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Chapter Six—What Astoria Greengrass Wrote

Draco stood in front of his closet, head cocked to the side. He had to wonder what sort of robes would attract a male lover. He was experienced in dressing to the taste of women, but he had never done this before.

Then he shook his head and snorted. He would not put more thought into the matter than it deserved. It was entirely possible that he would find this man a bore in person, and nothing more would come of the meeting than a mutual distaste.

More to the point, the man had conceived an attraction to him when he was wearing nothing more than ordinary robes. He would be a fool to try to dress himself differently and probably have his writer guess why he looked different.

In the end, Draco chose a pair of charcoal-grey robes that he knew made his eyes shine, and then stood in front of the mirror admiring himself for some minutes. When he smiled, the expression was brilliant and devastating, sparkling with an edge that could cut.

And now, he thought, as he turned and noted that the clock said six-thirty, I am going to conquer the man who thinks he can conquer me.

*

“Are you sure it’s all right?” Astoria glanced over her shoulder, as if she could see the drape of the gown over her own arse without the mirror.

“It’s perfect.” Harry stepped back and studied her for a moment. Yes, it worked. The gown was white and shone with silver trimming. It floated around Astoria and made her look like an angel when she descended the stairs. He smiled and met Astoria’s nervous gaze with a reassuring look of his own. “It’s perfect,” he whispered again.

Astoria swallowed and licked her lips. “I’m just trying to imagine what he’ll think when he sees me,” she said. “It’s so hard to know.”

“He’ll be surprised, no doubt,” Harry said calmly. He knew from Draco’s conversation with Ron that Draco suspected someone who worked in the Ministry. But what did that matter? When he saw Astoria write the letter, he would have to believe. “But he’ll accept you. Why wouldn’t he? You’re beautiful, pure-blooded, and capable of caring for him.”

Astoria looked at him somberly in the mirror. “Many other women who aimed to capture him have been the same way,” she said. “And they were all ignominiously refused.”

“But you won’t be,” said Harry. “You have the Veritaserum?”

Astoria held up the small vial of clear liquid.

“Good.” Harry touched his wand to her temple, coaxed her until her wand was at his temple, and then whispered the words of the spell that would construct the limited telepathic bond between them. Astoria gasped and shivered as it formed. Harry controlled the impulse to do the same. Suddenly it felt as if an echo chamber had opened inside his skull, and he could hear Astoria’s thoughts like a distant buzz, wordless as the undifferentiated sound of a Muggle telly unless he concentrated.

Can you hear me?

He could. Harry smiled at her and replied, Yes. What about you?

Astoria’s second gasp made him smile again. He was glad that he could at least be the means of showing her something new, in the midst of all the (necessarily) nerve-racking procedures of Draco’s seduction. He offered her his arm.

Remember that I’ll be just to the right of your table, under an Invisibility Cloak. The spell wasn’t meant to work over long distances, and I’d rather not test it that way.

Astoria nodded. Already the pallor had begun to fade from her cheeks, and a lovely determination replaced it. Harry swirled the Invisibility Cloak over his head, led her out the door, and Apparated them to Merlin’s Tor.

*

A silver-cloaked attendant met Draco when he entered, bowing. Draco stood patiently as the attendant took his cloak off. Granted, the man wasn’t quite as delicate or deferential as a house-elf, but Draco had put up with worse.

Draco looked around Merlin’s Tor as the man escorted him to one of the shapeless tables. It was an open building, with marble and glass walls that spiraled outwards from a single center and had unexpected gaps to admit the wind and the scent of jasmine and more exotic flowers, though the rain was kept out by common agreement. The panels of the walls rotated slowly on a predetermined round, showing various scenes out of Arthurian legend, and image after image of hills by night. On the whole, it was a silver, subdued place, looking haunted by moonlight even on a night like this, when the sun hadn’t quite set.

Draco smiled, a little. So his writer had a calm side to him as well as a flamboyant one. That was good. Draco was not sure how well they would have got on if his writer always had to be dramatic and straining against the barriers. But a place like Merlin’s Tor argued some appreciation for the finer things in life.

