Chapter Fifteen of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- In Passion We Propose

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Fifteen—In Passion We Propose

Harry snorted at himself as he cast yet another healing spell on the wound, and watched more skin knit together and more of the jagged line that announced his injury to the world blur and soften and scar. He’d been an idiot, lying here and depending on Ron and Draco for healing spells, when all he had to do to get his wand back was call out, “Accio wand!”

Of all the times to forget I can do magic without it, he thought, but he knew that that wasn’t entirely true. He hadn’t forgotten. He simply hadn’t seen the need to Summon it when Draco had been taking care of him, speaking gentle words and looking stricken when he made the wound worse.

Harry had uncovered his need to be taken care of long enough ago that he accepted it now. It didn’t make him feel less like an effective Auror. He could spend days protecting others and bringing criminals to justice whenever he wanted to recover the adrenaline jolt that heroic action gave him. But at other times he wanted to lie down on the bed and turn his head towards a lover, eyes closed, and feel soft and soothing hands moving on his skin.

Draco will not be soft and soothing.

Harry shivered, then swallowed. No. If Draco had felt anything like the same depth of desire for anything like as long as Harry had, then he would rip and tear and devour. But even that could be a form of caring, Harry thought, maintaining a stubborn front against the ghost of Ron that appeared to be haunting his head. He could bind Harry down and show him the passion too strong to be denied any longer.

And Harry would enjoy being bound.

At last the pain of his wound had eased enough that he thought he could walk without embarrassing himself. He stood and slipped out of the room, leaning carefully against the wall. If Ron came, he was prepared to cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself, but he could think of no one else whose presence would dismay him. Lucius he could ignore. Snape would hardly care to interfere if there was a chance that Harry’s activities might open the injury again. And if he met Draco—

Harry closed his eyes and licked his lips with quiet fervor, thoughts prowling around and touching Draco with gentle fingers. If I meet Draco, then I’ll let him take me.

He paused at a juncture of wide corridors, suddenly aware that he had never been in this part of Malfoy Manor before and really had no idea where to go next. So he paused and thought about where Draco might have gone when Ron appeared and irritated him.

Somewhere he can be free. His bedroom wouldn’t be enough, I think, since it’s indoors. And he won’t go back to the office as long as there’s that gaping hole in his wards, not when the imposter is so insistent.

A place where he could feel the wind in his hair and the pressure of freedom around him…

Harry turned towards the front door he remembered seeing during his initial scouting round of Malfoy Manor on unsteady legs. Draco would be on the Quidditch Pitch, of course.

*

Lucius sank deep into the padded chair with a small sigh. Potter was recovering from the wound, and he now had a friend to watch over him much as Lucius had promised Narcissa that he would watch over Draco. Surely the matter of his son’s obsession costing him everything valuable was attended to for the moment, and that meant Lucius could settle into place with his most valuable possession: the diary of Narcissa’s that was most beautiful and least doom-laden, the book that told her perspective on the day Draco had been born.

The blue-edged creamy paper flickered past under Lucius’s fingers. This diary was seventeen years older than the other, and Lucius did not think he had to worry quite as much about damaging it. He flattened his hands on the pages, and imagined that he felt a welcome from them, as if the ghosts of Narcissa’s hopes impregnated them and marched side by side with his for a moment.

It was only a moment, because then Lucius had to bow his head and read the words of the woman who had lived by his side as a stranger for decades.

I have a son.

I say that I have a son, and not that Lucius has a son, or the House of Malfoy or the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black have a son, because he is mine. I see that from the way he turns his head and fastens his eyes on me, pale and dim yet, their color unsettled between blue and gray. I see that from the way I carried him in my body, and the way he gleams, as if the blood and the amniotic fluid were not yet washed from him. Lucius ordered him bathed in cold water soon after his birth, a Malfoy test of strength that has endured for generations. I wonder that they do not connect the large number of their children who died as infants to that test.

But as coldness is more important to Lucius than blood and he carries ice in his own veins, my wonder is out of place.

Lucius shook his head. “Narcissa, how could you not see that I loved you?” he whispered. “How could you not see that I loved Draco? If I retreated behind an iron mask that day, it was only because I felt so proud and happy that I thought some dark fate would clasp us at any moment, and take my wife and son from me.”

The diary continued without pause, Narcissa’s thoughts and not his. Lucius sighed and murmured the words aloud as he read them, because he had scanned this passage enough times to know the whole.

He lies at my breast, detached from me, no longer part of me. My body no longer shelters him. We can be hurt separately now. Lucius spoke his usual form of nonsense about that, about how some of his enemies would disdain to destroy a pregnant woman, but would consider his heir a target from the moment he enters the world.

