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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Six—More Old Friends

            The building that Hermione took him to stay in was dim and gloomy. Harry wrinkled his nose as he opened the door of the room he’d been assigned. Sure, it had a bed, a bathroom, a desk and chair and an actual window, but it still smelled as if it had been shut up for years.

            Hermione turned around just in time to catch the expression on his face, of course, and she didn’t seem to share, at all, the sensibilities that made him wear it. She gave him a poisonous smile. “Did you expect that you would have a good room when you’ve been foolish enough to oppose my employer?” she asked. “Really?”

            Harry shook his head. “Do you admire her or not?” he asked, ducking into the room. He could cope with the dust by using Cleaning Charms, he thought. He should save his strongest opposition for those moments when his distaste could make an actual difference. “Sometimes you sound as though you do, or at least admire her power, and other times you make her sound like part of the establishment that keeps Muggleborns oppressed.”

            Hermione didn’t respond, but the door slammed. Harry raised his eyebrows at it and set about cleaning off the dust from the table and chair. When he was settled in it, he looked out the window.

            It was enchanted, he saw at once, reflecting a peaceful lakeside scene with people sailing back and forth in small boats. It was pleasant to look at, but it told him nothing, except that the Ministry had once spent some money on this building. He wondered if they’d ceased to keep it up when they stopped having such a flood of advocates and witnesses after the trials.

            The Malfoys must be the last, or nearly the last, he thought, and that accorded with the memories of his own world.

            He didn’t have anything to unpack. He suspected that he would have to find food and clothes somewhere in this world, but so far he wasn’t hungry. He went to clean off the bed and examine the bathroom. It was an utterly ordinary room, and if Harry had hoped to find any clues to Discipula’s evil plans in there, he was foiled. Then he told himself that of course he hadn’t meant to find anything. He’d just wanted to look, that was all.

            Someone knocked on the door. It was an utterly dispirited knock, and Harry went to answer it wondering if he would find a house-elf there. He didn’t know if he could cope with another melancholy house-elf, after Dobby’s death.

            Ron was standing there.

            Harry had to stare, just the way he had with Hermione. Ron was taller and thinner than he was in Harry’s own world, his shaggy red hair unkempt. He stared past Harry’s shoulder at the wall and immediately began mumbling what sounded like a generic speech of greeting. He had named several “activities” around the building and had started praising the food before Harry roused himself.

            “You’re a Weasley,” he said. “I can tell from the hair. What’s your name?”

            Ron blinked and looked at him as if Harry had done something that forced him to pay attention, although nothing interesting enough to lift the look of boredom. “Ron Weasley,” he said. “The youngest one.”

            Harry winced back from the bitterness in the depths of his voice and said, “I thought there was a daughter.”

            “Yes, once,” Ron said. “She died in her first year at Hogwarts.”

            Harry leaned against the wall, not able to stand when he felt as though all the wind was knocked out of him. Did that mean Lucius had succeeded with the diary plot in this world? But then it seemed Voldemort would have come back in Neville’s second year, and Harry didn’t know how Neville could have stopped him. Everyone certainly spoke and acted as though his victory was recent.

            “My name is Harry Evans,” Harry said, keeping his false name just in time. He didn’t know how many Potters survived here, if anyone did, but Ron was of a family that might know them, since they’d been pure-bloods. “I’m a stranger in town, and I’m beginning to feel just how much of a stranger I am. I don’t know anything I should know, since my family mostly keeps out of contact with the wizarding world. Would you be averse to telling me the most important events of the last several years?”

            Ron stepped forwards at that and stared at him. “Granger said something about how you were the barrister for the Malfoys,” he said. “You do know that they don’t deserve to be defended, right? Lucius Malfoy killed my sister.”

            Harry swallowed as that confirmed his suspicions. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

            Ron seemed to wake up a little for the first time, studying him with cooler eyes than Harry was used to. Even awake and alert, Harry thought, he had almost no passion. That was so different from the hot-tempered Ron he was used to that he winced again, wondering what in the world had happened here. Of course he had already thought that Neville was unlikely to make close friends in Gryffindor the way Harry had, but why had his best friends’ lives turned out so much for the worse? They had still survived the war.

            Maybe I’m here for more reasons than just defending the Malfoys.

            “I’ll come in and tell you,” Ron said, nodding slowly, judiciously. “And then you can tell me whether you really want to keep defending those murderers.”

*

            Harry spent even longer under the shower that morning, trying to warm away the chill of having seen such a different Ron and Hermione right in succession. Then he shook his head and turned the water off.

            It was dreams. Only dreams. Yes, he had to admit that their intensity and clarity was unnatural, but then again, he had already admitted that they were probably the result of a miscast curse. As long as it did him no more harm than this, Harry thought he didn’t have much to complain about.

