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A Better Bargain Driven	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3082 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
Title: A Better Bargain Driven

Summary: Two years of war. Draco’s forgotten what it’s like to want something possible. But now, he has two things: the possibility of freedom from the Dark Lord, and Harry Potter’s arse. Perhaps not in that order.

Rating: R

Warning(s): MAJOR dub-con at the beginning, AU (Draco never returned to Hogwarts after he became a Death Eater, and Dumbledore didn’t die), torture and gore, use of a truth potion.

Word Count: 21,500

Author's Notes: Thank you for such an intriguing prompt, centopiedi. I hope the fic pleases! Thanks much to my betas, Linda and Karen. The title for this fic comes from the Sir Philip Sidney poem quoted at the beginning.

Also: this fic has a lot of dubious consent at the beginning, and is probably darker than any of my other fics except Forgive Those Who Trespass and “Run.” Don’t read this if you have any issues whatsoever with sexual consent.

A Better Bargain Driven

            My true love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange one for another given:

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,

There never was a better bargain driven:

      My true love hath my heart, and I have his.

-Sir Philip Sidney, “The Bargain.”

Part I: Hath No Heart

            Draco stood with his eyes fixed on the Muggle. He watched strips of blackened skin pulling away from her bones. He watched as her eyes turned to slugs and wriggled down her face. He watched as her bones broke, one by one, and built themselves into a white cage atop her sternum.

            He didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. He looked, and applauded politely when the torture was finished, along with the other Death Eaters who had stood vigil for this execution.

            “Leave, Malfoy.”

            The Dark Lord’s voice washed over him like cold sewage. Draco crouched and touched his head to the floor, aiming at the throne in the corner, and then backed out of the room on his hands and knees.

            When he could stand up again, he cast a charm on his knees that rid them of dirt. Nothing could get the feeling of submission out of his mouth, but, well, that was something he would have to get used to, wasn’t it?

            Draco wandered down the corridors of what had been his home. They were empty at the moment, with the Death Eaters either watching the torture games or gone on missions. Draco still didn’t think it felt like home, and that had nothing to do with the empty spaces on the walls where portraits of his ancestors had once hung. It had felt nothing like home since the moment the Dark Lord placed the Mark on his arm.

            There was an echo of a thought in his head at that. An echo of regret. But really, two years had passed and nothing had changed. Draco hadn’t seen Hogwarts since he was still fifteen, and now he had “celebrated” his eighteenth birthday by making a Muggleborn writhe under the Cruciatus.

            After all this time, some things became deadly boring. If only through familiarity. Even having to watch his words around loyalists like Bellatrix had become—

            Routine. Dull. Grey.

            Draco sighed as he went up the stairs, past corners decorated with splashes of blood and framed scrolls of the Dark Lord’s plans for the wizarding world, to his bedroom. The combination of constant alertness and constant boredom wore on him fierce sometimes.

            He reached his bedroom and slipped inside, looking around at the blank walls. The Dark Lord had grown more and more paranoid as time passed. Let a Death Eater show attention to something other than him, even to polishing their wand too much, and he would start suspecting their loyalty. Death Eaters weren’t supposed to have a center of their lives or anything they cared about other than him.

            So Draco had no paintings or tapestries or curtains now. Just a huge blank glass window, and a bed decorated in green sheets, which was approved. Since the Dark Lord didn’t seem to relish sleep himself, he hadn’t yet started suspecting attachments to pillows and sheets.

            Draco lay down slowly and stared at the ceiling of his four-poster. Once, it had carried paintings done by his father and grandfather in childhood, with dragons blazing at fierce Malfoy wizards and golden chimeras gamboling with their heads turned back over their shoulders. But he had scraped it clean when the Dark Lord first started ranting about images.

            I wish I’d never made the choice to become a Death Eater.

            Such a thought was safe only here, out of range of the Dark Lord’s powerful Legilimency. And Draco knew Nagini was probably beneath his bed, or one of the Dark Lord’s other spy snakes, sliding in and out, compelled by his power to report to him. That meant he could never speak it aloud.

            Draco sighed and shut his eyes. He had come to the room and lain down in bed, which meant he had to sleep if a snake was here. He couldn’t cast the spells to be sure one was. Why would you need to look for a spy when you were absolutely loyal to the Dark Lord? Obviously, if you were loyal you had nothing to hide.

