Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Loup-garou	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 8099 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Nine—Under My Hands

            “This is the place.”

            Harry had made sure that he’d Apparated ahead of Malfoy, so that he could speak the words and move towards the hollow ahead of him, too. His skin was prickling with tension, his teeth gritted to try and avoid betraying it. He was already wondering if he’d made a mistake in agreeing to the quick method.

            But he could feel, more powerfully than his timidity, the burn of Malfoy’s palm on the Mark. He needed the one gone as quickly as possible, so that he would never have to experience the other again.

            “I know. I was here once before, you know, Harry.”

            Malfoy’s voice was soft and drawling and pressed against his ears in exactly the wrong fashion. Harry whipped around, teeth bared, throat so thick with words that he didn’t know which ones were going to burst out before he said them. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up! You don’t know what you’re talking about, you barely know that this will work, I have to trust you, and everything you say is only making me hate you more!”

            Malfoy pulled to a stop, staring at him. His brows had drawn down in a sharp frown, and he considered Harry as though he was thinking of pulling back and forgetting the whole thing. Harry stood there, panting, his body wracked with shudders as if he were a faultline subject to earthquakes, and hoped he would.

            Except that we can’t, because there are those bloody oaths to consider.

            For a moment, Harry felt something close to despair. He shut his eyes so that Malfoy couldn’t see the emotion in them and take advantage of it, and stared into the distance without staring, feeling nothing at the moment but the heat of the sun on his face.

            “Lead on, Harry,” Malfoy said at last. “I won’t say anything else until we arrive there, you can be sure of that.”

            They were there, on the edge of the hollow that Harry had covered with net spells before, but he couldn’t bring himself to say that and acknowledge the gently, obtrusively calm and rational tone Malfoy was taking with him. Harry turned and walked into the hollow, on the verge of throwing up, his hand hovering above his wand. If Malfoy tried anything, Harry was sure that he could have it out and casting faster than Malfoy could. This wasn’t Fox Valley, where Malfoy had lenses to drain magic set up everywhere and five Marked ones of various strengths at his back and call.

            That should have made him feel confident, Harry thought as his feet crunched on the dry dust that covered the floor of the hollow. Not afraid, and not lonely, as though wishing for the company of one of those Marked ones.

            He turned around to face Malfoy, fists held tight at his sides. Malfoy watched him in silence, arms folded as though he was reconsidering, in turn.

            “Do what you have to do,” Harry said. He had to moisten his lips and swallow saliva twice before he could make himself speak the words.

*

            Draco had been waiting for this moment, and not even Harry’s unexpected nervousness outside the hollow had deterred him. It had told him that he would have to move with more care, but that was all, and he had, essentially, prepared for that already when he thought of using the quick method with Harry.

            He took his wand out of his pocket and held it up. Harry tensed, and didn’t relax much when Draco laid the wand behind him near the side of the hollow that Harry had covered with trap spells the last time they were here, carefully out of the way.

            What are you doing? Harry’s voice sounded through the bond between them, up and down the scale, all the harmonics of caution.

            Getting something out of the way that might interfere with what I need to do, Draco answered. The Mark is rooted in my soul. It’ll take an effort of my soul—and my body, since that is what my soul acts through—to remove it. He spread his hands and flexed his fingers, fixing his attention on them and not on Harry for a moment. The magical signature of the wand could resonate with what I’m doing and distract me. He glanced sideways at Harry. It would be for the best if you got rid of yours as well.

            Harry’s mouth opened in a silent snarl of rejection. It would, would it? Well, too bad. That’s not going to work.

            Draco spread one hand out, fingers curving up slightly. Let Harry get a good look at them. They would be the prime instruments Draco was using, and Harry had to accept them or it wasn’t going to work. Fine, then. It’ll be the longer method, and that means that we have to spend most of the day here. I hope you brought something to eat.

            Harry stood staring up at the side of the hollow as if he expected his moralistic little friends to appear there. Draco waited, his fingers flexing silently open and shut. His hands were steady, he noted, a bit dry, but comfortable to work with. Good. He didn’t want his own nerves licking the palms with cold sweat or something like that when he was trying to do such delicate work.

            “Fine,” Harry said abruptly, and cast his wand from him in a high, slicing arc that Draco winced at instinctively, although it only clattered on the small stones behind him and didn’t snap. “But the moment you try doing something I don’t like, then I’m going to summon it back, and I think you know enough about my wandless magic to know what will happen then.”

            “I’m going to be doing lots of things you don’t like,” Draco said evenly, respecting Harry’s need to retreat from the dangerous privacy of their bond and speak aloud. “Will you try to hurt me the moment I hurt you? Then neither method will work, the quick or the slow.”

