Chapter Fourteen of 'The Same Species As Shakespeare'- Serpent's Egg

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Chapter Fourteen—Serpent’s Egg

Draco waited until he got back to his own room to explode. It was the one advantage he had so far seen from Potter’s staying in a guest bedroom whilst he recovered.

And even then, the explosion was nothing like the storm of screaming and temper that Weasley would no doubt have expected from him, because of course Weasley was that vulgar. Instead, Draco closed his door and locked it with several complicated warding charms. If his father or Severus came seeking him in the next half-hour, they would know to retire until he opened the door to them of his own free will. Draco imagined the expressions on their faces and experienced his first surge of pleasure since Weasley had arrived.

Weasley.

Potter was so pathetic that he must have summoned one of his friends the moment he sensed that he might lose the game to Draco and his own overwhelming desire. He had ever wanted to be a winner; he had never cared about cheating. But of course he had to preserve the appearance of genuine competence, so he couldn’t simply demur from Draco’s advances. He had to invite a friend who just happened to disapprove of Draco and just happened to want to stand in the way instead.

Draco’s hands clenched. His fingers dug hard enough into the skin of his palms to bring blood flowing. He opened his hands and gazed at the streams of red spilling free without expression.

Blood. Like the blood he had wanted to bear down to his room where the collection of artifacts from Potter’s body waited.

This game he played with Potter was a dance of desire and a dance of blood. Heat and passion, deep feelings that Weasley, with his shallow relationship with a woman who hadn’t even known she was a witch before her eleventh birthday, couldn’t comprehend. He could guard his friend, yes, but never enough. In the end, Potter’s own longing for Draco would pull him out from under that guardianship and deliver him to Draco.

Draco could feel his breath quickening as he pictured Potter creeping into his bed, shaken by his own lust. His imaginary Potter reached out and traced a hand above the hairs on his arm, and then the dream Draco rolled on top of him and half-smothered him into the bed, clasping his shoulders and kissing him greedily. Draco discovered in that moment that it was possible to be jealous of oneself.

He merely had to tempt, to show himself to Potter in good lights and with longing glances of his own until Potter’s groin overpowered his reason. He was healing rapidly, and so he would lose the chance to use his wound as an excuse in a few days. He would return to full-time duty protecting Draco.

He would see Draco, as Draco had not before shown himself to anyone. There had been no one else he desired to defeat this much.

Potter admired him as an architect, didn’t he? Then he should see the Keller house, which Draco was ready to begin preparing.

Potter was drawn to his physical attributes. Draco knew a number of potions and subtle charms that would show them off and make it seem like nothing more than the normal effect of attraction when Potter responded; the potions, in particular, could be tuned to one recipient, the way that love potions usually were.

Potter liked touching him, and he liked sweet, soft words, the way that all Gryffindors did. Draco could sacrifice his own dignity for a few days, when he knew he would win the greater gift of Potter’s humiliation. His vengeance would be more vicious because of that sacrifice, anyway.

Draco felt his tense lips, tightly clamped shut just a moment ago, relaxing into a smile.

He would have Potter, after all.

*

“What do you think you’re doing, mate?”

What made the words hard to hear was that Ron spoke so kindly. He’d taken the chair Draco had occupied the moment the other man left the room, and he stared Harry straight in the eyes as he spoke, a faint, sad smile on his face. His voice demanded nothing—or rather, it suggested that he knew Harry had a reasonable answer he would give as soon as he was reasonably asked for it. It had never been like this in the past, when his friends had assumed he was obsessed with Draco for no good reason.

Harry stared at his hands instead, and swallowed. He had an idea now what Ron must have seen when he opened the door, and for all that he believed Draco was worthy of regard and esteem, he flushed.

“Why do you want him so much?” Ron whispered. “Isn’t there anyone, anyone, in the world who could possibly mean what he does to you and be less dangerous? Please, Harry.” He reached out and laid a gentle, insistent hand on Harry’s knee. His fingers came near the wound. They didn’t really hurt, but Harry was glad enough of the excuse to flinch and stir so that Ron could see the full extent of the bandaging. Maybe he would feel sorry enough for Harry to give up the questioning.

“Merlin.”

Ron was on his feet, and his expression had hardened to the point that Harry felt briefly sorry for the imposter. Then Ron flicked his wand, and a sluice of cool, soothing magic cascaded over the injury. Harry sighed and leaned his head back on the pillow, free of pain for the first time since he’d awoken that morning.

“They don’t even give you proper healing spells, do they?’ Ron shook his head, eyes fastened on Harry’s face. “Mate, please. Say that you’ll heal and then let Kingsley pull you off the case, or at least this part of it. I’ve discovered a few clues that might eventually lead us closer to who this bloke is. Protect Malfoy from that direction. Leave this part of it to me.”

