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lomonaaerenDo not start reading here. This is the second part of a massive three-shot.
“That was pretty bloody stupid of you.”
Draco kept his smile angelic as he laid down his newspaper. Of course he had known about Potter coming to see him from the moment he landed on the gravel driveway that led up to the Manor, but he could pretend that this was a total surprise that nonetheless found him in a moment of cool relaxation.
Besides, Potter had lost the game in a way he didn’t anticipate. He had come here, instead of waiting for Draco to seek him out.
“What was pretty bloody stupid?” Draco asked, picking out the last words as if he’d never heard them before. It was true that they were words not often uttered in the Manor. He made a languid motion with one hand, and a house-elf appeared at the end of the couch. Which one it was didn’t matter to Draco; they were all identical in any case. “Bring me white wine. I don’t know what Mr. Potter would like to drink.” He looked courteously at Potter and waited for a reply.
Potter gaped at him for a moment, as if he didn’t know why Draco wasn’t leaping to his feet with his wand in hand. Then he snapped his mouth shut and drew himself up straight. Draco smiled back lazily. Yes, that kind of gesture could make Potter look stupid and cause him to question his choice, but in reality, he didn’t think he needed to be ashamed. Potter had a hard, considering spark in his eyes now as he looked at Draco. Yes, Draco hadn’t made the expected response; now Potter was interested in why that had happened.
“I want spiced chocolate,” Potter said in a challenging tone as he sat down on the chair opposite Draco’s couch. “Nutmeg.”
The elf bowed and vanished. Draco raised an eyebrow. “I never knew that you drank that sort of thing,” he said. It was a drink that some pure-bloods liked and it was served in pure-blood restaurants, true, but Potter wouldn’t have spent much time in those kinds of places.
Potter smirked, as if he were satisfied with surprising Draco. “I had to drink it while I was hiding undercover and watching some criminals who wouldn’t let any non-pure-bloods near them,” he said. “I developed a taste.”
“Ah.” Draco wondered if Potter’s fiancée knew that. He thought not. He arranged himself to be more comfortable in his seat, folded the newspaper so it wouldn’t wrinkle, and waited for Potter to continue.
Potter was content to sit in silence and study Draco for some time before he did. Draco looked back, more than content, on his own part, to see what emotions crossed Potter’s face.
His face was shadowed as he sat there. He looked like the hardened veteran of war that he was. On the other hand, he didn’t look joyless, the way he had when Draco met him at Janus Jewelry and the Quidditch demonstration. Having a mental puzzle to solve agreed with him, Draco thought.
None of his so-called friends would say that, since they think he’s so stupid, but it’s true.
The elf came back with the wine and the chocolate. Potter sighed as he drank his, closing his eyes and letting the smell seep into his nostrils long after he’d swallowed. Then he shook his head and set the cup down on the table next to him. Draco controlled his flinch. The cup wasn’t hot enough to mark the table, or Potter couldn’t have held it, he told himself sternly.
“I can’t understand this,” Potter said quietly. “I know that you started this because you hate the Weasleys, and making me walk away from them probably sounded like a good idea.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forwards, eyes so intense that Draco shivered and thought about other times that Potter might look like that. “But I’m not going to do it. And what you offered me was fairly weak proof, as I understood when Ginny explained it to me. Ron doesn’t always speak highly of me, that’s true. I don’t always speak highly of him. That doesn’t mean I should march away from years of friendship with him and—what? Join you in whatever thrilling adventures you have instead?” Potter cocked his head skeptically.
Draco had to avert his eyes, because otherwise there was every chance that Potter would see the weakness in them. Powerful, questioning, quiet, forceful. No one had told him Potter was like this. Draco had vaguely reckoned that there might be someone like this under the surface, but he hadn’t known.
Of course no one told me about him. There ‘s no one else except Potter himself who knows this man exists.
Draco took another look at Potter’s face.
And maybe the criminals that he hunts down, sometimes. I wonder they don’t give up the moment they see him staring at them.
“Wrong end of the stick,” Draco said with a faint smile, when he thought he wouldn’t sound too eager. On the other hand, maybe he needed to sound eager? It was honest admiration that had got Potter’s attention on the Quidditch pitch, after all. He leaned forwards in turn, and saw Potter blink as though someone had flung a shower of gold dust into his eyes. “I wouldn’t be opposed to thrilling adventures, but it’s not Weasley I want to take you away from. Not that Weasley.”
He waited for it to click. And it did, but as a shadow across Potter’s face and a slow, heavy shake of his head.
“You can’t—want to sleep with me,” he said, as though Draco might mean a different thing by that than everyone else did.
“Why not?” Draco’s voice came out breathy and greedy. He didn’t care. Potter had grown up a bit while still being intrigued enough by Draco to come here, of all places. He denied that Draco could make up walk away from his friends, but he had obviously still brooded on that Pensieve memory—which had taken Draco no effort to catch; just listen to Weasley long enough and he would start disparaging Potter—and accepted it seriously into the dark part of his brain. Yes, this was someone Draco wanted. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a life-long romance like the one Potter (thought he had) shared with Girl-Weasley, but Draco was willing to wager that it wouldn’t actually take that to catch Potter.
“Because—why would you?”
The bewilderment expressed by those wide eyes and that halting breath was real, Draco thought in wonder. Not fishing for compliments. Even though he hardly understood how it could be. But the great difference between him and the Weasleys was that he took Potter seriously when he said he didn’t understand and explained, instead of accusing him of stupidity.
“You’re quite attractive,” Draco said. “There are the power and the money aspects, as well.” He swirled the wine in his glass and took a sip. Potter just blinked at him as if he was speaking a foreign language. Draco hissed between his teeth. “You must have had enough propositions in the first years after you defeated the Dark Lord that—”
“That’s what I mean, though,” Potter interrupted. “Your finding me attractive depends on the money and power. And those are the things you want to sleep with, not me. It would be even better for you if you could skip straight over the sleeping together and just get to owning and wielding them, right?” His smile was wry, with a distant, grainy kind of bitterness that Draco would have thought too complex an emotion for his face, if he hadn’t seen it there.
Of course he would have heard propositions like this before. And rejected every single one of them. Draco cursed himself for not realizing that.
“You don’t know me,” Potter said. “Don’t try to tell me that my cleverness, of all things, attracted you.” He gave a credible sneer, and Draco wondered if his friends would recognize the source of it: their constantly telling Potter that he was a bit slow. “We don’t have a sense of humor in common, or hobbies, or friends, or shared friendly experiences, or any bit of it. So you can’t really want to sleep with me. You want to sleep with some shade of me, some picture that you’ve made up. I’m curious to know what kind of picture it was, I admit, because no one’s ever tried sending me a memory of my best friend saying something he says all the time before.” He leaned back in his seat and surveyed Draco with one raised eyebrow.
Draco took a slow, deep breath. He didn’t have an immediate answer, but he thought Potter would probably scorn him if he did. He was used to slick, sophisticated answers, and quick ones. His false friends probably gave him those all the time.
Draco knew exactly what the answers would be.
I didn’t mean that, Harry.
Oh, he’s just impatient, Harry, he didn’t mean it.
You know what we mean, don’t you, Harry?
Tiny lies. Small lies. But over time, they would pile up and wear away at someone like Potter, who valued honesty.
And so Draco went with the prompting of his instincts, and was honest in return.
“At first I simply wanted to take you away from the Weasleys,” he admitted.
Potter’s eyebrows shot up, and then he laughed. The laughter was frank and pleased. Draco found out that it tightened things low in his stomach. He leaned forwards, but Potter was too far away to touch. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice the motion Draco had made. He simply shook his head and looked at him with eyes that had a hint of fondness in them.
“That is different,” he said. “Most people try to go through the Weasleys to get at me. Going through me to get at them is new. I’m glad that you give them credit for existing and having an effect, instead of trying to dismiss them as people who don’t matter. They are war heroes, after all.” He took what Draco thought was only the second sip of his chocolate.
“You didn’t hear the most important phrase in that sentence, I see,” Draco said. He didn’t have to go far to find a sneer. Potter didn’t seem to mind. Maybe it comforted him, seeing Draco appear the way he thought Draco should appear. He cocked his head.
“Excuse me for thinking it was ‘wanted to take you away from the Weasleys,’” he said. “That’s certainly the one that matters to me.”
“It was at first,” Draco said. “Now I’ve seen more of you. You’re better than they are. You’re more courageous than they are. You deserve better than to put up with their stupid insults and Weasley’s stupid stunts for the rest of your life.”
Potter shook his head, his smile faint. “I see that you haven’t improved in subtlety since we were at school, Malfoy,” he said.
“Tell me why.” Draco could get used to someone who smiled like that. He wanted to see how it would taste against his mouth, but, of course, Potter was too cautious of him at the moment for that.
“Because you can’t come up with anything other than the same complaint you’ve always used,” Potter said quietly. He set down the cup of chocolate on the table beside the chair and rose to his feet. “You want me to believe that I’m too good for the Weasleys. That means you think I have some estimation of myself as being better than them—better than anybody in particular. I don’t. You’d think you would have realized this by now.” He gave Draco a pitying glance and started walking towards the door.
Draco panicked. That could be the only reason why he bolted to his feet and called out, “Potter, wait!”
He got a single patient, wide-eyed green glance, the same kind Potter had given the Weasel after he nearly crashed the broom he was riding. His words tumbled on, because he wouldn’t let Potter put him on the same level as the Weasleys, he wouldn’t. “You have to admit that some people are better than others. Where there are differences, there will be inequalities.” That had been one of his father’s favorite sayings.
“Sure,” Potter said. “Some people are more intelligent than others, or more creative, or more thoughtful. Some are more pointy.” He gave Draco’s face a glance of quiet amusement, and Draco had to stop himself from reaching up to feel at his cheekbones. He was not pointy, and he knew it. “But there’s a difference between that and believing that you’re somehow deserving of more courtesy or justice because of those things. That’s what I don’t believe, and that’s what you’re trying to get me to believe. It’s not going to work.”
God, he sounded like a parent explaining to a child why he couldn’t have a coveted toy. Draco hated the comparison. He gritted his teeth together and struck back. “You have to admit that someone can be honored above another person for their talents. Or would you agree that Weasley is equal to you as an Auror?”
