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Ad Pavonem	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4188 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Seven—Second Chances
“I want you to tell me why you wounded yourself for me.”
Harry had thought Draco would start with a harder question. Or one that he was less likely to know the answer to. He blinked, sat down in Ron’s chair, and stretched his legs out. It felt good. “Because I knew the Aurors already suspected you and I didn’t want you to get into trouble for making me ‘disappear.’ I couldn’t tell them the truth in peacock form, either. So I did something that would make them too concerned for me to question you.”
Draco ran a hand down his face. He looked as tired as though he’d had to perform some huge spell to help Harry out of peacock form after all. “But you could have thought of something else.”
“Maybe with more time. But they were right there, and I didn’t have the time.”
Draco stood up and paced back and forth in front of the desk for a moment. “But you didn’t have to wound yourself for me.”
“That was the only plan I could think of.” Harry hesitated, but in the end, he had to say it. “I think you’re putting more weight on this than it really deserves.”
Draco spun on one heel so fast that his cloak flew behind him, and stormed towards Harry. “Oh, I am, am I?” He laid his hands on the arms of Harry’s chair and leaned in. “Tell me why that’s so.”
Harry swallowed. There was an electric charge crackling between them, and it was—strange. “Because I believed you were innocent. I knew you were innocent. And it was partially my fault that I was trapped. I should have been more careful. I did this to correct my mistake and keep you safe.”
“So you would do it for other people, is what you’re saying.”
“Any innocent person I unwittingly got in trouble, yes.”
Draco gave a slow smile, one that curled up his lips in such a predatory fashion Harry couldn’t help shivering. Draco noticed and looked for a long moment at Harry’s collarbone. Harry thought he was deliberately keeping his eyes from dropping further. “And how often does that happen?”
Harry had to think. Honestly, he could only remember his first incident in the field, when he’d got fooled by a Ventriloquism Charm and chased down an innocent woman instead of the right criminal. She’d only run because he was running at her. “One of the thieves I was helping Dawlish track. She threw her voice, made it sound like it was coming from the mouth of someone else, and we nearly arrested that woman before she could convince us it wasn’t her.” That they hadn’t seen the thief without glamours was a large component of that particular mistake.
“But you didn’t wound yourself for her.”
“No. But I did offer her my sincerest apologies, and a lot of Galleons.” In the end, the woman had taken his autograph instead. A lot of her horror and outrage had disappeared when she realized he was Harry Potter. To Harry’s disgust, that wasn’t the only time he’d been forgiven a mistake because of his name, although it was his worst one.
“It’s still not the same,” Draco said, his voice as soft as ribbons. His hand rose and came to rest for a second on Harry’s cheek, and then he stepped away but still stood so that Harry couldn’t have risen out of his chair. “You did something incredibly risky for me. You could have died. You had a lot less blood to lose in peacock form.”
“The Elder Wand would have protected me.”
“When you refused to accept it?”
“It wouldn’t have let me die.”
“Wouldn’t it?”
Harry paused. He had to admit he didn’t really know, which was probably the main thing Draco was trying to make him admit. He sighed and ducked his head.
“You don’t have to worry about what this means for me, which it sounds like you’re doing.” A small edge crept into Draco’s voice, contrasting utterly with the soft way he touched Harry’s cheek. “I know you believed I was innocent and you took a risk for me. I want to talk about why you paid that risk in blood. And I want you to be honest, not try to excuse yourself. Or me, because you think it might upset me.”
Harry raised his head. Some of these things he had said to other Aurors, he reasoned. He could say them to Draco. They shouldn’t terrify him.
It was the other words, the ones he had never spoken, that did.
“I was sure you were innocent from the moment I heard about the smugglers going to Malfoy Manor,” he said. “I never—I thought you had more potential than that. And more sense. No way were you going to do something that stupid after the war.”
Draco’s lips twitched a little, and he said, “I think you might overestimate Malfoy common sense. But thank you for doing so in a way that’s so favorable to me.” He hesitated, then added, “I’m still waiting.”
“If you were guilty,” Harry said, “the Aurors would arrest you. And everyone else was obviously already convinced that you at least knew about it. I wanted to investigate myself to give you a fair chance.”
“Yes.”
“And I—I wondered what else you could become if you just had a chance,” Harry whispered. Here were the terrifying words he had only dared think in his bed at night, as if even being in the same room with someone else, or in the light, might illuminate them on his chest in blazing letters. “I thought that maybe, someday, when you’d had years to grow past the war and learn to settle into yourself, I could. Maybe talk to you. Maybe see if you wanted…”
“Yes?”
