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Universal Chaos	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13263 -:- 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.

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Chapter Six—Confrontations

            Draco fought to control his breathing. He was not about to pass out like a child because he had just seen two versions of Harry Potter in front of him, and that seemed to confirm the story that Potter had been telling him.

            Of course, he could still be partners with the Potter I know in some bizarre plot. It would be like the Potter he knew to show up at his gates, rant, and then Apparate without even attempting to confront them.

            But Draco remembered all too clearly that Potter’s passion for him and the embarrassing consequences that had come of it. Besides, he doubted that the man would be willing to let a rival for Draco’s affections this close to him, even with the ultimate goal of wooing Draco around to accept Potter.

            And he is a rival for your affections, isn’t he? The only competitor on the field at the moment, as a matter of fact, since you will hardly accept the Potter you know at any time or for any reason.

            Draco put the difficult thought behind bars and faced Potter, the one he reckoned he had to call the Potter from a different universe for the moment, until a better explanation presented itself. Potter had been staring at the grass as if he were absorbed in contemplation of his final words about falling in love, the way Draco would have been if he didn’t have better things to do. He looked up in surprise when Draco snapped his fingers.

            “I want to know everything,” Draco said harshly. “That means why you sought me out in the first place, why you pretended to be Potter at first, and why you haven’t talked to me more honestly about him since you got here.”

            “It didn’t occur to me to talk about him.” Potter blinked as he examined Draco. His face remained open, surprised and with a softness to the corners of his eyes that Draco couldn’t pretend was there all the time. It seemed to appear mostly when Potter looked at him. “I would much rather talk about you. At first, yes, I did mean to coax you into talking to him by pretending to be him and apologizing.”

            Draco swallowed. He felt as though someone had smashed a glass sculpture he valued in front of him.

            “I changed my mind,” Potter whispered, “when I realized that he wasn’t the one I should feel sorry for. At first, you were no one to me but a variation of the Malfoy I knew, who hasn’t crossed my path for two years, and my other self was someone in such a mess that I thought I could heal him. Then he lied to me about what he’d done to you, and I saw that you needed healing far more, and my sympathies swung.”

            “So you didn’t come here just for me.” Draco was hissing by the time he reached the end of that sentence.

            “Of course not.” Potter looked more surprised than ever. “I’ve told you. I had no idea who you were at first, what kind of person. The only way I could get to know you was by agreeing to this task and then changing my mind with more information.” His eyes turned hard suddenly, and it was Draco’s turn to blink, momentarily diverted. “You’re the only one who’s given me that information. All the other Harry has given me is lies and more lies.”

            “Maybe you’re the one who was lying to me,” Draco said, determined to seize control of the conversation again. The most remarkable thing about this version of Potter was the unselfconscious way he seemed to talk about the hardest subjects, so that Draco found himself distracted from what he’d meant to do half the time. “Maybe you really have a different purpose in all of this.”

            “What purpose would that be?”

            Faced with those guileless green eyes, Draco found himself faltering again, as much as he hated to. It was true that he couldn’t think of many reasons for a Potter from another universe to want to get close to him. Yes, he could be trying to get revenge on Draco for ignoring his universe’s Potter for so long, but why would he want to do that? What would someone from so far away care about a conflict between two people that, as he’d pointed out, he’d never met?

            He could be this universe’s Potter, come to woo Draco in a good disguise—

            But Draco rejected that thought immediately. He simply didn’t think the impatient, obsessed man he’d known since the war could have turned himself around so thoroughly in a few months. And if he had, all he would have had to do was come to Draco as himself, explain that, and then set about trying to court him.

            So there remained the possibility that he was an actor, not from another universe at all, and part of a revenge plot. Draco hadn’t seen him taking Polyjuice, but anything was possible.

            “You said that you could fall in love with me,” he said, and sneered. Potter only gave him another blink and nodded. “Then you’ll be willing to undergo some tests to prove that you’re who you say you are.”

            “If they’re not too painful,” Potter said, with a small smile that Draco hated himself for liking. “I have an aversion to my own pain, after I spent so long healing it. I like helping other people better than I like suffering myself.”

