Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Veela-Struck	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 52830 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this writing.

Chapter List
- 1-Veela-Struck
- 2-Changed
- 3-Thought-Through
- 4-Met
- 5-Challenged
- 6-Snapped
- 7-Struggled
- 8-Lost
- 9-Dazed
- 10-Worried
- 11-Shamed
- 12-Hidden
- 13-Dazzled
- 14-Astounded
- 15-Marked
- 16-Damaged
- 17-Chosen
- 18-Shuddered
- 19-Broken
- 20-Spoken
- 21-Influenced
- 22-Gifted
- 23-Promised
- 24-Distressed
- 25-Held
- 26-Tempted
- 27-Warded
- 28-Rumored
- 29-Fought
- 30-Flayed
- 31-Identified
- 32-Practiced
- 33-Enchanted
- 34-Blazed
- 4
- 5
- 6
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Challenged

            Laurent bent down and bit his ear. Harry whimpered and stretched his neck. There was a seething chaos in the back of his mind, which wasn’t unusual when Laurent was on top of him like this, except he still didn’t know why it happened. Laurent was all that was good and fulfilling in the world, and he had a perfect right to do this to Harry if he wanted.

            “Mine,” Laurent said. “Always wanted to have you, never could, and now you’re mine, and no one else can have you.”

            “I don’t want anyone else,” Harry panted, and spread his legs so that he could wrap them more securely around Laurent’s waist. “Will you move already?”

            Laurent laughed and heaved forwards, thrusting, giving him what he wanted, what he always wanted. And all the time, his hair shone, and his eyes, and the wings lifted and then descended, wrapping around Harry’s torso in a way that made him shiver with delight. No one could touch him when he was this way, no one could harm him.

            Harry opened his eyes. The sheen of sweat on his forehead and the bile on his tongue made him dizzy for some moments, until he sat up, took his wand, and cast a charm that dried the sweat and Vanished it. Then there was only the bile to deal with.

            He cared more about other people not having me than about having me himself.

            Harry leaped to his feet. His body was crazy with energy, and he would do something regrettable if he didn’t release it soon.

            His bedroom had multiple wards around it, and at least seven of them were specifically designed to conceal a small room that Harry had built as an addition not long after the Wizengamot sentenced Laurent. At least seven; Harry had layered and rewrapped them so many times that he was no longer sure how many there were. The point was, no one knew about that room except him, and now the door opened to his touch.

            The room was circular and made of bare stone, and when Harry stepped inside it and the door shut behind him, it appeared to have no way out. The walls groaned with the force of the magic that powered them.

            Harry whirled and lashed out.

            The magic screamed around his body, leaping from his core to the power in the walls as lightning leaped from sky to ground. More magic came back as streams of clear, coruscating light, which snapped out like whips and flayed the top layer of stone from the walls. Harry spun again, and the power trailed him, a buzzing strength great enough to lift his feet a few inches from the floor.

            Harry focused on one particular portion of wall under the ceiling, imagined that it was Laurent’s face, and lifted a hand.

            No need to aim his wand, not in this room that was built to both contain and channel his magic, making him more powerful and holding him harmless to anyone outside it. The stone exploded, the individual bits of it traveling through a fire so fierce that they vaporized long before they touched the floor.

            Harry screamed, mindlessly. He heard the sound and then put it from his mind, just like he did the tingling air under his feet and the blinding, nonexistent colors the light created. There was anger, and he had to get it out of him, just as he’d had to get Laurent out of him.

            He had known enough about rape cases, since he’d worked as an Auror, not to bathe until after he had taken Laurent in and provided evidence. But then he had come home and scraped and scraped and scraped with soap and water. It lasted until his hole bled, and that hadn’t been enough. He had ended up under the shower, arms wrapped around his head, crying out his rage in waves of magic that had nearly destroyed his house.

            With the room, that wouldn’t happen. And if Ron or Hermione or someone else felt compelled to come and check on him, they wouldn’t be hurt.

            Harry flung himself through the shattered remnants of his anger, his pride, his fear, his pain, until there was nothing left. Instead, a great, blank, white peace fell over him, a peace the color of—

            The color of a Veela’s wings.

            Harry smiled through bloodied lips at the irony, and because he could smile and not immediately need to destroy something, he knew this particular fit was over. He climbed to his feet, wincing as his hipbones and tailbone ached. He had probably hit them when he was soaring from one wall to another, but he couldn’t remember the individual knocks. Sometimes he had dreams he thought were memories of these bouts, much less clear than the dreams about Laurent.

            Will I do the same thing with Draco? I don’t want to hurt him.

