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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Twenty—The Silver Cloak

            Draco stared for a second at the place where the slimy water had started to close back over Harry’s vanishing head, and then shook his own head briskly and reached for his wand.

            Obviously he couldn’t let this death stand. No one would ever believe that Harry Potter had been defeated by a pink leopard with a cloak on its head. They would accuse Draco of murdering him, and Draco probably couldn’t find his way back to this swamp, which probably wasn’t a real place anyway, and so he would go on trial, and into Azkaban, and all his parents’ peremptoriness in summoning him back would go for naught.

            He cast a stronger version of the spell he had used before to make himself bounce up from the floor of the swamp, but this time, he added a little extra twist that he had once heard Louis give it, when he wanted to prevent Draco from jumping into bed with him.

            The swamp water gurgled and snorted like someone with a complex digestive problem. Then out of it came flying the leopard, and the cloak, and Harry, although Harry’s arms were dangling by his sides and his face looked as though he had swallowed an alarming amount of liquid. Draco Summoned the cloak and created a Cushioning Charm against the branch of the tree that Harry was apparently headed for.

            Harry hit it with a soft thump, which was at least better than a meaty one, and started to slide down. Draco cast another charm that turned the surface of the swamp soft and welcoming, and by the time Harry hit it, he was breathing again. Draco nodded. He knew that all those thumps Harry had taken had to be good for something.

            As Harry turned on his side and spewed up a load of moss and slime, Draco turned his attention to the leopard.

            It hadn’t flown far. It stood on a branch, in fact, its tail writhing circles in the air above it, its eyes fixed unwinkingly on him.

            “I told you that color wasn’t good for camouflage,” Draco told it, and unfolded the silver cloak from his arm.

            The leopard’s eyes fixed on the cloak, and it growled again. Draco nodded. On the one hand, he didn’t like that this creature was intelligent enough to recognize a weapon that was dangerous to it. On the other, at least it was confirmation that the cloak was necessary, and probably not as a sodden blindfold.

            Draco took a teasing little step to the side. The leopard leaped up to another branch and then towards him, again, with that quicksilver motion.

            Draco whispered a spell. Nothing happened, at least to the unaided eye. The leopard gave a yowl that sounded smug as it flew forwards.

            The yowl choked off a little, and also sounded less smug, as it hit the invisible barrier in midair. Its legs folded beneath it, and it slid down until it splashed into the water. There it stood, shaking its head and snarling.

            Draco looked down at the cloak. He thought it was probably his imagination, but it seemed the cloak had trembled in his arms, as though it was a butterfly that wanted to spread its wings and fly.

            But it didn’t. And of course nothing as helpful as it taking off would actually happen.

            But that tremble had given Draco an idea. The leopard was already preparing to spring, shaking its legs and tail as though it had once again healed its wounds. If Draco’s idea didn’t make the cloak take up its intended purpose, it at least should have the merit of serving as a good distraction.

            Draco tapped the cloak and cast the Flying Charm. The cloak rose slowly from his arm, billowing, and Draco promptly cast more charms to remove the stains it had left behind from his skin. His robes would never the same, of course, no matter how many Cleaning Charms he used, but Draco was resigned to that at this point.

            The cloak swooped around him and brushed his face with one drooping fold; Draco jerked away in spite of himself from the warm touch of what felt like saliva on his cheek. The cloak whirled and faced the leopard as if Draco had given it a signal.

            And now it was billowing like a Lethifold, and the leopard was staring at it and making no sound, and Draco could feel the delighted grin creeping up his face. He leaped down from the tree root into the water and made his way over to Harry with large splashes, still casting Cleaning Charms but not taking his eyes off the unfolding drama. The cloak had risen higher as though considering the best way to attack, and the leopard had crouched down. Draco wondered if it was afraid at last.

            Then, once again, the leopard flew as if winged.

            Up and up and up it flew, and Draco wondered why it wanted to get close to the cloak when it could hurt it, until he saw the way the filtered light glinted off the leopard’s claws. He stared. What would happen when the leopard stuck its claws in the cloak and started to rip the wolf fur to shreds?

            The cloak didn’t wait to find out. It whirled around and fled through the tree branches. The leopard touched down on one of them for a moment, shook itself as though it had just woken, and then followed.

            “Draco?”

            Draco turned his attention back to where he reckoned it should probably already have been, on Harry. Harry reached out a shaking hand, and Draco knelt down in front of him and took it. He tried to smile reassuringly, but from the way Harry eyed him sideways, Draco wasn’t sure he succeeded.

            “What happened to the leopard?” Harry whispered. He glanced around, then added, “And the cloak? Did you save me from drowning?”

            “I must admit that that was one of my many daring exploits,” Draco said modestly. “How do you feel?”

            “Like I’m going to have mosquitos hatching in my lungs soon,” Harry said, and rolled over, and hacked. Draco took a prudent step back from the grey water that trickled out of his mouth, although, when he thought about it, it wasn’t much different from all the other water that was seething around his ankles. “But thank you for saving my life.” He blinked at Draco. “But you didn’t answer my other questions about the leopard and the cloak.”