            Harry quivered for a moment, and then clenched his fists hard enough that Draco saw a few small drops of blood land on the sand. He was angry at himself, Draco thought, for showing fear, for feeling fear, for paying more attention to the fear than the possibility of his precious freedom that he wanted so much. He took a few steps nearer and knelt down, staring at Draco so fiercely that no one could have mistaken it for a gesture of submission.

            “Is this better?” he asked through gritted teeth.

            “Closer to what I need,” Draco said softly, and knelt down beside him. Harry blinked and looked as if he would shift away. Draco reached out and grasped his shoulders, pulling him nearer, then began to undo his shirt.

            Harry stared at him, then up at the sky. His breathing had increased in rapidity, but he didn’t sound as if he were about to hyperventilate and die, which Draco thought was a good thing. He shut his eyes a second later, in what looked like resignation.

            Draco knew that would change as the touching continued.

            But he had no particular need to prove that his contentions were right to Harry at the moment. So he continued to pull and unbutton, his mouth thick with saliva, his eyes heavy with dreams fulfilled. When he saw Harry’s bare skin emerging, he bowed his head and breathed, gently, on it, and watched gooseflesh spring up in response.

            Still Harry said nothing, and lay there with his eyes shut.

            Draco murmured words he couldn’t hear, and pushed Harry’s shirt off him so that he could see the Mark.

*

            This is a stupid idea.

            Harry’s mind had said that to him so many times since they left the Muggle restaurant that Harry was getting tired of hearing it. He wished he had something to bite; then his back teeth wouldn’t be constantly clenched together with nothing but air between them. He lay still and felt the sun on his face whenever he tilted it.

            This is a stupid idea.

            Yes, I know, Harry finally answered himself. But I have to be free of Malfoy, and do you have a better idea?

            Talking to yourself is even more stupid.

            Harry grimaced and waited. Malfoy should be starting the magic soon, he thought. The Mark was bare, and Malfoy had his hands hovering near it, his fingertips brushing a line of dry heat down Harry’s skin here and there in what Harry could only assume were deliberate touches, though they felt accidental.

            Malfoy murmured something Harry couldn’t make out, but which sounded like it was meant to be soothing. It wasn’t. Harry bit his lip against the impulse to snap at Malfoy and began counting backwards from one hundred in his head.

            Then Malfoy laid his right palm flat over the Mark and his left on the bare skin of Harry’s chest, over his heart, and he lost the count.

            Fuck you, he thought at Malfoy, though he didn’t send it along the bond that connected them. Do you have to keep touching me, or can you get on with it?

            Malfoy didn’t respond. Instead, he closed his eyes and seemed to fall into the center of himself. His breathing slowed to the point that Harry would have said he was asleep if he didn’t know better. Harry scooped up handfuls of sand and held them like that, ready to throw them in Malfoy’s eyes as improvised weapons if he had to.

            Malfoy’s fingers tightened in response, and Harry had the crazy idea, for a moment, that Malfoy would use his skin against him in return, scooping up handfuls of it like the sand. But then his fingers smoothed out again and he opened his mouth.

            Harry felt rather than heard the note he voiced; it trembled in the air around him, and the earth. His heart jumped in response to it, and then began to race. Malfoy’s fingers steamed. Harry stared at them and wondered if they would sink into his chest.

            They didn’t. He felt a violent tug racing down into the center of his body instead, aiming for the Mark on his shoulder at first and then traveling beyond it. Harry twisted like a fish on a line, upset and terrified. Malfoy hadn’t told him—

            Then he remembered. After Malfoy had moved the Mark, the only connection it had was to Harry’s soul. It made sense that it would pull at Harry’s soul now, when Malfoy was seeking to remove it. Harry laid his head back and remembered what Malfoy had said, that Harry would have to trust him if the fast way was to work.

            Trust him not to damage my soul.

            Harry swallowed a burst of laughter, the kind that would probably disturb Malfoy, and did his best to calm his panicked breathing. He could feel a further, shimmering tug, like someone feeling their way along the rope he was caught on, and decided that Malfoy had probably gone into his soul, or his mind, or the strange half-world that composed both when they talked along the Mark. He closed his eyes more tightly, and tried not to think.

*

            The pattern of red lights in front of him was the same as the one that Draco had conjured with the image. He had studied them until he memorized them, and he knew they wouldn’t suddenly change on him, melt or flash or flinch. That meant all he had to do was reach out and smother them with a palm.

            In theory.

            In practice, he couldn’t touch the lights. Draco kept reaching out, getting his hand—or the analogue of his hand, the magical power that, in this time and place, his brain pictured as a hand—near them, and then being rebuffed. A magical barrier seemed to protect them, sheltering them under glass.

