Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Descent of Magic	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18803 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 25
- 26
- 27
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Six—Stunning

            Draco didn’t know how he had come so far, so fast, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to continue.

            But Potter was in front of him, his eyes shut as though he was drowning, his balance wavering back and forth. Draco swallowed, hard enough that he felt his own eyelashes flutter and brush Potter’s. If he stepped back, then Potter would fall to the floor. He was the only one holding him up right now, not his potion and not Potter’s own pride and not Potter’s own legs.

            Draco placed his hands slowly on either side of Potter’s mouth. He knew that touching Potter’s skin should repulse him—it was the way he had been raised, it was the way he thought—but those emotions didn’t come. Instead, what he felt was greed, a desire for more, to touch and take and keep going.



It had carried him this far.

            He wasn’t sure if it would bear him any further.

            But the moment between them had become intolerable. Draco could feel it grating on his nerves like broken glass. He needed to move somehow, say something. His hands trembled, and his fingers dug into Potter’s skin, and he wondered if he could get away with shoving him off. But he pictured Potter staggering and missing the couch, and if he hurt his knee, he knew that no one would let him near Potter again.

            He wanted…

            He didn’t want Potter’s laughter, or his scolding, or even for him to look at Draco with reproachful eyes because of what he had offered and what Potter had thought was free for the taking.

            Then there’s only one way out, and you know what it is.

            Draco stooped forwards and kissed Potter with all the patience he could summon, all the desire, and all the fear. He didn’t want Potter to laugh at him, and so he kissed him so well that Potter would have no choice but not to laugh, that he would have no choice but to kiss back. His hands would hold Draco’s, and his tongue would come out to find his, and he would moan if Draco tried to back away and leave him…

            And all of that was happening. Draco’s eyes shut and opened, and Potter’s tongue was still there, touching his, his grip still firm and steady and his moans still persistent. Draco shuddered and pressed into him, rubbing his hips back and forth before he thought about it. And Potter clung to him.

            Clung, and was supported, and didn’t fall. Draco didn’t hear laughter. He didn’t hear Potter dropping to the floor. He held him, and only staggered back to sit on the couch Highfeather had left when the pressure and the pleasure became overwhelming and he knew he would fall if he tried to keep standing.

            So good. This isn’t—this isn’t what I thought it would be. Sometimes Draco had imagined kissing another man, or kissing someone who wasn’t a pure-blood, and he had always expected to feel dirty, like he was sliding into hot mud. But this was just hot.

            Potter fell with him, and grunted as his knee hit the side of the couch. Draco immediately pulled back, prepared to apologize if he had to, prepared to do almost anything if Potter would simply say that he wasn’t hurt.

            And this is what you wanted to avoid. You wanted to not be dependent on him, and you wanted to maintain enough of a distance that—

            Except that there were no words after that. Draco couldn’t remember what he had wanted the distance for, and he still obeyed the rules his mother had taught him to follow, which was that it couldn’t be very important if he didn’t remember it.

            “You kiss so well,” Potter whispered against his lips, sounding a little drugged, a little awed.

            Draco drew him up again, reaching down to touch Potter’s leg beneath the knee. “You didn’t hurt your knee?” He sounded like a Healer, not a lover, even with Potter sitting in his lap, but Potter opened his eyes and gave Draco a shining smile despite that. Draco’s skin prickled. He was smiling back without reason or necessity, and that was once something he never would have done.

            “No,” Potter said. “It’s sweet of you to be concerned, though.”

            Sweet. The word set up a ringing dissonance throughout Draco’s skull, because it was the kind of word he would have rejected once for being too weak, and that his father certainly never would have tolerated being applied to him. Narcissa might have called Lucius sweet, maybe, when they were teenagers, but Draco found it hard to imagine.

            But you aren’t your father.

            The world seemed to shift and thump when he thought that. And Draco was Draco, sitting on a couch with Potter in his arms, a half-blood in his arms, a half-blood he’d just kissed. He shook his head, dazed. He wondered if he could get used to being Draco as well as Malfoy, a lover as well as a Healer and an ally.

            From the way that Potter was looking at him, a brilliancy to his eyes and face that Draco had never seen even when Potter could walk and fly unhindered, he at least knew there was someone who would help him.

*

            “Do you really think you should be doing that?”

            Harry glanced up with a smile. He had been smiling constantly since Draco kissed him. Since Draco had made it clear that at least part of this was his choice, and that meant Harry wasn’t as wrong in pursuing him as he would have felt otherwise.

            “It’s just moving a few dishes around,” he replied, and picked up the dinner that Kreacher had left on the kitchen counter. They hadn’t known how long Highfeather might want to stay, this first time, so Harry had asked Kreacher to prepare extra food and leave it behind under a Warming Charm. “Less distance than I carried the tray from the door to the couches in the drawing room today.”

