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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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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seven—Learning to Help

            Draco thought about not answering the door when he realized that Potter had come back. He was only knocking, not leaning on the wards with his magic. Draco had the perfect excuse for curling back up in his bed and going to sleep.

            Except that he was tired of pretending to sleep, and also of lying still and staring up at the ceiling, which was his usual method of dealing with depression. He flung the covers back, gripped his wand, and sent his mind speeding along the network of wards towards the front doors.

            Potter seemed to be the same Potter. When he realized Draco didn’t intend to answer the door, he stepped back, conjured himself a chair, and sat down. But this time, he ripped his fingers through his hair and muttered savagely to himself. Draco had no spells that would let him hear what someone was saying near his doors, as opposed to seeing what they were doing. He violently wished, at that particular moment, that he did.

            Something must have gone wrong when he went to confront the Potter I know.

            Draco bit his lip. He wished he could stop caring. He wished he could stop thinking about what his life might be like if Potter kept his promises and really helped Draco to bear his grief and emerge from his house.

            But he couldn’t stop doing either, and he had grown tired of self-deception even before Potter showed up at his door.

            He snapped his consciousness fully back to his body, and dressed, darting nervous glances at the mirror. He had no idea how Potter would react to the sight of him. He had been patient and calm so far, but he seemed upset now, and it could be that he was upset about how Draco had treated him the last time they’d seen each other.

            At the same time, what else could he have done? He had to decide if he could trust Potter or not, and there were so many magical ways of fooling someone that he had needed to investigate them all.

            Or only the Veritaserum. That would have forced him to tell you right away if he was on Polyjuice or using glamours to disguise his face.

            Draco pushed his own thoughts away. He didn’t want to think about that right now. In fact, he was pretty bloody tired of thinking altogether, of the endless questions that chased themselves through his head and his endless doubts where Potter was concerned. When he was with Potter, he felt more relaxed and happy than he had in a long time. At a distance from him, he couldn’t help deciding that the happiness was a delusion and that nothing was ever going to rescue him.

            I know which way I prefer to feel.

            It was terrifying to embrace something that might not last simply because it made him feel good, but Draco couldn’t see that immuring himself in his house and hanging suspended in the midst of paralyzing doubts forever was a better choice.

*

            Harry scrubbed his fingers through his hair, in the hopes that irritating his scalp would make his thoughts leap faster and thus cause them to make more sense. So far, it wasn’t helping, but he kept hoping that it would. He scratched faster.

            The first flush of his anger was gone, and so he had to wonder if he should do something to help the other Harry.

            He wanted to. The very thought that he could have become that person made him feel sick and faint, and he did pity the other Harry from the bottom of his heart. As he had told Draco, pity wasn’t the best emotion to begin the process of helping someone else with, but sometimes it was the only thing possible.

            But a truth the Mind-Healers had drummed into his head when he was going to St. Mungo’s for treatment also recurred to him: You cannot help someone who absolutely does not want to be helped. That is the reason we accept only the willing. We won’t be responsible for someone who starts out wanting to remain exactly the same, fails the tests on purpose, and then blames us.

            The other Harry certainly didn’t act like someone who wanted to be helped, and Harry didn’t know of any successful case where a person had been dragged into healing kicking and screaming. Even worse, he wasn’t an experienced Mind-Healer, who might be able to manage it.

            “Potter?”

            And for now, it’s best to concentrate on the person that you can help. Harry took a deep breath and pushed his hair out of his eyes, then stood up with a faint smile for Draco. He was leaning against his front door, brow wrinkled as if he didn’t know whether or not he should interrupt Harry’s private mourning. “Hullo,” he said. “I know that I didn’t stay away as long as I thought I would.”

            “I was unaware that there was a length of time agreed upon,” Draco murmured. He hesitated, then stepped out of the door and walked towards Harry. His hair was rumpled, as though he’d spent some time in bed. It reminded Harry of the first day he’d come to the house, and he smiled. Draco returned the smile tentatively. “What happened? Where did you go?”