            That Draco knew the magical barrier to be of his own creation did nothing for his temper.

            He tried to approach each one in multiple ways before he decided that it wouldn’t work. He had known it wouldn’t from the first failure, truly, but he had thought he had to try, because Harry would be so unhappy about the other option.

            He turned and flung his voice in the direction of Harry’s mind. Harry! I need you to let me take control of your magic.

            The refusal that came didn’t have words. It was simple, flat, blank, drowning. Draco kept his balance under it with difficulty. He knew it could have swept him out of Harry’s soul, and Harry probably would have preferred it that way.

            But this was the quicker method, the one Harry had implied he wanted because God forbid that he have Draco’s Mark on his body for an instant longer than necessary. Draco sent that to him, a reminder, and then added, If you want me to do something else, then you’ll need to pause and let me get out of your soul.

            Silence, but Draco wasn’t so stupid as to think Harry hadn’t heard him. This was churning silence, the kind that a whirlpool in deep water made. A snarl echoed in Draco’s ears finally, and he felt magic flowing towards him.

            He reached into it, and took control of it, and was a god.

            The force that was him reached into dim and distant cracks and corners that he knew were the cracks and corners of Harry’s being. Draco could feel himself lifting emotions, reading thoughts, touching memories. He could have done anything in that moment, anything that concerned Harry’s soul, and as far as he knew or cared to know, Harry’s soul was the world. He could have ripped his body apart, commanded Harry to fuck himself on Draco’s fingers, anything. He breathed and he stormed and he flooded strength.

            Because he could do anything, he chose to do what was most tender and unexpected. He reached down and groped about a bit until he found the Mark. Then he hit the red lights that marked the bonds and protective spells with all the force of his grip at once, crushing them like the scurrying bodies of ladybugs. He felt a few minute flickers of pain as they faded, as one of his connections to Harry was ended.

            But given how much power he still had, he couldn’t mourn them, or the destruction of his perfectly-made Mark, as he had assumed he would when he was standing in Thylacine’s Lair.

            He could feel Harry’s mind circling him uneasily as he finished, and he reached out and touched it, melded his thoughts with Harry’s. They no longer had the mental bond they had used to speak to each other, but that didn’t matter, not when he was here and knew Harry’s impulses and ideas better than he knew them himself.

            You won’t give it back, Harry thought. You only agreed to destroy the Mark because you knew that you could make me more of a slave than ever to you. I see it all now.

            He did think he saw it all then, and his cry was a flood of bitterness that Draco refused to swallow. He shook his head. I gave it back once, when you poured your core into me, and I’m going to give it back again, he assured Harry.

            Harry’s lack of conviction was another blank wave slapping him, a streak of uncertainty and depth in all that living ocean. How can I be sure?

            Because of this, Draco said, and although it was the hardest thing he had ever done, he surrendered.

            He bowed down; he opened the hands that clutched Harry’s power close to himself, the knowledge and the memories and the thoughts that were part of him, or had come to feel as though they were part of him in that short time, and he let them go. They flowed and crashed back into the ocean of Harry’s being, and they ran away to become indistinguishable from the rest of him again.

            Draco could hear Harry gaping, gasping. He didn’t know how he was hearing that, but the sound made him hard anyway. He could feel his body settling around him again, like a shell. He shuddered and opened his eyes, trying not to mourn the sense of lost connection. He knew in a few moments that he wouldn’t remember the greatness of the composite being he had been, and that would dull the sadness he did experience.

            He found himself looking at Harry as he lay there with his shirt off, his chest shining. The Mark was gone from his shoulder, although there was a dent in the skin there, slightly red, as though he’d been sunburned. Draco reached out to touch it.

            Harry caught his wrist, hard, in a grip that felt like an iron pincer. Draco looked at him with calm, alien eyes. Harry shuddered and twisted away from him, digging one elbow into the sand as he sat up.

            “That was…” he whispered.

            “Fucking strange?” Draco asked with a faint smile as he leaned back.

            “I don’t know what the hell you did, Malfoy.” Harry turned around to stare at him, and his voice was a sharp bark. “But I know that you did it because you wanted me to trust you, and for no other reason.”

            “Your Mark is gone,” Draco said, working to hold back his anger. Yes, perhaps Harry thought he had reasons to feel this way, but he knew what Draco had given up, and he had to have felt Draco’s reluctance to do so. Hell, he would know that Draco was reluctant even if he hadn’t felt his emotions just then, because of the way that Draco had talked about power in the past. “What good would getting you to trust me permanently have done? I can’t make that happen. And you’ve sworn the oath, so I know that you’re going to stay with me, around me, no matter what.”