            Draco spent a minute driving his nails into his palms, to get rid of the temptation to smile. Then he said, “I want you to spend an hour bound in a chair, so that I can see that you’re not drinking Polyjuice. I’ll cast spells at you that will remove glamours and Transfiguration, and you’ll take Veritaserum.”



            “All right,” Potter agreed instantly, and turned back towards the Manor.

            Draco gaped at his back for a moment, then hurried after him. “Why are you so happy?” he demanded. “You know that this could hurt, especially if you’re on Polyjuice and it wears off suddenly.”

            Potter raised an eyebrow at him. “But I’m not on Polyjuice, and thus I have no reason to fear.” He gave that small smile again. “Besides, it means that I’ll get to spend some more time with you. I’m very happy about that.”

            Draco turned his mind sharply to the spells he could use to detect Transfiguration and glamours on Potter. It was far easier than thinking about his own feelings and what they would be if everything—the sympathy, the story Potter had told him, and the rest of it—turned out to be genuine.

*

            Harry sighed and squirmed a bit in the ropes. They were uncomfortable, but he supposed that, to Draco, the discomfort was part of the point. Any slack in the ropes would mean that he could reach the Polyjuice he supposedly carried with him.

            Draco had taken his wand, too, of course. Harry propped his chin on his arms and wondered if a full hour had passed yet. At the moment, he wanted his wand most not to defend himself but to ease the aches in his bound limbs and cast a Tempus Charm.

            The door of the small room where Draco had put him—a high one with only a narrow slit window, which made Harry imagine that it was some hiding place of ancestral Malfoys when Muggles with torches came hunting them—remained stubbornly shut no matter how long he stared at it, though, so he rolled his head down to the most comfortable position he could achieve and shut his eyes.

            He reckoned he could use some inner contemplation at the moment. (So could Draco, really, whatever his opinion on the matter).

            Am I in love with Draco or not?.

            That was a question he realized almost at once he couldn’t answer yet. Yes, the warm feeling was like being in love, but it also was like being about to fall in love, the way Harry had felt with Ginny sometimes. He’d always liked women, too, and he hadn’t known this Draco for very long. So he moved on to the next and more interesting question.

            What am I going to do about it?

            Not press Draco to commit to anything, of course. That would be the very worst thing he could do right now, when the other Harry had chased and crowded Draco like a dog chasing a cat. The choice had to be his. Harry would watch over him and offer help and sympathy and try to deal with his own feelings in the meantime. If Draco asked him about those feelings, he would answer honestly. He wouldn’t shove them in Draco’s face, though.

            And what am I going to do next?

            Harry smiled grimly. The answer to that was simple, too. He thought he’d allowed the other Harry to get away with lying for long enough. It was time to chase him down and demand some answers.

            The door of the room suddenly burst open. Harry sat up and saw Draco standing there with his wand in one hand and a vial in the other, which probably contained Veritaserum.

            “Finite Incantatem!” Draco snapped at him, a dangerous sound in his voice. Harry, opening his mouth to say something, shut it again and felt the tingling of the spell settle over him. A few charms in his robes that made them soft and colorful stopped functioning. The watch Mrs. Weasley had given him for his seventeenth birthday suddenly felt a bit heavier. But no other spells ended, because Harry didn’t have any other spells clinging to him.

            Draco tried several other spells, which sounded as if they hurt his throat. Harry sat patiently through each one, though the last hurt as if sand stung his skin and he couldn’t help giving Draco an irritated look. As though that were some sort of signal, Draco stood very straight, dropped his wand on the floor, and opened the vial.

            “I have to put three drops of Veritaserum on your tongue,” he announced.

            “Yes, I know,” Harry said. “Snape was very insistent on us knowing about that, even though we never learned to brew it.”

            Draco stared at him, then shook his head, muttered something about Veritaserum and idiots at Hogwarts, and squeezed out the drops. Harry stuck out his tongue and kept it from contact with Draco’s fingers, much as he was tempted to do otherwise so that he could see what Draco tasted like. That would count as pressure.

