Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Light of the Life That Is	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3154 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
- 5
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four—Meetings in the Light
            “We have to discuss what we’re going to do about your further schooling, Mr. Potter.”
            “We do?”
            McGonagall frowned, but Draco didn’t think Harry was trying to be insolent. He was very familiar, by now, with all the common twists of Harry’s expression, and this was the widening of the eyes and blinking that meant he honestly didn’t see what needed to be settled. It only confirmed for Draco that he was right when Harry turned to him for help, cocking his head.
            “Yes, we do,” Draco said, striking out a middle course. He was seated in the chair beside Harry in the Headmistress’s office, his hands folded on his stomach and his slouch just a bit pronounced. He hadn’t wanted to seem as if he was going to take authority away from the Headmistress, but now he smiled and nodded at Harry. “You never received your NEWTs, and it would be hard for you to have a normal life in the wizarding world without them. Or any kind of a life, really,” he added, because he was sure that Harry was opening his mouth to announce that he didn’t care about normality, and he would never have that anyway.
            “Oh.” Harry chewed his lip a second and turned to the Headmistress. “But I don’t have a wand. I need to get one first.”
            McGonagall’s eyes widened in turn. “But I thought that…I mean, your friends said something about your holly wand being broken, but I thought I’d misunderstood them.” She made no reference to the Elder Wand, for which Draco was grateful.
            Harry shook his head firmly. “It really did break. And the only wand that could have repaired it is gone now.” He stared thoughtfully at the portraits behind McGonagall’s desk. The portrait of Dumbledore was empty, Draco noticed. Perhaps that was a good thing. Harry had shown no interest in talking to it, although Draco knew that Harry had gone to his final death mostly on the Headmaster’s orders. “So. Maybe I should be thinking about a journey to Diagon Alley.” He turned his eyes expectantly to Draco.
            “You could Floo,” Draco said gently, even as he stood. It was Saturday, so he had no classes to occupy him, but he did wonder if it was a good thing for Harry to be as dependent on him as he had become. From McGonagall’s frown, she clearly didn’t think so.
            “But I want to Apparate, and I can’t do that without a wand.” Harry looked at him with melting eyes that would cause a lot of havoc if he ever figured out how bloody seductive they were. “Please?”
            “You also need an Apparition license, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall, ever the stickler for rules, pointed out sharply.
            “Yes, but that also doesn’t matter without a wand,” Harry said, and smiled at her, and didn’t seem to notice the way she stared at him. Draco didn’t think he meant to be insolent this time, either. It was just the way Harry spoke to adults, as if he wasn’t a young student anymore, which was true. He held out his arm to Draco. “Shall we go?”
            “I can’t Side-Along Apparate you from inside the school.”
            Harry blinked, flushed, and lowered his arm. “Sure, I knew that,” he said. “I was only testing to make sure that you were paying attention. And you were. So we can go now.”
            Draco darted a glance at the Headmistress, who was watching them with her hands folded on the desk and a much more relaxed expression on her face. She shook her head when she caught his look. Draco concealed a shrug and turned back to stretch out an arm to Harry. “It doesn’t matter that we can’t Apparate from inside the school. I can still walk you down to the entrance hall.”
            Harry flushed, but didn’t turn around and check to see which portraits were watching them, or even how intently the Headmistress was doing it. He nodded instead, a little haughtily, and said, “Thank you, Professor Malfoy.”
            Draco held his face straight, all the way down the moving staircase and to the entrance hall. He kept thinking Harry would drop his arm like a hot ember the minute they were out of sight, or make some kind of joke, and Draco was ready to meet it with a joke of his own.
            But Harry did nothing like that. He was still blushing, but he kept walking steadily, hand in place on Draco’s arm, head lifted to the point that someone walking past them could have looked up his nostrils.
            Draco shook his head in wonder, and enjoyed the light weight of Harry’s hand.
*
            “I suppose you know that I don’t make new wands much anymore? So you’ll have to take your choice from the wands that are already in the shop.”
            Harry suppressed the desire to retort that he had been gone from the world for six years and hadn’t known that Ollivander wasn’t crafting wands anymore. He just nodded and looked away from Ollivander, who had gloves over his hands, up at the shelves and shelves of boxes on the walls. A few drew his eye, made of a bright pale wood. He gestured towards them. “What is that wood?”
            “Birch,” Ollivander said, without looking away from Harry. “I don’t know that those wands would do at all for you, Mr. Potter, I really don’t.”
