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Incandescence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13843 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter; that belongs to J. K. Rowling. I am making no money from this fic.

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

Chapter Five�Intimate
Details

�� Why would
you want to look through those?� Madam Pince�s voice was sharp as a chisel. She
leaned forwards protectively across her desk, as though she thought Draco would
try to spring over it and snatch what he wanted by force.

�� Draco
offered the woman the rueful smile that he�d given Bertha when she asked why he
needed to know details about ink. �Research for the next novel.�

�� If
anything, the librarian�s eyes narrowed further. �Oh? And a novel that will be
set in the modern wizarding world, as all of yours are�don�t think I don�t know
your books, young man�requires details from newspapers that are fourteen years
old?�

�� Listen, you old witch, Draco longed to
say. I know those papers are doing
nothing but rotting back there. You might as well let me have them. I�ll be the
only one who�s read them in Merlin knows how long. What do you care if a few of
them fall apart in my hands? There are always Reparo spells.

�� Except he
couldn�t say anything like that, of course, both because it would be
undiplomatic and because Pince was one of those people unmoved by practical or
monetary considerations. Her obsession was her library, and she would believe
that moving about or changing any of the contents was impossible.

�� Luckily,
Draco had other tricks that were available to him, particularly when he knew
his audience. He started intently into her eyes and lowered his voice. �I am
producing a modern book, Madam Pince, but I despise
the shoddy standards of modern printing. I�ve persuaded Murray�s that this
novel should be made to last.�

�� Pince
uncoiled like a snake that someone had offered a mouse. �Oh?� she breathed.

�� Draco held
his wince back as her breath blew in his face. It smelled like dust and old
leather. �Yes,� he said. �I�ve noticed that far too many books nowadays fall
apart after you�ve read them only a few hundred times. Disgraceful.�

�� It
certainly is,� Pince agreed in a hard voice, standing up straight. �Which is
the reason that I must ban the students from reading some of the books. If they
would listen to me, they would
realize��

�� Draco moved
hastily. He didn�t want this to degenerate into Pince�s ranting about her
students. He imagined she had years and years of remarks stored up that no one
had bothered to listen to. �Yes,� he said. �But what if books existed that were
more like the old grimoiries? Bound with powerful spells as well as the petty
ones used now, and with glue and bindings that had themselves been enchanted?�

�� You have
my interest, Mr. Malfoy.� Pince pushed her glasses up her nose. �Such a book
would be easier to appreciate and to store and repair.�

�� Yes.�
Draco laid a hand on her desk, which was the closest he wanted to come to
touching her, and smiled charmingly into her eyes. �The novel I want to write
now will be like that. But I want the contents to match the binding, you know.
The binding will demonstrate some attention to history and sense of tradition.
I want my writing to do the same thing. And for that, I need the details I�ll
harvest from those newspapers.�

�� Pince
stared off into the distance for a moment. Draco waited patiently. He could see
the obsessive gleam in her eyes, and he didn�t want to interrupt the trance
that might be his best way of getting her to convince herself.

�� Then she
snapped her gaze back to him, and nodded briskly. �Your commitment to your
artistic principles is immense, Mr. Malfoy, and should be encouraged. I will
fetch the newspapers for you. There�s a room in the back of the library where
you can read them in peace.�

�� Draco let
out a sigh of relief as he followed her, mingled with one of regret. The Malfoy charm triumphs again. Now, if
only Potter were so easy to charm.

*

�� Draco paged
carefully through the yellowed copies of the Daily Prophet. Though the library contained other newspapers, which
Madam Pince had also placed at his disposal, the Prophet was the paper that reported most often on Potter. The
articles were full of lies, of course, but Draco wasn�t interested in the
articles.

�� He wanted
the photographs.

�� Notice the small details, Granger had
told him, and Draco intended to. Particularly since the photographs moved, and
he could tell much about Potter from looking at what his imaged self was
doing�or at least he could tell much about the man Potter had been from sixteen
to ten years ago, just after the war. He would have to be careful and
perceptive about integrating this older picture and the modern man.