From Potter’s stillness, Draco knew he had at least found a weak point. He concealed his smile. In truth, he should have seen that it was a weak point before, since Potter had taken so much time to consider that memory of Weasley bragging that he was the better Auror. But it was so hard to tell with this shifting, changing, metamorphosing Potter that he hadn’t been sure.
“Ron is a good Auror,” Potter said at last.
“But your equal?”
Potter’s nostrils flared. “Of course,” he said harshly. “I would never say that he didn’t deserve admiration and awards and backup from someone else because he wasn’t me.”
“That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about,” said Draco. He reminded himself to be patient. Potter would be enough reward for his patience, if he could just keep calm. “Do you think your superiors should trust him as much? Who should they send into a situation that contains hostages and Dark magic, him or you?”
Potter sneered at him again. “That shows your ignorance of the Ministry more than it does anything else, Malfoy,” he said. “Aurors always work in teams. They wouldn’t choose between us. They would expect us to act together.”
Draco opened his mouth to reply, but Potter ploughed on, his face averted from Draco’s now. “And you’re ignorant about plenty of other things, too. Why have I stood here talking to you for this long? Ginny’s right. You deserve nothing more than my silence.” He turned away again.
“Strange that you had to call on her words instead of your own,” Draco said to his back.
Potter kept walking.
“Have you thought about how many of their words you believe? Have you thought about whether you think that you’re slow because they said it, not because you actually are?” Draco paused for breath, in part because Potter was opening the front door now and Draco’s breath was coming short in fear. “Have you thought about whether you resent their jokes because you want to think differently of yourself, but you don’t dare?”
Potter gave him a single look before he went out the door.
But Draco felt free to lean back and chuckle, because no one gave looks that intense or ugly to someone they intended simply to discount.
He’ll come back.
*
Ginny knew what the slam of the front door meant. Harry was in one of his moods. She carefully finished patting sweat from her forehead with the towel before she opened the bathroom door and stepped out to confront him.
To her surprise, he wasn’t pacing back and forth in the drawing room and waiting for the conversation. Instead, he was out in the back, casting spells with deadly efficiency at a series of stone targets he’d set up near the Quidditch Pitch a long time ago but rarely used now. He said that being an Auror gave him enough practice of that sort.
“Harry?” Ginny called, but he didn’t hear her over the explosions he was creating. Bits of stone flew everywhere, some of them pinging off the windows. Ginny ducked her head and grimaced. She knew they had wards on their house to prevent anything from shattering, but it still didn’t make her comfortable when Harry did that.
He just doesn’t think about things all the time, she thought wistfully as she walked across the grass towards him. Of course, I don’t, either, but I would appreciate it if he told me when I was being thoughtless. He doesn’t appreciate it.
“Harry,” she said quietly when she was closer to him, with the firm tone that was usually good about getting him to pay attention.
Harry gave himself a little shake and turned to face her. Ginny set her jaw and refused to step back when she saw the wildness in his eyes. Harry would never hurt her. The power bulging and rippling around him, making the air heavy and wet as a drenched cloak, was just his magic’s way of expressing itself.
It frightened her, but he had never hurt her. She trusted him to keep that promise.
“Ginny?” Harry spoke in a voice that seemed to come from a long distance, as though he’d forgotten who she was for a little while. That alarmed Ginny more than anything else that had happened so far. He dragged an arm across his forehead, mopping off the sweat, and then looked at the back of his hand blankly.
Ginny shook her head. She sometimes felt the same way when she came back from an intense Quidditch practice, but at least she knew it was adrenaline and excitement that made her feel as though she was in another world. Harry was being driven by anger, and she was increasingly concerned about what could have got him so angry.
“What happened?” she asked, putting a hand on his arm now that it didn’t seem as if he would shake her off.
“That fucker Malfoy.”
Ginny peered at him, not sure whether to be more relieved or wary. On the one hand, Malfoy shouldn’t have been able to cause this much pain and frustration in Harry, not if he was back to ignoring Malfoy the way he had promised he was. On the other hand, it implied that he didn’t believe whatever Malfoy had told him about why he’d sent that memory.
Not that Ginny really thought Harry was disloyal or looking for reasons to distrust his best friends. Of course not. But…sometimes it seemed as though he’d never forgiven Ron for leaving him alone for a while during the Triwizard Tournament and the Horcrux hunt. Even though they were childish errors, even though Ron had come back both times, they were like festering wounds in Harry’s mind that had never healed.
“What did he say?” she asked quietly.
“That he despises you as much as he ever did.” Harry turned towards her and caught her hands in a crushing grip, staring down at her almost desperately. “Ginny, he’s trying to torment me to torment you. Why can’t he let whatever grudge he has against your family go?”
Ginny smiled in spite of herself. Harry hadn’t grown up in their world and didn’t understand the intensity of pure-blood grudges, how they usually mattered only to people who were dead and gone but had to be kept up anyway, out of respect to those dead and gone people. She squeezed his hands. “For the same reason we can’t let it go,” she said calmly. Yes, it’s going to be fine. “We should do it if he does it, right?”
“But you’re not going around trying to discredit him in the same way he is you.” Harry crowded close to her, as if he were going to shield her with his body from the evils of the world. Ginny found the behavior sweet, although only in moments when she didn’t need protection; then she wanted acknowledgment from Harry that she could stand on her own.
“No, we’re not,” Ginny said. “But I don’t think that’s a difference in our attitudes towards the feud so much as it is a difference in our upbringing. We had kind and compassionate parents. He didn’t.”
Harry stood still for a minute. Then he said, as if struck by something, “I do think his parents loved him. I told you about how his mother saved my life because I told her where Malfoy—Draco, I mean—was.”
Ginny sighed. This was one of those subtleties that it seemed Harry just didn’t understand. “Yes, but what I mean is that they don’t care for anyone beyond their family. If they did, then his mother would have lied to save you whether or not you could tell her anything about her son. They’re not compassionate in general.”
“No,” Harry muttered.
He was quiet for the rest of the evening, but Ginny didn’t mind. It was one of those evenings when she wanted to be quiet herself, and read sometimes, and lean on his shoulder sometimes, and talk dreamily of what would happen after their marriage, and cuddle instead of make love.
*
“I don’t want to do this right now, Hermione.”
Draco sighed with soft triumph. He hadn’t even “arranged” to be in the same place as Potter and his friends this time, and he certainly hadn’t arranged to put that note of agitation in Potter’s voice—much as he would have liked to think it was connected to his little conversation with Potter a few days prior. He rose to his feet and peered out through the curtain that separated the private room at the back of the Glass House restaurant from the main dining area.
Potter stood next to a table in the center, his knuckles white where they gripped the chair, his face distressed. Granger was watching him with the same kind of exasperation that Draco had seen her use when the Boy Wonder and her boyfriend didn’t do their homework properly.
She should remember that this isn’t Hogwarts anymore, Draco thought idly as he watched.
“When are we going to do it?” Granger asked quietly. “You were the one who wanted to practice, Harry. I’m just making sure that we do.” She pushed a curl of hair behind her ear, looking harassed. Draco vaguely recalled hearing that she was some sort of powerful, important lawyer now, and she looked it, given the rich, sleek robes she was wearing and the fact that her hair actually behaved. “You know Ginny will be disappointed if you drop food all over your wedding robes.”
Draco blinked and then had to hide a grin in his sleeve which might otherwise have turned into a loud laugh. She’s teaching him how to eat?
“I’m not—this isn’t—” Potter bowed his head and swore softly. Draco couldn’t hear all the words, but the ones he could hear were impressive, and so were the rest, judging from Granger’s frown.
“I do want to be clean and look nice for Ginny at the wedding,” Potter said at last, looking up. “But I didn’t ask you for a lesson. I just mentioned it to you. You were the one who decided that we needed to practice.” His nostrils flared, and Draco saw the view of things around him briefly distort. Draco sighed. That would be his magic shimmering out of control. So delicious.
“You need help,” Granger said bluntly. “We don’t have time to hire someone to do it, and frankly, I don’t trust that you would show up on time for the lesson if we did. So I’m going to be the one to do it. Sit down and put your napkin on.” She was already moving towards her own chair, drawing it out in a graceful, economical motion that Draco couldn’t help but admire.
Potter’s hands gripped his chair as if it were a weapon he was going to swing to defend himself. “No,” he said.
The power in his voice weakened Draco’s knees. He licked his lips and held as still as he could. For no reason in the world would he be denied his view of the scene he knew would happen next.
Granger paused and stared at him. “What?” she asked at last, in a tone of voice that said she couldn’t believe anyone would dare defy her.
“I don’t want to,” Potter said, his jaw jutting out. It was a good look on him, Draco thought. He should refuse to do what people wanted more often. Why not? He certainly had the power to get away with it, and he ought to be able to exercise his own desires some of the time. “I’ll eat as neatly as I can at the wedding, and that’s all anyone can ask of me.”
Granger gazed at him with a softened face. “I know you’ll try, Harry,” she said. “And I know that this wedding has everyone on edge. I’m sorry if I snapped at you. But—Ginny and Molly are concerned.”
“Why?” Potter ground that word out. His magic snapped around him again, rearranging several of the panes of glass in one of the Glass Room’s windows without breaking it. Draco had to shut his eyes and breathe through his mouth for a moment, or his breath would have stopped altogether.
“Because of the way that you behaved at George’s wedding.” Granger’s gaze was piercing.
Potter flushed. “That had more to do with me getting drunk than anything else,” he muttered.
“But before that,” Granger said quietly, “you were spilling food on your robes. And you stained your tie. Ginny might not have told you, but it really embarrassed her, Harry. She doesn’t want that to happen again.”
Potter jerked his head up. He’d been staring somewhere in the middle of the table, but now he was looking at his traitorous friend again, and Draco was glad. That look suited him much better than the exaggerated expression of penance he’d adopted. At least, Draco hoped it was exaggerated, because no one should feel that much embarrassment over a social faux pas. Not someone like Potter, who had done the Weasleys a favor by attending their little celebration in the first place. “Why didn’t she tell me?” he asked. “She bloody well should have.”
“She was afraid that you would get angry.” Granger answered slowly, her eyes so intent that Draco was afraid she would look straight through the curtain and spot him for a moment. But no, it seemed her attention was all for Potter. “Start yelling, the way you do sometimes.”
