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Sympathy for the Predators	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Lucius Views: 14906 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Sympathy for the Predators
- 2-Tiger
- 3-Cheetah
- 4-Wolf
- 5-Fox
- 6-Falcon
- 7-Jaguar
- 8-Killer Whale
- 9-Lion
- 10-Dolphin
- 5
- 6
- 7
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part VI. Falcon.

Falling, at great speed, from a height.

            Harry hesitated, then nodded and wrote down the last line of his letter to Luna, setting out the particulars of how he’d been imprisoned at the instigation of Draco Malfoy and then freed by his father. It made a strange story even to read it, and his friends had stared at him with disbelieving faces when he told them about it.

            “It couldn’t have been someone wearing Polyjuice, could it?” Ron had asked, his voice hopeless.

            “I’d like to know who would have the courage to imitate Lucius Malfoy in the middle of the Ministry,” Hermione had murmured, eyes narrowed. “But I reckon it was really him.”

            “It was,” Harry had said.

He was glad they didn’t ask him to explain the basis of that conviction. It would have had to come down to confused murmurs about the way Malfoy stood and held his head and looked at Harry as if he were made of gold, and that would produce stunned shock, more than even disbelief, in Hermione and Ron.

Harry could scarcely believe it himself.

            He sat there now, looking at the letter, and considered crumpling it up instead of sending it, the same way he had seven different times. If displayed, it would please nobody, certainly not Draco. Harry’s supporters could explode in a fury of righteous indignation at the Malfoys the way he had imagined them doing at the Minister, and while Draco would fully deserve it, Harry could envision this becoming a side row that would drag them away from the important business of challenging the Ministry.

            He looked at the lines that he had written in the center of the letter, and felt his lips curve in a small, smug smile.

            The printing of this article would not please Lucius Malfoy, either, since Harry gave the full credit for his freedom to him. But it would have been dishonest to conceal the matter, Harry could imagine himself saying innocently. He wanted people to know that Lucius Malfoy was kind and disinterested when it pleased him to be.

            He could, of course, have left that out. And Harry would have done so in an instant, if this had happened a month ago.

            But a month ago is not now, Harry thought as he scooped up the letter and went to find a post-owl in Diagon Alley. Circumstances change all the time. It’s only fit that people do so if there’s occasion for them to do so.

*

            Lucius knew when the newspaper arrived the next morning, not because he was awake to receive it, but because Bell came to rouse him from a sound sleep and ask for orders about “the young master’s raving in the drawing-room.”

            Lucius dressed himself with care in front of his mirror, letting Bell assist him whenever the little elf spotted a crease out of place or a bit of dust where it shouldn’t be. He smiled at his reflection. He didn’t think he had looked so relaxed since Narcissa died. It was a pleasant expression, molding the lines of his face in a way that he liked. He touched his cheek and decided that this was the expression he would wear to the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s paintings next week, where he fully expected to see Potter.

            The door of his wing rattled under a series of thunderous knocks. Bell turned to face it, ears trembling in indignation. Lucius raised his eyebrows and never looked away from the mirror.

            “Let my son in, if you would, Bell,” he murmured.

            “Is Master being sure?” Bell’s ears twitched again, but at least now he was looking at Lucius and was the picture of gracious poise that Lucius always desired him to be again. “Young Master Malfoy is being very loud.”

            “He is,” Lucius said. “I will not enjoy having him here. But I will enjoy him putting dents in my door even less.”

            That horrible prospect seemed to rouse Bell to action, and he hurried across the room, shaking his head and muttering on the way. Lucius adjusted the hang of his robes’ collar a final time, and then turned away from the mirror and took a chair in front of the light breakfast Bell had brought with him. Toast this morning, and soft, fluffy bread covered with already melted butter, and even softer scones covered with marmalade. Lucius liked bread. And as long as he was eating in the privacy of his own home, where no one could insult a taste that might have seemed rather plebeian, he saw no reason why he should not have it.

            He discovered a reason when Draco burst into the room and the force of his foot on the floor knocked a piece of marmalade-covered scone into Lucius’s lap. Lucius looked at it blankly for a moment while Draco began to shout at him.

            “It says here that you were the one to release Potter! What is the meaning of this, Father? You not only use your connections to ensure that that bastard walks free, you not only disgrace the Malfoy name by courting him past all the bounds of propriety, but you also allow your name to be associated with his in a public article? I don’t understand you, and if you suffer from this because you dared to try and find someone to replace Mother, it’ll be all you deserve—”

            Lucius looked up.

            Draco fell silent in the face of his look. Bell had already come to Lucius’s side, with a low wail rising from his throat, and swept away the piece of scone, so Lucius felt it no indignity to rise to his feet and confront his son. Draco backed a step away, and Lucius came around the table.

