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This Enchanted Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3669 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Two—A Vision of Life That Could Be

            Harry woke to light.

            He sat up on his bed and stared around. He had soft grass beneath him, grass that traveled away towards the horizon in ripples of green on green, of gold on gold. He reached out and pulled, and the grass rose and followed his hand. Yes, it felt real, and when he held it to his nose, the smell was sweet but not unbelievably so.

            Had they brought him to this place to heal? That would make sense, in a weird way, since they couldn’t bring him to St. Mungo’s, not with the ban on him coming into hospital there. Harry touched his arm, where he knew the globe had struck him, and then his head. He shook it. Nothing happened except the ordinary sloshing of what little brain he had—as Malfoy would say—against his ears.

            Well. It appeared he had been right to use the Shield Charm on Leah after all. He had thought he wouldn’t need to protect himself because the globes were so harmless in all the reports that came up in the Alexander file. And if he was dreaming, this was more pleasant than his dreams had been for a long time.

            He stood up and looked around. Yes, there were places in the distance where the grass began to slant up, and he could see hills there. He looked the other direction, and there was a lake, shining clear and blue, a reflection of the mild sky overhead. A haze in the distance told Harry this place might have a storm later, but for now, it wasn’t doing that.

            He would walk. Why not?

            He chose the lake as a random direction, and headed downhill towards it. The slope was gentle, never more than he could handle. Harry smiled as a gentle breeze touched his face and carried a dipping, swirling white butterfly with it. He was now convinced this place was a dream, but he would take it.

            He came to a halt on the grassy shore of the lake, and paused. He hadn’t realized how big it was until he was close, and now it swirled away, rather like the butterfly, in a cloudy mixture of sand and gravel and flowers and swamp. On the far shore, probably about fifteen minutes’ walk if he went around the lake, was a small white house, beneath the biggest oak tree Harry had ever seen, with the whole house in the shade of its branches.

            “Hello, Harry.”

            Harry felt his heart squeeze itself in, but not stop. It had done the stopping already, when it came to that voice, and then had to go on beating. He turned around slowly, pivoting on one heel, and almost praying that he wouldn’t see the person he knew that voice belonged to, after all.

            Lionel pushed himself up from leaning on a slender sapling and came towards him, smiling. He had on dark purple robes of the kind that he liked to wear on his day off, and his shaggy dark hair hadn’t been recently combed. His eyes shone with the same laughter they always had, though. That was what Harry missed most about him, his laughter. God knew there was precious little in most of his life.

            “I—Lionel,” Harry whispered, and reached out. He didn’t think he would touch anything solid, though the rest of the dream felt solid enough, but Lionel’s palm came to rest against his, as warm and callused as it had been when they touched hands in victory after a case. Harry stumbled towards him, pulled by Lionel’s arm.

            And then something happened that had certainly occurred in Harry’s dreams before, but furtively and guiltily. It said something, he had thought later, that he found it hard to imagine even after he had fallen in love with Lionel.

            Lionel kissed him.

            Tenderly, cradling Harry’s face in one hand; with a reverent manner that made Harry’s heart rebound painfully inside his chest and his ribs ache with longing; with one hand on the back of his neck, as if he would urge Harry further into the kiss, further into his mouth, but didn’t know how comfortable he would be with that. Lionel drew back and smiled, eyes shining as steady as stars.

            “You—how did you know I wanted to be kissed like that?” Harry whispered. It might not be the smartest question ever, he thought, when Lionel was doing this for the first time and Harry could drive him away again easily. But he had to ask it, he couldn’t have stayed in the dream and not asked it, and from Lionel’s slow smile, it was the right thing to say.

            “I didn’t know, not specifically,” Lionel asked, putting one hand on the small of Harry’s back and guiding him along the shore of the lake towards a bridge that Harry hadn’t noticed before. Well, no wonder, when it looked like it was made of ice and fairy lace and shimmered weakly grey in the sunlight, hardly different from the water it arched above. “But it was obvious from the way you looked at me, really. The way you reached out towards me and then snatched your hand back, as though you thought I would deny you a sweet.”