“A place should already have been arranged for me,” he told the attendant, because he could not believe his writer crass enough to forget something like that. “My name is Draco Malfoy.”

“Ah, Mr. Malfoy, of course, sir,” the attendant said, and bowed him through the room, away from one shapeless table towards another. Above them, the stars spun, and Draco tilted his head back to catch a glimpse of his birth constellation. “I wish you a fine meal. May it be one half as good as the companionship.”

Draco looked curiously at the man. Was he gay, then? Or was his writer so stunning that other men simply had to comment on his brilliance and beauty?

Well. Draco took a moment to preen, but subtly. Of course the most brilliant and beautiful would choose me.

“Here is your table, sir,” the attendant murmured.

Draco turned around, a faint smile on his face, his heart leaping. He had no idea who he would see sitting there, and the excitement was doing him even more good than he’d realized.

And he saw Astoria Greengrass sitting there, and he had to freeze for long moments before he felt fit to move forwards.

When he did, of course, he had already decided on what he intended to do.

*

He looks angry. Astoria’s voice skittered like an insect over the surface of Harry’s mind, agitated and trying to spread her agitation further.

He was surprised at seeing you, and that’s all it is, Harry answered firmly. Astoria paused, then relaxed visibly in her seat and leaned forwards to extend a hand to Draco. Harry wondered if it was his voice that had reassured her or the remembrance that he sat in a chair at the next table, carefully hidden under his Invisibility Cloak. He was right there. She couldn’t be in danger.

If anyone’s in danger, it’s me, Harry thought. One look at Draco’s face and his heartbeat and breathing had quickened. Of course, that wasn’t enough to ruffle the cloak or anything like that, so he was still in no danger of being seen, but it was inconvenient. If he was swept up in the way Draco looked, then he might make a mistake.

And that just proved to him, once more, that he wasn’t right for Draco. Would someone who really loved Draco be infatuated with his looks? Wouldn’t someone who really loved him probe deeper into his faults, or learn to live with them? Harry hadn’t done either. He vibrated between thinking that Draco’s faults, like his refusal to surrender his pure-blood prejudices, were excusable and thinking that Draco needed to wake up and realize there were other people in the world besides him. But he couldn’t criticize them consistently, except in the letters.

Astoria grew up in the same kind of world Draco did, Harry thought, as he watched Draco kiss Astoria’s hand with a graceful bow of his head and then sink down into the chair across from her. She wouldn’t even see them as faults. They’ll be far more suited to each other than he and I could ever be.

*

Draco had hidden his anger and his desire for vengeance—for the moment. He wanted Astoria to confess the deception to him of her own free will. She was an integral part of it, and had been from the beginning. If Draco had enough patience and showed enough charm, he might manage to extract the information with less effort than it would take him otherwise.

One thing he was sure of, even when she showed him the Veritaserum and challenged him, eyes sparkling, to hand her the charmed parchment. She was not his writer.

It was not merely that he trusted his mother’s perceptions above the “obvious” conclusion that his writer and Astoria were trying to push him towards. It was also that he simply did not think Astoria’s body hid a conqueror’s soul.

She was lovely enough when she smiled. She managed to score several conversational points off him in the first few minutes. But Draco had pictured his writer striving against him, and his simplest movement showed that he could enchant her, if he wished. Her pupils dilated when he moved his sleeve back from his wrist.

No, she was not his writer, but she might lead Draco to him, even if unwillingly.

When she offered to write the letter, though, Draco stilled. One can’t fool charmed parchment. I want to see this. Besides, she hasn’t made me take the Veritaserum first, as I would have done if I’d been in her place. I lose nothing by agreeing.

“Certainly.” Draco propped his chin up on one palm and stared steadily at her. “Write down your thoughts at seeing me like this, as if you weren’t in the restaurant. Tell me what you want from me, or would want from me if we were going home together.”

Astoria’s pupils dilated even more, but the proud lift of her chin showed that she had accepted the challenge. “Are you so sure, even now, that we aren’t?” she asked.

