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Business Meetings	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21371 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Six—The Lair

            “It’s the third.”

            This time, the flunkey’s wet eyes had darted away from him. Harry had known why. He had smiled and nodded and resisted the temptation to draw his wand or crush the parchment of the report he was working on until the flunkey had shut the door behind him. And even then, he had smoothed out the parchment after a moment and gone on working, because he knew that someone would watch his rubbish for signs of such temper.

            He walked into Malfoy’s mansion the same way he always did when not wounded: hand not far from his wand, head half-inclined, eyes watching the shadows. He made it to the throne room without stopping, but he paused inside the doorway, the sight of another vampire on the dais striking him as heavily as a blow to the throat.

            Then he saw the way the vampire knelt, its head bowed in the way a dog might use when being scolded, and Malfoy’s long, white fingers sweeping back and forth against the vampire’s black hair, as bright as magnesium in the darkness. Malfoy still sat on the throne, and he was the one who had a slight sheen of blood on his fangs, the one whose head moved around, and the one whose eyes still looked the way they should, without a taint of another color.

            Only you would be relieved to see a vampire who’s fed recently, Harry thought, and released a sigh that he hoped would be soundless even to Malfoy’s ears. Perhaps Hermione had been right when she told him the other day that she thought the negotiator position might be making him more sympathetic to vampires, and not always in the good sense of the word.

            “Lord Malfoy,” he said, and tried to keep his voice quiet, as much out of respect for the kneeling vampire as for Malfoy. There was something about that utterly submissive arch of the neck that got to him. “I have something to speak to you about.”

            “The same subject I have to speak to you about, no doubt.” Malfoy gestured, his hand bending upwards with the grace of a swaying palm branch, and the kneeling vampire rose and bowed. Malfoy nodded to him, and he backed away from the throne, body still frozen in the half-bow. When he reached the stairs down from the throne, he took them as if he hovered on marionette strings, and never turned even when he reached the door.

            Harry lightly clenched his fists. He had known that Malfoy had killed Duncan, the member of his flock who had spied for the Ministry, and he had seen the unnatural grey in the eyes of the vampire who had opened the door for him a few months ago. But this was the first time he had actually seen Malfoy exercising his power over someone else.

            “It bothers you,” Malfoy said, and sniffed the air as he said it. What he smelled there made him freeze with his head on one side.

            Harry met his eyes and thought the arch of his neck this way really wasn’t that different from the arch of the other vampire’s as it knelt. “No,” he said. “It should, but it doesn’t.” He hesitated, then decided that he might as well say the thought bubbling behind his lips. It probably wouldn’t give him any peace until he did, anyway. “I—don’t think it’s too different from some of the Auror tricks that I use. The power I exercise.”

            “You have the power to imprison,” Malfoy said, and leaned back and crossed his legs on the arm of the throne. It was more than grace when he did it; he moved as if he didn’t have bones in his knees. Harry felt his throat dry out. He’s dead, he’s dead, but he doesn’t move like a corpse, he thought, which meant the thought hadn’t accomplished what it was meant to. “To kill. To hold someone indefinitely.”

            “There are laws about that,” Harry began, and Malfoy flicked a glance that slid over his face like an icicle bound to bare skin. Harry paused, and then added, “In theory. In practice, we do have the power to do that, yes, especially someone like me.”

            Malfoy laughed, a sound that got everywhere up and down Harry’s skin, like the claws of rats hooked beneath his shirt. “There is no one like you, Potter.”

            Harry held his breath for a count of three. The slight discomfort in his chest took his thoughts away from Malfoy’s laughter and reminded him what he was here for. He shook his head and settled into the chair that Malfoy kept ready for him. It was strange to think of anything in a vampire’s house as belonging to him, but this seemed to.

            Other things could, too.

            Harry clenched his jaw and held his breath for a count of six, this time. That was the kind of thought that would lead to other thoughts that would lead to actions like the one he had come here to discuss with Malfoy.

            Malfoy swung back upright and stared at him. “Speak,” he said.

            Harry stifled a brief burst of stupid gratitude, like a firework in his chest, that Malfoy could sense his emotions well enough to react like that. Yeah, it’s because he’s a vampire, they can all do that, get over it. “One of your flock attacked one of my Aurors,” he said quietly. “Dyerson. Young kid, just finding his feet. He obeyed the rules, I would swear. The vampire used the thrall on him.”

Malfoy didn’t fold his arms across his chest or hiss or snap or do anything else that Harry had thought he would do. He had carried mourning with him into the house, mourning he shouldn’t have had, the same kind of mourning he had used last month when he had thought Malfoy would toss him out or try to kill him or simply request someone else because Harry had killed his sire. He shouldn’t mourn if Malfoy grew angry about this, either. Dyerson was the innocent in this situation.

He would recover from the loss of blood. Eventually. It would be harder to recover from the marks of fangs in his throat. Those feeding scars usually didn’t go away, and would earn Dyerson taunts for years about being the kind of addicted idiot who sold his blood to vampires.