“I would never hurt her.” Potter’s magic dimmed as he spoke, and Draco knew he was struggling to get better control of himself for Granger’s sake.
“I know that,” Granger said. She paused again and then reached out and put a hand on Potter’s shoulder. Draco’s skin shuddered as if he were the one being touched. “But I don’t know if Ginny knows it.”
Potter shook his head. “So is this about me spilling food on my shirt and embarrassing her, or is this about Ginny being afraid of me?”
“That’s something you’ll have to discuss with her,” Granger said. “But in the meantime, it really would be nice if you sat down and worked with me on this, Harry. We both took time out of our jobs to do this.”
Don’t do it, Draco thought, trying to send waves of mental strength to Potter. It doesn’t matter how nice she’s being right now or how understandable her motives might be. She still wanted you to do this ridiculous thing merely to appease the woman who’s too afraid of you and your magnificent power to talk to you herself.
Potter seemed to have heard Draco. He straightened his shoulders, bit his lip, and shook his head again. “No, Hermione. You can send Ginny to me if you want, so I can be the one to explain my decision. But I think it’s about time that I started thinking more about what I want than about what the Weasleys want to make me into.”
Granger stared at him with her mouth slightly open, then laughed. Draco smiled, feeling as though he’d swallowed a mugful of mead when he watched Potter’s eyes narrow. I think that you’ve just lost most of the ground you gained with him, Granger.
“That’s—that’s not what they’re trying to do at all,” Granger said, when she recovered. “They say things sometimes, but they don’t mean them.”
“Ginny meant this enough to ask you to come and talk to me about it,” Potter said evenly. “She meant it enough that she didn’t dare approach me herself. And if they can be excused because they’re under stress from the wedding and everything else right now, then surely I can be.” He put his chin up and stood there looking more wise and elegant and mature than Draco thought he could have looked in years.
Granger grumbled something under her breath and checked a watch that hung from the front of her robe. “I’m late already,” she muttered and then looked up at Potter. “Listen, Harry,” she said. “We’ll talk about this later. But you’ve got to stop thinking that because Ron betrayed you a few times in the place, and because he sometimes has a big mouth, that everything is going wrong. Ginny told me about that memory Malfoy sent. Who are you going to believe, him or someone who’s been by your side for years?”
Potter hesitated, to Draco’s fury. “It does sound simple when you put it that way,” he muttered.
No. Draco prepared to move. Even at the cost of revealing himself, he had to counter the damage that Granger had just inflicted to his goal.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Granger repeated, gave Potter a quick kiss on the cheek, and then scuttled out of the restaurant. A waiter peered past her timidly, apparently wondering whether Potter still wanted lunch. Potter rubbed his cheek and stared down at the table as though he had forgotten what one was.
Draco waited just a moment to make sure Granger wasn’t returning, and then flung the curtain back. “Come join me, Potter,” he called.
Potter jolted. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and his smile was less surprised than wry. “Why didn’t I expect to see you here?” he asked. “I should have. You seem to make a point of appearing in my life lately.”
Draco ignored this vague muttering, even though he thought Potter should have thanked him. Draco was there in time to stop him from making mistakes, after all. “Come join me,” he said, more softly, and extended a hand as though he was beckoning Potter in from the cold.
Potter examined him long enough that Draco imagined he would walk away after all. Then he nodded slightly and strode across the room to duck under the curtain.
For a moment, Draco was close enough to Potter that his skin sizzled and saliva filled his mouth. Potter didn’t seem to notice. He sat down at the table and looked around the private room with a slow, impressed blink. Draco attempted to look at it with a stranger’s eyes, to take new and unanticipated pleasure in the cleanliness of the tiled walls and the moving portraits of famous wizards from the past.
“Nice,” Potter said briefly, and fixed an eye on him. “So tell me what you’re doing here.”
“Originally, I was simply here to eat lunch.” Draco took his place across from Potter, trying to control his excited quivering and largely failing. I want him. The sentiment, strengthened by Granger’s words, seemed to surround his head like an iron band, pressing his skin against his skull. “But then I saw you, and overheard the conversation that you were having with her.”
Potter’s smile turned dark for a moment. “And you still can’t expect me to betray my friends for you, Malfoy.” His hand tightened on the arm of his chair as if he would shove it away from the table and stand.
“Betrayal’s such an ugly word,” Draco said. He watched as his plate appeared in front of him, though no food filled it. He only had to speak the name of the dish he wanted, but he hadn’t chosen yet. Besides, it would probably take the Glass Room’s magic a bit of time to adjust since he now had a guest. Draco looked up and into Potter’s eyes with a leisurely motion of his head. “I much prefer considering better options.”
“I have friends,” Potter said quietly. “I have a fiancée. You’ve told me what place in my life you want to fill, but there isn’t a hole for you to step into.”
“Unless you make one.” Draco was growing tired of dancing around the subject and suspected he might as well say it straight out.
“And why would I want to?” Potter’s voice was soft and slow, much like the tone Draco had chosen to coax him. He was leaning his elbows on the table—Draco winced, but decided he could ignore this in pursuit of larger things—and examining Draco with a deep gaze.
“You’re interested,” Draco said. “You have to be. You would have told me to fuck off otherwise.” He looked at the plate and the equally empty glass. “Duck with orange sauce,” he said. “Seasoned potatoes. Elf-made wine.” A spark of magic raced around the table, and the food came into view like a beautiful illusion.
“Aren’t you hungry, Potter?” he asked, picking up his fork and suspending it over the duck and the potatoes. Potter licked his lips, and Draco smiled, choosing to take that as a comment on more than just the food.
“I am,” Potter said. “But I’m not sure that I trust food that just appears.”
Draco shook his head in annoyance. “It’s been prepared by the hands of house-elves like Hogwarts food, Potter.”
“Why house-elves?” Potter asked quickly. “Why can’t humans do it themselves?”
Draco cut a bite of duck free and chewed it slowly, refusing to let himself get angry. Potter was trying to start an argument, he knew, to herd Draco away from the point of this conversation. “Because house-elves are the best at what they do,” he said at last. “The Glass Room prides itself on providing the very best food to its guests.”
Potter stared at his plate and glass with slightly dazed eyes, as though a new world of possibilities was opening in front of him. “Soft white chicken with rice on the side,” he said quietly. “Brown fish that’s crumbling and so soft it falls apart when you touch it. Chocolate spiced with nutmeg.”
Draco smiled slightly as Potter’s dishes filled. “You have a fondness for that chocolate, don’t you, Potter?”
Potter ate instead of answering him, and Draco started doing the same thing. It was a pleasure in more ways than the vicious pleasure that came with knowing Potter was with him and not the Weasleys, which Draco hadn’t expected. Potter had manners of a kind and a trick of closing his eyes when his mouth was full and he was savoring the food that made Draco have to watch his face.
Once Potter opened his eyes and caught him at it, but Draco refused to flush at the knowing smile. Potter’s actions compelled him. It wasn’t fair to blame Draco for that.
When most of the meal was gone and Potter was nursing his chocolate, Draco pushed his plate slightly aside to let the restaurant’s magic know he was done. The check appeared next to his hands, but he didn’t bother to look at it yet. The Glass Room hardly cared how long he lingered when he was paying them so well.
“Aren’t you tired?” he asked Potter.
“Define tired.” Potter looked away from the painting he’d been contemplating and back at Draco, his face much calmer than before.
“Tired of other people ordering you around,” Draco said. “Tired of people thinking they own you. Tired of being ignored by your friends, or treated with narrow-minded pettiness when they notice you.” He hesitated, then took a risk. He didn’t know for certain that Potter felt this way, but he had a good idea. If Potter hadn’t, there was no reason for him to share a meal with Draco after Draco had told him he wanted him. “Tired of rushing towards a wedding that you don’t seem to care about.”
Potter’s hands tightened on his glass. He said nothing for so long that Draco once again thought he might leave the table.
Then Potter lifted his head and said, simply, “Yes.”
Draco exhaled hard, surprised to find himself trembling. He reached across the table, letting his hand rest lightly on Potter’s wrist. Potter looked at it with some curiosity.
“But there’s nothing to be done about it now,” Potter said, with a slight shrug. “The invitations are sent. The decorations are ordered. I know which robes I’m going to wear. I even bought Ginny a ring.” He offered Draco a twisted smile, as if he was remembering that moment at Janus Jewelry when he had walked back into Draco’s life. “I’ll have to live with this wedding and everything that comes after it as best I can. Besides, most of the time my friends aren’t so bad. I can’t throw away years of friendship and a relationship with Ginny because—”
“Coward,” Draco said.
It was the one word he could think of that would get Potter’s attention, but it was also the word that expressed what he honestly thought at the moment. Potter stopped speaking and stared at Draco, color leaving his face.
Then the color came back in a rush and he said through gritted teeth, “I beg your fucking pardon?”
“You didn’t put up with the Dark Lord coming after you and trying to kill you,” Draco said mockingly. He tightened his grip on Potter’s wrist when he would have pulled away. Potter grabbed Draco’s hand in return and crushed down, but Draco refused to show his discomfort. They were wrestling, and as long as that happened, then Potter couldn’t ignore him. “You didn’t stand around and say nothing when I taunted your best friends, or when other Slytherins did it. You didn’t let Umbridge get away with what she did at Hogwarts. Why are you letting them get away with it? Why are you so resigned to a marriage that you don’t want?”
“They’re my friends,” Potter said, with a cut-off motion of his head that reminded Draco of a horse being forced into harness. “Not my enemies.”
“That makes it all the more urgent that you stand up for yourself.” Draco sneered at him. “Since friends are apt to think they can walk all over you if you don’t put them in their place.”
“I’m equal to my friends, Malfoy—”
“No, you’re taking up the inferior position when you let them trample you.” Draco leaned in. “Do you want to marry the She-Weasel or not?”
“There’s no reason for me not to want to,” Potter hissed at him.
“That’s not good enough.” Draco shook his head, glad for the smirk that played around his lips. It made Potter stare at him in fascination so intense Draco couldn’t believe loathing was behind it. Frustration, perhaps, but that was because Draco was the one pushing Potter to face up to what he would have preferred to ignore. “You need a positive reason, not a negative one. Do you want to marry her?”
