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I Give You a Wondrous Mirror	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 17806 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Three�The Tension of Bees

�� Do you really think that matters to me?�
Malfoy�s voice�except that Harry thought of him as Draco in this dream,
which was ridiculous, because he�d never done that before except when other
members of his family were around and he had to think of Draco by his first
name or get lost in the constant stream of Malfoys�was crisp and haughty, but Harry knew him well enough by now to hear
the slight undertone of hurt.

�� That�s mad,
I don�t know him, this is a dream�

�� But the weight fell on his mind like honey,
and drew him back into the midst of what he knew couldn�t be real. He was
standing in a large ground floor room in Malfoy Manor, with sunlight showering
through the windows. Over the year he�d spent here with Draco, it had come to
seem more and more like a home, but right now it felt to Harry like the building
where Hermione had been tortured.

�� I don�t think it�ll work,� he said, pacing
back and forth with his eyes on the floor. If they were on the floor, no one
could expect him to look into Draco�s face. �We�ve tried, but we still argue
all the time, and we can�t just have sex at the end of every argument as if
that solves something.� His hand rose
and waved in the air. It was a daring, extravagant gesture, and he hoped it
would suffice to make Draco think he was brave, because he still couldn�t look
up. �And you hate my friends, and they�dislike you.� He really wasn�t sure
about Ron; there might have been hatred there, not least because he rarely got
to see Harry now. �So I think it�s best to�just end it.�

�� He wasn�t aware that Draco had started to
stride across the room until a pair of painful, gripping hands caught his
shoulders. He looked up with a gasp, and found Draco�s mouth a few inches from
his. But Draco didn�t try to kiss him, the way that he usually would to heal
any row. Instead, Draco held him there, and struck him with forceful words.

�� You�ve never actually accepted that I�m in
this as much as you are, have you, Harry? Always thinking I�ll desert you at a
moment�s notice, always believing I�ll think more of my friends� opinions or
your friends� opinions than just yours,
always certain that this is a temporary fling for me or all I get out of it is
sex.�

�� Harry tried nervously to back away, because
he had never seen Draco this angry. Draco just held him in place without effort�and
normally, Harry was stronger than he was. Harry felt a
strange shiver run through him, golden as the sunlight, and stopped trying to
move. He just stared, and let Draco�s words fall into his mind like
stones into a pool.

�� This matters to me just as much as it does to
you. I won�t give up on it easily. And neither should you.�

�� And his lips came down on Harry�s, and Harry
felt, in that moment, a surge of wonder that swiftly turned into a surge of
greed. He brought his hands up and linked them together behind Draco�s neck,
moaning aloud in what probably sounded like desire, but was more than that. He
didn�t just want sex, at the moment, he wanted the life with Draco that he
could see gleaming in the distance like buried treasure, wanted it so much that
he thought he would die if he didn�t have it�

*

�� Harry�s
eyes flew open, and he gasped before he started coughing. He�d just breathed in
a huge lungful of dust, since he�d fallen asleep with his head on the old book
on life-debts that he�d been pondering since three in the morning.

�� He lifted
his head, shook it, wiped the dust from his glasses and his eyes, and canceled
the Lumos
on his wand, since it was daylight now and he could see perfectly well. Then he
turned at the sound of a slight cough, and found Ginny in the doorway of the
library, watching him with a faintly sad expression.

�� In her left
hand, she held Narcissa Malfoy�s letter.

�� When were
you going to tell me about this?� she asked.

�� Harry
flushed, a bit, and rose to cross the room and kiss her. Her lips felt
distinctly different than Draco�s in the dream�

�� Stop! Stop comparing them! That�s just a
dream, just part of whatever strange curse it is that makes you see Draco
bloody Malfoy in mirrors, too, and you don�t need to think about it!

