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Nature of the Beast	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 48977 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Five—Walls and Windows
            “Do you like it?”
            Draco caught his breath after he spoke the words, and promptly cursed himself. How was he ever going to get anywhere with his mate if he reacted like a nervous schoolgirl?
            But only he could know the sharp thrill that went through him as Potter stopped in the middle of the bedroom, spread his arms, and looked around as though he wanted to estimate the distance between his fingers and the walls. At least Draco took confidence from that. If it were a proper bond already, settled the way it should be, then Potter would be tuned to his emotions. As it was, Draco was spared humiliation.
            “It’ll do, thanks,” said Potter absently, and plunked his trunk down to the side of the bed. “You don’t mind if I use the cupboard space?” He moved his head towards the doors visible on the far side of the bed, eyes returning to Draco with what looked like equal absence of mind.
            “But do you like it?” Draco knew he probably should have stayed where he was and let Potter sort himself out, but he couldn’t help it. He came towards him, fingers floating to a halt just shy of Potter’s shoulders. “The colors, the layout, the way the bed’s arranged? All you have to say is a single word, and it can be changed to suit you. Whatever you’d like.”
            Potter gave him a glance that Draco couldn’t read, and then looked around again. Draco tried to see the rooms through a stranger’s eyes. The walls were a cool mixture of green and blue and white, one color sometimes predominating over the others in a corner or near a window, but quickly vanishing into the soft blending again. The bed was curved, the top extending away like Draco’s wings, the better to give more space for extra pillows and an attached writing desk. The rugs that scattered the stone floor were the same colors as the walls, and small representations of the solar system covered the ceiling in subdued, glittering gold and silver lights.
            “Well, yeah,” said Potter. “I said, it’ll do.”
            Draco flinched. Potter sighed and bent down to dig in the trunk. “Is this your room? Did I insult you by not liking it? But I do.”
            Draco shook his head, without words. No, he didn’t think Potter was insulting him, or even his family, or his family’s taste. It was more—
            It was more that the room was just a room to him, and he didn’t care. Not about the magnificent view out over a lake—false, enchanted, of course, but since when would even a Gryffindor care about that?—or the size of the bed or the conveniences that would appear if he summoned them. It was just a place to live, and that was that.
            Draco touched a wing to Potter’s shoulder. Potter looked up. “Yeah?”
            He was distant, from his eyes. Probably already in that bloody meeting, Draco thought, and for the first time in his life, he was jealous of a Muggleborn.
            “You can come up here to be alone whenever you like,” he said. It was probably useless to make Potter care about the room more than he already did, but he had to try. The Veela in him wanted its mate safe in the rooms where he should spend so much time. “You can call a house-elf if there’s anything that’s missing. The table attached to the bed will let you write on it, look.” He leaned over and pulled it out.
            “It is nice,” said Potter. And he looked at it, but Draco knew he missed everything important, from the softly glowing brown of the mahogany wood it was made of to the gold-handled drawers underneath it. “Now, do you want to come to the meeting with me?”
            Draco shut his eyes. It was still the same day that he had intended to claim Potter, he reminded himself. Remember that. He couldn’t expect all their compromises to happen at once.
            But knowing that if he had had a normal mate, he would have installed them already in his own rooms, and flown them around the Manor on a tender, triumphant parade of possession, and introduced them to the house-elves, and brought their first meal to share, it was hard to open his eyes again to this poorer world.
            “Yes,” he said. “I don’t think we should be separated for today.”
            He expected Potter to ask why. Potter only nodded and waved his wand in a swift flick that sent some of his clothes flying into the cupboards and spread others out on the bed.
            “Good, then come on,” said Potter, and moved towards the door, at a pace that would let Draco keep his wing on his shoulder. “We should just make it if we hurry.”
            His stomach as cold as an underground pool, Draco moved with him.
*
            “Thank you for coming, Mr. Potter.”
            Harry smiled without difficulty. While Charis Green, the Muggleborn witch standing at the head of the table, was a little prickly, all her objections were reasonable ones. And at least she had come, and brought the others with her.
            “Thank you,” he said, and shook her hand. He raised an eyebrow for a second when she stood there as if Stunned, and then realized that she was looking at Malfoy. “Oh. Yes. This is Draco Malfoy, my Veela mate.”
            The words made Malfoy press close to him from behind, taking a deep breath. Harry stood still and bore it. He couldn’t imagine a world where his neck smelled that fascinating, but obviously Malfoy lived in such a world. Harry didn’t want to hurt him. He would put up with it, and even with the wrinkles of suspicion that he could see bending Charis’s eyes.
            Before she could object, though, another member of the small delegation spoke up. “You would invite a pure-blood to speak to us?”