            Luckily, snakes couldn’t seem to detect the difference between lying there with your eyes closed and actually sleeping. And even more luckily, when Draco’s mind had dashed in several different directions and found nothing to occupy itself, it did let him go to sleep, most of the time. Draco had never been afflicted with insomnia.

            He drifted, and didn’t remember the moment when he did slumber. Honestly, he sleepwalked through most of his days.

*

            Draco opened his eyes to the most unusual of things: a sound that shouldn’t have been there.

            He lay absolutely flat and still, and even continued the cadence of his breathing. But his hand cramped under his pillow. His wand was there, and if someone had come into his bedroom to kill him—probably Bellatrix—then he was going to go down cursing. He would have nothing to lose, at that point.

            But the movement came again, and Draco put aside the thought that it was his aunt. She wouldn’t have stumbled like that, even if she had wanted to terrify someone before she killed him. She was all about glides and lunges.

            Then the person, whoever it was, tripped over the trunk where Draco kept his clothes and began cursing in a loud tone. Draco surged to his feet at once, casting a Lumos Charm that made the room blaze and the shadows flee.

            He had to stare. Because the person on the floor was Bellatrix, her hair sprawled around her and her dark eyes blazing with anger as she tried to untangle her foot from the mess of robes it was caught in. Draco shook his head, wondering if one of the other Death Eaters who enjoyed jockeying for position had finally managed to Confound her or feed her a potion that took away her faculties.

            Then her eyes rose to him, and she flushed. “Oops?” she muttered, in what was undoubtedly her own voice but still different. Draco had never heard Bellatrix say that except when she made a victim’s heart stop beating too soon.

            Draco felt his hand shake as he aimed his wand. The rush of hope after so long was painful, like waking up a limb that had gone numb with sitting on it.

            “Who are you?” he demanded. “Tell me and I might not simply hand you over to the Dark Lord.” He was evaluating her in the meantime with intense attention, trying to learn what he could on his own. She couldn’t be Polyjuiced. The Dark Lord had placed enchantments all over the Manor that would make someone who had recently consumed the potion’s ingredients start vomiting. But there were likewise enchantments, placed by Draco’s own family, that should have destroyed simple appearance-enhancing glamours. Draco didn’t know anything that could give someone another person’s appearance more cunningly than—

            Wait. No. He did know one thing. Draco moved a little to one side and tried to make himself seem both alert and less threatening.

            “Nymphadora Tonks?” She was a Metamorphmagus, a fact Draco knew although he wasn’t sure most of the Death Eaters did. None of them were Blacks, a family once well-known for having the gift, and most of them only seemed to think that Tonks could disguise herself so effortlessly because she’d been trained as an Auror.

            The witch froze. Then she said, “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks!”

            Draco took that as confirmation. He moved a little more, back towards the bed instead of the door, and saw Tonks’s mouth firm. She seemed to understand what he was doing, although really, Draco could have called a house-elf from anywhere and directed them to deliver his bumbling cousin to the Dark Lord. But symbolic gestures were important.

            “What mission did you come on?” Draco asked. He wasn’t an important enough Death Eater for them to send someone to assassinate him, and neither did his room contain any objects crucial to the war effort.

            His room probably did have a spy-snake under the bed, and that would have to be dealt with depending on the outcome of this conversation. But Draco was willing to wait and see if it would have to come to that.

            Tonks stared at him. It was more than disconcerting to see that guilty expression in his aunt’s eyes. She never looked guilty for anything.

            “I don’t have to tell you,” she said.

            Draco sighed a little. “This is the kind of thing you want to give your life up for?” he asked, and shook his head. “I never did understand the Order of the Phoenix. Proud at all the wrong times.”

            Those words were partially for the spy-snake and partially for Tonks. She gave him an earnest look, like a dog trying hard to understand, and then her eyes widened. “Y-you think you can th-threaten me?” Draco was almost sure it was excitement and not fear making her voice shake like that.

            “I think I can,” said Draco, and leveled his wand at her, although he pointed it at her feet rather than her head. That was the kind of distinction a human would understand and a spy-snake wouldn’t. Or at least, Draco hoped they wouldn’t.

