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Nature of the Beast	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 48976 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two—Fates and Fears
            Draco came down on Potter with his mind blazing and his hands curving in front of him like talons. How dare he deny Draco, how dare he hold back and be different just the way that he was always doing and humiliate Draco in public—
            But Potter had rolled as Draco landed on him, and Draco didn’t simply bear him to the floor the way he’d planned. Instead, he found Potter’s wand jammed into his neck, and Draco gasped out and tried to catch a breath. His wings beat frantically, holding most of his weight up in the air. He pulled away from the wand at last.
            That gave him another problem, though. Without most of his weight on Potter, Potter sprang to his feet again, and retreated through a fairly wide space. His mouth was open in what looked like a snarl. Draco’s skin crawled as he stared into Potter’s teeth. Potter looked as if he would lunge and tear through Draco’s feathers instead of caressing them. Draco found himself landing and shrinking back, pulling his wings in close to his body.
            Then he felt what he was doing, and anger ripped away his fear.
            Dominant Veela do not yield.
            He spread his wings out again, and said in a voice that felt strangled with his rage, “Do you realize that we’re in public, Potter? That you could earn a violent reputation for attacking someone who has the right to claim you?”
            “I don’t know about Veela having the right,” said Potter, and his eyes and his snarl that made him look so uncouth didn’t disappear. “I never heard of it. Do you realize that you just attacked me in public, and that if I pressed charges, your feathered little arse would be in Azkaban this time tomorrow?”
            Draco stared back at him in silence. He really had no idea what to say. Mates didn’t—mates weren’t—
            “You don’t need to insult me like that,” he finally whispered. The insults hurt, sinking into his body as though Potter had jabbed shards of glass into his abdomen. Mates didn’t insult their Veela, that was the most important thing. Maybe they did fight and resist sometimes, although Draco had never heard of such a thing. But he and Potter had a history, and that would make some things different.
            Perhaps. Why did I have to be the exception?
            The insults, though, made Draco want to tear his wings off. He caught his breath and said, “Please don’t insult me like that,” in what he thought was a more normal tone of voice.
            “Why not?” Potter glared at him. He was standing there with his elbow cocked and his wand still aimed at Draco. His friends stood behind him, gaping. Everyone else in the Atrium watched with breathless interest. Draco’s cheeks burned to think that this would be all over the papers tomorrow. Of course, he had wanted it to be when he thought he would be claiming Potter, but… “You insulted me. You said that I should crawl at your feet, and you expected me to just accept this strange medallion being put over my head. You should have known how I would react to that, when I get poisoned gifts all the time.”
            The feathers on the edges of Draco’s wings stood straight up and solidified; Draco felt their weight grow. He screeched this time, a low, rising sound that tore out of his chest. Potter stared at him some more.
            “Who did that to you?” Draco whispered. He knew, somewhere at the forefront of his mind, that he should be more concerned about the fact of Potter’s resistance and the fact of their eagerly watching audience, but right now, right at this moment, all he could think was that Potter had been hurt by other people who had no right to do that to Draco’s chosen.
            “Lots of people,” said Potter slowly. “I can’t give you all their names. The Aurors handled some of the cases. Why do you care, anyway?”
            “It’s my part to protect you.” Draco held up his hands, partially because he wanted to rejoice in feeling that particular weight for the first time, and partially to show Potter the claws that his fingernails had curved into. “As your dominant, I have to be the one who stands up in front of dangers and says that they can’t come any further to harm you. That’s what I want to do. What I was born for.”
            He felt as if he could balance atop the flow of fury through him now, the way he could dance atop a lava flow with his wings. How dare someone turn against the man who had made this peace possible, who was Draco’s? He could find them and tear them apart like paper. He could part steel walls and wards like curtains of grass to get to them. His wings and his pulse and his breath all trembled in response to the same rhythm.
            “Malfoy. You don’t even know me.”
            “I know that you’re my mate. That’s all I need to know.”
            Potter stared back at him wordlessly, and then his friend Granger stepped forwards and interfered. Draco showed her his teeth and the edges of his wings, but she didn’t seem impressed.
            “You’re holding up the ceremony,” she said. “Let’s let the Ministry do what needs to be done, and then maybe we can go somewhere and talk about this.” The way she looked at Draco said that she intended to be the one doing the talking.
            Draco bowed sarcastically to her and stepped back. His dream of claiming Potter in public had collapsed in folly. He would let the Ministry ceremony, far emptier than the ceremony of placing his gift around his mate’s neck, proceed.
            But he wouldn’t retreat into the background. He remained standing next to Potter as the Minister, shaking his head, gave a prepared little speech, and Potter gave a prepared little speech, and the Minister pinned the medal on him, and they both flashed smiles for the clicking cameras.
            Draco could hear the buzz of rapid conversation from near the back of the room, but no one had so far stepped forwards and accosted him. Why would they? Most people here were either pure-bloods or half-bloods who knew wizarding traditions. They knew what a great honor being chosen by a Veela was. They knew the natural way to react.
            Hell, even Weasley knew.
            It was a sad day when a Malfoy thought he would rather have a Weasley for a mate than the one destiny had placed him with.