            Harry turned to the person who was prickly enough that he hated when he showed up at meetings, Patrick Osborne. “Yes. Sorry. It’s a matter of Veela life and death that he be with me, at least for today.”
            Osborne frowned and took his chair. He was a stocky man with a nose that Harry had never seen not wrinkled, and now he wrinkled it at Malfoy.
            “I suppose if it’s a matter of life and death,” he said.
            Harry nodded. It was best not to get angry at Osborne, who would only take whatever someone had said and craft it into a more devastating insult. And this wasn’t insulting, as far as conversations with him went. “Tell me what you were talking about last time,” he said, taking his chair at the head of the table. Malfoy stood behind him, which Harry thought was weird. This was a large room in the Ministry, not exactly airy but with enchanted windows that made it seem that way, and there were plenty of chairs around the table thanks to the disgust of some Muggleborns who had decided not to show up after the last meeting.
            But maybe ignoring Malfoy’s weird behavior was as wise as ignoring Osborne’s insults. Harry didn’t intend to spend a lot of time being worried about it, in any case. He laid his hands on the table in front of him and leaned forwards. “Well? Do you want to start?” He turned to Charis, a little surprised that Osborne or one of the others hadn’t already grabbed the opportunity.
            Charis sighed and stretched out her arm. “I left after the first war,” she said. “Except for short journeys back to Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade when I needed some Potions ingredients, I hadn’t been in the wizarding world since. Until I got contacted for these meetings.”
            Harry nodded encouragingly. Charis looked around at the others—seven in all—as though recovering strength from them, and then went on.
            “I only heard about this, you understand. I didn’t experience it.” She toyed with the edge of her sleeve. “But they said that people were accusing Muggleborns during the war of stealing wands from pure-bloods.”
            “That did happen,” said Harry, the image of that room where Umbridge had sat smugly sheltered behind her cat Patronus from Dementors blazing in his mind. He felt Malfoy shift his weight behind him, but mercifully, he said nothing.
            “How do we know it’s not going to happen again?” Osborne had found his tongue. “How do we know another war’s not going to start and they’re not going to say that we can’t have wands again? Or how do we know that we’re not going to come back and someone will think we’re criminals because we’ve been gone from the wizarding world for so long? I don’t want to be thrown into Azkaban because someone doesn’t recognize my wand or my last name.”
            As prickly as Osborne was, he made good points. Harry nodded. “For the war, that’s one reason that I’m trying as hard as I can to keep peace between the Muggleborns and the pure-bloods,” he said.
            “We can hardly help it if they break the peace and attack first.” Osborne folded his arms.
            “I know,” said Harry. “That’s one reason to work on it, though.”
            “That doesn’t alleviate the more practical, day-to-day concerns,” interrupted Annie Wellwent, a woman with a nasal voice and turned-up nose who always reminded Harry of his Aunt Petunia. He struggled against his instinctive revulsion when it came to her, though, because she did sometimes make good points. “Like being attacked for our wands, or sneered at and spat upon.”
            “That will need a longer-term strategy,” said Harry. For a moment, the words consumed him with weariness. How many times had he said this since the war, to different groups of people who wanted quicker solutions?
            He shook the feeling away. Even though he had said it to those other groups, he hadn’t said it to this one.
            “I don’t know what your long-term strategy consists of, though,” said Charis, and did some more frowning in his direction. “It involves patting of the air and platitudes when you talk to us, but none of those is concrete action.”
            Harry paused, and swallowed. He had one of those ideas that had burst in his head in a way that seemed like a blinding flash of insight, even though he suspected he’d been thinking about them subconsciously for a while. But this one really couldn’t have had long to brew, given the events of the morning.
            “One good-will gesture that might help is for my Veela mate, Draco Malfoy, to ask some of the pure-bloods to consider treating Muggleborns better,” said Harry. “After all, his life and mine are tied now, and we need to show that the same thing is true of pure-bloods and Muggleborns. There are so few wizards left, and even some have died since the war, of wounds they got in it or old age. We need to send a message of strength.” He turned and looked up at Malfoy. “What do you think? Can we appear together in public and send that message?”
*
            Draco stared at Potter, shaken by a complicated rage.
            No submissive mate used the Veela bond for political gain like that. No one who was truly the heart of the house, and understood the division between public and private, would ask. They would know the bond as a separate and sacred thing, and while they would go along with it if their dominant mate wanted to display for others, they would retire back into the house the second that it was done.
            “I don’t think that I want our bond to be used like that,” he said, the first thing that came to mind. Maybe he could have softened it a little for Potter’s Muggleborn allies, but he saw no reason to. They weren’t his allies.
            Potter’s eyes went blank for a moment, as if he was considering alternatives. But instead of trying to persuade Draco, the way Draco had thought he would, he said, “All right,” and turned back to the table of Muggleborns.