            “I want to look at them anyway,” Harry said, trying to add a bit of command to his voice. He didn’t think he could achieve, yet, the calm expectation Malfoy had that his will would be done. Harry had gone along to a few Potions classes under Malfoy’s Disillusionment Charm, and the way he taught was impressive. Students’ taunts and misbehavior only earned a faint, disappointed look and detention in an impassive voice.
            Harry thought he could do worse than imitate Malfoy, in a lot of ways. He looked out of the corner of his eye now and saw Malfoy standing at his ease under one of the stacks of boxes, looking up at one of the same birch ones Harry had gestured at.
            “If you will,” said Ollivander, and began to pull boxes down from the shelves with flicks of his own wand, grumbling under his breath the whole time. Harry decided that probably had more to do with Malfoy’s presence than it did with him.
            Malfoy was so quiet, Harry thought, as he prepared to pick up the first box. It seemed as though he had decided in his own mind, long ago, that there was nothing worth getting excited about, and that enabled him to stand back and smile at the rest of the world when they started getting excited.
            The first wand, which looked like it was made of walnut, was ungainly in Harry’s hand, and cold. He didn’t even have time to wave it before Ollivander snatched it away, and shoved it back into its box. Harry hummed and opened the next one.
            But no, it wasn’t true that Malfoy was perfectly detached, was it? Harry had seen him passionate enough in that strange station between life and death where Harry had guarded the Horcrux. He had snorted, made faces, and argued with bitter precision as to why Harry didn’t need to spend the rest of eternity guarding the soul-piece.
            This wand was made of hickory, and while it felt a little better to him than the walnut one had, Harry waved it around and found that it whipped back and forth too much for his liking. He handed it back to Ollivander before Ollivander could try to take it from him, and opened the third box.
            If Harry was one of the few people who could pull that much emotion from Malfoy, then Harry thought…
            He thought it was a bloody fine compliment, was what he thought.
            This wand was made of ebony. Harry held it up and examined his faint reflection in the black wood curiously. His face shone back, with paler cheeks than normal. Harry took a deep breath and held up the wand, pointing it straight at the ceiling, while he thought as hard as he could, Lumos.
            The light that arose had a faint, shadowy tinge around the sides, but that didn’t matter. The sensation of performing real magic for the first time in six years rushed through Harry, and he felt as though he had leaped over a waterfall and was growing wings on the way down. His breath came faster and faster, and he nearly sagged to his knees. He might have done it, and never mind Ollivander, if not for Malfoy beside him.
            Malfoy’s faint, proud smile kept him on his feet, and made him think about what he could do to earn more approval. Harry swallowed with delight and turned to Ollivander, waving the wand around. “What’s its core?”
            “Phoenix feather,” Ollivander grumbled, still watching him. “It does seem that you’re doomed to have wands with phoenix feather cores.”
            Harry managed not to let his smile falter. At least he knew that the feather in this particular wand couldn’t possibly have come from Fawkes, since Ollivander had told him that Fawkes had only ever given two feathers. “Well. Tell me how much it costs, and I’ll pay for it.” He glanced at Malfoy. They hadn’t stopped at Gringotts before they came here, but they had the other day, after the Ministry had accepted that it was really him and he knew he could have access to his accounts.
            Malfoy, smiling now with an air of quiet amusement, pulled out the bag of Galleons. Ollivander said something about ten, and Malfoy put them on the counter, not compelling Ollivander to touch his hands.
            There’s something delicate about him, too, Harry thought, as he raised his wand and cast a Shaving Charm on his chin. He had a tendency to get stubble there when he forgot about the spells, and he was hoping that he wouldn’t look too ragged.
            From the feel of it, the spell shaved him precisely as close as it was supposed to, and the pleasure of the magic rang through him like a chime. Harry beamed and strutted out onto the street in Diagon Alley, Malfoy following behind.
            “It feels good to have a wand again?”
            “You could tell?” Harry glanced over his shoulder. He thought he could read Malfoy fairly well, but he didn’t know that the reverse was always true. Malfoy seemed to miss the most obvious things on Harry’s face, sometimes.
            “I noticed that you looked as if you were eating treacle tart.” Yes, there was still pride in the gaze that Malfoy let rest on him. And something else, too, something that brought warmth surging into Harry’s cheeks and made him look away and clear his throat.
            “Well, of course it feels good, after that long without casting magic,” Harry mumbled, knowing he sounded embarrassed and had no reason to and would probably cause Malfoy concern, but unable to stop it. “And the wand is obviously mine. It doesn’t feel exactly like the holly wand, but it would be weird if it did, wouldn’t it?”