�� There was
the photograph of Potter at Granger and Weasley�s wedding, in neat dress robes
that contrasted with the tangle of hair that nothing could tame. Draco smiled
in spite of himself as he watched Potter watching Granger and Weasley. The pure
affection in his eyes made it easier to think of Potter�s friends as likeable.

�� Then Potter
turned his head, and his eyes looked straight out of the photograph. At once
his face took on a blank expression, and he edged backwards until his body
mostly ducked out of the frame. Then he peered out like a small child looking
around a door at a monster.

�� Draco
blinked. Is that when he noticed the
photographer?

�� The rest of
the photos he looked at�at least the ones that had Potter in the background,
usually as part of a larger group at a celebration�were the same. Potter tensed
the moment he realized someone had a camera pointed at him. Probably the real
Potter was too diplomatic ever to do so, but the image sidled off, or crouched
down as if to hide himself, or ran away. Sometimes he hid behind a taller
person, usually Weasley.

�� And each
time, he wore a scowl on his face.

�� In the ones
where Potter was the subject of the photo and couldn�t flee, he stood stiffly,
his hands always clenched into fists or his arms folded. Sometimes he smiled,
but the smile was on the edge of a glare. Draco wondered that the photographers
didn�t seem to notice. Then again, some of them probably didn�t care what the
picture looked like as long as they had a
picture, and others would think Potter�s discomfort added an edge of tension
that made the photograph more exciting.

�� Draco knew
what he was looking at. He had seen the same look, though less intense, on
Lovegood�s face when she spoke of what she�d endured in the dungeons of Malfoy
Manor, and on Granger�s when she confessed that there had been a time during
the war when she was sure that she would never see Weasley again.

�� Potter was
in pain.

�� But why
would the mere snapping of a photograph make him seem so? Especially when he
had been a celebrity since he had entered the wizarding world?

�� Thoughtfully,
Draco looked at some of the more recent papers, the ones from between five and
ten years ago. By then, another reason to photograph Potter had been added to
the pile: he was a top Auror, involved in more captures than anyone else, and a
lot of the people threatened by Dark wizards liked to see them in custody, to increase their feeling of safety. Now
Potter was the center of attention, and he had a ready-made pose available to
him, one that he had probably been trained specifically to assume, unlike the
pose of hero.

�� He could
have set his jaw and held a wand to the throat or temple of whoever he�d
snatched today and looked stern and manly. It would have satisfied most of the
audience, who wouldn�t know any difference between that pose and Potter the
real person anyway.

�� Yet even in
these pictures, Potter couldn�t seem to do that. He stood in a resigned way
instead, muscles tensed to back up or run away, or kept his eyes fastened on
the wizard or witch who stood in chains. Then, Draco noted, he could make his
expression as hard as he liked.

�� Draco laid
the papers down and leaned back in the chair, in part to give his eyes a rest,
but also to consider what he�d just learned. He sneezed some dust out of his
nose and stared at the ceiling, where, instead of windows, bright, cold lights
hung. Madam Pince had explained that light might damage the more fragile old
paper, and though Draco could easily have said that was what Preservation
Charms were for, he�d nodded enough times to satisfy her.

�� The
conclusion was inescapable, no matter how many times he tried to dodge it.

�� Potter
would never be comfortable with his heroism, no matter how long it had been
since the war�in part because he�d built up a heroic reputation in the
aftermath, not just during it. And yet he went on acting as an Auror anyway.
Mere discomfort was not enough to make him give up a job that protected other
people.

�� He didn�t
mind showing that discomfort, though it seemed to be in ways that most people
didn�t notice. Maybe most people weren�t looking. So he was still terminally
honest, Draco thought, as he had been all his life.

�� And the
biggest revelation, the one that was most certainly true, the one Draco did not
want to admit because it threw the whole concept of a novel based on Potter
into peril�

�� Potter
didn�t like attention.

�� Draco
splayed his fingers over his eyes. Fuck.
What do I do now?

�� The answers
piled into him�not answers to the question he�d just asked, but to the question
of writing a book based on Potter. Potter would hate the renewed interest in
his exploits it would stir up. He would hate people asking him which parts of
the story were true and which weren�t. No chance that he would adopt Granger�s
cold stare and quick way with a hex when people thought they knew her through Fire in the Darkness, or Longbottom�s
shy, embarrassed smile, or Lovegood�s serene response that all the parts of the story were true, in one way or another. He
would hate the calls for interviews that many people, including Murray�s,
probably, would issue.

