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A Potion Named Desire	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10877 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Six—A Work of Three

            Harry woke slowly. It was one of those mornings when he managed to drift up from his dreams without breaking the stillness that held him, so he lay deliciously relaxed, as if his limbs were lapped in warm water.

            He could hear Hermione’s soft, snuffling breaths from his bedroom, if he listened. He left her the bed most often and took the couch in the drawing room, though when she felt better she insisted they switch off. And there had been more days lately when she felt better, at least enough to dig into books that Harry fetched from her former home and sit up reading late into the night about ethics and potions and the consequences of past magical discoveries.

            Harry felt a smile widen over his face, so gently it didn’t disturb the peaceful contours of his muscles. Malfoy was helping her just by being here, even though he hadn’t finished the potion; Hermione dug deep into herself and found a core of strength that she unearthed in her passionate belief they shouldn’t create a general version of the potion to release to the public.

            Malfoy never seemed to mind. He would answer Hermione’s arguments with logic of his own, and Slytherin “ethics,” and amazement that anyone would even worry about some of the concerns she had brought up. And though the potion variants they tried, even now, a month after they had begun their efforts to modify Harry’s potion, went inert or exploded or turned into deadly poisons, Malfoy showed no sign of discouragement or slowing down.

            The other day, they had managed one that seemed likely to work until the final step, the adding of the glass stirring rod. Then the potion had given a forlorn gloop and subsided into silence. Harry grimaced and swore under his breath. Malfoy only laughed and muttered something about duckweed interacting with the carrots he had introduced, and how he should have anticipated that. After a charm that dried the liquid in the potion to eliminate the last chances of a volatile reaction, Malfoy had peered closely into the cauldron, then picked it up and taken it with him, remarking that he wanted to study this.

            Their working relationship consisted of sharp exclamations and Malfoy’s attempts to explain Potions theory. Harry understood more than he had a month ago, but only basic facts. What he still lacked was the ability to think ahead and reason it out, as Malfoy could, so he could anticipate what ingredients they should try and which wouldn’t mix well at all.



            But still, Harry thought, drifting and floating between thoughts like a bather between Greek islands, their relationship reminded him of the peace that gripped him now. It could break easily, but so long as both of them attended to keeping it whole, it wouldn’t.

            He had learned that knowledge too late to benefit some of the bonds he had with other people. But he could cling to it now and wield it when it seemed that his ties to the Weasleys or Hermione were in danger of breaking down.

            Malfoy’s helped me, too. I’ll be sorry when he’s developed the potion and this is over. Though Malfoy had sometimes made little gestures towards the possibility of Harry helping him in the future, Harry doubted it would occur. They lessened the amount of magic in the potion every session. Soon, Malfoy would be able to simply brew, and then he would have the future control of the market Harry had promised him.

            Don’t try to make things linger past their natural stopping point, Harry advised himself. Enjoy them whilst they last.

            Hermione moaned in her sleep, and Harry stirred, disturbing the restful lassitude that had gripped him. It was about time for it to end anyway, though, so Harry refused to regret as he went into the bedroom.

*

            Draco had discovered most of what he knew about brewing by devouring books of theory, studying as many personal notes of other potions-makers as he could get his hands on, and experimentation. Most of the time, it was a good enough combination to get him the results he wanted.

            But there was something else, too, rarer than the passion he carried to his most interesting concoctions, rarer even than the times he felt totally in control and totally free, as Potter seemed to be when on the edge of explosion in his original recipe. And that was the moment when insight blazed in his head like a vision, and he saw ahead to the end of a long, troublesome process.

            He could not command those insights. He supposed they were what inspirations were to artists. They came and flickered and went out, and sometimes they vanished before he could grasp them.

            This one came as he half-drowsed, half-pored over Severus’s old Potions book, examining again, idly, the improvements on the making of the Draught of Peace.

            Of course he would recommend using crushed peridot to balance the hellebore. It symbolizes peace, which is wanted here, and why should anyone believe that extra flakes of peridot are harmful when they’re about to put hellebore in their bodies? That’s the kind of thing I really should have thought of myself, if—

            And then the book dropped from his hands, and Draco stared across the room, feeling his thoughts unwinding into a spiral, which quickly braided itself back together, tying his new notions about the Draught of Peace together with the latest improvements he and Potter had been trying to make on the Desire potion.

            A moment later, he had seized the quill and piece of parchment that always sat near him on the table and started scribbling madly.