Draco felt a faint tinge of disgust. He knew he would have been tempted by that just a few days ago, convinced or at least shaken by Astoria’s willingness to accept the test of the parchment. If his mother had not found the letter and opened his eyes…

My writer is clever. But not clever enough to escape me.

“This letter will take a leading role in convincing me,” he said, and Astoria lowered her eyes and smiled at him from underneath the lashes.

“Of course it will,” she murmured, and then picked up a quill she must have carried with her and began to write.

*

I think he’s seeing through it. Astoria’s voice chattered like an anxious squirrel in Harry’s head.

He isn’t. Harry could see the suspicious frown at the corners of Draco’s lips, but he wasn’t striding away from the table or throwing the parchment in Astoria’s face the way he would have if he had some kind of proof. He wouldn’t have minded making a scene in Merlin’s Tor, since no one here knew him well, and it would have been worth it to him to humiliate poor Astoria. Harry frowned then, the conviction that Draco’s faults were deep surging uppermost in his mind once more. Now, write what I tell you to write, and remember the incantation for the spell afterwards.

Astoria set her quill in the middle of the parchment and began to write in obedience to Harry’s words.

Imbecile to put all others to shame,

I know your thoughts. I saw them when you let your eyes run around the restaurant as you stepped through the door. You estimated the value of everything in sight and then relaxed when you realized that none of it can challenge the luxuries that you already have in your Manor. If something had, you would have insisted on buying it and conveying it home.

You can’t bear a challenge.

And that is, in the end, your most grievous fault and the reason I cannot understand my own love for you.

Astoria’s hand faltered when she wrote those words, and her eyes darted towards him. Harry held still and projected calm reassurance through their telepathic bond. Let her have doubts about him if that was what she needed to do, but Harry understood his own deeper emotions, if not the surface that altered in response to Draco’s actions. He had the kind of love that could give Draco up to someone who would do him good. He knew that.

So Astoria’s eyes went back to the parchment, and she wrote steadily on, staring as if she were fascinated by the words that emerged.

Why should I want to be with someone who will only try to subdue me? I could enjoy a competition, but not a dogged struggle that I know would make you bitter because you couldn’t make me submit to you. And if I submitted just to see what it would be like, then I’d grow bitter in turn and walk away from you. And I don’t want you to submit to me.

This is an impasse.

This is why we both need to change. I need to understand you better, and you need to give up this idea that you’re better than anyone else, more deserving of thought and consideration. You need to realize that other people have their own inner worlds that have nothing to do with you. Even more than that, though, you need to derive the willingness to pay attention to those inner worlds from—somewhere. I don’t know where to advise you to get it. I’ve loved other people and paid attention to them all my life. If I don’t know the origin of my own virtues, how can I help you gain them?

Impossible. Madness. I tell myself that whenever I think of living with you, of loving you. We wouldn’t suit.

But I thought I would offer anyway, because it’s possible that I’m still wrong. I know you because I’ve watched you, but that doesn’t mean I can predict your every move, especially since you hide so many of your motives and real emotions behind a mask. That mask could have fooled me the way it fools the public, although not as well. Maybe you can learn to accept an eternal opponent. Maybe I can enjoy submitting sometimes.

I don’t think I’ll ever know, because I’m only half the answer to the problem. The other half lies in you, and what you decide to do—if you’re willing to overcome your faults, if you’re willing to meet me on the battlefield armed with only your native strength and cunning.

This is what I offer you, Draco, simply and fairly and without pretenses: someone who will never run away, someone who will never back down, someone who will always be there to grip you by the neck and try to throw you.

Yours truly,
A sincere friend (who hopes to become more).

Astoria was shivering as she wrote the last words. Harry reached out mentally and caressed the back of her neck.

Just keep the spell in mind, he told her. I know that he’ll wonder about the handwriting not being the same, but the spell will take care of that. And now, hand him the letter.

All right. Astoria’s voice was subdued, not as frantic as it had been earlier, and her hand didn’t shake as she held out the letter to Draco. Draco took it and read it in devouring silence. Harry smiled his approval.