He does not think of the protection I am.

I have heard comparisons of angry mothers to lionesses roused to protect their cubs. Such things are nonsense. I know there will be no lioness-like anger in me if someone hurts Draco—because that is his name, a Black name. Lucius wanted to call him Abraxas. I looked at him with eyes that Bellatrix has told me shine like moons sometimes, and he yielded and chose the name of the strongest constellation he could think of.

Lucius shivered and wiped his lips, wishing for a moment he could have a cup of hot tea—but he didn’t want to risk tea around Narcissa’s diaries. Here was a mention of Bellatrix in this entry from years ago, as if Narcissa had been able to foresee how intimately involved her sister would be in her end, just as her love for Draco had been intimately involved in her end.

Then Lucius took a deep breath and rested his head against the back of the chair until his whirling mind cleared again. He believed in destiny, but only as regarded prophecies and other workings of mighty magic that were truly inevitable. If he once began to believe that fate rested in the mention of a name on a page, then he would drive himself as mad as Draco thought he was.

And madness would hinder his ability to understand Narcissa and to protect his son, the only things that mattered to him anymore.

He opened his eyes and read on.

If someone hurts my son, I will kill them. That is all there is, all that matters. My wand and my will will rise against them from that time forwards, and they will be dead. It does not matter if it takes months or years. They will die.

Lucius shivered and suffered another surge of yearning that Narcissa had trusted him with her innermost self instead of the superficial, correct façade she had believed he needed to love and protect. He would have admired a woman like this beyond all things. He would have laid his heart at her feet for her to tread to dust and ashes, if she wished.

And he could have put limitations to her grandiose ambition. He could have reminded her that there was at least one person in the world too powerful for her to destroy, if he threatened Draco: the Dark Lord. And together they could have worked out a plan for what would happen should Draco be threatened from that quarter after all.

Of course, at the time of Draco’s birth, Lucius had not truly believed that would ever happen. But he would have brought up the possibility, and then Narcissa would not have died as she did.

If she had trusted him. If he had been more trustworthy.

If Lucius hurts my son, then I will kill him, too. I can imagine him writhing beneath my wand because he has crossed that line that I will not permit him to cross. He has never learned to appreciate that I mean what I say. I would share my contempt and hatred if I could, and I do, in many small motions that must take the place of words.

My husband has been a chain clasped about my life, an iron bar braced across my chest and preventing me from moving forwards. He was necessary for the birth of my son and to bring peace to my parents. But there is nothing else that he gives me in the way of freedom or peace. My son, dozing beneath my breast, brings me both.

Lucius closed his eyes and sighed. “There are more important things than freedom or peace, Narcissa,” he whispered. “I wish you could have understood that. There is honor, and pride—“

He stopped, because the bile was burning in his throat and the memories of how Narcissa had died filled his head. He could see the splayed and broken bones, the spilled blood that shone black in the moonlight stabbing through a shattered window. He could hear Bellatrix shrieking, and feel the shame coiling about his limbs when he began to put the tale together from those shrieks.

Nothing he could do. Nothing he could change, with Narcissa gone from his life.

But he would do well to remember, he reckoned, that she had been wrong about some things, no matter how compelling her words.

*

Draco knew the moment Potter limped onto the Pitch, his head tilted back and his eyes fastened on the broom. He marveled that he could ever have mistaken Weasley or Severus for him. Potter’s nearness made his blood tingle and surge against the vein walls. He could feel his heart expanding, his breaths coming stronger and deeper and faster. And he experienced a heady surge of emotion so powerful he could not identify it. Joy, anger, hatred? Any of them would have been an appropriate response to Potter and what Potter’s presence meant for him.

Trembling, Draco swooped down and landed his broom a few feet from Potter. For a moment, the green eyes widened, and the lightning bolt scar stood out like a red scratch on Potter’s pale brow. But then the startlement melted from his face, replaced by a smile, and he held out a hand.

Draco took it in silence and turned it over, tracing the lines on the palm with his thumb as if he were a Seer who sought to divine Potter’s future that way. Potter’s fingers trembled in his, and his eyelids darted and flickered, so quick that it looked as if he were dreaming.

No one else could understand what they shared in this moment, Draco thought. They were like the hunter and his prey enclosed in a swift green world of their own, whirling around in a dance of limbs before the blood was spilled. No one else who had not tracked the prey could understand the hunter’s instinctive sympathy for it; no one else who had not run from the hunter could understand the way in which the prey cocked back his head, listening for a footstep with determination to survive so great that it drove out fear.

Draco knew what Potter wanted without question. He reached out an arm and curved it around Potter’s waist, drawing him nearer. Potter came without protest, though Draco knew from the position of his arm that he was pressing directly on the wound. His head was tilted back, his stunning eyes shut, his breath rising and falling like ripples in a pond dying away from a tossed stone.

