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This Enchanted Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3669 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Four—Loyalty and Jealousy

            “You have to understand that I haven’t told anyone else about this.”

            Stuart’s voice was low, his eyes cutting back and forth between Harry and Draco as though he assumed they would split up and come at him from different directions. Harry kept his posture relaxed against the enormous black couch Stuart had finally led them to, in the middle of his even more enormous drawing room. This wasn’t his fight, or his conversation. Stuart would be appealing mainly to Malfoy. Let him make his appeal there, then.

            Malfoy didn’t seem inclined to take it more seriously than Harry, though, and utterly let down his end of the Stuart-questioning task. He sipped at the tea Stuart had handed him and said nothing, his mouth set into an implacable line.

            Stuart stared at him for a little while, then uttered a gusty sigh and continued on. “When I was ten, I lost my aunt. She was the only one who really encouraged me to do anything but study to be the perfect pure-blood heir. I knew there was a wider world out there, but my parents wouldn’t show it to me, and you can’t build a life and knowledge of reality off the small hints I could get. But my aunt let me read the right books, and introduced me to a few children who didn’t fit the uptight mold of the ones my parents encouraged me to play with. She was the only one who cared.” His face softened and grew bright, as if the light from a distant sunset was playing over it.

            Harry bit his lip to stop himself from reacting with a cry of sympathy. After all, the man in front of him had been a Death Eater, and he didn’t know that it was from motives like the ones Malfoy had had, either, to save his family. The only thing Harry could possibly do right now was reserve judgment.

            “I had all the toys I could want, and all the books I could want as long as they weren’t about Muggleborns or Muggles, and all the racing brooms, and the owls, and the dress robes,” Stuart continued. “But she was the only one who cared. Who showed me other things. Who taught me about the way that I’d have to become if I wanted to survive.”

            He paused to take a swig out of the can, and then leaned forwards with his hands dangling between his knees. It was a posture that Ron took, a lot of the time. Harry frowned, and again reminded himself that he couldn’t show too much sympathy to someone who might lie to them, according to the way Malfoy sat coiled, just because he resembled Harry’s best friend.

            “When I touched the globe, I saw her again, and the way she really was, not the way I thought she was when I was a child.”

            “And she was a disappointment, I take it?” Malfoy’s voice had that glittering ice-rime on it again that Harry had heard before when he disappointed him.

            Stuart gave him a look strong enough to make Harry’s hand tighten on his wand. “You understand nothing,” Stuart said, and his voice seemed to make the room vibrate. “But I reckon that’s not unusual, since every relative you have either despises you or you despise them.”

            Malfoy’s face whitened, but Harry only noticed because he was looking directly at him. He tensed, ready to spring to his feet if Malfoy wanted Harry to defend him, but then thought about it. Malfoy could make a cutting remark of his own if he wanted to put Stuart in his place. If he didn’t really react, then he probably didn’t want the Stuarts of the world to know what he was feeling.

            Harry leaned back against the couch and wished he had accepted a cup of tea when it was offered, if only so he would have something to do with his hands. Stuart looked at him, and Harry smiled back. Unlike the whiteness of Malfoy’s face, that made Stuart shift in place and look away.

            “I didn’t know her,” he said. “Not really. My memories faded because I was a kid, and also because I went to Hogwarts the next year and started living the way that she had told me I always could. But now I saw how intelligent and vital she really was. The place we met was her house, but with rooms that I never got to see inside and had only heard described after her death. I don’t—it was more than a dream. More than a vision, even. Somehow the globe that Alexander left behind took me there.”

            “And you want to go back,” Harry said, after a glance at Malfoy to make sure that he didn’t want to handle the interrogation of this witness by himself. “More than you’ve ever wanted anything.”

            Stuart stared at him, and his tongue darted out to moisten his lips a moment later. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “How did you—how did you know?”

