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A More Worldly Man	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10960 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- 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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Thank you again for all the reviews! And sorry for the long delay in posting this chapter; I hated every draft I wrote until today.

Chapter Three—Learning the Ropes



            Harry spent a moment gazing down at Draco. He was asleep on Harry’s pillows more than on his bed, his head practically dangling over the edge, his mouth wide open, with delicate snores emerging from it. Harry was still slightly surprised that the Healers had allowed him to remove Draco from St. Mungo’s, with the shadows beneath his eyes. But given the embarrassed silence when Harry told them about Diggory’s visit—a silence that confessed they were not sure they would be able to keep enemies out—Harry had insisted.

            And Harry Potter gets what he wants.

            Harry turned his head and paced away from Draco, staring out through the window of his flat. The view was normally an uninspiring one of the streets of Muggle London, but Harry could conjure up enchanted visions if he wanted. He did so now, and found himself watching a dark forest in the light of a full moon, the silver ripples and flashes being destroyed and springing anew whenever the tree branches bent under the wind.

            He had been caught, unexpectedly, by an upswelling of indignation and anger and hopelessness yesterday, during one of Draco’s minute naps. Enemies seemed to be closing in on them from all sides. Just because Greengrass had sent the memories to the Malfoys didn’t mean she hadn’t also sent them to other people. The problem of Draco’s lost shop and home waited for them outside hospital; despite their new ties to one another, Harry couldn’t think Draco would want to share his home forever. And then there was Charlemagne Diggory, and the rules of the Potions committee, and the rumors that might be stirred when they tried to start selling Desire again, and the possible revenge Cordelia Nott might take if she could find a way past the Unbreakable Vows Harry and Hermione had made her swear.

            It was all too much to bear without help. Maybe, if it had been just him and Hermione alone, Harry would have risked it. But Draco had already lost too much, suffered too much. And Harry would die before he would let someone else hurt Draco again.

            And so he’d done the one thing he’d sworn he would never do, and sent a few letters to other people, asking for help—and drawing on the power of his name.

            He hadn’t wanted to. He’d sat there for long moments, last night, the quill in his hand, imagining what Snape would have said about this, whether Dumbledore would have approved or disapproved, whether Sirius would have thought it was all a grand joke or a rat-like act unbecoming of any true Gryffindor. Harry had had his share of nightmares, years ago when he first began to brew his own potion, about Sirius calling him Pettigrew for refusing to face up to his own emotions. Could he do this? What if he achieved safety but sacrificed his independence and self-respect?



            And every time, the sight of Draco’s face returned to him. And every time, he sighed and went on writing.

            He had already seen that he had one sort of power at his command which Draco didn’t fear or hate as much as Harry had thought he would, even though that magic could have devoured Draco, too. Harry would have to chance that Draco would think this was worth the cost, once he learned about it.

            He was trying to be more worldly, he thought, leaning his forehead on the cool glass of the window. He was trying to act like an adult. And acknowledging that he had the power to better their situation and using that power was adult, surely. The major problem was that he had multiple arguments in his head telling him that such and such an act was worthwhile, and providing him with excellent rationales against those actions at the same time.

            A flutter of dark wings crossed the scene in front of him, and then an owl rapped on the window. Harry took a deep breath and reached out to swing it open. Unless he was grossly underestimating the speed with which she’d respond to the offer of an exclusive interview, this first owl was from Rita Skeeter.

            You can do this, Harry. It’s worth it.

*

            Draco woke slowly. For a moment, he blinked at the ceiling and wondered why his head felt so fuzzy and grainy. He was out of hospital, now, and would be able to eat real food. He should have been cheerful.

            Then, once again, the memory of his mother’s words struck him. Draco closed his eyes and grimaced, indulging in a deep revulsion he didn’t feel comfortable showing in front of Harry. Harry had been there for Daphne’s defeat, and so Draco didn’t mind him seeing the consequences of her torture. But Harry had not been there—no one had been there—the day that Draco and his parents had the argument that resulted in their breaking.

