Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

A More Worldly Man	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10960 -:- 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.

Chapter List
- 4
- 5
- 6
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Gryffindor Tactics and Slytherin Bravado

            Harry had time to see the flash of blue flame and shimmering shadows before he reacted. His vision hazed with red. His breath came in gasps so loud he felt himself shake with them. He knew what the Malfoys were showing everyone, and the only thought in his head was that they might convince other people, the Ministry or Healers at St. Mungo’s or the pure-bloods that surrounded them at the party, to take Draco away from him. They had fought so hard for freedom and the right to make their own decisions, and now it was in danger of draining away—

            His magic rose and lashed out through him. Harry didn’t think he raised a hand. Instead, his eyes abruptly began to water, and he blinked and squeezed them shut. Draco’s hand tightened on his arm until it hurt, and he heard shrieks and a noise like multiple panes of glass smashing.

            “Harry,” Draco whispered, sounding frightened and reverent both at once. Harry could hardly hear him, so loud were the sounds around them. “What did you do?”

            “I don’t know,” Harry said, and then turned his head to the side, burying his nose in Draco’s hair. His body shook in the wake of adrenaline and powerful emotions, and he wanted to whimper and yell and grab Draco in his arms and Apparate away. “Just—don’t leave me because you’re embarrassed, please. I don’t care what taunts they hurl at me, but please, care more about me than your reputation. Please—“

            Draco shivered, as if it shocked him to hear Harry’s begging as much as it did Harry to say it. But the next moment, the tremors passed, and he tightened his hold on Harry’s waist. “I won’t leave you, I promise,” he said. “They would have to drag me away, and even then, I would find some way to come back.”

            Harry nodded, eyes still tightly shut, and let the overload of magic and fear and shock carry him somewhere else for a while.

*

            Draco didn’t see the moment when Harry actually shattered the panels of light that held the stolen memories. He had barely had time to realize what he was watching, the memories of the moments when Harry ate Daphne’s magic—and, of course, none of the moments when Daphne had actually tortured him—when a brilliant white flash exploded from beside him. Draco shot a hand out and clutched Harry’s arm so he wouldn’t be thrown from his feet.

            His first thought was, Someone is attacking in the middle of my parents’ party? Is it Diggory? This magic, however sophisticated, was just a distraction after all, and now he’s seizing the chance to kill us—

            Then he realized he recognized the feel and weight and even the smell of Harry’s magic, and he watched the panels implode as if made of actual glass and not light and fall in spitting sparks to the ground. Draco ducked as one piece of the light arched towards his head and shot over him like the tail of a comet. Harry leaned against him and shook, and then murmured that nonsense about Draco leaving him. Draco stroked his back and soothed him as best he could, but he already understood that Harry would be useless for the next few minutes.

            That left it up to him to face his parents, and their guests.

            He looked around him coolly, his face as blank as though he had expected this and wanted only to gauge others’ reactions. Lucius probably regretted teaching Draco a mask so effective.

            Most of the nearest wizards and witches had fallen back, confused, either blinking or babbling depending on how old they were and how invested in the traditions of coldness and stillness. Draco saw a few wincing and holding their hands over their eyes, but he saw no actual injuries or burns. He forced his breath to pass calmly through his lips instead of in a sharp exhalation of relief. Harry hurting someone would have been as difficult to explain away as his devouring of Daphne’s magic.

            Lucius stood not far from them, his hands folded behind his back, his head held stiff and his neck straight. Just from that, Draco knew his father was furious. He slipped to the side, to shield Harry from a physical attack if need be, but refused to respond otherwise. If his father had wanted to avoid anger and public embarrassment, he should have realized what would most likely happen when he tried to ambush Harry and Draco with the memories.

            Narcissa stood beside Lucius, her wand raised as though she had tried to halt the destruction of the panels and been unable to. Her face bore no expression, but her eyes glinted. Draco recognized that, too. His mother had discovered something about the situation from Harry’s reaction, something she had not known before and did not like. Draco wished he dared to sneer openly at her. Did she imagine the bond between Harry and I was weak? Or that I would abandon him the moment anyone else saw him eating my enemy’s magic?

