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Incandescence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13842 -:- 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.

Chapter List
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Title: Incandescence

Disclaimer: J. K.
Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun
and not profit.

Warnings: Angst,
profanity, manipulation. Takes place fairly far in the future after DH, but
ignores the epilogue.

Rating: PG-13

Pairings: Harry/Draco,
Ron/Hermione, Luna/Neville, Lucius/Narcissa.

Summary: Draco
has become a successful writer by novelizing the lives of heroes from the war
with Voldemort. He�s managed to charm the most difficult and reticent into
talking to him. Now he thinks he�s ready for the ultimate challenge: persuading
Harry Potter, who�s notoriously close-mouthed, to give him both the material
and the permission for a novel based on him.

Author�s Notes: This
is intended to be a fairly short novel, probably around 50,000 words (12 or 13
chapters), but I won�t rule out going longer.

Incandescence

Chapter
One�Irresistible Force

�� And as she stood within the arms of the man
she loved, Selene understood, finally, that she, and not he, was the one who
had made her darkness yield to the light.

�� Draco sat
back and took a deep breath, letting his fingers relax. He�d been busy with the
ending of The Hope-Well all morning,
and scribbling over a thousand words with a quill was no easy task. For long
moments, he did nothing but sit in his desk chair and
flex his hands.

�� At last he
opened his eyes and looked with calm pride at the complete manuscript in front
of him.

�� Done on time according to both my internal clock
and Murray�s ridiculous deadline. This deserves some celebration.

�� He turned
and walked three strides across the small tower room to pick up a waiting
bottle of Fairyflower. The pale golden wine bubbled
and hissed as it poured into the glass, and a fragrance of lavender filled the
room. Draco sipped, enjoying the first bitterness that faded almost at once
into the kind of fuzzy sweetness that gathered along the tongue and lingered.

�� He had a
garden immediately beneath the tower window that was filled with perfectly
ordinary blossoms: daisies, morning glories, and sunflowers. Draco leaned an
elbow on the window and stared for long moments, enjoying the combination of
wine on his tongue, warm stone beneath his skin, and brilliant colors in front
of his eyes.

�� Then he
whirled around and flicked his wand to call his owl, Justice, who lived in an owlery on the roof. The great horned owl landed on the
table and looked at the manuscript in distaste, not deigning to notice him.
Draco chuckled and cast a copying spell�he would never trust the only copy of
one of his novels to owl post again after what had happened to Fairest Morning�and then bundled the
original manuscript carefully into a special pouch Murray had given him years
ago. Back and forth the pouch went from Draco to his publisher, and it always
came back intact. It was made of toughened leather enchanted against any weight
and any puncturing instrument, including an owl�s talons.

�� Careful
with it, now,� Draco said, as he said every time.

�� Justice
turned his head, blinked his eyes once at him in admonishment, and then turned
and leaped out the window. Draco stood there watching him fade into the gold
and blue of the June morning.

�� Then he turned
about, humming, and stretched his arms in front of him as he considered his
next project.

�� Really,
there weren�t many people he hadn�t already interviewed for his Heroic Lives series, which told the
fictionalized stories of heroes who�d fought Voldemort. The Hope-Well was based on Luna Lovegood, and it had taken Draco
the utmost care and skill to get the necessary
interviews with her�after all, she had been his family�s prisoner�but he�d
succeeded. He had the notes for a novel on Ollivander waiting, but he�d never
been able to muster up much enthusiasm for that project; it didn�t have a
title.

�� He
considered Professor Snape. Then, as always, his mind shied away. He thought he
needed to be a better writer than he was to do justice there.

�� Not to mention the argument I�ll have with
Murray over including a former Death Eater in a series titled Heroic Lives.

�� He thought
a few more minutes about it, then shrugged. No doubt
the intuition would come to him as it always did. Maybe even the deep interest
he needed to tug him through the account of Ollivander�s activities.

�� He turned
to pick up the Daily Prophet, which
he hadn�t had time to read that morning in his intense desire to get The Hope-Well finished. He scanned the
front page idly; he had an authors� lunch to attend in an hour, and he needed a
few harmless items of news to talk about.

