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The Long Defeat	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 30612 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 7
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Nine—Separation
            “But you’re not really leaving the wizarding world?” Hermione perched on the edge of the bed that Harry knew perfectly well she shared with Ron, swinging her legs back and forth as she stared at him.
            Harry got up and roamed restlessly around Ron’s bedroom instead of answering. He was visiting the Burrow for the first time since the goblins had tried to enslave him, and Molly had greeted him with a hug that Harry thought had crushed small bones throughout his body. She had whispered how glad she was to see him out and about, and Harry had hugged her back.
            It had been nice—until he stepped away from Molly and saw Ginny standing in the kitchen doorway when her arms folded. But she had turned and left before Harry could say anything, and anyway, Molly had been plying him with enough food that Harry didn’t miss the Malfoys’ lunch table at all.
            “You didn’t answer me,” Hermione reminded him helpfully, as if Harry might have overlooked that.
            Harry closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “I’m not leaving it permanently,” he said. “What I want is a place that has ties to both. Maybe mostly in the Muggle world, or an isolated corner of the wizarding world. But Floo connections to all the places I want to go. I want to do some shopping in Diagon Alley and spend time with Draco and you lot. But I don’t want to have no option except people staring at me.”
            “So you want a place between the two worlds,” Hermione said, nodding. “That makes perfect sense to me.” She was quiet as she watched Harry pick up one of her books—her main addition to Ron’s room—and put it down again. “What doesn’t Draco like about it?”
            Harry blinked and looked up. “Am I that obvious?”
            Hermione smiled tenderly at him. “Maybe not to someone who doesn’t know you as well.”
            Harry sighed and sat down on the bed with her. “Draco wants me to live with him, and make Malfoy Manor my permanent and only home.”
            “Did you explain why you didn’t want to do that?” Hermione took his hand. “The way that you want a place of your own that has nothing to do with the Dursleys, and how you’ve been deprived of that, and—”
            “I did,” Harry admitted, and he winced at the tone of his own voice. It was so dejected. He coughed and tried to sit up and sound a little more cheerful. “He didn’t want to listen. I think that he sees it as abandonment, after the way he’s tried to do so much for me.”
            Hermione peered at him. “You’re allowed to want a life of your own, Harry, no matter what someone else wants. And you’re entitled to tell them that, too, if they try to interfere.”
            Harry nodded and wondered how he could explain it to Hermione. How he didn’t feel like what the Malfoys were doing was interference; there was real care and concern there. And how he still wanted to have a place away from them, where he could retreat when he wanted to think and didn’t want to be around other people or deal with Lucius’s prickliness or even Draco or Narcissa.
            It seemed so simple to him. It sounded simple, when he explained it to Hermione. But Draco kept hunching his shoulders and turning away, and when he did speak, made it clear that he did feel abandoned, no matter how careful Harry was trying to be.
            “Maybe you just have to force a confrontation,” Hermione finally suggested, when they had sat there in silence for several minutes, and Harry had begun to feel that they might go on sitting like that until Ron got home. “Some place where he can’t get away, and hold him there and explain what you mean. That you want to come and go from your house to his. Would it reassure him if you said that you wanted to keep your rooms there? It was such a big thing for him that you accepted them.”
            Harry opened his mouth, but someone knocked on the door and opened it before he could think of what to say. Ginny stepped in, shut the door behind her, and looked at Harry.
            “I heard what you said, Hermione,” Ginny murmured. “Sometimes you just have to force a confrontation, and this is the way I have to do it. Why didn’t you keep writing to me, Harry? If you could write to Ron and Hermione with that raven, then you could write to me.”
            “How, when you hadn’t acted like you wanted to hear from me for weeks and weeks by that point?” Harry demanded. He knew Hermione was slipping out of the room, but that was fine. He had eyes only for Ginny, anyway. “You stopped writing to me when people started supporting what the goblins were saying!”
            Ginny flushed and turned around, kicking the door. But she didn’t storm out, to Harry’s private relief. “Ron said that you were trying really hard to concentrate on your fight against the goblins and controlling your magic. That you didn’t need distractions.”
            Harry sighed. Ron had said that, but… “Did he tell you that your letters were distracting me? Did he say I had called them distractions?”
            “He said that those were the only things you were interested in,” said Ginny. “So I thought my letters must be distractions, and fine, I wouldn’t write them anymore.” She stared at him from eyes that had a good deal of hurt in them. “And then you never wrote to me, even to ask what was happening to me and why I’d stopped writing. And then there was this slavery, where you supposedly wouldn’t be able to communicate, and then you didn’t even write to me when you could have.”