Draco seated him on the broom and admired him there for a moment. Potter shifted forwards, adjusting his seat on the Clearstar without instruction. Draco would have bet he had never ridden a broom like this before, since they were only a few years old and probably too expensive for him to afford on an Auror’s pay. But still he moved with that inherent talent that had made Draco burn to beat him in Quidditch, just once.

A surge of old resentment tried to rise in him. Draco smoothed it out again. That crusty emotion was nothing compared to the glowing, nameless one that irradiated his body like an unknown color in the middle of sunset. He did not mind losing those ancient Quidditch games as long as he won this contest, the more recent one, the only one that mattered.

And Potter’s friends could not keep him safe. Draco had to acknowledge that he would revel in stealing Potter out from under Weasley’s nose.

At last Potter was seated, and Draco sat down behind him, wrapping both arms around his waist so that his hands could reach the shaft of the broom. Potter leaned his head back on Draco’s shoulder. Draco felt Potter’s breath stir the hair next to his ear, and exhaled hard, his hands shaking with excitement.

That would never do. He needed a clear head to fly the broom. He shut his eyes and waited until the excitement should have died down. But Potter’s head never moved, and the excitement never died.

At last, Draco cleared his throat roughly and whispered, “Up.”

The broom surged. Potter drew in a single awed breath, probably at the speed and smooth movement of the Clearstar, but didn’t try to snatch control, which Draco had been half-afraid of. They rose, and rose, and rose.

They broke through the low-lying clouds. Draco opened his eyes, and the blue stretched ahead of them in an endless dazzle, turned to blade-like beauty by the mid-afternoon rays of the sun.

*

Lucius stepped out of the library and nearly ran headlong into the Weasley who had claimed his hospitality. He raised an eyebrow and moved in such a way that it would seem as if he were leaning forwards to confront Weasley, rather than catching his balance against the door, as he truly was. “Is something wrong?” he asked, basing his question on the deep flush of Weasley’s cheeks that competed with his hair and the way he was staring around the corridor in distraction.

“Harry’s gone,” said Weasley at once. “And so is your son.”

Lucius crushed his fear in a ruthless grip. “Perhaps they have gone flying together,” he said, with a light, careless shrug. “There is no reason to fear that the imposter has taken them. He has so far proven no match for Potter in battle.”

“Yes, that’s why Harry was laid up in bed with an enormous bloody wound and inadequate healing spells,” Weasley snapped at him, and then leaned around the corner as if he would see Potter and Draco snogging in a corner.

Lucius’s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. “I was under the impression that the Aurors considered the man imitating my son the only threat of any note, Weasley,” he said. “Is there someone else you are hunting?”

“I’m worried that Malfoy kidnapped Harry, of course, you enormous prat,” said Weasley, in such an impatient tone that Lucius could hardly take offense; it was too obvious that most of Weasley’s concern was for his friend, and the insult to Lucius only a matter of form. “He’s obsessed with him, and his obsession is more dangerous than Harry’s any day.”

“So your friend is also obsessed with my son?” Lucius sighed. He had gathered so, from the way that Potter’s eyes followed Draco and the blind way that he believed in Draco’s assertions of Lucius’s insanity, but he had hoped he was dealing with an emotion of some lesser strength.

“You had better believe it.” Weasley wheeled towards him suddenly, tilting and rocking on his heels as if someone had struck him. “I don’t think his obsession is as destructive and dangerous, but it’s there.” His eyes were dark, and he sucked on the corner of his lower lip. Lucius shuddered. That was a disgusting habit. Leave it to a Weasley to have one like it. “I can’t promise that Harry wouldn’t do something desperate if he thought that someone was trying to keep him away from Malfoy. He certainly sounded desperate when I told him I was here to do just that.”

“And to protect my son.”

Weasley gave him a smile that Lucius had to admire, so cold and efficient was it. “The best way to do that is by keeping him away from Harry, so that I don’t have to kill him.”

Lucius shook his head and gave up the argument that was forming in his head. Arguing when his son might be in danger was something Severus, with his irrational hatred of the Potters, would do. “You can’t find them in the Manor,” he said. “But you do not know the Manor. I know the places Draco favors and the rooms that he might take Potter to if he did not wish to be disturbed. Come with me.”

Weasley followed him as he strode rapidly up the corridor. Despite his muttering, and the seriousness of the situation that could see a Weasley and a Malfoy acting in concert, Lucius found himself smiling.

I am protecting my son, Narcissa, from a situation that could destroy him. And he is my son as much as yours. And I shall be just as ruthless if Draco tries to harm himself because of his lack of self-knowledge as I shall be if Weasley points a wand at him.

