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A Determined Frame of Mind	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16811 -:- 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 Five—Staying Sane

            Draco continued to give Harry curious glances until they went to bed that night. Harry supposed Draco wanted to know what had changed in the time since he left to enact the next phase of their plan and the time he returned. Harry had, after all, calmed down enough to greet him civilly, and he had even laughed at a few of Draco’s jokes during dinner.

            But Harry still declined the invitation to sit and talk for a few hours—it wasn’t as if they would be talking about how to find the next suspect in the Ministry; they had to wait for Harry’s false letter to do its work—and went to bed alone. He shut the door behind him with a faint smile.

            He had thought of a way to stay sane while he waited in Malfoy Manor, unable to travel anywhere, unable to do anything but depend on Draco for help. It was not something Draco would approve of, most probably, but he didn’t need to know about it, either, not until after Harry was done.

            It wouldn’t hurt anything. Harry wasn’t stupid enough to actually send out the letters until the Curse had ended and he was safe again, after all.

            But he would write to Ron and Hermione nonetheless. He would write letters as if they would be able to read them and understand the truth of his words, and imagine them receiving the letters and sending responses. At least it would be a kind of talking.

            Because Draco was right about one thing. Harry knew he couldn’t avoid madness if he stayed silent on everything.

            But talking to Draco, giving the bastard that kind of power over him, just wasn’t an option. God knew what he would use it for when this was done.

            Harry had plenty of ink and parchment in his bedroom, of course; Draco had urged him to ask Batty for everything he needed, and the house-elf had brought ink and parchment with severe stares but never a grumble. She seemed inclined to reserve her bile for more important things, Harry thought, amused, as he arranged an inkwell and a stack of pages in front of him. Like trying to make him distrust Draco.

            He didn’t need any help to do that.

            For a moment, when he dipped his quill, remembrances of Hogwarts tried to overcome him. He cleared his throat roughly and shook his head, and then began to scribe the words.

            He wrote to Hermione first. He would quill joint letters to the both of them, but she was the one he most wished he could speak to at the moment—more level-headed than Ron, and more likely to listen to the full context of a problem before she would offer any opinion.

            Dear Hermione:

            I miss you. I wish there was some way you could receive an owl from me and be pleased, instead of just worried about where I was and replying to coax me to come back to St. Mungo’s.

            The Cassandra Curse has sapped me of so much. Your friendship. My peace. Ginny. My ability to think. I still don’t know what the best course is. I have to let Draco plan it because I don’t have any other option. But—but I wish it didn’t have to be that way. Even knowing that the Curse is nothing but reality, and I should have accepted that reality months and months ago, I still spend time wishing it was different. Does that sound stupid to you?

            Probably not, knowing you. You would just frown at me and tell me to go ahead and do something, no matter how stupid I thought my feelings were.

            So, I am. For the moment, I’m ready to act on any slight clue Draco’s plans turn up. God knows what’s going to happen next, but I’ll be waiting when it does.

            And I’m not going to argue with Draco any more, tempting as it is. Why should I? It does nothing productive. If he’d fight with me, maybe it would clear away some of the emotions I have hanging like a storm inside my chest, but otherwise…

I have the idea that he’s doing his very best to help me. Isn’t that strange, Hermione? And I would be pleased and grateful to accept, but Draco Malfoy’s idea of help isn’t like anyone else’s. He’d probably want me to take the Ministry to court for “damages” or something. As if the actions of one person in the Ministry condemn everyone inside it! But to him, they would—just like meeting and disliking you has probably convinced him that anyone Muggleborn is exactly the same. He never was good at thinking in particulars.

Harry hesitated, his quill hovering above the page long enough to drop a blot. Was that really true anymore? If Draco didn’t see the differences between individual souls, he wouldn’t be a very successful Psyche-Diver. And if he hadn’t tried several different techniques on Harry, he never would have uncovered the secret of the Cassandra Curse.

Harry dismissed it with a shrug. It felt true. And this was his private letter, written just to clear those feelings out that Draco’s smug superiority wouldn’t touch. He could watch later and learn the nuances, if they existed, for himself.

But of course I can’t trust him. If nothing else, that would—

Harry paused again. What he was going to write next was so honest that…

On the other hand, where would he be honest with himself, if not here?

Still with his hand held back from the parchment, as if he would change his mind and erase what he had written at any moment, he scribbled, prove that I’ve changed so much I might never be able to have your and Ron’s friendship back the way it was again. And I want that back, Hermione. So much. Ginny’s moved on from me, but you haven’t, and Ron hasn’t. At least, I don’t think you have.