            “I have borne your presence,” Lucius said, voice never varying from the low, level monotone he had chosen for it at first. “I have borne your petulance. I have borne your little, low flirtations and adulteries and pursuit of pleasure with no indication of anything higher. But I will not bear this.”

            “What are you t-talking about?” Draco was stammering, but he seemed to have regained his composure sooner than Lucius would have hoped for. I must remember that my son is no longer the small sculpture I could make with my hands while he was growing up, Lucius told himself as Draco stood up straighter and stared directly at him with hard eyes. “All I did was tell you that you should be following the rules of propriety a bit more closely—”

            “Your outburst,” Lucius said, “is undignified, and noisy, and unnecessary. You place yourself before me as an example of politeness? And this is the display that you would give me?”

            “I just meant,” Draco said, and then stopped there and left the sentence hanging.

            “Yes,” Lucius said. “You did not mean to use yourself as a pattern. But I have little reason to listen to you if you are incapable of obeying your own rules.” Deliberately, he turned his back on his son and sipped at the flavored water that Bell had brought him as part of his breakfast. “I demand better behavior from those who claim my name,” Lucius added over his shoulder. “You will leave Malfoy Manor in an hour.”

            “This is still my home!” There was genuine anguish under the surface of those words, but still more anger, which displeased Lucius. The only sincere emotion he would have been disposed to accept at the moment was penitence, and Draco was still a long distance from that.

            “Only at the pleasure of the current head of the Malfoy line,” Lucius said. “And I am still that. Leave my presence now.”

            The air behind him grew full of a charged silence. Lucius could imagine all the words that Draco longed to speak, ghosts of themselves that flickered around them both and needed to be carved in solid walls to become real.

            But in the end he said none of them, and simply slammed the door as he left. Lucius shook his head and turned back around. Bell bowed to him and said something about “Master Draco never being such a bad boy before, and how Bell is ashamed of him.”

            “Make sure that my son leaves the house,” Lucius told Bell. “Allow him to take anything he owns outright, but nothing for which he is in debt or which belongs to the family.”

            “Master Lucius,” Bell said, with what sounded like reverence, and then vanished. Lucius, listening hard, thought he could hear an outraged yelp from the direction of Draco’s wing a moment later.

            He sat down and finished his breakfast. He would take one kind of pleasure before he took another, and while he ate, he concentrated solely on the heat that filled his mouth, the fluffiness that dissolved before his teeth, and the sweetness that stroked the back of his tongue.

            Then he sat back and folded his arms on the table as he contemplated the exquisite, romantic pleasure of choosing a potential lover over a son, and casting the son who had displeased him from the house.

            It was a role that no Malfoy had played in centuries. Family was all. They were perfectly capable of conducting their love affairs with discretion, and children were perfectly capable of ignoring those lovers who displeased them, or finding some clever way into coercing their parents into giving them up. Had Draco done such a thing, Lucius would have applauded him and either ceased his pursuit of Potter or found some way to reconcile Draco to the company Lucius’s name would soon bear in the papers and the mouths of their social circle.

            For Lucius, cleverness and elegance did much, less only than beauty and power did.

            But Draco had done the thing clumsily, and he had reminded Lucius of loyalty to a woman seven years dead instead of his duty to his family. He had been crude and loud. He had believed, strangest of all, that he could threaten Lucius into agreeing, as if he were the one who held the name and the house and the vaults and the power.

            Have I truly presented such a weak figure to my son?

            After several careful considerations of the matter, however, Lucius decided that he had not. He had been cold and generous, marble and gold, to Draco since Narcissa died, once their shared mourning was done. It was Draco’s fault if he had chosen to believe that he might carve gold simply because it was malleable.

            Even gold did not melt without heat, and Lucius did not believe his son to possess one spark of the particular spiritual glow needed to mold him.

            Potter possesses it in abundance.

            And so Lucius turned to his third pleasure of the morning, and wrote a letter to Potter asking to see him at once.

*

            Harry shook his head in wonder as he stepped out of Madam Malkin’s, the place where he still did the majority of his robe shopping. He liked to be loyal to his memories and the past when he could.

            Not one person had come up to him this morning to ask for an autograph or to demand his opinion about some petty political issue that the Ministry was ultimately using as a means of distraction.

That didn’t mean no one had noticed him. There were plenty of stares. There were plenty of whispers. But people seemed content to stare speculatively from a distance, and then turn away when they realized Harry was looking back at them.

Malfoy was right. The whole world is shifting, and maybe I inspired some of it, but I’m not the one calling the tune to this dance.

Another metaphor occurred to Harry as he walked towards the Apparition point, and he frowned.