*

Harry leaned back against Draco’s chest and thought for a moment how similar their positions were to the ones in a dream he had had, where Draco came to bear him away from all the faults and wrongs of the world. When Harry was feeling in a particularly victorious mood, then he was the one who steered the broom and cradled Draco on the way. But most of the time the dream went exactly like this, with Draco holding him and flying at the same time, a combination of the protectiveness and strength that thrilled Harry.

He wanted a strong partner, he could admit in the privacy of his brain if nowhere else, and he wanted that strength directed at his. Sometimes he wanted to wrestle with it, meet it and match it, and fall with his lover in a tangle of limbs. Sometimes he wanted to dominate and kiss and stroke and clutch until his lover was breathing heavily and writhing in the way that Ginny would call wanton.

But a good portion of the time he wanted strength that could pull him in and shelter him—from nightmares, from memories of the war, from the horrors that he saw in his job as an Auror. The shelter wouldn’t be forever. Harry knew all about waking from nightmares and recovering from an unpleasant scene on the job and hastening right back to work. But it would be long enough that he could learn to breathe again and shake free of the dark shapes ghosting across the back of his eyelids.

That was part of the reason he thought Draco would be such a good partner for him, his admiration for Draco’s artistic talent and his fascination with Draco’s compound of good and evil aside. Harry knew that Draco possessed enough strength to leave an impact on him, given how effortlessly he had hurt Harry during school. If he wanted to use that strength to soothe and heal instead…

The contrast made Harry’s mouth water just thinking about it. And now he was in Draco’s arms, and he was in a daze. He had never imagined that he could feel this good from the simplest of touches.

He didn’t know where Draco was flying them. He didn’t care. So long as they kept simply going in one direction or curving in a gentle sweep to go in another, so long as they sat on the same broom and Draco’s breath brushed the hair by his ear now and then, it didn’t matter.

The broom began to spiral down at last. Harry looked down and blinked to see a gray waste of ocean beneath them. Either they had flown faster than he had known was possible on a broom, even one of this spectacular model, or he had completely lost track of time. Seeing the stars appearing like muted streaks of light on a Muggle telly in the upper corners of the air, he knew the second was more likely.

Malfoy landed on the seashore—what there was of it, since it was mostly sheer cliff sloping down to a narrow pebbled strand. Harry climbed off, stretching his sore limbs, and stared around curiously. The cliffs formed a series of curving headlands, which could look like the edges of eagles’ wings or clouds if he stared at them hard enough.

“Do you know what this will be?”

Harry stifled the impulse to lean back on Draco’s shoulder again. He doubted that Draco would be so tolerant of that when they were on the ground. He had to show that he was strong enough to deserve Draco, too. “No,” he answered, his voice breathy.

“The site of the Keller house.” Draco took several steps away and then faced him again, his eyes glinting. They were the image of the sea, Harry thought, staring at him in a sort of hypnosis. Not as many colors, perhaps, but just as restless. “I’ll raise it here, because his original plans were hopeless. It has to fit the land. Like this.” He whirled around and flicked his wand twice.

An illusion rose glittering from the cliffs, complete and perfect in seconds. Harry caught his breath. This was the first time that he had seen one of Draco’s houses without the clutter of stone and other material that formed them. If a house could be built of the gray light catching on the sea and reflecting from the shore below, of the skim of clouds along the surface of the sky and foam on the surface of the water, of the gathered strength of stone purified of solidity and the grace of seals purified of their waddling on land, then it was this house.

Harry knew his admiration was open on his face, but he didn’t care. Draco deserved to see it. He turned towards him and stared what he felt, because he knew he could not speak it.

*

As he stared at Potter, Draco felt that same nameless emotion roll like a boulder into his chest. He still did not understand exactly what it was, but he knew that he wanted to keep feeling it, and that he wanted Potter to keep looking at him. None of the grimaces of pain or the screams of agony he had imagined would do. This was the expression he wanted to see on Potter’s face for the rest of his life.

Yes. This is what triumph looks like.

Chapter 16.

Comments

[lunasky3.livejournal.com]

"And Harry would enjoy being bound." *snicker* I has a dirty mind...
*Snuggles Lucius* All I want to do is hug him!! And I'm sure Cissy has something to do with this whole thing... just have to wait until we get to that part in the diary... And that last bit! *is so happy right now*

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Well, you know from earlier in the story that Harry does enjoy bondage, so you can take that literally if you want. :)

And thank you!

[agr8fae.livejournal.com]

We do? I definitely don't remember that....
Maybe that was back when I was trying to skim to the part where they became more sane.