            “All right, all right!” Tonks folded her arms over her head and cringed for effect. Draco grimaced. She was an awful actor. It was just as well there were no other humans in here to overhear her. “Listen. I came here to give you a letter. There are people in the Order who think you can be used.”

            I will have to kill the snake, Draco thought calmly. No matter what the outcome.

            “I am one of the Dark Lord’s loyal servants.”

            Tonks looked at him, and her face changed a little, although it was only making her eyes blue instead of black. “The person who wrote this letter seemed certain you weren’t.”

            Draco just looked back at her, and wondered if he should tell her about the curses he’d cast. Yes, most of them had been at the Dark Lord’s direction, and on captured Muggles instead of wizards—even Mudbloods. But he had still cast them. Draco couldn’t imagine the person she was talking about. It would have been different if any of the professors except Snape had had a close relationship with Draco, or if any of his family had escaped, but neither of those was true. And Snape was an utter traitor.

            I can’t imagine Father and Mother going to the Order even if they did escape.

            “I am,” said Draco, and then he cast a carefully-calculated curse. Tonks squeaked as it went past her head. It leaped off the enchanted mirror that Draco had left up on the wall—he suspected the Dark Lord used them as spies, too—and then aimed straight for the most dangerous non-human thing. It made the carpet beneath his bed smolder, and the curtains writhe, but when Draco peered under the bed, it had done its work. An adder that Draco had often seen speeding along the Dark Lord’s business lay there, severed in two halves.

            “What are you—”

            They had perhaps five minutes of freedom before the Dark Lord noticed. It was always quick. Draco turned around and said, “I need oral information, not written. Now. Then leave.”

            Tonks stared at him, but just when Draco thought he might need to curse her to convince her he was serious, she nodded and began to whisper quickly. “We need to win the war. We’re losing the longer it drags on. He can kill us too easily. The one person who most wants to end the war wrote you that letter.”

            “His name. Or hers. Now,” Draco added, when Tonks hesitated. He suspected it was Dumbledore, but he was curious what Dumbledore thought he could offer Draco.

            Not even Hogwarts. The school had been shuttered for two years, since the Dark Lord had attacked successfully on a Hogsmeade weekend and killed a number of students. Draco had wondered if there was anyone he knew, but he had turned his eyes away from the published list of casualties.

            “Harry.”

            Draco’s mind ground to a stop, and now he was the one gaping at his cousin like a gormless fool. “Why does Potter care what becomes of me?”

            Tonks gripped her robes, the copy of Bellatrix’s robes, and shivered a little. “I don’t know. He said something once about knowing that you would—that you don’t like torturing people, and that you would like to stop being a Death Eater. And that you would enjoy taking a personal price from him. I didn’t understand that bit.”

            Draco was silent for long moments. No, he didn’t like torturing people, which was one reason the Dark Lord constantly forced him to do it. How Potter had realized that was a different question.

            But then Draco’s minds turned towards the last words Tonks had pronounced, and he found himself smiling without really knowing why, at least until Tonks shivered. He glanced at her, and she shook her head, eyes disturbed and now nothing like Bellatrix’s.

            “You’re scary when you smile like that,” she whispered.

            “I had a rivalry with Potter,” Draco said. “Yes, I can think of things that I would enjoy taking from him.”

            “I—you have to leave him alone, then!” Tonks stood up, and she looked noble and pathetic and enough unlike his aunt to make Draco want to laugh. But that would waste the little time they had. “If he’s wrong, and you’re not a noble person at all, then you have to leave him alone! If you want us to win, then you have to leave him alone so he can succeed!”

            “Ah,” Draco said. In truth, he was unsurprised that Potter was important to the Order’s victory and not just an obsession for the Dark Lord, but he could taunt Tonks as though the knowledge was new to him. “So he’s important, is he? I suppose we’ll find out just how important.”

            Tonks’s face was pale now, and her hair was changing to a flat brown. “You can’t,” she whispered.

            “I can.” Draco thought their five minutes were almost up. “You tell Potter to write a Blood Letter and send it to me.”

            “Dark Arts—Blood Arts—”

            “You needn’t say it in that shocked voice.” Draco abruptly leveled his wand at her and shouted, “Help, I don’t understand—my Lord?”