            This isn’t a dance. This is a pile of kindling, and it won’t take much to light it. My arrest probably would have done it if it had lasted longer.

            And that’s the reason Superbus couldn’t possibly be behind it. He’s more cunning than to do that.

            Harry grimaced and Apparated. He hated to think that he had another enemy, but it was better to accept the inevitable than to ignore the obvious.

            He returned home to a pile of letters on the front table; he received so many that the post-owls that came often to his house had learned to deposit their messages on the only piece of furniture big enough to hold them. Harry picked through them, setting aside the marriage proposals and the letters that looked like petitions for later laughing or burning. That left only three letters, all of them sealed in an official manner and bearing names he knew. He retired into the library on the second floor, the one he had been in when Hermione came to tell him about the house-elf law, to read them.

            The first one was from Hermione, exultantly telling him that the Wizengamot had asked Superbus for “more time” to consider the law, and also “testimony from the other side.” Hermione, of course, had volunteered herself as an expert witness. Harry grinned. He might go to watch her speak in front of the Wizengamot. She was entertaining when she got into full flow, especially when the opposition wasn’t expecting her.

            The second one was from Giles, apologizing for Ernie Macmillan’s failure to meet Harry at all after the first meeting but subtly defending him from Harry’s suggestion of treachery. Harry had to reconsider. After all, he had been arrested at the instigation of Draco Malfoy, not the Ministry. It was possible that Willowwand had shown up at that first pub simply because he’d been tracking Harry’s movements and not because Macmillan had betrayed Harry’s location.

            And the third one was from Lucius Malfoy. Harry stared at it in silence for some time before he opened it.

            It was an invitation, courteously worded so as to seem less like a demand, that he visit the Manor at once. And it contained details that Harry hadn’t expected, such as that Lucius had expelled his son.

            Harry sat back and stared at the ceiling. Malfoy couldn’t compel him to come, of course. He also hadn’t had to open his gates when Harry went to question him about the donation. And yet he had, and he had also been the soul of politeness in most of their encounters in public.

            And Harry owed him for his freedom, something he hadn’t wanted to think about. He had hoped that, by mentioning it to the papers and thus sharing the attention, he would irritate Malfoy enough that the other man would withdraw from contact. That hadn’t worked.

            Harry sighed. He was unused to this kind of pursuit. People who didn’t listen to him? Of course, they were common, and Willowwand was their exemplar. People who acted as if they had some special and secret connection with Harry, and he was the only one who could soothe their troubled hearts? Also common. There were even a few who had tried to intrigue him with downcast eyes and mysterious remarks. They didn’t understand that Harry’s heart was guarded from such things by the mysteries he had solved while he was still young.

            And also by Ginny’s presence.

            It was a shame that the memory of his vow to Ginny wasn’t enough, in and of itself, to guard him from Malfoy. It was even more unfortunate that he felt such an obligation to the bastard.

            Harry sighed again, and then accepted what his own curiosity as well as the debt made inevitable. He wrote a polite letter to Malfoy indicating that he had accepted his invitation and would be along some time in the evening to see him. Malfoy had said that Harry should come whenever it was convenient for him, and Harry thought that facing Malfoy as soon as possible and getting it out of the way would be best.

            Besides, Harry admitted, as he watched the letter wing away from him towards lunchtime, there’s a much better chance that I can irritate him face-to-face.

*

            “Welcome, Mr. Potter. My house-elves are preparing dinner for us. Please make yourself comfortable until we’re summoned.”

            Potter paused in the entrance to the sitting room, staring at Lucius as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He probably couldn’t, Lucius thought, smiling at him. Of course it would seem strange to him that he was invited for a meal instead of an abrupt explanation and dismissal. By setting their meeting for the same day, he had been trying to provoke a confrontation of that sort, Lucius knew.

            But Lucius, if he was amused or exasperated by Potter’s defiance, knew well how to tip such defiance to his own use. He waved him again to a chair, and Potter slowly took it, darting glances at the walls in the meantime, as if he expected them to squeeze together and crush him.

            “What is this, Malfoy?” he demanded, when he had settled himself and faced Lucius again.

            That fire in his eyes. Lucius dismissed a brief but unfortunately powerful vision of Potter bent over the low table between them, with the same fire irradiating his face and his naked body.

            “I summoned you to make an apology and to ask you questions,” he said. “Based on our latest exchange, but of course also the ones before that, when you so fascinated me. Is that not obvious?”

            “I don’t understand you,” Potter said bluntly. “You cast your own son out of the house for me? You’re inviting me for dinner when I pulled a trick that was impolite of me? You’re acting as though I’ve encouraged you to try courting me when I haven’t?” He tightened his hands on the arms of the chair and acted for a moment as if he would rise, but to Lucius’s delight, it was only a predatory tensing as if for a spring. “This is a lot of effort to go through for a fuck.”