            Harry took a slow breath and forced it out, as well as the words that had to come with it. “Well, yes. You did deny me, Lionel. You denied that you felt anything for me, you said you wished I hadn’t told you, and after that, you spent less time with me and didn’t trust me to guard your back. I—I know I shouldn’t have said anything, but you denied me.”

            Lionel sighed. “Yes. In that life, that was the only thing I could think of to do. After all, I thought, I liked women, and there are regulations against Aurors dating their partners, or there used to be, and I didn’t want the publicity.”

            “The publicity of dating Harry Potter?” Harry asked softly. He’d never thought that might be part of it, but of course, he should have. Lionel hadn’t talked about that, but he hadn’t talked about any of it, really, so Harry shouldn’t have thought he knew everything that was going through his head.

            “Right,” Lionel said. They walked out on the bridge, and Harry braced himself for the clatter of their footsteps across it, only to find that they were nearly walking in silence. He blinked and stopped himself with one hand on the railing, staring at Lionel. “But that was that life. This is this one.” He paused, then added, with a smile. “And I think I have too many that’s and thises in there.”

            Harry smiled back. This is so hard with Malfoy, to laugh. I wonder why I didn’t think of that before, when I was trying to improve my partnership with him. “I think you do, too,” he said, as they came down on the other side of the bridge and towards the cottage. “But—Lionel, I don’t understand. What is this life? Where are we?”

            “A vision in your mind,” Lionel said, pausing with one hand on the door of the cottage and staring at him. “Something that’s not real. But could be.”

            Harry licked his lips and thought about that. “All right,” he said at last. “But I don’t exactly understand—I mean, how can something in my mind become real? I’ve never trained in mind magic. I don’t know anything about it—”

            “More than you think,” Lionel said, leaning one hip on the door so that it opened further. Harry saw a room beyond decorated in blues and greys, and had to keep from bolting forwards. That was a room that looked exactly the way he had imagined that the drawing room in his ideal house would be decorated someday. “Someone who’s been exposed to Legilimency and Occlumency the way you have knows plenty about it.”

            Harry scratched the back of his neck, and avoided Lionel’s eyes. They expected something of him he didn’t know how to give. “But how?”

            “The globes are the chance,” Lionel said, leaning forwards. “The key. You have to concentrate on them, to learn why they affect some people and not others, and you have to go back and talk to Leah—”

            And the darkness closed in, whirling with colors like a Portkey, shutting Lionel away. Harry lunged desperately for him, and Lionel held out his hand and scraped his fingers against Harry’s. But he was going, he was fading, and the first moments of life that Harry had felt in several months went with him.

            Harry tried to hang onto the light, but opened his eyes to a different, dimmer light instead, inside a private Healer’s practice, with Malfoy leaning above him and staring into his face. Harry grimaced. Ordinarily he would have been pleased to see that Alexander’s attack hadn’t hurt Malfoy, but at the moment, Malfoy’s face was a poor trade for Lionel’s.

            “Are you all right?” Harry asked, through a scratchy throat. He grimaced again and reached up to touch it. Had he screamed? Or been screaming? He couldn’t remember anything like that when the globe hit him, but he had to admit that his memories of those moments were somewhat confused.

            Not the memories of Lionel, though. They stood out, not like the images of a dream, either confused and slippery or brighter than real life, but as if it were another life, a different one. Harry swallowed and focused on Malfoy.

            “Well?” he demanded, because Malfoy hadn’t answered his question, but continued to frown down on him as if Harry had got himself knocked unconscious on purpose. “What’s wrong?”

*

            You jumped in front of someone you didn’t know, again, to save them. Without knowing what the globes would do. What do you think is wrong?