            “To see the other version of myself and try to learn what he’d done to you,” Harry answered. “And what made him such a right wanker in the first place.”

            “Did you learn?” Draco had come to a halt and stuck his hands in his pockets. His shoulders were hunched, as if he believed that he was about to be rejected in favor of the other Harry.

            “I did,” Harry said. “And I’ve decided that it’s nothing I can help him with right now.” He walked straight up to Draco, hesitated a moment when an indescribable shadow flickered across his face, and then reached boldly for his right hand. “I’d like to help you instead.”

            Draco licked his lips, and said, “I don’t know how to do this. I haven’t had any friends since my parents died and Gregory rejected me. I’ll make a right hash of it.” His left hand opened and then relaxed. His right one twitched spasmodically in Harry’s hold, as if he were trying to reach out and grasp an invisible rope that would haul him out of deep water.

            “I’ll do what I can to keep you from making a right hash of it, then.” Harry smiled at him. “And Gregory? Gregory Goyle?”

            Draco tried to withdraw, but Harry held on to his hand and forced it open again when it almost clenched into a fist. After he had lavished attention to Draco’s palm and fingers in silence for perhaps five minutes, Draco closed his eyes and let out a loud, shuddering breath. “Yes. He blamed me for leaving Vincent behind in the Fiendfyre. But I didn’t,” he added, loudly, as if to convince a doubting audience. “I would never do that. I didn’t have the time to grab him when you—when Potter snatched me up. But Gregory didn’t believe that. He claimed that he saw, and I had plenty of time. I didn’t save him because of pure selfishness and jealousy, he says.”

            “That’s the place to start, then.” Harry kept his voice soft and low, watching as Draco relaxed. “Why don’t we go talk to Goyle and explain that you’d like his friendship again? It sounds like his rejection really hurt you.”

            Draco’s face hardened. “I did try to talk to him,” he said shortly. “I told you, he rejected me. When he met my words with curses, I didn’t see the point of trying.”

            Harry winced, thinking of the way he had given up on the other Harry without even curses. But that’s only for a while and only until you see some way of helping him, he told himself firmly. Stop thinking about it. If you blame yourself for it completely, then you exonerate him completely, and I think he’s already had enough versions of himself doing that. “I’m with you this time,” he said. “We’ll talk to him.” Draco gave a little pull on the hand that Harry held, but didn’t complain verbally. Harry smiled at him. “What can it hurt?”

            “My skin?” Draco asked in a flat tone, but when Harry pressed him for the Apparition coordinates to the Goyle home, he gave them without hesitation. Harry wrapped an arm around Draco’s shoulders and drew him close for a Side-Along Apparition.

            Just having Draco this close made Harry feel warm and contented. And, more than that, anchored. The goal he’d been seeking for the last two years without being able to define it was in sight now. He wanted to help people with their mental health. He thought the same thing would continue being true even when he went back to his own universe.

            But for the moment, he wanted to help Draco. And Draco was helping him as well, arousing his passion and stopping his drifting.

            With a smile, Harry drew his wand, closed his eyes, concentrated, and made them vanish.

*

            Draco looked up at the Goyles’ massive house and barely managed to restrain a shiver. It looked like it was made out of one huge boulder. Unlike the Malfoy ancestors, who loved marble, the Goyle ones had favored granite. Draco eyed the huge arched doorway with resignation and remembered with burning clarity the words Gregory had hurled at him the last time he came here.

            Selfish. Jealous.

            Neither of those was true, but the more Draco argued, the more certain Greg had become. And Draco couldn’t stand forever outside his house pleading and waving his hands, not when he had his own pride to salvage and his own life to live. He felt his nostrils flare, and glanced sideways at Potter. “You’re sure this is such a good idea?” he muttered.