            But then Draco looked at Potter’s face again, shining with determined pleasure as he stepped backwards and let his friends come forwards to receive their own Orders of Merlin, and his mouth filled with a slippery, sour taste. His hands grew heavy with the desire to press and bend and hold.
            No, Potter was his mate, that much was clear. And Draco wouldn’t give him up, and he didn’t want anyone else.
            The only mystery was why Potter didn’t feel the same way.
*
            Harry stalked into the anteroom where he and Amalantha had stood before the ceremony, feeling as though his blood was humming through his veins. The Order of Merlin banging back and forth on his chest comforted him. He turned around and folded his arms and stared at Malfoy, who was having trouble fitting through the door until he remembered to lower his ridiculous wings.
            Harry curled his lip a little. Putting aside everything else, Ginny and wanting to be with someone he loved and being busy right now and Malfoy being a bloke and being someone he used to hate, Harry wasn’t sure that he wanted a “mate” who didn’t have the common sense to think about the problems his wings could cause indoors.
            Malfoy stood near the door, barely shifting aside so Ron and Hermione could come in, or Kingsley follow them. His eyes had decided to be wide and unblinking again, and they were focused on Harry’s face. Harry sighed and turned to Ron.
            “You said that I should have been submissive and Malfoy should be dominant,” he said. “As if that’s the way it always happens. Explain.”
            Ron sighed noisily and folded his arms. “Because that’s the way it’s always been, mate. It’s like girls—women,” he hastily corrected himself, at a significant elbow-twitch from Hermione, “being able to have children. That’s the way it is. Something natural. You have to have a man and a woman in a relationship to get the woman pregnant and have a child, right? It’s the same thing with Veela. You have to have a submissive and a dominant.”
            “This had better not end with talk of me being pregnant,” Harry muttered.
            “Er,” said Ron, and turned red enough that Harry seriously considered drawing his wand and blasting Malfoy to smithereens. But Ron saved Malfoy’s life by blurting out, “No, there’s no pregnancy, but you do have to have a submissive and a dominant to create the egg.”
            “You make it sound so ungraceful,” said Malfoy.
            “You owe him a life-debt,” Harry told him. “Treat him nicer.”
            “What?”
            Harry shook his head. He could hardly expect Malfoy to keep up with his own private thoughts. “Look, Malfoy, I have no idea what went wrong here, but obviously something did, right? Because you should have a submissive mate, and that’s not me.” He had to admit, his skin crawled with the sympathy he felt for the other poor bastard, whoever it was, but presumably that person would welcome being Malfoy’s toy. “You can’t—reproduce without the right person, and that matters.”
            “It’s more than that,” said Malfoy, those wings of his beginning to beat again, the feathers trembling in a way that blurred them. “I need you to give me someone to defend, someone to love, someone to—”
            “But it went wrong this time,” Harry interrupted brutally. “I don’t know why, but it did.”
            “I think I know why.”
            Harry turned to Hermione with a sense of relief, ignoring how Malfoy sneered at her. The disgraceful way that Malfoy treated his best friends was number two on the long list of reasons that he and Harry were not going to be together, but at least Harry would only have to put up with it for a few more minutes. “I knew you’d have the answer. Why?”
            Hermione blushed, but looked at Ron. “I didn’t actually hear about this before, and Fleur doesn’t require the same thing of Bill. But it happens with full-blooded Veela, not quarter-Veela, right, Ron?” Ron nodded, and Hermione continued, her voice gaining confidence. “So people who were raised in wizarding society accept it the way it is. Natural. The same way that so many people in Muggle societies in the past believed that all women were naturally submissive and—oh, it depended on the period of history, but they could believe that they were naturally good mothers, or naturally evil, or naturally sexual.” Hermione was blushing a bit more, but she forged right ahead. “Women who weren’t like that were unnatural. At least, other people thought they were, and even some women who wanted different things were taught that that was wrong, and so they thought they were wrong.”
            “No offense, Hermione, but I’m not a woman,” Harry had to point out. This sounded far too close to Malfoy’s plan to make him into something he wasn’t, and he didn’t want Malfoy to get more ideas.
            Hermione shook her head impatiently at him. “But don’t you see? Someone who had been raised in a different culture would have thought that was odd, the way those people in the past thought about women. And it’s the same way here. Maybe someone who was raised in the wizarding world would think it was completely natural to be a Veela’s submissive mate, and would feel they had to be submissive the instant they realized the Veela was dominant. But you were raised in the Muggle world.”
            Harry cocked his head. Yes, that would explain some things. It didn’t happen all the time, and when it did he was mostly able to put it down to his own ignorance, but now that he thought about it, he could remember other times when he’d done something that made people like Ron or Neville gape at him. It was easy to laugh off when it didn’t concern his bloody freedom, like this did.
            He turned around and gave Malfoy a stern look. “Well, there you have it, then. You can’t have what you want from me because I wasn’t raised that way. Go away and bother someone else.”
            Malfoy’s face was utterly stricken. He reached out one hand, as though he was going to take Harry’s, and then dropped it and hunched away from him. “But that’s not the way it is,” he whispered. “This is something inborn. Natural. Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel dominant.”