            But the Auror Healer who had agreed to work with them when Potter was injured sat nearby, examining a sample of the glass globe that had hit Potter in a potion, and Draco didn’t want to disturb her, or talk about things that were none of her business to overhear. He leaned towards Potter and murmured instead, “Alexander got away. No one was hit but you, and you fainted immediately. What do you remember?”

            “Of the attack itself?” Potter tried to sit up. Draco pressed him back down. The Healer hadn’t been able to find anything that could have stunned Potter, but on the other hand, that couldn’t be good news. Potter rolled his eyes, but lay flat again. “Not much. That he walked in, that he flung the globes, that one of them went towards you and one went towards me, and I had time to Shield Leah.” He scanned Draco with suddenly brighter eyes. “And you’re sure you’re fine? Nothing hit you?”

            “I didn’t throw my body between a globe and anybody,” Draco snapped. Apparently some of his anger did want to come out now.

            Potter blinked at him, then gave him a surprisingly bitter smile. “I thought the globes were harmless, so I could safely risk taking them.”

            “Then why not trust to your Shield Charm?” Draco pressed. “There’s still no reason to hurl yourself between one of them and Leah, if you thought them dangerous enough that you Shielded her.”

            Potter looked away from him and huffed a little. “Would you believe that I thought I could catch one? I thought having one to study for ourselves, without the Unspeakables getting hold of it, would be a good idea.”

            Draco might have believed it, yes, if Potter had looked at him. Instead, he glanced away, and that meant something when he had a partner as Gryffindor as Potter was, as stubbornly committed to sacrificing his own life. Draco lowered his voice to a hiss. “I can’t trust you if you lie to me. So don’t start.”

            Potter grimaced as though he had swallowed a mushy apple, then swallowed in reality and nodded. “All right. I—wasn’t thinking. The way I wasn’t thinking when I didn’t tell you about the blue-eyed twisted. It was something that mattered to me, that I should have shared with you, but I didn’t hide it from you on purpose. It just slipped my mind.”

            Draco took a long breath. In his mind, the words he could speak mingled with the words he’d like to speak, and neither was appropriate at the moment. He waited several seconds until he had new words. “I thought this was something you worked on with Mind-Healer Estillo. That you had agreed that just thinking about your own safety as something unimportant, the priority on the bottom of your list, was a bad idea.”

            Potter shut his eyes and sighed. “Yes, we discussed that.”

            He said nothing more. Draco clutched at his robe for a moment and then said, “Well? It didn’t have results?”

            Potter sighed again and pinched his nose. “Because it’s thoughtlessness instead of action, and the only action I can take about it is being more mindful, I forget it more easily. So it slipped my mind again. Sorry.”

            “I think there is action you can take,” Draco said. He hadn’t suggested this before because Potter still had reason to distrust him over being under Alto’s influence, but he would now. “If we train together on defensive maneuvers other than you putting your body between someone and whatever threatens them, the way you threw yourself in front of me on the Larkin case and now.”

            Potter blinked at him, then bristled as though suddenly realizing he could. “I’m good at defensive magic.”

            “But you’re not good at applying it to yourself,” Draco said quietly, and thank Merlin, he had the right tone now, if the way Potter nodded was any indication. “I think we should practice.”

            Potter cocked his head. “You can come up with ways to practice something like that?” A hint of respect glimmered in the back of his eyes.

            Draco found that he was smiling. He enjoyed the way Potter respected him. He enjoyed being able to come up with solutions that Potter hadn’t, for things he might not even have realized were problems. Of course, some of that came from Draco’s different perspective and skills, and some were ideas that anyone could have suggested because Potter was a bloody idiot at times, but Draco was still the one who had Potter gazing at him like that.

            I would not give this up, if the Ministry offered me a trained and experienced partner who might guard my back better tomorrow.

            “Yes,” he said. “More easily than I can come up with constant, efficient, intelligent ways to rescue you.”