Harry bit his lip. Ron had never begged him for anything like he was begging for this now.

“I can’t,” he said, and then wondered that he had. He’d meant to keep silent and let Ron get upset at him for being a stubborn arse, but no. That wasn’t quite good enough anymore. He had to try to explain, even though he doubted anyone outside this private dance between him and Malfoy could understand. He lifted his head and sought Ron’s eyes, wondering for a moment what his own looked like. Blind, sun-dazzled, filled with a lack of sense? Maybe. “Ron, he’s like gravity. He draws me, and if I tried to go elsewhere, all I would think about would be him. I couldn’t possibly do a good job on the investigation. I would run back to the Manor at the earliest opportunity, or maybe get myself killed if the imposter appeared in front of me again. I have to go over the waterfall, or go into the trap, or—use whatever metaphor you want to use, I’ve got to do it.”

Ron stared at him with his lips slightly parted. Then he whistled shakily and sat down. The last thing Harry expected to hear him whisper was, “I understand.”

Harry blinked.

“I knew a woman like that once,” Ron went on, staring up at the ceiling. Harry looked up, too, but saw only the curves and patterns of snowflakes melting into streams that he had memorized in his first day flat on his back. The Malfoys favored more delicate decorations for their guest rooms than the ones they lived in, it seemed. “It was during that period of about six months right before Hermione and I got back together, you remember? That stretch of time when we didn’t speak to each other at all?”

Harry nodded. He retained his own memories of that time, when he had been Ron’s friend and Hermione’s friend, but couldn’t be both at the same moment, which had always been possible before. Sometimes it came back to him in dreams as a series of months when he had walked across blazing stone. He’d gone off by himself and got drunk and maudlin and weepy when they’d finally started speaking again.

“There was a woman in the second month.” Ron closed his eyes as if he could see her before him again. “I saw her when I was doing some shopping for Ginny’s birthday in Diagon Alley. Standing behind one of the counters; I didn’t know then if she was a patron at the shop or if she worked there. She had a sapphire in one hand, set in a silver star-shaped pendant. The silver was the exact shade of her hair.”

“She was older?” Harry blinked. If he had to say anything against Ron, it would be that his friend was sometimes shallow in the way he related to women, Hermione and his sister excepted. He tended to drool over Fleur even now when he thought she wasn’t looking. Harry wouldn’t have thought an older woman had the chance to attract Ron.

“She had silver hair,” Ron said with a curious obstinacy in his voice. “And she looked up, and I saw her eyes were green, about the shade of yours, mate. That was all I cared about. And there was an expression on her face as if she’d been using the pendant to see the future, and it had actually worked. That dreaming serenity.” He half-closed his eyes this time. “She turned around, put the pendant down on the counter, and walked out of the shop. I followed her. I had to know her name, see where she went.

“I never learned the first, not for certain. I heard someone call her Rebecca. That was enough for me. It was like learning her last name would make her too real, and then I’d have to think about whether I’d heard of her family, what side of the war they fought on, whether she had relatives in the Auror Department—“ Ron gave a harsh shrug of his shoulders and leaned forwards, staring intently at Harry. “You know what I mean?”

Harry nodded slowly. He had gone through enough contortions in his head, God knew, when he had first begun to be attracted to Draco, mentally separating Draco from the man who had hurt Ginny with Tom Riddle’s diary and the boy who had nearly killed Ron and Katie Bell in their sixth year. The arguments he used to persuade himself weren’t always reasonable, but what did fascination care about reason?

“I listened to her speak. Her voice paralyzed me. I didn’t want to go up to her and introduce myself, though I could have. As far as I knew, I would never marry Hermione at that point. But I just wanted to be quiet and look at her.”

Harry shivered and licked his lips. He wanted to say that that didn’t make sense, that Ron couldn’t have fallen in love just from looking at this woman, and that he obviously had got back together with Hermione and loved her again. And if Ron had managed to fall in love with this Rebecca somehow, why hadn’t he gone and talked to her? Nothing about it made any sense.

Except that it did. Except that it was how he felt with Draco, when the other man touched him and Harry thought he would give up his job as an Auror and his freedom and his eyesight to have Draco look at him with passion, kiss him, stroke him and bind his hands above his head.

“I understand, mate,” Ron said, his voice so quiet that his words came to Harry like an echo. “I understand how persuasive and gripping fascination is, and that you can’t really let go of it when you’re in it. You want just a little more, just a touch or a glance or an acknowledgment from the object of your obsession. That would be enough to satisfy you, you tell yourself. Just that much and you’ll go. When you know that’s not the truth, and you’ll never be satisfied until or unless you get as much from that person as you’ve invested in them.