            Lucius would have objected to the vulgar word, except that it entertained him even to watch Potter’s lips shape its hard consonants. He settled for a slow, burning glance that Potter could read disapproval in if he chose to.

Potter retaliated with a hard glance of his own. His eyes had become so jewel-like that Lucius half-expected to find scratches on his skin the next time he looked down at his own body.

            “Does that not tell you, then,” he asked, pitching his voice lower still, “that I must desire something more?”

            “If you do, I have no desire to supply it,” Potter snapped, and this time he did push himself to his feet. “An apology and questions, you said. So make the one and ask the other and be done with it.”

            Lucius shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “I shall do neither unless you agree to stay to dinner.”

            Potter shut his eyes and touched his temple as if he was developing a headache. “You frustrate me,” he mumbled. Lucius wished he could hear his voice more clearly, because Potter was beautiful when he expressed the full range of his emotions. It was the difference between hearing a French horn at a distance and hearing it close. “I don’t—look, I don’t know why you want all these things from me. I wish I did.”

            “I have tried to explain them to you,” Lucius said. He did not have a poor opinion of Potter’s intelligence, but he was beginning to have one of his stubbornness. Most of Lucius’s other lovers would have accepted what he told them, at least enough to begin negotiating over it. “I thought I had done a fine job of that in the Ministry.”

            “You can’t want me that much,” Potter said. “We’re too different. And your responses are out of all proportion to what I might be able to do for you. The donation? Getting me out of Auror custody? Rejecting your son?”

            “I have not rejected Draco,” Lucius said, and chose a tone of mild, crystalline protest, because it was available to him immediately. He was more occupied with what Potter’s words had revealed.

            You can’t want me that much.

            Out of all proportion.

            Potter did not think himself beautiful, and he also did not think himself worthy of such gestures as Lucius’s. Lucius had made them in the confidence that they would dispose Potter favorably to him, because why should anyone do such extravagant things for Potter who did not truly want him? But it seemed Potter had seen only the extravagance of the gestures, and not what might lie behind them.

            “Mr. Potter,” he said, “this is the first of my questions. Why do you think my responses are out of proportion? What do you believe you would be able to give me, if I did make a demand on you?”

            Potter relaxed at once, and even sat down again. Lucius wanted to shake his head. Honesty, yes, Potter responded to, but there were many kinds of honesty. It seemed that Potter had chosen this particular brand, the one that denigrated him and reduced his character, position, power, and beauty to its barest essentials, to become addicted to.

            “I could give you a chance to have more artists listen to you, perhaps,” Potter said. “I might get some of them to consider you as a patron. Maybe my most devoted fans would be inclined to give you more of an ear than they do now if I spoke for you. But that’s it. That’s all. I’m not going to donate money to your causes in exchange, because I’m persuaded that I would despise most of them. And I’m not going to get you out of custody or reconcile you to your son, because I don’t think you need help with either thing. And I’m not going to become your lover, because I swore a vow that I take as seriously as if it were one of Fedele’s sculptures.”

            In his eyes was a gleam that might have come off steel, but it was reflected in shining emerald. Lucius knew no artist who could have created such a shine.

            Lucius again wanted to touch, to caress, to hold Potter down and keep him so until he had removed all his clothes, to take some payment for his weeks of hunting and watching and considering and favors.

            But that would be the thing that would most alienate Potter. So he had to content himself with words.

            “I wish you to reconsider,” Lucius said. “I do not demand anything from you, no introductions and no commissions, except that which you find it hardest to give. Your trust. Your loyalty. Your consideration. Your friendship. And, yes, your physical love.”

            Potter frowned at him. “What kind of person would I be if I renounced my vow?”

            “The kind who can change his mind,” Lucius said, “and thus who distinguishes himself as different from, and superior to, those like Minister Superbus, who cannot.”

            Potter gave a smile that seemed to come in spite of himself. “You have a point,” he said. “But I still don’t think that I can give you what you want.”

            “Tell me your objection,” Lucius said. “You have made peace with others who treated you unfairly in the past. I know that you spoke up for Severus Snape and made sure that he was honored as he should have been, posthumous Order of Merlin and all. What keeps you from doing the same for me?”

*

            I believe you now, Harry thought. I believe that words are art.

            Malfoy spoke in a fashion that Harry would have appreciated as eminently reasonable and sensible coming from anyone else. It was rare to find reason in the wizarding world. Harry prized it when he discovered it.

            But not when it came from someone who tried to kill me more than once, and who made others suffer.

