Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Ancient and Noble Houses	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 29877 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Twenty-Seven—Confrontations With Friends
            “I want to know what’s been happening, mate.”
            Harry wrapped his arms around his knees and sighed a little. Ron had come into the hospital wing that morning, and talked to Harry about Snape’s portrait and the poisoning he’d suffered from the potion. And then he had sat down and looked at Harry and said he knew a little about the house and Harry’s interactions with Malfoy, and that he wanted to know more.
            He kept saying that he wanted to know every five minutes or so, while Harry sat there and agonized over how to tell him. Finally Harry decided that he could ask Ron to tell him something, and they could begin there.
            “Do the scars on my neck look like a number to you?” he asked, lifting his head and turning it so that Ron could see beneath his chin. He could have conjured a mirror to look at them himself, but probably not without Madam Pomfrey noticing, and Harry was a little afraid of what would happen if any of the professors learned about his problem.
            Ron leaned forwards and squinted. Then he sat back, shaking his head. “Not really,” he said. “There’s a loop like the top of a three, but the bottom is curved like the base of a two.”
            Harry half-closed his eyes. “The scars have looked like numbers, and they’re changing,” he said. “They went up to three at one point, when I attacked Draco. Maybe they’re in-between now, and that means that I’m sliding back down and out of the house’s influence.”
            “Maybe you should tell me everything from the beginning?” Ron’s voice was a little sharp.
            Harry nodded and opened his eyes, and began to tell Ron about Draco following him that night he left the Great Hall and Harry using Legilimency on him. Ron listened without much more than a tightening of his mouth, but the line got tighter and tighter as Harry talked about forcing Draco to help him, and taking him to Grimmauld Place and Gringotts. Harry still couldn’t bring himself to talk about Kreacher. Ron was sure to mention it to Hermione, and she would want to know why Harry hadn’t told her right away.
            It was…still something Harry wanted to think about, and not listen to the scoldings of his friends about. Or, worse, he would probably have to see tears in Hermione’s eyes, and he didn’t know how he could deal with that.
            “So you forced Malfoy to help you,” Ron ended by summing up. “And now he’s saved your life.” He sounded wary, baffled, as if he thought Harry had left something about Draco out of the story. “Why would he do that, if he didn’t want to help you?”
            Harry shrugged. “Maybe he thought about the money that he’s going to get from me, and he knew that he probably wouldn’t get it if I died under suspicious circumstances. Or maybe he was thinking that he would inherit the house if I died, and he doesn’t want to. Look at what it’s doing to me.”
            Secretly, Harry didn’t think it was any of those things. He thought Draco had simply wanted to help him, and this was his way of doing so.
            “Or he could have saved you to do something with you later.” Ron stared at him. “To get his revenge on you when you weren’t helpless and dying and you could appreciate what he was doing to you.”
            Harry clenched some of the sheets in his hand and discovered that his ears had heated up, the way Ron’s did when he was embarrassed. “You don’t have any idea what you’re saying,” he breathed. “Please, Ron, shut up. It’s not like that. It’s not.”
            “Maybe it’s not, but you have to admit that it’s at least likely.” Ron folded his hands and stared at Harry again.
            “I don’t want to hear you say something like that about Draco again.” Harry almost didn’t recognize his voice. It had that same polite, empty tone that he had used when speaking to Hermione about potions, after Snape told him there was a potion that could reverse the house’s influence over him. And it was the voice he might have used when he attacked her, if he’d spent much time talking to Hermione instead of Draco.
            “Mate, you have to consider the possibility that he had something to do with it. He was Snape’s favorite student, and he knew all about that potion—”
            “You need to speak to her if you want to know what I do when he’s threatened,” Harry interrupted him. His voice was low and savage, and Ron stared at him, but at least he seemed to be listening this time. “Or when I think someone is touching him. Or when anything happens near him, basically.” He lay back on the bed and shut his eyes. “I think the house is inspiring me to be loyal to him and his mum because they have Black blood. Please, Ron. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
            Ron breathed in silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “All right, mate. Since it means so much to you, I won’t talk about him.”
            Harry opened his eyes and smiled at Ron. “Thank you.”
            “But I don’t think you need his help anymore,” Ron plunged ahead, doggedly. “Hermione and I can help you, since you’ve finally told us the bloody house is still affecting you. Do you have to talk to him anymore?”
            Harry hesitated. Here was help, from an unexpected direction, with curtailing his dependence on Draco. He had been thinking he should let Draco go, give him his freedom. Draco would want that, since, as Ron had pointed out, he’d been forced into helping Harry in the first place. It was something he would never have chosen to do of his own free will.
            Harry should want that, too, shouldn’t he? He should want Draco to be happy more than anything else, if he really cared about him. If he just wanted Draco close to him instead, that showed he was under the house’s influence and cared more about what Draco could do for him than Draco’s happiness or health.
            Slowly, he nodded. He tried to ignore the way that Ron beamed, because when he did that, something dark and low in the back of Harry’s mind snarled.
            He wanted the numbers on his neck to keep changing, going down, Harry thought, half-listening as Ron vowed to spend some time in the library with Harry and Hermione instead of always being at Quidditch practice. He wanted to be back to normal. He wanted to be able to live somewhere else, instead of Grimmauld Place, and he wanted to keep from torturing Kreacher.
            But more than anything else, he wanted to give Draco his life back. He wanted to walk past him and listen to his laughter in the distance and know that he was having fun, that he wasn’t consumed with the quest Harry had to figure out the darkness and how to escape from it.
            “Yeah, mate,” he said, when Ron paused and Harry could get a word in edgewise. “You’re right. This is the best thing I can do.”
            Ron beamed at him again, and this time, the murmur in Harry’s mind was overpowered by the certainty that he had done the right thing.
*
            Draco had brought the cauldron and the vial to Madam Pomfrey, but that still left a tumble of library books on the table and the cut-up gillyweed that Potter had used to create the poison. And Draco had retained a little of the potion for himself, in a vial he had been using to hold a Calming Draught he’d already taken.
            There was all that, and there was the portrait frame.
            Draco stood considering it the day after he’d taken Potter to the hospital wing. It was the first time Draco had had to himself since then, what with talking to the mediwitch and going to class and doing homework. He walked around the table, tapping his finger against his chin. The books on the shelves in the background of the picture looked like the ones that Professor Snape had had on his shelves, the few times that Draco had been in his private quarters sixth year.
            When he was trying to persuade me not to let Death Eaters into the school, or kill Dumbledore.
            Draco winced, and then took a deep breath. One way or another, that was the past now. He had to concentrate on what was in front of him, and he had come to terms with Professor Snape’s death over the summer. What he had to do now was figure out whether this was the professor’s portrait, or whether someone else had enchanted it in an attempt to get rid of the Boy-Who-Lived.
            Draco took one more turn around the table, and then stopped. There was a figure forming in the portrait, amorphous and made of smoke, leaning forwards with a graceful little bob.
            Draco stood there, barely breathing, waiting for it to form a face.
*
            SP777: Well, you may be right. Or you may be wrong, and Snape may be right. What do you think?
            It is true that he doesn’t really feel kindly towards Harry right now, anyway.
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Ancient and Noble Houses