            The rage grew more complicated. Draco reached out and put a hand on Potter’s shoulder, beside the wing.
            “Yes?” Potter tilted his head back to look at Draco, without a trace of the trembling gratitude that should accompany every movement from a submissive.
            Draco struck as hard as he could, because things were wrong but he didn’t know why, and maybe striking would help massage them back into shape. “How can you ask me for something, and then yield like that?” he asked. “If it’s important to you, you should fight for it.” He squeezed down, hard enough that he thought he might have dented Potter’s shoulder blade.
            There was no pain in Potter’s face, though, and Draco wondered about that. Maybe he was just so used to being beaten up while he was fighting the Dark Lord that he didn’t acknowledge his own pain the way he should.
            He doesn’t do anything the way he should, Draco snarled to himself in silent frustration.
            “I asked you for something I thought made sense,” said Potter, his voice soft and precise. He seemed to have forgotten about the audience on the other side of the table. Draco hadn’t, but when his eyes darted to them, against his will, he saw them sitting frozen, as if this was outside their experience and they didn’t know what they should do. “You don’t want our bond to be used like that. I don’t know what else there is to discuss.”
            Draco bent down towards Potter and lowered his voice. At least some of the tales about dominant Veela and their submissive mates said that dominants could speak in a special tone that no one but the submissive could hear, and Draco was desperate enough to try that now, even though he didn’t think it would work. “You argue with me. You used to do that all the time! What happened?”
            “You made it clear that arguing with you wouldn’t do any good,” said Potter. “The way that arguing about living with you and being your mate wouldn’t. There are things that can do some good, like arguing with you about living outside the house, so I did that. But I thought this would be one of the things we could compromise on.” He sounded genuinely confused, as if he thought that he was doing his best to be a compliant little Veela mate and didn’t understand what Draco’s problem with it was.
            Draco massaged with his hand instead of squeezed. Maybe kindness instead of frustration would prove his point. “But you just gave up. That isn’t compromising.”
            Potter abruptly looked around, said, “Excuse me while we take this outside,” and stood up, seizing Draco’s wing. Draco felt himself arching his neck, his mouth dropping open. He hadn’t expected the first real touch to his wing from his submissive to come like this, but it paralyzed him with pleasure. It made him feel like he was floating in the middle of thick, sticky water and being supported by warm arms, all at once.
            By the time Potter let his wing go, they were out in the corridor, and Potter spun on him.
            “You don’t understand a single thing I’m trying to do,” Potter hissed, hand thrown up and coming dangerously near to hitting Draco in the face. Draco flinched back, irritated despite himself when Potter didn’t flinch back in turn, but maintained his gaze. “I wanted to live my life. You said no. I tried to compromise. You didn’t like some of the compromises. And now I’m going along with what you want, and not pressing you when you say that you don’t want to use this bond as a political tool, and you’re upset? I thought that yielding to you like a good little submissive was the right thing. What do you want?”
            This.
            Draco hadn’t really known. He would have said he wanted the usual submissive behavior, even after it was obvious that Potter wouldn’t give him that. But it was all he knew about, and all he knew to ask for.
            Now, he had a different idea. What he wanted was this Potter breathing fire and entirely focused on him, not thinking about the million other political compromises he had to make and if Draco would fit into the neat schedule of his life. Now Potter was in motion. Draco didn’t want dead eyes and polite voices any more than he wanted Potter to point his wand at and threaten him. He just wanted—
            Arguments. That’s weird to want arguments when he’s the submissive.
            But it was the same depth Draco had glimpsed in Potter a few hours earlier, and almost forgotten about since because Potter had done so many other weird things. If he could do something like this, though, and show he considered Draco worth fighting with, maybe he would eventually think Draco worth fighting for.
            “I changed my mind,” he said, as much to see Potter start and check and look at him with wary eyes as anything else. “I’ll appear in public and send that message of unity and let other people see and talk about our bond.” At least that way, everyone will know about my claim.
            Potter was still, cautious. Then he said, “What prompted you to change your mind?”
            “The way you looked when I refused,” said Draco.
            It was honest, but Potter didn’t understand, he could see that much, and Draco didn’t think he had the words to explain it right now. Perhaps in a while. Potter took a step back, then nodded, and said, “Then we’ll go back in there and explain it to them. And hope it’s a good explanation, one they accept.”
            Draco followed him. He didn’t care about the Muggleborns except insofar as they mattered to Potter’s happiness and maybe the time he spent with them that might cut into the time he spent with Draco. He had got a glimpse of something more precious, something he was going to hang onto.
            Who would want a mere pond, when they could have the ocean?
*
mamid3: Sorry! I hope this was fast enough.
delia cerrano: Harry does see that, but his life is hard enough already that this is just one more burden to bear.
Kain: Hey, thanks for those!
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Nature of the Beast