            Well, Harry had thought the same thing, so perhaps Draco should not dismiss that as such a ridiculous supposition.

            “Really,” said a mild voice from the doorway. “No need to put on such a show for me, Mr. Malfoy. When you sent me an invitation, I expected to be only another guest, not the guest of honor.”

            Draco turned to stare. Charlemagne Diggory was standing in the doorway of the room, his gaze mild as he looked from one face to another.

            “Mr. Diggory,” Lucius said, springing from fury to glacial control in a moment. “This display was not planned, but was the work of our illustrious Mr. Potter. It seems he does not know his own strength.”

            Draco resisted the urge to snarl. There was no way they could have planned something like this; Lucius would not have condoned such a disruption to his party no matter what the risk. But they were seizing the chance to embarrass Harry as smoothly as if they had.

            Yes, my father and Diggory have worked together before. And I’ll just bet that the deal is power for Lucius in exchange for his financial and social support of our beloved Ministerial candidate.

            “I have often found that to be true about Mr. Potter,” Diggory said, his voice soft and rueful, and glanced sideways at Harry. “Potter?” he added gently. “Do you want to join the conversation and tell us why you saw fit to disrupt a social event at which you are an invited guest?”

            Harry just held Draco harder, and Draco sighed. Harry wouldn’t be up to answering Diggory anytime soon. Draco’s answering for him would look suspicious, but Draco didn’t see that he exactly had a choice.

            “Harry’s had very little chance to learn how to behave at functions like these, given his natural modesty,” he said, and rubbed soothing circles on Harry’s back. The other man’s breathing had deepened and smoothed out. Draco hoped that meant he’d be ready for the task of defending himself before they left. “So, of course, the first time he ventured into a pure-blood social circle, he mistook some of the cues offered him. I’d call what just happened an overreaction, but a justified one.”

            “Really?” Diggory smiled at Draco, a fox’s grin rife with the longing to bite. “What just happened, then?”

            “My parents attempted to embarrass him publicly,” Draco said, mildly offended that Diggory thought he had trapped him. I’m not as knowledgeable about politics as I could have been, but I’m not so stupid as to be more specific than a question like that needs. “It’s no worse than that bint he dated some time ago threatening to sell indecent pictures of him to the Prophet, I suppose, but certainly no better.”

            “I’m certain that Lucius Malfoy would never wittingly commit such a gaffe,” said Diggory, and his smile grew brighter yet again. “Potter must have overreacted, as you yourself admitted. And such a—blast—of magic is not justified under any circumstances.”

            Draco rolled his eyes, not caring who saw the gesture. He was long since past tired of the games that his parents played, that the Ministry played, that Diggory played. He tried to remind himself that it was important to save Harry’s reputation in the eyes of the people attending the party, but considering this had been a trap from the beginning, who knew whether Lucius had actually invited any of the charity founders Harry was so anxious to meet?

            No, the exhaustion had turned into rippling, clenching irritation that invaded the lowest levels of Draco’s belly and being. He stared back at Diggory with narrowed eyes and tightened his hands on Harry until the other man shifted in protest and looked up, blinking. His face was still dazed, but rapidly returning to sanity. Draco positioned himself in front of Harry mostly as a precaution. Perhaps Harry was far enough gone to react to insults with spells.

            And then he let his words fly.

            “You would never think any of Harry’s reactions justified, Diggory, not with the restrictions you’ve tried to place on him,” Draco said. “You hate and fear his magic, and you’ve been worried he would throw his political support against you from the beginning. Funnily enough, the idea might never have occurred to him if you hadn’t suggested it. So here he is, trying to maneuver against you with your tactics. And my parents are helping you instead of me, their own son, because they care more about seeing me subdued than about seeing me happy. And none of you care about what’s best for the wizarding world.”