�� Then he
blinked, and found himself narrowing in on the single photograph the Prophet had placed even above the
headline.

�� The
photograph was of Harry Potter, and he was training his wand on a large man
with yellow teeth and fingernails, who snarled and snapped at him. Magical
bonds must have held the man back, but memories made Draco shudder anyway. He
knew exactly who the man was, without needing the headline to tell him.

�� HARRY
POTTER CAPTURES FENRIR GREYBACK!

�� Well done,
Potter,� Draco muttered. �And it only took you, what, sixteen years?� But the
words were absent as his mind leaped into motion.

�� Why in the
world had it never occurred to him to do a novel on Harry Potter?

�� It was
practically required for a series called Heroic
Lives. It was the natural culmination to such a series. Potter�s life
presented enough material that Draco could wring two or three books out of it
without trying. There was darkness and light, humor and drama, last-minute
escapes and desperate triumphs. Draco wondered if someone had knocked a gap in
his brain that was filling back in only now.

�� Of course
there were arguments against his attempting it. He and Potter had been enemies.
Plenty of other people had written books about him, and continued to do so,
because somehow Potter had managed to remain as inspiring as a thirty-three-year
old Auror as he had been when a young hero of eighteen. Draco had suffered some
humiliating reversals and rescues at Potter�s hands during the war, and would
have had to conquer his own pride and memories to begin an interview.

�� Now that
Draco was considering them head-on, all those arguments puffed away to reveal themselves
as the barriers of dandelion fluff they were.

�� So what if
he and Potter had been enemies? He had persuaded Ollivander and Lovegood into
interviews, and they had more reason to hate him. A schoolboy rivalry was
nothing compared to the tortures that Draco had been part of inflicting on
them. If he was really more worried about his years at Hogwarts than what he
had done as a slave of Voldemort, he could point to successes in interviewing
Neville Longbottom and Hermione Granger, too.

�� Yes, other
people had written books about Potter, but not with the skill and the insight
that Draco would. He�d begun writing to heal his own wounds left over from the
war; he had continued because he was good at it. His novel on Potter, or his
novels, was a masterpiece waiting to be born.

�� The last
reason was the most insubstantial, and Draco could not believe he had seriously
let it stand in his way. He rolled his eyes. If I can�t overcome my own insecurities and
weaknesses by this point�

�� He knew
this was the right project to choose for his next one. Energy surged through
him, roiling and billowing like a wave. He could feel his fingers
twitching�with desire to pick up a quill rather than with spasms or aches.

�� He smiled
as he sat down to write a letter to Potter. It would have to wait until Justice
had returned from delivering the manuscript to Murray, but then it would be
delivered. Potter would doubtless agree to a meeting, if only because he was
curious about what Draco wanted.

�� Once that
was agreed to, Draco had him. None of his subjects ever wanted to escape him,
once they found the opportunity to pour their cases into a sympathetic ear.

�� And Draco
was curious as well�wildly curious. He�d read a few of the Potter biographies
and glanced often at the newspaper articles, but they didn�t represent the real
man Potter was. What would he say? What did he look like when not showing off
for the cameras? How had he dealt with the burden of becoming the symbol and
focus of an entire generation�s hopes?

�� Draco
smiled when he realized that the questions so occupying his mind had caused him
to put on his shirt backwards. That was an excellent sign that his next novel
was the right one.

*

�� And then
we found out that Catherina had submitted the entire manuscript of a Muggle
play called Much Ado About Nothing instead
of the play she�d contracted with us for.� Angela Ellback
sighed and swallowed half the glass of juice she held. �She knows that we employ readers familiar
with Muggle culture. She�s not the first witch or wizard who�s thought they
could plagiarize some classic our world is unlikely to be familiar with. Why
would she try that?�

�� Draco
smiled over his own glass of juice and picked up one of the small sandwiches
from a passing plate held by a house-elf. He liked Angela, who was not only a
reader for Murray�s but a copy-editor who returned his manuscripts looking as
if she�d bitten into them and drawn out the inky blood. Someone had to find and
correct the mistakes, and Draco was just as glad that he wasn�t left to
discover them after his book was in print.

