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A Potion Named Desire	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10877 -:- 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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Chapter Four—Brewing

            Harry eyed the ingredients twice, counted them, then looked under the table to ensure none of them had fallen there. Then he paced in a circle and dried his sweaty hands with two quick sweeps of them on his trousers.

            He was nervous.

            And why shouldn’t he be? Normally, he brewed by himself, or at least when Hermione was resting, since she had come to stay. She would keep courteously silent if he made the potion in front of her, but even in a depression she flinched at every mistake he made and uttered little put-upon sighs. It was best for both him and her if he did it when she was sleeping.

            But today he would do it in front of someone who made his living brewing Potions. He’d had a chance to look over Snape’s Potions book, too, and get a little used to Harry, which he seemed not to have been during their first interview. Draco Malfoy would be sharper and more sarcastic than usual, and act to make Harry feel the full force of his expertise. Anything else was simply unthinkable.

            Harry closed his eyes and forced himself to stand absolutely still for a moment, not reaching for a tool, not touching a vial, and not thinking of the visit he would receive in a few hours’ time. He hovered distantly above his feelings, a skill he had used in the days troubled by the echoes of the war, and still more in the aftermath of Ron’s death. He’d had to know when he was feeling irrationally guilty, such as the first time he had really laughed after Ron’s funeral. The impulsive teenager he’d been could never have done this, but Harry liked to think he had better judgment now.

            Except during things like the Incident…

            Harry snorted aloud. The chances that there would be an Incident with Malfoy were slim to none.

            And he could identify the sources of his anxiety now. His fear that he might make a mistake in front of a perfectionist, known Potions expert was understandable; Snape’s presence had always affected his brewing the same way. The fear that Malfoy would stomp out of the flat in disgust, swearing up and down that he was sorry to have accepted the commission to brew Hermione’s potion, was ridiculous. At worst he’d shove Harry aside and take over himself.

            He should have remembered, too, that side-effects like this always struck him on the morning a few days after he’d drunk his latest dose of the potion. He had to pay for his calm with a reverberation of his calm.

            Harry forced his eyes open and shook his head again, smiling. Malfoy would no doubt find all sorts of things wrong with Harry’s preparations, but he would make them better, and that was in the end part of what Harry was paying him for.

            He went back to his arranging and gathering with a thoughtful eye, and this time noticed that he’d left out the duckweed. He went to retrieve it.

*

            Draco sat back and admired his letter to Cordelia Nott. It was a masterpiece of indirect compliments, full of sly insinuations that he’d come upon his fortune—and hers—and hints that he could deny later, if she ever asked him to prove them to a third party. He sent it on its way with a post owl he’d hired expressly for that purpose, as more discreet, and then sat back to give some cursory attention to the Daily Prophet before he went to Potter’s flat. He’d spent more time with Snape’s old Potions book in the past few days than being aware of the world around him.

            Oh, but it had been wondrous. Old as the scribbled marginalia were, the majority was still relevant. Draco had never seen most of the improvements Snape suggested anywhere outside that book. Sometimes, it was true, his professor’s acidic contempt for others had got the better of him; on several antidotes for poisons was scrawled the short suggestion Use a bezoar. Draco’s eyes rolled when he saw that. Potions was a delicate art, even a lover’s passion treated properly, a conception that Snape had been the first to teach him. He did damage to his own profession to suggest shortcuts that simply avoided the labor necessary.

            On the other hand, Draco had to remember that Snape had been trapped in a school, brewing potions to order, and mostly the same few over and over again, which would be used to heal the results of scrapes between adolescents who really ought to have known better. If he had been free—

            Well, if he had been free, he probably would have been using and teaching Dark Arts instead. Skilled as he had been, Potions had come second to Snape. Draco knew enough about his old teacher to admit it now.

            It had both amused and soured Draco to find the spell that Potter had used to cut him open in the book as well. Sectumsempra. He had paused with his fingers running over it, wondering if Potter had known he would find this incantation when he lent the book to Draco, wondering if he was meant to find it—

            Then Draco shook his head briskly. No, this time, surely, he was overestimating the Gryffindor’s intelligence. Potter seemed to have been honestly surprised the book survived. Granger might have planned something like this for him, but Granger was in no condition to plan anything right now.

