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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Twenty-Seven—All the Madness of Desire

            “I’ve told you already, Granger.” Malfoy’s voice was low and tense, and made Harry clench his teeth just listening to the words. “I can’t remember the exact moment that I cast the spell. I know I cast it in frustration, because I’d already tried several tactics to get Potter to pay attention to me, none of which worked. That’s all I can tell you.”

            “There must be more than that,” Hermione said. Her voice was so calm and studious that Harry could almost have believed she didn’t resent the harsh words Malfoy had flung at her. On the other hand, it was too calm. “Mere frustration wouldn’t cause the things Harry experienced in these dreams. Unless you were thinking of choking him because he frustrated you so?” Her voice ran with an undercurrent of amusement that Harry thought was entirely inappropriate. “I can understand that desire.”

            I’m right here, Harry wanted to say, but he thought that would hurt more than help. He scrubbed the back of his neck with one hand instead and tried to think of more memories he could pluck out of his dreams and put in the Pensieve, ones that would let Hermione and Malfoy understand what had happened.

            He already had the conversation with dream-Hermione in there, since it was the last experience he’d had before he woke up. After some thought, he had added the part where dream-Ron told him all the world would have been different if he’d been there, as well, though he couldn’t imagine what good it would do. But that was the point. They didn’t have enough answers about the dreams, and they might stumble on an answer without knowing they had clues that pointed to one.

            But what else?

            His awareness of Hermione and Malfoy’s voices had retreated again; it returned with some force when Hermione’s voice abruptly rose. “If you imagine for one second that Harry wants you—”

            “You must admit, Granger, that the moaning of my name is suggestive.”

            Harry turned to see Malfoy leaning back on the couch in Ron and Hermione’s living room that sat closest to the fireplace, his arms folded across his stomach and a faint smile on his face. It didn’t take a genius to read the hard glitter in his eyes, though, and know the smile wasn’t a friendly one.

            “He was moaning your first name,” Hermione said. “The one he thinks of the Malfoy in his dreams by. I don’t think you can assume that he wants you, either.” She turned to Harry, red blotches of anger standing out on her face. Well, at least she isn’t getting along perfectly with him this time and leaving me out like the child they both think I am, Harry thought, knowing all the while it probably wasn’t the most mature thing in the world, to be this amused by his friend’s predicament. “Tell him, Harry. You call him Malfoy, and the one you knew in the dreams Draco. Why?”

            “It was a way to distinguish them, since I started having the dreams right after Malfoy approached me to practice Quidditch with him,” Harry said. “And because the one in the dreams was younger than me, in every sense of the word. It seemed appropriate to call him by his first name while he was still referring to me by my last.”

            Malfoy snorted, a sound so deep that it could respectably have come from a horse. “You can imagine that I won’t stand for that,” he snapped. “I’m not younger than you in any sense of the word—I am, in fact, two months older—”

            “How do you know that?” Harry interrupted. He could see Hermione rolling her eyes, but she didn’t attempt to interrupt yet, which meant she didn’t consider the argument serious, which meant he and Malfoy could say what they liked to each other.

            “Everyone knows when your birthday is, prat,” Malfoy said, with a look of slow-burning contempt that made it seem as if having a birthday that was public knowledge ranked a person one step lower than a Muggle in his estimation. “And I should emphasize that I know the hour and minute when I was born, not simply the day, which I know is more than you do.”

            “Fine,” Harry said, through clenched teeth. “But this has nothing to do with thinking that you’re younger than I am. It was the dream-Draco.”

            “Who wasn’t entirely separate from me,” Malfoy reminded him. “Granger seems to think that you desire to save someone and my desire to be closer to you collided, and created a situation where you would be rescuing the Malfoys.”

            Harry nodded tightly. “Separate entities from you, if I’m remembering what you told me about the dream correctly. Fictional entities. I don’t know why you reacted to me talking about Draco that way.”