            And I wouldn’t have wanted him there.

            Yet it stung and preyed on his mind, nonetheless. The words burned in his head, a fever he could inflict on himself whenever he wanted to spend some time thinking about it.

            “We did the best we could to get you through the war and give you a good life afterwards, Draco—“

            “You didn’t!” he’d screamed back, with enough force that his voice cracked, and he thought for a moment (or maybe wished) that his throat would crack with it. “You never did! You’ve gone back to the same life you always had, the same limited, priggish, pitiful life, and God knows when you’ll make the next mistake!”

            His mother had curled her lip just a bit, but it was enough to tell Draco he had crossed the border of the things they never mentioned. Draco and Lucius did not accuse each other of making mistakes during the war. Draco never spoke of his bitterness that his father’s mad, foolish choice of the Dark Lord had placed his son in such danger, and Lucius never said he was disappointed Draco had submitted to everyone involved instead of somehow making an escape into dignity and victory. If they tore open the wound, no one knew when it might stop bleeding.

            And his mother was between them, but closer to his father with every year that passed, bearing her memories of the immediate danger of the war with it. She would risk everything again to guard Draco if he was in peril, but she had never admitted that Lucius should have refrained from joining the Death Eaters. The few times Draco tried to press her on the issue, she asked him what Lucius should have done, when he wanted political power and believed in pure-blood superiority, and reminded him that he had not been alive to judge his parents as they were in those days.

            Now Draco was treading close to that judgment, and his mother’s eyes warned him to stop. But Draco did not want to stop. He opened his mouth to launch another salvo.

            “Draco? Do you want breakfast?”

            He started, because for a moment he thought it likely the soft, diffident voice was his mother’s. Narcissa was capable of sounding like that when she thought she’d won. Then he recognized Harry’s words, and opened his eyes, and forced his memories away.

            “Morning already?” he murmured.

            “Yes.” Harry smiled at him and set a tray full of food—though most of it looked unfairly bland and nourishing—on the table beside the bed. “Ten-o’clock, in fact. Of course, I understand you have all these engagements that you just can’t miss, so in good conscience I couldn’t let you sleep any longer.”

            Draco tried to make a rude gesture at Harry, but a yawn rather interrupted that. He scooped up the first piece of toast near at hand and promptly lavished most of the marmalade Harry had brought on it. He shrugged when Harry raised a disapproving eyebrow. “You’ll just have to bring me more then, won’t you?” he muttered and bit into the toast. It crunched unappetizingly in his mouth, but with the marmalade, it was just about tolerable. Draco sighed and wondered if it was worth the effort of an argument with his mother to call Patty from the Manor. Now that she had reestablished contact, Narcissa would assume any move towards his parents meant Draco wanted to reconcile.

            It wasn’t that Harry’s cooking was horrid. But it wasn’t rich enough, and as a recovering invalid, Draco needed the best food he could get.

            “Let me know when you’re up to discussing something more serious than your choice of marmalade,” Harry muttered, leaning back in his chair.

            “The choice of marmalade is very serious. You, of course, would not understand that, being a marmalade plebeian.” Draco glanced at him, arrested in both the joke and picking up the next piece of toast and smearing butter on it. Harry looked, and sounded, tired. “Is sleeping on the couch not to your liking?” he asked. “I offered to share the bed, if you’ll recall.”

            Harry blinked twice, and then a blush, of all things, worked up his face from his shirt collar. “It’s not that,” he muttered, looking away. “I—stayed awake worrying about you. We’re not in a very good position, you know?”

            “With Diggory, and my parents, and the Healers, and possibly Nott, and the press, on our trail?” Draco made himself pay attention to the toast this time, simply so that he wouldn’t drip butter on Harry’s sheets. “You don’t say.”

            “Well.” Harry leaned forwards. “I have a strategy.”

            Draco stared at him. Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m not as hopeless at planning as that glance seems to imply.”