            Draco opened his mouth.

            Then they reappeared and answered the question themselves. The cloak skimmed like a kite around the same branches it had vanished between, making tight turns that Draco sighed with envy at. If he could have mountain-skimmed like that, he would have won that last race with Sylvie, and wouldn’t have had to listen to her bragging for the next fortnight.

            Behind the cloak came the leopard, bounding off the branches and ricocheting off the trunks with reflexes faster than Draco knew his were, and he wasn’t even sure about Potter’s. The leopard’s mouth was open, and it made a trilling, purring noise that caused Draco to wince. It seemed likely that the leopard would win the race, and catch up the cloak in a moment, and slash through it the way it had already tried to do.

            “Draco!”

            Harry’s arms grabbed him around the waist, and although he would have been thrilled about that ordinarily, Draco had been watching the chase. He turned to Harry with his mouth open, about to ask why Harry was so determined to pull him back under the surface of the water that Draco had just put great effort into escaping from.

            But they splashed down before Draco could ask, and he slammed his mouth shut before anything could crawl inside. Treading water, he looked up in time—

            In time to see the contest reverse.

            No matter how unnecessary he thought Harry’s dive had been, he had to forgive it, because he got to see this.

            The cloak had turned around just above the water. It was flapping slowly, new wings out to the side now, steadier ones than it had had so far. And it no longer looked like a kite, and as much as was possible with something that didn’t have eyes or a face, either, it looked angry.

            The leopard had come to rest on a huge stump, with the rest of the tree lying somewhere in the desolate mossy water behind it, perhaps four meters away. It stared at the cloak and shot its claws in and out. The purring, trilling sound had faded without a trace.

            Then the cloak shot forwards.

            The leopard rose and zigzagged away, ridiculous pink tail trailing behind it, but just as it had given the cloak a challenge in speed, the cloak could do the same thing. Up and around they went, at times almost vanishing into the sky above the swamp—as much as a giant pink cat and a silver wolfs-hair cloak could vanish, anyway—and at other times skipping across rocks and blowing through great billows of water.

            Draco laughed, and continued laughing as Harry lifted his head from the swamp and stared. That might have had something to do with the curl of moss that was hanging around Harry’s ear, too. Draco reached up and started plaiting it into Harry’s hair, and Harry reached up and swatted his hand away.

            “What are they doing?” Harry whispered. “What was the point of the first chase they had if the cloak could turn around and do this any time?”

            “I think, if you want my considered opinion,” Draco said, and then paused so Harry would look at him.

            Harry turned and frowned at him. “Yes? What?”

            “I think the cloak was fucking with its head,” Draco confessed, leaning near enough that he could have kissed Harry if Harry had wanted to cross the last small space that separated them.

            Harry scowled at him and chose to turn back to the chase instead. Draco again looked up as another interesting thing happened.

            The leopard had returned to a crook of a tree, where it had backed itself so that its hindquarters were up against the wood and relatively thick leaves shielded it from above. It was snarling, and its hair stood on end on its tail, and it would have looked more impressive if it wasn’t so pink.

            “Why is it pink, anyway?” Draco asked Harry in a mutter.

            “I made it out of a rose petal,” Harry snapped back.

            Draco raised his eyebrows and turned back as the cloak dived down and rose cradling a huge overflow of swamp water in the center of itself. The leopard spat in response, and then seemed prepared to abandon its defensive position after all and soared outwards, paws spread as though to embrace death.

            The cloak embraced it instead, winding around the leopard’s head and neck and front legs the way that Harry had tossed it the first time. This time, though, Draco imagined there was rather more of the swamp inside the cloak with it, and from the panicked thrashings the leopard was doing, it also couldn’t breathe.

            They both fell into the water then, and the cloak seemed to have lost its ability to fly. Instead, it simply wrapped tighter and tighter around the leopard, fold after fold after fold. The silver gleam dulled. The leopard slowly stopped moving.

            For a few seconds, they floated together in what Draco had to think of as a perfect symbiosis. He hoped they could keep the cloak afterwards. Cleaned of swamp water, it could come in useful.

            But both cloak and leopard dissolved like mist on a hot day, and merged. A silver rose, entirely artificial if the way its stem and petals curled was any indication, bobbed on the water where it had been, instead.

            Harry coughed. Draco patted his back, while Summoning the rose. He didn’t want to wade back into the middle of a small whirlpool to get it, and he hoped this way, they would get it before it sank, which would be the usual fate of a metallic rose in the middle of a swamp.

            When the rose landed in his hand, however, Draco gasped and held it to his face before he thought about it. Harry rolled his eyes audibly beside him. “It’s not going to have a scent, you know,” he pointed out. “Being made of metal and all.”