            “He’s the only version of me that you’ve wanted so far.” Malfoy shrugged his shoulders with a single intense rippling movement, his eyes never turning from Harry’s face. “I thought that I could guess your taste from that. You want someone innocent, someone dependent on you.”

            Harry shook his head fiercely. “Once again, you assume things without giving me a chance to explain them,” he said. “That’s exactly what I don’t want, now—what I thought was attractive about Draco, and then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t. Draco can’t give me a challenge. He was someone I didn’t know or understand, because I didn’t know his history or all the ways that the dreams differ from my history. But I built up a fantasy image of him, and that’s what I was admiring and worshipping. Plus his admiration of me,” he added. “I don’t really know why I got so caught up in it. You’d think I would hate that kind of thing, since it’s all my fans can offer me.”

            “I can promise you that I will never admire or worship you unconditionally,” Malfoy said with a solemn air. “As long as you don’t think I should, then we should be fine.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Seven years of hatred, put behind us like that?”

            “I hardly think so,” Malfoy said, and smiled at him, “given the way we’re arguing now.”

            Harry snorted and started to respond, but Hermione interrupted them with a growl that made it sound as if she’d been wanting to leap in for years. “Are we going to examine these memories, or not?”

            Harry pushed the Pensieve towards her and then glanced at Malfoy. “Why don’t you just put the memory of the moment when you cast the spell into the Pensieve, too? That ought to answer Hermione’s questions about what you were feeling when you cast it.”

            Malfoy looked at him as though he was the biggest idiot in the universe. “Because the Pensieve only shows you the memory from the outside,” he said patiently. “It would show me waving the wand and mouthing the incantation, yes. It wouldn’t say anything about whether I felt frustration, resentment, or something else most strongly at that moment.”

            Harry ducked his head down and shrugged. He’d known that. “I knew that,” he muttered, because Malfoy was still staring at him.

            Malfoy rolled his eyes and started to say something else, but Hermione intervened with another growl and dragged the Pensieve closer, plunging her head into it. Harry didn’t try to follow, although Malfoy did. He had no interest in Malfoy‘s reaction to the memories—he would hear all about it later—and already knew what his dreams looked like all too well.

            He watched Malfoy’s bowed head instead and sighed. He didn’t like the git, but the possibility of attraction wasn’t as foreign as it had seemed at first, not if he had been infatuated with Draco and felt the first stirrings of excitement when he watched Malfoy turn his head or clench his jaw or swallow.

            He still didn’t know what to do about them.

            Wait. See what happens. In the end, that was all he could do, and Harry closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair with his feet splayed out in front of him, waiting for the moment when Hermione and Malfoy returned to the world.

*

            “They were wrong.”

            Harry must have succumbed to a light doze, because when he opened his eyes, the angle of the light on the ground had changed and Hermione and Malfoy both had their heads out of the Pensieve and were staring at him. Hermione looked serious and earnest, and Malfoy’s eyes were utterly flat. He was the one who’d spoken.

            “Who was wrong?” Harry knuckled sleep out of his eyes and yawned. He felt as if he were the one who had plunged his head into the Pensieve, and drops of dreams and memory clung to the corners of his brain.

            “The Weasel and Granger in the dreams, who wanted you to stay and fight for them,” Malfoy said bluntly. “Tell me that you didn’t consider believing them.”

            “For a little while,” Harry said. “But then I realized that there are some fights that they’ll have to handle themselves. Hermione will be all right. She can force Discipula to do what she should have done long ago—at least according to Hermione—and earn more rights for Muggleborns while she’s at it. Ron has information, too, and he can use it to earn some distinction for himself. I don’t know if he will,” he added wryly, thinking of the way that Ron had leaned over him and practically yelled into his face. Harry had had more time to consider that reaction later, and he was ninety percent certain that behind Ron’s anger had been fear. He had been handed a tool that would change the future, and he had no idea what to do with it. “But I’ve given him the choice.”