            Even if what he says is true, and he’s changed?

            Harry stared Malfoy in the eye, and saw nothing but sincerity there. But of course he would see that, wouldn’t he? Malfoy didn’t only use words as his art; he made his facial muscles display what he wanted to show, and he could dazzle many people with a simple tone shift in his voice.

            Not me, though.

            “I don’t think I could ever trust you,” Harry answered at last, “because I don’t know what your ultimate purpose really is. Severus Snape showed me his memories, and I learned why he had done what he had. Granted, that came too late, when he was dying. I wish I had known when he was alive. But you won’t give me access to your memories, will you? Or take Veritaserum?” He tried not to blink or look away, no matter how much Malfoy’s eyes glittered. To do that would be to show weakness.

            “No,” Malfoy said. “I won’t. What you can do is trust me, the way you would anyone else.” He looked highly entertained.

            Harry raked a hand through his hair. “Anyone else, I would have more reason to trust.”

            “Really?” Malfoy asked. “Are there that many people who have given you such gifts, then, and conversed with you so openly, and provided you with such conversations on art and politics, and been so interested in you, and asked only for interest and attention in return?”

            Harry made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. That sounded reasonable no matter how he thought about it.

            Then maybe you’re the one who’s being unreasonable. It’s been known to happen.

            Harry grimaced. He still hated swallowing the bitter pill of his conscience, but it had to be swallowed at times.

            “I—apologize,” he said. “You did give me all those things, and I’m being ungrateful.”

            “But?” Malfoy asked, his voice so soft and delicate it reminded Harry of snowflake biscuits he’d had at some of the art exhibitions, that were designed to melt on the tongue, leaving only a faint chill taste behind.

            Harry laughed against all his instincts. “You can still sense the objection, can’t you?”

            “Yes,” Malfoy said. Then he waited, his hands folded on his lap and his eyes fixed on Harry with what Harry had to admit was flattering attention. He’d never asked for homage from people like Willowwand and the rest of the wizarding world, but the nice thing about receiving it was that he’d learned to distinguish between several different kinds.

            Malfoy’s was the rarest kind: centered in himself, but reaching out to Harry.

            “I don’t think it’s the objection to you, so much,” Harry said slowly, “as that I swore a vow not to take another lover, and the people who have proposed to replace Ginny over the years have mostly been ones like Willowwand—people I don’t trust and would never dream of taking to my bed. So I placed you in that category at first without thinking about it.”

            “Remove me from it.” Malfoy leaned forwards, his voice so suddenly intense that Harry blinked at him. It was like thinking he’d touched a velvet hanging, maybe one of those Risa sometimes wove as a side-hobby, and discovered that it was actually made of diamond-edged steel. “Give me a chance. Let me show you why you matter to me, and what pleasure you can enjoy with me, without betraying the woman you loved and buried.”

            Harry blinked again. Malfoy raised one hand and let it hover over Harry’s shoulder for a moment, which, Harry had to admit, was more enticing than many caresses would have been.

            “I have lost my wife, too,” he whispered. “I know what it is like to love someone so strongly that you think nothing could ever take her place. And nothing can. I would not be taking her place, not trying to step into the mold that cast her closeness to you. I would instead be encouraging you to look around you and see beauty in more than one kind of art.”

            Harry half-closed his eyes. Malfoy’s voice, at least when he spoke like that, conveyed a strange feeling to Harry, not exactly sexual but more as though someone were touching him just lightly enough to tickle, and the feeling ran throughout his skin.

            “The vow you made concentrates overmuch on the love of the body,” Malfoy said, “when I know perfectly well that what you shared with Weasley was more than that, was also the love of the mind. It is to that that I appeal. It is through that that I have tried to show you what matters to me, what is important, and what is important to you as well, if you will but admit it. Forsake a vow that is unworthy of you, and let me in.”

            Harry was breathing hard, and he didn’t know why, and he didn’t know when he’d begun that. He lifted a hand and captured Malfoy’s with it, rubbing at the long, slender fingers, and the palm that had never known hard labor, and a mark in the center of that palm which stood up above the skin like a raised life-line. Malfoy leaned closer still. Harry could feel his breath, hear his heartbeat, taste his nearness.

            And he shook his head, and let the hand go, and leaned away.

            “Perhaps that vow is stupid and unworthy of me,” he said. “But we’re all allowed some absurd decisions in our lifetimes. It’s a promise that hurts no one else. It only affects me, not anyone else.” He opened his eyes in time to see the lines of disagreement coiling around Malfoy’s mouth, and smiled back, gently. “No, not even you. You will find other lovers that can offer you what you want. I know you will. In the meantime, I’ll take that offer of dinner, and gladly. Conversations like this make me hungry.”