            A silvery haze spread over his mind, and he barely heard the questions Draco was asking. They were all about the other Harry and alternate universes and whether Harry really wanted to help him. Harry went dreamily along with it, and was glad he’d come to a decision already when he heard his dazed, unembarrassed voice explaining that he would wait and see what happened. Maybe he would fall in love with Draco, maybe he wouldn’t, but either way it really had to be Draco’s choice about falling in love with him.

            The crack of glass roused him from his daze, and he blinked. Draco had dropped the vial on the floor as he edged away from Harry. Now he stood, back against the door and arms spread across it, eyes wide as moons.

            “What’s the matter?” Harry asked, as gently as he could when his tongue felt huge against his teeth.

            “You can’t be real,” Draco whispered. “I must have made a mistake—I must have brewed the Veritaserum wrong—” And then he stopped and shook his head. “But I didn’t brew this,” he said then, as if that were a mystery instead of a memory.

            “I told you that I was telling the truth.” Harry hoped that he didn’t sound too smug. He’d been patient because this was obviously something that Draco needed to do, but the ropes hurt and taking Veritaserum and having spells fired at him wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. He flexed his shoulders. “Do you think you can let me out of these now?”

            Draco’s wand trembled, but he managed to move it, and the ropes around Harry collapsed. He stood up and stretched, clumsily. Then he asked, “Do you need to rest for a while?”

            “Get out!” Draco’s voice soared into a hysterical yell.

            Harry looked carefully at him. He wondered if he could reason—

            But Draco’s face was flushed, with one spot of red in each white cheek, and his hands shook, and he had snatched up his wand again and was aiming it. He really didn’t look amenable to reason at the moment.

            “I’ll see you later,” Harry said, resolving to make that come true if Draco couldn’t, and then turned and stumbled out of the room. He’d summon a house-elf to guide him to the front doors of the Manor, right after he Summoned his wand.

*

            Draco held his hands over his face and took deep breaths. It was still long moments before he could stop shaking, even when Ipsy came to tell him that Potter had most definitely left the house.

            The Veritaserum and the spells and the lack of transformation despite two hours, more than enough time for the Polyjuice to wear off, all pointed to one thing. The story Potter had told Draco was true, and there were two of that particular maddening madman in the world now.

            That meant that the rest of what he had said was true, too, since Draco had taken care to ask about that. He felt sympathy for Draco. It might be on the verge of love. Potter was trying to think about that without having the words, and so he rambled as much as anyone could ramble under Veritaserum.

            There was someone in the world who cared about him again.

            After a year and a half of grief, and sometimes gloomy satisfaction, that no one would ever understand him again, that he was suffering under a sorrow that separated him from the rest of the world for eternity, he had discovered someone who would make the effort to understand, and do a damn good job of it, too.

            Draco had not realized how unprepared he was to emerge from his private emotions and start sharing them again.

*

            Harry smiled grimly as he stepped through the other Harry’s wards. The one nice thing about dealing with a version of yourself from another universe was that the wards set up for his benefit would be convinced you were him, and let you in despite all his attempts to keep you out.

            The other Harry, as usual, was face-down on his couch, in a particularly dramatic fashion this time, with his shoulders shaking. He rolled over and sat up, staring, as Harry bulled his way in. Of course, he flushed and surged to his feet.

            “Oh, were you able to take enough time away from seducing Draco to rub my face in the fact that I’ve failed?” he snapped. Harry had never known that his face could look so miserably angry, his eyes squinted and his mouth pouting. “How long did it take you to work your way into Draco’s bed, and what did it cost? Did you promise him an autograph?”

            It was as if Harry’s body and his emotions had agreed on what to do next, without consulting his brain at all. His backhand hit the other Harry hard enough to make him reel into the wall. Harry strode up after him, and, mostly to restrain himself, cast a net of spells and invisible barriers around the other Harry that should keep him from moving.

            “Do you realize,” he asked conversationally, when he thought he had calmed down enough five minutes later, “that you just called the man you claim to love a whore?”

            “There’s no other way that you could have seduced him that fast!” The other Harry lunged forwards and bounced from the barriers, reeling into the wall again. Harry heard a nasty crack as his head connected and forced himself to ignore it. If the other Harry had been honest with him from the beginning, this could all have been avoided. “I must have been mistaken. He wouldn’t be right for me. No one who would sleep with someone he barely knows could be.”