            “Yes, I think it would,” Malfoy said thoughtfully. He glanced around Diagon Alley. “Is there anywhere else that you want to go while we’re here?”
            “Yes,” Harry said. “I want to go get some ice cream, and then I want to sit and talk.”
            Malfoy turned his head towards Harry and blinked, once. He had long eyelashes that seemed to cast a lot of shadows on his face. “I thought we’d had ice cream the other day. Or did I forget to order some from the house-elves?”
            “I meant that I want to have some at Fortescue’s—or whatever other place replaced it,” Harry added, remembering that Fortescue had been captured or disappeared during the war. “I’d think you would understand that desire. Didn’t you want to do things like that after the war? Ordinary things, no matter what kind of food you could get from the house-elves?”
            Malfoy nodded. “Of course I did. And the war didn’t end for you until a few weeks ago.” He turned in the direction of Fortescue’s. Apparently the new ice cream shop was at least in the same place, if it didn’t have the same name anymore, Harry thought, following him. “As long as you don’t mind being stared at.”
            Harry snorted. “They would have stared at me if I’d survived in the ordinary way, too. I reckon I might as well get used to it.”
*
            Does he have the least idea how remarkable he is?
            By now, Draco had given up flinching when those kinds of thoughts came to him. He would have had to cut his eyes out and cut off his ears not to notice how remarkable Harry was, all the time. How he walked through the world as though he was dealing with it, despite the fact that no one had ever had to deal with something like this before. How he beamed with clear and simple pleasure when he grabbed his wand.
            How he ate ice cream, nearly burying his nose in it and mumbling his way through a scoop of mixed chocolate and vanilla, munching as small drops escaped down the corners of his face.
            Draco sipped his own, mostly-melted strawberry ice cream and held his peace about the mess Harry was making. Now that he had his own wand, he could cast his own Cleaning Charms.
            People gaped at them through the window, and inside the shop, and from the tables. But Harry didn’t seem to take the least notice, and when it seemed as though someone might come over and be rude, Draco only had to catch their eyes and shake his head a little. Most of them retreated meekly. Others did so when they realized that Harry wouldn’t pay any attention to them.
            Maybe other people wouldn’t think that about him, Draco thought, and turned back to Harry. But I do.
            “This is one of the best things I’ve tasted,” Harry announced, surfacing from the chocolate. “Ever. Not just since I’ve been back.” He leaned against the back of the chair and looked around curiously. “They’re still calling it Fortescue’s even though Fortescue never came back?”
            Draco nodded. “I think a cousin of his runs it. I don’t know whether the name is the same, but he wanted to carry on the tradition. And I think a lot of people after the war wanted some suggestion of continuity and normality.”
            “I understand that,” Harry muttered, in a voice that came from the heart, and then he turned around. Draco found himself unexpectedly pinned with a gaze that seemed as sharp as the one that had pierced the members of the Wizengamot. He swallowed unnecessarily, and persuaded himself not to hide behind his ice cream bowl. “Now, tell me about you.”
            That respect was unexpected enough that Draco did allow himself a blink. “I haven’t? I thought you knew all the important details already.”
            “About how you got me back, and why you were willing to fight for me in the Ministry.” Harry leaned forwards insistently. “I want to know more about how you got your Potions mastery and why you came back to teach at Hogwarts.”
            Draco toyed with the spoon in front of him for a second, taking note of its unusual coldness from the ice cream. Why was it so hard to meet Harry’s eyes? “I could tell you what my friends think,” he said. “That I’m reliving Professor Snape’s life and trying to make up for his early death.”
            Harry’s airy gesture dismissed Pansy and Blaise and their whole stack of pretensions. “I want to know what you think.”
            “All right,” Draco said. He supposed that he could share it. It had just remained private for so long that he had it all arranged the way he wanted, and he’d thought no voice but that of his thoughts would ever speak it.
            But here was Harry, so intent and interested that he was almost shoving the table back into Draco’s stomach as he leaned on it. And Draco couldn’t help the little thrill that seemed to run up the middle of his forehead, and had nothing to do with ice cream headache.
            “I knew that I needed some firm point to stand on after the war,” Draco said. “I was reeling. I was lost. There were all these things that everyone was telling me I could count on, but they were all old things. I couldn’t brace myself on them because the war changed the world for me so much that I had two pieces of my life, before and after.”
            “But you were good at Potions before the war, too.” Harry’s eyes were cutting into him again.
            “Yes, but not in the way I am now,” Draco said. “I’ve got more training now, sure, but I can also go deep inside them and know that no matter what’s going wrong with the world outside, I can make things right in that little enclosed space. It was my mastery that taught me that, and I chose it because I thought Potions was a quiet subject, and one I could master.”