            “I was still waiting for you to write to me.” Harry rubbed his forehead. It seemed the whole thing had been a stupid misunderstanding, and he was sorry for that.
            But that neither of them had ever tried to get past that misunderstanding indicated something else to Harry. He looked up. “How important am I to you, Ginny?”
            "You were the most important thing," said Ginny, head still turned away and foot moodily swinging back and forth. "Once."
            Harry nodded. He could remember the crushing sense of Ginny's importance right before he went on the Horcrux hunt, when it felt like he would die if he didn't date her and walking away was the hardest thing he'd ever done. But now he didn't feel that way. "Do you still think that you would have let me go on in silence if I was the most important thing to you?"
            Ginny looked up quickly. "That doesn't excuse the way you treated me."
            Harry could have had a long argument with her about the way that Ginny had treated him, not writing to him and making him feel even more alone in the world with the goblins mistreating him and society's disapproval than he really was. But he didn't want to. Instead, he said, "You're right. What I'm saying is that if we were really meant to be together, we would have thought of each other night and day. We would have written to each other even if we were angry or hurt. We would have written and kept on writing."
            Ginny's face flushed for a second. "Ron and Hermione aren't together all day. You can date someone and not be with them all the time. When I thought you were going to go into the bank and be stranded there, I knew the goblins wouldn't let you write to me."
            "But then when the Malfoys rescued me?" Harry made it a question, and as gentle as he could.
            Ginny gave him a mule's expression. "I didn't expect you to go off and start dating Draco Malfoy!" For a second, she paled instead of flushed. "How much of that was just because he was there? How much of you dating me was just because I was there, and I was convenient? Ron's little sister. You'd be his brother-in-law if you married me, and you'd be part of the family. How much of it was because of that?"
            Harry shook his head. He could remember back to his life before the war, how he used to feel, but it no longer had the ability to impact him as much as it had at the time. "I don't know. Probably a lot."
            Ginny flinched as if he'd hit her. But she did manage to get her breath back and continue full-steam a moment later. "How romantic, Harry. How deeply romantic." She bowed her head and turned away so that her hair shielded her face.
            "I'm sorry," said Harry, feeling wretched and as though he was a kind of cheat. "I really am. But I don't know...I don't know what else to say. I think that I did start dating you because you were convenient, and because I really liked you. But I started dating Draco because he was reaching out to me, and I was with him all the time, and I started seeing qualities in him that I liked."
            "What you're saying is that your relationship with him is deeper than the one you had with me." Ginny stood there, oddly calm, as if saying the most awful thing and getting it out was a kind of purging.
            "I don't know," said Harry, and tugged sharply at his hair. "I can look back and see all sorts of motivations I had for doing things that I didn't acknowledge at the time, but I don't know..."
            "It's deeper," Ginny said. "If you didn't consider the convenience of marrying into his family. It's deeper."
            Harry looked up. "It's convenient in the sense that their family is the one sheltering me, and I thought I was going to have to stay in the house for a year. Yeah."
            Ginny shook her head, something like wonder and something like mourning mingled in her face. "Even with someone you supposedly love the most, you think of things like that. It's sort of sad."
            "I'm trying to be honest," Harry said. "Maybe it's good that we had this conversation, though. Then we can stop expecting the other one to write, and we can stop expecting that maybe we'll get together sometime in the future."
            "Even if you leave Malfoy, you'll never get back together with me, will you?" Ginny had one hand positioned at her side as if she was going to swing it up and either touch him or draw her wand, and Harry kept an eye on it, remembering how quick she was with a Bat-Bogey Hex. But she didn't move it. "Even though I could accept you wanting to live in the Muggle world, and he can't?"
            "Would you live there with me?" Harry asked, looking back at her face.
            Ginny flushed again. "I wouldn't mind if you had your own flat that was linked by a Floo connection to the Burrow."
            Harry nodded. "Then the only difference between you is that I haven't persuaded him around yet, and you wouldn't need the persuasion."
            Ginny seemed about to say something else, but maybe she realized it was useless. She shook her head violently and turned away. Harry watched until she had been gone about two minutes, but she didn't come back. Harry leaned over and gently shut the door of the room.
            It was amazing that someone who had once mattered so much to him was now only a friend, and someone he was still a little upset at for not writing to him, and someone he had once thought of as an annoying pest was his lover and his friend. But then, Harry didn't think that anyone would have predicted him being a Horcrux and the savior of the wizarding world and nearly a goblin slave, either.
            Maybe I should just stop expecting my life to move in predictable patterns.