            “Yes.” Potter had his head lifted, his bright eyes darting across the façade of the house. What he noticed about it, Draco had no idea—only that he would take those facts and fit them somehow into his strange tilted world-view that was so hard to second-guess. “I know a lot of people have a dread of these confrontations, of trying to repair mistakes and misunderstandings.” He turned his head and gave Draco an astonishingly sweet smile. “I’ve found that the reality is never as horrible as the anticipation. Come on.” And he went striding up the long, gray path that wound between tangled green walls of hedge to the doors.

            Draco shuddered and followed. He kept a careful eye on the hedges. The last time he was here, Gregory had turned them into weapons—swords, tridents, knives—and set them on him. He still bore a few scars on his shoulders and chest from them.

            Right next to the scars Potter gave you in sixth year.

            Draco studied the man walking ahead of him and wondered if he had given those same scars to his version of Draco Malfoy. According to what he had said under the Veritaserum, their two universes had been one recently, so he must have. Draco bit his lips and tried to decide how he felt about an injury to a version of himself—but to a version of himself he had never met.

            Oblivious to his insecurity, Potter reached the doors. He studied them for a moment, then grinned. He drew his wand. Draco braced himself for Potter to start drawing flowers and bright sparkly letters on Gregory’s doors the way he had on Draco’s, but instead, he whipped his wand in a flourish over his head and then brought it down in a slashing motion.

            A gap appeared between the doors, destroying their perfect symmetry. At once, wards sprang into motion, crying out and flickering on and off like a maelstrom of yellow and pink light. Draco stared. Such a simple spell shouldn’t have set off that many alarms. He knew the Goyles were proud of their home, but really, spoiling its symmetry was enough to get their attention?

            “I recognized some of the wards they were using,” Potter said, grinning wildly when he saw Draco looking at him. “Beauty wards. They’re designed to alert the house-elves whenever dirt builds up in a certain area or a wound occurs to the house.” He shrugged modestly. “I thought doing something like this would draw their attention and help to convince your friend of our non-hostile intent. After all, I could have used a much more powerful spell that would have inflicted real damage.”

            Draco chose to shake his head. “I don’t think Gregory will be convinced that I’m not hostile no matter what you do,” he muttered.

            “Let’s just see, shall we?” Potter asked, as the doors swung open and two house-elves sprang outside to examine the gap and decide what to do about it.

            When they saw Draco and Potter, they paused and stared, confounded. The one on the right pulled on his ears and said, “Master Malfoy is not being welcome here. Master Goyle said.” He looked dolefully at Potter. “And Master Harry Potter is not being a usual guest, and we has no orders about him. Oh dear, oh dear.”

            “If you’d just tell Gregory Goyle that we’d like to speak to him,” Potter said cheerfully.

            “Master Malfoy must be waiting off the grounds,” said the elf, with a low bow and a flapping of its fingers at the same time.

            “But he’s with me, and you said that you had no orders concerning me,” said Potter. “Together, we make a unit you don’t have any orders about either. Both of us are waiting on the grounds. Go ask Gregory Goyle if he’ll speak to us. The unit of Draco and Harry,” he added, with a relish that made Draco look at him speculatively.

            For long moments, the house-elf tried to work this out. His companion was busy smoothing the gap by adjusting the way the doors hung from their hinges, using almost imperceptible bursts of magic. The other elf banged his head on the doors, tugged on his ears again, and then said, in a deep, doleful tone, “Whimsy will ask.”

            “Thank you, Whimsy.” Potter nodded as if the elf were doing him a courtesy instead of acting under orders before Whimsy disappeared. Then he glanced around and up at the house and gave a theatrical shiver. “Gloomy place, isn’t it?”

            “The Goyles have always been like that,” Draco muttered. He hesitated, then stepped up to Potter. “Listen, if Gregory comes out and starts flinging curses, then you can leave. There’s no reason for both of us to risk our skins.”

            Potter stared at him, his mouth open. Draco stared back in some frustration. I’ve finally managed to surprise him, and as usual, I have no notion of how I did it.