�� He had told
Draco that he was a private person in the Fire-Room and that was the reason he
didn�t want to share his memories. Draco wondered if anyone but Potter himself
and his closest friends realized how private. It was no wonder he clung to the
secrets that he wanted preserved, and why he would be frantic if the mysterious
letter-writer had perhaps discovered one of them.

�� He would
not want to answer Draco�s questions, and he would never give permission for
some of his most intimate details to appear in the book.

�� Draco
placed that information side-by-side with the force that was still driving him
to write the book, the golden energy shimmering up his veins when he thought of
making Potter into a vision of glory.

�� One was
reality, the other dreams. Draco needed both to accomplish the kind of writing
he excelled at.

�� And they
were both as strong as each other. He would need something else to help him
make the decision as to whether to write the book or not.

�� Draco
sighed and put the papers carefully back in their places, wearing the Gloves
Charm that Pince had taught him. He doubted he could learn anything more than
he already had from the public records of Potter�s life. He would have to talk
to someone who knew him well.

�� There was
bloody little choice as far as that went. Granger had made it clear she�d
closed her mouth when it came to Potter. He�d angered his mother, and probably
exhausted the little information she possessed. He didn�t want to think about
approaching Weasley�the cretin had rejected every offer Draco made him, even
the apology he tried to send right after the war�and the Aurors in the
Department who had contact with Potter might be willing to talk, but Draco wouldn�t
trust them to know the kind of things he needed.

�� Which left
one person as a fairly good source.

*

�� Draco.�
Lovegood�s voice was soft and clear, the way it always was. She had dreamy
eyes, the way she always did. She called him by his first name as if they�d
been friends since childhood, and she smiled at him in a way that caused the
tight coil in Draco�s gut to relax. �Come in. I�m going to finish a Wrackspurt
hunt, and then I�ll prepare the chocolate.�

�� Draco
followed Lovegood into the long, ramshackle house that she shared with
Longbottom, her husband. It was on the borders of a forest that Draco didn�t
know the name of, and which didn�t appear on a map; Lovegood had to relax the
Unplottable Charm each time he decided to visit so he could get to it. The
house itself was made of wood, the walls constructed of the trunks and roots of
living trees. Draco admired the effect, but it made the floor underfoot rather
knobby and caused leaves to fall in one�s hair.

�� Neville�s
not home,� Lovegood said, when she had assiduously traveled around the room
twice, peering at the walls with a lens made of beaten gold, and then started
to heat a pot of chocolate. �We received report of a black unicorn in the
Forbidden Forest and he had to leave right away. Did you need to give me a
message for him?�

�� Draco
smiled in spite of himself. No matter how often he came to talk to Lovegood, he
assumed she wanted to talk to Longbottom instead. �No. I wanted to ask you
about Harry Potter.�

�� Oh, I
think Rita Skeeter knows much more about him,� said Lovegood seriously, as she
settled into a chair across from him and started tying a garland of mint in her
hair. �After all, I was only at school at the same time he was and fought in
one battle with him.�

�� Draco
blinked. That was something he didn�t remember hearing. Of course, he�d had
more trouble in his interviews with her than with some of his others; she
tended to wander from the point, and he tried not to bring her back too
sharply, because he wanted to incorporate so much of her speaking style into The Hope-Well to serve Selene. �What
battle was that?�

�� Lovegood
looked at him with very wide eyes, as though he had heaped shite in the middle
of her table. Draco coughed uncomfortably. Lovegood had a way of making her
most outlandish actions seem normal, so that you began to think you were the one who lived in a
different world from reality.

�� When I was
in my fourth year, of course,� Lovegood said, �and when Harry was in the year
above that. We flew on thestrals to the Department of Mysteries. I was glad to
be with him. Watching him fight was like watching a hippogriff fight.�

�� Draco
thought that was an odd observation, but it was exactly the kind of small
detail that might yield something important about Potter, so he said, �How is
Potter like a hippogriff?�

�� Oh, don�t
say it that way,� Lovegood said, pained. �That sounds like the opening of a bad
joke, and I would hate to think of hippogriffs or Harry as bad jokes. They�re
rather good ones, the universe�s laughter.� She stood up as the pot of
chocolate squeaked. �Think of a different way to ask,� she added over her
shoulder, as she poured chocolate into two delicate cups.