�� Catherina
is good at writing light tales about princesses in glass towers,� he said.
�It�s a shame she didn�t stick to that.�

�� She claims
that there�s much money but no respect in that.� Angela snorted rudely, and
hard enough to move her rather large glasses down her nose. She tilted them
back into place. �There are two kinds of writers: those who deserve respect,
and those who deserve everything else. Why she couldn�t be content with her
place in the second category, I don�t know.�

�� Draco
chuckled and leaned back against the wall, looking around happily at his
colleagues. Half of the most prominent writers in wizarding Britain were there,
mingling with editors, publishers, printers, and high-profile spellcrafters whose magic helped the industry roll along.
Rita Skeeter was attempting to pitch a new biography of Dumbledore, by the
sound of her undertones, to a thoroughly bored-looking Pamela Waterstone. Draco wouldn�t count on that market lasting
much longer. Even Skeeter�s readers had exhausted most of the interest to be
found in the sex scandals of a wizard almost twenty years dead.

�� Terry Boot
was reciting a tragic poem to an enthralled assembly. Draco rolled his eyes.
There was someone he had investigated as material for a novel and as hastily
backed away from. Boot hoarded his small amount of suffering in the war and
doled it out in slender poetry books, to the point that there was no room for
anyone else to make a profit on it.

�� Denise Bellanthe, her long blonde hair wound over her left shoulder,
was talking with another representative of Murray�s, Edgar Bullion, who looked
like a frog but was one of the deadliest negotiators Draco had ever dealt with.
Not quite deadly enough to corner Denise, though, who so far wrote her
best-selling Goblin Wars historicals independently of
any publisher and sold them to the highest bidder. Edgar had been trying to win
her for Murray�s since Draco sent in the first volume of Heroic Lives. What ten years hadn�t done, an afternoon was unlikely
to.

�� Yolanda Timpany leaned against a wall by herself and drank a tall
glass of juice with a sardonic expression, occasionally fastening her cat-like
golden gaze on a guest and staring at him or her for an exceptionally long
time. Draco shivered in spite of himself. Yolanda wrote surreal, savage short
stories from the eyes of house-elves, centaurs, merfolk,
madwomen, and similarly damaged people. She also had a well-deserved reputation
for slashing portrayals of people she didn�t like. She�d caused the loss of at
least two elections for Minister and more money than Draco cared to think about.
He never wanted to attract her attention.

��

�� She glanced
over at him as if she�d felt him think that. Draco hastily returned his eyes to
Angela�s face and asked the first question that popped into his head. �What�s
the market for books on Potter like these days?�

�� Angela had
never been slow on the uptake, even when Draco was struggling to explain the
particular twists and turns that a chapter should take to her. She peered at
him through one side of her glasses and said in a sly tone, �Why, Draco Malfoy,
have you managed to decide on your next novel?�

�� Women your
age shouldn�t be arch,� Draco told her firmly. Angela laughed. �And yes, I�m
setting up an interview with him, though whether he�ll agree I don�t know.�

�� Angela
stopped laughing with startling abruptness and looked at him with an expression
Draco had never seen from her before. �If you don�t have an interview yet,� she
said, �and if he hasn�t actually agreed to talk to you about his experiences
during the war, then I don�t think that book will get written.�

�� Draco
folded his arms and stared at her incredulously. �Do you doubt my work ethic that much? Or my
ability to charm someone?�

�� It has
nothing to do with your charms.� By now, Angela looked the way Draco imagined
she would if someone had died. �It has everything to do with the fact that
Potter doesn�t talk about what happened during the war. With
anyone.�

�� Draco
sighed, the sigh that he often used when Skeeter tried to interview him. �I
never thought you had such a poor memory. Potter did plenty of talking after
the war was over, remember? He talked about his experiences during the Battle
of Hogwarts, and he practically gave us the whole history of how he managed to
defeat Voldemort during that monologue when he dueled
him��

