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lomonaaerenChapter Seven.
Title: How Noble In Reason (8/9)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, background Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Flangst, a bit of sex, profanity. Ignores the epilogue.
Rating: mild R
Summary: The Head Auror thinks that there’s Voldemort-like magic in the cellars of Malfoy Manor. Harry agrees to investigate. The Head Auror thinks Harry should formally Court Draco Malfoy to get close enough. Harry doesn’t agree with this, but he doesn’t have a lot of choice.
Author’s Notes: This will be a short story, eight or nine chapters. In some chapters the angst is stronger than others, but it’s a light story for the most part. The title is a line from Hamlet.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eight—Draco Malfoy Is Tyrannical
“Wake up, Potter.”
Harry blinked his eyes uncertainly. He remembered falling asleep in his chair out in the drawing room because he was too excited to go to bed after Draco’s visit, but he didn’t remember granting someone access to his house through the wards.
He didn’t have to, he realized after he looked. Draco’s face was hovering in the fireplace in front of the chair, and he had a stern expression on his face. Harry sat up and tried desperately to pat his straining hair back into smoothness.
“Good, you’re awake,” Draco said, without a flicker of emotion on his face to show that he actually thought it was good. “I have a task for you.”
Harry gave up on his hair and nodded. “Anything that I can do,” he said. “With the exception of illegal things.”
Draco sneered a bit. “So you wouldn’t help me do something that might hurt your precious Ministry?”
Harry shrugged. “It would depend on what it was. Not all the things that hurt the Ministry are illegal. But yes, I’m not going to kill someone or torture someone because you ask me to. Not that I think you would,” he added hastily when Draco stared at him. “But I wanted you to know what my limits were.”
Draco’s nostrils flared and he drew in a breath so deep that Harry thought he was going to shout. In the end, he shook his head and said, “I want you to go to your friends and tell them everything about what happened between you and me.”
Harry let his mouth fall open, because there was just no other way to express his feelings. “Everything? Including that we slept together?”
Draco bowed his head as though before a strong wind, but his voice never varied from the clipped, cold tone that he had adopted. “That’s right. Everything, including how much of a bastard you were to lie to me.”
Harry nodded, but he was still baffled. “If this goes wrong and you decide that you don’t want me after all, will you be comfortable with Ron and Hermione knowing your secrets?”
Draco sneered at him. “Would I have asked you to do this if I wasn’t comfortable? Contrary to what you think, Potter, I am not some damsel in distress that you need to sacrifice yourself for and make decisions for.”
“I know that,” Harry said, but he got a skeptical glare in return. He shrugged. “All right. Do you want me to go and do that right now?” It was Saturday, and he thought Ron and Hermione would probably be awake by now. Hermione woke up early all the time on the weekends, claiming that she didn’t want to “get out of the habit” since she had to be to work by eight on the weekdays, and Ron usually rose with her.
“Yes,” Draco said. “If you have the courage to do it, of course.”
“I do,” Harry said, deciding that saying anything else would just sound self-aggrandizing, and cast a few Cleaning Charms on his skin and teeth. Then he went to pick up the cloak that hung on a peg by the door.
“I want them to know everything,” Draco said, making Harry jump. He’d assumed that Draco had cut off the Floo connection when he saw Harry was leaving. “If I found out that you left out any detail, I’ll have your heart.”
Harry glanced over his shoulder. Draco was watching him with a haughtily lifted chin. His eyes shone like glass—broken glass. Harry wondered if he knew how many of his emotions he was showing. Probably not. He wouldn’t be used to those, like Harry, who had both the ability to read him and a reason to try.
“You have that already,” Harry said.
Draco blinked once, and this time his features contorted in something that looked a lot like fear. Then he vanished from the fire as suddenly as though someone had propelled him away. The fire went dead and flickered back down into ashes and cinders.
Harry shook his head and opened the door. He would go and do as Draco asked, and though he didn’t really understand the motives behind the request, it was the very least he could do.
And surely something that he would need to do sooner or later, if his hopes came true and he started dating Draco. Hide anything of how they had originally met and agreed to date, and Hermione would sniff it out anyway.
*
“Harry? Are you all right?”
Harry snorted as he stepped through the front door of Ron and Hermione’s house and hung his cloak up on its accustomed peg there. He apparently couldn’t visit his best friends for an early morning breakfast without them thinking something was wrong. Then again, his expression might have given that away.
“I think I will be,” he said, bending down so that he could kiss Hermione on the cheek. “But I have something to tell you, and I’m not sure how to begin.”
Hermione studied him with her head on one side, then seemed to decide there was nothing immediately the matter and led him into the kitchen. Ron was cooking bacon, or at least standing beside the pan where it sizzled and trying to pretend that he wasn’t sampling a piece. That didn’t really work when he had to swallow it and then promptly choked.