            “Because that’s the way I feel about the vision I had,” Harry said, and felt Malfoy’s attention shift to him. Well, that wasn’t a problem. Malfoy wasn’t going to accost him about something private in front of a hostile witness like Stuart, and meanwhile Harry could watch Stuart for signs of anything important. “The person I fell in love with last year was there, and promised me we could be together if I learned the key to the globes.”

            “My aunt didn’t actually promise me that,” Stuart admitted. “Just said there was a locked door, and a key that fit it, and if I could find the key and fit it into the lock, then I could open the door and come to her.”

            “And that is the dangerous part,” Malfoy drawled, leaning back in his chair and fixing his eyes on the ceiling. “Do neither of you see that? The dream-worlds he promises do not exist, and if they did and you could cross into them, what would you do about the people remaining in the world behind you?”

            Harry turned to him as he finished, because he couldn’t help it, and so saw the spear-like glance that Malfoy threw at him, felt the way it pierced his body. He winced, and lowered his head. Then he lifted it again, because if Malfoy could only bring up subtle hints in front of Stuart, then Harry was free to pretend to ignore them. He wasn’t subtle in the same way that Malfoy was, after all.

            “I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to return, no,” Stuart said with some composure, and lifted the Muggle can to his mouth again. Malfoy’s hands curled inwards like ravens’ claws while Stuart made him wait. Harry winced and winced to himself, wondering if Stuart knew how lucky he was that Malfoy had the patience to wait like this. Of course, perhaps it wouldn’t matter, since Malfoy wouldn’t take out his temper on Stuart.

“But my aunt didn’t say that I had to,” Stuart went on, lowering his can. “There must be some way into the world where she dwells, and that’s what I want to find. The bridge there and back again.” He spoke with a faint smile, but the burning in his eyes made Harry lean still further back into the couch.

“These people are dead,” Malfoy said. “Both Stuart’s aunt and your lover, Potter.” Though it was no more than the continuation of the deception he had begun himself, really, Harry still felt a flash of absurd gratitude to hear Malfoy call Lionel his lover. It connected them in a way, and made it seem less like the connection had only been Harry’s absurd, one-sided crush. “Why do you think the vision is of another world? Why not a dream, a hallucination?”

“It was vivid,” Stuart whispered. “You didn’t see the colors of the tapestries on her walls.”

Harry thought of the way the grass had crushed under his feet as he walked with Lionel, and privately agreed.

            “Hallucinations are often vividly-colored,” said Malfoy, and there was no smile in his voice now. Harry waited a moment before he turned towards him, in fear of what he might see. Malfoy gripped the edges of the cushion he sat on, and his eyes shone, but not in a way that would have made Harry want to go near him if he saw him from a distance. “I lived for years with people whose delusions had the power to change every color in the world. I won’t live with more of them.”

            “That hardly matters to me, does it?’ Stuart drawled, and drained the can he held. “I know what I saw, and I know why it’s real.”

            Malfoy turned his head and pinned Harry with his eyes. Harry swallowed. He had felt nothing like this since some of the moments when he spoke with Lionel and tried to make him understand Harry’s feelings, or at least trust him again, since he couldn’t return them. Not even that was as intense as this.

This warning is meant for me.

Harry looked down and forced a little lightness into his voice. “We might never find the path to those worlds, but we know that we should look for them, that we have to look for them. After all, how else can we understand what Alexander is doing, and stop it?” There, he thought. That’s a good argument, and Malfoy can stop looking at me now like I’m a traitor to whatever beliefs he has.

            “We must understand what he is doing,” Malfoy said, and smiled charmingly, his lips curling. “We must understand what every Dark wizard we hunt is doing, and stop it. But becoming caught up in their games will avail us nothing.”

            And now Harry had no choice but to meet his eyes. He knew Malfoy was thinking of Healer Alto, and how he had fallen victim to her power without ever meaning to, and a pleasant little shiver danced over his skin. Perhaps he shouldn’t, but after a partner who couldn’t care less what he thought and then Lionel who Harry cared about too much, it was nice to have someone show that the things he’d done to Harry under Alto’s control, and Harry’s forgiveness for it, still mattered so much to him.