            Their audience had gone silent and fascinated, watching them. Diggory’s smile had frozen on his face.

            “Your hostility is also an overreaction, Draco,” he murmured. “I have offered you opportunities to compromise with me. I—“

            “Oh, do shut up, Diggory,” Draco said, fed up beyond measure. “You’ve also tried to put restrictions on the Desire potion out of nothing more than fear. It hasn’t disrupted your campaign yet, but you fear it might, and that’s good enough for you. When none of your tactics worked—not direct attack, not an indirect approach through the Potions committee, not buying up my debts through Cordelia—did you sit back, reassess your fear, and decide that you might have been wrong to interfere with us? No. You simply allied with my parents.”

            Shaking, he turned back to face his parents. Narcissa had one hand to her mouth, the way she might look when a badly-trained house-elf spilled something on the rug. Lucius glared, his eyes like two chips of ice. Draco shivered with another spasm of weary revulsion.

            “I’m not the boy you drove out of the house two years ago,” he told them flatly. “I’ve learned more about my feelings since then, more about what I want and what I’m willing to risk to keep what I want. You thought that embarrassment was the best way to force me away from Harry?” He closed his eyes and blew out a blast of air, which made the strands of hair in front of his face waver away from his lips. “You don’t know me at all. That’s not surprising. What is is your continued insistence that you know what’s best for me, in spite of all the evidence.”

            He slung an arm around Harry’s shoulders. “You’re the only person in this room I can trust, the only person in this room I actually want to spend time with,” he said to Harry, loud enough for everyone to hear. “That’s an excellent reason to leave together.”

            And before the astonished eyes watching them, he led a limping Harry away from the Manor he had spent most of the day nerving himself to enter. When he passed into the open, there was a sense of incredible lightness, but it was not fear he shed. It was the company of people he had found intolerable. He drew Harry closer, fixed his mind on an image of the alley behind Harry’s building, and Apparated.

*

            Harry recovered himself fully when they stood in the corridor outside his flat. He blinked, and a filmy covering that had seemingly wrapped his mind tore away, exposing his thoughts to fresh air. He hissed and rubbed his mouth with the back of one hand. “How badly did I fuck things up?” he murmured.

            “No worse than I did,” Draco said. “But that’s one of those things we need to talk about. If you’ll let down the wards, please?” He nodded to the door, which crawled with more protective spells than ever since Daphne had succeeded in cutting through them and stealing Draco from right under Harry’s nose.

            “What did you do?” Harry asked, struggling to remember, whilst the wards folded or fell away in front of them one by one. The past hour seemed to have dissolved into mist in his mind. He could remember the powerful drain as the magic left his eyes, and the scent of Draco’s hair and the warmth of his skin when he collapsed against him, but the words he knew had been spoken had become little more than a buzz.

            “Told Diggory off,” Draco said. “My parents, too. It felt good.”

            Harry turned to stare at him, though he could only stare for a moment before Draco ducked under his arm and into the flat. He was moving more easily than before, Harry noted, though he was taking deep breaths that made Harry wonder if some more memories of his time under Daphne’s “care” had cropped up. “Why did you do that?” he demanded, stepping in after Draco and beginning to repair the wards. “You were the one who emphasized the need to be careful, who told me even the colors of our robes would send an important message—“

            “That was before I found out my parents and Diggory are working together,” Draco said, and flopped down on the couch, his head tilting back and his mouth opening as he gasped in air. Harry subdued his impulse to drag answers out of Draco right now, and sat down quietly beside him instead, rubbing his shoulder with one hand. Draco opened one eye and gave him an exhausted smile. “His showing up right when you would have been most embarrassed, had you allowed my parents to continue showing those memories, rather proved it.”

            “What’s in it for Lucius?” Harry asked, but knew the answer even before Draco gave it.