            Malfoy went on staring for a few seconds, as if it was a matter of personal importance to him whether Harry believed that or not, and finally grunted and leaned back in the chair himself. Harry turned to Hermione.

            “Did you find out anything about why I might have woken choking?” he asked.

            “I saw a very disturbing vision of myself, and I’m afraid that distracted me at first,” Hermione said wryly, touching her hair as if she was thinking about the other Hermione’s hairstyle and glad that she didn’t wear it that way. Then she shook herself and came sharply back to business. “I think the explanation for your reactions is simpler than what I thought at first.”

            Harry nodded. “What, then?”

            Inexplicably, Hermione blushed. Then she said, “I think you woke moaning Malfoy’s first name in your dreams because that was the way he dreamed of you addressing him. As you pointed out, you would have no other reason to do that, since you weren’t interacting sexually with the ‘Draco’ in your dreams. Malfoy didn’t manage to influence the content of this other world, except maybe that the spell chose who you would help, but he did manage to influence your body and your voice. Classically, the brain isn’t in full control of the body during sleep, or at least the conscious brain isn’t. And it would be much easier for someone’s desire to influence a part of the mind beneath the surface.”

            “I don’t desire to kill Harry.” If Harry had thought Malfoy was sometimes short with him, it didn’t compare to the freezing stare that he now cast Hermione. “If you think I do, then I should—”

            “No,” Hermione said, shaking her head as she turned to face him. “But Harry managed to cast off the choking feeling fairly easy for a murder attempt. I think the problem with you, Malfoy, is that you couldn’t imagine your desire for Harry might be fulfilled, but you still continue to feel it, helplessly, against your will. Is that so?”

            “Fucking right it is,” Malfoy muttered, lashing out with one foot so that he hit the bottom of the table and it wobbled. “I wouldn’t be feeling this if I had any say in the matter.”

            “Have you tried a Freezing Charm on your balls?” Harry inquired politely. “Because I understand that works sometimes.”

            Malfoy let go with a bark of a laugh. “Exactly why would you be angry that I don’t want to want you when you spent so long trying to convince me that I shouldn’t want you anyway?”

            Harry shook his head. Malfoy was right; it made no sense to be angry now. But something about Malfoy’s arrogant, prickish, pushy manner still spurred him to respond. He clenched his teeth and looked away.

            “As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Hermione said, spacing her words a decent interval apart and looking back and forth between both of them as though she expected another interruption, “I think that the choking feeling is an expression of Malfoy’s own frustrated desires. You felt it, Harry, because that’s the way he feels when he stares at you, or at least felt when he cast the spell. If you had given in to him, then you might be experiencing pleasure right now, or at least the pleasure that seems to make you moan his name.”

            “Yes,” Malfoy said then, his voice soft, all traces of anger gone. “It’s like choking. Why didn’t I think of that myself? Strangled between my own unwillingness to feel what I’m feeling and the fact that I’ve tried, and failed, to get rid of it.”

            Harry cast him a caustic glance. Malfoy was staring into the distance with a look of enlightenment on his face. “Meanwhile,” he said, “you’re so enchanted with this revelation that you don’t care if I die because of your feelings.”

            Malfoy snapped back to life. “I never said that,” he murmured, leaning forwards far enough that Harry thought the bastard would try to touch him. “But it lets me understand a lot that I didn’t about the dreams. Notice that it’s only when you woke up that you started to choke.”

            “That doesn’t make sense, to my eyes,” Harry said stubbornly. He ignored the disapproving look Hermione cast at him. If he wanted to disagree with Malfoy in her house, then he still would. “Why wouldn’t I choke inside the dreams, instead? Coming back to the real world is what you wanted me to do.”

            “In the dreams, I can’t affect you, except when the potion let me whisper information to you,” Malfoy said. “I tried to touch you more strongly, and couldn’t. So it was only when you returned to your body—into the world where I want you, instead of the fantasies that your mind created in response to my spell—that what I desire starts to matter again.”