Malfoy said, “The vampire who attacked him is called Franklin. That was the one you saw in here just now. I was tasting him. I can see his memories that way. I know why he attacked Dyerson.”

Harry closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. Malfoy had refrained from attacking him before. That didn’t mean he always would, and Harry would be stupid to ask Malfoy to act against his nature. If Malfoy chose to do so, it was a gift, one he gave without the asking. “Why?”

“Because your Auror carried a potion in his bloodstream that would enchant any vampire as young and empty-headed as Franklin,” Malfoy said calmly. “Whether the Auror knew he’d been dosed by it, I don’t know. Franklin’s memories didn’t show enough clarity to be sure before the emotions invaded and he attacked to ease the hunger.”

            Harry leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He felt Malfoy shift, and wondered for a moment if he was exposing the line of his throat. But he had something else to think about, something even more important than Malfoy and keeping tabs on him.

            Strange to think that he could think that and mean it.

            “Yes,” he said at last. “I thought I heard—there was a rumor, months ago. They were developing a potion like that. I thought it was only a rumor.”

            “You should have reported it to me.” Malfoy’s voice whispered and dragged.

            “Yes,” Harry said. “I forgot about it, because it was before they made me your negotiator. But I should have.”

            Silence, silence that also whispered and dragged. Harry lowered his head to see Malfoy standing in front of him. He was too tired to start.

            “What?” he asked, rising to his feet. This was a mess. The Ministry would press for an immediate attack on Malfoy’s flock, and Harry didn’t know how he was supposed to stop it. His mind was distant, floating in a dark sea that he mostly pulled himself from when he came here. He had to concentrate on the reality of what Malfoy was and what his house was like, or he wouldn’t survive it.

            “You needn’t,” Malfoy said.

            “What?” Harry shook his head. “Speak to the Ministry? Go back to the Ministry?” Malfoy tipped his head forwards, as if to keep his throat from the fangs of another dominant vampire, and Harry sighed. “This was the job I signed up for. If not this exact one, then one like it, when I became an Auror.”

            Malfoy glided away from him, and turned his back. Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. He could ask to know the answer, but if Malfoy wanted him to know why he was upset, he could also say it. And he was probably upset because his flock was now in greater danger than ever. Sending an Auror out with that potion in his bloodstream was asking for trouble with the vampires, and given how large Malfoy’s flock was, there was a greater chance that the attacker would come from it.

            Harry had agreed to become negotiator in the first place to prevent that trouble from springing up between Malfoy’s vampires and the Ministry.

            He’d failed.

            He swallowed against the acid taste of failure in his throat and half-bowed his head to Malfoy. “I’ll bring you a solution soon, I promise. May I come back before the third if I need to, to speak to you?”

            Malfoy stood so still that Harry would have missed the tiny tilt of his head, if he hadn’t been looking for it. If he could look anywhere but Malfoy, as the trouble receded from his mind and he thought about it again.

            If Malfoy hadn’t brought his head down to protect his throat, if it had been a nod…

            Malfoy had given things to him, advice and invitations and stares. Harry had given back what he could, but he had never done this. He stepped nearer Malfoy anyway, moving the way he imagined a deer would when sneaking through a pack of sleeping wolves, and rested his hand on Malfoy’s shoulder.

            Denser bone than a human’s, he thought. Colder flesh. But something that made him close his eyes and have to fight the impulse to rest there, rest head and hand and burdens.

            “Thank you,” he whispered. “That you might want me here, that you might offer to shelter me from the Ministry even with as much as it would cost your flock, means a lot.”

            Malfoy glanced back at him, twisting his head around without moving his body. His neck appeared boneless when he did that, Harry thought, and the muscles his stomach contracted with an emotion he would not identify, because he didn’t want to.

            “You don’t understand everything,” Malfoy said.

            “No,” Harry said simply. “I don’t understand why you’ve offered me all you have, and I don’t understand everything that I’ve done in response, and I don’t understand how to keep your flock safe.”

            Malfoy showed his fangs. “And I don’t understand why you go back.”

            Harry shook his head and lifted his hand. His skin yearned for the cold he had touched the way it sometimes yearned for the warmth of a human lover when he moved away from one in the same bed. He swallowed and flexed his hand and ignored, once again, the bending and bowing of muscles in his body that had no business doing that.

            “I do my job,” he said. “That’s still most important.”

            “My senses,” Malfoy said, “are keen enough to hear unspoken words.”

            He did not gesture, he did not move, he did nothing but stare. Harry was the one who turned his back and retreated from the room, not-running deliberately, his head up and his blank stare fixed on the walls.

            Unspoken words. Like “for now.”

*

            unneeded: Yes, Harry thought that an insult of that kind against Draco needed vengeance, whether or not Draco agreed. And oh, yes. Draco is having trouble sharing even now, with the Ministry.

            polka dot: Thanks. This is probably the closest I’ll come to doing a Halloween fic this year.

            SP777: He doesn’t know yet.

            AlterEquis: No, he shouldn’t have punched him?

            lividfire: Thank you!
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Business Meetings