            Draco took it from him. He walked over to the table and put it down without a word. Harry raised his hands and walked after him, sinking into his chair and stretching his leg out on the stool under the table when Draco glanced sternly at him.

            It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had to carry a dozen trays, Harry thought. He could have done it as easily as a dozen Snitches. Probably easier, since the trays wouldn’t be trying to get away from him.

            He was full of air, and light, and heat.

            Whenever Draco looked at him, even though the content of most of his looks was disapproving, Harry wanted to shut his eyes and sing. He had a smile on his face, and cushioning coldness and softness—or so it felt—around his knee, and a desire to see people so he could do something good for them. If Hugo had walked in through the door at that moment, Harry would make him welcome and not even ask him if he had reconsidered his attitude towards Harry from the past few days.

            Does Draco want to tell everyone else?

            Harry had to admit that he didn’t know that, not yet. But he would ask Draco before the evening was out, and the first rush of joy would fade a little, too. Then he could behave appropriately when Hermione came over to help them, or his children and nieces and nephews visited, or anything else happened.

            Some of them might think that there’s nothing appropriate about this.

            I don’t care, Harry replied as if to a conversation, watching Draco as he took the seat across from Harry. All that thinking, and he was still barely a few steps across the room. Harry’s mind raced faster, too, jumping between different subjects, giving him different things to dance with, making him breathless with play and possibility.

            He makes me happy.

            Draco leaned forwards and rapped his fingers in the middle of the table, as though he thought he needed to catch Harry’s attention, as though he believed it would have wandered. Perhaps because he realized in the next instant that Harry was gazing at him devotedly, he cleared his throat and said, “We need to discuss how this will work.”

            Harry nodded. “I understand. Would you rather not mention this to anyone yet? Or can I tell some people and not others? Or no one? I’ll do whatever you want to.” He could have run out into the garden and grabbed a broom and flown if Draco wanted him to. Perhaps, though, from the suspicious glances Draco kept darting at his knee, it might be better not to mention that yet.

            Draco leaned further back in his chair. Harry watched him, quietly. Once, that movement would have cut him, would have looked like a retreat, but now he had the necessary faith that Draco would come back.

            “I don’t know yet,” Draco said, his voice low and charged. “It would make things more difficult with Granger if she thought that we were snogging on the side and working to spread your theory at the same time.”

            Harry clucked his tongue. He didn’t know what Hermione would do, to be honest. She would have blasted people working for her in a political campaign for doing that, because there was the chance that their enemies would use it as criticism, but he was her friend, and she was more tolerant of Draco.

            “We can keep quiet about it for now, then,” he offered. “It does seem like it would cause problems right now, and Hermione might not be able to keep it from influencing how she treats you. But I want to tell my friends as soon as you grant me permission.”

            Draco frowned all the more fiercely. It was too late, though. Harry would never see his face as ugly or forbidding again, so if he was trying to achieve that, Harry thought happily, he might as well give up right now. “Why? You act as though they’ll be proud of you for snogging someone like me.”

            “I don’t know exactly what they’ll do,” Harry admitted. “I never did anything like this before.”

            “What’s this?” Draco lifted his nose until Harry could see up it, but Harry knew what that meant now, and it didn’t bother him.

            “Dated a bloke,” Harry said. “Dated someone we weren’t friendly with in school. It was just Ginny, and then it was divorce, and I haven’t gone out with someone since then.”

            Draco stared at him. “What? Why not?”

            “Have you gone out with anyone since you divorced Astoria?” Harry asked. “It’s like that. I didn’t want to. The divorce from Ginny wasn’t—unfriendly, but it made me feel bad anyway, because I wanted it to work out, and for our children always to have one house to come home to. They’ve been wonderful about it, and so has Ginny, but I felt that way. And then this happened.” He tapped his leg above his knee. “That didn’t leave me much time for dating or thinking about dating, either.”

            He stopped, because Draco was pressed into a corner of the chair, which meant he must have said something wrong without knowing it. “What is it?” he asked quietly, and leaned back himself, so Draco wouldn’t feel crowded.

*

            How can he just—talk like that? About everything that’s happened to him, about everything that matters to him?

            Draco didn’t know. But he thought Potter might expect the same of him, and that made his skin crawl. He wasn’t like that. Free, open, uninhibited, chattering. The secrets he had revealed to Astoria, he had done so because he believed that she should know the kind of man she had married, and that it wouldn’t be as glorious as some Malfoy marriages had been in the past, because Draco was not his father.

            Potter would never ask the same kind of thing of him. But his giving was a kind of taking at the same time, an offer that called for recompense.