*

            Lucius allowed Potter to change the subject. He allowed him to lead the way to dinner, and enjoy the delicately baked chicken in an orange sauce that the house-elves offered, and make small comments during the meal that anyone might have made.

            He allowed it because he was busy thinking about the objection that Potter had raised, and whether he found any merit in it.

            We’re all allowed some absurd decisions in our lifetimes.

            Lucius wished he knew a way that he could have explained that Potter’s decision was more absurd than most. Yes, he might claim that it hurt nothing and no one except himself, but was his pain to be such a small thing? Was he to miss out on the pleasures of the flesh because the woman he adored had gone to her grave?

            There were people who would say yes, but Lucius was not one of them. One mourned one’s losses and then continued. If he had not been able to live by that philosophy, he would still have been mourning the loss of his parents, or his prestige in the first war under the Dark Lord, and the long years it had taken him to work his way back into a position of trust with people who didn’t really believe that he’d been under the Imperius. The tears would have flowed without stopping.

            He had learned to live without tears, instead. He had learned to admire beauty and to think that he was entitled to touch some of that beauty, to caress it with light hands that would do justice to its qualities, to draw it nearer to him.

            It was possible that Potter might disagree, of course. But he had never engaged with the philosophical position that Lucius represented at all. He had simply assumed that there were people who would help him to keep his vow and people who would not, and restricted himself to the company of the first.

            I must represent to him what a loss it is, somehow, Lucius thought, as he watched Potter close his eyes in enjoyment of the chicken and wondered if he would look like that when he was enjoying other things. And not a loss simply to myself. I doubt that he would care about that, so focused is he on denying me his bed.

            It hurts other people that Harry Potter is not all he could be, the same way that it would hurt others to see a wonderful work of art destroyed.

            Lucius knew what he would like to say. But he had taken a risk earlier, a much larger one than he could have imagined himself capable of taking, and had been rejected. What made him think that he could take another?

            Potter leaned back in his chair and said something about the Ministry. His eyes shone with a trace of gold from the fire.

            That does, Lucius thought. But this time I shall make my approach indirectly.

            He waited until they were once more in the sitting room where they had sat before, this time both with glasses of white wine. Potter took a sip and then closed his eyes. His expression was one of perfect contentment, Lucius thought. He was no ascetic who denied himself the finer things of life because he somehow imagined himself superior to them. He was living, breathing proof, instead, that one could be beautiful, powerful, cultivated, and still stubbornly idiotic.

            Lucius waited until all the exasperation of the last thought had drained out of him. Then he murmured, “Tell me, Mr. Potter, if an artist paints a wonderful picture, do you think he has an obligation to exhibit it?”

            Potter opened his eyes slowly, as if he had to travel a long way back from whatever distance the wine had cast him to. Then he shook his head. “Why would he?” he asked. “Unless he made the work as a commission for someone else, I suppose, and that person wanted the picture publicly displayed.” He scowled thoughtfully and ran a finger along the corner of his mouth—not along his teeth, Lucius was relieved to note. “But outside that rare case, no.”

            “Why not?” Lucius took one more sip of his wine. He wanted the coolness in his mouth as a contrast to the rising excitement, which filled his mouth like the taste of spices.

            Potter was silent for some time, swirling his wine gently against the goblet, as if he were using the swishes and curls of those minor, pale waves to predict his answers. Then he looked up and answered, “It might sound quaint to you, but I believe in the freedom of an artist to control his creations. Not always, of course; once he’s displayed the painting, he can hardly prevent people from seeing it, or make them forget. But if he never shows it to anyone, simply keeps it and treasures it, then who can invade his heart and say that he should spill its gems open on the pavement?”

            Potter’s voice became richer when he was passionate, Lucius noted. He leaned forwards in his chair as if he wanted to make his point, but he held the goblet still so that the wine couldn’t spill out of the top. His eyes were so bright that it was nearly painful to look at them.

            Or at least to look at them while knowing I don’t possess him, and might never do so. Lucius prepared to take his risk. As he had thought there would be, there was a hole in Potter’s argument.

            “But is it a treasure?” he murmured. “It is worthy of the intense value that he would place on it by keeping it to himself? How can he say that for certain, until someone else has looked at it?”

            Potter shrugged, a motion that flowed with rather than ruined the symmetry of his body. “Maybe he wouldn’t know. But to someone who loved his own work enough, that wouldn’t matter.”

            “And he might be a solipsist,” Lucius said, keeping his voice light enough that it might seem only musing, “gazing into a self-enclosed world and delighting his eyes with his own colors and no more. But I suppose no one would know that for certain.”