At least it was a question this time. Harry raised his eyes and made sure that he was looking into Draco’s face when he spoke next, because Draco didn’t deserve to have Harry’s cowardice get in the way of hearing something good about himself. “Maybe see if you wanted to go out with me.”
Draco studied him with a careful, grave face. When he smiled, it wasn’t mocking. “On a date?”
Harry nodded. “It was…kind of a fantasy. Because you were someone I testified for, but not someone I tried to redeem, obviously. Someone I thought should have the chance to recover himself, without interference.”
“You thought I needed redemption?”
“Not from the war. From yourself. I saw your face at the trials. Don’t tell me that you forgave yourself that quickly for all the mistakes you made.”
Draco frowned slightly. “I barely knew what I was feeling at the time. How could you know that? Or decide that?”
“I just thought that was the way it was.” Harry shrugged a little. “Like I said, I was going to let some years go by, and then ask you. If you didn’t want to, then I would have moved on. But it would all have been for nothing, if you were arrested for something you didn’t do. The waiting, I mean.”
“It’s been years now.”
Harry blinked and looked up. Draco had gone back to standing in front of him, staring down at him. But it didn’t seem as intimidating this time.
Slowly, Harry stood up. He stumbled a little—his legs were so much longer as a human than they’d been as a peacock—and Draco reached out and steadied him, his hand heavy and warm on Harry’s arm.
He hasn’t told me to fuck off yet. Maybe that’s a good sign.
Harry swallowed and said, “Thank you for your help. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a peacock forever.”
“Even if I didn’t learn about the Elder Wand just then, I would have eventually. I would have found a way.” Draco hesitated a little. “And part of it was about foiling my father. I couldn’t believe he would do something that would expose our family to harm like that, and then brag about it.”
“I think he’s gone truly mad in Azkaban. He might even have been mad at the time of the trials, once he realized that he never was going to get back to what he used to be.”
“You visited him?”
Harry felt himself flush. He had been thinking earlier that that was one thing he shouldn’t tell Draco, and now…but he nodded. It was out. “Yes.”
“Why?” Draco was examining Harry as if the truth might be written on his teeth, or his lips, or some other easily visible part of him.
Please let him try to see if it’s written on my lips. But Harry bit his tongue against the impulse to see that. “I wanted to see if he knew anything that would—well, that would make people stop looking at you so suspiciously. That was before the smugglers’ case began and we traced them to Malfoy Manor. But there were rumors circulating about you anyway. If he could lay some of them to rest, or if he was willing to take the blame for some of the wilder ones on himself, I thought it might spare you.”
Draco blinked slowly. “You wanted to get my father in more trouble?”
“They wouldn’t extend his sentence for rumors.”
Draco shook his head slowly, but Harry thought it was in wonder, not in anger. “How far gone on me are you, Potter?”
Harry flushed heavily this time. There was no way Draco didn’t notice. But he only continued to examine Harry with one eyebrow raised, not looking particularly upset. Harry swallowed and answered. “I was more gone on your potential.”
“Explain that.”
“You’re almost the only former Death Eater I thought stood some real chance of living a normal life after the trials,” Harry said in a low voice, his mind full of the people he’d testified for—and against. Greyback, snarling and lunging against his chains even in the middle of the courtroom before the full Wizengamot. Rabastan Lestrange, who hadn’t spoken a word since the death of his brother in a skirmish with the Aurors. Theodore Nott’s father, who had spent the entire time staring at Harry as if he could murder him with his eyes. And he had even been freed, since they’d already tried him for his crimes in the first war and during the second one he hadn’t actually done anything. But Harry had known, watching him walk from the courtroom, that he wouldn’t do anything new, wouldn’t make anything of his life. And not because of the weight of society’s turning its back on him.
“A normal life? A life a Gryffindor approves of?”
Harry gave Draco a slow, disgusted glance, in part to watch him flush. Then Harry rolled his eyes and relented. “Of course not. A life where you had what you wanted. Where you wouldn’t be suspected every time a crime happened. If you wanted to join society again, you could. You could work in the Ministry or get married and have kids or buy the hugest peacock flock you ever saw and turn them loose on your grounds. I wanted you to live, Malfoy.”
“You mumbled the part about me getting married and having kids.”
Harry struggled with himself for a second, then admitted, “I hated the idea of it. But I wanted you to do what you wanted. And at the time, I thought you’d probably want to get married if only to have children and watch your family grow again.”