            After seeing the preparations Potter regularly undertook to make his potion, Draco was a little surprised the git was around to plan anything at all.

            Enough. He had sat down to read the newspaper, not get involved in more speculations about what would happen later this afternoon.

            The leading article was about Celestina Warbeck’s latest love affair, because God forbid the Prophet put important news on the front page. Draco turned to the second one, which sometimes carried sense, and snorted when he discovered that was devoted to testimonies from Celestina Warbeck’s fans about how her latest love affair would affect their concert attendance. Irritated, he glanced at the third.

            And froze, his eyes narrowing. He couldn’t distinguish the immediate importance of the picture in front of him, since he couldn’t remember the face of the wizard in the photograph, but he was sure he had seen it before.

            The photo showed a wizard probably in his late thirties, his hair thinning already, his head canted forwards at an angle that for some reason reminded Draco of Cedric Diggory the Hogwarts Champion. (Still the real and true Hogwarts Champion, for Draco). Then he straightened, laughing, and waved to someone out of range of the picture. His smile was like Diggory’s, too, Draco mused. Very cheerful, very full of goodwill and peace on earth.

            Draco didn’t trust it for a moment.

            He remembered why, finally, and without being reduced to reading the article, which would no doubt be rubbish. This was Charlemagne Diggory, an older cousin of Cedric’s, who had actually survived to leave school and have a political career of the kind described by obscure Ministry officials as “brilliant.” He had negotiated a few diplomatic settlements with other countries where British wizards had made fools of themselves, if Draco remembered correctly, and also done well on sensitive assignments that took him near the Muggle Prime Minister. He typically waded into delicate situations with that cheerful grin on his face, and ended by making everyone else grin with him. Draco had noted him a few times as someone potentially dangerous in the future, assuming Draco made enough money and dredged up enough desire to go into politics, but Diggory had spent so much time out of the country lately Draco had almost forgotten his face.

            Now he was officially announcing his intention to run for Minister; the election was coming up quite soon.

            And Draco had remembered something else, something that made him frown thoughtfully at the paper. Charlemagne Diggory had been one of those half-helpless young wizards who became suitors of Cordelia Nott’s for a time. He had escaped with most of his money and his unimpaired health, which was impressive.

            Draco had wondered why Cordelia was back in the country, exactly—just as he had wondered why, at the time, Charlemagne Diggory did so well in comparison to everyone else who tangled with her.

            It was something to think about. Not something to do anything about, since Draco had next to no evidence, but he would remember it. He clipped loose the photograph and pinned it to the wall of his rooms, near one of the enchanted windows, then sat back and watched it until it was time for him to depart for Potter’s.

*

            Harry greeted Malfoy with a nod. He thought the less wasted conversation, the better. Trying to be polite at length hadn’t got him much the other day. He swept his hand towards the table in the center of the drawing room. “Here are the ingredients,” he said. “Did you have any questions before we begin?”

            Malfoy blinked at him like a lizard disturbed from its warm rock. “Before you begin, you mean.”

            Harry couldn’t really admit that he expected the git to meddle just because, so he simply shrugged, smiled, said, “I misspoke,” and turned back to the ingredients in front of him. The cauldron was already bubbling. Filling it with water and lighting a fire beneath it were tasks that even Harry had trouble messing up.

            Of course, the water had to be at a certain temperature, hot enough to melt some of the ingredients and not others. Harry cast a quick charm to ensure he’d reached that, and found himself short a degree. He waited—if only he’d had this kind of patience in regular Potions class, he might have reached the sixth year even with Snape still teaching it—and then began to cast the series of spells he’d given Malfoy.

            The order of them was unique to this potion, and several weren’t used in Potions-making otherwise at all. Harry had got used to them, and he found them much easier to master than the order in which he cast the ingredients into the cauldron or how many times he had to stir it with a glass or silver rod. Of the intense six months of experimentation and research under Hermione’s direction that he’d used to develop the potion, determining the spells had been his favorite.

