that needed him and that he could support unhesitatingly. There were people who would have killed for something like that.

            But it seemed that one particular sore point lingered within him still, one wound that someone could still tear open unexpectedly if they pressed on it without knowing it was there.

            Ginny died because of people who thought I was too lucky.

            If he did have any kind of luck, it was in having so much experience dealing with grief that he could do it easily by now. They came out onto the second floor, and Risa froze, staring. Harry stepped up behind her and folded his arms, leaning a hip on the banister, enjoying her reaction.

            The second floor was cut up into many smaller rooms, with corridors that ran all the way around, linking them. But the walls hung, slightly swaying, on great hooks, suspended a few feet from the floor. Risa would see the advantage of walls that could be moved in order to provide room for large or small projects, as needed, and to make into backgrounds for different kinds of art.

            “It is beautiful,” she said, and prowled around the floor, staring at various walls. Most of them were plain wood or stone. Harry knew that wouldn’t stop her imagination from painting them with incredibly vivid scenes. He followed her when it seemed that she wasn’t going to stop or slow down, wanting to be there for the final moment of revelation.

            Risa stopped. Then she turned to face him, hands extending again as if she didn’t know whether she wanted to embrace or strangle him.

            “You didn’t have to do this,” she whispered.

            Harry smiled at her. “I didn’t know exactly what you’d like,” he said, as he had said it about the building. “So I bought a bit of everything.”

            Risa’s “this” and his “everything” was a pile of canvas, paints, brushes, wood, bits of stone, palettes, stools, ladders, ointments, flowers, minerals, metals, and all sorts of other art supplies in the last, and currently biggest, room. Risa reached out and caressed a flapping sheet of canvas stirred by a wind from the open window nearby.

            “Will it do?” Harry asked, when he thought enough moments had passed for her to speak.

            Evidently he was wrong. Risa simply turned a full face to him, nodded once, and then went back to staring into the future.

            Harry smiled again, though he didn’t have an audience this time. He was content.

*

            Really, Potter didn’t seem to see the necessity of security anywhere. It was ridiculously easy for Lucius to slip into the building that he had chosen as the studio for his little artist friend and explore.

            He stood studying Potter’s expression for long moments when he caught up with the pair, and particularly the way that his smile never seemed to falter, even when he looked at the bleak, blank surfaces that currently occupied most rooms of the building. Apparently he, like many artists, was capable of seeing the unpictured future in glorious colors.

            Lucius made a soft, thoughtful noise in the back of his throat, and Potter craned his neck around to stare. But Lucius was wearing his powerful Disillusionment Charm again, and Potter’s gaze sliced and slid past him.

            He had wanted a way to introduce himself into Potter’s life, a way guaranteed to work. He had had one great failure in his lifetime. That was enough.

            He knew he would not fail now.

            A sound from the lower floors attracted him. He held still, letting his senses work out the threat, if threat it was. He saw from the corner of his eye Potter’s head turn and a frown creep across his face, but, beautiful as even a small change could make those features, Lucius would not let it distract him.

            Potter cursed in the next moment, and so volubly that Lucius began to hope that he sometimes disciplined his tongue. It was hard to think of Potter containing such ignobility as poor control over his temper.

            “What’s the matter?” demanded the Mudblood with Potter, turning around and staring down at the stairs as if she thought the building would collapse beneath her. You would not die if it did, Lucius thought at her, for Potter would surely save you, and I should save myself.

            “Trouble,” Potter said, and then began to spring down the stairs. Lucius could see the flexing of the muscles in his legs by turning his head slightly sideways. He uttered a pleased sigh, as there was no one who could hear it. He had wondered at first whether Potter might not lose something by not wearing the traditional robes, but he did not.

            Not at all.

            “Reporters?” Turner sounded unsurprised that it should be so. Indeed, she was patting her hair as she went down the steps. Lucius curled his lip. She must imagine that they are come about her and her art, to commission works that she cannot make.

            “No,” Potter said, and his voice was so thick with dread that Lucius stirred himself to follow. “Worse.”