            “I’m afraid I’ve told you all I can,” Stuart said abruptly, dragging them out of their little drama. And Harry could hardly blame him, when it must have been boring to sit there and watch him and Malfoy stare into each other’s eyes. “Is there anything else you wanted to ask me?”

            Malfoy turned to him and shook his head. “We know where to find you if we have questions,” he murmured.

            It was a standard Auror closing line, but Stuart must have taken it as a threat, because his face darkened and he half-rose from the chair. Then he glanced at Harry, fake-laughed, and dropped back. “Yes, you do,” he said. “In the home that I built with my own money that my parents were kind enough to give me when I said that I might want it.”

            Harry at least knew why that made Malfoy go into the kind of stillness that was the opposite of a visible flinch; his parents had abandoned him when he chose to become an Auror. But he couldn’t do much but scowl at Stuart in warning, and the way Stuart looked at him with half-lidded eyes, the wrath of Harry Potter was the last thing he was concerned about. Sometimes Harry wished he didn’t have the reputation of being caring and compassionate to everyone but Dark wizards.

            If you knew some of what I could do, he thought in Stuart’s direction, and hoped that the emotions showed in his eyes at the same time as he also hoped they didn’t, so that Stuart would have nothing to act against him for. If you hurt him…

            “Call off your attack dog, Malfoy,” Stuart said, and turned his head away. “I’ve done nothing but speak perfectly ordinary words to you, and answer you with all the politeness you deserve.”

            Harry felt himself flush, and bit his lips so he wouldn’t say something. Whatever he did say would probably only make it worse for Malfoy. Malfoy, by the way he reached out and lightly touched Harry’s wrist, seemed to agree.

            “Come, Harry,” he murmured. “We know where he lives, and we know his wealth. But he doesn’t know ours, does he?”

            Harry looked at Malfoy, blinking. Normally, he would never use Harry’s first name outside the office, and never for something this…unimportant. To hold him back from scowling at a witness? Malfoy would content himself with looks. Not a word and a touch. They were too vulgar, too intimate.

            But Malfoy was looking at him now, and from the step closer he made, Harry was suddenly reminded of the way Malfoy had acted in the Healer’s office. As if Harry deserved some new protection, more than usual, at least.

            Harry felt his stomach clench with something that could have been nausea but felt more like warmth, and smiled cautiously at Malfoy. Then he faced Stuart and bowed to him. “Sorry for causing you trouble, Mr. Stuart,” he said. “And thank you for answering our questions.”

            Stuart’s face took on a light flush as he sought for some way to interpret that, but Malfoy had a hand on Harry’s back and was guiding him towards the door by then. Harry sighed, resisted the urge to lean against that hand, and waited until they were outside before he turned to Malfoy to ask, “What’s the next step? Back to Leah’s shop, I suppose?”

            I have to find out if the Lionel I saw in the dream was real. If the way to get there was real.

            He did have to, he thought, ignoring the deep-searching way Malfoy stared at him. No matter what the result was of their investigation, if Alexander turned out to be truly twisted or not, Harry had to find out the reality of that dream, so he could lay it to rest and move on his with his life, the way Malfoy had appealed to him to do.

            Or he had to find a way into it, and explore the reality, and see Lionel’s eyes looking at him the way he had always wished they would look at him. One reality or another.

*

            Has Potter started to think the vision was real?

            Draco restrained himself from asking. He had already given away more than he wanted to, with that little act where his hand had landed on Harry’s back and he had called him by his first name instead of Potter. Draco was sure that Potter hadn’t seen the way Stuart’s eyes narrowed, or wouldn’t have known what that meant if he did see, but he wouldn’t put it past Stuart to watch them out his window, either.

            “Back to Eleanor’s Enchantments,” he agreed, and turned to lead the way.

            Facing them, in the shadow of a great, tentacled creature that Draco remembered from some of his fever dreams as a boy, was Alexander.