            “Power. Of course. The only thing he wants.” Draco snorted and shut his eyes again. “I thought for a few moments he actually wanted me back, but no, it’s only that he hates seeing anyone escape his control, and he hates failure. If I returned to him after all this time and submitted to him, that would be an admission he was right and his way of life really was best. He can never compromise with someone who opposes him. And if he works with a man who wants to destroy both my work and you…well, he wouldn’t care about that, as long as it gave him back his toy unharmed.”

            Harry winced when he heard the bitterness flowing through Draco’s words. This was not the way Harry thought parent-child relationships should work, but it was too obviously the way the Malfoys’ did.

            “And what do you think will happen now?” he asked, tightening the clasp of his hand on Draco’s shoulder, and moving so Draco could lean against him if he wanted.

            “God knows,” Draco said, and then yawned. “They may very well try to paint us as lunatics. Or they may say that my words and your magic indicate we’re coming to a break, that we cause each other stress rather than heal each other.” He swiveled his head and looked at Harry then. “But you know what? I don’t really care.”

            “Draco—“

            “No, Harry, I mean it.” Draco’s eyes were so bright he looked feverish, a sharp dot of color burning in either cheek. “I’m sick of politics. We can’t fight as well as Diggory and my parents can, either, because we don’t have their money or their contacts. And yet we haven’t done too badly, have we, even distracted by Daphne and with fewer weapons? Diggory’s plan to try and turn the Potions Committee against us didn’t work. The strongest strike against me—the destruction of my shop and most of the stock of Desire potion—wasn’t something he planned. And we’ve taken away his most powerful ally. We did all that using tactics that weren’t his. I say we keep using tactics that aren’t his. No more attending parties, no more pretending that we have no emotions. That’s the way my parents raised me, and that’s the way I fought against and escaped, because I was so tired of pretending my passions didn’t really matter to me.”

            Harry shivered and licked his lips. “But my keeping my passions at bay with my potion helped us when we went up against the Potions Committee—“

            “Our trust and faith in each other helped more. What little we had of it at the time, given that I was lying to you about Daphne and your emotions were still at bay.” Draco leaned forwards, his hands locking on Harry’s robes, his eyes searching his frantically. “We can still plan like that. Just—just say that you won’t be angry at me for my outburst. Say that we’ll fight like Gryffindors, not like Slytherins.”

            Harry stared at him, a thrill of an emotion that felt very much like pride moving through him. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked quietly. “It’ll mean public embarrassment for us both.”

            “Yes, I’m sure.” Draco’s arms shook, a fine trembling Harry thought came more from frustration than anything else. “I can’t do this anymore, Harry, watching my every step and wondering what will happen next, using tactics that my enemies have perfected. Maybe, when I’m stronger, I can go back to it. But not for the moment. I want to be open. Our enemies can always invent rumors about us, but we don’t have to make it easy for them by trying to conceal secrets they can easily discover.”

            “The secret of what my magic can do is one I still want to conceal,” Harry said.

            Draco sighed. “Yes, yes, that one, then,” he said, and his hands clenched in Harry’s robe again. “I’m not saying we need to run into the streets babbling every embarrassing thing we’ve done in our lives, Harry. I’m just saying that I’d rather spend time brewing the Desire potion, preparing to rebuild and reopen my shop, and surviving Diggory’s run for the Ministry than figuring out every little thing Diggory wants or my parents want.”

            “Perfectly understandable,” Harry said, and pulled him close, his eyes shutting as he draped his arms around Draco’s neck. Draco uttered a soft whimper and pressed his face into Harry’s chest. “Even if I do need to continue offering to sponsor charities in order to get the money we need to rebuild your shop.”

            Draco said nothing, but Harry thought his lips moved into a smile against the cloth.

*

            Draco waited until he was sure Harry was asleep to open the envelope he had felt crowded into the outer pocket of his robes. It was heavy only with the weight of his own dread; when he opened it, it contained a single slim sheet of parchment, twice folded over.