            After the charm to check the temperature came the spell that crushed the lavender petals into an even dust, and then the Diamond-Cutting Hex that Malfoy had been so impressed with the other day. The duckweed separated itself into the regulation lengths. The dragon scale shimmered and calved a piece as long as the joint of a child’s finger, or so Hermione assured Harry; he’d never had the temptation to go about measuring that. The fine Demiguise hairs, touched with a slight glow so Harry could keep track of them, were severed into equal halves. The hoof scraping from a black unicorn lost its impure end. The coil of tarnished silver rang and warbled as Harry cut half a spiral. And so on.

            He glanced sideways at Malfoy, though just with one eye, to see how he was taking this. A tricky feat of memory was coming up.

*

            The moment Potter began to cast, Draco felt it. The magic that had only hovered in the room before, subdued, landed and extended itself like moth’s wings from the cocoon, slowly, torturously, but inexorably.

            Draco pressed himself back against the wall. Potter didn’t appear to notice, though now and then one of his eyes drifted towards Draco in a motion that would have made the Prophet reporters dance and several hundred young witches considerably less enthusiastic about Potter’s appearance if they could have been here to notice it. The magic billowed and flapped and roared like the sails of a ship now, so expansive Draco wondered Granger could stand to be in the same flat with it. Of course, perhaps she was used to it by now.

            He had imagined that Potter would call upon some enormous reserve of power when he brewed, which otherwise he left untapped. That would explain both his ordinary calmness and lack of attraction for someone who had grown used to ferreting out magic, and the fact that he could cast the Diamond-Cutting Hex. Instead, Draco had the impression that Potter had loosed a wild beast from its fetters—most of them. He was still trying to control it with a slender halter.

            The beast strained against its bonds, but Potter ground it down into a fine point, which required both enormous power and enormous finesse. That someone could even keep track of all the multiple targets that sliced themselves apart when Potter cast the Diamond-Cutting Hex was impressive. Draco bit his lip and stood a little straighter. He might have been able to do it—

            If he could have cast the Diamond-Cutting Hex at all, which was still beyond him.

            Potter faced the cauldron, seeming unaware of Draco’s pallor and intense attention. He was gazing directly at the boiling water. He made a tiny gesture with his wand, and another with his left hand, in complement. Draco wondered if he was even aware of it. The crushed lavender petals swirled up in a tight cloud of wind that let none of them escape, and Draco imagined they would drop into the potion.

            Then he remembered the fifth spell on Potter’s list, and frowned. He was about to see it happen, obviously, but how it could apply to lavender petals—

            Magic raced past Draco like a single exhalation of midwinter’s wind. The lavender petals separated. Half of them remained as normal, and sifted down carefully into the cauldron. The rest transformed, crisping at the edges, turning white. Draco, staring, knew that Potter had changed their essence and not just their color; he had Transfigured them into daisy petals.

            We definitely didn’t cover that in Transfiguration at Hogwarts.

            The daisy petals attached themselves like a cluster of flies to the severed piece of silver, which Potter had just Levitated from the table. Draco was watching for it, knew it would happen from the list of spells, and still almost wasn’t able to believe it. The petals melted into the silver, the metal liquefying to accept them and hardening again around their ends, in a localized blast of extreme heat that should have been tangible far beyond the petals—should, in fact, have fried them.

            And Potter, when Draco turned back to him, though he had a slight frown on his face and his concentration appeared complete, still hadn’t broken a sweat.

            The coil of silver spun around twice, gathering momentum that Draco knew was essential for the angle at which it would drop into the cauldron, and then plunged. Potter had already cast a slight dome over the cauldron to prevent it from splashing hot water on him, Draco, or the ingredients still waiting on the table. Behind the silver and its fused daisy petals came the dragon’s scale, which Potter briefly caught close in his hand so he could cast a spell on it that made it throb like a heart, and then one of the transparent, glittering lengths of Demiguise hair.

            “This is the dangerous part,” Potter said suddenly, his voice odd and staccato, utterly devoid of emotion. Draco reckoned he was directing too much of his effort into the potion to be able to spare warning or anger for his audience.

            Draco pressed back against the wall. He would have cast a Shield Charm in front of himself, but he knew the Protego spell sometimes reacted badly with potions that contained silver. He waited, instead, immovable as stone now, fascinated as much by the risk as by the process.