            “Shut up,” Draco said, and suited his actions to words with a cuff on the back of Harry’s head. “I was just thinking about how light it was.”

            Then he tucked it away into one of the bags hanging from his belt that he’d brought for that purpose and turned to Harry. “All right,” he said. “So I want to know. Why a rose petal?”

            Harry stared at him for a second, then shook his head. His hair was slick on one side and half-green, Draco saw, and a tendril of a creeper had wound about his neck. Draco pulled it gently free, keeping a stern eye on Harry all the while, in case he tried to avoid answering the question.

            “Why are you so surprised?” Harry asked. “I had to have eight objects that were different colors to make the parts of the chain ritual. I already had brown and white and red and other things that were more natural colors for animals. I don’t think a rose leopard is any worse than a blue eagle or a silver horse.”

            “A pink leopard.”

            “It was rose,” Harry said, and nodded at the bag that Draco had put the silver rose into, as though that was some kind of proof.

            “Whatever it was,” Draco said firmly, “it was silly, and you’re not to do it again.”

            Harry spent a moment blinking at him before he broke out into a grin. Draco bent down and tapped Harry in the middle of the lightning bolt scar, purely to see his eyes cross.

            “What was that for?” Harry asked.

            “For your silly grin,” Draco said, and Harry’s smile broadened. “Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life following you around rescuing you from—”

            “It seems to me that you already volunteered,” Harry pointed out. “At least, if you were serious about following me around after I go back to being an Auror and helping me with those cases of people becoming Dark Lords.”

            “You didn’t let me finish,” Draco said, although he could feel a fluttering pulse of warmth behind his heart. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life following you around and rescuing you from pink leopards. I refuse to be part of anything so ridiculous, and I would condone being ridiculous because my mere presence would lead people to assume that I am part of it. I refuse. Do you understand?”

            Harry was smiling up at him, and his smile had gone gentle in a potentially embarrassing way. Luckily, Draco thought, his own voice had an embarrassingly affectionate tone, so as far as that went, they were at least well-matched.

            “I do,” Harry whispered, and hesitated for a second. Draco looked around. He couldn’t see anything else in the swamp, and in any case, every next magical animal they’d met as part of the chain ritual lived in a different kind of landscape.

            “What?” Draco whispered back, when the hesitation had gone too long for it to be out of fear. At least, the normal kind of fear.

            “I want to kiss you,” Harry said, in the same kind of whisper, more worried than afraid. “But I know that I had my mouth full of swamp water, and that might have given me permanent halitosis. Do you still want to try it?”

            Draco leaned down and answered the question with his lips and tongue instead of words, because most of the time words only led to misunderstandings between him and Harry. Harry sighed beneath him, his hands reaching up to get tangled in the hair at Draco’s neck. Draco tensed for a second, because he remembered that his hair had got wet at some point, but then, so had Harry’s hands and his clothes, and at least Draco’s hair would be the same again once he took a shower. He kissed back and pressed into the hold.

            Harry finally leaned away from him, still kneeling on the surface of the water that Draco had turned into a springy mattress to catch him. He cleared his throat. Draco took the chance to admire him. Harry looked gorgeous like that, he thought, still with his face all wet on one side and his mouth and eyes shining and wet in the middle of everything.

            “This is still kind of weird for me,” said Harry.

            “I know,” Draco said, and patted his hand. “For me, too. I had lots of lovers when I was on the Continent, but most of them weren’t the sort I met in the middle of cleaning up their mistaken magical rituals.”

            “Lots of lovers?” Harry’s voice had deepened a little.

            Draco blinked innocently at him. “No one current. Except for you, of course, if you want to take the position.”

            Harry flushed, but said, “I just—I don’t know if I can compete with the kinds of lives they must have led.”

            Draco’s lip quivered, but he managed to fight down the laughter that would otherwise have come bursting out. “Yes, of course,” he said gravely. “I can see that. After all, defeating a Dark Lord and a basilisk and being the youngest Seeker in a century and dying to save the wizarding world are what everyone’s doing these days.”

            Harry stared up at him. “But you said you hated that side of me.”

            Oh. Draco understood Harry’s insecurity now, and knew it wasn’t really about competing with Draco’s past lovers, so as much about competing with Draco’s past image of him. He shook his head and touched the back of Harry’s neck. “I hate the way you sometimes misuse it,” he said, “to try and sacrifice yourself. I think that you should remain alive a lot longer, and continue to delight the world.” He bent down so that his lips were next to Harry’s ear. “And me.”

            Harry’s returning kiss said he had forgotten all about the swamp water, and Draco was glad.

*

            Seiren: Draco will always be raising an eyebrow at that.

            delia cerrano: I think you might like Chapter 21 even more.

            SP777: If Draco knows he’s not going to be bored, then he’ll rush forwards to embrace whatever the day offers.

            And I haven’t watched the GoT show, but I have read the books. I like them.

            polka dot: But so are silver cloaks!
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A Black Stone in a Glass Box