            “Yes, but you’re—best in the midst of battle,” Draco said diplomatically. “I had thought I’d think up most of the plans, and you’d put them into operation.” He licked a few crumbs off his fingers, and, because it was his fingers and his tongue, Harry’s eyes followed the motions intently. Draco bit his lip to quell a smile; at the moment, Harry might take any happy expression as an insult to his very serious plans. “You’re force. I’m brains.”

            Harry reached out and casually ruffled his hair. Draco, caught between wanting to melt at the tenderness of the gesture and irritation at the dismissal it implied, settled for glaring even as he caught Harry’s retreating hand and smoothed his palm with a thumb.

            “Your rescue from Greengrass didn’t require any particular strategy,” Harry murmured. “And then the one I was forced to use was one I’d rather not repeat.” A quiver of darkness crossed his face, and Draco narrowed his eyes. Still afraid of his own magic, isn’t he? That is something we will have to address. “But I managed to come up with a strategy that worked for the potions committee.”

            “Indeed you did.” Draco rubbed his cheek against Harry’s palm, then picked up the bowl of porridge. Consume it slowly. You’ll have to get through it, from the looks Harry’s throwing you, but eat it too quickly and he’ll think you like it. “And this is a different kind of battle from that. I am not even sure you can help me with my parents.”

            “Maybe not.” Harry looked at him sidelong. “Not until you tell me what happened between you and them, anyway.”

            Draco stiffened his shoulders, but spoke lightly. “I told you. I wanted more independence, and they disdained that. In the end, we had a parting of the ways when I essentially told them to go fuck themselves, and they refused to speak to me or allow me back in the house until I gave up the dreams that so displeased them.” He put a spoonful of porridge in his mouth. It still didn’t taste good, but it gave him an excellent excuse not to answer the questions he could hear hissing on the end of Harry’s tongue.

            Harry watched him for a long moment. His eyes had darkened with some emotion Draco couldn’t read. He shifted, wondering what would happen if they lost the easy camaraderie that had existed between them in St. Mungo’s. Would that make them more vulnerable prey for their enemies? Would not confessing every thought that occurred to one of them, immediately, be the opening that allowed Diggory or someone else to destroy them?

            Then Harry shook his head and said, “Well. You can tell me in more detail when you’re more comfortable doing so.” Draco nodded, more soothed by the trust—for a moment—than he was irritated by the assumption that he would want to tell Harry sometime in the future. “We rather wandered from my strategy for beginning to deal with our position.”

            “And what was that wonderful strategy?” Draco asked, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth, where the porridge had pushed it.

            “Well, first, I think we can convince Skeeter to do a little digging into our friend Diggory’s immaculate background.” When Harry smiled, Draco found out, he still lost his breath and wanted to stare. That was, in a way, a good thing. “He’s a politician. There has to be something there he doesn’t want anyone to find out. And the fact that it hasn’t come out so far only means that it’s well-hidden, not that it doesn’t exist.”

            Draco frowned. “And how are we going to convince Skeeter to help us? Sure, she’d report something on Diggory if she found it, but—“

            “We’re giving her something she wants,” Harry said with quiet force. “Or I am, anyway.”

            Draco blinked. For some reason, the only thing he could think about was Harry offering to let Skeeter fuck him, and that thought made his shoulders stiffen with a wash of jealousy. But he knew enough about Harry by now to realize that he wouldn’t have held and kissed Draco as he did if he didn’t intend to be faithful to him alone, so he raised an eyebrow and waited.

            “I promised her an exclusive interview with me,” Harry confirmed. “She’s wanted one for years, even though I’ve mostly dropped out of the public eye. Maybe simply to make up for never having one that I didn’t control back when I was a student.”

            “You hate your publicity,” said Draco, when some moments had passed and staring didn’t seem able to convey the force of his surprise.

            “I know.” Harry’s hands knotted in his trousers, and he spent a long moment staring over Draco’s head at the opposite wall, as if he were already imagining the flash of the cameras and how much he’d hate them. “But it’s a weapon, Draco, one that Diggory’s wielded more successfully than we have so far. And he’s only a Ministerial candidate. If people are interested in him, they should be more interested in me.” He looked Draco directly in the eye. “I promise that I won’t say a word about the relationship between us, or about you at all, unless you tell me I can. I’ll only explain my own side of the Desire potion brewing, or the rumors that I oppose Diggory’s candidacy, or whatever Skeeter wants me to talk about.”