            “Ouch,” Potter said solemnly, but his smile had spread across his face now, and he lay back against his pillow as though Draco had eased his pain more than the Healer had. He paused a moment, gazing into the distance, and then said, “Yes, you need to know this, too. I had a really vivid dream while I was asleep. And I saw Lionel.”

            Draco narrowed his eyes. He would not react to that name the way he wanted to, with the Healer in the room. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter, and Potter had not watched his words and reactions, but Draco was not Potter, and that was the basis of their relationship. “Vane,” he said, and exhaled hard. “Alive?”

            “Well, he knew he’d died,” Potter said. “In the real world. He told—he told me that the world of the dream might become real, if I could learn the secret of the globes. He advised me to go back and talk to Leah.”

            Draco leaned towards him. “You think this is a side-effect of Alexander’s globes, and not a dream you would have normally?” he asked.

            Potter’s half-smile, uncertain and fragile from the first, narrowed. “Yes,” he said. “Because I don’t dream about Lionel that way all the time, you see, even with references to current cases running through my head. I have nightmares about him instead.”

            Draco ground his teeth. If they were alone, he could have explored that reference, demanded that Potter say what he really meant, drawn the history of the dreams out of him, and perhaps convinced him to speak to Healer Estillo about them, too, if he hadn’t already. It was one reason he had wanted to start combining their sessions. Not knowing how much Potter had shared about Vane with the Mind-Healer was driving him mad. Potter couldn’t heal without letting more people into the secret, Draco was certain, but he seemed to consider it some sort of betrayal of the dead.

            And the living. If one did know the truth behind his infatuation with Vane, it provided a channel of astonishing vulnerability into Potter.

            “All right,” Draco said. “Then we need to figure out why your reaction was different than those of the others who touched the globes and did have a reaction. And I have a list of the names we’ll need.”

            Potter smiled and started to sit up. “You’re amazing, Malfoy,” he said. “To gather that information and do it all on your own, or to remember to bring it—I wouldn’t have, when we went and talked to Leah.”

            Draco felt as though he had ascended a mountain and was standing breathless in the cold air at the top, to hear Potter’s compliment. He banished the sensation and took a step up, pushing Potter back into the bed. “You aren’t going anywhere yet. Healer Limerent has to make sure that you don’t have any other side-effects.”

            The Healer, who was very good at pretending to be professionally deaf whatever Draco might fear to trust her with, lifted her head with a tempered smile. “The samples of Auror Potter’s blood and flesh look normal, and the globe shard is only glass,” she said. “If he could cast for me, to make sure that nothing is different as far as that goes?”

            Potter nodded and took up his wand. Draco watched him covertly, wondering as he did so why he did so. No one would think it strange that he was deeply interested in the way his partner used magic, not when he had to trust in that magic to save his life.

            But others didn’t know the sensations that thickened his throat and blood when he watched Potter, the way he handled the wand as a natural part of his arm, the way the magic shone and foamed around him like a wave washing in from the ocean and the way that he seemed unaware of it. Did he know how powerful he was, and that other wizards didn’t live their lives like that, in the middle of a constant storm and dance of magic?

            I doubt he knows, Draco decided wisely. And I doubt he would try to do anything about it if he did. He thinks it—natural. He doesn’t think it’s something to be proud of.

            It was strange. Potter was pig-headedly obstinate, he was bloody-minded to the point of despair, but he wasn’t arrogant, not in the same way Draco had seen other wizards be arrogant. He seemed to think he had nothing in particular to be proud of, as a matter of fact, and would probably stare at people who told him he did.

            Meanwhile, Potter lifted his wand and pointed it at the far wall, saying with a calm that Draco had rarely heard from him, “Lux clara!”