            “Exactly!” Hermione clapped her hands and beamed at both of them. “You’re a fairly good explainer of things like this, Draco. I was thinking so hard about how to dress it up in theoretical language that I didn’t see the simple way forwards.”

            Malfoy’s face changed a few times. Harry wondered if it was because Hermione had called him by his first name or because he didn’t like being called simple, but in the end he only inclined his head to accept the compliment.

            “All right,” Harry said. “So how do we stop it from happening? I think I’m close to the end of the dreams now. Does that mean the choking feeling will stop when they stop, and we don’t have to worry about it after that?” He felt more than a little stupid now, a little sheepish that they’d involved Malfoy at all. They could have asked him, or told him, or whatever it was they needed to do, and he could have stayed away.

            Malfoy gave him an assessing glance, and Harry squirmed in his seat, flushing up to his cheekbones. Unbidden, a thought came to him. No, he couldn’t have, and he knows that even better than I do.

            “I’m afraid that a new round of dreams would start after that.” Hermione shook her head, lip stuck out as though she thought this was a tragedy. Well, it would be, if more dreams started, Harry had to concede. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hovering between the real world and what felt like fully-realized alternate universes, any more than he wanted to spend it choking when he woke up. “The impulse from Draco that made him cast the curse in the first place, the impulse that makes you choke, has to be resolved. One way or another, he has to come to terms with his feelings for you.”

            Malfoy shifted and looked away. Harry blinked at her, then at him. “I’m willing,” he said. “But he’s told me that he already tried and nothing came of it. What makes you think that he can resolve them this time?”

            “Because if he doesn’t,” Hermione said simply, “you probably die.”

            Harry winced. “Well,” he said. “Right. There’s that.”

            Malfoy spoke, low and vicious. “I want to be rid of these desires. I can’t be. I can think I’m fine, and then I see your bloody picture in the Prophet and it makes me catch my breath, and the smile or wink or whatever it is that they’ve captured seems directed straight at me. I can have sex with someone else and think I’m over you, and then I imagine you touching me and it’s better than the sex I just had.”

            “Have you been with other people and pretended they were me?” Harry asked, not sure whether curiosity or pity drove him to ask the question.

            Malfoy simply peered at him, eyes flickering up under the lashes and then down again. “More than once,” he said shortly.

            “Oh.” Harry licked his lips. He couldn’t believe he was going to suggest this, but he wanted the dreams to end and his life to continue, and if nothing else had worked… “Do you think the dreams would go away if you kissed me and realized that it was really no big deal after all?”

            Malfoy sat upright, quivering. Hermione stirred as if she would try to get between them, and then leaned back against her chair and shook her head. Harry found himself profoundly grateful for that.

            “How dare you,” Malfoy said, and it didn’t have the fake-outraged sound that Harry had always thought it did in school. It sounded as though he was speaking from the depths of real shock. “How dare you suggest that it wouldn’t be a big deal, when you know what I’ve felt and how hard I’ve tried to get rid of those feelings?”

            Harry shook his head helplessly. It sometimes seemed that every attempt he made to make things better only made them worse. But on the other hand, he couldn’t just sit there and let things go to hell, either.

            “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I didn’t—I’m not a good kisser, Malfoy. What you’ve done is build up fantasies that have to do with what you feel and want and value, more than what I am. I can’t possibly live up to those fantasies, the way that the other people you were with couldn’t, either.” Malfoy’s face flushed an ugly pink, but Harry kept charging ahead, to the end, because he needed to get there and say his piece before he lost his nerve. “If you kiss me, you’ll be kissing a real person. I think—I think that would help you. You’ll be able to see that the fantasies aren’t real, and that could help you to clear me out of your system completely.”

            Malfoy’s eyelids drooped over his eyes, so that Harry couldn’t see what he was feeling. Harry shifted uneasily. He hated that look, but on the other hand, he thought he had spoken more than enough, and so had Malfoy. He shut up and waited for the prat’s decision.