“None of your fucking business, Malfoy!” Potter attempted to wrench free again, but Draco had been prepared for that and brought both of his hands into play, straining to hold Potter’s arm flat on the table.
“It is,” he said. “Because I chose to make it so. Because I was the one who bloody noticed. Because I’m the one who wants you to stand up for yourself.” He leaned close to Potter, until Potter’s breath raked across his lips. “And you don’t have a good enough reason why you aren’t doing that,” he whispered.
Potter snorted at him, looking as maddened as a bull. Draco refused to allow himself to worry about that. He tightened his hand and raised an eyebrow instead. Attack me, Potter. Run away if you have to. That way, I know my words will linger in your head later, and you can’t escape them.
“I don’t have to stay here and be insulted,” Potter said suddenly, and rolled his shoulders, tugging his hands away from Draco with a movement Draco assumed they had taught him in the Aurors and which he had to admit he would have liked to learn. He cast a handful of Galleons on the table without even asking to look at the check and stepped towards the curtain.
“Running away?” Draco breathed.
He received a single furious glance that made his groin ache. There was so much concentrated passion in that one look. Draco couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have all of it focused on him, to be the one who caused Potter’s passion and the person who got to enjoy the consequences of it.
Potter stared at Draco for a moment, eyes widening. Draco thought he had probably seen Draco’s thoughts in his eyes. He swallowed—Draco saw his throat bob—and then turned and raced through the curtain as if a dragon was after him.
Maybe one is, Draco thought, giving a leisurely stretch as he picked up the check to ascertain the price of his meal. I might not have wings or a breath of fire, but I think my weapons are keener yet.
*
Ginny stepped into the Glass Room and frowned when she realized that Harry was gone. Hermione had sounded so sure he’d stand right here until Ginny came to talk to him.
And Ginny needed to talk to him, Hermione had told her, her eyes wide and concerned. Harry didn’t understand the request for him to brush up on etiquette at all. He was going to take it the wrong way. Ginny needed to speak with him honestly about her fear and about the way she wanted him to behave at the wedding.
He’s not here, Ginny realized a moment later, but his magic seems to indicate that he was here just a minute ago. I would have passed him if he was walking to the Apparition point, though. The Glass Room was the only open building on a small, select side street, and its wards prevented Apparition except at the corner.
She caught sight of a colorful curtain that covered the back of the room and wandered towards it. It didn’t seem as though Harry would be there. The restaurant had that deserted air she’d expected; Hermione had arranged with the management to meet Harry there privately so they wouldn’t be besieged for autographs during lunch. Harry could have been alone by standing in the middle of the main room. But maybe he’d thought that was still too public, given the wide windows, and decided to duck behind the curtain for a bit of privacy.
She heard the sound of cups hitting the table and forks scraping on plates before she drew the curtain back. She paused, embarrassed. She didn’t want to interrupt someone’s lunch. But if Harry was here, now was the perfect time to talk to him without anyone else overhearing.
In the end, she put her eye to a gap in the curtain and peeked.
Harry sat facing her and eating, but he wasn’t alone. She didn’t need to see his face to recognize Draco bloody Malfoy.
Ginny felt her fists clench, and she stood perfectly still. What was going on? Why was Harry meeting Malfoy, of all people, and why here? Ginny knew that he had originally come here to meet Hermione. Had he agreed to it in the first place because he had planned out some rendezvous with Malfoy?
Nothing made sense.
Then they pushed their plates away and started talking, and Ginny felt as if she had fallen even further into some twisted world with windows that looked out on a landscape she didn’t know or understand.
“Aren’t you tired?” Malfoy asked Harry. His voice was low, and teasing, and intimate, and the way his hand trembled made it look as if he’d like to reach out and touch Harry. Ginny felt her mouth twist. Was he seducing Harry? Of all the ugly acts she’d suspected him of, that seemed the least likely.
“Define tired.” Harry turned to face Draco, and his face was calm, making Ginny release a shaky breath. Maybe she was imagining things. Maybe she was imagining Harry’s susceptibility. She had to be. Harry wasn’t bent. He’d never imagined things like that, either. He would have told her if they had. They had no secrets from each other.
“Tired of other people ordering you around,” Malfoy said. He seemed to think what he said was clever, or words that Harry hadn’t heard a thousand times before from all sorts of people. “Tired of people thinking they own you. Tired of being ignored by your friends, or treated with narrow-minded pettiness when they notice you. Tired of rushing towards a wedding that you don’t seem to care about.”
Ginny felt her mouth fall open. The worst part of it was that Harry didn’t immediately speak up and contradict him. He seemed content to stare at his glass instead and turn it around in circles, squeaking softly on the table.
Ginny swallowed. The silence was like a tunnel that enveloped her, a tunnel that she was falling down.
Harry?
When he finally did reply, it was to say the worst thing Ginny could have heard from him just then.
“Yes.”
Malfoy reached out and clasped Harry’s wrist. Ginny had to put her hand over her face so that she could continue watching through her fingers.
“But there’s nothing to be done about it now,” Harry said, with a massive shrug.
With no enthusiasm. As if he didn’t care. As if he was resigned.
“The invitations are sent. The decorations are ordered. I know which robes I’m going to wear. I even bought Ginny a ring.” He smiled as if that was horrible, and Ginny’s heart rose in rebellion. I’m not a thing that he’s had to buy. I’m not a kitten clinging to his robe. “I’ll have to live with this wedding and everything that comes after it as best I can. Besides, most of the time my friends aren’t so bad. I can’t throw away years of friendship and a relationship with Ginny because—”
“Coward,” Malfoy said.
Oh, thank God. Harry couldn’t stand to be called a coward. Now, surely, he would give up this insane notion of sitting there and listening to Malfoy, wherever he’d got it from.
Yes. Harry turned red and said words that made Ginny want to burst through the curtain and kiss him. “I beg your fucking pardon?”
“You didn’t put up with the Dark Lord coming after you and trying to kill you,” Malfoy said mockingly. He was holding Harry’s hand so that he couldn’t stand, but Ginny thought Harry didn’t need to reach down and hold his wrist in return. “You didn’t stand around and say nothing when I taunted your best friends, or when other Slytherins did it. You didn’t let Umbridge get away with what she did at Hogwarts. Why are you letting them get away with it? Why are you so resigned to a marriage that you don’t want?”
“They’re my friends,” Harry said, and he spoke as though he’d tasted something sour. “Not my enemies.”
Yes, we’re your friends, Ginny thought. She wanted to rip through the curtain for different reasons now. And we don’t deserve to be treated like this.
“That makes it all the more urgent that you stand up for yourself.” Malfoy sneered. Ginny pictured him prancing around his poncey house sneering all the time, doing nothing else, and felt marginally better. “Since friends are apt to think that they can walk all over you if you don’t put them in their place.”
“I’m equal to my friends, Malfoy—” Harry’s voice was too soft.
“No, you’re taking up the inferior position when you let them trample you.” Malfoy leaned across the table. For a moment, Ginny had the mad vision of him spitting poison in Harry’s eyes like a cobra. “Do you want to marry the She-Weasel or not?”
“There’s no reason for me not to want to,” Harry hissed.
There was a block in Ginny’s throat stopping her breath. He didn’t defend me. He didn’t act like he even heard the insult.
“That’s not good enough.” Malfoy was smirking, from the sound of it. Why couldn’t Harry wake up from his daydream and realize this was his enemy, the same idiot he’d fought and hexed and driven away from him all through school? “You need a positive reason, not a negative one. Do you want to marry her?”
“None of your fucking business, Malfoy!” And Harry was trying to rise, the way he should have at the beginning of the conversation, just like he should have said those words at the beginning of the conversation, but Malfoy was holding him down, and God, if Ginny had only walked in at this point in their fight, she never would have known how much Harry loathed her.
“It is,” Malfoy said. Ginny had to blink and come out of her thoughts before she could realize that he was saying her and Harry’s marriage was somehow his business, and get furious in a new direction. “Because I chose to make it so. Because I was the one who bloody noticed. Because I’m the one who wants you to stand up for yourself.” He leaned in as if he was going to kiss Harry, and Harry didn’t punch him. That hurt, too. “And you don’t have a good enough reason why you aren’t doing that,” Malfoy whispered.
“I don’t have to stay here and be insulted,” Harry said, and pulled away from Malfoy with an Auror move. Ginny watched through a daze of tears as he cast Galleons on the table and turned away. He could have done that from the beginning. He could have got away at any time. The only reason for him to stay there and listen to Malfoy was if he wanted to.
“Running away?” Malfoy breathed.
Ginny didn’t hear what Harry answered, if anything. She had to scramble out of the way before Harry could see her standing there. She Disillusioned herself hastily and leaned against the wall, hoping that Harry’s Auror instincts wouldn’t kick in. It was true, he had no reason to think she was here and had overheard, but he had the ability to notice small things sometimes and add those clues together into conclusions criminals didn’t want him to reach.
Ginny had never thought that she would put herself, mentally, in the same class as the criminals Harry was fighting.
Harry glared back at Malfoy, she saw that much, before he stormed out of the restaurant. Ginny stood where she was and shut her eyes. She could have looked past the curtain to see what Malfoy was doing, but she thought it was probably only smirking and toasting himself anyway.
Besides, she didn’t want Malfoy to know she’d heard the confrontation. It would probably make him feel triumphant.
Harry was good enough at that. Ginny didn’t need to give him the competition.
No, she had someone else to confront.
When she was sure that Harry had left and that Malfoy wasn’t about to emerge and trail after him, Ginny exited herself. The Disillusionment Charm meant no one could see her, but she chose to walk with her head up and her feet carefully and precisely placed anyway, because it helped to steel her for what lay ahead.
Part 3.
“That was pretty bloody stupid of you.”
Draco kept his smile angelic as he laid down his newspaper. Of course he had known about Potter coming to see him from the moment he landed on the gravel driveway that led up to the Manor, but he could pretend that this was a total surprise that nonetheless found him in a moment of cool relaxation.
Besides, Potter had lost the game in a way he didn’t anticipate. He had come here, instead of waiting for Draco to seek him out.