“It’s like living with a child,” Hermione said to Harry, apparently resigned, and cast a spell that made a piece of bacon fly out of Ron’s mouth and stopped his choking. He looked both sheepish and relieved as he came over to shake Harry’s hand—probably because he knew that Hermione would get after him now, instead of concentrating her attention on Ron’s mistake.
“God knows what I’m going to do when I have this baby and have to deal with two children,” Hermione kept on muttering as she waved her wand and a complicated array of plate, glasses, and cutlery floated out of the kitchen and started to lay themselves across the table in the next room.
“You know I’ll step up and do my share of the work,” Ron told her, not indignantly but with a low seriousness that Harry had thought he only ever used when he was on Auror cases and telling Harry how he would dash in and cut the criminals off.
Hermione looked up at him and her face softened. “I know,” she said, and leaned up to kiss him on the mouth.
Harry coughed and turned away, wondering wistfully for a moment if he would ever have something like that with Draco, or anyone else if it turned out that Draco was too hurt to forgive him.
Then he shuddered a bit. If he did date someone he could fall in love with, he had to hope it wouldn’t be exactly like what Hermione and Ron had, or he would have to ask some serious questions about how his lover had got pregnant.
*
“Well, Harry, what did you have to tell us?”
They’d finished breakfast, and Harry felt a little better for having bacon and eggs and toast inside him. He sat sipping a cup of tea in front of the fireplace in Ron and Hermione’s drawing room, and both of them were in the chairs across from him, Ron looking contented enough that he might go to sleep right there. Harry saw him stir and then sit upright as Hermione’s words came home to him, though.
“It’s hard to know how to say this,” Harry said, which was true. He set his tea aside and leaned forwards, lowering his clasped hands onto his knees. Ron nodded encouragingly. Hermione smiled.
“You know that Binks sent me to Court Malfoy and see if I could get inside his house to work out what was making my scar burn,” he began.
Hermione nodded. “Ron told me about that, but then we assumed it had ended when you came back to the Auror Department and weren’t buying gifts for him any longer.” She raised a challenging eyebrow. “Did it end?”
“It probably should have,” Harry said. “But.”
And he told them the way he and Draco had danced, the way that he had kept buying gifts and seeing more of Draco at each meeting, how they had left the library opening ceremony and had sex—he skimmed quickly over that part, since Ron was green and Hermione obviously didn’t want details—how he’d found the egg and the rupture between them, and the way that he’d been trying to get back into Draco’s good graces since. He hoped they would have some answers for why Draco might have wanted him to tell these details to them, but they were as puzzled as he was, unfortunately.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Hermione said, her fingers plucking at her robes. “Why would he want more people to know his secret? It seems devastating enough to him that you know it.” She suddenly sat up and stared at Harry. “Are you sure that was him? Could one of his enemies be using Polyjuice Potion to make you think it was him?”
Harry shook his head. “Not unless they were actually doing it from inside Malfoy Manor. I set up an exception for his Floo if he wanted to contact me when Binks first assigned me this, but anyone else doing it from their own house would have trouble getting through.”
Hermione didn’t look entirely convinced. “But all those parties—”
“You’re forgetting that whoever did this would still have to have the details of what happened between Harry and Malfoy,” Ron pointed out. He was looking calmer than he had when he seemed to think that Harry would “favor” them with all the descriptions of the sex he and Draco had had. “And if he knew that information, he could spread the gossip himself, without relying on Harry to do it.”
“Besides, it’s not as if you two are going to gossip,” Harry said, looking them both in the eye.
Ron blanched and said, “Of course not, mate.” Hermione shook her head.
“I just hope that you and Malfoy can work this out,” she said, and smiled at him. “Have you thought about what you’ll do next if he keeps giving you more tasks?”
“Do them for him,” Harry said, standing and walking over to his cloak. “Unless it becomes illegal or so involved that there’s no way I can do them. And then I’ll tell him I can’t and await further orders. I really don’t think that he’d give me anything impossible,” he added thoughtfully. “If he wanted the fun of watching me beg fruitlessly to be readmitted to his affections, instead of the fun of watching me do things for him, he could have had that already.”
Ron nodded at him. “Good luck, mate.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?” he couldn’t help teasing. “I know you said that whoever I was going to date was a lucky bloke. Does that hold true now that you know it’s Malfoy I want?”
Ron hesitated, then nodded again. “It’ll take some getting used to,” he admitted grudgingly. “I didn’t really think you ever could want him, not at first. But you have to go after what you want, and it sounds like you at least have a chance.”