            He had no reason to let these dreams influence his interaction with other people—Malfoy, Ron, Hermione, Neville, none of them. Sure, he might look at them with some more speculation now, because he had seen a vision of them in another world, but still, it didn’t mean he had to be kinder or harsher with real people because of what he had seen in his dreams. In fact, it would be fatal if he did, because they wouldn’t know why he was acting that way.

            He had to keep the two lives, one awake, one asleep, separate. When he began to fail in that, he didn’t know what would happen.

            Once again, Hermione called him through the wall, and once again, Harry hurried because he knew they would be late to their case otherwise. But he sat at the table that morning and watched Ron and Hermione’s faces for nuances he wasn’t sure he could see.

            Would Hermione really be that different if she hadn’t been in Gryffindor with them? And why hadn’t she wanted to be brave in that world, instead of a follower of the rules? Had she read fewer books before she went to Hogwarts, or more? Had she been miserable in Ravenclaw, or proud? Harry had no idea how that House in general felt about Muggleborn people.

            And Ron…Would losing Ginny have transformed him that way? But Harry couldn’t think that even Ginny’s death would make him so hard and uncaring. Towards the Malfoys, yes, but towards everyone? The Ron he had seen in the dream wasn’t a man with a grudge, but a man who simply didn’t care.

            “Something wrong, mate?”

            Harry started and realized that he had been staring at Ron across the table instead of eating his breakfast. He cleared his throat and applied himself to his food. “No,” he muttered. “Sorry. I had a bit of a rough night. Strange dreams.”

            He could feel the significant glance that Ron and Hermione exchanged, and grimaced. They were always waiting for his visions to return, although Harry insisted that they’d died with Voldemort. Hermione seemed to think he had a natural gift of some kind and wanted him to get tested. Ron simply worried that their happiness was too good to last and it would turn out Voldemort was alive after all.

            “Tell me about the dreams,” Hermione said in a patient voice. She didn’t lean forwards and rap a hand on the table in front of Harry to get him to pay attention to her, the way she usually did, either. “Are they like visions? Do you feel as if you’re standing in the presence of the people you see? Have you confirmed anything that happened with articles the next day?”

            Harry shook his head. “No, Hermione. How would I do that? I’m not dreaming about the future. I’m dreaming about—things that could have been.” Maybe he could at least tell them that, although he still didn’t want them interfering and trying to take the dreams away. It was very hard to lie to his best friends, and Harry wondered how he had managed to do it a few times in the past. It helped that there was usually at least one person in on the secret, like Dumbledore knowing about the Horcruxes during their sixth year. And he’d told them that in the end.

            “That’s right!” Hermione snapped her fingers. “You said something the other day about Neville being the Boy-Who-Lived, and what we thought he would have been like. Did you dream about something else? Someone else?”

            Harry hesitated only a second. He didn’t want to mix the real people and the dream people up, but what if talking to the real people could help him understand the dream people? It was at least worth a try. “Yes. You had been in Ravenclaw and you were colder and more academic and bitter.”

            A sad smile played around Hermione’s lips. “Well, I didn’t have many friends in primary school,” she murmured. “I put that down to reading all the time and to magic, later, when I found out about magic, but I reckon I might have been the same as this woman you describe if I went to Hogwarts and didn’t eventually make friends.”

            “They were stupid to despise you,” Ron said, though Harry noted he stuffed a scone into his mouth, as if to carefully diminish the impact of his words. “They should have realized that having someone smarter around is a good thing. You can copy from their homework, for example.”

            Hermione rolled her eyes. “Ron, it wasn’t that kind of bitterness Harry is talking about,” she said. “If I went on thinking I was superior and that was the only reason people wouldn’t make friends with me, I might have ended up the way he described because I would feel isolated.”

            Harry wasn’t sure that was the answer—what in the world would have made the Hermione he knew work for someone like Discipula?—but he nodded anyway. He glanced at Ron. “And you were bitter, too,” he added. “You looked as if you were indifferent to everything around you. But I dreamed about Ginny dying because of Tom Riddle, too. So I don’t know if you were bitter because of that.”

            Ron sighed and stared at his hands. Harry watched him with some concern, and so did Hermione. Ron usually had a glib answer to most things ready nowadays. He must be thinking deeply if he didn’t.

            “When I was a boy,” Ron said lowly, “I felt like I was part of a pack of Weasleys. Nothing made me different from my brothers. I told you that,” he added, looking up at Harry. “Ginny was the girl, and Bill was the smart one, and Charlie was the dangerous one, and Perry was the proper one, and the twins had their jokes. I didn’t know what would make me stand out. It made me feel a little better when you chose me to be your friend. Especially when you chose me over Malfoy.”

            Harry smiled and nodded. He wondered for a moment if that was the only source of Ron’s problems in the dreams. How would he feel when he realized that Harry would carry forwards his commitment to defending the Malfoys?