            Draco shook his head. In a way, what Harry was saying made sense. They should use any weapon at their disposal. And was one that Diggory would fear, in particular, one he had tried to ensure Harry couldn’t use by trying to bribe him. But that didn’t lessen the fact that Harry would hate it like fire even as he used it.

            “I don’t want you to make yourself so unhappy,” Draco whispered at last.

            Harry’s eyes softened, and he reached out and laid his hand on Draco’s cheek. Draco turned his head and let his lips rest against the center of Harry’s open palm—not a kiss, but as good as.

            “And I don’t want to see you unhappy, either,” Harry said roughly. “Thanks to people like Greengrass and Diggory, I’ve already had to endure that, though. I can survive a little more suffering. There’s no way to get out of this unscathed, Draco. At least I’m choosing my wounds.”

            Draco grimaced and glanced at his tray. The porridge really had lost all taste for him, but he picked up a spoon and soldiered down another bite. “And is there anything else that you’re using your publicity for?” he asked.

            “Actually, yes.”

            Draco dropped the spoon and stared at Harry. He never would have expected that answer. And he had worried about their camaraderie from the hospital fading. It seemed Harry had deliberately changed himself into a stranger overnight.

*

            Harry sighed at the look on Draco’s face. Perhaps he should have told him about this from the beginning, the way that he wished Draco had simply told him about the arrangement with Greengass so Harry could be prepared when it went sour and she began to use curses to control Draco’s actions.

            On the other hand, Harry intended to remain in full control of the arrangements he made with others at all times. And if some of them had unintended consequences, at least they wouldn’t be Memory Charms, rape, and uncontrolled use of Legilimency.

            “What else?” Draco said at last. His voice was low and strained, as if he wanted to yell but knew it wouldn’t be productive.

            “I’ve contacted a few people who asked me to sponsor charities or pet projects,” Harry admitted. He winced at the thought of what “sponsoring” could mean—more appearances in public, more people convinced they knew him, more time lost he would rather have spent in private with Draco and Hermione—but it was still worth seeing Draco alive and uninjured to him. “From them, we’ll be able to get some financial backing for the Desire potion, and also to rebuild your shop.”

            Draco drummed a fist into one knee. When the drumming didn’t stop or slow down but only increased, Harry had to fight to keep from speaking. Draco was building up to something—a dramatic outburst or an accusation, perhaps—and so Harry alternated his gaze back and forth between the drumming fist and the bowed, shadowed face.

            “It might have occurred to you,” Draco said at last, voice more acid than Harry had imagined it could be, “that I am tired of having decisions made about my life without my consent.”

            Harry flinched backwards, then reminded himself that the owls were flown and he could not reverse this decision. Besides, he was not Draco’s parents, or Daphne Greengrass either, for that matter. He might have hurt Draco, and if that was the case he would apologize and they would work it out, but he had not started out with a malicious intent and he would not let Draco pretend he had.

            “We were already planning to rebuild your shop, and for me to help with that, before you were taken by Greengrass,” Harry pointed out. “I fail to see why a continuation of that plan, just with different methods, should—“

            “You don’t understand?” Draco snapped the words, yet somehow still managed to make them a question. At least he finally looked up again, though Harry didn’t like the squinted, shut-in look of his eyes. “The method we were planning on was different. It only required you to learn and think and employ your magic if you could. It didn’t require you becoming so unhappy.”

            Harry sighed. “Draco, I’m willing to endure being unhappy for your sake.”



            “And I don’t want you to be unhappy at all, and your saying that you’ll suffer like a martyr for me only increases my dislike of the idea,” Draco snapped.

            Despite himself, Harry smiled. Draco hesitated, then said, “Well? Are you going to tell me what you’ve found amusing in this situation?”