�� That�s all
old news,� Angela said. �Of course you could write some of that into the book,
and it would be a graceful retelling of a worn-out
tale.� Draco glared at her; he hated being accused of unoriginality most of
all. �But no one has ever managed to find out exactly how he learned what he had to do to defeat�You-Know-Who.� Unlike
Draco, Angela had never managed the leap to calling Voldemort by his actual
name. �It�s one of the greatest mysteries in the contemporary world. How did he
know that he would survive the
Killing Curse a second time? That the sacrifice he made for the people at the
Battle of Hogwarts would protect them? Dumbledore was almost a year dead at
that point, and all our sources agree that there was no contact between Potter
and Snape before Snape died, either. No, there�s a mystery hiding in the
Forbidden Forest and the memory of Harry Potter, and that�s what he�ll never
tell anyone.�

�� Draco could
have purred. Angela was staring off into space now, her eyes wide and her voice
rambling dreamily. The signs were excellent that he�d get a superb price for
the book, if one person at Murray�s was already so interested in the plot. He
congratulated his own business instincts before pressing onwards.

�� Angela,
have you ever known me to leave a subject before I had the full details? Even the ones that are the most difficult to talk about, as in the
details of rape or torture?�

�� She came
back to herself at the question and looked closely, critically, at him. �No,�
she said. �But the people you talk to are usually less well-armored against you
than Potter will be. Not only does he have those years of hating you to think
about, but also the fact that everyone under the sun has tried to get this
secret out of him before now. I don�t think your previous successes will make a
difference here, Draco. I really don�t. In fact, if anything, they might tell
against you. I�ve heard that Potter doesn�t like Heroic Lives. Says it�s voyeurism.�

�� He�s just
disappointed that he�s never seen himself in there.� Draco finished off his
juice with a snap of his head. �By the time I�m finished with him, Angela,
he�ll be begging to strip himself naked before me.�

�� Angela
closed her eyes. �Draco��

�� In words, dearling, in words.�
Draco raised his empty cup in a toast to her. �My letter is just the beginning.
I also know how to listen, and to ask the right questions. If Potter hasn�t
talked to anyone about this, that�s all the more sign that he must be inwardly dying to talk about it, right? Why
shouldn�t I be the one he chooses? He�ll never encounter anyone more persistent
or better fitted for the job than I am.�

*

�� Malfoy,

�� No.

�� Draco spent
some time staring at the letter that he�d received back from Potter. There
could be no doubt that it was from Potter, despite the absence of a signature,
because it had come back with Justice, and that was the last errand he had sent
Justice on.

�� Draco
looked up at the owl, who was preening himself on the
table after Draco had handed him a dead mouse. Justice flashed a yellow glance
at him that reminded Draco of Yolanda�s, stood on one foot, paused significantly,
and then switched over to preening the other wing.

�� So many
plans and inspirations would dissolve if he simply let this go, Draco thought,
sliding his fingers along the top of the table where Potter�s note lay. Not to
mention that he had all but promised Angela that this would be his next novel,
and he hated going back on anything he�d said to his publishers. Murray�s had
been good to him.

�� Potter was
used to dealing with people who rolled over and did as they were told. Or
people who ignored him and went ahead and published anyway, Draco thought,
thinking of Skeeter. She had any number of �expos�s� on Potter that didn�t
contain the slightest shred of truth, no matter how much she tried to get it.

�� He hadn�t
dealt with someone like Draco before: someone who was a good listener, a gentle
coaxer, almost a Mind-Healer, and who combined that with the ruthless
observation skills necessary to a novelist.

�� Draco
smiled and reached for his wand. There were many ways that he might try to get
around Potter�s objections, including writing him other letters. That was what
he did for most of his subjects who were initially reluctant to talk to him.

�� With
Potter, the direct approach was best.