The panic building inside his chest made Harry close his eyes and imagine Hermione’s concerned, caring voice saying, “Of course we haven’t, Harry.” He wouldn’t work himself into a frenzy anticipating things he had no way of knowing. Yes, Ron and Hermione might have decided to give up on him the way Ginny had. On the other hand, their friendship with him wasn’t an exclusive bond the way the tie to a fiancée was. They could make room in their hearts for other friends and still keep a place open for him.

He decided to think that they would.

I’ve already acknowledged that it probably won’t be the same, he wrote. But I have to curb my imagination when it tries to make me see howdifferent it will probably be. What’s the point of trying to heal if I can’t at least choose how I change?

So my relationship to you will change, but it won’t be nonexistent. That’s the status of any bond I have with Malfoy, though. If I did everything he wanted me to, I would be warped away from the path, and would emerge back into the sane world as a complete stranger to you. So I won’t let that happen.

Your friend, Harry.

He shoved the letter away, and sat a moment, tentatively feeling at the edges of his heart. He was immensely relieved to realize that it had helped him, somewhat. He no longer felt as if he’d start screaming just as a vent to pour some of the stress out.

He tugged the stack of parchment towards him and started to write a letter to Ron.

*

Draco stepped into the shower and stretched luxuriously. Water, perfectly timed by a spell to fall when he wanted it to and at the temperature he desired, struck his shoulders and his neck, and he relaxed with a long shake and an even longer sigh.

Harry was still driving him mad.

He was calmer now, yes, and seemed to make an effort to get along with Draco. At least he probably wouldn’t tear away into a wave of useless anger again. Harry Potter continued to make many of the same mistakes again, but not identical ones.

Still…

Draco had wanted to lean across the table many times during dinner, tug on the piece of his soul lodged inside Harry’s chest, and say, when startled green eyes met his, “There. Now ignore me if you can.”

He hadn’t done it. But there was only so much patience that he could affect and so much temptation he could take before he snapped.

There was a means at hand to relieve part of his frustration, though.

Draco slid a hand down his torso, tilting his head further back as he did so. The images were in his head in moments. And, surprisingly, none of them were naked images. He had enough memories of Harry simply reacting to his touch in St. Mungo’s not to need nudity, and his strokes were still leisurely and purposeful.

If Harry would turn to him here, surrender passionately in the way he had under Draco’s hands the other day—but that had only been for a few minutes. If he would widen his eyes the way he had the second time Draco touched him, the time they’d lain tangled in each other’s arms and legs. If he would make those helpless little whimpering noises the way he had the first time Draco brushed his fingers along his cheeks.

No gentle touches for more than a year meant that Harry hadn’t had sex for more than a year, either. Oh, sure, he’d probably wanked, just the way Draco was doing now, but he hadn’t been touched by another human being. He must be dying for it, and the thought of all that skin beneath him and all that half-outraged desire just for him…

Draco opened his eyes and gave a surprised gasp as sudden liquid flooded over his hands and mingled with the water. He hadn’t even sensed the pleasure building; he’d descended so gently and quickly into the images.

He reached for a towel even as he turned his torso to the spray and let it wash the white flow down his chest and thighs away. That had been all he had come into the shower for.

He no longer felt as if he were stretched taut between wild horses and waiting for the moment they would begin to draw and quarter him. Still, he knew that some of the tension would return in the morning. It would until Harry gave in and accepted that the one human being who understood him in the world right now also understood him, and desired him.

Harry wasn’t ready yet. But there was nothing that said Draco couldn’t…encourage him. Subtly.

He grinned a bit, and then called Batty, to make sure that she had certain orders and understood them very well.

*

Harry hesitated at the top of the stairs. This was the entrance to the wing of the house where Draco slept, and though he’d been in Draco’s bedroom before, the afternoon they came back from the Ministry, it still felt wrong to intrude.

But, damn it, Batty hadn’t shown up despite repeated calls, and Harry didn’t know the name of any of the other house-elves in the Manor. When he’d tried calling for elves in general, or clapping his hands the way Draco did when he wanted something, nothing had happened, either. A journey to the kitchens revealed no food in preparation and dangerous-looking spells guarding the cupboards and cabinets.

And Harry was hungry.

If Draco was still in bed at this hour, he deserved to be woken, anyway. At the very least he could make the house-elves order some food for Harry before he vanished into his much-needed beauty sleep again.

