Building With Worn-Out Tools | By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54266 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2 |
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Chapter Thirty-Two—A Whirlwind of Consequences
Harry straightened himself and eyed the narrow dark house before him nervously. Then he shrugged and moved forwards.
He had had to come to Mrs. Zabini’s house to see Ginny, since he had learned from Molly that she had fled the sanctuary of the Burrow the same day the article about Blaise’s past appeared. Dithering about outside the house wouldn’t lessen the unpleasantness of his task.
After this, hopefully, he would never have to see Ginny again. But even one more close contact made his skin crawl with disgust.
His feelings towards his wife had altered so violently that he nearly wondered how he could have married her at all. But he knew the answer. He had been a very different person five years ago: flushed with victory from the war and yet wanting to forget all of it, to run away from the memory of the magic that had possessed him when he killed Voldemort. Marrying Ginny seemed a way to do that. She was safe, familiar, a connection with his Hogwarts days, the period in his life when he had been happiest. And she had wanted to marry him, but she had manifested a wonderful discouragement of the idea at the same time, forcing him to chase and court and seduce her. That had made him think that she wasn’t impressed by his fame and money, which made her different from nearly everyone in his life but Hermione and the other Weasleys.
She had been, it turned out. But she had done a better job of hiding it.
Harry shook his head as he carefully conjured an invisible hand and used it to rap the griffin-shaped knocker against the front door. Spells spat and hissed around the hand, and Harry was glad he’d taken the precaution.
What would his life have been like if Ginny hadn’t lost the baby? Would they have stayed together, loved together, raised their child?
Then a horrible vision came to him: Ginny taking the baby with her when she found another lover, and using him or her to leverage far more money out of him, just so that he could stay in contact with his child from time to time. He shuddered.
“Come, Mr. Potter. Surely I am not so terrible as all that?”
Harry looked up, blinking. It had not been Ginny who had opened the door, though he had imagined for some reason that it would be. It was Mrs. Zabini, whom he had sometimes seen shopping in Diagon Alley at the same time as he or attending the same Ministry function, but never at close quarters before. Though he knew she must have been at least in her fifties, her face was still easily the most beautiful woman’s face he had ever seen. And the beauty was hard to define; it wasn’t the soft sheen of her dark skin, or the curve of her cheekbones, or the shape of her eyes, but something that flowed from all of them.
“Your pardon, Ma’am,” he said, and bowed. “I was contemplating an unpleasant possibility, but your presence has entirely dispelled it.”
She laughed in delight, and held out a hand to him. Harry studied it carefully for a moment, looking for some trace of poison, then reminded himself the house-elf would intervene if he was in any danger. Draco had agreed to let him come alone to confront Ginny, but had sent Seeky with him, invisibly, as protection, the same bargain they had agreed to to let Harry go flying. It seemed reasonable to Harry.
Lightly, he took her hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it.
“How charming, Mr. Potter,” Mrs. Zabini murmured, and then stepped out of the way so that he could come into the house. Harry did, trying not to feel like the fly who had stepped into the spider’s parlor. He caught only a glimpse of dark walls and dark woods with tapestries of dragons on them before he turned back to face her, thinking he needed to keep this dangerous witch in his line of sight. “If I had known how charming you were, I would have joined my son in the endeavor of divorce, I think.” She smiled at him. “You could have become my tenth husband.”
Harry shivered. He was not sure what was worse: the thought of that happening, or the realization that he thought there were probably worse things. He really had to stop finding people who could casually say things like that attractive.
“I will fetch your wife for you,” said Mrs. Zabini, and shook her head sadly. “She broke the Mouth-Binding Law, did she not? Contacting your Arguer with a letter.”
“She did,” Harry acknowledged. “I’m here to collect the fine, and also to talk to her about something she said in the letter.”
“The young have all the luck,” Mrs. Zabini sighed, and then clapped her hands. A house-elf arrayed in a petite white dress appeared and bowed. Harry stared, but Mrs. Zabini evidently found nothing odd about the sight of a house-elf wearing clothing, because she simply said, “Fetch my daughter-in-law down the stairs, if you would, Alette?”
“Mistress,” said Alette, in a clear voice, and bowed once more, and vanished.
Mrs. Zabini turned, saw Harry eyeing her askance, and nodded, a slight smile on her lips. “Yes, my house-elves serve out of love, and so I give them clothes to make them more sightly. I do so love beauty.” She let her voice and her smile linger as she looked at him, and Harry wondered if he would finally stop flushing when he got out of the woman’s house. “And yes, your former wife is in fact my daughter-in-law. She and Blaise married last night.”