�� Draco put
his chin on one fist and watched Lovegood in silence. She hummed softly under
her breath, her blonde hair floating freely around her. Her eyes peered in
perpetual surprise from behind her large glasses, but Draco knew that she
understood far more than she let on she did. She simply saw no reason to let
that reality trouble her.

�� When
Lovegood turned around with the two cups of chocolate, she was smiling. �I
thought of a way for you to phrase it,� she announced.

�� Draco
accepted his cup and sipped carefully. Lovegood never served a drink hot enough
to burn his tongue. She had learned the spells to avoid doing so from studying
house-elves, she had claimed. If so, it was the first time Draco had ever heard
of the study of house-elves doing anything useful for anyone, apart from
Granger. �How is that?�

�� How does
Harry fight like a hippogriff?�
Lovegood beamed at him. A smear of chocolate was by her lower lip. �Do you see?
Hippogriffs do other things than fight, and so does Harry, so it leaves part of
them free. Some parts of us should always be free.�

�� Draco
concealed his sigh under his breath and said, �How does Potter fight like a
hippogriff?�

�� You know
how proud hippogriffs are.� For a moment, Lovegood seemed to glance at the scar
on Draco�s forearm where the ugly beast had bitten him long ago, but he wasn�t
sure she really had. �They fight because something offends their honor. Harry�s
like that. Evil in the world offends his honor. He has to fight it.�

�� I used to
think he wanted to be a hero,� Draco said softly, more to himself than
Lovegood. �I know that�s not true now. But are you sure that he didn�t just
fight because he hated Voldemort?�

�� Lovegood�s
face went through one of those rare transformations where suddenly she was
sharp, and alive, and present, and
Draco knew he was looking at one of the most intelligent people he had ever
met. �Voldemort isn�t alive any more. Why would he fight all those Dark wizards
when he didn�t have to? He could have retired. It would be safer, and he�s done
enough. We all told him that. But he couldn�t stop, because there was still
evil out there, and the world needs people like him as much today as it did
yesterday. That�s what he said when I asked.� Lovegood smiled at Draco�s elbow.
�Isn�t that a wonderful saying?�

�� It was.
Draco definitely intended to have the hero he created to replace Potter in his
novel say it�

�� If he
decided to write the novel.

�� He cleared
his throat and did his best to find an answer for one of the questions looking
at the newspaper photographs had prompted in him. �Why hasn�t Potter learned
how to live with his celebrity? He�s had over twenty years to do it now, and
yet he still acts eleven years old when it comes to that.�

�� Lovegood
gave him a look of surprising pity and shook her head. �The answer to that
question is obvious,� she said. �Very unworthy of you, Draco. Ask more
interesting questions, and you should receive more interesting answers.�

�� It�s not
obvious to me.� Draco heard the snappish tone in his voice and forced himself
to calm. Lovegood tended to retreat into her own mental world if confronted
with too much anger, probably a defense against all the taunting she had
received at Hogwarts. He said in a smoother tone when he felt able to,
�Potter�s endured so much. Surely he could endure this, which has to be less
terrible than facing Voldemort each and every school year?�

�� Of course
not,� Lovegood said, sounding faintly shocked. �Harry doesn�t like standing in
one place.�

�� Draco
experienced a moment of despair. That wasn�t the first time Lovegood had said
something that Draco thought was profoundly insightful, but which he lacked the
ability to decipher. This time, it drove him more mad than usual. The
information he needed to crack Potter�s shell open could be hiding in those
words, but it was beyond his reach.

�� A person
does one heroic thing, and then stands still the rest of his life and
contemplates that thing,� Lovegood went on, shaking her head. �He becomes
enthralled with mirrors and reflections. But moving people go on, and do other
things, and they see the reflections
of other beings in the water.� She smiled serenely at Draco, as if what she
said should make perfect sense. �Harry�s a moving person.�

�� You�ve solved harder problems than this in
your time, such as why you find it impossible to write about Weasleys, Draco
reminded himself. You can think about
this, and find the answer, even though Lovegood won�t tell you.