            Draco shielded at once, and stepped in front of Harry, who had surged forwards as if he thought it was his task to stop Alexander and his nightmares all at the same time. Draco raised shields around Harry, too, while Alexander’s hand snapped out and two more globes flew from them. One of them hit the shields in front of Harry and exploded.

            The other passed through the shields in front of Draco as if they weren’t there.

            Draco dropped to one knee and rolled, left arm tucked closely in to his body. For some reason, a thought that burned and crackled through his mind like a storm, it seemed especially important to protect his left arm.

            But Alexander didn’t try to hit him again, and when he sat up and looked around, blinking, Draco realized that he was gone. The nightmares had gone with him, those things half-glimpsed and better left unseen.

            “Draco! Are you all right?”

            Harry was stooping over him, and the clarity in his eyes was everything that Draco could have desired, but had rarely seen, since the confrontation with Alto. He nodded and spent another moment scanning the street. Alexander had a habit of appearing out of thin air, it seemed, and vanishing as abruptly. He wouldn’t put it past him to appear behind Harry’s back and strike with a globe at him.

            Already, his mind was working on the possible reasons that his own shields might have failed. Harry’s greater power? Because Alexander had already hit Harry with one globe and wished to target Draco this time? Draco shook his head. Those were plausible reasons, but not ones that he could know were true without some extensive work in a training room or with magical theory.

            And preferably one of the globes.

            He looked at the street to see whether any were left, and cursed softly when he saw only small glass shards and what looked like a scattering of fairy dust. Perhaps the Unspeakables would have some in their custody.

            “Draco! Will you answer me?”

            Draco glanced up with his eyebrows lifted. Harry scowled at him as if he hadn’t seen Draco’s nod. Well, perhaps he hadn’t. Draco had noticed before this that Harry didn’t pay attention to gesture as much as words.

            Except the times that he wants to pay attention to the gestures, of course, or wants to find someone to blame for his own lack of attention.

            Saying so would start an argument they had no time for and probably couldn’t finish. Draco curbed his temper with sharp reins, and said, “I’m all right. The globe didn’t touch me. However, I think this proves that they’re more dangerous than we anticipated. Alexander used them as weapons, and on us this time, with no chance that he meant to strike at Leah. Are you still so confident that your vision of Lionel is a good thing, Potter?”

            Potter stared past him with his lips parted, his eyes rapt. Draco turned around swiftly, but saw no gateway to another world appearing in the middle of the pavement. He sighed. Pity. This is the time that I would be tempted to shove Potter through it.

            “Potter?” he said, and snapped his fingers in front of Harry’s face.

            With a snap of his neck and head, Harry seemed to come back to himself. Then he frowned. “I saw you cast your shields perfectly,” he said. “I’m sure there was no weakness in them that Alexander could have exploited. But then, we don’t know a lot about the globes or what Alexander’s associated gifts might be. We need to go back and talk to Leah again.”

            “Agreed,” Draco said.

            He did keep one eye on Potter as they began to move down the street in the direction of the designated Apparition point. It was one thing to have a revelation, and it might be that Potter had had one. It was another way to look as he had then, as if…

            As if the thing he most dearly wanted was in arms’ reach.

*

            Harry spent the afternoon trying to convince himself it was a trick of the light. He had a lot of time to think about that, since going to Eleanor’s Enchantments meant they found it shut up, and Leah’s neighbors said they had no idea when she would return. So there was nothing for it but to return to the office and do paperwork. Even the Ministry’s problem children, like Harry, had to do paperwork sometimes; not filing it was a bigger sin than occasionally violating the rules.

            He had not seen Lionel rise from the tumbled chaos that the shattered globes had made on the street. Not really. He had not seen Lionel’s hand stretched out, or his eyes big and yearning the way they had been in his vision of that other world, or his arms wide as if he wanted to embrace Harry.

            Harry glanced sideways at Draco, absurdly absorbed in the composition of a report. Harry wondered if he knew that his lips moved, silently spelling complicated words, when he was like that.