            Tonks understood, so she wasn’t stupid. She closed her eyes and shifted into the Dark Lord’s form just as a snake slithered under the door.

            The snake paused, and Draco bowed to the floor and stammered, “My L-Lord, I never knew that you—I didn’t know you would set me a test—”

            “Perhaps you passed, and perhaps you did not,” said Tonks in the Dark Lord’s high, cold voice, which gave Draco a shudder even though he knew it was an imitation. “I will have to inform you at a…later date.” She gave Draco a savage smile and then strode out of the room, her black cloak floating behind her. Luckily, the Dark Lord didn’t usually wear robes that differed much from the robes of an ordinary Death Eater, so Bellatrix’s clothes didn’t look out of place on “him.”

            Draco collapsed back on his bed and sighed, dragging his hand over his face. He might still be in danger. He could say that the “Dark Lord” had ordered him to kill the dead snake as a test, and it would probably be believed—since the snakes had to report to the Dark Lord in Parseltongue, not from a distance—but he could be punished for letting an intruder walk out of the room. Then again, it would all depend on what the newly-arriving snake told the Dark Lord.

            Draco closed his eyes. Maybe he would be tortured to death in a few hours.

            Maybe Tonks wouldn’t report his words to Potter, or Potter would decide the Dark magic required of a Blood Letter was too extreme to use.

            But there was the faint hope that he would manage to start reporting to the Order of the Phoenix, and resist the Dark Lord somehow. Maybe even bring him down.

            It was a lot more “maybes,” and “hopes,” than Draco had had an hour ago.

*

            “Stand.”

            Draco did, at once, even with his muscles still shaking from the aftereffects of the Cruciatus. You did what the Dark Lord commanded when you had his Mark on your arm, and he could send pain through that even worse than the Cruciatus Curse, because it was partially mental.

            The Dark Lord leaned forwards again. “You say that you think this was your cousin Nymphadora Tonks, Draco,” he said, and Draco nodded without regret. Tonks wasn’t stupid enough to try sneaking into the Manor again in someone else’s form—at least, she had better not be. And if Potter sent the Blood Letter, Draco would have a more secure way to communicate than through his cousin. “Why did you never mention that she was a Metamorphmagus before?”

            Draco looked at the Dark Lord in curiosity, although he dropped his eyes before the red ones that stared back into his. “Because I thought you knew, my Lord,” he said honestly. “I thought Aunt Bellatrix would have told you. She’s as closely related to Tonks as I am.”

            The Dark Lord stirred in front of him, but not one of the bad stirrings, like the beckoning gesture that would bring Nagini sliding forwards to claim a meal. “Perhaps she told me,” he whispered, and then fell brooding.

            Draco waited. If he could cast some doubts on Bellatrix’s loyalty, he would laugh, although he didn’t seriously think that would happen. Bellatrix always proved herself again with some new willingness to torture.

            “Go,” said the Dark Lord abruptly.

            Draco bowed in the deepest obeisance he could manage when still standing, and then backed out of the room, his eyes on the floor. The Dark Lord didn’t notice him. He had turned and was shouting for Bellatrix.

            Draco stood slowly, shaking his hands a little, when he got out the door. The Dark Lord didn’t believe him completely, he thought. He had bought Tonks shifting into him—she had already done that by the time the replacement snake had arrived—but he had also seemed dubious that Draco had killed the spy-snake on her orders and done whatever else she asked, because he was so afraid of failing the test that “the Dark Lord” had set him.

            He wasn’t sure enough of Draco’s disobedience yet to kill him.

            And as long as I live, there’s the hope, Draco thought.

            And when he woke the next morning to find the letter from Potter lying at the bottom of his bed in a pool of blood, he knew there was more than hope.

*

            The letter from Potter was wrought with blood, as it had to be to pass through the protections the Dark Lord had placed around the Manor. It would also have some of Tonks’s blood. She was the closest relation they had to Draco, and this sort of magical letter combined the blood of the sender with the blood of the recipient.

            The ink was red and shining as if just poured, the parchment itself woven close and thick with swirls of red and silver in it. Draco stroked it for a second, marveling—Potter had undertaken Dark Arts, and for him—before he moved his gaze to the words.