Draco was silent for a long, thoughtful moment. Harry waited. He’d given up on trying to predict what Draco’s response would be. So far, nothing had really gone the way he thought it would.
*
He saw that potential in me, and he fought to protect it.
Draco had thought it would be patronizing when he first heard of it, but it honestly wouldn’t. Harry had done something Draco could imagine few people in the world doing. And over and over again.
Given Draco a second chance. Refused to believe he was guilty even when all the signs seemed to point that way. Stood up against the pressure of the Aurors—and maybe his friends—to think that Malfoys were just no good. Visited his father in prison. Returned his wand. Fancied him and yet maintained a distance because he wanted Draco free to choose his own destiny.
Slowly, Draco studied Harry from head to foot. He wasn’t really looking at the lean lines of his muscles, though, despite the way Harry flushed again. He was looking for outer confirmation of what he already knew Harry had inside.
He had the strength to help me and fight for me and yet stand aside. He would stand aside even now if I told him to.
“Do you know what I think about my family?” Draco finally whispered.
Harry blinked, but shook his head. “No. Sorry. I don’t. I would have said—but I don’t know now.”
Draco nodded. At least that proved Harry wasn’t going to just listen to his own perceptions and let them override reality. He would listen to Draco’s words instead, and although he would probably find them hard to accept, Draco knew he would in the end.
“I don’t like my family anymore,” Draco said. “What we became. How my father taught me all about Malfoy pride and wealth, and yet he used it to fight for ridiculous things and bow down to a madman.”
“Ridiculous things?” Harry asked, his voice soft as a deer’s footsteps.
“Like getting a hippogriff executed.” Draco grimaced; he would remember his own part in that, too, although it made him flinch. “And feuding with the Weasleys. The man I thought he was never would have given an enchanted diary to a little girl that would kill her. Not because he liked the Weasleys, but because he would have been above such things. And he wasn’t.”
“You didn’t seem as if you were—”
Harry stopped, but Draco laughed softly and responded, “Above such things? No, I wasn’t. But I was a child. What is my father’s excuse? Nothing except that he wished for certain things to happen a certain way. When he had spent my life telling me that my own desires were never a good enough reason to do something.”
There was more thickness in his voice than he had thought there would be. Harry gently reached out and touched his cheek. “And he hasn’t exactly been granting a lot of your wishes since you came of age, either.”
Draco only shook his head. He had tried, battled, to avoid blaming his father for what had happened with the Dark Lord. He knew it had never been what Lucius had intended, that his son should be a slave. If nothing else, his father had valued the Malfoy family’s dignity too highly for that to happen.
But it had happened, because Draco’s father had not thought he could lose, that any Dark Lord he allied with would win simply because a Malfoy had chosen him. And Draco had been Marked, and Lucius was in prison, and he had woven the peacock spell Draco had known nothing about and made things more difficult.
No, his father had ceased to think of the Malfoy family and the way his actions could affect Draco. He was too focused on the way his actions could affect Lucius. Even mad, Draco was sure that was true.
“So what else does that mean?”
Harry’s voice was hesitant. Draco met his eyes and looked until he saw the flash in them that indicated mild irritation. Good. I don’t want a partner who will back down because he pities me.
“It means I’m free to choose my own fate,” Draco said. “And my father isn’t the only one who did ridiculous things.” He held Harry’s gaze until Harry ducked his head.
“Right, but I think you would have dismissed me already if that was a dealbreaker.”
Draco grinned. “You can learn. Yes. I want—a chance to get to know you. You’ve essentially been getting to know me from a distance, and doing things for me you thought would give me a peaceful life. Now I want you to be part of that life. For a while, at least. Give me a chance. Stand at my side.”
Harry’s flush came back just as it was subsiding, and he inclined his head with a small, graceful smile. “Of course.”
Draco looked at him thoughtfully, reaching up to slide one hand through Harry’s thick hair. Harry’s eyes fluttered closed in response. Draco felt his stomach clench and ache deliciously.
“Just how much do you fancy me?” It came out as a whisper even though Draco didn’t mean it to.
“I—tried to keep it at bay because I wanted you to live and I never thought you wouldn’t want to get married, but—quite a lot, given all that.”
Harry’s voice was strangled. Draco smiled slowly. He hadn’t thought a lot about fancying Harry Potter before this, but that was before Harry Potter had fought for him and wounded himself for him and come back to being human on Draco’s say-so, not any of his friends’.
“Then I want to try something,” he said, and leaned forwards, and gently tilted his lips against Harry’s.
*
SP777: No, he has a fetish for people who like him. :)
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