            “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Potter said at last, in a grave tone, “because it’s so very stupid.”

            “But why?” Draco shook his head and stopped himself from running his hand through his hair just in time. He didn’t want to appear disheveled in front of Gregory. Too much out of the ordinary, and he was likely to decide that this was a trick. “Even if you want to help me, that doesn’t include taking a wound for me.”

            “Of course it does,” Potter said, blinking at him. “The Mind-Healers I went to were ready to restrain me if necessary, and they could have been hurt doing that. Some of them dueled with me to relieve my tension. That could have hurt them. A few provoked me to magical rages because they thought I needed to learn how to control my temper and learn the difference between something worth getting angry over and something stupid that I allowed myself to snap apart over without sufficient provocation. They could have been hurt doing that. I want to help you, Draco, and that doesn’t include running away the moment it might get a little hard.”

            Draco didn’t get the chance to retort—and he wasn’t sure which of the many thoughts swirling through his head he would have picked to say, anyway—because the doors opened and Gregory stepped out onto the front stoop and stared at them mistrustfully.

            Draco’s heart tightened. He hadn’t thought about the way that two years would have changed Gregory, but of course they had. He was taller now, with a more looming presence than Draco remembered his own father having. He had long dark hair that he wore tied back with a single leather thong, the way that some of the older Death Eaters had worn it. His eyes were dark and hard, with what looked like a glazed sheen of painful experience. His hands formed into fists as he watched them; Draco noticed scars and burn marks and calluses on those hands that hadn’t been present two years ago.

            I’ve missed him.

            Maybe Gregory and Vince had never been Draco’s best friends in the ways that Granger and Weasley were Potter’s best friends, but they had still come with on him expeditions to steal food from the kitchens, to play pranks, to make up secret jokes that the rest of Slytherin would go mad trying to figure out. They had practiced spells with him. Draco had lost count of the number of times he had explained Potions to them. That was important. Such things made a bond between people.

            Death had severed the bond in one direction. Draco hadn’t realized until this moment how much he hadn’t wanted choice to sever it in the other.

            He stepped forwards, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Hullo, Gregory,” he said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

            Gregory opened his mouth, and then glared at Potter and shut it again. “Not in front of him,” he said. “What are you doing, flaunting the way you survived at me? No. We’re going to go behind the house and talk.”

            Potter stirred. Draco reached out, put a hand on his arm, and shook his head. “If he wanted to murder me, then he would do it in front of you,” he said, hoping as he spoke that he was correct and Gregory hadn’t changed that much. “I’ll be fine. This is something I need to do on my own.”

            Potter looked at him with wide, earnest eyes when he said those last words, and Draco tried to muster up a smile that might convince him. Potter stared at him for a time that seemed to stretch until Draco could imagine Gregory giving up and going back into the house. Then Potter nodded and clapped him on the shoulder.

            “I think there are things that everyone has to face by themselves,” he said. “The Mind-Healers who helped me knew where to stop, and that’s the thing I’m still learning.” He gave Draco a smile, Gregory a narrow considering look, and the back of his own head a slap, as if to scold himself for inappropriate thoughts. Then he turned away and went to look more closely at a few of the hedges they’d passed on their way to the front door.

            Draco licked his lips, told himself to stop breathing so fast, and then followed Gregory around the side of the house. It took them some minutes of walking to accomplish that, the manor was so large. Then he turned to face Gregory, ready for anything: harsh words, a punch, a curse.

            He wasn’t ready for the way that Gregory said simply, “Thanks for coming back,” and held out his hand.

            Draco blinked at it, then at Gregory’s face. He saw those hard eyes start to narrow, as if he thought that Draco might be rejecting him again. Draco promptly reached out and clasped his friend’s hand, though he would have liked to cast a few charms that would detect curses first. Gregory had been good at embedding curses into his skin once upon a time, one of the few pieces of Dark magic that he showed a talent for.