“What was pretty bloody stupid?” Draco asked, picking out the last words as if he’d never heard them before. It was true that they were words not often uttered in the Manor. He made a languid motion with one hand, and a house-elf appeared at the end of the couch. Which one it was didn’t matter to Draco; they were all identical in any case. “Bring me white wine. I don’t know what Mr. Potter would like to drink.” He looked courteously at Potter and waited for a reply.
Potter gaped at him for a moment, as if he didn’t know why Draco wasn’t leaping to his feet with his wand in hand. Then he snapped his mouth shut and drew himself up straight. Draco smiled back lazily. Yes, that kind of gesture could make Potter look stupid and cause him to question his choice, but in reality, he didn’t think he needed to be ashamed. Potter had a hard, considering spark in his eyes now as he looked at Draco. Yes, Draco hadn’t made the expected response; now Potter was interested in why that had happened.
“I want spiced chocolate,” Potter said in a challenging tone as he sat down on the chair opposite Draco’s couch. “Nutmeg.”
The elf bowed and vanished. Draco raised an eyebrow. “I never knew that you drank that sort of thing,” he said. It was a drink that some pure-bloods liked and it was served in pure-blood restaurants, true, but Potter wouldn’t have spent much time in those kinds of places.
Potter smirked, as if he were satisfied with surprising Draco. “I had to drink it while I was hiding undercover and watching some criminals who wouldn’t let any non-pure-bloods near them,” he said. “I developed a taste.”
“Ah.” Draco wondered if Potter’s fiancée knew that. He thought not. He arranged himself to be more comfortable in his seat, folded the newspaper so it wouldn’t wrinkle, and waited for Potter to continue.
Potter was content to sit in silence and study Draco for some time before he did. Draco looked back, more than content, on his own part, to see what emotions crossed Potter’s face.
His face was shadowed as he sat there. He looked like the hardened veteran of war that he was. On the other hand, he didn’t look joyless, the way he had when Draco met him at Janus Jewelry and the Quidditch demonstration. Having a mental puzzle to solve agreed with him, Draco thought.
None of his so-called friends would say that, since they think he’s so stupid, but it’s true.
The elf came back with the wine and the chocolate. Potter sighed as he drank his, closing his eyes and letting the smell seep into his nostrils long after he’d swallowed. Then he shook his head and set the cup down on the table next to him. Draco controlled his flinch. The cup wasn’t hot enough to mark the table, or Potter couldn’t have held it, he told himself sternly.
“I can’t understand this,” Potter said quietly. “I know that you started this because you hate the Weasleys, and making me walk away from them probably sounded like a good idea.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forwards, eyes so intense that Draco shivered and thought about other times that Potter might look like that. “But I’m not going to do it. And what you offered me was fairly weak proof, as I understood when Ginny explained it to me. Ron doesn’t always speak highly of me, that’s true. I don’t always speak highly of him. That doesn’t mean I should march away from years of friendship with him and—what? Join you in whatever thrilling adventures you have instead?” Potter cocked his head skeptically.
Draco had to avert his eyes, because otherwise there was every chance that Potter would see the weakness in them. Powerful, questioning, quiet, forceful. No one had told him Potter was like this. Draco had vaguely reckoned that there might be someone like this under the surface, but he hadn’t known.
Of course no one told me about him. There ‘s no one else except Potter himself who knows this man exists.
Draco took another look at Potter’s face.
And maybe the criminals that he hunts down, sometimes. I wonder they don’t give up the moment they see him staring at them.
“Wrong end of the stick,” Draco said with a faint smile, when he thought he wouldn’t sound too eager. On the other hand, maybe he needed to sound eager? It was honest admiration that had got Potter’s attention on the Quidditch pitch, after all. He leaned forwards in turn, and saw Potter blink as though someone had flung a shower of gold dust into his eyes. “I wouldn’t be opposed to thrilling adventures, but it’s not Weasley I want to take you away from. Not that Weasley.”
He waited for it to click. And it did, but as a shadow across Potter’s face and a slow, heavy shake of his head.
“You can’t—want to sleep with me,” he said, as though Draco might mean a different thing by that than everyone else did.
“Why not?” Draco’s voice came out breathy and greedy. He didn’t care. Potter had grown up a bit while still being intrigued enough by Draco to come here, of all places. He denied that Draco could make up walk away from his friends, but he had obviously still brooded on that Pensieve memory—which had taken Draco no effort to catch; just listen to Weasley long enough and he would start disparaging Potter—and accepted it seriously into the dark part of his brain. Yes, this was someone Draco wanted. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a life-long romance like the one Potter (thought he had) shared with Girl-Weasley, but Draco was willing to wager that it wouldn’t actually take that to catch Potter.
“Because—why would you?”
The bewilderment expressed by those wide eyes and that halting breath was real, Draco thought in wonder. Not fishing for compliments. Even though he hardly understood how it could be. But the great difference between him and the Weasleys was that he took Potter seriously when he said he didn’t understand and explained, instead of accusing him of stupidity.
“You’re quite attractive,” Draco said. “There are the power and the money aspects, as well.” He swirled the wine in his glass and took a sip. Potter just blinked at him as if he was speaking a foreign language. Draco hissed between his teeth. “You must have had enough propositions in the first years after you defeated the Dark Lord that—”
“That’s what I mean, though,” Potter interrupted. “Your finding me attractive depends on the money and power. And those are the things you want to sleep with, not me. It would be even better for you if you could skip straight over the sleeping together and just get to owning and wielding them, right?” His smile was wry, with a distant, grainy kind of bitterness that Draco would have thought too complex an emotion for his face, if he hadn’t seen it there.
Of course he would have heard propositions like this before. And rejected every single one of them. Draco cursed himself for not realizing that.
“You don’t know me,” Potter said. “Don’t try to tell me that my cleverness, of all things, attracted you.” He gave a credible sneer, and Draco wondered if his friends would recognize the source of it: their constantly telling Potter that he was a bit slow. “We don’t have a sense of humor in common, or hobbies, or friends, or shared friendly experiences, or any bit of it. So you can’t really want to sleep with me. You want to sleep with some shade of me, some picture that you’ve made up. I’m curious to know what kind of picture it was, I admit, because no one’s ever tried sending me a memory of my best friend saying something he says all the time before.” He leaned back in his seat and surveyed Draco with one raised eyebrow.
Draco took a slow, deep breath. He didn’t have an immediate answer, but he thought Potter would probably scorn him if he did. He was used to slick, sophisticated answers, and quick ones. His false friends probably gave him those all the time.
Draco knew exactly what the answers would be.
I didn’t mean that, Harry.
Oh, he’s just impatient, Harry, he didn’t mean it.
You know what we mean, don’t you, Harry?
Tiny lies. Small lies. But over time, they would pile up and wear away at someone like Potter, who valued honesty.
And so Draco went with the prompting of his instincts, and was honest in return.
“At first I simply wanted to take you away from the Weasleys,” he admitted.
Potter’s eyebrows shot up, and then he laughed. The laughter was frank and pleased. Draco found out that it tightened things low in his stomach. He leaned forwards, but Potter was too far away to touch. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice the motion Draco had made. He simply shook his head and looked at him with eyes that had a hint of fondness in them.
“That is different,” he said. “Most people try to go through the Weasleys to get at me. Going through me to get at them is new. I’m glad that you give them credit for existing and having an effect, instead of trying to dismiss them as people who don’t matter. They are war heroes, after all.” He took what Draco thought was only the second sip of his chocolate.
“You didn’t hear the most important phrase in that sentence, I see,” Draco said. He didn’t have to go far to find a sneer. Potter didn’t seem to mind. Maybe it comforted him, seeing Draco appear the way he thought Draco should appear. He cocked his head.
“Excuse me for thinking it was ‘wanted to take you away from the Weasleys,’” he said. “That’s certainly the one that matters to me.”
“It was at first,” Draco said. “Now I’ve seen more of you. You’re better than they are. You’re more courageous than they are. You deserve better than to put up with their stupid insults and Weasley’s stupid stunts for the rest of your life.”
Potter shook his head, his smile faint. “I see that you haven’t improved in subtlety since we were at school, Malfoy,” he said.
“Tell me why.” Draco could get used to someone who smiled like that. He wanted to see how it would taste against his mouth, but, of course, Potter was too cautious of him at the moment for that.
“Because you can’t come up with anything other than the same complaint you’ve always used,” Potter said quietly. He set down the cup of chocolate on the table beside the chair and rose to his feet. “You want me to believe that I’m too good for the Weasleys. That means you think I have some estimation of myself as being better than them—better than anybody in particular. I don’t. You’d think you would have realized this by now.” He gave Draco a pitying glance and started walking towards the door.
Draco panicked. That could be the only reason why he bolted to his feet and called out, “Potter, wait!”
He got a single patient, wide-eyed green glance, the same kind Potter had given the Weasel after he nearly crashed the broom he was riding. His words tumbled on, because he wouldn’t let Potter put him on the same level as the Weasleys, he wouldn’t. “You have to admit that some people are better than others. Where there are differences, there will be inequalities.” That had been one of his father’s favorite sayings.
“Sure,” Potter said. “Some people are more intelligent than others, or more creative, or more thoughtful. Some are more pointy.” He gave Draco’s face a glance of quiet amusement, and Draco had to stop himself from reaching up to feel at his cheekbones. He was not pointy, and he knew it. “But there’s a difference between that and believing that you’re somehow deserving of more courtesy or justice because of those things. That’s what I don’t believe, and that’s what you’re trying to get me to believe. It’s not going to work.”
God, he sounded like a parent explaining to a child why he couldn’t have a coveted toy. Draco hated the comparison. He gritted his teeth together and struck back. “You have to admit that someone can be honored above another person for their talents. Or would you agree that Weasley is equal to you as an Auror?”
From Potter’s stillness, Draco knew he had at least found a weak point. He concealed his smile. In truth, he should have seen that it was a weak point before, since Potter had taken so much time to consider that memory of Weasley bragging that he was the better Auror. But it was so hard to tell with this shifting, changing, metamorphosing Potter that he hadn’t been sure.
“Ron is a good Auror,” Potter said at last.
“But your equal?”
Potter’s nostrils flared. “Of course,” he said harshly. “I would never say that he didn’t deserve admiration and awards and backup from someone else because he wasn’t me.”
