lomonaaeren | Chapter Twenty of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- Do Not, For One Repulse, Forego The Purpose

Thank you again for all the reviews! And here’s hoping I can get back into this story after the week-long hiatus.

Chapter Twenty—Do Not, For One Repulse, Forego The Purpose

Draco ate breakfast quietly the next morning, his eyes fastened on the window as if he were too far above the house-elves and Lucius even to notice them. Lucius made a show of eating his own breakfast, but in reality his gaze spent more time on his son than on his plate. His throat closed and burned when he tried to speak, however.

And he did not think that the result of some spell Draco had cast.

I wish I could know what he was thinking, without asking. The question would betray my interest, and then Draco is more likely to shut his heart and his face against me than ever. He would shut his expression even now, did he know how much his lack of emotion betrays.

Not that Lucius knew much more than that Draco was disturbed. And if he did not know more than that, how was he supposed to protect his son? But how was he supposed to learn more than that?

He leaned back in his chair, holding a cup of tea, and blew gently across the surface of the liquid whilst closing his eyes. The chances that Draco would suddenly look at him were small, but if it happened, Lucius despised the notion of betraying his own agitation.

I must choose a tactic with which to approach him. When I am out of sorts and floundering about in my head, fearful to do anything for fear of betraying myself, then I do worse than alienating him.

Lucius finished his tea and leaned forwards. Sometimes, as the moment shaped itself, the right strategy would come to him. Draco’s gaze darted in his direction, and Lucius saw him deliberately swallow the last bite of his eggs before he laid aside his cutlery. Of course the elves appeared at once to whisk the setting away. Narcissa had trained them to a nicety in the observation of such things before she—finished, using methods perfected on the Black house-elves.

“Yes, Father?” Draco asked when the obligatory moment of respectful silence had crept past. His voice chimed, his eyes shimmered like crystal, and his face continued to convey nothing at all.

“I wish to understand,” Lucius said, and did not know he would speak the words until he had spoken them. They poured through his lips like pus from a lanced boil. “Why did you go to the papers about Potter? I can understand your being offended that he chose to pursue a sexual relationship with you when he was needed to serve as a bodyguard; I can even understand your being angry that he was not as good a fuck as you had spent years envisioning. But to take this sort of petty revenge—to rip your own heart out of your breast—“ He paused and then shook his head, rapidly, several times, as much in wonder at himself as at Draco’s stupidity. “I thought I had taught you better than to bare such a wound, at least. But you wrote that article in the blood of it.”

Apparently, my tactic is to be honesty, he thought, when he finished speaking. Very well, then. One lesson he had tried to learn in the years since Narcissa’s death, impossible though it had proven to learn when considering her in particular, was not to regret the unchangeable. He touched the table, and an elf appeared with a fresh cup of tea in the time it took his fingers to come to rest, so that he would not look ridiculous making an empty gesture.

Draco’s eyes had opened very wide, lending his pupils the effect of a polished window that looked out on a cliff of granite. And no more than that, Lucius thought, his pulse beating in frustration under the skin of his throat as he stared at his son. He had learned the lesson against displaying emotion far too well.

“I did not tear out my heart,” Draco said at last, voice curiously correct. “I tore out his.”

But his words had a wavering undertone that Lucius had been listening for, and so he was not content to let his son get away with that outright lie. He shook his head and leaned closer, and Draco leaned back in his chair as though they were balanced on opposite sides of a scale. Lucius felt pity stab through him. Draco was worse off than he had thought, if his gestures betrayed him, though his face remained perfectly smooth and calm.

“You could not pull out one without the other,” Lucius said. “They beat together.” He paused, but Draco sat there, unblinking and unbreathing. Lucius burst out before he could stop himself, as if the emotions that had spent years piling up behind the weakened walls of his psyche had grown too dense at last. “Draco, why cannot you admit that you made a mistake, and call upon him to apologize for the article?” He snatched the paper that lay on the table between them, bearing the next smug installment of Draco’s exposé about Potter. “And then perhaps you can convince Skeeter to retract this monstrosity.”

Draco lifted his head. Lucius would have thought his face as still as before, but this time his own pulse was trembling, throbbing and making the skin at his throat quiver oddly. Lucius held his tongue.

“Why, Father,” Draco said, with a scrim of sarcasm on the surface of his voice; it would crack like autumn ice if pressed, Lucius knew. “I do not know how to respond. You urge me to honesty and to stand against honesty in the same breath.”

“I am tired of fencing with you, Draco.” Lucius rose to his feet, and suddenly, strangely, it was so easy to announce what he was going to do, even knowing that Draco would take some step to counteract him. “I can see that you need Potter to survive. Where you developed this strange dependence, I don’t know, but I will not see my son wither away for lack of an easily obtained cure. I will give you a day. If you do nothing, then I will write to Potter myself, begging his forgiveness and describing what the thought of him turning against you forever has done to you.”