Harry blinked in turn. “And you—forgive me, ma’am, but you want her in your family? After what she did?”
“Well.” Mrs. Zabini laughed a bit, a sound that reminded Harry of Nagini. “Her stupidity is rather overshadowed by my son’s. And there is nothing that says she must remain in the family forever. Just until she has borne my grandchild.”
Harry glared hard at her. “Ma’am—“
“I am not threatening to kill her, never fear,” said Mrs. Zabini, with a languid wave of her arm. “There are far too many of her brothers to deal with, for one thing. But the terms of—parting—may be otherwise arranged.”
Harry winced. He could see Ginny’s future now, or thought he could, and it was bleak. After having her baby, she would be parted from her as soon as possible, and Mrs. Zabini would probably raise the child herself. As if she had told him, Harry could feel her ambition to produce a descendant who would not practice the same stupidities Blaise had.
I really have spent too much time around Slytherins, if I know them this well.
Another part of Harry answered stoutly that it wanted to spend the rest of its life around one Slytherin in particular. But before he could pursue that thought further, he heard footsteps behind him, and turned around.
Ginny’s eyes were wide, and shimmering with tears in the same way they’d been in Grimmauld Place. She wore a fragile dress, of fine cloth, that did not conceal her pregnant belly or her defenselessness. She paused at the foot of the handsome spiral staircase, and sniffed when she saw him.
Harry stamped out the worm of pity squirming in his heart—this was the woman who had threatened his lover—and nodded. “Ginny,” he said.
“I shall leave you two blackbirds alone, then,” Mrs. Zabini said, deep amusement in her voice, and stepped out of the entrance hall into a side room which Harry just saw, from the corner of his eye, as an explosion of deep red. Then he shook his head and faced Ginny again, as she stuttered a few steps forwards.
“Have you come to rescue me then, Harry?” she whispered. “I had no idea what it’s like here. It’s horrible.”
“Is it?” Harry asked neutrally.
Ginny nodded earnestly, and came another step closer. Harry’s hair rose at the thought of her touching him, and he managed to move, he thought, casually backwards, while making it seem as if he did no such thing. How had he shared a bed with her? It seemed impossible now.
“Mrs. Zabini is a tyrant in ways that Mother never imaged,” Ginny whispered. “And she—she keeps speaking of the baby as if it was her child, and my body as if it were her body that she wanted exercised and taken care of. It’s truly creepy, Harry. Please. I want free of this.”
“Which is why you married Blaise,” said Harry, frustration creeping up his throat.
She halted and stared at him.
“Ginny, did you really think I wouldn’t find out?” Harry shook his head and folded his arms. “And all this is beside the point. I didn’t come here to find out how comfortable you were. I came to tell you that if you threaten Draco again, I will hunt you down and use curses that will make the ones Draco put on your husband seem small.”
Ginny transformed in moments, throwing off the pitiable mask so completely that Harry was half-convinced it really had been just a mask, and that she’d never felt that sorry for herself. “He stole my husband!” she hissed. “Did you really think I would let that go without a murmur, Harry? Of course not. How can you defend him?”
“I’m sleeping with him,” Harry said. “That’s how.”
“And it’s a pretty, sordid affair, isn’t it?” Ginny stamped one small foot, making her belly bob. “Compared to me, you don’t love him at all. You just wanted another body in your bed, someone else to stick your cock in—“
“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” said Harry, and one of the tapestries on the wall started to smolder as his magic unfurled around him. “You have no idea what Draco’s really like, and I meant it, Ginny. I will hurt you if you contact him again, let alone if you touch him. I’m falling in love with him—“
Well, all right, that was as much news to him as it was to her, but she didn’t need to know that.
“And he’s far more than just a body. You can think that you turned me gay, if you like, but the truth is that I finally found someone really attractive to me.”
Ginny just stared at him, mouth slightly open, breathing hard. Harry folded his arms and glared her down. At least he had managed to make the flames stop climbing the tapestry.
“I know that’s not true,” Ginny whispered. “Maybe—“
Harry narrowed his eyes further, and she leaped and yelped as fire stung her foot instead. She came down hopping, and looked at him as if she had never seen him before. Harry thought she might be seeing the real Harry Potter for the first time.
“It is,” he said. “And you violated the Mouth-Binding concessions set by the court in contacting Draco. You’ll give me ten Galleons as a working fine right now, and I’ll take them back to Draco and ask if he wants more.”
“There’s no amount like that set—“
“In fact, there is,” said Harry, who had checked before he came to the house. “And the amount set by the court is considerably higher. This is just a working fine, as I said.” He put his hand out.