            Malfoy,

            Okay.

            I knew you weren’t going to help us just because you’re a good person. Tonks telling me about the Blood Letter cured that hope if I ever felt it.

            But if you’re going to demand my death or my slavery, that won’t work, either. The Order of the Phoenix needs me to win the war. I don’t think, if you’re willing to help us this much, that you want me to die, either.

            So meet me in the glade in the Forbidden Forest where we saw the thing that frightened you so much in first year, and we’ll see what I can give you.

            H. P.

            Draco closed his eyes and lay slowly back. That thing had been the Dark Lord, he knew now, feeding on unicorn blood. The Dark Lord had bragged of the extreme measures he had taken to keep himself alive—and he had also excoriated his followers with them, charging them with negligence for not searching for him more stringently.

            Draco wanted to smile when he touched the little vial of blood that dangled on the edge of the parchment. Potter had sent some of his blood so Draco could write back the same way. And he had obviously left the time, if not the place, of the meeting up to Draco.

            Two nights hence, there would be a raid on the Ministry, an attempt to break the Aurors’ determined defenses. Draco would pretend to Apparate along and then slip away. In the confusion of masked Death Eaters dodging in and out between their enemies, it was often hard to keep track of who was on a raid anyway.

            And that would give him the time to meet with Potter and decide—

            Draco ran a finger along the parchment and watched a little drop of the blood he would send back well.

            What he wanted.

*

            By the time he Apparated out of a chaos of Death Eaters and into the glade that he remembered as being full of darkness and fear, Draco knew.

            Potter was sitting on a log. He didn’t bother standing. Draco knew a wand would be aimed at him along Potter’s leg, and didn’t bother feeling offended. He sauntered a few steps nearer and then stopped, with a small nod.

            “Did you decide, Malfoy?”

            Draco started. He knew what Potter was like, of course, and as well as he could make out in the low light from his own wand, Potter looked the same as ever: messy hair, a jaw always squared up and tense, bitten fingernails. But his voice struck Draco like a jolt despite those other familiarities.

            It had deepened in the more than two years since Draco had last seen him. And when Potter stood up and moved towards him in the moonlight and the Lumos, Draco could see how deep his eyes had become. For a moment, he almost faltered. He wasn’t sure he could make his request of someone who looked like this, instead of his memory-Potter.

            But he caught himself back. He’d taken a risk by coming here, by having Potter send the Blood Letter, by sparing Tonks in the first place. A few unusual expressions or looks in Potter’s eye wouldn’t spare Potter from this.

            “I want to fuck you,” he said.

            Potter nodded, once. Draco, who had expected him to sway, opened his mouth. But Potter was already speaking. “Then these are the terms that this will work on. You’ll pass information on to me either by the Blood Letter or by meeting me here or in some other place you decide on.”

            “Any meeting place will become dangerous if we use it too much,” Draco told him starkly. “I’m a good Occlumens, but I can still only lie to him by omission.”

            Potter didn’t say the Dark Lord’s name, the first bit of wisdom—respecting the Taboo—Draco had ever seen from him. He said, “Then you’ll tell me which places would work for you to keep safe from His Noselessness.” Draco choked, but Potter was going on, staring over Draco’s shoulder into the forest, as if he found the pattern of the tree branches more interesting than the negotiations for his virtue. “And we’ll meet there, and you’ll trade me the information, and you’ll fuck me.”

            At least he flinched when he said the words. Draco moved a step nearer, feeling as heady as though he had sneaked a drink of the elf-mead that was now stored deep in the Manor’s cellars for the Dark Lord’s pleasure only.

            “How do I know that I can trust you to let me have you instead of just Apparating away?” he teased, and reached out to put his hand on Potter’s cheek.

            Potter flinched again before he let Draco touch. This time, it was as delicious as fresh cherries. But Potter kept his eyes on Draco’s face, and didn’t back away. His cheek was rough with the stubble that of course he didn’t know the right Shaving Charms for, Draco thought condescendingly.

            “Because I’m going to give you a taste tonight, and then you can consider the next time you pass on information as a payment for this. And each time you have me after that, it’s an advance on the next time you keep your side of the bargain.”