            Yes. Yes. One opposite of loathing is peace. We’ve been concentrating too much on the negative consequence, the simple removal of whatever is plaguing the drinker. But there’s another way to think of it: the soothing into somnolence of the evil personality trait or memory or nightmare. If we can combine the Draught of Peace, or the relevant parts of it, into the Desire potion…

            Draco sketched diagrams, created an elementary map of the way the brewing table would need to look for the most convenient access to the ingredients, and murmured to himself as he created a new half-list of ingredients, which would not need to substitute for the ingredients in the Desire potion but be mixed into and integrated with them. It would be tricky, of course, ensuring that the peridot flakes didn’t react with the dragon scale in any substantial way. He would need more magic from Potter after all; he knew the spell, but once again it was unlikely that he would have the time or strength to cast it in the middle of the brewing.

            He ought to favor this solution, though. It makes the Desire potion more unlike the parent potion, so when this causes speculation among brewers—as it will—it’ll be harder for them to trace back and reckon his original recipe.

            Draco laughed under his breath as he scribbled. He felt the passion washing through him now, slave to the complicated instructions unfolding, so beautifully and so clearly, in his mind.

            Potter will be so surprised. Perhaps he’ll even tell me what his potion does, as a reward.

*

            Harry had been sure that he’d seen the limits of Malfoy’s expressions. He could look contemptuous, pitying—when talking to Hermione—and engrossed when they faced the brewing. He had never known that Malfoy could look purely joyful, as if the morning had restored everything taken from him since the war.

            But that was the way he looked when he stepped through the door of the flat and nodded at Harry. “Potter. A very good afternoon to you. I hope you’re ready for an addition that should eliminate some of the problems we’re having and move us closer to a solution.”

            “Always ready for that,” said Harry, and gave a half-smile to prevent himself from replying in stronger terms. Really, Malfoy didn’t need any more encouragement; the way he looked, he would be dragging Harry behind him. He had some news to impart that might dampen the excitement, though. “Hermione feels well enough today to work with us, and she has some thoughts on why the potion went inert when we added the glass stirring rod.”

            Hermione gave a firm nod from the couch, where she sat with her arms wrapped around her stomach. It was her most frequent posture, Harry thought sadly, as if she were trying frantically to hold in a bleeding gut wound. But her face was less pale than it had been for weeks, and she met Malfoy’s challenging gaze with a direct one.

            Malfoy crossed the room in order to take up her hand and kiss the back of it. “Wonderful,” he said. “We are now a trio of Skill, Intelligence, and Magic.”

            Harry was sure he was staring. He had never thought Malfoy would willingly touch Hermione, let alone act charming. Hermione blinked, caught off-guard, and Harry could almost see her prepared words dissolving into mist.

            That was why he did it, Harry realized suddenly, and struggled to keep from shaking his head and giving away the game to Hermione. She frowned at him now, the corners of her eyes pinched, but not with pain.

            “I may be able to create a potion attuned to me, so that you don’t have to loose your extremely dangerous general variant on the rest of the populace,” she said to Malfoy.

            “The more the merrier,” Malfoy replied, “both in numbers of brewers and in the multiplication of potions.”

            And he swept back across the room to collect the parchments he’d brought, which Harry assumed contained his vaunted solution to the problem. The grace of the movements made Harry’s breath catch in his throat. He thought Malfoy looked best like this, not when he was arranging himself so as to attract the attention and approval of an audience.

            Malfoy glanced up and caught him staring. Harry stared back frankly, too mature now, he hoped, to stammer and blush like a schoolboy.

            He received, in return, one of those cool, appraising stares that told him Malfoy was back on his guard. Harry gave a shrug that was purely inwards and philosophical. He was sorry to see that unstudied artistry gone, but he knew that Malfoy wouldn’t let it interfere with his brewing. He never had, the other times Harry acted uncouth.

*

            A sharp awareness had been added to the emotions threading through Draco as he led Potter and Granger into Potter’s bedroom, the usual site of their brewing. He had someone new to impress, and he had impressed his older compatriot by doing nothing at all. Two of the purest pleasures of Hogwarts, competing with Granger and winning Potter’s attention, had returned to him unexpectedly.

            There would almost certainly be no permanent fruit of either interaction. Granger would not let herself be impressed for long—one reason she returned constantly, and fruitlessly, to the attack on Draco’s morals. And if Potter was not unaware of what his interest indicated, he was certainly too much of a Gryffindor to do anything about it.

            All the same, Draco was as far from displeased as it was possible to be. He set his new ingredients and the parchment list of them down on the table with a flourish. Potter, as usual, already had a cauldron hanging over a fire and awaiting him.

            “Now,” Draco said, “first, I’ve adapted some ingredients from the Draught of Peace. My thought was that we shouldn’t be trying just to subtract something from the people we give the potion to. We should be trying to replace what they most loathe with a better substitute. And the best thing to replace it with would be a sense of peace, a calm approach to the situation.”