Draco surged upwards and leaned across the table with a graceful twist of his neck that made Lucius think of a sea serpent. “You will not.”

Lucius narrowed his eyes and spread his fingers in a minute motion. In moments, the tablecloth had vanished from the table, leaving his teacup demurely in place, and the chair Draco had been half-leaning against was gone, making him stagger.

“I still rule here,” Lucius told him flatly. “You need not think that you can flatter and fuck me into compliance.”

And he turned and left the room, conscious, for the first time in a long time, of Draco’s disbelieving stare on his back.

It was a good feeling.

*

He doesn’t have the right—

Draco seized the voice in his head that was raging on about Lucius’s rights and his daring and cast it away into a locked corner of his mind. He could not fight his father if he were irrational. And he had already come close enough to irrationality when he saw the Prophet’s article this morning, which featured a photograph of him leaning forwards as if to touch the reader’s shoulder confidingly.

He sat down at the table again, taking one of the other chairs. When he glanced at the paper, a half-remembered sentence—“writhed like a whore strapped to the rack”—caught his eye. He looked away.

Lucius had only acted as a goad to the resolution he had already formed. He knew he had to announce himself to Potter again and do his best to explain, or demand an explanation, or use the charm and the seduction that had already proven themselves once to cozen Potter into accepting him. He had merely debated how to do it, since the letter Potter had sent seemed to promise a final and irrevocable separation.

Now he had to choose, and perhaps he should thank his father for the thought that immediately sprang to mind. When in doubt about what to do, choose frontal assault. Nothing so confuses your enemies when you have a reputation for indirectness and double dealing. They will be so busy checking for traps under the surface that they will not bother to confront you and turn aside the actual advances you make.

Draco began to smile. He knew his own honesty, and though he had a small stock of it, to be carefully dealt out, he could deal that small stock to Potter. Meanwhile, he thought he could gauge Potter’s honesty accurately.

And that letter, stinging as it had been, was dishonest. Potter meant to defend himself and hurt Draco with the words, no more. He would not really slam the door shut in Draco’s face if he showed up on his threshold.

Draco knew where he lived, of course. That was something he had made sure of in the early days, when the relics room under the Manor was only a dream and he had thought he might manage to exist without defeating Potter. He would go to the flat, wait patiently until Potter showed himself if he was out, and then explain everything. It ought to be simple to convince Potter to send his friends away, should he appear with them. He wouldn’t want them to hear whatever private might pass between him and Draco.

Course decided, Draco rose to his feet, destroying the Daily Prophet with a casual flick of his wand and a flash of whispered flame.

*

“You understand, Harry?”

Harry stirred restlessly for a moment, staring at the series of wet rings that marched along the edge of Kingsley’s desk. What did he set there? It was a strange fact of Harry’s life that he rarely saw Kingsley drinking anything but a single cup of tea, which was certainly not enough to make his desk look like a table out of the Three Broomsticks.

“Harry?”

“Yes, I understand.” Harry looked up at Kingsley. “But I don’t want to let the case go, you know that.” Resolutions to be brave and noble and do what was best for himself were harder to keep in the cold light of morning. Despite knowing pleading would do no good, he did it anyway. “Couldn’t I stay away from Draco entirely and work on the imposter angle of the case? I could try to find out where he came from, and that shouldn’t be as dangerous as guarding Draco or confronting him directly. I know Ron said he thought you’d found some hints at his real identity recently—“

“The very fact that you can’t call Malfoy by his last name shows how deeply involved you’ve become, Harry,” said Kingsley, and there was an infinite gentleness in his voice that hurt Harry worse than open pity would have.

“Sorry, sir,” he muttered, looking at the floor.

“The person you should apologize to is yourself.” Kingsley leaned across the desk and settled a heavy hand on his wrist. Startled, Harry looked up to meet his friend’s concerned eyes. It was the same way Ron and Hermione had looked at him last night. Ordinarily, he would have rebelled against the stifling effect of all that concern, but it was rather nice to see now, as contrasted against the effect Draco’s words in the paper had produced. “I see that your obsession with Malfoy has been a festering sore for years now. I should never have assigned you to the case at all—“

“I’m the best you have,” Harry said. “You know that when we didn’t have a clue what the imposter was doing—“

“We still don’t have a clue what the imposter is doing,” Kingsley said firmly. “Why did he attack you, if he’s interested in discrediting Malfoy or taking his place? Why did he try his best to kill you, with a ferocity he had reserved for Malfoy before this? Why did he switch from committing minor crimes to trying to commit murder?” He sighed and shook his head. “No, Harry, this is still the most baffling case I’ve ever worked. And you’ve done enough. It’s true that we needed you in the first portion of the case, and you’re probably the only reason Malfoy survived so many direct attacks. But now you’ve been wounded and personally hurt by the man you were trying to protect, and we have other Aurors who can take over the routine investigation and bodyguard work. I want you at a distance from this case for your physical and your mental health, Harry.” Harry figured the last had been added so quickly because Kingsley had seen Harry open his mouth to protest that his wound was fine. “And a complete isolation from news, unless we encounter signs that the imposter is seeking you to threaten you, is the best way to do that.”