            You’re thinking of the dream Ron as if he was real.

            But Harry couldn’t shake the conviction that it might be both better and simpler if he acted like the dream Ron, and all the others, too, were real. At least it would confuse him less when he came back into the dream. He couldn’t take the Malfoys’ plight seriously and refuse to take the others seriously, too.

            “Why would you dream that Ginny was dead?” Ron asked then.

            “And that we were different?” Hermione added.

            Harry gave some vague answer that let them think what they wished—that it was a coincidence, or magic, or the result of the gift Hermione was convinced he had—and they were satisfied. Harry, meanwhile, wondered what he should study today. Was there anything in his law books that would tell him how he should act around Ron and Hermione in the dream? Perhaps he should look up the way that Muggleborns had started winning legal rights in the wizarding world, something Hermione had been nagging him to study forever.

*

            “Potter!”

            Harry jumped. He wondered for a moment how the voice had got through the thick wards that wrapped his building, and then remembered that he and Hermione hadn’t wrapped the spells as thickly around the windows as elsewhere. If a fire started outside or someone attacked an innocent trying to get them to respond, then Hermione wanted to know about it.

            Harry leaned out and saw Malfoy standing on the street beneath him, staring up at Harry with his hands on his hips. Harry blinked at him, his thoughts scattering in a thousand different directions. All he could remember at the moment was what he had just read about Quintus Malfoy, one of those who had fought against the legal restriction of Muggle-hunting. Did Malfoy share his ancestor’s opinions?

            And then Harry remembered that he and Malfoy had been scheduled to practice Quidditch at four this afternoon, and he sighed. “Ah, shit,” he said. Malfoy was going to be insufferable over this.

            “Are you going to let me in or not, Potter? Unless apologizing to me in person is as unimportant to you as the game evidently is.”

            Harry winced. He thought there was real hurt underlying Malfoy’s tone, but that made him no less annoyed by the words—more annoyed, really, because now he would probably feel like a berk if he reacted to them. He shook his head and yelled back down, “I forgot. It’s not like it’s a deliberate insult.”

            Malfoy looked at him without a reply, his eyes narrowing, and then gestured with his head at the street around them. “Do you really want this to be public?” he asked. A few of the passersby who sometimes hung around Harry’s office when there was no other entertainment in the immediate neighborhood had started to drift over.

            Harry sighed and lifted the wards on the front door. “I’ve made a place for you to come in,” he said. “Go around. Alone.”

            Malfoy took the nuance, nodded, and vanished. Harry heard the sounds of a brief struggle as someone else tried to come in, but Malfoy must have successfully fought them off, because he appeared in the office by himself.

            He took a moment to study the books that lined the shelves and flowed over the desks and sat piled on the floor. Harry had never thought much about it before, but now he suddenly realized how messy the office could appear in a stranger’s eyes. He tugged self-consciously at his shirt collar and tried to make sure there was no dust on his robes without Malfoy noticing that he was checking.

            “What did you want, besides an apology?” he asked. “I can practice with you tomorrow, I promise. I just got caught up in the books and forgot.”

            “Do you always forget your promises, Harry?” Malfoy leaned against one of the sturdier piles of books, a sardonic smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “Or only the ones that you don’t really want to keep?”

            “I made a commitment,” Harry said shortly. His irritation was increasing, and he would have liked to flick his wand and hurl Malfoy through the window again. He would have made sure he landed safely, of course. “I’m embarrassed I forgot it. I’ll be on time tomorrow. But you’re acting as though you don’t want to practice with me today, so what else do you want?”

            “To see where you work,” Malfoy said easily, and then turned and began to wander as if he hadn’t seen and evaluated the whole office in one glance a few minutes earlier. “Not many people get that privilege.”

            Harry made a face at his back. He had to wonder if Malfoy knew how to speak sincerely. His drawl and his sarcasm would change a compliment into an insult no matter how he tried to phrase it.



Then Harry paused. I wonder if I’ve mistaken any of what he’s said to me, because of that.

            Oblivious to his thoughts, Malfoy snorted and then sneezed. A cloud of dust rose up in front of him. When Malfoy drew his wand and cast a Cleaning Charm, Harry thought of the way he had reacted to the dust in the room of his dream. Why notice it there, he wondered, and not here, where he spent part of every day?

            “This place is a pigsty, Potter,” Malfoy muttered. “I certainly hope that you keep house better than you keep office.”

            “Since when would you concern yourself with that?” Harry sniped back. “Angling for an invitation?”

            “That’s what you could do, in fact,” Malfoy said, turning around again and smiling at him. “Take me out to dinner.”