            The light that hit the far wall with a roar came out of Potter’s wand like a ribbon of gold-white cloth stretched across the air, and threw the wall into sharp relief. Healer Limerent started to her feet, then pushed her loose brown hair back from her face and handed Potter a reserved smile. “That will do very well, Auror Potter. And if you can cast with that focus and power, then I will declare you recovered, and fit to fight for your life against Dark wizards if you want.”

            “I want,” Potter said, lowering his wand, but he was giving the holly wood a puzzled glance that Draco didn’t miss.

            “What is it?” Draco asked. He had learned never to leave things like that alone. Potter proclaimed the truths of his soul constantly, with his gestures and his expressions and his words, but let them fester too long and he would try to bury them the way a cat buried its shit.

            “I—don’t know,” Potter said. “I felt well, certainly. Better than well, better than I’ve felt in a while. As though some burden or shadow had been lifted from me.” He bit his lip and eyed his wand once more.

            “You weren’t holding your wand in the hand which the globe struck,” Draco said, half-closing his eyes so he could remember the scene with more accuracy. “Do you think it could have affected your wand in any way?”

            “The bond between the wizard and his wand can’t be changed in such a way,” Limerent interrupted, sounding dead certain. “I’ve worked with many patients over the years, and never encountered magic that could do such a thing from the outside. If it came in through the wand core or damaged the wood, yes, that would be something, but…”

            Draco ignored her and focused on Potter, on his expression, his account of the experience. The one thing he had learned for certain over the years was that nothing normal happened around Harry Potter. If a wizard’s bond to his wand could be changed or damaged by a twisted’s flaw, then that would happen to him.

            Potter stared at his wand, and said nothing. Then he shook his head and said, “No, it’s—it’s fine, I think, Draco. Really. I know I could cast an offensive spell and have it count.” He looked up and smiled at Healer Limerent. “But I don’t want to damage the office of the Healer who was intelligent enough to ignore St. Mungo’s strictures and help me.”

            He could quit the bloody flirting, Draco thought, but he nodded reluctantly. He had earned more of Potter’s trust than he had dared hope to retain, or perhaps it was the other way around, but he knew when he couldn’t push something. Potter would recover fully or not, but Draco had to trust his word for now.

            “We will go and speak with the people who were affected by the globes,” he told Potter firmly. “And hope that we can find someone who has a dream similar to yours.”

            Potter gave Draco a painful half-smile. “Not exactly similar, I hope. I hope no one else had to go through what I did when I lost Lionel.”

            Draco stepped towards him and lowered his voice. “You didn’t kill him. He chose not to trust you enough to rely on you completely anymore. You told the truth, and he punished you for it. He should have known you better, been enough your partner to know that you wouldn’t do anything to him that he didn’t want you to.”

            “The trust in a partnership goes both ways, though,” Potter said quietly, and his hand rose to brush against Draco’s arm. “I should have known him enough to know what he could handle, and that he wouldn’t be able to handle this.” He squeezed Draco’s arm. “Thank you for knowing me so well.”

            There was little that Draco could say to that, especially in front of Healer Limerent, however much he might want to. He ended up nodding curtly and then following Potter with his eyes towards the door of the Healer’s office.

            “He’s a rare one, isn’t he?” Limerent said softly, and Draco glanced sharply at her. She was looking after Potter, and there was an expression in her face that Draco might have been able to translate as wistful longing.

            Draco hurried after Potter, bristling. He didn’t know why, but she had made him feel that way.

            And as if he wanted to hurry up to Potter, spread out an arm, block him from sight, shield him from it.

            The next thing I know, I’ll be thinking that she’s in league with Alexander, he decided irritably, and deliberately kept several paces behind Potter until they were out of the office.

*

            unneeded: He did have a reason for doing it; he really thought he wouldn’t be harmed.

            SP777: Exactly. This is the point in the series where I don’t have to spend a whole lot of time catching (most of) the readers up.

            AlterEquis: He does have a lot of luck. Although maybe not this time.
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This Enchanted Life