            Harry toyed with his dish. “Did you want to master them, or the world, or yourself?”
            Draco caught his breath. It was the sort of question that his friends had never thought to ask. Yes, Harry grew up when he was gone from the world. “All of those,” he said. “If there was one thing I could do well, then I could stop feeling so worthless. And the world would stop spinning around me. And while I don’t agree with my friends that I’m living Professor Snape’s life for him, there was satisfaction in proving him wrong.”
            “How could being good at Potions prove him wrong? I thought he always praised you.”
            Draco shook his head. “He had a real passion for them, and he told me in private that my skill was all technical accomplishment but no real art.” A subtle art, Severus had called it, and there had been emotion in his voice that Draco had never heard elsewhere. “He thought I couldn’t get good at Potions, or as good as he was, because I wasn’t that emotional about them.”
            “What did you care about the most?” And Harry whispered the words, as though he had no idea what Draco would say, and it was of utmost importance that he know.
            “Then? My life, staying alive, and my family staying alive.” Draco smiled and shook his head at the look on Harry’s face. “Remember, I wasn’t like you. I wasn’t a hero. I didn’t have a greater goal beyond myself. My goal was just to see tomorrow.”
            “I’m not criticizing you for that,” Harry said, and Draco had to roll his eyes. “No, really, I’m not. Most of the time during the war, my goal was just to stay alive, too. And to kill Voldemort, but I had to do that to stay alive.”
            “You know we’re different,” Draco couldn’t help saying, in a chiding way. He understood Harry’s impulse to make them equal, and honored him for it. Harry wanted to believe that because Draco had done one thing that required a lot of effort, rescuing Harry from the prison his soul was in, he had been a hero in other ways, too. But it wasn’t true. “You always had a grander purpose in mind during the war. I didn’t until after the war.”
            “I was a scared schoolboy more than half the time.” Harry clenched his fist. “And I resented Dumbledore so much for making me walk into the Forbidden Forest.”
            “I know,” Draco said. “But you went and did it, and that’s the important thing. I was all talk and no action until after the war. And I think I would have gone on being that way, except I told you, I had to have something to cling to. Potions became that thing.”
            “And proving Snape wrong,” Harry said, grinning at him. “I think that’s an admirable goal.”
            Draco laughed. “I won’t say there’s not a lot of Slytherin in me still. I think that’s a reason I came back to Hogwarts, too. I wanted to be an even better Head of Slytherin House than Snape had been, and show that I could care for the students, too. Maybe this has been all about showing that I can do things well, better than people would ever have thought if they believed I just cared about myself.”
            Harry sighed and slurped up a little more ice cream. “I wish there was a way I could take some of your reputation. So many people think I’m a great hero.”
            “You are,” Draco said.
            “Not you, too.” Harry pouted at him, and Draco decided that he could find that enchanting as long as he never told anyone about it. “I mean it. I don’t want to be seen as a great hero. If people thought I was in the middle, normal, selfish, then I wouldn’t feel so bad about acting selfish.”
            “I didn’t know that you were feeling bad about it.” Draco reached out and poked Harry in the middle of the chest. “If that’s the case, then stop. You did more than anyone should ever be able to ask you to.”
            “I know, but…” Harry frowned. “I want to take what I want. I want to act the way I want. That’s one reason why I got so irritated when McGonagall asked if I was coming back to Hogwarts to take my NEWTs. I don’t like it when people have expectations of me like that. They don’t own me. She didn’t bring me back. She doesn’t have the right to say what I should be doing.”
            “If you become a student, she will.”
            “That’s another reason not to do it.” Harry folded his arms. “But then I also feel guilty about staying away for so long, and I remind myself that I look eighteen, and it’s no wonder that people keep trying to pick up exactly where we left off.”
            “It’ll take them time to get used to you,” Draco agreed. “But just like you did with the Weasleys, you don’t need to lean back and let them think whatever they want. You need to speak up clearly and gently with them the way you did with Ginny. It would have been more cruel to let her go on thinking that you were going to come back and marry her.”
            “It would have been cruel to Dean, too.” Harry caught him with his eyes again. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you talking to him. Thank you.”
            Draco merely smiled and said nothing. There was no way that he could say that he was happy to do anything Harry wanted without it coming off as soppy, and probably more pressure on Harry than he wanted at the moment.
            “Right,” Harry said thoughtfully. “So I’ll take what I want and live like a normal person, as much as I possibly can.” He nodded. “But I need something to cling to, the way you did with Potions. One thing that’s consistent.”