            “As a matter of fact, we haven’t slept together yet.” He hated telling the other Harry even that much, but Harry couldn’t stand here and let him slander Draco without responding. “We might never. That doesn’t mean you will sleep with him. It doesn’t mean that he would have fallen for you if I was never here. Especially since you don’t have the courage or the common sense to fucking talk to him.” By the end of that little speech, Harry’s voice had risen, and he didn’t try to control it. He was infuriated on Draco’s behalf, and the other Harry’s flushed face and stupid words called forth an answering anger from him, and maybe if he’d confronted the other Harry like this from the beginning, there wouldn’t have been such a stupid runaround.

            “You have no idea what it was like—”

            “What happened?” Harry demanded, in a tone that made the other Harry stop speaking in mid-rant. He blinked like a befuddled toad, and Harry rampaged ahead, letting the first words he thought of flow off his tongue. “What made you into this—this sneaking, stupid, wailing, whinging imbecile? I’m embarrassed to think I share a name with you! You’re an idiot, and—”

            “I lost my place, and I couldn’t find it again!”

            The sudden outburst snapped Harry free from his own rage, at least. He was glad. He hadn’t found it comfortable to be that angry, with no safe way of taking out the emotion. He folded his hands together behind his back and glared at his other self.

            “That’s not an answer,” he said. “What do you mean?”

            “I mean that after I defeated Voldemort, there was nothing left.” The other Harry was speaking rapidly, and Harry had the impression that he was glad to be talking about this at last; his words spilled out like pus from an infected wound. “I had no place in the world anymore. I wasn’t a hero, or I was a hero who did what I was supposed to, and that was the end of it. I didn’t have a hand to wield me anymore. Dumbledore was gone, and he didn’t turn out to be as perfect as I thought he was. Snape was dead, and I never got to apologize. I owed life-debts and was owed them, and Ron and Hermione were moving forwards with their romance, and I tried with Ginny but I couldn’t, and there was nothing the same and no place for me anymore.”

            He leaned forwards, his hands clenched now around the bars of the main spell that kept him trapped. “I flew to Hogwarts on my broom and went up to the top of the Astronomy Tower. I almost jumped. Did you know that? Do you have any idea what it’s like, to contemplate suicide because you know that no one would miss you, just the idea of you?”

            Harry started.

            As a matter of fact, he knew exactly what it was like, because he had taken his broom outside the Burrow one evening soon after the war, the evening he realized he would never love Ginny the way he wanted to, and sat on it, wondering if he should fly to Hogwarts. The thought of the Astronomy Tower was taking shape in the back of his mind, but he had barely admitted that to himself.

            But he’d never done it. He’d thought of Ron and Hermione and the rest of the Weasleys, and Snape and Dumbledore and Sirius and his parents who had died for him, and even the people like the Malfoys who might be prosecuted worse than they would if he were gone. He thought of what his best friends’ faces would look like when they realized he had killed himself.

            He’d climbed down from the broom, shaken and sobered by the realization of how far his self-pity extended, and then gone back into the Burrow and lain down in his bed in Ron’s room. In the comforting company of Ron’s snores, he’d sorted through his choices and decided that he needed to get help. No matter how hard it was to ask for that help and then go through with it, it had to be less hard than leaving his friends behind to grieve for him forever.

            That has to have been what changed us into two different people, the event that started the cascade and the fracturing of the universes.

            “I know what that’s like,” Harry said in a voice without much inflection, because to try and explain all his emotions would have taken hours and he didn’t think the other Harry would understand them anyway. “What did you do after that?”

            The other Harry spent some time staring at him, during which his face became a normal color again, and then he offered a mocking bow. “What do you think I did? In fact, precisely what you think already. I thought of the connections holding me to life. One was the life-debts that Draco owed me. I determined to do what I could to stay alive, if only to see him fulfill those.”

            His voice softened. “And then, as I watched him, I fell in love with him. I realized that he was exactly what I needed to bring me back to myself, because he could teach me how to love life again. He didn’t have much of a life himself in the shadow of the war and his parents’ suicides. His career isn’t serious. He has time for me, in the way my friends don’t, because they’re so busy living already.” His voice grew corrosive towards the end.