�� I didn�t
want to wake you,� he whispered against her lips, when he drew back, holding
her with one arm around her shoulders, and Ginny had relaxed against him. �That
arrived by owl around three, and I knew how hard your day had been. I didn�t
want to wake the kids, either.�

�� Considerate
of you,� Ginny murmured, but her voice hadn�t entirely lost its sharpness. �You
have to answer, don�t you?�

�� Harry
nodded, and gestured back at the book he�d been reading. �That says that
whoever decides to fulfill or call on the life-debt first has the choice of how
it�s paid. The only exception is if the debtor or the person the debt is owed
to dies, and then the survivor has to choose what to do.� He thought for a
moment of Snape, who had apparently fulfilled his
debt to James Potter by protecting Harry during his first year.

�� Or did he do it even then just because I had
my mother�s eyes?

�� Harry shook
his head. He had never sorted out his own feelings about Snape,
beyond deciding that he�d been the bravest man he ever knew and giving Severus
as a middle name to his second son�a choice Ginny had argued strenuously
against, until Harry had shared Snape�s memories with
her. It was disconcerting, and hurtful, to think too much more about it.

�� And if he was alive right now, who knows
what he would be like?

�� People can change so much in ten years.

�� Maybe Malfoy has, too�

�� Harry slammed
the door of his mind abruptly on that thought. He would travel to Malfoy Manor,
because he had no choice, but he would deal only with Narcissa. Draco bloody
Malfoy could fucking well wait.

�� And how
are you going to fulfill it in the face of all the other things you have to do?�
Ginny�s voice was lightly exasperated, but Harry heard real fear there. She didn�t
want him to run off and leave her by herself with the children again.

�� Harry
smiled and kissed her cheek. �I�ve already sent off an owl to ask George to
come and stay with them,� he said. George still ran Weasleys� Wizard Wheezes by
himself, but he was prone to taking half the days in the week off without
explanation, and to sit up until all hours working on new pranks. He would be
happy enough to come and spend some time in the Potters� house, Harry knew; the
children always cheered him up. �And I�m only giving my mornings to this
life-debt business. There�s just too much else
to do.�

�� Ginny�s
arms closed around him in a tight embrace for a moment. Then she murmured into
his ear, �You are the best husband ever, and I�d make breakfast for you right now if Glynnis
hadn�t told me that practice starts at eight this morning.�

�� Harry briefly
drew out Fabian Prewett�s watch to examine the time:
half past seven. He nodded. �I�ll manage well enough for myself and the kids
until George gets here. Go on.� He gave her a gentle push in the direction of
the door.

�� She waved to
him jauntily, and then went to fetch her broom and uniform and a few pieces of
toast to eat on the run. Harry spent some moments rubbing out the crick in his
neck.

�� Then he
heard a thump from down the hall. A loud cry announced that Al had fallen out
of bed again, probably in the course of one of his dreams, and then James began
his singsong declaration that Al was a baa-aaa-aaby.

�� Harry
rolled his eyes and went to fetch his children, glad that George hadn�t arrived
yet. Al tended to join James in unmanageable behavior until he�d had his
breakfast.

*

�� �He�s coming, dear.�

�� Draco tried
not to make it look as if his shoulders were hunching defensively when his
mother waved the letter from Potter at him. �Really?� he muttered into his
porridge, and turned another page of the Daily
Prophet. Not that he cared about Quidditch scores, and not that it was easy
to forget that the story of �his� crime was the lead article, but it was better
than pretending to be happy that his old rival was coming.

�� Old rival and new torment.

�� If
something ten years old could be considered new.

�� Yes. He
says that he�ll only give the mornings to us, because he has��
Narcissa sniffed to show what she thought of the next phrase ��other things
to do. But he�s coming, and he promises to investigate the crime to the best of
his ability.�

�� Of course,�
Draco said, and then yelped as the paper was ripped away from him. His mother
stood glaring at him, shaking her head.

�� You should
at least clean yourself up a bit
before he arrives, Draco,� she said, and gave a toss of her long blonde hair as
if to show how clean she wanted him to be. �And put your memories of the night
that that girl was killed into a Pensieve, so that
Potter can see you have a perfectly good alibi.�

�� Mother�� Draco began, determined to try and make her understand,
yet one more time, that he couldn�t
see Potter because of the mirrors.