            Harry hesitated, but ultimately shook his head and stepped back into his bedroom, sealing the room up behind again. Hermione would be worried if she knew about it. Ron might understand, but he would also feel compelled to tell Hermione. Harry thought a lot of problems were avoided if they just didn’t know.

            I think I can get out of range before I hurt him like that. I’ll never remain near him if rage like that builds up.

            Besides, if that happens, then we’ve probably already fucked up things beyond repair.

            Harry lay down gingerly in the bed again and closed his eyes. He had a meeting with Draco tomorrow at lunch. The more rested he was, the calmer he’d be.

*

            “Malfoy.”

            Draco tightened his shoulders, but didn’t look around as he strode through the corridors towards Harry’s office. He didn’t recognize the voice, which probably meant that this was another of the minor Ministry flunkies convinced that the Malfoys had hurt him “personally” in the war and that he “needed” revenge. Draco had no time to spare for such idiots.

            “I’m talking to you, Malfoy.”

            Someone seized his shoulder and tried to slam him into the wall. Draco sidestepped gracefully and yanked himself free. He would have liked to spread his wings, but he didn’t advertise the fact that he was Veela.

            The enhanced strength his heritage gave him often came in useful, though.

            The man facing him wore the robes of an Auror, but he had a wet-behind-the-ears, unfinished look that Draco had learned to associate with trainees. Probably someone who had been at Hogwarts with him and hadn’t learned that most people considered the war over now, Draco thought. He curled his lip, ran his gaze quickly up and down the bloke’s body—scrawny legs, the beginnings of a gut, sandy-blond hair, a pouting mouth—and said with a frozen distance that only his father did better, “Do I know you?”

            The man flushed and took a step closer. “My name is Elton Lewis,” he said. “And yeah, you should know me.”

            “Lewis.”

            Draco snapped his mouth shut at that tone of voice, and looked over his shoulder. Harry had come out of his office.

            God. All the spit in Draco’s mouth dried up. Harry looked like a stalking predator. He had one hand in his robe pocket, where Draco knew he often kept his wand, and a slight smile on his face, which you could perhaps have considered friendly if you came from an alternate universe—or if you had been dropped on your head as often as a child as Lewis undoubtedly was.

The menace he exuded didn’t come from the position of his hand or his smile. It had to do with the hunch of his shoulders, the way his leg muscles were tensed as if to shift his weight suddenly and unpredictably, the savage eagerness in his eyes.

Draco curled his fingers into his palm and fought for composure, knowing he would make the situation worse if he said something. He wanted Harry so fiercely at this moment. To have the predator tamed, to feel that lion-like weight leaning trustingly against him—

            Maybe I can even explain it to him that way.

            “We’ve been over this, Lewis,” Harry said in a soft, smooth voice that made Draco’s back teeth tingle with the urge to bite. “The Malfoys had nothing to do with the death of your grandmother. That was Yaxley, and he was sentenced to Azkaban two years ago.”

            “You’re going to tell me they didn’t do something to help? Everyone knows that those Death Eaters planned something together. They couldn’t go to the bathroom without help!”

            Draco watched in fascination. Lewis’s words were belligerent, and if Draco had only heard them without seeing the expression on his face, he would have expected a charge in the next moment, and the beginnings of a duel.

            In fact, and in person, Lewis was flattening his hands to his sides and shrinking away from Harry. His eyes were fastened with particular dread on Harry’s wand, and when Harry’s pocket twitched a bit as if he would pull it out, Lewis actually hid his eyes and turned, preparing to run away.

            Harry laughed, a sound rich in scorn that Draco hadn’t known he could make. “If you have nothing new to say—especially if you have nothing new to say that directly contradicts Yaxley’s and Malfoy’s testimony under Veritaserum—then it might be best if you leave.”

            Lewis retreated, giving Harry terrified looks over his shoulder all the while. Harry watched him carefully, in the way that Draco thought he might regard any threat, but without particular fear. When the other bloke was around the corner, he rolled his eyes, snorted, and turned to face Draco.

            “Forgive me for not checking right away,” he said softly, reaching out and laying his hand on Draco’s shoulder. “But it looked as if you weren’t hurt, so I didn’t want to show Lewis any sign that I thought he could injure you. Now. Did he hurt you?”

            Draco shook his head. His throat was still dry. His hand drifted out, as soft as thistledown and blown by as inevitable a wind, and settled against Harry’s temple.

