Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Ancient and Noble Houses	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 29877 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Forty-Four—Before the Ordeal
“The room is being this way.”
Kreacher seemed to have forgotten that he had already showed Harry the way to the room once before, or perhaps this was part of the ritual and he had to say it whether or not it was needed, Harry thought. He certainly had his arm gravely stuck out in front of him, pointing towards the corridor they had entered last week. Harry took one slow breath, conscious of his nakedness other than the necklace and the towel around his waist, and of Draco at his side. He didn’t know where Ron or Hermione were.
He was becoming slowly sure, the certainty rising in him like a dark tide, that he couldn’t worry about them. He couldn’t worry about Draco either, if it came to that, but Kreacher had let Draco stay openly at his side so far and might even let him into the ordeal room, for all Harry knew. He had to go ahead, he had to push forwards, and let other things—like what it would be like to face his soul—take care of themselves.
Draco’s hand cut into his left shoulder. Harry turned around, only to have Draco tense at the sight of his face. Harry sighed a little. He supposed he might have been staring ahead, as if asleep. He thought he could feel sleep, or peace, pulling at the edges of his eyelids now.
“Well?” Harry whispered. Kreacher had halted and was looking back and forth between him and Draco, but didn’t seem inclined to hurry him. Well, Harry thought, it was only a little after nine. If the ordeal was supposed to last until dawn, they had plenty of time.
Draco swallowed, and then picked up such a commanding presence that Harry stared. Had Draco been able to do that all this time? He should do it more often, Harry thought, as he felt a stirring under his towel. It made Draco devastatingly attractive.
“Wait up the corridor for us, Kreacher, please,” Draco said, and inclined his head slowly so that his hair fell around his ears like a silken shroud. “There is something I need to talk to the Heir of Black about.”
Kreacher bowed. “Kreacher is obeying the Heir of Malfoy and the Heir of Black,” he said, and vanished. He appeared by the door of the bathing room, his back turned to them. Harry wondered if it would really keep him from overhearing anything that they chanced to say.
If Draco was worried about that, he didn’t show it. He whipped around at once instead, and pressed Harry’s shoulders up against the wall.
Harry raised his hands and locked them on Draco’s wrists, but didn’t try to pull them away. “We could have done this a month ago,” he murmured. “I would have been agreeable then.”
Draco didn’t smile. Instead, his eyes searched Harry’s intently, and then he shook his head. “You can’t feel it,” he whispered.
“Feel what?” Harry tugged on his wrist, wanting it back now, if Draco was going to be stupid.
“The spell this place is casting over you,” Draco hissed, close to his ear. “You look like the perfect little sacrifice walking to his death. You can’t do that.”
“Of course I can’t do that,” Harry snapped, feeling a flame awaken in him for the first time in what felt like hours, although he didn’t think his cold bath had lasted more than fifteen minutes. “I already did that once, when I walked to my death in the Forbidden Forest. It’s not going to happen again.”
“Thank Merlin you have that much sense left to you,” Draco muttered, and then shook his head. “But your expression…it was the same.”
“You didn’t see me walking to my death, so how do you know what I looked like then?” Harry asked.
Draco took a breath as though praying for patience, and then leaned in and set his mouth against Harry’s ear. Harry immediately shivered and tilted his head back, losing any sense of his surroundings—at least until Draco gripped his shoulder and shook him.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Draco hissed into his ear. “You’re surrendering to the sense of the house, the way it’s inducing you to almost look forward to the ordeal. Then at least it will be over, right? And we’ll know what we feel about each other, when we’ve been uncertain before?”
Harry stared at Draco with wide eyes, wondering how he could know so well what Harry felt. Was the house reaching out to him in the same way, since he was Harry’s heir now? Had Harry trapped him, and maybe Narcissa, in something that he should never have started?
Draco shook him again. “Focus,” he ordered, still with that commanding aura around him. “Have you been feeling those things?”
Harry swallowed once. “Yes,” he whispered. “I don’t think—it wouldn’t be as bad as what you’re saying, Draco. We researched and we tried, and we just couldn’t find out more than we already found. It was great to even find that much, to come that far. Isn’t that what you were saying, the last time we discussed the ordeal?”
Draco’s hands tightened on him again, which Harry hadn’t known was even possible; he hadn’t thought there was that much give left in his skin. “Listen to me,” Draco hissed. “We have to make sure that we don’t just walk in there and wait for something to happen to us.”
Harry steeled himself against the lethargy and the thoughts of Draco that wanted to wash over him once more, and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What would you suggest?”
*
Draco knew one thing he could do. The problem was, he had never heard of it before that he remembered, and he couldn’t be sure if it was his pure-blood upbringing or something he didn’t remember reading that had told him what to do, or—
Or the house, influencing him, trying to ensnare two prey for the price of one.
Either way, he was the leader of this little expedition right now, and he had to do what he thought best. He reached out and drew his wand. He thought he saw the little house-elf tense from the back, but he didn’t appear between them or try to stop them, and that was all Draco could hope for right now.
“We make a bargain,” Draco said. “Here and now. A blood bargain.”
“Not a vow?” Harry’s gaze went back and forth between Draco’s wand and Draco’s face.
Draco nodded. “Not a vow. Just a bargain. The blood and the magic help us keep it, though. If we see one of us falling asleep, then we’ll wake him up. All right? I see you drooping and surrendering, I’ll tell you. And you do the same thing for me.” He thought it was the best solution, indeed, as he watched the way Harry’s eyes took fire. Yes, he would do for someone else what he might neglect to do for himself.
“All right.” Harry held his palm out, flat.
Draco lightly scored the wand along it, opening a line of blood there with a quickly muttered charm. Then he held the wand up, twirled it once to send the blood scattering onto his face, and brought his hand sharply down on the tip. It flared with light, and power rose up his arm and to his shoulder, then stabbed down after that to the heart.
“I make the bargain to wake you up if I see you fading,” Draco whispered harshly. He had no idea if there were more formal words, since he had no idea where the bargain had come from in the first place, but this would do, he thought, as the blood chilled and glowed on the tip of the wand, and what he had scattered on his face became incredibly hot and tight, creating lines that ran from his forehead around his eyes. “Do you make the same for me?”
Harry nodded, the motion of his head as heavy as his eyes and the gaze he rested on Draco.
Draco waited a moment, then prompted, “It needs words.”
Harry jumped and reached out, resting one hand on Draco’s blood-encrusted face, although he didn’t need to. “I make the bargain to wake you up if I see you fading,” he whispered, and words that had sounded normal in Draco’s voice sounded husky and exotic in his. Then he drew Draco’s face closer, and added, “I would do anything for you, Draco.”
Their kiss had blood in it. Draco leaned nearer, bearing Harry backwards, but aware, from the iron grip Harry’s hand had on his face, that he was not the only one in control here. They broke apart slowly, and Draco leaned near to put his own hand on Harry’s jaw and close his eyes.
It was harder than it should have been to pull back from that, to summon Kreacher and continue the walk to the room of the ordeal. But at least Draco thought that he knew a little bit more about his own feelings now.
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Ancient and Noble Houses