This will work. It has to work, he said in his mind, but he wasn’t sure if he was comforting Astoria or himself.

*

Draco looked carefully at the letter. He would keep from pointing out the obvious until he had no choice; at the moment, he wanted to see the words.

And yes, they were words such as his writer would have written. Astoria, though he was sure she was not his writer, had managed to imitate that. The boldness was there, the half-disdain for Draco’s faults, the laughter and the longing. Draco shifted, because the words had affected him in a way inappropriate for a public restaurant.

But, with Astoria staring at him over the table, her eyes shining, he couldn’t keep the obvious to himself any longer.

“Your handwriting isn’t the same as it is on the letters I received,” he said. His voice was temperate. Someone would have to know him very well indeed to realize how angry he was. I expected intelligent enemies, not one who would try to take me in with this pathetic stratagem.

Astoria raised a brow and her wand at the same time. She cast the spell nonverbally, so Draco couldn’t tell which it was, but the letters on the parchment swirled about just as they had when Granger was casting charms that would disguise her writing for him. In moments, they had assumed new shapes, and Astoria tapped the letter with one of her nails.

“I think you should look again,” she said.

Draco looked down—and yes, now the writing was the same as it was on all the letters he had received.

He pretended to engage in an intense study of those words whilst silently scanning Astoria from beneath lowered eyelids. He watched until he’d seen it happen twice, which was evidence enough for him. Astoria’s eye flicked to the right, towards another table. It could have been the telltale sign of a lie, but Draco, when he risked his own slight sideways glance, saw a shimmer that suggested someone sat there under a Disillusionment Charm or complicated glamour. He worked to keep his mouth from widening in a hungry snarl.

My writer is here. Astoria is getting advice from him. They worked out some way to fool the charmed parchment, some way to transform her writing into his. I still don’t understand the motive, but I will no longer allow them to treat me as if I were stupid.

Draco at last looked up. Astoria leaned towards him with a confiding smile. Draco uttered a bark of a laugh, and she promptly paused. She was too well-bred to exclaim aloud, but a faint pallor worked its way across her face.

“I am not stupid,” Draco said. “I do not appreciate being lied to. I do not appreciate being handled as if I were a child, incapable of making my own decisions about who is best for me.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t need to; he saw the increased force of his words tear into Astoria like arrows. “You’re not the one who wrote these words.”

Astoria had the courage to flutter her eyes at him in confusion. “I don’t know what you mean, Draco. You saw me write them—”

“The writer is a man.” Draco lowered his voice still further. It would force them to pay attention: both Astoria, and his writer, who was resisting his destined meeting with Draco for some reason unknown. “I know that. Where is he?”

Astoria went a little paler, but she inclined her head with the grace of someone who knew she was beaten. “Perhaps we should have consulted you,” she said, and once again her eye twitched sideways, towards the shimmer in the chair.

Draco stood and whirled around in the same smooth motion.

*

No! Harry couldn’t believe she would give him away like this. Astoria! What are you doing?

I know what he wants, Astoria’s voice said softly, resignedly, in his head. And it’s not me. I still hoped—I still thought I might be able to convince him, and if I could, then he would be in a fair way to being happy with me—but I can’t, and that means an illusion won’t do. He needs and chooses—Harry, watch out!

Harry snapped his head back towards Draco, and realized he was on his feet, wand aimed directly at Harry’s chair. His lips were already moving in the first words of a spell, and Harry recognized a Latin word used at the beginning of many binding incantations.

Utter panic seized him, and convulsing grief. He had made a mistake in trying to impose on and lie to Draco. He did need to make his own choices. But it was better that he should believe the writer was too cowardly to meet him—which might actually be the truth—than that he should realize the whole ploy had been the plan of someone he must still despise. This way, at least Draco could have his pride and think of it as a failed romance instead of a deception that had fooled him for a while. Hurt pride would cut him more deeply than anything else.

Harry twisted to his feet, paused a moment so the Invisibility Cloak could flow about him, and then began to run. Draco’s spell struck the chair behind him, and he heard a complicated grinding of wood that must be its legs twisting up into a bound position.