Ginny stared at him, breath rushing. Harry raised one brow and focused on her hair this time. It started to creep down her face and twine around her throat.
She stumbled away from him, a thin wail breaking free of her. Harry stood where he was, a strange, giddy exaltation rushing through him.
Was this the way Draco felt when he got revenge on an enemy? Harry had never seen what was so attractive about the process before—he might have started out wanting to kill Voldemort from revenge, but he had overcome that as the war progressed—but now he discovered some sympathy in himself after all.
“I’ll get it,” Ginny whispered, and started to scuttle away.
“And your promise to leave Draco alone?” Harry asked.
“I promise,” she said, back turned to him.
“A Wizard’s Oath.”
“My Wizard’s Oath to leave Draco Malfoy alone,” she said, voice dead, and then passed from the room.
Considering what must have changed for her in the time he had to wait before Ginny came back with the ten Galleons, Harry realized that perhaps her faith in him never to hurt her, the stubborn hope she had maintained that he was still in love with her, had burned out at last.
He craned his neck and resisted the urge to whoop. He felt as if he had been released from heavy iron chains.
*
Draco had gone shopping in Diagon Alley that morning on purpose. He wanted to see what the reactions of others would be, now that the entire wizarding world knew he was sleeping with Harry Potter.
The shopkeepers, oddly enough, tended to look at him with more respect. After the first interaction, Draco figured out that they probably thought he had access to the Potter vault, now, along with his own.
I might as well, he thought smugly, adjusting the fall of a new robe against his body in Madam Malkin’s, and carefully considering the line in the mirror. Considering that I have a Gryffindor lover who will give me any of his money should I ever require it, because he’s like that.
He did earn some glares and hisses from the common shoppers as he passed them, but that was only to be expected. They thought he had stolen and corrupted their Golden Boy, after all. Draco had even seen a few of the gossip newspapers, trashier than the Prophet, discussing the “fact” that he and Harry had been lovers since the end of the War, or before that, and that Harry had strung his poor wife on with the hope that he might really love her someday, until he found the perfect excuse to divorce her in her seeking physical satisfaction for herself.
Draco didn’t intend to let the bad publicity trouble him. He was rather used to it, after the notoriety that had surrounded the name of Malfoy.
And the thought of Harry’s easy smile around him now, the way Harry oriented on him the moment he entered a room without noticing what he was doing, and the way he’d curled trustingly along Draco’s flank yesterday…
Draco felt a shiver of arousal at the mere thought, and put it aside as conveniently as he could. He had a secondary purpose to his journey this morning (of course he did, or he wouldn’t have been a Slytherin). He was hunting for the right trappings to prepare a very special dinner for Harry. He could have had the house-elves find the ingredients he wanted, but then he wouldn’t have seen the stares and rude gestures for himself.
He spent a long moment considering the glamour spellbooks in Flourish and Blotts, before he settled on the perfect one and made his way to the front of the shop. On the way, he bumped into a large witch with a sneer on her face and dark hair piled high on her head, or rather, she bumped into him. Draco recovered from the collision and smiled at her courteously, feeling a surge of excitement pass through him when her sneer deepened.
“So is it true?” she asked, loud enough for everyone in the shop to hear. Heads turned. Draco preened a bit, feeling the attention settle across his shoulders like a heavy cloak.
“That I won the case and got the money?” he asked. “Of course it’s true. You must have read about the result of the trial in the papers.”
“No, no.” The witch scowled and leaned closer to him, her fingers wringing around each other as if she wished she could clutch his neck and strangle it instead. “No, I meant your love affair with Harry Potter.”
“Yes,” said Draco. “But I can’t tell you anything he might have whispered as pillow talk. The better part of valor and all that.” He winked and made to step past her.
The witch restrained him with a hand on his shoulder this time. Draco nearly laughed aloud. He hadn’t thought it would come to plebeians touching him. He looked down at her fingers with a little moue, which made her appear to gain even more confidence. He wondered why. Did she think he would have any trouble calling the Aurors, purely to complain about a groping in Diagon Alley?
Or perhaps she thought they’d believe her instead, if they did come. Draco supposed that was the case. There were still some people in the Ministry who hated the very name of Malfoy, and some of them, simply because the percentage was so large, must be among the Aurors.
“You corrupted him,” the witch asserted. “You enchanted him. You made him think that he didn’t really love his wife, but I saw them when they went on a tour of Britain after they married. You never saw a happier couple.”
Draco snorted. He had missed Harry’s wedding tour entirely, involved as he was in studying to become an Arguer, but he knew that must have been Weasley’s idea entirely; Harry would have hated it. “And things can’t change in five years?” he asked calmly, standing still under her grasp.