�� Up, Draco!� And his mother clapped her hands and shoved at
his shoulders the way she might have tried to train a naughty Crup puppy, if the Malfoys had ever been undignified enough
to stoop to having pets.

�� Grumpily,
Draco went to his private loo. It had been carefully redone in green and silver
tile with dimming charms cast on it, so that none of it reflected him. They�d
found no way to detach the enchanted mirror from its place, but a cloth cast
over it prevented Draco from seeing strange visions in it.

�� He
showered, bending his head down so that the warm fingers of water could rake
through his hair more easily. Then he used his own fingers, pausing, as always,
when he went through some strands and trying to figure out if they were
actually thinning and falling out, or if it was just his imagination. Marian
had said they were, but Marian would say nearly anything.

�� It hadn�t
been like that, once, the relationship between him and his wife, Draco thought
as he turned so that the shower could rake across his back. They hadn�t ever
loved each other, but they�d understood each other, and their companionship had
been settled and strong. They�d been united in a desire that Scorpius should have the best life possible, certainly, and
Marian didn�t care if he had male lovers as long as he didn�t bring any
diseases back to their bed.

�� And then she�d
tried to kidnap Scorpius, and things had�

�� Well.

�� Things changed.

�� Draco faced
forwards again, and this time the shower caressed the scars he�d got from Sectumsempra, the bloody curse that Severus had
invented but Potter had used. Severus had explained to Draco in short tones as
he healed him that the curse was �for enemies,� and Potter probably hadn�t
known what it would do.

�� Not that
that was an excuse, to Draco�s mind. Who simply used
an unknown spell on someone else, without having the slightest idea of what it
might do, even if it might backfire on him?

�� Perhaps someone faced with an enemy trying
to cast the Cruciatus Curse on him?

�� Draco told
his conscience to hush�it was a very inconvenient mind-part to have�rinsed one
more time, and stepped out of the shower. A charmed towel already waited for
him, fluffing around him, and heating and drying his skin in all the right
places. A comb and brush fluttered above his head, carefully using his mother�s
judgment to decide how best his hair should look. Draco hated the way they
felt, but since he wouldn�t look into mirrors, it was a necessary spell.

�� Not that his
avoiding mirrors mattered, of course, since he would see Potter in the flesh in
a few hours anyway.��

His eyes rose and locked on the
enchanted mirror covered with a cloth.

A surge of unaccustomed bravery�or perhaps
just longing to see if it was as bad as he remembered, since he hadn�t looked
in so long�made him reach out and violently rip the cloth aside, exposing the
glass.

For a moment, he saw only himself,
exactly as he looked now, scars partially exposed, towel moving around him like
a snake, and he exhaled loudly in relief. And then Potter appeared behind him,
head bent as he mouthed at the nape of Draco�s neck, his eyes half-closed, his
lips moving in the words of some joke that Draco, of course, couldn�t hear.

His scars began to tingle,
including the cuts in his palms that still remained from the exploding mirror a
few weeks gone, and a high singing invaded his ears, like the humming of bees
disturbed in a hive.

�Accio cloth!� Draco yelled, and the
cloth rose and went back into place. At once, the vision of himself and Potter
vanished.

The pain in the scars only slowly
subsided.

Draco closed his eyes as the comb
and brush and towel continued to tend to him, and tried with all his heart not
to think about what would happen when he saw Potter again.