            Granger narrowed her eyes, even as her face took on a hopeful expression. It was an odd combination to look at. “But wouldn’t that mean you wouldn’t really be changing the people who drank the potion?” she asked. “Just giving them the strength to deal with whatever bothered them?”

            “Not at all,” Draco said. “In the end, the Desire potion won’t be the Draught of Peace, and it won’t be what Potter brews, either. It has to be capable of reacting to the emotions of the drinkers, and it has to be capable of neutralizing anything it encounters—within reason. It can’t make someone immortal, for example.”

            He spoke with his gaze apparently fastened completely on Granger’s face, but in fact he was looking sideways from the corner of one eye at Potter. Potter’s face had gone pale, and he had stepped heavily away from the table. It took only a moment for him to shake his head and stride back, of course, and Draco suspected he had already swallowed whatever had disturbed his calm in the first place. Say what you liked about Potter; in the last seven years he had become much better at keeping his temper, even in the face of all the needling little provocations that Draco couldn’t help but give.

            Interesting. Draco licked his lips, and tamped down the temptation to go after the unusual reaction right then and there. Very interesting. But I’ll make him trust me more, and perhaps relax his guard, if I lure him in.

            Granger had picked up the ingredients list and was reading it in the meantime. “Peridot?” she said disapprovingly. “Malfoy, you know as well as I do that extra flakes of peridot should never be added to any potion—“

            Draco rolled his eyes and turned back to her. “And do you know why, Granger?”

            “They’re dangerous for human health—“

            “More dangerous than hellebore?”

            Granger lifted her chin, the very picture of Mudblood stubbornness. That was all right. This just gave Draco another chance to show her the superiority of pure-blood culture and all the ways that pure-blood wizards had of thinking and doing and acting. “The Draught of Peace neutralizes the hellebore. I must admit, I have no idea how peridot flakes will neutralize the hellebore in this solution, or how you plan to keep them from reacting with the Antipodean Opaleye scale.”

            Draco gazed at her, and tried not to give, too much, the impression of a cat crouched in front of a mousehole with its tail twitching. “Oh,” he said. “Quite simply, Granger, Potter is going to cast a spell that Transfigures the crystalline structure of the peridot when the dragon scale is added.”

            “Harry—“ Granger shook her head, looking lost. “Harry isn’t confident enough as a brewer to do that.”

            Ah. Things are as I suspected, then. Granger only sees the lack of control Potter has over his magic when he’s brewing, and the way he doesn’t follow the usual procedures perfectly, and that leads her to imagine that he can’t do it correctly. “You’re wrong,” Draco said, and extended his hand. Potter stared at him, blinking like a Muggle toddler seeing a wand for the first time. “Come here, Potter,” Draco snapped, irritated that the way he wanted to present Potter in front of Granger had been ruined by the former’s cluelessness. “Time to show her that you do indeed know what you’re doing, and give up this charade of your incompetence.”

            “You know how often Snape said that I wouldn’t amount to anything in brewing potions,” Potter said, reluctantly stepping up beside Draco. Draco grabbed his hand. “The only reason I succeeded at all during sixth year was because I had his book.”

            Draco grabbed Potter around the waist and hauled him back against Draco. Potter’s gasp of surprise was muffled; he seemed to be more interested in finding a way out of Draco’s hold than letting his jaw hang open. Good. Draco bowed his head and whispered, “Severus, much as I admired his skill, could be blind when it came to recognizing talent different from his. I would have impressed him. You wouldn’t have. But you can do it, and you know it. Now.” He nodded to the cauldron and the table and the ingredients, familiar and abnormal, arranged in front of Potter. “Cast.”

*

            Harry shivered, partially from the warmth around his waist. In the eleven months since he’d broken up with Susan, no one had held him like this.

            But, feeling strangely disconnected from his own body and his own fears, he raised his wand and cast, crushing the lavender petals and using the Diamond-Cutting Hex to slice the ingredients on the table.

            Halfway through the sending of the magic out of himself to power the spell, he realized that Malfoy’s new ingredients list called for the hellebore to be shredded, not sliced, and that the flakes of peridot were as cut as they needed to be. But Harry had cast the spell intending to sever everything except the things he was used to leaving out.

            Finite Incantatem flew through his mind, as smooth and powerful as if he’d spoken it aloud, and then Harry flipped his wand over in his hand and cast the spell upside-down. That was a good technique he’d found for dividing his magic in half—or, at least, it worked for him. Half the power went into the Diamond-Cutting Hex as usual; the other half concentrated simply on modifying the spell to shred the hellebore and the waxy, sticky lump of dark stuff Draco had brought along, which must be honeyed dragon dung.