            Harry’s eyes darted to the side, but he didn’t move immediately. He said, as if nothing had happened and Draco wasn’t touching him, “Good. I’m sorry about that,” he added, moving to the side so that Draco had no choice but to drop his arm. “Lewis has never forgiven the Wizengamot for exonerating you or your family; he thinks that all Death Eaters should have been put in Azkaban. And he’s never forgiven me for standing up for you. I ‘betrayed the right side of the war,’ to hear him talk.” Harry rolled his eyes. “Of course, if you listen to him at all, you wouldn’t know the war wasn’t still happening.”

            “I feel the same way about you,” Draco said.

            Harry blinked. “What? That the war is still happening?” He smiled suddenly, and Draco’s throat grew thick with something strangely like desperation. “Or that you’ve never forgiven me for standing up for you?”

            “Neither,” said Draco. “I wasn’t talking about Lewis. I was talking about the way you defended me.”

            “What about it?” Harry gave him a nonplussed look.

            That’s it. That’s what I want to make him see I feel. Draco leaned forwards insistently. “Did you think before you came to my rescue? Is there any force on earth that would have held you away if you wanted to do it?”

            “No,” Harry said, without hesitation.

            Draco nodded. He was smiling, and could only hope that he didn’t look an idiot. He reached out, again giving Harry plenty of time to see that his hand was coming, and stroked Harry’s cheek. Even the dry skin Draco felt here and there was only more kindling for his desire, more fodder for his fantasies.

            “That’s the way I think about protecting you and cherishing you,” Draco said. “The way that all Veela think about it, if they’re healthy.” He spoke those last words quickly, because a flicker in Harry’s eyes said he was about to mention Laurent. “Automatic. Instinctual. Something that you couldn’t not do without violating the deepest parts of your nature.”

            Harry closed his eyes and didn’t reply for some moments. Then he murmured, “I thought—I didn’t think about it that way. Maybe because Laurent acted as though he was conferring some great favor on me if he spoke nicely about me or argued on my behalf in front of someone else.” A shudder rippled through Harry’s body that seemed to bow his spine.

            If he hadn’t known how adamant Harry was on the subject, Draco would have asked again whether he couldn’t hurt Laurent. As it was, he had to clench his teeth and make sure the rage wouldn’t explode out of him in the form of claws or something else. “He was a bastard,” Draco finally said, when he could sound like a normal human being. “A Veela gives of himself because that’s what we do.”

            Harry was watching him when Draco looked up again—probably more closely than Draco thought he was, because he would be attuned to the minor signs of the body that Aurors received training to read. “You’re a Veela the way I’m an Auror,” Harry said, as if to test the concept.

            Draco gave him a quick smile. “Not exactly the same, of course. Mine’s in the blood, and yours in the training. But I think we meet in the soul.”

            Harry caught his breath, and he shook his head a little. Then he turned towards his office and said in a rush, “Do you mind if we eat in my office today? I need to think about this, and I wouldn’t be—at my best if we were out in public.”

            “I was sure we would eat here anyway,” Draco confessed as he followed Harry into the small room. Weasley wasn’t there, thank Merlin. Draco thought Harry had probably told his friends the truth about Draco and what he wanted by now, but Draco would still like to put off a tiresome confrontation as long as possible. “Since you need to make your own food.”

            Harry gave him a shining, enigmatic look, the origin of which Draco wasn’t sure about, and pulled out a box from beneath his desk that he quickly enlarged. “I had planned on a picnic,” he said. “But with my food, yes.” He opened the trunk and gave Draco a plate—pewter, to Draco’s surprise, not paper—and then added sandwiches and a cup that he filled with hot chocolate from a flask.

            Draco bit tentatively into the first sandwich, not knowing what to expect. His eyes rolled back in his head as he tasted the mingling of fresh lettuce and tomato, soft chicken, and some kind of sauce that he didn’t know.

            “You made this?” he demanded, when he had eaten half the sandwich and stopped long enough to realize that Harry was watching him in amusement. “I would have said that it was professional quality if I didn’t know better.”

            Harry flushed and ducked his head. “It’s just a sandwich,” he muttered. He had one of his own, Draco was glad to see. Even if he didn’t dare show it openly yet, he felt entitled to worry about whether Harry ate and slept enough and was otherwise in good physical health. “Not something complicated like I’m sure your house-elves make for you.”

            Draco pointed the crust at him. “There’s still an art to a good sandwich, and some people never master it.”

            Harry shrugged. “Well, I had more incentive than most, didn’t I?” And the flush faded, and he looked half-wary again, half-grim, as he began to eat, watching Draco all the while.