Harry worked his way towards Draco’s bedroom, mouth set in a thin line. He rolled his eyes at the many doors he opened that didn’t lead into bedrooms. There were more loos than anyone sane could need, and an inordinate number of private entertaining rooms, and one room filled with brooms and Quidditch gear. Harry tried to ignore the stir of longing in his stomach when he saw that. Quidditch lay on the other side of an insurmountable abyss. Even if he did break the Cassandra Curse, he wasn’t sure that he would ever again be able to muster enough trust to appear unarmed in front of so many people.

Finally, he reached Draco’s bedroom door. He touched it cautiously, and waved his wand over it, but it didn’t appear to be locked or warded.

“Less cautious than I would be,” Harry muttered as he nudged the door open. “Of course, maybe the house-elves are all standing guard around his bed.”

He’d planned to march in clapping his hands and yelling, and then lift his wand to cast the sound of several thunderclaps, so that he would have the satisfaction of seeing Draco roll out of bed, startled and disoriented, hair ablaze around his head.

That…didn’t happen.

Instead, Harry halted and stared. He hadn’t realized before that there was such a large window in Draco’s rooms, but there was. And the deep blue curtains on it were drawn back, as if Draco had ordered the house-elves to leave them that way so the sun would wake him.

It hadn’t worked.

Thick bars of sunlight fell across the bed, but just short of the sleeper entwined in the sheets. Nonetheless, Harry could see him clearly. The sheets were dark green at the moment, the glamour that covered them rippling up and down the scale from malachite to jade, but never becoming any other color.

On that bed Draco lay cradled like a prince out of a fairy tale.

Harry licked his lips, not sure why his mouth was dry and his heartbeat was high in his ears, like a river in flood. Sure, Draco lay with his arms folded, elbows crooked out to the sides, and his head pillowed at the join of his hands, so that he looked graceful and arranged even in the depth of sleep. Sure, the sunlight made his pale skin and his pale hair glow, while not forcing them to sparkle in a distracting way that would have stunned Harry’s weak eyes. Sure, he quite clearly slept nude, which added to the distraction factor—although the sheets covered every part of him from the waist down, and muffled the lines of his flanks and legs.

None of that should have made him react like this.

You know why.

He did. Draco was beautiful.

The realization was just…all around him in the room, present as the sunlight, overwhelming and wonderful as the colors of green in Draco’s sheets and canopy. Harry could not have stood in this room and not thought that. His sexual orientation didn’t matter. The fact that he thought Draco was a right git when awake didn’t matter.

He was beautiful.

And Harry couldn’t clap his hands or cast a spell and awaken him. He couldn’t.

On the other hand, he couldn’t seem to leave, either. He kept lingering and looking. Draco would probably awaken when some outraged house-elf appeared and demanded to know why Harry was at its master’s door, which was another reason for hastening away. And yet Harry remained.

It felt like watching some wild animal browsing on flowers. A unicorn in the Forbidden Forest, maybe. Harry knew it couldn’t last forever, and that each moment flowing past as he stared brought the end nearer, and yet he couldn’t look away.

Draco stirred at last, and Harry felt a pang of keen loss. He would look silly flailing out of the room in an attempt to make it seem as if he hadn’t been there, though. After all, house-elves didn’t need doors, and there was only one other person in the house. He steeled himself for the first mocking comment.

Draco opened his eyes, and sleep must have still held his brain, because he grinned a bit, dazed, and then stretched out a hand.

“Good morning,” he said softly.

Harry looked straight at the pale skin of his right forearm. It was clear and unmarred. That meant nothing, of course. After all, Death Eaters were marked on the left forearm, and he could still have his wand nearby. Under the pillow, even.

But to Harry it made Draco look achingly vulnerable. And he kept the hand outstretched, instead of rolling over. Harry stared at him. Draco looked back, his smile dim and peaceful, his arm starting to shake with the effort of holding it steady.

The soul connection between them began to hum.

For the first time, it didn’t make Harry leap and start. He licked his lips again, and then took a few steps forwards. It felt as if he were doing something greatly daring. After all, Draco could laugh at him any time now—not least for making a simple morning greeting into something so laden with awe.

But he didn’t laugh. He just kept gazing, blinking now and then like a lizard content on a sun-warmed rock, in no haste to clean the sleep out of his eyes. Harry edged closer and closer, and still the hand remained, reaching for his. It did turn over when he reached the edge of the bed, the palm curling up, empty, unprotected.

It seemed only natural to clasp it.

The warmth of the hold, and the unexpected firmness of it when Draco closed his hand around Harry’s wrist, sent a jolt through him. But it was the same kind of jolt Harry would have felt if the unicorn he were watching had turned and come towards him to rest its horn on his shoulder, instead of bounding away.