*
            Draco was still jumpier and angrier than he'd like to admit to himself when he saw Harry at dinner that day. That had something to do with the length of time Harry had spent at the Burrow. Draco had tried to read, but visions of his friends persuading Harry to live with them, since he had this argument going on with Draco, danced in his head.
            Harry came back for dinner, though, and although he was speaking to Draco's mum when Draco came into the dining room, he looked up with a smile that was gentle and bright and private. Draco walked over to the table, reassured, and took his usual seat opposite Harry.
            Throughout dinner, Harry paid more attention to touching Draco's foot with his under the table than he did to the food. At least, he did until a gentle word from Narcissa made him use his fork more properly. Draco smiled into his plate and acted with a noteworthy grace that he hoped Harry would look upon as a free model to imitate.
            When they left the dinner table, Harry immediately caught Draco's hand and murmured, "I'd like to go for a walk in the gardens."
            Draco's heart quickened. He doubted it was anything so ordinary as sweet nothings that Harry wanted to tell him. But he managed to nod and, he thought, look relatively normal as he led Harry outside.
            Harry chose a path that led them close to the night-blooming flowers that dotted the garden, some of them huge and smelling so sweet Draco choked a little. But being near the flowers seemed to give Harry courage. He reached out, touched one, and then turned around and blurted, "Is there really no way that you could accept me having a Muggle flat that was linked to the Manor?"
            Draco winced. At least Harry hadn't come back with an announcement that he was moving out, but he wondered if his friends had been talking to him about this after all.
            "I want to live with you," he said, and looked down at the flowers himself. "If you were in a flat and I was here, I wouldn't really be living with you."
            "I don't see why it's any different than our having separate rooms," Harry murmured peacefully, without letting go of his hand.
            Draco tore his hand away and glared. "You really can't see a difference? Really?"
            "I suppose there is one," said Harry. "But I would come back and visit all the time, and there would be some days when we couldn't see each other, and there would be times we went shopping together, and times we went shopping separately. You gave me freedom back when no one else would have, and a purpose, and you helped me with my vengeance. And you gave me love when I didn't even know I was looking for it." He reached out and took Draco's hand again. His grip was almost painful. "I don't know what else you would ask for. I owe you a lot. But I don't want this relationship to be based on debts."
            "Of course not," Draco said stiffly. It hadn't even occurred to him that Harry might still be thinking about this in terms of the life-debts. The thought horrified him. "But I want you with me all the time."
            Harry gave him a wry look. "What happens if one or both of us get jobs?"
            Draco paused. He hadn't thought about that, either.
            Harry nodded. "If I had stayed in the house for a year, then yeah, we wouldn't have been parted for long in that time, and we would have had all those days together." Draco was satisfied that Harry's eyes expressed at least a little bit of longing for that lost Eden. "But as it is, I'm free, and you'll be free of the conditions the Ministry imposed on you in a while. What are you going to do?"
            "Manage the family business," Draco said. Nothing else had occurred to him. It seemed that the boundaries of his thoughts were confronting him all over today.
            "But your father isn't going to die for a long time, is he?" Harry looked at him with careful eyes. "What are you going to do until then?"
            "Learn how to manage the family business."
            Harry rolled his eyes, and Draco relented. "I always thought learning would occupy a lot of my time," he said. "But I did picture--I don't know, finding my place back in society. Learning how to live in a world with less reverence for my name. Practicing any spells I wanted to know. Learning languages. Getting married."
            Harry smiled at him. "Those sound wonderful. I'll be glad to help you with them."
            "But?" Draco asked delicately.
            "Not twenty-four hours a day. Not thirty days a month." Harry's face was sober. "I think both of us need a break, both of us need someone other than the other person in our lives. I've been glad that your mum was here several times, and I have friends. You've only had me, and your parents, for a few months now." Carefully, he touched Draco's face. "Eventually, we'll find a balance, and maybe things will calm down enough that I'll feel I can move back into the Manor. But not for a year or so, at least."
            He's talking about a year. He never intended to abandon me.
            That eased yet another fear Draco hadn't considered, and so he took Harry's hands and said, "Yes. All right. I don't like it, not completely, but I'll get used to it."
            Harry's face flashed with such relief and beauty that Draco couldn't help leaning in and kissing him. And after that, they both found other things to do than argue.
*
            staar: Harry's not abandoning Draco, but Draco does sort of feel that way.
            Jester: Harry's hoping that it will teach him whether he can really live in the wizarding world after all, or whether he ought to abandon it.
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The Long Defeat