�� He pressed
his fingers into his temples and sat still for a few minutes, thinking.
Lovegood rose to her feet and trailed about the room, flicking a cloth at parts
of the wooden walls and murmuring to them under her breath.

�� The easiest
possible interpretation of Lovegood�s words was that Potter wasn�t
self-absorbed; he saw others� reflections instead of gazing enthralled at his
own. Well, Draco had already known that. A self-absorbed person wasn�t the kind
who sacrificed his life for others.

�� Then there
were her words about motion and standing still. Potter didn�t like to look back
on his past. Again, Draco had already known that from the photographs and
Potter�s refusal to tell someone he trusted about the details of his sacrifice
before this. Anyone who studied Potter closely enough would know that.

�� So combine the ideas of reflection and
motion.

�� Draco felt
stupid in the next moment. Of course. Potter didn�t like being judged for a
single heroic exploit. He didn�t want to stand still and rest on his laurels of
killing Voldemort for the rest of his life, which might be part of the reason
that he�d become an Auror, so that people would have to consider some of his
other actions. That part of it charmed Draco, because it indicated a subtle
selfishness, or at least consideration of self, in Potter that Draco had seen
no sign of before. He would have feared that he might actually be writing about
a perfect plaster hero, except that Potter had slammed him into walls and tied
his tongue in knots.

�� And Potter
must be uncomfortable with the attention he received because he thought, or
suspected, that all of it stemmed from one incident in his life, his defeat of
Voldemort. Or maybe even the definitive one before then, when he had survived
the Killing Curse and become the Boy-Who-Lived.

�� What must it be like to have your life
defined by an event that happened when you were a baby, an event that you can�t
even remember?

�� Draco
closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers gently back and forth over his temples
this time, to soothe his building headache.

�� There was
no way that Potter would ever consent to let Draco write a novel about him.
Because what Draco wrote about was the war, and the way that people�s lives
changed as a result of it. Potter didn�t want to be defined by the war. He
would never give his sanction to a text that froze that part of his life and
constructed his being around it.

�� Draco�s
effort was doomed.

�� And if what
he understood about Potter was true in all particulars, not just a few, he should not write it, because that would
make him no better than all the people who slobbered over Potter for a single
action, who tried to turn him into a picture when he was busy moving out of the
frame.

�� But that
realization did not kill his curiosity about the letters, or the feeling of
golden rightness when he thought of writing about Potter, or�

�� Or his
interest in Potter for himself.

�� Draco
opened his eyes and stared at the table.

�� He had
liked learning these details about Potter for their own sake. He wanted to know
more, the kinds of things that Granger and Weasley would never give him. He
wanted to sit across from Potter at a table again and ask questions that had
nothing to do with the war, simply to see his eyes flare with something other
than distrust. He wanted to find the letter writer and watch Potter look at him
with uncertain gratitude.

�� But if I can�t and shouldn�t write about
him, why do I feel this?

�� Some
questions are very hard to answer,� he said aloud.

�� Lovegood
turned around and gave him an intensely sympathetic smile. �Such as all
questions about Wrackspurts,� she agreed.

*

�� butterpie: Thank
you! I meant the fourth chapter, and this one, too, to show a gentler side to
Draco. He can change his mind about things; it was just that, until this point,
he had no reason to do so. And Draco is doing his best to follow Hermione�s
advice indirectly.

�� Snivelly:
At the moment, Draco still has a resistance to thinking of Harry as anything
more than another subject.

�� Glad you
liked the story! Harry has changed more than Draco, in this case, and part of
the process of Draco learning more about him is figuring out how much Harry has
changed and why.

�� I don�t
know why I decided to randomly pick on Terry Boot and make him an awful poet,
but I think it gives the story flavor.

�� Thrnbrooke:
Afraid I can�t answer your questions about what Harry was hiding. And Bertha
didn�t say only women bought it; the wizarding equivalent of angsty young goth
teens also buy Hell�s Fields Ink, because they think it makes them �decadent.�

�� hieisdragoness18:
Thank you!
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Incandescence