            Potter grimaced horribly as he said the words, but he said them, standing there sturdy and stubborn under the half-moon’s light. Draco leaned towards him and whispered, “Why did you agree? You couldn’t have known what I wanted before you came here.”

            “There were a limited amount of things it could be.” Potter said those words in such a resigned tone, shifting back and forth to balance himself, while Draco’s hands found the vulnerable points in his muscles and coaxed yet more shivers and shifts out of him. “I thought it would probably be this.”

            “Why did you agree?” Draco repeated. “That was an answer to one of my questions, and not another.”

            He slid his finger along the corner of Potter’s jaw. For a second, Potter’s eyes shut. He didn’t sag, though. He just stood up even straighter, as if he thought he could defeat Draco’s touches with sheer hardness.

            I’ll be even harder than that. It was already true.

            “Because this is for the war,” Potter said. “For all the people who would be killed otherwise. For all the people who’ve already died.” He met Draco’s gaze head-on. “Why would you choose this, anyway? I thought you would choose something more—physical.”

            Damn. Draco hadn’t anticipated what it would do to him, to have Potter think these acts weren’t going to be physical. It was a good job he didn’t have any further to walk this evening. “What do you think this is, Potter?”

            “I thought you would want to torture me.”

            “Some of it will probably be like torture, from the way you’re flinching,” Draco observed, and traced a hand from Potter’s neck down his breastbone. He sucked in his breath and didn’t move. Draco chuckled. “Are you going to hold your breath all the way through what we do tonight? I assure you, you’ll have to breathe for at least part of it. You’ll be gasping soon.”

            Potter’s eyes flared, and some of the depth Draco had seen there fell away, revealing the familiar look he’d worn when they were challenging each other over the Snitch. “Right, Malfoy. With disgust.”

            “No,” Draco said. He returned his hand to Potter’s throat, delicately letting his fingers encircle it. Potter was still mostly twigs and light flesh. Whatever the Order of the Phoenix fed its members clearly wasn’t all treacle tart and shepherd’s pie. “But I can’t do anything to help my parents. I’ve spent the past two years thinking they’re going to die. It might be any moment. It might be because someone convinces the Dark Lord they’re traitors, or just because he’s bored. There’s no way to plan for something like that.

            “This, though?” Draco was breathing faster, and he was enormously pleased to see Potter’s chest heave in response. “This will have regular dates and times. I’ll get to help defeat the Dark Lord if it works. And you’re going to entertain me.”

            He bent his head and kissed Potter.

            Potter stood there, accepting it. He was so restrained and held back that Draco wanted to shout for joy. And when was the last time he’d felt that impulse?

            Draco also wanted to break Potter’s restraint, but that was a lot easier than keeping hope alive, or winning his parents free from the Dark Lord, or even passing information to the Order. He pushed Potter to the grass. Potter went with his arms flying, trying to get his hands beneath him and roll him away.

            “No,” Draco whispered, kneeling beside him. “Because this is the price, Potter. And you said yourself that this is an advance payment.”

            Potter jerked once, then closed his eyes and lay there. A muscle in his jaw kept jumping, and so did his pulse, but he seemed to accept it.

            On the other hand, how fun was someone who lay there and pretended that you were the darkness behind his eyelids? Draco shook his head and clucked his tongue, and slid his hand down Potter’s groin. Potter gasped, his eyes flying open.

            “Look at me,” Draco commanded. He waited until Potter did, his eyes glinting and wild in the darkness, before he lay down on top of him.

            It was delicious, even with how tight Potter’s muscles were, which made for a not-very-soft bed. Draco let his hand wander in patterns down Potter’s chest; he found the lines of his legs and traced them. Then he returned to his breastbone, and opened his shirt there—Muggle clothes were so ridiculous—and licked one of Potter’s nipples.

            He jumped and tried to push Draco off him. It was hysterical.

            But Draco was still hard, and toying with Potter wasn’t as much fun as having Potter jerk him off. He reached down and thrust his cock into Potter’s hand, which was down by his side, as if he thought he could make Draco’s interest wane by keeping as far away from him as possible. Potter promptly jumped and glared again, but his eyes slid away from Draco’s after a second.

            “Pull me off,” Draco ordered, bending down so his mouth was right beside Potter’s ear.