“Mate, I pulled back from it after three days of watching her. I understood what my obsession was doing to me—drugging me, stealing the best part of my life to moon over a woman who wouldn’t have understood even if I approached her. She was a private, self-contained person; I learned that much from the days I watched her. She couldn’t have understood falling in love within three minutes, and that would have made me unhappy, because I needed her to understand that.”

“You didn’t fall in love with Hermione in three minutes,” Harry muttered, determined not to comprehend what Ron was trying to tell him.

“No,” said Ron. “But that’s all right, because my relationship with her isn’t obsessive.” Harry would have liked to snort at that, remembering how closely Ron and Hermione had watched each other during their sixth year and how jealous they had been of the people the other had dated in their place, but he couldn’t. He and Ron understood each other too well, on far too many levels, during this conversation, and mockery would throw Ron’s confidence and gesture of trust back in his face. “You need someone to match you in passion when you fall that strongly. And I don’t think Malfoy can.”

“You haven’t seen the way he looks at me sometimes.”

Ron’s face was grave. “I don’t need to. Frankly, mate, it doesn’t matter if he feels as strongly about you as you do about him. His passion’s not—not clean.”

Harry scowled. “You’ll never get over the fact that he was a Death Eater, will you?”

“Not what I meant,” Ron said. His eyes reflected disappointment that made Harry squirm, which irritated the wound, which required Ron to use another healing spell. He looked a bit calmer when he continued. “What I meant was that he might want you, might think he loves you, but there’s something sneaky and cowardly and self-interested behind it. You want to give him things. He wants to take them from you.”

“You don’t know how he’s changed, Ron. You’re basing your conclusions on what he used to be like—“

“I think it’s a lot more likely that he’s changed in some things, as many as he needs to to gain back some reputation and some clients after the war,” Ron said sharply. “In other things, why shouldn’t he be exactly the same? He wouldn’t want to abandon ambition or give up the hopes of a grand victory someday.”

Harry sighed. “The truth of the matter is that you haven’t watched him long enough, and I have, even during times when he didn’t know I was there. He couldn’t have been putting on a show all the time.”

“Was he with other people?” Ron asked.

“What?” Harry didn’t know what that question meant. “Do you mean, did he have other lovers? Sure he did, and so did I, but it’s not like I knew that he could possibly be interested in me that way, and he—“

“I mean,” Ron said patiently, “did you ever watch him when he was by himself, or only when he was with clients?”

“With clients, mostly,” Harry said, wondering what the point of this question was. “Sometimes he was by himself for a minute or two.”

“Then he was still acting,” said Ron. “You’ve drawn your knowledge of him from that performance, Harry.”

“He’s been alone with me plenty of times over the last few days,” Harry snapped, stung. Really, where did Ron get off imagining he knew Draco better than Harry did? He knew some parts of Draco. Harry was willing to admit that Draco had a cruel streak, that not every trait of his personality was equally attractive. But Ron hadn’t guarded Draco, he hadn’t saved his life, and he hadn’t seen Draco’s instant contrition when he’d opened Harry’s wound with his savage kiss earlier. “I think I know him.”

“You think.” Ron shook his head, mouth set in a hard line. “No, mate. I’m sorry. I tried to stay out of it as long as I could, because I thought Hermione was being paranoid and intruding far too much into your life with that bloody ring of hers. But you’ll run your head blindly into the noose. I’m stepping between you and Malfoy as of this moment.” He stood up, turned, and walked out of the room.

“Ron!” Harry shouted after him. He sat up and then winced as he felt a warning pull from the wound. But he didn’t care, even though he couldn’t get out of bed. “Ron, what the fuck are you doing?” The door shut with no sign that Ron had heard him or was going to turn back. “Ron, sod off!”

*

Draco had gone to the Manor’s Quidditch Pitch as the first step in his new plan. Potter would probably come out soon, seeking him, and why shouldn’t he see Draco soaring gracefully above the grass on his new Clearstar broom? Let him stare and admire, perhaps even envy. Draco no longer made a habit of chasing Snitches, but he would wager he’d been up on a broom more often in the last several years than Potter, who seemed to be busy either with Auror work or entertaining a traitorous lover.

Among whom you will soon number.

Draco bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and directed the Clearstar into a hawk-like circle. Of course he was different than the hapless men and women who swarmed into Potter’s bed, drawn by fame and what they saw as beauty. He was repaying Potter’s treachery to him, which had begun when they were eleven years old and never really stopped, since Potter hadn’t once apologized.

A movement behind him made him look down, and he started to stoop the broom before he realized the figure had red hair. He curled his lip and turned his head away. Perhaps Weasley would carry the report of his flying to Potter, and then the idiot would drag himself out of the bed to look. Of course, Weasley was much more likely to lie and say that Draco had flown poorly, but—

“Malfoy! I want to talk to you.”