Harry swallowed and nodded. He had to remind himself again that Draco had hurt him, and he had a right to withdraw from the world to think about it for a while. With Penelope and the rest, he’d had to swallow his pain and continue working; none of it had ever been connected with his job before.

“And it will look better, too,” Kingsley said, in a murmur so quiet that Harry could hardly hear him. “There will be people watching to see if we discipline the Savior of the Wizarding World for sleeping with someone he was supposed to protect. If we send you away under guard for a short period of time, then we can pretend that you’ve been suspended for that.”

Harry nodded and gave a wan smile. Yes, suspending his work on this case was the best course; he knew that. It made sense from all angles.

From all but the angle that said he should be protecting Draco anyway—from a distance, of course—and that he would be a coward to run away. He’d sent Draco a proud letter, and now he was going to turn his back and bound into hiding?

But those feelings meant nothing against the hard look in Kingsley’s eyes, which he kept on Harry even as he chose several sheaves of parchment and splayed them across the desk.

“There are several Ministry properties under Fidelius. Which one would you prefer? There’s a nice cottage on the coast of Wales…”

*

The first book held no solutions. Not the strongest mind-controlling potion Severus knew of could persuade Potter to lay aside his enmity against Draco, not when that enmity was so recent and excellently seated.

(The Mind-Shaping Potion, now, that held possibilities for the time when the hatred began to wear off and Potter would be more susceptible to considering Draco’s side of the sordid mess. It was powerful, subtle, could enter the subject by touching the skin as well as by ingestion, and worked well when the enmity was a month old).

The second book held no answers, either. Severus laid it aside reverently, however. It had reminded him of a Dark Arts potion that he had always meant to pursue, though brewing it under either Dumbledore or Voldemort’s nose would have meant suicide.

And the third book…

Severus held the third book still in his lap and gazed down at it as he ran his finger over the lettering on the front. Dark purple, heavy script imprinted on ornamented leather; the leather itself was worked with gold and bands of a glittering, crumbling substance Severus knew was mother-of-pearl. The title said simply, Of Potions of Control, Bright and Dark.

The potions in this book were guaranteed to give mastery of the mind, the body, the soul, or the magic of a wizard to whoever used the potion. If he brewed carefully—most of the recipes were difficult even for a Potions master, which was one of the reasons Severus had never shown Draco this book—and ensured that no hand but his gave Potter the potion, then Severus could command the Chosen One to come back to Malfoy Manor the next day. And no matter how assiduously his friends investigated Potter’s bloodstream, saliva, semen, and urine, no trace of the potion would alert them. It would exaggerate Potter’s obsession with Draco to overwhelming amounts, and in the end his friends would have to give in and accept that it was simply this emotion leading him back to Draco’s side and his bed.

Draco would be ecstatic. Potter himself would know no difference; this potion had been developed by wizards who wanted willing slaves, and so he would experience the change in his emotions as natural.

Severus could solve the problem at one stroke.

But he did not know if he wanted to.

He half-closed his eyes and thought of the article Draco had carried to the Prophet. Skeeter had certainly provided the narrative context, the photographs, and the majority of the supercilious tone. But the words themselves, the “confessions” of what he and Potter did together in bed, were Draco’s.

Severus spent some time sifting the words through his memory, sharpened by years of noting small details in his spying life and the clinging grasp of a Potions master’s mind, which stored all manner of trivia on the off-chance that it would be useful in brewing someday. When he was certain he had the essence of the article stripped down before his inner eye, shining as if cut with a diamond from glass, he opened his physical eyes and slightly shook his head.

Draco had willfully betrayed a man he cared a great deal for, though the why of that emotion was as much beyond Severus as Albus’s will towards goodness had been whilst Albus lived. He had done it in the least flattering and the most hurtful way possible. Even buried in his lab as he was, Severus was aware that more than one of Potter’s past lovers had gone to the papers; one would have to cut off one’s eyes and ears not to know that, and even then, someone would seize one’s hands and insist on spelling the news out.