            And it was a process that Potter had obviously perfected.

            Not that it was controlled; Potter bowled along on the edge of disaster, conjuring salt onto the scraping from a black unicorn’s hoof and hurling it into the cauldron just a moment before the potion would have gone unstable without it, casting a Finite Incantatem that released the hold of the Diamond-Cutting Hex on the silver but not on the dragon’s scale a breath before the potion became unusable sludge, whirling through a series of no less than five separate spells to enchant the duckweed and the remaining Demiguise hairs into a glittering lumpy concoction like a piece of obsidian, which would make everything explode if an edge on it was too sharp.

            He sped the lump into the cauldron and cast a Finite Incantatem to remove the diamond properties from the duckweed and the Demiguise hairs in the same motion. Then he raised the temperature of the water at the surface of the cauldron, while chilling the part closest to the fire, and began a steady chant that turned the middle of the liquid into a maelstrom, mixing and spreading the ingredients more or less evenly, whilst guiding several of them through a spiraling widdershins path that called on solar magic, of all things.

            Draco didn’t think he could have taken his gaze from Potter at that moment if Cordelia Nott had walked through the door with the news that he was free of his debt. Potter’s eyes were narrowed, proud and pure in their determination. His wand never faltered, not even when he had to take up a silver stirring rod in his left hand and lash it through the middle of the maelstrom. A glass stirring rod followed, but he broke that one with a sharp ringing sound on the rim of the cauldron, tilting his palm at the one angle that would protect his fragile skin from the shards. One shard fell into the potion, one outside the cauldron. Draco thought it might look accidental, but he knew it was planned.

            Like an Auror battling his way through the middle of a duel, like a Dark wizard fighting for the family honor, like a politician walking through the fiery ordeal of his first speech, Potter finished the last spell, a hoarse Finite Incantatem that doused the fire. Then he shook his hair back from his face and studied the thick green liquid in the cauldron with every indication of happiness.

            “There,” he said. “I’ll leave that to cool for a few hours, and when that time ends, I’ll bottle it. And it’ll be exactly like every other vial of potion I have sitting on my shelves.” He looked up at Draco, as if this were an ordinary occurrence. “So now you’ve seen how that’s brewed. What do you say?”

            Draco swallowed the pride and the long-standing grudge against Gryffindors that would have made him lie and temporize. He stood up straight instead, and stared into Potter’s eyes. Potter blinked twice, and a slight wrinkle appeared in his brows.

            “I think that I can’t brew this potion without you,” Draco said.

*

            Harry snorted and folded his arms. The expression on Malfoy’s face had shaken him. There was a raw appraisal there that Harry was all too familiar with from the faces of Prophet reporters—how many papers could he help them sell?—and people who had wanted his autograph or pictures of him “doing beneficial things” or his childhood blankets—how could they profit from this?

            “I don’t see why,” he said. “Yes, you’ll need my help and Hermione’s in the initial research, but the actual brewing—“

            “Is impossible for me without your command of magic,” Malfoy interrupted smoothly. “I don’t have it. I told you I can’t do the Diamond-Cutting Hex.”

            “And that’s why we’ll prepare this potion a different way, and seek out possible variations on the incantations.” Harry thought he was being very patient. “You won’t need this particular set of spells, Malfoy.”

            “I won’t need one that’s much different, if I’m to produce a potion that has the same general effect it has on you, but adapted to other people.” Malfoy smiled a little. Harry wished he knew what there was to smile about. “Do you know how rare it is to introduce magical modifications into a potion, Potter? New magical modifications, not ones that were tested and agreed upon generations ago? Do you know how much rarer it is to see them work so well? What you’ve done—or Granger’s done, I suppose—is to alter the basic nature of Snape’s potion, not just the surface composition of it. If we’re to market the Desire potion in the form everyone will want it in, then we’ll need that magic. And you cast the spells with a finesse that I can’t touch.”

            Harry shifted uneasily. Malfoy was already making plans to drag Harry into the part of the process he wasn’t interested in. “But I leave the marketing to you. I’ve resigned the potion we develop to your care. And it’s only this one set of spells that I cast with—finesse.” The word sat oddly on his tongue. He was accustomed to thinking of himself as someone who blundered, as clumsy in most of his relationships with the world as Tonks had been physically. “That’s because I’ve practiced them so long. I’ll just stumble on the others.”