            Draco took a few bites before he tried to answer. “If someone had asked me what you would do if necessity obliged you to,” he finally said, “I would never have thought that you would make something this good. I’d have thought you’d content yourself with a few thrown-together pieces of stale bread and old cheese.”

            Harry blinked at him.

            “You’re better than I thought you’d be,” Draco whispered. “Not better in the sense of healed, but skilled and proud and confident.”

            Harry turned his head slowly to the side, as if looking at Draco from a new angle would offer him the solution to the mystery. “But I’ve always tried to be that,” he said. “It’s not something that changed with—Laurent.”

            Draco smiled, and wished he dared to reach out and stroke his fingers over Harry’s wrist. He could feel the soft skin there in imagination, the dazzled flutter of the blood, and so the imagination would have to do for now. He was proud of Harry for speaking Laurent’s name, instead of avoiding it with that mixture of dread and awe that sounded too much like reverence. “Then say that I’m seeing it for the first time,” he said. “I was hardly the best audience in school.”

            Harry gave him a wry glance. “If you could go back in time and tell your younger self that you’d be here someday, eating lunch with me in a friendly fashion, he’d be horrified.” He bit into the sandwich. Draco held his breath until he caught a flicker of enjoyment across Harry’s face. He wouldn’t have wanted to miss it.

            “I don’t think so,” Draco murmured, when he had time to think about Harry’s statement. “I always wanted you, in the same way that you always wanted to be skilled.”

            “As a friend,” Harry said. His color dimmed, the smile fading from his lips. “It’s different now.”

            “Not that different,” Draco said. He would fight as hard as he could to keep Harry from dwelling on doubt and fear, or regretting his decision to let Draco eat lunch with him. “It was a clutching desire then, an insistence that I had to keep you with me or you would vanish, and it’s much the same thing now.”

            Harry chuckled. His eyes brightened and he asked around a mouthful of sandwich, “Is it all right if we discuss this? I don’t want to distress you if reliving those memories is painful to you.”

            “Not nearly so painful as when I thought I would never have you,” Draco said.

            He saw the tension that Harry tried to hide, the way his shoulders and head bowed as if before a mighty wind, but he revived so quickly Draco wasn’t sure he could guess what had caused it. At least, Harry’s voice was utterly casual when he asked, “Tell me what it was that you used to want from me.”

            Draco obliged and went ahead, but he was on the alert now. He would watch. It appeared there were traps strewn everywhere for Harry in conversation, and while Draco didn’t think he could possibly guard all his words well enough to avoid ever hurting Harry, he could learn the most common ones.

            And he could help Harry heal the wounds that caused those traps to spring.

*



            Have you.

            Laurent had said the same thing when he was raping Harry. He had said the same thing with love and longing when he was standing with Harry in front of the mirror, naked, showing him the way that his wings could drape Harry’s body from neck to ankle and enclose him. He had run his hands up and down Harry’s chest, scratching lightly and not so lightly at his muscles, and murmured about how no one else would ever have Harry, and that was sweet to him, so sweet.

            In a way, Harry’s whole life since Laurent had gone to Azkaban had been a rebuke to him for that remark, and in other ways it hadn’t. Laurent was right that no one had slept in Harry’s bed since he was sentenced.

            I am going to change that, Harry thought, holding so fiercely to the idea that he was somewhat surprised to look down and not find bruises on his hands. If not with Draco, then he can help me get ready for someone else, the person who will share my life. I will not be ruled by what Laurent thought was best.

            And I’m not going to be ruled by my fear of some words that Draco couldn’t know would remind me of Laurent when he spoke them.

            It took long moments, but Harry managed to surface from the memories that had threatened to drown him when he heard Draco speak, and keep those memories to images instead of an intense second reliving. He began to listen to Draco instead, who had been talking while Harry struggled.

            “…started in first year, but it went on from there. I wanted your attention. And sometimes, I have to admit, I wanted your bloody fame and the power that so many people were willing to bestow on you and not on me.” Draco pouted and took a bite of his sandwich. Harry struggled not to laugh at the innocence of the pout, which he wouldn’t have believed on a much younger man’s face, never mind Draco’s. “For a long time, I was sure, and my father was sure, that that was all it was. That I wanted to be the Boy-Who-Lived.”

            “It wasn’t all as good as it looked,” Harry muttered, his hand going up to rub the scar through his fringe.

            “I know that, now.” Draco’s voice rang like a piece of iron dropped on stone, and he leaned forwards. “But we’re talking about things that we never noticed until later. Can you blame me for not knowing that at the time?”

            Harry looked up, surprised at how stung Draco sounded. Draco’s eyes held a real spark of agitation.