Harry tapped his fist lightly on Ron’s shoulder, hugged Hermione, wished her luck with the appointment she had at St. Mungo’s tomorrow to check on the baby, and then left in a swirl of cloak, wondering how Draco would contact him next time and how he was going to take Harry’s report of the conversation with Ron and Hermione.
*
The next contact came with a letter, in fact, that the showy, bad-tempered white owl carried through his window the next day and dropped on the desk where he was trying to convince himself that he should use part of the weekend to do paperwork. Harry raised his eyebrows and looked from the owl to the envelope. He couldn’t sense any stinging charms on it this time, and the owl didn’t try to shit on him or his parchment.
“Is this a sign of a truce?” he asked, picking up the paper and sliding his finger beneath the seal. The owl only fluttered its feathers to show that it didn’t know and didn’t care, and then turned its back.
I want to know whether you told your friends the way I wanted you to. Write it out in a letter to me. Leave no detail out, including their reactions. And then I want you to strip and take a photograph of yourself naked.
Harry coughed, his face flushing. The owl turned around and cocked its head threateningly, as if it knew exactly what Draco’s demand was and thought he should grant it as soon as possible.
He wondered, again, why Draco wanted this. But he was beginning to get an idea. Draco was trying to render Harry as powerless and vulnerable as he felt. If Harry’s friends knew about what had happened between Harry and Draco, they would ask questions if something went wrong or Harry suddenly wasn’t talking about it anymore. If Draco had a photograph of Harry naked, then he could publish that and make an immediate impact that his words might not, particularly if no one believed them.
At least, Harry hoped that was the rationale. Maybe Draco just wanted to drive him mental.
He actually had to go to Diagon Alley and buy a camera before he could do as Draco asked. He had enough of photographs when people were snapping their cameras madly in his face on an ordinary day, and had seen no reason to keep one around. He had the album of his parents’ pictures that Hagrid had given him, and some pictures that Hermione and Ron had given him as gifts. But other than that…
It might be nice to have a picture of Draco, Harry admitted to himself as he nodded to the woman behind the counter in Peabody’s Pictures and walked briskly out the door in the direction of his Apparition point. The woman was babbling behind him about what an honor it was to serve the Great Harry Potter, and someone had come out of the back of the shop and was asking what she meant. Harry would as soon be far away before the reporters showed up here.
Once he got home, he examined the camera and the book of spells that came with it and learned that there was one that you could use to put the camera on the floor or a table and make it snap a picture of yourself. He wondered if Draco had known that, or if he had simply left the problem of how Harry was to take a picture of himself when he was alone up to Harry’s ingenuity.
Or maybe he just assumes that I would be comfortable enough to be naked in front of a friend who could take it for me, Harry thought as he began shrugging off his clothes.
It was strange, but he found himself blushing intensely as he stood in front of the camera, which he’d put on the desk, in a way that he hadn’t even when he was naked in front of Draco. There was something about Draco, he thought, that made the nakedness seem natural. There, Harry had been assured he was wanted and desired, and it was easier to slip into desire himself, without thinking about consequences.
“Really without thinking about consequences,” he said aloud, which made the white owl shift on its perch.
But he had all the clothes off at last and his embarrassment conquered enough that he could stand in front of the camera and speak the appropriate incantation. The camera flashed. Harry flushed, cleared his throat, and hastily cast the spell that would let him develop the photo, while he tugged his pants and trousers on.
The picture didn’t look too bad, he reckoned, and hoped that Draco would ignore the flush of his face and the half-hardness of his cock. Or maybe he wouldn’t even look at the picture that closely. Maybe it just existed to prove that Harry had done his bidding.
Maybe Draco will spontaneously fall in love with a Muggle tomorrow morning.
The letter was easier. Harry just described as much as he could, including Hermione’s fears that someone had replaced Draco using Polyjuice, and sealed the letter into an envelope with the picture. The owl swooped across and nipped it out of his fingers before he could properly seal it, then flew out the window.
Harry leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. It was done, then, and he could only hope that Draco liked it.
*
“I see that you make a habit of sleeping in your chair, Potter.”
Harry popped his eyes open at once. It was Monday evening, and he had dozed off in front of the fire hoping that Draco would firecall. At this point, the tension was so extreme that Harry would almost have welcomed the news that Draco planned to publish his photo on the front page of the Prophet tomorrow, because at least it would let him know what was going on.
Well. The key word in that thought was almost.
“When I’m waiting for a message from you, I do,” he admitted, and yawned into the palm of his hand. “Did the letter and the photo reach you intact? I was worried about the owl’s beak.”
Draco gave him a discomforting smile. “Glacier is well-trained.” He paused, and then added, “It looked as though you were excited about something when the camera snapped. Had you just finished wanking?”