            Potter studied him, and Draco sat there and struggled with his silence, because even an admission of this that seared him would come close to the openness he didn’t want to practice. And then Potter nodded, and said simply, “I think I understand. You don’t have to answer my questions, Draco. When I asked if you’d gone out with anyone since you divorced Astoria, it was a rhetorical question.”

            Draco flinched, and blurted it out before he could stop himself. “How can you talk to me like that? How can you answer all my questions and not ask for anything in return?”

            Potter blinked at him, and looked for a minute as though he didn’t know how to answer. Then he said, “Because I want to. Because talking to you like this makes me happy.” He ducked his head and peered up at Draco from under fluttering eyelashes. “You wouldn’t want me to make myself unhappy, would you?”

            Draco felt a violent ripple in his stomach at the thought. He shook his head, and unlocked his teeth. “I don’t know—I don’t know how long it could be until I’m comfortable talking to you, or comfortable with you telling your friends.”

            Potter reached across the table and touched the back of his hand again, one finger scraping up and down in a way that made Draco have to pull away, because it was driving him mad. Potter only smiled at him. “I know. But I think someday, you will be. And I’m willing to wait until you say that you’re comfortable.”

            Draco wanted to say something, but his tongue tangled around his teeth, and the words escaped him after all. He had to turn his head away, and Potter, after a few more touches to the back of his hand, changed the subject.

            “You don’t think Highfeather will be so offended with my refusal of her proposal that she’ll go out and gossip against us, do you? It was impossible for me to accept, but I don’t know how graceful the actual non-acceptance was.”

            Draco nodded and forced his lungs into motion again. “I don’t think so. She had to know it was a gamble, and if she told anyone else about it, she would have to reveal that she took that gamble and lost. Most pure-bloods don’t like the losers who take risks any more than they do someone who refuses them something they want.” He looked at Potter and forced some of the words loose, if not the ones that he knew Potter would most have liked to hear. “But you realize that it won’t keep someone else from asking.”

            “And I’ll refuse in the same way.” Potter seemed to not want to turn a hair this morning, which Draco found as provoking as anything else he could have done.

            “At some point, that will cause comment, and you’ll have to say why,” Draco pointed out.

            Potter shrugged. “I’ve been without a wife or a lover of any kind for years. It’s not strange to keep to that for a while. If anything, that would make them all the more determined to win me, I think, and see each other as competitors. If they battle each other instead of fighting us, that’s good.”

            Draco narrowed his eyes. “So you aren’t bad at politics after all. Why did you always say you were?”

            Potter snorted. “It was less saying than being. I can handle politics like this when someone else has trained me in them—and you have, and Hermione has.” Sharing the credit with Granger kept his face from stinging too much with the blush, Draco had to admit, however irritating it was in other ways. “When I was in the Aurors, the kinds of things I was expected to do had little to do with my job, sometimes. When they did, I usually excelled.”

            “You could become better than you are.”

            Potter shrugged. “I have experts around me already, and no reason why I should. Besides, that would probably ruin the image of the bumbling, good-natured lout that a lot of people have of me. They think I’m someone they can trick. They don’t have to know otherwise right away.”

            Draco said nothing. Potter was right, and if that fact lashed Draco, well, lots of things were doing so at the moment. If anything, he should be looking forward to the moment that those feelings dissolved and move on to other subjects.

            There was one thing he had to ask, however, no matter how difficult it was. He sat there and struggled, and Potter sat there and watched him, now and then eating a bite of the food that Kreacher had provided.

            “I don’t want to pretend when there’s no one else here,” Draco said at last. “I don’t want to only brew the potion for your knee and talk about Highfeather and our other enemies and the people who might disapprove of our—” There was no right word to talk about it, either. “Us,” Draco finished. “I want to snog you some more.”

            He was asking for other things, too, but Potter seemed to know that, if the soft, steady light that shone in his eyes as he looked at Draco was any indication.

            “Whatever you want,” Potter whispered, and stretched out a hand.

            Draco touched it, in return, clasped it and drew it to his lips, and that was, if nothing else this day had been, an overwhelming relief. And Potter kept watching him that way, face bright with the promise of more joys to come.

            It had been a long time since Draco had felt this kind of quiet delight, this eagerness to wake tomorrow. It was uncomfortable.

            But less uncomfortable than mistaking it for indigestion would have been. At least, this way, I won’t waste potions.

*

            moodysavage: No strangling! And Harry would consider tripping too forward, anyway.

            Goldpen: Thank you! I hope this chapter was to your liking.

            lividfire: Thank you!

            ChaosLady: What Harry wanted to do, definitely.

            TalisRuadar: I wanted to end the last chapter with the kiss, but Draco hadn’t quite talked himself into it.

            SP777: Draco would have wanted to if he was a little more confident!

            I’m not sure. There are some political stories I’ve written that didn’t get as good a response, and some non-political ones that got a better.
- 25
- 26
- 27
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Descent of Magic