Draco flinched. Of course. How crude. Weasley might not have a broom of his own, but he’d cast Sonorus and direct his voice all over the Pitch as if he had something important to say. Draco turned and gave him the flaying look that he used with clients who wanted him to add an extra wing onto the house at the original price. It was too bad that the distance between them meant Weasley wouldn’t see it and grasp all the nuances Draco wanted him to take away. “Go away, Weasley,” he called back. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Weasley. “You only need ears to listen to me, not a voice to speak responses. I’m interested in your brain, though God knows if I can reach it.”

Draco bristled, and then wondered why. It wasn’t as though Weasley’s insults were brilliant ones he wished he had thought of himself, or strong enough to sting. He was in a hypersensitive mood because he wanted to impress Potter, he supposed, and so far Potter had not been obliging enough to let Draco do that.

“I understand all about obsession,” said Weasley. “I understand that Harry isn’t the kind of person who hurts the one he’s obsessed with. He’s more likely to hurt himself, and hover around the fringes of your life and worship, and get his heart quietly broken when you finally wed some pure-blood bitch.”

Draco bit the corner of his mouth so he wouldn’t call back that Potter would get his heart broken before then. Honestly, there was no need to shout his plans to the world just because he was rather bereft of an audience at the moment. Sometimes Draco simply didn’t understand his own instincts.

“But you,” said Weasley, and his voice held a world of loathing that made Draco wish they were on the ground, face to face, and Weasley could clearly see the crystalline contempt in his expression. “You’ll try to rip the one you’re obsessed with limb from limb, as punishment for their making you focus on something beside yourself. You’ll befoul what you touch on purpose, because you can’t tolerate the idea that anyone else would get satisfaction or pleasure from it. I know you, Malfoy, much better than Harry does. And hear this. I won’t let you hurt him. I’ll make him hate me, if I have to, because he won’t hate you, but that’s better than letting him bleed from a wound that would destroy his entire life.”

And Weasley turned and walked away.

For long moments afterwards, Draco continued to hover on his broom, hands clamped around his broom handle, his breath so thick with anger it felt as if he were strangling on the sputum from a cough. Then he managed to relax the hold of his hands and loop around in a large circle, thinking hard.

Would Weasley actually be a threat? He had no idea what Draco planned to do to Potter. He was surely no match for a Potter who actually wanted to sleep with Draco, since Potter was the more magically powerful. But it was possible he could appeal to Potter’s conscience and friendship and sense of shame, and make it harder for Draco. Or he might even manage to tip things the other way in a delicate moment.

Yes, he would have to ensure that Potter slipped out to meet him as soon as it was practical for him to do so, with his wound. The courtship and seduction were best off taking place out of Weasley’s sight.

“Draco.”

Draco started and looked down. It sounded as if Severus had spoken right next to him, but he was waiting on the far side of the Pitch, staring upwards. He hadn’t used Sonorus, of course—he had more dignity than that—but a spell that projected his voice directly from his lungs to Draco’s ear. Draco dropped in a stoop that made Severus shake his head and landed in front of his mentor.

Severus looked him over in silence. Draco thought there was a hint of disapproval behind the glassy surface of his eyes, but he had no idea why that would exist, if it did. He generally only became angry when Draco ruined a potion, and that hadn’t happened in years.

“I have one caution to speak to you,” said Severus at last. “It is the only interference I will permit myself in this affair, the only debt I owe.”

Draco blinked. His father had told him that Severus had healed Potter’s wound, but what in the world did that healing have to do with Draco?

“Potter is not the hero I thought him,” said Severus, “not the mindless attention-seeker. When he was nearly fainting with the pain of his wound, he still concentrated long enough to tell me about the attacker. He was concerned with the danger to you, and standing between you and that danger.” Severus curled is lip. “If you harm him, you will do worse than bring the wrath of the Ministry down on you. You will betray the friendship of someone who has decided that you are worth guarding.”

Draco laughed. There was simply no other response possible to a declaration that absurd. “Severus, what he feels for me isn’t friendship.”

“It is only practical,” said Severus, “that you delay your vengeance until this imposter is in custody and you no longer need Potter’s protection.”

Draco immediately shook his head. That was impossible, and he was somewhat mystified Severus didn’t know that. Would he have been able to give up vengeance against Potter when it was within his grasp? “I won’t do that.”

Severus bowed his head. “This is the only interference I will permit myself,” he repeated, and then turned and walked away.

Draco snorted and kicked his broom into the air again, where he did several violent swoops and dives to relieve his feelings. First Weasley and then Severus. Even his father might have tried, if he didn’t already know that Draco was committed to ignoring him. Could no one else understand that Draco needed this, and that what he needed should be allowed to be more important, for once, than Potter’s life?

Chapter 15.