            Draco held it up to the light of his wand. In his mother’s neat handwriting, the parchment said, It is not too late for reconciliation. Give up Potter in public and request a private interview with your father, using a white owl. It would not take more than a few minutes of groveling for him to take you back.

            No signature, of course. Narcissa would not want to put her name to anything that might be seen as a plea.

            Draco touched his wand to the parchment and murmured almost lazily, “Incendio.” The paper burst into flames, which Draco made hotter with a few more taps of his wand, so they consumed the letter completely. Then he cast another spell that banished the ashes from his bedclothes and lay back on the pillow, his hands folded behind his head. Harry had left open the door of the bedroom as always, so that he could hear Draco call if he needed anything; at the moment, Draco was glad of the ability it gave him to hear Harry’s soft, steady breaths.

            I’m not interested in anything my parents can offer me at the moment. If they ever offer reconciliation on my own terms and I honestly feel I can trust them, I may accept. But that will be a long time coming.

            Draco closed his eyes. If I do not want reconciliation with my parents, what do I want?

            The answers were not slow in coming. Harry. Fame and money from selling the Desire potion. The ability to live on my own or with Harry, as I choose. Freedom from the nightmares that plague me.

            Draco felt a small smile curve his lips. He could take the steps to achieve the first of those goals tomorrow.

*

            An insistent rapping on the window woke Harry perhaps an hour before he would have chosen to rise himself. He lay listening to it and wondering if the owl would give up and depart, but the thought it might deprive Draco of much-needed sleep caused him to stumble off the couch, swearing sleepily.

            The owl was a large, magnificent dark brown bird he didn’t recognize, who swooped into the flat and sat down on the windowsill with a solid thump suggesting he didn’t intend to go anywhere until he’d been fed. Nor would he let Harry near the letter until Harry showed him a nearly full packet of owl treats and extended a few between cautious fingers.

            The letter was sealed inside creamy parchment, marked with swirls of gold that made Harry raise his eyebrows. The seal itself wasn’t one he recognized: a thin bird, perhaps a stylized stork, standing against a tree and a circle. Perhaps the circle was the disk of the full moon or the rising sun. Harry had never paid a great deal of attention to pure-blood symbolism.

            When he tore the seal open, a flicker of power made his knuckles tingle before it subsided. Someone had charmed the letter to sting anyone but him. Wondering if it had been keyed to his magical signature or something more subtle, Harry shook the letter in the parchment into his hand.

            It was short, and the handwriting itself arched forwards to the edge of the paper, as though the writer didn’t believe in taking any time to straighten her lines.

            Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy:

            Your performance last night at that pompous party has deeply impressed me. I have been looking for a way to get back at Lucius for an insult he gave me last year. Perhaps we could help each other. I await your owl.

            Millicent Bulstrode.

*

            nomdeplume: Yes, Draco’s parents are terrible. Draco has finally decided he won’t take any more of their shit, though.

            And yes, they didn’t show any of the memories of Daphne’s torture of Draco. They don’t have those memories.

            Yume111: I think Harry and Draco may come closer after this, as Draco has decided that it’s useless trying to be the man his parents want him to be and Harry can give up the thought of trying to be a Slytherin politician and just be himself.

            And yes, he feels natural and at ease in front of Harry, then turns the gesture into a seduction.

            Narcissa and Lucius are confident they understand the post-war world as well as the pre-war one; it’s still the politicians who are succeeding. And they think, therefore, that Draco must come to and act like them if he wants to be on the winning side.

            MistressNicole: I think you know the answer to most of your questions now! In this case, though, Daphne didn’t send the memories of her torturing Draco to the Malfoys, so they couldn’t have shown those.

            Thrnbrooke, bunnicle: Thanks for reviewing!

            avihenda: Draco’s parents do understand the pure-bloods and how they would have reacted, but at this rate they’ll never understand Draco and Harry.

            Mangacat: As you can see, at least one member of the public has responded positively.
- 4
- 5
- 6
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

A More Worldly Man

Chapter Five—Gryffindor Tactics and Slytherin Bravado