            Harry closed his eyes and said nothing. He felt sick. There were too many things wrong with what the other Harry had just said.

            He saw Draco as a tool to serve him, no more.

            He never thought about Draco’s own suffering and sorrow.

            He chose to do all this, to try to ruin someone else’s peace and privacy, because he was too much of a coward to ask for help.

            And all of that told him what must have happened, the event that he thought was central to the way the other Harry related to Draco but had been missing.

            “You tried to force him to fulfill the life-debts, didn’t you?” he whispered. “You demanded something impossible of him, and told him that he would pay with his life if he didn’t comply. Then he probably did the research and found out that the life-debts are heavy, but can only be fulfilled if the person who owes them gives free consent. I can’t think of much else that would make Draco despise someone the way he despises you.” He shook his head and finally managed to open his eyes and look at the other Harry. “No wonder he didn’t believe you when you claimed to love him later.”

            “I do love him,” the other Harry said hastily. “Now. I didn’t when I first tried to force him, no. But now I do.” Then he paused and gave Harry a glance that was far too keen. “And you must have considered trying to force your world’s Draco. I don’t think you could have guessed the truth so quickly if the thought hadn’t passed through your head, too.”

            “It did,” Harry said softly, “as a means of getting vengeance on the Malfoy in my universe. And it was one of the things that made me decide I should get help, because I was contemplating ruining someone’s life—especially if he didn’t think to do the research—for a little petty vengeance.”

            “That’s the difference between us,” the other Harry interrupted quickly. “For you, it would have been petty. For me, it’s a necessity.”

            Harry shook his head. “You could have gone to Mind-Healers the same way I did. Perhaps our two universes would even have been the same if you had.”

            “Not every version of us has your strength,” the other Harry whispered. “I’ve peered into universes that would shock you and seen crimes committed by people with the name and face of Harry Potter that would chill your soul.”

            “I’m sure you have,” Harry said. “That doesn’t mean you need to commit them yourself.”

            He spent some time considering the other Harry, and his mingled feelings of disgust and pity did not lessen. The other Harry need not have turned out this way. He could have controlled himself. He could have helped himself.

            And yet…

            Should Draco also have been able to control and help himself? Should he have had to overcome his immense grief on his own, without help?

            Another thought whispered and drifted through Harry’s mind like fog, as well.

            He could have been me. It almost was.

            He banished the spells that caged the other Harry. Then he shook his head and turned away. “I’m going back to Draco.”

            The other Harry said in a ragged voice, “Have you considered that this universe isn’t yours, and this Draco isn’t yours, and that you’ll have to go home sooner or later?”

            “Of course I’ve considered it,” Harry said, and then walked out of the house before the other Harry could say anything else.

            As he prepared to Apparate back to the Manor and talk to Draco, he sighed. He had once thought that healing himself, and so gaining the strength to spare to help other people, was enough. It didn’t appear to be now.

*

            polka dot: True, but this Harry won’t necessarily think about that first of all. The first thing on his mind is helping Draco.

            weepingtenshi: I can imagine!

            Isadmalfoy: I imagine that sending the other Harry back to his universe in his place might be a little unfair to his friends.

            Anon: Thank you!

            momoko: Thank you!

            butterpie: One thing about this Harry is that he uses his stubbornness to help other people instead of clinging to illusions like most of the versions of Harry I’ve written!

            SP777: You’re welcome!

            Draco is too suspicious to realize the truth that easily. Hence the way he confronted Harry about it in this chapter.

            Are you talking about the fic I wrote called ‘Run’? That is on this site as well.

            Mehla Seraphim: That would be funny, but the alternate universe spells will only work for versions of that same person. The only one who could bring over the Draco of Harry’s universe is Draco himself.

            MewMew2: Glad you enjoyed it.

            mrequecky: Thank you!

            Thrnbrooke: I think you have partial answers to your questions now.

            Kodaijin Yurei: Thank you! I am enjoying writing this one.

            Black Padfoot: I am aware that the end of the story could be a little confusing. However, there are other options.

            nellyhug: Thanks for reviewing!
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Universal Chaos