Perhaps Potter had escaped pain. Perhaps Draco had miscalculated how much the article would hurt him—but Severus did not think so. Draco had to have learned something about Potter in the years he had tracked him and obsessed over him, though not his own heart.

He had betrayed what he shared with Potter as Severus had betrayed his friendship with Lily, but not in the flaring impulse of a moment, regretted as soon as it was done, and not taken back mostly because of stubborn pride.

And should he escape suffering for that, when Severus had spent the rest of his life in the shadow of his own deed?

No.

Severus stood and put the third book carefully away, then walked over to the nearest clean cauldron and conjured a fire under it, drawing the second book out to rest on his arm.

*

Harry thought he had turned to stone or dreams for a moment when he came around the corner outside his flat and saw Draco standing against the door—or both. Some moment like this had appeared in his nightmares occasionally. Then he straightened, shook his head, and took a deep breath. No, this moment was reality, and Harry had the right to feel more than the helpless terror or admiration he usually did when in a dream.

Draco lifted his head when he saw Harry, and for a moment it seemed as if he trembled. His face was pale. Then a smile widened across his lips, and stare as he might, Harry could see no consciousness, no shyness, to that smile. Draco looked as if he thought a simple explanation would right things.

Rage chased Harry’s weakness away. He moved a step forwards, eyes narrowed, breath breaking through his lips in hungry pants. Hermione, who had stopped behind him, began to hurry forwards, but Harry lifted his hand without looking at her. Draco gazed at him curiously in the meantime, as if he had seen but not understood Harry’s change in demeanor.

And the idea that he could not understand, that nothing Harry had said made any difference to him, drove the rage to a height that made Harry say in a grinding voice, “Leave, Hermione,” though Merlin knew he wasn’t angry at her.

Hermione had more sense than Malfoy. She stepped back around the corner, and Harry was alone with the man he had obsessed over and fallen in love with and let fuck him in the grass of a magical place that still made him tingle to remember it.

Draco lifted his hands before his face, as if he really considered that that would slow down the magic, should Harry decide to strike. “Harry, listen to me,” he said, voice soft and slow and commanding. “There are various reasons why I hurried to Skeeter, reasons I can explain. I know you don’t understand them yet, but you never will if you don’t listen to them.” His voice took on a lightly chiding tone. “You assumed the worst when you sent me that letter, you know, and yet you hadn’t even taken the time to listen, to look, to think. You could have waited for me to send you a letter first.”

“The article was your message,” said Harry, his voice hoarse.

Draco cocked his head and sighed delicately. “One that you lacked the skill to read, Harry. I only intended to warn off the rest of the world, give them a few morsels to satisfy their salacious curiosity, and create some privacy for us. If they thought they knew what was really going on, they’d be more likely to leave us in peace later—“

And Harry couldn’t stand it. Draco didn’t even have the courage to own his revenge. Instead, he jumped back into deceptions so simple a child would have seen through them, and for what? Why?

Because he thinks me that stupid. Because he mistook a willingness to trust and let him prove himself for a lack of intelligence.

Harry barely had to concentrate. Draco’s jaw froze, a heavy invisible weight pressing down on his tongue, as Harry’s wandless magic sparked along his nerves. He stood there with his arms folded and considered Draco with a faint smile until Draco began to make inarticulate protesting noises, trying to move his tongue. A line of drool slid down his chin; he no longer had the ability to shut his mouth.

“There was a time when I would have given much for you to look at me like that,” Harry said softly.

Draco had the audacity to let his eyes narrow. Of course he wasn’t ashamed, even now, Harry thought. And the pity he had been feeling since last night suddenly overwhelmed the anger. He stepped closer and let Draco see it. Draco blinked and stopped struggling.

“Not now,” Harry said. “Now, I can only be ashamed of myself for falling in love with someone so cowardly, so childish, so unwilling and unready to face the world despite being twenty-seven years old.” He shrugged. “I have to live with myself and what falling in love with you says about me for the rest of my life. But I don’t have to live with you. Go back to your lair, lick your wounds, and brood over the wrongs I’ve done you. And I have done worse than you have,” he added, despite the protesting way Hermione’s robes rustled around the corner. “Because I expected you to aspire to an impossible standard of goodness, cleverness, and artistry. I should have known you’d never be more than yourself.”

He flicked his hand, and Draco vanished, Apparated unwillingly back to Malfoy Manor. Then Harry took a deep breath, gathered up the strength that he had thought might be weakened by pity and the shock of seeing Draco again, and called Hermione from around the corner.

At least that was one good thing about Kingsley’s plan. He was going to a cottage on the coast of Wales under the Fidelius Charm, with Ron for bodyguard. He’d like to see Malfoy find him there.

Chapter 21.

Chapter Twenty of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- Do Not, For One Repulse, Forego The Purpose

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