            Potter did, his eyes half-open and staring past Draco’s neck. That was all right, for this evening, Draco thought, as he panted and his body surged. It had been so long since someone touched him—a quick fumble with Pansy in a corner of the Manor when her parents had visited to pay obeisance—that he hadn’t known if this would work.

            But it did, and he emptied himself so quickly his head spun. Potter made a disgusted sound and wiped his hand off on the ground even though he’d only been touching Draco through layers of cloth. Draco chuckled and let his head fall for a moment, to rest on Potter’s cheek.

            Part of the quickness undoubtedly was because of the length of time he’d been celibate. But he thought the other part was Potter.

            When he felt good and ready—and judged the raid wouldn’t be over yet—Draco leaned down and kissed Potter’s cheek, then his lips, then his nose. That last was purely so Potter wouldn’t be able to glare past him. Then Draco sat up and stretched his arms and said, “Don’t worry, Potter, I’ll let you have a chance to play the good little martyr soon.”

            Potter stood up without a word and wiped his hand off once more against his trousers. Then he Apparated.

            Draco closed his eyes and let his body hum for one moment more. Then he gathered up the discarded Death Eater masks, both the white one he’d tossed aside when he came into the clearing and the expression of indifference that was the only safe one to wear most of the time in the Manor.

            Potter had brought back more than hope into Draco’s life. He’d brought fun.

            Draco would have to remember to thank him appropriately, the next time he saw him.

*

            “I know you weren’t on the raid, Draco.”

            Draco paused, on the verge of leaving the dining room after another tedious meeting, and turned to his mother. It was the first time she had said something like that since the beginning of their siege in the Manor. Two years ago, now. More. Draco could feel the sweat burst out on his skin and the heartbeat like needles set to puncture his eardrums.

            His first thought was that this was Bellatrix with special permission to be under Polyjuice, or that the Dark Lord had found his own Metamorphmagus. Because his mother wouldn’t risk saying such a thing in the presence of the snakes certainly watching them.

            But Mother looked straight at him, and her pale eyes were huge and wary but real. She said, “Your father’s finally got back enough control of the protections on the Manor to defend us so we can speak.”

            Draco swallowed, overcome. At one time, Malfoys could have said anything they wanted to anywhere in the Manor and no one else could have overheard them, even given eavesdropping spells or spying house-elves. The Dark Lord had taken control of that magic from Father when he came here, thanks to his link to Father’s Dark Mark. Draco had assumed the control had only strengthened when he himself was branded.

            But if Father had taken them back…

            “He can only hold them for a few minutes at a time,” Mother went on, her hands clenching in her robes. She held Draco’s eyes and said, “Whatever you are doing, I want you to keep yourself safe first. Not us.”

            “I have to keep you safe.” Draco said it helplessly. He knew Mother wished he had gone back to Hogwarts during what would have been his sixth year, and the Dark Lord had even thought of it, of some kind of “special mission” that in the end never came to fruition. But even on that mission, Draco would have done anything and everything for Mother and Father. They were his world.

            “Not at the expense of your own life. If you have an escape, we wish you to take it.”

            Draco gnawed his lips. Too dangerous to say much. Even as he hesitated, he saw Mother’s eyes move to the corners, which probably indicated that the magic was reverting to the Dark Lord’s control. But he said, “It’s for the ultimate escape.” Not personal, he hoped she understood from that. Not something that would help him to flee, but something that would free them all.

            Mother’s eyes widened. And then she lowered her eyes and whispered, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Draco.”

            The room became a little heavier in the corners, and Draco felt as though someone was sliding a slimy finger down his soul. He forced some semblance of a smile onto his face and reached out to pat Mother’s shoulder. “It will work out the way I want.”

            Mother bowed her head. Draco strutted out of the room as though he was thinking of some plan that would set him higher in the Death Eaters, something she had tried to talk him out of.

            In his heart, he reeled. Because he had known that his parents feared the Dark Lord and would bow only because of that fear, but…

            For Father to have taken back the magics of Malfoy Manor meant he had turned against him completely. He had forsaken the loyalty implied by the Dark Mark and stood outside it. The Mark could still hurt him, still had some sort of claim on his body, but the claim on his magic was lessening.

            Draco had never thought that would happen.
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A Better Bargain Driven