            By the time that Lucius arrived on the ground floor—large and drafty as it was, it could have used several pieces of art to warm it and break up the immense space—the intruder was inside. He leaned on the wall, his hand resting on his right hip, trying to look nonchalant and feline. He succeeded mostly in looking duck-like, his arm echoing the curve of that water-bird’s wing.

            Lucius’s face quivered and he felt a harpchord of sadness that he could not share the comparison with Potter. From the look on his face, it would have amused him. Lucius watched the way Potter stood, his arms folded, his fingertips resting on the ends of his elbows, his body quivering with leashed tension, and wondered what he would do if Lucius stepped up beside him and drew his own fingers in a slow line down his spine.

            Start, of course, and fling himself backwards, drawing his wand as he went. Lucius could see the motions in his mind.

            But with an acknowledged, accepted ally? Support? Lover?

            Lucius could not wait to find out.

            “I’m sorry,” the man said, in a voice so plummy with insincerity that Lucius knew he was not trying to fool Potter. He probably thought his presence flattering and used the apology the way Lucius would a formal bow to a hostess whose party he had arrived at late. “But I couldn’t be deprived of your presence any longer, Harry.” He dipped his head and looked up from under his eyelashes, a maneuver that Lucius had found suited very few of those who were inclined to try it.

            Potter clenched his right elbow hard at the first name. So this man did not have his permission to speak it, Lucius thought. He was a fool to try. Society gossip might discuss Potter as open and generous, but Lucius’s one pair of eyes could see further than a thousand clouded ones. Potter glittered on the surface, but he was shut tight underneath, like one of Narcissa’s gold-lidded jewelry boxes.

            “I’ve told you not to come here, Willowwand,” he said, voice low and controlled. “Or any place I happen to be standing.”

            Lucius turned his head lazily to consider the object of Potter’s ire, who was now pouting.

            He wore scarlet Auror robes. He had black lace edgings on the cuffs that Lucius was sure were not standard regulation. His hair was blond, with an ice-colored trail down the middle of his skull that Lucius knew had been artificially added. His eyes were common brown, nothing at all like the glorious shade that Lucius had imagined for Potter before he saw the green.

And they were fixed on Potter as though Potter was about to bend over for him.

            Lucius would perhaps have been angry if Potter had shown any sign of regarding this puppy with interest. As it was, he sighed, pitying those who did not understand the enormous gap between the mud and the stars.

            Potter again turned and looked behind him when he heard the sound. Willowwand, the trained Auror, did not notice, because he was too busy filling his ears with his own rattle.

            “I can’t stay away. You know I like you, Harry. You know I want to date you. Why won’t you give me a chance?” He turned his head to the side in what was probably meant as a charming gesture, and which Lucius recognized at once as the motion of someone who had been told his profile was his best side.

            Lucius wished he could meet the person who had said that to Willowwand. He wished to congratulate such a successful liar, someone whose triumph in making the boy embarrass himself was still going on to this day.

            “Because you’re an idiot and won’t leave me alone when I told you to?” Potter sneered as he replied. The sneer did not disfigure his face. Lucius was beginning to wonder if anything could. A scar, perhaps, but the one on his forehead had done nothing in that respect.

            You are a source of light, he thought at Potter. Do not disdain the boy for recognizing it in you and wishing to draw closer, though to do so would burn his wings. It is the only commendable thing about him.

            “But if I left you alone, that would hardly be conducive to getting you to date me.” Willowwand smiled. Lucius felt like applauding at this evidence that he knew words of more than two syllables. “I’m the best Auror in the Department right now, and there are some people who say that I’m a hero like you. You wouldn’t have to run after me or protect me. I could protect you. What makes you not like me?”

            Lucius felt a tingle in his mouth as he watched Potter stare coldly into Willowwand’s eyes. That is not the way to appeal to him. I do not think that Potter would want to admit himself in need of protection, even if he was. And he is not.

            Lucius wondered again what would happen if he revealed himself, if Willowwand would think that Potter needed protection then.