            Potter darted him a tiny, suspicious glance, as if he thought that Lucius was making fun of him but didn’t know why he would want to. Lucius smiled serenely into his eyes. He had to win Potter through seriousness, but, later, he could see enormous possibilities for teasing him.

            “He would know,” Potter answered at last, slowly. “He would still go out and interact with other people. He would create other works of art that they saw, and he would gain some estimate of his skill from that. I think you’re giving far too much credit to the idea that he wouldn’t extend his—his soul past the boundaries that the painting created for him, just because he chose not to share it.”

            “Once solipsism begins,” Lucius said, “it can stretch to encompass an individual’s whole life. I should know. I have known many of those who follow that philosophy. And to have the potential to change the world and to refuse to is, I think, worse than to never have that power.”

            “No painting has the potential to change the world,” Potter said.

            “Really? Why, then, did you bother asking Catham to create that cartoon that so scandalized the Wizengamot?” Lucius met Potter’s strangled half-denial with a gentle grin.

            “That wasn’t what I meant to say,” Potter complained. “Bloody wine is going to my brain.”

            Lucius showed his teeth, gently, to let Potter know that he didn’t believe a word of that for a moment.

            “All right, that wasn’t fair,” Potter said, with a roll of his eyes and a little smile Lucius was glad he had not gone to his grave without seeing. “It was bad wording on my part. I meant that not every painting has the potential to change the world. And if you’re right that no one can fully evaluate his own work without using outside eyes, then how would he know that that work of art could have changed things? Perhaps he’s spared the world a lot of ugliness, instead. Or at least a lot of bitter critical rows.”

            “Power should be used,” Lucius said. “Power of all kinds. To make art, to sway minds, to clear the vision of those who labor under a cloud. It is worth nothing and can do nothing when it lies locked away in a casket, let the casket be ever so jeweled.”

            “And what kind of power are you saying that I should exercise?”

            Lucius smiled. “I am glad that you are not always oblivious,” he said. “I am speaking of the power of your heart and your body, of course. Do you think that your fiancée would have asked you to make the vow you made?”

            Potter’s face darkened. He still set his wine down carefully, which Lucius appreciated. “I told you, that was all my idea. It had nothing to do with her.”

            “Your absurd decision,” Lucius said. “I remember. But still, do you think she would have demanded that you never share your bed or your heart with anyone again?”

            “No,” Potter said. “She was generous, and giving, and full of life.” He looked away, as though he assumed Lucius would use his grief as a weapon against him. “She would have married again herself, and she would have encouraged me to do the same thing if she had had time to before she died.”

            “Do you believe that sex is a source of unique power, so special that it must be protected?” Lucius asked.

            Potter turned back to stare at him. “What? Of course not. Maybe some people can get power and magic from sex, but I’ve never been one of them.”

            “Then why go to such lengths to protect it?” Lucius asked. “Why make that particular vow? Why not vow, instead, to never give another person that place in your heart that belongs to her? Why not assume that you could have sex with someone else?”

            Potter shrugged. “I don’t know.”

            Lucius blinked. He had suspected that the basis of Potter’s decision was irrational, but he had not expected him to so blithely admit it. “Then why make the choice?” he asked, as soon as he had his breath back again.

            “I want to ask you something for once,” Potter said. His eyes were beautiful even flickering with resentment. Lucius shook his head. Has there ever been anyone like him?

            “Oh, I see,” Potter said. “So you’re the only one who has the right to ask questions, then?”

            Lucius realized that Potter had taken his headshake as a sign that he would not submit to an interrogation. “Forgive me,” he answered as smoothly as he could. “I was responding to a thought of my own. Of course you may ask me.”

            “Good,” Potter said, and threw the words like javelins. “Why does it matter to you so much whether I have sex with you or not? Why should I break a promise, no matter how stupid, for your sake?”

            Lucius sighed softly. This was the position he had hoped to arrive in, but he had thought it would take at least two more weeks of maneuvering before Potter allowed him to obtain it.

            Since this was the evening to take risks, he thought that he would not let this opportunity pass him by.

            “I cannot tell you that,” he said. His voice was like softened jade, or he was sure Potter would have interrupted him at that point to laugh triumphantly. As it was, his mouth strained, but he kept silent. “I must show you. Will you permit me to?”

            Potter stared at him for a space that seemed as long as the interval between the time when Lucius had asked Narcissa to marry him and when he had received the answer. Then he nodded mutely.

            Lucius sat still a moment longer, perhaps to give Potter another chance to back away, perhaps because he still had a mental block against accepting his own plan. He did not know. Never before had he been so uncertain about his movements. But the time came when Potter would take the chance to back away, and that, Lucius could not bear.

            He leaned forwards and kissed Potter.