            “What you say makes a kind of sense,” Malfoy said. “But only a kind. I have kissed you once before, and it destroyed none of my desires.”

            Harry snorted. “You took me by surprise then. This time, I’ll participate. Ginny said that I wasn’t a natural snogger, that someone had to teach me. I won’t live up to your sophisticated standards.”

            He expected Malfoy to laugh, or at least smirk, but instead, Malfoy went on studying him attentively. Then he shook his head. “You intend to use me against myself, even now,” he said. “You want me to be able to joke about something important to me.”

            Harry flung up one hand and started to speak, then shut his mouth and breathed deeply a few times. If he left now and did nothing, he reminded himself forcefully, nothing would change for the better. It would just sit there between them, stinking, and Harry wanted Malfoy’s mind clear when they focused on the dreams.

            He tried to speak as simply and honestly as he knew how.

            “I’ve only recently realized that I take care of people too much. I’m not trying to do that now. I think that part of it is also that I ignore people. I give them what I think they need and want, instead of what they actually do. Sometimes to ridiculous extents,” he added gloomily, remembering some of his sillier arguments with Ginny. “I want you to have what you need—to break this infatuation I seem to have cast over you, if nothing else. I think that kissing me will tell you the truth. What else would do it? Tell me, and I’ll do my best to get you what you need.”

            Malfoy stared at him with those droopy eyes again and said nothing. Harry forced himself to be patient. He wanted to turn to Hermione; he wanted to roll his eyes; he wanted to walk away, because he’d already told the truth and what else was there? But he waited instead, attention fixed on Malfoy, who never moved from the chair.

            “Kiss me,” Malfoy said hoarsely.

            Harry blinked, then nodded. He rose and walked across the room to Malfoy’s chair. Halfway there, he realized that Malfoy didn’t intend to stand up and so Harry would need to bend down to him.

            Well, needs must.

            Awkwardly, he bent and brushed his lips against Malfoy’s. Malfoy’s mouth opened, and Harry answered the invitation he thought was hesitant, whatever the bold face that Malfoy put on it. He swept his tongue out and into Malfoy’s mouth, wondering whether he would taste of anything besides heat.

            No. There was just heat, and the usual saltiness and copper that Harry would expect from anyone. Malfoy tensed beneath him, and then reached up a hand and gripped Harry’s neck, pulling him forwards, mashing their mouths more firmly together.

            Harry opened his mouth to—make some sort of noise. He didn’t know what it would have actually been, because the next moment Malfoy’s tongue touched his and the kiss grew harder, deeper, stronger.

            And Harry shuddered with awareness that fizzled down to his nerve endings, because he could see Malfoy’s eyes fully now, and the fierce light in them enthralled him far more than the taste of his mouth.

            This was someone who might stand up against him when Harry tried to coddle him. This was someone who would argue with him the way Ginny had, but in the case of Ginny, their arguments had destroyed their relationship; Harry knew that he and Malfoy would always row, so it might be part of their relationship. Maybe.

            Malfoy, angry and impetuous and hard-headed and loud as he was, might match all in Harry that was angry—

            His mouth open as he barked instructions at Hermione not to interfere with his life anymore—

            And impetuous—

            He leaped onto the platform beside Discipula to defend the Malfoys—

            And hard-headed—

            He had still thought that Malfoy must not be really attracted to him even after Malfoy had claimed he was, and sounded serious about it—

            And loud—

            His voice as he yelled at Malfoy, in a way that he never would have done if he had thought Malfoy was just another annoyance like Rita Skeeter or one of his fans who wanted to “love” him—

            It was Malfoy’s eyes, and not the kiss, that told him that. Harry had always felt better when he could see them.

            Then the kiss broke, and Malfoy stood smoothly and said, “What I need is an hour alone. Potter. Granger.” He nodded to both of them and moved away through the door out of the house before either of them could say anything.

            Harry blinked, and sat down.

            And waited.



*

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Sleepless