            No. And he would deny it if I told him. Malfoys wouldn’t do anything so plebeian as to move their lips. Despite his parents turning their backs on him, Draco was still more Malfoy, in some ways, than he had been in school.

            And Harry, having been more defiantly magical in the Dursleys’ house than ever after he had started Hogwarts, could understand that.

            He shook his head and dragged his eyes back to his paper. None of this was helping him figure out what he should write down for the next line in the report, and Merlin knew he had to write down something.

            Or helping him figure out whether he had really seen Lionel this afternoon.

            At least I have my own private Draco-voice in my head to help me figure out what he would say about this, Harry thought, and rolled his eyes, after another check on Draco to make sure that he wasn’t looking Harry’s way. Delusion, hallucination, obsession. Those are all words he’s already used about Lionel. I can’t expect him to understand this.

            That was the problem, wasn’t it? Harry had come to know it was a bad thing when he lied to Draco, and that included lying about these visions that the globe hitting him might have caused. On the other hand, Draco was hardly more encouraging when Harry did tell the truth. It always came down to how something wasn’t right with Harry, either his intelligence or his perceptions. Draco gave Harry the impression that he had already thought all the interesting thoughts, and when they passed through Harry’s brain, they were second-hand and used-up.

            Harry grimaced and rubbed his face. Careful, that could turn into resentment.

            And that was another thing. Why in the world did his mind keep drifting to Draco when he wanted to think about Lionel?

            Harry sat bolt upright and scattered several sheets of parchment on the floor. He bent down to retrieve them, moving like an automaton, and glad for the excuse to avoid Draco as he glanced towards him.

            He—he had thought like this, once, during meetings and exchanges of files and reprimands by his superiors. His mind had always strayed, and he had dismissed the warnings he received and the suggestions that might have made him a better Auror in the mold of people like Okazes, because he had had something better to think about.

            Lionel.

            And now, Draco.

            Harry shut his eyes and shivered. He didn’t—want—he didn’t—he couldn’t—

            And then determination seeped into him, so strong that it seemed for a moment as if he were floating in the midst of a sea of it.

            He’d made mistakes handling his crush on Lionel (Draco would probably say that the biggest one was having it at all), and that gave him warning about how to act if it turned out that he really did have a crush on Draco now. He had to think of the man as his partner first and a potential lover second. He had to stop being disappointed that Draco was straight; he had probably only seen Draco as flirting with Stuart earlier this afternoon because he was so desperate to see anything that would suggest Draco was bent. He had to make sure not to moon around after Draco and let it interrupt their work.

            And he had to make sure that he never, ever told him. Giving one straight partner reason to doubt and hate him was quite enough.

            “Potter? You all right? I didn’t know you were that unnerved by our appointment.”

            Draco was standing by his desk. Harry was proud of the way he let his eyes rise to Draco’s face without stopping at the points of interest in between his waist and his throat. “What do you mean? What appointment?”

            Draco’s teeth flashed. “Why, our first joint session with Mind-Healer Estillo, of course!”

            Harry managed not to let his head fall into his hands, but only barely.

            I’m doomed.

*

            SP777: Well, a heart-to-heart is getting closer, though I can’t promise it will be one that’s all positive.

            And Harry never got the chance to resolve things with Lionel, and still believes that telling him his feelings killed him. I don’t think it’s surprising that he’s still obsessed.

            Yami Bakura: Thank you so much! This series has been on my mind for a long time—almost two years, in fact—so having someone enjoy it and read it all at once from the beginning, and still say the stories hold up, is a joy.

            I can’t scold you for not reading it at first, though, because the summaries of some of them are pretty tame, and it’s hard to explain the concept of the series without putting that in the stories themselves.

            Here’s hoping you continue to like the series!

            unneeded: No, not emotionally intact at all—though I wonder if you’re surprised that Harry is beginning to crack first?
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This Enchanted Life