*

�Hello?� Harry slowly pushed in the
door of Iris�s Gallershop and looked around, although
he could already tell the large front room only had easels and palettes and
half-finished portraits in it. �Luna?�

Bare feet sounded on the wooden
stairs, and Luna danced into view a few moments later, her blonde hair braided
with so many different kinds of flowers it looked as if she were wearing a
garden on her head. Her eyes were bright and dreamy,
with the kind of serenity that Harry knew only came to her when she was
panting. She had a smock on, but only partway; it had come untied from her left
shoulder. Daubs of paint covered her face, hands, and arms as messily as the
ice cream that George had fetched James and Al from Florian
Fortescue�s this morning. �Oh, hello, Harry,� she
said, and gave him a slightly more �present� smile. �You came because you heard
the yellow singing?�

�Yes,� Harry agreed, because it was
best to agree when he had no idea what Luna was talking about. �And to give you
payment for that portrait that Dean was doing. He said it was completed--?�

�Oh, of course!�
Luna flung away the paintbrush she was holding, paused to consider the splotch
of blue where it had slammed against a wall, and then seized his hand. Harry
resigned himself to doing cleaning charms when he got home, but he was smiling
in spite of himself. Luna�s happiness was very hard to resist. �How could I
have forgotten? Except that the Wrackspurts do steal thoughts, you know, and keep
them in their nests. If I could discover one, I�m sure I�d find all sorts of interesting
things I�ve forgotten, like my father�s middle name. The portrait�s upstairs.�

She pulled him upwards at a rapid
rate, and Harry came briefly eye-to-eye with many finished and half-finished paintings
before they emerged into the first floor of what Luna called the gallershop and Dean called the gallery or the shop,
depending on his mood at the moment. Here there was much more
light, thanks to the three enormous windows overlooking Diagon Alley,
and ceilings so airy that Harry had often thought it was the only indoor space
in wizarding Britain, other than the Great Hall at Hogwarts, where one could
have a good game of Quidditch. An enormous mural occupied one wall, twining in
and out of Luna�s dazzling colors and Dean�s more subdued style. Though they
were both fine artists on their own, Harry liked the paintings they worked on
together best.

Dean looked up from a canvas across
the room and gave Harry a little wave, but he was immersed in creation from the
blank-eyed look of him, and so Harry just nodded back instead of trying to talk.
Luna was dancing him past a series of paintings showing what looked like the
Quidditch Pitch of Hogwarts, and finally settled like a small whirlwind before
a portrait.

�This is the one?� she asked
solicitously, as if someone else might have requested a portrait of Harry�s
family.

�Yes,� Harry said, quietly, and not
just because the painted children were dozing. He had to take a moment to
admire how it had come out. Ginny sat in a chair in the forefront, with Harry
leaning on the back of it, bending over her to whisper in her hair. James stood
beside him, since he�d insisted on
standing while Dean painted him�though this version of James was currently asleep
on his father�s hip with his mouth wide open. Al and Lily sat in Ginny�s lap,
at the moment collapsed together with their hair mingled. Harry felt another
pulse of fierce love strike through him, and he smiled. It had been an excellent
idea to have this painted, and though he knew he would sometimes regret the
noise the children in the portrait made on top of the noise the real ones made,
he could only commend Ginny for coming up with the idea.

�I brought the two hundred Galleons
we agreed on�� he began, reaching into a pocket of his
robes.

�It was fifty,� said Luna.

Harry eyed her. �No,� he said, �it
was two hundred.�

Nothing more futile than arguing
with Luna, as her wide-eyed stare reminded him a moment later. �But it was
fifty, Harry,� she said. �We�ve already been more than paid by the enjoyment we
had in painting it.�

�Luna��

�We aren�t hurting, Harry,� said
Luna, and for a moment she was looking as keenly at him as someone �normal�
would. �I promise, with our talents and as many people buy from us, we really aren�t hurting.� And then she
slipped back into her dreamworld again. �The thought
that it was two hundred is in the Wrackspurts� nest,
too, I�m sure.�

In the end, Harry had to shake his
head and give over the fifty Galleons. He was sure that Dean had agreed with
Luna, because Dean agreed with Luna most of the time. He only hoped the payment
really was enough to cover the paints, canvas, spells, and time they would have
woven into the work.