            Harry decided to ignore that. It didn’t make sense, and it only meant that Malfoy couldn’t have been listening closely to Hermione, or he would know already that he “felt” dominant because he thought he should. “Well, you’d be happier with someone who could feel submissive the way you want, right? Not with me.”
*
            Draco wondered how in the world this had all gone so wrong, and what kind of twisted thinking growing up in the Muggle world taught you, if this was the way that they reacted to all obstacles.
            He shook his head and bore in. “My instincts are fine. They wouldn’t have told me that you were my mate if you weren’t. Instincts are natural. Inborn. They can’t be fooled by things like what sort of family raised you. You would still be my mate if my family hadn’t raised me or if we had never been rivals or if you had never been the Boy-Who-Lived.”
            Potter snorted, his eyes hard and unyielding. That was so wrong for the eyes of a submissive that Draco had to look away. “How can you know that? I would have been so different without Voldemort trying to kill me, if that never happened, if my parents never died—” This time, he was the one who cut himself off, glancing away and shrugging. “How did you learn that I was your mate? Who told you that? Can’t you just go back and ask them to find you a different mate, one who would actually be glad to be with you?”
            “You’re not listening,” Draco snapped. And that was another unnatural thing, that a submissive wouldn’t hang on any word his dominant said. It was one reason that Draco had been so glad when he found out he was dominant, so that he could have an audience. “It wasn’t anyone outside my head. It was my instincts. The day you turned eighteen, this formless anxiety that had been drifting around inside my mind sharpened and clarified. I woke up whispering your name. That was how I knew.”
            Potter didn’t look impressed. If anything, his lip curled. “And you knew my birthday, right?”
            Draco stared at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”
            “What would have happened if you didn’t?” Potter folded his arms. “Would you still have woken up on your mate’s birthday? On my birthday, assuming that we entertain the mad position that I am your mate for a second? Would you have known the day? I’m wondering if that stupid celebration that made front page of the Prophet that day influenced you at all, or knowing that was the date I was born. If you wanted me as a mate, maybe your instincts just picked that day, and it only felt natural to you.”
            “That’s not the way it works.” Draco gestured violently between them, although only a few hours ago, he would have been unable to imagine doing that to his mate. But this was going all wrong, tumbling to the floor in wrecked pieces. “I don’t want you as a mate! Look how horribly it’s going already! My instincts just chose you because you were the right one!”
            “It is horrible,” said Potter. “So find someone else.”
            “I can’t.” Draco gripped his hair and turned away. His wings were vibrating around him now, a betrayal of his emotions that he wanted to stop. But maybe his mate would feel sorrier for him if he saw that. “You’re it, Potter. If you refuse…I don’t know exactly what will happen. Because no one refuses.”
            “This time, it’s happening. I think Hermione’s right.” Draco heard Potter shift his weight, probably leaning back towards his friends and away from Draco just to show that he could. “I wish you luck in finding a mate who was raised in the wizarding world, but that’s not me.”
            Draco shook his head. His wings beat faster and faster, fast enough now that his feathers were starting to hurt. He raised one hand, and found it on his face, digging into the skin of his cheeks, digging for his eyes.
            “Mr. Malfoy!” That was Shacklebolt. He muttered a spell, and a second later, Draco’s hands were chained in front of him, bound by heavy cuffs that meant he couldn’t reach his face.
            Draco bowed his head and moaned. His wings kept fanning, and the Minister muttered another spell. That bound his wings closely to his side, but that didn’t make Draco feel any better. His stomach was churning with nausea now.
            “There is a legend,” he heard Weasley shout, sounding alarmed. Over him. Draco knew he should feel amused, but that was only a faint urge among the much stronger ones sweeping him. “That if a dominant Veela can’t get to his mate or can’t find them or can’t protect them, they try to destroy themselves. Or combust from the inside. Or something.”
            There is that legend, Draco thought distantly, numbly. He hadn’t connected it to the probable consequences of a mate refusing his dominant, which had never happened.
            “Harry, mate, do something!”
            Draco felt blackness creeping in around the corners of his vision. His gut’s churning got worse. Draco hadn’t eaten anything this morning, as was traditional with this rite of courtship; the first meal he would eat with his mate, and feed to him, would also be Draco’s first meal of the day. Otherwise, he would surely have vomited by now.
            “What am I supposed to do?” he heard Potter yell. “I can’t just feel like his slave! He would probably know I was lying.”
            I would, Draco agreed silently. But it might feel good anyway.
            Then he slumped to the floor, and then there was a noise like ringing glass, and pain in his wings, and then he passed out.
*
BAFan: Thank you!
SP777: For Harry, I think so, but not for Draco.
delia cerrano: Thank you! Harry is embarrassed, too, but mostly because of the way Draco is behaving.
Kain: As you can see from this chapter, Draco had no idea that things wouldn’t go his way. It just has never happened before.
And the Aurors and others did hesitate to interfere because most of them know you aren’t supposed to interfere between a Veela and his mate.
Eros: Thank you!
CareLessLover: Thank you!
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Nature of the Beast