            He wanted badly to bring his hands into play, to smooth them along Potter’s jawline and cup the pulse that beat in his throat, to touch that hair in such a way that Potter would move helplessly into the touch, begging, arching his neck, whining under his breath. He could not. His hands remained on his knees, and he concentrated on answering Potter’s question with his lips and tongue alone.

*

            Harry had never had a kiss like it, and not just because it was his first kiss with a man.

            The tongue that swept along his lips. The eagerness that raged behind the kiss, so Harry knew he was an inch away from being pulled into Malfoy’s arms and devoured. The passion that made one white blaze of Malfoy’s face and his own senses.

            The traitorous quiver that passed through him, fired by longing and nervousness and surprise and fear.

            Harry tried to argue against that. It was only a kiss, for God’s sake. He’d had plenty of them from Ginny.

            But that was it. He’d had plenty of them from Ginny. Because of that, he’d thought he knew what kisses were like. But trying to judge Malfoy’s kisses by hers was as foolish as judging Ginny’s by that long-ago, wet brush of the lips with Cho. They were different people.

            There was no comparison.

            Harry had laid aside all loyalty to the idea of bodily pleasure long ago, when he had sealed Ginny’s tomb. He had been confident he could do so. After all, it wasn’t passion that made him in love with her. It was so much more than that, and he knew he would never be able to duplicate that experience with anyone else, and that it was ungrateful and stupid to try.

            Somehow, he had never managed to envision that an experience unlike that could exist, and yet be as absorbing.

            He could tell from that kiss that Malfoy had probably never meant to mean so much. He could see the expanse of the future that half-opened for him, trembling like a panel of fire-colored silk woven by the hands of the artist who called herself the Perilous Spider and always exhibited her works in a mask.

            It wasn’t Malfoy’s fault. He had said that he would show Harry why Harry’s refusal to have sex with him mattered, and he had.

            It was his. He had been overconfident, and now there was nothing he wanted so much in the world as he wanted to break his vow.

            And that would be mad and worse than mad. He was deceiving himself with the vision of everything that could be, because no kiss could ever give that much. And his promise of loyalty to Ginny should matter more than the thought of spending a night in someone’s bed.

            He broke roughly away from Malfoy and angled sideways out of his chair; he could hardly stand straight up without hitting Malfoy. He ran his fingers through his hair and tried not to laugh at himself, because then the screaming would start. He had to get control of himself—he had to—he had to hold onto it—

            “Mr. Potter,” Malfoy said, voice as gentle as a coiling python. Why shouldn’t he be? Harry thought. He’d won. “Have I frightened you?”

            “No,” Harry said, and his voice was harsh. But it was a start. He cleared his throat. “I’m the one who made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

            “What mistake have you made?” Malfoy had come closer, from the sound of his voice. It bothered Harry that his heart was pounding so hard he had no chance of hearing Malfoy’s footsteps. “Is there something I can do to soothe you?”

            Harry moved, because he knew that he would turn around again and try for Malfoy’s lips if that hand fell on his shoulder. Or maybe Malfoy’s throat.

            “I thought I could withstand your kiss,” he whispered. “I thought myself more romantic than I actually am.”

            The silence seemed to prove Malfoy puzzled. Harry didn’t intend to explain it further. He Summoned his cloak to him with a burst of wandless magic that proved how upset he was, and then walked out the front door of the Manor. Malfoy didn’t come after him, and Harry imagined that was the only reason he escaped with his dignity intact. He wanted too much to see what that mouth and those hands could do to him.

            I thought I was better than this. I thought I was actually the kind of person who could bury my desire and never feel it again.

            It was bitter, to know that he wasn’t and was just as human as anyone else.

            I was flying at a height, and I fell.

*

            Lucius stood where Potter had left him for long enough that Bell popped into the room to see if something was wrong. Lucius waved an absent hand, and the house-elf left again.

            “Well,” Lucius said finally. “That was quite interesting.”

            He called Bell, then, so that the elf might prepare a hot bath for him and some of the scented oil that would make dealing with the condition Potter’s dazed eyes had left him in more comfortable.

*

            k lave demo: Thank you! In this case, Harry is tripping Lucius up, but he doesn’t really realize it or know how to take advantage of Lucius’s pauses and hesitations the way he did in the books.

            Selene: Thank you! I’m deliberately making my writing more ornamental than usual in this story; glad you like it.

            purple-er: Thanks! Poor Draco. Things would go a lot better for him if he would stop being stupid.

            KillingProphet: Thanks so much! In the next chapter, Harry starts being more pro-active than he was in this one, though of course that’s partially going to contribute to carrying him closer to Lucius.
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Sympathy for the Predators