He enchanted the painting to hover
behind him, nodded to Luna, and had started to turn away when she put her hand
on his arm. Harry turned around. �What?� he asked. �Do I have a Nargle in my hair?�

Luna shook her head, even as she
stared at him. No, not precisely at him, Harry realized a moment later�at the scar
in the center of his brow. His skin prickled with unease, but he didn�t draw
away. One didn�t do that to Luna, either, any more than they argued with her.

�You have two lives,� Luna
whispered.

Harry laughed in spite of himself. �More
than that, I think, Luna, since I did
come back from the dead after I defeated Voldemort.�

�Two lives,� Luna insisted, in the
same breathless voice. �There is great happiness and great danger ahead for
you, and even though you run from the danger, you hurtle towards the happiness.
What you must learn to understand is that they both lie in the same direction.�
She gave a solemn little nod.

Harry swallowed. He hadn�t told
Luna about the mirror curse, because he wasn�t entirely sure that she wouldn�t
have sallied off to confront Malfoy at once. Luna did that kind of thing for
her friends.

�And, Harry?�
Luna leaned close to him.

�What?� Harry whispered back.

�There are Crumple-Horned Snorkacks around the corner,� Luna told him in exactly the
same tone as before, and then turned and bounced across the room to resume work
on the painting she�d abandoned.

Harry gave a little snort and
relaxed. Luna wasn�t a Seer; that had been proven true often enough, when her
seemingly eerie predictions simply failed to come true. He had no reason to
feel as if she had taken him out of the world and then ducked him back into a
colder place than before.

He left the Gallershop�he
tended to prefer Luna�s name for it�with one final wave to Dean and
determination riding in his mind. He would not
allow things to be strange. He would
go to the Malfoys�, as soon as he had deposited the painting at home with
George and the kids, and he would behave like a calm, rational adult, and if he
felt strange on seeing Malfoy, so what? He hadn�t seen the man in ten years,
and he had never decided exactly how he felt about him. Some unease was to be
expected. But no strangeness.

The fact that now
both his lightning scar and his marks from Nagini�s bite were burning didn�t matter. It was just a fact, and
facts could be ignored.

*

Harry Apparated in outside the
ornate iron gates that fenced off Malfoy Manor from the rest of the world, and
immediately had to lean against them, trembling, as a thick buzzing invaded his
ears. His tension felt as if a dozen swarms of bees had left their hives and
all settled on him.

Stop
it, he told himself. This is only fear,
and fear may be a legitimate emotion, but it�s never stopped you from doing
anything necessary. He took a step back and raised a fist, rapping on the
gates.

He�d been expected, he saw, as the
gates dissolved in a soft, pearly fall of mist and let him step through.

Harry crossed the gleaming gardens
without a glance to left or right. Be
damned if I let Malfoy impress me.

He reached the door at last, and
let out a little sigh. He�d told Narcissa in his return letter that he wanted
to talk to her, not Draco, using the
excuse that speaking to the accused so soon would prejudice his conclusions. So
a house-elf should meet him here and guide him to the mistress of the house.

He raised a hand to knock, and then
the door swung in and he found himself facing Draco.

Their eyes met.

And everything around them�Manor,
gardens, doorstep, the ridiculous white peacock stalking a few steps away�began
to ripple and blur and weave and waver, and the tension of bees hung around
Harry�s neck like lead weights, and the only thing he could hear beyond the
buzzing as he sagged to his knees was Malfoy�s weak, hoarse cry.

*

Daft Fear: I know exactly what you
mean; I think every post-DH fanfiction could be
simultaneously wonderful and horrible. Glad that you�re enjoying this one.

As for magicking
Scorpius�s hair blond, I absolutely could not resist.
:)

Moyima, thrnbrooke: Thanks for reviewing!

Mangacat:
Glad you think that Marian is at least somewhat sympathetic.

rAiNwAtEr: Thanks very much! I hope you enjoyed this
chapter.

Yami Bakura: Thanks! Yes, this is still being updated; it�ll be
updated around �A Reckless Frame of Mind.�
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I Give You a Wondrous Mirror