            “Enough practice, and you won’t.” If Malfoy had resembled a lizard earlier, he was a crocodile now, in the long, lazy smile he gave Harry. “It took months to develop this potion, didn’t it?”

            Harry nodded. “Six.”

            “We can take at least three with this one.” Malfoy flung a glance at Harry’s green sludge. “Three is all it should take. Of course,” he said, and his voice had dropped into previously unknown registers of softness when he turned around again, “it would go much faster, and give me support for the theory I’ll need to back my modifications, if you would just tell me what the potion does for you.”

            Harry narrowed his eyes. “Not on your life.” The Incident had been bad enough when his friends and family were the only ones who knew about it. The thought of how Malfoy would stare chilled Harry’s stomach like a full glass of ice water.

            “It increases your magic, doesn’t it?”

            And Harry laughed, and managed to relax again. From the calculating glances Malfoy was giving him, he had entertained an absurd suspicion of the bastard knowing. But of course he didn’t. “Try again.”

*

            Draco resigned himself to not knowing right now. He didn’t really need that little tidbit of knowledge, though it would have amused him, when visions of an extremely profitable and entertaining future were dancing in his head.

            “I need you to help me,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much potion I’ll need to produce, and how much time it will take, if I work at this alone?”

            Potter blinked and frowned. “I’m sure there are other potions out there that do something like this one. Madam Skullwink’s Happy Draught—“

            “Madam Skullwink’s Happy Draught gives delusions of comfort,” Draco said flatly. “That’s all. This would actually enable a person to escape the problems that always haunted them, and for good—and without much expenditure of effort, given that you only take the potion every two weeks. That is correct, isn’t it?” Potter gave a guarded nod, and Draco spoke on, gazing appealingly into the other man’s eyes. Gryffindors liked that sort of thing. “Potter, do you have any idea what it would mean to people if there was a convenient, easy solution to problems even more damaging than Granger’s depression, which they’ve struggled with for months or years?”

            “But Hermione won’t take it forever,” said Potter. “She only wants her variant so she can establish a routine of activity that will fight the depression.”

            “And you?” Draco edged a few steps nearer and put a hand on Potter’s arm. People were more likely to agree to things when you touched them. Potter gave him an extremely puzzled glance, but didn’t move away. “Do you think you’re likely to take it for the rest of your life?”

            Potter flushed and averted his eyes. “My situation is different. Without it, I’m a—“ He forced the word out. “A criminal.”

            “Hmm,” said Draco. “But consider how many people aren’t as brave as Granger. And consider how many people there might be like you. Potter, this Desire potion is going to be enormous.”

            “Isn’t that a cheat, though?” Potter asked, obviously still caught in a wrestling contest with his morals. “We would be giving people a way around their problems, instead of forcing them to face them.”

            “House-elves are a way around problems,” said Draco. “And heating charms, and cleaning charms, and a bewildering array of others that I can’t even mention right now.” He caught Potter’s gaze and leaned forwards. “You’ve lived in the wizarding world almost as long as I have. You know, better than anyone else, that the majority of our precious fellow wizards would rather someone else take up the burden of defending them, encouraging them, creating for them. We’re just taking advantage of an attitude that already exists, that’s all. And if we can get some Galleons in the bargain, why not?”

            Potter chewed his lip. Then he nodded, not with the manner of someone entirely convinced, but with the manner of someone who’d think about it.

            “Good,” Draco said, and stared back at the cauldron. The feeling that came over him then was like falling in love.

            Welcome, little potion, to a brand new future.

*

            Lilith: There are more clues to the nature of Harry’s potion in this chapter!

            Js: Thank you!

            Mangacat: Harry has seen death and darkness; he’s committed to not causing them. But yeah, Draco definitely doesn’t understand everything about this new Harry yet, though here he’s more successful at manipulating him.

            QueenBoadicea: Well, the title of the series is also ‘An Intellectual Love Affair.’ I’m making the characters as complicated psychologically as possible.
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A Potion Named Desire

Chapter Four—Brewing