*

�� �A word with
you, Potter.�

�� The man
who�d been walking down the Ministry corridor ahead of Draco swung around.
Draco had a glimpse of the familiar scar, the Auror robes, the too-narrow and
too-tanned face�all the details that he�d expected.

�� Then he
caught his breath, because there was too much that was unfamiliar there, and which jolted him. The lack of glasses that
made his green eyes stand out as though someone had
lit a lightning flash behind them. The sharpening and smoothing of the angles
in his face, so that he actually looked like an adult. The
short cut to the dark hair, which tamed its messiness somewhat.

�� And the intelligence behind his focused,
concentrated gaze, which considered Draco as a threat and probed more deeply
into his psychology than Draco liked.

�� He�d let
himself be taken off-guard too long. Potter said in a voice deeper than Draco
remembered it, �There�s only one word that needs to matter to you, and that�s
no,� then turned around again as if he were about to walk on.

�� Draco
leaped forwards and seized his arm. He was aware of people staring at him, some
with hostility, but he�d experienced worse walking through hospital wards and
funerals. At least these were people who probably realized he had less chance
of doing harm to Potter than Potter did of doing harm to him, and they might
even include some readers of his books.

�� Potter spun
back to him, made a little dancing step, and slid sideways. Suddenly Draco�s
hand was empty. The next moment, he was pinned against the wall with Potter�s
wand gently but firmly pressed to his windpipe.

�� I didn�t
think you�d sink to assault, Malfoy.� Potter�s voice was gentle, but mocking
for all that. �Of course, your books are an assault on most of what�s decent
about society, so perhaps I shouldn�t be surprised.� He pressed a little closer
and lowered his voice to be for Draco�s ears alone. �I say that because they
expect it of me. They know I don�t like parasites. Now, I don�t care if you
publish intimate facts about anyone who�s agreed to it. But you won�t be
publishing them about me. Why don�t you go away and make them up along with the
rest of the good little writers feeding the public�s appetite for scandal?�

�� It took
Draco a long moment to catch his breath. He�d never interviewed an Auror or
anyone else so involved in the physical careers before,
and Potter�s strength impressed him as much as it surprised him. When he could
finally speak, he locked his eyes with Potter�s and shook his head.

�� I�ve
achieved too many successes,� he said. �And there�s a thrill when you know that
you�ve chanced on the right story, like a golden arrow shooting up your spine.
Much the same thing happens when you know you�re on the track of a criminal, I
suspect. I can�t back out now, Potter.�

�� Potter
offered him a level gaze and a slow smile. �Then I�m sorry for you,� he said.
He stepped away and let Draco escape from the wall. �You seem to have forgotten
what disappointment�s like. Well, you�ll learn.� He again turned his back.

�� An evening
of your time,� Draco said, brushing dust from his sleeves and making sure that
his voice was perfectly pleasant. �We don�t have to talk about your experiences
in the war the first time out. We can discuss something else less intimate. The latest case that you�ve been on, perhaps, or your
correspondence.�

�� Potter
stopped as if Draco had fired off a Blasting Curse at him. For long moments,
Draco had the feeling that he�d scored a point, but not why. Potter stood
there, breathing evenly, still not looking at him.

�� Finally,
Potter snapped his head down and said, �One dinner. Tomorrow
night at eight. Meet me in the Atrium.�

�� When he
moved away this time, an interested, excited murmur ran through the Aurors. A
young woman in the bright robes of a trainee winked at Draco and mouthed,
�Congratulations. That�s more than he�s ever given anyone else.�

�� Draco
winked back, exhilarated. No one resists
the Malfoy charm, even if they�re determined to do it.

�� The feeling
of rightness settled further in his
chest, unfurling wings like a dragon�s. Draco was more aware than ever that
this was the right book to write.

�� He didn�t
know the title yet, but that title was waiting in him like a golden egg. It
would hatch at the proper hour, probably when he�d sucked every last bit of
information he could out of Potter.

�� As he swaggered
out of the Ministry, Draco whistled and ignored the odd, sometimes suspicious
glances he got. I love my job.
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Incandescence