He bowed his head. The humming in his ears grew louder.

The silence around the humming was the sweetest sound Harry had ever heard, except phoenix song.

“Good morning,” he whispered back.

*

Draco watched Harry through half-lidded eyes, smiling. It had been a simple trick, instructing Batty to stay away from Harry in the morning and to tell the other house-elves not to prepare breakfast. Hunger would eventually force Harry to seek him out.

Draco had been able to predict the time to within the hour. And he had arranged, after that, to look beautiful.

And he had shown that he had trusted Harry.

That was wove the magic between them, whatever Harry might think in his daze of sunlight and green. Harry would have hated beauty that seemed complicated and seductive; he was wary of traps. And he would have approached Draco in a guarded manner if Draco had shown him guarding.

But show him trust, and he responded.

He was beautiful, too, this close, his green eyes wide with wonder and the soul-bond humming between them. Draco didn’t think he realized it. There were people, both men and women, who knew they were lovely; even if they never did anything with it, you could see their knowledge in the way they moved. Harry carried himself as if he were unaware that people even thought about such things.

So beautiful.

Draco sucked in his breath suddenly, but let it out gently enough that he wouldn’t alarm Harry with a gasp. He had just realized, as he stood at the edge of a warm cliff, what his own willingness to be this open in front of Harry meant.

Something much more than just gaining Harry’s trust because he could. A wanting that went beyond sex.

Well. The trust had to come first. Draco put the realization away for now and sat up, still moving slowly, languidly, giving the impression that dreams clung to every inch of him. And, as he had thought would happen, Harry moved back a few inches to give him room, but didn’t let go of his hand or run from the room.

“I slept well,” Draco said, keeping his words low and precise. “You?”

“Very well.” Harry blinked his eyes once or twice, and light frown lines appeared along his scar, as if he felt the presence of a spell and didn’t like it. He shifted, so that the rough edges of the bandages on his wrist pressed against Draco’s skin.

Draco knew their enchanted interlude was about to end, and it was better to let it fall apart now than to let Harry awaken and retreat into embarrassment. He yawned, deeply, tilting his head back. The sunlight would strike his hair and neck, he knew, and make his sometimes disturbing pallor appear to handsome effect. And it would, even more to the point, bare his throat to Harry, and show he had no fear of that.

From Harry’s slight gasp, it was working.

*

Harry could not remember feeling more comfortable since the nights he used to spend snuggled up in bed with Ginny. The soul-bond had become a soft, constant sound. Like bees making honey, it was going about its own work, and so long as Harry didn’t disturb it, it had no reason to attack.

He could no more have kept from staring at Draco’s throat than he could have kept himself from obeying the call of gravity.

And that was all right.

Harry blinked. He didn’t want to tear himself apart for that. He was sitting close to Draco, touching him of his own free will, and the distrustful corner of his mind wasn’t screaming at him for being an idiot. The distrustful corner of his mind was completely quiet, in fact, drugged into stillness.

Every one of Harry’s bones felt as if it were melting.

But Draco would think it was strange if Harry just kept clinging to his hand, and so he turned his eyes away and drew his hand reluctantly free. The sensation of warmth traveled along his palm for slow, delicious seconds. Harry choked a whimper, and then told himself not to be such a child.

Ignoring the sweetness of the soul-bond’s humming, he asked, “What about breakfast?” He couldn’t speak above a whisper, though.

“Yes. I’m hungry,” Draco said, and his voice was the same—deep, tranquil, dragging over the words as if he would like nothing better than to sit here for the rest of his life and speak them.

Harry made a soft, helpless sound, and shook his head a bit as he stood. Maybe that would get the cobwebs out of his mind.

He was acting ridiculous in front of Draco Malfoy, a man he had no reason to trust.

He felt so good.

Maybe, just maybe, Harry thought, his brain moving too slowly for the urgency of the subject, he should see about changing a few of his basic assumptions.

            Because if he hated and feared Draco Malfoy, he shouldn’t feel this much longing to watch him dress, or have this much difficulty turning his eyes away.

*

Mangacat, thrnbrooke, paigeey07: Thank you for reviewing!

jbj1031965: Still a while before they find out the culprit, who can lay red herrings pretty well.

AnyaGreyback: Well, for right now he’s not got a lot of choice…

Myra: This chapter marks a beginning of it. Harry definitely couldn’t stay in the same state forever.
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A Determined Frame of Mind