            But I intend only to offer him pleasure and honor, esteem and intelligent conversation. He is wise enough to understand the difference, and this boy’s opinion does not matter.

            Perhaps he would have moved then if he were younger and less capable of recognizing a useless risk. As it was, he was content to stand still and observe as Potter spoke in a low, cutting tone, the kind that would tear anyone’s confidence to shreds.

            “Do you know how much that doesn’t matter to me? I dislike my own heroic reputation, and you want me to deal with yours? You think I’m some trembling, fragile thing who requires a pair of arms to cure my fear?” He leaned closer to Willowwand, but Lucius could not disapprove of that, not when he was breathing a winter wind across the fool’s hopes.

            “I’ve done things you can’t imagine, and been places that you’ll never see,” Potter said, each word hurled like a hex. “That separates us in ways that you can’t imagine, either.”

            Lucius could have purred. Very well done, though the repetition of “imagination” unfortunately shows a contraction of the vocabulary. I can offer him books that will do him a great deal of good, however.

            “But you still need a warm body to keep you company at night,” Willowwand said, his voice cajoling. “Don’t you, Harry?”

            Potter stared at him, then laughed like a wolf. “And you’re willing to rate yourself that low?” he asked, when he recovered.

            Willowwand’s earnest look didn’t waver. “I know I have to start somewhere,” he said. “Please, Harry. I want you any way I can have you.”

            Potter gave him a narrow-eyed glare that was the closest to interest in the boy Lucius had seen from him. Perhaps he admired honesty. Perhaps he did like being pursued, after all—Lucius rather thought he would—and this was determined enough to make him pay attention.

            But you have a better prospect in view, Lucius told him. Then he paused and reconsidered. Perhaps not in view, but close.

            “And that says a lot about your motives,” Potter said. His voice was less cold than before, but more intense, and for the first time Willowwand flinched and stepped back. Lucius thought he’d probably heard this tone before. “It’s all talk of having and possession and working for me as if I was some sort of treasure.” Potter sighed, but this time Lucius thought the sound was directed at himself as much as at his audience. “Go away and find someone who’s worthy of what you’re doing and won’t make you turn yourself into some sort of whore.”

            Lucius knew many people whose lust would have turned to hatred at those words. But Willowwand simply sighed himself, looked at Potter as if he was a feast Willowwand was being sent away starving from, and then bowed and retreated through the door.

            Potter spun back to Turner as though nothing had happened. “I’m sorry, Risa,” he said. “A minor interruption.”

            “Cale Willowwand,” Risa said, with her eyes thoughtfully distant. “I’ve wanted to paint him, but I’d never seen him close enough.”

            Potter smiled, for some reason, as if he found the artist’s attitude refreshing. Lucius took the beginning of their conversation as an opportunity to slip out the door.

            Thank you, Willowwand, he thought, and wished there was a way to let the puppy know of his gratitude, the first and last time he would ever have something so precious. I know now that speaking of making Potter mine will earn me no favors, and nor will any seeming of being desperately in love with him.

            But that does not matter, not with that cleverness and spirit of independence he bears beneath his beauty. I will appeal to both of them.

            As for being worthy of what I am doing… Lucius laughed quietly to himself. I would never have demeaned myself by wanting someone who was not.

            In time, Potter will understand and appreciate that. He might never agree.

            But what would any alliance be between us if we agreed perfectly? The tiger and the lion are both full of strength and grace, and the world would be poorer if one of them did not exist.

*

            Sharkoon: Thanks! I’m going to try my best to make this a good story. Writing it more slowly than my others may help me to make it that way.

            G. Sands: Thank you! I hope you continue to enjoy it.

            Ithilwen: Thanks! I like your username.

            Mia: Thanks! At least now Lucius knows that, although he does want to possess Harry, he shouldn’t phrase it that way.

            Cassis Black: Thank you!

            KllingProphet: Thanks! Harry might not think that heat is there yet, but he will.
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Sympathy for the Predators