Harry felt the familiar flush creeping into his skin again as if it had never been away, but managed to clear his throat and say, “I was thinking about you, and I didn’t realize I was that excited until I saw the photo.”
Draco leaned back as if the response hadn’t been what he expected and stared at Harry through narrowed eyes. Harry looked back, not knowing what else he could do.
“I see,” Draco said, in a tone that could have cut glass. “And you still claim that you’re willing to do anything I ask?”
“With the same constrains that I mentioned before,” Harry said, “about not doing something illegal or something that could hurt other people. Unless they’re Binks,” he added, thinking of the information he had accumulated at work today. The other Aurors were always ready to gossip about Binks and the stupid rules that he had introduced into the Department. It would take Harry some time to sort the stupid rumors and half-remembered stories about something that had happened to a friend’s brother’s dog from real, actionable facts, but he had a good beginning list.
“Why Binks?” Draco tilted his head as though he were trying to get a lock on the name. “Benjamin Binks, the Head Auror?”
“He was the one who told me to Court you,” Harry said. “Now he’s trying to get me to spy on Ron. I’ll take him down for that, and replace him with a better Head Auror. It’s time that we had someone who actually cared about the Department, not just someone who’s related to a Wizengamot member.”
Draco eyed him carefully. “You’re willing to use your name to do this?”
“If that’s the only way,” Harry said. “I still hope that I can convince some of the Wizengamot members he’s incompetent with only testimony. But that’ll take a while. Relying on my name would be easier,” he ended with some wistfulness. Yes, it would be easier, but Hermione would probably glare at him sternly and remind him that because something was easier wasn’t a reason to do it. Probably a reason not to do it, really.
“Are you punishing him for what he made you do in regards to me?” Draco’s voice was absolutely neutral.
“Not only that, but yes,” Harry said.
“I see.” Draco was dragging in long gulps of air as though he could make himself calmer that way. It didn’t seem to be working. Harry was just about to point that out when Draco said, snapping his words off like nuts being crunched between his teeth, “You still value Weasley more than me.”
“What?” Harry spluttered. “What makes you think that?”
“I’m not good enough to fight your private little war over, but he is,” Draco said, and there was a shrug of his shoulders that Harry thought meant he was folding his arms, although that was out of sight of the flames. “Your loyalty to your friends still comes before your loyalty to me. I should have known.”
“Stop being ridiculous,” Harry snapped. “I don’t care how hurt you are. You should realize that I don’t value either of you more. He’s my friend, you’re—well, I hope you would be my lover. I couldn’t act against Binks because I was weak and because I was more intrigued by you than I realized when the Courting started. I should have, but I didn’t. Now I realize what kind of idiot Binks is, and that means I won’t take his request to spy on Ron seriously at all. It was the Courting which taught me that. I can’t help that one of those experiences happened before the other.”
Draco’s face had an icy glaze now. “It’s excuses,” he said. “And, what, intrigued with me? Next you’ll claim that you were secretly in love with me for months or years before you started Courting me.”
“I wasn’t,” Harry said. He surrendered to the impulse to get up from the chair and pace around the room, waving his arms. Why not? Draco wasn’t making enough sense for him to keep still. “But I thought about you. I was interested. I wondered how you’d changed. You’re the only one left who was really nasty to me during Hogwarts days, the only one I had to imagine stories for because death or Azkaban hasn’t ended them. And so, yes, I wondered, and I thought, and I pondered, and it weakened my resistance to the Courting idea. I could have come up with ideas that would persuade Binks, but I decided not to. That’s what happened. That’s all.”
“If you felt that strongly, you never would have begun the Courting in the first place,” Draco said harshly. “The thought of causing me pain would have been enough for you to leave me alone.”
“I felt strongly enough to be weak.” Harry turned and whirled in place, his own arms folded now. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Tell me,” Draco said, his eyes narrowed. “If he hadn’t ever ordered you to spy on Weasley, would you have wanted to get rid of him?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said.
Draco inclined his head slowly. “I consider myself answered,” he said. “I come in second place in the hierarchy of importance. Your friends come first. I don’t know why I find myself startled or hurt by that revelation.”
“I’ve been trying desperately not to put you first,” Harry said loudly. Anger and fear warred inside him, whirling up and down, and all the while he had to consider whether anything he said might not put too much pressure on Draco. “I don’t know if you’ll ever want me back, after all. In that case, putting you first and pining away after you would be stupid.”
“Yes, of course it would be,” Draco said, and vanished from the fire as he shut down the Floo connection.
Harry flopped back into his chair, stared gloomily at the empty hearth, and wondered if all his attempts to reconcile with Draco were doomed to end in futility.
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Date: 2010-07-25 10:45 am (UTC)Can't wait to see how you resolve this!