            “Hogwarts could be that for you,” Draco suggested. “I don’t want you to think that I believe that’s the most important thing you could do, but McGonagall’s right that you could use the NEWTs, and the routines of school are predictable and soothing, in a way.”
            “There’s also bad memories associated with Hogwarts. I don’t think I could just be a regular student again.” Harry poked his bowl even though there was no more ice cream left. “Besides, I already found my constant.”
            “You did?” Draco tried not to sound wounded, because that would put more pressure on Harry that he didn’t need, but he couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t noticed Harry changing his attitude. “What is it?”
            Harry smiled at him. “You.”
            That opened a moment for Draco that was like falling through space, but he managed to clear his throat and shake his head. “But—but I have changed since we knew each other before the war. And you said you needed something that hadn’t changed.”
            “You haven’t changed since I came back. You keep protecting me and inspiring me and making it easier for me.” Draco had to wonder whether Harry’s eyes had been like this before the war, and if anyone could bear their direct gaze, if so. Maybe Granger and Weasley had had more practice. “You’re my constant.”
            Draco swallowed. The words rang little chords in his soul that hadn’t rung since he was eighteen years old, and had chosen Potions, and he picked up his bowl and stared into it.
            Harry reached across the table and clasped his hand. “I would ask if you wanted to be,” he said, “but I think you want to be, and you’re upset for some other reason. Tell me.”
            “I’m not upset,” Draco said, and then wondered if that was true. But no, against the shining light of Harry’s eyes, it was true. Draco was startled, but not upset. He just wondered… “I wonder if you’re wise to put so much trust in me.”
            “Is this the part where you tell me that you only brought me back because you were secretly scheming to get your hands on the Potter fortune all along?”
            Draco snorted with laughter, and noticed that Harry was still clasping his hand. Draco tried to pull his arm back. Harry raised his eyebrows and kept his hand in precisely the same place, his fingers tracing the veins and little pulses in Draco’s wrist.
            “I don’t blame you for trusting the person who rescued you,” Draco said. He had meant to speak the words strongly, confidently, but they lapsed into little more than breath. He met Harry’s gaze, saw that wouldn’t work if it was by itself, and swallowed. “I mean—I do think that I could be your constant. But what happens after you leave Hogwarts? I plan to stay as Potions professor and Head of Slytherin House for a while. I have students there who also need me.”
            Harry paused as he thought about that. Draco watched the tousle of his hair, and admired—not so much the way the hair sat on Harry’s head as the fact that he was thinking before immediately arguing or agreeing.
            “I think that I can have you as a constant even if I can’t see you every day,” Harry said. “And I hope that you’ll agree.”
            “Well, you could have found someone else by then.”
            Draco thought the sentiment reasonable enough, given that Harry had already started reconnecting with his friends and would have to find someone to date who wasn’t a Weasley, but he didn’t expect the way that Harry fired up in seconds. “Not to take your place,” Harry all but hissed, leaning forwards and shooting the words at him like lightning bolts. “Someone else I could trust, maybe, but not someone else who can be what you are to me.”
            Draco swallowed. It was necessary, no matter how nervous it made him look, with his throat so dry. “What am I to you? Besides your touchstone?”
            Harry looked at the table. Then he muttered something that sounded like, “No, damn it,” and stubbornly looked Draco in the face again. “You’re someone I can trust. Someone I would trust above so many other people. My defender. The person who didn’t laugh at me when I forgot that you can’t Apparate out of Hogwarts. All those things.”
            Draco licked his lips and tried to find his voice. “And—you can’t see someone replacing me as any of those?”
            “Maybe one,” Harry said. “Not all of them.”
            Draco looked at him. He had no words to define this moment. Harry wasn’t one of his Slytherins, and he wasn’t a friend, and he wasn’t the rival he had been before the war. Nor was he simply the man Draco had persuaded to come back to earth, or rescued. That word didn’t take account of the several arguments he’d had to have with Harry, or the way that Harry’s Deathly Hallows had basically fixed his spirit back in his body themselves.
            But he knew that he didn’t want to leave this moment.
*
            That’s it, Harry thought, as the warm feeling pulsed through him and settled, and left him with an acceptance nearly as complete as it was strong.
            I’ll have to call him Draco now. It’s ridiculous to call him anything else.
*
SP777: I think that Draco’s feelings have mainly happened since he realized how useless a sacrifice Harry was making, guarding the soul-piece. Harry, though, hasn’t always been perfectly transparent to Draco.
- 3
- 4
- 5
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Light of the Life That Is