“That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about,” said Draco. He reminded himself to be patient. Potter would be enough reward for his patience, if he could just keep calm. “Do you think your superiors should trust him as much? Who should they send into a situation that contains hostages and Dark magic, him or you?”
Potter sneered at him again. “That shows your ignorance of the Ministry more than it does anything else, Malfoy,” he said. “Aurors always work in teams. They wouldn’t choose between us. They would expect us to act together.”
Draco opened his mouth to reply, but Potter ploughed on, his face averted from Draco’s now. “And you’re ignorant about plenty of other things, too. Why have I stood here talking to you for this long? Ginny’s right. You deserve nothing more than my silence.” He turned away again.
“Strange that you had to call on her words instead of your own,” Draco said to his back.
Potter kept walking.
“Have you thought about how many of their words you believe? Have you thought about whether you think that you’re slow because they said it, not because you actually are?” Draco paused for breath, in part because Potter was opening the front door now and Draco’s breath was coming short in fear. “Have you thought about whether you resent their jokes because you want to think differently of yourself, but you don’t dare?”
Potter gave him a single look before he went out the door.
But Draco felt free to lean back and chuckle, because no one gave looks that intense or ugly to someone they intended simply to discount.
He’ll come back.
*
Ginny knew what the slam of the front door meant. Harry was in one of his moods. She carefully finished patting sweat from her forehead with the towel before she opened the bathroom door and stepped out to confront him.
To her surprise, he wasn’t pacing back and forth in the drawing room and waiting for the conversation. Instead, he was out in the back, casting spells with deadly efficiency at a series of stone targets he’d set up near the Quidditch Pitch a long time ago but rarely used now. He said that being an Auror gave him enough practice of that sort.
“Harry?” Ginny called, but he didn’t hear her over the explosions he was creating. Bits of stone flew everywhere, some of them pinging off the windows. Ginny ducked her head and grimaced. She knew they had wards on their house to prevent anything from shattering, but it still didn’t make her comfortable when Harry did that.
He just doesn’t think about things all the time, she thought wistfully as she walked across the grass towards him. Of course, I don’t, either, but I would appreciate it if he told me when I was being thoughtless. He doesn’t appreciate it.
“Harry,” she said quietly when she was closer to him, with the firm tone that was usually good about getting him to pay attention.
Harry gave himself a little shake and turned to face her. Ginny set her jaw and refused to step back when she saw the wildness in his eyes. Harry would never hurt her. The power bulging and rippling around him, making the air heavy and wet as a drenched cloak, was just his magic’s way of expressing itself.
It frightened her, but he had never hurt her. She trusted him to keep that promise.
“Ginny?” Harry spoke in a voice that seemed to come from a long distance, as though he’d forgotten who she was for a little while. That alarmed Ginny more than anything else that had happened so far. He dragged an arm across his forehead, mopping off the sweat, and then looked at the back of his hand blankly.
Ginny shook her head. She sometimes felt the same way when she came back from an intense Quidditch practice, but at least she knew it was adrenaline and excitement that made her feel as though she was in another world. Harry was being driven by anger, and she was increasingly concerned about what could have got him so angry.
“What happened?” she asked, putting a hand on his arm now that it didn’t seem as if he would shake her off.
“That fucker Malfoy.”
Ginny peered at him, not sure whether to be more relieved or wary. On the one hand, Malfoy shouldn’t have been able to cause this much pain and frustration in Harry, not if he was back to ignoring Malfoy the way he had promised he was. On the other hand, it implied that he didn’t believe whatever Malfoy had told him about why he’d sent that memory.
Not that Ginny really thought Harry was disloyal or looking for reasons to distrust his best friends. Of course not. But…sometimes it seemed as though he’d never forgiven Ron for leaving him alone for a while during the Triwizard Tournament and the Horcrux hunt. Even though they were childish errors, even though Ron had come back both times, they were like festering wounds in Harry’s mind that had never healed.
“What did he say?” she asked quietly.
“That he despises you as much as he ever did.” Harry turned towards her and caught her hands in a crushing grip, staring down at her almost desperately. “Ginny, he’s trying to torment me to torment you. Why can’t he let whatever grudge he has against your family go?”
Ginny smiled in spite of herself. Harry hadn’t grown up in their world and didn’t understand the intensity of pure-blood grudges, how they usually mattered only to people who were dead and gone but had to be kept up anyway, out of respect to those dead and gone people. She squeezed his hands. “For the same reason we can’t let it go,” she said calmly. Yes, it’s going to be fine. “We should do it if he does it, right?”
“But you’re not going around trying to discredit him in the same way he is you.” Harry crowded close to her, as if he were going to shield her with his body from the evils of the world. Ginny found the behavior sweet, although only in moments when she didn’t need protection; then she wanted acknowledgment from Harry that she could stand on her own.
“No, we’re not,” Ginny said. “But I don’t think that’s a difference in our attitudes towards the feud so much as it is a difference in our upbringing. We had kind and compassionate parents. He didn’t.”
Harry stood still for a minute. Then he said, as if struck by something, “I do think his parents loved him. I told you about how his mother saved my life because I told her where Malfoy—Draco, I mean—was.”
Ginny sighed. This was one of those subtleties that it seemed Harry just didn’t understand. “Yes, but what I mean is that they don’t care for anyone beyond their family. If they did, then his mother would have lied to save you whether or not you could tell her anything about her son. They’re not compassionate in general.”
“No,” Harry muttered.
He was quiet for the rest of the evening, but Ginny didn’t mind. It was one of those evenings when she wanted to be quiet herself, and read sometimes, and lean on his shoulder sometimes, and talk dreamily of what would happen after their marriage, and cuddle instead of make love.
*
“I don’t want to do this right now, Hermione.”
Draco sighed with soft triumph. He hadn’t even “arranged” to be in the same place as Potter and his friends this time, and he certainly hadn’t arranged to put that note of agitation in Potter’s voice—much as he would have liked to think it was connected to his little conversation with Potter a few days prior. He rose to his feet and peered out through the curtain that separated the private room at the back of the Glass House restaurant from the main dining area.
Potter stood next to a table in the center, his knuckles white where they gripped the chair, his face distressed. Granger was watching him with the same kind of exasperation that Draco had seen her use when the Boy Wonder and her boyfriend didn’t do their homework properly.
She should remember that this isn’t Hogwarts anymore, Draco thought idly as he watched.
“When are we going to do it?” Granger asked quietly. “You were the one who wanted to practice, Harry. I’m just making sure that we do.” She pushed a curl of hair behind her ear, looking harassed. Draco vaguely recalled hearing that she was some sort of powerful, important lawyer now, and she looked it, given the rich, sleek robes she was wearing and the fact that her hair actually behaved. “You know Ginny will be disappointed if you drop food all over your wedding robes.”
Draco blinked and then had to hide a grin in his sleeve which might otherwise have turned into a loud laugh. She’s teaching him how to eat?
“I’m not—this isn’t—” Potter bowed his head and swore softly. Draco couldn’t hear all the words, but the ones he could hear were impressive, and so were the rest, judging from Granger’s frown.
“I do want to be clean and look nice for Ginny at the wedding,” Potter said at last, looking up. “But I didn’t ask you for a lesson. I just mentioned it to you. You were the one who decided that we needed to practice.” His nostrils flared, and Draco saw the view of things around him briefly distort. Draco sighed. That would be his magic shimmering out of control. So delicious.
“You need help,” Granger said bluntly. “We don’t have time to hire someone to do it, and frankly, I don’t trust that you would show up on time for the lesson if we did. So I’m going to be the one to do it. Sit down and put your napkin on.” She was already moving towards her own chair, drawing it out in a graceful, economical motion that Draco couldn’t help but admire.
Potter’s hands gripped his chair as if it were a weapon he was going to swing to defend himself. “No,” he said.
The power in his voice weakened Draco’s knees. He licked his lips and held as still as he could. For no reason in the world would he be denied his view of the scene he knew would happen next.
Granger paused and stared at him. “What?” she asked at last, in a tone of voice that said she couldn’t believe anyone would dare defy her.
“I don’t want to,” Potter said, his jaw jutting out. It was a good look on him, Draco thought. He should refuse to do what people wanted more often. Why not? He certainly had the power to get away with it, and he ought to be able to exercise his own desires some of the time. “I’ll eat as neatly as I can at the wedding, and that’s all anyone can ask of me.”
Granger gazed at him with a softened face. “I know you’ll try, Harry,” she said. “And I know that this wedding has everyone on edge. I’m sorry if I snapped at you. But—Ginny and Molly are concerned.”
“Why?” Potter ground that word out. His magic snapped around him again, rearranging several of the panes of glass in one of the Glass Room’s windows without breaking it. Draco had to shut his eyes and breathe through his mouth for a moment, or his breath would have stopped altogether.
“Because of the way that you behaved at George’s wedding.” Granger’s gaze was piercing.
Potter flushed. “That had more to do with me getting drunk than anything else,” he muttered.
“But before that,” Granger said quietly, “you were spilling food on your robes. And you stained your tie. Ginny might not have told you, but it really embarrassed her, Harry. She doesn’t want that to happen again.”
Potter jerked his head up. He’d been staring somewhere in the middle of the table, but now he was looking at his traitorous friend again, and Draco was glad. That look suited him much better than the exaggerated expression of penance he’d adopted. At least, Draco hoped it was exaggerated, because no one should feel that much embarrassment over a social faux pas. Not someone like Potter, who had done the Weasleys a favor by attending their little celebration in the first place. “Why didn’t she tell me?” he asked. “She bloody well should have.”
“She was afraid that you would get angry.” Granger answered slowly, her eyes so intent that Draco was afraid she would look straight through the curtain and spot him for a moment. But no, it seemed her attention was all for Potter. “Start yelling, the way you do sometimes.”
“I would never hurt her.” Potter’s magic dimmed as he spoke, and Draco knew he was struggling to get better control of himself for Granger’s sake.
“I know that,” Granger said. She paused again and then reached out and put a hand on Potter’s shoulder. Draco’s skin shuddered as if he were the one being touched. “But I don’t know if Ginny knows it.”
Potter shook his head. “So is this about me spilling food on my shirt and embarrassing her, or is this about Ginny being afraid of me?”