            Harry reached out, picked up Draco’s hand, and kissed the back of his knuckles. Draco flexed his fingers shut once, as if he would make a fist and punch Harry in the jaw, then permitted the gesture, to Harry’s relief.

            “Yes,” Harry said softly. “We’re angry with each other because we’re each so determined that the other not suffer. I find it endearing, not funny, that this is because we care for each other so very much.” He shifted his position so he could more easily put an arm around Draco’s neck.

            Draco’s breathing sped up, and for a moment Harry worried that he might have triggered a bad memory of the time in Greengrass’s care. But Draco shook his head and pressed impatiently forwards, whining a bit in his throat. Harry accepted the invitation and kissed him, keeping the pressure of his mouth light and his tongue a darting, barely-felt presence against Draco’s lips.

            Draco accepted the request at once, and Harry groaned as he felt his tongue slip into Draco’s mouth. He had forgotten how salty a kiss like this always tasted to him, forgotten how it made him want to press closer and nip at his partner. His arm tightened instinctively on Draco’s shoulders, and he leaned in until he found himself falling on top of Draco in the bed, their chests slamming abruptly together and their legs tangling.

            Draco grunted, the breath jolted out of him, but returned to the kiss before Harry had time to withdraw his mouth and ask if he was all right. Harry laughed, and the sound made interesting vibrations as his tongue curled and lapped around Draco’s teeth and Draco made a sharp thrust with his hips.

            It broke off before long; Draco was still tired and weak, and Harry didn’t want him to think he was using sex as a way of distracting Draco from his anger. Draco dropped his head on Harry’s shoulder and sighed.

            “I’m still not happy about this,” he admitted, taking a knot of Harry’s hair between his fingers and pulling on it a little harder than strictly necessary.

            “I wouldn’t expect you to be,” Harry whispered, and kissed his shoulder. He would have gone on, but a tap from the window told him another owl had returned. He rose to his feet, smoothed his hair down, and smiled at Draco. “But what’s done is done, and I’ll do what I can to make sure no bad consequences will emerge from it.”

            “Harry,” Draco murmured, throwing his arm across his eyes. “You’re playing politics. Bad consequences will always emerge from it. The only thing you can do is try to ride those consequences, and tame them to your liking.”

            Harry smiled, and went right on smiling until he opened the next owl. Then he spent some time staring at the letter before he cleared his throat. “Draco, how likely is this to be a joke?”

            “What?” Draco had sat up and was eating another piece of toast from the tray, but he turned around, eyes narrowed, at the sharpness in Harry’s voice.

            Harry wordlessly handed him the letter. He didn’t need to retain and read it. He thought he had memorized it in the few short moments he held it.

            Dear Mr. Potter:

            As I see you are whoring yourself out as a charity case, might I suggest coming to a party at Malfoy Manor where you will be certain to meet many wealthy benefactors interested in celebrity? The party is on Saturday at two-o’clock. Do try not to be late, and make sure that you, as well as any companions traveling with you, are suitably dressed.

            Lucius Malfoy.

*

            Paigeey07: Thanks!

            Thrnbrooke: In this case, Narcissa just knows what Harry did to Daphne.

            Mangacat: Narcissa is still convinced she can win Draco back without sacrificing her pride, so that’s what she’s trying to do.

            Nomdeplume: Not much of a comment on either Narcissa or Diggory, I’m afraid. ;)

            Lilith: Thanks for reviewing!

            Avihenda: The revelation is actually in this chapter: Harry decided to use the power of his name.

            SP777: Well, you’ve just found out, right?

            I’m hoping this will be a political thriller, but also feature the developing romance and Draco’s new relationship with his parents. And I write the story as I go.

            Yume111: Draco, as you can see here, has very mixed feelings. He’s angry, and he wants them back, but he won’t do it unless they’re the ones to admit they were wrong.

            And I’d see Narcissa’s appearance has elements of both.

            Diggory is dangerous. And it’s telling that no one has come forward to report on his secrets yet.
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A More Worldly Man