            Harry scuttled backwards like a crab. His eyes never moved. His sides heaved and shook with distrust. Draco thought of asking him if it hurt to be such a pinhead, but refrained.

            “You can’t,” Harry whispered, and nothing else.

            “Can’t what?” Draco rose to his feet and backed towards the part of the pit where his wand lay, but Harry was closer to the holly one. “Enlighten me.”

            “You can’t—do this,” Harry said, and his fingers were digging into his palms and his eyes were so wide with distress that Draco wanted to touch and soothe him. But when he eased a foot closer to Harry, Harry bolted even further away. His fingers were only a few inches from his wand now. “You can’t do what you just did to me.”

            A slow excitement began to tighten the muscles in Draco’s legs and groin, but of course there was no saying that Harry had felt the same sort of impulses and longings that he had. He kept his voice calm, relaxed, bored, his hands draped at his sides. “What? Take control of your magic? I did it and then I left your mind. I promise, I haven’t left some little part of me in your mind to control you. You would have known if I did, and it would have been contrary to the spirit of the oath.”

*



            The spirit, but not the letter, Harry thought. He felt the same way he imagined someone without the ability to speak Parseltongue would when confronting a snake: horrified, upset, flinching in instinctive terror.

            Harry had known how it would be when Malfoy went into his head. He had known that Malfoy would make some demand that Harry was unwilling to meet, assert his “dominance,” because that was what he did. He had handed over control of his magic only because he was relatively sure that he could get it back in a pitched battle.

            Malfoy had yielded without much pressure, the way he had poured the magic back into Harry’s core a few days ago under no pressure that Harry could have brought to bear.

            It hurt Harry. It upset him. It made his skin prickle and sting and his fingers hurt with their grip on each other.

            Malfoy wasn’t supposed to do that.

            He was the Dark Lord Harry had been fighting for months. He was the owner of Fox Valley, the man who had enslaved God knew how many Marked ones; Harry knew that at least one had died in the past, and there were probably others he’d never met. He was the one who had given Harry the Mark against his will and said that he would rather Harry die than remove it.

            He was obsessed with power. It didn’t matter what sort of gabble and burble Malfoy might spout about being attracted to him; Harry knew the real source of his fascination. If Harry had suddenly become a Squib, then Malfoy’s attraction to him would have died as fast as it had arisen in the first place.

            That meant Malfoy should have fought to keep the magic. He shouldn’t have handed it back, as though it were a gift.

            As though…

            As though he was capable of learning better. As though he was capable of changing.

            And Harry knew that couldn’t be so, because he knew that Malfoy was a machine, an obsessed madman, a Dark Lord. As insane as Voldemort, and that meant that anything Harry did against him was all right.

            If Malfoy could change, that meant Harry had to question everything he had thought was true about Malfoy. It meant that he might have to feel guilty about torturing Malfoy when he had almost managed to put that behind him. It meant that he might have to consider Malfoy’s requests to meet and work on their shared magic, their creation of magic, seriously, rather than assuming it was all a trap and a trick.

            He could still be tricking you, whispered the cautious voice that Harry had carried in the back of his head for years, and that had saved his life more than once when the choice had been resisting or trusting a Dark wizard. He could have decided that he’d rather give up a small amount of power now to gain a larger one later.

            But that still meant his mind slammed against the cage bars it had built for itself, because the way Harry understood Malfoy, he shouldn’t have been capable of such a plan—not because he was unsubtle, but because it was simply too opposite the way his mind worked. He should have been unable to let the power go. He would cling to it because he had to, because he was irrational when it came to the use and retention of magic.

            If Malfoy could change…

            It meant that Harry would have to change.

            He seized his wand and cast a curse at Malfoy, barely thinking about which one he picked, only knowing that it was something that would hurt. Malfoy lifted his hands and parted them, and a crackling white ball of energy, shining like ripples of light on water, opened between his palms, swallowing the curse harmlessly.

            For a moment, there was nothing in the pit but their breathing and the stare that filled the world between them with crackling intensity.

            “The Cruciatus Curse, Harry?” Malfoy’s voice was low, and if there was any emotion in it besides disappointment, Harry couldn’t read it. “I—thought you would choose something different if you cared to choose something that would hurt me. But it seems that you return to your old tricks like a dog to vomit.”

            The Cruciatus.

            He’d cast it again.

            Harry turned, his breath coming short, and bolted for the side of the pit, scrambling up it with his elbows and his fingers. Halfway through the climb, he remembered that he was a wizard and Apparated back to the rock garden outside Ron and Hermione’s house.

            All the while, the skin where his Mark had been stung and hissed with guilt.

*

            Review responses can be found at http://lomonaaerenrr.livejournal.com/21863.html
- 8
- 9
- 10
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Loup-garou