“That’s something you’ll have to discuss with her,” Granger said. “But in the meantime, it really would be nice if you sat down and worked with me on this, Harry. We both took time out of our jobs to do this.”
Don’t do it, Draco thought, trying to send waves of mental strength to Potter. It doesn’t matter how nice she’s being right now or how understandable her motives might be. She still wanted you to do this ridiculous thing merely to appease the woman who’s too afraid of you and your magnificent power to talk to you herself.
Potter seemed to have heard Draco. He straightened his shoulders, bit his lip, and shook his head again. “No, Hermione. You can send Ginny to me if you want, so I can be the one to explain my decision. But I think it’s about time that I started thinking more about what I want than about what the Weasleys want to make me into.”
Granger stared at him with her mouth slightly open, then laughed. Draco smiled, feeling as though he’d swallowed a mugful of mead when he watched Potter’s eyes narrow. I think that you’ve just lost most of the ground you gained with him, Granger.
“That’s—that’s not what they’re trying to do at all,” Granger said, when she recovered. “They say things sometimes, but they don’t mean them.”
“Ginny meant this enough to ask you to come and talk to me about it,” Potter said evenly. “She meant it enough that she didn’t dare approach me herself. And if they can be excused because they’re under stress from the wedding and everything else right now, then surely I can be.” He put his chin up and stood there looking more wise and elegant and mature than Draco thought he could have looked in years.
Granger grumbled something under her breath and checked a watch that hung from the front of her robe. “I’m late already,” she muttered and then looked up at Potter. “Listen, Harry,” she said. “We’ll talk about this later. But you’ve got to stop thinking that because Ron betrayed you a few times in the place, and because he sometimes has a big mouth, that everything is going wrong. Ginny told me about that memory Malfoy sent. Who are you going to believe, him or someone who’s been by your side for years?”
Potter hesitated, to Draco’s fury. “It does sound simple when you put it that way,” he muttered.
No. Draco prepared to move. Even at the cost of revealing himself, he had to counter the damage that Granger had just inflicted to his goal.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Granger repeated, gave Potter a quick kiss on the cheek, and then scuttled out of the restaurant. A waiter peered past her timidly, apparently wondering whether Potter still wanted lunch. Potter rubbed his cheek and stared down at the table as though he had forgotten what one was.
Draco waited just a moment to make sure Granger wasn’t returning, and then flung the curtain back. “Come join me, Potter,” he called.
Potter jolted. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and his smile was less surprised than wry. “Why didn’t I expect to see you here?” he asked. “I should have. You seem to make a point of appearing in my life lately.”
Draco ignored this vague muttering, even though he thought Potter should have thanked him. Draco was there in time to stop him from making mistakes, after all. “Come join me,” he said, more softly, and extended a hand as though he was beckoning Potter in from the cold.
Potter examined him long enough that Draco imagined he would walk away after all. Then he nodded slightly and strode across the room to duck under the curtain.
For a moment, Draco was close enough to Potter that his skin sizzled and saliva filled his mouth. Potter didn’t seem to notice. He sat down at the table and looked around the private room with a slow, impressed blink. Draco attempted to look at it with a stranger’s eyes, to take new and unanticipated pleasure in the cleanliness of the tiled walls and the moving portraits of famous wizards from the past.
“Nice,” Potter said briefly, and fixed an eye on him. “So tell me what you’re doing here.”
“Originally, I was simply here to eat lunch.” Draco took his place across from Potter, trying to control his excited quivering and largely failing. I want him. The sentiment, strengthened by Granger’s words, seemed to surround his head like an iron band, pressing his skin against his skull. “But then I saw you, and overheard the conversation that you were having with her.”
Potter’s smile turned dark for a moment. “And you still can’t expect me to betray my friends for you, Malfoy.” His hand tightened on the arm of his chair as if he would shove it away from the table and stand.
“Betrayal’s such an ugly word,” Draco said. He watched as his plate appeared in front of him, though no food filled it. He only had to speak the name of the dish he wanted, but he hadn’t chosen yet. Besides, it would probably take the Glass Room’s magic a bit of time to adjust since he now had a guest. Draco looked up and into Potter’s eyes with a leisurely motion of his head. “I much prefer considering better options.”
“I have friends,” Potter said quietly. “I have a fiancée. You’ve told me what place in my life you want to fill, but there isn’t a hole for you to step into.”
“Unless you make one.” Draco was growing tired of dancing around the subject and suspected he might as well say it straight out.
“And why would I want to?” Potter’s voice was soft and slow, much like the tone Draco had chosen to coax him. He was leaning his elbows on the table—Draco winced, but decided he could ignore this in pursuit of larger things—and examining Draco with a deep gaze.
“You’re interested,” Draco said. “You have to be. You would have told me to fuck off otherwise.” He looked at the plate and the equally empty glass. “Duck with orange sauce,” he said. “Seasoned potatoes. Elf-made wine.” A spark of magic raced around the table, and the food came into view like a beautiful illusion.
“Aren’t you hungry, Potter?” he asked, picking up his fork and suspending it over the duck and the potatoes. Potter licked his lips, and Draco smiled, choosing to take that as a comment on more than just the food.
“I am,” Potter said. “But I’m not sure that I trust food that just appears.”
Draco shook his head in annoyance. “It’s been prepared by the hands of house-elves like Hogwarts food, Potter.”
“Why house-elves?” Potter asked quickly. “Why can’t humans do it themselves?”
Draco cut a bite of duck free and chewed it slowly, refusing to let himself get angry. Potter was trying to start an argument, he knew, to herd Draco away from the point of this conversation. “Because house-elves are the best at what they do,” he said at last. “The Glass Room prides itself on providing the very best food to its guests.”
Potter stared at his plate and glass with slightly dazed eyes, as though a new world of possibilities was opening in front of him. “Soft white chicken with rice on the side,” he said quietly. “Brown fish that’s crumbling and so soft it falls apart when you touch it. Chocolate spiced with nutmeg.”
Draco smiled slightly as Potter’s dishes filled. “You have a fondness for that chocolate, don’t you, Potter?”
Potter ate instead of answering him, and Draco started doing the same thing. It was a pleasure in more ways than the vicious pleasure that came with knowing Potter was with him and not the Weasleys, which Draco hadn’t expected. Potter had manners of a kind and a trick of closing his eyes when his mouth was full and he was savoring the food that made Draco have to watch his face.
Once Potter opened his eyes and caught him at it, but Draco refused to flush at the knowing smile. Potter’s actions compelled him. It wasn’t fair to blame Draco for that.
When most of the meal was gone and Potter was nursing his chocolate, Draco pushed his plate slightly aside to let the restaurant’s magic know he was done. The check appeared next to his hands, but he didn’t bother to look at it yet. The Glass Room hardly cared how long he lingered when he was paying them so well.
“Aren’t you tired?” he asked Potter.
“Define tired.” Potter looked away from the painting he’d been contemplating and back at Draco, his face much calmer than before.
“Tired of other people ordering you around,” Draco said. “Tired of people thinking they own you. Tired of being ignored by your friends, or treated with narrow-minded pettiness when they notice you.” He hesitated, then took a risk. He didn’t know for certain that Potter felt this way, but he had a good idea. If Potter hadn’t, there was no reason for him to share a meal with Draco after Draco had told him he wanted him. “Tired of rushing towards a wedding that you don’t seem to care about.”
Potter’s hands tightened on his glass. He said nothing for so long that Draco once again thought he might leave the table.
Then Potter lifted his head and said, simply, “Yes.”
Draco exhaled hard, surprised to find himself trembling. He reached across the table, letting his hand rest lightly on Potter’s wrist. Potter looked at it with some curiosity.
“But there’s nothing to be done about it now,” Potter said, with a slight shrug. “The invitations are sent. The decorations are ordered. I know which robes I’m going to wear. I even bought Ginny a ring.” He offered Draco a twisted smile, as if he was remembering that moment at Janus Jewelry when he had walked back into Draco’s life. “I’ll have to live with this wedding and everything that comes after it as best I can. Besides, most of the time my friends aren’t so bad. I can’t throw away years of friendship and a relationship with Ginny because—”
“Coward,” Draco said.
It was the one word he could think of that would get Potter’s attention, but it was also the word that expressed what he honestly thought at the moment. Potter stopped speaking and stared at Draco, color leaving his face.
Then the color came back in a rush and he said through gritted teeth, “I beg your fucking pardon?”
“You didn’t put up with the Dark Lord coming after you and trying to kill you,” Draco said mockingly. He tightened his grip on Potter’s wrist when he would have pulled away. Potter grabbed Draco’s hand in return and crushed down, but Draco refused to show his discomfort. They were wrestling, and as long as that happened, then Potter couldn’t ignore him. “You didn’t stand around and say nothing when I taunted your best friends, or when other Slytherins did it. You didn’t let Umbridge get away with what she did at Hogwarts. Why are you letting them get away with it? Why are you so resigned to a marriage that you don’t want?”
“They’re my friends,” Potter said, with a cut-off motion of his head that reminded Draco of a horse being forced into harness. “Not my enemies.”
“That makes it all the more urgent that you stand up for yourself.” Draco sneered at him. “Since friends are apt to think they can walk all over you if you don’t put them in their place.”
“I’m equal to my friends, Malfoy—”
“No, you’re taking up the inferior position when you let them trample you.” Draco leaned in. “Do you want to marry the She-Weasel or not?”
“There’s no reason for me not to want to,” Potter hissed at him.
“That’s not good enough.” Draco shook his head, glad for the smirk that played around his lips. It made Potter stare at him in fascination so intense Draco couldn’t believe loathing was behind it. Frustration, perhaps, but that was because Draco was the one pushing Potter to face up to what he would have preferred to ignore. “You need a positive reason, not a negative one. Do you want to marry her?”
“None of your fucking business, Malfoy!” Potter attempted to wrench free again, but Draco had been prepared for that and brought both of his hands into play, straining to hold Potter’s arm flat on the table.
“It is,” he said. “Because I chose to make it so. Because I was the one who bloody noticed. Because I’m the one who wants you to stand up for yourself.” He leaned close to Potter, until Potter’s breath raked across his lips. “And you don’t have a good enough reason why you aren’t doing that,” he whispered.