Her hands tightened. “Not that much,” she said. “Heroes doesn’t turn up gay that often, after all.”
“But common people do?” Draco cocked his head and painted a look of understanding across his face. “Oh, I see why you stopped me now. Well, I still can’t tell you what Harry says in bed, since it’s rather private, but I can direct you to the proper section of this grand bookshop, should you wish to explore your own sexuality.”
The witch’s face purpled. Draco stood there and enjoyed the sensation, wondering if someone would pull a wand next.
And then Harry’s voice, unexpectedly but wonderfully, said, “Is there trouble here, Draco?”
The black-haired witch loosed him and stumbled away. Draco stepped forwards and offered his hand to Harry, grinning when Harry took it possessively and pulled Draco back against him. Jealous that someone was touching me, even though he must know I’d have no interest in someone who looks like that. Nearly everything I could want in a lover.
“Trouble?” the witch asked, her voice shrill. “Of course! He’s corrupted you—you, the Savior of the Wizarding World!”
Draco turned his head back and met Harry’s glare of disgust for the title. Then he looked down at Draco, and his face softened so suddenly that Draco would have suspected him of playing for the crowd if he hadn’t already had experience of how abruptly Harry’s moods could change. “He didn’t corrupt me,” Harry said, softly but clearly enough for everyone in the crowd to hear. “He only showed me what should have been obvious already. And then he fought for me where no one else would have, and overcame old prejudices to give me a chance, and allowed me to fight for him. The only thing you really need to know about all that, though, is that I’m very happy in his company.”
He curled a hand around Draco’s face and kissed him, softly and gently and chastely, but he didn’t try to protest when Draco made it something more, deeper. Draco grinned to hear gasps from the people watching. Some of them were sounds of pre-retching, but not all of them.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Harry breathed into his mouth, drawing back a bit.
“You have no idea,” Draco said, and licked Harry’s lips, chasing his tongue back into his mouth. When that ended, he added, “How’d you find me?”
“Asked Heeky where you’d gone,” Harry said, “and then searched until I saw you. But I wanted to wait until—oh, God, Draco—“ He arched his back suddenly, since Draco had taken the opportunity to attack his neck, and Draco heard his groan with deep satisfaction.
It was also as much as he felt comfortable showing in public, and he needed more time if he were to plan his seduction for tonight, so he put his arms around Harry, and Apparated them home. He stepped away from him when he got there, laughing a little at the confusion in his eyes.
“Later,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing Harry touch his mouth for a moment, a soft smile forming there, before he slipped away.
*
“Harry! Come here. I want to look at you.”
Harry turned obediently to the side. Draco had told him to come down to a small, intimate study for dinner, but he doubted that he would mind if Harry delayed to visit Narcissa.
She had completely recovered in St. Mungo’s, with the Healers managing even to soothe her nightmares, and she looked as pale and lovely as she ever had, dressed in a set of long white robes. But she also looked stronger than usual as she stood up from her harp to meet him, and beckoned him forwards sharply, the way a sane woman might. Suddenly aware that he was facing Draco’s mother, whose disapproval Draco would take seriously, Harry approached her with some caution.
Narcissa spent long moments gazing at him. Harry knew, now, where Draco had got his stern face that he used to hide his true emotions in court. Lucius could look colder, but Narcissa’s expression was a lack of expression, making the watcher try to guess, frantically, what was going on behind it.
“Hmmm,” she said, which could have meant anything, and then walked around him once. Harry stood still, though it took some effort, and tried to clench his fingers into his palms, rather than wipe his hands on his robes, which would leave sweat stains.
Narcissa came to a stop in front of him. She continued to stare into his face. Harry stared back, and realized for the first time that, rather than the gray eyes of her husband and son, her eyes were actually a very pale ice-blue, sometimes appearing translucent depending on the light.
And then she smiled at him, and stepped forwards, and kissed him on the brow—her lips were soft and cold, like melting snow—and said, “You will make him happy, I think, Harry. I approve.”
Then she stepped decisively away from him, sat down, and began to play her harp as if he had ceased to exist.
Harry blinked a bit, but blew her a kiss, which caused a faint smile on the side of her face and gave the lie to her ignoring him, and then slipped down the stairs.
He tried to tell himself the warm glow in his chest was embarrassment, but he knew better.
*
GrimWriter: As you can see, Mrs. Zabini has plans for raising Ginny’s baby. But not all your questions are destined to be answered, alas.
Anon: As you can see, yes, Ginny was fined for breaking the Mouth-Binding decree by writing to Draco. However, she will not be fined for her encounters with Harry, as he initiated those himself.
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