            “I would have come back a long time ago,” he said. “But I was hurt, and I thought I’d probably hurt you further if I did.”

            Gregory shook his head. “Vince—he died, and he should have lived. But I realized after a while that I had to blame myself for surviving, too, if I was going to blame you. I was just angry, and upset, and it seemed like you were the one with the better life.” He paused reflectively, scratching the back of his neck. “I realized when I heard about your parents that that wasn’t true.”

            Draco gave a shallow nod. “Thanks.” He still thought he would disgrace himself if he talked about his parents’ suicide, so he wasn’t going to. “It sounds like we were both waiting for the other person to move first, huh?”

            “Yeah.” Gregory gave him a small smile. “I wasn’t angry after a few months, like I said, but I don’t think I could ever have come to you. It was just too much, you know?”

            Draco nodded again. Gregory’s blunt words were a better summary of what had happened between them, and why Draco hadn’t sought out his friend again, than any of the more complicated words Draco had come up with. “I know. So…” He hesitated, afraid of looking stupid again, and then began, “What have you been doing with yourself?”

            Gregory turned to stroll across the lawn towards a clump of yew trees, bringing Draco with him. “Designing brooms,” he said. “I’ve made one that’s going to give the Beaters lots of speed and force, if I can get it off the ground…”

            Little by little, Draco relaxed and began to listen, still half-unable to believe that he was walking here, with one of the people he had considered a friend since he was a child, and the prospect of recovering more of his life beyond that.

            Maybe. I think—I think I could start doing it by myself, but it would be easier if Potter was with me and supported me.

            I hope he stays.

*

            Harry took a deep breath and leaned back against the side of the manor house. He’d used a Mirror Charm to peer around the house and make sure that Goyle wasn’t hurting Draco. It was one thing to let someone face hurtful words alone, as more than one Mind-Healer had told him, and another to let them face physical assault.

            But it had begun. Draco had only taken one step, but it was an important one. He had emerged from his Manor, where he seemed to huddle most of the time like a snail inside its shell, and got one of his friends back. They would probably need to fumble around a bit before they attained an easy friendship again. Harry didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing. Draco would distrust an experience that didn’t have at least a bit of pain intermingled.

            Harry smiled. Then he sighed.

            I’m glad that he has a friend back. It will help sustain him when I have to leave. And I’ll have to.

            So far as he knew, there was no physical limit on the amount of time that two versions of one person could stay in the same universe; the other Harry had seemed willing for him to take as long to woo Draco as he needed. But there was a limit on the time the other Harry would remain willing to send him home, and there was a limit on the time that Harry’s staying here would be healthy for Draco. He didn’t want Draco to become too dependent on him, the way Harry had almost become on Healer Ellison. He would need to stand on his own two feet and take control of his own life.

            Another fortnight, maybe, or a month. That should give me the time to start both Draco and the other Harry on a path of healing. I can’t do everything for them, but I can introduce them to reality. He rolled his eyes. Or, in the case of the other Harry, smash his head into reality until he consents to see it.

            And then I can go home, to my own friends, who must be frantic.

            And if I fall in love with Draco in the meantime…

            Harry squared his shoulders. If that happened, he would just have to live with it. He was strong enough now to live with a lot of wounds.

            Helping Draco was more important than deserting him too early because Harry was worried about falling in love with him.

*

            polka dot: I understand the feeling. I think the Harry who tells the story is actually more mature for his age than normal, though.

            butterpie: I think you and the sympathetic Harry have similar viewpoints. He does want to help now; he feels badly about snapping at the other Harry. But he can’t help if the other Harry continues to blame everyone but himself for what happened.

            SP777: I think it’s possible to pity the other Harry as well as despise him. But he’s cut connections off with his friends for a reason.

            TianaMae: Thanks for reviewing!

            Thrnbrooke: Here it is.

            Kodaijin Yurei: Thank you! Here is the next chapter.
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Universal Chaos