Potter snorted at him, looking as maddened as a bull. Draco refused to allow himself to worry about that. He tightened his hand and raised an eyebrow instead. Attack me, Potter. Run away if you have to. That way, I know my words will linger in your head later, and you can’t escape them.
“I don’t have to stay here and be insulted,” Potter said suddenly, and rolled his shoulders, tugging his hands away from Draco with a movement Draco assumed they had taught him in the Aurors and which he had to admit he would have liked to learn. He cast a handful of Galleons on the table without even asking to look at the check and stepped towards the curtain.
“Running away?” Draco breathed.
He received a single furious glance that made his groin ache. There was so much concentrated passion in that one look. Draco couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have all of it focused on him, to be the one who caused Potter’s passion and the person who got to enjoy the consequences of it.
Potter stared at Draco for a moment, eyes widening. Draco thought he had probably seen Draco’s thoughts in his eyes. He swallowed—Draco saw his throat bob—and then turned and raced through the curtain as if a dragon was after him.
Maybe one is, Draco thought, giving a leisurely stretch as he picked up the check to ascertain the price of his meal. I might not have wings or a breath of fire, but I think my weapons are keener yet.
*
Ginny stepped into the Glass Room and frowned when she realized that Harry was gone. Hermione had sounded so sure he’d stand right here until Ginny came to talk to him.
And Ginny needed to talk to him, Hermione had told her, her eyes wide and concerned. Harry didn’t understand the request for him to brush up on etiquette at all. He was going to take it the wrong way. Ginny needed to speak with him honestly about her fear and about the way she wanted him to behave at the wedding.
He’s not here, Ginny realized a moment later, but his magic seems to indicate that he was here just a minute ago. I would have passed him if he was walking to the Apparition point, though. The Glass Room was the only open building on a small, select side street, and its wards prevented Apparition except at the corner.
She caught sight of a colorful curtain that covered the back of the room and wandered towards it. It didn’t seem as though Harry would be there. The restaurant had that deserted air she’d expected; Hermione had arranged with the management to meet Harry there privately so they wouldn’t be besieged for autographs during lunch. Harry could have been alone by standing in the middle of the main room. But maybe he’d thought that was still too public, given the wide windows, and decided to duck behind the curtain for a bit of privacy.
She heard the sound of cups hitting the table and forks scraping on plates before she drew the curtain back. She paused, embarrassed. She didn’t want to interrupt someone’s lunch. But if Harry was here, now was the perfect time to talk to him without anyone else overhearing.
In the end, she put her eye to a gap in the curtain and peeked.
Harry sat facing her and eating, but he wasn’t alone. She didn’t need to see his face to recognize Draco bloody Malfoy.
Ginny felt her fists clench, and she stood perfectly still. What was going on? Why was Harry meeting Malfoy, of all people, and why here? Ginny knew that he had originally come here to meet Hermione. Had he agreed to it in the first place because he had planned out some rendezvous with Malfoy?
Nothing made sense.
Then they pushed their plates away and started talking, and Ginny felt as if she had fallen even further into some twisted world with windows that looked out on a landscape she didn’t know or understand.
“Aren’t you tired?” Malfoy asked Harry. His voice was low, and teasing, and intimate, and the way his hand trembled made it look as if he’d like to reach out and touch Harry. Ginny felt her mouth twist. Was he seducing Harry? Of all the ugly acts she’d suspected him of, that seemed the least likely.
“Define tired.” Harry turned to face Draco, and his face was calm, making Ginny release a shaky breath. Maybe she was imagining things. Maybe she was imagining Harry’s susceptibility. She had to be. Harry wasn’t bent. He’d never imagined things like that, either. He would have told her if they had. They had no secrets from each other.
“Tired of other people ordering you around,” Malfoy said. He seemed to think what he said was clever, or words that Harry hadn’t heard a thousand times before from all sorts of people. “Tired of people thinking they own you. Tired of being ignored by your friends, or treated with narrow-minded pettiness when they notice you. Tired of rushing towards a wedding that you don’t seem to care about.”
Ginny felt her mouth fall open. The worst part of it was that Harry didn’t immediately speak up and contradict him. He seemed content to stare at his glass instead and turn it around in circles, squeaking softly on the table.
Ginny swallowed. The silence was like a tunnel that enveloped her, a tunnel that she was falling down.
Harry?
When he finally did reply, it was to say the worst thing Ginny could have heard from him just then.
“Yes.”
Malfoy reached out and clasped Harry’s wrist. Ginny had to put her hand over her face so that she could continue watching through her fingers.
“But there’s nothing to be done about it now,” Harry said, with a massive shrug.
With no enthusiasm. As if he didn’t care. As if he was resigned.
“The invitations are sent. The decorations are ordered. I know which robes I’m going to wear. I even bought Ginny a ring.” He smiled as if that was horrible, and Ginny’s heart rose in rebellion. I’m not a thing that he’s had to buy. I’m not a kitten clinging to his robe. “I’ll have to live with this wedding and everything that comes after it as best I can. Besides, most of the time my friends aren’t so bad. I can’t throw away years of friendship and a relationship with Ginny because—”
“Coward,” Malfoy said.
Oh, thank God. Harry couldn’t stand to be called a coward. Now, surely, he would give up this insane notion of sitting there and listening to Malfoy, wherever he’d got it from.
Yes. Harry turned red and said words that made Ginny want to burst through the curtain and kiss him. “I beg your fucking pardon?”
“You didn’t put up with the Dark Lord coming after you and trying to kill you,” Malfoy said mockingly. He was holding Harry’s hand so that he couldn’t stand, but Ginny thought Harry didn’t need to reach down and hold his wrist in return. “You didn’t stand around and say nothing when I taunted your best friends, or when other Slytherins did it. You didn’t let Umbridge get away with what she did at Hogwarts. Why are you letting them get away with it? Why are you so resigned to a marriage that you don’t want?”
“They’re my friends,” Harry said, and he spoke as though he’d tasted something sour. “Not my enemies.”
Yes, we’re your friends, Ginny thought. She wanted to rip through the curtain for different reasons now. And we don’t deserve to be treated like this.
“That makes it all the more urgent that you stand up for yourself.” Malfoy sneered. Ginny pictured him prancing around his poncey house sneering all the time, doing nothing else, and felt marginally better. “Since friends are apt to think that they can walk all over you if you don’t put them in their place.”
“I’m equal to my friends, Malfoy—” Harry’s voice was too soft.
“No, you’re taking up the inferior position when you let them trample you.” Malfoy leaned across the table. For a moment, Ginny had the mad vision of him spitting poison in Harry’s eyes like a cobra. “Do you want to marry the She-Weasel or not?”
“There’s no reason for me not to want to,” Harry hissed.
There was a block in Ginny’s throat stopping her breath. He didn’t defend me. He didn’t act like he even heard the insult.
“That’s not good enough.” Malfoy was smirking, from the sound of it. Why couldn’t Harry wake up from his daydream and realize this was his enemy, the same idiot he’d fought and hexed and driven away from him all through school? “You need a positive reason, not a negative one. Do you want to marry her?”
“None of your fucking business, Malfoy!” And Harry was trying to rise, the way he should have at the beginning of the conversation, just like he should have said those words at the beginning of the conversation, but Malfoy was holding him down, and God, if Ginny had only walked in at this point in their fight, she never would have known how much Harry loathed her.
“It is,” Malfoy said. Ginny had to blink and come out of her thoughts before she could realize that he was saying her and Harry’s marriage was somehow his business, and get furious in a new direction. “Because I chose to make it so. Because I was the one who bloody noticed. Because I’m the one who wants you to stand up for yourself.” He leaned in as if he was going to kiss Harry, and Harry didn’t punch him. That hurt, too. “And you don’t have a good enough reason why you aren’t doing that,” Malfoy whispered.
“I don’t have to stay here and be insulted,” Harry said, and pulled away from Malfoy with an Auror move. Ginny watched through a daze of tears as he cast Galleons on the table and turned away. He could have done that from the beginning. He could have got away at any time. The only reason for him to stay there and listen to Malfoy was if he wanted to.
“Running away?” Malfoy breathed.
Ginny didn’t hear what Harry answered, if anything. She had to scramble out of the way before Harry could see her standing there. She Disillusioned herself hastily and leaned against the wall, hoping that Harry’s Auror instincts wouldn’t kick in. It was true, he had no reason to think she was here and had overheard, but he had the ability to notice small things sometimes and add those clues together into conclusions criminals didn’t want him to reach.
Ginny had never thought that she would put herself, mentally, in the same class as the criminals Harry was fighting.
Harry glared back at Malfoy, she saw that much, before he stormed out of the restaurant. Ginny stood where she was and shut her eyes. She could have looked past the curtain to see what Malfoy was doing, but she thought it was probably only smirking and toasting himself anyway.
Besides, she didn’t want Malfoy to know she’d heard the confrontation. It would probably make him feel triumphant.
Harry was good enough at that. Ginny didn’t need to give him the competition.
No, she had someone else to confront.
When she was sure that Harry had left and that Malfoy wasn’t about to emerge and trail after him, Ginny exited herself. The Disillusionment Charm meant no one could see her, but she chose to walk with her head up and her feet carefully and precisely placed anyway, because it helped to steel her for what lay ahead.
Part 3.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-11-16 10:50 am (UTC)And Harry's attitude doesn't make it better. It comes across to clearly in Draco's words - Harry is so happy to have friends, he allows them to trample all over him. And he's scared to lose them, so he won't say anything.
Also love Draco changing his "plan" in accordance to what he finds out about Harry. It's something I love about just all of yours stories that give Draco's pov: he makes a plan, based on what he thinks he knows about Harry, and pursues it. In pursiut, he gets to know Harry better and changes his plan. I really love that. It's sneaky and Draco, but also promises to lay a sound basis for a relationship.
Oh, yes, and Harry and Draco eating together? Lovely! There is proof for Harry that he doesn't need "lessons" in eating. After all, if someone like Draco doesn't protest his manners ... And, oh, how I love that Harry can relax in Draco's company!
no subject
Date: 2009-11-18 02:31 am (UTC)Harry would never want to lose his friends. I think he would put up with a lot from them before he would snap. Thanks to his childhood, he doesn't really know what having friends is like, and so he doesn't know what reasonable limits are.
Ginny might not have thought about how significant it was that Harry would eat with him, but Draco certainly did.