            Draco’s arm tightened around his waist, hand splaying across his stomach. Harry didn’t allow himself to think about that as he began to incant, and the lavender petals separated, sifting down into the cauldron and blending with the copper. This time, though, he lifted the piece he’d cut from the honeyed fewmet and sent it into the cauldron right beside the copper. Then came the Demiguise hairs, and then came…

            Harry lost himself in the rush of magic, in the slight flick of his wand and the throbbing in his veins that always resulted when he was brewing like this. He kept part of his mind alert for the changes in the necessary spells, though, and when the moment that he had to change the crystalline structure of the peridot arrived, he was ready. He let himself fall into the trance that was waiting for him, that always waited for him the first time he performed a particularly complex and difficult piece of magic.

            “Commuto compositio lapidis,” he sang, uncaring that his voice probably sounded like a croon on the words, and that Draco and Hermione would both think he was strange. Was it any stranger than the impulse to call Malfoy by his first name, the closeness that had joined him along with the rush of warmth?

            The power lunged out through him—

            And met resistance.

            Harry closed his eyes fully this time, so as to shut out any distractions, and forced himself deep into the crystalline structure that sprawled in front of him. Because, yes, it was there in front of him, though before he hadn’t had any idea what peridot looked like, and he doubted he could describe it in words now. He only knew that there were two structures stretched before his eyes, one of them the arrangement the stone flakes currently sustained, one of them the arrangement he wanted to change it into. And it was so simple, wasn’t it? Just the matter of altering a few segments, turning this into this, and bending and smoothing certain corners.

            Harry smashed headlong against the resistance, bearing it down with main strength, willing it to yield to him as all things did when he was in the middle of a potion. He was afire with confidence, forgetful of his fear that he couldn’t do this right, or of the fact that Draco had intervened in their other solutions before this point. He called up more strength, and more, and hurled it in.

            The structure changed.

            But there was a terrifying moment when it wobbled, and Harry was certain it was about to change back and waste all his work. He held up a commanding hand, forbidding it to do so; it didn’t appear inclined to listen. But he felt a slice of magic come in just behind him, adding force to his demand, and he heard another voice chanting the spell he had initially used to Transfigure the peridot, over and over.

            He leaned on that voice, and on the flow of power from behind him. Someone had opened his magical core to Harry, inviting him to take what he needed. Harry didn’t question, simply took, and then flicked a surge of healing behind him that should repair the wound in the other wizard’s core.

            He had no words for the whipsaw of magic, like colored winds, coiling past him in the next few moments. He floated in the middle of it all, not in control. Ignored might be the best word. Providentially ignored, because the forces moving around him could destroy him if he was a threat.

            And then it was done, and Harry sagged boneless to the ground. He blinked, and realized his throat was hoarse and dry as sand, and there was a heavy body on his back. He stirred, and the body squeezed him once before it very slowly sat back on its heels.

            “Malfoy,” Harry said, concentrating hard for a moment so he would address him by that name and not Draco. He turned around with a tired grin on his face. “Did that work?”

            “Not quite,” Malfoy said. “We Transfigured the peridot, you and Granger with me lending you strength, but we lost track of its place in the potion and ended up with sludge again. At least it’s different sludge this time.”

            Harry laid his head down and laughed. Malfoy’s grumbling voice couldn’t hide the tone of exaltation behind his words.

*

            Draco would have to say that was—quite an adventure. He had lost all track of the room and the people around him, something he never did when he was brewing. Granger had managed to overcome her own depression and join in, probably because she saw her one remaining friend about to lose himself to the complexities of changing the crystalline structure. And Draco had given of his magic without hesitation, something he hadn’t done even with Snape or his close friends in the past.

            At least he now knew it was possible. And he would take note of what had gone wrong for next time, and correct it.

            For now, he simply wanted to lie still, and feel his arms shake, and think about the moments when Potter had seemed to exert the gravity of the sun while Draco held him. It wasn’t as though his companions could complain. Granger had slumped against the table, her face gray, and Potter was humming under his breath like an idiot.

            Which he is, for taking that potion. Draco didn’t question the direction his thoughts had taken; some amount of mental wandering was to be expected after an experience that intense. If he’s like this under it, what could he be without it?

            Certainly I should encourage him to find out.

*

            Mangacat: After this last chapter, Draco’s position probably includes magical arousal, too…

            QueenBoadicea: Hermione knows she can’t change Draco’s mind yet. But she doesn’t see that as a reason to give up.

            She didn’t use the addiction argument because Harry’s potion is not addictive (she certainly would not have allowed him to use it if it was). Whether it might become a non-physical addiction is a problem to worry about after the potion is brewed.

            And thanks for reviewing!
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A Potion Named Desire

Chapter Six—A Work of Three