            Laurent’s eyes had never looked like that. He had always been proud, serene, collected. Even when Harry had defeated him, arrested him, and taken him into the Wizengamot, he had never looked more than puzzled, as if it was going to take his mind long months to catch up with what had happened to his body.

            Harry relaxed. Draco was human as well as Veela, and the expression he wore now had helped Harry to remember that. “Sorry,” he said. “Of course it was hard for you to know, when almost no one realized what was happening to me behind closed doors.”

            Draco cocked his head, opened his mouth as if he was going to ask what had changed Harry’s mind, and then turned his words into a continuing story instead. “But sometime around my fifth year, maybe when I saw you fighting so hard against Umbridge and her takeover of the school, my feelings changed. I stopped wanting all your fame and power. I wanted people to pay attention to me, sure, but I also wanted you, there with me.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps I hoped that the shine you carried with you would rub off on me.”

            Harry laid his sandwich on the plate and leaned forwards. “I can understand why you would feel that way,” he said. “But you don’t still, do you?”

            Draco swallowed his last bite and leaned forwards in turn. His left shoulder had risen as though he wanted to extend a wing that wasn’t growing there at the moment and touch Harry. Harry breathed through his nostrils to avoid getting sick. “No,” Draco said softly. “I am very much in possession of my faculties, and I want you because I want you.”

            Harry nodded. Draco’s expression was full of yearning that Harry still found it hard to face, but he trusted him enough to accept this.

            And enough to know what he needed in turn, and to be happy to give it, because it meant that he could help to take care of Draco.

            “I envied you at least once,” Harry said. “I saw how much your mother and father loved you at the Battle of Hogwarts. I overheard your father asking about you, and your mother lied to Voldemort about me being dead, because I’d told her that you were still alive.”

            Draco froze, except for a few slow flickers of his eyelashes. Then he said, “You really envied me?”

            “Yes,” Harry said. “I wanted a family. You had one, and—I know it was hard for me to see this before, but I saw it then—they really loved you.” He braced himself, counted three under his breath as he often did before doing something dangerous, and then reached out.

            Draco sat absolutely still as Harry touched his cheek, then his chin and jawline and throat, getting to know the shape of them. Harry would have liked to touch Draco’s lips, but his eyes literally wouldn’t look at them, and he didn’t think that was a good sign.

            Instead, he drew a circle on Draco’s left cheek, let his fingers trail up to cross the bridge of his nose, grew acquainted with the way his right cheek swelled, and then counted his pulse through his fingertips.

            Draco stared at him with sheer hunger. Harry therefore looked only at the lower part of his face, and not his eyes.

            “Is this all right?” he asked, surprised to find that his voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper. “I mean, it won’t make things worse for you that I’m touching you like this?”

            “Oh, Merlin, no,” Draco said, and his fervent tone made Harry smile.

            The end of his tolerance came suddenly. His hand had left Draco’s face before he realized it, flinching away as if from a fire, and he had to turn his back to forget the sight of pale skin and pale hair and pale eyes.

            White. It had been so white.

            Harry gagged, but locked his throat and kept himself from vomiting. He conjured a glass and filled it with clear water from the Aguamenti charm, then gulped it several times. After that, he felt better, and nodded to Draco without turning around. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

            “I understand,” Draco said, and his voice was resigned and calm if not cheerful. “Let’s finish lunch, and then I’ll leave you alone for a while so you can get caught up on your work.”

            Harry knew exactly why Draco was leaving him alone. It was not something Laurent would have done.

            He turned around and smiled before he could think better of it, and saw Draco soak up the smile like a man in a desert would drink the rain.

*

            paigeey07: Thanks!

            Sarah: Thanks for reviewing.

            SP777: Very carefully is how Draco will work around it.

            Harry can remember how he treated Draco before he knew, yes, but that doesn’t lessen his physical and emotional reactions now.

            Lady_of_Clunn: That might be one way in which Harry doesn’t give himself enough credit. He thinks he’s weak because he can’t do everything that he imagines he should do, instead of thinking about how he managed to stay friends with Draco.

            Brandy Lacey: Thank you!

            mrequecky: Thank you for reviewing.

            HeartStar: I love this story, and plan to work on it all the way to the end.

            polka dot: Yes, you are! ;)

            luvlustblood: Yes, I don’t think this can go quickly without making less of Harry’s predicament than should be made. And there will be at least a few meltdowns along the way.

            Sneakyfox: That he did is one of the things which makes Harry more comfortable saying he’s serious about this. Otherwise, he might have suspected Draco only wanted the quick shag and would back away when it wasn’t forthcoming.
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