            Harry blinked. “What does dinner have to do with housekeeping skills?” he asked. He thought it was a reasonable question, but Malfoy gave him a pointed, mocking glance of the kind that he used to use in Hogwarts, and which, Harry discovered, still had the power to make him burn. He clenched his fists and scowled.

            “I have to wonder about many of your skills,” Malfoy said. “Oh, yes, you’re good on a broom. But can you cook? How neat are you? What good are you at law if you can’t even see that the books you depend on to teach you need dusting?”

            Harry scowled at him. “Look,” he said. “We’re—we’re not friends.”

            “We’re friends enough that I trust you not to throw me off my broom several hundred feet above the ground,” Malfoy said easily. “If that’s not friendship, what is it?”

            “I don’t know,” Harry said, and had to turn his head away, because otherwise he would grin, and he didn’t think Malfoy needed the encouragement. “I told you before that you’re weird, that you don’t fit in with my life. And sometimes you act as though you need my friendship and me to train with you, and sometimes you act as if you don’t care whether I like you or not. Why? What makes the difference?”

            Malfoy was silent, which Harry hadn’t expected. He turned back and found Malfoy leaning on the wall, face silent and thoughtful. He sucked on his lower lip and then studied Harry for a moment before nodding.

            “I find that you bring my childhood back to me,” Malfoy said. “And sometimes I act as though I was a child again, because of that. Then, too, I see the way you act now, and the ways you’ve changed, and I want to aspire to that. I wasn’t your friend once, but perhaps I can be now. It tugs me back and forth. You tug me back and forth. You always have. There’s something else I want,” he added, in a tone that made it seem as if it wasn’t relevant. “But I know I can’t have it.”

            Harry shook his head. “Well, at least that’s opened up a new side of you to me,” he said. “I thought you never hesitated if there was something you wanted. I thought you always took it.”

            Malfoy’s eyes kindled. He looked like he was about to get into a massive row with Harry, and Harry was glad. He didn’t want to be discussing and listening to uncomfortable things, things that made him wonder if he had ever known Malfoy at all and if he should have done more to save him.

            “Well,” Malfoy said, “are you encouraging me to go ahead and take this thing that I want from you?”

            “If you think you can,” Harry said. He was already prepared to defend his wand, if that was what Malfoy would try to take, and his Invisibility Cloak and his broom weren’t here.

            Malfoy stepped forwards. Harry felt his eyes widen and his excitement begin to peak. Was Malfoy really going to duel him? Harry started to think of ways he could do that without destroying half the books.

            Malfoy came closer still, and reached out, and the next thing Harry knew, a tongue like cool water slipped into his mouth.

            Harry gasped around it, and then stood there like a statue for a few stupid moments while Malfoy slowly, languorously, tasted him. That was the only word Harry could find for what he was doing. He could have made it into a full-on snog like the ones that Ron and Hermione still shared; he could have driven into Harry’s mouth and bit him to punish him for his sins in the past. But instead, he tasted, as if it really mattered to him what Harry tasted like, as if that would help him to some kind of decision.

            Harry finally came to his senses and wrenched away. Malfoy had a firm enough grip on Harry’s face and arm that he kept kissing for a second after Harry had woken up. Then he stepped away and grinned at Harry.

            “You told me to take what I wanted,” he said. His voice was lower, his lips swollen. Harry hated to think about the cause. “So I did.”

            “That’s—stupid, Malfoy,” Harry said, when he could talk. “You wanted that? Why in the world? Why would you care about something like that?”

            “Because I’m still being tugged back and forth, but I’m also learning a new way of being, thanks to you.” Malfoy tugged his shirt back into place and then nodded briskly to Harry, as though there was nothing else he needed to do to make things normal again. “I wanted to share that new way of being with you. That was the best way to do it. Now. Dinner?” He turned away and walked to the top of the stairs.

            Harry spluttered behind him. “You want to—to date me, or something?”

            Malfoy turned back to regard him with wide, luminous eyes. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Not for certain. This will help me decide. Where are we going? No, wait,” he continued. “I’ll choose the restaurant. We both know that you don’t have many skills, after all, and I don’t want it to turn out that choosing a restaurant is another of those you lack.”

            He left, and for all Harry’s impulse to kick something, there was nothing to do in the end but follow him.

*

            polka dot: Harry thinks she would have, which is why he’s so puzzled.

            SP777: Well, you were right one out of three, at least! Harry might not hit the wall so hard now that he’s met Ron.

            Clau: It’s possible, but since Harry hasn’t yet met anyone intimately associated with his parents in that way, he might have escaped detection so far. And I personally think that resemblances between people are often prepared for by prior knowledge; without thinking that Harry is James’s son, the similarity might escape unremarked.

            So far, Harry has been too busy dealing with the dreams to deal with the source of the dreams, if that makes sense.

            MlleKathy: Thanks so much! I hope you continue to like it.
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Sleepless