Not even one full heartbeat later, Draco’s feet pounded the floor as he ran after Harry.

Harry gasped curses under his breath as he skidded out the front door and leaped one of the magical engines that drove the rotating panels surrounding the restaurant. Merlin’s Tor had anti-Apparition wards everywhere; you were supposed to walk up a long road to the restaurant and admire the sights on the way. Harry had at least a thousand feet to cover before he would be free to get away.

And you won’t run it hesitating here, he scolded himself, as Draco fired another binding spell past his shoulder, and began to run again.

*

Draco had no idea why matters had worked out this way. His writer should have stood up to him when he realized all his plans had failed. He should have pulled off the glamour or the charm or whatever it was and explained himself. He should have acceded to Draco’s tight clasp on his wrist and come back to the Manor for a few hours of talk.

He should not have run away.

But Draco couldn’t deny that he was enjoying the chase. He had used binding spells at first, but then he remembered that the anti-Apparition wards would keep his writer from escaping immediately, and that he had always been able to run silently.

And that there was another way he would prefer to capture his writer.

He followed that shimmer as closely as he could without making enough noise to cause it to turn around, and counted steps under his breath. Soon, they were near the edge of the anti-Apparition wards, and the shimmer slowed down. His writer was probably fumbling for his wand.

But he wasn’t paying enough attention to the world around him whilst he was at it.

Draco pounced. He grabbed his writer around his waist and bore him to the ground, twisting at the same moment so that he was straddling his writer’s hips, legs firmly gripping the other man’s knees. He laid his hands on his writer’s shoulders and stared down into the invisible face, grinding slightly with groin and arse. He was already intensely excited from the chase and his anger before that; he could feel his writer responding, which made him stiffer with satisfaction.

“Why did you run?” Draco whispered, wishing he could lower his head and breathe into his writer’s face, but too cautious to bring his mouth within range of teeth yet. “You’ve already practically said that you belong to me.” He shifted from side to side, trying to gauge his writer’s strength and physique as well as tell what sort of spell shielded him from sight. It felt oddly silky, whatever it was. Perhaps it was an Invisibility Cloak rather than a spell after all.

The man was nicely muscled, at least, and there was no problem with the erection pressing against him. Not that Draco was a good judge of other men’s erections. But he would learn to be, he thought, and ground down again.

“Who are you?” he whispered. “Mine, at the very least.” And he reached down to tear the Invisibility Cloak from the stubborn arse’s face.

The bastard slipped to the side, brought his knee up into Draco’s chin, and practically dislocated his shoulders squirming free. Draco fell back, reeling, and heard a quick, roughly chanted spell. He gasped before a whirling sequence of lights descended in front of his eyes, disorienting him and keeping him from getting a firm grip on his wand so that he could mutter a Finite.

When he could see again, the air still resounded with the crack of an Apparition and there was a note on the ground beside him, in his writer’s hand. Draco snatched it up and read it immediately despite the pounding in his head.

I was wrong. I see that now. I shouldn’t have tried to deceive you, and I acted far worse than you ever have. Accept my apologies, both for trying to foist Astoria on you and for writing in the first place. You deserve to make your own choices. I won’t come near you again.

Draco crumpled the letter in his hand with a snarl.

“I do deserve to make my own choices,” he whispered. “And you don’t get to withdraw so easily from the contest.”

He did have a second thought and hastily turned back to the restaurant then, but by the time he reached their table again, Astoria was also gone. Draco closed his eyes and composed himself, knowing he would have to give explanations of some kind to the owner of Merlin’s Tor.

But that was on the surface of his mind only. Every other thought was full of his writer, full of pointed fury and cool appreciation and angry hunger, intent on tracking him down.

You don’t get to offer me something like that and then draw the hook back when I snap at the bait. I’ll find you, I’ll know you, and I’ll fight with you.

Draco felt a small smile widen into a large one across his face.

And whether I end up taming you or you tame me, I will deeply enjoy this, my writer.

Chapter 7.